Chris Hayes: Trump Has Become 'The Establishment'

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 2 Degree Advanced, the world's number one antiperspirant, provides up to 72 hours of protection against the sweat and odor that comes with life.

Speaker 2 Degree is the getting a walk before work, getting dressed in the car, running from the parking lot antiperspirant, the deadlines approaching, crunch time, hustle hard, play hard antiperspirant, the sweating, working, maximum exerting, antiperspirant for when the heat is on.

Speaker 2 So you can do what you need to do and work how you need to work. Sweat moves you forward.
Degree is here to make sure it doesn't hold you back. Degree here for sweat.

Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to the Bullworth Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
Happy Veterans Day.

Speaker 3 I'm delighted to welcome back to the show the host of All In on MSNBC, which will be officially known as MS Now starting on Saturday. He's also the host of the podcast, Why Is This Happening?

Speaker 3 His latest book is The Siren's Call. It's Chris Hayes.
What's going on, man? How are you, buddy? I'm doing well. Do you feel compelled to do MS Now like me?

Speaker 3 Or do you have a more or do you have a more comfortable

Speaker 3 like New York MS Now? Yeah. I don't know.
You know, it's funny because for so long, the shorthand that we would use for it is always MS. We'd say like, oh, at MS at MS.

Speaker 3 So I almost kind of want to just say MS because that's. I don't think anything's going to change.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, there's no change. Literally, there's no change for anyone except for us.
Like, we're the one.

Speaker 3 We got to move to a new building and, like, you know, you're not going to have a new outfit on or anything. You're not the only breaking out the chain.
The studio, the studio looks remarkable.

Speaker 3 It's a great studio, actually. I was just over there.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, maybe I'll break out the chain. Maybe for the stay at MS Now.
Yeah, on MS Now, I think you can be chain-friendly. Okay, we'll talk about it.
I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Speaker 3 I'll be up there next week. Is it next week? I don't know.
Time's a flat circle. I'll be up there.
I'll see you soon. The studio is really nice.
And yeah, the studio is great.

Speaker 3 We want to start with shutdown.

Speaker 3 I don't know if this is 100% true because I've done a full fisking of the entire internet, but I might very well be the most positive pundit in America on the Democrats cave. I saw your take.

Speaker 3 It's fine with me.

Speaker 3 This is maybe some vestigial element of being like the establishment Republican when the Tea Party was making crazy demands and me just having to be like, really, guys, like we're not going to repeal Obamacare over the shutdown.

Speaker 3 So maybe it's just that experience. But I also think the Democrats are obviously on much better turf politically than they were when it started.
And so that's a good thing. But I don't know.

Speaker 3 It seems like you maybe are not quite as positive. No, I'm actually broadly sympathetic to your take.
I mean, I think there's a few things to think through.

Speaker 3 One is, was victory on the substance possible? And I don't think we really know that, right? The victory on the narrow substance of could you have gotten a deal on the subsidies?

Speaker 3 And I don't think we really know that, but I'm inclined to think no. I think what likely would have happened is more and more pressure would have built for them to break the filibuster

Speaker 3 before you actually cut a deal on subsidies. That's my, that's my insight.
Because of the House. I mean, it's just like, and Trump would have to say that.

Speaker 3 Because Trump would have had to go really all in on,

Speaker 3 I really want to do this, but that's tough for Trump because Obamacare is in the name.

Speaker 3 Like maybe if it was a different type of subsidy, but then he would have to, he'd be like whipping votes in the House for subsidies. Yeah, trying to get Chip Roy to vote for the Obamacare.

Speaker 3 It's just hard to imagine that happening for me. Right.
I think it's hard to imagine that.

Speaker 3 I do think like it was interesting to me to watch pressure build on the Senate on Republican senators to kill the filibuster.

Speaker 3 And so to take a little sideline here, like

Speaker 3 I'm opposed to the filibuster and have been for a long time. And I think nothing has.

Speaker 3 told me that my opposition is genuinely good faith more than the fact that I was excited by the thought of the filibuster being killed under these circumstances, right?

Speaker 3 Because the argument that people always say is like, oh, well, you're saying it now and you're the Democrats have a narrow majority, but how I'm like, you know what I would like?

Speaker 3 I would like Congress to reassert its constitutional role in our governance. And I would like to see the houses pass things.

Speaker 3 Like if they, if Donald Trump wants to raise tariffs, the House and the Senate can pass a tariff bill.

Speaker 3 If he wants an authorization for the use of military force in Venezuela, you can pass an authorization for the use of military force.

Speaker 3 Like I think those are bad, substantively, I would oppose both of those, but that is at least constitutional governance.

Speaker 3 Like, it's like what has happened is the filibuster to me has been part of the process by which Congress has neutered itself and the vacuum has been filled by the executive.

Speaker 3 And we see it more and more and more. If you get both houses working again,

Speaker 3 I think you tip that balance a little bit. So what I think ended up happening was it came down to a question about the filibuster, which made people antsy.
The third thing I'll say is this.

Speaker 3 There's an asymmetry that's always in all of these fights that I've experienced, which is

Speaker 3 Democratic politicians, if you talk to them, like off the record, behind closed doors, Tim Kaine said this in public about like losing sleep.

Speaker 3 They genuinely, truly believe their job is to like deliver things to people to make the government work. And it freaks them out when like federal workers aren't getting paid and snap is cut off.

Speaker 3 It really does. Like I talk to these people all the time.
There's, This is not a thing.

Speaker 3 They're not disingenuous about it. No, and they were also making a judgment that I think is real.

Speaker 3 Like I got some of the negative feedback I got yesterday from people about my take was like, but I'm genuinely upset that my Obamacare subsidy is going to go up.

Speaker 3 Like this, like I am not a person who was performatively upset because of an online Twitter war. And I hear the people that say that.
I guess what I'm saying, though, is that like.

Speaker 3 That was not going to get fixed. The Republicans.
Everything flows from that first question in the flow. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then if you believe that, like Tim Kaine does, then you're like, well, no, there's also real suffering that's happening on the other side, right?

Speaker 3 All these people that are working that aren't getting paid, that people are on, you know, furlough, people that got riffed, people lost their jobs, people aren't getting their SNAP benefits.

Speaker 3 I mean, like, there was real harm happening to people on the other side. And that was weighing on these senators.

Speaker 3 And it was weighing on many of the senators who didn't vote yes because they didn't want to deal with the blowback from constituents, by the way.

Speaker 3 And I've heard privately from some, not the senators themselves, but people in their order. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And in some ways, I was surprised and impressed they did it as long as they did because of that, because that's usually the way the dynamics work.

Speaker 3 The last thing I'll just say on this is I do think the messaging has been really bad.

Speaker 3 And to me,

Speaker 3 the best message to the extent there is one is look,

Speaker 3 we have a minority and we have a little bit of leverage.

Speaker 3 They are hurting so many people in so many directions that we have been trying to use this leverage to stop them from screwing people on the Obamacare exchanges.

Speaker 3 Their response to that was to turn up the pain on everyone else. And at a certain point, we had to make a calculation.
We're the only responsible party in this entire governance.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump's talking about how SNAP is a Democrat program, Russ Vote is Darth Vader. They like hurting people.
They like it when people suffer. We don't like that.

Speaker 3 We're trying to minimize the amount of suffering and cruelty. And at a certain point, the calculation for eight of our members became that it was too much.

Speaker 3 And you can say that's the wrong calculation. We could have won.
Just say that.

Speaker 3 That is a defensible argument.

Speaker 3 I can even go one step further than that, which is like, we gave them 40 days to come to the table and help their own voters help their own supporters who are going to suffer because we're going to pay higher health care prices who are losing access to coverage we gave them this opportunity

Speaker 3 they refused to do it we offered them a win i mean honestly it would have been a win for them 100 they refused to do it and so now we'll just have to take that to the voters again next year just like we did last week and we won and we'll do it again next year and i think that we're going to win again you know what i mean like that's that's like arguing from strength rather than you know angus king who is on uh MS now yesterday.

Speaker 3 Trump, Trump, we got to hand it to Mr. Trump on this one.
So he stood up. You're the communications director for a senator who's going to say that.

Speaker 3 Please just give them some meetings all day for the rest of the week. Part of it, too, is that there's not a lot of coherence.

Speaker 3 this sort of question of like, was this really a Schumer opera, an off-book Schumer operation that he wasn't. I don't think it was.
I think he knew that they were doing it.

Speaker 3 It wasn't like he was surprised. This was coordinated by the people who coordinated it because they wanted the shutdown to end.

Speaker 3 So that's part of it, too, because I think part of the messaging failure is the fact that it wasn't coordinated.

Speaker 3 All right, y'all. I was looking around for a new wallet.
And, you know, when you get a new sponsor coming in, here's a little peek behind the curtains.

Speaker 3 They'll send you the products online so you can take a look at them. And I looked at the Ridge wallet, and it is just so sturdy and steel and masculine.

Speaker 3 I thought to myself, I don't know, maybe I'm too gay for this wallet. Two days later, I was down at a bar.
I was with a friend, another gay dad, you know, because we have a conspiracy together.

Speaker 3 And he takes out his wallet. Boom.
The masculine Ridge wallet. Just raving about it, raving about how great it is.
Looks good, sturdy, safe, handsome.

Speaker 3 This is your Christmas gift for your husband, ladies. It's the Ridge wallet.

Speaker 3 Losing your wallet is the worst, but with the Ridge tracker card on top of this, in addition to being sturdy and looking good, it's got a tracker card.

Speaker 3 So if you've got an absent-minded man in your life,

Speaker 3 you always know where his wallet is before panic mode kicks in. Gives you perfect peace of mind for holiday travel.

Speaker 3 You know, it's good if you're the type of person that just forgets where you put stuff. I lost my car keys recently for like months.

Speaker 3 One of the car keys sets created a lot of consternation in the house. Turned out they were inside of my rollerblades.
Long story, I'll tell you later.

Speaker 3 Anyway, if it was the Ridge wallet or the Ridge keychain, wouldn't have had to worry about that. Would have known it was right there in the Rollerblade bag.

Speaker 3 For limited time, Ridge is having having their huge Black Friday sale. Head to ridge.com to get up to 47% off your order.
This is by far the biggest discount they've given all year.

Speaker 3 That's ridge.com for up to 47% off your order during their biggest sale of the year. After you purchase, they'll ask where you heard about them.
Please support our show and tell them we sent you.

Speaker 3 One last thing on the filibuster, you know, I have limited appetite. You have a little bit more on all in, and you did on your, on the old weekend show.

Speaker 3 You used to to have a lot of uh appetite to spend many multiple segments doing filibuster talk and talking about the arcane rules of Congress.

Speaker 3 I've kind of limited appetite for this, but I do, I think it's worth just exploring that point as well. Because,

Speaker 3 I mean, A, just for starters, I'm kind of it's frustrating to me when people are like, well, we could have got this win of them eliminating this filibuster.

Speaker 3 I was like, was that the point of the shutdown? Like, nobody mentioned that until last week. It's like, we started the shutdown.
I didn't realize that was the goal.

Speaker 3 But anyway, isn't the filibuster at this point really just a question of political will? Why do you need Mr. Trump to give you permission? And they've already did a carve-out for judges.

Speaker 3 They already disregarded the filibuster rules on reconciliation earlier this year. Like, there were certain budget act rules that in order to get the 50 vote on the PBD, they ignored those.

Speaker 3 They just ignore Congress altogether all the time when they don't have the votes.

Speaker 3 I guess that the filibuster already dead, like, shouldn't the Democrats who are against it just like speak that into existence? Right.

Speaker 3 Like, why would in this case, let's say that John Thun would have said, well, according to the 1872 Act of whatever, you know, in a government shutdown situation, we have another carve-out like we do for judges and for reconciliation.

Speaker 3 The problem is not everyone in the Democratic caucus is there on the filibuster. And so you need some forcing mechanism to get it there.
Yes, you're right.

Speaker 3 And you were hoping this would be it, that like that maybe the scales would fall from the end of the big curve. I think if the president and the senate nuked it, it would alter the calculation.

Speaker 3 I mean, even if they came up with some face-saving citation to some 1872 precedent. But to me,

Speaker 3 you're right to point out the thing that's so crazy about the modern filibuster is that you need a simple majority to put in lifetime judges who will rule for right-wing causes and a simple majority to cut taxes.

Speaker 3 And those are the two domestic priorities of the Republican Party. And everything else you want to do, which are the priorities of the Democratic Party, you need 60 votes.

Speaker 3 Boy, what a cool system. Like it's like, so you've got these carve outs that are like just happen to align with the priorities of right-wing governance legislatively.
And that's a huge problem.

Speaker 3 So there's a partisan valence, but there also, to me, there just is. And now we can do appointments by group, actually.
Yeah, too, that they decided to do this year. Right.

Speaker 3 You know, so it's like it isn't even one at a time anymore. I understand the complaints about the Democratic senators on the filibuster question and what to do going forward.

Speaker 3 And maybe this is like a way to put pressure on them to be like, guys, if you ever get back in power, like business has to be different. Like, we need to, you know.

Speaker 3 Part of the thing I think that people are sensing that they're not wrong to send is that there's a lot of politicians, most politicians, a lot of politicians don't just don't want to do a lot of stuff.

Speaker 3 They They want to do small stuff that they can, they don't want to do big stuff.

Speaker 3 They don't want to hurt people. They don't want to hurt people, but they also don't want to do big stuff.
And, you know, you saw this around, this is one of the reasons that in all the kind of

Speaker 3 write-ups of Nancy Pelosi's career, like that, why that moment around the ACA was such a big deal, because it was like after Scott Brown won.

Speaker 3 A lot of people were like, let's just not do it. It's just easier to not do it.
Let's not do it. And she was like, no, we're going to do it.
And I don't care if it's easier or not do it.

Speaker 3 And so what I think people are picking up in their rage at the Democrats is that they're seeing a party that isn't still quite there where the risk profile and the appetite to do stuff is commensurate to the moment.

Speaker 3 And I think that's a fair critique. No, I think it's fair critique too.
And I share it sometimes. I just didn't share it in this case.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like, not all fighting is good fighting. Here's an example of good fighting.
The redistricting. thing has changed so much in the last three weeks.
It's really wild.

Speaker 3 There was a court ruling this morning in Utah that the people of Salt Lake City now finally get a representative rather than the old map, which was, you know, just like a pizza out of Salt Lake City.

Speaker 3 Like each red corner of Utah had its own representative, and Salt Lake City had no representative. We're calling it the reverse Chicago because there's a little bit of that in Illinois.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there is.

Speaker 3 So now

Speaker 3 Salt Lake City gets a representative thanks to a judge out there. Virginia, with the massive win, it's obviously going to redistrict and pick up a few more seats.

Speaker 3 I was looking at Dave Wasserman this morning who analyzed that basically right now, like we're at about a draw, like the way that he sort of projects it out, Republicans have like a plus one advantage on like one more seat than they may have had it been status quo, but that is before Virginia and Florida.

Speaker 3 And so we'll kind of see how those shake out.

Speaker 3 But like it went from something that I literally on this podcast three weeks ago, I was like, the Republicans might end up with like a plus 17 advantage on this if everything goes right.

Speaker 3 And to now being neutralized. And big shout out to Gavin on that and to other Democrats.
It's worth worth noting, like, how, how much has this changed over the last few weeks? Yes.

Speaker 3 And I mean, we should say the one huge caveat, right, is pending both the timing and the result of SCOTUS's Voting Rights Act decision, right?

Speaker 3 Because if they basically kill the last remaining parts of the Voting Rights Act, the southern states can basically like redistrict out all their black reps. Literally.

Speaker 3 Just go back to like a fully all-white Confederate, like

Speaker 3 all-white rep from the former Confederate states. You have to laugh just because it's so awful.
It's so dark. It's so awful.
So pending that, like in terms of where we are, yes.

Speaker 3 And I think the Newsom thing, you got to give them credit. Just really quick on the voting rights.
So, I mean, I don't know, the folks I talk to feel like this is probably a 28 issue.

Speaker 3 That's why I said pending the outcome and the timing. Like the court rushes when it wants to rush and it's slow when it wants to slow.

Speaker 3 If they want to rush it, they can rush it and be like, yeah, and this is good for 2026. And here's our opinion.

Speaker 3 I think that's less likely, I think more likely it's a terrible decision, but they say it's for 28 in the decision. So, but pending that, you're right, and it's pretty amazing.

Speaker 3 I mean, the California thing is huge.

Speaker 3 The Virginia election, I mean, I know that we've like all talked about it, but like I've been just going, looking at those like House delegate races, slaughter, like Republicans got their asses kicked in Virginia.

Speaker 3 I mean, truly, I mean, everywhere on the map, like flipping seats, flipping Trump Trump seats, not just seats that were, it wasn't just that this is a House delegate seat with a local Republican, right?

Speaker 3 That had been, these were seats that were in a presidential year were, you know, plus five, plus six, Trump.

Speaker 3 So yes, and I think Democrats, to the point that we were just making now about like not quite being there on the filibuster and not quite ready to sort of, from a game theory perspective, like establish deterrence and go tit for tat, that if that's not the case on sort of procedural hardball yet in Congress, it has been the case on procedural hardball with gerrymandering.

Speaker 3 All right. If you've been reading JBL's triad and you're thinking about the future and how things could be, well,

Speaker 3 a stop for you after you sign up for the Bulwark Plus is to go to trustedwill.com/slash Bulwark to get 20% off their simple, secure, and expert-backed estate planning services.

Speaker 3 Trustedwill.com, that stuff can feel intimidating, right? It feels like a pain in the ass.

Speaker 3 You don't know what do you need? Do you need lawyers? Well, they got a website that is very simple to use. Process is quite straightforward.

Speaker 3 The end you'll have peace of mind, knowing that your assets and wishes are secure.

Speaker 3 Each will or trust is state-specific, legally valid, and customized to your needs, which makes it perfect for you.

Speaker 3 They got an overall rating of excellent and thousands of five-star reviews on TrustPilot and used by hundreds of thousands of families and counting.

Speaker 3 Add some peace of mind to your future with Trust and Will. Go to trustandwill.com/slash bulwark for 20% off.
That's 20% off at trustandwill.com/slash bulwark

Speaker 3 to the Virginia race. I have Mikey Sheryl in Tomorrow in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.
Oh, that's awesome.

Speaker 3 I wonder, you know, a big part of the Chris Hayes theory of everything in the book, The Sirens Call, is, you know, how the Democrats need to update their views on how to deal with the attention economy.

Speaker 3 It's something I agree with, generally speaking. I do wonder if

Speaker 3 the overwhelming victories from Spanberger and Cheryl, who I think we can just be candid, did not exactly, I mean, ran like pretty conventional Democratic campaigns.

Speaker 3 And there certainly were some tactics, like messaging tactics, some things updated that were better than what come, but I just meant like on the tactics. No, I think that's true.

Speaker 3 Didn't run that different. Does their kind of landslide victories change your priors on the attention theory at all? It's a great question.
I've been thinking about this a lot.

Speaker 3 And I would say two things. One is that like structural factors are always the most important factors, you know?

Speaker 3 And in some ways, what's really interesting is take, take my sort of, you know, attention focus aside and just compare those two races.

Speaker 3 Everyone in politics and in the states, like when you talk to people, people in New Jersey and Virginia thought that Spamberger was running a really good race and her opponent sucked and that Cheryl was running a really bad race and her opponent was strong.

Speaker 3 Everyone said that. And everyone expected that New Jersey was going to be close and Spamberger was, and they were like, the same outcome.

Speaker 3 So it's not like, it's not just like my particular views on attention.

Speaker 3 It's that the structural factors in both places seem to just be so overwhelming that people are just the combination of the excitement of Democrats to vote,

Speaker 3 the fact that people do not like the way the country's going. The thing I will say, though, on attention is

Speaker 3 I think that attention stuff is the maximum, the places most important are in presidentials with the most marginal voters.

Speaker 3 So like you're still talking about even in a high turnout off-year election, you on like the year after, you're still several concentric circles out from like the pool of people that vote in a presidential and just in a presidential.

Speaker 3 And that's the place that I think this attentional question is kind of the most urgent because you're talking about people that like really don't pay attention to the news.

Speaker 3 Like they are very insulated from the world of politics. Even someone who's voting in an off-year gubernatorial in the grand scheme of Americans is like a pretty plugged in person.

Speaker 3 I mean, you just got to remember how many more people are voting in a presidential.

Speaker 3 And that outer concentric circle of people totally disinterested from politics was the worst for Democrats and is the place where I think they have to think the hardest about how to reach those people.

Speaker 3 Even the more outer was even the worst, right? The people that didn't vote. Didn't vote, yeah.
Which is a huge switch. Enormous switch.

Speaker 3 Like the number one thing that I talk about when I talk to, you know, goody tushu is democracy people. I'm just like,

Speaker 3 everybody has to update their priors about like where we are on the people that don't vote.

Speaker 3 Because in the Obama era, the people that didn't vote, if you got them to vote, they're probably going to vote for the Democrats. And now it's the inverse.

Speaker 3 I mean, maybe that won't be true in the future. I don't know.
But you have to at least think about it. I keep wondering at what point

Speaker 3 that reality, I mean, first of all, we should say these things are fickle, right? So like, you know, 10 years ago, it was different than it is now. But

Speaker 3 at what point that reality starts to get into the heads of Republicans who want to restrict people's access to voting? Like, right. Now, they tend to be smart enough that it's very targeted, right?

Speaker 3 It's like,

Speaker 3 we're going to take away polling prices on college campuses.

Speaker 3 And they've run the numbers on this. And it's kind of like

Speaker 3 the black voters that didn't vote, you know, if you projected what they would look, if you modeled it out until if they voted, like they would vote more Republican than black voters that voted still would vote for the Democrats.

Speaker 3 Exactly, right. Yeah, so

Speaker 3 trying to tamp down voting is still a net positive for Republicans. I do wonder at what point this access question, which has been such a

Speaker 3 dogma for Republicans,

Speaker 3 starts to change. I mean, you saw it with Vance's tweet afterwards about calling about low propensity voters, and he sounded like a progressive organizer circa 2000, you know, 2007.

Speaker 3 Like, we got to register our people.

Speaker 3 I just want to go a little bit deeper on that question about the attention thing, because I feel I always want to question it the most when I'm so susceptible to a theory, like I'm with you very much, like that the Democrats need to change their game, and we live in it, yeah, right, we live in it.

Speaker 3 But I'm again, you just look at this Spanberger show race, I look back at like the Colin Allred race in Texas right now, for example, like in last time, and he's so maligned right now.

Speaker 3 And he's like in this race right now, and there's an open Texas Senate seat, and it's like people are excited about Tallerico because he could go on Rogan, and maybe Jalesman Crockett can get in.

Speaker 3 She gets a lot of attention.

Speaker 3 And I don't know, I mean, you know, while the getting a lot of attention and being ostentatious and going everywhere thing thing like really worked for Trump, like it didn't work for Herschel Walker and Carrie Lake, right?

Speaker 3 Like it backfired. And not to compare Jasmine Crockett or James Tallery to them, but, you know,

Speaker 3 like the boring candidate. Yeah.
Yeah. And the boring candidate, Colin Allred, like he outperformed.

Speaker 3 Harris by like eight points. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 3 And like this year, if the Democrat senate candidate outperforms the whatever the Democrat ballot number by eight points, they might be the senator from Texas. Right.

Speaker 3 So, you know, I mean, maybe in some places and states and, you know, it does feel like it's a little bit more of a case-by-case basis.

Speaker 3 I think not for the presidential year, but like thinking about these other races, like overlearning the lesson of the 2024 campaign about podcast appearances might be a mistake in certain situations.

Speaker 3 I agree with that. I think there's a few things to think about, right? So the thing that I stress is.

Speaker 3 Part of my point is you need to have a theory about how you're going to get in front of the voters you need that isn't just, we'll raise a lot of money and run a lot of TV ads on local news.

Speaker 3 That's the place you start from, right? Which is the place I'm the most sympathetic because all those ad guys who are old friends of mine are all building beach houses and getting boats for nothing.

Speaker 3 For beach houses, yeah, right. Yeah, for nothing.
Like for nothing. Like literally nobody's watching these ads anymore.
Anyway, so that's the fundamental part that applies everywhere, right?

Speaker 3 Again, this was a solved problem for 40 years in American politics.

Speaker 3 We're talking at races that are basically the congressional level and above, statewide races and congressional races in like pretty saturated media markets. Below that, it's a whole different world.

Speaker 3 Like if you're running for House delegate, that's just another category, right?

Speaker 3 So you have to have a theory of how you're getting known to people. And that attentional question is higher for people the further from being known entities, right? So like

Speaker 3 Tallarico, who is just a fairly random, he's a state senator in Texas. He's pursued a kind of high attention strategy, which has been effective to get him from this tier to that tier.
For sure.

Speaker 3 And again, this is an important thing to figure out because part of the point I'm trying to make is you actually do want to expand the universe of people that are trying to run and can run and they have to be more innovative.

Speaker 3 But I think you're right that like not overlearning the lessons and that the point that I make consistently in the book and in the writing I've done is that like the high leverage approach often backfires, which is the notion of all attention is good attention, even if it's negative was a disastrous approach for Blake Masters, Carrie Lake, Herschel Walker, Doug Maastrichto, like on and on and on and on.

Speaker 3 I mean, Trump-like figures, trolls, Mark Robinson is a great example, right? Like, you know, he underperformed the national ticket by, I think, 10 points in North Carolina.

Speaker 3 He was, you know, running for governor. And then on the other side, you got Roy Cooper, who's like the most boring man on earth, but is like,

Speaker 3 above water in a purple state and about to run for Senate and has got a good shot. So you can't just say, hey, be like Trump, and that's going to work in every race.

Speaker 3 I wish authoritarianism wasn't on the line, you know, here, and it wasn't so important that the Democrats win these mid-year elections because I would like to

Speaker 3 run the main Senate race twice and just see what happens.

Speaker 3 Because I have no, I actually have no idea which is a better option. And I think that they're both kind of, it's like almost the caricature of both paths.
You have like a

Speaker 3 geriatric establishment politician who is very safe on the one side, and like a guy who

Speaker 3 had the Are We the Baddies tattoo on the other side.

Speaker 3 And who's like very charismatic? Very charismatic doing selfie videos about firing Chuck Schuber and all that. And I'm kind of open to any possible potential outcome, but

Speaker 3 we won't be able to know. I mean, we'll know how one side works, I guess.
Well, and that's the thing that

Speaker 3 makes politics so.

Speaker 3 both sort of enjoyable maddening is no one ever gets to run randomized control trials. Like we just, we don't, and we have very small sample sizes, you know?

Speaker 3 I mean, even you're talking about presidential elections, it's like, you know, they happen every four years. You know, even in baseball, it's like, you know, there's like 5,000 at-bats, right?

Speaker 3 Per team this year. It's like you could actually draw some statistical conclusions.
If you try to like look at presidential elections in the modern era, you're talking about what?

Speaker 3 What are you talking about? 16, like a sample size? There have been five since the internet.

Speaker 3 There's been five since the internet since the social internet. So like everyone, we're all just trying to work, work this stuff out.

Speaker 3 And in some ways, I think, you know, to go back to the question you were saying about attention is

Speaker 3 one of the things i think that's interesting about trying to theorize problems right so you're not just you're trying to come up with a theory right this is and that's what the sirens call is right there's a theory of attention there

Speaker 3 one of the things that's useful about theorizing is that theories can be clarifying frameworks even when they're wrong you know like it's like there's a reason that everyone still reads freud like and it's not because people believe in psychoanalysis necessarily.

Speaker 3 It's that the theory of Freud is an incredibly useful framework, even for pointing out things about the way human psychology works that he was wrong about. I had Fukuyama on like two weeks ago.

Speaker 3 I think that's a perfect example. Great example.

Speaker 3 And so I think with politics, it's really useful for our understanding, like even having this sort of theory of attention, then you being like, well, wait, let's test the facts against the theory.

Speaker 3 And there's like, and you're right. Like there's some places where they don't match.
It's like, okay,

Speaker 3 now we're thinking in a kind of rigorous fashion where we're sort of, we're taking a theory that would have seemed to have predictions. We're looking at outcomes and we're comparing them.

Speaker 3 And maybe that says something about the theory like or not, but we're not just doing the thing that everyone does, which is like, I like it when the people that have my politics win and everyone should have them.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Which is like, which I think is just the way that too much political discourse happens. This is my view.
This is my example of, we'll both pat ourselves on the back one time in this podcast.

Speaker 3 My version of this for you on the filibuster is like, I look at those five elections in the, in the internet era, and I'm like, basically, four out of the five, the person that won, like, ran against the establishment and said that everything that was going was wrong.

Speaker 3 We need to change. We need to, it's a charismatic person running against the status quo, basically.
Like, I mean, Trump won.

Speaker 3 They both won the election, but even still, it's like these outsider figures with Obama and Trump.

Speaker 3 And like, to me, if it's like, there's one thing that a Democrat's like, I want to run in 2028, like, how should I position myself? It's like

Speaker 3 as an outsider running against the system and it's running against the status quo. And that's like not me because I'm, I really sort of think things are like basically fine.

Speaker 3 Like they're bad for a lot of people, but like I just, I could be a lot worse. Yeah, I'm small C conservative in the way that it's like, it could be a lot worse than the status quo.

Speaker 3 Here's a question I have.

Speaker 3 I don't mean to take us off into a tangent.

Speaker 3 But here's a question I've been like very obsessed with. So I was looking the other day because Janet Mills has a very low approval rating in terms of governors.
It should basically break even.

Speaker 3 So I was looking at approval ratings for all 50 governors. And I think 47 have positive approval ratings.
I thought it was Kim Reynolds was the only one who had a negative. Who else has a negative?

Speaker 3 And she's really negative. And when you look at Iowa, which has had its GDP contract by 5.6%, you're like, okay,

Speaker 3 I can see a signal there, right? But if you look at the top, like there's no rhyme or reason, like some are liberals, some are conservative, some are in red states, some are in blue states, some are

Speaker 3 why is it?

Speaker 3 I think there is a structural question here

Speaker 3 that people are so overwhelmingly happy with their governor. And the incumbent president going back now multiple terms has been underwater for almost all of their time in office.

Speaker 3 And Congress and just right track, like natural right track numbers. Right track, right track, wrong track.
But it wasn't always like that. There used to be a lot more variability in the governors.

Speaker 3 And there used to be approval, like presidents, you know, Bill Clinton's second term, like had a positive approval rating. You know, George W.
Bush was at 90% after 9-11.

Speaker 3 Like, obviously, that's an exogenous shock. I just want to get my head around this public opinion reality.
Now, I'm trying to theorize it myself, but I don't quite have the theory for the internet.

Speaker 3 So, that's the question: like, the internet and nationalization of politics and the information environment is that all of the things that are wrong are on the guy in the White House. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I haven't quite worked out exactly how this works. I'm just, we're doing this live, but I do, I often think about the Sarah Longwell focus group of, I think it was of Florida.

Speaker 3 I forget, it must have been during the primary. I forget why we were doing Florida and Alabama voters because that's a weird mix.

Speaker 3 But at some point, we were doing a combination of Florida, it was like Southern voters.

Speaker 3 And in the focus group, people were talking about, this was, I think, maybe before Ron DeSantis got tanked and became Ron DeSanctimonious.

Speaker 3 They're talking about Matt, and they're talking about what they like about Ron DeSantis in Florida.

Speaker 3 It's like, he did this thing, he got this thing done, I liked this bill, these are conservative voters. And then in Congress, they're like, who do you like?

Speaker 3 And they're like, we like Matt Gates, you know, and it's like, why? And it's like, well, who else do you like? It's like Margie Cogg, because they're actually doing something up there. Right.

Speaker 3 And like, there is some level of like the entertainmentification, the nationalization of politics that has made people

Speaker 3 feel like

Speaker 3 that the national political scene is about like winning some existential battle for the future of our culture and society. And that like the governor's job is to make sure schools are okay.

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Right. But it's also interesting to me too that like

Speaker 3 there was a period of time in like 2009, 2009, for instance, right? Which was like, you know, wrong track numbers through the roof when all the governors were unpopular too. Like, right.

Speaker 3 Like, you know, they all got their butts kicked in that election.

Speaker 3 Now we're in the space of like things aren't as bad for people as they really say. And that's like something that you get in real trouble if you say that.

Speaker 3 Because like, again, some people are having like at all times in all parts of societies, there are people that are going through really bad things, really challenging things. Life is fucking hard.

Speaker 3 Life is hard. If even real things are going well, life is October.
But like comparatively speaking, like, where is it?

Speaker 3 Are they going so bad that I'm mad, not just at this amorphous thing in DC, but I'm mad at like the people that are supposed to be making my life better narrowly, right?

Speaker 3 A good example of that is the consumer sentiment stuff, right? Where it's like, you keep seeing like consumer sentiment is lower than it was in 2009. I was like, I was there in 2009.

Speaker 3 Like, the economy was

Speaker 3 so much worse in 2009. It's bad now.
And there's like, again, people are struggling. When you talk about this existential thing, I mean, I said this on Jon Stewart's podcast last week.
Like,

Speaker 3 to me, the really useful thing in all of this is to come back to like

Speaker 3 starting at a whiteboard of like, well, what do you want?

Speaker 3 Like, and and to me, it does come back to like what people want, I think, in the main is to like have a little bit of space, be able to buy a home, have a job they don't hate and doesn't crush them, send their kids to school, feel safe, and like take some vacations, go camping, have some friends over.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 it is actually pretty hard to get that. It's harder than it should be in America to get that.
And there are tens of millions of people for whom that just seems not possible. And that's too many.

Speaker 3 And then if you replace that with, okay, now what I want is the people that I don't like who I feel like are causing this, I want them to suffer, right?

Speaker 3 That gets you to the national politics side of this, right?

Speaker 3 Where it's like, okay, so if I don't have that, you know, and I'm, and I'm on the left, right, then I want, I want to see MAGA people losing and suffering. And so if they're winning, then I'm sad.

Speaker 3 If I'm MAGA, I want to see whatever, like, you know, the, I don't know, the trans gal taking off the Bud Light camera or whatever. I want to see more white people in the movie.

Speaker 3 I don't know, whatever it is. You know what I mean? Then it becomes this other stuff, right? Like, I want to win this daily war on Facebook that I'm having.

Speaker 3 But the weird thing about that is, I think there's an argument, if you look at the data, that it's the more affluent people who have the more effective politics.

Speaker 3 Like, that it's like the people who have more money and education, who are the more like i want my enemies to suffer and the people who are more

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 you know what i mean like i think that's more or less what the data shows basically that like the people who are like i really just need enough money that i can like get my car fixed when it breaks down to get to my job like are actually less into

Speaker 3 national politics as kind of

Speaker 3 you know, combat sport for, quote, the other side.

Speaker 3 And I don't know.

Speaker 3 Again, this, all this stuff is, it's hard to sort of distinguish all this stuff, but I do think like, to me, there's a combination about the information environment that, that, that speaks to something that JVL is saying that I think is right.

Speaker 3 There's like a structural pessimism in the way we learn about the world that is pretty corrosive.

Speaker 3 And also there is a structural problem with the way American capitalism particularly functions, such that way too many people in a very rich country just feel cut out of the deal.

Speaker 3 And this is where like my admissions against interest come in.

Speaker 3 In some ways, that should be like somewhat optimistic for Democrats in that like they, a lot of the people they lost were folks in that second camp, right?

Speaker 3 That's why Tuesday night was, that's why the election was so important for exactly that reason. Cause it was like, it's very, every, this has been driving me crazy.
So let me just rant on this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, rant. You're like, wow, the Democrats figured out an affordability message.
They're not the incumbent party.

Speaker 3 It's, it is, it's not a symmetrical issue for the party that has the White House and doesn't. Inflation is out of control.
I can't afford anything. Try running on that when

Speaker 3 you're the party associated with incumbency in the status quo. Like, like, wow, they really figured it out.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Like, and Donald Trump, everyone's saying, Donald Trump really seems to have lost his mojo on this. Yes, because he's now responsible.
Like, this is not rocket science.

Speaker 3 It's like, if people are upset with the economy or they think inflation's high, the incumbent party is into rough shape and the challenging party is in better shape.

Speaker 4 Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew Wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. Kentucky born with 100 years of know-how.

Speaker 4 Our pre-Prohibition style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So you know it's right too, for whatever you do with it.

Speaker 4 Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon makes an old-fashioned or bold fashion for bold nights out or at home. Wild Turkey bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor.

Speaker 4 Copyright 2025 Party American, New York, New York, never compromised, drink responsibly.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried. So keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 This takes us to the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we were gavin about in the hallway the other week, which is it's not just the economy.

Speaker 3 It's a bunch of other stuff Donald Trump owns now.

Speaker 3 And like you and I both share an obsession with like listening to like the, whatever you want to call it, conservative, like mega comedian space manosphere or whatever and kind of how that intersects with tech world and all this yep and a lot of those guys you know who are not the right-wing ideologues and they have certain weak cultural conservative views on certain things but are not political ideologues right partisans yeah you hear them now you hear the tim dillon's world now i played his him him a little bit yesterday and they start talking and it's just like shit sucks like shit isn't getting better right so they're not fixing the economy part like they're not doing that so now he owns that on top of that a lot of those folks were like skeptical of the establishment in the sense of the security state, you know, of like the big government.

Speaker 3 Right. And now it's Palantir.
Oh, right. Yeah.
Right. So now it's they own Palantir.
They are the ones with the masks coming after people in their neighborhood.

Speaker 3 They're the ones bombing people, naming things Department of War.

Speaker 3 And they're also in bed with the tech companies, which like I think there's a healthy skepticism about across the partisan divide, but certainly in this kind of space. Right.
And so now it's like

Speaker 3 all of a sudden, like the ability for Democrats to take back the mantle of being anti-status quo, this is the best moment for them to do that in a decade and more, I don't know, since Obama, maybe since 08, maybe, because it's like Trump finally is owning some of this stuff.

Speaker 3 Finally. Yeah.
And the second time in a way he was not after the, during the first time.

Speaker 3 And that's partly because there was, because the establishment, such as it exists, and it's always a fuzzy term, was kind of fighting him in his first term and it rolled over. Unfolded this time.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I totally agree with it.
It's kind of like a gift.

Speaker 3 We were all pissed that all the tech CEOs went to the inauguration because F those guys, I wanted them to fight them for my own emotional needs, but like for the Democratic Party interests, it was this gift actually for them that they did.

Speaker 3 So I felt that, I felt that immediately.

Speaker 3 And the reason I felt it immediately is because I remembered the Bush years, watching this kind of cultural consensus form around the president that was like, well, we got to change everything.

Speaker 3 And, you know, that it's like Alex Jones, the first time I saw saw Alex Jones was in a Richard Linklater film, but the first time he really came across my sort of consciousness was him with a bullhorn ranting outside of the RNC in 2004.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 all the, all the low trust, skeptic, anti-establishment energy was all on the left in 5, 06, 07, leading into Obama. And there really was this flip that happened.

Speaker 3 particularly around COVID and particularly around, you know, and Biden and inflation, all this stuff. And I completely agree it's flipping back.

Speaker 3 And again, it relates to the exact same argument about inflation, which is like, it's easier to be anti-status quo when you're the out-party and harder when you're the in-party.

Speaker 3 But I also think Donald Trump,

Speaker 3 like the buddying up with the billionaires, knocking down the ballroom in the middle of the shutdown, throwing a great Gatsby party on the day that snap benefits are going to run out.

Speaker 3 Like, It was always the case that this guy was going to be, is a billionaire, is friends with billionaires and wants to hook them up. That was always the case.
And it was maddening

Speaker 3 how hard it felt to get that message through in 24.

Speaker 3 But it does feel now

Speaker 3 that has penetrated the consciousness of exactly the people you're talking about who are not like the obsessive politics nerds. And to your point, you called it low trust.

Speaker 3 And like there are a lot of other more, you know, pejorative words, the cranks, the conspiracists.

Speaker 3 But like, there's something to be said that like the crank alignment around Trump, like, because this is your point, like that crowd would have the crank alignment won him the election, 100% because there are more of them than there are of me.

Speaker 3 Yeah, let's just be real. Like the idea, like the number of like, I'm a college-educated, high-trust, suburban Republican.
Like, some of them voted for the Democrats.

Speaker 3 It was pretty important for Abigail Spanberger in Northern Virginia, right?

Speaker 3 But like nationwide, there's a lot more people who, for good reason, have not a lot of trust in the way the system has worked, and they're pissed.

Speaker 3 And for a while, they were Democrats for a while, or maybe they're unaffiliated or not in touch. And now, and like, they're listening to these shows, whether

Speaker 3 anything from Alex Jones to Joe Rogan to Tim Dillon to like Barcelona, whatever, right? Like that's a huge range.

Speaker 3 But anybody in that range now is like, wait a minute, I'm pretty skeptical of the guy that is having a meeting in the gilded ballroom with the people that run the spyware for the government.

Speaker 3 That's exactly what? Yeah.

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, like the gay guy who's obsessed with the Antichrist who's running spyware on behalf of the government, I think it's pretty natural that you'd find some skepticism of that among the Alex Jones, Joe Rogan crowd.

Speaker 3 You even see it with Shane, Shane Gillis, who Shane Gillis, who, by the way, whose politics I really find fascinating, I'm like, I'm constantly reading his tea leaves.

Speaker 3 Cause like, I think Shane Gillis is in his heart, he's a lib. Like, he, I think he votes.

Speaker 3 They said he votes. He's in heart, he's a lib, but he's annoyed by a lot of politics.
He's annoyed, and he's, and he's also very much of Trump world.

Speaker 3 And he talks about his dad watching Fox News all the time. But in his, you know, in his heart, that's my, my read of his politics.

Speaker 3 But I've just been watching him recently, and he's like on that podcast with Matt McGowan where he's like, he's like, I'm back on my lip shit. He's like,

Speaker 3 he's like, I'm back on my, he's like, and he started with Elon Musk, who's just like so annoyed by Elon Musk, you know, and so, but you see that everywhere.

Speaker 3 The other part of this that we got to talk about, if you don't mind, I'm going to bring this up.

Speaker 3 No, please. I am just fascinated by the sort of anti-Semitism

Speaker 3 like

Speaker 3 thing happening in the right. And the reason it's connected is because there's a through line, right? Because I think in the kind of low trust, like

Speaker 3 right-wing adjacent world,

Speaker 3 people are very critical of Israel's war in Gaza. They're very critical of the Israeli government.
You had like Theo Vaughan coming out and being like, I have to speak what's in my heart.

Speaker 3 I think it's genocide. And you got Tim Dylan.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the people who are courting that same low-trust audience in the more hard-right spaces, Tucker and Candace Owens, specifically, Nick Fuentes, are like chasing that.

Speaker 3 And there has been historically a connection between like

Speaker 3 cranks and anti-Semitism. It's like, it's like the place crank politics sort of always end up.
It's like where every conspiracy theory ends up. Marx called it the socialism of fools.

Speaker 3 It's a great, great phrase.

Speaker 3 So there's a relationship here to me because

Speaker 3 the enduring power of the Jews as the secret puppet masters as a long-running thread in Western discourse and the kind of like

Speaker 3 up for grabs crank realignment polarity are colliding to me in this way. I mean, I don't know how much Candace Owens you're watching right now.

Speaker 3 It is a ton. It is so

Speaker 3 it's both insane at a level where you're like, I think this is. like, I think I need to call like for an intervention here with this individual, but it is all, I mean, partly it's performative.

Speaker 3 It's also so insidious. I mean, my.
We should have done a whole hour on this because I could do, I have like two separate thoughts just on the Candace Resource. Here's the thing I worry about.

Speaker 3 Well, the thing I worry about first, and then

Speaker 3 kind of the watching it collapse over there, which is the good part. The thing I worry about a little bit about how this stuff connects is like the way people are consuming information right now.

Speaker 3 That's one of my worries too. You know, so that I hear, like, I've done a bunch of college speaking recently.
Like, I hear from left kids

Speaker 3 that are mad about Israel, that watch whatever, watch a son Piker, watch whatever, that have legitimate anger towards how Israel prosecuted that war.

Speaker 3 And so they're watching, you know, a lot of whatever material on their TikTok feed or Instagram feed that's from a lot of left activists, right, that are talking about the way Israel's bad.

Speaker 3 And then into their feed pops in Candace and then pops in Tucker, and they're saying the same shit on this one issue, Nick Fuentes. 100%.

Speaker 3 They're saying the same shit on this one issue, maybe a little nastier. You know what I mean? Like in certain cases, if it's Fuentes, like way nastier, right? Like absolutely explicitly in my feed.

Speaker 3 In my feed personally, yeah, you get it.

Speaker 3 Like, if you look at stuff that is critical of the war in Gaza, if you look at stuff that's like, here's a report on like a horrible thing that happened in Gaza, the algorithm will give you Candace Owens.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 And so then I've talked to kids who, like, I was literally arguing with a kid like three weeks ago, a college kid, who was like, you know, starting to think that the Jews killed Charlie Kirk and is a left kid.

Speaker 3 Like, you know what I mean? It's like, maybe Masad did the Charlie Kirk killing. And I don't know, I'm starting to have questions about Emmanuel Macron's marriage.
And I was like, is this a troll?

Speaker 3 And again, it's one big person, whatever, like the world contains a lot of multitudes of weirdness.

Speaker 3 But like, to me, I just, I'm pretty worried that on the one hand, the Democrats are going to benefit from this crackup on the right.

Speaker 3 But on the other hand, that there's going to be some young people that get kind of sucked into this pipeline of the Candace stuff because the entry point was this war. Yes.

Speaker 3 I mean, you have articulated exactly my fear and what I've been seeing happen. And there's a very cynical

Speaker 3 algorithm chasing by the people that are are doing. They know exactly what they're doing.

Speaker 3 I mean, Tucker doing a 9-11 truth special. I mean, in the year of our Lord 2025, being like jet fuel can't melt steel beams.

Speaker 3 He did chemtrails this morning. Just popped into my feed this morning.
We're doing chemtrails now. It's like

Speaker 3 he understands exactly where the bread is buttered. And Shapiro's critique of him was right on the Flintist thing, by the way.
He had Frentis on because he felt like he was loot. Yeah, right.

Speaker 3 That's his audience. And so I think this, this is one of these places where just the reason I bring this up is it throws this, it's a very complex other aspect in the crank realignment.

Speaker 3 Because in the crank realignment happening now, it's like, it was like VAX and it's this.

Speaker 3 And then it was like, and then you saw it online generationally, like no one on TikTok, like the entire universe of Gen Z,

Speaker 3 social media was

Speaker 3 basically against the Gaza War. I mean, not everyone.
There was tons of content on the other side, but

Speaker 3 I think if you looked at the number, and this was something that a lot of people talked about,

Speaker 3 that has moved seamlessly into some really nasty stuff, and that sticky wicket of that, which is a thing you could do, you know, hours about, which is that like

Speaker 3 criticism of Israel is fly paper for genuine anti-Semites, but they're also not the same thing, and like, right, on and on and on.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 where we are right now is, and you see this in the polling, like, I have never seen like it's the Jews are the problem as consistently as a kind of like

Speaker 3 thing people are saying in the media sphere, not in the mainstream media, as I am right now. And I find it like unbelievably unnerving.
Me too.

Speaker 3 And I feel like this is an area where I have, I'm not as credible of a messenger, you know, as a former neocon.

Speaker 3 I'm like begging my like left progressive friends who are speaking out on the war to be just brutal and mocking kids because I just like the Masad again, the number of young people online that like really are like, I don't know, maybe Masad was involved in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

Speaker 3 It's different than in the past. There are always people that believed in conspiracy theories about assassinations.
Like this is that, like, that it's a specific

Speaker 3 thing that's, yeah. Yeah, the Jews did it.
And it's like, no, it was a Mormon kid from rural Utah. And like, he, we have the text.
Let me say this, too.

Speaker 3 Like, as someone who is, I think my politics are, I was incredibly critical of the Israel war in Gaza. I called for ceasefire like seven days into that bombing campaign.

Speaker 3 I think everything that I warned about and predicted came to bear. You had a really great interview with the journalist.
I was in Gaza. I'm blanking on the guy's name recently.
I just listened.

Speaker 3 Oh, in the West Bank.

Speaker 3 Sorry, in the West Bank, rather. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah. I think,

Speaker 3 and I can't speak, I'm not Jewish and I'm not like sort of part of the, you know, I'm definitely not part of like some ideological formation of sort of like Palestinian solidarity. I think

Speaker 3 people critical of Israel, people critical even of Zionism as a, as an ideology, which I think is a completely legitimate critique to have ideologically and is not anti-Semitic, you know, per se at all.

Speaker 3 I think those people have to do really intense line drawing right now.

Speaker 3 Honestly, and I think that's. An intense mockery of the right anti-Semites, actually.
You got to fit fights with the right. They're not in.

Speaker 3 They are like, and I've seen people actually doing this who I really respect. Like, no, no, this is.
This is anti-Semitic bullshit. This is vile.
This is insidious. This is calumny.
This is libel.

Speaker 3 This is all the things that I ging have been overused by some of Israel's defenders to heap on people in a way that I think has also been not very productive in cheapening what the words mean.

Speaker 3 That the people who have been critical and who are on the left and progressive must, must draw this line here. I'm with you on anti-Zionism, not necessarily being anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 I also, I do think it's noteworthy when people like only say, say Israel doesn't have a right to exist because of the way that minority religions are treated in the country.

Speaker 3 I'm like, well, I mean, basically every country in the region is a theocracy. And so I don't really, I mean, okay, that's fine.
But then does Qatar have a right to exist? I don't know. Right.

Speaker 3 But the thing about right to exist to me is just like, it's such a weird phrasing. Like, it's like, what does that even mean? Like, so, right.
So here's a question.

Speaker 3 Like, does Kurdistan have a right to exist? Right. I mean,

Speaker 3 I think the Kurds. probably are owed self-autonomy and should have their own state.
No one's going around being like, wait, you don't think Kurdistan has rights?

Speaker 3 It's like the Kurdistan having a right to exist is not like an actually extant concept. It's like, it's like,

Speaker 3 right? I believe that Kurdistan has a right to exist.

Speaker 3 Right. Yeah.
Well, Joe Biden did too. Remember famously.
Remember his partition plan? No, of course I do. Maybe decent in retrospect.

Speaker 3 Couldn't have been worse.

Speaker 3 Point being that like, I do think the right to exist construction, and I'm not, I'm not going to, definitely not going to get into like Zionism and anti-Zionism, but I do think that like people who are critical for all these reasons, and again, I mean, the other thing to sort of think about the context here, which I think is brought to you to this point is like, and I try to say this to people who are not on social media and not on algorithmic social media and people who are older is like, I truly can't articulate to you the sheer level of horror that I have seen on this phone over the last two years.

Speaker 3 Like it, like the worst things I have ever seen in my life as a journalist have been,

Speaker 3 and not fake, not fabricated, like real images of a father holding his child's body parts in a bag, like like day after day, hour after hour.

Speaker 3 And so, you've got this like insane emotional weight that's been packed into this thing, and now the fuse is being lit on it. And I just think it's really scary.

Speaker 4 Master distiller Jimmy Russell knew Wild Turkey Bourbon got it right the first time. So, for over 70 years, he hasn't changed a damn thing.

Speaker 4 Our pre-Prohibition-style bourbons are aged longer and never watered down. So, you know it's right too.

Speaker 4 For whatever you do with it, Wild Turkey 101 Bourbon makes an old-fashioned a bold fashion for bold nights out or at home.

Speaker 4 Wild Turkey Bourbon, aged longer, never watered down to create one bold flavor. Copyright 2025 of Harry America, New York, New York, never compromised, drink responsibly.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 1 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 1 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal. Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family? What lengths will he go to? One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 3 Two other things I just had to get your take on this kind of vaguely in the space. Have you seen the Nikki Haley son stuff lately? Have you been following Nalen Haley at all? I saw the profile of him.

Speaker 3 He's got some new book out. Oh, yeah.
So he did an interview on Fox yesterday.

Speaker 3 I've been following him for a while because he was doing some pretty hot, like anti-DeSantis tweets or something during the primary. And I was like, oh, I'm intrigued by the family.

Speaker 3 I worked for a couple of candidates who had family members who sent hot tweets that became a problem. Yeah, messy family members.
I was like, I might as well monitor this.

Speaker 3 But he did this interview yesterday. And I think it's destructive in this sense because he's Nikki Haley's son.
He is against H-1V visas.

Speaker 3 He wants to cut back on legal immigration. Thinks if you come, you have to fully assimilate.
He converted himself to Catholicism. He wants to de-naturalize Mediasan.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 right. I mean, I don't really want to pick a, I don't know how old is.
I don't really want to pick a fight with a 20-year-old kid of a politician, but I think it's an instructive

Speaker 3 thing that it's like the most prominent kind of of the neocon.

Speaker 3 Oh, like if you have any hope left, it's like, oh, we're going to, the Republican Party is going to revert to some kind of normy, pluralistic,

Speaker 3 you know, type small L liberalism, you know, classical liberalism. It's like the son of the most prominent politician that would potentially conceivably lead that effort.
He's a Kriper.

Speaker 3 It's like Kriyper adjacent. Yeah, it's Kriyper Adjacent.
And I think that is like extremely instructive about this whole conversation and like where things are going on the right in that generation.

Speaker 3 So here's the only thing I'll say to inject a little hope. All right.
There was a period where like

Speaker 3 corporate America was more performatively progressive than I'd ever seen it in my life.

Speaker 3 And then as soon as the winds changed, they stopped doing it because they were making basically a calculation about the market and business environment.

Speaker 3 Like literally the same people that had end racism and the football end zones did Charlie Kirk tributes like three years apart.

Speaker 3 Yeah, right. Exactly.
Three years apart. Exactly right.
That's a perfect example.

Speaker 3 It takes all of us to do it.

Speaker 3 I also want to end racism and believe that we should honor people who are assassinated. Politically, that said, it was pretty, in both cases, the degree to which you're speaking about both of those as

Speaker 3 a corporate entity was pretty aggressive. Exactly.

Speaker 3 And I think my point about this is just that when I read the Nikki Haley Sun profile, and when you see it with Tucker, think about all the incarnations of Tucker, like Bowtie, William F.

Speaker 3 Buxley Jr., Tucker, Crossfire Tucker, MSNBC, Tucker, Cable News Tucker,

Speaker 3 9-11 was an inside job, Tucker.

Speaker 3 That's someone who is just figuring out where the Zeitgeist is and where the audience is.

Speaker 3 And I think there's lots of people calculating about where the audience is and where it's going to be right now. And I think they're being rewarded, but I also think that can really change.

Speaker 3 So I just don't want to extrapolate out too far because I think things, one of the things we saw, even to your point before about like who's on the right side or wrong side of anti-establishment stuff,

Speaker 3 things can change. And events are always the thing to remember is that events have a huge, we don't know what lies in front of us in the future, but things happen and people react to them.

Speaker 3 We don't know what lies in front of us in the future, but it seems like.

Speaker 3 The Republican Party is going to be a populist nationalist party for the, for now, for a bet. Yeah, if that's where Nikki Haley's son is headed.

Speaker 3 Okay, last thing I just want to ask you about really quick, because it kind of really saw this is the AI and the anti-establishment stuff related to AI leaders.

Speaker 3 And there's just one funny example that I had to get your response to. Did you see the Mark Andreessen Pope tweets? Yes.

Speaker 3 Mark Andreessen is the VC who was just a Normie Obama lib, Normie Mitt Rodney, Republican, then went in with Trump. The Pope tweeted this.

Speaker 3 Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight for every design choice, expresses a vision of humanity.

Speaker 3 The church calls all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work. I would think that that should be a pretty popular.

Speaker 3 We would want moral discernment for those that are

Speaker 3 creating supercomputers. One such investor in those computers, Mark Andreessen, quote, tweeted him with a meme of a woman making like a skeptical face.

Speaker 3 We'll put it up for YouTube, just like a mocking face.

Speaker 3 And he did receive a lot of pushback to that. And I do, I want to close this because my final area of encouragement in the anti-establishment sense is i i do think that maybe

Speaker 3 uh maga erred in bringing in all these guys and i think that there there could possibly be a crank realignment against them if uh

Speaker 3 if they get so close to somebody who's like i don't actually think that the creators of ai had to have any moral discernment at all and i'm going to mock the notion that we should have moral discernment um i i can understand how there'd be a blowback to that i totally agree with that and to connect to the point i was just making i don't know, you know, I'm not a trader.

Speaker 3 I don't make financial bets, but there's a really interesting and open question right now about this

Speaker 3 huge boom in AI CapEx investment, right? And it's, it's bigger in, in, in real terms than even late 90s. And

Speaker 3 is it a bubble? Is it not? But let me just say this.

Speaker 3 If the whole thing blows up, which is a possibility, I don't know if it's going to happen. The pitchforks are going to come out for these guys.

Speaker 3 Like you have not like they thought they had them because people had their pronouns in bios. Like, that's not nothing.

Speaker 3 Like, if the whole thing blows up and Trump is particularly associated with them,

Speaker 3 like, that will absolutely reorient politics around that. Occupy Atherton.
Way beyond that. Occupy Wall Street outside of dudes' house in Atherton.
Yeah, it's not going to be good. All right, brother.

Speaker 3 Nick's, how are you feeling about the Knicks? I'm a Bulls fan.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 This is a moment.

Speaker 3 The Bulls have had the best eight games. It's really fun.

Speaker 3 Well, I mean, we're now down at 6-4. We blew a game against the Spurs last night, but they are really, you know what they are? All I ask for, all I ask for in my sports life,

Speaker 3 a competitive team that's fun to watch. Like a playoff caliber team that for the whole season, I just hate being like, oh, there's 20 games under 500.
I can't watch this team.

Speaker 3 I just want to watch, I want to kill the voices in my head by watching a meaningless sports game where the ball goes back and forth.

Speaker 3 And all I ask for my teams is to be competitive enough that I can invest in enough of those games during a regular season to do that. Were you able to watch last night?

Speaker 3 It was the Wemby, now that you mentioned it, it was the Wemby last second shot. He had two threes in the last minute, right? To win.
Which, you know, he believes that way. He's an alien.

Speaker 3 What can you do? He's unbelievable. He's an alien.
All right, let's do a special basketball podcast. All right.
We'll do a basketball podcast and a Groiper podcast next. That's Chris Hayes.

Speaker 3 He's on MS Now. It's called MS Now starting on Saturday.
So everybody go check him out. What time's your show on? Eight o'clock in the East? Yes, eight o'clock.
I'm on it sometimes.

Speaker 3 It's hard to keep track. It's only been on at eight o'clock for the last 12 years.
Okay, eight o'clock. I got it right.
Yeah, I don't know. You know, New Orleans is central.
Is New Orleans central?

Speaker 3 Central. I struggle with the time zone sometimes.
Eight o'clock.

Speaker 3 All right, buddy. We'll see you on your show next time.
Everybody else, we'll see you back here tomorrow for another edition of the podcast. Peace.

Speaker 3 everywhere.

Speaker 3 I'm the fool on the hill, and I've been waiting 24 years of anticipating. I said changes in my man.

Speaker 3 How

Speaker 3 people, I'm here to tell ya.

Speaker 3 I've been around since the world began.

Speaker 3 Hey.

Speaker 3 Well, Mr. Politician,

Speaker 3 reform me if you can.

Speaker 3 Having empty established my mail.

Speaker 3 I'm tired of you treating

Speaker 3 all of my children and sale

Speaker 3 everywhere.

Speaker 3 Spending all that money

Speaker 3 on a stupid wall in your name,

Speaker 3 when you ain't needed a home,

Speaker 3 I'm the fool on the

Speaker 3 and I've been waiting. Twenty-four years of anticipating my set changes in my man.

Speaker 3 People, I'm here to tell ya.

Speaker 3 I think it's about time

Speaker 3 the world began

Speaker 3 all over.

Speaker 3 Well, Mr. Competition,

Speaker 3 reform me if you can.

Speaker 3 I've been empty, established on me.

Speaker 3 And I

Speaker 3 jail!

Speaker 3 The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 4 The kind of fishing hackers do online is a lot like this kind of fishing. They cast their lines, bogus emails, fake websites, deceptive login screens, hoping you'll take the bait.

Speaker 4 With online phishing, there's no calm, no peace. Well, until now.
With Cisco Duo, fishing season is over.

Speaker 4 Duo goes beyond multi-factor authentication, delivering end-to-end phishing resistance built on passwordless authentication, session theft protection and help desk verification, all at half the cost of traditional solutions.

Speaker 4 So when fishers cast their lines, they come back with nothing at all. That's why attackers hate us and users love us.

Speaker 4 Learn more at duo.com. Cisco Duo.
Fishing season is over.

Speaker 3 This is Matt Rogers from Los Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang. This is Bowen Yang from Los Culturalistos with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang.
Hey, Bowen, it's gift season.

Speaker 3 Stressing me out. Why are the people I love so hard to shop for? Probably because they only make boring gift guides that are totally uninspired.
Except for the guide we made.

Speaker 3 In partnership with Marshalls, where premium gifts meet incredible value, it's giving gifts. With categories like best gifts for the mom whose idea of a sensible walking shoe is a stiletto.

Speaker 3 Or best gifts for me that were so thoughtful I really shouldn't have. Check out the guide on marshalls.com and gift the good stuff at marshalls.

Speaker 5 At Carrington College, we're ready to help you begin your next chapter. We've been helping students launch healthcare careers for over 55 years.

Speaker 5 Our hands-on programs in nursing, medical assisting, pharmacy technology, and more are taught by experienced, real-world professionals.

Speaker 5 With programs completed in as little as 9 to 12 months and convenient learning options, we make sure your education works with your life.

Speaker 5 Classes start soon in Pleasant Hill, San Leandro, and San Jose. Visit Carrington.edu to find out more.
Programs vary by location.

Speaker 5 For information about student outcomes, visit carrington.edu/slash SEI.