Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions.
Speaker 1: Welcome to acodop and here a podcast where sometimes the
Speaker 1: here is the world's largest democracy, and that I think
Speaker 1: I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it.
Speaker 1: This is, in fact India a very basic democracies around
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're calling either to the US or
Speaker 2: India the world's largest democracy, you've got to put an asterisk.
Speaker 1: There. We'll get to that land of asterisks, Age of asterisks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: with you to talk about the age of asterisks and
Speaker 1: maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: astressing on that too.
Speaker 3: Why not?
Speaker 1: Oh boy? And I'm mea long a guess asterisk there too. Sure,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I got nothing, I got nothing. Well,
Speaker 1: what are we talking about today?
Speaker 3: Maya.
Speaker 1: We are talking about the fact that a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that
Speaker 1: is unprecedented in the twelve year reign of Indian Prime
Speaker 1: Minister and enemy of the show, the butcher a Gujarat
Speaker 1: himself one Prime Minister Modi Narindra Modi, thank you very much. Yep,
Speaker 1: hate him Jesus Christ.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the entire time he has been in power, no
Speaker 1: one has successfully been able to manage to force him
Speaker 1: to make a countet member resign. No, and protesters just
Speaker 1: did this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is the first.
Speaker 2: It's not the first, because there was the most recent
Speaker 2: set of elections didn't go great for him. But this
Speaker 2: is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen
Speaker 2: since the Modi regis kind of clanked into place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And to understand sort of what that means, we
Speaker 1: need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisk,
Speaker 1: that's a democracy on both this in the US, Yeah,
Speaker 1: which is that? So Modi's ruling party is the BJP,
Speaker 1: and I would classify the BJP as the world's largest
Speaker 1: fascist party. It has a horrifying one hundred and forty
Speaker 1: million members.
Speaker 3: Jesus Age Christ.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not good, very bad.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's also like not the only ultra right
Speaker 1: wing Hindi nationalist party in India. There are also others.
Speaker 1: So yeah, great, great things happening here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims
Speaker 2: and other non Hindu groups and chunks of India over
Speaker 2: the Modi years.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So they've been in power like effectively uncontested. I mean,
Speaker 1: they didn't do great and last lections, but they held
Speaker 1: on to power and they've been in power for twelve
Speaker 1: years now, during which they have both transformed Indian politics
Speaker 1: and also just continue to get more and more right wing.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: There's something I think is worth mentioning with the BJP,
Speaker 1: which is that it's not like most political parties, even
Speaker 1: fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political
Speaker 1: party that like developed a paramilitary right. The VJP was
Speaker 1: developed as the political wing of, you know, a very
Speaker 1: very far right, anti Muslim like Hindu nationalist parabilitary group
Speaker 1: called the RSS, which was responsible for a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of absolutely hideous crimes even before the BJP took power
Speaker 1: or even existed. So again, like this is a ruling
Speaker 1: party that is like the political wing of a parabilitary
Speaker 1: not the other way around. And it's been running India
Speaker 1: for twelve years. And as Robert sort of mentioned before,
Speaker 1: the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've
Speaker 1: also faced large scale protest movements before, most notably sort
Speaker 1: of the Farmer's protests in twenty twenty and then twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, which were about attempts to implement right wing
Speaker 1: market reforms to India's like agricultural markets. But they've successfully
Speaker 1: been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to
Speaker 1: dismiss government ministers in the face of protests until now.
Speaker 1: So what has actually been happening. Yeah, so these protests
Speaker 1: have been rallying under the banner of I guess kind
Speaker 1: of a meme organization or meme.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it started as a as a joke, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it's called the Cockroach johnta party which is named
Speaker 2: after these comments.
Speaker 1: They were made by India's Chief Justice of like the
Speaker 1: Indian Supreme Court, calling young unemployed people quote parasites and cockroaches.
Speaker 2: It's a little bit of a reversal of like the
Speaker 2: Hillary Clinton deplorables comment where this this person in politics
Speaker 2: uses a derogatory nickname to refer to a group of
Speaker 2: people he's opposed to, and they kind of take it
Speaker 2: on as a badge of honor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and because it's fascist, right right, it's also yeah fascist,
Speaker 1: the Chief Justice Supreme Court is calling them cockroaches. Jesus Christ. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this party is like obviously a joke. It's like CJP,
Speaker 1: like cockroach instead of BJP, et cetera, et cetera. That
Speaker 1: the main focus of these protests are a series of
Speaker 1: scandals in India's education system, and it feels kind of
Speaker 1: redundant to say, like, oh, yeah, like what kind of
Speaker 1: education do you get? Has a huge amount of you know,
Speaker 1: sort of determinants in like what your life turns out
Speaker 1: to be and what your economic conditions turns out to
Speaker 1: be in a sort of more intense version of like
Speaker 1: the way that American sanitized testing works. But there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of these sanitized tests that you take that
Speaker 1: can determine a whole bunch about what your future is
Speaker 1: going to be. And I think mostly obviously there have
Speaker 1: been a couple of big scandals recently, but the most
Speaker 1: famous one is called the neat scandal. NEAT and EATS
Speaker 1: is basically it's India's like pre med exam. Basically.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's this huge exam that everyone who wants to
Speaker 2: go into pre med has to take and get a
Speaker 2: certain grade on, as I understand it, basically, Yeah, So
Speaker 2: it's one of these especially for kids like aren't rich.
Speaker 2: It's like a massive barrier that you have to get
Speaker 2: past if you want to like have a better life.
Speaker 1: Basically. Yeah, And these tests, and specifically the MET in particular.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is just the one if you want
Speaker 1: to become a doctor. But like you know, there's a
Speaker 1: huge number of people taking these tests. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from al Dazeira, nearly two point three million test
Speaker 1: takers across India and at examination centers in Doa, Dubai,
Speaker 1: Singapore and Kampman Dou appeared for the NEAT this year
Speaker 1: on May third, battling out for less than one hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty thousand spots in medical colleges. So a very
Speaker 1: small percentage of the of these of these two point
Speaker 1: three million people who are taking this test can even
Speaker 1: possibly get a score good enough to get them into
Speaker 1: a very small number of spots in these medical colleges
Speaker 1: and then it turns out for this year's test that
Speaker 1: the answers to the test had been leaked aheat of
Speaker 1: time and were being like sold on a telegram channels. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this turns into a massive scandal and the government
Speaker 1: for us the students to take the test again, and
Speaker 1: this is a complete disaster. Eleven students died by suicide
Speaker 1: as result of it.
Speaker 3: Good God, it's really.
Speaker 2: Bad because it's like a mix of everything you've heard about.
Speaker 2: Particularly in Southeast Asia. You've got a lot of like
Speaker 2: pressure as a kid to do well in exams like
Speaker 2: this because there's not both for cultural leases and because
Speaker 2: there's not other ways legally to like get those jobs
Speaker 2: if your family is not rich. And also the people
Speaker 2: whose families are rich, like often can pay to get
Speaker 2: the answers ahead of time, which is what the leak
Speaker 2: of this shows, right, Like the fact that it leaks
Speaker 2: out is because people's rich kids are getting these yeah. Well,
Speaker 2: and and also like if you're rich enough, you can
Speaker 2: send your kid to like a private college right right,
Speaker 2: that too, you know, but if you're a working class kids,
Speaker 2: you cannot afford one of these one of these private universities. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so your only way in is through these tests exactly.
Speaker 2: And these tests are also you know, they're like they're
Speaker 2: like a huge sort of extraction engine inside of the
Speaker 2: Indian economy where like, you know, one of the things
Speaker 2: that Alda Zerra talks about is the story of this
Speaker 2: twenty one year old kid who is one of the
Speaker 2: people who died by suicide, who in order to get
Speaker 2: through these tests, you have to go through these like
Speaker 2: massive extremely expensive coaching centers effectively in order to study
Speaker 2: enough for it. And these things are these things are
Speaker 2: really expensive to the point where this kid's family like
Speaker 2: sold their ancestral lands in order to be able to
Speaker 2: pay for test coaching so this kid could become a doctor.
Speaker 2: And she had passed the test after like not getting
Speaker 2: high enough scores like the previous two times, and then
Speaker 2: he had to take it again. There are stories like
Speaker 2: this all over India and it's just a nightmare. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so much of this too shouldn't be separated from the
Speaker 2: broader issues gen Z and Jin's Alpha are having all
Speaker 2: over the world, right, Yeah, like this is part of that.
Speaker 2: Like this is we are fucked. We have no way
Speaker 2: of making it in the economy. You've left us and
Speaker 2: one of the tiny slim slippers of a way to
Speaker 2: get ahead is just a scam too, Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 3: They should be pissed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like it's particularly intense in Indio because there's
Speaker 1: a story recently that CNN was talking about where there's
Speaker 1: a study that showed that there's a forty percent unemployment
Speaker 1: rate for graduates under the age of twenty five. Good god,
Speaker 1: that is nightmarish. That's end of civilization kind of shit.
Speaker 1: Like any sane government would be worried about a revolution
Speaker 1: in these conditions. Those are the kind of unemployment levels
Speaker 1: that got you the Arab spring, right, Like, yep, that's
Speaker 1: how this stuff happens. And Facebook, yeah, and Twitter, I
Speaker 1: guess yeah, well yeah, Facebook playing both sides on that one.
Speaker 3: Sha I roan.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a variety of foreign intelligent agencies from all over
Speaker 2: the world, a lot of things like yeah, a lot
Speaker 2: of things.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and speaking of things that have a lot of
Speaker 1: problems that the education system as well, like there's other
Speaker 1: issues with it. Right, the BJP, again, they've been in
Speaker 1: power for twelve years, so they've installed a bunch of
Speaker 1: RSS guys, like in the Department of Education, and so
Speaker 1: you get this curriculum that in something that I think
Speaker 1: is very familiar to Americans, where you're just getting all
Speaker 1: of this right wing nationalist bullshit just like attempting to
Speaker 1: be pumped into the education system. They're doing that too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and conditions over this are bad enough that yeah, people
Speaker 1: take to the streets.
Speaker 3: Yeah, as they should and did. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's I don't know, like a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff reading this, it was like, oh, I've like
Speaker 1: I've like been in this protest like so so originally
Speaker 1: these originally the protests are not that large in scale.
Speaker 1: But there's there's a big march on like July twentieth that's,
Speaker 1: you know, like a march at the Parliament and there's
Speaker 1: a giant police attack on it. That's an attempt at
Speaker 1: crush and movement entirely, and it doesn't work. It does
Speaker 1: exactly the opposite. It has, you know, a very very
Speaker 1: familiar pattern of a bunch of people watch like a
Speaker 1: bunch of actual literal children who are protesting, like the
Speaker 1: answers to the test got sold to a bunch of
Speaker 1: rich kids. Then they get the shit beat out of it.
Speaker 1: This suddenly like accelerates the protest massively and massively increases
Speaker 1: the number of people who are in the streets, and
Speaker 1: you know, this eventually does the unthinkable, which has forced
Speaker 1: the government to make the Minister of Education resign, and
Speaker 1: they're also able to get some reforms. The multi government
Speaker 1: in theory says it's going to address like some of
Speaker 1: the kind of like bureaucratic things around why it's so
Speaker 1: easy to get these questions. They also promise not to
Speaker 1: arrest any of the protesters, a thing that is never true.
Speaker 1: They are every single time you promise this, they are
Speaker 1: always lying.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: But is also the thing that a government does when
Speaker 1: it is scared.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a sign that they know they can't start
Speaker 2: talking about cracking heads from the jump.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And I think we're going to get a
Speaker 1: bit into more of the reason why the government was
Speaker 1: so alarmed about this later. But one of the things
Speaker 1: where I think this probably unfortunately was good strategic timing
Speaker 1: by the government is that these were these protests were
Speaker 1: sort of like crystallizing into these more general like antimody protests,
Speaker 1: and by sort of heading it off at the past
Speaker 1: here over an issue where like in theory, the BJP
Speaker 1: also wants the tests to work normally although obviously this
Speaker 1: does beg the question like, okay, so if it's government
Speaker 1: officials who are selling the answers to the tests, like
Speaker 1: who is running the governments? Yeah, which is you know,
Speaker 1: another part of this and another thing that is a
Speaker 1: part of this is these products and services.
Speaker 3: Robert, Oh, god, I love a good product and a
Speaker 3: good service.
Speaker 1: Ugh, we're back.
Speaker 2: We're filled with the bounty of products and services, and
Speaker 2: we're ready to hear more about the cockroach Janta.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So again kind of very familiar to a lot
Speaker 1: of protests that we have seen over our lives. These
Speaker 1: are very very social media driven protests in a way
Speaker 1: that's also similar to a lot of the protests that
Speaker 1: have been happening in actually, I mean particularly in neighboring
Speaker 1: regions protesting like Bangladesh and Shri Laka, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And you know, if if you watch any of like
Speaker 1: the Instagram reels or whatever from these, god, I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's it's so just depressingly familiar in a lot of
Speaker 1: ways where it's it's very funny reading people talking about
Speaker 1: this because they're like, ah, it's these like irony meme
Speaker 1: driven you know, like kids making these like irony meme
Speaker 1: driven things about like getting the shit beaten out of
Speaker 1: by riot police and like, you know, it's like people
Speaker 1: doing fit checks and then like getting like beaten with batons,
Speaker 1: and it's like, oh, yeah, okay, we've all been there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I've been having a very like I'm feeling old moment
Speaker 1: these because it's like, oh god, I remember these from
Speaker 1: like twenty thirteen when we were doing the same shit, And.
Speaker 2: Well that's one of the tough things too as you
Speaker 2: get older, is both you know, and this is less
Speaker 2: the case when we're talking about a foreign movement, because
Speaker 2: I don't think I have any ability to influence that.
Speaker 2: When you're talking to like younger activists, it's a mix
Speaker 2: of wanting to like let them know about the pitfalls
Speaker 2: and problems that previous generations have encountered when you see them,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of heading in that same direction, and
Speaker 2: also not wanting to be like, well, just because I'm
Speaker 2: burnt out doesn't mean you should because I mean I should, Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like you shouldn't be excited about this thing just because
Speaker 2: I can't get excited anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's like, you know, and that's always the
Speaker 1: thing with these kind of protests. It's like sometimes you win, yeah,
Speaker 1: and sometimes you win and there's there's never God. David
Speaker 1: Graeber had this quote I forget who.
Speaker 2: Yes, well, I know the one you're talking about where
Speaker 2: he's he's talking about like the dealing with.
Speaker 1: Like the surprise of victory. Oh, I was actually gonna
Speaker 1: do a different one. Oh, okay, that one's also good.
Speaker 1: But he had this quote with a revolutionary in from
Speaker 1: the twenty eleven like uprising there, and you know, she
Speaker 1: had this quote where it was like, you do these
Speaker 1: protests all the time, and sometimes thirty people show up
Speaker 1: and you're depressed, and sometimes one hundred people show up
Speaker 1: and you know, you're really happy, and then one day,
Speaker 1: eight hundred thousand people show up and you kind of
Speaker 1: forgot that could happen. Yeah, And that's kind of what
Speaker 1: this is, right, where it's like, yeah, that's that's exactly
Speaker 1: how it goes.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: It starts as like a bit from a dude who's
Speaker 2: not even in India at the time, right, he's at
Speaker 2: a school in the US and he and so he
Speaker 2: just makes this kind of meme page and it takes off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then suddenly you know you actually have part
Speaker 1: of this is also like weird stuff about how algorithms work,
Speaker 1: but like part of what's been happening here too is
Speaker 1: that there's been a huge shift in the regime in
Speaker 1: India's ability to control social media, which something they've been
Speaker 1: very very good at up until this point. They've been
Speaker 1: really good at controlling both sort of online discourse and
Speaker 1: also have taken almost complete control over just the regular
Speaker 1: mainstream media and these protests, and like the way that
Speaker 1: people are just sort of casually being like hey, fit
Speaker 1: check going out to a protest, and like the way
Speaker 1: that the self spread algorithmically, and the way that you know,
Speaker 1: you have people going out for protest stuff. Then that
Speaker 1: also mixes with is you know, people who are going
Speaker 1: out just to film it for like their Instagram reels
Speaker 1: and it, but all of them, all of them end
Speaker 1: up like in the streets, and you get the situation
Speaker 1: where like the mainstream media is just like absolutely refuses
Speaker 1: to talk about the protest whatsoever. But then you know,
Speaker 1: if you're like on Instagram, you're on any social media site,
Speaker 1: it's the only thing you're seeing. And this kind of
Speaker 1: weakens the control that the BGP has been able to maintain.
Speaker 1: Over all of these spaces. Yeah, but that doesn't mean
Speaker 1: that like they've you know, lost control completely. You know,
Speaker 1: the BGP is like kind of in their counterattack phase
Speaker 1: right now, and you get a really bleak look at
Speaker 1: how like right wing governments with longstanding sort of right
Speaker 1: wing online basis and media bases work where they do
Speaker 1: these like harassment campaigns as women who went out protesting
Speaker 1: they share do. Yeah, it's like it's all the stuff
Speaker 1: that you're familiar with, right, Like they'll show clips if
Speaker 1: people like on news channels and then people will like
Speaker 1: dogs them and like start stalking them and they get
Speaker 1: threats and.
Speaker 2: Yeah I've heard people had to like hide and stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: especially like female activists while they were during the protests.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And it's also you know, it's like it's like
Speaker 1: large scale threats to sexual violence are yep, a very
Speaker 1: common part of this. And that's god, yes, you know,
Speaker 1: that's like how these people are able to maintain power.
Speaker 1: But even as this sort of digital kind of attack
Speaker 1: is happening and it's extremely brutal and it's really a mess,
Speaker 1: the control of the mainstream media is also slipping. One
Speaker 1: of the things I learned, like reading about this is
Speaker 1: there's a term that I guess generally kind of like
Speaker 1: opposition people are using with the protesters also used where
Speaker 1: they call they call the like the mainstream press, like
Speaker 1: goaty media, which is like it's like lap in Hindi.
Speaker 1: So it's it's basically like calling them like lapdog media
Speaker 1: instead of being watchdogs, which I love. I don't know,
Speaker 1: I like it a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I did too.
Speaker 1: That's great. It's like it's good. I don't know, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't know exactly how to steal that for us,
Speaker 1: but I love it. It's great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I should be thinking about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. But part of the problem with with having you know,
Speaker 1: this kind of like incredible degree of like media centralization
Speaker 1: that the regime has been able to pull together is that,
Speaker 1: you know, after being in power for so long, having
Speaker 1: their narrative be like completely hegemonic for so long, they're
Speaker 1: running into like the cracks, you know, these sort of
Speaker 1: cracks forming in their nationalist messaging, because like they're running
Speaker 1: into the fundamental problem that you can't eat national pride.
Speaker 1: And so if if literally the entire media all the
Speaker 1: time is trying to ignore that these protests are happening,
Speaker 1: and then also was telling you that your country is
Speaker 1: great and like modi is great and you're such a
Speaker 1: world great world leader. But then you know you can't
Speaker 1: feed your family. That that's actual problem. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
Speaker 1: and like and like normally the way that nationalists would
Speaker 1: sort of deal with this is to be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't have jobs and your economy sucks because of
Speaker 1: like some either immigrant group or in this case, it
Speaker 1: would sort of like shuld probably be doing this with Muslims,
Speaker 1: but they've been in power for so long that it's
Speaker 1: like kind of hard to do that because it's like
Speaker 1: this is your country now, right, like you have taken
Speaker 1: control of it. And yet Yeah, and this kind of
Speaker 1: feeds into this, you know, question at a broader level
Speaker 1: about what these protests are actually about, because on a
Speaker 1: very basic level, they're about education perform and they're about
Speaker 1: these tests, and they're about the education system as a whole.
Speaker 1: But on a broader level, it's more complicated because these protests,
Speaker 1: as you know, protests often do function as a sort
Speaker 1: of aggregator of different kinds of struggle with you know,
Speaker 1: different beliefs and motivations, and you get a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of different kinds of people in the street. I want
Speaker 1: to read this quote from an interview Frontline India did
Speaker 1: with the guy who was the founder of the CJP,
Speaker 1: which is to say, just like the guy who made
Speaker 1: the meme that went viral.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that is how he got the job, so
Speaker 2: to speak. And he's done a really good job, by
Speaker 2: the way, Like I think he's been really responsible. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he could not have anticipated this happening, but he seems
Speaker 2: to be really dedicated to the cause.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I want to quote him here talking about
Speaker 1: what the ideology of this party, if it existed, would be.
Speaker 1: The ideology of the CJP and many of our young
Speaker 1: people are also very progressive, liberal, secular, will be secular,
Speaker 1: democratic and socialist, and we strive for social justice. And
Speaker 1: he also mentions three people that he's you know, he's
Speaker 1: he's inspired by, and two of them I think are
Speaker 1: kind of not particularly surprising given this kind of like
Speaker 1: this is kind of what like secular, progressive democratic key
Speaker 1: politics look like, which is he mentions Gondi and Nehru.
Speaker 1: But what's interesting and what I haven't seen literally at
Speaker 1: all in any other coverage at this protest, is that
Speaker 1: the third person that he mentions is Ambedkar, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: I assume you, having been there and spend a deep
Speaker 1: amount of time in India, I assume you know who
Speaker 1: Ambedkar is. No, no, no, I don't know. Really interesting, okay,
Speaker 1: not in a meaningful way. Now, this is actually kind
Speaker 1: of a good proxy. I assume people listening to the
Speaker 1: show know who Gandhi is. You've probably at least heard
Speaker 1: of Nehru. Yeah, who was the first trime Minister of India. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Ambitcar is a lot less well known. He's another one
Speaker 1: of the very important sort of independence era figures in India.
Speaker 1: But he is the guy around which like the anti
Speaker 1: cast movement rallies was it?
Speaker 3: Was he in the fifties or sixties.
Speaker 1: No, he like first starts this in like the like
Speaker 1: the twenties and thirties, and then he's alive through independence.
Speaker 1: Oh okay really that era? Yeah yeah, yeah, he's he's
Speaker 1: around like in the era of like revolutionary struggle against
Speaker 1: the British creed independence yeah yeah, yeah, and then he,
Speaker 1: you know, he like survives through independence and gets to
Speaker 1: see some of that.
Speaker 2: The partition of India and all that good stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: all the fun things happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is a period, you know, if you
Speaker 1: look at like the nineteen ten's, twenties thirties, this is
Speaker 1: a period both about the anti colonial struggle and then
Speaker 1: also like what the struggle is going to be, right, Like,
Speaker 1: who's whose vision of India is going to come out
Speaker 1: of a post independence world if there is one? And
Speaker 1: Mbitkar's thing here is yes, like we want like we
Speaker 1: want independence and we want socialism because you know, a
Speaker 1: lot of the people of the like Neighbory is technic,
Speaker 1: is like a kind of socialist right, like a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of the independence activists are. But he's
Speaker 1: also in a position of we need to get rid
Speaker 1: of the cast system because he sees it as like correctly,
Speaker 1: as like an incredibly powerful sort of force of oppression
Speaker 1: in Indian society. And he thinks that that's not something
Speaker 1: that they should like wait until independence to deal with.
Speaker 1: And so he's a very very important like leader in
Speaker 1: the anti cast movements and he's probably I think he's
Speaker 1: probably just like their best known intellectual. I would really
Speaker 1: recommend reading his book, The Annihilation of Cast. Well, I
Speaker 1: say book, it's like not that it's not that long, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like it's probably my favorite thing I've read and from
Speaker 1: the writers of that era. It's an address that he's
Speaker 1: making basically to both I guess you'd call it like
Speaker 1: more conservative pro in dependence activists and then also to
Speaker 1: the socialists to be like, hey, you should also talk
Speaker 1: about cast at the same time you're talking about British
Speaker 1: oppression and also class. The CJP founder like mentions this
Speaker 1: because he's from a low cast background and he goes like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like no, like I wouldn't have been able to go
Speaker 1: to school in the United States and like have the
Speaker 1: successes that I've had in my life without ambicar. I
Speaker 1: thought this was really interesting because it's not mentioned in
Speaker 1: any other reporting, even though it's like in an interview
Speaker 1: he's said, and also, I think this is a dynamic
Speaker 1: here that is like not well understood in most places,
Speaker 1: that like, this is a still operative system of oppression
Speaker 1: that people are still fighting against, and that is, you know,
Speaker 1: relevant enough to be like one of the things that
Speaker 1: gets mentioned by the guy who starts this movement. And
Speaker 1: that's not to say the rest of the movement like
Speaker 1: necessarily is exactly this focused on it, which is one
Speaker 1: of the parts of this movement that's both why it
Speaker 1: succeeded and also one of the kind of messy parts
Speaker 1: of it, right, is that on the one hand, this
Speaker 1: has become a really powerful vehicle for these sort of
Speaker 1: like broadly secular like pro democracy, like anti Moody, anti
Speaker 1: dictatorship students, and there's always been like a fairly large
Speaker 1: like cohort of you know, sort of like young left
Speaker 1: leaning or leftist students. I mean, there was a whole
Speaker 1: i don't know what you'd call it, like social panic
Speaker 1: slash government purge against this idea of like quote unquote
Speaker 1: urban Naxles, which was supposed to be like oh, there's
Speaker 1: like these like urban versions of like the Naxal like
Speaker 1: communist guerrillas that are in the universities, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, very similar to but a
Speaker 1: significantly more advanced and repressive version of the stuff that
Speaker 1: like you see the Trump administration doing in the US
Speaker 1: education system and the sort of like witch hunts so
Speaker 1: for you know, Palestine and stuff like that. So you know,
Speaker 1: you have that group of sort of like center left
Speaker 1: and leftist students to where a lot of people who
Speaker 1: started the protest movement, but also there's also just like
Speaker 1: BJP kids, Yeah, who are in the streets because they're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like we all got fucked in our tests.
Speaker 3: Because it's bullshit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's the same reason.
Speaker 2: Now you've got a decent chunk at least like a
Speaker 2: third of the twenty or something percent of the people
Speaker 2: who voted for Trump in twenty twenty four are more
Speaker 2: people who'd voted for Biden or for Hillary a few
Speaker 2: years earlier. Right, there are people who maybe they went
Speaker 2: for this guy, but as soon as it stops working
Speaker 2: for them, as soon as like the fascist and missn't
Speaker 2: delivering what it promises, they'll get pissed, they'll get out
Speaker 2: wide up with the streets. Yeah, you don't have to
Speaker 2: like them to recognize that as a phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's a kind of like third phenomenon too, which is
Speaker 1: as these protests go on, you get more and more
Speaker 1: of different kinds of like both rural and urban workers,
Speaker 1: more urban workers and real workers. But this but this
Speaker 1: is you know, the thing about education protests at their
Speaker 1: core is that this is something that cuts across like
Speaker 1: rural urban divides to an extent in the sense that
Speaker 1: like both poor rural kids and poor urban kids are
Speaker 1: still getting fucked by this, you know, like by the
Speaker 1: exam system. But then you know, you get workers starting
Speaker 1: to join it who also have these I think, I
Speaker 1: don't know the way that commentators talk about it is
Speaker 1: that they're unconnected. I think they're a lot more connected
Speaker 1: than that. But you know, you get you get you
Speaker 1: get these workers with these like cost of living crisis
Speaker 1: concerns who who are also joining this protest. And I
Speaker 1: guess part of this is a girl who spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time studying and writing about ten. But this
Speaker 1: is kind of the exact class composition of Timen and
Speaker 1: how those protests unfold. It where you have its origins
Speaker 1: in like this, in this specific student movement thing that
Speaker 1: has kind of specific student movement grievances that then you know,
Speaker 1: goes into the streets around their specific demands, and then
Speaker 1: everyone watches them get the ship beaten out of them,
Speaker 1: and that brings more and more people into the streets
Speaker 1: who have their own kind of specific demands around like
Speaker 1: the economic conditions they're in. And this is a very
Speaker 1: common like composition for revolts. I mean, it's it's the
Speaker 1: basis of everything from like I mean, god like it's
Speaker 1: part of the basis of the French Revolution. You can
Speaker 1: look at like May sixty eight, Like, you know, so
Speaker 1: there are revolts against Pinochet, Like I mean, occupy is
Speaker 1: like a lot to a large extent, like this class base, right,
Speaker 1: if you have a bunch of students who are very
Speaker 1: concerned about debt, and then that brings in a bunch
Speaker 1: of more working class people who are like not students anymore.
Speaker 1: But that's also what makes it dangerous. It's a very
Speaker 1: old kind of alliance, and it's a kind of alliance
Speaker 1: that can always materialize because students and poor workers are
Speaker 1: some of the first people to feel when the economic
Speaker 1: ties are shit, and that like constantly creates these kind
Speaker 1: of uprisings, right, and you know, they're dangerous enough that
Speaker 1: if you look at the last thirty years of Chinese politics,
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of the politics of modern China are
Speaker 1: about specifically making sure that this exact coalition doesn't form again.
Speaker 1: So you know, when the old working class is sort
Speaker 1: of crushed with the like remains the welfare state in
Speaker 1: the nineties, like, there's a very deliberate attempt to buy
Speaker 1: off the students at the same time to make sure,
Speaker 1: they never make common cause, and like any time you've
Speaker 1: seen sort of student worker actions since then, there's this
Speaker 1: massive crackdown on it because the Chinese government understands that
Speaker 1: this is this is a very very dangerous political coalition,
Speaker 1: and it's a political coalition that has outlasted I mean
Speaker 1: literally like a lot of the like working classes that
Speaker 1: were originally in these uprisings, like the French revolutionary like
Speaker 1: artis in class, like that doesn't exist anymore, right, Like
Speaker 1: the industrial working class in like France or like Italy
Speaker 1: in the sixties, like that also doesn't exist anymore, but
Speaker 1: you still see this like specific configuration of classes doing
Speaker 1: these protest movements. Yeah, there's obviously always a lot of
Speaker 1: different motivations, and conflict against the state tends to be
Speaker 1: the thing that can like solidify a kind of identity
Speaker 1: that allows you to do any kind of mass movements,
Speaker 1: right Like this is like one of the few things
Speaker 1: that can you know, fighting the police and having the
Speaker 1: state repress you, and that having the states as a
Speaker 1: force you can fight against concretely that just appears when
Speaker 1: you oppose it is one of the things that makes
Speaker 1: these kinds of protest movements work and then also underneath
Speaker 1: that the economy is broken in a lot of the
Speaker 1: ways you saw like in like twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: which is like I think the last big cycle of
Speaker 1: these mass protests where you have this economic instability. And
Speaker 1: what I think is particularly similar between now and like
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen was that technically speaking, if you look at
Speaker 1: the economy in India right now, as as long as
Speaker 1: you ignore the youth unemployment rate, it looks like the
Speaker 1: economy is growing. Things are good. Yeah, yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: the same thing as the US, where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean, the economic indicators have been getting worse, but
Speaker 1: like you know, technically speaking, it looks like the US
Speaker 1: economy is growing, but if you're living under it, it's like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not. And there's all of these sort of cracks
Speaker 1: and ripples in the global economy. In twenty eighteen was
Speaker 1: like this where like the American economy was like doing fine,
Speaker 1: and a lot of like the major economies were in
Speaker 1: theory doing fine. But then you know, there was a
Speaker 1: series of currency like crises and like there were like
Speaker 1: these economic collapses. Yeah, there's like this hyperinflation in Turkey.
Speaker 1: You get these things in like Chile, and then you know,
Speaker 1: you start seeing these protests, you get like Haiti get
Speaker 1: the yellow ves, you see like Hong Kong Lebanon a
Speaker 1: rock god, like Iran, or for the first time of
Speaker 1: this giant cycle of protests in Iran me and Maar,
Speaker 1: like even like Russia briefly goes up. And I'm bringing
Speaker 1: this up to say that like one of the things
Speaker 1: about a protest like this, right, and there's been several
Speaker 1: other ones who are very big protests in Indonesia over
Speaker 1: the last couple of months. These protests often a recur
Speaker 1: and b are in some ways an early warning signal
Speaker 1: before like there's going to be another giant round of
Speaker 1: these kind of protests.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean hopefully all right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think there's a decent chance of
Speaker 1: it because like you know, the economy still hasn't like
Speaker 1: hit rock bottom yet, no, and in the way that
Speaker 1: like you know, you saw that in twenty twenty where like, yeah,
Speaker 1: the bottom finally fell out of the economy with COVID.
Speaker 2: Furthermore, maybe this is putting it a little bit too strongly,
Speaker 2: but like the people who do not like the regime
Speaker 2: at particularly the activists have like tasted a little blood now, Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Like it's really hard once people win, once a movement wins,
Speaker 2: for it to not try to keep winning, right, That's
Speaker 2: kind of a natural instinct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And and the BJP is is, you know, obviously
Speaker 1: doing its best to do to supper this, yeah, to
Speaker 1: suppress or co opt yeah. Yeah. But the problem that
Speaker 1: they're facing is is the fundamental problem of all of
Speaker 1: the regimes everywhere, which is that, like it's a lot
Speaker 1: harder to maintain one of these kinds of regimes when
Speaker 1: you have been in power for a long time and
Speaker 1: suddenly the economy implodes. And that's coming for India the
Speaker 1: same way that's coming for the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: And also in very specific ways of like you know,
Speaker 1: we've talked about I talked about on this show elsewhere,
Speaker 1: the effects of the blockade of the Stradiformus has been
Speaker 1: devastating in India in a way that it hasn't been
Speaker 1: in the US.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 1: And you know, you also have like heat waves that
Speaker 1: are also you know, both economically and just like living devastating.
Speaker 1: There was an expression in the Hong Kong protest that
Speaker 1: they were drawing from a Mao quote but also it's
Speaker 1: way older than Mao, as like Mao says in the
Speaker 1: thing where he says it. But the Hong Konger has
Speaker 1: had this line that like a single spark can start
Speaker 1: a prairie fire. And the thing about the Indian economy
Speaker 1: is it is throwing sparks off everywhere. Sure, and that
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that every individual spark is going to be
Speaker 1: the one that starts the fire. But it means that
Speaker 1: as as you continue to get more and more sparks,
Speaker 1: the odds that you see another one of these revolts increases,
Speaker 1: and hopefully the odds that one of these protests in
Speaker 1: one of these movements can finally knock off the fascists
Speaker 1: and yeah, fundamentally transform Indian society rises.
Speaker 3: Yep, or at least get mody out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just at a bare minimum. You know, I'll take
Speaker 2: the minimum if that's what it is. Oh God, Okay, Well,
Speaker 2: thank you Miya, and thank you the cockroach Janta over
Speaker 2: in India.
Speaker 6: Good work.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, y'all, that is actually really nice to see.
Speaker 1: Fucking rocks. Give them hell of you.
Speaker 7: Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. The
Speaker 7: past few weeks I've been covering the midterm primaries and
Speaker 7: the battle between the left and the establishment for the
Speaker 7: future of the Democratic Party. As evidence just this month
Speaker 7: in Michigan and Wisconsin, left populism continues to be.
Speaker 1: On the rise.
Speaker 7: A few weekends ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held
Speaker 7: their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois.
Speaker 7: I did not attend the Socialists Summit because instead I
Speaker 7: wanted to check in on the other side of the isle.
Speaker 7: So last month I went down to Washington, d C.
Speaker 7: To attend the New Liberal Action Summit, or, as it's
Speaker 7: affectionately referred to by attendees, Globe con named after the
Speaker 7: blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter, symbolizing globalism,
Speaker 7: free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration, and yimbiism. The
Speaker 7: New Liberal Action Summit was a three day event, with
Speaker 7: one main conference day filled with panels featuring policy makers,
Speaker 7: fireside chats with liberal politicians, and networking opportunities for young
Speaker 7: liberals who share a passion for center left policies. I
Speaker 7: went to eight of the fourteen panels. One of the
Speaker 7: first panels was on energy policy, featuring two former politicians
Speaker 7: turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Bayer spoke about
Speaker 7: the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors
Speaker 7: discussed why quote unquote slopulist tax proposals are stupid. Representative
Speaker 7: Richie Torres promoted abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat
Speaker 7: Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting
Speaker 7: back against DSA, and I listened into a live recording
Speaker 7: of Francis Fukuyama's podcast. Abundance was probably one of the
Speaker 7: most frequently used words at the conference. There was a
Speaker 7: big focus on building, housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and
Speaker 7: a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti
Speaker 7: tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly,
Speaker 7: most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zoramamdani's reign thus
Speaker 7: far but still very oppositional to stuff like wealth taxes,
Speaker 7: the rent freeze, populism in general, DSA as an organization
Speaker 7: and their other candidates. About three hundred libs attended the
Speaker 7: summit last July. They mostly ranged between their early twenties
Speaker 7: to late thirties. These are econ, POLI, PSI, and law students,
Speaker 7: young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks, and aspiring policy wonks.
Speaker 7: Just as the use of the blue globe emoji online
Speaker 7: was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the
Speaker 7: red rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind
Speaker 7: it is a response from young ish liberals to rising
Speaker 7: populism in the United States, and especially the growing influence
Speaker 7: of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party.
Speaker 7: The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an
Speaker 7: organization called the Center for New Liberalism or CNL. CNL
Speaker 7: is a nonprofit five oh one C four quote digital
Speaker 7: first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the
Speaker 7: age it is most under attack, according to their website.
Speaker 7: At the summit, they were giving out CNL stickers, which
Speaker 7: they sell on their website for five dollars. One of
Speaker 7: the stickers reads quote, we believe in economic growth both
Speaker 7: through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free
Speaker 7: flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment,
Speaker 7: immediate criminal justice reform, a tech optimist society at tax
Speaker 7: on carbon freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion, or
Speaker 7: sexual orientation. Pragmatism over populism, cnliberalism dot org, forward slash join.
Speaker 7: The Center for New Liberalism claims to have about eleven
Speaker 7: thousand members and fifty local chapters in cities across the US,
Speaker 7: though according to their website, cnl's private Slack channel has
Speaker 7: just about seven hundred dues paying members of the organization.
Speaker 7: In contrast, DSA is about one hundred and twenty thousand
Speaker 7: dues paying members. During the summit, I spoke with cnl's
Speaker 7: deputy director, Tobin Stone, and he told me that the
Speaker 7: Center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as
Speaker 7: a counterweight to the DSA. Stone said that the populist
Speaker 7: right has their own little organizations like TPUSA, the populist
Speaker 7: left has the DSA, and the Center for New Liberalism
Speaker 7: wants to be both a political organizational force as well
Speaker 7: as a social body for young center left liberals who
Speaker 7: believe in quote unquote lower case L liberalism to meet
Speaker 7: with each other, organize, and advance their ideas. Stone did
Speaker 7: admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the
Speaker 7: ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular and voters
Speaker 7: are expressing all these things around affordability, but moderate Dems
Speaker 7: have failed to seize this moment. There is a big
Speaker 7: window open for Democrats, and really the only people taking
Speaker 7: it are the DSA.
Speaker 8: What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no,
Speaker 8: we can be central left, moderate, what ever you want
Speaker 8: to call us, but actually have a real agenda that
Speaker 8: excites people and offers alternative what the DSA is saying,
Speaker 8: because none of these a lot of these current moderates,
Speaker 8: like in some ways we'd rather have them than a
Speaker 8: DSAY person. At the same time, like the moderates can't
Speaker 8: just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to be
Speaker 8: willing to take on the fights, like fight the nimbi's
Speaker 8: and build more housing because young.
Speaker 9: People can't afford housing anymore.
Speaker 8: So that's what we're trying to do, is like be
Speaker 8: a counterwait and up for a real alternative.
Speaker 7: About two years ago, CNL Deputy director Tobin Stone told
Speaker 7: the Columbia Journalism Review quote, were Hillary Clinton Democrats?
Speaker 1: Basically?
Speaker 7: Now that was two years ago, but last month I
Speaker 7: asked Stone what kind of politicians does CNL want to
Speaker 7: see taking power?
Speaker 8: They ftterally like you see people like Jake Auchenclass. I
Speaker 8: think when people hear and talk it residates like he's
Speaker 8: incredibly smart and he knows how to talk to people
Speaker 8: and about the issues that they're mad about.
Speaker 7: Jake Auchngloss headlined cnl's opening reception on the first day
Speaker 7: of the summit. Aucenlass is a Congressional rep from Massachusetts
Speaker 7: and a former Marine. After Zoramuandani won the Democratic primary
Speaker 7: last June, Auchenlaus wrote a blog post on Substack, reading,
Speaker 7: neither democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom.
Speaker 7: I propose a ten word agenda for financial freedom for
Speaker 7: the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt, and
Speaker 7: save social security unquote. Earlier this year, his reelection campaign
Speaker 7: accepted over twenty five thousand dollars from Pallentier, including seven
Speaker 7: thousand dollars from Pallenteer's CEO, Alexander Karp. In January twenty
Speaker 7: twenty three, Auchenclaus was the first Congressman to read an
Speaker 7: entirely chat GPT generated speech on the House floor. This
Speaker 7: speech was in support of a bill to create a
Speaker 7: joint US Israel AI Center for the Development of AI research,
Speaker 7: and last year Auchenclaus told Politico that it's quote unquote
Speaker 7: readily apparent that TikTok's algorithm is quote amplifying anti American,
Speaker 7: anti Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency. Stone told me, quote,
Speaker 7: we need more people like Jake Auchencloss and not all
Speaker 7: of the electeds in this room, but like a lot
Speaker 7: of the folks here. But also what we're trying to
Speaker 7: do and eventually want to do is like have our
Speaker 7: chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates unquote.
Speaker 7: Stone also pointed to State Rep. Jasper Martis, who became
Speaker 7: friendly with CNL through the organization's anti tariff advocacy.
Speaker 8: You want to see what we can do as an
Speaker 8: organization to help elevate voices like him who can be young,
Speaker 8: charismatic and is without offering an agenda that we think
Speaker 8: would do more harmful good on ere or do.
Speaker 7: You see a point where you will not just have
Speaker 7: to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA
Speaker 7: is offering, but but like but in primaries like specifically
Speaker 7: kind of like like like counter them, like like directly.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like that is like part of what we want
Speaker 8: to do is we have always been and will continue
Speaker 8: to be willing to get directly into those primaries, whether
Speaker 8: it's supporting someone we already you know and work with,
Speaker 8: like it likes to be up here today, or like
Speaker 8: if someone tries the primary jake out and class, our
Speaker 8: Boston chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors
Speaker 8: to support him, especially if it's a DSA candidate. But
Speaker 8: then also, like again, long term, we would love to
Speaker 8: be able to be the group that can identify the
Speaker 8: candidates who can run against the tasty. We want to
Speaker 8: do the work to find those young charis amountic candidates
Speaker 8: and get them to run again to the DSA.
Speaker 1: Candidate and offer them real trains.
Speaker 8: We really just want to see like organization like five
Speaker 8: year old feet even bigger. We want to not just
Speaker 8: be like doing this conference here in DC, but then
Speaker 8: go over like all over the country and say, like
Speaker 8: we can go in Denver and host a whole conference
Speaker 8: in Denver with all of our members of a chapter, yeah,
Speaker 8: talk and about the work and to elevate the pragmatic
Speaker 8: politicians in Colorado or New York.
Speaker 7: Late Slantaccorld, the Center for New Liberalism's annual impact report
Speaker 7: for the election year of twenty twenty four, claimed that
Speaker 7: the organization made five thousand, five hundred dollars in quote
Speaker 7: successful campaign contributions and gained one hundred and eighty six
Speaker 7: new members. That's one hundred and eighty six new members
Speaker 7: during the year of a highly impactful presidential election. DSA
Speaker 7: gained over seven thousand members in just the two months
Speaker 7: after the twenty twenty four election, and since then, DC
Speaker 7: membership has more than doubled, from fifty thousand to one
Speaker 7: hundred and twenty thousand members. Just ten years ago, DSA
Speaker 7: had only five thousand members before Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign,
Speaker 7: which breathed new life into the organization. But in order
Speaker 7: to fully understand CNL, you have to understand their deeply
Speaker 7: online origin, because they essentially internet trolled themselves into something
Speaker 7: resembling a real political organization. Center for New Liberalism can
Speaker 7: be traced back to our slash neoliberal on reddit, where
Speaker 7: after the twenty sixteen election, a new team of moderators
Speaker 7: tried to grow the subreddit as a place to discuss
Speaker 7: liberal policy making and free market economics in response to
Speaker 7: online conversations about politics being dominated by populism, whether from
Speaker 7: MAGA or the rejuvenated socialist left. Following Bernie's twenty sixteen campaign.
Speaker 7: These moderators turned the subreddit into an online community of
Speaker 7: policy wonks discussing economics as well as neoliberal shit posting,
Speaker 7: in an attempt to compete in the arena of internet
Speaker 7: politics and make center left liberalism cool and memeable. And
Speaker 7: I don't know about you, but when I think of cool,
Speaker 7: the first thing that comes to mind is reddit memes
Speaker 7: about liberal free market economics. In twenty eighteen, two moderators
Speaker 7: from this subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah Johnson, started to
Speaker 7: consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called
Speaker 7: the Neoliberal Project. They started a at neoliberal Twitter account
Speaker 7: and launched the Neoliberal Podcast. All this neoliberal branding was
Speaker 7: sort of a troll at the time. Still now, the
Speaker 7: word neoliberal was mostly used as a pejorative in current
Speaker 7: political parlance, so the Neoliberal Project's use of the term
Speaker 7: was almost this form of slur reclamation, a tongue in cheek,
Speaker 7: semi ironic but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies.
Speaker 7: To quote a twenty twenty two article in The Washington Post,
Speaker 7: quote Carl Nielsen, a twenty four year old aerospace engineer
Speaker 7: who leads the DC chapter told me his brother turned
Speaker 7: him onto this neoliberal community a few years ago, and
Speaker 7: he was immediately smitten.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 7: I was like, dude, this is it, this is where
Speaker 7: we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a
Speaker 7: neoliberal shill bracket, which is a Twitter tournament where you
Speaker 7: vote to determine who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was
Speaker 7: really easy to get excited about, so I jumped right in.
Speaker 1: Unquote.
Speaker 7: The neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March
Speaker 7: Madness style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists,
Speaker 7: or influencers are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year.
Speaker 7: This basically amounts to standing figures like Ezracline, Matt Iglesias,
Speaker 7: Nate Silver, and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described
Speaker 7: the organization as being on quote a quest to bring
Speaker 7: market friendly moderation into the age of Internet meme politics.
Speaker 7: In twenty twenty, the Neoliberal Project was absorbed into a
Speaker 7: centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement,
Speaker 7: Will Marshall, the president of PPI, said that the Young
Speaker 7: liberals quote fill a vacuum in our politics for a
Speaker 7: pragmatically liberal alternative to right wing populism and democratic socialism.
Speaker 7: Colin Mortimer, the Neoliberal Project's executive director, is quoted in
Speaker 7: the announcement saying, over the last several years, we have
Speaker 7: built the Neoliberal Project into an online community of politically
Speaker 7: engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological
Speaker 7: extremes that put our country in peril. Now we are
Speaker 7: proud to join one of the most storied think tanks
Speaker 7: in the country as we develop and advocate for a
Speaker 7: radically pragmatic agenda for change our country so so urgently needs.
Speaker 1: Unquote.
Speaker 7: A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute PPI was
Speaker 7: founded in the late eighties by the Democratic Leadership Council,
Speaker 7: when the word progressive referred to center left pragmatism, as
Speaker 7: opposed to the modern connotation of the term as used
Speaker 7: by left wing progressives today. In the nineties, PPI functioned
Speaker 7: as the idea factory of the Clinton administration and was
Speaker 7: a big part of the shift in the Democratic Party
Speaker 7: away from New Deal, Great Society redistributive liberalism towards the
Speaker 7: neoliberal politics of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era.
Speaker 7: Soon after joining PPI, the Neoliberal Project rebranded into the
Speaker 7: Center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive
Speaker 7: unpopularity of neoliberalism and that it might actually it be
Speaker 7: pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner.
Speaker 7: CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New
Speaker 7: Liberal podcast, told The Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal is
Speaker 7: a great word to use quote when what you want
Speaker 7: to do is get in fights on the internet, but
Speaker 7: it turned out to be less great for recruiting Congress
Speaker 7: people to their cause. Two years after joining PPI, the
Speaker 7: Center for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal
Speaker 7: Action Summit. Twenty twenty six was the fifth year of GLOBECN.
Speaker 7: The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in twenty twenty four that
Speaker 7: the Center for New Liberalism is quote Biden's fighters in
Speaker 7: the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his
Speaker 7: brand of politics trendy again unquote. The past few years,
Speaker 7: the Center for a New Liberalism has tried to legitimize
Speaker 7: itself beyond its Reddit shit posting and humble Twitter troll beginnings.
Speaker 7: Earlier this year, CNL brought on Greg Schultz as a
Speaker 7: senior advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager for Joe Biden's
Speaker 7: twenty twenty presidential primary campaign and general election strategist. What
Speaker 7: are the aspirations for the New Liberals? Is helping to
Speaker 7: secure a center leaning candidate for president in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 8: One of our big goals is definitely to influence to
Speaker 8: our next president and maybe there ends up being a
Speaker 8: more compromise candidate or what we're saying conference is the
Speaker 8: wrong word, but like you're seeing right now, like a
Speaker 8: lot of people are gravit hitting towards us off. If
Speaker 8: he does end up running like people like him, it's
Speaker 8: a bit we would rather not see like a further
Speaker 8: Leck candidate, and we also want to be exceeded. The
Speaker 8: platform that we run on in twenty twenty eight is
Speaker 8: not when that sometimes you have to have a lot
Speaker 8: of opopulance and but like it's kind of like slowly
Speaker 8: losing the you see right now, we're just like, oh,
Speaker 8: cut everyone's taxes, Like we want to see like a
Speaker 8: real concrete platform that doesn't overpromise can be enacted and
Speaker 8: you can maybe repair people's hope in government again. Senator
Speaker 8: Bennett talked about it earlier or alluded to it, but
Speaker 8: like people don't feel like government works anymore. So we
Speaker 8: want to make sure that the agenda in twenty twenty
Speaker 8: eight is one about making government work again. Obviously, we
Speaker 8: have to workshop the message. You figure out what it's
Speaker 8: gonna appeal to the American people the most, because part
Speaker 8: of it is like probably superfighting the DASI. We're aware
Speaker 8: they're going to exist in America, like they're part of
Speaker 8: the people climate. We don't want to take them away,
Speaker 8: but we also like think it will be extremely harmful
Speaker 8: if they're in the driver's seat. They should absolutely have input,
Speaker 8: but like if they're in the driver's seat, the presidential
Speaker 8: will like shit, like we're gonna lose again, and we
Speaker 8: want to make sure that we win because obviously if
Speaker 8: we lose again to Donald Trump or whoever his sudden
Speaker 8: era is like, it's not gonna be great for America
Speaker 8: or the rest of the international art national institutions.
Speaker 7: I mean, I think some of those DSA people would
Speaker 7: look at centrist candidates going up against Trump in like
Speaker 7: sixteen twenty four or like you know it's more center
Speaker 7: leaning that would be.
Speaker 8: Very hesitant to call either of those centrists or the
Speaker 8: center left. Like if you look at the exit polling
Speaker 8: data from twenty twenty four. Twenty four, everyone thought Kamala
Speaker 8: was much further like from the center than Trump, which.
Speaker 1: Is ever good at marketing. But like, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it was not center like you ask anyone in.
Speaker 8: This room who's worked for We all work for a
Speaker 8: center left modern organization. We will also was not center left.
Speaker 8: There's a reason we lost in because dinner press serve
Speaker 8: voters thought for too far to leward, and I means
Speaker 8: you've heard of two out of touch. I think that's
Speaker 8: a good right for him out of touch.
Speaker 7: I think it's really important to understand that too far
Speaker 7: left and too out of touch are vastly different things.
Speaker 7: And secondly, what is considered quote unquote left is not
Speaker 7: at all clear. Does left refer to left wing economics,
Speaker 7: wealthy distribution, or like the sort of performative liberal wokeism
Speaker 7: that was completely captured by corporations and the elite before
Speaker 7: being quickly dropped as Trump took back power. Because the
Speaker 7: recent batch of left wing populists are running on economic
Speaker 7: policies to make life more affordable, their focus on uplifting
Speaker 7: workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of
Speaker 7: large swaths of marginalized populations way more than corporations posting
Speaker 7: black squares, academic language policing, White House pride events, and
Speaker 7: Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole as
Speaker 7: a scarf. A New York Times pull from May of
Speaker 7: twenty twenty six found that the majority of Democrats and
Speaker 7: Democrat lean independence do not want the party to move
Speaker 7: to the center on healthcare or economic issues, and should
Speaker 7: embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, sixty three
Speaker 7: percent of likely Dems said our political and economic system
Speaker 7: needs major changes, and twenty percent said it needs to
Speaker 7: be torn down completely. Eighty eight percent said the economic
Speaker 7: system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans.
Speaker 7: Seventy four percent of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel.
Speaker 7: Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. Ninety one
Speaker 7: percent had not heard of abundance. Only five percent said
Speaker 7: the economic conditions were good or excellent, and forty nine
Speaker 7: percent said they were favorable to socialism versus twenty two
Speaker 7: percent unfavorable. Only twenty percent of respondents said the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party was too far to the left, and respondents were
Speaker 7: evenly split on whether the party in general should move
Speaker 7: to the center, but most said that the party should
Speaker 7: move to the left on things like healthcare. A frequent
Speaker 7: topic of discussion at the New Liberal Action summit was
Speaker 7: how the Democratic Party can win back quote unquote working
Speaker 7: class voters and a spoiler. They think it's by moving
Speaker 7: to the center.
Speaker 10: Something we've talked about at PBA for a long time
Speaker 10: is looking back as for a non college voters.
Speaker 1: Working class voters.
Speaker 11: We have a new report king assuming that showcases House and.
Speaker 12: Left fines are being a lot better in that regard
Speaker 12: than their progressive countervice.
Speaker 13: We do a little whole in non college voters working
Speaker 13: class voters.
Speaker 8: As usual, most of our data says that the people
Speaker 8: that vote for Zara tend to be heavily college educated,
Speaker 8: whereas is people without degrees that voting for quota, which
Speaker 8: the best sweet lens for working custers is not I
Speaker 8: think it's just has college reread does don't have a
Speaker 8: college degree.
Speaker 7: The New Liberals believe that DSA is out of step
Speaker 7: with the working class, and by working class they mean
Speaker 7: voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to
Speaker 7: high profile races like zoron Or Abdul al said, where
Speaker 7: the more center leaning candidate often quote unquote wins the
Speaker 7: non college or low income demographic. Now, these wins are
Speaker 7: often in the single digits. In the Democratic primary, Andrew
Speaker 7: Cuomo quote unquote one the under fifty k a year
Speaker 7: income bracket by eight points. Quomo also won the highest
Speaker 7: income bracket two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in over
Speaker 7: by eleven points, while Mamdani dominated the middle income brackets.
Speaker 7: Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul al
Speaker 7: Said versus Hailey Stevens primary in Michigan. Left wing populist
Speaker 7: candidates are doing so well with college educated voters, in
Speaker 7: part because they're just driving such high turnout, especially among
Speaker 7: millennials and Gen Z. But center left liberals will often
Speaker 7: use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college
Speaker 7: graduates to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled
Speaker 7: elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote unquote
Speaker 7: real working class, which again to them, means a voter
Speaker 7: without a college degree. And while income level or education
Speaker 7: can be an indicator of class, just defining working class
Speaker 7: as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really
Speaker 7: make sense nor does it tell you anything about the
Speaker 7: class interests of voters, because it doesn't actually point to
Speaker 7: anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just
Speaker 7: whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point
Speaker 7: to what your income is, which which is itself kind
Speaker 7: of a flawed way of understanding what working class means,
Speaker 7: which in a Marxist sense, refers to whether you live
Speaker 7: off selling your labor for a wage, that is, being
Speaker 7: a worker, or if you own private property like business
Speaker 7: and make your money off of controlling other people's labor.
Speaker 7: But all that matters to these liberals is voter's proximity
Speaker 7: to higher education based on looking at election data, where
Speaker 7: DSA type candidates do very well with college educated voters
Speaker 7: and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized
Speaker 7: as a non college educated or maybe sometimes a low
Speaker 7: income voter, even if the difference is only a few
Speaker 7: percentage points. The liberal analysis of class simply being whether
Speaker 7: or not a voter has a college degree offers no
Speaker 7: insight into why a middle class of educated work are
Speaker 7: moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of
Speaker 7: democratic socialism, and are voting for policies that benefit people
Speaker 7: largely more poor than them, instead of just supporting the
Speaker 7: center left democrat who would advance elite interests. To this point,
Speaker 7: I talked with Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology
Speaker 7: at the City University of New York, about why class
Speaker 7: analysis is important.
Speaker 12: It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be
Speaker 12: regarding the politics when it comes to how should the economy,
Speaker 12: how should our society be oriented. If you are a
Speaker 12: worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you
Speaker 12: are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal.
Speaker 12: If you are an owner, your interests are going to
Speaker 12: be geared oppositely. They're going to be geared towards capital,
Speaker 12: towards ownership of private property and the making of profit
Speaker 12: being protected against the interests of life, labor. And so
Speaker 12: this is the conception of class that I think paints
Speaker 12: a much more lucid picture of the world then one
Speaker 12: that just sort of treats, you know, the poorer you are,
Speaker 12: the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that
Speaker 12: the base of the working class is always the poor
Speaker 12: relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working
Speaker 12: class is its source of power, and it's the better
Speaker 12: paid workers who, while you know, they are in a
Speaker 12: theoretical sense in the working class. They often are the
Speaker 12: ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being
Speaker 12: compensated fairly well. But again it's a kind of analysis
Speaker 12: that can't comprehend the liberal view cannot really comprehend how
Speaker 12: college educated people who may be securing somewhat you know,
Speaker 12: decent middle class jobs, they can't understand how they are
Speaker 12: also a part of the working class and respond to
Speaker 12: the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy,
Speaker 12: when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that
Speaker 12: it just it squeezes the whole of the working class.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and there's these certain moments with like technological advance
Speaker 7: like you're seeing with like AI that lead to the
Speaker 7: de skilling of certain workers. Right the past twenty years,
Speaker 7: adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Yeah,
Speaker 7: work in tech. This is like the last growth area
Speaker 7: of the economy.
Speaker 1: Learn coding.
Speaker 7: And now those skills are not as useful as they
Speaker 7: used to be because AI can do it. And there's
Speaker 7: this like proletarianization of tech workers happening that just this
Speaker 7: like liberal model. The working class then can't real understand
Speaker 7: why whise people are going to be turned against liberalists.
Speaker 12: Capital produces its own grave diggers marx rights in the
Speaker 12: manifesto right that, you know, the socialist projects sees that
Speaker 12: there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production,
Speaker 12: not only in that capital appropriates exploits workers. The capitalist
Speaker 12: class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker. That's fundamental to
Speaker 12: the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is
Speaker 12: continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out
Speaker 12: of their positions of property, but also out of positions
Speaker 12: of skilled labor into you know, having to move down
Speaker 12: into proletarianized positions where you are not going to be
Speaker 12: paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building
Speaker 12: a class that goes against it.
Speaker 6: It's the socialist.
Speaker 12: Project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode
Speaker 12: of production, and it is the liberal project that is
Speaker 12: utterly blind to them that just to the liberals, no
Speaker 12: capitalism is good. It increases GDP, right, it leads to
Speaker 12: economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent
Speaker 12: that you can show them to them. They absolutely refuse
Speaker 12: to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are
Speaker 12: fundamental to the capitalist system, and so they have no
Speaker 12: answer to this. You can see how these people who
Speaker 12: are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants to
Speaker 12: the liberal institutions, they perceive like, well, if you're smart
Speaker 12: and you have the right policies and you believe the
Speaker 12: right things, you'll get taken care of. It's a very
Speaker 12: different experience from I think a lot of college grads
Speaker 12: who have tried very hard to do the right things
Speaker 12: and who do not have a place in the economy,
Speaker 12: or a very limited place with very limited power and
Speaker 12: very limited resources.
Speaker 7: While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mamdani among the lowest income
Speaker 7: voters in the twenty twenty five Democratic primary come the
Speaker 7: general election in November, that ceased to be the case.
Speaker 7: In the general, Mamdanni won low income districts by eleven points,
Speaker 7: to quote the New York Times quote, Mamdani largely expanded
Speaker 7: on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods
Speaker 7: across the city. He swept communities of every income level
Speaker 7: save for New York's wealthiest enclaves, where his top opponent,
Speaker 7: former Governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best unquote in the November general.
Speaker 7: Donnie also won districts where less than twenty percent of
Speaker 7: the residents have a college degree by thirteen points, though
Speaker 7: a CNN exit poll of less than five thousand voters
Speaker 7: showed that Cuomo did just five percent better than Mamdani
Speaker 7: with voters without a college degree. I think it is
Speaker 7: also worth reiterating that one out of ten people who
Speaker 7: voted for Zorn in twenty twenty five also voted for
Speaker 7: Trump in twenty twenty four. That's something that liberals never
Speaker 7: talk about, And something else they never talk about is
Speaker 7: just how much these non college low income statistics graf
Speaker 7: ont age. More than anything else, both Mamdani and Abdul
Speaker 7: al Sayid overwhelmingly won with voters aged eighteen to forty five,
Speaker 7: young people who are low income, who maybe have not
Speaker 7: graduated college or are in college, or maybe just graduated
Speaker 7: college but are it's all low income. Those young people
Speaker 7: are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going
Speaker 7: to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election.
Speaker 7: The sort of low income voters that are going towards
Speaker 7: either these incumbents or more traditional moderate candidates are generally
Speaker 7: older voters. And if we want to have a real
Speaker 7: discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters,
Speaker 7: maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters.
Speaker 7: Then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had.
Speaker 7: But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract
Speaker 7: low income voters is just completely not true. Many low
Speaker 7: income people without a college degree are old retirees who
Speaker 7: tend to vote more conservative, even if they're registered Democrats.
Speaker 7: Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending. Abdul said
Speaker 7: was outspent eleven to one, and that is going to
Speaker 7: have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves
Speaker 7: with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural
Speaker 7: areas and districts with low information or less engaged voters.
Speaker 7: This same general trend happened in the June twenty twenty
Speaker 7: six Democratic primary in New York City. That election was
Speaker 7: not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that
Speaker 7: skewed whether someone was backing the incumbent or the DSA
Speaker 7: was age. By and large, Younger voters, whether they were
Speaker 7: middle class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates
Speaker 7: like Clare val Dez, while older voters backed the incumbents,
Speaker 7: the moderates, and the establishment politicians that these voters were
Speaker 7: maybe more familiar with that maybe has been representing their
Speaker 7: district for anywhere between five to thirty years. But what
Speaker 7: makes this whole college educated working class debate so absurd
Speaker 7: to me is that most of the city based Center
Speaker 7: for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested in trying
Speaker 7: to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking,
Speaker 7: like that if.
Speaker 8: The DSA can only appeal to the people in the
Speaker 8: college there, that's seventy sixty to seventy percent of voters
Speaker 8: that we are missing and we need to do better
Speaker 8: than that.
Speaker 7: Do you think that the New Liberals should be going
Speaker 7: after like a totally different voting block and what DSA
Speaker 7: is trying to go after.
Speaker 8: I don't know if that's our role. Like most of
Speaker 8: our chapters do operate in cities where it is more
Speaker 8: college educated things there are our role we view as
Speaker 8: like trying to convince the college educating people that we
Speaker 8: have the better ideas in the more optimistic vision, whereas
Speaker 8: then it's other groups like if we have a chapter
Speaker 8: in Swing district, obviously that's for PUAL that like our
Speaker 8: chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on
Speaker 8: not that. Yeah yeah, yeah, So like I think there
Speaker 8: are groups in the stuff that should be doing that.
Speaker 8: I don't know, but our role.
Speaker 7: So CNL has already foreclosed themselves to really only going
Speaker 7: after college educated voters, despite insisting that their ideas are
Speaker 7: what actually can appeal to the working class. In evaluating
Speaker 7: the political potential of the Center for New Liberalism, one
Speaker 7: must keep in mind how their online shit posting origins
Speaker 7: still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNL describes
Speaker 7: itself as a quote unquote digital first grassroots organization, and
Speaker 7: on their website they claim, quote our work reaches upwards
Speaker 7: of sixty million people a month. That number seems to
Speaker 7: be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account
Speaker 7: on x the Everything app. These are Twitter views. So
Speaker 7: as much as CNL likes to put on their little
Speaker 7: in person networking events their own metrics, the organization is
Speaker 7: essentially a glorified Twitter account. And I could just go
Speaker 7: through years of bad or offensive tweets, and many people
Speaker 7: at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made
Speaker 7: by DSA candidate Daria Liisa of Ila Chavier, But rather
Speaker 7: than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with
Speaker 7: the actual substance of their politics and how CNL is
Speaker 7: trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the DSA,
Speaker 7: in part because of how much it's focused on online
Speaker 7: edge lord contrarian liberalism. For whatever reason, be it their upbringing,
Speaker 7: class position, or type of education, these liberals have not
Speaker 7: hopped on the populist train, but still feel left doubt
Speaker 7: from the rest of their age peers who are all
Speaker 7: having fun with DSA, and so they have decided to
Speaker 7: define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism
Speaker 7: in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in
Speaker 7: the Democratic Party. So, in effect, their new liberal politics
Speaker 7: largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against popular
Speaker 7: left wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that
Speaker 7: left wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class.
Speaker 7: It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online. In an
Speaker 7: attempt to make center left liberals cool again, I went
Speaker 7: to a bar after the summit with a few of
Speaker 7: the attendees and a law student was passionately trying to
Speaker 7: argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency
Speaker 7: and just have states pay for their own disaster response
Speaker 7: so that quote unquote, my tax dollars won't have to
Speaker 7: go towards idiots in Florida, And like both myself and
Speaker 7: a writer from the journal Liberal Currents had to explain
Speaker 7: from like first principles why it's good to care for
Speaker 7: poor people and care about it general public good. That's
Speaker 7: what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter
Speaker 7: of the New Liberals were involved with that pro billionaire
Speaker 7: march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of
Speaker 7: California's proposed wealth tax, and stunts like this. March for
Speaker 7: billionaires is another perfect example of cnl's overly online, irony
Speaker 7: poisoned politics, which still display a deeper sincerity. Before I
Speaker 7: interviewed Professor Porter, I had him listen to a recent
Speaker 7: episode of the New Liberal podcast, hosted by the co
Speaker 7: founder of CNL, Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism
Speaker 7: is in crisis, but because there is no more great
Speaker 7: struggle in America. Basically, the economy is doing too good
Speaker 7: and that's triggered a sort of post modern crisis of meaning,
Speaker 7: resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to
Speaker 7: feel something, and confusingly, cnl's co founder proposes a centrist
Speaker 7: neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis.
Speaker 12: The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and
Speaker 12: how one of the central liberal you know, programs of
Speaker 12: like a revived liberalism has to be like kind of
Speaker 12: you know, technocratic politics and a renewed like faith in
Speaker 12: technocratic politics. And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting
Speaker 12: because you know, the point that like you need technocrats
Speaker 12: to do good policy, to do good governance is a
Speaker 12: bit of an odd one because absolutelytly you need technicians
Speaker 12: to do good policy, like you know, complex social institutions
Speaker 12: at the scale of like you know, a city or
Speaker 12: a state or a federal government in today's world. You
Speaker 12: need people who know how to run systems and who
Speaker 12: are trained. You need intellectuals. You need technicians in a
Speaker 12: general sense, right, you need specialized people. What's interesting is
Speaker 12: that the whole thing allies like the crat part like
Speaker 12: technocrat the idea that well, those with technical capacities also
Speaker 12: rule this way in which it just completely conflates the
Speaker 12: idea of technical expertise and decision making at the highest
Speaker 12: level right, that it doesn't even think that those are
Speaker 12: two separate realms. It literally is the people who can
Speaker 12: technically do the job are also the people who should
Speaker 12: make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do,
Speaker 12: how the whole system functions, right, which essentially on this
Speaker 12: notion that there is only one game, right that you
Speaker 12: know in the podcast you hear a lot is essentially
Speaker 12: you know, the unspoken aim, And for them it doesn't
Speaker 12: need to be spoken, because as they conceive the world,
Speaker 12: it is the only real game to be played is
Speaker 12: economic growth, right, is just growing the GDP machine, capital growth,
Speaker 12: capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what
Speaker 12: kind of a society do we want to build? Their
Speaker 12: main drive is GDP growth, and so everything else is
Speaker 12: just sort of how do you technically do that best? Right,
Speaker 12: how do you improve productivity? How do you grow the
Speaker 12: economy best? They have no concept of like that there's
Speaker 12: any kind of like political battle at the heart of that.
Speaker 12: It's a view of politics without politics.
Speaker 7: Many of the attendees at the New Liberal Action Summit,
Speaker 7: we're aspiring technocrats often self described as such. I think
Speaker 7: the main tendency among these overly online center less liberals
Speaker 7: is to confuse technical knowledge for politics for the ability
Speaker 7: to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority,
Speaker 7: not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority
Speaker 7: of what is true or useful knowledge. To the contrarian
Speaker 7: liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad,
Speaker 7: but it's actually evil because it disrupts the market. It
Speaker 7: unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's all these studies
Speaker 7: proving this.
Speaker 14: Right.
Speaker 7: In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may
Speaker 7: have trade offs. That yes, rent control might negatively affect
Speaker 7: the class of landlords and for profit developers, it might
Speaker 7: alter supply, but it might be still worth doing as
Speaker 7: a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition
Speaker 7: to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing
Speaker 7: to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of trade
Speaker 7: offs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to serving the market,
Speaker 7: to just acting on what studies say is true. The
Speaker 7: liberal technocrat thinks that politics is just the application of
Speaker 7: technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on
Speaker 7: what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible.
Speaker 7: History did not end in the nineties. What is politically
Speaker 7: possible changes over time, and politics is about responding to
Speaker 7: different opportunities in history.
Speaker 6: They're missing the part of history which is class struggle.
Speaker 15: Right.
Speaker 12: It's the case that we're in a capitalist world and
Speaker 12: that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain competitive production
Speaker 12: on the world stage and internally as well. Totally true,
Speaker 12: but that does not follow that, you know, you just
Speaker 12: pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about
Speaker 12: how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just
Speaker 12: completely left out by these people is the notion that
Speaker 12: in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth,
Speaker 12: how that's distributed distributive politics. These people, they don't seem
Speaker 12: to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I
Speaker 12: think he literally he says something like, you know, the
Speaker 12: biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle, like
Speaker 12: it literally just conceives the world as like there aren't
Speaker 12: really any problems. Things are fine. There's big citation needed
Speaker 12: on that one. He's just sort of like, yeah, things
Speaker 12: are things are fine. If you look at it, things
Speaker 12: are fine, which is just. I mean, it's just an
Speaker 12: insane thing to say wages haven't risen in like forty
Speaker 12: fifty years, you know, inequality has exploded, life has stagnated
Speaker 12: for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are
Speaker 12: most workers. So the idea that there is actually a
Speaker 12: realm the politics that revolves around class struggle, around you know,
Speaker 12: how wealth is distributed and how we gear our economic growth.
Speaker 12: To them, that's a separate category. And so their entire
Speaker 12: politics is the politics of technocracy, and in that, you know,
Speaker 12: I'll give it to them. I think that they probably
Speaker 12: are pretty good at the technical expertise of governance stuff.
Speaker 12: I mean, one would expect Liberalism has been in power
Speaker 12: in the United States for most of its history, so yeah,
Speaker 12: I would expect that they would be good at technical expertise.
Speaker 12: Their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing.
Speaker 12: It's that they have totally jettisoned politics, the deciding what
Speaker 12: do you do with that expertise?
Speaker 6: How do you gear the.
Speaker 12: Economy, how do you consciously control where it's going, how
Speaker 12: distribution happens, Who is empowered in government and in the economy. Right,
Speaker 12: this is all to discuss class, right, which these people
Speaker 12: basically never do.
Speaker 7: This limited view of what politics is then determines what
Speaker 7: the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on and what
Speaker 7: they view as being impossible, like how they view Medicare
Speaker 7: for all as this impossible goal, whether that's because they
Speaker 7: think voters will never support switching away from private health care,
Speaker 7: or that a single payer healthcare system might even hurt
Speaker 7: the economy and therefore we should oppose it.
Speaker 1: Their extremely narrow view of.
Speaker 7: What is politically possible is the main reason why this
Speaker 7: sort of young new liberal organization will never succeed in
Speaker 7: rivaling DSAY because the whole better things aren't possible mentality
Speaker 7: makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause,
Speaker 7: especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass
Speaker 7: Medicare for all because x Y reason, a rent freeze
Speaker 7: is actually evil because x Y reason. I don't know
Speaker 7: how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone
Speaker 7: except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the
Speaker 7: entire makeup of CNL as an organization. After the summit,
Speaker 7: an elected member of cnl's leadership Steering Committee got drunk
Speaker 7: at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better
Speaker 7: when certain types of fathers are incarcerated because some study
Speaker 7: proved that the type of father who gets charged with
Speaker 7: the crime would be a bad influence on his kids.
Speaker 1: A commands of the third ring.
Speaker 7: That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project.
Speaker 7: This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment
Speaker 7: to cold, emotionless, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to
Speaker 7: what's socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk, fully aware that
Speaker 7: what this saying is morally detestable, while self assured in
Speaker 7: appealing to the authority of technical knowledge.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: This tendency to fall back on the pretext that a
Speaker 7: study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that
Speaker 7: there may be alternative solutions to the base problem here.
Speaker 7: When your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration,
Speaker 7: then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's Globecon
Speaker 7: twenty twenty six, next episode, I'll be doing a deeper
Speaker 7: dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising populism.
Speaker 7: Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 7: Last episod eisode I detailed my experience at globecon twenty
Speaker 7: twenty six, or the New Liberal Action Summit, a three
Speaker 7: day convention for young liberal professionals to socialize and listen
Speaker 7: to panels about zoning reform, energy policy, and broad based taxes.
Speaker 7: The summit is put on by a nonprofit called the
Speaker 7: Center for New Liberalism, a digital advocacy organization that promotes
Speaker 7: center left policies and neoliberal economics. The Center for New
Speaker 7: Liberalism or CNL, basically started as a group of policy
Speaker 7: wonks on Reddit and Twitter making political memes during Trump's
Speaker 7: first term, but in twenty twenty, CNL was brought into
Speaker 7: the clintonite think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Since then,
Speaker 7: CNL has been doing yearly summits and more IRL political
Speaker 7: engagement in hopes of filling in the role of something
Speaker 7: like the DSA but for more technocratically inlined moderate young Libs.
Speaker 7: The twenty twenty six New Liberal Action Summit took place
Speaker 7: in the backdrop of an ascendant democratic socialist and left
Speaker 7: wing populist movement winning congressional primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado,
Speaker 7: and now Michigan, beating the more moderate establishment type candidates.
Speaker 7: A few days before the Summit in DC. The New
Speaker 7: Liberal Podcast released an episode about the current crisis of
Speaker 7: Liberalism where CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson talks about why
Speaker 7: he thinks people are quote abandoning the idea that liberalism
Speaker 7: can help them and are turning to populism, whether from
Speaker 7: the right or the left.
Speaker 9: The clear trend over time is that we are getting
Speaker 9: more and more are extremely progressive members of Congress, representatives, etc.
Speaker 9: That we are getting more socialists and more DSA aligned candidates,
Speaker 9: and that the far left is simply out organizing and
Speaker 9: out hustling the moderate wing of the party or the
Speaker 9: liberal wing of the party, however you'd like to say it,
Speaker 9: and this is troubling.
Speaker 7: Jeremiah Johnson cites the Mamdani DSA sweep in New York
Speaker 7: last June, where socialist candidates beat establishment incumbents, and this
Speaker 7: episode came out about a month before the populist wins
Speaker 7: in the Michigan Democratic primary. But Johnson does bring up
Speaker 7: the Colorado primary, where one of cnl's favorite politicians, Senator
Speaker 7: Michael Bennett, just lost his primary for Colorado governor to
Speaker 7: the state attorney general, who, to quote Johnson quote frankly,
Speaker 7: was not even necessarily more progressive than him, but simply
Speaker 7: rode the wave of I'm the popular, stanty establishment, I'm
Speaker 7: more angry, etc.
Speaker 4: Etc.
Speaker 7: Michael Bennett is an interesting case. In twenty twenty, he
Speaker 7: ran for president as like the most centrist candidate of
Speaker 7: that entire bunch and only qualified for the first two debates.
Speaker 7: He used to be like one of the least populist
Speaker 7: senators in the country, like a very CNL type politician who,
Speaker 7: weeks after losing his primary bid, opened the New Liberal
Speaker 7: Actions summit with a forty five minute fireside chat with
Speaker 7: cnl's deputy director Tobin Stone. Senator Bennett's remarks earned a
Speaker 7: very tepid response from the attendees. Bennett blamed the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party for losing to Trump because they had no ideas.
Speaker 7: He talked about the need to build housing and transit
Speaker 7: from a bottom up approach that helps regular people, not
Speaker 7: just those at the top, how his constituents in Colorado
Speaker 7: can't afford to live where they grew up, and how
Speaker 7: people in their late twenties and thirties can't get a
Speaker 7: real job. He often mentioned quote working people and quote affordability,
Speaker 7: and referred to Bernie Sanders as his quote friend, the
Speaker 7: whole talk felt kind of Bernie Light, which was especially
Speaker 7: odd because the summit schedule said that this fireside chat
Speaker 7: was going to focus on the threat of the ascendant
Speaker 7: populist left, but to the extent that Bennett targeted populism,
Speaker 7: it was the Trumpean right wing authoritarian variety. And like,
Speaker 7: don't get me wrong, Michael Bennett is still very much
Speaker 7: a moderate. But if even a long time ultracentrist like
Speaker 7: him feels like he has to make overtures to progressives
Speaker 7: or populists even when he's speaking to the completely wrong audience,
Speaker 7: then the Libs must be really feeling the pressure on
Speaker 7: that New liberal podcast CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson asked
Speaker 7: his listeners to consider, if things continue on their current course,
Speaker 7: what the socialist movement could look like in ten years.
Speaker 9: But just ask yourself, you know, is this type of
Speaker 9: candidate winning democratic primaries more or less often than they
Speaker 9: were five years ago, than they were ten years ago,
Speaker 9: and five to ten years from now, do you expect
Speaker 9: that they will have more energy or less energy? Because
Speaker 9: I think any honest appraisal of where we are at
Speaker 9: right now is that the socialist wing of the Democratic
Speaker 9: Party has the energy and the momentum. Their organizing infrastructure
Speaker 9: is far better, far more than the moderate or the
Speaker 9: liberal wing of the party. They have more people who
Speaker 9: are out there willing to do the work knocking on doors,
Speaker 9: phone banking, posting on social media. That is where the
Speaker 9: grassroots energy of the Democratic Party is. And we can
Speaker 9: talk about whether or not the voters are there yet,
Speaker 9: but the voters ultimately follow elite opinion.
Speaker 7: Voters are not just mindless sheep that follow elite opinion
Speaker 7: see here the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four elections.
Speaker 7: They can be influenced by the power of capital, but
Speaker 7: voters do evaluate their material conditions and compare that to
Speaker 7: how different candidates promise to change or not change those
Speaker 7: conditions once in office. There may be an elitist side
Speaker 7: of the academic left, but the unspoken assertion here that
Speaker 7: the DSA is uniquely representative of the elite as opposed
Speaker 7: to the centrist Democrats, who do not represent elite opinion
Speaker 7: and are more in touch with voters. That's patently absurd,
Speaker 7: and cnl's new senior advisor agrees. Here's Greg Schultz, Biden's
Speaker 7: campaign manager and general election strategist who spoke on a
Speaker 7: Globecon panel about winning back Maha voters.
Speaker 13: I think farm the reality is a Democratic Party is
Speaker 13: a self righteous, know at all party, and voters not
Speaker 13: can feel that and they can see it. Do you
Speaker 13: think we know it's better for you and your family
Speaker 13: than put.
Speaker 16: You know it's for you and your advantiate.
Speaker 13: So one is we are increasingly a party of the academical, elite,
Speaker 13: academical fility. So I don't think absolually talk for real
Speaker 13: players understand their real.
Speaker 7: Concern So, while Greg at least admits among friends that
Speaker 7: the Dems are an elite party detached from the concerns
Speaker 7: of voters, CNL co founder and podcast host Jeremiah Johnson
Speaker 7: remains somewhat confused as to why people just don't support
Speaker 7: the smartest policies as defined by him and are instead
Speaker 7: turning to populism.
Speaker 9: Any honest appraisal of where we are at says that
Speaker 9: liberals are losing ground to socialists in the Democratic Party.
Speaker 9: To some degree, the establishment has done this to themselves.
Speaker 9: I think it would be wrong for any analysis to
Speaker 9: leave that out. But having said that, in America, living
Speaker 9: conditions are still quite good.
Speaker 7: Even in his explanation of why liberalism is failing, he
Speaker 7: still insists that things are actually fine. He talks about
Speaker 7: how real median income is quote unquote as high as
Speaker 7: it's ever been, which doesn't actually mean that things are
Speaker 7: going great. It's barely keeping up with inflation. But Johnson
Speaker 7: relies on this narrow batch of macro economic statistics to
Speaker 7: insist that quote America is still throw life is still good.
Speaker 7: Last week I forced Ben Rose Porter, a professor of
Speaker 7: sociology at the City University of New York, to listen
Speaker 7: to this whole Crisis in Liberalism podcast and then discuss
Speaker 7: his thoughts.
Speaker 12: The mainstream capitalist order, which is to say, the liberal
Speaker 12: order as its political correlate is breaking down, is failing,
Speaker 12: so you would expect to see if political moves away
Speaker 12: from it. There's a very famous graph of worker compensation
Speaker 12: to productivity. So worker compensation that's wages, basically how much
Speaker 12: of profits more or less is going to the workers. Right,
Speaker 12: So how much are workers compensated? Tracked with productivity, which
Speaker 12: is to say, how much are firms producing relative to inputs? Right,
Speaker 12: input to output productivity over time, and this is over
Speaker 12: the course of the twentieth century. And what you see
Speaker 12: in that graph is that for basically the whole of
Speaker 12: the twentieth century, wages worker compensation tracks very closely with productivity.
Speaker 12: So as firms industries produce more and more stuff, are
Speaker 12: more and more efficiently producing, are creating more and more wealth,
Speaker 12: workers wages are going up and keeping pace with that.
Speaker 12: So the share of wealth between the owning classes, the bourgeois,
Speaker 12: and the workers is staying about level.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 12: As there's more made, workers are getting some of that, right,
Speaker 12: and they're getting an even piece. And around eighty eighty one,
Speaker 12: you know the collapse of the labor movement in the
Speaker 12: seventies and especially with Reagan. Right, you see worker compensation flatline,
Speaker 12: and it basically has been inert since the eighties. Since
Speaker 12: the beginning of the eighties, productivity has continued to go
Speaker 12: up about the same rate. So we have been producing
Speaker 12: more and more wealth in this country. Right, This is
Speaker 12: what capital's production does. It's basically almost always growing in productivity. Right,
Speaker 12: We've been producing more and more wealth, and the share
Speaker 12: of that wealth that the workers get has flatlined. You
Speaker 12: cannot spin that as things are basically fine. That has
Speaker 12: all kinds of of of major effects one of the
Speaker 12: big ones is, you know, inequality. Even if workers are
Speaker 12: not being paid starvation wages, living in that profoundly and
Speaker 12: a profoundly inequal society has all kinds of effects socially speaking, right,
Speaker 12: It does for the middle classes too, people who are
Speaker 12: you know, comfortable, who are doing well, who have who
Speaker 12: have captured a bit of that growth, because it gets
Speaker 12: worse the further you go down the line. That when
Speaker 12: you look at like wages for the lowest paid workers,
Speaker 12: they've often even decreased, right, But even for those middle
Speaker 12: class professionals and such, who may very well be comfortable,
Speaker 12: and many of them, we should stress, are not. I
Speaker 12: think that when you go through and you look at
Speaker 12: the data, there's a lo lot of indicators of all
Speaker 12: kinds of ways in which people might not be comfortable.
Speaker 12: But even those that are comfortable, you know, they still
Speaker 12: have to live in a society that is profoundly unequal.
Speaker 12: That is letting the bottom strata just rot, right, that
Speaker 12: is just letting like people die on the streets. That
Speaker 12: has an effect.
Speaker 6: Anyone with a.
Speaker 12: Soul with a conscience is you know, affected by that.
Speaker 7: Having foreclosed the idea that there is anything economically or
Speaker 7: structurally wrong with society. Jeremiah Johnson is left to conclude
Speaker 7: that this quote crisis in liberalism appears to be a
Speaker 7: crisis of confidence, a crisis of storytelling. So to Johnson,
Speaker 7: it's simply that the liberal story is no longer as
Speaker 7: compelling as the alternative populist narratives. Johnson mentions two potential
Speaker 7: explanations for liberalism's decline, one coming from the right, the
Speaker 7: other from the left, neither of which he finds convincing.
Speaker 7: Johnson says that the right wing is promoting a cultural
Speaker 7: explanation for liberalism's decline, arguing that liberals have moved too
Speaker 7: far to the left on cultural issues and lost voters,
Speaker 7: while the left wing offers a quote unquote materialist explanation, claiming.
Speaker 9: Living conditions have actually deteriorated, and your statistics do not
Speaker 9: capture this, and people can tell when their lives are getting,
Speaker 9: you know, materially worse. You know, when things cost too
Speaker 9: much and they don't have as much income, and that
Speaker 9: is why people turn away from liberalism towards alternate explanations.
Speaker 7: Of course, in this entire fifty two minutes of podcast,
Speaker 7: Johnson never talks about like wealth inequality, as a real
Speaker 7: problem in society because someone from his self described neoliberal
Speaker 7: economic worldview just does not believe that skyrocketing wealth inequality
Speaker 7: is actually a real problem in and of itself. But
Speaker 7: then he has to pretend to be confused as to
Speaker 7: why more and more people are falling for this materialist
Speaker 7: explanation of why there's a crisis in liberalism and why
Speaker 7: people are not convinced by the quote unquote story that
Speaker 7: liberalism is telling them with macroeconomic statistics. You know, the
Speaker 7: stock market is booming, Unemployment is low. Things like that
Speaker 7: don't actually indicate what types of jobs are available. Service
Speaker 7: industry or gig economy. Work is crushing and offers no
Speaker 7: path for a sustainable future. Buying a house seems impossible.
Speaker 7: Rent keeps skyrocketing, energy costs are ballooning, all while the
Speaker 7: rich get even richer. Even if, on average, the median
Speaker 7: wage has kept up with inflation at about three point
Speaker 7: five percent per year, there are, of course many people
Speaker 7: who are not seeing that wage growth, and even if
Speaker 7: they are, that three point five percent is far below
Speaker 7: the thirty percent rise in the price of groceries over
Speaker 7: the past few years, or the twenty five percent jump
Speaker 7: in residential electricity rates, and of course minimum wage workers
Speaker 7: are not keeping up with inflation, let alone the massive
Speaker 7: bumps in housing, education, and healthcare costs. A New York
Speaker 7: Times poll from last May showed that among Democrats and
Speaker 7: Democrat leaning voters, only five percent said the economic conditions
Speaker 7: were good or excellent. Eighty eight percent said the economic
Speaker 7: system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans.
Speaker 7: Sixty three percent said that the political and economic system
Speaker 7: needs major changes, and twenty percent sid it needs to
Speaker 7: be torn down completely. But Johnson would have you believe
Speaker 7: that the materialist explanation is without merit because DSA candidates
Speaker 7: actually get a lot of support from middle class workers.
Speaker 9: The people who tend most to be sympathetic to this
Speaker 9: kind of leftist story tend to be the people with
Speaker 9: the most education and the highest incomes. If you look at,
Speaker 9: you know, the demographics of Zorn Mamdani's win in New York,
Speaker 9: he won the highest income brackets. And this is despite
Speaker 9: you know, having kind of a eat the rich kind
Speaker 9: of persona, and very very DSA aligned politics. And this
Speaker 9: makes me doubt the materialist explanation.
Speaker 7: As we discussed last episode, this is just patently untrue.
Speaker 7: In both the Democratic primary and the general election, former
Speaker 7: Governor Andrew Cuomo performed best in the city's highest income
Speaker 7: districts and with voters who made over two hundred thousand
Speaker 7: dollars a year.
Speaker 1: But no, it is actually the.
Speaker 7: DSA who are truly representative of the elite, and the
Speaker 7: richest of the rich are Zorn's main base of support.
Speaker 7: Johnson needs that to be true because, as we will
Speaker 7: learn after this ad break, he contends that liberalism might
Speaker 7: actually be suffering from its own success. Welcome Back, CNL
Speaker 7: co founder and new Liberal podcast host Jeremiah Johnson doesn't
Speaker 7: buy into either of the populist explanations for liberalism's decline,
Speaker 7: the cultural one pushed by the right or the materialist
Speaker 7: one argued by the left. Johnson thinks that, if anything,
Speaker 7: these explanations should be reversed. He discounts the right way
Speaker 7: a cultural explanation because the places where those progressive cultural
Speaker 7: advances have gone the farthest are in deep blue districts
Speaker 7: that are still deep blue. And as for the materialist
Speaker 7: story told by the left.
Speaker 9: If you look at the places that have actually suffered
Speaker 9: potentially under the.
Speaker 1: Liberal era.
Speaker 9: Of the last forty to fifty years. I think the
Speaker 9: places you could most point to authentically, that you could
Speaker 9: make the strongest case for would be the kind of
Speaker 9: rust belt towns, small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and
Speaker 9: Michigan and so forth, where the decline of manufacturing, you know,
Speaker 9: the decline of the auto industry or of the steel
Speaker 9: industry or whatever may have hollowed out the local economy. Now,
Speaker 9: this is a very left leaning explanation, but the people
Speaker 9: in those towns have not bought into the left explanation.
Speaker 9: They've turned into Republicans, is the thing. You know, the
Speaker 9: materialist argument pushed by the left is actually most applicable
Speaker 9: to the areas that now vote for Donald Trump.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's the whole point. It's the economy idiot just
Speaker 7: flatly dismissing any materialist analysis on the basis that such analysis,
Speaker 7: as argued by the left is actually even more applicable
Speaker 7: in places that are voting for Trump rather than Democrats
Speaker 7: is completely missing the entire point of the left's analysis.
Speaker 7: Trump ran as a populist, a right wing populist, But
Speaker 7: that is like evidence for what the left is arguing.
Speaker 7: That is the left's explanation why those places which used
Speaker 7: to be Democrat working class union. Why they have gone
Speaker 7: to Trump It's because he's offering a populist solution. Now,
Speaker 7: is Trump's right wing popular solution actually going to be
Speaker 7: a real solution to the base problems? No, because instead
Speaker 7: he's gonna do economic nationalism. He's gonna do tariffs, He's
Speaker 7: gonna scapegoat immigrants as the reason for why housing is expensive,
Speaker 7: why the job market sucks. So he is offering a
Speaker 7: populist solution, but not a good solution. While campaigning, he
Speaker 7: was addressing the poor economic conditions, price of eggs, as
Speaker 7: opposed to the liberal assertion that things are great actually
Speaker 7: or something as tone deaf as Bidenomics is working.
Speaker 12: Here's a better start, like a better explanation for that
Speaker 12: is just paying attention to the actual history. I'm from
Speaker 12: the South, right, the South is so much of it
Speaker 12: is the core for you know, a kind of reactionary cultural,
Speaker 12: right wing cultural politics. The South is also where the
Speaker 12: the labor movement, the unions were just decimated. I mean
Speaker 12: it's brutal there. Union densities is in the shitter and
Speaker 12: has been for a while. And so one way of
Speaker 12: explaining this is like, yeah, people in these places. People
Speaker 12: in the South often gravitate towards a kind of cultural reactionary,
Speaker 12: confused politics precisely because there's no other option. They don't
Speaker 12: have a kind of coherent socialist project, and so they
Speaker 12: go towards these other things where there's more of a
Speaker 12: labor movement, where it has held on to some degree
Speaker 12: somewhere like New York, for instance, there is an alternative route, right,
Speaker 12: and it took us a while to get there. You know,
Speaker 12: this is a relatively new trend of the rise in socialism.
Speaker 12: But I don't know whether this is like cynical or
Speaker 12: if he just genuinely does not conceive of how well, yeah,
Speaker 12: it may be that these these are real material stressors
Speaker 12: and pressures that are then in interpreted through cultural lenses
Speaker 12: for all sorts of reasons. But that the idea that
Speaker 12: it must be one or the other, that if well,
Speaker 12: if these if people favor a cultural explanation, then there
Speaker 12: must not be material problems. It is also the whole
Speaker 12: thing is just fraught. I mean, like the idea that
Speaker 12: the only place is suffering from de industrialization or you know,
Speaker 12: dried up economies are just republican states and cities that's
Speaker 12: just not true in any sense. There are lots of
Speaker 12: places where a dying economy is responded to with very
Speaker 12: left materialist analyzes and nor also the idea that again
Speaker 12: i mean just very hand wavy, like just citation needed,
Speaker 12: we're moving pack things are fine outside of like a
Speaker 12: limited de industrialized red states, you know, where things maybe
Speaker 12: are a little bad, everything else is fine. Like is
Speaker 12: the idea that in major coastal cities everything's fine and
Speaker 12: just completely ignores that, like service workers in the lowest
Speaker 12: rungs of workers in these places are being crushed right now,
Speaker 12: many of which have to then leave the cities they're in.
Speaker 12: And then you know, people who may be able to
Speaker 12: maintain a comfortable income and comfortable there is you know,
Speaker 12: a little strained, I mean.
Speaker 6: Gig work is on the rise.
Speaker 12: People are having to work all sorts of strange hours
Speaker 12: that beck and call of their employers. Alienation from their
Speaker 12: kinds of work and the ability to choose one's job
Speaker 12: is really profoundly wrong. Incomes for college graduates have dropped,
Speaker 12: so professionals, while they may be able to maintain a
Speaker 12: somewhat comfortable income, are often still declining in that capacity.
Speaker 12: Enfranchisement in people's worlds, both in their economic world and
Speaker 12: in saying how they labor, how they work, but also
Speaker 12: in the wider political world in getting a say in
Speaker 12: how government is happening. People are feel totally disenfranchised. They
Speaker 12: are disenfranchised from those things. So it's just a very
Speaker 12: thin patina of things are fine that falls apart upon
Speaker 12: any examination. Ironically, these people represent the whole project of
Speaker 12: things are fine because we maintain full control. The other
Speaker 12: side of the coin of things are fine is we
Speaker 12: need not empower anyone else, just let us the technical
Speaker 12: experts run everything.
Speaker 7: So instead of a cultural explanation or a materialist explanation
Speaker 7: for the current crisis in liberalism, the Center for New
Speaker 7: Liberalism seems to kind of embrace this sort of liberal affluenza,
Speaker 7: as if people are actually suffering from affluence. For this,
Speaker 7: Johnson turns to Francis Fukuyama.
Speaker 9: Fukuyama, in his book The End of History in the
Speaker 9: Last Man very famously said that he believed man needs
Speaker 9: struggle essentially. You know, in the twentieth century we got
Speaker 9: the great struggles of World War I and the Great Depression,
Speaker 9: World War II, and then the Cold War and liberalism
Speaker 9: flourished under these conditions because it had an identifiable enemy
Speaker 9: to fight. It had a struggle that you know, men
Speaker 9: and women could throw themselves into. You know, that we
Speaker 9: could defeat the Nazis, we could defeat the communists. And
Speaker 9: then he predicted that if history really did end in
Speaker 9: air quotes, that men might struggle just for the sake
Speaker 9: of struggle. They would struggle against the very system that
Speaker 9: created this prosperity, just for the sake of having something
Speaker 9: to feel, of having something to feel useful for.
Speaker 7: The idea is, now that liberalism has conquered the globe,
Speaker 7: people don't actually require anything materially different, but will still
Speaker 7: desire for self worth, dignity, and recognition. This is a
Speaker 7: sort of post modern crisis of a struggle for meaning,
Speaker 7: totally divorced from a materialist desire.
Speaker 9: But Fukuyama argues that while modern liberal democracies can provide
Speaker 9: peace and material wealth, they leave people feeling alienated by
Speaker 9: not delivering that sense of higher purpose, and that that
Speaker 9: is what leads people to nationalism or populism or identity politics,
Speaker 9: because people want some sort of recognition.
Speaker 7: To Johnson, ultimately, liberalism is struggling because quote there is
Speaker 7: no more great struggle.
Speaker 12: Yeah, there is no real struggle. That this is all
Speaker 12: made up. It's all smoke and mirrors, like everybody's fine.
Speaker 12: I mean, if you pursue it to its logical conclusion.
Speaker 12: It's the most condescending politics there is. It's literally just
Speaker 12: you don't really have problems. You are just rebelling against
Speaker 12: us because things are so good and you don't have
Speaker 12: meaning other other than opposing us. It literally I was
Speaker 12: listening to that and I was like, this sounds like
Speaker 12: bourgeois revolutions of early modernity, right, this is like how
Speaker 12: the monarchy reacted. So many times you get like, you know,
Speaker 12: absolute monarchs just saying like, well, the people there aren't
Speaker 12: really problems. You're fine. It's it's fine to chill out.
Speaker 6: Like I'm your king. We're doing fine.
Speaker 12: It's all good, right, And of course that worked out
Speaker 12: brilliantly for them. Yeah, it's the same politics. It's just well,
Speaker 12: there's basically no struggle. Are people are mad because you
Speaker 12: know they don't have enough meaning? I just I don't
Speaker 12: know how that plays out to anyone.
Speaker 6: Is insane to me.
Speaker 12: The idea that you know, all of the struggle and
Speaker 12: strife in the world today is just it's not real.
Speaker 12: It's somehow made up pretend we're all doing it's ridiculous.
Speaker 7: Johnson's contention is that things just got so good under
Speaker 7: neoliberal technocracy that it created a postmodern crisis of meaning,
Speaker 7: resulting in people struggling against the very system that provides
Speaker 7: for them to gain a new sense of purpose, basically
Speaker 7: self sabotaging by electing bad populist candidates, which then do
Speaker 7: make economic conditions worse. But then Johnson's solution to this
Speaker 7: problem is just to put neoliberal technocrats back in power,
Speaker 7: but this time be even more cynical and also more
Speaker 7: patriotic in contrast to the United States. Johnson points to
Speaker 7: Canada as an example of where liberalism is currently succeeding,
Speaker 7: and he credits this to quote technocratic ability, cynical maneuvering,
Speaker 7: and liberal nationalism, adding quote we need technocrats more than ever.
Speaker 7: I introduced the idea last episode that one of the
Speaker 7: main tendencies among these so called new liberals is the
Speaker 7: belief that politics is just the application of technical knowledge,
Speaker 7: you know, conflating having technical knowledge with the ability to
Speaker 7: govern well and do decision making at the highest level.
Speaker 7: A view of politics without politics.
Speaker 12: The technocratic point of view sort of works like this.
Speaker 12: It understands that like, okay, there's technical expertise. Let's say
Speaker 12: you're trying to you know, reform tax policy. Tax policy
Speaker 12: is very complex. The way that taxes work, the way
Speaker 12: that you know, government revenues work is very complex. So
Speaker 12: if you're going to rearrange that, yeah, you are going
Speaker 12: to need some people who understand how that work. Who
Speaker 12: are intellectuals, you know, who have the technical knowledge required
Speaker 12: to make your policies work. That's a crucial part of
Speaker 12: any politics. You absolutely need that. Any political faction that
Speaker 12: seeks to have a chance of successful governance needs a
Speaker 12: level of technical expertise. Absolutely, But that is an entirely
Speaker 12: set question from what does one choose to do? Your
Speaker 12: technical expertise is a key part to successfully doing what
Speaker 12: you set out to do. But politics at the highest levels,
Speaker 12: right at the level of like party line of like
Speaker 12: what party strategy is about? What are you trying to do?
Speaker 12: The technocratic view basically thinks that that question is already
Speaker 12: decided to them. It's obvious what you should do. What
Speaker 12: you should do is grow the economy, maximize economic growth,
Speaker 12: because in their view, that's good for everybody. You know,
Speaker 12: rising tide lifts soul boats, that's good for everybody. There
Speaker 12: is no conflict here, and so if there is no
Speaker 12: conflict here, then that's the obvious pick. And then the
Speaker 12: only difficulty is just getting people in to do that
Speaker 12: job well. And so for them, politics is just about okay, well,
Speaker 12: our team has the people who know how to do
Speaker 12: this job well, and the other team doesn't know how
Speaker 12: to do the job well, and they have trouble sometimes
Speaker 12: even conceiving that. In fact, no, the debate would be
Speaker 12: about what we're choosing to do.
Speaker 7: Johnson explains that liberal governance has to walk a dangerous tightrope.
Speaker 7: If you lean too far to the left, you stifle
Speaker 7: the economy and feed radicalism and extremism. Johnson points to
Speaker 7: Europe as an example of this. But if you lean
Speaker 7: too far to the right, economically, people will revolt if
Speaker 7: they don't share in the prosperity.
Speaker 9: If you don't successfully walk this tightrope, then you risk
Speaker 9: entering a kind of doom loop where you know, oh,
Speaker 9: everything seems really bad. We're all dooming, And so people
Speaker 9: are going to choose an illiberal candidate, and that illiberal
Speaker 9: candidate is going to do stupid things that make things
Speaker 9: worse in society, and that's going to make people even
Speaker 9: more illiberal, even more tilted towards extremism, which will lead
Speaker 9: to worse candidates who will make things even worse than before,
Speaker 9: and so on, etc. There is real risk of entering
Speaker 9: that kind of doom loop, and that's why it's important
Speaker 9: to actually have smart technocratic leadership.
Speaker 7: The doom loop theory glosses over the fact that Trump
Speaker 7: came after Oh Baba. The sentiment that this technocratic leadership
Speaker 7: wasn't working didn't just come from the right. Bernie Sanders
Speaker 7: also rose to prominence by arguing this from a left
Speaker 7: wing perspective, and the capitalist class were more threatened by Sanders,
Speaker 7: so they mobilized to take out the threat of left
Speaker 7: wing populism, even if that meant Trump's right wing populism
Speaker 7: would win, because they know that the left wing version
Speaker 7: is the one that could actually empower labor against the
Speaker 7: interests of capital. Johnson also claims that Joe Biden had
Speaker 7: big goals, but quote his technocratic ability wasn't there, meaning
Speaker 7: there was too much red tape prohibiting his policies from
Speaker 7: having an impact because he quote went about policy in
Speaker 7: a stupid way. Now Johnson knows that calling for a
Speaker 7: technocracy isn't an election strategy. For that, he proposes more
Speaker 7: quote unquote cynical maneuvering and that Liberals should get more
Speaker 7: quote unquote ruthless in terms of running elections. He says
Speaker 7: Kamala Harris should have forcefully distanced herself from Joe Biden,
Speaker 7: or the party should have pushed her out for being
Speaker 7: too compromised due to her association with Biden. Of course,
Speaker 7: Johnson does not acknowledge that the party is very capable
Speaker 7: of cynical, ruthless maneuvering when it serves their interests and
Speaker 7: the interests of their donors. Once again, consider the twenty
Speaker 7: sixteen and twenty twenty Democratic primaries and the concerted efforts
Speaker 7: to take down Bernie Sanders, something that quite possibly lost
Speaker 7: the Democrats the twenty sixteen election. But Johnson also talks
Speaker 7: about the need for cynical maneuvering in implementing policy.
Speaker 12: The main things he talks about seemed to be flatly
Speaker 12: at odds with each other because he says, well, you know,
Speaker 12: we need technocratic politics, which is to say you just
Speaker 12: need the right policies. You need the ones that are
Speaker 12: correct to do the job.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 12: Again, what the job is, what we're trying to do
Speaker 12: is totally like not on the table. That's a given right,
Speaker 12: and then you just need the people who can technically
Speaker 12: do that well. But then he also says you need
Speaker 12: some cynicism. You need to be able to just be
Speaker 12: ruthless electorally and operate politically in order to win, which
Speaker 12: seems to directly contradict is like, well, what should you do.
Speaker 12: Should you pick the policies that are correct, pursue technocracy
Speaker 12: regardless of whether or not it's popular, whether it can
Speaker 12: win elections, right, which is his whole contention, is that
Speaker 12: the right policies are somehow, somehow not popular among the people.
Speaker 12: Or should you you know, be electorally ruthless and try
Speaker 12: to appeal to the masses and win elections by perhaps
Speaker 12: I mean he gives an example with the carbon tax,
Speaker 12: where he says, like, I think this policy is great,
Speaker 12: I think this is the technically correct policy, but you
Speaker 12: have to abandon it.
Speaker 6: Again.
Speaker 12: I'm sure if you asked him he would say, well,
Speaker 12: you have to strike a balance between the two. But
Speaker 12: as strategy. That's useless. Right, It's like, well, how should
Speaker 12: you ride a bike? Well, you don't want to lean
Speaker 12: too far left, but you also don't want to re
Speaker 12: lean too far right. You want to kind of stay
Speaker 12: right in the balanced middle. Okay, that tells us nothing.
Speaker 12: You should pick the right policies, but not so much.
Speaker 12: You need to also be ruthless and be able to
Speaker 12: win elections. Pick the right policies and win win elections.
Speaker 12: Don't see take it immediately.
Speaker 7: Johnson argues that the final necessary step in exiting the
Speaker 7: populist doom loop is quote unquote liberal nationalism, basically the
Speaker 7: idea that liberals need to become loudly more patriotic and
Speaker 7: reclaim and be proud of the progressive parts of American history.
Speaker 7: But liberal patriotism isn't enough to win elections, and the
Speaker 7: Harris campaign already kind of tried this.
Speaker 9: Liberals have got to be better at telling a story
Speaker 9: of how America is great. Liberalism made America great. Liberalism
Speaker 9: is why we're all rich and successful and awesome.
Speaker 7: This is the massive contradiction at the heart of their project.
Speaker 7: They want to say, we're all rich, the economy is great,
Speaker 7: living conditions are fine, but the new liberals do have
Speaker 7: at least some way awareness of material problems because most
Speaker 7: of the conference panels were about affordability, especially in relation
Speaker 7: to housing and energy costs. So are there massive economic
Speaker 7: factors driving voter behavior or not? How can you pretend
Speaker 7: that everything is great actually and then also put on
Speaker 7: a whole conference focusing on how housing and energy are
Speaker 7: way too expensive? You do know that there are material problems.
Speaker 7: What's actually happening here is that you're frustrated that people
Speaker 7: aren't buying into your neoliberal solutions to the problems caused
Speaker 7: by neoliberalism. But to the technocrat, it can't be the
Speaker 7: policies that are wrong. So instead it must be that
Speaker 7: we are not telling a strong enough story.
Speaker 9: We need to be able to figure out a pro growth, patriotic,
Speaker 9: muscular liberal message that work because people respond to two things.
Speaker 9: In the end, they respond to material conditions. If the
Speaker 9: material conditions are bad enough, they will get mad at you.
Speaker 9: But they also respond to stories, and it's hard to
Speaker 9: identify the story that liberals tell today.
Speaker 7: At the very end of this podcast, Johnson finally admits
Speaker 7: that people do in fact respond two material conditions, but
Speaker 7: only if things get bad enough. But he also believes
Speaker 7: that the economy is good, we are rich, we are successful,
Speaker 7: so the problem has to be something else, and that
Speaker 7: something else is stories. Liberalism just isn't telling the right stories. Again,
Speaker 7: it's not material problems, it's storytelling problems. And Johnson says,
Speaker 7: quote the story we should tell should be rooted in
Speaker 7: two things, a return to history and a vision of abundance.
Speaker 7: Johnson truly believes that this is all about stories and
Speaker 7: not actually about politics. And this is where the technocratic
Speaker 7: version of politics hits its own massive limitations. This is
Speaker 7: where it runs up against it's extremely narrow view of
Speaker 7: what politics is and what is politically possible.
Speaker 12: They're totally whipped by capital. Like that's the thing is,
Speaker 12: like capital sets the agenda because you know, they, as
Speaker 12: I said, they've ceded the territory of like political decisions
Speaker 12: properly put right, They concern themselves with the technical administration
Speaker 12: of the system, but are are totally uninterested in the
Speaker 12: commanding heights of the system of like how is the
Speaker 12: economy structured? But seating that territory doesn't mean it's it's neutral.
Speaker 12: It just means that, like, yeah, capital gets to call
Speaker 12: the shots. Then, and so capital basically says, well, here's
Speaker 12: what's possible, and here's what's not right, based very much
Speaker 12: on capital's interests, right, in order for us to maintain
Speaker 12: our profitability at the levels we would like and the
Speaker 12: ways we would like, these things are not possible. And
Speaker 12: the technocrats they just accept that, right, like it's a
Speaker 12: real belief for them.
Speaker 6: It's it's not cynical.
Speaker 12: You know, there is a time where with shrewder and
Speaker 12: more aware liberals, liberals who are aware of like class struggle,
Speaker 12: i think, and who were throwing in on the side
Speaker 12: of capital, like originally, like the classical liberals as well
Speaker 12: as liberals in throughout the twentieth century. Rightly, when they
Speaker 12: had to contend with like real socialist politics, they knew,
Speaker 12: like they were self conscious about, well, we are on
Speaker 12: the side of capital.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 12: That's the biggest difference between sort of the past ages
Speaker 12: of liberalism and this, you know, upstart, young liberals they're
Speaker 12: so in the pocket of capital, they're so at capitals
Speaker 12: bidding that they don't even really know it's there anymore.
Speaker 12: And so they just perceived this as like, again, what
Speaker 12: capital wants is basically just the natural state of the
Speaker 12: world what is possible period with you know, like just
Speaker 12: such an impossibly narrow historical focus on like what is possible?
Speaker 12: And I just don't know how anyone like looks at
Speaker 12: the past, you know, one hundred years of history and
Speaker 12: feels they can conclude very solidly what is and is
Speaker 12: not possible. But they just feel that what capital says
Speaker 12: is basically the natural constraints of what's possible in society.
Speaker 12: And so given that which they take as a given,
Speaker 12: the only question is competent administration. It's a fall from
Speaker 12: previous liberals, you know, who argued for like, no, we
Speaker 12: want to empower capital over labor to a certain extent, right,
Speaker 12: or we want to achieve a balance between these things,
Speaker 12: usually with capital leading in some way.
Speaker 7: It's time for one more ad break before we learn how.
Speaker 7: Jeremiah Johnson believes that a quote unquote brightness loop might
Speaker 7: be the key dissolving the crisis of liberalism Welcome back.
Speaker 7: Johnson proposes the way out of this populist doom loop
Speaker 7: is what he calls a brightness loop, or basically like
Speaker 7: a positive feedback loop, which will be achieved through technocracy,
Speaker 7: ruthless politics, and liberal patriotism. Embracing America and our history
Speaker 7: and loudly proclaiming.
Speaker 9: We are rich, and we are successful, and we are awesome.
Speaker 9: America rocks.
Speaker 7: I wonder how that's gonna go over with voters who
Speaker 7: are struggling to pay bills and household expenses every month.
Speaker 7: Might they turn to another candidate who actually addresses the
Speaker 7: fact that maybe things aren't so great for everyone. The
Speaker 7: limitations of the technocratic mindset is a big part of
Speaker 7: why centre left candidates are losing to left populists in
Speaker 7: very high profile races. I really don't know how CNL
Speaker 7: expects to grow their organization and build momentum among young
Speaker 7: people to advance their own candidates, to claw back the
Speaker 7: Democratic Party away from the socialists, away from the populists,
Speaker 7: from the progressives. When their political project is calling for technocracy, cynicism,
Speaker 7: and liberal nationalism, how do you think that will attract
Speaker 7: and then mobilize an actual, energized, motivated base. Because the
Speaker 7: only people I can see that appealing to are those
Speaker 7: who aspire themselves to be technocrats and to reform. That
Speaker 7: is who attended the New Liberal Action summit last month
Speaker 7: in Washington, DC. It was a group of people who
Speaker 7: identify with and submit themselves to the mainstream neoliberal order,
Speaker 7: and who understand themselves through identifying with the base structure
Speaker 7: of capitalist American society. That's where they get their self
Speaker 7: identification and in many cases their jobs and their income.
Speaker 7: This is people who want to work in politics, who
Speaker 7: want to work as a consultant, a campaign manager, a lobbyist,
Speaker 7: or a congressional staffer. In contrast, a lot of the
Speaker 7: people in DSA don't have an actual interest in politics
Speaker 7: as an industry. In fact, they might have a frankly
Speaker 7: aversion to electoral politics, and they're kind of involved in
Speaker 7: DSA somewhat begrudgingly in a sense. Most DC members that
Speaker 7: I interact with would not want to work in politics
Speaker 7: as their job, But they are doing this because they
Speaker 7: believe in it, and because there's material forces that are
Speaker 7: driving them towards wanting this sort of change, versus the
Speaker 7: CNL approach of trying to base all your on the
Speaker 7: ground mobilization on like other aspiring technocrats and professionals whose
Speaker 7: lives are built very materially around these politics, around doing politics,
Speaker 7: and so their efforts to promote neoliberalism could be interpreted
Speaker 7: as a form of class reproduction and attempts to maintain
Speaker 7: their particular position within a class dynamic. Now, of course,
Speaker 7: the socialists do have their own flock of aspiring professionals
Speaker 7: and intellectuals who are seeking roles within civil institutions and
Speaker 7: political positions of authority. The difference lies in what political
Speaker 7: project you are a part of, what kind of class
Speaker 7: politics you're tied to, what class you're trying to empower,
Speaker 7: are you intending to maintain or alter class relations? And ultimately,
Speaker 7: what does political success look like just growing the GDP
Speaker 7: as much as possible, increasing the total amount of wealth,
Speaker 7: or is it economic equality and democratic control of society
Speaker 7: and production. In their attempts to claim liberal history right,
Speaker 7: the new liberals will associate themselves with you know, FDR,
Speaker 7: the New Deal. Maybe if they're shrewder the Great Society.
Speaker 7: One of the most frustrating parts of the conference for
Speaker 7: me was hearing these lobbyists talk about, you know, the
Speaker 7: great legacy of FDR, while in another breath strongly arguing
Speaker 7: against wealth taxes, against taxing the rich. At the end
Speaker 7: of the Crisis in Liberalism podcast, Johnson says, quote, the
Speaker 7: populace left says that you don't actually need to have
Speaker 7: any form of economic growth as long as you can
Speaker 7: categorize people into good and evil groups and tax the
Speaker 7: evil ones and give all their money to the good
Speaker 7: ones unquote. And I just don't think that is how
Speaker 7: they would describe New Deal or Great Society era tax rates.
Speaker 7: They would never describe those tax rates and the reasons
Speaker 7: for why they were instituted as like, we decided there
Speaker 7: are good and evil groups, and therefore we must punish
Speaker 7: the evil ones and give all their money to the
Speaker 7: good ones. The new Liberals have to play it both
Speaker 7: ways because they still want to associate themselves with the
Speaker 7: sort of heights of liberal democracy in the United States,
Speaker 7: which they point to these eras as, but they're both
Speaker 7: fundamentally opposed to what these eras actually are, the economic
Speaker 7: policies and tax base that made those policies possible, and
Speaker 7: also vehemently opposed to the organized labor apparatus that fought
Speaker 7: for those policies. So they want to claim the legacy
Speaker 7: of those things for liberalism, but shorn of all content,
Speaker 7: they have to complet completely ignore both the substance of
Speaker 7: those politics and the forces that drove those politics, which
Speaker 7: was chiefly the labor movement, and socialists were a huge
Speaker 7: part of that. But neoliberals don't want to acknowledge or
Speaker 7: promote labor because organized labor runs contrary to the interest
Speaker 7: of capital, and because they know they can't compete with
Speaker 7: DSA if you're going to play that game. In somewhat
Speaker 7: breaking from Ezra Cline, cnl's strain of neoliberal abundance explicitly
Speaker 7: blames unions for why it's so hard to build housing
Speaker 7: and infrastructure. They think labor unions are bad for the
Speaker 7: economy and thus are evil, and that the general public
Speaker 7: are stupid children throwing a temper tantrum sabotaging the greatest
Speaker 7: country ever by electing populists because liberalism made the world
Speaker 7: too good. There's no more struggle, and liberals just have
Speaker 7: to tell the people a better story so that neoliberal
Speaker 7: technocrats can stay in power, that those with technical knowledge
Speaker 7: can rule.
Speaker 12: It's a profoundly undemocratic politics. You pursue it to its
Speaker 12: logical ends, and it is literally well, the people do
Speaker 12: not really know what their interests are, and in fact,
Speaker 12: we'll go against them just for the sake of having meaning.
Speaker 12: I guess, so it's up to us those who do
Speaker 12: know what the right politics are to be in charge
Speaker 12: and to basically call all the shots. And who has
Speaker 12: the authority to say that we have the right politics?
Speaker 12: Well us, of course, right. It's why you know, these
Speaker 12: people exist at the whim of capital. Without capital, they
Speaker 12: are nothing, right. They have this idea that they produce
Speaker 12: their own authority by having the correct policies. They know
Speaker 12: the world, and that's where their power comes from. They
Speaker 12: exist at capital's whim, right, and if capital decides to
Speaker 12: move into a different direction, they have no authority.
Speaker 18: They have nothing.
Speaker 12: It's capital or labor. You either get your source of
Speaker 12: authority and political power from the economic powers that be
Speaker 12: the property owners who control production and have an enormous
Speaker 12: amount of power in that sense, or you get it
Speaker 12: from the masses, from the people, the laborers, who actually
Speaker 12: power society and power all production. Those are the two forces.
Speaker 12: This idea that correct knowledge in itself supplies authority is
Speaker 12: not only obviously undemocratic, but it's i mean, just profoundly confused.
Speaker 12: It's completely oblivious to political reality. It doesn't believe in politics,
Speaker 12: it doesn't think there is a realm of politics.
Speaker 7: With that though, you are forgetting that we're rich that
Speaker 7: were successful, that were awesome.
Speaker 12: Yeah, we are rich, we are successful, we are awesome.
Speaker 12: America rocks, America rocks.
Speaker 6: God what a Yeah.
Speaker 12: He pairs that one with talking about like you can't
Speaker 12: be a depressing nerd and talk about what America is
Speaker 12: done wrong. I love the idea of like trying to
Speaker 12: set yourself up against like nerds, being like, don't be
Speaker 12: a nerd, and then being like, America rocks, We're rich,
Speaker 12: we're successful. Where all that is like the nerd line.
Speaker 12: It's like, this is a.
Speaker 1: Whole nerd conference.
Speaker 7: This is like the yes policy wonky will Stancil matically
Speaker 7: sious like nerds central.
Speaker 12: Well, maybe you're on the football team, but I have
Speaker 12: an a in math, Like it's literally that it's that, well,
Speaker 12: we're rich, where successful? And where awesome? We We've won
Speaker 12: World War Two, we.
Speaker 1: Beat the communists, we beat the communists.
Speaker 12: Where it's just very Yeah, it's it's hollow too. I mean,
Speaker 12: I'm a red blooded American. You know, there's a lot
Speaker 12: to like about the American society, but this, like America
Speaker 12: rocks America is awesome. Like, I don't know, maybe there's
Speaker 12: a reason people aren't really feeling that one, right, now,
Speaker 12: you know, just shouting it into into the faces of
Speaker 12: the misery of the masses is not the best move.
Speaker 7: You don't think that's gonna go over well with voters
Speaker 7: who are maybe not rich and who are struggling.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I don't know, man, look around, it's been a
Speaker 12: pretty bad time. Like, yeah, no, I don't I think
Speaker 12: this kind of God, we're awesome.
Speaker 7: As much as the New Liberals are upset and confused
Speaker 7: why the political momentum is with DSA and not them,
Speaker 7: the Center for New Liberalism will never be able to
Speaker 7: build an organization of young Libs capable of rivaling DSA
Speaker 7: because technocratic liberalism categorically rejects mass politics. So while CNL
Speaker 7: and the New Liberals make a big show online, ultimately
Speaker 7: they are just a front group for PPI, the Progressive
Speaker 7: Policy Institute, the centrist think tank that convinced the Democratic
Speaker 7: Party to abandon the working class of the nineties, abandon
Speaker 7: redistributive new deoliberalism, and embrace de regulatory, free market neoliberal
Speaker 7: economics under Bill Clinton. So while the blue Globe emoji
Speaker 7: people will continue to post prolifically online, I suspect that
Speaker 7: is where their political impact will largely remain. Here's a
Speaker 7: final note from sociology professor Ben rose Porter.
Speaker 12: I mean, look, economies are hard to figure out, but
Speaker 12: I think it's just worth saying, like, what are you
Speaker 12: growing the economy for?
Speaker 10: Right?
Speaker 12: The whole point is to provide people with better lives,
Speaker 12: you know, raise their wages, give them more power and
Speaker 12: control over their lives and their society.
Speaker 6: And they just seem to have it very reversed.
Speaker 12: Where the point is to grow the economy at whatever cost.
Speaker 2: Welcome back, it could happen here, a podcast about it
Speaker 2: happening here. And in this case, the here we're talking
Speaker 2: about is Texas, and the it we're talking about is
Speaker 2: one of America's most corrupt and evil politicians, kN Paxton.
Speaker 2: And I'm using corrupt and evil in like an objective
Speaker 2: scientific since I need you to understand this is not
Speaker 2: a matter of opinion. The Vatic can convene the series
Speaker 2: of scientists who who did confirm that Ken Paxton has
Speaker 2: the evil equivalent of midichlorians in a concentration never before
Speaker 2: seen in an American politician. And to talk to me
Speaker 2: about Ken Paxton and say things that are real and
Speaker 2: accurate and not nonsense. Is a guy who actually reports
Speaker 2: on Ken Paxton directly as part of his professional job
Speaker 2: as a real journalist. Robert Downan, Robert, welcome to the show.
Speaker 17: Thank you for having man, Thank you for that incredible introduction.
Speaker 1: Gotta have a little fun with Ken oh k Pax.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, first off, you want to introduce yourself, put
Speaker 2: up your plugs up front here.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 17: My name is Robert down In.
Speaker 10: I'm a writer at Texas Monthly. I've been in Texas
Speaker 10: for almost a decade now, where I've kind of covered
Speaker 10: I guess you could say religion, the convergence of far
Speaker 10: right politics and religion extremism, et cetera, which is to say,
Speaker 10: you know, now, I basically just cover the current Texas
Speaker 10: GOP because they are kind of the incubator for a
Speaker 10: lot of policy that goes national.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it is like the breeding warren in the
Speaker 2: center of the fever swamps in a lot of ways.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You and I met a couple of years ago now
Speaker 2: at the r n C during twenty twenty four, which
Speaker 2: was a lot of fun. And I'm kind of curious
Speaker 2: because I don't know that I actually asked you then,
Speaker 2: when did you start kind of covering kin Pas and
Speaker 2: do you remember like when you first like really became
Speaker 2: aware of him in a meaningful way.
Speaker 17: Yeah. I don't know if you remember this.
Speaker 10: I think we were actually in the middle of talking
Speaker 10: about it, and we were at some stake joint and
Speaker 10: I looked to my right and recognized a very large
Speaker 10: Rambo asked bodyguard sitting next to us, who happens to
Speaker 10: be Canpax's bodyguard, and realized that right next to us.
Speaker 17: So I don't think you ever finished the conversation.
Speaker 1: You're right, we did. Fucking the RNC guys. It's a wild.
Speaker 17: Time, yes, And then I met Roger Stone was great, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fucking Ted Kruz walked in. What a day.
Speaker 10: I started covering Ken Paxton probably officially in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 10: twenty twenty three. Before that I had kind of covered,
Speaker 10: you know, Southern Baptist stuff. I was really focused more
Speaker 10: on the religion side of stuff, so like he's always
Speaker 10: been in my peripherals, but never you know, been a
Speaker 10: sole focus.
Speaker 17: And then about you know, five.
Speaker 10: Years ago Ish, who I guess four years ago Ish,
Speaker 10: I started really focusing on this far right movement in Texas,
Speaker 10: the billionaires behind it, who you know.
Speaker 17: For that movement.
Speaker 10: Ken Packson is kind of the tip of the spear.
Speaker 10: So he's been not a primary focus of mine, but
Speaker 10: you know, someone who I'm paying very frequent attention to
Speaker 10: for quite a while.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so Ken is he's not a Texan by
Speaker 2: birth obviously, which which doesn't matter to anybody but some Texans,
Speaker 2: but he was. He was born in North Dakota if
Speaker 2: I'm remembering correctly, and he first kind of comes on
Speaker 2: the scene politically in like two thousand three when he's
Speaker 2: he's a state representative, right right, Yeah, with is kind
Speaker 2: of the first really notable moment in the Kim Paxton
Speaker 2: saga in your opinion, Like when you go back to
Speaker 2: like where, where, where does this guy start to differentiate
Speaker 2: himself from everyone else?
Speaker 10: I think you really to kind of understand Ken Paxton's
Speaker 10: rise and especially the political climate of Texas right now,
Speaker 10: you have to go to this twenty nine to twenty
Speaker 10: ten period where Texas really was on the forefront of
Speaker 10: what would become the Tea Party movement. We started to see,
Speaker 10: you know, this huge influx of billionaire oil money, in
Speaker 10: particular these two dudes named Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn,
Speaker 10: who I'm sure, we'll get to in this conversation. Yeah,
Speaker 10: you know, they kind of coalesce around this strategy in
Speaker 10: the Texas House in particular, where they're going to basically
Speaker 10: just accuse anyone who's not sufficiently far right enough for
Speaker 10: them as being a rhino and pump all of this
Speaker 10: money into a media and political eCos or you know
Speaker 10: network that kind of just becomes almost like this this
Speaker 10: way that they are holding people speak to the fire
Speaker 10: to the point where you know they are, you know,
Speaker 10: funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to
Speaker 10: primary opponents for incumbent lawmakers. A lot of these you know,
Speaker 10: these candidates are you know, dead on arrival, they have no.
Speaker 17: Actual chance of winning a primary. But the whole point
Speaker 17: is just kind.
Speaker 10: Of like bruise up these lawmakers, deplete their campaign coffers
Speaker 10: and kind of make them second guests anytime that they're
Speaker 10: thinking about defying this political network.
Speaker 17: In the next session.
Speaker 10: So Paxson really emerges out of that, I guess kind
Speaker 10: of movement. You know, you start to see around twenty
Speaker 10: twelve twenty thirteen, these groups that are funded by Tim
Speaker 10: Dunnanfarris Wilks really start to hold him up as this
Speaker 10: tax payer champion. And then in twenty fourteen, he launches
Speaker 10: what was kind of thought to be a long shot
Speaker 10: bid for attorney General that he ends up winning against
Speaker 10: a little bit more moderate Republican candidates with key help
Speaker 10: from these billionaires, and that kind of you know, is
Speaker 10: off the racist from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this is a really as you bring up,
Speaker 2: a really interesting thing that starts happening to Texas politically.
Speaker 2: It starts like right as the Bush ears are coming
Speaker 2: to an end, because obviously George W. Bush was not
Speaker 2: just the governor of Texas, but he was kind of
Speaker 2: the governor of Texas who his victory sort of heralded
Speaker 2: the defeat of the Democratic Party in Texas in a
Speaker 2: way that it, I mean, it still hasn't recovered from
Speaker 2: at least, you know. That's kind of the way I
Speaker 2: often see it. And you have you have Bush come
Speaker 2: in and then obviously become the president, but because of
Speaker 2: the unpopularity of the neo cons Texas also winds up
Speaker 2: becoming kind of this incubator of the backlash, the conservative
Speaker 2: backlash to Bush too, and and Paxton embodies that to
Speaker 2: some extent because he literally defeats a Bush as part
Speaker 2: of his his rise to power right like much later on,
Speaker 2: But that is interesting to me.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, I think the way to really understand
Speaker 10: that texaschuoki is for the longest time it was this
Speaker 10: coalition of you know, big big business interests, specifically oil.
Speaker 10: But then you know, you had the evangelical cohort and
Speaker 10: they kind of existed in harmony.
Speaker 17: With each other for a while.
Speaker 10: You know, there were obviously rough patches for the party,
Speaker 10: but you know, overcoming you know, the the democratic establishments
Speaker 10: that had ruled the state for so long, I think
Speaker 10: kind of, you know, it's much easier to stick together
Speaker 10: when when everyone's winning. But then out of this, oh
Speaker 10: but out of the Obama years, in the post Obama years,
Speaker 10: you have this Tea Party movement that is you know,
Speaker 10: really led by Ken Pax and these billionaires to many degrees,
Speaker 10: they turned their sights on those in the party.
Speaker 17: So again you have.
Speaker 10: Just this really really ugly early days of what turns
Speaker 10: into a full on civil war within the party, where
Speaker 10: you know, people who in most other states would be
Speaker 10: considered you know, the most far right member of the
Speaker 10: legislature are being branded like rhinos and traders and this
Speaker 10: is you know, this is in the pre Trump era
Speaker 10: before that was kind of the I guess, you know,
Speaker 10: animating philosophy.
Speaker 17: Of you know, kind of you know, borrowing from this
Speaker 17: no enemies to the right framework.
Speaker 10: That was something that was really I think defining and
Speaker 10: all of what's happening in Texas first and not nationally.
Speaker 2: And do you have a sense personally of when can
Speaker 2: sort of ultra right beliefs begin. Is this something that's
Speaker 2: always a thing for him or is this something that
Speaker 2: he adopts opportunistically.
Speaker 1: Is it becomes clear that that's the future of the party.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean it's a really tough question and something
Speaker 10: I think a lot of us have spent a lot
Speaker 10: of time trying to figure out. He almost is so
Speaker 10: emblematic of the direction of the text Europe in general
Speaker 10: that it's almost impossible to differentiate whether you know, he
Speaker 10: always harbored these beliefs and then translated that into political
Speaker 10: momentum towards them, or if the political momentum broke in
Speaker 10: towards you know, it's a chicken and egg situation home.
Speaker 10: But I will say that, you know, starting as soon
Speaker 10: as he becomes Attorney general, he really starts to use
Speaker 10: that position to aid the political objectives both on social
Speaker 10: policy but also on campaign finance reform. You know, all
Speaker 10: these other issues really start to push the state and
Speaker 10: the state party towards the I guess policy positions of
Speaker 10: this far right billionaire.
Speaker 17: Now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now when it comes to Ken himself, his first
Speaker 2: big scandal is kind of like a bribery allegation, right
Speaker 2: is I'm recalling?
Speaker 10: Yes, So in twenty eleven, when he is still a
Speaker 10: state Rep. He meets at a dairy queen with the
Speaker 10: CEO of a software company Fary Texas. As we continue
Speaker 10: this conversation, you're going to notice there's a lot of
Speaker 10: fast food. Yeah, this man loves a fast food joint.
Speaker 2: You know what North Texas born in well, not born
Speaker 2: but raised, so I do get that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 10: Anyways, so he meets this guy to dairy queen and
Speaker 10: again this is all allegedly. This court case was settled
Speaker 10: I think in twenty twenty four, but basically the allegation
Speaker 10: from the SEC which later indicted him was that he
Speaker 10: was offered one hundred thousand shares in this new company.
Speaker 10: Ken Paxon claims that he tried to pay the CEO
Speaker 10: for the shares, and the CEO is like, no, God
Speaker 10: told me to give this to you.
Speaker 17: You can't give me any money.
Speaker 10: And then so Paxton allegedly goes on and sells something like,
Speaker 10: you know, almost a million dollars worth of shares in
Speaker 10: this company to people without allegedly telling him that he
Speaker 10: was also an investor. So he gets indicted in twenty
Speaker 10: fifteen on selling a security fraud, and that charge is
Speaker 10: kind of hanging over his head for the next almost
Speaker 10: ten years, and as we'll get into, is kind of
Speaker 10: like just looming off in the distance for all of
Speaker 10: its political rise, but also plays an important part of
Speaker 10: his impeachment. But there's one other scandal that you know,
Speaker 10: wasn't criminal that kind of predates the impeachment, which is
Speaker 10: that in twenty fourteen, as he's running for attorney general,
Speaker 10: he is at a courthouse in the Dallas area and
Speaker 10: there's a video of this A guy in front of
Speaker 10: him in the security line leaves one thousand dollars month
Speaker 10: ten in the in the.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it is my one of my favorite KPEX.
Speaker 10: Yes, yeah, there's this little video of Ken Paxton just
Speaker 10: kind of plucking it out there and putting into his
Speaker 10: pocket and yeah, so saw something.
Speaker 2: He liked it, he took it pretty funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh god, that is beautiful. And we have a
Speaker 1: lot more beautiful Kin Paxtan stories to come. But first
Speaker 1: some ads and we're back.
Speaker 2: I guess one of the things that occurs to me,
Speaker 2: just kind of as i've every time I've looked over
Speaker 2: Kin's background, is how much of his election history is
Speaker 2: ran unopposed in the primary, ran against a Democrat who
Speaker 2: had no chance of victory, right Like, once he gets
Speaker 2: in this isn't totally the case, but once he gets
Speaker 2: into office, a lot of his elections are almost like
Speaker 2: a rubber stamp pro forma soda deal kind of.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 10: I mean, I think that I'd have to go back
Speaker 10: and look at the actual margins, but I think that
Speaker 10: he is actually historically kind of lagged behind, you know,
Speaker 10: as far as the margins he's winning by have always
Speaker 10: kind of lagged behind what other top.
Speaker 17: Republicans are winning. Bye.
Speaker 10: Yeah, in twenty eighteen you start to see some cracks. Yeah,
Speaker 10: and then in twenty twenty is when you start seeing
Speaker 10: you know, the.
Speaker 17: Courre quote establishment Texas GOP starting.
Speaker 10: To fund his opponents and ultimately that doesn't work and
Speaker 10: lays the groundwork for I guess the kind of conspiracy
Speaker 10: theories around his impeachment, which I'm sure we'll get there.
Speaker 2: It is interesting that Kim has never been a great campaigner.
Speaker 2: He's benefited from the Republican Party's dominance in Texas and
Speaker 2: like the abount of funding and whatnot that he's able
Speaker 2: to raise his result of that, But as you said,
Speaker 2: he's like lagged behind other Republicans in terms of like
Speaker 2: his electoral performance, and he has had some real close
Speaker 2: squeakers in the past too, which is one of the
Speaker 2: reasons why, like this current election is so interesting. But
Speaker 2: what do you think the Republican Party, the state party
Speaker 2: starts to turn against him. What is it that does that?
Speaker 2: Is it just sort of the weight of scandals that
Speaker 2: this guy accumulates, because we've only talked about a couple
Speaker 2: of them, or is it something else?
Speaker 10: I think that again, he becomes very emblematic of this
Speaker 10: far right flank of the Texas GOP that is funded
Speaker 10: by Tim Dunferis Wilkes, Like, there's this moment in twenty seventeen,
Speaker 10: twenty eighteen ish where the Texas House and the Texas
Speaker 10: legislature has just gotten out of this brutally you know,
Speaker 10: controversial session where they were you know, doing early versions
Speaker 10: of the bathroom build There was really just acrimonious within
Speaker 10: the party. And there are these quotes of these I guess,
Speaker 10: you know, we would call them more moderate Republicans, but
Speaker 10: again still very right wing in any other state.
Speaker 17: Yeah, but they come out.
Speaker 10: You know, there's a famous quote from then, you know,
Speaker 10: the man who became the House speaker basically says, you know,
Speaker 10: we're done bashing the gays, basically trying to move the
Speaker 10: party away from these you know, I guess, for lack
Speaker 10: of a better term, culture war issues, that really the
Speaker 10: far right flank is trying to coalesce around. Yeah, and
Speaker 10: I think that Ken Paxton is is very much seen as.
Speaker 17: A as a kind of you know, emblem of.
Speaker 10: That flank that for a while looked like it was,
Speaker 10: you know, on the verge of being on the outs
Speaker 10: of Texas politics.
Speaker 17: I mean, if you go back to that summer before
Speaker 17: his impeachment.
Speaker 10: There are so many different things that happened in the
Speaker 10: lead up to that where you're like, oh, this Tim
Speaker 10: Dunferris Wilk's network looks like, you know, this is a
Speaker 10: death rattle moment for it, and instead of dying, it
Speaker 10: becomes more powerful than ever and starts exporting all of
Speaker 10: its stuff nationally.
Speaker 3: Why why do you think that is?
Speaker 10: Like?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 3: How the fuck does this guy?
Speaker 2: Sorry, how is this guy though, the one who manages
Speaker 2: to like reincarnate himself at this moment that should have
Speaker 2: been his end?
Speaker 3: A I think I know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's not an answer to that, but I guess
Speaker 2: I'm yeah, your feeling's on it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, So before we got on, I just was like,
Speaker 10: I need to almost refresh myself on everything that happened
Speaker 10: with his impeachment. And at the time, I was covering
Speaker 10: it like turn of this crew, like wall to wall
Speaker 10: coverage every single second of the impeachment hearing. And I
Speaker 10: don't think unless you were paying that much, you know,
Speaker 10: intimate attention to everything that was going on, people are
Speaker 10: fully capable of under standing just like how wide ranging
Speaker 10: and frankly insane the entire episode was.
Speaker 17: And I think because of that, it was really easy.
Speaker 10: For Ken Paxon's defenders, both in the in teachment hearing
Speaker 10: and you know, just.
Speaker 17: Outside in the political realm.
Speaker 10: It was much easier for them to take this complicated
Speaker 10: scandal and turn it into just a oh, this is
Speaker 10: a witch hunt. They're going after Ken Paxon because they
Speaker 10: can't get to you. It's worth also backtracking here. Yeah,
Speaker 10: there are a significant number of people, because of this
Speaker 10: Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes operation, that believe fundamentally that
Speaker 10: the Texas legislature and state has been under the control
Speaker 10: secretly of Democrats for more than like twenty years. I mean,
Speaker 10: this is this is how successful this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 10: it sounds insane, but it's the truth. And so you know,
Speaker 10: when Ken Paxton gets impeached, he becomes again this stand
Speaker 10: in for everything that these people, you know, fear about,
Speaker 10: this supposed democratic rhino cabal. And I think that that,
Speaker 10: coupled with just like the complexity and often absurdity of
Speaker 10: the impeachment charges more broadly, really insulates him in a
Speaker 10: way that turns him into a folk hero once he
Speaker 10: survives the impeachment.
Speaker 2: Great, I mean, yeah, that's that's as much sense as
Speaker 2: I think can be made of the Kiin Paxton story. Sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: that makes sense.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean it's this whole thing, you know, And
Speaker 10: I've noticed this even just in my time covering tech
Speaker 10: of politics is there used to be a moment where
Speaker 10: if we wrote a negative story about someone there were
Speaker 10: maybe not consequences, but like people cared.
Speaker 17: And now it's not only that people don't care, it's
Speaker 17: to be attacked by the quote unquote.
Speaker 10: You know, liberal media is in and of itself a
Speaker 10: badge of honor that like, yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, and I think that he really exemplifies that.
Speaker 1: They're waiting for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, how would you describe kin Paxton as an attorney general?
Speaker 2: Which is kind of because obviously he's a state legislator
Speaker 2: too before that, but like he's most known and has
Speaker 2: been most influential as the ag.
Speaker 1: How would you describe his work?
Speaker 10: I think that he has done a remarkable job of
Speaker 10: advancing a once non explicit but now explicit Christian nationalist
Speaker 10: movements that is very far right in its views on immigration,
Speaker 10: LGBTQ rights, abortion, and basically every other social issue. I mean,
Speaker 10: he has used his office, as you know, at times
Speaker 10: a pretty blunt instrument in this.
Speaker 17: I guess the lack of a better term, culture war.
Speaker 10: Has used it to investigate political groups on the left,
Speaker 10: has used it to advance twenty twenty election fraud, conspiracy theories.
Speaker 10: I mean named something within the hodge you know, the
Speaker 10: Hodgepodge of right wing kind of culture war issues.
Speaker 17: And I guarantee you he has used his officer being.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's some questionable decisions that attorneys under him have
Speaker 2: made about some specific relevant cases, including a pedophile that's
Speaker 2: one of the biggest most recent scandals against Ken. I
Speaker 2: talk about this on the ed that we did a
Speaker 2: week or so ago, And one of the things that
Speaker 2: you have to like encounter looking at him is that
Speaker 2: throughout all of these horrible things that he and people
Speaker 2: have done kind of as part of his office, none
Speaker 2: of it has knocked him out. Like and you get
Speaker 2: interesting quotes from different people who have run against him
Speaker 2: that are all variants of like, well, I had all
Speaker 2: of these opposition files, but also we had to make
Speaker 2: a decision of like how much to talk about it
Speaker 2: because there's so much out here, and like, what more
Speaker 2: do you say about Ken? If you're trying to run
Speaker 2: against him?
Speaker 1: It could matter?
Speaker 10: Now, Yeah, I mean I think that he has a
Speaker 10: similar you know ethos as Trump, where it's like, yeah,
Speaker 10: people have heard so much about him for so long
Speaker 10: that they just kind of you know, at least amongst
Speaker 10: amongst a lot of the Republicans, they've been able to
Speaker 10: just tune it out entirely. I mean, going back to
Speaker 10: his impeachment, which you know, that is an episode onto
Speaker 10: itself everything that happened.
Speaker 17: But the people who were who brought.
Speaker 10: About Ken Paxson's impeachment were top deputies in the Oag's office.
Speaker 10: One of them would is almost confirmed for a federal
Speaker 10: judge ship in like twenty nineteen, but was deemed too
Speaker 10: anti trans at the time to survive a Senate confirmation.
Speaker 1: Here, my god.
Speaker 10: Another one of these guys went on to be a
Speaker 10: vice president and Alliance Defending Freedom, the group that you know,
Speaker 10: I been kind of the tip of the legal spear
Speaker 10: in the Christian nationalist movement.
Speaker 3: Yeah so not the Wokes.
Speaker 10: No, Arguably, some of the most right wing people now
Speaker 10: argue some of the most right wing people in the
Speaker 10: world at this point.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they would argue some of the most right wing.
Speaker 10: People in yes, right, And I mean we're talking, you know,
Speaker 10: like the platonic ideal of a Texas Ranger, like people
Speaker 10: who by all extent and purposes should be people who
Speaker 10: are taking very seriously by the Republican voters in Texas,
Speaker 10: and yet yeah, he again because of you know, just
Speaker 10: there's something about Ken.
Speaker 17: I don't know, man, that's.
Speaker 1: So fucking weird. There's something about Ken.
Speaker 2: And there's also something about the sponsors of this show,
Speaker 2: who we're going to go back to for a minute
Speaker 2: and then we'll return. All right, we're back. So Kim
Speaker 2: Paxton is currently running for Senate. He just defeated John
Speaker 2: Cornyn for the primary and he's running against Democrat James Tellerico.
Speaker 2: And I brought this up on Edie last week. But
Speaker 2: it's close, and at least according to one pole, currently
Speaker 2: Tellerico is ahead one pole isn't head by a good bit.
Speaker 2: Most of what I've seen has them like pretty much
Speaker 2: neck and neck. There's a few big differences with this
Speaker 2: election so far and all of Kin's previous elections. One
Speaker 2: is that he does not have a gigantic advantage in funding,
Speaker 2: and in fact, tell Rico currently has a lot more
Speaker 2: money on hand. And the other is that, at least
Speaker 2: per some of the most recent polling, tell Rico is
Speaker 2: actually beating him with non college educated voters. That's the
Speaker 2: heartland for Kim Paxton. So yeah, it's very unclear what's
Speaker 2: going to happen again. I would say it's smarter to
Speaker 2: say this is a neck and neck then tall Rico
Speaker 2: is ahead. But yeah, how did we get here?
Speaker 10: I mean, I think a couple of important things. One,
Speaker 10: James tell Rico has I think that he has done
Speaker 10: it good. And maybe this is just the religion reporter
Speaker 10: in me. I think he has done a good job
Speaker 10: of finding palable messaging around Christianity in ways that like
Speaker 10: can appeal to the you know, republican leading white Christian
Speaker 10: voter of Texas. That coupled with his kind of you know,
Speaker 10: campaigning frequently on you know, it's not left versus right,
Speaker 10: it's top versus bottom. That kind of stuff I think
Speaker 10: is playing really well here. The other thing about Paxton, though,
Speaker 10: is that you know, we've I've mentioned Tim Dunn and
Speaker 10: Ferris Wilkes in this conversition a bunch of times because
Speaker 10: they really are crucial to this story. They both have
Speaker 10: basically entirely pulled out from supporting it in the Senate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that is really interesting.
Speaker 10: Ferris Wilkes as a result of some very long story.
Speaker 10: But in twenty twenty three, there was reporting I did
Speaker 10: about their network having, you know, meeting with Nick Fuentes
Speaker 10: and having a bunch of ties to other pretty avowed
Speaker 10: white nationalists. There was a big fallout in that network,
Speaker 10: and that from what I understand, drou Ferris Wilkes out
Speaker 10: of politics entirely, and at the same time, Tim Dunn
Speaker 10: was adamantly opposed to Ken Paxton running for Senates from
Speaker 10: everything that we've heard, and so it wasn't until literally,
Speaker 10: I think on Monday, Tim Dunn's one of the super
Speaker 10: PACs spent one hundred thousand dollars to send out text
Speaker 10: messages against Tallariico, that we saw any kind of movement
Speaker 10: from Tim Dunn or Ferris Wilkes in support of Paxton.
Speaker 10: And I think that that does actually kind of speak
Speaker 10: to their level of concern that you know, they have
Speaker 10: sat out all of this for almost two years now
Speaker 10: and suddenly with three months ago, are getting engaged.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's it's it's really been kind of stirring
Speaker 2: to see I'm not resigned as I usually am in
Speaker 2: a Kin pax An election to like, well, clearly at
Speaker 2: some point he's just going to like leap frog ahead
Speaker 2: of this fucker and wind up back in office, is he?
Speaker 2: And maybe that'll happen, but it doesn't feel like it.
Speaker 2: It doesn't feel like that's the only thing that could happen,
Speaker 2: I should say.
Speaker 10: Right, And you know, to be fair, there's this kind
Speaker 10: of myth that Texas is secretly blue, if it's just
Speaker 10: a voter turnout, probably that's not true.
Speaker 1: It's not.
Speaker 10: No, Texas is solidly read in order to win statewide here,
Speaker 10: Like there's a reason why Beto when he ran here,
Speaker 10: he went to every single one of our two hundred
Speaker 10: and fifty four counties. Yeah, it's because you have to
Speaker 10: really turn out world voters.
Speaker 3: And try to make personal connections with him.
Speaker 17: Yeah, exactly. Because of that, it's easy for Republicans in.
Speaker 10: The state to wave away any kind of for momentum
Speaker 10: from a Democratic.
Speaker 17: State white candidate.
Speaker 10: But if you look at the polling in this race
Speaker 10: between Tallarrican Paxson, like Tall Rico has been pulling way
Speaker 10: ahead of where Beto was, where any you know, comparable
Speaker 10: Democratic state white candidate has been over the last you know,
Speaker 10: thirty years. And I think that that kind of you know,
Speaker 10: disbelief amongst Republicans that this state could ever elect to
Speaker 10: Tall Rico or flip blue. I think is potentially left
Speaker 10: them kind of asleep at the wheel and made a
Speaker 10: lot of them much more willing to support someone like
Speaker 10: Paxton despite his many flaws, as canit.
Speaker 2: So I guess as we close out here, is there
Speaker 2: anything else you wanted to say about Ken anything we
Speaker 2: didn't get to that you think is really important to
Speaker 2: talk about?
Speaker 10: I mean, do we have forty five more minutes we
Speaker 10: can talk about his impeachment?
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean get a little.
Speaker 10: Bit, you know, I'm just going to read my notes,
Speaker 10: just just a few fun things. Sure, fast food joints
Speaker 10: in all capital. Yes, Walter Junior from breaking bad with
Speaker 10: somehow involved.
Speaker 17: There's a lot there, not directly involved, but his family.
Speaker 17: It was insane and yeah awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh man, is there is there any reading you'd
Speaker 2: recommend to the listeners on the contacts and impeachment?
Speaker 10: Honestly, there's four thousand pages of court documents.
Speaker 17: I think that's it. I mean someone's got to do
Speaker 17: a story about it.
Speaker 3: I mean, okay, okay, well maybe we'll maybe we'll hire
Speaker 3: you to do that.
Speaker 17: If we can't, yeah, we'll get Won't Junior on it?
Speaker 2: So, yeah, you know, I did want to say because
Speaker 2: it's very wrong when people think that Texas is like
Speaker 2: a secret blue state. But it's also not read in
Speaker 2: the way most of the red and it isn't necessarily
Speaker 2: read in the way that that people think of it,
Speaker 2: because like I think back to my family who are like,
Speaker 2: we're like solidly read and would never vote for a Democrat.
Speaker 2: But like my mom didn't own guns and didn't really
Speaker 2: think they should be legal, and was very much like
Speaker 2: pro abortion. She was culturally a Republican, And that's like
Speaker 2: an important thing like that. It's not just a belief system,
Speaker 2: it's that that is your culture and your team. And
Speaker 2: so much of the difficulty is there are a lot
Speaker 2: of people in Texas who'se values personally certainly do not
Speaker 2: align with a man like Ken Paxton, but breaking rank
Speaker 2: is not a doable thing for a lot of them.
Speaker 1: I don't know how else to.
Speaker 2: Describe it, Like it's it would be like getting someone
Speaker 2: who was born and raised rooting for the Packers to
Speaker 2: like support the Dallas Cowboys in a game against the
Speaker 2: Packers or something like. It's that fucking kind of mindset
Speaker 2: in a lot of ways.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean I think that the other thing about
Speaker 10: it is kind of the ethos of Texas politics for
Speaker 10: the longest time has been this real antipathy towards you know, DC,
Speaker 10: Like one of the things that it's it's always been
Speaker 10: kind of you know, we're not DC, and like kind
Speaker 10: of the circus of it all. It plays here differently.
Speaker 10: There's circus here, but it's a different circus.
Speaker 17: I guess. So what you have is like a lot
Speaker 17: of these people. Again, the other thing about Texas is.
Speaker 10: It's just so dam big, Like there are parts of
Speaker 10: Texas that are closer like there's a part of Textar,
Speaker 10: Canada that's closer to Chicago than it is. They'll passo
Speaker 10: and I think that like people, yeah, really don't understand
Speaker 10: what that does to the politics here, as far as
Speaker 10: just like making people view politics as this really far
Speaker 10: off thing off in the distance that like it's like
Speaker 10: a libertarian almost like you know, don't don't mess with
Speaker 10: me and I won't engage with you kind of ordeal.
Speaker 10: And as I think that the state has become more dcified,
Speaker 10: for lack of a better term, I think that that's
Speaker 10: starting to really test some of these you know, some
Speaker 10: of that kind of mentality you were speaking to and
Speaker 10: then you add on you know, well, the fact that
Speaker 10: the schools here are just really in bad shape, or
Speaker 10: doing school voucher legislation, all of these things that like
Speaker 10: are actually rural issues are being kind of flipped on
Speaker 10: their head.
Speaker 17: And I think that that has the.
Speaker 10: Potential maybe not to flip those voters, but if enough
Speaker 10: of them stay home and you.
Speaker 17: See enough energy in the cities, like that isn't enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so yeah, that is enough. And like as individuals,
Speaker 2: some of those people can flip on a candidate. You know,
Speaker 2: they might not flip party wise, they're certainly a lot
Speaker 2: less likely to vote for like a Democrat for president.
Speaker 2: That may be completely out of the question, but you
Speaker 2: might be able to get them to vote for a
Speaker 2: senator or something like that. Like that's not impossible for everybody.
Speaker 2: And it certainly looks like I think he's got about
Speaker 2: four or five percent of Republican voters voting for him
Speaker 2: right now.
Speaker 17: Yeah, I mean he's got a lot of crossover.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which is a good amount of crossover, by the way,
Speaker 2: Like that's low and objective numbers, but it's pretty good
Speaker 2: for a candidate in Texas, right right, right, cool, All right, Well,
Speaker 2: that has been a brief version of the Kim Paxton story.
Speaker 2: We'll have more about kpas in the future, and hopefully
Speaker 2: we'll have Robert back as well. You have anything you
Speaker 2: want to plug before we end here.
Speaker 10: Just I'm on Blue Sky at Robert Downdon. Subscribe to
Speaker 10: Texas Monthly for twenty five dollars. You can get two
Speaker 10: years of print magazine and digital editions. So good, best
Speaker 10: deal on journal awesome.
Speaker 3: Check that out.
Speaker 2: Please do sign up and yeah, we'll be back probably tomorrow. Anyway,
Speaker 2: go do something else.
Speaker 7: Now, this is it could happen here in Executive Disorder,
Speaker 7: our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,
Speaker 7: the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I
Speaker 7: am Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Nia Wong, James Stout,
Speaker 7: Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 1: Who want my correspondent Hi.
Speaker 7: For some small things. White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt
Speaker 7: will be stepping down to spend more time with her family.
Speaker 7: At twenty seven, she was the youngest person ever appointed
Speaker 7: to the position. Now, I don't comment on women's age
Speaker 7: or appearance, and yeah, I don't comment on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I do want to mention that when we say
Speaker 1: stepping down to spend more time with her family. This
Speaker 1: is the first time I've ever seen this where that
Speaker 1: is actually true. This is true, she did have a baby,
Speaker 1: actually legitimately doing that and not.
Speaker 19: Yeah, I just assumed you are speaking euphemistically about like
Speaker 19: basically fired she did have, not a euphemism.
Speaker 7: Actually actually some seems to really like her.
Speaker 1: Yeah, unfortunately she sucks, but yeah, just just just to clarify,
Speaker 1: not an euphemism, actually doing that.
Speaker 7: On the ninth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally,
Speaker 7: a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has
Speaker 7: been arrested on fraud charges for payments to informants within
Speaker 7: white nationalist organizations. We talked about the indictment against SBOC
Speaker 7: the organization a few months ago. This is the first
Speaker 7: charge against a specific individual. For some other small items.
Speaker 7: Let's throw to James Stout.
Speaker 18: I'm going to start by saying some small things. The
Speaker 18: Texas Land Commissioner has sent a cease and assist to
Speaker 18: CBP Customs of Border Protection, claiming they illegally cleared state
Speaker 18: land to begin.
Speaker 4: Border wall construction. Quote.
Speaker 18: Texas sovereignty will not be infringed. By failure to follow
Speaker 18: established protocol, said Commissioner Buckingham, quote, My office has a
Speaker 18: proven track record of strong border enforcement, and I applaud
Speaker 18: efforts to protect our border. I am committed to maintaining
Speaker 18: a positive relationship with CBP, but we will not allow
Speaker 18: rogue actors who breached our agreement to undermine the incredible
Speaker 18: work we.
Speaker 4: Do for Texas.
Speaker 18: The second quotation I've included there was oddly missing from
Speaker 18: lots of people's commentary on this, because I think the
Speaker 18: people who make money from clicks or just have a
Speaker 18: relationship with clicks which is not healthy or good for them,
Speaker 18: wanted to portray this as like Texas is going woke
Speaker 18: and fighting Trump, and no they're not. Don't be silly.
Speaker 18: Read the thing. It's in the press release. Secondly, Al
Speaker 18: Monitor reported that the United States was withdrawing its last
Speaker 18: forces from a bill amidst Iran's campaign strikes on the region.
Speaker 18: The United States has a pre agreed withdrawal with a
Speaker 18: deadline of September thirtieth, but another source told The New
Speaker 18: Arab that they had not left and that they had
Speaker 18: relocated them closer to the consulate. So the United States
Speaker 18: will be withdrawing from this region, probably relatively soon. But
Speaker 18: it seems that at the time they didn't leave as
Speaker 18: people had feared, but they relocated. Keeping with the theme
Speaker 18: of the United States war in Iran, CNN reported last
Speaker 18: week that the Kentigon was looking for outside the box
Speaker 18: thinking in its war with Iran. Quote, we are looking
Speaker 18: for new and creative and unconventional ways to pressure and
Speaker 18: punish Iran, an officer in the United States Central Commands
Speaker 18: Intelligence Branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday into a
Speaker 18: broad group of military analysts. According to a source familiar
Speaker 18: with a message, this is fucking spectacular, right.
Speaker 7: It sounds like a San Francisco startup trying to make
Speaker 7: like AI powered coffee or something.
Speaker 1: I had to shake up the coffee industry.
Speaker 18: Yeah, can we disrupt the bombing Iran marketing guys?
Speaker 1: Yeah, move fast and break things in the in the
Speaker 1: regime of collective punishment. Yeah, it's what we're doing now.
Speaker 18: Except that moving fast and breaking things was kind of
Speaker 18: plan A. So God knows what will come out of this,
Speaker 18: but I can't wait to see. I'm sure it'll be
Speaker 18: exciting and fun. I received news from the PAK that's
Speaker 18: the Kurdistan Freedom party, different party from PGAAK, the Kurdistan
Speaker 18: Free Life Party. They let me know that an assassination
Speaker 18: attempt was made in a bill. Again, it's mukri Yas Danpana.
Speaker 18: He's the son of their leader, the leader of the
Speaker 18: Kurdistan Freedom Party.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 18: He was injured and he's currently under medical care in
Speaker 18: a hospital. They didn't want to make a formal statement
Speaker 18: about this either than clarifying that that had happened. It
Speaker 18: appears someone tried to shoot him in a bill. A bill,
Speaker 18: if you're not familiar, is the capital of the Kurdistan
Speaker 18: Autonomous Region of Iraq. Then this is not the first
Speaker 18: time that I'm just going to go ahead and assume
Speaker 18: that this is an Iranian state linked assassination attempt. I
Speaker 18: think that's a reasonable assumption to make. Not the first
Speaker 18: time that this happened in a bill, and it is
Speaker 18: pretty clear that this is the Iranian government continuing its
Speaker 18: attempt to punish Eastern Kurdish parties for the United States aggression. Right,
Speaker 18: which we can draw a line all the way back
Speaker 18: to the reporting we did late winter early spring of
Speaker 18: this year on people who were suggesting that there was
Speaker 18: going to be a Kurdish ground component to the United
Speaker 18: States war in Iran, which as of yet there has
Speaker 18: not been. This has continued to have consequences for these parties. Right,
Speaker 18: and then finally from me, I want to talk about
Speaker 18: these two executive orders. The President has written a pair
Speaker 18: of executive orders this week aimed at reducing the number
Speaker 18: of people eligible for citizenship by birth right. And basically
Speaker 18: what they've done here, and I would suggest to people
Speaker 18: wanting more context and I'm able to give here, go
Speaker 18: back to our Supreme Court special episode of ED they've
Speaker 18: did a few weeks ago where I talked at length
Speaker 18: about the fourteenth Amendment and the one kim Ark case.
Speaker 18: They've taken the exemptions that I outlined there and they've
Speaker 18: tried to kind of stick a crow bar in there
Speaker 18: and leave of them open as far as it can
Speaker 18: would be the way that I would describe it. And
Speaker 18: particularly they've looked at the exemptions for foreign diplomats and
Speaker 18: for invading armies, one for vessels in the United States
Speaker 18: waters PA's the most significant one is the one that
Speaker 18: is meant for invading armies.
Speaker 4: And when I say invading.
Speaker 18: Armies, I want to be clear what I mean. This
Speaker 18: is like Mexico decides that eighteen forty eight wasn't the
Speaker 18: end and they want some of that landbag, so they
Speaker 18: decide to invade the United States. They push up into
Speaker 18: San Diego. Right, they say they're in, They've liberated Cardiff
Speaker 18: by the Sea, and one of their soldiers gives birth.
Speaker 4: Well, they're here.
Speaker 18: That Baily would not be a United States citizen because
Speaker 18: that person was engaged in an invasion of the United States. Right.
Speaker 18: What the Trump administration here has gone for is adding
Speaker 18: quote either parent of that person is an alien enemy,
Speaker 18: defined to include any member of a designated foreign terrorist
Speaker 18: organization under a USC eleven eighty nine, especially designated global terrorists.
Speaker 18: Now we have to remember they have added a number
Speaker 18: of groups to the FDO list, and that they have
Speaker 18: attempted to define people as members of those groups using
Speaker 18: absolute bullshit criteria like having a tattoo. Right, That is
Speaker 18: the one that might be what they are going for here.
Speaker 18: I if I had one where I suspect they will
Speaker 18: try and use this en mass, it will be that
Speaker 18: one using that same criteria that the earlier used to
Speaker 18: send people to Si Good right near Olsalblor. They also
Speaker 18: added a broader away of people who have worked to
Speaker 18: work for foreign governments. They also add quote, the person
Speaker 18: is born in a territory or territorial water the United
Speaker 18: States to a citizenship is not conferred by federal statute.
Speaker 18: That refers to American Samoa. Now we're covering this next
Speaker 18: week actually in an episode with Carlos Belio Polanco, but
Speaker 18: just very briefly, there is actually a bill to remove
Speaker 18: birth or a citizenship from people in American It's not
Speaker 18: going to go anywhere, but it just it's a signal
Speaker 18: of where the right is out on this, which is
Speaker 18: they're trying to remove as access to being an American from
Speaker 18: as many people as possible United States American the second
Speaker 18: egective order to take to swing what the right cause
Speaker 18: birth tourism. Right birth tourism has been a thing on
Speaker 18: like the VD air tendency has been obsessed with this
Speaker 18: for a long time. My Nottal quote is a lot.
Speaker 18: You can go back to an episode in November twenty
Speaker 18: twenty four they did with Sophie and Robert and you
Speaker 18: can hear us talking about the rights concern with this,
Speaker 18: that the phenomenal they're talking about represents it generously if
Speaker 18: we define it a fraction of a single percent of
Speaker 18: babies born in the United States every year. It would
Speaker 18: already be fraud to enter on a tourist visa with
Speaker 18: the intent of delivering your child here so that they
Speaker 18: could be a citizen. But nonetheless, this is kind of
Speaker 18: a bugbear for the right, and so they are attempting
Speaker 18: to clamp down on specifically, like they believe that there
Speaker 18: are these giant companies sort of shipping people in to
Speaker 18: deliver their children. It's worth noting some people do come
Speaker 18: to United States to deliver because the United States has
Speaker 18: very good medical care compared to other paths of the world.
Speaker 18: Will be it also very expensive medical care, so people
Speaker 18: who might have the means to access that might choose
Speaker 18: to come to liver or simply let's say you reside
Speaker 18: in Mexico but work in the United States and have
Speaker 18: health insurance in the United States, you might come here
Speaker 18: to liiver your baby. Right, there are reasons why people
Speaker 18: might do that. Nonetheless, it is a very limited phenomenon,
Speaker 18: but it is a thing that the right has been
Speaker 18: talking about for some time and it's shocking to see
Speaker 18: the jump administration going as to this. Again, these will
Speaker 18: wings to be challenging courte We will see.
Speaker 4: How it goes.
Speaker 1: In other news, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is under
Speaker 1: three hundred million barrels, which is the lowest level it
Speaker 1: has been since the US started filling it in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. It was created in response to the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies OPEC embargo. The Trump administration has been draining the
Speaker 1: strategic reserve in order to attempt to stabilize the price
Speaker 1: of oil as a result of his war in Iran. Now,
Speaker 1: the administration has stated that it will be refilling the
Speaker 1: strategic reserve next year. However, paired with Trump's statement that quote,
Speaker 1: we are low keying it. We are only semi negotiating
Speaker 1: with them. We are just watching the Ran with its
Speaker 1: hues inflation and the fact they have no money, it
Speaker 1: is unclear how the reserve would be refilled because the
Speaker 1: war does not seem to actually have a way to end.
Speaker 1: It is also unclear whether the US will succumb to
Speaker 1: likewise having no money and huge inflation in the meantime.
Speaker 7: That seems bad. Low keying it.
Speaker 1: It's not great. It's not great. One of the things
Speaker 1: I should sort of mention is that part of the
Speaker 1: reason the economy is still functioning is that the analysis
Speaker 1: from places like JP Morgan from the financial sector has
Speaker 1: been based on the fact that this war will end,
Speaker 1: and every week that it continues and every week that
Speaker 1: there seems to be no potential way for it to end,
Speaker 1: increases the likelihood that the bankers will figure out that
Speaker 1: this war is not going to end and that everything
Speaker 1: is just like this now. So that is a financial
Speaker 1: collapse warning.
Speaker 19: I feel like that's been like everyone has just been
Speaker 19: trying to figure out, like, why has this not collapsed
Speaker 19: the economy yet? And so I'm always curious your take
Speaker 19: on why hasn't this collapsed the economy yet? Because everything
Speaker 19: points to this should collapse the economy. Yeah, but it
Speaker 19: keeps stumbling on. Energy prices are skyrocketing, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean basically it's because it's not in
Speaker 1: the interest of the people who have money to believe
Speaker 1: that it will. So they're still behaving as if eventually
Speaker 1: it's going to end in actually, the prices are going
Speaker 1: to come down, and eventually everything from you know, petroleum
Speaker 1: defertilizer that comes through the shaff about is simply going
Speaker 1: to be available again. And the moment they realize that
Speaker 1: it's not the.
Speaker 7: Pyramid collapses speaking of money, Robert, So yeah, for my
Speaker 7: little thing today, I mean, it's a little thing in
Speaker 7: terms of how I guess important the story is at
Speaker 7: this point, but it's a big thing in terms of
Speaker 7: the amount of money being discussed, because.
Speaker 2: Y'all remember back when Elon Musk bought Twitter and see
Speaker 2: what he yeah, he shared it. There should be a
Speaker 2: website called Twitter Garrison.
Speaker 3: It's before your time. It's what X became. Oh X Yeah, No,
Speaker 3: I love ac the everything out the everything.
Speaker 17: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So when when Musk bought Twitter, he promised that he
Speaker 2: was going to take for like forty billion dollars. He
Speaker 2: was going to take the company's AD revenue for about
Speaker 2: four and a half billion dollars, which is what Twitter
Speaker 2: made an AD revenue twenty twenty one, to twelve billion
Speaker 2: dollars by twenty twenty seven. Sure, and also there'd be
Speaker 2: billions more in subscription income right now, given that it
Speaker 2: is currently last I checked pretty late in twenty twenty six. Actually,
Speaker 2: we're like most of the way through the year. You
Speaker 2: would expect Twitter's AD revenue to be pretty close to
Speaker 2: twelve billion dollars, right, Like if I'm extrapolating from four
Speaker 2: and a half billion in twenty twenty one to twelve
Speaker 2: billion in twenty twenty seven, we should be somewhere on.
Speaker 3: Nine or ten billion right now.
Speaker 2: Maybe you know that's not where we are, and there's
Speaker 2: a really good article in techtered. But and the reason
Speaker 2: why we know all this is because once once Musk
Speaker 2: bought Twitter, it's not being a public company, right, so
Speaker 2: you don't have any fucking knowledge at all about really
Speaker 2: what's going on inside a private company, right in terms
Speaker 2: of it's like revenue and stuff. But because Musk recently
Speaker 2: folded X into SpaceX and these AI company, he had
Speaker 2: to include a bunch of revenue information. This came out
Speaker 2: in what's called their ten Q filing, and tech Dirt
Speaker 2: has has done an analysis of it that I'm going
Speaker 2: to quote from. Now, all of X's revenue is now
Speaker 2: misleadingly labeled AI revenue, But even then the reporting has
Speaker 2: to admit AD revenue took a big hit, dropping one
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty million compared to the first half of
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five, which is already way way lower than
Speaker 2: when Elon took over the site, going from eight hundred
Speaker 2: and seventy million in twenty twenty five to seven hundred
Speaker 2: and ten million in the first half of twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: The company tries to claim this decrease in AD revenues
Speaker 2: because they transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted
Speaker 2: AD sales for a short period of time, which is
Speaker 2: a curious explanation given that on the analyst call, CFO
Speaker 2: Brett Johnson credited that very same overhauled ad tech platform
Speaker 2: for the very slight quarter over quarter uptick in AD revenue.
Speaker 2: The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it,
Speaker 2: depending on which direction the number was moving. And yeah,
Speaker 2: so within the second quarter of last year to this
Speaker 2: year to where we are at now, AD revenue has
Speaker 2: dropped from four hundred and twenty six million to three
Speaker 2: hundred and sixty seven million year over year, and in
Speaker 2: no way, shape or form is Twitter anywhere close to
Speaker 2: the numbers that Elon Musk claimed they would be in
Speaker 2: right now. In the second quarter of twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: which is the last full quarter before Elon bought the company,
Speaker 2: Twitter brought in about one point eight billion dollars in
Speaker 2: AD revenue. By the second quarter of twenty twenty six
Speaker 2: X brought in three hundred and sixty seven million dollars.
Speaker 1: Is that bad?
Speaker 2: That is a reduction of seven hundred and thirteen million
Speaker 2: dollars a quarter. In other words, from tech Dirt, Elon
Speaker 2: has wiped out two thirds of Twitter's ad business over
Speaker 2: the exact period in which you promised investors seed nearly
Speaker 2: triple it.
Speaker 1: It's just incredible. It's just fun.
Speaker 3: That's just a good time.
Speaker 7: I wonder how much like the recent drop off can
Speaker 7: also be attributed to, like right wing political content getting
Speaker 7: much less engagement following Trump taking office than what it
Speaker 7: was near twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four when I was,
Speaker 7: you know, driving a lot of traffic to the site.
Speaker 3: That's got to be part of it.
Speaker 2: Part of it has to be also that aislop has
Speaker 2: reduced the value, because we're seeing this at Facebook stars
Speaker 2: across the board, like all of them are seeing reductions
Speaker 2: in like in user engagement because people don't like the
Speaker 2: slot very much. Yeah, this isn't one thing, and well, honestly,
Speaker 2: as funny as it is, you can't even just blame
Speaker 2: it on Elon, although you can blame it on things
Speaker 2: Elon has championed pretty much entirely, right.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, just a fun little story.
Speaker 17: Sweet.
Speaker 19: I have one short piece that I brought today which
Speaker 19: is in a story of good stuff, of people doing
Speaker 19: cool stuff against bad stuff. There is a tree sit
Speaker 19: that is currently blocking construction of the border wall in Arizona.
Speaker 19: Hell yeah, yeah, no, it's it's I'm really excited about it.
Speaker 19: To quote a write up from crimethink dot com about it. Quote,
Speaker 19: two weeks ago, one protester decided it was time to
Speaker 19: block the machine that was about to destroy the last
Speaker 19: of our four ancient cottonwood trees that stood in the
Speaker 19: way of the walls construction. A sheriff arrested him. He
Speaker 19: was released twelve hours later with no charges filed. This
Speaker 19: arrest galvanized the community. Less than two days later, friends
Speaker 19: installed a platform in the tree end quote, and it
Speaker 19: seems to be ongoing as of this recording. And if
Speaker 19: you want more information about the group who is stopping
Speaker 19: construction of the border wall, you can read the whole
Speaker 19: piece on crimething dot com, which is entitled the border
Speaker 19: is an open wound.
Speaker 1: Speaking of open wounds, or I guess I'm gonna call
Speaker 1: you our crime correspondent positive. Margaret has another story about
Speaker 1: things that are open wounds in the face of our society.
Speaker 1: I did pitch that.
Speaker 19: If y'all ever need someone to come on and talk
Speaker 19: about crimes that I approve of, I am always happy
Speaker 19: to talk about crimes that I approve of. And this
Speaker 19: week I can bring you really positive news, really happy
Speaker 19: news that you can file under direct action gets the
Speaker 19: goods because today, as we record this August twelfth, twenty
Speaker 19: twenty six, two days before you're listening to it, the
Speaker 19: police in the town of Winona, Minnesota, have given up
Speaker 19: not entirely. They announced that they will not be replacing
Speaker 19: the eight Flock license plate reader cameras that were stolen
Speaker 19: last week because on or about August third, well on
Speaker 19: August third, the police department in Winoda, Minnesota, reported a
Speaker 19: terrifying loss in just one night, every single one of
Speaker 19: their eight flot cameras, their automated license plate readers that
Speaker 19: tracked every single person who came in and out of
Speaker 19: the city that were set up in pairs along all
Speaker 19: the ways in and out, All eight of them were
Speaker 19: cut down and stolen. I said, on just one night.
Speaker 19: Book the cops don't actually know when it happened. It
Speaker 19: happened sometime between July twenty ninth and August first, and
Speaker 19: they only noticed when eventually the cop was like, look
Speaker 19: of our cameras aren't talking to us anymore. So they
Speaker 19: only noticed a while later. Each camera and its poll
Speaker 19: cost about three thousand dollars, so there's a total of
Speaker 19: twenty four thousand dollars in theft. The crime wasn't noticed
Speaker 19: for days. The WPD also said that some flot cameras
Speaker 19: in Buffalo County, which is a Wisconsin county just up
Speaker 19: from or across the river from there, were also cut down,
Speaker 19: probably on July twenty ninth. And when the police reported
Speaker 19: this theft to social media, over nine hundred people commented
Speaker 19: on the police's post, which takes more nerve. I don't
Speaker 19: comment things on politicians or police departments posts personally, not
Speaker 19: very often.
Speaker 1: And when I do, a delete it and call my lawyer.
Speaker 19: And so nine hundred people commented on the post, almost
Speaker 19: universally in support of the action.
Speaker 1: As reported by the Winona Post.
Speaker 19: One comment or put it, it's almost like people don't
Speaker 19: want to be washed twenty four to seven. And so
Speaker 19: today Winona Police Department declared surrender They put out a
Speaker 19: press release saying how important the cameras have been for
Speaker 19: solving crime, but even more important to them than solving
Speaker 19: crime is building community trust, which they clearly have lost,
Speaker 19: and so they will not be replacing the cameras. Flock
Speaker 19: Safety is a brand name of automated license plate readers ALPRs.
Speaker 19: At this rate, flock is probably kind of becoming the generic. Yeah, like,
Speaker 19: I will run across headlines that say flock like cameras
Speaker 19: that will be talking about something from Axos or other
Speaker 19: places Axon crap, I don't remember else, Axon, thank you.
Speaker 1: It'll probably become the generic.
Speaker 19: I'm working on a longer piece about the revolt against
Speaker 19: these cameras, but it is getting hot this summer. Red state,
Speaker 19: Blue state people just fucking hate the idea that they're
Speaker 19: being tracked everywhere they go. Cop after cop has been
Speaker 19: caught using them to stalk their exes, and it seems
Speaker 19: very likely that if we stay a democracy, the style
Speaker 19: of surveillance will be found to be a violation of
Speaker 19: the Fourth Amendment. Because similar technologies keep getting found to
Speaker 19: be violations of the Fourth Amendment. You know, eventually they're like, oh,
Speaker 19: you actually do need a warrant to look at someone's
Speaker 19: cell phone data, that kind of thing, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 19: but here is a highlight reel among dozens or hundreds
Speaker 19: of other acts of vandalism against these cameras. In June,
Speaker 19: a forty year old man named Marcus B in Monterey, California,
Speaker 19: is alleged most of these people have not been convicted
Speaker 19: yet or will never be convicted, is alleged to have
Speaker 19: destroyed three cameras with his truck. He's on camera doing this.
Speaker 19: They alleged he simply ran down a bunch of these cameras.
Speaker 19: He has bowl bars on the front of his truck,
Speaker 19: so he just goes like, I got big, I'll pick
Speaker 19: up drug and bullbars, and he just knocked them over.
Speaker 19: Possibly another one he attached maybe a toast strap or
Speaker 19: a chain and yanked it up out of the ground
Speaker 19: with his truck. Also in June, a twenty one year
Speaker 19: old in Alexandria, I'm just going to present the opposite
Speaker 19: kind of person doing this. Probably in June, a twenty
Speaker 19: one year old in Alexandria, Virginia on the opposite coast,
Speaker 19: is accused of climbing atop a Subaru forester to smash
Speaker 19: a flock camera with a baseball bat on a day
Speaker 19: where at least five other cameras were destroyed in the area.
Speaker 19: The suspect was caught by flock cameras. Houston has seen
Speaker 19: a rash of vandalism. One night, four poles were cut
Speaker 19: down and left lying in the grass with their cameras
Speaker 19: still attached, but all during July, cameras have been spray
Speaker 19: painted and smashed and cut down in Houston. Last year, Eugene,
Speaker 19: Oregon wound up canceling its flock contract after only about
Speaker 19: six months of the cameras being up due to an
Speaker 19: apsolo massive public outcry that include lawsuits, statements before city council,
Speaker 19: and at least six cameras being destroyed. At the scene
Speaker 19: of one of the crimes, the vandals left a note
Speaker 19: that read ha ha ha get wrecked, Yes surveilling fucks.
Speaker 1: I love these people.
Speaker 19: Maybe the most public case is that in Suffolk, Virginia, Suffolk,
Speaker 19: oh where a forty one year old US Air Force
Speaker 19: engineer named Jeffrey S. Sovereign is facing felony charges for
Speaker 19: the destruction of thirteen flock cameras between April and October
Speaker 19: and twenty twenty five it is alleged that he used
Speaker 19: vice scripts to take apart the two piece polls and
Speaker 19: then took home the solar panels in the battery, possibly.
Speaker 1: To use for camping.
Speaker 19: That's what he said later when the cops raided his
Speaker 19: house and found solar panels there. His truck was tracked
Speaker 19: by other cameras near the scene of one of the crimes.
Speaker 19: The police put a GPS tracker on his vehicle, which
Speaker 19: is another thing that the Fourth Amendment. Eventually you actually
Speaker 19: have to get a warrant to put GPS trackers on
Speaker 19: people's cars. Now, his house was raided by the police,
Speaker 19: they found solar panels, and he is very open about
Speaker 19: being opposed to flock cameras and refers to them as
Speaker 19: a violation of the Fourth Amendment. But he has pleaded
Speaker 19: not guilty to the actual destruction. More recently, an independent
Speaker 19: candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives, a thirty seven
Speaker 19: year old man named Adam lee Heimerman, is facing felony
Speaker 19: charges for allegedly shooting down four alpr's automated license plate
Speaker 19: readers in two counties between July fourteenth and July twenty second.
Speaker 19: One of the cameras he is alleged to have shot
Speaker 19: down was like during church services. He allegedly went out
Speaker 19: into the parking lot and there was one within shooting distance,
Speaker 19: so he just shot it from the church. A go
Speaker 19: fenby was set up and bailed him out of jail.
Speaker 19: Police in Long Island report that all summer cameras have
Speaker 19: been run over, spray painted, or simply had their wires
Speaker 19: unplugged or turned around to no longer face the street.
Speaker 19: Oh and there's also a guy in Florida who's just
Speaker 19: holding up signs that block them. He's retired. He's like
Speaker 19: a seventy seven year old retired Republican guy. So he
Speaker 19: just that's up lawn chairs and sits there with its
Speaker 19: signs on ten foot like painters polls, and just blocks
Speaker 19: the cameras fools. And when police or news report on
Speaker 19: these incidents, the posts are flooded with supportive comments, including
Speaker 19: those that indicate that people should look into jury and nullification.
Speaker 19: But of course, as cities canceled their Flock contracts, many
Speaker 19: of them are simply signing with other ALPR companies, like Denver,
Speaker 19: which ended its contract with Flock in February, but by
Speaker 19: March had signed up with another company, Axon for fifty cameras.
Speaker 19: So it's working, but people got to keep up that
Speaker 19: pressure legally or whatever, do whatever you want.
Speaker 1: It seems like these cameras have kind of mobilized this
Speaker 1: coalition of like the kind of leftist people who generally
Speaker 1: hate these things, different kinds of like civil libertarian from
Speaker 1: both kind of I guess, like the contemporaries of a
Speaker 1: libertarians tend to be on the left, and then the
Speaker 1: kind of old school Republican like why is the stay
Speaker 1: watching people? And then it also seems important that these
Speaker 1: are supposed to be licensed plate readers, which means they've
Speaker 1: pissed off just people who drive cars. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: you've declared war on motorists. Yeah, which is a demographic
Speaker 1: people that.
Speaker 19: I was reading this eighty eight percent of Americans drive
Speaker 19: a car on any given week.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 19: Yeah, this and data centers are the most red blue
Speaker 19: a movement that just has everyone being like, no, wait,
Speaker 19: I don't like that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems like the general text surveillance complex. It's
Speaker 1: just extremely unpopular right now and people are doing stuff
Speaker 1: about it. Yeah, which is good because it's been going
Speaker 1: on for a while.
Speaker 19: And yeah, I'm really excited that people are doing something
Speaker 19: about it. And yeah, I'm really really proud of Winona
Speaker 19: for canceling that contract. Like I know of people who've
Speaker 19: been convicted and done time for this, and you know,
Speaker 19: it's it's it's wider than what's being reported on.
Speaker 7: I think definitely the massive movement we're seeing around or
Speaker 7: against Flock right now is one of the biggest positive
Speaker 7: downstream impact of stop coop City, which was one of
Speaker 7: like the first movements really put Flock into focus because
Speaker 7: Flock cameras were being first tested out on the site.
Speaker 7: Flock is an Atlanta based company. The first kind of
Speaker 7: articles you started to see talking about Flock, where we're
Speaker 7: often in relation to to reporting around stop cop City
Speaker 7: or you know, activists discussing Flock is it's like a
Speaker 7: new emerging threat like years years ago, way before the
Speaker 7: public kind of realized that there's now these cameras cropping
Speaker 7: up in like every every city.
Speaker 19: I think you're right, and I also think that the
Speaker 19: stop cop City method of being both direct and also
Speaker 19: showing up a city council. Sure, you know, I think
Speaker 19: nothing is more effective than when those two groups support
Speaker 19: each other. Yeah, and you know the fact that when
Speaker 19: the cops says, don't worry, we are We're going to
Speaker 19: catch whoever did this, and everyone's like, nah, they were
Speaker 19: fishing with me last weekend, you know. But yeah, I
Speaker 19: think I think you're right about stop cup seity building
Speaker 19: a lot of the framework with which to understand this
Speaker 19: kind of thing.
Speaker 7: Let's go on an ad break and then hear from
Speaker 7: James again.
Speaker 4: And we're back.
Speaker 18: So this week, I want to talk about a couple
Speaker 18: of immigration stories not getting as much coverage. I thought
Speaker 18: I would start by talking about some training materials for
Speaker 18: immigration judges that Matthew Hopook obtained by Freedom of Information
Speaker 18: Act request. They're in a drop box which I will
Speaker 18: link in the show notes. It appears from these documents
Speaker 18: that the quote unquote judges, they are not judges in
Speaker 18: the sense that other judges are judges. Right, Immigration judges
Speaker 18: are effectively civil servants. They receive twelve week days of training.
Speaker 18: What yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah, before this, many of the
Speaker 18: will have never seen an immigration case, right, And like,
Speaker 18: as someone who has covered immigration for oh my god,
Speaker 18: a decade, like this is the topic of byzantine complexity. Right,
Speaker 18: Immigration law is very complicated. I'm not going to do
Speaker 18: the thing where you like compare the training to barbers
Speaker 18: or something, because I don't think that's particularly useful here.
Speaker 18: I think all of us can understand that twelve days
Speaker 18: of training is not very much training to be making
Speaker 18: decisions which are life or death for people. Right. These
Speaker 18: can directly result in people as we saw recently with
Speaker 18: the couple who were found tied.
Speaker 4: Up and shot after being deported.
Speaker 18: Yeah, and there will be many more cases of that
Speaker 18: that we are not able to directly report just because
Speaker 18: no one has published them, or in places where people
Speaker 18: fear to publish them, than they won't have got out. Right,
Speaker 18: But we should be under no illution that deportation and
Speaker 18: asylum cases are life or death. Seven very complicated policy
Speaker 18: memoranda are packed into the last hour of the second day,
Speaker 18: so the foyer has the schedule the day by day
Speaker 18: skeate right. The entirety of asylum with holding of removal
Speaker 18: and the Convention against Torture are covered in a single day,
Speaker 18: and it's not the whole day. There's other stuff in
Speaker 18: that day. The materials also show that they provide templates
Speaker 18: to judges for making decisions, and they contain some errors
Speaker 18: and contradictions regarding the law as it stands today. The
Speaker 18: important context of this is that more than two hundred
Speaker 18: immigration judges have been fired since twenty twenty five, and
Speaker 18: two hundred and fifty have been hired. So there is
Speaker 18: a whole scale change in the immigration justice landscape, and
Speaker 18: it is being repopulated with people who have very little training.
Speaker 18: They do get a slide I was looking through the
Speaker 18: slide presentation, so they do get a slide on judicial independence,
Speaker 18: but the nature of their employment is different to a
Speaker 18: regular judge as I said earlier, and in their first
Speaker 18: two years are basically on like a probationary period, and
Speaker 18: they have very little right to appeal if they're fired.
Speaker 18: This is another example of things that the Trump administration
Speaker 18: is doing that will take years to remedy, even if
Speaker 18: the next government is amenable to trying to do so.
Speaker 18: Right Like, these are the people who are making decisions
Speaker 18: for thousands of people that are life or death. The
Speaker 18: second thing I want to talk about is a DOJ
Speaker 18: lawsuit against New York, Connecticut, and Vermond. The DOJ says
Speaker 18: it is quote challenging state laws that provide instate tuition
Speaker 18: to illegal aliens. The DOJ claims that quote, these laws
Speaker 18: unconstitutionally discriminate against US citizens who are not afforded the
Speaker 18: same reduced tuition or scholarships, create incentives for illegal immigration,
Speaker 18: and reward illegal aliens with benefits that US citizens are
Speaker 18: not eligible for, all in direct conflict with federal law. Now,
Speaker 18: they have been going after this for a while, right,
Speaker 18: The DOJ has been doing these suits since last year.
Speaker 18: In some Republican states Texas is when I think of
Speaker 18: I think Kansas maybe as well, definitely Texas. In some
Speaker 18: Republican states, state officials joined the DOJ in asking their
Speaker 18: policies to be vacated, so they obviously had success with those.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 18: In Illinois, not a publican state, the dj won a
Speaker 18: case and had the in state's benefits declared unconstitutional based
Speaker 18: on a federal statute that reads, quote, notwithstanding any other
Speaker 18: provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present
Speaker 18: in the United States shall not be eligible on the
Speaker 18: basis of residents within a state or political subdivision, for
Speaker 18: any post secondary education benefit, unless a citizen or national
Speaker 18: of the United States is eligible for such a benefit
Speaker 18: in no less amount, duration, and scope, without regard to
Speaker 18: whether the citizen or national is such a resident. So
Speaker 18: I would attempt to simplify that and explain it to people.
Speaker 18: But as we are about to find out, the very
Speaker 18: nuances of that text matter.
Speaker 7: I mean, this sort of was often complicated, but I
Speaker 7: was having trouble following what that means exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a fuck.
Speaker 18: Like if somebody wrote that sentence in a writing class
Speaker 18: I would teaching. I wouldn't be happy about it. It's
Speaker 18: a sentence that requires us alties circular breathing to read it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 18: So in Minnesota there was a case like this. But
Speaker 18: because Minnesota uses attending a state high school to determine
Speaker 18: tuition fees, this is therefore not a residency test, right,
Speaker 18: so the residency part of that massive sentence matters. They
Speaker 18: also argued that the law says unless a citizen or
Speaker 18: national of the United States eligible for such a benefit,
Speaker 18: it does not say all citizens of the United States
Speaker 18: are eligible for such a benefit, and so Minnesota was
Speaker 18: able to show that a non Minnesota resident who did
Speaker 18: attend a Minnesota high school went to University of Minnesota
Speaker 18: was eligible for interstate tuition. So a US citizen would
Speaker 18: be eligible, all US citizens would not, And so they
Speaker 18: were able to hang their hat on those two things. Right,
Speaker 18: It's not about residency per se. A citizen could receive
Speaker 18: those benefits. I was looking around for residency requirements, and
Speaker 18: it seems that some of these states may be able
Speaker 18: to make a similar case to Minnesota.
Speaker 1: Others will not.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 18: Some of them require residency in the more traditional like
Speaker 18: domiciled in a state. Yeah, perhaps driver's license rate, to vote,
Speaker 18: et cetera, et cetera. Right, and so it will be
Speaker 18: more challenging for some than others. Eventually, I imagine this is
Speaker 18: one of those things where we've already seen different decisions, right,
Speaker 18: and that's because different Stitts have different laws. But I'm
Speaker 18: sure this is one of those things that will eventually
Speaker 18: find its way to the Supreme Court in the next
Speaker 18: couple of years. Regardless, it's an attempt to drive undocumented
Speaker 18: people further into the shadows and create an underclass of
Speaker 18: underpaid labor without rights.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 18: People on the right constantly talk about assimilation. Are they
Speaker 18: used to? I think now they just straight up do
Speaker 18: more racis shit. But the active assimilation will be much
Speaker 18: harder if people cannot access education. Right. I am sure
Speaker 18: I have had hundreds of undocumented students come through my classroom.
Speaker 18: I'm not gonna be like, hands up if you're undocumented, right,
Speaker 18: I'm not going there's no need for me to know that.
Speaker 18: But I know that the universities I teach how to
Speaker 18: do a great deal and provide a great deal of
Speaker 18: resources to undocumented people. Our universities are better because of that.
Speaker 18: Having a diverse range of experiences and opinions in the
Speaker 18: classroom makes your classroom better. It will make it easier
Speaker 18: for people on the right to make these arguments that
Speaker 18: they're like stealing working class jobs right, because people will
Speaker 18: not have the qualifications they need to do other jobs.
Speaker 18: They will end up being underpaid and exploited. These policies,
Speaker 18: I should add, were relatively bipartisan when they were passed
Speaker 18: into twenty tens and even for the last quarter of
Speaker 18: the last century. True heads will recognize this from a
Speaker 18: show I did in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 1: Yes, my name is David Grosberg, and I'd like to
Speaker 1: know do you think that children of illegal aliens should
Speaker 1: be allowed to attend to public schools free or do
Speaker 1: you think that their parents should pay for their education?
Speaker 17: Who you're addressing that too? I thank you first looking
Speaker 17: right at you, I.
Speaker 19: Said, he was love.
Speaker 5: I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien
Speaker 5: problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about
Speaker 5: labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up.
Speaker 17: But today, if.
Speaker 5: Those people are here, I would reluctantly say I think
Speaker 5: they would.
Speaker 9: They would get whatever it is.
Speaker 5: That they're you know, what the society is giving to
Speaker 5: their neighbors. But it has the problem has to be solved.
Speaker 5: The problem has to be solved because as we have
Speaker 5: kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd
Speaker 5: like to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating
Speaker 5: a whole society of really honorable, decent, family loving people
Speaker 5: that are in violation of the law. And secondly, we're
Speaker 5: exacerbating relations with Mexico. The chance the answer to your
Speaker 5: question is much more fundamental then whether they attend Houston schools.
Speaker 5: It seems to me, I don't want to see a
Speaker 5: whole if they're living here, I don't want to see
Speaker 5: a whole. I think as six and eight year old
Speaker 5: kids being made, you know, one totally uneducated and made
Speaker 5: to feel.
Speaker 1: That they're living with outside the law.
Speaker 3: Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.
Speaker 5: These are good people, strong people. Part of my family
Speaker 5: is in Mexican.
Speaker 1: That's wild.
Speaker 18: Yeah, that is a famous woke immigration advocate, George Herbert
Speaker 18: Walker Bush.
Speaker 7: That's really kind of mind blowing.
Speaker 18: It's genuinely remarkable, isn't it to look back? This is
Speaker 18: not that long ago. Yeah, none of us were alive then,
Speaker 18: I guess, But like, you know, these are people who
Speaker 18: people still look to as like contemporary political people who
Speaker 18: they admire.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 18: This is to the left of a lot of Democrats
Speaker 18: right now on immigration.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, a lot of Democrats would be scared to
Speaker 7: talk about, yes, immigration that way.
Speaker 18: Yeah, to say part of my family is Mexican, to
Speaker 18: say that, like I would never want to leave these
Speaker 18: children as an underclass like.
Speaker 1: That, Like, no, it's it's insane.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Like I mean, like this coupled with like the
Speaker 7: public charge rules, the concerted effort to increase this war
Speaker 7: on like the poorest, most marginalized people in our country
Speaker 7: and criminalize them and push them out of public life,
Speaker 7: compared to yeah, George H. W. Bush in the eighties
Speaker 7: is wild. Yeah, Like, it's remarkable that we have come.
Speaker 7: So I'm not saying that things were great in the
Speaker 7: nineteen eighties, to be clear.
Speaker 1: No, that's part of what makes it so wild.
Speaker 18: Right, Like these people did a bunch of really terrible shit,
Speaker 18: but like Reagan and Bush would both be on the
Speaker 18: very progressive flank of the Democrats with some of their
Speaker 18: policies on immigration today. I guess the way I would
Speaker 18: like to finish this segment, if we can come that
Speaker 18: far that fast, then we can come back a long way.
Speaker 4: Pretty quickly too.
Speaker 18: I think, yeah, yeah, it does take courage, especially from politicians, because,
Speaker 18: as Garrison said, like a lot of politicians feel like
Speaker 18: they're going to lose the center when in fact, like
Speaker 18: that position was a centrist position in many voters lifetimes.
Speaker 18: I think it just bears remarketub on how far we've
Speaker 18: come and how quickly we've got there.
Speaker 7: Yeah, jeez, I'm still just kind of in shocked. I mean,
Speaker 7: my whole life. I feel like the way I've heard
Speaker 7: debates are immigration, certainly on the Republican side, but also
Speaker 7: largely on the Democrats side, it's just pitting like workers
Speaker 7: against each other, yeah, and hearing a Bush talk about
Speaker 7: how no, we should like care for these people, they
Speaker 7: should be educated, Like why would we want to have
Speaker 7: these people who are living here be not educated, not
Speaker 7: able to actually live like a meaningful life. Yeah, it's
Speaker 7: a level of like humanity that I just have not
Speaker 7: really experienced in you know, politics, in my kind of
Speaker 7: living memory, and certainly on the Republican side.
Speaker 18: Like yeah, yeah, I mean George Walker Bush spoke Spanish, right,
Speaker 18: it was Walker's bed on named George W. Bush spoke Spanish.
Speaker 18: W's has been on name. I think it's a sea
Speaker 18: change since even then, right, Like, I think we can
Speaker 18: draw a pretty straight line from Obama's massive deportation campaign
Speaker 18: to today. For whatever people think of Obama, he deported
Speaker 18: a shit town of people. Yeah, the reason they called
Speaker 18: him the deporter in chief. But like, yeah, nine to
Speaker 18: eleven and then the grow and terror and in the
Speaker 18: Syrians of war, that certainly changed a discourse in Europe, right,
Speaker 18: And I think, yeah, I mean once we had little
Speaker 18: babies washing up dead on beaches, and politicians realized that
Speaker 18: that wasn't going to trigger people to get in the
Speaker 18: streets and fuck things up. Yeah, they knew that they
Speaker 18: could do an awful lot and not acknowledge, not acknowledge
Speaker 18: that humanity that George H. W. Bush acknowledge is in that.
Speaker 7: The other thing that's really interesting to me about this
Speaker 7: is like this is this is nineteen eighty Reagan is
Speaker 7: on stage here. Yeah, and how much of this this
Speaker 7: is also like a pretty determining fork in the road
Speaker 7: in some ways and like leading to like neoliberalism totally
Speaker 7: taking over. How state capacity gets completely completely reduced. And
Speaker 7: then you see this in like you know, the next
Speaker 7: Bush era and Obama and is getting accelerated with Trump.
Speaker 7: Is that their only solution to the problems caused by
Speaker 7: neoliberalism is not actually fixing neoliberal economics, but it has
Speaker 7: to be turning workers, I guess each other. Yeah, that
Speaker 7: is that is the last thing that they can do
Speaker 7: because they still serve capital. They still want to do
Speaker 7: neoliberal economics, but that system has completely stressed itself and
Speaker 7: has sabotaged the economy, wrecked housing and jobs, and so now, no,
Speaker 7: we should not actually fix those things or have the
Speaker 7: government care for people.
Speaker 1: But it is it's these other people.
Speaker 7: Who are you know, even more poor than you that
Speaker 7: are causing all of these problems.
Speaker 18: Right, like this pivot to scapegoating, yes, as opposed to
Speaker 18: like doing anything useful with it.
Speaker 3: I mean even Reagan, right, Reagan pisce the Irica.
Speaker 18: It was a massive amnesty, like to two point six
Speaker 18: two point seven million people something in that range. Yeah,
Speaker 18: were effectively like legalized by the Reagan administration. And to
Speaker 18: vault from that where we're at, as you say, like
Speaker 18: to vault from like the state trying to make any
Speaker 18: meaningful difference in making working class people's lives better, to
Speaker 18: escape growing one group so the other group doesn't complain
Speaker 18: about their own situation.
Speaker 4: It's very obvious.
Speaker 7: Every day for the past like month, Fox News has
Speaker 7: had a segment about the DSAS like amnesty for all immigrants,
Speaker 7: playing on their platform.
Speaker 18: Right, Yeah, I'm not alone in pointing out that like
Speaker 18: Reagan did a similar thing. I think, like, yeah, I'm
Speaker 18: sure lots of people have tried to dunk on them
Speaker 18: that way. But yeah, I heard like a right wing
Speaker 18: metal song about like three outdoor attention. Someone send it
Speaker 18: to me today. One of the funniest fucking things. But yeah,
Speaker 18: it for some reason it talked about the DSA amnesty,
Speaker 18: which is a hard thing to shoehorn into a metal song,
Speaker 18: but they did it, so I guess, right, well done. Congratulations. Yeah,
Speaker 18: that has become like the boogeyman of right wing politics
Speaker 18: from people. I guess, like, I know I talk about
Speaker 18: this student law. I would love to hear from this dude.
Speaker 18: I would love to talk to this dude. The dude
Speaker 18: who is walking around Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretty
Speaker 18: was killed with a sign that said what would Ronald
Speaker 18: Reagan do? And he was at the anti ice march,
Speaker 18: right like, yeah, huh, seriously, like genuinely, if anybody knows
Speaker 18: who that person is, please put that person in touch
Speaker 18: with me. Oh yeah, Like I think that is a
Speaker 18: type of person who we need to talk to right now.
Speaker 18: Yeah yeah, and like not make that person feel like
Speaker 18: they can't grow in other ways hopefully, you know. By Oh,
Speaker 18: I don't know, maybe there's just an ironic sign.
Speaker 4: And anyway, I'm fascinated to talk to that person.
Speaker 18: It's always real sad to me to look at these
Speaker 18: things and just be like, you know, like it's not
Speaker 18: that long ago that this was very bipartisan issue, and
Speaker 18: like now, once again I guess by part is and
Speaker 18: in that there is a complete agreement that people who
Speaker 18: tried to come here without part of the report of
Speaker 18: entry should die in numbers that are large enough to
Speaker 18: dissuade people from doing it, and if those numbers have
Speaker 18: to increase, and so be it. And that migrants should
Speaker 18: be treated as humans without rights like the Biden administration
Speaker 18: absolutely did that too. Yeah, and yeah it sucks.
Speaker 1: You know, if if if you want to look at
Speaker 1: what the actual policy disagreement is about, it's should you
Speaker 1: use the state to carry out a full on ethnic
Speaker 1: cleansing or should you use the states to simply commit
Speaker 1: heinous acts of violence?
Speaker 18: Yeah? It should the basis of this purge be some
Speaker 18: arbitrary line along the line from like full legal status
Speaker 18: to no legal status? Right, or should the basis of
Speaker 18: it be as it is now? Any one we can
Speaker 18: get out, we get out, like yeah, unlet's you're on
Speaker 18: that DSA like amnesty point when I guess, like, that's
Speaker 18: a different point. But it is not one that like
Speaker 18: the DNC is making us a whole.
Speaker 7: No, that is that is a it is I think
Speaker 7: it's useful to hold those things in distinction. Yes, at
Speaker 7: this point right now, it will that change over time?
Speaker 1: Maybe?
Speaker 7: Will that hosts its own contradictions over time, maybe, but
Speaker 7: we will deal with those when they get there. Yeah,
Speaker 7: but mean, yeah, it seems the opinion of Trump now
Speaker 7: is no, not unless you pay me a million dollars
Speaker 7: for the gold cart or whatever, you are not allowed inside.
Speaker 18: It's mind boggling to think that this is the thing that, yeah,
Speaker 18: within my parents' lifetime was completely uncontroversial, even like I
Speaker 18: remember those you know, I was in the US when
Speaker 18: they passed those the situition things. This is at the
Speaker 18: same time, right where there was relatively bipartisan support for
Speaker 18: dreamers too. Yep, like when it was uncontroversial that those
Speaker 18: people who've grown up for nearly their entire lives here
Speaker 18: should be allowed to remain here. And all of that
Speaker 18: shit has gone now and then, like I guess, like
Speaker 18: the fact that there are some people who are so
Speaker 18: cowardly on both parties that they have they once supported
Speaker 18: it and now don't just because they think that's the
Speaker 18: way the wind is blowing. Yeah, it is something that
Speaker 18: shouldn't go unremarked upon. Lake, I don't know, the least
Speaker 18: qualified people to be in any position of leadership are
Speaker 18: the ones who are cowards like that, and yet we
Speaker 18: have a great deal of them in Congress. If you
Speaker 18: want to hear about some people who shouldn't be in Congress,
Speaker 18: I have a podcast called Natural Causes. We will talk
Speaker 18: eventually about Mike Lee and why he is like this,
Speaker 18: Why does Mike Lee want to sell all the public
Speaker 18: land that we get to share, and who has donated
Speaker 18: to his campaign to make him want to do it,
Speaker 18: But we can hear about other stuff too. This week,
Speaker 18: we're going to cover cyclospora, which is the incontinence parasite
Speaker 18: spreading through the Midwest, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 18: what it tells us about the rights of agricultural labor, neoliberalism, NAFTA,
Speaker 18: and all the massive corporations between you and your crunch rep.
Speaker 18: And after that, we're going to talk about fire. If
Speaker 18: you listen to the show, you'll know that I was
Speaker 18: in Spokane. So I'm going to talk to some people
Speaker 18: who evacuated about what you should do when your phone
Speaker 18: starts going ape shit, and how you can prepare yourself
Speaker 18: for fire evacuations because this stuff isn't changing anytime soon.
Speaker 18: I'm going to talk to some people about how you
Speaker 18: can be a good friend to your friend who is
Speaker 18: being evacuated. And then I'm going to talk to some
Speaker 18: folks who lost their homes in Los Angeles and how
Speaker 18: they've recovered since then and what you can do to
Speaker 18: help them. And then a week after that, we're going
Speaker 18: to talk about what we can all learn from indigenous
Speaker 18: fire knowledge and how we can better take care of
Speaker 18: our lands to not suppress fire, but to have more
Speaker 18: say in when.
Speaker 4: And how fire happens. So if you.
Speaker 18: Would like to hear about those topics, you can look
Speaker 18: up at Natural Causes wherever podcasts are given away for free,
Speaker 18: probably the same place you're listening to this one. Yeah,
Speaker 18: talk about fucking golf as well. Hate golf.
Speaker 7: Somehow, that's both the most at least British moment I've
Speaker 7: ever I've seen it from you.
Speaker 1: Returning to the bleak present, Trump has issued an executive
Speaker 1: order on Monday about vaccines that is at the same
Speaker 1: time both extremely disturbing and somewhat unlikely to do that much.
Speaker 1: There's sort of a few different components to this executive order.
Speaker 1: There's one part of it that is an attempt to
Speaker 1: ram through RFK Junior's attempt to reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: vaccines that children get for absolutely no reason whatsoever. RFK
Speaker 1: jor We've talked about this previously on the show. RFK
Speaker 1: Junior has been attempting to reduce a number of vaccines
Speaker 1: that children get in childhood through CDC advisory boards, which
Speaker 1: is the way that you're theoretically supposed to do this. However,
Speaker 1: this was blocked in court, and as those litigations are ongoing,
Speaker 1: those policies simply have not gone through. So Trump's attempting
Speaker 1: to use an executive order to bypass that process.
Speaker 4: Won't work.
Speaker 1: There is another separate part about separating the MMR vaccine
Speaker 1: into three different vaccines. So the MMR vaccine is a
Speaker 1: combined vaccine from measles, mumps, and rebella, and part of
Speaker 1: his executive order is an attempt to get those spread out.
Speaker 1: And then there's also a part that's about threatening states
Speaker 1: who don't allow religious exemptions for vaccinations in order to
Speaker 1: send their kids to school. And then a lot of
Speaker 1: the total executive order is this kind of in some
Speaker 1: ways grandstanding, where Trump is talking about how this is
Speaker 1: what the government says the science is, and Trump is
Speaker 1: saying the government says that the science is that the
Speaker 1: MMR vaccine is bad and that you need three separate vaccines,
Speaker 1: and that that's good, and that that's what like the
Speaker 1: gold standard of evidence based in medicine is now. It's
Speaker 1: almost more like a post than an executive order. It's
Speaker 1: just him saying this is the government's position on the science. Now,
Speaker 1: this is all very classic anti vax stuff. In particular,
Speaker 1: the separating out the MMR vaccine is just the classic
Speaker 1: anti vaccine stuff. Getting back to a man named Andrew
Speaker 1: Wakefield to a stripped of his medical license after it
Speaker 1: discovered that he had been hired to produce evidence linking
Speaker 1: vaccines to autism by a group that was trying to
Speaker 1: sue the British government for damages over their belief that
Speaker 1: vaccines were quote unquote causing their children's autism. So Wakefield
Speaker 1: was hired by this group to produce study that would
Speaker 1: support their claims. And then also Wakefield's turned out had
Speaker 1: lied to the parents of young children about the painful
Speaker 1: and invasive medical experiments he performed on them. So that's
Speaker 1: how he'd lost his medical license. There's a very good
Speaker 1: Age Bomber Guide long essay video essay on this that
Speaker 1: I recommend watching, and Wakefield very specifically pedaled a line
Speaker 1: about the MMR vaccine. His argument was that the MMR
Speaker 1: vaccine could be dangerous if they were taken together, but
Speaker 1: if taken individually, they were safe. This doesn't make sense
Speaker 1: even by the mechanism of the fake condition he made up,
Speaker 1: but it made him seem like less of a full
Speaker 1: on anti vaxxer. And then he also did this because
Speaker 1: he was trying to get a patent to make a
Speaker 1: separate vaccine to sell them to the kids of parents
Speaker 1: who believe the MMR was dangerous. So that this entire
Speaker 1: thing is a product of Wakefield's attempt to do a
Speaker 1: grift in the nineteen nineties and the British media latching
Speaker 1: onto it and spreading it, and this has just sort
Speaker 1: of persisted as this zombie belief where in the speech
Speaker 1: where Trump is giving talking about him signing this executive order,
Speaker 1: he's talking about how the MMR together is lethal, but
Speaker 1: individually they're safe, which is the stuff that Wakefield was
Speaker 1: saying in the nineties. It was never true then, it
Speaker 1: was never true now. But that's why we all died
Speaker 1: as children. I guess that's why I have autism. I
Speaker 1: don't know, like I didn't diet rebella or whatever that's
Speaker 1: caused by transness. That's not the other way around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So basically we have executive order that is the sort
Speaker 1: of persistence of this zombie grift that has transcended this
Speaker 1: guy's original grift and is now in an executive order
Speaker 1: for the President of the United States. But it's sort
Speaker 1: of unlikely that any of the stuff in here is
Speaker 1: going to actually have actual effects on children getting vaccines,
Speaker 1: which is mostly good. Obviously, the attacks on states that
Speaker 1: don't have relateous exemptions for vaccinating kids to go to
Speaker 1: school is bad. But it's really unclear how the legal
Speaker 1: mechanism for any of this would work. And another complication
Speaker 1: is that we don't have separate vaccines for the components
Speaker 1: of MMRSH. The US does not make them nominally. This
Speaker 1: executive order is supposed to set up the option for
Speaker 1: parents to do that, and Trump said he would be
Speaker 1: like working with the private sector to allow this to happen.
Speaker 1: But this doesn't currently exist, So we need another operation
Speaker 1: light speed. Yeah, it's operation warp speed. But like for
Speaker 1: anti vas yeah, light drive. Yeah. And obviously every single
Speaker 1: reputable medical institution recommends that you do them all at
Speaker 1: the same time because it's safe. And also there's actually
Speaker 1: does mean giving children less vaccinations so they're more likely
Speaker 1: to show up and do them.
Speaker 7: But they have seventy two vaccines mia seventy two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so let's make it seventy four, all at once,
Speaker 1: all at the same time. More vaccines. I want more vaccines.
Speaker 1: I want to catch less diseases. You should vaccinate children
Speaker 1: even more like that rules.
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 1: I want to get vaccine for everything.
Speaker 19: It's like in dand we're like, oh, do you want
Speaker 19: protection from fire, and you're like, yeah, I want protection
Speaker 19: from fire.
Speaker 1: Rocks, give me a lined vaccine. I want it. Wait,
Speaker 1: what is that.
Speaker 11: Locked rocking jazz, rocking jazz? Bot sorry, locked rocking jazz,
Speaker 11: rocking jazz, Bob.
Speaker 1: By God? Is that Meal Wong some music? Yes it is.
Speaker 1: It is tariff talk. We have a brief tariff talk.
Speaker 1: So tariff refunds are continuing after the Supreme Court overruled
Speaker 1: the so called Liberation Day tariffs. But the question remains,
Speaker 1: who are these refunds actually going to. I'm guessing it's
Speaker 1: all of the consumers, right. No, No, it's corporations. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say right off the bat that Amazon is
Speaker 1: saying it's claiming that some specific consumers will get on funds. No,
Speaker 1: if you know they're not like if you if you
Speaker 1: believe that I have the nft of a bridge to
Speaker 1: sell you like just no, no, they're not.
Speaker 7: You don't think Amazon's going to pass off all like
Speaker 7: six hundred million dollars to consumers and like an equitable
Speaker 7: and terif fashion.
Speaker 1: Come on, I just I just I can't. I can't
Speaker 1: take this seriously. This is this is one of those
Speaker 1: things where you read mainstream journalists talking about this and
Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, yes, they have to at face value
Speaker 1: quote the Amazon CFO, yeah, and print the just obvious
Speaker 1: lie that they are telling. But I don't have to
Speaker 1: do that. No, absolutely not, They're just lying to you. Now.
Speaker 1: In reality, it has been you know, it has been
Speaker 1: large corporations who have reaped the over one hundred billion
Speaker 1: dollars rewards from the tariff refunds, not consumers, and prices meanwhile,
Speaker 1: have stayed high. Who could possibly have guessed that. Now,
Speaker 1: this obviously allows corporations to double dip by both receiving
Speaker 1: their teriff rebate checks from the government will also maintaining
Speaker 1: the increased prices nominally caused by the tariffs. This is
Speaker 1: because corporations are so called price setters. They do not
Speaker 1: as neoclassical economics suggest take prices from some kind of
Speaker 1: abstract market or like, you know, the point which occurs
Speaker 1: me that is not how prices are set. Prices in
Speaker 1: reality are set by guys in corporate offices whose job
Speaker 1: it is to set the price, and now increasingly it
Speaker 1: is sometimes set by you know, AI programs which are
Speaker 1: doing effectively the same thing but trying to rip you
Speaker 1: off even more. Now, what this means is that while
Speaker 1: you do have to take into account consumer sentiment to
Speaker 1: some to some extent, right in terms of like, you know,
Speaker 1: maintaining brand loyalty, once you have an excuse to raise prices, right,
Speaker 1: once consumers have been disciplined into accepting higher prices as
Speaker 1: the quote unquote result of tariffs, companies can simply leave
Speaker 1: prices high without fear of backlash and reap in more profit.
Speaker 1: This is also a decent amount of the inflation during
Speaker 1: the Biden administration, where there were increased supply chain costs
Speaker 1: which increased prices, but then those costs never came down
Speaker 1: again as supply chain costs decreased a little bit. Because
Speaker 1: corporations could simply leave the price sticky and keep like
Speaker 1: screwing you over. So the net result of the terrif
Speaker 1: Frey funds has been companies leaving prices at the points
Speaker 1: they were at already and consumers seeing absolutely none of it.
Speaker 10: It.
Speaker 7: It's even kind of well, even Amazon is saying that, like,
Speaker 7: they're not setting up a system for consumers to like
Speaker 7: file for acclaim. Amazon will assess by themselves if individual
Speaker 7: consumers deserve a refund and then contact them individually.
Speaker 1: Oh, I trust them to do that. That makes sense.
Speaker 1: It's incredible, it's incredible. There's a Canadian version of the
Speaker 1: song Dulloyd Polozzi, which is down with the Police with
Speaker 1: classical Yiddish song. A Canadian guy whose name I'm blanking
Speaker 1: on right now wrote a version. If it were One
Speaker 1: of the lines is it's about it's about the police,
Speaker 1: like killing a guy in custody.
Speaker 19: Hey, hey, deloy Polyze means the same thing now as yesterday.
Speaker 1: Out of your house is in Yeah. But one of
Speaker 1: the lines that is always stuck with me is specifically
Speaker 1: the line at first the situation makes the law men
Speaker 1: look so filthy, but they investigate themselves and it turns
Speaker 1: out they're not guilty, and then that's what's happening here.
Speaker 1: They investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty.
Speaker 1: Who could possibly have expected this? All power to the corporations.
Speaker 1: Let's let's also that's right. That's right, electrification plus corporate power.
Speaker 7: Let's let's go on one more ad break and then
Speaker 7: discuss everyone's favorite thing, elections. All right, we are back
Speaker 7: in Minnesota. Amy Klobashar will likely succeed Mike Walls as
Speaker 7: governor of Minnesota, winning the Democratic primary with ninety percent.
Speaker 1: Of the vote.
Speaker 7: Meanwhile, the Trump endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Lindell, also
Speaker 7: known as the my pillow guy, has lost the primary
Speaker 7: to Lisa Damouse, the Minnesota House speaker. So Mike ended
Speaker 7: up losing with thirty two percent of the vote to
Speaker 7: Lisa Demutz forty three percent. This is a legitimate blow
Speaker 7: to like the power of Trump's endorsement, and you know, obviously,
Speaker 7: Mike Lindell's very public figure, while Lisa, you know, is
Speaker 7: an actual state politician that voters are somewhat more familiar
Speaker 7: with as a real politician and not that guy in
Speaker 7: that TV ad who thinks the election is fake. So
Speaker 7: this is an interesting referendum in the Republican Party itself
Speaker 7: on Trump's endorsement power and figures.
Speaker 19: Like Mike so kind of basically picking old style Republicans
Speaker 19: to new style Republicans.
Speaker 7: Yes, like she is like the Minnesota like house speaker,
Speaker 7: like of the Citate house like people that they know
Speaker 7: who are local where we not as diehard mega at
Speaker 7: least compared to Mike Lindell not saying that Lisa Dedmouth
Speaker 7: is a good politician, nor Amy Klar right like right,
Speaker 7: both of the people in this race I think suck.
Speaker 7: But it in looking at like what the the future
Speaker 7: of the Republican Party might be the fact that Trump's
Speaker 7: endorsement here did not result in Mike winning is something
Speaker 7: that I find to be a bit interesting. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 7: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
Speaker 7: Peggy Flanagan.
Speaker 1: Who probably a Margaret you think so Peg is usually
Speaker 1: a Margaret.
Speaker 7: Well, there you go. She won the primary to replace
Speaker 7: Democratic Senator Tina Smith, who is stepping down. Flanagan got
Speaker 7: fifty nine percent of the vote compared to the APAC
Speaker 7: backed Moderate House Representative Angie Craig, who earned thirty nine
Speaker 7: point four percent. So basically like a twenty point difference.
Speaker 7: Ice was one of the main factors in this race,
Speaker 7: as a lot of the races are in Minnesota are
Speaker 7: being defined in large part by ice. Following metro surge.
Speaker 7: Flanagan attacked Craig for voting in support of the Lake
Speaker 7: and Riley Act and voting for a resolution thanking Ice. Meanwhile,
Speaker 7: Craig attacked Flat again for the post pandemic daycare fraud
Speaker 7: scandals in Minnesota regarding their state run social services. Peggy
Speaker 7: Flanagan has also been very outspoken in support of trans
Speaker 7: rights and trans youth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she's She's been firmly outspoken in her support of
Speaker 1: trans kids getting gender affirming healthcare and also wearing the
Speaker 1: like protect trans Kids like knife shirt. I like when
Speaker 1: Margarets don't go in the Thatcher direction. So yeah, that's right.
Speaker 7: Had his set is cut so House Representative Angie Craig,
Speaker 7: who was running for Senate, is now out of a
Speaker 7: job after losing to Peggy and in the race for
Speaker 7: her House seat, the former mayor of Lakeville, Matt Little,
Speaker 7: who's a progressive running on Medicare for all and regulating
Speaker 7: AI data centers, just won the Democratic primary, beating the
Speaker 7: pro Israel candidate State Senator Matt Klein. This is forty
Speaker 7: seven percent to thirty percent. Matt Little also participately in
Speaker 7: the community rapid response to Operation Metro Surge. Elanomar also
Speaker 7: won the primary for her reelection campaign by over eighty percent.
Speaker 7: But for the big election news this week, let's turn
Speaker 7: to Wisconsin, where DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was heavily
Speaker 7: favored to win in the polls, barely lost in an
Speaker 7: upset to establish him back to candidate David Crowley, the
Speaker 7: Milwaukee County executive, who was endorsed by this sitting governor
Speaker 7: late in the race. And this race was so close.
Speaker 7: This is less than four thousand votes, Like I think
Speaker 7: it's at three thousand, seven hundred some votes right now.
Speaker 7: That's the difference. It's point five percentage point difference. This
Speaker 7: was an incredibly close race. As much as the polls
Speaker 7: were wrong about this race in some ways, polls did
Speaker 7: have support for Hong about right around forty percent. Some
Speaker 7: polls maybe had her overperforming by like two to six percent.
Speaker 7: But the main thing that polling did not account for
Speaker 7: was the electorate getting in behind Crowley late into the
Speaker 7: race to edge out Hong polling had Crowley at about
Speaker 7: twenty two percent, and he ended up winning with just
Speaker 7: over forty percent. Now, this polling was also from at
Speaker 7: least a week or more before the election, and as
Speaker 7: we'll discuss in a bit, things can change pretty late
Speaker 7: in the.
Speaker 1: Game in some of these elections.
Speaker 7: Now, the turnout was also much higher than expected, over
Speaker 7: eight hundred thousand votes, nearing like presidential primary levels. So
Speaker 7: like Hong got a lot of votes, just she needed
Speaker 7: four thousand more to win the election. I think the
Speaker 7: way mainstream media is gonna be talking about this race
Speaker 7: will be somewhat frustrating. The Politico headline right now is
Speaker 7: quote the far left hits a wall, which is interesting
Speaker 7: framing because last week their headline following Abdul al Sa'id's
Speaker 7: victory was quote, Progressives didn't get the big election night
Speaker 7: they wanted, meaning Abdul did not win by as big
Speaker 7: of a margin as what progressives were expecting. And so
Speaker 7: this is actually bad for progressives. So whether or not
Speaker 7: you win, or whether or not you lose, it's actually
Speaker 7: bad for progressives. Right that is, that is the line
Speaker 7: that media is gonna take regarding this race. And again,
Speaker 7: this race was very close. Hong lost by less than
Speaker 7: four thousand votes and did pretty well in some rural counties.
Speaker 7: These results come down to campaign strategies. Is not a
Speaker 7: massive referendum on like DSA politics, and like this race
Speaker 7: was a stacked roster. There were seven people on the ballot.
Speaker 7: Over one hundred and fifty thousand votes were for other
Speaker 7: candidates besides Hong and Crowley, many of whom suspended their campaigns.
Speaker 7: And there's no rank choice voting in this state. And
Speaker 7: oddly enough, Crowley himself suspended his campaign in early July
Speaker 7: before two other moderate candidates dropped out of the race
Speaker 7: for various reasons, and so then crowd got back into
Speaker 7: the race with consolidated support from the party establishment. Though
Speaker 7: Crowley might not like that term establishment.
Speaker 14: Here's amternal federal who the establishment is?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 14: I think that when we talk about the establishment, I
Speaker 14: don't know who that is. I'm a kid that grew
Speaker 14: up in five three two little six ZIPC. My parents
Speaker 14: was drug addicts and suffered from mental health. I would
Speaker 14: work extremely hard to be where I am today, and
Speaker 14: so when people try to call me the establishment, I
Speaker 14: look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American.
Speaker 7: Candidate Hong was also wildly outspent, like many of these
Speaker 7: DSA or left populist races. She did end up spending
Speaker 7: two hundred and thirty five thousand dollars on digital and
Speaker 7: streaming ads, but she spent zero dollars on traditional TV ads,
Speaker 7: and an outside group also spent about two hundred and
Speaker 7: twenty thousand dollars in ads for Hong, but these ads
Speaker 7: were also digital. There was there was no TV ads
Speaker 7: for Hong in this race. Meanwhile, to quote Politico quote,
Speaker 7: two outside groups backing late re entryant David Crowley spent
Speaker 7: a combined three point three million, mostly on TV, while
Speaker 7: the Milwaukee County executive's own campaign spent nearly nine hundred thousand, unquote.
Speaker 7: So one of the takeaways from this race is that
Speaker 7: maybe you should spend money on some TV ads at
Speaker 7: least now. Hong's campaign was not, you know, flush in cash,
Speaker 7: but TV ads might be needed to edge out a
Speaker 7: bit more support in rural areas where throughout election I
Speaker 7: Crowley kept building a lead little by little, and like
Speaker 7: I was watching Karnaki's stream last night and that was
Speaker 7: the main way Crowley.
Speaker 1: Edged out a lead.
Speaker 7: Is that basically every ten minutes he would win like,
Speaker 7: you know, twenty votes in some rural county and then
Speaker 7: you know, fifty votes in another, and this slowly built
Speaker 7: up to you know, hundreds and then thousands of votes
Speaker 7: in these little small counties. Now, Hong also did win
Speaker 7: some rural counties, specifically in the northern part of the state,
Speaker 7: and also a few rural counties in like the center
Speaker 7: of the state as well. And the fact that Hong
Speaker 7: did so well with no tv ads shows how good
Speaker 7: the DSA ground game was. This was a four thousand
Speaker 7: vote difference with no tv ads, and she did very well.
Speaker 7: She just didn't do well enough. So maybe as good
Speaker 7: as the ground game is, it might not be good
Speaker 7: enough alone. Now, the other sort of thing I'm seeing
Speaker 7: people talk about is that maybe a stronger base turnout
Speaker 7: could across this four thousand vote gap, right, and it's
Speaker 7: specifically Madison and in Green Bay, where she was expected
Speaker 7: to do a little bit better than what she did.
Speaker 7: And what if something like you know, Bernie Sanders sort
Speaker 7: of AOC endorsement rally have helped mobilize in extra few
Speaker 7: thousand votes in these areas where her kind of base
Speaker 7: is concentrated no AOC and Bernie have said that for
Speaker 7: the cycle, they're mostly focusing on congressional races, which.
Speaker 1: Is why they did not get involved in this governor's race.
Speaker 7: But it is definitely worth pointing out that Hong did
Speaker 7: not do as well with college educated voters as other
Speaker 7: DSA candidates have in recent past, or someone like el said.
Speaker 7: She still won college voters, but not by like sort
Speaker 7: of massive margins that you're seeing in other races. And
Speaker 7: as I mentioned before, a lot of this race shifted
Speaker 7: pretty pretty late when the final weeks of the primary
Speaker 7: were spent arguing about quote unquote electability, and this was
Speaker 7: a joint effort from both the media, from news media
Speaker 7: and the Democratic establishment to question whether Hong is electable,
Speaker 7: if she'll be able to beat the Republican in the general,
Speaker 7: or will her like extreme views and old tweets alienate voters.
Speaker 7: Here is the sitting.
Speaker 20: Governor Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers today wading into the governor's
Speaker 20: race as he was asked about Democratic front runner Francesca Hong, specifically,
Speaker 20: can she beat Republican Tom Tiffany.
Speaker 11: A tough point.
Speaker 16: She has spent her entire campaign dealing with not with
Speaker 16: the issues, but what's on the Twitter. And I just
Speaker 16: find that that's not a good way to beat Tom Tiffany.
Speaker 7: In TV news and online, there's a lot of questions
Speaker 7: about her previous stances on abolishing police and outlets like
Speaker 7: Fox News and also on social media. They circulated an
Speaker 7: old clip from twenty twenty one, when she started serving
Speaker 7: in the State Assembly, talking about being concerned about her
Speaker 7: son's quote unquote proximity to whiteness. Here's a former Biden
Speaker 7: admin official, the chief of staff to the White House
Speaker 7: Press Office and press advisor, discussing Hong on the morning
Speaker 7: of the election.
Speaker 1: She has no.
Speaker 21: Talent, she has no charisma. Her ideas if a toddler
Speaker 21: said them out loud, would get put in time out.
Speaker 21: She's not a real person. She's actually, in my opinion,
Speaker 21: deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy
Speaker 21: some of her own beliefs. And I cannot believe that
Speaker 21: we might be on the cusp of having to lift
Speaker 21: up this person who's undeserving of a seat in Congress.
Speaker 1: That's pretty wild.
Speaker 7: Also pretty wild because quote unquote undeserving for a seat
Speaker 7: in Congress. Hong was not running for Congress. She was
Speaker 7: running for the governor of Wisconsin. But anyway, you know,
Speaker 7: much of the news coverage of the campaign during during
Speaker 7: the final week and a week and a half of
Speaker 7: the race, was spent talking about this stuff, and specifically
Speaker 7: talking about old tweets about quote unquote canceling Thanksgiving and
Speaker 7: how Hong, who used to work in the restaurant industry,
Speaker 7: just doesn't really like holidays. And I think the way
Speaker 7: that this really dominated the race and she was, you know,
Speaker 7: bombarding with a lot of questions by this kind of
Speaker 7: demonstrated how important message discipline is in running these races.
Speaker 7: And you do not need to answer stupid questions flatly,
Speaker 7: but you can rather use that as as a way
Speaker 7: to promote or spread your campaign message saying like, no,
Speaker 7: my biggest concern and as governor, is whether families will
Speaker 7: be able to afford to put food on the table
Speaker 7: and eat together no matter what holidays that they celebrate.
Speaker 7: That would be message discipline, right That is that is
Speaker 7: something that Zoron did very well when campaigning.
Speaker 1: And the other thing I've kind of seen.
Speaker 7: These past few weeks is a lot of these DSA
Speaker 7: candidates get asked about DSA's new platform Workers Deserve More,
Speaker 7: which we've discussed from the show, which is neither like
Speaker 7: a minimum nor a maximum platform. It has a lot
Speaker 7: of like immediate term things that are very very possible,
Speaker 7: like in the short term that people you know should
Speaker 7: be collectively rallying around and pushing for. But it also
Speaker 7: has a lot of like long term goals that the
Speaker 7: platform's own prologue admits like won't be possible under our
Speaker 7: current system and would require like a complete overhaul of society.
Speaker 7: But the platform itself doesn't distinguish between its own like
Speaker 7: actual minimum and maximum proposals. All of the actual proposals
Speaker 7: are like in the same section, and I think this
Speaker 7: is in some ways opened up attacks from news media uses,
Speaker 7: especially host news media.
Speaker 1: This is both a good thing or a bad.
Speaker 7: Thing, right, You could interpret the platform being structured the
Speaker 7: way it is as a way to kind of help
Speaker 7: keep DSA or some of these like some of these
Speaker 7: ideas from sliding over to the right, and having all
Speaker 7: these proposals together, it does open the Overton window on
Speaker 7: a lot of like legitimately radical ideas, where you know,
Speaker 7: now the public is debating things like abolishing the Senate
Speaker 7: and the Electoral College, drafting a new constitution, you know,
Speaker 7: public ownership with the largest corporations and essential industries. But
Speaker 7: the way this platform is structured opens candidates up to
Speaker 7: attack from you know, media journalists who do not have
Speaker 7: you know, the best interests of these candidates at heart,
Speaker 7: where they're being grilled about a lot of things that
Speaker 7: they themselves are not running on. So instead of being
Speaker 7: asked about you know, raising the minimum wage, but ending jerrymandering,
Speaker 7: you know, ice, healthcare, childcare, data centers, whatever, they're instead
Speaker 7: being asked about other you know, maximum proposals in the
Speaker 7: DSA platform. And again I'm not saying this is necessarily
Speaker 7: a bad thing. I think a skilled speaker can navigate
Speaker 7: this and defend their own positions without throwing DSA under
Speaker 7: the bus. But this is a sort of trend that
Speaker 7: I am noticing. I think specifically Oliver Larkin and Florida
Speaker 7: has handled this really really well. And Chris rab who
Speaker 7: won the primary in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has also handled
Speaker 7: questioning on this really really well. And I think Hong
Speaker 7: herself was getting better at this towards the end. To close,
Speaker 7: I want to play this short clip of Hong on
Speaker 7: Fox News the Morning of the election.
Speaker 9: Our voters who fear that democratic socialism could turn into communism,
Speaker 9: what would you want them to know?
Speaker 15: No, this is a state where we still have a
Speaker 15: two thirty three tip minimum wage and seven five seven
Speaker 15: tive minimum wage. I think it's going to be pretty
Speaker 15: hard to turn that into socialism soon. But what we
Speaker 15: can do with this campaign is make sure that we're
Speaker 15: fighting for the policies that we're class people first, who
Speaker 15: we're fighting for twenty dollars in one range.
Speaker 7: Interesting the way the anchor is there at the end,
Speaker 7: just to have no idea how to react, I think
Speaker 7: that that is really telling.
Speaker 19: I mean, there's just a fundamental generational divide between people
Speaker 19: who are like that person said socialism that should completely
Speaker 19: end their political career, which, if you're over the age
Speaker 19: of about forty, is just like an axiom. Yes, if
Speaker 19: you're an American and you said the word socialism, you're
Speaker 19: not fit, you don't belong here, And if you're under forty,
Speaker 19: you're like, shut the fuck up.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I can't afford to live at all. Yeah, so
Speaker 7: maybe I'll support politicians or policies that might might make
Speaker 7: my life slightly better. Yeah, anyway, that is Wisconsin. Let's
Speaker 7: close with Robert and a very funny story.
Speaker 2: Okay, so onto my main story for this week, which
Speaker 2: obviously is not really my story, but I thought it
Speaker 2: was the funniest thing I read this week, so you
Speaker 2: guys about it. So, on July eighth, twenty twenty six,
Speaker 2: Donald Trump was in Ankara, Turkey, with a bunch of
Speaker 2: his top aids and cabinet people, as well as his
Speaker 2: normal press Corps retainers. He was there for a NATO summit,
Speaker 2: and overnight on the seventh, I believe he made the
Speaker 2: decision to have US forces restart their strikes against Iran.
Speaker 2: After I think this is like the fourth or the fifth,
Speaker 2: maybe the seventh breakdown in negotiations we've had. I honestly
Speaker 2: have lost track of how many times that has happened.
Speaker 2: But we started doing strikes again overnight right so after
Speaker 2: that decision was made, but before Trump decamped from Turkey.
Speaker 2: Late on the eighth, CBS News reports that US intelligence
Speaker 2: detected a quote credible plot to fire a missile at
Speaker 2: Air Force One. Now, for clarity, the Air Force one
Speaker 2: that the President flew to Ankara is what I'm going
Speaker 2: to call Air Force one. Two, because it's the Katari
Speaker 2: Air Force one that replaced the real air Force one
Speaker 2: that Trump was given as a gift by a four
Speaker 2: hundred million dollar gift by Cutter, Right, and this is
Speaker 2: legally distinct from a bribe. I need to specify that,
Speaker 2: and I need to note we will be talking about
Speaker 2: a lot of Air Forces one in this episode. Well,
Speaker 2: we'll be talking about three specifically, because.
Speaker 1: Like technically, any plane the president is honest supposed to
Speaker 1: be air Force one.
Speaker 3: Yes, that said, it says supposed to.
Speaker 2: They're also supposed to like change the transponder, but they
Speaker 2: don't do that in situations like we're about to talk
Speaker 2: about where there's like a threat. Right, Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: should talk a little bit about the Katari Air Force one,
Speaker 2: which I'm calling air Force one two. Yeah, I said
Speaker 2: it was a four hundred million dollar gift that's legally
Speaker 2: distinct from a bribe, and it was. But because all
Speaker 2: they had done was make a really nice plane, air
Speaker 2: Force one is a lot more than a really nice plane.
Speaker 2: Air Force one is presumably, I everyone who is an
Speaker 2: expert on plane says about the hardest plane to kill
Speaker 2: in the world, right, because it's air Force one. The
Speaker 2: Katari Air Force one is not that naturally that hard, right,
Speaker 2: because it can't be. So they spent months and months
Speaker 2: and months in seven hundred and fifty million dollars retrofitting
Speaker 2: the Katari plane to ensure that it had the proper
Speaker 2: security features to transport and protect the president.
Speaker 3: Now, even though.
Speaker 2: I just said that that seven hundred and fifty million
Speaker 2: dollars still did not bring this plane up as far
Speaker 2: as I'm aware, it didn't even bring it particularly close
Speaker 2: to what the actual Air Force one is capable of.
Speaker 2: It does not have the whole suite of electronic countermeasures
Speaker 2: and stuff that the real Air Force one has. It's
Speaker 2: still not as secure. I also want to read one
Speaker 2: other note from Aviation Source News about the Katari Air
Speaker 2: Force one plans to transfer the jet to the Trump
Speaker 2: Presidential Library Foundation rather than extend used to the next
Speaker 2: president after his term.
Speaker 3: Add to the controversy.
Speaker 7: It's yes, That's one of the most insane parts of
Speaker 7: the Cutter jet is that it's technically not a personal
Speaker 7: gift to Trump because it's a property on the government,
Speaker 7: and yet after he leaves office it will be transferred
Speaker 7: to his library foundation.
Speaker 3: It's keeping that.
Speaker 1: Fucker it's insane, which he's putt nearly a.
Speaker 2: Billion dollars of public money into anyway. So the plane
Speaker 2: that he flew to Ankara, the Secret Services immediately like, well,
Speaker 2: now that there is a credible threat, we cannot have
Speaker 2: him fly out on the Katari Air Force one because
Speaker 2: it doesn't have the counter.
Speaker 3: It would need.
Speaker 2: So at the last moment on the eighth, mister Trump
Speaker 2: announced that, for old time's sake, I think was very
Speaker 2: close to his exact statement, He's going to be flying
Speaker 2: home from a car on the old Air Force one,
Speaker 2: which we'll call air Force one one. Right, So he
Speaker 2: says he's going to fly home on this thing, and
Speaker 2: to all as far as everyone is aware, on the
Speaker 2: eighth he does, right. He goes, takes a whatever kind
Speaker 2: of ride out to air Force one. He's photographed at
Speaker 2: the door of Air Force one. He enters air Force
Speaker 2: one one, and then Air Force one one takes off
Speaker 2: with all of the press people and a bunch of Trump.
Speaker 3: Staffers on it. Now, what we didn't know then but
Speaker 3: we know now is.
Speaker 2: That Trump was not on Air Force one one after
Speaker 2: it took off, even though he got on the plane,
Speaker 2: because the day before we sat.
Speaker 3: Down to record this episode of ED.
Speaker 2: The Washington Post published one of the funnier investigations of
Speaker 2: the second Trump era. Its title is Contradicting public statements
Speaker 2: Trump took secret flight from Turkey and Mediterranean threat. Now
Speaker 2: CBS and The New York Times had previously reported that
Speaker 2: Trump boarded the old Air Force One due to this threat.
Speaker 2: That was a lie. In reality, the Secret Service had
Speaker 2: Trump board the old Air Force One on camera and
Speaker 2: then put all of the normal people who would be
Speaker 2: on it and then scent it on its way without
Speaker 2: Trump as a decoy in case the Iranians wanted to
Speaker 2: turn the shoot it down. Any major administration visit to
Speaker 2: a summit like they held in Ankara is going to
Speaker 2: include not just Air Force One, but a couple of
Speaker 2: other Air Force marked passenger jets, which are all suitable
Speaker 2: for hosting cabinet officials and other high ranking members of
Speaker 2: the government, but are also there for another reason in
Speaker 2: case the President needed to make a discrete escape on
Speaker 2: a different plane.
Speaker 3: This is not the only.
Speaker 2: Time the President has not been on Air Force One
Speaker 2: when people have thought he was right. The White House
Speaker 2: doesn't have a history of lying to people about this.
Speaker 2: It's more than obfuscated kind of in the moment, like
Speaker 2: they did with Busher, they'll just say, we're not telling
Speaker 2: you where the fucking president is because shit's happening right now.
Speaker 2: So the fact that they did an elaborate lie and
Speaker 2: sent Air Force one into the sky full of people
Speaker 2: as like a decoy for an Iranian missile is pretty new.
Speaker 3: And fucked up. But the fact that the Secret Service
Speaker 3: was like, we probably shouldn't.
Speaker 2: Send him out on any of the obvious Air Force
Speaker 2: ones is not really all that like weird of a moment.
Speaker 3: What is weird is how they did it right.
Speaker 2: And I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post and Ankara
Speaker 2: Trump boarded the old Air Force one jumbo jet in
Speaker 2: view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later
Speaker 2: to a smaller plane and Air Force C thirty two
Speaker 2: a via an airport catering truck you typically used to
Speaker 2: load meals and other supplies brief flight. According to the
Speaker 2: US official corroborating material reviewed by the Post, that made
Speaker 2: Air Force one a decoy with media and some White
Speaker 2: House staff aboard the official set, and the article goes
Speaker 2: into a hysterical amount of deal. They're combing through all
Speaker 2: of the pictures of the airport on that day, and
Speaker 2: they show the catering truck when Trump would have been
Speaker 2: on it. You can see that in the article, Like
Speaker 2: it just looks like a catering truck on a plane.
Speaker 3: But it's really funny to know that he's just squatting
Speaker 3: him there.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, he's gotta be having the best time of his
Speaker 1: life doing this, right, Like he's just like, I bet.
Speaker 3: It was really fun, but it was super fun and
Speaker 3: he felt like a spy.
Speaker 7: I know.
Speaker 22: Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer god, but it is really
Speaker 22: funny because like there's a lot that's funny of this
Speaker 22: right now, and I can't, to be fair, I can't
Speaker 22: imagine any member of the White House Press Corps would
Speaker 22: be surprised at.
Speaker 2: The President using them as a decoy. In fact, before
Speaker 2: it was revealed that Trump had left the original Air
Speaker 2: Force one or Air Force one one for what I
Speaker 2: guess we'll call Air Force one three, this happened. Quote
Speaker 2: asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window
Speaker 2: shades on the plane in Turkey, Trump said that it
Speaker 2: was because you're probably on a dangerous flight because of
Speaker 2: the sleeves bags we.
Speaker 3: Have to deal with.
Speaker 2: Trump said that he has a threat all the time
Speaker 2: against his life and that he is number one on
Speaker 2: Iran's list. But if I go, you go right, Trump
Speaker 2: suggested to reporters, Perhaps someday you want to change perfections.
Speaker 1: Christ He's really funny sometimes.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, guys.
Speaker 7: It does feel like an eighties movie slake side plot.
Speaker 3: It really does. It really does.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: The people I'd imagine might be kind of hurt by
Speaker 2: this are the staff members, like the member of Trump's
Speaker 2: White House who got chosen to fly on the Human
Speaker 2: Shield flight without being told, rather than being rerouted to
Speaker 2: Air Force one to three where the boss was flying,
Speaker 2: because not all of them were. Pete Hegseth was on
Speaker 2: Air Force one three with Trump right, he got rerouted
Speaker 2: to the real one. But a bunch of Trump's people
Speaker 2: just found out today that he put them on the
Speaker 2: death flight to see if a missile with him.
Speaker 3: And I think that's beautiful.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 3: That's what I.
Speaker 1: Got, Margaret.
Speaker 7: Where can people listen to more cool people doing cool
Speaker 7: stuff like flock cameras?
Speaker 19: Well, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff,
Speaker 19: which is usually about history, But lately, I've been doing
Speaker 19: a lot of history that sometimes happened a week or
Speaker 19: so ago, and it's on this very network or even
Speaker 19: in this very feed. You can listen to cools on
Speaker 19: Media book Club, where I read a different story every
Speaker 19: week to you.
Speaker 7: Also, James's new show Natural Causes coming out soon.
Speaker 1: Put a trendscoll on your We reported the news, We
Speaker 1: reported the news.
Speaker 2: Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat Death of the Universe.
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