Factually! with Adam Conover - Why Walz Played Along with Vance’s Lies

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) It’s no surprise that JD Vance was lying during his recent debate with Tim Walz—but let’s be real, Walz wasn’t being totally truthful either. The fact is, the entire American political conversation has drifted out of the realm of reality, and in this monologue, Adam breaks down exactly why that is.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story especially during this election season. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. So JD Vance and Tim Walz kept it pretty civil in the vice presidential debate, which meant that compared to the last debate's Feast of House Pets, it was f***ing boring. You know, the vice president is a powerless position and this debate never affects the outcome so the least they could have done is make this thing fun to watch. Come on, let's see those two manly men mud wrestle. But nah, Walz just said Minnesota more times than his state has lakes, and Vance was on his best psychopath behavior. The dude didn't even f*** a couch once. Give

the people what they want, JD! But the real reason I was losing my mind during this debate is that the things the candidates were saying were almost totally divorced from reality. I mean, this debate proved that our political conversation in this country is just in a different f***ing universe from the actual facts on the ground. The candidates told scary stories about problems that do not exist and then proposed fake solutions to our real problems.

It almost seemed like the entire debate was designed to mislead the public and pander to the most ridiculous myths about what is actually happening in America. And that was especially true once they started talking about immigration. Real quick, I want to thank today's sponsor, Ground News, and remind you that you can support this channel on Patreon. Also, I am back on tour right now, so if you want to come see my brand new hour of stand-up comedy, look for me in one of these fine cities near you. Head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates.

And now, let's get back to JD Vance's criminal migrant story hour. So we've got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. We start with the criminal migrants. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime. I think you start with deportations on those folks. So first of all, the actual estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. is less than half of what JD just pulled out of his vans. And even the arch-conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, agrees that immigrants commit far less crime than American citizens. And all that has

been true, by the way, since the f***ing 1800s. Immigrants also don't steal jobs. Study after study has shown that they actually improve the job market and help finance programs like Social Security. Now, look, none of that is to say that immigration isn't a real policy issue. It is. It has a lot of disparate impacts and difficult questions to work through. So it would have been great to hear any discussion of that at the debate. But Vance didn't talk about the real issue. Instead, he scaremongered about a fake immigrant crime wave.

He even blamed immigration for the opioid crisis. We had a record number of illegal crossings. We had a record number of fentanyl coming into our country. I had a mother who struggled with opioid addiction. Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels. You've got to reimplement Donald Trump's border policies. Oh yeah, that could work, JD, except that illegal immigrants aren't actually the ones bringing in the fentanyl.

The vast majority of illegal fentanyl is seized at official border crossings, where it's carried by people legally authorized to cross the border. More than half of them are US citizens. Mexicans aren't bringing the drugs in. Dudes from f**king Texas are. And JD should know this because of his own mom's story. She didn't get hooked on Mexican drugs like in Breaking Bad. She pulled a nurse Jackie and stole it from her job at the hospital.

And that doesn't make her a bad person. Addiction is a terrible thing, and stealing from work is your right as an American. The point is that we're not going to fix America's massive opioid problem by lying about where the drugs come from. So what does Tim Walz do in the face of all this easily disproven nonsense? Well, he says the Democrats will be even tougher on immigrants. Kamala Harris was the attorney general of the largest state in a border state in California. She's the only person in this race who prosecuted transnational gangs for human trafficking

and drug interventions. That's why we had the fairest and the toughest bill on immigration that this nation's seen. It was crafted by a conservative senator from Oklahoma, James Langford. So the bill Walls is talking about literally would have built Trump's border wall and deported a ton of immigrants.

It's an arch-conservative anti-immigrant bill. But here's Mr. Warm Hugs, Tim Tim Walz bragging about how tough it is. That means the Democrats have adopted the Republican framing on immigration even though they know it's false. And that's a bad thing, because guess what? When you present a false version of a problem, then you can't f***ing solve the problem. If you think pneumonia is caused by an imbalance of the four humors, you're not gonna cure the patient. You're just gonna make a bloody mess. So why are the Democrats playing along with the lies? Simple. Because they need votes and

because the public has started to believe those lies. The number of Americans who want immigration to decrease has skyrocketed in recent years to more than half. But this isn't a well thought out policy perspective. Instead, public opinion on immigration is basically incoherent. In one poll, 26% of Americans said that immigrants in the US illegally should be deported while at the same time saying that illegal immigrants should have the opportunity to become US citizens. The literal same people both said kick them out and let them in. It's like getting a marriage proposal that says, will you marry me? And also, we should break up.

Mixed f***ing messages. So the Democrats are chasing public opinion, even though public opinion has no f***ing clue what's actually going on. So we have to ask, how did Americans get so confused? Well, maybe it's because our entire political system, from the media to the candidates themselves, puts no effort into educating the American people when we get it wrong. I mean, just look at this debate. The moderators were asking questions about nine-month abortions.

Former President Trump said in the last debate that you believe abortion, quote, in the ninth month is absolutely fine. Yes or no? Just one little problem. Nine month abortions functionally do not exist. Asking if you believe in nine month abortions is like asking if you believe zombies should eat people's brains.

It's f**king fictional. But the moderators ask questions like that because even though it is not happening, the right says it is so often that the public feels like it's happening. In other words, the election isn't being run on facts. It's all vibes, baby! And you can see how the media spreads those vibes. If you do what I did to research this episode and use our sponsor, Ground News, Ground News

is like a fact checker for the fact checkers. If you go to Ground News' page for the Vance Walls debate, you can see more than 300 articles published on it worldwide and view how they break down between the left and the right and how those sides cover the debate differently. For instance, the right-wing National Review said that Vance dominated walls in a substantive policy debate, which implies that everything he's saying about immigration is true, while the left-leaning Washington Post highlighted Vance's complaints about being fact-checked. And Ground News also helps you find the few publications that actually did fact-check the debate, which was super helpful when putting this video together. They also rank every source for factuality and even have a

blind spot feed to help you see the stories the media is not covering. This really helps me get outside of the algorithm and think critically about the information I consume. And ground news is subscriber funded, which means they always have your best interests at heart. So if you want to give ground news a try, head to groundnews.com slash factually or scan this QR code. My viewers get 40% off unlimited access. Now there was an even more glaring

example of how our political conversation is just completely disconnected from reality. It was how the candidates said they'd handle the housing crisis. Vance, of course, blamed it all on illegal immigrants. 25 million illegal aliens competing with Americans for scarce homes is one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country. Okay, I mean this is just unbelievably stupid on its face. JD, my dude, have you ever tried to buy a house? The bank asks you for every document you have ever had in your life.

So am I really supposed to believe that undocumented immigrants, people who by definition do not even have social security numbers are buying up all the three bedrooms in Glendale? It's ridiculous. There are literally no facts to support the idea that immigrants cause housing scarcity. Even Vance's own source doesn't say that. It says that because we have so little housing available, immigration could theoretically increase demand for housing by an unknown amount in certain areas. But a lot of things cause housing demand. The root cause of high housing prices is that we don't have enough f***ing housing.

According to every expert, America currently has four to seven million fewer homes than we need. So if JD Vance really wanted to fix the housing crisis, he'd propose that we build more housing. But he doesn't do that. Instead, he blames it on immigrants because he hates immigrants and he wants to deport them. And he wants to deport them because he hates them. He just... the guy just hates immigrants. You know, he's a pretty simple man. So how does Tim Walls reply? Well, he blames a different wrong target. We could talk a little bit about Wall Street speculators buying up housing and making them less affordable. Now that line probably sounds pretty good to liberals, doesn't it?

Oh, that dastardly corporate power at it again, right? But while yes, private equity buying homes is a very bad thing, it is also statistically insignificant as a cause of the housing crisis. Private equity only accounts for a tiny percentage of home purchases made in America, about 3% in 2021, and that's not nearly enough to put serious pressure on the housing market. And yes, corporate landlords who gouge rent are a problem too, but those landlords only have the power to do so because housing is such a scarce resource to begin with. So the root question we have to ask is why is housing so scarce in the first place?

And Tim Walz actually knows the answer to that question. He just has to dance around it because the truth is it's rich homeowners. See, in America we built an economic system where home ownership is an essential part of building wealth. And that means homeowners expect their house to go up in value every year. So they literally want housing prices to be high. And to ensure that they are, homeowners have gotten restrictive zoning laws passed across the country that make it impossible to build affordable housing. And critically, they did so by voting. One study found that homeowners turn out almost twice as often whenever zoning issues are on the ballot, and another found that when home

values rose before a presidential election, more homeowners voted for the incumbent party, but when they fell, more homeowners voted for the opposition. And this is especially true in swing counties. In fact, rich homeowners just straight-up vote more often than poor renters, so their interests are overrepresented in our political system. And that makes it almost impossible for politicians like Walls to argue for policies like rezoning that would actually lower housing prices, because the people who vote for them literally want housing prices to go up. And that sucks, because Tim Walls actually knows how to reduce housing prices.

You can tell because of what's happened in the state he loves to bring up. Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. Minnesota. A few years ago, the city of Minneapolis ended single-family zoning, and as a result, they have built a ton more housing. Can you guess what happened next? Rents dropped. Holy s***! Turns out that when you have more of something, it gets f***ing cheaper. Walz knows that we can fix the housing crisis by rezoning and building more housing. He knows it because he's done it and it f***ing worked.

But he can't just come out and say it because he wants to win an election. Now, the Harris campaign does have a plan to build more housing, and that plan is better than violently deporting 20 million people. But it's also fundamentally at odds with her promise to build wealth through home ownership. Because making housing truly affordable requires lowering housing prices, which makes it a worse investment.

And the homeowner she needs to vote for her don't want that to happen. So we end up with these tortured debates where Harrison Walls dance around the issue, blaming false villains and trying to avoid pissing off voters. And you know what? That kind of political jujitsu can work in the short term.

If the public believes that crime is out of control despite the fact that crime rates are falling, well, emphasize Harris' bona fides as a prosecutor. Does the public believe that immigrants are criminals? Well then sure, partner with the Republicans on a couple of draconian immigration bills. Maybe you can even win an election that way. And hey, Donald Trump is a big threat and so important to defeat that maybe it's okay for the greater good, right? But all of that comes at a cost because when you're not truthful with the public, you eventually become chained to the lie. You have to keep locking people up and growing mass incarceration. You have to keep locking people up and growing mass incarceration.

You have to keep building a useless wall and you have to keep deporting innocent people while all of our real problems get worse and worse and the public gets angrier and angrier. At the end of the day, if you want to stay in power as a political party, you need to actually make the country a better place for everyday Americans. And step one of that is explaining to the public clearly and truthfully the reality around us, the actual causes of our biggest problems. And that takes maybe the hardest thing for any politician to do, cutting the bullsh** and being brave enough to tell the truth.

That was a hate gum podcast.