Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to it could Happen Here, a podcast about things
Speaker 2: falling apart and how to put them back together again.
Speaker 2: I'm your host bo Wog. With me is Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Woo woo.
Speaker 2: So we have spent a lot of time on this
Speaker 2: show talking about the rise of the far right and
Speaker 2: what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in
Speaker 2: the streets, and the sort of you know, deleterious effects
Speaker 2: that it has had on effectively everyone in the US.
Speaker 2: This is going to be a little bit of a
Speaker 2: different episode. We've talked about a lot of the responses
Speaker 2: to the far right, sort of you know, in terms
Speaker 2: of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. We
Speaker 2: haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally.
Speaker 2: And I do think that a significant portion of the
Speaker 2: far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a
Speaker 2: series of things that are not particularly complicated. But the
Speaker 2: problem is that defeating feeding the far right means going
Speaker 2: beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is
Speaker 2: the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you want
Speaker 2: to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is
Speaker 2: not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with
Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every election
Speaker 2: into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral
Speaker 2: victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat the
Speaker 2: base of the far right. When the Republican Party held
Speaker 2: power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
Speaker 2: they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2: They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to
Speaker 2: ensure unions would no longer be able to provide the
Speaker 2: ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If
Speaker 2: we are going to defeat the far right, we need
Speaker 2: to wage the same kind of campaign against them. Now.
Speaker 2: Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need
Speaker 2: to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs
Speaker 2: of the far right out from under them. There is,
Speaker 2: in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement
Speaker 2: to defeat the far right that is very simple. It
Speaker 2: has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that
Speaker 2: drives them effectively completely underground.
Speaker 3: Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing for these
Speaker 3: appearance schemes right, which are a major source of funding
Speaker 3: for the fire right. I mean, this is where Trump
Speaker 3: comes out of right, this is why he did that
Speaker 3: fake university like, this is a big part of his base.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, we're going to get more into that in
Speaker 2: a seconds. The second, very important one is a regulatory
Speaker 2: overhaul of how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which
Speaker 2: sounds like it. Yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but
Speaker 2: supplements are another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get
Speaker 3: their shit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yep, yep. And the third is another kind of
Speaker 2: wonky change that will be extremely important, which is making
Speaker 2: sure to allow car companies to make sure rec sales
Speaker 2: to customers, thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful
Speaker 2: base of right wing American car dealership owners.
Speaker 3: Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any
Speaker 3: other career field in this country.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from
Speaker 2: this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms
Speaker 2: EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
Speaker 2: sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial
Speaker 2: and political base of the far right that they will
Speaker 2: at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term,
Speaker 2: becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now.
Speaker 2: So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as
Speaker 2: Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
Speaker 2: very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably
Speaker 2: the most famous and the one that Robert has done
Speaker 2: an entire show on. So go listen to that if
Speaker 2: you want to really actually in detailed thing on the
Speaker 2: history of Amway, Mway and the sort of political family
Speaker 2: the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part
Speaker 2: of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously,
Speaker 2: Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Speaker 2: Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of
Speaker 2: prince family is embedded into this. And Amway famously used
Speaker 2: its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates
Speaker 2: and also uses its base and also directly its own
Speaker 2: funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of
Speaker 2: Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that
Speaker 2: is true of all of these reforms, is that everything
Speaker 2: we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
Speaker 2: own right, right, MLMs are scams. They're extremely exploitative, and
Speaker 2: their rule, I think in the far right is a
Speaker 2: lot more important than people understand. Even if you just
Speaker 2: look at the money, you're sort of missing part of
Speaker 2: what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot.
Speaker 2: They're part of how the far right builds his ideological base.
Speaker 2: Teach you to convert all of your personal relations into
Speaker 2: potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a
Speaker 2: moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level.
Speaker 2: The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious
Speaker 2: relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world,
Speaker 2: and this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.
Speaker 2: Once you've been trained that literally everything, even in your
Speaker 2: sort of closest friends, and you know your dearest relationships
Speaker 2: with your family, are just business opportunities, it's extremely easy
Speaker 2: to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform.
Speaker 2: In the same way the experience of being in a
Speaker 2: union and organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out
Speaker 2: the ideological base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous
Speaker 2: political basis for the right and Unfortunately, this sort of
Speaker 2: ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able
Speaker 2: to get out of MLMs, or especially if they're sort
Speaker 2: of cast out of mlems because they've simply are broken
Speaker 2: brand of money and are in debt. The isolation and
Speaker 2: alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single
Speaker 2: relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell them
Speaker 2: soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and makes
Speaker 2: them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this is
Speaker 2: why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way to
Speaker 2: sort of cost Republican party money, because that's not enough
Speaker 2: to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources of money.
Speaker 2: What you need to do is systematically remove parts of
Speaker 2: their political base. And when I say your roofports to
Speaker 2: their political base, what I mean is you have to
Speaker 2: go after the systems that are creating more members of
Speaker 2: the far right. Going after MLMs is a way to
Speaker 2: do that. Now. The FTC has gone after m lms before.
Speaker 2: They sort of famously, as you talked about in that
Speaker 2: episode an mway, they went after a bunch of MLMs
Speaker 2: in the eighties, but this sort of caused MLMs to
Speaker 2: get smarter and has you know, has been pretty effective
Speaker 2: in in sort of warding the FTC off from really
Speaker 2: going after MLM since then.
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were
Speaker 3: just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the
Speaker 3: minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them,
Speaker 3: you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in
Speaker 3: which this sense of impunity has developed among the people
Speaker 3: who run and participate in these things due to their
Speaker 3: capture of the legal system is also a part of
Speaker 3: like why the far right works the way it does,
Speaker 3: that sense of impunity.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that
Speaker 2: impunity is is just the way the FTC goes after
Speaker 2: these companies, right, I mean there was in the in
Speaker 2: the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light,
Speaker 2: which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But
Speaker 2: the way they went after them was they issued them
Speaker 2: a two hundred million dollar fine and that's a lot
Speaker 2: of money, but it didn't drive Neutralight out of business.
Speaker 2: And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government
Speaker 2: regulation just means setting fines and if the finds still
Speaker 2: all the business to make more money than they lost
Speaker 2: from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
Speaker 2: It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these
Speaker 2: businesses and the worst that could happen to you is
Speaker 2: the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know,
Speaker 2: two thousand and eight right where all these banks know
Speaker 2: they're going to get bailed out and they know the
Speaker 2: worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just
Speaker 2: the government taking a small cut and they can go
Speaker 2: back to just making all their money. So in order
Speaker 2: to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
Speaker 2: the FTC. You know, even if if you were to
Speaker 2: sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that
Speaker 2: was were willing to go after stuff. There needs to
Speaker 2: be actual regulatory change here, and that is possible but difficult.
Speaker 2: But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious
Speaker 2: about wielding political power to defeat the far right and
Speaker 2: to keep them from re emerging and to keep them
Speaker 2: out of power generationally, then this is the start of
Speaker 2: what we have to do. So we mentioned neutral Light,
Speaker 2: which is you know, a very very power. NEUTRALI is
Speaker 2: important because it is actually two kinds of business that
Speaker 2: are extremely important to the far right at the same time,
Speaker 2: it is part MLM, but is an MLM that also
Speaker 2: sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from these ads,
Speaker 2: we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated
Speaker 2: dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right
Speaker 2: more broadly, and we are back. Oh boy, Yeah, the
Speaker 2: supplement market. There is a lot less that has been
Speaker 2: written about this than there should be. So dietary supplements
Speaker 2: are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting scammed
Speaker 2: all over the place. Enormous numbers. I mean, I've seen
Speaker 2: numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million people
Speaker 2: take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things
Speaker 2: like sort of vitamin gummies, et cetera, etc. This is
Speaker 2: an enormous This is an enormous business. I'm going to
Speaker 2: read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an article about
Speaker 2: supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health. If
Speaker 2: you're going to read this, By the way, this is
Speaker 2: slightly out of date because the next year, I don't
Speaker 2: know if this is part of this. The next year
Speaker 2: at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations. But
Speaker 2: here is star quote. The dietary Supplement Health and Education Act,
Speaker 2: which is the big thing that sort of deregulated supplements,
Speaker 2: prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows
Speaker 2: the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue immediate
Speaker 2: bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes the
Speaker 2: FDA to implement current good Manufacturing Practice guidelines. The law
Speaker 2: also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements, defines
Speaker 2: supplements that were not marketed in the US before October fifteenth,
Speaker 2: nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary Supplement Health
Speaker 2: Education Act went into effect. Products violating these regulations are
Speaker 2: deemed dangerous, adulterated, and miss it, or otherwise unlawful. And
Speaker 2: that all sounds well and good until you get to
Speaker 2: the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need not
Speaker 2: be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety
Speaker 2: are required for new supplement ingredients.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So, like, you're not supposed to let people sell
Speaker 3: dangerous supplements, but we're all also not supposed to check
Speaker 3: to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah it as the FDA itself admits that even
Speaker 4: the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that
Speaker 4: the FAA in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to
Speaker 4: like notify the FDA if you put new ingredients.
Speaker 2: But like even that just isn't happening. These companies just
Speaker 2: don't care. They're just not either' not even like doing
Speaker 2: the little tiny legal mandate stuffy're required to.
Speaker 3: I should also note a large part of the blame
Speaker 3: for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLM's actually
Speaker 3: they play a role in it too. It's the state
Speaker 3: of Utah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: By the way, the political power of the State of
Speaker 3: Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are
Speaker 3: a massive fuck industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So,
Speaker 3: by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where
Speaker 3: they like kidnap your children and torture them, these are
Speaker 3: all things that the State of Utah and specific will
Speaker 3: fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any
Speaker 3: way shape or for.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary
Speaker 2: Supplement Health Education Act, that is the baby of Utah
Speaker 2: Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing
Speaker 2: force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch
Speaker 2: has been this effective, and the fact that Utah serves
Speaker 2: as such a powerful base. Here demonstrate something that's important
Speaker 2: about this political strategy, which is that it has to
Speaker 2: be a federal level political strategy because there are a
Speaker 2: lot of seats the Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need
Speaker 2: to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block
Speaker 2: of sort of political power in these states. I want
Speaker 2: to read a little bit more from that article by
Speaker 2: Star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements
Speaker 2: because I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote,
Speaker 2: manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all
Speaker 2: ingredients supply to them.
Speaker 3: Sure why they need to do that?
Speaker 2: Unbelievable, And they're not required to followup river how I
Speaker 2: talked about. There's current good manufacturing practices guidelines. Following those
Speaker 2: guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover,
Speaker 2: unlike drugs, which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they
Speaker 2: do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US
Speaker 2: pharmacopia and national formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Speaker 2: Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by
Speaker 2: US pharmacopia, so they don't have to work. They can
Speaker 2: choose whether or not they want to be submitted to
Speaker 2: see if any of this stuff works now in theory, also,
Speaker 2: the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated
Speaker 2: by the FDC, But like, is the FDC regulating all
Speaker 2: of these false class people are making with their dietary elements? No,
Speaker 2: of course they're not doing that. So why do we
Speaker 2: care about supplement market Robert has kind of has talked
Speaker 2: about this at the very beginning of the episode. The
Speaker 2: easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets
Speaker 2: is simply the figure of Alex Jones, who, you know,
Speaker 2: we have talked about extensively on this show. It's been
Speaker 2: behind the Bastards. If you want to really, really in depth,
Speaker 2: look at who Alex Jones is. The podcast and Knowledge
Speaker 2: Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has
Speaker 2: ever created. Yeah, it would be hard to beat. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know,
Speaker 2: as an individual figure, has done more to sort of
Speaker 2: spread the ideology the far right and turn this country
Speaker 2: into what it is now than maybe almost any other
Speaker 2: single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he is
Speaker 2: probably most well known now as quote the Sandy Hook guy,
Speaker 2: which he's extremely mad at all people calling him, but
Speaker 2: he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a bunch
Speaker 2: of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flat
Speaker 2: And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems,
Speaker 2: which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company.
Speaker 2: Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about
Speaker 2: eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now,
Speaker 2: these court records come from one of a number of
Speaker 2: lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the
Speaker 2: victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are serty for defaming
Speaker 2: the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And you know, in the process of discovery, we got
Speaker 2: a bunch of information about how Alex Jones's internal media
Speaker 2: empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over
Speaker 2: the years, you know that he's hawked everything from silver
Speaker 2: to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements that
Speaker 2: actually sell. Right, As an MPR article said, about eighty
Speaker 2: percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. This is
Speaker 2: not a sort of small independent media outlet right free
Speaker 2: speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was worth hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions of dollars, this is an enormous far right
Speaker 2: media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing figures like
Speaker 2: Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes
Speaker 2: a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage
Speaker 2: pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against Tucker Carlson
Speaker 2: for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed
Speaker 2: them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on Fox before
Speaker 2: he got kicked off, and what do you want to
Speaker 2: fund this? And you know that was actually a sort
Speaker 2: of effective strategy. But you know, the funny part about
Speaker 2: this is if you look at the end of Tucker
Speaker 2: Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show were ads
Speaker 2: from the my Pillow guy who was a far right
Speaker 2: extremist in his own right and a very important election denier,
Speaker 2: and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a
Speaker 2: durable and renewable grift because there's a ready an extensive
Speaker 2: network of suppliers and distributors right wing brands who want
Speaker 2: to make a bunch of money can just sort of
Speaker 2: slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
Speaker 2: and then they can market them to their viewers, and
Speaker 2: this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding.
Speaker 2: And this is used all over the place.
Speaker 3: Right Again, it impacts what they say and like how
Speaker 3: they like the obsession they have with like seed oils
Speaker 3: and what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all
Speaker 3: of these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know,
Speaker 3: what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all
Speaker 3: of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right,
Speaker 3: Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust
Speaker 3: and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
Speaker 3: own profit. And so it's not just a matter of
Speaker 3: like this is how they get money, but this also
Speaker 3: is why they do some of the things that are
Speaker 3: so harmful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the
Speaker 2: incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies
Speaker 2: and selling more and more of the supplement things. It's
Speaker 2: a spiral. It keeps on just increasing in size and
Speaker 2: increasing in size due to the feedback loop from the
Speaker 2: incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this is
Speaker 2: actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to just
Speaker 2: completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about,
Speaker 2: I think is actually a much harder political fight, But
Speaker 2: a lot of the market for this can be defeated
Speaker 2: by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way
Speaker 2: they do drugs because, and this is really important, these
Speaker 2: supplements are being marketed as drugs, right The advertisements that
Speaker 2: these people are already doing are already illegal. The FTC
Speaker 2: is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this.
Speaker 2: They shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this. And
Speaker 2: this is again, as with banning MLMs, this is something
Speaker 2: that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement
Speaker 2: market exists after sort of a massive regulatory even crackdown
Speaker 2: will be much safer, it will be much more effective,
Speaker 2: and it will also destroy the base of far right media.
Speaker 2: If you can cut the knees out of this sort
Speaker 2: of far right media ecosystem, you can go an enormous
Speaker 2: way towards solving the crisis of the far right that
Speaker 2: has been brought upon this country. Speaking of crisis, Yeah,
Speaker 2: we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads, and
Speaker 2: then we're going to come back and close by talking
Speaker 2: about car manufacturers in the American gentry.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're back, and this is a fun one. This
Speaker 3: is also like one of my particular favorite things to
Speaker 3: hit because I don't think a lot of people know
Speaker 3: how much the Republican Party is just a party of
Speaker 3: used car dealers YEP.
Speaker 2: Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really
Speaker 2: fully about car dealerships, but it mentions the sort of
Speaker 2: political effect and the kind of class that they belong to.
Speaker 2: Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in
Speaker 2: the last decade, at least one of the best things
Speaker 2: they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry
Speaker 2: by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that huge swaths
Speaker 2: of America are ruled by what he calls the local gentry.
Speaker 2: These are millionaires, and notably, these are not billionaires. These
Speaker 2: are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction
Speaker 2: from the surrounding communities. In places like Wyman's childhood home
Speaker 2: of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous local power over
Speaker 2: the territory. They rule like the landed gentry of old.
Speaker 2: Here's Wyman quote. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet setting
Speaker 2: cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, but they are
Speaker 2: far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed league group,
Speaker 2: one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies
Speaker 2: that govern life for tens of millions of people. Donald
Speaker 2: Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting as
Speaker 2: he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct, when he
Speaker 2: crowed about his quote beautiful boaters, lauding the flotilla of
Speaker 2: his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor,
Speaker 2: or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January sixth
Speaker 2: crowd that included people who had flown to the event
Speaker 2: on private jets. He knew what he was doing. Trump
Speaker 2: was courting the support of the American gentry, the salts
Speaker 2: of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders
Speaker 2: in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of a once
Speaker 2: great nation.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: Wyman is largely focused on the agricultural gentry because that's
Speaker 2: you know, the sort of the sort of agrobarons who
Speaker 2: are very important to this story, but are are kind
Speaker 2: of are are kind of auxiliary to this and that
Speaker 2: you know that that's largely because he's talking a lot
Speaker 2: about the places where he grew up, which are which
Speaker 2: are agricultural pubs. But a very critical component of this
Speaker 2: American gentry, of this local elite class are card dealership owners,
Speaker 2: and their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated. The
Speaker 2: journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate
Speaker 2: in twenty twenty three. Quote auto dealers are one of
Speaker 2: the five most common professions among the top point one
Speaker 2: percent of American earners car dealers, gas station owners, and
Speaker 2: building contractors. It turns out, make up the majority of
Speaker 2: the countries one hundred and forty thousand Americans who earn
Speaker 2: more than one point five million dollars a year. Crunching
Speaker 2: numbers from the US Census Bureau, data, scientists and author
Speaker 2: Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent of car dealerships
Speaker 2: in the US have an owner in banking more than
Speaker 2: one point five million a year, which is absolutely absurd.
Speaker 2: That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who, really,
Speaker 2: when you think about it, don't do anything like what
Speaker 2: is the actual service that a car dealer is doing.
Speaker 3: I mean, the primary thing that they do is rip
Speaker 3: people Offcause the entire way that car sales work is
Speaker 3: based on fraud, ye right, Like it's based on getting
Speaker 3: you to buy things that do not actually work, like
Speaker 3: service packages and whatnot that you often will not get
Speaker 3: any benefit from. And it's a lot of it is
Speaker 3: based around also just outright scams, you know, altering the
Speaker 3: information buyers have access to so they don't realize like
Speaker 3: problems with a used car or whatever. Like, it's it's
Speaker 3: all fraud, right Yeah.
Speaker 2: And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters,
Speaker 2: scammers and people who are just their entire existence is
Speaker 2: dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political
Speaker 2: power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same
Speaker 2: article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one
Speaker 2: hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of
Speaker 2: around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
Speaker 2: actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became
Speaker 2: one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with
Speaker 2: sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five
Speaker 2: hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual Nauta
Speaker 2: convention became routine for presidential hole fuls, and even Presidents
Speaker 2: Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended
Speaker 2: ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
Speaker 2: after they left the White House. And the fact that
Speaker 2: Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a
Speaker 2: moral level. Right, This is an entire organization of fraudsters
Speaker 2: and it doesn't even work.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes.
Speaker 3: But they really want that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's the same thing with like you've got Schumer going
Speaker 3: out for the crypto caucus now, where like, yeah, well
Speaker 3: only a fraction of those guys are going to donate
Speaker 3: to DIMS, but it's all scam. He doesn't really care
Speaker 3: as long as some of it goes to him.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now.
Speaker 2: The thing that's more that's dangerous about these people, and
Speaker 2: I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money,
Speaker 2: is that these are local elites, right, and they are
Speaker 2: dispersed enormously across the country. This is this is something
Speaker 2: that Salmon is very sort of specific about is somebody
Speaker 2: that comes up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up
Speaker 2: if you do any research about this at all. A
Speaker 2: huge part of the power is because these people are
Speaker 2: spread geographically across the country, and because they are the
Speaker 2: richest people or among the richest people in the sort
Speaker 2: of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts
Speaker 2: of political power. And because they are again unbelievably wealthy,
Speaker 2: they can funnel this money directly into local politics on
Speaker 2: a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of
Speaker 2: grassroots organizations. This allows them to buy everything from city
Speaker 2: council's to seats in Congress.
Speaker 3: And they effectively unionize. Like in Portland, They've got the
Speaker 3: Portland Business Association right, which is to a significant extent
Speaker 3: allied with the police, and like dominates local politics. They're
Speaker 3: the ones who buy the mayor's election, Like, They're the
Speaker 3: ones who make deals with the Portland Police Officers union.
Speaker 4: Like.
Speaker 3: This is the way in which a lot of power
Speaker 3: gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they've also been doing things like coordinating and
Speaker 2: doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. I mean, this is
Speaker 2: why most of these big associations were formed was specifically
Speaker 2: to destroy unions in the early twentieth century. And you know,
Speaker 2: I mean the Autolobbying group was formed to do autolobbying
Speaker 2: because these car dealerships don't have unions. That's another thing
Speaker 2: that we'll come back to it a little bit. But yeah,
Speaker 2: these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful for
Speaker 2: us in electoral politics, and they deliver seats and this
Speaker 2: is the most important thing if you're an electoralist, right,
Speaker 2: these people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an
Speaker 2: amount of money into local races that people can't compete with.
Speaker 2: And because of this, they miserate the lives of hundreds
Speaker 2: of millions of people. And they can also largely be
Speaker 2: destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe oversalling it a
Speaker 2: little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous
Speaker 2: array of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales
Speaker 2: of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing
Speaker 2: with local retailers. And this is something that the autolobby
Speaker 2: has been you know, the Auto Association Lobby NA has
Speaker 2: been fighting for for ages. They've gotten it in an
Speaker 2: enormous number of states.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms
Speaker 3: of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big
Speaker 3: part of like how Tesla is different from other auto
Speaker 3: manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where
Speaker 3: they're not allowed to do this, but in most states
Speaker 3: they sell directly to the customer, which is like back
Speaker 3: before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a
Speaker 3: major reason why these people didn't like him.
Speaker 2: Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing,
Speaker 2: is what the thing I want to close on here. Yes, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: these people still hate Musks and they hate electric cars
Speaker 2: because electric cars to a large extent are both a
Speaker 2: being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to
Speaker 2: you actually have to do service on them in a
Speaker 2: way that makes it more expensive for these these companies
Speaker 2: to write about this. This is something that Semon has
Speaker 2: written about extensively. So they absolutely despise elect cars. And
Speaker 2: this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because
Speaker 2: Elon Musk now is again one of there is I
Speaker 2: think he's still the richest person in the world technically
Speaker 2: until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is
Speaker 2: an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right,
Speaker 2: because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have
Speaker 2: are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other
Speaker 2: parts of the Republican base. Right, Elon hates them. Actual
Speaker 2: car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is
Speaker 2: also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this,
Speaker 2: and this is one of the few times libertarians are right.
Speaker 2: They look at this and go, oh yeah, Well, these
Speaker 2: people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a
Speaker 2: lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there,
Speaker 2: if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things.
Speaker 2: So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions
Speaker 2: of the Republican base who oppose these companies. And if
Speaker 2: you can, you can use this as a wedge issue
Speaker 2: to split the Republican base. And that's sort of where
Speaker 2: I want to close on. As much as I've been
Speaker 2: talking about these three very specific things, right, banning MLMs
Speaker 2: or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns
Speaker 2: on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales. What
Speaker 2: we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of
Speaker 2: the money that supports the far right. We're trying to
Speaker 2: destroy their institutions, and we're trying to fracture their base. Right.
Speaker 2: Going after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce
Speaker 2: more produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more
Speaker 2: people in the far right from these MLMs. Going after
Speaker 2: supplements is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem,
Speaker 2: which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.
Speaker 2: And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
Speaker 2: coalition by pitting two parts of the Republican base against
Speaker 2: each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon and versus
Speaker 2: the auto manufacturers.
Speaker 3: Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This
Speaker 3: is again something we're going to continue to talk about
Speaker 3: because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
Speaker 3: these three things don't solve every problem with the far right,
Speaker 3: but this is like, if you could actually like packaged
Speaker 3: these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the
Speaker 3: equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Think this is a smart thing to be hitting. We
Speaker 3: will continue to talk about this in more detail, but
Speaker 3: you know what we're done for the day. Go do
Speaker 3: something else.
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