Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 12/2/23: Krystal and Ryan LIVE at Politics and Prose Presents THE SQUAD

Episode Date: December 2, 2023

Krystal and Ryan have a live discussion at Politics and Prose for his new book The Squad: AOC And The Hope Of A Political Revolution. Buy THE SQUAD here: https://www.amazon.com/Squad-AOC-Hope-Political-Revolution/dp/1250869072See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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the term that we always hear from our audience is that they feel seen. Listen to Good Company on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned no town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine 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. I'm thrilled to introduce Ryan Grimm in celebration of his book The Squad, AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. Referred to informally as The Squad, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the group laid down a marker for an aggressive left-wing agenda. Grimm takes you behind the scenes as that new energy makes impact with Washington,

and the squad spends as much time fending off assaults from Donald Trump, who regularly singled them out and led chants of send them back at rallies, as they did battling their own party's sclerotic leadership. As they've grown in office, they've had to contend with the eternal question that confronts outsiders whose power their way into the inside. Are they still radical organizers willing and able to lead a political revolution? Ryan Grimm is the Intercept's DC Bureau Chief and the co-host of CounterPoints. He was previously the Washington Bureau Chief for HuffPost, where he led a team that won a Pulitzer Prize. He's the author of the book We've Got People from Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

and The End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement and This is Your Country on Drugs, The Secret History of Getting High in America. Grimm will be joined in conversation with Crystal Ball, an American political commentator and co-host of Breaking Points. She was previously a political candidate as well as a television host on MSNBC. Now enough of my voice, please join me in welcoming Grimm and Ball to the stage. Ryan, I think those two excerpts were a perfect way to jump off this conversation because you start with the sort of beginning of AOC's political arc, which you track with incredible insider reporting throughout the book. And also a recurring nemesis, you might say, Josh Gottheimer, and also the influence of AIPAC and some of the affiliated groups. So it's a great place to start. Thank you so much for letting me be involved in this conversation.

Congratulations on the book, which is fantastic, which I read cover to cover, and I encourage all of you all to do as well. I actually thought a good place to start was one of the questions that we got from you all, sort of a philosophical question about the book itself, which is, is the squad a brand or a moment? Is it something that can be nurtured and cultivated, or is it more of a progressive click? In other words, what even is the squad? So I think the context for that, the answer would be that I think all we have now are moments

in the sense that we have these bursts of activity that has its own life in the real world and then it has a second life kind of on social media which then shapes it back in the real world and then also shapes how people understand it. That goes back, we could start with like Occupy Wall Street was, it was a moment but it was also something that changed everything that came after it. The Occupy moment is over, but, and as I write about in the book, you probably don't get Bernie Sanders without the Occupy moment. But you also wouldn't have either of them if the material

conditions were not there to like ripen both of those ripen both of those things uh and so black lives matter again the moment but the moments that we live in after that are shaped by by that moment so i think on a political electoral scale they are a moment that it was a you know the arc of the book is kind of like mid-2015s bernie sanders launching launching his campaign up through the 2022 midterms. And that's kind of the moment. I think you could kind of see it kind of cresting in 2020 and breaking. And then after that moment, something new is born from it that is different for it having happened.

Ilhan Omar told me, as I was reporting this book, she's like, you know there is no such thing as a squad. I know that, but also there is. There's no regular meetings. There's no kind of criteria for membership. If people remember the Onion article from 2019, I forget which 85-year-old New Jersey lawmaker the Onion said was appealing for membership in the squad. And they then jokingly said,

you're in, you're in, sure, you're in. But it then becomes a, so as Ilhan Omar's put it, it's a media creation. And it was created by an Instagram caption. Like AOC posted a picture of the four of them and just wrote squad in the caption. And it took off from there. So that's where it comes from.

So it is a media creation. It's also a creation of the political moment. But then as its adversaries identify it, they forge it into a thing. And so now it's a thing whether it wants to be a thing or not. Interesting. I mean, a lot of the book, there's several different narratives that are running. But one of them is this journey of AOC from what she thinks she is and what people project on her going in and then faced with both the reality of the job and also the reality of some of her own sort of personality traits. So talk about, you know,

how she views the job in that moment where you were just reading the book where she's occupying Speaker Pelosi's office and she's there with the activists, etc., to the moment where we find her now more focused on building relationships and trying to play the sort of more traditional political inside game. And what I like about that moment where she occupies the office and later in that excerpt, I quote from her actual speech while she's in the office, because I think it epitomizes everything so perfectly. Her whole speech while she's in the office because I think it epitomizes everything so perfectly. Her whole speech while she's there is about how great Nancy Pelosi is and how much all of the climate activists are there to support Nancy Pelosi in her kind of pursuit of her climate agenda. So she really does want to be there, potentially even getting arrested, occupying her her office but also as the person there supporting her and part of her really like it's genuine like i i contrasted a little bit with

obama who kind of people wanted uh to be able to put whatever they wanted onto ob. Whereas I think AOC genuinely feels like she can do that. Like she wants to lead a political revolution by just persuading everyone that it's the right thing to do. It's like, she, she just, she's like, well,

well, of course, Nancy Pelosi has been for climate for a strong climate agenda for decades. Like all we're doing is supporting her here. But at the same time, she also knows she also doesn't want me occupying her office. So this is not... So there's this tension throughout.

And she talks about, and her staffers will also talk about how there was a kind of marriage of convenience that you couldn't see from the outside. And both she and some of the people from Justice Democrats used that kind of same phrase.

That in order to become a member of Congress, she couldn't just... Our system is not set up where a bartender can just win without any help from anybody else. And so there was this organization, Justice Democrat, and also nobody else could challenge Joe Crowley. Nobody within New York politics could challenge Joe Crowley, and this is a point that she would make.

Because if they tried, their career would absolutely be over. That's what it means to have a machine. So it had to be someone from outside the machine. Somebody who didn't have a career. Had to be someone who had nothing to lose, basically. Nothing to lose. Absolutely nothing. And this organization, Justice Democrats, had launched.

Kyle Kalinsky actually helped launch them. I was aware of that. They flew out of and grew out of brand new Congress, which had tried to elect 435 kind of populists to Congress. That was their goal. By the end of the year, they realize they're on the brink of electing zero. And in the meantime, they had split into Justice Democrats,

which worked on the Democratic side and brand new Congress, which stuck with the original thing of doing candidates in every primary, regardless of the party. And so when they realized that they might get zero, they then put all their resources into aoc so so when she then wins the people that she knows are the people that supported her she

can't she beat joe crowley going to work for her at that point in the democratic party would have been career suicide and so it was very hard for her to find people from inside the party so that brings them together and it create but from the outside it looked like it was this kind of revolutionary vanguard that had been well organized and kind of powered its way through when in fact the the four members didn't really know each other right and we're there just kind of there was a coincidence that they all arrived on the same themes at the same time. And then they're expected to work together as this media creation. And then immediately they're hit, starting in January, with the constant question, are you anti-Semitic for not kind of condemning Ilhan Omar or for the Benjamin situation? And like the first six months are just consumed by attacks from APAC and its

allied organizations. I want to pick up more on that piece in a moment, because one of the things that you and I have talked about is how much that theme runs through the book and how influential those organizations and the funding of those organizations and the funding of in primaries ended up shaping, you know the democratic caucus and their response to what's happening right now in gaza so i want to come back to that but i thought this was a really good question as well that gets to some of the heart of

the critique that the left has had of the squad um the question here is why haven't the progressives hijacked the democratic party in the manner of the Freedom Caucus, especially considering the comparably slim majorities of the 117th and 118th Congresses, asked Jonathan. So partly you have to think about, well, partly Democrats are just different and they're always going to be different. Like when you tell, if you tell the Freedom Caucus, look, if you don't support this thing, the government's going to shut down. Or if you don't support this thing, we're going to have a global financial crisis and we're going to default on the debt. Their claim of being okay with that is quite credible. Like, all right, fine, go ahead. Do it without me then. So Democrats have always had that that had some of that

problem because they you can always come back and say well all right here we're giving you this and it's so easy to whittle them away so that's the kind of that's one that's one structural problem that they have but then just if you think about the timing when they came in donald trump is president and so they it's not as if they're them to kind of organize a kind of offensive forward-thinking strategy, because it's just every single week, it's just they're playing defense. But then also this constant battle with Nancy Pelosi, which breaks out in the press and ultimately ends with a couple of staffers being pushed out of the office and things really shifting around. So then soon after that, the presidential campaign picks up.

And so at that point, the squad, three of whom endorse Bernie Sanders, Ayanna Pressley with her eye on Massachusetts politics and a potential Senate seat. She's like, oh, Elizabeth Warren getting a nomination, a Senate seat opening up? Yes, I endorse Elizabeth Warren. So three of them endorse Bernie Sanders and they really believe that he can win the nomination. He comes within a hair's breadth of winning that nomination. Democratic primary voters are much more affectionate toward the Democratic Party than Republican primary voters are.

If you watch Republican primary ads, they're all kind of running against the Republican Party. To them, the Republican Party is just as bad as the other elites. Whereas the Democratic Party, if you're considered not a good Democrat, like happened to Nina Turner in her special election, then a lot of kind of normal Democratic primary voters are going to reject you.

So Bernie Sanders, running as an independent Democratic socialist who caucused with Democrats, had that uphill climb. And so you had he and the squad constantly trying to assure democratic primary voters like we're not radical like and you know he gave that speech i'm just running on the legacy of fdr and so if you're trying to convince the democratic party that you're you're you're good

democrats you're just a lot more kind of democratic socialist and you just want kind of higher minimum wage you want medicare for all you want a green new deal but you're you're just a lot more kind of Democratic Socialist and you just want kind of higher minimum wage, you want Medicare for all, you want a Green New Deal, but you're a Democrat. Then that makes it harder at that point. And that's where you hear some of the stuff that she'll get criticized for. When she said, I think she called Pelosi Mama Bear at one point. People have never forgiven her for that. That was while Bernie was, well, it looked like Bernie might win the nomination.

And she's trying to win the kind of the normie Democrats over into the camp to say, no, no, no, the water's fine. We're not threatening. We're not dangerous. We love Nancy Pelosi too. And then of course, within three days, there's that massive turnaround and it all collapses.

So then 2021 becomes their opportunity and they did then and i have some interesting examples of it in the book particularly around the american rescue plan they there was so much outside pressure and anger about particularly the 15 minimum wage not being kept in the legislation, that when Manchin came back and tried to pull a lot of the unemployment benefits out, Schumer went over to the House and said, look, Manchin's not with us unless we do these massive cuts to unemployment benefits.

And Pramila Jayapal, the Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair, was able to tell Schumer, if he does that, he's like, I'm fine with it. I mean, I'mila Jayapal, the congressional progressive caucus chair was able to tell Schumer if he does that, it's like, you know, I'm fine with it. You know,

I mean, I'm not fine with it, but you know, don't worry about me. I'm, I'm still with, with you, but you're going to lose the squad and it's going to go down.

And because there was so much outside pressure and anger, that was a credible threat and mansion caved on it. And this, and hundreds of billions in unemployment benefits went through. So there were moments where it could happen, but it was but it was never done in a way that kind of made kind of the outside folks happy because they still didn't get the $15 minimum wage. Right. So from the outside, people were still like frustrated about it. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised

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That's a good question. I mean, she's answered some of them in some interviews. I think she thinks a lot of them are unfair, that a lot of them are people who are making kind of bad faith arguments kind of to feed algorithms and like get, you know. For clicks. For clicks, basically.

And I think she thinks some people just don't kind of understand like what she's dealing with on the inside, what it's like to be an inside legislator. But I think also, I think she thinks some of it is fair. But there also is, there's no coordinating mechanism. and she has talked about this as well, that say back in the 1960s, you had major mass organizations that had steering committees that were in contact with each other that were setting ambitious strategies and tactics

and then executing them and had the manpower to do it. They had the grassroots kind of mobilization to do it. That doesn't exist now. What has replaced that is basically Twitter. And Twitter is reactive. Twitter usually can give

feedback to legislators after it's too late. Right. After they've done something that people are unhappy about. And wouldn't have known why did you do this thing thing now at that point it's too late yeah gotcha um we got a couple questions in this regard uh but you know you track how aoc she gets elected she's instantly i remember watching she was then on morning joe and suddenly everyone's like oh my god who is this person and she's instant media star and getting, you know, all of these this interest in social media followers and mainstream press really excited about.

And she's kind of knocking it out of the park interview after interview. And then she sits down for one interview and gets asked about Israel and Palestine. jumping off point to talk about the way that that conflict has both been a difficulty, a challenge for members of the squad and sort of the squad adjacent members as well. But also how strangely, because there was so much organization on the other side trying to enforce unanimity on the topic, it actually strengthened their spine in terms of their position. Talk about a little bit about that, starting with that moment with AOC, which is incredible. Yeah. So it started really with the Great March of Return, which a lot of people missed it

happening in real time. But now with the war going on currently, people have looked back and said, oh, that was an interesting development. If you don't know what the Great March Return was, that was a civil society-led initiative in Gaza that kind of came from the grassroots where people would say every Friday we're going to go near the fence and we're going to picnic. It's going to be a joyous thing and then we're gonna march non-violently to the to the fence and we just do this every friday just and we're gonna look out at the places where our parents and grandparents used to live this will be a fun community event but also symbolic of uh our our hope that one day there will be peace and we can return and the Israeli troops started shooting and every Friday they'd start shooting and it became this

kind of infamous thing since then where eventually started shooting they started aiming for legs and so it created so then they shot out so many people's legs that in Gaza you'd have it just became a very regular thing to see people going around with missing one or both legs. The UN has the numbers, but they're astronomical. And so after one of these mass shootings, I think 60 people were killed. And these are nonviolent. There's some stone throwing, but generally these are not kind of Hamas-led actions. Hamas eventually reluctantly supported them, but there was nothing armed about them.

And so AOC responded on Twitter saying, it's appalling that 60 nonviolent protesters were killed in this Gaza demonstration. And it's appalling that there's so much silence from so many here in New York City about that. And that created a lot of interest in this congressional candidate from the Bronx and from Queens who's standing up for the rights of Palestinians because it was so unusual. And so she then gets asked about that question on this in this interview and she's been nailing kind of interview after interview and it initially it seemed like the biggest event that the night that she won her primary was joe crowley losing it very quickly became clear after as she was nailing all these interviews that the biggest event was actually her winning and that joe crowley would be somebody that was like a trivia question a couple years later.

Does anybody know what he's doing? He's a lobbyist. Lobbyist, right? Had to be. Yes, yes, he's a lobbyist. And so she's doing great in all of his interviews and then she gets hit with this question. And Margaret Carlson says,

you used the word Palestine. What do you mean by that? And you can see her whole demeanor change, where she's sort of like, I know that there are third rails everywhere on this issue. And I might have touched one, but I don't know if I did or not. And she sort of tries to explain. She's just saying that she sees it if 60 people were killed at a protest in Puerto Rico or 60 people were killed at a protest in Ferguson. I would stand up for that.

And so I should stand up for it when it happens in Gaza as well. And she's like, yes, but you used the word occupation. What do you mean by that? And again, you're like, oh, what's what's happening here and finally she says look i'm not a geopolitical expert uh this wasn't something that we talked about a lot at my bronx dinner table growing up which summer lee later told me the same thing just growing up in pittsburgh it's not an issue that you're steeped you're steeped in if you're growing up in the African-American community in Pittsburgh. And so she just, at that point,

they kind of pull her off the trail, and she realizes, I need to learn more about this. Because clearly, this is going to be a very big issue. And I think once you're kind of pressed to look into the history and to look into the reality you're probably going to get pushed in the direction of saying that this this is wrong Jamal Bowman did it did an interesting interview recently that can be who became one of you know either the fifth or sixth squad member who talked about his experience of visiting the west bank and bizarrely there are

people who on the left who were angry that he even took that trip but everybody who takes that trip and sees the west bank in person kind of comes back changed because there are streets that you can't walk down you know if you're palestinian uh there are there are front doors of palestinian homes that are like sealed shut like they have to go out their back door only they can't go out through this street uh different you know different streets are blocked off for people with different license plates and you and you see this up front you're like this is this is wrong it just it just it just feels wrong and so i think that uh over the years as they've learned more about the issue now obviously omar and talib didn't need that

education right um but also as they as they realize that this is this is going to be much bigger than i thought it was like uh one of the and kyle would vouch for this too well well each sides uh who also helped launch uh justice, has said, he always gets asked, why do you guys focus on Israel-Palestine so much? He's like, we don't. We're just always getting hit on it. So we have to respond. So one of the questions that we got from the audience was, in your opinion, what is the reason that the Israel lobbying infrastructure has been so successful at enforcing narrative discipline? And I might add as a corollary, what happened to John Fetterman?

Yeah, yeah. So the John Fetterman story is in the book. It's part of, and this is kind of an answer to the question in so in in 20 2019 in direct response to Omar and Tlaib getting sworn in that the group Democratic majority for Israel gets founded and there and they're pretty explicit that that was the thing that they were founded to push push back against the first money they spent was later that year against Bernie Sanders in the presidential campaign. That was their kind of foray into it. Their first huge effort was trying to stop Jamal Bowman from unseating

the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel, one of the most talkish, unapologetic defenders of Israel in Congress. And the idea that he could be beaten by a former principal, nobody backed by Justice Democrats, was unthinkable. And so DMFI spent $2 million plus in this primary, but he still ended up losing, even lost in heavily Jewish precincts. And so it ended up being a blowout, something like 15 points. And in the wake of that, DMFI, which was kind of an offshoot of AIPAC, and AIPAC realized, okay,

this $2 million is not gonna cut it. Like we need to come in here with some serious money. And so in the next cycle, the 2022 cycle, the MFI again came up with something like 10 million dollars. So to spend some affiliated groups came up another couple million, but APAC launched its own super PAC, which was new in its history. It had always been purely a grassroots organization with chapters and sub chapters all over the country and they launched uh the united democracy project super pack which they put more than 30 million dollars into and put

almost every penny of it into democratic primaries trying to uh knock out progressive incumbents or to stop progressive challengers uh from from winningaries. And that's just an absolutely enormous amount of money. Like the organization J Street, which was set up to be a counter to AIPAC, told me that they had seen what happened in 2020, and so then they organized their own super PAC to try to defend progressive candidates who they felt were strong on Israel, that they felt the argument that AIPAC is pro-Israel is

a misnomer, that AIPAC is actually leading Israel in a direction that's not only going to be harmful for the Palestinians, but also for Israel. And so, J Street was able to raise about $2 million. So, they thought, the MFI will have 10 million, we'll have 2 million. The MFI's positions are extremely unpopular. And so they have to spend much more money in primaries to overcome that. So at a five to one disadvantage, we can hold our own. Then when APAC comes in with 30 or 40 million, they're just able to annihilate people. There may be some former constituents of Donna Edwards here. They spent, I think, $7 million sure that donna edwards did not get back into congress like

a third she's like a 30 point lead popular former democrat uh she had voted they didn't like a particular vote she took in 2008 on the war in gaza wow. And $7 million later, she was beaten. Nita Alam, who was, her good friends, I don't know if people remember, there was this horrific, and it became a national story, a hate crime in Chapel Hill, or Durham, that area,

where three Muslim students were killed. And she was good friends with them. She became the first Muslim county commissioner in Durham. She was running for Congress and was expected to win. It was popular with a lot of the Democratic voters in the area. They spent something like $5 or $6 million to stop her from winning. Candidates around the country started seeing this. And so there would be consultant calls.

They'd say, okay, how do we stop this money from coming in? We can't raise enough to compete against it, but how do we stop it? Say, well, one direct way to stop it is just to ask them how we can stop it. And so that's what Fetterman did. Fetterman's campaign reached out to DMFI. At the time, Fetterman was running against a conservative Democrat named Conor Lamb,

who was, his campaign was openly sending out memos saying, if we get super PAC support, here is how we can beat John Fetterman. If we do not get super PAC support, we will lose, and Democrats are going to lose this seat, and it's going to be a disaster. They were very explicitly making this point, going on TV

and circulating the memos to the meeting. We need super PAC money. We can't beat him without super PAC money. And the super PAC money they're talking about beat him without super PAC money. And the super PAC money they're talking about is DMFI, for the most part. And mainstream Democrats, which is, mainstream Democrats pact is allied, funded by Reid Hoffman, but allied with DMFI. So they go directly to DMFI and say, what does our Israel Palestine position need to be, basically? And Mark Melman, the head of DMFI, later told uh later said on the record uh that the

meeting went very well uh that fetterman staff then sent over their israel palestine platform it was pretty good not quite there so they made some edits kicked it back to the campaign campaign check said this is good posted it this is our position and connor lamb out of luck we're not gonna we're not gonna support you because this guy's this guy's good enough and you saw that happen in a lot of different races that candidates who hoped they were going to get apac support to beat a progressive didn't because the progressive was able to persuade apac and dmfi that they were that they had sufficiently switched their position on the issue. Wow. And you also have the story of Summer Lee, who had sent out some pretty mild tweets,

but knew she was going to be a target and just sort of accepted it and was able narrowly to still win her race. You know, there are two reports of candidates who are running right now in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, both of whom were reportedly, according to them, offered $20 million to drop out of the Senate race to primary Rashida Tlaib. I mean, that's like as naked as it gets, a donor calling you up.

This is not even legal, by the way, to do, but a donor calling you up and saying, hey, I'll give you $20 million in your primary campaign against Rashida Tlaib if you drop out here. Based on your reporting and your knowledge of how all of this has gone down in the past, I mean, are you surprised by just the brazen nature of that? Not really, because it has taken Citizens United some time to kind of blossom into what it really could become and what people could see that it could become from the beginning, which is just the floodgates completely open. The first cycle, 2012, there were a couple Senate candidates that got involved with Super PACs, but very few. It only started drifting into House races a couple cycles after that. But 2022 and AIPAC's spending of 30 plus million dollars kind of really, really changed, I think, the calculation because that is on the one hand, so much money that it can reshape how the party positions itself on Israel-Palestine.

It can purge an entire faction of critics from the party. But it's also not much money. There is a small number of donors. The Super PAC, a lot of AIPACX money is dark money that goes for kind of general operations. But the Super PAC money is public. And you can see this person gave $5 million. This person gave $1 million. This person gave $1 million.

And then you'll see like on a single day, you can look at the FEC reports on it. On a single day, 30 different people gave $100,000. So you're like, oh, that must have been a nice fundraiser somewhere uh and so it only takes a few people spending a small amount of money to them right like they it's a rounding error to them right and once you can see you can have an impact then you're like oh well let's let's do this again and i think they one mis kind of mistake they feel like they made is they did not spend heavily against ilhan omar like they felt like she was uh comfortably ahead in the race and that it was going to be a waste of money and also that uh she in this i get into this in the book, she and Pelosi had a very close relationship,

which might surprise a lot of people. And so they would have been going against Pelosi to go after Omar. She ended up only winning by a couple points. And so now she's facing the same person, and I don't think they'll make that mistake again. Like they're going to, I think Tlaib, and we can get into, we could go race by race, but they feel like there's enough shot at winning and it's cheap enough that why not?

That they may as well give it their best. One of the questions we got from the audience is with the squad members vocally calling for a ceasefire and really leading the charge on that and challenging democratic leadership does this prove the electing progressives inside the democratic party is not a fool's errand i don't have to tell you that you know there's a lot of progressive and lefty disenchantment with electoral politics disappointments with the squad's unwillingness and inability at times to challenge democratic leadership directly um i i have never seen them be as forceful in critique of democratic leadership, and especially President Biden, as they have been in this moment with Israel's, you know, all out war being waged on Gaza. So what do you think of this person's question? Do you think it proves that that this was worthwhile? And what are some of the factors

that led them to be so strong on this particular issue? So the structure that makes it, that made it so difficult for so many years for progressives to get into office was just the lack of resources. And Bernie Sanders, well, Elizabeth Warren kind of in her 2012 Senate campaign, you can read my last book for this,. Howard Dean with his first presidential campaign, really kind of bringing small donors into the game. Obama kind of showing that you can do it on a national scale in 2008 with small donors, obviously combining it with a lot of Wall Street and other big donor money. That opens up the possibility for outsiders without without money to then come in and

challenge since then you've seen some co-opting of that by the Democratic Party more broadly I'm sure everybody here has their inbox completely carpet bombed with messages saying that the world's gonna end if those are the those are the nicest ones the others kind of look like phone bills or something. So, you know, taking something that ought to be a beautiful thing, you know, democratizing the process, bringing people in and then allowing candidates to take positions based on what people want rather than what their donors are demanding,

gets then contorted by consultants who then own the kind of big emailing firms who then blast your inbox so that that that coupled with the fact that you can't really scale the squad in the sense that one reason that aoc can raise 10 million dollars every cycle uh is that she's aoc but she's aoc because other people aren't you can't have 250 people like that she's AOC. But she's AOC because other people aren't. You can't have 250 people like that. There is a limited amount of stardom.

That's the definition of stardom. And so, but, it has built, in collaboration with the Sanders ecosystem, built at least an ecosystem that that is there and can be and can be triggered when when the

moments arise and so this moment is an example of that where you know if if you didn't have them in office now you know where where would the pressure have come from on, you know, from within the Democratic Party? And so it's not, I don't think it's ever worth giving up, but there are the challenges. This system is very adaptable, and the challenges are just going to keep, you know, replicating. One of the things that you document in this book as well is obviously, you know, if you're going to accomplish change, you need allies who have power like the squad. And you also need outside groups that are going to pressure, put pressure on, a lot of these organizations were eaten up by sort of internal turmoil. And I've got a quote from you from the book about what was going on within these organizations.

You say, a sense of powerlessness on the left had nudged the focus away from structural or wide-reaching change which felt hopelessly beyond reach and replaced it with an internal target that was more achievable one former executive director of a major non-profit advocacy group told me he saw those in his organizations turn inward out of desperation maybe i can't end racism myself but i can get my manager fired or i can get so-and-so removed or i I can hold somebody accountable, he relayed. People found power where they could, and often that's where you work, sometimes where you live or where you study, but someplace close to home. How did this dynamic play out over the years that you're covering here,

and how did it intersect with progressive goals getting accomplished through the House and with this White House? One interesting example that I have in the book is actually the Sunrise Movement itself. And the Sunrise Movement was one of the few organizations that endorsed AOC and I think every member of the squad. They were an obscure group at that point. They were an obscure group when they occupied uh pelosi's office but it was that moment was so electric that it kind of it allowed them to eclipse every other green group uh in washington and become these stars and and you then had almost every democratic president presidential candidate endorse a green new deal uh even joe biden's climate uh platform was

arguably like to the left of bernie's from 2016 like that's how far things had gone uh varsney the the head of sunrise was put with aoc on the like six-person task force does you know assigned to uh with john kerry to design the uh design the Biden climate agenda and Sunrise had this direct line to Ron Klain who was the White House Chief of Staff who very much believed that

and for better or for worse and whether it's right or wrong that Sunrise represented a real youth movement and that their input was important and that winning them over meant keeping together the coalition that would be needed in the to pass legislation to hold the House and Senate to win re-election and so sunrise found itself in this unique and surprising position to them where they

were constantly able to like shape legislation as it was being crafted before it was even sent over to the senator house which is in many ways like a more important place to be in the beginning because the product that starts you know goes over to congress and then people push it to the left or push it to the right. But where it starts dictates like 90% of where it's going to end up. And so they're right there in the beginning shaping it. And right at that point, the organization just implodes over internal strife had it was like the maybe sixth near implosion there had been you know uh there have been tussles over mostly over kind of uh wages and

and uh white supremacy would be the would be the buckets but and they'd be uh tossed in together uh but they had been suppressed first by you know we're doing the green new deal we're doing bernie sanders uh you know we're we're pushing this agenda but once biden gets into office and this was this became true for a lot of other progressive organizations there there was a lack of kind of faith in in a direction and so there and so those uh pressures that had been suppressed before kind of faith in a direction. And so those pressures that had been suppressed before kind of burst through.

And so I talked to the political director of Sunrise who said that right at this moment of maximal kind of influence, it turned out 50% or more of his time instead was directed toward like Zoom meetings, sorting out all the different issues that they were having back in Sunrise. And he was like, and as he put it, if I'm not there, either the Biden White House is just writing its own agenda, which you don't necessarily want to leave them to that. Or some big green groups are in there or oil and gas groups are in there.

And so that's one example. But there are others in the way that the thing just kind of falls apart. Yeah. We did get a really important question about your performance in the Eastern Shore boat docking competition, but I will put that one to the side. I'll let you comment on that separately. That's a 4th of July event in Rock Hall, Maryland. So whoever asked that can ask it afterwards while I'm signing their book.

One quick question for you. There's a lot of Joe Manchin in the book, and there's a lot of no labels, speaking of big money and influence on politics and all of that, also in the book. And obviously Joe Manchin just announced he's not running for Senate again, and there's a lot of speculation that he might try to run for president on no labels. Do you have any insight into whether that is real? It has been surreal to watch all of the threads of this book kind of burst into full public view. I thought when I was writing it, are people going to think I'm crazy for focusing this much on Apex influence on the squad and those around them? Are people going to think I'm crazy for

chapters on the money behind No Labels and Joe Manchin and Josh Gottheimer as basically the founder of No Labels? Because covering this stuff every single day, I saw how determinative this money was. Not just influential, just completely driving things. And so even though this isn't the thing that gets into the news, these have to be major themes of the book. And now, sure enough, yeah, Nancy Jacobson and Mark Penn are looking to raise, yeah, or they claim they have raised $70 million to get Joe Manchin or whoever they can convince to be on their ticket in an effort that would, you know, the only way you can put it is it would help Trump get reelected.

Like that's, there's no other way to see that. Like some of the weird ones like RFK are like, I don't know how that plays out. But no labels, that's pretty clear. That's purely a play that's going to hurt Democrats and help Republicans. And that Gottheimer and Manchin

are able to participate in that so actively, yet be held up as kind of these kind of paragons of democratic virtue while folks like the squad who are

constantly bending over backwards against the wishes sometimes of their own base to support the Democratic Party are constantly being told that they're not good enough Democrats is the kind of the contradiction that runs through the book. Yeah, absolutely. Well, the last question for you, and we'll wrap things up on this one.

We started off talking about the squad as a moment. Is that moment over? And what do you think, you know, what do you think it looks like going forward? What do you think of the sort of state of the progressive movement is at this time? I mean, I think the moment is over in the sense that that's what it was. But we're in the kind of post Bernie post squad moment now that is that is still that is still being shaped. I think it will be significantly shaped by the Democratic Party's response to the war in gaza and that is ongoing and i i i fear that we're looking at the beginning like that as horrible as it is like that we might be only at

the beginning because the the disease has has set in but hasn't kind of taken over when you have destroyed not just the health care system but the sewage treatment system you know people talked about how awful fire festival was because they didn't didn't have sewage treatment for like two days or something you know this is endless and so i think some of it will be uh will be shaped will be shaped by that. But I do think the new generation of voters is kind of structurally different than previous ones. People have always thought

that young people are to the left. But if you go back and look, young people supported Reagan. There's some debate over whether or not they supported Nixon, but it was very close. It was not by no means a blowout for Democrats. It's just that the media likes to talk about the left-wing ones a lot more. And so it always seemed like generations were left-wing. These people under 30, 35 today really genuinely are much more progressive.

And so that is going to mean that they're going to see the politics of the squad as just normal. This is how politics ought to be. They're not going to see that as radical at all. And I finish toward the end of the book with this wild poll that came out in January in New Hampshire, where they asked New Hampshire voters, you know, who's your most popular, who's the Democrat that you like the most? And you would not have expected it in 2018, but the answer was Ocasio-Cortez. And I asked her if she'd seen that poll, and she was like, I did see that. I don't believe it, but I did see it. So that's an interesting place that this goes.

Yeah. Ryan, you wanted to close us out with another excerpt? Very short, like two-page reading. I'll just do it from here. This is... This is called... This is from chapter six which is called uh doing the thing and this is this is this takes place uh during the uh government shutdown if you remember trump shut down the government in order to get his wall at the end of 2018 and wouldn't open it back up. Never got money for the wall, but built a lot of it anyway.

So on January 22, 2019, a month into what would become the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, House Democrats made a bid to open things back up, unveiling legislation to fund only the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security. There would be no wall money, but some supplemental funds would go toward improving conditions at the Department of Homeland Security. There would be no wall money, but some supplemental funds would go toward improving conditions at the border for detained migrants. Six months earlier, AOC had been at those facilities and had been shocked by what she saw.

The treatment of the migrants, she said, was fascist. Photos of her pained emotional reaction had become synonymous with Democratic outrage over Trump's policy. In her televised debate with Joe Crowley, she had savaged him for his hypocrisy on the issue, arguing that while he had called immigration and customs enforcement fascist, he wouldn't do anything about it. If you think this system is fascist, she asked him, then why don't you vote to eliminate it? He had no answer. There is no good answer. But now it was her responsibility to offer one. She sat down with her staff and opened the discussion. Do we vote against this funding proposal? She laid out the terms of the debate to her team. The bill includes money for things we

don't support, and we might be the only vote against it. Meanwhile, a lot of this is symbolism. The party is trying to reopen the government, and it's not like this bill will pass the Senate and get signed by Trump. It's a messaging bill, and the message is that Democrats are being the adults in the room while Trump is having a tantrum. Assembled that day was most of her team, including Chakrabarty, Corbyn Trent, her legislative director Ariel Ekbald, and her new legislative aide Dan Riffle. AOC noted that eventually she would have to vote for a CR, short for Continuing Resolution, a bill that continued to fund the government on the same terms as it had been funded. The CR would include the money

not just for Homeland Security, but also for many other agencies whose missions she supported. Drawing a line in the sand now, she said, would mean voting against all future government funding bills, even when it came to actually reopening the government. Where do we draw that line, she asked. What is enough? Before she could finish the question, Trent interrupted with an answer in the form of his own question. Yeah, what is enough to fund a fascist agency that cages children? Nobody had an answer. We all just kind of looked at each other, Dan Riffle recalled, like nothing, nothing is enough. So we're a no on this. Trent's intervention had ended the conversation, but it was clear that what they were trying to do was going to be a challenge. You could see not just her, but me, everybody in the office, sort of like doing the thing, Riffle said. It's going to be hard, he realized. It's going to be hard for us to be principled here.

The squad huddled and agreed to vote as a block, making up the only four no votes on the bill. A few days later, Trump caved, and the House voted on a measure that was actually meaningful. The bill would reopen the government and ICE, the fascist agency AOC wanted abolished. This time, it wasn't a messaging bill. This funding would actually get to ICE. AOC stuck with her no vote. On the way to the House floor, she shot an Instagram video. Walking beside her was Riffle, and she introduced him to

her followers. He's every billionaire is a policy failure on Twitter. So yeah, she quipped, a reference to his handle, which had recently sparked a national conversation about whether the claim was fair. She subtitled the video with an explanation of her vote. Most of our votes are pretty straightforward, but today was a tough, nuanced call, she wrote. We didn't vote with the party because one of the spending bills included ICE funding, and our community felt strongly about not funding that. When the roll was called, precisely one Democrat voted no, Representative Ocasio-Cortez. The rest of the squad had gone along. Casting the vote was draining. She'd been

pressed on the floor by party leadership to switch. Told by whip staff she'd be put on a list. What kind of list? Nobody said, but it didn't sound like a good one. She'd been called in for a personal meeting with Steny Hoyer. Everyone had told her that what she was doing was wrong, that it was hurting the team. It weighed on her. The final vote came late into the night, past midnight, and Chakrabarti walked AOC back to the apartment, back to her apartment, as they passed Capitol Hill's famous Mexican restaurant, Tortilla Coast. A worker was leaving, having just closed it down. Alexandria, is that you? he asked. She told him it was. I just wanted to say thank you for standing up for me and my family. It means so

much, he told her. The weight for just that moment had lifted. Thank you, Ryan. I believe we'll be signing some books up here. Thank you, Crystal. My pleasure. I'm Michael Kasson, founder and CEO of 3C Ventures and your guide on good company, the podcast where I sit down with the boldest innovators shaping what's next. In this episode, I'm joined by Anjali Sood, CEO of Tubi. We dive into the competitive world of streaming. What others dismiss as niche, we embrace as core.

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