It Could Happen Here Weekly 245

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Welcome to acodop and here a podcast where sometimes the
here is the world's largest democracy, and that I think
I'm actually not sure how many Americans are aware of it.
This is, in fact India a very basic democracies around
the world.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
I mean, if you're calling either to the US or
India the world's largest democracy, you've got to put an asterisk.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
There. We'll get to that land of asterisks, Age of asterisks. Yeah,
with you to talk about the age of asterisks and
maybe how to get out of it is Robert Evans. Yeah, yeah,
astressing on that too.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Why not?

Speaker 1 (01:07):
Oh boy? And I'm mea long a guess asterisk there too. Sure,
I don't know, I got nothing, I got nothing. Well,
what are we talking about today?

Speaker 3 (01:15):
Maya.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
We are talking about the fact that a couple of
weeks ago in India, protesters managed to accomplish something that
is unprecedented in the twelve year reign of Indian Prime
Minister and enemy of the show, the butcher a Gujarat
himself one Prime Minister Modi Narindra Modi, thank you very much. Yep,

(01:36):
hate him Jesus Christ.

Speaker 4 (01:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Yeah, the entire time he has been in power, no
one has successfully been able to manage to force him
to make a countet member resign. No, and protesters just
did this.

Speaker 3 (01:49):
Yeah, this is the first.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
It's not the first, because there was the most recent
set of elections didn't go great for him. But this
is like the biggest break in his armor we've seen
since the Modi regis kind of clanked into place.

Speaker 1 (02:02):
Yeah, And to understand sort of what that means, we
need to talk a bit about why Robert was like, yeah, asterisk,
that's a democracy on both this in the US, Yeah,
which is that? So Modi's ruling party is the BJP,
and I would classify the BJP as the world's largest
fascist party. It has a horrifying one hundred and forty

(02:24):
million members.

Speaker 3 (02:26):
Jesus Age Christ.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
Yeah, not good, very bad.

Speaker 3 (02:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Yeah, and it's also like not the only ultra right
wing Hindi nationalist party in India. There are also others.
So yeah, great, great things happening here.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, this is why you've had ethnic cleansings against Muslims
and other non Hindu groups and chunks of India over
the Modi years.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
Yeah. So they've been in power like effectively uncontested. I mean,
they didn't do great and last lections, but they held
on to power and they've been in power for twelve
years now, during which they have both transformed Indian politics
and also just continue to get more and more right wing.

Speaker 3 (03:02):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
There's something I think is worth mentioning with the BJP,
which is that it's not like most political parties, even
fascist ones, in that it's not like it's a political
party that like developed a paramilitary right. The VJP was
developed as the political wing of, you know, a very
very far right, anti Muslim like Hindu nationalist parabilitary group

(03:24):
called the RSS, which was responsible for a whole bunch
of absolutely hideous crimes even before the BJP took power
or even existed. So again, like this is a ruling
party that is like the political wing of a parabilitary
not the other way around. And it's been running India
for twelve years. And as Robert sort of mentioned before,

(03:44):
the BJP has faced some challenges to their power. They've
also faced large scale protest movements before, most notably sort
of the Farmer's protests in twenty twenty and then twenty
twenty four, which were about attempts to implement right wing
market reforms to India's like agricultural markets. But they've successfully
been able to maintain this policy of just refusing to

(04:05):
dismiss government ministers in the face of protests until now.
So what has actually been happening. Yeah, so these protests
have been rallying under the banner of I guess kind
of a meme organization or meme.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, it started as a as a joke, right, yeah, yeah,
it's it's called the Cockroach johnta party which is named
after these comments.

Speaker 1 (04:29):
They were made by India's Chief Justice of like the
Indian Supreme Court, calling young unemployed people quote parasites and cockroaches.

Speaker 2 (04:38):
It's a little bit of a reversal of like the
Hillary Clinton deplorables comment where this this person in politics
uses a derogatory nickname to refer to a group of
people he's opposed to, and they kind of take it
on as a badge of honor.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
Yeah, and because it's fascist, right right, it's also yeah fascist,
the Chief Justice Supreme Court is calling them cockroaches. Jesus Christ. Yeah,
this party is like obviously a joke. It's like CJP,
like cockroach instead of BJP, et cetera, et cetera. That
the main focus of these protests are a series of
scandals in India's education system, and it feels kind of

(05:14):
redundant to say, like, oh, yeah, like what kind of
education do you get? Has a huge amount of you know,
sort of determinants in like what your life turns out
to be and what your economic conditions turns out to
be in a sort of more intense version of like
the way that American sanitized testing works. But there are
a bunch of these sanitized tests that you take that
can determine a whole bunch about what your future is

(05:36):
going to be. And I think mostly obviously there have
been a couple of big scandals recently, but the most
famous one is called the neat scandal. NEAT and EATS
is basically it's India's like pre med exam. Basically.

Speaker 2 (05:50):
Yeah, it's this huge exam that everyone who wants to
go into pre med has to take and get a
certain grade on, as I understand it, basically, Yeah, So
it's one of these especially for kids like aren't rich.
It's like a massive barrier that you have to get
past if you want to like have a better life.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Basically. Yeah, And these tests, and specifically the MET in particular.
I mean, this is just the one if you want
to become a doctor. But like you know, there's a
huge number of people taking these tests. I'm going to
quote from al Dazeira, nearly two point three million test
takers across India and at examination centers in Doa, Dubai,
Singapore and Kampman Dou appeared for the NEAT this year

(06:28):
on May third, battling out for less than one hundred
and thirty thousand spots in medical colleges. So a very
small percentage of the of these of these two point
three million people who are taking this test can even
possibly get a score good enough to get them into
a very small number of spots in these medical colleges
and then it turns out for this year's test that

(06:50):
the answers to the test had been leaked aheat of
time and were being like sold on a telegram channels. Yeah,
and this turns into a massive scandal and the government
for us the students to take the test again, and
this is a complete disaster. Eleven students died by suicide
as result of it.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
Good God, it's really.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Bad because it's like a mix of everything you've heard about.
Particularly in Southeast Asia. You've got a lot of like
pressure as a kid to do well in exams like
this because there's not both for cultural leases and because
there's not other ways legally to like get those jobs
if your family is not rich. And also the people
whose families are rich, like often can pay to get

(07:32):
the answers ahead of time, which is what the leak
of this shows, right, Like the fact that it leaks
out is because people's rich kids are getting these yeah. Well,
and and also like if you're rich enough, you can
send your kid to like a private college right right,
that too, you know, but if you're a working class kids,
you cannot afford one of these one of these private universities. Yeah,
and so your only way in is through these tests exactly.

(07:53):
And these tests are also you know, they're like they're
like a huge sort of extraction engine inside of the
Indian economy where like, you know, one of the things
that Alda Zerra talks about is the story of this
twenty one year old kid who is one of the
people who died by suicide, who in order to get
through these tests, you have to go through these like

(08:15):
massive extremely expensive coaching centers effectively in order to study
enough for it. And these things are these things are
really expensive to the point where this kid's family like
sold their ancestral lands in order to be able to
pay for test coaching so this kid could become a doctor.
And she had passed the test after like not getting
high enough scores like the previous two times, and then

(08:36):
he had to take it again. There are stories like
this all over India and it's just a nightmare. Yeah,
so much of this too shouldn't be separated from the
broader issues gen Z and Jin's Alpha are having all
over the world, right, Yeah, like this is part of that.
Like this is we are fucked. We have no way
of making it in the economy. You've left us and

(08:58):
one of the tiny slim slippers of a way to
get ahead is just a scam too, Yeah, I get it.

Speaker 3 (09:04):
They should be pissed.

Speaker 1 (09:06):
Yeah, And like it's particularly intense in Indio because there's
a story recently that CNN was talking about where there's
a study that showed that there's a forty percent unemployment
rate for graduates under the age of twenty five. Good god,
that is nightmarish. That's end of civilization kind of shit.
Like any sane government would be worried about a revolution

(09:29):
in these conditions. Those are the kind of unemployment levels
that got you the Arab spring, right, Like, yep, that's
how this stuff happens. And Facebook, yeah, and Twitter, I
guess yeah, well yeah, Facebook playing both sides on that one.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
Sha I roan.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, a variety of foreign intelligent agencies from all over
the world, a lot of things like yeah, a lot
of things.

Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah, and speaking of things that have a lot of
problems that the education system as well, like there's other
issues with it. Right, the BJP, again, they've been in
power for twelve years, so they've installed a bunch of
RSS guys, like in the Department of Education, and so
you get this curriculum that in something that I think
is very familiar to Americans, where you're just getting all
of this right wing nationalist bullshit just like attempting to

(10:16):
be pumped into the education system. They're doing that too. Yeah,
and conditions over this are bad enough that yeah, people
take to the streets.

Speaker 3 (10:26):
Yeah, as they should and did. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:30):
Yeah, it's it's I don't know, like a lot of
the stuff reading this, it was like, oh, I've like
I've like been in this protest like so so originally
these originally the protests are not that large in scale.
But there's there's a big march on like July twentieth that's,
you know, like a march at the Parliament and there's
a giant police attack on it. That's an attempt at

(10:50):
crush and movement entirely, and it doesn't work. It does
exactly the opposite. It has, you know, a very very
familiar pattern of a bunch of people watch like a
bunch of actual literal children who are protesting, like the
answers to the test got sold to a bunch of
rich kids. Then they get the shit beat out of it.
This suddenly like accelerates the protest massively and massively increases

(11:13):
the number of people who are in the streets, and
you know, this eventually does the unthinkable, which has forced
the government to make the Minister of Education resign, and
they're also able to get some reforms. The multi government
in theory says it's going to address like some of
the kind of like bureaucratic things around why it's so
easy to get these questions. They also promise not to

(11:37):
arrest any of the protesters, a thing that is never true.
They are every single time you promise this, they are
always lying.

Speaker 3 (11:42):
Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
But is also the thing that a government does when
it is scared.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Yeah, it's a sign that they know they can't start
talking about cracking heads from the jump.

Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah yeah. And I think we're going to get a
bit into more of the reason why the government was
so alarmed about this later. But one of the things
where I think this probably unfortunately was good strategic timing
by the government is that these were these protests were
sort of like crystallizing into these more general like antimody protests,
and by sort of heading it off at the past

(12:13):
here over an issue where like in theory, the BJP
also wants the tests to work normally although obviously this
does beg the question like, okay, so if it's government
officials who are selling the answers to the tests, like
who is running the governments? Yeah, which is you know,
another part of this and another thing that is a

(12:35):
part of this is these products and services.

Speaker 3 (12:39):
Robert, Oh, god, I love a good product and a
good service.

Speaker 1 (12:53):
Ugh, we're back.

Speaker 2 (12:54):
We're filled with the bounty of products and services, and
we're ready to hear more about the cockroach Janta.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
Yeah. So again kind of very familiar to a lot
of protests that we have seen over our lives. These
are very very social media driven protests in a way
that's also similar to a lot of the protests that
have been happening in actually, I mean particularly in neighboring
regions protesting like Bangladesh and Shri Laka, et cetera, et cetera.
And you know, if if you watch any of like

(13:23):
the Instagram reels or whatever from these, god, I don't know,
it's it's so just depressingly familiar in a lot of
ways where it's it's very funny reading people talking about
this because they're like, ah, it's these like irony meme
driven you know, like kids making these like irony meme
driven things about like getting the shit beaten out of
by riot police and like, you know, it's like people

(13:45):
doing fit checks and then like getting like beaten with batons,
and it's like, oh, yeah, okay, we've all been there.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
I've been having a very like I'm feeling old moment
these because it's like, oh god, I remember these from
like twenty thirteen when we were doing the same shit, And.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Well that's one of the tough things too as you
get older, is both you know, and this is less
the case when we're talking about a foreign movement, because
I don't think I have any ability to influence that.
When you're talking to like younger activists, it's a mix
of wanting to like let them know about the pitfalls
and problems that previous generations have encountered when you see them,
you know, kind of heading in that same direction, and
also not wanting to be like, well, just because I'm

(14:27):
burnt out doesn't mean you should because I mean I should, Yeah,
Like you shouldn't be excited about this thing just because
I can't get excited anymore.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Yeah, And it's like, you know, and that's always the
thing with these kind of protests. It's like sometimes you win, yeah,
and sometimes you win and there's there's never God. David
Graeber had this quote I forget who.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Yes, well, I know the one you're talking about where
he's he's talking about like the dealing with.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
Like the surprise of victory. Oh, I was actually gonna
do a different one. Oh, okay, that one's also good.
But he had this quote with a revolutionary in from
the twenty eleven like uprising there, and you know, she
had this quote where it was like, you do these
protests all the time, and sometimes thirty people show up
and you're depressed, and sometimes one hundred people show up

(15:11):
and you know, you're really happy, and then one day,
eight hundred thousand people show up and you kind of
forgot that could happen. Yeah, And that's kind of what
this is, right, where it's like, yeah, that's that's exactly
how it goes.

Speaker 5 (15:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (15:23):
It starts as like a bit from a dude who's
not even in India at the time, right, he's at
a school in the US and he and so he
just makes this kind of meme page and it takes off.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah, and then suddenly you know you actually have part
of this is also like weird stuff about how algorithms work,
but like part of what's been happening here too is
that there's been a huge shift in the regime in
India's ability to control social media, which something they've been
very very good at up until this point. They've been
really good at controlling both sort of online discourse and

(15:55):
also have taken almost complete control over just the regular
mainstream media and these protests, and like the way that
people are just sort of casually being like hey, fit
check going out to a protest, and like the way
that the self spread algorithmically, and the way that you know,
you have people going out for protest stuff. Then that
also mixes with is you know, people who are going
out just to film it for like their Instagram reels

(16:16):
and it, but all of them, all of them end
up like in the streets, and you get the situation
where like the mainstream media is just like absolutely refuses
to talk about the protest whatsoever. But then you know,
if you're like on Instagram, you're on any social media site,
it's the only thing you're seeing. And this kind of
weakens the control that the BGP has been able to maintain.

(16:39):
Over all of these spaces. Yeah, but that doesn't mean
that like they've you know, lost control completely. You know,
the BGP is like kind of in their counterattack phase
right now, and you get a really bleak look at
how like right wing governments with longstanding sort of right
wing online basis and media bases work where they do
these like harassment campaigns as women who went out protesting

(17:01):
they share do. Yeah, it's like it's all the stuff
that you're familiar with, right, Like they'll show clips if
people like on news channels and then people will like
dogs them and like start stalking them and they get
threats and.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yeah I've heard people had to like hide and stuff. Yeah,
especially like female activists while they were during the protests.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (17:20):
Yeah. And it's also you know, it's like it's like
large scale threats to sexual violence are yep, a very
common part of this. And that's god, yes, you know,
that's like how these people are able to maintain power.
But even as this sort of digital kind of attack
is happening and it's extremely brutal and it's really a mess,
the control of the mainstream media is also slipping. One

(17:42):
of the things I learned, like reading about this is
there's a term that I guess generally kind of like
opposition people are using with the protesters also used where
they call they call the like the mainstream press, like
goaty media, which is like it's like lap in Hindi.
So it's it's basically like calling them like lapdog media
instead of being watchdogs, which I love. I don't know,

(18:03):
I like it a lot.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
Yeah, I did too.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
That's great. It's like it's good. I don't know, I
don't I don't know exactly how to steal that for us,
but I love it. It's great.

Speaker 3 (18:12):
Yeah, I should be thinking about that.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
Yeah. But part of the problem with with having you know,
this kind of like incredible degree of like media centralization
that the regime has been able to pull together is that,
you know, after being in power for so long, having
their narrative be like completely hegemonic for so long, they're

(18:36):
running into like the cracks, you know, these sort of
cracks forming in their nationalist messaging, because like they're running
into the fundamental problem that you can't eat national pride.
And so if if literally the entire media all the
time is trying to ignore that these protests are happening,
and then also was telling you that your country is
great and like modi is great and you're such a
world great world leader. But then you know you can't

(18:58):
feed your family. That that's actual problem. Yeah, absolutely, yeah,
and like and like normally the way that nationalists would
sort of deal with this is to be like, yeah,
you don't have jobs and your economy sucks because of
like some either immigrant group or in this case, it
would sort of like shuld probably be doing this with Muslims,
but they've been in power for so long that it's
like kind of hard to do that because it's like

(19:20):
this is your country now, right, like you have taken
control of it. And yet Yeah, and this kind of
feeds into this, you know, question at a broader level
about what these protests are actually about, because on a
very basic level, they're about education perform and they're about
these tests, and they're about the education system as a whole.

(19:41):
But on a broader level, it's more complicated because these protests,
as you know, protests often do function as a sort
of aggregator of different kinds of struggle with you know,
different beliefs and motivations, and you get a whole bunch
of different kinds of people in the street. I want
to read this quote from an interview Frontline India did

(20:01):
with the guy who was the founder of the CJP,
which is to say, just like the guy who made
the meme that went viral.

Speaker 2 (20:07):
Yeah, yeah, that is how he got the job, so
to speak. And he's done a really good job, by
the way, Like I think he's been really responsible. Yeah,
he could not have anticipated this happening, but he seems
to be really dedicated to the cause.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
Yeah, And I want to quote him here talking about
what the ideology of this party, if it existed, would be.
The ideology of the CJP and many of our young
people are also very progressive, liberal, secular, will be secular,
democratic and socialist, and we strive for social justice. And
he also mentions three people that he's you know, he's

(20:40):
he's inspired by, and two of them I think are
kind of not particularly surprising given this kind of like
this is kind of what like secular, progressive democratic key
politics look like, which is he mentions Gondi and Nehru.
But what's interesting and what I haven't seen literally at
all in any other coverage at this protest, is that
the third person that he mentions is Ambedkar, which, yeah,

(21:06):
I assume you, having been there and spend a deep
amount of time in India, I assume you know who
Ambedkar is. No, no, no, I don't know. Really interesting, okay,
not in a meaningful way. Now, this is actually kind
of a good proxy. I assume people listening to the
show know who Gandhi is. You've probably at least heard
of Nehru. Yeah, who was the first trime Minister of India. Yeah,
Ambitcar is a lot less well known. He's another one

(21:27):
of the very important sort of independence era figures in India.
But he is the guy around which like the anti
cast movement rallies was it?

Speaker 3 (21:36):
Was he in the fifties or sixties.

Speaker 1 (21:37):
No, he like first starts this in like the like
the twenties and thirties, and then he's alive through independence.
Oh okay really that era? Yeah yeah, yeah, he's he's
around like in the era of like revolutionary struggle against
the British creed independence yeah yeah, yeah, and then he,
you know, he like survives through independence and gets to
see some of that.

Speaker 2 (21:54):
The partition of India and all that good stuff. Yeah,
all the fun things happen.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Yeah, and this is a period, you know, if you
look at like the nineteen ten's, twenties thirties, this is
a period both about the anti colonial struggle and then
also like what the struggle is going to be, right, Like,
who's whose vision of India is going to come out
of a post independence world if there is one? And
Mbitkar's thing here is yes, like we want like we
want independence and we want socialism because you know, a

(22:21):
lot of the people of the like Neighbory is technic,
is like a kind of socialist right, like a lot
of a lot of the independence activists are. But he's
also in a position of we need to get rid
of the cast system because he sees it as like correctly,
as like an incredibly powerful sort of force of oppression
in Indian society. And he thinks that that's not something

(22:41):
that they should like wait until independence to deal with.
And so he's a very very important like leader in
the anti cast movements and he's probably I think he's
probably just like their best known intellectual. I would really
recommend reading his book, The Annihilation of Cast. Well, I
say book, it's like not that it's not that long, yeah,
Like it's probably my favorite thing I've read and from

(23:02):
the writers of that era. It's an address that he's
making basically to both I guess you'd call it like
more conservative pro in dependence activists and then also to
the socialists to be like, hey, you should also talk
about cast at the same time you're talking about British
oppression and also class. The CJP founder like mentions this

(23:30):
because he's from a low cast background and he goes like, yeah,
like no, like I wouldn't have been able to go
to school in the United States and like have the
successes that I've had in my life without ambicar. I
thought this was really interesting because it's not mentioned in
any other reporting, even though it's like in an interview
he's said, and also, I think this is a dynamic

(23:53):
here that is like not well understood in most places,
that like, this is a still operative system of oppression
that people are still fighting against, and that is, you know,
relevant enough to be like one of the things that
gets mentioned by the guy who starts this movement. And
that's not to say the rest of the movement like
necessarily is exactly this focused on it, which is one

(24:14):
of the parts of this movement that's both why it
succeeded and also one of the kind of messy parts
of it, right, is that on the one hand, this
has become a really powerful vehicle for these sort of
like broadly secular like pro democracy, like anti Moody, anti
dictatorship students, and there's always been like a fairly large
like cohort of you know, sort of like young left

(24:35):
leaning or leftist students. I mean, there was a whole
i don't know what you'd call it, like social panic
slash government purge against this idea of like quote unquote
urban Naxles, which was supposed to be like oh, there's
like these like urban versions of like the Naxal like
communist guerrillas that are in the universities, which is, you know,
in a lot of ways, very similar to but a

(24:56):
significantly more advanced and repressive version of the stuff that
like you see the Trump administration doing in the US
education system and the sort of like witch hunts so
for you know, Palestine and stuff like that. So you know,
you have that group of sort of like center left
and leftist students to where a lot of people who
started the protest movement, but also there's also just like
BJP kids, Yeah, who are in the streets because they're like, yeah,

(25:19):
like we all got fucked in our tests.

Speaker 3 (25:21):
Because it's bullshit.

Speaker 1 (25:22):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Yeah, it's the same reason.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Now you've got a decent chunk at least like a
third of the twenty or something percent of the people
who voted for Trump in twenty twenty four are more
people who'd voted for Biden or for Hillary a few
years earlier. Right, there are people who maybe they went
for this guy, but as soon as it stops working
for them, as soon as like the fascist and missn't
delivering what it promises, they'll get pissed, they'll get out

(25:46):
wide up with the streets. Yeah, you don't have to
like them to recognize that as a phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (25:50):
Yep.

Speaker 3 (25:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
There's a kind of like third phenomenon too, which is
as these protests go on, you get more and more
of different kinds of like both rural and urban workers,
more urban workers and real workers. But this but this
is you know, the thing about education protests at their
core is that this is something that cuts across like
rural urban divides to an extent in the sense that

(26:13):
like both poor rural kids and poor urban kids are
still getting fucked by this, you know, like by the
exam system. But then you know, you get workers starting
to join it who also have these I think, I
don't know the way that commentators talk about it is
that they're unconnected. I think they're a lot more connected

(26:34):
than that. But you know, you get you get you
get these workers with these like cost of living crisis
concerns who who are also joining this protest. And I
guess part of this is a girl who spent a
lot of time studying and writing about ten. But this
is kind of the exact class composition of Timen and
how those protests unfold. It where you have its origins

(26:57):
in like this, in this specific student movement thing that
has kind of specific student movement grievances that then you know,
goes into the streets around their specific demands, and then
everyone watches them get the ship beaten out of them,
and that brings more and more people into the streets
who have their own kind of specific demands around like
the economic conditions they're in. And this is a very

(27:18):
common like composition for revolts. I mean, it's it's the
basis of everything from like I mean, god like it's
part of the basis of the French Revolution. You can
look at like May sixty eight, Like, you know, so
there are revolts against Pinochet, Like I mean, occupy is
like a lot to a large extent, like this class base, right,
if you have a bunch of students who are very

(27:38):
concerned about debt, and then that brings in a bunch
of more working class people who are like not students anymore.
But that's also what makes it dangerous. It's a very
old kind of alliance, and it's a kind of alliance
that can always materialize because students and poor workers are
some of the first people to feel when the economic

(27:59):
ties are shit, and that like constantly creates these kind
of uprisings, right, and you know, they're dangerous enough that
if you look at the last thirty years of Chinese politics,
a whole bunch of the politics of modern China are
about specifically making sure that this exact coalition doesn't form again.
So you know, when the old working class is sort

(28:20):
of crushed with the like remains the welfare state in
the nineties, like, there's a very deliberate attempt to buy
off the students at the same time to make sure,
they never make common cause, and like any time you've
seen sort of student worker actions since then, there's this
massive crackdown on it because the Chinese government understands that
this is this is a very very dangerous political coalition,

(28:41):
and it's a political coalition that has outlasted I mean
literally like a lot of the like working classes that
were originally in these uprisings, like the French revolutionary like
artis in class, like that doesn't exist anymore, right, Like
the industrial working class in like France or like Italy
in the sixties, like that also doesn't exist anymore, but
you still see this like specific configuration of classes doing

(29:05):
these protest movements. Yeah, there's obviously always a lot of
different motivations, and conflict against the state tends to be
the thing that can like solidify a kind of identity
that allows you to do any kind of mass movements,
right Like this is like one of the few things
that can you know, fighting the police and having the
state repress you, and that having the states as a

(29:28):
force you can fight against concretely that just appears when
you oppose it is one of the things that makes
these kinds of protest movements work and then also underneath
that the economy is broken in a lot of the
ways you saw like in like twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen,
which is like I think the last big cycle of
these mass protests where you have this economic instability. And

(29:49):
what I think is particularly similar between now and like
twenty eighteen was that technically speaking, if you look at
the economy in India right now, as as long as
you ignore the youth unemployment rate, it looks like the
economy is growing. Things are good. Yeah, yeah, it's like
the same thing as the US, where it's like, well,
I mean, the economic indicators have been getting worse, but
like you know, technically speaking, it looks like the US

(30:12):
economy is growing, but if you're living under it, it's like, no,
it's not. And there's all of these sort of cracks
and ripples in the global economy. In twenty eighteen was
like this where like the American economy was like doing fine,
and a lot of like the major economies were in
theory doing fine. But then you know, there was a
series of currency like crises and like there were like
these economic collapses. Yeah, there's like this hyperinflation in Turkey.

(30:36):
You get these things in like Chile, and then you know,
you start seeing these protests, you get like Haiti get
the yellow ves, you see like Hong Kong Lebanon a
rock god, like Iran, or for the first time of
this giant cycle of protests in Iran me and Maar,
like even like Russia briefly goes up. And I'm bringing
this up to say that like one of the things

(30:58):
about a protest like this, right, and there's been several
other ones who are very big protests in Indonesia over
the last couple of months. These protests often a recur
and b are in some ways an early warning signal
before like there's going to be another giant round of

(31:18):
these kind of protests.

Speaker 3 (31:20):
Yeah, I mean hopefully all right.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Yeah, I mean I think there's a decent chance of
it because like you know, the economy still hasn't like
hit rock bottom yet, no, and in the way that
like you know, you saw that in twenty twenty where like, yeah,
the bottom finally fell out of the economy with COVID.

Speaker 2 (31:37):
Furthermore, maybe this is putting it a little bit too strongly,
but like the people who do not like the regime
at particularly the activists have like tasted a little blood now, Yeah. Yeah,
Like it's really hard once people win, once a movement wins,
for it to not try to keep winning, right, That's
kind of a natural instinct.

Speaker 1 (31:55):
Yeah, And and the BJP is is, you know, obviously
doing its best to do to supper this, yeah, to
suppress or co opt yeah. Yeah. But the problem that
they're facing is is the fundamental problem of all of
the regimes everywhere, which is that, like it's a lot
harder to maintain one of these kinds of regimes when
you have been in power for a long time and

(32:15):
suddenly the economy implodes. And that's coming for India the
same way that's coming for the rest of the world.
And also in very specific ways of like you know,
we've talked about I talked about on this show elsewhere,
the effects of the blockade of the Stradiformus has been
devastating in India in a way that it hasn't been
in the US.

Speaker 3 (32:33):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (32:34):
And you know, you also have like heat waves that
are also you know, both economically and just like living devastating.
There was an expression in the Hong Kong protest that
they were drawing from a Mao quote but also it's
way older than Mao, as like Mao says in the
thing where he says it. But the Hong Konger has

(32:54):
had this line that like a single spark can start
a prairie fire. And the thing about the Indian economy
is it is throwing sparks off everywhere. Sure, and that
doesn't mean that every individual spark is going to be
the one that starts the fire. But it means that
as as you continue to get more and more sparks,
the odds that you see another one of these revolts increases,
and hopefully the odds that one of these protests in

(33:17):
one of these movements can finally knock off the fascists
and yeah, fundamentally transform Indian society rises.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yep, or at least get mody out.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah, just at a bare minimum. You know, I'll take
the minimum if that's what it is. Oh God, Okay, Well,
thank you Miya, and thank you the cockroach Janta over
in India.

Speaker 6 (33:40):
Good work.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
Hell yeah, y'all, that is actually really nice to see.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
Fucking rocks. Give them hell of you.

Speaker 7 (33:59):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. The
past few weeks I've been covering the midterm primaries and
the battle between the left and the establishment for the
future of the Democratic Party. As evidence just this month
in Michigan and Wisconsin, left populism continues to be.

Speaker 1 (34:18):
On the rise.

Speaker 7 (34:20):
A few weekends ago, the Democratic Socialists of America held
their national organizing conference, the Socialist Summit, in Chicago, Illinois.
I did not attend the Socialists Summit because instead I
wanted to check in on the other side of the isle.
So last month I went down to Washington, d C.

(34:42):
To attend the New Liberal Action Summit, or, as it's
affectionately referred to by attendees, Globe con named after the
blue globe emoji used by liberals on Twitter, symbolizing globalism,
free trade, free market capitalism, liberal immigration, and yimbiism. The

(35:03):
New Liberal Action Summit was a three day event, with
one main conference day filled with panels featuring policy makers,
fireside chats with liberal politicians, and networking opportunities for young
liberals who share a passion for center left policies. I
went to eight of the fourteen panels. One of the
first panels was on energy policy, featuring two former politicians

(35:28):
turned fossil fuel lobbyists. Next, Representative Don Bayer spoke about
the need for AI regulation. A panel of policy advisors
discussed why quote unquote slopulist tax proposals are stupid. Representative
Richie Torres promoted abundance. Congressional representatives from the New Democrat

(35:48):
Coalition had a panel about how their caucus is fighting
back against DSA, and I listened into a live recording
of Francis Fukuyama's podcast. Abundance was probably one of the
most frequently used words at the conference. There was a
big focus on building, housing, zoning reform, permit streamlining, and

(36:10):
a lot of speakers were nervous about the growing anti
tech backlash and the public support for data center moratoriums. Interestingly,
most panelists and attendees were impressed by Zoramamdani's reign thus
far but still very oppositional to stuff like wealth taxes,

(36:30):
the rent freeze, populism in general, DSA as an organization
and their other candidates. About three hundred libs attended the
summit last July. They mostly ranged between their early twenties
to late thirties. These are econ, POLI, PSI, and law students,

(36:51):
young professionals, campaign staffers, influencers, policy wonks, and aspiring policy wonks.
Just as the use of the blue globe emoji online
was in response to socialists identifying themselves online via the
red rose emoji, this whole conference and the org behind

(37:12):
it is a response from young ish liberals to rising
populism in the United States, and especially the growing influence
of the Democratic Socialists of America on the Democratic Party.
The New Liberal Action Summit is put on by an
organization called the Center for New Liberalism or CNL. CNL

(37:36):
is a nonprofit five oh one C four quote digital
first grassroots organization dedicated to fighting for liberalism during the
age it is most under attack, according to their website.
At the summit, they were giving out CNL stickers, which
they sell on their website for five dollars. One of

(37:56):
the stickers reads quote, we believe in economic growth both
through free markets, a robust social safety net, the free
flow of people and goods, deregulating barriers to housing and employment,
immediate criminal justice reform, a tech optimist society at tax
on carbon freedom regardless of gender, age, race, religion, or

(38:18):
sexual orientation. Pragmatism over populism, cnliberalism dot org, forward slash join.
The Center for New Liberalism claims to have about eleven
thousand members and fifty local chapters in cities across the US,
though according to their website, cnl's private Slack channel has

(38:39):
just about seven hundred dues paying members of the organization.
In contrast, DSA is about one hundred and twenty thousand
dues paying members. During the summit, I spoke with cnl's
deputy director, Tobin Stone, and he told me that the
Center for New Liberalism is specifically intending to serve as

(39:01):
a counterweight to the DSA. Stone said that the populist
right has their own little organizations like TPUSA, the populist
left has the DSA, and the Center for New Liberalism
wants to be both a political organizational force as well
as a social body for young center left liberals who

(39:22):
believe in quote unquote lower case L liberalism to meet
with each other, organize, and advance their ideas. Stone did
admit that most moderate Democrats are kind of dropping the
ball right now. The Republicans are super unpopular and voters
are expressing all these things around affordability, but moderate Dems

(39:42):
have failed to seize this moment. There is a big
window open for Democrats, and really the only people taking
it are the DSA.

Speaker 8 (39:51):
What we're trying to do is we're trying to say, look, no,
we can be central left, moderate, what ever you want
to call us, but actually have a real agenda that
excites people and offers alternative what the DSA is saying,
because none of these a lot of these current moderates,
like in some ways we'd rather have them than a
DSAY person. At the same time, like the moderates can't
just be sitting there doing nothing. They have to be

(40:11):
willing to take on the fights, like fight the nimbi's
and build more housing because young.

Speaker 9 (40:15):
People can't afford housing anymore.

Speaker 8 (40:17):
So that's what we're trying to do, is like be
a counterwait and up for a real alternative.

Speaker 7 (40:21):
About two years ago, CNL Deputy director Tobin Stone told
the Columbia Journalism Review quote, were Hillary Clinton Democrats?

Speaker 1 (40:29):
Basically?

Speaker 7 (40:30):
Now that was two years ago, but last month I
asked Stone what kind of politicians does CNL want to
see taking power?

Speaker 8 (40:39):
They ftterally like you see people like Jake Auchenclass. I
think when people hear and talk it residates like he's
incredibly smart and he knows how to talk to people
and about the issues that they're mad about.

Speaker 7 (40:50):
Jake Auchngloss headlined cnl's opening reception on the first day
of the summit. Aucenlass is a Congressional rep from Massachusetts
and a former Marine. After Zoramuandani won the Democratic primary
last June, Auchenlaus wrote a blog post on Substack, reading,
neither democratic socialism nor crony capitalism will deliver financial freedom.

(41:15):
I propose a ten word agenda for financial freedom for
the middle class. Treat cost disease, reduce the debt, and
save social security unquote. Earlier this year, his reelection campaign
accepted over twenty five thousand dollars from Pallentier, including seven
thousand dollars from Pallenteer's CEO, Alexander Karp. In January twenty

(41:38):
twenty three, Auchenclaus was the first Congressman to read an
entirely chat GPT generated speech on the House floor. This
speech was in support of a bill to create a
joint US Israel AI Center for the Development of AI research,
and last year Auchenclaus told Politico that it's quote unquote

(42:02):
readily apparent that TikTok's algorithm is quote amplifying anti American,
anti Israel content disproportionate to its actual frequency. Stone told me, quote,
we need more people like Jake Auchencloss and not all
of the electeds in this room, but like a lot
of the folks here. But also what we're trying to

(42:25):
do and eventually want to do is like have our
chapters be the group that identifies some potential candidates unquote.
Stone also pointed to State Rep. Jasper Martis, who became
friendly with CNL through the organization's anti tariff advocacy.

Speaker 8 (42:43):
You want to see what we can do as an
organization to help elevate voices like him who can be young,
charismatic and is without offering an agenda that we think
would do more harmful good on ere or do.

Speaker 7 (42:54):
You see a point where you will not just have
to kind of offer an alternative to what the DSA
is offering, but but like but in primaries like specifically
kind of like like like counter them, like like directly.

Speaker 8 (43:07):
Yeah, like that is like part of what we want
to do is we have always been and will continue
to be willing to get directly into those primaries, whether
it's supporting someone we already you know and work with,
like it likes to be up here today, or like
if someone tries the primary jake out and class, our
Boston chapter is absolutely going to be out knocking doors
to support him, especially if it's a DSA candidate. But

(43:27):
then also, like again, long term, we would love to
be able to be the group that can identify the
candidates who can run against the tasty. We want to
do the work to find those young charis amountic candidates
and get them to run again to the DSA.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Candidate and offer them real trains.

Speaker 8 (43:41):
We really just want to see like organization like five
year old feet even bigger. We want to not just
be like doing this conference here in DC, but then
go over like all over the country and say, like
we can go in Denver and host a whole conference
in Denver with all of our members of a chapter, yeah,
talk and about the work and to elevate the pragmatic
politicians in Colorado or New York.

Speaker 7 (44:01):
Late Slantaccorld, the Center for New Liberalism's annual impact report
for the election year of twenty twenty four, claimed that
the organization made five thousand, five hundred dollars in quote
successful campaign contributions and gained one hundred and eighty six
new members. That's one hundred and eighty six new members

(44:24):
during the year of a highly impactful presidential election. DSA
gained over seven thousand members in just the two months
after the twenty twenty four election, and since then, DC
membership has more than doubled, from fifty thousand to one
hundred and twenty thousand members. Just ten years ago, DSA

(44:45):
had only five thousand members before Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign,
which breathed new life into the organization. But in order
to fully understand CNL, you have to understand their deeply
online origin, because they essentially internet trolled themselves into something

(45:06):
resembling a real political organization. Center for New Liberalism can
be traced back to our slash neoliberal on reddit, where
after the twenty sixteen election, a new team of moderators
tried to grow the subreddit as a place to discuss
liberal policy making and free market economics in response to

(45:26):
online conversations about politics being dominated by populism, whether from
MAGA or the rejuvenated socialist left. Following Bernie's twenty sixteen campaign.
These moderators turned the subreddit into an online community of
policy wonks discussing economics as well as neoliberal shit posting,

(45:46):
in an attempt to compete in the arena of internet
politics and make center left liberalism cool and memeable. And
I don't know about you, but when I think of cool,
the first thing that comes to mind is reddit memes
about liberal free market economics. In twenty eighteen, two moderators
from this subreddit, Colin Mortimer and Jeremiah Johnson, started to

(46:10):
consolidate this loose online community into a real organization called
the Neoliberal Project. They started a at neoliberal Twitter account
and launched the Neoliberal Podcast. All this neoliberal branding was
sort of a troll at the time. Still now, the

(46:30):
word neoliberal was mostly used as a pejorative in current
political parlance, so the Neoliberal Project's use of the term
was almost this form of slur reclamation, a tongue in cheek,
semi ironic but largely sincere embrace of neoliberal economic policies.

(46:50):
To quote a twenty twenty two article in The Washington Post,
quote Carl Nielsen, a twenty four year old aerospace engineer
who leads the DC chapter told me his brother turned
him onto this neoliberal community a few years ago, and
he was immediately smitten.

Speaker 1 (47:08):
Quote.

Speaker 7 (47:09):
I was like, dude, this is it, this is where
we belong. The memes were fantastic. They were doing a
neoliberal shill bracket, which is a Twitter tournament where you
vote to determine who's the chief neoliberal shill. That was
really easy to get excited about, so I jumped right in.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Unquote.

Speaker 7 (47:31):
The neoliberal shill bracket on Twitter is like a March
Madness style bracket for Twitter users to rank which politicians, columnists, lobbyists,
or influencers are the biggest neoliberal shill of the year.
This basically amounts to standing figures like Ezracline, Matt Iglesias,

(47:51):
Nate Silver, and the streamer Destiny. The Washington Post described
the organization as being on quote a quest to bring
market friendly moderation into the age of Internet meme politics.
In twenty twenty, the Neoliberal Project was absorbed into a
centrist think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute. In the announcement,

(48:16):
Will Marshall, the president of PPI, said that the Young
liberals quote fill a vacuum in our politics for a
pragmatically liberal alternative to right wing populism and democratic socialism.
Colin Mortimer, the Neoliberal Project's executive director, is quoted in
the announcement saying, over the last several years, we have

(48:38):
built the Neoliberal Project into an online community of politically
engaged young individuals who are pushing back against the ideological
extremes that put our country in peril. Now we are
proud to join one of the most storied think tanks
in the country as we develop and advocate for a
radically pragmatic agenda for change our country so so urgently needs.

Speaker 1 (49:01):
Unquote.

Speaker 7 (49:03):
A quick note on the Progressive Policy Institute PPI was
founded in the late eighties by the Democratic Leadership Council,
when the word progressive referred to center left pragmatism, as
opposed to the modern connotation of the term as used
by left wing progressives today. In the nineties, PPI functioned

(49:25):
as the idea factory of the Clinton administration and was
a big part of the shift in the Democratic Party
away from New Deal, Great Society redistributive liberalism towards the
neoliberal politics of maximizing economic growth that defined the Clinton era.
Soon after joining PPI, the Neoliberal Project rebranded into the

(49:49):
Center for New Liberalism, displaying some awareness of the massive
unpopularity of neoliberalism and that it might actually it be
pretty hard to grow a political project under such a banner.
CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson, who also hosts the New
Liberal podcast, told The Columbia Journalism Review that neoliberal is

(50:14):
a great word to use quote when what you want
to do is get in fights on the internet, but
it turned out to be less great for recruiting Congress
people to their cause. Two years after joining PPI, the
Center for New Liberalism started doing their annual New Liberal
Action Summit. Twenty twenty six was the fifth year of GLOBECN.

(50:38):
The Columbia Journalism Review wrote in twenty twenty four that
the Center for New Liberalism is quote Biden's fighters in
the meme trenches, doing what they can to make his
brand of politics trendy again unquote. The past few years,

(51:05):
the Center for a New Liberalism has tried to legitimize
itself beyond its Reddit shit posting and humble Twitter troll beginnings.
Earlier this year, CNL brought on Greg Schultz as a
senior advisor. Schultz was the campaign manager for Joe Biden's
twenty twenty presidential primary campaign and general election strategist. What

(51:29):
are the aspirations for the New Liberals? Is helping to
secure a center leaning candidate for president in twenty twenty eight.

Speaker 8 (51:37):
One of our big goals is definitely to influence to
our next president and maybe there ends up being a
more compromise candidate or what we're saying conference is the
wrong word, but like you're seeing right now, like a
lot of people are gravit hitting towards us off. If
he does end up running like people like him, it's
a bit we would rather not see like a further

(51:58):
Leck candidate, and we also want to be exceeded. The
platform that we run on in twenty twenty eight is
not when that sometimes you have to have a lot
of opopulance and but like it's kind of like slowly
losing the you see right now, we're just like, oh,
cut everyone's taxes, Like we want to see like a
real concrete platform that doesn't overpromise can be enacted and
you can maybe repair people's hope in government again. Senator

(52:18):
Bennett talked about it earlier or alluded to it, but
like people don't feel like government works anymore. So we
want to make sure that the agenda in twenty twenty
eight is one about making government work again. Obviously, we
have to workshop the message. You figure out what it's
gonna appeal to the American people the most, because part
of it is like probably superfighting the DASI. We're aware

(52:38):
they're going to exist in America, like they're part of
the people climate. We don't want to take them away,
but we also like think it will be extremely harmful
if they're in the driver's seat. They should absolutely have input,
but like if they're in the driver's seat, the presidential
will like shit, like we're gonna lose again, and we
want to make sure that we win because obviously if
we lose again to Donald Trump or whoever his sudden

(53:01):
era is like, it's not gonna be great for America
or the rest of the international art national institutions.

Speaker 7 (53:08):
I mean, I think some of those DSA people would
look at centrist candidates going up against Trump in like
sixteen twenty four or like you know it's more center
leaning that would be.

Speaker 8 (53:17):
Very hesitant to call either of those centrists or the
center left. Like if you look at the exit polling
data from twenty twenty four. Twenty four, everyone thought Kamala
was much further like from the center than Trump, which.

Speaker 1 (53:29):
Is ever good at marketing. But like, yeah, I mean
it was not center like you ask anyone in.

Speaker 8 (53:35):
This room who's worked for We all work for a
center left modern organization. We will also was not center left.
There's a reason we lost in because dinner press serve
voters thought for too far to leward, and I means
you've heard of two out of touch. I think that's
a good right for him out of touch.

Speaker 7 (53:50):
I think it's really important to understand that too far
left and too out of touch are vastly different things.
And secondly, what is considered quote unquote left is not
at all clear. Does left refer to left wing economics,
wealthy distribution, or like the sort of performative liberal wokeism

(54:15):
that was completely captured by corporations and the elite before
being quickly dropped as Trump took back power. Because the
recent batch of left wing populists are running on economic
policies to make life more affordable, their focus on uplifting
workers and the poor would materially improve the lives of

(54:37):
large swaths of marginalized populations way more than corporations posting
black squares, academic language policing, White House pride events, and
Nancy Pelosi wearing a West African kente cloth stole as
a scarf. A New York Times pull from May of
twenty twenty six found that the majority of Democrats and

(54:59):
Democrat lean independence do not want the party to move
to the center on healthcare or economic issues, and should
embrace economic populism. According to the Times poll, sixty three
percent of likely Dems said our political and economic system
needs major changes, and twenty percent said it needs to

(55:20):
be torn down completely. Eighty eight percent said the economic
system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans.
Seventy four percent of Dems oppose sending aid to Israel.
Most respondents were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party. Ninety one
percent had not heard of abundance. Only five percent said

(55:42):
the economic conditions were good or excellent, and forty nine
percent said they were favorable to socialism versus twenty two
percent unfavorable. Only twenty percent of respondents said the Democratic
Party was too far to the left, and respondents were
evenly split on whether the party in general should move

(56:03):
to the center, but most said that the party should
move to the left on things like healthcare. A frequent
topic of discussion at the New Liberal Action summit was
how the Democratic Party can win back quote unquote working
class voters and a spoiler. They think it's by moving
to the center.

Speaker 10 (56:22):
Something we've talked about at PBA for a long time
is looking back as for a non college voters.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
Working class voters.

Speaker 11 (56:30):
We have a new report king assuming that showcases House and.

Speaker 12 (56:32):
Left fines are being a lot better in that regard
than their progressive countervice.

Speaker 13 (56:37):
We do a little whole in non college voters working
class voters.

Speaker 8 (56:41):
As usual, most of our data says that the people
that vote for Zara tend to be heavily college educated,
whereas is people without degrees that voting for quota, which
the best sweet lens for working custers is not I
think it's just has college reread does don't have a
college degree.

Speaker 7 (56:56):
The New Liberals believe that DSA is out of step
with the working class, and by working class they mean
voters without a college degree. Moderates will often point to
high profile races like zoron Or Abdul al said, where
the more center leaning candidate often quote unquote wins the

(57:19):
non college or low income demographic. Now, these wins are
often in the single digits. In the Democratic primary, Andrew
Cuomo quote unquote one the under fifty k a year
income bracket by eight points. Quomo also won the highest

(57:41):
income bracket two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in over
by eleven points, while Mamdani dominated the middle income brackets.
Almost this exact same trend appeared in the Abdul al
Said versus Hailey Stevens primary in Michigan. Left wing populist
candidates are doing so well with college educated voters, in

(58:02):
part because they're just driving such high turnout, especially among
millennials and Gen Z. But center left liberals will often
use the support of DSA from possibly downwardly mobile college
graduates to point towards socialism as this kind of disgruntled
elitist phenomenon that's not actually connected with the quote unquote

(58:26):
real working class, which again to them, means a voter
without a college degree. And while income level or education
can be an indicator of class, just defining working class
as meaning a voter without a college degree doesn't really
make sense nor does it tell you anything about the

(58:48):
class interests of voters, because it doesn't actually point to
anything regarding their place in the capitalist production process. Just
whether or not you have a degree doesn't even point
to what your income is, which which is itself kind
of a flawed way of understanding what working class means,
which in a Marxist sense, refers to whether you live

(59:09):
off selling your labor for a wage, that is, being
a worker, or if you own private property like business
and make your money off of controlling other people's labor.
But all that matters to these liberals is voter's proximity
to higher education based on looking at election data, where

(59:30):
DSA type candidates do very well with college educated voters
and maybe don't do as well with what is categorized
as a non college educated or maybe sometimes a low
income voter, even if the difference is only a few
percentage points. The liberal analysis of class simply being whether

(59:52):
or not a voter has a college degree offers no
insight into why a middle class of educated work are
moving in droves towards social democracy or some form of
democratic socialism, and are voting for policies that benefit people
largely more poor than them, instead of just supporting the

(01:00:13):
center left democrat who would advance elite interests. To this point,
I talked with Ben Rose Porter, a professor of sociology
at the City University of New York, about why class
analysis is important.

Speaker 12 (01:00:27):
It indicates what your fundamental interests are going to be
regarding the politics when it comes to how should the economy,
how should our society be oriented. If you are a
worker who makes your money by selling your labor, you
are interested in a policy that gives labor a fair deal.

(01:00:47):
If you are an owner, your interests are going to
be geared oppositely. They're going to be geared towards capital,
towards ownership of private property and the making of profit
being protected against the interests of life, labor. And so
this is the conception of class that I think paints
a much more lucid picture of the world then one

(01:01:08):
that just sort of treats, you know, the poorer you are,
the more working class you are. It's absolutely true that
the base of the working class is always the poor
relatively speaking. I mean, the bottom strata of the working
class is its source of power, and it's the better
paid workers who, while you know, they are in a
theoretical sense in the working class. They often are the

(01:01:28):
ones who are comfortable with capitalist production because they're being
compensated fairly well. But again it's a kind of analysis
that can't comprehend the liberal view cannot really comprehend how
college educated people who may be securing somewhat you know,
decent middle class jobs, they can't understand how they are
also a part of the working class and respond to

(01:01:51):
the economic squeeze that happens when capital rules the economy,
when capital is so unquestioned by its liberal administrators that
it just it squeezes the whole of the working class.

Speaker 7 (01:02:03):
Yeah, and there's these certain moments with like technological advance
like you're seeing with like AI that lead to the
de skilling of certain workers. Right the past twenty years,
adults have been telling kids to just learn coding. Yeah,
work in tech. This is like the last growth area
of the economy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Learn coding.

Speaker 7 (01:02:19):
And now those skills are not as useful as they
used to be because AI can do it. And there's
this like proletarianization of tech workers happening that just this
like liberal model. The working class then can't real understand
why whise people are going to be turned against liberalists.

Speaker 12 (01:02:37):
Capital produces its own grave diggers marx rights in the
manifesto right that, you know, the socialist projects sees that
there is a fundamental antagonism in the capitalist mode of production,
not only in that capital appropriates exploits workers. The capitalist
class survives parasitically by squeezing the worker. That's fundamental to

(01:02:57):
the capitalist system. Not only that, but it also is
continually growing the working class. It's constantly pushing people out
of their positions of property, but also out of positions
of skilled labor into you know, having to move down
into proletarianized positions where you are not going to be
paid as much. And by constantly doing this, it's building

(01:03:17):
a class that goes against it.

Speaker 6 (01:03:19):
It's the socialist.

Speaker 12 (01:03:20):
Project which recognizes those antagonisms inherent in the capitalist mode
of production, and it is the liberal project that is
utterly blind to them that just to the liberals, no
capitalism is good. It increases GDP, right, it leads to
economic growth. These antagonisms do not exist to the extent
that you can show them to them. They absolutely refuse

(01:03:43):
to acknowledge them or else to understand how they are
fundamental to the capitalist system, and so they have no
answer to this. You can see how these people who
are themselves sort of like intellectual, you know, sycophants to
the liberal institutions, they perceive like, well, if you're smart
and you have the right policies and you believe the

(01:04:04):
right things, you'll get taken care of. It's a very
different experience from I think a lot of college grads
who have tried very hard to do the right things
and who do not have a place in the economy,
or a very limited place with very limited power and
very limited resources.

Speaker 7 (01:04:18):
While Andrew Cuomo slightly outperformed Mamdani among the lowest income
voters in the twenty twenty five Democratic primary come the
general election in November, that ceased to be the case.
In the general, Mamdanni won low income districts by eleven points,
to quote the New York Times quote, Mamdani largely expanded

(01:04:41):
on the base he built during the primary in neighborhoods
across the city. He swept communities of every income level
save for New York's wealthiest enclaves, where his top opponent,
former Governor Andrew Cuomo, performed best unquote in the November general.
Donnie also won districts where less than twenty percent of

(01:05:03):
the residents have a college degree by thirteen points, though
a CNN exit poll of less than five thousand voters
showed that Cuomo did just five percent better than Mamdani
with voters without a college degree. I think it is
also worth reiterating that one out of ten people who

(01:05:25):
voted for Zorn in twenty twenty five also voted for
Trump in twenty twenty four. That's something that liberals never
talk about, And something else they never talk about is
just how much these non college low income statistics graf
ont age. More than anything else, both Mamdani and Abdul

(01:05:45):
al Sayid overwhelmingly won with voters aged eighteen to forty five,
young people who are low income, who maybe have not
graduated college or are in college, or maybe just graduated
college but are it's all low income. Those young people
are backing DSA candidates. Those young people are not going

(01:06:06):
to Andrew Cuomo in the general election or the primary election.
The sort of low income voters that are going towards
either these incumbents or more traditional moderate candidates are generally
older voters. And if we want to have a real
discussion on how the DSA can appeal to older voters,
maybe voters who are not as politically engaged as younger voters.

(01:06:30):
Then yeah, that is a real discussion to be had.
But just breaking that down as DSA does not attract
low income voters is just completely not true. Many low
income people without a college degree are old retirees who
tend to vote more conservative, even if they're registered Democrats.

(01:06:51):
Another factor is the effectiveness of ad spending. Abdul said
was outspent eleven to one, and that is going to
have an effect on the election results. Blanketing the airwaves
with misleading attack ads can be hugely impactful in rural
areas and districts with low information or less engaged voters.

(01:07:13):
This same general trend happened in the June twenty twenty
six Democratic primary in New York City. That election was
not divided by income or race. The largest indicator that
skewed whether someone was backing the incumbent or the DSA
was age. By and large, Younger voters, whether they were

(01:07:33):
middle class or lower working class, backed the DSA candidates
like Clare val Dez, while older voters backed the incumbents,
the moderates, and the establishment politicians that these voters were
maybe more familiar with that maybe has been representing their
district for anywhere between five to thirty years. But what

(01:07:54):
makes this whole college educated working class debate so absurd
to me is that most of the city based Center
for New Liberalism chapters don't even seem interested in trying
to appeal to the voters that they think DSA is overlooking,
like that if.

Speaker 8 (01:08:12):
The DSA can only appeal to the people in the
college there, that's seventy sixty to seventy percent of voters
that we are missing and we need to do better
than that.

Speaker 7 (01:08:20):
Do you think that the New Liberals should be going
after like a totally different voting block and what DSA
is trying to go after.

Speaker 8 (01:08:27):
I don't know if that's our role. Like most of
our chapters do operate in cities where it is more
college educated things there are our role we view as
like trying to convince the college educating people that we
have the better ideas in the more optimistic vision, whereas
then it's other groups like if we have a chapter
in Swing district, obviously that's for PUAL that like our
chapter in San Francisco is going to be focused on

(01:08:49):
not that. Yeah yeah, yeah, So like I think there
are groups in the stuff that should be doing that.
I don't know, but our role.

Speaker 7 (01:08:55):
So CNL has already foreclosed themselves to really only going
after college educated voters, despite insisting that their ideas are
what actually can appeal to the working class. In evaluating

(01:09:21):
the political potential of the Center for New Liberalism, one
must keep in mind how their online shit posting origins
still influences their ideological outlook. If you recall, CNL describes
itself as a quote unquote digital first grassroots organization, and

(01:09:42):
on their website they claim, quote our work reaches upwards
of sixty million people a month. That number seems to
be almost entirely based on the impressions from their account
on x the Everything app. These are Twitter views. So
as much as CNL likes to put on their little

(01:10:03):
in person networking events their own metrics, the organization is
essentially a glorified Twitter account. And I could just go
through years of bad or offensive tweets, and many people
at the summit were very concerned about old tweets made
by DSA candidate Daria Liisa of Ila Chavier, But rather

(01:10:26):
than focusing on posting, I would prefer to engage with
the actual substance of their politics and how CNL is
trying and failing to place itself in opposition to the DSA,
in part because of how much it's focused on online
edge lord contrarian liberalism. For whatever reason, be it their upbringing,

(01:10:51):
class position, or type of education, these liberals have not
hopped on the populist train, but still feel left doubt
from the rest of their age peers who are all
having fun with DSA, and so they have decided to
define themselves in opposition to populism. It's a reactionary liberalism

(01:11:13):
in response to the growing influence of democratic socialism in
the Democratic Party. So, in effect, their new liberal politics
largely manifests itself as a form of contrarianism against popular
left wing policies, while also continuously reiterating to themselves that

(01:11:34):
left wing ideas aren't actually popular with the working class.
It's a politics entirely downstream from trolling online. In an
attempt to make center left liberals cool again, I went
to a bar after the summit with a few of
the attendees and a law student was passionately trying to
argue why we should abolish FEMA as a federal agency

(01:11:57):
and just have states pay for their own disaster response
so that quote unquote, my tax dollars won't have to
go towards idiots in Florida, And like both myself and
a writer from the journal Liberal Currents had to explain
from like first principles why it's good to care for

(01:12:18):
poor people and care about it general public good. That's
what I mean by contrarian liberalism. The Bay Area chapter
of the New Liberals were involved with that pro billionaire
march in San Francisco earlier this year in protest of
California's proposed wealth tax, and stunts like this. March for

(01:12:40):
billionaires is another perfect example of cnl's overly online, irony
poisoned politics, which still display a deeper sincerity. Before I
interviewed Professor Porter, I had him listen to a recent
episode of the New Liberal podcast, hosted by the co
founder of CNL, Jeremiah Johnson. The episode argued that liberalism

(01:13:05):
is in crisis, but because there is no more great
struggle in America. Basically, the economy is doing too good
and that's triggered a sort of post modern crisis of meaning,
resulting in voters sabotaging our own political system just to
feel something, and confusingly, cnl's co founder proposes a centrist

(01:13:29):
neoliberal technocracy as a way out of this crisis.

Speaker 12 (01:13:34):
The guy on the podcast is talking about technocrats and
how one of the central liberal you know, programs of
like a revived liberalism has to be like kind of
you know, technocratic politics and a renewed like faith in
technocratic politics. And I thought technocratic politics was very interesting
because you know, the point that like you need technocrats

(01:13:54):
to do good policy, to do good governance is a
bit of an odd one because absolutelytly you need technicians
to do good policy, like you know, complex social institutions
at the scale of like you know, a city or
a state or a federal government in today's world. You
need people who know how to run systems and who

(01:14:16):
are trained. You need intellectuals. You need technicians in a
general sense, right, you need specialized people. What's interesting is
that the whole thing allies like the crat part like
technocrat the idea that well, those with technical capacities also
rule this way in which it just completely conflates the

(01:14:36):
idea of technical expertise and decision making at the highest
level right, that it doesn't even think that those are
two separate realms. It literally is the people who can
technically do the job are also the people who should
make all of decisions about what kinds of jobs we do,

(01:14:56):
how the whole system functions, right, which essentially on this
notion that there is only one game, right that you
know in the podcast you hear a lot is essentially
you know, the unspoken aim, And for them it doesn't
need to be spoken, because as they conceive the world,
it is the only real game to be played is
economic growth, right, is just growing the GDP machine, capital growth,

(01:15:20):
capital accumulation. They do not entertain the question of what
kind of a society do we want to build? Their
main drive is GDP growth, and so everything else is
just sort of how do you technically do that best? Right,
how do you improve productivity? How do you grow the
economy best? They have no concept of like that there's
any kind of like political battle at the heart of that.

(01:15:42):
It's a view of politics without politics.

Speaker 7 (01:15:46):
Many of the attendees at the New Liberal Action Summit,
we're aspiring technocrats often self described as such. I think
the main tendency among these overly online center less liberals
is to confuse technical knowledge for politics for the ability

(01:16:06):
to govern. They display this deep failure to question authority,
not just in like an authoritarian sense, but the authority
of what is true or useful knowledge. To the contrarian
liberal technocrat, something like rent control is not just bad,
but it's actually evil because it disrupts the market. It

(01:16:27):
unnaturally alters supply and demand. And here's all these studies
proving this.

Speaker 14 (01:16:32):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:16:33):
In this technocratic mode, there's no consideration that policies may
have trade offs. That yes, rent control might negatively affect
the class of landlords and for profit developers, it might
alter supply, but it might be still worth doing as
a measure to provide relief to tenants, perhaps in addition

(01:16:53):
to other efforts to make it cheaper to build housing
to increase supply. But that sort of appraisal of trade
offs requires governing beyond a pure commitment to serving the market,
to just acting on what studies say is true. The
liberal technocrat thinks that politics is just the application of

(01:17:16):
technical knowledge, which of course is a massive limitation on
what you understand politics as being and what is politically possible.
History did not end in the nineties. What is politically
possible changes over time, and politics is about responding to
different opportunities in history.

Speaker 6 (01:17:39):
They're missing the part of history which is class struggle.

Speaker 15 (01:17:41):
Right.

Speaker 12 (01:17:42):
It's the case that we're in a capitalist world and
that requires economic competitiveness. You need to maintain competitive production
on the world stage and internally as well. Totally true,
but that does not follow that, you know, you just
pursue that blindly. There are very hugely significant decisions about

(01:18:03):
how economic growth proceeds. The biggest one that is just
completely left out by these people is the notion that
in growing the economy, the wealth produced by that growth,
how that's distributed distributive politics. These people, they don't seem
to conceive of it. The podcast you sent me, I
think he literally he says something like, you know, the

(01:18:25):
biggest liberal struggle is that there is no struggle, like
it literally just conceives the world as like there aren't
really any problems. Things are fine. There's big citation needed
on that one. He's just sort of like, yeah, things
are things are fine. If you look at it, things
are fine, which is just. I mean, it's just an
insane thing to say wages haven't risen in like forty

(01:18:46):
fifty years, you know, inequality has exploded, life has stagnated
for so many people, especially the poorest people, which are
most workers. So the idea that there is actually a
realm the politics that revolves around class struggle, around you know,
how wealth is distributed and how we gear our economic growth.

(01:19:10):
To them, that's a separate category. And so their entire
politics is the politics of technocracy, and in that, you know,
I'll give it to them. I think that they probably
are pretty good at the technical expertise of governance stuff.
I mean, one would expect Liberalism has been in power
in the United States for most of its history, so yeah,
I would expect that they would be good at technical expertise.

(01:19:31):
Their critique is not that they don't know what they're doing.
It's that they have totally jettisoned politics, the deciding what
do you do with that expertise?

Speaker 6 (01:19:41):
How do you gear the.

Speaker 12 (01:19:42):
Economy, how do you consciously control where it's going, how
distribution happens, Who is empowered in government and in the economy. Right,
this is all to discuss class, right, which these people
basically never do.

Speaker 7 (01:19:56):
This limited view of what politics is then determines what
the neoliberal technocrat thinks is worth focusing on and what
they view as being impossible, like how they view Medicare
for all as this impossible goal, whether that's because they
think voters will never support switching away from private health care,

(01:20:17):
or that a single payer healthcare system might even hurt
the economy and therefore we should oppose it.

Speaker 1 (01:20:24):
Their extremely narrow view of.

Speaker 7 (01:20:26):
What is politically possible is the main reason why this
sort of young new liberal organization will never succeed in
rivaling DSAY because the whole better things aren't possible mentality
makes it really hard to attract young people to your cause,
especially young people who are struggling. No, we can't pass

(01:20:48):
Medicare for all because x Y reason, a rent freeze
is actually evil because x Y reason. I don't know
how that kind of messaging is going to attract anyone
except fellow aspiring technocrats, which, yeah, that is basically the
entire makeup of CNL as an organization. After the summit,

(01:21:10):
an elected member of cnl's leadership Steering Committee got drunk
at the bar and argued that child outcomes are better
when certain types of fathers are incarcerated because some study
proved that the type of father who gets charged with
the crime would be a bad influence on his kids.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
A commands of the third ring.

Speaker 7 (01:21:37):
That moment was very emblematic for this whole political project.
This person was so delighted in their own contrarian commitment
to cold, emotionless, uncomfortable truths that may run counter to
what's socially accepted. Their little knowing smirk, fully aware that

(01:21:59):
what this saying is morally detestable, while self assured in
appealing to the authority of technical knowledge.

Speaker 5 (01:22:06):
Right.

Speaker 7 (01:22:06):
This tendency to fall back on the pretext that a
study proved such a controversial fact, while willfully ignoring that
there may be alternative solutions to the base problem here.
When your main political solution to social problems is just incarceration,

(01:22:26):
then you have lost. Your politics have failed. That's Globecon
twenty twenty six, next episode, I'll be doing a deeper
dive into neoliberal technocracy as a counter to rising populism.

(01:22:55):
Welcome back to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Last episod eisode I detailed my experience at globecon twenty
twenty six, or the New Liberal Action Summit, a three
day convention for young liberal professionals to socialize and listen
to panels about zoning reform, energy policy, and broad based taxes.

(01:23:18):
The summit is put on by a nonprofit called the
Center for New Liberalism, a digital advocacy organization that promotes
center left policies and neoliberal economics. The Center for New
Liberalism or CNL, basically started as a group of policy
wonks on Reddit and Twitter making political memes during Trump's

(01:23:42):
first term, but in twenty twenty, CNL was brought into
the clintonite think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. Since then,
CNL has been doing yearly summits and more IRL political
engagement in hopes of filling in the role of something
like the DSA but for more technocratically inlined moderate young Libs.

(01:24:07):
The twenty twenty six New Liberal Action Summit took place
in the backdrop of an ascendant democratic socialist and left
wing populist movement winning congressional primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado,
and now Michigan, beating the more moderate establishment type candidates.

(01:24:27):
A few days before the Summit in DC. The New
Liberal Podcast released an episode about the current crisis of
Liberalism where CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson talks about why
he thinks people are quote abandoning the idea that liberalism

(01:24:48):
can help them and are turning to populism, whether from
the right or the left.

Speaker 9 (01:24:54):
The clear trend over time is that we are getting
more and more are extremely progressive members of Congress, representatives, etc.
That we are getting more socialists and more DSA aligned candidates,
and that the far left is simply out organizing and

(01:25:16):
out hustling the moderate wing of the party or the
liberal wing of the party, however you'd like to say it,
and this is troubling.

Speaker 7 (01:25:26):
Jeremiah Johnson cites the Mamdani DSA sweep in New York
last June, where socialist candidates beat establishment incumbents, and this
episode came out about a month before the populist wins
in the Michigan Democratic primary. But Johnson does bring up
the Colorado primary, where one of cnl's favorite politicians, Senator

(01:25:49):
Michael Bennett, just lost his primary for Colorado governor to
the state attorney general, who, to quote Johnson quote frankly,
was not even necessarily more progressive than him, but simply
rode the wave of I'm the popular, stanty establishment, I'm
more angry, etc.

Speaker 4 (01:26:09):
Etc.

Speaker 7 (01:26:10):
Michael Bennett is an interesting case. In twenty twenty, he
ran for president as like the most centrist candidate of
that entire bunch and only qualified for the first two debates.
He used to be like one of the least populist
senators in the country, like a very CNL type politician who,

(01:26:32):
weeks after losing his primary bid, opened the New Liberal
Actions summit with a forty five minute fireside chat with
cnl's deputy director Tobin Stone. Senator Bennett's remarks earned a
very tepid response from the attendees. Bennett blamed the Democratic
Party for losing to Trump because they had no ideas.

(01:26:56):
He talked about the need to build housing and transit
from a bottom up approach that helps regular people, not
just those at the top, how his constituents in Colorado
can't afford to live where they grew up, and how
people in their late twenties and thirties can't get a
real job. He often mentioned quote working people and quote affordability,

(01:27:20):
and referred to Bernie Sanders as his quote friend, the
whole talk felt kind of Bernie Light, which was especially
odd because the summit schedule said that this fireside chat
was going to focus on the threat of the ascendant
populist left, but to the extent that Bennett targeted populism,

(01:27:42):
it was the Trumpean right wing authoritarian variety. And like,
don't get me wrong, Michael Bennett is still very much
a moderate. But if even a long time ultracentrist like
him feels like he has to make overtures to progressives
or populists even when he's speaking to the completely wrong audience,

(01:28:03):
then the Libs must be really feeling the pressure on
that New liberal podcast CNL co founder Jeremiah Johnson asked
his listeners to consider, if things continue on their current course,
what the socialist movement could look like in ten years.

Speaker 9 (01:28:20):
But just ask yourself, you know, is this type of
candidate winning democratic primaries more or less often than they
were five years ago, than they were ten years ago,
and five to ten years from now, do you expect
that they will have more energy or less energy? Because

(01:28:42):
I think any honest appraisal of where we are at
right now is that the socialist wing of the Democratic
Party has the energy and the momentum. Their organizing infrastructure
is far better, far more than the moderate or the
liberal wing of the party. They have more people who

(01:29:06):
are out there willing to do the work knocking on doors,
phone banking, posting on social media. That is where the
grassroots energy of the Democratic Party is. And we can
talk about whether or not the voters are there yet,
but the voters ultimately follow elite opinion.

Speaker 7 (01:29:23):
Voters are not just mindless sheep that follow elite opinion
see here the twenty sixteen to twenty twenty four elections.
They can be influenced by the power of capital, but
voters do evaluate their material conditions and compare that to
how different candidates promise to change or not change those

(01:29:44):
conditions once in office. There may be an elitist side
of the academic left, but the unspoken assertion here that
the DSA is uniquely representative of the elite as opposed
to the centrist Democrats, who do not represent elite opinion
and are more in touch with voters. That's patently absurd,

(01:30:08):
and cnl's new senior advisor agrees. Here's Greg Schultz, Biden's
campaign manager and general election strategist who spoke on a
Globecon panel about winning back Maha voters.

Speaker 13 (01:30:22):
I think farm the reality is a Democratic Party is
a self righteous, know at all party, and voters not
can feel that and they can see it. Do you
think we know it's better for you and your family
than put.

Speaker 16 (01:30:33):
You know it's for you and your advantiate.

Speaker 13 (01:30:35):
So one is we are increasingly a party of the academical, elite,
academical fility. So I don't think absolually talk for real
players understand their real.

Speaker 7 (01:30:43):
Concern So, while Greg at least admits among friends that
the Dems are an elite party detached from the concerns
of voters, CNL co founder and podcast host Jeremiah Johnson
remains somewhat confused as to why people just don't support
the smartest policies as defined by him and are instead

(01:31:05):
turning to populism.

Speaker 9 (01:31:07):
Any honest appraisal of where we are at says that
liberals are losing ground to socialists in the Democratic Party.
To some degree, the establishment has done this to themselves.
I think it would be wrong for any analysis to
leave that out. But having said that, in America, living

(01:31:28):
conditions are still quite good.

Speaker 7 (01:31:31):
Even in his explanation of why liberalism is failing, he
still insists that things are actually fine. He talks about
how real median income is quote unquote as high as
it's ever been, which doesn't actually mean that things are
going great. It's barely keeping up with inflation. But Johnson

(01:31:52):
relies on this narrow batch of macro economic statistics to
insist that quote America is still throw life is still good.
Last week I forced Ben Rose Porter, a professor of
sociology at the City University of New York, to listen
to this whole Crisis in Liberalism podcast and then discuss

(01:32:16):
his thoughts.

Speaker 12 (01:32:17):
The mainstream capitalist order, which is to say, the liberal
order as its political correlate is breaking down, is failing,
so you would expect to see if political moves away
from it. There's a very famous graph of worker compensation
to productivity. So worker compensation that's wages, basically how much

(01:32:38):
of profits more or less is going to the workers. Right,
So how much are workers compensated? Tracked with productivity, which
is to say, how much are firms producing relative to inputs? Right,
input to output productivity over time, and this is over
the course of the twentieth century. And what you see
in that graph is that for basically the whole of

(01:33:02):
the twentieth century, wages worker compensation tracks very closely with productivity.
So as firms industries produce more and more stuff, are
more and more efficiently producing, are creating more and more wealth,
workers wages are going up and keeping pace with that.
So the share of wealth between the owning classes, the bourgeois,

(01:33:26):
and the workers is staying about level.

Speaker 17 (01:33:29):
Right.

Speaker 12 (01:33:29):
As there's more made, workers are getting some of that, right,
and they're getting an even piece. And around eighty eighty one,
you know the collapse of the labor movement in the
seventies and especially with Reagan. Right, you see worker compensation flatline,
and it basically has been inert since the eighties. Since
the beginning of the eighties, productivity has continued to go

(01:33:52):
up about the same rate. So we have been producing
more and more wealth in this country. Right, This is
what capital's production does. It's basically almost always growing in productivity. Right,
We've been producing more and more wealth, and the share
of that wealth that the workers get has flatlined. You
cannot spin that as things are basically fine. That has

(01:34:15):
all kinds of of of major effects one of the
big ones is, you know, inequality. Even if workers are
not being paid starvation wages, living in that profoundly and
a profoundly inequal society has all kinds of effects socially speaking, right,
It does for the middle classes too, people who are

(01:34:36):
you know, comfortable, who are doing well, who have who
have captured a bit of that growth, because it gets
worse the further you go down the line. That when
you look at like wages for the lowest paid workers,
they've often even decreased, right, But even for those middle
class professionals and such, who may very well be comfortable,
and many of them, we should stress, are not. I

(01:34:57):
think that when you go through and you look at
the data, there's a lo lot of indicators of all
kinds of ways in which people might not be comfortable.
But even those that are comfortable, you know, they still
have to live in a society that is profoundly unequal.
That is letting the bottom strata just rot, right, that
is just letting like people die on the streets. That

(01:35:17):
has an effect.

Speaker 6 (01:35:18):
Anyone with a.

Speaker 12 (01:35:19):
Soul with a conscience is you know, affected by that.

Speaker 7 (01:35:23):
Having foreclosed the idea that there is anything economically or
structurally wrong with society. Jeremiah Johnson is left to conclude
that this quote crisis in liberalism appears to be a
crisis of confidence, a crisis of storytelling. So to Johnson,

(01:35:43):
it's simply that the liberal story is no longer as
compelling as the alternative populist narratives. Johnson mentions two potential
explanations for liberalism's decline, one coming from the right, the
other from the left, neither of which he finds convincing.
Johnson says that the right wing is promoting a cultural

(01:36:06):
explanation for liberalism's decline, arguing that liberals have moved too
far to the left on cultural issues and lost voters,
while the left wing offers a quote unquote materialist explanation, claiming.

Speaker 9 (01:36:21):
Living conditions have actually deteriorated, and your statistics do not
capture this, and people can tell when their lives are getting,
you know, materially worse. You know, when things cost too
much and they don't have as much income, and that
is why people turn away from liberalism towards alternate explanations.

Speaker 7 (01:36:40):
Of course, in this entire fifty two minutes of podcast,
Johnson never talks about like wealth inequality, as a real
problem in society because someone from his self described neoliberal
economic worldview just does not believe that skyrocketing wealth inequality
is actually a real problem in and of itself. But

(01:37:03):
then he has to pretend to be confused as to
why more and more people are falling for this materialist
explanation of why there's a crisis in liberalism and why
people are not convinced by the quote unquote story that
liberalism is telling them with macroeconomic statistics. You know, the
stock market is booming, Unemployment is low. Things like that

(01:37:26):
don't actually indicate what types of jobs are available. Service
industry or gig economy. Work is crushing and offers no
path for a sustainable future. Buying a house seems impossible.
Rent keeps skyrocketing, energy costs are ballooning, all while the
rich get even richer. Even if, on average, the median

(01:37:49):
wage has kept up with inflation at about three point
five percent per year, there are, of course many people
who are not seeing that wage growth, and even if
they are, that three point five percent is far below
the thirty percent rise in the price of groceries over
the past few years, or the twenty five percent jump
in residential electricity rates, and of course minimum wage workers

(01:38:12):
are not keeping up with inflation, let alone the massive
bumps in housing, education, and healthcare costs. A New York
Times poll from last May showed that among Democrats and
Democrat leaning voters, only five percent said the economic conditions
were good or excellent. Eighty eight percent said the economic

(01:38:35):
system in this country is generally unfair to most Americans.
Sixty three percent said that the political and economic system
needs major changes, and twenty percent sid it needs to
be torn down completely. But Johnson would have you believe
that the materialist explanation is without merit because DSA candidates

(01:38:56):
actually get a lot of support from middle class workers.

Speaker 9 (01:39:00):
The people who tend most to be sympathetic to this
kind of leftist story tend to be the people with
the most education and the highest incomes. If you look at,
you know, the demographics of Zorn Mamdani's win in New York,

(01:39:24):
he won the highest income brackets. And this is despite
you know, having kind of a eat the rich kind
of persona, and very very DSA aligned politics. And this
makes me doubt the materialist explanation.

Speaker 7 (01:39:42):
As we discussed last episode, this is just patently untrue.
In both the Democratic primary and the general election, former
Governor Andrew Cuomo performed best in the city's highest income
districts and with voters who made over two hundred thousand
dollars a year.

Speaker 1 (01:40:00):
But no, it is actually the.

Speaker 7 (01:40:02):
DSA who are truly representative of the elite, and the
richest of the rich are Zorn's main base of support.
Johnson needs that to be true because, as we will
learn after this ad break, he contends that liberalism might
actually be suffering from its own success. Welcome Back, CNL

(01:40:37):
co founder and new Liberal podcast host Jeremiah Johnson doesn't
buy into either of the populist explanations for liberalism's decline,
the cultural one pushed by the right or the materialist
one argued by the left. Johnson thinks that, if anything,
these explanations should be reversed. He discounts the right way

(01:41:00):
a cultural explanation because the places where those progressive cultural
advances have gone the farthest are in deep blue districts
that are still deep blue. And as for the materialist
story told by the left.

Speaker 9 (01:41:14):
If you look at the places that have actually suffered
potentially under the.

Speaker 1 (01:41:22):
Liberal era.

Speaker 9 (01:41:25):
Of the last forty to fifty years. I think the
places you could most point to authentically, that you could
make the strongest case for would be the kind of
rust belt towns, small towns in Ohio and Pennsylvania and
Michigan and so forth, where the decline of manufacturing, you know,

(01:41:46):
the decline of the auto industry or of the steel
industry or whatever may have hollowed out the local economy. Now,
this is a very left leaning explanation, but the people
in those towns have not bought into the left explanation.
They've turned into Republicans, is the thing. You know, the

(01:42:11):
materialist argument pushed by the left is actually most applicable
to the areas that now vote for Donald Trump.

Speaker 7 (01:42:21):
Yeah, that's the whole point. It's the economy idiot just
flatly dismissing any materialist analysis on the basis that such analysis,
as argued by the left is actually even more applicable
in places that are voting for Trump rather than Democrats
is completely missing the entire point of the left's analysis.

(01:42:44):
Trump ran as a populist, a right wing populist, But
that is like evidence for what the left is arguing.
That is the left's explanation why those places which used
to be Democrat working class union. Why they have gone
to Trump It's because he's offering a populist solution. Now,

(01:43:07):
is Trump's right wing popular solution actually going to be
a real solution to the base problems? No, because instead
he's gonna do economic nationalism. He's gonna do tariffs, He's
gonna scapegoat immigrants as the reason for why housing is expensive,
why the job market sucks. So he is offering a
populist solution, but not a good solution. While campaigning, he

(01:43:31):
was addressing the poor economic conditions, price of eggs, as
opposed to the liberal assertion that things are great actually
or something as tone deaf as Bidenomics is working.

Speaker 12 (01:43:44):
Here's a better start, like a better explanation for that
is just paying attention to the actual history. I'm from
the South, right, the South is so much of it
is the core for you know, a kind of reactionary cultural,
right wing cultural politics. The South is also where the
the labor movement, the unions were just decimated. I mean
it's brutal there. Union densities is in the shitter and

(01:44:09):
has been for a while. And so one way of
explaining this is like, yeah, people in these places. People
in the South often gravitate towards a kind of cultural reactionary,
confused politics precisely because there's no other option. They don't
have a kind of coherent socialist project, and so they
go towards these other things where there's more of a

(01:44:33):
labor movement, where it has held on to some degree
somewhere like New York, for instance, there is an alternative route, right,
and it took us a while to get there. You know,
this is a relatively new trend of the rise in socialism.
But I don't know whether this is like cynical or
if he just genuinely does not conceive of how well, yeah,

(01:44:53):
it may be that these these are real material stressors
and pressures that are then in interpreted through cultural lenses
for all sorts of reasons. But that the idea that
it must be one or the other, that if well,
if these if people favor a cultural explanation, then there
must not be material problems. It is also the whole
thing is just fraught. I mean, like the idea that

(01:45:15):
the only place is suffering from de industrialization or you know,
dried up economies are just republican states and cities that's
just not true in any sense. There are lots of
places where a dying economy is responded to with very
left materialist analyzes and nor also the idea that again
i mean just very hand wavy, like just citation needed,

(01:45:37):
we're moving pack things are fine outside of like a
limited de industrialized red states, you know, where things maybe
are a little bad, everything else is fine. Like is
the idea that in major coastal cities everything's fine and
just completely ignores that, like service workers in the lowest
rungs of workers in these places are being crushed right now,

(01:45:59):
many of which have to then leave the cities they're in.
And then you know, people who may be able to
maintain a comfortable income and comfortable there is you know,
a little strained, I mean.

Speaker 6 (01:46:12):
Gig work is on the rise.

Speaker 12 (01:46:14):
People are having to work all sorts of strange hours
that beck and call of their employers. Alienation from their
kinds of work and the ability to choose one's job
is really profoundly wrong. Incomes for college graduates have dropped,
so professionals, while they may be able to maintain a
somewhat comfortable income, are often still declining in that capacity.

(01:46:35):
Enfranchisement in people's worlds, both in their economic world and
in saying how they labor, how they work, but also
in the wider political world in getting a say in
how government is happening. People are feel totally disenfranchised. They
are disenfranchised from those things. So it's just a very
thin patina of things are fine that falls apart upon
any examination. Ironically, these people represent the whole project of

(01:46:59):
things are fine because we maintain full control. The other
side of the coin of things are fine is we
need not empower anyone else, just let us the technical
experts run everything.

Speaker 7 (01:47:12):
So instead of a cultural explanation or a materialist explanation
for the current crisis in liberalism, the Center for New
Liberalism seems to kind of embrace this sort of liberal affluenza,
as if people are actually suffering from affluence. For this,

(01:47:33):
Johnson turns to Francis Fukuyama.

Speaker 9 (01:47:36):
Fukuyama, in his book The End of History in the
Last Man very famously said that he believed man needs
struggle essentially. You know, in the twentieth century we got
the great struggles of World War I and the Great Depression,

(01:47:57):
World War II, and then the Cold War and liberalism
flourished under these conditions because it had an identifiable enemy
to fight. It had a struggle that you know, men
and women could throw themselves into. You know, that we
could defeat the Nazis, we could defeat the communists. And

(01:48:17):
then he predicted that if history really did end in
air quotes, that men might struggle just for the sake
of struggle. They would struggle against the very system that
created this prosperity, just for the sake of having something
to feel, of having something to feel useful for.

Speaker 7 (01:48:40):
The idea is, now that liberalism has conquered the globe,
people don't actually require anything materially different, but will still
desire for self worth, dignity, and recognition. This is a
sort of post modern crisis of a struggle for meaning,

(01:49:01):
totally divorced from a materialist desire.

Speaker 9 (01:49:05):
But Fukuyama argues that while modern liberal democracies can provide
peace and material wealth, they leave people feeling alienated by
not delivering that sense of higher purpose, and that that
is what leads people to nationalism or populism or identity politics,

(01:49:31):
because people want some sort of recognition.

Speaker 7 (01:49:35):
To Johnson, ultimately, liberalism is struggling because quote there is
no more great struggle.

Speaker 12 (01:49:44):
Yeah, there is no real struggle. That this is all
made up. It's all smoke and mirrors, like everybody's fine.
I mean, if you pursue it to its logical conclusion.
It's the most condescending politics there is. It's literally just
you don't really have problems. You are just rebelling against
us because things are so good and you don't have
meaning other other than opposing us. It literally I was
listening to that and I was like, this sounds like

(01:50:05):
bourgeois revolutions of early modernity, right, this is like how
the monarchy reacted. So many times you get like, you know,
absolute monarchs just saying like, well, the people there aren't
really problems. You're fine. It's it's fine to chill out.

Speaker 6 (01:50:18):
Like I'm your king. We're doing fine.

Speaker 12 (01:50:21):
It's all good, right, And of course that worked out
brilliantly for them. Yeah, it's the same politics. It's just well,
there's basically no struggle. Are people are mad because you
know they don't have enough meaning? I just I don't
know how that plays out to anyone.

Speaker 6 (01:50:36):
Is insane to me.

Speaker 12 (01:50:37):
The idea that you know, all of the struggle and
strife in the world today is just it's not real.
It's somehow made up pretend we're all doing it's ridiculous.

Speaker 7 (01:50:49):
Johnson's contention is that things just got so good under
neoliberal technocracy that it created a postmodern crisis of meaning,
resulting in people struggling against the very system that provides
for them to gain a new sense of purpose, basically
self sabotaging by electing bad populist candidates, which then do

(01:51:14):
make economic conditions worse. But then Johnson's solution to this
problem is just to put neoliberal technocrats back in power,
but this time be even more cynical and also more
patriotic in contrast to the United States. Johnson points to
Canada as an example of where liberalism is currently succeeding,

(01:51:39):
and he credits this to quote technocratic ability, cynical maneuvering,
and liberal nationalism, adding quote we need technocrats more than ever.
I introduced the idea last episode that one of the
main tendencies among these so called new liberals is the

(01:52:00):
belief that politics is just the application of technical knowledge,
you know, conflating having technical knowledge with the ability to
govern well and do decision making at the highest level.
A view of politics without politics.

Speaker 12 (01:52:18):
The technocratic point of view sort of works like this.
It understands that like, okay, there's technical expertise. Let's say
you're trying to you know, reform tax policy. Tax policy
is very complex. The way that taxes work, the way
that you know, government revenues work is very complex. So
if you're going to rearrange that, yeah, you are going
to need some people who understand how that work. Who

(01:52:40):
are intellectuals, you know, who have the technical knowledge required
to make your policies work. That's a crucial part of
any politics. You absolutely need that. Any political faction that
seeks to have a chance of successful governance needs a
level of technical expertise. Absolutely, But that is an entirely
set question from what does one choose to do? Your

(01:53:04):
technical expertise is a key part to successfully doing what
you set out to do. But politics at the highest levels,
right at the level of like party line of like
what party strategy is about? What are you trying to do?
The technocratic view basically thinks that that question is already

(01:53:28):
decided to them. It's obvious what you should do. What
you should do is grow the economy, maximize economic growth,
because in their view, that's good for everybody. You know,
rising tide lifts soul boats, that's good for everybody. There
is no conflict here, and so if there is no
conflict here, then that's the obvious pick. And then the
only difficulty is just getting people in to do that

(01:53:52):
job well. And so for them, politics is just about okay, well,
our team has the people who know how to do
this job well, and the other team doesn't know how
to do the job well, and they have trouble sometimes
even conceiving that. In fact, no, the debate would be
about what we're choosing to do.

Speaker 7 (01:54:12):
Johnson explains that liberal governance has to walk a dangerous tightrope.
If you lean too far to the left, you stifle
the economy and feed radicalism and extremism. Johnson points to
Europe as an example of this. But if you lean
too far to the right, economically, people will revolt if

(01:54:32):
they don't share in the prosperity.

Speaker 9 (01:54:35):
If you don't successfully walk this tightrope, then you risk
entering a kind of doom loop where you know, oh,
everything seems really bad. We're all dooming, And so people
are going to choose an illiberal candidate, and that illiberal
candidate is going to do stupid things that make things
worse in society, and that's going to make people even

(01:54:59):
more illiberal, even more tilted towards extremism, which will lead
to worse candidates who will make things even worse than before,
and so on, etc. There is real risk of entering
that kind of doom loop, and that's why it's important
to actually have smart technocratic leadership.

Speaker 7 (01:55:22):
The doom loop theory glosses over the fact that Trump
came after Oh Baba. The sentiment that this technocratic leadership
wasn't working didn't just come from the right. Bernie Sanders
also rose to prominence by arguing this from a left
wing perspective, and the capitalist class were more threatened by Sanders,

(01:55:46):
so they mobilized to take out the threat of left
wing populism, even if that meant Trump's right wing populism
would win, because they know that the left wing version
is the one that could actually empower labor against the
interests of capital. Johnson also claims that Joe Biden had

(01:56:06):
big goals, but quote his technocratic ability wasn't there, meaning
there was too much red tape prohibiting his policies from
having an impact because he quote went about policy in
a stupid way. Now Johnson knows that calling for a

(01:56:27):
technocracy isn't an election strategy. For that, he proposes more
quote unquote cynical maneuvering and that Liberals should get more
quote unquote ruthless in terms of running elections. He says
Kamala Harris should have forcefully distanced herself from Joe Biden,
or the party should have pushed her out for being

(01:56:50):
too compromised due to her association with Biden. Of course,
Johnson does not acknowledge that the party is very capable
of cynical, ruthless maneuvering when it serves their interests and
the interests of their donors. Once again, consider the twenty
sixteen and twenty twenty Democratic primaries and the concerted efforts

(01:57:12):
to take down Bernie Sanders, something that quite possibly lost
the Democrats the twenty sixteen election. But Johnson also talks
about the need for cynical maneuvering in implementing policy.

Speaker 12 (01:57:27):
The main things he talks about seemed to be flatly
at odds with each other because he says, well, you know,
we need technocratic politics, which is to say you just
need the right policies. You need the ones that are
correct to do the job.

Speaker 1 (01:57:38):
Well.

Speaker 12 (01:57:39):
Again, what the job is, what we're trying to do
is totally like not on the table. That's a given right,
and then you just need the people who can technically
do that well. But then he also says you need
some cynicism. You need to be able to just be
ruthless electorally and operate politically in order to win, which
seems to directly contradict is like, well, what should you do.

(01:58:02):
Should you pick the policies that are correct, pursue technocracy
regardless of whether or not it's popular, whether it can
win elections, right, which is his whole contention, is that
the right policies are somehow, somehow not popular among the people.
Or should you you know, be electorally ruthless and try
to appeal to the masses and win elections by perhaps

(01:58:24):
I mean he gives an example with the carbon tax,
where he says, like, I think this policy is great,
I think this is the technically correct policy, but you
have to abandon it.

Speaker 6 (01:58:33):
Again.

Speaker 12 (01:58:34):
I'm sure if you asked him he would say, well,
you have to strike a balance between the two. But
as strategy. That's useless. Right, It's like, well, how should
you ride a bike? Well, you don't want to lean
too far left, but you also don't want to re
lean too far right. You want to kind of stay
right in the balanced middle. Okay, that tells us nothing.
You should pick the right policies, but not so much.
You need to also be ruthless and be able to

(01:58:55):
win elections. Pick the right policies and win win elections.
Don't see take it immediately.

Speaker 7 (01:59:02):
Johnson argues that the final necessary step in exiting the
populist doom loop is quote unquote liberal nationalism, basically the
idea that liberals need to become loudly more patriotic and
reclaim and be proud of the progressive parts of American history.

(01:59:25):
But liberal patriotism isn't enough to win elections, and the
Harris campaign already kind of tried this.

Speaker 9 (01:59:33):
Liberals have got to be better at telling a story
of how America is great. Liberalism made America great. Liberalism
is why we're all rich and successful and awesome.

Speaker 7 (01:59:46):
This is the massive contradiction at the heart of their project.
They want to say, we're all rich, the economy is great,
living conditions are fine, but the new liberals do have
at least some way awareness of material problems because most
of the conference panels were about affordability, especially in relation

(02:00:08):
to housing and energy costs. So are there massive economic
factors driving voter behavior or not? How can you pretend
that everything is great actually and then also put on
a whole conference focusing on how housing and energy are
way too expensive? You do know that there are material problems.

(02:00:30):
What's actually happening here is that you're frustrated that people
aren't buying into your neoliberal solutions to the problems caused
by neoliberalism. But to the technocrat, it can't be the
policies that are wrong. So instead it must be that
we are not telling a strong enough story.

Speaker 9 (02:00:52):
We need to be able to figure out a pro growth, patriotic,
muscular liberal message that work because people respond to two things.
In the end, they respond to material conditions. If the
material conditions are bad enough, they will get mad at you.
But they also respond to stories, and it's hard to

(02:01:14):
identify the story that liberals tell today.

Speaker 7 (02:01:17):
At the very end of this podcast, Johnson finally admits
that people do in fact respond two material conditions, but
only if things get bad enough. But he also believes
that the economy is good, we are rich, we are successful,
so the problem has to be something else, and that

(02:01:38):
something else is stories. Liberalism just isn't telling the right stories. Again,
it's not material problems, it's storytelling problems. And Johnson says,
quote the story we should tell should be rooted in
two things, a return to history and a vision of abundance.

(02:02:00):
Johnson truly believes that this is all about stories and
not actually about politics. And this is where the technocratic
version of politics hits its own massive limitations. This is
where it runs up against it's extremely narrow view of
what politics is and what is politically possible.

Speaker 12 (02:02:23):
They're totally whipped by capital. Like that's the thing is,
like capital sets the agenda because you know, they, as
I said, they've ceded the territory of like political decisions
properly put right, They concern themselves with the technical administration
of the system, but are are totally uninterested in the

(02:02:43):
commanding heights of the system of like how is the
economy structured? But seating that territory doesn't mean it's it's neutral.
It just means that, like, yeah, capital gets to call
the shots. Then, and so capital basically says, well, here's
what's possible, and here's what's not right, based very much
on capital's interests, right, in order for us to maintain
our profitability at the levels we would like and the

(02:03:04):
ways we would like, these things are not possible. And
the technocrats they just accept that, right, like it's a
real belief for them.

Speaker 6 (02:03:12):
It's it's not cynical.

Speaker 12 (02:03:13):
You know, there is a time where with shrewder and
more aware liberals, liberals who are aware of like class struggle,
i think, and who were throwing in on the side
of capital, like originally, like the classical liberals as well
as liberals in throughout the twentieth century. Rightly, when they
had to contend with like real socialist politics, they knew,

(02:03:36):
like they were self conscious about, well, we are on
the side of capital.

Speaker 6 (02:03:40):
Right.

Speaker 12 (02:03:40):
That's the biggest difference between sort of the past ages
of liberalism and this, you know, upstart, young liberals they're
so in the pocket of capital, they're so at capitals
bidding that they don't even really know it's there anymore.
And so they just perceived this as like, again, what
capital wants is basically just the natural state of the

(02:04:01):
world what is possible period with you know, like just
such an impossibly narrow historical focus on like what is possible?
And I just don't know how anyone like looks at
the past, you know, one hundred years of history and
feels they can conclude very solidly what is and is
not possible. But they just feel that what capital says

(02:04:21):
is basically the natural constraints of what's possible in society.
And so given that which they take as a given,
the only question is competent administration. It's a fall from
previous liberals, you know, who argued for like, no, we
want to empower capital over labor to a certain extent, right,
or we want to achieve a balance between these things,
usually with capital leading in some way.

Speaker 7 (02:04:45):
It's time for one more ad break before we learn how.
Jeremiah Johnson believes that a quote unquote brightness loop might
be the key dissolving the crisis of liberalism Welcome back.

(02:05:10):
Johnson proposes the way out of this populist doom loop
is what he calls a brightness loop, or basically like
a positive feedback loop, which will be achieved through technocracy,
ruthless politics, and liberal patriotism. Embracing America and our history

(02:05:30):
and loudly proclaiming.

Speaker 9 (02:05:32):
We are rich, and we are successful, and we are awesome.
America rocks.

Speaker 7 (02:05:38):
I wonder how that's gonna go over with voters who
are struggling to pay bills and household expenses every month.
Might they turn to another candidate who actually addresses the
fact that maybe things aren't so great for everyone. The
limitations of the technocratic mindset is a big part of

(02:05:59):
why centre left candidates are losing to left populists in
very high profile races. I really don't know how CNL
expects to grow their organization and build momentum among young
people to advance their own candidates, to claw back the
Democratic Party away from the socialists, away from the populists,

(02:06:19):
from the progressives. When their political project is calling for technocracy, cynicism,
and liberal nationalism, how do you think that will attract
and then mobilize an actual, energized, motivated base. Because the
only people I can see that appealing to are those

(02:06:40):
who aspire themselves to be technocrats and to reform. That
is who attended the New Liberal Action summit last month
in Washington, DC. It was a group of people who
identify with and submit themselves to the mainstream neoliberal order,
and who understand themselves through identifying with the base structure

(02:07:04):
of capitalist American society. That's where they get their self
identification and in many cases their jobs and their income.
This is people who want to work in politics, who
want to work as a consultant, a campaign manager, a lobbyist,
or a congressional staffer. In contrast, a lot of the
people in DSA don't have an actual interest in politics

(02:07:29):
as an industry. In fact, they might have a frankly
aversion to electoral politics, and they're kind of involved in
DSA somewhat begrudgingly in a sense. Most DC members that
I interact with would not want to work in politics
as their job, But they are doing this because they

(02:07:50):
believe in it, and because there's material forces that are
driving them towards wanting this sort of change, versus the
CNL approach of trying to base all your on the
ground mobilization on like other aspiring technocrats and professionals whose
lives are built very materially around these politics, around doing politics,

(02:08:14):
and so their efforts to promote neoliberalism could be interpreted
as a form of class reproduction and attempts to maintain
their particular position within a class dynamic. Now, of course,
the socialists do have their own flock of aspiring professionals
and intellectuals who are seeking roles within civil institutions and

(02:08:36):
political positions of authority. The difference lies in what political
project you are a part of, what kind of class
politics you're tied to, what class you're trying to empower,
are you intending to maintain or alter class relations? And ultimately,
what does political success look like just growing the GDP

(02:08:59):
as much as possible, increasing the total amount of wealth,
or is it economic equality and democratic control of society
and production. In their attempts to claim liberal history right,
the new liberals will associate themselves with you know, FDR,
the New Deal. Maybe if they're shrewder the Great Society.

(02:09:22):
One of the most frustrating parts of the conference for
me was hearing these lobbyists talk about, you know, the
great legacy of FDR, while in another breath strongly arguing
against wealth taxes, against taxing the rich. At the end
of the Crisis in Liberalism podcast, Johnson says, quote, the

(02:09:45):
populace left says that you don't actually need to have
any form of economic growth as long as you can
categorize people into good and evil groups and tax the
evil ones and give all their money to the good
ones unquote. And I just don't think that is how
they would describe New Deal or Great Society era tax rates.

(02:10:07):
They would never describe those tax rates and the reasons
for why they were instituted as like, we decided there
are good and evil groups, and therefore we must punish
the evil ones and give all their money to the
good ones. The new Liberals have to play it both
ways because they still want to associate themselves with the

(02:10:29):
sort of heights of liberal democracy in the United States,
which they point to these eras as, but they're both
fundamentally opposed to what these eras actually are, the economic
policies and tax base that made those policies possible, and
also vehemently opposed to the organized labor apparatus that fought

(02:10:50):
for those policies. So they want to claim the legacy
of those things for liberalism, but shorn of all content,
they have to complet completely ignore both the substance of
those politics and the forces that drove those politics, which
was chiefly the labor movement, and socialists were a huge

(02:11:10):
part of that. But neoliberals don't want to acknowledge or
promote labor because organized labor runs contrary to the interest
of capital, and because they know they can't compete with
DSA if you're going to play that game. In somewhat
breaking from Ezra Cline, cnl's strain of neoliberal abundance explicitly

(02:11:34):
blames unions for why it's so hard to build housing
and infrastructure. They think labor unions are bad for the
economy and thus are evil, and that the general public
are stupid children throwing a temper tantrum sabotaging the greatest
country ever by electing populists because liberalism made the world

(02:11:58):
too good. There's no more struggle, and liberals just have
to tell the people a better story so that neoliberal
technocrats can stay in power, that those with technical knowledge
can rule.

Speaker 12 (02:12:11):
It's a profoundly undemocratic politics. You pursue it to its
logical ends, and it is literally well, the people do
not really know what their interests are, and in fact,
we'll go against them just for the sake of having meaning.
I guess, so it's up to us those who do

(02:12:31):
know what the right politics are to be in charge
and to basically call all the shots. And who has
the authority to say that we have the right politics?
Well us, of course, right. It's why you know, these
people exist at the whim of capital. Without capital, they
are nothing, right. They have this idea that they produce
their own authority by having the correct policies. They know

(02:12:55):
the world, and that's where their power comes from. They
exist at capital's whim, right, and if capital decides to
move into a different direction, they have no authority.

Speaker 18 (02:13:03):
They have nothing.

Speaker 12 (02:13:04):
It's capital or labor. You either get your source of
authority and political power from the economic powers that be
the property owners who control production and have an enormous
amount of power in that sense, or you get it
from the masses, from the people, the laborers, who actually
power society and power all production. Those are the two forces.

(02:13:25):
This idea that correct knowledge in itself supplies authority is
not only obviously undemocratic, but it's i mean, just profoundly confused.
It's completely oblivious to political reality. It doesn't believe in politics,
it doesn't think there is a realm of politics.

Speaker 7 (02:13:42):
With that though, you are forgetting that we're rich that
were successful, that were awesome.

Speaker 12 (02:13:46):
Yeah, we are rich, we are successful, we are awesome.
America rocks, America rocks.

Speaker 6 (02:13:53):
God what a Yeah.

Speaker 12 (02:13:55):
He pairs that one with talking about like you can't
be a depressing nerd and talk about what America is
done wrong. I love the idea of like trying to
set yourself up against like nerds, being like, don't be
a nerd, and then being like, America rocks, We're rich,
we're successful. Where all that is like the nerd line.
It's like, this is a.

Speaker 1 (02:14:12):
Whole nerd conference.

Speaker 7 (02:14:13):
This is like the yes policy wonky will Stancil matically
sious like nerds central.

Speaker 12 (02:14:20):
Well, maybe you're on the football team, but I have
an a in math, Like it's literally that it's that, well,
we're rich, where successful? And where awesome? We We've won
World War Two, we.

Speaker 1 (02:14:32):
Beat the communists, we beat the communists.

Speaker 12 (02:14:34):
Where it's just very Yeah, it's it's hollow too. I mean,
I'm a red blooded American. You know, there's a lot
to like about the American society, but this, like America
rocks America is awesome. Like, I don't know, maybe there's
a reason people aren't really feeling that one, right, now,
you know, just shouting it into into the faces of

(02:14:55):
the misery of the masses is not the best move.

Speaker 7 (02:14:58):
You don't think that's gonna go over well with voters
who are maybe not rich and who are struggling.

Speaker 12 (02:15:02):
Yeah, I don't know, man, look around, it's been a
pretty bad time. Like, yeah, no, I don't I think
this kind of God, we're awesome.

Speaker 7 (02:15:10):
As much as the New Liberals are upset and confused
why the political momentum is with DSA and not them,
the Center for New Liberalism will never be able to
build an organization of young Libs capable of rivaling DSA
because technocratic liberalism categorically rejects mass politics. So while CNL

(02:15:34):
and the New Liberals make a big show online, ultimately
they are just a front group for PPI, the Progressive
Policy Institute, the centrist think tank that convinced the Democratic
Party to abandon the working class of the nineties, abandon
redistributive new deoliberalism, and embrace de regulatory, free market neoliberal

(02:15:54):
economics under Bill Clinton. So while the blue Globe emoji
people will continue to post prolifically online, I suspect that
is where their political impact will largely remain. Here's a
final note from sociology professor Ben rose Porter.

Speaker 12 (02:16:14):
I mean, look, economies are hard to figure out, but
I think it's just worth saying, like, what are you
growing the economy for?

Speaker 10 (02:16:20):
Right?

Speaker 12 (02:16:20):
The whole point is to provide people with better lives,
you know, raise their wages, give them more power and
control over their lives and their society.

Speaker 6 (02:16:29):
And they just seem to have it very reversed.

Speaker 12 (02:16:31):
Where the point is to grow the economy at whatever cost.

Speaker 2 (02:16:47):
Welcome back, it could happen here, a podcast about it
happening here. And in this case, the here we're talking
about is Texas, and the it we're talking about is
one of America's most corrupt and evil politicians, kN Paxton.
And I'm using corrupt and evil in like an objective
scientific since I need you to understand this is not

(02:17:09):
a matter of opinion. The Vatic can convene the series
of scientists who who did confirm that Ken Paxton has
the evil equivalent of midichlorians in a concentration never before
seen in an American politician. And to talk to me
about Ken Paxton and say things that are real and
accurate and not nonsense. Is a guy who actually reports

(02:17:30):
on Ken Paxton directly as part of his professional job
as a real journalist. Robert Downan, Robert, welcome to the show.

Speaker 17 (02:17:37):
Thank you for having man, Thank you for that incredible introduction.

Speaker 1 (02:17:43):
Gotta have a little fun with Ken oh k Pax.

Speaker 2 (02:17:46):
Yeah, yeah, first off, you want to introduce yourself, put
up your plugs up front here.

Speaker 3 (02:17:50):
Sure.

Speaker 17 (02:17:51):
My name is Robert down In.

Speaker 10 (02:17:52):
I'm a writer at Texas Monthly. I've been in Texas
for almost a decade now, where I've kind of covered
I guess you could say religion, the convergence of far
right politics and religion extremism, et cetera, which is to say,
you know, now, I basically just cover the current Texas
GOP because they are kind of the incubator for a
lot of policy that goes national.

Speaker 2 (02:18:13):
So yeah, it is like the breeding warren in the
center of the fever swamps in a lot of ways.

Speaker 5 (02:18:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:18:20):
You and I met a couple of years ago now
at the r n C during twenty twenty four, which
was a lot of fun. And I'm kind of curious
because I don't know that I actually asked you then,
when did you start kind of covering kin Pas and
do you remember like when you first like really became
aware of him in a meaningful way.

Speaker 17 (02:18:37):
Yeah. I don't know if you remember this.

Speaker 10 (02:18:38):
I think we were actually in the middle of talking
about it, and we were at some stake joint and
I looked to my right and recognized a very large
Rambo asked bodyguard sitting next to us, who happens to
be Canpax's bodyguard, and realized that right next to us.

Speaker 17 (02:18:53):
So I don't think you ever finished the conversation.

Speaker 1 (02:18:55):
You're right, we did. Fucking the RNC guys. It's a wild.

Speaker 17 (02:19:00):
Time, yes, And then I met Roger Stone was great, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:19:02):
Yeah, fucking Ted Kruz walked in. What a day.

Speaker 10 (02:19:07):
I started covering Ken Paxton probably officially in twenty twenty two,
twenty twenty three. Before that I had kind of covered,
you know, Southern Baptist stuff. I was really focused more
on the religion side of stuff, so like he's always
been in my peripherals, but never you know, been a
sole focus.

Speaker 17 (02:19:23):
And then about you know, five.

Speaker 10 (02:19:25):
Years ago Ish, who I guess four years ago Ish,
I started really focusing on this far right movement in Texas,
the billionaires behind it, who you know.

Speaker 17 (02:19:34):
For that movement.

Speaker 10 (02:19:34):
Ken Packson is kind of the tip of the spear.
So he's been not a primary focus of mine, but
you know, someone who I'm paying very frequent attention to
for quite a while.

Speaker 2 (02:19:43):
So yeah, so Ken is he's not a Texan by
birth obviously, which which doesn't matter to anybody but some Texans,
but he was. He was born in North Dakota if
I'm remembering correctly, and he first kind of comes on
the scene politically in like two thousand three when he's
he's a state representative, right right, Yeah, with is kind

(02:20:06):
of the first really notable moment in the Kim Paxton
saga in your opinion, Like when you go back to
like where, where, where does this guy start to differentiate
himself from everyone else?

Speaker 10 (02:20:16):
I think you really to kind of understand Ken Paxton's
rise and especially the political climate of Texas right now,
you have to go to this twenty nine to twenty
ten period where Texas really was on the forefront of
what would become the Tea Party movement. We started to see,
you know, this huge influx of billionaire oil money, in
particular these two dudes named Farris Wilks and Tim Dunn,

(02:20:38):
who I'm sure, we'll get to in this conversation. Yeah,
you know, they kind of coalesce around this strategy in
the Texas House in particular, where they're going to basically
just accuse anyone who's not sufficiently far right enough for
them as being a rhino and pump all of this
money into a media and political eCos or you know
network that kind of just becomes almost like this this

(02:20:59):
way that they are holding people speak to the fire
to the point where you know they are, you know,
funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars to
primary opponents for incumbent lawmakers. A lot of these you know,
these candidates are you know, dead on arrival, they have no.

Speaker 17 (02:21:14):
Actual chance of winning a primary. But the whole point
is just kind.

Speaker 10 (02:21:16):
Of like bruise up these lawmakers, deplete their campaign coffers
and kind of make them second guests anytime that they're
thinking about defying this political network.

Speaker 17 (02:21:26):
In the next session.

Speaker 10 (02:21:27):
So Paxson really emerges out of that, I guess kind
of movement. You know, you start to see around twenty
twelve twenty thirteen, these groups that are funded by Tim
Dunnanfarris Wilks really start to hold him up as this
tax payer champion. And then in twenty fourteen, he launches
what was kind of thought to be a long shot
bid for attorney General that he ends up winning against

(02:21:51):
a little bit more moderate Republican candidates with key help
from these billionaires, and that kind of you know, is
off the racist from there.

Speaker 2 (02:21:58):
Yeah, So this is a really as you bring up,
a really interesting thing that starts happening to Texas politically.
It starts like right as the Bush ears are coming
to an end, because obviously George W. Bush was not
just the governor of Texas, but he was kind of
the governor of Texas who his victory sort of heralded
the defeat of the Democratic Party in Texas in a

(02:22:19):
way that it, I mean, it still hasn't recovered from
at least, you know. That's kind of the way I
often see it. And you have you have Bush come
in and then obviously become the president, but because of
the unpopularity of the neo cons Texas also winds up
becoming kind of this incubator of the backlash, the conservative

(02:22:40):
backlash to Bush too, and and Paxton embodies that to
some extent because he literally defeats a Bush as part
of his his rise to power right like much later on,
But that is interesting to me.

Speaker 10 (02:22:50):
Yeah, I mean, I think the way to really understand
that texaschuoki is for the longest time it was this
coalition of you know, big big business interests, specifically oil.
But then you know, you had the evangelical cohort and
they kind of existed in harmony.

Speaker 17 (02:23:05):
With each other for a while.

Speaker 10 (02:23:07):
You know, there were obviously rough patches for the party,
but you know, overcoming you know, the the democratic establishments
that had ruled the state for so long, I think
kind of, you know, it's much easier to stick together
when when everyone's winning. But then out of this, oh
but out of the Obama years, in the post Obama years,
you have this Tea Party movement that is you know,
really led by Ken Pax and these billionaires to many degrees,

(02:23:29):
they turned their sights on those in the party.

Speaker 17 (02:23:32):
So again you have.

Speaker 10 (02:23:34):
Just this really really ugly early days of what turns
into a full on civil war within the party, where
you know, people who in most other states would be
considered you know, the most far right member of the
legislature are being branded like rhinos and traders and this
is you know, this is in the pre Trump era
before that was kind of the I guess, you know,
animating philosophy.

Speaker 17 (02:23:53):
Of you know, kind of you know, borrowing from this
no enemies to the right framework.

Speaker 10 (02:23:56):
That was something that was really I think defining and
all of what's happening in Texas first and not nationally.

Speaker 2 (02:24:02):
And do you have a sense personally of when can
sort of ultra right beliefs begin. Is this something that's
always a thing for him or is this something that
he adopts opportunistically.

Speaker 1 (02:24:16):
Is it becomes clear that that's the future of the party.

Speaker 10 (02:24:18):
Yeah, I mean it's a really tough question and something
I think a lot of us have spent a lot
of time trying to figure out. He almost is so
emblematic of the direction of the text Europe in general
that it's almost impossible to differentiate whether you know, he
always harbored these beliefs and then translated that into political
momentum towards them, or if the political momentum broke in

(02:24:39):
towards you know, it's a chicken and egg situation home.
But I will say that, you know, starting as soon
as he becomes Attorney general, he really starts to use
that position to aid the political objectives both on social
policy but also on campaign finance reform. You know, all
these other issues really start to push the state and
the state party towards the I guess policy positions of

(02:25:01):
this far right billionaire.

Speaker 17 (02:25:02):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:25:03):
Yeah, now when it comes to Ken himself, his first
big scandal is kind of like a bribery allegation, right
is I'm recalling?

Speaker 10 (02:25:14):
Yes, So in twenty eleven, when he is still a
state Rep. He meets at a dairy queen with the
CEO of a software company Fary Texas. As we continue
this conversation, you're going to notice there's a lot of
fast food. Yeah, this man loves a fast food joint.

Speaker 2 (02:25:28):
You know what North Texas born in well, not born
but raised, so I do get that.

Speaker 3 (02:25:33):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:25:34):
Anyways, so he meets this guy to dairy queen and
again this is all allegedly. This court case was settled
I think in twenty twenty four, but basically the allegation
from the SEC which later indicted him was that he
was offered one hundred thousand shares in this new company.
Ken Paxon claims that he tried to pay the CEO

(02:25:56):
for the shares, and the CEO is like, no, God
told me to give this to you.

Speaker 17 (02:26:00):
You can't give me any money.

Speaker 10 (02:26:01):
And then so Paxton allegedly goes on and sells something like,
you know, almost a million dollars worth of shares in
this company to people without allegedly telling him that he
was also an investor. So he gets indicted in twenty
fifteen on selling a security fraud, and that charge is
kind of hanging over his head for the next almost

(02:26:24):
ten years, and as we'll get into, is kind of
like just looming off in the distance for all of
its political rise, but also plays an important part of
his impeachment. But there's one other scandal that you know,
wasn't criminal that kind of predates the impeachment, which is
that in twenty fourteen, as he's running for attorney general,
he is at a courthouse in the Dallas area and

(02:26:45):
there's a video of this A guy in front of
him in the security line leaves one thousand dollars month
ten in the in the.

Speaker 3 (02:26:52):
Yeah, yeah, it is my one of my favorite KPEX.

Speaker 10 (02:26:55):
Yes, yeah, there's this little video of Ken Paxton just
kind of plucking it out there and putting into his
pocket and yeah, so saw something.

Speaker 2 (02:27:01):
He liked it, he took it pretty funny.

Speaker 1 (02:27:05):
Yeah, oh god, that is beautiful. And we have a
lot more beautiful Kin Paxtan stories to come. But first
some ads and we're back.

Speaker 2 (02:27:25):
I guess one of the things that occurs to me,
just kind of as i've every time I've looked over
Kin's background, is how much of his election history is
ran unopposed in the primary, ran against a Democrat who
had no chance of victory, right Like, once he gets
in this isn't totally the case, but once he gets
into office, a lot of his elections are almost like
a rubber stamp pro forma soda deal kind of.

Speaker 3 (02:27:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 10 (02:27:47):
I mean, I think that I'd have to go back
and look at the actual margins, but I think that
he is actually historically kind of lagged behind, you know,
as far as the margins he's winning by have always
kind of lagged behind what other top.

Speaker 17 (02:27:59):
Republicans are winning. Bye.

Speaker 10 (02:28:00):
Yeah, in twenty eighteen you start to see some cracks. Yeah,
and then in twenty twenty is when you start seeing
you know, the.

Speaker 17 (02:28:07):
Courre quote establishment Texas GOP starting.

Speaker 10 (02:28:09):
To fund his opponents and ultimately that doesn't work and
lays the groundwork for I guess the kind of conspiracy
theories around his impeachment, which I'm sure we'll get there.

Speaker 2 (02:28:19):
It is interesting that Kim has never been a great campaigner.
He's benefited from the Republican Party's dominance in Texas and
like the abount of funding and whatnot that he's able
to raise his result of that, But as you said,
he's like lagged behind other Republicans in terms of like
his electoral performance, and he has had some real close

(02:28:41):
squeakers in the past too, which is one of the
reasons why, like this current election is so interesting. But
what do you think the Republican Party, the state party
starts to turn against him. What is it that does that?
Is it just sort of the weight of scandals that
this guy accumulates, because we've only talked about a couple
of them, or is it something else?

Speaker 10 (02:28:59):
I think that again, he becomes very emblematic of this
far right flank of the Texas GOP that is funded
by Tim Dunferis Wilkes, Like, there's this moment in twenty seventeen,
twenty eighteen ish where the Texas House and the Texas
legislature has just gotten out of this brutally you know,
controversial session where they were you know, doing early versions

(02:29:19):
of the bathroom build There was really just acrimonious within
the party. And there are these quotes of these I guess,
you know, we would call them more moderate Republicans, but
again still very right wing in any other state.

Speaker 17 (02:29:30):
Yeah, but they come out.

Speaker 10 (02:29:31):
You know, there's a famous quote from then, you know,
the man who became the House speaker basically says, you know,
we're done bashing the gays, basically trying to move the
party away from these you know, I guess, for lack
of a better term, culture war issues, that really the
far right flank is trying to coalesce around. Yeah, and
I think that Ken Paxton is is very much seen as.

Speaker 17 (02:29:51):
A as a kind of you know, emblem of.

Speaker 10 (02:29:54):
That flank that for a while looked like it was,
you know, on the verge of being on the outs
of Texas politics.

Speaker 17 (02:30:02):
I mean, if you go back to that summer before
his impeachment.

Speaker 10 (02:30:05):
There are so many different things that happened in the
lead up to that where you're like, oh, this Tim
Dunferris Wilk's network looks like, you know, this is a
death rattle moment for it, and instead of dying, it
becomes more powerful than ever and starts exporting all of
its stuff nationally.

Speaker 3 (02:30:18):
Why why do you think that is?

Speaker 10 (02:30:21):
Like?

Speaker 1 (02:30:21):
What?

Speaker 3 (02:30:21):
How the fuck does this guy?

Speaker 2 (02:30:23):
Sorry, how is this guy though, the one who manages
to like reincarnate himself at this moment that should have
been his end?

Speaker 3 (02:30:31):
A I think I know that.

Speaker 2 (02:30:33):
Yeah, there's not an answer to that, but I guess
I'm yeah, your feeling's on it.

Speaker 10 (02:30:37):
Yeah, So before we got on, I just was like,
I need to almost refresh myself on everything that happened
with his impeachment. And at the time, I was covering
it like turn of this crew, like wall to wall
coverage every single second of the impeachment hearing. And I
don't think unless you were paying that much, you know,
intimate attention to everything that was going on, people are

(02:30:58):
fully capable of under standing just like how wide ranging
and frankly insane the entire episode was.

Speaker 17 (02:31:06):
And I think because of that, it was really easy.

Speaker 10 (02:31:09):
For Ken Paxon's defenders, both in the in teachment hearing
and you know, just.

Speaker 17 (02:31:13):
Outside in the political realm.

Speaker 10 (02:31:15):
It was much easier for them to take this complicated
scandal and turn it into just a oh, this is
a witch hunt. They're going after Ken Paxon because they
can't get to you. It's worth also backtracking here. Yeah,
there are a significant number of people, because of this
Tim Dunn and Ferris Wilkes operation, that believe fundamentally that

(02:31:35):
the Texas legislature and state has been under the control
secretly of Democrats for more than like twenty years. I mean,
this is this is how successful this is. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
it sounds insane, but it's the truth. And so you know,
when Ken Paxton gets impeached, he becomes again this stand
in for everything that these people, you know, fear about,

(02:31:57):
this supposed democratic rhino cabal. And I think that that,
coupled with just like the complexity and often absurdity of
the impeachment charges more broadly, really insulates him in a
way that turns him into a folk hero once he
survives the impeachment.

Speaker 2 (02:32:12):
Great, I mean, yeah, that's that's as much sense as
I think can be made of the Kiin Paxton story. Sure, yeah,
that makes sense.

Speaker 10 (02:32:20):
Yeah, I mean it's this whole thing, you know, And
I've noticed this even just in my time covering tech
of politics is there used to be a moment where
if we wrote a negative story about someone there were
maybe not consequences, but like people cared.

Speaker 17 (02:32:33):
And now it's not only that people don't care, it's
to be attacked by the quote unquote.

Speaker 10 (02:32:38):
You know, liberal media is in and of itself a
badge of honor that like, yeah.

Speaker 17 (02:32:43):
Yeah, and I think that he really exemplifies that.

Speaker 1 (02:32:45):
They're waiting for it.

Speaker 3 (02:32:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:32:47):
So, how would you describe kin Paxton as an attorney general?
Which is kind of because obviously he's a state legislator
too before that, but like he's most known and has
been most influential as the ag.

Speaker 1 (02:33:01):
How would you describe his work?

Speaker 10 (02:33:03):
I think that he has done a remarkable job of
advancing a once non explicit but now explicit Christian nationalist
movements that is very far right in its views on immigration,
LGBTQ rights, abortion, and basically every other social issue. I mean,

(02:33:24):
he has used his office, as you know, at times
a pretty blunt instrument in this.

Speaker 17 (02:33:29):
I guess the lack of a better term, culture war.

Speaker 10 (02:33:32):
Has used it to investigate political groups on the left,
has used it to advance twenty twenty election fraud, conspiracy theories.
I mean named something within the hodge you know, the
Hodgepodge of right wing kind of culture war issues.

Speaker 17 (02:33:46):
And I guarantee you he has used his officer being.

Speaker 2 (02:33:49):
Yeah, there's some questionable decisions that attorneys under him have
made about some specific relevant cases, including a pedophile that's
one of the biggest most recent scandals against Ken. I
talk about this on the ed that we did a
week or so ago, And one of the things that
you have to like encounter looking at him is that
throughout all of these horrible things that he and people

(02:34:12):
have done kind of as part of his office, none
of it has knocked him out. Like and you get
interesting quotes from different people who have run against him
that are all variants of like, well, I had all
of these opposition files, but also we had to make
a decision of like how much to talk about it
because there's so much out here, and like, what more
do you say about Ken? If you're trying to run
against him?

Speaker 1 (02:34:31):
It could matter?

Speaker 10 (02:34:32):
Now, Yeah, I mean I think that he has a
similar you know ethos as Trump, where it's like, yeah,
people have heard so much about him for so long
that they just kind of you know, at least amongst
amongst a lot of the Republicans, they've been able to
just tune it out entirely. I mean, going back to
his impeachment, which you know, that is an episode onto
itself everything that happened.

Speaker 17 (02:34:52):
But the people who were who brought.

Speaker 10 (02:34:54):
About Ken Paxson's impeachment were top deputies in the Oag's office.
One of them would is almost confirmed for a federal
judge ship in like twenty nineteen, but was deemed too
anti trans at the time to survive a Senate confirmation.

Speaker 1 (02:35:07):
Here, my god.

Speaker 10 (02:35:08):
Another one of these guys went on to be a
vice president and Alliance Defending Freedom, the group that you know,
I been kind of the tip of the legal spear
in the Christian nationalist movement.

Speaker 3 (02:35:15):
Yeah so not the Wokes.

Speaker 10 (02:35:17):
No, Arguably, some of the most right wing people now
argue some of the most right wing people in the
world at this point.

Speaker 1 (02:35:23):
Yeah, they would argue some of the most right wing.

Speaker 10 (02:35:25):
People in yes, right, And I mean we're talking, you know,
like the platonic ideal of a Texas Ranger, like people
who by all extent and purposes should be people who
are taking very seriously by the Republican voters in Texas,
and yet yeah, he again because of you know, just
there's something about Ken.

Speaker 17 (02:35:45):
I don't know, man, that's.

Speaker 1 (02:35:46):
So fucking weird. There's something about Ken.

Speaker 2 (02:35:50):
And there's also something about the sponsors of this show,
who we're going to go back to for a minute
and then we'll return. All right, we're back. So Kim

(02:36:10):
Paxton is currently running for Senate. He just defeated John
Cornyn for the primary and he's running against Democrat James Tellerico.
And I brought this up on Edie last week. But
it's close, and at least according to one pole, currently
Tellerico is ahead one pole isn't head by a good bit.
Most of what I've seen has them like pretty much

(02:36:30):
neck and neck. There's a few big differences with this
election so far and all of Kin's previous elections. One
is that he does not have a gigantic advantage in funding,
and in fact, tell Rico currently has a lot more
money on hand. And the other is that, at least
per some of the most recent polling, tell Rico is
actually beating him with non college educated voters. That's the

(02:36:52):
heartland for Kim Paxton. So yeah, it's very unclear what's
going to happen again. I would say it's smarter to
say this is a neck and neck then tall Rico
is ahead. But yeah, how did we get here?

Speaker 10 (02:37:04):
I mean, I think a couple of important things. One,
James tell Rico has I think that he has done
it good. And maybe this is just the religion reporter
in me. I think he has done a good job
of finding palable messaging around Christianity in ways that like
can appeal to the you know, republican leading white Christian
voter of Texas. That coupled with his kind of you know,

(02:37:27):
campaigning frequently on you know, it's not left versus right,
it's top versus bottom. That kind of stuff I think
is playing really well here. The other thing about Paxton, though,
is that you know, we've I've mentioned Tim Dunn and
Ferris Wilkes in this conversition a bunch of times because
they really are crucial to this story. They both have
basically entirely pulled out from supporting it in the Senate.

Speaker 3 (02:37:46):
Yeah, that is really interesting.

Speaker 10 (02:37:48):
Ferris Wilkes as a result of some very long story.
But in twenty twenty three, there was reporting I did
about their network having, you know, meeting with Nick Fuentes
and having a bunch of ties to other pretty avowed
white nationalists. There was a big fallout in that network,
and that from what I understand, drou Ferris Wilkes out
of politics entirely, and at the same time, Tim Dunn

(02:38:10):
was adamantly opposed to Ken Paxton running for Senates from
everything that we've heard, and so it wasn't until literally,
I think on Monday, Tim Dunn's one of the super
PACs spent one hundred thousand dollars to send out text
messages against Tallariico, that we saw any kind of movement
from Tim Dunn or Ferris Wilkes in support of Paxton.
And I think that that does actually kind of speak
to their level of concern that you know, they have

(02:38:32):
sat out all of this for almost two years now
and suddenly with three months ago, are getting engaged.

Speaker 2 (02:38:38):
So yeah, it's it's it's really been kind of stirring
to see I'm not resigned as I usually am in
a Kin pax An election to like, well, clearly at
some point he's just going to like leap frog ahead
of this fucker and wind up back in office, is he?
And maybe that'll happen, but it doesn't feel like it.
It doesn't feel like that's the only thing that could happen,

(02:38:58):
I should say.

Speaker 10 (02:38:59):
Right, And you know, to be fair, there's this kind
of myth that Texas is secretly blue, if it's just
a voter turnout, probably that's not true.

Speaker 1 (02:39:07):
It's not.

Speaker 10 (02:39:08):
No, Texas is solidly read in order to win statewide here,
Like there's a reason why Beto when he ran here,
he went to every single one of our two hundred
and fifty four counties. Yeah, it's because you have to
really turn out world voters.

Speaker 3 (02:39:21):
And try to make personal connections with him.

Speaker 17 (02:39:23):
Yeah, exactly. Because of that, it's easy for Republicans in.

Speaker 10 (02:39:28):
The state to wave away any kind of for momentum
from a Democratic.

Speaker 17 (02:39:32):
State white candidate.

Speaker 10 (02:39:33):
But if you look at the polling in this race
between Tallarrican Paxson, like Tall Rico has been pulling way
ahead of where Beto was, where any you know, comparable
Democratic state white candidate has been over the last you know,
thirty years. And I think that that kind of you know,
disbelief amongst Republicans that this state could ever elect to

(02:39:54):
Tall Rico or flip blue. I think is potentially left
them kind of asleep at the wheel and made a
lot of them much more willing to support someone like
Paxton despite his many flaws, as canit.

Speaker 2 (02:40:08):
So I guess as we close out here, is there
anything else you wanted to say about Ken anything we
didn't get to that you think is really important to
talk about?

Speaker 10 (02:40:17):
I mean, do we have forty five more minutes we
can talk about his impeachment?

Speaker 1 (02:40:20):
But yeah, I mean get a little.

Speaker 10 (02:40:23):
Bit, you know, I'm just going to read my notes,
just just a few fun things. Sure, fast food joints
in all capital. Yes, Walter Junior from breaking bad with
somehow involved.

Speaker 17 (02:40:35):
There's a lot there, not directly involved, but his family.
It was insane and yeah awesome.

Speaker 2 (02:40:45):
Yeah, oh man, is there is there any reading you'd
recommend to the listeners on the contacts and impeachment?

Speaker 10 (02:40:50):
Honestly, there's four thousand pages of court documents.

Speaker 17 (02:40:53):
I think that's it. I mean someone's got to do
a story about it.

Speaker 3 (02:40:55):
I mean, okay, okay, well maybe we'll maybe we'll hire
you to do that.

Speaker 17 (02:40:58):
If we can't, yeah, we'll get Won't Junior on it?

Speaker 2 (02:41:03):
So, yeah, you know, I did want to say because
it's very wrong when people think that Texas is like
a secret blue state. But it's also not read in
the way most of the red and it isn't necessarily
read in the way that that people think of it,
because like I think back to my family who are like,
we're like solidly read and would never vote for a Democrat.
But like my mom didn't own guns and didn't really

(02:41:24):
think they should be legal, and was very much like
pro abortion. She was culturally a Republican, And that's like
an important thing like that. It's not just a belief system,
it's that that is your culture and your team. And
so much of the difficulty is there are a lot
of people in Texas who'se values personally certainly do not
align with a man like Ken Paxton, but breaking rank

(02:41:45):
is not a doable thing for a lot of them.

Speaker 1 (02:41:48):
I don't know how else to.

Speaker 2 (02:41:49):
Describe it, Like it's it would be like getting someone
who was born and raised rooting for the Packers to
like support the Dallas Cowboys in a game against the
Packers or something like. It's that fucking kind of mindset
in a lot of ways.

Speaker 10 (02:42:02):
Yeah, I mean I think that the other thing about
it is kind of the ethos of Texas politics for
the longest time has been this real antipathy towards you know, DC,
Like one of the things that it's it's always been
kind of you know, we're not DC, and like kind
of the circus of it all. It plays here differently.
There's circus here, but it's a different circus.

Speaker 17 (02:42:22):
I guess. So what you have is like a lot
of these people. Again, the other thing about Texas is.

Speaker 10 (02:42:25):
It's just so dam big, Like there are parts of
Texas that are closer like there's a part of Textar,
Canada that's closer to Chicago than it is. They'll passo
and I think that like people, yeah, really don't understand
what that does to the politics here, as far as
just like making people view politics as this really far
off thing off in the distance that like it's like
a libertarian almost like you know, don't don't mess with

(02:42:46):
me and I won't engage with you kind of ordeal.
And as I think that the state has become more dcified,
for lack of a better term, I think that that's
starting to really test some of these you know, some
of that kind of mentality you were speaking to and
then you add on you know, well, the fact that
the schools here are just really in bad shape, or
doing school voucher legislation, all of these things that like
are actually rural issues are being kind of flipped on

(02:43:09):
their head.

Speaker 17 (02:43:10):
And I think that that has the.

Speaker 10 (02:43:11):
Potential maybe not to flip those voters, but if enough
of them stay home and you.

Speaker 17 (02:43:15):
See enough energy in the cities, like that isn't enough.

Speaker 2 (02:43:18):
Yeah, so yeah, that is enough. And like as individuals,
some of those people can flip on a candidate. You know,
they might not flip party wise, they're certainly a lot
less likely to vote for like a Democrat for president.
That may be completely out of the question, but you
might be able to get them to vote for a
senator or something like that. Like that's not impossible for everybody.
And it certainly looks like I think he's got about

(02:43:40):
four or five percent of Republican voters voting for him
right now.

Speaker 17 (02:43:44):
Yeah, I mean he's got a lot of crossover.

Speaker 2 (02:43:46):
Yeah, which is a good amount of crossover, by the way,
Like that's low and objective numbers, but it's pretty good
for a candidate in Texas, right right, right, cool, All right, Well,
that has been a brief version of the Kim Paxton story.
We'll have more about kpas in the future, and hopefully
we'll have Robert back as well. You have anything you
want to plug before we end here.

Speaker 10 (02:44:05):
Just I'm on Blue Sky at Robert Downdon. Subscribe to
Texas Monthly for twenty five dollars. You can get two
years of print magazine and digital editions. So good, best
deal on journal awesome.

Speaker 3 (02:44:17):
Check that out.

Speaker 2 (02:44:18):
Please do sign up and yeah, we'll be back probably tomorrow. Anyway,
go do something else.

Speaker 7 (02:44:24):
Now, this is it could happen here in Executive Disorder,
our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House,

(02:44:44):
the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I
am Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Nia Wong, James Stout,
Robert Evans, and special correspondent Margaret Kiljoy.

Speaker 1 (02:44:56):
Who want my correspondent Hi.

Speaker 7 (02:44:59):
For some small things. White House Press Secretary Carolyn Levitt
will be stepping down to spend more time with her family.
At twenty seven, she was the youngest person ever appointed
to the position. Now, I don't comment on women's age
or appearance, and yeah, I don't comment on that.

Speaker 1 (02:45:21):
Yeah, I do want to mention that when we say
stepping down to spend more time with her family. This
is the first time I've ever seen this where that
is actually true. This is true, she did have a baby,
actually legitimately doing that and not.

Speaker 19 (02:45:36):
Yeah, I just assumed you are speaking euphemistically about like
basically fired she did have, not a euphemism.

Speaker 7 (02:45:41):
Actually actually some seems to really like her.

Speaker 1 (02:45:44):
Yeah, unfortunately she sucks, but yeah, just just just to clarify,
not an euphemism, actually doing that.

Speaker 7 (02:45:53):
On the ninth anniversary of the Unite the Right rally,
a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center has
been arrested on fraud charges for payments to informants within
white nationalist organizations. We talked about the indictment against SBOC
the organization a few months ago. This is the first

(02:46:16):
charge against a specific individual. For some other small items.
Let's throw to James Stout.

Speaker 18 (02:46:23):
I'm going to start by saying some small things. The
Texas Land Commissioner has sent a cease and assist to
CBP Customs of Border Protection, claiming they illegally cleared state
land to begin.

Speaker 4 (02:46:34):
Border wall construction. Quote.

Speaker 18 (02:46:36):
Texas sovereignty will not be infringed. By failure to follow
established protocol, said Commissioner Buckingham, quote, My office has a
proven track record of strong border enforcement, and I applaud
efforts to protect our border. I am committed to maintaining
a positive relationship with CBP, but we will not allow
rogue actors who breached our agreement to undermine the incredible
work we.

Speaker 4 (02:46:54):
Do for Texas.

Speaker 18 (02:46:56):
The second quotation I've included there was oddly missing from
lots of people's commentary on this, because I think the
people who make money from clicks or just have a
relationship with clicks which is not healthy or good for them,
wanted to portray this as like Texas is going woke
and fighting Trump, and no they're not. Don't be silly.

(02:47:17):
Read the thing. It's in the press release. Secondly, Al
Monitor reported that the United States was withdrawing its last
forces from a bill amidst Iran's campaign strikes on the region.
The United States has a pre agreed withdrawal with a
deadline of September thirtieth, but another source told The New

(02:47:37):
Arab that they had not left and that they had
relocated them closer to the consulate. So the United States
will be withdrawing from this region, probably relatively soon. But
it seems that at the time they didn't leave as
people had feared, but they relocated. Keeping with the theme
of the United States war in Iran, CNN reported last

(02:47:59):
week that the Kentigon was looking for outside the box
thinking in its war with Iran. Quote, we are looking
for new and creative and unconventional ways to pressure and
punish Iran, an officer in the United States Central Commands
Intelligence Branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday into a
broad group of military analysts. According to a source familiar
with a message, this is fucking spectacular, right.

Speaker 7 (02:48:19):
It sounds like a San Francisco startup trying to make
like AI powered coffee or something.

Speaker 1 (02:48:24):
I had to shake up the coffee industry.

Speaker 18 (02:48:27):
Yeah, can we disrupt the bombing Iran marketing guys?

Speaker 1 (02:48:31):
Yeah, move fast and break things in the in the
regime of collective punishment. Yeah, it's what we're doing now.

Speaker 18 (02:48:37):
Except that moving fast and breaking things was kind of
plan A. So God knows what will come out of this,
but I can't wait to see. I'm sure it'll be
exciting and fun. I received news from the PAK that's
the Kurdistan Freedom party, different party from PGAAK, the Kurdistan
Free Life Party. They let me know that an assassination

(02:48:58):
attempt was made in a bill. Again, it's mukri Yas Danpana.
He's the son of their leader, the leader of the
Kurdistan Freedom Party.

Speaker 4 (02:49:06):
Right.

Speaker 18 (02:49:07):
He was injured and he's currently under medical care in
a hospital. They didn't want to make a formal statement
about this either than clarifying that that had happened. It
appears someone tried to shoot him in a bill. A bill,
if you're not familiar, is the capital of the Kurdistan
Autonomous Region of Iraq. Then this is not the first
time that I'm just going to go ahead and assume

(02:49:28):
that this is an Iranian state linked assassination attempt. I
think that's a reasonable assumption to make. Not the first
time that this happened in a bill, and it is
pretty clear that this is the Iranian government continuing its
attempt to punish Eastern Kurdish parties for the United States aggression. Right,

(02:49:49):
which we can draw a line all the way back
to the reporting we did late winter early spring of
this year on people who were suggesting that there was
going to be a Kurdish ground component to the United
States war in Iran, which as of yet there has
not been. This has continued to have consequences for these parties. Right,
and then finally from me, I want to talk about

(02:50:10):
these two executive orders. The President has written a pair
of executive orders this week aimed at reducing the number
of people eligible for citizenship by birth right. And basically
what they've done here, and I would suggest to people
wanting more context and I'm able to give here, go
back to our Supreme Court special episode of ED they've
did a few weeks ago where I talked at length
about the fourteenth Amendment and the one kim Ark case.

(02:50:33):
They've taken the exemptions that I outlined there and they've
tried to kind of stick a crow bar in there
and leave of them open as far as it can
would be the way that I would describe it. And
particularly they've looked at the exemptions for foreign diplomats and
for invading armies, one for vessels in the United States
waters PA's the most significant one is the one that

(02:50:56):
is meant for invading armies.

Speaker 4 (02:50:57):
And when I say invading.

Speaker 18 (02:50:58):
Armies, I want to be clear what I mean. This
is like Mexico decides that eighteen forty eight wasn't the
end and they want some of that landbag, so they
decide to invade the United States. They push up into
San Diego. Right, they say they're in, They've liberated Cardiff
by the Sea, and one of their soldiers gives birth.

Speaker 4 (02:51:17):
Well, they're here.

Speaker 18 (02:51:18):
That Baily would not be a United States citizen because
that person was engaged in an invasion of the United States. Right.
What the Trump administration here has gone for is adding
quote either parent of that person is an alien enemy,
defined to include any member of a designated foreign terrorist
organization under a USC eleven eighty nine, especially designated global terrorists.

(02:51:41):
Now we have to remember they have added a number
of groups to the FDO list, and that they have
attempted to define people as members of those groups using
absolute bullshit criteria like having a tattoo. Right, That is
the one that might be what they are going for here.
I if I had one where I suspect they will
try and use this en mass, it will be that
one using that same criteria that the earlier used to

(02:52:03):
send people to Si Good right near Olsalblor. They also
added a broader away of people who have worked to
work for foreign governments. They also add quote, the person
is born in a territory or territorial water the United
States to a citizenship is not conferred by federal statute.
That refers to American Samoa. Now we're covering this next
week actually in an episode with Carlos Belio Polanco, but

(02:52:26):
just very briefly, there is actually a bill to remove
birth or a citizenship from people in American It's not
going to go anywhere, but it just it's a signal
of where the right is out on this, which is
they're trying to remove as access to being an American from
as many people as possible United States American the second
egective order to take to swing what the right cause

(02:52:47):
birth tourism. Right birth tourism has been a thing on
like the VD air tendency has been obsessed with this
for a long time. My Nottal quote is a lot.
You can go back to an episode in November twenty
twenty four they did with Sophie and Robert and you
can hear us talking about the rights concern with this,
that the phenomenal they're talking about represents it generously if
we define it a fraction of a single percent of
babies born in the United States every year. It would

(02:53:09):
already be fraud to enter on a tourist visa with
the intent of delivering your child here so that they
could be a citizen. But nonetheless, this is kind of
a bugbear for the right, and so they are attempting
to clamp down on specifically, like they believe that there
are these giant companies sort of shipping people in to
deliver their children. It's worth noting some people do come
to United States to deliver because the United States has

(02:53:32):
very good medical care compared to other paths of the world.
Will be it also very expensive medical care, so people
who might have the means to access that might choose
to come to liver or simply let's say you reside
in Mexico but work in the United States and have
health insurance in the United States, you might come here
to liiver your baby. Right, there are reasons why people
might do that. Nonetheless, it is a very limited phenomenon,

(02:53:55):
but it is a thing that the right has been
talking about for some time and it's shocking to see
the jump administration going as to this. Again, these will
wings to be challenging courte We will see.

Speaker 4 (02:54:04):
How it goes.

Speaker 1 (02:54:05):
In other news, the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve is under
three hundred million barrels, which is the lowest level it
has been since the US started filling it in the
nineteen seventies. It was created in response to the nineteen
seventies OPEC embargo. The Trump administration has been draining the
strategic reserve in order to attempt to stabilize the price
of oil as a result of his war in Iran. Now,

(02:54:28):
the administration has stated that it will be refilling the
strategic reserve next year. However, paired with Trump's statement that quote,
we are low keying it. We are only semi negotiating
with them. We are just watching the Ran with its
hues inflation and the fact they have no money, it
is unclear how the reserve would be refilled because the

(02:54:49):
war does not seem to actually have a way to end.
It is also unclear whether the US will succumb to
likewise having no money and huge inflation in the meantime.

Speaker 7 (02:55:00):
That seems bad. Low keying it.

Speaker 1 (02:55:03):
It's not great. It's not great. One of the things
I should sort of mention is that part of the
reason the economy is still functioning is that the analysis
from places like JP Morgan from the financial sector has
been based on the fact that this war will end,
and every week that it continues and every week that
there seems to be no potential way for it to end,
increases the likelihood that the bankers will figure out that

(02:55:25):
this war is not going to end and that everything
is just like this now. So that is a financial
collapse warning.

Speaker 19 (02:55:32):
I feel like that's been like everyone has just been
trying to figure out, like, why has this not collapsed
the economy yet? And so I'm always curious your take
on why hasn't this collapsed the economy yet? Because everything
points to this should collapse the economy. Yeah, but it
keeps stumbling on. Energy prices are skyrocketing, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:55:50):
Yeah, And I mean basically it's because it's not in
the interest of the people who have money to believe
that it will. So they're still behaving as if eventually
it's going to end in actually, the prices are going
to come down, and eventually everything from you know, petroleum
defertilizer that comes through the shaff about is simply going
to be available again. And the moment they realize that
it's not the.

Speaker 7 (02:56:11):
Pyramid collapses speaking of money, Robert, So yeah, for my
little thing today, I mean, it's a little thing in
terms of how I guess important the story is at
this point, but it's a big thing in terms of
the amount of money being discussed, because.

Speaker 2 (02:56:26):
Y'all remember back when Elon Musk bought Twitter and see
what he yeah, he shared it. There should be a
website called Twitter Garrison.

Speaker 3 (02:56:34):
It's before your time. It's what X became. Oh X Yeah, No,
I love ac the everything out the everything.

Speaker 17 (02:56:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:56:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:56:42):
So when when Musk bought Twitter, he promised that he
was going to take for like forty billion dollars. He
was going to take the company's AD revenue for about
four and a half billion dollars, which is what Twitter
made an AD revenue twenty twenty one, to twelve billion
dollars by twenty twenty seven. Sure, and also there'd be
billions more in subscription income right now, given that it
is currently last I checked pretty late in twenty twenty six. Actually,

(02:57:03):
we're like most of the way through the year. You
would expect Twitter's AD revenue to be pretty close to
twelve billion dollars, right, Like if I'm extrapolating from four
and a half billion in twenty twenty one to twelve
billion in twenty twenty seven, we should be somewhere on.

Speaker 3 (02:57:17):
Nine or ten billion right now.

Speaker 2 (02:57:19):
Maybe you know that's not where we are, and there's
a really good article in techtered. But and the reason
why we know all this is because once once Musk
bought Twitter, it's not being a public company, right, so
you don't have any fucking knowledge at all about really
what's going on inside a private company, right in terms
of it's like revenue and stuff. But because Musk recently
folded X into SpaceX and these AI company, he had

(02:57:42):
to include a bunch of revenue information. This came out
in what's called their ten Q filing, and tech Dirt
has has done an analysis of it that I'm going
to quote from. Now, all of X's revenue is now
misleadingly labeled AI revenue, But even then the reporting has
to admit AD revenue took a big hit, dropping one
hundred and sixty million compared to the first half of

(02:58:04):
twenty twenty five, which is already way way lower than
when Elon took over the site, going from eight hundred
and seventy million in twenty twenty five to seven hundred
and ten million in the first half of twenty twenty six.
The company tries to claim this decrease in AD revenues
because they transitioned to a new advertising platform which impacted
AD sales for a short period of time, which is
a curious explanation given that on the analyst call, CFO

(02:58:25):
Brett Johnson credited that very same overhauled ad tech platform
for the very slight quarter over quarter uptick in AD revenue.
The same overhaul apparently both tanked the business and rescued it,
depending on which direction the number was moving. And yeah,
so within the second quarter of last year to this
year to where we are at now, AD revenue has
dropped from four hundred and twenty six million to three

(02:58:47):
hundred and sixty seven million year over year, and in
no way, shape or form is Twitter anywhere close to
the numbers that Elon Musk claimed they would be in
right now. In the second quarter of twenty twenty two,
which is the last full quarter before Elon bought the company,
Twitter brought in about one point eight billion dollars in
AD revenue. By the second quarter of twenty twenty six

(02:59:07):
X brought in three hundred and sixty seven million dollars.

Speaker 1 (02:59:10):
Is that bad?

Speaker 2 (02:59:10):
That is a reduction of seven hundred and thirteen million
dollars a quarter. In other words, from tech Dirt, Elon
has wiped out two thirds of Twitter's ad business over
the exact period in which you promised investors seed nearly
triple it.

Speaker 1 (02:59:25):
It's just incredible. It's just fun.

Speaker 3 (02:59:27):
That's just a good time.

Speaker 7 (02:59:28):
I wonder how much like the recent drop off can
also be attributed to, like right wing political content getting
much less engagement following Trump taking office than what it
was near twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four when I was,
you know, driving a lot of traffic to the site.

Speaker 3 (02:59:44):
That's got to be part of it.

Speaker 2 (02:59:45):
Part of it has to be also that aislop has
reduced the value, because we're seeing this at Facebook stars
across the board, like all of them are seeing reductions
in like in user engagement because people don't like the
slot very much. Yeah, this isn't one thing, and well, honestly,
as funny as it is, you can't even just blame

(03:00:05):
it on Elon, although you can blame it on things
Elon has championed pretty much entirely, right.

Speaker 7 (03:00:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, just a fun little story.

Speaker 17 (03:00:15):
Sweet.

Speaker 19 (03:00:17):
I have one short piece that I brought today which
is in a story of good stuff, of people doing
cool stuff against bad stuff. There is a tree sit
that is currently blocking construction of the border wall in Arizona.
Hell yeah, yeah, no, it's it's I'm really excited about it.
To quote a write up from crimethink dot com about it. Quote,

(03:00:39):
two weeks ago, one protester decided it was time to
block the machine that was about to destroy the last
of our four ancient cottonwood trees that stood in the
way of the walls construction. A sheriff arrested him. He
was released twelve hours later with no charges filed. This
arrest galvanized the community. Less than two days later, friends
installed a platform in the tree end quote, and it

(03:01:02):
seems to be ongoing as of this recording. And if
you want more information about the group who is stopping
construction of the border wall, you can read the whole
piece on crimething dot com, which is entitled the border
is an open wound.

Speaker 1 (03:01:14):
Speaking of open wounds, or I guess I'm gonna call
you our crime correspondent positive. Margaret has another story about
things that are open wounds in the face of our society.
I did pitch that.

Speaker 19 (03:01:25):
If y'all ever need someone to come on and talk
about crimes that I approve of, I am always happy
to talk about crimes that I approve of. And this
week I can bring you really positive news, really happy
news that you can file under direct action gets the
goods because today, as we record this August twelfth, twenty
twenty six, two days before you're listening to it, the

(03:01:47):
police in the town of Winona, Minnesota, have given up
not entirely. They announced that they will not be replacing
the eight Flock license plate reader cameras that were stolen
last week because on or about August third, well on
August third, the police department in Winoda, Minnesota, reported a
terrifying loss in just one night, every single one of

(03:02:11):
their eight flot cameras, their automated license plate readers that
tracked every single person who came in and out of
the city that were set up in pairs along all
the ways in and out, All eight of them were
cut down and stolen. I said, on just one night.
Book the cops don't actually know when it happened. It
happened sometime between July twenty ninth and August first, and
they only noticed when eventually the cop was like, look

(03:02:34):
of our cameras aren't talking to us anymore. So they
only noticed a while later. Each camera and its poll
cost about three thousand dollars, so there's a total of
twenty four thousand dollars in theft. The crime wasn't noticed
for days. The WPD also said that some flot cameras
in Buffalo County, which is a Wisconsin county just up
from or across the river from there, were also cut down,

(03:02:56):
probably on July twenty ninth. And when the police reported
this theft to social media, over nine hundred people commented
on the police's post, which takes more nerve. I don't
comment things on politicians or police departments posts personally, not
very often.

Speaker 1 (03:03:15):
And when I do, a delete it and call my lawyer.

Speaker 19 (03:03:17):
And so nine hundred people commented on the post, almost
universally in support of the action.

Speaker 1 (03:03:22):
As reported by the Winona Post.

Speaker 19 (03:03:24):
One comment or put it, it's almost like people don't
want to be washed twenty four to seven. And so
today Winona Police Department declared surrender They put out a
press release saying how important the cameras have been for
solving crime, but even more important to them than solving
crime is building community trust, which they clearly have lost,

(03:03:45):
and so they will not be replacing the cameras. Flock
Safety is a brand name of automated license plate readers ALPRs.
At this rate, flock is probably kind of becoming the generic. Yeah, like,
I will run across headlines that say flock like cameras
that will be talking about something from Axos or other
places Axon crap, I don't remember else, Axon, thank you.

Speaker 1 (03:04:07):
It'll probably become the generic.

Speaker 19 (03:04:08):
I'm working on a longer piece about the revolt against
these cameras, but it is getting hot this summer. Red state,
Blue state people just fucking hate the idea that they're
being tracked everywhere they go. Cop after cop has been
caught using them to stalk their exes, and it seems
very likely that if we stay a democracy, the style
of surveillance will be found to be a violation of

(03:04:29):
the Fourth Amendment. Because similar technologies keep getting found to
be violations of the Fourth Amendment. You know, eventually they're like, oh,
you actually do need a warrant to look at someone's
cell phone data, that kind of thing, you know. Yeah,
but here is a highlight reel among dozens or hundreds
of other acts of vandalism against these cameras. In June,
a forty year old man named Marcus B in Monterey, California,

(03:04:51):
is alleged most of these people have not been convicted
yet or will never be convicted, is alleged to have
destroyed three cameras with his truck. He's on camera doing this.
They alleged he simply ran down a bunch of these cameras.
He has bowl bars on the front of his truck,
so he just goes like, I got big, I'll pick
up drug and bullbars, and he just knocked them over.
Possibly another one he attached maybe a toast strap or

(03:05:12):
a chain and yanked it up out of the ground
with his truck. Also in June, a twenty one year
old in Alexandria, I'm just going to present the opposite
kind of person doing this. Probably in June, a twenty
one year old in Alexandria, Virginia on the opposite coast,
is accused of climbing atop a Subaru forester to smash
a flock camera with a baseball bat on a day

(03:05:33):
where at least five other cameras were destroyed in the area.
The suspect was caught by flock cameras. Houston has seen
a rash of vandalism. One night, four poles were cut
down and left lying in the grass with their cameras
still attached, but all during July, cameras have been spray
painted and smashed and cut down in Houston. Last year, Eugene,

(03:05:54):
Oregon wound up canceling its flock contract after only about
six months of the cameras being up due to an
apsolo massive public outcry that include lawsuits, statements before city council,
and at least six cameras being destroyed. At the scene
of one of the crimes, the vandals left a note
that read ha ha ha get wrecked, Yes surveilling fucks.

Speaker 1 (03:06:15):
I love these people.

Speaker 19 (03:06:17):
Maybe the most public case is that in Suffolk, Virginia, Suffolk,
oh where a forty one year old US Air Force
engineer named Jeffrey S. Sovereign is facing felony charges for
the destruction of thirteen flock cameras between April and October
and twenty twenty five it is alleged that he used
vice scripts to take apart the two piece polls and
then took home the solar panels in the battery, possibly.

Speaker 1 (03:06:39):
To use for camping.

Speaker 19 (03:06:41):
That's what he said later when the cops raided his
house and found solar panels there. His truck was tracked
by other cameras near the scene of one of the crimes.
The police put a GPS tracker on his vehicle, which
is another thing that the Fourth Amendment. Eventually you actually
have to get a warrant to put GPS trackers on
people's cars. Now, his house was raided by the police,
they found solar panels, and he is very open about

(03:07:02):
being opposed to flock cameras and refers to them as
a violation of the Fourth Amendment. But he has pleaded
not guilty to the actual destruction. More recently, an independent
candidate for the Tennessee House of Representatives, a thirty seven
year old man named Adam lee Heimerman, is facing felony
charges for allegedly shooting down four alpr's automated license plate
readers in two counties between July fourteenth and July twenty second.

(03:07:27):
One of the cameras he is alleged to have shot
down was like during church services. He allegedly went out
into the parking lot and there was one within shooting distance,
so he just shot it from the church. A go
fenby was set up and bailed him out of jail.
Police in Long Island report that all summer cameras have
been run over, spray painted, or simply had their wires

(03:07:49):
unplugged or turned around to no longer face the street.
Oh and there's also a guy in Florida who's just
holding up signs that block them. He's retired. He's like
a seventy seven year old retired Republican guy. So he
just that's up lawn chairs and sits there with its
signs on ten foot like painters polls, and just blocks
the cameras fools. And when police or news report on

(03:08:09):
these incidents, the posts are flooded with supportive comments, including
those that indicate that people should look into jury and nullification.
But of course, as cities canceled their Flock contracts, many
of them are simply signing with other ALPR companies, like Denver,
which ended its contract with Flock in February, but by
March had signed up with another company, Axon for fifty cameras.

(03:08:30):
So it's working, but people got to keep up that
pressure legally or whatever, do whatever you want.

Speaker 1 (03:08:37):
It seems like these cameras have kind of mobilized this
coalition of like the kind of leftist people who generally
hate these things, different kinds of like civil libertarian from
both kind of I guess, like the contemporaries of a
libertarians tend to be on the left, and then the
kind of old school Republican like why is the stay
watching people? And then it also seems important that these
are supposed to be licensed plate readers, which means they've

(03:08:59):
pissed off just people who drive cars. Yeah, it's like
you've declared war on motorists. Yeah, which is a demographic
people that.

Speaker 19 (03:09:09):
I was reading this eighty eight percent of Americans drive
a car on any given week.

Speaker 1 (03:09:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 19 (03:09:16):
Yeah, this and data centers are the most red blue
a movement that just has everyone being like, no, wait,
I don't like that.

Speaker 1 (03:09:24):
Yeah, it seems like the general text surveillance complex. It's
just extremely unpopular right now and people are doing stuff
about it. Yeah, which is good because it's been going
on for a while.

Speaker 19 (03:09:33):
And yeah, I'm really excited that people are doing something
about it. And yeah, I'm really really proud of Winona
for canceling that contract. Like I know of people who've
been convicted and done time for this, and you know,
it's it's it's wider than what's being reported on.

Speaker 7 (03:09:52):
I think definitely the massive movement we're seeing around or
against Flock right now is one of the biggest positive
downstream impact of stop coop City, which was one of
like the first movements really put Flock into focus because
Flock cameras were being first tested out on the site.
Flock is an Atlanta based company. The first kind of

(03:10:12):
articles you started to see talking about Flock, where we're
often in relation to to reporting around stop cop City
or you know, activists discussing Flock is it's like a
new emerging threat like years years ago, way before the
public kind of realized that there's now these cameras cropping
up in like every every city.

Speaker 19 (03:10:32):
I think you're right, and I also think that the
stop cop City method of being both direct and also
showing up a city council. Sure, you know, I think
nothing is more effective than when those two groups support
each other. Yeah, and you know the fact that when
the cops says, don't worry, we are We're going to

(03:10:53):
catch whoever did this, and everyone's like, nah, they were
fishing with me last weekend, you know. But yeah, I
think I think you're right about stop cup seity building
a lot of the framework with which to understand this
kind of thing.

Speaker 7 (03:11:05):
Let's go on an ad break and then hear from
James again.

Speaker 4 (03:11:22):
And we're back.

Speaker 18 (03:11:23):
So this week, I want to talk about a couple
of immigration stories not getting as much coverage. I thought
I would start by talking about some training materials for
immigration judges that Matthew Hopook obtained by Freedom of Information
Act request. They're in a drop box which I will
link in the show notes. It appears from these documents
that the quote unquote judges, they are not judges in

(03:11:44):
the sense that other judges are judges. Right, Immigration judges
are effectively civil servants. They receive twelve week days of training.
What yeah, Jesus Christ. Yeah, before this, many of the
will have never seen an immigration case, right, And like,
as someone who has covered immigration for oh my god,

(03:12:05):
a decade, like this is the topic of byzantine complexity. Right,
Immigration law is very complicated. I'm not going to do
the thing where you like compare the training to barbers
or something, because I don't think that's particularly useful here.
I think all of us can understand that twelve days
of training is not very much training to be making
decisions which are life or death for people. Right. These
can directly result in people as we saw recently with

(03:12:29):
the couple who were found tied.

Speaker 4 (03:12:32):
Up and shot after being deported.

Speaker 18 (03:12:34):
Yeah, and there will be many more cases of that
that we are not able to directly report just because
no one has published them, or in places where people
fear to publish them, than they won't have got out. Right,
But we should be under no illution that deportation and
asylum cases are life or death. Seven very complicated policy
memoranda are packed into the last hour of the second day,

(03:12:57):
so the foyer has the schedule the day by day
skeate right. The entirety of asylum with holding of removal
and the Convention against Torture are covered in a single day,
and it's not the whole day. There's other stuff in
that day. The materials also show that they provide templates
to judges for making decisions, and they contain some errors
and contradictions regarding the law as it stands today. The

(03:13:20):
important context of this is that more than two hundred
immigration judges have been fired since twenty twenty five, and
two hundred and fifty have been hired. So there is
a whole scale change in the immigration justice landscape, and
it is being repopulated with people who have very little training.
They do get a slide I was looking through the

(03:13:40):
slide presentation, so they do get a slide on judicial independence,
but the nature of their employment is different to a
regular judge as I said earlier, and in their first
two years are basically on like a probationary period, and
they have very little right to appeal if they're fired.
This is another example of things that the Trump administration
is doing that will take years to remedy, even if

(03:14:03):
the next government is amenable to trying to do so.
Right Like, these are the people who are making decisions
for thousands of people that are life or death. The
second thing I want to talk about is a DOJ
lawsuit against New York, Connecticut, and Vermond. The DOJ says
it is quote challenging state laws that provide instate tuition
to illegal aliens. The DOJ claims that quote, these laws

(03:14:26):
unconstitutionally discriminate against US citizens who are not afforded the
same reduced tuition or scholarships, create incentives for illegal immigration,
and reward illegal aliens with benefits that US citizens are
not eligible for, all in direct conflict with federal law. Now,
they have been going after this for a while, right,
The DOJ has been doing these suits since last year.
In some Republican states Texas is when I think of

(03:14:49):
I think Kansas maybe as well, definitely Texas. In some
Republican states, state officials joined the DOJ in asking their
policies to be vacated, so they obviously had success with those.

Speaker 17 (03:14:57):
Right.

Speaker 18 (03:14:58):
In Illinois, not a publican state, the dj won a
case and had the in state's benefits declared unconstitutional based
on a federal statute that reads, quote, notwithstanding any other
provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present
in the United States shall not be eligible on the
basis of residents within a state or political subdivision, for

(03:15:19):
any post secondary education benefit, unless a citizen or national
of the United States is eligible for such a benefit
in no less amount, duration, and scope, without regard to
whether the citizen or national is such a resident. So
I would attempt to simplify that and explain it to people.
But as we are about to find out, the very

(03:15:41):
nuances of that text matter.

Speaker 7 (03:15:43):
I mean, this sort of was often complicated, but I
was having trouble following what that means exactly.

Speaker 3 (03:15:50):
Yeah, that's a fuck.

Speaker 18 (03:15:52):
Like if somebody wrote that sentence in a writing class
I would teaching. I wouldn't be happy about it. It's
a sentence that requires us alties circular breathing to read it.

Speaker 1 (03:16:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (03:16:02):
So in Minnesota there was a case like this. But
because Minnesota uses attending a state high school to determine
tuition fees, this is therefore not a residency test, right,
so the residency part of that massive sentence matters. They

(03:16:23):
also argued that the law says unless a citizen or
national of the United States eligible for such a benefit,
it does not say all citizens of the United States
are eligible for such a benefit, and so Minnesota was
able to show that a non Minnesota resident who did
attend a Minnesota high school went to University of Minnesota

(03:16:47):
was eligible for interstate tuition. So a US citizen would
be eligible, all US citizens would not, And so they
were able to hang their hat on those two things. Right,
It's not about residency per se. A citizen could receive
those benefits. I was looking around for residency requirements, and

(03:17:09):
it seems that some of these states may be able
to make a similar case to Minnesota.

Speaker 1 (03:17:14):
Others will not.

Speaker 17 (03:17:15):
Right.

Speaker 18 (03:17:16):
Some of them require residency in the more traditional like
domiciled in a state. Yeah, perhaps driver's license rate, to vote,
et cetera, et cetera. Right, and so it will be
more challenging for some than others. Eventually, I imagine this is
one of those things where we've already seen different decisions, right,
and that's because different Stitts have different laws. But I'm

(03:17:37):
sure this is one of those things that will eventually
find its way to the Supreme Court in the next
couple of years. Regardless, it's an attempt to drive undocumented
people further into the shadows and create an underclass of
underpaid labor without rights.

Speaker 4 (03:17:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 18 (03:17:51):
People on the right constantly talk about assimilation. Are they
used to? I think now they just straight up do
more racis shit. But the active assimilation will be much
harder if people cannot access education. Right. I am sure
I have had hundreds of undocumented students come through my classroom.
I'm not gonna be like, hands up if you're undocumented, right,
I'm not going there's no need for me to know that.

(03:18:14):
But I know that the universities I teach how to
do a great deal and provide a great deal of
resources to undocumented people. Our universities are better because of that.
Having a diverse range of experiences and opinions in the
classroom makes your classroom better. It will make it easier
for people on the right to make these arguments that
they're like stealing working class jobs right, because people will

(03:18:36):
not have the qualifications they need to do other jobs.
They will end up being underpaid and exploited. These policies,
I should add, were relatively bipartisan when they were passed
into twenty tens and even for the last quarter of
the last century. True heads will recognize this from a
show I did in twenty twenty three.

Speaker 1 (03:18:54):
Yes, my name is David Grosberg, and I'd like to
know do you think that children of illegal aliens should
be allowed to attend to public schools free or do
you think that their parents should pay for their education?

Speaker 17 (03:19:05):
Who you're addressing that too? I thank you first looking
right at you, I.

Speaker 19 (03:19:09):
Said, he was love.

Speaker 5 (03:19:12):
I'd like to see something done about the illegal alien
problem that would be so sensitive and so understanding about
labor needs and human needs that that problem wouldn't come up.

Speaker 17 (03:19:23):
But today, if.

Speaker 5 (03:19:24):
Those people are here, I would reluctantly say I think
they would.

Speaker 9 (03:19:28):
They would get whatever it is.

Speaker 5 (03:19:30):
That they're you know, what the society is giving to
their neighbors. But it has the problem has to be solved.
The problem has to be solved because as we have
kind of made illegal some kinds of labor that I'd
like to see legal, we're doing two things. We're creating
a whole society of really honorable, decent, family loving people

(03:19:52):
that are in violation of the law. And secondly, we're
exacerbating relations with Mexico. The chance the answer to your
question is much more fundamental then whether they attend Houston schools.
It seems to me, I don't want to see a
whole if they're living here, I don't want to see
a whole. I think as six and eight year old
kids being made, you know, one totally uneducated and made

(03:20:14):
to feel.

Speaker 1 (03:20:15):
That they're living with outside the law.

Speaker 3 (03:20:16):
Let's address ourselves to the fundamentals.

Speaker 5 (03:20:18):
These are good people, strong people. Part of my family
is in Mexican.

Speaker 1 (03:20:24):
That's wild.

Speaker 18 (03:20:25):
Yeah, that is a famous woke immigration advocate, George Herbert
Walker Bush.

Speaker 7 (03:20:30):
That's really kind of mind blowing.

Speaker 18 (03:20:33):
It's genuinely remarkable, isn't it to look back? This is
not that long ago. Yeah, none of us were alive then,
I guess, But like, you know, these are people who
people still look to as like contemporary political people who
they admire.

Speaker 11 (03:20:46):
Right.

Speaker 18 (03:20:47):
This is to the left of a lot of Democrats
right now on immigration.

Speaker 7 (03:20:50):
Yeah, yeah, a lot of Democrats would be scared to
talk about, yes, immigration that way.

Speaker 18 (03:20:56):
Yeah, to say part of my family is Mexican, to
say that, like I would never want to leave these
children as an underclass like.

Speaker 1 (03:21:03):
That, Like, no, it's it's insane.

Speaker 7 (03:21:04):
Yeah, Like I mean, like this coupled with like the
public charge rules, the concerted effort to increase this war
on like the poorest, most marginalized people in our country
and criminalize them and push them out of public life,
compared to yeah, George H. W. Bush in the eighties

(03:21:25):
is wild. Yeah, Like, it's remarkable that we have come.
So I'm not saying that things were great in the
nineteen eighties, to be clear.

Speaker 1 (03:21:34):
No, that's part of what makes it so wild.

Speaker 18 (03:21:38):
Right, Like these people did a bunch of really terrible shit,
but like Reagan and Bush would both be on the
very progressive flank of the Democrats with some of their
policies on immigration today. I guess the way I would
like to finish this segment, if we can come that
far that fast, then we can come back a long way.

Speaker 4 (03:21:55):
Pretty quickly too.

Speaker 18 (03:21:56):
I think, yeah, yeah, it does take courage, especially from politicians, because,
as Garrison said, like a lot of politicians feel like
they're going to lose the center when in fact, like
that position was a centrist position in many voters lifetimes.
I think it just bears remarketub on how far we've
come and how quickly we've got there.

Speaker 7 (03:22:18):
Yeah, jeez, I'm still just kind of in shocked. I mean,
my whole life. I feel like the way I've heard
debates are immigration, certainly on the Republican side, but also
largely on the Democrats side, it's just pitting like workers
against each other, yeah, and hearing a Bush talk about
how no, we should like care for these people, they
should be educated, Like why would we want to have

(03:22:40):
these people who are living here be not educated, not
able to actually live like a meaningful life. Yeah, it's
a level of like humanity that I just have not
really experienced in you know, politics, in my kind of
living memory, and certainly on the Republican side.

Speaker 18 (03:22:56):
Like yeah, yeah, I mean George Walker Bush spoke Spanish, right,
it was Walker's bed on named George W. Bush spoke Spanish.
W's has been on name. I think it's a sea
change since even then, right, Like, I think we can
draw a pretty straight line from Obama's massive deportation campaign
to today. For whatever people think of Obama, he deported

(03:23:19):
a shit town of people. Yeah, the reason they called
him the deporter in chief. But like, yeah, nine to
eleven and then the grow and terror and in the
Syrians of war, that certainly changed a discourse in Europe, right,
And I think, yeah, I mean once we had little
babies washing up dead on beaches, and politicians realized that
that wasn't going to trigger people to get in the
streets and fuck things up. Yeah, they knew that they

(03:23:41):
could do an awful lot and not acknowledge, not acknowledge
that humanity that George H. W. Bush acknowledge is in that.

Speaker 7 (03:23:47):
The other thing that's really interesting to me about this
is like this is this is nineteen eighty Reagan is
on stage here. Yeah, and how much of this this
is also like a pretty determining fork in the road
in some ways and like leading to like neoliberalism totally
taking over. How state capacity gets completely completely reduced. And
then you see this in like you know, the next

(03:24:09):
Bush era and Obama and is getting accelerated with Trump.
Is that their only solution to the problems caused by
neoliberalism is not actually fixing neoliberal economics, but it has
to be turning workers, I guess each other. Yeah, that
is that is the last thing that they can do
because they still serve capital. They still want to do
neoliberal economics, but that system has completely stressed itself and

(03:24:31):
has sabotaged the economy, wrecked housing and jobs, and so now, no,
we should not actually fix those things or have the
government care for people.

Speaker 1 (03:24:40):
But it is it's these other people.

Speaker 7 (03:24:42):
Who are you know, even more poor than you that
are causing all of these problems.

Speaker 18 (03:24:46):
Right, like this pivot to scapegoating, yes, as opposed to
like doing anything useful with it.

Speaker 3 (03:24:50):
I mean even Reagan, right, Reagan pisce the Irica.

Speaker 18 (03:24:53):
It was a massive amnesty, like to two point six
two point seven million people something in that range. Yeah,
were effectively like legalized by the Reagan administration. And to
vault from that where we're at, as you say, like
to vault from like the state trying to make any
meaningful difference in making working class people's lives better, to

(03:25:16):
escape growing one group so the other group doesn't complain
about their own situation.

Speaker 4 (03:25:21):
It's very obvious.

Speaker 7 (03:25:23):
Every day for the past like month, Fox News has
had a segment about the DSAS like amnesty for all immigrants,
playing on their platform.

Speaker 18 (03:25:32):
Right, Yeah, I'm not alone in pointing out that like
Reagan did a similar thing. I think, like, yeah, I'm
sure lots of people have tried to dunk on them
that way. But yeah, I heard like a right wing
metal song about like three outdoor attention. Someone send it
to me today. One of the funniest fucking things. But yeah,
it for some reason it talked about the DSA amnesty,

(03:25:55):
which is a hard thing to shoehorn into a metal song,
but they did it, so I guess, right, well done. Congratulations. Yeah,
that has become like the boogeyman of right wing politics
from people. I guess, like, I know I talk about
this student law. I would love to hear from this dude.
I would love to talk to this dude. The dude
who is walking around Minneapolis the day before Alex Pretty

(03:26:19):
was killed with a sign that said what would Ronald
Reagan do? And he was at the anti ice march,
right like, yeah, huh, seriously, like genuinely, if anybody knows
who that person is, please put that person in touch
with me. Oh yeah, Like I think that is a
type of person who we need to talk to right now.
Yeah yeah, and like not make that person feel like

(03:26:39):
they can't grow in other ways hopefully, you know. By Oh,
I don't know, maybe there's just an ironic sign.

Speaker 4 (03:26:44):
And anyway, I'm fascinated to talk to that person.

Speaker 18 (03:26:48):
It's always real sad to me to look at these
things and just be like, you know, like it's not
that long ago that this was very bipartisan issue, and
like now, once again I guess by part is and
in that there is a complete agreement that people who
tried to come here without part of the report of
entry should die in numbers that are large enough to

(03:27:08):
dissuade people from doing it, and if those numbers have
to increase, and so be it. And that migrants should
be treated as humans without rights like the Biden administration
absolutely did that too. Yeah, and yeah it sucks.

Speaker 1 (03:27:22):
You know, if if if you want to look at
what the actual policy disagreement is about, it's should you
use the state to carry out a full on ethnic
cleansing or should you use the states to simply commit
heinous acts of violence?

Speaker 18 (03:27:37):
Yeah? It should the basis of this purge be some
arbitrary line along the line from like full legal status
to no legal status? Right, or should the basis of
it be as it is now? Any one we can
get out, we get out, like yeah, unlet's you're on
that DSA like amnesty point when I guess, like, that's

(03:27:57):
a different point. But it is not one that like
the DNC is making us a whole.

Speaker 7 (03:28:01):
No, that is that is a it is I think
it's useful to hold those things in distinction. Yes, at
this point right now, it will that change over time?

Speaker 1 (03:28:09):
Maybe?

Speaker 7 (03:28:09):
Will that hosts its own contradictions over time, maybe, but
we will deal with those when they get there. Yeah,
but mean, yeah, it seems the opinion of Trump now
is no, not unless you pay me a million dollars
for the gold cart or whatever, you are not allowed inside.

Speaker 18 (03:28:26):
It's mind boggling to think that this is the thing that, yeah,
within my parents' lifetime was completely uncontroversial, even like I
remember those you know, I was in the US when
they passed those the situition things. This is at the
same time, right where there was relatively bipartisan support for
dreamers too. Yep, like when it was uncontroversial that those

(03:28:46):
people who've grown up for nearly their entire lives here
should be allowed to remain here. And all of that
shit has gone now and then, like I guess, like
the fact that there are some people who are so
cowardly on both parties that they have they once supported
it and now don't just because they think that's the
way the wind is blowing. Yeah, it is something that
shouldn't go unremarked upon. Lake, I don't know, the least

(03:29:09):
qualified people to be in any position of leadership are
the ones who are cowards like that, and yet we
have a great deal of them in Congress. If you
want to hear about some people who shouldn't be in Congress,
I have a podcast called Natural Causes. We will talk
eventually about Mike Lee and why he is like this,
Why does Mike Lee want to sell all the public

(03:29:30):
land that we get to share, and who has donated
to his campaign to make him want to do it,
But we can hear about other stuff too. This week,
we're going to cover cyclospora, which is the incontinence parasite
spreading through the Midwest, and we're going to talk about
what it tells us about the rights of agricultural labor, neoliberalism, NAFTA,

(03:29:51):
and all the massive corporations between you and your crunch rep.
And after that, we're going to talk about fire. If
you listen to the show, you'll know that I was
in Spokane. So I'm going to talk to some people
who evacuated about what you should do when your phone
starts going ape shit, and how you can prepare yourself
for fire evacuations because this stuff isn't changing anytime soon.

(03:30:12):
I'm going to talk to some people about how you
can be a good friend to your friend who is
being evacuated. And then I'm going to talk to some
folks who lost their homes in Los Angeles and how
they've recovered since then and what you can do to
help them. And then a week after that, we're going
to talk about what we can all learn from indigenous
fire knowledge and how we can better take care of

(03:30:34):
our lands to not suppress fire, but to have more
say in when.

Speaker 4 (03:30:39):
And how fire happens. So if you.

Speaker 18 (03:30:42):
Would like to hear about those topics, you can look
up at Natural Causes wherever podcasts are given away for free,
probably the same place you're listening to this one. Yeah,
talk about fucking golf as well. Hate golf.

Speaker 7 (03:30:56):
Somehow, that's both the most at least British moment I've
ever I've seen it from you.

Speaker 1 (03:31:05):
Returning to the bleak present, Trump has issued an executive
order on Monday about vaccines that is at the same
time both extremely disturbing and somewhat unlikely to do that much.
There's sort of a few different components to this executive order.
There's one part of it that is an attempt to

(03:31:26):
ram through RFK Junior's attempt to reduce the amount of
vaccines that children get for absolutely no reason whatsoever. RFK
jor We've talked about this previously on the show. RFK
Junior has been attempting to reduce a number of vaccines
that children get in childhood through CDC advisory boards, which
is the way that you're theoretically supposed to do this. However,

(03:31:47):
this was blocked in court, and as those litigations are ongoing,
those policies simply have not gone through. So Trump's attempting
to use an executive order to bypass that process.

Speaker 4 (03:32:00):
Won't work.

Speaker 1 (03:32:01):
There is another separate part about separating the MMR vaccine
into three different vaccines. So the MMR vaccine is a
combined vaccine from measles, mumps, and rebella, and part of
his executive order is an attempt to get those spread out.
And then there's also a part that's about threatening states
who don't allow religious exemptions for vaccinations in order to

(03:32:23):
send their kids to school. And then a lot of
the total executive order is this kind of in some
ways grandstanding, where Trump is talking about how this is
what the government says the science is, and Trump is
saying the government says that the science is that the
MMR vaccine is bad and that you need three separate vaccines,

(03:32:47):
and that that's good, and that that's what like the
gold standard of evidence based in medicine is now. It's
almost more like a post than an executive order. It's
just him saying this is the government's position on the science. Now,
this is all very classic anti vax stuff. In particular,
the separating out the MMR vaccine is just the classic

(03:33:08):
anti vaccine stuff. Getting back to a man named Andrew
Wakefield to a stripped of his medical license after it
discovered that he had been hired to produce evidence linking
vaccines to autism by a group that was trying to
sue the British government for damages over their belief that
vaccines were quote unquote causing their children's autism. So Wakefield
was hired by this group to produce study that would
support their claims. And then also Wakefield's turned out had

(03:33:32):
lied to the parents of young children about the painful
and invasive medical experiments he performed on them. So that's
how he'd lost his medical license. There's a very good
Age Bomber Guide long essay video essay on this that
I recommend watching, and Wakefield very specifically pedaled a line
about the MMR vaccine. His argument was that the MMR
vaccine could be dangerous if they were taken together, but

(03:33:55):
if taken individually, they were safe. This doesn't make sense
even by the mechanism of the fake condition he made up,
but it made him seem like less of a full
on anti vaxxer. And then he also did this because
he was trying to get a patent to make a
separate vaccine to sell them to the kids of parents
who believe the MMR was dangerous. So that this entire
thing is a product of Wakefield's attempt to do a

(03:34:17):
grift in the nineteen nineties and the British media latching
onto it and spreading it, and this has just sort
of persisted as this zombie belief where in the speech
where Trump is giving talking about him signing this executive order,
he's talking about how the MMR together is lethal, but
individually they're safe, which is the stuff that Wakefield was

(03:34:37):
saying in the nineties. It was never true then, it
was never true now. But that's why we all died
as children. I guess that's why I have autism. I
don't know, like I didn't diet rebella or whatever that's
caused by transness. That's not the other way around. Yeah,

(03:34:58):
So basically we have executive order that is the sort
of persistence of this zombie grift that has transcended this
guy's original grift and is now in an executive order
for the President of the United States. But it's sort
of unlikely that any of the stuff in here is
going to actually have actual effects on children getting vaccines,

(03:35:19):
which is mostly good. Obviously, the attacks on states that
don't have relateous exemptions for vaccinating kids to go to
school is bad. But it's really unclear how the legal
mechanism for any of this would work. And another complication
is that we don't have separate vaccines for the components
of MMRSH. The US does not make them nominally. This

(03:35:42):
executive order is supposed to set up the option for
parents to do that, and Trump said he would be
like working with the private sector to allow this to happen.
But this doesn't currently exist, So we need another operation
light speed. Yeah, it's operation warp speed. But like for
anti vas yeah, light drive. Yeah. And obviously every single

(03:36:04):
reputable medical institution recommends that you do them all at
the same time because it's safe. And also there's actually
does mean giving children less vaccinations so they're more likely
to show up and do them.

Speaker 7 (03:36:13):
But they have seventy two vaccines mia seventy two.

Speaker 1 (03:36:17):
Yeah, so let's make it seventy four, all at once,
all at the same time. More vaccines. I want more vaccines.
I want to catch less diseases. You should vaccinate children
even more like that rules.

Speaker 5 (03:36:28):
I know.

Speaker 1 (03:36:29):
I want to get vaccine for everything.

Speaker 19 (03:36:30):
It's like in dand we're like, oh, do you want
protection from fire, and you're like, yeah, I want protection
from fire.

Speaker 1 (03:36:35):
Rocks, give me a lined vaccine. I want it. Wait,
what is that.

Speaker 11 (03:36:42):
Locked rocking jazz, rocking jazz? Bot sorry, locked rocking jazz,
rocking jazz, Bob.

Speaker 1 (03:36:58):
By God? Is that Meal Wong some music? Yes it is.
It is tariff talk. We have a brief tariff talk.
So tariff refunds are continuing after the Supreme Court overruled
the so called Liberation Day tariffs. But the question remains,
who are these refunds actually going to. I'm guessing it's

(03:37:18):
all of the consumers, right. No, No, it's corporations. And
I'm gonna say right off the bat that Amazon is
saying it's claiming that some specific consumers will get on funds. No,
if you know they're not like if you if you
believe that I have the nft of a bridge to
sell you like just no, no, they're not.

Speaker 7 (03:37:41):
You don't think Amazon's going to pass off all like
six hundred million dollars to consumers and like an equitable
and terif fashion.

Speaker 1 (03:37:48):
Come on, I just I just I can't. I can't
take this seriously. This is this is one of those
things where you read mainstream journalists talking about this and
it's like, Okay, yes, they have to at face value
quote the Amazon CFO, yeah, and print the just obvious
lie that they are telling. But I don't have to

(03:38:09):
do that. No, absolutely not, They're just lying to you. Now.
In reality, it has been you know, it has been
large corporations who have reaped the over one hundred billion
dollars rewards from the tariff refunds, not consumers, and prices meanwhile,
have stayed high. Who could possibly have guessed that. Now,
this obviously allows corporations to double dip by both receiving

(03:38:32):
their teriff rebate checks from the government will also maintaining
the increased prices nominally caused by the tariffs. This is
because corporations are so called price setters. They do not
as neoclassical economics suggest take prices from some kind of
abstract market or like, you know, the point which occurs
me that is not how prices are set. Prices in

(03:38:54):
reality are set by guys in corporate offices whose job
it is to set the price, and now increasingly it
is sometimes set by you know, AI programs which are
doing effectively the same thing but trying to rip you
off even more. Now, what this means is that while
you do have to take into account consumer sentiment to
some to some extent, right in terms of like, you know,

(03:39:16):
maintaining brand loyalty, once you have an excuse to raise prices, right,
once consumers have been disciplined into accepting higher prices as
the quote unquote result of tariffs, companies can simply leave
prices high without fear of backlash and reap in more profit.
This is also a decent amount of the inflation during
the Biden administration, where there were increased supply chain costs

(03:39:39):
which increased prices, but then those costs never came down
again as supply chain costs decreased a little bit. Because
corporations could simply leave the price sticky and keep like
screwing you over. So the net result of the terrif
Frey funds has been companies leaving prices at the points
they were at already and consumers seeing absolutely none of it.

Speaker 10 (03:39:59):
It.

Speaker 7 (03:39:59):
It's even kind of well, even Amazon is saying that, like,
they're not setting up a system for consumers to like
file for acclaim. Amazon will assess by themselves if individual
consumers deserve a refund and then contact them individually.

Speaker 1 (03:40:14):
Oh, I trust them to do that. That makes sense.
It's incredible, it's incredible. There's a Canadian version of the
song Dulloyd Polozzi, which is down with the Police with
classical Yiddish song. A Canadian guy whose name I'm blanking
on right now wrote a version. If it were One
of the lines is it's about it's about the police,
like killing a guy in custody.

Speaker 19 (03:40:35):
Hey, hey, deloy Polyze means the same thing now as yesterday.

Speaker 1 (03:40:40):
Out of your house is in Yeah. But one of
the lines that is always stuck with me is specifically
the line at first the situation makes the law men
look so filthy, but they investigate themselves and it turns
out they're not guilty, and then that's what's happening here.
They investigate themselves and it turns out they're not guilty.
Who could possibly have expected this? All power to the corporations.

(03:41:02):
Let's let's also that's right. That's right, electrification plus corporate power.

Speaker 7 (03:41:11):
Let's let's go on one more ad break and then
discuss everyone's favorite thing, elections. All right, we are back

(03:41:31):
in Minnesota. Amy Klobashar will likely succeed Mike Walls as
governor of Minnesota, winning the Democratic primary with ninety percent.

Speaker 1 (03:41:41):
Of the vote.

Speaker 7 (03:41:43):
Meanwhile, the Trump endorsed candidate for governor, Mike Lindell, also
known as the my pillow guy, has lost the primary
to Lisa Damouse, the Minnesota House speaker. So Mike ended
up losing with thirty two percent of the vote to
Lisa Demutz forty three percent. This is a legitimate blow

(03:42:05):
to like the power of Trump's endorsement, and you know, obviously,
Mike Lindell's very public figure, while Lisa, you know, is
an actual state politician that voters are somewhat more familiar
with as a real politician and not that guy in
that TV ad who thinks the election is fake. So
this is an interesting referendum in the Republican Party itself

(03:42:28):
on Trump's endorsement power and figures.

Speaker 19 (03:42:31):
Like Mike so kind of basically picking old style Republicans
to new style Republicans.

Speaker 7 (03:42:37):
Yes, like she is like the Minnesota like house speaker,
like of the Citate house like people that they know
who are local where we not as diehard mega at
least compared to Mike Lindell not saying that Lisa Dedmouth
is a good politician, nor Amy Klar right like right,
both of the people in this race I think suck.
But it in looking at like what the the future

(03:43:00):
of the Republican Party might be the fact that Trump's
endorsement here did not result in Mike winning is something
that I find to be a bit interesting. Meanwhile, the
Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren endorsed Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota
Peggy Flanagan.

Speaker 1 (03:43:16):
Who probably a Margaret you think so Peg is usually
a Margaret.

Speaker 7 (03:43:20):
Well, there you go. She won the primary to replace
Democratic Senator Tina Smith, who is stepping down. Flanagan got
fifty nine percent of the vote compared to the APAC
backed Moderate House Representative Angie Craig, who earned thirty nine
point four percent. So basically like a twenty point difference.

(03:43:40):
Ice was one of the main factors in this race,
as a lot of the races are in Minnesota are
being defined in large part by ice. Following metro surge.
Flanagan attacked Craig for voting in support of the Lake
and Riley Act and voting for a resolution thanking Ice. Meanwhile,
Craig attacked Flat again for the post pandemic daycare fraud

(03:44:03):
scandals in Minnesota regarding their state run social services. Peggy
Flanagan has also been very outspoken in support of trans
rights and trans youth.

Speaker 1 (03:44:13):
Yeah, she's She's been firmly outspoken in her support of
trans kids getting gender affirming healthcare and also wearing the
like protect trans Kids like knife shirt. I like when
Margarets don't go in the Thatcher direction. So yeah, that's right.

Speaker 7 (03:44:28):
Had his set is cut so House Representative Angie Craig,
who was running for Senate, is now out of a
job after losing to Peggy and in the race for
her House seat, the former mayor of Lakeville, Matt Little,
who's a progressive running on Medicare for all and regulating
AI data centers, just won the Democratic primary, beating the

(03:44:52):
pro Israel candidate State Senator Matt Klein. This is forty
seven percent to thirty percent. Matt Little also participately in
the community rapid response to Operation Metro Surge. Elanomar also
won the primary for her reelection campaign by over eighty percent.
But for the big election news this week, let's turn
to Wisconsin, where DSA candidate Francesca Hong, who was heavily

(03:45:15):
favored to win in the polls, barely lost in an
upset to establish him back to candidate David Crowley, the
Milwaukee County executive, who was endorsed by this sitting governor
late in the race. And this race was so close.
This is less than four thousand votes, Like I think
it's at three thousand, seven hundred some votes right now.

(03:45:36):
That's the difference. It's point five percentage point difference. This
was an incredibly close race. As much as the polls
were wrong about this race in some ways, polls did
have support for Hong about right around forty percent. Some
polls maybe had her overperforming by like two to six percent.

(03:45:57):
But the main thing that polling did not account for
was the electorate getting in behind Crowley late into the
race to edge out Hong polling had Crowley at about
twenty two percent, and he ended up winning with just
over forty percent. Now, this polling was also from at
least a week or more before the election, and as

(03:46:19):
we'll discuss in a bit, things can change pretty late
in the.

Speaker 1 (03:46:22):
Game in some of these elections.

Speaker 7 (03:46:24):
Now, the turnout was also much higher than expected, over
eight hundred thousand votes, nearing like presidential primary levels. So
like Hong got a lot of votes, just she needed
four thousand more to win the election. I think the
way mainstream media is gonna be talking about this race
will be somewhat frustrating. The Politico headline right now is

(03:46:46):
quote the far left hits a wall, which is interesting
framing because last week their headline following Abdul al Sa'id's
victory was quote, Progressives didn't get the big election night
they wanted, meaning Abdul did not win by as big
of a margin as what progressives were expecting. And so

(03:47:07):
this is actually bad for progressives. So whether or not
you win, or whether or not you lose, it's actually
bad for progressives. Right that is, that is the line
that media is gonna take regarding this race. And again,
this race was very close. Hong lost by less than
four thousand votes and did pretty well in some rural counties.
These results come down to campaign strategies. Is not a

(03:47:28):
massive referendum on like DSA politics, and like this race
was a stacked roster. There were seven people on the ballot.
Over one hundred and fifty thousand votes were for other
candidates besides Hong and Crowley, many of whom suspended their campaigns.
And there's no rank choice voting in this state. And
oddly enough, Crowley himself suspended his campaign in early July

(03:47:54):
before two other moderate candidates dropped out of the race
for various reasons, and so then crowd got back into
the race with consolidated support from the party establishment. Though
Crowley might not like that term establishment.

Speaker 14 (03:48:10):
Here's amternal federal who the establishment is?

Speaker 5 (03:48:14):
Right?

Speaker 14 (03:48:14):
I think that when we talk about the establishment, I
don't know who that is. I'm a kid that grew
up in five three two little six ZIPC. My parents
was drug addicts and suffered from mental health. I would
work extremely hard to be where I am today, and
so when people try to call me the establishment, I
look at that as a slur, particularly as an African American.

Speaker 7 (03:48:32):
Candidate Hong was also wildly outspent, like many of these
DSA or left populist races. She did end up spending
two hundred and thirty five thousand dollars on digital and
streaming ads, but she spent zero dollars on traditional TV ads,
and an outside group also spent about two hundred and

(03:48:54):
twenty thousand dollars in ads for Hong, but these ads
were also digital. There was there was no TV ads
for Hong in this race. Meanwhile, to quote Politico quote,
two outside groups backing late re entryant David Crowley spent
a combined three point three million, mostly on TV, while
the Milwaukee County executive's own campaign spent nearly nine hundred thousand, unquote.

(03:49:19):
So one of the takeaways from this race is that
maybe you should spend money on some TV ads at
least now. Hong's campaign was not, you know, flush in cash,
but TV ads might be needed to edge out a
bit more support in rural areas where throughout election I
Crowley kept building a lead little by little, and like

(03:49:41):
I was watching Karnaki's stream last night and that was
the main way Crowley.

Speaker 1 (03:49:47):
Edged out a lead.

Speaker 7 (03:49:48):
Is that basically every ten minutes he would win like,
you know, twenty votes in some rural county and then
you know, fifty votes in another, and this slowly built
up to you know, hundreds and then thousands of votes
in these little small counties. Now, Hong also did win
some rural counties, specifically in the northern part of the state,
and also a few rural counties in like the center
of the state as well. And the fact that Hong

(03:50:11):
did so well with no tv ads shows how good
the DSA ground game was. This was a four thousand
vote difference with no tv ads, and she did very well.
She just didn't do well enough. So maybe as good
as the ground game is, it might not be good
enough alone. Now, the other sort of thing I'm seeing
people talk about is that maybe a stronger base turnout

(03:50:34):
could across this four thousand vote gap, right, and it's
specifically Madison and in Green Bay, where she was expected
to do a little bit better than what she did.
And what if something like you know, Bernie Sanders sort
of AOC endorsement rally have helped mobilize in extra few
thousand votes in these areas where her kind of base
is concentrated no AOC and Bernie have said that for
the cycle, they're mostly focusing on congressional races, which.

Speaker 1 (03:50:56):
Is why they did not get involved in this governor's race.

Speaker 7 (03:51:00):
But it is definitely worth pointing out that Hong did
not do as well with college educated voters as other
DSA candidates have in recent past, or someone like el said.
She still won college voters, but not by like sort
of massive margins that you're seeing in other races. And
as I mentioned before, a lot of this race shifted

(03:51:20):
pretty pretty late when the final weeks of the primary
were spent arguing about quote unquote electability, and this was
a joint effort from both the media, from news media
and the Democratic establishment to question whether Hong is electable,
if she'll be able to beat the Republican in the general,

(03:51:41):
or will her like extreme views and old tweets alienate voters.
Here is the sitting.

Speaker 20 (03:51:47):
Governor Wisconsin, Governor Tony Evers today wading into the governor's
race as he was asked about Democratic front runner Francesca Hong, specifically,
can she beat Republican Tom Tiffany.

Speaker 11 (03:52:00):
A tough point.

Speaker 16 (03:52:00):
She has spent her entire campaign dealing with not with
the issues, but what's on the Twitter. And I just
find that that's not a good way to beat Tom Tiffany.

Speaker 7 (03:52:15):
In TV news and online, there's a lot of questions
about her previous stances on abolishing police and outlets like
Fox News and also on social media. They circulated an
old clip from twenty twenty one, when she started serving
in the State Assembly, talking about being concerned about her
son's quote unquote proximity to whiteness. Here's a former Biden

(03:52:37):
admin official, the chief of staff to the White House
Press Office and press advisor, discussing Hong on the morning
of the election.

Speaker 1 (03:52:44):
She has no.

Speaker 21 (03:52:45):
Talent, she has no charisma. Her ideas if a toddler
said them out loud, would get put in time out.
She's not a real person. She's actually, in my opinion,
deeply unsettled, and she should really work through in therapy
some of her own beliefs. And I cannot believe that
we might be on the cusp of having to lift
up this person who's undeserving of a seat in Congress.

Speaker 1 (03:53:06):
That's pretty wild.

Speaker 7 (03:53:07):
Also pretty wild because quote unquote undeserving for a seat
in Congress. Hong was not running for Congress. She was
running for the governor of Wisconsin. But anyway, you know,
much of the news coverage of the campaign during during
the final week and a week and a half of
the race, was spent talking about this stuff, and specifically

(03:53:28):
talking about old tweets about quote unquote canceling Thanksgiving and
how Hong, who used to work in the restaurant industry,
just doesn't really like holidays. And I think the way
that this really dominated the race and she was, you know,
bombarding with a lot of questions by this kind of
demonstrated how important message discipline is in running these races.
And you do not need to answer stupid questions flatly,

(03:53:51):
but you can rather use that as as a way
to promote or spread your campaign message saying like, no,
my biggest concern and as governor, is whether families will
be able to afford to put food on the table
and eat together no matter what holidays that they celebrate.
That would be message discipline, right That is that is
something that Zoron did very well when campaigning.

Speaker 1 (03:54:11):
And the other thing I've kind of seen.

Speaker 7 (03:54:13):
These past few weeks is a lot of these DSA
candidates get asked about DSA's new platform Workers Deserve More,
which we've discussed from the show, which is neither like
a minimum nor a maximum platform. It has a lot
of like immediate term things that are very very possible,
like in the short term that people you know should
be collectively rallying around and pushing for. But it also

(03:54:34):
has a lot of like long term goals that the
platform's own prologue admits like won't be possible under our
current system and would require like a complete overhaul of society.
But the platform itself doesn't distinguish between its own like
actual minimum and maximum proposals. All of the actual proposals
are like in the same section, and I think this

(03:54:55):
is in some ways opened up attacks from news media uses,
especially host news media.

Speaker 1 (03:55:01):
This is both a good thing or a bad.

Speaker 7 (03:55:02):
Thing, right, You could interpret the platform being structured the
way it is as a way to kind of help
keep DSA or some of these like some of these
ideas from sliding over to the right, and having all
these proposals together, it does open the Overton window on
a lot of like legitimately radical ideas, where you know,
now the public is debating things like abolishing the Senate
and the Electoral College, drafting a new constitution, you know,

(03:55:25):
public ownership with the largest corporations and essential industries. But
the way this platform is structured opens candidates up to
attack from you know, media journalists who do not have
you know, the best interests of these candidates at heart,
where they're being grilled about a lot of things that
they themselves are not running on. So instead of being
asked about you know, raising the minimum wage, but ending jerrymandering,

(03:55:48):
you know, ice, healthcare, childcare, data centers, whatever, they're instead
being asked about other you know, maximum proposals in the
DSA platform. And again I'm not saying this is necessarily
a bad thing. I think a skilled speaker can navigate
this and defend their own positions without throwing DSA under
the bus. But this is a sort of trend that

(03:56:09):
I am noticing. I think specifically Oliver Larkin and Florida
has handled this really really well. And Chris rab who
won the primary in Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, has also handled
questioning on this really really well. And I think Hong
herself was getting better at this towards the end. To close,
I want to play this short clip of Hong on

(03:56:30):
Fox News the Morning of the election.

Speaker 9 (03:56:33):
Our voters who fear that democratic socialism could turn into communism,
what would you want them to know?

Speaker 15 (03:56:41):
No, this is a state where we still have a
two thirty three tip minimum wage and seven five seven
tive minimum wage. I think it's going to be pretty
hard to turn that into socialism soon. But what we
can do with this campaign is make sure that we're
fighting for the policies that we're class people first, who
we're fighting for twenty dollars in one range.

Speaker 7 (03:57:05):
Interesting the way the anchor is there at the end,
just to have no idea how to react, I think
that that is really telling.

Speaker 19 (03:57:13):
I mean, there's just a fundamental generational divide between people
who are like that person said socialism that should completely
end their political career, which, if you're over the age
of about forty, is just like an axiom. Yes, if
you're an American and you said the word socialism, you're
not fit, you don't belong here, And if you're under forty,
you're like, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 1 (03:57:33):
I don't know.

Speaker 7 (03:57:33):
Yeah, I can't afford to live at all. Yeah, so
maybe I'll support politicians or policies that might might make
my life slightly better. Yeah, anyway, that is Wisconsin. Let's
close with Robert and a very funny story.

Speaker 2 (03:57:52):
Okay, so onto my main story for this week, which
obviously is not really my story, but I thought it
was the funniest thing I read this week, so you
guys about it. So, on July eighth, twenty twenty six,
Donald Trump was in Ankara, Turkey, with a bunch of
his top aids and cabinet people, as well as his
normal press Corps retainers. He was there for a NATO summit,
and overnight on the seventh, I believe he made the

(03:58:13):
decision to have US forces restart their strikes against Iran.
After I think this is like the fourth or the fifth,
maybe the seventh breakdown in negotiations we've had. I honestly
have lost track of how many times that has happened.
But we started doing strikes again overnight right so after
that decision was made, but before Trump decamped from Turkey.
Late on the eighth, CBS News reports that US intelligence

(03:58:35):
detected a quote credible plot to fire a missile at
Air Force One. Now, for clarity, the Air Force one
that the President flew to Ankara is what I'm going
to call Air Force one. Two, because it's the Katari
Air Force one that replaced the real air Force one
that Trump was given as a gift by a four
hundred million dollar gift by Cutter, Right, and this is

(03:58:57):
legally distinct from a bribe. I need to specify that,
and I need to note we will be talking about
a lot of Air Forces one in this episode. Well,
we'll be talking about three specifically, because.

Speaker 1 (03:59:08):
Like technically, any plane the president is honest supposed to
be air Force one.

Speaker 3 (03:59:12):
Yes, that said, it says supposed to.

Speaker 2 (03:59:15):
They're also supposed to like change the transponder, but they
don't do that in situations like we're about to talk
about where there's like a threat. Right, Yeah, So I
should talk a little bit about the Katari Air Force one,
which I'm calling air Force one two. Yeah, I said
it was a four hundred million dollar gift that's legally
distinct from a bribe, and it was. But because all
they had done was make a really nice plane, air
Force one is a lot more than a really nice plane.

(03:59:36):
Air Force one is presumably, I everyone who is an
expert on plane says about the hardest plane to kill
in the world, right, because it's air Force one. The
Katari Air Force one is not that naturally that hard, right,
because it can't be. So they spent months and months
and months in seven hundred and fifty million dollars retrofitting

(03:59:56):
the Katari plane to ensure that it had the proper
security features to transport and protect the president.

Speaker 3 (04:00:01):
Now, even though.

Speaker 2 (04:00:03):
I just said that that seven hundred and fifty million
dollars still did not bring this plane up as far
as I'm aware, it didn't even bring it particularly close
to what the actual Air Force one is capable of.
It does not have the whole suite of electronic countermeasures
and stuff that the real Air Force one has. It's
still not as secure. I also want to read one
other note from Aviation Source News about the Katari Air
Force one plans to transfer the jet to the Trump

(04:00:24):
Presidential Library Foundation rather than extend used to the next
president after his term.

Speaker 3 (04:00:28):
Add to the controversy.

Speaker 7 (04:00:29):
It's yes, That's one of the most insane parts of
the Cutter jet is that it's technically not a personal
gift to Trump because it's a property on the government,
and yet after he leaves office it will be transferred
to his library foundation.

Speaker 3 (04:00:43):
It's keeping that.

Speaker 1 (04:00:43):
Fucker it's insane, which he's putt nearly a.

Speaker 2 (04:00:47):
Billion dollars of public money into anyway. So the plane
that he flew to Ankara, the Secret Services immediately like, well,
now that there is a credible threat, we cannot have
him fly out on the Katari Air Force one because
it doesn't have the counter.

Speaker 3 (04:01:00):
It would need.

Speaker 2 (04:01:01):
So at the last moment on the eighth, mister Trump
announced that, for old time's sake, I think was very
close to his exact statement, He's going to be flying
home from a car on the old Air Force one,
which we'll call air Force one one. Right, So he
says he's going to fly home on this thing, and
to all as far as everyone is aware, on the
eighth he does, right. He goes, takes a whatever kind

(04:01:23):
of ride out to air Force one. He's photographed at
the door of Air Force one. He enters air Force
one one, and then Air Force one one takes off
with all of the press people and a bunch of Trump.

Speaker 3 (04:01:33):
Staffers on it. Now, what we didn't know then but
we know now is.

Speaker 2 (04:01:37):
That Trump was not on Air Force one one after
it took off, even though he got on the plane,
because the day before we sat.

Speaker 3 (04:01:45):
Down to record this episode of ED.

Speaker 2 (04:01:47):
The Washington Post published one of the funnier investigations of
the second Trump era. Its title is Contradicting public statements
Trump took secret flight from Turkey and Mediterranean threat. Now
CBS and The New York Times had previously reported that
Trump boarded the old Air Force One due to this threat.
That was a lie. In reality, the Secret Service had
Trump board the old Air Force One on camera and

(04:02:09):
then put all of the normal people who would be
on it and then scent it on its way without
Trump as a decoy in case the Iranians wanted to
turn the shoot it down. Any major administration visit to
a summit like they held in Ankara is going to
include not just Air Force One, but a couple of
other Air Force marked passenger jets, which are all suitable
for hosting cabinet officials and other high ranking members of

(04:02:30):
the government, but are also there for another reason in
case the President needed to make a discrete escape on
a different plane.

Speaker 3 (04:02:37):
This is not the only.

Speaker 2 (04:02:38):
Time the President has not been on Air Force One
when people have thought he was right. The White House
doesn't have a history of lying to people about this.
It's more than obfuscated kind of in the moment, like
they did with Busher, they'll just say, we're not telling
you where the fucking president is because shit's happening right now.
So the fact that they did an elaborate lie and
sent Air Force one into the sky full of people
as like a decoy for an Iranian missile is pretty new.

Speaker 3 (04:03:01):
And fucked up. But the fact that the Secret Service
was like, we probably shouldn't.

Speaker 2 (04:03:04):
Send him out on any of the obvious Air Force
ones is not really all that like weird of a moment.

Speaker 3 (04:03:10):
What is weird is how they did it right.

Speaker 2 (04:03:13):
And I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post and Ankara
Trump boarded the old Air Force one jumbo jet in
view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later
to a smaller plane and Air Force C thirty two
a via an airport catering truck you typically used to
load meals and other supplies brief flight. According to the
US official corroborating material reviewed by the Post, that made
Air Force one a decoy with media and some White

(04:03:34):
House staff aboard the official set, and the article goes
into a hysterical amount of deal. They're combing through all
of the pictures of the airport on that day, and
they show the catering truck when Trump would have been
on it. You can see that in the article, Like
it just looks like a catering truck on a plane.

Speaker 3 (04:03:50):
But it's really funny to know that he's just squatting
him there.

Speaker 1 (04:03:54):
Unfortunately, he's gotta be having the best time of his
life doing this, right, Like he's just like, I bet.

Speaker 3 (04:03:59):
It was really fun, but it was super fun and
he felt like a spy.

Speaker 7 (04:04:02):
I know.

Speaker 22 (04:04:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's a bummer god, but it is really
funny because like there's a lot that's funny of this
right now, and I can't, to be fair, I can't
imagine any member of the White House Press Corps would
be surprised at.

Speaker 2 (04:04:15):
The President using them as a decoy. In fact, before
it was revealed that Trump had left the original Air
Force one or Air Force one one for what I
guess we'll call Air Force one three, this happened. Quote
asked why reporters had been instructed to lower the window
shades on the plane in Turkey, Trump said that it
was because you're probably on a dangerous flight because of
the sleeves bags we.

Speaker 3 (04:04:33):
Have to deal with.

Speaker 2 (04:04:34):
Trump said that he has a threat all the time
against his life and that he is number one on
Iran's list. But if I go, you go right, Trump
suggested to reporters, Perhaps someday you want to change perfections.

Speaker 1 (04:04:45):
Christ He's really funny sometimes.

Speaker 3 (04:04:48):
I'm sorry, guys.

Speaker 7 (04:04:49):
It does feel like an eighties movie slake side plot.

Speaker 3 (04:04:52):
It really does. It really does.

Speaker 1 (04:04:56):
Now.

Speaker 2 (04:04:56):
The people I'd imagine might be kind of hurt by
this are the staff members, like the member of Trump's
White House who got chosen to fly on the Human
Shield flight without being told, rather than being rerouted to
Air Force one to three where the boss was flying,
because not all of them were. Pete Hegseth was on
Air Force one three with Trump right, he got rerouted
to the real one. But a bunch of Trump's people

(04:05:16):
just found out today that he put them on the
death flight to see if a missile with him.

Speaker 3 (04:05:21):
And I think that's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (04:05:25):
Anyway.

Speaker 3 (04:05:25):
That's what I.

Speaker 1 (04:05:26):
Got, Margaret.

Speaker 7 (04:05:28):
Where can people listen to more cool people doing cool
stuff like flock cameras?

Speaker 19 (04:05:35):
Well, you can listen to cool people who did cool stuff,
which is usually about history, But lately, I've been doing
a lot of history that sometimes happened a week or
so ago, and it's on this very network or even
in this very feed. You can listen to cools on
Media book Club, where I read a different story every
week to you.

Speaker 7 (04:05:56):
Also, James's new show Natural Causes coming out soon.

Speaker 1 (04:05:59):
Put a trendscoll on your We reported the news, We
reported the news.

Speaker 2 (04:06:09):
Hey, We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat Death of the Universe.

Speaker 23 (04:06:15):
It could happen here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
now find sources where it could happen here listed directly
in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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