Even More News: Sen. Eric Schmitt NAILS Jack Smith For Attending Other Basketball Game w/ Alex Pearlman
00:00 Hi, on today's episode, we talk about Senator Eric Schmidt's hawk-hawkeye embarrassment, the disturbing Cornell case, and Pete Higgsett's new plan for the future of warfare. Hi, hello, and welcome back to Even More News, the first and only news podcast. I'm Katie Stoll. You are, you're so Katie Stoll. I'm so Cody Johnson. I'm so happy to say hi. I am also very so happy to welcome today's guest, a first time guest, co-host of the podcasts, crashing out with Philip DeFranco and Alex Perlman and Too Many Tabs. Also on TikTok as Pearlmania 500, it's Alex Perlman. Hello, thanks for having me here.
01:01 That feels like a beefy resume that I didn't realize I had all of a sudden. Isn't that nice when you hear it recited back to you? Like, you know what, I did that. I did do that. I did. I did. You guys didn't mention that I was a library aide in ninth grade. Well, you need to send that over next time.
01:17 I'll put it in. I'll put it in. We'll fix it in post. Don't worry. Jonathan is also here. Hi. Hello. Oh.
01:25 Yeah, I limited my background check to the podcast and the TikTok. I felt like that was fair enough. Reasonable. You don't need to go the extra mile there. Given this note, maybe in the future, we'll check Wikipedia. We'll check. check high school resume is yeah you gotta get creepy with it way back machine on LinkedIn find out what yeah what jobs have been deleted yeah yeah if you can find my
01:47 my space let me know because there's a really bad picture of me wearing a fedora that I'm terrified will someday come out oh boy we've got news folks we've got lots of it to get to well what's happening what happened what happened what's going on yeah well we're gonna dive into the exciting world of congressional hearings Senate committees and what have you. Jack Smith was getting grilled by Eric Schmidt. Republican Senator from Missouri. Eric thought he had Jack.
02:18 He thought he had Jack backed up against the wall. He thought that guy was perjuring himself. That guy was a dirtbag. I know that because he said it. I don't know that Eric Schmidt checked his receipts before he showed his receipts. It's like he returned to Walmart to try to return everything he bought from T.J. Max didn't line up. You know, this is embarrassing for him, and it's fun to laugh at the Republican Senator, but there's, like, more to this, and I think it says something about their, like, media play.
02:47 Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024? I'm sorry, could you say that again? Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024? What city would that be in? Atlanta. No. Okay. Let me just give you a little context.
03:11 The day before Fannie Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor. You know the Atlanta prosecutor that was also Trump? Gotcha. The next day were you in Atlanta? I do not believe so. What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair? I don't think you know that we have this stuff. This is a poster port.
03:43 So I'll give you a second to process it so you don't, you know, perjure yourself. Oh, you just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again. I think you've already perjured yourself, but. Which you don't want it. Can we see it? Can we see it? Did you or your office seek? This is my time.
04:00 Senator, if you want to use your time to criticize my question. I recall I recall I'm going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Kaylin Clark was playing. Right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me, you could check if that was the exact. that date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think February of 2024. But again, you can check that out if that's what we're talking about. Could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it? And maybe before we show this kind of thing. I know. But if he was at an Iowa game, is that correct? It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. Uh-huh. We went to the game. I know. But But that might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully.
04:55 I'm going to begin my questions now, but I think that people should have their back straight before they accuse someone of being a dirt bag and not get the team. I stand by that statement. You had the team's wrong. Amy, I think we should all consider that this woman eats her salad with a fort of comb, not a for a fork. Yeah. I get to say that I was just because we're doing a tour right now and I was just in Minnesota for the first time my life. life and I saw an Amy Klobuchar ad come on in the wild in Minnesota and it hits different over there. You're like, yes, ma'am, yes, general. I will follow you. Yes, I get if we retreat,
05:31 you shoot us in the back. I understand completely. I will admit to living out a little bit when she goes, you had the team's wrong, sir. Yeah, with a little Midwestern smirk like, well, there's also a minute in here that isn't in there where she, Eric Schmidt, it's Eric Schmidt, right? Yeah. Senator Schmidt from Missouri. He clearly realizes oh fuck she has me and he starts going well I'm sorry whose question is this. Oh oh but there's no
05:57 rules anymore and he tries to desperately just be like just act like a big asshole and then hope that the entire committee will just stop and she's like okay I love whenever they start reclaiming their time that's my favorite moment because that's when you know someone's fucked. Yes. When they start acting like a baby who lost their time
06:15 yeah. It's fun to see somebody in this position, somebody so disgusting. And who clearly the laziest, most desperate attempt at pinning Jack Smith into an uncomfortable position. I real got you.
06:32 But you didn't do your fucking homework, dude. Or your staffer didn't. They gave you bad information. It's just embarrassing. This is all a desperate attempt to place Eric Schmidt in Atlanta with the idea that
06:46 Okay, then he must have talked to Fannie Willis. He must have. And if so... If so, what? Yeah. What's the point? Yeah, like, we do need to point out that the, even if he hadn't screwed up, the big scandal is that the day after something completely different happened where Fannie Willis admitted to the affair, which damaged the case against Trump, that Jack Smith was supposedly in the same city. The next day, though.
07:14 Doing what? Hicking up with them? Was he... Is the implication that... He was a part of the affair? For what? For what? Yeah.
07:20 I looked it up. There's 6.4 million people inside the Atlanta metro area. I've been down to Atlanta a lot. My co-host lives down there. There's also like 180,000 cameras. Atlanta's the most surveilled city in the world. Yes. And instead, they went through a series of emails and they saw Hawks and I guess just let the AI do what it was going to do in the research team back there.
07:46 and just go, all right, he said basketball game. I saw the word hawks, start Googling. How can we get a connection here? Where can we start doing the red string? And here we are. Did the text have hawks in it? Because from what I, then he's trying to explain it. And what's so interesting, because we're going to talk about that next, is that clearly,
08:04 prior to this debacle, the marching orders had already been sent out to all of their surrogates, their media personality types, their online trolls about the messaging that they want to run it like, ah, Eric Schmidt got Jack Smith and it imploded, but they didn't watch it apparently and they still marched forward with their talking points. But I just real quick, in terms of the text messages, there was one of these clips seeing Eric Schmidt talk about it being like, well, yeah, no, no, we had text messages. We had text messages that, you know, we knew that he was going to a basketball game at 730 and the only NBA game that was playing was that game in Atlanta. First off, not true. There were other games, but also
08:47 nothing about it said like NBA. He was going specifically to see women's basketball, you know. Which we respect and love. And yeah, which is the most important thing in the midterms. He was also, they were also, Schmidt, his team were warned that the texts were not vetted and they just like used them anyway. There was a secondary thing that happened that I've heard in like the days since this, which is that he thought he had such a slam dunk and he was going to do his matlock moment of being like, oh, but you don't know about this evidence that he never shared it with the Democrats. So like, and the thing is if he had, I actually believe that the Democrats would have actually stopped him and been like, hey, just, you know, you're going to look
09:26 like an asshole. And we know that if I stop you from looking like an asshole, maybe you'll stop murdering kids in our streets. And that, we know that doesn't work. But that would have been the way the Senate seems to work. And then John Federman would have been afraid of a matchbox or something in the background. The other thing that happened during this is Jack Smith mentioned that the U.S. Marshals were with him. So they could have just checked the marshals itinerary. Like they have all this public information. They think they found this secret email got you.
09:51 They try to hide it. They set up all of this other stuff on the side. They're like, we got this guy. We nailed him to the wall. And I'm like, the man was trying to prosecute a former president of the United States. I'm pretty sure he was like, hey, let me not accidentally do anything that even looks stupid. He's on the radar. And he knows it.
10:09 These are all serious people. they aren't Eric Schmidt exactly yeah it's just like all these like just a series of career like serious people with serious jobs being confronted by the most clownish people in the world who don't care and are just trying to get these moments
10:25 that don't work out and he'll forget about this this won't matter at all it's nothing yeah but this is like the third time they've they've brought Jack Smith in I think and he's always said the same thing like no it was right for me to prosecute Trump and I would have gotten a conviction had he not become the president again, all this stuff.
10:43 Did you see the Ted Cruz clip? There's a clip of Ted Cruz being like, how come I've noticed on your list of people here? It's only Republicans. Well, it's like, yeah, dude, they were the only ones doing the crime. Like, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Fetterman's stroke hadn't gone full tilt yet, so he didn't have one D on the list.
10:59 Isn't it funny that everyone there on January 6th was a Republican? Isn't that? I noticed. I noticed there wasn't a single Biden hat in the crowd. Schmidt. Went on the Charlie Kirk show later. Who has two other... Are they still calling it that?
11:14 Why is it called the Charlie Kirk show still? They gotta stop that. There's a big image of Charlie Kirk up the entire time, like on the big screen behind them. They kind of, you know, went over it as if it was a big gotcha and then the next day admitted it was a blunder. Sean Hannity and Benny Johnson tweeted about it and then deleted those tweets. And there was even an article in Axios that morning written by the CEO of Axios with the headline, Senator Eric Schmidt is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028. And the source must have been drawing buzz from Schmidt's staffers.
11:48 Dude, Axios is such garbage. God. Yeah. That's unbelievable. For Axios is completely believable, though. This is the same guys who every other day said the Iran war was just wrapped up. It completely adds up. Per Axios.
12:04 God. Insiders say this. I bet they do. Wouldn't Axios be mad? like you keep feeding us stuff that ends up not being true. We're happy about the access, but stop, like, lying to us. It embarrass everybody involved. Yeah.
12:18 Well, we're all assuming that embarrassment still exists. This is the one issue that we have. If we're sitting here in our world of shame and podcast mics, we're not there at the crazy AI billionaire money parties where there is no shame because we're all in the same exact blackmail files. So they don't care. Eric Schmidt doesn't care. Like, that's just where we're sitting right here.
12:38 He's Eric Schmidt's just happy as name trended. Honestly. 100%. And Fox isn't going to run it so old people aren't going to see it. And it won't trickle down to Missouri. So he doesn't give a shit. He might have been embarrassed. I agree with you for the most part.
12:51 Because what I, this is probably always been true, but it's definitely true now. Since Donald Trump and what he is awoken in all of us and online and what it's become and Twitter, etc. Is that it doesn't matter. Go ahead and be embarrassed. But yeah, your name's going to trend. and people are going to, there's so much. They're going to forget the specifics of it. They're just going to remember that your name stood out at one point.
13:16 You got attention. So if you can weather this three days of embarrassment, then you're fine. My theory in general, whether it be politics or just the idea of like cancel culture when it comes to entertainment is can you get to Friday? If you can just get to Friday and then when the football game start trending and just reset it sometime over the weekend, do something crazy, do another thing. We see us all the time with, you know, like Twitch and Kickstrand. streamers. We're starting to see this more, especially with the musicians and especially internet
13:44 personalities. Like I've seen people get canceled on a Monday and have their biggest video ever on a Wednesday. For sure. And they're fine. None of the brand deals get moved or anything. And the same thing is kind of true for the politicians. We've seen it with Republicans can seemingly blast through every scandal. Their scandals will be, you know, like this or literally dead kids or some other crazy thing. And then the Democrats like, he drank a boba tea on camera. That's kind of gay. And then you're like, well, I guess Susan Collins rolls again. I mean, right now we have the Susan Collins thing with that check is insane. It's the most open bribery we've ever seen in the world.
14:19 But Eric Schmidt, you know, basically did a crazy fart on camera. And now Susan Collins skirts away. And it's a thing we've been trying to figure out how to cover on our show. Because we want to talk about distractions. But then where these other things were like, well, with this thing over here seems really important. But it's not fun. Fuck. How do we make it entertaining at the same time?
14:37 and everybody to want to watch because there's so much. And then as you're watching, you start to see the retention go and you're like, oh, shit, all right, mention more furries, I guess. Never look at the retention. Don't, no, no, no, no. Nobody retains anything anymore. Because, I mean, if you look at Fox News now, they are all, they all have their boba teas out. They're doing the boba tea story.
14:58 Like, literally, that is what they are doing. Oh, really? They're not covered calls. They're not going. Oh, yeah. Jesse Waters notably had to cover the straw, which made it look. worse. That makes me that's this is this like
15:11 Gunther Eagleman trying to eat a banana with a spoon? The fact that I know that and that you shook your head yes The same underlying premise is there. We need both of us need to go outside in different places. Yeah everyone listening to this who has no clue what we're talking about you're free like don't just net do not Google anything I mean starting at like Gunther Eagleman and being like yep okay go on and then you're like eating yeah I know you're going to say the banana yes I know with the spoon yeah I know
15:37 Yeah, in public, so he doesn't act. So someone can't be like, you eat a banana pretty gay. It's like insane. In conjunction with this conversation about how whatever cancel culture is, it just gives you your biggest boost yet. One thing that seems to stick in our zeitgeist narrative is it's like, well, Richard Nixon was the most corrupt president. And then we look at what's happening here with Donald Trump and how, like,
16:03 we would have never back then with Richard Nixon, like, we, whatever. Like if we could even get back to these rules of civility that we had in the 70s. And lo and behold, now they want to reopen. They want to look back at Richard Nixon and find how he was unfairly treated. And I'm like, of course that's what you want to do. You want to change the narrative further back. You want to make it look like all of this, all of us universally condemning bad presidents is just us being woke bullshit liberals. And that it was fine.
16:36 And what Nixon did was wrong. I mean, Vance a couple weeks ago said that if the scandal happened, it would be like a 12-hour news cycle wouldn't be anything. It was nothing. And that's good, actually. It would be a TikTok trend of how to tape a door properly. That would have been the thing with Watergate. There would be a thing there. I find it interesting that we constantly are living through like the, like the subtext of rage against the machine lyrics, right?
17:00 Like that who controls the present, controls the past, who controls the past controls the future. It's that same sort of idea in that And running through this like constantly consistently of them being like Hey somebody said that like Nixon wouldn't even been impeached like well maybe he shouldn't have been How about that? Maybe actually he was great. And then they don't want to deal with the actual subtext which was Nixon got in Nixon left office. Ford came in and Ford's assistants looked around and said how do we make sure this never happens again?
17:29 And Roger Ailes Dick Cheney and others said let's invent Fox News. Like let's legitimately create. conservative media in parallel and then make them fight the middle is insane. And now that's how we have Jesse Waters, I guess, trying to not look gay while using a straw. Is that what it is going? He needs it not to look like he's sucking a dick. So he covers it up in a way that I'll let you judge if it's effective. He was sipping out of this thing.
18:01 Like it was the last thing on earth. So we're going to try it. Okay. You can't watch me while I suck the straw. They made that really weird laughing noise. Remember I was like, oh, I got a ball in my mouth. Yes. Yes.
18:12 So at the bottom of it, there's balls, right, Kennedy? That's right. Tapioca balls. All right. Black milk bubble tea. Try it. Tonight, Jesse, what is prime time? Sorry, Dana.
18:24 You got to be careful. I can taste the femininity. It tastes like estrogen. Yeah. All right. This is an AM, this is AM news segment that they're running on prime time. This is what My Foxvilley does when they're like, we have another, there's a new restaurant in town and it's got bubbles in it.
18:40 Ooh. You can take your dog to the coffee shop. They're calling it a pup cup. I love that. And also the fact that there is a wrestler just there, like on the five, one of those is a former WWW wrestler, which is just great. I got CTE just watching that. And also that's the same episode of the five from Wednesday where Jesse Waters goes off on being a upset about a fake right-wing outrage about Mary Peltola.
19:10 That's the same one? Yeah. He's like, why are we talking about this? This is how we talk around here at Fox News or whatever. And there have been more clips lately of Jesse Waters being like, why are we still talking about WNBA? Why are we doing this? I don't know what his angle is.
19:24 He's just being genuine. No, I think he's just bored. I think he legit is bored and he's like, I don't want to talk about women's basketball anymore. So I'm going to do this in the most chauvinist way possible. Jesse is always scrambling for content and trying to find the next thing. I know because he's used my clips before from TikTok. And I found out from people tagging me.
19:43 I had a rant one time about, you know, like the plastic bag ban. And it was just more of a general one. The rant was actually like bring back paper bags then. That was the whole point of the rant. And he cut all of that. And he was like, I agree with this guy. He hates the woke. And I was like, ah, no.
19:57 And I now, like, I'm covered in NPR toads when I go out. Yeah. Head to toe. Just to make sure. That's how I keep Jesse. Waters away. Guy in Boba T. Isn't that so frustrating, Alex?
20:07 I don't know. It terrifies me about this ecosystem. We live and work in where you can say something and it just gets plucked. Yeah. And you just, you're like, no, that's not what I was singing. Jesse Waters' his own, Alex Perlman. I know. Well, this is the thing.
20:23 So there was, I had a clip one time. And it ended up, if you Google me right now, AI says that I was on the Joe Rogan show. What happened was, it's never happened. I've never been on the Joe Rogan experience. But someone came on, no, he hates me. Someone came on, I know for a fact, someone came on his show and then played one of my clips. And it was me yelling at the Democrats in 2022 to get their shit together before the midterms and stop asking us off for money. And they played that clip for Joe Rogan and then as an example of how the, the libs and the left is abandoning the Dems and maybe going MAGA.
20:59 And so when I first got popular, I had a bunch of MAGA people who, who are like, I can't wait for him to put the hat on. And I'm like, it's never happening, man. Never. I'm angry. I'm angry that they aren't woke enough. You think I'm angry that, blah. It's so, it's a constant consistent.
21:16 What a bizarre way to think about stuff. Like to see somebody like, I'm frustrated that Dems aren't doing this or like going far enough for this. It's like, MAGA any day now. You don't understand anything. You do understand like what either party represents or wants to try to do. That's such a weird impulse. I find it helpful in my town that I, live in where there's I live in the mountains.
21:37 Okay. Tomato tomato whatever. It's far more conservative that I've ever. She recently moved to the mountain but then came down a hill. But I have had it helpful in terms of disarming conversations with people that disagree with me on stuff. I mean like, look, I agree with the Democrats are a mess. No, I don't consider myself a Democrat and they go, oh, okay, good. And I know that there was probably some of that. Like, yeah, she'll be around. No, but they've learned that it's
22:05 They're not woke enough for me And that continues to shock people They're like, what? But at least I'm not At least I don't represent the general Knejerk liberal in their mind But it is frustrating when they think that that's going to lead to a MAGA hat Nope, absolutely not
22:25 The thing is I'll give them this because I've seen enough Especially from like, I mean look look at somebody like fucking Michael Rapopore or some of these other assholes where like you look at some of the Trump One personalities and where they are now. And like these ones you wouldn't have expected, especially around COVID. There was a bunch across that aisle because they went insane in their own different ways. But the biggest thing for when in real life, in real and like in person, when I talk to people, especially if I know that they don't have the same politics as me, I tell them the real baseline of my politics isn't liberal or left or whatever.
22:55 I just tell them my actual politics is I want a better world for my son that has more opportunities. And I hope that involves that there's so many opportunities because he can't take all of them. then more kids get opportunities and it shouldn't just be for kids. And that usually cuts through in a different way that the algorithms don't grab. They just don't grab. Absolutely. But when you talk to people with that, you start to see, I'm not under any pretense that some of these people I'm thinking about in my mind would come around and vote for Joe Biden. Some of them maybe would.
23:24 Some of them, though, would. But when you can talk to people of like, look, I know that we have different ways of approaching what we want. but ultimately cost of living too high. I want my kids to have opportunities, and I want to have insurance for my home in the wake of as climate change gets worse. And everyone agrees with that. They do agree with that.
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25:25 Kind of like how Buffalo Wild Wings blaze and knockout sauce is a perfect partner of a pale logger and the aforementioned probiotic drink. This one's gonna be wild, folks. Taking off the Pluto TV. Free and what have you. The top guns and such. My favorite movie on Pluto TV at the moment is called
25:48 Hell Nino. What does that mean? It's all weather stuff. That's what we're doing right now, folks. Actors combined with weather things. Everybody got it? Everybody got the bit? Okay, we're on board.
26:01 All right. go. So here's the cast of my favorite Pluto TV movie, Heleneo. And warning, some of these are going to be a bit of a stretch. Starring Kevin Frostner, Climite, Damon, E. Blizzard Beth Olson, Rachel McAssad Rain, Freeze Ving Rains. Winda, Hamilton, Humid Thermant Man Amy Shumulus Clouds That one's about clouds
26:41 Danny Glovercast Colin Fahrenheit Olivia Munnil Cloud Galgadu Point Galgadu point Dust in Hoffman
26:55 Cludeufall Clea DuFall Clea DuFall Bobby Moist hand math snow pack McCona hay snowmath noah wiley like Noah NOAA do you guys do you guys get it Ozonees Saldania dermot Mel Rainey
27:17 Chillin McDermott forecast Whitaker the late foger moore the late Gavin McCloud the late Kelvin van Peebles and the late Rutger showers directed by Martin Scorhazy. What is this? Why? Jonathan, why? Pluto TV.
27:41 Gulfstream now? Bain ever. I am going to admit to everybody, especially as the only woman on this panel of men, that I have a hard time. I have been avoiding this story. I do know enough about it to talk about it, but my initial reaction before we even get into this
28:04 is that I feel so overwhelmingly depressed that this is the conversation we're continuing to have. There was so much hope in my heart during the Me Too era. And I understand. People have their different perceptions of Me Too in hindsight, and maybe there's this one
28:22 that they want to point to, like that one's ridiculous or whatever. And I think that is ridiculous because all of that conversation was important and worthy. It just, we're still here where women aren't allowed to speak to their very traumatic experiences without getting dragged through the mud online.
28:42 So yeah, I've been having a hard time wanting to dig into this story because it just feels like we've been here before and it hasn't worked out well for women, for society, for culture. But let's run through some of these details briefly and then talk about the reaction online because while we're waiting for more information about this,
29:04 This is going to develop in the coming months. What we do know is that people are fucking appalling. So Jonathan, let's set this up. A couple years ago, October 2024, a woman at Cornell was coerced into taking drugs and sexually assaulted by seven students at the Kai Phi fraternity house. She went to campus police a few weeks later. campus police reportedly shortened or condensed her statement, leaving out the sexual assault part of it bafflingly. And this is, the DA says, is what resulted in there not being charges at the time. She has now filed a lawsuit that is reopening and the DA is reopening criminal investigation. Because of that, she is also suing the fraternity and the university. Cornell is under fire.
30:04 Because in the lawsuit, it says that some of the students who were suspended had the opportunity to just write an essay and move on. And Cornell denies that an essay was the sole consequence for anyone and that there was expulsions. There's a lot going on here. This has also brought up scrutiny of New York's state laws, which make it tougher to prosecute sexual assault if there's alcohol and drugs involved. And then there was the text thread. Information that was revealed that, you know, one of these men sent a text saying, I think, free pussy. And open door for people to come in and assault this woman. And so, okay, there's that.
30:53 And then there's all the people in this fraternity who received this text message and did nothing. Did nothing to stop it. Maybe they didn't participate, but they did nothing to stop it. before we even dig into the online, let me just say, yes, a person in college shows up to a party and has had drinks. I think a lot of us can relate to that, having been in college and being 18, 19 years old. Okay, you show up to an environment where you've been invited by a friend. There's people that you trust there, and maybe you want to do drugs, maybe you don't, but you certainly are being peer pressured.
31:24 And once you do, what is consent? What happens next? Are we going to victim blame people? are we going to address the behavior that is so fucking disgusting and deplorable? And, you know, like, we can all agree. Gang raping somebody under the influence isn't okay. But beyond that, okay, so she does the thing. She reports the crime, says what happens.
31:51 Some people get suspended for a few days, have to write an essay, and then they get to walk around this campus. And this woman has this young lady, a child, actually. I don't even like calling a college student and adult because you're still a child, in my opinion. But yeah, you know, New York's laws might be prohibitive in getting proper justice. But we as human beings should be able to have empathy to know that this isn't okay. We as human beings should know better than to pick apart a young person's entire life and try to victim blame them and not put any, any, any criticism on the behavior of these disgusting dudes. It just blows my fucking mind.
32:37 And, you know, this woman is a Jane Doe. And then, you know, people love to say, like, well, why? If she's got a story, why does she have to be secretive? Why do you have to, because of this bullshit, because. At the same time saying, well, she's coming forward for all the attention and to, like, get something out of it. But she's also anonymous. So what is that? What does that do?
33:01 What are you talking about? I didn't want to talk about this today. I did want to talk about this today. I didn't want to talk about it today because it's just so disgusting. But, Alex, you brought up something that you noticed today. Yeah. So it's a very difficult conversation because before we started the show, we talked about whether or not we would talk about it.
33:19 And I think we should because I think there's so much silence that happens in these. as somebody who has been there for acquaintances or people I've known and had to have taken them to the hospital or have them speak to the police and have to argue with cops after an assault to see how these things have happened before and to the many women I've talked to in my life who have been assaulted or been raped
33:41 or have had horrible things happen to them, to see this entire system falling apart and failing along the way. And then also at the same exact time, seeing aspects, especially from Cornell, seemingly to be working to protect the fraternity specifically and Cornell's brand over one of their students at the same exact time has been horrific. I have friends of mine who went to Cornell or Cornell alumni who have been there over the last six years, who have posted online about their stories about things of dealing with Title IX there and more.
34:16 We've also begun to see over the last few days. Basically, once the story broke over the weekend and then the story, then people started to realize it had legs. And by legs, I mean specifically, it was getting play in the algorithm. They started to try to fuck with it. We have seen people try to docks Jane Doe. We've seen people try to come back
34:35 and repaint the entire story of the situation. We've seen people try to find more information to try to exonerate either the Cornell 7 or the Cornell 57, whatever we want to talk about with the Kai 5 fraternity or other sides of this. But the one thing that happened is there were women who saw this specific thing of people. And there's very specific.
34:58 There's one specific guy. I don't even want to say his fucking name. He's such a piece of shit. And everyone who's on Twitter already knows what the fuck I'm talking about. He specifically was trying to go and find out this young woman's name. He's the same reporter that also has spoken in the past. He doesn't believe any of the Epstein victims are actually victims. And basically he tries to defend any rapist that ever pops up.
35:17 A lot of women came forward and started to say, I am Jane Doe. and they started to post that I am Jane Doe in like an I am Spartacus type of moment. So that way would throw off some of these things on Threads, the Twitter clone that is run by meta, that Mark Zuckerberg has was Mark Zuckerberg's dream to try to replace Twitter. Threads has a AI moderator that chooses its top trending. And then it also creates a summary to explain why this item is trending. And out of the thousands of women who went on threads who said, I am Jane Doe, it picked one woman. and then made her Jane Doe.
35:53 It declared that she is a alumni of the school of Cornell. It said that she was the one who was there, that she was the one who was doing the lawsuit, all these things. She never went to Cornell. She's never even been to that area of New York, any of these things. The AI just grabbed pieces of information and it created a narrative. And then she immediately started getting death threats. She immediately started being attacked.
36:15 She immediately started because the system itself wants to find someone to blame. We've seen on the other side on Twitter that there have been random women that people have put forward and said that this was definitely Jane Doe. Those women have been attacked. Their boyfriends have been attacked online and more because this is a situation where they want it's very similar to mass shootings, honestly. In the moment after a mass shooting, what happens? We all play the same game America plays every single time. We wait. What is the race, the gender, the religious beliefs, the following or whatever of the shooter?
36:45 They're trying to do the same exact thing to Jane Doe. So they can find in there, is there anything about Jane Doe's story that would say that would that you could point to and say, well, if she didn't do this, if she didn't believe this, if she didn't like this music, if she didn't wear that dress, if she didn't follow this influencer, would this not have happened? And they want to try to take that onus and move it into this. Because it's the big thing though we're not talking about is that it's actually a culture issue. Yes. The first time, in 2010 I heard the term rape culture. And I remember back then hearing that term and thinking it was, I went, that's a little strong. in 2010 when I heard it.
37:19 And basically since the day I said that, I've been wrong. I do truly believe in the, especially in the way, I mean, it's worldwide. But we have a belief that it's owed. And the thing that really drove a lot of people crazy with that text is two out of the five got suspended for writing for the rape and then for writing free pussy and whatever. But four people got suspended from Cornell for saying free Palestine. And the fact that that is so unbalanced from that same university and that we can see this. And as we sit here with a president who has been found criminally liable for sexual assault, with Supreme Court members, many of which were accused of sexual assault, how many senators,
38:04 how many congressmen, how many, as we go down the entire list, and I just go back to 2010. Presidents, exactly. As we go down this entire list and I look at it, and I just go, it's a rape culture. And that's where I just keep coming back to And as you see it come out online That's what's coming out online from it Yeah, it's in that it's in that Snapchat thread That is that is the culture
38:24 That is what it is It's disgusting We'd like to commend you for acknowledging That when you first heard that term That it maybe it felt a little overblown And then you have the presence of mind To watch it and unlearn what you've Or learn about it
38:40 Unlearn the patterns of the past And be able to have awareness of being able to see it, being able to see it in real time, being able to connect the dots, because nobody wants to do that. But it's important. It's important in order to understand and fix this, and it shows basic human empathy. But it was multi-combinational, though. It was not only just me too. It was the women in my life. Right. And the situation I've been through. But another thing, I talked about it actually in a TikTok a couple days ago, I grew up near a small college town and I got lunch one day with the mayor. And I was asking the mayor, like about,
39:14 what they do in their job. And I didn't realize that our mayor, the local mayor of the small college town, actually oversaw the police force. So I said, oh, because you get this big summer report every month. I bet you have some crazy fears. And I'm thinking Al-Qaeda. I'm thinking school shootings. I'm thinking DUIs and things like that.
39:30 And she told me that she was afraid of the end of summer because that's when the students come back. And that's when reported rape spike. And this was something that was said to me five years ago. And this is, but this is, this has been a constant. The difference is, the only difference that we really have now is that we can see and feel the palpable outrage. But if we go back to, you know, thinking if this was the 2000s, if this was the 90s, if this was the 80s, it would be a much different reaction. That's the only good side I can see from the change that's coming and that we're hoping for.
40:04 I know it doesn't feel like it. And this has been the hardest part of the living through these, especially these last two fucking years, because it felt like, especially in 2020, it felt like things were moving forward. and then we took such a giant leap back. But there is, we can see the building blocks of what many of us need to do to move forward and how we need to do that locally and inside of some of these smaller systems. Yeah. Because that's how we can build this back up. Alex, thank you for saying that.
40:30 I think that's really important. You're kind of the same wave. I mean, it's similar to the conversation we had a few moments ago about politics or talking to people in person. Because what we see online is disgusting. But we also see lots of people outraged, right? And we didn't have access to that 20 years ago without the Internet. We didn't have the information sharing. It was there was definitely more of a culture of like push that under the rug or let's not pay attention to it.
40:55 So this is progress and you were completely right. And this tool that we have that we all is embedded in all of our lives that we rely on, this AI bullshit is so overwhelming and there's so much danger that comes with it. because when you dock somebody and all of a sudden they're in the limelight and their personal information's online or the wrong person is docs, they're getting death threats. A platform where anonymous chuds can just spout about how if she didn't want to get raped, she shouldn't have gone to that party or conflating giving consent to one person as giving consent to seven.
41:37 And I just want to acknowledge that that is happening online. And you can also find other people online that say the opposite. And that this online percentage is as for most of us, this is the access we get to other people's ways of thinking. But this is distorted. It is sadistic. It is twisted. And it is actually not representative of how most people in their day to day lives operate. I have to always remind myself of that, that this is extreme.
42:07 choosing to show you things that make you mad. Even that same person tweeting that bullshit, if you were to have that conversation with me in person, I bet you're two chicken shit to say that. I bet you wouldn't. And that's why he got punched in the face of the White House Correspondence Dinner. But the thing is I do want to say because I'm a millennial.
42:28 We're all mostly, I think we're all millennials here, right? So many of us have kids. The one thing we also have to keep in mind is to raise our, especially our sons, to have a son. to raise the sons to have a better world to view people as people and that empathy is not toxic, number one. And number two is to when we're talking to friends and family, to make them aware that maybe some of the influencers or content that's out there, not to tell their kid to not watch it, but to just be aware of what's out there. Because a lot of people, we're all trapped in our own little
43:00 tiny algorithms. I had somebody I was with recently and I was like, oh, you definitely know about this thing. It's a major thing. It had 100 million. And she looked at me and she goes, I only get AI cat videos on Instagram. And so there's a thing about having to break through, having to have those conversations, but also just telling people to every now and then be like, hey, do you know that this guy exists? Right. Do you know that your son might be watching this guy?
43:22 Do you know that? Ask your son if you knows who you knows who some of these other has been called content creators. Yeah. Any of these ones. Is he, is he worshipping the roach lord? Like there's because part of parenting needs to be, yeah. Knowing what their social media diet is and what kind of content they're consuming.
43:40 And it's also, but again, it's not doing the thing where you come in. You go, I'm definitely going to ban it because that's how we saw that in the 80s and Satanic panic and that type of bullshit. It's more of like, okay, I heard you heard those things. Let's have a conversation on what that means. And maybe then do we go into the, hey, we have to have a conversation about what empathy is. We have to have a conversation of what it's like to stand in somebody else's shoes. We have to have a conversation. I'm going to raise my son in M. Knight Shaman's the village.
44:03 He's going to have no access to anything. ever. Well, you're going to get a little tree creature costume for yourself? There was a little bit of a depressing feeling, knowing that these are Gen Z kids that have grown up in the era of Me Too. But I think your point, Alex, of like, I mean, it's the Cuspi, but I'm just saying that these conversations have been going on for about 10 years,
44:28 and these kids, there's in theory they could have grown up with some parenting that did do exactly what you're saying. but I think your point is really well taken that you kind of have to pay attention to what they're consuming or say like not outlaw it. And the issue we have is 10 years ago and Me Too happened? What happened? Elon Musk bought Twitter. There's a lot of counter messaging to Me Too in the time since then.
44:53 That's a well taken point. And amidst the time when like parents are more and more hands off in a lot of ways and passing off iPads and so on and the COVID, all of it. Okay. So Pete Higg says, gave one of his big weird testosterone speeches on Wednesday. You know, he paced around and he was like man bicep, you know. And he said that there's going to be a Pentagon plan to study the future of warfare called Project Meridian.
45:21 And it's going to be led by America's top innovators, Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Lucky, the fat co-founder of Andrew Real. Can I ask? The smoothest man in politics. What about Newt Green Gritch? What? I don't know. What about him specifically gets him on this drag tag too? Wait.
45:44 Who? All of them. Okay. No. Katie. I'm just curious. Newt what's his last name? Yeah.
45:53 What did I say? Nothing. I don't want to me to poke fun. You said Newt Green Gritch, which green Grinch, which is very hilarious. Green Grinch. Now I don't. But the Grinch is green. He is Newt Green Grinch.
46:04 That's true. The grink is also. Did I actually say green grinch? You turned him into a Harry Potter character, which is amazing. I like it better. No, it's much better. A lot of people were pointing out this bullshit with Project Meridian because Pete Hegsteth gave this speech where I'm going to, I'm removing one word because it's a slur. Because he keeps using slurs for trans people.
46:26 He said no fatties, no no beardos, no wimps, no radicals, just warriors. But then people had then started putting up images of Palmer Lucky, Newt Gingrich, and Elon Musk. And it's like, Beardough, Fatty, and Weirdo. What are we doing here? Also, radicals. Also, like, last I checked, like 10% of the military are white supremacists. Like, they report on that. He means radicals.
46:54 Ah, no cool dudes. Okay. Yeah, no cool dudes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How dare you skateboard? Squares. Squares, no beardos. Yeah, no beardos.
47:01 because he's Pete Hegseth is still battling against a 1960s idea of a cool guy, hippie with long hair and a beard who's there to smoke dubies and do communism, you know. Which, you know. He's like watching Apocalypse now
47:16 and being like none of this stuff would have ever happened if it was my war fighters. They wouldn't have had any of these things going on in their head. He's like Mark Wahlberg on 9-11. I hate the term war. Yeah.
47:27 What'd you say? Wouldn't happen. Mark Wahlberg thinks it wouldn't have gone down like that if he was on. the plane. Yeah. Wouldn't have gone down like that. It's my big dick and I'm ready to fuck.
47:36 But I'm just trying to think of like all of the great war movies, most of which are anti-war. And he's just like, nope, it wouldn't have been that. Full Metal Jacket? I don't think so. I started watching Full Metal Jacket last night. Oh, really? It was a bad call because I needed to go to bed, but I started it. Yeah, that's a commitment.
47:53 Yeah, I was like, what are you thinking? There's a lot of guys who watch. I call it the Scarface paradox. where like you're supposed to watch the movie Scarface and not want to be a drug dealer because his life ends terribly. But if you try to go line for line with Scarface, you never make it to the end of the movie
48:09 because you're just like, we got to go out right now. Get me a chainsaw. That looks really cool. And I think that's Pete Hegseth with basically and the same thing with the tech billionaires. Oh yeah. The sci-fi movies. They're just like,
48:20 hell yeah. They've got their fight club posters on. Like, yeah, man, this is cool shit. Yep. Very focused, rightfully so, on, you know, getting the conservatives out of office. The midterms are coming up. Hooray, we're going to win big.
48:33 We're going to sweep this one time. And then hopefully again in two more years, whatever happens from this bullshit politics, the people that are running our country that we're more and more seating power to are these billionaire class. And the more we can remind ourselves and be able to pinpoint stuff like this,
48:50 like, oh, Elon Musk, qualified for nothing. Jack of all trades, master of none, but not even a jack of all trades. No. Just a steeler. A jack off all trades. A jack off of all trades.
49:03 But rich is hell. And he can buy our elections. Any of them can. They, the Peter Teals, all of it. They're going to pick our president. They're going to pick the vice president.
49:12 They're going to, you know, get $4 billion dollars off of their tax bill because they're going to pretend that their data centers or research centers. They'll get all these contracts and everything. They get to do what they want. That is.
49:27 is to me what's all of this is bullshit we've plenty of stuff to clown on we can watch a clip of heggseth being a total jack off whatever weirdo creep he'll be gone at some point hopefully sooner than later but these people will remain and their power that they are increasingly and they're embedding themselves into the fabric of our our government in a way that's inextricable it's not just the people they're embedding they're embedding themselves and it's like they're technology and their access, even if they're, like, in the background and not heading up Project Meridian, they're still in there. Yeah.
50:06 And they're gaining access to all these sort of things. I mean, yes, like two, three days ago, this summit were like all these billionaires are like, yes, sir, we'll call it super intelligence now for you, sir. There's super intelligence factories, sir. Anything for you, sir. It's so dumb and embarrassing. It's so pathetic. Yeah.
50:23 Because they just need, they just need to get more access. to money and power, even if they know that this is damaging. And then they go out and Musk is like, don't worry, all of you people will have five jobs and three robots each. It's like, no, no, no. To be clear, as soon as we get a Democrat in office, they're going to cozy up to that Democrat too. Yeah. Oh, I mean, they're going, this is continue. This will, this is, this is, this is, um, nonpartisan, I guess.
50:57 No, no, listen, one of the things we've been talking about a lot on when I'm doing my live tour has been pushing back on the failures of Democratic leadership, specifically right now. Democrats in general like to fall back on whoever's president. That's typically how the party turns to in their hierarchy. And so we haven't had one that hasn't been embarrassed on a national stage. So Harris and Biden are out as leaders. Obama just wants to build his museum and play basketball. And the Clintons aren't allowed to be around. So those are the ones we have around.
51:28 And so instead we've been stuck with Hakeem and Chuck Schumer. And I think what's been happening is we've been seeing from leaders, you know, like Zora Mamdani and some of the ways AOC and especially the DSA wing have begun to be in a talk. The DSA wing has been successful not just because their message is good, but because they actually are asking people to do stuff and that they're actually being present in communities. And the Democratic Party in general has just really sat on its laurels of not Trump for the last 10 fucking years. It worked in 2020, barely. And then we've been sitting in the repercussion of that ever since. So I do have, I have, I constantly people ask me where I'm seeing my hope. And I'm like, my hope is that I'm beginning to start to see leaders who can see beyond that a little bit and can cut through some of this.
52:17 And when I do get a chance to get in the room with any of the ones that we currently have, I literally yell at them. I go, hey, you're fucking idiots. Please read a comment section. You're the only people I'm ever going to say this to. Please read a fucking comment section. Yeah. And that's, but this is, this has been a constant and consistent situation with it. And if there is an option that is a better independent, then we should ask the Democrat to
52:40 fucking drop out, like in some of these cases and have somebody else come in. But it's, it's rare. And that's kind of where we're stuck right now. Yeah. No like salt, no unifying message of the party or anything. And not every year will gas prices be constantly rising and there be an unpopular war and all the stuff that is helping this. You know, he's unpopular. There would have been some sort of blue wave anyway.
53:06 But he's helping a lot. Well, you know, Cody, that I will say Cody and I just did. That's the first thing we probably disagreed about. You think that gas prices won't be high and there won't be a war. I think we're in forever high war. Oh, I'm not confident that we won't. I'm saying, but it's beyond other thing. I'm saying that it's lucky.
53:25 The Democrats are lucky that we are currently in that situation. So they can just sort of lean on that. You can run on not Trump in the midst of his unpopularity. He sucks. We hate him. But the point. The Democrats don't want to hold on to power. They fundraise based off of help donate now so we can beat this awful person.
53:48 Let us win. And they like that. They like that. That status quo. But if you were serious about holding on to power or making long-term changes in this country, you would have some sort of a message other than Trump. It might win in 2020. It might win in midterms, but you're going to get fucked after that.
54:04 But it's emerging. They're like there, it does seem like some are starting to sort of coalesce around some message. Yeah. And I think the big difference that we've had for a very long time is the Republicans have had billionaires standing in the background who have been able to say, here's our hundred year plan. I mean, if you look at if you look at the last, especially the last four years, a lot of this is tied around Elon.
54:26 I mean, so much of this falls back on Elon coming in and purchasing Twitter, dumping money in. He was trying to back to Santis until he realized he fucked that poach. And what's her name? The staff, his chief of staff crossed the road. There's a few settings on there. But Elon came in and said, hey, to the other billionaires, you can do this stuff.
54:47 You can be crude. You can be a dickhead. You can be more overt. And the Democrats aren't going to react fast enough. And the other thing we've seen as well with the Republicans, especially. And actually, and I wish the Democrats would understand this. We are now in a strategy system of running the clock out constantly. Trump read 2020 to 2024 was Trump running the clock out until election day to try to get the charges thrown out against him.
55:13 And it's the same thing for a lot of this stuff running. It worked. It did work. And there's been a lot of this. And this is the, it's not a high scoring game. It's a shitty one. And so when you get the ball, fucking try to score. I hate metaphors like this because I'm not them into sports.
55:28 But if, but they need to have something and they need to have a list. And I've been, I've been asking repeatedly, what is the party plank? What are going to be the 10 things? And can you get them back to being fucking bumper stickers again? Like, I hate MAGA. I hate Make America Great again. It is a bumper sticker. It is a bumper sticker.
55:47 Being able to say, being able to say, build the wall. that's a very easy, simple message that sucks. But it's effective for people who like that kind of stuff. Medicare for All is a great example. Chantable. Chantable. Chantable. Yeah, that's what we want.
56:06 Because all politics is wrestling. Just make everything. Tax incentives and credits for certain industries. Mass investigations now might be. Mass investigations now. That's not bad. Yeah. I mean, or you can.
56:20 just put up there like what never mind i'm not going to say that one i will get a knock on my door Alex it has been such a delight having you here with this has been fun it's been a great time like i got told you guys before we hit recording this has been a dream of mine being on the show for a long time but all of you guys are awesome i respect all of your opinions on everything and it was really cool to be here with you and for everybody out there for your fans please find the crashing out podcast right here on youtube or wherever you get podcasts and i'm on tour this weekend is my last part of the tour, Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. crashing outtour.com.
56:53 Thank you so much. Thank you so much. We're going to have to ask you to plug. You are such a professional. You know exactly what to do. You know when to do it. Everybody, uh, check out the various shows. Check out the live show tour.
57:05 Have fun on the tour. Good luck in the end of the tour. While I'm asking you to do things, I'm going to also ask you to like and subscribe. Send this video. Yeah. Unlike Alex who knows when and what to say, we're going to say at the end of the show, please like and subscribe to the video. out.
57:20 And you know what? I'm just going to say it. I'm going to tell you guys what's in my heart. I'm going to be vulnerable. You're going to throw your heart out to everyone. I'm going to throw out to everyone, but I'm not going to do any hand movements along with it. You can do a normal hand movement. They're a normal.
57:37 They're a normal. Oh, my. Oh, my gosh.
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