The MeidasTouch Podcast - Howard Dean Chops It Up with Chef Brett & the Bros

Episode Date: March 23, 2021

Former Vermont Governor and former DNC Chair Howard Dean knows how to deliver a message more effectively than almost any politician out there. The former presidential candidate joins MeidasTouch to discuss Democratic messaging, the fascist takeover of the GQP, the innate corruption that comes with the desire for power, the problems with the media and big tech and more. The brothers also dig into this week's hot-button issues including the GQP's border bluster, the mess in Miami, Trump's new social media app, and Brett's foray into the world of viral TikTok recipes.  Thank you for making this podcast such a huge success! Please rate us 5-stars on the Apple Podcasts app and share this episode with a friend to help us continue to climb the charts! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/meidastouch/support Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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With over 3,000 games to choose from, including fan favorites like Cash Eruption, We'll be right back. miss out visit betmgm.com for terms and conditions 19 plus to wager ontario only please gamble responsibly if you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you please contact connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming ontario Welcome to the Midas Touch podcast, Ben Micellus, joined by my younger brothers, Brett and Jordy Micellus. And we got a great guest for you today. We have former Vermont governor, former head of the Democratic National Committee, Howard Dean, joining us. And pleased to announce that Brett has got a new nickname this weekend.

Brett is the chef. Chef Brett. Is it Chef Brett or Brett the chef? I think it's Chef Boyard Brett. Boyard Brett. I don't even know if that makes any sense but I like it though because I'm cooking up some edits in the lab you know

you could use it for various different things why don't you what happened Brett what spurred the chef comment I feel like someone said something to you that really rubbed you the wrong way this weekend on Twitter well first of all I was just going through I think a comment that Ben made on Twitter and he made fun of you I think or, or something. It was some very like lighthearted

statement. And I saw somebody in response to it was like, enough Yankee doodling around. These brothers need to stop Yankee doodling around. They're not taking their jobs that seriously. Yeah. You need to be thinking constantly about 2022, get back to work. This is getting ridiculous. And, you know, I didn't want to like sell that person out on its own. So I did a subtweet, which everyone knows who I was subtweeting now. I'm sorry if you listen to the podcast, but do better. Hold on.

I just want to say, I didn't think that like, I thought very clearly that person was kidding. You guys, like, as you always do, got way overly offended by it. Ben, I noticed your comment right back was like, you were defensive. And then Brett was the, I'm like, Jesus, what's going on with the brothers? Cause I get comments like it, like all the time. Like every time I joke, they're like, okay, enough, enough, enough joking, get back to work. Chop, chop, chop. Yeah. Jordy, let me explain it to you. Brett and I, we're not always taking sexy photographs of ourselves and posting them online. We're not really focused on the Midas Touch calendars. You know, I got Brett locked in this little room that he's in. Brett's in a six by six room editing.

I smell it every time. Yeah. The walls are closing in. I was watching last night on Netflix. I am addicted to anything about El Chapo. And I'm watching the Netflix show on El Chapo. And while he's in prison, they put him in the isolation room,

which is like a six by six room with metal walls. And Brett is in El Chapo's room. We've locked Brett in El Chapo's jailhouse room over there. And he's been trying to burrow out ever since March and we're forcing him to edit. The fact is we work now, I mean, I think 15 hours a day would even be underselling it. Yeah. So Brett's working 15 hours to 18 hours a day.

I'm putting in those hours. And then Jordy is out there texting me and Brett while we're like sweating and running around. Jordy goes, I got a great idea, brothers. We're like, what is it, Jordy? He goes, why don't we do a Midas touch liquor with gold flakes in them? Genius idea. I stand behind it. So I then said, Jordy, that's a bad idea. You know, and I did the kind of Jordy emoji where we say that Jordy should be a hall of

fame baseball player because he strikes out seven out of 10 times, but those three ideas are golden. So Jordy goes to Twitter and Jordy goes, I've struck out with my brothers and all of these ideas. I then tweet about Jordy's idea and say what Jordy's idea was about creating a Midas touch liquor and how absurd it was. And then the other person who Brett eventually sub tweets that person then comments and says that you boys need to stop Yankee doodling around and be working on 2022. And that sets up the stage for Brett's sub tweet. And then afterwards, Brett just starts tweeting the whole day about food and he's like posting

about fettuccine Alfredo. Well, okay. Okay, OK, OK. It did get outrageous. It got outrageous. It was. I ended up at first. I was upset that that person commented that we need to start focusing on 2022. And then honestly, I agreed with that person.

I'm like, what are you doing, Brett? Why are you talking about Fettuccine Alfredo? I'm like, focus on politics here, Brett. Listen, guys, Joe Biden is president. We don't have to worry about the president trying to kill us anymore. So now we could tweet occasionally about food and recipes and stuff. And like, just what I'm doing in my day. Hey, guys, going to the park.

That's like Twitter used to be. I don't know if you remember back in the day, Twitter used to be just innocuous comments about what you were doing with your day. And so I'm bringing Twitter back to its roots. And I was making the famous, world famous TikTok viral feta cheese pasta. For those who may not know it, you basically get a block of feta cheese and you get two pints of tomatoes. You don't have to go into the whole recipe.

You don't have to do that. You melt it and then you mix the pasta in. And this recipe went so viral that literally I've been trying to find a block of feta cheese in the supermarket for the past four weeks. And they've been sold out of the supermarket. So finally- Because it's been so viral, that's why everyone's-

Because it's been so viral. Everyone's buying blocks of feta cheese. But finally I found a block of feta cheese. So I was excited. So I posted about the feta cheese pasta, which was delicious, by the way. I highly recommend it. You can see my review at Be My Sellers and check out for more Chef Brett reviews. Chef Brett.

We're cooking up feta cheese pastas. But we could also cook up politics and some politics news and deliver it hot and fresh to the people. So Ben, what's going on today? No, no doubt about it. I want to set the record straight on the Republicans all of a sudden now claiming that there is a crisis on the border. There has been over the past 40 years, significant systemic issues that have been problematic to multiple administrations across the border. But each administration over the past 40 and 50 years have worked productively to try to fix the solution and have tried to balance the need for a very strong border

with basic humanity and to not intentionally try to rip away children from their families. That was, of course, until Donald Trump became the president and affirmatively tried to rip children away from their family using xenophobic rhetoric, not actually making any significant major differences other than ripping apart our system. So as the Biden administration came into office, they inherited a devastatingly broken system that was broken by Donald Trump. Because in the past, there was a system. Donald Trump destroyed all of the systems, going into his very xenophobic and horrible immigration policy. We have the Department of Homeland Security chief Alejandro Mayorkas, who went on CNN, who discussed that the problem that was inherited at the border was a problem from the Trump administration. Dana, we will not abandon our values and our

principles. We will not abandon the needs of vulnerable children. That is what this is all about. We are executing on our plan. It does take time. It is difficult. Our plan includes the deployment of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, FEMA, to assist HHS in building its capacity more rapidly to shelter the children. But it is taking time and it is difficult because the entire system was dismantled by the prior administration. There was a system in place in both Republican and Democratic administrations that was torn down

during the Trump administration. And that is why the challenge is more acute than it ever has been before. Trump is just such a chaos agent that really every lever of government was just destroyed. If we got the Midas touch, he's got the opposite of the Midas touch. Like literally everything he touched was destroyed and turned to shit. Now, one of the major changes that Joe Biden has made to the policy is that Joe Biden's allowing unaccompanied minors and some families with their children in the U.S. to be processed. Literally what Trump was doing is if there was a kid all alone by themselves, he would send them back to a country alone by themselves, separating them from their families, or he would throw them in a cage and separate them from their families, separate these families when they came to the border. Joe Biden is not doing that because this administration doesn't think

it's okay to rip families apart. They think that it's on them to try to figure out how to reunite these families and deal with the situation in a humane way. And really at the end of the day, aside from just wanting to make political hay out of it, you have people like Senator John Cornyn, who are kind of saying the quiet part out loud. And Cornyn tweeted and he was so oblivious that this is like not a OK thing to tweet. He said today as if it were a bad thing. He said President Biden has instead emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants regardless of legal status. Like, OK.

Senator Cornyn is upset. This is that President Biden has emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants. And this is him tweeting a tweet that he's tweeting his own tweet. He's quote tweeting himself. And the quote tweet of himself from earlier was, Bill Clinton ran for reelection on a platform that said,

we cannot tolerate illegal immigration and we must stop it. And then so Cornyn tweets himself and says, President Biden has instead emphasized the humane treatment of immigrants regardless of their legal status. I think interestingly, no one, including Biden, is promoting in any way illegal immigration. But yes, we are promoting the humane treatment of human beings. And so, yes, rather than make kids go into cages, Biden administration is looking into awarding contracts for hotel rooms that are near the border to temporarily shelter migrant family members who cross over. He's in fact entered into at least one contract close to $100 million. And guess what? They're pissed off about that.

Oh, of course. They want to see the families ripped apart. They want to see the brutality. And they don't even care if it's not effective as a strategy. They just want to see the physical manifestations of torture and the physical manifestations of doing something, even if it doesn't work. In today's day and age, what Trump did by erecting a portion of a portion of a wall, okay? In a digital age where people are burrowing underground, where people can climb a wall, where they don't build a wall across the border, even if you built it across the border, which you didn't do, that's not an effective way of dealing with it. Like, we should deal with the issues if we want to stop it by using technology and identifying where the appropriate points are that we need to divert our resources to and not use the xenophobic and hateful rhetoric

and tore families apart. My summation, Brett, though, is look, the immigration policy needs work. We shouldn't give Joe Biden an A plus or an A minus or a B plus or B minus or even a C for what he's doing right now. There are real, absolute problems that are going on at the border right now as we speak. But you have a president who's been there for 60 days, who's trying to fix four years of an individual who has completely and utterly dismantled it. This is where we're different than the GQP. If we were the GQP right now, we would be out there praising Biden and saying Biden was doing the most amazing job at the border. That's not what we're doing. We're saying he has a lot of work to do, a lot of work to do. And we want to watch it. If he's doing a bad job six months from now, nine months from now, a year from now, we're going to call him out. Yeah. You know who actually had a really interesting point on this

was Brian Karam last week when he said, this is a 40-year problem. It's not a 60-day problem right now. It's not all of a sudden a crisis. This has been something that's been mismanaged for quite some time now. And yes, Trump royally fucked it up even worse the last four years, but you got to give Biden at least some window here to try and figure this thing out. But you know what I like about him too? Biden acknowledges that there's a problem. Biden acknowledges, yeah, there's a problem. Yeah, the conditions aren't ideal. These aren't the conditions that we want for people.

And that's why he takes actions like buying hotel rooms and stuff, which conservatives go crazy over. How could you spend all this money to house illegal immigrants? Da, da, da, da, da, da. Well, that's the humane thing to do. You kind of play that clip today. It was from Fox News this morning when Trump called in and they just bizarrely claimed that the Department of Homeland Security chief, Mayorkas, resigned. And then Trump's like, good, that's great. Victory for us. And then she said,

actually, he did not resign. Oh, I guess not a victory for us. Like there's just no fact check. It's just a complete and utter just shit show, just making stuff up and breaking fake news as we speak. So just play that clip because it's just happened now. And I want to double check this with our producers. The DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkasas has resigned, Mr. President. Well, I'm not surprised. Good. That's a big victory for our country.

Hold on. Let me stop. Let me stop. Let me listen to my team one more time. Forgive me. Forgive me. That has not happened. And I apologize, listening to the team and you.

Okay, cross off that victory well look i i want to i'd like to laugh at that but like what the fuck is that like there's no even effort at at journalism at that point she goes wait i want to confirm with my producers of this one thing and then she just says it. Why wouldn't you then wait and confirm it with your producers? You're just going to go spit out that the Department of Homeland Security just resigned when it's not true. How does that even happen into somebody's ear? What were the four or five words that were said that she picked up on? What do you think Mayorkas is thinking? I think Mayorkas knew what he was signing up for. I think that the level of stupidity this early is a bit shocking.

The hypocrisy of the GQP, though, is always on full display. And I think that somebody who knows the hypocrisy of the GQP more than anybody, someone who is a big Midas Touch fan. I think he follows us and I'm super glad that we get him on the show. Former Vermont governor, former head of the Democratic National Committee. We have Governor Howard Dean coming up right after these messages. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. I am joined by physician and former six-term governor of Vermont, ran for president in 2004, Governor Howard Dean. Thank you for joining the Midas Touch podcast. Thanks for having me.

Governor Dean, no, definitely. We're big fans. I want to start with on your Twitter account after your name. It says, I block bigots, whiners, and enraged right wingers. Governor, doesn't that just describe the entire GOP right now? Yeah, not many Republicans I talk to, but actually, there's not many that want to talk to me either. So how did that happen, though? Wasn't there a time? I mean, even when you ran for president in 2004, when you were the DNC chair, where you could have

conversations with members of the opposite, you know, aisle? Well, yeah, it still exists in Vermont. We have a Republican governor, although he did vote for Biden, and he's done a terrific job managing the coronavirus problem and the vaccines and everything else better than most other governors of both parties. have adopted racism as their principal appeal to people. I think I tweeted a great phrase out of Ann Applebaum's article in The Atlantic, which basically said that the Republican Party has become a party dominated by people who fundamentally want power and don't really care about the country. And that's what the Republican Party has become. They're really fundamentally, not all of them, but they either are evil, like Hawley and Cruz, or they're afraid of the evil, so they have no backbone. And it's pretty hard to name too many people that that doesn't apply to in the Republican Party.

Some of the oddest things I'm seeing over the past 50, 60 days is just overtly rooting for Vladimir Putin, you know, mocking how Biden would do in a debate versus Putin, acting like it's a negative that Kim Jong Un doesn't want to go and meet with Biden immediately, basically praising these dictators. And I suppose the GOP really appears to be rooting for our enemies at this point. They are rooting for, they're doing whatever they think they need to do to maintain power. They've completely given up on any of the fundamental idealism that the country was founded on. Look, our country has plenty of faults and we were built on genocide and racism. There's not any question about it, but we also have high aspirations. And by and large, we've become an inspiration to the rest of the world because of our aspiration,

despite our very unsteady foreign policy over the last 100 years. But the Republicans have just turned their back on everything that's idealistic. There is no hope in the Republican Party. And when you think about it, conservatives are basically people who are afraid of the future. And the difference between conservatives and Democrats, for all the bumbling around we do, which we can do plenty of, but the basic difference is we embrace the future. I mean, we are a global nation, whether people like globalism or not, it's here to say there's 7 billion people on the globe. And, you know, this is, the Republicans are completely anachronistic and out of touch with anything that makes any sense for anybody, except, of course, their extremely wealthy ally, like the Koch brothers and the Federalist Society, which cares about power, not ideals.

Could you explain their quest for power and their denial of science? Are those concepts intertwined? Sure. Look, the quest for power is part of our DNA as human beings. I mean, there's an ugly side of humanity. And what I admire about the American Constitution and the EU Charter, for example, is the task that we have as human beings is to build institutions around the ugly part of human beings that wants power and that commits genocide and does terrible things. So we build institutions to stop ourselves from doing that. That's what the EU sprang up out of the ashes of Europe after Hitler, who was probably the most evil person, certainly in the last

millennial, I would say, millennium, if not more. So we have to contend with that part of human beings. The problem is the Republicans embrace it. Their vision is apocalyptic destruction of the human race and the earth. That's what their basic visioncribe that part, which we share, of us that will choose destruction and power over the future. And that apocalyptic vision, too, manifests in anti-vaxxing. I mean, Jordy just got his vaccine today. He lives near a red district where nobody showed up. And so they had a waiting list. And because he was by a red area, he was able to show up. As a physician, when you see the misinformation, disinfo, and just sheer anti-science from the GOP, what goes through your mind? There's been some of that too. And again, that's not just particular to the GOP. The GOP has embraced it as a way, a reason to vote for them. But they're, you know, unfortunately, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaxxer and he certainly is not a Republican.

So, I mean, that's a whole different thing. That's a sort of a perversion of science. Look, science is tough and sometimes science is wrong, but there is this illness that we're going through right now. And part of it's because we have no grip on social media. People can say anything they want anytime. And I actually am not for censoring social media, but I am for getting rid of Section 230 and being able to sue social media for putting stuff up that's damaging because there has to be some restraint and the government certainly can't restrain the media. Otherwise, you get a situation you had in Nazi Germany or China or any of a number of autocratic states. On the Section 230 issue, was it always confusing to you when you would see people like Donald Trump want to get rid of Section 230? Because wouldn't, in essence,

that make social media companies want to remove the disinformation that he's spewing at the end of the day? Yeah, well, see, Trump doesn't think. I actually think Trump was deeply psychiatrically disturbed. Trump's reason for getting rid of Section 230 is he lashes out at anybody that opposes him or hurts him. Social media gave people a platform to attack him. So that was his reason. I don't think he fully understood why it was important. It's important because government in a democracy, government cannot and must not regulate what's in the media. That is out of the question. So how else can you regulate what's in the media? How can you prevent people from Fox News saying outrageous lies and actually killing their own viewers? Because a lot of people who could have gotten a vaccine didn't.

And a lot of them are going to die as a result or already have died. How do you stop that? Well, you can't have the government decide what goes on the media or not. Otherwise, you undermine democracy. So why not have recourse available? There's nothing the media likes less than losing money. So whether if you can sue Fox or you can sue Google for their content on YouTube, or you can sue any number of, you know, Facebook, of course, is the biggest villain for carrying content, which is damaging to people that lets them self censor. And people should self censor when they're lying and telling destructive lies. But Trump never thought about that. When Trump said get rid of Section 230. He just was lashing out the same way he was lashing out of the Washington Post and Amazon because he didn't like Jeff Bezos. It's just juvenile and narcissistic. He was upset that we would get

a hashtag trending and then he would rush and say, get rid of section 230. That was Trump's MO basically. To that end, you're known as one of the best messengers of the party. So I'm curious, what media outlets do you read every day? Who do you trust and why? I like Vox a lot. I get most of my news off Twitter, not people who angrily, as you noticed, except with the exceptions of the people you just talked about that I don't look at.

But I read The Guardian. I like The Guardian a lot. And then I'll read a smattering of almost everything. Anything Ezra Klein writes or Jane Mayer writes, I'll read. I don't go too far. I don't read The Intercept because I think it's, you know, a lot of it's titillating and a lot of it's bullshit. So I don't go way out there, but I tend towards center left reading.

I like facts. One of the greatest papers that I love is the Financial Times. I care about facts and information. I don't want a lot of screaming and yelling and carrying on. And I don't want a lot of incompetence and clickbait. We expect that from Fox News, sadly. But are you worried that the rest of this quote unquote mainstream media has not learned the correct lessons from the Trump years?

It seems like they're sort of looking for controversy in a lot of aspects and just are very quick to parrot these right wing talking points. So I'm wondering what your perspective on that is. I think they're very quick to parrot anything that is clickbait. I mean, they all do that. I thought cable television would be dead by now, and I think that Trump resurrected it. Because cable television thrives on outrage and clickbait, no matter whether you're left, right, or center.

They rarely tell the amount of lies that Fox tells without any chagrin whatsoever, apparently. But they do, you know, they're smarter networks than others. I think MSNBC is a pretty decent network, but it is clickbait. I mean, let's not forget, Joe and Mika helped build Donald Trump by letting him do his interviews in his bathrobe, in his slippers from a hotel room on the phone, and everybody else, including Hillary Clinton, had to show up in the studio. If that's what you're willing to do, you're really not a news organization. You're an entertainment organization. But again, let's be honest about this. This speaks to the dark side of human beings. We're the consumers. Without us, MSNBC and Fox wouldn't exist. As DNC chair from 2004 to 2005, actually, to 2009, one of the things you're most known

for was the 50-state strategy, you know, which many people at the time were critical of, many people supported. Could Democrats actually compete? I think we're seeing the fruits of that in Georgia. Some of the races were close in Texas. What do you think the legacy of that 50 state strategy is? And is it something that we should be leaning in more on right now? Oh, yeah. We have not yet begun to do it. We've gotten into some of the semi-decent 50 state strategy in Congress.

We have not done anything about local people. We ought to be running in the Democrats in every state legislative seat in the country and especially in places like Kansas and Texas. Look, if you don't run people and run for office in all these conservative areas, then you're leaving the messenger for the Democrats to be Rush Limbaugh or whoever is Fox News. You've got to be out there. Personal interaction is the soul of politics. And if we don't have somebody knocking on doors saying, hey, I'm running and here's what I want to do. That's why I think we've got to have more tolerance in the Democratic Party between moderates and progressives. You know, the moderates need to vote. The American public is more progressive than people think they are. So they ought to be

voting for universal health care. But the progressives should not use a blowtorch on the moderates that don't want to do everything they want to do. And for a long time, progressives have said, well, you know, if you're not with me, then you're against me and you're a capitalist pig. That is not reasonable. We're not going to get people like that in deep Texas, but we could. And, you know, right now we're in this sort of place with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. We need to get rid of the filibuster. We need to pass substantial legislation for the sake of saving the country. But we can't use a blowtorch on each other. We've got to stop that.

The moderates have got to belly up and start voting for more progressive stuff. And the progressives have got to give them a little room and stop with a flamethrower rhetoric. Let's talk about messaging, particularly right now. What does that actually look like in terms of actually getting out, you know, actually getting out there? I mean, the American Recovery Act passed overwhelmingly popular. In fact, most of the Democratic policies, I think if you put them up for referendum, which would all be voted on overwhelmingly. So do we go out there and is it press conferences? Is it knocking on doors? Is it going back into the communities and literally holding town halls and saying, this is what we brought to you?

How do we do that, especially as you see some GOP members taking credit and saying, look, you see that bridge? I helped get that amendment in the American Recovery Act. No, you didn't. You voted against the act. Right. That's true. And here's one of the problems, the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans are really good at campaigns because the word campaign is a military word. And the truth is, politics really is war by another means. So the Republicans run top-down campaigns. As many have said, the truth is always the first casualty of war. They don't care about the truth, nor do the Republicans care about facts.

But they're really good at unified messaging. We're not. But the Republicans can't run anything because they don't care about facts. Name a Republican president that did a good job running anything in the last 50 years. I'll give you Reagan on disarmament with the Russians. Not many others. And Bush Sr. was very good at foreign policy. But the rest of it is just disastrous, pretty much.

So here's the Democrats' problem. The problem is we like to think through every issue. We argue every issue. We argue every issue. We raise every issue. We want perfection. And so we're not terribly well-disciplined. Now, the truth is we do a pretty good job of governing. We get a lot of stuff done.

But the difficulty is getting elected. We care what the facts are. We fight about the facts. We have open debates. It's good to have that when you're governing. It's tough to get elected without that unified message that you're just pounding three words every single day across the country with 9000 candidates. I feel like that's what you've seen in these last few weeks or a couple of months. You've seen the Republican Party try to find that unified message to attack Democrats with. And they went from the Muppets to Dr. Seuss.

And when those didn't work, now they're switching to Biden border crisis. There's a huge crisis at the border and the media has picked it up and it's ran with it. These are issues that sometimes are easy to laugh at, especially like the Dr. Seuss and the Muppets. But the fact is, I think those issues actually work on their voters. They understand that they are these emotional issues. So I guess, how do the Democrats, though, own the narrative on something like the border that Republicans typically get much more credit for? Okay, so there's a difference between Dr. Seuss and the border. The greatest tragedy of Trump was not his corruption. He's certainly the most corrupt

president in the history of the United States. The greatest tragedy was all the people who surrendered their agency as human beings to Donald Trump. That is a sign that something is very wrong in our society, where huge swaths of people, maybe as many a third of the people, decided that their lives weren't worthy enough, and they would surrender their agency to basically a crook, to a con man. It's happened a lot. It's basically the same principle that Hitler used to take over and that most dictators used to take over. It's a pathetic construct, though, because it means that there are an awful lot of Americans who've given up on themselves. And we have to figure out how to motivate them not to do that. The truth is, yes, it matters what our platform is. And yes, we,

I don't think Dr. Seuss gets anywhere except for the true believers, and we're not going to get them anyway, because they've disabled themselves. The biggest problem is how can we convince people to use their own agency to make the country better, as opposed to surrendering it to people who are incompetent? In your opinion, is there a moment in time where the Republican Party, I mean, we refer to them as the GQP, started just to, you know, forego any ideology that they actually had that emboldened conservatism and started leaning into these more radical, you know, QAnon philosophies? Is there a particular moment that stands out to you? Yep. The election of Donald Trump.

I mean, here's this guy gets elected and his party collapses. I look, I used to get along fine with Republicans when I was governor. In fact, a lot of them used to run them. And some of my party accused me of being a Republican because I cared about the budget and I didn't want to spend money we didn't have. The problem is there are decent Republicans, sort of, that just don't have the backbone to stand up. I mean, you know, you get a guy like John Portman, very decent guy, no backbone whatsoever. Right. And that hurts America. I mean, to surrender to fascism is just as much of a sin as being a fascist. They don't know what to do. They're lost. Look, you can have philosophical

differences between the parties that make sense. How much money should we spend? How much debt is too much debt? That's not the problem. The problem here is do you have any principles whatsoever that you stand up for? And the Republican Party does not have any principles at all, as far as I can see right now, except for I want power and I'll do whatever I can and lie in any way I need to in order to get power. That is a principle for the destruction of the United States and any other country. And Governor Dean, as we empower people with agency, one of the issues is, is that the GOP is trying to remove that agency through voter suppression. We see literally hundreds of bills across. You've been very vocal about what corporations should be doing. What can we be doing collectively? What can corporations be doing?

How big of a threat are these voter suppression bills that are being introduced by the GOP? They're a disaster. This is a multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic society. It has been one almost since we got here. It is also somewhat, I won't say it's a racist society, although it is. What I will say, though, is racism is a part of all of us, as Ibram Kendi has pointed out so well, all of us. We can all have, we all have our worst side that we can appeal to. It is the job of political leaders to get us not to do that. And we have to reinforce the political leaders. What the Republicans have done is given up any semblance of that. They have signed off. They have given up on America. And they want to create America

as something else so they can run it. That's pathetic. What we have to do is stick to our principles and stick to our ideals at any cost. And that means, for example, not flying on airlines that are based in Atlanta or not using products where the company is giving a ton of money to Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz or some of these other neo-fascists. Consumer power is enormously important in this country. Companies pay attention to it and companies will often lead the way in social progress.

I can remember that IBM was putting African-American members on its board of directors before the Civil Rights Act passed. So the business community gets what it needs to do, but it is guided by profit. And we can, as consumers, can affect profit. Governor Dean, where are you focusing your time these days? Well, I'm doing about nine different things. I teach a foreign policy course, which I really enjoy. And I work for a big law firm. I don't, I mean, I'm a consultant different things. I teach a foreign policy course, which I really enjoy. And I work for a big law firm. I don't I mean, I'm a consultant for them. I don't do any lobbying, contrary to what The Intercept tries to claim all the time. But I do Party, the kind that Republicans have. It's much, much different. It's very distributive. Nobody owns the data. So it's built the way somebody in your generation would build it. And so we have something called the Democratic Data Exchange, which was quite successful. We put a couple of hundred million pieces of data into Georgia

in the last two elections. But that's basically what I'm doing. That's the one thing when Trump won, a group of people, including Hillary Clinton and myself and a couple of others started funding things like Run for Something and Collective PAC and Voto Latino. And, you know, the groups that if you look at them all, they all do together what the Democratic Party needs to do. And the one thing we couldn't do was build a database because it was really expensive and really difficult. Well, the Democratic Data Exchange is the database. So because people your age don't particularly like parties and they don't like institutions. And so but they do care deeply. People your age almost all vote for the Democrats because we embrace the same ideals that you embrace.

You know, you see gay rights as a civil rights issue of your time. You like diversity. You like immigration. And so and of course, you embrace social media, although neither the Republicans have done that and made it much worse. So the database is the one thing we couldn't do by funding organizations that had sprung up on their own, like Run for Something. And so that's what I'm mostly doing now in terms of Democratic Party politics is running the organization that creates the database that can be shared. Thank you, Governor Dean, for joining the Midas Touch podcast. We'd love to have you back. We'll be right back after these messages. Welcome back to the Midas Touch podcast. Great interview by Governor Dean. Love to have a Governor Dean on the show. I want to talk to you about two things that are completely and utterly fucked up. One is Miami and Florida spring break. And the other is Trump claiming that he's going to be starting a social media application now that he's been banned from

every app, which I'll discuss to you with you why I think that is utterly and totally going to fail. But let's talk about Miami. I don't even know what the fuck to call what's going on in Miami. Clusterfuck? Disaster. And I feel bad. We got some folks on in Miami. Clusterfuck? Disaster. And I feel bad. We got some folks down in Florida. We got some Midas Mighty down in Florida and they're just suffering with this. I know. I know. Asshole DeSantis. Seeing these crowds while COVID's still raging, it really just feels like the runner running around the track and then just stopping and celebrating before he reaches the finish line and then everybody else passes him. It's like, we're so close to the end of COVID. And here's something that Governor Dean said

that we should all take note. He recognized that people are flawed when it comes to braving power. People are also flawed sometimes in being educated on issues. And what you need, though, as leaders in a political system are leaders who can help actually lead people and not play to people's most basic and horrible instincts and ignorant instincts. It's for leaders to educate. It's for leaders to bring people together and to unite people. And the GQP wants to just tear at our fabric because, as Governor Dean pointed to, and he said it incredible in that interview, because ultimately their goal is to make people feel stupid and dumb, to take their agency away from them and to give it in the hands of a despot, to give it into the hands of a GQP dictator to basically run people's lives without any accountability. That's what's taken place in fascist countries and dictatorships.

And that is specifically what the GQP wants. You don't take our word for it either. I mean, Trump says it himself. Trump's the guy who got up there at the RNC four years ago and said, only I could fix it. That's a dictator move. There are all these problems that exist, all these problems, all these things that are happening to you, whether it's the immigrants, globalism, and I'm the only one who could fix it. All your problems will go away if you just give up all your freedom to me and let me be your brain. Let me decide what you should be doing, what this country should be doing. Give me your power. And it's a move that dictators have done throughout history. And we dodged a, I would say a bullet, but we

dodged a nuclear bomb by getting this guy out of office. But the problems still remain. I mean, we're seeing the remnants of this all over and seeing this spring break partying footage in Miami is just really troubling. So that's why the city had to declare a state of emergency. The mayor announced an 8 p.m. curfew in the South Beach Entertainment District to shut down the city. Did you see the clip of the masked man waving the flag? What was he even screaming? COVID is over. Yeah, his face painted like the Joker. He was standing up on a car waving an American flag, screaming COVID's over, baby. COVID's over. I mean- Was he throwing money?

Yeah. And he threw like $7 up in the air. He was making it rain. Yeah. I mean, I $7 up in the air. lot of people were isolated and by themselves. I think we're seeing that now out in public with people like that who are painting themselves as the Joker and are getting on top of cars and throwing money and waving flags and screaming, COVID's over. I'm a little worried, honestly, about the mental health fallout of Trump feeding these people just hate. Well, I'm with you. And look what Governor Ron Death Santa says. I mean, bad leadership leads to certain results. And obviously, when it comes to Florida, it leads to over 2 million coronavirus cases there. But specifically on February 26, right before spring break, Governor Death-Sas states, Florida is an oasis of freedom from coronavirus restrictions.

Calling Florida an oasis of freedom and inviting people to the state to not wear masks and to engage in this incredibly dangerous and deadly behavior, this is the consequence of failed and flawed and just disgusting leadership. That is what will happen when you have them like that. It's just basic safety measures in the past were never politicized. I mean, could you imagine when people said you need to wear seatbelts if you had this brand of GQP in power? And they would say, you know, oh, wearing a seatbelt takes away my freedom. That's what they would argue. They would argue basic health and safety measures infringe on their freedom. And if it was up to them, I mean, just think about all the past

health issues from Ebola to H1N1 to mad cow, just all of these diseases in the past, how Republicans would have handled this. It's horrible. And, you know, now we have Donald Trump wanting to create his own social media app. Absurd that you have, you know, these individuals even go on TV in the first place. I mean, you have Jason Miller, who's just one of the most... How do they keep sending this guy out? He's like the most disgusting human being on the planet. Yeah. Jason Miller. I mean, what he's testified to, what he's been accused of, what has been proven facts, what people very close to him have said about him. Go look up Jason Miller and you'll see one of the most

disgusting and despicable human beings in the world. Google Jason Miller abortion pill. Google Jason Miller child support. But here's the thing. This is the guy who unabashedly, with Trump's endorsement, is the face of Trump right now. This is like the main spokesperson going out there. You know, and this is why I'm proud to be a Democrat at the end of Trump right now. This is like the main spokesperson going out there. And this is why I'm proud to be a Democrat at the end of the day, because I don't want a Jason Miller out there as the face of my beliefs and my value systems. This isn't the C team. This isn't the D team or the F team. This is, as I've learned, the Omega team. Omega being the last letter of the Greek alphabet. There is no such thing as Zeta being the last letter of the Greek alphabet. It

is Omega. And Jason Miller is an Omega. Okay. A really educational process for you. I'm impressed. Learning. I'm like artificial intelligence. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, capital M, mu, nu, xi, m, crom, pi, rho, sigma, tau, epsilon. Where do you get to omega? You didn't get to omega. I could get to it if I wasn't on the podcast. Oh, got it, got it, got it. Stage fright. So what they do say is that we're going to see the social media app in two to three months. During the administration, infrastructure week, a health care plan, all of that was always two to three weeks. And we never got those in four years.

So judging by that, saying that the app is going to be out in two to three months tells me that we probably need to wait. I don't know. Never. There will never be a Trump social media app that he runs. Could you imagine Donald Trump running anything? The man couldn't, he's been a failed operator his entire life. And one of the funny things though, is like the heads of Parler and Gab are like really pissed and are just denigrating him and are like, oh, this, they're like, they're now basically like, oh, this clown thinks he knows how to run an app. Yeah. Good luck. It'll be as good as his presidency. Like all of a sudden you're starting to see this negativity, but I think it's just funny how quickly they turn once there's like a business stake out there. Here's my bet

of exactly how this is going to go. He's going to make the app. It's going to be like a paid platform. There's going to be a paywall. It's just going to be him grifting and the app's going to be like a paid platform. There's going to be a paywall. It's just going to be him grifting. And the app's going to fold. He's never going to maintain it. And that's going to be how it, just like all of his other businesses. That's why he runs it. Like he gets them off the ground,

but it's all sham at the end of the day. Then he's going to sue somebody and say, I could have, they'll probably end up suing Parler and Gab. He's going to claim that he tried to get it off the ground and they intentionally interfered with his ability to get it off the ground. He'll take in a few billion dollars of investment and then he'll shut it down and then basically just sue everybody. That's totally. If I were the developer, here's the app I would create for him.

I would create, I would just clone Twitter and I would make him an account, a fake account, and have him just tweet and have it look only on his app as if his tweets are going through and are getting likes and retweets and things. But nobody else in the world could see any of this stuff. So it just keeps him occupied. And he thinks he's talking to a crowd. He's really just talking to himself the whole time. He's happy.

We don't have to deal with him. He's talking into the wind. I think it's a win-win. Oh, I definitely love, love, love that. He could get fake Twitter. He could just get fake Twitter on his phone. We need a fake Twitter account for Donald Trump. Well, that is our show today. Thank you for listening to the Midas Touch podcast. It was great having Governor Dean on the show. Thank you, Governor Dean. We've got some incredible guests lined up

over the next few weeks who are locked in. We'll keep you suspenseful over who they're going to be, but you will love these guests. Thank you so much for making Midas Touch one of the top podcasts in North America. Let me just do a deep tease for people for what you're going to might find out on next podcast this friday's podcast we have reached a settlement with marjorie taylor green in our lawsuit and we will tell you all the details of this settlement on the next episode of the might oh that's a great tease that's my favorite thing when we do when we do these at the end it's like we always interrupt each other so you know there's that one or two people or probably a couple people that have already signed off who don't know the DPs. We're like a Marvel movie where you have to stay through the credits. You got to stay through the end credits because you won't even know about Marjorie Trader Green and what's the status of the lawsuit and what happened with the settlement.

But it's coming at you on this Friday's episode of the Midas Touch Podcast podcast so shout out to the Midas Midas shout out to the Midas Midas