Pod Save America - “Cowboy up, Joe Manchin.” (with Stacey Abrams and Ben Rhodes!)

Episode Date: June 3, 2021

Donald Trump says he’ll be reinstated as President this August as his former National Security Advisor calls for a military coup, Republicans continued their coordinated assault on voting rights, and Democrats win big in a New Mexico special election. Then, Stacey Abrams talks to Jon Favreau about the fight for democracy, her latest book, and more.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. And I'm Ben Rhodes. Look at this. Look at this crossover. We got Ben Rhodes as co-host today. Worldo Crosspod. Love it. I love it. On today's show, Donald Trump's telling people he'll be president again in August as his former national security advisor calls for a military coup.

Republicans continue their coordinated assault on voting rights. And Democrats win big in a New Mexico special election. Then Stacey Abrams is here to talk about the fight for democracy, her latest book and more. Big show. First, Ben, you have written a second book that makes you two for that makes two for you, two for Dan and a bunch of tweets for me. and a bunch of tweets from me. That's what, that's the, you're- But John, if you add up the total word count of your tweets, you might have a book in there. Fuck, that's even more depressing.

Your new book is called After the Fall, Being American in the World We've Made. It is incredibly timely, compelling, beautifully written. But why don't you tell us all about why you wrote it? Well, it's kind of a Thursday PSA book. You know, as I was kind of pummeled after the 2016 election, like you guys, trying to make sense of it, you know, I realized I could kind of figure out what was happening in America by looking at it from the outside in, in the same way that if you've ever had a challenge

in your family or something, sometimes you have to step out of it. And I went to Germany on one of these trips, and I met with a young Hungarian activist who's opposing Viktor Orban there, who's like the autocratic prime minister of Hungary. And I was like, hey, how did you guys go from being a democracy to an autocracy in about a decade? And he's like, well, that's easy. Orban got elected in a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis. He redrew the parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power, changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote, enriched a bunch of cronies who financed his politics, bought up the media and created really a right-wing propaganda machine,

packed the courts with right-wing judges, and wrapped it all up in a nationalist bow of us versus them, us, the true Hungarians, them, as liberal elites, as immigrants, as Muslims, as George Soros. And he's kind of talking, and I'm thinking like, well, that sounds like kind of the last decade of my life. And really, it started from this premise of like, there's this trend globally of democracy slipping away. And I talked to Hong Kong protesters. I talked to Russians like Alexei Navalny, you know, Putin's chief opponent.

I talked to these young activists in Hungary. And really, it's a personal book. It's kind of my journey through the experience of having left power and looking at power from the outside in and trying to figure out how America helped shape this world and what we need to do about it. in other parts of the world, but also comforting knowing that sort of different countries and societies are sort of going through the same thing we are and that there are people, there are activists, especially young activists who are trying to fight these sort of autocratic rulers and governments. And I think there's a lot of inspiration in it too.

It's a beautiful book. I'm glad you took that away. Yeah. Thanks, Dan. No, I'm glad. I was going to compliment you. Hold on. So look, it is a, I have read it.

It is an amazing book. I would say, and this is the one downside for me personally, is it's so beautifully written that it literally gave me writer's block for four days. So thank you for that. Well, I, you know, look at the point that I appreciate that. And I, I, I, I like this book more than my memoir because I really took a little more time on the writing. But I also was getting at, I discovered, John, what you referenced, which is actually not

unlike, this is not just me complimenting you guys, although it kind of is, you guys built this community after the 2016 election where I think people were just happy to figure out that there were other people who thought things were as fucked up as they did and wanted to do something about it. And that was kind of the feeling I had. You know, there's something hopeful in the fact that people everywhere around the world are kind of dealing with the same stuff, you know, the same nationalist playbook, the same disinformation and surveillance machinery. And they're finding different ways to fight back. And we all need to learn from each other. And what I really found that ended up being more personal than I thought when I started this is people are also just trying

to figure out their identity in this world that doesn't make a lot of sense. And I made the subtitle, Being American in the World We Made made because what we really have to figure out is who we are as Americans. And where I kind of land on that is something that our former boss, who's also a character in the book, I think would subscribe to. Yes, we're a multiracial, multiethnic democracy that doesn't always live up to the stories we tell about ourselves. But being American is about like doing the work, doing the work of pursuing what we are not yet. And if we can do that, then we can get over all the goons and creeps that we're going to talk about on the pod today. I remember that in a few Obama speeches, that theme. So I'm going to play Tommy's role since he's on vacation. The person currently at the top of the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list is Bill O'Reilly. No one wants to see that. So what everyone has to do is go by After the Fall today and we're going to help Ben knock him off.

Tommy also would have made up that like Don Jr. has a new book out that's on the charts, which is not true. But the only one I could find right now is Bill O'Reilly, the most loathsome right-wing figure who has a book on the charts. But that should be enough for all of you to go by after the fall.

Yeah, he's killing somebody else this week. And he's always killing somebody. Take care of that. All right. Let's get to the news. So once again, we're living in two wildly different realities now. In one reality, you know, Joe Biden met with Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito on Wednesday to see if they could hash out a bipartisan infrastructure deal. And both parties said they were encouraged by the constructive negotiations. It's like normal

politics world. In the other reality, The New York Times' Maggie Haberman reported that Donald Trump is telling people he expects to be reinstated as president by August. And this news came just a few days after Trump's former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, was asked at a QAnon event in Dallas why something like the military coup in Myanmar couldn't happen here in the United States. Here's what he said. I want to know why what happened in Myanmar can't happen here. No reason. I mean, it should happen. No reason. No reason. And just in case you're tempted to write that off as an isolated bit of lunacy,

CNN interviewed a number of Trump supporters who all parroted the same military coup fantasies that can be found all over QAnon message boards. Take a listen. Biden is just, he's like a puppet president. The military is in charge. It's gonna be like Myanmar, what's happening in Myanmar. The military is doing their own investigation, and at the right time, they're gonna be restoring the republic with Trump as president. What's going on in Myanmar right now? The government took over and they're redoing the election, correct? That could possibly happen here, possibly. Would you like to see it happen? Absolutely.

I would like to see it happen. Really? Yes. You know why? Because the election was stolen from us. Very cool. So Flynn later said he was misquoted. Sure, right, yeah. But regardless, we got Trump thinking he's heading back to the White House this summer, which is apparently what the MyPillow CEO and his old lawyer, Sidney Powell, are telling him. We have a growing number of Republican voters who are at the very least coup curious. A new poll out this week from the Public Religion Research Institute

shows that QAnon is now as popular as some major religions and that 15% of Americans believe that people may have to resort to violence to restore the country's rightful order. Ben, you've spent a lot of time in Myanmar. You've just written a book about the rise of autocratic governments all over the world. How worried should we be about all this?

It's not great, John. No, no, it's not. this in my book, like this, the post 9-11 mindset started out as this war on terror. And Flynn was at the forefront as a guy who's, you know, a military officer in that war, you know, obsessed with radical Islam. And what's been interesting over the last 20 years is how the targets have just comfortably shifted, you know, it's radical Islam, then it's a black president, then it's communism, and now it's American democracy itself. And I think, first of all, let's be clear. First of all, world of correction, it's not Myanmar, it's Myanmar. But they're killing people.

They're shooting live fire at people in the streets. I have friends who I was in touch with in Signal who've had to flee to the Thai border to get out of the country. So this is some very serious shit they're talking about. And here's why I'd be concerned. It's not that I think there's going to be a military coup in August, although we had some bad August, you know, when we were in office. of voter suppression laws and kind of rigging the system to favor minority rule in this country is like, you know, on the spectrum, not quite as totally batshit insane as the military coup. I'm not saying that's why Flynn is doing this, but that's a dynamic you've seen in other places where autocracy takes hold is, you know, Orban has done this in Hungary, right? You kind

of threaten a much more aggressive takeover of things. And then suddenly you're kind of slow motion strangling of democracy looks less radical. And that's part of what I think we have to be on guard about. resistancey Twitter overreaction and also scare people every time I see news like this. But at the same time, we all lived through a fucking attack on the U.S. Capitol after the president lost an election, tried to steal it, and then sicked his supporters on Congress. So I think it is something to be alarmed about, but I don't know. What do you think? Look, so like I think it is something to be alarmed about, but I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, we live in a world where everyone overreacts to everything and it's easy to then outright dismiss that overreaction as just the typical online panic porn that we hear so much about. But so sometimes I find it easier just to like restate the facts to see how worried about something you should be. So here we have a retired general, former top aide to the defeated president who incited a violent insurrection on the Capitol,

calling for a military coup at a conference in support of a movement designated a domestic terror threat by the FBI. That seems concerning to me. It sounds bad when you put it like that. And Ben is correct. The concern is not that the military is going to overthrow the government and install that on Trump in August. The concern is these people who were in the CNN clip you played or others are going to take the signal and act out violently. Violent people looking for a reason to do violent things. and most evocative example of how these dangerous conspiracy theories translate into real-life violence. You have the guy who sent the pipe bombs in 2018 to the big Trump supporter who sent them to all of Trump's favorite Twitter targets. You have the guy who took the, I think it was an assault rifle to Comet Pizza, the pizzeria in DC that was at the center of the absurd Pizzagate conspiracy. And when you read the indictment of the Oath Keepers for their activities on January 6th, they were preparing to – the Oath Keepers is a violent right-wing militia movement, but they were preparing to step in once Trump invoked the

Insurrection Act to act militarily to take over the government. People listen to this and they act on it and it is dangerous and we should not, it's not, we should not all of a sudden assume the government's going to get taken over, but we should recognize that there, that words matter and words, dangerous words from dangerous people really matter a lot. Yeah. And I would also say too, you know, for Maggie Haberman reports, this like Trump reinstatement thing, a bunch of people get mad on Twitter for some ridiculous reason. I guess they're like, they don't think that Maggie should be reporting this. They want to pretend it's not true. They think that if Maggie doesn't report it, then it's not true, right? The Washington Post confirmed her reporting. Charles Cook, who is not even a never Trump or a Republican, like a

real Republican who has at times been very favorable towards Trump, just wrote this piece in the National Review where he said, yeah, no, everyone's been telling me this. I've heard this. Trump really expects to be reinstated in August. And not only does he expect that, but he now hopes that that this belief that he should be reinstated is a litmus test for all the candidates that he may endorse in 2022. And this is how it also shapes the entire Republican Party, right? Like it puts down a marker for the crazy supporters out there that may act on this, like that you guys were saying. But also for Republican candidates.

Now, this is the party line that they have to tow if they hope to win a primary. So now you have the entire Republican infrastructure being like, yeah, not only was the election stolen, but we should get this guy back in office. And that's when that's how things spiral out of control, you know? Yeah, I remember it makes me think, John, of like when we were in office in 11 and 12, and you'd see these polls of Republicans that said like a majority of Republicans thought Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. And it was easy to kind of laugh at that. But then, you know, that dynamic of people living in a totally alternative reality led to a birther becoming the Republican nominee and then President of the United States, right? And we haven't done enough, you know, soul searching in this country, the fact that like,

it's not just these people disagree with us, it's that they believe things that are the opposite of the truth. And, you know, I had a young person in Hong Kong described to me the essence of the Chinese totalitarianism is that essentially they ask you to point at a deer and call it a horse. The goal is to get people to live in an alternate reality, because once you've done that, you control them. And unwinding that, particularly as those people are getting elected to the US Congress, is going to make everything else we have to do harder. And it's going to make each election a kind of existential election for American democracy, because you don't want those people to get their hands on the levers of power.

Let me ask you, if you were in the White House right now, if we were all back in the White House and this was happening, like what can the Biden administration do about like a growing threat of extremism that happens to involve a former president of the United States. Like there's there's no playbook for this. Lock him up. I mean, I like this DHS, like we would be having meetings with DHS, the Department of Homeland Security and DOJ. Is it like I don't even know what you do. Well, one thing and Dan and I've talked about this, you know, that you haven't heard much from the Biden people on yet is what their approach is going to be to social media. And it's all well and good for Twitter to kind of ostracize Trump to his blog, but the algorithm of Facebook is still turbocharging disinformation in everybody's feeds on a daily basis. And the regulation that is necessary to affect those algorithms and start to kind of detoxify American discourse, that's one thing. It's not the only thing, but that's

one thing that I've been surprised to hear so little about thus far. Yeah. Question for you, Dan. One thing we should mention here is that Trump's blog, which Ben just mentioned, is dead after just 29 days RIP. A Trump advisor told the Washington Post that the former president didn't like that it was being mocked as a loser for getting fewer visitors than the pet adoption service Petfinder. First of all, the idea that he like that suddenly the blog can be mocked as a loser. The blog as a loser, I thought was very funny. I'm tempted to laugh about this,

but there's a question here. What does it say that Trump was banned from all social media sites, launched a blog that no one visited, lost most of his free media coverage, and is still so popular within the Republican Party that he's not only leading the 2024 primary polls, he's got supporters who want to reinstall him in a military coup. I mean, got supporters who want to reinstall him in a military coat.

I mean, I don't want to miss the opportunity to take some personal, maybe it's petty joy at Donald Trump failing at blocking like that. I find that enjoyable. I do think he's underestimating the amount of traffic that something called petfinder.com would get. People like pets, not that many people like Trump. So that seems fine. Do you think Donald Trump will start a sub stack now? Probably, probably. Yes. I think there are some, there's some serious elements of this that we ought to think about pretty seriously because it's fun to laugh at and I'm not denying anyone fun at Trump's expense ever. But it is a massive indictment of Facebook in particular, because their argument always is that this is the content people want. We're just serving it up to

you. But here you have Trump has content. He's off Facebook and no one is going to get it. And so what that shows is that it's not that Facebook is giving people what they want. Facebook is giving people something pretty dangerous that they think they want. And that has had a very alarming, radicalizing effect on the American people. And the same could be said for Twitter to a lesser extent based on how their algorithms work. But I think even the more concerning thing is the entire understanding of Trump's rise to political power is that he is this massive celebrity with this fake business cred who had an ability to dominate the political conversation that no one else could have. And it's been this sort of comfort for Democrats and media types that all these Trump

wannabes do not have that ability. Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, they're just losers. They're like generic mayonnaise versions of Trump. Don't forget Mike Pompeo, Dan. A world of favorite. A world of favorite. He's so lame that I literally forgot Mike Pompeo. I forgot he was the person that existed. And that sort of a sense is like, well, if we defeat Trump or Trump goes away or goes

to jail, then this will be fine because no one else can do what he did. But what should be so scary to your point, John, is that he is banned from social media. Other than a handful of phone calls with Maria Bartiromo, he is absent from media. Yet his power and control of the Republican Party is stronger than it was before, which suggests that he is not the leader of the movement. He's just a vessel for a very powerful movement that exists and will persist after he's gone. And I do think that that should force everyone to recognize that what we're dealing with here is not about Trump. It's a structural problem within American politics that Trump benefited from.

He didn't create. Well, I also think that it's evidence that there are more evidence that there is a sort of closed right wing information ecosystem that Donald Trump both benefited from and helped build as well. And Ben, you talk about this in the book, too, that like some of these autocrats, it's not that they just, you know, went over and took control of the of the media on their own and said that everything's going to be state run media now. and took control of the media on their own and said that everything's going to be state-run media now. Like some of what they did was similar to how the conservative media infrastructure has been built here in the United States. It's like a little more gradual than you might think. Yeah. I mean, you know, Putin really perfected this playbook and it started with, you know, his cronies buying up TV stations and the like, but it really didn't tip into this more dangerous and virulent control that he has over society there until he realized how much you could just flood social media and manipulate the algorithm. I mean, this is intentional. People

know that they can kind of turbocharge certain narratives and conspiracy theories. I remember talking to Navalny, you know, before, tragically, he was poisoned and then imprisoned over the course of last summer agent and he was working for the FSB, you know, the Russian intelligence outlet. And this enraged Navalny because one of the things that they would argue in this conspiracy theory is, well, if he was really an opponent of Putin's, he'd be dead by now. And Navalny's like, hey guys, like I'm still alive. Does that mean I'm a double agent? But it speaks to the fact that these are, in part, the algorithms prioritizing sensationalism. But this is by design. And I don't think that's a conspiracy theory here.

I think if you look at QAnon, clearly there's an effort to kind of turbocharge a conspiracy theory and shape the minds of unwitting people consuming that information. And that's why I do think this is the kind of thing that requires a policy response. You know, just sitting back and hoping that Facebook solves this because they've got a PR problem is clearly not sufficient. So some Republicans aren't quite ready to call for a military coup. Fucking rhinos. They're trying to win the next election the old fashioned way by making it harder for Democrats to vote. That's happening in Texas, where the Republicans voter suppression legislation was temporarily stopped this week when Democrats in the statehouse walked out of the chamber, which denied Republicans a quorum and prevented a vote on the bill.

Governor Greg Abbott responded by threatening to cut the entire legislature's funding. And he said that he'll call a special session to revive the bill. But Democrats said that they hope the episode serves as a wake up call to their colleagues in Washington to pass the For the People Act. Here's what state Representative Trey Martinez-Fisher had to say to Joe Manchin. You know, down here in Texas, we'd say when times get tough, it's time to cowboy up. And so with all due respect, I'd ask Senator Manchin to please cowboy up. President Biden also had a message for both Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema during his remarks to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa massacre, though his dig was a bit more subtle. I hear all the folks on TV saying, why doesn't Biden get this done?

Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. So the president also said that he's putting Vice President Kamala Harris in charge of voting rights and that he'll, quote, fight like heck to ensure the passage of the For the People Act. Question, Dan, will any of this make a difference to Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, or any of the other filibuster-loving Democratic senators who are hiding behind Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema? Say their names, John. I don't know. It changes with every story.

Gene Shaheen seems upset. Then John Tester's not sure. Then the two Democratic senators from Delaware that you're eventually going to run against. They're out there. We're not sure about that. Both of them. I'm going to run against both of them. Dan's going to run against both of them.

He's going to take up both seats. Because that's just how much I love the Senate. And Delaware. And Delaware. And Delaware. I do love Delaware. Back off. We don't know, right? I was very pleased to hear Biden talk about this and say he's going to fight like heck for it. I'm glad that he has put Kamala Harris in charge. We know from our time there that it's always better when there is one person in charge of a big project, because particularly when it's the vice president. Biden did this a bunch for Obama, whether it was on gun safety

after Newtown, the Recovery Act, Iraq policy in the first term, because they can bring to bear their entire office on this project, and it becomes a top priority, which sometimes is hard in the day-to-day crisis management that the president must deal with. So that's very good. I don't know whether it's going to make a difference. It may just be that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and the unnamed others would prefer to preserve the filibuster than save democracy, and that nothing will change their mind.

But we don't know that. And that is why we're on the clock now. Senator Schumer said they're going to bring up the For the People Act, S-1, in June. And I think it's incumbent upon all of us, particularly Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, to make it as uncomfortable as fucking possible for the people who may stand in the way of this. Right? Like, if your decision is that the filibuster is so important, as Kyrsten Sinema so annoyingly said, standing in Texas, the basically ground zero for democracy rigging right now, said

that, you know, extolled the virtue of the filibuster. If they think that is so important, then they should feel pain for that, political pain for doing that, right? It should be uncomfortable when they go into their states and their districts should be uncomfortable when they turn on their TV. To all the other Democratic senators out there, it should be uncomfortable in the lunch line at the Senate. You see Joe Manchin, you see Kyrsten Sinema, talk to him about this. Put pressure on him. Because I do think that this is one of those times in history that people will remember for decades. When they look back on this time, I wish people thought it was the American Rescue Plan. Maybe they'll think it's the

infrastructure plan, but I think it'll be what we did at this moment to protect our democracy. Because you know how Biden talks about how he wants to be like an FDR-style president, where we have this crisis and we're going to use it to put in place economic change. And that that sort of view has informed, I think, a lot of his very progressive policy choices. But I don't think it's FDR, that's the right model for this is LBJ. Because right now, the crisis we're dealing with is democratic, and all those other things that Joe Biden wants to address that are very real, right, growing economic inequality, healthcare crisis, poverty, hunger, all of that. None of that can happen if we don't fix our democracy. And so this is the thing. And I hope he talks about it every day between now and the moment when it either happens or it's too late. I hope he

calls Joe Manchin every day. I hope he calls Kyrsten Sinema every day. I hope he goes to their states and puts pressure on them, particularly Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona, because this is it. Rant over. Sorry. Apologies. No, no. What do you guys think the conversation in the White House was like that led Biden to include that subtle dig? Because it did sound it been it sounded like a line that we would have definitely given to Obama and that Obama would have liked to make a little subtle dig at them. And then, you know, we'd hear from from people in Washington that like, oh, the senators hate when Obama lectures them. But it's very it was very unbinding to do that. I was happy he did.

Yeah, well, I mean, yeah, you're right. I mean, it's kind of language that would be incredibly parsed, Yeah, you're right. I mean, it's kind of language that would be incredibly parsed, although people couldn't decide whether we shouldn 2009 and says, well, Obama could have done a little bit more, but for Max Baucus, right? I mean, people are going to remember whether or not Joe Biden got this done, fair or not. apprehensive in what you're doing. Because again, having looked at how parties that don't have majority support entrench themselves and hold on to power despite that, what's happening isn't subtle. Like Texas, like what we're looking at on the map, and I know this from being an avid listener to the Thursday Pod, but like the whole game of American politics are these states, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida, that the question is, can the Democrats start winning these states to account for the fact that they're losing some of these states in the upper Midwest? So it's no coincidence that the most intense voter suppression efforts, including efforts that would allow for election results to literally be overturned

by Republican elected officials, are taking place in those states. And you have to deal with that through using your megaphone, as Dan said, as best you can, and connecting the kind of top-down campaign that only a president and vice president can lead with the kind of bottom-up efforts that you're going to talk about with Stacey Abrams. It's like an all-hands-on-deck moment here. And just because it looks hard and difficult, and just because Kristen Sinema and Joe Manchin look stubborn, isn't a reason to kind of throw up your hands and say, okay, we're going to move on to infrastructure. Like this is the whole ballgame here, and they have to throw everything they have at it. And I think this was the first step and probably an escalation,

hopefully, of a campaign run out of the White House that is top down and bottom up. Yeah, that's right. All right, we have some good news. On Tuesday, Democrats won a landslide victory in a New Mexico special election to fill the House seat of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland. The win itself was expected, but the margin was not. Democratic State Representative Melanie Stansbury beat Republican State Senator Mark Moores by 25 points in a suburban Albuquerque district. The Joe Biden won by 23 points and Deb Haaland won by 16 points. The New York Times had called the race a, quote, crucial test of the Republican focus on crime since Moores effectively ran a

one issue campaign against Stansbury in which he linked rising crime in Albuquerque to her past support for a congressional proposal that would cut police funding and abolish ICE. It didn't work. One possible reason is that Stansberry massively outspent Moores with ads that featured police officers talking about how much public safety funding she helped bring to Albuquerque. Dan, what, if anything, can this special election tell us about the political environment in the Biden era? It is very easy to overread these special

elections and parties tend to dismiss the ones they underperform and tout the ones they overperform. But in a world where you have to take every poll with like a trainload of salt, a special election is an actual piece of real data to look at. And in that sense, Democrats should feel very encouraged about it. It is one where, you know, this was not a Mark Moore who was a Republican candidate. It was not some sort of like MAGA reject who slipped through in a low turnout primary. He was a very good candidate. I believe he represented a Biden district, a district that Biden won in New Mexico. And the fact that Stansbury exceeded Biden's margin is a sign that

Democrats stay engaged. And there's some real warning signs for Republicans that at least in this district on this day, there may be a challenge for Republicans running without Trump on the ballot as they saw in 2018. The question I have is, what we've seen over the last couple of years is just polarization increase and intensify. And I start to wonder if, you know, some of this overperformance as time goes on, like blue districts are just going to get bluer, red districts are going to get redder. And the fight is still, you know, what's really going to tell us about the 2022 midterms or the 2024 presidential are these districts where it's just a lot closer and more competitive. And it's really hard to draw too many conclusions from a blue district like

this. Or, you know, a couple of weeks ago or months ago, we were talking about that sort of redder district in Texas that the Republicans sort of won big on. So I'm just I was wondering, what do you think about that? I was going to say, I'm not sure you're familiar with the dynamic of this podcast. And I recognize you had a very significant birthday this week. So maybe your mentality has changed, but you're half full and I'm half empty. And so if we're going to switch that, I'm cool with it, but just like, give me a heads up, right? I just decided to be more pessimistic than possible about this. No, I just like turning 40 is hard. It's hard. Like, I get it. I think that dynamic helps us in a bunch of because everyone keeps talking about like, oh, the suburban districts.

Well, the suburban voters who turned out for Joe Biden and voted against Donald Trump, who might have been former Republicans, will they stay with us? My glass half full answer to that is yes, they will, because those districts are becoming more polarized and thus more blue. I think on some of the other districts that are like a little more rural, a little more exurban, I think it's going to be harder for us. And I think once again, this is like trench warfare in a very closely divided country between red and blue. That's going to keep these elections up for grabs, both the more competitive House ones, if we have competitive House elections left, and of course, the national popular vote for president. But we shall see. So Republicans are excited to run on rising crime rates regardless. You can imagine Trump and other candidates yelling about Democrat run cities where immigrants are committing all kinds of crimes. That's going to be their their their favorite attack.

Ben, isn't this another page out of the authoritarian playbook that you've seen in other countries, really harping on crime and immigration and others? And has it worked in those places? Yeah. I mean, I was thinking, even listening to the previous discussion, you know, so Viktor Orban, who's such an interesting laboratory, it's like looking in miniature at this global trend, including the Republican Party here, you know, he has this anti-immigrant tough on crime message. And what he does with his media is, you know, he'll take one crime and just blow it out on television and blow it out in the kind of newspapers that reach people in rural areas in Hungary. And sometimes, frankly, it's not even like a true crime. They're just mainlining fear

into communities where there really isn't actually that much crime in rural Hungary. There really aren't that many immigrants. But it was enough to shape a kind of politics of fear that turned his people out. And I profile in the book a young woman who's in her early 30s, so much younger than you now, John. Thank you. Appreciate that. who's in her early 30s, so much younger than you now, John. Thank you. Appreciate that. And she started a political party with some of her friends, and they did two things that were really smart that I think are instructive to us.

The first is they were a single-issue party out of the gate, anti-corruption. Everybody kind of suspects Orbán is corrupt. Everybody suspects he's on the take. And he wanted to host an Olympics in Hungary, which everybody knew he would have done what Putin did, which is skim a few billion dollars off the top to enrich himself and his cronies. And they got a lot of traction with an anti-corruption message, which, by the way, is popular everywhere, including with Orban supporters, right?

So it's a reminder that sometimes, you know, this is, as you guys talk about, don't forget to make your offensive message that has the most traction in these places. And here it's the same thing. It's corruption. It's tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy. But then the next thing they did is they went very deliberately after they lost some elections in their first try. They went into all these rural places and they showed up and they went door to door, literally. And we're like, and the first reaction they got is you guys are socialistists, you're George Soros puppets, because that conspiracy theory is in Hungary too. But they ate into the support that Orban has. And the reason that Orban is actually politically vulnerable is because of a very concerted effort to drive a very negative

contrast on corruption and to start showing up in all these places, even if you're going to lose them, right? And I do think that there's no other way to do it. I mean, Obama used to say to us, I remember him saying to me, Dan, all those events you organized in 2012, where he'd do a big rally, and that was kind of the blue state people showing up. But then he'd always go to some barbecue place, and he'd shake every single hand in the place. And usually it was like people look a little grumpy and meet him. And he's like, look, like everybody in that place thinks I'm the antichrist. But you know what? If like a few of them are just going to say, well, actually like, you know, he seems like a good man or at least he has a good marriage. Maybe some of those people will vote for him. Maybe they won't at least spread the most nefarious conspiracy theories

about him. And he's like, that's the only armor I have, you know, and so it's a reminder, like, you do have to show up in all these places. That's the only way to push back against the diet of misinformation and disinformation people are being fed. Yeah, and that's certainly, you know, about to talk to Stacey Abrams, but that's the Stacey Abrams playbook in Georgia, right? Show up everywhere, talk to everyone and don't leave anyone out. Dan, do you think that the New Mexico race shows that Democrats have finally found a way to rebut the defund the police attacks or these crime attacks? Because certainly Stansberry, at least we don't, I mean, we know that they didn't hurt her or they didn't, you know,

she had a margin that was bigger than Biden's. I don't, I don't want to draw all the conclusions for this, but it seems pretty clear that advertising against it, both responding to the attacks and insulating yourself from them is going to be one piece of a successful 2022 strategy. And what I thought was interesting, and I watched a couple of the Stansbury ads, which is she made the point credentialing herself on law enforcement, making it harder for someone to believe that she would want to abolish or defund the police in the most right-wing pejorative sense of that term. And then pivoted immediately to attacking her opponent. And so you don't dwell on it. You don't play by their set of the rules. It's what we often talk about is you call it out, you correct the record, and you move back to sort of stronger territory, and that's good. This is not going away.

There are several elements of this. Crime is going up in parts of the country, and Democrats need to address it rhetorically and substantively. to address it rhetorically and substantively. Second, we always have to recognize that Republicans are not focusing on crime because crime is going up. Crime is just one part of a decades-long strategy to make white people more scared of non-white people. It's sort of their central political thesis. And that's immigration, that's welfare, that's crime, that's all of this, and that's going to be there. But this is not some right-wing fever dream. I was looking at polling on crime this morning in preparation for this podcast, and I saw a Yahoo YouGov poll, which showed that more Americans rated crime as a very big problem

than the coronavirus, race relations, the economy, political correctness. And so when you see that, oftentimes you think it's going to be 95-5 Republicans and then independents more close to the middle and then like very few Democrats. But in that poll, so it was 49% of all Americans found crime to be a very big problem. It was 45% of Democrats. And so this is something that our voters are also concerned about. And we have to have responses to it that are not dismissive of the issue. We have to have progressive policy response and progressive messaging around it that diffuses the Republican attack, but doesn't dismiss it in a way that makes our voters think we're out of touch with what's

happening in their districts. I will say also, she did two things at once here in this campaign. I will say also she did two things at once here in this campaign. She didn't shy away from that either in the need for police reform. And yet she also had a bunch of ads with cops in them and talked about public safety and how public safety funding was important and how she brought public safety funding to Albuquerque to protect citizens. So she really tried to do two things at once. And I don't imagine she would have wanted to run this campaign without the ad with the cop in it or talking about how she supported public safety funding. But also, she didn't shy away from talking about racial justice and police reform. And she wasn't like some centrist Democrat that was like, oh, now I can't talk about that because they're attacking me. So it is an interesting balance that she struck there that I wonder if other candidates will try to do the same thing.

Well, voters are smarter than most politicians, and certainly most political consultants think they are. So you can be both, right? You can have concerns about police conduct and want more police accountability, and you want to be very concerned about the impact of structural racism in your community, and particularly in law enforcement, and also be for funding that makes your community safer. You can do all of those things, and you can talk about it in a way that makes sense. It's not an either or. And sometimes we default into that. And so, you know, kudos to our campaign team for pulling this off because it was very well done. I do think it is a model for some Democrats. It's going to be harder. And this is not a positive statement

about American life and American politics. But these attacks are always more vehement and more dangerous when they are levied against black and brown candidates. And so you know that that is going to come against a lot of these candidates and they're going to have – I'd say one more thing about this, which is resources. We should not dismiss the resource advantage here is that we – in some cases in these House races where we lost, Republicans were spending money and Democrats weren't on these attacks. And so the fact that Sandsbury spent more than her opponent is something we should just keep in the back of our mind that we haven't exactly, we shouldn't assume we figured out exactly how to do this, but that there's a maybe, you know, sort of the seeds of a strategy going forward.

All right. When we come back, Stacey Abrams. I'm now joined by the organizing legend who helped turn Georgia blue after nearly two decades of Republican wins in her spare time. She's written her ninth novel, the number one New York Times bestseller, While Justice Sleeps. Stacey Abrams, welcome back to the pod. Thank you for having me. So we were just talking about the coordinated Republican attack on voting rights. I'll be honest, I'm sort of at a loss right now about what to do. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have ruled out getting rid of the filibuster. Manchin has said no on a filibuster carve out for voting rights, which is what you've suggested. And even if there were no filibuster,

he said he doesn't actually support the For the People Act as written, which we can't pass without him. So how do we protect the right to vote? I begin with the posture that people take positions based on the current environment and that the more we see evidence of perfidy and malfeasance, the more likely we are to see change. I believe that as a former Secretary of State that Joe Manchin understands how fragile our democracy actually is without the rule of law to protect the most vulnerable voters. And his ethos, which is to say that he wants to protect the voice of minorities in the Senate, should extend to protecting the voice of minorities as American citizens. Part of what we are seeing play out here is shifting the narrative from one of this is

Democrats versus Republicans to one of this being Republicans versus Americans. This is not partisanship. This is about citizenship. And the more we can amplify and populate with evidence the proof of their intention, I think the more likely we are to actually see a shift in behavior. I can't say that's for certain, but I know that given my time in the state legislature, there were moments where I was absolutely certain, or at least certainly I should have been convinced that no movement was possible, but I saw it happen. Now, that not withstanding, we still have to fight. We need to get to the place where we can get people on board. And that means really articulating the critical provisions of the For the People Act, which are essential. That may mean that we can't have everything we want in the For the People Act, which are essential. That may mean that we can't

have everything we want in the For the People Act, but we must have enough to preserve access to the ballot. And I think what we saw happen in Texas, what happened in Georgia, what happened in Florida, what happened in Arizona, what's about to happen in Ohio, what happened in Oklahoma and in Kansas and in Iowa signal that this is not a limited issue. This is not a Southern issue. This is not a Black issue. This is a citizenship democracy issue, and it is a continuation of the insurrection. And I know that Senator Manchin and Senator Sinema have both signaled that they believe that the insurrection was wrong, and thus we should be holding them accountable and providing the evidence necessary to demonstrate that if you disagreed with the attempt to dismantle our

democracy on January 6th, you should disagree with this coordinated attack on our democracy at the state level. Have you had any conversations with Manchin or Sinema about this topic? I have not. Do you think you might? I would hope so. But part of my responsibility is to make certain that we as a nation are speaking with one voice about this issue, that we move this beyond a conversation of what happened in November of 2020 to a conversation of what is going to happen to us in 2030, if or 2022 or 2024, if we do not address this triple assault on our democracy. You mentioned making sure that a final bill had the most critical provisions of H.R. 1

of the For the People Act. What do you think are like that we can't live without provisions in that bill? So I would start with what's happening at the state level to signal. So there are three pieces. One is the anti-voter provisions that are sweeping our country. And that means that we have to protect voters in their right to access, the right to register, the right to stay on the rolls, their right to cast a ballot and the right to have those ballots counted. So can you register and stay? Can you cast? Can you count? That means we have to have automatic voter registration, same day registration.

We have to have in-person early voting no matter where you live, because we no longer live in an agrarian economy where everyone can take off Tuesday in November to go and vote. And we have to have no excuses absentee balloting because the Republican intent is to limit voting to a single day unless you are infirm, disabled, elderly, or in the military. Those should not be the only exceptions we make to a system that was put in place long before our economy evolved, before our nation evolved. So we have to push back against the anti-voter provisions. The second wave of attack is against election workers themselves. And we are seeing this play out in response to the horrific lies told about election workers in Michigan and in Georgia and in Arizona.

And a number of these laws are weakening their protections, increasing their liability, and putting them in harm's way by allowing more poll watchers, meaning poll intimidators, to come in and question their work without evidence or without knowledge. And then the third attack that's happening is that we are watching a subversion of American democracy by allowing legislators, people in power to overturn the outcome of elections. I mean, in Texas, the bill that was stopped briefly,

unfortunately it will come back in special session, said that you could try to overturn an election without proof of fraud, which means that you just don't have, if you just don't like the outcome, and there are going to be those who push back and say, that's not what it says exactly, but I'm a good enough lawyer. And it's similar to what they've done in Georgia. When laws are this porous, and when they're this poorly written and this hidden from investigation, you know that the intention is to allow the unspoken to become the rule. And when we can have our elections overturned by the bad actions of others, that is deeply problematic. Right now, the For the People Act addresses the anti-voting provisions.

There are conversations about adding more protections in for election workers and the subversion of democracy. But those are the three pieces that we're going to absolutely have to move if we want to see sound elections heading forward. I'm really interested in that last part, because I know a lot of people have pointed out that the current version of the For the People Act doesn't include enough protections around election subversion. Have you heard of legislative

proposals anywhere that would address that, whether it's a state legislature overturning the election, whether it's the House of Representatives, whether it's a county board, a secretary of state's office? Obviously, Republicans are trying to plant Trumpy people in all of these offices. But how do we prevent against that? What can we do to prevent election subversion? So they're not only trying to plant people in, they're actually trying to strip people of power, what they did to Secretary of State Katie Hobbs. And we've seen vestiges of this when Republicans won recent elections, they go in and strip the constitutional officers of power that people have enjoyed for or that these offices

have held for decades, if not centuries. enjoyed for or that these offices have held for decades if not centuries. So what we know is that this is a new this is a new phenomenon and so I don't think legislation has been introduced but I have great faith that legislation will soon follow because we're just now seeing this play out. Now we've been warning about it for a while but now that we actually see it happening when the new you know when the Heritage Action Fund for America acknowledges their intention, I think that finally signals that we need legislative action. So my hope is that as this bill moves forward, if amendments are allowed, that we will see the kind of amendments necessary to protect against what is happening at the state level. You and I have talked before about how one of the more pernicious aspects of voter

suppression is that it makes people think this just isn't worth it. I might as well stay home. If this round of voter restrictions becomes law, or at least if some of them become law, how do we get people to believe that their vote in 2022 matters and will be counted? By talking about what's happening now. as long as this is framed as Democrats versus Republicans, as progressives versus conservatives, it's a pox on all your houses. But when we frame this for voters as a conversation about your right to be heard in the future, if you were unhappy with the response in your community to COVID-19 and you want to have a say the next election, this is going to be a problem. If your children didn't have access to the technology they needed to participate

in remote learning, the school board elections matter. And these laws are not just about the presidential election. These laws, once they become inculcated into our fabric, they affect every election and every facet of life. And so we've got to talk about this as one, an attack on democracy, and two, an attack on community. When you are being told as a community that you will not have the right to make decisions without someone coming in and possibly overturning your choice, regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, as a citizen, that is a subversion of democracy. And so I think the way we get people on board is that we do what we're trying to do through StopGemPro2.com, which is that we're talking about voter suppression every day.

The more we talk about it, the more people realize this is a systematic attack on their right to vote and for communities of color in particular, it's been a systemic issue. But that we have to frame this as a systematic attack that can only be thwarted the same way we took action in 2020 and 2021. And that's by showing up and declaring what we want. Speaking of 2022, what, if anything, would prevent you from being a candidate for governor of Georgia? I figured I'd try it that way. And that's a novel approach, nicely done. My focus right now is on making sure we have elections, but I'm also really focused on making sure

that the work that I need to do doesn't get clouded by conversations about what I may want personally. This is an all call. And my responsibility as someone who is speaking about this issue is to be solely and singularly focused on how we make our democracy stronger. And so I'm not making any decisions

about my personal investment anytime soon. Do you have a timeline in mind? Because I know that for the 18 race, it was June of this year, the year before the race that you made the formal announcement that you were running. I don't have a timeline. I will say this. It's very different where I was in 17 versus where I am now. That is true. It's different. And part of what I hope for is that we are building an infrastructure for Georgia and for the country that doesn't require that kind of advanced behavior.

Luckily, the infrastructure we built in 2017 morphed into the infrastructure that became Fair Fight. I do not intend to leverage it for any other purpose than to fight for democracy. But what I mean is that infrastructure that made it possible for more voters to be heard, which is what my campaign was grounded in. It was grounded in turning out voters who had not been heard before. As long as that work continues, as long as we continue to amplify the voices of citizens, lift up the needs of residents and community members, then that work is good and that work is being done. And I've got some time to think about the rest. Can we nerd out about writing for a few questions?

Okay. So I got into bed the other night and my wife, Emily, was reading your latest novel, While Justice Sleeps. And she had this like pained expression on her face. And I was like, do you not like it? And she said, no, I love it. But I can barely respond to emails like, how on earth does Stacey Abrams find time to write a novel while she's flipping Georgia? Which I thought would be a good question to ask you. What made you want to write this in the middle of everything else you're doing? And how

do you find the time? When do you write? Okay. So in defense of everyone, I wrote this book actually a decade ago and could not get anyone to buy it because they thought that there was absurd that there would be a corrupt president involved in international intrigue or that the Supreme Court would matter. Well, that's fun. Yeah. So once those became prescient, I went from being absurd to being prescient, then people were willing to buy the book. And I did spend a lot of 2019 and early 2020 tweaking it and bringing it up to speed. There were a few anachronistic moments in the book.

Like Avery Keene had a flip phone when I wrote it. There were no smartphones to be heard of. So I had to fix some of those pieces. There were some DC folks who pointed out that when I lived in DC, what Adams Morgan was like before gentrification is not where it is today. That is true. In the last 10 years. But I write because I love telling stories.

And I try to make sure I carve out time for myself when I've got a story to tell or when I have a book contract to get the book done. And as you know, John, the impetus of a contract that either want the book or their money back gets you to write really fast. Yeah, that is true. Do you find it easier to write your novels or your political speeches? And which do you enjoy more? So I actually don't write most of my speeches down. I tend to speak extemporaneously. So I usually have a, you know, you sort of figure out your general themes and I react to the crowd when I do speeches. My nonfiction writing is just a different type of writing. But for me, I've always written fiction and nonfiction at the same time. I wrote my romance novels when I was writing, you know, my treatises on tax exemptions and the unrelated business income tax

policies. So for me, it's just two different sides of my brain, but it's the same. I'd say that's some real compartmentalization right there, writing a treatise on task laws while you're writing romance novels. Not too many people do that, I imagine. I'm in a small club, yes. How has being a novelist affected how you think about political communication? Because, you know, I certainly, I had the experience of writing with Barack Obama, and he wasn't a novelist, but he was a writer. And watching his transition from being a writer into being sort of a political speaker was interesting to watch. But someone who's written fiction, I'd be even more interested to know how you see that.

Whether it's politics or advocacy or business or writing. It's all about telling a good story. And when I say good story, it's about one, making sure your audience can situate themselves in your narrative. Two, that they share your vision for what is to be. And three, that you are so compelling in your imaginings that it feels possible and real. Those are things that you have

to do no matter where you are in the universe of behaviors. And for me, it's self-reinforcing. If I'm a good fiction writer, it's because I have to bring enough pathos and humanity to what I say. If I'm writing well in nonfiction, it's because I can take what seems like a stultifying, if not absolutely paralyzingly boring topic and make you care about it for a while. And when I'm talking, when giving political speeches, whether I'm talking about free port exemptions or criminal justice reform, you've got to believe not only that it's possible, but that you have a role to play in making it so. And so I see it all as a through line. So you talked about story. When it comes to the broader story that Democrats tell about what

we're for and who we're fighting for, there's been this long running debate. I know you're very familiar with it over how much the party should emphasize issues of class and economics versus issues of race and identity. I don't know if you saw this study that came out of Yale last month, but these two political scientists, Micah English and Joshua Kala, asked 5,000 people about six policies using different messaging frames. Central finding of their study was that linking public policies to race is detrimental for support of those policies. Now, you've waited on this larger debate before in a brilliant foreign affairs essay about identity politics, which everyone should go read if you haven't. But what do you think about those findings and what they say about how

Democrats should frame messages and support for policies? I begin by critiquing the comparison to Republicans. Republicans are largely a very homogenous party with a fairly unitary notion of what their mission is. Democrats are everyone else. And so even with a study with 5,000 people, you're not, 5,000 people are not going to vote the same way. And you've got to piece together a coalition that of that 5,000 will include the 300. I'm making that number up because I didn't read the study. The 300 people for whom race was resonant, in fact, was the most important part of it. If you leave them out, that is the margin by which you lose an election because they

don't show up. And this notion that we can be so reductive in our politics on the Democratic side, as we have seen be so successful for Republicans, ignores the complexity of our party and the range of needs of our constituents. My point is not that we have to have this overly simplistic messaging, but we've got to be clear about why we're talking about what we're talking about and who we're talking to. I mean, just going to your earlier question about the timing when I started running in 2017, I had to talk to people who had never heard from a politician and that took a lot of time. And I had to be very specific in my conversations. I told the same story everywhere,

but I made certain that I made the story relevant to each person. And so sometimes the relevance of a policy is about the race experience. Some it's about the class experience. For others, it's a geography issue. For some, it's tangential to their identity, but central to their future. And the role of a good politician and the effectiveness of a party is the ability to walk chew gum at the same time and to understand that they're going to be those who join us part of the way and who peel off. And our mission is to make sure they're not peeling off to go to the other side. They're just peeling off because they got distracted and we've got to go and get them

again. That's the most effective way for us to message. But this notion that we have to ignore factions of our community in order to satisfy and mollify those for whom this is discomforting is exactly how we lose elections. And I'm hopeful that because of the proof points of so many communities of color showing up in 2020 and 2021 in Georgia, that we have seen that it is worthwhile to have multiple conversations as long as we have the same core message, which is that we are here with you, for you, and we are about you. So one more language question for you about sort of the most effective way for Democrats to talk about particularly issues of race and identity. Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville

stirred up a debate last month. He gave this interview to Vox where he said, you know, wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it. We have to talk about race. We should talk about racial injustice. What I'm saying is we need to do it without using jargony language that's unrecognizable to most people, including most black people, because it signals that you're trying to talk around them. The example he uses are words like Latinx and phrases like communities of color, which he calls faculty lounge language that most people don't use. Now, since you just helped flipped a red Southern state for the first time since James won his last election in 1992, I figured I would ask you for your reaction to that as someone who thinks a lot about language and communication. And like you just said, has gone to communities where people

have never heard from a politician, let alone have heard progressive language? Again, it depends on who you're talking to. The language that's sometimes dismissed as jargony sounds jargony to older people. But if you're in a room with 18 to 22-year-olds having a conversation about race and you don't understand their lexicon, you are going to lose them. So you've got to be, we have to be fluent in multiple languages, including what can be termed derogatively as wokeness. It's not that. It's about being able to meet people where they are. And that language is very pervasive for a segment of the population that we need to have turnout to vote.

There are other communities where I would never use language like that, but I need to have every set of conversations in my back pocket so that when I'm talking to a community, they believe that I understand them, or at least that we are starting with the same baseline. And so I don't think he's wrong, but I do think there's something that is slightly off key

when you presume that every that your experience is normative for everyone there are communities for whom they need to hear you use their language and reflection of their experiences because that's how they describe it to themselves and we've got a lot of communities for whom what's dismissed as wokeness is more, this is the first time we've had language to describe our experiences of these issues in our moment in this political space. And it's an important thing for us to be able to differentiate. Yes, use the language that makes the most sense where you are, but don't ignore or dismiss the language that works in other places. Last question, because we always like to give our listeners something to do and you do great calls to action. If people are worried about voting rights right now and the

attack on voting rights and they are calling their representatives and they're talking to a Joe Manchin or a Kyrsten Sinema, what should their message be? What would your message be? One, that our democracy is in peril and that January 6th wasn't an anomaly. It was a call to action for so many. And our response has to be defending our democracy by leveraging it as best we can. talk about voter suppression and we've got to use real stories and real examples. And we've got to talk about it everywhere. This isn't a Southern problem. This isn't a Republican problem. This is an American problem. And we've got to keep talking about it, especially on social media, particularly outside of Twitter, because the disinformation campaign that is happening is so aggressive that we've got to be everywhere telling the counter narrative, talking up the For the People Act, talking up the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and talking about the fact

that voter suppression is real. Number two, support all of the voting rights organizations where you live, because even if it's not happening to your community on the macro level, strengthening voting rights everywhere strengthens it for everyone. And then number three, call your congressmen, congresswomen, call your senators and demand that they pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. And to get all this in a much more succinct form,

go to stopjimcrowto.com. Outstanding. Stacey Abrams, thank you so much for joining us as always. Come back anytime. We really appreciate the time. Thank you, John. And please tell Emily, thank you for reading my book. I will for sure.

Take care. Thanks to Stacey Abrams for joining us today. Rhodes, thank you for being our co-host. This was a lot of fun. Everyone, please go buy After the Fall. It's an outstanding book. Go sign up right now if you haven't already. Yeah, thanks, guys. It was a great ride along.

As I've said on Pods of the World, this is the audience I wrote the book for. It's really good to speak to the Thursday pod audience as well. It was great. Awesome. Well, good to have you here. Bye, everyone. Bye, everyone. See ya. Podsave America is a Crooked Media production.

The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas. Our associate producers are Jazzy Marine and Olivia Martinez. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmal Konian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as videos every week.