Latest / Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar / 6/5/26: Graham Platner Scandal, California Elections, Screwworm Outbreak & MORE!
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here.
- 0:01Speaker 2: Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election,
- 0:05Speaker 2: and we are so excited about what that means for
- 0:07Speaker 2: the future of this show.
- 0:08Speaker 1: This is the only place where you can find honest
- 0:10Speaker 1: perspectives from the left and the right that simply does
- 0:13Speaker 1: not exist anywhere else.
- 0:14Speaker 2: So if that is something that's important to you, please
- 0:17Speaker 2: go to Breakingpoints dot com. Become a member today and
- 0:19Speaker 2: you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free,
- 0:22Speaker 2: and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
- 0:25Speaker 1: We need your help to build the future of independent
- 0:27Speaker 1: news media and we hope to see you at Breakingpoints
- 0:29Speaker 1: dot com.
- 0:31Speaker 2: Happy Friday everyone, Ryan, great to see you.
- 0:33Speaker 3: Good to see you too.
- 0:35Speaker 2: So we have a little bit of timing challenges today.
- 0:38Speaker 2: I have to leave here shortly, and Emily was doing
- 0:41Speaker 2: another podcast that has to come in late. But we
- 0:44Speaker 2: wanted both of us have things to say about this
- 0:46Speaker 2: whole grand Platner situation, so we're going to sort of
- 0:48Speaker 2: split split the grand Platner segment in two. Ryan will
- 0:53Speaker 2: be there throughout the whole process to guide us through
- 0:57Speaker 2: so we can get this covered from all aspects. But
- 0:59Speaker 2: didn't want it to just to be two lefties. But
- 1:01Speaker 2: also Emily actually knows the woman who's the main accuser
- 1:05Speaker 2: in the story against Graham Platner, so definitely wanted to
- 1:08Speaker 2: get her view on what is going on there. We're
- 1:09Speaker 2: also gonna update you on the California election results, which
- 1:13Speaker 2: continue to shift in very interesting ways. We're gonna update
- 1:15Speaker 2: you on screwworm as well. And I had an interview
- 1:19Speaker 2: with Oliver Larkin excuse me this week, who is challenging
- 1:22Speaker 2: Jared Moskowitz in a Florida district in the Democratic primary. Moscowitz,
- 1:27Speaker 2: my opinion, has been a real villain. You can he's
- 1:30Speaker 2: certainly he's proud to be a top a pack candidate.
- 1:34Speaker 2: He defends taking those eight pack dollars. He says, basically,
- 1:37Speaker 2: it's he doesn't understand why they're singled out for scrutiny. Ryan,
- 1:41Speaker 2: I'm sure you have some thoughts about his comments on that,
- 1:44Speaker 2: But in any case, Oliver Larkin challenging him from the left,
- 1:47Speaker 2: and you know, has a very interesting story and very
- 1:50Speaker 2: compelling in his own right as well.
- 1:51Speaker 4: Yes, yes, indeed, and you know the news God's gifted
- 1:55Speaker 4: us with a slow news day, one of the first
- 1:59Speaker 4: in months, so that allows us to spend some spend
- 2:03Speaker 4: some quality time with this New York Times UH investigation,
- 2:07Speaker 4: which I think is useful, not just for what it
- 2:09Speaker 4: says about Platiner or or for this particular Senate race,
- 2:15Speaker 4: but it's a really it's kind of a snapshot of
- 2:18Speaker 4: our moment in time in a really interesting way.
- 2:21Speaker 2: I completely agree. So let's go ahead and dig in.
- 2:24Speaker 2: This is the New York Times piece. And we should
- 2:26Speaker 2: say before we jump in that there were rumors flying
- 2:28Speaker 2: all week that some major scandal was going to break
- 2:33Speaker 2: about Graham Platner above and beyond the you know, sexting
- 2:37Speaker 2: revelations that had come out. Was that early this week
- 2:41Speaker 2: or last week? I can't even remember at this point,
- 2:43Speaker 2: and so this appears to be what the rumors were about.
- 2:47Speaker 2: So the UH, go.
- 2:49Speaker 3: Ahead, Ryan, No, it definitely is.
- 2:51Speaker 4: The rumors were that the New York Times had this
- 2:55Speaker 4: story and they had they spoke to a bunch of
- 2:57Speaker 4: his ex girlfriends, and it was going to be kind
- 3:00Speaker 4: of devastating, and the senators Democratic senators. When Platner came
- 3:06Speaker 4: down to d C I believe it was on Tuesday,
- 3:08Speaker 4: even asked him, you are there assault and abuse allegations coming?
- 3:13Speaker 3: He said, no credible ones.
- 3:17Speaker 2: You know, I can guarantee what someone is going to
- 3:19Speaker 2: say about them, right, And turns.
- 3:21Speaker 4: Out, you know, we there weren't any period unless we'll
- 3:25Speaker 4: get we'll read through the piece. There's this one grabbing
- 3:28Speaker 4: the shoulder thing that you could say, well, that's physical
- 3:31Speaker 4: and that there's touch like Representative Luna was badly assaulted
- 3:37Speaker 4: by Medea Benjamin as we'll talk about later in the
- 3:40Speaker 4: program as well thoughts and prayers, So any any contact
- 3:43Speaker 4: can be considered.
- 3:46Speaker 3: Over the line. So but we'll go through it.
- 3:48Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, So the headline here is several women.
- 3:53Speaker 2: By the way, they news alerted this just to people know,
- 3:55Speaker 2: which means you get it on my phone and I
- 3:57Speaker 2: got a news alert that this story had broken, which
- 4:00Speaker 2: is what they reserve for what they consider to be
- 4:02Speaker 2: their sort of most important or most explosive stories. Several
- 4:05Speaker 2: women who dated Graham Platner recall quote unsettling behavior. The
- 4:11Speaker 2: Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women
- 4:14Speaker 2: said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing.
- 4:19Speaker 2: And so if you go through this piece, they speak
- 4:21Speaker 2: with I think six different Platiner ex girlfriends. The primary
- 4:26Speaker 2: accusations here. In fact, really any of the accusations that
- 4:29Speaker 2: have any sort of detail to them come from one woman.
- 4:33Speaker 2: Will get more into her background, and Ryan has done
- 4:35Speaker 2: some reporting on that. And as I mentioned before, Emily
- 4:37Speaker 2: actually knows this woman, Lindsay who leveled the most serious
- 4:43Speaker 2: allegations against Graham in this piece. She does work for
- 4:47Speaker 2: right wing causes, and to me, the headline after I
- 4:50Speaker 2: read it was very was kind of misleading because even
- 4:54Speaker 2: though they say several women, which led me to believe,
- 4:57Speaker 2: as I dug into this, that you're gonna have multiple stories,
- 5:00Speaker 2: specific accounts, it's really only this one woman who says
- 5:03Speaker 2: anything even remotely specific. The other two say things like, well,
- 5:07Speaker 2: he came home drunk one time and I found his
- 5:10Speaker 2: behavior settling and I cut off contact, that sort of thing,
- 5:13Speaker 2: but no real specifics and certainly no allegations of anything
- 5:17Speaker 2: that would approximate quote unquote abuse.
- 5:19Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting, and well, yeah we can parse
- 5:24Speaker 4: it because yeah, if they say three said X, but
- 5:27Speaker 4: then when you go through it, you're like, well who
- 5:28Speaker 4: are the three?
- 5:29Speaker 2: Yeah, And actually the primary accuser here is taking issue
- 5:34Speaker 2: with that as well, because she's saying she was told
- 5:37Speaker 2: that there would be other women making similar allegations, and
- 5:41Speaker 2: she was very surprised when she read the piece and
- 5:43Speaker 2: it was all about her. The byeline here is Katie
- 5:46Speaker 2: Gluick and Lisa Larrr. What do we know about them
- 5:49Speaker 2: as reporters? Ryan, because I know you have experience with
- 5:53Speaker 2: both of them in some regard.
- 5:54Speaker 3: Yeah, Lisa.
- 5:57Speaker 4: Was a colleague of mine back at the when I
- 5:59Speaker 4: was at political back now almost twenty years ago.
- 6:01Speaker 3: At this point, I think she's a great reporter.
- 6:04Speaker 4: And I had told somebody close to Platner was like,
- 6:08Speaker 4: you know, if if Lisa, if Lisa on her own
- 6:10Speaker 4: takes you down, you probably deserve to go down.
- 6:11Speaker 3: Like she's a very good reporter.
- 6:13Speaker 4: And and and I think you can really put a
- 6:15Speaker 4: lot of faith in in what she in what she
- 6:19Speaker 4: reports and writes.
- 6:20Speaker 3: Uh, Katie is is different. Katie.
- 6:25Speaker 4: Katie is a little like me on the on the
- 6:27Speaker 4: reverse side, like both a journalist and somebody with a
- 6:31Speaker 4: sense of uh politics. And she is for her entire
- 6:37Speaker 4: career been pretty you know, strongly pro Israel.
- 6:39Speaker 3: Uh in it. In college she was I.
- 6:43Speaker 4: Forgot what was the organization you know that she she
- 6:46Speaker 4: was president of like Friends of Israel, or whatever it
- 6:48Speaker 4: was that like won an award from APAC.
- 6:51Speaker 3: So like fine, like go ahead, that's fine, Like I don't.
- 6:55Speaker 4: I think it's we should all, you know, as long
- 6:58Speaker 4: as what you're telling is is you know, you can
- 7:01Speaker 4: back up what you're saying. But it's been interesting to
- 7:04Speaker 4: see people now slamming The New York Times as like
- 7:08Speaker 4: this is a catch and kill, like these reporters were
- 7:11Speaker 4: like in the tank for the Platiner campaign. It's like,
- 7:14Speaker 4: do you have any idea like what Katie's politics?
- 7:17Speaker 3: Are you saying?
- 7:18Speaker 2: Like, yeah, you couldn't she writes some of the critical
- 7:21Speaker 2: pieces about Zoran during his campaign.
- 7:23Speaker 3: Yes, yes, on some of the most egregious Yes.
- 7:27Speaker 4: So if you had Katie as your lead byline here
- 7:31Speaker 4: and this is what you got, like, you're not going
- 7:33Speaker 4: to do any better, Like there's just no world in
- 7:36Speaker 4: which you can say that she is biased here for Platiner.
- 7:41Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, let's get back to the actual text
- 7:45Speaker 2: of this and I'm just going to read through this
- 7:47Speaker 2: and we'll just like pause and comment where we think
- 7:49Speaker 2: appropriate on Tuesday evening, because I don't want to, you know,
- 7:51Speaker 2: I don't want to mischaracterize what the report says. We'll
- 7:53Speaker 2: give you the actual language that's in the report. On
- 7:55Speaker 2: Tuesday evening, after a whirlwind day in Washington, Grand Platiner,
- 7:58Speaker 2: the Democratic candidate for Senate in me rushed home. Rumors
- 8:01Speaker 2: were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about mister Plattner's
- 8:04Speaker 2: messy personal life after news reports that he had sent
- 8:07Speaker 2: sexual messages to women while married. Democratic senators were pressing
- 8:11Speaker 2: him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were
- 8:15Speaker 2: swarming staking out his hometown. Amid the turmoil, mister Plattner
- 8:19Speaker 2: worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex girlfriends who
- 8:22Speaker 2: might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a
- 8:24Speaker 2: bad boyfriend, he was in fact a decent guy. In
- 8:27Speaker 2: interviews with The New York Times on Wednesday, several women
- 8:30Speaker 2: did just that, describing mister Plattner as a fun and
- 8:33Speaker 2: caring partner and saying they felt safe with him. Some
- 8:36Speaker 2: remains remain friends with him to this day, years after
- 8:39Speaker 2: their relationship ended, but in extensive conversations over the past
- 8:43Speaker 2: two months, three other women who had been romantically involved
- 8:47Speaker 2: with mister Plattner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing
- 8:51Speaker 2: volatile and quote toxic relationships that were unsettling and at
- 8:55Speaker 2: times emotionally wrenching. Mister Plattner could be charming and charismatic
- 8:59Speaker 2: they were called interviews, but also demeaning to women, in
- 9:02Speaker 2: at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily
- 9:05Speaker 2: and was regularly unfaithful. Mister plattin forty money combat veteran,
- 9:09Speaker 2: has spoken openly about groppling with PTSD, depression and drinking
- 9:13Speaker 2: that he said has resulted from his time in the military.
- 9:16Speaker 2: As revelations about him have surfaced, including his dismissive remarks
- 9:20Speaker 2: online about rape and derogatory comments about women, as well
- 9:23Speaker 2: as a tattoo he had that is widely recognized as
- 9:26Speaker 2: a Nazi symbol, he has said his past behavior does
- 9:28Speaker 2: not reflect who he is today. Maners, he has urged,
- 9:31Speaker 2: should not judge him for the worst thing I said
- 9:33Speaker 2: on the Internet on my worst day fourteen years ago.
- 9:36Speaker 2: The critical accounts provided by three of the women interviewed
- 9:38Speaker 2: by The Times, who were each in romantic relationships with
- 9:40Speaker 2: him for years, give a fuller picture of mister Plattner's life.
- 9:44Speaker 2: They shed light on an earlier era when he has
- 9:46Speaker 2: acknowledged in ten struggles, but also raised questions about his
- 9:49Speaker 2: more recent years in Maine, which his campaign has presented
- 9:52Speaker 2: as a period of healing and personal redemption. And again, Ryan,
- 9:55Speaker 2: when I read this portion, I really fully expected to
- 9:58Speaker 2: get like a, you know, detailed accounts from all three
- 10:01Speaker 2: of these women, which is not what you end up
- 10:03Speaker 2: getting in this piece.
- 10:05Speaker 4: No, yeah, you get maybe and maybe we should do
- 10:09Speaker 4: those first, because I know you got to leave in
- 10:10Speaker 4: five minutes. Maybe take take a look at Yeah, let's
- 10:15Speaker 4: take a look at the accounts from the two that
- 10:17Speaker 4: aren't Lindsay, because I've seen people saying, oh what you okay,
- 10:23Speaker 4: you don't believe the Republican operative, but what about these
- 10:27Speaker 4: other two women? It's like, well believe what like what
- 10:29Speaker 4: like prepared to believe, you know, or not believe or
- 10:35Speaker 4: evaluate claims and allegations or accusations.
- 10:38Speaker 3: But what what are they like? What like? Literally like what?
- 10:42Speaker 5: So?
- 10:42Speaker 3: Yeah, Jenny, I can read this.
- 10:44Speaker 2: You've got Jenny Rassico forty one mean Democrats said she
- 10:48Speaker 2: dated him, casually said the post deepened her belief he
- 10:51Speaker 2: did not respect women. When I saw the old comments
- 10:53Speaker 2: he made online, I recognized a version of him that
- 10:56Speaker 2: I had experiences with.
- 10:59Speaker 4: So that so so like, what is a reader supposed
- 11:01Speaker 4: to take from that? And is there anything else from her?
- 11:05Speaker 4: Is she the one where he showed up drunk at
- 11:06Speaker 4: the house?
- 11:08Speaker 2: Let's see, see they say these vague things. The three
- 11:12Speaker 2: described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could
- 11:14Speaker 2: be exhilarating, they said. They also recounted patterns of heavy
- 11:17Speaker 2: drinking and womanizing. I mean, think Graham's owned up to
- 11:19Speaker 2: all of this, by the way, this aspect of it,
- 11:21Speaker 2: you know, I think that was already on the retil
- 11:23Speaker 2: that he had a drinking problem and the womanizing problem.
- 11:26Speaker 2: Asked to some of how he treated her. The third woman,
- 11:29Speaker 2: I think that is the main Democrat said she felt
- 11:31Speaker 2: like collateral damage to the world that is his Yeah, okay, sure,
- 11:39Speaker 2: I believe her. I believe that she felt that way.
- 11:42Speaker 3: All right.
- 11:42Speaker 4: So here's from Rasico. This is the this is the allegation,
- 11:45Speaker 4: and this is the part that winds up in the
- 11:48Speaker 4: headline as unsettling. Rasico also said that in twenty twenty one,
- 11:52Speaker 4: he arrived at her house drunk after she had asked
- 11:54Speaker 4: him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but
- 11:57Speaker 4: said she cut off contact soon after that episode and
- 12:00Speaker 4: found his behavior quote reckless and quote unsettling. So to
- 12:04Speaker 4: let you in on the journalism here, as you're doing
- 12:06Speaker 4: interviews and then packaging a story, unsettling wound up in
- 12:10Speaker 4: the headline of this article.
- 12:13Speaker 3: And this is where it comes from.
- 12:14Speaker 4: Usually, if you're going to put that in the headline,
- 12:16Speaker 4: you're going to quote the person like you'll, you'll do
- 12:20Speaker 4: the entire thing that she said. Instead, here it's paraphrased
- 12:24Speaker 4: and then and then thrown into a quote, so you
- 12:26Speaker 4: don't know, like sometimes a journalist will say, well, was
- 12:28Speaker 4: that unsettling, and Rascoc said, yeah, it was unsettling, and
- 12:32Speaker 4: so then it winds up like this.
- 12:34Speaker 2: But okay, so he showed up, rinds up as they
- 12:36Speaker 2: they all said that the same thing that he's unsettling.
- 12:40Speaker 4: And so she he showed up drunk after she said
- 12:42Speaker 4: don't come over, and then she didn't elaborate on that.
- 12:44Speaker 4: So it looks like, well, then I guess he left,
- 12:47Speaker 4: Like I mean, well, I mean we can I guess
- 12:49Speaker 4: we can guess that. You know, I shouldn't want to
- 12:51Speaker 4: talk about whatever happened after that. But that's it. So
- 12:55Speaker 4: when when people are like, well, what about her allegation,
- 12:58Speaker 4: it's like Okay, I told believe one hundred percent. This
- 13:02Speaker 4: sounds like a credible claim. I don't think Platner has
- 13:05Speaker 4: denied this. Did she say did he say, I'm going
- 13:08Speaker 4: to come over, you know, when I'm done with the bar,
- 13:11Speaker 4: and she said, don't come over, and he came over anyway?
- 13:14Speaker 3: Like quite possibly? How is this in the New York Times?
- 13:18Speaker 3: Is the is kind of my question there?
- 13:22Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and I did want to ask you, Ryan,
- 13:25Speaker 2: and Emily welcome. We started diving into the article because
- 13:28Speaker 2: I'm going to have to jump and I wanted to
- 13:30Speaker 2: get a little bit of my two cents in here,
- 13:31Speaker 2: and we definitely wanted your two cents on this story,
- 13:33Speaker 2: given that you know Lindsey. So we started going through
- 13:36Speaker 2: actually the other allegations of the other two women that
- 13:38Speaker 2: are in this piece, which are you know, which I
- 13:40Speaker 2: don't think Graham denies in which are consistent with things
- 13:43Speaker 2: that he said about his you know, what he describes
- 13:46Speaker 2: as negative content content conduct from a previous era of
- 13:51Speaker 2: his life. But you know, Ryan, I wanted to ask
- 13:54Speaker 2: you because you've done reporting on alleged sexual assault and
- 13:58Speaker 2: I never have, you know, I found it to be
- 14:01Speaker 2: shocking just to get to the main claims in the
- 14:03Speaker 2: story from Lindsay, who, by the way, does not allege
- 14:06Speaker 2: sexual assault. You know, the most egregious thing that she
- 14:10Speaker 2: alleges is that he grabs her by her shoulders, that
- 14:12Speaker 2: he yanked her by her hand out of a cab,
- 14:15Speaker 2: and that there was an incident where he put her
- 14:17Speaker 2: arm behind her back, pushed her into her room, closed
- 14:19Speaker 2: the door, and locked the door. He, by the way,
- 14:22Speaker 2: completely denies this. The time says they were not able
- 14:24Speaker 2: to independently corroborate it, you know, in any way, it's
- 14:28Speaker 2: just basically her word against his word. And so what
- 14:33Speaker 2: I was fairly shocked that they printed this given that
- 14:36Speaker 2: not only do you not have corroboration, but you also
- 14:39Speaker 2: have an actor who is does have a potential political
- 14:43Speaker 2: motivation here, given that she you know, worked for Heritage
- 14:45Speaker 2: and is a right wing operative. But I wonder, as
- 14:48Speaker 2: someone who's done this sort of sensitive reporting, how you
- 14:52Speaker 2: viewed that aspect of it. And you know, to be clear,
- 14:54Speaker 2: you're involved in the reporting on kavanaugh allegations, on terror
- 14:58Speaker 2: Reid's allegations against Joe Biden, So how do you weigh
- 15:01Speaker 2: how to do that reporting and what meets the standard
- 15:04Speaker 2: of printing something publicly.
- 15:07Speaker 4: I think because the allegations are at a low level,
- 15:12Speaker 4: the bar then becomes kind of lowered for them to
- 15:15Speaker 4: be included, Like the higher the offense than the higher
- 15:19Speaker 4: bar for corroboration. So because you can also imagine, like
- 15:25Speaker 4: so basically what she's saying is they were having a
- 15:27Speaker 4: fight and she has i think discussed this elsewhere. They're
- 15:30Speaker 4: having a fight and he kind of like pushes her
- 15:32Speaker 4: into the moves her into this room, closes the door
- 15:35Speaker 4: and says like stay in here until you cal him down.
- 15:39Speaker 4: And she says, like it hurt when he'd pushed her
- 15:42Speaker 4: in there, and then but then she fell asleep in
- 15:45Speaker 4: the in the room. So it's like it also it's
- 15:48Speaker 4: like most people in relationships can picture some version of that, Yeah,
- 15:55Speaker 4: and so uh it's so it's so it's a it's
- 16:00Speaker 4: easier to include. I think what happened is that they
- 16:03Speaker 4: had a lot, they had heavier allegations that they couldn't
- 16:07Speaker 4: substantiate or corroborate, and so they whittled it down, whittled
- 16:11Speaker 4: it down, whittled it down until they had what they published.
- 16:16Speaker 4: And if they originally would have pitched to their editors,
- 16:20Speaker 4: so here's what we have. We have, you know, three
- 16:23Speaker 4: women who say unsettling stuff. One of them he came
- 16:26Speaker 4: over drunk at the house when I asked him not to.
- 16:29Speaker 4: The third one said he was demeaning towards women.
- 16:31Speaker 3: I don't.
- 16:32Speaker 4: I think the third one has no no, no accusation,
- 16:35Speaker 4: just kind of he was disrespectful towards women, which he
- 16:38Speaker 4: had disrespectful things to say about women in his Reddit
- 16:41Speaker 4: posts like that, Yeah, that tricks. And then the third
- 16:45Speaker 4: one saying he kind of pushed me into a room
- 16:47Speaker 4: during a fight and pulled me out of a cab
- 16:50Speaker 4: by his risks, Like I don't have a hard time
- 16:53Speaker 4: believing that he might have grabbed her wrist and pulled
- 16:55Speaker 4: her out of a cab, like and sometimes like you
- 16:58Speaker 4: often will help someone out of a cab and if
- 17:00Speaker 4: you're angry, maybe like yank Like totally plausible accusation there,
- 17:05Speaker 4: but also not remotely kind of debilitating to the campaign.
- 17:09Speaker 4: So I think it's easier then to get in. But
- 17:11Speaker 4: I think if they could pitched it as that, like
- 17:14Speaker 4: this is what we have, the editors would have said, no,
- 17:16Speaker 4: that's you don't have a story there. But once with
- 17:19Speaker 4: the entire country is talking about your story and there
- 17:24Speaker 4: are all these rumors going around, you got to publish
- 17:26Speaker 4: something my gut.
- 17:29Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's the thing to me, is like, Okay, well,
- 17:31Speaker 2: if it's not that serious of an allegation, then why
- 17:35Speaker 2: are we digging into past relationships from over a decade
- 17:39Speaker 2: from you know, years ago? And if it is a
- 17:42Speaker 2: serious allegation, then how are we printing this without any
- 17:47Speaker 2: corroboration given the likely the clear cut political motivation here.
- 17:53Speaker 2: And you know, as I said before, he completely denies it.
- 17:56Speaker 2: In fact, maybe I'll go ahead and play a little
- 17:58Speaker 2: bit of his den here. Emily, while I'm pulling that up,
- 18:02Speaker 2: you want to just react a little bit and tell
- 18:04Speaker 2: us a little bit about what you know about Lindsey
- 18:07Speaker 2: and your experience with her.
- 18:09Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 18:09Speaker 5: Well, and have you guys mentioned her post this morning yet?
- 18:12Speaker 3: Not yet?
- 18:13Speaker 5: Okay, So this is also worth mentioning on the corroboration point.
- 18:16Speaker 5: So she and I guess some of her friends, and
- 18:20Speaker 5: I'm out in West Virginia and was driving all night,
- 18:22Speaker 5: so I've may have missed some stuff, but I've seen
- 18:24Speaker 5: what her friends said. By the way, we do have
- 18:27Speaker 5: some mutual friends and some I think some close mutual friends.
- 18:30Speaker 5: I've met her a handful of times, and I am
- 18:33Speaker 5: not personal friends with her, but I know her and
- 18:37Speaker 5: not well I should say, but we do have some
- 18:39Speaker 5: close mutual friends. I am also a Actually I don't
- 18:42Speaker 5: even know this for sure. I think I'm still a
- 18:43Speaker 5: fellow at independent Women's Forum that don't pay me for anything.
- 18:47Speaker 5: It's kind of like a brand ambassador thing for some people.
- 18:49Speaker 5: I would describe it as I think they said she
- 18:51Speaker 5: was paid fifteen grand over the course of a couple
- 18:54Speaker 5: of years in the early twenty twenty one twenty twenty
- 18:56Speaker 5: two time period, but.
- 18:59Speaker 3: I don't think I've seen in like five plus years.
- 19:01Speaker 5: So she's now saying and some of her friends are
- 19:04Speaker 5: saying that they offered to provide corroboration. I don't think
- 19:08Speaker 5: they have, specifically, unless I've missed something said what they
- 19:12Speaker 5: would have provided that corroboration for. Would it be for
- 19:15Speaker 5: the arm twisting incident, for the wrist incident. But there's
- 19:20Speaker 5: I just there's no way right now to know what
- 19:23Speaker 5: was happening behind the scenes of the reporting. All we
- 19:25Speaker 5: can do is like read the tea leaves, and it's
- 19:28Speaker 5: just a strange, strange story for the new York Times
- 19:32Speaker 5: all around. It is just an incredibly strange story for
- 19:35Speaker 5: The New York Times. And Chrystal, you have up here
- 19:38Speaker 5: some of the stuff from the women.
- 19:40Speaker 3: Is that what that is?
- 19:42Speaker 2: Yeah, we had This is one of Lindsay's posts. The
- 19:46Speaker 2: other posts that she put up. The other post that
- 19:49Speaker 2: she put up said that, yes, she felt misled by
- 19:53Speaker 2: the Times, that they came to her and were like,
- 19:55Speaker 2: we have these other women who are going to also
- 19:59Speaker 2: go on the record with significant allegations, and that her
- 20:03Speaker 2: impression was she was not going to be the only one,
- 20:05Speaker 2: because she expresses in the piece she understands like, look,
- 20:08Speaker 2: people are going to look at this on a Republican
- 20:10Speaker 2: like operative I'm you know, they're going to see psycho
- 20:14Speaker 2: bitter ex Republican girlfriends and be like, what are we
- 20:17Speaker 2: talking about here? And so I you know, I don't
- 20:20Speaker 2: rule out that the Times came to her and in
- 20:23Speaker 2: order to encourage her to put whatever she was going
- 20:26Speaker 2: to say on the record that they claimed they had
- 20:29Speaker 2: more than they actually claimed than they actually had. And
- 20:33Speaker 2: that also makes sense, like you were saying, Ryan, in
- 20:36Speaker 2: terms of the editors greenlighting this, you know, if they
- 20:40Speaker 2: were portraying to them as well, like, oh, we've got
- 20:42Speaker 2: these you know, we've got these multiple women, and they're
- 20:44Speaker 2: all going to go on the record, and at the
- 20:46Speaker 2: end of the day, you just have one political operative
- 20:49Speaker 2: who was literally, you know, involved with the organization that
- 20:52Speaker 2: helped shepherd through Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and coach Susan Collins
- 20:59Speaker 2: on what to say in order to help get him through.
- 21:03Speaker 2: You know, the editors probably would again and I don't know, like,
- 21:06Speaker 2: I'm not sure this is strong enough. So it does
- 21:09Speaker 2: seem like there are some other things that are going
- 21:11Speaker 2: on here behind the scenes. I do want to quickly
- 21:14Speaker 2: and then I probably I probably got a run. I
- 21:16Speaker 2: want to get Graham's voice in here a little bit,
- 21:18Speaker 2: because he did do a lengthy interview with Chris Chris
- 21:21Speaker 2: Hayes last night, and you know, the first portion of
- 21:24Speaker 2: this I'll play for you just his reaction and just
- 21:27Speaker 2: to generally characterize the interview, he acknowledges, Yeah, I was
- 21:30Speaker 2: a bad boyfriend. I've spoken about this. I've tried to
- 21:33Speaker 2: be transparent about the man that I was and the
- 21:35Speaker 2: man that I've become. But on the issue of any
- 21:38Speaker 2: sort of physical altercation or harm, he categorically denies that
- 21:44Speaker 2: so let's go ahead and take a listen to the
- 21:46Speaker 2: beginning of this interview so you can hear that portion.
- 21:48Speaker 3: Good to have you on. Thank you so much for
- 21:49Speaker 3: doing this. Thanks Chris, I really appreciate it. Thanks for
- 21:53Speaker 3: having me on.
- 21:54Speaker 6: I just want to say at the start that, like
- 21:56Speaker 6: you know, we've had you on before, and I think
- 21:58Speaker 6: you and I are both people that in other content
- 22:00Speaker 6: talk about income into cality in healthcare and all those
- 22:02Speaker 6: issues which are extremely important, and we devote a lot
- 22:04Speaker 6: of time to on this program or this is not
- 22:06Speaker 6: you know, the thing that we spent a lot of
- 22:08Speaker 6: time chasing.
- 22:09Speaker 3: But you know there's some serious stuff there. Who I
- 22:11Speaker 3: want to go through with you.
- 22:13Speaker 6: I think I know about it, and I want to
- 22:14Speaker 6: start with what miss Fifield says about being rough is
- 22:19Speaker 6: the term the times were. And I'm going to just
- 22:20Speaker 6: read you the account so you haven't This is from
- 22:23Speaker 6: the times. Mister Plattner could be rough with her, Miss
- 22:25Speaker 6: Firefield said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken
- 22:28Speaker 6: and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, she grappled with how
- 22:30Speaker 6: to process her experiences. She was quick to note he
- 22:32Speaker 6: never hit me, never punched me. She said it regularly
- 22:35Speaker 6: grabbed her by the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks.
- 22:38Speaker 6: On one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by
- 22:39Speaker 6: her wrist after an argument she wanted to stay in
- 22:42Speaker 6: the car. During one argument, she recalled, he quisted her
- 22:44Speaker 6: arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and
- 22:46Speaker 6: held the door close to the other side so she
- 22:48Speaker 6: couldn't get out, telling her to remain there until she
- 22:50Speaker 6: was calm. Eventually, Miss Fifield said she fell asleep and
- 22:53Speaker 6: left the next morning. It hurts, she said, but she added,
- 22:55Speaker 6: it didn't cause any injury.
- 22:57Speaker 2: It didn't break my arm.
- 22:58Speaker 3: Did that happen, No, it did not.
- 23:04Speaker 7: There are some allegations in this piece that I just
- 23:06Speaker 7: want to be kind of unequivocal about are simply not true.
- 23:11Speaker 7: Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my
- 23:15Speaker 7: tattoo was. These are the statements of someone who's politically motivated.
- 23:20Speaker 3: In this piece. There's a lot.
- 23:22Speaker 7: About my struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self
- 23:25Speaker 7: medicating with alcohol. And I've been very upfront since the
- 23:28Speaker 7: beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark
- 23:31Speaker 7: period of my life after I came back from my
- 23:33Speaker 7: combat service, and that's what that combat, that's what that
- 23:36Speaker 7: kind of life looks like. And so there are things
- 23:41Speaker 7: in this that I absolutely will take responsibility for and
- 23:46Speaker 7: have been speaking about openly for months now. But those
- 23:49Speaker 7: serious allegations are just not true.
- 23:51Speaker 2: So there you go. That's and that's kind of the
- 23:54Speaker 2: tenor of what he says. He also makes a point
- 23:56Speaker 2: at one point that I think is worth noting, which
- 23:59Speaker 2: is like, look, this is why people don't run for office,
- 24:03Speaker 2: because I mean, look, I don't know you guys put
- 24:06Speaker 2: if reporters when talk to my exes, I don't know
- 24:09Speaker 2: that you'd get a very flattering portrait. Let's just be
- 24:12Speaker 2: very clear. So you know, I think many of us
- 24:17Speaker 2: can look back and imagine the way others in our
- 24:19Speaker 2: life may view us and sorts of things that they may,
- 24:21Speaker 2: you know, tell to the press if they wanted to,
- 24:24Speaker 2: you know, hurt you and take you down and say, yeah,
- 24:26Speaker 2: that might be a little uncomfortable for me.
- 24:27Speaker 3: So growing that.
- 24:29Speaker 4: One of them is a Republican operative and you're running
- 24:31Speaker 4: as a Democrat.
- 24:33Speaker 2: Yeah literally, I mean, actually it's funny you mentioned just
- 24:36Speaker 2: a very quick digression.
- 24:37Speaker 5: You know.
- 24:37Speaker 2: I when I ran for Congress, the stupid photos were
- 24:40Speaker 2: released of me like at this, you know, triple ximist party,
- 24:43Speaker 2: I'm dressed up and now it's like so tame that
- 24:46Speaker 2: it's ridiculous to even talk about, right, But at the
- 24:48Speaker 2: time it was a scandal and I was young, and yeah,
- 24:52Speaker 2: Ryan remembers, well, I'm sure I was young, and you know,
- 24:55Speaker 2: I have this weird name, and it was a whole thing. Okay, Well,
- 24:58Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure that the person who least the photos
- 25:01Speaker 2: was my friend who hosted the parties Republican Heritage staffer
- 25:06Speaker 2: boyfriend at the time. So I feel the story deep
- 25:10Speaker 2: in my ponees, is what I'm saying. I just would say, listener,
- 25:16Speaker 2: in the case of case of Graham, in the case
- 25:18Speaker 2: of Zoran, you see the level where there was an
- 25:21Speaker 2: Abdul al Saiah reported scandal of like he didn't finish
- 25:25Speaker 2: his residency even though he's like an mdaph to, like
- 25:27Speaker 2: super decorated and accomplished person. One of the pieces of
- 25:32Speaker 2: this is who is the scrutiny applied to and why?
- 25:35Speaker 2: And Katie Gluke is an ideological actor that just is
- 25:39Speaker 2: what it is in terms of her reporting. Obviously, the
- 25:41Speaker 2: Republican here is also an ideological actor as well, and
- 25:45Speaker 2: so I think that is for me. The main media
- 25:47Speaker 2: takeaway is, look, there's things on the record that suggest
- 25:52Speaker 2: Susan Collins had an affair in the seventies. Have we
- 25:54Speaker 2: had any reporting about that and what that says about
- 25:58Speaker 2: her character and voters are grappling with it. Have we
- 26:00Speaker 2: interviewed all of her exes? No. Graham Platner challenges power,
- 26:04Speaker 2: He challenges the oligarchy, and he challenges the powers that
- 26:07Speaker 2: be on Israel, and we know that is a recipe
- 26:10Speaker 2: for people coming after you and doing whatever they can
- 26:14Speaker 2: to try to tarnish you and ultimately take you down.
- 26:17Speaker 2: So anyway, that's what I'll that's those are my thoughts
- 26:21Speaker 2: that I'll sort of leave us with and I'll let
- 26:24Speaker 2: you guys continue on. You can talk about the tattoo
- 26:26Speaker 2: and all the things. But but you know, that's where
- 26:29Speaker 2: I get angry in this story is it's not that
- 26:34Speaker 2: they're you know that it's not unreasonable to report on
- 26:37Speaker 2: Graham and his struggles in his past and whatever, But
- 26:39Speaker 2: when you see how selectively this level of scrutiny is applied,
- 26:44Speaker 2: and the type of things they will print about him
- 26:47Speaker 2: that I do not think they would print about you know,
- 26:50Speaker 2: a Chuck Schumer if you had a similar, uncorroborated, ideologically
- 26:54Speaker 2: motivated allegation against him. That's where it, I think is
- 26:58Speaker 2: very biased and in my opinion, egregeous.
- 27:03Speaker 3: All Right, we run Crystal, Thank you guys.
- 27:07Speaker 2: Can't wait to watch the rest of your coverage.
- 27:10Speaker 3: Yeah, I've had a lot more sun.
- 27:13Speaker 2: Ryan.
- 27:13Speaker 5: I was just gonna jump in and say I kind
- 27:15Speaker 5: of wish Crystal was because I was gonna say, actually,
- 27:17Speaker 5: a lot of what she just laid out. And I
- 27:18Speaker 5: have also done some me too type reporting and this
- 27:23Speaker 5: was the stuff that drove me crazy during Kavanaugh is
- 27:26Speaker 5: I would say, the powers that be did not want
- 27:29Speaker 5: Roe v. Wade overturned and I saw so. And this
- 27:32Speaker 5: is driving me crazy about the right at this moment too,
- 27:35Speaker 5: but also a little bit about the left, Like I
- 27:36Speaker 5: feel like I'm my head is about to explode because
- 27:39Speaker 5: it is frustrating to see the Michael Avenatti allegations of
- 27:43Speaker 5: what was it like the Devil's Triangle gang rape in
- 27:47Speaker 5: the New York It was New York Magazine I think
- 27:50Speaker 5: that first reported that. That is to me, that was
- 27:54Speaker 5: clearly done with political motivations by Julie Sweatnik.
- 27:57Speaker 3: I think was who clear had clear political motivations. Yeah,
- 28:00Speaker 3: also just a fabulous it seems.
- 28:02Speaker 5: Like, yeah, right, And so I think this is a
- 28:04Speaker 5: good moment because it tests everybody's priors. The right now
- 28:08Speaker 5: is valorizing and pumping up a story that I think
- 28:12Speaker 5: if it were published about Pete Hegseth, who did challenge
- 28:15Speaker 5: power at the Pentagon, he's not anymore, but when before
- 28:18Speaker 5: he was confirmed, he was saying he was going to
- 28:20Speaker 5: do all these big reforms at the Pentagon and the like.
- 28:24Speaker 5: I really think Republicans, if the story were about a Republican,
- 28:29Speaker 5: would be saying this is more thin me too reporting.
- 28:34Speaker 5: I genuinely firmly believe that. On the other hand, I
- 28:36Speaker 5: think one of the reasons Republicans are running to the
- 28:38Speaker 5: story is because they're trying to They're like, well, you
- 28:40Speaker 5: guys set these rules, and so now if we're playing
- 28:43Speaker 5: by these rules, he's screwed, and so they're kind of
- 28:46Speaker 5: reveling in that. And it's so so infuriating to.
- 28:50Speaker 3: See this, Like it's driving me.
- 28:51Speaker 5: Insane, because there is a way to have consistent standards
- 28:54Speaker 5: across the board, and I don't feel like anybody is
- 28:57Speaker 5: doing that in this now.
- 28:59Speaker 3: I shouldn't say anybody.
- 29:00Speaker 5: I'm not speaking with proper nuance when I say that,
- 29:02Speaker 5: because obviously, you know, I'm talking to somebody who I
- 29:06Speaker 5: think is being very nuanced on this. But it's just
- 29:09Speaker 5: like maddening to see the whole thing like that, Like
- 29:13Speaker 5: it was Katie Gluick probably, I bet she was.
- 29:16Speaker 3: I bet Crystal serious.
- 29:17Speaker 5: Correct, she probably was like selling this to the people
- 29:21Speaker 5: to entice them to participate by saying that it was
- 29:24Speaker 5: or implying that it was a much more serious story.
- 29:28Speaker 6: But I don't know.
- 29:28Speaker 5: Maybe they did have other people, Like what's your sense
- 29:30Speaker 5: of how true it might have been that there were
- 29:32Speaker 5: other people that were talking to that had more serious allegations.
- 29:35Speaker 3: I don't know.
- 29:37Speaker 4: So Lindsay said this morning on Twitter that's she's in
- 29:42Speaker 4: touch with these two other women who spoke with the
- 29:47Speaker 4: maybe I can find it, who spoke with The New
- 29:50Speaker 4: York Times and whose stories were not included, And she
- 29:53Speaker 4: said she is there. They are considering what to do. Oh,
- 29:59Speaker 4: here it is, she says, she said, thankfully, I'm connected
- 30:01Speaker 4: to two of them, and we're deciding what to do next.
- 30:04Speaker 4: They're much more vulnerable than me, and it's not an
- 30:06Speaker 4: easy decision. Considering what New York Times just did to us,
- 30:10Speaker 4: slash me. The Daily Caller last night straight up wrote
- 30:15Speaker 4: a piece saying that The Times had two women who
- 30:18Speaker 4: were accusing some level of abuse that they that they
- 30:22Speaker 4: did not that they did not run, which is an
- 30:25Speaker 4: interesting kind of way around kind of defamation law. I
- 30:31Speaker 4: don't know if it is a way around actually to say, like,
- 30:34Speaker 4: because you're not saying that the things happen, you're saying
- 30:36Speaker 4: the Times had this thing that they didn't publish.
- 30:38Speaker 3: So we haven't heard the last of this for sure,
- 30:40Speaker 3: which is interesting to me because you're original.
- 30:42Speaker 5: You were literally the first person who broke that there
- 30:44Speaker 5: was something coming with Kavanaugh, and it was that the
- 30:46Speaker 5: Feinstein office seemed to be sitting on.
- 30:48Speaker 4: It, right, that was and that was a end run
- 30:51Speaker 4: around it. In that sense too, there's this kind of
- 30:57Speaker 4: there there's a meta level of coverage which says, so,
- 31:00Speaker 4: so you know, what I reported is that Feinstein had
- 31:04Speaker 4: a letter but you know from a woman m hm,
- 31:09Speaker 4: that she was under pressure to circulate among Democrats and
- 31:14Speaker 4: she and she was and she was not doing so,
- 31:17Speaker 4: but that the rumors about this letter had circulated around
- 31:22Speaker 4: Capitol Hill and it was not clear what was in
- 31:25Speaker 4: the letter, just that it was something explosive and then
- 31:29Speaker 4: and then she shared the letter and then Christine Blousiford
- 31:33Speaker 4: ended up ended up testifying. So yeah, in that sense,
- 31:37Speaker 4: that's that's a kind of similar thing. But so yeah,
- 31:42Speaker 4: it is interesting because like when as I read Lindsay's
- 31:46Speaker 4: you know, quote unquote accusations, I'm like, I don't like
- 31:50Speaker 4: Peter saying, oh you don't what about believe all women?
- 31:53Speaker 3: I kind of believe.
- 31:54Speaker 4: Them, like like did he grab her by the wrist
- 31:58Speaker 4: out of a cab? I I don't know, but like
- 32:03Speaker 4: it's not an insane thing to think that that could happen,
- 32:06Speaker 4: Like I know, and I think there's this weird distance
- 32:11Speaker 4: between the way that we in the media and the
- 32:15Speaker 4: media broadly kind of talk about life and the way
- 32:19Speaker 4: life actually unfolds in the real world. Like two violatle
- 32:24Speaker 4: drunk people who are in this emotional relationship, like did
- 32:30Speaker 4: he grab her by the wrist at one point or
- 32:33Speaker 4: like kind of tell her to go in this room
- 32:35Speaker 4: like room and slam the door and keep it closed
- 32:38Speaker 4: and say don't come out of there until you're calm,
- 32:41Speaker 4: Like that's a rather believable story. But on the other hand,
- 32:46Speaker 4: so is he lying when he's saying it didn't happen.
- 32:52Speaker 4: Maybe maybe he doesn't even remember it. He's saying he's
- 32:54Speaker 4: drunk at the time. On the other hand, the gap
- 32:59Speaker 4: between how the media talks about things and and how
- 33:04Speaker 4: things unfold in real life is so great that in
- 33:06Speaker 4: the in the middle of it it's unbridgeable. So let's
- 33:10Speaker 4: say he said, yeah, you know what I think, you know,
- 33:12Speaker 4: I probably did, you know, push her into the room
- 33:14Speaker 4: and close the door. Like the headline would be because
- 33:19Speaker 4: now you've crossed that gap between real life and and
- 33:22Speaker 4: the way media covers life. The headline would be, Graham
- 33:25Speaker 4: Platner acknowledges, you know, physical abuse. And it's like, oh,
- 33:29Speaker 4: then he has to drop out of the Senate race.
- 33:31Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
- 33:32Speaker 4: So we've kind of like cornered people into being unable
- 33:37Speaker 4: to talk about life in all of its messiness and complication.
- 33:41Speaker 4: Even me just saying this here, people are like, oh,
- 33:43Speaker 4: look at him defending like domestic abuse. It's like, bro,
- 33:46Speaker 4: but no, nobody's defending it. I'm like, it's just acknowledging that,
- 33:51Speaker 4: like that's this is a plausible thing that has like
- 33:56Speaker 4: lot that lots of people cannot imagine, yep. And when
- 34:00Speaker 4: people lose their temper, I happen to not have like
- 34:02Speaker 4: much of a temper, so like it's not something that,
- 34:06Speaker 4: as you can believe it or not, my emotional registers
- 34:10Speaker 4: from here to here.
- 34:13Speaker 5: I wonder who's I wonder who's been arrested more you are.
- 34:15Speaker 4: Graham, probably right, yeah, probably me and you you're used
- 34:21Speaker 4: no violent, no violence.
- 34:23Speaker 3: Though, no, no, no, no, no.
- 34:26Speaker 4: Yeah, and so well, meanwhile, his for his life was violence,
- 34:31Speaker 4: like his profession was was state sanctioned violence. So anyway, uh,
- 34:40Speaker 4: that it's but I think we're the kind of show
- 34:43Speaker 4: that should be able to talk openly about that stuff.
- 34:46Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree and openly about where we disagree too,
- 34:49Speaker 5: and I think that's good.
- 34:50Speaker 3: And my like.
- 34:53Speaker 5: It's I've I've actually dropped me too stories that I've
- 34:57Speaker 5: one particularly story that I spent a ton of time
- 34:59Speaker 5: like talk to people, spent like them, and I've dropped
- 35:02Speaker 5: it and I published it, and I don't think I
- 35:04Speaker 5: agreed with my editor at the time. But the way
- 35:06Speaker 5: that I look at this story is if I were
- 35:09Speaker 5: an assignment editor, like hypothetically in a fantasy world, I
- 35:12Speaker 5: put myself in the shoes of ansignment editor at the
- 35:14Speaker 5: Daily Mail or the.
- 35:16Speaker 3: New York Post.
- 35:17Speaker 5: Probably the story you'd be like, Okay, that's kind of
- 35:19Speaker 5: a New York Post, Daily Mail story, the New York Times.
- 35:22Speaker 5: To frame the story as it did as it was
- 35:24Speaker 5: printed is very bizarre.
- 35:26Speaker 3: The whole thing is strange, and I just like, I.
- 35:32Speaker 5: Really believe, as somebody who's been like, the Egen Carroll
- 35:36Speaker 5: allegations are completely politicized. They were used as a cudgel
- 35:40Speaker 5: and a weapon by people like Rachel Maddow. I don't
- 35:42Speaker 5: know if Rachel Madder genuinely believes Egen Carroll, but I
- 35:45Speaker 5: don't think most people who have read Een's Egen Carroll's
- 35:48Speaker 5: story look at that and say, as she is describing it,
- 35:51Speaker 5: this probably happened. It's a very thin allegation. Maybe it
- 35:56Speaker 5: did happen. I don't know. I'm not saying one way
- 35:58Speaker 5: or the other. I don't think it did, that's my guess.
- 36:00Speaker 5: But like it was so so politicized and the sad
- 36:04Speaker 5: thing about all of this, and I sensed it happening
- 36:07Speaker 5: about a month into the Me Too movement. I don't
- 36:09Speaker 5: know if you had a similar sens Ryan, but like,
- 36:11Speaker 5: covering these stories really closely as a media writer at
- 36:14Speaker 5: the time, it was going to permanently destroy our ability,
- 36:19Speaker 5: well not permanently, but indefinitely destroy our ability to actually
- 36:25Speaker 5: find stories that should reflect on or that should influence
- 36:29Speaker 5: voting choices because somebody has a serious allegation, a character
- 36:34Speaker 5: allegation against them that they abused a woman, and because
- 36:39Speaker 5: of the way so much of that reporting was done,
- 36:42Speaker 5: it has made the public put the public in a position,
- 36:46Speaker 5: reasonably so where they don't trust a lot of these
- 36:49Speaker 5: stories anymore. And again I think that's reasonable from the
- 36:52Speaker 5: position of the public, and so for Republicans, I think
- 36:55Speaker 5: it makes sense right now that they're jumping all the
- 36:57Speaker 5: story Politically, I get it certain point. It doesn't make
- 37:01Speaker 5: sense because people right now have gas four plus dollars
- 37:04Speaker 5: a gallon, they are looking at an unpopular war. There's
- 37:09Speaker 5: so many different things happening in the country right now
- 37:11Speaker 5: that to take this fairly thin story from ten years ago,
- 37:18Speaker 5: before Graham Platner said he got help, which he said
- 37:20Speaker 5: happened in twenty seventeen he started going to the VA.
- 37:24Speaker 5: Now there are some weird Reddit posts and some of
- 37:26Speaker 5: the allegations about him being a bad boyfriend or after that.
- 37:29Speaker 4: We can generously call a journey and to be there
- 37:33Speaker 4: like nobody. You don't snap overnight and get help and
- 37:36Speaker 4: all of a sudden you're good. But like yeah, like yeah,
- 37:40Speaker 4: the dog behavior creeped into the beginning of their marriage,
- 37:44Speaker 4: as he has twenty twenty, which is recent, which is recent.
- 37:48Speaker 5: Yeah, And so is there. I think there's an honesty
- 37:52Speaker 5: is going to be important question for him. He has
- 37:54Speaker 5: to come across like he's not lying. I think there
- 37:56Speaker 5: have been some cases where it looks like he was
- 38:00Speaker 5: budging again to be charitable in that, And I think
- 38:02Speaker 5: that's a real problem for populist candidates because they have
- 38:05Speaker 5: to come across as though they're the anti Yeah, and
- 38:10Speaker 5: you're the anti Packson. If you're James Talerico, you are
- 38:12Speaker 5: the anti Susan Collins. If your Grandpattern or the anti establishment,
- 38:16Speaker 5: you're going to do things differently. You're not someone who's
- 38:18Speaker 5: been bought by Washington, et cetera. And so lying is
- 38:21Speaker 5: the that is like such a red flag for voters
- 38:23Speaker 5: with a candidate like that.
- 38:24Speaker 3: So I think that's really really important.
- 38:26Speaker 5: On the other hand, I think another part that we
- 38:28Speaker 5: wanted to or that you and I should mention is
- 38:31Speaker 5: the Jewish Insider story about.
- 38:32Speaker 3: Quote unquote my totein COPS.
- 38:36Speaker 5: That now looks like Lindsay Fifield was the person who's
- 38:39Speaker 5: talking to Jewish Insider, which I think calls into question
- 38:42Speaker 5: how the New York Time story came to be, which
- 38:45Speaker 5: is a meta question.
- 38:46Speaker 3: I get it. But yeah, that is also interesting. You
- 38:50Speaker 3: have two elements here, let me put up. Yeah.
- 38:52Speaker 4: So here's Bethany Mandel, who's her co host of the
- 38:56Speaker 4: Lady Brains podcast. She says she came forward the totein
- 39:00Speaker 4: cop many months ago, naively believing that a Nazi tattoo
- 39:04Speaker 4: would be disqualifying. Unfortunately that was not a bridge too far,
- 39:09Speaker 4: much to our dismay. And so yes, so the my
- 39:12Speaker 4: tote cough story was in Jewish Insider and also uh
- 39:17Speaker 4: Kazinski at CNN Very Good Reporter had it was anonymous.
- 39:23Speaker 3: Right, it was anonymous.
- 39:24Speaker 4: It was called an acquaintance when it was in acquaintance
- 39:26Speaker 4: from the tune in is how Lindsay was described in
- 39:29Speaker 4: the Jewish Insider. And then Andrew Kazinsky had said that
- 39:35Speaker 4: he saw a text message exchange among friends talking about
- 39:39Speaker 4: it like before it came out, which clearly is that's
- 39:43Speaker 4: the text message exchange that she shared with The New
- 39:45Speaker 4: York Times. So when people thought, oh, well, now she's
- 39:49Speaker 4: backing up these previous sources, it's like, Okay, well now
- 39:53Speaker 4: we know who the source was for this in in
- 39:56Speaker 4: the beginning, and then one of one other point, let
- 40:01Speaker 4: me find this because I actually tend to maybe I
- 40:05Speaker 4: think I kind of believe her on the total kuff story.
- 40:08Speaker 3: Yeah, like we.
- 40:11Speaker 4: Can talk about how the wedding still complicates it for
- 40:13Speaker 4: me at the twenty fifteen wedding where he took his
- 40:15Speaker 4: shirt off in front of a bunch of Jewish family members,
- 40:18Speaker 4: so it's like, could he really have known and done that?
- 40:21Speaker 4: He's like, and also that he passed these two security clearances. Anyway,
- 40:26Speaker 4: The other related thing here, so this Senate Leadership Fund
- 40:31Speaker 4: the day this is April, the day that Janet Mills
- 40:35Speaker 4: withdrew the Senate Leadership Fund, which is Mitch McConnell's kind
- 40:38Speaker 4: of superpacked that or elects Senate Republicans. They start their
- 40:42Speaker 4: statement by saying, Graham Plattner is a silver spoon Charlatan
- 40:46Speaker 4: who fantasizes about sexual assault, admires Nazi Nazi stormtroopers, and
- 40:53Speaker 4: then goes on to the other stuff, and when that
- 40:55Speaker 4: came out, I remember being like, what, so we now know?
- 41:00Speaker 4: So we now know that this Nazi stormtrooper thing is
- 41:02Speaker 4: something that the Free Beacon published just a few days
- 41:05Speaker 4: ago where he doesn't admire Nazi stormtroopers. There's a photo
- 41:11Speaker 4: of Swedish volunteers who are under the command of a
- 41:15Speaker 4: Finnish unit who are fighting the Soviets using American weapons,
- 41:21Speaker 4: a bar and a German helmet, and Platner writes on
- 41:26Speaker 4: Reddit cool photo. Now, the Nazis were also fighting the
- 41:33Speaker 4: Soviet Union, so in the Free Beacon article they say
- 41:37Speaker 4: Nazi allied troops. It's like, okay, these are Swedish and
- 41:41Speaker 4: Finnish troops who are fighting the Soviets and they had
- 41:44Speaker 4: a German helmet and an American gun. So it's like
- 41:45Speaker 4: a fascinating photo and he says cool photo. Cool pick
- 41:50Speaker 4: that becomes in SLF's words, admires Nazi stormtroopers.
- 41:54Speaker 3: Anyway, so we know.
- 41:56Speaker 4: That SLF was had that APO at the time where
- 42:00Speaker 4: they get this admirers Nazi stormtrooper saying. The one that
- 42:03Speaker 4: really raised eyebrows at the time was fantasizes about sexual assault.
- 42:08Speaker 4: Because people are timely wait I don't remember that being
- 42:11Speaker 4: in any Reddit posts like what what do you?
- 42:13Speaker 3: What are you talking about? And so now we know
- 42:17Speaker 3: that Lindsay.
- 42:19Speaker 4: Has been talk had had been talking to SLF like
- 42:25Speaker 4: that's the only place that could have come from. And
- 42:29Speaker 4: so let's let's put up this, you know, this moment
- 42:33Speaker 4: from the article, Uh, where the heck?
- 42:37Speaker 3: I have so many tabs, it's brutal where Well, while
- 42:44Speaker 3: you look for it, I'll just shay.
- 42:45Speaker 4: I accidentally closed. I accidentally closed the New York Times thing. Yeah,
- 42:50Speaker 4: you go, you can respond while I go look for it.
- 42:52Speaker 3: Well, yeah, because I was saying, actually, think this is
- 42:54Speaker 3: an important point.
- 42:54Speaker 5: The Nazi tattoo point is an important one because when
- 42:57Speaker 5: Bethany Mandelsa is, you know, Lindsay thought the Nazi tattoo
- 43:01Speaker 5: thing would be disqualifying. What's so interesting about both of
- 43:05Speaker 5: these things is that an argument? And I think actually
- 43:09Speaker 5: you'd be open to this, if not fully in agreement.
- 43:11Speaker 5: But there was a real problem during like capital p
- 43:15Speaker 5: W peak, woke, whatever the hell we want to call it,
- 43:17Speaker 5: where allegations of sexual assault and racism, whether it was
- 43:22Speaker 5: with the Meat Too movement or whether it was with
- 43:24Speaker 5: sort of BLM era political correctness or I don't hate
- 43:30Speaker 5: usually the word wokeness, but I guess everybody kind of
- 43:32Speaker 5: knows what I mean by that. But where these allegations
- 43:36Speaker 5: would be based on something sort of thin, and a
- 43:40Speaker 5: lot of that was coming from and a lot of
- 43:42Speaker 5: that you experienced it, right exactly, Yes, very much, Yeah,
- 43:46Speaker 5: your truth.
- 43:47Speaker 3: I felt traumatized by your behavior.
- 43:51Speaker 5: Right exactly. And so what that did was set a
- 43:54Speaker 5: very low bar, and it was mostly pushed by the
- 43:56Speaker 5: left and in the media, and a lot of leftists
- 43:59Speaker 5: were upset with that at the time, and I think
- 44:02Speaker 5: conservatives made common cause with some of those leftists.
- 44:04Speaker 3: But part of the problem.
- 44:06Speaker 5: Here is that the right has been enormously frustrated by
- 44:11Speaker 5: weaponized allegations, particularly of Conservatives Republicans who are not genuine
- 44:16Speaker 5: secret Nazis. Not to say that there aren't some actual
- 44:19Speaker 5: racists and bigots, of course, of course, but people who
- 44:22Speaker 5: aren't and clearly aren't. But get these weaponized allegations of
- 44:25Speaker 5: Nazism or of sexual assault, most of which was pushed
- 44:30Speaker 5: by the kind of center left in the media, and
- 44:34Speaker 5: now they're like, well, if we were playing by these rules,
- 44:37Speaker 5: of course, you'd have to just qualify Grand Platner. Of course,
- 44:39Speaker 5: you'd X, Y, and Z, and so part of this
- 44:42Speaker 5: is Republicans now saying, well, screw it, I'm throwing up
- 44:46Speaker 5: the rule book, which I don't think is correct. But
- 44:49Speaker 5: I also it's frustrating because some of this does stem
- 44:52Speaker 5: from that like five year period, maybe ten year period
- 44:56Speaker 5: between like I don't know, twenty thirteen and twenty twenty
- 44:59Speaker 5: three hysteria cultural hysteria.
- 45:02Speaker 3: Which is a gay back yeah, yeah.
- 45:04Speaker 5: And which is itself, by the way, rooted in Yes,
- 45:07Speaker 5: not that long ago. Our country had a horrible history
- 45:10Speaker 5: of racism and sexism. We've made enormous progress in that direction,
- 45:13Speaker 5: which is kind of what was frustrating to me about
- 45:15Speaker 5: that ten year period. But nonetheless, that's the immediate context here,
- 45:19Speaker 5: and it is frustrating to see from my end a
- 45:22Speaker 5: little bit of the both parts of it. And it's
- 45:24Speaker 5: very disappointing to see. I think some people on the
- 45:26Speaker 5: right then be like.
- 45:27Speaker 3: Oh, this story.
- 45:30Speaker 5: Is it just qualified because nobody believes Grant Platner is
- 45:33Speaker 5: a secret Nazi.
- 45:34Speaker 4: Nobody believes that that's that That is a key point. Actually, yeah,
- 45:38Speaker 4: So here's a good example of the rights kind of
- 45:41Speaker 4: deployment of left wing therapy speak Bethany Mandel her good
- 45:45Speaker 4: friend and podcast co host. She says, I've been close
- 45:48Speaker 4: friends with Lindsay Fifthfield for fifteen years. I've known about
- 45:52Speaker 4: Graham since they began dating. She carried a lot of
- 45:54Speaker 4: trauma from their time together. I'm so proud of her
- 45:57Speaker 4: for her bravery and coming forward like like it's yeah,
- 46:03Speaker 4: it's very left wing coded and it feels like purposely
- 46:09Speaker 4: so to like kind of get back at the left
- 46:12Speaker 4: for like, Okay, you say that so and so is
- 46:15Speaker 4: guilty because you felt you carried carried a lot of trauma. Well,
- 46:19Speaker 4: now we're going to say it as well.
- 46:21Speaker 5: It does sound like it was kind of well I
- 46:24Speaker 5: was gonna say, like you said, I do believe that
- 46:26Speaker 5: it was a traumatic relationship.
- 46:27Speaker 3: It sounds like it was a mess. It sounds like
- 46:29Speaker 3: a mess, sounds like a total mess.
- 46:32Speaker 4: So she so, she let's you want to go through
- 46:36Speaker 4: a little bit of her own post. So, so she says,
- 46:45Speaker 4: this is show she'd shut down all of her social
- 46:47Speaker 4: media and now she brought it back along, which is
- 46:51Speaker 4: a very Washington operative thing to do. Like we we
- 46:55Speaker 4: in Washington, we can't stay off social media.
- 46:58Speaker 5: Well, I also love your recent searches looking for your
- 47:00Speaker 5: own posts on.
- 47:03Speaker 3: It's hilarious. So let's see.
- 47:10Speaker 4: So, she says, anyone who has ever ever extracted themselves
- 47:15Speaker 4: from a relationship with a narcissistic abuser knows it isn't
- 47:18Speaker 4: clean or easy, and so this is the kind of
- 47:20Speaker 4: thing that the right would have just been livid about
- 47:24Speaker 4: if the left was doing it. Just just throw out
- 47:27Speaker 4: words like abuser after saying in the Times like he
- 47:32Speaker 4: never hit me. Okay, he grabbed my shoulders and he
- 47:35Speaker 4: pulled my wrist. But I think she's clearly using the
- 47:38Speaker 4: word abuser or abusive in the sense of emotion emotionally abusive. Yeah,
- 47:47Speaker 4: but the way that headlines are written, it's hard to
- 47:52Speaker 4: keep that distinction. Agreed, So he says, they connected me
- 47:58Speaker 4: to two of the other victims so we wouldn't feel
- 48:00Speaker 4: so alone. I insisted to each of them that I
- 48:03Speaker 4: trusted the New York Times journalists and that we were
- 48:04Speaker 4: doing the right thing, despite their sadly very accurate sense
- 48:08Speaker 4: that something was wrong. One of the victims and I
- 48:11Speaker 4: realized our relationships with Graham overlapped completely. He had been
- 48:14Speaker 4: cheating on both of us the entire time we were together,
- 48:17Speaker 4: and This goes into something I had posted yesterday.
- 48:19Speaker 3: The word cheating suggests they were exclusive. My understanding.
- 48:24Speaker 4: Is that they like they were, not that, you know,
- 48:29Speaker 4: Graham was a dog at the time. She's saying this
- 48:33Speaker 4: went until twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen, she does that
- 48:36Speaker 4: famous podcast where she talks about breaking off her wedding,
- 48:40Speaker 4: and she had been in a long term relationship for
- 48:43Speaker 4: you know, several years before that. So the timing is
- 48:46Speaker 4: off here to say that there's that cheating could even
- 48:50Speaker 4: be possible given what seems to have been going on here.
- 48:56Speaker 4: And then she was I blocked.
- 48:58Speaker 3: So then so then this is more about the New
- 49:02Speaker 3: York Times.
- 49:03Speaker 4: The weeks dragged on, they kept coming back to us,
- 49:05Speaker 4: saying the editors needed more. I needed to go on
- 49:07Speaker 4: the record, we need more screenshots. I met every benchmark
- 49:10Speaker 4: they said, eager to provide more sources as as evidence.
- 49:14Speaker 4: Why does it say nobody could corroborate when I offered
- 49:17Speaker 4: them sources that could corroborate and we don't know exactly
- 49:20Speaker 4: what I suspect we may learn soon what she's talking
- 49:25Speaker 4: about in the Daily Caller or somewhere or somewhere else.
- 49:29Speaker 4: Why did they include that an out of context quote
- 49:31Speaker 4: from a friend joking, do not call Graham after I
- 49:34Speaker 4: called off my wedding. Where were the screenshots they said
- 49:37Speaker 4: they would use, or to mention that I'd supported local
- 49:41Speaker 4: Democrats and that most of my family and husband are liberal.
- 49:47Speaker 5: I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean much when you're a
- 49:50Speaker 5: work for the Nikki Haley campaign and the Heritage.
- 49:52Speaker 4: But anyway, right, yes, So I again, I actually believe
- 49:57Speaker 4: her here, Like I think that the reporter probably did
- 50:04Speaker 4: make a lot of promises like that, you know, reporters
- 50:07Speaker 4: do that to try to draw out their sources. So again,
- 50:12Speaker 4: like within the article itself, and that claim there that
- 50:17Speaker 4: like the Times kind of misled her, I actually believed,
- 50:20Speaker 4: you know, I tend to believe her, and I think
- 50:24Speaker 4: but I think main main voters, which are only the
- 50:27Speaker 4: only ones that matter, aren't going to find anything in
- 50:32Speaker 4: that that, you know, fundamentally changes their impression of who
- 50:37Speaker 4: Graham is or the kind of arc that he's that
- 50:40Speaker 4: he's telling some people. I think it's going to damage
- 50:44Speaker 4: him because I think some people will and we can
- 50:47Speaker 4: talk about the tattoo, think that he's not being straightforward here.
- 50:51Speaker 8: Mm hmmm.
- 50:53Speaker 3: Because so.
- 50:56Speaker 4: Chris Hayes asked the question on the chronology if if
- 51:01Speaker 4: she was talking about it in August and you said
- 51:04Speaker 4: you didn't learn about it in October, like, how did
- 51:05Speaker 4: she know about it now? Like clearly? And her what
- 51:11Speaker 4: her argument is is he told her about it now.
- 51:14Speaker 4: I've also been told on the internet that everyone knows
- 51:16Speaker 4: what this is, that that is the most common Nazi
- 51:20Speaker 4: symbol after the swastika. So if that's the case everybody
- 51:24Speaker 4: who saw it, I don't. I don't believe that I
- 51:26Speaker 4: didn't even know what it was when I saw it. Yes,
- 51:29Speaker 4: and I'm not, I'm not a World War two buff,
- 51:30Speaker 4: but I've done you know, deep half buff. I didn't
- 51:35Speaker 4: know it, and people were like, oh, it's on that meme?
- 51:38Speaker 4: Are we the baddies? It's on the guy's collar, Like, okay,
- 51:42Speaker 4: I don't. I don't study study these means, So that
- 51:47Speaker 4: to me seems plausible. I saw zad Jelani saying, look,
- 51:51Speaker 4: let's let's assume that his that he didn't know what
- 51:56Speaker 4: it was when he got it, which all of them,
- 51:58Speaker 4: his fellow Marines say, but that he learned at some
- 52:00Speaker 4: point later what it was. It does stand a reason
- 52:05Speaker 4: that you wouldn't get it covered up if you're just
- 52:08Speaker 4: a regular person and you're just keeping your shirt on.
- 52:12Speaker 4: Like let's say he learned after he was at this
- 52:14Speaker 4: Jewish wedding, right, that's the part. It's like, okay to
- 52:17Speaker 4: security screenings plus to get it, you know, to reenlist,
- 52:22Speaker 4: and then also taking his shirt off at this wedding famously,
- 52:30Speaker 4: But let's say he learns after that what it is.
- 52:33Speaker 4: But he's not running for office, you know, he had
- 52:36Speaker 4: it has a connection, like he got it with his
- 52:38Speaker 4: comrades to honor, not because they were anti Semitic, but
- 52:44Speaker 4: to honor their fallen comrades, people who died, Like that's
- 52:49Speaker 4: why they say they got it. So to get it
- 52:51Speaker 4: covered up would be then and I'm just you know,
- 52:55Speaker 4: putting myself and who.
- 52:56Speaker 3: Knows, to get it covered up could would be its.
- 52:59Speaker 4: Own kind of traumatic moment to feel like a betrayal
- 53:03Speaker 4: of your of your friends both living and dead, and
- 53:08Speaker 4: also just politically, is it any better to be like, yeah,
- 53:12Speaker 4: it's true, I had a Nazi tattoo for fourteen years,
- 53:15Speaker 4: but I've had it covered up for the last three.
- 53:18Speaker 4: I don't think anybody who's mad about it would give
- 53:22Speaker 4: him any grace over that. So my sense is he
- 53:25Speaker 4: probably knew about it, like at some point in the
- 53:28Speaker 4: last several years. That's hard to imagine Lindsay making that up.
- 53:35Speaker 4: But there's a lot, you know, But I kind of
- 53:38Speaker 4: I don't know. I wouldn't want to bet my life
- 53:39Speaker 4: on it. I also think, just as a political matter,
- 53:42Speaker 4: is that part of it is kind of baked in
- 53:45Speaker 4: and that it's too far into the weeds. The timeline
- 53:48Speaker 4: is too far into the weeds, or normal voters who
- 53:52Speaker 4: like he have heard about the tattoo and they're like, wow,
- 53:56Speaker 4: we all make mistakes. So I don't know where do
- 53:58Speaker 4: you come down on on that timeline.
- 54:01Speaker 3: And what's Yeah, I think I think you're right.
- 54:04Speaker 5: It's hard to believe that at some point he didn't
- 54:05Speaker 5: realize it was a Nazi tattoo.
- 54:07Speaker 3: I think you're I believe.
- 54:09Speaker 5: That he was absolutely hammered and split Croatia on leave
- 54:13Speaker 5: with his Marines but marine buddies and did it without knowing,
- 54:17Speaker 5: So I believe that I believe you probably did know
- 54:20Speaker 5: at some point. I do think again, like just the
- 54:22Speaker 5: dishonesty is a problem. I've been saying this with tallerco too.
- 54:25Speaker 5: Where Tallery goes on tape saying, of course there are
- 54:29Speaker 5: at least six biological sexes, and now he's saying, of
- 54:32Speaker 5: course there are only two biological sexes. I just think
- 54:34Speaker 5: the basic honesty thing is what makes it hard if
- 54:37Speaker 5: you're trying to be the anti pack Center, anti Susan Collins,
- 54:39Speaker 5: because it becomes a litmus test for voters as to
- 54:41Speaker 5: whether they feel like, you know, voters feel like they've
- 54:44Speaker 5: been duped by this time and again George W. Bush
- 54:46Speaker 5: running and saying we're not going to do nation building
- 54:49Speaker 5: and then becoming the king of nation building. I think
- 54:51Speaker 5: that's it's just it's a litmus test for voters. But honestly,
- 54:55Speaker 5: I think the big picture from all of this, again,
- 54:58Speaker 5: I wish I wish Crystal was still here because hersh
- 55:00Speaker 5: is going to be I think that actually might historically
- 55:03Speaker 5: be the beginning because at the time I remember how
- 55:07Speaker 5: it was covered Ryan this was she was like the
- 55:09Speaker 5: millennial Facebook candidate, and it produced.
- 55:14Speaker 3: A lot of hot takes to that point. Yeah.
- 55:16Speaker 5: Right, And so what we're now in is this weird
- 55:19Speaker 5: adjustment period where people who started living their lives online
- 55:25Speaker 5: because so much of our personal and professional lives were
- 55:28Speaker 5: exported to the internet, particularly starting in the mid odds
- 55:32Speaker 5: when that happened, you then have all of this evidence
- 55:36Speaker 5: that's going to get thrust in the court of public
- 55:38Speaker 5: opinion without context, often sometimes with it, but often without context,
- 55:43Speaker 5: without any nuance, being weaponized. And sometimes it's legit, sometimes
- 55:48Speaker 5: it's stupid. But when people who have lived their lives online,
- 55:52Speaker 5: not like political candidates, not like people who are going
- 55:54Speaker 5: to run for office, but over the course of ten
- 55:56Speaker 5: plus years into their adulthood, this for some people, well
- 56:00Speaker 5: in the future is going to start when they were
- 56:01Speaker 5: literally kids on roadblocks, Like, are we legitimately going to
- 56:04Speaker 5: be have like roadblocks screenshots from thirteen year olds fourteen
- 56:08Speaker 5: year olds in our politics ten years from now when
- 56:10Speaker 5: twenty five year olds are running for.
- 56:12Speaker 4: House or we should set a we should set a
- 56:14Speaker 4: line now? Is it twelve and under? You can Actually
- 56:20Speaker 4: they went after mom Donnie's wife for posts when she
- 56:23Speaker 4: was thirteen or fourteenager.
- 56:25Speaker 3: Yeah, and so I just think this, it's not even
- 56:28Speaker 3: like seventeen.
- 56:29Speaker 4: I'm having all was seventeen allegedly, well he was seventeen
- 56:32Speaker 4: when he allegedly assaulted.
- 56:34Speaker 5: And none of that was and none of that was Internet.
- 56:37Speaker 5: That was still like hard diaries, calendars and that type
- 56:40Speaker 5: of thing.
- 56:41Speaker 3: The diary was squeak, remember, yeah, yeah, squeak, who can forget?
- 56:49Speaker 5: But it's like ten years from now, Like this is
- 56:52Speaker 5: already bad because we're taking scraps of people's lives and
- 56:55Speaker 5: fust And this is why, like I wrote a ton
- 56:57Speaker 5: about this and did like a lot of stuff field
- 57:00Speaker 5: way too much inc during like the peak woke era
- 57:04Speaker 5: on the stuff, because I think it's very interesting and
- 57:06Speaker 5: I think it's a tech story. I think it's a
- 57:07Speaker 5: human story. It's a meta media story. We're taking these
- 57:10Speaker 5: scraps of people's lives and thrusting them into parties and politics,
- 57:16Speaker 5: and it's changing the way that we look at each other,
- 57:18Speaker 5: relates to each other, that we live our lives, and
- 57:21Speaker 5: it's just getting worse by the year, and we are
- 57:23Speaker 5: not learning. And this is a moment, if there ever
- 57:26Speaker 5: were one, to learn like a little bit about what
- 57:31Speaker 5: we should be doing as in the media as journalists,
- 57:36Speaker 5: what should be taken in one way or the other way.
- 57:39Speaker 5: But instead it's just going in the opposite direction, and
- 57:42Speaker 5: it's only going to get worse.
- 57:45Speaker 4: Yeah, I wonder, how how do you think Republicans are
- 57:49Speaker 4: going to.
- 57:51Speaker 3: Respond?
- 57:51Speaker 4: To this over the next week or two, go like,
- 57:57Speaker 4: just try to get these three, both Lindsay and the
- 58:00Speaker 4: two others, and forced that someone out of the public,
- 58:04Speaker 4: and then like, what's your how do you think they'll
- 58:06Speaker 4: handle this?
- 58:08Speaker 3: Looks to me like they're all in, you know.
- 58:10Speaker 5: The first press release and I think we might have
- 58:13Speaker 5: even been on air because I think I sent it
- 58:14Speaker 5: right away. The first press release I got from the
- 58:17Speaker 5: NRSC after Janet Mills dropped out was calling Platner a Nazi.
- 58:22Speaker 5: And that's that was actually very interesting to me because
- 58:26Speaker 5: it suggests they think they have a really big weapon
- 58:30Speaker 5: to use against him in an election where people will
- 58:32Speaker 5: probably be going to the polls with gas prices north
- 58:35Speaker 5: of four dollars a gallon probably, uh. And I honestly
- 58:40Speaker 5: like right, and so like Platner. We've interviewed him, you
- 58:44Speaker 5: know him.
- 58:46Speaker 3: I think he.
- 58:47Speaker 5: Seems like, uh, like dude who would be very interesting
- 58:51Speaker 5: to have a conversation a beer with he or maybe
- 58:54Speaker 5: not a beer now, but he, you know, is by
- 58:59Speaker 5: a Republican standard, it's extreme and by the average voters standards,
- 59:02Speaker 5: extreme on certain issues. The guy referred to himself as
- 59:07Speaker 5: a communist. He referred to himself as a socialist. He
- 59:09Speaker 5: says neither of those things are true. But it's very
- 59:11Speaker 5: telling to me that Republicans are focusing on the Nazi
- 59:14Speaker 5: stuff and not saying this guy is a communist who's
- 59:17Speaker 5: going to make inflation worse. And again, just like stealmanning,
- 59:21Speaker 5: what the Republican argument could be, he's going to make
- 59:23Speaker 5: inflation worse, he's going to make your standards of living worse,
- 59:26Speaker 5: he's an extreme on trans issues, et.
- 59:29Speaker 3: Cetera, et cetera. They barely even talk about that stuff.
- 59:32Speaker 5: It's all just been Nazi, Nazi, Nazi instead of something
- 59:34Speaker 5: that is closer to the average voters, like immediate concerns.
- 59:39Speaker 5: And I think that's why my expectation is that they're
- 59:41Speaker 5: going to go all in on this going forward. Also
- 59:44Speaker 5: because Lindsay knows a lot of people in DC Republican circles.
- 59:50Speaker 5: People are kind of excited to have something that they
- 59:55Speaker 5: feel like is electric from someone they know is plugged
- 59:58Speaker 5: into the network. It's different than somebody who you've never met.
- 1:00:02Speaker 5: And so I that's my guess of what happens.
- 1:00:05Speaker 4: Yeah, before we wrap, there was one what I thought
- 1:00:12Speaker 4: was an error in the piece that but you know,
- 1:00:17Speaker 4: this IWF better than I do. So here, let me
- 1:00:24Speaker 4: put this up here. So at the she says so.
- 1:00:31Speaker 4: Miss Fifield said she had no connection to the campaign
- 1:00:34Speaker 4: of Senator Susan Collins, mister Plattner's likely Republican opponent. She
- 1:00:38Speaker 4: acknowledged that Independent Women had been supportive of Ms Collins,
- 1:00:42Speaker 4: but said she had not been active with the organization recently.
- 1:00:47Speaker 4: And however, so on April sixteenth, April fifteenth, here she
- 1:00:53Speaker 4: has quoted at a House Republican event described as stay
- 1:00:58Speaker 4: at home Mom Independent Women for them and she and
- 1:01:02Speaker 4: she gives a quote, I have thirteen friends who it's
- 1:01:04Speaker 4: a you know, it's a it's a conservative women's rights
- 1:01:08Speaker 4: like event. This is is and it's something about probably
- 1:01:14Speaker 4: it's like a pronatal policy something I probably liked actually,
- 1:01:19Speaker 4: But so so here she is three what six weeks
- 1:01:24Speaker 4: ago identifying herself in a political at a political event
- 1:01:29Speaker 4: as IWF, after telling The Times she hadn't done anything political.
- 1:01:36Speaker 3: With them for years.
- 1:01:38Speaker 5: And what was the year on that one, twenty twenty six,
- 1:01:41Speaker 5: twenty twenty six, Yeah, that's this week.
- 1:01:44Speaker 3: Yeah, we're talking six weeks ago.
- 1:01:46Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I would say that's that's typical because
- 1:01:49Speaker 5: The way that it's they're like kind of fellow thing
- 1:01:51Speaker 5: is structured is that it's I was saying this earlier
- 1:01:54Speaker 5: with Crystal, it's kind of like a brand ambassador thing.
- 1:01:56Speaker 5: There are some people who are fellows there who are
- 1:01:58Speaker 5: like full time on staff, and there are some people
- 1:02:00Speaker 5: I legitimately don't even know if I'm still technically a
- 1:02:02Speaker 5: fellow there, but I was at one point.
- 1:02:06Speaker 3: I might still be listed as a fellow. Now I
- 1:02:09Speaker 3: haven't taken money for them.
- 1:02:10Speaker 5: I've spoke for them without getting paid, like a month ago,
- 1:02:14Speaker 5: but other than that, like not much in the.
- 1:02:16Speaker 3: Last several years.
- 1:02:18Speaker 5: And so the way that it works is that like
- 1:02:22Speaker 5: IW gets their their branding basically for some people who
- 1:02:27Speaker 5: use it a lot to go on Fox News and
- 1:02:29Speaker 5: they'll book some people on Fox News, Fox Business or
- 1:02:32Speaker 5: radio interviews, or they'll place op eds for them. Again,
- 1:02:36Speaker 5: that is not the case with me, but that is
- 1:02:38Speaker 5: how some people use it. And the conceit of the
- 1:02:42Speaker 5: program is that conservative women are underrepresented. These are underrepresented voices,
- 1:02:47Speaker 5: especially like moms underrepresented voices. IW doesn't take a position
- 1:02:52Speaker 5: on abortion, which is really interesting and frustrating for some conservatives,
- 1:02:55Speaker 5: but they're like very hardline on that.
- 1:02:57Speaker 3: They won't go one way or the other on.
- 1:02:58Speaker 5: It, but they the goal of the program is just
- 1:03:01Speaker 5: to get more conservative women into media. But they also
- 1:03:04Speaker 5: do have I think, if I'm remembering correctly, they have
- 1:03:06Speaker 5: a C four arm that is like an actual political
- 1:03:13Speaker 5: because you're not if you're C three, you're not supposed
- 1:03:15Speaker 5: to technically be political. It's a legal distinction, meaning you
- 1:03:18Speaker 5: can't be involved in partisan politics Republican Democrat, et cetera.
- 1:03:21Speaker 5: But you can be involved in ideological like politics in
- 1:03:25Speaker 5: a different political sense. It's just not supposed to be
- 1:03:27Speaker 5: partisan electioneering type stuff. And so that's I don't know
- 1:03:32Speaker 5: if she's affiliated with the C four at all. I
- 1:03:35Speaker 5: put all of this on my website, by the way
- 1:03:36Speaker 5: people can can look at I just keep a running
- 1:03:39Speaker 5: list of groups that I've spoken to and for and disclosures.
- 1:03:42Speaker 5: It's it's linked to my ex file. But that may
- 1:03:45Speaker 5: mean that she was just leaning into the brand ambassador
- 1:03:48Speaker 5: part of it, or it could mean that there's there
- 1:03:52Speaker 5: was something more formal. IW says it was only I
- 1:03:55Speaker 5: think in the New York Times they said she made
- 1:03:56Speaker 5: like fifteen grand between twenty twenty one and twenty twenty two.
- 1:03:59Speaker 3: That's would be very typical.
- 1:04:00Speaker 5: And there there are people who are just sort of
- 1:04:03Speaker 5: like raising their kids and refer to themselves as they're
- 1:04:06Speaker 5: with their iw fellow title at public speaking events. Because
- 1:04:09Speaker 5: I also sends people to go speak for things, so
- 1:04:13Speaker 5: that would be my best guess. It's kind of like
- 1:04:14Speaker 5: complicated inside baseball stuff, but it's a that's just help.
- 1:04:19Speaker 4: The thing I had just put up there. Like, she
- 1:04:22Speaker 4: has an author profile on her Visiting Fellow page and
- 1:04:25Speaker 4: the most recent post was from October twenty twenty five.
- 1:04:29Speaker 3: Mmm, now, so she was still writing for them.
- 1:04:32Speaker 4: So she was writing for them as recently as October
- 1:04:35Speaker 4: and identifying herself with them at a public event six
- 1:04:39Speaker 4: weeks ago. And I understand why she wanted to say
- 1:04:43Speaker 4: I'm the Justice, I'm now Virginia, like I'm not a
- 1:04:49Speaker 4: Republican operative, but like it's it goes to a little
- 1:04:56Speaker 4: bit of credibility to when when when she is also
- 1:04:58Speaker 4: like I think both sides here kind of shading and
- 1:05:01Speaker 4: fudging things that one seemed like an actual material.
- 1:05:06Speaker 5: It looks like I am technically still a senior film.
- 1:05:08Speaker 5: I'm still on the website, you fellow, Well, look it's
- 1:05:10Speaker 5: still got counterpoints with Ryan Grimm.
- 1:05:12Speaker 3: There, let's see what is it? Yeah, oh yeah, I
- 1:05:16Speaker 3: was on this podcast a lot several years ago.
- 1:05:18Speaker 5: Okay, anyway, just just like I literally didn't even know
- 1:05:21Speaker 5: that that existed. So just a to make the to
- 1:05:24Speaker 5: make the point that it is used as like for
- 1:05:26Speaker 5: some people it can mean something more formal.
- 1:05:28Speaker 3: For other people it can just be like an affiliation. Yep,
- 1:05:32Speaker 3: that makes sense.
- 1:05:33Speaker 4: And in the way some of these the way the
- 1:05:36Speaker 4: way they I don't know if I W does this,
- 1:05:38Speaker 4: but just to let people in on how some of
- 1:05:40Speaker 4: these things work. For some like say New America Foundation,
- 1:05:45Speaker 4: mm hmmm, the person is responsible for raising the money,
- 1:05:50Speaker 4: so like the fellow Wow, yeah, so the fellaw Well,
- 1:05:54Speaker 4: sometimes New America will just have its own pot of
- 1:05:57Speaker 4: money and accept applications for fellowship. Other times you go out,
- 1:06:03Speaker 4: let's say you ran a big nonprofit and you built
- 1:06:06Speaker 4: some good relationships with donors. When you leave that organization,
- 1:06:10Speaker 4: you go those donors and say, hey, I'd like to
- 1:06:13Speaker 4: do a fellowship or I'm going to write a fifty
- 1:06:16Speaker 4: page paper about how we're going to save climate, and
- 1:06:19Speaker 4: you get a climate donor to give two hundred k
- 1:06:22Speaker 4: or whatever to New America New America takes a third
- 1:06:26Speaker 4: for its administrative costs and the desk and internet overhead whatever,
- 1:06:32Speaker 4: and then they give you the title New America Fellow
- 1:06:36Speaker 4: and move move the cash then through to you. I mean,
- 1:06:42Speaker 4: I'm smarty, Okay, So we get fifty grand and we
- 1:06:46Speaker 4: get like this nonprofit person's name and picture on our website.
- 1:06:52Speaker 4: So not only is it free for us, we make money. Right,
- 1:06:55Speaker 4: So yeah, that's a thing that happens in Washington.
- 1:06:58Speaker 5: And C three's are really supposed to be like about
- 1:07:00Speaker 5: influence and the entire C three structure, like some of
- 1:07:03Speaker 5: it is just like I'm actually here for another C three,
- 1:07:07Speaker 5: Like I'm in West Virginia for a C three. Again,
- 1:07:09Speaker 5: I have these all listed, but like C three structure sucks.
- 1:07:12Speaker 5: It needs to be changed. It allows for way too
- 1:07:15Speaker 5: much grift and graft. It is a disaster. I think
- 1:07:18Speaker 5: it is like sucking the life out of American politics
- 1:07:21Speaker 5: in many ways.
- 1:07:21Speaker 3: So you just have to be.
- 1:07:23Speaker 5: Kind of conscious of which. And like C fours are
- 1:07:27Speaker 5: very different than C three's. Fours are also very pact
- 1:07:29Speaker 5: production for a C four right right, Yeah, And C
- 1:07:32Speaker 5: fours are very sneaky ways to be influential. Like that's
- 1:07:36Speaker 5: actual I would call that dark money.
- 1:07:39Speaker 3: Do you think it's fair to.
- 1:07:39Speaker 4: Say for it is totally dark money because you can Yeah,
- 1:07:43Speaker 4: you can get it from dark vehicles to the point
- 1:07:45Speaker 4: where you never have to right and disclose. Yeah, if
- 1:07:51Speaker 4: you have enough layers of darkness, it's very hard to
- 1:07:54Speaker 4: get the light through.
- 1:07:56Speaker 5: Yeah, which is why I think it's best to just
- 1:07:57Speaker 5: disclose it all. If you have any of a diale
- 1:07:59Speaker 5: that from Tim Carernie, who's my ol letter, I think
- 1:08:02Speaker 5: you know him right, I know you know him right.
- 1:08:03Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
- 1:08:04Speaker 5: But anyway, if you're like an ideological personal once aday
- 1:08:08Speaker 5: the other, it's hard to avoid coming into contact if
- 1:08:11Speaker 5: you want to have like a normal middle class journalism lifestyle.
- 1:08:14Speaker 5: But anyway, all that is to say, that's like way
- 1:08:16Speaker 5: inside baseball. But all that is to say she's definitely
- 1:08:19Speaker 5: a political operative, and it's foolish to act like otherwise.
- 1:08:24Speaker 5: We both know that political operatives can have true stories. Like.
- 1:08:28Speaker 5: It doesn't necessarily mean it's not categorically yes, because it's
- 1:08:31Speaker 5: kind of from a political operative, but it obviously is
- 1:08:34Speaker 5: a fair question to agree.
- 1:08:40Speaker 2: Quick update on the California results, which continue to come
- 1:08:44Speaker 2: in and continue to actually pretty dramatically shift the possibilities
- 1:08:49Speaker 2: of what might happen. Election night looked very much like
- 1:08:53Speaker 2: the top two in the LA Mayor's race, we're going
- 1:08:55Speaker 2: to be Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt. In the California
- 1:08:58Speaker 2: Governor's race, very much like it was going to be
- 1:09:02Speaker 2: Javier Basara and Steve Hilton the Republican, with Tom Steyer
- 1:09:05Speaker 2: coming in third. Nothing is certain yet, Well, I shouldn't.
- 1:09:09Speaker 2: I shouldn't say that. Actually, two things are certain. Karen
- 1:09:11Speaker 2: Bass will make it through in the LA Mayor's race
- 1:09:13Speaker 2: and Javier Bsara will make it through in the California
- 1:09:15Speaker 2: Governor's race. But the top two slots are now significantly
- 1:09:18Speaker 2: up for grabs because, as predicted, as more ballots are counted,
- 1:09:24Speaker 2: the later ballots are favoring the left wing Democrats. So
- 1:09:30Speaker 2: Stier is closing the gap on Hilton and Nythia Rahman
- 1:09:34Speaker 2: is closing the gap on Spencer Pratt. Let's go ahead
- 1:09:37Speaker 2: and put this analysis up on the screen just so
- 1:09:39Speaker 2: you guys can see the numbers here. This is from
- 1:09:42Speaker 2: Zachary Domini, who's been tracking all of this, or Domini
- 1:09:46Speaker 2: for vote Hub, and this is the LA Mayor's race.
- 1:09:52Speaker 2: So in the late mail, you can see that Nythia
- 1:09:55Speaker 2: Rahman is performing quite well. In fact, she's very close
- 1:09:58Speaker 2: to Karen Bass in terms of her positioning in some
- 1:10:02Speaker 2: of this late mail, and his analysis here is that
- 1:10:05Speaker 2: Ramen is hitting her benchmark to overtake Pratt. At this
- 1:10:08Speaker 2: point is fair to say she is favored. The outstanding
- 1:10:11Speaker 2: turnout remains uncertain. The race is still tracking toward a
- 1:10:14Speaker 2: very close finish. And Ryan, I understanding is part of
- 1:10:16Speaker 2: what has shifted the analysis to is that they underestimated
- 1:10:20Speaker 2: the number of ballots that remain to be counted here.
- 1:10:23Speaker 2: The more ballots that are left, the better that is
- 1:10:25Speaker 2: obviously for Nathia Raman in LA, and also the better
- 1:10:28Speaker 2: it is for Tom Steyer statewide.
- 1:10:31Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:10:31Speaker 4: Yes, And credit to Dave Dean who warned us on Monday.
- 1:10:36Speaker 4: He said, be careful, like there's going to be an
- 1:10:38Speaker 4: enormous amount of Democratic vote share that is outstanding, and
- 1:10:42Speaker 4: it's going to be counted over the coming days and
- 1:10:46Speaker 4: on election night it's going to look like the Republicans
- 1:10:48Speaker 4: are doing much better than they will end up doing.
- 1:10:52Speaker 4: Credit to me, I think I said if I would
- 1:10:54Speaker 4: rather be Rama than Pratt, even as.
- 1:10:57Speaker 2: Really impressive me a big guy there you.
- 1:11:02Speaker 3: Go, h the governor's race.
- 1:11:05Speaker 4: I'm like, I feel like such a like East Coast chauvinists,
- 1:11:10Speaker 4: and I apologize to we have a huge audience in California.
- 1:11:13Speaker 4: I just there's that state just politically frustrates me, like
- 1:11:18Speaker 4: this one party state which is dominated by corporate interests
- 1:11:23Speaker 4: and doesn't have the same kind of urban cores that
- 1:11:25Speaker 4: allow like a DSA style movement that you have in
- 1:11:30Speaker 4: like a Philadelphia or New York to take hold like
- 1:11:33Speaker 4: the dsas in California. I think car culture, you know,
- 1:11:37Speaker 4: damages them and the nimbiism that that comes along with
- 1:11:42Speaker 4: you know, having such you know, having the kinds of
- 1:11:45Speaker 4: cities that they have there. I think also then you know, uh,
- 1:11:49Speaker 4: you know, poisons the ability to kind of organize in
- 1:11:53Speaker 4: the same way that you.
- 1:11:54Speaker 3: Get in like a Chicago too.
- 1:11:55Speaker 2: For Yeah, I think some politics may be more akin
- 1:11:59Speaker 2: to like west Chester or like Long Islands than like
- 1:12:03Speaker 2: New York City.
- 1:12:04Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:12:05Speaker 4: So, but Raman, you know, looks like she's going to
- 1:12:09Speaker 4: make the top two here. And Karen Bass you know
- 1:12:11Speaker 4: former what trained with the Cuban revolutionaries as the Republicans
- 1:12:16Speaker 4: who repinted us, you know, down the stretch. But the
- 1:12:21Speaker 4: implication for the billionaire tacks are significant.
- 1:12:23Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah, because and especially for the statewide
- 1:12:30Speaker 2: top two because if you do end up with a
- 1:12:33Speaker 2: Democratic shutout and there's no Republican on the ballot there
- 1:12:36Speaker 2: and no Republican on the ballot in LA which is
- 1:12:38Speaker 2: obviously a very large city and consequential in terms of
- 1:12:41Speaker 2: the political dynamics in the state of California, Republicans are
- 1:12:44Speaker 2: going to be pretty unmotivated to come out and vote, like, oh,
- 1:12:47Speaker 2: do I wanted to be Karen Bass or do Fear Ramen?
- 1:12:50Speaker 2: You know, do I wanted to be a hobbyer? But
- 1:12:51Speaker 2: there are times Tom Syer and so you would expect
- 1:12:55Speaker 2: that disproportionately Republicans would be the ones voting against the
- 1:12:57Speaker 2: billionaire attacks. And I think there are number of other
- 1:13:00Speaker 2: ballot initiatives where this could be consequential. Also can be
- 1:13:03Speaker 2: very consequential for the congressional races because just like the
- 1:13:07Speaker 2: stay wide you know, it's this jungle primary system, so
- 1:13:10Speaker 2: they're you know, you're going to have a sort of
- 1:13:13Speaker 2: lack of motivation to come out at all and vote
- 1:13:16Speaker 2: for Republican candidates who are down ballot too. My understanding
- 1:13:19Speaker 2: is that based on the numbers and mac maybe can
- 1:13:21Speaker 2: put this next element up on the screen here that
- 1:13:26Speaker 2: Stier is gaining on Hilton and exactly what he needs
- 1:13:30Speaker 2: to happen is happening, which is that the longer the
- 1:13:34Speaker 2: count goes on, the closer they get to you know,
- 1:13:36Speaker 2: the latest ballots that came in, the more the shift
- 1:13:41Speaker 2: is going towards Stire. And this other Republican candidate Chad Bianco,
- 1:13:47Speaker 2: who you know, is kind of as you can imagine,
- 1:13:50Speaker 2: as taking votes away from Hilton, seems to be hanging
- 1:13:53Speaker 2: in there more or less with his vote total, because
- 1:13:55Speaker 2: that was another danger that if he just totally collapsed
- 1:13:58Speaker 2: in the final days and everybody voted for Hilton, who
- 1:14:00Speaker 2: was a Republican, that would make it more difficult for
- 1:14:02Speaker 2: Styr to catch up. However, based on the analysis that
- 1:14:06Speaker 2: I'm saying, it is more likely that Ramen ends up
- 1:14:10Speaker 2: in the top two in LA than it is that
- 1:14:12Speaker 2: Stier ends up in the top two statewide, although that
- 1:14:15Speaker 2: is also appears to be basically a coin flip. At
- 1:14:18Speaker 2: this point, it's going to be very close based on
- 1:14:20Speaker 2: everything I've seen, well.
- 1:14:22Speaker 4: I guess for the political consultants out in California. We
- 1:14:26Speaker 4: hope that the and and for the influencers and the
- 1:14:29Speaker 4: you know, the TikTokers, the Instagrammers.
- 1:14:31Speaker 2: All the paid influencers.
- 1:14:32Speaker 4: Tweeters like we can root for we can root for
- 1:14:35Speaker 4: styrs you know, many many, many millions to continue to
- 1:14:38Speaker 4: flood our social media feeds.
- 1:14:41Speaker 3: If he is.
- 1:14:43Speaker 2: Sarah also caught doing that too though, But yeah, I.
- 1:14:46Speaker 4: Ate a whole astro turf to like social media campaign
- 1:14:49Speaker 4: that as soon as Swalwell was out, like all of
- 1:14:51Speaker 4: a sudden, it's like the sarahmentum and then people.
- 1:14:55Speaker 2: Are like, who, I'm sorry, what I asked this.
- 1:14:57Speaker 4: Guy Javier's hell raisers and then all it was, all
- 1:15:01Speaker 4: of a sudden, it just vanishes.
- 1:15:03Speaker 3: Like where'd hobby AARs hell razors go? Huh? Just left
- 1:15:07Speaker 3: with Saire's influencers here.
- 1:15:09Speaker 4: It's even though Stier says like everything I kind of
- 1:15:13Speaker 4: agree with generally, and like he's still a billionaire, and
- 1:15:16Speaker 4: it's it's like better I guess that a billionaire buys it,
- 1:15:20Speaker 4: then like other billionaires buy it on their behalf. Yeah,
- 1:15:25Speaker 4: but good lord, is this is this what we have
- 1:15:27Speaker 4: to deal with? Speaking of billionaires though, trying to buy stuff.
- 1:15:31Speaker 4: Let me put up, let me put up Rocana's district
- 1:15:33Speaker 4: real quick.
- 1:15:34Speaker 3: How much did these.
- 1:15:37Speaker 4: All in goons and the rest of these I don't
- 1:15:39Speaker 4: know about the all in guys specifically, but how much
- 1:15:41Speaker 4: they put in a lot of money behind an opponent
- 1:15:45Speaker 4: to Rocanna who.
- 1:15:47Speaker 2: Doesn't even show up there in that crop because.
- 1:15:49Speaker 4: You are candidates to see him, Ethan Agerwall. I'll check
- 1:15:57Speaker 4: the FEC and the super pac stuff later to see,
- 1:15:59Speaker 4: like what they spent on behalf of this guy, but
- 1:16:03Speaker 4: at four thousand so far and ninety six votes, like
- 1:16:08Speaker 4: you could have paid everybody one thousand dollars or something
- 1:16:11Speaker 4: to vote for your guy, Ethan and done better maybe
- 1:16:15Speaker 4: than what they spent so far.
- 1:16:18Speaker 2: And so its nohow As we got closer to this contest,
- 1:16:21Speaker 2: I heard less and less from them.
- 1:16:23Speaker 3: About they did. They were like, yeah, this candidate.
- 1:16:25Speaker 2: Suddenly got very quiet from them on the front.
- 1:16:28Speaker 4: Data driven gentlemen. In the end, yes, they saw that
- 1:16:31Speaker 4: this saw the data not going their way. But now,
- 1:16:33Speaker 4: speaking of wasting enormous amounts of money, I remember we
- 1:16:38Speaker 4: had Randy Vegas on the show, community college professor, auto
- 1:16:40Speaker 4: shop owner from Bakersfield who had the support of like
- 1:16:45Speaker 4: Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party, Bernie Sanders AOC,
- 1:16:49Speaker 4: like that whole Congressional Progressive Caucus, I think even the
- 1:16:52Speaker 4: Congressional Hispanic Caucuses because it's a Hispanic district like got
- 1:16:55Speaker 4: behind him, and the D Triple C and DMFI Democratic
- 1:16:59Speaker 4: Majority for Israel came in and dropped like more than
- 1:17:02Speaker 4: five million dollars on his for his opponent and coming
- 1:17:07Speaker 4: after him with millions of dollars of attack ads basically
- 1:17:11Speaker 4: calling him like a child sex abuser in like incredibly
- 1:17:14Speaker 4: gross ways. You know, none of it true, but like
- 1:17:18Speaker 4: the kind of like thirty second ads where you're like, wow,
- 1:17:22Speaker 4: that's awful, and say they spent millions and look at him.
- 1:17:28Speaker 4: He's up right now twenty one hundred votes, five percent
- 1:17:33Speaker 4: as the votes keep coming in. So it's it's hard
- 1:17:35Speaker 4: to see how Jazzmine Banes overcomes this. Jazz Mey bans
- 1:17:40Speaker 4: you guys may remember she's the one who said, well,
- 1:17:43Speaker 4: she sponsored a resolution in the California Legislature condemning a
- 1:17:49Speaker 4: genocide of between thirty and fifty thousand seeks in India,
- 1:17:54Speaker 4: so she understands how to condemn a genocide. She was
- 1:17:57Speaker 4: asked at a forum if she thinks that Israel's committing
- 1:18:01Speaker 4: in genocide in Gaza. She said, yes, then DMFI and
- 1:18:05Speaker 4: d triple Ce get behind her, and she said, oh, no,
- 1:18:08Speaker 4: I misheard the question.
- 1:18:10Speaker 3: I don't think it is. And here she is now.
- 1:18:15Speaker 4: May may fail to make the top two, and in
- 1:18:20Speaker 4: the process all Democrats will have done is spend millions
- 1:18:23Speaker 4: of dollars of Democratic money damaging their own candidate.
- 1:18:27Speaker 3: Yeah, David Volato is the Republican incumbent here.
- 1:18:30Speaker 4: And this is to me a super important race because
- 1:18:33Speaker 4: it's it's an attempt by like.
- 1:18:34Speaker 3: Bernie to show like I'm not just Vermont.
- 1:18:38Speaker 4: He loves doing that, like going to Montana, like where
- 1:18:41Speaker 4: they got behind the Union smoke jumper out there who
- 1:18:44Speaker 4: won and saying like, no, my stuff can work in
- 1:18:47Speaker 4: Bakersfield too.
- 1:18:49Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:18:50Speaker 2: I think that's never been more true than this moment
- 1:18:52Speaker 2: as well. You know, I think there were other times
- 1:18:54Speaker 2: when maybe that was more of a stretch. But now
- 1:18:56Speaker 2: for sure he has that appeal in his style of politics,
- 1:19:00Speaker 2: have that broad ranging appeal. There's no doubt about it.
- 1:19:03Speaker 2: What do you think in terms of let's say that
- 1:19:06Speaker 2: it does end up Bass and Ramen in the La
- 1:19:10Speaker 2: mayoral race, you'd have to think that Bass is favored
- 1:19:13Speaker 2: in that circumstance, right, do you think Romen has any
- 1:19:15Speaker 2: Nythia Raman has any shot? And just for people to
- 1:19:17Speaker 2: know she's not backed by the DSA, but she is,
- 1:19:20Speaker 2: you know, certainly seen as more left wing than Karen Bass.
- 1:19:24Speaker 2: Had relatively unimpressive campaign, struggled in the debates, et cetera.
- 1:19:27Speaker 2: But obviously looks like it's going to be enough to
- 1:19:30Speaker 2: knock Spencer Pratt online phenom out of the top two.
- 1:19:34Speaker 2: But in any case, do you think do you think
- 1:19:35Speaker 2: she has any shot in the general or do you
- 1:19:37Speaker 2: think that in either case Karen Bass kind of has
- 1:19:39Speaker 2: this thing locked up.
- 1:19:42Speaker 3: I don't quite know enough.
- 1:19:45Speaker 4: About you know, people there think seem to think that
- 1:19:48Speaker 4: Karen Bass, like, you know, I would trust people there
- 1:19:52Speaker 4: more than my own instinct on this.
- 1:19:54Speaker 2: It's hard to knock out and incumbent. You know, the
- 1:19:56Speaker 2: fact that it even went to a runoff, that she
- 1:19:59Speaker 2: didn't get the fifty percent on night one is very unusual.
- 1:20:02Speaker 4: And I think I think Pratt voters, even though a
- 1:20:04Speaker 4: lot of them are like upset the apple carte kinds
- 1:20:06Speaker 4: of voters, like they don't want to upset the apple
- 1:20:09Speaker 4: cart with a DSA member.
- 1:20:11Speaker 2: Right, you'll probably just stay home now.
- 1:20:16Speaker 4: They're interesting one unfolding in uh it was it California?
- 1:20:22Speaker 4: I think this is seven where we covered the Doris
- 1:20:26Speaker 4: Matt Suey may Vang race where Doris Matt Sue's in
- 1:20:30Speaker 4: her eighties and has spent forty Her and her husband
- 1:20:35Speaker 4: for more than forty years have had this seat. She
- 1:20:38Speaker 4: spent and her backers put together a superpack to lift
- 1:20:42Speaker 4: up like a Republican college kid to get it, try
- 1:20:45Speaker 4: to get him into the top two. And they're close
- 1:20:48Speaker 4: to getting there. I don't think they're going to make it.
- 1:20:51Speaker 4: But so this kid, Zach Wooden, is currently ahead by
- 1:20:58Speaker 4: just two hundred votes or so over Mayvang, who's a
- 1:21:03Speaker 4: you know, I think she had Justice Democrats basically the
- 1:21:06Speaker 4: whole left wing apparatus. We had her on the program.
- 1:21:11Speaker 4: She seemed she seemed really impressive, and I and Mattsouey agrees,
- 1:21:16Speaker 4: like that's why Matt Suey has, you know, desperately spent
- 1:21:19Speaker 4: and loner campaign tons of money to try to keep
- 1:21:22Speaker 4: Mayvang from making from making the top two. And the
- 1:21:27Speaker 4: fact that he's only up by a couple hundred votes
- 1:21:31Speaker 4: with like half the votes still to go, and all
- 1:21:33Speaker 4: of the Democratic votes are the ones that are outstanding,
- 1:21:35Speaker 4: suggest that Mattsoi is probably gonna lose, like I think
- 1:21:39Speaker 4: it in the general, So that'll be one of the
- 1:21:41Speaker 4: few incumbents interesting actually gets knocked off and she's you also,
- 1:21:48Speaker 4: did you see the Jimmy Gomez scandal?
- 1:21:49Speaker 3: Speaking of sex scandals.
- 1:21:52Speaker 2: No, I don't think I did so.
- 1:21:54Speaker 4: Uh, and it consensual stuff, a little bit of well whatever.
- 1:21:59Speaker 4: People can decide what they one. Uh, Jimmy Gomez the
- 1:22:04Speaker 4: New York Daily News or or is it the Post?
- 1:22:07Speaker 4: The Post now has like an La tabloid and they've
- 1:22:11Speaker 4: just daily.
- 1:22:12Speaker 2: News like not exist anymore. Didn't Kushner like buy it
- 1:22:14Speaker 2: and kill it or something like that.
- 1:22:16Speaker 4: Anyway, I think there's like four reporters there left, but
- 1:22:19Speaker 4: they're going they're going hard at Gomez because he got
- 1:22:24Speaker 4: caught and making out with Eric Swalwell's chief of staff
- 1:22:29Speaker 4: a couple of years ago at some party in California
- 1:22:32Speaker 4: and turned out they were in a long term thing
- 1:22:36Speaker 4: while he was the chair of the Dad's Caucus and
- 1:22:40Speaker 4: like doing this whole I'm such a great dad and
- 1:22:42Speaker 4: blah blah blah. So he's getting busted he's getting busted
- 1:22:45Speaker 4: for that. Now it's all no no abuse alleged. It's
- 1:22:49Speaker 4: all consensual stuff. Uh, you know, that's between him and
- 1:22:53Speaker 4: him and the lord and his wife and his mistress
- 1:22:56Speaker 4: or whatever. But he has a Justice Democrat opponent who
- 1:23:04Speaker 4: did make it into the runoff, Angela Gonzalez Torres, and
- 1:23:10Speaker 4: they waited. It seems like the Los Angeles Post or
- 1:23:15Speaker 4: whatever this New York Post knockoff in la Is waited
- 1:23:18Speaker 4: until the primary was over to like start dropping this
- 1:23:23Speaker 4: and they're prob they're probably just gonna like they've been
- 1:23:26Speaker 4: putting him on the cover and like it's going to
- 1:23:28Speaker 4: get ugly. I think they're just going to dog him,
- 1:23:31Speaker 4: you know, for the throughout the summer and fall. And
- 1:23:34Speaker 4: Apak in the past has spent millions to kind of
- 1:23:37Speaker 4: bail him out from progressive challenges. But a lot of
- 1:23:39Speaker 4: people think that this is this is the year that
- 1:23:42Speaker 4: he go that he goes down.
- 1:23:45Speaker 3: So that's at least that.
- 1:23:47Speaker 4: Could be two incumbents to get knocked off. But wow,
- 1:23:51Speaker 4: we miss it because it happens on election day in
- 1:23:53Speaker 4: November and everybody's focused on like.
- 1:23:57Speaker 2: The general elections. Is there a dumb Tea Party? Yeah, Yeah,
- 1:24:04Speaker 2: one other question for you, what a statewide if? I mean,
- 1:24:07Speaker 2: I don't think anyone thinks that Steve Hilton is going
- 1:24:09Speaker 2: to be governor says pretty clear if it's Hilton versus Sarah,
- 1:24:12Speaker 2: Besarah is going to be the next governor of California.
- 1:24:15Speaker 2: If it's be Sarah versus Styr, though, you think Sire
- 1:24:18Speaker 2: has a shot because I actually kind of do you know?
- 1:24:21Speaker 2: Bessarah is not an impressive candidate. He is very corporate,
- 1:24:26Speaker 2: back to like every major corporate interest you could imagine
- 1:24:29Speaker 2: is basically gotten in behind him. Even some of his
- 1:24:32Speaker 2: Biden administration colleagues have come and like, this guy was
- 1:24:35Speaker 2: a terrible cabinet secretary. So it seems to me like
- 1:24:39Speaker 2: more time for voters to process the choice between these
- 1:24:42Speaker 2: two candidates could actually benefit Tom Steyer. You know, I
- 1:24:46Speaker 2: don't know how much like the identity politics plays into it.
- 1:24:50Speaker 2: Obviously there's a large Hispanic population in California. Does that
- 1:24:53Speaker 2: make them more inclined to vote for Basara? I don't know.
- 1:24:55Speaker 2: I tend not to really buy into that line of thinking,
- 1:24:59Speaker 2: but that is an our argument that's out there. But
- 1:25:00Speaker 2: what do you think?
- 1:25:02Speaker 4: Yeah, I think Styr has a has a real shot. Also,
- 1:25:05Speaker 4: like the endless money is going to help. So yeah,
- 1:25:10Speaker 4: I think it's a I would put it at a
- 1:25:12Speaker 4: toss up if it becomes Styre and Sarah. The other
- 1:25:17Speaker 4: fascinating statewide race is did you follow the Jane Kim
- 1:25:20Speaker 4: Insurance Commissioner race at all?
- 1:25:23Speaker 2: I did not?
- 1:25:24Speaker 3: We should? We should actually have her on next week.
- 1:25:27Speaker 4: So she won, and she put it up here like
- 1:25:33Speaker 4: this is actually quite something for California because it's such
- 1:25:38Speaker 4: a corporate dominated state. So she she ran as you're
- 1:25:43Speaker 4: seeing here, like if you look at her, if you
- 1:25:46Speaker 4: google her, it says Jane Kim endorsed by Bernie Sanders,
- 1:25:49Speaker 4: like that, that's that's like her tagline for who she is,
- 1:25:53Speaker 4: affordable available insurance for all. And so she's she's really
- 1:25:59Speaker 4: trying to bring kind of state power to bear to
- 1:26:03Speaker 4: try to like fix the brokenness of California.
- 1:26:08Speaker 2: And are we talking about a like property insurance all
- 1:26:13Speaker 2: all insurance? I guess because I know they've got you know,
- 1:26:16Speaker 2: property insurance or yeah, homeowners insurance issues in a way
- 1:26:21Speaker 2: that like Colorado and Florida and other states do as well.
- 1:26:24Speaker 4: That's why we need to have her on what on
- 1:26:27Speaker 4: earth kind of jurisdiction does she have and what can
- 1:26:32Speaker 4: she because you know they've been pushing ah, yeah, disaster.
- 1:26:40Speaker 4: Here's disaster insurance, which you know, disaster insurance is becoming
- 1:26:49Speaker 4: like audio auto insurance, Medicare for kids, you know, flood insurance,
- 1:26:55Speaker 4: disaster insurance, all this earthquake like this is all becoming
- 1:26:59Speaker 4: with with climate existential for yeah, places like Florida and California.
- 1:27:06Speaker 2: This is actually something I we have an interview with
- 1:27:09Speaker 2: Oliver Larkin who's challenging Jared Moscowitz and the Democratic primary.
- 1:27:12Speaker 2: And first of all, Jared Moskowitz is such a villain,
- 1:27:14Speaker 2: it's unbelievable, and when you learn all the things that
- 1:27:17Speaker 2: he's done and said, describing himself as a Rhonda Santist
- 1:27:20Speaker 2: Democrat and all these things. But in any case, one
- 1:27:22Speaker 2: of the things that Larkin was also highlighting is what
- 1:27:25Speaker 2: a crisis this is in Florida as well. I think
- 1:27:27Speaker 2: it's probably more of a crisis in Florida than anywhere else.
- 1:27:30Speaker 2: And it's their real estate market is a mess right
- 1:27:33Speaker 2: now in part exactly because of this issue. So it's
- 1:27:38Speaker 2: a major, increasingly major concern in a wide variety of
- 1:27:42Speaker 2: states across the country. And then the other thing just
- 1:27:44Speaker 2: to note, you know, to go back to the star
- 1:27:46Speaker 2: of as Era Ray since you mentioned mentioned insurance, I
- 1:27:48Speaker 2: mean Styer does support medicare for all in the state
- 1:27:50Speaker 2: of California. And you can imagine because this is one
- 1:27:53Speaker 2: of always one of the noox on medicare for all.
- 1:27:56Speaker 2: It's like, well, you know, no state has ever tried it,
- 1:27:58Speaker 2: it's never been successful. No one can pull this off.
- 1:28:00Speaker 2: It was contemptly you know, they tried to do it
- 1:28:02Speaker 2: in Vermont and they failed, and they it basically got
- 1:28:05Speaker 2: killed by Gavin Newsom without getting into the legislative weeds
- 1:28:07Speaker 2: in California, even though it had a lot of momentum
- 1:28:10Speaker 2: behind it. So if he was actually able to, you know,
- 1:28:13Speaker 2: successfully implement universal healthcare in the state of California, which
- 1:28:18Speaker 2: already is pretty close to having universal coverage, it's one
- 1:28:21Speaker 2: of the top states in the country in terms of
- 1:28:23Speaker 2: healthcare coverage. But that would be an extraordinarily significant development
- 1:28:28Speaker 2: that I think, you know, would a lot of people
- 1:28:29Speaker 2: would take notice. And also if it didn't work out
- 1:28:32Speaker 2: and it had all kinds of problems, people would definitely
- 1:28:34Speaker 2: take notice of that too, probably more so than even
- 1:28:36Speaker 2: if it's successful.
- 1:28:38Speaker 3: Yes, indeed, so.
- 1:28:40Speaker 2: I wanted to update everybody on a crisis that is
- 1:28:43Speaker 2: developing here in this country, in the beef industry. We
- 1:28:46Speaker 2: can put this up on the screen from NBC News.
- 1:28:49Speaker 2: So they say that flesh eating screwworm has returned to
- 1:28:53Speaker 2: the US after sixty years, threatening the cattle herd. The
- 1:28:56Speaker 2: case of New World screw worm was confirmed in a
- 1:28:58Speaker 2: three week old caf in the Prior, Texas, near the
- 1:29:01Speaker 2: US Mexico border. According to Agriculture Secretary Brook Rawlins, flesh
- 1:29:06Speaker 2: eating parasite that had been kept out of US livestock
- 1:29:08Speaker 2: for decades has been detected in Texas, threatening the nation's
- 1:29:11Speaker 2: cattle industry and food supply at a time and prices
- 1:29:14Speaker 2: are already high. They say that the parasitic flies larvae
- 1:29:18Speaker 2: feed exclusively on the living tissue of warm blooded animals,
- 1:29:23Speaker 2: while the fly is capable of infecting humans and pets.
- 1:29:26Speaker 2: Such cases are rare and pose little risk to the
- 1:29:28Speaker 2: broader public. The paraf site does not pose a food
- 1:29:31Speaker 2: safety threat, but a wider outbreak could still cost the
- 1:29:35Speaker 2: livestock industry billions of dollars and put additional pressure on
- 1:29:38Speaker 2: beef prices that are already at record highs. They go
- 1:29:41Speaker 2: on to say it follows months of warnings from US
- 1:29:44Speaker 2: and Texas agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders as the
- 1:29:47Speaker 2: pest steadily moved north through Mexico toward the American border.
- 1:29:51Speaker 2: This is a quote from the Texas Agriculture commission Sid Miller.
- 1:29:55Speaker 2: He said, for months, the screwworm has rapidly advanced through
- 1:29:58Speaker 2: Mexico in spite of the USDA's existing game plan. Instead
- 1:30:01Speaker 2: of using every available tool, USDA moved too slowly and
- 1:30:06Speaker 2: relied solely on a partial solution that takes years to
- 1:30:10Speaker 2: fully implement. So, uh, I don't know much about Texas
- 1:30:14Speaker 2: ad Commissioner sid Miller, Ryan, I'm going to guess he's
- 1:30:17Speaker 2: probably not a not a libtard. I'm going to guess
- 1:30:20Speaker 2: probably relatively right wing fellow who is criticizing the Trump
- 1:30:25Speaker 2: administration here for their their lack of concern and their
- 1:30:29Speaker 2: lack of you know, fully addressing this situation and allowing
- 1:30:32Speaker 2: it to get to this crisis point and to that
- 1:30:35Speaker 2: point if we can put this Forbes article up on
- 1:30:37Speaker 2: the screen here as well, they did you know a
- 1:30:40Speaker 2: look at okay, well, who is to blame here?
- 1:30:43Speaker 3: You know?
- 1:30:43Speaker 2: Is it fair to blame DOGE for their cost cutting,
- 1:30:47Speaker 2: And basically the answer here is yes, screw worm and
- 1:30:50Speaker 2: Texas cattle could drive up beef prices after DOGE acts
- 1:30:53Speaker 2: prevention efforts. They go on to say that containment efforts
- 1:30:58Speaker 2: may cause the government to implement i'd spread cattle movement restrictions.
- 1:31:02Speaker 2: The return of screwworm comes after the Musk led Department
- 1:31:05Speaker 2: of Government Efficiency cut funding last year for a project
- 1:31:10Speaker 2: dedicated to monitoring and containing New World screwworming Central America.
- 1:31:14Speaker 2: So DOSEE cut that funding. That funding was apparently asked
- 1:31:18Speaker 2: days before the US ended a temporary suspension of cattle
- 1:31:22Speaker 2: imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was then allowed to cross
- 1:31:26Speaker 2: the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by
- 1:31:30Speaker 2: the usai D. So not only did they cut the
- 1:31:34Speaker 2: funding for this project to monitor it, days later they said,
- 1:31:38Speaker 2: come on, you know we can, we can let more
- 1:31:40Speaker 2: livestock across the border, and they also cut the funding
- 1:31:44Speaker 2: for the USA i D that would have been used
- 1:31:46Speaker 2: to track that livestock going across the border. So truly
- 1:31:51Speaker 2: truly a perfect storm here that has resulted in this
- 1:31:55Speaker 2: you know, this development, and at the.
- 1:31:57Speaker 4: Time you had a bunch of you know, American cattle
- 1:32:00Speaker 4: ranchers and processors freaking out about allowing in the Mexican
- 1:32:06Speaker 4: cattle and arguing like this is going to bring in screwworm.
- 1:32:12Speaker 4: And it's it's so ironic because Trump's entire stick is
- 1:32:17Speaker 4: that he's protecting American manufacturers and the American industry.
- 1:32:23Speaker 3: Yet when it.
- 1:32:24Speaker 4: Came to beef in particular, he was, I guess it,
- 1:32:29Speaker 4: the he's just trying to get down the price of beef. Rather,
- 1:32:32Speaker 4: you know, you could get down the price of energy
- 1:32:34Speaker 4: inputs and that would do more. But and then he
- 1:32:38Speaker 4: wanted to help out Argentina, so he also brought in
- 1:32:40Speaker 4: a bunch of Argentinian beef and the end the American
- 1:32:45Speaker 4: cattle ranchers will also pointed out that because of the
- 1:32:48Speaker 4: way that they determine what is American what's not American,
- 1:32:52Speaker 4: you can actually get a bunch of like labels that say,
- 1:32:56Speaker 4: you know, made in the USA on beef that isn't
- 1:32:58Speaker 4: at all made in the USA.
- 1:33:01Speaker 2: Yah.
- 1:33:02Speaker 4: It's also this a really prime example of the way
- 1:33:07Speaker 4: that business really does require good government to operate. Like
- 1:33:13Speaker 4: there's this like fantasy idea that you know, business would
- 1:33:18Speaker 4: do so much better if it could, just if government
- 1:33:20Speaker 4: would just get out of the way, like get rid
- 1:33:23Speaker 4: of the red tape, like let the let the free
- 1:33:26Speaker 4: market do its thing, and you know, the screw worm
- 1:33:30Speaker 4: has something to say about that, Yeah and so, and
- 1:33:33Speaker 4: no individual company can address the screw worm problem, obviously,
- 1:33:39Speaker 4: that has to be a public like hemispheric wide approach.
- 1:33:46Speaker 4: It's it's just it's just infuriating and depressing. And you
- 1:33:50Speaker 4: couldn't predict exactly what the DOGE cuts were going to do,
- 1:33:54Speaker 4: but on this one you could actually predict exactly what
- 1:33:56Speaker 4: it was going to do. But overall you couldn't predict
- 1:33:58Speaker 4: which ones were gonna manifest. This was one of the
- 1:34:01Speaker 4: most predictable of them because like these screw worms are.
- 1:34:05Speaker 2: They were marching north. Yeah, everybody they knew this was happening,
- 1:34:09Speaker 2: and you're like at that time, you're like, you know,
- 1:34:11Speaker 2: we're going to defund that program, and we're going to
- 1:34:13Speaker 2: let more livestock across and we're going to defund the
- 1:34:15Speaker 2: program to track that livestock.
- 1:34:17Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, and no effort is hamstrung too by
- 1:34:22Speaker 4: all of the cuts to the to the agency and
- 1:34:25Speaker 4: the demoralization and the loss of expertise and talent. Well,
- 1:34:31Speaker 4: and these are the same people that like don't want
- 1:34:34Speaker 4: lab grown meat, but they also want to destroy the
- 1:34:37Speaker 4: capacity to do the factory farming. So I guess they're
- 1:34:41Speaker 4: probably just like Trump is ushering in the era of
- 1:34:44Speaker 4: kind of clean energy by blowing up the fossil fuel industry,
- 1:34:48Speaker 4: He's ushering in the air of lab grown meat by
- 1:34:50Speaker 4: by just destroying.
- 1:34:54Speaker 3: The factory farm system.
- 1:34:55Speaker 2: Yeah, and obviously beef is already extraordinarily expensive. You know,
- 1:35:00Speaker 2: we talked a while ago about how the Costco. One
- 1:35:02Speaker 2: of the Costco executives, I think it was a CEO,
- 1:35:04Speaker 2: came out and said, you know, first we saw people
- 1:35:07Speaker 2: shift from beef to ground beef, and from steak to
- 1:35:10Speaker 2: ground beef and chicken. Now we're seeing them shift to
- 1:35:13Speaker 2: like canned meat, canned tuna, canned chicken, just looking for
- 1:35:18Speaker 2: the most inexpensive form of protein that they can possibly find. So, yeah,
- 1:35:24Speaker 2: so this is another situation where you know, things that
- 1:35:27Speaker 2: we sort of took for granted as kids, that you know,
- 1:35:32Speaker 2: you could as a middle class family or a working
- 1:35:34Speaker 2: class family, you could enjoy a steak now and again
- 1:35:38Speaker 2: is going to become increasingly a rarefied thing that only
- 1:35:41Speaker 2: the you know, the wealthy and the upper middle class,
- 1:35:44Speaker 2: are able to even even contemplate, and certainly not as
- 1:35:46Speaker 2: a part of their their normal diet. The other thing,
- 1:35:50Speaker 2: I saw someone make this point on Twitter, and I
- 1:35:52Speaker 2: think this is a really important one too, You Screwmarmer.
- 1:35:54Speaker 2: Is the sort of thing that it would be good
- 1:35:57Speaker 2: for none of us to have to know about this, right,
- 1:35:59Speaker 2: This is not a topic that I particularly want to
- 1:36:02Speaker 2: have to study and be aware of. It's the sort
- 1:36:04Speaker 2: of thing that, in an era of a functioning government,
- 1:36:08Speaker 2: you just take for granted that there's someone who is
- 1:36:10Speaker 2: an expert on this, who's spearheading a project to make
- 1:36:13Speaker 2: sure that this isn't a problem. And it's the way
- 1:36:16Speaker 2: that good government becomes sort of invisible when it's actually functioning.
- 1:36:20Speaker 2: This was working for what sixty years. We didn't have
- 1:36:23Speaker 2: a problem. Those people who were doing the work. They
- 1:36:26Speaker 2: weren't celebrated, we didn't know about it. But it was
- 1:36:28Speaker 2: actually a good use of money. And it's only now
- 1:36:31Speaker 2: that that has been dismantled by a bunch of arrogant
- 1:36:34Speaker 2: idiots who think that nothing matters and nothing ever happens,
- 1:36:38Speaker 2: and you can just go in and smash things without
- 1:36:40Speaker 2: any sort of real consequence. It's when that happens that you,
- 1:36:44Speaker 2: you know, we probably should have a screwworm tracking program
- 1:36:48Speaker 2: that was probably actually a good use of tax dollars.
- 1:36:51Speaker 2: So it's only in the absence of those things functioning
- 1:36:54Speaker 2: that you recognize how important these programs truly are.
- 1:36:58Speaker 4: Yep, yeah, exactly. It's it's utterly and utterly infuriating. Yeah,
- 1:37:02Speaker 4: the the arrogance combined with the the fact that the
- 1:37:07Speaker 4: people who drove this are going to be fine, like
- 1:37:10Speaker 4: they can they can get steak, then get burgers, they
- 1:37:12Speaker 4: can get then get whatever they want. It's everybody from
- 1:37:16Speaker 4: the consumers to the ranchers, to processors, to everybody involved
- 1:37:20Speaker 4: in the industry. And yeah, it's like it's an it's
- 1:37:25Speaker 4: an indefensible industry other than the fact that burgers are
- 1:37:28Speaker 4: delicious and steak is you know, like it's utterly indefensible,
- 1:37:33Speaker 4: like how you know, horrifyingly cruel it is to these
- 1:37:37Speaker 4: living creatures. And so, yeah, maybe this is Musk's long game.
- 1:37:41Speaker 4: Maybe he's a secret kind of vegetarian that's been that's
- 1:37:46Speaker 4: that's pushing to end the factory farming.
- 1:37:50Speaker 2: D from the few steps ahead.
- 1:37:53Speaker 4: Yeah, because he needs that lab grown meat to really
- 1:37:55Speaker 4: develop so you can.
- 1:37:56Speaker 3: Take it to Mars.
- 1:37:57Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, that's that's the ticket count of art. Great point.
- 1:38:02Speaker 2: You can't imagine, Yeah, I can. I can imagine the
- 1:38:05Speaker 2: Fox News segment during the Doge era where they're going
- 1:38:09Speaker 2: through all the ridiculous things that the government's spending your
- 1:38:12Speaker 2: money on. Like I can imagine them being like screw
- 1:38:15Speaker 2: worms of hundred million dollars for screw worm? What even
- 1:38:21Speaker 2: is that? You know? I mean you can just imagine
- 1:38:23Speaker 2: these and they.
- 1:38:24Speaker 4: Were probably they were probably literally studying the mating habits
- 1:38:27Speaker 4: of screw worms, which is even even funnier. But of
- 1:38:31Speaker 4: course you would do that, like how does it reproduce?
- 1:38:35Speaker 4: That's a rather important thing to know. But yes, if
- 1:38:39Speaker 4: Jesse Waters.
- 1:38:40Speaker 2: And God forbid, they did a transgenic study on it,
- 1:38:43Speaker 2: then forget about it, right.
- 1:38:46Speaker 4: It was it was a trans like continental problem, and
- 1:38:49Speaker 4: they're like, oh.
- 1:38:50Speaker 2: Trans get rid of done yea we laugh. That literally
- 1:38:56Speaker 2: could have happened, literally could have happened, because you know,
- 1:38:59Speaker 2: I did this podcast with Matt Bernstein, the Bitfruity Pod,
- 1:39:04Speaker 2: and we went through the testimony of these Doge guys
- 1:39:08Speaker 2: who were being sued and that was how they went
- 1:39:11Speaker 2: about it. They typed into they fed the programs into
- 1:39:16Speaker 2: chat GPT. I think it was they didn't use GROC,
- 1:39:18Speaker 2: which is amusing anyway, into chat GPT, and then you know,
- 1:39:22Speaker 2: it would spit out like here's the ones that have
- 1:39:25Speaker 2: something woke in it, and they'd be like, okay, check
- 1:39:27Speaker 2: the box, like they don't know anything. They're just going
- 1:39:29Speaker 2: through letting a chat bot pick out the words that
- 1:39:32Speaker 2: they thought were like woken objectionable, and then tossing out programs.
- 1:39:36Speaker 2: That is the way that this operated.
- 1:39:38Speaker 4: A guy in the Navy told me that they came
- 1:39:40Speaker 4: after a program that had non binary in the name
- 1:39:44Speaker 4: because it was about game theory and decision making and
- 1:39:48Speaker 4: it was a.
- 1:39:49Speaker 2: Non binary choice in a naval.
- 1:39:51Speaker 3: Battle, right, so it was like non binary.
- 1:39:53Speaker 4: There were multiple different things that you could do in
- 1:39:56Speaker 4: this moment, and they were like, you have to cut this,
- 1:39:59Speaker 4: and he said they stood their ground, but it was
- 1:40:01Speaker 4: a massive fight. They're like, we are not cutting this,
- 1:40:05Speaker 4: and we're not changing the name because this is English
- 1:40:07Speaker 4: and we speak English.
- 1:40:10Speaker 3: And they eventually won. But yes, but that was greased.
- 1:40:12Speaker 3: They had a lot of power.
- 1:40:14Speaker 4: And so yep, so they did actually come for some
- 1:40:17Speaker 4: of these Pentagon that people say they didn't go for
- 1:40:18Speaker 4: the Pentagon, they actually did come for some of the
- 1:40:20Speaker 4: Pentagon stuff. Yeah, searching for non binary and stuff in
- 1:40:24Speaker 4: the Pentagon getting rid of anything that they thought was
- 1:40:27Speaker 4: the EI.
- 1:40:29Speaker 2: What a joke. What a joke, And here we are
- 1:40:32Speaker 2: having to now deal with the consequences. Who could have imagined? Indeed, So, guys,
- 1:40:39Speaker 2: we've covered a lot of important political campaigns throughout the cycle.
- 1:40:42Speaker 2: We're going to continue to do so. But rarely do
- 1:40:44Speaker 2: you have so many of the most central stories of
- 1:40:47Speaker 2: our politics come together in one race like we do
- 1:40:50Speaker 2: with this one. You've got the dump Tea Party, You've
- 1:40:53Speaker 2: got an APAC backed candidate who was losing support. You've
- 1:40:57Speaker 2: got the redistricting wars. You haven't a San Piker endorsement
- 1:41:00Speaker 2: thrown in there for good measures. You join us now
- 1:41:03Speaker 2: to talk about his campaign for Congress in Florida's twenty
- 1:41:06Speaker 2: fifth district against Jared Moscowitz. Is Oliver Larkin.
- 1:41:09Speaker 3: Great to see you, Oliver, Great to see you again, Crystal.
- 1:41:13Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, So you've been running against Moscowitz for
- 1:41:17Speaker 2: a while. We've spoken before, but the whole thing got
- 1:41:20Speaker 2: kind of turned upside down because Florida decided to completely
- 1:41:23Speaker 2: redistrict everything. So bring people up to speed, just a
- 1:41:26Speaker 2: little bit of year background. We'll get into Moscowitz in
- 1:41:28Speaker 2: a moment, and what the redistricting did to your campaign.
- 1:41:32Speaker 2: How it's all shaking out there.
- 1:41:34Speaker 3: Yeah.
- 1:41:35Speaker 9: So I'm running in this race as the only candidate
- 1:41:38Speaker 9: who's organized a work union in my workplace with the
- 1:41:41Speaker 9: news Guilled Communication Workers of America. So I'm a union organizer,
- 1:41:44Speaker 9: I'm a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer, and I'm someone
- 1:41:47Speaker 9: who's not taking any corporate pack money in this race.
- 1:41:50Speaker 9: And that's something we're really proud of. It is quite
- 1:41:52Speaker 9: unique in South Florida, which for so long has been
- 1:41:55Speaker 9: dominated by establishment politics. But we're showing that something different
- 1:41:58Speaker 9: is possible, and it's been more needed as we've seen
- 1:42:01Speaker 9: the bottom fall out for the Florida Democratic Party and
- 1:42:04Speaker 9: that's really left us powerless to this latest redistricting scheme
- 1:42:07Speaker 9: that Ron De Santis and Florida Republicans have embarked on
- 1:42:09Speaker 9: against the Florida Constitution and the Fair District's Amendment. And
- 1:42:13Speaker 9: what it did was it split our district into three
- 1:42:15Speaker 9: new ones. So we're running in the new twenty fifth district,
- 1:42:18Speaker 9: which constitutes about fifty percent of the old district. But
- 1:42:21Speaker 9: we've seen Republicans just try to grab at more and
- 1:42:24Speaker 9: more seats. We've gone from a state that was sixteen
- 1:42:27Speaker 9: to twelve a pretty even partisan redistribution. Now we've seen
- 1:42:32Speaker 9: it go from a twenty to eight map. Ron de
- 1:42:33Speaker 9: Santis drew the maps in twenty twenty two behind closed doors.
- 1:42:37Speaker 9: Usually when you do redistricting, it's done in the legislature,
- 1:42:40Speaker 9: it's done in the light of day. It's subject to
- 1:42:43Speaker 9: a legislative review. But because of fair districts and that
- 1:42:46Speaker 9: amendment in the Florida Constitution, Ron DeSantis knows that the
- 1:42:49Speaker 9: partisan redistricting scheme that he's embarked on, if it was
- 1:42:53Speaker 9: seen in the light of day, would be completely illegal.
- 1:42:55Speaker 9: So that's why they've done it behind closed doors. And
- 1:42:57Speaker 9: they've just gone even further at Donald Trump's behest.
- 1:43:00Speaker 2: So this district is this supposed to have been drawn
- 1:43:03Speaker 2: in this redistricting to be a Republican seat, and I
- 1:43:07Speaker 2: know you have some polling showing whether that's going to
- 1:43:09Speaker 2: work out or not.
- 1:43:11Speaker 9: Yeah, So this is absolutely one that Republicans wanted to
- 1:43:14Speaker 9: draw to advantage themselves to win in November. This is
- 1:43:17Speaker 9: a seat that Donald Trump won by nine points in
- 1:43:19Speaker 9: twenty twenty four, but Joe Biden won it by five
- 1:43:22Speaker 9: points in twenty twenty and in twenty eighteen, when the
- 1:43:24Speaker 9: state of Florida was decided at the gubernatorial and US
- 1:43:27Speaker 9: Senate election by a one point margin of victory, Democrats
- 1:43:30Speaker 9: also would have won us won this seat in that race,
- 1:43:33Speaker 9: and we've done polling that shows me ahead of the
- 1:43:36Speaker 9: two leading Republican contenders by nine points and twelve points, respectively.
- 1:43:40Speaker 9: Democrats have a twelve point generic ballot advantage. People are
- 1:43:43Speaker 9: so upset with the cost of gas, groceries, housing, people
- 1:43:46Speaker 9: are actually leaving South Florida in a reversal of the
- 1:43:49Speaker 9: COVID trend because it's becoming so unaffordable down here. And
- 1:43:52Speaker 9: so we have an advantage to press and we see
- 1:43:54Speaker 9: non party affiliated voters breaking towards Democrats, and this is
- 1:43:57Speaker 9: our moment that we need to assert the strongest candidate
- 1:44:00Speaker 9: possible to motivate the Democratic base. We cannot miss this
- 1:44:03Speaker 9: opportunity because again, if we nominate the same milk toast
- 1:44:06Speaker 9: centrist candidates that we've been doing, then we're going to
- 1:44:09Speaker 9: see more of the same in Florida, So we're really
- 1:44:11Speaker 9: trying to turn our state around, all right, So.
- 1:44:14Speaker 2: Let's talk about your Democratic primary contender. So you're running
- 1:44:18Speaker 2: against Jared Moskowitz. He is a current incumbent member of Congress.
- 1:44:22Speaker 2: I think he would probably describe himself as proudly pro APAC.
- 1:44:26Speaker 2: Play clip in a moment of him saying, of course,
- 1:44:28Speaker 2: I'm going to continue to take a PAC money and
- 1:44:30Speaker 2: how dare you even question those of us who are
- 1:44:33Speaker 2: recipients of these funds. He also describes himself, I think
- 1:44:37Speaker 2: as a Ron De Santis Democrat, which is something I've
- 1:44:40Speaker 2: never heard of before, So that's very innovative on his part.
- 1:44:44Speaker 2: Voted for the Lake and Riley Act he called Rocanna,
- 1:44:48Speaker 2: and Thomas Massey's Around Warpowers Resolution, the Ayatola Protection Act.
- 1:44:54Speaker 2: He is, I think, you know, pretty steadfastly one of
- 1:44:56Speaker 2: the most pro Israel Democrats in Congress, certainly, So let
- 1:45:01Speaker 2: me go ahead and play this clip that you shared
- 1:45:03Speaker 2: recently of him getting asked about his APAC funds and
- 1:45:07Speaker 2: whether he'll continue to take them, and then we can
- 1:45:09Speaker 2: get your reaction on the other side.
- 1:45:11Speaker 8: I think one of the areas that some people may
- 1:45:14Speaker 8: may end up criticizing you on is you are someone
- 1:45:17Speaker 8: who do accept donations from APAC. Are you going to
- 1:45:20Speaker 8: continue to take money from APACK? And and what do
- 1:45:24Speaker 8: you say to those critics who say that APAK has
- 1:45:26Speaker 8: been a malevolent force here in the United States and
- 1:45:28Speaker 8: many congressional races.
- 1:45:31Speaker 10: Yeah, am I going to take donations from Jewish Americans? Yes,
- 1:45:34Speaker 10: I am going to take donations from Jewish Americans, Okay,
- 1:45:38Speaker 10: And that's what APECK is. It is not anything other
- 1:45:41Speaker 10: than Jewish Americans donating through an organization, just like there
- 1:45:44Speaker 10: are a number of packs, very progressive packs, by the way,
- 1:45:48Speaker 10: in which very progressive people donate through a pack and
- 1:45:51Speaker 10: that pack gives. And so this is part again of
- 1:45:54Speaker 10: the singling out of just the Jewish organization. By the way,
- 1:45:57Speaker 10: I don't even think they make the top one hundred
- 1:46:00Speaker 10: of Packed donations in the country, yet they're being singled out.
- 1:46:04Speaker 2: So yet, s Jim, I will continue to.
- 1:46:06Speaker 10: Take nations from Jewish Americans who care about America.
- 1:46:11Speaker 9: Your response, Oliver, he can't actually say he takes a
- 1:46:15Speaker 9: PACKED donations because he knows how politically toxic it is.
- 1:46:19Speaker 9: And I just want to set the record straight for
- 1:46:21Speaker 9: people across the country. Who have any misconceptions about South
- 1:46:25Speaker 9: Florida in this new district in the twenty fifth district,
- 1:46:28Speaker 9: one of the highest representative Jewish congressional districts in the country,
- 1:46:32Speaker 9: with about twenty five percent of respondents in our poll.
- 1:46:35Speaker 9: In both the primary and general election, eighty six percent
- 1:46:38Speaker 9: of Democratic primary voters eighty six percent want to place
- 1:46:41Speaker 9: conditions or even cease entirely military aid to Israel. One
- 1:46:45Speaker 9: in every two Democratic primary voters wants at minimum conditions placed,
- 1:46:49Speaker 9: one in three wants to cease US military aid. And
- 1:46:52Speaker 9: this is a winning general election argument as well, because
- 1:46:54Speaker 9: sixty eight percent of general election voters Democrats, Republicans, and
- 1:46:59Speaker 9: independents the same thing. So we talk about how support
- 1:47:02Speaker 9: for Israel is a ninety ten issue where the people
- 1:47:05Speaker 9: of the United States want to see these conditions placed
- 1:47:08Speaker 9: or cease military aid entirely, which is my position and
- 1:47:11Speaker 9: APAC would have us believe differently, but it is not true.
- 1:47:14Speaker 9: There is a majority all across this country that is
- 1:47:17Speaker 9: disgusted by what our members of Congress on both sides
- 1:47:20Speaker 9: are enabling by taking these APAC donations, and as Jared
- 1:47:23Speaker 9: Moskwitz has done, offering the House resolution to bar the
- 1:47:26Speaker 9: State Department from citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry.
- 1:47:29Speaker 9: It's literal genocide denial. And then he's gone ahead and
- 1:47:31Speaker 9: centered Rashida Talib as you mentioned with his opposition to
- 1:47:35Speaker 9: the War Powers Resolution. His four purchases of Lockheed Martin
- 1:47:39Speaker 9: stock hid an all time high on the market the
- 1:47:41Speaker 9: monday after Donald Trump launched these illegal strikes.
- 1:47:43Speaker 3: So there's a tremendous amount of corruption.
- 1:47:45Speaker 9: And just to set the record straight about APAC as well,
- 1:47:48Speaker 9: this is a group that supported one hundred and nine
- 1:47:50Speaker 9: insurrectionists in the twenty twenty two midterms. So this is
- 1:47:53Speaker 9: not simply about, you know, Israel, It is about APAC's
- 1:47:57Speaker 9: corrupting influence in our country and what they empowering with
- 1:48:01Speaker 9: the fascist right.
- 1:48:02Speaker 1: Yeah.
- 1:48:02Speaker 2: Well, and when he says, oh, it's just support from
- 1:48:05Speaker 2: Jewish Americans, I mean that's not actually what APAX mission
- 1:48:08Speaker 2: is whatsoever. It's to enforce the lockstep support of the
- 1:48:13Speaker 2: positions of the Israeli government and has many supporters that
- 1:48:18Speaker 2: are not in fact Jewish, and there are many Jewish
- 1:48:20Speaker 2: Americans who of course oppose deeply what APAC is up
- 1:48:24Speaker 2: to in the positions that they support. Tell us a
- 1:48:27Speaker 2: little bit more about Jared Moskowitz. What does he mean
- 1:48:30Speaker 2: when he calls himself a Ron DeSantis Democrat. How has
- 1:48:34Speaker 2: he positioned himself politically?
- 1:48:36Speaker 9: Yeah, so the reference to being a Desantist Democrat is
- 1:48:40Speaker 9: Jared Moskowitz was politically appointed twice, not once, but twice
- 1:48:44Speaker 9: by our governor, once to the Florida Department of Emergency
- 1:48:47Speaker 9: Management and then to the Broward County Commission. So Ron
- 1:48:50Speaker 9: DeSantis has been Jared Moskowitz's stepping stone to Congress. And
- 1:48:54Speaker 9: it's why he's so reluctant to criticize the governor When
- 1:48:57Speaker 9: he's gone after pride flag street art in the city
- 1:48:59Speaker 9: of Fort Auderdale, in our district and in other cities
- 1:49:02Speaker 9: across the state, Jared Moskwitz has not spoken out against it.
- 1:49:06Speaker 9: When Jared Moscowitz went to tour Alligator Alcatraz, which was
- 1:49:09Speaker 9: set up by the DeSantis administration, Jared Moskwood said, don't
- 1:49:12Speaker 9: call this a concentration camp, as he is literally taking
- 1:49:15Speaker 9: max out donations from the private security contractors working not
- 1:49:19Speaker 9: only at Alligator Alcatraz, but that we're also putting in
- 1:49:22Speaker 9: bids for the Gaza Board of Peace. So Jared Moskwitz
- 1:49:26Speaker 9: owes his political career to Ron DeSantis, and that is
- 1:49:29Speaker 9: how he is positioning himself. He doesn't have a bad
- 1:49:32Speaker 9: word to say about any Republican. If you've heard him
- 1:49:35Speaker 9: in some of his viral clips on the House committees,
- 1:49:38Speaker 9: he is saying not that Donald Trump can fail, only
- 1:49:41Speaker 9: that he can be failed by his subordinates like Pam
- 1:49:44Speaker 9: Bondi and Christinom. Jared Moskowitz was considered to be Trump's
- 1:49:48Speaker 9: FEMA pic, the only Democrat in Trump's cabinet, and the
- 1:49:51Speaker 9: day that we launched this campaign, a pull went out
- 1:49:53Speaker 9: in our district asking if the election were held today
- 1:49:55Speaker 9: and the candidates were Jared Moskowitz, a Republican with Donald
- 1:49:58Speaker 9: Trump's endorsement, and all over Larkin the Democrat, for.
- 1:50:01Speaker 3: Whom would you vote?
- 1:50:02Speaker 9: So Jared Mosquwitz I fear very much as someone who
- 1:50:05Speaker 9: could be a turncoat after winning this election and crossing
- 1:50:09Speaker 9: over to the other side and again using the excuse
- 1:50:11Speaker 9: of anti semitism on the left. I just saw before
- 1:50:14Speaker 9: we jumped on here that he's once again criticizing Hassan Piker.
- 1:50:18Speaker 9: This is someone who is punching left reflexibly and doesn't
- 1:50:21Speaker 9: have a bad word to say about the fascist right,
- 1:50:24Speaker 9: that is driving our state and our country into the dustbin.
- 1:50:28Speaker 2: Recollection is he takes a big tech and crypto money
- 1:50:31Speaker 2: as well.
- 1:50:33Speaker 9: Yeah, he took over a quarter of a million dollars
- 1:50:36Speaker 9: from Sam Bankman Freeze Pack in twenty twenty two. He
- 1:50:39Speaker 9: also is very much enmeshed in the artificial intelligence kind
- 1:50:44Speaker 9: of support. I mean, palent here just moved their corporate
- 1:50:47Speaker 9: headquarters to South Florida, to the city of Aventshura in
- 1:50:50Speaker 9: the twenty fifth district. So it is open season for
- 1:50:53Speaker 9: these fascists collaborating organizations and corporations to move down here.
- 1:50:58Speaker 9: We've got the headquarters of the Geogroup, the private prison corporation,
- 1:51:02Speaker 9: headquartered in Boca Ratone, right across the street from Florida
- 1:51:05Speaker 9: Atlantic University in our district. And we can talk about
- 1:51:08Speaker 9: how Jared Mosqwitz publicly recommended a Geogroup private prison executive
- 1:51:13Speaker 9: to lead a public university in our district. As we
- 1:51:15Speaker 9: now see the new ICE director, the acting director was
- 1:51:19Speaker 9: a twelve year executive at Geogroup, and we see the
- 1:51:21Speaker 9: controversy around their administration of Delaney Hall in New Jersey.
- 1:51:26Speaker 9: We are at the epicenter of this in South Florida.
- 1:51:29Speaker 9: And we cannot allow Democrats to be paying lip service
- 1:51:33Speaker 9: to these corporations that are increasing masurveillance over Americans, that
- 1:51:37Speaker 9: are violating our civil and constitutional rights. We have to
- 1:51:40Speaker 9: make a stand, and it has to be here in
- 1:51:42Speaker 9: this primary.
- 1:51:44Speaker 2: Let's talk a little bit about you and your journey.
- 1:51:46Speaker 2: I was reading a profile of you that you were
- 1:51:48Speaker 2: working for a political consultancy. You found yourself like sending
- 1:51:51Speaker 2: out all of these Adam Schiff fundraising emails, and you
- 1:51:55Speaker 2: had kind of like a how did I end up here? Moment?
- 1:51:59Speaker 2: When you were at a fundraiser room there were Gaza
- 1:52:01Speaker 2: protesters outside, and You're like, wait, I'm on their side.
- 1:52:05Speaker 2: What am I doing here? Can you talk just a
- 1:52:07Speaker 2: little bit about what that journey has been for you
- 1:52:09Speaker 2: and what made you decide to want to jump into
- 1:52:11Speaker 2: this race.
- 1:52:12Speaker 3: Yeah? Absolutely so.
- 1:52:14Speaker 9: When I was twenty three years old, I was graduating
- 1:52:16Speaker 9: from college with a mountain of student loan debt, and
- 1:52:19Speaker 9: I was working for eight bucks an hour as a
- 1:52:21Speaker 9: line cook in my college campus restaurant. And I saw
- 1:52:24Speaker 9: Bernie Sanders talking about a fifteen dollars minimum wage and
- 1:52:27Speaker 9: medicare for all in college for all, and for the
- 1:52:29Speaker 9: first time in what felt like my life. I heard
- 1:52:31Speaker 9: a politician describing the material conditions that I was working
- 1:52:35Speaker 9: under and providing a path forward to make my life better.
- 1:52:38Speaker 9: So I was so inspired by that as he was
- 1:52:41Speaker 9: down fifty sixty points in the polls, that I actually
- 1:52:43Speaker 9: quit that job as a line cook and I drove
- 1:52:45Speaker 9: to New Hampshire just to show up at the office
- 1:52:48Speaker 9: and show up every single day until I could get
- 1:52:51Speaker 9: a job on his campaign staff, and I traveled the
- 1:52:53Speaker 9: country with the Sanders campaign. After that campaign was over,
- 1:52:56Speaker 9: I went to the digital marketing agency that the campaign used.
- 1:53:00Speaker 9: I helped organize a union as a member of the
- 1:53:02Speaker 9: organizing committee, one of the first political consulting firms to
- 1:53:06Speaker 9: win a union, in tandem with my comrades's efforts to
- 1:53:09Speaker 9: establish the Campaign Workers Guild to unionize the political campaign
- 1:53:13Speaker 9: industry in that twenty eighteen cycle. But you go into
- 1:53:16Speaker 9: politics with this belief that you were fighting for something
- 1:53:19Speaker 9: greater than yourself, that you're fighting for your ideals. But
- 1:53:23Speaker 9: in this corrupt campaign finance industry and in the kind
- 1:53:27Speaker 9: of corporatized and businesslike political campaign industry, we just see
- 1:53:32Speaker 9: these recurring themes of layoffs, of taking advantage of these young,
- 1:53:37Speaker 9: bright eyed campaign staffers, laying them off and then having
- 1:53:40Speaker 9: them start over from scratch after election after election. And
- 1:53:43Speaker 9: so after having gone through that a few times, and
- 1:53:46Speaker 9: really just ultimately for my own job security, taking a
- 1:53:50Speaker 9: position and finding myself at the same time that I
- 1:53:54Speaker 9: was working to oppose Donald Trump and was hired to
- 1:53:57Speaker 9: start working with Adam Schiff after the January sixth insurrection,
- 1:54:01Speaker 9: I felt like there was a tremendous amount of importance
- 1:54:04Speaker 9: in what I was doing, But at the same time,
- 1:54:05Speaker 9: I felt that I'd strayed so far from the original
- 1:54:08Speaker 9: values that brought me into politics in the first place.
- 1:54:11Speaker 9: And after we saw, just as in twenty sixteen, in
- 1:54:13Speaker 9: twenty twenty four, everything that you were told to accept,
- 1:54:17Speaker 9: as a matter of course, everything that you are told
- 1:54:20Speaker 9: to tolerate from this Democratic Party establishment in pursuit of
- 1:54:24Speaker 9: a larger goal of defeating fascism, of defeating Donald Trump,
- 1:54:28Speaker 9: we saw that that just was not true. And you're
- 1:54:31Speaker 9: exactly right, Crystal. When I found myself at a fundraiser
- 1:54:34Speaker 9: for Joe Biden in South Florida and I saw three
- 1:54:37Speaker 9: Palestine protesters on the other side, it was clear to
- 1:54:40Speaker 9: me that I was so far from where I had
- 1:54:43Speaker 9: originally entered into politics to affect the kind of work
- 1:54:47Speaker 9: and change that I wanted to see. And then when
- 1:54:49Speaker 9: I saw my Congressman Jared Mosquitz blaming progressives for why
- 1:54:54Speaker 9: we lost the twenty twenty four election in the same
- 1:54:56Speaker 9: breath that he is becoming the first Democrat in Congress
- 1:54:59Speaker 9: to join Elon Musk's Doche Caucus, I just knew that
- 1:55:01Speaker 9: I did not want to go back and continue to
- 1:55:04Speaker 9: do more of the same. I actually was offered a
- 1:55:07Speaker 9: position to do Jared Moskowitz's emails, but instead of doing that,
- 1:55:11Speaker 9: I decided to stand up to him because we have
- 1:55:14Speaker 9: to change this campaign finance industry. It's gone from the
- 1:55:18Speaker 9: empowerment of small dollar donations against the corporate packs and
- 1:55:21Speaker 9: the super PACs to now this just total invasion of
- 1:55:25Speaker 9: privacy where we see big tech rearing its ugly head
- 1:55:28Speaker 9: and creating more and more incentive not to affect political change,
- 1:55:32Speaker 9: but to raise the stakes of the kind of partisan
- 1:55:36Speaker 9: fur that is really driving people so crazy with our politics. Yeah,
- 1:55:41Speaker 9: and I just needed to break out of it and
- 1:55:43Speaker 9: really return to my roots that I found on the
- 1:55:46Speaker 9: Bernie Sanders campaign and be that kind of change agent
- 1:55:49Speaker 9: that I wanted to see for over a decade in
- 1:55:52Speaker 9: South Florida where I grew up, and this is the
- 1:55:54Speaker 9: race where I had to make that stand.
- 1:55:56Speaker 2: Can you give people a little bit of a window
- 1:55:58Speaker 2: into the sausage make of that campaign fundraising industry, because
- 1:56:04Speaker 2: you know, I ran for Congress at this point, it's
- 1:56:05Speaker 2: been million years ago in twenty ten, and obviously fundraising
- 1:56:09Speaker 2: dominates your day. You got at the time, you got
- 1:56:11Speaker 2: all these calle es. You're just calling through donors endlessly.
- 1:56:14Speaker 2: It gives you some like data on them and what
- 1:56:16Speaker 2: they've given to you before. We were you know, we're
- 1:56:18Speaker 2: sending on emails. This was really pre text messages, but
- 1:56:22Speaker 2: we're constantly trying to come up with like, Okay, what's
- 1:56:25Speaker 2: the email that's going to grab their attention? And there's
- 1:56:27Speaker 2: almost like this arms race of attention grabbing. What does
- 1:56:31Speaker 2: it look like today when you were doing fundraising for
- 1:56:34Speaker 2: Adam Schiff? What was the sort of like mindset that
- 1:56:36Speaker 2: you had as political events would unfold or if Trump
- 1:56:39Speaker 2: like said his name or called him a name, how
- 1:56:42Speaker 2: were you thinking about how do I maximize what I
- 1:56:45Speaker 2: can pull out of people's in the grassroots pockets.
- 1:56:48Speaker 9: Yeah, it's all about that rapid response. As soon as
- 1:56:51Speaker 9: Donald Trump tweets something, as soon as there's a breaking
- 1:56:54Speaker 9: news event, you are going into the text messaging platform,
- 1:56:57Speaker 9: you're going into the email platform and sending it out.
- 1:57:00Speaker 9: And we even see how this is used now to
- 1:57:03Speaker 9: prop up establishment candidates. And there's one very prime example
- 1:57:07Speaker 9: here in South Florida with the Senate candidate that's running
- 1:57:10Speaker 9: against Angie Nixon in our US Senate primary. There are
- 1:57:14Speaker 9: DC politicians, establishment Democrats that just select at the very
- 1:57:19Speaker 9: start of a cycle, this is the person we're going
- 1:57:21Speaker 9: to get behind. We've seen how Chuck Schumer has done
- 1:57:23Speaker 9: that with Janet Mills in Maine with a candidate out
- 1:57:26Speaker 9: in Iowa's up for election today against a more progressive candidate,
- 1:57:30Speaker 9: and they just funnel all of this energy, all of
- 1:57:33Speaker 9: this money into pre selecting for us, rather than letting
- 1:57:37Speaker 9: the voters decide these are the people that we are
- 1:57:39Speaker 9: going to boost and to elevate. And there's a tremendous
- 1:57:42Speaker 9: amount of violation of our data privacy. I remember when
- 1:57:45Speaker 9: I got into political fundraising. You would run petition campaigns
- 1:57:49Speaker 9: on Facebook to sign up and support of Medicare for All,
- 1:57:51Speaker 9: to get on Bernie Sanders' email list and affirmatively opt in. Now,
- 1:57:55Speaker 9: with the way that the political finance industry works, you're
- 1:57:58Speaker 9: just seeing who ran for my seat last time, I'm
- 1:58:00Speaker 9: going to buy their entire list, and before you know it,
- 1:58:02Speaker 9: you donate to one candidate and you end up on
- 1:58:04Speaker 9: the fundraising list of twelve that you've never heard of before,
- 1:58:07Speaker 9: and it just becomes an overwhelming, oversaturated, politicized kind of
- 1:58:13Speaker 9: effort that really does not directly connect with people the
- 1:58:18Speaker 9: way that they believe they should when a candidate reaches
- 1:58:21Speaker 9: out and asks them for money. So what we're trying
- 1:58:24Speaker 9: to do is very different running on this grassroots fundraising model.
- 1:58:27Speaker 9: Of course, I don't have any politicians in Washington, DC
- 1:58:31Speaker 9: that are boosting my campaign from the very start. This
- 1:58:34Speaker 9: was grassroots from the beginning, and the only way that
- 1:58:36Speaker 9: we've been able to grow it is by just going
- 1:58:38Speaker 9: out there and speaking the truth. And I think one
- 1:58:40Speaker 9: thing that I've been really proud of on this campaign
- 1:58:43Speaker 9: when I went on Hassan Piker's stream, Wired wrote an
- 1:58:45Speaker 9: article after the fact to say, this is how political
- 1:58:48Speaker 9: fundraising is changing in this new environment where people expect
- 1:58:52Speaker 9: a greater degree of accessibility. They don't want to see,
- 1:58:55Speaker 9: and I'm sure candidates, including myself, don't want to spend
- 1:58:58Speaker 9: all day every day on the phone. So if we
- 1:59:01Speaker 9: can speak to mass audiences and connect on issues and
- 1:59:04Speaker 9: discuss ideas, and also use that as a means of fundraising,
- 1:59:08Speaker 9: that's I think the recipe to at least elevate more
- 1:59:12Speaker 9: grassroots candidates. But then when we get in there, we
- 1:59:15Speaker 9: absolutely need to enact campaign finance reform with public financing
- 1:59:18Speaker 9: of elections. We cannot continue to ask people across the
- 1:59:22Speaker 9: country to donate five bucks, ten bucks, twenty bucks for
- 1:59:25Speaker 9: what is this the most important election of our lifetime,
- 1:59:28Speaker 9: for the fifth cycle running. I mean, we need to
- 1:59:31Speaker 9: change and actually move forward and overturn Citizens United and
- 1:59:35Speaker 9: return our democracy to something that's more participatory and less
- 1:59:39Speaker 9: subject to whether or not you.
- 1:59:40Speaker 3: Can pay at the door.
- 1:59:42Speaker 2: I'd never been more convinced that that is absolutely existential
- 1:59:45Speaker 2: if we're going to continue forward with anything approaching even
- 1:59:48Speaker 2: like a semblance of democracy. It's just gotten so incredibly
- 1:59:52Speaker 2: out of hand. I wanted to ask you a little
- 1:59:54Speaker 2: bit about Florida and this issue in particular. This is
- 1:59:57Speaker 2: this something that Sager and I've covered a bit, which
- 1:59:59Speaker 2: is the housing market get in Florida. And someone shared
- 2:00:01Speaker 2: with this with me recently. I wanted to get your
- 2:00:03Speaker 2: reaction to it. So this says, as of this morning,
- 2:00:07Speaker 2: twelve percent of Flora's four sale homes are an active
- 2:00:09Speaker 2: fire sale territory. That means they've been sitting on the market.
- 2:00:12Speaker 2: The seller's actively cutting prices and increasing the frequency of
- 2:00:15Speaker 2: those price cuts, pressures mainly concentrated Tampa and Fort Myers,
- 2:00:18Speaker 2: where fire sales now top thirty percent of listings in
- 2:00:21Speaker 2: some sub markets. That mean sellers cannot find buyers even
- 2:00:24Speaker 2: though they want to. And the ankle that Sager and
- 2:00:26Speaker 2: I have covered is how difficult and expensive it is
- 2:00:30Speaker 2: increasingly sometimes impossible to get homeowners insurance in Florida, primarily
- 2:00:35Speaker 2: because of climate change and hurricane and flooding risk in
- 2:00:40Speaker 2: vulnerable communities. And so I wonder what you can tell
- 2:00:42Speaker 2: us about the housing market in Florida and how much
- 2:00:45Speaker 2: that comes up on the campaign trail for you?
- 2:00:47Speaker 9: Also, Yeah, it comes up all the time. And running
- 2:00:51Speaker 9: a grassroots campaign, I'm out there canvassing every weekend. I'm
- 2:00:54Speaker 9: talking to voters face to face, and I've been in
- 2:00:57Speaker 9: working class communities in our old district, and I spoke
- 2:01:00Speaker 9: to a Puerto Rican Marine Corps veteran who's over the
- 2:01:04Speaker 9: age of sixty five. He's on Social Security, on a
- 2:01:07Speaker 9: fixed income, and his homeowner's property insurance doubled from three
- 2:01:11Speaker 9: thousand dollars to six thousand dollars, and the math just
- 2:01:14Speaker 9: doesn't add up, and so people are now fleeing the
- 2:01:17Speaker 9: state of Florida and looking for more affordable places in
- 2:01:20Speaker 9: the country to live. There's long been this narrative since
- 2:01:24Speaker 9: COVID and since Ronda Santis was campaigning on the Free
- 2:01:27Speaker 9: State of Florida that we were having an influx of
- 2:01:30Speaker 9: in migration and the population is growing. But we've seen
- 2:01:33Speaker 9: in recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal and other
- 2:01:36Speaker 9: outlets that people are now fleeing South Florida because the
- 2:01:39Speaker 9: property insurance crisis is so bad. And this is connected
- 2:01:42Speaker 9: to other parts of the country. In Florida, we suffer
- 2:01:45Speaker 9: from hurricanes, from flooding, but if you go out west,
- 2:01:48Speaker 9: it's wildfires, it's extreme drought, and it's really precipitating a
- 2:01:54Speaker 9: need for a national homeowner's insurance solution to lower costs
- 2:01:58Speaker 9: and get control of these rates. But Democrats like Jared
- 2:02:01Speaker 9: Moskowitz aren't helping if you look at Lenar Holmes, the
- 2:02:04Speaker 9: private home construction industry, their top three donation recipients in
- 2:02:08Speaker 9: the twenty twenty four cycle where Jared Moskowitz, Jared Moskowitz's Pack,
- 2:02:12Speaker 9: and the National Republican Congressional Committee. So if that doesn't
- 2:02:16Speaker 9: tell you where Jared Moskwitz's priorities lie when it comes
- 2:02:19Speaker 9: to affordable housing, this is who we have as the
- 2:02:23Speaker 9: Democratic Congressional Committee boosts Moskwitz in our primary as a
- 2:02:27Speaker 9: frontline candidate despite being the least effective Democrat in Congress,
- 2:02:30Speaker 9: and it's directly tied to his inability to address the
- 2:02:34Speaker 9: homeowner's insurance crisis, his inability to address the rise of
- 2:02:38Speaker 9: utility rates, as he's taken over twenty seven thousand dollars
- 2:02:41Speaker 9: from the parent company of Florida Power and Light, not
- 2:02:44Speaker 9: only to mention Southern Company and Duke Energy and Next
- 2:02:47Speaker 9: Air Energy. FPL's parent company is now trying to merge
- 2:02:50Speaker 9: with Dominion in a multi multi, multi billion dollar deal.
- 2:02:54Speaker 9: Jared Moskwitz is not addressing these concerns. But we need
- 2:02:59Speaker 9: to lower the cost of housing, and it has to
- 2:03:01Speaker 9: include repealing the Fair Cloth Amendment and passing legislation like
- 2:03:05Speaker 9: ilhan Omar's Homes for All Act to really build, you know,
- 2:03:09Speaker 9: millions of new affordable homes across the country because the
- 2:03:12Speaker 9: cost of housing in Florida is far too high and
- 2:03:14Speaker 9: climate change is only making it worse.
- 2:03:17Speaker 2: And then my last question for you is about the
- 2:03:19Speaker 2: Democratic Party in Florida. Obviously hasn't done very well in
- 2:03:23Speaker 2: recent years. I'm old enough to remember when Florida was
- 2:03:25Speaker 2: the ultimate swing state no longer. What did Trump win
- 2:03:29Speaker 2: it by double digits, I know, like thirteen points this
- 2:03:31Speaker 2: last time around. Ron DeSantis seems to be dominant, But
- 2:03:36Speaker 2: I have seen some polling recently that shows both the
- 2:03:39Speaker 2: Democratic gubernatorial candidate and the Senate candidates are in range of,
- 2:03:44Speaker 2: you know, having a shot. So I wonder if you
- 2:03:47Speaker 2: think that there is a possibility. Why you think Democrats
- 2:03:50Speaker 2: have you know, fallen off so hard in the state
- 2:03:54Speaker 2: of Florida, And what you think needs to be done
- 2:03:57Speaker 2: to write the course if it's possible.
- 2:03:59Speaker 9: Yeah, having a conversation about this with Richie Floyd, who's
- 2:04:03Speaker 9: another Democratic socialist who was recently re elected unopposed to
- 2:04:07Speaker 9: the Saint Petersburg City Council, and we had a call
- 2:04:10Speaker 9: on Florida Emancipation Day, and we were reflecting after I
- 2:04:13Speaker 9: had worked on twenty eighteen's Amendment for a campaign to
- 2:04:16Speaker 9: restore voting rights to over a million Floridians in that
- 2:04:19Speaker 9: next election, Ron DeSantis was making political propaganda out of
- 2:04:23Speaker 9: arresting recently returning citizens with the recently restored right to vote.
- 2:04:29Speaker 9: Of course, the Florida legislature passed what amounts to a
- 2:04:32Speaker 9: poll tax after by requiring that returning citizens with their
- 2:04:36Speaker 9: right to vote restored would have to pay for court
- 2:04:39Speaker 9: fees before they were actually eligible. So they're creating political
- 2:04:42Speaker 9: propaganda to discourage recently re enfranchised voters from participating in
- 2:04:46Speaker 9: the process. Of course, they had purged the voter roles
- 2:04:49Speaker 9: and made people who were inactive voters just purging them
- 2:04:52Speaker 9: from the roles entirely. So Republicans have been touting this
- 2:04:55Speaker 9: one and a half million dollar one and a half
- 2:04:57Speaker 9: million voter registration advantage, but it's not actually reflective of
- 2:05:01Speaker 9: how people in our state feel. And right now, the
- 2:05:04Speaker 9: way that we feel after thirty plus years of unified
- 2:05:07Speaker 9: Republican governance in Tallahassee and a trifect in Washington, DC,
- 2:05:12Speaker 9: is that our problems amount to the Republican Party's leadership,
- 2:05:15Speaker 9: and so we are looking for alternatives. There is not
- 2:05:17Speaker 9: a tremendous amount of trust in the Florida Democratic Party,
- 2:05:20Speaker 9: which is why campaigns like ours are so important to
- 2:05:22Speaker 9: show people that are sick of both parties that we
- 2:05:25Speaker 9: are asserting a new vision for our state. I do
- 2:05:28Speaker 9: really feel like there is a chance to win more
- 2:05:31Speaker 9: seats in Florida this cycle. We've seen in our polling,
- 2:05:35Speaker 9: non party affiliated voters are breaking in some cases twenty
- 2:05:38Speaker 9: points towards the Democratic Party. And this is a state
- 2:05:41Speaker 9: where NPA's makeup I believe more than both Republicans and
- 2:05:45Speaker 9: Democrats independently. This is a working class state. It's a
- 2:05:49Speaker 9: state that is rejecting partisan politics, and I think that's
- 2:05:52Speaker 9: why we're seeing this kind of movement. But to again
- 2:05:54Speaker 9: take the greatest advantage of it, we cannot simply cowtow
- 2:05:58Speaker 9: to what the washing in DC corporate Democratic establishment wants,
- 2:06:02Speaker 9: because what they've prescribed for us over the past decade
- 2:06:05Speaker 9: has only led us to more and more failure. So
- 2:06:07Speaker 9: we need something different, all.
- 2:06:09Speaker 2: Right, Oliver, t help you more. They can support your
- 2:06:11Speaker 2: campaign if they are so inclined.
- 2:06:14Speaker 9: Www dot Oliver Fourcongress dot com. That's where you can
- 2:06:17Speaker 9: find us on social you can donate some money, and
- 2:06:19Speaker 9: if you're in Florida you can volunteer.
- 2:06:21Speaker 2: And primary is August am I right about.
- 2:06:24Speaker 3: That, August eighteenth.
- 2:06:26Speaker 2: Okay, so you got you still got a little bit
- 2:06:28Speaker 2: of time, but it's a fast approach. I'm just thinking about,
- 2:06:31Speaker 2: you know, all these campaigns that are coming up, like
- 2:06:32Speaker 2: this week and next week and whatever, but certainly in
- 2:06:35Speaker 2: the home stretch here, Oliver, thank you so much for
- 2:06:37Speaker 2: taking the time. It's great to reconnect with you.
- 2:06:39Speaker 3: Thank you so much. Crystal.
- 2:06:41Speaker 5: All right, Ryan, first AMA question we have here is
- 2:06:43Speaker 5: from Andrea, who says, can we see Ryan on THEO Vaughn?
- 2:06:46Speaker 3: Would that be a possibility? I think you guys would vibe.
- 2:06:49Speaker 3: That would be good Ryan. I think it would be
- 2:06:51Speaker 3: a good vibe. That'd be fun. Yeah, theo's got a call.
- 2:06:56Speaker 3: I'm not pitching. But where does he tape? Is he
- 2:07:01Speaker 3: a Texan? What's his story?
- 2:07:03Speaker 5: He's Nashville, I'm pretty sure. Okay, this is a funny
- 2:07:08Speaker 5: one from Lee. Well, I guess it's it's kind of funny,
- 2:07:11Speaker 5: but it's it's also kind of serious. Lisays, why is
- 2:07:13Speaker 5: China not making Cuba a solar powered state.
- 2:07:17Speaker 4: So I actually have an interview that I need to
- 2:07:19Speaker 4: get up with the Cuban official who oversaw or is
- 2:07:23Speaker 4: overseeing the energy transition, and it's fascinating to clean energy,
- 2:07:29Speaker 4: and she said that it's China, Like China is totally
- 2:07:35Speaker 4: responsible for what they've been able to do, and at
- 2:07:38Speaker 4: times they're getting to twenty five maybe twenty five percent
- 2:07:41Speaker 4: renewable generation, but China could be doing a lot more,
- 2:07:44Speaker 4: Like they have so much stuff, and they also have
- 2:07:50Speaker 4: so many people, Like if they can apparently build a
- 2:07:54Speaker 4: city of ten million people in like six weeks, like
- 2:07:58Speaker 4: they could send over a couple thousand people plus just
- 2:08:03Speaker 4: flooded with the panels and set it up like they could.
- 2:08:07Speaker 4: So the fact that they haven't, like they've they've been
- 2:08:11Speaker 4: very helpful. Cuba would be screwed without them. But they
- 2:08:13Speaker 4: could do so much more. And I think they don't
- 2:08:17Speaker 4: want to poke the US bear.
- 2:08:21Speaker 3: Their approach has always been to just be careful and
- 2:08:26Speaker 3: Iran too, Yeah, they don't.
- 2:08:28Speaker 4: They they are the opposite of the US when it
- 2:08:31Speaker 4: comes to how how we kind of engage with the world.
- 2:08:34Speaker 4: We're everywhere all the time and violently. They just want
- 2:08:39Speaker 4: to like come in, build a road, get you on
- 2:08:42Speaker 4: the hook, extract your resources, the road collapses like too bad,
- 2:08:49Speaker 4: got your resources.
- 2:08:51Speaker 5: And and they have like this minimal like intel footprint.
- 2:08:54Speaker 5: But they probably don't want to jeopardize that because what
- 2:08:57Speaker 5: that could mean, I mean, the foothold for them in
- 2:08:59Speaker 5: the future could be really important. So I guess maybe
- 2:09:01Speaker 5: they wouldn't want to have some type of full scale
- 2:09:04Speaker 5: military It wouldn't be in their interest if there is
- 2:09:06Speaker 5: some full scale like military blow up over Cuba, because
- 2:09:09Speaker 5: then they probably if Trump does to Cuba what he
- 2:09:12Speaker 5: did to Venezuela, then there's no Chinese foothold there.
- 2:09:14Speaker 4: I guess it is sad because, like you know, the
- 2:09:17Speaker 4: island is a washing sun.
- 2:09:20Speaker 3: Yeah, they should not be relying on oil.
- 2:09:26Speaker 5: This one is from Benjamin T who says, do you
- 2:09:27Speaker 5: think MASSI could still win his congressional seat by running
- 2:09:30Speaker 5: as an independent? My first answer to that would probably
- 2:09:32Speaker 5: my instinct is no. I wouldn't say it's impossible, but
- 2:09:35Speaker 5: it's just a very I mean, he lost the Republican
- 2:09:37Speaker 5: primary in a very Republican district. So do I think
- 2:09:41Speaker 5: there are probably some like independent dem leaners who could
- 2:09:45Speaker 5: help get him? I mean, he was forty five percent
- 2:09:47Speaker 5: in the Republican primary, so it's I think mathematically possible.
- 2:09:51Speaker 5: But I would just probably unlikely because all that same
- 2:09:55Speaker 5: money that came in this.
- 2:09:57Speaker 3: First time around would come in even hot.
- 2:10:00Speaker 5: They've got plenty of money to spend against him. So
- 2:10:03Speaker 5: and he had he did well raising money, small dollar
- 2:10:06Speaker 5: money in particular.
- 2:10:07Speaker 3: But I don't know, Ryan, what do you think about that?
- 2:10:10Speaker 4: You know that district much better? Yeah, so, yeah, it
- 2:10:13Speaker 4: would be really tough given all the money. Would the
- 2:10:18Speaker 4: Democrat drop out?
- 2:10:19Speaker 5: Is?
- 2:10:19Speaker 3: I assume there's a Democrat who won the nomination has
- 2:10:23Speaker 3: no chance. That's a good point.
- 2:10:24Speaker 5: That's a good point actually, because I bet you know
- 2:10:26Speaker 5: there's even if there's twenty percent fifteen percent, like hardcore
- 2:10:29Speaker 5: done voters in that district, they're probably not going to
- 2:10:31Speaker 5: go form MASSI so most of them.
- 2:10:35Speaker 3: Yeah, Right.
- 2:10:35Speaker 4: If you're a national Democrat, you like Massy because he's
- 2:10:38Speaker 4: been bucking the Republicans. If you're a local Democrat, you
- 2:10:41Speaker 4: probably annoyed at him for like, because you know him
- 2:10:46Speaker 4: better and you know the freedom call gets history.
- 2:10:49Speaker 3: He's never been HFC technically.
- 2:10:51Speaker 5: I used to like to get reminded by HFC by
- 2:10:54Speaker 5: that all the time and be like, hey, you guys
- 2:10:55Speaker 5: have yeah, anyone, but he was.
- 2:10:57Speaker 3: An HFC j Yeah, yes, yes, he hung out with them.
- 2:11:02Speaker 3: This one.
- 2:11:02Speaker 5: I'm curious, Joe says, what's your take on Zoro Ranch
- 2:11:05Speaker 5: Epstein New Mexico cover of Allegations and Ran I'm very
- 2:11:08Speaker 5: curious what your take is on that because I don't
- 2:11:10Speaker 5: know that I've ever heard you talk about it, but
- 2:11:11Speaker 5: that story is endlessly fascinating.
- 2:11:15Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't know enough about it, but yeah, like again,
- 2:11:21Speaker 4: like very little investigation speaking of the New York Times,
- 2:11:25Speaker 4: Like come on, Like there's a lot, Like if you're
- 2:11:29Speaker 4: going to put months of resources from your top reporters
- 2:11:32Speaker 4: into like investigating something I don't know if grand plantners
- 2:11:38Speaker 4: as girlfriends or the place you're going to strike gold,
- 2:11:42Speaker 4: like send them out to the ranch.
- 2:11:46Speaker 3: Like yeah, like there's a lot to uncover.
- 2:11:50Speaker 4: Still when it comes to the behavior of Epstein and
- 2:11:53Speaker 4: is Cohort, Yeah, what do you think?
- 2:11:59Speaker 3: I mean, there's so much. What's the craziest part to
- 2:12:01Speaker 3: you about it?
- 2:12:04Speaker 5: How incurious New Mexico officials were about it for so long,
- 2:12:11Speaker 5: very very very very bizarre. Just I went on Google
- 2:12:17Speaker 5: Earth and spent like a it's like way too long,
- 2:12:20Speaker 5: probably like an hour one day, scouring the entire area
- 2:12:23Speaker 5: around the ranch because the rancher's address was in all
- 2:12:25Speaker 5: of the emails. So I popped it into Google Earth
- 2:12:28Speaker 5: and just was like, it is so so remote and
- 2:12:32Speaker 5: from what we know, they knew all of these high
- 2:12:35Speaker 5: wealth people were coming in and out and it's in
- 2:12:37Speaker 5: the middle of absolutely nowhere. It's just so so strange.
- 2:12:42Speaker 5: I don't know that there's going.
- 2:12:42Speaker 3: To be an You're one of Thisian island, right, Yes,
- 2:12:47Speaker 3: that story.
- 2:12:47Speaker 5: Tom Elliott had an interesting breakdown on his subsack. People
- 2:12:50Speaker 5: could go read about that good teeth. Yeah, it was
- 2:12:53Speaker 5: quite an interesting piece. So if we do, I don't
- 2:12:57Speaker 5: know if you have any more thoughts on that, Ryan,
- 2:12:58Speaker 5: I can pull up one more a If not, okay,
- 2:13:03Speaker 5: So this one is okay. So we'll end it on
- 2:13:07Speaker 5: this one from Robert who says pundits are always comparing
- 2:13:10Speaker 5: the conditions in the USA to the fall of Realm.
- 2:13:12Speaker 5: I'd like to hear them compare conditions here to France
- 2:13:14Speaker 5: before the revolution, can you right? And that's a that's
- 2:13:17Speaker 5: a great question for you.
- 2:13:18Speaker 3: I think, wait, what was that one again?
- 2:13:20Speaker 5: So pundits are always comparing the conditions Robert says in
- 2:13:23Speaker 5: the USA to the fall of Realm. I'd like to
- 2:13:25Speaker 5: hear them compare conditions here to France before the revolution.
- 2:13:30Speaker 4: The conditions in France before the revolution, or that the
- 2:13:34Speaker 4: food prices were going insane and in inflation was bankrupting
- 2:13:42Speaker 4: the country, and that's specifically why they called the National
- 2:13:46Speaker 4: Assembly to enact some type of policy to turn turn
- 2:13:53Speaker 4: around the inflation and the bankruptcy. And once the once
- 2:13:58Speaker 4: the Assembly was gathered, they were like, how about we
- 2:14:02Speaker 4: go a little bit further and do do the whole
- 2:14:06Speaker 4: you know, it took took many years.
- 2:14:08Speaker 3: For that to unfold. So yeah, that.
- 2:14:14Speaker 4: Ironically, you know this we have the same blue red
- 2:14:18Speaker 4: situation where the rural areas of France were not at
- 2:14:23Speaker 4: all keen on on how the how Paris was going
- 2:14:28Speaker 4: about this, and in fact that like the bloodiest part
- 2:14:35Speaker 4: of it, where you know, they say twenty thousand people
- 2:14:37Speaker 4: were killed or whatever in the in the terror, like
- 2:14:40Speaker 4: almost all like there were a decent amount, you know,
- 2:14:44Speaker 4: beheaded by the guillotine in Paris a lot, but almost
- 2:14:49Speaker 4: all of them were killed in Vonde, these Catholic kind
- 2:14:55Speaker 4: of opponents of the revolution and the revolutionaries went out
- 2:14:59Speaker 4: there just slaughtered them by the by the thousands. I
- 2:15:03Speaker 4: saw Twitter keep sending me an ad for some right
- 2:15:06Speaker 4: wing film about the Vonde.
- 2:15:09Speaker 3: Have you seen this? That's so niche.
- 2:15:12Speaker 4: I'm like, man, I want to, I actually want to
- 2:15:14Speaker 4: see this, like and look, I will cop. What the
- 2:15:17Speaker 4: left did to the right in the Vunde is horrifying.
- 2:15:22Speaker 3: I'm down the South.
- 2:15:24Speaker 4: They were putting Catholics on barges and sinking them the Spanish.
- 2:15:29Speaker 5: Civil word too, that's how Yeah, that's he was a
- 2:15:31Speaker 5: huge component of that too.
- 2:15:34Speaker 4: But so you know there so there was a and
- 2:15:38Speaker 4: basically that was that was actually draft related that that
- 2:15:41Speaker 4: wasn't like they weren't. They were like, okay, revolution whatever
- 2:15:47Speaker 4: they want.
- 2:15:48Speaker 3: The Paris wanted them to serve in the in the wars.
- 2:15:52Speaker 4: And also they were coming after the Catholic priests and
- 2:15:56Speaker 4: making them sign loyalty oaths and if they wouldn't sign
- 2:15:58Speaker 4: loyalty oaths, basically killing them.
- 2:16:01Speaker 3: It was. It was ugly. I'm gonna go see this movie.
- 2:16:04Speaker 3: Let's let me see if I can find it.
- 2:16:06Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean there's always this debate about you know,
- 2:16:10Speaker 5: is Rome about the fall of the is it about economics.
- 2:16:15Speaker 5: Is France about economics? Is Rome about economics? Is why
- 2:16:18Speaker 5: more Germany about economics? And I think it's or is
- 2:16:23Speaker 5: it about culture? And I think it's like very obviously
- 2:16:25Speaker 5: always a combination of like you have this, there is
- 2:16:27Speaker 5: this thread of elite cultural decadence that you always see.
- 2:16:31Speaker 5: It seems to always presage the fall of an empire.
- 2:16:35Speaker 5: But I don't think it's just one or the other.
- 2:16:37Speaker 5: I think, Whymar you clearly see economics and culture. I
- 2:16:40Speaker 5: think that's the same thing with Rome. I think it's
- 2:16:41Speaker 5: probably the same thing with France DSAD and all that
- 2:16:44Speaker 5: stuff happening as people can't afford bread and so I mean,
- 2:16:49Speaker 5: actually you could probably talk well I was gonna say Russia,
- 2:16:51Speaker 5: but that might be more debate and debatable, But that's
- 2:16:54Speaker 5: go ahead.
- 2:16:57Speaker 3: We want to watch the trailer. Let's do it.
- 2:17:00Speaker 4: It's called It's called Victory or Death, and this is
- 2:17:04Speaker 4: about the reactionary region. This is so, this is this
- 2:17:08Speaker 4: is a right wing attempted a film. Let's see see
- 2:17:12Speaker 4: how they do.
- 2:17:27Speaker 3: Right wing doing it in French. I can't win doing
- 2:17:35Speaker 3: it in French. It's off French.
- 2:17:42Speaker 11: Out Here come the revolutionary a going out in the
- 2:17:44Speaker 11: countryside Bell make you now.
- 2:17:55Speaker 3: The k are about the.
- 2:18:10Speaker 5: Wow.
- 2:18:28Speaker 3: I think we're gonna have to do we need to
- 2:18:32Speaker 3: step very victory. Yeah, I mean listen January.
- 2:18:40Speaker 5: I'm watching that and I'm thinking, as a non Catholic,
- 2:18:43Speaker 5: I'm I'm still frightened that you're gonna put me in
- 2:18:44Speaker 5: a camp, Brian.
- 2:18:48Speaker 3: But I that is that is interesting that they're doing
- 2:18:50Speaker 3: a film on that. That there's like a right Way
- 2:18:52Speaker 3: film on that.
- 2:18:52Speaker 4: Now, it was an indefensible slaughter and overreach by my comrades,
- 2:18:59Speaker 4: I said, is a comrade, I mean, I cannot defend it.
- 2:19:05Speaker 4: It's always I mean, wouldn't be a good revolutionary because
- 2:19:09Speaker 4: like it was like essential I guess to like locking
- 2:19:12Speaker 4: in the games of the revolution, I would I don't
- 2:19:14Speaker 4: have the stomach for it.
- 2:19:16Speaker 3: Well, but that's also knows that too much.
- 2:19:21Speaker 5: Well, there's Yeah, you get dangerous when you start getting
- 2:19:24Speaker 5: to end justify the means territory, which is kind of
- 2:19:26Speaker 5: the theme of the whole show. Like even when we're
- 2:19:27Speaker 5: talking about on a much much much smaller, smaller scale
- 2:19:30Speaker 5: at Platner, stuff like that does.
- 2:19:31Speaker 3: Get you don't want to be on the person.
- 2:19:33Speaker 5: You don't want to be the person who's causing people
- 2:19:35Speaker 5: to throw out the rule book or the person throwing
- 2:19:36Speaker 5: out the rule book, if that makes sense, Like, because
- 2:19:39Speaker 5: what happens is you get Donald Trump saying he who
- 2:19:42Speaker 5: saves his country violates no law in all caps on
- 2:19:44Speaker 5: freaking true social which is maybe an apocryphal Napoleon quote,
- 2:19:48Speaker 5: but a Napoleon attributed to Napoleon nonetheless. And so that's
- 2:19:51Speaker 5: maybe the theme of the show today.
- 2:19:56Speaker 4: That's the seventeen ninety three French Revolution. For three years now, Charret,
- 2:20:01Speaker 4: a young man retired from the Royal Navy, has been
- 2:20:03Speaker 4: back home. Oh yeah, you gotta have the retired guy
- 2:20:06Speaker 4: who just wants to be left alone in the country,
- 2:20:10Speaker 4: in the country, the anger of the president's rumbles, they
- 2:20:13Speaker 4: call on the young retiree to take command of the rebellion.
- 2:20:17Speaker 3: The fight for freedom has only just begun. Oh yeah.
- 2:20:20Speaker 4: So it's got that thing where they're like, he's like,
- 2:20:22Speaker 4: I'm out of the game, son, don't bother me with
- 2:20:27Speaker 4: this rebellion. Know the radicals they're coming for us. They're
- 2:20:31Speaker 4: coming for our way of life. And they literally were
- 2:20:33Speaker 4: coming for their way of life like they were trying
- 2:20:36Speaker 4: to yes, they were trying to kill all the priests.
- 2:20:42Speaker 3: They replaced the calendar. Yes, they replaced the way want
- 2:20:46Speaker 3: that Christian calendar. They got rid of the week.
- 2:20:49Speaker 4: They made it a ten day week because they were like,
- 2:20:52Speaker 4: this whole seven day thing is irrational.
- 2:20:54Speaker 3: We're doing ten days. They yeah, they.
- 2:21:00Speaker 7: Way.
- 2:21:01Speaker 5: There's a good rest Is History series on the French Revolution,
- 2:21:04Speaker 5: Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook if people want.
- 2:21:06Speaker 3: To brush up. So, yeah, I'm gonna watch that. Yeah,
- 2:21:13Speaker 3: it looks good. I was not involved in that. I
- 2:21:15Speaker 3: do not know. Yeah, it's like French Revolution apocalypto.
- 2:21:19Speaker 4: Yeah, actually he's probably involved somehow. There's no way, no
- 2:21:24Speaker 4: way he missed out on that.
- 2:21:26Speaker 5: Oh man, well, Ryan, I guess we could leave it there.
- 2:21:29Speaker 3: We did our.
- 2:21:29Speaker 5: Amas and I love Amas, so that was a little
- 2:21:34Speaker 5: bit of fun. Actually not really that much fun because
- 2:21:36Speaker 5: we were talking about revolution. But anyway, well let her
- 2:21:40Speaker 5: and enjoy their weekends on that note.
- 2:21:42Speaker 3: Anything else, right, I think that's it.
- 2:21:45Speaker 5: All right, Well, thank you everybody so much for tuning in.
- 2:21:48Speaker 3: We're going to be back, of course.
- 2:21:49Speaker 5: Well we're always here over the weekend if there's breaking news,
- 2:21:51Speaker 5: so stay tuned. If there's a major story, you can
- 2:21:54Speaker 5: bet we'll be on it. And We will come to
- 2:21:55Speaker 5: you with the news as soon as we can. Otherwise
- 2:21:57Speaker 5: we will see you back. Your Crystal Soccer will be
- 2:21:59Speaker 5: in so we'll see you then