The MeidasTouch Podcast - The Shiny Pants Doctrine with Elie Mystal

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

On today's episode of The MeidasTouch Podcast, the brothers sit down with Elie Mystal! If you’ve been living under a rock, Elie is "The Nation’s" justice correspondent—covering the courts, the criminal justice system, and politics—and the force behind the magazine’s monthly column “Objection!” During the interview, Elie discusses the ludicrous sentences being given out to Jan 6. insurrectionists, why Merrick Garland needs to step up his game, voting rights and much more. During the remainder of the episode, the brothers discuss what exactly Kevin McCarthy was opposing during his 8-hour speech on the house floor, Louis DeJoy’s final days in power, and how Democrats need to go on the attack with messaging their accomplishments. If you enjoyed today's episode please be sure to rate, review and subscribe! As always, thank YOU for listening. DEALS FROM OUR SPONSORS: BETTER HELP: betterhelp.com/meidas ADAM & EVE: Visit adamandeve.com and use promo code MEIDAS STAMPS.COM: Stamps.com and use promo code MEIDAS Remember to subscribe to ALL the Meidas Media Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://pod.link/1510240831 Legal AF: https://pod.link/1580828595 The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://pod.link/1595408601 Kremlin File: https://pod.link/1575837599 Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://pod.link/1530639447 Zoomed In: https://pod.link/1580828633 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome to the Midas Touch podcast, Ben, Brett, and Jordi. We've got an incredible episode for you today. Our guest, Ellie Mistal. Let's go! Yes! Justice correspondent covering courts, criminal justice system, for you today. Our guest, Ellie Mistal. Let's go! Yes! Justice, correspondent, covering courts, criminal justice system, and politics. Of course,

he's the force behind the magazine's monthly column, Objection! And you know Ellie. I know Ellie. I miss NBC. See him there all the time. Every time Ellie comes on the air, I'm like, oh shit, it's going down right now. It's about to go down. I love seeing Ellie on my TV. So excited to have him on the podcast.

It's going to be great. They have to. I can only imagine that their internal data has to show because everybody I know it's consistent with this. When Ellie shows up, it's like, all right, I'm going to watch MSNBC now. Then when Ellie's gone, I'm like, all right, I'm going to go watch Netflix or something. So true. He's so great. He really is that great. I always love seeing Ellie excited to hear what he has to say about everything. Because I really don't need anymore the media basically telling me about Kamala Harris saying

the versus the. You don't think that's good reporting? No. And I don't need the media. I don't need the media ignoring the benefits of the infrastructure bill, ignoring how historic Build Back Better is. I guess the media just wants to cover, is Kamala Harris in a feud with Pete Buttigieg? And how is that feud going to impact 2024? When meanwhile, the Biden administration is trying to get done historic legislation and say what you want to say about this Biden administration. But the infrastructure bill is like the biggest infrastructure injection

of capital in the history of our nation, or at least the recent history of our nation since the New Deal. And this build back better. I mean, Brett, just maybe take down all of the things and Brett's got a hot take on salt that Brett wants to give you. That's so many people talking about salt all weekend. Some people are probably going to get upset with me on my hot take on salt. But first off, I just want to take a step back and say happy Thanksgiving to everybody. For all intents and purposes, this will probably be our Thanksgiving episode. We're going to be taking off this Thursday, but we'll be leaving you guys with a Thanksgiving message just to give you guys a chance. We'll have Thanksgiving content.

We'll have Thanksgiving content, but it won't be a traditional full episode of the show. So I just wanted to say happy Thanksgiving to everybody. I'm just so thankful to be able to do this show with my brothers and to be able to just be so unabashedly pro-democracy every single day and to be in this fight with you, to be in this fight with Ben and Jordy, and to just really, I just feel like we built a community, we built a movement, and I really want to keep this going into 2022. You got to save this content for the Thursday episode. What are you doing? I know. That's the whole emphasis

of the Thursday episode. Thursday, Thursday content. Should we save some stories for the Thursday episode too? I think we can do a really quick one though about you playing football. So really quick, Brett.

Wait, which story are you talking about? You playing football with the cousins when it was like 40 degrees outside and you took off your shirt and everyone in the family

was concerned for your well-being. So seven, Brett's 10, Ben's, you know, 15, 16. We go to our cousin's house for great Thanksgiving. We're all having so much fun. What do you do? You do a little quick turkey bowl on Thanksgiving. Always. You play a nice game of touch football, got a place to play. You split up the team. So no one takes it too seriously. You know, you have family, you have members of family on each team. We're playing the game. It's an amazing night. It's probably like 45 degrees, definitely cold. You should be wearing a sweatshirt, should be wearing gloves. What does Brett do mid-game?

My man just takes off his shirt out of nowhere and just runs a fly pattern. Everyone at at this time is just so confused. Like what is going on? Everyone, like I said, is in their sweatshirts, in their gloves. And next thing we know, we got naked Brett running around the backyard, truly puzzling. Next thing I know, I have all the aunts and uncles and cousins and parents and brothers laughing at me. And from my perspective, you know what? It's like a little chilly, but the sun comes out and you feel the warm sun on you. So to me, I felt like I was a bit warmer than it was. And okay, I'll concede it was probably like 40 degrees out, but the sun made it feel warmer.

And we were about to play some football. And then I look over and literally everyone is like laughing at me. Truly a scarring moment in my childhood. And I just broke down and started hysterically crying. Just hysterically crying. And now it's, of course, a story that the brothers make fun of me with to this day. And it's a story that has been ingrained in my psyche. I remember that day so perfectly. I'm going to admit something that I've never admitted

to any family member ever. Right before you took your shirt off and ran your little fly pattern, I thought to myself, hey, I'm getting a little hot play and I can take my shirt off. I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. Jordy Bomb dropped here on the Midas Touch podcast. Let me intervene here. I have no recollection whatsoever of this story. Like not even the faintest recollection. I remember it like it was yesterday.

It's funny what you remember in your childhood and what you don't. It was a defining and scarring moment for me. Build Back Better. Let's talk about Build Back Better, guys. Let me leave this to my therapist, and let's leave this to the good folks at BetterHelp to talk about. Here's what happened over the weekend, in case you missed it. I'm sure none of you guys have missed it, but Democrats in the House passed the Build Back Better bill. This, of course, came after Kevin McCarthy's bizarre, unhinged eight-plus-hour meltdown on the House floor. Very bizarre, very strange. Here's a little montage of Kevin McCarthy's

antics on the House floor in case you missed it or didn't quite catch all eight and a half hours. I can look anywhere I want, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I cannot believe the amount of control one party rule wants. They now want to dictate to a member of the floor of where I can look. This isn't a Republican or Democrat issue. This is the safety of this nation over a self-described police obologist. So let this sink in. You're encouraging more to come. We think, you know, that's a little unfair.

The other countries got destroyed a little more than America. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama. Gas prices. Thanksgiving. A border. So we went down the path with the doors open. America, you're weak. You're weak, America.

You're weak because you believe in God and you take Fentanyl. Yeah, I want to go back. Just a sick man. You're weak, America. You're weak because you believe in God and you take Fentanyl. Yeah, I want to go back. Just a sick man. I mean, at the end of the day, what he's really saying is, why in the world would we want universal pre-K? Why would we want $555 billion to deal with our climate crisis? Why would we want $3,000 and close to $4,000 cash for parents? Why would we want four weeks paid leave? Why would

we want more childcare money? Why would we want to cap seniors out-of-pocket drug spending at $2,000 a year? Why would we want to cap insulin payment at $35 a month? Why would we want Medicare drug price negotiations? Why would we want to expand Medicare to cover hearing benefits? Hearing benefits, what are we talking about? Hearing benefits. You want to hear? We don't need to hear. Very impressive. Well done. Really, really well done. The commitment was perfect. Get him on the house floor. Get Ben on the house floor. I needed to do eight hours, Ben. Hearing benefits. There's a bill that will make you hear better. We don't want to hear. That would be communism. You don't want communism. Do you know how deranged of a human being you have to be?

You're rambling and mumbling like a complete lunatic. I'll tell you. See, when Speaker Pelosi set the record for the amount of time on the House floor and she spoke for an extended period of time, it was to prevent dreamers, immigrants who have lived here their whole lives, from being deported. That was why she took a stand. Kevin McCarthy took a stand to make sure that you can't get your insulin capped at $35 a month. And that you can't get universal pre-K or money towards child care or health care or paid leave. That's where Kevin McCarthy drew the line. Meanwhile, the CBO reported that this is actually going to reduce the deficit by $127 billion.

Billion with a B, reduce over 10 years with the new tax enforcement mechanisms. So I think that's something important also to highlight for the Joe Manchins out there, for the Republicans out there, because let's be clear, these Republicans, they don't care about the deficit. They don't care about running up the debt. They don't care about the economy, really. They just care about getting richer and richer and richer at your expense. And I think the irony of it all is they talk about, you know, you got to pull yourself up for your own bootstraps here, right? Government can't do anything for you. You don't want to take that government money.

That's socialism. That's communism. You don't want to take that price cut to your insulin. You should be paying $800 a pop for insulin. You should be paying thousands of dollars a month for your healthcare costs. You don't want communism. Meanwhile, the rich in this country are the ones mooching off the government. They're taking the money. Nobody's telling them to pull themselves up by their own

bootstraps. And they're taking the money to the tunes of billions and trillions of dollars. And when that happens, Republicans don't even bat an eye. And Brett, it's just the statistics. You forwarded me this article earlier from Huffington Post, which talks about how Trump's estate tax giveaway to the rich the ultra-rich sparked a 50% plunge in IRS revenue from the taxes. Estate tax payments dropped from $20 billion to just over $9 billion last year, Bloomberg reported, based on its analysis of IRS data. And then American billionaires, meanwhile, have doubled their collective net worth to more than $5 trillion in just over five years. $5 trillion in just over five years. I want you to think about that because everyone wants to, but oh, the trickle down economics. No, that seems to have trickled up to me to the tune of $5 trillion. Yeah.

If there was some sort of intellectual consistency here, if, and I don't want to see an America like this, but if regular people, working people were not receiving benefits from the government and also the rich were not receiving these benefits from the government, you'd at least say, okay, there's some sort of even handedness here. But the fact is the rich are being bailed out on a daily basis. No one bats an eye at these multi-billion dollar weapons contracts. No one bats an eye at these tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires. None of the Republicans bat an eye at any of that stuff. But when it comes to, okay, let's spend a fraction of that money. By the way, it's our money. It's our money that goes to the government and our taxes, and they decide where to prioritize it, right? They decide what to do with it. So in the second, this becomes a matter of, okay, what if we use some of this money to make insulin, life-saving insulin cheaper

for people who need it? It becomes, oh, where are we going to pay for that? I don't think we have the cash for that. Oh, is that more of that socialism? More of that communism? You don't want none of that communism. And a lot of Republican voters just go, yeah, I don't want communism, I don't want that. And then they end up voting against their best interests

and paying exorbitant amounts for drugs. But that's why I think we need to constantly that's why we haven't we've expressed our that we're not the biggest fans of calling it build back better build back better instead rather focusing on the provisions that ben listed in his kevin mccarthy voice for the bill because that's what's really important and those provisions are what are really hard for people to vote against, just across the board. And Ben hinted at my take on SALT. And tell us why it's controversial.

Tell us what it is and why you feel strongly about SALT and why you were talking to me and Jordy about this all weekend. I was not talking to you about this all weekend. You were. So stop it. But no, so one of the provisions of the Build Back Better Act that's probably the most controversial that's being fought by against the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is that they want to raise the SALT cap to $80,000.

Now, the SALT cap is state and local taxes. Basically, before Trump, homeowners, property owners have been able to write off their taxes on their properties to the IRS. There used to write off their taxes on their properties to the IRS. There used to not be any cap on this. And then Trump came in and Trump set a cap for $10,000 for homeowners to write off. Now, why did Trump do this? Why did the Republicans do this? It's simple. They did it because it punishes blue states because blue states are higher tax states with higher property values. And this is a tax that specifically will affect, for the most part, people who live in these blue states.

And I remember when this passed in 2017, when the tax scam passed, a lot of people were very upset about this. And now I understand that the country as a whole will probably say, hey, well, who's paying more than $10,000 in property tax? That's ridiculous. You must be a millionaire. But I really don't think that's the case. Growing up in New York, living in the tri-state area, living in California, I mean, I think you need to have a sense of what it is truly like for working families in New York, in New Jersey, in Connecticut, in California. The country is the same. It's really, the country is so diverse and spread out

that sometimes it's hard to really get the perspective. But I remember when that passed and the GOP tax scam of 2017, I remember that's what hit people in the suburbs hardest from where we're from. I know that's what hit people in New York, in New Jersey the hardest because all of a sudden,

they had bought their houses for life. They had been able to write off those taxes every single year. And all of a sudden, they were capped and weren't able to do it. So they ended up having less disposable income, less money to pay their bills. And do I think it should be $80,000 or whatever? I think $80,000, that sounds high to me. I'll concede that that sounds high. There used to be no limit, though.

But I'll concede that that sounds high. There used to be no limit, though. But I'll concede that that sounds high. But I think raising this salt cap, I think even politically, whether you think it's the right thing or the wrong thing, I think politically it is the smart thing to do. I think suburban voters are going to be incredibly important going forward. And this is something that Republicans are trying to take credit for because they know how popular it is on the ground. I mean, they know how popular it is on the ground in Long Island, where we're from. They know how popular it is in New Jersey. The guy who lost to New Jersey, the Republican, he was trying to run against the salt cap that Trump instituted, acting like it was a democratic plan. So this is an important issue, I think. I

think this is a winning issue because I think it affects homeowners across the country, especially in blue states who, in my opinion, were unfairly targeted by the Trump administration. I know I've had a lot of people reach out to me saying, thank you for saying that. I am by no means rich and I'm struggling to pay the bills for my family and this totally killed me in 2017. And I've been really struggling big time back then. And I think we need to take those perspectives into account and really focus on, you know, targeting. Okay. We want to target people who are really the major earners in this country, not the people who are struggling to send their kids through to school and, and get groceries who just happened to live in States that have a higher cost of living. And the Trump tax cuts at the end of the day, as the previous article I just discussed,

was one of the motivating factors of why the richest Americans have increased their wealth by $5 trillion. And we need to focus on tax plans that benefit all workers, the middle class. And again, I've said it before on this podcast, am I upset that someone reaches the level of being a billionaire? No, I'm not upset about that. But I am upset about it when a billionaire needs to aggregate that wealth to such a level that it's so disproportionate to the individuals who helped that billionaire attain that wealth in the first place. After a number of yachts, after a number of planes, I just don't think you need plural, multiple private jets to chaperone people while we have people in this country who can't afford groceries, who can't afford-

Then don't leave me on an island here. Do you agree with my salt take at all? I mean, I don't want to take all the criticism here. No, my point though is, is that I do think- And it was a yes or no question. Yes, yes, yes. And look, because I think where that impacts is upper level, middle class income who needs that level of relief versus the billionaires of the world who are getting their tax deductions

through private jet deductions and through offshoring labor and through other schemes that they have where we see billionaires even say, all right, state, you want me to be in your particular state? You've got to give me a whole package of tax incentives before I'll even consider being in your state. And I've seen people say, well, it should be means tested, right? It should be, okay, well, you get this benefit if you're not making over a certain amount. I think the problems are twofold there. I think, one, I think it costs an exorbitant amount to do any sort of means testing like that, which probably outweighs the benefits of doing some sort of mean testing.

And let's face it, the true wealthy rich people in this country, they're not making their money through traditional sources of income. They're making their money through capital gains. They're making their money in many other ways that aren't even going to come through in this sort of mean testing way. So I think it's a winning issue that I think Democrats should actually rally behind, especially in the suburbs, especially after what we saw in Virginia. This is the kind of thing that would really rally people who we need to turn out to vote. And yeah, I mean, overall, though, I think these provisions are all just super important, especially those health care provisions. I mean, think about if, I think these provisions are all just super important, especially those healthcare provisions. I mean, think about if any one of these things was on a bill on its own.

It would be transformational, right? If capping insulin at $35 on its own was the bill, that'd be life-changing for so many people. Life changer. Say, you know, universal pre-K. Say the whole bill was universal pre-K, that would be life-changing. That would be history-making if that was it on its own. But this bill does that and more, and is supposed to reduce inflation as well, per all the expert and Nobel laureates.

I guess, Brett, as you're saying that,, this may sound very juvenile and maybe it shows a lack of understanding on my part of the process, or maybe the process has become so overly thought out that people don't think of the simplest solution, which is why don't we just pass each one of these very popular bills like every week? Like why not just do the $35 cap on insulin? Why not then do a universal pre-K? Why not then do and just roll out one bill per week that's very popular and just have win after win after win? Why do we have to put them together in a bill that has a huge number and makes people go, oh, that's not going to help the deficit? Why do they all have to be combined? I mean, we'll have to get Speaker Pelosi on the

show to ask her about that. But I mean, just thinking about it right now, I'm like, OK, well, think about how slow Congress moves. It's going to take until 2055 before we get to the last provision of this thing. I guess that's the answer. Is that the whole process between the ability for them to talk and debate and then have the vote? I guess by the time you do it, it just takes too long. But wouldn't it be incredible if you just queued up like one win after one win? Boom, what do we do this week? Universal pre-K.

What do we do this week? Insulin cap. What do we do this week? You know what I mean? That would be pretty. Anyway, this podcast is brought to you by BetterHelp. If there's something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals, we all go.

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professional. In fact, so many people have been using BetterHelp that they are recruiting additional therapists in all 50 states. Special offer for Midas Touch listeners. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com slash Midas. That's betterhelp.com slash Midas. Let's bring on Ellie Mistal, the nation's justice correspondent covering the courts, criminal justice system and politics, the force behind the magazine's monthly column, Objection. I love seeing Ellie on MSNBC. Whenever I see him there, I am glued to my TV. And as a lawyer, Ellie's takes are spot on, refreshing

and needed in this moment. Ellie, welcome to the Midas Touch podcast. Thank you so much for that introduction. I have a law school professor who would love to hear you say that I know what I'm talking about because it wasn't always that way. Well, you obviously definitely know what you're talking about more than some of these judges, the Justice Department, apparently, when it's coming to January 6th insurrectionists in one of the most serious terrorist attacks on our nation, giving these insurrectionists slaps on the wrists, $5,000 fines, no jail times. Don't do it again. Is this the most infuriating thing?

And could you put it in words just for our listeners from your law background, from your legal training, how just offensive this is and how it strikes at the heart of just our justice system. Yeah, I can't emphasize enough how bonkers it is to have a sitting federal judge in open court criticize the prosecution for undercharging and under-sentencing a person who has just been convicted in her court, which has happened to the Garland Justice Department multiple times over the course of prosecuting the foot soldier insurrectionists. It is, it is out of this world that judges never complain that sentences are too

light and that they're forced to sentence people to too easy a term. It's like a dog complaining that you didn't, that his bone wasn't meaty enough. Like it just, It doesn't happen. But that has happened to this Justice Department. What we have here are prosecutors who are going after low-level foot soldiers. There are about 700 people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. And the Justice Department is kind of quite happy to go prosecute them, but their sentencing recommendations have been very light because they're treating them each as individual operatives, right? So, like, if you today

stormed the Capitol and went to a place where you weren't supposed to, you would get charged with, you know, a legal trespass and maybe kind of worst case scenario, get like 30 days in jail, right? Like that would be, that would be what happened if you did it today. And so they're charging all the January 6th people like they were just individual actors who just, you know, it's Tuesday, let's storm the Capitol, which is not what happened, right? They're not, they're not combining them together. They're not bringing conspiracy charges and we can get into this later and they're not going after the people who organized planned and inspired the insurrection they're just going after the foot soldiers and

treating them as individual bad actors and that's why you see these light sentences um it's it's frustrating it's it's it's not it's you know one of the things guys this happened in real time i won't say who but uh on january 6th so i was watching in january 6th because just you know side note that was the day that biden was supposed to announce merrick garland so like i had this whole like merrick garland is not the right guy for the job post ready to go i had to pull back as I'm watching on TV. And it's like, is this really happening? Right.

But so anyway, so watching on TV and I'm texting with some, some, some black friends and we're just all floored. We're just all like, where, where are the guns going to come out? When are they going to start shooting? This is really bad. And of course it never does. And so we're talking about it and I'm like, you understand that if black people had been there, if that had been an all black crowd, they would have nuked the place from orbit. Like they just they would have nuked us. And this other guy, another black commentator, he says, brother, you couldn't get a thousand black people to storm the Capitol because a thousand Black people would have to be willing to die. They would know that if you were Black and doing that, you would know

that that was a suicide mission that you were signing up for. The protesters, the insurrectionists, the rioters on January 6th, they didn't know it was a suicide mission. They didn't think that anything bad would happen to them. And so far, for the most part, Merrick Garland has proved them right. And right, Ellie, I mean, they were right, those insurrectionists. They thought it was going to be, you know, basically a vacation where they get to go in, they take the photographs, they pose directly on the Senate chambers. You got your Disney characters. Let's bring in the shaman. Get the shaman right. Let's get the shaman on the floor. And they treated it like a joke. And it's been treated like a joke by the Justice Department. But it begs the question, Ellie, why?

I mean, is the Justice Department overworked? Do they not care? Is it just the systemic issues that exist? Is Merrick Garland not the right person? A little bit of all of the above. What's your thought there? It's definitely all of the above. Merrick Garland is an institutionalist. Coming off of the back of Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions, Merrick Garland and Joe Biden, who picked him, thought that the most important thing for the Justice Department to do was to retain or recapture the imprints of impartiality. And so that is what he has set out to do. He is making things political

by being afraid to make things political. This was a political attack on our nation. This was a coup attempt. That's fundamentally political. But Garland wants to make it seem like nothing is political. And that is why he is going after the insurrectionists one by one on petty charges without roping them into a larger political conspiracy to overthrow the government. Right. You see what I'm saying? Like, because he is trying to be an institutionalist, he is actually making this political attack. He's allowing these people who committed this political attack to get away with very light punishments. And he's only focusing on the people who actually breached the Capitol as opposed to the Biden plan. Again, I had a whole post. Garland's not the right guy. Right. Like this was part of Biden's plan. It's how you assess what the problem with Bill Barr was. Right.

Like if you and this is, I think, a general problem with Democrats. It's like they've learned the wrong lessons from the Trump administration. Right. And so with the Justice Department specifically, the wrong lesson that they learned is that the problem with Bill Barr's Justice Department was that it was too political, going out there, taking political stances and points of view, and that that was the problem. No, the problem with the Barr Justice Department was that it was corrupt, that it was doing these political things in service of evil that the Trump administration was trying to pull off. That was the problem. The right way for the Justice Department to be, since it is a political appointee anyway, is for them to aggressively pursue that party's conception of justice. So yes, I want my Justice Department to take racist and white domestic terrorists more seriously, right? I want that. I want my Justice Department to not go so hard after people who are out of status, otherwise known as illegal aliens. I think that that's

a horrible term. I don't think that we should punish those people. I don't think that we should punish DREAMers. And I want my Justice Department to act like that because that's who I voted for. The law is not impartial, right? The law is just one way that we decide which things that are important to us and which things are not important to us. The law is not objective. It can be applied objectively. And the goal should always be for the law to be applied objectively. But it itself is not objective. It is a series of choices that we've made. And I would like our guys to start making better choices about what we want justice to look like in this country. And that's just not all the way that Biden went. That's not all the way that biden went that's not at all the way that garland went um and that's why he's here look i garland's a fine public servant a dedicated decent man i don't have a problem with him personally i think you know i don't think he was the best pick for the supreme court he's better neil gorsuch all right i'll take merit garland over neil gorsuch every day twice on sunday but in terms of an aggressive attorney general, I mean, look at the kinds of people that Republicans nominate for attorney general.

Bill Barr, Jeff Sessions, John Ashcroft. These are these are these are rock ribbed, blood dripping conservatives who use the levers of justice to promote conservative ideals. The last time a Democrat picked an attorney general like that, like an Ashcroft, like a Jeff Sessions, quite frankly, was Janet Reno. The last time the Democrats had an attorney general who DGAF and was going to go out and pursue an aggressive form of justice was Janet Reno. Now, one can argue that Eric Holder and Lauren Lynch were more like that, but were held back by Obama. I, I tend to believe those kind of, I want to say conspiracy theories, but I believe the kind of beltway scuttlebutt that like Holder wanted to go faster and more. And Obama was trying to pull him back. I believe that. But in reality, Holder and Lynch kind of towed the line of the administration, whereas Reno, I mean, Clinton couldn't think about the things

that Clinton didn't want Reno to do that. She just didn't. She was just going to do it. Right. And that's the kind of person that we needed at justice in this moment. We didn't get them. And poll after poll shows that Americans support progressive policies, whether it's on health care, whether it's on education, whether it's on the environment. Overwhelmingly, if you took away the party and you just put the issue, you know, the progressive issues are polling 70, 75 percent. Yet each time the Democrats get in power, they appear to be afraid just to embrace these issues. Are they psyched out? Does all the let's go, Brandon chance and Sesame Street stuff, does that get in our heads? And then we get a Merrick Garland thinking, all right, all right, we got you. We're trying to do a compromise here. Here we go. Merrick Garland for you

versus just saying, you know what? This is what you want. We got someone who's going to fight for you. And after a year in office, here's what I got. I got your infrastructure. I got your universal pre-K. I got you all of these things. Here you go. in office, here's what I got. I got your infrastructure. I got your universal pre-K. I got you all of these things. Here you go. Like it, hate it. This is what you want. What's up here? Like what what's going on? Every single cabinet confirmation should have been approved 5150. Right. Every cabinet official should have been right at that razor's edge of 5150 to get into office. Instead, Biden went for people that he thought would get Republican support, like America Garland, like

Janet Yellen at Treasury, right? Like these are the that's that's Biden's DNA. That's his modus operandi. He is he's been that way. I mean, he's very he's been here for a while, right? But Biden didn't just show up off the turnip truck yesterday. He has a long and storied political career of trying to find the center mass of the country and going exactly there. That's what he is, and that's what he's doing. And we can't be surprised about that. That's why, I mean, in the primary, he was like my eighth choice, I think.

But he won and he won because the country thought that he was the person who could defeat trump and you know what he did and i don't know if my people would have won i don't know if the people that i would have supported that i did support in the primary i don't know if they would have gotten it done so you know like good bully for him but now he but now that he won what is he gonna do and the thought and this is where Democrats, I think, always fall down. They kind of campaign on the right things because, again, it's broadly popular. The Democratic platform is broadly popular. The Republican platform is broadly unpopular. It's easy to campaign for Democratic issues because people agree with you. But when it comes times to govern, when it comes times, when it comes times to govern

and you've got an entire media ecosphere screaming at you all the time, you've got you've got moderates and centrists in your own party who are constantly caught. The Democrats have never gotten over losing the white non-college educated vote. Right. They've never they've never just dealt with that reality. White people have voted. A majority of white people have voted for the Republican candidate for president every single election since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. It's not an accident. It's not a phase that white people are going through, all right? This is who they are. A majority of white people are going to be against the democratic platform. There are two ways of dealing with that reality.

Inspire and turn out every person of color you can and every white person who rejects the racist authoritarianism of the Republican Party. Turn them out, inspire them, have them willing to walk through walls to support your agenda and your party. That would be one way. We'll call that the aoc way the other way is to constantly beg and plead with the with the non-college educated whites to please come back home like it's still 1950 and that is the biden way and that is what democrats usually do when they get into power and that is what we're seeing now i have this i have this story i like to tell so i went to harvard for college and you know uh hung out with a bunch of nerds because you know we're we're people right but yeah occasionally you go into to to roxbury you know occasionally you go into into boston proper to for for a time and we had this one friend of ours very nerdy guy you

know glasses the whole the whole whole Harvard thing going out. Right. And whenever we go to a bar or club like the girl that he like really wanted to talk to was some like six foot tall, totally decked out, like Amazonian looking woman with like shiny pants on. Right. Like that's the girl. Never like the nice, quiet girl who was just sitting at a bar sipping her. You know, never her. Always shiny pants lady. And it and it was like dude you're never gonna get shiny pants lady right that's never gonna happen for you there are other nice girls at this bar who would be willing to talk to you you should go talk to them and not shiny pants girl who was sitting in the middle of the club with like rave sticks kind of you know doing e that's not always wanted the shiny and that's democrats are always going after the shiny pants

and never the person who brought them don't don't i love the shiny pants metaphor the shiny pants metaphor is probably one of the best metaphors i've ever heard about the current state of democratic politics um but even even you ellie you could acknowledge like the practical limitations of the party like you said like we have a couple senators who are more right wing in the democratic party itself and to me and you could totally disagree with this but whether it's aoc in there or whether it's president biden you're dealing with the same roadblocks along the way and I still think it's pretty incredible that we're able to get through infrastructure, that we pass Build Back Better in the House, that we're still able to do this stuff, despite the fact that we don't have 63 senators out there, which would make everything easy.

If we had 63 senators, Democratic senators, I would be the first person to say, hey, what the hell? Why aren't we getting shit done? But we kind of have 48 in a way. We got infrastructure done, but we got infrastructure done in part because Biden made that his signature thing. Biden put everything he had, his entire political capital, his entire weight behind that. You know what he didn't do that for? Voting rights, which is what I would have made my signature thing, because there's no point to any of this if Republicans succeed in taking away voting rights. Remember, Republicans do not have a strategy to deal with the browning of America, right? They don't have a strategy.

Totally. The Republicans lose Black voters by about 85%. They lose Latino voters by about 66%. They lose Asian American voters by about 66%. And they have no strategy to decrease those margins. Their only strategy is to suppress the turnout of those groups. That's their entire game. So for the Democrats, it should be crucial. It should be party saving to prevent Republicans from suppressing turnout and do everything you can to increase turnout. Because as much as Democrats do have problems in certain Latino communities, and quite frankly, do have problems in certain Black communities consistently, 85%, 66%, 66%, you see that across the board. So if you just, if you are, if you get more Latinos to the

polls and two out of three are going to vote for them, that's always better than trying to get more white college educated, non-college educated voters or employees to the polls who are going to oppose you by about 64, 65, 66%. Right. So that that's just the math of it. Right. Biden got the infrastructure program done because that, that is the thing that he came into office pushing and selling and whatever. He didn't do that for vote for voting rights. And that was a practical calculation, though. Like, do you think he was like, well, I could get the votes for infrastructure. I know I could do that. Like this has been being talked about right now by Republicans and Democrats alike for a while. I know I could get Manchin and Sinema on board to an infrastructure plan. I don't know if I could do that with voting rights right now. So let's deal with this.

Yeah, I think that that might have been the calculation, but he didn't try. Right. He didn't do everything he could to try. Even Joe Manchin, who was against H.R. 1, ended up coming out in favor of a voting rights package package the freedom to vote package you know by the way the difference between hr1's voting rights package and the freedom to vote package that mansion ended up supporting you know what was different about them all of the ethics reforms from hr1 is what mansion wanted out right so like literally all the voting reforms they're still in there but for some reason joe manchin didn't want reforms that were that required candidates to release their tax returns

before they ran for president didn't want reforms that would have prevented candidates from funneling money not just to their children but to their children's businesses don't know why manchin was against that but he was against. But he was for the voting rights part. So even if we look at that change, right, if Biden comes in at the beginning being like, H.R. 1 is the thing. H.R. 1 is the bill that I care about. And then has to compromise down to the Joe Manchin, okay, we can have the voting, but not the ethics reform that gets you to 50. You've got you've got 50 plus one votes for voting rights in the Senate. Now, does that get you over the filibuster? Probably not. But now now we're having our fight. We reform the filibuster to reform voting rights or nothing happens like that. That's what I would have run on. Like this is a this is a threshold issue, whether or not every American should have the right to vote after what

we just saw on January 6th. Right. After what we just saw with people literally trying to overthrow the government and what we see every single day right now. Right. On January 20th and said, like, look, the first thing we're going to do is secure elections. The first thing we're going to do is make elections safe and fair and participatory. And nothing else happens until we do that. That's how I would have come in. So do you think that's going to be the focus now as we head into 2022? Do you think the priority is going to shift and it's going to be 2022? Voting rights is everything. We got a big election coming up. We need to get this done. No, no, I do not think the Democrats have the have the sense to switch gears at this point coming into 2022. It's not going to be here's what we're going to get done in 22. It's going

to just be here's what we already got done. It's just going to be infrastructure and build and build back better. You've got got your roads you've got your covid vaccine look the democrats are great and if you don't vote for democrats oh the scary republicans will come back and be authority like that's going to be that's their campaign see that's the thing when these people say like oh we need to do things that are popular we need to go with popular like that's actually biden's entire point right biden isn't running on defund the police, nor is any Democrat in any swing or moderate state running on such stuff. They're not running on defund the police. They're not running. Biden isn't running on critical race theory. Those words have never

escaped his mouth, right? So if you want Democrats to just focus on things that appeal to white people, Biden is doing that. And most Democrats are doing that. We'll see how that works out for them. Well, yeah, to that end, 2022 is going to be the most important year of politics yet. You know, what's at stake if Republicans get control of Congress? I mean, I ever since about 2018, I've kind of realized that the next election Democrats lose could well be the last election. Right. Just the last free and fair election we're allowed to have. The thing that Trump did that I think Democrats have been slow to catch up on is that he ripped off the mask, he swallowed the dog whistle, and now these people who have always had kind of hatred in their hearts for the concept of living in a pluralistic

society, now those people don't even have to be ashamed about it. Now they can just kind of outwardly, so like when you look at court cases, when you see the state people in Arizona defending their voter suppression law in front of the Supreme Court, openly admitting that their law is meant to depress turnouts among Blacks and other minorities in Arizona. And the Supreme Court being like, yeah, that's fine. That's cool. It's just a little bit racist. So a little bit of racism is fine. Literally, I mean, that's Sam Alito's majority opinion in the Arizona case, is that, and Brnovich, is that, yes, the Arizona law will have a racist effect, but I'm Sam Alito, and I've determined that that racism is not too much to be unconstitutional. Thank you very much.

That's his whole freaking opinion. So when you see stuff like that, what you realize is that these people are not ashamed to now kind of front their bigotry, right? They don't feel the need to hide it behind a hood. You know, they're just out there in the open. And if they win, whether it's they take back Congress in 2022 or the White House in 2024, we can expect those bigoted policies now to be pushed forward, unvarnished, and right in your face. They're already doing all the things they need to do to make sure the Democrats are not allowed to win another election. So we've used the corrupt, the census that Trump corrupted and broken. We're still using that. So now all of these maps have been gerrymandered in such a way that it's almost impossible for the Democrats to keep control of the House anyway, just based on the map, right?

So they've already kind of won the map writing contest, right? They've put their insurrectionists and their conspiracy theorists, they've put them on State Board of Elections and Secretaries of State and all these like smaller, you know un below the radar municipal uh positions that allow them to have large effects on the election the votes who counts the votes how those votes are counted whose votes get thrown away they've already done that right so they've it's like two they've got two out of three they've they've uh gerrymandered the maps they've put their people in place they're they're trying to make it so democrats can't win in 2022 if they make it so the democrats can't win in 2022 they're

gonna make it a lot easier for them to make sure the democrats cannot win in 2024 and that democrats can just never republicans do not believe that that it's legitimate for non-white people to hold power in this country. But if you are a non-white person in power, they assume that and will put the laws in place to continue doing that as we if they if they retake power. That's just where we are. And the Democrats, I think, are a little bit slow to the table to to realize that. And they're expecting non-white voters to bail them out again. And that's where I see the poll numbers. That's the part of the poll numbers that give me the most cause. Because the entire theory of the Democratist case, right, the entire shiny pants theory is that, well, the Black voter is still going to be there for you when you need them, right? So you can spend

two years just begging white people to vote for you because when it comes time to actually have the election black people are still going to turn out and they're still going to vote for you at 85 and his numbers in the black community right now are are frightening like his approval bryden's approval rating and that's the democrats approval rating um in in communities of color is not great. It's not the numbers that you can have and win an election, right? So I don't know that, you know, I hope we do. I hope we once again save America from itself, but I don't know that we will. I don't know that we can. That's a scary thought. I want to shift gears slightly here and talk about Vice President

Harris right now. So in the last week or so, I feel like the media has been obsessed with Vice President Harris. I mean, last the last week or so, I feel like the media has been obsessed with Vice President Harris. I mean, last week, a Bloomberg reporter called her out for saying the instead of the. Chuck Todd had Pete Buttigieg on and talked about some sort of Kamala rivalry. New York Post wrote a piece. Why does Kamala Harris laugh so awkwardly?

I mean, where is all this disdain coming from? Because it's very specifically targeted at her. She's a black woman in America. I mean, they're just there aren't black women in America who have not experienced what Kamala Harris is experiencing. You know, it's smaller. It's in their own ways. It's over. It's at the company retreat as opposed to in the New York Post. But it's the same crap. Every every person goes through it. They're they're criticized from how they look to how they talk to how they act. If they do stuff, they're called bossy or impudent or whatever. Uppity. If they don't do stuff, they're called lazy or they're they're they're dumb or whatever uppity if they don't do stuff they're called lazy or that they're they're they're dumb or whatever like there there is no way to win as a black woman in this country they're just

the country doesn't allow for that the country has not conceived of itself that way and so of course harris is taking it from all from both sides from all sides at all times. And the coverage is... Think about it this way. The vice president doesn't do anything. Her actual job is to have a pulse.

That's her entire official constitutional responsibility. She doesn't do anything.iden didn't do anything when he was we always try to say like oh the vice president was key and this was it's just for they don't actually have power and so for the media to spend so much time talking about her as if she has the power to do a damn thing is ridiculous is ridiculous she doesn't do anything she's just there and she's she's good at being there right

she's nice and smart and funny when she's there but she's just just have the power to do a damn thing constitutionally speaking right she had more power as a senator from California. She gave up that power to be a part of this administration, to sit there with, you know, and cheer on the Biden administration as it has its constitutional authority to do things. So I don't even understand, like, why, what is there to criticize? Like, she's not doing, she's doing nothing in a way that you don't like chuck todd like what is that i don't i have no i have no idea why anybody wastes ink on the vice president except for like you know if if this was 2024 if biden won a second term then it's time to start talking about the vice president because the the assumption is that the vice president is now going

to run for the third term of the proof like that's when you start talking about the vice president because the the assumption is that the vice president is now going to run for the third term of the proof like that's when you start talking about the vice president but talking about the vice president in the first term it's just why i like harris you know like i i i think she she's a fine politician i've got no i've got no issue with with harris and there's nothing about that the b administration does that I'm like, oh, man, that Kamala Harris. Right. Like I have lots of criticism of the Biden administration. I have no idea what President Harris would be like because she's not allowed to be president. She was president for 85 minutes. Everything was fine. That's all I know. Finally, our listeners always want to know after an inspiring interview like this, what can they do?

You know, they're, you know, they're motivated now. They hear what you're saying. They hear about the problems. And we always inspire them with our story, which is that we're not political people. And we just try to make one video that resulted in lots of videos and created this platform. So what do you suggest the person listening to you, you know, hearing your constructive criticisms about the Justice Department, what we can do to be better as a party, as a nation? What should they do if there's kind of one takeaway that you have? I mean, you know, all the energy that people brought for Bill Barr protesting outside of his house and, you know, just being super angry about him. I don't see why Merrick Garland doesn't get that same heat, quite frankly. Like, I just, I don't see why that's not the case. In general, look, the reason why

Democrats do not take criminal justice reform, Supreme Court reform, the courts, the third branch of government, the reasons why the Democrats do not take the third branch of government. The reasons why the Democrats do not take the third branch of government seriously is because not one of them has ever lost a primary because of it. Not one. If you were a Republican running for Senate, running for dog catcher, and you were weak on the courts, you weren't sure if you were going to put on conservative justices who were going to take away abortion rights, you could not win that primary. One of the only concessions Donald Trump made during his primary run was to put out a list of Supreme Court justices that was approved by the Federalist Society that he would appoint if he was elected, right? He had to promise to put justices

who were against Roe v. Wade on the court to win the Republican primary. That was the bridge. It wasn't the sexism. It wasn't the rape allegations. It wasn't anything. That was the line that Republican voters had for Trump. You have to promise that you will promote the justices that we want. And he did. Democrats never lose because of that. Biden was the weakest on court reform in the primary. Didn't matter. Pete Buttigieg was the strongest on court reform during the primary. Didn't matter. Biden was rolling out all of his cabinet level secretaries, nobody but me basically raised a flag about Merrick Garland and talked about how Merrick Garland was the wrong guy at the wrong time for the wrong job, right? Because it never hurts Democrats to be weak on justice.

And until that changes, until Democratic-based voters respect the courts the same way Republican-based voters do, until we understand the difference between a good judge and a bad judge, between a good attorney general and a bad attorney general, until we demand our own versions of Ashcroft and Sessions. Until we start doing those things, Democratic candidates will continue to use the courts as a way to placate moderates instead of a way to pay off progressives. What's the takeaway? Care. That's what I need you to do. I need you to care. I need you to pay attention when these just judges are floated. I need you to pay attention when people like Stephen Breyer are just like, I don't think I'm going to retire ever because that's never gone bad before ever.

I need you to care about that. I need you to tweet about that. I need you to to talk to your friends about that. I need you to put that on your gram, whatever you do. I need this to be an issue that you care about as much as these other issues, because that's what Republicans do. And that's how Republicans live. Ellie Mestal, thank you so much for joining us on the Midas Touch podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Ellie Mestal. Let's go. Let's go.

Ellie comes out swinging always, always. I always love his perspective, even if I don't always agree with him 100% on certain things. He's a little harder on garland than than i am typically um but i really value his perspective and always happy to get a diverse range of of opinions and stuff on the show and i think he's very on point like really more than not and i hope and by the way i hope he's wrong i hope he's wrong about voting rights you know i really do i'm rooting against him but i'm his biggest fan but i hope that i hope that president biden i hope that the democrats as we go into 2022 i hope he proves ellie wrong and i hope we make voting rights a a staple of what we are doing

going forward and then we understand the gravity this moment because ellie's right i mean everything's at stake here everything's at stake shiny shiny pants this podcast is also brought to you by Stamps.com. We use Stamps.com at Midas Touch to handle all of our mailing needs. You may have gotten our Midas Touch membership cards or our holiday cards from last year or just other mail from Midas Touch. We use stamps.com to help us compare rates, print labels, and access exclusive discounts on UPS and USPS services all year long. Going to the post office instead of using stamps.com, that's like using instant messenger to communicate. Like what generation are you in? You got a dial-up connection?

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President Biden on Friday announced his intention to nominate two former federal officials to positions on the Board of Governors of the United States Postal Service, potentially setting the stage to replace Postmaster General Louis DeJoy. Pause, pause. Isn't it crazy that we know this fucking guy's name? Ever in the history, have you guys known the postmaster general of the United States? Like, no, I'm being very sincere right now. Ever at any point in your time. And I'm asking you, the listeners, have you ever been like, oh yeah, John Smith, he's our postmaster. It's so crazy that we have to talk about this guy. No doubt, Jordy. And then one of the issues is, is that, you know, we got president Biden whose hands are a little tied here because, you know, there's a board of governors.

And this board of governors is the one who decides the fate of Louis DeJoy, who the postmaster general is. And it's been stacked with Republicans right now. So adding these two will change the balance and should set the stage for DeJoy to be out. I mean, we all remember, I mean, especially us, when we sent our holiday cards out last year, we sent them in early December. Some folks didn't receive our holiday cards until March and April. And so that made just me think and made me horrified, honestly, because I was thinking, okay, if we sent holiday cards in December and they didn't arrive to some people in March or April, how many people's prescription drug deliveries were delayed? How many votes were sent to the mail?

And I think this was really the point of Trump putting DeJoy in this role. How many votes were delayed? Yeah. How much more could Biden maybe have won by in that case? And so this is going to be a good thing for America. I cannot wait. And I will celebrate the day that DeJoy is asked. It will keep you updated on the latest with the situation. I am happy to see DeJoy go. And did you see, Jordy, the federal court, which in its sentencing of one of the insurrectionists really tied the insurrectionist to Trump and to Trump's actions?

You see that, Jordy? I did see that. Not only did I see it, I think he was the very first judge to actually speak on that and pointed the blame at Trump. Judge Amit Mehta, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, directly invoked the president's name on Friday when sentencing John Lolo's to, oh no, 14 days in jail in a deadly demonstration. I think people get more jail time for throwing garbage on the street and

polluting the, who, who, who is the, who is the woman with the college scandal? She got more jail time than this. Lori Laughlin. Yeah.

Laughlin got more jail time for whatever went down with her daughter and all of that nonsense than someone who invaded the Capitol. This is what the judge said, quote, the fact remains that he, John Lollos and others were called to Washington, D.C. by an elected official prompted to walk to the Capitol by an elected official. People like Mr. Lollos were told lies, were told falsehoods, were told the election was stolen when it was not, Judge Maeda added, calling Lollos a pawn, according to CNN. Now, I agree. You don't need a law degree to know that. I agree that Lolos was a

pawn. I also don't agree, though, with 14 days. You don't just get to be a pawn on a terrorist attack against our nation's capital and get 14 days in prison. 14 days in prison would be a in prison, like would be a vacation.

You know, I don't get to work for, I don't have to work for 14 days. I mean, 14 days is absurd. And we talk about, you know, look, Michael Cohen was just served his sentence and he's leaving today. But I'll tell you what, if you compare Michael Cohen to a Jan 6th insurrectionist who attacked and invaded the Capitol building, who are getting just minor slaps on the wrist versus someone like Cohen, who's gone out there, who didn't say, Cohen wasn't like, I'm a pawn. I'm a victim in Donald Trump's big scheme. Pity me. That's not what Cohen said. Cohen said, I am responsible for my actions.

I take full responsibility for all the people who I hurt, including my family. And I'm going to speak up and speak out against this evil fascist regime. That's what Cohen said. And these people who are getting slaps on the wrist, they're going out there. What are they doing? They're turning around. They're doing interviews with OAN and Newsmax. They're profiting off it.

Not only are they not being really sentenced, they're making money. And actually, they're raising their stock price as a person off of this. You know what worries me about this, guys? So right now, there are around 40 Capitol riot insurrectionists, defendants who are facing similar charges. They're being held together in a DC jail and in the same wing of the DC jail together, and just a few feet away from the building that they were accused of storming, that they did storm. And they're calling this wing of the DC jail the Patriot wing. And they're calling this wing of the DC jail, the Patriot wing.

And they're just all together there. And like you said, they're not there for that long. They're really not there. And I'm like, why aren't we separating these people? Why are they in the same rooms together? So they're just hanging out? They're just hanging out in the DC jail, plotting something else,

talking about what they're gonna do when they get out? Like, is that safe for America? Is that safe for our country? No, it's an excellent point. And Ben, you bring up a really interesting point too with Cohen, who really went above and beyond and said, hey, I did X, Y, and Z, and now I'm going to make things better. What message are we sending to society when you could plead ignorance, like these insurrectionists who are so, say, oh, it's just a pawn in this plan. What message are we sending from an ownership standpoint of own your failings, own the bullshit that what you've done to society? Like a guy like Michael

Cohen who comes out and speaks, who speaks on it. And I mean, that's why, you know, that's why so many Americans are so furious at the process. And that's why Elie Mestal on our show is so angry about the process. People have the right to be angry. I want to set expectations a little bit. Watergate took around two years or a little over two years to complete their investigations and everything. Much different time though, much different stakes at play. As we go into 2022, what happens in these next few months, what happens in this next year is going to be absolutely essential. We're going to have our eyes on the DOJ. We're going to have our eyes on Merrick Garland. And we're really going to have to ramp up these efforts. We're going to have to really keep our eye on the January 6th committee. And I think

they've done a lot of good. I mean, the January 6th committee has now interviewed over 200 people, ex-Trump officials who've come together voluntarily. They've received over 25,000 documents. They're getting a lot of information. One of the issues is we don't know what that information is. So it's hard to judge if it's going in a good direction or a bad direction. If we're moving towards justice or away from justice, it's so hard because the process is so opaque. I mean, that's one of the issues right now. But as we head into 2022, I think we're going to learn more and we're going to see, are we a nation of laws? Are we a nation of justice or are we not? Well, we are one political party as a nation of justice and laws.

And that's what makes this very different than Watergate. We had Jill Weinbanks on the show, a great guest of the Midas Touch podcast. And she talked about the similarities, but more strikingly, the differences between now and Watergate, where justice was far more swift in Watergate because back then people had actual accountability and the Republican Party viewed us as a nation of laws. committee is going against is the fact, and what the judiciary is going against, is that the insurrectionist conduct has been mainstreamed by a full political party. Republican doctrine is that these January 6th insurrectionists are freedom fighters and heroes who were fighting for our nation on January 6th. And there is one political party, the Democrats saying that's the most absurd fucking thing I've heard. These people attacked the Capitol building and another political party saying, no, no, no, these are heroes. This is what America is all

about. That's the frightening part about it, Brett. And we talked about McCarthy's speech from the halls of the chambers of Congress. I mean, that's the individual who would serve as speaker of the house in the event that the right-wing GQ peers take over the house and shit will be absolutely- If they don't give it to somebody even crazier, which is a possibility. Absolutely. And then finally, I just want to close the show by talking about not the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. For that, I would say listen to this past weekend's Legal AF, the top legal podcast in America and the number one news show in all of Micronesia and Cyprus.

Shout out Micronesia. Shout out Micronesia. Shout out Cyprus. Shout out Micronesia. Shout out Micronesia. Shout out Cyprus. But it's always in the top 25 and 50 in most European countries as well. And many countries- You think if you went to Micronesia, they'd be like Ben and Popak. They definitely know.

They definitely know. It's pretty impressive. You can do the hand thing. You can't do this? Oh, I can't even come close to doing it. This is great podcasting right now. We're making the Papakian symbol, which is like the Star Trek live long and prosper in case you want to visualize it.

And Ben is unable to separate his fingers from each other. Was it an accident? Was he okay? I couldn't even separate any of them from each other. It's very embarrassing. We'll talk about that offline. I'll talk about that with my better help therapist. But what I want to talk about now is I noticed this too, though, that it seemed that

it was reminding me of the beginning of the Trump administration, 25, 2016, with the massive amounts of social media accounts that were just pushing these bizarre pro-Kyle Rittenhouse messaging, just brutally trolling anyone who was not in support of that Kyle Rittenhouse verdict. And it was done in weird English and accounts that were just created. And on my own, I was like, this is some weird stuff going on here. The volume of it just seemed overwhelming. Former FBI official, Frank Figliosi, who we had on this podcast as well, he tweeted about an analysis of tweets post-trial of Kyle Rittenhouse that they came largely from outside the United States. And Fugliazzi said that researchers took a sample of 32,000. It's a small sample. I mean, big in terms of sample size, but

this is what they found. Of 32,315 pro-Rittenhouse hashtag tweets on November 19th to 20th, the data showed 29,609 of those came from Twitter accounts that disabled geolocations. And one of those, and of those, 17,000, 1701 were listed as foreign, but a deep scrub revealed that most of those were in Russia, China, and the EU. And Fugliazzi noted that this is more of the divide and conquer approach that Americans had previously seen with foreign influence coming in, realizing how divided the United States of America is, and further sowing those seeds of discord through their social media infiltration. And social media had done a really good job at, especially Twitter did once it realized that like in 18, 19, like particularly 19 leading up to the election, but I, it looked like literally the floodgates were open. And I was like, holy shit, this reminds me so much of those early Trump days.

It's funny because you said that before Frank Fugliosi posted this analysis. And I mean, that's literally almost 55% of the tweets coming from Russia or China or the EU. And so I want everybody to know, and I want everybody to just be a little discerning when you're online and on social media, because it's easy to get duped. Like I've gotten fooled before. I think we all have, like, it's easy to get fooled by things. And just before you hit like, or retweet, or before you engage or reply to somebody, remember just in the back of your mind that the person you are engaging with might not even be a real human being, or they might be a real human being, but they may be somebody being paid by Russia or by China to make you angry,

to set you off, and to set us apart as Americans. There is a concerted effort right now by Russia and a lot of these countries to try to divide us. And by the way, I think we're doing a good enough job of that on our own. But there is an effort by these countries to divide us. Don't let them take advantage of you. When you see stories, like especially a breaking news story, like we saw the horrific, horrific, horrific visuals coming out of Waukesha. When you see stuff like that, these are breaking news stories. Most people don't have the accurate information. People take advantage of situations

like that to stoke hate, to stoke violence, to put disinformation out in the world, to divide you and get you to yell and scream at each other internally, at people on the other side of the aisle. That's what they're doing. So just be careful. There was so much disinformation being spread over the weekend about that tragedy. And it goes at such a rapid pace. So anytime anything happens, just be discerning and be on guard because they're trying to get you. They're trying to get me. They're trying to get all of us. And have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family, friends, colleagues. Have a happy Indigenous Persons Day. Happy Thanksgiving.

Happy spending time with your family day. And that's what this week is really about. And we hope that we've empowered you and given you the tools and the facts with thought leaders like Ellie and others for you to feel comfortable and confident in your positions about why it is we need to treat people decently, with compassion, why a nation of laws needs to work for everybody, why government needs to work for the people and not just for billionaires. At the end of the day, it's that simple for me about why I'm a Democrat, because I truly believe in the rule of law being applied equally to everyone. And I also believe that government has a role to play, especially in an ever increasing complex society, to deal with the challenges we face worse. I believe the government is a tool to help climate change. I believe the government can be a tool to help educate all Americans. I believe

the government can be a tool to help Americans, all Americans, get the best healthcare and the healthcare they deserve. No one should not be able to hear because they can't get coverage that would otherwise help their hearing. Nobody should not get life-saving insulin because they can't afford it. Go on the offensive with these things. Don't always play defense like Democrats like to. You know, this is how you win the messaging war. And I read a great piece by Dan Pfeiffer from Pod Save America over the weekend, which I recommend that you all read. It's called Selling Economic Progress to an Angry Electorate. And what he was basically talking about is you got to ask the questions to Republicans. You got to ask the question saying, hey, Republicans are blocking bipartisan measures to lower

your child care, health care and prescription drug costs because they refuse to ask a single corporation to pay a single penny more in taxes. Put it on the Republicans. Hey, why won't you raise taxes on millionaires and billionaires so that people could afford their insulin, so that people could afford their health care costs, so that seniors could get their health care costs capped, so that we could have universal pre-K? You really won't raise the rates of the super super rich in this country because you don't want people getting these life-saving incredible benefits that are going to change their lives put it on them and we need to talk about it in those terms we can't hide behind issues we need to be talking about oh guess what you have a problem with inflation

well democrats actually have a plan to manage inflation, the Build Back Better bill. Actually, what all the experts say about the Build Back Better Act is this is actually going to ease inflationary concerns, and inflation is expected to come down over the next year. Now, what do Republicans do? I mean, they kind of got us here in the first place, right? And what are they going to do if they get power? They're going to give more tax breaks to the millionaires and the billionaires. That's not going to help our inflation issue at all. So you've got to frame it just like that. You know what Republicans are going to do? They're not going to give you extra money in your bank account so that you could get through this hard time. They're not going to be giving you universal pre-K. They want you to spend an

exorbitant amount for your prescription drugs. They're not going to be doing anything to help you or this issue. It's like I made the analogy the other day of the drunk driver. Republicans are like a drunk driver who drove America into this ditch, and it's a deep ass ditch that Democrats have spent the last 10 months getting us out of. As we head into the next year, you don't want to hand the keys back to that driver because next time you hand the keys back to that driver, they might take us off a cliff. And then there's no coming back when we're off a cliff. Meanwhile, Democrats are moving us forward and just got to vote D for democracy, vote D for driving us forward. And here's the thing too, listen to what they're saying. A lot of times what the GQP does is they just lie in their facts. They lie

in their numbers. I sent Brett Light last night, this incredible video of someone debunking everything that Charlie Kirk says about the vaccines not working. And literally Charlie Kirk will just take, manipulate data that isn't accurate. And he'll just literally lie about the data. He'll lie about what the studies say. And like, literally that's not what the studies say. That's not what the data says. And so you have to be able to be armed with, well, if that's really the case, is it your belief that every scientific institution doesn't agree with you? I mean, do you just think that you found it it like you alone have found and you've discovered what every major scientific agency has a big brain Kirk, big brain Kirk. And just want to wish you

all a very happy Thanksgiving. Enjoy. It's an honor being able to be on these podcasts with you each week. And we'll make sure we do some special content, make it available for you on Thanksgiving. We're thinking about what that is to keep it special. It's not going to be a new Midas Touch podcast. And then we'll start rolling with the new Midas Touch podcast the week after Thanksgiving with the regular schedule. So we'll see you next time, Jordy. You want to give the usual closeout?

Shout out to the Midas Mighty!