Pod Save America - “No Climate, No Deal.”

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

Donald Trump fails to stop Republicans from supporting the bipartisan infrastructure deal, Joe Biden and the Democrats look to budget reconciliation as their last best chance to fight climate change, Crooked Media Political Director Shaniqua McClendon joins to talk about Vote Save America’s No Off Years campaign, and New York Times tech reporter Sheera Frankel talks to Jon Lovett about her new book about Facebook, “An Ugly Truth."

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Levitt. Tommy Vitor. On today's show, Donald Trump fails to stop Republicans from making a bipartisan infrastructure deal. Joe Biden and the Democrats look to reconciliation as their last best chance to fight climate change. Crooked's own Shaniqua McClendon joins to talk about how you can start winning the next election now. And later, Levitt talks to Shira Frankel, tech reporter at the New York Times and co-author of An Ugly Truth. All right, let's get to the news. This is the biggest week yet for Joe Biden's economic plan,

known in the White House as his Build Back Better agenda. The Senate is set to pass a $1 trillion infrastructure bill by a huge bipartisan margin that will include all 50 Democrats and maybe around 20 Republicans, potentially including Mitch McConnell himself. This despite a Saturday statement from Donald Trump, where he called the bill a gift to Democrats, attacked McConnell as foolish and threatened to withhold his endorsement from any Republican who votes for the bill. We talk all the time here about Trump's grip on the Republican Party. Lovett, why do you think they seem ready to openly defy him on this one? I would say that I actually just think it's because this isn't about him. This is just not about Donald Trump.

And even Donald Trump's heart has not really been in this fight. He mentioned it once at a speech he gave a couple of weeks ago. He said, I don't do it. And this statement doesn't say he won't endorse anybody. He says it's going to make it very hard. It's clearly his own McConnell politics. You know, he knows he's supposed to have this fight, but he doesn't seem that invested in it. And beyond that, I think these Republicans are more interested in just they want to do this. There is they many of them actually do want to say they passed one fucking

thing. And that is more important to them right now than what is ultimately a kind of lukewarm little fight through a statement that Donald Trump is using. Yeah, Tommy, do you think this is indicative of any larger sort of moving away from Donald Trump and the Republican Party? Or do you think this is just a one off that's hard to extrapolate to anything else? I would love to think that I think it's probably unique to this. I mean, the main negotiators in the Senate were on the Republican side were Portman, Mitt Romney, Murkowski, Collins and Cassidy. So Portman's not running again. Romney doesn't care about Trump, right? He's opposed him on many different things. And he has unique politics in Utah. Collins and Cassidy just won reelection. And they're probably assuming that no one will care about this bill in six years, then Murkowski is the one who could be in some interesting

political trouble because Trump is trying to float a candidate to her right to primary her when she's up in 22. But I also think that as funny as it sounds, I think these senators know that Trump doesn't really care about policy. Yeah. You know, the things he gets really mad about are something about himself. If you criticize him personally, feeling like an alpha, wanting to be a winner. If this bill passes, he'll say, well, I always wanted to do infrastructure and no one will really care if he'd if he'd really tried over the last few months to kill this bill, instead of talking about the big lie that he was somehow really reelected president, it might be a different conversation. But, you know, this has been late and half-hearted,

this opposition to the BIF or whatever we're calling it. Yeah. And especially he doesn't care as much about, if it's a cultural issue issue, this was about immigration. And this was, you know, one of the cultural issues that would be one thing. Economic policy doesn't usually get Donald Trump all that riled up anyway. No. Trump aside, though, you know, Mitch McConnell did everything he could to obstruct Barack Obama's entire agenda, including stealing a Supreme Court seat. He has even said about Biden, his job is to sort of obstruct as much as possible. Why would McConnell give Biden the big bipartisan win he's wanted since taking office? I don't know that he does want to give him a win, but it does seem as though he had way over

10 members of his caucus saying, be for what's happening. We want to do this. I don't know that it has to be more complicated than that. Like, you know, these negotiations were ongoing. At first, it was a way to stave off a partisan reconciliation bill. Maybe they still have some hope that that could fall apart because of pressure against the moderates or the kind of the Venn diagram of, you know, the liberals in the House not overlapping with the moderates in the Senate. But by the time you're at a point where they're walking out to the podium and there's a bipartisan deal and you have a dozen Republicans who have their own local politics that says they want to pass infrastructure,

it's a rare place where spending money on roads is a place where Democrats and Republicans have traditionally been able to work together no matter what else was going on. Yeah, the theories where people think that maybe McConnell actually has some grand plan that he's implementing are give Biden a limited win on this, block a much bigger reconciliation bill that might include pay-fors like tax increases for corporations, the thing he really gets upset about. There's also the theory that by passing this bill, McConnell can say, look at all the stuff we've gotten done.

Your arguments that the Senate is broken, that we should get rid of the filibuster now seem even more ridiculous. My gut is, along with what you said, Lovett, is that members of his caucus think that some of these projects in the bill are important to their states. You know, like Rob Portman's retiring. He really wants to get some things done for Ohio before he does. McConnell's good at obstruction, but I think we all sometimes give him too much credit for being this master strategist and genius when really he's just an obstructionist prick during the Obama era. And the last four years have shown that he actually had quite little control over the Trump iteration of the GOP. I also just say too, you know, we talked about this months ago and it was like, how can they come to an agreement without a way

of paying for it? You know, because the Democrats wanted to raise taxes, the Republicans wanted a gas tax and Democrats wanted to increase IRS enforcement and Republicans obviously didn't. Well, we got to the end of another bill and they just did nothing. They found like pay-fors, they moved some money around. Some of it isn't paid for. They claim it is paid for. And, you know, Democrats and Republicans coming together to spend money without worrying about the consequences. They don't care. So he got rid of the stuff they hated. I do think that he and other Republican leaders and Republican candidates and strategists do want at least one talking point for the midterms where they can say we are not completely obstructionist.

We work with Joe Biden and the Democrats on issues where it made sense, like infrastructure. We oppose them where they tried to, and what they will say is overreach, like this huge big reconciliation bill. We're not as obstructionist as you think. We're trying to audition here to govern ourselves. So this is part of that. This is part of that audition to voters. Look, we can actually govern responsibly and we can still fight the Democrats on things

that we care about. We're reasonable and we're saving you from socialism. Right. Meanwhile, stop the steal, big lie, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. I mean, look, it's not really coherent. I'm not saying that. Mitch McConnell's governing the Senate. Kevin McCarthy's impeaching in the House. That's what we're heading towards. So the rest of Joe Biden's agenda must be passed through Democrats' budget reconciliation bill, a process that starts with both houses of Congress voting on a budget resolution, which basically lays out the top line policy goals of the bill, not numbers and details, which get filled in later. That resolution was released today. It taxes big corporations, the richest 1 percent and corporate polluters to pay for, among other things,

universal pre-K, free community college, the child tax credit, universal paid family and medical leave, expanded Medicare, home care, lower health care premiums, lower prescription drug prices, affordable housing, permanent legal status for some immigrants, and the big one, funding to meet Biden's goal of reducing carbon emissions 50% by 2030, which seems particularly important in light of this morning's report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which paints a pretty bleak future for the planet if all countries don't stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050. Tommy, let's start with this climate report. What has changed since the last IPCC report in 2013? And how do you think

it should shape Democrats' strategy around this budget reconciliation process? I think every new piece of information we have about the impact of climate change should make us tackle the issue with more urgency. That's the takeaway. We have more better data, the climate models are better, and we're learning that climate change is further along than we think. Basically, this new report says we cannot stop the warming intensifying over the next 30 years. What we can do is stop something worse from happening. So all the droughts we're seeing, all the hurricanes, all the extreme weather, what we can do is prevent that from becoming catastrophic. I think one of the best parts about this report is that we are now better able to say climate change is

having an impact in this specific way. So we can point to the record heat wave in the Pacific Northwest and say that is directly tied to climate change. That might sound obvious to a lot of listeners, but unfortunately, a lot of media coverage doesn't close that loop. The conversation doesn't become about how, you know how the California fires are in part because of a hotter planet, because of climate change. And think about the coverage you see in your own life. California right now is experiencing the second largest wildfire in the state's history. Last year was the biggest. Do a mental inventory of fire coverage versus cicada coverage and get really mad with us. So I do think that's one of the important pieces of this.

Everyone just needs to raise this issue in your priorities list and act more urgently. Love it. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing the report will help do is connect weather coverage and climate coverage, which are still really separate in a lot of places. A lot of news coverage around the heat waves, around the fires, around a host of other climate related weather changes are covered like weather and they need to be tied back to the climate to climate change. And they need to use this kind of these kinds of reports to make that just sort of the part of the routine, like whether people covering local news need to make climate change a part of how they

talk about this. I will say like so the report basically paints with certainty that things are going to get worse for a while. We are headed towards a kind of medium bleak scenario of 1.5 degrees warming. But one other piece of this is that another thing that's happened since 2013 is governments have made all kinds of promises. Now, they're not necessarily on track to meet those promises. But you can look at this and say, all right, if countries like the US and China hit the goals that they have set, whether it's by 2050 or 2060, we are headed towards 2% warming. That is cataclysmic. That's catastrophic. But it shows you the actual problem we need to solve. We need to keep that to 1.5, not to what do we need to get there. And so I think what the report is actually now providing is more and more certainty and clarity

on exactly what has to happen in the next few years in a way that wasn't as clear or wasn't as direct in 2013. Yeah, climate scientists say this all the time, but climate change and catastrophic climate change is not an on-off switch here. It's not like once it hits above 1.5, it's over. And once it goes below 1.5, it's fine. It is more gradual. And, you know, this report does say, like, right, it's going to be very hard to keep it under 1.5. But we are going to have, we're going to feel the effects of a hotter climate no matter what here on out. We're already feeling those effects, right?

But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do absolutely everything in our power to stop an even more cataclysmic result from hitting two, three, four. So it's not an on and off switch here. And I do think your point, Lovett, about covering weather events as climate events is really important. I can remember, I'm sure you remember, when you and I were writing speeches in the White House and we'd write climate speeches and we'd say climate change, you know, causes severe drought, severe hurricanes. All of the policy wonks would say, well, the links aren't definitive yet with extreme weather and we could get dinged for that by the fact checkers and

blah, blah. And what this report does is say, no, no, they're absolutely linked. All these crazy weather events are absolutely linked to climate change. This is where Washington's just the tendency to both sides every issue and treat both sides of an argument as if they have equal merit has really gotten us to a bad place. Because for a long time, this was treated as disputed science. And now it's not. I mean, I saw one thing when I was prepping for this. There was a 2014 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Communications. I saw one thing when I was prepping for this.

There was a 2014 survey by the Yale Program on Climate Communications. And in 2014, it found that only 48% of people believe that global warming was caused by human activity. That number is now closer to 57%, which is good. No surprise, states with deep ties to the energy industry like West Virginia lag the national average. But only 45% of Americans think global warming will harm them personally. And I think that's the communications opportunity you're talking about in basically linking climate change and the weather coverage. Because it's not happening in local news broadcasts.

And there's nowhere to hide from this. It's not about coastal cities. Nowhere, no. Look at Germany. It's had huge floods. The smoke being in, like reaching all the way to the East Coast and happening regularly. I do think part of this is just like, we need to have a collective conversation like, hey, this is new. Like being thinking about fires all the time,

smoke hitting the East Coast, like that wasn't part of our childhood. There was no, there was no, there was no summers where you knew that every once in a while you wouldn't be able to go outside even as far all the way to the East Coast. Like the smoke map, huge amounts of smoke coming down from Canada and sweeping over the country. Like these are new phenomenon, these heat waves in Seattle and in Portland. Like we need to just, I think, acknowledge like what we're feeling is real. Like there are changes. They are observable. I do think that's another aspect of what this report can do, which is like be a hinge. Like we need to stop. I know we know this and we do it like climate change isn't a possibility. It's here. You know, we say that all climate change is here. And I do think constantly referring to not climate

change as some abstraction, but the wildfires from climate change, the heat waves from climate change, the floods from climate change, the storms from climate change. We need to constantly drill into people's minds that this is happening everywhere all the time. Even the phrase climate change seems like it's ill-fitting when you think about the actual consequences. It's just climate change. No, these are like climate disasters that are playing out. Remember that. Things are just changing.

We had our man Al Gore at the table saying we were calling it the climate crisis. That felt – Well, everything's a crisis. We're over-crisised in the way that we describe things. You know, we're over-crisised in the way that we describe things. So it is hard to talk about it in the existential sort of language that is the reality that we face at this point. Right. It's just more extreme weather. It's worse droughts.

It's more extreme hurricanes. It's everything is worse. Like there was a flood in China a week or two ago where like eight inches of rain dumped in an hour. And there was a bunch of people in a tunnel, like a commuter tunnel that just filled with water. And it just was not built to a standard that could deal with that much water. Once people drowned to death, imagine being in the Holland Tunnel when something like that happens, right? That's the kind of scenario people need to imagine when they think about how this could impact them. And I do think though, like part of what makes this hard as a sort of a messaging communications thing is that like this sucks, right?

Like this doesn't make you feel energized and desirous to make changes like, hey, like it or not, over the next 10 to 20 years, things are going to get worse. There's literally no avoiding that. Even if we do everything, the consequences of action or inaction are kind of you're right. They're diffuse. They're hard to measure. It will be slow. It will be slow. It will be gradual. But like the actions we can take, they will work. And we do know exactly what to do to prevent the actual worst outcomes. Is Biden and other Democrats talking more about the urgency of climate change and framing this as a climate bill or quietly negotiating the climate provisions with Democrats so as not to further polarize this issue?

I struggle with this. I'm going to do to you guys what Obama's national security team used to do to him. Mr. President, this is a really tough challenge. Serious, sir. That's a tough one. That's a hard challenge. Thank you for that insight. Yeah.

No shit, Mr. Secretary of Defense. Look, in terms of messaging, I mean, I just talked about some of the numbers and how they've changed, but there's still this opportunity about explaining to people how climate change will impact them in their lives. But we've also learned from COVID that there's a subset of people in this country who will be reflexively opposed, and loudly so, to whatever Democrats say, even if it kills them. They are often members of the Trump family. But, you know, so I do worry a bit about the strain of the Republican Party trying to fight harder against an issue if Biden is more focused on it. That said, I've come down on the side of I think he should probably be talking about it every day because it's an existential problem that we face. And it's also a global problem. What Biden needs is to get a big, important bill passed through this reconciliation

problem that helps get electric vehicles on the road and gas burning vehicles off and that transitions our grid to renewables. And he needs to take that accomplishment to this big international climate summit in late October, early November, and say, look at what America did. We're 15% of global emissions, but look at what we did. Now everyone needs to do more because Paris was insufficient. And that was always kind of by design, right? The Paris Climate Accords put in place a bunch of targets that were designed to be ratcheted down and to get tighter and tighter over time. But Trump lost four years. So now he has to show, not tell to the international community because they're not going to trust us

that we're going to do the right thing after watching four years of Trump. Like we need to show them that we are doing things. This really may be the last chance for a decade to do a big climate bill. I think we all know the odds of keeping the House, the Senate and the White House are not where we'd like them to be.

Right. And so if you think about this as our last chance, it actually becomes less about the long-term messaging we need to do to kind of make sure this issue doesn't become more polarized in the country. It's about keeping the progressive wing of the Democrats in the House on board by making sure it is big and substantive and does what we need to do on climate

while giving whatever sop you need to give to Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema so they feel like they've extracted some blood so that they can claim that this has been moderated in some way. There was a whole kerfuffle with Sinema when she said she wasn't in favor of $3.5 trillion. And I think the response from AOC was both, I think, fair, but also about laying a marker down because this is a negotiation. This was a negotiation taking place on Twitter. And so, to me, it's less about some big public messaging campaign and more like make it about the climate because that is what the house wants. That is what most Democrats in the Senate want. And then figure out what you

need to do, what compromise you need to give somewhere to keep cinema, to keep mansion and keep the moderates in the Senate on board. Yeah. I feel like, like Tommy does, which is, you know, it's, it's tough, the polarization issue. And I get the polarization issue too. I feel the way, I feel about climate the way that I feel about vaccine requirements, which is this really isn't about persuading a bunch of people, a bunch of voters and Republicans or Republicans in Congress to be on your side. Look, the Republicans in Congress aren't Biden's audience anyway at this point. None of them are going to vote for the reconciliation bill. So like you said, Leavitt, it's a question of how do you get moderate Democrats on board with a really big climate agenda? And it's not just Manchin and Sinema in the Senate. You know, there's now a bunch of

moderates in the House, moderate Democrats who are saying, we're concerned about this reconciliation bill that, you know, in light of all this spending and inflation and blah, blah, blah, we don't want it to be too much money. If the conversation around the reconciliation bill is how much money it spends and debt and inflation and all this bullshit, it's going to be easier for them to pare back this, this, the climate is stuff in the bill, right? Which is why I actually think it's important for Joe Biden to talk about and other Democrats to talk about how important the climate provisions are, because if you're a lot of these moderate Democrats in moderate House Democrats in swing districts, I guarantee even if your voters may be a little concerned about inflation and spending, these are voters who also care a lot about climate change.

A lot of these suburban districts, you have a lot of college educated voters who really fucking care about climate change. And I don't think you need to negotiate all the details of the spending and provision, stuff like that in public. But I think you need to remind people of the consequences of climate change that we're all feeling right now and how it could get worse in the future on a daily basis or else it could be forgotten in this bill. Yeah. Also, I have this feeling that suddenly the amount of spending won't be as problematic when they do some sort of deal on the state and local tax deduction for some of these moderates. Yeah, they're going to be, yeah, it's going to be like, oh, suddenly 3.5 trillion is not so bad as long as my kind of

wealthier district keeps their tax deduction on their houses. Suddenly, suddenly it'll be okay. I mean, Republicans are trying to slip 50 billion in additional spending for the Pentagon into the bipartisan infrastructure bill. So obviously, these numbers, they don't care about spending. They don't care about debts or deficit. They just care about their pet thing. I don't know. I think all of us who live in California have been particularly seized with this because you just kind of feel how close you physically are to these fires and the chance that one could actually come to a town you live in. And it's been particularly scary, but I think that's happening to people all over the world. You know, there's fires in Oregon,

there's floods in Germany, there's floods in China, there's massive fires in Greece and Spain. Drought. And Turkey. I mean, it's not just that those fires could burn people to death and kill them. It's that they could lead to famine and mass migration and political instability. I mean, there's so many bad things that could come from what we're seeing. And I think telling that story in a more, I don't know, holistic global way is going to be an important piece of this puzzle. I'm really hopeful that this, the UN summit in November will be a place where we can get some big things done because like you said,

love it. Like we are running out of time. Yeah. And I also, you know, they did sneak $150 billion of clean energy and climate spending into the bipartisan infrastructure deal without talking about it much. So I can see Democrats thinking, okay, that's a model, right? Like that's a model for getting, we got it in there, but this, this is going to, this is going to be a lot bigger in terms of climate. This is the know i think brian our friend brian shots was quoted the other day saying that was the appetizer this is the main course what's going to be in the reconciliation bill on climate yeah i mean just to give you one anecdote right like this bill the bipartisan bill is 7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations biden wanted

174 billion to get 500 000 of them across the entire country, which is what it's really going to take to make an electric vehicle as convenient as a gas-powered vehicle. So we've got to get there. And we've got to get it out of the air. Got to get it out of the air, too. Got to get it out of the air.

The carbon, you mean. The carbon. Get the carbon out of the air. Right. Got to sponge it up. Got to put it in the ground. Yeah, who's doing that? Some people.

Smart people, yeah. Look, in all of human history, it's doing that? Some people. Smart people. Look, in all of human history, it's never been a mistake to bury things and hope nobody finds it. Progressive Democrats in the House have threatened to tank the infrastructure deal. The reconciliation bill isn't progressive enough. Moderate Democrats in the House and the Senate are now saying, you know, they're concerned the reconciliation bill might be too expensive. If you're Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi, like, how do you navigate these politics? How do we get from here to a day where Joe Biden's signing not only the bipartisan infrastructure deal, but the reconciliation bill, you know, with a bunch of Democrats behind him and he's handing out pens? I mean, it's a frustrating answer, but I do think

like he's just going to have to get this bipartisan bill done and assure the progressive members who are making the obvious point that we need to do more that we will get it done. I mean, look, it's hard. Once again, we're in like cinema mansion land where no one wants to be and we're relying on their votes. But I do think you just got to get the bipartisan one done first. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of there's been some like debate, like, why are we doing this bipartisan bill when you're just going to come back in with a partisan one after? Why did you spend all this time that should have been spent on voting rights and a host of immigration, health care, a host of other issues that have been put to the side to get this done?

And the reason Joe Biden is doing this is because he has no other fucking choice, because the only way he can get Manchin and Sinema on the partisan reconciliation bill is to pursue the bipartisan deal all the way to the end. So he has to pursue that all the way to the end. Then he has to make a big, big case for why the country needs these important changes to the social safety net, to our energy policies. He has to make that case big and he has to do it in public while doing a ton of ugly negotiating behind closed doors to get everybody on board. I don't think there's some grand strategy. There's just going to be some horse trading behind the scenes while doing, making the best possible case for the positive aspects of what this bill would do. And, you know, we focused a lot on, on Biden and then the Senate and Manchin and Sinema. I do think

Pelosi has some pretty tricky politics in the house, right? Because we don't have much room for error there at all. It sounds like what, you know, what she's been saying is I'm not going to pass the bipartisan infrastructure deal until we have a reconciliation bill i think the plan here is like we said they're going to try to pass the budget resolution first which is you know you have to pass that before you get into the details of what's in the reconciliation package i think she will put both the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the budget resolution on the floor of the house and sort of dare the moderate democrats to vote against the budget resolution and dare progressives to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure deal, believing that, and I think this is sort of the overall strategy, we're kind of all in this together, every Democrat.

Again, like from AOC to Manchin, you need everyone happy with everything we're doing on economic gender, whether it's the infrastructure deal or the reconciliation package. And we can afford to lose very few Democrats on any of them. You might be able to lose a few more Democrats in the House on the bipartisan infrastructure deal because you could end up getting a bunch of Republicans, as we've already seen. You're getting a bunch of Republicans in the Senate on this. But you're really you can't lose almost anyone on the reconciliation deal. And it does seem like their interests are aligned. Like, I don't know what person is going to make it like if the bipartisan if the if the reconciliation bill passed and some Republican wave comes, you being the lone Democratic holdout is not going to

fucking save you. You know what I mean? And if you part of shutting it down and making this Democratic Congress a failure, the wave's coming for you anyway. So there's no like, which is why that's why they're all in it. You're right. They're all in it together. Which is what we learned after passing the Affordable Care Act back in 2010. You know, the House Democrats who voted against the ACA weren't necessarily more likely to survive the Republican wave in 2010 than the ones who voted for it. That's just the way it was. Yeah. I don't know the best political strategy for Pelosi and Schumer. I do know that if the entire thing falls apart, it is going to be a disaster and no one should want that outcome, whether you're Josh Gottheimer or AOC or anybody in the middle. That is correct.

I agree with that. All right. When we come back, we have Crooked Media's political director, Shaniqua McClendon, who's going to talk to us about our new campaign, No Offers. All right. We've been talking a lot about the threat to voting rights in democracy. At least 18 states have passed laws to restrict voting this year. The Census Bureau is set to release data on Thursday that will kick off a redistricting process where Republican-controlled legislatures will try to gerrymander their way to a House majority. And in Congress, Democrats are still trying to pass a voting rights bill that can overcome a Republican filibuster. If all this makes you angry and frustrated and maybe feel a little helpless, you're not alone. A lot of people have been asking us, what can we do? Which is why our team at Vote Save America

has been working hard to put together a brand new campaign full of volunteer opportunities and actions you can take right now to help save democracy before we even get to the midterms. It's called No Off Years, and here to give us all the details is Crooked Media's very own political director, Shaniqua McClendon. Hey, Shaniqua. Hi, how are y'all? Pretty good. Good.

Good to see you. Great. We got a sick new climate report out there, but it's also a pretty fucking great mood, you know? Yeah, that's true. That was fun.

I was going to, I was going to say something about being sad. I wasn't in the office with you all, but then you said the bad news. Yeah, no, say that. Go back to that.

I like that. We miss you. Also, yeah, we miss you. I am sad. I'm not in the office with you all, but next time.

Can you tell us how no off years came to be? Yes. Well, so, I mean, the really, really honest story, EJ and I were talking about the ways that people can get involved other than just calling their members of Congress, because calling your members of Congress does work. That was the last time I was on here talking about that. But we can't actually go into the chamber and vote. And so people wanted to find other ways that they could more actively participate. And we started thinking about- The January 6th people tried that approach and it turns out it ends poorly for them and for the country.

It does. You might go to jail. Yeah. Good note. Extreme door knocking. Extreme door knocking. Sorry, you were saying, Shaniqua. No, it's okay. No, this is all very important to make sure people know the right way to get involved in off year, you know, in off years. But yeah, pretty much we were thinking through like, how can our audience get involved now?

And a lot of our volunteers from last year were really eager to continue the work they did last year in the 2020 election. And we knew that a ton needed to be done between now and then. I know we say this every year, every election that I've worked at Crooked, we've told people it was the most consequential election of their lifetime. But so is this one. And it's the truth every time we say it. But we knew we needed to get started earlier.

We spoke to a lot of activists, a lot of organizations, a lot of political consultants and people just involved. And the thing that they made clear is that we had to get started sooner than 2022 to win in 2022. And so that's how we came up with no off years. A lot of people really think that odd years are years that we don't have to worry about elections. But in all honesty, there are elections happening every year, so we should never call them off years. But the work that we, you know, are doing and the work that a lot of our audience is engaged in, it can't just happen every other year. We have to keep this work going. Because if we don't, that just leaves more time for Republicans to do things like pass voter suppression laws that make it harder for us to participate and ultimately win during election time. Yeah, I mean, look, if you it was amazing that people donated so much money at the end of the cycle

in 2020. But if you felt a little frustrated that most of that went to television ads and didn't come in earlier and allow for deep community-based organizing, this program is for you. Invest early. Get on the ground. Get grassroots. You mentioned these voter suppression laws. What are some of the

tactics and strategies in the face of these laws that we can use to get around some of this voter suppression that are going to be part of no off years? Last year, a lot of states put laws in place that made it a lot easier to vote. And a lot of people voted for the first time and really liked this expanded access to the ballot. But a lot of the laws that are being put on the books now are actually making it harder. And so making sure people know what they actually can do to vote so that they don't, you know, try to follow the same steps they took last year and not have their vote counted because there's some change in the law. We're also going to have volunteer opportunities for deep canvassing, which, you know, when people go out and knock on doors right before an election, ultimately you're asking someone, are you going to vote for my candidate?

And like, how likely are you to actually go out and vote? But these conversations will allow volunteers to talk to voters a lot earlier. And it's not about a candidate. about what issues are important to them so that this information can then be a huge part, hopefully, of whatever candidate ends up running and just really centering the voters in these conversations and not pressuring them to vote for a candidate. And then fighting mis- and disinformation. Last year, especially toward the end, we got to see what some of the ads were with mis- and disinformation targeted at voters that we really need to turn out. And we're hoping we're going to start paying attention to that very early, see what those specific messages are going out to specific people, and come up with different ways that

people, one, are aware of this mis- and disinformation going out, but also finding ways to combat that. So if we know what people are saying, we can get the truth out there in front of them so they're not more susceptible to combat that. So if we know what people are saying, we can get the truth out there in front of them so they're not more susceptible to those things. And then engaging first time voters who, you know, maybe are confused by everything that's happening right now and making sure they have the information they need to vote. So I feel like a lot of people listening, we've talked to death about how frustrated we are with Joe Manchin, how frustrated we are with Kirsten Sinema, who I think has been great in White Lotus.

And that's where she is right now. No spoilers. I'm only on episode one. I haven't gotten to that. Well, no, she had to get... She was busy. She wanted to go on a vacation. Okay.

I don't know where you're going. Not that there's a Kirsten Sinema spoiler somewhere in White Lotus. Well, I didn't know that. I've only seen one episode as we discussed right before. That was a good joke. That was a good joke.

It was not. That's not what you have to say. You can tell when the joke is good because instead of laughing, you say, that was a good joke. This is actually a thing that happens a lot at Crooked Media. I think what happened is, love it goes for the Shaniqua laugh. That was a good joke every day. I want to tell you something. I want to tell you something.

Obviously, while other people are talking, while other people are talking, I'm thinking about what I'm going to say and not listening that's like what I tend to do and I was focused on thinking about like should I talk about Kyrsten Sinema with like a strawberry daiquiri waiting to get out of town I was trying to rile you up but the white lotus thing had been planted in my head from before we had talked and I kind of regret it because I think a simpler joke with fewer steps might not

have let John into the briar patch of not knowing what I was talking about so I think it's a misfire frankly how does this fit in what we're doing at the national level? You interrupted me. The question is, I'm sorry about Tommy. I'm sorry about John. What does this how do we how does what we're doing with no no off years fit into the pressure we need to put on the Congress to pass actual protections as well? Yeah, I mean, all of this goes together. Ultimately, we can't fight the voter suppression head on that is happening at the state level, we're going to need Congress to pass the For the

People Act or whatever version of a voting rights bill they come up with that will, you know, roll back, retroactively get rid of these laws that are being passed at the state level. So it's not going to, you know, this program isn't to be in place of what we need Congress to do. We still need to put pressure on them to pass something. Because as long as these laws are on the books, and we keep having more and more on the books, especially ones that allow, you know, election officials to overturn elections. There's just not really a way to kind of organize around that. But what it does do is allow us to take the action that we're able to take as individuals. It allows us to make sure people know what voting laws are on the books,

when they can vote. Some states, you know, early voting, they're taking days away, and making sure people know what those calendars look like. And then just, you know, educating people on what's at stake this year. I know that a lot of people are probably sick of us keep continuing to talk about this and like, okay, and you know, is there something else you can be talking about? But I think a lot of people are not realizing how dire things are right now. And so we need to take one, we need to make sure people know that and then take whatever energy and frustration comes out of that and direct it toward tangible actions they can take. And so, you know, Tommy mentioned this, but investing early in grassroots organizations, it allows them to plan for the next year and a half to see what, you know, what kinds of things are they going to do?

How many voters can they actually engage? Can they engage voters who are not just the ones who, you know, typically show up, but maybe people who have never voted in their lives, but just need that touch of engagement to show up. So all of this goes together, but we can't let up pressure on Congress and specifically the few Democrats. Republicans are in the way too. They're not doing anything. But as far as like who we can put pressure on, who will listen to us, there's a handful of Democrats who need to get going. Here is the edit. Is there anything we do to get Sinema's vote before she heads out to the White Lotus? That would have been cleaner, you know, if she wants to go on vacation.

Oh, yeah, that's very clear. That's very clear. I would have got that. Good. Anyway. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Leave it all in. Shaniqua, what are some of the 2021 races that people should be focused on? Oh, yes. well first first up is definitely the california recall yes fill out your ballots it's going to come to your house

people couldn't be easier do you want larry elder to be your governor i don't i don't yeah it's it's it's gavin newsom or the kenosha shooter at this point oh my goodness is that can i say that no elijah what do you think leave it in i mean leave it in i think that's right leave it in sorry shaniqua beyond california no no um you know i want john to have space for his jokes Oh, my God. I'm sorry. So Newsom, we got to help him. That's important. Newsom's good.

And, you know, it's not even, we just need to let him have a regular election next year. If people don't like Gavin Newsom, they can vote him out of office during a normal election. But this recall is just kind of a roundabout way of going around normal elections to get someone else in. So people should fill out their ballots and mark no for recalling Gavin Newsom. You're making me laugh. But that's good because that's the intent, right?

You want people to laugh. Okay. Even when you don't say anything. Sorry, one more race or a few more I have down here. Virginia, there's a gubernatorial election in Virginia this year. But also they are trying to maintain, Democrats are trying to maintain control of the legislature. And so only the House is up this year. But if they don't maintain control of the legislature, even if Terry McAuliffe wins, he's not going to have the legislature he needs to continue advancing progressive policies.

So making sure you're paying attention there. And we'll have some opportunities in no off years to do that. But a couple of others that people should pay attention to. Atlanta is having a mayoral this year. And I know it's like, oh, Atlanta is going to elect a Democrat, of course. But going in line with our no off years program, if we can get more people registered during this mayoral election, that's less people we have to get registered next year. Good point. Yeah. And then in Seattle, there's also a mayoral race and the two top candidates, you know, they have kind of similar backgrounds, but are pretty

different on two big issues. And so they are on opposite sides of a ballot initiative on homelessness. And overall, the ballot initiative seems fine and is making investments in housing, but there's a provision in there that will allow the city to basically remove any encampments around Seattle and kind of forcibly remove people if they refuse to take this housing. And so they're on opposite sides on that. And then different stances around funding for police officers and community safety. So elections are happening every year. They're very consequential and people should pay attention to them. Damn right. Last question. How can people get involved in no off years and what can they expect when they sign up? Well, you should do like I did this morning. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash nooffyears, enter your email address, and then you can actually read on the page about

what's at stake this year. But once you sign up, we'll be sending out weekly emails with information on what's going on in the states and specific calls to action that you can take to have an impact very early on. And so that might be asking you to donate to an organization that's doing good work right now to lay the groundwork for 2022, getting voters registered, starting to talk to voters now, and then helping us fight mis and disinformation. So that next year, in November, we, you know, we'll know we've done everything we could. And then just to finally stop thinking about odd years as off years, we should be doing stuff year round every year. Amen. Shaniqua, thank you for joining us.

Thank you and the entire Vote Save America team for putting no off years together. And thank you, as always, for telling John that his jokes are funny. And to the cast of White Lotus. Thanks, y'all. joining us on the pod she's a new york times tech reporter and one of the authors of an ugly truth inside facebook's battle for domination shira franco thank you so much for being here thank you so much for having me love the book i it is I feel like for years, there's been a lot of reporting about what's going on inside of Facebook, but it's sometimes hard to figure out the difference between the company's positive spin, some of the kind of worst possible readings on their decisions.

And then the reality of what goes on inside of a company of, of just human beings, uh, sometimes, uh, being malevolent, sometimes being incompetent. And I felt like this was an incredible window into how Facebook works. I wanted to start by asking about something that's happening right now, which is that Facebook kicked off some misinformation researchers connected to NYU's Cybersecurity for Democracy project. They cited privacy concerns. And when I saw the news, what I immediately thought of is that is something Facebook does in your book repeatedly when they're not sure what to do. They just say we can't do anything. There are privacy concerns. Senator Ron Wyden made this point like it's pretty laughable that they would cite privacy as the reason that they're kicking

off these researchers who are seeking transparency. What was your reaction to the news about these two researchers being kicked off? I just thought that this fit so well into the pattern that was established in the book of what we see Facebook doing again and again, this really sort of almost random piecemeal effort at fixing things, which doesn't ever get to the root of the problem, but just offers these really sort of surface level solutions. So in this case, kicking off one group of NYU researchers who happen to be conducting fairly interesting and important academic researchers,

while not addressing, A, a number of other academic researchers that are doing similar things, a number of commercial groups that are doing similar things. I mean, there are actual groups making money off of collecting data on Facebook the same way that these NYU researchers are. And it's baffling to me that Facebook wouldn't address those groups while they would address a group of academic researchers who have been very public about what kind of steps they're taking to safeguard people's privacy and what they're actually doing with the data they've

collected. So one thing I learned from the book that I was really surprised by. So in 2018, Kara Swisher interviews Mark Zuckerberg. It's a famous conversation because it is the conversation in which he says he would leave Holocaust deniers on the platform because people should just see all the information, including information like that. It creates a firestorm of controversy, obviously. So what I was surprised to learn was that this was planned. I thought this was Mark Zuckerberg going off script because he believes what he believes and he's prepped to within an inch of his life, but just said something offhand.

But this was a planned response. He planned to make this philosophical argument about Holocaust denial, which I found to be shocking. But then by summer of 2020, Zuckerberg has changed course completely, orders Facebook to craft a policy to ban deniers. What changed in those two years? So it's funny as a reporter how you come to something. The reason we have that anecdote in the book is because as reporters, we had the same thought you did. Like, surely this was Mark Zuckerberg acting off the cuff. Surely he just said something without thinking. And then because he was in the middle of an interview with a very high profile journalist, he doubled down on it. And it turned out like he just said, no, like this was a planned idea. He came up with it

ahead of time. He was actually really into it. He thought it showed just how staunch he was in his beliefs that as a Jewish man, he believed so much in freedom of speech that he would allow something abhorrent like people denying the Holocaust. In his mind, that was like intellectual purism. And I think that tells you a lot about him as a person and how he thinks. You know, what changed if you were asking for Facebook's version of this, they would tell you that Mark Zuckerberg was shown a study, an internal study done in which millennials, people are roughly the age of myself and Mark Zuckerberg, were increasingly coming to believe theories that denied the Holocaust. They were increasingly

coming to gravitate towards some of these antisemitic groups. And that really frightened him, the idea that someone his own age would be so persuaded by false information on Facebook. It finally caused him to reverse course. I think in fact, it was two years of people wearing down on him and showing him repeatedly that this was a horrible decision. This just didn't make sense. And again, I think what's interesting here is that it's really piecemeal, right? He makes a call to reverse his thinking on that one thing, but he doesn't get to the bigger issue at play, which is that he ultimately is a person that believes that like more speech is better, that good speech will outweigh bad speech. And that if you give people this broad array of ideas,

they'll gravitate towards the things that are true. His own platform keeps showing him that that is not the case. That is not what his algorithms push people towards. And instead of being like, okay, so broadly, my ideas about free speech are not actually accurate. He makes these really one-off decisions. Yeah, that was, I think, that was also in general surprising to me in reading this really great account of these decisions around what they limit and what they don't. So you have people like Andrew Bosworth, Bos, writing these sort of like dorm room style memos describing why it's okay to have the harm because connecting people is the good. Clearly, per the book, Mark Zuckerberg has this instinct, as you're saying, this libertarian instinct. But when they realize that that won't apply, that they need to do some kind of a limit, there doesn't seem to be, at least in the reporting you have here, any moment where they like really kind of put the same level of thought into how to manage violations as they do into building a new product. In your reporting, have you come across any clear articulation of a philosophy around Facebook's role when it does decide to

limit speech on the platform? No, and I think it's because they don't have it. And as a reporter, I searched for that for years. This book, we did over 400 interviews with people who worked at Facebook or still work at Facebook. And you ask them, what's the philosophical idea driving Mark Zuckerberg? Explain it to me. Not a one-off decision on QAnon or conspiracy theorists or COVID misinformation. I don't want one-off explanations. I want to know what is the big idea about how you create a social media platform with algorithms that drive really emotive content, and then you allow what to exist on the platform? You allow, where's your line? What is the thinking around what it means to have a free speech on a platform like this? And there is no articulation of that.

And I think that as a reporter, it can sometimes feel fruitless when you search for something and then you learn it doesn't exist. And then you kind of settle into that and you're like, oh, well, how terrifying is that, that that doesn't exist? Yeah. And it does. I want to get to Sheryl Sandberg, because this does seem to be like where the kind of the Mark Zuckerberg philosophy and the Sheryl Sandberg philosophy seem to meet. She has there was a nickname for the conference, which was it's only good news. Is that right? Good news is what Sheryl Sandberg calls her conference room. And there are a few moments in the book where it is pretty striking that she seems to get pretty frustrated that the truth doesn't comport with what she wishes the truth to be. Can you talk a little bit about what happened when Sheryl Sandberg met with, I believe, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia with the head of security, Stamos, John Stamos from Full House in a second. Very stupid. I'm so sorry.

But no, but so she's meeting with Congress and describing what they have found about Russian interference. But there's a disagreement between what Sheryl Sandberg is saying, what the head of security is saying. Can you talk more about that? Yeah, I think that's a fascinating moment because it shows so many of the problems at facebook so alex not john but alex stamos is the head of security um he for months at this point has been looking at russian election interference with his team they found a lot of really frightening detailed information about how russia had used facebook to to interfere with the elections and they're still looking this is the key right they know they haven't found everything there is to find.

And actually, like his motivations for being at that meeting is to ask for Senator Warner's help. He wants the help of Congress to find what U.S. intelligence agencies know, right? He wants them to kind of tap in to the wealth of information that U.S. intelligence agencies have. And he's thinking, we can go to this meeting. We'll come out of it. Maybe they'll help us.

Instead, they go to this meeting and Sheryl Sandberg essentially says to Warner, we found what there is to find. We've got it. It's under control. We've wrapped it, is kind of the sense she gives him. And Stamos is sitting next to her and he's just shocked because he's thinking, what? Have you not read any of my reports? Do you not know that we're still looking for stuff that just a month or two ago, we were helping the French root out a real-time attack on their elections? It's not done. We haven't found everything there is to find. And what ends up happening as a result of that meeting is that, well, Warner walks away from it, not trusting Facebook. Facebook walks away from it, not trusting Warner. And both sides, it seems, seem to think, and I think rightfully,

that Sheryl Sandberg isn't fully aware of what her own security team is doing. And it's not one-off. I just want to add this one note here, which is at this point, it's been six months of the security team looking and at no point does Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg ask for daily or even weekly meetings to get updated

on what the security team is finding. That was one of the most, I couldn't believe it. So there's this sequence where we're now, the election is over, we're now months past the election. This internal security team has uncovered basically what will become one of the biggest scandals in modern electoral history and the way in which Facebook was abused. I was shocked by how much the security team knew and but also about how many people seem to claim they had no idea when they were told. So you have it. You have Sheryl Sandberg saying, why wasn't I told about this? You have Mark Zuckerberg saying, why wasn't I told about this? You have board member Erskine Bowles saying, why wasn't I talked about it?

Mark Andreessen, another member of the board, all of them seemingly having no idea this was going on. The head of security, Alex Stamos, claims he reported this up to kind of, in my experience of reading the book, Cheryl's henchman. She got two henchmen. Do you believe that? Obviously, if you believed it, you would have put it in the book. You could not put in the book that Sheryl Sandberg knew about this research. We put in the book everything we knew, right? So we put in the book that Alex Amos is filing these reports up to two men, Joel Kaplan and

Elliot Schrag. And we know that they've told us in previous interviews, and I think we included this, that they give to Sheryl Sandberg the things they think are important and relevant. Now, people in the security team have told us there's no way they didn't tell her. There's no way they didn't mention this. But they're very careful to do these in in-person meetings. So whatever was or wasn't said, there's no paper trail of it. There's just what was said in a conference room called only good news.

he's it's exhausting uh but we get through it um i know that there are things what i when i read that section what i took away with from it was uh it seems like you were hunting for evidence that cheryl sandberg knew about the interference but was pretending not to and that maybe they misled congress uh do you believe that do you believe that there's a possibility that they willfully misled Congress at any point during these hearings or in any of this testimony? So we didn't find evidence that they willfully misled Congress. And you're right. As journalists, we were looking, I wouldn't say we were hunting for evidence, but we were trying to figure out how close it got, right? How close it got to top executives knowing something and not revealing it. And I think what was damning about what we found is that they perhaps didn't want to know,

maybe willfully misleading isn't quite right, but maybe willful blindness is. I think there's a point as an executive where you're two weeks after the elections and your head of security tells you Russia interfered. Your answer is, well, how did I, he says an expletive, Mark Zuckerberg, which is in the book, I won't repeat it now, but you know, how did he says an expletive mark zuckerberg which is in the book i won't repeat it now but you know how did i not know about this um and at that point not asking for regular meetings and updates and being on top of it seems extremely odd to me and you know facebook will give the regular line which is these are important people they they are you know heads of what is now a trillion dollar company they have have a lot on their plate. But again, you've just been told that Russia interfered in an election in an unprecedented

way and you don't want to be updated regularly on what your security team finds. That just seems so incongruous to me even now after several years of reporting on this. Yeah, you do see that place where the Zuckerberg mentality of connecting people is good, what's good for Facebook is good for the world, and the Sher the Zuckerberg mentality of connecting people is good. What's good for Facebook is good for the world. And the Sheryl Sandberg mentality of kind of not where the PR strategy ends. It's hard to tell where the PR strategy ends and the actual kind of truth begins, like where everything is about making the best possible case, seemingly even to herself. So one thing you say in the introduction to this book is that you did

not speak to Mark Zuckerberg, but you had several off the record conversations with Sheryl Sandberg until she figured out that this book wasn't going to be wasn't going to tell the version of the story she would have liked to have told. What do they say to themselves to justify all of this harm? Right. What do they say to themselves now when we've had not just the election, not just the insurrection, not just what happened in Burma and their failure to intervene there, not just what happened in France, but now ongoing COVID misinformation, right? What is the kind of conversation they have with God about this? I think that, well, first of all, I think they

feel bad. And that'll be the first thing they tell you as a reporter is that we feel awful about what happened. We feel so bad. And then they'll say something along the lines of, well, we're doing better. You know, we've hired all these security teams. We've revamped the way we've done things. We're going to make sure the same thing doesn't happen again. That's something I hear a lot of, like Russia won't interfere in the elections in the same way they did in 2016. And ultimately, I think their bottom line and their heart of hearts, and this is why we named the book An Ugly Truth, is that they think they do more good than bad. And if they have to break a few eggs along the way, I think they really believe that connecting the world is a valiant and important mission and that it is ultimately

history is going to see it as something important and good, overwhelmingly good. And so that is their parting thought that they do more good than bad. I thought there was sort of like a chilling moment about just how little they've really learned in describing what happened when they made adjustments to the newsfeed and the kind of news that people saw. And then what happened to engagement? Can you talk a little bit about basically what happened when Facebook adjusted the newsfeed to show people more reliable news and then what they had to do once they realized the effects? Yeah. So I think you're referring to a moment in time

right around the 2020 elections where Facebook kind of sits up and goes, OK, this is a really important moment for democracy and we don't want to mess it up the way we did in 2016. So we're going to we have essentially what you can think of it as dials. We're going to dial up the amount of trustworthy news people see, because even though Facebook doesn't advertise this, they rank every single news platform that is on their site. So you get a really high score if you regularly show people truthful news and you get a low score if you're a place that fact checkers, independent fact checkers regularly mark as having stuff that's not factually accurate. And so they turn up the dials on the factual stuff. They turn

down the dials on the not factual stuff. And this kind of lasts for around a month before they reverse course on it. And when we brought it to them as reporters, we were like, wait, why would you do this? And why would you do it for only a month? And they gave us this weird answer, which was like, well, it was always planned to be temporary, which for me as a reporter at this point, it's like a month after November 6th, I'm watching Stop the Steal take off. And I'm watching all these really far right extremist movements use it to rally around a fake idea that the election was stolen. And I'm thinking, wait, you think that the jeopardy, the peril to our democracy is done? Like, how does anybody watching this scenario right now think we're done being in a perilous

situation? But then the real reason, as we uncovered in interviews with sources who are not the executives at Facebook, but the people actually in the trenches running things, is that they were getting a ton of complaints because the outlets being affected were, by and large, really far right-wing extremist outlets that have a very small but very vocal audience. And they were really angry that they were there that their viewership was going down that people weren't visiting them as much because Facebook had turned down the dials on them. And that ultimately, Facebook had a PR problem on their hands of stories emerging of conservative

bias. And that is that is, again, a theme that runs this book, this idea that Facebook is really afraid of accusations of conservative bias. Of bias against conservatives to the point where, can you, there's one very funny moment. So where they've decided to remove these pernicious QAnon posts and users, but they had to do something at the exact same time in order to get it through. Can you just talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I remember this well as a reporter, because I actually reported on this for the New York Times and then made it into the book, which I'm thankful for. Yeah. So their security team had for a long time been working on a list of QAnon pages and groups that they wanted to remove. They'd come up with hundreds of them

of really dangerous groups that they knew were... These the kinds of groups i should just note that are that are driving people to commit acts of violence of real world violence there was a man who rammed his car into a port in los angeles and i can go on there's a number of things if you if you look at you know our reporting on this so yes their policy team basically says okay that's fine but we need something on the left because if we just take down qAnon, it'll be seen as an attack on the right, which in and of itself is problematic because of course, left-wing and right-wing people are drawn to QAnon conspiracies, but the group kind of sits there in bafflement. I remember the one guy I interviewed was telling me I had a look of shock on my face because he was like, there is no real left-wing equivalent of

QAnon. And they figure it out after a few weeks that they're going to take down a bunch of Antifa groups. Because even though, in their own words, Antifa and QAnon are not the same, and putting them on par with each other seemed ridiculous to the group itself, it was the only way they could come out with an announcement that seemed, in their minds, to have some level of, quote-unquote, balance to it, so that the right wing wouldn't be upset about this takedown of QAnon. So last question, there does seem to be, as we get to kind of post, we get to 2020 and beyond, there does seem to be

a new level of remorse around some of the harm that has been done through Facebook. But you also point out that there has been a mantra, a part of what Mark Zuckerberg has been doing since the very beginning of the company, which was company over country. That what's good for Facebook is what's good for the world, even if it's bad for America. That Facebook is more important than America. Do you think that that is still operating right now? Do you think right now that Facebook is making decisions that will be harmful to the country because they believe it's in what's best interest to continuing to connect more and more people around the world no matter what? So I can tell you what people at Facebook say, right? If you're talking to the PR wing, they say they're a changed company and that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg care deeply about democracy, not just here in the United States, but all over the world.

That's going to be what their executives tell you. I've spoken to a dozen people that work at the company since the book came out, and all of them say they feel like the mantra in the company is still very much company over country. And that whether it's COVID misinformation or the delay in making a decision on what to do about elected leaders, you know, Donald Trump was temporarily kicked off for two years, but you're about to have really important consequential elections in countries all over the world, ranging from the Philippines to Hungary. And those elected leaders are still using Facebook. And there is no, there's no policy, there's no explanation at Facebook for what they're going to allow those elected leaders to do in the time of an importantly consequential election in those countries. They're just kind of kicking this can down the road, it seems, until maybe, you know,

they have to make a decision on Trump in a couple years. So yes, I think people within the country, within the company very much feel like the company hasn't changed and they still put themselves and their success as a company over not just, I mean, country being this bigger idea, but really over the idea of, you know, helping democracies all over the world survive. Shira Frankel, thank you so much for coming on the show. Everybody should read An Ugly Truth. It is a great read and I found really helpful to understanding this incredibly important, powerful company that seems unwilling to recognize how important and powerful it really is. So thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. All right, before we go, Republicans have been talking a lot lately during the Olympics about how much they just love this country because they're so patriotic, the pride they feel for America.

We just wanted to play a compilation of those comments. And now it's time for a segment we like to call Republicans Loving America. But I took pleasure in the men's basketball team, USA's, first team lost. Earlier this week, they unexpectedly lost to Sweden, 3 to nothing. And Americans were happy about it. We don't need any more activist athletes. She should be removed from the team. The entire point of the Olympic team is to represent the United States of America.

That's the entire point. Turns out we don't want to watch people who ate our country represent our country. Imagine that. I think they're disgraceful. I think woke is really a loser's philosophy. And you take a look at what's happened with the women's soccer team. They lost to Sweden. The woke means lose. And that's exactly what's happening with the women's soccer team. They lost to Sweden. The woke means lose, and that's exactly what's happening.

And you know, the sad part is the Americans are rooting for the opponent. Not on my fucking watch. Woke means lose? He's not even trying anymore. That's not a phrase. We won the most golds. We won the most medals.

If we won the most golds. We won the fucking most. Okay, it's just like we're not rooting for the american olympic team anymore that's become a divisive cultural issue now thanks to the right wing trump has done so many things for his people he ruined football for them he's trying to baseball he's written movies he just ruins he just wants these people sitting on facebook just clicking just clicking it drives me so angry it really does frustrate me that the political incentives are just so different for both parties that like we can't make them own and get hurt politically by

opposing america in the olympics it seems like the easiest thing is the easiest way like wedge issue i've ever could imagine but here we we are. We need somebody, yeah. We just, we don't have the thing. They have the thing. I mean, it's racism, right? They're mostly attacking black athletes. No, they feel very proud of not being on the side of America. That's what it is. That's what Republicans have shown us through the Olympics. So that's

great. Thank you so much for, thank you so much to Shira Frankel from the New York Times and our own Shaniqua McClendon for joining us today. Everyone have a great day and we'll talk to you later this week. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. The executive producer is Michael

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