Raging Moderates: How Social Security and Education Are Being Reshaped

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Speaker 5 Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Sky Galloway.

Speaker 6 And I'm Jessica Tarlov.

Speaker 5 Jess, we are literally bigger than the NVIDIA conference. We're even, maybe even bigger than Taylor Swift.

Speaker 5 We have sold out in minutes the 900-seat auditorium at the literally the Cathedral of Wokeism, the 92nd Street. We are sold out, Jessica Tarlov.
I know. We are sold out.

Speaker 6 I'm on the one hand, super excited about that. And on the other hand, upset because people can't get tickets anymore to come.
And I'm getting a lot of stub hub. That's what.

Speaker 6 Do you think the the secondary market is going to be huge for us?

Speaker 5 Well, I don't know, but I reserve 50 tickets and daddy needs new shoes. So we'll see.
Daddy needs new shoes.

Speaker 6 So you sold us out, basically.

Speaker 5 No, let's be honest. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
One of us is quirky and interesting. The other is smart and hot.
I'm going with smart and hot sold us out.

Speaker 5 And I hope that doesn't trigger our feminist followers. But yeah, I've done a lot of these events.
I've never had.

Speaker 5 It sold out for this big an auditorium this quickly. And I think you're the variable here.

Speaker 5 Anyways, we can't say who we have, but we have someone who's probably a likely contender for president and a huge power player. I didn't want a guest.
Just did. I thought we could carry the thing.

Speaker 5 I want more opportunities to talk about me and he'll take some of the oxygen or she, he or she will take some of the oxygen out of the room because they're a player, a player. But you wanted a guest.

Speaker 6 I wanted to have a broad discussion that made plenty of time for us, more for you than for me, because one of us needs more of that than the other.

Speaker 6 and I also wanted to cement our place in the Beltway relevancy I guess and I think it's super cool and there will be tons of opportunities also for us to do this I was talking with producer David that maybe we would do a little touring around the midterms or something like that and we can go selling out theaters across the country what do you think so I'm dying to be relevant in Miami in New York and LA I could give a shit about being relevant in the Beltway I think the the Beltway is literally the...

Speaker 5 Name a cool bar in DC.

Speaker 5 First off, the people aren't that hot. Secondly, no good bars, nowhere to go out after midnight.
I mean, I could literally give a shit how relevant I am in the Beltway.

Speaker 6 I mean, they literally decide everything that affects your life there. I understand.
I mean, and I'm just not a DC person. I'm sure there is a cool DC bar in like one of the hotels or something.

Speaker 5 Not even the hotels are that cool. The hotels are lame.
It's inspiring. It's where you take your kids.

Speaker 5 But if you want to roll, if you want to have some fun if you want to meet super interesting people yeah uh the people from dc anyone who's lived in dc for longer than 10 years pro tip they brighten up a room by leaving it anyways we have we have someone important showing up to the 92nd street why yeah thank you for just totally crapping on the entire premise of this anyway it's going to be great and most of the people are from different districts so they're from different areas right so they're They're cool back home, but once they get there.

Speaker 5 It starches them of all their cool once they get there.

Speaker 6 Uplifting Uplifting promo for our talk at the 92nd Street White. Anyway, we're really excited.

Speaker 5 Clearly. All right.
Today, in our episode of Raging Moderates, we're discussing what's going on with the Social Security Administration.

Speaker 5 Trump tries to dismantle the Department of Education in the 2024 presidential election autopsy report. All right, let's bust into it.

Speaker 5 The head of the Social Security Administration, Leland Dudek, threatened to shut down the entire agency over a court ruling, only to walk it back after a federal judge called him out for misinterpreting her order.

Speaker 5 This all started when the agency gave Doge broad access to Social Security data to supposedly root out fraud.

Speaker 5 A judge stepped in, saying that was a major privacy violation, and Dudek responded by claiming that limiting Musk's team also meant limiting his own employees, essentially making it impossible to run Social Security.

Speaker 5 The judge wasn't buying it, and now Dudek has backed down.

Speaker 5 But this whole situation raises big questions about what's really going on with Social Security under the Trump administration and Musk's involvement.

Speaker 5 Meanwhile, protesters, retirees, and union members are sounding the alarm about potential cuts and disruptions to benefits.

Speaker 5 As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggested that only fraudsters would actually notice if Social Security checks just didn't go out one month.

Speaker 5 I can't even get past that statement without saying, Jesus Christ, talk about winner of hit up your ass.

Speaker 5 That statement, as you can imagine, did not go over well. Let's have a listen.

Speaker 7 Let's say Social Security didn't send out their checks

Speaker 7 this month.

Speaker 5 My mother-in-law, who's 94,

Speaker 7 she wouldn't call and complain.

Speaker 7 She just wouldn't. She'd think something got messed up, and she'll get it next month.

Speaker 7 A fraudster

Speaker 5 always

Speaker 7 makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.

Speaker 5 My dad is 95. He's struggling.
And he is in hospice. He no longer recognizes anybody, including his son and his daughter.

Speaker 5 If his Social Security check didn't show up, I'm pretty sure he would come to and head down and protest.

Speaker 5 The notion that this wouldn't immediately cause massive panic for anyone

Speaker 5 whose son isn't the head of an investment bank and magnificently rich, I couldn't get over.

Speaker 5 This was tone deaf even for the Trump administration. Your thoughts? Yeah.

Speaker 6 And they're setting a new standard, right?

Speaker 6 When you have 13 billionaires in the government, which, and again, I'm not anti-billionaire i think capitalism is a wonderful thing but i think that there are good billionaires and there are bad billionaires and the bad ones shouldn't be in charge of our government and lutnick has been

Speaker 6 on a tour of asinine commentary in the last few weeks i mean it's not just this which i think will kind of be in the hall of fame and if he is out of a job soon which i've spoken to a number of republicans who feel like he will be the first to go just because he is embarrassing the administration right, left, and center.

Speaker 6 This comment will obviously be atop the list of why that happened. But I'm wondering how somebody can have

Speaker 6 such little

Speaker 6 aptitude for self-reflection to understand that your mother-in-law, by virtue of being your mother-in-law, is also a billionaire and is probably actually claiming a social security check that she doesn't need.

Speaker 6 And I don't begrudge her that. Social security, we paid into the system.
It's your money that you're getting out of it. They're acting like that this is a handout.
It's absolutely not the case.

Speaker 6 But it's like every time they talk about one of these departments, they expose themselves to be not only mean, but also incredibly lazy, that they don't want to do the work to understand what it is that the government is actually doing.

Speaker 6 And I think that that's one of the most potent arguments against them: that A, there's an evilness to this, and there's a derisiveness and a nastiness that is really important.

Speaker 6 Like, I understand he's not a candidate for president, but I was reflecting back on Hillary Clinton saying about half of Trump supporters could go in this basket of deplorables, right?

Speaker 6 And I don't, there were a lot of different factors that ended up causing her to lose the election. And the Comey letter was the number one.
cause of that, a la Nate Silver.

Speaker 6 But she made that comment, which was obviously really bad if you're going to an election.

Speaker 6 And then you think about someone like the the commerce secretary, which is not the most important job, but it's still, you know, a pretty good cabinet position saying something like this, that exposes them for having zero respect for

Speaker 6 anyone, certainly not in the top 1%,

Speaker 6 right?

Speaker 6 And no understanding of how the system works and that they're proud of it too.

Speaker 6 Like if I felt that way about the vast majority of Americans, I would be embarrassed and I would try to be in private as much as possible when I was espousing these offensive,

Speaker 6 nasty views. And they're just letting it all hang out, right?

Speaker 6 Like they're mansplaining and manspreading all over every kind of media outlet that will have them, these views that are completely un-American. And if you asked him, well,

Speaker 6 what is Social Security to you?

Speaker 6 He certainly wouldn't say it's the greatest anti-poverty program that we've ever had in American history, but that's actually what Social Security is, keeping millions of seniors out of poverty.

Speaker 6 And not only that, but returning their own money to them. It floored me.
And then he just sat there and that also the hosts and the all-in podcast that was the one he was on just went, mm-hmm.

Speaker 6 And I understand you have a guest and it is sometimes difficult to tango with them, right? And you don't want to make it controversial. You don't want to be pushing back that hard.

Speaker 6 How do you not mention the fact that

Speaker 6 most people actually rely on their social security, any stats. I mean, these people are supposed to be good at finance, right?

Speaker 6 The economy, understanding what's going on, saying like, oh, this is actually what's keeping seniors above water in most cases.

Speaker 6 And it's really nice that your mother-in-law has a great life because her daughter married well. But the rest of the world doesn't work like this.

Speaker 5 Yeah. I mean, there's so much here.
First off, one of the things that's really disappointing was.

Speaker 5 I think in the first Trump administration, he did find really talented, bright people and surrounded himself with talented and bright people. And I don't don't think that's the case here.

Speaker 5 I think the litmus test is, will you do anything I say?

Speaker 5 Are you willing to go out and lie? Are you willing to go out and just speak non-truths? He's looking for acolytes and cult members, not for competent professionals.

Speaker 5 I mean, just looking at the last commerce secretary under Biden, Gina Marie Ramondo. She was a venture capitalist, a lawyer, the governor of Rhode Island.
She was outstanding.

Speaker 5 And anyone who dealt with her thought, this is someone who does an outstanding job of representing U.S. commerce interests domestically and internationally.
And this guy's going off and saying that

Speaker 5 just stupid shit. First off, if you're guilty of Social Security fraud, I doubt you're going to complain.
I think you probably want to stay under the radar.

Speaker 5 And if there's anything Doge has proven is that there's a lot less fraud and waste than initially theorized, including Democrats.

Speaker 5 They're having trouble finding fraud. and waste.
And just a few things about Social Security. It arguably is the most successful social program in American history.

Speaker 5 It's taken senior poverty from about,

Speaker 5 they think it would be somewhere around 38%,

Speaker 5 and it's taken it to below 10%. So it's been hugely effective.
Now,

Speaker 5 what I will say is, and we might differ a little bit on this, and I'm looking for points of friction because we're usually in sort of violent agreement. I do believe.

Speaker 5 Well, you said that you paid into it. It's yours.
I don't agree with that.

Speaker 5 I think the reason they call it a Social Security tax, not the Social Security Pension Fund, is I don't think you or me have rights to Social Security when we hit 65.

Speaker 5 And the notion that I paid into it, I should get my money back, actually, the majority of people take out well more than they actually put in.

Speaker 5 And if we're going to,

Speaker 5 I believe that nobody over the age of 65 or maybe even under the age of 65 should be live in poverty. And I'm absolutely not against cutting Social Security benefits for anyone who needs it.

Speaker 5 I believe somewhere between 10 and 30 percent of people who get Social Security right now should not receive it because they don't need it.

Speaker 5 And that is the wealthiest generation in the history of this planet are senior citizens.

Speaker 5 And the fact that every year we affect a $1.2 trillion transfer from young people who are not doing as well as they have in past generations to the wealthiest generation in history means something is wrong.

Speaker 5 And I do think that the initial instinct around reforming Social Security is a good one.

Speaker 5 It's something I would like to see someone take on because I think when the program was started, people were living on average 10 to 15 years. They were dying much earlier.

Speaker 5 They weren't making as much money. They weren't working as long.
So to means test it and slowly but surely increase the age limit or the age qualification,

Speaker 5 we just need to do it. There used to be, I think when the program was initially conceived, there were 12 young people paying into the system for every one person taking money out.

Speaker 5 Now it's three to one.

Speaker 5 And if you were really serious about this, this is how outrageous our economy has become in terms of the transfer from young to old. So it's a program that should keep seniors out of poverty.

Speaker 5 It shouldn't continue to be a wealth transfer from the young to the old, who are already, as an aggregate, the wealthiest generation in history. We need serious reform.

Speaker 5 We need to dramatically cut the costs. It's been way too politically dangerous to get near.
$40 billion child tax credit gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill.

Speaker 5 Old people have figured out a way to vote themselves more and more money. It needs to stop.
A good,

Speaker 5 I'll go as high as a third of senior citizens should not be getting Social Security. Your thoughts?

Speaker 6 Well, I appreciate the effort to get us to disagree.

Speaker 6 I want to keep up with that, but it's pretty persuasive. And I know, like, my dad, before he passed away, he didn't claim his Social Security.
He said, I don't, I don't need this.

Speaker 6 You know, I'm doing fine. And maybe there should be some.
type of means testing mechanism.

Speaker 6 I think Democrats would be smart to be having a more kind of responsible conversation about the fact that social security is going to go insolvent and you know not far down the road down the road at a time that we're going to be able to see that.

Speaker 6 The issue is, is that what the Trump administration is doing makes that kind of conversation impossible because they're trying to ruin Social Security for people who actually need it.

Speaker 6 So not the third of seniors that you're talking about. They're talking about it for the two-thirds of seniors that desperately need it.

Speaker 6 So they're doing things like closing Social Security offices all over the country.

Speaker 6 They're also cutting back on the employees that answer the phones and making it impossible for seniors to be able to talk to anyone and to collect their benefits.

Speaker 6 And, you know, you have a 95-year-old father who is not going anywhere on his own anyway, has to send someone, I presume, to go and do things for him.

Speaker 6 But when you say to people, oh, just come down to our office. Oh, just kidding, that office is closed.

Speaker 6 Oh, just kidding, the next closest office can be up to 120 miles away from where that senior citizen lives.

Speaker 6 You're essentially saying a huge F you, right, to them, but also we're doing away with social security, whether you like it or not. They're also doing crazy stuff.

Speaker 6 And this goes back to Lednick talking about the quote unquote fraudsters.

Speaker 6 And I just wanted to add to the conversation that apparently the level of social security payments that are erroneous is under 0.00625%.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so no one.

Speaker 6 So no one. Basically, no one.

Speaker 5 No one.

Speaker 6 And what they did to a man in Seattle, Seattle, they decided he was dead. He is very much alive.
They canceled his social security payments and also his Medicare payments.

Speaker 6 So he can't get health care and he can't get the money that he lives on. And he was able to, with the help of family, claw it back.
Right. And now everything is fine.
And they do this collective.

Speaker 6 So what? Oh, so you were a little inconvenienced. I get this all the time on the five from my colleagues.
Talk about an American man who was detained in Chicago for 10 hours.

Speaker 6 Luckily, the guy was carrying his social security card. So once they gave him back his stuff after they cuffed him and threw him in an ICE detention center could say, excuse me.

Speaker 6 And not only I wasn't just naturalized, I was born here. They say, oh, well, everything was fixed.
No big deal. You tell me, are you comfortable if I throw you in the back of an ICE truck?

Speaker 6 And 10 hours later, I say, oh, no, you'll still make your dinner reservation. You can go.
Or someone who's. needs their social security payments.
And we just say, well, it was rectified.

Speaker 6 That's Elon's thing. He says, oh, we cut, you know, an AIDS funding program.
That was a mistake. We turned it back on.

Speaker 6 How is this an okay way to do governance? That's where it really falls down.

Speaker 6 And because they're doing it at a warp speed and at this level of inaccuracy or stupidity, it makes it impossible to have any sort of adult conversation like the one that you were trying to have.

Speaker 6 So I don't know if that counts as disagreeing with you a little bit, but.

Speaker 5 That's all I got. I have a, as usual, I always enjoy incorporating my own personal parables into all of this.
When my mom passed away, I handled all her affairs, you know, only son.

Speaker 5 And so we had her bank account, and I kept it open for a while such that we could pay any remnant bills.

Speaker 5 And I just left the money in there for a few years, mostly because I was too lazy to figure out what to do with it, and it wasn't a ton of money.

Speaker 5 And when I was reviewing it after year one, I noticed that $3,600 or something had been just taken out. And I said, what was this? Did we pay this? And it said it had some government thing on it.

Speaker 5 And it ended up that the Social Security Administration had continued to pay her Social Security for three months post her death. And they recognized it.
They have some system of figuring out.

Speaker 5 They look at death certificates or something. And then they just went in very cleanly and then pulled it right back out.

Speaker 5 So they were pretty efficient and immediately figured out she was no longer living nor entitled to Social Security payments. Geico.
her insurance company. Obviously, I'm not very meticulous.

Speaker 5 I noticed something like two or three years later, I kept saying, what is this $120 payment that keeps

Speaker 5 going out of her account every month? And Geico continued to take money out of her account for her car insurance. And so I called them and said, okay, my mom died.
It might have been four years.

Speaker 5 I'm like, my mom died years ago. I sold the car years ago.
And you have been taking money out for her auto insurance for

Speaker 5 years.

Speaker 5 And they said, well, per your policy, it's incumbent upon you to notify us. And they wouldn't give give me the money back.

Speaker 5 So there's Geico, private sector, and there's government. One of them is corrupt, amoral, and inefficient, right?

Speaker 5 That makes the government the other guys. They were honest, very efficient.
So the notion somehow, people got to stop shitposting government, right?

Speaker 5 And what I figured out is it's, you can shitpost everyone in government unless they're carrying an assault weapon. Like we're like, we're pretty benign towards cops or an axe, fireman.

Speaker 5 And if you're carrying an M15 with a uniform, then you're, all those people are heroes. And everyone else working for government is incompetent.
Well, how can that be possible, folks?

Speaker 5 And we just don't give enough credit to the rank and file.

Speaker 5 And one of the things that's most discouraging about all of this is that in the next administration, which I'm convinced is going to be a Democrat, because I think people.

Speaker 6 That makes me feel better because I'm very scared.

Speaker 5 Well, and I usually get this wrong. So let's be

Speaker 5 caveat that. But I think that essentially Trump and the clown car here is revealing itself every day.

Speaker 5 And I think even not even moderate Republicans, but I think Republicans are like, Jesus Christ, we did not bargain for this.

Speaker 5 And I think the next administration will fill their administration with talented people. People want to serve.
They can attract really talented people.

Speaker 5 We'll have no problem should we retake the White House in three years and nine months to get competent people?

Speaker 5 The hard part is the millions of employees that work in the engine room and make this shit work.

Speaker 5 Because when you fire the people overseeing your nuclear stockpile and then you ask them to come back, a lot of them don't. And guess who doesn't come back?

Speaker 5 The people with the most external opportunities, which is Latin for the best people. Imagine you were running.
I can't even imagine. I've run organizations my whole life.

Speaker 5 If I said to the entire tech team, you're fired. I did it via email.
I don't care how long you've worked. You're fired.
Go all your emails been turned off.

Speaker 5 And then a couple of weeks later, I said, oh, I fucked up. I realize we do need technology.
You're rehired.

Speaker 5 They just, most of the most talented ones would not come back. They'd be like, no, I'm, I'm, sorry, boss.
You can reach me at, you know, lisam at google.com. I'm now at Google.
So the hollowing out.

Speaker 5 of what is, in my view, the most impressive organization in history, and that is the U.S. government, specifically, I would argue it's probably the U.S.
military, but in general, the U.S.

Speaker 5 government that gets delivered unbelievable prosperity, rule of law, rights for what are some of the lowest taxes in history. Just look at it as a product.
The shit you get from America, from the U.S.

Speaker 5 government, and how much you pay for it. This is the best product for the price in history.
And you have to credit some of the people in the engine room doing this.

Speaker 5 And we are essentially saying to them, this is a bad place to work. And it's going to be very hard to bring back the morale, the standard.
How are you going to get young people?

Speaker 5 How are you going to convince the breast and brightest? Some of our government agencies, specifically our security apparatus recruits out of my class at NYU,

Speaker 5 I don't think a lot of them are going to want to go to work for the government any longer. I'm like, I don't want to get summarily fired for no reason.
I don't want to be overseas and find out.

Speaker 5 I just heard, I don't know if I told you this, this great kid, Greg Townsend, who was in my fraternity. I hadn't heard from him in 30 years, four years.

Speaker 5 Anyways, and he said, I've been working for the U.N.

Speaker 5 And I basically, he's in Switzerland and then he was in Africa. And he said, I hunt down and prosecute war criminals.
And he makes a good living, not a great living.

Speaker 5 He made much more living in private practice as a lawyer. Met a woman, fell in love.
She does something similar. And he said, overnight a few weeks ago, all payments were stopped.

Speaker 5 None of them are getting paid. And they've decided to continue to do this work.

Speaker 5 And if you think about, you know, it's probably a good idea that if people decide to go into remote villages and start killing women and children, that there might be a price to be paid down the road.

Speaker 5 That's a good incentive system to have in place. And we've just decided to remove that incentive system.

Speaker 5 And when Greg finds another job, which he will, because he's a very talented guy, and at some point he has an obligation to support his family, if we call him back in four years and say, you know, we're sorry, we're firing up whatever it is, the U.N.

Speaker 5 Rights Commission on, or the, I forget what it is, the U.N., I forget what organization it is. Are they going to get people like Greg Townsend back involved in the government? So,

Speaker 5 this is yet another example of how we are not thinking, how we are taking, we have taken for granted what an outstanding organization.

Speaker 5 And people are so angry that they don't understand that organizations like this, the culture, the engine room is really hard to replace. It's not like turning off and on a switch.

Speaker 5 Even if we get the right people back in charge, the damage here

Speaker 5 is going to be be lasting for a while. Any thoughts?

Speaker 6 No, I agree with you.

Speaker 6 And we also took away a central plank of why government work appeals to people, which is the consistency and that you are somewhat at least protected by being part of the government, right?

Speaker 6 This is a place where you can make a good living, you can set up camp.

Speaker 6 Like you said, you can meet someone, fall in love, have kids, live in a pretty nice place, and also know that you should be able to continue to be employed as you go through your career, that you can be there 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

Speaker 6 And it was a real career in the sense that I feel like folks don't have anymore. I remember when I was graduating college, my dad was like, okay, well, what do you want to do?

Speaker 6 I ended up going to grad school, but I was looking around at all these different fields. And he said, it doesn't appeal to you at all to go work at a big American company.

Speaker 6 Like you don't want to go get in on one of those programs, right? Where you start off, you do the first two years.

Speaker 6 But he said, even though I wasn't into, you know, working in defense that way, he's like, it doesn't appeal to go work at a company like Boeing, right?

Speaker 6 They're doing super interesting things and that could be a great career. And you can bop around within it.
You know, I have friends who are at like Pepsi or Coke, right? And they're there for decades.

Speaker 6 And

Speaker 6 I was like, no, it doesn't really appeal to me that way.

Speaker 6 And I ended up having a career thus far where I have hopped around from a bunch of different things, not only just media companies, but, you know, in academia, then out of academia, I aspire one day to go back to academia.

Speaker 6 But

Speaker 6 working in public service is picking that straight line, right? That you want to be somewhere. You want to be dedicated to it.
You want to understand the ins and outs of it.

Speaker 6 And you also want to fundamentally help people.

Speaker 6 And it's been really interesting from more of a political point of view in this to see what's going on in these town halls because I feel like the American public is now separated into two buckets.

Speaker 6 You're either outraged or you're not. And it doesn't really have a party ID connected to it.

Speaker 6 So there was a Washington Post editorial and she went to dueling town halls, one Republican Mike Lawler, one Democrat Pat Ryan, who we had on the show and we really like, but Mike Lawler, a moderate, someone who's spoken out against the Trump administration.

Speaker 6 Someone who folks talk about as maybe being able to run for governor of New York. And the town halls were essentially the same.

Speaker 6 Those are their Hudson Valley districts side by side because everybody is just outraged. And these are folks who voted for a Democrat and folks who voted for a Republican.

Speaker 6 Social Security, the Department of Education, which we're going to talk about in a little bit, atop the list there. How does Doge have access to all this information? We didn't.
talk about that.

Speaker 6 That's the central problem with what Doge is doing, that they're getting access to private information that actually leads to fraud.

Speaker 6 If you're concerned about fraudsters, look at the 19-year-olds that Musk has with their hands in everything that's precious to us.

Speaker 6 And I think that that is going to be the basic premise for the political landscape over the course of the next three to four years. Are you outraged or are you fine with what's going on?

Speaker 6 And you're going to have a lot more people on the outrage side of things than those who think that it's okay, even if they think that we are directionally going in the right direction, right?

Speaker 6 Like, is it directionally correct that we are getting undocumented people in our country who are part of a Venezuelan gang that kills Americans. Yes.
Is that right?

Speaker 6 But are we outraged that there are innocent people who, you know, claimed asylum through a legal port of entry? Like this story about the gay barber from Venezuela who Tim Miller's been great on this.

Speaker 5 Yes.

Speaker 6 Yeah. I agree.
Amazing.

Speaker 6 Who there was a time journalist that got into the El Salvadorian prison camp that they sent him to and documented this young man who had a legal asylum claim, having his head shaved, crying out for his mother.

Speaker 5 His mother? Yeah. Go to his Instagram page and decide if you think he's a Venezuelan gang member.

Speaker 6 If gangs were filled with people like this man, I think the face of gang warfare would be changing a lot. So are you outraged over that?

Speaker 6 I know a lot of people who agree with Trump's immigration plans and know that we need to fix the border.

Speaker 6 Even Bernie Sanders was on with Jonathan Carl over the weekend and he said that he thinks that Trump has done net net a good job on immigration, that we don't have this massive flow of illegal immigration anymore.

Speaker 6 But are you outraged about something like that? Or the 54-year-old guy, American that I talked about who was detained? Yeah. And that will hopefully unite more people.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 So I couldn't get past your career journey from academia to the private sector. And now you're on the five and doing a pod with me.
What went wrong? What went wrong? Okay.

Speaker 5 Let's take a quick break. Stay with us.

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Speaker 13 What are you hoping for today in the founders?

Speaker 14 Scrappy, traction-oriented grinders and hustlers who will blow through every brick wall in this building to get to where they need to be?

Speaker 15 Welcome to the pitch season 14, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. On this season of the show, 10 VCs, seven startups with one shot to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 1 Oh my God, we built the entirely wrong product.

Speaker 15 shots to build the company of their dreams.

Speaker 1 With that intro, let's go.

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Speaker 5 Welcome back. President Trump signed an executive order to begin dismantling the Department of Education, a long-held conservative goal.

Speaker 5 While he needs Congress to fully eliminate the agency, his administration is already moving key functions, student loans to the Small Business Administration, and special education programs to health and human services.

Speaker 5 Critics argue this will gut protections for students, especially those with disabilities, while supporters say it will cut bureaucracy and return control to the states.

Speaker 5 Just what immediate impact do you think this will have on students, schools, and families, especially with layoffs hitting the Department's Civil Rights Office?

Speaker 6 It's going to, as with everything that they're trying to do, make it harder to use. So there's this chart that's floating around social media.

Speaker 6 It starts with claim it's broken, goes to justify cuts to to it, cut essential services, make it harder to use.

Speaker 6 And they want to make the government impossible to use.

Speaker 6 And because I guess it doesn't affect them personally, even though I assume they just haven't spoken to anyone who might have a kid with disabilities or that they know anyone who's poor.

Speaker 6 As Howard Luttnick has demonstrated, they don't understand some of the good that the Department of Education does. And they are, again, to go back to the idea that they are mean and lazy.

Speaker 6 I do wonder how many people who are saying that they want to get rid of the Department of Education thinks that the Department of Education is the one that sets the curriculum because they aren't.

Speaker 6 That's done on the state level. So

Speaker 6 exactly. But when they talk about critical race theory or DEI in your classrooms,

Speaker 6 they are throwing everything that they don't like. into this bucket, even though it's completely irrelevant to it.

Speaker 6 And you listen to people like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, which has one of the lowest rated education systems in the country, talking about the DOE as if it's not actually her fault that the kids in her state

Speaker 6 have like the 48th or 49th worst, least, you know, educational attainment.

Speaker 6 So I think this is an opportunity, going back to what you were saying about Social Security, for Democrats to do something positive.

Speaker 6 So there's an education function here that you need to talk to people about how the DOE is actually a funding and civil rights enforcement agency, that this is not about setting the curriculum.

Speaker 6 But to do that, you need to also own the fact that education, public education in this country is not up to standard.

Speaker 6 And the national report card, you can use all of those stats falling behind other countries. It makes us less competitive, et cetera.

Speaker 6 And I thought it was really interesting to see the change in how the public views education in this country and who they think would be best to manage it.

Speaker 6 Because Democrats used to have a double-digit advantage, and now it's essentially tied. Maybe they have a one or two point advantage based on the poll.

Speaker 6 And you saw this in Glenn Youngkin's election to be the governor of Virginia when Terry McAuliffe came out there and said, basically, your kids aren't yours. They belong to the teachers.

Speaker 6 No one likes that. Parental rights is really important.
And in New Jersey, it was a huge issue. And Phil Murphy, you know, barely got.
elected there.

Speaker 6 I think it was four or five points, which should have obviously been much bigger. So Democrats really need to find a way to own this space better.

Speaker 6 And that will include admitting some of your own failings.

Speaker 6 And frankly, I think going after Randy Weingarten and the teachers' unions, at least to some degree, obviously not saying we want to break up the union.

Speaker 6 Unions are an incredible force for good in people's lives. And they built out the middle class.
You don't have a middle class without them.

Speaker 6 But I think that there has to be more ownership of what happened during COVID, that these schools, the public schools, especially the ones that serve our least fortunate and needed them to be open the most, were closed when we needed them.

Speaker 6 And now we've lost, I mean, I'm sure you've seen these stats. There are millions of kids that are just lost, that disappeared from the public school system and never came back.

Speaker 5 Yeah, I went into ChatGPT and I asked, if you wanted to destroy America or undermine democracy, what would you do?

Speaker 5 And it gave me, it was really interesting, the things it came back with, including have algorithms on social media to get people fighting with each other over non-important issues.

Speaker 5 But one of the things that came up was said, slowly erode public education such that people aren't critical thinkers.

Speaker 5 And I'm like, I started reading all these things and it was sort of frightening that, okay, that kind of feels like what we've done the last 20 years.

Speaker 5 So I'm of two minds on this. First, just a bit of a tangent on unions.

Speaker 5 I acknowledge that unions were an important part in American history. I think they've become ineffective with a sprinkle of corruption.
I don't think we should have unions.

Speaker 5 I think they are a failed construct. I'm not, people have the right to organize, but I think they're ineffective.
And the states that allow them are the states that need them the least.

Speaker 5 And the states that don't allow them are the ones that need them the most. We should have one union.

Speaker 5 It should be the federal government, $25 an hour minimum wage, get rid of all the corruption, the waste. UAW, current CO, super smart, first, last CEO in jail, one before him in jail.

Speaker 5 And Randy Weingarten, in my opinion, used teachers as drug meals to try and exploit. schools during the weakest moments during COVID rather than focusing on the kids.

Speaker 5 Anyway, thank you for my union TED Talk. The Department of Education, I would argue, needs to be radically reformed and possibly reduced.
And it's about 4,500 people right now.

Speaker 5 It's in charge of enforcing civil rights laws. And there are some really important things here.

Speaker 5 If your kid's disabled, the Department of Education makes sure that a bus that's handicapped accessible will show up and get that kid to school.

Speaker 5 They ensure that there are the laws enforced that a kid will get a hot lunch. I mean, They do important work.
They also oversee student loans. I would argue that system needs to be reformed.

Speaker 5 I think one of the reasons you've seen an escalation in student tuition at Forex,

Speaker 5 the price of inflation, is the access to cheap capital. And I know that sounds harsh, but I think offering kids cheap, easy credit for shitty schools does not have good outcomes.

Speaker 5 And then suspending student loan payments just creates moral hazard where a nice lady in a pan suit with a logo behind her saying, you always get a return when you invest yourself, just sign here, because they get a check right away.

Speaker 5 And not putting schools on the hook for student loans has resulted in just a massive escalation in tuition costs. So I think the Department of Education,

Speaker 5 I mean, I'm torn here because I'm also the beneficiary of Pell Grants and that kind of saved my ass. I came from a household that was in the lowest or lower quartile or lowest quartile of income.

Speaker 5 So I got unfair advantage. I got grants.
And so I feel some obligation. But the DOE of all of these or many of these institutions, I would argue, if you have a thoughtful argument for pushing

Speaker 5 funds out to low-income areas, the needed help,

Speaker 5 okay, I get it. And getting rid of federal bureaucracy.
And also, the Department of Education oversees this mandatory national testing, which was a good idea, and it ended up not working.

Speaker 5 Teachers hate it. Parents hate it.
Students hate it. It kind of isn't working.
And it's taking valuable time away from just trying to lift kids up.

Speaker 5 So I do think that's a department that warrants a radical audit. The problem is they, you don't trust them.
They're bad actors. They're not trying to help kids.

Speaker 5 They're trying to just gut the system and do away and implement their own sort of, and they say they're going to replace it with vouchers, which is nothing but a transfer of wealth from the lower and middle income households to you and me who don't need money for our kids to go to school.

Speaker 5 It even reminds me of the debate on.

Speaker 5 a woman's rights to pregnancy where we're not even willing to have a conversation around whether there should be restrictions in the third trimester because like we can't trust the other side.

Speaker 5 They're using that just as a cudgel to outlaw all of it.

Speaker 5 And the Department of Education, in my opinion, is probably a department that if they put in place more local assurances around funding, especially in low-income areas, you could see, quite frankly, doing away with it.

Speaker 5 But no one trusts them. No one thinks you're actually concerned about our children.

Speaker 5 No one says, all right, are you really being an honest broker here around ensuring our our kids have access to some decent education?

Speaker 5 And again, the mother of all own goals, the districts that need this the most are the ones that are like rooting them on.

Speaker 5 It's like, I mean, I hate to say it, but look at what happens when you're no longer getting your Medicaid,

Speaker 5 there's no longer a school within driving distance and there's no one to enforce it. Your kid that is severely autistic there to enforce that this kid has a place to go to school.

Speaker 5 It's like, folks, be careful what you're asking for here.

Speaker 5 So I don't, I feel like the Department of Education was ripe for reform, but this is just people who aren't sincere about helping kids. Yeah.

Speaker 6 Well, that's the theme, right? Of everything that's going to go on for the next few years.

Speaker 6 If you have bad actors in positions of power, I'm going to dig in and say you can't have access to anything because you're not going to be doing this in a responsible, well-intentioned way.

Speaker 6 And the Department of Education is already one of the smallest cabinet departments, $268 billion a year, 4% of the U.S. budget.

Speaker 6 McMahon, Linda McMahon, who is in charge of it, wants to cut staff by 50%.

Speaker 6 So I don't know what the right number is in terms of cuts to keep it functioning or at least the key things that it does functioning, but that feels really scary to me.

Speaker 6 And when they say, oh, we'll just shift the things that we do that are important, like Title I funding or making sure that we're protecting disabled kids to other departments.

Speaker 6 They say, Oh, we'll send that over to the DOJ. No thank you to Pam Bondi being in charge of these kinds of policies.

Speaker 6 I don't know her personally.

Speaker 6 Maybe she's perfectly nice, but I don't get the vibe off of her that she cares at all or that there's anyone in kind of top lieutenant role that understands how important it is that those dollars get to those kids.

Speaker 6 And in February, there was a group of

Speaker 6 top education officials from GOP control states that took a meeting with Linda McBann, and they want this money as block grants, right?

Speaker 6 They want to say, send it back to the states and we'll deal with it. So your point about vouchers is well taken.

Speaker 6 And we talked about this a few weeks ago and I got some really thoughtful feedback from people who live in red states explaining to me what would actually happen if we moved to a voucher system where they are.

Speaker 6 So not only would kids not have a school option anywhere near them and they'd end up priced out of the private schools anyway, but that it was a move to get people into religious schools to be able to turn, you know, one nation, quote unquote, under God into the policy across all areas of life.

Speaker 6 And I hadn't seen this quote before.

Speaker 6 This is from Betsy DeVos, who was the former Trump education secretary, who openly called it advancing God's kingdom, that that was the plan for how they wanted to do education in this country.

Speaker 6 So I hear that.

Speaker 6 And then I think about even what I was saying about vouchers, like, should there be some optionality, especially during a once in a century global health pandemic, that you should be able to get $78,000 to be able to go to the Catholic school down the street or to the temple down the street that has a good program.

Speaker 6 And that scares. the living daylights out of me.

Speaker 6 The Oklahoma superintendent wanted three or four million dollars to buy Trump Bibles, because of course everything is branded and everything's a grift to put those in the schools in Oklahoma.

Speaker 6 And so if you hand the keys over to these religious zealots that have demonstrated no care or concern for the children who need a good public education the most,

Speaker 6 I feel that I can't abide by that. And I'm going to become even more dug in.
about the Department of Education, which probably does need some level of reform.

Speaker 6 And this has been going on since Reagan, right? It went in under Jimmy Carter or became through the act of Congress that it was created. And we should note, it can't be abolished.

Speaker 6 That has to go through Congress and that will never happen. But starting just a year later, Reagan is crusading on this.
And every Republican since then has been making it its goal to abolish it.

Speaker 6 But Trump is clearly showing that he will spend his last term or

Speaker 6 hopefully his last term. I don't know what he's certainly going to declare something funky can go in at the end of this, but to destroy every aspect of the federal government.

Speaker 5 I think the kind of the strategy or the thing that unifies everything they're doing is the following.

Speaker 5 I think they're trying to turn America into an operating system that just transfers wealth from the bottom 99 to the top 1%.

Speaker 5 And this is yet another example, because if you send your kids to private school, you want to literally starve all public education of all funds so that you have more money for other things that you benefit from, whether it's tax cuts or investments in technology or investments in infrastructure.

Speaker 5 So I think about 10% of U.S. households send their kids to private schools, which is probably less than most people think.
But once you get into the top 1%, see above the tail wagging every dog here,

Speaker 5 about half those households send their kids to private schools.

Speaker 5 And that's even misleading because if you're a household in Woodside, if you send your kid to the public school in Woodside or in Portola Valley, It's a private school, folks. Let's be honest.

Speaker 5 They have an auction. They're so overfunded.
And one of the great inequities in the U.S. is a disproportionate amount of funding levels are based on local property taxes.

Speaker 5 So this is just transparently saying we don't want to pay for anything

Speaker 5 that will primarily affect the bottom 99.

Speaker 5 And the top 1%, this doesn't mean anything. Your kids don't need a public school.
Your kids, you have the resources to ensure that your kid has the special ed he or she might need.

Speaker 5 You don't need to worry about how your kid gets to school.

Speaker 5 And literally everything they're doing is like, okay, how do we tilt everything from the bottom 99 to the one? I just see that as another example here. It's the strategy behind everything.

Speaker 5 It's the explanation behind, I think, almost every activity is there decided America is an underlying engine to try and create prosperity or more prosperity for the top 1%, which

Speaker 5 Folks, spoiler alert, I mean, the NASDAQ and the Dow Jones, which we're obsessed with, they're basically just a litmus test for how the top 1% are doing, who own 80 to 90% of all outstanding equities.

Speaker 5 And guess what? They keep hitting record highs.

Speaker 5 Everything we do right now, I would say in America and Trump to a certain extent encapsulates this, is how do we cut services from the bottom 99 such that we can provide more money and more opportunities for the top 1%.

Speaker 6 Yeah, to add to that, I saw the CBO releasing the data on the implications for the revenue we're going to collect with the cuts to the IRS, another $500 billion into the deficit.

Speaker 6 And guess who's not going to have to pay their taxes? The wealthy who can navigate around the system, who don't actually need to get an IRS agent on the phone. And I don't want to hear

Speaker 6 ever again from the right about the debt or the deficit. I'm just over it.
If these tax cuts are going to go through, which is going to be trillions over several years, what is it?

Speaker 6 The 800 billion a year adding to the deficit And things like getting rid of the IRS so we can't even pretend that we're going to collect money from folks who are prone to tax cheat. Just like save it.

Speaker 6 And Alan Simpson, who died last week, I was reading again about the Simpsons Bowles Commission. And like people would be laughed off the stage if they tried to do something.
like that again.

Speaker 6 And I mean, it didn't even work when they first tried it. But now I feel like it's just a massive joke that anyone is actually concerned about the the deficit.

Speaker 5 Well, to your point about, and this is my favorite thing, taxes. Aren't you a hoot? I know.
I'm fond of parties. But what other department do you give $1 to? And within a year, they give it 12 back.

Speaker 5 And the Republicans don't want to claim that they're harassing people. They're not harassing anyone.

Speaker 5 IRS agents are overworked and trying to figure out a way just to get people to pay the taxes they owe. And what happens when the tax code goes from 400 pages to 7,600?

Speaker 5 Those incremental 7,200 pages are there to fuck the middle class because what they are is is full of all sorts of loopholes and Byzantine means of corporations in the top 1% being able to engage in massive loopholes and tax avoidance.

Speaker 5 And when you have an IRS, AI will help, but AI will be able to start from the bottom and audit in a millionth of a second someone's fairly simple tax return, i.e., a middle-class household.

Speaker 5 Once you get to people who are in the top 1%,

Speaker 5 making $700,000 a year or have net worths of over 10 million, their tax returns purposefully get really complex.

Speaker 5 And you need highly skilled, well-resourced, and expensive groups of people to hold those people accountable.

Speaker 5 And this is what's happened with our tax code: it's created an incentive of the following: an incentive structure of the following.

Speaker 5 If you're really, really wealthy or you're a corporation, the incentive is to be absolutely as aggressive as possible.

Speaker 5 Because

Speaker 5 if you've got a parking meter in front of your house that costs 50 bucks, but the ticket is 10 bucks, you're going to break the law or you're going to be as aggressive as possible.

Speaker 5 And our current tax system, as it relates to the wealthiest Americans, basically incents them to be as aggressive as possible in terms of what they write off.

Speaker 5 Because, A, probably there's no sheriff in town. There's a lack of agents.
And B, even if the sheriff shows up, the penalties are fairly minimal.

Speaker 5 So the notion and then this trope that somehow the good people of the IRS

Speaker 5 are mean or harassing people. No, they're not.
They're trying to make sure that people pay what they're supposed to pay, such that we can afford snap food payments and the Navy.

Speaker 5 So again, another example, cutting funding from the IRS. Who does that benefit the most? Cutting funding of the IRS.
Does it benefit all taxpayers who are aggressive? No. It benefits the top 1%.

Speaker 5 Full stop. See you above my unifying theory of everything, Joss.

Speaker 6 I do like that you've reduced it all to one short TED Talk. Break it down.

Speaker 5 That's why I'm here. All right, let's take one more quick break.
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Speaker 6 welcome back i just want to call out you are entering that stage with little kids where you are going to be you're going to have a cold for about the next 10 years thank you and I apologize to our listeners that I'm just like snotting through all of our conversations.

Speaker 6 It's crazy. We were at the pediatrician yesterday.
The baby had crazy hives all over her body, but we thought it was... Sorry to hear that.
It's okay. Zyrtec, kid Zyrtec, fantastic.

Speaker 6 And she woke up without it, basically got rid of everything, but we thought it was hand, foot, and mouth. And I was having a meltdown.
Did the boys ever have that?

Speaker 5 No,

Speaker 5 but their parents had a lot of meltdowns. So

Speaker 5 it's really a, I think mothers, I think women may know this is going to happen. I don't think most dads realize

Speaker 5 the panic and stress you're going to feel when one of your kids is not doing well. I mean, something, God really does reach into your soul and turn on a switch that says,

Speaker 5 not only are you going to love this thing, but you are not going to be able to relax for a millisecond when your kid isn't doing well. The few times my kids have not, have had a health issue.

Speaker 5 I mean, I remember when my son had a breathing issue or a respiratory issue, and we would, he would Google on this, I figured we call it a breathing mechanism that they would put medicine in it and he would breathe through this thing.

Speaker 5 And I was so freaked out that the medicine had gone bad and somehow I might be like...

Speaker 6 Poisoning him. Yeah.

Speaker 5 You get so paranoid, so neurotic. And I'm not someone who, at least until the last few years, was ever neurotic, worried about anything.
And then Ted Sarando's wife wrote this book.

Speaker 5 And I love this statement that grief is the receipts for love. I think anxiety.

Speaker 5 is the receipts for kids because you know you do get a lot of joy from them but anyways i feel for you because i never ever anticipated the type of crazy stress.

Speaker 5 I mean, when your kid does break out on hives, there's no like, oh, it'll probably be fine. It's like, what the fuck? Like,

Speaker 5 get to

Speaker 5 zero.

Speaker 6 How you would treat yourself. Oh, yeah.
Right. I'm like, eh, no, it's fine.
I'll just bury Christmas.

Speaker 5 Whatever. Man up.

Speaker 6 I'm like, he's big and strong. Everything's going to be fine.

Speaker 6 And then, you know, your little almost one-year-old has these huge splotches all over her and you're like running around the house like a crazy person like did you see this one did you see this one and you know anyway pediatricians are saints also and all the nurses that work there as well one of the lowest actually of course one of the lowest paid providers let's back to me did you know when i applied to ucla i thought i was going to be a pediatrician that's what i put in my application really yeah and then chemistry disavowed me of that when i got a d in it sent me from south campus to the north campus you would be such a weird pediatrician just your vibes thank you for that i guess they would be different i'm good for i'm good with kids actually i'm shockingly good with kids.

Speaker 5 Anyways, but it sent me from North Campus, I'm sorry, from South Campus to North Campus, where the people were much hotter and the parties were much better than the South Campus.

Speaker 6 So everything worked out for you.

Speaker 5 Everything worked out. But I actually thought, I actually believed I was going to be a pediatrician for about a year.

Speaker 5 Anyways, before we go, we're getting clear insights into what happened in the 2024 election.

Speaker 5 Blue Rose Research's analysis shows that key voter groups, including Hispanic, Asian, young, and disengaged voters, shifted towards Trump, mainly due to his perceived strength on economic issues, including inflation and the cost of living.

Speaker 5 Despite concerns over democracy, voters felt Trump was the better option. Now, with Trump's popularity dropping, the Democratic Party is left scrambling, unsure about their identity and next steps.

Speaker 5 The analysis reveals that if those who stayed at home had voted, Trump would have won the popular vote by almost five points.

Speaker 5 While Trump's favorability remained steady, Vice President Harris and the Democratic Party saw significant drops.

Speaker 5 And voters cared most about issues where Dems lost trust, like the economy and inflation, though they still trusted them more on healthcare. Just this is kind of your wheelhouse.

Speaker 5 Which findings from the Blue Rose data really caught your eye? Any surprises or patterns that stood out to you?

Speaker 6 I mean, the pattern

Speaker 6 that stands out to me is that it's real bleak. I was expecting at least something that felt like a sunny day, and it was all a torrential rainstorm of information coming down.

Speaker 6 I listened to David Choron with as recline. And I don't know, I guess now because of how prevalent podcasts are.
And again, thank you to the listeners.

Speaker 6 It's great that you're paying attention to what we're talking about, like that that's the best way that I'm absorbing information at this point. And I was walking listening to it.

Speaker 6 And I didn't actually shed a tear, but I felt my ducks start to activate as David Shore kept bringing out chart after chart and saying to him, like pointing at something and saying, you see this quadrant, we have nothing in this quadrant.

Speaker 6 And it was like the success quadrant, right, of the chart. Things that stuck out in particular,

Speaker 6 the idea of if we vote, we win is now over is deeply problematic because I also don't want to become the party who wants folks to stay at home. Like that was always the Republicans thing.

Speaker 6 And now I guess it has to be our thing.

Speaker 6 Because if we all vote, we lose and we lose by a lot. I mean, the idea that Republicans could win a popular vote by 4.8 percentage points, they hadn't won the popular vote in 20 plus years anyway.

Speaker 6 But like, that's our thing, right? That folks turn out to vote and we do super well. So that's over.
Everybody, please stay home. I'm for disenfranchisement now.

Speaker 6 I'm just kidding. I'm not.
We'll fix it and we'll make it so that we win back the voters. But that was deeply concerning.
The one

Speaker 6 that really stood out because I feel like it flies in the face of everything that we thought about the way Trump was campaigning and how people were receiving his message was this change that Biden won the immigrant population vote by 27 points.

Speaker 6 And it looks like Trump won it by one this time. Like that level of sway.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Especially when the guy is out there, you know, they're eating the cats and the dogs.
And,

Speaker 6 you know, Puerto Rico is just a. island, a floating island of garbage and all the xenophobia.
And

Speaker 6 it didn't matter at all. And obviously this is different amongst, you know, various immigrant populations.

Speaker 6 And we always know that there are more conservative groups like the Cubans, for instance, have always been that way. But it feels like we've been going through

Speaker 6 20, 30 years of a particular political reality. And now it has been completely upended.
And this idea that we are trying to quote unquote rebuild the Obama coalition has to go out the door.

Speaker 6 It is dead and buried at this point.

Speaker 6 When you lose, you know, some polls, you know, 12 to 24 percentage points with Latino voters, you're not rebuilding anything, even if you get some of those folks back.

Speaker 6 So we have to do a full burn-it-down strategy that's really focused on attracting working class voters back of all races and ethnicities.

Speaker 6 But I don't know if we're going to win national elections again, it's going to look wildly different. And David Shore was pointing out that we did surprisingly well on the Senate map.

Speaker 6 And we had good candidates and they had bad candidates. And that has been a feature of the Trump era that he goes and he backs people that can't win elections and we get lucky because of that.

Speaker 6 Like Ruben Gallego, who we have on the podcast this week, actually going to interview him. He won in Arizona where Trump won Arizona by five points.
Now, he was running against Kerry Lake.

Speaker 6 Are they going to run Kerry Lake again? I don't think so. Or a Kerry Lake adjacent type person.

Speaker 6 And a lot of that is for what the world looks like in a post-Trump era, you know, 2028 and beyond. But deeply concerning is how I felt.
How did you feel looking at the data?

Speaker 5 Well, I love this stuff, but I like to bust the solutions.

Speaker 5 In my view, even the poll is the problem of the

Speaker 5 Democratic Party's platform. And that is, in my view, how you get Latin voters back or Hispanic voters back is you stop talking about them.

Speaker 5 The way you get black voters back is you stop talking about them. And what do I mean by that? The Democratic Party has to make it verbatim to continue to engage in identity politics.

Speaker 5 And they should focus on the economy through the lens of the middle class. There's been too much advantage crammed into

Speaker 5 the most advantaged group in America right now are non-white children of rich people

Speaker 5 because we have based affirmative action on

Speaker 5 race and our entire politics in the Democratic Party through identity. And it made sense 20, 40, 60 years ago.

Speaker 5 The academic gap between black and white 60 years ago double was double what it was between rich and poor and now it has flipped. And the swing voters have one thing in mind.

Speaker 5 Swing voters have the economy in mind. And this is the opportunity because it's dynamic, meaning some cycles, people see Democrats as better on the economy, some Republicans as better on the economy.

Speaker 5 And what the Democratic Party, in my view, needs to do is say, look,

Speaker 5 we are going to restore the middle class. The most prosperous nation in the world should have the following table stakes.

Speaker 5 Young people need the venues, opportunities, and means to meet someone, fall in love, and should they desire, own a home and have kids.

Speaker 5 So we're going to have mandatory national service, more freshman seats, vocational programming, more interaction for less anxiety.

Speaker 5 We're going to have 7 million manufactured homes in cool little areas that cost 30 to 50% less than homes built on site. We're going to make it affordable.

Speaker 5 We're going to have low interest rate loans for anyone under the age of 40. We're going to have a tax holiday for anyone under the age of 30.
We're going to have $25 an hour minimum wage.

Speaker 5 And if you don't want to get married and you don't want to have kids, fine, you can spend all that money on brunch and St. Bart's.

Speaker 5 But we are going to get out of this lens of trying to shove advantage and talk about the needs and the wants and the injustice of people based on their gender, their sexual orientation, or their race.

Speaker 5 And we're just going to say we are here to reverse engineer everything we do to the following.

Speaker 5 The middle class in America and young people are going to have the opportunity to be able to have kids and have a home and live in relative prosperity. And these are the 8, 10, 12 programs.

Speaker 5 And stop rolling out every special interest group, which all it says to the 24% of people that don't qualify for a democratic special interest group, that we're not going to discriminate against you.

Speaker 5 We're about the poor in the middle class rising up. That's it.
That's your only identity politics. Because even these polls are like, how do we get Hispanics back? No, you don't want Hispanics back.

Speaker 5 You want the middle class back. And you want to stop telling people you should vote for me because you're Hispanic and I'm better for you.
Hispanics don't want you to talk about them as a group.

Speaker 5 Try and group. Mexican Americans in Los Angeles into the same group as Cuban Americans in Florida.
They have entirely different priorities.

Speaker 5 And the notion that some, the daughter of a Taiwanese private equity billionaire needs affirmative action is just fucking stupid. All of our programs should be focused on color, specifically money.

Speaker 5 If you don't have money in America, you need more. And corporations and the top 1% should be paying a lot more.
Lowest taxes in history for corporations since 1939.

Speaker 5 25 wealthiest Americans paying an average tax rate of 6%. And everything that has happened over the last 30 years is an attempt to cram more money into the top 1% of corporations.

Speaker 5 But for God's sakes, get away from these polls and this discussion of how do we get black voters back. No, how do you get the middle class back? Stop the identity politics.

Speaker 6 I want to agree with something and then I want to disagree with something. So definitely color green, most important, 91%

Speaker 6 of voters said cost of living was their top issue. There's an argument to be made that incumbents lost all over the globe.
And Kamala Harris was also an incumbent. She was Biden-Harris administration.

Speaker 6 And as an interesting corollary, Mike Donnellin, who's top advisor to Joe Biden, was speaking about what happened in the election. And he said, it was crazy that they pushed Biden out.

Speaker 6 I think that the party went insane. And we all thought that that was crazy, right? Like that we breathed new life into the campaign, getting Kamala out there.
And we would have.

Speaker 6 lost by, you know, Trump could have won 400 electoral votes if it had been Biden. But the way that favorability ended when we went into election day, Kamala was negative six and Biden was plus six.

Speaker 6 Now, would that have drifted down further? Had he stayed the candidate? Possibly. But it was interesting.
David Jork kind of entertained the premise that Mike Donnellin wasn't in C.

Speaker 6 On the identity politics front, I agree with you in general. I'm not mad about the idea that we move away from having all of these special interests conversations.

Speaker 6 But you used black voters, for instance, where Kamala Harris was trying really hard to just have an agenda for all Americans.

Speaker 6 Her best testing ads were ones that appealed to everybody in the lower and middle classes. She wasn't necessarily going after the wealthy voter.
She said, you know, you'll just come with me.

Speaker 6 And that is what ended up happening.

Speaker 6 But then she had to go and do a town hall with Charlemagne on the breakfast club for black men.

Speaker 6 She had to release an agenda for black men because she was hearing from all of her key stakeholders that black men in particular didn't think that she had any proposals specifically focused on them.

Speaker 6 So, what do you do about that when you're trying to run a general campaign where the economy is your central issue? These are the kind of policies that are, I'm implementing to help you.

Speaker 6 I want to build more housing. I want to go after price gouging, those hugely popular policies.
And yet, a target demo comes back to you and says, Well, what's in it for me?

Speaker 6 You haven't told me specifically with my name on it, like the black man agenda.

Speaker 6 What do you do?

Speaker 5 I think you have your sister soldier moment, and I say, you grow the fuck up. I'm not here to play identity politics.
I'm here for young people.

Speaker 5 Programs to focus on young people would right now disproportionately impact and benefit young men who are struggling. It would disproportionately impact young men of color who are really struggling.

Speaker 5 And look, Democrats need to come out of the closet and acknowledge the following data and truth in America. And that's the following.

Speaker 5 You would rather be born today, and this is a victory we should celebrate, you'd rather be born today non-white or gay than poor.

Speaker 5 And that's great. That's a sign of our victory.
So who are we going to help? We're going to help the poor and we're going to help young people.

Speaker 5 And by the way, the way you calm special interest groups down who are used to Democrats showing up and pandering to them is you say, folks, do the math. There's a 70%

Speaker 5 overlap between many of the special interest groups who count on the Democratic Party to represent them and poor and middle-income households.

Speaker 5 As MLK said, if you don't bring along the white poor, you're never going to make that much progress because it creates resentment.

Speaker 5 It also creates accidental racism where when you're at a school or anywhere, you immediately look at someone left and right and think, okay, did they get in? 54% of gay men are attending college.

Speaker 5 It's 38% of straight men.

Speaker 5 I mean, at some point, we just have to acknowledge the data and be the party of the middle class instead of rolling out every special interest group and having Michelle Obama, who I adore, go, who's going to tell him this might be a black job?

Speaker 5 That is not helpful. That is not helpful.
And the only people they don't parade on stage are young men. When they're, in fact, are the ones who have probably fallen further faster than anyone.

Speaker 5 So get away from the identity politics. The discussion around how we get back Hispanics is only going to alienate more Hispanics.
It's to say we've made tremendous progress.

Speaker 5 We are here to lift people up who are poor and make sure the middle class is the most prosperous middle class living in the most prosperous country in the world. And here are a series of programs.

Speaker 5 And if you want me to talk about what goodies you get because of the color of your skin or your sexual orientation or whether you have indoor or outdoor plumbing.

Speaker 5 other than protecting a woman's rights to family planning, I'm not going to engage in that conversation. I'm here for the middle class full stop.
I think that message really resonates.

Speaker 5 It gets a lot of moderates back in the fold and it gets the white poor back in the fold. And I think a lot of non-whites are absolutely ready to have that conversation.

Speaker 5 They're sick of being categorized and taken for granted that I'll vote for Democratic because you're going to throw more goodies at me because of the color of my skin.

Speaker 6 Or that the other side is racist. They don't think that anymore.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 And Trump can point to a bunch of data from 16 to 20 that people, that non-whites actually did okay during his administration.

Speaker 5 Now, granted, it was all debt-fueled, which is a tax on young people, but that's the argument. It's we got to stop these deficits.
They're going to fuck our children in 10, 20, 40 years.

Speaker 5 It doesn't matter what color you are, what sexual orientation. If we keep running up deficits, you're all going to be fucked.
That's the argument.

Speaker 6 Now, that's a sexy message. Right.

Speaker 5 That's not a bumper sticker, is it?

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 6 I can see that. That's perfect for Galloway 2032.

Speaker 5 We sold out the why. We sold out the why.
Oh my God. I'm so excited about that.
I keep rubbing it in Kara Switch's face.

Speaker 6 I'm like, I don't know if you heard, but I know. I can also hear Pivot.
It is publicly available.

Speaker 5 I'm like, I don't know if you heard, but me and the much younger Jess Harloff sold out the 90-second why in about three minutes. I'm like, we've never done that, have we, Kara?

Speaker 6 Well, in Kara's defense, apparently you're not open to doing these things, but you don't want to go to Paris with her. So I'm going to go to Paris with her.

Speaker 5 There you go. Actually, oh, I know, all of a sudden I feel a little threatened and a little jealous.
Do you? Yeah.

Speaker 5 I think you guys, yeah, that's an interesting thought. Don't get any ideas.

Speaker 5 Remember who discovered you. All right.
That's all for this episode. Actually, I think Rupert Murdoch discovered you.
All right. That's all for this episode.

Speaker 5 Thank you for listening to Raging Moderates. Our producers are David Toledo and Chenenye Onike.
Our technical director is Drew Burroughs.

Speaker 5 You can now find Raging Moderates on its own feed every Tuesday. That's right.
What a thrill. Its own feed.

Speaker 5 Folks, we're doing great, but we need you to subscribe to our own feed so we can hit certain benchmarks and bring in the big advertisers. That means exclusive interviews with sharp political minds.

Speaker 5 You won't hear anywhere else if you subscribe to our distinct feed. This week, Jess will be talking with Senator Gallego.
Make sure you follow us wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 5 You don't miss an episode. Jess, I'm glad that your little girl is doing just fine.
And again, I don't know if you've heard.

Speaker 5 We're doing an event at the 90 second Why, and we're sold out.

Speaker 6 I heard something. I also heard we're sold out.
We are.

Speaker 5 We're sold out. Thanks, everybody.