The Majority Report with Sam Seder - 3561 - Trump's DC Occupation; Democrats Recalibrate Partisan Politics w/ David Weigel

Episode Date: August 15, 2025

It's Casual Friday on the Majority Report: On today's show: DC residents are fed up with the federal occupation and the resistance in the streets is growing nightly. David Weigel from Semafor joins us to discuss the last week's the DC occupation, Netroots conference, right wing media, and the failures of the Democratic party. In the Fun Half: The white house posts a propaganda video showing 20+ federal troops arresting a man in his apartment showing a dramatic waste of resources and personnel just for a fascist TikTok clip. Zohran Mamdani continues to put Andrew Cuomo not that it is very difficult. Hakeem Jeffries still refuses to endorse Zohran Mamdani. All that and more plus calls and IMs The Congress switchboard number is [phone]. You can use this number to connect with either the U.S. Senate or the House of Representatives. Become a member at JoinTheMajorityReport.com: https://fans.fm/majority/join Follow us on TikTok here: https://www.tiktok.com/@majorityreportfm Check us out on Twitch here: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport Find our Rumble stream here: https://rumble.com/user/majorityreport Check out our alt YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/majorityreportlive Gift a Majority Report subscription here: https://fans.fm/majority/gift Subscribe to the ESVN YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/esvnshow Subscribe to the AMQuickie newsletter here: https://am-quickie.ghost.io/ Join the Majority Report Discord! https://majoritydiscord.com/ Get all your MR merch at our store: https://shop.majorityreportradio.com/ Get the free Majority Report App!: https://majority.fm/app Go to https://JustCoffee.coop and use coupon code majority to get 10% off your purchase Check out today's sponsors TUSHY: Get 10% off TUSHY with the code TMR at https://hellotushy.com/TMR FAST GROWING TREES: Get 15% off your first purchase.  FastGrowingTrees.com/majority SUNSET LAKE: Head on over to Sunset LakeCBD.com and remember to use code BIRTHDAY for 25% off sitewide. This sale ends at midnight on August 17th. Follow the Majority Report crew on Twitter: @SamSeder @EmmaVigeland @MattLech Check out Matt’s show, Left Reckoning, on YouTube, and subscribe on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/leftreckoning Check out Matt Binder’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/mattbinder Subscribe to Brandon’s show The Discourse on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse Check out Ava Raiza’s music here! https://avaraiza.bandcamp.com/ The Majority Report with Sam Seder – https://majorityreportradio.com

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Do yourself a favor. Great for company and also great for Brian over the weekend. Love them. All right, folks. Now it's time for the show. The Majority Report with Sam Cedar. We are every day's casual Friday. That means Monday is casual Monday.

Tuesday, casual Tuesday. Wednesday, casual hump day. Thursday, casual thurs. That's what we call it. And Friday, casual Shabbat. The majority report with Sam Cedar. It is Friday. August 15th, 2025.

My name is Sam Cedar. This is the five-time award-winning majority report. We are broadcasting live steps from the industrially ravaged Gowanus Canal in the heartland of America, downtown Brooklyn, USA. On the program today, Dave Weigel, author, journalist. covering politics at Semaphore, formerly at Washington Post and Slate Magazine on this week in the news, also on the program today, Trump to meet Putin in Alaska to suss out kickbacks for himself and also maybe deal with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Meanwhile, in D.C. Pam Bondi says the,

the DEA chief, now emergency D.C. police chief, and D.C. no longer a sanctuary city. Meanwhile, the D.C. Attorney General and mayor say Bondi can say that, but it's not so as they sue the Trump regime. California, Gavin Newsom launches a California gerrymander campaign as Texas Dems still holding firm RFK Jr. appears to be asking what he can do for pesticide manufacturers.

Trump appointed federal judge rules the Department of Education attempt to bar diversity programs illegal. PBS slashes budgets by 21% as Prager You wants to replace it in classrooms.

Costco bails on selling abortion pills. Greedflation is back as corporate profits soar amid a tariff inflation shield. Trump officially rolls back Biden's DOJ, FTC, antitrust protections. Trump polling in the toilet. He's down dramatically with young men and Medicaid recipients. And it turns out the meta-chatbot, it's okay with romantic and sensual overtures to 13-year-olds. All this and more on today's Majority Report. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen.

It is casual Friday. Yes, it is. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Hello, hello. Hello. We got a lot to get to I am just like three days away from

vacation and that is what I'm really thinking about I understand I thought like I had to get that off my chest You can't wait for a break I mean it's you know We won't rest We won't rest I'm incidentally I'm spending my vacation

protesting outside of Chuck Schumer's house. There's a lot in the news today. I don't know if people have been watching this, but there are essentially armored vehicles driving through Washington, D.C. It's not a parade, at least not an official one. Let's start with this clip, maybe folks have seen this

he's gone viral as the sandwich man it turns out he is former air force former DOJ and um he uh was basically getting in the face of some of these um

occupiers of DC military occupiers of DC and very um I mean maybe stylistically people have an issue, but I think when you offer an officer like a cup of coffee or a donut or a sandwich, it seems like you're doing a nice thing. Apparently they took issue

with it. How else you get a sandwich at the wee hours of night? Exactly. This is clip number seven. I want to give you food. Are you hungry? Really, Reno 911. It is amazing. Seven guys running after him. I mean, just a great sense of hospitality. That's D.C. hospitality for you.

You got to get food and drinks for folks. Well, it turns out, they were obviously, pretty upset because they had specifically requested their bread be toasted. And when the guy shows up, it's not toasted, he get pissed. They charged him with a felony. And a judge threw it out, I guess, yesterday or last evening, basically saying, no, it's not a felony. Assault to... The judge threw it right in his chest.

Exactly. So good for him, but here is other residents of Washington, D.C., greeting this sort of array of National Guard and federal, I don't know, prison guards and DEA and FBI all geared up, apparently, to hand out traffic violations or what not um here is uh watch this clip here's a real cop he has a badge he has a real cop that's a real fuck no he's not a real cop

he's not a real cop Oh! Oh! has been booed at work, that sucks. And the community seems very happy to have them there. That is two nights ago, and the size has, like, tripled of the crowds

too, like last night. They're out now just, yes, protesting. Now, you guys played the Mark Wayne Mullen stuff yesterday, right? No. You didn't? We played a... No, we didn't. I don't think that had happened yet. Oh. He's not afraid. He doesn't buckle himself in.

Oh, we got to get, we got to pull that for later in program but here is uh james comer uh arguing that uh washington dc is just the beginning and we should say he said this yesterday on news max right around the time that pam bondi um claim that she had the authority to fire the police chief to put the uh head of the dea in as the acting police chief and that she could unilaterally decide after the dc city council had voted to make dc a sanctuary city, that she could unilaterally decide it's no longer a sanctuary city. This is in court today. But here is James Comer saying he wants to do this all over the place.

Carjacking. We have people mugging people at all hours of the day, and it's out of control. So the president had to send in the National Guard. And I think that you've seen just in the last 24 hours a huge decline in crime. and we're going to support this, we're going to support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C. And again, it's unfortunate, but we spend a lot on our military. Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the street, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that's what the president's doing.

Is that what the troops have been doing, just walking around different cities across the globe and reducing? reducing crime. I mean, tell that to... Yeah, we reduce crime in Afghanistan. We reduce a lot of crime in Iraq by killing us to a million people. They just walk around of those bobby hats, actually. But the, I mean, what's... There's a couple of things here. Obviously, um, a week ago,

crime was down 26% year over year. And a reminder, last year was a 30 year low in violent crime in Washington, D.C. So it's down 26% from its 30-year low from last year. So I don't know what it's dropped to in the past two days. But that would be pretty impressive if it had dropped even that much more because you're just crime is at a below a 30-year, longer than a 30-year low in D.C. at least. And across the country, I mean, violent crime has declined. when comparing January through May, 2024 to 2025, by nearly 11%, property crime over 12%. This is a national trend, as James Comer talks about, taking this police state stuff national.

And we should say, you know, for the 20 years that James Comer talks about, I know that there have been eras where we have been saying, this is a problem. This is going to blowback. The military equipment, there was a program during the Bush years to sell extra military equipment to police departments. The idea that now we're talking about deploying military to city streets around the country, it's sort of the culmination of what the Republican Party has been doing for 20 years. And we should also note that the Democrats, have also failed in this accord. Put up, do we have that graph of how people think crime is? Yeah. Put this up. This is sort of stunning.

It shows, and we'll probably reference this again later, but it shows that since 1990, that's the question, since 1990, do you, um, has crime increased since 1990? Since 1990, would you say murder rates in U.S. cities have? That's the prompt. Right. And 34% say increased a lot. 20% say increased a little. That's 54%. 9% say stay the home. so we're at six it stayed about the same that's 63 the fact of the matter is and then 12 percent decreased a little uh nine percent decreased a lot those nine percent are the only people who got this right murder rates in u.s cities have decreased dramatically since

1990 i mean dramatically yeah and um no one seems to know it and part of that is because the media if it bleeds it leads and there's a value to being able to show heinous crimes and push crime in news you see sort of like you know even if they're not doing it for ideological reasons local news does it because it's titillating

but this is a failure of Democrats afraid to sort of like be pegged as being soft on crime. They can't even bring themselves to tell the truth about what's happening with crime and take credit even though maybe, I mean, personally, I think it was the

getting rid of leaded gasoline. There's a lot of evidence that that had a lot to do with it. But regardless, there is a perfectly compelling position to stake out here, and Democrats don't do that. Even the mayor of D.C., her

first reaction was like, well, we could use a couple of more, a hundred more cops because of cuts to our budget. The instinctive move of Democrats to sort of be afraid of being seen as soft on crime instead of just telling Americans the truth that, like, we live in a pretty safe country and your cities are pretty safe overall. This is a failure of Democrats. Yeah. And when you talk about how Republicans lead the press and get what they want out there and the Democrats only react, that that's one of the dynamics at play here. But it's not just the traditional media.

Like we talked to Gilderan about the network state and how these big tech Silicon Valley overlords are obsessed with the idea of cleansing our cities, of homeless people, of crime. in their viewpoint. They led their recall against Chesa Boudin. Yeah. And they are pumping propaganda about urban crime that's heavily racialized to the top of people's social media feeds. And that's a huge reason why the Republicans see an opportunity with this narrative and that the Democrats also just have been so cowardly on it.

It's not just the traditional media covering these stories either. A lot of this stuff is even less verifiable. and sometimes staged, but it has this corrosive effect on people's opinion about urban centers, even though when we see that per capita, violent crime is higher in redder, more rural states and their city areas. All right, we're going to take a quick break in a moment. We'll be talking to Dave Weigel. First, a couple of words from our sponsors. We're headed into fall.

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I don't know. I don't know. We are back, Sam Cedar, Emma Vigland on the Majority Report. It is casual Friday. I want to welcome back to the program. Dave Weigel, author, journalist covering politics at Semaphore. Dave, welcome back to the program. It's good to be back.

I'm looking at my window at Occupy, D.C., which looks exactly like it did last week, but now it's safe. I did. I don't know if you have a car or not, but do you drive around without a seatbelt on because you're worried about a carjacking? No, because just statistically you're more likely to be in a car crash than get carjacked, so why would I do that? Oh, well, because you're obviously not set material. It's because you love violent crime. I've heard you signaling over here. Actually, let's play this clip right now because it's obviously because you're not a senator. And here's Mark Wayne Mullen revealing that he doesn't understand that dynamic of the chances of him being in an accident are far greater than being carjacked.

Pop this up. And by the way, I'm not joking when I say this. I drive around in Washington, D.C., in my Jeep, and yes, I do drive myself, and I don't buckle up. And the reason why I don't buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to. They can raise their eyebrows at me again is because of carjacking. I don't want to be stuck in my vehicle when I need to exit in a hurry because I got a seatbelt around me. And I wear my seatbelt all the time, but in Washington, D.C., I do not because it is so prevalent of carjacking. And I don't want the same thing happen to me

What's happened to a lot of people That work on the Hill And by the way I mean, isn't there something so uniquely American About buying a Jeep like a big Jeep And being a real tough guy Didn't he challenge Was it Sean O'Brien to a fight on the Senate floor

But he's so afraid of seeing black people in D.C. They can't wear a seatbelt That's what the, that's Republicanism Together, they're both incredibly tough But also so, so weak and scared Well, I'm torn on the carjacking stuff because, not his approach, that's silly, but there was a carjacking problem in D.C. that spiked a couple years ago, it still does happen. It happens sometimes. We're not going to live in minority report. You prevent all crime. The issue is just basically a procedural issue where the city raised the age for trying juveniles, a lot of juvenile. were just recommitting this crime because they weren't being tried as adults. And the city already has been changing that.

And so the goofy thing about this, this whole discourse, many goofy things. One is just that the city had been rolling back some of the reforms that they didn't have a press conference to say, sorry, we went too far. But there was a carjacking problem. It has been getting better. But you do hear when this kind of take comes out that just there should never be any crime whatsoever in the city, which is hard to do. That sounds great.

Very hard to pull that off. being terrified of a city when a certain kind of crime is decreasing, I guess that's human nature, but why brag about it? It's just one of the things that evolutionary traits in our brain that we over-worry about things that aren't likely to happen to us. But I'm not what the people say it doesn't happen, don't worry about it. It just, there are ways to fix it. If sending the National Guard to areas where carjacking is not happening is not fixing carjacking,

that's been the craziness this week of the mismatch of this visual. TV response and the problems D.C. has actually been dealing with. And the, the, the fascinating thing to me, too, is just the absolute fear of, of cities that is just not warranted. And the idea that, A, they could cut a billion dollars, a billion dollars from D.C.'s operating budget and then send in the military ostensibly to make things safe. I don't know if they're going to permanently occupy D.C. They don't, the statutorily, they don't seem to have any authority whatsoever to do that. What is the sense that you're hearing down there in terms of like,

are there any national Democrats that are saying, hey, this is a bad idea? this is ridiculous um i know that the attorney general for dc has sued now uh to basically say like and that the mayor and the the attorney general are saying the dc police chief is still the dc police chief do not listen to like what happens in that situation do they have a sometimes standoff their power is well you have officers of the law taking orders from somebody else told it takes over for somebody else. What they asked for in D.C. was a temporary restraining order so that the police chief is in charge while until a court rules. And everything's following the same pattern. So there's the DC, you file a lawsuit, you get a panel of three

judges. If there are Trump judges, they'll usually find some reason why actually what Trump did is fine. That happened five minutes ago with the CFPB layoffs. If you get Katsis and Rao, you know they're going to say, actually, we read it, we read the Constitution. Trump is fine. about it. And then you go on Bonk and try to get the whole circuit, and then they go to the Supreme Court. Same thing. But if you're lucky, you get a restraining order, and she's in charge, the police juice in charge again. But you're getting it, the way Trump was trying to divide Democrats in the city, which was pretty effective, and how he's overreaching because it's more politically advantageous for him to just make it look like Democrats are crazy and they can't

run the city. So he understood that in D.C., there's the mayor of Muriel Ball, and there's the council. The council has been more progressive on crime than the mayor. One example is the city decriminalized fair evasion because of studies that said, oh, it was hitting black youth more than white people. She was against that. She vetoed it. They passed it again. And she felt vindicated because actually fair evasion went up much more than expected. The city ended up building gates, things like that. She has been more amenable to tough on crime policies than a lot of Democrats. And he knows. that. I mean, yes, she presided over the Black Lives Matter

Bureau, but then she presided over getting rid of it. So Trump understood her if somebody he could manipulate. And she initially, at the start of the week, was criticizing the takeover, but saying they could work with it. So she has this community meeting, a virtual community meeting on Tuesday, where she says, we actually could use more cops. To your point, the house just kind of out of spite cut a billion dollars of taxpayer funding. D.C. for taxpayers

paid the billion dollars. It's in the federal budget because of the crazy home rule situation. And the House just said, well, we're cutting everything. So, ha, ha, we don't trust you. We're cutting it. She was trying to navigate around that. And how she did was not cutting policing. She cut a bunch of social programs instead of policing.

Bowser's message has been, I love cops. They're great. I want more. Give me more money for cops. Her reaction to the takeover is, you're sending more resources. Great. But our police chief is willing to work with you. You're undermining our sanctuary city policy.

Great. I, Muriel Bowser, don't like the sanctuary policy. And he started a divide, I wouldn't say effectively because it's been pretty chaotic every day. What they're doing now is just it's kind of stunting on them and saying, well, we all know these people can't run anything. So Pam Bondi's going to run it now. And the DEA is going to run it now. And we're going to just send you're going to have to fight us in court for the ability to run this. The premise being, and this is the premise of everything in Republican politics right now, the premise being that liberals ruin their cities and we need to take over because you're all idiots.

that is that is through gerrymandering that is that is the premise of gerrymandering that you guys deserve fewer seats because you can't control yourselves we need to wipe out the kansas city seat we need to wipe out the nashville seat etc that's the premise here uh you guys can't run it so we're going to send the military in and we expect there to be no backlash also there definitely won't be a backlash if you guys can't win the house that's and so the national democratic response i i get into the bowser one because it's a little more complicated the national democratic response i think uh not muddled it just wasn't have been very effective. It's, hey, D.C. deserve statehood, don't take it over, and the crime has been going down. Democrats have actually been clashing more with, let's say, the pundit clas than with Republicans, because you see in pundits who talk about D.C., they'll say, well, they shouldn't say crimes going down because it's actually, it's actually still pretty bad. Yeah, obviously, crime's bad. Sorry. We all agree that there is too much crime. And it's tough for Democrats to get their tiny megaphones into this conversation. what there's it's the argument is hey we all agree crimes bad the city's been trying to reduce it

the city needs the money that people paid for it to reduce it don't take it over if it's translated on tv as democrats don't think crime's a problem uh then i guess they lose that argument but there's many arguments they lose because they try to explain themselves and it just gets mangled on tv so do you think that um this is going to so it trumps overreaching and is actually like sort of a move past where the point of the wedge issue was, at least within the context of D.C., do you think, have you seen any evidence that there's anybody in D.C. who, Democrats, who are saying this is why we need statehood. Like, ultimately, because that's really the best thing that Democrats can get out of this is that they actually use this as a leverage point. to, in the event that they get into a position of power over the next two to four years, really, I guess, you know, four years or so, D.C. statehood is on the table, and there is a real clear need

or understanding why you would need D.C. statehood. Yes, that's another thing Democrats are very comfortable saying they support, there is no Democrat I'm aware of in the Congress who doesn't support statehood. When the bill comes up, they vote for it. The problem has been you need 60 votes in the Senate, and then you know you're going to get constitutional challenges on it. And there are some Democrats who, because they know the constitutional challenges, you're coming, say, well, what's the point doing this? The closest they came was there was a bill that would have expanded the House by two seats in 2009 when Utah had grown fast enough that they correctly said they deserved another seat because the census had not captured their population growth.

And it was going to be one more seat for Utah, one more seat for D.C., pass in the House, just, and this is you can go back and litigate the Obama years and how they didn't leverage their power effectively. If they could go back in time, if Democrats would go back in time and knew it was coming, would they have banned gerrymender and given D.C. statehood, I think probably. I think even Joe Lieberman probably would have been negotiated with on that. But in lieu of that, yeah, every Democrats in favor of this. and so the bowser i'm kind of simplifying it by saying the bowser position but they're in the bowser position other democrats the bowser take the the dc reformer take is oh well in order to get statehood we need to be seen as a place that is so obviously ready to run itself that we get it and the other democratic take is just listen to republican they don't want to give it statehood for power reasons and trump will say that trump will say as he did at the kennedy center no don't

give them statehood because they get two Democratic senators. That's it. The city could turn into paradise. It could have no crime for 10 years, but it would elect two Democrats to the Senate, therefore don't give it statehood. And so is there some future compromise? You can imagine a Aaron Sorkin compromise where, I don't know, you get a third Dakota or something, or Alberta gets admitted to the union. As a tradeoff, Alberta is going to leave Canada. They're going to get two Republican senators. D.C. gets two Democratic senators. Great. But the idea that the feds shouldn't be able to intervene in D.C. because it's been denied these rights. I think that will intensify, and Democrats need to be ready for Republicans to never agree for power reasons.

You're never going to get the city so clean that they want to give it statehood unless it started voting like West Virginia. The fascinating thing, I think they'd be interested in it. Right, of course. And the fascinating thing is that this is analogous in some ways, although I think there's some evidence that maybe it's changing a little bit. to the redistricting fight. Like the idea that Democrats, there are Democrats who legitimately believe, and I don't know, I mean, you tell me if they legitimately believe this, and it's not just a concern that there's going to be, you know, too much of a majority, perhaps potentially in the Senate.

But the idea that they legitimately believe that if, if D.C. can show that it attains, a certain level of competency in self-rule, then Republicans will buy onto this. It's just like I feel like you'd have to be dropped

like literally airlifted out of 1952 and just dropped in to 2025 to believe that's what this is about. I mean, it's fascinating. And I

feel like there's some and I'm you know there's a lot of things I don't like about Gavin Newsom but I like the fact that California Democrats have basically said we're going to do this

and because we're not going to wait for the you know the the Republicans to read district to do this we're going to do this we're going to go forward with this right now because it it just shows like a

slightly better and I don't know how sincere they are in California, to be honest with you, but it shows at least that they understand, rhetorically speaking, this is just a fight about power. It's not a fight about whether good government or, you know, competency. Yes, it's a fight. It is a fight about power. I'm agreeing with the point you're making because it's a good way to explain what Newsom's doing.

If you watch Newsom's speech, and I've seen him a lot over the years, I follow. him in South Carolina when he went there a couple weeks ago. He's a California booster, and he's a booster of just California as a pluralist state, as a diverse pluralist place. His argument, he's very comfortable making is it's not just diversity is our strength, and he can have his bromides, I guess. But he argues, look, we are all better off if there are big, messy places with lots of people from different walks of life.

And Republicans don't think that. I am the governor in California. I think the country should be more like California. But in the meantime, I think I can prove that California has figured out a better way to live. Yes, it includes higher taxes, but it includes more social benefits. And the problem he sees with, this is not to get into the entire, but it's discourse. But the problem he sees with that is that people around the country need to hear California and think, oh, yeah, they have nice, the way they think of Switzerland or something or France.

Well, they're liberal, but at least if you're there, things are pretty nice. He's aware that progressives have a branding problem around this, and they're up against daily coverage from Fox News and from conservatives and from some reality. This is the thing where I never say it's all fantasy. There were some decisions that I think progressive criminal justice performers made that were a little naive about the effects of lowering sentences that were reversed. And Newsom was for those changes. he was against changing them back, but voters in California have reversed some of these things.

They get turned to cartoons on TV that you can shoplift with no problem in California. It's not that. It is just there are, it turns out, there are a small number of people who are repeat offenders if you don't convince them, they might actually have to spend some time in jail. So, setting aside the police abolitionists, the people who think that's, that's bad, that's what Newsom's doing is. is I am trying to defend a version of the country that I think is really pluralist and progressive and economically dynamic and good. And on the other side are the national conservatives represented by Trump who are posting memes from DHS about how the country was better off in 1880 and how heritage Americans are having their futures taken from them by immigrants.

That is what he sees happening. I think he is correct. I think just if you listen to the Trump administration and Stephen Miller, their plan for the country, is fix the country by getting rid of immigrants. Now, not just, you know, there are people who are immigrants and are conservative who can stay here, but there are elements of that movement. You can log on to X and see them who will make fun of Vivek Ramoswame

because they don't think Indian Americans should be here, who will make fun of Asian conservatives, because they don't think should be here. Certainly make fun of black conservatives. He is trying to square up the California version of things with a nationalist version of things that says we'd be better off if we had a smaller population. now eventually what you know people who heritage americans having more babies um that's how to fix the

country and it's this idea is really very old i mean i'd start day back to the the opponents of the 1965 immigration act so let's say 60 years the the idea of what america should be i think there were a lot of liberals who said we all agree as americans that diversity is our strength and they're now in conflict with conservatives who say no it's not that was a lie told to us we need to turn the country into what it would have been if we didn't have so much immigration. And that's what he's against. So that's that runs through the cities. That's when when you see criticism of cities, one thing I see online a lot is criticism of like Canal Street in New York, which is not a multiculturalism. It's just it's like there are some people,

some of immigrants who are selling goods on the street and you'll see criticism. That's what the third world looks like. We shouldn't have that. Does it look like parts of New York in 1880? It kind it does. It looks exactly like except for in 1880, there's a lot more people on the street selling stuff. Yes. I mean. But there is this idealized, AI created version of the past that, that Newsom's competing

with. Well, I mean, and to be fair, we should also say that it didn't start in the conservative movement in 65. It started, you know, you can go back to 1920. You can go back. I mean, there is a history of this. this, the political parties may have shifted, but there has been, you know, since its founding, there has been a sense of, or at least shortly after its founding, a sense that, you know,

we want to have a certain purity in the, who we consider to be actual Americans in this country. But specifically on the gerrymander, I mean, my sense of Newsom is that he's a bit of, of a sieve like you say he's reacting like he he reacted uh very quickly to the uh narrative that um you know the podcast bros and we should be uh you know he didn't go as far as saying like i'm glad we can say the r word now but he did sort of adopt a lot of that uh stuff but he actually trans kids under the bus had steve ban on yeah i say that only because uh he is in my mind a bit of a barometer maybe

whether he's accurate or not I don't know but he certainly reacts to what he thinks is out there and it seems to me that he's moved from if Texas does this redistricting we're going to do it

to we're going to do it or at least like we're going to edging up to we're going to do it and uh you do what you're going to do and it is that change am i imagining that change and if that change is real that he's moved a little bit on this like gotten more aggressive and leaned into it is that indicative of a change within the um at least strains of thinking in the democratic party that because from my perspective i welcome that it's like

republicans are going to do this i think democrats should go ahead full steam ahead and do the redistricting because I think it's going to benefit Democrats in the long run because they have done less of this. They don't have to cut into safe seats to do the redistricting in the way that Republicans will. And I think you've got to do this until Republicans find like it's not in their benefit and then they'll start coming up. We need good governance. Yeah, there's a Newsom as a figure in this.

I don't want to get too far on attention from the gerrymandering, but I think it all comes from him wrestling with why people rejected Kamala Harris and with her California in 2024. Why did you have that podcast? You can debate how much ground he gave when he talked to Charlie Kirk and Steve Bann, etc. My sense is that Newsom really wanted to understand, okay, what is going on on the right that is so attracted to people because I'm a progressive Californian and I don't get it. I think we're figuring things out.

I don't get why so many young people are especially into this. And he's somebody who's not that young anymore, but he's somebody who has watched, who is watching these districts, these younger, more diverse districts move to the right. Why is that? I think he's trying to figure that out. So what he's trying to do is almost, he's making this argument that democracy as at stake, you're not going to have the right to choose your leadership unless you vote for this gerrymandering proposal in California, the anti-vote-rigging proposal.

And if it sounds a little bit like Democrats saying democracy is taking 2024, he's saying, no, seriously, though, be willing, please, Californians to pause this map that we got an independent commission to draw and draw five seats because Trump is trying to ruin the country. And it's audacious, but is it that much? more audacious than a lot of Republicans talk, or a lot of Republican governors talk, because if you, you guys consume some conservative media, know what's going on. If you, when I hear him talk about the threats to freedom, I've heard the same thing for all of the governors in red states for years.

Barack Obama's going to do Jade Helm and he's going to take over the beauty. He's talking about Jade Helm today. And now literally they're doing it. They're going to have agents steal your guns. COVID was super, supercharged this. And again, to be fair, and Newsom was one of the companies who were people who wanted to go to church and they couldn't go to church during COVID. And for a lot of people who voted for Trump in 2024, that was we need to vote for him to save our democracy from the threats of the state. That's the Kennedy version of things.

Newsom is using the same sort of appeal saying, yes, we all want to just kind of glide through life. But your freedom is at stake. It is worth voting this way because your freedom is at stake. it's a flight 93 election. That's what I hear him doing. And when he talks about gerrymandering, he's not saying, I love gerrymandering, it's awesome. He's not saying California deserves more seats, which is what Republicans are saying about themselves in Missouri and Indiana.

Their quotes, if you see them, are just, yeah, we should have more seats. Trump wants more seats, we should get them. His argument is that, look, maybe one day you'll vote against me, but we'll never get our country back without this. We're going to turn into Nazi Germany. He didn't say Nazi Germany, but he didn't say Nazi Germany, but he's talked about the 53 days, and that's a reference to Hitler consolidating power. So, yeah, I said audacious before, like repeating myself, what he's doing is very audacious

for a Democrat because even when Democrats talk about democracy, yeah, well, even when they talk with democracy, it's more like the Biden version of folks, we need to restore our democracy, but we're not going to break the filibuster to do it. Right. We're going to debate this. We're going to have our GOJ gets some consent decrees, but look, it'd be a bad idea to have our DOJ go after Donald Trump on January 21st, and they look at Republicans, they being Democrats, look, Republicans saying, boy, it looks like you could just take power

and do stuff. And if they can do that, how do we get Democrats to feel like motivated enough to compete with them? That is what Newsom is trying to do. And I feel like the coverage, I don't know, I could criticize the coverage, but it's, he's trying to make it a bigger than partisan thing. I don't know how effective that will be, because he's going to have on the other side, not just Republicans, but the League of Women Voters in California has said it's going to oppose this ballot measure because it's, I mean, this is, yes, I mean. Times, like, well, L.A., yes, authoritarianism is happening, but we shouldn't get rid of this great reform in the meantime.

I mean, that's my point, is that, like, I wonder, for a Democrat, this is a big move. This is, like, basically saying, like, we're not going to be bound by norms right now. going to be we're going to address the moment we're in and what we're actually facing and not hope that it's you know things cooler heads are going to prevail um and i wonder if you know and i guess we'll find out but he doesn't strike me as a guy who's going to go too far out on a limb unless he's you know somewhat confident that there's some support for this which i think you know Well, and part of the problem is you could just go back and look at like Democrats, you know, 15, 20 years ago, the vast majority of voting Democrats wanted their politicians to compromise versus Republicans who did not. And that has changed dramatically over the past 10, 15 years. And I think, you know, Newsom is reflecting that, I hope.

you know it's just the the idea that the league of women voters is like well we've got the military in but the important thing is that we maintain uh some type of like because if we're not an example who will the folks in texas follow it's just that's what like can i i have a bit of a thought that it's maybe a different i don't know perspective on it because there's all this talk about how mom Johnny's victory is not replicable outside of New York City. But Newsom's actions here feel a little bit more specific to California even than a broad-based focus on affordability and not just in the way that the Democratic Party talks about it, but a redistribution of wealth or taxing the rich. Like Newsom, this is good partisanship, but it's only made possible given the size of California and its and its blueness. I'm just not necessarily sure without a material angle

how you can paint that picture because the fact that he didn't really understand why Kamala Harris lost that's a bit of a problem, right? Like we have gilded age levels of income and wealth inequality. Right, but he also was thinking about what aspects of pluralism in California

piss people off so much. And he really does listen to, try to understand a lot of conservative rhetoric to see what's so popular. I'm not trying to do this, this Gavinuz and Mesh contest. I just think he is different than some Democrats

who just say that stuff's crazy and I don't want to listen to it. I don't want to platform it. And that has, you can see it's almost like in the mediocre matrix sequels where like Agent Smith gets defeated

but then he gets the good Neo code and he's able to compete with him. I'm not saying that's what Newsom thinks he's doing. I'm saying as somebody who watched that mediocre Matrix movies, That's what I thought. He's like taking some of the tactics that he thinks is working for the right. But yeah, not wreckable everywhere, obviously.

That is what you're finding. And each of these states has its own rules. Democrats are learning that they kind of built up this lattice work of rules to protect voters that make it harder to then take power from voters, which seems like the way they should work. I was in Michigan a couple weeks ago. And I was asking all the Democrats running for Senate there, hey, there's a nonpartisan and commission in the state, should you get rid of that? And they said, I'm not, they're not naive. They're saying, no, here's the thing. We would never have won back the legislature but for that

commission because Republicans gerrymandered it for for so long. We support what Texas Democrats are doing. We support what Newsom is doing. Each state's different. And what we want as Democrats is, is president whoever, in 2029 to sign an anti-jerrymandering bill, which would mean getting rid of the filibuster. And that is a thing. Every, uh, every, every, uh, every, Democrat I talked to, you want to get rid of the filibuster. But that's four years away. That doesn't solve your problems right now. This is a real fight inside liberalism, though.

I was at NetRuts, which maybe we'll talk more about. But that was a topic at NetRutes Nation was there are lots of liberal groups and liberal donors who just still say, like, but can't we, once the backlash comes, can't we roll this back? And there are other, I'm using liberals and progressives interchangeably, but like the liberal legal movement is what it calls it. self. And there are other people in that movement saying, you guys are idiots. Like, you need to be, you need to think like a conservative in, uh, in 1992 when they're writing law review articles about the executive, um, uh, unitary executive theory. You need to think about how you take power and do things with it. Because if you don't, we will never, we will, you will never get the government you want ever because Republicans will have pulled up all the ladders. That is a, that's a real fight happening. That's not just around these, these districts. But that's, how it affects the gerrymandering fight because in a lot of in new york in virginia democrats

took power and said we're the democrats we're going to have rules that you can't just rig these maps same thing in cal in colorado and in a country where republicans are allowed to gerrymander and do and justify by saying they want to stop democrats from winning how do you respond is it is not easy i have i have sympathy for democrats as they answer questions about this especially poor tim walls I see people tweet at him, demanding he gerrymander when, like, there was an assassination in his state that maintained Republican control of the House. They can't gerrymander for very important reasons. But yes, people are right. The Democrats are for now, and they weren't, you know, in the 60s, in the 70s when Dixie Crats ran the whole South and made sure that no black members would get elected.

Yeah, Democrats used to love charymandering and do this. The current version of the Democratic Party, though, they want to ban gerrymandering. eventually. What does that mean for everything else they want to do? Because they don't have a plan that is let's take power and then lock it in forever. That is the Trump DeSantis plan. Take power, make it impossible for liberals to win again. How do you compete with that? The interesting thing, though, is when you, that while in a place like Michigan, maybe what happens in California doesn't work, it, with Pritzker and Newsom probably like in a, you know, pre-shadow primary with each other on some level.

It increases the pressure on Pritzker, it seems to me, to do the same in Illinois. And with Hockel having to deal with Delgado and just the idea of like where, you know, the other big blue state, it's going to put pressure on her, I think, what happens in California because all of a sudden she's going to be measured against that and there's going to be an indication that like it can be done so it's going to be fascinating to see what happens with that but let's talk about net routes you were there um uh you've been going since 2007 um i think i was at the was the first one 2005 when it was daily

uh really coast yeah i i spent a lot of years there it it is a change over the years, and you write about some of those changes, give us a sense of what's happening there, because Emma and Matt were at the DSA convention. I don't know why this one weekend in August has to be like where, you know, anybody left of the DNC is having their convention. But give me your sense of what was there. And I don't know, put it. contrary to 07. I think we were both there in 07. I can't remember if that one was still in Vegas or not.

But what have you noticed that's happening there? Yeah, I started to talk a little bit about it where there's this debate about how you ever get power back. And networks have changed over time. It started as progressive bloggers just being online, organizing, politically donating to their candidates, wanting the Democratic Party to get better, and meeting in one place to do that. So the big story out of the first, it was yearly, it was yearly coast for two years, and it was Net Roots. Big story of the first was Ned Lamont's there,

and they say, we're going to beat Joe Lieberman. And then in a primary, they beat Joe Lieberman. And it changed over time. The progressive donor space changed a lot and changes all the time. But Labor wanted to fund it more. Progressive organizations wanted to fund it more. Somebody would have a $10 million grant, and they'd come and they'd fund a party at NetRoutes.

It definitely had shrunk this year. which I took as, you know, I was just taking notes of the funders from last year and this year. Certainly the progressive donor space, and this has been reported most in the New York Times, is just a little wimpy and not sure what to do. And they've been scaling back some of their funding for organizations. So that's one thing that came up. I quote from one panel in my story where people at nonprofits were saying, yeah, there's donors who stop funding us because we put out a statement on Palestine.

They said, we don't want that. Wow. It's not that secret. There's a good New York magazine profile of Alex Soros, where he says this about sunrise movement. It's like, yeah, we funded sunrise movement. Now they talk about Palestine. What's that about? So activists are dealing with how donors who might have just cut checks before don't want to anymore.

And then people who are in democratic politics, it's all the stuff we were talking about. But also a discussion of what do you do if you're just not allowed to win? What is the strategy for winning? And some of it was Democrats suck and they didn't have good messaging that breaches the race class divide. That's a common theme. That's 20 years of this in that route. Look, if we had candidates who just explain to people how we could benefit them and how the right was screwing them and trying to divide them by race instead of saying you get a tax break. If you started a nonprofit in three years with a Pell Grant, like if we just were more compelling, we could win.

And so, you know, you're at Abdul Al-Sayed's, your progressive members of Congress like Dili Ramirez, that's kind of their, that was the message they were saying. But nobody came out of it saying, hey, we figured it out. And that was, again, the big takeaway just from being there was it wasn't like a ghost town, but you could tell there are groups that used to send lots of people who have been minimized by Trump. And it's not just the donors. It is media matters and Act Blue have both been attacked by, in Media Matters case,

Elon Musk and Republican Attorneys General in lawsuits meant to bankrupt them. In Act Blue, it's the DOJ trying to run Act Blue out of business because they are funding portal for Democrats. The premise is that they're not stopping secret foreign money from getting in, which would be legal if they just had a stable coin, I guess. But it's a real problem if Act Blue does it. And so that was, it was a, I was surprised, now there was some media competing there's competition, as you said, with a DSA convention, which is an overlapping story. Very little media there.

And I think it's just right now the left is seen as mostly like a problem for the Democratic Party. What do they do with it? This is how the Mamdani story is covered. But that's important. If the organizing capacity of the left is being strung in by donors and by investigations, look, that is a much worse and much more real version of what conservative said was happening 10 years ago when the IRS was not giving tax status to every Tea Party group. This is happening under Republicans of trying to undermine progressive organizing.

And one, it's been pretty successful. Two, some of the donors are fine with it. But that's a difference. I mean, this is a story for, like a massive story that involves organizations that don't let anyone into their meetings. But the large donors saying we're not sure what we should be funding anymore because we think progressive activists are too crazy and too focused on Gaza. that is a real it there are some democrats who think that is good because they do not want those

activists to have much of a role in the party they do not want them to be the face of the party they want to that to be in this is hekeem jeffreys they want that to go away so they can talk about medicaid and that was clearly happening they were not at net roots but that was that was the worry about what was happening to the party at net roots it's interesting we have a clip let's play this clip. It was a panel that included Keith Allison. I know you had an interview with Keith Allison.

And they featured a clip from Derek Thompson. Derek Thompson. I guess he was at the, you know, one of the abundance corporate festivals and interviewing somebody.

And this was sort of fascinating to me. play this clip if we were having if you and I Marshall if we were having like a debate on this stage if you and I were like running in a primary

and you said that you said the far right has a story and they've won the far left has a story the center doesn't have a story and that's a problem what I would say in response to that is yeah

stories are for children Americans what that guy said is wrong if you're thinking about running for office absolutely ignore him as aggressively as you can but think about a story

that is compelling that anyone can understand because you get why I'm very pissed off about Alex Smith right? You get why I would leave Congress to fight for Alex Smith right because the story happens to be a true story.

So this is a version of your part of the debate that you had with Ezra Klein, the co-author of Abundance, Sam, where you said that who is the villain of your story and Ezra said that you had a difference of opinion about whether or not it was good politics to have a villain. You know, I've seen Donald Trump single-handedly change the debate about the immigration

in the Republican Party by having immigrants be the villain. Like when he rose to prominence, the RNC was like doing an autopsy about how they had lost to Obama with Romney. And they were talking about how they need to soften their stance and reach out to Latino voters. And Trump came in and completely took a sledgehammer to it just by the power of the narrative being repeated over and over and over again. And that guy, Mr. Centress up there wants to tell me that stories don't have power. power in politics? My God. Yeah, I'm going to be boring and agree with everybody because obviously stories have power. It's just when you think about how one of the things that every Democrat is now nodding and agreeing with is,

hey, we can't just respond to these crime stories in D.C. with charts of crime decreasing. Okay, that sounds like if you agree on that, you agree that, for example, Donald Trump changed a lot of opinions about immigration by saying, I'm going to stand on stage with some mothers of women whose children were killed by drunk drivers who weren't citizens and say, this will happen to you if we do not close the border. Yeah, obviously, stories are important. I don't get the point of insulting people's intelligence on this. Do you want somebody to hear a story and then say, let me find the actual truth behind this? Sure. But you need compelling stories. This is how the media works, but it's also how I listen to, you know, not just this podcast,

but you listen to a conservative podcast, and they're not saying a new study came out. They're saying, check out this crazy video, check out this crazy person. Check out this crazy person on TikTok. Kids are using kitty litter in their classrooms. And I heard this from my, I mean, the amazing thing is that Thompson himself purports to tell a story in abundance about MNRNA. I mean, the story, it's not a very good story. uh personally uh and i can understand now why because he doesn't uh think that there's any value to

it but what's fascinating is i think in that instance i mean i don't know what his motivation is about it but that feels like what the democrats are doing i mean i you know like what the leadership of the democratic party is doing we're not going to tell a story uh we're going to just wait until Donald Trump's approval rating is in the toilet and let that do all the work for us, we don't need to provide a story because that would then require a, a vision of what America could be, right? Like, I mean, aside from how just absolutely stupid the idea of like there is, there should be no narrative, like, we plan to do what? Well, we don't need to tell you what the plan is. Putting that aside, it's almost as if that's how the democratic establishment functions is like we don't need, we don't have a vision of where we're going in any way.

And so best to just like be at the ready and deploy certain things when it comes. I mean, it's almost like they don't want to be responsible for an overarching narrative. And it's, I don't know, I find that fascinating. Did you think, like, you know, with the net roots thing, the most interesting thing, I mean, like, my recollection has been the first year after a loss election tends to be a little bit, like, sort of disempowering for, for, net roots and that it starts to come back when there's more sort of election activity in the second year. I mean, early on it was different because the energy was so untethered from democratic, from, you know, like the democratic machinations, I guess. It was more sort of like an independent life for the net roots. But this idea of donors really sort of starving it, like

Is there any type of broad understanding that the same people that they're defunding because they're talking about Gaza were also the people they were relying on to get the vote out who were also upset about Gaza then? Like this, like, it's a tacit admission that they were depressing the activists, if not with lack of dollars, but at least in terms of like what the campaign was saying about Gaza or not saying about Gaza. Yeah, which I wrote about the DNC is going to have its meeting end of the month and the resolution is going around. One of them is a very soft Gaza one that just calls for a sea fire. One that will probably not pass is calling for an arms embargo. The party is going to continue to fight about that. And it's an odd issue because if you look at the polling right now, just saying, hey, do you want your tax dollars to continue to be funding this war that you don't quite know why is not over yet?

Most people say no. But everything's around Gaza. It's more that, and this has happened throughout the liberal space, I hate that word, but the liberal spaces, basically there has been this conflict between older and more, not even more conservative, just older liberals who fund organizations and younger progressives who've come into the organizations where the younger progressives have different ideas about intersectionality, different ideas about Gaza, different ideas about even gender. and there has been a blame game you can very well covered in the new york times because the times is one of the organs i think that enforces this uh saying those guys wrecked it for us those guys are the ones who are wrecking the movement because they have ideas that are unpopular and they're alienating the party was in better shape when we we when the people in the room were labor leaders who didn't care about this stuff and even the labor leaders we have this is democrats

to talk themselves in my fantasy monologue. Like, Randy Weingarten and her ideas appeal more to the people we have already, the liberals in Tacoma Park in Berkeley. We need those people who come from Northeast Ohio. How come we lost them? Well, part of the reason is because of these crazy progressives coming in. And you've seen this even in the fight over universities and them paying out settlements of the administration.

You start to see some academics publish essays saying, look, can we just cut bait and, like, saw off the humanities people because they suck and I want my funding and I'm tired of them. And you have to give Trump his role in this. Trump is in his first term because I think, I don't think I know, even with a popular vote, Democrats said this is an aberration. This is a more progressive and diverse country that did not want him to be president. And politics moved to the left with all the things people I'm just talking about moving in tandem. There was not this disagreement from the Democracy Alliance donors and the young progressives.

That's why you saw, like Neyroll and Planned Parenthood, et cetera, saying, yes, we support to fund the police. In the second Trump term, you now have these people, and what's the popular vote? If it 49.9% win. Because he won the popular vote, there is the sense that they have lost the country. This is several elections now of being unable to win places like Northeast Ohio. And those donors saying, we got to do something about these young. progressives because they're so alienating. And Republicans get that. In lieu of Democratic leadership that people know and respect and think are good, the Democrat leadership assigned

by Republicans every week is like the craziest liberal they can find online. And that was the entire Sydney-Sweeney discourse was just there are some people on TikTok and some columnists for liberal websites who have this opinion. That's the Democratic Party. And after that, it was, there are sorority girls dancing. There might be some liberals who were against this. That's the Democratic Party. How do Democrats get this electoral coalition that's not identified with that? That's where Republicans think they've got progressives over the barrel.

You guys can't do that. We can build, on the right, a coalition of conservative Latino dads and white evangelicals and free press subscribers who hate liberalism. you guys can't put a coalition together of conservative union members and Berkeley gender studies majors. You can't. So we're going to keep blowing it up. What's the response in the left? They have no idea what to do is my, I mean, they're progressing to say, the thing we do is build solidarity and remind people that it should not matter to you. If a school has a gender policy you don't like somewhere else, meanwhile that your tax dollars are being redirected to Peter Thiel and your

401k is being put in private equity or in crypto, they're distracting you. That's a message Democrats are happy making. But there is that view there that we need to do something so people don't think Democrat and then think some annoying college student. And that's basically imagine a world where there is no conservative media. I don't think you get that. Conservatives had a version of, I wouldn't say this problem. But let's like, let's stimulate.

Since Elon bought X, there's a lot of, more very far-right content on X that if you showed it to a swing voter, they might say, that's pretty gross. Like for the stuff we were talking about before, of people fantasizing about how great it would be deporting Vivek Ramoswamy and give his house to Americans whose family fought in the Civil War, that's probably not that popular around the country. Why are they not forced to own that, with swing voters? That's an interesting question that no one has figured out an answer to.

And I've seen Chris Hayes ask this. how come J.D. Vance does not have to answer for some opinion he follows and every Democrat has to answer for some random person on TikTok. It's not a rhetorical question. I think that is one part of it is the anti-woke backlash means just less interest in saying you won't believe what this Republican said. I mean, Trump exists. You'll believe what they said. You'll believe somebody said this on Twitter. But why is that political movement, which is not a majority movement, which if you went down to South Texas and showed a person voted to Trump,

hey, here's a guy who thinks you're not really human. They might not agree with that, but how come they're not supposed to, they don't own them too. I heard a little bit of that at net roots, but there is a fatigue because people voted for Trump last time. He has run three times and gotten more votes each time.

There's just this punch drunk attitude. Okay, maybe much of the country will put up with stuff that we think is anathema to democracy, is authoritarian, is racist. If they will, then what do we do? It's really tough. But the answer's in their face, right? Like, I mean, this is what's frustrating about this conversation is an overarching

vision about a working class coalition. And it's about improving people's standard of living by taxing the rich. That's the answer. That cuts across everything you're saying and gets ahead of the whatever aesthetic, cultural elitism that they're trying to harness. And like, I'll give you credit, Dave. You were much more bullish on Trump winning or having a really good shot than I was. And I was wrong about Harris winning. So I defer to you on some of this stuff. Like, you know, that could cut across some of the, that's squishiness that you're talking about. Well, I at the same time, sorry,

I've been interrupted. Also, Trump, if he was running as Mitt Romney and saying, and I'll cut social security, I don't think any of this would work. Like, you need him to do that too. Sam, sorry, I drove you, yeah. No, no, but I, I'm curious about that question because I think part of the answer is the nominal left, left of center, has less resources to do that now, I think, than it has probably at any time in the past 15 years, right? Like you mentioned, media matters is gone. They were a juggernaut. cap is a shell of what it was. They basically jettisoned everybody from that organization, I don't know, five years ago

who were- They just hired Anthony Blinken, so they're not going to embrace the pro-Palestine energy. It's always been, you know, it was developed as a sort of like a Clinton in exile, but they had a lot of progressives there. I mean, you know, Fas was there. Sarota was there. I mean, people came out of that operation and were putting out content. And, you know, I mean, I remember 10, 15 years ago, you know, if you would talk about a lawmaker in the Iowa legislature, a Republican who had some crazy idea, people would be like, what are you doing? That's ridiculous. Meanwhile, they could look at one person at a protest on the right and say, like, look at the Democrats.

They're, you know, they're wearing stilts. And so this dynamic is sort of like built in, I think, to the nature on some level of the difference between the way society is set up, at least since probably the 60s, where hippie punching still echoes on some level. And we still have a democratic party that is defined by that attitude on some level where they feel a certain defensiveness. I think the Gaza stuff has sort of like cleave, you know, has cleaved the democratic leadership and establishment from much of the party, it seems to me. And that, I think, is another problem. But what do you think, I mean, aside from like the loss of resources, cap, media matters. um i think having a social media like you know having twitter owned by um uh elan musk at this point particularly when we don't have blogs in the way that we do we have this consolidation by

instagram and facebook in a way that we didn't when you know when it was a yearly cozer net roots nation early on things were far far more um uh you know small d democratic and uh populist just in terms of the media. I mean, we just don't have a similar dynamic to that. Maybe the shows like this somewhat replace it, but not exactly. What is your sense if it doesn't include those things as to why Democrats are in the defensive mode? Aside from the fact, I think Emma's point is, you know, well taken. You need to have a positive agenda or an aggressive agenda or a proactive agenda.

or a proactive agenda, the best offense is a good defense, right? I mean, they attacked Kerry for what his strength was. But aside from that, taking these individual moments, and there's plenty of them, maybe there's too many, but in blowing them up, I mean, Epstein is the only thing that's happened like that, and that's not such a small thing. And it was only on the map because of the right. It was.

You identified something about the Epstein story, which was that in the current configuration of the parties, this is, I think somebody called this the crank gap. It might have been Madaglacius, as he likes to coin terms. But they used to have a disaggregation of people who didn't trust the government. And frankly, just talking about media, I've been listening to not just a lot of podcasts, but a lot of old podcasts. And I'll listen to a podcast from 2009 or 10 or 14, and you'll find a guest on that. who I checked their writing since then.

And they've, they in 2010, 14, we're at Bush sucks. I don't, the Republicans are trying to destroy the country from within the whole Department of Homeland Security, the Massachusetts, you look with the writing in 2025 and they're like, Trump's amazing, he's blowing up the deep state. We need to find out what happened to Russiagate. There's this, there is a roving, not even that political anti-establishment view that I think Democrats have have not lost like they weren't trying to hold on to it just as the parties changed they became a more evidence-based norms loving party and they didn't they didn't hold on to

those those people and COVID sped that up so that's well I'd argue that was deliberate Dave right in that in the pursuing of suburban Republicans as a way to change the constituency of the party which Chuck Schumer said since 2016 they were deliberately doing that a jettisoned critique of the government and as conspiracism, which I think like really is alienating to folks who aren't well off or older boomers and have a

more a difficult relationship with the government when you can't talk about dark things like Epstein. I mean, Democrats feel very uncomfortable using that kind of conspiracy against Trump. Sorry to cut you off. No, no, no. Let's have some back and forth. That's fine. I think that that, but

it was interesting because it was so unnatural to them. Whereas something totally forgotten politically these days is 2006, the Bush administration is making a deal of reports management with a company from Dubai. And Chuck Schumer leads the charge and saying, that's terrible. We can't have this Arab country running our ports. And just Democrats wouldn't do that anymore. They wouldn't say, hey, we're all in on a conspiracy theory that the color of skin and like the funding of these guys is a national security threat. Yeah, they just don't do that anymore. They have become a more Let's Defend America with Facts and Reason Party, which I'm not saying even is bad.

But the discourse, the conversation that sometimes is who would have Bill Hicks be voting for now. That's what I mean is I just feel there's sort of a, I don't trust these frauds in power mindset that is now entirely Republican. And there's a lot of organically popular media that has that mindset. That's the Joe Rogan thing. You've seen some Democrats go on Joe Rogan and he doesn't really push them on that stuff when they've been. successful to your John Fetterman's and your James Tala Rikos. And Republicans are successful. That's why they got bit.

It's because Cash Patel will go on Jop Rogan's show and say he's got all this information that he won't release it. That's been losing those people. But I'm thinking the audience of those people, the people who were floating between the parties before and always hated George W. Bush. I wrote about them in 2016. I was finding these people who voted for Ron Paul, then were voting for Bernie Sanders. I've always been interested in that kind of voter.

That consumer is very important. And this is one fractal of what we're talking about, but that media just, yeah, Democrats are not seen as credible because they were the party that in 2020 was saying, stay at home to avoid the spread. And I think that hangover is going to last for people for a while. How come Trump gets away with it? I have no idea. That's a complicated question.

He's made people forget he was president during all that. He's just overcorrected by destroying vaccine research, I guess. So what did the Democrats do in the? this in this media it's um i i feel like it part of it is funding so it's not like um and in charlie kirk's media network the t p turning point network it's very successful but it involved lots of startup capital over many years when it same with daily wire very seriously oh yeah daily wire same thing which which has made a ton of mistakes and lost um it lost its CEO over them over investing in a bunch of media products it didn't work but it didn't go like he didn't get shut down like like

thing progress got shut down. And so one thing, I'm glad this ties what I was saying before because I was worried I was into rambling. Yeah, progressive donors, I think, need to be ready for some stuff to bloom that they don't like because on the right, that happens. There are conversations that happen on right-wing media funded very well by large conservative donors that are not helpful for Republicans that day, and it doesn't matter because people stay organically interested in it.

And sometimes they're talking about that stuff, and it catches fire. and Republicans do it. This is the entire politics of the gender issue. This was something that was lighting up conservative talk radio podcast for years. And Republicans were saying, we lost all these elections over the bathroom bill in 2016. Shut up. This is not a winning issue. As soon as Trump wins one issue, wins the election, every Republican ad this year, not every ad, but every Republican campaign I've seen this year that has money is spending on gender stuff. So they are willing to see, have media figure something out and then chase after it because the media prove that it was popular. I don't think liberals are in that same space.

They don't like seeing liberal commentators say the Democratic Party sucks. And it's like you have to get over it. Like it helps like Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell who are not popular. Well, Johnson more so. But Mitch McConnell's like gotten everything he ever wanted and he never was popular on conservative media. It just helped the conservative media was popular. So they kept winning elections. Yeah.

That's a great point. Dave Weigel, author, journalist, Samafour, newsletter. We will link to that newsletter at Samifor. Dave, always a pleasure. Really appreciate it. It was great. Thanks for this conversation. I really had fun.

Thanks, Dave. All right, folks. I think it's time to head to the fun half of the program. Oh, yeah. wherein we will take a day was still on here sticking around I hope he knows that that was not

specific to him that's the branding that we use yeah I always worry about that I always worry about that I always try and make sure that the guest is off they don't hear us saying that yeah now for the fun part of the show sorry I send him some CBD

yeah sorry folks you have to take you medicine I like talking to Dave because, first of all, you know, it challenges some of my preconceived notions, and he does, is on the ground all the time at all of these events. I mean, I don't know if anybody has more continental U.S. travel miles than Dave Wigel. So he knows what's up. He has his ear to the ground, and that's what I appreciate about our talks. He also, we should say, was I think back in 07, maybe. maybe before then, sort of a little libertariany, I think, in terms of like he came out of that media.

And sometimes that perspective is very, very helpful. You saw that with like, what's her face, Collins, too. Having a sense of where these people are is sometimes helpful, particularly in the context of just reporting. and being able to know what it is you're observing in many respects. So very helpful. With all that said, we're going to head to the fun half, and it's your support that keeps this show alive and thriving. Aliving and thriving.

You can become a member at JoinThe Majority Report.com. When you do, you know, I get the free show free of commercials, but you also get the fun half. Also, don't forget, just coffee. dot co-op, fair trade coffee, hot chocolate, use the coupon code majority, you get 10% off, you can buy the majority

port blend. They have all sorts of blends, they have single origin, great, great coffee, and a great progressive co-op in Madison, Wisconsin. Matt, left reckoning, what is it? Reffening. Yeah, we had a good show.

I had a good show, Seth Harp on talking about his excellent, excellent new book, the Fort Braggart tell. Have you, if you've been hearing about all the murders and deaths, like hundreds of deaths going on at Fort Bragg and been curious about what's going on there? Well, it turns out that it's a pretty familiar story about narco-trafficking conspiracies and lawlessness in the armed forces. A really amazing book. I, and everyone should check out the interview. Patreon at Comsless Left Reckney, but that was out last Tuesday. Ronald Reagan is reminding me that

that we used to call it at one point the better half, but Ken Burns was still on the line. When I had said that, we were going into the better half, and then I felt bad because the look on its face when we went into that second half of the show. Then I just started calling it the fun half, but that's also, who wants to hear that they're unfun. You're lucky he didn't do an 18-hour documentary.

Yeah, exactly. Well, he canceled the one that he was. was planning on me because of that yeah he couldn't have been on video what do you mean this i've never heard this ken burn story before oh yeah no i think this was this was like it back in like 2013 i think right but he was on the phone you could tell that he was put out by calling it the uh better half no i think maybe we did have we didn't use video but we would connect video wise huh okay i'm not sure interesting maybe it was the phone maybe he was still on i don't know I don't remember.

I think Ken was probably okay, but that's just me. We'll see. All right. We've got to take a quick break. We'll see you in the other place. Three months from now, six months from now, nine months from now. And I don't think it's going to be the same as it looks like in six months from now. And I don't know if it's necessarily going to be better six months from now than it is three months from now.

But I think around 18 months out, we're going to look. look back and go like wow what what is that going on it's nuts wait a second hold on for hold on for second Emma welcome to the program hey what is up everyone what is up everyone fun what is up everyone no me keen you did it let's go Brandon let's go Brandon Bradley, you want to say hello? Sorry to disappoint. Everyone, I'm just a random guy. It's all the boys today.

Fundamentally false. No, I'm sorry. Women? Stop talking for a second. And let me finish. Where is this coming from, dude? But dude, you want to smoke this? Seven, eight.

Yes. Hi, me. Is this me? Yes. Is it me? Is it me? It is you. It's me.

I think it is you. Who is you? No sound. Every single freaking day. What's on your mind? We can discuss free markets and we can discuss capitalism. I'm going to go to life. Who libertarians?

They're so stupid though. Common sense says, of course. Gobbled e-gook. We fucking nailed him. So what's 79 plus 21? Challenge men. I'm positively clovery. I believe 90s.

I want to say. 857. 210. 35. 501. One half. Three-eighth. 9-11 for a scene.

$3,400. $1,900. $6.5.4. $3 trillion sold. It's a zero-sum game. Actually, you're making me think less. But let me say this. Hoop.

You can call it satire. Sam goes to satire. On top of it all, my favorite part about you is just like every day, all day, like everything you do. Without a doubt. Hey, buddy. We see you. All right, folks. Folks, folks.

It's just the week being weeded out, obviously. Yeah, sundown guns out. I don't know. But you should know. People just don't like to entertain ideas anymore. I have a question. Who cares? Our chat is enabled, folks.

Love it. I do love that. Look, got to jump. I got to be quick. I get a jump. I'm losing it, bro. Two o'clock, we're already late, and the guy's being a dick. So screw him.

Sent to a gulaw? Outrage. Like, what is wrong with you? Love you. Love you. Bye-bye.