Pod Save America - “Joe vs. the Fall-cano.”

Episode Date: September 20, 2021

Joe Biden is having a less than stellar September thanks to crises abroad and setbacks at home, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Horwitz talks to Tommy Vietor about his team’s scathing five-part series on Facebook, and early voting begins in the most important and most competitive off-year election, the Virginia gubernatorial between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, please visit crooked.com/podsaveamerica. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Very chipper, Lovett. Yeah. I'm trying. Wow, good. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Very chipper, Lovett. Yeah. I'm trying. Wow. Good for you. Monday. On today's show...

I'm wearing jeans that are actually sweatpants. What? Wow. Wait, it's so weird to see you in these jeans. But they're sweats. Who says that we don't innovate in America? Continue. On today's show, Joe Biden is having a less than stellar September,

thanks to crises abroad and setbacks at home. The Wall Street Journal's Jeff Horwitz talks to Tommy about his team's scathing five-part series on Facebook. And early voting begins in the most important and most competitive off-year election, the Virginia gubernatorial between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin.

But before we get started, John, tell us one more time about the return of Love It or Leave It Live. We just heard Tommy zipping up his fly crooked.com i just noticed wild um we are returning to live shows leave all this in leave all this in we're doing a run of live shows in la outside mast and backs all leading up to our beacon show in new york on November 12th. Please get the tickets now. Tickets are, there's some tickets left for New York. There'll be tickets for shows, I think, after this Thursday.

They're starting to sell out. So, Crooked.com. It's going to be very fun. We're back. Nice. I don't have to tell jokes to one person in a screen, in a screen anymore. So exciting. It's hard.

All right. Let's get to the news. Guys, I just want you to imagine what you'd be dealing with if you went to work at the White House this morning. In the span of just one hour on Friday, the Pentagon admitted that the terrorists they said they killed in Afghanistan were actually civilians and children. France recalled its ambassador to the United States because they were cut out of a nuclear submarine deal between the U.S., the U.K., and Australia. And the FDA's Independent Advisory Committee voted down the administration's plan to give everyone over the age of 16 booster shots. For now, they're only recommending a third

dose for people over 65, people with underlying health conditions, health care workers and teachers. Meanwhile, at least 14,000 migrants, mostly from Haiti, are huddled at the border in Del Rio, Texas, trying to enter the United States. And on Sunday night, the Senate parliamentarian ruled the Democrats can't include their proposal to include a path to legal residency for eight of America's 11 million undocumented immigrants in Joe Biden's economic plan, a plan that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema reportedly just told the president that they don't currently support because it's too expensive, moving too fast, and does too much to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

How's that for a Monday? I feel like he's trying to, this is a leading question, and the answer is it would be bad. Yeah, I think it was bad. Do you guys think it would be a fun, fun work day? No, that's very, that's a lot on your plate. And the UN General Assembly is this week.

Oh my God, UNGA. UNGA is this week. UNGA is this week. Articles say words like buffeted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Buffeted by a host of competing. Host of setbacks. I used it in the interest. Host of setbacks. I used it in the interest.

Host of setbacks. Setbacks and disappointments. I mean, having those three things happen in one hour on Friday, especially you're going to work on Friday, you're thinking, maybe this weekend will be a little quiet.

Afghanistan might be in the rearview mirror. Not so much. Tommy, let's talk about the significance of these developments one by one. Can you walk us through how the Pentagon could have made such a gut-wrenching, horrific mistake, and then also shed some light on why

France is so pissed off about a submarine deal? Yeah, I mean, on the drone strike, it was just a horrible mistake. They'd been tracking white Toyota Corolla. They thought they'd observed patterns of life that had showed a terrorist plotting an attack. Turns out it was an Afghan aid worker filling up water jugs, commuting home, and they ended up killing 10 civilians and seven children. And it's just the worst possible outcome. And frankly, it happens far too often. And this is why all the times you read that, you know, Joe Biden should have just kept a couple thousand troops in Afghanistan. There was a low cost. It was no big deal. Those arguments are completely immoral and ridiculous.

Like this is what happens when you're at war constantly for 20 years, children get killed. So this is just horrific. With respect to the French piece of this, it's a little harder for me to get worked up about. I'm not going to lie to you guys. Last week, the US and the UK and the Australians announced a new defense partnership. The biggest piece of that deal was the US and the UK agreed to help Australia develop

nuclear powered submarines. This is supposed to help them counter the risk from China in their neighborhood. Australia had previously agreed to spend $66 billion with a B on diesel powered French submarines. They ended up not wanting those bad boys because they have limited capabilities. They're probably really noisy. Yeah. Oh, the't know i wouldn't buy a french car by french i mean a diesel powered submarine come on so and they just bought all these sweet they promised to buy these sweet submarines from uh from us then yes now they're going to take our submarines there's a lot of like complicated policy issues that are problematic about nuclear non-proliferation under this but at the end of the day the french are just mad because it's going to cost them a ton

of money. They had a $66 billion contract to sell submarines to the Australians. That is now not going to happen. So they're reacting very angrily. They're acting like it's a bigger problem with the alliance. It's a stab in the back. They recalled their ambassador from the u.s and australia also canceled the party they canceled the party what party did they cancel there was some sort of uh celebration that the ambassador was going or that someone from the french are they're skipping out on a bunch of different um really fun events yeah i bet does this mean the correspondence in her party is not going to be at the french embassy that would be a big win whoa that's gonna talk about things that are gonna lead playbook i don't think that's happening anymore there was a line in the ap story that i thought really captured what happens when like there are

many competing crises that are enveloping the biden white house i don't consider it fair to add this to that list the strain with france came just as biden had hoped to pivot to his ambitious domestic agenda like yeah i don't think it's going to affect reconciliation. I'm not questioning like the Joe versus the volcano narrative, right? There's a lot going on. But I mean, I was listening to an NPR report this morning that was like, this will be a big issue at the UN General Assembly. Like, I agree that the US French, US European alliances are very important. But like, you tell a bunch of voters that we pissed off the French french because we won out on some arms deal they're going to be psyched so let's not pretend there's political conflict i

mean this is part you know once you're in the barrel it's like the longer you're in the barrel the harder it is to get out of the barrel because every new development and every piece of bad news is like now part of that narrative you know and so you the reporters are all trying to shoehorn the french thing into the rest of the narrative and And it's like, well, the French said he's acting just like Trump and they thought it was going to be a change. It's like, yeah, of course, the French know that they can say, oh, he's acting just like Trump and it's going to get everyone going. It's an arms deal. It's what it is. It's a military sale.

It's whatever. A lot of problems we're covering. This is low on the list. Love it. The Biden administration's top federal health officials announced in August that they were targeting today, September 20th, as the data start giving everyone who'd received their last shot eight months ago a booster. What's your take on the advisory board's decision and what happens now? So, look, as you know, I'm a world renowned epidemiologist, but I will say like a lot of the doctors in my life are basically like acupuncturists at this point. They're like little Johnson and Johnson, little Pfizer, little Moderna. They're all off label. That's what's going on. And the closer they are to COVID, the more likely they are to have given themselves a couple of jabs just for fun.

Yeah, just you can't be just just in case. So there were a couple of dissenters when the advisory panel voted against the boosters for everyone. Then they agreed unanimously to recommend boosters to older people and people at high risk. That'll be kind of left to the CDC, I think, to determine exactly what that means after the FDA commissioner, acting commissioner Janet Wood of people could miss is that this advisory committee, their job is to advise the FDA commissioner. Her job is to take a whole bunch of different things in consideration, including their advice. Yes. And then that goes to the CDC and then that will lead to more specific recommendations. And by the way, that then goes to governors who can make recommendations based on they can follow those. They can adjust those, I think, probably because of the kind of lethargic pace by which they have been making these kinds of recommendations. You already see

governors like Larry Hogan in Maryland just kind of getting ahead of it and saying, I'm recommending for over 65 starting right now. So Janet Woodcock gave an interview to Andy Slavitt on his podcast, and she said, if people are acquiring the virus and spreading it, you want to stop that as much as possible. She was very kind of opaque and vague. But that is important because she made her decision. She's made her decision, apparently. Well, right. We don't know.

Didn't announce it on. Oh, but that sounds like. OK, so it's interesting. We don't know what it means. It seems like one hopes that it's going to be a broader recommendation than what the advisory committee said. But what's important about it is some of this debate is what should inform the recommendation, like how to weigh when a vaccine is still effective against severe disease and hospitalization, but less so against asymptomatic and mild to moderate illness. So Fauci was interviewed by the Post about this, and he said

some scientists believe it is OK for vaccinated people to get infected as long as they experience only mild or moderate symptoms. But as a clinical person who sees a lot of patients, that isn't OK. Adding that even mild infections can result in missed work, disruptions of family life and potential cases of long COVID with its debilitating effects. And the biggest part of it is if boosters can significantly lower your chances of getting infected in the first place and thus lower the chances that a vaccinated person might transmit the virus to someone else, then boosters will help control the spread. Now, we don't know how long the booster, you know, the added immunity from the booster lasts because the data is still out on that and Israel is ahead of us, but they're not

that far ahead of us. So we don't know yet. But if we could slow down transmission and reduce transmission by giving people boosters that's not just like a benefit for an individual that's a benefit for all of society so i don't have i don't fucking understand what they're doing here counterpoint 80 of vaccine doses have gone to rich white countries i think 0.4 of vaccine doses have gone to the poorest countries on the planet and so we are in a situation we're gonna have like a bunch of people in america with their third and fourth dose. The next variant is still going to emerge from someplace else globally. Like I just. But Andy Slava was talking about this in his podcast

too. That's not the issue with vaccinating the rest of the world. It's not the number of doses. If we took all the doses we bought for another booster shot and started shipping them around the world, we still wouldn't solve the real problem with getting the rest of the world vaccinated, which is the last mile logistics issue. We need more people on the ground. But you start with a finite number of doses. That's not it. We have more doses right now. We are we are not using as many doses as we are producing globally every day right now. This is an important debate. It is a political debate about how to distribute vaccines. The reason I am frustrated, if the FDA advisory panel wants to say, we think boosters would help all Americans, but we don't want them to have them right now because we want them to go abroad, fine. But

they're actually kind of combining the political calculus and the scientific calculus. The thing that has been the most frustrating to me is when public health officials throughout this pandemic have taken off their scientist hat and put on their pundit hat. And so, you know, that's what happened with masks early on. We are still paying for that in a lot of ways. So two of the members of the FDA advisory committee wrote this piece in the Lancet preempting the advisory committee meeting saying boosters should not be recommended. And then now inside of that piece, they do a lot of analysis of data, hard data, and that is for the scientists and experts to weigh in. But what was really frustrating about it is throughout the piece, they say,

if unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Punditry. The message that boosting might be soon needed,

if not justified by robust data, could adversely affect the confidence in vaccines and undermine messaging. Yeah, that's not your role. Public health authority should also carefully consider the consequences for primary vaccination campaigns of endorsing boosters only for selected vaccines. Politics.

So if they want to be pundits, then we all have a say, right? They have no more expertise on how things will be received, what the message should be. That's stupid. And I find that- They said nothing to challenge the safety profile of boosters. There is no evidence anywhere that the boosters could cause any kind of significant side effects, certainly not anything different than the first two shots. So like that's not based in science at all. Yeah, but last week,

COVAX announced that they'll have 25% fewer doses to give to the developing world than they thought they were going to have. And then the WHO used that announcement as an occasion to call for a delay of boosters until next year. So there could be a middle ground here that does deal with the problem of scarcity of boosting the rest of our country when we know we need it and also vaccinating the rest of the world. I don't think that's the choice. I just like, I mean, need it for whom? Young, healthy people? Maybe not.

Well, another thing that proves that the FDA's advisory committee thing is a little loose is they started by saying, okay, let's go for 65 plus. And then they're like, let's do 65 plus and people with comorbidities, right? So that's anyone from high blood pressure to obesity. Then they said, let's also do healthcare workers, even if you're young and healthy.

Healthcare workers because they're on the front lines because they're exposed to the virus. And then they added teachers. So now they're saying, if you're a healthcare worker and you're a teacher and you're close to the virus,

we actually do think you need a booster. So if they're starting to say that people who are close to the virus and could be exposed to it need a booster, then obviously there is something about younger and healthier people that need a booster. So if they're starting to say that people who are close to the virus and could be exposed to it need a booster, then obviously there is something about younger and healthier people that need the booster. And I would say if it turns out in a few months, more data comes out and it reveals that boosters are ineffective and actually don't make a big difference. Yeah. And they only get boost immunity for like a couple of weeks or something. Yeah, you're right. Then their caution and their hesitance will have been justified.

Correct. But like based on what Fauci is saying, based on what some of these other experts are saying, based on this Israel data and based on like the experience of doctors closest to COVID, it does not seem that that is the case. And the thing that is so frustrating, what makes it so annoying to me is like there's this ponderous concern about making sure the process is exactly methodical when we are in the middle of the fourth wave. It is it is. Hospitals are overwhelmed. Also, we're headed towards the winter, right? There's a bunch of younger, healthier, vaccinated people who end up in the hospital

this winter. Should they go to the FDA advisory committee to complain because they told them they didn't need a fucking booster? I don't know what we could spell like the the long the number of cases of long covid that come from breakthrough infections is like five percent so you're talking like five percent of five percent so again like at some point you know we are dealing with uh very unlikely scenarios driving these massive decisions and i don't look i'm not saying it's easy or that i have the right answer but i don't from a pure complicated it's also it's also I mean, there's a lot of breakthrough cases that someone then passes it on to their unvaccinated child. Right. Like why?

It's all bad. And the other piece of this, too, is we vaccine. Vaccines are available. They're widely available. The United States are getting thrown out, getting thrown out every day. We know what it looks like to not boost vaccinated people and keep trying but failing to reach the currently unvaccinated. It looks like this, a kind of hobbled America limping along with COVID not getting better. Will vaccinating, will boosting change that in a fundamental way? I don't know.

I'm not an expert, but something's got to give here because if these guys want to start taking politics into consideration, if they're worried about people being resistant to vaccination campaigns, wait till Speaker McCarthy is in charge. Wait till President DeSantis is in charge. You want to hobble this country for the next two years because you're being extra cautious. That's stupid. Look, look, look, look what happens to scientific research. Look, look what happens to health care equity if you allow this to hobble our country going into these elections. And I will say the important thing here is if the FDA commissioner or the CDC head of the CDC or the administration or some combination of all of them end up making the decision that they want to expand boosters to more people, I don't want to see a bunch of fucking headlines that they didn't follow the science. Because, again, to your point, Lovett, their job, the FDA commissioner's job, CDC, Biden administration, is to weigh a number of different factors here.

You know? And, look, in terms of how big of a deal this is, how important it is, if like Fauci said at one point, in a couple of weeks or a couple of months, there's enough data to say, okay, boosters for everyone. We just wanted to wait for more data and boost everyone.

We'll forget about this, right? This will be, this will be, have been a blip. And that's ultimately what could happen is that they're just waiting for more data out of Israel because again, they were ahead of us. So we're going to dig into this story about migration at the border later in the week because it was just developing over the weekend. And, of course, the Senate parliamentarian ruled late Sunday night. But I do want to talk about that ruling on immigration reform, especially as it relates to a broader legislative agenda that keeps getting fucked up over arcane Senate rules and the

performative centrism of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. There are going to be calls this week for Schumer to fire the parliamentarian, for Democratic leaders to get tougher on Manchin and Sinema, for Democratic leaders to give in to Manchin and Sinema. Tommy, what should the White House be doing and saying right now, both privately to Democrats in Congress and publicly, to get the best plan possible passed. Fucked if I know. I mean, here's like what's happening, right? Like Durbin and PDSA, they're going to run this new alternative proposal by the parliamentarian's office in coming days and see if they can get that through. Maybe that'll work. There's going to be a ton of

pressure on Schumer to ignore the parliamentarian, fire the parliamentarian, do whatever it takes to include immigration reform in the bill anyway, although that's going to create a whole new set of problems with senators who are already on the record. I think several of them are on the record saying they won't vote for something that has been ignored by the parliamentarian. There's going to be more coverage of the border situation in Texas. Biden's now deporting Haitian migrants or refugees who are crossing the border into Texas, which is deeply fucked up, considering that that country is reeling from the assassination of its president and another earthquake on top of the one in 2010. And so like, again, the broader question I think we

all have to figure out or Biden has to figure out is all of this is tied into the bigger fight over the size and scope of the stimulus bill and this hostage negotiation between the moderates and the progressives over whether the bipartisan bill goes first or the secondary reconciliation bill goes first. So like this is there's a lot of pieces to this puzzle. Yeah, I mean, you have there's now like a desperate effort to try to find a way to convince the parliamentarian to to put an immigration proposal inside this larger package that Joe Manchin is saying he does not want to do and that we cannot. This is the problem with the again. Would I love it if the parliamentarian was fired?

Absolutely. Of course. Like for that parliamentarian. Make love at the parliamentarian. It'll be much better. I will fucking crush it. I would be honored and I will do you proud. But here's the problem.

Chuck, I'm your guy. Chuck. I'll love it. He's going to be the parliamentarian. Again. You'll be amazed by what I think is a budget relevance. I will shock you by how much you can do. You know, but everyone's doing all this stuff.

They're like, okay, well, if Schumer fires the parliamentarian, doesn't need mansion and cinema to agree with him true kamala harris uh vice president harris overrules the parliamentarian uh it would need 60 votes to stop her and so you need 10 democrats to stop her probably not gonna happen to right but all of this is sort of a beside the point joe mansion and kirsten cinema are not going to vote for an underlying bill that includes in the bill something that the parliamentarian didn't want because they fucking care about the filibuster and they care about these stupid fucking rules and they care about the parliamentarian.

All roads lead back to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. And the danger right now is that they seem like they would be willing to let the bipartisan infrastructure bill die rather than make concessions on the reconciliation bill in order to save the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And that's what's really dangerous here.

Pramila Jayapal and some of the progressives in the House are also threatening to tank the bipartisan bill unless it's paired with this broader reconciliation bill. So it feels like what we need to do

is hire a hostage negotiator to work for Ron Klain to see if he can referee this thing. No, but what I worry about is I think Manchin and Sinema will let the hostage die at this point. That's what I mean. Yeah, they don't have a lot of negotiation.

Like they're shooting. These are shoot the hostage people. If I'm if I'm a progressive in the House, I'm absolutely voting to tank the fucking bipartisan infrastructure bill at this point, because if you don't follow through on that, then no one cares what you say after this. So you have to follow through on that. And basically Manchin and Sinema are daring them to vote it down at this point. Well, what they what is what is crystal clear is if they pass the bipartisan one first,

the Democratic bill is dead. I mean, Manchin and Sinema couldn't be more clear unless they just said that out loud. Yeah, of course. So like the only thing we have to negotiate with is the fact that they want this bipartisan bill. Well, we're also trying to learn what Joe Manchin wants based on reports that either leak out from conversations he had with the Chamber of Commerce or a bunch of Procter and Gamble employees. Like, how is this the best way to communicate? But also, it's like the most important conversation happened between Manchin

and Sinema and Biden late last week. Yeah. Right. Like, that's the only one that really matters. And, you know, we're getting some leaks out of that. Like, Sinema is saying she doesn't she's against the prescription drug plan. Sin cinema is saying that she will kill the reconciliation bill if the bipartisan infrastructure bill dies these are all reports we're hearing out of that meeting but um like i don't know what you do if you're biden right because your ultimate goal is to get the package passed of course to get both bills passed and the only way to do that is to persuade cinema and mansion to change their only way to do that is to persuade Sinema and Manchin to change their mind

or at least be willing to some concessions. And what's the best way to do that? Is it private discussions with them like this? Does he go public at some point? Obviously, speaking out publicly against Manchin and Sinema is not necessarily going to change their minds. I mean, Biden must just feel like

he's in some crazy alternate reality. He's fighting with Democrats to support a proposal to let Medicare negotiate for lower prescription drug prices that polls at 90% approval. Literally nothing more popular than we proposed. Save the country money, and they oppose that? I mean, that's why I think at some point you have to decide whether or not you're going to go down showing people that you fought as hard as you could for the priorities. Right. There is a majority in this country, Democrats, independents, some Republicans who are supportive of Joe Biden's agenda here. I think he probably has to start picking a fight, like, and show people that he is willing to fight for that majority and that agenda and fight against, you know, I don't think saying that you're going to fight against Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema is necessarily going to be all that effective, even though it might be satisfying. But fight against drug companies, wealthy tax cheats, oil companies, right, like insurance companies, all the special interests that are blocking your agenda. companies, right, like insurance companies, all the special interests that are blocking your agenda, like he's got to kind of show that fight, even as I think there are a lot of negotiations

going behind the scenes, because right now, if he doesn't if he doesn't get out there more and start fighting for this, it looks like he is going to be buffeted by forces beyond his control. And that's not a great place to be. We started by talking about this narrative that's forming about this sort of rough couple of of weeks and months for Joe Biden. And I do think that like one of the frustrating aspects of the way politics is discussed is like you would like to believe that the role of the political media would be to tease out the places where Joe Biden has agency versus the places where he doesn't. Right. That was my next question is what's within his control and what isn't. Right. Like you would like the idea of being like, hey, a bunch of things that are happening. Some are good.

Some are bad. There's been a lot of bad news. Here's how Joe Biden is responsible. Here's how he isn't. Here's what he can do. Here's what he can't. Of course, it doesn't happen when bad things happen. They are bad politics.

They are bad for Joe Biden. And then when he says things like the reason we have low vac have a fourth wave is because of the unvaccinated and Republican policies that is cast as laying blame as opposed to simply explaining reality. The place where Joe Biden can make the biggest difference is getting these negotiations done. This is where he can figure this is where his power is figuring out a way to find some some path by which we pass both this bipartisan infrastructure bill and this Democratic only bill. And that that's where his power lies in the long term to kind of get out of this morass. Yeah. I mean, the problem is that Washington and a lot of these reporters, they only care about winning and losing.

And if he wins and that he gets these bills passed, then that changes the narrative. And if he loses, then he's going to be a loser for a while. Right. Like that's that's all they care about. He's just not having a lot of good news days not a good news days i mean talking about things within his control you know his polling numbers have barely improved since afghanistan there was a fox news poll out over the weekend again we always say this fox news is a good pollster it's different than the news outfit um they have him at 50 49 which is better than a lot of other polls but when you like look under the hood there, you know why people like him. COVID, 25%. General positive feeling, 19%. Not Trump, 15%. Empathy and behavior, 9%. Why people disapprove. Incompetence, poor leadership is number one at 22%. Then

Afghanistan still at 19%. General dislike is 13%. That's just Republicans. Then economy, COVID, and border right after that. The other interesting thing is, like, characteristics about him. His mental soundness for office and his honesty have basically been unchanged since he's elected. So it's not, even though the Republicans like to call him the rotting bag of oatmeal, it's not about mental soundness. But cares about people like you and strong leader have taken big hits. And I think that's part of it. about people like you and strong leader have taken big hits and i think that's part of it like things are you don't want to get to a point where it seems like everything is beyond your control and you're just like sitting there watching it happen and the cares people like you like go out

there and fight for this oh the agenda they pulled they pulled the bill the reconciliation bill and they did what we don't like to do which is give the 3.5 trillion dollar price tag 56 39 percent in support even with the 3.5 trillion dollar price tag dan told us not to use the price tag fox news did and they got a they got a majority they got more people liking the bill than they like joe biden and they like the mandates for vaccines i mean someone print out the poll and give it to joe manchin i don't know what else to tell you i'm at a loss and and look they're bad at politics and i'm boosters you know what joe like nothing would make me happier than joe bet go out there i think these uh i think I'm at a loss. They're bad at politics. And on boosters, you know what, Joe? Nothing would make me happier than Joe Bettegaard there.

I think these nerds are fucking wrong. Everybody get a booster. I would love that. Or just start attacking the French. Just double down on that fight. Lean in. Honestly, lean into the French. This is where Trump really had an advantage

because they would just lean into the sort of jingoistic American response to anyone ever criticizing us we would change the name of some appetizer or maybe an hors d'oeuvre to freedom something yeah from there yeah joe and boar is just gonna stuff macron into a locker gavin newsom having dinner at freedom laundry um i do want to just one before we go on i want to bring up kirsten cinema because she's sort of been hiding out in the background here joe mansion's been getting getting all the attention, but she popped her head up with some of these leaks to be like, hey, I'm fighting to make sure prescription drugs are as expensive as they are now, and also I'm going to kill the whole bill if infrastructure doesn't go through.

Joe Manchin, we've talked a lot about, he's from West Virginia. He might be the only Democrat who can win in West Virginia. He's 74. He might not run again. I don't know what Kyrsten Sinema is doing. And don't tell me that, like, oh, only a moderate like her can win in Arizona with her positions. Mark Kelly is a moderate like her. Mark Kelly is not fucking things up by yelling about the filibuster or threatening to tank bills.

Yeah, and he's seen the earth from space. You can be a moderate in Arizona that doesn't act like Kyrsten Sinema and she's up in 2024. Like, yes, I do think a primary challenge could be dangerous to her, especially if it's like

someone who's generally moderate but not as fucking annoying as she is. At least the threat of one would be probably useful here. Yeah, I'm all for that. The Manchin thing,

I just feel like it's not going to be effective because it's West Virginia, but she isn't. I mean, the minute Chuck Schumer sniffed AOC on his left flank, flank all of a sudden we're doing all kinds of good stuff yeah he's got a jay rivera t-shirt on schumer's like carrying around a red rose yeah yeah uh speaking of space did you see elon musk acting all upset that joe biden hadn't called him about his

like astronauts going around the earth what i didn't see that it was a tweet he was uh very sad about it crying my face my face. All right. He insulted him and suggested he was still asleep, so he repeated some sort of right-wing meme. All right. When we come back, Jeff Horwitz of The Wall Street Journal talks to Tommy about all the internal Facebook memos he got his hands on.

So The Wall Street Journal in recent days has published a series of incredibly damning reports about Facebook and Instagram and the harm that the platforms can do. Joining me today to discuss those reports and much more is the lead reporter behind the series, Jeff Horowitz. Jeff, thank you so much for joining. Sure. Happy to be here. Are you getting a lot of friend requests from Facebook staff these days in earnest? I would say a few people are reaching out. Honestly, what I find to be more interesting is a whole bunch of people who won't necessarily talk to me are discussing the work publicly on Twitter, which I just love watching. So like when Facebook comms or Nick Clegg,

you know, is talking about the work, you know, and in some instances suggesting how we got it wrong, there's what appears to be like kind of a growing body of people who are either there currently or there recently who are talking about, talking about, about maybe where, where they think maybe we didn't get it wrong. And that's,

that is a pleasure to watch. And honestly, some of these folks are really understand these issues better than I do, obviously. Right. You know, I'm, I'm the one who's going through, um, stuff that, that, you know, with, has been providing me with a lot of context, but, but I'm the one going through the work product. These are the people who did the work. Yeah. Right. Right there. They saw all the data. So let me jump listeners into what we've learned. So thanks for your reporting. We've learned that Facebook has a secret list of VIP users that are in many ways shielded from the consequences of breaking the rules that the rest of us might receive if we, I don't know, did something that

was against the terms of service. We learned that Facebook has internal data showing that Instagram harms the mental health of teenage girls in particular. We learned that Facebook was aware that an algorithm change made the site angrier, that it is openly used by cartels and human traffickers abroad, and that over 40% of comments on English language vaccine posts risk discouraging vaccinations. Did I leave anything out of the reporting so far? Those are, there were a lot of words. Those were, those are, that's a pretty basic, basic summary of where we've been. I mean, I think the last one, just about the number of comments on, or the volume of sort of anti-vaccine comments on COVID conversations and news, I think that one stretches a bit past just the frequency of the comments and just gets into to failures, Facebook's failure to predict that the anti-vaccine movement would become

the anti-COVID vaccine movement, which is amazing because Facebook has been dealing with this same crowd for years and they have been using Facebook's tools against Facebook's own state of public health goals for years. And just the fact that early this year and into the spring of this year, Facebook seemed to be a little flat footed and trying to rush to catch up with the abuse of its own system by the sprue is kind of remarkable, just because it's like everyone outside the company could see that. Why was it that Facebook seemed to have as much trouble as they did?

Yeah. Yeah. And clearly you also have some reporting about Mark Zuckerberg. Understandably, it was seemed like personally invested in trying to solve the problem, reaching out to Fauci directly, offering the fund trials. Like there's a lot of, he's trying to do the right thing in a lot of respects. And then the platform itself has this. Yeah.

On COVID, there was very much a sense of like, love's not wisely, but too well, in terms of the tragedy, right? Which is that like, they were focused on all the things that Facebook could do that would be great and useful. And they sort of neglected to address the ways in which the platform had been abused and obviously would be abused in ways that might undercut Facebook's own response. Right, right. Well, so let me start with this research about the impact on teenage girls. So Facebook found that Instagram can make body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls, one in five say it makes them feel worse about themselves. 13% of British users trace the desire to kill

themselves to Instagram. Hold on, hold on. One minor corruption there, which is the 13% is of users who told Facebook that they had thought about harming themselves in the last month. 13% trace that directly to Instagram. So not 13% of all girls. Got it. That's a very- I'm not popping in to do Facebook comms work here for you. No, no, no. That's a very important correction. It's a very important distinction. That's a lot fewer. But so with that sort of important correction aside, I mean,

what else did you learn about the mental health impact of Instagram? And I guess more importantly, what did the company do to address it? So I think, you know, let's start off with the props to Facebook for having decided they wanted to study this thing internally, because they didn't have to. People were talking about it publicly and had been talking about it publicly. It's not like Facebook kind of was ahead of the external research on this one, but they caught up with it. And I think the thing that they found that I think is just endlessly fascinating is one, that it's bad for the mental health of vulnerable users, right? So if you come to social media and you're in a good place, you're pleased with your life, you know, you're very happy about who you are,

social media is going to be just fine. It's not to say you won't feel some level of what they call negative social comparison, but like, you'll be okay. It's going to be all right. They found that people who were in a rougher emotional place did not do as well. And also, they didn't have the capacity to basically stay away. So they found that there were some users that were knew that being on the platform was bad for them, which just made them, you know, they'd wake up in the morning, they'd check it, and they'd feel like crap. And, and they, they, however, those people had the hardest time staying away. And so, I mean, I think the things that were really stood out were one that, you know, this wasn't like some minor, you know, people might, you know, feel bad a little bit, you

know, uh, about themselves. This was like, could seriously alter a perception of their own body and of their relationships with their friends. And like, in some instances, like their sense of whether or not their life was worth living. And that is like, I think a level of influence and power that I, even the company is pretty uncomfortable with. And so they, they did try to figure out what they could do to address it. And one of the problems is that the issues they found were kind of unique to Instagram. Some of them were. I mean, I'm not saying that other forms of social media don't come with other truly terrible things. My colleague, Georgia Wells, just did a great piece on TikTok

and their recommendation systems, and it's pretty ugly, but Instagram, because it's focused so much on the body, as opposed to like TikTok, which is performance Snapchat, which is on the face and silly features. And, you know, there was basically a sense that Instagram was uniquely bad on some of these things. And so they were looking to see if maybe taking away likes was going to be something that would help. They spent a few years on this. It got delayed a little bit because they started doing social justice stuff last year in the middle of the BLM protests. And it was a good idea. Maybe if we hide likes, it'll make it less of a competition. It didn't really work.

And to the company's credit, when they did make that feature available earlier this year, they did acknowledge that it wasn't really statistically significant in terms of affecting how users felt. The problem is they don't really have another really promising thing to go for um at the moment and and i think that's a like so okay you know the thing that they kind of had pinned their hopes on didn't pan out for them um and so what do you do now because like you know at least based on their own data the there are some serious questions about whether the product is currently safe for people who are in a not great mental space, particularly young women.

Although I should mention young men, it kind of manifests differently. It's more of a social status and wealth type envy issue there. And then they found that for black girls, it was less like eating disorders than it was over sexualization and things of that nature. So there was kind of a, I mean, it manifests differently in different communities and for different genders, but some pretty far reaching effects

and they don't really have anything lined up to deal with it. I mean, other than maybe the thought of completely overhauling the product, but that's obviously a hard sell internally. Yeah. And I guess, like, you know, I think anyone who's used Instagram, or any real social media platform, I think intuitively knows that it can create this sort of unrealistic depiction of reality that can make you feel bad. I mean, compare and despair is one of these sort of like oldest tenants of, you know, AA and all these programs that sort of help people feel better about themselves. But I guess like, this is the part of the story that makes me really mad, which is you learn about all these harms. And mark zuckerberg announces a plan to create a product for kids under 13 and that to me is where we're going from i mean ignoring a problem to maybe

shifting it to even younger users is that a fair reaction um yeah i i will cop to sort of being surprised by the plan for the under 13 users in light of this stuff. And I mean, I think the company's line on this is that social media is part of life and we're not going back. And, you know, something they need to try to get it right for younger users. And besides, younger users are probably going to be on the platform anyway, so might as well. And I think that's, I'm not arguing with those points. I'm just suggesting that it seems like at the moment, it's a bit of an uphill battle on that front for them. Because I mean, they they do and here's the thing that i think is facebook is currently getting beaten up pretty badly among pre-teen users by tick tock tick tock and snapchat there

is no question that there is an active hunt for the next generation of users and that facebook is not in the lead um and so i have some sympathy you know with the idea that preteens aren't supposed to be on social media. They are. At the moment, I think there's perhaps a bad set of incentives being provided to all the companies because it is absolutely legal to market your products to people who are under 13, and it is absolutely unacceptable to allow them to stay on your platform at the same time. Obviously that's where the competition is. And, um, and so I think there's a, it is kind of a crazy thing that, that, you know, everyone's sort of simultaneously not marketing to this demographic, but at the same time, we hear we going after them. So, uh, you know, I'm not sure that that's something where Facebook is uniquely bad on that front, in

the least. If in fact, if anything, the stats would indicate that their competitors are doing better at it than they are. So- Yeah. Yeah, there's sort of hard data we learned from your reporting that I think I sort of intuitively felt was that a change to Facebook's algorithm made the site angrier. And that change led publishers and political parties to reorient their content to make it more sensational or more likely to outrage people. But again,

like this is an instance where reading your reporting made me so angry because Mark Zuckerberg is made aware of the impact of these changes, but then resists fixes for, I guess, business reasons. Can you talk about that algorithmic change and what ultimately did or didn't happen? Yeah. So there were two parts of it. The first one was boosting content more from friends and family. And that actually totally fine. In fact, the research that Facebook took when we did showed that that actually reduces the amount of sort of polarizing, violating, you know, gory, like pornographic, you know, name whatever ill you want to talk about, like, it helps. It turns out that people tend to get sort of better quality stuff from friends and family. I'm not saying it's they get the most exciting stuff from friends and family. But like in terms of harm issues, they get better stuff. The other part was increasing engagement based ranking. And that

just basically means that the more a thing gets liked and honestly, even more than liked gets commented on, reshared and direct messages, direct message and emojied on the platform like those are the things that are more valuable the more facebook was going to sort of promote it to everyone else and what facebook found out after rolling that thing out was that it really did incentivize both bad things to go viral and people to create more bad content and more aggressive content, right? So it turns out that there's nothing more engaging than a flame war, right? People commenting in ways that they might regret five minutes from now, but nonetheless, they're commenting. And Facebook system was built to engineer that. And I mean, they did find, as you noted, some pretty far

reaching effects, right? I think one of the most interesting things, I don't think this made it engineer that and i mean they did find as you noted some pretty far-reaching effects right i think like one of the most interesting things i don't she don't think this made it into the story but we found that a um one of the tactics of a um of a far-right spanish political party was to actually buy ads targeting their opponent's supporters precisely because the opponent's supporters were going to get super pissed and like, and comment a ton. And it turns out that was the thing that would then make the content go viral because it was super high engagement. And so Facebook's algorithms would basically be like, oh, like clearly this is great content because like, damn, these people are commenting lots.

And so point being, this is like a thing that, I mean, you know, for people in politics, right, you'd never consider targeting your ads at, you know, like your TV ads, like the opposition supporters. But it works here because of this different system. You also noted that in Poland, one party social media team shifted from 50-50 positive negative content to 80% negative. that in Poland, one party social media team shifted from 50-50 positive negative content to 80% negative. So it's just wild that upranking the click of an emoji with a frowny face can materially impact the entire social media strategy of a Polish political party.

That is staggering. Yeah. And this is self-reported from the parties. they were basically saying, like, hey, guys, we noticed that you changed something. Here's what we're doing in response. And I think that this gets to something very big picture with Facebook that is really important, which is that like. We've been talking about like, oh, God, should President Trump's post come up or stay or I'd rather go down or stay up. And like, what are the free speech implications of it this is like literally the least consequential area of facebook moderating speech um is the actual decision on whether things should get removed or not i mean it's what everyone screams about but the thing that matters is how facebook distributes content and what it prioritizes and there is as a number of Facebook people have told me, there is no way to do that work without imposing values, value judgments on

it. Like you are literally determining what things are worth being heard and what aren't. And I think Facebook has for a long time sort of tried to adhere to the line that, in fact, it's a completely neutral platform. And it's not. It makes choices and those choices affect what succeeds. And whether it does that by like Mark Zuckerberg literally like, you know, like saying like boost this post or not, which is, of course, like obviously that does not happen. boost this post or not, which is, of course, like, obviously, that does not happen. Or whether it does that by just simply setting up incentive structures that result in a different form of discourse is, you know, a real question. Yeah. I mean, going beyond just for like political discourse, you know, you looked internationally at ways that Facebook was used to essentially

traffic people to the Middle East and force them into, you know, this Facebook is enforcing them into slave labor, but is being used by people who are doing that. Facebook is being used by government related or government connected groups in Ethiopia to incite violence against ethnic minority groups, which is it just made me think about, you know, the examples we talked about in a couple years ago, the way Facebook was used in Burma to incite violence against the Rohingya ethnic minority. And it made me wonder whether we are at a point where this site is just so big and so widely used that it is almost impossible to police. Or if you think that there is, I guess, just a lack of resources being put towards monitoring speech in Burma or Ethiopia or, you know, name a place that isn't in Danlo Park. So a couple of things.

I mean, the first one is the resources thing is real. This is something that candidly, in terms of how information got to me, I think played a role, which is just the sense that people were literally dying and the company was not investing in it. I mean, Facebook put so much more research into making sure that you or I don't see something offensive on its platform than they do into making sure that there aren't calls for genocide in places where there is a very real prospect of it by Facebook's own acknowledgement. And so that's just an issue of spending and care. And, you know, I think that's, you know, but then, then separating out just sort of the, just like underinvestment in this stuff

that I think contributed to some of the worst things that we were discussing or that you were discussing in terms of the human trafficking and ethnic bloodshed and all that. I think there is an awareness within the company, or at least within certain sections of the company, that in particular, virality has benefits and it has harms, and that where it has more benefits than harms is going to depend on the society it's operating in. But I think that in places like India, where there are a whole bunch of users that have never been on the internet before and aren't sophisticated in terms of their ability to curate their feeds and sort of,

you know, and to recognize things that seem dubious. I mean, by the way, I'm not saying that Americans are great at that either. It turns out we aren't by Facebook's own research. But in places where people are sort of new to the internet, I think there is a bunch of questions as to whether or not the idea of letting anyone go viral at any time, particularly through somewhat abusive tactics, whether it's worth the risk. Ben Felix, I mean, there are ways that you could have Facebook be every bit as big in the sense of having as many users, but have it be less viral.

I think that that's where a whole bunch of people internally, I mean, have been kind of that's the hill they've been dying on repeatedly is, is like, why don't we continue to offer the service? It's which is obviously extremely valuable, but just dear God, can we dial it back on groups? Can we dial it back on newsfeed? Can we dial it back on the explore page? Like, can we basically stop recommending things if we aren't sure if they're bad? Um, you know,

or if, or if we don't have classifiers, which is like an algorithmic system for finding, you know, content that work, like, can we not do that? Basically it's just like, do not proceed until you can be sure the product is safe rather than launch the product and then ask integrity, the integrity staff to clean it up after the fact. Right. I mean like the, you know, the, the, you know, like basically spilled, you know, spilled milk on aisle four is like, does feel to kind of be like the strategy that Facebook is taking with integrity stuff. Yeah. I mean, you used to be proudly so, right? Like move fast and break things. And now it's global.

Final question for you. I mean, like the comparison you're starting to hear with Facebook is to big tobacco. Senator Blumenthal makes that comparison in one of the pieces you reported saying basically both these companies, Facebook and the big tobacco companies knew they were doing harm based on internal research.

They said something different publicly. I guess, like, I'm amazed by the escalation of the rhetoric in those comparisons, but also getting used to reading about these horrible first, second, third order impacts of Facebook. And I guess my final question is, based on these conversations you're having with sources and others in the company, like, what you think might get them to change? Is it regulation getting broken up? Is the brand of the company getting so tarnished that they can't attract employees? Like the step that needs to happen? Because I know a lot of people that work at Facebook, they're good people. They're not there to do harm, right? But like this thing has just gotten out of control.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting that the breakup proposal, I'm not totally clear, relates work people have been doing on the inside, other than maybe just like a lack of attention at some points would be easier at a smaller company or, you know, at, at one of two to three smaller companies. Right. Like, so it's, it doesn't seem like, I think the, the kind of the antitrust discussion feels like it's kind of not, I'm not saying that there's no point in having that discussion, but it feels like it's kind of not, I'm not saying that there's no point in having that discussion, but it feels like it's happening in a different world. The things that seem more meaningful, first of all, is just getting the information out. Like I think the people who are doing this work inside Facebook are just absolutely brilliant. They are like, I started covering this company two and a half

years ago. And honestly, I have learned nothing nearly as well as I've learned from like, just being able to look at their work product. Because these folks are smart, they have access to data, Facebook is an experiment-based operation, so they can just basically test things out and figure out what, you know, what ground truth is with remarkable speed. So I think the first thing is just like figuring out how to get data access in a way that doesn't involve a weasel like me, you know, getting some folks to want to cooperate because they have concerns that important things are being neglected. Once that happens, I would suspect that there would be better solutions proposed and perhaps some level of, I mean, because we've had this

before, like with other industries, it's not like Facebook is the first company in the history of American business to realize that things that they thought were going to be great for everyone turned out to have some serious downsides. And, you know, you can choose which industry and potentially toxic product you want to, you know, compare with. But like, obviously we then, it takes a while, you got to get a lot of data, you have to be clear on what much as the information needs to keep on getting out in a way that I don't know I or anyone else in my profession can reliably guarantee it will. I mean, I am deeply lucky that I got a chance to be involved in this. I'd love to say it was due to talent and skill rather than just knowing enough to be able to ask some questions and happening to run into the right people at the right time.

But this is not a, this is not a solution for us all. Yeah. Yeah. I would prefer you not to have to be the Facebook ombudsman either, but you know, until that happens, I think it might pay very well. Good options. Yeah. I don't think, I don't think they'd want me for it either. Yeah. I don't know that they would either. But you know, until that happens, I think it might pay very well. Good options. Yeah, I don't think I don't think they'd want me for it. Yeah, I don't know that they would either. But look,

until then, everyone should check out your work at the Wall Street Journal. And Jeff, thank you so much for joining the show today. Keep up the good work. Hope you're getting some sleep and that Facebook WikiLeaks is still leaking because it's I would prefer have that be the analogy. If you're talking about comparison, comparing, comparing to anything, Facebook, WikiLeaks, let's avoid that one,

but we got some more stuff coming. Okay. So take care. The Menlo park papers. That's better. That's better. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. All right. Deal. Okay. Let's talk about Virginia. Early voting has begun in the most important, most competitive election of 2021, the race between former Governor Terry McAuliffe and Trump backed private equity executive Glenn Youngkin. Joe Biden won Virginia by 10 points in 2020 and Governor Ralph Northam won by nine points in 2017. But polls currently show McAuliffe with a narrower lead. The latest survey from The Washington Post has him ahead by just three points among likely voters, 50 to 47, with a wider six point lead among registered voters.

The two candidates held their first debate on Thursday, where McAuliffe hammered Youngkin as an extremist because of his support for Trump, his record on outsourcing jobs, his plan to ban abortion. And McAuliffe went especially hard at Youngkin's opposition to vaccine requirements. Here's a clip. I have been very strong in this from day one. And Glenn and I differ on this issue. His anti-vax record, what he has said, he's had rhetoric out there. He told college students, if you don't want to take the vaccine, just fill out an exemption. You know, I think that's life-threatening, and I think that's disqualifying his governor. He doesn't believe in forcing people to understand what COVID is going

to do to the state and to this country. It's still raging all across the country. Right here in this county, all the ICU beds are full. So I am for requiring mandate vaccinations. He's not. He likes to do PSAs. PSAs aren't going to get you anything. PSA will get you whatever you want, Terry. Just tough hit on. He was talking about the podcast, right?

That's what we call our show, PSA. He got a little, it's funny, it's a good clip, but it's midway through he said forced and he kind of realized he had said, he doesn't believe we should force, that's not the word I wanted, people to understand why they need vaccines and you're gonna take the vaccine gun you're gonna go door to door um then grab the bibles terry's a good politician you know like he's a former dnt he's kind of a hack like us he knows how to do this stuff at a debate you realize there are some benefits to having a former candidate um love it

what's your take on mcculiffe's narrow lead? And what's your overall level of concern about this race? I mean, I was concerned about California as we should have been, as we should have been. But being concerned is how we make sure we went. The I mean, it seems like it seems like the goal here is to paint young. Youngkin is like kind of half Trump, half Romney. They're kind of hitting him for his Carlyle stuff stuff he answers the question like what would happen if you combined mitt romney's business record with donald trump's politics you get glenn youngkin and he could and that could that could work because this is america in 2021 and that can work but uh my overall feeling about this is like the lead is now like trump kind of changed the politics of virginia uh and now they're kind of

receding back a little bit he's a little bit out of the spotlight so some of the kind of changed the politics of Virginia. And now they're kind of receding back a little bit. He's a little bit out of the spotlight. So some of the kind of advantages that Democratic Democrats had aren't as strong. And it's a little bit looking more like how Virginia looked when it was kind of a purplish blue state. And that just makes it a harder fight. But he's he's leading. We just to make sure he wins. Tell me you got to take be warm, could be lukewarm, could be hot.

I just want to be clear that that was barely above your temperature i'm going more like something borrowed something blue so this is a nbc pointed out that going back to the 70s the party that controls the white house has lost this gubernatorial race every time except for one exception which was 2013 when terry mccullough beat ken cucinelli who's a kind of a lunatic um Um, and the other warning sign being Biden's job ratings, uh, in that 46% in that Washington post poll, which is very not great. Uh, so the, I guess the question is like, will those sort of meta factors, these meta narratives drive the race or will it be issues where McAuliffe I think is on much firmer ground, uh, on issues like the

coronavirus and abortion? Yeah. I don't know. And clearly that's why Terry leaned into the COVID vaccination stuff at the debate. For sure. The thing that stuck out at me most in that poll, the number was voters who say they're absolutely certain to vote are almost evenly split with 49% for McAuliffe and 47% for Youngkin, pretty close to the top line. But McAuliffe holds an 18 point advantage among voters who say they will probably vote or who are 50 50 so much like the california recall this clearly seems to be a race where democrats need to wake up and democrats need to wake up their voters and pay attention to this

early voting has begun i didn't even know that early voting had begun on friday until i was looking at the news like this is yeah democrats wake up and vote he's going to be okay if people like sleep through this election yeah absolutely glenn yunkin could could win here yunkin winning would be a five alarm narrative fire i mean i wouldn't i would probably i couldn't read the news for a fucking week honestly at least correctly you know california is like sui generis like if if gavin newsom, it would be because of the way in which a fringe is able to kind of take control of the state through a stupid process.

If we lose this race, the alarm should go off. Fuck. Yeah, oh, they absolutely should go off. Allow me to attack the conventional list. No, and Tommy, you know I love that when you do that. Thank you, I appreciate it. You know that I really love that. The other interesting thing is McAuliffe

is doing the same as Northam in the redder southern and western Virginia parts of Virginia, but much worse in at least in this poll in the northern Virginia exurbs and suburbs, which to me says, OK, there's at least an opportunity there. That goes back to the maybe there's some Democrats up there, Democratic leaning independents who are sort of sleeping through this election who aren't paying attention yet. And you've got to get them going. And I do think like that speaks to McAuliffe's strategy of tagging yunkin as an extremist especially like a trump guy i mean that's the trying to get these people riled up in the way that they were riled up in the previous two gubernatorial elections um and you know you see this like yunkin was pretty pissed when mccullough did this sort of romney like attack attack on him as if he was romney

about what the carlo group has done carlo obviously famous. It is run by a collection of sentient lizards from outer space. Famously pulling the strings at places like Bilderberg. Which I do think is a liability for him. That's good. We also saw from our own change poll at Virginia that that's the most effective attack, at least, that we saw. The lizard one?

Not the lizard one. I mean, we didn't test the lizard one, but we should go back in. We should run it back. No more that, like, Youngkin is a new Mitt Romney at Bain, except with Carlisle. Youngkin's response has been to pretend he's more moderate than he really is. He's encouraging people to get vaccinated, even though he's against vaccine requirements. He said he's against the Texas abortion ban, even though he was caught on tape saying he wants to ban abortion. Why do you think he's going with this strategy over the base first strategy that we saw from our good pal Larry Elder? Like what Love was saying earlier, I mean, just different state, totally different election in a normal year with a normal electorate and not some weird

recall turnout contest in the middle of September. I mean, Trump and Trumpism has alienated the kind of suburban moderate people that helped us win the majority, that helped make Virginia a place where we're winning by seven, eight, nine, ten points. These are the same kind of voters that are in favor of vaccination, that are in favor of vaccine mandates and are put off by the kind of radicalism and extremism of Trumpism. So he's clearly trying to have it both ways because early on he decided he needed to be like Trump. He needed to do critical race theory. He needs to do all this shit to keep the base happy. And now he's kind of trying to trying to even it out. Forty eight percent of the people in the poll said that they knew little or nothing about Glenn Youngkin. So to me, this is a race to define him. Right. And Glenn Youngkin wants to define himself as, oh, you pissed at the Democrats and Biden and McAuliffe and all that.

Then I'm a I'm a moderate, sensible alternative to that. And Terry wants to say, oh, no, no, no. Glenn Youngkin is just as fucking crazy as Donald Trump. And I think they found that two thirds of respondents in that Washington Post poll were following the Virginia governor's race closely. So there's they have some folks they can educate. Yeah, for sure. It's also six foot five. Who? Youngkin. Youngkin. That's too tall. Wow. I just think so. Bill Bradley taught us that. Very surprising.

I just think as a rule, people of that height have not been given enough negative feedback and are too confident and cocky. And it's just a dangerous recipe. Is this a de Blasio thing? It could be. If you'd like. Speaking of tall losers. How tall is that guy? Six five is tough.

I don't know. Really tall. I've never heard you attack tall people like this before. They don't get enough. They don't know what's going on up there. They're out of touch. Wow, this is a whole rant. Other things people should know about Glenn Youngkin.

Fun facts. Forbes says he has, quote, he has, quote, several mansions at his disposal. I think it's funny to have a couple of mansions at your disposal. In the chamber. funny to have a couple of mansions at your disposal. In the chamber. Huh.

Wife owns a horse farm. So this is sort of a Romney-McCain combo. Nobody knew how many houses he had. In 2008, John McCain famously was asked, how many houses do you own? And he was like, I don't know. Ask my staffer. I think he didn't want to say the number out loud, but basically ended up saying, I don't know. And that was one of the more devastating hits in the whole election.

Shipped 1,300 jobs overseas while he was at Carlisle Group. That's something fun there. That's not cool. That's a very Romney-esque thing. And then this is like the winner of the cartoon villain category here. Raised the rent on seniors in mobile home parks. Oh, come on. Are you kidding me?

No, he did that. He also ran a nursing home accused of neglect, malpractice, and wrongful death. And they extracted like $1.3 billion of value from that company before it went bankrupt, which is like the classic... Vulture capitalism. Yeah, private equity is a scourge on this country. So

often you will go into a business and you will not know that it was taken over in some way by private equity. But what you will find is suddenly the prices are fundamentally more annoying than they were before. Like everything's a little bit more. You're paying a little bit. You're getting you're getting charged like this happens everywhere from gyms to veterinary, like to everywhere from gyms to vets, like all of a sudden this thing that was local that provided a service to you has been kind of absorbed into the like vampire capitalistic private equity system. Yeah. I mean, a lot of these ads write themselves for McAuliffe, right?

He's like, I want to require vaccinations in all nursing homes and from healthcare workers who deal with our seniors and Glenn Youngkin just buys them up and then runs them into the ground and puts people at risk. Yeah. I mean, like watching Yunkin try to deal with the understanding that half of his base is anti vaccine while like towing the line of being electable in a state like Virginia is interesting. I mean, suggesting to a bunch of college kids that they just fill out some sort of waiver to not have to take the vaccine is completely irresponsible. It's you can watch him thinking this through in real time. And you know what? The truth of it is, like he wants to say he's a kind of moderate,

reasonable Republican with a business background. McAuliffe wants to paint him as a Trumpist. And the answer is he is somewhere on the spectrum between full Trumpist and what the Republican Party used to be. But what happens now through these Republican primaries, through these elections is no Republican may can make it to the end of an election without embracing some of those heinous and vile politics in this country, which makes them completely unacceptable. Right. Because at this point, it doesn't matter if you embrace it or have believed it from the start. You're still there. Yeah. And you can't criticize Trump or components of the Trump agenda because he will then go out and try to find someone to run against you, as Trump is currently doing to Mitch McConnell, which we support.

Yeah, that was a fun story. That's awesome. I was a little into it. You sent that story, Tommy, and I was like digging through it because I was hoping for something real. And then there was too many Republican senators who were like, even Trumpy Republican senators were like, what? We would never do that. We would never get rid of Mitch McConnell. We love this guy. He stole the Supreme Court.

He's Mitch McConnell. Come on, go Trump. I'm rooting for you on this one. Anyway. Six foot five. What an asshole. Bottom line with six foot five Trumpy Carlisle executive Glenn Youngkin is we need everyone to work even harder on the Virginia race than you all did

on the California recall because it's much tighter. And if you're wondering what you can do about the shit show in Congress, Virginia, anything else, the answer is to start organizing now to make sure Republicans don't take power in 2022 and that we mansion-proof and cinema-proof our Democratic majorities, which seems important. That's why we have launched No Off Years through Vote Save America, where you can help donate, volunteer, and register voters in all the key states in 2021 and 2022. You can go to VoteSaveAmerica.com slash No Off Years to chip in now and find out more about how you can help in all these very important races. And I just want to say that there's some dissensus about Glenn Youngkin's height.

He may be anywhere from 6'5 to 6'7. We cannot have a 6'7 inch governor in this country. It's too dangerous. That's a big range. It's too dangerous. 6'7? You can't trust somebody that tall. I feel like this show goes on any longer. It's going to be 6'9 before we end. No off years. No off years.

Thanks to Jeff Hurwitz for joining us today to talk about Facebook and hopefully we'll have some better news for you when we talk to you on Thursday. Okay. Pats of America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael Martinez. Our senior producer is Flavia Casas and our associate producer is Olivia Martinez.

It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick. Kyle Seglin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Tanya Somenator, Katie Long, Roman Papadimitriou, Caroline Rustin, and Justine Howe for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Phoebe Bradford, Milo Kim, Yale Freed, and Narmel Konian, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.