Pod Save America - “Horseshoes and hand grenades.”

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

Tuesday’s special election and primaries deliver some Democratic victories and a warning against complacency, another Republican is indicted for corruption, and Dan offers tempered thoughts on Mark Leibovich’s Paul Ryan profile. Then Matt Rivitz of Sleeping Giants talks to Tommy about their success in persuading companies to remove ads from right-wing news outlets that promote bigotry and hate.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the pod, you'll hear an interview Tommy did with Matt Rivets from Sleeping Giants. We're also going to take a deep dive into the results of Tuesday's primary and special elections. Also, there's a new Pod Save the World out featuring an interview with Isabel Young, a correspondent for Vice on HBO. Tommy talked with her about her recent reporting trips to Raqqa, Syria, and Yemen. Isabel interviewed two of the most cruel and notorious ISIS terrorists in Raqqa

and tells Tommy what it's like to sit across from someone that evil. You'll also want to check out the new episode of Pod Save the People, where you can hear an interview with Beto O'Rourke. And on this week's episode of The Wilderness, we talk about the politics of immigration and what Democrats should say and do about the issue. This is one of my favorite episodes some of the people who've been on the front lines of the immigration fights for the last few decades tell some very moving stories about the fight for a better immigration policy um dan how you doing you're uh you're on vacation right now you're the only member of pod save amer who, when he's on vacation,

still does the pod. You're making us all look bad. Well, I am on vacation. I am in the home state of past great President Barack Obama and home state of future great President Brian Schatz. You're in Kenya? Oh, sorry. Yeah, I am in Kenya via Indonesia, yes. I am doing the pod in part because I took many weeks off in the back a few months ago, and you guys had your vacations, and we had an election, and I thought it would be fun to talk about an election, which is always better and more interesting to talk about Trump's tweets. But we will talk about Trump's tweets about the election, just to be clear,

in case anyone is here for the Trump tweet content. We are both huge election nerds. I'm excited to talk about it as well. So there were elections in Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, Kansas, and Washington State on Tuesday. Let's start with the special election in Ohio's 12th congressional district, which remains too close to call right now. Democrat Danny O'Connor is trailing Republican Troy Balderson by about 1,700 votes. Actually, right now it's 1,500 votes because there was apparently a counting error in Franklin County. And there's about 3,400 provisional ballots and up to 5,000 absentee ballots left to be counted by the August 24th deadline. If O'Connor wins roughly 60% of those outstanding ballots, he'd take the seat. If not, he will have come less than 1% shy of winning a seat that Trump and Romney won by 11 points,

a seat that Democrats haven't won since the 1980s. Dan, do you see this result as good news, bad news, or eh, whatever? Somewhere between good news and eh, whatever. And I say that because you've got to look at these things in two ways, right? Ultimately, the goal of campaigns is to win seats in Congress, and we have not yet done that. I mean, if we're being totally frank and honest with the listeners, it'd be really hard to have those sorts of margins in the provisional ballots and to make up that deficit out of that many votes. But we got to count the votes. We got to see how it goes.

The no news part is, it tells us something we already knew, which is that Democrats seem well positioned to take the House and win elections up and down the ballot. And we've now looked at special elections in California, the South in Georgia, Pennsylvania, deep red states like Kansas, and then here in sort of the bellwether state of presidential elections, historically Ohio, and they all tell you the same thing. There is a consistent message about Democratic enthusiasm, trumping, no pun intended, where the Republican voters are. So that is a good positive takeaway from this. But ultimately, you want to have more people in Congress. But even if we had won this one, it's Daniel O'Connor would be running again, as he will be in a few months.

Right. Yeah, that was my first thought about this. These two are going to face each other again in a couple months. Danny O'Connor or Troy Balderson, more likely at this point Troy Balderson, whoever goes to Congress. Not going to do much. Not many votes in the next couple months. So, you know, there's focusing a lot on the race for a very little time period before they face each other again. Look, obviously, there are no moral victories here. You know, my dad always says there's no such thing as close except in horseshoes and hand grenades. But depending on what rating you use, we also know that there are between 60 and 70 Republican held seats that

lean more Democratic than the Ohio 12th. There are more than 100 less Republican seats than the District Connor Lamb one in Pennsylvania. And of course, as we all know, we need 23 seats to take the House. So I mean, my thought is, look, if we are out there losing special elections that are, you know, R plus one, R plus two, R plus three, R plus four, I'd be worried. I think that's bad news for Democrats. Those are the kind of seats Democrats absolutely need to win to take back the House. This is an R plus seven district. And I should say, in case people don't know, when I say R plus seven, this is the Cook Part voting index, which means that an R plus seven district means that the district voted an average of seven points more Republican than the rest of the country did over the last two

presidential elections. So that's how they tabulate this stuff. So this is a, it's a very deeply Republican district and our path to the house, taking back the House, probably runs through districts that are much less Republican than that, right? I mean, yeah, that is very clear. And if you look at these elections in two ways, like one, how does it affect the balance of the House in the immediate term? And what does it tell you about November? And the signs are good, but there's, you know, I guess there are what, like 90-some days left till the midterm elections. But that is a long time with a lot of work to do to make that come to fruition

because we do have to be honest about something. Even though these were all hard races in really hard districts we had no business competing in, we still only won one of the nine contested special elections that took place. And so that is something. And you can say that maybe we would have won in better districts, but we did not. At least in this case, I don't want to, like this has not been called yet, but we have

not yet won this district. And if we had won it, that would have been better in the short term. It would have meant we needed one less seat, essentially, to beat one less incumbent. And it would have just been very enjoyable to watch the utter complete meltdown of Republicans. This is almost like a tie. Nothing changed in anyone's perception of anything from Monday night to Wednesday morning. It's sort of, this is what we thought the political landscape looked like.

This is what we, how many seats we think the Democrats need to win. Here's where we are. It's also, it's a good reminder that Democrats cannot be complacent, that every single fucking vote matters in these elections, that a lot of these districts could come down to a couple hundred votes a couple thousand votes and that means that like every

phone call matters every time you knock on a door it matters every dollar you can give to these races matters um you know of course danny o'connor was way outspent by Republican-aligned groups helping Troy Balderson. So, you know, this is going to be a fight every single day from now until November to win the House. It's just not going to happen automatically because we think that Donald Trump screwed up or said something wrong or fucking sent out a bad tweet or whatever might have happened. Like, these are districts. or fucking sent out a bad tweet, or whatever might have happened. Like, these are districts, and when you're trying to, you know, these are districts that don't really change too much from election to election. And even with this huge swing towards the Democrats, as we've seen in all these special elections,

we're also seeing that in some of these Republican districts that are very gerrymandered, you can get close, but not quite all the way there. Yeah, and, you know, one of the arguments that, arguments that, sort of the negative spin against Republicans in this is they basically had to spend, like throw every resource they possibly had. Mike Pence, Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., which I can't imagine is an actual resource, but all this money, all these ads,

and that that is not replicable in 70 other districts. And that is true, that is not replicable in 70 other districts. And that is true. It is not replicable in 70 other districts. But there is a pretty bottomless well of Republican billionaire money hoping to protect their tax cuts. And so the Republicans will be able to... The Democratic challengers have done a great job outraising Republicans. The Republican groups will be able to spend a lot of money in the most targeted districts and dramatically outspend. So they have money, we have enthusiasm and organization, and we have to pair those two things together by getting every single person, not just to vote, but to volunteer, make phone calls, et cetera, as you were saying.

Yeah. I mean, I think I saw the other day that Sheldon Adelson just cut another $30 million check for the Republicans to take to keep the House, which, you know, could happen any number of times, whether it's Sheldon Adelson or some other asshole between now and in November. What, if anything, does the race tell you about what kind of voters are trending Democrat and Republican and sort of the shift from 2016 to 2018. I know you mentioned that, you know, turnout was obviously way up in the more Democratic areas and way down in the more Republican areas, or at least up by not as much in Republican areas. But what did you see in the race about, you know, sort of the kind of voters that are trending toward each party?

Well, we're continuing to see Democratic strength in the suburbs, right? And that is what has helped us remain competitive in districts that we should never have a chance in. It is what gives Democrats great hope about taking the House is that there are all these districts that are in suburban, urban or suburban areas that are either the districts that Clinton won in 2016 or districts that are much closer that where you've seen a shift, where you were seeing Republicans underperform, as they did in 2016, in suburban areas, yet still overperform in rural and blue-collar, exurban and rural areas. Now, the Democratic overperformance in suburban areas is exceeding the amount of Republican overperformance

in the rural areas, but still, if we want to go into Election Day 2018 with as wide a playing field as possible we need to have more districts in play than just the ones that are primarily suburban. If we run the table on the suburban ones we will take the house but if you want to have a true

wave we have to put some of these other districts whether they're ones in Ohio other parts of Pennsylvania, upstate New York in play and that means winning back either getting people to turn out in these districts who did not turn out in 2014 or 2000, or maybe even 2016, and getting some voters who either voted third party or reluctantly voted for Trump to actually just pull the lever for a Democrat. Right. Yeah. I mean, in Ohio 12, in Franklin County, which was the most affluent, well-educated, diverse part of the district, Obama won that by three points.

Hillary won by 18 points. And Danny O'Connor last night won it by 30 points. In the most rural areas, you saw Balderson sort of like, you know, almost, the key word is almost, match Trump's margins, which were huge in those rural areas, you saw Balderson sort of like, you know, almost, keywords almost, match Trump's margins, which were huge in those rural areas. The interesting part was Delaware County in the Ohio 12th, which is also well-educated, but more of an exurb, like further from Columbus. And Danny O'Connor made some gains there, but not enough. That's sort of where he fell a little short. And I found this fascinating from Ron Brownstein writing in The Atlantic today. He said 45% of college-educated white men disapproved of Trump in the Ohio 12th, but O'Connor only won 36% of them.

60% of college-educated white women disapproved of Trump, but he only won 50% of them. And yet, O'Connor got almost all of the non-college-educated white voters who disapproved of Trump. So these non-college-educated white voters who are, like, so heavily for Trump, if they did disapprove of Trump, these Obama-Trump voters, then, you know, he got their votes. But there are still this set of country club Republicans who have not left the party, who may not like Trump, but they're hard for Democrats to reach, and they still seem to be voting Republican. What do you make of that, and what do you think that tells us about Democratic message, who we should be trying to reach, et cetera? you know, democratic message, who we should be trying to reach, etc. It's a couple things, but it's a fascinating statistic. And it does, I think, speak a little bit to why presidential elections and congressional elections are different.

Like those voters may be actually more available to a Democratic nominee in 2020 against Trump than they are to Danny O'Connor, for instance, right? Because this is sort of where political tribalism and party identity are so strong. I would guess that the people that Ron Brown is talking about are very consistent voters. They've been voting for Republicans in Congress as long as they've been voting. And so to step away from that and vote for a Democrat is very challenging, even if they don't like Trump. And so finding ways to message those voters is very interesting and very challenging, because what you don't want to do, like, and this is in no way an argument, in fact, it's an argument against this idea that we should, you know, sort of tack argument against this idea that we should, you know, sort of tack to the middle to try to get these voters. That is not the way to do it. I think the way to do it is to run harder against the Trump Republican culture corruption in

Washington. And you have to do a better job of tying the Republicans and Trump together if you want to get those voters. I think the same economic populist arguments that are actually, I think, working not just with millennials and the Obama coalition, but I think also have real currency with these quote-unquote blue-collar voters in these more exurban rural areas, it's the same message that will work with these people. Well, you won't get all of them, but you do have to make the Republicans part of the Trump problem and not somehow separate. And this is a little bit of a corollary to the challenge that the congressional Democrats had when Obama was running and not on

the ballot, was even though Obama was clearly a Democrat, clearly supporting Democrats, was, even though Obama was clearly a Democrat, clearly supporting Democrats, he seemed somewhat removed from politics as usual. Maybe it was his personality, his message. He looked and acted different than most politicians. And so he had limited coattails when not on the ballot. And it may be that in some of these areas, Trump has limited drag because they don't really think of him as a Republican. They think of him as sort of this party crasher. And I think we have to do more to tie them together. And when we talk about Chris Collins getting arrested today, I think you can see some seeds of what kind of message you would want to Yeah. And look, there's some evidence that Democrats not trying to target their message towards some of these like, you know, more affluent college educated Republicans instead have a more populist argument sort of targeted at Trump's corruption and economic populism might work.

noted that O'Connor actually outperformed Clinton by small but non-trivial margins in the more blue-collar small-town counties. And O'Connor's pollster, Jason McGrath, said that what helped in some of those counties, just taking Balderson's margin down just a little bit, was his candidates' focus on jobs, health care, and infrastructure spending. So I do think that there's evidence that some of these, and I saw this when I was doing The Wilderness and spoke to experts during that podcast too, that some of these Obama-Trump voters who still identify as Democrats tend to be more liberal, more progressive on economic issues, and by the way, some other cultural and social issues as well. And, you know, they voted for Trump for whatever reason. They thought he was going to change the system

or shake up Washington, whatever. But they are having regrets now. And if Democrats have a message that's focused on jobs, focused on health care, we may be able to win back some of them. Not all, not even most, but some of them. And that, to me, is a better strategy than trying to go after some of these country club Republicans who are still pulling the lever for people like Troy

Balderson. I think the important thing to understand is this is why some of the debates that I think are not truly happening, to the extent you would believe from reading Twitter within the Democratic Party on strategy, are somewhat pointless, which is that each district has a different mix of voters you need to win, right? The strategy that, like your voter target group that you need in California 48 could be very different than Ohio 12 or Pennsylvania 18. And then we have to have the freedom for each candidate to go in and find that out. Is the difference between winning by 1,000 or losing by 1,000 getting increasing turnout on college campuses? It may be if there is a college campus in that district, right?

Is it winning back some percentage of Trump voters? Is it holding down the Republicans' margins in these suburban counties? And each one is going to be different. Now, what I think is important to recognize is that doesn't actually require fundamentally different messages. It may require fundamentally different ways of communicating those messages. messages, but I think it is the same, like a campaign centered around healthcare taxes, running against corruption and serving as a check on Trump. That works everywhere. Now, you may strike a higher note on one of those than the other, but the core elements of the Democratic platform should work everywhere. But each district is going to be slightly different,

right? Some candidate is going to need to win back more of those Obama-Trump voters, and some candidates are going to need to hold down margins in suburban counties. And that's just sort of the nature of winning the House back. And that's why just sort of running a national campaign to win Congress back is very different than running a presidential election. So that's the Democratic strategy. Let's talk about the Republican strategy. The New York Times were in a piece on Monday about how the Republican 2018 plan is to polarize the electorate as much as possible. This is basically, you know, the message that Nancy Pelosi shows up at your house with a

bunch of MS-13 gang members and kneeling NFL players. This was basically Trump's closing message in Ohio in addition to attacking LeBron James. So, you know, did it work? Did Trump deliver the win here? Is polarizing the electorate the, uh, the best strategy for Republicans? Maybe. I look, they, they have a terrible hand, right? They have, they don't even have a pair of twos. It is a, is a shit hand. They have an unpopular president.

They have an unpopular party whose signature legislative accomplishment is incredibly unpopular. All they have is the old hits, right? And they're trying to replicate what worked for Trump, and that is a race-based appeal to fire up white voters, to scare them. It is a campaign based on fear. It worked for Trump. It may work in some of these districts. I think it seemed to have no impact in this district. The polling before the election showed this was a one-point race. Trump went in. He had his rally. He acted

like a paranoid goofball, and Balderson still is leading by a tiny fraction of a percent of a vote. Nothing seemed to change. I think the Republicans just don't have... There's nothing really available to them. They

said they were going to run on the tax plan. The tax plan is incredibly unpopular and getting more unpopular by the day, which anyone who knew anything about fucking politics could have told you the day they passed it. And we tried. We said it a lot then. We warned you, Paul Ryan. You didn't listen. We know your staff heard it.

They should have listened to us. Ryan, you didn't listen. We know your staff heard it. They should have listened to us. So I think the only thing they can do is what they did, which is, you were right, it is Colin Kaepernick showing up at your home with MS-13 and Nancy Pelosi. That is sort of... That's the nightmare. And what it probably does, to the extent that that has any impact at all, if that strategy can have any impact, it is going to be the difference between Democrats taking 70 seats and 50 seats, right? It is going to be more likely to have an impact on those sort of marginal, those so far stretch seats that Democrats hope to win than it would in the core set of districts that are the ones that are the most likely to tip the house towards the Democrats. Yeah. And you're absolutely right that every district is different and every state is

different. I mean, clearly the strategy did not work in Virginia. It failed miserably in Virginia. Ralph Northam crushed Ed Gillespie. But also, you know, Virginia is a state that is trending blue in a very rapid way. But I think it's interesting, like, the more they try this strategy, the more they whip up these cultural battles, there is evidence that it's going to turn off a lot of these college-educ, um, even more, you know, the in districts like in some of these California districts and districts and, you know, basically a lot of these districts that Hillary Clinton won, where there's still a Republican sitting in that district representing the district in the house. Um, so, you know, it's not like, uh, this is without, you know, it's not a zero-sum game here.

You know, you ramp up the base a little bit and you could lose some of these college-educated voters. Yeah, that's exactly right. And it just, it also feels like it's starting to feel old and tired, right? Every Trump tweet about every Republican is strong on border, strong on crime, strong on the Second Amendment. And then every Democrat is soft on MS-13, soft on crime, weak border. Nancy Pelosi puppet, raise your taxes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it was never great.

It was never a compelling message. It feels like a little more old and faded and tired every time Trump tweets it. Cause no, it's like you can like you, it has exhaustion dripping off of it. Everyone. It's like,

it's like everyone's just playing the role of what they're supposed to do. Cause they don't have anything else to do. Like you, even when you hear like Corey bliss, who is the head of Paul Ryan ryan's super pack the congressional leadership fund which has i think the most money of any group other than the coke brothers and they have a shit load of the coke brothers money because they did that whole money laundering scheme legal money laundering scheme of giving the coke brothers a tax cut and then getting a cut of that tax cut

um like they when you hear these guys talk, they're just, they, like, they know they're like immigration, MS-13, there's no enthusiasm for this because they know it has real, it has real limits. Not a lot of feeling behind it. Um, there was some feeling behind Trump's tweet this morning, or I guess it was late last night, uh, Tuesday night. When I decided to go to Ohio for Troy Balderson, he was down in early voting 64-36. That was not good. After my speech on Saturday night, there was a big turn for the better.

Now Troy wins a great victory during a very tough time of year for voting. He will win big in November. He also then tweeted Wednesday morning, five for five, which I don't even know what that meant. And then later he tweeted tweeted red wave in all capital letters um it's always you know fraught to try to talk about like what was behind these tweets or what he was thinking um obviously there's a possibility that it was just you know typical Trump neediness um do you think there's any strategy behind it what do you think he's trying to do here well at first at first, he's really,

I hate to say this about the President of the United States, but he is painfully stupid. Painfully stupid. It's just, it is so, like he doesn't understand early vote, what that means. He thought it was smart to suggest the Republican wanted a tough time of the year without voting, which I guess is August.

Yeah, I don't know what that means. A tough time of the year without voting about voting which i guess is august like august yeah what did i mean the tough time a year for voting i guess when you were super rich and you spend that time at your golf club uh it doesn't seem like an ideal time for voting i don't know but also democrats also had to vote if it was a tough time for republicans vote it was also a tough time for democrats so i mean it's just so asinine. I mean, it's just, it's... Red wave, too. Imagine just tweeting red wave. Like, okay, buddy. Yeah. And I am, so I am curious,

is Trump seems like someone who doesn't go out in search of information that contradicts his point of view. So, and he does seem like someone that like anyone in his staff who would tell him bad information seems to have left or quit to spend more time with the grand jury. And so it's, I think he probably believes that a red wave is around the corner. That it, that, you know, he's been talking to Hannity, talking to Jeanine Pirro, master political strategist, and checking out those Rasmussen poll numbers. And he thinks, yeah, we're probably going to win.

And so he may actually believe this. Good. I hope they all believe it. Yeah, good. Because I want the surprise of the century. Don't worry about it. Don't work hard. It's fine.

The red wave is coming, Republicans. Just let it happen. Don't worry too much about it. I want you to prepare yourself for this now because this will be the thing that makes your head explode. worry too much about it. I want you to prepare yourself for this now because this will be the thing that makes your head explode. It will be after the election, if the Democrats take the House, when Trump tweets

blaming the Russians for helping the Democrats. That will be the thing that causes you to spontaneously combust in the crooked media offices. I was trying to think about that, but I couldn't get my head I couldn't imagine past the election any kind of good feeling about us winning because i i couldn't get my head i couldn't imagine past the election any kind of

good feeling about us winning because i just i can't get myself there so that's that's what's prevented me from imagining that scenario i think that's a bad feeling because that would be so annoying that and then like fox would be like did did the russians help the democrats we have no evidence that they didn't and so and it'll just be like hillary, collusion, DNC server, all in the same tweet. Now, here would be the argument. If Donald Trump was capable of two-dimensional thinking, which I do not believe that he is, then this would be the strategy, which is Republicans are disenchanted. Like there's a self-fulfilling prophecy to Republican disenchantment, which is they are

disenchanted. Everyone, the press says they're disenchanted. They think they're going to lose. And therefore which is they are disenchanted. The press says they're disenchanted. They think they're going to lose, and therefore they become more disenchanted, and it just sort of spirals on itself. We've seen this happen before. Now, Karl Rove, back when he was a person in politics, had a theory of politics where basically that if you say you're winning, you're more likely to win, because people want to hop on the winning train as opposed to staying off the losing train, however that metaphor extends itself. So he had this theory in 2000 where he would go around and they leaked to reporters that

they saw a surge in California. And even in 2000, they sent Dick Cheney to Hawaii, where I am right now, because they said they saw something in their polling that said that Hawaii was in play. And the idea is like you want to create the idea of momentum. And so theoretically, like I said, theoretically, this could be at what a more intelligent person with a more coherent Twitter account would be trying to do, which is to try to, you know, and then, because especially if you have a massive propaganda operation to leverage it, you can convince people that maybe you can win, and therefore there is a reason to turn out, or a reason to volunteer, a reason to donate money. Supposedly we're just going to lose anyway, so why the fuck should I care? Which is kind of where I think they're afraid their voters are right now. I'm still trying to imagine who, which reporter, which person in America would have believed

there's a close race in Hawaii and one man could tip the balance and that man is Dick Cheney. John, you were a young boy back then. You didn't know about the pre-911. You didn't know about the pre-911 Dick Cheney? Yeah, well, I mean, he beat Joe Lieberman in a debate. That was pretty embarrassing for the Gore campaign.

Also nominating Joe Lieberman to be the vice president was embarrassing to the Gore campaign. That was before he started a bunch of wars in the Middle East. That's right. Yeah, yeah. It was very different. He was known as the quintessential government bureaucrat. Just real solid guy. Yeah, it seems crazy now. These were different times.

All right, so there were also primaries on Tuesday night in Michigan, Kansas, Washington State, and Missouri. A lot of the national coverage focused on the races where progressive candidates with insurgent campaigns were running with support from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, a former leader of the state senate there, won the Democratic nomination for governor over our friend Abdul Al-Saeed, who Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez recently campaigned with. Whitmer's nomination means that a record 11 women are running for governor this year. There are currently only six women governors, so hope that changes.

Also in Michigan, Rashida Tlaib won the Democratic primary in John Conyers' old district and is on path to be the first Muslim woman ever elected to Congress, also the first Palestinian American ever elected to Congress. In Missouri, William Lacey Clay held off a challenge from Cori Bush. In Kansas, Sharice Davids, an openly LGBT Native American attorney and former MMA fighter, won the Democratic nomination against the Sanders-backed Brent Welder. Dan, you'll be surprised to learn that there were plenty of piping hot takes about what this all means for the Democratic Party, Democratic Socialists. A Politico headline read, Down Goes Socialism. Jim Kessler from the Centrist Third Way organization

told Dave Weigel of the Washington Post that Tuesday night was a victory for, quote, centrist Democrats, saying, quote, there's a quiet enthusiasm in the middle. What do you think of that? Do last night's results say anything about the broader appeal of Democratic socialist policies or even lefty progressive policies or Bernie Sanders or Ocasio-Cortez or any of that stuff? I mean, we can't even decide what the debate is, right? Is this a debate between the establishment versus anti-establishment? Is this a debate between, is this a question about Bernie Sanders's political appeal? Is it a question of, you're right, progressive versus centrist policies? And the answer to all of those is no.

Now let's take the Kansas example. So it's like, is this in a victory for traditional establishment Democrats, the lesbian Native American woman defeated the white guy? Right? It's like Gretchen Whitmer, who was a great candidate, expanded Medicaid and helped expand Medicaid in Michigan. A Republican state. Yeah, who was a great candidate, expanded Medicaid and helped expand Medicaid in Michigan.

A Republican state. It's done very good things. Yeah, she did a great job there. Yeah. Like, this was a battle. Sometimes this is a battle between two good candidates endorsed by two different groups of people. And it has a lot to do with the individual candidates, individual states, and it doesn't

tell you anything broader. Also, like, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an incredibly impressive leader. She was awesome on the podcast that came out on Tuesday. Lovett's interview with her was great. She's smart. She is compelling. I think there's an incredible amount of lessons to learn from how she ran her race that applies in blue districts, red districts, purple districts, etc. But she also was elected.

She won a Democratic primary a month ago. And we're now writing stories questioning her broader political appeal. Like, of course, like the whole thing is just so crazy. We're just trying so hard. We have to jam everything through this Democrats in disarray filter. It's the only way to do it. At a time in which the Republican Party is literally collapsing around its fucking self, we have to wonder about where, about these very, these sort of dumb, esoteric questions that do not matter to voters. That is, I promise you,

none of the voters in Michigan thought as they were going in, well, what is this? You know, I would vote for Gretchen Whitmer, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is for her. It's just, it's not how people think. They evaluate the candidates, the surrogates. Their main role is to help candidates get press and get crowds together for rallies that you can then leverage for organizing, registering to vote, volunteers, et cetera. And that's kind of the extent of it. We spend way too much time thinking about what endorsements mean, what surrogate appearances mean. It doesn't really mean a lot. This is a question of what these voters wanted and who the candidates were, full stop. Yeah. And also, none of these Democrats who won, or I guess, you know,

quote unquote, establishment Democrats could be classified as centrist Democrats, first of all. I mean, like, the difference between Abdul and Gretchen, right, was basically their position on healthcare. Gretchen was not quite for single payer healthcare. Abdul had a plan for single payer. It's one of the reasons that I liked him. But, you know, she's for $15 minimum wage. He was $15 minimum wage. He's for debt-free college. She's for, you know, two free years of community college, right? So these are, the reason that I've thought that these primaries are a good thing for the party in these challenges from whether you call them democratic socialists or justice democrats back candidates or Bernie, Cameron, whatever you want to call them.

They have pushed the party and they've pushed some of these other candidates to the left, particularly on economic issues. And I think that there is a hunger in the country right now for more economic populism. We saw that because Trump supposedly promised economically populist policies during the campaign, even though it was complete bullshit, and so did Hillary. And so there's a hunger for that out there. And I think, I mean, you've said this before, too, there's a million different factors that go into why a different candidate wins a particular race. The strength of the candidate, the makeup of the district, the policies they propose, right? So it's hard to untangle exactly what did it. But you can poll which policies are, you know, more popular in the country. We know that Medicare for All is widely popular when you ask it the right way. You know, Data for Progress, Sean McElwee's group,

and our friends at Civis Analytics, who, you know, did a lot of work for the Obama campaign. You know, just today, they pulled five progressive policies, support for large-scale investment in public housing, free tuition, paid family and medical leave, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands statehood, and worker representation on a company's board of directors. and worker representation on a company's board of directors. All five policies received net positive support with likely 2018 voters nationally and in the majority of congressional districts. Some of those policies in almost all congressional districts, especially statehood. You'll be happy to know. So, like, we know that, you know, progressive policies, and especially economically progressive policies, are popular, widely so, throughout the country.

But that doesn't necessarily mean any candidate who promotes those policies is automatically going to win in any district across the country. And I think that Ocasio-Cortez and some of those candidates realize that. They realize it's sort of a long fight. And what they're trying to do is sort of like slowly push the party to the left, win where they can, and where they don't win, you know, take a stand. And it is impossible to sort of reverse, to go sort of do an autopsy to understand exactly what happens, because like a winning campaign is some mix of message and messenger, right? Sometimes it's the right message, wrong messenger. Sometimes it's the right messenger, wrong message. And you've never, and it's. And you never really know how those percentages allocate, right? Is it 50-50? Is it 60-40? And so in some cases, to your point, the policy is very popular, but this was not the most compelling messenger to deliver it or the right messenger for the moment. Right. The other thing is that it's all in a context of a certain moment in a state. And I think there is one important thing to note, which is, you know, each of these are sort of district, you know election nights at redistrict from the Cook Report, who does some marketing with FiveThirtyEight as well, is that when there has been a Democratic primary between a man and a woman, the female candidate has won nearly 70% of the time.

Yeah. In this election cycle. In the Republican Party, it's been approximately 34%. So that is something that happens whether you're in California or Kansas. And I think it is just worth noting about where the party is, who is driving success, driving the enthusiasm and success the party's had to date. And that is a consistent theme that we should watch hitting in 2018. And frankly, something to be very curious to watch in 2020 is all these candidates decide whether

they're going to run or not. Yeah. Women candidates are running. Women candidates are winning. Women are carrying the vote for Democrats in a lot of these districts. And women are doing a lot of the work, most of the work, on the ground, volunteering, knocking on doors, making phone calls. So that is the energy that we're seeing in 2018, for sure. Yeah, we should give a shout out to two groups on that front. A couple groups, actually, more than two. Run for Something, Amanda Lippman, our friends there, who have encouraged people to run up and down the ballot, but have recruited hundreds upon hundreds of women to run for office. Emily's List, which has been training and endorsing and electing candidates.

And Emerge America, which has also been training female candidates. And all of those have had a huge impact in what we're seeing up and down the ballot since the day Donald Trump was elected. Right. So a few other results. since the day Donald Trump was elected. Right. So a few other results. In Missouri, progressive criminal justice reformer Wesley Bell ousted St. Louis prosecutor Bob McCullough, who's been criticized for the way he handled the police shooting of Michael Brown.

Bell promised to end cash bail and mass incarceration. Missouri voters also rejected the state's right-to-work law, this is big, which hadn't yet gone into effect. By huge margins, they rejected this law. The law would have allowed workers to get all the benefits of being in a union without paying dues, which is basically a way of just decimating unions. According to the Economic Policy Institute, right-to-work laws, which are now on the books in 27 states, have led to roughly 3% decline in wages

for union and non-union workers. Dan, why is that such a big deal? I mean, workers in this country have been suffering from a decades-long Republican strategy funded by big business to decimate unions, both at the federal and state level, and to eliminate collective bargaining rights, to make it so they can offer less wages and benefits, less worker safety, etc. And we have to fight back on this, and we have not. And in a state as red as Missouri, that voters overwhelmingly got rid of a right to work law. That should send a warning sign to the corporatist wing of the Republican Party, the Koch brothers, and everyone else. And it should be a signal to Democrats that in every state in which you can put this on the ballot and you need to put it on the ballot,

we should put it on the ballot because it is the right thing to do. And we have a, this is to your point about populism, that this is, you see this, people want to side with workers. And so I think it's a hugely encouraging sign and I hope we try to replicate it everywhere we can. I also, the St. Louis prosecutor, Wesley Bell's victory, is a truly wonderful thing.

And I think whether you saw this with the new district attorney in Philadelphia, or you've seen it in other urban areas around the country, where there's few things that can do more to put in place core progressive reforms than electing a criminal justice reform minded prosecutor, state's attorney, district attorney, et cetera. Huge. Yeah. It's really great news in Missouri overall. And also Republicans also knew, Republicans in Missouri knew, or at least were very worried that the right to work law would go down. And in fact, they were so worried that it was originally supposed to be voted on in November, in the November election.

But they tried to decouple it from the November election and put it during the primary on Tuesday because they were worried that it would fuel Democratic turnout in November and help Claire McCaskill keep the Senate and help some of the House candidates win. So they tried to make sure that it was during the primary and not in November. So Republicans get that these, that haven't, you know, trying to repeal right to work laws will get the base out and will, you know, gin up turnout. So you're right, we should put it on the ballot wherever we can. Finally, Democrats got some very good news in Washington state, where it looks like three seats held by Republicans could now be within reach for pickups in the fall by Democrats. Washington has a top two primary system, just like California, where the top two vote getters advance to the general election regardless of their party. This means that the California and Washington primaries are historically very predictive of what happens in the general.

In two of the races where Democrats are trying to flip seats, the Democrats running had a combined total of more votes than the Republican incumbent in In the district held by Kathy McMorris-Rogers, who's one of the Republican leaders in the House, I think she's number four, Democrat Lisa Brown was nearly tied after early returns. Does this mean, Dan, there are seats up for grabs that aren't even on most people's radar yet? That is great. Also, it is nice to the House in elections for the House, unlike the president, the person with the most votes, votes win. So that is a very encouraging sign that Democrats have more votes than Republicans. Yeah, look, in a in a wave, you can win seats anywhere and everywhere that there are seats that would seem out of reach members of Congress who seemed unbeatable who go down, which is why it is so impressive and important that Democrats have done such a good job of running candidates nearly everywhere. And so in previous years when it was harder to get people

to run for office, when people weren't as enthusiastic, when frankly the party, and by the party I don't just mean like the DCCC, but I do mean the DCCC, but also swing left, indivisible, all the outside grassroots groups. We're not working so hard to get people to run for office. We would have these districts that we could have won. We just wouldn't have had a candidate to do it. And so run everywhere, fight everywhere, compete everywhere, and we can win everywhere. We really can. The opportunity is there. It's like you can see it, right? We have everything we need to take the House back in a huge way.

We just have to get people to vote. That's all it is. It's just getting people to vote. Persuading people to vote who would not otherwise vote. Persuading people to vote for a Democrat over a Republican. Registrating people to vote. It is all right. Everything we need to fundamentally stop this White House in its tracks is right before us. We just have to do the work. And that is both tantalizing and fucking scary. Because if we blow this opportunity, it could be a generation before

we get it again. It all comes down to turnout, Dan dan that's what they say um so we'd be remiss if we didn't discuss the latest republican crime today uh federal prosecutors on wednesday charged one of donald trump's earliest congressional supporters with insider trading congressman chris collins of new york has been accused of scheming with his kid to avoid losses in a biotechnology investment. Prosecutors said he tipped off his son with inside information about bad trial results. Dan, is that bad? That sounds bad. Yeah, that definitely seems bad. I think this is not a New York Times investigative story suggesting that he did something wrong.

He was arrested. No, he's been arrested. He was arrested. No, he's been arrested. He was arrested for allegedly committing a crime. And I think there's several things here. One, this is yet another argument for why Democrats can and should be running on the culture of corruption in Washington. And it's not just that Republicans are corrupt. It's the Democrats have to be pushing an agenda of congressional reform, which is sometimes uncomfortable for Democrats because they are also in Congress. But we need ethics reform.

So Jake Sherman of Politico Playbook fame asked this question on Twitter. A question I've gotten a lot in the last few hours was, how was Chris Collins, a member of Congress, allowed to serve on a board of a publicly traded pharmaceutical company when serving? To add to that, Collins was on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the industry. Yeah, good question, Jake. That is a great question. I have been refreshing my feed. I am looking for a fucking answer to this question, Jake. So if you're out there, please tweet it at us. But at this point,

I think Jake's question may be rhetorical, which is because the rules fucking allow it, and we should change the rules. And this is something that people can understand. And it is an argument. This is when we talked about how, you know, how we can get some of those suburban voters who may be out of loyalty to the Republican party supporting, even though they don't like Trump supporting Republicans in Congress,

it is this, it is cleaning up this mess, which we can and must do. And it can't just be, we're going to, you know, they didn't drain the swamp, we're going to drain the swamp. We have to put the meat on the bones of specific ethics proposals and reforms. And that should be a big part of 2018. It should be a big part of 2020 because our president is a corrupt grifter. I mean, in just the last two days, I've started keeping track of all these.

They're giving us so much material for this. We're going to forget that there's so much material. Billionaire cabinet secretary Wilbur Ross accused of stealing over $120 million. Prosecutions of white-collar crime at a 20-year low under the Trump administration. EPA allowing companies to use asbestos again. And then, my favorite story from yesterday, ProPublica had this, Mar-a-Lago guests making policy for veterans. We have the head of Marvel running the VA secretly from Mar-a-Lago

when he's on the golf course with Donald Trump. What the fuck? John, question for you. Is Marvel a healthcare company? It is not, Dan. It's not a healthcare company. You mean the guy responsible for the Ant-Man and the Wasp is running the VA secretly from a fucking golf club?

Is that what you're telling me? No, this is what America is today. If you can afford to be a member of the president's fancy golf club, you can make policy in whatever agency you see fit. So, you know, if you want to make some agriculture policy, that's fine. Just, you know, fork over however many tens of thousands of dollars

you need to be a fucking Mar-a-Lago member. It is, uh, it's bad. It's bad stuff. Yeah, it's really bad. We can fix this. We can fix it. We will be much better at this. We can bad stuff. Yeah, it's really bad. We can fix this. We can fix it. We will be much better at this. We can fix it. Okay, before we go, before we get to Tommy's interview,

I have to get your thoughts on New York Times reporter Mark Leibovich's profile of your friend and mine, Paul Ryan. Lovett's here. Lovett's laughing already. Here's the quote. It was really hard to pick out one quote from Ryan to get you to react to, but I think I found my favorite. Ryan said, I'm very comfortable with the decisions I've made. I would make them again, do it again the same way. I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say, I avoided that tragedy. I avoided that tragedy. at the end of the day and say, I avoided that tragedy. I avoided that tragedy.

I avoided that tragedy. I advanced this goal. So Dan, I guess we owe Paul Ryan one big thank you. We have been so wrong. The whole article, which is brilliantly written, because as you read the article, everyone is in on the joke. Mark Leibovich, the readers, Paul Ryan staff, everyone except Paul Ryan. And really what this really is, is a case study in the power of self-delusion. Which is only Paul Ryan can somehow make himself believe that he is not the bad guy in this situation.

But you can see it. Even the quotes are half-hearted. Like he's just... One of the other quotes, he was like, you know, he put out a very good tweet last night, which was also like, oh, right, because you've been lying to us for however many years now when you say, I don't read his tweets. I don't know what you're talking about. In the interview, Paul Ryan just out of the blue remembers a tweet that Donald Trump put out last night. So Mark Leibovich is a friend of ours. I have been involved with many over the years,

Mark Leibovich profiles articles of politicians I've worked for. And the piece of advice, the first time Mark Leibovich ever called my office and asked to do a profile of a politician I was working for, the piece of advice I got was, Mark Leibovich is great, but he has the finest eye for phoniness of anyone out there. So if your boss is phony run as far as you can first time i talked to mark litovich i was terrified i don't think i said anything i was like i'm gonna say something he's gonna write a terrible profile i gotta run yeah yes paul ryan is the phoniest fucking person in america and i he just he he is and everyone

knows and i do think paul Paul Ryan has very smart communication staff, and their decision to participate in this profile was proof that they hate themselves and they hate their lives. Dan, hey, so I came in the last five minutes. There were so many episode titles. I don't know what to do. I know.

But here's the thing. Reading that, first of all, the profile is incredible. I came away believing that Paul Ryan believes what he told Mark Leibovich. I think he has convinced himself of that. I think so, too. I believe that, too. I agree. I agree with that.

He is. He does not. He's not bullshitting us. He actually, I mean, he is bullshitting us, but I don't think he knows it. He really does. He's going to go back to Wisconsin and think, I did my best. The whole, all, It's just like all the people in the Trump administration who know better, who should know better. I prevented tragedy. It

could have been so much worse without me there. And what they don't say is it was also the politically easy thing for them to do what they did, which was to say nothing and do nothing to stop this man who has degraded our fucking country. Dan, I want to ask you this question. It is a yes or no question. Is Omarosa the person who has carried him or herself with the most integrity of anyone who has left this White House?

Yes. Nice. We should get Ira on to ask that. We should ask Ira, too. I'm talking about Love It or Leave It tomorrow. I've got this very question. We're going to have an inter-Kranken Media. We're going to ask all the Kranken Media host this question about Omarosa. Yeah, I can't wait to hear the tapes because of the Daily Beast report,

just as we were sitting down, that she taped Trump. You know what we should do is we should do a bet about how many times the phrase, Diet Coke, please, is heard. Well, everyone, if you haven't read it yet, please go read the Mark Leibovich, Paul Ryan profile because it is fantastic. Michael Barbaro talked to Leibovich for Wednesday's Daily. And they have an audio recording of the interview between Leibovich and Paul Ryan. They have just like little snippets of it. So go listen to that.

And the daily's a podcast? But it is great just because you've got Michael, who was always very serious in that podcast. And then you've got Leibovich, who is really funny. And then you've got this recording of Paul Ryan. And it's just like, I was laughing the whole ride. I'm like, I can't believe Barbara's not even laughing at this. But as we know, remember when this happened with Stephen Miller,

when the Times had audio of Stephen Miller talking about the family separation policy, and then the White House refused to allow the Daily to use that audio for broadcast. So there was a moment where they did this. They agreed to this interview. They did the interview they listened to the things that paul ryan said and then the daily called and said hey can we broadcast this and they were like definitely well i think no i think that they did they learned from their mistakes and now they get the permission to use it in the podcast in advance i think he was, I think that they had bound, he was fucked.

At one point he's like, he prints out the tweet from Trump and he hands it to Paul Ryan to have Paul Ryan read it. And Leibovich is like, and he's just sitting there and he's like mumbling things to himself. And at one point you just hear Paul Ryan go, oh yeah, I like the all caps for emphasis there. Anyway, great job being speaker, Paul Ryan.

You nailed it. Enjoy your retirement. When we come back, we will have Tommy's interview with Matt Rivets from Sleeping Giants. Sleeping Giants is an organization that was founded in 2016. They've been fighting against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, anti-Semitism in the media. The way they've been doing it and pushing this campaign of media responsibility is by targeting ad dollars. That campaign and the men and women behind the site were anonymous until The Daily Caller, our good friends at The Daily Caller, revealed the identity of its founder against his wishes.

I am honored to have that man on the show today, Matt Rivets. Welcome to Pod Save America. Good to be here. So first, I want to do a little disclosure because this is a responsible media organization. You and I have DMed for a while because all of us at pate america we saw the work you were doing early on you and the the many other giants the sleeping giants uh that support the twitter page uh but for most of that time you were anonymous i didn't know your name but i felt like i should be straightforward about that yeah and there's also this could probably put

to bed the idea that we're the same person, which has been floating around Twitter for a long time. So many people have accused me of being the person behind Sleeping Giants. I'm like, do you see how much work they do? Yeah, I mean, nothing I've done in my life is as effective. So let's get into it. So shortly after the election, you created this Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, and you started urging people to take screenshots of ads being served on Breitbart. And you asked the brands, then they would take those screenshots and ask the brands that were serving those ads if they were comfortable giving money to a website. There were articles with headlines like, quote, birth control makes women unattractive and crazy, end quote.

That's an actual Breitbart headline. The effort was wildly successful. You know, the organization itself is apolitical. You describe it as apolitical. You yourself weren't particularly politically active before starting Sleeping Giants. Why did you decide to do this and how did you come up with the idea? don't really remember all that well sort of how the early thoughts I had on it. It was just kind of like cruising on the frustration of Steve Bannon being, you know, in the media so much. And he seemed to me, I had never really heard about him too much until he was in the spotlight. And, you know, he just clearly was, to me anyway, very racist and was divisive. And so, you know, I just hadn't heard of Breitbart myself. And so I just, you know, just wanting to be well informed, went to check out the site and pretty quickly was shocked to see like a black crime section, say, you know, and the articles you mentioned.

I mean, the headlines are ridiculously sexist and racist to me. you know, who's flowing their ad dollars to this website that, you know, denigrates everyone from women to the gay community to Muslims to every, you know, just all different kinds of groups. And it was just, it felt to me like it didn't feel like a news site. It felt like an incredibly, you know, racist sort of propaganda organ. And I just couldn't figure out how, you know, what companies would be supporting it because, you know, being in the business, you see, you want to appeal to as many people as you possibly can. So why would you advertise on a site that, you know, that is sort of dedicated to tearing those people down? So I just looked at who was advertising there. And the first advertiser I saw was this company SoFi, which is a mortgage company, a progressive loan company

in San Francisco. And that felt fishy to me. So I started this thing. I put up some really terrible, um, uh, you know, stock art that I found online and, uh, you know, with, and I found some, you know, some, uh, like an illustration as a logo and just put it up. And I was like, well, I'll just let them know and we'll just see what happens. And I thought maybe there'd be, you know, five, six advertisers on there. And I really wanted to find out if they supported this kind of stuff. So I dropped a tweet to the CEO and to the company on their Twitter handle, because literally one other time I had tweeted at Ikea while I was waiting for a stupid dresser to come out and they were not getting back to me. They were not bringing it out. It was like two hours long. I was waiting. So I tweeted at the company, they got back to me right away. So I said, well, maybe there's probably someone at all these companies is

manning the Twitter handle. So I just sent them a screenshot with their logo next to a particularly offensive article. And they got back within 30 minutes and they said, whoa, we had no idea we were there. And then, of course, that sort of became a much bigger deal. It became, okay, so we're dealing with five advertisers to who knows how many advertisers we're dealing with because they have no idea they were there. So it really became an informational campaign after that. Yeah, 90% of the blue checkmark verified people on Twitter use it to bitch at airlines. So you picked up on something important here.

I definitely am part of that. And just to let you know, that is literally one of the maybe like 10 tweets I had sent out in my entire life. And so sitting on a mountain of like, you know, 40,000 tweets a year now or something like it was a new was a, it's a new experience for me. Yeah, I'm sure. So, okay. So what people do with, to help out sleeping giants is they, they go to the Breitbart website, they take a screenshot of an ad, they tweet it to the advertiser with a polite note, uh, and they tag sleeping giants and inform them, Hey, brand X, did you know that your ad dollars are going to support xenophobia, homophobia, etc? Can you explain how programmatic advertising works and why so many of these companies had

no idea where their online ad dollars were being spent? Yeah. I mean, it used to be when I got into the business that you would create a television spot, you would know where the spot was going to run. They would tell you what time it was going to be on so you could watch it for the first time. They knew what show was going to be on and what time and what network. And what's happened now is that companies will create an ad and then they will then send it to Google or Facebook or there's another company called AppNexus. There are a lot of these different programmatic ad companies out there to basically spray it all over the internet. And so some companies like AppNexus dropped out of Breitbart even before we had started this campaign. I had

started it. And so they knew that it was wrong right away and they took their business elsewhere because they knew that they needed to keep their brands safe. And like kudos to them for doing that. But Google and Facebook, their ad networks, like on Facebook, when people place an ad on Facebook, they don't even have any idea that they're even going to be placed on another site other than Facebook. And yet they are, this happens every single day. So they really, these companies don't know they're there. And the responsibility is on these programmatic ad companies to decide what is brand safe and what is safe for these companies. And they're not, they're not actually doing it. And so that's how Breitbart ends up there. They're on these ad networks, and despite their terms of service, they won't let go of Breitbart, even though a lot of these articles and the comments on those articles break their terms of service. They won't remove them from their ad networks. So it's kind of incumbent upon us to let them know. And I don't know what the percentage is, but there's a decent percentage of companies that we tweet at maybe in the 90, 90s, uh, 90 percentile,

um, that will remove themselves. We've gotten very few notes back that say, yeah, we're not interested. Um, maybe three. Right. So, I mean, so you've, you have not done this alone. Um, you, Right. So, I mean, so you have not done this alone. You had an early co-founder, Nandini Jami. Yeah. And then this army of just average people helping out, alerting advertisers one by one that they were on Breitbart. And to date, you guys have gotten nearly 4,000 advertisers to stop working with Breitbart. I mean, that is insane. It's pretty crazy. That is an enormous impact. Was there a moment where you stepped back and thought, holy shit, this is maybe too effective?

Yeah. Like every day I say, holy shit, this is going to be too effective. I mean, like no one is more surprised than me that this thing has been successful. I mean, I just, it literally started on a, you know, on a whim. I mean, I just it literally started on a, you know, on a whim. And then I think within like 10 days of doing it, I realized that this was going to be kind of a big deal, that it was worthy of pressing on. And I'm lucky enough that right after I started it, this incredible woman posted an article talking about doing exactly what I was doing, but independently of me. And you mentioned her name, Nandini Jami. So she, I reached out to her really early on. I said, hey, you seem to have the same idea. Do you want to collaborate on this? And she was all over

it and jumped in. And she's been, you know, an equal part with me. And then we've got another level of people that don't want to put their names out there that help every day doing, you know, everything from the spreadsheets of the companies to keeping track of things to, you know, helping out on, on other projects that we've been doing. So, you know, we've got a smaller team, but everyone has been, has been incredible. But what's amazing too is the following is the people have joined the campaign just on Twitter and Facebook

come to us with ideas every day. They're all over it and they've got, you know, some ideas we'll use, some we won't. We're pretty picky because we don't want to, you know, feed the outrage machine. But the Sleeping Giants army is a pretty effective one, and they're really engaged, and that's been incredible. I mean, we've now got feeds in, like, 13 countries.

People have just volunteered to take over in their countries, and they're doing a similar thing. Like, Australia right now is killing it in a huge way. And, um, we've just seen that over time and it's been, I'm blown away. I mean, I have, I literally, I really had no idea this was going to happen. And some days I think, why, why did it happen? And why am I doing this? But for the most part, it's gone pretty well. Yeah. Hour nine, you've logged on any given day of tweeting it, right? But it is like one of the most impactful examples of citizen activism I've seen since 2016. Thank you, man. Kudos to you guys.

So ad revenue is important to any media company. I say that as an individual who reads ads personally. But one challenge that you have and your organization has is a lot of these right-wing outlets are propped up by money from billionaire Republican donors. For example, there's the Mercer family. They seeded Breitbart. They're big Steve Bannon fans. There is JV Breitbart, a shitty rag called the Federalist that is propped up by some anonymous donor's money. Those creeps aren't seeding these organizations for a return on their investment. It's all about ideology and spreading that ideology. Does that worry you? How can sleeping giants be effective in those instances, whether it's a Republican or a Democratic billionaire that's pushing hate speech? Yeah, I don't think that's a good thing for any of us. News should be news. And when these sites look like news and act like news and

they couch themselves as news, I think that's really dangerous for everyone on any side of an issue. And so ideally, that's why we're dealing with this whole fake news issue. What's real and what's not. And I think as a country, when we lose track of that, that's really dangerous. I think as far as the donors are concerned, look, they have every right to fund whatever they're going to do. That's their prerogative. It's a free country. We've got free speech. They've got free speech. All is above board as far as the laws are concerned. But what's dangerous is when they start really pushing these ideologies and people don't know who's behind it. It just feels like these are very self-serving websites that are really divisive and convincing people of things that they might

not have been convinced of otherwise because they take it as news. Right. So as I mentioned at the top, the good people, the Daily Caller decided to disclose their identity. I guess this shouldn't surprise me or anyone since they have a vested interest in protecting the, you know, kinds of content that you guys are going after, or at least, you know, they're, they're Breitbart like, that's for sure. But here we are. I know from talking to you and from, you know, reading about the experience that you've gotten death threats and been targeted personally. Can you talk a bit about what this experience has been like and, you know, what it has taught you about the people supporting Breitbart.

Yeah, I mean, it sucks. I think we're really tribal right now and people are willing to protect whatever side they think they're on. And, you know, and that means doing dastardly shit like, you know, exposing people's private information. So, I mean, that part sucked. We got relentlessly harassed for days and still do. My wife, who's had nothing to do with this, gets calls from people and they published our address and my kids' names and the whole thing. And

that part really sucks. But on the other side of it, it's been enormously, it's been a boon for Sleeping Giants. There's never been a public face to this for a reason. We wanted to keep it about the issues and keep it about the people that are taking part in it. Ultimately, four days later, we ended up on the cover of the, on the front page of the New York Times business section. And we got a lot of love from that. And we got a lot more people joining. I mean, since they exposed my name and my wife's name and my friend's name and where my wife grew up going to school for really no reason at all. They have now, you know, we've added like 20,000 more people on Twitter and, you know, a bunch more on Facebook. And we've gotten a whole

lot more ads. But the more people we add, the more effective it is and the bigger voice we have. So it has a compounding effect. If we have more people, there are more retweets, more people are paying attention and more companies are paying attention. So it's been a loting effect. If we have more people, there are more retweets, more people are paying attention, and more companies are paying attention. So it's been a lot more effective, and I'm not sure that was their goal. I think their goal was to get me to lose my job and to make my life miserable and to harass me. And there's no real other reason in my mind that they would have done that because, frankly, we weren't going after them at all. And so they definitely had a vested interest in making my life a living hell, but at the same time, it really helped. And so while the harassment obviously has been, you know, shitty, the outcome

has not been what they had planned. And it's not like I'm putting it in their face, but, you know, it's helped us grow this movement a lot more and we're going to continue to grow from here. It's been, it's been a wild two and a half weeks. Yeah, I imagine. I'm sorry you had to deal with that on a personal level that is just so unnecessary, but. It is, it is. And it is, it is for everybody. And it is completely representative of the, these organizations too. I mean. Yeah, it is for everybody. You know, no one, we should, we should have a little bit of

privacy in this world and there's so little of it left. And so, you know, you'll hear people on all sides of an issue, this is happening to them. And it's just, you know, people wanted to expose the address of the, the guy that wrote, um, the article about me exposing me. And, and, you know, we were like, let's not do that. It's not fun. It's not good for anybody and it doesn't improve the discourse. So like, let's, let's just keep it on the up and up. We gotta be better than that. Yeah. Um, so in recent days, a bunch of technology companies decided to kick Alex Jones off their platforms. He is a ranting, raving, conspiracy theory, loving hate speech, peddling

individual who makes a bunch of YouTube shows. Basically. Um, it started with Apple, then YouTube and Google. I think I have the sequencing, right. And then Facebook came along as well. Um, Alex Jones is hardly new to this scene. He's been saying horrible, horrible things like nine 11 was a conspiracy done by the government. Uh, the Oklahoma city, Oklahoma City bombings was an inside job for many years. Can you talk about what these companies did to Alex Jones' content and whether you think it's sufficient? Well, look, they've been helping Alex Jones spread these messages for a long time. And they've done it very much against their own terms of service.

We all sign on. When we sign up for any social platform or really anything, we sign on to a bunch of rules. And we don't look at those rules a lot of time, but we sign them. And we are all supposed to live by them. And the companies are supposed to live by them. But what they haven't done is enforce these terms of service on Alex Jones ever. For the better part of a year, we've been asking Facebook and Twitter and YouTube why certain things that he says, like when he threatens the life of Robert Mueller, special counsel, why is that not against your terms of service?

And every time they do backflips to keep him on their platform because they're afraid to take a stand. And every time they do backflips to keep him on their platform because they're afraid to take a stand. Because what's happened is there's been a big movement saying, you know, our voices are being silenced. These tech companies, what he's really done is he's used his platform and then all these other social platforms to relentlessly harass Sandy Hook parents after their kids were murdered. Some of these families have had to move five times to get away from these people that are harassing them that are Alex Jones followers. He's smeared Las Vegas shooting victims as actors and he makes their lives a living hell. And these social platforms are allowing it to happen. So what happened the other day is Apple took a stand and said, we're going to actually enforce our rules this time. And they went and did it. Then Facebook did it, and then Spotify did it, and then YouTube did it. The problem is they should have done this a long time ago. And when they all did it at the same time on the same day, it makes it look like it was all planned. Even if it wasn't, they were all just looking for cover to cover themselves. And Apple went forward and did it. So they all did it. They really should have all done it independently

on their own a long time ago, according to their own terms of service. So we've been asking them, why now? Like, why didn't you do this a long time ago? And will you do it in the future if Alex Jones or someone like him decides to spread hate on your platform? What are your rules going to be? And how are you going to enforce them? And so we're looking for some more clarity there. Yeah.

I mean, so, I mean, I think anyone listening knows that I'm, I'm very much on your side on this issue. I mean, there's no First Amendment violation when a private company says you can't spew hate on our private platform. And there actually might be a legally problematic component to this. If someone's making totally false claims, it could cross the line into libel and slander. And certainly Jones has gone there. But there are some who say, okay, hate speech is the reason these companies put forward for kicking Alex Jones off their platforms. That is an ambiguous term. And ambiguous terms like that, combined with political pressure, can be a slippery slope to censorship. What do you say to that? Yeah, it is a slippery slope. It really is. They're right. What they're missing is that

they haven't enforced these terms that are very clear. The terms are very clear. The enforcement is not so clear. So by avoiding the situation as long as they have and actually enforcing these very clear terms, they've opened themselves up to, you know, it sounds like they're being pressured. It sounds like they're all working together to get rid of them when in fact they were all just looking for cover. So, you know, look, there've been, obviously, since this happened, because we've been tweeting at these companies for a long time, we've had after Alex Jones got kicked off Apple and then subsequently the other platforms, there's been a whole lot of obviously incredibly heated debate in our mentions. And debate is good.

And there are people that are really worried that it is a slippery slope. And I tend to agree. I mean, I think these companies should be very clear in their enforcement and very unequivocal in their rules. They need to tell us all what is expected of us, and then they need to follow through when people don't actually abide by those rules. And so if they do that, then it's clear, and then we don't have these debates anymore. So speaking of ambiguous rules, let's talk about Twitter. Twitter has not suspended Alex Jones. They say he hasn't violated their rules. And it tweets storm about the decision

Jack Dorsey seemed to pass the responsibility for vetting Alex Jones's statements to journalists, which is strange since not only journalists are allowed to follow him. What do you make of Twitter's decision, Jack's explanation? And do you understand their rules of the road? No, I don't think anyone does. You know, I think that they haven't made it super clear. And what I think he muddied the waters even more with his thread yesterday. I mean, he really said that we've never been good at explaining what our rules are and how we enforce them. And then he went on to not explain what the rules are or how they enforce them on Alex Jones, or they didn't enforce them.

So to me, they have not made it clear. You know, I've caught a little shit on our Twitter handle. I did a little thread last night saying it's good, actually, that Twitter didn't just follow the leader here, because all these platforms have to have their own rules and their enforcement policies. So it's, in a way, you know, the fact that he didn't just follow the leader arbitrarily is a good thing. The reality is, is that he should have gotten rid of him a very, very long time ago. And these companies all need to figure out what they're willing to put up with on their platform. And they need to tell us all what those things are. I think Twitter has not

made that very clear. And, you know, I think they're getting credit on in certain circles, and they're getting, you know, absolutely decimated in other circles, because they haven't made it clear. So that would be a really good step on the right direction if we all just knew what to expect. As a technical thing, what would be good to know is that if Alex Jones posts or anyone else posts a video on Twitter that breaks their terms, is that going to count as harassment or hate speech or whatever those rules are going to be? Will that break those rules instead of just a written tweet? It's a technical thing, but it means everything.

Yeah. Well, that's an interesting point. And also sort of complicating this whole question is a lot of these companies say, well, you know what? Well, they said before this week that they were already dealing with Alex Jones and others like him by pulling down hateful content on a case by case basis or throttling back the amount that those posts were shared by tweaking their algorithm or whatever they do. But like, how is, how do you take this absolute position on free speech, but also throttle content that seems completely discordant to me. Yeah, it does. And I, if we're being honest, I think that's a crock of shit. I don't think you spin at all, like they're shadow banning or whatever. I think those are all made up terms. And, um, you know, frankly, we give Twitter so much crap that I can't believe we're not shadow banned if that's the thing.

So that doesn't make any sense to me. But look, these companies, they're private businesses, publicly traded private businesses, and they need to make the rules of the road. Free speech protects us all from our government. We can yell and scream anything we want on our street corner. We can set up a website if the web host is okay with it to say whatever we want. But these companies have nothing. Free speech doesn't apply to them. And they need to give us the rules, their rules. The free speech argument is not a good one to me. We should have a free discourse, and that's great. But if there's a certain amount of discourse that doesn't work, then they need to get rid of it or tell us what is good and what's not.

The other thing is these companies are ad-supported. And getting back to what the original mission of Sleeping Giants is, they're ad supported. They've got tons of advertisers flowing millions and millions and millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars into their coffers. And they need to keep those brands safe. So they're trying to find that line. No advertiser that I know wants to be next to Alex Jones saying 9-11 is a conspiracy. That is not a brand safe environment. So they need to figure out what they're going to do about that. Yeah. If people listen to this conversation, they like your mission, they like the work you're

doing, how can they help? Just follow us on Twitter and we'll give you some instructions. Just follow us on Twitter and we'll give you some instructions. That's the best way to do it. You know, we have not, we don't take any money. We've done two crowdfunded operations. We've sent a billboard to Amazon and a mobile billboard to Amazon and a mobile billboard to Facebook, asking them why they continue to support, uh, Breitbart. Um, and nothing happened from there, but it was a worthy, uh, it was a worthy endeavor and people donated that we've made money to do that. We raise money to do that very quickly, but we're doing this on a volunteer basis, all of us. And so the only money that we take in is through merch sales. And we're not even paying ourselves with that. We're going to just put it right back into endeavors that we're going to do in the future. And so we're not looking for cash.

We're just looking for help. And so if people want to show up and follow us, that would be awesome. We're manning the Twitter handles and Facebook page at all times and would love any ideas they want to bring and any help they can give us. Well, Matt, thanks for doing the show. A lot of people after the 2016 election sat around and thought, what the hell can I do? How can I make a difference? I'm just a election, sat around and thought, what the hell can I do? How can I make a difference? I'm just a random citizen. And you sure as hell found an impactful way to, you know, try to clean up some of the awful rhetoric and things that were going on, especially around that election. So thank you

for that work. And thanks for doing the show. Thank you, man. I really appreciate it. And thank you guys for all you do too. We're trying. And if you can, if you log onto the twitter.coms, go to search for Sleeping Giants. It's a fun feed. You'll learn a lot. And you can tweet at Jack like the rest of us and complain at him. Cool. All right, man.

Thanks again. Thank you. Talk soon. Thanks to Matt Rivets from Sleeping Giants for joining us. And, you know, we'll talk to you next Tuesday. Bye, everyone. Oh, remember when I used to also always come for the outros? That's right.

Yeah. It was nice, like old times. Yeah, it's great. Okay. Okay. We're going to go do some ads now. All right. Ads.

Bye, guys. All right. Bye, everyone. Thank you.