Transcript

Nervous TikTok · Politix

0:00
SPEAKER_00: The establishment is trying to ride the tiger, right?
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, to some extent.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: And the problem is,
0:09
SPEAKER_00: I think we have not had,
0:10
SPEAKER_00: for all the dissension and like,
0:13
SPEAKER_00: quote unquote,
0:13
SPEAKER_00: factional infighting that we've had,
0:15
SPEAKER_00: there was no contest for either Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries to become leader.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: I know.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: And then Pelosi was leader forever.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: The lack of contest includes lack of contest from the left.
0:28
[music]
0:33
SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, you're listening to a free preview of the Politics Podcast.
0:37
SPEAKER_01: We're in the homestretch before the midterms now.
0:39
SPEAKER_01: October is almost out of time for surprises.
0:43
SPEAKER_01: So we'll run through the latest big politics news and why,
0:46
SPEAKER_01: thus far,
0:47
SPEAKER_01: it doesn't seem to be altering the dynamics that have been in place for months.
0:52
SPEAKER_01: Then, in the second half,
0:54
SPEAKER_01: progressives seem to think Abdul El-Sayed is going to win the Senate election
0:57
SPEAKER_01: in Michigan.
0:58
SPEAKER_01: They also seem to want his victory to represent a watershed.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: And so they're characterizing his race in some strange ways.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: We'll talk about what the Abdul case does and doesn't mean for the future
1:08
SPEAKER_01: of democratic politics and whether progressives are making the best possible case
1:13
SPEAKER_01: for the change they want to see in the country.
1:16
SPEAKER_01: If you want to hear or watch the whole episode, upgrade to paid at politics.fm.
1:26
SPEAKER_01: Hey everyone, welcome to the Politics Podcast.
1:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm Brian Boyler.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
1:30
SPEAKER_01: So first thing is a little bit of housekeeping.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: Next week's episode will be normal because it's the last one before the midterms.
1:37
SPEAKER_01: The week after that,
1:38
SPEAKER_01: we are going to dispense with the like wait until one in the morning to do
1:42
SPEAKER_01: a live thing or record while results are still coming in.
1:45
SPEAKER_01: And we're just going to record on Wednesday morning.
1:49
SPEAKER_01: When we will have a much clearer sense of the results of the election for a Thursday release.
1:54
SPEAKER_01: I suppose there's like some chance that things could get so crazy that we'll have
1:58
SPEAKER_01: to upend the schedule again.
2:00
SPEAKER_01: But that's the plan for now.
2:01
SPEAKER_01: And I think it's like an artifact of our brilliant decision as podcast hosts,
2:06
SPEAKER_01: political podcast hosts,
2:08
SPEAKER_01: to decide years ago that we would make Tuesday our recording day as
2:12
SPEAKER_01: if nothing important ever happens in politics on a Tuesday.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: It was good, right?
2:19
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:19
SPEAKER_01: It was like good foresight.
2:21
SPEAKER_01: Tuesday.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Who knew?
2:23
SPEAKER_00: It's like in the Constitution, right?
2:26
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:26
SPEAKER_01: I mean, Liz Smith wrote a book about it, which by the way, her book is called Any Given Tuesday.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: And that's like wrong.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: It's like very specific Tuesdays, not any given Tuesday.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: That's why...
2:38
SPEAKER_00: That's the thought of our podcast is that honestly, most Tuesdays there isn't an election.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: Right.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: And so most of the time,
2:44
SPEAKER_01: but every year now,
2:46
SPEAKER_01: at least once or twice,
2:47
SPEAKER_01: we get a,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: you know,
2:48
SPEAKER_01: an off your election or whatever on a Tuesday and we're like recording and
2:52
SPEAKER_01: the results are going to be coming in and just bad.
2:56
SPEAKER_01: We should have thought ahead.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, there's no, there's no going back in time.
2:59
SPEAKER_01: So this week we're going to do a little bit of potpourri and then we're going
3:02
SPEAKER_01: to talk about progressives.
3:04
SPEAKER_01: The potpourri is all about like,
3:07
SPEAKER_01: Politics news that may be relevant to the election or maybe not.
3:11
SPEAKER_01: I have here,
3:13
SPEAKER_01: Trump goes all in with Vladimir Putin against Ukraine,
3:17
SPEAKER_01: even as he's basically hiding the ball with respect
3:19
SPEAKER_01: to his entire post-election agenda,
3:22
SPEAKER_01: but did this big switcheroo in global warfare and geopolitics right before
3:30
SPEAKER_01: the midterms.
3:32
SPEAKER_01: I have the tech companies still doing some political colluding, right?
3:37
SPEAKER_01: TikTok kicked the Musk documentary account off its platform for good, it seems.
3:43
SPEAKER_01: Meta suspended the No Kings Instagram account on No Kings Day this weekend and seems
3:49
SPEAKER_01: in Brazil to have been throttling pro Lula da Silva content
3:53
SPEAKER_01: while amplifying pro Bolsonaro content.
3:56
SPEAKER_01: Meta claims both were technical glitches,
3:59
SPEAKER_01: but, you know, when they all point in the same direction, it makes you wonder.
4:03
SPEAKER_01: And then finally,
4:04
SPEAKER_01: I have a new Republican smear campaign against Alyssa Slotkin for the crime
4:10
SPEAKER_01: of advocating robust congressional oversight.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: Do you want to take those in any particular order?
4:15
SPEAKER_00: Well...
4:16
SPEAKER_00: I mean, the Ukraine developments seem the most, like, substantively significant.
4:23
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you know, this is one of these tragedies of world affairs, right?
4:28
SPEAKER_00: Where, you know, as my politics with an X hat on, like...
4:34
SPEAKER_00: This is kind of a nothing burger, right?
4:36
SPEAKER_00: That Trump has decided to cut off Starlink access for Ukraine.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: So now their interceptors are not nearly as good at shooting down Russian missiles
4:46
SPEAKER_00: and tons of extra Ukrainian civilians are getting killed as part
4:49
SPEAKER_00: of some Trump effort to...
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Coerce the Ukrainians into surrendering or something.
4:56
SPEAKER_00: I would not say this has been like a political earthquake in the United States of America.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Most voters seem broadly indifferent to this kind of question.
5:04
SPEAKER_00: And yet, I mean,
5:05
SPEAKER_00: it's at a minimum the lives of hundreds of people being sacrificed and conceivably,
5:13
SPEAKER_00: you know, much, much bigger, broader consequences for the United States of America.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: And it's,
5:19
SPEAKER_00: you know,
5:20
SPEAKER_00: obviously Donald Trump's Curious attitudes towards Vladimir Putin are nothing new
5:25
SPEAKER_00: at this point,
5:26
SPEAKER_00: but he had been cutting off American financial aid to Ukraine while continuing
5:34
SPEAKER_00: to provide a certain amount of logistics assistance in continuity
5:38
SPEAKER_00: with Longstanding American policy and the kind of,
5:43
SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
5:44
SPEAKER_00: like a like a customer service framework for the defense industrial complex
5:48
SPEAKER_00: that like if you buy American military hardware, it should work well.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
5:57
SPEAKER_00: the motivation for this appears to be a kind of sweaty desperation
6:01
SPEAKER_00: about global oil prices,
6:04
SPEAKER_00: where obviously the cost of living is a big problem for Trump.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: The primary thing that has spiked energy costs globally is Trump's war in Iran.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: He has gone to great lengths to try to get the flow of oil back coming through
6:19
SPEAKER_00: the Strait of Hormuz,
6:21
SPEAKER_00: which has mostly worked,
6:23
SPEAKER_00: but it's expensive to do the stuff that now has to be done to ship oil out of
6:30
SPEAKER_00: the Gulf.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And so that has made the price of oil high.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: But Ukraine has also attacked Russian energy infrastructure.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: And Trump has just fixated on this as if his central problem is Ukrainian attacks
6:45
SPEAKER_00: on Russian energy infrastructure.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: And he's letting that tail wag the dog with,
6:51
SPEAKER_00: you know,
6:52
SPEAKER_00: mind boggling consequences for America's basic Credibility and participation
6:58
SPEAKER_00: in world affairs for the future of European security,
7:01
SPEAKER_00: et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
7:02
SPEAKER_00: And all as like a total dud as a midterm intervention.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Brent is above $110 a barrel.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: Nobody is impressed by this.
7:12
SPEAKER_00: And so, you know, it's just Ukrainian lives are being sacrificed.
7:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think it's clear that this...
7:20
SPEAKER_01: This is not helping Trump win the election if that was in any sense his motivation.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: I want to test your intuition that it might not be in mathematical terms
7:30
SPEAKER_01: at least hurting his party in the election and thus maybe whether we should smell
7:37
SPEAKER_01: a rat, right?
7:38
SPEAKER_01: Because there are,
7:40
SPEAKER_01: I suppose,
7:41
SPEAKER_01: small communities in the U.S.
7:43
SPEAKER_01: where this is really like an issue
7:45
SPEAKER_01: where you have like big Ukrainian immigrant population or something like that.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: Set that aside.
7:52
SPEAKER_01: There is a, this is important in the blob, right?
7:56
SPEAKER_01: Like his own party has like approximately half the people
8:02
SPEAKER_01: in it really don't like this,
8:04
SPEAKER_01: even though they're,
8:05
SPEAKER_01: you know, Their allegiance is to him first, so they tolerate it.
8:09
SPEAKER_00: Elite Republicans disagree about this.
8:11
SPEAKER_01: And so right before the election, he's kind of cleaving his party.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: You see these straight comments,
8:16
SPEAKER_01: and so far they're just comments,
8:18
SPEAKER_01: and Trump can withstand that, but no party wants to go into an election divided.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: So Trump chose to do that.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: Trump chose to do this knowing also that there is this longstanding,
8:29
SPEAKER_01: you know,
8:29
SPEAKER_01: never resolved suspicion among his opposition about his relationship with Russia.
8:34
SPEAKER_01: And he is feeding that to an already motivated election base.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: Right.
8:40
SPEAKER_01: So, you know,
8:42
SPEAKER_01: most people who are like P-tape believers or whatever are going to be coming out
8:47
SPEAKER_01: to vote anyway.
8:48
SPEAKER_01: But like if they needed a little extra nudge, he just gave it to them.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: So like.
8:53
SPEAKER_01: If anything, it seems like the calculation runs the other way, right?
8:58
SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
8:59
SPEAKER_01: Putin is not a popular figure in the United States,
9:01
SPEAKER_01: but Zelensky is to the extent that anyone cares about this stuff.
9:05
SPEAKER_01: And so, like...
9:06
SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
9:08
SPEAKER_01: I have been wondering, right?
9:09
SPEAKER_01: Because there's been some reporting.
9:11
SPEAKER_01: It's hard for me to know how credible it is that Elon Musk is complicit in this
9:15
SPEAKER_01: in some way, right?
9:16
SPEAKER_01: Like that this was in some sense his idea or something brainstormed in conjunction with him.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: And now there's this...
9:27
SPEAKER_01: And scuttlebutt about a big authoritarian summit of Trump, Putin,
9:32
SPEAKER_01: and Xi, where maybe they'll resolve the future of Ukraine like colonial overlords.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: And I mean, to get even more weird about it, right?
9:42
SPEAKER_01: Like months ago,
9:43
SPEAKER_01: back in the summer,
9:44
SPEAKER_01: there was reporting in Politico that Kash Patel,
9:47
SPEAKER_01: who's the FBI director,
9:48
SPEAKER_01: was going to take this October trip to Moscow to meet with some counterparties
9:53
SPEAKER_01: over there.
9:55
SPEAKER_01: And then Democrats on Capitol Hill wrote a letter to him calling on him to call off the trip.
10:02
SPEAKER_01: It got reported on, I think, Ken Delaney on live TV that Patel had actually arrived in Moscow.
10:10
SPEAKER_01: It turns out he wasn't there at all.
10:13
SPEAKER_01: It's unclear if he's going.
10:14
SPEAKER_01: It's unclear if he's canceled a trip.
10:15
SPEAKER_01: But like this is like a MacGuffin, right?
10:17
SPEAKER_01: Like what what is this doing in the in the plot?
10:22
SPEAKER_01: And I feel like Trump is of a low enough character
10:26
SPEAKER_01: and is conspiratorial minded enough that he might think
10:30
SPEAKER_01: that there is some way doing this kind of thing could save Republicans
10:35
SPEAKER_01: the election because.
10:38
SPEAKER_01: Foreign,
10:39
SPEAKER_01: powerful people will do some hocus pocus in the election and like,
10:44
SPEAKER_01: you know,
10:45
SPEAKER_01: kind of pull it out for him the way it essentially worked out for him in 2016.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: You know,
10:51
SPEAKER_01: not like hack the voting machines or space lasers or whatever,
10:54
SPEAKER_01: but like email dumps and stuff like that.
10:57
SPEAKER_01: More hacking, more stuff like that.
10:59
SPEAKER_01: I can't rule that out.
11:01
SPEAKER_01: And it seems consistent with Trump's Behavior going back more than a decade now.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: The dream in big picture politics,
11:10
SPEAKER_00: I think, would be that because Russia is an ally of Iran's, right?
11:19
SPEAKER_00: And China sort of is.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think from Trump's viewpoint,
11:23
SPEAKER_00: if he could cut some kind of deal with Moscow and Beijing in
11:28
SPEAKER_00: which he sells out Ukraine and in exchange they sell out Iran— Somehow,
11:35
SPEAKER_00: I think that's his like vision of a geopolitical masterstroke that will also get all
11:41
SPEAKER_00: the global energy supplies flowing again and, you know, make everyone happy.
11:45
SPEAKER_00: And they're probably just not good enough to pull it off.
11:51
SPEAKER_00: You know, like this crew is...
11:54
SPEAKER_00: They have blundered their foreign policy into a kind of a dead end
11:59
SPEAKER_00: that is not satisfying anybody.
12:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's interesting.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you talked about,
12:05
SPEAKER_00: you know, has there been sort of blowback against this that hurts Trump?
12:08
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
12:08
SPEAKER_00: I was looking at the gasoline prices,
12:10
SPEAKER_00: which continue to be high,
12:12
SPEAKER_00: but they are down about, I think, about 5% from where they were a month ago.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: Which, you know,
12:20
SPEAKER_00: should be giving Trump some uplift, but the poll numbers have basically not moved.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, some states are in different places from where they were before,
12:28
SPEAKER_00: but we're pretty consistently, you know, about where we were in September.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: So it's perhaps like a little bit of a push-pull where,
12:36
SPEAKER_00: you know,
12:36
SPEAKER_00: Trump has achieved some things that are good for him,
12:39
SPEAKER_00: but he's also generated a lot of news that's bad for him.
12:43
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
12:44
SPEAKER_00: to the extent that anything has changed in polls,
12:47
SPEAKER_00: Democrats continue to have these white knuckle leads in Texas, Iowa, Ohio.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: And like sometimes Kansas, where you're like- And Nebraska.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: If the polls are right,
13:05
SPEAKER_00: this is a very,
13:06
SPEAKER_00: very good night for Democrats because the polls say Democrats are going to win Ohio
13:13
SPEAKER_00: and Iowa and Texas and Alaska and Kansas.
13:17
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Right.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Which would be amazing.
13:19
SPEAKER_00: But also all of those leads are really, really narrow, except Alaska.
13:24
SPEAKER_00: So the polls wouldn't need to be off by much to tilt it from amazing to disappointing.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: As of five,
13:32
SPEAKER_00: six weeks ago,
13:33
SPEAKER_00: Democrats were also looking a little soft in Michigan,
13:38
SPEAKER_00: Minnesota and New Hampshire, winning, but but narrowly.
13:43
SPEAKER_00: The one thing that has really changed is that all three
13:45
SPEAKER_00: of those Democratic candidates have improved their standing.
13:50
SPEAKER_00: You know,
13:50
SPEAKER_00: not by transformative quantities or anything,
13:55
SPEAKER_00: but the kind of the states that Democrats,
13:58
SPEAKER_00: quote unquote, should win all look more solid.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: And I think Trump doing disgraceful things in public is just inherently good
14:08
SPEAKER_00: for Peggy Flanagan, for Abdul El-Sayed.
14:12
SPEAKER_00: And for Chris Pappas,
14:13
SPEAKER_00: who all for different reasons were displaying a little bit of softness
14:17
SPEAKER_00: in their polling.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: But all those candidates basically need to do is like get Democrats to vote for them.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, Trump.
14:27
SPEAKER_00: Selling out Ukraine,
14:28
SPEAKER_00: conspiring with foreign dictators,
14:30
SPEAKER_00: musing about public executions,
14:32
SPEAKER_00: all this kind of like Trump antics is very good for Chris Pappas, right?
14:36
SPEAKER_00: So that you now have John Sununu put out an ad today where he's like,
14:40
SPEAKER_00: I've never even met Donald Trump, which,
14:42
SPEAKER_00: you know,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: which I mean,
14:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure is true,
14:45
SPEAKER_00: but it's like,
14:48
SPEAKER_00: obviously Donald Trump will be happy if John Sununu wins the election.
14:52
SPEAKER_00: There's only,
14:53
SPEAKER_00: you know- Sununu is going to run,
14:55
SPEAKER_00: I think,
14:56
SPEAKER_00: a strong campaign in a bad situation,
14:59
SPEAKER_00: but it's like there's only so much you can do, right?
15:01
SPEAKER_00: When Donald Trump is out there reminding the world of who he is,
15:04
SPEAKER_00: of what he is,
15:05
SPEAKER_00: of how hard it will be for even a really determined opposition to bring him to heel
15:11
SPEAKER_00: in any way.
15:13
SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
15:14
SPEAKER_00: it means you're drawing dead if you're John Sununu this late in the game,
15:18
SPEAKER_00: being like, hey, Donald Trump, that's not me.
15:20
SPEAKER_01: I think I agree with all that.
15:22
SPEAKER_01: I would just asterisk it with the note that you're imagining a uniform polling error.
15:28
SPEAKER_01: And I tend to think over the last eight,
15:33
SPEAKER_01: 10 years of elections that you're more safe assuming that
15:38
SPEAKER_01: the polling error will be uniform across states that share...
15:42
SPEAKER_01: But the concern is Kansas, Iowa, Ohio.
16:10
SPEAKER_00: That's like a block of similar states where Democrats have narrow leads across all three.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:16
SPEAKER_01: And if they if they,
16:18
SPEAKER_01: you know,
16:19
SPEAKER_01: you can imagine like a polling error wiping all three of those small leads out.
16:24
SPEAKER_01: But I don't think it would necessarily mean anything for North Carolina,
16:28
SPEAKER_01: Georgia, South Carolina, potentially too.
16:32
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that's just a very small asterisk on a thing
16:34
SPEAKER_01: and like something similar I think I read happened in 2022 where we don't like think
16:40
SPEAKER_01: about it because the marquee races all came out.
16:45
SPEAKER_01: Without major surprises,
16:47
SPEAKER_01: but basically Democrats overperformed where they needed to overperform.
16:50
SPEAKER_01: But you find if you if you look deep,
16:52
SPEAKER_01: deeper down the ticket that they underperformed in like New York,
16:56
SPEAKER_01: which is weird, right?
16:57
SPEAKER_01: Like it's a good Democratic year.
16:59
SPEAKER_01: Why would they underperform in a blue state?
17:00
SPEAKER_01: But they did.
17:02
SPEAKER_01: And so just like they could surprise in in the in the states
17:08
SPEAKER_01: with white working class,
17:10
SPEAKER_01: large white working class populations,
17:12
SPEAKER_01: or they could underperform, but it wouldn't necessarily.
17:15
SPEAKER_01: You know, have any correlate in Texas or Alaska or whatever.
17:20
SPEAKER_01: Anyway,
17:22
SPEAKER_01: I'm just trying to like trying to like remember that even though like it seems like
17:29
SPEAKER_01: a small miss in either direction could be the difference between like
17:33
SPEAKER_01: the biggest Democratic blowout we've ever seen in one where they do well enough
17:37
SPEAKER_01: to take the Senate, but just barely or something like that.
17:41
SPEAKER_01: But but that it might it might be weird.
17:43
SPEAKER_01: You might get like it.
17:45
SPEAKER_01: 52 is still possible,
17:47
SPEAKER_01: even though with a swing in one direction,
17:49
SPEAKER_01: you might expect 50 and a swing in the other direction, you might expect 54.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: Anyway, the point about all the Trump,
17:59
SPEAKER_01: Russia, Musk stuff, I think relates to the other two topics, right?
18:05
SPEAKER_01: Because
18:08
SPEAKER_01: there's at least concern that social media companies are...
18:14
SPEAKER_01: Are doing things right now to try to affect elections here, Brazil.
18:22
SPEAKER_01: And part of that is greed, but also part of it seems to be concern about oversight, right?
18:30
SPEAKER_01: Like the stuff that Alyssa Slotkin was talking about.
18:34
SPEAKER_01: They understand that they made a big all in bet on Donald Trump almost two years ago.
18:40
SPEAKER_01: It seems to have been a bad bet.
18:42
SPEAKER_01: And now like they're approaching the find out stage and they're trying
18:48
SPEAKER_01: without being too overt about it to not get caught.
18:53
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know.
18:54
SPEAKER_01: I don't know which one of these stories makes sense to talk about first, but like.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: You know,
19:00
SPEAKER_01: when I saw the No Kings people,
19:03
SPEAKER_01: the Indivisible people, like,
19:04
SPEAKER_01: making a big deal about the fact that their Instagram account went down
19:07
SPEAKER_01: on No Kings Day,
19:08
SPEAKER_01: I was like,
19:11
SPEAKER_01: are you sure that this isn't just, like,
19:14
SPEAKER_01: maybe a bunch of bot traffic,
19:16
SPEAKER_01: malicious bot traffic is being sent to your account,
19:19
SPEAKER_01: and this is just automatic,
19:21
SPEAKER_01: and really meta has nothing to do with it,
19:22
SPEAKER_01: and maybe Russia does, or whatever, some Macedonians or some shit, but...
19:29
SPEAKER_01: But then like I read about the controversy in Brazil and just like,
19:35
SPEAKER_01: what do I know about these guys?
19:36
SPEAKER_01: And maybe it was a glitch,
19:37
SPEAKER_01: but they also were kind of like,
19:39
SPEAKER_01: let's let this glitch happen, like stay a glitch longer than it needs to.
19:43
SPEAKER_01: And then like Indivisible or maybe it was No Kings issued like a like a letter
19:49
SPEAKER_01: where they're asking for answers ahead of the election,
19:51
SPEAKER_01: like essentially like an oversight letter that you would expect from a committee
19:54
SPEAKER_01: on Capitol Hill, but it's coming from them.
19:57
SPEAKER_01: And I find myself in agreement,
19:58
SPEAKER_01: like we deserve transparency about this now,
20:00
SPEAKER_01: but if not now,
20:01
SPEAKER_01: definitely after the election,
20:03
SPEAKER_01: if Democrats take Congress and you're starting to see Democrats.
20:10
SPEAKER_01: Warning these people like we're going to we are going to look into this
20:14
SPEAKER_01: and I wonder what where like you feel like like what's the Occam's razor here?
20:19
SPEAKER_01: About whether like is Zuckerberg getting more comfortable doing the kind
20:25
SPEAKER_01: of shady shenanigans that we associate with like foreign dictators
20:31
SPEAKER_01: and maybe Elon Musk or.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know.
20:35
SPEAKER_00: You know, this is a longstanding concern, I think, about mass scale social media, which is that.
20:46
SPEAKER_00: I think if you held congressional hearings and you nailed Mark Zuckerberg,
20:51
SPEAKER_00: you know, like a few good men style.
20:57
SPEAKER_00: And he's there, you know, you could imagine it, right?
20:59
SPEAKER_00: This like great Sorkin-esque denouement.
21:02
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, you're goddamn right.
21:03
SPEAKER_00: I throttled the No Kings protests.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: I believe that's like not a crime.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, that it's his company and he, again, I'm not saying that's what he did.
21:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm not saying there's nothing wrong with it.
21:19
SPEAKER_00: But like on a public policy level,
21:22
SPEAKER_00: a kind of fundamentally disturbing aspect of
21:26
SPEAKER_00: the way modern internet infrastructure works is that certainly TikTok has
21:33
SPEAKER_00: the legal right to just say, well,
21:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm friends with Elon Musk and Elon says this Gibney documentary is bad,
21:40
SPEAKER_00: so I'm not going to run TikTok.
21:44
SPEAKER_00: The ads.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I turned down...
21:52
SPEAKER_00: A gambling ad on the Argument podcast,
21:56
SPEAKER_00: the other podcast that I'm on, because I didn't want to be advertising gambling.
22:01
SPEAKER_00: And as a, like, I think that's a core free speech.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: You'd like my ability to not have ads of companies I don't want to be associated
22:11
SPEAKER_00: with on my podcast.
22:13
SPEAKER_00: But when you get to the scale of a TikTok or something like that,
22:18
SPEAKER_00: it feels like The freedom of association and freedom of speech
22:23
SPEAKER_00: that lets you reject these kinds of things also is dangerous.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: And we've been kicking this theme around in different formats for probably 10,
22:32
SPEAKER_00: 15 years now and have not reached a kind of an adequate level.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: Social understanding of it.
22:39
SPEAKER_00: But I think we definitely need to kick the tires post-election on what happened
22:45
SPEAKER_00: with this kind of stuff because,
22:47
SPEAKER_00: you know,
22:47
SPEAKER_00: it certainly hasn't been Meta's official position that they did throttle
22:52
SPEAKER_00: the No Kings rallies and they're just entitled to do that if they want to.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: They're saying, oh, it was technical problems and...
23:01
SPEAKER_00: As you suggested,
23:02
SPEAKER_00: that could be true on a number of different levels,
23:06
SPEAKER_00: you know, and depending what the level is, we might have a different reaction to it.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: And you just need much more clarity and much more real disclosure
23:15
SPEAKER_00: about what these kinds of things are.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: The main thing I would say is that,
23:19
SPEAKER_00: you know, I think you're going to have to, you want to get companies to cooperate.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: With post-election congressional hearings, right?
23:30
SPEAKER_00: Like part of the general theory of oversight is that Trump is going to try
23:34
SPEAKER_00: to stonewall everything and invoke all kinds of executive privilege claims.
23:39
SPEAKER_00: But we really want,
23:40
SPEAKER_00: for example,
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Netflix to come to Congress and tell a story about how
23:46
SPEAKER_00: the antitrust division helped chill Trump.
23:49
SPEAKER_00: Right.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: To then kind of get the ball rolling and move pressure on everybody else
24:15
SPEAKER_00: to start dishing dirt, right?
24:18
SPEAKER_00: And there's always going to be a ambiguity between who was being extorted and
24:24
SPEAKER_00: who was paying bribes, right?
24:26
SPEAKER_00: And I think,
24:27
SPEAKER_00: you know,
24:29
SPEAKER_00: we may never fully understand the truth about Some of that in some of these kinds
24:34
SPEAKER_00: of domains.
24:35
SPEAKER_00: But like we want to get as much on the record as we can about all
24:41
SPEAKER_00: of these companies' interactions with the Trump administration across
24:44
SPEAKER_00: the whole spectrum of things from the inauguration to the ballroom to
24:48
SPEAKER_00: the implementation details.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and we want to make them want to.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: Dish dirt on wrongdoing by the administration and wrongdoing by their competitors.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: I mean,
25:05
SPEAKER_01: this like makes me think about some of the stuff we might talk about in part two
25:09
SPEAKER_01: about like,
25:11
SPEAKER_01: when is something,
25:13
SPEAKER_01: when is it right to start thinking about something more like a monopoly than like
25:17
SPEAKER_01: a regular business, right?
25:18
SPEAKER_01: Because like what...
25:19
SPEAKER_01: I think what you ideally would want in a non-Trump,
25:23
SPEAKER_01: non-corrupt environment or a less corrupt environment is that the main thing
25:27
SPEAKER_01: that would stop Meta from doing something like this and thus stop us from wondering
25:33
SPEAKER_01: whether they did what it seems like they did is a view that if they are seen
25:39
SPEAKER_01: to be really...
25:42
SPEAKER_01: Like thumbing the scale in politics that it'll be really bad for their business.
25:46
SPEAKER_01: And so they just won't do it.
25:47
SPEAKER_01: Right.
25:48
SPEAKER_01: Like there are there always have been certain executives or whatever that are very partisan.
25:53
SPEAKER_01: But generally speaking,
25:55
SPEAKER_01: the big brands do not want themselves to be seen as wearing a red hat or a blue hat.
25:59
SPEAKER_01: Right.
26:00
SPEAKER_01: And but, you know, it is hard.
26:03
SPEAKER_01: And as you move across the platforms,
26:07
SPEAKER_01: it is easy,
26:08
SPEAKER_01: I suppose,
26:09
SPEAKER_01: to ask people to boycott Netflix because you can use a different streaming service,
26:14
SPEAKER_01: right?
26:14
SPEAKER_01: It's harder to ask them to boycott social media.
26:17
SPEAKER_01: It's harder to ask them to boycott Amazon.
26:19
SPEAKER_01: It's harder to ask them to boycott Gmail or Google or whatever
26:24
SPEAKER_01: because it's much more ingrained in other things, right?
26:27
SPEAKER_01: And...
26:28
SPEAKER_01: And so they may feel like they've reached a scale where they can pick
26:35
SPEAKER_01: the political leaders of the country using their technologies and that like
26:40
SPEAKER_01: the boycott method is not going to be viable.
26:44
SPEAKER_01: You know,
26:44
SPEAKER_01: it might cost them a cent here or there,
26:46
SPEAKER_01: but they're going to make up for it in volume with tax cuts and regulatory relief
26:50
SPEAKER_01: and just being the incumbent tech platforms underneath
26:54
SPEAKER_01: a corrupt oligarchical system, right?
26:57
SPEAKER_01: So I like...
27:00
SPEAKER_01: I think like the goal has to be to get enough information out of them to ascertain
27:06
SPEAKER_01: whether they're thinking in any way along those lines.
27:08
SPEAKER_01: Right.
27:09
SPEAKER_01: And and.
27:12
SPEAKER_01: So maybe like a big tell will be how cooperative they are when the request
27:17
SPEAKER_01: for their internal communications comes from a Democratic Congress, because like.
27:22
SPEAKER_01: Like you can't account for liars and Republicans have done a very good job
27:26
SPEAKER_01: about lying about this stuff.
27:28
SPEAKER_01: But like when the Twitter files came out and when
27:31
SPEAKER_01: the like certain communications around COVID came out, you could kind of tell.
27:37
SPEAKER_01: What impressed me about the Twitter files was like...
27:59
SPEAKER_01: These were just kind of people bumbling through,
28:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
28:02
SPEAKER_01: it was definitely not some kind of like, oh, we got to like help the Democrats.
28:06
SPEAKER_01: We got to stop the Republicans or whatever.
28:08
SPEAKER_01: And if that's if the if the if the deplatforming of no kings and the throttling
28:16
SPEAKER_01: of Lula pro Lula content in Brazil was really just a glitch,
28:21
SPEAKER_01: I think like that will be.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: Revealed in the way that people talk about what's happening.
28:27
SPEAKER_01: You know, there will have been emails or Slack messages sent between people.
28:31
SPEAKER_01: And like,
28:31
SPEAKER_01: if they're actually frenetically trying to solve the problem,
28:34
SPEAKER_01: then their excuses will be vindicated.
28:38
SPEAKER_01: But if they're like,
28:39
SPEAKER_01: let's see how this plays out,
28:42
SPEAKER_01: then it like raises further questions or maybe it answers them.
28:45
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I think the key,
28:46
SPEAKER_00: you know,
28:46
SPEAKER_00: mode of change is probably not actually consumer boycotts,
28:51
SPEAKER_00: but direct employee pressure.
28:53
SPEAKER_00: You know,
28:53
SPEAKER_00: we talked on this podcast about open AI executives giving to the leading
28:59
SPEAKER_00: the future super PAC and the role that that was playing.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: This was, you know, several weeks ago when Pacing the Frontier and stuff was happening.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: And as a result of discussions that,
29:11
SPEAKER_00: you know,
29:11
SPEAKER_00: you and I had,
29:13
SPEAKER_00: things that I wrote,
29:14
SPEAKER_00: things that other people in D.C.
29:18
SPEAKER_00: wrote about leading the future,
29:20
SPEAKER_00: word got back to OpenAI employees
29:24
SPEAKER_00: that Washington political people did not view Sam Altman's public statements about
29:31
SPEAKER_00: the company's lack of involvement with this super PAC as credible.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: And Greg Brockman agreed to stop funding it.
29:40
SPEAKER_00: And Chris Lehane,
29:41
SPEAKER_00: who runs Global Affairs for OpenAI,
29:44
SPEAKER_00: has shifted, like, what he is saying now in a good, constructive way.
29:50
SPEAKER_00: And that is OpenAI staff was being, you know— These guys live in the Bay Area.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: They know technical stuff.
29:58
SPEAKER_00: They may have opinions about politics,
30:01
SPEAKER_00: but they don't have detailed knowledge and information about it.
30:04
SPEAKER_00: They were willing to accept a very superficial explanation
30:08
SPEAKER_00: from their company's leadership of what their political activity was.
30:11
SPEAKER_00: Then people who know more about politics brought more information to light.
30:16
SPEAKER_00: That changed what OpenAI employees were saying to their executives,
30:21
SPEAKER_00: and it changed executive behavior.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: And that's the main reason why it's going to be important
30:27
SPEAKER_00: to get more detailed information about what's actually happening here.
30:30
SPEAKER_01: But either way, I think it's interesting either way,
30:34
SPEAKER_01: whether it's like fear of consumer boycotts or fear of internal staff rebellion,
30:39
SPEAKER_01: that you don't think that the answer or the explanation
30:42
SPEAKER_01: for this is they know Democrats are coming to power and they're worried.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: It might be.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I don't know what happened.
30:49
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
30:50
SPEAKER_00: Like, there's no way to know what's going on.
30:55
SPEAKER_00: Like, Democrats are not going to, it seems to me,
31:01
SPEAKER_00: stop Meta from being a successful company.
31:05
SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
31:06
SPEAKER_00: That's not really credible.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: What Democrats could do is create huge problems for meta executives about
31:13
SPEAKER_00: the growing gap
31:15
SPEAKER_00: between what rank-and-file meta employees think their company is doing and what
31:19
SPEAKER_00: the top leaders of the company do.
31:21
SPEAKER_00: I mean, just as like Meta's corporate positioning used to be very, left-wing.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: Right.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's like flip flopped wildly with shifting political winds,
31:44
SPEAKER_00: but also with pressure from the government and things like that.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: And this this can be done again.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: It should be done again.
31:50
SPEAKER_00: It's just that I don't think the mode of change is going
31:56
SPEAKER_00: to be like Congress makes Instagram illegal.
31:58
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:00
SPEAKER_00: You know,
32:00
SPEAKER_00: it's Congress is going to get all these people to be like,
32:03
SPEAKER_00: like, what are we doing here?
32:04
SPEAKER_00: Like, why are we participating in Trump propaganda MMA fights?
32:08
SPEAKER_00: Like, because you like mixed martial arts?
32:11
SPEAKER_00: Like, that's not a good reason.
32:13
SPEAKER_00: You know, from a Zuckerberg corporate standpoint for doing things.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: We'll have to see what happens.
32:19
SPEAKER_00: I wanted to sort of just like drag back, though,
32:21
SPEAKER_00: to the political circumstances of the moment that we find ourselves in,
32:27
SPEAKER_00: because I find it very...
32:30
SPEAKER_00: Challenging to think about just because we are on such a knife's edge with regard to
32:34
SPEAKER_00: the Senate, like the world in which all of this polling comes true.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, I'm just scrolling through scrolling through Nate Silver's averages.
32:46
SPEAKER_00: Right.
32:48
SPEAKER_00: But right now we're in a world where Turek wins by one,
32:51
SPEAKER_00: where Hamilton wins by one, where Jackson wins by three.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: Flanagan wins by four and a half.
33:00
SPEAKER_00: Cooper wins by 10.
33:02
SPEAKER_00: You know, Brown wins by four.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: What's his name?
33:05
SPEAKER_00: El-Sayed wins by three.
33:09
SPEAKER_00: Tallarico wins by three.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: If that materializes, that's a catastrophe for Republicans.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: You know, like that's doing incredibly badly relative to this Senate map.
33:23
SPEAKER_00: And that's the kind of thing where your supporters,
33:25
SPEAKER_00: your elite supporters, your supporters in the business world should start panicking.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: You know, like we have really misjudged the situation.
33:34
SPEAKER_00: If we've gone all in with MAGA and now Democrats are winning in Texas and Iowa
33:39
SPEAKER_00: and Kansas and Alaska and Ohio, right?
33:41
SPEAKER_00: That's like...
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Then if Democrats play it smart,
33:46
SPEAKER_00: you can really rout the opposition by,
33:49
SPEAKER_00: you know, causing their soft supporters to peel off.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: You've talked about the other senators from Kansas and Ohio and things like that,
33:56
SPEAKER_00: their reaction they might have.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: But all of those leads are small.
34:00
SPEAKER_00: You know, that's small leads in red states.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: It's also small leads in purple states.
34:05
SPEAKER_00: We could easily wake up in a world where Democrats take the House
34:08
SPEAKER_00: and Democrats pick up two Senate seats, but Republicans hold the majority.
34:13
SPEAKER_00: And in that case,
34:14
SPEAKER_00: everybody feels like,
34:16
SPEAKER_00: you know,
34:16
SPEAKER_00: we took a huge hit from Iran and gas and diesel prices,
34:21
SPEAKER_00: but fundamentally, things are okay.
34:25
SPEAKER_00: We're going to lock it down.
34:26
SPEAKER_01: It's going to be the same as 2018, where they're like normal swing of the pendulum or whatever.
34:31
SPEAKER_00: We're going to lock it down.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: We're going to have to work on the energy thing, right?
34:34
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that will just be their takeaway,
34:36
SPEAKER_00: that like gas prices at $4.50 means we lose the electoral college.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: But if we get it back down to $3.80, we're going to win.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: And it just means solidarity, right?
34:46
SPEAKER_00: Rally the troops, stonewall everything, get our donors more on board than ever before.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: Just say, like, we're sorry about the Strait of Hormuz.
34:57
SPEAKER_00: We're working on the problem.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Maybe we'll crush Ukraine, whatever it is.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: And so it's really close.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: It's more likely— That we're in the world that the polling says than that we're in
35:09
SPEAKER_00: a world of a two to three point polling error.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: But a two to three point polling error would not be anything we haven't seen before.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: It would not be anything out of the ordinary.
35:20
SPEAKER_00: And the stakes for the country of whether,
35:25
SPEAKER_00: you know,
35:25
SPEAKER_00: Tallarico, Turek,
35:27
SPEAKER_00: Hamilton can pull off these narrow winds,
35:30
SPEAKER_00: I just think are really,
35:31
SPEAKER_00: really big because that's the tipping point around the Do we continue to bandwagon
35:38
SPEAKER_00: with Trump or do we fracture?
35:40
SPEAKER_00: It seems to me.
35:41
SPEAKER_01: I agree with what you're saying.
35:42
SPEAKER_01: I just don't know what you'd do about it two weeks out, right?
35:45
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't know either.
35:47
SPEAKER_01: It's stress and campaign as vigorously as possible.
35:50
SPEAKER_01: But in some ways, this thing is probably already cooked, right?
35:55
SPEAKER_01: Whatever the outcomes are going to be,
35:57
SPEAKER_01: they're probably unchangeable, absent, a huge exogenous thing.
36:02
SPEAKER_01: Right.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm just observing that,
36:06
SPEAKER_00: you know,
36:07
SPEAKER_00: part of what is frustrating about politics is just a D plus seven world and
36:12
SPEAKER_00: a D plus nine world are objectively similar worlds.
36:16
SPEAKER_00: But I think our future really goes on quite different pathways, right?
36:21
SPEAKER_00: Just like Hillary wins the popular vote by 2.2 in 2016 is
36:27
SPEAKER_00: a totally different universe from the one in which she wins by 2.7.
36:31
SPEAKER_00: If she'd won by 2.7,
36:32
SPEAKER_00: like literally everything about American politics would be completely transformed,
36:37
SPEAKER_00: even though the margin that we're talking about is really, really small.
36:41
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I mean,
36:45
SPEAKER_01: guess like I'm going to try to weld this to the Slotkin conversation.
36:50
SPEAKER_01: And her comments were quite contingent on – Democrats winning both the House
36:56
SPEAKER_01: and Senate,
36:57
SPEAKER_01: not entirely,
36:57
SPEAKER_01: but she talked about how her vision of using accountability as a kind
37:02
SPEAKER_01: of behavioral change mechanism for people thinking
37:07
SPEAKER_01: about entering Republican politics under Trump was reliant in some sense.
37:14
SPEAKER_01: She's vibing with you on this idea that if somehow the Senate doesn't come through
37:18
SPEAKER_01: at this point,
37:19
SPEAKER_01: that they are going to have a harder time imposing accountability and thus
37:23
SPEAKER_01: a harder time.
37:26
SPEAKER_01: Getting people to think about things differently, right?
37:30
SPEAKER_01: But I was glad to hear her make this case.
37:35
SPEAKER_01: And I think Democrats,
37:36
SPEAKER_01: even if they come up short in the Senate or only have a 51-vote majority in
37:40
SPEAKER_01: the Senate, need to act like this is their lodestar, right?
37:44
SPEAKER_01: Like the...
37:46
SPEAKER_01: Winning did not end the emergency.
37:47
SPEAKER_01: You need to think about yourself as still locked in this kind of power struggle with fascism.
37:54
SPEAKER_01: And so just use the levers of government that you do win by however thin a margin.
38:03
SPEAKER_01: And it does seem to me that
38:08
SPEAKER_01: a lot of the things we were just talking about,
38:10
SPEAKER_01: the The Trump Ukraine stuff,
38:13
SPEAKER_01: the meta stuff,
38:15
SPEAKER_01: the TikTok stuff,
38:16
SPEAKER_01: the Elon stuff is they are also vibing with Slavkin and they are trying to make it
38:23
SPEAKER_01: so that Democrats win as few seats as possible in two weeks because they are worried
38:30
SPEAKER_01: about what happens in the world you described where,
38:36
SPEAKER_01: you know,
38:37
SPEAKER_01: the polls are right or maybe even a little more favorable to Democrats than Trump.
38:41
SPEAKER_00: Yes, which obviously that also could happen.
38:43
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I want that to be the case for the obvious reason,
38:46
SPEAKER_01: but also for the specific reason that like if Darlene Graham loses,
38:51
SPEAKER_01: it adds a level of a poetry.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember like Lindsey Graham back in 2016 was like,
38:56
SPEAKER_01: if we nominate Donald Trump,
38:58
SPEAKER_01: it will destroy the Republican Party and we'll deserve it.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
39:02
SPEAKER_01: Like for that to come down on his own sister after he died of an aortic rupture
39:08
SPEAKER_01: or whatever would just be like,
39:11
SPEAKER_01: My belief in God would change or something like that.
39:14
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, but
39:20
SPEAKER_01: I think that their reaction to what she said,
39:23
SPEAKER_01: the histrionic and dishonest reaction to what she said is revelatory.
39:30
SPEAKER_01: It says that we all kind of understand that in a 54 plus,
39:35
SPEAKER_01: 53 plus seat Democratic majority,
39:40
SPEAKER_01: They're going to have a hard time avoiding really severe consequences,
39:44
SPEAKER_01: really ugly revelations.
39:47
SPEAKER_01: And so this is going to become a snowballing political catastrophe for them.
39:54
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, sort of.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: I guess the only thing I would say about this Slotkin event is this is such
40:01
SPEAKER_00: a classic of conservative politics.
40:03
SPEAKER_01: I guess we should probably say what happened in case people-
40:09
SPEAKER_00: What did she say?
40:10
SPEAKER_00: I don't have the exact quote.
40:15
SPEAKER_00: I can pull it up.
40:15
SPEAKER_01: Do you want me to?
40:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's do it.
40:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:19
SPEAKER_01: So, Slotkin was at an event at the University of Chicago being interviewed by a steed.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: I think it was a steed.
40:30
SPEAKER_01: A steed.
40:32
SPEAKER_01: Anyway.
40:32
SPEAKER_00: I think you pronounce that name Ested.
40:34
SPEAKER_01: Okay, sorry.
40:35
SPEAKER_00: I don't have proof.
40:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
40:38
SPEAKER_01: Apologies to Ested or Ested.
40:42
SPEAKER_01: They were talking about accountability,
40:45
SPEAKER_01: oversight, In the in the next Congress, depending on how the election comes out.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: And she she like she was more muscular than just
40:54
SPEAKER_01: about any moderate incumbent would be about this.
40:58
SPEAKER_01: Like I thought her remarks were quite good, but they were not.
41:02
SPEAKER_01: They were not like fully boiler pilled.
41:05
SPEAKER_01: It was still very much like,
41:06
SPEAKER_01: number one,
41:06
SPEAKER_01: we got to pass a bunch of affordability stuff and prove that we're not just here
41:10
SPEAKER_01: for, you know, to to get revenge on Donald Trump.
41:14
SPEAKER_01: But then, though,
41:15
SPEAKER_01: we need to
41:18
SPEAKER_01: really go to town on three or four marquee issues that have captured
41:25
SPEAKER_01: the public's attention.
41:26
SPEAKER_01: She specifically name-checked the ballroom and the people who donated to
41:31
SPEAKER_01: the ballroom and so on because she thinks that that is basically
41:35
SPEAKER_01: a telegenic scandal.
41:36
SPEAKER_01: People will pay attention to that more than what she described
41:38
SPEAKER_01: as some random corruption in a defense contract or something like that.
41:44
SPEAKER_01: And then at the very end of it, like what is the purpose of it all?
41:54
SPEAKER_01: You know,
41:54
SPEAKER_01: she talks about like how there's going to be a need to like de-Trumpify
41:58
SPEAKER_01: the government.
42:00
SPEAKER_01: Like not necessarily specific people,
42:02
SPEAKER_01: but a kind of behavior that has become endemic under his leadership.
42:08
SPEAKER_01: And so she's like,
42:11
SPEAKER_01: you know,
42:12
SPEAKER_01: Whether we get to impeachment or not, she was leaning away from impeachment.
42:17
SPEAKER_01: She said,
42:18
SPEAKER_01: I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president,
42:22
SPEAKER_01: but on the people who enabled him.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: I want young people coming out of school to say, should I go work for the Trump administration?
42:28
SPEAKER_01: Like, that sounds fun.
42:29
SPEAKER_01: I might get an opportunity.
42:31
SPEAKER_01: I want them to be like, Lord, that might be buying myself a ton of problems that I don't want.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: And so let me avoid participating in that.
42:37
SPEAKER_01: I want that deterrence message sent.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Right.
42:41
SPEAKER_01: She's saying the only way to decorrupt the government,
42:44
SPEAKER_01: if Republicans are unwilling to clean up their own house,
42:47
SPEAKER_01: is to make it so that the people coming to work for the government know that
42:50
SPEAKER_01: if they do corruption, they will get in trouble.
42:55
SPEAKER_01: Excellent message, correct message.
42:57
SPEAKER_01: Republicans freaked out about this in a so obviously dishonest way that it's clear to me
43:07
SPEAKER_01: That they are trying to,
43:09
SPEAKER_01: in both a narrative sense and in some cases like a threatening sense,
43:14
SPEAKER_01: do their own deterrence thing of deterring the oversight to begin with.
43:20
SPEAKER_01: Now,
43:20
SPEAKER_01: why would you do that if you didn't think Democratic oversight efforts were going
43:27
SPEAKER_01: to be successful if they win?
43:29
SPEAKER_00: Well, this is just the illegal orders controversy a second time.
43:34
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
43:35
SPEAKER_00: Like it's literally the same issue.
43:37
SPEAKER_00: Where Senator Schoen said,
43:40
SPEAKER_00: along with a couple of other members several months ago,
43:43
SPEAKER_00: that they have heard instances of people receiving illegal orders and
43:49
SPEAKER_00: that their view as veterans of the national security institutions currently serving
43:54
SPEAKER_00: in Congress is that you have both a right and an obligation to decline
43:59
SPEAKER_00: to follow illegal orders,
44:01
SPEAKER_00: which conservatives choose to characterize as they were fomenting mutiny.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: And now at this time, she's saying she wants to deter people from following illegal orders.
44:14
SPEAKER_00: And they chose to characterize that as she wants to deter people from doing government work.
44:20
SPEAKER_00: In both cases,
44:22
SPEAKER_00: they are just ignoring the accurate premise of Senator Slotkin's remarks,
44:27
SPEAKER_00: which is that the Trump administration is asking people to do things
44:32
SPEAKER_00: that are illegal and unethical.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: Clearly...
44:38
SPEAKER_00: If nobody is doing anything wrong, then it would be wrong to punish them.
44:43
SPEAKER_00: But, you know, we're adults here.
44:46
SPEAKER_00: That's not what's going on.
44:49
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, she is in the right.
44:51
SPEAKER_00: She's 100% in the right.
44:53
SPEAKER_00: I think, though, that in some ways it's almost refreshingly normal.
44:58
SPEAKER_00: This has always been something that the conservative movement is very,
45:02
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if I want to say they're good at it, they are adept at it.
45:06
SPEAKER_00: But is kind of getting 30% of conservative media influencers
45:11
SPEAKER_00: to just wildly mischaracterize something while the other 70% just kind
45:16
SPEAKER_00: of twiddle their thumbs and write about something else.
45:19
SPEAKER_00: And so nobody is,
45:21
SPEAKER_00: there's no like article,
45:24
SPEAKER_00: you know,
45:25
SPEAKER_00: there's no debate on Fox News as to like,
45:27
SPEAKER_00: why are we making things up about what Alyssa Slotkin said?
45:31
SPEAKER_00: You know,
45:31
SPEAKER_00: they have like a high degree of tolerance for this kind
45:34
SPEAKER_00: of Coordinated misrepresentation of what's going on here.
45:40
SPEAKER_00: And it's not even, I think, so much that it deters oversight.
45:46
SPEAKER_00: It tries to deter Democrats from ever departing from closely scripted talking points.
45:55
SPEAKER_00: You know,
45:55
SPEAKER_00: because it becomes about one singular person and the things that she said
46:00
SPEAKER_00: on this panel or in a video or something like that that you find yourself kind
46:06
SPEAKER_00: of like out on an island where everybody is jamming you.
46:10
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, you didn't thousand percent vet Every detail of the wording, things like that.
46:17
SPEAKER_00: And, you know, it's bad.
46:19
SPEAKER_01: And keep talking.
46:20
SPEAKER_01: I think that I think that you could run that in either direction.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: Right.
46:23
SPEAKER_01: Like if you're a Democrat, it could make you spooked about, you know, speaking extemporaneously.
46:29
SPEAKER_01: Sure.
46:29
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
46:53
SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
46:53
SPEAKER_00: you know, anyway,
46:55
SPEAKER_00: this is also,
46:56
SPEAKER_00: you know, this is narrowly good for Alyssa Hawkins' presidential aspirations, right?
47:01
SPEAKER_00: She is more at the center of attention without having actually done anything.
47:05
SPEAKER_00: I mean, in a good way.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: But I mean,
47:08
SPEAKER_00: she appeared on a panel at the University of Chicago and was like,
47:11
SPEAKER_00: I want to do oversight, right?
47:13
SPEAKER_00: This is a kind of boring actual statement,
47:15
SPEAKER_00: but now she's, you know, she's a resistance hero as well as she should be.
47:20
SPEAKER_01: You know, my one...
47:22
SPEAKER_00: I think a kind of a failure mode of 2019 politics was that a lot of these Democrats
47:30
SPEAKER_00: who have experience in the national security domain are kind
47:36
SPEAKER_00: of like more – Personally outraged by certain things related to Ukraine than
47:43
SPEAKER_00: to other things that more relate to the domestic economy.
47:48
SPEAKER_00: And it's both true that these military veterans and things like that make
47:54
SPEAKER_00: for good candidates because people like them, people esteem veterans.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: But the habit of mind of focusing a lot on national security issues is probably not
48:05
SPEAKER_00: so constructive.
48:08
SPEAKER_00: Just like most voters don't care that much about foreign policy.
48:10
SPEAKER_00: They like and respect veterans because they associate military service
48:15
SPEAKER_00: with self-sacrifice and personal courage, right?
48:18
SPEAKER_00: But like the reason the ballroom is good,
48:22
SPEAKER_00: you know,
48:23
SPEAKER_00: the ballroom is objectively much less important than the provision of Starlink
48:28
SPEAKER_00: to Ukrainian missile defenses.
48:30
SPEAKER_00: But the ballroom is like closer to home, right?
48:33
SPEAKER_00: It's closer to people's...
48:36
SPEAKER_00: A sense of what the government is doing and what it's all about and who it serves and for why.
48:41
SPEAKER_00: So, you know,
48:42
SPEAKER_00: I think in a weird way,
48:44
SPEAKER_00: we're going to hear a lot more about the ballroom,
48:46
SPEAKER_00: even though the ballroom is a little...
48:49
SPEAKER_00: And that's correct.
48:51
SPEAKER_00: That's perhaps maturation on the part of some of the class of 2018 legislators.
48:57
SPEAKER_01: That's a good take.
48:57
SPEAKER_01: We should do an episode about how this problem,
49:01
SPEAKER_01: you know,
49:02
SPEAKER_01: Democrats want national security types to run because it strengthens
49:07
SPEAKER_01: a perceived area of weakness,
49:08
SPEAKER_01: but then they are sort of bad on the domestic issues that are at the bread
49:12
SPEAKER_01: and butter center of politics,
49:14
SPEAKER_01: is that these things are going to become one as Trump dismantles The global order
49:20
SPEAKER_01: and the world de-dollarizes and we can't afford cheap debt and blah, blah.
49:24
SPEAKER_01: Like, it is going to become one fucking story,
49:27
SPEAKER_01: but it's a complicated story and we don't have time for it.
49:29
SPEAKER_00: I just think,
49:30
SPEAKER_00: you know,
49:30
SPEAKER_00: one reason I'm particularly excited about James Tallarico as a politician is
49:38
SPEAKER_00: that he doesn't seem like a great recruit, if you know what I mean.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: Like, he's not like a...
49:47
SPEAKER_00: Navy SEAL who started an offshore drilling rig, right?
49:51
SPEAKER_00: Like he's a politician.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: He's a state senator from Austin, Texas,
49:55
SPEAKER_00: who my wife met when he was in high school and she was an intern for
50:00
SPEAKER_00: a different state senator because he went to like a program to learn how
50:05
SPEAKER_00: to do politics.
50:06
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
50:07
SPEAKER_01: He strengthens another perceived weakness of godlessness, I guess, because he's seminary.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: But I just mean like he's a politician.
50:16
SPEAKER_00: He's a guy who's been interested in politics for a long time.
50:19
SPEAKER_00: He's in elective office.
50:21
SPEAKER_00: It's good.
50:22
SPEAKER_00: I It's smart to recruit superstar personalities when you can,
50:26
SPEAKER_00: but it can also be a crutch versus just a politician who thinks about politics a lot
50:33
SPEAKER_00: and tries to practice politics well.
50:37
SPEAKER_00: Ultimately,
50:37
SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking about this in Israel a lot,
50:39
SPEAKER_00: where the Israeli center and center left keeps relying on retired generals
50:44
SPEAKER_00: as their kind of anti-Netanyahu avatars because they have credibility.
50:49
SPEAKER_00: But then they get outfoxed by Bibi, who's just like a smart politician.
50:55
SPEAKER_00: And it's,
50:55
SPEAKER_00: you know, I mean, again,
50:57
SPEAKER_00: I think Slotkin is showing maturity as a politician rather than as a CIA analyst
51:03
SPEAKER_00: over the years.
51:03
SPEAKER_00: And that's good.
51:04
SPEAKER_00: And we'll need that from her and from Mark Kelly and from Abigail Spanberg and
51:07
SPEAKER_00: the other people of that vintage.
51:09
SPEAKER_00: But I just think it'll be amazing if we can win some tough races
51:12
SPEAKER_00: with slightly banal politicians who then like go do politics over
51:17
SPEAKER_00: the next two years, because it's a political struggle, right?
51:20
SPEAKER_00: It's not Yeah.
51:21
SPEAKER_01: I like that point.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: I like that point.
51:22
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to the moon.
51:23
SPEAKER_00: We're trying to win elections.
51:25
SPEAKER_01: All right.
51:26
SPEAKER_01: We are going to talk on the other side about progressive discourse
51:31
SPEAKER_01: about this election and whether they are overselling,
51:35
SPEAKER_01: underselling, or selling themselves short.
51:37
SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
51:38
SPEAKER_01: If you want to hear that conversation, go to politics.fm and upgrade.