The Texan Podcast - 2024 in Review: SMSS Ep. 11

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

Happy New Year! On this episode of Send Me Some Stuff, Cameron, Rob, and maybe a couple special guests take listeners back through the political craziness of 2024.It's been a wild year, but we're ready for another one!

And for your information, you're absolutely right. I was not paying attention back then. I had more important things on my mind. You were watching Rugrats. I was watching... No, I wasn't watching Rugrats. No, see, you're kind of showing your age a little bit, because that's a little bit before my time. Oh, okay. I was probably playing Pokemon on my Nintendo DS back in the day. Pokemon, that started in year wrap-up.

We talk about all the biggest stories of the year. And once again, my name is Cameron Abrams, reporter here at The Texan, and I'm joined by Rob Lauches, assistant editor. And Rob. Cameron. It's been a crazy year. It's been a pretty big year in politics. Yeah, it's been a big year for Texas and the country as a whole. And we talked a lot about the election. We talked about all sorts of different stuff. But I wanted to ask at the very top, your favorite story of the year. Do you have one?

Favorite running story of the year. You know, for me personally, I think the most exciting one was the whole question of whether or not Joe Biden was going to drop out of the 2024 race. Because you were saying back at the beginning of the year that you thought he was going to drop out. And I was like, no way. I mean, Biden, you know, I don't know if he's if he's doing super well, but I don't I don't think he's going to drop out. I think he's going to stick to it. And I remember where I was in July when the news was in July or was it August at that point? It was right after the debate. It was right. So whenever the last debate was, I just remember I was driving home. I was I was driving to the grocery store was right so whenever the last debate was i just remember i was driving

home i was i was driving to the grocery store i was on the phone with my grandpa talking about politics and i get a notification on my phone and i have to just turn my car around and say grandpa i've got to let you go biden just dropped out of the race i got to get home for work so that was that was pretty crazy i'd say that was probably my favorite story because it was the one thing that I got most wrong and you don't learn anything unless you make a mistake. That's true. That's true. Yeah. You guys were giving me a hard time when I kept saying, I think Biden's going to drop out, but I ended up getting that one right. I remember where I was when I got the news i was at my

apartment complex gym i was gonna work out in and i was actually texting back and forth with my brother and he just says i'm surprised you haven't haven't said anything yeah like what happened and he sends me the tweet yeah uh because that was was the craziest thing. It was via tweet. Yeah, it wasn't. He didn't give some statement to a news organization. No. He didn't go to the New York Times. No.

Just posted a tweet. Nope, just posted a tweet. And I was like, oh, my gosh, what the heck. And I immediately finished up, went back to my apartment. And, yeah, my phone and Slack was blowing up trying to get stuff done. Biggest surprise. Craziest thing. Biggest surprise.

Well, to be honest, Biden dropping out was pretty surprising, but possibly the only thing more surprising was Trump almost getting killed at an assassination attempt. Yes. Another thing that dominated a lot of our conversations here on the podcast. Do you remember where you were for that one as well? Because I do remember where I was. I do, because I, so it's funny. I was in Houston. I was, again, I was visiting my brother and I was with my dad. We had just finished up a game of putt-putt and we got back to my brother's apartment.

Very Trumpyian sport there. Yeah. You know, keep it on theme. And we're just hanging out. And I'm not even looking at my phone. It's just in my pocket. And it's just buzzing over and over again. And I pull it out.

And the news had just broken. And videos being sent around about what was going on. And then unfortunately on this trip, I had forgotten my laptop. So luckily I was able to borrow my brother's laptop and the rest of the day was consumed with trying to figure out what the heck just happened. Yeah. It's funny you bring up you were with family because I was also with family. I was with my dad and my sister and we were coming back from a family vacation. We're just like going on a little walk around the neighborhood and my phone starts buzzing like crazy and I got the exact same thing and it was like one of my friends calling and

we immediately got on the phone just talking about how insane it was that you see something. Because at the time, I remember it was still kind of like fog of war. All people saw was that, you know, Trump went down after gunfire. I mean, there was speculation that he'd been seriously injured. There was, you know, a lot of speculation of people saying it was fake. I think that was very exciting. Well, because we heard the pops and people didn't immediately know that it was gunshots. Yeah.

You know, you could sort of assume. But that was the funny thing. News stories were trying to get out first what was going on. And so we saw a bunch of crazy headlines like loud sounds heard at a Trump rally. Yeah. You know, things like that. Popping noises. Yeah, yeah.

So just another day in the media cycle with headlines like that. Well, the craziest thing is still the fact that, you know, later analyses showed that Trump was, the assassin had a prime target on Trump's head and probably would have killed him had Trump not done that thing he does where he kind of cocks his head while he's talking. And it grazed his ear just barely. You know, he had a lot of blood on his face.

You know, there's the iconic photo of him holding his fist in the air with the blood on his face. But, I mean, it really was the least bad shooting possibly ever, you know, second only to not being shot, which it was still unfortunate, of course, because someone did actually die. One of the attendees at the rally did actually die getting shot. Cory Compratore. Yeah, Cory Compratore. And so it was probably, I'd say that was probably the biggest surprise of the year. Yeah, that was, that's something I wrote about for Redacted, something that I've continually commented on because it seems like we have not gotten as much information

about this shooter as we should have. And obviously the investigation is still ongoing, but because of our 24-hour media cycle, it seems to just be absorbed back into the background and new stories pop up. But I'm sure once Trump enters office, there's going to be a renewed focus on trying to figure out what happened. And we will be talking more about that specific topic later on in this episode. And we might, is it true, Cameron, we might be joined by a special guest for that topic? We could get some special guests.

That would be pretty exciting to see. I'm looking forward to seeing who it is. We have an empty chair here. Absolutely. Maybe it will be filled with someone that the audience is familiar with. That would be pretty exciting, I think. Well, in order to get on to that, I think we should start with our first article of the day from The Atlantic titled, Maybe Democrats Didn't Do So Badly After All by Russell Berman. And this is an interesting article talking about the two divergent views within the Democratic Party right now over did the Democrats get wiped out and,

you know, need to change their policies to become a lot more populist and focus on a lot more social services? Or did the Democrats do about as well as they could have in a bad situation? This article talks about how obviously Trump did very well in the day over Harris was because he was able to get those gains, I think, in those blue states. But saying that, in fact, the Democrats did not do too bad in the congressional races. I believe that they mentioned the House Democrats even gained a seat. And if I recall correctly, there's one statistic they have here. Yeah, this is an interesting statistic from the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman. Democrats could have retaken the House majority with only 7,300 more votes across three congressional

districts. It was actually that close for the Democrats retaking the House. So I thought that this was very interesting. And I wanted to get into this because this is a good springboard onto the Trump election in general. Yeah. So I wrote a postmortem for the site as a standalone newsletter. I've done quite a bit of reading and listening to postmortems from across the political spectrum. And one of the more interesting conversations I listened to was a conversation hosted by the Harvard Kennedy Institute for Politics, where they had Chris LaCivita from the he's the campaign co campaign manager for Trump and then Tony Fabrizio who is a pollster for Trump and then they had five different or four different individuals from the Harris campaign talking about

what happened and I also listened if people are interested they should go check out pod save America that, if not the most, one of the most popular left-leaning liberal podcasts on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. And they've been doing a lot of postmortems and did one with the Harris campaign. And from what I gather, the Harris campaign has attributed the reason for losing is because of the truncated campaign that Harris had to embark on. Like we talked about at the top, Biden dropped out halfway through the campaign season. I mean, if you consider the campaign season have started in November 2022, when Trump announced it's almost at the very end there. Yeah. So they had a limited window and they said

the most difficult thing they encountered. The final quarter, as some might say. Was trying to introduce Kamala to America. They just not having enough time to do that. People not really understanding what her policies were or who she was as a person. And that was sort of the big takeaway there. And there's been quite a number of articles saying this past election was the podcast election, right? And Trump going on, you know, whether it was something like Bussing with the Boys or Theo Vaughn or Andrew Schultz or Joe Rogan and Kamala Harris really sticking to traditional media outlets. And she did do a couple podcasts. She did Shannon Sharp's podcast. She did Call Her Daddy. But they just didn't land the same way.

What I think is going to be interesting moving forward, if we're just sticking on a big picture idea of what presidential campaigns are going to look like, is it seems as though traditional media, whether that be newspapers or traditional television, those are really withering away for how much influence they have on impacting presidential elections or really just the culture more generally. So my sort of analysis is in four years, we're going to see presidential candidates really dominating on podcasts, really focusing on sitting down for an hour and a half, two hours, three hours even, really laying out not just their policy positions, but giving viewers and watchers an opportunity to relate to their authenticity as a human being. Because I think people, that's what they really want, is to know who the person is that they're electing, rather than just thinking, oh, this is an empty suit. No, that's a fair point. I mean, you know, with the way that our, like, mainstream political debates work,

you know, everybody gets a minute to answer, and they always give the same canned responses that they obviously memorized beforehand. You know, these debates never really feel like an organic interaction unless you get to the part where the candidates start insulting each other, you know, when you get into these kind of spats, which is something I think that helped Trump back in 2015 and 2016. I mean, he kind of put people on the real defensive, you know, which was, it was interesting to watch. It was very interesting to watch. Trump is a master of the medium. He understands television. And so, like you mentioned, going back to 2015, he understood how to gain attention, how to get eyeballs on him.

In that very first debate when they asked, who will not support, who will not pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee? And he raised his hand and immediately had the eyes on him. Yeah. And so that's one aspect of the postmortems from the Democrat party and liberal voters is a breakdown in messaging. But the other aspect that you brought up in regard to policy positions a that was an issue where we saw Kamala Harris in 2020 run to the left of Bernie Sanders on some issues and that really came back to bite her during the presidential campaign when we saw one of the most effective ads for Donald Trump was the transgender ad, girls or men and women's sports ad,

where they said something along the lines of, Kamala Harris is for they, them, Trump is for you. Right, and portraying this issue as something for kind of out-of-touch liberals who don't care about real issues they care about this is you know that's the portrayal is that this is like fake issues for limousine liberals right so so talking about the policy issue is there is the factions within the the Democrat Party that have relied on the progressive activist groups, the transgender issue, the immigration issues, those sorts of policy areas. And then there's the group of policy issues that are related to working class voters that are really focused

on whether it be taxation or um welfare programs incentive programs and it seems as though there's a big split there right now and as we saw in polling that came out afterwards is it's the only group that Kamala Harris gained as compared to the 2020 election with voters is over 65 people who also made over $100,000. So a very small contingency where Trump made gains with every other demographic, specifically or rather especially with younger voters and with working class voters. Again, he made big gains. So it seems as though the culture or the electorate right now is leaning more towards a right-wing populist where the Democrat Party, at least their messaging or their policy positions, at least in the media how it's portrayed, is more leaning into the

ideological progressive policies rather than the more left populist policies. Tell me what do you think? Well, so it's interesting you bring that up because in this Atlantic article, they cite U.S. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who said in his, this is a tweet that sort of opens the article, that was a cataclysm. He said in reference to the November election, electoral map wipeout. Senate D practical ceiling is now 52 seats ours is 62 time to rebuild the left we are out of touch with the crisis of meaning slash purpose fueling MAGA we refuse to pick big fights our tents are too small or our tent is too small and his argument here is that the the Democrats have kind of abandoned that really economically progressive, I think, strategy of focusing on social services, helping working class people.

And his argument is, of course, that if the Democrats won't do that, then the Republicans will with their kind of right wing populism. online media spheres like I do, and I know you do a bit, a very progressive commentary show, The Young Turks, Anna Kasparian and Cenk Uygur, they seem to have moderated on some of their messaging recently. I wouldn't say their policy positions, but at least their messaging, messaging where someone like Anna Kasparian has been very vocal about how the left has how they've adopted a radical position on crime and a radical position on transgenderism to where it's alienating a more moderate uh a more moderate voter and so she has taken it upon herself to go speak with a right-wing podcast you know she went and spoke with glenn beck you know very you know someone very much at the right same thing with jake huger he has gone on a number of uh conservative right-wing podcasts talking about how he wants to see a populist from the left,

populist from the right sort of coalition be built. Because he sees, at least through MAGA, some of these more populist working class agenda items be able to move forward, which I think is interesting. You know, you got to be careful when it comes to the more culturally progressive things, not to let those leak in as well. So just something to keep an eye on moving forward over the next four years. Another thing that I think is worth mentioning is it's so crazy because we're talking all about the presidential election, but there was an entire GOP primary that captured media attention at the beginning of the year because really going back, people thought this was going to be an opportunity for someone like DeSantis to take over the party. And I don't know for you, did that really – what do you think failed on the DeSantis front? My opinion – oh, sorry for interrupting.

No, go ahead. My opinion on that whole front basically is that I think a lot of DeSantis supporters underestimated the degree of personal loyalty that a lot of Trump supporters have towards Trump, not as a leader of the GOP and not as a standard bearer of conservative beliefs, but simply for the specific person that he is. I think that this only was strengthened by this past year of the legal challenges he faced, the assassination attempts. I think a lot of Trump supporters, you know, were simply motivated by loyalty to a person they believe was doing his best for them and that they wanted to do their best for him. And a lot of them saw DeSantis as just some guy who wants to step in and take over, you know, Trump's movement. Yeah. I feel like that's that's in my opinion, the biggest issue there is it's it's this personal loyalty that, you know, it's pretty astounding the degree of loyalty that Trump's attracted to himself as an individual.

And I think you can't take that for granted. Yeah, and it just didn't seem like it was really – there wasn't really an opportunity for someone else to step in because of that personal loyalty that many in the Republican Party had or still have for Trump. There were some failures on the messaging for DeSantis. If you compare how DeSantis ran versus someone like Vivek ran, Vivek was very aggressive on hitting the podcast circuit. And during the debates, very aggressive. Very aggressive during the debates.

But he was also very referential to Trump in the previous, his previous time as president. And it just didn't seem like DeSantis was able to come off as relatable in many instances. And you see, it didn't seem like he was able to explain some of his positions very well. But I'm sure we'll see DeSantis emerge once again. Absolutely. In 2028. And, you know, there's talks he might even be in the cabinet. Yeah, who knows? Trump's administration. But indeed, speaking of Trump's future administration, I think we can now hit on our next big article we're going to be talking about here. This one is from the Texas Tribune titled, The Best Time to Prepare. Migrant Rights Group Warns Undocumented Texans to Plan for Deportations by Berenice Garcia. Now, this is an interesting little article talking about,

let's see, his name is Joaquin Garcia, the director of La Union del Pueblo Entero or LUPE, which is an organization that supports, it says, immigrants, farm workers, and Hispanic Texans. And one of the big issues they're focusing on right now are the imminent mass deportations that the Trump administration is planning on carrying out when Trump is inaugurated. Trump has said that he wants to not, you know. Ronald Reagan did an amnesty back in, I believe it was, back in the 1980s. And a lot of conservative, the more hardliners on immigration, I think, have now decided that that's not going to happen again. And they want to carry out mass deportations of all of the illegal aliens in the United States. I think it's an

estimated 11 million, although I know some people put it as closer to 20 million, of course, due to being undocumented. The documents aren't there to prove how many there are, but they mentioned a Pew article from Pew Research that says that the estimated number of illegal immigrants in Texas is about 1.6 million. So that's about one in every 30 Texans, if I believe it's about 30 million people in Texas, 30, 35 million. So that's a lot of people. program is going to be, you know, a big thing to watch going forward, how the Texas state government works with it or doesn't work with it, you know, depending on how that works. I mean, I feel like the Senate, the Texas Senate won't have a difficulty with it, but given the current state of turmoil in the House, you know, the degree of to which they support it, but the,

you know, the statewide government of Texas otherwise will probably be working with it quite a bit. And I believe Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham even recently purchased a bunch of land near the border to help set up – I believe that she plans to gift to the Trump administration to use to build holding facilities for the illegal immigrants the administration is planning on deporting. Yeah, so this being a year in review, if we go all the way back to the early months of this year, there was a, quote, bipartisan border bill that was proposed in Congress that then ended up passing. And one of the big reasons why is because even though it was called bipartisan, there was many issues within that bill regarding how many individuals would be allowed to call for amnesty or be granted amnesty or a certain number of people let into the country.

Well, it was bipartisan because there were Republicans who supported it, but there were also a lot of Republicans who didn't. Who were against it, correct. And so there's been quasi-border bills proposed, right? But they haven't ended up passing because they weren't up to snuff on not just what someone like Trump is planning on introducing when he takes office on January 20th, but what we saw the American people wanting because Trump throughout the campaign season was saying mass deportations. And we saw Starr County, one of the most heavily Hispanic areas in Texas, go for Trump. We saw, like you mentioned in the last segment, many blue states, many blue cities even, going in favor of Trump based upon this issue of illegal immigration. And something being said during the campaign was every state is a border state.

And that's returning to Texas. One of the things that Governor Greg Abbott did that really brought this to national attention was this busing program. And at the beginning of the year when he started doing this, it seemed as though it might have been just a publicity stunt, something to put eyeballs on the issue here in Texas. But it turned into a national story and it really brought to light for people living in Chicago, people living in New York City. This is a national issue. And so I think Trump, with winning the popular vote, winning the electoral college, really shows that the issue of illegal immigration is something people, the electorate want fixed and so you mentioned a lot of different things of what's going on here in Texas you know the purchasing of the land you know we've seen Tom Homan go on a number of traditional news outlets

accompanied many times with Governor Greg Abbott and Tom Homan the borders are future borders are has often been presented with the question what's gonna happen when a let's say they say something along the lines of a mixed household meaning American citizens and then illegal aliens living in a household. What are you going to do with those families? It's like, well, the families, if they want, they can leave together. Yeah, there's definitely not. They're not looking for some kind of, I think, like half approach.

At this point, I think with the second Trump administration, especially knowing there's not going to be a third. Now, of course, some people want there to be a third, but I will make this prediction that there will not be a third Trump administration here. And I'll eat crow if I end up being wrong on that. But I think they definitely view this as like their last attempt to get this big policy done. And so they're not going to be messing around this time well and so there there was the busing from Texas and also from Florida but it also the

issue of illegal immigration caught national attention when the Cuban Haitian Nicaraguan Venezuelan flights program really popped up in national media when the eating cats and dogs story, the Haitian migrants in Springfield. Became a big meme on TikTok. They're eating the pets. Well, it made it all the way to a debate stage. All the way to the presidential debate. So the issue of illegal immigration is still

front of mind for many people. It's going to be front of mind for the Trump administration. Like I've explained before, I've listened to J.D. Vance talk about how this process might be carried out. And he explains it like eating a hamburger. You don't put the whole hamburger in your mouth when you eat it. Take one bite, you put it down, take another bite. So by focusing on criminals, people who have already committed crimes in the country, we know who they are, we know where they are, we can take those people out first. And then you start to work your way down. You know, it's not people, federal law enforcement going door to door, knocking on every door they find to say, do you have an illegal immigrant? Right, right. It's going to be a targeted approach. So it'll

be interesting to see how it's carried out. I don't know if you have any other thoughts on the issue. I mean, I'm not very, I'm not personally very familiar with like the specific strategies they intend on employing. I imagine anybody in imagine anybody in a US prison who's an illegal immigrant is probably going to be one of the some of the first people that they target for deportation yeah and then one of the other things that I think people are should be paying attention to to how this might be carried out is there are ways to incentivize self deportation mm-hmm whether it be from taxing remittances meaning money that is sent from the United States to Mexico putting a large tax on that or even we've seen that

Trump is perfectly comfortable with the idea of raising taxes between the United States and Mexico with the the tariffs Right. And then you could also see something like E-Verify come back into mainstream conversation. We could also see policy instituted making it illegal to hire illegal immigrants, whether or maybe even renting or selling homes to illegal immigrants. That could be a policy that encourages people to self-deport. So there are different ways to go about this. That doesn't have to be just putting handcuffs on people. Well, it reminds me of the Colony Ridge story last year of this development outside of, I believe it was outside of Houston, that was accused of deliberately targeting illegal immigrants to come and live in this development.

And it became kind of a big statewide issue last year. I believe it even made it onto a, did it make it onto a special session call or did it almost make it onto the special session call? Either way, it was, I think he said he might. Well, we sent he might um well i think he did actually we sent um it was a year ago after this year my brain is fried for anything from 2023 yeah we sent uh brad down there to colony rich to investigate he did a really good piece on that got some great photos of the area yeah so encourage everyone to go check that out but why don't you tell us a little bit about this Joe Biden pardon story you got here from Newsweek. Indeed, Newsweek's Monica Sager wrote, Will Joe Biden pardon Trump and what betting odds say after Hunter's pardon? So obviously, it became very big news when President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter of, I believe it was, all federal criminal charges between 2014 and 2024.

It was this massive period. Sweeping pardon. Absolutely. He was, you know, Hunter was convicted on gun and tax evasion charges. And President Biden had said for months that he was not going to pardon Hunter. And then at the beginning of this month, he came out and said, I am going to pardon Hunter. I hope the country understands where I'm coming from as a father. He said, I don't want my family to be targeted uh what he would accuse of being like a partisan witch hunt um and and that was i think that came as a big surprise to a lot of people

biden's definitely been using the power of the pardon quite a bit well you came across some an interesting uh stat or you brought this up in the office about the comparison between previous administrations i saw something i don't remember it off the top of my head but it it showed something along the lines of biden pardoning like an exponential number more of it was a lot of people it was a lot more people than previous it was over 8 000. to put that into perspective, Trump, yeah, for Biden right now, the number is, I believe, 8,027. For Trump, that was 237. So it's significantly more.

He joins the ranks of people as high as, for example, Ulysses S. Grant, who pardoned, let me see here. I have the exact number here. Grant pardoned about 1,300 people, which at the time was the highest number for after the Civil War. A lot of people were getting pardons. Coolidge pardoned a lot. Of course, the second highest, I believe, behind Biden now was Franklin D. Roosevelt at nearly 3,700 pardons, which I read that a lot of those were due to prohibition-related pardons, which I read that a lot of those were due to prohibition-related pardons, like a lot of people were getting their charges dropped after having been convicted on

prohibition charges. And, you know, now that prohibition, once prohibition was over, Roosevelt was wiping a lot of those away. So I believe the biggest one, though, most of Biden's pardons come from about 6,500 people that he pardoned in October 2022 for the offense of simple possession of marijuana. So it was 6,500 people for this one massive pardon. And the other 1,500 are a bunch of individual pardons, some of which have garnered some controversy. There are some controversial individuals besides, of course, simply Hunter. There have been lots of people who it looks like were pardoned, who had requested, I believe, a pardon during the COVID-19 pandemic, asking to get out of prison because they believed that they were at risk of dying. Now, of course, those

COVID-19 pandemic is basically over. So it's certainly a lot of people accusing it of either being, you know, some people are saying it's very merciful of him. Other people are saying it's politically corrupt of him. It depends, I think, on your view of the president, if you think this is a good thing or a bad thing. But it's definitely interesting to see this use of the pardon power, especially since now there are arguments that Biden should actually pardon Donald Trump of the federal crimes of which he is accused. Because I believe he's only been convicted in New York, if I recall correctly. Yeah. And something I want to touch on before we move on on the pardon issue, where you talk about people lobbying to be pardoned. This is a very common

thing that happens is high profile individuals who have been charged with crimes will actually hire lobbyists to go to Washington and lobby for a pardon on their behalf. I wrote a big newsletter about the power of the pardon, and in the extra credit section, I linked to a podcast by Kim Wheel where she talks about this. She wrote, she's written a couple of books on the pardon power, the presidency, if people are interested in some background on that issue. But you mentioned pardoning Trump. That would be very interesting if it happens. I don't see it happening. You know, we had Nixon be pardoned, right? That was a big one. That was a big one. That Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon after the Watergate scandal to avoid tearing the country apart was his argument.

And, you know, I thought it would be interesting if Trump got into office and pardoned Hunter. This was a big thing people were saying. I think Trump even said, well, I wouldn't rule it out. But since that's off the table, no, I don't see Biden pardoning Trump. But what do you think about the possibility of Trump pardoning some of the January 6th rioters. Because there's a number of them who are still in prison that haven't gotten their due process. And there's a number of them that have cases that are following them

where based upon so much information that has come out post january 6 seems like there's a number of individuals who have who were i wouldn't say that there's not the evidence there to say they were either violent to the extent where being in solitary confinement is necessary, right? Yeah. So what do you think about Trump going in and pardoning January Sixers? I mean, he said he want to. I'm sorry. He's said that he wants to.

And I believe there's a pretty good chance he probably will. I mean, I think that this is I would be surprised if it didn't happen. I, yeah, I think that that's, that's been a big political issue ever since the January 6th riot occurred, is this has been a big issue over the last four years. This was a big issue that Democrats were citing during the campaign season, you know, saying this is what Trump represents. Trump represents this kind of violence and disorder and this attack on the Capitol during the election certification. You had Republicans saying, no, this is not as big of a deal as you're making it out to be. This is a protest. There have been protests, you know, people have protested at state legislatures before and disrupted things from happening.

Now, of course, there was a number of people, you know, some people came with weapons, some people came with zip ties. I believe they even found a bomb on the premises. There were people there. Are you talking about the pipe bombs? Yes, that's what I was referring to. People should go read Darren Beatty's reporting on that, Revolver News. I'm not familiar with that specific report, but I will say that there were people there with the intent to do some harm. But a lot of people, you know, you see the videos, obviously, you know, the only videos that Democrats will post are the ones of people fighting police. The only videos Republicans will post are the ones of people just walking around saying, hey, how's it going to the security guards, right?

And there were some people who were involved in, you know, there were people involved in one and there were people involved in the other. But I think, yeah, that Trump is definitely going to pardon a lot of those people. That's probably going to become another big political issue when that happens. Imagine Republicans are going to be very happy. Democrats are going to be very upset. But Trump is, again, like with the deportation issue, this is his last term in office. I mean, he is, I believe he's prepared to hit the ground running and get everything he wants done. He wants to get, he wants to do everything he wants to do, and he doesn't want to waste any time on it. So we're also, of course, get the interesting question of can a president pardon himself, which I think that if Trump has enough legal people behind him who says he can, he might try to do it um i wouldn't be surprised if he tried but

it's it's the power of the pardon is a really interesting one you wrote a really good redacted about the power of the pardon that uh it's definitely worth reading yeah people should go check that out something that i want to end on here that you mentioned about this article from newsweek is the introduction of betting markets into politics. Oh, yeah. We saw during the presidential election, polymarket be a big influence on how people were gauging the direction of the election. And polymarket was spot on. They had Trump was going to win. They had Trump was going to win the popular vote.

And what's interesting is... One guy made like $85 million, I believe, betting on Trump's win, a French guy. It was called a whale, guy who made some really big bets. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting. I have my issues and quibbles with online gambling just generally. But when it comes to political issues, I'm torn here because could it potentially have an effect on policy outcomes if there isn't this sort of oversight that might be necessary? Because there is already the big issue of stock trading by elected representatives while betting on policy being passed or not passed or certain things

being uh certain things happening in the country will that impact how elected officials act in their position you know it's one of those arguments that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later. I don't know if you have any big picture thoughts on betting markets in politics. I mean, I think it's interesting to see just, I mean, betting markets in politics, you know, betting on politics is one thing, but the politics surrounding betting is a big issue. That was a big issue in 2023. You know, you had lots of lobbyists like the Las Vegas Sands Pack, which was pushing for legalizing, you know, casinos in Texas. You have sports gambling. Sports betting has become a huge issue.

It feels like you can't watch a game anymore without getting a DraftKings ad. You know, somebody telling you to put up money on something. And, you know, those – that's been, that's, that's been, it's, it's interesting to see how much, how you can bet on anything now. There's all these websites where you can, you can put a bet on almost anything happening and someone, it seems will take you up on it. So that's, that's just been an interesting thing, I think, to see become more common in general, especially with mobile phones. I mean, you can, you know, download an app to place a bet on just about anything related to sports

and now with politics. And it'll be interesting to see going forward if there's another push in the 2025 legislative session here in Texas to legalize, to further legalize forms of gambling. Doesn't look likely, depending, of course, on the chaos in the House. We'll see what happens. But speaking of like new technologies, I think we have another interesting article here from the Dallas Express titled, Tech Giants Pledge Millions to Trump's Inauguration, a New Era of Reconciliation? This article talks about how big tech companies, Amazon and Meta, have each pledged $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration fund.

Now, this is very interesting because I feel like I say this is very interesting for every article, but they are all very interesting. I'll say this is fascinating because I think that for a while there during COVID, you know, people viewed Trump and someone like Mark Zuckerberg of Meta as being kind of at odds. You know, Trump was, I believe, banned from Facebook. Well, and Mark Zuckerberg spent hundreds of millions of dollars during the 2020 campaign for Get Out to Vote. Activist organizations. organizations and like you mentioned this inauguration fund has had donations from people like Mark Zuckerberg and many other people from the tech industry and I think to get the full picture of this evolution is go back all the way to 2015 and there was one uh big name in the tech industry that was a supporter of trump and he spoke at the um rnc you know who this is and who was that peter teal

peter teal very early uh big trump supporter and also someone like Paul Merlucky, who if people don't know who Paul Merlucky is, he was the creator of Oculus. And now he is the founder and creator of Anduril, which is a military drone startup. A lot of guys in tech who are big fans of Lord of the Rings isn't there? Yeah, there is between Palantir and I believe and a rail is also from the Lord of the Rings, you know It's it's you know, I don't want to call people nerds. But if you're super into tech super into Speculative it's an interesting overlap if you want to stick on the on that idea a You know, I was very excited about the. Vance election for VP because of his Silicon Valley ties. Yeah, it's definitely something fascinating to watch how this tech industry is becoming more sympathetic to Republican politics when they were probably, you know, I mean, not probably, about 10 years ago, you would have stereotyped them all as, well, I've said it earlier in the episode, limousine liberals.

You know, I think that that was the stereotype. Well, again, something I wrote about for Redacted quite a few months ago was this pairing of Trump and Silicon Valley tech investors. Someone like Marc Andreessen, I've spoken about and written about quite a few times in newsletters. He wrote the Techno Optimist Manifesto and where he was very much pro-tech, very much pro-free speech,

pro-accelerating artificial intelligence, cryptography technologies, saying that an alignment between Silicon Valley and the Republican Party can be something that is going to allow the tech industry to flourish, whether it be on free speech issues or reducing environmental regulations or even regarding SEC oversight so that these both small tech and big tech companies, startups or people even like Google, Microsoft can begin to innovate again, begin to hire more people, begin to onshore manufacturing, because right now many manufacturing companies,

technology companies are outsourcing the productivity, whether it be through workers in countries like China, India, Indonesia. They can bring that back home by aligning themselves with the Republican Party, who has promised to reduce oversight and regulation so we can begin to accelerate technology innovation again. Well, it's interesting you bring up accelerating, you know, this because I think we're in a bit of a bit of a technophobic kind of time right now. I think people feel generally very unhappy and pessimistic about things like AI and social media. You know, it's the conventional wisdom. We're all addicted to our phones, you know.

Well, in one aspect, that is correct. But in another aspect, returning to what I mentioned at the top, someone like Peter Thiel, he has spoken about how there has been quite a bit of innovation on the software front and not as much innovation on the hardware front so if you focus on something like artificial intelligence we've seen exponential growth in innovation where something like chat gT was rather elementary in its ability to have a level of intelligence in its responses early in the year. But now we are here in December, and the ability for it to produce responses that have some coherence is light years from where it was earlier in the year. So the type of development in the area of AI is really exciting, but we're still using smartphones that look like they did in 2012. We're still using laptops. We're still using, you know,

microphones. Well, I've heard it said that, you know, the time period from, say, 1990 to 2020, you know, I feel like if you went back in time to 1990, you just looked around. Materially speaking, it would look pretty similar. You know, the specific, the gizmos and gadgets people have. Now, obviously, a lot of those have changed. A lot of them have just been condensed down into the smartphone. But think about the time period from, say, 1990 to, say, 1960 or 1950. I mean, you know, we're talking about machines that didn't exist yet that came into being, whereas nowadays, as you mentioned, it seems like software is the new kind of frontier, except perhaps in the realm of spaceflight. Because if we're talking about Donald Trump

and big tech, we can't forget about Elon Musk, who, of course, is, I think, definitely wants to be a very big hardware guy. You know, he wants to be the electric vehicles guy, the reusable rocket ships guy, the personal Android guy. If you've seen the video of the little serving robot he had at a launch party for, I believe, his cyber bus. Yeah, cyber taxi. Exactly. So seeing the way that Musk has, you know, obviously purchasing Twitter is a big deal. X now, whatever, you know, whether you call it, it'll always kind of be Twitter in my heart, you know, even if it's officially called X on the official forums. But that was enormous in, you know, a lot of people predicted that Twitter was just going to fail because, you know, a lot of people predicted that Twitter was just

going to fail because, you know, with Elon Musk in charge, he's going to run it into the ground. I was even myself wondering if this was going to happen. But we still see that Twitter has remained very central. As we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast, the president used Twitter, not a social, not some other social media site, not some cable network, not the New York Times. Twitter, which was owned ostensibly by somebody who is against him, to put out his message that he's not running again. And so seeing the way that Trump has now become, you know, Trump, Musk is going to be leading this Department of Government Efficiency,

depending on what exact form that takes. We don't know. But seeing the way that— Well, he has promised to—well, not promised, but he has said, but also Vivek Ramaswamy, who during his campaign for presidency talked about firing half of the, well, not firing, mass layoffs. Yeah. Half of federal government employees. And, you know, someone like Vivek, who does have a law background,

and then someone like Elon, who, when he went into X, he eliminated half or more than half, probably, of Twitter's workforce, and it's become just as efficient or even more so. That's true. Hopefully they can bring that to the federal government. And, ladies and gentlemen. The special guest is here. I am back.

Veteran alumnus of Send Me Some Stuff, Brad Johnson. Brad, is it good to be back? You know, y'all voted me off the island and you still couldn't get rid of me. Yeah. No, we could never. We could never replace you, Brad. No, I took myself off the island. We already have a smoke-filled room with Mackenzie.

So you guys are already pretty busy with that. Embarrassment of riches, if we'll call it that. Well, Brad, you joined just in time for us to discuss our fifth and final article of the day from CBS News. Tell me about it. All right. The article's title, House Task Force Releases Final Report on Trump Assassination Attempts by Kaya Hubbard and Caitlin Yillick. So the House task force that was charged with investigating these assassination attempts against Trump has released their final report. It is 180 pages talking about every security... Did you read it all? I have not read it all,

unfortunately. I'm not as big of a... I'm just not as smart as you've read. You probably could have read this whole thing. I haven't read that thing. You probably could have read this whole thing. That's a demarcation of intelligence. We all have a problem. But yeah, it details all of the kind of security failures that allowed something like this to happen. And I think it's worth taking a look at something like this, because I think at the beginning of the year, if you would have said somebody was going to try and shoot Donald Trump, I think a lot of people would have gone, oh, ha ha, sure. They've been saying that for years. Yeah. And people have tried. You know, there was the guy, I believe, in 2016 who rushed the stage. You know, now we

don't know if he was, I don't think he had a gun on him. There was a British man who rushed the stage. You know, people have certainly indicated it. You remember you had the whole scandal about Kathy Griffin holding a fake severed Trump head and, you know, accusations about violence going both ways. Well, and, you know, you might be too young for this, and Cameron was not interested in politics at the time, but people said the same thing about Obama. I remember hearing during the 2008 election, people would say, you know, we're voting for the vice president either way because either McCain's going to die in office or Obama's going to be assassinated. And obviously neither came to pass.

Unfortunately. Thankfully, yes. But I think this happens all the time. At least the frenzy, not the assassination. But this actually did. The fact that it succeeded is the big deal. And for your information, you're absolutely right. I was not paying attention back then. I had more important things on my mind. You're watching Rugrats. I was watching,

no, I wasn't watching Rugrats. No, see, you're kind of showing your age a little bit because that's a little bit before my time. I was probably playing Pokemon on my Nintendo DS back in the day. Pokemon, that started in the early 90s. Yeah, but it was the one from the 2000s. I just think that this article is a very good springboard for a general discussion on kind of political violence more broadly this year. From the Trump assassination attempt, the second Trump assassination attempt. We just had Daniel Penny be acquitted of murdering Jordan Neely in New York City. And of course, the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. It's been a very crazy year for this kind of thing. I think it shows a kind of general, I think there's been a general sense of a kind of breakdown of normalcy.

Now, maybe that's been running since 2016. I don't know. Well, I remember Cameron and I – I don't remember which episode this was, but we talked about this before the assassination attempt on Trump, just how – maybe it was – I think it might have been when Shinzo Abe got assassinated, right? The former prime minister of Japan. Yeah. That happened this year, right? Yeah. Yeah. That happened this year, right? Yeah. Okay. I think that was what sparked us to talk about this, and I made

the point... It was 22, yeah. It was 22? Yeah, we brought it up because we were talking about... I think it was after the first assassination attempt, wasn't it? Or it was... I don't remember. Anyway, I don't know. It's been a crazy year. My recollection was it was before the Trump assassination attempt, the first one.

But I don't know. Regardless, I made the point where this isn't the 60s, and things have been pretty good for a long time. It's kind of surprising with how much weaponry has advanced. Not only that, but become quite affordable. You know, look at AR, it's, you know, the top sportsman's rifle in the country, hunting rifle, because it's so easy to shoot. But still, like, you know, the Japanese guy,

he had to makeshift a pipe gun or whatever the heck it was. And it's just we had been in this period of at least low political violence overall until we hit about 2020. And we saw it ramp up quite a bit. Absolutely. But then specifically on assassinations, there were a lot of assassinations in the 60s and 70s. Oh, yeah. And now we, it seems like, have gotten to the point where it's at least tipping back up. It's not where it was, but you have Trump twice, and then this health care CEO get assassinated.

Absolutely. There's kind of, I think, a general concern about vigilante violence. You know, it seems like you have, I think the conventional wisdom is people on the right are defending Daniel Penny and condemning Luigi Mangione. And on the left, they're supporting Mangione and condemning Penny. I don't think you can put Penny in that. I don't. Yeah, that's that's totally. Yeah, no, that's all. Penny was not a vigilante. He was a good Samaritan. He was someone who was, there was a threat to the lives of the people on that subway train.

And he, did you ever watch the video of him after he was arrested when they were questioning him in the police office? I think I watched it when it first came out. The Free Press put that out. Do you remember watching that? No. Where he's explaining to the police what happened and what spurred his action in that instance and he explains to them as well he wasn't putting force on Jordan Ely's neck in an attempt to kill him he was saying I did this to try and subdue him try it try and prevent him from committing the types of crimes he was saying he was going to kill people

on that subway train. So it wasn't like he was going out to kill someone. Not like Luigi Mangione, who actually premeditated attack. No, that's true. That's true. I'm just making this point in general. You see, it's become part of political rhetoric, is this concern about vigilante violence on the other side well there's side claiming you have your own pet vigilante is what i'm what i'm trying to get

out here i just find that to be an interesting phenomenon the phenomenon is the framing of it where one where there is a segment of maybe it's the media maybe it's online commentators who are trying to set up that framing that you just explained, where they're, in some instances, they're even celebrating Luigi killing this healthcare CEO, which is even more disturbing. Because if we are, if we're thinking in such a way that people are uh memetically motivated to carry out certain actions then to see kind of copycats copycats is something we might have to worry about especially with how much acclaim he's getting on social media and you know all the comments about how

attractive he is as a dude um all of these Twitter people thirsting over him. Yeah, lots of memes. To use a term of Rob's generation. But, yeah, it's pretty disgusting. And the guy just shot a man in cold blood in, I guess it wasn't daylight because it was night, but. But just on the street. This is a guy who has a family.

He might not like what his company's done, but you just took out a husband and father more than anything else in the name of what exactly? And we still don't exactly know. I mean, that's the thing. There was so much speculation right when this first happened. I mean, you all remember seeing, like, fake manifestos circulating. People wrote...

Somebody wrote a big manifesto on a sub stack, I think it was, that circulated for a while until it turned out to be not true. But it's weird. It's also just, I'm sorry, but it's just so fake. A lot of this post hoc justification for what this guy did is because as soon as the assassination occurred of this healthcare CEO then you see all these media outlets putting out stories all the issues with the healthcare industry Oh concerns about people getting treated

properly or issues with insurance you know all coming after the assassination in some sort of attempt to justify these actions. And it's just, you know, if there obviously are issues with the healthcare system and healthcare insurance, but if people are going to be justifying these actions, that's just not appropriate in my mind. Like if you have an issue with the healthcare industry, address it on a policy level you know don't what you're saying don't do this vigilante sort of things and trying to take out CEOs it's just not proper well in a lot of these people they have a straw man's opinion of what other countries healthcare systems are like healthcare in general is a mess. Well, yeah. The United States is bad.

The Canada's, the National Health Institute or whatever it is in health service in Britain is bad. It's all bad for various reasons. You can get two out of three things in a health care system. You can get quality, you can get get affordability and you can get universality it's pick two yeah in the u.s we actually have relatively high affordability and quality yeah it's not it's not as difficult to get treatment it's just that if you don't have insurance you'll get saddled with an enormous medical bill right but it's generally not very hard to get um like emergency health care treatment i mean there are people that live in Canada.

One of my relatives is one of them, is one of these examples where they had to come to the U.S. to get some treatment for, it wasn't like super serious, but it was not nothing. It wasn't removing a wart or something because it would take months to get anything in Canada. Because it wasn't super serious, so they weren't going to put them at the front of the line. Is that why?

My understanding is yes, but I don't know all the details. But, yeah, like this, outsourcing your anger about a health care system when especially you don't have anything else to compare it to other than just think pieces about here's how the system is. It's pretty ridiculous to take it to the step of killing somebody over that. Especially because what is that going to do? That's not going to change the system.

It'll probably have relatively speaking the same effect as the Trump assassination attempt which is to bolster security. I mean I imagine it's probably going to lead to several other major CEOs just improving their own personal security at this point, knowing that this kind of thing will happen. But as Cameron, you mentioned that sometimes people do copycats, and hopefully that will not happen in this case. You know, I think that, you know, with the Trump administration, the Trump assassination, that second attempt might have been inspired by the first, the guy who waited at the Mar-a-Lago golf course, I believe, for hours on end

before being spotted and running and trying to escape. That was bizarre. Unfortunately, that guy didn't get close. Well, that whole situation, the guy, we talked about it a little bit because he had some interesting ties to some foreign government activist groups. We talked about it before. We can go look into it. I mentioned it in one of the stories I read about it.

But, yeah. What else about this do you think we haven't touched on? I mean, I think the other big thing to just mention is the way that the Trump assassinations might have affected the race. I know that, of course, we already talked about this a little bit, but I think that it probably solidified any Trump voter who thought, well, you know, because there's a lot of people who, if you're not very politically engaged, obviously, there's a lot of people who think, maybe I'll vote. If I don't, it's not the end of the world. I think that a lot of Trump voters after that were like, I'm not missing this. I will stand in line as long as I need to. They tried to kill him and I'm not going to let that,

I'm not going to let that slide. Well, yeah, we saw immediately after the attempted assassination, lots of people coming out on, we might have one more guest people coming on the podcast here if we can get another chair we might have our senior editor she's throwing a curveball i know getting you guys off guard we weren't expecting this i said i wasn't coming and then i came but maslin solicited she was like guys not guys just me well because you were talking would you like my chair no i'd rather just crouch like this okay you joined in at the perfect time we're talking about the uh trump assassination

oh my gosh i'm like as tall as you when i go oh the Trump assassination? Yeah, the first one. How far into the podcast are we? We're at the very end. We're literally at the very end of the podcast. Do you think that's what changed the election for Trump? Was the attempted assassination?

I think it was a turning point. Yeah. Yeah, huge. But I also think, I've said this so many times, the political runway of the assassination attempt, the first one, was shortened by the swap of Biden and Harris. That's fair. I think it's hard to measure. Because that's happened almost immediately afterwards. That news cycle was cut so short because of that switch.

I don't want to say it was one thing. I think it was a bunch of different things. Like the RFK endorsement. I think that was huge, too. things, like the RFK endorsement. I think that was huge, too. You're really big on that. I'm not sure. I think that's just in line with what a lot of people are saying about the bro vote and the podcast appearances.

That's all in line with those voters that turned out. It's funny. When you notice online, the word bro is only ever used in a very negative way by a lot of these journals. It's never used in even a remotely positive sense, which is, I think, how if a guy calls another guy bro, it's only really in a positive sense that it's being used here. But instead here, it's the bros. It's this very scary word. The reason why I think...

You guys are all very scary bros, by the way. The RFK Jr. endorsement was so huge is because when he was still in the race, there was, you know, anywhere from, let's say, five to nine percent in some of these states that were going to be voting for RFK in these in these polls. Right. But and so that could have swung the election in favor of the Democrat nominee. So if we say just even half of those percentage of voters swung towards Trump post-endorsement, then we could say that swung the election in favor of Trump. And those voters who were RFK stalwarts, you know, they're not Trump supporters. They're RFK supporters. And they voted for Trump because of RFK. They didn't vote for Trump for Trump. I know, like at least three people. It's like we're talking about with, let me make sure I'm speaking into the microphone.

It's like what we're talking about with this personal loyalty thing, how Trump's voters, you know, DeSantis couldn't come in and just replace Trump because Trump voters are loyal to him as a person, you know, not as a standard bearer of conservative beliefs. And with RFK Jr., you had a lot of that same personal loyalty, you know, and the kind of social media has made politics more individualistic in the sense that individual politicians can communicate with voters on an individual basis through something like a Twitter account well and if I was gonna pick one thing that really switched the election in favor of Trump it was the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk because the Twitter files and the suppression of speech and the ability for people of all political persuasions to be able to communicate openly and honestly on social media, that wasn't possible in 2020. It just wasn't. But now in 2024, they were able to express that online, and messages were more easily spread online through DMs or through paid advertisements, whatever it may be.

Some of the issues that come up with paying people to advertise certain messages. Little issue, a little political scandal in Texas maybe. Right, but I think the open flow of information really showed that people were wanting Trump, and that was able to convince maybe the moderate independent voter who could have went either way. Just because they were exposed to pro-Trump messages, was able to move them towards Trump. So that's my ending salvo on that. Well, I think that's a good stopping point for now. We could obviously

keep talking for several more hours, but unfortunately we can't do that. This podcast goes out on, I should know the date. December 30th. Wow. Happy New Year, people. Absolutely. Happy New Year, everybody. Merry New Year. We're recording this, of course, before that. Far in advance. Yeah, far in advance. But yeah, it'll be going out on Monday, December 30th is when this will be hitting. Well, before we wrap, is there something that people should be looking for in the new year? What's going to be the biggest issue you think that people should be paying attention to? Is there anything that's top of mind for you guys?

For me, I'll start off. Texas or nationally? Either or. You guys on your podcast really focus on Texas politics. So if you want to pick something like that, I'm going to pick the mass deportations, how that's going to be carried out and sort of the media reaction to that. Because I've mentioned on Weekly Roundup before how the media has already sort of tried to frame how the mass deportations are going to be carried out when it when it was explained by some media

outlets that people are going to be put in quote camps you know try to pay for people listening pay attention to how stories are going to be framed in the next few months once trump is and what the methods of the deportation the methods pay attention to how they're described because it's they're going to attempt to frame it in a negative light. So I'll be interested to see the media reaction and, you know, videos that are going to be coming out or even the tactics for how the mass deportations are going to be carried out. That's something I'm really going to be. I'll piggyback that with how the Texas legislature responds and what kind of response there needs to be in Texas, like how it's actually carried out in the legislative session, what bills are

filed. I think a lot of the questions surrounding, and of course, I'd rather talk about session than anything else because that's just where my brain is. But I think a lot of the questions right now surrounding session are, okay, what are even going to be the big policy fights? Like what are the big bills? We have priorities from the leaders in both chambers, but that doesn't tell us as much as we usually have because the leadership in one of the chambers is definitely not going to be the same as it was previously. So we just have a lot of questions about what those big policy fights will be. And I foresee the border, especially under a Trump administration, either being like kind of left alone in some sense, because there will be a lot of resources provided or you know some almost

accompanying type legislation needed for an effort like a mass deportation so i'm super curious to see where that will lie what about you guys i'm gonna go with the speakership in the texas house but not just because of who is running it but how that changes things in the body. David Cook is obviously committed to substantial reforms. If he gets it, how many can he actually implement? Because the thing I always tell people on this is things are the way they are for a reason. That doesn't make them necessarily good or bad. They can have pros and cons to each, and they have both.

But they've developed that way for a reason, and changing that is always more difficult than you think. And so how much can he actually get across the line in reforms to the chamber? How much does he want? Because I don't know if he personally, like he obviously ranks them on importance. So for priority one, it will be something big. It will probably be like no no Democratic chairs, right? But where do the rest of those potential reforms lie for him? And then on the other side, Justin Burroughs, he'll probably reform some things too.

We might see a floor vote on Democratic chairs. In fact, if you read between the lines of all the statements, that's what it sounds like. He's not going to just ban it himself. But if the membership votes to ban it, then that will happen. But if a ban doesn't happen, well, he still ought not to make Democrat shares, right? Because that's entirely in the Speaker's purview. Right, exactly. And the parliamentarians, just the rules themselves, do the rules governing points of order change? All this stuff is very in the weeds minutia, but it affects all these big policy topics that we want to talk about to a large degree. So that's what I'm most interested in to see how it plays out. And, you know, whoever's elected speaker, you know,

they're the figurehead of these two movements that are competing for power in the Texas House and in Texas politics. Yeah, and you've done great reporting on that. I encourage everyone to go check that out. Rob, for you? Y'all have taken all the good ones. So I'll say honestly honestly i think my favorite thing that i'm going to be following this next year is just going to be foreign policy is the

relationship between the u.s and the rest of the world that's such a good one i mean we've talked about already uh the border and the u.s and mexico have kind of fraught a fraught relationship right now there's a little bit of tension there especially with trump coming out and saying he wants to implement 25 tariffs on mex Mexican and Canadian goods. There's a big political debate right now in Canada with claims that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government is going to collapse in Canada. By the time this comes out, Canada might have a new prime minister. There's claims that some new economic policies could be implemented to fight massive tariffs on Canada. Donald Trump called Justin Trudeau the governor of the 51st state in one of his Truth Social posts.

That was an interesting thing to see. After meeting with Trudeau in person. After meeting with Trudeau and saying, you know, well, if your country needs to rip us off $100 billion, then, you know, why aren't you part of our country? And then I think Trudeau laughed it off. But, you know, Trump enjoys, of course, prodding people like this. Something we didn't talk about for over the hour that we've been talking. Hour and 16 minutes. We didn't talk at all about the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

We mentioned it, but we didn't talk about it. We didn't talk about Israel-Hamas. And there's incredible disruptions in the Middle East ongoing. I know, in Syria. Yep. Just had Bashar al-Assad, longtime president of the Baathist dictatorship

in Syria just fall, and all these claims about the rebel groups and are they, you know, some of these people who are veterans of Al-Qaeda, you know, all these claims coming out that these people are going to implement some kind of Islamist fundamentalism, other people saying that they're going to try and veer more towards liberal democracy. I mean, it's very fog of war over there, I think, right now.

Well, it's something we talk about a lot in the office that we don't write about at the Texan. We're the Texan. We're not the global. But it's something that I... We're not the cosmopolitan. Yeah something. We're not the cosmopolitan. Yeah, but I think you're spot on. That's something people are going to want to be paying attention to,

especially with how Trump has been very, he's been vague, but pointed in saying that he's going to solve all these problems. He's day one. Day one going to solve all the problems. But I just want to say thank you everyone for listening over the past year. This has been a brand new venture for us here at The Texan with all these new podcasts

and newsletters. Thank you for reading and watching and thank you for tuning in to this special episode and we'll check you out next year. If you have any interesting stories to send us, you can send us some stuff at editor at the Texan. Stop laughing at me. At editor at the Texan dot news. So thank you all very much

and have a happy new year. Why aren't y'all waving? I joined you. Thank you.