Pod Save America - “St. Paddy’s Day rage tweeting.”

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

The world grapples with the rise of white nationalism, Trump spends Sunday attacking everyone from John McCain to autoworkers, Beto reminds us that Twitter isn’t real life, Mayor Pete is having a moment, and Elizabeth Warren churns out another ambitious policy proposal on housing. Then Mehdi Hasan, host of the Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast, talks to Tommy about Islamophobia and anti-Muslim rhetoric from politicians. Also – Pod Save America is going on tour! Get your tickets now: crooked.com/events.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. Later in the pod, you'll hear a conversation Tommy had earlier this morning with The Intercept's Mehdi Hassan about the terrorist attack in New Zealand. But first, we're going to talk about the global rise of white nationalist-inspired terrorism and what we should do about it, why Donald Trump spent St. Patrick's Day blasting off about two dozen batshit crazy tweets, and all the latest developments in 2020 primary news. Lovett, there's a new Lovett will leave it up. I know the latest developments in 2020 primary news. Love it.

There's a new Love It or Leave It up. I know because I was in it. You were. We had a great episode of Love It or Leave It. John and I ran through the week's news in a rapid-fire fashion. Stay for the commentary on the Boeing 737. Not a fan. William H. Macy in a hot air balloon.

And then we went to our live show in Milwaukee with Angela Lang, who's an activist, Move On's Ben Wickler, and Akilah Hughes, returning champion. It was a great episode. We drank beer, and we talked about beer. Sounds fun. And Foxconn. There are still some tickets left to our Boston and New Hampshire shows in April. Come see us.

Pod Save America. That's who we are. We're going to be there. I think we have, oh, we have Heather McGee is going to be our co-host in Boston, and Alyssa Mastromonaco will be in New Hampshire with us. Very exciting. Crooked.com slash events, grab some tickets.

Also, I will be interviewing Senator Cory Booker right here tomorrow, Tuesday, and we will release that episode as a special bonus episode of Pod Save America on Wednesday morning. So check that out too. Check it out. Alright, let's get to the news. Dozens of people

were killed in New Zealand on Friday in a terrorist attack on two mosques in Christchurch. Parts of the massacre were broadcast on the internet after a sprawling manifesto had been published online earlier that day. The suspect, an Australian who was arrested after the attack, wrote in his manifesto that he published online earlier that day. The suspect, an Australian who was arrested after the attack, wrote in his manifesto that he moved to New Zealand for the purpose of the attack,

identified himself as a racist, listed white nationalist heroes, and said that Donald Trump was, quote, a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose. The prime minister of New Zealand has said that the suspect will be tried in her country and that New Zealand's lawmakers will begin this week considering changes to the country's gun laws. So on Friday, Donald Trump was asked whether he thought white nationalism is a global rising threat. And he said, quote, I don't really, I think it's a small group of people that have very, very serious problems. Is he correct? He is a moron. No, he's not correct at all. I mean, so in the past decade, 73% of all American extremist-related killings have come from the right wing.

The ADL says right-wing extremists were linked to at least 50 murders last year, a 35% increase over 2017. So clearly, clearly, these violent right-wing attacks are increasing. Stepping back a bit, when you look at the growth of far-right extremist parties, not only is their presence increasing globally, but in part it's because Steve Bannon is running around Europe helping them and fomenting all the garbage that they're trying to do.

So it's a huge, growing problem. Yeah, and the violence is clearly a growing problem. Also, the actual number of hate groups has increased over the last couple years in the United States. White supremacist propaganda efforts more than doubled last year. The number of racist rallies and demonstrations went up. The number of hate groups reached a record high after three years of decline during the Obama administration. This was all according to the Anti-Defamation League. Love it? demonstration this was all according to the anti-defamation league so love it yeah i mean

you know there's this term uh stochastic terrorism which i think it's always worth coming back to in moments like this because i think the debate you know about the rhetoric of right-wing politicians and white supremacist politicians like donald trump then turns into this conversation of who's responsible and i think one of the challenges of dealing with a global phenomenon of white supremacy that has far reaching horrible consequences for societies around the world long before anybody engages in a terrorist attack, right? I mean, the white supremacist ideology Donald Trump profits from politics, you know, makes center to his politics is about fanning false fears and bigotry to propel his agenda that has nothing to do with the wall. It has to do with the corporate

power and his own corruption and what have you. But, you know, what happens when these, when politicians use anti-Muslim rhetoric, when they use anti-immigrant rhetoric, when they talk about how we're being invaded. This is something that Donald Trump does. This is what you see with Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity. This is what you see across the right. This is what you see now growing because of Steve Bannon around the world. That lands in people's brains. It lands in the brains of people who then embrace a kind of right-wing racist politics. And it also lands in the brains of people who are willing to do something destructive and violent.

And what they do is they raise the temperature. When you raise the temperature, things boil up. And so everything these politicians are doing is contributing to an environment in which we are seeing more of these kinds of terrorist attacks. He literally pivoted from his answer dismissing the rise of right-wing terrorism into an answer about invaders on the southern border. Yeah. The exact language that dehumanizes people so i want to dig into the rhetoric from right-wing

politicians and donald trump itself uh but first um kevin roos wrote a piece in the new york times that was called a mass murder of and for the internet where he notes that the attack was conceived online teased on twitter announced on the online message board 8chan, broadcast live on Facebook, and replayed on YouTube and Reddit. What do we do about this? How much responsibility do these tech and social media platforms bear? I think they have an enormous amount of responsibility. I mean, YouTube, we've hammered on Facebook for a long time for a variety of reasons,

in part fake news. Twitter has certainly been subject to a lot of criticism. But YouTube is a radicalization algorithm, right? We all worry about the rise of robots coming to kill us. The fucking algorithms on Facebook are... You are two hops away from YouTube being some topic to some Alex Jones content, which takes you to something else

that is far more troubling and frightening. And people are prone to believe these conspiracy theories. That's what these things are. These conspiracy theories about white genocide and the white race being replaced by others. They're prone to believe these things. We're all as humans have been prone to believe crazy conspiracy theories for a long time. And what the Internet has done is supercharged our ability to find that stuff. But like also on top of that, Donald Trump has created this MAGA internet universe that has helped people find this kind of stuff.

Like, for example, during the campaign, he retweeted an account called White Genocide. Remember that? Yeah. I think he might have done it twice. And the profile used the name Donald Trumpowitz and it linked to a pro-Adolf Hitler documentary. It had the location of, quote, Jew-merica, right? So he's helped people find this stuff. On top of that, there's this cottage industry of MAGA people that came up during the campaign. One is a guy named Bill Mitchell.

He used to tweet things that people found ridiculous, and people would dunk on him. And fortunately, his arguments looked a little less ridiculous after Trump won. But the guy is still out there saying that Trump was chosen by God. He literally said Trump's mind is a supercomputer. He built out this big following, and that guy last week used his platform to interview a conspiracy theorist who said the New Zealand attack

was a liberal false flag operation. Right? So, like, the technology, the individuals who are leading this country are helping people find this crap. I think for a long time, the argument from the tech platforms and the social media platforms is, well, these platforms are neutral. Right? And then there's also, well, they just mirror what humanity is, what society is. But the algorithm changes that. Right?

Like the algorithm, it's not just a reflection of what society is. It's actually pushing you towards content that is more hateful. Like, these platforms are contributing to people who appeal to the worst of humanity. Silos are real, right? Like, you get into the silo online, whether it's on Reddit, whether it's on YouTube, whatever else, with other like-minded people, and propaganda works. We've talked about this, right? Like, and the more you're exposed to this stuff the more propaganda that's that's pushed out right like if you're some like

alienated young fucking white dude um who's sitting there like this like this killer was and you are suddenly radicalized by all of this hate that you're seeing on youtube and everywhere else not just in australia or New Zealand, but all over the globe from the fucking comfort of your own home, that's very dangerous. And tech platforms have a fucking responsibility to do something about this. Yeah, I mean, look,

tech companies talk about all the advantages that come with technology, the efficiencies, the speed with which you can do things, right? That's like email versus mail, right? The same applies when you're talking about groups of people coming together and radicalizing each other, right? It used to be people had to go drive somewhere.

Now they don't. Now it's right there at their computer. And, you know, it's a... And I think one of the challenges, too, is that this ecosystem is effective at every level of involvement on the part of people who see it, right? Right-wing, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim propaganda.

It works at the furthest distance, right? Planting just a little seed of concern in people's minds, planting a little seed of concern about Ilhan Omar in people's minds, planting a little bit of anxiety about an issue. They might not even bring it up, but in the back of their minds, they have a little concern about Muslims. It doesn't start like, hey, come be a Nazi. But so that has a huge impact, right? That affects behavior. That affects how people view Muslims.

That affects how people make decisions. You go one step up and it's now people watching Fox News regularly and now their politics are changing, right? Or now they're seeing more of this stuff on Facebook because that's what their friend shared, right? You go one step up and we all, you know, people have, we have relatives who have become kind of enamored of online right-wing culture who become embittered, hard to talk to because they're so in this kind of ecosystem. And you keep going up and you keep going up until you end up at this tiny clutch of

people who are willing to do terrible violence. And this White House doesn't care. I mean, Trump dismissed the rise of white nationalism. But then this morning on TV, Kellyanne Conway was asked if Trump's rhetoric was somehow responsible for the shooting. And in her effort to dismiss any possible connection, she said, I hope everyone will go online and read the shooter's manifesto because she thinks it will exonerate her boss. So she's cool if people go read a document that could radicalize more people as long as you don't blame Trump. That's this White House in a nutshell. I mean, yeah, on Sunday, acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said on Fox News that it's, quote, absurd to suggest that Donald Trump's words

influence the alleged attacker and that, quote, the president is not a white supremacist. I mean, Donald Trump called during the campaign for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and currently has a travel ban in place for multiple Muslim-majority countries. Like, I just, and then, you know, people were sending this around this weekend. Remember during the campaign at one of his rallies, man stands up and says, we have a problem in this country. It's called Muslims. We know our current president is one.

Trump says, right, we need this question. Man says, when can we get rid of them? Trump says, we're going to be looking at a lot of different things. A lot of people are saying that. Like, you can't tell me that rhetoric like that. And, you know, they said that, like, you know, John Kelly and Jim Mattis and all them were fond of saying, we'll put the words in one basket and Trump's actions in another. Right. Yeah. But it's like when you're talking about what inspires and radicalize people, it's words. Words do that.

Of course. And again, like, you know, this is I think you can't lay any one random act of violence at the feet of any politician or any sentence or any sentiment expressed. random act of violence at the feet of any politician or any sentence or any sentiment expressed. What happens is all of this rhetoric over time reaches a lot of people and some of those people take it literally. And if enough people start taking it literally, enough of those people will then, you know, if enough people take it literally, a small subset of them will act on it. And that is just a reality. And so, no, can you say to Donald Trump, did Donald Trump's specific words cause a specific event? No. But did Donald Trump cause this rise of random acts of anti-Muslim violence? Certainly contributing to it. Absolutely.

Yeah. Look, in 2017, he retweeted, like, anti-Muslim snuff films that were so disgusting. They had been posted by a far right-wing party in the UK that he was rebuked by the British government. They had been posted by a far right wing party in the UK that he was rebuked by the British government. You know, like this is there's nothing new here. And it is just building and building and building. But at the same time, he's out there talking about reacting to his enemies with violence. He did this interview, I think it was with Breitbart, where he was talking about how he is the support of the police, the military, bikers for Trump.

Right. And we have tough people. So if the left wing goes to a certain point, it'll get very bad, right? He encouraged, he goes, I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough until they go to a certain point. And then it would be very, very bad. Yeah, I mean, he told his people at his rallies to knock the hell out of hecklers. He told the cops that he liked it when they roughed up suspects. I mean, he is, he's pushing people towards this rhetoric and he's pushing them towards more violent actions as being OK. How should Democrats talk about this? And what should the next president do about this? What can the next president do about this? I mean, I think that the bare minimum is to call it out. And I think we need to get past this little game where we pretend that it's somehow not

contributing or we worry about offending the Fox News of the world by staying quite clearly that Trump's language is fomenting violence. His policies are bigoted. They are. Just call him out. I mean, I saw that this morning, Jerry Nadler announced that the House Democrats are holding hearings on white nationalism. I think that's a good start. I think you're right. Talking about it, calling it out is a good first step. You see Jacinda Ardern, 38, youngest female head of state in New Zealand, and it's just watching her over the weekend too, consoling, hugging people, standing with the Muslims in New Zealand,

just watching someone play the role that presidents used to play. Not just Obama, like all U.S. presidents. We had people when something bad happened in the country and the president would console people. Core decency. She also announced plans to ban semi-automatic rifles right after that,

which would be something completely new here in America. I saw Mayor Pete Buttigieg sent a letter to the Muslim community in South Bend where he said, you know, you're not only loved but needed. He also said white nationalism kills, right? Like, I think talking about this more and exposing it more is one good step. It's not sufficient, but it's one good step. Also probably dedicating more resources in the Department of Justice and the FBI to actually going after white nationals and investigating these groups

is probably pretty important as well for the next president. Yeah, I think also a lot of people have talked about the success that some of the internet platforms have had getting rid of ISIS propaganda, and they have had far less success in getting rid of white nationalist propaganda. And I think the reality is there's not been enough pressure, but also it's harder because white nationalist propaganda runs all the way

from like, it's, there's no clear line between far right wing, anti-Muslim violent propaganda all the way to the kind of acceptable right wing racism we see all the time. And because of that gray area, they're terrifying of getting inside of it, but they have to.

No, this is the long-running problem that Facebook deals with, that the media deals with all the time, is is it a political opinion or is it hate speech? And it's tough on the right to figure that out. And to the platforms, not credit, but I understand where they're coming from because it is hard to police all of this language. Right. Like you don't know where to draw the line, but they need to start drawing some lines. Right. Like I know this isn't perfect. This isn't a perfect exercise.

I know there's free speech like you want to be careful with all this and it's like it's a balance. But when you see that this is creating so much violence and hatred, like maybe you should be a little bit more lean to the side of taking it down than worrying that a bunch of like Republican commentators and pundits are going to yell at you because they think that you're biased. Or when you learn that seven active duty military members were identified as being part of a white nationalist group called Identity Europa. I think we need to think damn hard about the amount of resources being put towards, you know, tracking, penetrating and breaking up these kind of groups. Because in 2009, when DH released a report that talked about the rise of white nationalism and extremism and their likelihood of recruiting former military members into those groups because of their training, it received massive political blowback.

Obama wrongly walked back the report and we kind of hid from it because of the attacks. And that was a huge mistake. And we need to just be clear eyed and honest about the shit. Yeah. There's one other point, too, and love it. You were getting at it a little bit on CNN this weekend. Waleed Shahid was on from Justice Democrats. And he was talking about like Democrats sort of making the turn or all of us making the turn as we talk about why this is happening and saying, like, you know, billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, like the Mercers, use this propaganda to tell people that Muslims and immigrants are to blame for our economic problems, trying to divide white people against black and brown people, you know, so that there is no class solidarity.

Like, it is a very concerted strategy on behalf of rich and powerful people, right? Like they want you to think that it's like poor white folks who are driving this movement. And honestly, it's rich people who are doing this. Rupert Murdoch is more responsible for this than almost anyone else. Yes, I think that's absolutely right. And, you know, I think one of the things that's hard, too, is it's like, even when it's not fomenting violence, it is still a false ideology designed to scare people. You know, right now in this country, you know, who are the victims of religious based violence? They are Muslims and they are Jews, right? That's who is getting the brunt of religious-based violence. Who is committing the bulk of terrorist attacks and radical violence in the U.S.?

It's white supremacist organizations. Those are what the statistics say. I would add African-American churches into the list of victims, too. Right. And so it's exactly backwards, and I think we do have to talk about it. I do think, by the way, just, you know, talking about the responsibility of tech to billionaires in Silicon Valley any more than I find it, than I want to hand it over to Congress. You know what I mean? It's a, it's a difficult issue. So I think part of it is about figuring out how to take some of that power back and not just asking, not just outsourcing this responsibility to another group of people somewhere else,

but figuring out how to make it our own responsibility together. I mean, I do think that's what our, that's what our Congress is for. That's what our government's for, ultimately. I also think a piece of this is... There's some regulation here that's going to... There's also a piece of this that I think is understanding the scope of the problem. And I think 4chan and Gab and some of these places where this stuff grows and festers were seen as fringy. And I remember the morning of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville,

people were like, if you'd only stop covering these stupid nerds and khakis walking around they wouldn't get the attention they know this is a real growing presence and threat and danger and we need to recognize that and understand that like this sort of shit posting online culture the the like you know the the pewdiepie reference like that's something that hundreds of millions, if not billions of people understand and get. And it helps launder these radical views into like memes that are allegedly funny, but actually are not. They're Trojan horses to carry deeply fucked up views that are going to get people hurt. You can't ignore it. You have to expose it. One last incident related to the attack I want to mention.

On Friday night, two students from New York University confronted Chelsea Clinton at an interfaith vigil for the victims of the New Zealand attack. They were upset because Clinton tweeted the following response to a tweet that said Ilhan Omar's comments about AIPAC and Israel were seen as anti-Semitic by American Jews. And Chelsea's tweet said, quote, co-signed as an American, we should expect all elected officials, regardless of party and all public figures, to not traffic an anti-Semitism. One of the young women who confronted Clinton said, quote, this right here is a result of a massacre stoked by people like you and the

words that you put out into the world. 49 people died because of the rhetoric you put out there. Guys, what do you think of this? And what did you make of all the people on Twitter, like yelling about this? Some of them, a lot of people defending the young women. So I found it all very silly. I'm sorry, just silly. And it's silly because there are real serious issues at stake, right? There are serious issues about anti-Muslim sentiment even being expressed by liberals. And there's a serious issue about how even liberals and even people who are trying to be supportive of the Muslim community feed into anti-Muslim stereotypes in the way they talk about Muslim Americans, right? One of the things I think people point to often is,

often, like, it's similar to how on TV shows for a very long time, if you were a gay character, the stories that were told about you had to do with your gayness, right? Like, if you're going to be a gay character, you might be out coming out or being secretly gay. Bohemian Rhapsody does this, too. In our politics, when you're... Muslim people are Muslim first, right?

The first thing they have to do is prove their loyalty. We don't ask other people to prove their loyalty. The first thing they're expected to address is their Muslim faith. And so I think that there is a legitimate conversation to be had about how we talk about Muslim Americans even when we're trying to be supportive. This was not that. This was maybe you have a disagreement with how she addressed an issue. But to take that and take it to a vigil and attack somebody and claiming that they played a part in this attack or responsible in some way for this attack, I think is counterproductive, even if there is a legitimate conversation to be had underneath it all. But Twitter will not be that place. And that vigil was not going to be that place. I guess, you know, if you want to confront Chelsea Clinton, that is, I guess, fine. And you're right. But like the they wrote that she was part of a, quote, bigoted anti-Muslim mob that came after Ilhan Omar. And any reading of the facts, as you just outlined, shows that that's completely ridiculous. Actually, Ilhan Omar

apologized and Chelsea Clinton then thanked her. So, uh, again, like what, what's frustrating about this is all of a sudden, instead of having a conversation about actual Islamophobia and the things we need to do to maybe address the problem, we're talking about fucking attacking Chelsea Clinton and a bunch of blue checkmark journalists, uh, in, you know, in New York are attacking her for getting paid too much for having worked at NBC at one point. Like, what is the value of this conversation? And how do we just decide that someone that we don't like for unrelated reasons is somehow deserving of this sort of reaction when they were attending a vigil? It's just like, it's such misplaced rage and energy.

Yeah. It's everything I fucking hate about Twitter. You're wasting everyone's time. Everything I fucking hate about it. Well, here's the thing. There is, like, first of all, Chelsea Clinton is the, she was there because she's the head of an interfaith organization. Seems relevant. Just, you know.

But, like, whether it is justified or not going up to Chelsea Clinton, it's almost like, and I didn't think that she deserved to be yelled at like that at all. But it's almost beside the point. Like, let's talk about effective activism, right? Like, activism is fueled by anger, righteous anger, that's oftentimes very understandable. It's an important part of activism, why you're angry about something. But it also requires discipline, and it requires persuasion. And like, if those women, young women, wanted to go up to Chelsea Clinton and say, hey, that tweet about Ilhan Omar, like that really, that hurt me. And I think it had contributed to some of this.

And I'm, you know, I'm a little worried about it. And like, what do you think about that? You really, you made me mad with that tweet. And here's where I'm coming from. Like Chelsea Clinton probably would have had a great conversation with them and none of us would be talking about this. What a shame that would be. Yeah, right.

But like how many minds, how many minds do you think you change? How many minds do you think you change by going up to Chelsea Clinton and saying that she's responsible for a massacre? I agree. I totally – I mean, I agree with that. I also give them far more of a pass to feel how you feel in the moment when you're very frustrated and emotional. It's then the sort of – the online refs who are supposed to be journalists who just decide to pile on someone that they don't like because their last name is Clinton. It's just like, it's transparent. It's obvious.

It's childish. And look, I'm sure these young women have done that a lot of times. Maybe it was just a moment that they were really angry. But like, we really have to, and the people online, by the way, all the checkmark blue journalists, they don't do activism, right? Which is why all they do is yell on Twitter, you know? It's also, you know, and this is, I think, part of the problem, too, which is like, okay, so, like, I actually do think there's a worthy conversation about, you know, bad faith, like, the role that Ilhan Omar was forced to play

in our politics because of bad faith arguments on the right. Very interesting and important conversation. How does your denouncement of her comments feed into that? Worth having. Fine. A random confrontation at one vigil in New York City. Now it's the national topic. Now we're talking about it. And I don't know, I don't think any of us really know how to do this. You know, how do you, how do you, how do you, look, we're stepping into this debate right now. We're deciding this is worthy of a conversation because we don't believe that the conversation we saw online was a smart or a good one. So we're having a different conversation here. And yet we are part of now this big conversation about Chelsea Clinton and who's responsible for a terrorist attack in New

Zealand. And so like, I think one of the things we all grapple with is how do you participate in a debate that you're not sure should even be happening because it elevates a small thing and turns it into a big thing and it happens every single day and i don't think there's very many good answers no look and the reason the reason i wanted to talk about it is for the point that i just made is there are a lot of things out there in the trump era that are making all of us very angry all the time yeah and the the question hanging over all of it is what do we do about it what do we do with all that anger and how do we bring about change and i think there is a way there is a way we do about it? What do we do with all that anger and how do we bring about change? And I think there is a way,

there is a way to bring about change that activists and organizers have followed for decades that is at risk because of the social media environment that we have right now. And I think it's an, I just think it's something for everyone to think about. Agreed. There's it's which, which,

and we just talked about algorithms that push people towards anger and more fear. And, you know. The only algorithm that really matters, the human mind. Let's move on to the President's St. Patrick's Day, which he celebrated with nearly two dozen tweets that attacked John McCain, Meghan McCain, a rerun of Saturday Night Live, Fox News executives for not defending Jeanine Pirro and Tucker Carlson, Fox News anchors like Shep Smith, who are not sufficiently loyal to Trump, and Democrats for trying to steal the 2016 election, first at the, quote, ballot box, as he put in quotations, then through a coup. Guys, what do you think's going on? So two quick points. One, I do love that he criticized SNL for going after him over and over again

because it was a rerun. It's so funny because I went to bed Saturday night and was like, oh, cool, we can watch Saturday Night Live before falling asleep. And then it was like, oh, fuck, it's a rerun. And then I woke up and I'm like, did we miss a real Saturday Live? Because Trump's tweeting about it. Turns out no. It was a rerun, so that was baffling to him.

In terms of his angry tweets, I do think it's worth noting that Donald Trump had to go to church on Sunday because it was St. Patrick's Day. And that clearly, he was angry about it. He was doing it from church? I don't think he tweeted from the pews, but I do think he was incredibly angry about having to go to church. I think he hates going to church. He doesn't know what to do with his brain during that time. He can barely pay attention. The pastor did talk about tolerance

and how to fight cruelty and bad rhetoric, which of course really hissed him the fuck off. It's like, who's this fucking guy? Why am I not talking to this? I mean, the SNL thing is unbelievably hilarious and perfect, but he did ask if the federal election commission or the FCC should look into it.

So like, that's a pretty direct threat on a television show or a network, you know, and abridgment of freedom of speech. He also told Fox news to bring back Janine Perot, who Fox had just recently banned for saying something incredibly Islamophobic. Pretty fucked up to do in the context of New Zealand that we're just talking about. He attacked McCain and wrongly said he gave the Steele dossier to the FBI during the campaign.

Actually, he did it after. And then he retweeted an attack on Meghan McCain, John McCain's daughter, who had responded to him. Meghan McCain, John McCain's daughter, who had responded to him. I just want to quickly note that pathetic Lindsey Graham could only muster a subtweet where he didn't name Donald Trump in response. So I don't know. Best friend. Normally, normally, like when if someone fired off 24 tweets on St. Patty's Day, I assume they were hammered.

We know, John, we know that Donald Trump does not drink. So that can't be the case here. I am hopeful that maybe he learned some Mueller news. And this is all just a big prelude to the next thing. But like, you know, these these this is completely unhinged. But within the unhingedness are some really serious things like the the FCC investigation into NBC or the, you know, just dismissing Islamophobia out of hand that, like, it's hard to process. He attacked a deceased senator and veteran for being last in his class at Annapolis. And his daughter. I didn't know that. I'm finding that out now.

That's what he said. That is fucking deranged. That is deranged. He's a deranged human. Part of what was so alarming about it was, like, we haven't had one of these spells in a little while. The Donald Trump going off on 20 tweets. And it's like, is it is it alarming that these tweets are losing a little bit of their shock value? Or is that a good thing that we're not letting them sort of distract us all from the larger issues at stake here?

I think it's fine. I think it was an inevitable. You know, there's only there's only so much shock we can muster. There's a natural equilibrium between the... This is not normal. It's like, well, guess what? Now it is. It's pretty normal. There's a natural equilibrium between the amount of shock his crazy tweets generate

and the amount of crazy tweets he's generating himself. And that seems like we've kind of hit that. The more rare the tweets, the more they're shocking. I don't know what to do about it, but that's just the reality. On the Jeanine Pirro thing, I actually think it's a very easy one. He's a racist, and Jeanine Pirro is a loyal racist, and he wants his loyal racist back because she was really good to him, and he doesn't care about the fact that she just went into anti-Muslim bigotry

because, A, he agrees with it, and, B, even if he didn't, he wouldn't care because he likes her more than he cares about the country. And it's not like he's sitting there thinking about what happened in New Zealand because these things don't, like, they fire through the synapse real quickly and then they just move on. No, his brain is a well-oiled sluice way. Yeah, information. You throw a marble in that thing, it comes out the other side faster. One last note, though. He also retweeted a QAnon account.

And if you don't know a QAnon account. And if you don't know what QAnon is, reply all from Kim. We did a really great episode on it. Check it out. But, like, again, so we're talking about these crazy, like, dark corners of the Internet conspiracy theories. When the president of the United States retweets one of them, it lends them credence. It lends them credence. The darkest corner of the Internet is in the Oval Office. Yes.

Chelsea Clinton's fault. All right. Chelsea Clinton's fault. All right. Chelsea Clinton is responsible and it is time we all face the fact that this wealthy woman from Tribeca

is responsible. She is cute. There were two Trump tweets I think are worth Democrats paying attention to and those are the tweets where he literally blamed autoworkers

for the closure of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. He wrote that United Autoworkers local 1112 President David Green, quote, ought to stop complaining, get his act together, and produce. This is after Green twice reached out to the White House for help over the last couple months and got no response from the White House.

Later, Trump, maybe realizing that it was actually a mistake that he did this, tweeted that he spoke to GM's CEO and told her to do something quickly about the plant closure, but she blamed it on the union. And then he was like, I don't care, just get it open. So first of all, back to my point.

She said something on that call that stuck in his brain just long enough for it to get from his brain to the Twitter machine, which I'm sure he mischaracterized, but clearly she expressed some blame for workers and then he just parroted it. And then someone's like, you can't. Don't you see?

She has an agenda on this call, whatever. And he's just like, oh, fuck, I stepped in again. Oh, well. It's worse than that. The initial tweet immediately followed a segment on Fox News about the plant. So he was just live tweeting Fox again. But then, I mean, like big picture, blaming workers for a plant closure is an interesting electoral strategy.

I'll tell you, I'm no pollster, but if you put a poll on the field, I'm going to take a wild guess on that one. I'm glad Sherry Brown immediately got out and responded, but this is something Democrats could talk about literally every day until the election. I mean, it's 1,300 jobs in Ohio. There's a whole story here about Trump at the carrier plant in Indiana promising jobs coming back into this country. Trump promising factories are going to open up, right?

And it's like everyone dutifully reporting on it. They're dutifully reporting on it. Even amid an economic recovery where unemployment is low, these places in the Midwest, places like Lordstown, places all over Ohio, Michigan, stuff like that, they have still not recovered fully from the Great Recession, from the financial crisis. And there are people hurting. And when you look at the places where Trump won, the Obama-Trump places where Trump won in the Midwest and then swung back to Democrats in 18, these are like, there's, you know, there's a whole bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and voted for Sherrod Brown in 2018, voted for Tammy Baldwin in

Wisconsin, voted for Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, for Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne in Iowa, right? So we know that there are these voters who voted for Donald Trump, came back to the Democrats in 2018, and getting them to vote for a Democratic president in 2020 is going to require a big push around this story that Trump has broken promises to people in the Midwest that he would bring jobs back, when in fact what he actually did was his only legislative accomplishment so far is passing a gigantic

tax cut that went to a lot of these companies and actually incentivized outsourcing jobs. Plus all of his tariff bullshit. Right, and one of the stories, a lot of people know that a lot of things we built in the U.S. we built from imported steel. And like, these are many things making it harder to make things in the U.S.

Yeah, and I'm happy that the Center for American Progress rolled out an ad campaign on Facebook and Twitter and other social media platforms hitting Trump on the tax breaks for GM this week. So they're going to be doing that. Those are the kind of ads that we need to see. More of that. Donald Trump is the grifter from the monorail episode of The Simpsons, and we have reached the part where we were discovering that actually he didn't build very much of a monorail in Ogdenville,

and also the monorail is on fire. End of analogy. All right. Cool, cool, cool. Michael's with me. Michael's nodding. Kyle's with me. Kyle's nodding.

They're paid to be with you, but continue. Maggie, you with me? Oh, God. Maggie's not with me. Nope. We're taking a fucking poll. All right. We've got lots of 2020 news to talk about today.

Beto O'Rourke has received lots of very polarized coverage for his campaign rollout and first trip to Iowa. Mayor Pete Buttigieg is having a moment. Elizabeth Warren is churning out more new ambitious policy, this time on housing. Kirsten Gillibrand is officially launching her campaign with a new video, new slogan, and a big speech at Trump Tower on Sunday. Stacey Abrams is considering a White House run. And Joe Biden seems to have accidentally announced he's running at a dinner on Saturday, saying, quote, I have the most progressive record of anybody running, anybody

who would run. Classic. Totally saved it. Totally saved it. Oh, no, Joe, the cat's out of the bag. Joe, why'd you say that, Joe? OK, let's start with Beto, who announced this morning that his campaign raised a record six point one million dollars of online only contributions in its first 24 hours, surpassing the five point nine million announced by Bernie Sanders and all the other Democrats running. all the other Democrats running. I think it's fair to say that Beto's announcement got more coverage than your average presidential campaign rollout, but I did think it was notable that so much of the national and Twitter coverage was snarky to negative, while the local Iowa coverage and interviews with Iowa caucus goers were positive to glowing. Tommy, as the former Iowa press secretary for Barack Obama, what did you think of that dynamic? There will always be a delta between the national coverage and local Iowa coverage. It tends to be more substantive and focused on issues and then on the street conversations.

That said, the national debate bleeds into Iowa coverage in a big, big way. It's true for all the TVs. It's true for the Des Moines Register. They all have the Internet. They all have Twitter. They see this conversation happening. So it will ultimately merge more than you want it to, but that's how it works.

I mean, I thought that Beto's smartest thing he did was get to Iowa and get in the car and do a whole bunch of events. Most of the things they had done up to that point are not how I would have done it. I thought the Vanity Fair piece was kind of bad. I thought that the announcement video wasn't great. Like, I think that a lot of the things felt rushed and like there weren't enough people there to sort of handle the processes to get it done right.

And I think that's a direct result of taking some time to think about this decision. Like, I don't begrudge anyone for thinking really long and hard about whether or not you're going to run for president. But then there's going to be a cascading series of events, which means you won't have enough people on the ground. Especially when you're not Joe Biden,

who has been collecting people and teams for 40 years in politics. Now, like the blue checkmark Twitter uprising gave me a lot of flashbacks to Obama coverage, because I think a lot of reporters confuse being cynical and sarcastic for sounding smart.

And I think that's especially true if you are trying to have a message that's hopeful and optimistic because it can often be interpreted as being naive. It's more savvy sounding to talk about process. So, you know,

this is going to be a long process. Not one of the people that is attacking him on Twitter has a vote. And now he's going to go to New Hampshire's 10 counties in two days. So, like, those are the things I would do. But it was funny to see reporters. Like, there was a guy from The Atlantic who went after him saying that, you know, he wasn't even – people weren't even Googling his name. name and uh nate silver from 530 it had to be like hey um if you search for beto o'rourke or beto it's actually four times the next candidate's search history so it's like there's a lot of dumb

unforced errors that felt like they were derived from people wanting to uh look at the candidacy in in a harsh light at the start love what would you? So I think there's a good, um, look, small story that, that captures, I think this dynamic. So, uh, how much money did Beto raise in his first 24 hours? Okay. It's a big question, right? Cause Bernie raised, I think 5.9 million. Beto didn't put out the number right away. So it fed into this argument online that actually there's a, there's no, they're there. His appeal was not as broad as we thought. He's not releasing the number because it's not very good. Beto's campaign is already foundering. He's already failed to properly answer a question about health care. He's already failing to put substance behind his name. His video wasn't good. His wife didn't speak in the video. These

are all symptoms of the fact that Beto O'Rourke is not the candidate. He's not going to work. It's never going to happen. It's all over. It's done. It's all over. Then we learned today that actually he raised $6.1 million, meaning he raised more than Bernie in his first 24 hours. He's raising a ton of money. The enthusiasm is there. Good news for Beto. According to this new conversation, he's frontrunner once again. That's it. It's over.

He's won. He wrapped up the nomination. But here's the actual truth. He did some events in Iowa. He has appealed to some people. There is a fundamental question every single candidate that's in Iowa. He has appealed to some people. There is a fundamental question every single candidate that's in this race is going to have to answer, which is, why am I the person to take on Donald Trump and become president in this moment?

Here's what happened. No one has successfully answered that question because it's not possible to answer it in the first days of your campaign. It is a long process at the end of which we will come together and decide who is the best person to take on Donald Trump and who is the best person to be president. I think Beto clearly has charisma. He has enthusiasm. He's inspired a lot of people. There's questions about substance. There's questions about what he would actually do as president. He's answered some of those questions well. He's answered some of those questions poorly. That is what the campaign is for. It's just a, I know we say this a lot, but it is another chapter in Twitter is not real life.

And, you know, people say, well, why are you so focused on Twitter? Just get out Twitter. But the problem is all the journalists that are covering this campaign are on Twitter. And what happens on Twitter then leads to journalists writing political analysis based entirely off tweets, entirely off what's happened, the conversations going on Twitter. So it does matter. The coverage does matter. And it's not just Beto that's had to deal with this. Like, I know we all, like, every day is fucking memento in this campaign where we just, like, you know, we forget what happened. But, like, Kamala Harris dealt with this. Elizabeth Warren dealt with this in their roles, too.

Like, Kamala Harris, oh, the prosecutor thing is going to be a huge problem. Everyone at her events is going to be talking about the prosecutor thing. Elizabeth Warren, everyone's going to be talking about Pocahontas and the DNA thing and all that kind of shit. Everyone's going to be talking about this. Lo and behold, Beto, same thing. The people at the rally, every, when you interview all these people who are going to these events who are not committed fans, that's another mistake people are making.

A lot of these are, especially in Iowa, they are undecided caucus goers. And when you interview them at Kamala's events or Warren's events or Beto's events, none of the shit that people are talking about online gets brought up. They don't talk. What they're saying is this person makes me feel inspired. I like this person's plan for X. I want someone who does this. Just basic things that normal human beings ask.

I do think that, you know, the one the one Q&A that kind of made me scratch my head was on health care. And I think, you know, whether he supports Medicare for all or universal, and I think that's going to be something that can be vetted out throughout the campaign. But like the money thing to me is just your classic sugar high process story bullshit. And like, I wish these candidates didn't feel like they needed to release these 24 hours number because they're ultimately kind of meaningless. And it's like, you know, so there's all this sneering about how Elizabeth Warren is putting out all this great, substantive, important policy. And I just would suggest to some of the people pointing that out who cover politics, like, cover the policy then.

You have agency here. You can focus on whatever you want to focus on rather than make it about that contrast of coverage versus policy role. It's like, anyway. Well, I will just say that this drove me nuts because I'm a health care nerd about this. But, like, when the full answer came out for Beto and he said, I like the Schakowsky bill. This is the bill by Schakowsky and Rose DeLauro. And it's Medicare for America. We've talked about this before.

This is similar to the plan that Center for American Progress put together as well. And reporters, finally, when they got that, and they're like, oh, he did land on a position that he likes this bill. They're like, oh, he likes the buy-in option. Now they're all right. And he likes the Medicare buy-in option. It's like, it's not a Medicare buy-in option, actually. And if you just go click on the plan, you'll find it out. It's a plan that enrolls half the country in Medicare automatically and then tells everyone else in the country,

you can enroll in Medicare if you want to. It's not a buy-in. It's not a public option at all. And all I'm saying is, if you're going to start reporting all this policy and someone throws out an actual piece of legislation, all you have to do is just go read the legislation and don't tweet partial quotes.

And Vox has written all about Medicare for America long before Beto got in the race. There's all kinds of great stories about it. Just go look them up. And the same thing with Elizabeth Warren's plans. You can accurately talk about the plans and describe them in an easy way. It's not hard to figure out what's in a plan. I will say, though, I think part of this is it's feeding into a dynamic in our political coverage that is very frustrating

and that it is personality and charisma-driven opposed to policy driven a lot of the time. So that's been always the case. Always the case. I mean, well, I think it's more, it's always been the case and it's become more the case with television, the internet and social media. But, you know, I think one of the challenges Beto has is, I think he's going to face these hard questions about healthcare. He's going to face these hard questions on substance because, A, he doesn't have, you know, Cory Booker has outlined a set of sort of key policy priorities and put out some new ideas that he's going to sort of take the lead on. Kamala Harris has done that with the LIFT Act. I think Cory Booker's done it with baby bombs. Elizabeth Warren is, you know,

I've said this before, just like, I mean, just leading the field in terms of coming up with intellectually serious, far-reaching, but practical practical policy ideas that will whether or not she's the nominee become the the mainstream position of Democrats for sure. And into that is where Beto is stepping, which is an incredibly sophisticated and incredibly advanced policy debate. And so far, he said, well, I signed on to, you know, I'm I like this this health care bill. I like Cory Booker's baby bonds bills. signed on to, you know, I like this health care bill. I like Cory Booker's baby bonds bills. Like, OK, but this is going to be the central question, which is, can you back up the inspiration and charisma with an agenda of your own that speaks to this moment? And I think because of how he's done this, it's just still an open question, which is why it's hard for him to

get out of these little kind of policy conversations. One story about this from 07, and then we'll move on. Early on in that race, there was a SEIU forum about health care. And Hillary Clinton had already had a detailed health care plan ready to go. John Edwards already had a detailed health care plan ready to go. Barack Obama said, I will pass universal health care by the end of my first term in office. That was his promise. He did not have a detailed health care plan.

We go to the SEIU forum, and they ask him questions about health care and his health care plan. Hillary Clinton gives detailed, detailed answers. John Edwards gives detailed answers. Barack Obama fumbles through it and is maybe the angriest I had heard him in the whole campaign because he felt unprepared. He felt like he didn't do the work. And the truth was, you know, we were just getting a policy staff together. He didn't he didn't do the work. And the truth was, you know, we were just getting a policy staff together. He didn't have time to put the whole plan together. And but he was like, that's no excuse. I'm running for president. I need to put plans together and we need to get this. Now, the other part of the story is because Hillary Clinton was the substantive policy one in the race, Barack Obama then for the next five or six months over-corrected and started getting into

such detail on every single policy to the extent where in Iowa he was giving these 50-60 minute long speeches because he wanted I remember. You remember, you were there. I lived through all of them. Because he wanted to prove to people that he was super substantive. And it turns out people want sub-substance but not a ton of substance because they also want

message and inspiration. And it wasn't until the Jefferson Jackson dinner that fall that he then once again lost all of the details on policy and got back to inspiring people. But just a process point, too. If you want to lay out every single policy you're going to propose on day one, that is an incredible accomplishment and super admirable. But politically, in terms of a communication strategy, it makes a lot more sense to sequence them and phase them over the course of a campaign

so you might actually get covered on each proposal. Yeah, I think that's right. My point is just it makes a lot more sense to sequence them and phase them over the course of a campaign so you might actually get covered on each proposal. Right. Yeah, I think that's right. My point is just it's a balance. I think, of course, it's a balance. And I don't know that anyone's hit it yet. No. I mean, Warren is dominating the policy conversation.

No, but I'm saying what she has to think about is I have all the policy and now can I put a story together? But I think I would argue she has some speech. Yeah. I just one thing that Barack Obama had, especially in 2007, was a kind of a case for why we should go with him instead of Hillary Clinton. Right. That was what it was. It was like, look, I was against the Iraq war from the start. She voted for it. I represent change.

She represents the establishment. Right. She voted for it. I represent change. She represents the establishment. There was this fundamental case that undergirded every single thing Barack Obama did, which I think inert him to some of the consequences of maybe not having a policy answer from the beginning. But that case did not come together until the very end of the primary, until the fall before Iowa,

because we were just flailing before that. Sure, sure. And this is the problem is no one has a case against anyone else yet because there's 20 candidates. And this is the problem is no one has a case against anyone else yet because there's 20 candidates. But what I'm saying is that like that deeper motivation was there from the start, whether it was perfectly articulated, whether it got him over the hump, whether it helped him win debates. I don't know. And I think the question for Beto is, do you have that deeper cause that is galvanizing your campaign? That's the big question. Of course. That's a big question for all of us. Let's talk about Mayor Pete, who's now crossed 65,000 donors, the threshold necessary to earn a spot in the Democratic primary debates. His national profile has

also been boosted by a CNN town hall and, of course, his Pod Save America interview with Dan Pfeiffer. Mayor Pete is campaigning on intergenerational change, and he actually did a Fox News interview on Sunday where he joked about owning the, quote, white Episcopalian gay veteran lane in the Democratic primary. When asked about where his political beliefs fit within the party, he said, quote,

I think everyone wants to fit you on an ideological spectrum, and I think that has never been less relevant. Why do you guys think Mayor Pete's catching on? Is he catching on? He's certainly catching on in some quarters. It's a great example of someone just being really, really fucking smart. I just think he's a really, really smart person. There was also this great anecdote that came out over the weekend, which was he was at an event, of someone just being really, really fucking smart. I just think he's a really, really smart person. There was also this great anecdote that came out over the weekend, which was he was at an event,

he was introduced to a Norwegian journalist, and then he just started speaking Norwegian, and the journalist was just sort of aghast, like, how did this person learn to speak Norwegian? And it turns out that Mayor Pete had read a book by a Norwegian author that had been translated to English. He liked the author so much he wanted to read more, but none of the author's other works

were available in English, so he had to learn Norwegian to read it. Donald Trump is president. Yeah. That's the punchline. The aristocrats. I just think you see someone like Mayor Pete at CNN Town Hall,

and he just sort of exudes a core decency. It comes from who he is in his presentation, but also his bio, having served in the military. And there's just a lot of goodness about him. And I think we're in a period of time when it's easier to focus on the contrast between Democrats on the left. But the contrast between Mayor Pete and Donald Trump is so strong and so interesting to see

that I do think like he's definitely having a really interesting moment. It remains to be seen if he can maintain it, if he can have a great moment in a debate that continues to help him surge. But, you know, it's great that he's getting a look from people because that's the kind of guy you want to run for for various offices. Yeah. He said in The Washington Post this weekend, like, I can only be myself. I don't know how to create a persona. I'm not smart enough. I don't have a big enough staff to do that. You know, like,

the love is rolling aside. Oh, and so humble. Yeah, because you know that someone could never be really humble. They only have to be acting humble. Yeah, well, he can be humble, but that was, of course, but that's performative humility. He's expressing his humility to reporters.

I'm not going to attack Mayor Pete's motivations. I love Mayor Pete. I'm literally in love with him. He is the love of my life. You're talking about the love of my life. Yikes. But yeah, no, he's just running as himself. When you have a sort of shoestring campaign like that, you basically have no choice but to go just say what's on your mind and run yourself.

And it turns out who he is is a really fantastic person. Yeah. So that's why it's working well. So we can do more speculation on Biden and Stacey Abrams. Okay. And we're going to talk more about Jill Brand's kickoff speech after she gives it on Sunday. But I do want to end with Elizabeth Warren, who, as we've just said, is just churning out new policy nonstop. Over the weekend, she announced her plan to address the country's affordable housing crisis. It limits the ability of big private

equity firms to buy up housing for the sole purpose of renting it out, which is a big problem that drives up rent. It calls for targeted homeownership assistance in minority communities to close the racial wealth gap, and it provides funding for public housing. Warren, of course, has already contributed a list of big ideas to the presidential primary conversation, including a wealth tax, universal child care, and a plan to break up large tech companies like Facebook and Amazon. On Monday night, she joined CNN's Jake Tapper for a town hall broadcast from Mississippi. So, as we've said, she's clearly leading the field when it comes to new ideas and new policy, especially economic policy. How much has this mattered in the past and how much should it matter? Or how can she get it to matter? Or maybe she is. I can't answer that question. No one can. But I mean, I think a couple of things are important.

One, like I sat down for 40 minutes with her and like, it's not just that she has great bite-sized policies, that she has a broader vision and theory of the case for how she views the world that is all woven together and it makes sense and it ties into her message and story. And it's incredibly impressive. She's also running an interesting campaign where, you know, on top of the substance, like in terms of process, she's doing all the things in early states like Iowa that you need to do to do well, sticking around, take every selfie, signing people's things, like meeting everybody, which is important.

It's like the personal politics. Lastly, you just said she's doing a town hall in Mississippi. It's like, what is she doing there? She's going to interesting states to communicate this message that are about a broader electoral strategy.

So like on every facet of the campaign feels new, it feels different, it feels interesting. And like, I think it's going to catch on in places like Iowa, is my guess. Iowa seems like a very good state for her. Because I think she, like you said, she doesn't just have these policies she has. And when I was talking about the story earlier, she is clearly woven together because it has been her story throughout her life, a story about economic inequality in this country and a rigged system and what happens when corporations have too much power and how to rein them in. She has nailed that. She tells it better than anyone in the country, anyone that

I've ever seen. The question is, can she broaden that story out to include other facets of American life that voters are concerned about? Right. And I think she probably can, right? Like, I think we're going to find out over the next 10 months. But, you know, I think that's, but she does remind me, like, I remember in 07 and 08, like, John Edwards was the one with the just laser-like focus economic message, right? To America's... Well, yeah, it was, a little bit of that laser caused him to a little... Some of that laser did not make it all the way to the target.

It went off to a crazy bathroom thing. Right, all before... A bathroom thing? Well, that's where he got hounded by the reporter. Remember he had to hide in the bathroom? Oh, I don't remember the whole story. Anyway, before anyone knew that, 2007 happened and the race.

And he was sort of quietly running around Iowa with this message that was very appealing and he almost caught us in the race. And, you know, he was sort of like quietly running around Iowa with this message that was very appealing. And he almost caught us in the end. I mean, Hillary got third in Iowa. And like, and we were. What a night. We thought for a while that everyone was going to win in Iowa because this economic populist message did so, so well. Then the same thing happened in 2004 with the To America speech. I mean, look, I think that Warren's story

about her bio and her family and the way she grew up is incredibly compelling. But it's not like, I've also been impressed with the fact that she also gave a major foreign policy speech. And I think only Bernie has also done that. And, you know, she is completely fluent talking about nuclear weapons or Venezuela

or Israel, Palestine. Like she is just, she's got it all. And that's the kind of stuff that like, that gets you ready to play the long game, right? Yeah, it's interesting. We talk a lot about sort of like, oh, where do you persuade people? Where do you not?

And persuasion inside of a movement, inside of a party is much more possible on policy because it's much more people acting in good faith. And so it is, right? One would hope. One would hope. And it often is um and so inside of our primaries and inside of primaries generally i think you do see a more substantive policy debate and look you know donald trump coming down that escalator and saying they're coming here they're rapists they're murderers it was a policy argument right he came out and said i'm going to make an argument about

immigration and trade didn't have a lot of details but he had a policy he had a policy a core policy argument for why he was running. Elizabeth Warren has a democratic version of that core policy argument, and it has, in a lot of ways, animated this primary so far. So that's actually, I think, heartening that she has staked her claim saying, I'm going to run on policy,

and every single time she rolls out a policy, it does captivate the media. We should say that Bernie Sanders also was leading the policy debate in 2016. Oh, for sure. Absolutely. And, you know, as we talk, like, most of these, on healthcare, no one has their own healthcare plan.

They've all signed on. Well, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand have all signed on to Bernie's Medicare for All plan. That is their healthcare plan. And then you have, now Betoo sort of liking this Medicare for America thing. Buttigieg also likes the Rosa DeLauro Medicare for America thing. You had Sherrod, who's not in the race anymore,

but talking about just lowering the age to 50. So you do have some variation, but most of them are it's Bernie's plan. Remember when we were told to take Donald Trump seriously but not literally? Has any observation worn less well over time? No. Okay. Bernie gave a funny interview on NPR where the interviewer asked him, he said,

you know, you got in this race in 2016. Now all of your policies have been adopted by all of these other candidates. And if all these other candidates are adopting your policies, why are you in the race? And he's like, shouldn't the question be, why are they in the race? He's really funny.

I'll never stop laughing at his dismissal of Howard Schultz. Oh, isn't that nice? That was really good. It was so funny. That was a good impression. Oh, me. No, I was talking about you, Tommy. I was blown away.

All right. Are we done yet? Yeah. When we come back, we'll have Tommy's's interview with the intercepts medihassan the crooked store's latest collection has a clear message for anyone trying to take away abortion rights don't the no trespassing collection features four different designs each inspired by a different state where abortion is under attack. There's Stay Out of My Swamp for Florida, Stay Out of My Hole

for Arizona, Stay Out of My Prickly Pair for Texas, and Stay Out of My Strip for Nevada. But obviously, I'll be wearing these no matter where I am. A portion of proceeds from the collection will go to Vote Save America's F-Bans, the Fight Back Fund, which currently is supporting abortion rights organizations across Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.

Head to Cricut.com slash store to shop. On the line is Mehdi Hassan. He's a columnist for The Intercept, the host of the Deconstructed podcast, and the host of Al Jazeera English's program, Upfront. Mehdi, thank you so much for doing the show. Thanks for having me, Tony. I am well. I hate the circumstances under which we're talking today, but I love speaking with you. We've had a bunch of conversations for Pod Save the World because there's never been a punch pulled from

your end. So I'm grateful for you for making the time. So you wrote a piece for The Intercept a couple of days ago that said, don't just condemn the New Zealand attacks. Politicians and pundits need to stop their anti-Muslim rhetoric. I think a lot of people listening probably assume, OK, that's a reference to Trump, but it's actually a lot more pervasive than that. Can you explain? Yes, sadly, it is a lot more pervasive than that because Trump, of course, has emboldened Islamophobia and white nationalism. He's enabled it. He's empowered it. But he's not the cause of it he's a symptom of it he rode it you know he rode the wave to power as it were he made it a core part of his appeal to his base but islamophobia is part of the republican

party before him it'll be a part of the party after him so that's one point it's the republican party more broadly than trump so in the piece i about, you know, Ted Cruz in 2016 talked about calling on law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. Or Senator Marco Rubio, he said he was in favor of closing down Muslim cafes. Senator Lindsey Graham, who said, if I have to monitor a mosque, I will monitor a mosque. Former Governor Mike Huckabee said Muslims in the Middle East come out of Friday prayers, quote, like uncorked animals. What do you think that kind of rhetoric has? What impact that has on people like the New Zealand shooter, you could argue. And then I kind of made the point that it's not just about the right either. It's easy to go after Trump. It's easy to go after the Republicans. These are kind of low hanging fruit. It's easy to go after Ann Coulter, who

talks about ragheads and jihad monkeys, or Ben Shapiro, who says the majority of the world's Muslims are radicalized, or Tucker Carlson, who we now know from these new recordings that came out, talks about Iraqi Muslims as semi-literate primitive monkeys. Those are all easy targets, Tommy, but we need to have a much more difficult conversation about, quote unquote, the mainstream media, the the liberal media and democratic politicians who have wittingly and unwittingly fed into this uh islamophobia that we're seeing across the western world who have uh you know pushed some tropes uh about muslims again wittingly and

unwittingly who have talked sometimes quite openly about how you, look at what Bill Maher says about Muslims on his show, being violent and bringing in a desert culture. It's really worrying that it's so across the board and so prevalent in all pockets of our political. Yeah. Well, so how do you feel about the way the Christchurch attacks have been covered by the U.S. media so far? That's a good question. I mean, the U.S. media is always difficult when we talk about the media, because obviously there's the newspapers, which cover everything more responsibly. And then there's cable news, which tends to cover things a little bit more irresponsibly. I mean, I've ended up doing a bunch of hits on CNN and MSNBC over the last few days. And I have to say,

I was kind of impressed for the first time that we were having discussions about white nationalism and Islamophobia. And I think that's partly to do with Trump, because Trump is so polarizing a character that journalists are much more willing to talk about some of these issues. It's the silver lining of Trump. He's so bad. He's forced people who were on the fence to get off the fence and take a position on things like racism and Black Lives Matter and Islamophobia and deportations when they didn't, perhaps. When your former boss was in office, it was a much harder to critique some of these things maybe because the Democrats were in power.

A lot of liberals were unwilling to talk about some of these uncomfortable issues. I think Trump being in power has made Islamophobia so brazen that, you know, back in the day, Tommy, I've been writing about, you know, white far-right terrorism for years. When I was in the UK, I wrote about it for The Intercept a couple of years ago in 2017. And people said, you know what they said? They said, oh, you're just a Muslim who wants to distract attention from jihadist terrorism. Now they don't say that because the numbers don't lie. And we're seeing this in front of our face, the sheer number of attacks, the sheer hatred that we're seeing online and in front of us. And I think therefore that,

you know, Don Lemon did, I went on Don Lemon's show on CNN on Friday night, and he's devoted two hours to talking about white nationalism in depth, which groups are on the rise, where is this coming from. I went on Joanne Reid's show on Sunday, and we had a 13-minute conversation, which, Tommy, as you know, in cable news, well, that's an eternity. That is an eternity.

About Islam, the way that media covers Muslims. So there are some bright spots, but you know, there's always this, there's always the, you know, there's always in my country, Britain, I don't know if you saw the Daily Mirror cover, which got heavily attacked the newspaper where they had angelic baby boy who grew up to be a far right killer. You'd never have that headline for ISIS killer, would you? No, you never would. Well, so, okay. I'd like to talk about some of the more virulent, nasty people in a minute, but then I want to try to do a little self criticism of, uh, maybe the ways, uh, you know, Islamophobic language gets laundered through our politics. Like for example,

I remember Barack Obama did an interview with, I think it was Nick Kristof in like 2006. I staffed it and he talked about how the, the growing up in Indonesia, the call to prayer was one of the most beautiful things you could ever hear. And I remember my default thinking was that's going to be a political problem, right? Or all the times that someone accused him of being a secret Muslim born in Kenya,

we said, no, he's not. But, you know, maybe the next response should have been, but fuck you, what's the problem if you were a Muslim, right? And Colin Powell actually said that, to be fair. Colin Powell famously said said that meet the press in 08 if you remember right i mean so i guess what course corrections need to be made by i don't know well-meaning people uh to to fight this stuff it's a very good question i think i think look number one like with any other kind of bias implicit bias you have to recognize it right tommy you have to own up to the fact that we all have biases about other groups and and in particular, majorities have biases

about minorities. And when we talk about, quote, unquote, white privilege, by the way, that's not a criticism of all white people. That's about institutional systemic problems. That applies to Muslims in particular. And it's very hard for Muslims who don't, you know, people talk about the way that African-Americans have been able to overcome, you know, a history of racism in the U.S. and fight against it, and Jewish communities. The difference with Muslims, of course, is unlike African-Americans, they're not Christian, which African-Americans had in common with the majority. And unlike Jewish folks, they're not white, which our Jewish cousins have in common with the majority. So we're in a kind of double bind as Muslims. We tend to be majority non-white community. And we also have a very different religion, which people don't know very much about. So even amongst liberals, there tends to be a lot of ignorance. There tends to be a lot of kind of myths and tropes that are spread about. And even the language, the example I always use, and I cited it in the intercept piece, and some Democrats don't like it, but I have to make the point. Bill Clinton at the 2016 Democratic National Convention gave a speech in which he said, and I quote,

if you're a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together. Now, for a lot of people in the audience, they clapped. They thought, that's great. That's Bill Clinton standing up against Trump's Islamophobia. A lot of Muslims heard it a very different way. They heard it as a white politician, former president, telling Muslim Americans, many of whom were born in this country, especially African-American Muslims who go back centuries to slavery, being told that their citizenship, their place in this country is conditional on, quote, unquote, fighting terrorism. on quote-unquote fighting terrorism. If you're a Muslim and if you love America. This idea, and there, Clinton,

I don't think he had an evil intention there. But unwittingly, perhaps, he's spreading this trope of the Muslim other, the Muslim foreigner, the Muslim who's not quite American, unless he's fighting. And even Hillary at the time, when she was standing up against Trump's Islamophobia,

kept saying, we need to work with Muslim Americans to beat terrorism. Well, sorry, Muslim Americans are more than just props or instruments in the war on terror. And that's the kind of kind of unconscious biases, maybe unwitting tropes that are spread even by Democrats who are trying to do, you know, who in their heads are saying, well, I'm fighting against anti-Muslim bigotry. Yeah, there's a there's a an obligation foisted upon Muslim Americans to fight terrorism that is not foisted upon the rest of the population. And Muslim Americans are seen through a national security prism, rather than as any other community that has the same issues, the same struggles with access to

health care, the same desire to have their kids go to a great public school, the same challenges of stagnant wages. We see Muslim Americans through the national security foreign policy prism. In the UK, Tommy, I'll give you an example of what happened in the UK recently when this issue of Islamophobia was raised in parliament by a Muslim member of parliament, raised the issue of what's going to happen about all these attacks on Muslims. And the Tory minister, the conservative minister said, why don't you ask the foreign office? Wow. Okay. As if British Muslims are a foreign policy problem. That is. Glad to see that there are idiot politicians on both sides of the pond.

Oh, yes. So speaking of idiots, so Judge Jeanine Pirro, you know, Trump's maybe favorite Fox News host, she suggested that Ilhan Omar, congresswoman from Minnesota, puts her loyalty to her religion because she's a Muslim ahead of the U.S. Constitution. So Fox News suspended her, which felt like a step forward. But then over the weekend, President Trump decided to attack that decision. What was your response to Fox's rare rebuke of Judge Jeanine and then Trump's subsequent broadside? I mean, it's a reminder, isn't it, Tommy, that Islamophobia is so out of control now.

Even the bosses at Fox News think it's gone too far. I mean, that is an astonishing. If Fox News thinks you're too bigoted to be on air, you're really bigoted. And I think that's been partly a result of liberals and liberal organizations putting pressure on advertisers, which I think has been great, to put pressure on them. Do you really want to be advertising with people like Jeanine Pirro or Tucker primitive monkeys in Iraq, Carlson? That's been powerful. It seems to have worked in many ways.

Let's see how long she's off the air for. I don't think it'll be that long, given Trump and his base are putting a lot of pressure on Fox to bring her back. But again, it speaks volumes not just about Fox and Jeanine Pirro, but Trump himself. This is a man who, less than 72 hours after the worst anti-Muslim terrorist attack in years, is agitating loudly and passionately to bring her back on air, a woman who was openly Islamophobic. And, you know, the thing about Trump always is he's always so much more passionate about stuff like this, isn't it, Tommy? When it comes to like the actual

terrorist attack in New Zealand, it's very subdued. It's kind of low energy Jeb Bush. Oh, it's very sad. And of course, I condemn what happened in New Zealand. And then when it comes to like the SNL rerun on Saturday night or Jeanine Pirro being taken off the air, then it's, oh, my God, this is the end of the world. Then it's ranting, angry Trump. He gets way more worked up about a Fox News Islamophobe being taken off air than he

gets worked up about an actual Islamophobe gunning down 50-51, I can't remember the horrible death poll right now in New Zealand, in a mosque. And that, I think, speaks volumes about how he is an enabler of Islamophobia by campaigning for people like Pirro, but also how people like Pirro, even on Fox News, wouldn't have said this stuff a couple of years ago, but they say it now. And one last point on this issue, Tommy, just to come back to the whole liberal angle, just so we're self-critical. Bill Maher on his show says pretty much what Jeanine Pirro says every other week. He said comments very similar to Jeanine Pirro. And I don't see the same backlash against him from, I mean, some liberals, yes, some on the left.

But you still have Andrew Gillum and major Democratic Party politicians turning up for interviews with Bill Maher. I think Barack Obama, one of his last interviews in office was with Bill Maher. Bill Maher says Islam is a mafia. He's accused violent Muslims of bringing, quote, that desert stuff to our world. He says the Muslim majority world has, quote, too much in common with ISIS, has a lot in common with ISIS, I think is his phrase. And we don't see the same backlash against Bill Maher. Why? Because he's a liberal. Yeah, I don't know. Good question. So let me talk more about being proactive. that people care about the treatment of Muslims globally is to start talking about the fact that the Chinese government has basically imprisoned a million Uyghurs in re-education camps

in an effort to get them to renounce Islam and their cultural identity. It's this horrific thing happening in plain sight. Can you talk a bit about what's happening to the Uyghurs? And you had a recent interview on this subject with an informal advisor to the Chinese government that didn't go too well for the interviewee. Your country, the government you support and have advised, according to a UN rapporteur, according to the US State Department, according to Amnesty International, according to Human Rights Watch, according to plenty of journalists and many others, are believed to

have detained maybe a million people or more, mainly from the Uyghur Muslim ethnic minority, in re-education camps. A million people, Charles. A million. Okay. It's certainly, Charles. A million. Okay. It's certainly not grabbing headlines in China. Isn't that because you don't have a free press in China, so you can't have headlines about the Uyghurs? No, it's because there are 55 national minorities in China, and Uyghurs' population is in total...

Nine and ten million, I believe, in Xinjiang. Yes, 0.7% of the population. Yes, zero point zero point seven percent But the world doesn't work on percentages if you lock up a million world doesn't the world pays attention 1.4 billion people need to be fed need to be closed I got to be educated people in Xinjiang that must concern you to hear that a million people of your fellow Chinese Countrymen and women have been locked if it's true. Sure. How do we establish if it's true or not? Why don't you let people in to check and count then we's true, sure. How do we establish if it's true or not? Why don't you let people in to check and count?

Then we'll know for sure. I think people have visited. No, they've been on kind of supervised trips with Chinese monitors to select camps where they haven't been able to see everything. In fact, Reuters went on a trip last year. They were taken around. They were allowed to meet some people, and the people sang,

if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. And Chinese government monitors stood in the room the whole time and no one was allowed to speak to anyone independently. You know, Charles, that there are people who have been in those camps, who have come out of those camps, and now refugees in the US, in Kazakhstan, and they have testified to hooding, shackling, torture, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, starvation.

This is what's coming out from people who've been in those camps in Xinjiang. If it's true, then they're certainly very bad. This is not my area of expertise and I'm not involved in the politics and I've never been to Xinjiang. I'm more concerned about the economic side. So yes, Tommy, I interviewed Charles Liu, who is an entrepreneur, informal advisor to Chinese government, on my head-to-head Al Jazeera English show at the Oxford Union a couple of weeks ago. And he didn't want to defend what was going on. And the Chinese

know they can't defend what's going on. They just don't want anyone to talk about it. So they don't allow media access to Xinjiang province, which is this province that the Uyghur Muslims, who are Turkic-speaking people, one of the many Chinese minority groups in China. There happen to be a different language, different culture, different religion. There's 10 million of them living in Xinjiang. They call it East Turkestan. They think it's been occupied or at least repressed for 50 years. The Chinese say, no, it's an integral part of our homeland.

But here's the thing. There's about 10 million of them. And right now, according to reports from U.S. government folks, from U.N. officials, from Amnesty International, there are believed to be up to a million, maybe more than a million Uyghur Muslims in these detention camps. That's one in 10 of the population. That's astonishing. Even for a country as big as China, they're just a proportion. And they are in these camps where they are being beaten. They are being, quote unquote, reeducated, forced to kind of sing songs saying long live Xi Jinping, the president of China. They're forced to sing Communist Party propaganda songs. They're forced to talk about, you know,

shave their beards. A lot of these Uyghur Muslims are not allowed to give their kids names like Mohammed. The women are not allowed to veil. Kids are not allowed to enter mosques. Communist Party officials are not allowed to fast during Ramadan. This to enter mosques communist party officials are not allowed to fast during Ramadan, this is in this province it's astonishing, it's Orwellian you even have communist party officials Tommy going to live in Uyghur houses can you imagine that? A government official comes to stay in your house to monitor

you 24-7, there is no concept of privacy, I've never heard or seen anything like it in any other country on earth and I've covered a lot of repressive countries in my time as a journalist. And yet, as you say, this is China. It's happening in plain sight. We know that the Western world has huge trade and investment links with China. China is an economic superpower. And therefore, you see governments holding back and not just Western governments, even more disappointing Muslim majority countries who you think would come to the aid of their Muslim brothers and sisters.

They speak very loudly about Palestinians or Kashmiris. And yet the Muslim majority world has been virtually silent on the Uyghurs, the governments at least, because they're all in bed with the Chinese. The Chinese government is investing in the Middle East, in North Africa, in Pakistan. You saw the Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saying in an interview recently, well, I don't know what's happening to the Uyghurs and I would never publicly criticize the Chinese. So that's a problem. You have Muslim-majority countries not willing to make a lot of noise.

The Turks are now making some noise. And you have Western countries uneasy about this. Although, to be fair, the Trump administration, maybe for its own anti-China agenda, has made some noise at the UN about the Uyghurs, to be fair to them. You know who else has? Tom Cotton gave a speech where he hammered China on this pretty hard. Yeah, and I don't believe it's because Tom Cotton gives a damn about the Uyghurs, to be fair to them. You know who else has this? Tom Cotton gave a speech where he hammered China on this pretty hard. Yeah, and I don't believe it's because Tom Cotton gives a damn about the Uyghurs.

I think it's because Tom Cotton sees China as a geopolitical rival. He's a hawk, and therefore the Uyghurs are a useful prop. But look, I'll take it, right? I'll take whatever I can get from Pompeo or Nikki Haley did when she was ambassador at the UN. If they're going to raise the issue for their own reasons, fine. But at least it's being raised.

Right now it needs far more coverage, Tommy. I mean, a million people, men, women, and children being held without charge in camps and being forced to sing songs about the president, being told they can't eat meals until they declare their allegiance to Chinese communism and to Xi Jinping. That's astonishing. We talk about genocide and the Holocaust and never again. This is happening right now in 2019 in the country where we get all our MacBooks and iPhones from. I also can't imagine a more self-defeating policy than repressing a group of people like this. And it is likely to radicalize them. And I don't say radicalize because they're Muslim. I mean, look at Northern Ireland, right?

It doesn't matter if you're a Catholic or Protestant living somewhere. If you were completely repressed by a government, bad things are going to happen but i think that's i mean is that a bug or is that feature tommy because there's an argument that says the chinese want to want to kind of you know like bashar al-assad the argument with assad was always he liked having he liked having a radicalized opponent he was able to point to you know there were a lot of syrian rebels who were not alQaeda. He was always able to point to the al-Qaeda folks and say, well, look, I'm fighting a war on terror. And the Chinese since 9-11 have seen the war on terror rhetoric of Bush and after that, unfortunately, your boss and Trump today as a way of basically, you know, shutting this story down as an issue. And therefore, you know, so for example, straight after 9-11,

when everyone was talking about Al-Qaeda, the Chinese government turned up at the UN, and they're like, well, we've got our own Al-Qaeda outlet. Everyone's like, what? They're like the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, the ETIM. No one had ever heard of this group. And the Chinese government turned up and said, oh, it's a Uyghur terrorist organization.

And within a year, by September 2002, Tommy, the UN and the US had listed the ETIM as a terrorist organization. Why? Because they were linked to bin Laden. So it's been very useful for repressive governments to always say, well, our dissident minority is linked to Al-Qaeda, bin Laden, ISIS. Therefore, let us do what we want with them. And they have conveyed the entire Uyghur situation through the discourse of the war on terror. Yeah. One last question sort of along these same lines. I mean, you recently interviewed Eric Prince, who is best known as the founder of Blackwater, which was a private militia force that was responsible for murdering 17 innocent civilians

in one horrific incident in Iraq on top of a whole bunch of other problems. Bloomberg reported that his new company has been hired to build a training center in that same region of China where the Uyghurs are being held. For some reason, he agreed to do an interview with you. I will never understand why these guys go on your show when they are horrible people. He denied this report despite it being in his own company's press release. Do you believe him? No, I don't believe him because he's Eric Prince and I did an hour-long interview with him in front of an audience and he was very,

how should I put it, Trumpian in his approach to truth and falsehood. He is the brother of Betsy DeVos. He's a big Trump donor. And yes, he borrows the Trump rhetoric of just saying things are fake news and misreported. And with me as well, and if people want to listen to the clip,

he says, oh, that's a mistranslation from Mandarin when I asked him about, you know, his company building training facilities. And I had to point out to him there was no mistranslation from Mandarin. We literally printed it out in English off his own company's website. But, you know, this is the thing they think. This is the things that people like him and Kellyanne Conway and others think they can get away with, just saying brazen falsehoods and hoping the journalists won't challenge them. I did challenge him. And, you know, I don't believe him. I do think he's doing lots of dodgy stuff in Xinjiang.

He denies any role in any of these detention camps. He says we're just training people in how to avoid getting kidnapped. But look, his company is majority owned by Chinese entities linked to the Chinese government. Think about that. This is Eric Prince, formerly of Blackwater, close Trump ally, has been interviewed by Bob Mueller, wants to get a contract to run the war in Afghanistan. Tommy, that's his latest proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan. Some mercenaries run the war in Afghanistan for the U.S. I mean, think about that conflict of interest. He's also working for the Chinese government at the same time as he wants

to work for the American government. I mean, you don't have to be some kind of Tom Cotton hawk to see that as an astonishing conflict of interest. I cannot think of a worse idea than privatizing the war in Afghanistan, but that's a conversation for another day. Mehdi, thank you so much for doing the show and for holding all these guys accountable. Everyone should check out your show and out your English deconstructed podcast and all the stuff you're writing. So I appreciate it, man. Thanks so much, Tommy. Thanks for having these conversations. all the stuff you're writing. So I appreciate it, man. Thanks so much, Tommy. Thanks for having these conversations.

Alright, thanks to Mehdi Hassan for joining us today. Tommy, take us out with a little Bernie. Wasn't that interview nice? It's pretty good. It's the deepness. It's the deepness. I can't wait to get savaged by a whole bunch of people. And look, I think

I like Mayor Pete Buttigieg but he's not the love of my life. That's not true. It's savaged by a whole bunch of people. And look, I think me... And I think... I like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, but he's not the love of my life. That's not true. He is married. He's married. And they're happy, I'm sure. And he didn't respond

when I was filling up a boom box outside of his house. I took the headphones off a minute ago. Can't we have a gay... If we have a gay candidate, can't I have some fucking fun? I hope there's music. We're both gone.