Rebecca Jones on the Power Dynamics of Politics

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Jack Hopkins Show podcast, where
stories about the power of focusand resilience are revealed by
the people who live thosestories and now the host of the
Jack Hopkins Show podcast, jackHopkins.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
So, rebecca Jones, I am so glad to have you back on,
and I must say I think part ofthat is that we are so much
alike.

Speaker 3 (00:33):
I'm glad to disagree with you.
I actually I said yesterday tomy husband I was like you know
what I feel like he's the maleversion of me if I stuck with
this for a few more years.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
Right.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
Because we always seem to be on the same page.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Yeah, yeah, and we both know what it's like to make
really tight friends with somepeople and then have other
people who run away as fast asthey can because they don't want
to be friends.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yeah, at-risk-averse people is quite common in the
Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Yeah, yeah, that's been.
I think I talked about that alittle bit yesterday with
Anthony Scaramucci.
I said, you know, as a formerRepublican coming to this party,
that's been.
My biggest complaint is what doyou have to do to get the party
as a whole, and particularlyleadership, to fight, to fight,

(01:29):
to roll up their sleeves andduke it out?

Speaker 3 (01:32):
Well, there's more sinister theories about that.
You know, of course, that theydon't really want to to begin
with.
They're satisfied with thestatus quo.
They just need to this is goingto sound very awful be more
successful in herding sheep tovote for them so they can
maintain that status quo.
But you know, I know a lot ofpeople in democratic politics

(01:55):
and that might be a lot of them,but it's not all of them and
there are enough people inprominent positions who aren't
like that to still leave mebeing a member of the party.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Sure, sure, I understand what you mean here.
A while back and I guess Ishouldn't even really bring it
up because I can't remember whatevent it was, but I think you
may know, there was some type ofin honor of somebody type event
where Chuck Schumer was inattendance and Donald Trump was

(02:32):
speaking, and it's been within,I don't know, the last three or
four months.

Speaker 3 (02:37):
I think it was the Catholic fundraiser.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, I think it was too.
I think it was, and, to be fair, there were people from both
parties there, yeah, and whatstood out to me, though, chuck
schumer was seated to trump'sleft, kind of somewhere on the
front, and when, when donald wasreally digging in, kind of

(03:00):
making some jokes about someissues that are pretty sensitive
to the Democratic Party.
He was laughing.
Yeah, he was laughing.
Now I brought that up at thetime and some of his defenders
rushed out and said oh, you knowhe was just.

(03:21):
But any time I hear that word,just my ears perk up.
Yes, you're right, you're right.

Speaker 3 (03:28):
Is it really possible ?
You know, to get through thisnight I'm going to need some
hard liquor.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
And by that point.

Speaker 3 (03:33):
I'm like who cares?

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Right, right.
Yeah, it's one of those things.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
I was at a very private event with Chuck after,
after Harris had become thenominee and there was a lot of
debate about the vicepresidential nominee.
First of all, that the personthat brought me to this thing is
a very important person andthey could have as soon as

(03:59):
because they all know who I wasand recognize me immediately
they could have said you know, Idon't think this is an
appropriate conversation to havearound somebody like that, and
I would have not been offended.
I'd be like, yes, I'm somewhatfamous, actually pretty much
exclusively famous for notkeeping my mouth shut, so that
would be fair.
But they decided to have thisconversation in front of me

(04:21):
anyways, and there was a lot ofdrinking.
Drinking, first of all that wasone of the first things I
learned in politics is everybodyis drunk all the time.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Uh, I may have, uh, walked away with that one, but
um go to a flat.

Speaker 3 (04:37):
It's friday night it is, and I've had a really long
day, but um, they were.
They were talking about timWaltz as the VP pick and this
was, was it?
It was like a week before itwas announced, maybe five days.
Oh my God, do you know how hardit was.
I didn't burst until late thenight before I posted a Harris

(04:58):
Waltz like T-shirt thing thatone of the graphic designers,
who was, you know, involved withmaking sure that they had the
stuff ready to go for sale,because obviously they wanted
that to hit the shelf the minutethey announced it.
So you bet those people had toknow.
And, uh, luckily I only did iton like threads, so nobody
really noticed.
Or maybe they thought I wasbeing hopeful.

(05:19):
Um, I thought I was gonna be onthe shit list after that, like
for real on the shit list, and Igot invited to something else
this week and I was like I don'tknow what I was.
Like I didn't think ChuckSchumer cares about social media
or reads it, because I'm prettyhard ass on him yeah.
You know, I think we've readsome of the things I said I need

(05:40):
to be invited to these things,but it's a little transactional
with these people.
It's really unfortunate.
But the higher up you go, it'sall about what's a resource we
can keep close enough to ourcircle so they feel included,

(06:01):
but not so close that they couldscrew something up just in case
we need them.
And I felt like that's howmyself and a lot of other people
I think think that areprogressive influencers on my
level feel sometimes.
Yeah, it's just verydisingenuous.
And that's what I felt when Iwatched the Laughing during the
Catholic thing.
I was like ultimately, this isall just a game.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
Right.

Speaker 3 (06:16):
But this is our real life.

Speaker 2 (06:18):
Right, I have to agree, I was pissed off.
I was like, look, you know what, out here, these are black and
white issues for us, even theones that have a gray area.
Because of the voting system,the way that works, we think in
terms of black and white, interms of pick a side right, and

(06:41):
so when we see people operatingin the gray area that we
sometimes see, pretending likethey are black and white or
opposite one another, it's, it's, it's not confusing to to you
and I, I guess in the sense thatwe know what's going on yes,
yes yeah, they're sitting theretelling us that this election is

(07:03):
the end of the world foramerica.

Speaker 3 (07:05):
And you know, we, we, us, the people, have to fight
like hell.
We've got to give up all ourmoney to these people and now.
But you're expecting all of usto treat it this way and that's

(07:27):
not being conveyed.
You know it's, it's, there'ssomething lost in translation,
and I think it's just that a lotof normal people don't think
this is a game yeah and theydon't understand that.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
That's how those types of people exist I agree
with you in that, an electedleader on that level.
Look, if you are going to tellme, if you're going to give me
some version of it's the end ofthe world, then it better be the
end of the world.
When you are telling me thatdon't, don't.
Later let me see you in a frameof reference or context where

(08:02):
you're going.
Oh you, you know it's, it's.
It's not that big a deal.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
Be consistent, like Biden immediately inviting Trump
and being all warm and cozy.
Everyone's like you told usthis guy was going to destroy
the United States and he wasgoing to round people up into
camps and that he was the mostevil, awful person in the world.
And then you're like, let'sjust come by, it's all fun and

(08:29):
games, you know it'll be cool.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
Yeah, that's even like nobody's gonna trust this
ever again, like we may know Iyou know and don't get me wrong
and and I think that the same istrue of you, although I'll let
you speak to that.
Look, I love joe biden, I, Ilove joe b, but, as you said, if
you are going understand you,the citizens, your fears and

(08:50):
concerns, but then, because oftradition and and protocol, um a

(09:12):
day after the election, you'relike hey, buddy, come on over,
let's time.

Speaker 3 (09:17):
Yeah, like I remember that was like the tweet is.
You know, we talked about thefuture of our country and
they're both smiling and it'sjust.
It's like you had people readyto go to jail.
That's what it took to stopthis guy, and then it's all cool
once it's done.
And yeah, it was.
The Democrats wanted to make apoint that this is how a

(09:38):
transition is supposed to work,not like the last time, to kind
of reestablish what theprecedent is, and I get the
historical importance of that.
Like years from now, that willbe very important, but right now
I hate to use this word becauseit's one of the worst words
that I think you can accuse aperson being of Disloyalty.

(09:59):
That's just how it feels likeTo everything that we stood for,
not like our party, which ishaving a multiple identity
crisis across the board, um, butto the belief that democracy
was sacred and that it had to beprotected.
I mean, shit, I didn't go toprison just for fascism to.

(10:20):
Or.
I didn't go to prison, I'msorry, I didn't go to jail and
face going to prison just forfascism to take over the whole
fucking country.
And I mean, half the peopleappointed are from florida and
you know, it's like I'm sittingthere like, oh god, who that
wants me dead or in jail isgoing to be appointed to a
cabinet position today right um,and you know the santas really,

(10:42):
really wants to to have hisname in there and it's kind of
sad and desperate if you knowDeSantis really, really wants to
have his name in there and it'skind of sad and desperate if
you know the backstory behindthat.
But it's just like what Shitguys.
I think I really didn't want tojail for this shit.
I was ready to go to prison.
I didn't flee like Ed Snowdenor Julian Assange God bless his
soul.
I stayed here to fight becauseit was important and I was

(11:05):
willing to do that.
And yet nobody here is willingto.
I mean because you know theyhave shit.
You know they have plenty.
If they wanted to, they coulddo Right, but they just don't
want to.
They're cowards.

Speaker 2 (11:21):
Right, there's a book actually that's referenced
quite a bit.
I don't own the book, I alwaysforget, I always say I'm going
to buy it, but I think the titleof the book is Three Felonies a
Day and it essentially waswritten by an attorney, I
believe, who was saying look, ifsomebody wants you bad enough,

(11:46):
the average American commitsthree felonies a day, three
felonies a week, whatever.
But yeah, frequently, andentering into the time frame
that we are about to findourselves in, that is a little
spooky, you know.

Speaker 3 (12:02):
Well, I don't know if we commit that many, because
Florida really, really, reallywanted to get me and I walked
out scot-free no convictions, noguilty pleas.
I managed to get my ass out ofthere, but I had a lot of
institutional support, academicsupport, professional
organization support, a lot ofpublic support that most people

(12:25):
in that situation don't have andthat definitely played a part.
But there was a highergovernment by the time all of
that started to happen, becauseTrump was president when I was
raided.
But by the time that I wasarrested it was three days
before Biden was inaugurated andactually on my drive home was

(12:46):
Inauguration Day and it was the.
I actually think I posted aboutthis because it was so strange
is that when I left you know wemoved there January 6 to DC or
5th, which was, I thought thisplace was like a war zone.
Because of that we were fourmiles from the White House.
It was crazy.
I left to go to jail that wewere four miles from the white

(13:07):
house.
It was crazy.
I left to go to jail in florida.
Um, stayed I.
I was sick with coven, so Iwent to jail for one night.
They let me go.
I was in hiding under a fakename in a hotel, sick, passed
out on the floor, I thought Iwas gonna die.
But on my drive back home to mynew home in dc, biden was being
sworn in and I realized thatsomething is changing and there

(13:29):
was someone that I could go toif this really became a wrong
hand, and I think that's part ofthe reason why they never made
my case a federal case.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
I was going to ask you.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
I or anybody like that, because as long as the
state controlled it, bidencouldn't pardon me for state
crime.
Um, the very first thing thathe signed as president, the very
first thing, was the covet 19whistleblower protection act.
James rathke flat out told mehe wrote that for me and I was
like, oh, that's great, itwouldn't help me.
But now that I just got back,from jail, but thank god um, but

(14:04):
you know, know, I had hope that, you know, if there were other
people like me in states likeFlorida, there was somewhere
they could go, and I think thatcomfort has been just kind of
evaporated overnight and Floridahas become America and that's,
frankly, the scariest thing ofall is that all the things that

(14:25):
were tested and tried in Floridayou know, this classic fascist
playbook are now beingimplemented everywhere.
I mean, project 2025 is likethe DeSantis Federalist playbook
and we're going to have to liveunder that for at least four
years Hopefully only four.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Right, hopefully only four.
Yeah, under that for at leastfour years.
Hopefully only four.
Right, hopefully only four.
Yeah, I'm sure no doubt that atthe time of your at the raid or
the arrest or or even servingtime in jail, the thought has
had to have crossed your mind.
This could have been sodifferent if trump would have
been re-elected, in terms of howit applied to you.
Do you think you would havebeen?

(15:04):
Maybe they would have looked atyour original charges
differently.

Speaker 3 (15:09):
Yeah, I think they would have, because I knew some
people in the Biden admin frommy work that I had done in 2020.
Like, I knew the guy who wasappointed to head the White
House COVID data task force,andy Slavitt, and other people
that I had enough connectionwith and I was being like you
know, this is what Biden ran forwas doing right by COVID and

(15:31):
the first bill he signed.
And then yet, because that allhappened right before he was
sworn in right after theelection, that was the thing
people were talking about.
It would have been really badoptics to ignore the situation I
was in.
But, yeah, if it was Trump, Idon't know.
Well, I mostly stayed off thatguy's radar for a good reason, I

(15:52):
don't know, I don't own theshit list of these very powerful
men.
It just keeps happening, but,yeah, I wouldn't have felt like
there was a potential you knowsavior out there for me
somewhere, right and that's abig deal.

Speaker 2 (16:09):
That is a big deal to um to, to feel like somebody's
got your back, somebody on alevel that, whether they did or
not, at least hood kind of comein and say you know what this is
injustice, we're going to dosomething here, just like that
was my, we moved to this areaspecifically because we were our

(16:33):
first house here was in, I meansprinting distance to like six
different consulates that do nothave extradition.

Speaker 3 (16:43):
We're like, okay, you know, like zimbabwe's right
there and we have all theseother ones over here.
And if we really really had to,you know, if the santa sent
stormtroopers up from florida,which he threatened to do when I
moved here, um, they threatenedto come to my house again and
take me.
Uh, I hit the road and was like, well, guess what?
I'm on my way to jail.
So you can't do that andthere's no purpose in doing that

(17:04):
.
Um, we could literally pick upa bag and just run somewhere
safe.
Yeah, and um, I'd certainlyknow that.
Biden wouldn't have tried toextradite me for any of those
things you know.
Um, trump hates to Santa.
So I'm not sure that he wouldhave, but you never know.
I and he would have, but younever know.
I mean this is all about favors.

Speaker 2 (17:26):
That's the first thing that came to mind.
I don't know.
I saw a blurb the other daythat potentially Trump was
considering DeSantis forsomething and my first thought
is that'll never happen becausehe would be taking too much of
the spotlight away from Donald.
Or if it does happen, it'll beso short-lived just because of

(17:47):
the conflict between the two ofthem.
I would guess that kind ofmirrors your thoughts on it.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
DeSantis thinks that he is divine government and that
he's entitled and appointed byGod to go to these high places,
and Trump doesn't believe in Godat all.
So there's a fundamentaldifference to the two right off
the bat.
And he thinks DeSantis is ajoke and he hit DeSantis really

(18:18):
hard during the primary and Igot to know some of Trump's
people.
I think I might have actuallyspilled the beans about that on
your show last time.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
I think you did, maybe?
Yeah, and, by the way, foranybody watching, rebecca and I
did a prior episode of the JackHopkins show, so if you haven't
seen it, be sure to go watchthat.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yeah, and so you know , I had some friends who told me
, like how could you do that?
Like how could you work withthose people?
How could you help those people?
Was like I'm not helping them,I'm hurting him right.
And you know, if florida hadrisen up and like gotten the
pitchforks and ddd this guy wayback when I wouldn't have to be

(19:03):
fighting this monster, what Ifeel like on my own, I wouldn't
be shouting into an echo chamberof people who already know all
of this and won't changeanybody's mind.
I got Donald Trump to use mywords against the Santas and,
yeah, I had somebody recently Igot into a big fight with over

(19:24):
Israel-Gazaaza stuff and hethrew that in my face and I was
like wow, that's pretty fuckedup.
I was like you better thananybody, um, understand why I
did that.
You were the first person Itold that I did that.
Yeah, and because I disagreewith you about a genocide, um,
you're gonna try to make me feellike a bad guy, as if I'm

(19:44):
aligned with trump.
So this is strange, but it was.
But you know, I think part ofand that kind of encompasses
what I hate about democrats isthey're cowards.
You know, we won't go intospaces that we don't feel safe,
like grant stern I don't know ifyou know him- yes, I had him on
here a while back, yeah okay, Ilove him to death.
He is one of the most insightfulpeople I've ever met in my life

(20:07):
.
Um, you know, I met his familyand everything and he, uh, he
goes on like oan and newsmax,all the freaking time he does,
he really does yes he goesstraight to them and challenges
their perspectives and he's kindof becoming like their token
liberal.
But it's like otherwise wewouldn't have a voice there.

(20:29):
Like if I hadn't gone toTrump's people, what I had to
say would never have reachedhalf the population and we have
to be willing to do those things.
We have to be willing also toinvest in people like you and
not a lot.
Seed this space to theRepublican far right QAnon crazy

(20:50):
people, which has been, sincethe election, one of, like, the
biggest things people have beenpushing.
It's like you have a slate oftalent so deep that you could
invest a hundred million dollarsin it and you get at least like
a hundred different top showsout of it, like yours was one of
the ones I mentioned and, um, Iwas like it's insane that we're

(21:10):
not doing that because we'reafraid.
We're afraid that somebody likejack hopkins will say something
that doesn't align with theparty platform and that there
will be bad names called aboutdemocrats who support you and we
.
We for some reason think that,oh my God, I must stop this.
I must stop funding this.
I must not associate with this.
You know I have to.
We can't have loose cannons.

(21:31):
Right.
He doesn't care about that.
I mean, half the stuff JoeRogan says is liberal or doesn't
make sense, and then sometimeshe's conservative.
It's all over the place.
But they know that at the endof the day he's on their team,
right, and that's the agendathat he will forward in the end.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
the details don't matter as much, but we don't do
that no, we don't, and I thinkone of the things we miss out on
I think anthony and I talkedabout this a little bit
yesterday when we aren't havingthose conversations, we lose out
on a whole bunch of feedbackthat lets us know more than any

(22:11):
amount of campaigningdoor-to-door could ever give us
right.
Because it's in those momentsof disagreement, where where the
emotional stuff comes out,where the the stuff that really
matters, the stuff that peopleare really going to be voting on
, that's when that comes out.
And, man, if you're willing tothrow in the towel on that and

(22:35):
say nope, can't talk to youbecause we might disagree on
something, you're throwing a lotaway, I think.

Speaker 3 (22:42):
Yeah, it was Wednesday.
This is how bad time has gonefor me.
The other thing that I wasinvited to that I said I was
surprised to invite to was liketwo days ago.
It was like forever.
We went over some of the.
It was like a high-end debrieffor political operatives in this
area in Montgomery County,which is one of the most
politically active places in thecountry because half of DC

(23:04):
lives here, which is one of themost politically active places
in the country because half ofdc lives here.
Um, like jamie raskin's, my rep, and you know we just elected,
uh, angela also brooks.
That was a hard fought, youknow, win with a good, good
person and uh, I was just atfirst I was like I can't believe
you guys are still inviting meto shit, but they were showing
some of the, the trends that wehad seen and pretty much since
like 2002 or three, the majority, almost three quarters of the

(23:28):
people in this country, nomatter who is president, think
that our country is moving inthe wrong direction yeah and we
have seen the seesaw of powerexchanged by one or more
branches every single electionsince 2004, every single one and
um.
It's because people are justfrustrated.

(23:49):
And when they're frustratedthey take it out on whoever is
in power, regardless of whetheror not what they say makes sense
.
So like, look, I knowsomething's not working, let's
try something else yes and thatis something that's like I said.
It's like the last 20 years it'sa phenomena, um coincided with
the rise of social media, withthe iraq war, you know, taking

(24:12):
this really kind of publicdownward turn and a lot of other
things.
I mean, hurricane katrina wasabout that time, um, and so it's
just if people are, they'regoing to blame whoever is in
power.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
Oh, I agree.

Speaker 3 (24:26):
And that's not very productive for making change.
No, and I'm going to give you.

Speaker 2 (24:32):
I'm not, you know.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
And so it's how do we tease this out to do something
effective?

Speaker 2 (24:40):
Right, I just had this thought the other day and

(25:02):
I'm no James Carville or anykind of strategist, it's just a
random thought I was having.
But I thought, you know,particularly in this election of
course, hindsight's 20-20, butbecause of the simplicity of
this thing that you just nailed,which is when people are
frustrated, they just take itout on whoever.
It's almost as if we would haveput up a candidate who was so
much unlike what Democrats wouldnormally vote for, but because
of who it was against, theywould have voted for him anyway
that some Republicans would havesaid you know what?

(25:23):
I can actually buy into this.
I wouldn't have voted for himor I wouldn't have voted for her
, because they were just towingthe party line.
But this is radically differentand I think we are so afraid to
break that mold and say youknow what?
We are going to try?
Something different.
It's what people want.

(25:44):
I mean, kamala Harris wassomething different.
It's what people want.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
I mean, Camilla Harris was something different,
you know when she was she wasone of the most progressive.
Her voting record was one ofthe most progressive senators.
during the term that she was inthe Senate A lot of people felt
like she felt pressured from theBiden administration to go
along with policies that she maynot have otherwise agreed with,

(26:05):
because she had to, on one hand, remain loyal as the vice
president, on the other, try tomake herself different, and she
wasn't given enough time forthat.
The guy who was presenting allthis data the other night said
the second that Biden decided torun for reelection.
We were toast.
The second that he said I'mrunning for reelection.
It was the second that he thathe said I'm running for
reelection.
It was over, we were nevergonna win.

(26:27):
And, uh, if he had done whateverybody kind of thought he was
gonna do when we elected himthe first time, it'd be a one
term.
You know, let's fix some shit,stabilize, you know, get the
pulse going back normally, andthen we'll explore new avenues.
Then it would have beencompletely different.
Because something we didn't seedemocrats talk about was that

(26:49):
trump was already president once.
We should have been talkingabout what he did when he was
president the last time he hadthis chance.
He tanked the economy duringcovid, you know he did.
He almost started a war with,you know, iran and all of these
other things.
Instead, we talked so muchabout what he might do that we
didn't associate him with a badperiod of time that everybody

(27:10):
remembers that he already did doyes, it's like he had his
chance to fix shit and hewrecked it and you know buying
his stabilized things.
It's not great, but here is anew democrat with fresh ideas
and they're going to pick up themantle and bring us in a new,
different direction.
And I think for Harris, thatwas her struggle.

(27:31):
She did not have enough of anidentity, separate from Biden,
and not long enough to establishit.

Speaker 2 (27:39):
She was just too, and you took the words right out of
my mouth where I was going withthat, because you are so right.
She was different and, as youalluded to, I think the mistake
was not unleashing her right.
She felt this commitment, thisloyalty to President Biden, not

(27:59):
to harm him, but she'sunderstandable.
Yeah, absolutely Get it.
I get it.
But she's understandable.
Yeah, absolutely Get it, I getit.
But I think it probably playeda role in costing her the
election.
I read an article the other dayand I can't remember it might
have been David Frum, I can'tremember who wrote it, but it
was a great article and ittalked about the moment that

(28:19):
everything shifted and this, ofcourse, is debatable, but it was
a key moment when she was onthe view and asked can she think
of anything she would dodifferent from president biden?
And she said right now, there'snothing I can think of.

Speaker 3 (28:36):
And I agree everybody's frustrated with
their life.
They hear that it's like soyou're not going to try anything
different right, you know thisguy's he's going to come in with
all these new ideas.
You know so well.
It's the what.
Do I have to loose mentality?
Things are shit right now forme and my family.
She's saying she's not going tochange anything.
You know, at least that guy'ssaying I'm going to, you know,

(28:58):
blow it up and rebuild it and alot of people like that idea
even on the left, a lot ofpeople like that idea.
Even on the left, a lot ofpeople like the idea of the
system is broken, blow it up andlet's do something different.
I mean, of course, they've beencompletely bamboozled and the
people that want to blow it upare the same people in charge
right now and they just want torebuild it to be more beneficial

(29:20):
to them.
And then that's where the mediapart comes in, and god knows
that I've said enough how greatand fantastic traditional uh
media outlets have been incovering this kind of
unprecedented, repeatedlyunprecedented um period in
american history.
But yeah, it's.

(29:40):
You can't tell people that theyshould be grateful for what
they have, but so many peopleare struggling.
It's like that is not theanswer.
Someone's like look, I'mworking two jobs.
I mean we got back to I thinkthey said pre-COVID.
Pretty much that's what oureconomy is.
It's like does no one rememberhow shitty that was?
How everybody in the country Ithink it was like 90% of the

(30:02):
country was one you knowunexpected hospital bill or one
expected, you know, car repairbill away from poverty.
That was not a good place formost of America.
Bragging that you got us backto 2019 is not a good thing.
It's not enough.
You know you don't go out andtell people look, it's a lot
better than it was.
It's still not enough.
What are we going to dodifferently?

Speaker 2 (30:27):
and then harris said can't think of anything and it's
like oh, you know, if there'sone thing and I, I I hate to I
guess I don't hate to do itbecause I do it, I dislike that,
I can, can do this and that isis give Donald Trump credit for
anything.
But if there's one thing heexcels at, and there's a quote

(30:49):
long before Donald Trump thathad to do with I think it was
the Sizzler Steakhouse.
I think it might have beensomething somebody said about
them and said we don't sell, wesell the sizzle, we don't sell
the steak right.
So, meaning the commercial, thesteak is on the grill and it's

(31:10):
the anticipation of that steak,that's what they, they sell.
And donald trump frames thingsin such a way that he creates
such an anticipation andexcitement and half of it's at
least, and and the other halfsometimes everybody right, right

(31:31):
he doesn't know what his herefis.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
So you know, it's like, oh, we're right.
We're like, yeah, it's like, doyou choose?

Speaker 2 (31:38):
like yeah, we, we need we need to be able to frame
things.
We need to be able to framethings in a more emotional way.
You know, talking policy justdoesn't resonate with the guy.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
People don't vote for policy anymore.
No, no they don't that ageprobably died with the 24-hour
news cycle?
Yes, or some people say it diedwith Kennedy versus Nixon.
The debate stage that was themoment that policy discussion
died right I don't like to giveinto that, because I think that
the fact that the more educatedyou are, the more likely to be
liberal, is a strength, not aweakness, because it is it also

(32:18):
works the reverse way.
It's not.
It's bimodal, it's not a linearline and so, like you have the
poor people in the country andthe least educated people in the
country, and then you have themiddle class, you have a
Republican and then you have thesmartest.
It's bimodal.
And there's a reason why thepoorest people in the country
vote the same way as the mosteducated people in the country,

(32:39):
and that is because theyunderstand the system yes, and
why it's not working Agreed.
They understand the system yesand why it's not agreed.
So I don't think that we shouldgive up on policy.
I just think we need better.
What's salesman?
and then that sounds reallyreally shitty, no we do, we need
yeah, yeah, we need people whocan make people understand who
actually care.
That's always a benefit.

(33:00):
They legitimately care aboutpeople.
I think you can always kind ofkind of tell when somebody's not
really there.
Like nobody thinks mitchmcconnell gives a shit about
anybody.
He's, he's all about the partyand the power.
Nobody's going to mistake himfor an empath right.
But you know we have a lot ofdemocratic people who fake it

(33:20):
and for me it's easy to readthrough them and their actions
and the things that they votefor.
But you know real people wholive real lives, not online, you
know, not in CEO meetings orinvestor meetings, like on the
job.
They can tell they feel thatand Trump, for as ridiculous as

(33:49):
he is, is exactly what he is inreal life on TV, Like you know,
like whole thug persona thing.
No, that is him all the time.
He is being authenticauthentically stupid
authentically sure but stillthat is his real self.
And we have not.
We haven't found a jfk.
You know the embodiment ofsomebody who knows what they're
talking about, has, has thepolicy points, has the I hate to
say it good looks of charm andcan sell something to people who

(34:13):
are looking for hope.
I mean, we had Obama.
I guess I should say that Obamawas all of that.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
He was, he was and we're trying to recreate it.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
But maybe it can't be recreated.
Maybe what we need next is thenext step from that right, and I
feel like that's that's part ofour struggle too.
And, uh, I'd be remiss if Ididn't mention that jared
moskowitz is one of those peoplewho's fake as fuck, but I I
think you mentioned that inepisode one as well.

(34:41):
Yeah, now on the Doge committeetoo.
So he's on the UFO committeeand the Doge committee with all
Republicans.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
I see that.

Speaker 3 (34:49):
He was totally supporting for the AG nominee
and I tried to tell people aboutthis guy.
He was like I got something too.
He was my friend.
He was a close friend, liketalk to every single day, friend
.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
And then something changed well as I recall on the
first episode I think correct meif I'm wrong you were saying
that he and matt gates were atone time pretty close friends.

Speaker 3 (35:15):
They have always been close um, since they were both
in the state legislature and heis one of the people named in
that report.
That well, apparently theyvoted not to release.
I think that vote was today oryesterday, and so that's it.
It's gone, unless one of theDemocratic House members who
received it decides to leak it.

(35:35):
But they won't, because of thesame things that we're talking
about.
They're cowards.
There are Democrats who areimplicated in it, which makes
things messy for everybody.
Democrats were implicated in it, which makes things messy for
everybody.
There are large financiers whodonate.
You know, smart people donateto everybody Because so no
matter who, wins they got it.

(35:56):
Sure, that's likeUnitedHealthcare.
They are almost 50-50 in thepercent of people that they
support, so that no matter whocomes out on top, they're above
them Right, and that's why theyrelease it.
I mean, if democrats reallywanted to put up a fight, they'd
link it and they won't rightmaybe somebody will have a stage
of heart and do it.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
But looking back, I I think the record shows that
that pre-politics, donald trumpalways, uh, contributed politics
.
Donald Trump always contributedto candidates of both parties.

Speaker 3 (36:27):
Well, he was in New York City and most of the power
in New York City is Democrats,so that's who he gave to.
He had, you know, come upthrough Miami and there was a
lot of Republicans he would havegiven to them.
It's just about racing thewheels of whoever's around.

Speaker 2 (36:39):
That's it.
That's what I was going to say.
He knows I may need yousometime in the future.
Uh, you may not align with meright now with what I need, but
you might, and so, whether itwas an actual campaign
contribution or something elsethat you could call a favor, uh,
and like you said, I I it notto pick on any one particular

(37:04):
person.
I think it's just a way ofdoing business at that level,
because you know it is what itis.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
There was a national beer pack I think it was
actually called beer pack that Iapproached about endorsing me
instead of Matt Gaetz, because Iguess Democrats are hazy about
that stuff and I was like fuck,no.
I was like, let's have a couplebeers, let's talk about
policies you want to instill.
And it was like a craft brewerynational back and I was like

(37:35):
you guys make the good stuffanyways, so you know, let's talk
about how we can do it.
I was like I'm drinking youanyway.
I mean, if I have to andthere's no other choice, maybe a
heineken, but I'm not drinking,right, you know.
And um, they basically said,yeah, we will give to you, but
we'll also give to him.
And I was like, hey, and theysaid, what he's probably gonna

(37:55):
win?
We like you, but he's probablygonna win.
And I I found that very, verytelling.
I was like so you're justbusiness people, for for most of
them, they're just businesspeople.
They're like yeah, we like her,she, I got a lot of attention,
which is great for them.
Um, that's really ultimatelywhat matters.
But they're like he's gonna win, so we'll give to him, but sure

(38:15):
, because you're spunky andyou're fighty, you know we'll
give you a little bit too.
Um, so I mean, it's, it's justbusiness.
That's why I said thetransactionalness of politics is
just business.
And maybe they're, maybethey're second guessing that, I
don't know, with this dddshooter out there.
But well, the news, like thelast two days has been oh, it is

(38:38):
sufferable, right, everythingon my is a different news agency
being like police are lookingfor information.
Police found this backpack.
Police are like nobody's goingto fucking give this guy up.
I seriously hope that theyrealize that, unless somebody
feels like they're personally indanger, this guy has been
anointed to almost hero statusand nobody even knows who he is.

Speaker 2 (38:59):
He has.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
I agree, stop trying to force us to be against this
guy.
We're not against this guy.

Speaker 2 (39:05):
Right.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
No one's going to come out and be like, yeah, we
should start killing all theCEOs.

Speaker 2 (39:09):
No, no I mean.

Speaker 3 (39:10):
Sure, I'm sure there's that population.
Morality is such a thing, Imean.
But this isn't just yourstandard like small business CEO
.
We're talking about the largest, you know, health care agency
in the world, the health careagency that denied 32 percent of
all claims made.
32 percent to like only two outof three people got their

(39:33):
claims approved throughUnitedHealthcare and that's
absolutely insane.
And they land these huge statecontracts.
I heard that people at Unitedwere starting conspiracy
theories that the NYPD wasn'tactually looking for this guy,
because United Health Care isthe NYPD health care insurance
provider and they denied like 50percent of their claims over
the last five years.
I was like you know, judgingfrom the Internet, they seem to

(39:56):
think we should all be outsleuthing for this guy, like he
was the Boston Marathon bomber,which, by the way, the Internet
sleuthing identified the wrongperson and that person ended up
dead.
So that's not necessarily agood thing that you want to do,
but you know it's like we're notgoing to help you with this.
Like this guy is in the middleof a DOJ investigation for

(40:16):
defrauding one hundred and onepoint two million dollars from
UnitedHealthcare because theyfound out there's two different
lawsuits.
They found out they were beinginvestigated for fraud and a
whole bunch of other stuff, andso they started dumping stocks,
knowing that the second thatthat information became public,
the stocks would tank, andthat's exactly what happened.
This guy personally got awaywith at least $15.1 million.

(40:39):
These are bad guys and theAmericans were so cold about it,
holy shit, they literallystepped over his body before he
was even dead and we're likewe're still holding this meeting
and you know we got to moveforward and right.
He said not for his job.
Like less than 48 hours laterand that was the only moment I
actually kind of feltsympathetic towards this person

(41:00):
was like they're like he's dead,let's get somebody else and
move on, and I was like're like,yeah, he's dead, let's get
somebody else and move on.

Speaker 2 (41:11):
And I was like, damn, even if you're the ceo of this,
that they don't think youmatter, that you're a human
right.
And I had some lag time on thatstory.
I was paying attention to, to acouple of other things and it
kind of, you know, I just in theperiphery, I knew that it
happened, but I hadn't reallyzoned in on it yet.
But a few hours later, when Idid, and and I, okay, this is
what it's about, this is who itwas and I remember thinking in
my mind this guy's going to be afrigging hero in about 24 hours

(41:32):
and that, like you said, it'salmost where it's at.

Speaker 3 (41:36):
Yeah, well, I think the latest update was that they
know that he bought a bus ticketout of New York and I honestly
I mean you, new york, and Ihonestly, I mean you should read
the comments on all of this andpeople are claiming it's toxic.
I was like no toxic isthreatening.
She caught off a woman's headand rape her, severed head
because she stood up for ronsantos.
That's fucking toxic.
Saying that, you know why?

(41:57):
Is it okay that this guy helpeddenied claims, that kills.
I think it's a unitedhealthcare 68 000 people a year,
every year, die because ofclaim denials and delays and
that's okay.
But somebody probably therelative of one of these people,
or somebody radicalized, I meanbecause clearly the what was

(42:21):
written on those bullets wasmeant to send a message.

Speaker 2 (42:24):
Clearly.

Speaker 3 (42:26):
Yeah.
So either he's radicalizedagainst the industry, which
nobody can blame him for, orhe's been personally affected.
I told my husband I was like,if it turns out, this guy lost a
parent or a spouse or Godforbid a child.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
The jury in the world is going to convict this guy?
No, and I was like nobody'sgoing to help them find him,
because they're acting like whathe did is the most atrocious
thing comprehensible.
I mean.
Several blocks away, twoteenagers were attacked because
they didn't speak english bythree men with screwdrivers.
One of them died.
One was a 17 year old immigrantand died.

(42:59):
The other one's in the hospital, just blocks away.
No fbi involvement.
These three men are still atlarge and their faces aren't
being plastered by literallyevery network news station every
five minutes on all socialmedia.
It's.
That is why I think there'sthis disconnect between the
media, people, uh, which hasbeen a problem for a while, and

(43:22):
it is you're like.
I want you to catch themotherfuckers who stabbed and
killed a 17 year old with ascrewdriver because he didn't
speak english.
That is who I want you to catchthe guy who took the bus out of
the country and clearly thiswas it for him.
He decided he was going to dothis one thing he's not on a
spree and get the fuck out andsome kind of revenge, possibly
killing.
I don't give a shit about that.
Another ceo they've alreadyreplaced him.

(43:45):
Who the fuck cares that kid,though that kid did not deserve
to die why are you looking atthose people with this ceo
health story?

Speaker 2 (43:55):
I I personally have had over the last probably 35,
40 years a who it could beargued and probably proven in
court that they died as a resultof the claims being denied.
Yeah.
And I think back to the griefand just the pain and the sheer

(44:19):
anger at first, where they wouldhave, absolutely, if there
would have been a figurehead,somebody who they knew a face,
they would have fucking killedhim in an instant over the death
of their daughter, no questionabout it.
So, as you said, when the nineinhalers.

Speaker 3 (44:35):
When they're going through chemo and they're being
charged $30,000, they loseeverything.
I mean, I was young, but whenthe movie John Q came out, and
the guy like makes the erhospital hostage?
Not really, and he doesn'tintend to hurt anybody, he just
wants them to save his son.
But his insurance company didnothing.
His heart transplant becauseit's an elective surgery.

(44:58):
No one walks away out of thatmovie thinking that john q was
the bad guy.
Not a single person, you knowthey think the bad guy, that
bitch who denied the insuranceclaim, who the only reason that
it ends in this like greatresolution is because she hears
him talking to his son and thensuddenly finds a heart and soul.
But that that is the partthat's most unrealistic, you

(45:19):
know, like that is the part tome that was the fiction and but
we've been almost conditioned tonot think that that's a bad guy
.
I mean because if it was mychild sick with leukemia, you
know, and we lost everything andwe did everything to save this
child's life and it still wasn'tenough.
More people sympathize with aparent in that position than

(45:42):
could ever sympathize with a CEOwho designs an AI algorithm
that ends up denying 90 percentof claims for elderly people,
which is what they did.
And that's just as human nature.
No-transcript that they wouldwork with him in the future,

(46:09):
which, by the way, never fuckingworks.
You can extend your arm likethat's what Harris did as far
out to the Republicans as youthink you know, and you think
they're going to grab back, butno, they're going to cut your
fucking arm off.
And it happened every damn time, every.
They're going to grab back, butno, they're going to cut your
fucking arm off, and it happensevery damn time.
Every time we try to compromise, they're like, oh sure, we'll
do this, this and that, and thenwe lose what we set out to do

(46:34):
and they get away with all of it.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
I don't know who it was Somebody the other day in
the article that I was reading,it was a Democrat and they were
talking about moving forward.
They want to be able to reachacross the aisle and work with
him.
I'm like motherfucker, do younot understand what they have
been saying?
They want to do to theConstitution, to the people in

(46:57):
this country.
They've issued every kind ofthreat that you could issue and
you want to reach across theaisle.
If reaching across the aislewas what was going to work, we
wouldn't have gotten to thispoint in the first place.

Speaker 3 (47:12):
Exactly, exactly, like Obama, bent over backwards.
He had two years where he hadcomplete control, and then he
had the Tea Party wave, whichwas really just this kind of
reflexive racism that was fundedby the heritage foundation to
make it look like it wasgrassroots, when it never really
was.
Um to to make a real differenceand he decided, if he gets one
thing done, it's going to behealth care.

(47:33):
That was the one thing he saidhe would do, because it was one
of the biggest issues of, andthis was what 16 years ago, um
and uh.
So that's what he did, and itwas at the very last hour.
It was joe mansion, a couple ofother fuckers who were like if
you want to get the majority forthis, you have to do certain
things, and the one thing theydemanded was seeing the public

(47:56):
option.
I remember my brother-in-lawbefore he was my brother-in-law
told me that because he hadchecked in on his phone and I
cried.
I was sitting at dinner and Icried.
I cursed him out too, but hewasn't my brother-in-law then.
So it was fine, but I had justhad my son.
This was 2009.
And I did not qualify forMedicaid because I was over 18,

(48:22):
so I couldn't get on my parents'health insurance back then,
which, for all of the younginsout there, if you were over 18
years old and you were pregnantand you had a dependent, you
could not be on your parents'health insurance.
Now it's 25 instead of 18.
I didn't qualify for Medicaidbecause the state calculated my

(48:43):
scholarship to Syracuse asincome.
Syracuse was $50,000 back then,so it looked like I was doing
just fine and I rememberthinking I mean I was already in
debt so there was not going tobe any fix in that.
But how many other people weregoing to go through this?
And I just started crying.
I was at the Whistle Stop Cafe,which was a trailer next to the

(49:04):
train tracks in Wiggins,mississippi, crying because they
gave up on the public optionand to me that set the precedent
of you cannot work with thesepeople and of all the data that
we saw the other night.
I thought there were two pointsthat were that really stuck
with me.
The first was the loss ofenthusiasm within Democratic

(49:26):
Party when she hosted the Cheneyand other type people events
and the respective lack of poolthat that had for Republicans.
It ended up driving moreDemocrats away than it did bring
in moderate Republicans, whichwas to me very telling because I
wasn't sure at first.
I was like that that might haveoffset but I wasn't either you

(49:47):
know, and so seeing that datafor the first time was was like,
though, so that really was aloss.
I was like I was hoping thatwould at least be neutral, you
know, yeah, and the only otherthing that could have turned the
tide was gossard, but you know,we're fucked on that issue
anyways.
So, no matter what, and it'sjust to me, it's like we're
either the moral party whostands firmly for what is right

(50:13):
or we're not the pretending tobe both at the same time.
Obviously, people see throughthat.
Yeah, this wasn't like thebiggest turnout election.
It was, I think, like thesecond biggest turnout since
maybe the 80s, but second to, ofcourse, 2020, when voting was
accessible and easy for everyperson in the country.

(50:33):
But you know it's they wereonly about a point and a half
apart.
Only places where she couldhave swung it wisconsin,
michigan.
The issue that broke people wasgaza, and so to me, I was like
so bringing a chain, you didn'thelp, or it didn't help in the
places where we needed help was,and really, that's all we're

(50:56):
talking about.
We're talking about like sevenor eight states.
If you cannot push the needlein those states, it doesn't
matter how many people you havefrom new york no, it doesn't
matter I matter california.
You like hillary clinton did.
She won the popular vote byalmost three times as much as
donald trump did this time, andshe was still not president, you
know.
So it really only matters inthose seven states, and in those
seven states, the only issuethat could have broken those

(51:18):
seven states was three of them,which may not have been enough
to win.
It was Gaza, and everybody wastrying to say that, oh my God, I
was part of that group, eventhough I implored everyone.
I was like you can't fuckingvote for Donald Trump, you have
to vote for Harris, becauseHarris at least there's a chance
she'll listen to us.

(51:39):
Donald Trump's going to letJared Kushner turn all of Gaza
into a Mediterranean resort,literally paved with the bones
of dead children.
You know, at least with Harristhere, the Democrats are scared
and they're cowards.
So if you build enough of apressure campaign, you can sway
them, and Harris was never all apack in before Biden anyways.

(52:02):
Pack in before biden anyways.
No, in fact, there were severalpoints in the last, like year
and several months, where shesaid things that she was
reprimanded for because theywere not in line with the biden
administration.
She said ceasefire in decemberof 2023, and she was publicly
railed for it by biden's people.
So you know, it was like she'splaying this part.

(52:26):
She's got these loyalties.
Biden's ancient I mean he wasborn before Israel even existed.
So this is like a generationalthing.
And the worst part of that to meis the Democrats were blaming
the people who care about Gaza.
I'm like I don't fucking careabout Gaza.
I've taken a lot of fuckingheat for caring about Gaza.
I'm like I don't fucking careabout Gaza, like I've taken a
lot of fucking heat for caringabout Gaza.

(52:47):
Because, frankly, what's thiswhite bitch?
You know know about sufferingthe Middle East?
I don't, but that doesn't meanthat I can't care about it.
I can't look at it from ascientific standpoint.
You know, I've been publishednow and estimating the death
toll in Gaza because I've workedin natural disasters and
man-made disasters and I knowhow calculating those

(53:07):
uncertainties were.
And from a scientific and froma moral standpoint, I cannot
side with Israel.
At the same time, I have neveronce suggested anybody do
anything other than passionatelyand, you know, excitedly vote

(53:29):
for Harris.
But I, I gotta be honest, we arehurting ourselves every time.
We say stupid shit like well, Ihope all the gaza supporters
feel better now.
It's like, how is thisdifferent?
The trajectory that we were onwith biden was a destruction of
gaza.
It was with the ethniccleansing of palestinians.
How has anything changed?
It might happen faster, butthere's no guarantee they would

(53:50):
have stopped and acting likenone of you know.
You're suffering now.
Fuck you for not doing thething.
I was like.
Why us?
Why is that on us, the voters,and not the candidates, for
listening to us?

Speaker 2 (54:05):
I think the thing we forget after an election.

Speaker 3 (54:08):
I've got a lot of rum in this drink.
This is like three quarters ofa cup.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Good, good, so it's going to get better as we go
along.
I think the thing people forgetso quickly right after an
election is they forget howquickly the next election is
going to come around.
They forget how quickly thosefour years go.
And if we start tearing eachother completely apart right

(54:34):
after the election instead ofworking to build, saying okay,
what do we do?
What went wrong?
How do we put this backtogether and go?
And I've got to tell yousomething I've noticed that, I
think on a very micro level.
It's kind of a metaphor for meabout the larger problem in the

(54:55):
Democratic Party in terms ofwhat we spoke about earlier.
Unless you just line up witheverything, then you're kind of
cast out to the side.

Speaker 3 (55:07):
Earlier.
It's like I actually started todraft something that was a list
of 100, what we would call likecreators or talent that could
spearhead emotion, and this wassomething that was distributed
internally within the party andyou were on the top 10 of my
list and it was immediatelyflagged immediately flagged as

(55:29):
unreliable right and and to thatI thought y'all are asking me
for this fucking list.
If there's anybody in the worldwho has shown they will not fit
in a fucking mold, it is me youbet it's like you, like me,
because I can raise moneyhonestly.
I think, at the end of the day,that is it.
I mean I raised a milliondollars for my campaign, banned

(55:50):
on twitter, starting fresh withfacebook.
Instagram had never used thembefore.
Um didn't use tiktok until like2022 um, but despite, like my
huge platform on twitter.
Everybody thought that's how Iwould earn money, but it wasn't.
It was also my reputation, andthat's a million dollars for a
congressional campaign that hadno fucking chance of winning for

(56:13):
a person who's never run foroffice ever before, with no
social media, you know, presencewhatsoever.
It was impressive to them.
They're like, oh yeah, weshould, and I I helped some of
them Only the people that Imorally aligned with.
But if you're going to ask mewho I think we need on board and
then you're going to flag themfor being not fully in line,

(56:36):
then you're asking the wrongfucking person.

Speaker 2 (56:38):
Yeah, and that's the thing.
See to me, being completely inline is a weakness.

Speaker 3 (56:44):
It's exhausting, it's like I get so sick.
There are some people who areprominent in the social media
sphere who I see them justtowing the party line every day.
I'm like, oh my god, do youhave an original thought?
Do you have a single originalthought?
Do you have any contributionother than the same thing that's

(57:05):
being shared by everybody elseto bring to the discussion?
Because at this point, you'repaid mouthpieces and that's it.
And if we're going to succeed,we need something deeper than
that.
You need people who can speakwith these issues, just with
authority or not, you know,expertise, um per se, but heart,

(57:29):
somebody can, who can say look,I'm not being told to tell you
this, I care about this, this is, I'm allowed to focus on this
thing because this is somethingthat means something to me and
it matters not just I'm gonna.
You know the talking points ofthe day, because I get the
talking points memo, what's sure, every day.
Most of the time I just fuckingignore it, but, um, I'll be

(57:50):
like, all right, it's a harristhing, I'll tweet it out, but um
, it's.
It's ridiculous to think that wemaking us all generic.
It is, it's failure, it'ssetting us up for failure.
We need actual people and andpeople are risky, but we're not
risky, though.
That's the other thing too.
We're not risky in the way thatthey are risky.
I mean, you know, some of thesefar like Tim Pool, who's talked

(58:14):
about me multiple times on theshow, spread a lot of shit about
me, stalked me for a while onTwitter, was literally being
paid by Russia like a hundredgrand a week to spread one
pro-russian story, and you know,I kind of want to feel like I
am owed all this shit thatyou've paid to talk shit about
me um, but but they did actualthings that borderline illegal.

(58:42):
But you're the democraticparty's afraid of investing in
someone who would disagree withthem about something, and that,
to me, is like you're riskadverse to disagreement.
They're not even risk adverseto foreign funding for election
interference.
Like, yeah, how do you thinkwe're going to win this?
This is is insane, and part ofwhat the Democratic Party

(59:06):
espouses is the power ofuniqueness, of individualism, of
experience, of heart.
That's supposed to be us, yetwe have nobody out there
championing that, and that, tome, is a missed opportunity, to
say the least.

Speaker 2 (59:23):
I'm paying $100 dollars to invest in people like
you, so I you know, at the endof the day, it's not yeah, you
know that that emotional loadedpunch is is what has been
lacking for a long time, and Ithink there's a there's this

(59:44):
quickness to jump to conclusionsthat anybody who's being very
emotional must be some sayingsomething that's irrational,
right, right, which sometimesthat's the case people do.
But when, when you ignore whatyour, your prefrontal cortex is

(01:00:06):
processing as logic, justbecause it's got emotion
attached to it and you'relooking for somebody that only
packages it the way you do, sonow, it's logic, but it's also
sterile.
So it's okay, that's a greatword for sterile.
Yeah, that doesn't winelections.

Speaker 3 (01:00:25):
It doesn't.
We often mistake what we wouldthink of as emotionality with
passion, especially when itcomes to women.
I mean, we saw what happened inCongress this week with the
Secret Service chief and thenthat crazy Fallon guy
Representative Fallon, texas, Ithink.

(01:00:46):
Oh wow, Lost their shit.
Now.
I'm not a fan of the SecretService, but I was really
enjoying what the guy from theSecret Service was saying.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
They were going full tilt boogie.

Speaker 3 (01:01:02):
I'm the emotional species that can't be
responsible for anything.
It's just like these people aresuper emotional.
Call elon, elon musk, cisgender, and he shit.
Talk about the santa wearinglifts in his boots and all of a
sudden he's an unhingedpsychopath.
Or me, and then he's anunhinged psychopath, and you
know it's it's.
We mistake emotional for passionand, and those people are

(01:01:25):
emotional, we're passionate andyou know, I think that goes to a
greater disease within ourparty of having people that are
dispassionate Because we will.
In scientific communities, wereward being dispassionate we
always have, because if you'reseen as caring too much, then it

(01:01:45):
could blind your, you know,perspective, your objectiveness.
But I think that, and aspecific agreement climate
change, which is, until covid,uh, probably the single
discipline most fraught withcontroversy, um, we've seen a
shift away from that.
Like michael man, uh, he'sconsidered to be one of the

(01:02:07):
leading climatologists in theworld.
He's one of my mentors, one ofmy good friends.
He has bucked the tradition andhas really become active in
politics.
Because, as he sees it and Iand I agree if you're not
advocating for your science withpassion and respect for what
you do, why would you expectanyone else to?

(01:02:31):
If you cannot advocate for?
what that's it and how itimpacts the world.
In this case, why would anyoneelse?
Now, you have to be out there.
You have to be an advocate,because what you're advocating
for is based on thisdispassionate research that
leads to one conclusion, andit's really.

(01:02:53):
I mean, there's a lot ofacademic discussion about this,
especially right now.
We saw a lot of it in 2016,where people were like, oh shit,
we should probably back up theNational Climate Database Center
, but now there are mechanismsin place that no one person can
destroy it because of 2016.

(01:03:13):
And now people are doing thething that, you know, everyone
says not to do in fascistregimes, which is comply in
advance.
A lot of climate scientists arescrubbing their Twitters.
They're, you know, pulling back, scrubbing their twitters.
They're, you know, pulling backon being politically active
because they're afraid, right,and they are rightfully afraid.
I don't mean for that to seemunjustified.

(01:03:38):
I mean fucking the, the toddlerwho can't jump.
Um published a list of fourlike people in the federal
government that he personallywanted to fire.
Yeah, these are private people.
These are not people that areout, you know, influencing
politics.
They're.
They're doing work, real work,meaningful work.
They just threw their names outthere like it was nothing and

(01:04:01):
those people become targets.
They they're not getting deaththreats.
Three, all four of them, werewomen, first of all, and three
of them were not white, whichI'm sure was a total coincidence
.
Oh, yeah.
But I'm going to be on one ofthose fucking lists.
They said they're trying toroot out shit.
You not harvesting climatescientists who work for the
federal government?

(01:04:21):
I mean, hello, I ran forCongress as a Democrat against
Matt Gaetz and I'm a climatescientist for the federal
government.
I wouldn't be on that list, andso they're scared.
But that's not going to make meshut up.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
No, that's the thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:35):
I grew up poor.
Missing money is nothing newfor me.
It sucks, but I'm not going tocomply and downplay or even
fabricate data to make this seemlike it's less of an issue than
it actually is to appease theoverlord.
I've been through that shitonce before.
I've already proven that youcan send my ass to jail, I will

(01:04:59):
face prison time and I'll go in,and I'll do it gladly, sick as
fuck with COVID, but I will notcomply.
And we have too many, and I'lldo it gladly Sick as fuck with
COVID, but I will not comply.
Yeah, no, nor will I Too manypeople are afraid to do that and
, I've got to be honest, a lotof these Democratic influencer
people wouldn't do that either.
They would not risk sacrificinga minute of their time or a

(01:05:24):
dollar in their bank account ifpush came to shove, and that
worries me it worries the hellout of me like these voices that
what would you be willing to do?
I mean really be willing to doyeah to fight this fight and, if
it's not, go to jail, go toprison or be killed, which is
what I thought was going tohappen to me in jail.

(01:05:44):
I was 100% convinced they weregoing to kill me in jail and I
still think the only reason theydidn't was because I caught
COVID on the way down and I hadto be put in 24-7 monitoring
isolation because they had nomore med beds available.
I left my family and I actuallyrecorded it for the.
My friend told me to and I waslike I'm'm never gonna see my

(01:06:06):
kids again.
They are going to kill me.
And left feeling like I knewthat and so, if you not that
everybody should have to feelthat.
But we may reach a point wherewe do.
And even some of the people whogot famous I hate to take a
personal shot here even some ofthe people who got famous I hate
to take a personal shot hereeven some of the people who got
famous off my story would not beable to do that.

(01:06:29):
You would.
I feel like I'd trust you to doit.
You'd like some people to watch.
That's why I love you.
You should do it.
You can tell if somebody'swilling to actually lose
something.
I I appreciate that because I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:06:46):
I'm glad you you pick up on that because, uh, I can't
think of any better way to putit than this I don't give a fuck
right, I'm not going to changea goddamn thing for this
administration.

Speaker 3 (01:07:03):
Nothing, I'm I'm not willing to do that that's where
I'm at with my family now, butthat is absolutely not where I
was four years ago.
I mean it's oh, wow, it'sdecember 6th, so I was raided
exactly four years ago tomorrowand I wish that's why I was
always uncomfortable.
Back then, in 2020, people callme like a hero and all this.
I was like, look, I'm justdoing what I think is right, and

(01:07:25):
I didn't feel like I was reallyin jeopardy until that moment,
until they came to my house andpointed a gun at my head and
told me to open the door.
I was living in this naivebliss where that didn't happen
to scientists in this countryand, frankly, if I hadn't
recorded it, nobody would havefucking believed me.
And, frankly, if I hadn'trecorded it, nobody would have
fucking believed me.

(01:07:46):
Anyways, desantis would havepainted me out to be a crazy
person.
They would have said that allthe cameras of every officer who
came inside the house wasmalfunctioning that day, which
they later claim not a singleofficer who came into my house,
13, had a working body camerathat day.
They would have said I was crazy, but until that moment I did
not realize how much danger Iwas in and I didn't realize how

(01:08:07):
much danger my family was in.
Everything after that has beena conscious, a conscious choice.
Knowing that threat.
Before that I was like I'mtelling people about the coven
numbers, like I built the system, I know where the back doors
are to it.
I'm going to tell everybodywhat's happening, in full
perspective, with all of thethings the state doesn't want to

(01:08:28):
highlight and what's the worstthey could do to me Trash me
online.
I'm like, oh, big fucking deal,I don't care, I had no idea.
Now I do, and there have been,you know, moments where I've
walked away.
Earlier this year, I walkedaway for Twitter for several
months.
I recently quit it.
I've walked away.
Earlier this year, I walkedaway for Twitter for several
months.
I recently quit it, althoughI've seen people like you be

(01:08:49):
like we can't see this space andwhile I get it, they came after
my kid again.
So that was really, reallydifficult for me.
I kind of walked away, but I'min the process of deleting
everything I've ever tweeted andrestarting.
And I understand both sides ofthis I do yeah, I get it so a

(01:09:12):
couple weeks ago.
My son is autistic.
We've we've talked about thissometimes.
Anybody who's a parent of anautistic kid knows that
sometimes they have episodes,and when you're dealing with a
15 year old autistic child, theycan be violent in a way that
you can't control yourself.
Yeah, so I call for a medicaltransport to the Crisis
Counseling Center here, which isa service that Maryland offers

(01:09:34):
that Florida has never,apparently, thought was
necessary.
Me online, who have been doingthis for four and a half years
without stop, found the dish,the dispatch log, with my name
spelled incorrectly, without mychild's name mentioned in it.
That is how much they scour theinternet every single fucking

(01:09:57):
day for this shit.
Within two days, they had thedispatch log and they published
it online and I was like knowwhat?
They're making money off ofthis?
They are monetizing accounts.
They're making money off ofthis.
Fuck this shit.
I'm out, yeah, and I spentpretty much all of this week
listening to people who aretrying so badly just to reach

(01:10:19):
other people.
I literally had somebody told meI was in Baltimore today with
people from the governor'soffice.
I literally had somebody toldme I was in Baltimore today with
people from the governor'soffice.
They were like, like if wecould just tell our stories,
people wouldn't see immigrantsas these horrible people.
You know, I've been here for 30years.
You know my child sees doingthis and that and I sat there
thinking I have 300 and somethousand followers on Twitter

(01:10:41):
and I threw it away because itwas inconvenient for me to have
to emotionally deal with theDeSantis people.
And what does that say about me?
You know that these peoplesimply just want to be heard and
I'm like I have this and I saidfuck it and I walked away from
it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
I think it only.
If it says anything, it onlysays it about that snapshot in
time.
I don't think it's indicativeof you as a whole.
I think it's you know.

Speaker 3 (01:11:14):
It's teetering between walking away pretty much
all of this year and I thinkthat's because part of me wanted
to move on from Florida.
Like you know, as soon as theyfinally dismissed the case,
finally dropped it.
You know so that on paper theraid never happened.
None of the charge singlecharge, because there was only
one from that never happened.

(01:11:34):
It was dropped.
I am free and clear.
I passed an FBI backgroundcheck to get my friend the
relief I felt like my son isfree.
After they tried to go afterhim you know he's no longer on
probation I felt like wait, likethey don't have a foot on my
neck anymore.
So I felt like in many, manyways I had already vanquished.

(01:11:57):
My monster.
Desantis went down crashing andburning during his presidential
campaign, in no small part towhat I did with trump, um, his
whole like I'm gonna besecretary of defense thing.
Like you're really gonnaappoint somebody secretary of
defense who hasn't spent asingle fucking day in combat.
Good luck with that.
Um unmasked that whole bullshitand got to some of trump's

(01:12:19):
people to kind of explain whythey were doing this in the
first place, in which theyforwarded to trump.
And although my civil lawsuit'sstill going on, it's very
fucking clear I'm going to winit.
Even the state knows that I'mgoing to win it.
They tried to move for a motionof sovereign immunity recently
and that's a public filing andthe judge, who is considered the

(01:12:40):
biggest DeSantis fan in thatdistrict, said fuck that, are
you kidding me?
Went so far as to file a claimthat said that the plaintiff was
entitled to unhapped damages inher filing and this was like
this week, and so I was like I'mkicking their fucking ass and I
vanquished my monster.

(01:13:02):
He's done, he's toast, he'sirrelevant.
He's a lean-up governor who'sall fascist experiment blew up
in his face and everybody hateshim, even trump if he's still,
maybe he'd have a future, but hedoesn't, because I break that,
and so you know me and a lot ofother people worked on that, but
um well, since that's on cap.

Speaker 2 (01:13:21):
When you win that, uh , you can send me a dinner
invitation.

Speaker 3 (01:13:25):
I'll bring my wife, we'll go, oh, I'll well, you
know, what's weird is that like,as I've mentioned, I grew up so
poor is when I started to getso much public support during
covid, god, it never sat aroundwith me, never, like people.
I woke, I went to bed and toldone of the reporters, ch Chris
Brassad from the Palm Beach Post.

(01:13:46):
I was like, look, I have tokeep doing this.
You know, people became theytrusted this thing I built for
the state and now they don'tknow where to go.
Half the state thinks that it'spropaganda.
The other half thinks that I'mstill seriously running it and
it's not true.
They don't know what to do.
So I'm going to keep doing itand I'm going to do it better

(01:14:10):
than I was ever allowed to dowhile I was there and you know,
maybe people care, maybe theywon't.
He published his story.
I went to bed the next day.
I woke up with 68 000 in mygofundme, which was more than I
took home in a year, and Iremember thinking this is a joke
.
This is a joke, right, becausewhen I worked for the state, a
whole year worth of work wasn'tworth this, you know.

(01:14:33):
And then it climbed to like$250,000.
And I, honestly, I was like Iwould have kept doing this even
if you guys hadn't given meanything Like I had computer
equipment I had to buy, so youknow that was one thing.
But I was like this feels weirdand so I gave it all away and
my husband hated me for it.

(01:14:54):
If you're going to run out ofmoney.
I was like surely by now I'llhave a job.
You know I had no idea what Iwas getting into and so I gave
it all away.
And I gave it all away and Igave it to very worthy causes,
mostly veterans groups, nicenice.
But you know, feeding the GulfCoast and other organizations

(01:15:21):
and people that helped the kindof people that I was when I was
a kid and I didn't think I'd bebroke.
But you know I'm broke.
So whenever it comes about thatI'm no longer broke, I already
kind of I'll say this withouthim hearing me have a plan for
what to do with it.
And yeah, I'm going to buy afucking house.
That's the first thing Buying agoddamn house.
I want to own my house, freeand clear.

(01:15:42):
Nobody's going to give me adollar worth of credit anyways,
so I've got to buy in cash andafter that kids, college funds,
you know all that, whatever.
They need a deposit for theirfuture house, whatever, and then
I'm gonna give it all awayagain.
So I mean, like some of thesewhistleblower organizations that

(01:16:04):
were there for me when I wasreally down in like March of
this year, one of my friends,john Barnett, he into one of my
stalkers in Florida.
There was a civil investigationinto one of my stalkers in

(01:16:24):
Florida.
It didn't seem to stop them.
Nothing seemed to stop them.
And the way they were goingafter my kid, I, honest to God,
felt like my family would besafer if I wasn't here, if I
didn't exist, and that was theclosest to suicide I've ever

(01:16:46):
been in my life.
And, um, I actually I'm supposedto save this for the book.
I think I told you that lasttime I was like I'm terrible at
saving these for the book.
Um, it'll be with lessdrunkenness and more poise in
the book.
But I actually parked somewhereand there was a pair of
scissors in my husband'sdashboard and I man, they

(01:17:09):
weren't sharp enough.
I was ready.
I started crying and then Iwent to the hospital and I was
like I need help.
I need like somebody help me.
Took a week to detox out theinternet, read a bunch of stuff
from Taylor Lorenz, who reallyhelped get me through it, and
some retreat, mark ruffalo, andit was better.

(01:17:29):
But you know, the people whodid not stop calling me that
night were the otherwhistleblowers that I've met
through all of this.
So, like tyler schultz calledme like a hundred times, he was
one of the theranoswhistleblowers who also tried to
kill himself at one point.
I mean, his grandfather wassecretary of state of the united

(01:17:52):
states and the chief funder oftheranos, which was elizabeth
holmes scam project wow, um, youknow he he's very open about it
now, but, um, when we werefirst starting to meet each
other four years ago, he told meit was like, yeah, I, my
parents, had to put their houseup for mortgage to pay to keep

(01:18:15):
me out of jail, because that ishow far this went.
And there were people followingme.
There are people following um.
The other girl who I know fromtheranos and I can't remember
her name right now it startswith an e emily maybe um, yeah,
she was regularly herself.
We both were, because wethought that was it and he did

(01:18:37):
not stop calling me that night.
The head of whistleblower foramerica, jackie geary, did not
stop calling me that night.
Jane Turner, who is the founderof National Whistleblower
Center, would not stop callingme that night.
And you know you think it'suseless to call and ring
somebody over and over again,but I saw that on my phone and

(01:19:00):
they are the ones who made me goget help and were one of the
reasons why I took that bigbreak from Twitter.
And I think that whistleblowingis a whole thing.
It is a unique.
It's like going through Katrina.
Only people who have actuallybeen through it can really
understand what it is and thatcommunity saved my life, so they

(01:19:23):
are getting a big shot.

Speaker 2 (01:19:26):
Whatever I get to continue to support people like
me that come to me and I'm gladyou're revealing this because I
don't think most people everreally even pause to think about
the emotional aftermath for awhistleblower.

Speaker 3 (01:19:45):
Just that alone.
Most of them we only seethrough the media, so we see
their stories covered, likeJulian Assange.
Have you ever actually read anytweets by Julian Assange?
Most people haven't.
Most people haven't read anyletters by him.
They've seen media coverage ofhim written by other people.
And what was kind of uniqueabout my story was that all of

(01:20:07):
it played out publicly everyminute every day I put it out
there because I felt like I hadnothing to hide.
And the second that I was thrownout there I was like well, if
you guys really want to knowwhat's going down, let's really
talk about it.
And I think that's that's oneof the reasons I'm kind of one
of these ambassadors for thewhistleblower programs now is

(01:20:31):
because I didn't shy away fromhow ugly and how dark it gets.
Most people are ashamed offeeling suicidal like tyler.
It took him 10 years to seejustice.
I mean, elizabeth holmes wasjust convicted and sent to
prison, like last year.
She had to rebrand herself.
She even got pregnant onpurpose, I'm pretty sure to try

(01:20:52):
to get the jury to lighten hersentence a little bit.
And they were like fuck thatbitch, you're going to jail.
She rebranded as Liz and I thinkit was New York Times wrote
this really fluff article.
It's like oh, she wants you tocall her Liz.
Now I was like, what are youdoing?
People won't realize this.
There was a third Theranoswhistleblower, ian Gibbons.
He killed himself, he fuckingkilled himself the day before

(01:21:16):
depositions.
And Erica Erica Chong is theother one and Tyler Schultz
survived, but barely.
They barely fucking survived.
And it is hard.
And that wasn't even agovernment organization, that
was a private company and eachof them was.
They had these family dynamicsgoing on.
They were young, they were juststarting their careers, which

(01:21:39):
meant that the value of whatthey had to say wasn't great.
And I I know something aboutthat.
I wasn't as young as tylerbecause he was like 25 when it
happened.
You know I was 30 but I'm awoman, so I lost a few years
worth of value coming forwardand, um, people don't realize
how hard that is john barnettkilled himself after the second

(01:22:02):
day of his depositions, beforehe had to go back for the third
day, after the second day of hisdepositions, before he had to
go back for the third day.
And you know he drove up therefor depots, and depots are
considered to be the lowestmoment in your case, like it is
the opposite.
Organizations or companies orgovernments chance to
interrogate you about everythingin your fucking life.

(01:22:23):
And they do, believe me, theyfucking.
I can't talk about anythingthat's happened in depositions
yet because of legal issues.
I'm not going to blow up a casefor that, but they fucking do.
Between day two and three, hedrove to his hotel, he sat there
in his truck and he was a realSouthern boy too, which is why I
think we connected and wrotesome stuff on a scrap piece of

(01:22:52):
paper and shot himself, and oneof the last things that he wrote
, the last message that he sentto the whole world, was that
whistleblower protections werebullshit.
That was the last thing he saidto the whole world, and he was
right.
They're not going to get anybetter under Trump.
But there's this glitz andglamour of being a whistleblower
.
I'm pretty.
I mean, I feel like confidentenough to be able to say that

(01:23:15):
I'm pretty.
Not maybe last session that wedid this because I didn't do my
hair, I wasn't wearing makeup.
No, no, I look pretty.
No, no, I look pretty.
No, you don't have to choose tobe yeah well, I'm aware of the
privilege that I have as ahighly educated white.
Maybe a woman is a double-edgedsword.

(01:23:41):
By being attractive and havingdegrees of communications, I can
effectively say these things,so I have an advantage.
Effectively say these things,so I have an advantage.
But you know it's still.
It is a.
After the initial media frenzyfades, you are left alone,
isolated, blacklisted.
No government's going to wantto hire you if you've already
proven yourself to be a spillerof secrets.

(01:24:02):
No profit for-profit company iseither.
Like that's the last placeyou're gonna end up and
something that, if you're likeme and you had spent more than a
decade studying and workingtowards something, to be asked
to set aside all of that workespecially for someone like me
who grew up poor with nothingand had to, like, come, overcome

(01:24:25):
some fucked up obstacles to getthere, it's heartbreaking.
I mean I I'm close friends withum sharon walkins, who's the
enron whistleblower, and we werehaving dinner one day and there
was another one of the enronwhistleblowers there and she
said the other one told me she'slike oh, you should really try
to get back into climate science.
And sharon just looked at herdon't give her false hope.

(01:24:47):
Dead in front of me Said don'tgive her false hope.
This is never going to happen.
It's like you need to findpublic speaking.
You can become a life coach.
She said you will never go backto what you did.
No one will trust you.
And the whole Enron thing waslike what in the 90s, early
2000s, and so this is a womanwho has.

(01:25:07):
She was Times Person of theYear.
You know Right, she fuckingknows.
Yeah.
And I was caught at that momentand this was a summer between
accepting that and acknowledgingthat and refusing to believe it
.

(01:25:28):
And that's a tough balance to do.
It is.
It really is because you'relike I'm.
They're like, oh, you're soyoung.
I was like I'm 35, so I'm thatyoung, I need to kind of get my
shit together.
I've got kids and I was like Iremember listening to her and be
like you know what she's right,but she doesn't have to be.
And a month and a half later II was fired as a climate
scientist again for the federalgovernment.

Speaker 2 (01:25:51):
So it's like that to me, was the moment I was like my
life still has value.

Speaker 3 (01:25:54):
Everything that I work for still matters.
Talk a little bit about it Now.
Trump may just like destroyNoah's.

Speaker 1 (01:25:59):
I don't know, I'm still here.
I'm still here, and I said Isaw you.

Speaker 2 (01:26:05):
That had to be a really validating moment for you
, though, to know that you hadgotten this, as you've already
said this really solid piece ofadvice from somebody who's been
there, done that, and yet youdemonstrated that, even as good
as your advice was in general,that, when it comes to the

(01:26:26):
specificity of me, I didn't haveto subscribe to that yeah right
, nothing if not stubborn.

Speaker 3 (01:26:35):
But you know, jaron's from texas.
She's a southern girl, so isthe other lady that was with her
.
Um, you know, tyler grew upvery privileged in california.
I mean, like I mentioned, hisgrandfather was the the single
most decorated public servant inhistory, like a Ross president,
secretary of state departmentof, like all of it.

(01:26:55):
This guy was one of the mostpowerful people in America.
His own grandfather was againsthim when it came to Theranos.
That is, I got to be honest.
That's a whole other level offucked up, that, and I've told
him this to his face.
I that is.
I gotta be honest.
That's a whole other level offucked up, that, and I've told
him this to his face.
I don't think I could havedealt with If I didn't have my
full-fledged family support.
I don't know what the fuck Iwould have done If I had my

(01:27:17):
grandfather meet me in a roomwhere he had lawyers listening
in the next room to try torecord me saying something
self-incriminating.
I don't know what the fuck Iwould have done and that's what
he did and his grandfather didthat him
and you know it's because he's.
So he bought into this lie ofelizabeth holmes and and her

(01:27:39):
creative genius.
Now, don't get me wrong, shewas smart, but I mean her career
before she went there wasexceptional, really was.
Um, he refused to listen.
His own flesh and blood refusedto listen when he said, look, I
work in this fucking lab, I ranthe tests.
It's bullshit, he said.

(01:28:01):
He told me once, near the veryend, his grandfather said
something to him like it wasn'tremorse, necessarily, it wasn't,
I'm sorry, but it was more ofan acknowledgement that he had
been taken advantage of, andthat was all the closure he got

(01:28:22):
before he died.
And so you know that's how heleft.
His grandfather was like themost important person in his
died, and so you know that's howhe left.
His grandfather was like themost important person in his
life.

Speaker 2 (01:28:28):
Yeah, I don't know wow that that's that's tough
that's yeah that is losing heart.

Speaker 3 (01:28:34):
if I had been isolated by my own family, I I
have no idea.
I I was lucky because I had anestablished academic career
before this.
I had already won awards in myfield.
I was getting nationalrecognition, even by the Trump
White House administration, forwhat I was doing in Florida.
I had something to prove myworth when shit went down, yeah,

(01:28:59):
and had my family, I had mywhole academic field behind me.
They all issued public lettersof condemnation both when I was
fired and when I was rated.
If I didn't have that I I wouldbe like ian gibbons, I'd be
dead, and you know it's peoplereally like oh, we love our
whistleblowers.
Do you really have you followedup on any of them?

(01:29:22):
Have you checked in how hard itis for reality winner, who's
had three movies made about her,by the way, in the last year
and a half?
How they cannot legally profitoff any of them?
Not a cent as part of her pleaagreement served the longest
sentence ever under theEspionage Act, for leaking

(01:29:42):
public should have been publicdocuments about how russia
actually interfered with the2016 campaign.
Nothing that she said wasuntrue, but she had served the
longest sentence in us historyunder the espionage act.
She can't find a fucking jobbecause she's a convicted felon
and I've been trying to, whetherwanted or not, assist in this

(01:30:03):
public campaign to get herpardon, because she served the
fucking time she served servedher country, you know, as a
member of the armed forces andthen for years afterwards she
should be able to start lifeover.
She's so young and wide awakeaway.
She's fucking brilliant andhilarious and kind of like
bizarrely like me, which isprobably why I like her so much
and also why we clap a lot ofthe time.

(01:30:23):
So I mean, we had this verysimilar like.
I was always in trouble as akid.
I was always different.
I wanted something more.
I wanted to see the world, Iwanted to learn these languages
and I love and adore her.
But she actually went to prisonfor that shit and she did it
fully knowing that what she didwas worth it.
How many people who know herstory, have watched her movies,

(01:30:47):
have written to the Bidenadministration to pardon her or,
you know, sent her money onVenmo or done anything else to
actually help her?
Because as soon as, like theglitz and the glam fades,
there's still a person that'sleft to deal with the fallout of
committing truth-telling, whichis what Dan Ellsberg called it
and which goes back to theDemocratic Party thing, is, he

(01:31:10):
told me once he was sorry.
I still get.

Speaker 2 (01:31:15):
Knowledge.

Speaker 3 (01:31:18):
Losing Dan Ellsberg was hard, really hard.
I never imagined in my lifethat someone as important and
influential in American historywould know who I was.
Much less think that much of me.
He said I actually inspired himmore than Ed Snowden and he
loved Ed Snowden.
I don't, but he did, and everytime something happened I went

(01:31:43):
straight to him.
Every time something happened Iwent straight to him and yeah,
he, uh, sorry, he passed a fewyears ago.
Um, he used to tell me.
He said the problem is thatpeople are afraid to be called
names.
So democrats, especially, areafraid to be called names.

(01:32:03):
And if you're too afraid to becalled a bad name and you are
not cut out for the shit, I meanthat man he went to print he
was being faced with theespionage act as well ransacked
his psychiatrist's office.
They tried to drug him whichsome also happened to me, um,
before a major peace conference,so that they tried to drug him

(01:32:24):
with lsd so that he would seemdelusional and crazy and maybe
stripped down and go nuts.
Um, and he said if you're tooafraid to be called bad names,
you should just quit now,because that is the least of the
things that you could do wrongin this world, and I think about

(01:32:46):
that, about Democrats, all thetime.
I was like you're afraid aboutanonymous accounts, probably
Russian bots on social media,not real life Flooding your
comments every time you mentionme in a story.
I mean because that's whathappens.
I mean I've had that at leaston Twitter, nowhere else but
Twitter.
Mean, I've had that at least ontwitter, not nowhere else but

(01:33:08):
twitter.
Um, this whole apparatusdedicated to do nothing but
attacking any mention of my name, to the point where somebody
who works the tallahasseedemocrat told me we don't cover
you because we want, don't wantto deal with bullshit.
That happens when we do, and Iremember I was like, well,
thanks for being honest, whichwas in one way, but at the same
time.
I'm like, excuse me, what's yourfucking job?

(01:33:30):
And you know, that happens, andI've noticed that even a lot of
my allies online will back away,because as soon as they mention
me and you've probablyexperienced this too the same 10
or so accounts show up, almostin succession Sordo, who's the
account that's run by, brianGriffin, who is Ron DeSantis'
press secretary, and then awhole lot of Dan Goldwasser,

(01:33:53):
cheryl Renaud all of thesepeople who have the police and
criminal charges filed againstthem will show up with a bunch
of bullshit, and if we areyielding our supposed heroes to
a bunch of fucking internettrolls and that's enough to
scare us off, we are fucked.

Speaker 2 (01:34:15):
We are truly, truly fucked.
I could not agree more.
I think at first, when I firststarted my newsletter, there

(01:34:45):
were a lot of people that eventhough they subscribed, they
weren't sure the connectionbetween what it was about, which
was building resilience andovercoming your anxiousness and
your excessive worry and justkind of getting your emotional
shit together and being able tostand up to more right, and they
were trying to make that linkto politics and this and my
position on that then, and willcontinue to be, until you can
get to the point where itdoesn't matter what insult, what

(01:35:05):
full word somebody throws atyou.
You're like you know what, fuckyou.
I don't have a problem withthat.
The problem I have is, if youtry to undermine the truth, I'm
telling then that irks me, justwon't.
Right Now, if you want toattack me, you want to attack my
family, who you don't even know, that's fine, and so that's my

(01:35:31):
emphasis there.
And I always said that winningan election is every bit as much
about being able to drive yourown bus emotionally.
Your own bus emotionally becauseand I think we are at a moment
right now that underscores thiswhen people are starting to back

(01:35:52):
off because of fear right,trump's about to come back right
and it's like look, that'swhere, having your head screwed
on tight and being able toregulate your own emotions,
that's what gets us to the pointwhere we can say we save
democracy because we said fuckit.

(01:36:14):
I'm not backing down becauseI've got enough.
I I can regulate my emotionsenough.
I can acknowledge my fear, butI can acknowledge it while I'm
saying fuck off, it's not.

Speaker 3 (01:36:25):
You know what I mean yeah, but the problem is with
that is that the costs are notequal, like no, they're not
today.
You know there were these um, Ijust found out about, even
though it happened days ago,these two george mason students
whose house was raided overalleged graffiti that appeared
on campus on the groundsomewhere, which I thought for

(01:36:47):
sure, if it was that bad, I'd beable to find a story about it
or mention about it.
Nothing, I mean.
I checked the ADL, I checkedeverywhere.
Nobody shared a picture of thisalleged graffiti.
Two female students One was amaster's student at George Mason
, one was an undergrad.
There was a third kid in thefamily who was already a
graduate and an alumni and worksin very prominent position.

(01:37:09):
George mason is a very me.
You know hoity-toity they say.
You know what I mean I do it'snot.
It's a different cut from adifferent.
Yes.

(01:37:35):
But the oldest brother and thetwo younger sisters were all
presidents of Students forJustice in Palestine and a
couple of days ago their housewas raided by the FBI because
George Mason forwarded somethingto the FBI that said that there
was some kind of graffiti onthe ground.
First of all, you don't fuckingraid somebody with the FBI with
over a dozen officers without awarrant which is, for me, kind

(01:37:57):
of a personal thing because ofgraffiti.
You better have more than that.
They rounded them the wholefamily up, the parents,
everybody else in the house, putthem in the living room for
hours, refused to show them awarrant, stole all their
electronics and didn't tell themabout anything that was
happening.
I was like this is deja vu.

(01:38:19):
In florida, four years ago fromtomorrow, police showed up to my
house armed like guns drawn.
One was pointed at my face withthe window nest on my door,
told me to open the door, didnot have a warrant, waited three
hours while they went and got awarrant, rounded us up in the
living room at gunpoint, kept usthere for hours while they

(01:38:39):
waited for it, handed me a listof all the electronics that they
had taken on their way out andthere was nothing I could
fucking do about it because ofan alleged text message sent to
former colleagues telling themto and this is a quote speak out
and be honest.
A charge that took two fuckingyears for them to dismiss two
fucking years.
And when I was reading thestory about these two girls I

(01:39:02):
was like this this sounds likeoh, it's complicated.
No one in that family, thesecond that they ever hear
somebody knock on the door, willever be okay again no I agree,
they don't.
They don't realize that, butlike if somebody knocks on my

(01:39:22):
door, everybody my family, hidesmy six-year-old daughter will
run upstairs and run under herbed and hide and she was like
two when that happened.
And they will never feel safein the George Mason community
ever again, even though they'renot charged with a crime and
it's not even clear that they'rebeing investigated for a crime.

(01:39:43):
George Mason suspended both ofthose students, both of them the
same day and you know therehave been 80 different.
I think it was 80 organizationsand universities signed letters
saying like no bad job.
Um, but when I tried to sharethis online and I gotta tell you
I'm not a conspiracy theoristtype person that shit is being

(01:40:05):
so suppressed anytime youmention anything involving
Israel or Gaza.
It's like the view count, thestats on it are a fraction of
what I normally get and I meanyou're talking about.
If I went to Twitter and youknow I had 350-whatever-thousand
followers, maybe 3,000 wouldsee them, maybe two, that's it.

(01:40:26):
And I experimented with thistoday.
It was my first post back onTwitter and I was like the
entire country actually theentire international community
was up in arms when thishappened to me because I was
rated without a warrant forspeech that the governor did not
approve of, for something thatdoesn't sound like it should

(01:40:49):
remotely be a crime, and becauseI was going against what the
state narrative was, the wholeworld rose up against that.
I mean, I did Channel 4 inBritain, I did Australia, I did
New Zealand, I did Greece.
I did New Zealand, I did Greece, I did France, and yet no major
news outlets are even hoveringwhat happened to these girls 30

(01:41:10):
miles away.
And to me it's like if we decidethat we're only outraged when
these injustices happen tosomebody we agree with, then
we're no better than them.
Right, and I mean I obviouslyfall inside of being
pro-palestine, but even if Ididn't, if these had been girls

(01:41:31):
who were raided because theyhung up, you know the, the
hostages, posters all over theplace, um, I would be like this
is not acceptable.
I I mean, if it had been thatsituation, honestly I think
there would have beencongressional investigations,
the university would have beenput on notice of being defunded
and the whole situation would bedifferent.
But it makes me very reticentto speak when I'm seeing young

(01:41:58):
girls, and I mean I'm in my late30s now.
If you're over 35, you can saylate, 30s, 30s now if you're
over 35 you can stay late 30s.
So for anybody, for me that'slike 25 and young younger you
know, like a kid um, that's whathappens when you get your
mid-30s everybody 25 and younger.
These girls will never be okayagain ever, and I speak that

(01:42:20):
from experience.
Neither were their parents orany other children who were
there.
And for what?
her fucking and I think I, Ithink when we look at your
situation like I'm going to killso and so at x time and x date,
to warrant such?
Because when somebody actuallycalled my husband's cell phone

(01:42:40):
and left a voicemail threateningto fucking kill me, the literal
words it it was three sentenceswas I'm going to kill you, I'm
going to kill your family,you're going to die,
motherfucker.
You think they rated his health?
No, they shut up, knocked onthe door and he was like, oh
yeah, I did that.
And they were like, oh well,don't do it again.
And that was it.
So this is a strategic,acceptable point of view and

(01:43:13):
that is scary.

Speaker 2 (01:43:14):
How many situations like.

Speaker 3 (01:43:16):
Like I'm not an acceptable point of view.
Does that make it okay to throwme in jail again?

Speaker 2 (01:43:20):
How many situations like yours do we think we are
going to see nationwide underTrump?

Speaker 3 (01:43:27):
Oh, holy fuck, I hope .
Well, I will say H5N1 is scary.

Speaker 2 (01:43:36):
That was my next question.

Speaker 3 (01:43:39):
Dr Rick Bright, who is one of the nicest people I've
ever met, is super supportive.
He was a federal whistleblowerfor COVID-19.
He was on the original taskforce.
He was trying to warn peoplethat I'm managing this so well
and they came after him.
He's great now.
He's at the RockefellerInstitute.
He's making waves.
He's been sounding the alarmabout H5N1 for 13 months.

(01:44:03):
He's gone to the White House.
He's gone to the White House.
He's gone to the Bidenadministration.
Essentially, what has happenedis they said we can't deal with
another pandemic right now, notin the sense of logistics, but
as publicity, and that hasallowed this to go unchecked.
And this is where I get, wheremost democrats are like, okay,

(01:44:28):
we don't listen to her anymore,um, because I talk about things
like this.
But most of the deaths duringcovid happened under biden and
the 20 I think just 22 wholeshow at congress where they
refused.
They like actually did notallow people to wear masks on

(01:44:48):
camera because they wanted theappearance that they had
defeated COVID, even thoughclearly, as we're seeing with
current numbers, we did not,because that was their promise
was to end COVID pandemic, whichwas an unrealistic promise to
begin with.
They should have just promisedto deal with it in an effective
manner, not to, you know, tidythis up, because the truth is

(01:45:10):
that by the time Biden waselected, containing it was not
possible.
You know, it's been reallyfrustrating to watch the same
people who put their lives,their careers, on the line for
COVID be ignored, um, beostracized for doing the same
thing about h5n1.

(01:45:31):
I mean 90 percent.
90 percent, that that is a hugenumber.
I don't know if people know wholisten to know how many like
birds we have that we eat, thatare in stock.
90 had to be euthanized in thelast year because of this virus.
That is how widespread it is.
It is fucking scary.

(01:45:53):
We've had our first few casesof non-direct contact with
animals in California, oregonand Canada.
So people who don't work ondairy farms or work on poultry
farms, who have been infectedfrom person to person contact.
Now this could end up dying out.
The virus could fuck up andsizzle out, like 99.9% of

(01:46:16):
viruses do.
But what if it doesn't?
And do we really want Trump tobe president during another
pandemic?
I mean that is so frustrating.

Speaker 2 (01:46:32):
Especially when you keep in mind that the heat he
knows, the heat that he caughtafter he left office and how
much that tarnished him for thislast run, oh he won't because
of COVID Sure for this last runbecause of covid, not because of
the crazy shit or the almostwar with iran, um, in syria and
pretty much the whole middleeast.

Speaker 3 (01:46:53):
He lost because of covid sure.

Speaker 2 (01:46:56):
so you know then what his approach is going to be if
we face another pandemic, hehe's going to air he might just
fucking euthanize everybody whogets sick with it right away.

Speaker 3 (01:47:08):
Who knows, right, I mean, it hurt him so badly and I
don't think he intends on notrunning again.
I think that's prettyunderstood from his own
statements that he plans onrunning again.
But he might just euthanizeanybody who gets sick to try to
quash the spread of it, which is, a not going to work and B one

(01:47:32):
of the most inhumane things youcould do.
And C partially what China wasalleged to have done at some
point in their thing, which is ahuman rights violation and all
kinds of other problems.
But, most importantly, does notwork Because, like Florida, by
the time they were willing toadmit they had cases internally.

(01:47:54):
We knew there was communityspread because we had been so
focused on testing people fromAsia that we had missed that
there was already communityspread throughout Florida.
The first case that we hadrecorded was community spread
and we did not admit thatpublicly until weeks later and

(01:48:17):
ultimately ended up being one ofthe big debates that got me
fired.
But the first transported casewe had was somebody who had
recently gone to Turkey andIsrael.
We weren't even looking in theright fucking places.
So this whole like China focusand this is something I have
like two chapters in my bookrelated to the xenophobic thing

(01:48:39):
about China, drew all of ourattention to that when it really
should have been elsewhere,because by the time that China
was reporting it, it was alreadyin the Middle East, it was
already, you know, in parts ofEurope and we had this triage
mentality because of Trump, andhe absolutely was the one who

(01:48:59):
steered this.
He said it was a China virus,like.
He said that, like right offthe bat, that's who we
prioritize testing.
I mean, the first person whodied their recent travel was to
Jamaica and that was it, so atleast in Florida.
And so we were looking in allthe wrong places because we had

(01:49:21):
somebody in charge whofundamentally did not understand
what we were dealing with, oreven the had the capacity to
understand the field that wewere dealing with.
And, um, that's dangerous, it'sincredibly dangerous.
And if somebody goes and tellstrump, look, we, we killed 90
percent of the birds, but youknow, 92 percent are still

(01:49:43):
infected, I'm probably justsaying kill them all again, you
know, or what dull import birdsor whatever irrational things he
thinks is causing it?
Because this is a virus thatoriginated here, um, much like
the 1918 lupoenza, which was avirus that originated, I think,
from either nebraska or kansasand met up with the seasonal flu

(01:50:03):
in World War I and then justcaused mass death throughout the
world and was dubbed theSpanish flu because the Spanish
were not involved in that warRight.

Speaker 2 (01:50:15):
I think it started in Kansas.

Speaker 3 (01:50:17):
Kansas or Nebraska, it was one of those two At a
military base at a pig farmRight, it was a wine flu and
soldiers who were going out in1918 to you know, in the
trenches, which trench warfareis a whole, I'll let the
military people speak, as howawful that was.
Let the disease spread likewildfire.
But spain was not involved inthat war.
Spain was in the midst of itsown civil war, and so spanish

(01:50:40):
newspapers were the only placesthat were not propagandized by
either the Axis or the Alliesand published about all of these
soldiers' just mass deaths.
I mean, we're talking aboutmillions of people just dropping
dead in these trenches, and sothat's why we call it the
Spanish Flu, because the onlyway that you could hear about it
was through Spanish newspapers.
And they had to be smuggled too, because the United States

(01:51:03):
tried to stomp that news outlike the fuck out.
Pretty much the only news youcould get at that point from the
1918 flu was in, like the twomajor newspapers over there,
like the New York Times, theWashington Post, or officially
government-sanctioned, liketheater propaganda videos, and
so Spanish was like the only wayyou'd find out.
So we called it Spanish flu.

(01:51:23):
It was the United States flu,it was the United States
pandemic, and so is this one.
And Trump is an idiot.
He's surrounded by idiots.
He disappointed RFK to what?
The head of the NIH, which healso plans to defund.
So kind of wondering if, likeif RFK's pissed about that
because he's like, wait, you'redefunding conflict funding.

(01:51:49):
You know, um, yeah, I know,right, like that's like the
third agency that's on thechopping block, right after,
like, the va and my agency.
So, um, but you know, havingpeople in charge of the cdc like
jay or russia or whatever hisname, is a vaccine skeptic or
whatever he wants himself.
That's way worse than where wewere in 2016.

Speaker 2 (01:52:07):
Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 (01:52:07):
You know it's an.
Anthony Fauci was the head ofthe NIH back then and he had
been there for like 30 years andno his.
You know he didn't alwayshandle things perfectly, but he
handled them as well as anybodycould have been expected to.
He was not a great spokesperson, but in science we have a
saying that you know, know, thetop expert in the field is not
necessarily the top person thatyou want explaining the field to

(01:52:29):
the public, but, um, you know,he survived trump, he was there
the whole time and, uh, which isincredible when you think,
looking back at it, I don'tthink that would happen.
It really is but um, yeah, hestayed there the whole time,
which to?

Speaker 2 (01:52:44):
me that always spoke to me as much of a beef as Trump
now says he had with him.
The fact that he kept him thewhole time tells me he knew how
badly he needed him.

Speaker 3 (01:53:00):
Yeah, he was serious was serious and every instinct
that he had to like fire him.
When he embarrassed him or whenhe laughed at him, at least
somebody in that circle was likeyou can't fire him.
We actually kind of need thisguy to handle this shit.
Um, I don't know who thatmagical person was probably the
person who penned the anonymousop-ed in the new york times that

(01:53:22):
they got rightfully panned fordoing.
Maybe that person's still there, maybe they're not, but having
J whatever his name is run theCDC, that's not a good sign.

Speaker 2 (01:53:36):
No, not at all.
What would you say to peoplewho were in or people who are in
your position in florida,across across the united states,
when they come face to facewith a situation like yours?
What would you, looking back,what would your advice be to

(01:53:57):
them?

Speaker 3 (01:53:58):
so I have some stock advice and I'm usually paid like
5k a pop to deliver sober soI'm gonna say that you're
getting paid like ten thousanddollars to go give this advice
in scotland in february well,this is the rum version mama's
gotta pay the bills, um, but andI kind of break this down in
one of my my videos the way youhave to protect yourself first,

(01:54:25):
everything that you know,everything that you have, back
it up Offsite.
So if you have like Outlook asyour state agency, you can
export your entire fucking inboxand put it into a CSV file and
email it to yourself to yourprivate Gmail to have a copy of
it.
That saved my ass so much inthis lawsuit.

(01:54:46):
I cannot even tell you thesecond that I started to think
that things are off because ofthings that happened previously
in my life.
I was like this blind copymyself on this email because it
feels like I'm being told to dosomething that isn't kosher and,
um, the first rule to protectyourself is back everything up

(01:55:09):
off of their servers.
You can run into complicationsif you end up backing up
sensitive information, so Ialways recommend people email
their supervisor saying hey, isit okay if I work from home?
Today my computer's not working?
Boom, you're done, you'recovered.
Yeah, everything that youemailed yourself is good, right,
you have to protect yourselfand I would say collect enough

(01:55:35):
that if anybody ever questionsyour version of events, you can
prove everything that you'resaying and be sure that you can
prove everything that you'resaying.
I've never said somethingpublicly that I could not back
up.
I even went so far as to, inthe early 2020 period, being
like I didn't think I had to sayI said anything to do with this
.
It's like he wasn't in theseemail chains.

(01:55:57):
I was surprised, as anybodyelse, that he was involved with
it.
To see him attacking me infront of the vice president was
literally paralyzing, like Iremember the moment I saw it.
To see him attacking me infront of the vice president was
literally paralyzing, like Iremember the moment I saw it.
I was in a hotel.
This was my first day off sinceFebruary I think of that year,
january, february.
My parents had lost their housein a tornado in April and they

(01:56:19):
were staying in hotels.
Somebody wanted to go see themand I went downstairs to the
lobby and there was MSNBC, therewas CNN and there was Foxsnbc,
there's cnn and there's fox news.
You know the obligatorychannels at the, at the mini bar
, and my face was on everyfucking one of them and I
remember thinking what the fuckjust happened, like I didn't
have, I hadn't said anything toanybody.
Why am I this the thing?

(01:56:42):
And luckily I had not done myhair, my makeup and I had on
because it was summer and sonobody recognized me.
Eventually somebody did andthey spit at me, which was crazy
.
But protect yourself, make surethat you're fully protected,
because you have no fucking cluewhat you're getting into.
You might think you know, youdon't know.

(01:57:02):
This could go way differentthan what ever happened.
I didn't think it had anythingto do with the governor's office
at first, and it did.
And you know, and now jaredmoskowitz, who's a sitting
congressman, who was the head ofthe dem at the time, is a
witness in my lawsuit and that'spublic information, because all
this stuff is filed publicly,and you know.
So I was sitting congresspeople in my lawsuit because

(01:57:24):
that is how far this went, andso and I see a witness on you
and a witness on for you.

Speaker 2 (01:57:30):
Is he a witness for you?

Speaker 3 (01:57:32):
no, I wouldn't.
Um, I think it's a previousconversations that, like I said,
I backed up because she shouldback up everything.
If somebody's like, hey, can wetalk in person about this as
soon as they walk out, you needto email that person a record of
everything they just asked youto do and say, hey, thanks for
coming by my office.

(01:57:53):
Type, type, type.
You just asked me to do X, y, z.
Please confirm that this iswhat you want me to do, so that
you have a record of it, becausethat I cannot express how much
that has saved my life of it,because that I cannot express
how much that has saved my lifenot feeling that something was
off and not being afraid tocreate some physical record that
that had happened.

(01:58:14):
It's extremely important.
I mean, they moved my office tothe corner multi-window office.
I was like in a cubicle next tothe elevator before and it was
no windows.
It was miserable and I feltlike I was like in a cubicle
next to the elevator before andno windows.
It was miserable and it feltlike I was in a cave.
They moved me to the corneroffice to take over the former
head of epidemiology's office sothat we would email less and so

(01:58:35):
that there'd be less paper trip, which, to me, at the very
second they did it, I was likeI'm going to take the corner
office I mean, half the staff'sat home anyway.
So what's the matter?
And I like windows, but I'mstill gonna email and document
every single thing that you guysare asking me to do.
So if you feel like somethingis off, trust that like, trust

(01:58:56):
that instinct.
If you feel like somebody iswashing you, make sure you
document that.
Somehow.
You know record conversations,depending on the laws in your
state about you know one or twoor all party recording, because
even if you can't use it incourt, that doesn't mean you
can't use it in the media andthat's important.
And so just createdocumentation of everything.

(01:59:21):
It sounds simple and it soundssomewhat kind of productive, but
if you have to sue the state orGod forbid they kill you and
throw you in jail, there'ssomething there that can prove
that what you said happenedhappened and I wouldn't be
winning this lawsuit without him.

(01:59:43):
I was going to ask you had younot have documented as you did,
you'd be in a much different,much different position I mean
even the things that I didn'tintend to be documents, like
when I texted my mom and mysisters on the way home from the
reopening weekend whole debacleand I said that I was exhausted

(02:00:04):
and that people were going toget killed and I didn't sign up
for that.
I never intended that to be arecord, but in my lawsuit it's
proof that as soon as shit wentdown, I reached out to the
people that I trusted most inthe world my family and told
them what was happening and thatI I was warned about what to do

(02:00:26):
.
My sister kind of became famousfrom it because she told me to
call him with explosive diarrheaand yeah, and I said that it
wouldn't work, like they didn'thave anybody to run the shit.
Afterwards she was like nobodyquestions explosive diarrhea and
so there was like this wholeself-pandemon with my sister
that developed um, but none ofthem want fame, they don't want

(02:00:47):
to be attached to any of this.
That's the other part of this.
My nephew was just going throughthis whole fundraiser thing for
his high school and my oldersister sent out a text saying,
oh, can everybody share?
And I was like you sure youwant me to share it?
And she was like oh no, not you, I meant everybody else.
I was like I can't even do likenormal people things anymore.

(02:01:07):
Yeah, like I can't share mynephew's popcorn fundraiser
because I know that the stalkersthat follow me will figure out
what school he goes to and thenthey'll figure out what school
my teacher, my sister teachers,teaches at and then they'll
harass her, they'll harass thestaff, she could lose her job
and I think a lot of times wedon't realize that that's part

(02:01:28):
of this, this whole public lifething.
It should not be.
There are laws already on thebooks that prevent that kind of
harassment.
There should not be exemptionsfor people like me who are quasi
famous or somewhat famous orhave a social media following
because they don't even do likeregular media anymore.

(02:01:49):
I walk back from all that.
That should not make that kindof shit.
Okay, if I was a normal person,somebody did that they'd throw
their ass in jail.
Somebody went and tracked downmy sister and my nephew because
of his popcorn fundraiser,because he was associated with
me and harassed the school.
They'd be a fucking crazyperson and they'd be thrown in

(02:02:09):
jail.
But because they're paid byDeSantis and he's the governor
and I'm famous, nothing happens.
And again, if Democrats weren'tfucking cowards, they would
enforce some of these laws.
But every time I reportsomething to the FBI, they're
like, oh yeah, we really time.
I report them to the fbi,they're like, oh yeah, we really
gave him a talking to.
It was like you threw me injail not the fbi, but sure you

(02:02:34):
put me in jail for a textmessage that two years later you
had to admit that I didn't send.
And you won't do anything aboutthese people threatening to
kill me or scouring the Internetevery 24 hours for every
possible combination that youcan misspell my name so that you

(02:02:55):
could find a dispatch in whichI called for help for my son.
My autistic minor son, who's aprivate citizen, does not have
social media so that you couldpublish it and make me look like
a bad mother.
Does not have social media sothat you could publish it and
make me look like a bad mother.

Speaker 2 (02:03:09):
It's, it's reached a level of insanity.
I I mean it really has anybodywho wants to put themselves out
in front, to lead in any kind ofway.
They really have to to think ofthese things.
No, you have to know.

Speaker 3 (02:03:28):
And that's the thing I didn't know and I didn't
consent.
I was thrown out there Like Ihad not done a public interview,
I had not made a publicstatement.
I was hiding in a hotel room,worried that guys in Russian,
like traditional hats, weregoing to like push me out of a
window or something.
When DeSantis was with the vicepresident, in front of the
whole fucking world, live sayingthat I was a sexual predator,

(02:03:51):
which was never true.
That was never a thing.
That happened.
And the job six figure job thatI had lined up just ghosted me.
And you know it's like inFlorida.
You cannot sue a publicofficial for defamation if it is
considered within the course oftheir job duties.
Believe me, I've I've had thesediscussions with my lawyers

(02:04:14):
over and over again.
They've exempted themselvesfrom defamation suits.
The theory is is that yourpolitical opponents should not
be able to sue you into oblivionif you're running a campaign
against them for things that arejust completely made up.
I was not a political woman.
I was not a political person inany shape or form, but yet,

(02:04:37):
because that was Ron Sanchez'sofficial duties, he can say
literally whatever he wants.

Speaker 2 (02:04:42):
He can call me a Nazi .

Speaker 3 (02:04:44):
He can say that I showed up to like antifa
meetings, which you know itwouldn't be that bad, but you
know, that would be less harmfulto me than what he did say.
He can literally say whateverhe wants and there's nothing
anybody can do about it, andthat that is.
It's a powerless feeling and, Ihave to admit, sometimes people
feel rageful Like they wantsomething to break.

(02:05:11):
They want to break somethingover what has happened to them
because it's so wrong.
But I had the benefit of havingthe public and I have to wonder
and this kind of goes back tothe whole healthcare guy, the
DDD guy If I didn't, what wouldI have done?
You know, would I have done?
Would I be like Ian Gibbons atTheranos, just giving up, or

(02:05:32):
would I be like the DDD guy,taking shit into my own hands?
I was extremely privileged tohave the audience and the
platform that I did.
Most people don't have that.
That's why I'm coming back totwitter, which is a nice preface
to that, because instead oftelling my story, which there's

(02:05:54):
a movie about, there's going tobe a second movie about.
You know, people have heard it.
It's in like cosmo, it's in themighty hero.
Oh my god, I I want you to stoptalking about it.
Instead of doing that, I'mgoing to start telling other
people's stories, because Ispent the entire day today
listening to people saying ifsomeone would just understand

(02:06:15):
why I came to this country andwhat I want for my life, what
I'm going to do for this country, maybe they wouldn't see me as
the enemy.
Those are the stories I want totell.
I want to tell the stories ofpeople like me who don't look
like this, who don't get thatattention.
Um, because horror is poor, yes, but white is white, and white

(02:06:39):
always comes with privileges.
And, um, you know, this happenedto a fellow geographer.
I don't know if we talked aboutthis earlier in the year or if
that had happened yet.
There was another geographerwho worked for the state of
Florida, who turnedwhistleblower against the Sandas
and attracted his ire.
I made a lot of videos abouthim, I posted a lot about him.

(02:07:02):
He blew the whistle on asubversive plan to basically
turn public state lands thatwere protected into Gulf Corses
for rich people, and he wasspecifically tasked with
designating the area that wouldbe turned into protective land,
into Gulf Corses, and he waslike you know what?

(02:07:25):
What this is fucked up and sohe leaked into the media.
He was fired for unauthorizedcommunication with the media,
which is a weird thing, um, andthe first thing I did when I
heard that story, I was reachedout to him, was like, get the
fuck out.
I was like if you do a TVinterview, they will come after

(02:07:45):
you.
If you tweet about it, theywill come after you, and you
think that it'll last like aweek or whatever.
It will not stop.
It has been four and a halffucking years for me.
Every day, everything I say istracked by these people online.
Everywhere I go is tracked bythese people online.
They search my face in GoogleImages to see if I appear on

(02:08:06):
things to find me to criticizeand attack the organizations
that I'm associated with.
It will not fucking stop.
I helped him raise like $230,000and he got the fuck out of
Dodge and I was like, if I hadme back in 2020, that's exactly
what I would have done Raise themoney, get the fuck out.
Never look back because this Istill don't know if it's worth

(02:08:34):
it and I think that's like fouryears ago.
If you had asked me on thisevening before the raid, I've
told you to be.
Absolutely Every you knowhaving, like Rebel Cole from
Florida Atlantic or whatever,harass me and make weird creepy
rape threats.
It's like what is that?
What is that really?
You know, I'm making adifference.

(02:08:54):
I'm telling people what'sactually happening and they're
informed, which is all I everwanted.
But four years and one day ago,that completely changed and he
listened to me, which was greatbecause, uh, now he's safe and
his daughter is safe and he'sgot 230 000 to figure out what

(02:09:15):
the fuck to do next with the,which I don't know.

Speaker 2 (02:09:23):
Well, I think that's probably the most honest answer
that anybody could give.
Is that um, I, depending on themoment of the day, I question
even now whether it was worth it, because it most things aren't
that crystal clear.
You're going to have those, youknow, peaks and troughs where

(02:09:45):
there are days where you're like, fuck yeah, it was worth it.

Speaker 3 (02:09:48):
I'd do it again in a minute, and then you're going to
have those fighting the power,you know everything's worth it
and then when you find your kidssleeping on the floor crying
yeah, you're like this isn'tworth it.
Right, this isn't worth it.
I knew my kid was broken theday the day, fucking night it
happened.
There's video of him cominginto the house with his fist
gripped looking down becausehe's too afraid to look up.

(02:10:10):
He was 11 years old, anautistic kid who had struggled
his whole life with adhd andadhd.
We didn't have the money tohave the autistic testing done
yet at that point, but we didlater.
Now has trauma to add to it andhe has absolutely struggled and
disantness.
People have chosen to make thata public struggle.
So even as a teenager he can'tgo through already difficult

(02:10:32):
things autism, adhd by himself.
He has to now have his traumalaid out for the whole world and
that really makes it hard whenmy six-year-old daughter goes to
school.
She's the school resourceofficer, which is a cop.
For all of last year they hadto create a cubby for her where

(02:10:59):
she could run and hide becauseshe was so afraid the school
resource officer was going tokill her.
She needed a safe place to hide.
She used to hide like underthis table but there were like a
bunch of cords under it.
So I had a special meeting.
I was like, oh, she set up likea blanket and a little cubby
and you know, put the cords awayso that she has somewhere to
run and hide.

(02:11:20):
The school resource officer andshe still struggles with that.
She was only in the first grade, she was two and a half when
that happened and you know yougo back and you look at the
video and she's in my husband'sarms and she's just looking
around and you think maybe she'stoo little, maybe she's too
small, too innocent to have thatimprint upon her.
But there are periods that shegoes through where every single

(02:11:45):
day she asked me if somebody's anice police officer or not,
because even though nobody saidthat to her, she saw it and you
know this and that goes to likeresearch that we have on
children who are exposed to, youknow, gun crime and violent
crime and all kinds of differenttypes of environments and the
long-lasting impacts that thatcan have on communities, and

(02:12:08):
that's why recidivism andcontinued problems continue
within those communities.
I just think my daughter wastwo and a half years old.
One event, I mean it's beenfour years.
It's a deep batch but, they'rethat strongly.
yeah, like imagine all the kidsout there who don't have the

(02:12:28):
whole world watching video ofthem going through that outrage.
And so I felt really guiltytoday about quitting twitter
about that stuff.
But that's why the first thingI posted back after leaving for
several weeks was the storyabout those two students at
George Mason, because I was likeyou know, if these were two
Jewish students who had beenraided for posting, you know,

(02:12:52):
the hostage posters, there wouldbe congressional investigations
, there would be threats ofdefunding George Mason, there
would be all kinds of shit.
We have to do better than that,because the second that we
allow tyranny to happen topeople we don't like, we are
inviting it to happen to usright and speaking as somebody

(02:13:15):
who's been there, um and comethrough it.
You have no idea what you'reasking, what you're inviting
into your life.
You think, oh, this will neverhappen to me.
I'm a law-abiding person, guys.
I was raided at gunpoint for analleged text message that they
took two years to dismiss thecharge.
It doesn't fucking matter ifyou are a saint, they will find

(02:13:37):
your reason, like you said,three felonies, and they will
hurt you.
They will find your reason,like you said three felonies,
and they will hurt you.
They will find a way to hurtyou the way it hurts you most
and what's what people oftenforget.

Speaker 2 (02:13:48):
If they haven't been through something like that is,
people always say well, you know, in this country you're
innocent until proven guilty.
What?
They leave out of what?
What they leave out of, that isthat until that time, you have
legal expenses piling up in thatperiod where you're innocent
until proven guilty, right.

Speaker 3 (02:14:09):
Oh yeah, I get trashed all the time for how
much money I raise.
I was like you realize that Ihad to pay a $50,000 retainer
just to get my lawyer to take me$50,000 retainer.
That doesn't include all theother charges that came after
that.
I'm very lucky in that my legalteam on the whistleblower case
is working on contingency orconsignment, whichever.

(02:14:31):
There's too much wrong.
Now for me to remember whichword.

Speaker 2 (02:14:37):
One of those C words right.

Speaker 3 (02:14:39):
One of those C words that implies that they get a cut
of whatever I went yeah well, Idon't have to pay them anything
now, and it's they've beenworking basically for free for
four and a half years, which,more than anything, is a
testament to their confidence inthe case, because if they
didn't, bet then said that theywere going to win, and they
weren't convinced that they weregoing to win a lot of money,
they wouldn't bother, um.
But for my criminal case there'sonly one of two outcomes it's

(02:15:01):
dropped or you're convicted orplead guilty.
Either way, that lawyer doesn'tprofit off of anything.
So they require that money upfront and that's what I had to
do.
I literally hadn't transferredfifty thousand dollars in one
day, um, through this guy torepresent me and it was
ultimately dismissed.
So money well worth it.

(02:15:22):
But, my god, the two years thatit took to get to that place.
They hung that over me as athreat the entire time.
That if I jaywalked, you know,if I failed a drug, I wasn't
allowed to drink for two years.
I mean for fun to the world.
Well, that is mean.
That's proof.

Speaker 2 (02:15:43):
Right, there's proof.
You're not innocent untilproven guilty.

Speaker 3 (02:15:45):
I know right, like your Second Amendment rights,
you think you have those untilyou're proven guilty.
No, you don't.
The second that you're chargedwith a felony, you have to
surrender all firearms.
You cannot be in a house withfirearms.
You're not allowed to hold orpossess firearms.
Your Second Amendment rightsboom gone.
You cannot drink.
You cannot smoke weed, eventhough weed is legal in most
states.
In the United States, because Iwas charged in Florida, I could

(02:16:09):
not smoke anywhere in thecountry and I never have.
I'm still a virgin when itcomes to that because I was
afraid I'd get drug tested andI'd get fired.
But the day that I decide to dothat will be very interesting,
but a lot of your rights aregone.
The second that they arrest youand charge you with a felony and
two years two fucking yearsthey tried to play their

(02:16:31):
heaviest hand um three weeksbefore the election in 2022 the
primary and told me that I'dhave to admit guilt, drop my
whistleblower lawsuit which, bythe way, is considered extremely
unethical to use a criminalsuit to force someone I mean, at
least on paper like you wouldnever admit that you were doing

(02:16:52):
that um to drop an unrelated,like pre-existing civil suit.
All this other shit.
I would apologize.
Apologize to the Department ofHealth.
I went there in August.
I was already picked off theballot Because of this whole
other thing.
I didn't even know if I wasgoing to be eligible for the
ballot.
I didn't know what the fuck wasgoing to happen.

(02:17:13):
We went into that meeting withthe state and they laid out
those demands and I literallysaid go fuck yourself and my
lawyer.
They're like sweet dude.
I was like you want me to drawmy whistleblower lawsuit?
Is this because you know I'llwin?

(02:17:34):
Go fuck yourself.
You think you have this leveragebecause I allegedly sent a text
message telling people to speakhonest and you know, whatever I
was like you can't prove thatit even came from my computer.
You didn't even take my router,which would have been the only
evidence that you needed toprove that it did.
But you didn't take that.
Instead, you sent a warrant infor my OneDrive where I had

(02:17:58):
backed up a bunch of data,including a roster of publicly
accessible contact information.
You can get that from a publicrecords request of people
working on the ESF-AT.
I was like you don't have shitand I literally said go fuck
yourself.
Like that was the patience thatI have with them.
About a month later they cameback and all of those

(02:18:21):
stipulations were gone and mylawyer, he told me he's like I
have never in my career, in 40years practicing law, had a
client say to the state, totheir face, go fuck yourself and
get a better deal out of it.
And I was like well, this isone.

Speaker 2 (02:18:38):
That's one reason I can call you friend, though you
have to know that I was like.
Well, this is one.

Speaker 3 (02:18:41):
That's one reason I can call you friend, though you
have to know that I was likewell, this is not your normal
case and I'm not your normalclient.
He was like I'm starting torealize that, yeah, and so it's
like and and you know we'vetalked about this before if I
hadn't grown up the way that Idid and I hadn't struggled so
much, I don't think I would havefound that inner strength to

(02:19:03):
literally the state of Floridathreatening me with prison.
I mean they were literallycoming at me, we will send you
to prison for years.
And say to them I mean I lookedthat bitch dead in the eye and
said go fuck yourself.

Speaker 2 (02:19:17):
And I'm glad you brought that up, because,
whereas somebody listening orsomebody you know, if it's
something that you or I postonline, somebody might just see
the profanity element of that.
But what I think what is whatneeds to be addressed is that it

(02:19:39):
is an attitude, it is a mind.

Speaker 3 (02:19:43):
It is not that big of a deal.
Okay, I might be more flexiblewith my language and profanity
and proximity to alcohol, but atthe same time it's been proven
statistically that people withhigh IQs curse more.
And because we recognize thatthese are expressive ideas that
emphasize a particular feelingor emotion that instantly

(02:20:06):
resonates with who we're talkingto.
And, plus, I grew up in thesouth and nobody gives a shit
and you know, I didn't grow upat empty dinner parties where
you weren't allowed to, like,say these things and right, I
think if you talk to most peoplewho have struggled, they're
going to tell you their storyand it's going to be laden with
profanity, because that is theway we learn to emphasis and it

(02:20:28):
is maybe not and you've neverseen me live on tv.
I never cursed, it's like wellyou're like I know, battle is
specifically talking about thisone thing.
I'm going to tell you aboutthis one thing for two and a
half minutes, and you're goingto understand it, and it's going
to be in an accessible.
I'm going to tell you aboutthis one thing for two and a
half minutes and you're going tounderstand it, and it's going
to be in an accessible way.
Then I'm going to go back toTwitter and start cursing again
about you know how fucked up thewhole like capitalism is People

(02:20:50):
are very often, I think, theplace where I've been asked the
most.

Speaker 2 (02:20:58):
people who just knew me from my Twitter feed would
watch some of my podcasts, wherethere there might be entire
episodes where I I don't use somuch as one curse word.
It's very contextual with it.
It depends on the person thatI'm talking to.

(02:21:19):
It depends on the person thatI'm talking to.
I did an episode yesterday withAnthony Scaramucci.
That was a very differentcontext than the one with you.
I make people correct me.

Speaker 3 (02:21:35):
You say bad words, potty mouth, yeah, but that's
the truth.
It's like today we went throughthis whole storytelling thing,
um, and you know, everybody hadto boil down basically the life
story into three minutes and,despite what probably most of
the people who I work withthought I was going to say, I
did not tell the story relatedto florida or covid or the

(02:21:57):
governor or anything like that.
I told a story about the girlon the train and when I told it
in our small group there's lotsof language.
But when I was asked to, as theambassador of 80 people, to
make that the final presentation, which for some reason I kind
of already knew I was going toend up being not one curse word.

(02:22:18):
So live TV, no curse word.
I used to do the Young Turkslike once a week, you know,
there they will literally sendyou a guide, like saying if you
curse, not only will it be cutbut you will be disinvited from
anything in the future.
Like the Young Turks isextremely strict about that.
And obviously live TV if yousay fuck, you know as much as

(02:22:41):
Chris and I are close.
Chris Cuomo is not going tobite me back if I say fuck,
every other word, but thereneeds to be spaces where we can
just talk like normal people.
And this kind of brings me backto like I took this advanced
political reporting class withthe night chair at Newhouse my
senior year and she asked us togo out and talk to people like

(02:23:02):
real people.
And I think my idea of realpeople was different from
everybody else in my class,which was only like eight people
.
But I went out and I justtalked to workers and I asked
them and this was like the NewYork State Fair.
I was like you know what's itlike working here?
I was like I noticed that thesepeople were silent and they
were shuffling between thedifferent booths and it kind of

(02:23:23):
seemed like they had a catch-alljob and I asked them to speak
to me and when I recorded theirinterviews there was a lot of
language and my professor waslike you need to go back and
redo all these interviews.
There's too much language forus to use.
So I was like have you everconsidered for a second that
that's the way people talk in adifferent socioeconomic class

(02:23:48):
and that by requiring thatsomeone meets your loquacious
standards, you are excluding anentire class of people who have
learned to speak this way andfrankness to each other and that
my camaraderie with thesepeople made them comfortable
enough for them to open up, talkto me like I'm one of them, and

(02:24:08):
I thought that was a very goodargument.
I was like fair enough.
But what's interesting is thatmy coverage of the New York
State Fair because I was adouble major in earth science
and journalism was the firstthing I ever had that picked up
national news for the New YorkState Fair that they were being

(02:24:42):
shipped in in bus flows.
They were being kept basicallyin warehouses and empty like
trucking whatever they're calledcontainers and being forced to
work for like $2 an hour andthey had no idea who they were
working for but they weresupposed to sell shit and make
sure everything was stocked.
One of the employees actuallywatched in front of me get in
trouble for talking to me and itended up making national news.

(02:25:02):
It became a state investigationand people went to jail and I
remember 10 years later or so,in a night chair with a K at a
university is considered themost esteemed position.
There's only five in the wholecountry.

Speaker 2 (02:25:18):
There's the night chair of political reporting,
which is at Syracuse,no-transcript no kidding, yeah,

(02:25:58):
yeah, that's, you know, probablythe probably one of the biggest
compliments, and I don't thinkhe thought he was paying me a
compliment, but I took it as acompliment.
When I was in the Navy I had acaptain say to me one time he
said I can't say that I approveof your approach to things, but

(02:26:20):
I can't argue with the results.
There you go, and you know Itook that as keep getting the
results.

Speaker 3 (02:26:30):
Now, I don't think that's something he would have
said, something about the waythat you're doing this is
working better than it does forother people, right?

Speaker 2 (02:26:37):
Although it may ruffle feathers and make people
uncomfortable Exactly otherpeople right, although it may
ruffle feathers to make peopleuncomfortable exactly, and that
had a big that.
That one statement had a playeda has played a role in my life
since that time because itreinforced an idea that I
already had in my head, but I'dnever had any body that I

(02:26:59):
respected like that ever feed itback to me and I came away from
that going.
You know, I am different, I dothings different than most
people, but here's a guy who'sall about the results and I'm
making him happy there.
You know what I mean all aboutthe results and I'm making him

(02:27:21):
happy there, you know.

Speaker 3 (02:27:22):
I mean, yeah, I'm a I'm a very, very close friend
who once told me the reason likepeople like me with adhd cannot
rest when something seems offis because our brains work in
such a way that we understandright and wrong in kind of these
universal terms.
Like if this happens to x or yor z, it's wrong, it doesn't

(02:27:45):
matter, you know, and that'skind of like the the whole you
know raid on the students thing.
Doesn't matter who, what thespeech is or who said it.
That is wrong and we cannotstop until that thing is fixed.
Like we're obsessive almostabout it and it becomes kind of
compulsory to be like and it'skind of associated loosely with

(02:28:08):
autism as well to be like, nope,not right, not right.
I cannot be quiet about it.
I cannot do it the way you'reasking me to do it, because
that's not the most effectivemeans and it's not the most.
It will not generate theresults that are necessary that
describes me.

Speaker 2 (02:28:26):
To a t.

Speaker 3 (02:28:29):
We see something that is out of place in the context
of society, even if that thingis being universally condemned.
Um, we must rectify thatbecause it doesn't.
It doesn't fit, and people withadhd, 88 add, and possibly
autism cannot stop untilsomething fits right and it's

(02:28:52):
like it's.

Speaker 2 (02:28:52):
I think it's important to to add to that,
like when I make a post that Iknow is probably not going to be
aligned and therefore notperceived as okay, that lines up
with the, the core democraticvalues.
Or if I call out somebody inthe democratic party oh no, I

(02:29:16):
don't like I.
I, I know that as I'm writingit, I, I already know it's never
a surprise that, oh, peopledon't like this.
I know that a lot of people, orat least some people, aren't
going to like it, but I can'thelp myself.
I have to write it.

Speaker 3 (02:29:39):
Somebody needs to see it, and if everybody else is
going to shut up about it, thenI'm going to be able to say it.
I mean, I felt like that withthe whole COVID-19 tracking
schools thing, as I thought, forsure states or the federal
government will take thisproject.
It's very important to know howCOVID is spreading in schools
and then just watch as all thesestates plan to reopen

(02:30:02):
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia,Florida were the first.
Nobody had a plan and I waslike fuck it, I'll do it.
That was literally the originof the whole project with Google
.
Was that looking around,waiting, expecting some source
of authority to take up thisproblem, seeing that vacuum and

(02:30:24):
being like, OK, somebody has todo this.
This is important, Like this is.
We're talking about kids.
We have no idea how COVID isgoing to affect kids.
We certainly know it's not noteffective, as like a lot of
people would have me believe, aslike a lot of people would have
me believe.
And now we of course know thatit has long-term cardiac and all
types of vascular problems andprocessing problems.

(02:30:46):
So somebody must do this, and Iwas the first one to raise my
hand.
And then Google was like she'sfamous, let's do her, and that's
how that whole project thattook up like nine months of my
life, started was seeing that noone was speaking and deciding
that that was not okay.
And I know that you and Iprobably don't agree on Gaza.

(02:31:10):
That's how I felt about Gaza.
I was like am I the onlyfucking white person who is
willing to put their reputation,their social media prowess you
know all of this on the line forthis?
Because, frankly, if myreputation is one that shies
away from controversial issues,then I've failed.

(02:31:31):
If it's one that people feellike would be afraid to take an
unpopular stance, I've failed totake an unpopular stance.
I failed.
And if it's one that peoplethink would say that it's okay,
like what's happening there,then I failed.
Because the only reason I evercame forward in the first place

(02:31:52):
was because my privacy hadalready been sacrificed by not a
choice of my own.
That was a decision made for me,and at that point I figured you
know what.
I'm one person and, if all ofour models are right, 40,000
people are going to die thissummer if we continue on this
path, and I don't matter as muchas 40,000 people, and it ended

(02:32:14):
up being more than double that,and while I have not yet
quantified how much of adifference I made.
I'd like to think that Istopped some people from
participating in that shit showand if I stopped one person from
coming to Florida just one lifethen everything I did was worth
it.
And if I can convince 10 peoplethat what's happening in Gaza

(02:32:39):
is wrong and they write theirsenators, that doesn't feel like
a waste to me.
It doesn't feel like I'vewasted 20,000 followers or
whatever I've lost for it.
It's like I cannot help but feellike if I was born there, if I
didn't have the privilege ofbeing born here and being born
the way that I am, if I wasbrown, with brown eyes and brown

(02:33:00):
skin and I spoke Arabic, whowould I be?
Who would my children be?
And seeing how clearly thatimage is painted, the second
that I even think it and notsaying something, what am I
really protecting?
I'm protecting my comfort, myfame.
You know my following, yeah,but what is I really protecting?

(02:33:20):
I'm protecting my comfort, myfame.
You know my following, yeah,but what is that really worth if
it's not people who arededicated to the same ideals
that I am?

Speaker 2 (02:33:30):
yeah yeah well, and I think what's interesting about
this because you mentioned, yousaid I don't think you and I are
probably aligned on gaza, butone reason that's not like a, a
dividing line between you and Iis because I get your passion.
Yeah, on this you're not like.

Speaker 3 (02:33:49):
Maybe you're anti-semitic for thinking that
type of thing.
Right, my god, I gotta tell youmy husband is like the most
anti-israel person in the world.
He found out a few months agofrom ancestry dna.
I should not um, you knowexactly.

Speaker 2 (02:34:06):
Yeah I do, yeah, I do that he is jewish.

Speaker 3 (02:34:09):
He's, um, a ashtonazi jewish from russia, um, so for
a thousand years back he's gotjewish dna from russia, which
means that both of my children,despite how white and, you know,
fair skin they are, are partjewish.
And, uh, he is too.
It didn't change a single thingin his mind.
But you know, I thought itchanges things for me because I,

(02:34:34):
I mean, nobody's gonna suspectme being jewish but, um, at the
same time, nobody would havesuspected him either.
Apparently, 10% of people inAncestry DNA's entire database
are Jewish and they're EuropeanJewish.
And if they really wanted to gofull on Nazi psycho when you

(02:34:56):
know, back in the 1930s and 40sthey instituted, like these,
bizarre face measurement ratioswhich were not at all founded in
science, but anyway they wentall full on psycho about it my
kids could be subject to that.
That leads to the people thatTrump surrounds himself with,

(02:35:20):
and it didn't change my mindabout Israel or Gaza at all, but
it definitely changed my mindabout anti-Semitism.
And it's been interesting to mefinding out that my kids are
and I say Jewish the same waythat George Santos said it,
because we never knew about thisuntil recently.
And it doesn't diminish howEuropean they are, but at the

(02:35:47):
same time it's like they couldbe a target, like if Ancestor
DNA surrendered all of itsinformation to the government.
I would be fine.
I'm like 100% Scandinavian,like Viking princess.
Back to you know, the conqueror,william the Conqueror type.

(02:36:07):
I'm more closely related toWilliam the Conqueror than the
current royal family is, and Iwould be cool, but my kids would
be in danger.
And that has definitelyreshaped my view of
anti-semitism but has not in anyway changed my view of mizuru,
and I think that we don't.

(02:36:27):
That's not a distinguishmentthat a lot of americans are
willing to make.
You know, and that's a problemI've lost.
I lost my best friend in thewhole world over this issue.
I mean my absolute best friendbefore I was famous, going back
decades, somebody I love to thisday so much.

(02:36:50):
Um, because when the story cameout about the beheaded babies
thing, which was false, I tracedit back to where it came from
and proved that it was false.
You know, it wasn't false in amalicious kind of way at first.
It was like a reporter asked asoldier who spoke to another

(02:37:12):
reporter who spoke to somebodyin a community who claimed they
had heard from somebody else.
It was good.
It basically took on its life ofits own and to the point that
President Biden said it in apublic address to the American
people.
He said he saw photos ofbeheaded babies.
Now, within hours after sayingthat, he walked back, or his

(02:37:34):
teen walked back, rather, it'slike he heard that photos exist
of 40 beheaded babies and that'swhere it all started to fall
apart.
I lost my best friend in thiswhole world over that, over
publishing that that was space,that that wasn't true.
Now everybody knows it wasn'ttrue.
You know, like medea, san andzio and aljazeera all these

(02:37:55):
people have found the source thesame source I found and been
like that wasn't true, thatdidn't happen.
It was just a hearsay thingthat kind of got out of control
and I'm not sure I'll ever getthat friend back.
When he found out, my husbandfound out that he was part

(02:38:16):
Jewish because I tweeted aboutit or something.
He came back and he was likehas your view changed any?
In back?
And he was like has your viewchanged any in Israel?
I was like are you kidding me?
I was like whether or not myhusband is 10% Jewish doesn't
change that this was not true.
It does not change for me howimportant it was to say this is

(02:38:37):
not true because I saw it beingweaponized to criticize an
entire group of people asanimals, to make them less
humans so that killing themwould seem okay, and that has
resulted in the deaths of tensof thousands of children, and he
told me he would never speak tome again after that.
It's like I can't believe yourchildren.

(02:38:59):
Children are Jewish and youcan't be quiet about this.

Speaker 2 (02:39:03):
I think that's one of the challenges people have with
people like you and I theydon't know where the fuck, to
what category to put us in rightwe?
Don't make it simple.
Right and so.

Speaker 3 (02:39:19):
Well, we do, but at the same time we do, we just don
just open in their boxes.
Exactly, something is eitherright or it's wrong, and it
doesn't matter where thepolitical fallout comes from
that or the religious play outor that, even the ethnic play
out.
It's either right or it's wrong, and that, to us, is like a
fine line, is like cannot killchildren, like why are we having

(02:39:42):
this debate?
Children are innocent, killingthem is wrong.
But then we come into a societywhere the people that we have
associated with or sympathizewith or even been activists
alongside of for a decade orlonger, are saying that there
are some circumstances in whichit's a it's acceptable.

(02:40:02):
Yeah, but we had always this.
We felt like this unspokenlanguage, like we agreed killing
kids is wrong.
It doesn't matter who does it,or why, or by whom, or for what
purpose.
It's wrong.
I thought we agreed on that andthey don't.
We never changed boxes Right.

(02:40:23):
They left us, they foundexceptions and we were like no
rape is wrong.
Rape is wrong no matter who ithappens to.
Rape is wrong in all contexts.
Rape is wrong when there'salcohol involved, or short
skirts Does not matter, andthey're like what do you mean?
A short skirt and we're likeman like why did you move to

(02:40:45):
this box, you know?
And then that's kind of what itfeels like.

Speaker 2 (02:40:49):
It's like it does telling kids is wrong there are
democrats who loved the ideathat, as a Republican, I would
question and call out somebodywithin my own party Right, and
so when I came to the Democratic.
Right, and you, you know, it'slike, hey, wait a minute, right,

(02:41:14):
six years ago, when I did this,you were all like, oh, we,
welcome you, we, you know,welcome to our party.
Then, when you're not allowedto agree, right, when, when,
when there are situations whereI deem it appropriate to start
questioning president biden ormerrick garland or whoever it
may be, and then all of a sudden, no, no, no, no, we, we don't

(02:41:37):
do that, shut up and it lookwherever I find myself in terms
of a party.
If there's questionable shit inmy mind, then I'm going to ask
questions.

Speaker 3 (02:41:49):
Which you're not supposed to.
Yeah, because they have thisidea that that creates division
within our party.

Speaker 2 (02:41:56):
Sure.

Speaker 3 (02:42:03):
But that's partly because they don't want to
accept the reality that ourparty has always been divided.
It's been a hodgepodge ofdifferent cultures, different
ideas, the people who have beenpushed out all coming together
so like, if you know anythingabout the seminal tribe, this is
, you know, I'm a fourth statefor my phd, so so I got to be a
little biased here.
I think it was Bert.

Speaker 2 (02:42:20):
Reynolds.
Was he, or was that a myth?
I have no idea.
Okay, all right, for somereason.

Speaker 3 (02:42:29):
I got really into the lore from my undergrad.
But you know, when you get yourmaster's or PhD, it's not as
much.
But you know, it's like therenegade tribe and for anybody
who's listening, who doesn'tknow about them, they were not
an actual like ethnic group.
They were basically all thepeople who had been pushed out
of their own tribes forquestioning things or doing

(02:42:50):
things different or seeing adifferent path forward, who came
together and formed a new tribe.
They were Chochotl, chickasaw,they were Biloxi, they were
Tunica.
You know all of the differenttribes that came together and it
was like we are the renegades,that is what they call
themselves and that's whatFlorida State to this day calls
themselves is the renegades.

Speaker 2 (02:43:12):
So that was the Rebecca, and Jack tribe.

Speaker 3 (02:43:13):
basically, yeah, people had said you know we have
a different way of doing things, but we all kind of want to
accomplish the same thing in theend and there was no place for
us to do that where we were.
So we're creating that placenow and I'm really connected

(02:43:44):
with the whole, like seminalmythology and that context,
because you know it was aboutbeing the odd man out and
finding a team of odd men out toaccomplish the same goal.
You have to agree abouteverything.
You know.
That's the thing that I thinkis our party weakness is right
now.
They really want us to agreeabout everything.
I was like, first of all, untilyou recognize the g word in
gaza, um, we're never going toagree on everything, and that's
what's offshoot the election.
And instead of blaming peoplewho saw that, you should blame
party officials who pressuredharris into not acknowledging

(02:44:05):
that when she very clearly earlyon wanted to.
That would have distinguishedher from biden in leaps and
bounds.
But you know it's.
It's like we don't agree onlogistics, but what we really
want is to take care of eachother.
Yeah, we want people to betaken care of and all of our

(02:44:28):
efforts are to move that forward.
And as long as you're on thatteam.
You're welcome here If you wantto join the pitchfork press
club into finding this guy whokilled the CEO.
If you look, really one of us,you don't get it Right, which is

(02:44:51):
interesting to me to see thisplay out, because the first
person who posted condemnationabout this was a Democrat.
It was Amy Klobuchar, and Iremember looking at that and
being like how did we weren'ttone deaf before?
Um read the fucking room.
These people have killed tensof thousands of people every
year by denying health careclaims to children, and if you

(02:45:16):
don't think killing childrenwith the pen is worse, like tens
of thousands, than shooting it.
The guy who did it, the corruptmotherfucker who did it in the
street, maybe we're not on thesame team yeah, we're not, we're
not listening yeah, and I waslike, even if you don't condone
it, okay, murder's bad, blahblah.

(02:45:36):
I was like, but would youdecides, everybody, if they were
cheering on the street becauseputin died, you're gonna go out
and say, oh, we shouldn'tcelebrate the death of blah blah
?
I was like because I rememberwhen scalia died, oh, the
democrats were happy and we werelike ding dong, the
motherfucking witch is deadbecause he had pervasive,

(02:45:57):
negative um legislature can youknow a deciding person and
people's personal civil rightsand individual freedoms and
liberty.
We all celebrated thatmotherfucker being dead.
I'm not ashamed to say thatbecause he was a person.
When hitler died, people wereliterally kissing in the fucking
street in front of the you knowthe new york square, wherever

(02:46:20):
they have.
All any new york-centric personcan understand what I'm talking
about there but what's itcalled?
um, one of the most iconicamerican photos ever taken in
history is two people kissingtwo strangers, which is kind of
groby and rapey, but okay, asidefrom that, it's true, two
strangers kissing at the atfinding out the hitler's death,
one of groby and rapey.

(02:46:40):
But okay, aside from that,there's two strangers chasing at
finding out that Hitler's dead.

Speaker 2 (02:46:44):
One of them, a sailor , by the way.

Speaker 3 (02:46:46):
One of them was somebody sent out to help kill
him.
Because what are you doing bysending a military out to defeat
a foreign enemy, if not to killthat person?
Right, and we accomplished ourgoal and Hitler was dead.
Whole country erupted in cheers.
Now, if they do that for putin,I I expect that the

(02:47:07):
condemnation will be very low,because it'll be like he's an
enemy you know, but the problemis is with the political elite.
And then you know, the mediaclass is that they don't see
ceos, health companies, as theenemy.
But we do, because we're thepeople who actually have to deal
with them in life or deathsituations and paying your rent,

(02:47:28):
paying your grocery billsituations, and it's that
disconnect I mean.
I went to journalism school atSyracuse, which is fucking
Northwestern the best journalismschool.
They know the type of kids thatwent to that school and they
are not kids that had struggle.
Maybe one out of ten had everwanted for anything in their
life and those are the peoplewho are writing stories right

(02:47:50):
now, because I'm in my 30s, soby now most of those people are
writing the majority of thingsthat you read.
None of those kids know whatit's like to be hungry, to sleep
on a park bench, to watcheverything you've ever known be
washed away overnight.
They don't know that and sothey're looking at the ceo
murderers like the work.

(02:48:10):
This is a violation of ourterms of capitalism and the rest
of us are looking at us likeseems like it caught up with him
and and they don't understandthat.
They see it as barbaric.
We see it as he kills 60,000people a year nets $35 million,
and you don't see anything wrongwith that.
We'll see you next time.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Rebecca Jones on the Power Dynamics of Politics

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}24/7 News: The Latest

Crime Junkie

The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show

All Episodes

Rebecca Jones on the Power Dynamics of Politics

24/7 News: The Latest