Pod Save America - “It’s like Medieval Times every night!”

Episode Date: December 11, 2017

The Alabama special election comes down to who gets more votes, Trump and his propagandists continue to delegitimize the press, and there’s too much Diet Coke being consumed in the White House. Then the Atlantic’s Julia Ioffe joins Jon, Jon, and Tommy to discuss Putin’s long game, and DeRay Mckesson talks about the latest incident of police violence.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On the pod today, we have The Atlantic's Julia Yaffe. We'll talk about her brand new piece on Vladimir Putin called Putin's Game. And later, we'll talk to the host of Crooked Media's Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. We're going on tour. Grab tickets for our 2018 stops at cricket.com slash events.

That's exciting. Yeah, it is. I feel like you were about to say something funny. Nothing. It was something about your tone that struck me. My tone?

It's very chipper. It was a sales vibe that I didn't hate. Speaking of sales vibes, love it or leave it on Friday. We had an awesome show. It was the last Friday. I know how it works, John. We had an awesome show was the last Friday we're promoting I know how it works John

we had an awesome show check the tape maybe not with Andy Daly Jenny Yang and Emily Heller it was a really funny episode very loose

we had a good time Emily Heller's rant about the fake sign language interpreter toward the end of the show made me laugh so hard it was so funny it was a great episode and then this Friday it's the Lover Leave It the end of the show made me laugh so hard. It was so funny. It was a great episode. And then this Friday,

it's the Love It or Leave It last episode of the year holiday spectacular. Oh my God. You guys may be enlisted because you'll be there. Cool. I can't wait.

That's going to be fun. A lot of guests. Let's really brainstorm some near offensive ideas. We're going to do some fun stuff. You know what's funnier? Some contributors may stop by. Pod Save the World.

My Pod Save the World. My Pod Save the World. My Pod Save the World. Funny title, Tommy. On Jerusalem. Jerusalem went to Jared. Thank you, John. You're the only one who noticed. Yeah, it was a thoughtful conversation about why he made this overtly political decision

about a fraught diplomatic issue. And then the empty suit that is Rex Tillerson that just sort of wanders around the 7th floor of the State Department. Will he go? He's firing people. Won't he? Who will replace him? Just expelling diplomats who have been there forever.

The hall to see from Politico. It's a brilliant report. Can I tell you, though, watching all the Jerusalem coverage over the last week and a half, I was constantly struck by, like, were you guys all super happy with the status quo? Like, how dare you violate the status quo in which things were terrible for half a

century? I know, there's not a lot of good ideas in this debate. No. Maybe we can solve it here. I think Trump already did it. Okay, let's talk about the news. Tomorrow, voters in Alabama will choose their next senator in a special election to fill the seat held by Jeff Sessions. A win by Democrat Doug Jones would drastically increase the chances of the Democrats retake the Senate in 2018, which would allow them to effectively kill Donald Trump's legislative agenda, his ability to staff the government with whoever he wants, his ability to confirm whatever judges he wants, including the Supreme Court. John, stop. I can't. It's too exciting. Let's raise the stakes here, people. Let's raise the stakes here, people. A win by Jones could also jeopardize the Republican tax bill since Corker's a no and Collins is back on the fence after being snookered by Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

And I don't know if you saw, guys, but Marco Rubio says that if he doesn't get his way in the bill, there's going to be problems. Yeah, he's going to put out a – he's going to tweet out a Bible verse that's very stern about taxes. So anyway, Republicans know about the stakes. They understand this. And so Donald Trump, the Republican National Committee, and way too many elected Republicans are actively supporting alleged child molester Roy Moore, a twice-fired Supreme Court justice who believes homosexuality should be illegal, women shouldn't vote, Muslims shouldn't serve in Congress, and the Constitution would be better without every amendment after the 10th.

There are some really good ones after the 10th. Yeah, you're going to want to go back and look at those. There's some big ones. There's an entire gender that would be written off from the voting booths. And a race. Race, gender, a couple other things. He was particularly upset about the

direct election of U.S. Senators. Yeah, I wonder why. So anyway, we have a very close race. Polls have been all over the place. This has been extraordinarily difficult to poll. The Fox News poll out this morning that has Jones up 10, I don't think anyone believes that is correct. But who knows, guys? Nobody knows.

Nobody knows. Nobody knows. There's not been a competitive race down there. It's been a long time. Like, I mean, what are you supposed to do? Like, how do you poll when it's an Alabama Senate seat, one of the people is an accused pedophile? Like, there's no good way to crunch the numbers.

Yeah, the sample size is... The percentage of people who vote this weekend is going to be so low. But also, Roy Moore has just left the stage. He apparently was in Philadelphia this weekend at the Army-Navy game. That was a report I read this morning. I mean, he is as fully hidden from the press as you can possibly do when running for an election including leaving the state so why is this thing so close guys why is it i know it's alabama but you know alleged child molester roy moore what's going on anyone see the anyone see the vice focus groups yes yeah

that was i watched that friday night for some reason to really bring me down while I wasn't feeling well. I didn't like it. I didn't like the vice focus group. So Frank Luntz polls. Frank Luntz hits down a bunch of conservatives. They call themselves conservatives, more supporters. So it's not like it's a group of undecided voters. But he wanted to know why they liked Roy Moore so much.

And the response is a little depressing. Yeah. It's Moore so much. And the response is a little depressing. Yeah. It's just so cynical. It was fascinating to watch. It was an interesting insight into a certain kind of voter who we see, you know, the people that are diehards for Trump. These are people that are diehards for Moore. These are people that are choosing and then adopting the propaganda that comes at them

via ByteBart and Fox News. And it's a good reminder that those people are out there. However, I was trying to remind myself as I watch these people to assemble and try to make an argument based on what they'd been seeing and hearing that there's a self-selecting group of people. And that if in the days before this election, you're raising your hand and said, I'm a proud Roy Moore supporter, and I'd love to go on television to talk about it. You're not the coolest person in the room. this election, you're raising your hand and said, I'm a proud Roy Moore supporter and I'd love to go on television to talk about it. You're not the coolest person in the room. Yeah.

You combine those people with the rant that Judge Jean Pirro gave that we'll talk about later and you get the scariest possible scenario for fascism. I mean, there was a few people in that group who excused the assault allegations. But I think there were far more people this is telling that simply said they didn't believe them that they were made up the george soros paid for this paid these women obviously kind of came up so it's like a lot of people are saying like how could these people in alabama vote for an alleged child molester and the answer is they don't believe they're doing that or they don't want to believe it or they don't want to believe it and and that desire to not want to believe that is being reinforced by Fox and Breitbart and the president of the United States.

Nobody wants to be told they're wrong. And I think the right-wing media and the Moore campaign and Donald Trump have fomented the idea that this is a Washington elite pushing their culture and their values down your throat and don't believe them because you're buying into their bullshit. And it's undercutting the very belief in truth in our country. Yes, which is a bigger problem, which we should talk about soon. In better news this weekend, Alabama's other senator, Republican Richard Shelby, no liberal, no, who rarely goes on the Sunday shows, told Jake Tapper on Sunday that he couldn't vote for Roy Moore and wrote in another Republican. What do you guys think of this?

It's a big deal and a big message to Republicans out there that it's okay to not vote for Roy Moore. I think getting people to vote for someone is significantly harder and might be a bridge too far if, say, you're staunchly pro-life. But getting them to write in Nick Saban, which is what one of the super PACs is doing as, you know, essentially a way to pull votes away from Roy Moore is smart. I think it's great when people decide to vote for someone named Nick Saban. And I hope people write in that. Richard Elijah laughing in the background. I just think that Nick Saban is the perfect kind of person clearly from the sports, that many people could write in.

No, I thought it was actually, you know, look, Richard Shelby did not have to do that. He clearly made a choice. He clearly said, I want to go on a Sunday show. I want to create video that can spread around Alabama and send a signal to Republican voters not to vote for this guy. So, you know, good for him. Good for him. And it's harder to do than some of these other Republican senators. Like, you know, it's awesome that Jeff Flake donated to Doug Jones, but Jeff Flake's in Arizona and never- And retiring. And retiring.

And Richard Shelby, who also, I mean, he's 83. I don't know if he's going to run again either. He looks good for 83. Although maybe it's just that we're all grading senators on a curve because we're governed by the McDonald's bag. What's a McDonald's bag?

But I just mean where the Senate is filled with septuagenarians and octogenarians, and we're just used to it. Just Alabama, we don't ask you for a lot. Can we just talk for a minute? The first wedding I ever went to was Alabama. I had a great time. My favorite musician's from Alabama, a guy named Jason Isbell, wonderful artist. Thank you for that.

He's been tweeting about that job. Thank you for doing this for me. Can you guys just do us one solid and not send a pedophile to congress we really would appreciate it if we could just get this one maybe it could be as a in return for you know what we already get alabama back because they vote conservative republicans into the senate and the house year after year and then have a net positive from the federal government over and over again as we fund medicaid and medicare and social security even though they don't pay as much in taxes so hey but hey guys hey it's it's us here

in the rest of the country we're asking for we're asking for a solid we'll leave that one out of the robocall i went with uh i went with the flies from honey approach love the love of uh just whacking them you know we'll see which works hopefully sticking carrot tommy sticking carrot okay so what will it take for jones to win obviously alabama is tough he has to win more votes john yeah exactly there you go that's how this is our trench some people have like data people like to get steve kornacki up there and john king crunching numbers we got lots of data more votes data is out data is out gut instinct and propaganda is in pipe Pipe down, Chuck Todd. I got this.

Here we go. Vote for Doug Jones. So Republicans win statewide by margins of 10 to 20 points. Just so everyone knows how hard this is. Only about a quarter of the entire population has college degrees, which is higher than only six other states. And we know that these days with Trump as president, and this has been a trend that's been happening for some time, white voters without a college degree are voting Republican in historic margins no matter what.

So incredibly difficult. Also, just don't leave out voter suppression. Voter suppression, yes. It's a big problem down there. Which is a huge problem. Special election turnout, no way to model who turns out in a special election. And so for Jones, it comes down to the African-American vote. African-Americans make up 27% of the state's population.

Doug Jones needs the black vote to account for at least 25% of the electorate. Then he could lose the white vote by 51 to 36. If he bumps it up to 26%, 27%, he can lose by even more. And then you would need more to underperform in the northern part of the state, which he's done in the past. And you basically still have to have some suburban professionals around Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, places like that, who might be Trump supporters to say, either stay home or vote for Doug Jones. That's what you need. That's the recipe. Okay.

So we'll see. What do we do with that information? It's just for everyone to, you know, as you're looking at the returns coming tomorrow night, that's what you're looking for. It's been interesting to see how Jones' campaign is approaching this because they've had a number of prominent African-American surrogates come into the state. Cory Booker was there. There's reports that President Obama's recorded a robocall, but they're not sure if they're going to use it yet. So it doesn't seem like they've gone all in on an African-American turnout strategy. It's still something they're trying to do in a way that doesn't tie them to Washington or tie them to Obama further than they already are, which is, I don't know.

I've not seen any numbers, so I don't know what I would do in their case. But it seems like if you're hinging the whole thing on African-American turnout, I might push all those chips on the table and say, hey, let's do a big event. Let's get Obama doing TV ads, whatever it might be. I had the same thought. And I know people are like, oh, if he went down there, that would be it. And, you know, Doug Jones would lose and it would hurt him. But, you know, Doug Jones is running a strategy that is not, that is unlike many Democrats in the South over the last several years. He's not running as a conservative Democrat. He's running as who he is, a liberal Democrat, or at least a mainstream Democrat. And he's banking on it. It's African American vote or nothing. Yeah, I don't know. I just I don't know enough. I don't know enough. And I don't think a lot of people make observing from outside know enough.

The truth is, nobody knows. We haven't seen a competitive Alabama race. We don't know the impact of Barack Obama nationalizing the race, whether the turnout you'd see increase amongst the African American community would outweigh the nationalization of the race and the reminding of Republicans the Senate stakes, which is, you know, all the people saying they don't believe in more, they believe in more. All of it boils down to a desire to want to have permission to vote on party lines, right? To be told it's okay to care about holding the Senate more than voting for a pedophile. Right. Alleged. All right. So we'll see what happens. No predictions here from Pod Save America.

We don't do predictions anymore. Not when the mics are on. Why don't we just record two predictions, then we'll edit it later. Excellent idea. Well, we'd have to just switch it out tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. cut this part. Just kidding. Leave it in. Okay, I want to talk about the press.

So specifically, this is the story that I want to talk about, which is the systemic effort by Donald Trump and his state-run media to delegitimize the free press, which they did this weekend by harping on three mistakes on the Russia investigation made by three different outlets that were all corrected within hours. This weekend, Trump also called for Washington Post reporter Dave Weigel to be fired for putting up a picture of the wrong crowd size at his rally, a picture he immediately took down when corrected. Of course, this was the same rally where Donald Trump told people to vote for an alleged child molester who doesn't like any of the constitutional amendments after the Bill of Rights. This is so frustrating. I'm glad we're having this conversation.

But the fact that this is a national conversation means that Donald Trump has already won. We've already gotten sucked into this bizarre. We should say it's not a national conversation. It's a conversation among the D.C. press and us and all these people who pay attention. I think it's a conversation on Fox News and everywhere in the right wing. So I do think it's a national conversation. And he's already won it because we are in a frame where we're demanding more accountability from reporters than we demand from the President of the United States, because he told the biggest crowd size lie in history, and he still maintains it is true.

He says that millions of people voted illegally for Hillary Clinton or that Barack Obama wiretapped him, something I think he said again over the weekend. But Dave Weigel, who's a great reporter at The Washington Post, made a mistake, corrected it, and apologized. And we play into this farce like it's a real debate, like his attacks on Dave are legitimate, when in fact the guy is just using it as a political wedge. It's a strategy. It's not actually a conversation about fact or fiction. That is the best point, and that is what has been lost in all this. It's not that, like, it's not hypocrisy.

Brian Boitler's made this point in some of his pieces on cricket.com, too. It's not like, oh, you know, Trump lies all the time, and he doesn't get caught, and Fox News lies all the time, and we don't yell at them, and it only happens when the mainstream media does it. It's not about that. This is a strategy by donald trump and his press to destroy the media okay this is editor of bright bar matt boyle said the following in july of this year in public the goal eventually is the full destruction and elimination of the entire mainstream media

we envision a day where cnn is no longer in business We envision a day where CNN is no longer in business. We envision a day where the New York Times closes its doors. I think that day is possible. And then he wiped a drool off his chin. But it's like, this is what they're doing. And then you have, and I read the Synaxius. I read that CNN did this. Brian Stelter did it. And New York Times, tons of mainstream media sources are having these like introspective,-wringing conversations what are we to do

did we just fuel you know donald trump's strategy and help him out blah blah blah and it's like i'm so glad that they're all concerned about getting things right and they're going to slow down and take their time they absolutely should do that these are important things but you know what like as long as reporters are fucking human beings they they're going to make mistakes. And guess what? If reporters were perfect and all these outlets were perfect, do you think Donald Trump would just back off and Fox News would close its doors and say, oh, we're fine now. We're not going to attack you anymore. You win. Of course not.

It's like the mainstream media is a restaurant. And it's like a fine restaurant. and it's like a fine restaurant. And every morning Fox News and Breitbart and Donald Trump and Kellyanne Conway and like the alt-right, they run up to that restaurant and they spray, this place is filled with rats. They spray painted on the wall

and the restaurant has no rats. But the other day they did serve a piece of undercooked chicken to somebody who was there. And then, you know, they immediately realized the mistake. They pulled it back. No one got sick.

And then the owner of the restaurant is like, I can't believe it. We've aided the people that say we're filled with rats. And meanwhile, they're outside and they're actually now like throwing things through the window. And it's like, you know what? My undercooked chicken mistake, which I corrected instantly, is just fueling these attacks on us. And then Breitbart's out front, hucking Chick-fil-A people like Will Ferrell and Elf, right? And like, here we are. Just poison. I don't know if this analogy worked very well, but I liked it.

Do you think the few times that Fox News has corrected their mistakes, they have long panel discussions all week? How are we to regain the trust of the Fox News viewer? What will happen to our Fox News viewers? Will they believe us anymore? These people believe them no matter fucking what. And they will believe that the

mainstream media is a joke no matter how perfect they are that's not the fucking problem also just you know it is important to get things right you are not getting things right to try to make Sean Hannity and Donald Trump like you they're not doing this it doesn't fuel anything it doesn't help them they don't care if you're

honest or not that's not why they do what they do they don't care about the truth they're liars and so we've built the system now where lies on breitbart don't count lies on hannity don't count lies on fox and friends don't count kelly and conway's lies don't count those are lies that don't count the only lies that matter or the only mistakes that matter are the mistakes made by people who care about the truth and that is no standard and meanwhile the mainstream media i think rightly is covering the rise of all these sort of like right wing apparatuses. Like they're covering Steve Bannon constantly, like he's Svengali. Like my views on that are well known.

But they did a piece on Project Veritas, which is James O'Keefe running around setting up suit of sting operations where essentially he just records people offering their views in offhand ways and selectively edits them in a deeply dishonest fashion to like sell this narrative but the mainstream media is getting savaged and they're not standing up for their own reporters like dave weigel who've made an honest mistake and corrected it and then they're sort of like looking at this right-wing apparatus that's set up to destroy them like it's a it's a zoo animal and they're just kind of observing it from afar this is something is often they're coming for you guys this is the problem with the guys. This is the problem with the times. This is also the problem with the times. When they print people like Eric Erickson

in their op-ed pages as if that pay-on to a certain segment of the right wing is going to win them plaudits or sort of win them support or demonstrate that they care about an ideologically broad perspective. Are you up for this fight? Because they're not coming for you

because there aren't enough conservatives on the op-ed page. They're coming for you because it's about power. This is about power. And you need to stand up for yourselves, not as some institute. Like you're not observing the alt-right. You're not observing them. You're in a fight with them.

They want to beat you and they're going to try to destroy you. You getting them right on your pages doesn't matter. Also, you report stories. And one of the biggest stories of our time is the fact that the president and his propaganda machine are trying to destroy and delegitimize the free press. That is a story. And you have to expose the bad faith motives behind their actions. Like, not because you're in a war, not because, you know, liberal partisans want you to bring down the president because that's one of the biggest stories of our time and your reporters and your job is to report on that. And doing so will necessarily be adversarial because you're trying to expose the lies that are covering up their strategy and their wrongdoing. That's the whole point of it.

It is. It's like, you know, you didn't make this happen, but you're the story. Like your place in this is part of the story. And that's just the reality. Yeah. And I think the person who responded best of all to this this weekend was Dave Weigel. Yes. Who I saw Brian Stelter tweet last night.

Oh, I reached out to Weigel for another comment, but he's busy covering the race in Alabama. Like, he didn't make it about him. He didn't have this big thing. He just kept tweeting about Alabama and then, like, moved on with his life. You know, and he said the worst thing that happened to this weekend was that Delta lost his luggage. And so I get that. And I get that. Yeah.

I mean, I do think the Brian Ross case, like, Brian's a good reporter. I've worked with him many times. But he's made a number of very high-profile mistakes over time that have probably led to the suspension for a month. Weigel tweeted a photo and he deleted it. And it's not a big deal. And let's stop pretending it is. I think CNN would have probably been better served if their team, if Manu Raju and the guys who screwed up the story about Donald Trump Jr.'s email had more thoroughly corrected it in the way Weigel did and just said, we screwed up. I think sometimes media outlets circle the wagons

and they get defensive. It doesn't serve them well over time. But more broadly, and they get defensive. It doesn't serve them well over time. But more broadly, Donald Trump's strategy of never, ever admitting you lie, never saying you're sorry, works in this media day and age. The minute you show any contrition, you get savaged.

And also, by the way, on top of all this, it's hard to be accurate. These are journalist institutions that are doing their best to be accurate. It's tough to get things right. It's especially hard when every source you have is a fucking liar. Like they're dealing with the most obstinate, deceptive, malicious White House and governing apparatus we have had in our country in our lifetimes. So that's tough. Yes. And so it's like, this is, you know, I'm no fan of George W. Bush. I think Richard Nixon made some big

mistakes. But even these people pale in comparison to the dissembling and lying and viciousness of the current administration. I mean, Sarah Huckabee, she lies on the podium every single day. So it's tough. Figuring out what's going on is tough. They're going to make mistakes. Also, a Fox News host this weekend called for the arrest by Donald Trump trump of department of justice officials and fbi officials texting for investigating donald trump whose four associates have already been charged with felonies that happened this weekend on a pretty major network and it speaks and it's actually connected to this right the idea that that oh you're you're the the assault on the institutions in the press is similar to oh oh, look, there are Democrats or there are people with political views that differ from Donald Trump inside the FBI, inside the Justice Department, which there always have been because it's the United States and people are allowed to have political views in their private lives.

These people must be purged. These people must be ferreted out. They can't handle the responsibility of investigating the president. The implications of that are incredible. Only Republicans can investigate the White House. Only people with political views. We have right. Not to mention. Right. Of course. But but the standard they're suggesting so cavalierly. Right. So just glibly out of an out of a desire to protect the president is people can't have personal views and then do their job professionally, which has never been a standard and is not possible to uphold unless you want to literally do a purge.

It's manufactured. I mean, let's just dig into this for a second. Like Judge Jean Perreault is not just a Fox News host. She's essentially a Trump advisor. She's someone who gets an audience with him for like hours at a time where she rants about how she said publicly on her show that the FBI and DOJ needed to be cleansed, to use the word cleansed, of individuals like the deputy director of the FBI. She called for Mueller to go. I mean, these are – apparently these views are so crazy that Donald Trump got bored and walked out of the room, which says something.

That says a lot. It says an awful lot. But it's more dangerous than just a lunatic ranting on Fox. Yeah, he's like like you want a story about media malfeasance there's your fucking story why isn't she has a pretty big audience there's a couple million people who saw that why don't we talk about that and also and also just the kind of the respectable conservatives on twitter who are like cnn made a mistake when will these people learn that they're adding fuel to the fire this is uh this is the problem can't

trust as if they won't make mistakes in the future by thinking to themselves, like, oh, we're just going to be adding fuel to the fire if we accidentally get this wrong. But it speaks to a fundamental blind spot, which is the same, you know, the serious conservatives, the reasonable ones, the ones that don't like Fox News. They don't watch it. They try to ignore it. It makes them feel bad. They don't address it right. to ignore it it makes them feel bad they don't address it right like there there is no equivalent to what janine pierrot and sean hannity and fox and friends are doing and they never get the same level of criticism from the people who claim that they're just out there trying to figure out the truth because they think they're they're crazy the

crazy people in our party who we don't agree with they're just on tv or quietly taking over yeah that's how they that's why would they care the national review weekly standard crowd or any of the sensible that's how they see the fox news people oh they're crazy but like whatever yeah not that they have this huge audience of people that they're you know it's again it's like because it's this strange sort of like paradox of oh fox news and those guys assaulting the mainstream media don't matter because we have a mainstream media like because we have a media under assault that's doing a pretty good job, even though we point out its sins

with far greater frequency than we do on our own side, it's okay because of it. It's like, don't you see what the end result of this is? If you don't point it at your own side, we're going to run out of the good guys. Anyway, the story is not the media's mistakes. The story is that powerful people are trying to destroy the media,

whether it makes mistakes or not. Speaking of good stories, let's talk about the New York Times story. There's a little dessert at the end. Yeah. Does Maggie McHibber have a sleeping bag and she rolls over to the White House and stays there for a couple weeks to get these? She's crawling through the vents. She's got 60 sources in the piece. This is a New York Times story over the weekend.

She pops up in a little vent in the Lincoln Brewery. It's like, hey, can I just ask you a couple things? All right. Sorry. Continue. So the story's called Trump's Hour by Hour Battle for Self-Preservation, a New York Times story. This story has it all. Trump hate watching four to eight hours of depot cable news every day.

Which he tweeted about this morning in the midst of a terror attack. That was what was on his mind. Someone might have bombed the subway in New York City and he tweeted that he doesn in the midst of a terror attack. That was what was on his mind. Someone might have bombed the subway in New York City and he tweeted that he doesn't watch that much TV. Also, I saw that Ashley Feinberg matched up the time stamp of his tweet with a Morning Joe segment about how he was watching so much

TV. So he was tweeting about not watching TV while watching TV. He live tweets Fox and Friends. It's not hard to figure out. Drinks 12 Diet Cokes a day. Love it. I feel like you have some special as a DC drinker yourself. As you guys know, love Diet Coke.

12 Diet Cokes a day is so much. That's 500 milligrams of caffeine. If he is having that many at night, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say a substantial part of our current national crisis is fueled by someone who is exhausted, drinking caffeine to stay awake, waking up after four and a half hours of sleep because there's still caffeine flowing through his bloodstream, and then caffeinating all over again and repeating the vicious cycle. Like, if John Kelly, part of the Committee to Save America, should go into that fridge and quietly replace some of the caffeinated Diet Cokes with caffeine-free Diet Coke. And then after 6 p.m., give him caffeine-free Diet Coke.

All of a sudden, it's 9.30, 10 o'clock. He's tuckered out. He's fallen asleep. Now he's getting six hours. Now he's getting seven hours. He's waking up a little more refreshed. Maybe he's got a little more spring in his step. Maybe he can follow a fucking thought.

Love it. I mean, how many times do you think he has to pee during the day? Twelve Diet Cokes? You're in there all day. I also don't think it's like- That's many times do you think he has to pee during the day? 12 Diet Cokes? You're in there all day. I also don't think it's like... That's an entire meeting you're missing. But there's a television on the bathroom wall, too, and he's just... Well, I also just...

I don't think he's alternating with water. You know what I mean? Like, I think that he is just a straight-up, I hydrate with Diet Coke. Also, the dinners with the turrets of gravy. He's so unhealthy. Just sitting there like a fucking... Is he holding a turkey leg to Mike Pence's on a horse in front of us he just turrets of gravy the big he's gonna remote one hand and the great He's taking a turkey leg,

scooping up some chocolate cake, eating it off the turkey leg. He's like 12 Diet Cokes, a burnt steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, two pieces of dessert a la mode. Screaming about Don Lemon. Melania's just like,

how did I get here? He is so unhealthy. Two things that don't appear in that story, an elliptical and time with his family. It's also got him tweeting against the advice of every advisor and lawyer he has. They're all telling him not to tweet things. And he's just like, I don't care. So they're doing a great job there. It has him needing verbal briefings because he doesn't read.

He just doesn't like reading He just doesn't like reading. He doesn't like reading that much. But my favorite is when he learned that the New York Times was writing this piece about his four hours of television time a day. He went back to the press cabin on Air Force One and talked about how he was so busy reading documents. He just kept referring to them as documents.

I don't watch TV because of the documents. I love, though, that just sort of little like, oh, it's like almost like a time machine like oh i remember when he did that he got angry about look it wasn't connected to any specific allegation it turns out he received an inquiry a fact check about this article and he i think it's such a funny thing it's the uncertainty principle like like donald trump is changed when maggie haverman observes him i mean so obviously we could be laughing or crying about all this.

I actually, yeah, I have to say though, like it was, I feel like it was not more crazy than what we've seen in the past. Like I didn't find it to be, there could be a version of that article that made it seem like he was in some kind of rapid and deeply terrifying descent. But I found it in this horrible reality of ours,

heartening to see that the status quo ante of where he was on January 21st continues, which is watching four hours of television a day and having no sense of the importance of his own job. I laugh because it's all I got. But the thing that really scared me was every single one of his advisors told the New York Times that he has trouble sorting out fact from fiction. And you couple that with like some of the batshit crazy people that he has in his White House. Like Mike Flynn famously told the Defense Intelligence Agency that Iran was behind the Benghazi attacks and go prove it and make it so. So if you have people like selling shit like that to him in a time of crisis, that gets unbelievably scary. Yeah, partly because, you know, Maggie and their great writers, they like painted this picture of, you know, kooky president comes to Washington and remains kooky, you know.

But when you step back and think about the consequences of, again, you know, we may be in the best part of the Trump presidency. Yeah. And you think about the threats from North Korea and what's going on all over the world. And you're like, this kind of behavior at the wrong moment, making a certain decision, could be catastrophic. And also, I think the most interesting thing in the piece, and Maggie tweeted this out, was she wrote at one point, there's seldom a plan apart from preemption, self-defense, obsession, and impulse. So this whole, like, is he trying to distract us from something else?

Is this a strategy to do this? There is no strategy here. There's only, like, how do I get through, like the headline of the piece, hour by hour battle for self preservation. So I think you're right, right? So we should be obviously at all times terrified, because events are coming, the world is coming, there will be a crisis, and then this person will be in this job. But what the sense I get when I read these articles about what Trump is doing is, it's not that he's misusing the presidency, it's that he's not doing the presidency. He has abdicated the presidency.

I feel like every president spends a year being told what to do by the White House, being sort of battered and buffeted by the job itself. And then over time, and there's no way to teach you how to control. They learn how you learn how to be president. Every president does that. They all describe the mistakes they made. And they all come down to, oh, I forgot I was president, and I decide what this job is. And you read this article and you see that, oh, this is a person who can't learn, who can't adapt. He has stepped into this role. He is unable to perform the functions. And what that means is there's no control.

There's nothing happening. We just don't really have a president. We have a tweeter. A competent president, a competent administration could have done, like, 50% more damage. more damage absolutely i guess that's heartening he doesn't see the presidency as a job he sees it as a role that he's starring in it's a prize he must get accolades for right so that's how he's treating he's not treating it as a job to perform so funny him like reading the news and just not seeing himself for a couple days and being just like what controversy should i ignite because i'm which tracks with what's happening. You know, it's interesting.

There are days when he falls out of the news once in a while. And then all of a sudden he goes to Kaepernick or what have you. He jumps back in and you think, did something bad happen? Did he hear about something with Mueller? That's maybe not the case. Maybe just what happened is he's like, I'm pretty bored. I want to get back to the news. That's right. We always think like, oh, he must be afraid of some story that's coming.

It just turns out that Donald Trump wants to be in the news every few days. And every few days, there's an administrative defining scandal. And we connect them, but he doesn't. He doesn't. No, synapses aren't firing. Okay, when we come back, we will talk to the Atlantics, Giulio Ioffe. On the show today, we have friend of the pod, Atlantic's Julia Yaffe, who has a new piece in the Atlantic called Putin's Game. Julia, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, guys. Hi. Hi. Hello to you. That's my chipper radio voice. That's a great, very good chipper radio voice. Okay, so the thrust of your piece is Vladimir Putin is not playing, you know, 3D chess. He's gambling. He's playing blackjack. Can you explain what that means and the sort of broader point you're trying to make with that comparison? Sure. So we like to think of Vladimir Putin, or we've come to think of him here in the US, especially in the last year as this kind of villainous mastermind, something out of James Bond, as somebody who has a grand strategic vision that is very detailed and that he is able to carry out and execute. But a more accurate description of

how he operates is that he has kind of a long term goal, which is to create friction for America in the world stage. And to maybe get back at America for what he sees as regime change via the color revolutions in former Soviet republics and in the Middle East and things like the Arab Spring, which he blames the CIA for. And then he'll do kind of like the first and second step and the rest he'll figure out as he goes along. So he kind of acts very emotionally. There's a lot of kind of knee-jerk last minute decision making that he does. And he doesn't really think about the consequences in the moment. It's kind of a, you know, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, if we get there. And as a result, a lot of these actions that we describe as, wow, he's totally running circles

around us in Ukraine and Crimea or in Syria or with our elections in 2016. But these things end up coming back and biting him in the derriere. Yeah, you can say ass here. I can say ass? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. Ass, ass, ass. So your piece is really smart and it's incredibly well reported and everyone should go read it. I think it gets at something that's bothered a lot of people who've been watching the response to the election hacking unfold over the last year, which is like, unfortunately, we're in a place now where we're, you know, every Russia connection is held up as some huge deal too much as being ascribed to Putin. But there's also the other reality that like, you can do great harm and cause damage without a broader strategic plan. How do you sort of like hold up both of those thoughts in your head at the

same time if you're the US government and figure out a response that might be able to deter them from these kinds of activities? So email that's found or every new link to a Russian or meeting is held up as this kind of smoking gun with this kind of tacit implication that Trump is going to step down tomorrow. And he's not going to. He's stuck with us as long as we have this Republican Party. We're stuck with him for the next, I don't know, three years. Too many. But who's counting? And as opposed to looking at this as a national security issue and as a broader political issue the fact that the russians were able to get the

kind of result they got with not a lot of sophisticated stuff and not a lot of strategic operative genius it says is a kind of an indictment of our political culture, of our media literacy, of the, you know, of all the things that we created that the Russians didn't create. So we have to look at ourselves and think about the fact that the Russians didn't create Donald Trump, the Russians didn't create Fox News, they didn't create Breitbart, they didn't create Infowars, they didn't create an incredibly polarized discourse. They certainly didn't create the racist backlash to the first black president. They didn't create the electoral college. A lot of this stuff was there. They just kind of exploited what we gave them. So we have to think about that. And the second thing is we have to think about this as a national security issue and as a cybersecurity issue. But unfortunately,

under this administration, in part because this president feels so warmly toward Vladimir Putin and other strongmen, and in part because he is stubborn and under so much pressure when it comes to Russia that he has not and his administration has not given the green light to our cybersecurity counterintelligence forces that we have in our intelligence community. They're kind of just sitting idly by and waiting for a signal to counterattack to defend America. And there's no signal. So there's no command to go. And that's also a problem. problem. Yeah. And you just made this point. One of the things that Michael Hayden said to you, I think, in the piece was covert influence operations don't create divisions on the ground. They amplify them. I sometimes wonder if, you know, we have a hard time wrapping our heads around what happened to us in 2016, because it is difficult for us to admit to ourselves that propaganda works on us like it's one thing if russia hacked our election machines but if you hack people's minds um it's sort of a trickier thing to both admit and then guard against but i wonder like i don't know it feels

like the russians have had a quite a long history with the uses of propaganda. Like, what are some of the ways that societies could prevent against, you know, a propaganda attack from a foreign actor as we look ahead to 2018 and 2020? So I just want to push back on the premise of that a little bit, which is I agree with you that I think it's hard for us to wrap our heads around what happened in 2016. But I would say the vast majority of the propaganda the American voter was subject to in 2016 was American made. Oh, yeah. Oh, more so than Russia. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And I think it's much easier for us to blame somebody else. I think it's a basic human trait really embodied by this president that it's never your fault. It's always somebody else's fault. It's not that you lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. It's that there was a shady plot of illegal immigrants voting against

you. And we see it everywhere. And to me, it's very Russian. It's a very Putin-esque response. Right. experiencing deja vu here, because what I saw then in 2012, and then again, in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and there was this jingoistic craziness, was that any Russian who had any connection to an American, an American friend, if this Russian ever studied in America or visited in America, this was automatically suspect. And this person was automatically a traitor And this person was automatically a traitor to Russia because it's much easier to explain your failings by blaming them on somebody else. And it's much people who are about my age who missed the Cold War and who really want to, you know, give it a go and experience that as opposed to thinking about really kind of vague, nebulous and unsexy things like

Americans' media literacy, or, you know, the effects of mechanization and globalization, or campaign finance reform, or the fact that we have institutionalized minority rule because of gerrymandering and the electoral college. These are very kind of big, hard to tackle, unsexy things, whereas this is very easy. There's a guy in a big chair stroking a bald cat, and his name is Vladimir Putin and he's responsible. No, I think that's exactly right. I guess the point I was trying to make is it seems like it's going to be extraordinarily difficult

to guard against this in the future from a national security standpoint because whatever their capabilities are, all they need to do is falsify one document or leak one email. And all the divisions that are present within the United States are going to do the job for them. All it takes is one document and then Jim Comey is sold on the whole thing. That's what I'm thinking about. That's pretty low-tech.

To your point, John, for me, I don't think the Russians are the reason Hillary Clinton lost. But I think the fact that, you know, despite all this evidence, a third of the country won't believe that they were involved, but somehow rather blame the Democratic Party than the Russians is probably more instructed than anything that happened before the election itself. Yeah, I mean, just the shift that's happened. Also, the fact that, you know, Democrats have become incredibly hawkish on Russia, and Republicans, the party of Reagan, who called it, you know, the center of evil in the modern world for referred to russia in that way you know are now buddy buddy with russia because you know

russia helped their guy win so it's just such it's been such a mind fuck you know i think for everybody see i wouldn't say ass before but now if you know you've let me you've unleashed me indoctrinated you sort of hinted this at the end that, you know, Putin has announced his reelection. Good luck, sir. In 2018. Who do you think is going to win? I'm just, I'm waiting with bated breath. We'll find out.

But I mean, I think so many of our fears are wrapped up in this one little judo loving man. The New York Times is a big piece on, you know, sort of how the secession, a struggle for who comes after Putin is happening concurrently with Putin's reelection. You know, ballpark it for us. Do you think things get worse? Do they get better? Are we more likely to see a continuation of Putin-like policies because that's the only way you can sort of maintain control of a country that's in decline in so many other ways? So this is one of the things I tried to get at in this piece is that Putin has propagated this vision to his citizens, which is Russia's always on the brink of collapse. And he's the only one

standing between 144 million Russians and the abyss. And that if he were to go, everything would fall apart. And there would be bloodshed and chaos and economic decline. Unfortunately, by being in power for so long, by personalizing his rule for so long, he has assured that this is probably what will happen when he goes. Because unfortunately, no man is immortal and he will die one day or he will be ousted one day. And a lot of the things that he has spent nearly 20 years scaring his countrymen about will happen because of how he ruled. The reason Russia is in decline is because of his policies, is because of the rampant corruption in Russia, because of the fact that civil society has been completely raised and leveled with the ground because there's no political competition because there's no competition of any sort in

Russia. And because he he has spent the last 20 years feeding the Russian population, really jingoistic and kind of violent nationalistic propaganda. So, you know, when he says, kind of, you know, you'll miss me when I'm gone, he might be right. But he created that reality. He set Russia up for that kind of grim future. So the one theory of collusion that I would say, might be supported by your piece is this idea that, you know, if Russia really is more hapless than we have allowed ourselves to believe, and they don't have this extremely sophisticated strategy or understanding of the American political system, and they sort of got lucky, then, and I know that, you know mark warner's raised these questions and the senate committees have raised this but you know the the targeting of sort of some of the fake news

facebook ad stuff seems to have been incredibly sophisticated and precise here in the united states and so then the question is well like yeah if if russia didn't know what they were doing and they just kind of got lucky how did they know how to target all of these precincts? In which case, you know, the idea is maybe they had some help. What do you think of that? Is that just crazy? I don't think it's crazy, but I don't think we know the answer just yet. I think it's really hard to kind of stay in the moment and stay with what we know and the facts we have and not to run ahead. I think that the Russians have gotten tremendously more sophisticated when it comes to understanding our political process, but they're still not that sophisticated. That said, if you really wanted to

target all these precincts and figure out where the battleground states and counties were, target all these precincts and figure out where the battleground states and counties were. All you need is a computer. All of this stuff is out there on, you know, 538 and on Cook's political report and Sabato. You know, if you really get into the weeds of American political reporting, it's all there. You know, and, and in this way, the Russians are a lot like, I like comparing them to the 9-11 terrorists. They used our system against us. You know, they use the openness of our system, the fact that we have a lot of information out there because this is not, you know, an authoritarian dictatorship. You can access this stuff and target things.

You also have, you definitely had a willingness to collude from the Trump side. And you had on the far right, a definite affinity with the Russians with this kind of white Christian nationalistic, you know, global north versus the global south, kind of streams of thought with that dovetailed nicely. And even after the election, you see how and places like the Atlantic Council have done a great job documenting this, how the far right, like the alt-right Twitter sphere and Infowars, how they launder Russian disinformation and propaganda, how they take a meme that starts somewhere on the Russian internet or Russian official media, and then they launder it and make it their own.

Case in point was when they said, you know, the hashtag Syria hoax, when there was that chemical weapons attack by the Syrian regime in April of 2017. And it was in the Russian government's interest to defend Assad. And they said, no, it was a hoax. It was actually the rebels who gassed their own people to frame Assad's government. And you can see the chain, you can see how Infowars and the alt-right and Richard Spencer and all those people just took it and ran with it. And it kind of goes both ways. They sit online, they sit on Twitter, they're on Facebook, the Russians are, I mean, and there's a lot of give and take. Sometimes

the Russians are running with what the American Twitter sphere, the American internet produces, and sometimes they're trying to inject memes back into our discourse. So that makes it hard to trace. Yeah. So basically they they just have better media literacy than we do. No, no, they just have they have. So the reporting that's coming out of Russia is also really interesting. And this is kind of where Putin's work has really paid off, right? Like he completely almost completely annihilated independent journalism in Russia. But the people who are left are have done some amazing reporting. And what they've shown is this, you know, the famous troll factory that Adrian Chen wrote about

in the New York Times Magazine a couple of years ago, that they had, you know, a bunch of people working in shifts for a year, or longer than a year, on Twitter, on Facebook, in comment sections all over the internet in the US. And what was interesting to me about that is these were college students at the University of St. Petersburg, which is, you know, the number two school in Russia. This is the, you know, Russia's second capital, very kind of very westernized, very progressive, very European. They're college students. They were students in Middle East studies, linguistics, journalism. These were kind of the college elite. And these are people who are

familiar with Western culture who were using VPNs, the same VPNs they had used to watch Netflix and to watch all the American shows that we watch. They were then using the VPNs to attack us. And what I thought was so interesting about that was, you know, this is the demographic that we in the West assume is the most naturally anti-Putin, that they're the ones who are always itching to go out into the streets and topple him. And here they are because they're making twice the monthly average monthly salary by just, you know, trolling people on Twitter, doing Putin's dirty work. Yeah. Fascinating. So what I learned today was Putin, not as powerful as we make him out to be. Two, don't argue in the comments section because it's probably a Russian college kid.

Three, the Russians were colluding with 538. So Nate Silver, Harry Enten we're coming for you Mueller's calling yikes tough news for them tough news tough news

Julia thank you for joining us thank you for keeping us all sane and sensible with this piece it's a really really great piece

thank you guys thank you so much okay talk to you later alright bye bye Thanks so much. Okay, talk to you later. All right, bye. Bye. Bye. On the pod, we have with us the host of Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. DeRay, how are you? Hey, I'm good.

I'm good. It's great to be here. Great to have you. DeRay, update. My romp-hem is here. I have it. It's a little snug on the fence about whether I'll ever wear it publicly. Oh, snug is how it's supposed to be.

Is there another way to have a rompum? It's supposed to be like form-fitting. Yeah. Yeah. We can talk about it. Love it. Wear it on Love It or Leave It this week. I'm thinking about it.

I'm thinking about it. Have you seen it? Have you guys seen him in it? No. No. No. I haven't been treated to that image yet. So far it's just been me in the mirror. I love it.

I love it. Send me a picture. Okay. DeRay, who's on the show this week? We have Tom Wheeler, the former chair of the FCC, who was the chair when that neutrality got passed. So that's dope. And then we have Sinead Burke, who is a disability rights activist.

She is a little person and I learned so much. So it's great. That's excellent. Cool. And I saw that you have a new effort that you launched in Florida for voter registration. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So we're actually just helping out the incredible organizers who've been doing so much work down there. So they need about 700,000 good signatures. You know, there are about 2 million people in Florida who can't vote, 6 million ex-felons across the country who can't vote, one in four black people in Florida can't vote, which is wild. So we worked with them to just, like, provide additional capacity. So they've been doing incredible work getting signatures.

We helped them launch a mailing campaign. So we're mailing petitions to people across Florida so they can just mail the petition in. We also, you know, the organizers down there were at the Jay-Z concert. They were at the Lady Gaga concert getting signatures, and we helped them do that. So they need these signatures by the end of January. They're close. And if you go to florida.ourspates.org, you can help. You can help either mail petitions to people or you can sign a petition if you live in Florida.

Cool. That's great. Great. We'll tweet that out. It's a very big deal. And, you know, we just saw, you know, Terry McAuliffe did this in Virginia successfully and, you know, re-enfranchised ex-felons. And, you know, it makes a huge difference, especially some of these people before the election, what it meant to them that they were able to go vote was inspiring. So, yeah, I'm hoping to see this.

Yeah, you know, with Terry, Terry actually lost, McAuliffe lost the structural way to do it. So to this day, the governor of Virginia, this is why it's a big deal that a Democrat won, still has to sign the order person by person to give ex-felons the right to vote back because they have not been able to pass legislation to do it. So hopefully we'll get a legislative fix or some structural fix in Virginia. Getting a structural fix in Florida would be huge because, again, it's only six million ex-homes in the country who can't vote. Two million of them live in Florida. So it would be the single biggest re-enfranchisement that's on the table right now. Yeah.

Hey, Dre, we've all been emailing about this video of Daniel Shaver who was shot by the police in one of the more chilling pieces of video I've ever seen in my life. He's clearly complying. He's on the ground. He's crying. He's begging for his life. And he's just executed by this cop who will seemingly see no penalty for his actions. Do you think this recent piece of video, this piece of evidence might wake people up? Or do you think it's going to get sort of added to the long list of horrifying videos of police misconduct? I think in many ways, it's like a both and, right? I think for those of us who've been in the streets about this, we're like, we told you, right? Like that the police are violent. And we talk about the disproportionate impact on people of color because there is a disproportionate impact. But the truth also is that the police are

killing white people. This is just one of the first videos that has become a national story. I hope that this helps white people see that the issue of police violence is not like a fringe issue that doesn't impact them. Is it that guy like was he the only person who you had to fear in that video was the police officer like he was as you said tommy i mean he's like on his stomach like he has no weapon they let the girl go like he was not a threat to anybody and if there are people who saw that video and can see themselves in that moment and realize like that could be them their son their brother their nephew their daughter like that could be them, their son, their brother, their nephew, their daughter, like that could be anybody. And like, we try to help people see that, like, this is not just an issue that impacts

people of color. Like this is an issue that we need to address so that everybody's safe. And what's frightening about that video is that like people saw it, like the jury saw that video and still acquitted the officer. And like, that just doesn't make sense to me. What does that say to you? That to me is like the part that I think is the hardest to grapple with, that people saw that video and agreed with the argument that this was self-defense, agreed with the argument

that this police officer shouldn't pay any kind of a price. And like, how do you attack that problem, which isn't about the police? It's about the way citizens in our society view the police. And prosecutors and the criminal justice system, right? Like how they present the case. Right. But people saw that video and decided it was not something to punish. Yeah. I'd love to know what part of the video stuck out to you? Like, what was it about this video that made it like appalling in a way that it has risen to a national conversation?

I mean, I wouldn't have known what the hell I was supposed to do. The instructions were confusing and contradictory, and the kid couldn't have been in a less threatening position with his hands down on the ground. I guess I would hope that in that situation, when there's a body camera on the cop, when it's all being filmed, that there would be such a massive disincentive to shoot someone in cold blood and execute them but that didn't stop this cop from doing it yeah i

guess for me it was like and it's the same thing that always gets me in a lot of these videos that i've seen it's when the person is pleading you know with the police officer or usually sometimes it's a you know a relative of the person or a friend of the person pleading with the police officer don't shoot he doesn't have a gun you know please i'm not i'm not here to shoot you i don't have a gun like this person clearly pleading for their life clearly scared and terrified and yet somehow we're meant to think that the police officer sees that as a threat yeah no it's it it is wild. And like, you know, people say that body cameras don't have an impact.

And what's interesting about body cameras and the organizing community split on them is that there are almost no instances of a police officer ever being held accountable where there's not video. And the video is like one of the only things, in this case, there was a video and the officer wasn't held accountable.

But the video is like the only thing that has helped people see this like as a real problem because we if i explained daniel shaver's death to you like people would be like wow that's really bad but like there are all these questions of like he might have done something he probably yelled something he might have threw something like that's what people's mind does but you see the video and you're like this little boy was terrified you know like yeah the videos are i think the videos are important yeah he's terrified it's i i guess the the thing that i don't understand how you make a shift is i think it's it's a question of who you see yourself as in the video like what you're scared of being like are you scared of being the person behind the gun

are you scared of being the person on the ground? Which is why I think maybe the fact that there's a white person might change things for some people. But even still, like there is still, I think, a block for some people to imagine them lying there on the ground, that they're still likely to sympathize with the person who's worried about whether or not this person is going to do something, whether they're really scared, what have you, and not able to necessarily empathize with what it's like to be the person who's being threatened by the cop. Yeah, I think you're right. And you know, the police do have like a whole separate justice system is that, you know, we did the first ever database of police union contracts and across the country in places like Austin, for instance, the police get access to all of the interrogation materials before they can be interrogated. And

it's like, no private citizen has those protections. So I hope that this wakes people up. You know, it was interesting to see like the National Review and like, reason, like they were alarmed about this. And it's like, yeah, you should be alarmed, because this will be any of you. And like, think about all the instances without a camera that happened where the police are just like, they're afraid, you know? Yep. Daryl, what have you learned? I mean, clearly, this is a systemic issue. What have you learned about, like, you know, which problems are occurring during, you know, the training and preparation of these officers where, you know, if we change that, maybe it would lead to less violence? Like, what are, you know, how do you fix some of the more systemic problems within the police system? problems within the police system. Yeah, I think that one of the root cause systemic problems is that there's no accountability despite everything. So I don't know if you saw that story recently of the, there was a training going on and it was a white female officer who responded to a white

male officer by saying that his like white male privilege was on display and that she got suspended because he said that he was being, that that was like a defamatory statement by saying he had white male privilege did any of you see that story no i didn't see that that's supposed to be training right training supposed to be the place where like you talk about privilege and when it looks like he literally got her suspended by saying that like he felt like he was being targeted and you're like i don't even know like what overall realm where that's the case so i think that training can be a part of it but like imagine being in a profession where like despite the training all that stuff no matter what you do people make an excuse for and i think that that is actually the root cause thing that i believe

that police officers might act differently if any of them ever were held accountable but like imagine being able to go to work and like daniel shaver got killed and like it's just seeing there's like a like that nothing happened to him he's chill chill. Like, he gets to work again. He'll go to another police department nobody will ever know. And so I think that the accountability conversation, like, about investigations, about, like, the laws, about who can be held accountable, like, those can be actually the root cause. I think training, body cameras, all that stuff is good. But if, despite everything, you're not going not gonna be held accountable i don't know how much that matters you think about baltimore you all read where like that entire division of the

police department has just been indicted for like selling drugs beating up people all that stuff it's like how do you how do you trust that it's like you don't you know yeah yeah well hopefully this case draws some more attention to this very, very big problem. DeRay, thank you so much for joining us. And we'll talk to you soon. Cool. Awesome. Bye, guys. Keep an eye on those text messages because there's a picture of a rompum coming. He already hung up. I think he hung up just in time.

Okay. Are we in the outro? We are in the outro. The outro is here. Anyone have any final thoughts they'd like to share i shouldn't have done that that'll just you know what john i don't okay great well we'll see y'all again on uh on thursday take care merry christmas merry christmas are we allowed to say that we are now happy hanukkah I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm

I'm I'm I'm I'm