Offline with Jon Favreau - Who Can Own the Most Libs? Tim Miller on the ’24 GOP Primary

Episode Date: February 5, 2023

Tim Miller, former Republican operative, current Never Trumper, and contributor at the Bulwark, joins Jon to kickoff the GOP’s very online, very weird 2024 presidential primary. The two discuss Donald Trump’s return to Facebook, Ron DeSantis’ culture wars, and the competition for MAGA media’s stars, trolls, and grifters. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

And this is, you know, my burden as a former Republican. It's my continued penance that I listen to these assholes and read them and follow them. Because a lot of people really don't. You know, I think it's easy to kind of say, you know, to be in your media bubble in DC or New York and be like, what's the point of listening to Steve Bannon's podcast? It's like Matt Walsh guy who's obsessed with trans people is like a joke. If you go to the podcast rankings, if you go to the YouTube views, like Steven Crowder and Three Shirted Bannon and Matt Walsh and Candace Owens, and these people are like up with you, Favs. They're at the top of the list. They're at the top of the charts. You're competing with them. That's your competitive set.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Tim Miller, former Republican operative, current Never Trumper and contributor at The Bulwark, and author of Why We Did It, a travelogue from the Republican road to hell. So it appears the 2024 Republican primary has begun. Trump finally left Mar-a-Lago for New Hampshire and South Carolina. Ron DeSantis is identifying early state hires and picking more culture war fights. Nikki Haley is about to announce. And there are a bunch

of other clowns trying to squeeze into the car. But the two frontrunners for now seem to be Trump and DeSantis. They're already taking shots at each other, trying to compete for the support of various MAGA media stars, internet trolls, shit posters, and grifters. The Daily Beast reported this week that Ron DeSantis has built out an army of right-wing influencers to promote his content. Meanwhile, Donald Trump invited the woman behind libs of TikTok to dinner at Mar-a-Lago. Great

stuff. So I wanted to talk about all this, especially the online aspect of the Republican primary, from how Trump's return to Facebook could impact the race to all the ways the 2024 digital strategy might evolve. And I figured Tim would be perfect for this. He's a former Republican strategist, having made stops on the McCain campaign, Jeb Bush's campaign and the RNC. But since 2016, Tim has been one of the Republican Party's most outspoken critics, writing extensively and compellingly in the Bulwark and other places about all the ways the modern Republican Party has lost its mind. He also hosts Not My Party, an excellent Snapchat news series. We had a fun chat that I think you'll really enjoy where we talk not just about the long primary ahead,

but what's motivating the Republican base, the candidates, and some of the decisions in their campaigns. As always, if you have comments, questions, or episode ideas, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Tim Miller. us at offline at crooked.com and please rate review and share the show here's tim miller tim miller welcome to offline i'm the worst possible person to invite to this podcast is this going to be like some kind of you know here's what not to do yeah here's what kind of like a lecture is this going to be you know are you going to bring all my friends in is this like you know we need to have an intervention right now and here comes your mom up on the next screen i'm saving the personal questions about

your own uh online habits till the end of the episode otherwise we're going to get derailed all right so we like to talk about how the Internet's breaking our brains here. I think there are few brains have been more broken than those of the trolls and shit posters and mouth breathers who populate the MAGA media universe. This is a motley crew that's going to help determine the next Republican nominee for president. You got their MAGA kings back for a third run. Some of them are swooning over Ron DeSantis. They're being courted by a bunch of other clowns who've deluded themselves into thinking they can win. So I figured, who better to guide us through this right-wing hellscape than our favorite former GOP operative turned never-Trump cuck? And I guess my first question before we even get to the media conversation is, how strong or weak of a frontrunner do you think Donald Trump is right now? I guess he's a weak frontrunner, but he's a frontrunner. He's a frontrunner. I mean, I think that one way to look at it is that he's a stronger frontrunner than he was, you know, at this time in 2015, when he won that primary. so i think that certainly there's no doubt that he's weaker

than he was six months ago and i think that he made a lot of bad decisions not maybe the same bad decisions that your listeners and like those of us in the reality community would think were his bad decisions but like some other like uh things that have hurt him with the republican base over the past six months um particularly actually one of them is just kind of a boring practical thing getting unnecessarily involved in in the midterm, right? I mean, like he created this opening for Ron DeSantis, right, by endorsing all these losers, you know, and letting Ron DeSantis win and be like, hey, I'm a winner, he's a loser, right? And had Trump just sat on his ass in Mar-a-Lago and like showed the Kim Jong-un love letters to cougars and like sent out truths

and whatever, ate well done steaks, and cougars and sent out truths and whatever, ate well-done steaks and sat back, he probably would be stronger. So I think that has really weakened him. And I think that just generally, we're in a different environment than we were in 2016, as far as him not being the new blood anymore. All that said, he's got a clear base of support. He's got no real credible threats besides one guy, Ron DeSantis, who has not had to perform underneath the bright lights and is very grating, to say the least. of shape as some of the other front runners that we've had you know some of them lost you might remember one hillary's probably in similar strong strength of hillary right there was one person that could have beaten her right and he turned out to be very talented on the campaign trail but had barack obama turned out to be you know somebody far less talented on the campaign trail

i won't trigger your listeners and name any any names um maybe you know she probably would have won that one right and then And then he's probably as strong as Hillary was the next time when she does end up winning against Bernie, right? So, you know, I think that, you know, sometimes you get tempted in the pundit space, be like, Trump's dying, or Trump's unstoppable. And like, that's not really what's happening. He's a weak, but clear front runner. Yeah, the big, I mean, the reason i think that the hillary comparison is somewhat apt here is because unlike 2015 he's like the most known figure in the country maybe the planet at this point and hard to find anyone who doesn't have an opinion of him a strong opinion of him

so when you think that he's like getting you know around 30 percent of the republican vote right now or at least 30 percent of like 30 percent of the republican electorate seems like they're diehard trump supporters you wonder if that's close to hitting the ceiling oh because like who's changing their mind at this point ross doubt that here we're back to the ceiling conversation i'm getting getting like PTSD from the 2016 campaign. This was our whole theory of the case. He had the ceiling. No, I don't think so. Look, if you listen to the, you know, the focus groups we do at the Bork and that Sarah Longwell does, you know, and if you just look at the polls and talk to Republicans, like the overwhelming majority, maybe it's 70, maybe it's 80, you know, maybe it's 85, right? You can pick the number. Like Donald Trump, right? And so the competition here is not among never Trumpers or people that hate him or have moved on. You know, that's a small minority within the party. The competition here is Trump has his base of people who really love him. Let's call that 30% for the

sake of conversation. Then there's 60% that like him, but like, I could be ready to move on. Maybe I'm tired of him. Maybe I'm tired of losing. Maybe I could find somebody I like better. And then there's 10% that dislike him, right? And so that 60 is really where this competition is going to be. This primary is going to be, you know, focused on. And so I don't think he's got to, I mean, if Ron DeSantis bailed out and decided not to run or he just doesn't wear well, as I've said, and Trump and let's say he decides to drop out, he says, I'll do better if I run 2028. And Trump ends up running against Mike Pence and Nikki Haley. And he's going to get 85% of the primary. I don't think that he's got a ceiling anywhere near 30. I sorry john i wish that that was true no that's that's i i get well let's talk about the 60 percent then because they're gonna be making their decision and one of the ways there's gonna be making their decision is just to consume the information they get from their information environment which is you know uh right wing media i don't know i call it maga media right wing media what do you call it now it's not conservative media i'm sure you

wouldn't call it that do you have a mega yeah the mega media universe yeah yeah multiverse okay yeah i say ecosystem but you know multiverses are in now so what's your take on the on the mega media primary so far like who's sticking with trump who's ron curious who's undecided how much does any of this matter i assume it matters quite a bit. It matters a ton. And this is, you know, my burden as a former Republican. It's my continued penance that I feel like I have to give back that I listen to these assholes and read them and follow them. Because a lot of people really don't. You know, I think it's easy to kind of say, you know, to be in your media bubble in DC or New York and be like, I don't know, what's the

point of listening to Steve Bannon's podcast? It's like Matt Walsh guy who's obsessed with trans people is like a joke. If you go to the podcast rankings, if you go to the YouTube views, like Steven Crowder and three-shirted Bannon and Matt Walsh and Candace Owens, and these people are like up with you, Favs. They're at the top of the list fab so they're at the top of the list like they're at the top of the charts you're competing with them like that's your competitive set okay as far as ratings are concerned so you know the other stuff um and then obviously primetime fox uh which includes the five now which is which is you know probably i guess this is the best show on yeah yeah well certainly the most popular um i heard an interesting theory the five against the best ratings actually because a certain demographic of fox Fox falls asleep after the five is over.

I don't know if that's true or not. I think maybe it's just the dynamism of the panel. But so like this all really matters, right? And so the only consuming of conservative mega whatever media you get is like these clips of Fox on Twitter. Like, okay, well, that's somewhat representative. But there's this whole other universe that's kind of blind to people. And that's on Facebook. It's on all these alt-right social media apps.

You know, it's on YouTube and podcasting. It's on TikTok. And I think that it's extremely important. And the most interesting thing about, as it relates to that 60%, is most of those people are at least DeSantis curious. Like DeSantis has locked down a, and this is what makes him I think stronger than anybody in 2016, just as a single person, is that like the National Review, which doesn't matter at all, that represents about 4% of the Republican primary base, but like they're running a Ron DeSantis

fanzine, right? Like that is like a group of people that like ranges from active never Trumpers to like Trump maybe to I really, really hate Trump, but I have to vote for him anyway, because the libs are mean, right? Like so that kind of world. They love Ron DeSantis, okay, and like are lecturing people who don't want to support him. But then you take it all the way up to your Candace Owens, as you know, what's happening in the Daily Wire. What's happening in, we'll get into this, you know, on these big like Twitter personalities and social media personalities. MAGA social media personalities. All of them like DeSantis. It's really this tiny sliver of, you know, ultra super MAGA like Steve Bannon world that is hostile to DeSantis.

So, I mean, he covers most of the ground, about 90% of the ground. And in 16, it was much more divided, right? Like nobody had that broad of support within the conservative media universe. So then it sounds like of the biggest personalities in this world, you got Bannon, who's sticking with trump feels like hannity is still pretty much on uh in in trump's corner is there any other like still hardcore big name republican media personalities who are like squarely with trump again oh boy i have to pull up the great olivia newsy profile who showed up to the announcement mar-a-lago you know brick man i can't get brick man out of my head brick man was there uh brick man uh the man that wears the brick suit the wall

suit the man that wears the wall suit he's sticking oh because it's the wall it's the wall it's the wall build the wall it's bricks yeah it's a suit of bricks um brick brick man was there i mean squarely in trump's corner you know like that i think that's the point like not not not really i i guess i'm sure as we go along i'm like one person might come to mind but like for the most part i mean like he's got you know american greatness are the you know your cat turds of the world right like there are some like donald trump cat turd very firmly yeah donald trump yeah cat turd too um so then you? Like there are some like Donald Trump. Cat turd very firmly. Yeah, Donald Trump. Yeah, cat turd too. So then you've got,

I don't know what happened to cat turd one, but then you've got like are the Donald, right? So there's some like pure Donald Trump fans, but of like your big personalities that I'm talking about, like, no, not really. I mean, some of them are very much playing both sides, right?

So I went to the TPUSA thing, which I've suffered through in Arizona. and all of those people were both and were you know charlie kirk um you know you're matt all the whole daily wire extended universe uh benny johnson right like when at that at that function you know everybody on stage was just doing the oh we love them both so much they're so great um so it's So it's not as if, you know, once you get into kind of real MAGA world, they're like pro DeSantis, anti-Trump, but Trump doesn't have a lock on these people at all. So there've been some rumors in reporting that the Murdochs are done with Trump and might throw

their empire behind DeSantis. Do you buy that? Or are they just sort of, you know, if the voters follow Trump, will they just sort of fall back in line? I mean, I think we'll know based on how much Trump is on Fox, right? You know, I think they'll try to, like, I don't think that, look, I don't think the Murdoch's, you know,

we've all watched Succession. You know, Tucker is the power player there, not Lackland. You know, Tucker is the power player there, not Lackland. You know, Lackland doesn't tell Tucker what to say, right? So, you know, and I think that there's like a lack of control over some of their biggest personalities to the point that it doesn't really matter what the Murdoch's opinion is. But is Trump, like Fox and Friends, you know, how friendly does Fox and Friends get towards DeSantis? This is another, it's a good answer to your question. I knew more would come to me. So there's that right-wing TV universe to the right of Fox. They're all very pro-Trump.

Now, maybe not every personality, right? But your OANs, your Newsmax, your Real America's Voice. Don't sleep on Real America's Voice, John. I spend a lot of time streaming. I think that's the first time I've heard that. I don't even know what Real America's Voice is. They're big, yeah. They stream all three hours of bannon's podcast um the video or maybe it's four hours now um so

that's their anchor uh for people who just for people who don't want to just listen to bannon but they need to see them yeah you know they need to see like what the latest deterioration is of his skin and like how yellowed it has gotten. How many polo shirts he's wearing. What are the layers? Yeah, no, I understand. Yeah. Charlie Kirk's got a show on that. Looks like Ted Nugent does.

I just pulled it up here. Yeah, there's, you know, some other guys. Steve Gruber, the guy. And then there's a guy on Newsmax that was the New York. Greg Kelly. You know, he's going to be pretty's a guy in Newsmax that was the New York, Greg Kelly. You know, he's going to be pretty staunchly in Trump's camp. So that crowd is. But no, I think that, no, Fox is going to be pretty DeSantis friendly.

But again, Fox has shown time and time again that they're going to go where their people go, right? And so the question kind of remains, right? Like, let's say Trump dominates DeSantis coming out here and the shine wears off. I don't really expect that. But if that happened, Fox will be right back in Trump's camp in no time, right? Fox wasn't pro-Trump at the beginning of 2016. Famously, you know, for anybody who wasn't old enough to have lived through it and have my lines from it, the very first debate was Fox.

And that was Megyn Kelly you know the very first question of the very first debate to Trump was like it was like Megyn Kelly asking about all the sexist comments and Trump's you know saying that she was bleeding out of her wherever right that was debate one like they thought that was like that was kind of a Fox top down like we're gonna try to hit this guy and he and he crushed them so you know we've kind of been down this road before with the Murdochs. So you ask people, you know, who are the most influential players in the MAGA media universe? People would probably go right to Fox in prime time, talk about Tuckerucker talk about those characters who are some of the like biggest names in the mega media universe who have a lot of juice with the base that people in the reality based community who who might not listen to this all the time um wouldn't necessarily know like if

you want to reach the biggest audience of republican primary voters that's not just on fox like who are you talking to besides the the fox prime Republican primary voters that's not just on Fox? Like, who are you talking to besides the Fox primetime? Yeah, well, I mean, the obvious answers are people that folks will know. So I'll start with that before I start dropping any deep cuts on you. But Candace, you know, I mean, Candace, Candace's audience is insane. So when we do the MAGA focus groups, and just sort of get a sense for what people are listening to and all that and ask them, Candace is the number one thing that everybody says. And when we ask about 2024, if it's like, hey, if not Trump and not DeSantis, like what are some other names out there that you like? Candace gets brought up all the time, even though we did.

Does Candace have a podcast or where else is she? Is she on TV? I don't even know. No, no, no. She's not on TV. It's her own brand media ecosystem. But yeah, no. Yes, she has a hugely rated podcast.

Maybe not as good as yours, but pretty huge. But I don't know how it compares your YouTube views. She's got huge YouTube numbers. She's across all of the social feeds, right? And then she's in people's Facebook feeds. She's like multi-platform in that sense and then does a lot of you know speaking and going on to the other doing the other stuff so now she's part of the daily wire extended universe she is part of the day she is part of the daily

wire extended universe um and that's why you know when she was like going pro kanye when he was pro nazi like ben ben and them didn't dump her. Right? I mean, you couldn't. But I mean, you know, I just, and look, she's got 3.3 million on Twitter, some more on Instagram, and her YouTube numbers are huge. So Candace, I think, is number one.

And then Ben, I guess the whole kind of, then you'd get into the rest of the Daily Wire, but she is first among, with no equal as far as hearing what these people listen to. And then it's, again, I hate to keep giving the guy credit, but then it's like the Bannon podcast world. You know, that podcast is a top 10 podcast, but it is airing on this show.

Its live streams get big numbers. Like Bannon, unfortunately, I had to spend time with him, as people might know, when I did the circus thing. Like he gets recognized, right? Like a little celebrity in that world, you know? So, and that's why the RNC chairs race basically took pace on his podcast, right? I mean, it was like he had to have Harmeet on and then he had Rana on, which is crazy. And he's been indicted multiple times and like was, you know, pro January 6th.

It's like they learned nothing from the midterms. But for sure, that's a big one. I mean, I think that you kind of now then get to a bit of a fracturing after that. But I think that there is another kind of group of folks that now, well, Crowder, I should have mentioned Crowder too. And Crowder's making 500 million, apparently. So he's doing pretty well. I know I promised that if you came came on i would not make you talk about the stephen crowder uh ben shapiro daily wire fight you promised you promised to not make me have to learn about the details of their contract dispute which i like that was my line i will i will i will monitor what stephen crowder is doing and speaking about politically i can't care about his contract it's a dispute with the daily no the

only the only number that popped out at me from that that i wanted to bring up to you is that he's got 300 000 people paying 99 a year subscription for him that's why he's making that 300 000 people are paying 100 a year for steven crowder i barely i've like heard that name a bunch of times but i don't think think I've ever heard Stephen Crowder before. You really haven't? I mean, probably. A lot of them just look and sound the same. It's just like someone yelling into a microphone about something that they're aggrieved about.

But yeah, I definitely heard the name, but I'm not too familiar with Stephen Crowder. I go way back with old Steve. But he's big. Look, and just 300,000 right there i mean that's all republican primary voters i mean how many you know how many people are we really talking about in this university you're trying to get to um so that's a big one

we should have mentioned in the um sticking with trump camp the trump family has their own oh yeah you know what i mean i mean like don jr is now media uh personality of his in his in his own regard um that's pretty big you've got your tommy's you you keep track of tommy yeah of course tommy of course tommy lauren yeah it's important just one final thing at the turning point thing there is now like this second tier right which is like okay this isn't a one-stop shop if i'm trying to get famous i don't i can't go on with diamond and silk anymore rip diamond but um there are like middle level diamonds all over the place right like this was like a big takeaway for me from going to the turning point thing and i started following some of them just because i like to suffer you know and and you know like just dudes

or a lot of times actually it's people of color, it's gays, right? Because, you know, you get a little extra juice for that being like the gay that's like, I'm the gay for Trump, right? This gets Christian Walker, her, Walker's kid, very famous. But, you know, there's like these little celebrities walking around. Like there's this whole celebrity ecosystem. I mean, I go down the escalator, you know, it's like going down the stairs to the gates of hell. And I got to tell you, you've never heard of Real america's voice i'm in this world and i try and i'd never heard of some of these things like there were like nine different conservative streaming outlets and then they're

like these little tiktok influencers walking around and and people are and they're getting recognized selfies are happening and so you know i think that like underneath kind of the radar of everybody you know is is this other ecosystem and i and i do think that the the daily beast story you know the desantis guys are doing a good job of kind of trying to penetrate that world too and those all those people matter way more in the republican primary than like rich lowry yeah yeah well which is interesting and because that media ecosystem is such a bubble and so closed off from uh the rest of america i think the rest of america particularly like the elites in in dc political elites in dc and new york especially in uh journalism and politics

they do think rich like rich lowry gets invited onto the meet the press panel and everyone thinks like rich lowry represents the republican party or whoever they have on and meanwhile there's just this like army of influencers and tiktok stars and podcast hosts that have a lot of juice in this primary oh yeah and and this is true of republican like elites even like more so frankly than democratic elites right because they don't want to know, right, what's happening, you know, like, they don't like, because they have to live in their comfortable bubble where they're still voting for tax cuts. You know, it's like my pick, every time I talk to a Republican, I'm like, I'm giving you homework. You're listening to one hour of the Charlie Kirk show, or the Steve Bannon podcast. Like, that is it. Like, I'm giving you

homework, and you need to know what's actually happening out there because it's a completely different conversation. I just pulled out the American Fest because I couldn't remember these people's names because they're all just generic. But it's like when the Coachella lineup comes out and you start to feel old because you're like, I've never heard of this. Blackpink is the headliner. I've never heard of Blackpink. This is like this. It's like Brandon Tat it's like the number three headliner i never heard of him he was he's a black conservative like i clicked on his you know one of his social accounts it's like a million followers right i'm like oh okay well no wonder he was he was headlining ahead of madison cawthorne you know so like there is there's another layer of like things like that

that's happening out there so one of those uh sort of like new darlings of the right that's popped up in the last couple years is uh libs of tiktok creator uh chaya reichick trump and desantis have both been courting her desantis i guess called her to offer her refuge from all the angry libs at the at the governor's mansion said she said she could stay there as long as she wants she's getting attacked by the libs and uh and then trump invited her to mar-a-lago just took a picture with her can you explain to people why uh libs of tiktok has become a thing it's your fault mostly john um for getting outraged by it if you just ignore the libs in the title yeah you had the lips um uh so let's see let's sort of how's rightly what under what undergirds all this is it's an like one of the central tenets of the mega ethos right is is one

is that they are the ones that are being discriminated against and they are the aggrieved right okay so that's one element of it and the other one is that it's the libs that are the crazy ones, right? And because, and I think they feel like, and I heard this a lot in the speeches. And this was very, this was like Tucker's, most of his speech to this Turning Point conference I went to. And he, you know, he's talking about how it didn't make any sense to him. He's like, I think I'm not, how would any normal person vote for these people, right? Because they do this nut picking right where they're like okay well we might have you know george santos anthony devold or whatever his name is and like the crazy the racist game show host is the president we might all have all

these lunatics in congress but look at this one teacher in saginaw and what she said that was really strange like she wore cat ears to class and like wants to you know says her pronouns are meow or whatever i you know like this is one person right and so oh man they are the crazy ones right not us like we're normal okay we're the ones that are like we just i just want to go by he you know like i don't know all right like that's their that's the whole shtick right and so they they need a constant stream of examples to like move to themselves, like we're not the crazy ones, right? I promise. We're not the crazy ones. It's them that's crazy. And so LaChaya at the lives of TikTok basically, you know, filled this need. She was the supplier.

There was a lot of demand for crazy libs saying stuff, and she filled the supply side of the equation. And so, you know, the account is pretty gross, right? I mean, you know, when it first came out, you'd see it, and now everything is through the context of, I mean, it's directly targeting trans people mostly, but also, you know, broader LGBT folks and other marginalized folks. But when I didn't really realize who the person was behind it, you know, it pops into your feed. And you can see how people get sucked into this. You're like, one, it's like, oh, this is kind of mean that she's doing this. And then one will come up and be like, oh, that's kind of funny. Like, it's harmless, right? Like, it's a video of somebody doing a TikTok where they're, you know, expressing their sexuality in a way that's a little quirky

or fun or whatever. And it's's like you know ben ben shapiro like there's only one segment he does that i find actually funny because he's not funny at all but he they like his producers which also speaks to this need to find extreme stuff like find like like a polyamorous quadruple you know that does like a little video about themselves and like ben just kind of reacts to the video and he's like you guys are weird and it's kind of like ah like i don't want to laugh at ben shapiro but like it is kind of you know so she filled that void right okay but then it gets darker and darker right it goes you know as anything does when you're picking and picking on people and being cruel to people but like

she goes down this rabbit hole where it's really targeting people and then she then she literally begins targeting people you know by by posting things it's like hey there is this drag show that's happening at your library in san antonio on friday like people should go right so she then becomes kind of like a digital organizer of these protests that obviously become violent in certain places colorado springs wasn't a protest but you know there's been violence targeting uh drag performers so so you know it's gotten really dark but i think that like the genesis of her popularity was like you know i think you know based on this insecurity of republicans knowing how how like their whole all of their candidates for senate were all freaks and like you need

to balance this out by like finding crazy liberals to make yourself feel better about this and that was kind of the genesis of her popularity but then it's it's skyrocketed and now i mean you know she's like feeding fox and all you know all these other folks with content i think that the funnel there though is is important you know that like the the the sort of lighter hearted cruelty right where she just mocks people that's how she gets sort of mainstreamed or platformed on play you know like the joe rogan's will pick that up and other you know sort of more mainstream places will pick that up and everything oh well it's funny that wasn't too harmful that's just a little quirky and then you know the further you get into it much like anything else on the internet

you go down and down the rabbit hole and now they're having to clear out mass general hospital right because uh she's or whatever i think it was mass general children's hospital there in boston that they thought libs of tiktok like sort of you know incentivize people to go uh call in bomb threats yeah because of uh what she was yeah and then there's a rogan thing i don't know if rogan has actually done this but like other things it's the shock jock thing right other folks have done this right and that and it's and you know and and so this is not to defend, but you can kind of understand how they get like hooked into it, right? And then so then you're promoting her, you know, she's getting like tons and tons and tons more views. And now I mean, she's like, now she doesn't even need that, because she's this darling, and Trump uses all

his prop platforms, and, you know, his kids do. And so how important she is, in like the primary setting, I don't know right i mean so she's really influenced a lot of these ways that are very disturbing you know but i i you know i don't she hasn't proven that she's like she's not crossing over and like running a podcast and analyzing races right making endorsements and all that sort of stuff but but i mean obviously she they feel important enough that she is being courted by both of the two leading contenders. So, you know, you went to this Turning Point USA America Fest after the midterms. I know before that you're an avid listener of Steve Bannon's forum podcast, like our friend Tommy. I know you listened to like a full week of it around the insurrection yeah uh insurrection anniversary uh last year what's been bouncing

around that echo chamber lately like now that they've had a tough midterm are they strategizing about how to actually beat the libs in the next election or are they just content owning the lips content owning no no there there is not i mean without besides this sort of like there is this like desantis is a magic you know you know kind of fairy dust element to everything right like we don't really have to think about this because you know for the ones who believe that trump lost right it's like we don't have to really think about this that deeply because look he won by 20 in florida and we'll just use his magic fairy dust and so we can just keep on doing our deal and we don't have to actually reflect on on why we lost all these races and then the ones that don't believe that they lost all these races like

that's this is an important element carrie lake who lost in arizona held a rally on sunday this past sunday across from the nafc championship game she she is not currently a candidate for anything she lost the governor's race it is in the middle of a very prime sporting event people were lined up around the block i i guess this is not spin from her people i it was like there was a democrat yes i had a i had a friend that was there and i was and and he was calling me he's like man i was in my neighborhood I went to this thing just to kind of like check it out, just like see if there's a – this was like mostly I think for schadenfreude purposes. He was like I wanted to kind of like laugh. And he was like I wish I could have laughed.

Like it was a full house. Not how many people are there, a thousand or whatever. I don't know. Who knows? But like still, they are – so and that is all this alt-reality oh we didn't really lose you know the machines are out to get us things so there's that element um the thing that is the most the vaccines is the thing that continues and this will be the most interesting thing about how desantis plays this now trump plays this the vaccines are the hot button there is the uh are you aware of the

damar hamlin actually died and they are showing his body double yeah that one is out there so that's okay so that one's in the more extreme that's like in the stew peters universe i didn't mention him anywhere but stew is like also a top i don't know who that is i think he's beating the bulwark podcast i don't know i like we're competing with stew you're competing with you know candace We're competing with Stu down in the 20s. I keep an eye on the ratings. So this is not a not nothing. So that was Stu. He was pushing that, and I'm sure some other people. But just general, there was an MSNBC host that had myocarditis weekend, MSNBC host. I don't know if you saw this. She had to take a couple days off. She went on the show

and said, I had a little heart ruffle. It seemed like a real scare actually it's pretty a little pretty scary but uh it has on the mend is back on tv it's a weekend msnbc host and um oh man that video was going wild uh yesterday or monday whenever i was i was doing my rounds like of them trying to dunk on her make fun of her oh she obviously got this from the vaccine and oh and she was a healthy person why did she even take this vaccine so like all of that like the covid culture war stuff has not lost any steam see that's so interesting to me we talked about this on tuesday's pod save america because you know trump and desantis are now sort of sniping at each other over, you know, who was who was more anti-vaccine, because the winner of that is the is the winner of the primary. Right. It's not a bizarro world. But I thought, like, you know what, is covid politics still going to be relevant to Republican primary voters two years after this whole thing started. Like it feels like picking a fight over an issue that is largely in the past, at least the political conflict over it

being in the past, if not the actual disease itself. But I don't know. I mean, the Republican base is pretty crazy. So maybe it has salience for the next two years i don't know that was my instinct as well it was and it was at the you know at it was the at the tb the tbsa thing gave me like a little bit of a different vantage point because you know um then then you know just me and tommy's like weekly um steve bannon appointment uh that is because i talked to like the attendees right and the thing that I asked everybody I was like like just the first question you know after pleasantries was like what like what's getting you riled up right now you know like what's the animating issue for you and like anti-woke

COVID Ukraine not not on the good side of Ukraine wow you know like that was it and Ukraine was like a distant Ukraine's like a distant third it was really like anti-woke stuff you know the covid which i would encapsulate as like vaccine or still being mad about school shutting down and like those were the two things that came out of people's mouths and like college republicans older folks that went there um and that was completely consistent the other thing from those conversations and from the speeches is i would be like okay well after the loss of your original question here like what do you think they should be doing differently and like there just wasn't you know like the answers to that were all very random like one-off peccadillos that they have oh we should be better

on the data i mean some people didn't believe that machines worked right but oh like the democrats out out foxed us on certain things right or turn out but there was no nobody was like man we should be tamping this down like i'm concerned about the fact that in arizona in maricopa county like eight percent of registered republicans voted for katie hobbs like um like that you would think that would be the place to start right how do we get those people back um but but you know i would follow up with that and and it just you know they there is this kind of mythical non-voting working class person out there that they are going to win back right it's this sort of idea of oh no like we just need to keep fighting this culture war and desantis figured it out and like some of the other candidates weren't as good and

maybe it was cheating in certain places etc etc but like we but but like we're letting you people go so um you people being me um and uh which is fine by the way that's a mutual divorce uh you know i i think that is like the big, you know, takeaway. And I think that it shows it just again, like how insulated, like their news environment is, right? Like, if those like, those are the big items for them. You know, like, it really is very separate from kind of like what's happening on the Wall Street Journal. I mean, speaking of their news environment like do you think there's any incentive for for trump desantis or any of these

republican candidates to do interviews or make media appearances outside the right-wing echo chamber during the primary like are we down to just we're not going to hear much from them on mainstream news outlets there definitely is no incentive to like try to engage on the merits like what did donald trump get out of the john swan interview and john did a great job right so not everybody's going to be as good as him but like nothing right like i mean he just got embarrassed and clowned and um you know just revealed like to be uh the kind of lying lightweight that he is right so the question DeSantis has used the Christie model of like yelling at the poor, you know,

Tampa News 5 reporter who just like wants to, like asks like a reasonable question, right? About like this teacher at a university like had to quit their class, you know, because of your stupid stop woke act and like, aren't you concerned about that? And he's like, you know you know and then he yells at her right um so there'll be some of that um i think that there's some value in doing that uh for them but mostly the main lesson that i like the main observation i have that i want to pass along it's like they also can really survive just

doing interviews in all of these outlets. And there are just so many more than you realize. Like DeSantis did an interview with, and they're propping up in the States with like some, you know, Florida, whatever, you know, fair and balanced Florida, right? Like.org. But then you know that like, you take the clip from it, you know, you send it to all the trolls that you're paying, you know, on your social media feeds. It gets in their Facebook feeds, right? And so that's like the same, right? So if you're just thinking about this as a consumer, if you are a MAGA hat wearing, Fox watching, you know, resident of Tampa, right? Like, and you see on your Facebook, Ron DeSantis doing an interview with some person you don't know who's like you know some hack in florida right and he's like you know ranting about the issue of the day

that's news for you right i mean that's news for you desantis doing the interview legitimizes the outlet because it's like well ron desantis is talking to these people and then for the outlet they get ron desantis you know so it's a yeah well and then for desantis he gets right like this oh i i talked about this i covered this you know like go back and look at whatever florida whatever today so and there are a million of those that have sprouted and so i i don't know i don't i don't think that there's a ton of value and certain issues you know there's gonna be certain times and the new york times did a pretty friendly r DeSantis article today, I would say. A little friendlier than maybe I would have done. So, you know, I think that they're right.

There may be your strategic moments where you feel like you can engage. But I think for the most part, they're going to pretty much duck media outside of their bubbles. I mean, so they got their right wing media channels. They're also going to have their own media channels. You know, Elon invited Trump back to Twitter. Zuck invited him back to Facebook and Instagram. He hasn't taken up either on their offer just yet, though I can't imagine he'll abstain for much longer. How do you think Trump's expected return to both platforms will affect the primary? Is it going to help him, hurt him? Neither? Too early to tell.

I think he needs them for the primary. Probably hurts him net and like general audience and the Republican Party brand. I think it was good for him and the Republican Party brand that he was off Twitter, probably, you know, sending those like insane truths into the ether, like requiring people to like screenshot them. I just didn't have the same effect. And so in a primary, though, Facebook fundraising, Trump is struggling on fundraising, which is I think another sign of his weakness as a frontrunner, which is another parallel to some of the past establishment frontrunners who didn't have that juice anymore to raise the online money. But part of that for Trump is that he can't do the Facebook ads. You know, give me five bucks

right now to say F you to the, you know, whatever. Right. And so Facebook was a big resource for him for money. So getting back on there at minimum is important for that for him. And yeah, I think that platform wise, you know, he's been a little bit out of the him. And yeah, I think that platform-wise, he's been a little bit out of the conversation. I mean, Trump's strength has always been dominance, right? I'm dominating the field here. I'm everywhere. You can't get away from me. I'm the alpha. I'm starting these conversations. They're responding to me. It's hard to do that on truth, right? i think it on net probably probably helps him even though maybe medium term isn't great for the party for him to be back on

and obviously it's not good for you know our societal fabric well that's yeah that goes without saying charlie warzel had this very funny subhead on his piece about trump coming back to facebook he said at least the platform finally added a user. How much do you think Facebook or Instagram or Twitter will matter in 2024? Do you think it matters as much? Do you think their juice is not quite what it was? Yeah, I think that they matter. Instagram, certainly.

Who's on Facebook still, right? This is kind of like us hipsters in our media environment always like want to get ahead of like does talk radio matter like not really i guess but like who listens to talk radio old people in the midwest right like who are dry you know like who listens to talk radio and i well republicans are still doing iowa right like people that are out on their you know combines are doing long drives or, you know, so has Facebook lost its juice? Like, obviously.

But the people that are still on there, I think, are going to overlap. Boomers. Yeah, quite a bit with the Republican primary electorate. So I do think that's important. The observation I have, and I don't really have a great answer to this, but I don't hear anybody talking about this, is the TikTok,ok um i mean that for all of this conversation you should maybe have a whole offline on this find some somebody that's an expert on this to bring in so i'm just going to give you my anecdotal you know we all first of all i just

wanted i just wanted to start by you just you did say uh the tiktok maybe you sound like a real elder millennial well i am i'm i'm sorry i'm not i am who i am john um i'm on i'm on it you know i've got my fyp i'm not i'm not telling you what's in my fyp okay that's private um no i'm not i'm not sharing that with anyone okay but um i'm on i'm on it because i want to see what's happening uh and you know it's addictive it is yeah it is uh so the people that are talking about concerns about misinformation and like what kind of information are voters getting you know going to the primary and manipulation you know i i feel like everybody's talking about like it like it's 2016 right where we're worried about you know twitter and him getting back on twitter him getting back on

facebook but the black box that is the TikTok's algorithm and the amount of insanity on there and how, like I said, there can be these influencers, these Turning Point USA things and other Republican things that have no visibility to anybody in the media at all, right? That have 100,000 followers that are just spreading insane nonsense, right? Everybody focused on the Twitter because it's in front of us,

a Twitter conversation around Paul Pelosi, for example, right? Like the Paul Pelosi conspiracies. I went down a TikTok rabbit hole trying to find Paul Pelosi conspiracies and it's madness. And every once in a while, you'll just flip it and the next thing will come up and it'll be like, this has 200,000 likes.

You know, it'll be some guy talking about how Paul Pelosi's gay lover did whatever, right? Or some other thing that's not true. So I don't exactly know what that impact is going to be on the Republican primary. And maybe that's a cycle away because of the demographic of Republicans. But I think that, you know, sometimes we fight the last battle on this stuff yeah and uh probably not great that the uh that the chinese government could be fucking with the algorithm themselves because that seems like it'd be a a good way to screw with american politics yeah it does you mentioned the influencers we referenced this daily beast piece a couple times so they published this piece the other week about um desantis's people recruiting an army of influencers to amplify

all that top-notch desantis content out there um apparently they're luring them in with offers of money and fake followers is this a new thing and do you think this will be effective i no i don't think it's mike bloomberg did this don't think it landed for mike um so there's always it didn't land there is a supply and demand issue i forgot about that move in the private yeah dude come on mike bloomberg did i thought it was clever you know there's nothing wrong i guess in theory with paying you know like isn't organizing happening on social media right you know so if you're gonna have a person that's like puts in their feed team desantis and has that okay

so the question is the the people who are presenting themselves as media right you know the paying people that are deeply problematic in various ways like in some ways they're paying the one guy that's kind of only problematic in a funny way it was the alpha um blanking his name jack i can picture him he has he has like a very soft face but then he has this huge beard to cover it up and he's like his whole thing is i'm an alpha man and uh and then he like who's into cuckold porn people found that he liked being cuckolded and which is hey whatever it teaches cuckold porn yeah i was like what is this story i haven't heard this guy before and then i like clicked off the daily. Yeah. I was like, what is this story? I haven't heard this guy before. And then I clicked off the Daily Beast.

I was like, whoa. What's going on here? Emily's like, what are you even? She gets on your browser. What are you even doing there, John? Anyway, but then there were some other folks like, oh, gosh, I'm having a senior moment. All these people are breaking my brain. But my old friend, who always used to troll me on Twitter, anyway, he was, you know,

he had had a lot of n word posts on his social media, like people that were doing, you know, a lot of alt right, you know, posting on these alt right message boards, right? So, okay, so, you know, I think there's kind of layers of potential scandal here. I think that it's a decent strategy. I don't know, a lot of campaigns spend money on a lot of stupid shit. So spending money on people that have a following to support you. I think that in the bulwark in JVL's newsletter today, great newsletter, which you confided me your daily reader of, it's impossible to write a good daily newsletter. Impossible. And he does it.

So I love JVL. His newsletter today is smart. It's like, this isn't really a scandal what DeSantis is doing. It's smart. And if Trump was good, you know, Trump had all these people last time. So Trump didn't give him money. But how did Trump get the Bill Mitchells? You remember Bill Mitchell got the big face, you know, who was always defending him?

Okay, great. He was like a key person in the Trump cinematic universe in 2015, right? And no matter what crazy shit Trump did, Bill Mitchell came up with an insane excuse for it. And then he got 1,000, 10,000 retweets. Okay. How did Bill Mitchell, what was the arrangement that was happening there? Well, Trump had Twitter, right? So he was quote tweeting them, retweeting them, helping them, you know, elevating them.

Then they'd get big followings, which they could monetize various ways, you know, sell shirts or whatever, you know. And, and so there was this grift that wasn't like a direct I'm paying you. But it was like, oh, I'm going to elevate all these voices. That's how you know, Diamond and Silk get famous, and you could go down the list. And so Trump doesn't seem to be nurturing that community anymore, right? And I think that that does matter, right? Like they, them coming to his defense, nobody wants to go to a to an empty party. You know what I mean? Like, people are attracted to, there's a group, we have a team, we're all in this together. And the fact that Trump had insane grifters tweeting defenses of him all the time when all the blue checks were attacking them made people want to come to his

side, right? And so maybe Trump didn't do this intentionally. Maybe it was just his lizard brain, but like he cultivated this community. And that is withering a little bit. And DeSantis, I think, doesn't have the same, whatever, charisma and platform and all that that Trump does. So they're trying to make it a little artificially. And strategically, I think that's smart. Yeah, no, I do think that, you know, the Daily Beast piece, sort of the tone of it was like, oh, he's got some second or third or fourth rate influencers that he's gathering up here. But to your point of like, all the hundreds of influencers on the right that are out there that we've never heard of who are people are taking selfies with at conferences and who have hundreds of thousands

of listeners and are rising on the podcast charts like you know you get that community even if it's a bunch of grifters and lunatics uh in in the context of a primary that's some uh that's some real power that's some real influence so you know we've been talking about the fact that like these Republican candidates are like so really had to be a MAGA junkie to even know what he was talking about half the time and it ended up hurting him and I do wonder if most of the party now has sort of followed him down this rabbit hole where and I'm not saying that like yeah we're fine in a general election I feel like and I can sleep easy at night but i do think some of the shit that they obsess over is just not really important to your normie undecided voter even right like do most people give a shit about gas stoves and drag queens and all the stuff that they're freaking out over all the time i don't know i don't think so but

yeah just by just my own accountability here, Jack Murphy is your cuckold friend, and Caleb Hull was the N-word guy. I had to get Caleb Hull's name, the little prick. Okay. I agree. I love this take by Jane. Totally agree with it.

And I think that it's a little bit of an inversion. This was always the critique of the left, and I think that at times it still is a fair critique, right? And it's not usually a critique of left. This was always the critique of the left. And I think that at times it still is a fair critique, right? And it's not usually a critique of left candidates, but more campaigns, right? It's like, who's running the Twitter feed for these candidates? A lot of times it's a super online 27-year-old. God love you, you know, right? And what they care about, you know, is maybe a little bit different than what the median voter, a non-college 50-year-old white person thinks about, right? And so that created tension for the Democrats. And there was is maybe a little bit different than what the median voter, a non-college 50-year-old white

person thinks about, right? And so that created tension for the Democrats. And there was a lot of discourse around this and narrative around this. And is that a problem? And I was always inside of it was kind of a problem. I think that at times the Democrats hurt themselves unnecessarily just with rhetoric that made them feel more out of touch as opposed to their actual policies. And I think that this is inverted, right? I think that the Democrats have noticed this, there's still examples of this sometimes, of course, no one can have be fully in touch with the median voter, and maybe you don't really want to be fully in touch with the median voter at all times.

Like, if you look at look at the Arizona Senate race, as a short best example, this Mark Kelly just was out there talking about, man i'm a guy i care what i was an astronaut you know i'm worried about your concerns i'm worried about inflation you know i'm worried about the border but i also think we should be compassionate right we should make sure people have health care i mean that was mark kelly just like a dad an astronaut talking about stuff that people care about then blake masters is like i you know talking about like the weirdest shit that you're gonna wear your skin like hey you know who had a good point the unabomber it's like i was reading curtis yarvin's blog the other day about the impact of demographic change in the country and

and it's just like dude like you're weird like you are weird and the stuff that you care about and i you know i went to the speeches and i was like he would attack kelly for being an astronaut at the start of his speech we're sending you back to the moon and everybody laughed i'm like people like astronauts i think i don't know you should have somebody on your team that's like a gut check that's like a normal person that's not like deep in you know 4chan right and so i i and so i think the good just circling back to when i asked those folks what they care about vaccine conspiracies anti-woke like you know whether the african-american studies department like has a queer class or not

like like that's just not at the top of the list of the key voters that you need to win a presidential race. No one brings that up in the open-ended question. So that is a problem for them, for sure. So let me just ask you to put your sort of never Trump, but pretend you're a Democrat hat on. If you were running communications and messaging for Joe Biden's nascent re-election campaign, and you didn't yet know who you were facing in the general, Trump, DeSantis, someone else, what would you tell him to do and think that Joe Biden needs to occupy the space of we are trying to actually address your concerns. And these people are weird as fuck. I mean, Joe Biden's not going to say that himself, right?

But I mean, that was basically Mark Kelly's campaign against masters, right? I mean, it wasn't he didn't say weird as fuck, you know, but his surrogates would. And like the ads made Blake seem as weird as he is right it was easy but ron desantis is weird and trump we already know right but like ron desantis is is a weird guy i mean like he got married at disney world and you know the boots and like the nasally voice and the thing and he just he's nobody's like man i want to hang out with ron desantis right and so obviously there's some extreme policy side of things but i i just think that there is a the republicans have failed i think that they were maybe on a concerningly right track

of of saying we want to just carve off some more of the working class even voters of color if maybe we can even just carve out 10 percent more eight percent like you don't need to get a majority of the black vote or vote. But we're just going to focus on we're going to say the Democrats, the Democrats are weird, you know, we're not going to get in these like, they're, they care about all this culture stuff. We care about you, you know, we wanted to, you know, keep things open during COVID, right? Like, like, there was a more of an economic based kind of, there was a little bit of a culture element to it, but not getting into all the very online stuff that might have worked, might not have worked. I don't know. But I thought that it was a concerning possibility. They haven't done that. And across the country,

in every place, with the exception of like the handful of normal Republicans like Brian Kemp, they haven't focused on, you know, actually dealing with people's whatever their real concerns are right now, be it inflation or something else. And I just think that Joe Biden can go out there and say, I worked bipartisan. We tried to deal with inflation. We tried to bring jobs back here. We're doing manufacturing like we're on the right track. Things are getting better. They're obsessing over whatever, gas stoves or whatever their newest thing is. The M&M's having high heels and like trying to create that sort of dichotomy is is where is where they should be i think that the the weird point is very important and underappreciated because you're right we

we talk about it extreme side in terms of extremism right and i think that obviously works with democratic voters and people who lean democratic and i think that there's a lot of truth to it that they've embraced very extreme policies, and they're extreme candidates, right? But when you think about Fetterman versus Oz, right? Yeah. What was the biggest hit against Oz? That he's just fucking weird. He's weird.

The crudité. Doug Mastriano, extreme, right? Likes to cosplay as a Confederate soldier. That's very extreme. And also weird. It's also weird. It's also weird. Like Blake Masters, very weird yeah right very weird yes and i think that sometimes we under appreciate how

powerful that is because most most voters are just people who like show up on election day and pick between two people that they haven't really heard that much about and if they think that one person sounds kind of normal and kind of down to earth and and is talking about that they care about, they'll vote for that person, especially if the other person sounds like a fucking weirdo. Yeah. You know, I mean, obviously, you can't make your whole campaign around that. But that would be my North Star, I think, for starting. And that also includes, which is much more in the Biden wheelhouse than the weird side, the focusing on, oh, we're doing stuff for you. I think that it shows actually how powerful the weird part is, that the Democrats did well in the midterms, really mostly based on the weird. I don't think that the Democrats did a particularly

great job of talking of the positive story to tell of the Biden administration. Part of that was because it was hard, because the economy was really shaky there. But the economy keeps getting better in particular. That's a powerful two-pronged message. We're on the right track. They're weird as fuck. Last question I have to ask as a fellow Twitter addict. How are you handling the Elon era? Are you less addicted, happy, sad?

Are you over there on post with the other resistance libs? What's going on? I'm never leaving. Me and Elon will be the last ones. You can take twitter out of my cold dead hands i am addicted to it my screen time report is disturbing i don't like elon i think all his decisions are making twitter worse and yet i need i need the constant feed of information i need my i have my little nuggets list you know i've got my i've got

my drag race list all of my interests you know i won't list all of my interests but you know i've got my lsu list got my politics lists yeah i found it in the elon era easier to use with by using the lists that's that's actually helped it a little bit because i do think that the overall experience has been degraded not just by elon that was at the beginning because he's making himself the main character every day but now it's just like it feels like people the party's emptying out a little bit but i i am like you as i need the rush of information more than anything i don't need to tweet a lot i need to get in twitter fights i'm like sort of over all that but the uh but the rush of information i still find

myself i still and there isn't a good and the And there isn't a good, in the post, there isn't a good substitute. So I've maybe tacked down my Twitter usage 10% since Elon has come in and I've tried to do some other things. I'm more of a Reddit man now. And I do find sometimes you get interesting little information on Reddit you don't see on Twitter because it's like the people over there are different. So I have started that. But no'm i'm going down with the ship and um and i have i have like i have twitter wrist and twitter thumb which is why you shouldn't have me on this podcast like i'm gonna be a literally my thumb is clicking right now i'm gonna be like a 60 year old man i'm right there on the i'm right there on the deck of the Titanic with you, Tim.

It's going to be so embarrassing when I'm in the senior citizen's home and I can't lift a fork and someone has to feed me. And they're like, why? And I was like, Twitter thumb. My thumb is broken. The ligaments. Well, let's start. There was this thing called Twitter about 30, 40 years ago.

Tim Muller, thanks for joining Offline. This was fun. Thanks, Fabs. We'll see you later. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer. Andrew Chadwick is our sound editor. Kyle Seglin, Charlotte Landis, and Vassilis Fotopoulos sound engineered the show. Thank you. and share our episodes as videos every week.