Air Date 12/10/2024

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

 

Air Date 11/5/2024

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

There's big money in politics, and then there's 2024. The role and influence of billionaires has taken on new shapes and patterns as the threat of fascism has made itself undeniably known, from the candidate and the campaigners to those acquiescing to the mere threat of power, billionaires are everywhere you look in this election season. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 55 minutes today includes Reveal; 5-4; The Majority Report; The Muckrake Political Podcast; The Bradcast; and Today, Explained. Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections: 

Section A. Democracy dying in daylight; 

Section B. Actual election interference;

Section C. Elon Musk, the billionaire; and 

Section D. Trump, the fascist.

Why Elon Musk Went Full MAGA - Reveal - Air Date 10-30-24

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Anna, how would you define Musk's politics? 

ANNA MERLAN: [00:01:00] So this is a really interesting question because, like a lot of very wealthy people who own businesses, he's complained bitterly about federal regulation, right? He's gotten in fights with the FCC. He's just seemed really critical of government as a concept. 

But at the same time, two of his companies have billions of dollars in federal contracts. That would be SpaceX, his rocket company, and then Tesla, his car company. They have incredibly lucrative and really consequential contracts with the federal government.

So he's in this interesting position where he's both very critical of government and pretty involved in it. No matter who wins, he will still be pretty involved in it through his companies. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Yeah. I think it's safe to say that even though his companies will still do work with the government, regardless of who wins, he's probably seeing a larger windfall if [00:02:00] Donald Trump wins.

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, that's accurate. Donald Trump has actually said that if he is elected, he will make Musk the head of a new government efficiency commission with the power to recommend wide-ranging cuts, to change federal rules, to rollback regulations, including things like safety regulations that he's complained about affecting Tesla and SpaceX. It's fair to say that this is going to be pretty consequential for him and his companies, both personally and financially, if Donald Trump takes office. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Speaking of Donald Trump, I just have to say that when he took the stage with Musk in Butler, Pennsylvania back in early October, I cannot know what was in the former president's mind, but I would say that while Elon was jumping on stage, the look that Trump gave him was kind of like, "Uh, buddy." 

ANNA MERLAN: A really indelible photo.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So what comes to mind when I saw that [00:03:00] photo was that these men are very much kind of the opposite in some ways, and very much alike in a lot of ways. And they're lockstep. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Like, how are they alike? 

ANNA MERLAN: Well, you know, they've feuded a lot over the years and in a way, they've feuded because they are so similar. They're both people with one might almost say like messianic beliefs in their own sort of abilities and their own importance in the history of the country and the world. They are both people who believe very strongly in unfounded ideas about voter fraud. They both like to talk a lot about things like illegal immigration at length.

But, we could probably say that Elon Musk is a more successful businessman than Donald Trump. But again, they are, both of them have inflated and mythologized their claims about how they run their businesses over the years. I guess there are more similarities than there are differences [00:04:00] now that I think about it.

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Yeah, I will say Elon may be the better businessman. And if you just go by financial value, obviously, Elon is worth more than Donald Trump. But I would say that like when Trump was in his prime, there aren't many people that know how to connect and work an audience the way Trump could, let's say 2016. I don't think right now, but 2016 he was masterful in how he worked his audience and how he worked his message.

And every time you see Elon in public, it's just really awkward. 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So going back to Musk and the election and Trump, the New York Times has reported that he's effectively moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support Trump's campaign. Why Pennsylvania? 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, Pennsylvania is going to be pretty consequential.

But what is interesting to me here, though, is that obviously Elon Musk is throwing tons and tons and tons of money into the Trump [00:05:00] campaign. But at this point, while you and I are sitting here talking, Kamala Harris is still outraising Donald Trump on the whole, right? She still has an enormous cash advantage.

So one thing that Elon Musk's involvement here is going to do is it's going to be an interesting case study in how much one person's money moves the needle. You know what I mean? How much specifically Elon Musk's involvement does something and whether one guy can have an outsized effect on the election 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Yeah, so he's offered to give away a million dollars each day to randomly chosen registered voters in some swing states Including Pennsylvania who agree to sign a petition supporting the first and second amendment. First, is that legal? It doesn't feel like it's legal, right? Like you can't give people prizes for elections. 

ANNA MERLAN: So the Department of Justice has warned Elon Musk and AmericaPAC that this $1 million daily giveaway might indeed be [00:06:00] contravening federal law. AmericaPAC is saying, no, it is perfectly legal, we're not paying people for votes, we're paying people who signed this pledge, we're awarding a prize to a randomly-chosen person who signs this pledge. So, it's fair to say that the DOJ is super interested in what's going on here, and they're paying very close attention. So I guess we'll see what happens with that. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: How would you characterize the kind of power that Musk has right now? The influence he has, being the world's richest man, with one of the most popular social media platforms in the country. It seems unprecedented. 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, it certainly feels unprecedented to me, in that there have always been billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics, like Henry Ford famously ran for Senate and then when he lost, suspected voter fraud and suspected it very loudly. 

But I think the scale of Musk's involvement is really different because it's not just that he's a billionaire. It's not just that he's [00:07:00] endorsing Trump. It's also that he controls a powerful and widespread communication medium, which is Twitter. And I think Musk's role in this election cycle is probably going to be studied for years to come, to understand really what it did. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Do you think he can actually tip the balance of favor for Trump?

ANNA MERLAN: I really wonder about this because this is such a complicated election. There's so many things going on. It's one of those things where it's like, if just money mattered, there would still be a question, because Harris is still out-raising Trump. 

So, I think that probably in the end, his effect on the election is not going to be discernible, though I could be wrong. I think it's going to have much greater effects on him and his business and his public profile, which could be good or bad. We'll see. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Yeah. What will you be watching from Elon Musk as the election gets near? 

I mean, I think the big thing that journalists are paying attention to is allegations of voter fraud, [00:08:00] election interference from him that he's either posting himself or reposting on Twitter, and how those allegations move when he makes them. Does him making a claim cause it to spread extremely widely, for instance.

So I'm going to be paying attention to that. I'm going to be paying attention to where he decides to be on the ground. And then of course, once the election results come in, depending on how they go, I am super curious to see if he questions them, if he accepts the results of the elections or not.

Because I do think that again, somebody with a platform like the one he has, if he decides to claim that the election was illegitimate, that could be a pretty big deal. 

Elon Musks War on Workers - 5-4 - AIr Date 10-29-24

MICHAEL MORBIUS - HOST, 5-4: Several large companies have recently had actions brought against them through the NLRB, and they have responded to the NLRB to those actions by arguing that the NLRB is functionally unconstitutional. 

RHIANNON HAMAM - HOST, 5-4: Yeah, four big companies, probably everybody listening [00:09:00] to this has at least seen some headlines about one or more of these companies doing terrible labor practices and being taken in front of the NLRB for complaints about violations of the NLRA. And then also these companies then taking their cases to court to challenge the NLRB's decisions and now challenge the NLRB existing at all.

These companies: SpaceX, of course, run by the monster Elon Musk. Amazon, run by the goon Jeff Bezos. Trader Joe's, run by Shirley, and an insane person whose name I don't know. And Starbucks, that ugly guy that runs Starbucks. It's these four bad actors, these four companies have been charged with, over the past few years, have been charged in front of the [00:10:00] NLRB, of course, with complaints of firing pro-union workers, retaliating against organizing by cutting hours, closing shops, denying benefits being provided to non union workers, and bargaining with workers in bad faith. 

Currently, and I think this was as of March of this year, Amazon had 250 cases, open cases in front of the NLRB. Starbucks had 741 open or settled cases by that time in front of the NLRB. Trader Joe's was actively being charged with retaliating against workers for organizing activity and for failing to bargain in good faith. And then famously, of course, Amazon has denied the right of workers to organize into a union left and fucking right. 

So, now, I believe the first of these companies to make the [00:11:00] legal argument, and then was joined by the rest of these companies, make the legal argument that the NLRB is unconstitutional actually, is SpaceX. And Elon has been talking all over the internet about this bullshit. And here's what SpaceX is arguing, again joined by Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joe's in this legal case. Their argument in court is that the existence of NLRB, the NLRB structure, violates the provisions in the Constitution that protect the separation of powers, right? So SpaceX is saying that the NLRB exercises this prosecutorial function by enforcing labor laws, but also has a legislative function by being about like a labor policy. And then it's adjudicatory authority. These are administrative law proceedings where administrative law judges are adjudicating complaints at the NLRB [00:12:00] that this violates the separation of powers, that no federal agency should be able to prosecute and also legislate and also adjudicate, right? Judges and the executive branch and the legislative branch, those should all be separate.

Now, They're also arguing that the NLRA, the law that created the NLRB, only allows the NLRB to basically provide or decide that equitable back pay is the remedy for workers who are making complaints, and complaints that are found to be true, about labor law violations. 

MICHAEL MORBIUS - HOST, 5-4: To jump in here, the reason that this is so pernicious is because if the only relief that can be awarded in these cases is back pay, it pays to just do unfair labor practices. You might as well just fire people who are organizing, because the worst case scenario is that you just owe them the wages that you would have owed them.

And I also want to add some color. The original issue that this spawned out of was [00:13:00] that several SpaceX employees criticized Elon Musk in an open letter. And then SpaceX just fired them. Usually it's like you try to organize a union and you get fired, but with SpaceX, it's just like, you can't be mean to daddy Elon. And I will also add, while we're on the topic of Elon Musk, maybe six or seven years ago, some discrimination cases came out of Tesla that were the most egregious cases to enter federal courts in years.

Just to give you a little bit of an example, there were supervisors openly using the N word in Tesla factories, and Tesla defended that case. They did not settle. They took it to a judgment, which they lost. But that's part of Elon's philosophy of fight every case because he truly does not give a shit about the conditions in his workplace.

RHIANNON HAMAM - HOST, 5-4: Yeah, speaking of the stinky billionaires who are so ugly and don't care about the workplaces that they [00:14:00] run, Jeff Bezos. Let's talk about Amazon. Amazon jumped on board, of course, with Elon's case challenging the constitutionality of the NLRB. Amazon has so many complaints in front of the NLRB, something like 250 as of March of this year. Three administrative law judges at the NLRB had already ruled against Amazon. A federal court had ordered that Amazon not interfere with workers organizing rights. That's where Amazon is at legally. 

PETER SHAMSHIRI - HOST, 5-4: Starbucks, as Rhiannon mentioned, has had a lot of claims against it at the NLRB. In one particular case, it's being charged with unfair labor practices for interfering with two workers who were union organizing in Philadelphia. That's the case that they have decided to bring this claim echoing SpaceX, saying the NLRB is unconstitutional. And, I just wanted to read this funny bit from that complaint. On January 25th, the store manager sent an email to his [00:15:00] boss, the district manager, venting about the two employees who were union organizing and stating he was, quote, "willing to deal with the backlash that would come with terminating the two of them, because it doesn't matter if we terminate now or one year from now, they will still call the NLRB." That's definitely the email you want in your unfairly practices lawsuit. 

MICHAEL MORBIUS - HOST, 5-4: Just make the phone call. I don't want to help. I don't want to help managers out. But just pick up the phone and say the illegal thing. It's not that hard. 

PETER SHAMSHIRI - HOST, 5-4: Yeah. 

Trader Joe's also getting on this. Also, you, will never believe this, accused of being union busting. No way. Again, just a funny note from that case, the ALJ, the law administrative law judge when they first made their motion was like, I'm certainly not going to be ruling on my own constitutionality anytime soon. You're going to have to be taking this up with the federal courts, basically. But they are. And we'll see [00:16:00] what the Supreme Court says. 

Elon Musk Is SO Bad At This - The Majority Report - Air Date 11-3-24

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But let's pull up this article from Wired by Jake LaHute, who I knew back in the day when he was reporting in New Hampshire, but he's with Wired now. And he did this reporting on workers that are working for the America PAC, Elon Musk's PAC, door knocking for Trump. If we could just scroll down to the opening paragraph. "In Michigan, canvassers and paid door knockers for the former president, contracted by a firm associated with America PAC, have been subjected to poor working conditions, a number of them, working conditions.

A number of them have been driven around in the back of a seatless U-Haul van, according to video obtained by Wired, and threatened that their lodging at a local motel wouldn't be paid for if they didn't meet canvassing quotas. One doorknocker alleges that they didn't even know they were signing up for anything having to do with Musk or Trump. A representative for Musk and AmericaPAC did not return a request for comment. [00:17:00] The contract these doorknockers signed with Blitz Canvassing, which is a subcontractor of Musk's America PAC, says they are expected to maintain a 17 to 22 percent engagement rate during their campaign, which is a high target relative to the number of people who typically open the door for a stranger." That is extremely high and unrealistic target, I'll just say anecdotally. "A group of out-of-state America PAC canvassers were told during a recent team meeting that if they didn't hit their targets, which the door knocker says, were more than a thousand a week on total doors knocked, the organization would stop paying for their motel rooms."

So, Wired obtained this audio, but let's scroll and, did they have the photo of the -- here we go. Here it is. This is the photo of the van that they're apparently driving them around in. And, not -- 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: It's a moving violation, I think? 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yes. Yes. And, the door knockers, they spoke to Wired under the condition of anonymity because, of course, this -- 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The richest man in the world put them in the back of a van?

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And made them sign [00:18:00] NDAs. But, this part here. "One of the canvassers who was flown out from the Midwest tells Wired that they had no idea they would be knocking on doors in support of Trump, or that the subcontractor that they were working for was a part of Elon Musk's voter turnout operation through AmericaPAC. 'I knew nothing of the job, or much of the job description, other than going door to door and asking the voters who they are voting for,'" says a doorknocker who was one of the people in the back of the van and who was requesting anonymity because of the NDA. "'Then after I signed over an NDA is when I found out that we are for Republicans and with Trump.' The doorknocker adds that they had overheard my su --" can we scroll down a little? Doorknocker adds -- no, still that part, "that they had overheard my supervisor and a few others mention Elon Musk by name marking the first time that they had heard of the billionaire ex owner's involvement." 

This is the other part that's key here: "The Trump campaign has largely outsourced its field operation in Michigan to Musk, a move that has come under heavy criticism, as previously reported by [00:19:00] Wired. Blitz canvassing has also reportedly had issues with fake door knocks being flagged by campaign sidekick, the glitchy app used by AmericaPAC. In Nevada and Arizona, up to a quarter of the door interactions were flagged as potential fakes within the app, according to The Guardian. They did their own research." 

The other part that I don't need to read, but they also point out that these people that they hired, none of them have valid driver's licenses. I think, I would imagine that they're paying them very little, and they're shoving them in the back of a U-Haul, and having them meet these impossible quotas, and if they don't, they won't pay for their hotel room. And then there's reports out of Arizona and Nevada that they're faking it. Of course they are, because they're trying to get paid and be able to keep their lodging and -- 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Efficiency.

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The gamification of this is everything that's horrible about tech, and everything that's also not effective in doing these kinds of actual door-to-door retail politics. It's also the other [00:20:00] stuff that gives me more confidence than the polls would suggest, because the fact that he's giving his get out the vote operation, Trump is handing it over to this complete charlatan, it shows right there what this actually looks like. 

BRANDON SUTTON: Yeah, he came and paid for it to be done well. Like he has all the money in the world. So much money that he gives away a million dollars in Pennsylvania a day, which might also get him in trouble very soon. And so, but he can't help but subcontract it out to make it as cheap as possible.

MATT BINDER: I saw that picture and all I could think of was, damn, that's how like my high school punk band traveled to shows back when we were funded by my Applebee's dishwasher job that I worked on the weekends. That's literally how we traveled: the sitting in the van like that. This is apparently a company that Musk's group contracted out to, with a $9 million contract or something like that. And that's what they're doing. 

And also, I think it [00:21:00] speaks a lot to not just Musk, but like the whole tech, Silicon Valley mindset as well. So many of these guys have convinced, especially Musk, have convinced the world that their geniuses when their entire reality is fake it till you make it. And their success has been basically faking it long enough until they actually make it. But the problem is, you're not going to be able to do that with every single endeavor you launch. You fake it till you make it on one endeavor and you get lucky and it hits off. Everyone thinks you're a genius. But once you try to do multiple things like Musk is now doing, and you're trying to fake it till you make it for all of them, eventually people are going to see that, Oh, this is how he runs. And he just got lucky previously. 

BRANDON SUTTON: Also, just real quick about that too, along with Fake Until You Make It, they also, with Blitzscaling and other types of semi legal businesses, they believe in breaking the law until you are big enough and powerful [00:22:00] enough that you can change the law to retroactively make what you did legal or at least not be prosecuted for it.

And it doesn't seem -- I know when you talk about human trafficking, you think about those true crime videos where like people's kids get taken or like people across the border, stuff like that -- but moving people across borders, across state lines, under false pretences, and then trying to withhold their ability to get home or withhold their ability to escape, is or could be interpreted as a type of human trafficking. And so that's just another crime he's committing that he may or may never see justice for. 

The Trump White Supremacy Festival and Hootenanny - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 10-29-24

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: And if we can, and I'm looking at it now to remind myself, the Post was vehemently against Trump and had written, you can argue in there, coverage of him was pretty negative. And in retaliation, Trump had the Department of Justice file this suit against him.

The Amazon, which they had tried to get dismissed because they felt there was political retribution. So you know, as a businessman, he's like, I don't want that again. I don't want to do it at all. So [00:23:00] let's, sit this one out and signal that, you know, again, this is such, it's a petty dictator, right?

Using his authoritarian powers. And you know, from day one, they're, going to be able to do a lot, be a lot more effective in that. Um, did you see that they're actually going to try and, um, uh, circumvent the FBI's vetting process for, uh, access to top secret material? Did you see that? Oh, that, that, that is just wonderful.

That's good. Yeah. So they're going to, they're going to, there's some way I think that they, they figured out that the president can override that. And we know that because Jerry Kushner could not get a clearance originally, right? Because he lied. On his FS 86 form so many times and you know, you know, when you fill out that form, it says, you know, under penalty of like felony, like you were going to go to prison and they never, nothing ever happened to him on that one.

And then Trump finally like waved his magic wand and he was able to get, uh, you know, access to all sorts of secrets. Supposedly they're going to do that again. And, but this time is a broad swath across a whole bunch of these loyalists who are going to come in from day one. [00:24:00] Um, you know, it's, uh, I'm trying to convince myself that it won't matter.

Like I'm living in my bubble in California and nothing will affect me. And, uh, I don't know, but it doesn't feel any better thinking about it that way. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah, because it's not true. Unfortunately, like, I mean, the, the, the, the cultural change in the political sort of see change affects everybody. And on top of that, you are inherently and intrinsically linked to people who are going to suffer, right?

They are just versions of you out in the world trying to live a life just like you are. And quite frankly, Yeah. Like the only people who are actually going to benefit from this are people like Jeff Bezos, that's it. And, you know, people have been bringing up the Los Angeles times, refusing to endorse. And it's owned of course, by Dr.

Patrick Soon Shiong, uh, the, the, uh, the doctor who's made these drugs and all that now has billions of dollars, a reminder to everybody that Soon Shiong like asked Donald Trump to be part of his administration in 2016 and 2017, like, When this state of play emerges, it isn't [00:25:00] just capitulation, Nick. It is recognizing an opening to power and wealth.

And that is how this cycle works at first. Everyone's like, Oh, this is so disgusting. I don't want any part of that. This is dangerous. And by the way, shame on the Washington post for their democracy dies in darkness bullshit, which just made people feel better. Like they were somehow or another getting a newspaper subscription, but making a real difference at the same time.

It's total charlatan bullshit. But as the state of play and environment has changed, Nick, what we're now seeing is a willingness to embrace people like Donald Trump because they're a means to an end to further enrichment and empowerment. It's now the manners don't matter now. It doesn't matter what he actually says.

All that rally that we talked about earlier, like that stuff isn't enough to repel people. Now it's obvious that things are changing and developing and metastasizing to the point where people like Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, you name it. They recognize that they have everything to gain from this, which for the [00:26:00] record is the next step in the authoritarian cycle.

It's when they buy in, they see this as something that helps them, something that they should go ahead and put their money and their power and their weight behind. And that's when it starts gaining some serious traction and momentum. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Right. And what's supposed to be able to balance all of that is like the business aspect of it, where enough people will say, I'm not going to.

Subscribe to the Washington Post anymore. I know I canceled my subscription as soon as I read that over the weekend. And I saw reports where, uh, in one day they lost as half as many subscriptions as they had gotten all year long, you know, across the board from, from the digital side, uh, But unfortunately Bezos doesn't give a shit because we, you know, people have become so rich, right?

They, they've allowed to accumulate so many billions that losing like 1 billion doesn't mean anything to them. And they don't care if the Washington post is, you know, lost a whole bunch of subscriptions. Um, eventually maybe you could hurt them enough where like the, the bottom line is, is something that's [00:27:00] significant.

But, uh, I, again, they, they've become so rich at this point that they don't care, even though someone like Musk as well. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, I think there's a couple of things to look at here, which are really important. One, cancelling your subscription to the Washington Post. He doesn't give a shit about that. He didn't buy the Washington Post to make money.

He bought the Washington Post in order to influence the communication environment of the United States of America. That's worth way more to him than any amount of subscriptions we would pay for. Also, you know what would hurt more? Cancelling your subscription to Amazon Prime. Or buying things from Amazon.

And that right there is where a lot of his money is made. But Nick, I want to point something out. That still doesn't hurt him all that much. You know why? Because the vast majority of the money that Jeff Bezos makes is actually from his contracts with the United States government. I don't control that.

You don't control that. The idea that our dollars, whether it's the Washington Post or Amazon Prime, are going to make a difference isn't true. [00:28:00] We could boycott him all day long. It's the fact that the government, like, it depends on him. He is still going to get all of these different contracts. The only way that this changes is if we have a sea change in terms of how the government does business.

And we've already seen Elon Musk has promoted some of the worst conspiracy theories and also election interference that we've ever seen. Do you think for a second that any government contract he's up for has been affected in any way, shape or form? 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Uh, no, I guess only the invites to the, uh, events that they have about electric cars.

But other than that, nothing else has been canceled. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Nick, he has been enabling and working with dictators around the world. He actually, if America is a supporter of Ukraine, why didn't he lose some of his contracts to be investigated after he helped Russia in their invasion of Ukraine? On top of that, we just found out that Taiwan that the United States of America is supposed to support in its, in its conflict with China, we just found out that he screwed them over at the behest of Vladimir Putin, the whole point.

[00:29:00] And again, just to bring this thing full circle, we've talked about Israel and Saudi Arabia and how they realized the United States is powerless to do anything for them because their construct of power depends on them, right? They can do whatever they want. The oligarchs understand that as well. They can do anything that they want and they're still going to get the contracts because they're basically the only game in town.

They have monopolized the functions of the United States government and all of its complexes. And so as a result, like why would you piss off a guy who might be the next president of the United States of America and also serves your bottom line? It will only change when our government actually changes and our environment changes.

That does start with us demanding it, but it's not going to be from boycotting Amazon prime or canceling Washington post subscription. 

Ballots Burn in WA, OR; Billionaire WaPo, LATimes owners 'Obey in Advance - The BradCast - Air Date 10-28-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: Unfortunately, he is not alone. 3,000 miles to the west, Bezos's fellow billionaire, Patrick Soon Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, since 2018, pulled the same maneuver in killing his editorial [00:30:00] board's endorsement of Harris that had been in the works for weeks, and which followed months of editorials warning of the authoritarian dangers of a Trump presidency.

Observers noted that Soon Shiong is a longtime close friend to, yes, you guessed it, lottery man, Elon Musk. Vote buying man, Elon Musk. The world's richest man and who has thrown all his time and considerable dollars, more than 100 million that we know of so far into getting Donald Trump elected, even if he has to offer voters the possibility of a million dollars to sign them up in that effort.

Writes Will Bunch, while the moral center of the journalistic universe seemed to be collapsing, Trump told a rally in Tempe, Arizona that the media is, quote, the media is, quote, the enemy of the people. Echoing ominous language of dictators from the 1930s [00:31:00] and quickly followed that by a new threat to create licensing problems for CBS because Trump did not like the way they edited a 60 minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

And then a lengthy post on Truth Social, his dumb media site, threatening to prosecute his political enemies. He has already suggested several times that he would be willing to use the U. S. military. To help him do that, to round up his domestic political enemies. not just migrants in this country who so many of Trump's supporters seem to think he is talking about, despite Trump's own repeated words to the contrary, saying, no, I'm not talking about immigrants. I'm talking about my domestic political enemies. I'm talking about the Nancy Pelosi's. I'm talking about the Adam Schiff's. Maybe Fox News doesn't play those words to his supporters as much. I don't know. Maybe [00:32:00] outlets on the left don't play those words as much as they should. But the message here is clear, writes Bunch.

The cowardice of the news organizations controlled by Jeff Bezos and Sun Xiong has already taught Donald Trump, in the words of Yale's Tim Snyder. What? Power can do. And if he prevails in next week's election, he plans to bring that hammer down in full force, make no mistake. I should note again here, as we did last week on this program, I believe that on page 247 of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025, the 900 page policy blueprint for Trump's next term as written by dozens of former Trump administration officials.

At least the ones who aren't out right now trying to loudly warn that he's a fascist and should never be allowed anywhere near the Oval Office again. Chapter 8, page 247 of Project 2025, it is noted [00:33:00] that, quote, Pacifica Radio. Which owns our flagship station here in Los Angeles and helps syndicate this program to dozens of other Pacifica radio outlet, radio affiliate stations around the country and across the world.

That Pacifica Radio, they're specifically mentioned by name, should be defunded and quote, shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest and receive the privileges that often accompany so acting. Now to date, I can report that Pacifica Radio. A network founded in 1946 by Lewis Hill and E.

John Lewis in opposition to fascism as part of their commitment to progressive and anti authoritarian values, Pacifica Radio has not Obeyed in advance, at least to my knowledge, as the billionaire owners of the L. A. Times and the Washington Post have [00:34:00] demanded that their newspapers do. What happened at the Post and the L.

A. Times, writes Bunch, was a stunning betrayal of journalism's moral values. But in a strange way, he says, the papers did perform a public service, showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like. Are American voters noticing? These reversals, he says, coming now, and coming from the poisoned heart of American oligarchy, have instead confirmed the worst fears among an anxiety wracked electorate.

That the core institutions that once saved U. S. democracy under the life or death pressures of Watergate, that would be the Supreme Court, Congress, and aggressive media, all have morally imploded into empty shells.

The editorial, page editor of the, of the LA Times, resigned in protest, [00:35:00] despite the horrendous journalism job market out there. Uh, two, at least two other colleagues have now joined her. Marielle Garza bravely said, I'm resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent.

In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I'm standing up, she said. The Washington Post. For its part in its style section, confirm that, quote, the decision to no longer publish presidential endorsements was made by the posts owner. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos.

As Will Bunch concludes at the Philly Inquirer, whose editorial board, by the way, on the same day as the news from the Washington Post endorsed Kamala Harris, they, had no fear of doing so on that very same day. he writes, This early sneak preview of what [00:36:00] dictatorship actually looks like is also providing the most important lesson we could have right now.

Which is how to not obey in advance, but stand up against strongmen and bullies. How all of us respond over the coming days and weeks will decide the fate of the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country, 

The Trump White Supremacy Festival and Hootenanny Part 2 - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 10-29-24

TERRIBLE 'COMEDIAN': I welcome migrants to the United States of America with open arms, and by open arms I mean like this. It's wild. And these Latinos, they love making babies too, just know that. They do. They do. There's no pulling out. They don't do that. They come inside just like they did to our country. Republicans are the party with a good sense of humor. [00:37:00] 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: No, they aren't. They, uh, Hinchcliffe would also go on to call Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage invoke about cutting watermelons with a Black attendee of the rally. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Oh, that one was a, uh, this chef's kiss. I think. Yeah. Good work. Um, you know, we've discussed this in the past. Gutenberg, not Gutenberg, Guttenfeld, Gutfeld? What's his name? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Gutfeld. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yes. You have this, these people that, uh, you know, try to be funny and because obviously most of the great comedians are on the other side, I think, right? It's kind of fair to say. And so they try and do their version and it's, um, and I think Trump is probably the top of the list, right?

He's the guy who wants to drink minimum and, you know, and And it's like, um, it's, it's just not, it's cruel. It's, you can't, you can't really mine comedy out of cruelty. You're not supposed to at least. And even when like Rickles could do that, but like he had a, he was, he was talented. And this guy is not.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah. You're not supposed to be punching down. You know, so, so making fun of people who are in the [00:38:00] crosshairs of an authoritarian movement doesn't, isn't really that funny and what actually happens here and sometimes comedy will do this, it will provide clarity. It was really, really a good move by Tony Hinchcliffe to make it.

Obvious what the Republican party actually believes. They don't care about, you know, conservativism. They don't, they don't care about family values. What they want to do is they want to hurt the people that they do not like, and that they do not see as humans. Um, this was some of the most unvarnished hate that we have seen.

And the, the, the issue here, Nick, and before we move on to other clips from this white power hootenanny to end all white power hootenannies is to point out. That while a lot of people are celebrating online is if this is somehow or another going to be a death knell towards the Trump campaign, or it's going to hurt his electoral chances, it's simply not.

You can say any of this, you can make any of these claims. You can, you know, traffic in racist stereotypes. It does not move the bottom line when it comes to Donald Trump, not even the beginning of a percentage point. [00:39:00] 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Okay. But it might move the needle in terms of anybody of the undecided or people who might even have quite voted.

I don't know if anybody's even out there like that. Um, so that's what's interesting to me on that end. Um, but, but then if you look at the comments, I like to do that, right? I like to follow like what the response is to these kind of things. And it's like, so many of the people who are, you're talking about who are not swayed at all.

Um, it think it's like, it's a joke. He's a comedian. Is you guys don't have any, you don't have a sense of humor. What's wrong with you? Right? Like, what's wrong with us for not finding humor, uh, from something like that, or calling Puerto Rico a piece of trash? Um, for what it's worth, there's half a million Puerto Ricans that live in Pennsylvania.

Um, and what the early returns are, it seems to be, is that that is going to be, have an effect. This, that's what I've been seeing, like, you know, if we use Twitter, like if you listen to Musk right? That's the, the source of news. Um, it's possible. And there might be some Puerto Rican people of that heritage who [00:40:00] would, you know, figure out a ways to get more votes for, for Kamala Harris.

I don't know. You don't think so? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: No. And I, I, I think that, like, that is a, a comforting. Idea, particularly. I mean, we're going to do our election forecast in a while. And it is, uh, it is a really tense election coming up. I mean, whatever the truth is, Nick, if, you know, superstitions or sort of things like comfort people, that's totally fine.

But I think the really dire thing. Is to look at what happened at this rally. And I have now watched every second of it and have been repulsed by it. It it's really shocking by the way, that they decided to make their final appeal, the most like pure concentrated version of their hate and ugliness. That that was what they went with because it's been working for them.

Um, I, I, I don't think that this is necessarily going to hurt Donald Trump in some way, by the same fashion. For the record that the clip we're getting ready to listen to this from a preacher who at one point nick [00:41:00] Grabbed a crucifix and called on god to help donald trump and destroy their political enemies here He is, uh giving uh, you know his his idea of who kamala harris is 

TERRIBLE 'COMEDIAN': In fact, she is the devil, whoever screamed that out.

She is the antichrist at her. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: She is the antichrist. She's the literal personification of evil who has been birthed into the world in order to destroy 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Christendom. I'm so glad I watched the omen and started watching the omen too. So I know what he's talking about. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, in case you wondered what else other people thought about the Democratic Party, here is another one of the speakers.

By the way, this thing went on for six hours. It's incredible. And, and, and, and quite frankly, it never ceases to shock here. Here is a, another, uh, look at what they think about the Democratic Party. 

CLIP: She is some sick bastard that Hillary Clinton, huh? What a sick son of a bitch. The whole fucking [00:42:00] party, a bunch of degenerates, low lives, Jew haters, and low lives.

Every one of them. Every one of them. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Do you ever think you'd hear a political campaign, like, turn towards this, Nick? 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, he's off script, right, Jared? 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Oh, great. Cool. I assume he was drug off by a hook, right? 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Uh, he's reading off a teleprompter, as I think they all were. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Uh, oh, cool. Oh, great. Great. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Tells us that these were vetted. These were all speeches that were okayed. Um, you, you have to imagine that, you know, the kind of control that they have means that they would not let that, this kind of thing happen if they didn't approve it. But like, it's like what you said, so I've been saying for the last several weeks, this is, they, they, they.

The polls are telling them that they need to continue to do this. It's going to get worse, right? They're going to get even worse. I try to, I wish I could predict this accurately to figure out exactly what they're going to go do next, right? Because it's so bad as it is, but I don't, they're going to, there's going to, they're going to find another way to, you know, Think that they're gonna get an extra half a point off [00:43:00] of that.

There's a reason why this is in the A Block of today's show. This right here is yet another mile marker along the way to point out exactly what's happening to American politics. You and I started our discussion eight years ago, Nick, back in 2016 when I started reporting from Trump rallies. That's when we linked up and started talking about this thing.

And I said, you know what, over time, regardless of what happens in elections, this thing is going to continue to mutate. and worsen as radicalization and polarization worsen. What happens with that? Not only does hate become the main driving force of one of the main political parties, but you start to see this embrace of, of conflict politics.

And it isn't going to be the same old speeches. Like if this was Mitt Romney speaking a couple of days before, you know, the, the 20, uh, 2012 election, like you would not be hearing this. Right? Like this is down a path that is encouraging this and [00:44:00] incentivizing this. And what you just said is completely correct.

I can only imagine within the next week, we're going to hear something else that is even going to take what we saw at Madison Square Garden and, and honestly put that to shame or put it into new context. 

Well, I wrote this down because the question hit me, uh, over the weekend. Uh, when you were looking at sort of what Michelle Obama was trying to say, or it was saying in her speech, and when you hear Kamala and Wallace talk, like, how are you supposed to sell decency?

To people who are fueled by anger and hate, you know, that's where we're at because what they're going to think is that decency and empathy are all weakness. And in this society, the way we've gotten to in a way that we were going toward that, a more empathetic place, we've the pushback probably in the same way that the pushback against like the counterculture movement swung us way back toward Reagan, like this swinging back again into the toxic masculinity of which we thought had been kind of Conquered, you know, uh, is really, um, [00:45:00] frustrating and troubling.

How Trump could steal the election - Today, Explained - Air Date 10-29-24

NOEL: You recently wrote a big piece called The Very Real Scenario where Trump Loses and Takes Power Anyway. And it starts with the claim If Donald Trump loses the election next week, he is going to challenge the results again. Why do you feel comfortable making such a claim?

KYLE: Well, first of all, that was the collective judgment of dozens of people we talked to about what they expected that scenario. But but really, the answer is almost obvious in that Donald Trump is essentially telling us that he has said he can't lose unless there's some kind of massive cheating by Democrats.

<CLIP> DONALD TRUMP: If the election's not rigged, we're going to win.

 He's describing massive cheating by Democrats, even though it's not based on any real evidence.

<CLIP> DONALD TRUMP: We got to stop the cheating. If we stop that cheating, if we don't let them cheat, I don't even have to campaign anymore. We're going to win by so much.

 And he’s expressed such supreme confidence that he's going to win. That is conditioning his supporters to believe that anything other than a win is stolen from him. So he's essentially saying it [00:46:00] almost explicitly and it's what we saw four years ago, so everyone expects it to recur.

NOEL: Politico did not write a similar piece about Kamala Harris. Why not?

KYLE: Similarly, the dozens of people we spoke to said, look, if Donald Trump wins the election, he wins. There's you know, you could you'll see some protests. You'll see some legal challenges in a really close state. But if Donald Trump is the winner, he's going to be the winner.

NOEL: All right. Let's go through the chronology as you laid it out in your story. You identified a bunch of discrete stages, starting with right about now, the end of October through November 11th. Where does the potential plan to steal the election start?

SCORING IN—STUDIOUS RED 

KYLE: Well, what we said in the story was, you know, if you look at if you count this as step one or phase one, it's already underway. And that is this effort to condition as many people as possible to not trust the election results so that in the event Donald Trump loses, he'll be able to say, we can't believe the numbers that we're seeing. So that's happening that Donald Trump's talking about this new Democrats registering massive numbers of non-citizen voters trying to [00:47:00] solicit illegal votes from overseas.

<CLIP> DONALD TRUMP: Our elections are bad. And a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they're trying to get them to vote. They can't even speak English. They don't even know what country they're in practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote.

 Again, No evidence of this. There are there are certain parts of the process that are being litigated, I think, in a more legitimate way about how, you know, the different safeguards and what the right safeguards are. But there's no evidence that there's some massive orchestrated plot to get thousands and thousands of unlawful people to register and vote. But he's saying that in part because it creates that noise and pressure that he needs for later phases of the process. So I think that's really step one. Step two is election night itself. When we expect and everyone we talk to expect Donald Trump to either declare victory or at the very least cast doubt if it seems like there's a Harris victory in the offing.

<CLIP> GLOBAL NEWS: It's the same playbook he used in 2016. and again in 2020, where he still refuses to admit he lost. 

<CLIP> TRUMP AT DEBATE: [00:48:00] “if you look at the facts, I would love to have you do a special on it, you can look at georgia, I’ll show you Wisconsin, I’ll show you Pennsylvania..we have so many facts and statics but you know what? That doesn’t matter..

SCORING OUT

NOEL: Okay. Americans are on edge. We're suspicious. Half the country is suspicious in one direction, half in the other. Where does it go from there?

KYLE: So the next phase in the process after election night, you know, obviously, we'll see some states being called, we might see some states that are too close to call. It could be a couple of days before we get the final results. But assuming we're heading toward a Harris victory, it probably would be a very close one. But the next phase is for the state, county and state election boards to certify those results, canvass and certify the results. Four years ago, we saw Donald Trump try to intervene in that process, lean on allies and state and county boards and tell them not to certify.T hat didn't work. It didn't get him anywhere.

<CLIP>CBS NEWS: President Trump continued his [00:49:00] assault on a 2020 vote today. And oreven as he claimed total election corruption in Arizona…BRIAN KEMP: All 15 counties have certified their results. REPORTER: The state's Republican governor was certifying Biden's victory…

 But in the intervening four years, we've seen a lot of turnover on these boards, and many of them are now populated with much closer allies.

<CLIP> DONALD TRUMP: I don't know if you've heard, but the Georgia state election board is in a very positive way. This is a very positive thing, Marjorie. They're on fire.

 So if there's a state where Donald Trump wants to protest or reject or challenge the outcome using those boards, he can ask those same officials and make it a different result this time. Now, what's interesting about that is we talked to a lot of secretaries of state and other election chiefs in different states, and they said that's not going to amount to very much. They they will make a lot of noise, but we will go to court and force these boards to certify the election. In their view, that's sort of a successful outcome. But [00:50:00] if you're viewing this through the lens of Donald Trump and what he wants to accomplish, in some ways that's actually right on target because that gets him [to] say these state and county boards have been forced to certify an invalid election under pressure and duress by the courts, not because they think the election is legitimate. That's why I need help from other elected Republicans to reverse the outcome.

NOEL: All right, then the next state in your chronological timeline is December 11th. What goes on on December 11th?

KYLE: So that is a really important dividing line in this process. That is called the safe Harbor deadline. It's something set out in federal law that says states have to send their certified election results to the federal government by December 11th in order for the results in their electors to be counted. And so that's when you go from this sort of this very administrative process where you're just tabulating votes and certifying them, and then to the next phase, which is where you have state legislatures and ultimately Congress receiving those results and acting on [00:51:00] them. That's when the sort of the counting process is over and you're in this sort of political power process of this this entire situation.

NOEL: What did we see in 2020 that makes you think December 11th is such a key date here?

KYLE: Sure. So. So in 2020, I think what people didn't appreciate was that once the states certified and sent the results in Trump, Donald Trump was not going to be done trying to reverse his defeat. That was when the sort of pressure campaign really ramped up again on state legislatures.

SCORING IN—A SIMPLE REVENGE

<CLIP> PBS NEWSHOUR: The accusation, like much in the Trump case, is unique. Federal prosecutors point to these seven states which Trump lost, but where they allege he plotted to subvert the results with a false slate of electors…..

KY: E And this is interesting. And this was a process that was sort of overlooked in 2020 and now is very highly scrutinized. But state legislatures under the Constitution essentially have the power to decide who gets their presidential electors. [00:52:00] And now most constitutional experts say they've already made that choice. They've said it's a popular vote. and so the winner of the popular vote gets those electors. But what Donald Trump did was surround himself with a bunch of lawyers who adopted a sort of fringe theory and said those state legislatures can take that power back at any time. They can say we don't trust the election results. We think it's tainted by fraud and irregularities. And we actually want to decide immediately, you know, that we should appoint a different set of presidential electors and send those to Congress alongside the electors certified by the governor.That is the point in the process where that would happen. If the if the governor certifies a slate that Donald Trump disagrees with and he wants an alternative slate, he can lean on those state legislatures to do that.\

WARNING Trump's Threating to END Civil Liberties - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 10-31-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to American civil liberties that could issue in [00:53:00] usher in a new era of racial violence, political tyranny. I think it's a legitimate warning. He writes, it is the We lead at our kitchen table and in our bedrooms that is most dangerously threatened by the tyranny that a return of Trump to power would represent.

This is the kind of tyranny that everyone who reads these words should fear most and work hardest to hold at bay. He notes that Trump has already begun to dismantle political protections that might prevent him from carrying out threats. This includes siccing the military on his perceived enemies, which could be you or me.

Aligning himself with dictators whose charm and patriotism he praises. Dismantling the civil service. And sacrificing American influence abroad by abandoning European allies. Edsel warned that one third of MAGA [00:54:00] Republicans expect imminent civil war. One third. More than half of MAGA Republicans say political violence is justified.

Nearly three quarters of MAGA Republicans believe that white people face discrimination and that there's a plot to replace white people in America. Which pretty much tells you, you know, why white people are supporting Donald Trump. Or why so many white people are supporting Donald Trump. It's all about white privilege.

We wanna keep our white privilege, don't you know? You know? The study says, uh, this is, you know, he's quoting a study here. He says, assessments by law enforcement experts in violent domestic extremism and prior research concern about the potential for political violence among MAGA Republicans appears to be justified.

Edsel notes that there are three protections against a president being out of control. Number one, White House advisors. [00:55:00] Two, the threat of impeachment, and number three, the threat of prosecution. Well, Trump is not going to have the same advisers again. He's not going to have John Kelly back. The threat of impeachment, he just shrugs because Republicans in the Senate won't convict him, so he doesn't care if he gets impeached in the House.

And the threat of prosecution? Ha! The Supreme Court did away with that. So, or at least six Republicans on the Supreme Court did away with that. John Kelly, per our song just a moment ago, is quoted in the Atlantic as saying that he wanted Donald Trump, excuse me, it's in Peter Baker and Susser Glaser's book, The Divider, Trump and the White House, that Trump asked John Kelly, a general, why can't my generals be more like Hitler's generals?

John Kelly tried to patiently explain to him that Hitler did what Hitler told them to do and it was a disaster. You know, attacking Russia, and as a [00:56:00] result, three times, Hitler's generals tried to, and he didn't believe it. He said, no, no, no, no, no, they were totally loyal to him. That's what Trump told John Kelly.

Meanwhile, over at Fox, Brian Kilmeade says if Trump becomes president and he gets generals like Hitler's generals, quote, that would be great. Seriously. This is Brian Kilmeade, quote, he would say it's not your job to rein in the president. It's your job to do what the president wants. It would be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do.

Thank you, Fox News. We, we understand who you are and what you're all about.

Note from the Editor on how to feel about the road ahead

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips, starting with reveal, discussing the process of Elon Musk going manga. Five four explained to the war on labor, launched by mosque with others following his lead. The majority of report looked at Musk's election efforts through America pack the muck rake political podcast discussed the role of the billionaire elite in a fascist power [00:57:00] structure. The Brad cast also looked at the shifting power games among business elite Hedging ahead of a potential Trump presidency. The McCurry political podcast discussed Trump's Madison square garden rally. Anne's today explained, looked at the potential path for Trump to subvert the election results. 

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 trying to make each other laugh in the process. 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 use to listen, you may be able to use the time codes in our 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 [00:58:00] 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. I just want to clarify a couple things, share some thoughts. 

The first is that we are sharing everything we are sharing in the show today, not to frighten or depress, but to prepare. My hope is that if you're a listener of the show, You won't have been metaphorically holding your breath, leading up to election day. In the hope that a feeling of relief would be coming soon. And if you have been doing that, let me help reorient you. It's like the tunnel game when you're driving and you hold your breath as you go through, but we're not coming to the end of the tunnel here on election day, we are entering that tunnel right now. 

And that tunnel is at least two months long. So be mentally and emotionally prepared for that. Of course, that's in the case of the Harris win and the election. If Trump pulls out another 2016 and eats out an electoral college [00:59:00] victory, Then the tunnel we're entering is much longer. Indeed. But I have thoughts on that too. The idea of entering a second Trump term And more broadly, a fully entrenched Trump era of the Republican party. Is as dark of a political possibility as most of us will have experienced in our lifetimes. You know, maybe all of us. I'm not here to downplay that in any way. It's a, certainly better to expect the worst. Which is absolutely what they're promising. Out loud with their own words. But just take a long view on various forms of dictatorship and authoritarian government. History is littered with examples of them coming to glorious ins. I tend to think of the major bridge in Lisbon Portugal. 

I'm not even going to try the Portuguese pronunciation, but it's named the 25 day, uh, Breall bridge, April 25th bridge named for the date that their dictatorship was overthrown in 1974. [01:00:00] And whenever I think of. Either current present. Dictatorships in reality or theoretical future dictatorships and authoritarian governments. 

I tend to end up thinking about that bridge because it reminds me of the limitations of dictatorship, the, you know, nature of them to very often be. Short-lived I mean, you know, like 20 years. For a dictatorship. As is normal but it's not a thousand years, which is how long they imagine they're going to last. 

So take from that what you will, but the point being. These things come to an end and then everyone celebrates and puts up monuments, celebrating the end of their dictatorships and, you know, pulling away from that. Just more generally speaking about politics, you know, once you've been paying attention to politics long enough, it becomes easier to remember that no defeat is permanent. Just as no, when is either. Progress and progressivism is always about [01:01:00] the endless fight and can never be about achieving permanent victory. And so when I had that mental shift years ago, it really helped reorient me and my energies to, to not be in a perpetual state of disappointment that we hadn't yet achieved. Permanent victory or that. Permanent victory seemed to be. Getting pushed farther off and oh, well, well now it's going to take longer to get to that permanent victory. 

That seems to be just over the horizon. No, it's not there. that's. What I learned and came to terms with is there is no permanent victory. Any time. Ever. 

But in the same way, there's no permanent defeat either. So. Regardless of the length of the tunnel we're entering today, there will be a light at the end of it. We may be much worse for wear. Again, I am not downplaying the likely damage of a Trump presidency, mostly for our chances of addressing climate change. 

If [01:02:00] nothing else. It's just that I find taking that long view can help give the strength to keep the fight alive day after day. In the present. 

SECTION A - DEMOCRACY DYING IN DAYLIGHT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up section a democracy dying and daylight followed by section B actual election interference section. See Elon Musk, the billionaire and section D Trump. The fascist.

Ballots Burn in WA, OR; Billionaire WaPo, LATimes owners 'Obey in Advance Part 2 - The BradCast - Air Date 10-28-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: you know, I mentioned at the, uh, at the top of the show, uh, the importance of supporting, uh, whichever media outlet happens to be making the Bradcast available to you today. Well, uh, this news from Friday and over the weekend should make the necessity of that right now, the necessity of independent media, uh, right now, just one week away from election day, more than clear.

The Washington Post Post The newspaper with the now wildly and embarrassingly ironic [01:03:00] slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness, a slogan by the way that was adopted by the paper after Donald Trump was elected to his first term in office, uh, that paper has decided it just can't make an endorsement this year in the presidential race.

It just can't choose between, uh, the sitting Vice President Kamala Harris and a guy whose own top White House advisors from the last time he served in the White House have repeatedly and loudly described him as a fascist. A man who kicked off his final week before Election Day with a rally on Sunday night that's being described today as Nazi esque.

Given the, uh, attacks on immigrants and the calls for mass deportations and one of the speakers who described Puerto Rico, an island, by the way, of U. S. citizens, as a, quote, island of garbage. Uh, this is, uh, this is the man that, [01:04:00] uh, held a rally, Donald Trump at Madison Square Gardens in New York City, the site of the infamous America First rally back in 1939 held at the time by the American Nazi party.

These similarities there were not lost on anybody, but sure. It's a tough call for Washington Post to make, uh, as to who they should endorse this year. The Los Angeles Times made the very same decision to not endorse either of the two presidential candidates late last week. In both cases, the decision, the cowardly decision, was made by its billionaire owners.

After the editorial boards at each of the otherwise highly regarded papers had already drafted their endorsements. In both cases, For Kamala Harris, as you also heard at the very top of the show, the world renowned us expert on fascism and tyrannical authoritarian regimes, Timothy Snyder. leads off his [01:05:00] landmark 2017 book titled On Tyranny with the most basic warning for how to respond to the rise, or the potential rise, of a, of a fascist regime.

Quote, Do not obey In advance, most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given, he notes in his now classic book. In times like these, he writes, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then they offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

And yet, as our friend Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who happened to be on this program on, uh, on January 6, 2021, [01:06:00] when the man now running for president again on the Republican side, incited a violent attack on the U. S. Capitol and on the U. S. government himself in hopes of blocking the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in U.

S. history, that Will Bunch wrote at the Enquirer over the weekend, once upon a time, in a world that feels so very far away, stories of courage by the reporters, editors, and publisher at the Washington Post inspired a generation of young people to believe that journalism was a way, and maybe the best way, to change the world for good.

The pivotal scene, he notes, in the 1976 film, All the President's Men, which burnished both the facts and some legend about the Post, uh, their star reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and their role in the Watergate scandal that took down Richard Nixon, that, uh, pivotal scene takes place in the dead of [01:07:00] night on the Pivotal Island.

pitch black lawn of the, uh, top editor at the paper, Ben Bradley. The two journalists fear they are being bugged and they relay their source deep throats warning that, quote, people's lives are in danger, maybe even ours. In a famous monologue, Bradley, played by the Oscar winner Jason Robards, tells Woodward and Bernstein to keep reporting the story, that, quote, nothing's riding on this except the First Amendment to the Constitution, freedom of the press, and maybe the future of the country, adding his trademarked newsroom cynicism, quote, Not that any of that matters.

Yet perhaps an even more revealing scene, notes Bunch, occurs earlier in the film when Nixon's campaign manager, John Mitchell, called by the reporters for his comment on a damning article, instead issues a warning to the Post's trailblazing publisher at the time, saying, quote, Katie Graham's gonna get [01:08:00] her He used a crude word for breast.

Caught in a big fat ringer if that story's published. Well, Kathryn Graham's post had a lot at stake. Federal regulators could have stripped her company's lucrative TV licenses, for instance, at the time. And yet both the story and the quote Minus the T word, were in fact published in The Post, which ended up winning a Pulitzer Prize for its relentless pursuit of Watergate.

These are the stories, Will Bunch notes, that journalists tell ourselves in order to live. So much so, that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos Felt compelled when he bought the post from Graham's heirs in 2013 to invoke them to reassure the newsroom that he would never diminish the post's reputation for courageous journalism.

The 200 [01:09:00] billion dollar man at the time wrote in a letter to staffers quote, Well, I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a ringer. If they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham's example, I will be ready. Will Bunch notes, Jeff Bezos was lying. On Friday, the world's richest, third richest person, his scandal scarred British publisher, Will Lewis, and the iconic newspaper they control, stunned both the American body politic and the media world by spiking their own editorial board's endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.

Just days ahead of an election defined by her rival, Donald Trump's increasing threats to impose a tyrannical form of government With mass deportation camps and arrests for his growing enemies lists, including, yes, journalists,

the, uh, [01:10:00] Lewis's, uh, this is the, uh, the publisher Lewis's utterly incoherent defense of the decision ending a tradition of presidential endorsements they post launched in 1976. The very same year that All the President's Men was released did nothing to quell the rampant, informed speculation that his boss, Jeff Bezos, had killed the already drafted editorial out of fear of a revenge minded Trump 47.

Who could terminate the billionaire's extensive business dealings with the federal government. It seemed all too fitting then that Donald Trump was in Austin, Texas, meeting executives of Jeff Bezos space venture, Blue Horizon, at the very same time that the Washington Post kiboshed the endorsement. That space company, uh, owned by Jeff Bezos, already has contracts for billions of dollars with the federal government.[01:11:00] 

And many other such contracts as well, all of which, well, depending on who wins the next presidential election, could simply go away. Will Bunch notes, if this looks like the latest saga of open corruption in a nation that's become a billionaire kleptocracy, it is. But this moment is also so much more than that.

He says America is witnessing the raw power of dictatorship just days before voters even decide if that will truly be our future path. He is obeying fascism in advance.

TYT Explodes Over Calling Trump 'Fascist' - The Majority Report - Air Date 11-1-24

ANNA KASPARIAN: Donald Trump is deeply racist, and he says deeply racist things, okay? I want to make a distinction between Donald Trump, the person who says and does racist things, and the notion of a fascist.

Because look, if we're just going to use fascist toward anyone we dislike, we're going to be Alright, then the word doesn't actually mean anything. Okay, 

CENK UYGUR: what do you want me to say, Anna? You want me to say wannabe dictator? Sure, you can say [01:12:00] 

ANNA KASPARIAN: wannabe dictator, but I don't even think he wants to be a dictator.

Of course he does! That's what you do when you lose an election and you go, 

CENK UYGUR: oh, I've got to convince the electors and I'd like to change the Constitution and bring out the tanks and use martial law against American citizens and shoot protesters. I mean, if that's not fascist, then I guess the word just shouldn't exist.

ANNA KASPARIAN: Was he able to do those things? 

CENK UYGUR: First of all, his entire cabinet had to threaten, not cabinet, administration, his White House team, had to say we're all going to mass resign if you roll out tanks against American citizens. Okay, so 

ANNA KASPARIAN: if you think he's a fascist, wouldn't that justify taking physical action against him?

CENK UYGUR: No, because that doesn't help, that devolves us further into fascism. Whoa, what a straw man. Can you pause it actually? 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: There's a difference between somebody I guess I didn't see that part, but what, I mean, If you're a 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: fascist, why aren't you, uh, What is the guy who tried to kill Hitler? Uh, Ribbentrop I mean, It's 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: a way to continue to delegitimize what Cenk is saying there, and Cenk is absolutely right.

I mean, look, if she wants a definition, uh, [01:13:00] Fascism's a political ideology that started as an outgrowth of Mussolini and Hitler's reigns at the start of the 20th century. You can characterize it as highly militaristic, I don't think. Nationalistic, anti democratic, a political movement that encourages violence, um, uh, against leftists, um, against, um, uh, LGBTQ people, um, minority groups, sorry, what'd you say, Brandon?

I said 

BRANDON SUTTON: marginalized groups, yeah. Go ahead. Marginalized 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: groups, right? Or anyone that's opposing you and, you know, that can involve, like, um, a, a consolidation of power for the wealthy, I mean, the, the definitions of fascism are quite well established, but forced deportation. Like, that's unequivocally what Donald Trump and J.

D. Vance are proposing there, is unequivocally a fascist policy. So, to basically And it's 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: demographically motivated as well, despite the, like, National Socialist gloss that they give to it. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So, so, so, I found that fascinating and depressing to see how, okay, he's not a fascist, or, when you make these claims, like, that [01:14:00] goes too far is basically what her contention is.

And then, um, Um, she asked was he able to do any of those things, and the point is that, like, yeah, he was thwarted. But apparently you're only a fascist if you win. Let's give him some more reps at it. Saga and Jenny 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: make the same point. Like, well, he didn't, he couldn't really do it, and he didn't really do it, but let's give him four more years to try knowing what he knows now.

Are you fucking stupid? Yeah. It's such 

BRANDON SUTTON: a moving goalpost, too, because it goes from, like, okay, he's not, He's not in favor of those things to like, okay, yes, he is in favor of those things, but he wasn't able to do them. And you see like Republicans whose main role it is to like run interference for Trump, who are more media savvy, play this, like, Picard all time was like, he's just saying those things to trigger lip.

He's like, okay, well, we have evidence of him trying to do those things, like actually try to, you know, And that's what he says, they go, okay, but he wasn't able to do it. It's like, that's, you know, you can't, you can't fight with that. Cause until he does it, then suddenly it's not like, there's no provable point.

It's the same argument people make about Israel's genocide in Palestine, where it's like, there are still some Gazans alive. [01:15:00] So it can't be genocides. Like that's not how it works. And I would also just point out, you know, you can read Umberto Eco about fascism, but when you're talking about neo fascism or at least fascism that takes place in the aftermath of Nazi Germany, in the aftermath of.

Italian Mussolini fascism. You have to understand that fascists are able to disguise fascism better because they understand that fascism is simply not popular. You know, there is a reason why, even people on the right, when they're accusing socialists of, you know, being, Uh, anti liberal or illiberal, use the word fascist because they know fascism as a political project has been extremely delegitimized due to the many, many Or the word Nazi, 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Brandon.

Yeah, Nazi. Right, like these right wingers, so many of these people that are actual Nazis in terms of the, the core of their ideology, but they won't brand themselves as that in public at the very least. 

BRANDON SUTTON: They'll try to brand Nazis as socialists, they'll be like, oh, they were national socialists, a complete canard, a complete red herring.

But, you know, you just have to be aware that neo fascists nowadays understand [01:16:00] that what they are preaching is not popular, and that's why they have to launder it into modern, you know, mainstream political discourse with any number of just like, sleights of hand that help them, you know, escape that.

Identification. But Trump isn't able to do that. He just says straight up fascist stuff and then people who are defending him have to try to launder it or disguise it as something different than it is. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, and you know, I've, I've, on Left Reckoning, we've talked a lot about, um, the definition of fascism and that sort of thing, and Robert Paxton is another definition of fascism that I think pretty much, uh, indicts Trump, uh, and he, he traces it back to the Klan as like a early form of neo fascism.

Um, Richard Evans is a historian who makes that point about a militaristic society being a difference between, uh, the original fascists and now, and I think that sort of taxonomy

But this thing where it's mainly about you're too alarmed, uh, is a big problem for me and I don't, uh, think it's, uh, you know, well founded. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And even under [01:17:00] that definition, in terms of the militarism, you could make a case for neo fascism and the, with the level of armaments that, like, a certain level of our population has, um, if you wanted to basically say that they could be, you know, Galvanized into some sort of, uh, action against the groups that are being targeted.

I think that's a very fair, uh, academic perspective on fascism. Um, but yeah, just the claim essentially that it's hysterical to make these, uh, accusations or to call him a fascist. Well, I would say that, uh, a conversation between, uh, Mark Milley and Anna is in order or with these other Trump administration officials that have said his former chief of staff, The very same things where they don't have an incentive to do so in any regard.

They're just saying what they heard. We know from Ivana Trump's, uh, divorce proceedings that he, at least she claimed that he had a speech of, uh, Hitler's is a 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: sequel to Mein Kampf is how it was marketed, which is the speeches of Adolf [01:18:00] Hitler, right? And that is, seems to be, I mean, if she made that, if she made that, If she made that detail up, she had a great divorce lawyer because it probably said like, Oh, Mein Kampf is too obvious.

Go with this. No, I think it's probably because Trump did have a collection of Hitler speeches on his bedside table. But, 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: but that's 

BRANDON SUTTON: what Mein Kampf is too mainstream. He's more of a Hitler deep cuts. B sides. B sides. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: But, but like what adds credibility to her claim is what we've heard from like people that worked with him and what he says in private and then what he says in public.

So the question is, how much Like, how credulous are you going to be to these right wingers? And it seems that she's made an assessment that at this point, that, uh, she lends them a lot of credence, and gives them a lot of flexibility in terms of, like, what they claim publicly, matching what they claim in private, and what that political ideology really means for people in this country.

And so, um, I found that despicable, to be honest with you. Um, and, uh, You know, it's [01:19:00] all doing whatever you want because you feel like it's better for your career makes total sense, but to downplay the threat of Trump, especially in after what we saw at the Madison Square Garden rally, which was an attempt to, uh, gesture towards the bun, the Nazi rally of 85 years ago, um, to downplay that in this moment, I feel like is a real disservice and frankly, irresponsible, uh, to do that and communicate that with your audience.

SECTION B - ACTUAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B. Actual election interference.

How Trump could steal the election Part 2 - Today, Explained - Air Date 10-29-24

NOEL: What happened with the fake electors after the 2020 election?

KYLE: So this is interesting. So in 2020, no state legislature did this. Trump wanted them to. He asked them to over and over again. And they all said, show us your evidence of fraud and we'll think about it. And he can never get them anything that was remotely convincing. And so the state legislatures balked. This is sort of similar to what I said earlier. A lot of those state legislators who stood in his way four years ago are gone and have been replaced by much more compliant, closer Trump allies. That's number one. [01:20:00] Number two is what Trump did four years ago with appoint or have his campaign essentially in the state Republican parties assemble slates of active Republican activists who called themselves legitimate presidential electors, signed documents saying they were legitimate presidential electors but were not. And they sent those documents to Congress. And what happened was a lot of the people got charged with crimes for signing false documents.

<CLIP> FOX 13 NEWS: 16 people in Michigan now facing felony charges for acting as fake electors for Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election.

 And it amounted to nothing because Mike Pence, then presiding over Congress, refused to even recognize them. They had no legitimacy at all. What we point out in the story is if a slate of electors is backed by their legislature, it's a little bit of a different story. They actually have some legitimacy in the sense that a government authority has given them its backing. That was the big thing that was missing in [01:21:00] 2020. Could Donald Trump get legislatures to do in 2024 what they wouldn't do in 2020? That could actually change the equation a little bit.

NOEL: And if he did, if he was able to do that in 2024 this year, what would happen next?

KYLE: I mean, then you're going to Congress. Congress receives electors that, you know, after they meet the electors meet on December 17th this year and cast their ballots and send those ballots to Washington. If there are competing slates of electors endorsed by state legislatures, presumably they would meet too, And similarly send their documents to Congress. So when Congress starts counting electors, you may get to a state that has two slates. Now, that presents a sort of unprecedented controversy that we haven't really seen, where you have two government backed slate of electors that come before Congress at the same time. Now, one of the things that's also happened since 2020 is a federal law was passed by Congress and Joe Biden that tries to prevent this [01:22:00] scenario basically puts a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of the electors backed by the governor. But there is an open constitutional question about whether state legislatures do have that authority. And it would certainly have to go to court and be back. And it'd be a big battle over whether those alternate electors would also have to be considered by Congress.

NOEL: And and and, as you said, control of who controls Congress would really matter here.

KYLE: This, to me is is probably the most important question of all: who controls Congress? You know, after the votes are counted on Election Day and the days thereafter, because if you have a Democratic-led Congress, number one, Kamala Harris is going to be the one presiding over the January 6th session where they count electors. And so even if she had to introduce a slate backed by a state legislature, there's no universe in which Congress is going to count that alternate slate for Donald Trump in a state where Harris was the popular vote winner. It just doesn't, it doesn't compute. And so if [01:23:00] Democrats control the House and even if they narrowly lose the Senate, but you have senators like Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski and others who have been averse to these efforts by Donald Trump, you are not going to see this plan go anywhere. If you have a Republican House, that's when you get into some of these sort of wild scenarios where where this effort could still succeed.

NOEL: The final date in your timeline is January 6th. Close listeners of the podcast may recall what happened four years ago on January 6th. What would an attempted steal look like on January 6th, 2025?

KYLE: So assuming you have a Republican Congress, assuming all these other steps in the process, go as you sort of again, very hypothetical for many reasons, but that's when you get wild scenarios.

SCORING IN—A SIMPLE REVENGE

 It depends on who's the speaker. Is Mike Johnston going to be speaker again? But let's assume that he is the speaker and that he is totally on board with any effort by Trump to continue challenging the election as late as January 6th. Well, then you have [01:24:00] you have to have a situation where Mike Johnson says the federal law that passed in 2022 to prevent these election challenges. I don't think it's constitutional. I don't think it binds Congress because if it does bind Congress, then we have to basically accept the results certified by the governors. If we don't accept that it binds Congress, then we have a much messier situation where we may have to think about these legislatively endorsed electors. We may not have to accept the process for challenging electors and which ones we're supposed to accept. We can actually prevent Congress from counting electors for Kamala Harris. And if we prevent both either candidate from reaching 270 electoral votes, then the election goes to the House. But in a weird sort of way, where instead of a just a majority vote, it's actually a vote by state where each state gets one vote. And that process favors Republicans pretty heavily. And so that's the scenario. That's sort of the ultimate [01:25:00] capper on this. If you get to that contingent election, they call it, you probably have a Donald Trump presidency.

SCORING

Ballots Burn in WA, OR; Billionaire WaPo, LATimes owners 'Obey in Advance Part 3 - The BradCast - Air Date 10-28-24

BRAD FRIEDMAN - HOST, THE BRADCAST: I'll get to the billionaire endorsement business. Uh, I'll get back to that or, or, or, or lack thereof. Momentarily, but we've got some breaking news today that I need to quickly wave at, at least in that, of course, uh, we may cover in more detail on the broadcast, uh, throughout the coming days as the final week before election is now, uh, underway.

And well, uh, literally in this case, heating up quickly, we reported on an incident last week in Phoenix, Arizona, where someone had set a U. S. Postal Service collection box on fire, burning at least 20 mail in. absentee ballots in the bargain. And now it has, guess what happened again and in two different states this time, not to a us postal service box, but to a ballot drop boxes with hundreds of ballots in them.[01:26:00] 

According to KGW eight out of Portland today, hundreds of ballots were destroyed in a ballot box fire. In Vancouver, Washington, early Monday morning and another ballot box fire in Portland, Portland, Oregon, which destroyed in that case, just three ballots where apparently there was a fire suppressant inside the ballot drop box.

Now I thought I knew a lot about elections. I did not know that some ballot drop boxes apparently have a fire suppressants in them. That's good. Uh, and, and, you know, I'm glad to hear it. If so, unfortunately, apparently not in that one in Washington state. However, Vancouver police, uh, responded around 4 AM to a, on Monday to a reported arson at a ballot box on Southeast 164th Avenue near Fisher's Landing Parkway.

Transit Depot. I'm giving that very specific address, uh, because we have quite a few listeners in both [01:27:00] Washington and Oregon. And in case you or anyone, you know, might have used that specific drop box, uh, and may need now to vote again to replace a damaged ballot. Well, if you voted at Southeast 164th Avenue.

Uh, the officers found a, quote, suspicious device next to the ballot box, which was smoking and on fire, according to Vancouver Police. Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey told KGW that hundreds of ballots were severely burned, many of which were destroyed. Uh, KGW is the NBC affiliate in Portland. The Clark County auditor told the outlet that anyone who dropped off a ballot in that box after 11 AM on Saturday should contact the election division at 564 397 2345 or go to, or email elections at clark.[01:28:00] 

wa. gov. The office of the secretary of state in Washington said the, uh, Clark County auditor's office will quote work diligently to make sure any impacted voters receive replacement ballots before the November 5 general election in a state which votes almost entirely by mail, or in this case, via Dropbox.

Voters may check their ballot status online at vote WA. gov to track, uh, its return status. That's a good idea wherever you may vote to track that ballot. If the jurisdiction you're voting in allows you to do ballot tracking for absentee and mail in ballots and so forth. I know we do that here in Los Angeles.

If a return ballot, they note, is not marked as received, voters can print a replacement ballot in Washington, in Vancouver, or visit their local election department for a replacement, according to the Secretary of State's office. [01:29:00] Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said, quote, uh, we will not tolerate threats or acts of violence that, uh, Seek to undermine the democratic process, adding quote, I strongly denounce any acts of terror that aim to disrupt lawful and fair elections in Washington state.

He said, despite this incident, I have complete confidence in our county election officials ability to keep Washington's elections safe and secure for all voters. The FBI is said to be investigating the incident in the democratic leaning state and around three 30 a. m. More. Uh, also on Monday, security at the Multnomah County Elections Division notified Portland, Oregon police that they responded to a fire at a nearby ballot box on Southeast Morrison Street.

Security personnel extinguished the fire in that case before officers even arrived. Portland police determined an incendiary device was put inside the ballot box to ignite that [01:30:00] fire again in another Democratic stronghold. As mentioned, a fire suppressant inside that ballot box, in that case, helped protect the ballots, according to the, uh, county, and only three ballots were damaged.

The election division will contact those three voters so they can receive replacement ballots. Late on Monday, Uh, Monday afternoon, AP was reporting that police now say they have identified what they describe as a suspect vehicle connected to the incendiary devices that set fires to those ballot drop boxes in both states.

So it sounds like it could be the same person, uh, who carried out both terrorist attacks, which is what this really is. Of course, we will keep our eyes on this story and other acts of terrorism meant to disrupt.

But I will take this opportunity again to recommend that voters who choose to vote by mail, uh, by [01:31:00] mail in absentee ballot in any state for any reason, that if you do so, please try to hand deliver those ballots, if possible, to a precinct or a voting center or a municipal election headquarters as allowed in your particular jurisdiction.

I always recommend that anyway, frankly. But of course, given the news, uh, today and, and last week and what is becoming a troubling pattern, I'm going to double down on that advice. Try to hand that ballot, uh, to a person or to a box that is being watched by, uh, a person. If you must use a postal service box, uh, the USPS advises that you do so before the last collection time of the day, which is marked on the box.

Uh, and with election drop boxes, uh, you know, do so during business hours. Again, If possible, uh, that's probably wise this year for what is quickly becoming obvious reasons. That said, if putting your ballot into a [01:32:00] mailbox or a drop box is the only way that you are able to cast your vote this year, do it and do it soon.

And don't be cowed by terrorists. And don't obey in advance, as you heard discussed at the top of the show, and as I'll discuss a bit more momentarily. Yes, your vote does count and will be counted as cast, at least if I and a few million other Americans have anything to say about it. 

Little Secret Elie Mystal on Trump's Likely Plan to Steal Election with GOP House Speaker Johnson - Democracy Now! - Air Date 11-1-24

DONALD TRUMP: You know, with me, we’ve got to get the congressmen elected, and we’ve got to get the senators elected, because we can take the Senate pretty easily. And I think with our little secret, we’re going to do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact. He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: “He and I have a secret. We’ll tell you what it is when the race is over.” And clearly, President Trump is concerned. Pieces in The Washington Post, Politico, Politico headlined [01:33:00] “Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania, a red flag for GOP.”

For more, we go to Elie Mystal. He is author of Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.

Elie, welcome back to Democracy Now! OK, what is this “little secret”?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, so, it’s really the 12th Amendment. One of the reasons you have to ask yourself: Why is Donald Trump and this group of MAGA people stomping around the country calling Puerto Ricans garbage and generally acting like they don’t need to get any more votes to win the presidency? And the reason why they think that they don’t need any more votes is — comes from the 12th Amendment. The 12th Amendment is where you get to these contingent election scenarios. What the 12th Amendment says is that the winner of the presidency is determined by whoever has a majority of the electoral votes among the electors appointed, right? And that’s the key phrase. If you do not get to a majority among the electors [01:34:00] appointed, then you kick it to the House, and that’s where you have the contingent election, where, importantly, the House votes based on its own state delegation. So, basically, every state gets one vote. Currently, there are 26 delegations that are Republican, 24 Democrat, so Trump would win in that contingent election of the House.

But that’s not the secret. The secret is that if you decrease the number of electors appointed — right? — the math is simple that the majority of electoral votes that you need also goes down. So, in a very simple case where we think it is — you need 270 electoral votes to win, if there are 538 total electors. But if you take that number down to, say, 528 electors, well, then, all of a sudden, you only need 264 electoral votes to win, right? And you can do that, you can decrease the number of electors appointed, if [01:35:00] you prevent, delay, obfuscate the ability of any particular state to certify its elections and send electors to Congress by the statutorily required deadline of December 11th.

And so, Amy, I think that’s where this whole game is going to be played by Trump and Johnson. They’re going to try to prevent states from submitting — states that Harris wins from submitting valid slates of electors by the December 11th deadline. And then, once we get to that deadline, Mike Johnson, as speaker of the House, and Republicans in control of the House, will simply call the process over and say any electors not appointed by the statutory deadline of December 11th simply don’t count. And that is a way for Trump to steal an election that he loses.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And for people who are watching this globally, Elie, for people who don’t understand the Electoral College — and there are movements to change it, like the [01:36:00] National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, designed to ensure that the candidate who received the most votes nationwide is elected president, would come into effect only when it could guarantee that outcome. What this system is that we have, that they’re finagling with right now?

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah. So, for people who are not from America, who are, like, trying to figure out what’s going on, I believe the scientific term for the Electoral College is “stupid.” Right? The Electoral College is anti-democratic and dumb. If you’re living in some other country and you have been told that America is the greatest democracy on Earth, you have been sold a lie. We are not the greatest democracy on Earth. We are not even a true democracy, because of the Electoral College, right? The Electoral College, which has always been a part of our history of our nation, it’s always been part of the structure of the government, is fundamentally an anti-democratic system for the single [01:37:00] elected official, the single representative that is supposed to be elected by all the people in the United States, right? Everybody else, it’s based on their county, their town, their state. The president of the United States is the one official that’s supposed to be elected by everybody, but he’s actually elected by — he or she, one day hopefully soon, is elected by nobody, because of the Electoral College. It is a ridiculous system.

It’s an anachronistic system, basically, like so much else in the Constitution, made to — it’s another one of those poison pills the enslavers put into the original Constitution in hope that it would make it very difficult for slavery to ever be outlawed in this nation. And while we overcame slavery, its fundamental structure of allowing for minoritarian white rule is still in place, and we still see the effects. And that’s what we’re looking at in this election.

You got to remember, Donald Trump is most likely — you know, regardless of what happens on Tuesday in the [01:38:00] Electoral College, Donald Trump is almost certainly going to lose the popular vote for the third time. For the third time in a row, this man will have a minority of the popular vote, yet still could be president, either by winning the Electoral College outright or by gaming the system as I’ve outlined in my piece in The Nation.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: Tell us more about what you wrote about deadlines, that what this means is that Republicans just have to delay long enough to pass those deadlines. They don’t have to win; they just have to stall. And we’re seeing more and more across this country these complicated local election laws that have to do with counting. You know, we’re doing an election special at night, an election special the next morning, when we very possibly might not know what the election results are, even the next morning.

ELIE MYSTAL: Yeah, delay, delay, delay is the name of the game for the [01:39:00] Republicans. Statutorily speaking, electors have to be submitted to Congress by December 11th. Statutorily speaking, those electors have to vote and then submit their votes on who the president should be by December 25th, Christmas Day, because we are that kind of stupid, right? January 3rd is when the new House takes office. That’s a constitutional deadline, so no shenanigans are applicable there. And January 6th, as the violent MAGA people know, is the date when the House certifies the results of the Electoral College vote. But that day is largely ceremonial. Even Mike Pence understands that date is largely ceremonial. The real action is on December — is between December 11th, when the electors are appointed, and December 25th, when they’re supposed to be done voting.

Now, those deadlines are statutory. That means they can be changed. And if you roll the tape back to 2020, when Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House and the Democrats control the House, one would imagine that if [01:40:00] states had gotten cute with their delaying submitting their slates of electors, Nancy Pelosi would have just extended the deadline. But this is why Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is critical to Trump’s secret plan to steal the election, because if Mike Johnson is in charge, which he absolutely will be — even if Democrats win the House, Mike Johnson is in charge on December 11th. If he’s in charge then, he could not move the deadline, essentially, and declare the process over.

Now, let’s say Democrats win the House, right? Let’s say January 3rd, Democrats come in, Hakeem Jeffries is the new speaker of the House. Could the Democrats undo what Mike Johnson has done on December 11th and December 25th? Maybe. But as my colleague John Nichols just reminded us all, Democrats probably ain’t going to control the Senate on January 3rd. So, you generally need a bicameral proposition to move deadlines like [01:41:00] that. You’re probably not going to have the Senate, even if the Democrats win the House.

SECTION C - ELON MUSK THE BILLIONAIRE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: \ Up next section. See Elon Musk, the billionaire. 

Why Elon Musk Went Full MAGA Part 2 - Reveal - Air Date 10-30-24

ANNA MERLAN: So yeah, for the last 10 years, I have been pretty focused on conspiracy theories in American life. And of course, the common definition of a conspiracy theory is a belief that a group of people are working together to hide a consequential secret or to seize power, for instance.

So I spend a lot of time covering conspiracy communities, what they believe and sort of how it drives them to make. Uh, the decisions that they make about how to live their lives. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So, Elon Musk has been in our lives for a long time. Um, and you know, I mean, my first remembrance of Elon Musk is basically Tesla, electric cars.

The first time he came on my radar, he was a tech bro. He was like working in tech. Everyone was saying he was a founder of this great new company, which he wasn't actually the founder. He just [01:42:00] ran the company. But I think back then I thought of him as leaning a little bit left and then he buys Twitter.

And even before he bought Twitter, you could see the gradual shift in who the, the person that we know as Elon Musk became. Um, I'm curious if you have any idea, like, what his red pill moment was. 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, you know, there's been a lot of reporting about this because it has been so consequential. Like a lot of very rich people, Musk always went back and forth in who he supported and who he made campaign donations to, you know, he made donations to Hillary Clinton.

Um, he and President Trump feuded for years, but there has been a pretty noticeable rightward shift in his politics. And like for a lot of very wealthy people, it seems like it accelerated during the pandemic. A lot of these folks were sort of faced with [01:43:00] A level of government, what they saw as intrusion in their lives that they were not used to and became openly skeptical about things like vaccines, which mask has tweeted skeptically about quite a bit.

Um, so we saw not just mess, but a lot of other people in the tech space kind of accelerate a skepticism about government and. to some degree, like a skepticism about liberal democracy. So there have been a bunch of moments like this for Musk. You know, one was around COVID. Another was around what he calls illegal immigration, which he is, um, increasingly concerned with.

And a third is about trans people, gender affirming care, gender affirming medication. These are all things that he has expressed an increasing amount of concern about over the years, and that has found him a lot of new supporters on the right, both in politics and sort of elsewhere. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So, as he's [01:44:00] beginning this rightward shift, uh, where does the acquisition of Twitter fit in all that?

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, so Musk ended up buying Twitter, um, in, I believe, October of 2022. Uh, and this was a pretty big surprise. It didn't actually seem like he could pull it off. He had to get a lot of financing to do it. Um, and Musk has said many times that one of his interests in buying Twitter was that he believed that it was no longer a free speech platform and that it was suppressing, you know, disfavored views of conservative.

People and players. Um, and of course, this is something that like Republican politicians have claimed for years. Um, and so he spoke a lot about wanting to make Twitter into a free speech platform again, as he put it. Um, and in practice, what that's meant is, It's bringing back folks who are banned previously for doing things like spreading misinformation, uh, fomenting threats.

A lot of those users have been brought back on mass, you know, people like Alex Jones [01:45:00] who were expected to stay off the platform forever. Um, and then of course, as we've seen accelerate recently, becoming a huge spreader himself of what most people would agree is mis and disinformation. Especially around immigration and now around election fraud.

He's become very, very concerned about, uh, election fraud. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: It's striking to me that right before he bought Twitter, he was talking a lot about free speech and how he was the free speech guy and he just wanted to, you know, buy the platform to restore free speech. And then he got the platform and started banning people that said anything negative about him, essentially trampling down on free speech.

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, the irony of those bans has been noted, though to be fair, a lot of those people end up Getting to come back ultimately like a recent one was the journalist Ken Klippenstein who was briefly banned and then eventually brought back But all of this kind of [01:46:00] points to the same thing Which is that Twitter under Elon Musk or X as he now calls it is his platform his rules go his decisions They do not have to be consistent.

They just have to be his which of course has concern Free speech advocates, federal regulators, like there's been a lot of concern about a very, very powerful platform, um, controlled by the whims of one guy. 

The Trump White Supremacy Festival and Hootenanny Part 3 - The Muckrake Political Podcast - Air Date 10-29-24

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: But what you just said is apt and it's correct. Nick, I started talking about this in 2016 precisely because I wanted to avoid this moment. Where we are right now, watching this rally, watching Trump, watching the 2024 election, I wanted to avoid the possibility that we would arrive at this point. I wanted to avoid the major conflict.

I wanted to diffuse it before we got there. And unfortunately, history shows us how these cycles work. So, for instance, historical context in all of this. This is not the first time that we've had a fascist rally in Madison Square Garden. In 1939, the German American Bund held a Nazi [01:47:00] rally at Madison Square Garden that included over 20, 000 people in attendance.

For those who haven't seen footage of this or heard stories about it, it included a picture of George Washington surrounded by Nazis. It was a Almost verbatim, the rhetoric that was on display at this Donald Trump rally, just with some rhetorical flourishes here and there that hid the expressive fascistic ideas.

The entire point is this, this is not something that goes away. This is something that cycles around. And this actually, and, and I, Nick, I'll be honest with you. I find it hard to believe that this rally happened, you know, what, 75 years. After this rally with the, the German American bun, I have to imagine it's not a coincidence that this is something within the Trump, Trump campaign, Trump campaign, the Trump campaign that recognize the, the historical parallels of this thing.

And if you don't believe me, here's a clip from Donald Trump who is making one of his final pushes and appeals to the American voters. [01:48:00] 

DONALD TRUMP: Get your husband off the couch. The football game doesn't mean a damn thing. You gotta get out and vote. Get up, Harry. Come on, Harry. Get up, Harry. Let's go. You're gonna vote for the president, Harry.

We're gonna save our country. For the past nine years, we have been fighting against the most sinister and corrupt forces on Earth. With your vote in this election, you can show them once and for all that this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you. 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: So to believe that all this is a coincidence is also to believe that this rhetoric, the idea that Trump is fighting sinister forces, that the press are the enemies of the people and that they are battling an enemy from within.

They just are accidentally completely mirrors of fascist Nazi rhetoric. Like we're supposed to believe that that's what's happening, as opposed to people within the Trump campaign and the Trump circle studied these things, understand their rhetorical appeal, and [01:49:00] understand how they can lead to electoral victory.

It's not even a contest. It's obvious that this is a chosen, chosen display. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: For sure. And, you know, there are probably problems that we have with the constitution and laws and issues that we would like to change, but you know, you have to imagine that the founders also, while it's not that explicit, the press were sort of like the fourth coequal branch of the government.

They had protection in the Bill of Rights at the very least. Well, time 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: out, time out. I think what you just stepped on is something important because they were also the organs by which the Federalists were able to push their legislation and manufacture consent and they were also the friends and the landowners and the, the compatriots and wealth.

So yes, there's, there's a reason why they viewed the press as something that, that deserved to be taken care of for sure. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Although what you're describing is what the Republicans do now to plant stories and then cite them in their arguments. We're not 

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: wrong. 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Yeah, so I suppose that's been going back for a long, long time, but there was a moment in this country at the very least where it did feel like the press was such a vital [01:50:00] part of our democracy and it should still be that way.

But again, when you mix democracy and you mix, uh, Capitalism, uh, eventually that's going to bleed into the press as well, where they're not going to have enough money to, to, you know, have enough journalistic integrity and then hire good journalists. And then that dies too. And then here's what we have. The New York post, excuse me, is, is now the paper of record, uh, to a lot of people.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Man, uh, you know, it's also a situation where the economic, uh, circumstances around journalism become so dire that a billionaire is able to reach into their pocket and find the funds necessary to buy one of the major press organs in the country, which brings us to the response. To what we've been discussing with this reality, uh, with this rally in Madison Square Garden with Trump, which is one of the major stories over the last few days is that the Washington Post has announced that it is declining to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time since, uh, 1972.[01:51:00] 

All right. This is a statement by William Lewis, the chief executive officer of the Washington Post. The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

As our editorial board wrote in 1960, the Washington Post has not endorsed either candidate in the presidential campaign that is in our tradition and accords with our action in full. Five of the last six elections and a reminder, they have been endorsing candidates since 1976 and what we have seen after a resignation, uh, from, uh, Robert Kagan of the Washington post and critiques by other members of the post, we have heard.

That Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, and also just benefactor, uh, uh, enjoyer of a bunch of benevolent contracts in the United States government, was the one who put the kibosh on the Washington Post endorsing a presidential candidate. [01:52:00] This is capitulation. It is appeasement of Donald Trump.

There's a variety of reasons for it. But Nick, what are your initial thoughts about this before we get into the background of why this decision was made? 

NICK HAUSELMAN - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Oh, I think this is corruption. I think this is Bezos trying to avoid, uh, you get government interference in his businesses. Um, by. Pretending that half support Trump.

And so if he wins, they'll get rid of that investigation into Amazon. Uh, I think that was the issue that I'm trying to find the thread right now, but there I'd seen it on Twitter where, uh, you know, he's under scrutiny by the government right now. And he's, there's no other explanation for my mind as the fact that he's trying to cozy up to him more and prove to him, uh, that, uh, that he's on board and then in, in return, they will quash, uh, any kind of regulatory, regulatory investigations of his businesses.

JARED YATES SEXTON - CO-HOST, THE MUCKRAKE POLITICAL PODCAST: Well, I'll say this. First of all, I think a missing component. What you just brought up is the idea that Jeff Bezos would oppose authoritarianism in the first place. The idea that morally and ethically, he's against Donald Trump. But you know, he's been [01:53:00] compromised because of business decisions. What we are seeing is a Is a real bellwether situation in which the billionaires in this country, you'll notice Nick, all of the tech people, the, the, the tech industrialists who gained all this money at the turn of the century, creating this infrastructure that we're currently quote unquote, enjoying.

You'll notice Elon Musk bought Donald Trump and is using him for his own purposes. Mark Zuckerberg is suddenly very Trump curious and Jeff Bezos is now. And by the way, For the record, I don't think a Washington Post endorsement would have given the presidency to Kamala Harris. It's the point that it was withheld that's important.

There are investigations of Amazon and Bezos's, uh, actions. That, by the way, was activated by Donald Trump consistently posting that he was going to go after the people who helped Kamala Harris, endorsed her, gave her money, you name it. So that right there was a legal threat. But on top of that, Nick, Jeff Bezos, like Elon Musk, like Mark Zuckerberg, like all these other tech industrialists, where do they get [01:54:00] their real money from besides the products and subscriptions that they sell?

They get it from their government contracts. They get it from their multi billion dollar contracts that they get helping the government operate their systems, including the military industrial complex, the space agencies, and just the logistics of federalism. So as a result, Why would Jeff Bezos allow his paper to endorse somebody, right?

Like, it isn't actually in his favor to do that, considering the state of play, how it has changed. 

Trump & Musk Are Engineering a Recession Why Billionaires Profit When America’s Economy Crashes - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 11-1-24

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: The recession racket, Musk, Trump, and the billionaire's blueprint for profit. And, you know, in a recent town hall, a multi billionaire, world's Musk, acknowledged what 23 Nobel Prize winning economists across the country have predicted, that if Trump is elected and he and Elon undertake their project to gut government spending, it will provoke a severe recession.

Moss said, we have to reduce spending to live within our means, and you know that necessarily involves some temporary [01:55:00] hardship. Right. But it will ensure long term prosperity. Most Republican voters are not taking this seriously. They're like, you know, why would Republicans, who, you know, generally are the party of the rich people, why would they want to crash the economy when rich people have all their money invested in the stock market and stuff like that?

Why, why would Republicans ever want to crash the market? Well, the question itself reveals a huge misunderstanding about how rich people get richer and richer and richer. They are uniquely in a position to take advantage of recessions and depressions that hurt people like you and me. I mean, this story is as old as capitalism.

Back in the 1930s, Joe Kennedy, Gloria Swanson told me this story. I used to visit her in New York. She would make me dinner in her apartment in New York City. We were both vegetarians, and she was on the board of our children's charity. And, [01:56:00] uh, just a remarkable woman, and she told me how Joe Kennedy, you know, when the market was at its bottom, Joe Kennedy was buying stock as fast, in fact, he bought a Hollywood studio.

He was one of the richest men in America as a result of the Great Depression. J. Paul Getty, his favorite phrase was, uh, buy when everyone else is selling and hold on until everyone else is buying. I mean, the afternoon of the Great Crash, J. Paul, this was, you know, October, uh, what was it, 28th, I think, 1929?

Uh, J. Paul Getty skipped his parents golden wedding anniversary celebration to get onto Wall Street to begin buying stocks. He wrote, it is the opportunity of a lifetime to get oil companies for practically nothing. And as a result of that, he became one of the richest men in America. I mean, this is, you know, recessions help.

Billionaires. They hurt you and me, but they become buying opportunities for billionaires. In, in, uh, 2007, for example, the Bush crash, [01:57:00] the stock market, uh, the American economy, home prices collapsed by 21%. Over 10 million Americans lost their homes to predatory Mnuchin, the foreclosure king, who, uh, you know, personally oversaw, uh, kicking roughly 30, 000 California families out of their homes.

Billionaires. The stock market dropped by 50 percent in the last year of Bush's presidency. On October 9th, 2007, it was at 14, 000. By March 5th, 2009, it was at 6, 500. And 8 million Americans lost their jobs. They were wiped out. And across the country, Americans who had their money in 401k's in the stock market were liquidating their 401k's, paying that, I think it's a 20 percent penalty, uh, just to get access to cash to pay their bills because they've been laid off.

And who was buying those stocks? Billionaires! Between 2009, the bottom of the bush crash in 2012, when the [01:58:00] Republic re recovery really began, the top 1% of Americans just in those three years saw their income, their income grow by over 31%, 95% of all the income gains made during that period of time, where that top 1%, if you had bought a, if you had invested a billion dollars in 2009, in the s.

It would have become 4. 6 billion in just 11 years. And by the way, during those 11 years, the combined wealth of America's billionaires went up by 80%. And then they did it again. The Trump COVID crash of 2020. Once again, the market collapsed this time under Republican Trump. working people out of work, selling stocks at a loss to pay the mortgage and buy food.

But, you know, the Dow on March 16th 2020 suffered its largest single day crash in its entire history. Worse than the Republican Great Depression of the 19 twenties and thirties. But for the investor class, [01:59:00] it was a huge opportunity. The Institute for Policy Studies documents the world's 2356 billionaires saw their wealth increased by a full 54%.

U. S. billionaires saw their wealth, their net wealth surge by 62%. Average billionaire wealth worldwide increased 27%, all just in this one year of 2020. And meanwhile, the billionaires real taxes have dropped by a full 79 percent since Reagan came into office in 1981. And, uh, so, of course, Elon Musk is saying, Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna cause a recession.

And, uh, you know, it'll be a good thing. Well, it will, it will be a good thing for him. So, I just, I just wanted to tell ya, that's how it works. Right? I mean, the, the billionaires live and operate by different rules than you and me. It's just, it's pretty straightforward. Meanwhile, Donald [02:00:00] Trump, By the way, Donald Trump is out on bail.

Nobody seems to be mentioning this. Donald Trump is out on bail. He's awaiting, he's awaiting his, his, uh, sentencing. And, you know, I, I, I, I recall when Judge Marashan said, okay, we'll postpone the sentencing until after the election. And everybody was like, oh, Trump got away with something. Well, if Trump loses, and I think there's a good chance he does.

And after the election, Juan Michon sentences him, and there's no longer the risk that Trump is president, I think he's going to give him prison time. I mean, it'll be a hell of a lot easier for the judge. He won't have all that pressure on him. And, you know, frankly, I think if he was going to impose a jail sentence, or if he was not going to impose a jail sentence, he probably would have sentenced Trump.

You know, earlier it just said, [02:01:00] okay, you owe, you owe 300, 000. But if it's gonna be a jail term, you know, Mershon said, okay, we'll postpone this until after the election. But anyhow, Donald Trump, the guy who's out on bail, came out yesterday and said it's time to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, essentially.

I mean, this, this is absolutely crazy.

Why Elon Musk Went Full MAGA Part 3 - Reveal - Air Date 10-30-24

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: So now that we are in this political season and we're moving towards a presidential election, Musk isn't on the sidelines tweeting, support.

He is actually on the field playing. What is he doing to help, uh, Donald Trump become the president again? 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah. So he endorsed Donald Trump, uh, following the first assassination attempt against President Trump in July. Uh, he appeared recently at a Trump rally, but the biggest thing is that he founded the a political action committee called America Pack.

He founded it relatively recently, and he sent it, you know, [02:02:00] something like 75 million. So, There's that. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Right. And not just that, because in the first half of October, he spent even more, about 44 million dollars. So, in all, Musk has put down around 120 million dollars to try and get Trump elected. I mean, it's so much money.

And I know that's not all he's doing, right? 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, there's also something that's happening on the platform, which is that Twitter created, uh, something called an Election Integrity Community, which is a hub on Twitter where people can report instances of what they view as, quote, voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.

So this is, Totally user generated content, and as our colleague Julianne McShane noted the other day, it is already full of false allegations of voter fraud. So, um, it's pretty easy to see where this is going. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: It sounds like what he's [02:03:00] created is a conspiracy theory generator, like an engine of conspiracy theory.

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, specifically around voter fraud. And of course, uh, allegations of voter fraud are becoming more More and more common. Every single time we have an election, especially from powerful people, especially from powerful people who lose. So what he's done really is like turbo charged that dynamic for this particular election, you know, well ahead of any votes taking place, 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: which we should say that.

In all the cases where voter fraud has been investigated, and it's been investigated a lot, there is very little evidence that it is actually happening. Especially, there's no evidence that it's happening on a massive scale. 

ANNA MERLAN: Right, there's none, but it's one of those things where Having somebody like Elon Musk, uh, make these claims to a massive platform over and over and over again has ill effects and it can probably change what people think about voter fraud.

Um, I should also mention that he recently appeared at a [02:04:00] rally in support of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, and he seemed to refer to false conspiracy theories that Dominion voting machines were part of a plot to rig U. S. elections. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: Yeah, I mean, it feels like he is begging to get into a fight with Dominion.

Yeah. Dominion got almost 800 million in a settlement after it sued Fox News over defamation. So, I mean, good luck. 

ANNA MERLAN: Yeah, it's a very interesting choice and I'm curious to see if he continues, uh, making these particular claims. 

AL LETSON - HOST, REVEAL: In the past, someone with Musk's stature and wealth making false claims about election security still might not break the law.

through to the public, but, but Elon Musk isn't your typical billionaire. 

ANNA MERLAN: There have always been, you know, billionaires and titans of industry who get involved in politics, but I think the scale of Musk's involvement is really different because it's not just that he's a billionaire. It's not just that he's endorsing Trump.

It's [02:05:00] also that he controls a powerful And widespread communication medium, which is Twitter.

SECTION D - TRUMP THE FASCIST

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D Trump, the fascist. 

Imara Jones Transphobia Is Key Pillar of Trump's Push for a Patriarchal Fascist Regime - Democracy Now - Air Date 10-30-24

AMY GOODMAN: We look now at how Republicans are spending tens of millions of dollars, something like over $60 million, to flood the airwaves and social media with political ads that attack transgender rights. The Trump campaign is running the first-ever presidential campaign ad on the topic, and the Senate Leadership Fund, backed by Mitch McConnell, is running ads in key Senate races in swing states, often during major football games.

NARRATOR: Kamala was the first to help pay for a prisoner’s sex change.

VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS: The power that I had, I used it in a way that was about pushing forward the movement, frankly, and the agenda.

NARRATOR: Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.

 But Brown voted multiple times to allow transgender biological males to participate in girls’ sports.

 Baldwin supported [02:06:00] providing puberty blockers and sex change surgeries to minor children. She even supports forcing Wisconsin women’s domestic violence shelters to admit biological men who claim to identify as women.

AMY GOODMAN: Anti-trans attacks are a key part of Trump’s message. Some say it’s his closing message. At a Bronx barbershop campaign stop aired on Fox last week, Trump pivoted back to trans kids when asked how he would improve schools.

DONALD TRUMP: I say reading, writing and arithmetic. No transgender, no operations. You know, they take your kid. There are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. OK? Without parental consent. What is that all about?

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Imara Jones, founder and CEO of TransLash Media, host of its investigative podcast The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, which just launched a new season about how [02:07:00] paramilitary groups have weaponized transphobia to forge ties to Republicans and stoke political violence. Imara Jones’ new piece for Newsweek is headlined “What’s at Stake for Trans People in This Election” in national, state and local races.

Welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us, Imara.

IMARA JONES: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about the overall climate? I mean, I listened to almost every speech on Sunday at Madison Square Garden. Almost every speaker, including Robert F. Kennedy, talked about trans issues. I think his line was “We’re going to protect women’s sports.” But if you can talk about the overall climate, the tens of million of dollars being put into ads?

IMARA JONES: Well, I’m sorry that you did that to yourself, Amy, and watched for six hours.

I think that what we have to be very clear about is that transphobia is not just a plank, but a key pillar of the Republican Party. It has staked a large part of its argument as to [02:08:00] why it should be in power and why it should return to power due to transphobia and due to its campaign against trans people. It’s sort of that and immigration are essentially the reasons why they say that they should be reelected.

And I think that, for them, anti-trans hate does a couple of things. I think the first thing that it does is that it helps them continue to animate their base and to essentially give them something to focus on after abortion. For several years, they’ve known that abortion was going to be on the chopping block and that they had a key part of their constituency that was engaged on gender, and so they have to give that group of people something to do, essentially.

Secondly, it allows them to have inroads into places and people that they would never be in conversation with. They normally wouldn’t be in conversation with suburban moms, who they had been turned off to. They wouldn’t be able to be in conversation with certain Black religious [02:09:00] people and Latinos who are evangelicals, or even some gay people — right? — who are anti-trans, the so-called TERFs. So, what this does is that it allows them to be able to shave off just enough votes in marginal races to eke out a win. And that’s what they look at this issue as. And I think the fact that they’ve dropped so much money on these ads tells us that they believe that this race is extremely close or they’re behind. And so, what they’re trying to do is to pick up one or two votes per precinct in order to win, which was Donald Trump’s margin over Hillary Clinton in Michigan in 2016, for example.

And the last thing that it does for them is that it cements them as a Christian nationalist party. It is the imprimatur of the fact that the Republican Party has become an extremist movement that has been taken over by the Christian nationalist movement and brands them as such and puts them in league not [02:10:00] only with political extremists, but also paramilitary extremists, in a bid to destabilize democracy from the ground up.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Imara, I wanted to ask you — The Wall Street Journal's editorial board recently ran a piece titled “Transgender Sports Is a 2024 Sleeper Issue,” and they especially focused on Senate races in Ohio, Montana and Wisconsin. I'm wondering your response and why particularly these states that they’re focusing on.

IMARA JONES: Well, those states are Republican-leaning states where the Senate candidates in those states have to rely on a lot of Republican votes, or independent voters who lean Republican, in order to be able to win. Those are also all tight races — right? — which is where you want to deploy, from their perspective, anti-trans issues and anti-trans hate or discomfort at a minimum. And so, it is a part of that [02:11:00] strategy of eking out votes, getting just enough, and playing to Republicans and reminding them that the candidates that they might be inclined to vote for in this race might be strange or somehow anti-American or, in some ways, just, you know, weird people, to turn the phrase back on Democrats. So, it’s an otherization that’s happening with this issue. And again, it’s in these tight Senate races where these Democrats have to rely on Republican votes.

And the Republican Party, in a really short amount of time, has primed its entire base to be concerned and to be focused on anti-trans issues. So, they’re ripe for it, you know? In the last four years, they have passed anti-trans laws in half of the country. And just this year, 600 anti-trans bills have been introduced, becoming more extreme each year. So, this is just something that [02:12:00] Republican voters are naturally inclined to focus on. And so, if you’re in a tight race and you have to rely on some Republican votes, and as a Republican, you see the Democrat is doing that and maybe making inroads, then you want to deploy this issue as a way to bring those voters back home.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And you’ve also looked into how paramilitary groups have used anti-trans politics to forge closer ties to Republicans. Could you talk about what you found?

 So, essentially, anti-trans issues acts as an affinity point between paramilitary groups and the Republican Party. And one of the things that happened after January 6th is that these paramilitary groups saw that if you do one big thing against the national government, the national government deploys its power. But what these groups decided to do was to atomize themselves, to go local, in the words of Gavin McInnes, who told me in an [02:13:00] interview that that was their strategy.

AMY GOODMAN: The founder of Proud Boys.

IMARA JONES: The founder of Proud Boys. And what he was alluding to is the fact that these groups have kept their members engaged, recruited new members, forged relationships with local politicians, Republican politicians, all across the country, and continued to develop their brand by focusing on Drag Story Hours and protesting LGBTQ events across the country. And so, it seemed as if the Proud Boys and the other groups had gone away, but all they’ve done is gone to ground. And because they’ve focused on LGBTQ issues, local authorities and other politicians and even the mainstream media have ignored their continued development and growing strength, because they see, “Oh, they’re just protesting, you know, Drag Story Hours.” But what they’ve been doing is exercising themselves and getting ready for sort of the next big events.

And one of the things that we need to focus on is that [02:14:00] SPLC last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremists and extremist groups, last year did a study, and in that study, they counted more extremist groups in the United States than ever, than since they’ve been counting. And half of white supremacist groups, half of those groups last year engaged in anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans actions and protests and some form of violence. So these groups have used these issues in order to grow strength below the radar for whatever comes next.

Elon Musks War on Workers Part 2 - 5-4 - AIr Date 10-29-24

MICHAEL MORBIUS - HOST, 5-4: Uh, so there's a lot going on here. You know, I, I think this is one of those cut and dry issues, right? Similar to sort of reproductive rights, where I don't feel like we need to make the case that To any listener that like Democrats are better on labor than Republicans, but there is a little bit of nuance here.

There's always a little bit of [02:15:00] tension between the reality of Trump and the aesthetic of Trump. And I think you see this disconnect on labor and workplace issues quite a bit, like Trump markets himself as a populist, the blue collar billionaire, right? But there are very few issues where he has been as explicit as his disdain for unions, right?

He openly hated them as a businessman. He laughs with Elon Musk about firing, striking workers. He implements anti union policies when he's in office. And. Yet he hasn't really suffered a lot of electoral consequences for it. Vox recently published a piece titled the Democrats pro union strategy has been a bust.

The piece basically argues that despite Joe Biden's like very pro labor, pro union policy strategy, union members are only slightly more supportive of his administration than the general [02:16:00] public is. And. That support has been consistently declining over the course of a decade on top of that. It's starting to manifest in union decision making.

The teamsters conducted an internal poll a few months back, showing 60 percent support for Donald Trump among their members. And after that, The union declined to make an endorsement in this election. The International Association of Firefighters followed their lead. I think there's like a tendency here among many people to basically just blame the union members for being idiots, right?

They're voting against their interests. They're being stupid. And I, I agree. Fundamentally. I think that's right. They, they are. And it's especially true of like. Teamsters leadership, right, who are abdicating their obligations to their members. But this is also the natural result of the Democratic Party's decisions over the past half century, right?

The party very consciously decided to move [02:17:00] away from labor as its base and then ostracized them further with like free trade deals under Clinton and Obama. Obama ignored Lieber's request for a card check bill, which would have made it easier to form unions. He sidled up to Silicon Valley billionaires.

And by the way, where are they now? Are they supporting Democrats? No, they're literally running the Trump campaign. Yeah, they're all melting down ever since Epstein's Island closed. Generally speaking, although Democrats have been better on labor than Republicans, labor is just not the priority for Democrats that it once was.

And The lower it goes down the priority list, the less likely you are to win over union members, right? That is just a simple fact. It's just how politics works. Politics isn't about being like slightly better than the other guy and then scolding voters for not being rational enough, right? You need to prioritize the things that are salient [02:18:00] to voters and Democrats haven't done that.

Right, Biden has done a solid job, but you can't undo what's now generations of walking away from organized labor in the span of a single term. 

PETER SHAMSHIRI - HOST, 5-4: We can definitely debate like when this break with labor happened and what initially instigated it. Right. Because a lot of white working class voters started leaving the party during the sixties and seventies in response to civil rights.

And sure. Right. Sure. Whatever, that's not really, that's besides the point. The point is that Democrats went looking for votes elsewhere in a way that has damaged their ability to pitch themselves as an unequivocal pro union party, right? And that's a, that's a, that's a problem. It's a problem with like the big tent, right?

Just, you know, Inherently, like if your tent is big enough for labor and the management, they're fighting, you're going to have trouble convincing labor that [02:19:00] you're on their side, right? Like that's legitimately that that's, they are oppositional. Right. Those are oppositional forces. And yeah, Biden was, uh, better on labor than any democratic president I think is since Johnson, at least.

Right. As we were talking, you got to go back 50 years basically, but that's one guy. There are a lot of representatives and senators who are, who were not super pro labor, who are very private equity friendly, management friendly, not to mention that it's only four years, right? Like building a political constituency or rebuilding a political constituency takes time.

It takes a lot of time and consistency across the party. Like there's no reason why labor should trust Kamala Harris as much as they might trust Joe Biden after he's earned it, like legitimately, because they don't have the record for [02:20:00] her, right? Like, I think she'll be good on labor. I personally think so.

Um, I think they should trust her, but I think from a basic political perspective, like, I think it's defensible. I do. It's, which is unfortunate.

Elon Musk Is SO Bad At This Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 11-3-24

AD: Warning this ad contains multiple instances of the c word viewer discretion is advised Kamala harris is a c word A big old c word In fact, all of the other c words think she's the biggest c word of them all you can hear this in my that's right She's a tax hiking regulation loving gun grabbing c word communist She's proud of it Kamala harris the c word america simply can't See you nationwide, Tuesday, 

BRANDON SUTTON: November 5th.

See you nationwide, Tuesday. That's a good one. What were they 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: trying to imply? It's just so, it's like they, it's like they want to say the C word, but they can't. It's almost like that. 

BRANDON SUTTON: You know, I will say communist has all the [02:21:00] same letters as the word I was thinking they meant, but just, you know, a few extra ones.

MATT BINDER: Few extra. Wait, how, how did they miss the opportunity? How did they miss the opportunity at the end to say, see you next Tuesday? They did. They did. They did. They did. They said it straight up. Yeah, nationwide 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Tuesday. As 

MATT BINDER: opposed to nationwide Tuesday. That's not the same. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I 

BRANDON SUTTON: mean, they're so clever. They think Elon Musk, because like, he thinks he's so much smarter than everybody else.

Like he, like he, he thinks that provides plausible deniability and everyone's going to think it's really cute. This is America. People don't use that word there. 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Does Elon only have one joke formulation, that you think something is happening and then ultimately at the end of your set up, it's another thing, like the SNL, uh, It's a class of mid direction.

The SNL pitch where he said, uh, I'm gonna whip out my cock, and it's actually just a rooster or something? 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I read a joke format that's supposed to subvert expectations, um, But you guys are right that he's [02:22:00] just, I don't know what this strategy is. And that this path is just incompetent. Push away women, that's the only thing I 

MATT BINDER: think of.

I know. Look at the way, like. Like, like you, you see these guys out here right now, like it's, it's even more crazy what we're seeing about like their reaction to that, uh, Kamala Harris ad about, you know, uh, uh, women, you don't, uh, you don't have to tell your husband who you vote for. Their reaction to that is even crazier than they're like, Reaction to like abortion and controlling women's bodies.

Because at least there, they use their, their, their, their faux care for the children to cut to make cover there. What is the cover for getting mad that a woman would vote differently than her husband? There is no cover there. Like, it's just, they don't think women should have the ability to think or act independently of their husband.

And this is just another way of them saying how little they think of women. It's, it's incredible 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: to see. They're [02:23:00] denigrating her. And, and, and honestly, again, like, She's a powerful woman, and they're trying to bring her down a peg, and that is what gets their, like, right wing online audience excited. But for women like me, we see that, and we're repulsed.

We're repulsed, and also motivated. And to your point, uh, Binder, like, the, the, the, They're also obsessed with methods of birth control and contraception that they can't see. Like, the ones that are always the ones that these fundamentalist Christians, uh, or fundamentalist religious people target are IUDs, the morning after pill.

Methods of birth control that women are able to, uh, Maybe doing private, or secretly, or express agency over, like they're not coming for condoms. There's some 

BRANDON SUTTON: guests with no fault divorces. This is about control, like they're, you know, this is about a type of man who sees their, you know, their wife, or their girlfriend, or any woman who they might have sexual or intimate desires for as property or potential [02:24:00] property, just like their children.

They're also obsessed with controlling every aspect of their, their child's life. Uh, but I, I just, I'm always reminded of like when Sam was talking about that, uh, post State of the Union address by that Tea Party candidate for years ago. Michelle Bachmann, how like, you know, she was looking at the Tea Party camera and so facing like a profile.

This is the wrong side. Yeah. It's like a profile to like the main camera and how he would say, you can't speak to the Tea Party and the rest of America at the same time. And this is like a furtherance of that problem where it's like, you can't speak to the GOP's base of divorced dads and incels and also speak to the women and children who have no contact orders with them.

And they've basically given up 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: on it, right? Like Trump won in 2016 with a lot of suburban women and he's. polling really poorly with suburban women now, so they're just hyper driving the mail vote. It seems like. 

MATT BINDER: I think the difference is like, like with what Brandon said, like that, that's a great analogy with the Michelle Bachman staring at the tea [02:25:00] party camera.

But then they knew. That there was this fringe that they had to speak to. They knew there was two separates. There was main, the mainstream and then their fringe. And yes, they would speak to their fringe, but ever since Trump, because Trump just had that outlier win in 2016. They now are convinced that they are the masses, that that fringe is now everybody.

So they now deliver that tea party address while staring at the mainstream America camera. Because they are convinced they, the fringe is now everybody or at least The vast majority of people who will now support them because that's the same reason why they can't believe that they lost in 2020 and that they won't believe that they lost in 2024.

They no longer live in the reality where they even know that there's that fringe that they have to speak to, to win. They now think that fringe is the mainstream and they're speaking the same way to everybody. 

EMMA VIGELAND - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, there's no, there's no Republicans [02:26:00] that are basically telling them traditional political things like this is time to pivot to the center, this is time to appeal to moderate voters, this is time to reclaim your image as someone who's too extreme or anti democratic, and the, the idea that, the sign that they weren't going to do this was with the J.

D. Vance election, um, that was not a selection that's meant to win, um, Over parts of the electorate that you're struggling with, that's one to hypercharge your base, and it was an arrogance decision made when Biden was still in the race.

Imara Jones Transphobia Is Key Pillar of Trump's Push for a Patriarchal Fascist Regime Part 2 - Democracy Now - Air Date 10-30-24

IMARA JONES: Hi. I’m Imara Jones. I’ve spent years investigating authoritarian and far-right movements. And lately I’ve been alarmed by the rise in dangerous political violence across the United States. It’s at levels not seen since the 1970s. And an unprecedented amount of this violence is being directed at queer and trans people.

NOELLE BELLOW: Drag queen story time interrupted at an East Bay library, a hate crime investigation now underway.

IMARA JONES: So, on this season of The Anti-Trans Hate [02:27:00] Machine, I’m going to show how the anti-trans ecosystem has expanded its fight from legislatures and courtrooms to the streets, and what this means for all of us.

ELI: Everybody was armed that day. Everybody was carrying sidearms. Everybody had knives on display. Everybody was putting their hands on their pistol grips.

IMARA JONES: Paramilitary groups have seized upon anti-trans hate to solidify their alliance with supposedly mainstream conservatives. I’ll show you how these attacks are part of a coordinated strategy to bring about a patriarchal, fascist regime in America, one where queer people would be erased from public life.

ANITA PARISOT: If the bullets start flying, I’m covering her up. And I’m taking the bullet for her, and she’ll survive. So she has to be with me.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s the trailer for the new season three of Anti-Trans Hate Machine. You talk about a lot of specifics here, groups in Idaho who are using the state as a testing [02:28:00] ground for a new wave of extremism. Episode three, “No Such Thing as a Lone Wolf,” looks at the responses and solutions to terrorist violence fueled by anti-trans hate. You’re looking at Wadsworth, Ohio. Tell us some specific stories and also how they relate to down-ballot races.

IMARA JONES: So, one of the things that’s happening in Idaho — there’s so many examples, but in Idaho is the fact that extremist groups, paramilitary groups have found common cause with an organization called the Idaho Freedom Foundation. And the Idaho Freedom Foundation acts as sort of this connective tissue between paramilitary groups, extremist politicians and the promulgation of laws to make the state more extreme.

And essentially, what they are all doing is working to create an atmosphere of fear and intimidation at the local [02:29:00] level, transforming what was once a right-leaning “mainstream,” in quotes, Republican Party into one dominated by people who want to do things or are promoting to do things like make paramilitary groups legal in the state, to literally legalize them. And this air of intimidation means that people who are considering running for races, who may not be extremist politicians, come under threats, people who put LGBTQ signs or pro-anything other than what Christian nationalists want in their yards. One person drove up to a person that we interviewed and told her when she put an LGBTQ sign in her yard, “Thanks for putting that sign in your yard, because we know where to shoot when the bullets fly.”

And so, what this is doing is using the paramilitary groups as a way of shifting the comfort level with [02:30:00] democracy, with making your voice heard at the democratic level, and therefore getting more and extreme politicians there. And they’re working and also signaling with places like Libs of TikTok, which put out a call around an LGBTQ event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. And that event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, drew in Patriot Front, who was there to stoke violence that day as a part of what an Idaho Freedom Foundation politician had called for in terms of protesting that event.

And the problem with Idaho is that it’s a Petri dish for these conditions, where we are starting to see it occur in other places, like Tennessee, where Patriot Front is beginning to make more and more of a show of force. It’s passed more anti-trans laws than any other state in the country. And so, what we’re seeing is this affinity, I mean, even in places like New York City, where the Proud Boys are increasingly allying with [02:31:00] certain, believe it or not, Republican members of the City Council around Drag Story Hour events here. So, what is happening is that being anti-trans is a signal for extremists as to who’s on their side, and that signal then allows them to work together to push the country more and more to its extremes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Imara, I wanted to ask you: There’s been a lot of attention focused on Project 2025 by the Democrats, but could you talk about the central place that anti-trans ideology plays in Project 2025?

IMARA JONES: You can’t understand Project 2025 without understanding or grasping the Republican Party’s obsession with trans people and with transphobia. As a matter of fact, anti-trans sentiment and anti-trans, you know, ideas are on page [02:32:00] one of Project 2025, going into page two. It’s literally on the first page. And essentially, Project 2025, with its weaponization of government, is essentially taking all of the learnings that the Trump administration garnered from its anti-trans policies, where it learned how to weaponize the government against a group of people, in healthcare, in the military, in education, attempted in housing, and essentially then took those learnings and then applied them to Project 2025. As a matter of fact, one of the key architects of Trump’s anti-trans policies, Roger Severino, is one of the key people who drafted and wrote Project 2025. And to close the loop, you know, he and other people were at the Heritage Foundation, came into the Trump administration with these policies and are now carrying them through, applying them to many people through Project 2025.

Credits

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for [02:33:00] 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 Bradcast; The Majority Report; Today, Explained; Democracy Now!; Reveal; The Muckrake Political Podcast; The Thom Hartmann Program; and 5-4. 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 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, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you [02:34:00] 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. 

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 11/2/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: [00:00:00] Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. The cult of Trump isn't really just about Trump. It's religion and patriarchy reacting to a moment of global economic and climactic instability. But those organizing the religious right aren't just reacting to their environment. They've also been planning for a very long time. 

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our top takes in about 55 minutes today includes The Majority Report, Ideas, Straight White American Jesus, Democracy Now!, and Unf***ing the Republic. Then in the additional deeper dives half of the show, there'll be more in four sections. Section A: The movement. Section B: Trump and election. Section C: Patriarchy and race. And Section D: American Christian.

Extremist White Christian Nationalists Prepping For War w Brad Onishi - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-16-24

BRAD ONISHI: If we turn to the 1960s, we see great change in the country. We see a civil rights movement. We see the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, [00:01:00] everything from Stonewall to the attempts to get the ERA passed. That's a moment when many conservative Christians in the country, especially many White conservative Christians in the country, don't see progress. They don't see the country living up to its promise to be a more perfect union. Instead, they see that as that's when we lost our country. That's when it was given to those who were left behind. That's when rights and representation were afforded to people who are not perhaps real Americans and should not be trusted with the country's destiny going forward.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And so where I didn't realize this, let's talk a little bit first about your personal journey, because it gets interwoven here with the rise of this movement. 

BRAD ONISHI: Sure. So I grew up in Southern California and I grew up in Orange County. And I know that for most [00:02:00] folks around the country, California, they picture California as a liberal bastion where we, the Democratic Party has a super majority and so on and so forth, right? We teach our kids Das Kapital in Kindergarten or something. The reality is it's a much more mixed political landscape and Orange County in particular in the mid 20th century became what the Harvard historian Lisa McGurk called the "epicenter of American conservatism". 

Orange County is a funny place. After World War II, it was the central nervous system for the American defense industry. So in the decades 60s, 70s, 80s, you have millions and millions and millions of Southerners and Midwesterners who migrate to places like Orange County. Now they don't see themselves as transplants trying to figure out how to fit into a new place. They're implants. They're going to bring their culture. Their life and their religious ethos with them and they're going to [00:03:00] do so unmoored from all of the histories and the sedimentation of where they came from. In Pittsburgh, you might have Jewish neighborhoods. You might have large and historic Black neighborhoods. Well, in Anaheim, California, in 1965, you don't have any of that. So you see this sort of distilled form of White Christian conservatism take root in Orange County, and that's what I was born into and grew up in the 1980s. That's where I converted to evangelical Christianity as a teenager. I was ushered into a whole religious political landscape that, to me, at the time, felt normal, but I realized later, was really a kind of a central node in the development of what we now call White Christian nationalism. And if you do the history, you see it. You see that this is the region that gave birth to Richard Nixon. My hometown, Richard Nixon's hometown. This is the place that championed Barry Goldwater more than any other in Southern California and in California in general. This is the place that was really Ronald Reagan's spiritual [00:04:00] home and named its airport after John Wayne. You start to look into it and you realize the deep roots of American conservatism and somehow they unexpectedly take you back to Southern California. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I mean, we've done a couple of actually interviews about the birth of conservatism or at least the movement conservatism coming out of California. I mean, it ties in also to the medical profession. There was a lot happening in car dealerships. I mean, there's a lot of different narratives there. What I'm fascinated, is the idea of this, the distillation of the, for lack of better, I keep calling it Christian nationalism, but was it Christian nationalism when it got there? Like, the idea that this is a completely blank canvas, California, very big country. A lot of people, the whole [00:05:00] story about California, but for much of at least the 20th century was, we're going out there and I'm starting my life anew in many respects for various reasons that we saw, the Great Depression, but also because it's just so far away, if far away from their relatives far away from the legal problems, it's a blank canvas out there. But [were] there Christian nationalist, like, desires before it got there, or did things coalesce there and become more concentrated and virulent? 

BRAD ONISHI: Yeah. I think the answer is "both and". And I think if we start with this idea that Christian nationalism in its essence is a fusion of the Christian and American identity, the idea that to be a Christian means to [00:06:00] be an American, and to be an American, a real American, one needs to be a Christian, right? Those are some, just a basic working idea of Christian nationalism, that Americanism and Christian identity go together. And that, if you separate them, you're left with something that, for folks who adhere to this ideology and worldview, feels incomplete. 

Now, folks who are migrating from Georgia, from Pennsylvania in the 50s and 60s, are they going there saying, You know what? I just wish I could be a virulent White Christian nationalist. It's time to get the family in the station wagon and head west. I don't think so. But my argument would be those places had long and deep histories, both religiously, ethnically, and politically, that were different from Southern California.

So again, if I'm in Pittsburgh, I'm surrounded by neighborhoods, Black neighborhoods, Jewish neighborhoods, Italian, Polish, I'm surrounded by Catholic folks and other folks, right? So this [00:07:00] means that there's a check on my ability politically and religiously to distill this pure White Christian nationalism into my community, there's just things getting in my way to do that. When you get to Southern California in the 1960s, 1970s, all of those things are not there. Those main streets, they're not there. You know what is there? Burgeoning mega churches, where folks are realizing, preachers are realizing, if I combine just vehement anti communism with all these people who have jobs at defense industry plants, Anti Communism, pro Capitalism, pro Individual, you know what that equals? The Gospel of Jesus Christ. If I put all that together, now all of a sudden I get a religious and political set of elements that fuse into something that is not only, uh, what I would call white Christian nationalist, But it's unchecked by all those, those foundational components on the main streets where the, [00:08:00] where these folks left.

And that's why I think you're able to see this distillation, this petri dish of, of a conservative movement based on the idea that Christianity and America go together, form in this region of the country. 

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation - Ideas - Air Date 10-18-24

CLIP: My whole goal in life was to grow up, get married, And we didn't believe in things like birth control.

So, the expectation was that we'd have as many children as possible, and our parents would use us. to bring about this change in the country. It would make the country a Christian country. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: It draws a direct link between evangelical, masculinity and masculine authority, patriarchy, and Christian nationalism.

Both of those center a particular understanding of power as power over others. Yeah, and In which then the ends always justifies the means and [00:09:00] we see the effects of that in the lives of women who live under the authority of these men and we see what happens when things go wrong. 

CLIP: So in 2018, I finally got the courage to decide to come forward and I looked up Andy Savage who was now one of the leading pastors at a mega church in Tennessee and I decided to write him an email.

And I signed off, hashtag me too. Two days later was a Sunday, and the head of the church announces to the congregation that Pastor Savage has something he needs to tell them. What happened next was so enraging. I wanted the world to see it. I regretfully had a sexual incident with a female high school senior in the church.

He tells the [00:10:00] world that it had occurred and that he was sorry. And

everybody stands, and they give him a standing ovation.

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: And what we see is Faith communities invariably, repeatedly rallying around the perpetrators, the abusers, protecting them, giving cover to the man of God, trying to, as they say, protect the witness of the church. And it's the victim who is maligned, who is blamed, who is silenced, and who is often pushed out of those communities.

And so For Our Daughters features the stories of several survivors who had this experience sometimes even decades ago, and came to see it in a new light, often when they had daughters of their own, I wanted to give them a powerful platform to speak their truth. And it [00:11:00] is true. Their stories are true.

They are legally vetted. They are speaking truth. And to, bring these stories to faith communities so that they can take a critical look at their own practices and also challenge them to look at the broader political scene of how this Ideology. is linked to Christian nationalism and how some of the very men depicted in this film are connected to networks that are working to essentially achieve a Christian nationalist takeover, which could in fact be upon us in this next election.

The, lines are direct. And so this is, an issue that affects us. Evangelical women inside churches, absolutely. But we're making the case that we need to listen to the warnings from some of these evangelical women who have seen the dark side of this ideology because it matters for all American women.[00:12:00] 

Now, when Jesus and John Wayne released, I, within about two, three days, started getting letters. I have gotten thousands of letters, most of which say some version of the same thing. This is the story of my life. But it's also somehow shocking. I never understood how all these pieces fit together. How can Readers both be so intimately familiar with the book, so much so that some actually send me pictures of their bookshelves that are aligned with all the things that I talk about, or they [00:13:00] tell me their life stories, and it could have just been a through line of Jesus and John Wayne.

And yet, it's shocking to see it all come together. How can this be? And I, came to realize just how much evangelicals had controlled their own narrative. They had told the stories about themselves in a particular way, including some details and omitting others. They have written their own histories so that facts can seem like attacks.

Especially when they were organized efforts to tell people that legitimate histories are attacks on their faith. For generations, we've been told the enemy is post modernism, the post truth world, we are the moral majority, all that stuff thrown out the window now, and instead it's whatever it takes.

I've even seen very recently some guy on Twitter, from the right came on [00:14:00] and said, I don't know, somebody was lying about me. It happens a lot. I've been misrepresented so many times. I just saw somebody post. somebody jumped in and said, you're lying. you, you, can't.

That's not what she said. Why do you do this? And the response, I appreciated the honesty there, was essentially, she's an enemy. We can say whatever we want about her and do whatever we want to her. And I thought, wow, that is starkly presented. It is chilling, but I think it encapsulates well kind of the spirit within this movement when pushed to extremes and the leaders of this movement are doing everything they can to push followers to those extremes and they use this language of threat to do so.

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: Just thinking about you about you being you and reading something like that, you know, 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: yeah My internal response was very clarifying given the interactions. I've had [00:15:00] with people on on social media Not, not just random people, this was a random person, but more respectable folks, including some pretty powerful leaders inside evangelical organizations and institutions.

This kind of describes the way I am treated in some of those spaces, and it's, it's not just me, um, at, at all. Um, and, and it actually, I was showing it to a friend, uh, a couple of friends who were kind of scholars working in these areas. Areas, and it wasn't actually until one of them said to me, Kristen, this is really frightening.

This is actually a threat. And I, I hadn't, I just saw it as, of course, this makes so much sense of what I have been experiencing. And I didn't see it as the threat that it actually is or could entail. Uh, so I guess you work in these spaces long enough, you kind of get used to this. Um, I didn't feel personally threatened by that tweet.

I do feel personally, um, disquieted by this kind of rhetoric [00:16:00] and the dehumanizing rhetoric that I see in these spaces. I try to call it out whenever I see it, um, the, but it's always spiritualized. So you can call people demonic. You can call people a wolf. You know, the first time I was called a wolf, I thought, Oh, that's silly.

And then I realized, no, no, no, that actually has a deep meaning inside these spaces, a theological meaning, right? You are an enemy of the church, an enemy of Christ, but it also, in terms of authoritarian movements, it also dehumanizes others. And we see a lot of that kind of language used now towards immigrants.

right, to people on the margins and high levels of comfort in some of these conservative Christian spaces with extremely dehumanizing language, which, you know, to my mind goes against

MAGA's 'Young Male Voter' Plan Hits Bottom Of The Barrel - The Majority Report - Air Date 10-22-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: The Trump campaign set out to target male voters, young male voters, low propensity, young male voters. And [00:17:00] what young male voters want is stuff like that Owen Schroyer thing we played earlier, where you have young women saying, abortion is my top issue. In terms of the election, because that makes men feel like, Oh, these girls don't know what they're doing.

They're voting based upon an issue that's important to them and not me. They should be freaking out about the border like I am. Exactly. I don't know. I guess there is a cohort. I mean, wrestling fans, young people, but I don't know if wrestling fans even know who Hulk Hogan is anymore.

Maybe they do. But here is Jesse Watters. One of the, really creepy style men you'll recall the way that he basically start started his second marriage, right? 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Oh, I don't know, but entrapped his current wife into a marriage. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, he let the air out of her tires when she was going home. And then she needed a ride home, so he gave it to her. I guess this is from Fox. [00:18:00] Incidentally They also sell things like pepper spray and alarms if you come across this in a parking lot. Anyways here is Jesse Waters interviewing Hulk Hogan. 

HULK HOGAN: Speaking from, and you'll know exactly who they are. So when they say that Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan and stuff like that doesn't make Trump one with the people or a blue collar worker. If you listen to where people were speaking from and you put Buttigieg up there, Trump definitely wouldn't be a man of the people. That's how it really is, brother. But by the way, just to correct you, Jesse Waters, I know about waters and your world and all that stuff. Well, this is Trumpamania, and this is his country, brother. 

JESSEE WATTERS: All right, I'll give it to him. Just for this show. But not after that. I'm going to be taking it back. We saw you ripping your shirt off at the RNC. You know, there have been saying that men that lift weights are fascists. Can you just kind of remind Democrats?

Cause they didn't used to be like this. Can you remind Democrats [00:19:00] what American men are made of? 

HULK HOGAN: Well, brother, at the end of the day, no, this is a chain of command. Our Lord and savior the wife and the husband and the kids at the end of the day, The mother is to nourish, but the man is to protect, serve, and provide.

So at the end of the day, that's what this is all about. Is being a real man, being a real American and getting this country and making it how, not how it used to be, but how it should be, brother. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: When you, okay, brother

I mean, this may resonate with people, but some people, but you've heard me say over and over again, that all the trans stuff. That all the issues with like a high value men even like back to Gamergate, all of this stuff, hat, Hulk Hogan just told you there is a fundamental hierarchy that starts the series that starts at the [00:20:00] top of the hierarchy.

And it's not man over woman. It's God over man, and then it's man over woman, and then brother, and brother. But when we say that the issue of, the political issue of trans women and women's sports is not about women's sports. It is about freaks who, for whatever reason, Maintain a notion of the patriarchy.

And the patriarchy is simply a, essentially the human version of religious hierarchy. God, who also happens to be a man, of course, and then human, and by human we mean man, and then woman, who, of course, was derived from the man. And then children and whether it's trans issues or whether it's [00:21:00] like women caring about abortion rights.

That's why they're voting. Like they're putting themselves in their own their ability their reproductive rights above my sense of national chauvinism, all of this stuff emanates. From religious fundamentalism. And often it gets laundered through other things.

This is about ethics and gaming reporting, or this is about the integrity of women's sports, or, this is protect the children or whatever it is, what it is at its root is a freak out about gender and gender roles. And that comes from religious fundamentalism. Some instances, the people know that they're operating on it.

Some instances, they don't know.

If you walked around with a swastika, [00:22:00] you could have just seen the image and said, that's a cool image. I'm going to make a t shirt with that. And walk around with it and go you know what? I'm like I believe I should wear this thing without any knowledge of where this idea or what it represents comes from.

And that's what I'm talking about with this sort of like gender freak out. Now other people may have some other issues around gender that they're struggling with individually. And then this like wind of what society and traditional society and religious society like brushes up against their own insecurities and that becomes fuel for their gender war.

But understand that these constructs exist because of religious fundamentalism.

 

NAR Watch Ep. 7 JD Vance Joins Lance Wallnau in Spiritual Warfare - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 10-14-24

MATT TAYLOR: So if we go back into the history, um, in the fall of [00:23:00] 2015, Paul Y. Kane is gathering charismatic leaders at Trump tower to meet with Trump. These are the first religious leaders that meet with Donald Trump. The people who are at those meetings become the nucleus of Trump's evangelical advisors.

And this is part of this changeover that occurs that I'm observing in my book of how these previously fringe characters from the, these independent charismatic spaces move into the center. Of right wing politics because of their association and closeness to Trump. Wall now is in those meetings. In fact, he, he, he talks to Trump in these meetings personally.

And, and is, um, he's one of the first Christian leaders to endorse Donald Trump, and even when he is endorsing Donald Trump, he's, he's offering this prophecy, this prophecy about Cyrus that he he's cribbing it from Jeremiah Johnson. But he, he's, he's the one who really popularizes a lot of these ideas and gets the ball rolling on.

This whole Trump prophecy element to, um, the, the Christian campaigning for Donald Trump. But then, Wallnau is never put on the official board of [00:24:00] evangelical advisors. Many of his friends are, but he's not. And he's invited into the White House at different points during the Trump administration to advise the White House.

I'll be damned if I can find any photos of that. Where he's in the white house. And so he, he has brought in, he's clearly an interlocutor. He's clearly a voice that they value. And he is one of the most effective Christian propagandists for Donald Trump, just bar none. I mean, he's, he's the one who's using these seven mountains ideas.

I mean, one of my, I don't know if I've ever told this story on here. Uh, so after, um, the, the access Hollywood tape comes out in October of 2016, right? And it's this moment. For those who, who were, were politically paying attention to the times, this moment where everyone's like, okay, Trump's done, right? The evangelicals are just going to abandon him.

Even Mike Pence was on the fence about whether, whether he could even talk about defending Donald Trump on this question. And it's one of the [00:25:00] few times in Donald Trump's life, especially political life that he's actually apologized. But in the midst of that, Walnut had just issued, it just published this book, God's Chaos Candidate, predicting.

And prophesying that Donald Trump would win the election. And so he, he is really in a tough spot because he has just said Donald Trump is God's anointed candidate. And then it comes out the Trump is like from his own mouth, describing how he sexually abuses women. And so Lance is in, um, he's in Israel at the time and he goes on Facebook live and records like a 10 minute video.

And in this video, it's so fascinating because he, so again, he's using the old Testament, Hebrew Bible imagery. And he says, This is his, this is the core of his message. And he says, God could use the jawbone of an ass to slaughter a thousand Philistines, but God could never use a Jezebel. And so to unpack that he's, he's, he's, he's using these two, he's linking together these two old Testament stories.

So there's, there's the [00:26:00] Samson story where Samson, Takes the, the jawbone of a donkey and slaughters a thousand Philistines. And then Jezebel, the evil, wicked queen, the, the, the most pagan of all the queen, the female characters in the Hebrew Bible. And so what he's saying there is like, Donald Trump is the jawbone of the ass.

Donald Trump is a donkey's jawbone, but he's an instrument. He's a weapon. In the hand of God and but God could never work through a hillard clinton at jezebel And and this video gets more than 4 million views before the election And I would argue it's one of the major factors in bringing evangelicals back into the, back into the fold, keeping them on the Trump train, not letting them jump off saying, Hey, he's a bad dude.

We all acknowledge that, but he's an instrument in the hand of God. And so that, that is the role wall now has played for Trump. And yet he never is apart from those, those very, the very first meetings, you never see a picture of him. With Trump and you never see him in the white [00:27:00] house. And so I think that is kind of the pattern that we're seeing, even with this JD Vance thing, they want his audience.

They want his people, but they want to maintain a little barrier so that there's a little plausible deniability. 

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: So there's, there's people listening who are thinking, you know, they're informed and they're thinking, okay, I know there's pictures of Sean Foyt in the white house, touching Donald Trump. Paula white for, for goodness sake was the spiritual advisor.

Uh, Donald Trump has done so many, uh, events with, uh, people in the, like, Evangelicals for Trump or the, you know, he had the, the whole, um, the, the Latinos, uh, for Trump and that was, that, that was kicked off at an N A R church. Here's my point. Donald Trump takes pictures with everybody. He had, the guy had dinner with Nick Fuentes.

I mean, you know, and Kanye West. So if I'm listening right now, can you help me understand why is Lance Wall now, like, beyond the pale? Like, you, he's not allowed to have a photo? And then, You know, much less, they basically like made sure [00:28:00] Lance was not touching the stage before like JD took one step onto the stage because they didn't want anyone to ever say they shared the stage.

Why is Lance beyond the pale compared to all these other people? 

MATT TAYLOR: Well, if you go back, the Nick Fuentes, Kanye West dinner, that was before Trump had entered the race. So this was, this is in that kind of interregnum where he had lost in 2020 before he had really fully kind of stepped into and launched his 2024 campaign.

So I think there was, there was an element of, of wanting to kind of, again, play this sort of game there. With Walnut, if you track Walnut. I just, I just have, I 

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: just have to say this, like, so back in the days when he was not a candidate, when he was allowed to, I don't know, call Putin on his free time, have classified documents behind the toilet and have dinner with Nazis, I mean, he wasn't even in the race yet, Matt.

It's not a big deal. He was a private citizen. Who cares? I mean, gosh, 

MATT TAYLOR: Brad, aren't we all having dinner with Nick Fuentes on the [00:29:00] side? Come on. 

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: You know, I'm not running for office. So hey, what's the big, I'm sorry. I just had to say that like, I I'm not doubting what you're saying, but it's ridiculous. So go ahead. 

MATT TAYLOR: Walnell of all of the Trump Christian propagandists is really willing to push the envelope. And, and again, it's not, it's not that he is persona non grata. It's not that he's a bridge too far. They want his audience. They bring him in, but it's about maintaining a little bit of plausible deniability there because I don't think they want to be on the hook for the things that he says, because while now is of all of these leaders that I have seen the most willing to demonize.

His political opponents, the most willing to, I mean, he, he has at least three or four times now gone after Kamala Harris said that she is an amalgam of the Jezebel spirit, that you can't listen to her because it's just demons speaking through her, that she used witchcraft to win the debate with Donald Trump.

[00:30:00] So he really leans in. And it attaches these narratives. To his political opponents and he's also very deep into these conspiracy theorizing. In fact, just the other night, he was tweeting, Hey, Marjorie, Marjorie Taylor Greene might be right because she's doing, she's, she's saying that they control the weather.

And hey, if this, this next hurricane, this hurricane Milton hits a bunch of red counties, then I'm going to suspect that she's right. Like, so he, he plays footsie with Alex Jones and he very much is actually modeling himself. Off of Steve Bannon and Alex Jones right now, if you, if you watch how he runs his kind of podcast and media empire, he he's merchandising the way that they merchandise, he pays homage to Steve Bannon frequently.

I mean, he's really kind of taking these models of other far right provocateurs and playing with them. I think a figure like Sean Foyt still plays as a worship leader. Even though I have done the deep dive on Sean Foyt, he is an extreme far right figure. Who has, has used his influence to, to very [00:31:00] nefarious and harmful ends.

But Wallnau is, is, is so public and has, has so many of these things attached to him. I think that the Trump campaign, they, they, they want to use him. And then they also want to keep just that sliver of daylight, just so that they don't feel like they ever have to answer for the things that he says, but he can keep saying them and they can keep promoting him.

Ziklag Exposed Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge Voters in Battleground States - Democracy Now! - Air Date 7-30-24

ANDY KROLL: Ziklag is a secretive network of ultrawealthy Christians, conservative Christians, who have this two-part goal, two-part vision for this country. One is to get heavily involved in the 2024 elections, in the ways that you just described, mobilizing pastors, knocking people off the voting rolls, demonizing trans people to motivate conservative voters. But then, looking toward the 20- and 30-year horizon, Ziklag’s goal is nothing less than moving the country toward a state of Christian [00:32:00] nationalism, having biblical worldviews, quote-unquote, “biblical truth,” shaping, influencing every part of American culture, the seven mountains that you described. So, this really is, as one expert we quoted in the story told us, a vision for Christian supremacy.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: “Ziklag” mean?

ANDY KROLL: Ziklag, the name, refers to a biblical reference about David taking refuge during his struggle with King Saul. The analogy here, of course, is that the Christians in this group apparently feel that they are under siege and that this group is their refuge, but then the place from which they plan their campaign, their assault to take back American culture.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: In a Ziklag member briefing video that you obtained at ProPublica, one of Ziklag’s spiritual advisers, Lance Wallnau, a Christian evangelist and influencer, laid out a plan [00:33:00] to deliver swing states by using an anti-transgender message to motivate conservative voters who are exhausted with Trump.

MATT TAYLOR: If we can get the left to own their position on LGBTQ — the country has already drifted on the homosexual issue, but on transgenderism, there is a problem, and they know it. They’re going to want to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump, he’s indicted, the guy’s a criminal, this and that. They’re going to have riots on the street and all the kabuki theater. Meanwhile, if we talk about it’s not about Trump; it’s about the parents and their children, and the state is a threat. When you get Governor Newsom or Governor Whitmer or Polis, your top three potential candidates for the future presidency of the United States, other than Kamala, you got these — when they’re going to have to stand with their LGBTQ donors, and so, when they solidify that position, that’s where they’ve gone too far.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: So, that’s Lance Wallnau, a [00:34:00] Christian evangelist and influencer. Andy Kroll, if you can talk about him, what he’s saying, and who the other leaders of this are?

ANDY KROLL: Lance Wallnau is maybe one of the most important Christian evangelist figures that maybe your audience hasn’t heard of. He was one of the earliest Christian right leaders to endorse Donald Trump. We’re talking way back in 2015 here. He popularized this notion that Donald Trump was a modern-day Cyrus, a sort of flawed but virtuous leader who would deliver a victory for Christians. And that Cyrus idea really caught on, was a big reason that evangelicals turned out to such a big degree for Trump in ’16, again in ’20. Wallnau remains this bridge between the Christian right, Christian nationalism and Trump world.

Wallnau is one of a number of really influential and well-known people that are part of Ziklag. Some [00:35:00] members that your audience might have heard of, the Green family, they’re the family behind Hobby Lobby. Obviously, they’ve had a pretty big impact in trying to strike down parts of the Obamacare law back in the Obama presidency. The Uihlein family have donated to this effort. They are, of course, the billionaire office supply family out of the Midwest, major, major political donors to Republicans and to Donald Trump. And then, another family is the Waller family, influential in Ziklag. They are the owners of the Jockey apparel company, which probably a lot of people have heard of even if they haven’t heard of this family. So you have a number of really wealthy, really influential conservative Christian families in this group. They have the means to invest not just in political work, but also in this larger cultural transformation plan that Ziklag has really put its — really organized itself around.

 

Spirit & Power Episode 4 Take Back that Which Was Stolen from Us The Charismatic Rituals of the Religious Right - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 10-17-24

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: Lance Wallnau gave a very interesting talk about time and different phases of [00:36:00] life. And I think there were like six phases of life that he went through, but he said that nations also have these phases. And so, he drew like a stair step on his whiteboard. Because we always use the whiteboard.

DR. LEAH PAYNE: Here's where another historic Pentecostal practice comes into play, prophecy. Pentecostals have long made prophecies about current events and political leaders and tied their leadership to the apocalypse. For example, there were prophecies about the Kaiser during World War I or FDR during World War II. But I will say the way that some prophecies tie Trump's presidency to the end of time is quite distinct.

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: He drew these stairs and the first one was leader slash Cyrus. So if you look, his argument is, if you look at biblical timelines and prophecy, that it requires a King [00:37:00] Cyrus, something, someone like a King Cyrus. 

DR. LEAH PAYNE: King Cyrus of Persia, celebrated for freeing the Israelites from Babylonian captivity and allowing them to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, was a pagan ruler, but he's still called God's anointed in the book of Isaiah and According to charismatic interpretations, he's used by God for divine purposes.

And in these circles, Donald Trump is often compared to King Cyrus. Many view him as an unlikely vessel chosen by God to advance Christian causes. And, They draw parallels to Cyrus's role in Israel's restoration as Cyrus restored ancient Israel. So Trump could restore and is restoring 21st century Israel, which according to their theology would bring the second coming.

So the end of time and the [00:38:00] return of Christ is tied to Trump. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: To set this domino effect into place that will then bring about. The kingdom of God. The first one was Cyrus. The second one was the house, which was the rebuilding of the temple. 

CLIP: Open the eyes, the awakening, we pray for the awakening revival.

We need a revival. All the preachers said we need a revival. And most Christians go, we need a revival. And we think somehow God's going to pour out like a Zeus and the nations going to go all speak in tongues. We're all going to become righteous. First, God gets to give you a ruler. You've got to pray for the right ruler.

Then you got to be in the right project, which is the Ecclesia, which is his house. Then the awakening comes to those that are in the building project. God's got them in. I honestly think those are the politically engaged and keep themselves from a spirit of strife right now are probably more in the [00:39:00] revival than they know.

Years from now, we're going to look back and say, when was the period of the great awakening? We're going to date historians will date it and they'll put you in that period of great awakening. Pictures like this crowd will be in the little textbooks in the future, saying these were the early signs that when the Trump era came, then there was a galvanizing of Christian concern and a lot of praying and a lot of gathering, a lot of indigenous grassroots people, a lot of people like are in this room right now, hearing the call of God to go into government, to go into schools, to go into media, to begin to do what, what, what, what, what, what the awakened church did next, which was they had to see for Cyrus house of God, awakening.

Yeah. They began to occupy the territory around their local church. 

DR. LEAH PAYNE: Kerry notes that this vision is ultimately about the charismatic vision of the end of time. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: That's the ultimate goal. It's not the immediate. This election doesn't just have these. immediate consequences for the next four years. We're [00:40:00] talking about the restoring of the temple.

It's massive. It's a major spiritual win if this can happen in his eyes. That's what's motivating and what's encouraging to people because you can have a place in this history that gives it that historical significance as a Christian, as a faith filled person. 

DR. LEAH PAYNE: This is an important point to drive home because Pentecostal and charismatic Trump enthusiasts might be quite patriotic, but that doesn't mean that they are ultimately interested in American democracy. The nation of nations in the charismatic mind is the end times nation of Israel and the United States has ultimately utilitarian value. Is the U. S. important? Yes, but not necessarily as a model of democracy. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: Whenever the lens does get turned back onto the U. S., um, the [00:41:00] words and the narrative surrounding that is typically something to do with government overreach.

And so democracy is not, not on their agenda. Uh, Rick Green gave a long talk about biblical citizenship and what. The constitution allows and what it doesn't, and that there's been government overreach going on for quite some time that we need to get rid of the department of education. 

CLIP: So we are so blessed in America. We know America's great. We know she's crumbling, so we've got to turn her around. So if we want that life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, we build it on truth and we had it for a while. The reason we're losing it is because we're not doing that next sentence consent of the governed. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

You give or refuse consent by being involved. When you sit on the sideline, government assumes you've consented and starts taking over more and more of our lives, telling us how [00:42:00] to raise our families, how to, how to take care of our property, how to run our businesses, all of those things. And that's essentially where we are.

And it's not just It's not just the DEI and CRT and ESG, and it's not just the federal government. Our local governments are squeezing the life out of the free enterprise system. They're squeezing the life out of property rights. They're micromanaging what you do with your property. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: We need to get rid of the CDC because all of these were just oversteps that they're not supposed to be government functions.

And they said outright that government is supposed to protect you, not provide for you. There was a lot put into this kind of reap and sow narrative of it and framed it as, you know, the nation. So, I mean, essentially they used a lot of words, but the gist was give us your money or you're losing your nation.

CLIP: What am I saying to you? I'm saying simply this in a few weeks, we are getting ready. I believe to cut the head of a [00:43:00] lot of giants and things that have been attacking our children have been attacking our country. This is what Flashpoint's been about. It's why I've given four years of my life as a busy senior pastor of a, of a 1, 500 member church and growing and a worldwide ministry.

And yet I do this because I recognize that I'm giving my time as an offering for God, but because I also believe I put my money behind it. Because I recognize the power of an offering to not only deliver me, but to position my country for victory. How many of you would like a part of that? 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: That's really, that's really what it amounted to. And they called it this prophetic gifting. 

CLIP: So I want to bring you to what I believe is a prophetic act. And here's what it is. How many of you are believing for victory in a few weeks? How many of you are believing and those of you that are watching for defeat against the giants? [00:44:00] Of all the things that we've been facing in the harsh season we've been in.

Alright, I believe a prophetic act then has to proceed our victory. And I want to show you out of the Bible some prophetic acts. I want to show you at least two that have to do with an offering that brought a deliverance to a nation. 

Unfcking Flashback The American Propaganda Machine. - UNFTR - Air Date 10-12-24

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: To get the point across, let's talk about one of the heavyweight champs of public policy. The Heritage Foundation. Sounds homespun and charming, doesn't it? The Heritage Foundation, and its sister lobbying arm Heritage Action for America, openly develop public policy for so called conservative issues and lobby conservative lawmakers to adopt them.

The main foundation receives funding from a labyrinth of conservative donors, several billionaires, other foundations, foreign entities, the oil and gas, defense, tobacco, and technology industries, among others. and other undisclosed donors. Here's a fun one. Did you know that they [00:45:00] were the chief architects of what became known as Obamacare?

Yep. They lobbied for universal privately insured healthcare with an individual mandate. Why? Because they wanted people to pay for insurance and to stop undocumented immigrants and poor people from using the emergency room as a primary care doctor. You didn't think Mitt Romney came up with that all by himself, did you?

Then the second it was adopted by a Democratic president, meaning a black guy, it became the third rail and Heritage promptly reversed course. Beyond this seismic flip flop, the Heritage Foundation greatest hits include Fighting Against Taxes on Cigarette Companies, Blasting immigration reform measures, railing against climate change legislation, and advocating for covert military funding and operations in foreign nations to overthrow governments.

Just a few among other pet projects they have. 

CLIP: Well, isn't that special? [00:46:00] 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: One of the most effective ground strategies these organizations have is the creation of what's called model legislation. In other words, they write the legislation they want to see, leave the sponsors blank, and circulate them throughout the states hoping their measures will be turned into law.

Let's put some real numbers to this to demonstrate just how little influence voters have on what their legislators actually do and propose. In 2019, the Center for Public Integrity published a report generated by USA Today and the Arizona Republic which found at least 10, 000 bills. Almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in just the past eight years.

And more than 2, 000 of those bills were signed into law. To help us through a few passages in the report, here's my friend. We'll call him Bobby. Bobby from Brooklyn, to give us some highlights. 

CLIP: Model bills passed into law have made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations. They've called for [00:47:00] taxes on sugar laden drinks.

They've limited access to abortion and restricted the rights of protesters. Fuckin bunch of dicks. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Uh, Bobby, please, just keep reading. 

CLIP: Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn't help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money.

The HOPE Act, introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps. You fucking kidding me. That shit wouldn't fly where I'm from 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: again, if, if you don't mind. 

CLIP: All right, all right, all right. Where was I? Cities and counties have raised their minimum wage, banned plastic bags and destroyed seize guns.

Only to have industry groups that oppose such measures make them illegal. With model bills passed in state legislatures. Y'all fucked up. Bullshit. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Fuck this bullshit. Indeed, Bobby. So who exactly is writing these model bills? Sorry, Democrats [00:48:00] outgunned again. Turns out 83 percent of model legislation was written either by conservative advocacy groups or directly by corporations.

92 percent of the bills that actually became law were from those two groups, proving once again liberals suck at hand to hand combat and lack the kind of overwhelming coordination that corporations and conservative groups maintain. So where are we? Oh, right. Billionaire X has a problem. So he, I'm assuming his preferred pronoun is he, uses a network of shell corporations to provide funding to think tanks that generate research to support a thesis that would eliminate said problem.

The think tanks send research to lobbyists who push it off to legislators as proof that new laws need to be passed. Then they coordinate with billionaire X's corporation to write the legislation directly. Now the biggest missing ingredient here is public sentiment, buy in, manufacturing. [00:49:00] Someone needs to sell this bullshit to the American people so the lawmaker can hold up some new bill with some fucking patriotic title and claim that he or she is defending the best interests of the American people.

Enter the mouthpiece, or the shill. The reason I call the Heritage Foundation the heavyweight champ among the thousands of think tanks, lobbyists, and corporations directly peddling influence Isn't because they're the biggest. Now, it's a hundred million dollar plus organization with ties to several other closely related groups and lobbyists that all told pour billions of dollars into our elections.

But they're still not the biggest. They're the best because they're by far the most Now, to really sell your snake oil, you need some clever spokespeople and mouthpieces. 

These are folks who identify with the people and can twist that thing [00:50:00] that's good for you around in your brain until it no longer makes any sense coming back out of your mouth.

Take, for example, this sincere and charming fella convincing Americans that Medicare, yeah, Medicare, is nothing more than socialized 

RONALD REAGAN CLIP: medicine that will rob you of your freedoms. One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.

Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can't afford it. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: In case you couldn't place the voice, that's none other than the Gipper himself, Ronald Reagan, shilling for the AMA in a prepared script designed to attack Medicare. That's when there were five TV stations and AM radio only.

Today, the information channels are limitless. And no one has fused policy and punditry better than the Heritage Foundation. Where others [00:51:00] rely on making their own videos they post to YouTube and speaking on panels at conferences, Heritage has a revolving door booking engine that gets their research fellows on podcasts Evening news shows and mentioned in op eds.

BEN SHAPIRO CLIP: Welcome back. This is the Ben Shapiro show. Joining us on the line is John Malcolm, vice president for the Institute for Constitutional Government and director of the Mies Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at Heritage Foundation. 

CLIP: ...the Institute for Constitutional Government at the Heritage Foundation, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General. Blue cities burning. I want to get a, a big picture historical overview with our friend, Jared Stepman. He's from the Heritage Foundation. 

NEWSCLIP: John Malcolm, vice president of the Institute for Constitutional Government at the Heritage Foundation. 

The Heritage Foundation. I have it here in front of me. 

The Heritage foundation. 

The Heritage Foundation. There have been 1,285 proven cases of voter fraud... 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Voter fraud, immigration, Black Lives Matter, Obamacare, Union, Second Amendment, you name it. They've got an expert locked, loaded, and ready to spray verbal bullets through the screen and into your ear balls. Heritage Foundation research and mouthpieces [00:52:00] regularly make their way through high profile shows like Hannity and popular podcasts like Ben Shapiro.

CLIP: Twelve thousand lobbyists, eighteen hundred think tanks, two party system, and one ass fuck nation. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Clean air and water? 

CLIP: It's my right to pollute if it makes me money.

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Access to affordable health care. 

CLIP: Get a job with benefits you welfare queen. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Pre-existing condition. 

CLIP: Your diabetes is not my fuckin' problem 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Ranked 15th in standard of living despite being the wealthiest nation.

CLIP: Move to Sweden you fucking Commie. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Raise the minimum wage.

CLIP: You're a job killer. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: Background checks on weapon purchases. 

CLIP: This isn't North Korea. 

MAXIMILLIAN ALVAREZ - HOST, UNFTR: If you can make a common sense argument based on the concept of general welfare, there's a corporation funded policy group armed and ready with a white paper, a spokesperson, a sponsor for pre written laws, and a talk show host with prepared bullet points [00:53:00] all ready to tell you why it's a communist plot to take your guns away, kill your grandparents, and turn us into Denmark.

Note from the Editor on susceptibility to manipulation

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting with the majority of report, laying out some of the history of the Christian conservative movement. Ideas looked specifically at Christian patriarchy. The majority report discussed the politics of Republicans targeting young men. Straight white American Jesus explained the spiritual warfare going on. Democracy now explain the movement of extremely wealthy Christians looking to make a political impact Straight white American Jesus laid out. 

Why some tie Trump to the second coming of Christ. And unending the Republic dove into the power and influence of the heritage foundation. And those were just the top takes. There's a lot more in the deeper dive section, but first 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. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes delivered seamlessly to the new [00:54:00] members only podcast feed the chill, receive sign up to support the [email protected] slash support. 

There's a link in the show notes. Through our Patrion 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 onto the deeper dives, half of the show, a quick thought about religion and for context, I used to be. More on the angry side of the spectrum. Talking about religion and it's, you know, deleterious effects on society writ large. But over the years, you know, If you'd asked me 15 years ago, I would've been much more angry than I am now. 

Over the years, I've I've chilled and sort of come to understand it [00:55:00] as part of the human condition. Not just like, well, it's a natural thing that happens. People are going to believe in stuff that isn't true. But the reason that they're. Drawn to believe in things that aren't true. Has to do with all of us trying to get through life, you know, life's hard and we need something to grab onto every once in a while. 

And when things get harder That phenomenon ramps up even more. I think the real tragedy of it is not just, you know, believing in as the show's describing today, you know, political fantasies of things that aren't true, or depending on your perspective of. Religion in general, you may consider the religious tenants to be untrue as well. 

But like the real tragedy is how leaning too hard into faith. Leaves one. So wide open to manipulation. And that. Is a pattern that repeats itself. Throughout history, right? Which brings [00:56:00] us to this little segment from an article. Uh, describing not history, but right now this is from slate. Why we still can't grasp the actual problem of president Donald Trump. And it says, quote, For Republicans and Fox news truth no longer has anything to do with facts or even reality. 

Truth has returned to its pre enlightenment meaning Or as Miriam Webster puts it, it's archaic. Meaning fidelity, constancy. To be true in the medieval Trumpy and world is to be loyal and steadfast. It's no longer about reason or even belief. 

It's about faith. Freud had a word for this kind of primitive faith. He called it illusion people crave a godlike father figure for I'd explained, especially when they feel threatened with the eruptions of two dangers. The crushing Lee superior force of nature. And the shortcomings of society, which have made themselves painfully felt. In the [00:57:00] 21st century facing severe social inequities, just when nature seems most out of control, america is in exactly that vulnerable state. 

And so it shouldn't actually surprise us That nearly half the country's voters have rallied around a sociopathic strong man who promises protection. In return for absolute fealty in quote. 

And I think that says almost all that needs to be said on this topic. But with that in mind, I just want to tie a bow on it by sort of putting this entire topic of discussion into the category. I come back to over and over again. often borrowing a phrase from Michael Brooks. Go hard on systems, but easy on people. And this is what has allowed me to chill over the last decade or two. Understanding that the vast majority of the rank and file and the religious right. 

And Trump faithfuls are not manipulative mastermind, seeking [00:58:00] power. 

They're just regular people trying to make the most sense of a chaotic world as best they can.

Those aren't the people who deserve our anger. And that's the vast majority of them. Frustration. Sure. Maybe, But aim higher with your anger and always understand the systemic forces involved. 

SECTION A - THE MOVEMENT

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics. Next up section a. The movement followed by section B Trump and the election section C patriarchy and race And section D American Christian.

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Part 2 - Ideas - Air Date 10-18-24

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: A while back, I spoke to a large group of evangelical pastors. Now, having written the book Jesus and John Wayne, I never take for granted when I get to speak in front of evangelical pastors. It was not a given. And when I spoke to them, I started off by affirming just how hard it is to be a pastor right now.

Any pastors in the room? [00:59:00] It's pretty rough. Many pastors are at a loss. They like to think of themselves as leaders, but what they've discovered in the last few years, The cruel realization that they exert very little leadership over their flocks. 2016 was a humbling time for a lot of evangelical pastors.

Now, pastors often like to blame the secular media. In the United States, we're talking Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and discipling the flock, right? These guys get their parishioners far more hours of the week than they do on a Sunday morning. And they are absolutely right. But it's not just out there. It's also inside popular Christian culture, Christian radio, Christian publishing, organizations that platform preachers and sell products.

A lot of things are marketed and [01:00:00] sold and a lot of money changes hands under the guise of ministry. Now pastors aren't just up against an invisible hand of the market. If you push back against the status quo, which in white evangelicalism means against conservative politics and against an alignment with the Republican party, and there is a long history here, you are going up against extremely well funded and well organized political networks.

Good hearted evangelical pastors may think that the answers to our toughest questions are to be found in opening the scriptures. and reading theology, seeking truth in community and in light of tradition. But that is not how this game is being played. When I spoke to that lecture hall filled with evangelical pastors, I told them, if you are feeling [01:01:00] like you are up against a lot right now, you are.

And also, you did this to yourselves. And then I explained how, over the past century, White evangelicals had shaped their movement through exclusion and coercion, such that by 2016 the voices that they needed to listen to were nowhere to be found. 

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: I was struck by a moment in Waterloo, and by the final paragraph of your Acknowledgements section.

You talked about people telling you that your book might have gotten into the hands of certain people if, you know, it could be a little nicer. You know, which, which is a funny thing to say about a, a very well researched history book. That's been clearly a very carefully written, uh, and in the acknowledgements you write that I'm quoting you now, but the, the analysis and conclusions found in these pages do not necessarily represent the views of many who contributed to this project, uh, including [01:02:00] friends, family, and my place of employment.

And I guess the question that comes to mind for me is what is it like to write a carefully researched history and to have to countenance. An idea of being nicer or to deal with people whose views don't align with what you understand as history. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: Yeah. That pressure to be nice. Um, so you're allowed to critique a little bit here or there, as long as you keep it on the edges and as long as you kind of center the good guys, the heroes, uh, and, and you give Christians the starring role, then you're okay.

Um, this is not a book where. I did that. I was trying to get the story right. But here's the thing. The vast majority of books about evangelicals are written by evangelicals. And their primary goal is to make evangelicalism look good because [01:03:00] they want to recruit. They call it evangelize. And so every work is a work of apologetics.

a work of evangelism at its heart, whether it's history, whether it's a devotional, whether it's, you know, child rearing guide, all of the above. And that's just, that's not my training. That's, that's not what I do. And it never occurred to me to do so. I was trying to get the story and then let the chips fall where they may.

I didn't want to make them look worse than they are. I didn't want to make them look better than they are. But let's just look at it, sit with it. and understand it. And that's really the goal. 

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: When you began writing this book, were you aware that you were embarking on such a sweeping history of power in, in modern, in the modern American?

Like, I felt like so many times I was reading this book, I started out reading, I'm like, okay, I'm reading a book about a very specific, community topic, but it just [01:04:00] kept zapping through into the main, this big narrative. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: Yes. That is such an astute comment because here's a little backstory that most people aren't aware of.

Um, we had a lot of interest from a lot of different publishers and I loved all the editors I talked with except this one. And I liked him as a person just fine, but I didn't feel like we shared the same vision for the project because he told me, um, you know what you have here, Kristen. This is a new history of American Christianity.

And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm doing something much, much smaller. I'm pulling the thread of evangelical masculinity and militarism. I'm not trying to rewrite the history of American evangelicalism or of American Christianity. I'm doing something far more modest. He's like, no, you're not. Yes, I am.

And so I decided, um, not to go with him. And I landed with a fabulous publisher. No regrets there. However, let me say about two or three months after that conversation, after we had signed with a different publisher and I [01:05:00] was writing, I don't know where I was, chapter three or four at that point, and I was overwhelmed and I was like, how do I make all these pieces fit together?

And exactly what you saw, it just like kept getting bigger and it kept touching more things. And all of a sudden his words came back to me. Kristen, you're writing a new history of American Christianity, and I thought, I'm writing a new history of American Christianity, or American Evangelicalism, certainly.

You find one thread, and you start pulling it through, and you start just doing the research, doing the research, and I started to see, wow, these Evangelicals, I'm just trying to understand what they're saying about masculinity, and then it's about gender, and it's about authority, and it's about power, and it, and at a certain point, I thought, Wow.

I mean, if I didn't know any better, this sounds almost authoritarian. And then this is just, and I was initially focused on foreign policy as it intersected with this militancy. And then I thought, oh, this is very much a story of domestic politics. And it just grew. And by the time I finished it, I felt like, I think I can explain it [01:06:00] all.

So it definitely didn't start that way, but it ended that way because of where my research brought me. 

Exurbia Democracys Newest Battleground w David Masciotra - The Majority Report - Air Date 4-13-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I can picture, honestly, the town, these developments that you're talking about, you know, I had family living in a kind of town like that in Pennsylvania, right, where it used to be middle class, began to decline, but there's all these developments and kind of cul de sac areas where all the houses are newly constructed, and it fits the mold that you say, where it's upper, or it's middle class people moving in, And then eventually, I would say, there's this, there are some upper middle class people who are small business owners, which I'm curious about if that was a part of your analysis.

There was, in the wake of January 6th, there were a lot of people saying, well, these are just the working class people. It's the cry of the working class attacking the Capitol. And then weeks, in the weeks following, there was some analysis done where it goes, a lot of these folks flew in. [01:07:00] And a lot of these folks own a pool cleaning business in Missouri.

Or they, uh, have uh, Uh, some sort of, you know, small financial business in, uh, Indiana. And I think that that fits quite neatly with your analysis of some of these Trump voters. 

DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah, that's a crucial point. Uh, David Brooks and his brethren gave us this asinine definition of the working class, that it's just someone without a college degree.

So if you're going to think and act according to those terms, an elementary school teacher. Making 30 grand a year is not working class, but a small business owner or a tradesman making 80 to 90 grand a year is working class. That makes no sense, but it tends to be that latter category. So as you're saying, I'm a small business owners, but also people who do relatively well in the trades who populate these exurban towns and consistently support [01:08:00] Trump and consistently support people like Jim Jordan.

And Matt Gates and some of the research into January 6th is really fascinating. So for example, the number one common characteristic of people who stormed the Capitol, uh, is residency in an exurban County. Uh, where the non white population is growing and also where the black white poverty gap is shrinking.

Uh, and people who've looked at these, uh, you know, these, these wannabe aspiring fascists, uh, have concluded That it's primarily culture and identity and resentment and hatred surrounding those issues, not economics, because they're not working class by any sensible definition of the term. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: So, um, where are these people working?

Like if you're out [01:09:00] in that sort of like, you know, netherworld, like, like, where are they? If I was to look at a A typical, you know, five or three typical X urban folks like, are they. Are they working remotely? Are they going in? Are they work for insurance company? Like, who is it that they, they work? What kind of jobs these people have?

How often are they going into the city or do they just work in suburbia or are there, are there, are they working in exurbia? 

DAVID MASCIOTRA: So they tend to work in suburbia. So you'll have people living maybe say 60 miles, 70 miles out of Chicago. working in suburban towns that are 15 or 20 miles out of Chicago. I, and as I was saying, they tend to be in the trades.

Many of them own their own construction firms or, uh, own their own electrician company, uh, a plumbing company. So they're, they're people [01:10:00] of that nature, you know, Petty bourgeoisie, uh, who are going into the suburbs where they previously escaped. Usually they used to live in these suburbs. That's where they built their business.

That's where they began to earn their living. Then they fled to exurbia, but most of their customer base and clientele still is in suburbia Interesting 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: and um, let's talk about the uh, the megachurches because you also uh, write that this is Um, maybe not coincidentally Um, where we find the vast, overwhelming majority of megachurches in the country are in these type of like, uh, geographical areas.

DAVID MASCIOTRA: Yeah, that's very interesting because it began as a practical matter. If you're going to build a church the size of a basketball arena, it's probably difficult and costly to do so. Well, not probably, it is difficult and costly to do so in an urban [01:11:00] area or in a densely populated suburb. So it was exurbia that had the open space and also the cheaply available land and the low, uh, property taxes, although that's a different matter because we're talking about religion.

Uh, So, the megachurches sprang up, and then they act as a magnet. for people who attend these megachurches, because many of them tend to be quite devout, and they want to move closer to their source of community, the institution that they attend, and from which they gain some sense of belonging and purpose.

Uh, so then they move closer to Xerbia, and in many of these Xerban towns, They don't have much local government. I mean, they do in nominal terms. Uh, they don't have many third places in the classic sociological sense. It's a lot of corporate chains. Uh, but what they do have are megachurches. So the [01:12:00] megachurch becomes, uh, the daycare, the source of political news and perspective.

Uh, the source of social and recreational life. And, I mean, I don't have to tell your audience why that's a big problem, because many of these megachurches, uh, at best, they preach the prosperity gospel, uh, which is destructive and insane. Uh, but at worst, they become citadels. of Christian theocratic nationalism.

Right-Winger DESPERATE For Christian Minority Voters - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-19-24

BRAD ONISHI: Well, I, I, I think there's a sense there of sometimes less is more, sometimes less. Name recognition is more, I mean, I think we're seeing this with Trump in Project 2025. Right, you're seeing more and more Americans understand what Project 2025 is, so he comes out with this incoherent rant about how he has no idea what it is and he, he doesn't believe any of it.

Well, if you don't know what it is, how do you know you don't believe it? He's just basically trying to, to do, you know, damage control. It's the same with Opus Dei. If we recede into the background, right, slowly, drip by drip, what we see over the course of the aughts in the Obama years [01:13:00] is So much funding, so much network building, right?

So much political influence coming into, uh, into cultivation. By the time we get to the Trump years, it's the Federalist Society who picks us three judges, right? By the time we get to 2022, 23, 24, we have people like the Southern Baptist convention and a Supreme court justice in Alabama condemning IVF. I mean, that is.

An overwhelming victory for the likes not only of Opus Dei, but anyone in that traditional Catholic universe. They feel enormous victory and I, I dare say enormous momentum right now. Leonard Leo's at a place where he's like, I got the court. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: He's got a billion people forgotten this, but he was given a billion with a B dollars to basically go be a, an authoritarian entrepreneur, wherever you can push this, this, uh, agenda, do it.

BRAD ONISHI: We've already got the court, in his mind, that's what he's thinking, and so let's go get the [01:14:00] state legislatures and let's go get Congress, I mean, and make Congress even worse than it is now. I mean Well, that, that, that 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: controversy, just to add to it, from, with the kicker from, uh, the Kansas City Chiefs, uh, Harrison Butker, that he was speaking at a college where, uh, Leonard Leo has connections and has donated, as well as Josh Hawley, uh, having connections to that, too.

BRAD ONISHI: Leo was the, was the commencement speaker the year before. 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yep. 

BRAD ONISHI: Right? So here we have Harrison Butker, 28 year old kicker, and the year before it was Leonard Leo. And so I think that, I mean, it just follows along everything you're saying. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah. Uh, it's terrifying. Um, and 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Good thing the Democrats are in a great position to beat this back right now.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: This is your cue, Brad, to say something like, Oh, but here's the good story. 

BRAD ONISHI: Well, I mean, look, I mean, I, I think, I think for me, uh, here's a couple of things we could take away, uh, perhaps is, uh, we got news of [01:15:00] stunning left center victories in France over the last couple of days. Uh, labor is in, is in power in the UK, uh, and the Tories are gone after 14 years.

Uh, whether we look to places like Mexico or the pushback on Modi, Modi in India. There are people across the world saying no to fascism. And I think for me, the hope lies in a message that says. Uh, look, I, Biden, uh, Harris, uh, whomever, we have a chance to say no to fascism. We have a no to say, we have a chance to say no to totalitarianism, and there are people across the world who have already signaled that they, uh, understand the threat and they're doing the same.

So, um, yeah, I'm not, I'm not going to prognosticate and, and I'm never going to take the foot off the gas of trying to reveal to people just what a dire situation we face right now because we do. But there's always hope and hope springs from, from organizing and togetherness. And, uh, if people are willing to like rub shoulders with other human beings, you often feel a sense of momentum and a sense of, of, uh, of hope grow.

And so that's my [01:16:00] encouragement. Go do one thing you don't usually do. And, uh, don't sit on the sidelines as we kind of descend into what could be a, a, a summer of despair.

SECTION B - TRUMP AND ELECTION

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering section B trump and the election.

Christian Nationalist State Official Delivers TERRIFYING Proclamation - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-7-24

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: One of the things that I think we can look forward to in a, uh, Trump, uh, administration, uh, would be the furtherance of theocracy. Why? Because the Republican Party is, um, very, very dependent on so called evangelical, uh, Christians and Christian nationalists for its votes. And many of its elected officials are also Christian Nationalist.

Here is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. He is the Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, and this is him just about, I don't know, almost a week ago, announcing at a news conference that [01:17:00] Bibles will be required and Bible instruction will be required in schools. 

CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST: We're gonna make an important announcement today regarding the Bible and the 10 Commandments.

My staff has been looking at Oklahoma statute. We've been looking at Oklahoma academic standards, and it's crystal clear to us that in the Oklahoma academic standards under Title 70 multiple occasions, the Bible is a necessary historical document to teach our kids about the history of this country to have a complete understanding of Western civilization.

to have an understanding of the basis of our legal system. And it's frankly, we're talking about the Bible, one of the most foundational documents used for the Constitution and the birth of our country. We also find major points in history that refer to the Bible that reference the Bible. We see multiple figures, [01:18:00] whether we're talking about the Federalist Papers, constitutional, conventional arguments, and Martin Luther King Jr.,

who use it as a tremendous impetus for the civil rights movement, and tie many of those arguments back to the Bible. It is essential that our kids have an understanding of the Bible and its historical context. So we will be issuing a memo today that every school district will adhere to. Which is that every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom to ensure that this historical understanding is there for every student in the state of Oklahoma in accordance with our academic standards and state law.

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: All right. So you see the, um, uh, the, the sort of like, um, What is that game where you, where you shuffle the three card Monte essentially here that's going on here. Um, it may be the case that the Bible [01:19:00] has inspired different historical figures. And so the way that you, the way that you would, um, Discuss the Bible is in the same way that you would discuss any, um, other, uh, document that might've inspired people.

You'd bring it in the course of studying that person or a particular event. There's no, um, mandatory, you know, we're not mandating, um, you're not even, he's not even mandating the, the federalist papers in, in, in the, uh, classroom. And do we even mandate that the constitution be printed, you know, uh, on the walls of these classrooms?

Probably unlikely. Well, 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: I mean, if we're talking just historical documents, we should be, uh, printing out the Communist Manifesto and putting it all over the classrooms. I mean, come on, it's a historical document. A lot 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: of people say that Martin Luther King was also a Marxist. Right. We should, uh, are we going to mandate Marx in every classroom?

Yeah. And at the very least, [01:20:00] not only is that maybe a good idea, but the fact is there's no prohibition under the constitution to, um, uh, imposing marks, uh, on students in a classroom. There is a prohibition for our government to in any way, recognize an official religion or to promote religion. And forcing people to read the Bible, and again, first of all, there's multiple versions of the Ten Commandments, depending on what religion you are a part of.

There's multiple versions of what constitutes the Bible. Um, depending on what religion you are. Here's that same guy, Ryan Walters, uh, on America's Voice, explaining why he needs to put the Bible In, uh, in these classrooms. [01:21:00] 

CHRISTIAN NATIONALIST: But the reality is, as you see, the Chinese Communist Party, they're buying up land in America, they're weaponizing, um, and trying to influence anything in America they can.

And they are absolutely targeting our schools and our education centers. We saw this with the Confucius institutes, which by the way, remember. President Trump clamped down on him. Joe Biden let them back in by loosening those restrictions. And you're seeing in real time here in these last eight years, Trump presidency puts America first, puts communist China last, and the Joe Biden presidency says, well, we're going to put communist China first.

And we'll put the American interest last. So, it is so essentially a President Trump back in the White House. It's not the reality. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, I mean that, that was one of the, that was one of the mistakes I would say that Biden has made. You should not announce that Chinese Communist, uh, Communist China is first and America is last.

Why did Ron Klain 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: advise him to do that? It's 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: such a dumb thing to 

MATT LECH - PRODUCER, THE MAJORITY REPORT: do. Other historical documents I think should maybe be entered into the record is, uh, Thomas Jefferson talking to William Short about a [01:22:00] syllabus, uh, about Jesus, and he says, uh, Among the sayings and discourses imputed to Jesus by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence, and others, again, of so much ignorance and so much absurdity.

Absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. I therefore separate the gold from the dross. Uh, yeah. So, I mean, Our, our, the Founding Fathers were deists. Um, almost all of them. Then, they would think this guy's a freak.

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Also, uh, Oklahoma is, uh, 49th in education, uh, according to the, uh, Tulsa World, uh, local, local paper there. And, uh, Notice how he uses, uh, how the, it's foundational for, um, didn't he, did he say Western Civilization? He said that right in that first clip, if I'm not mistaken. Um, and so, yeah, I, I believe that was at least in the tweet itself.

Um, That is also often what you hear in the defense of Israel by [01:23:00] Zionists. And western civilization is often a substitute for, like, white supremacy. What'd you say? White supremacy. White supremacy. Or, uh, yeah, like colonial empire or power to wipe out the experiences of people who, uh, are either formerly colonized people, people who have a different religion, religious and ethnic minorities in this country.

So just notice that dog whistle. Um, because the reality is that Western civilization was built on chattel slavery, colonialism, and millions and millions of people dying. to create these systems and that's the real history that should be taught. What he's trying to teach is religious propaganda. 

Ziklag Exposed Secretive Christian Nationalist Network Tries to Purge Voters in Battleground States Part 2 - Democracy Now! - Air Date 7-30-24

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: talk about more in depth these three programs, Checkmate, Steeplechase and Watchtower.

ANDY KROLL: Yeah. You see an almost sort of wraparound, 360-degree approach to influencing the [01:24:00] 2024 election in these three groups. So, with Steeplechase, you have mobilizing conservative pastors out in America, out in the field, to mobilize their congregations to get them out to vote. And, you know, there’s some concern that maybe there’s fatigue about Donald Trump in 2024, that maybe conservative Christians won’t turn out in the numbers they did in 2016. That’s what this program is there for, getting the church as involved as possible.

You have this anti-trans operation. As Lance Wallnau says in that video that you just played, they believe that going after trans people, demonizing transgender Americans, transgender healthcare, can, quote-unquote, “deliver” swing states. That’s what Lance Wallnau himself said.

But then, this final one, I think, is, honestly, perhaps the most interesting, this Operation Checkmate, putting money into mobilizing conservative voters in key counties — not just states, but the counties — so Maricopa County in Arizona, Fulton County in Georgia, the other battleground counties in the [01:25:00] country, and then trying to put money into knocking more than a million voters off the voting rolls in these states. And you see this in a couple of ways. But what’s so interesting is how the Christian right, Christian nationalism is fusing here with the election integrity or, really, the election denial movement that grew out of the 2020 election. We didn’t have a lot of evidence of that before this reporting on Ziklag. But you see this bridge, again, between the Christian right and the election deniers in a really big way going into this election.

AMY GOODMAN - HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And how effective can they be in knocking voters off the rolls?

ANDY KROLL: A little bit of money goes a long way when you are trying to get people knocked off the eligibility list for voters. That’s what the experts, the political consultants, the folks that know these worlds, told us in the reporting for this story. You know, Ziklag is putting, say, $800,000 or $1 [01:26:00] million into something called EagleAI, an artificial intelligence software that makes it easier to challenge the eligibility of voters en masse. So, you’re not doing it one by one; you’re doing it by the hundreds, by the thousands. You don’t need tens of millions of dollars, the experts told us, to be able to make those challenges and to sort of turbocharge the effort to make voters ineligible. You only need a few hundred thousand dollars, maybe a million dollars. That’s what this group, Ziklag, appears to be doing. So, it could have an effect. And we’re talking about margins again in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, margins that are a few thousand, a few tens of thousands of voters.

JUAN GONZALEZ - CO-HOST, DEMOCRACY NOW!: And, Andy, how does the election officials in every state, especially in the battleground states, their cooperation with these efforts, how might that turn out in the coming [01:27:00] election?

ANDY KROLL: Well, you have two different camps here. You have the election officials in these states and in these counties who are just trying to run a free and fair election. What we’ve heard from those officials is that these efforts, like EagleAI or the work of the group True the Vote, another, quote-unquote, “election integrity” group — these mass challenges to the voter rolls make an already difficult job, an already stressful job, a time-consuming job, even more difficult. It’s putting just more stress on the work of these local election officials, the ones who are trying to do a good job.

And then you have the officials who have sort of bought into the election integrity claims, who have bought into Donald Trump’s election denial for 2020 or 2022 even. And for them, they are, in some places, encouraging these mass challenges. And so you might see confusion. You might see chaos. You might see voters unaware that they’ve been removed from the rolls in [01:28:00] these kinds of places. So, it’s just creating either more stress on good officials, or it’s creating more chaos with officials who buy into these baseless claims about election fraud.

NAR Watch Ep. 7 JD Vance Joins Lance Wallnau in Spiritual Warfare Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 10-14-24

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: I'm wondering how, uh, J. D. was at the Courage Tour, because my, you know, my take for months on this show has been J. D. Vance is a Catholic convert, and, and I'm happy for you to correct me if I'm wrong here, Matt, in your own mind, but to me he strikes as the kind of Catholic convert who is a very much a bro Very much into like the guy that would like say, hey, should we get cigars tonight and some whiskey and just like talk over Aquinas?

What do you think, bro? On a leather couch. Yeah, there's probably a leather couch So my point is he's always talking about how the ways Catholicism is intellectual. Catholicism has meat. He grew up around Folks in Appalachia who were Christian, but there was no head to it. It was all [01:29:00] just heart and and speaking in tongues and all kinds of stuff.

I'm wondering if he if he in your mind was comfortable. Was he? Trying to get outta there. Did he seem like, I don't really wanna be here, but the boss sent me what? You know, I'm just wondering how Vance played to this quintessential charismatic audience who's not even really like old school evangelical.

This is, this is like, as you've outlined in, in so many places in, in your work as a whole, this is a different kind of religious right. How is JD at the Courage Tour? 

MATT TAYLOR: He didn't do great. So I, I mean, all right, next question. What are the things that I'm watching for? Because it very much will be a harbinger for what will come is to find who can inherit the mantle of Trump's connection to these folks, who, what political figure [01:30:00] can take on all of the, the, the, when, when Trump.

What, whether by the hand of God, the hand of man, or he just decays into senility, who will step forward? Who will kind of take on the role that he's been playing? And you could see, even in the orchestration of this event, that Vance was trying to play a role. To that, that to cater to that audience, to speak to the new, new religious, right, this more charismatic, more populist religious, right.

Um, and, but he, he just, he came off as pretty flat footed in this event. Um, and you can tell, cause I mean, the video is online if you wanted to watch it, but occasionally they'll pan to the audience and when, when, when Lance Walno is speaking or when Mario Murillo, the, his, his kind of co host of the, the courage tours being, or really any.

of the charismatic Pentecostal folks who are speaking, you can see the audience just reacting the way the charismatic [01:31:00] audiences do when there's a good preacher. There's the amens, there's a shouting, there's the clapping. Sometimes people will, will kind of echo back what the person's saying. It was very mild with Vance.

And, and, and it, and you could tell at points that he was, he never, I don't think he mentioned being Catholic in the entire 45 minutes that he was speaking. So you just speak about Christian, but then he would use phrases that if you know what you're talking about, sound very Catholic. So at one point, he even invoked quote unquote Christian social teaching, which if, if, if many Protestants and you could very much tell from this audience had no idea what he was talking about, because the phrase is not Christian social teaching is Catholic social teaching.

And this is, this is one of the traditions within the Roman Catholic Church in the way that it thinks about politics, the way that it thinks about social issues. And yet here, Vance is trying to kind of pull these phrases and, Oh, and I've even [01:32:00] volunteered the John three 16 was his favorite first. So he was clearly trying to win these folks over, but honestly, um, he sounded even less effective than Mike Pence seemed with these folks.

Like at least, at least Pence could, could do the evangelical ease. Vance really kind of fell flat with that audience. And, and it almost was like, um, that, that there was more energy. When this pastor, his last name is Howard, was, was introducing himself. There was more like feedback from the audience, more excitement than the entire time that Vance was on stage.

Cause Vance just doesn't know how to speak to these folks. What is still shocking in some ways is that, that, that Trump can't. Because Trump comes from even a weirder world in terms of distance from this stuff than Vance does. I mean, Vance grew up around Pentecostal, charismatic, and evangelical folks.

But, but he, he, Trump has Charisma in, in [01:33:00] all the senses of that word, Vance does not, and, um, and he does not, he isn't able to kind of grab a hold of audiences the way that, especially Christian audiences, the way that Trump does. And part of it might be intellectualism. At his heart, I think, I think Vance views himself not as a populist, but as an intellectual and, and I think he tries to straddle those two ideas, but he much more comes off as the intellectual and that's just, it's not going to win him over with Walnau's audience

SECTION C - PATRIARCHY AND RACE

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Up next Section C: patriarchy and race.

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Part 3 - Ideas - Air Date 10-18-24

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: My book's subtitle is admittedly a bit provocative. But I wasn't aware of just how provocative it was. I thought the problem might be with the whole corrupted of faith thing, or even the fractured a nation part. But no, it was just one word. White. White. It was triggering to some. And I've been accused more than once of being racist.

simply for including white in my [01:34:00] subtitle. It was not meant to be pejorative, merely descriptive. Precise. This points us to a foundational question. What is evangelicalism? Who are evangelicals? Now, if we insist on a pure theological definition, it can be really difficult to see what whiteness has to do with anything.

But if we think of evangelicalism as a historical and cultural movement, whiteness becomes visible. If you know where to look, did you know that when the fundamentals were published, this is a series of pamphlets, booklets in the 1910s, right? That gave fundamentalism its name. These books were sent out only to white pastors and not to any black pastors, even though the majority of black pastors in the United States aligned with these doctrinal stances?

Did you know that when the National Association of [01:35:00] Evangelicals was formed, black denominations were excluded from the association? Did you know that when racial justice surfaced in its early years, And in conversations among the founders of Christianity today, it was deemed too divisive to engage directly.

Now, those with openly racist and segregationist views, they were kept inside the fold. Black pastors were kept at arm's length. Historian Jesse Curtis has shown us how the myth of colorblind Christians came to dominate white evangelical understandings of race and foster in them a benevolent understanding of themselves.

A belief in their own righteousness and innocence. And people of color who bolstered this myth were welcomed and platformed. And those who challenged it were ushered out the door. Now we've noted the marginalization and erasure with [01:36:00] respect to black evangelicals, but we also see that around the issue of gender.

There is a long history of evangelical feminism going back more than a century before Betty Friedan discovered that problem that has no name. And I know because I wrote a book on it. Christian women, evangelical women, white evangelical women were among the leading proponents of women's suffrage and women's rights more broadly in the late 19th century.

And they pointed out the dangers of the sexual double standard, of an overemphasis on gender. on female purity, which they called out as unbiblical. They offered sophisticated theological critiques of Christian patriarchy, and they were thoroughly evangelical. But they have been forgotten, or rather, they have been disappeared, because there is agency here.

Now, the result of this erasure means that patriarchy remains normative. [01:37:00] biblical, and traditional, instead of contested as it was historically and theologically. So you see how this works. If we erase this history, it's much easier to erase feminist evangelicals today. They cannot be true evangelicals. For many Evangelicals, Evangelical equals true Christian, you see where this goes.

The history of American Evangelicalism as one of gatekeeping is in many ways the story that I tell in Jesus and John Wayne.

Right-Winger DESPERATE For Christian Minority Voters - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-19-24

BRAD ONISHI: I think the, the answer though, to your central question, Sam is really this, how do you convince The black church, the Latino church to vote for Donald Trump, given his stance on, uh, the border, on immigration, on race in general, the, the Central Park five, whatever may be.

And I think the answer is let's look to people who we see in front of us, Byron Donalds, Herschel Walker, uh, you know, folks like this. The key here is to emphasize what do you want for your country? Do you want a [01:38:00] country built with strong men, strong families based on a husband and a wife, men and women, no pronouns.

No non binary, whatever that means. Do you want to have groomers and perverts in your schools or do you just want to have a candidate who will support, uh, what is the right kind of sex, the right kind of marriage, the right kind of love. Do you want that kind of country over there with the rainbow flag and the gender spectrum?

Or do you want strong men leading you into an uncertain future where we are, uh, at threat and every turn? That's the cell. The cell is lean on the patriarchy, lean on the gender structure, lean on, uh, the sense of, uh, the otherness that you talked about earlier, who is other than me. Well, the people who are, who are lesbian, gay, non binary, the people who are trans, they're more other than you than, than the, the, than the folks who are telling you that Joe Biden is better for the person of color.

Be more afraid of them, be more angry at them. [01:39:00] And that works in many of these churches. It works in many of these spaces. And so that's the sell. And that's, that's the play. That's why they call 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: her the DEI. That's why the post I think called her the DEI, um, uh, Barbie or, they just, they 

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: couldn't print the N word.

So. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Well, but that, but the, but the point is, is that by, by saying the D E I Barbie, instead of the N word, they can then sort of appeal to, uh, uh, people of color and say like, she still represents alien ness, even though in some areas, I mean, and that, that's the, that's the point is that they've been able to sort of like convert slightly the terminology so that it can apply, it can be, it's sort of like a, together on this and that we are all purpose, racist other eyes Asian that can can work meet the the the sort of the big it where they are in some way.

Well let me I want to also final question [01:40:00] because of this I think is plays a very big part what we're seeing with the Supreme Court. Is opus de. Um, the, um, um, my understanding is, is that, uh, Scalia and Alito, at least, uh, are opus de that, uh, Leonard Leo, um, who is the, um, Who has orchestrated essentially the Supreme Court, uh, via the Federalist Society for a couple of decades, also Opus Dei.

Um, I know that Kudlow, I think, is also, uh, who was, uh, Trump's chief advisor. How does Opus Dei play with this Christian nationalism? Are they just cousins, essentially? 

BRAD ONISHI: No, they're I think, I think one of the things that I've tried to get across over the last few months Is that radical tradition, traditional Catholicism, right?

This, this very [01:41:00] overwhelmingly conservative strain of Catholicism, of which Opus Dei is a major part in that ecosystem, is at the center of what we now understand the Christian nationalist movement in this country and everything that's happening at the Supreme Court, as well as Project 2025. So let me lay it out.

The Heritage Foundation is behind Project 2025. Who starts the Heritage Foundation? Paul Weyrich. Paul Weyrich was a radical traditionalist Catholic. After Vatican II, he started going to a church that, uh, where the, the, the mass was in Greek because he couldn't stand the vernacular. He broke with his own church because he thought they were too liberal.

If you look at the life of Paul Weyrich, he is a strict male supremacist. He's a Christian supremacist, and he is somebody who believes that a dominant patriarch should be the head of the house, the church. and the government. Who is now in charge of the Heritage Foundation? Kevin Roberts, also a traditional Catholic.

Okay. So there's a long lineage of the Heritage [01:42:00] Foundation having this vision of Christian supremacism. They believe Christ is king, not in religious pluralism. They believe that Christian, their Christian value should be infused throughout the government without any question. They believe that male leadership Is the way to go, period.

So it's no, uh, uh, accident to me that Kevin Roberts gets on, uh, gets out there in public the other day after the immunity ruling and says, you know, if the left will allow it, we'll have a bloodless revolution. That's a traditional Catholic leading in the lineage of Paul Weirich, who is, uh, articulating that they are so excited for a unified executive.

In the vision of Project 2025, where a male patriarch will have almost complete control of the executive branch and perhaps the entire government, it's also why we're seeing SCOTUS. So one of the arguments I made in Politico a couple months ago is that the IVF rulings represent the Catholicization of American sexual ethics.[01:43:00] 

Evangelicals in the 60s were not against abortion. Evangelicals up until recently were not against IVF. But IVF and abortion have been Catholic, traditionalist Catholic. issues for a long, long time. So when you see the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on IVF, or you see the Southern Baptist convention, uh, condemn IVF, they're doing so at the, at the, the influence of those traditionalist Catholics, you're mentioning the folks who are, uh, not only affiliated with Opus Dei, but who are running the Federalist Society and in many ways are driving the conversation about gender and sex within those, uh, with those communities.

So if there has ever been a moment. Of overwhelmingly conservative Catholic, uh, forces dominating our politics. It is now whether you look at the Supreme Court or Project 2025. Project 2025 in its essence is a rad trad fever dream. 

How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation Part 4 - Ideas - Air Date 10-18-24

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: So if you go back deeper [01:44:00] into evangelical history and into Christian history, you can certainly find expressions of patriarchy, but you can also find expressions of egalitarianism. In the 19th century, you had a lot of evangelical women who were also prominent women's rights activists.

You had evangelical women who were preaching. And in the early 20th century, that starts to change. And it doesn't change entirely, but increasingly you see that kind of fundamentalists define biblical fidelity in terms of excluding women from positions of religious authority from preaching, but it's never complete, so much so that it's It's not until the 1970s that the Southern Baptist Convention feels a need in the late 70s actually to start cracking down on all these female pastors inside the SBC.

This was not all members of the SBC by any means, but it was a powerful faction. And so they end up squeezing out not just [01:45:00] the women who are preaching, but any quote unquote moderates who supported women preaching. And this is known as the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC or conservative takeover, or as conservatives like to call it, the conservative resurgence of the SBC, right?

You know, pick your terminology there. And so, What we see happening then is this is linked with the idea of inerrancy, the way to approach scriptures, the only way to approach scriptures. And this also comes out in the late 70s, and it really takes hold during the 1980s. Now inerrancy means taking every word of the, the scripture as the literal truth, except it doesn't.

It means that when applied to select passages. 

CLIP: It's a question of authority. I think that's what makes everybody nervous, but the Apostle Paul makes that argument. I forbid a woman to have authority over a man. That's not some [01:46:00] theologian sitting out on a horse staring at a sunset coming up with this.

That's the Holy Spirit. Speaking to the church through the Apostle Paul. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: So, women should be silent. Women should submit to husbands. Oh, absolutely. And we're going to interpret it in very rigid ways as we apply it to our current situation. You know, the story of the rich man being told to sell off his possessions.

No, no, that gets explained away. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemies as yourself. Turn the other cheek. Welcome the stranger. There's a lot of pretty direct commands. Those don't get the literal treatment there. Wait, let's look at the context. Let's look at the biblical languages here. Oh, no, no, no.

You got that wrong. You don't understand. Biblical literalism and inerrancy is used to enforce this new orthodoxy, where you are outside of the Christian fold if you do not support patriarchal authority. Then they kind of rebrand it as [01:47:00] complementarianism. Then we have the growth of really influential organizations like the Gospel Coalition.

The Gospel Coalition was never a gospel coalition. It did not invite everybody in. who believed the gospel message. It was a complementarian club. You were only allowed in those spaces if you were a complementarian, and you were only allowed a position of power, certainly, if you were a complementarian man, 

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: right?

And to be clear, complementarianism is this idea that men and women are created in a very specific way. They complement each other in a very specific way. Yeah. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: So gender difference. Is key there, right? They compli, men and women are different. But what that means then is, you know, men like sports, women like watching on the sidelines.

Men are gifted with leadership. Women shouldn't lead. You have, you know, people like John Piper who are parsing this out. 

CLIP: Paul says in Ephesians five now as the church submits to Christ, [01:48:00] so also wives should submit in everything. to their husbands. Men take their cues from Christ as the head, and women take their cues from the church called to admire and stand in allegiance to Christ.

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: Could a woman be a police officer? Ooh, that's problematic. Could a woman give a man directions? Well, let's look, you know, ah, that's a little sketchy, too, right? Let's, you know, so, so complementarianism, um, you know, presents itself as gender difference, um, and that we complement each other, but obscure the fact that this is also a hierarchical relationship.

And then they extend it out to women's role in all of society and extrapolate from that, you know, this whole set of rules of what is and is not permissible. And complementarianism, right, has, has had an incredibly strong hold across evangelical, um, churches, organizations, and institutions. [01:49:00] 

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: Yes. And, and I think the thing that struck me also about the book was the depth of that order of things, how it permeates women's lives in their very homes, families, relationships, identities.

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: So much so, um, and the degree to which or the ways in which it does that will, um, vary depending on where you're situated within the evangelical community. So in the more conservative. Extremes than the homeschool networks, for example, or an independent fun, a fundamental Baptist spaces. Those influenced by the teachings of Bill Gohar, for example.

CLIP: I love that definition of witnessing is taking your spiritual finger and rubbing it along the edge of a person's soul feeling for the cracks. Are there things you wish never happened? Is there guilt there? And it isn't long before they say yes. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: You're going to get some pretty extreme versions [01:50:00] of, um, this sort of thing.

Um, even to the point of having been, uh, uh, kind of stay at home daughter movement where a woman, uh, a girl is under her dad's authority until she marries. And if the right guy doesn't come along that the dad approves of, she stays at home, does not go to college and is under the direct authority and control of her dad.

Um, even if she's in her twenties or, you know, um, so those are more extreme versions. Um, but then in more moderate or mainstream spaces, you'll still have a lot of echoes of this. And so a woman's primary role is as a wife and a mom. Women who have careers can tell stories about how they're, you know, well, well, who's watching your kids?

Well, you know, what is your, uh, what does your husband do? And you know, this kind of sense of judgment, um, the idea that, uh, a man has to have leadership. 

CLIP: So what Eve does. She seeks control. If Adam is not going to lead, I will. 

SEAN FOLEY - HOST, CBC NETWORK: Mark Driscoll, founder of Trinity Church in Scottsdale, Arizona, and co founder of the now defunct Mars Hill Church.

CLIP: She has the argument [01:51:00] with Satan. She gets confused. She sins. She gives something to her husband. He participates. She's the leader. He's the follower. And the truth is, men, hear me in this, if you don't lead your family, Satan will. 

KRISTIN KOBES DU MEZ: This hierarchy of authority and submission applies to the bedroom as well.

The idea that God filled men with testosterone to make them good leaders, to make them aggressive, right? You need that for leadership, they say. And, um, but then you don't have the same kind of self restraint. That's not how God made men. So it's up to women to step in. God made women to, to kind of be the moral figures.

So it's very, very important that women not tempt men who are not their husbands. It's very important because boys will be boys here and women who are married have to do everything they possibly can to meet their husband's sexual needs, whatever they may be. What that means then in the case, for example, of sexual assault.

There is quite literally always a woman to blame. Even a young girl [01:52:00] can be blamed if her dad abuses her because she somehow seduced him. A wife can be blamed in that situation, even if she knew nothing because she clearly wasn't meeting her husband's sexual needs, right? This rhetoric is abhorrent. And yet it is not uncommon inside these spaces, it's kind of the logical conclusion of these teachings that are in fact quite mainstream.

There is a deep theology here, a deep set of cultural practices, and a strong sense of community within these spaces, so it's very hard to break out and it's very hard to critique from the inside.

SECTION D - AMERICAN CHRISTIAN

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally section D American Grissom. 

Spirit & Power Episode 4 Take Back that Which Was Stolen from Us The Charismatic Rituals of the Religious Right Part 2 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 10-17-24

DR. LEAH PAYNE: Today on Spirit and Power, take back that which was stolen, the charismatic rituals of the religious right. My guest and I take you on an audio tour of Flashpoint Live New Orleans, a live taping of a show from televangelist Kenneth Copeland's Victory Channel. Flashpoint is one of many conservative Pentecostal [01:53:00] and charismatic rallies and marches taking place leading up to the 2024 election, like Clay Clark's reawakened tour.

Jenny Donnelly's A Million Women, and Sean Foyt's Kingdom to the Capitol. At all of these meetings, charismatic and Pentecostal Trumpers animate conservative talking points with exuberance. My guest today shares her insights. From attending Flashpoint Live New Orleans. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: My name is Carrie Gaspard Hogwood. I am a doctoral fellow in sociology at Tulane University, and I study charismatic religions and that intersection with the political arena.

DR. LEAH PAYNE: Swag subscribers will recognize Carrie's voice because she also does research for spirit and power and frequently provides bonus content. Carrie, I wonder if you could tell us a bit about Attending Flashpoint. 

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: It was held at Covenant Church, which is Jesse Duplantis Jesse 

DR. LEAH PAYNE: Duplantis is a charismatic [01:54:00] televangelist known for his prosperity gospel teachings, lavish lifestyle, and his enthusiastic support for Donald Trump.

KARRIE GASPARD-HOGEWOOD: The parking lot when I got there was pretty full. They opened the doors at six, the event started at seven. And so for Flashpoint Live, for this particular event, the first day was actually the evening. It was Flashpoint Live that started at seven and I don't think we left until around nine. And then the next day it was Flashpoint.

Talks with two movie screenings and a Flashpoint live again. I did register and you get badges and a gift bag full of lots of goodies. There was a magnet with the watchman's decree. 

DR. LEAH PAYNE: The Watchman Decree on the Victory Channel website says, as a patriot of faith, I attest my allegiance first and foremost to the kingdom of God and the great commission.

Secondly, I agree to be a watchman over our nation concerning its people and their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, [01:55:00] then it goes on. Whereas we, the church are God's governing body on earth, whereas we have been given legal power from heaven and now exercise our authority, whereas we are God's ambassadors and spokespeople over the earth, whereas through the power of God, we are the world influencers.

Whereas because of our covenant with God, we are equipped and delegated by him to destroy every attempted advance of the enemy. And it goes on from there. Okay. It includes a declaration that America's executive branch of government will honor God and defend the constitution. It stands against wokeness, the occult and every evil attempt against our nation, which is a fascinating.

Trio there. And it also includes the seven mountains mandate. If you're listening to this podcast and you're a subscriber, I'm sure I hardly need to describe the seven mountains mandate, but just in case you're new [01:56:00] for charismatics, particularly those associated with the new apostolic Reformation, the seven mountains of influence that Christians are supposed to exercise God's kingdom over include media.

And Charismatics and Pentecostals already know how to do that quite well. Business, finance. Family, education, politics, arts and entertainment, and religion. So it's a very holistic vision to conquer for Christ. A watchman in the Bible is someone who guards and protects military groups, towns, cities, et cetera, from enemy incursion.

And so the people who take this watchman declaration seriously, they're not just what you see at. an average flashpoint gathering. They're not just predominantly white charismatics of a certain age. No, they are people of biblical significance. According to this decree, they are watch people. Watch [01:57:00] people don't just live in the mundane realities of this world.

They're also engaged in a thrilling spiritual. They aren't just citizens, they're watchmen and the work of the American government isn't democracy per se, it's warding off political enemies. And if you think about combining that language with the language of voting interference and guarding polling and polls, you can see that that's a very different language.

Extremist White Christian Nationalists Prepping For War w Brad Onishi Part 2 - The Majority Report - Air Date 7-16-24

EMMA VIGELAND - CO-HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: And I'm fascinated by the usage of religious Like, iconography and justifications and grafting that onto political realities, whether it be Southern California is Eden, or whether it be Donald Trump is, uh, sacrificing himself for our sins, and, you know, he's an imperfect vessel for our political goals.

That is so infa I mean, if you could just explain that, um, as someone who grew up [01:58:00] secular. The usage of that, those religious modes of thinking and applying it to politics. 

BRAD ONISHI: You know, we really see this at January 6th, you know, a lot of, uh, so many of my colleagues, uh, religion scholars have, have done great work in addition to what we've done on our show to point out the deep and wide religious symbology at January 6th, Christian flags, appeal to heaven flags, you know, proud boys wearing patches with the Psalms quoted on them, uh, icons of Mary, statues of Jesus, prayer circles.

Why? And I think the response with January 6th, and I think in general to your question, Emma, is that there's a sense when you invite people into a story that has a sense of transcendence, a cosmic significance, you're able to mobilize them in a way that, uh, perhaps you couldn't, uh, you know, without it, uh, as Sam said, on the left, there's often this pluralistic and diverse coalition that, that is, has a hard time agreeing.

Well, if you invite people into a cosmic story that says we have to act now. [01:59:00] That, that Donald Trump is not just a candidate who, who maybe, like, likes some of the policies you like, but he's been chosen by God to save this country from a woke globalist apocalypse? You're, you're able to usher some folks into a movement and usher them in with urgency?

have without those, you know, those religious or or pious symbols. And so I think they have a really important function in these movements past and present. 

SAM SEDER - HOST, THE MAJORITY REPORT: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the the Democrats are trying to do a similar thing in terms of saying that he's an existential threat. It's a lot harder to do because we do not have a framework for any of it.

And we don't have those. Um, you know, we don't have that natural cohesiveness. Um, and that we don't have the sort of like a accoutrements, I guess, to maintain that. Is it when these directives come down, like how much of it is, [02:00:00] who's the policeman? Like is it God? And I know, I know it's like even just, I know the act of, of, of sort of pulling these strains apart are.

Is is conceptually not how it works. It's really just a way for us to understand but how much of it is like God or is it you know that the vehicle for God is my pastor. Or is it the community when I go to, you know, to dinner, uh, or I go to friend's house, like how, who's, where is, where are the different forces of maintaining discipline?

BRAD ONISHI: I think that one of the things that's, that's helpful is to think about something like Christian nationalism as an identity and as living out a story. That if we, if we do what my first year students [02:01:00] do all the time and say, Hey, religion's about belief, right? We're just going to learn about what Hindus believe and what Buddhists believe.

Uh, we, we kind of get off track because what it's really about is an identity that gives people a character to play. There's some data out there that shows us that there's many people who haven't been to church in a long time who will tell you in a survey that they think the country, the federal government should declare this a Christian nation, that they believe our laws should be based on the Bible.

And yet you say, that's great, Jeff. When's the last time you went to church? And they say, I can't remember, maybe 2020, right? And so what that tells me is this is about an identity and a story to play. Well, then the question I think you're asking, Sam, is, well, how do I plug into that story, right? How do I plug in and play a part?

And what we're finding increasingly is, yes, it's pastors and churches. They're important. But those pastors and churches are just part of a kind of, uh, a network of voices. Uh, and those voices are, you know, across the media landscape. They're across the political landscape. So one of those is going to be Trump and his MAGA [02:02:00] lieutenants.

Others are going to be the Charlie Kirk's and the Ben Shapiro's and the others in the right wing media. And so by the time somebody enters church on a Sunday. There's a really good chance they've had eight or ten podcasts, YouTube channels, uh, uh, you know, other outlets, uh, Fox News and Newsmax that have informed their understanding, not only of politics, but of religion.

And so if their pastor doesn't confirm that, what we're finding is they often are just going to find a new pastor. So if you're a pastor in this day and age, even if you're not a hardcore MAGA person, you really have to make a choice. Do I get on board? save my job, probably get a couple hundred more people in the door on a Sunday, or do I disagree, take a stand and probably find myself without a job or a career and just kind of have to start over even though I'm 48 and I've never done anything else.

So I guess my point here is, I think we need to see the cultivation of this discipline and, and this worldview as multifaceted, but it's all, it's all sort of disciplined by [02:03:00] Are you on board with it is understood as a broad conservative conservatism outlined by Trump and, uh, the, the, the elites at hand and, and those come down to family, they come down to gender, they come down to immigration, they come down to sex, and, uh, those have been raised to the level of doctrine, 

NAR Watch Ep. 7 JD Vance Joins Lance Wallnau in Spiritual Warfare Part 3 - Straight White American Jesus - Air Date 10-14-24

MATT TAYLOR: Yeah. One of the things that, that, um, this also calls to mind for me, cause I've been, I've been doing quite a bit of, of comparisons and trying to look at, you As you have these more authoritarian style movements emerging within democracies, what, what is the path that they, they, they forge?

How, how did, how did they get to power? And then who do they go after as they start to come to power? And, and one of the things that's very striking in that, in that, Um, research, if you, if you dig into it is when, when these authoritarian groups emerge, especially when they're very ideological, um, on one side of the political spectrum, they, they don't, they, they [02:04:00] actually really like having foils who are opposite them on the political spectrum.

So like, like while now the attempt to link me to the far left or pretend that I'm, I'm somehow being funded by far left causes really fits his narrative that, that, Oh, he is, he's crusading, I mean, Wallnau, who was there on January 6th, who I argue in my book, was, was one of the most influential, um, Christian leaders mobilizing Christians for January 6th, was supposed to speak at a rally on January 6th.

But, but, Wall Now, uh, has maintained that it was Antifa and the FBI that caused January 6th. And so, but, the, the, so, that attempt to label centrists and moderates as the far left is actually part of the strategy for authoritarian movements. Because, the, the, when, when you have the far, uh, real far left actors, they can kind of play off of that.

But people who are, I'm pretty darn centrist in my politics. I mean, I am registered independent as, as an evangelical. I voted for George [02:05:00] W. Bush twice after I left evangelicals, I voted for Barack Obama twice. So it's like the, I, I really do have him kind of right around that median voter profile, um, as close as maybe you can find in, in, in real life.

And, but he wants me to. He wants to push me off to the left because it is much easier to caricature. Whereas if I'm coming in and actually voicing my, it's using my voice as a Christian to challenge his theology. And, and you see this, this dynamic playing out with David French or Christian Cobb as you may, right.

People who have chosen. To inhabit more centrist identities and positions in this argument. I think actually come in for greater castigation often because they are more inconvenient foils. They're, they're critics that that wall now and his, his ilk don't want because they, they really want to be able to.

Portray themselves as, as being mainstream [02:06:00] and try to cast any critic as extreme. 

BRAD ONISHI - HOST, STRAIGHT WHITE AMERICAN JESUS: Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it also is just a window into the thinking that we've talked on the show about a lot, which is Unless you're with him, you're against him. And to be against him means to be a left wing nut.

There, there are no moderates. There are no Christians who don't agree. There's just Christians, and then left wing nuts. And so, I think that's right. Let's move, let's move into something that I think got a lot of press, and I'll admit I saw so many headlines, I saw so many tweets, I saw so many Instagram posts.

I saw very little meat on the bone in terms of analysis, and that is Pennsylvania, Lance Wallnau, is joined by J. D. Vance at the Courage Tour stop. Would you help us understand first, what happened that day? You know, in terms of content, we can analyze what it means here in a minute, but what actually took place with J.

D. Vance? Stopping by to hang out with Lance Wallnau at the Courage Tour. 

MATT TAYLOR: So the Courage Tour is, um, [02:07:00] it's, it's a voter, a very highly targeted voter mobilization, um, operating as an adjunct to the Trump campaign, um, sponsored by Turning Point USA and the America First Policy Institute, run by Lance Wallnau, um, and, but it masquerades as a revival tour.

And I, I've been trying to call attention to this for quite a while, and there's a bunch of other researchers in the space who are also very, very concerned about the Courage Tour, um, because it, it, it's, it's a more NAR version of Reawaken America in many ways. So premised on, 2020 election denialism premised on kind of this very far right vision of america, but then Just injected straight into the heart of our swing states and and this voter mobilization effort and One of the things we've also been really calling attention to is this effort that they have and we've talked about this on on the podcast before to to enlist Conspiracy theory believing [02:08:00] 2020 election denying Christians to be election workers in the swing states, people are actually counting the votes and and and then kind of trying to orchestrate and set pieces on the board to uphold claims of election fraud if Trump has declared the loser.

So it's a very concerning manifestation of this hand in glove dynamic between the charismatic Christian far right and the Trump campaign. 

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 Ideas, The Majority Report, Democracy Now!, and Straight White American Jesus. Further details are in the show notes. 

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 [02:09:00] 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 a 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. 

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So coming to from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay, and this has been the best of left podcast coming to twice weekly. Thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from best of left.com.