The Daily Beast Podcast - How the Silicon Valley Bank Implosion Leads Back to Trump

Episode Date: March 14, 2023

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), a congressman representing New York’s 10th district and former lead counsel during Trump impeachment hearings, spells out the link between Trump and the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank—and what frustrates him the most when it comes to the GOP attacks on Hunter Biden. Also on the podcast: Dan Primack, business editor at Axios, breaks down the Silicon Valley bank collapse from a logistical standpoint, including the biggest difference between this SVB situation and the 2008 bank bailout. Plus! Primark shares a Taylor Swift analogy that’ll help you understand what makes bank runs unavoidable. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show today.

First, we're going to talk to Congressman Dan Goldman, who represents New York's 10th Congressional District. And he's going to talk to us about a host of issues, including the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax Act. Then we'll talk to Dan Primick, who's a business editor at Axios, who's been doing fantastic reporting on the Silicon Valley Bank collapse. And he'll tell us just what's going on there. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, another week, and I know nobody here but me wants to talk about the Oscars, so we'll skip right by them and go to the other big story, this one out of Silicon Valley, where a bank called Silicon Valley Bank, a very innovative name, failed last week after there was a run on deposits by its customers.

It was then taken into what's called receivership by the FDIC. and then on Sunday evening, the Department of Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC, they got together and put out a joint statement saying that all the depositors who had their money in the bank would be fully protected and they would receive access to all their money, but that they were not going to save the bank itself. They were not going to save the investors or the management of the bank, the executives of the bank. The bank will cease to exist. And so they're taking great pains to say that this is not a bailout.

They are simply making the customers whole. And that strikes a lot of people as a good compromise. So we're not getting into one of these too big to fail situations where a corporation can have all sorts of malfeasance and just overall bad management. And then the taxpayers end up keeping them in business. That's not happening here. But at the same time, the people who put their money in the bank are not going to lose. that money. What do you make of that? I mean, here's the thing. And, you know, I am very rarely a person to blame Barack Obama or the Obama administration for anything, really, when we look at, you know,

what we've been inundated with over the last seven years. But I want us to go back to the beginning of 2000 in our time machine when the big banks were failing. And what happened to those executives, to those Wall Street that gambled with people's mortgages that started the foreclosure, crisis because they were giving out poor mortgages that they knew were not good in order to recoup as much money as possible for their CEOs and their shareholders. What happened to those banks? Not a fucking thing. Not a thing happened to anyone. No one went to jail. Millions of people lost their home, namely those that were black and brown and low income. You know, people who invest everything that they have because they're told that buying a home is contingent.

upon accessing the American dream. And so you have the early 2000s, I'm so tired of this fucking bumper sticker bullshit which says that nobody is above the law. Because clearly, when you're able to give out platinum fucking parachutes to all of the executives, when you're using the tax dollars of the middle class and the working class and the poor in order to bail out these fucking greedy ass banks,

fast forward now to the 2020s and look where we are. I just don't understand why it's like fool me once over and over and over again. It's like motherfucking groundhogs day for Wall Street and these big banks. Why? Because we're looking at people in Congress who receive both, on both Republican and Democratic side, receive donations from the very people that they are responsible for regulating. How to fuck that work? And it doesn't end up falling on the backs and the necks of the middle class and working class in America.

It drives me fucking crazy. Right. I agree with you. And I think a lot of people agree with you. And I think that's one of the reasons that's not what we're seeing here. And that this bank is not being bailed out. And look, at least from what we know now, there ain't going to be no golden parachutes for the executives at SVB. They are gone.

They are out of fucking business. And the only people being sort of rescued here are the depositors, the people who put their money in the bank. And so I do think that maybe that is a lesson learned from the early 2000s and 2008 and all of that stuff. It really isn't a lesson learned because the fact is that you're going to have these banks continue to do this. So whether or not, quote unquote, the actual executives are not going to be made whole, but those that are trusting their money and putting their faith into these systems in order to hold their money.

So those people will be taking care of. The actual customer is great. But what I'm saying is, you know, they're talking about, you know, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders have talked about the fact that rampant deregulation, particularly in 2018, under the Trump administration, is what sowed the seeds for the moment that we're in now.

My feeling, again, is that it is greed that drives this. It is greed and lack of regulation that drives this. And because no one was held accountable and is ever held accountable, they'll just keep doing this shit over and over and over again. And that's what's driving me crazy. Is that like, again, if you were to look at any other industry, any other space, people would not be able to act in this manner. But so long as they are white, wealthy men, you either get a slap on the wrist or you

get absolutely nothing. So like, yes, okay, the customers are going to be made whole in this case, but can we get to the source of the fucking problem? Absolutely with you on that. And I think Bernie Sanders is right. And I think, you know, and he's not the only Democrat saying this, that it was the sort of mid-sized banks in 2018 were made exempt from a bunch of regulations that affect bigger banks. And and the argument was, oh, it's stifling. And it's the same argument you're always here. We're going to stifle innovation. We're going to crush these banks. And look, some of that may be true. But on the other hand, what you also do is you take away protections from the people who use those banks. And there is a question of the people who put their money in this bank, which were mostly venture capitalist types,

this bank sort of specialized in working with startup companies. They took advantage of these lax regulations. And I'm talking about now the depositors. So there is part of me that feels like they should be on the hook for this too. I don't think they went into this not knowing. And unlike what you were describing with the housing crisis and all of that, that was clearly predatory action on the parts of the banks and the lenders sort of, you know, basically very much misleading people. And as you said, a lot of those people, I think disproportionately people of color, into buying homes that they couldn't possibly afford or that they, you know, they could afford at the time. But the minute the housing bubble hit, they were completely screwed. So, yeah.

Yes, I do think you can make an argument here that even helping the depositors here is almost like enabling this behavior. On the other hand, I am a little sensitive to the argument that there are, you know, some of these companies employ a lot of people. And if they lose their money, you know, the lower level employees who have absolutely no say in any of this, they're the ones that get hurt because that's the way the system works. Surprise, surprise. So I'm a little sympathetic to that. But that said, I think it's important that they did not bail out this bank. And if you want to talk about whether or not there should be penalties for the people who ran the banks, I'm not sure they broke the law. The law as currently constructed, I don't know that anything illegal was done here.

According to Business Insider, it wasn't. This was the problem with the changes that Donald Trump and the Trump administration made in 2018. They write this in Business Insider, that signing the bill into law meant that. that Trump was exempting smaller banks from stringent regulations and loosening rules, which you said, Andy, that big banks had to follow. The law that they signed raised the asset thresholding for, quote, systematically important financial institutions

from $50 billion in holding to $250 billion. Silicon Valley Bank, which ended in 2022, with a holding of $209 billion in assets, was no longer designated as a systemic, important financial institution. So no, because of the decisions that the Trump administration made in order to raise that test from $50 billion of holdings to $250 billion, no, they didn't break the law. This is what deregulation does. No, absolutely. And of course, Silicon Valley Bank was one of many banks that lobbied for this deregulation, which is the way it always works. I mean, we've seen this,

I don't know how many stories we've had, whether it's trained arra ailments. Oh, guess what? The company that had the trained arraignment lobbied for lower safety standards. This is the way our country works, unfortunately. So yeah, I don't think they can be held accountable in the legal sense. You know, I think the best you can do, unfortunately, is just say, hey, you're out of business and we are not helping you keep that business afloat. And look, let's talk about another one of the reasons that this happened. And this was this, what we call a banquet. run where somebody takes all their money out of the bank and that sort of stokes a panic among the people who have their money in the bank and they all start taking their money out of the

bank. And there's no bank in the country that could survive that because of the way the laws work in terms of how much cash on hand a bank is required to have. And in this case, it seems, you know, the early reports anyway or that it was Peter Thiel's venture capital fund that was the first to take its money out of there, and then it quickly snowballed. And later in the show, I interview Congressman Dan Goldman, I said my sort of theory on this, and I'm not claiming it's original. I'm sure other people have said this, is, you know, we live in a world of instant banking. You don't have to go into the bank to take out your money.

You can do it on your phone in two seconds. So if there's a bank run now, you're talking about everybody who has an account at that bank can literally, within the span of 30 seconds, they can all take their money out of the bank. And there's no bank in the world that could survive that. You know, I don't care how big they are if all their clients suddenly did that. So I don't know if there needs to be some kind of regulation about that. If there's something Congress needs to do about that. And the other aspect is, you know, we also have social media.

So a report gets out that Peter Thiel is doing this. And unlike in the old days where, you know, you'd have to wait for the morning paper to hear it or someone would have to call you and then you'd have to call someone else, everybody knows about this instantaneously. And it very well may be that all our banking regulations when it comes to stuff like this are hopelessly outdated and just, you know, have been totally demolished by technology and that there needs to be some sort of newer form of regulation to prevent this from happening to other banks.

At the same time, when I think about the inability then of customers that have deposited, that have large sums of money that they're holding in these banks that are faulty, and then not being able to have the ability to then pull that money out, because at the time of hearing about this collapse, you don't know whether or not the government is going to make you whole, right? So if you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in there, say if you only have $15,000 in there, and that's all you have in the world, like it's gone.

So your inability, like, to, I think to hamstring, consumers from being able to move their own money, not knowing that they're going to be protected, the regulation would need to be that regardless of a bank's failure, that the federal government will always make the consumer whole outside of the CEO, the shareholders, and the executives at that back. Like, that would need to be the regulation, but telling people that they wouldn't be able to move their own money, to me, would seem woefully problematic. Well, and it's And look, I want to make it perfectly clear, as I think I have several times on this podcast, I am the opposite of a financial expert. But the FDIC insures deposits up to $250,000. And what's

happening here is that the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury and the FDIC are stepping in to say, hey, we're going to insure all your money, regardless of how much money you had in Silicon Valley Bank. And we're going to make you whole. And I guess my question, there is, okay, maybe that's a good thing in this one particular instance. But what does that do to say a family-owned business that has their account somewhere else? And let's say they have $500,000 in that account and the bank goes under. Is the FDIC going to insure all of their money or only $250,000, which is currently how the law works? So what you're saying is we need to get rid of that $250,000 cap.

And that is the way to prevent bank runs because people will know they'll always get their money back. I guess the thing is that one of the reasons for this cap is to ensure sort of diversity of banking in the sense that people are not supposed to put $2 million in one bank. Yeah. They're supposed to put $250,000 in four banks and that that is supposed to be good for the banking industry and somehow good for the country or whatever. And look, it's also sort of common sense. it seems to me that if you have that much money, you shouldn't put it all in one place because something like this might happen. But I don't know what the answer is here because if the FDIC here is going to make all these people whole, regardless of how much above $250,000 they have, then A, how is that

fair to everyone else? Right. Who might be in a similar situation at a different bank. And B, what is the point of having that be the law? Well, Andy, according to Republicans, you shouldn't worry you're pretty little head about this, because this all has to do with wokeness. If you really want to understand this precarious situation that the banking industry is finding itself in once again, according to Ron DeSantis, it is none other, none other than their new favorite boogeyman, which is diversity and inclusion. So apparently, in their summation that Silicon Valley Bank is a quote unquote woke bank and that so long as you allow white, straight, cis-hete people in the workplace to use the N-word and grab women's asses, none of this would be happening at all. So I don't want you to trouble yourself.

So what you're saying is we need to make America grab ass again. Correct. And that will solve every single problem from Lagos to Silicon Valley banks and everything in between. This really is like unbelievable. Like you always, you know, you always want to think you know when they've hit rock bottom on something. And like every time they invoke the word woke, you think this can't get any dumber. And then this happens. And this has got to be at least top five dumbest uses of the word woke.

But you're right, though. It's, it's Rhonda Santis. It's James Comer, who is the goddamn chairman of the House Oversight Committee. He is out there slamming Silicon Valley Bank, calling it one of the most woke banks in the U.S. And basically they're trying to make this a go-woke, go-broke situation, as their little bumper sticker likes to say. And it is absolutely the dumbest thing I've ever heard, which is, of course, why the Daily Mail picked it up in England and the New York Post picked it up. I obviously have not watched Fox News today or at all for the past, you know, five years or whatever. But I am imagining that talking point is going on as we speak.

Oh, it's going on everywhere, including fucking CNN, which had a reporter say, well, on one hand, you have Democrats talking about deregulation. And then on the other hand, you have Republicans talking about wokeness. And once again, the reporters that are supposed to be providing analysis, in some type of way or once again doing a false bullshit equivalency between one party that is actually laying out the reasoning for this happening and then the other party creating an entire balloon distraction because their fucking Maga King is one of the reasons why we're in this situation in the first fucking place. From trains to banks, look at who is voting for deregulation and see where the fuck we are.

But yes, you're right. It's diversity and inclusion. the N-word has so much power, so much power. If we would just let AI say the N-word, none of this would have happened. Yeah. My next guest was an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York and served as lead counsel for the House Intelligence Committee in the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump before being elected to Congress himself in 2022, where he represents New York's 10th Congressional District.

Congressman Dan Goldman, thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me, Andy. be with you. Before I get to your committee work and other issues, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you about Silicon Valley Bank, something that's on a lot of people's minds right now. To quickly recap for our listeners, SVB, quote unquote, failed last week after there was a run on deposits by its customers. It was taken into receivership by the FDIC. And Sunday evening, the departments of treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC put out a joint statement saying that all depositors will be fully protected and have access to all their money. Do you agree that that was the right thing to do?

I do agree that that was the right thing to do, not necessarily because of the specifics of the Silicon Valley Bank, but more because what I was hearing all weekend and what I'm sure the federal authorities were hearing is that Silicon Valley Bank would be only the first of a series of regional mid-sized banks to fail if the Fed and FDA, under the oversight of Secretary Yellen did not intervene to guarantee the deposits. And I think it's very important to discuss the difference between what people commonly refer to as a bailout and what happened yesterday. All that the Fed and the FDIC did was to guarantee that people who had accounts at Silicon Valley

Bank, and I heard from my constituents, one of whom only only. a small business of providing child care centers in lower Manhattan, and he had all of his company's money with Silicon Valley Bank. If he did not have those deposits guaranteed, and if he lost all of the access to that money, his business would have folded. 500 families in New York would not have had child care as of this week suddenly. So the ripple on effect of such a failure could be catastrophic,

for the people who bank with Silicon Valley Bank. But unlike a bailout, it did not save the investors or the executives or the management. The people who really caused the failure, they did not get any protection or benefits from the federal government, and they should absolutely be held accountable for their reckless investments. Absolutely. I mean, the Silicon Valley Bank, as we knew, it, I guess, will no longer exist after this. This is, as you point out, not a bailout of a corporation

that will then go about its business. What do you think were the main factors that led to SVB's failure and what needs to be done to hopefully ensure that something like this doesn't happen again or at least makes it as rare as humanly possible? Well, look, we're going to have to, I think, in Congress, look very closely at this. It's pretty well known now in 2018 under the Trump administration regulations of banks were softened and loosened, which very well may have contributed to the highly concentrated investing that Silicon Valley Bank did with all of its deposits. And that ultimately when a relatively simple change in interest rates caused Silicon Valley Bank to essentially turn upside down, that's a failure of the system. I mean, we cannot be in a

banking system right now where if the Fed happens to raise interest rates, you know, by 4% in a year, whatever it was, that all of a sudden a significant $200 billion bank just fails. And there are, you know, reasons why that has occurred. It is not a structural thing to the banking industry. It happens to be very specific to Silicon Valley Bank. But there could be any number of different things like this that could undermine the security of any regional mid-sized bank. And we also need regional banks. We cannot be in a situation where we have an over-concentration in the extra large banks, which already suffer from concerns about being too big to fail. So we are going to need to make sure that we put proper guardrails around banks so that their management,

if reckless and overaggressive does not undermine our entire banking system. And that's what would have happened if the Fed and FDIC did not step in yesterday as they did. I am the opposite of a financial expert. And in fact, if I did a bank run, the bank would never notice it. But there were a couple of things that sort of struck me. And I don't know, maybe a lot of other people are saying this too and I just haven't seen it. But when you talk about a bank run, you know, what we're talking about is, somebody who has a lot of deposits there takes their money out and then that sort of leads to a

stampede where everyone that has their money there takes their money out and that means the bank loses its liquidity and all of that stuff so there are two things here one is it is undeniable how because of social media and places like twitter how easy it is for a bank run to happen with like the snap of a finger somebody sees a tweet and then they go and take their money out and then they tweet about it and it snowballs and the other thing is is how easy it is with the state of technology right now. You know, most of us do our banking at home and you do it with a few clicks on your phone. You don't have to go into the bank and talk to a bank teller and say, I'd like to take out all my money.

You literally do it on your phone. Are those things that maybe, I don't know, maybe Congress has to look into, different ways to protect banks from bank runs just because of the advances in technology that we have now? You know, it clearly was the reason why this happened so fast, and I think took a lot of people by surprise. Right. I spoke to a number of people this weekend who said, you know, that they had put in their wire transfer for 9 a.m. this morning from any number of different regional banks. And they were locked and loaded to, who essentially do a virtual run on the bank. And that obviously, you know, no bank can sustain that. The model of a bank is they, of course, do not keep all of their...

in the bank. The way they make money is by having a, you know, is understanding that not all of their clients will take out their money at the exact same time. So, yes, in the Twitter world, in the online world, it obviously was hyper-concentrated because there are a disproportionate number of Silicon Valley Bank customers who are in the tech world to begin with. So, you know, they're more focused on a lot of the sort of similar newsletters or accounts. or whatever it may be. But it is a real concern that something like this could happen. And again, it wouldn't have just been Silicon Valley Bank.

It would have taken down a significant number of regional banks. It would have caused a number, you know, hundreds or perhaps thousands of small businesses to collapse. It would have not just impacted Wall Street. It would have had a serious trickle-down effect on Main Street. And that's really what we need to be protecting against. If there are speculators and there are reckless investors, that's one thing. And they should bear the consequences of their bad decisions.

But Main Street and small businesses should not bear the consequences for other people's reckless investments. And that's really where we're going to have to dig in and figure out how to make sure that we prevent this going forward. But the other thing, Andy, is we cannot continue to just be so narrowly focused. to correct for the thing that just happened. Right. I think what we are going to need to do is look at this, but look at it as an example of a broader category of potential horribles, so to speak, and make sure that we are properly regulating for the eventuality that any of those might happen.

And this was a good lesson in that. That's a great point. One thing I noticed you didn't bring up is something that I'm hearing from some people on the right, including unbelievably some of your colleagues, and that is that SVB failed because it was too woke. My honest question is, what do you even say to something like that when you hear it? Define woke. They had a diversity initiative. Yeah, as they should, as every company does, as we all need to be doing in this day and age.

But the reason why Silicon Valley Bank went upside down is because they put too much of their money in long-term treasury bills, long-term bonds that were losing value as interest rates went up. And that would be okay in an ordinary circumstance. But when they had a lot of people start to ask for their money back, they had to take the losses on those bonds. And that would, therefore, not be enough to pay them back. So how that relates to wokeness, I have no idea. But that is actually the cause of Silicon Valley Bank going under. So you are on record as saying that wokeness did not cause SVB to fail. Yes, I'm on record to say that. I'm also on record to say that every time anyone uses the term woke, I would like for them to define it. Yes. This seems like a

good time to pivot to the work you're doing in Congress. You are on the ridiculously named select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government. My first question is, how many times a day on average would you say you let out a huge sigh? Several. It's a really menacing name. Yes. That has not met with its promise in any way, shape, or form. And I think there are a number of things about it that are very frustrating from someone

like me who, you know, believe strongly in oversight and accountability. There is plenty of space to. look into the weaponization of the federal government. And I've talked about this before, including our hearing last week, you know, Donald Trump used the Department of Justice as his personal lawyer and the arm, you know, for him to attack his enemies and to protect his friends. But we're not focused on that. You know, we're focused on sort of these baseless theories of First Amendment violations by private companies and somehow the president's family, or son had some influence over the president.

The biggest problem, and this really sticks in my craw as a former prosecutor who had to go to court with actual admissible evidence is they really have not presented any evidence to support these very serious allegations. And it's one thing, if you have serious allegations and you have evidence to support it, but they have not demonstrated any of that. And it's not just on this so-called weaponization subcommittee. I'm also on the Oversight Committee, and they're barking down some of the same rabbit holes on that committee, and they've also yet to find a support for their conclusions.

They have reached conclusions without evidence. And they're now trying to backfill the evidence in so that they can perpetuate those conclusions, which, as Jim Jordan said last summer, are solely designed to politically hurt President Biden. But even if that is the case, they are not even doing it successfully, yet they're wasting taxpayer time. And they're frankly abusing the power of House of Representatives and going down these rabbit holes. Yeah, look, don't get me wrong. I am extremely glad that you are on this subcommittee and on the House Oversight Committee.

I just need to know, did you ever dream that as a congressman you'd have to explain to some of your fellow members, things like, no, Twitter, not promoting your tweet, doesn't violate your First Amendment rights, or, yeah, this is what the FBI and the Department of Justice do. This is how they work. Well, I would have said before I went to the House Intelligence Committee as the director of investigations that, no, I would not have expected to do that. But sadly, I've had enough experience to realize that, fortunately, these investigations are not about facts. And, evidence and truth. They're about politics and they're about partisanship. And it's not why I went to Congress. There are real problems and real issues that we should be addressing, including,

as you just say, banking regulations or even including, frankly, the balance between, you know, speech and our national security and, you know, foreign interference in our elections. That's a complicated, difficult issue that, you know, the government should be giving guidance to private companies within the bounds of the Constitution as to how to deal with foreign interference in our social media and through, you know, online cyber attacks. And that's what happened in 2016. So let's make sure that we protect against it while also making sure that people can freely speak in the, you know, public discourse and that the best ideas rise to the top. I agree with that. But the problem is we're not talking in any serious way about any kind of a solution.

The Republicans are trying to use a cudgel to make what is a very narrow point. And they can't even do that. Right. So a little bit ago, you and your fellow New York Congressman Richie Torres introduced the Stopping Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker Act. I believe that form is an interesting anagram. And that would require candidates to file additional information about their educational and employment backgrounds to the FEC. Where does that stand? Well, we've introduced it. As with many bills I'm learning in my first two months, there are hundreds of bills that are introduced every Congress. Very few of them get to the committee, even fewer get to the House floor. So we're working, you know, on it, trying to gather some support for it. The Democrats, of course,

do not control the House floor. The Speaker McCarthy does that. So it would be up to him if it were to ever come to the House floor. But, you know, the point of this, of filing this bill is because what we realize is so many of the egregious lies that George Santos told during his campaign, to deceive and defraud his voters in order to be elected to Congress are not actually violations of the law. Right. It is not a violation of campaign finance law to lie about your education, to lie about your employment, to lie about your military history. You have to certify that your financial disclosures and that your campaign finances are accurate and comply with the law, but you don't have to certify anything else. And so Congressman Torres and I filed an ethics complaint against Congressman Santos.

But that was focused solely on his financial disclosures and his campaign finances because that is the only thing that the law applies to among all of his lives. We also felt like that, you know, someone like George Santos should not be able to legally deceive his voters in the way that he did about his own personal background. Yeah, I mean, that would be nice. And I would like to actually thank you and Congressman Torres for keeping this ball rolling because it's starting to feel like Congressman Santos is going to do what a lot of grifters do and just sort of ride this out and hope it all goes away. And obviously I'm hoping that that turns out not to be the case. Well, we had a good reaction from the House Ethics Committee a couple weeks ago. One of the very first things they did after they organized themselves was to announce a a bipartisan investigation into our ethics complaint against Congressman Santos. And that's a very important first step for accountability. And I expect that we will continue to learn about more and more lies because there is no

question that this guy is a serial, pathological, sociopathic liar, but that there will be some accountability that's coming around the corner. That's fantastic. And I hope you're right. Before I let you go, Congressman, I have to ask you, I suppose last, last week, Tucker Carlson released his own little Tucker's cut of the January 6th tapes that he was given by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, in which he mainly tried to portray what happened on that day as a bunch of innocent little people who had just sort of wanted a tour of the Capitol and were

vacationing. What's your reaction to that? Well, as a prosecutor, I find it incredibly frustrating. and really disingenuous. You know, a jury is given an instruction by a judge in every trial that just because there may be some other evidence of innocence, that that doesn't negate evidence of criminality. And what Tucker Carlson showed and made the argument about is the equivalent of showing video of someone waking up, brushing his teeth, going to get breakfast, walking to the bank, and then cutting off the video before he pulls out a gun and goes in and robs the bank and say, see, most of the day was really peaceful until, of course, he went and robbed the bank.

So it is completely irrelevant that there may have been some of these same people who bludgeoned police officers or broke through the window or stormed the house floor, that they also were walking around the Capitol at different points. That is irrelevant to the fact that what they did was a riot and an insurrection and an effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And it is incredibly misleading and disingenuous to be making that argument using cherry-picked surveillance video. But that's exactly what Kevin McCarthy knew that he was doing. And he is playing into this effort to whitewash January 6th, which is especially galling. given his comments in the aftermath of January 6, where he clearly blamed the president for it, understood the seriousness and significance of it.

In fact, on January 6th, even reportedly called the president and told him that he needed to call off the rioters because he clearly felt unsafe himself. And so the fact that he's now playing into this political deception is truly shocking and unfortunately not surprising. Yeah. The reaction to Tucker's release of these tapes seems to have been kind of muted, which I guess is the best that anyone could have hoped for.

And look, I know there are people who are credulous enough to fall for the tactics that Tucker and his show used here. But I do think, and maybe I'm just being too hopeful, that the January 6th committee did a great job of showing the tapes of the actual bad stuff and getting those out there. and that that, you know, sort of mitigates some of the damage that Tucker is trying to do here.

You know, Andy, I would like to believe you are right, but I suspect that the people who watch the January 6th hearings are not the same people who watch Tucker Carlson. No, very true. And as long as Fox News is going to pretend to be a news organization while just continuing to funnel misinformation into their little ecosphere, we are going to have a significant. disconnect in America about what actual facts are. And that is something that we haven't quite figured out how to grapple with and deal with. I'm hoping that this Dominion lawsuit against Fox can help to provide some degree of accountability to Fox, but so far they've escaped it and

have only just continued to make more money, and which just incentivizes them to continue with their alternative universe of conspiracy theories and facts. But it is, you know, perhaps top five most serious issues that we're facing right now is that there isn't a uniform set of facts that everybody can then debate. Yeah, that is, I might put it top three. Congressman Dan Golden, thanks so much for coming on. And I appreciate all the work you're doing down there in the swamp itself. Thank you, Congressman. Thanks so much for having me. Great to be with you. Nothing is more abnormal than the rise of the radical right. Fever Dreams is a Daily Beast podcast, taking you inside the rights push to retake power,

from the Maga Acolytes to the straight-up grifters. They recently released their 100th episode, so there's no better time to listen. Head to beast. pub slash fever dreams to check it out. Dan Premack is a business editor at Axios, an author of the Daily Axios newsletter, Perrada, and he joins us now to talk about a big financial story you may be aware of. And welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So, Dan, obviously, my first question is,

what the hell were the Raiders thinking giving Jimmy Garapolo a three-year, a $67.5 million deal? I think it is Las Vegas. And if you win, like, at the slots, you're going to get to play quarterback for the Raiders. It's a pretty good prize. It is a pretty good prize.

Interesting. All right. Now I guess I have to talk about Silicon Valley Bank. So you wrote a piece on Sunday before the government stepped in, and your piece was called The Three Options for preventing a national banking crisis. And if I'm not mistaken, the one that we ended up with, which was the government backstopping deposits without a buyer for the bank itself, that was not what

you considered the best option. What were the others and why was this one lower on your list? The best option was for the government to find a buyer for Silicon Valley Bank. And Silicon Valley Bank, it's worth noting, it really has four parts. The commercial bank is the part that was in trouble. There also has a British unit, which is getting bought. It has a securities unit that kind of underwriting and it has a private wealth group, which is mostly because it bought something called Boston Private a couple years ago. Anyway, I felt that buying Silicon Valley Banker having an outsider, J.P. Morgan, Stanley, some other financial institution, PNC, was the best option because what that meant was that the private markets, the business community, had basically

taken care of its own problem as opposed to the federal government coming in and doing a backstop. And I know there's all sorts of debate about, you know, backstop versus bailout and taxpayer money versus not. The cleanest way to do this would have been to have someone just buy it. So that leads me to my next question, I have seen that the move that the government made jointly in a statement by the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the FDIC, I've seen it described as a, quote, bailout. I have also seen it described as, quote, not a bailout.

So which is correct here? There aren't like official capital markets definitions for these things. You know, a bailout slash backstop is kind of in the eye of the beholder. I mean, I think it is fair to describe it as either one. It is worth noting that the $25 billion, at least initially, that they announced on Sunday night is going to be used to make sure that all SVB depositors are made whole. That is not taxpayer money per se. That is money that is in a fund that actually other banks put into.

It's insurance essentially, banking industry insurance. Ultimately, in theory, taxpayers never have to pay because the Federal Reserve could just keep printing more and more money, right? The Fed is the lender of last resort. It can just keep printing money. But eventually that has an impact on taxpayers. is the difference between this, say, and what we saw in 2008, the bailout, the so-called TARP bailouts, that was something passed by Congress and was essentially a budgetary measure,

right? Literal taxpayer dollars were going to fund people on Wall Street. Right. And so why do you think, okay, so I guess this is a two-part question. Why do you think nobody stepped up to buy SVB? And did the government, I think I saw something, actually, you might have tweeted it, that the government said there was a potential buyer, but they shot it. down? There's been a lot of speculation about this. And really, the FDIC and the Treasury Department have

been very, very cagey about details of this. We know there was an auction. The bids were due apparently at 2 p.m. Eastern on Sunday. There's a senator, a Republican senator who said group of senators were told in an FDIC briefing that there was a bidder that the FDIC turned down. They didn't provide additional information on who that bidder was. We've heard speculation. There was a lot of so-called indicative interest. In other words, folks who were interested in bidding, but maybe didn't put in a final bid. And no one quite knows that Silicon Valley Bank is a really, really valuable asset to a large financial institution in the sense of it has really good relationships and a lot of goodwill with the tech and life sciences communities. It's the sort of thing that a big bank would kill to have.

And there's speculation, or I've kind of got a sense that perhaps one reason that a bid didn't come through was either that the White House was a little bit concerned about a big bank buying it, i.e. optics of a big bank getting bigger, or perhaps that the Fed or the FDIC wasn't willing to, for lack of a term, cover any liabilities. In other words, if you're, and I'm just going to keep using JPMorgan, if you're JPMorgan and you're looking at this and says, okay, we're interested in buying it, we think that it could be this price, which we all agree on. But what we don't know, because we've only had a day of due diligence, is if there's any huge skeletons in the closet, we haven't uncovered yet, because normally it would take us weeks or months to do a deal like this.

you federal government, you should give us liability protection in case there's a skeleton that jumps out because we're kind of doing this to help out the U.S. economy. And I don't believe they were able to get that. They got that on Bear Stearns back in 0809 and it became a lot of political blowback when some of those skeletons came out. Gotcha. So again, going back to this piece you wrote and correct me if I'm wrong, you thought the best option would be if a buyer stepped in and the federal government didn't have to backstop anything. And then the second best option would be if a buyer stepped in, but the federal government also said, we're going to backstop this. And hopefully that would make it easier to sell, I assume. Correct. Yeah, that was number two was government steps in and does a backstop what it did on Sunday night. And then a buyer shows up because now, you know, you don't have all the deposit risk,

et cetera. Number three, which was number three is what we've gotten, at least as of this moment, which is the government stepped in. They did a backstop, but no buyer has emerged. It's still possible one will. It's not outside the realm of possibility. but as of now, there is not one. Okay, that was my next question. How long is there that another buyer could step in? Or is at this point, you know, at what point is this bank just not an entity anymore? There's a bunch we don't know.

We do not know how many deposits walked out the door of Silicon Valley Bank either last Friday before the FDIC seized it or today. We know $42 billion left on Thursday. I'm told a ton left Friday morning in the first couple hours of banking. And then we don't know what happened today. So it's hard to say exactly what. is left there, except that there are a lot of employees and good bankers there. Silicon Valley Bank employed thousands of people, and the FDIC, as it does, didn't fire everyone. They fired the executive

team, but a lot of those bankers have been asked to stay on for at least 45 days because, you know, the FDIC is a smart organization, but it doesn't know how all of SVB works. It doesn't know how the clients, et cetera. So it has a lot of people who are still working there. And those relationships Matter. Ultimately, a startup, do business with a place like SVB, often because they know an individual banker and they have a relationship. So there is still value just to the people. That's really interesting. To piggyback off something you said in terms of what's still there, I have seen some people blaming this whole thing on Peter Thiel because his founders fund seems to have been, I don't know if it was the first to pull its money from SVB or among the first.

I got to say, as much as I generally loathe him, this strikes me as maybe a bit unfair to him. Am I wrong, which believe me I would be happy to be? I'm sympathetic to both sides of this debate. I understand why people are criticizing Teal and there was a bunch of other firms. Like they've gotten a lot of attention. But for what it's worth, they didn't go out and publicly say this. They did it privately. It's not like, you know, they put out a blog post saying, everybody pull your money. That never happened. They privately said to a bunch of their portfolio companies, get out. And the reality is, they were right. Now, you could say it was reinforcing. If they don't say it, then they're wrong. But the truth is, on Saturday and Sunday morning, companies that hadn't pulled out were panicked because they couldn't access their money.

And until Sunday night, didn't know if they'd be able to make payroll on Wednesday, pay their rent, pay their Amazon Web Services bill. Basically, they could have all been insolvent. Companies that shouldn't be, right? Companies that it's not bad management if you put your money in the bank. Like, that's what they did. So I'm kind of sympathetic. I think Teal and, you know, founders fund and the other venture capital firms, their job is to look out for, for their companies and indirectly their investments in those companies and they have their own investors.

It was the prudent thing to do. I would say that on Sunday morning, the companies who had pulled their money out of Silicon Valley Bank and put it somewhere else, say like JP Morgan or Wells Fargo or Bank of America, they were feeling a lot more confident than the other ones were. Yeah. So, you know, everyone talks about, well, this was a bank run and Teal kind of started it. But as you said, I absolutely have loathing for him, but what is he supposed to do in a situation where, you know, he and his fund have decided, oh, our money is not safe there. I don't

know what they're supposed to do. I don't either. And I'll say, look, there are some folks in Silicon Valley, some venture capitalists who are kind of like hold the line. You have to understand, Silicon Valley Bank has been around for decades. It's been talked about how they got so big recently, which is true. But they've been around for decades. And one of the reasons they're so beloved by so many, not everyone, they're bankers. They have sharp elbows. But one of the reasons they're beloved by a lot is when you're a real startup, you know, two people with a business plan, Silicon Valley Bank would open the door to you. You could get an account there. The big banks wouldn't return your calls. So there is a lot of affinity. And so there were certain venture capitalists who were like, you know, don't turn your back on SVB. And I think some of those folks were sincere. I will say, though, I'm fairly certain that there's some people who on Twitter were saying that. But privately, we're saying their portfolio companies, if not pull all your money, pull some of it. Make sure you've got, you know, take some money out. Make sure you can make payroll next week. Right. Along those lines, so generally the FDIC insures accounts are up to $250,000. In this case, my understanding is that accounts larger than that will also be made whole.

What is the reasoning here? Could this have unforeseen consequences? And could you make an argument that if the government is going to fully restore accounts over $250,000 in cases like this, that there's no point in having that be the FDIC limit anymore? On your last point, yes. On the first point, the reason to do it is that you would have had Just so many second order effects, right? If you have hundreds, maybe thousands of companies that otherwise should be solvent, suddenly not be able to make pay, basically go bankrupt, right? Because if you can't pay your employees and you can't pay your rent and hell, you can't even,

you know, pay for the, I don't know if you're making something, you can't pay for supplies or vendors, you disappear. Like you hear all the time, you know, startup X raised $30 million. Now if they have zero, there's no startup X anymore unless their venture capitalists put more money in. So, I mean, that's the reason to do it was to, honestly, was to project jobs and companies and really an entire ecosystem, which is technology, is life sciences, and really is nationwide. SVB is Silicon Valley Bank, but they're all over the place and they make loans all over the

place. So that's the reason to do it. There is for sure, though, so-called moral hazard from what has happened here. And the moral hazard isn't only about FDIC deposits in the future, but it's also potentially saying to bank executives, hey, look, go and take more risk. Because one of the problems here was that SVB offered very, very high interest rates to certain clients to kind of bring them in the door as kind of a carrot. And that's a risky thing to do. But if you're being told that your depositors will always be safe, you might not be right. The bank could go under. There could be a bank run.

You might lose your stock value, et cetera. But if the depositors are always safe, it could encourage some people to take higher risks, which is a problem. And so really, this now gets punted over to Congress and the White House to figure out how to fix. this and really how to see the problem at SVB, which was really a risk management problem, how to identify that earlier. You know, the San Francisco Fed, who is the regulator of SVB, didn't seem to see the problem. There were some banking regulation rollbacks under the Trump administration, which, you know, SVB had actually advocated for those rollbacks. There is a decent case that perhaps had that not happened. This would not have happened. But like, there's

definitely a moral hazard. Congress is going to have to deal with this, whether this Congress can deal with an actual serious bank regulation problem. Like, I wouldn't bet on that. But, you know, I can, you know, I can be, you know, a hopeless optimist, I guess. Sure, of course. But also, I want to ask you about the flip side of that is if depositors are now sort of under the belief that, oh, I'm going to get all my money back. It's not just going to be $250,000. Does that discourage kind of diversifying where you do business with? Yes and no. I mean, in the short term, yes. But that's That was kind of the point, right? One of the big fears from the Fed, there was two fears. There was the concern about what would happen if companies couldn't get their money today. That was one fear.

The other fear, though, was that people in other banks, particularly small or mid-sized banks, would all pull their money today. And what you would end up having, and they would all put it in the biggest banks, in the J.P. Morgan, in the Goldman Sachs of the world. And what you would basically have is the destruction today of the regional banks, community banks, and even mid-sized banks like PNC and Bank of New York Mellon, things like that. So the FDIC was telling people that. Now, that said, they're kind of pledging this quasi-insurance for 12 months. So it makes sense for diversification still. But what they were able, it seems to push off, was massive bank runs today. And you and I having a conversation about, you know, all the banks that went, you know, under today.

And the FDIC is seizing, you know, 50 banks. Right. Along those lines, a bank here in New York, signature bank, which I gather does a lot of stuff with the cryptocurrency industry, was also shut down on Sunday. was mentioned in this same joint release about the backstopping of the Silicon Valley accounts that the Treasury Department, the Fed, and the FDIC put out. And it felt like it was almost like an afterthought. It was like, oh, by the way, we're also doing this. Yeah. And people like me didn't realize that was coming. Right. There was some kind of, I don't even mean PR, but kind of like argument value. So one of the things about Silicon Valley Bank that people had been debating was, is it really systemic risk, right? Because the Fed and the FDIC, the Fed was only supposed to step in if there was

systemic risk. Well, if you have two banks, one in the West Coast and one in New York, and they're both going under, that feels like systemic risk. And you know, you had something called Silvergate last week, which was kind of a crypto bank, I wonder. So I think it gave them a little bit of cover on systemic risk. And there are lots of questions still about signature. One thing that's interesting about it is Barney Frank of Dodd-Frank fame is on the board of that. He's been arguing today that he doesn't think the bank needed to be seized, that this was really, you know, pushback against crypto, more than against signature per se, but that obituary hasn't completely been written yet. Interesting. So Senator Bernie Sanders put out a statement saying, quote, let's be clear,

the failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump, which I think you alluded to weakened Dodd-Frank a little bit, is what he says true. In part, but not completely. I mean, the bank still had oversight. The San Francisco Fed's job, in large part, is to oversee the banks in its region. Silicon Valley Bank was there. It didn't see this problem. And candidly, the people inside the bank didn't seem to see the problem until about two weeks ago or maybe a week and a half ago. It wasn't an obvious problem. It's possible that if there hadn't been rollback, there would have been a little bit more oversight, perhaps by the Treasury Department. But again, the Fed should have been

paying attention. It really wasn't. And what's most, I think, important here, the rollback was about these so-called stress tests. And this came in after the financial crisis. And the idea, very generally, of a stress test is, okay, you have this bank. It has a balance sheet. It has all these assets. It's what if there's a massive macro shock to the system, like something like a 9-11 or a war or a massive hurricane or some financial contagion? Like what happens then? No stress test can stop a bank run. A bank run can't be stopped by a government unless the government does what the FDIC does, which is walk in and shut down the bank. And the analogy I've given to this is like go to a Taylor Swift concert, right?

There's a lot of security that makes sure that some crazy concert goer doesn't jump up and like attack Taylor's. Swift or member of the band, right? You know, you got those big guys in front of the stage. But if 50,000 people in the crowd all decide at the same time they would like to go up on stage, they're going to get up on stage. It doesn't matter how much security you've got. Right. Talk about these bank runs. Is part of the problem that a bank run is much easier now than it was even, say, 10 years ago because of technology, because everyone can kind of sit there on their phones and move all of their money out of a bank in 10 seconds or whatever. You don't have to go into the bank, you don't have to talk to a teller. It just can be done really quickly. So if people start doing it,

there's almost no way to stop it now. Yeah, that's true. And I'd say technology in two ways. One, as you said, things can be done via apps and stuff, although generally speaking, if you're talking about corporate accounts, it's still wire transfers, et cetera. You usually have to speak to an actual person. Okay. You don't have to physically go into a branch, though, and you know, pull your money out. The other thing, though, is the social media piece of this, right? Which is that the fact that a bank run is happening gets amplified much, much quicker. It's not just like, you know, if this was in the mid-1980s, someone calls someone who calls someone and it's literally a game of telephone and that happened or you know you'd see 50 people lined up outside the bank. In this case though, one person tweets something, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people can see that within minutes and then they say, I'm pulling my money too and then hundreds of thousands of people can see that. And I'll tell you from a reporting standpoint on Thursday at about 1 p.m. Eastern time. I was having a conversation with two colleagues and we were debating whether or not we could call us a bank run because we on the outside don't have any visibility into there's no real time. tallying of what's happening with deposits inside a bank. We on the outside can't see that. So what I simply

did was I tweeted out, hey, does anybody know of anybody pulling their money out of SVB today? My DMs are open. I got flooded with people who told me they were pulling their money out quickly. So like really, within me just tweeting that, within about five minutes, I said to my colleagues, there's a bank run. How much of that do you think was caused by you tweeting that? Not much. These were people who had been pulling their money out, but one thing that we learned about it. And I started seeing this a little bit on Twitter, and this contributed to this also, SVB was so overwhelmed by people pulling their money out that the transfers were going slowly. You should be able to get a wire transfer very, very quickly, almost in real time. It was taking hours. And when you read, hey, I tried to get my money out at 11 a.m.

It's 1 o'clock and I haven't gotten it yet. Well, that makes you want to go get your money out too. Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Okay. My exit question for you is on a scale of zero to zero, with zero being the lowest and zero being the highest, how much of SVB's failure do you blame on wokeness? I will put that at zero. Okay. That was the low one, right? Zero was low.

I'll put that stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stuff. Yeah. Dumb. That is becoming, though, I mean, as I'm sure you've seen, that's becoming a big talking point on the right now. It has. And we also have learned that, that wokeness apparently has now extended to many things. So actually, here, I'll put it at five, and here's why.

SVB's main problem was it invested in long-dated treasuries. So T-bills perhaps are now considered woke. And if you consider T-bills to be woke, then yes, this was because of wokeness. It's just unbelievable the world we live in. Dan Permanak, thank you so much for being here and explaining all of this. Please come back anytime. Thanks for having me. Andy Levy.

Danielle Moody. Who is your fuck-that guy to start out this good, good week? So my fuck-that guy is both a person and a network. And the person is Jim Kramer and the network is CNBC. Look, as I said earlier in the show, I am not the most economically savvy or financially savvy guy in the world. And even I know that James Kramer has become a punchline for people doing the opposite of what he says. And last month, he said Silicon Valley Bank, he recommended it as a buy. that people should buy stock in Silicon Valley Bank at $320 a share.

Probably as you're listening to this, that bank is no more. It has been shut down by regulators. And this is what he does. So he gets a fuck you for just apparently giving the worst advice of any possible financial advisor in the world. But I think my bigger fuck you is to see NBC for continuing to employ this guy. It's like, what are you doing? Like you are supposed to be a network. that sort of guides people correctly, one would hope, as to how to invest or, you know,

give them the proper strategies for investment and let them know what's going on in the world. You employ a guy who, again, is literally a punchline. He is a punchline. I didn't know this, but right before we went to air, Jesse Cannon, our producer told me that there is a Twitter account, a bot, I think, that just picks the opposite of everything that Jim Kramer says. and apparently substantially out earns him with its picks. So why do you have that guy in the air? I understand, you know, he's been around for forever and he hosts this show Mad Money that I guess is a popular show on CNBC because people find him to be an entertaining guy.

But is that your point? Is that, again, this gets into Fox News territory. Like, is your point to entertain or is your point to enlighten people and inform people? And with Fox News, we. We know it's not to inform people. It's an entertainment channel for people who like to have their priors confirmed. But CNBC is not supposed to be that. And this, you know, particular show and this particular guy seems to be exactly that.

This is just a guy who is wrong far more often than he's right. And the fact that they continue to employ him and he's out there telling people to invest in a bank that literally is now a month later shut down by state and federal. regulators and that there's now a whole crisis around and the federal government has had to step in to reimburse the depositors in this bank and a month ago he was recommending people buy this stock. So fuck that guy and fuck that guy, fuck that network for just continuing to employ him and for putting entertainment above the financial interests of its viewers. I mean, they put ad dollars above everything else and I know that we're-

talking about CNBC and not Fox, but Rupert Murdoch pretty much speaks for all television executives. When he says that it's not about the red, it's not about the blue, it's about the green. So if his show brings in the ratings, which brings in the ad dollars, then he going to have show. It doesn't matter whether or not a chicken can pick a better fucking rundown of stocks than he can. You know, the chicken's TikTok will probably blow up. But like until they employ them at CNBC, like he'll have a job and he'll be safe. Yeah, it is amazing. I just found the Twitter account.

It's called Kramer Tracker. Inverse Kramer is the name of the ETH. Yeah, and Inverse Kramer. And its little bio says tracking the stock recommendations of Jim Kramer so you can do the opposite. Wow. It's just unbelievable. Anyway, who is your fuck that guy, Daniel? I mean, I can go and kind of do the same, which is a person and also a network.

So staying on cable news, and I use news in quotation marks when talking about Fox, they continue to have fallout of the treasure trove of text exchanges and email exchanges that were happening between top Fox executives and their producers about the stolen election and their lies thereof talking about the stolen election and having the likes of Sidney Powell on air. So former producer for Tucker Carlson, Alex Fifer, when responding to Rock, Shah, who is a Fox executive, and they're going back and forth about how the claims that Sidney Powell is making, quote, might want to address this, but this stuff is so fucking insane, vote rigging to the tune of millions. Come on. This is what Raj Shah, a Fox executive, wrote.

Then to that response, Alex Pfeiffer says this, which is just like, it's so crazy. He responds and says, quote, it is so insane, but our viewers believe it. so addressing again how her stupid, her being Sidney Powell, stupid Venezuela affidavit isn't proof might insult them. Then he goes on to say, it's like negotiating with terrorists, but especially dumb ones. Cousin fucking types, not Saudi royalty.

Oh my God. Wow. I mean, it is just, They think so fucking little of the people who have them raking in millions of dollars. And what is so fascinating about this is that they're also terrified of their fucking audience. This monster, this like massive MAGA fucking monster that they've created by inundating them with the lies and literally turning their brains into white supremac mush. at the same time are responsible for what these people are doing, the actions that they're taking, and then want to turn around and say, cousin fucking types, not Saudi royalty.

Only the best fucking people. That's all I got to say. So for that fucking Alex Pfeiffer, Raj Shah, the entire Fox fucking network, fuck you, all of you. You're disgusting. And you know what? no one will be held accountable for any of this shit that's happening. I wish that the money that Dominion was seeking in damages was coming out of these fucking people's pockets. Because maybe then they would learn a lesson and set an example for people moving forward who are actual journalists

to mind what the fuck they say. Yeah. I mean, look, never in history has a grifter had respect for their mark. And that's what this is. I mean, this is a network of grifters right now. This is the Fox Grift channel, FGC, as a lot of people are calling it. And their viewers are their marks. And they know that. And of course they don't respect their viewers because grifters don't respect their marks. That's the whole point of grifting is you're taking advantage. You're trying to find the easiest marks you can and take advantage of them.

And that's what they're doing. So, yeah, I mean, fuck all those guys. Alex Fyfer, I guess, left the network. I would be curious to know if he left because he couldn't take it anymore or if it was another reason. I don't know. CNN. I know a friend of my job.

Who knows? Maybe. Yeah. I don't know. But yeah, that's how drifting works. And the marks never realized they're the marks until it's too late, if then. And that's exactly what the Fox News viewers are. Cousin fucking types.

That's all I got to say. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts.

If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and science. Sign up today.