Rick Wilson is endlessly negative and cynical. I get where he's coming from but I'm not a huge fan of being insulted. Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/hellwqrld. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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| Hello everyone, Poker and Politics here. | |
| Wanted to do a review of Running Against the Devil by Rick Wilson. | |
| A book trying to tell the Democrats how to win the 2020 presidential election and defeat Donald Trump and save America from total destruction. | |
| This book is very angry. | |
| Wilson spends most of the book rolling his eyes and being just generally disgusted with Democrats and liberals writ large. | |
| The book is very weird in that way where He's telling us he has to be mean and condescending and insulting in order for us to understand that he truly knows what he's talking about and that he knows what he's doing. | |
| And in reality, he's only doing this because this is the Rick Wilson brand. | |
| This abrasive, gruff, brash, elbow-throwing kind of guy who talks the talk and tells it like it is and all that kind of stuff. | |
| He's got a brand to maintain, so he's going to give you this kind of very churlish, mean-spirited sort of advice and information. | |
| Now my big problem with the book, besides the tone and the very condescending nature of it, is that the book I'm treating you like a moron when you're buying a book by Rick Wilson. | |
| So you're probably a little political savvy if you're gonna do that. | |
| And the book really just treats you like you're dumber than dirt. | |
| Because it's like, the Electoral College is all that matters and any idiot Democrat who thinks otherwise is a fool and a moron and a sucker and I hate them. | |
| And it's like, of course, Rick, we understand how American elections work. | |
| We know the Electoral College is what matters. | |
| We're not idiots. | |
| Hillary Clinton didn't campaign in California and New York. | |
| And we'll get to his hatred of Hillary Clinton in a minute. | |
| But the fact that he's like, the Electoral College is what matters. | |
| You've got to win that in order to win the presidency, you big dum-dums. | |
| It's like I just bought a book on the 2020 presidential election. | |
| I think I would know that. | |
| But maybe, maybe there's one person in America who's like, oh, wow. | |
| Thanks for that keen insight, Rick. | |
| Really needed that. | |
| I never would have known how to win the presidency if I didn't read your book. | |
| So it's very condescending and it really doesn't give a lot of solutions to the problems he brings up. | |
| He basically brings up the fact that Trump's gonna have a lot of money this time around, Trump's gonna just throw bombastic attacks at his opponent 24-7, he's going to lie constantly, and that you have to be just as terrible and scummy as Trump if you want to win. | |
| You might want to not lie as much as Trump, but you definitely need to just constantly be throwing punches, constantly attacking, constantly doing everything you can to possibly win the election. | |
| You need to fund the Libertarians to try to siphon off votes from Trump by attacking his right flank with a third party. | |
| If you want to, if you could fund like the QAnon party in Florida or some other important battleground state to try to siphon votes, do it. | |
| Wilson is writing this book from a hyper-cynical, win-at-all-costs, have-no-principles, have-no-integrity, stand-for-nothing kind of worldview. | |
| He is endlessly very dismissive of transgender people in this book. | |
| It is really kind of Jarring how much he really seems to just roll his eyes and get upset about these kinds of things. | |
| He mentions government-funded transgender abortions at one point because he's trying to work into a bunch of buzzwords. | |
| At another point he talks about how back in the old days you'd be worried about being caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy, whereas nowadays you'd be worried about Uh, some crime happening to your gender-fluid, uh, nanny, having, being, uh, murdered, and having, uh, skin-sealed viziers. | |
| I don't know if I got that pronoun right, and I apologize if I didn't, being worn. | |
| And it's very much the big, big issue that Wilson has is just you liberals are too liberal | |
| to win these elections where it matters. | |
| And that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were unicorns of magic and fairy dust. | |
| And even they ran as middling centrists who tried not to tip the apple cart. | |
| And if you lunatics nominate Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders and they promise too much | |
| and they talk too much about abortion and guns and pronouns and socialism, Trump will | |
| crush you and you will deserve it because the Democratic Party must appeal to me, Rick | |
| Wilson basically. | |
| And I am a Republican who just hates Donald Trump. | |
| So I want to vote for the thing that's closest to a Republican on God's green earth. | |
| And everyone else in your target demographic is also me. | |
| And this is the thing about all of this is that he really doesn't explain how you're going to handle all of Trump's attacks. | |
| He does a quick chapter on deepfakes and he's just like, there'll be a terrible deepfake out there that will accuse Joe Biden of using a racist slur. | |
| And he doesn't actually explain how you stop this or debunk it or defeat it. | |
| He just says, this is a bad thing that will probably happen and you better be ready for it. | |
| Exactly how you combat a deep fake without having some sort of immediate reaction. | |
| Just scream that it's a fake and that Trump campaign is lying. | |
| And this is the real problem. | |
| Just stream of consciousness here. | |
| I'm punchy and tired. | |
| So sorry work with me but the real problem with this that Rick doesn't want to address is that this comes down to the media and the media are going to be Kowtowing to Trump constantly because they hate calling him a liar. | |
| They hate the charge of being quote-unquote liberal So let's say a terrible deep fake video comes out where Joe Biden's accused of using a racial slur. | |
| The only thing the Biden campaign can do is to get the media to condemn it. | |
| Because the Biden campaign will obviously come out and say it's fake. | |
| But how does that play in the media? | |
| How does CNN cover it? | |
| How does MSNBC cover it? | |
| How does Fox News cover it? | |
| How willing is Fox to pull that punch? | |
| How long will Fox News stay out on that hill? | |
| And that's the real problem is how does our, how do our newspapers, how do our talking heads, how do our political, how does the political cycle treat this video? | |
| And the real answer is that it's outside of the Democratic campaign's hands. | |
| It's one of those things where the story runs on page 1 above the fold and the retraction runs on page 21A below the fold next to the crypto quote. | |
| So, I mean, you... | |
| We are beholden to our very scummy political media system here, and there's really no good way for a candidate to handle that kind of crisis, other than just praying that there's a shred of decency in our corporate media, which there isn't, so you're kind of screwed. | |
| That and a bunch of other things like Trump's gonna attack you on Twitter. | |
| They're gonna do all these campaign ads. | |
| He gives a general outline of the fact that Trump's gonna basically run on the Ronald Reagan morning in America thing where he's just gonna tout the strong economy and that's his one claim to fame. | |
| And then dog whistle a bunch of racist crap as well. | |
| And you have to... his policy for you is just attack Trump 24-7. | |
| Just attack Trump for being a liar, a misanthrope, a grifter, a dirtbag with small hands who's not rich. | |
| Just attack Trump at all costs. | |
| Never actually Do anything other than attack Trump. | |
| Don't really actually articulate anything. | |
| Policy is meaningless. | |
| He makes this abundantly clear over and over and over again that policy is the death of a campaign. | |
| Stand for nothing. | |
| Promise nothing. | |
| Vague empty platitudes. | |
| We'll fix stuff. | |
| Maybe. | |
| Sort of. | |
| Kind of. | |
| And the one thing about this is that it really kind of opens up the candidate to the attack of standing for nothing. | |
| Of being an empty suit. | |
| Of not really having a plan or a policy. | |
| And again, this becomes a thing about our media. | |
| Where Trump can say and do anything he wants and our media will just be like the wacky President of the United States is doing it again! | |
| Golly shucks gee willikers ain't he a rascal? | |
| But if Elizabeth Warren is $0.10 off on her $20 trillion plan to pay for health care for America while getting us off fossil fuels and making our country totally renewable friendly, they will scream bloody murder that she's cooking the books and that her numbers don't make any sense and why is Elizabeth Warren lying to America about her plans that she cannot possibly pay for. | |
| This is the nature of the media. | |
| The media is the big thing here. | |
| And he really doesn't go after the whole thing about how you would deal with the media. | |
| He mostly just, again, he's just all attack dog all the time. | |
| The higher surrogates who go after the media and scream and spit everything back at Trump and attack Trump. | |
| That's it. | |
| That's all he wants. | |
| That's all he cares about. | |
| And local issues. | |
| Because again, he really wants to make it clear that you crazy coastal liberal elites don't know what it's like to win a campaign in Wisconsin or Michigan or Florida or Pennsylvania. | |
| That you do not speak for real America and that the things you care about will not play in those areas. | |
| And that they are actually losers in those areas. | |
| He gets very angry about the Virginia late-term abortion bill and how late-term abortion is a massive political loser for the Democrats and how Trump calling the Democrats baby killers will be a huge winner for him and that the Democrat had better just be a total squish on abortion and just be like, I don't like abortion. | |
| I respect a woman's right to choose. | |
| But I won't say more than that because I wouldn't want to actually defend women or their rights or anything. | |
| Don't hit me, Donald. | |
| And that's the thing that's really funny about it is because on the one hand, he's like, attack Donald Trump at all times, but also don't ever stand up for what Democrats actually believe in. | |
| Don't actually give voice to the things that are the backbones and the tenets of the Democratic Party, because if you do that, Trump will hit you even harder. | |
| So your only just called Donald Trump a liar at all times. So when | |
| Donald Trump calls you a baby killer, you call him a liar. When the media asks you | |
| what your stance on abortion is, just literally just say I'm pro-choice with no | |
| details, no information. And if they ask you about third trimester | |
| abortions, just run, run, run, run into a waiting car and flee. Flee the scene. Don't | |
| give them anything because if you do big bad Donald's gonna punch you. | |
| And again, this is like the whole stupid narrative of the Trump world is that Donald Trump throws punches and Rick Wilson's answer is throw punches back! | |
| Which is such a really cliche answer. | |
| It's a 300 page book. | |
| It's really not even that. | |
| The book is incredibly padded. | |
| So many pages are just literally like just one-off jokes. | |
| pages of the chapter and every chapter has an interlude which is a bunch of | |
| like angry tweets from Trump or like fact checks of debates and just these | |
| silly jokes and I stopped reading them halfway through the book because I just | |
| didn't care about them. I wanted to read what he was actually saying which again | |
| is what you're getting right now. The thing is is I understand where he's | |
| coming from from the incredibly bone cynical grind out just enough votes to | |
| win an election mentality and worldview that he comes from. | |
| And, I mean, it's a situation where you can see why it would be acceptable. | |
| Why it would be kind of easy and clean to do what he says. | |
| But the problem with that is that the whole point of having principles is that you have principles when it's hard. | |
| Having principles when it's easy isn't having principles at all. | |
| If you can't get up in front of a crowd and explain to that crowd what third trimester abortion actually is and why you're okay with states approving it, What good are you? | |
| What point is there? | |
| And I think being able to articulate that isn't a weakness. | |
| I don't think it's a bad thing. | |
| I don't think standing up for transgender people is a bad thing. | |
| I don't think explaining gun control regulations and laws to people is a good, is a bad thing. | |
| Because I, good lord knows why, because I'm a middle-aged white dude, but the abortion argument always makes me extremely angry because it's just such an obvious way to subjugate women and it's just so mean-spirited and cruel and these people who use abortion as a cudgel against women are just so disingenuous and scummy they make my blood boil. | |
| But third trimester abortions are tragedies. | |
| They're so sad. | |
| Every single story you read about a third trimester abortion is a happy mother and probably with the father of the child going to the doctors and getting an ultrasound at like five months or six months or whatever and The ultrasound attendant is just like, oh, oh God. | |
| And then they leave the room and then a doctor comes in and then they look at it and then they just pull the couple into a room and they're just like, yeah, your baby is going to be born without a brain or just some other hideous defect that will make death assured within either at birth or days after birth. | |
| And there's nothing that can be done about it. | |
| And it's just so grim and awful and dark. And these, again, these abortions are so exceedingly | |
| rare because no woman wants to have an abortion at that time. They've carried the baby that far | |
| along. They want to have a child. They want to be a mother or they want to be a mother to another | |
| child after having a, after having previous children. And And the idea that you can't get up on a stage and talk to that, to speak to that story, and to show that you are supportive of this legislation because that's what this legislation is truly about. | |
| And that Donald Trump and the Republicans, when they call these doctors and these women baby killers, Are just absolutely scum. | |
| Really, I just don't understand why you can't do that. | |
| Why can't you articulate your position in a way that is actually what the truth is? | |
| And guns are bad. | |
| We should get rid of them. | |
| But again, I understand where Wilson's coming from, but I don't agree with it in the sense that, yeah, winning an election is important. | |
| Stopping Donald Trump is very important. | |
| But when do you actually show people who you truly are? | |
| When do you actually stand for what you believe in? | |
| And what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you want? | |
| Because, I mean, literally just saying that I want to be president so Donald Trump isn't president isn't a very persuasive argument in a lot of ways. | |
| And I think that's one of the things that really Rick doesn't want to bring up because he doesn't want to show you that there's a counter to his narrative. | |
| The other thing that is really like kind of galling and jarring in the book There's a section where he talks, and he talks about this a lot, but there's this one section where he talks about how he and the Republican strategists stole Democratic voters from the Democratic Party by learning to speak the language of those people. | |
| And he talks about this happening in the South and the Midwest and stuff like that. | |
| And the moment he started bringing that kind of stuff up, all I could think in the back of my head is the Southern strategy. | |
| And how racist dog whistles were used to win these people over and to get them to vote for the Republicans. | |
| And the thing is, is that Rick goes into great detail about how terribly racist Trump is and how Trump's horrible racist policies are bad and terrible and awful. | |
| And it's just, Talk in a way that sounds very much like the Southern strategy and also have that person go, Donald Trump's really racist and that's bad and we need to stop him because he's a racist monster. | |
| And it's just, I'm just thinking to myself, I'm like, Rick, you're, you're talking like the Southern strategy guys. | |
| you're talking like the guys that explained how dog whistles work and how | |
| you let the white people know you were on their side because you were going to | |
| stick it to the other people, the bad people, the dark people, the immigrants, | |
| the blacks, the bads. And it's just really funny to have like Rick Wilson sort of | |
| be there and literally just tell you look I was using racism cynically to win | |
| But Trump actually believes in this stuff and that. | |
| Hoo boy, that's a bridge too far. | |
| We can't be having that. | |
| We gotta put a stop to that. | |
| This is the problem. | |
| If you've worked for the Republican Party after 1964 you have been working to empower racists using a racist agenda. | |
| That's just the way it is. | |
| There's no two ways about this. | |
| So I really find the book to be condescending and cynical and it really didn't show me deep truths. | |
| I understood what it was going for. | |
| I understood what it was about and in a lot of ways I agree with the overall thesis of what he's going for in the sense that, like in 2018 in the midterm elections, do I want Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez running in every district in America? | |
| God, no! | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| I want a candidate tailored to each district. | |
| I want people running for Senate tailored to those Senates, those states. | |
| I want people that are beholden to the local issues and know the lay of the land in those areas to be the people that are going to run for election in those places and I want them to be able to win. | |
| The problem with the presidency and the problem with the national election with one candidate is that the idea that you're just going to tell the liberals Wait your turn. | |
| Shut up. | |
| I gotta placate the moderates. | |
| I gotta placate the Obama-Trump voters. | |
| I gotta placate the mushy middle. | |
| I gotta placate these squishes. | |
| I gotta go out here and be inoffensive and dull because I've gotta trick them into voting for me. | |
| I've already got you suckers in my back pocket. | |
| You have no choice. | |
| You have to vote for me. | |
| Now, from my point of view, I am trapped. | |
| I do have to vote for that person. | |
| They have me over a barrel. | |
| I have no way, shape, or form. | |
| And it's a hostage situation. | |
| But at the same time, I totally see how that unbelievably cynical worldview will make people | |
| not vote for the candidate. | |
| They'll say, well, if you're not actually going to stand up for me, then what good are | |
| you? | |
| I always sit this one out. | |
| And this is, this begins the whole argument of earning your vote versus just voting for | |
| the lesser of two evils and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. | |
| And trust me, I am the lord of voting for the lesser of two evils. | |
| I'm probably going to convert this podcast into just a straight political podcast and | |
| have most of my QAnon stuff on my Twitter feed. | |
| And I am going to be the champion of whoever the Democratic nominee is because I get it totally and wholeheartedly and fully and I really want to beat Donald Trump. | |
| But I will hold that person's feet to the fire if they try to sell people out of our coalition, as it were. | |
| I'll hold their feet to the fire during the campaign and after they win, especially after | |
| they win, hold their feet to the fire after that. | |
| The proverbial hold your nose and vote thing, that's fine. | |
| I will do that. | |
| I will be very angry about it that I had to do it, but I'll do it because we win this | |
| time and then there's hell to pay. | |
| The Republicans have to pay. | |
| The corporate Democrats have to pay. | |
| Everyone has to pay. | |
| This is the beginning. | |
| This is not the end. | |
| Not by a long shot. | |
| That's something I'm going to really get into. | |
| Because now, as I talk about this, I've really kind of worked myself into a lather. | |
| Go lather! | |
| But the thing about the Rick Wilson cynicism is that it's very defeatist, it's very bleak, it's very grim. | |
| I don't think it's a message that resonates very well with people that want to engage in politics and change the world and make the world a better place. | |
| I think his worldview is very jaded and very dark. | |
| And I understand it, but I think there's other ways. | |
| I think what he says can be taken with a grain of salt, and I think what he says has actionable information and important intelligence in it, that you have to have an analytics-driven polling operation in your campaign, that you have to go where the votes are, that you have to work hard, you have to have good field operations. | |
| But again, all of this is just really fucking totally common knowledge kind of stuff. | |
| He really isn't splitting the atom here. I just dropped an f-bomb. That was weird. I'm tired and punchy but | |
| It's really it's really depressing read and It's just the whole idea that a | |
| Republican basically kicks down the door of the Democratic Party and | |
| If you read between the lines, it's not very difficult to hear what he's saying, which is, strap Bernie Sanders down to a chair and don't let him scream and yell too much. | |
| And nominate Joe Biden, then lock Joe Biden up in an ivory tower and just run on. | |
| Trustworthiness, accountability, stability, honor, integrity. | |
| Make it an election completely about the personality of Joe Biden versus the personality of Donald Trump. | |
| And just beg the American people to want Biden, to pick Biden over Trump. | |
| And that's his goal. | |
| That's his dream. | |
| It's just a total personality-driven election between two old white men. | |
| And just, just hope that Trump's pathological lying and scumminess loses him the election over Joe Biden's just folksy old man who promises to be boring and inoffensive. | |
| And boy, man, makes me want to run through a brick wall to vote for the Democrat. | |
| Oh boy, am I fired up now. | |
| Oh boy. | |
| Mild centrism for the win. | |
| Inoffensive. | |
| Inoffensive voter messaging. | |
| Boom. | |
| You got it. | |
| Oh yeah. | |
| America. | |
| So yeah, Rick Wilson's book is really not... He had one section where he broke down each state, and it was like a paragraph each, and it was like, man, I wish the book was... | |
| 15 thick chapters just doing these massive data dives into like, Pennsylvania, you gotta go after this district because Suburban Moments voted for Trump at this percentage. | |
| But in 2018, they flipped to this percentage for the Democratic congressional candidates and the governor. | |
| So if you can hold this line here, and if you win this section over here, you lock this state up. | |
| And this is what the issues that they care about are. | |
| I would have loved an incredibly great How do you actually motivate and galvanize the Hispanic population in Florida to go Democratic? | |
| How do you do this? | |
| How do you do that? | |
| that I could win. I would have loved Rick Wilson just going like hardcore nuts and bolts each battleground state. What | |
| were the metrics you got to hit? How do you actually motivate and | |
| galvanize the Hispanic population in Florida to go Democratic? How do you do this? How do you do that? How do | |
| you get these people in these areas? This, this, this, this. | |
| That That would have been a very interesting book. | |
| Instead, the book we got is Don't Be Trump and Shut Up. | |
| Hopefully that will be enough to get us started. | |
| I get it. | |
| I get that in desperate times you do desperate things and you want to just literally nominate a person wearing a mask and you promise to America, when we take this mask off on the night of November 3rd, you're going to be so happy with your president. | |
| Just trust us and don't vote for Donald Trump because Mystery Candidate is the best! | |
| But I just don't think that works. | |
| I just don't think that's a sell job that's effective. | |
| And one other thing he brings up is that young people do not vote. | |
| They do not vote, and they suck, and they're terrible, and don't ever go after them. | |
| And if you go after young voters, you're a moron. | |
| And so that's what I'm going to devote my life to for the next year, going after young voters. | |
| Because guess what, Rick Wilson? | |
| I'm a moron. | |
| And that's my new cause, my new goal, my new thing I'm going to try to do. | |
| And I'm going to, I mean, I'm never going to stop the QAnon thing. | |
| That's my addiction. | |
| They'll find me with the proverbial heroin needle in my arm when I check out. | |
| I'll literally have a half-written-out tweet attacking a major patriot, and that's how they'll find me. | |
| They'll be like, man, he died doing what he loved, yelling at people on Twitter. | |
| I don't know if that's happy or pathetic. | |
| Probably both. | |
| But yeah, I'm gonna try to rustle some cages. | |
| I'm talking to some people, working on some things. | |
| So yeah, that's me. | |
| Stemwind, you're over. | |
| I'm angry that Cyberpunk 2077 is being delayed for five more months. | |
| Really wanted to play that in April. | |
| Probably not going to get to play it again until after the election because September is going to be kind of busy. | |
| Oh well. | |
| Catch you all later. | |
| If you listen to this for a half hour, God bless you. | |
| You have a lot of stamina and I'm a crazy person. |