Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 11/21/24: End Of MSNBC, Cenk Wrecks Lichtman Keys, Rand Slams Trump Military Deportations, Junk Food Industry Vs RFK, AOC Vs Mace On Trans Bathroom Debate

Episode Date: November 21, 2024

Krystal and Emily discuss the end of MSNBC, Cenk destroys Lichtman keys to his face, Rand Paul slams Trump military deportation plot, junk food industry war on RFK Jr, ICC issues arrest warrant for Bibi, Biden team secretly sabotaged Kamala, AOC war with Nancy Mace on trans bathroom debate.    To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everyone. I can't be as loud as Sagar, but we are loudly internally, Crystal, wishing him the best honeymoon ever. He's off to Japan at this very moment, so we miss him. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to go to Japan, but I would not love the trip in the jet lag. No, so not interested. Thank you. But it is ready for that level of travel suffering. So everyone's in for girl shows for the next, what, three shows until Thanksgiving break. Yeah, that's right. So get ready for four hour long shows. That's right. Because Emily and I, when we get together, do the longest shows ever for whatever reason. We look at the clock and we're like, whoops. Yep, indeed. But there is a lot to

talk about this morning. Lots of interesting stories, actually. So it's official now. Comcast is spitting off MSNBC. There's a bit of a freakout happening over there at the network. So obviously for me as a former MSNBC person, it's very, the tables have turned, one might say. I'm excited for that segment. Yeah, I got a lot, a lot to say there. So we'll get into that. Also, we have some, a look at some interesting ways that liberals are coping with Kamala Harris's loss. So we'll bring you that as well. New details about Elon and Vivek's plans. And Emily and I are going to talk about whether or not Trump is sort of overreaching and over reading, I guess, his mandate that he received in this election.

The junk food lobby is gearing up to do battle with RFK Jr. An interesting report there. The ICC has now officially issued arrest warrants for both Bibi Netanyahu and Yoav Galan. So we'll bring you those details. There's also some significant developments on the domestic front with regard to Israel policy in the Senate led by Bernie Sanders. So give you those details as well. My friend Tori is going to be here.

He has some very interesting reporting from inside the Kamala Harris campaign where basically the campaign chair, like the person who was running the campaign, doesn't really like Kamala Harris and was sort of like sabotaging her from within, which is not a great thing when you're trying to win the presidency. So she was a Biden loyalist, Jenna O'Malley Dillon. She was one of the people who was always like sort of smearing Kamala to the press behind the scenes, trying to undercut her and say you have to stick with Biden because this lady's terrible and she's not electable. And then she ends up in charge of the campaign. So when you wonder why the staff never prepared Kamala, not that it's not

also on Kamala to be prepared for this question of like, how are you different from Biden or what would you do differently? They didn't want her to separate from Biden because they're like Biden loyalists, Biden people. So he got some really interesting behind the scenes details there. I'm taking a look at Nancy Mace and her whole interest in the bathroom at the Capitol facility and also how Democrats can better respond to some of these questions about transgender issues. So a lot to say on that one as well. Yes. And Crystal, I am wondering who we could ask about MSNBC. Who do we know that might have some connectivity there into MSNBC? I think maybe you have thoughts on everything that's going down. A little bit, a little bit, yes. So we'll go ahead

and get into that. Before we do, though, guys, if you can become a premium subscriber, we would love you for it, and it would support all the exciting things that we're planning to do this year, BreakingPoints.com. If you cannot become a premium subscriber or you already are a premium subscriber, make sure you like and share the videos on YouTube. That helps us out a lot. We really want people to know about what we're up to here. You know, we've got a lot of plans in terms of this is one of the only big, like, Internet shows, maybe the only big Internet show that's here in D.C. So we're kind of uniquely positioned to, as politicians, wake up to the fact that actually, like, alternative media is really important and a lot of people watch it and maybe you should be engaging with that. We're kind of

uniquely positioned to take advantage of that moment. So if you can like, if you can share, those things all really help us out over on YouTube. And that is just a perfect transition to this segment, actually. That is so true. This is the ripest time to support independent media. It's so important to help the political class kind of wake up to what's happening. Yeah, that's exactly right. So let's go ahead and put the official news up on the screen here. So Comcast has decided and officially announced that they are going to spin off a number of their cable channels, so it's not just MSNBC.

But this is a huge deal because they're keeping the NBC News brand under Comcast. The spinoff, though, will include MSNBC, raises all kinds of questions about the future of that network, which, of course, is really, really struggling post-Kamala's loss. You know, their whole sort of theory of the world has just been dramatically undercut. You also had the whole incident with Joe and Mika going down to Mar-a-Lago. You and Ryan reported on the fact that even just an hour later, their audience were basically like, screw you, we're done here. And who could blame them? Who could blame them? When two weeks earlier, you got Joe saying Trump is Hitler. And then, hey, we're making nice with him. We're restarting,

restarting negotiations, restarting communications with them. Yeah. So, you know, they're really in the wilderness. And I think the fact that you have this spinoff coming right now, you know, it genuinely raises questions about whether or not this network is even going to be able to survive into the future. Yeah. I mean, MSNBC is one of the most interesting places in media right now because they're an old brand, an old traditional media property, cable, old in the sense of like several decades. Yeah, early 2000s. I guess they launched maybe in the late 90s. Late 90s, yeah. I just listened to a podcast about it. It was pretty interesting,

oddly enough. But Microsoft and NBC, of course. That's right. Because why not? Why not just merge corporations and news gathering organizations? What could go wrong? It seems fine. What's what's interesting about it, though, is that it's developed a really niche audience, but it's still trying to do kind of monoculture, you know, big picture, reach a bunch of people in order to get, you know, to compete with Fox News, they would have to be in primetime getting a couple million people at least each hour. And that's not happening because they started, you know, marketing themselves to a sliver of the public, they started, you know, marketing themselves to a sliver of the public, which is, you know, the best analogy I use is it's Stephen Colbert versus

Johnny Carson, right? Like you just, everyone has more choice now. So if you can corner one demo, you can do really well, but that means you have to keep them in the bubble because they don't want the content outside the bubble. It's comfort food. Fine. It's not how I like to get my news, but if you want to break the comfort food bubble, you're going to lose your audience. Yeah. Well, last time around, after Trump won in 2016, you know, after the initial shock, MSNBC really dug in on the whole like Russiagate drama. CNN too. And it was compelling, right? I mean, a lot of it was completely false and phony and a lie that they were selling their audience and stringing them along. You might think the audience would have lost trust then.

But it was compelling. People were tuning in to Rachel Maddow every night to know, like, okay, what's the next shoe that's going to drop? What's the next piece of evidence that we're going to get in this grand conspiracy that they were spinning? And so even though, like I said, it was not accurate, it did make for great television. And they created, you know, a bit of a liberal juggernaut and were outpacing CNN a lot of times because they were willing to lean into that. You know, this time around, there is no grand conspiracy. Trump is no longer a one-off. He just won. And the direction that MSNBC has pushed the party in, which has been not just to, you know, resist Trump, but to also even more aggressively

in a lot of ways, resist the like Bernie left within the party and embrace the Nicole Wallaces, the Liz Cheney's of the world, like Morning Joe was the beating heart of that embrace of the Never Trump movement as being central to the Democratic Party and central to the strategy of the Democratic Party. That whole notion has just been completely obliterated. So, you know, one of the big problems they're going to face is now without having NBC News there to assist them in any sort of news gathering when they don't really have their own news gathering operation. She's NBC, right? Right. So then they're just in the like hot takes business, you know, like we are. At least we have Ryan doing real journalism and you doing real

journalism. We're honest about it, right? That's the difference. Like we're fundamentally honest about it. And we say we're coming from positions of bias. And Nicole Wallace will still, I heard her the other day talking about how objectively X, Y, and Z is disinformation. And Nicole Wallace will still, I heard her the other day talking about how objectively X, Y, and Z is disinformation. She was talking about it with somebody hilarious. I forget exactly who it was. I think it was someone from Media Matters. And she was talking about how objectively this one fact is totally wrong. It's like, what are you smoking, Nicole Wallace? I mean, probably nothing. That's the sad part. She doesn't have to smoke anything to be delusional. True. But I mean, Fox, it's a lot of comfort food, yes.

But even when you were on MSNBC, they had voices in that were from different perspectives because they knew that disagreement was good for TV. CNN is starting to try and do this again. They really minimized it during the Trump years. But MSNBC has really become an echo chamber of, like, feds agreeing with centrist Democrats about policies, just like nodding sagely. Well, here's the thing. So just to give you a little bit of like the history of MSNBC, which I'm curious what podcast you listen to, because I want to I'm curious what they had to say as well. But, you know, it started off as just to try to be like a rival to CNN and just kind of like straight news. Right. And then they kind of

stumbled into this liberal branding. It wasn't intentional from the executives at the top. But Keith Olbermann during the Iraq war days, you know, was very he copied some of the model of like sports newscasts, you know, and some of that like that that energy. Talk radio. And yeah, and he really, you know, captured a moment. And so his ratings really blow up. They lean into that. Rachel Maddow comes out of, you know, that she was a regular guest on that show. She comes out of that. And so they just sort of lean into, OK, this is working for us or we're just going to keep going down this path. And I think the other big mistake that they made is in that 2016 Democratic primary fight, rather than being the venue where these things are really battled out and where you really have both sides of that Hillary versus Bernie divide represented, instead of that, they overtly sided with Hillary and the Democratic establishment. And, you know, they wanted to keep their access and that was important to them and their business model. And ultimately, MSNBC in the grand scheme of Comcast is like a little blip on their bottom line. So they don't even care that much about the ratings. And, you

know, Hillary is more acceptable and more comfortable for them. It's more prestigious to be aligned with these forces in the Democratic Party that have power. But in doing that, they also shut themselves off from not just the half of the country that isn't democratic, but they also shut themselves off from the part of the party that was like young and rising and energetic and made themselves adversarial to, you know, that wing of the party as well. So now you're slicing down your potential audience even further. And while, by the way, playing into the identity politics game with Joy Reid, and it's not surprising, obviously, and like from the perspective of a genuine leftist, like you were Ryan, that they're using that as their sort of fig leaf to promote like corporatism.

Of course, that's what's happening. But they went all in on the sort of cultural, like progressivism. That's right. Yeah, that's correct. And people who watch the show or have read Ryan's book, because he really, you know, literally wrote the book on this, will recall that the identity politics direction of the Democratic Party didn't come from the Bernie Sanders left. It came directly from the Hillary Clinton campaign, trying to blunt the Bernie Sanders movement and using these this, you know, very academic language and these niche identity issues as a way to smear Bernie and his movement as being sexist and racist and as not being truly progressive because all they care about are these broad based class economic issues. And, you know, that was effective in a sense. It

was effective enough that Bernie felt the need to respond to some of that in 2020. But yeah, that's the identity issues have often been used and certainly were used at MSNBC as a way to virtue signal as if you were on the left, virtue signal as if you were progressive while maintaining all of your corporate goodies for the darn class and increasingly affluent base. It's funny. People were having this identity politics debate online. And Matt Iglesias pointed out, I'm not the biggest Matt Iglesias fan, but he's correct about this. He's like, well, one way that identity politics was quite salient is that Biden picked Kamala Harris because of, you know, pressure from Jim Clyburn and, you know,

sort of promises that he had made on the campaign trail about diversity. So he ends up picking this vice presidential candidate who had no demonstrated track record of electoral success and had in fact been rejected in the Democratic primary. And, you know, I pointed out, yeah, that's true, but take note of where that came from. That didn't come from the left of the party. That came from Joe Biden and the centrists. So now in the, you know, postmortems to then turn around and try to blame the Bernie Sanders left for the identity politics that you all invented and used and weaponized against the Bernie Sanders left is just like, it's kind of too perfect. Yeah, it's kind of too perfect. Yeah, it's kind of too perfect.

It is. So as I mentioned before, Joe and Mika, they're the beating heart of the never Trump embrace, the Liz Cheney mode of the Democratic Party. And they had a little bit of gallows humor on the show about what this Comcast MSNBC spinoff might mean for them. Let's take a listen to that. Our parent company, NBC Universal, plans to spin off its cable TV networks. That's according to the Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the situation. The company will separate off entertainment and news channels, including MSNBC,

CNBC, USA, Oxygen, E, Syfy, and the Golf Channel. So it's been enough. The new cable venture will reportedly have an ownership structure that mirrors Comcast. I mean, I could be completely wrong. We could all be fired a year from now whenever this happens. You never know what's going to happen. Or tomorrow. Yeah, but in this case, though, Willie, what they're doing is what other media firms are doing. You spin off the cable channels, which seven years ago were making a ton of money. Now they've got to figure out how to make them profitable.

Disney, which, by the way, huge media news. Disney has figured out now how to make streaming profitable. Peacock had an extraordinary success in the Olympics. So they're talking about spinning this off. Comcast still owns, I think Brian Roberts still owns a third of that. And because Comcast didn't jump into the bidding war like everybody else, throwing stupid money at streaming services and then watch it flop. Comcast has a ton of cash.

So now they spin this off and they're in a position to, what do you all say? We, to, to, to, to get a lot of chat, to get a lot of consolidate, consolidate, but also to just ramp up. And so you get a lot of people, a lot of different channels together. And so whatever that entity is going to be, it'll probably be a lot of cable channels and they'll be in a much better position. Yeah, this is to keep these networks like this network healthy and to keep Comcast thriving the way it is. And this is just the way it's going. People are cutting the cord, right? The cable subscribers are down across the board. This is something Bob Iger talked about last year doing. Crystal, Willie Geist is an NBC News is an NBC News employee. And throwing that question to him was dangerous. True. Yeah. No, that's a great,

that is a great point. And, you know, one of the things that these people are going to have to reckon with is like their business model where Joe and Mika are making millions a year. You know, they've got a bunch of highly paid talent. They have large teams, production teams, you know, huge overhead costs. That business model just doesn't really work anymore. You know, as your ratings slide, and then more importantly, as cable companies start to ask themselves, like, do I, is this really worth it for me to be paying you the cable carriage rate that is what they really depend on in terms of their budget. So yeah, they're in for it because now effectively they're basically in the same business that we are and trying to figure it out with this giant behemoth and all this overhead and all these overpaid like celebrity hosts that no one really cares about or wants

to hear from. And so it's going to be difficult for them. Let's put some of the specifics up here on the screen about what the concerns are internally and how this was all delivered. So they said the prospect of being separated from NBC News has raised alarms among journalists at the company because MSNBC and CNBC routinely share reportage contributors and more. And because much of MSNBC's daytime schedule is filled with correspondents who are affiliated with the more traditional NBC news, not the opinion programs that are MSNBC's most watched properties. Let's put the next piece up on the screen. They say that they could also have to consider changing their name and familiar markings. So they may not be able to hold on to that NBC part of the MSNBC or CNBC name. Let's go

ahead and put the next piece up on the screen. So they described the new company as a, quote, well-funded startup. These people said indicated they would have a presence in Manhattan, but noted that executives were not certain at present where the corporation would be based. That is brutal. A well-funded startup. And that really is, I mean, it's not a bad place to begin, by the way, because imagine if they understood new media. CNN actually does some big numbers on YouTube. Imagine if they understood new media and figured out what they could do. We're about to talk about what Piers Morgan does on his show in just a bit. Yeah. Like they don't have the will to lean into what people actually really want,

other than a pretty small slice of the public that wants to eat up whatever Nicole Wallace is serving day in and day out. But that's not a lot of people. It definitely exists, but it's not a lot of people. And so, I mean, you can be a well-funded startup and you can figure some of this stuff out if you're smart enough to. And if you're actually, if you have the like political stomach for quote unquote platforming all of these debates but that's the question for them yeah well and the other thing is you know cnn doesn't have to live and die just by like their youtube revenue stream because again the numbers would not work out even as they get good numbers on youtube the numbers would not work out to support you know multi-millionillion dollar salaries for their hosts who don't really

drive views in particular. Like no one really cares that much what Wolf Blitzer has to say at all. A Wolf Blitzer monologue. Large production overhead. Like, you know, they have other revenue streams still. So this is, yeah. And the other thing, so let me show you this clip because to me it just demonstrates, this is Mike Barnicle, who was weighing in on this poll that came out about how many people now, oh my God, get their news from social media and from YouTube and other places other than cable news and newspapers. And what's evident to me in this conversation is that they really have never thought about this. Like they don't get it at all. It's like a foreign world to them that they've never had to grapple with it for the first time. They're like, holy shit, I got to wrap my head

around what is going on over here. And just before we toss to it, Ryan and I talked yesterday about Joe Scarborough coming back from his announcement that Mika and he had gone down to Mar-a-Lago the next day and saying, for the first time in my life, I have seen how out of touch social media is with reality. And it's like, bro, you have been covering the news for how many years? And just now, because it affected you, you noticed that there's a disconnect between social media and the outside world? But to me, it's actually the exact wrong time to learn that lesson. Because to me, one of the big parts of this election was like, oh, actually, social media does bear a lot of resemblance to the real world, that there's been a flip now where it used to be able to say, oh, what's happening on Twitter is

not real life. Like what's happening in these spaces is not real life. It's like, no, actually, this is real life now. This is representative of something larger that's going on and not just like a niche online bubble sentiment. And that's why this election, you know, flip into being the podcast election, how successful that strategy was ultimately for the Trump campaign. I think it's the exact wrong time to learn that lesson. If anything, at this point, you should be saying, you know, there actually is more going on there than I really thought. So, but he's got to protect, you know, himself and believe that the people who are in his Rolodex calling him are the ones who

really get, have their finger on the pulse of what's going on out there. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. Nobody cares. Incredible. All right. Let's take a listen to Mike Barnicle and how he was grappling with this. And Mike, that's the challenge. You grew up in a newsroom like Jean grew up in a newsroom. I mean, that's a lot of challenge. That's a challenge for a lot of mainstream media sources is do they make themselves relevant again to hear 20 percent of adults who actually get influencers on social media? I don't know. Maybe somebody who makes baskets and while they're making baskets, they look up and say, vote for candidate X. I don't know how they make themselves. We make ourselves relevant again because we can't compete with 20 second snippets on an iPhone, walking up the street, getting your entire news digest of the day in less than a minute on your phone as you're walking into the crowd with coffee in one hand

and your phone in the other. I don't know how we catch up to that. Yeah. So Gene Robinson, do you agree with Mike? Because I find this hard to believe that younger voters would be more interested in getting an entertaining 20 news, 20 second news snippet than watching a cable news show for four hours from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. It seems like an easy choice to us here. What is wrong with these people? Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that segment says so much. First of all, the example that Joe gives of like somebody's like weaving baskets and then they look up and they're like, vote candidate. Have you literally ever been on YouTube? Have you ever listened to a podcast? Have you where have you been? And then Mike Barnicle, like, oh, my

God, they're just consuming these 20 second snippets. And the thing that's funny to me coming out of the cable news world and into this world is that I had the exact opposite experience of like, oh, in cable news, you have these truncated segments where you get maybe like five minutes in an interview. If you're going to do, I used to, we used to do monologues with the cycle. They had to be three minutes long. I was lucky if I could make one point effectively. And so, yeah, some of what's happening is TikTok, YouTube shorts, like these very short snippets. That's some of what's happening or, you know, people on Twitter or whatever, but also some of what's happening is actually really long form and the medium enables you to do whatever. Now I

have personally become very disenchanted with alternative media because I think a lot of it is slop, propaganda, junk has in some ways worse incentives than mainstream media spaces. So I'm not gonna act like this is all, but it's all great that like there's a transition to independent media

because I think there's a lot of problems there as well. But it's striking to me how little they have interacted with or thought about this world. And part of it, especially on the MSNBC Democratic side, part of it is that the left alternative media ecosystem all sprung up around Bernie Sanders. And since they have total like contempt and disgust for that movement and think that it's like a bunch of irrelevant, you know, like useful idiots for Trump or whatever, since they have total contempt for that part of the party, they've always just, you know, overlooked it, dismissed it, thought it was unimportant. And now suddenly the check is coming due and they're realizing like, oh shit, this is the world we live in. And I have no idea what to do about that.

Well, they're also demanding that you take seriously people like Mike Barnicle, who's a serial plagiarist. He had to resign from the Boston Globe over a massive plagiarism scandal. He was plagiarizing George Carlin. He was lying then about plagiarizing things. It's just like you are putting these people in front of us and nobody in this new media atmosphere. I mean, maybe boomers are still kind of okay with that. Like they get to know TV personalities, whatever else, but everybody wants way more authenticity now. Meaning like if you want to put Mark Barnacle in front of people day in and day out, he's probably going to have to talk about what happens sometimes because in like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram world, people just want to trust

more than anything. Like they'll listen to a socialist, tell them the news. They just want to trust the person. Like they want to hear that. Here's what I'm saying. Here's what I believe. I trust that you're smart enough to make your own mind up about whether it's true. And that's not the model that they operate on. And it's not clear to me. I mean, we see this at other corporations that just, you know, one place I think continues to not quite get it, probably get in trouble for saying this, but the Hill like still doesn't quite understand what to do with rising, right? Because they don't understand. They're a mess. Right. But they don't understand what you have to do in new media. They don't understand how different it is and can't quite figure it out.

Yeah. I mean, with regard to Morning Joe, too, their self-seriousness and Mike Barnicle acting like, oh, their news production, their four-hour cable news show, which, by the way, no one is watching Morning Joe for four freaking hours. But anyway. So I think some of the boomers are. Some retirees, like, posting up with five cups of coffee. Don't do that. Joe Biden probably watches it for four hours.

That's exactly right. This is what I'm saying. This is the Biden, this is a critical Biden demo. But that serves, you know, serves my point, which is that probably no group of media figures has been more complicit in the destruction of the Democratic Party and thorough abandonment of the working class than Joe Avika. You know, if you think about it, how integral they were in terms of, you know, bashing the left populist movement that organically sprung up, which was a much better response to Trumpism than the, you know, rotting husk of neoliberalism that they were absolutely dedicated to. They're central to making never Trump Republicans, which basically only exists in cable news green rooms, central to the Democratic Party strategy. They're central to helping Joe Biden hold on to power long after he should.

I mean, they cozy up to Joe Biden. They were the Biden whisperers. I mean, just totally embedded in this administration, which is devastatingly unpopular and in which, obviously, Joe Biden should never have been running for a second term to begin with. Even after that debate, they're still out there running cover for him, trying to keep him in and then ultimately, you know, being part of blocking any sort of a democratic process so that Democrats could have chosen a candidate who may have been better equipped to go up against Donald Trump. Like they're at the scene of every major Democratic Party crime over the past, let's say, decade. And so for them to still think that their news reporting and their commentary and whatever help people to understand the world during this time period. I mean, that's

that's why they're ultimately that's why their viewers have just completely fled. Because not only did you not help me understand the world, but also, you've just exposed yourselves as being just complete liars, where you said the things that you thought we wanted to hear when it was convenient for you about the threat of Trump. And as someone who thinks Trump is genuinely a threat, I think that by going down to Mar-a-Lago and just instantly bending the knee like that, they also undercut the seriousness of the threat for those of us who are saying that because it makes it look like all of us are just out here like saying what we think people want to hear. So in any case, I think, you know, they've in a lot of ways made

their own bed. And I think they're in, I do not think we will once, we will ever again see Joe and Mika have the level of power and influence that they did during the Biden administration or previous Democratic administrations, but especially during the Biden administration and during the first Trump administration. Like, I think that era is completely over. Two final questions. One, is part of the benefit or was part of the benefit of having MSNBC as a Comcast property, the access that you get by running a news channel? I'm genuinely curious. I don't, I have no idea whether or not that's true, but just do you have like important people circling in and out? They have to be somewhat responsive. I mean, obviously they already have NBC News, but you get a little bit more leverage over Democrats. That's my second question, which is

like, I saw how Rush Limbaugh and the Drudge Report shaped Republicans, shaped conservatives. Just these media outlets, these formats, they shape the way Republicans acted and behaved. And you were just making this point about never Trump, Republicans driving messaging in the Democratic Party, partially as a response to the content on MSNBC. But is that sort of, I mean, did Comcast see part of the benefit of keeping MSNBC around as having a little bit of sway on the left? Yes. Yes, I think, and this is, because, like I said, MSNBC, in the grand scheme of Comcast, is like a gnat on their ass.

Right. Like, it's nothing. Right. And in some ways, that's a positive for the network, because then, like, even if revenue drops, like's it doesn't really hurt Comcast that much. On the other hand I think that's a big part of the reason why they ultimately made the decision they did in 2016 to be all in on the Hillary establishment side of the party because that's also the part that you know the executives at Comcast are comfy with and that's the part they wanted to ascend and ultimately since MSNBC for them was mostly sort

of like a prestige play like you said havinget, being a voice in the room, whatever, you know, even if the ratings and the energy were on the side of the Bernie movement and they could have done better from a business perspective, I think they could have if they had leaned into that or at least had those voices present at all on the network, they didn't really care that much about the revenue because it was so insignificant to the overall corporate bottom line that they would rather just try to elevate the part of the party that was most comfortable for them and their class interests. So to me, that was the biggest significance of having the large Comcast brand. On the one hand, you would think the fact that they don't have to care that much about small changes in revenue, et cetera, would be a benefit, but it actually ended up being, you know, a detriment in terms of having a, you know, a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and hosting all of those voices and being able to continue to serve some of the younger parts of the Democratic Party that were more interested in this left populist direction. I do think that it's possible if Kamala wins, because this is

kind of like a prestige play for them. I do think it's possible if Kamala wins, they don't actually make this move. Yeah. Because then they, you know, they continue to have access. You know, it's not a problem for them in terms of like, you know, with the Trump administration coming in now, Comcast has to worry about their own corporate needs with regards to its administration. And MSNBC out there with hosts saying Trump is Hitler and he's a fascist and all of these things like that can become a problem for the larger corporate entity in terms of avoiding, you know, regulatory backlash and the government being weaponized against them, which obviously Trump is willing to do. So I don't think the timing here is an accident. And, you know, I suspect if Kamala will never know, but I suspect if Kamala had won, they may not have made this move because

the prestige play still would have made sense for them in the grand scheme of like their corporate goals and priorities. Say pharma advertising gets banned from television. If RFK Jr.'s confirmed. I'll believe that when i see a girl same but say it happens goodbye to cable news true you can't sell boniva on uh on msnbc and that's we and rachel that's cross the board i mean all of these networks and that and that is important to point out too is like fox obviously has a larger audience partly because conservatives don't feel like they have representation in other mainstream places. So it was like, okay,

this will be a magnet for all conservatives. Whereas liberals feel like they've got all kinds of places where they can go and get their news. Well, and a lot of Dems watch Fox too, because they put Buttigieg on, like they have a higher proportion of Democrats watching them than any of the other networks have Republicans watching them. Yeah.

So, but all of these networks are facing a decline. Yeah. But all of these networks are facing a decline. Yeah. All of them are in various stages of this same level of decay. But MSNBC, it's going to be interesting to see what happens and if they're able to hold on at all. But they are not going to be the force that they were previously. And that, to me, is a really, really positive, actually, development. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast,

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And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. All right, let's go ahead and talk some about various liberal coping mechanisms. So this was hilarious. Cenk Uygur went on Piers Morgan. Actually, my hubby Kyle was on there as well during this show. But Cenk went on. You guys are married? Oh, my gosh.

You were literally at my wedding, Emily. You were at my wedding, Emily. You were at my wedding, Denise. Anyway, Cenk went on and had a heated exchange with Alan Lichtman, famous for his keys, which did not turn out to be accurate in this particular election. And the result is pretty hilarious. So let's take a listen. Look, I debated Professor Lichtman before. I told him his theories about the keys were absurd. I was right. He was wrong. I said he'd lose his keys. No, you were not right. And I was not wrong. And that's a cheap shot. And I won't stand for it.

Well, who won, brother? You should not be taking cheap shots at me. Who won? You live in a total world of denial. I read your own followers comments and they all trashed you, every one of them, and supported me. Yeah, right, right. So quiet with your personal attacks. Yeah, come find out again. Make whatever point you want. Yeah, yeah.

Don't make it personal. You don't know anything. You don't know anything. You attacked me personally. You're so deluded. Oh, right. I've only been a professor for 51 years. On this program, I've never been able to finish a thought.

How many books have you published? No, because you're personally attacking me again. Say whatever you want, but I'm not going to stand for personal attacks. Brother, you got it wrong. You were preposterously and stupidly wrong. So, okay, all right. Can I just finish a goddamn thought ever on this show? No, not if you're personally attacking.

I admitted I was wrong. I don't need you to call me stupid. Okay. Can I just say, it's great to see you Democrats all getting along so well. Who taught you manners? It's lovely to see you.

Can I finish your goddamn point? We're just one right now. Hey, Alan, you deserve a tall glass of shut-up juice, so can you just shut up for a second and let someone who knows what they're doing. You're so right. So I will not sit here and so for personal attacks, for blasphemy against me.

You don't need to do that. You don't blasphemy against you. What are you? Are you Jesus Christ? You loser. So, you know, incredible stuff there. I personally love the Alan Lichtman like arc. I've enjoyed it very much.

And Jenkin, I don't know if you had seen this, but before the election, actually back when Biden was still in the race, because even then Lichtman claimed his keys said that Biden would win. And he and Jenkin had a big debate about it. And Jenkin would be like, OK, well, you know, he would offer some preposterous example. Like, let's say the person, like, has a heart attack and is incapacitated and, like, wheelchair bound. That's not going to be reflected in your keys. So how can that make any sense? And he's like, oh, the keys just, you know, it still works out. So anyway.

The keys always know. It is true that, like, in this election, almost all of the people who had been at all reliable in the past, like, all of them got it right. Selzer, who's now retired, which we didn't talk about, who put out the Iowa poll that had Kamala winning by three. And what did she end up in that state losing by 13? Yeah. So, you know, just a little 16-point miss. But there was a lot of stuff like that going on. There was. So Ralston,

you know, in Nevada has had never been wrong at the presidential level and he got it wrong. Now, in fairness, like that race ended up being very close in the state of Nevada. So he wasn't that far off and he did say that it would be really close. But still, this was someone that like, you know, had a perfect track record. Lichtman, for all of his whatever, he called Trump in 2016. He was one of the only people that did. It's a bold move. Yeah. So, you know, now going forward, like they've all been wiped off the map there. You know, like all anything that had been predictive in the past has now been completely cleared out. And I saw this was interesting to me. The polymarket whale, you know, who bet so much money on Trump that it like moved the whole average odds or whatever. He said that what he had looked at and I think commissioned his own polling of not what people said they were going to do, but what they thought their neighbors were going to do.

And I thought that was really fascinating approach. And I mean, obviously, he ended up getting it right and making a lot of money because of it. But I thought that was an interesting way of getting it like, you know, if I'm not able to get a representative sample of people who are Trump supporters or that I don't really believe in the shy Trump supporter theory anymore. I think it's more just you can't really get the people on the phone. If people have an accurate sense of what their neighbors are going to do, maybe that ends up helping you understand what's going on out there better than traditional polling methods. I actually started asking that question when I was talking to voters this cycle. Do you think all of your friends are doing this? Because that to me, back in 2016, if people had been asking that question, probably would have

been more predictive. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's right. So anyway, that'll be something to look at going forward as we try to make sense of the world. This one I just had to get in here. So this woman is a pollster and has been at times an advisor to the DNC, Rachel Bittico you'll recall, like, you know, Waleed and others, they backed Kamala. One of the people, like, were very clear-eyed about the threat of Trump and all those things. She tweets him and says, I probably won't be able to stop the schadenfreude when Shahid gets deported. F-A-F-O, which is F around and find out. So this supposed like liberal, you know, humanitarian type figure who is opposed presumably to the Trump mass deportation policies, the second that things don't work out her way, first of all, rather than ever blame the Democratic Party for any fault on their part, she singles out this Muslim man for and is excited, expressing her glee that he could be deported under a Trump administration. And she doesn't stop there either, Emily. So let's put this up on the screen. This one was to in a way, even more wild. So she says, here's a full list of people I'll be schadenfreuding over when the Trump check comes due.

By the way, I saw someone on Twitter say it was, like, appropriate that she resorted to German for these tweets. Anyway, the climate nuts who attack cultural artifacts shut down traffic. The pro-Hamas people, working class people who just voted themselves back to peasantry. Blacks for Trump. McConnell R missing and to me it's so noteworthy here that of course the demographic group first of all like doing this whole like demographic slicing and dicing obviously i think is gross put that aside but the demographic group that actually voted for trump the most was white men and And somehow they escape her ire. It's just these various like minority demographics that didn't obey her commands and the way she thought they were

supposed to act in the world. Voted themselves back to peasantry. They're the ones that she's excited to be for them to be deported and, you know, put back into peasantry and sent to camps or whatever. And it's like, lady, how are you different from the people you claim to oppose? Like you are cheerleading the ugliest possible imaginable things here and doing it publicly and apparently unrepentantly. Now, producer Griffin says she's now deleted these tweets.

Incredible. Like days later has now deleted the tweets, but she's going, she's going through it. It seems she's going through it. I'm reading her author bio on the Random House website and she's, it says she worked with Democratic Party candidates and organizations to implement negative partisanship strategy in the 2022 midterms. So obviously, Crystal, she knows exactly what she's talking about. It's funny because she's a political scientist. Like she, I believe that she's actually a professor. Yeah, she's a Virginian. I've met her before. Amazing that this is the science of politics

is just telling people that they voted themselves back to peasantry because you are an academic and you know better than these voters who thought about this decision and made up their own minds because they are humans with equal worth and dignity to you, Rachel. And that's, I mean, it's the voter blaming. And it's also just like, you know, if you oppose a policy that I consider to be cruel and inhumane, it's not supposed to be subject to like what that person's political views and voting patterns happen to be like. Those are supposed to be universal values that you hold. And Rachel is not the only one that I've seen out there doing this, but she's one of the most prominent ones to just be out and out. Like, I can't wait for you to get to be deported, which is just outrageously disgusting.

So anyway, those are some of the things that are going on over in the liberal world. Everything's going well. And actually, Crystal, what we're going to talk about is some of the things that are going on in the Republican world right now. Let's pivot to B1. We can put B1 up on the screen because votes are still being counted. And Dave Wasserman noted on Axe yesterday, he's a new Cook political. Over 154 million votes now counted. Trump's popular vote lead is down to 1.65 percent.

Trump is, of course, claiming that his popular vote margin is a mandate and his electoral college margin combined is a mandate for him and his administration as they prepare to come into office in January, Crystal. And, you know, listen, he won. Most people didn't expect him to win. Many people didn't expect him to win. He still has a popular vote margin. He was successful in the battleground states. I do think, as much as the left was wrong about this election, that the right finds itself in a very precarious position as well, because almost 50% of the country voted for Kamala Harris, who was a terrible, truly terrible candidate. I think Alan Lichtman, not entirely wrong that some giant chunk of the country would have voted for Joe Biden because they are so either they're so genuinely afraid of Donald Trump or they hate Donald Trump so much. This is not like the vibe shift I think a lot of

people are now seeing it as. It's significant. There's no doubt about it. I don't think Donald Trump is wrong at all to be taking a victory lap. I do think Republicans should realize that it isn't as though the country has suddenly embraced Donald Trump warmly and brought him in and said, we love you, Grandpa. Like, please guide us to a better future. Well, and in some ways, the trouble is even more clear down ballot because in most of the swing state Senate races, they lost. I mean, they were able to very narrowly pick up Pennsylvania. And then obviously they won Montana, where actually John Tester outperformed more than almost any other Democrat. I think he outperformed Kamala by 13 points. But in Montana, that's not enough. They picked up West Virginia, another obvious one.

But when you're talking about, you know, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, they weren't able to pull it off. And so, you know, Trump seems to be a bit of a unique figure. You had huge numbers of voters who voted only for Trump and then just left the rest of the ballot blank, which was a phenomenon that Democrats saw with Obama, which ended up being a little bit of a canary in the coal mine for their own party's problems because Obama famously, while he was very good at getting himself reelected, he was very poor at expanding the Democratic Party. In fact, the Democratic Party was really destroyed in rural areas under the Obama administration. They end up, you know, losing the House, losing the Senate, and then ultimately handing the presidency over to Donald Trump. So that was a warning sign for them that,

like, okay, you've got this one figure that can really drive up turnout and people give him this sort of like unique and special status that doesn't necessarily translate to the rest of the party. of, you know, the more extreme, in my view, things that he's going to do in the administration, that the RNC, they're holding up signs that say mass deportation now. And certainly, you know, characters like Matt Gaetz and RFK Jr. and whatever, like no one would be surprised that they're in this orbit, etc. I also think, and Trump said things like, I will be your retribution. I'm going to suspend the Constitution. I'll be a dictator on day one. So it's not like he wasn't saying these things. But I know among a lot of Wall Street people, I think among a lot of people in general,

they felt like, well, it's just Trump. And he doesn't really mean these things because, you know, we saw him in action before and he didn't do like the craziest things that he claimed he was going to do. So they were able to, the fact that he's like really dishonest and just makes a lot of stuff up all the time ended up being a benefit because they could pick and choose which parts of what he was saying they liked and the parts that they didn't like because he's not serious about that piece. And now, at least in the early phases of the administration, it is very much my sense that he was serious about all the things that he was saying, including, you know, we're going to talk about Elon and Vivek.

I know it's been sort of floated that this is like a make work project that they're put on, but to massively slash government spending and social safety net programs and all of these things. I don't think that's really true because the administration also appears to be looking at what powers they have to unilaterally make these sorts of cuts without Congress. So I think they're serious about that. Our friend Jeff Stein has done a lot of reporting on that. He also we had him on early this earlier this week to talk about. They're also looking at how they can use, you know, existing code and doesn't require Congress to implement a massive increase in tariffs potentially across

the board. So I think he's serious about that, too. And, you know, that's very likely to lead to inflation, a lot of like economic chaos in terms of the markets and all those sorts of things. So I think, you know, those things should be taken seriously. And we've certainly seen with the personnel choices with regard to immigration that, you know, the mass deportation plans, Trump reiterating that he wants to use the military and declare a national emergency to engage in mass deportation. Like, I think that was true as well. So the Trump people seem to have this feeling that like, and this mandate for a truly like revolutionary type government. Like Reagan in 84.

And I think there's some part of the populace that voted for that and wants to see that. And I think there's some part that was just like, you know, like prices were lower and there were fewer wars under the Trump administration. I'd like to get back to that and didn't actually sign up for like Matt Gaetz and all of like the whole program that is now being put into place. Or they were willing to risk that in order to prevent Kamala Harris from becoming president, which is interesting. It doesn't necessarily mean they support it, though. It means that they might vote it out four years later or in the midterms. So, yeah, I mean, I think the election was was really close. The popular result, the popular vote continues to get smaller and smaller. I think it's very significant that Donald Trump won the popular vote, especially after all of the lawfare.

I think it's very significant that he won the popular vote after January 6th. Like, all of these things do absolutely count. I think there is a vibe shift afoot. There is, like, a cultural shift afoot. I don't think that this is a—obviously, mathematically, plainly, this is not a Ronald Reagan 1984 type of mandate. And if you look at Florida in particular, Florida had two very interesting amendments that voters were deciding, Amendment 3 and Amendment 4. They had to get to the 60% threshold in order to pass. So this is weed and abortion, enshrining these into the Constitution of the state and recreational weed.

And what's really interesting about this is most of the headlines have been, OK, these amendments failed. Well, they failed barely. So in a state where you had these pretty dramatic shifts among different demographics towards Trump, Trump wins handily, Republicans are doing great, Rick Scott wins, all of that happens. You also almost have voters. I mean, it was really, really close on abortion and shining it into the Constitution. Like 58 percent or something like that. Yeah,

it was exactly. And the same thing with weed. And I think I posted this a couple of weeks ago. I said Kamala Harris, a terrible candidate, won 47 percent of the popular vote. Most Americans support abortion access, gay marriage, legal immigration, tax hikes on corporations and the rich, a robust social safety net, et cetera. Trump understood that better than most of the Republican Party and neutralized some of the vulnerabilities, but those vulnerabilities are still there and Democrats have a lot to work with if they can rebrand. It's obviously a very, very big if. That's a big if, yeah. But Republicans enjoy their victory, sure. But man, this is, I mean, the long-term future of the Republican

party isn't as clear cut after Trump as I think some people are interpreting it right now. There's still a lot of question marks. I mean, here's another one. I mentioned this in my monologue. So in New York, they passed a constitutional amendment that they called Equal Rights Amendment. It includes like protections for people based on their pregnancy status. So it's meant to protect people based on abortion. But they also add it in their gender identity. And the opponents to this constitutional amendment ran ads saying, this is going to codify into the Constitution a right for transgender girls to play in girls' sports leagues.

And it's going to codify a right for undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses. Like they, you know, they did the whole list of like the, you know, conservative, like the scariest things imaginable that can happen. I thought the trans piece was especially important. It was approved overwhelmingly. It was, you know, not even close. So it was like, you know, two thirds to one third effectively, even with that sort of messaging being run. And at the same time, New York is the state in the country that moved the most to Trump. Eleven and a half points that it shifted towards Trump. have wanted like Matt Gaetz as AG then if they voted for Trump and they must have wanted Vivek to come in and slash two trillion dollars from the budget and Elon and like get rid of, you know, every social safety net program you can imagine, because that's what we were broadcasting we were going to do in advance. But I don't like I don't think it's accurate to imagine. And if there had

been a few different decisions made on the Democratic side, you can easily imagine them being able to win. And then the projection is, oh, this is this massive rejection of Trumpism, whatever. You know, it's still very much a 50-50 country. So what I would say is for the Democratic Party, the trends are death, right? If that Latino realignment continues to happen, if the working class realignment continues to happen, then they're in like permanent minority status territory. But those trends are far from settled at this point. Exactly. And Donald Trump is truly this sort of like uniquely charismatic political figure that, you know, could be like Obama,

where Obama is able to put together this coalition that actually included a lot of white working class voters that other Democrats are just not ever able to put back together again. That's also a future possibility. So a couple of the things we wanted to share with you guys so we could put B2 up on the screen. This is, I want to take a note here. So this is the approval ratings

for these various Trump nominees after people have been read some like negative things about them. Oh, you're right. It's a progressive firm. Right. It's a progressive firm. Right. It's a progressive firm. And this is like, OK, once we tell you a little bit about RFK Jr., how do you feel about him now?

So but all of these attacks against these people, like they are very salient in the media right now. And so it's not crazy to imagine that people are taking in some of the negative commentary about each of these individuals. And they've got all of them underwater. RFK Jr. minus eight. Lee Zeldin, who's been put up for EPA minus 15, Tulsi Gabbard minus 17, Hegseth minus 19, and no surprise, Gates coming in the worst year at minus 28. So, you know, not exactly like a clear mandate for any of these appointments. And then this was interesting to me as well, Emily. So as we talked about on the show earlier this week, as I talked about with Sagar and with Shelby Talcott, Trump has affirmed

his intention to use the military to help facilitate mass deportations, which, you know, armed military officers in cities going door to door into workplaces or whatever. You know, that's quite an image and not something that we've done before here, at least not in recent times in this country's history. And Rand Paul has come out and said that he's very much opposed to that. Let's take a listen to that. I think what I would do if I were in charge of the immigration situation would be to first to go after those who have committed crimes. You know, the big news right before the election was that there were 15,000 people in our country who have committed murder. There are about 13,000 that have committed sex crimes, violent sex crimes. That's 28,000 people. Why

don't we start with that 28,000? Why don't we put out an all points bulletin and won't we have them removed? I think if we start there, we'll be fine. I'm not in favor of sending the army in uniforms into our cities to collect people. I think it's a terrible image, and that's not what we use our military for. We never have. And it's actually been illegal for over 100 years to bring the army into our cities. Army and our military are trained to shoot the enemy. They're not trained to get a warrant to do what they're doing. The police have a difficult job, but the people removing people from our country need to be a police enforcement domestic agency, not the military. So while I'm all for remain in Mexico, I will not support an emergency to put the army into our cities. I think that's

a huge mistake. What did you make of that from Rand Paul? I thought it was, you know, I mean, at this point with Trump with such a lock on the Republican Party for him to remain principled in this regard, I thought was really noteworthy. Yeah, I think I agree with that. And libertarians obviously tend to be more pro-immigration and even pro like just open borders in general, like explicitly open borders. Right. There should not be borders. And Rand Paul saying he wants to combine remain in Mexico with this opposition to having the military go rounding up undocumented immigrants is really interesting. And something that's very interesting about immigration in particular is pollsters use a stupid word, thermostatic, in terms of describing public opinion on immigration, which means we all remember during the Trump administration, one of the reasons Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was going to the border fence and weeping is that public opinion had shifted throughout the course of the Trump administration. Like people got steadily more pro-immigrant because they were opposed to at least the version of what Donald Trump was doing

that the media was telling. There was funny business going on there that people in the press were reporting that what Donald Trump did had not happened under the Obama administration, or they were acting like it hadn't happened under the Obama administration. So you have to take that with a little bit of a grain of salt. But Rand Paul just said it's a terrible image. Like he was talking about, in some ways, the public relations of having the military. I think he's opposed to it on the substance, too. But the public relations of it is clearly, clearly going to be more dangerous than I think some people in hardcore Trump circles realize. That said, mass deportations actually poll well, which is surprising given how negative the media

coverage of something like a mass deportation is. I think it speaks to some people's just like total disgust with what they're told is okay. It's like, yeah, mass deportations. You're asking me about that? Of course, like you're saying I shouldn't be in support of this. Like I'm in support of it because they've been told over and over again, this isn't a problem. You're not allowed to care about it. So I feel like that shows up in the polling when you actually see it done, if you're actually using the military to do it instead of, we already have, by the way, militarized immigration forces. We have ICE. We have CBP. These agencies exist. So, I mean, I think Rand Paul is offering a very useful dose of caution

to the Trump administration, the incoming Trump administration. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. Because, I mean, we all remember those images from the first Trump administration of children who are crying and being, you know, sort of mocked by border patrol agents. And it was truly horrifying. Like, I think people were really shocked and horrified by that. And to your point, the support for increasing immigration to the country reached like modern heights in opposition to that. But the other important thing you had then that was a distinction is that you had a Democratic Party that was unified against that view of immigrants and against the Trump immigration policy. And you did well in the midterms. That's right. And Biden won on a very like pro-immigrant

and oppositional to the Trump immigration policy. That was the message that he ran on. You guys will remember the 2020 primary and I'm speaking their high school Spanish, whatever. And so you had this unified democratic critique that you don't have anymore. And I've been saying the whole time that I thought it was a mistake, the way that the Biden-Harris people tried to handle this of being like, you know what, we're going to do the hawkish border thing too. We're going to dare Republicans to pass it. And then Kamala is going around talking about like how basically she's the one who's tougher on the border. No one is going to believe that. But you will help to foment more like rightward shift in terms of people's views on immigration, because if you a lot of people who are partis immigrants are bad and they should all just be shipped down en masse and no, we shouldn't have a pathway to citizenship. Yeah, the public is going to shift to the right some. I do want to say, though, that even in that context, I just was looking at some polling. question because people continue to have very complex views on the topic where they continue to feel immigrants are, you know, a net positive for the country and are a core part of like American identity. And, you know, there continues to be significant support for things like a pathway

to citizenship. So even on this issue where I'm not going to deny that there's been a rightward shift, I certainly think there has been a rightward shift, which has to do with the Democratic Party position and also does have to do with the fact that there has been an increase in immigrant crossings under the Biden administration. But even there, it's not as clear cut as it is sometimes portrayed and depends a lot on how things are presented. And yeah, people may, you know, when you just say like, do you want to deport people? That's very, you don't actually have to see those human beings and what that looks like, or military in your city, in the workplace, whatever, and what that looks like. And that, you know, can create a very different sense around the policy. Totally. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people who are very pro-immigration voted for Donald Trump

because they're also very pro quote quote unquote, law and order. Like people see those two things as not being mutually exclusive. That's why you're seeing him making gains, for example, with Hispanic voters, because people can hold two of those complicated views in their head at the same time. So, yeah, I mean, I think the Biden administration's policy was really the worst of all worlds where they swung the pendulum way too far in one direction by their like sort of bureaucratic tweaking and asylum policy and all of that. But then on the other hand, tried to lie about it. You know what I mean? just owning it and saying that's exactly why these, you know, policies that we put in place immediately after taking office, a lot of bureaucratic administrative decisions that they made in the first 100 days, instead of owning it and saying what they were doing,

they like lied about it, acted like it wasn't happening and still claimed that they were being tough on the border and cracking down on the, it was like, what are you, it's the worst of both possible worlds. And I think that's part of why public opinion, where it was during the Trump years, it swung so far is because Biden just had probably the worst possible policy. Ryan also always points out that they also continued like the push, like the sanctions regimes that helped to push people. And, you know, the incredible chaos in Haiti that we are always complicit in, the sanctions on Cuba, sanctions on Venezuela. This is a major part of the migrant crisis as well. So let me just get to these next

pieces because this is important as well. We have an op-ed from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy in the Wall Street Journal indicating some of their plans for what they want to do with this Department of Government efficiency. Jeff Stein was tweeting about this. We can put this up on the screen, some of the details. They say they think that SCOTUS could open the door to unilateral spending cuts, meaning that they wouldn't have to go through Congress based on what they say is the unconstitutionality of the 1974 budget law. He says that could be an absolutely massive, pivotal fight. I think

that is correct. And, you know, the basic idea here is that they argue, yes, Congress has to authorize spending, but you're not then required to spend it. So if the executive wants to come in and basically say, like, we're going to slash all of these agencies and social safety net programs. Like we can unilaterally do that because we aren't obligated to actually spend the funds that Congress has authorized and appropriated. Let's put the next piece up on the screen also from Jeff summarizing this op-ed. So he says they gave us our first DOGE roadmap. As I understand the key steps, number one, put DOGE people at each U.S. agency, then use advanced technology, potentially AI, to have them identify thousands of regulations

to cut across government. Number two, give Trump a list of thousands of regulations to cut and have him approve their elimination. Number three, identify the minimum number of employees necessary to maintain each agency's core function, which should be lower once two is complete. For example, Musk oversaw about an 80% reduction in X headcount. Number four, cut the federal employees. Number five, cut programs where Congress's specific spending authorization has lapsed. That includes things like VA health care, NASA, and many anti-poverty programs. Number six, approve a temporary suspension of payments amid large-scale audits. Don't really know what that means. Number seven, assert POTUS authority to stop spending

without congressional approval by challenging that budget law we were talking about before. All seems to be without Congress. And then go and fight whatever you need to in the courts. And this is another thing where I think when people see this, a lot of people's natural instinct will be like, OK, that sounds great. Like government efficiency, like Musk is, you know, personally, I think Musk, like the idea of having the richest man in the world, having who is by the way, the, I think largest Pentagon contractor or one of the largest Pentagon contractors in charge of just like, Hey, do what you want. And by the way, has a bunch of legal issues with the federal government because of labor via alleged labor violations and environmental violations and all kinds of other things.

Now he gets to go in and be like, those regulations that I was running foul of, no problem. Let me make sure I'm getting my, my taxpayer goodies are coming to me, but my competitors are maybe iced out. Like, you know, and, and just the general thrust of, if you are a plutocrat, the weaker the government is, the better it is for you. Because that's the only entity that can really check you and your impulses and the things that you want to do as the self-appointed master of the universe. That's my view. But I think a lot of people look at this and like government efficiency. Sounds good.

Yep. But again, like with the deportation, then when it's like that, because the budget is basically defense, which, you know, Musk is going to continue to get his contract. So I'm and Trump has always increased the defense budget. I would be shocked if he did any different this administration. So it's defense. And then if you're not cutting defense, then everything else is basically like Social Security and Medicare. The other items in the budget are comparatively like relatively trivial. So if you're making massive cuts, you are almost inherently cutting, you know, those programs, which are extremely popular and extremely important to the public. The political viability of doing this was experienced by the Republican Party when Donald Trump was first elected and they had campaigned for nearly a decade on repeal and

replace Obamacare, repeal and replace, repeal and replace. And then when the reality hit them and senators, including John McCain, who said he would repeal and replace, ultimately voted down the legislation that had been. I mean, if there was a repeal and replace bill that could be as friendly to most of the party as possible, it's what they were ultimately voting on. Right. Lost by one vote. And it's because Republicans got really spooked by the reality of how voters would react when things changed. Would they be able to actually implement a change that was better than what they'd been saying they were going to repeal and replace? Does the replace part of that, you know, you can repeal regulations. And I think a lot, obviously, I support a lot of that. But how do voters react to it?

It's a pretty serious question. That 1974 budget law in policy circles, that has just electrified the nerds. Like they're going crazy over what can actually, because it's really consequential. The president can just, I mean, if they operate on that, and I'm sure it would be a lawsuit no matter what, but if they start operating on that principle, there's so much that they can do. And that's partially because there's so much administrative bloat. I mean, that is definitely part of it. But at the same time, the way that some of this happens, you know, they're going to have to make sure that there's an off-ramp. And that is what seems less certain that they want to do. That like for some of these programs, that there'll actually be a way for people to adjust

that isn't shocking and then translates into political losses. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country

begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking.

Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops and they get asked all the time,

have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.

We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives. This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne.

We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. Got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things.

Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

It also comes into conflict is a goodK Jr. claims he wants to do at HHS, because what he wants to do would actually be to implement more regulations and, you know, to ban certain substances from our foods and things of that nature and to actually increase some of the regulatory state. And, you know, that cuts not only against what Musk and the Baker tasked with doing, but also cuts completely against what the Trump administration did last time around. Emily, you've been taking a look at this. Yeah, I mean, this is incredibly interesting. We can put this Lee Fong piece up on the screen. This is C1. And Lee sort of did a dive into how lobbyists and the food and drug industry in particular are reacting to the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as the head of the Health and Human Services Agency, which is, honestly, if you are RFK Jr. and you have spent your career working on these issues, it's a fantasy come to life. I mean, this is truly like, short of being president, this is truly like the most powerful position he could find himself in here. So Lee was looking into the freakout that's happening and the effort to mobilize lobbyists starting to talk about advertising on new media platforms, which is absolutely hilarious.

Like totally Joe Rogan is literally listed in the Fong story. Like you guys want to lobby for Pepsi on Joe Rogan show. But let me say, I mean, we saw with the whole tenant media thing that a bunch of these, quote unquote, independent podcasters are willing to take money from whatever and shill for whatever because they're not really independent media. They're, you know, outside of the like legacy media. But they'll take the money. Like, I think it's a smart strategy from these junk food makers, like start advertising. But some others. Yeah. But I mean, maybe you I don't know. But but some others certainly. And yeah, that's the way that you buy influence, because if you're getting a giant paycheck from Frito-Lay or whatever, then how critical are you ultimately going to be? So, you know,

they know that these people can be bought in the same way that the mainstream outlets can be bought as well. And in a lot of senses, not just, I mean, it's very clear. The connection is actually more direct because if you do work at a CNN or an MSNBC, you're not the one as a host who's talking to the advertisers. You're not the one doing the ad reads. Whereas in many instances in these alternative media spaces, like you're talking directly one as a host who's talking to the advertisers. You're not the one doing the ad reads. Whereas in many instances in these alternative media spaces, like you're talking directly to these corporate sponsors. This is why we don't do any of this here and why it's really important that we not do any of this here so that there's not even the appearance of potential corruption with

regard to these, you know, food companies or anything else that you might be shilling. And then not only are you talking directly to them, you're the one doing the ad read for whatever it is. So, you know, I think it is an intelligent influence peddling strategy and we'll probably see some success. Yeah. And I've done some small like ad reads for small companies and you have to be even that you have to be really really really careful of course because you have to like drill down and see like the it's it's especially if you don't have a corporate bureaucratic infrastructure to kind of make some of those legal decisions you just have to be so careful and a lot of people aren't obviously yeah people will you know all kinds of things that are like do you really stand by this product yeah or some of the financial advice stuff i mean that to me or the supplements or whatever like you really stand by this product? Or some of the financial advice stuff? I mean, that to me,

or the supplements or whatever, like you really feel confident that this works and it does what they say and it doesn't have blowback, whatever. So yeah, in any case, I don't think that this is a crazy strategy. I think it will probably be pretty effective. Now, if we put C2 up on the screen, this is more from Lee's story about the details on how the industry is trying to disrupt potentially what RFK Jr. would be able to do. So he starts with Senate confirmation and he says, they know that as RFK meets with senators, they will discreetly, they will ask discreetly that he trades major MAHA policy items away in order to get 50 votes. So pressure senators to get concessions prematurely, preemptively from Bobby Kennedy Jr. in exchange

for them actually voting him through. The second part of it, we just talked about Joe Rogan and Independent Podcast. They call for shifting advertising budgets of major snack producers and processed foods. Don't just fund legacy media in the Beltway Press. Thirdly, they go with appropriations and they note that congressional voices, according to Lee, can block RFK from implementing any of his policy goals by freezing funding for the FDA or HHS. Similar strategies were used previously to force regulators to count frozen pizza as a vegetable. Classic.

Yeah, classic. Many such cases, as Donald Trump would say, not entirely unusual at all, but obviously a very, very core part of their ability to thwart what Bobby Kennedy Jr. wants to do if he is confirmed as secretary of HHS. And to your point, Crystal, it's interesting because his agenda is a patchwork of deregulate and hyper-regulate, right? Deregulate raw milk, deregulate all of these different, like it's not just raw milk. He wants to deregulate different types of foods that he thinks are over-regulated. And some of it is you get this like patchwork. This is the most disgusting part about our system. We were talking about Elon, this patchwork where different

loopholes have been carved out by special interests over time. So what we regulate and what we don't regulate, especially in food and drugs is so, so inconsistent because it's just been, oh, you want this and this bill? Sure. Oh, you want this and this bill? Like just concessions made over the course of decades that make absolutely no sense. So he wants to do a little extra regulating, a little less regulating. And it's like, where does that drive with the Vivek and Elon?

I think that's probably the most interesting tension in the entire Trump administration because they're all close. Like that's a group of people, Elon, Vivek and RFK Jr. that have become a serious like I would say tightly knit part of the Trump coalition. And so I'm pretty curious as to in practice, in practice, when Elon and Vivek start making these recommendations to deregulate. Yeah. Where does RFK Jr. fall if he's confirmed? And that is a very big if. Yeah, I think always in government, even putting Elon and this cast of characters aside,

always in government, it's easier to sort of tear down than it is to build. So I think RFK is much more likely to have success in deregulating raw milk. Which, okay, whatever, fine. And also in, you know, he wants to really like, he wants to really clean house at places like the FDA and the NIH. And, you know, I'm the first to be critical of the revolving door and those corruption between those agencies and the businesses that they're supposed to regulate. But if you want to actually have food and drug regulation and, you know, be able to go and do inspections and these things, which are important, we just had this huge listeria outbreak at Boar's Head and just had E. coli at McDonald's. Like, it's important

that you have these regulatory bodies. I think it's much more likely that you're going to get the libertarian, like, stripping away the regulations, getting rid of the employees, you know, letting people do what they want with raw milk, which again, OK, fine if you want to. Then you are those other pieces of adding in new regulations and keeping things out of the food supply and having a body that's able to go and do those inspections and make sure that that's actually happening because that also would some of that at least would would require acts of Congress as well. And as Lee indicates in this piece, I mean, as whatever Republicans want to say publicly, like they are getting tons of money

from big food and big ag, and they're not going to want to give that up lightly. In fact, we could put C4 up on the screen here, guys, like Chuck Grassley, who obviously Senator from Iowa, corn very famously, very important there. And the government subsidizes corn production. That's why if you go in the grocery store, like most of the center aisles are just different ways that you can combine corn into different food items. He says he wants to meet with RFK Jr. However, he says, I may have to spend a lot of with, you know, big food are going to be pretty skeptical of making any big changes. That doesn't mean that they won't necessarily vote to confirm RFK.

But then if he actually wants to come to them to do anything, that is a whole other can of worms. I actually asked a source about this recently because Trump has been open on this tension. You know, he said, we're not going to let Bobby go anywhere near the liquid natural gas. He said, like, have fun, Bobby, but liquid gold, like stay away from the liquid gold. And I asked a source whether there would be enough people to staff HHS under RFK Jr. Because what's interesting is that some even Tea Party senators like Ron Johnson have very sincerely said we were wrong. We are changing our views on food and on drugs. And we were way too deferential to corporate interests. And like

whatever anybody thinks of Ron Johnson, that man is entirely sincere about this new worldview. And he's been pretty like transparent about what changed his mind and opened his eyes. And there are a lot of people in the greater conservative world. This first started with cultural issues that became very disillusioned with the Chamber of Commerce and corporate America and now have no relationships with those prior supporters, donors, allies, and have sincerely come around on the question of food and drugs. But when I asked the source, like, are there enough people to even go into the government and give him staff? The person was like, no, there's a lot of appetite,

but there's not a lot of actual manpower that genuinely believes. And we can put, this is C3, I think, up on the screen. This is some polling. We can put this up on the screen. Voters disapprove of recess appointments. They disagree with Trump nominee's controversial statements. And some of that is related to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. This is voters disagree with various statements made by HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And if you're looking here at some of the most, this really is, Crystal, some of the most controversial stuff that RFK Jr. said that's being pulled here. This is, I'm going to go for it. It's not controversial. Most of the stuff is batshit insane.

Vaccines do not cause autism. HIV is the cause of AIDS. That one is. And to suggest otherwise, you know, this is where, like, you know, I know there's, like, some of the things RFK says about food and whatever, I'm totally on board with, even as I'm completely skeptical that any of this is actually, any of the positive things I would want to see are actually going to happen. This is why I think putting him at HHS is honestly terrifying. Because while he is skeptical of anything that is mainstream science, including settled science, like the measles and the polio vaccines were a great benefit to society and to suggest otherwise, I think is deeply damaging. And to have someone in a piece of a position of

power who believes that is quite scary. And yeah, to, to be an AIDS truther in this, like that's, that is so frightening to me and potentially damaging that you could have someone like that in a position of power. You know, this crazy thing is about like COVID-19 was ethnically targeted. Oh, the new one that I like is that he had a conspiracy that actually it was the Trump administration that developed COVID-19 as like a bioweapon. Excellent. Yeah. That, that audio just came out. The chemicals in the drinking water are transing the kids. Like they're, this is where online. Transing the frogs. And the kids and the kids. Um, this is where the online bubble is a real bubble because overwhelmingly people do not believe these things and, you know,

do not support them whatsoever. But if you, you know, if you go online and say, hey, you know what, vaccines actually are good and have been good for humanity, you will get instantly dogpiled. To the point we were having, the conversation we were having earlier about social media is in some ways totally overlapping. It is real life. And then in other ways, it is disproportionately a platform for echo chamber stuff too, still very much so. And then in other ways, it is disproportionately a platform for echo chamber stuff too, still very much so. And that's where it's like, I was curious why I asked this person, you know, and this is a person that is a longtime Capitol Hill senior staffer. And I'm like, does this exist even in like professional Republican circles? Like A, people who are

comfortable with the anti-corporatism of RFK Jr., and then B, who are willing to sort of put up with some of that. No, like that just is not, like the middle of that Venn diagram is not big enough that you get people who are comfortable, you know, potentially being in a position. And this is RFK Jr. also, he has to make his decision about what he would prioritize if he's confirmed. And as he's having conversations with senators, they're going to ask him about every single one of those. So he has to decide, you know, you are in this fantasy position that you've dreamed of being in for decades. Do you touch vaccines? Do you touch, um, it's hard to see how he wouldn't,

but do you touch AIDS? Like, what do you actually do on those topics? Good luck figuring that one out. Yeah. And my experience in interviewing him is that even as he talks about corporate power, he is actually much more of a libertarian at this point, which is why, you know, something like universal health care was never something that he embraced, at least not in this campaign. Maybe he did in past iterations. But, you know, when I asked him about that, he was oppositional when, you know, he'll talk about corporate green, how this is such a bad part in terms of the food and drug systems. But then it's like, OK, well, do you want to, you know, do you want to nationalize some of these pharmaceutical companies? Do you want to do like what they do in California of having state produced insulin that compete, at least to provide lower costs. He's not interested in any of those sorts of things.

So I find his comments about corporate power, skepticism of corporate power, to not be backed up with policy that would actually challenge corporate power. So in any case, we'll see how all of this goes. But, you know, many of the things that he believes in and he supports are, you know, effectively a rollback of some of the most important advances in modern medicine that have helped to eradicate measles, have helped we can face another pandemic. We could face another situation where this becomes incredibly important. And have someone who is skeptical, certainly of corporate profit motives. Great. But who is so credulous when it comes to any sort of like insane crackpot theory floated by randos on Facebook or whatever is, to me, very frightening. My position on this is basically like we all know that HHS and the revolving door situation with food and drug is a complete mess and disaster. Same thing with FDA, same thing with NIH. Like these are obviously, obviously agencies that desperately need to be uprooted.

I don't know how much anyone could do in terms of doubling down on their existing power or being a metaphorical grenade to their existing power in four years. I genuinely like if you're worried about RFK Jr., I think he'll be more powerful than people fully understand because of the regulatory control that you have as a cabinet head. But I think even then you just in four years, I don't know how much you can metaphorically grenade all of this so we will see Crystal. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone I've learned one thing no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her.

And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter.

She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley

comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th.

Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working, and we need to change things. Stories matter, and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real.

Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Speaking of metaphorical grenades, Bernie Sanders lobbed one on the floor of the Senate just yesterday.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So Bernie Sanders offered an, I don't know if it was a resolution. I'm not sure what the technical term is for it. But he basically offered an opportunity for people to vote against continuing to fund this Israeli onslaught in Gaza. And he was able to garner more support than we've ever seen for such a measure. Still far too few senators ultimately voting for it.

But let's take a listen to Bernie Sanders on the Senate floor right now making the case. The Foreign Assistance Act and the Arms Export Control Act are very clear. The United States cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block U.S. humanitarian aid. Let me repeat that because that is the essence of this entire debate, not complicated. The United States government cannot provide weapons to countries that violate internationally recognized human rights or block U.S. humanitarian aid. That is not my opinion. That is what the law says. Madam President, according to the United Nations, according to much of the international community, according to virtually every humanitarian organization on the ground in Gaza, Israel is clearly in violation of these laws. Under these circumstances, it is illegal for the United States government to provide Israel with more offensive weapons. So that speech and this vote came just before the International Criminal Court has now officially issued arrest warrants for both Bibi Netanyahu and for former Defense Minister Yoav Galant. We can put this up on the

screen. Jeremy Scahill tweeting out this news. And he goes on to say that the ICC said there is reasonable grounds to assert both Netanyahu and Galant engaged in, quote, the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare, which, by the way, relates directly to what Bernie Sanders was just saying there, and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts. The warrant remains classified in part to protect witnesses. He also points out, Jeremy Scahill does, is of course Ryan's partner over at Dropsite. This week, the incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune called on Congress to pass bipartisan legislation sanctioning ICC prosecutors attempting to prosecute Israeli officials.

So obviously, this is a significant move. It's one we've been expecting for quite some time. You know, while there is no police force that can go out internationally and go to Israel and arrest Bibi Netanyahu, there are quite a lot of countries worldwide where he will now no longer be able to travel without being in danger of arrest. And for the Israeli psyche also to have their prime minister now, you know, a rust warrant issued for these crimes against humanity is quite significant. But just to go back to to Bernie here for a moment, and like I said, this relates directly to what Bernie was saying. He's pointing out, we don't have to even look at international law, which I think we should look at international law, but you don't have to. The U.S. has laws on the books that says you cannot supply military weapons

to a country that is blocking humanitarian aid. Leahy law. Leahy law, exactly. The Biden administration before the election sent out this letter, you have 30 days time, Israel, to prove to us that you are not blocking humanitarian aid and to improve the situation on the ground. They laid out specific benchmarks of the number of aid trucks that they wanted to see going. We all know Israel did not meet those benchmarks. Now, the State Department, Ryan pressed them and other journalists pressed them as well. They said, oh, we don't really know. We can't really say. We didn't really assess. And it's like, well, you wrote the letter. You laid down the benchmark. And now you don't know and you can't say. But long story short, once the election was over, oh, lo and behold,

we're just going to keep doing what we have been doing. So let me just put this next piece up on the screen and then, Emily, I'll get your reaction. This is D2. So Bernie did garner some significant support. As I said, this is far too few. But you had 18 Democratic senators and one voting president, but 18 who voted in support of blocking those tank rounds to Israel. They were Heinrich, Hirono, Kaine, Tim Kaine, Angus King, Marky, Merkley, Ossoff. That's an interesting one because he is Georgia swing state up for reelection in this next election cycle. So that's interesting. Bernie, of course.

Schatz, Smith, Elizabeth Warren, Peter Welch, Dick Durbin, Chris Van Hollen, Gene Shaheen, Lujan Warnock. Ossoff's obviously partner down there in Georgia. And Chris Murphy and Baldwin was a, Baldwin was the president. Carper was a yes, then flipped to no. So again, obviously nowhere close to a majority, but we've never seen this level of resistance to continuing to fund and supply Israel. So in that way, it is noteworthy. Well, and John Ossoff, Ryan pointed this out on X, that is the only Democrat to vote to restrict those weapons shipments to Israel from a state that Donald Trump won. He is up for reelection this coming cycle as well, and that

is John Ossoff. So that I do think does speak to the nature of how differently people are seeing this conflict right now. And John Ossoff, by the way, he's a very interesting figure. He's sort of far left progressive on some populist questions. He also obviously has a base in Georgia. So he has to, you know, I think he's genuinely kind of centrist on other things. But all that is to say, he has his thumb very firmly on the pulse of like younger voters. And you've probably noticed this too. And that's one of the things boomer politicians are confounded by when they look at public opinion polling on Israel. I think they totally missed in the election. For example, you've talked about this in your monologues, how significantly that either depressed the youth vote, depressed youth turnout,

depressed youth support for Kamala Harris, or shifted some people to Donald Trump. And we can disagree with the reasons that they would have done that. But younger Americans just see this conflict so incredibly differently because their experiences are post 9-11. Yeah. And also black Americans tend to have a very different view of this conflict. And obviously Georgia with a large black population, Reverend Warnock coming out of the black church tradition would be very much in touch with that and those historic connections between black civil rights movements and the struggle for liberation in Palestine. The other thing with the other question with Ossoff is, you know,

is this a guy who has presidential ambitions, who for him, this vote is also, you know, laying down a marker to distinguish himself on an issue that I think is going to end up being a litmus test in the future for this party, as I hope history reckons with the horrors that unfolded thanks to the Biden administration. And the other thing that's become really clear is, we can put this up on the screen, you know, there was a bit of a question going into the election, this is D3 guys, there was a bit of a question heading into the election like, oh, are the Biden-Harris people just sort of doing the wrong calculation about how the politics of this work? And they're still in this old model where they think you just

have to support Israel and that it's electorally damaging not to do so. And maybe once the election is over, I never really thought this was the case, but anyway, this was a theory, right? Maybe once the election is over, then maybe Biden, look, YOLO, you've got only probably not that much longer time on this earth, but certainly not that much longer time in the White House. Like you can take a firmer line. You can actually be moral and do the right thing. But the White House was whipping aggressively against this measure from Bernie Sanders, including saying that if you oppose these weapons, you're basically Hamas, classic. And also in these talking points that HuffPost was able to get their hands on, they also really undercut their public messaging that

they want a ceasefire and talked about how now's the time for Israel to put the pressure on and continue fighting. So even this public posture that they were supposedly in favor of ending the fighting and seeking a ceasefire is really undercut by the way that they were whipping against this. Chuck Schumer was also involved in pressing senators to, you know, back the continuing flow of military equipment to Israel. So, you know, if anything, actually, I think what we know now is that the electoral calculation, they did realize that they were couldn't just be all in for Israel. They had to at least give some rhetorical nod to restraint with regards to this conflict. And now that the election is over, Biden can go fully, you know, fully embrace his, I guess, genocidal instincts here and not even pretend like he

wants a ceasefire at this point. One of the things that HuffPost piece points out is something Ryan talked about yesterday. This is really the first time that Congress has considered banning weapon shipments to Israel. So Bernie introduced these joint resolutions of disapproval, and it was basically blocking six weapon transfers. So that would be things like guided missiles, tank rounds, mortars, tactical vehicles, and F-15 fighters. So it's very rare that you're actually forcing members of Congress to go on the record on this question. And the Biden administration, to the point you were just making, was pushing so hard precisely because of that. It's not something that they want people going on the record in the middle of the

war to point out because that's just not something we've done historically. We've bear hugged historically. Absolutely. For Israeli politicians, Israeli voters to see this, I think does really change things going forward. Yeah. And at the same time, you know, also to that point about how the Biden administration really feels. Let's put this next piece up on the screen. D4, they just vetoed another UN Security Council resolution that demanded an immediate, unconditional, permanent ceasefire and release, unconditional release of all hostages. 14 voted in favor. One, that's us, opposed. And, you know, there's a contrast with when Obama was on the way out, he actually allowed

some resolution of condemnation of Israeli content. I think of the Israeli occupation to go through the UN security council, you know, once he was already, okay, you know, we're, um, done here. I'm not running for like, I can't run for reelection. He allowed that to go through. And that was noteworthy here. We have the Biden administration choosing the polar opposite direction, um, noteworthy speech given from the Palestinian representative, really, you know, laying things out about the double standards as applied to Israel. Let's take a listen to a little bit of that. Madam President, the world should not grow accustomed to the death of Palestinians, to seeing Palestinian children starving,

to seeing mothers carrying their children from one place to another, forcibly displaced. They should not get accustomed to seeing journalists killed and humanitarians killed. To see Palestinians detained, abducted, carried on trucks to go be tortured, sexually abused and raped. Is there a UN Charter for Israel that is different from the charter you all have? Tell us. Is there an international law for them, an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die?

And as you were saying, Emily, you know, if you ask people, did they vote on foreign policy? Very few say that like foreign policy was their number one issue. But just to give you guys a little bit of a teaser, we actually have been interviewing some of those, Griffin's been out interviewing some of those AOC Trump voters. And I listened to the first one yesterday. And the first thing she said of why she voted for Trump and AOC is because she wanted peace. Yep. Trump was talking about that on the campaign trail. He kept saying, I'm the candidate of peace. Now, I think that Trump is not the candidate of peace. But if you are trying to position yourself as the campaign that has the moral high ground,

making an argument in favor of democracy, human rights, et cetera, and voters are looking on their phones every day and seeing these horrors unfold in their name with their tax dollars, that's kind of going to undercut your position as the, you know, morally superior party. And when you're out there claiming you're going to be the best for the working class or the middle class was the language that Kamala used, which I prefer working class, but anyway, we'll put that aside. When you're out there claiming that you're going to deliver for people in middle class, that's what you're going to be focused on. But what they see is that you seem to be, and certainly Biden, the way he talked,

definitely seem to be way more focused on NATO, AUKUS, Ukraine, and backing Israel endlessly. People rightly question whether your commitment to those economic issues is real and whether your commitment to using their tax dollars to actually help them rather than fuel these foreign conflicts is real. So, you know, it's not, things are not isolated in the way that pollsters portray or that pundits portray. I think that, I'm not going to say it was the only issue. I don't know that it was determinative, but it was significant that the backing of these whores undercut the Kamala Harris campaign and, you know, helped to usher back in the next Trump administration. In my view, there is no doubt in my mind and, you know, people are not wrong to be horrified by what this administration has done. And now that the election is over, their true colors are only coming out to an even greater extent than they were previously.

Two points of breaking news. Ryan just posted that the State Department has canceled its briefing today. And secondly, Ben-Gavir, I'm relying on a translation that Yashar Ali is reading here, but just very recently tweeted that Israel should, as Yashar puts it, react to the news of ICC arrest warrants by annexing the occupied West Bank. Combine that with U.S. incoming ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, and the way Mike Huckabee sees the West Bank, for example. I don't know that Trump will be the candidate of peace. Well, and Miriam Adelson, who backed Trump to the tune of some hundred million dollars, has said this was a top priority for her, the annexation of the West Bank. So, you know, Huckabee, Adelson, and now I would say Trump, more aligned with like the Ben-Gavirs and the Smotriches of the world than, you know, not that this is like a great

difference, but the Biden administration was like Yoav Galan, who also was a monster and was just, just, you know, a rust warrant out for him from the ICC as well. But he at least postured like he was interested in some sort of a peace deal. So anyway, I think that's likely where we are headed. Wild. Yeah, indeed. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. It's a cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this

day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes.

But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution. But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multi-billion dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1. Taser Incorporated.

I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Apple Podcasts. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves.

Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug ban is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill. NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush.

What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does. It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad-free with exclusive content,

subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Very happy to be joined this morning by my great friend and independent Substack journalist, Torre. You can follow him over at his Culture Fries sub stack. Great to see you, my friends. Nice to see you. Yeah, of course. So you did some fantastic reporting here. You can put this up on the screen about some of the internal dynamics within the Kamala Harris campaign. And you asked the question, did Jen O'Malley Dillon,

a Biden loyalist, doom Kamala's presidential bid. You say Harris was forced to run with a Biden loyalist who stabbed her in the back. Just explain some of these dynamics that were going on behind the scenes, Torrey, according to your reporting. Yeah, I just started calling my friends in D.C. at Democratic high places and people kept talking about Jen O'Malley Dillon, who was the campaign chair for Kamala Harris 2024. But in 2023, when Biden felt threatened that the party might try to push him out and replace him with Kamala or force them to do a primary, Biden people like Jen O'Malley Dillon started messaging to media against Kamala. So there's these articles from 2023 saying maybe Biden should dump Kamala

as VP. Those are coming from Jen O'Malley Dillon. So the person who Kamala would later have to take on as her campaign chair, because there's 100 days left, we don't have time to look for a new person. We have a million tasks. We have to accept her. She had been messaging against her. Besides the fact that the entire campaign was constructed for Joe Biden, they just put a different face on it. And I think a lot of people understood there's a Frankenstein nature to this campaign. So it didn't feel right. It didn't fit right. And you've done a lot of criticism of the consultant class. General Mellie Dillon is one of these people who has an ad buying company. So when a candidate places a television ad, Jen O'Malley Dillon or someone like her is personally enriched by that decision. maybe not decisive and Trump going on podcasts and the bro sphere,

the manosphere and seeming like a man of the people somehow when that was working, Jen O'Malley Dillon and people like her are incentivized to not notice that trend. They are being personally enriched by putting her on TV ads again and again. So these are some of the reasons why people keep telling me Jen O'Malley Dillon was a big problem, but Kamala couldn't get away from her because the campaign did not have time. And there's reporting that there were still Biden signs up inside Kamala Harris headquarters on Election Day because it just hadn't they hadn't fully like shifted.

Could you talk to us a little bit about Jen O'Malley-Dillon just as an operative, like who she is, where she came from, like the context about her? So I think it's sort of telling and you're right about this. I mean, it's sort of telling us to what ended up happening. The long term Biden person, she was huge in the victorious Biden campaign. She was also huge in the disastrous federal work for president campaign. She was the deputy White House chief of staff. So she isn't the real Biden person. And people talked about how Biden did not let new people in. Almost everybody around him had been around him since the 70s. Many of them shared his last name or

in his family. So to let somebody else new into the group like General Malley Dillon, she had to be really loved and trusted. So this is a person who signed up to work for Biden, who believed in Biden as far as the campaign, who felt like this is the guy. It's hard to run a campaign when the people around you didn't sign up for you and don't necessarily believe in you. And we see in Jen's example, a lot of people are like, they never liked her. Jen just never was impressed by Kamala, didn't want her to be the VP. How do you have that sort of a person who doesn't really believe in you, truly deeply important to your campaign? I think it also, and you indicate this as well, could have had an impact on their inability to separate themselves from Joe Biden. And this ends up being one of the most central problems I think everyone would acknowledge with the campaign is Kamala Harris gets asked this question on The View of like, what would you have done differently?

And she says, not a single thing. And it's like, OK, you've got this guy who is profoundly unpopular. You can see the polls. We can all see the polls. We know as a change election, one of your biggest jobs is to try to make the case for why you would be different. And you're unable to do that. Now, obviously, Kamala Harris, the big girl, like she could have come up with that answer herself. But when you have a team around you that is so deeply loyal to Joe Biden and doesn't want to criticize him at all, then you aren't going to be supported from your staff in trying to separate yourself in the way you need to to be electorally successful.

That's exactly right. The staff that loves Biden personally, that is loyal to him, that has been with him for years, is not going to counsel her to say, hey, I'm going to be different than Biden. Here's how I'm going to do it. A Kamala staff would have done that. But a Biden staff advising Kamala is just not going to do that. And yes, a lot of people were like, she's not drawing enough of a contrast from the unpopular president. Well, that then she becomes a semi incumbent where she has to run on his record, which she did not create. But then she also has to deal with what has she done the last four years? So like, which is it? She was getting the worst of it from both sides. Yeah, it's almost like, and this is what I'm really curious about, too. I've heard

some on why Kamala Harris decided to keep Jen O'Malley Dillon around, but it seems pretty clear at this point that that's potentially the fatal error of her campaign. And I know we're going to talk a little bit about the lack of the primary and your position, I think, rightly on why that was disastrous for Democrats. But even keeping on Jen O'Malley decision, Jen O'Malley Dillon, which is a decision Kamala Harris didn't seem to have to make, but went with anyway. What do you make of that? I mean, was there any way for Kamala Harris not to hire Jen O'Malley Dillon? The people who I spoke to who understand the Dems, who understand campaigning, were like, there was no way to move away from General O'Malley Dillon. We've got a hundred some days. We've got to pick a VP.

We've got to get the messaging right. We've got to get ready for the DNC. A million gigantic tasks that we generally spend a year to two years doing. We've got a year to two years doing. We got 100 days. Anything that is not on fire, we got to leave it be and just keep plowing forward. And Janet O'Malley Dillon was too much of a part of the campaign already. She moved there to support the Biden campaign when it when the switch happened, which is what they all call it, the switch. It was too late. We have to keep going. We can't replace her. They also had Stephanie Cutter, who was working communications, who founded that eye buying firm with Jen O'Malley Dillon. It's a very small, incestuous group. So I don't know

how far away from that sort of post Obama world she could have gotten away from because all these people, David Fluff is the third big name advising the campaign these are all obama people right right yeah and um i mean it is a difficult situation she was put in let's put torre's uh additional piece up on the screen where you talk about how the lack of a primary really was a disaster for kamala as a disaster for the party in general and again you know the the Jenna O'Malley Dylans of the world are kind of the scene of both crimes because they're also the ones that are leaking to the press,

like you gotta just stay with Biden because Kamala would be next in line and she'd be a disaster. That helps to rally the troops and circle the wagon. So there is no real Democratic primary process in order to, you know, either pick a candidate

who's different from Kamala or even just for Kamala herself to be able to go through that process and become a better candidate as a result of it. Yes. All the criticism of, oh, she's not great at interviews. She's not great at speeches. She's not great at connecting with voters, what have you. All of those things would have been strengthened if she had had time to campaign. She had a year, year and a half to be out in the trail, connecting with voters, talking to Millie in Iowa, whatever. It would have made her better at all these things. But the other thing is that this air of illegitimacy hung around the campaign. If she had had to fight and won, that would have conveyed a certain legitimacy on her campaign. I know some folks are going, she's the VP. You know, a lot of voters,

left and right, used words like coronation, used words like coup. They did not like the way that Kamala ascended to the nomination. They wanted to see some fight. And Kamala's message that democracy is under threat was undercut by the not so democratic way that she got the nomination. It undercut her whole argument. Yeah, no, that's so true. And also, if she had had to go through that process, and whether it's her that emerges or someone else, they would have been out there affirmatively making the case of what they wanted to do in opposition of what Biden has already done. So it sort of would have rendered moot

this question of how are you different? Because you would have had a whole primary process playing out where people are explaining what their views are and how they do things different and what it would look like going forward. Yeah, yeah. And you know, part of the thing too, people talked about Kamala's 2020

campaign was relatively short. So she doesn't create these deep bonds with campaign folks who are going to ride with her into the future. There weren't people from that campaign who were helping her this campaign. And other people have pointed out that Tony West, who is her brother-in-law, I believe, who was a huge advisor to this campaign. At first, Kamala was saying, you know, we need to bring down prices. A lot of people were mad about the prices of Ubers. Tony West was a lawyer at Uber. He said, please stop dissing Uber and Uber's prices. That was a great message for her. So the whole message of

dealing with prices, they edged her, they pushed her away from because they were in that system. So she's being advised by people who are not helping her in the right way. Yeah, that's such a great point. And actually, there was a lot of reporting about how influential Tony West ends up being. And that's like, you know, the one person she brings in that she feels comfortable with. And here he is, this corporate lawyer who's like, you know, this price gouging stuff. I don't know about that.

I don't know about that one. And so actually her super PAC had tested this ad that was all about price gouging. And they said, you know, tested 100%. It was the most effective ad they tested. It got virtually no money behind it because of that pushback from, you know, the Tony West of the world and the other corporate donors who were uncomfortable

with that messaging. So just, yeah, a very... You know, somebody pointed out to me, and I hate to say it, but like Obama, Obama world, who else have they elected besides Obama? They haven't gotten anybody else elected. And we can love him as a candidate or as the president, but like they haven't had any coattails. And this was another attempt to create that. And some may say like, OK, well, Biden gets elected, like for sure. But like a lot of other people who the Obama world tried to push have failed. Well, and Obama world tried to shiv Biden, actually, and never had any confidence that he would succeed. So, you know, there's a lot there. Torrey, tell people where they can find you, where they can follow your work.

I'm on Substack. It's called Culture Fries by Torrey. Fantastic. Great reporting on this, and always great to see you. Nice to see you. Thank you. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try.

She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I know a lot of cops, and they get asked all the time, have you ever had to shoot your gun? Sometimes the answer is yes. But there's a company dedicated to a future where the answer will always be no. Across the country, cops called this taser the revolution.

But not everyone was convinced it was that simple. Cops believed everything that taser told them. From Lava for Good and the team that brought you Bone Valley comes a story about what happened when a multibillion-dollar company dedicated itself to one visionary mission. This is Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated. I get right back there and it's bad. It's really, really, really bad. Listen to new episodes of Absolute Season 1, Taser Incorporated, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Binge episodes 1, 2, and 3 on May 21st, and episodes 4, 5, and 6 on June 4th. Ad-free at Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Lott. And this is Season 2 of the War on Drugs podcast. Yes, sir. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast. We are back. In a big way. In a very big way. Real people, real perspectives.

This is kind of star-studded a little bit, man. We got Ricky Williams, NFL player, Heisman Trophy winner. It's just a compassionate choice to allow players all reasonable means to care for themselves. Music stars Marcus King, John Osborne from Brothers Osborne. We have this misunderstanding of what this quote-unquote drug thing is. Benny the Butcher. Brent Smith from Shinedown. We got B-Real from Cypress Hill.

NHL enforcer Riley Cote. Marine Corvette. MMA fighter Liz Karamush. What we're doing now isn't working and we need to change things. Stories matter and it brings a face to them. It makes it real. It really does.

It makes it real. Listen to new episodes of the War on Drugs podcast season two on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear episodes one week early and ad free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, smelling blood in the water and never wanting to miss a good opportunity for self-promotion, decided to take aim at one of her newly elected colleagues, a woman named Sarah McBride, who happens to be transgender. Now, Mace, who in a previous incarnation went out of her way to explain

how she supports LGBTQ rights, has had a very politically expedient change of heart. Because in 2024 Republican politics, cruelty pays, and none more so than cruelty towards trans people. So Mace went on a self-righteous posting spree, performatively declaring herself to be the savior of women by policing the bathroom that one singular trans member of Congress might be allowed to use. For her efforts at bullying, she of course earned rapturous ovation from the Twitter Republican base. I'm sure the Fox News hits are incoming. Mace, though, is correct to sense some Democratic vulnerability on this issue right now, as the party enters into a round of recriminations in which the potential role of trans rights in their electoral defeat looms quite large. Now, central to this Dem Party debate is the effectiveness of this particular Trump campaign ad, which dominated the airwaves in battleground states.

Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners. Surgery. For prisoners. Surgery. For prisoners. For prisoners. Every transgender inmate in the prison system would have access. It's hard to believe, but it's true. Even the liberal media was shocked Kamala supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens. Every transgender inmate would have access. Kamala's for they, them. President Trump is for you. I'm Donald J. Trump and I approve this message. So that ad serves several purposes at once. First and most obviously centers a deeply unpopular position held by Kamala Harris and has the benefit of Kamala herself being on camera explaining her

support for that fringe issue. And I do mean fringe. According to Popular Info, only two trans inmates have ever received surgical care. And then after long legal battles to achieve that care, no undocumented transgender immigrants have ever, ever been provided with surgical care. Also happens the law was on the books and enforced under the Trump administration as well. Second, though, the ad seeks to paint Kamala as more focused on these fringe issues than on the things that will improve the lives of the vast majority. That's what makes the tagline so deviously brilliant and memorable. She's for they, them. He's for you.

So how effective was this ad? To be honest with you, you can kind of paint the data any direction that you want to. For those who claim it was really damaging, there's the simple fact that both campaigns thought it was effective. The Trump campaign, of course, put tens of millions of dollars behind it. According to the New York Times, the Harris campaign and their affiliated super PACs, they had big debates internally about how and whether to respond. We'll get back to that in a moment. In addition, a poll after the election found that swing voters were most persuaded by the message that, quote, Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like

transgender issues rather than helping the middle class. On the other hand, in the states where the ad was in heavy rotation, Kamala narrowed her national gap, suggesting that Kamala's ad campaign focused on economics actually outperformed the Trump campaign, which heavily focused on trans issues, since her ads did help to close the gap in contrast to the overall national environment. Furthermore, a Gallup poll found that of 22 possible issues, voters ranked transgender issues at the very bottom of all 22 issues in terms of importance. Now, in all of the voter interviews I've seen, for what it's worth, I actually haven't heard the issue of transgender rights mentioned a single time in either direction. In addition, at the same time that New York State moved more than 11 points towards Donald Trump, the single largest shift in the entire country, voters at the same time overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment which would guarantee transgender equality. Critics aggressively ran against that

measure. They claimed it would enshrine in the state's constitution a right for trans girls to play sports in girls leagues and to receive transgender surgeries without parental consent. Voters didn't care, though, and they passed that initiative in a vote of 62 to 38. So I am a little skeptical of the notion the issue was the deciding factor, but regardless, Democrats have got to figure out how they're going to respond. And right now, they're kind of in a freakout mode. The Times quotes former Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, saying that Kamala's failure to respond to the Trump attack ads was, quote, political malpractice. But apparently, it wasn't that the Harris camp didn't want to respond, it's that none of the responses they tested to it actually really worked. Quote, largely the campaign decided the best response was changing the subject.

Meg Schwenzweiser, the chief analytics officer for the Harris campaign, said the vice president's team determined its economic message was the most effective answer. Quote, in all of our quantitative and qualitative research on this ad, our best testing responses pivoted to the economy, she said. These responses not only neutralized the attack, but actually moved people towards us because they showed voters that the vice president did care about you. You know, to be honest, I think the campaign was probably right that the best thing they could do in the moment was just try to change the subject because you can't respond to these attacks with a clever messaging strategy or targeted ad. You have to respond with a completely different narrative

and different worldview. You see, the reason these attacks on transgender people have any resonance whatsoever is because they do fit into Trump's narrative, his story of the world. In that story, immigrants and cultural elites are destroying your communities, your way of life. Democrats are in league with those cultural elites who are ideologically driven by weird cultural fixations

like transing your kids and letting homeless people shoot up in your driveway. If the Democrats don't offer a different narrative to compete with that worldview, then they will end up hopelessly caught in the trap that the Republicans laid just as the Kamala Harris campaign was. So if you don't respond, then you let those ugly lies spread and you let them define you with no response. If you do respond with a counter-argument, then you give life to their narrative that you care more about trans girls in sports than you do about working class issues. And if you respond with capitulation by, for example, opposing trans girls in sports, then you lend credence to the Trumpian narrative that transgender issues are central and that

transgender people should not enjoy equal rights. After all, if both parties are in agreement that transgender people are a real problem, then it must be the case, right? This third approach is the worst of the lot, in my opinion, as proven by the Biden-Harris response to a similarly difficult and likely more potent issue of immigration. Democrats thought they were so clever, embracing border hawkishness, abandoning a pathway to citizenship, and their previous defense of the character and benefit of migrants. Kamala crowed about how Trump blocked their efforts to be aggressive border hawks. This approach ultimately was a complete disaster. It only served to help shift the public right on the issue and to provide the Trumpian narrative

that immigrants were bad and a massive problem for the country more credence. Capitulation and acceptance of right-wing narratives only fuels those narratives. The only way on of this trap is to offer a broad counter-narrative that is more compelling than the Trumpian story of the world. Because it

is not, in fact, immigrants and cultural elites who are screwing you. It's economic elites. It's the plutocrats who've rigged the political system, bought the media, hogged all of the economic gains. Those plutocrats and their political puppets love to use wedge issues on vulnerable groups like migrants and trans people to break the working class apart because a unified working class is their greatest nightmare. And that is exactly what Trump, Nancy Mace, Elon Musk, et al, that's what they're up to. Now, to my great shock, a Democratic representative, Jim McGovern,

actually did a solid job of articulating this message. The truth is that this is not what people voted for. They voted for their pocketbooks, and frankly, I don't blame them. You know who I do blame? I blame the billionaires who have rigged our country against working people and spent the last four decades squeezing every penny they could out of people. I blame the politicians, including the incoming administration, who have abandoned workers and who have done nothing while the rich get richer and everyone else gets screwed.

My friends on the other side, they want to blame trans people. Guess what? Trans people aren't the ones raising people's grocery prices. Big corporations are. They want to blame immigrants. And here's the deal. Immigrants aren't the ones denying health insurance claims, Mr. Speaker. It's the billion-dollar insurance companies that do that on a daily basis. And they want to blame woke this and woke that. What's woke about thinking special interests should not be able to buy tax breaks? What's woke about telling Chevron and Exxon that they can't dump toxic chemicals into

our air and water? What's woke about thinking it's wrong to give tax breaks to billionaires while the rest of us get screwed? It is time for us to get serious about fixing this country and making sure it works for everyone. And instead we have BS bills that allow the new administration to go after any group who disagrees with the government and shut them down. So my friends on the other side can keep doing whatever the hell this is. Good luck with that. Sounds like Bernie there, and I'm

certainly here for it. But with this narrative frame, fighting back becomes a lot easier because voters are then primed to understand these attacks on trans people is just part of a distraction tactic to hog more gains up for the rich. AOC also actually handed Mace's provocations pretty well. She flipped the script on the claim that Mace was protecting women and girls and also pointed out how Nancy Mace was clearly just shamelessly grifting for fundraising dollars. What Nancy Mace and what Speaker Johnson are doing are endangering all women and girls. Because if you ask them, what is your plan on how to enforce this, they won't come up with an answer.

And what it inevitably results in are women and girls who are primed for assault because they want, because people are going to want to check their private parts in suspecting who is trans and who is cis and who's doing what. And so the idea that Nancy Mace wants little girls and women to drop trow in front of who? An investigator? Who would that be? In order because she wants to suspect and point fingers at who she thinks is trans is disgusting. It is disgusting.

And frankly, all it does is allow these Republicans to go around and bully any woman who isn't wearing a skirt because they think she might not look woman enough. People have a right to express themselves, to dress how they want, and to be who they are. And if a woman doesn't look woman enough to a Republican, they want to be able to inspect her genitals to use a bathroom? It's disgusting. And everybody, no matter how you feel on this issue, should reject it completely. What are they doing? They're doing this so that Nancy Mace can make a buck

and send a text and fundraise off an email. They're not doing this to protect people. They're endangering women. They're endangering girls of all kinds. And everybody should reject it. It's gross. Now, this is definitely way more effective than the duck and cover or total capitulation strategies of the dumb centrists.

But until the party overall embraces a populist class war narrative, these sorts of attacks on trans people and migrants are going to have way more traction than they should. And of course, it's not enough to just tell a good story either. You also got to deliver to add credibility to your narrative frame. Because if voters feel like you are actually delivering for them personally in a way that is tangible, that they can see and feel, they'll be a lot more forgiving of cultural issues where inevitably there's going to be some disagreement. Bernie is the perfect example of this approach. He was further left than Kamala on virtually every issue, yet pretty impervious to the attack that he does not care about working class issues.

He has endless credibility from his years of work, bolstered by a narrative frame in which the millionaires and billionaires use issues like trans kids in sports to divide people up and maintain their power. Andy Beshear, twice-elected Democratic governor of Kentucky, offers another really powerful example of this approach. He defeated a Trumpian businessman back in 2019 by running a populist campaign centered around defending public education amidst a mass teacher strike, fighting for union jobs and affordable health care. In office, he is really delivered. He brought significant investments into the state from the auto industry in particular and high-paying union jobs, and he has communicated constantly with the public about what he was up to and why it was he

was doing it. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Governor Beshear wrote about what he was up to and why it was he was doing it. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Governor Beshear wrote about how he was able to get re-elected even after making some decisions on cultural issues that polled as extremely unpopular in his conservative state. Quote, as governor, I have vetoed numerous anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice bills, yet I still beat Mr. Trump's handpicked candidate last fall. That happened because even if some voters might have disagreed with the vetoes, they knew the next day I would be announcing new jobs, opening a new health clinic, or finishing a new road that would cut 20 minutes off their commute. They knew my focus and effort was on their daily needs and that our gains as a commonwealth would help every single one of our families. He goes on to say of his decision to veto anti-trans bills, quote, I believe all children are children of God, and whether people agree with my decision,

they know why I'm making it. They know where I am coming from. Now, Republicans, they're feeling very confident right now, but they are also in grave danger of overreach. After all, here Nancy Mace is, after just getting reelected, focusing on what happens in a single bathroom in the U.S. Capitol rather than the issues that her constituents presumably sent her to Washington to fight for. She literally posted about this, now it's up to more than 200 times, about the single person's theoretical use of this bathroom. Wild stuff. It would not be hard at all for Democrats to point out the dirty game of distraction that Republicans are playing. In fact, Congresswoman

elect McBride herself is doing her version of that, putting on a statement saying, quote, I'm not here to fight about bathrooms. I'm here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. When Democrats really prove that by ditching the big money donors and rebuilding the party as a working class party, it will be manifestly self-evident to all that the Nancy Maces of the world are nothing more than shameless, self-promoting enforcers of the status quo. And Emily, Nancy Mace seizing the moment here. You know, she sees an opening. You had after the election, you had a couple of Democratic congressmen immediately come out and be like, I oppose trans girls in sports. There's been a lot of discussion about this particular ad. And I do think Democrats are kind of caught in a bind because they don't have a narrative worldview that would retrain people from, you know, Trump's got his villains and, you know, cultural elites and downstream from that transgender people are part of that narrative. You have to offer a compelling counter narrative and back that up with credibility that you

actually are fighting for working class people. You're not just doing, you know, lip service to it. You know, I have an interesting theory about this. And we talked, we did a whole, you guys had me on KKF. We did a whole episode on this debate. It was like 18 months ago, something like that. But one thing I think Democrats have to reckon with is that Pew Research has found the highest opposition to the question of, this is the specific question that people have asked, that Pew asked. I want to make sure the wording is exactly right. Whether a person is a man or a woman, quote, can be different from sex assigned at birth, quote, is determined by sex assigned at birth. it actually goes up the lower your education level is. So that's roughly a proxy for income.

So people who are lower socioeconomic ranks tend to be less in agreement with the sort of AOC position on sex and gender. And that's something I think is really, really an obstacle because it's not that this is the number one issue people are going to the polls and voting for. I think it's a question of trust, that if you are fundamentally telling them, Andy Beshear has been, he's handled this, he's such a good example. This is Andy Beshear a year ago. He said, my position on this has always been clear. I've never supported gender reassignment surgery for minors and they don't happen in Kentucky. But he's also been willing to make the case that you just outlined, which is a path forward for Democrats, because it doesn't give in to this problem of trust, which is if you are telling people that what they are seeing, they're not seeing that, you know, if you're telling them that there's this like very complicated academic theory about the gender binary and fluidity and that these sports teams, like it's really no different. You might be able to defend the position of having the sports question from the left. You might be able to do that. But what you can't tell people is that they're wrong to see differences

between men and women. And if your position is predicated on that, I just think you lose trust with voters. It's hard to sell industrial policy when voters are being told that they're, or voters know that you think maybe they're bigoted because they're seeing what they're seeing. But here's the thing, Emily, is that Trump supports all kinds of unpopular shit. Like nothing is more unpopular in America than abortion ban with no exceptions. Which is why he shifted. Who did he put on his ticket? J.D. Vance, who supported very clearly abortion ban with no restrictions. But had to walk it back. Had to walk it back. But Kamala didn't talk about any of this in her campaign. But the administration did. I mean, not really. Like she literally didn't say the word transgender here. There's a reason they had to pull clips from 2020. So why is Trump able to

get away with holding incredibly unpopular positions in certain instances? And the Democrats aren't. Why is Bernie Sanders able to get away with holding this same position, if anything, being to the left of Kamala on social cultural issues? And she's not. And it's because people by and large, like they don't really, like the sports team thing is they don't really care. Even Trump said, like, no one actually brings this up to me, right?

Because it's such a fringe, it applies to so few kids, like it doesn't impact your life, whatever. What they do care about is the sense that you're more focused on these niche things than you are about me. And that ties into like, you know, the conversation we were having about the war too. Like you are more focused on these things.

And so if you don't have, number one, the credibility where you've actually delivered for people, where they can see like, oh no, it's preposterous to say that Bernie Sanders or Andy Beshear is more obsessed with these issues than they are with like delivering for me and my family. If you don't have that credibility, and if you also don't have the narrative frame of guys, this issue is not core to you and your family. This is just a distraction. And, you know, we're focusing on these issues that unite people that are going to deliver broadly for, you know, working class people across the board, then yeah, you're going to end up in a very difficult position. And so, you know, I think that's where Democrats find themselves is they have lost all

credibility that they actually are willing to stand up to the donor class, that they actually have, you know, a narrative view of the world that points fingers at a villain that is not transgender people and is not immigrants, ultimately. They haven't laid out that, the neoliberal wing of the party hasn't laid out that critique and has lost their credibility on delivering. So then these issues where they're at odds with some of the people they're trying to win over become absolutely more significant. One thing I think is interesting in the they-them ad is Sam Britton and Rachel Levine, in that it wasn't, you know, Kamala Harris didn't have to talk about, this administration appointed Rachel Levine and Sam Britton to these high positions. She didn't do that. She didn't

tout it. It wasn't like her run in 2019 or 2020. But I think people just look at that. And actually, to the point you're making, Republicans have weirdly turned this, I shouldn't say weirdly, but if you had predicted this 20 years ago, you'd be like, what the hell? Have turned it into a class issue by saying like, this is what the elites are trying to tell you is normal. And Republicans in a way have realized that before Democrats, which is entirely surprising because of the way shifts are happening. But like, it is ultimately, the reason this resonates is from that class framework. And that's, to your point, something that Democrats can use that framework, like to actually robot it 100% agree, you know, even Joe Biden is a good example, because that 2020 campaign was way more woke than like,

wokeness was at its peak around like the 2020 DNC. If you go back and look at that, you will think you're in like a fever dream of another world. Right. Oh, yeah. And yet Joe Biden in that atmosphere is able to win. And I think part of why is even though like, you know, Joe Biden's track record is very corporate friendly, whatever, whatever. He had this image and this credibility of being middle class Joe from Scranton. Yep. And people felt like they could trust that he was kind of, you know, looking out for the average Joe and Jane. Yep.

And so even though there was all this like stuff, you know, swirling around. I always point out Elizabeth Warren with the Black Lives Matter blocks behind her. All this. Saying black acts. Like the most ridiculous performative wokeness you could possibly imagine. And the Democratic primary just happened where Kamala and everybody else was saying things like what is on camera there. That wasn't a problem for him. He was able to win on a pro-immigrant and pro-trans message

because there was a sense of like, okay, but I, you know, I trust this guy that his core priority isn't that stuff. It's actually delivering. And also, by the way, we're really sick of this guy, Donald Trump, who's just like a chaos machine over here and let's do something different. So even though Joe Biden isn't my model of like what they should be doing in the future, right? You need a much more clear cut populist class war messages that names villain, purges the donor class.

Like these things have to happen if Democratic Party is gonna build back credibility. I even think in Joe Biden, you can see a little bit of a model of how this was able to be successful in the past. And, you know, I've pointed out with Bernie a bunch of times, but I just think it's really worth reminding that Bernie's is left on these issues as you can get. Like no one would question his credentials there. And who was he strongest with? Young men, right? The famous bros that were all smeared as being sexist and racist, blah, blah, blah, for supporting Bernie Sanders.

The bros, he was very popular with Latinos. He overperformed and famously, you know, wins Nevada and that's like dismissed as who cares about that because it's not, you know, it's not the demographic group that we've decided is going to be most consequential in this election. And in general, with working class people. This map has been shared around recently a lot on Twitter. I don't know if you've seen it. Back from the 2020 primary, the New York Times put together a map of which candidates in the Democratic primary

were getting the most grassroots donations from different places in the country. And the whole map was Bernie Sanders. Yeah. They had to make a separate map taking Bernie Sanders out of the equation to show some of the detail of like, okay, but these other candidates, like they're a little bit outperforming this or that place. That's how dominant he was. And it was obviously not high dollar donors. It was like Starbucks workers and Amazon workers and delivery drivers, like teachers were one of the major

professions that were contributing to him. So he shows, proves that, you know, yes, if you polled his views on transgender issues with the population, you would get some results that were, you know, not favorable for him. But because he had so much credibility built up and such a clear narrative of the world, no one thought that he was going to be obsessed with trans bathroom issues once he got into the Congress. And, you know, if Democrats are able, which is a big if and very unlikely to happen, but if they're able to turn it around, then Nancy Mace is putting herself and the party in a much more precarious position where it's like, oh, actually, you all are the ones that just ran $35 million on trans issues. You're the one who put out 250 posts in 36 hours or whatever about

this bathroom. You are the ones that are actually obsessed with these issues and won't let people just live their lives. Just to return very, very briefly, the demo with the highest level of support for the position that sex is assigned at birth is black Americans. Like they're just, there's definitely a class disconnect. And I think that's, I agree with you, Joe Biden won black voters much more strongly in 2020 than Democrats did this time around. I think because he handles the issue differently. All right, guys. Well, thank you very much for watching the show. And Emily's going to be back next week for some great pre-Thanksgiving content. Another five hour show. Two of them. Sometimes we do goofy

like pre-Thanksgiving. We'll do like the travel or like the cost of turkey or whatever. I'll come up with some cheesy like morning show style content for us to do next week. Maybe we cook. Like we do Kathie Lee and Hoda with like glasses of white wine and we make something that like really upsets Sagar.

Like something that really would get him going. We'll have to brainstorm on that, but I like the vibe. We do fry a turkey right here. I like the vibe. People have been, I got a lot of appreciation for my various dressing up schemes on this show. They've been excellent. The ray gun and then putting on the mega hat.

People love that, unfortunately. Some people really loved that, Crystal. Yeah, but anyway, it's making me lean into more of my campsite. So maybe we'll dream up something good for Thanksgiving next week. Love it. Love it. It's giving Ryan Murphy. Come on. Do what you can. All right, guys. Love you all. Have a great weekend. We'll see you back here next week. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Helen Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder.

I'm Catherine Townsend. I've heard from hundreds of people across the country with an unsolved murder in their community. I was calling about the murder of my husband. The murderer is still out there. Each week, I investigate a new case. If there is a case we should hear about, call 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

We asked parents who adopted teens to share their journey. We just kind of knew from the beginning that we were family. They showcased a sense of love that I never had before. I mean, he's not only my parent, like he's like my best friend. At the end of the day, it's all been worth it. I wouldn't change a thing about our lives. Learn about adopting a teen from foster care. Visit AdoptUSKids.org to learn more.

Brought to you by AdoptUSKids, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Ad Council. High key. Looking for your next obsession? Listen to High Key, a new weekly podcast hosted by Ben O'Keefe,

Ryan Mitchell, and Evie Oddly. We got a lot of things to get into. We're going to gush about the random stuff we can't stop thinking about. I am high key going to lose my mind over all things Cowboy Carter. I know. Girl, the way she about to yank my bank account.

Correct. And one thing I really love about this is that she's celebrating her daughter. Oh, I know. Listen to High Key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast.