White "Dudes" and Women Rally for Harris; "Weird" J.D. Vance Attacks; Interviews with Political Analyst Bill Scher & Radio Host John Ziegler
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
White Dudes for Harris (1:50)
Interview with John Ziegler (34:55)
Interview with Bill Scher (59:35)
Outro (1:30:57)
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. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet.
It is Tuesday, July 30th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Glenn is once again away on vacation, so sorry to break it to you, but you're stuck with me again.
I'm Michael Tracy.
Inspired by the Kamala Harris campaign, our show tonight will be limited exclusively to white dudes.
So we'll discuss this sudden embrace, peculiar embrace, by the Democratic Party of white identity politics.
Then journalist and media critic, and fellow white dude, John Ziegler and I will confront our shared whiteness in relation to the new Kamala juggernaut.
And finally, Bill Sher, editor at the Washington Monthly, and yet another white dude, will analyze with me how he stopped worrying and learned to love our new Kamala Overlord.
Before that, a few programming notes.
System Update is available in podcast form on Spotify and every other podcast platform.
If you would like to support System Update, you can sign up to Glenn Greenwald's Locals Community at greenwald.locals.com.
Today being Tuesday, we will have our after show on Locals.
We had one yesterday, we're going for another one today.
We're giving you more than your money's worth, I suppose.
But for now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
So the Democratic Party has taken an interesting turn.
First, they seem to have collectively decided that Donald Trump is no longer a fascist, he's just weird.
So for months and years and what seems like decades, but it's been slightly shorter than that, thankfully, the Democrats have been histrionically shrieking
That Donald Trump is this existential threat to democracy, that he's undermining our democratic order irreparably and irreversibly, that he wants to overturn everything that is great and sacred about American and liberal internationalist values, and we need to all come together as a popular front to thwart his next rise to power.
Democrats seem to have taken an entirely different course these past couple of days, and they've decided that, you know, turns out most people don't actually believe that Trump is this existential threat to democracy.
You can have plenty of criticisms of Trump.
We've shared some on the show.
You can do critical reporting on Trump, as I've done for now eight, nine years, or however the hell long it's been, without endlessly lurching into this just tedious refrain that Trump is going to destroy our Democratic order, which never made a whole lot of sense.
The Democrats appear to have decided that, you know, at the 11th hour, they're just going to start calling Trump weird and not explain how they made that logical transition.
And they're bolstered in this apparently by J.D.
Vance having said some quote-unquote weird stuff Over the past couple years.
So we'll talk with our guests about that weird shift on Democrats' part.
What I want to get to now is an even more shocking turn of events in terms of how the Democrats are handling their current electoral argument.
They've decided to embrace white identity politics.
Fascinating.
Take a look at this beautiful trucker hat.
This was developed, created by a group of Democratic operatives and strategists, and they convened last night a Zoom call of lots of white dudes, so they're having racially exclusivist Gatherings, I suppose, where they're emphasizing the racial identity and gender identity of the participants.
And I should note, in fairness, they did clarify at the outset of this Zoom call, everybody was technically welcome, but it was clearly branded as for white dudes.
It was for white dudes to demonstrate their solidarity.
Their racial solidarity With Kamala Harris.
So they were showing how important it was to be allies of the newly presumptive Democratic presidential nominee with their racial identity.
And you can purchase that hat.
Take a look at it again.
Gaze at it with wonder and joy.
That is available to you for the low price of $35, I'm told, plus $7.05 shipping.
So, approximately $42, that could be yours and you'll have an in-kind contribution to the Harris campaign.
And if you're a white dude like myself, then you'll, I guess, be...
Repurposing your whiteness toward a positive, progressive end, at least in terms of how the organizers put it.
So let's hear a little bit from the intro from this magnificent Zoom call that I actually sat and watched.
So the things I do for you people, Glenn, whenever the heck he gets back, really should elevate my compensation drastically.
Because what I did this afternoon was I sat through like three and a half hours of a white dudes for Kamala Zoom call and collated all the funniest bits.
So you don't have to watch it all yourself.
So for that alone, man, I should be getting his entire salary, frankly.
So let's let's have a look at what this white dude had to say vis-a-vis the intro of this Zoom call.
And I'll start by really addressing the elephant in the room.
which is a lot of people feel and felt uncomfortable And I think that's understandably so.
You know, throughout American history, when white men have organized, it was often with pointy hats on.
And so I think that discomfort, I think the skepticism is understandable.
The reason that we are doing this is because we've just, you know, the left that has been seating white men to the MAGA right for way, way too long, you know,
So that's the organizer of this white dudes for Harris call, preempting whatever discomfort some might understandably have, he acknowledges, at the impetus for this call being apparently shared racial and gender identity, which, at least in terms of whites, the Democrats used to be pretty aggressively skeptical of, and you might even say hostile to, in recent years.
But they're Diving into it headfirst apparently now because it can be marshaled toward the self-absolving and heavily virtuous end of electing our first Half Asian, and you have to go through every historic first that Kamala would represent.
You can't just say woman, it's half Asian and half black.
And also woman.
And also first person from Berkeley, California.
And also first San Francisco district attorney.
And also the first vice president to be theoretically elected president who was picked basically as an emotional blackmail tactic by an incumbent or by a presidential nominee in 2020, Joe Biden, who had was was basically pressured into selecting a black woman after who had was was basically pressured into selecting a black woman after the George Floyd uproar emerged And there was some political necessity for him to demonstrate his own solidarity in that election cycle.
I guess racially or something and pick a black woman.
And Kamala ended up rising to the pack to the top of the pack after her surrogates and supporters kind of basically kneecapped her other rivals for the VP slot.
But that's neither here nor there.
Let's look at what the white dude in chief himself, Jeff Bridges, had to say.
This is funny.
Kamala is just so certainly our girl, you know.
I can see her being president.
I'm so excited.
A woman president, man!
How exciting!
You know, and her championing of women's rights.
Before that!
Okay, so Jeff Bridges, I guess, is just really excited about a woman president.
So would he have been excited about Nikki Haley, perhaps?
How about, I don't know, Sarah Palin?
Marjorie Taylor Greene?
Lauren Boebert, who we interviewed at the Republican convention recently?
I mean, so much of what was discussed on this call as this rallying cry around Kamala was just pure recitation of her identity traits.
Which was thematically in keeping with the organizational reason for this call, purportedly, which is that these are all white dudes and they have to stand together as white dudes and show that they will very dutifully line up behind Kamala despite having divergent racial characteristics.
And that's supposed to be very heartwarming for us all in this pluralistic democracy that we're so fortunate to live in.
Let's go to Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina.
Yet another white dude.
As I mentioned, this is a whites-only space tonight.
This is a safe space for white dudes.
If you're not a white dude watching, you might not even want to turn off the broadcast because maybe you'll feel uncomfortable and frankly you're not even welcome as far as I'm concerned because I'm going with the vibes that have been sent forth by The Democratic Party.
Don't turn off the broadcast.
That would be bad for Rumble and our advertisers.
I'm just kidding.
But you get my point, right?
This is all about...
Apparently racial solidarity.
So we're trying to model that.
We're emulating what the Democrats are doing.
And it's in service of racial justice.
So here is Governor Roy Cooper, Democrat of North Carolina.
We're told just took himself out of the running for a potential VP pick for Kamala as of yesterday.
But he nevertheless made time to appear on this white dude's for Kamala Zoom call.
So let's hear what he had to say.
I'm going to get right to it, guys.
Real men respect women, their decisions, their careers, and it's pretty clear that Donald Trump and J.D.
Vance don't.
So I guess all real men out there, and I consider myself a very real man, can't you just see me radiating with masculinity?
I feel like I'm going to overdose on masculinity.
My muscles are just going to burst out of the seams of my shirt here.
It's going to be really actually probably seductive for many of you watching.
But what Roy Cooper's point is, I gather, is that real men No, when it's time for them to defer to women.
And the number one woman to be deferred to now is Kamala Harris.
Notice they're marshalling this woman argument, which seemed like it was played out with Hillary Clinton, but I guess, you know, never say never with the Democrats.
It's back, baby.
They're saying that, you know, real men would understand that what they ought to do, what they have a moral obligation to do, is defer to the the divine rights or the
Obviousness of Kamala Harris ascending to the presidency again as we've gone over many times in this show without having won a single vote, acquired a singular delegate through a single popular vote outcome in a single state or territory in two presidential primary cycles, but that's all being swept to the side and according to Roy Cooper, real men Understand that it's our duty to defer to Kamala.
Next, we have Mitch Landrieu.
He's the former mayor of New Orleans.
He's also a Biden administration or Biden campaign, rather, operative.
And here's his take.
We need to stand in this moment.
Kamala is carrying on her shoulders 248 years of pain, of agony, of hope, of frustration.
And no matter how high she jumps, no matter how many degrees she has, no matter how good her grades are, she's never good enough because they're always moving the line.
And I think in that idea, she holds the heart of so many people who have been left out.
So there's Mitch Landrieu.
Yes, a white dude.
As indicated by his participation in this call, taking it upon himself to assert that Kamala Harris, as a personage, as a figure that hasn't been elected to any office in terms of this current election cycle, yes, she's the elected vice president, but nothing
Beyond that, in terms of having acquired delegates or votes in the nomination cycle, but even if she had, it's very bizarre for Landrieu to ascribe to Kamala this world historic importance as a racial forgiveness vessel, or a racial absolution vessel, where Landrieu is suggesting that she carries centuries of
Racial injustice on her shoulders?
Really?
According to who?
I mean, did she carry that on her shoulders when she was locking up plenty of young black men in California as District Attorney and then as Attorney General?
I'm not sure.
I'm not even sure what entitles Mitch Landrieu to posit all these Extravagant racial narratives onto the personage of Kamala Harris.
It's all very strange.
And you could easily imagine this being taken much differently if similar narratives were being concocted by Republicans.
Where they're trying to appropriate like this racial suffering of, I guess, blacks and say that they stand for this, you know, historic remedy to the Centuries-long plight of black Americans, and you can break that glass ceiling, I guess, by voting for their preferred nominee.
So here's an even funnier one.
I hope you all enjoy this.
I hope you go to bed tonight and you just replay this over and over again in your head, because I know I will be doing so.
So let's hear.
This is from Josh Gad.
I have to confess, wasn't I'm exactly familiar with him prior to subjecting myself to this White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call, but now I'm a huge fan of his work, so I'll be studying his filmography very closely.
I have his IMDB page loaded up and ready to go.
Let's hear from Josh.
I'm a white dude.
That much you can probably tell by now.
But I also happen to be a father of two girls.
I have a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old.
And I'm not sure if you guys can recall that feeling you had on the night of Tuesday, November 8, 2016.
I stood over my kid's bed and I wept.
I wept because I felt like I let them Oh, that was my screw-up.
I apologize for that.
I should not have pressed the screen there.
Hey, I'm still learning my wares.
Let's go.
Yeah.
I stood over my kid's bed and I wept.
I wept because I felt like I let them down.
I wept because...
They had the chance and we had the chance to have a female president for the first time in our lives and in the history of this nation.
Isn't that wonderful?
I need my, where are my tissues?
Where are my Kleenexes and my other supplies to dab my eyes just because I'm so moved by his performance there.
It really is something.
I mean, what is there really to add?
I like when he says, as you can see I'm a white dude, that much should be clear.
I think I'm going to introduce myself in every social situation from now on by saying the same thing.
So I'm just going to burst into a room and say, as should be clear, I'm a white dude, but, and then I'll make my point.
I'll offer whatever greetings I was planning on offering, but I want to preface everything by announcing that I am in fact a white dude.
Again, inspired by the Democratic Party's recent turn toward white identity politics.
And what makes this so just unbelievably ironic?
Well, in 2020, you might recall, during the summer of George Floyd, you had a bevy of best-selling books and Atlantic Magazine articles and viral tweet threads where white people were being instructed to, for the first time, develop a sense of racial identity that maybe they had been oblivious to or had neglected in the United States, where they have a stature of privilege.
This was the theory.
But they needed to cultivate a sense of white racial identity in order to recognize the racial grievances of their fellow black Americans or POC Americans and to understand that they had to listen to them and value them and allow them to take the lead in all kinds of endeavors and step back
White people were being instructed to know their role and shut their mouth to quote Dwayne the Rock Johnson, one of my idols.
And what was clear at the time was that what a lot of these white liberals were doing in a fit of racial hysteria was echoing what much of the white reactionary right, like truly extreme online racialist right, like truly extreme online racialist right, had been obsessed with for a very long time and were desperate to get some kind of mainstream acceptability for, which is to also cultivate white racial identity.
But for their preferred ends, which is some kind of white nationalism, perhaps, overblown term, but to foster a political movement around this sense of collective white identity to preserve white interests or even white racial purity.
So the irony was that the white liberals who thought that they were cultivating this white identity politics
To elevate blacks or something or to forge this new racial utopia or progressive utopia, they were actually giving a huge favor to the genuine reactionary racialist right-wing types who wanted to foster this sense of identity politics for entirely different reasons.
And that's continuing now because What are the white dudes for Commonwealth doing?
Well, yeah, I mean they are further entrenching this idea that white dudes have these distinct interests or they're a distinct racial grouping.
They're just like maybe any other racial group or ethnic group that organizes amongst themselves.
And I'm not even endorsing or opposing the logic of that.
I'm just noting, for the record, That the function, it seems to me, of this new embrace by the Democratic Party and the Harris campaign of white identity politics in service of its own ends just kind of underscores the creation of this new category of politico-racial organizing.
And, you know, that can have some potentially Worrisome downstream effects, or it's at least something not to just be mindlessly cheered, I wouldn't think.
Especially if you at least at one point pretended to be into like a colorblind society like, I don't know, Barack Obama kind of was.
He was into that rhetoric in like the ancient days of 2008 or 2010, which I guess is an entirely different epoch in our collective history here.
Let's go to Scott Galloway, who I'm told is some kind of internet celebrity.
I don't really understand the appeal, I have to say.
Every time I see him...
On some program he just looks like entirely dour and he's like lecturing in this really morose way and I don't know apparently he inspires a lot of people to listen to his like marketing podcasts or something but hey different strokes for different folks right and I'm a certainly I'm certainly a different folk myself so I'm not one to judge.
He joined, he graced the White Dudes for Kamala Zoom call with his presence as an internet celebrity.
That's how he was introduced, actually.
And here's what he said.
This is amazing.
Thanks very much, Rosh.
My name is Scott Galloway.
I teach at NYU.
I consider myself a man, and I think my job is to provide and protect, and the way that manifests in this age is to ensure that Vice President Harris is in the White House.
So Professor Scott says how he manifests his masculinity at the moment is to elect Kamala Harris.
Again, so selfless.
You could tell why he's such a popular Internet celebrity.
That he's willing to Put it out there for anyone to see that he is of the belief that what his commitment to true, pure, and righteous masculinity entails in this moment, in this trying moment, when the soul of America is once again at stake in the most important election of our lifetimes, which is the case for every election, we're told, right?
I mean, 2016, 2020, and even go back.
I mean, I would love to resurrect the ghost of Bob Dole, Or at least go through the archives from the 1996 election because I'm sure there are some schmucks who said that the election of 1996 between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton was the most important of all time.
They say it every election cycle and it's always a bit of a ruse because it's all about just inflaming partisan sentiment to get people rushing out to the polls marching
Dutifully to the polls to pull the lever or check the box or mail the postcard or what have you to keep in power the two major parties and then they can just usher in their respective professional classes who get empowered as a result of
The voter going and voting in the Republican and Democratic Party and then look forward to next election cycle always also being the most important of all time.
So in light of that I'm very thankful for Scott Galloway instructing us or lecturing us because he's such a brilliant NYU professor and he really has the academic expertise to inform us that what it means to be a man in this moment is to ensure that Kamala Harris And you know who's tough?
It's Kamala Harris.
And so, she's tough.
Next, let's go to Erica Swalwell.
Always a fun guy to hear from.
And you know who's tough?
It's Kamala Harris.
And so she's tough, she's real, she's ready, she's smart.
And something that we're all starting to really see that I really like is that she's fun.
And she's a person who can be serious without taking herself too seriously.
But what I was hoping to impart on everyone tonight in my experience of like telling the story of why Kamala and not the past president, I couldn't agree more Eric, Congressman.
And so I wanted to just give you kind of three things that we all can do.
And something that I found helpful in my messaging are these three things.
And if there's anything that us white dudes like to do, it's to have a good hot take.
I couldn't agree more, Eric, Congressman.
If there's anything that us white dudes love to do more than rattling off hot takes, I don't know what it is.
I know I associate my whiteness and my white dude-ness intrinsically with the art of the hot take.
Like the art of the deal, written by another infamous, famous, depending on your point of view, white dude, Donald J. Trump.
Us white dudes and our hot takes, you know, it's just something we're born with.
And I'm, once again, very inspired by Eric Swalwell.
Marshalling his inborn propensity to muster hot takes in service of what is now all our righteous and collective duty, which is to elect Kamala Harris, apparently.
And one more, this one also tickles me.
This is another actor who I have to familiarize myself with because I'm just so moved by his thespian skill.
Rory O'Malley.
Let's hear from this gentleman.
Thanks for having me.
What's up, my white dudes?
Ross, it was my honor to do anything for this call.
I want to thank you.
What's up, my white dudes?
That's right, baby!
Raise the roof!
What's up, my white dudes?
Yes!
Thank you, Rory.
Sorry, Rory.
Sorry to interrupt.
Please continue.
Thank you and everyone who's been a part of it, and all of you who are on the call and who have donated that crazy amount of money.
I'm in shock that this has happened.
I'm here because I'm a dude, I'm clearly very white, I'm representing the pasty white contingency of the delegation, and I'm voting for Vice President Harris because she is the candidate that stands for justice, for freedom, and the future.
She's the embodiment of the backbone of the progressive movement.
She's a woman, more specifically, she's a black woman.
And black women have been showing up to elect progressive white dudes for generations.
And it's time we show up.
Okay, so there's this Rory fellow of White Dudes for Harris, one of the organizers, saying it's time we, white progressives, show up for black women.
You notice, have you heard like one statement of policy, of a policy stance associated with Kamala Harris over the course of any of these declarations?
I heard very little in sitting through that three and a half hour It's all about how white progressives, I have to say many of them seem like gay men, which is fine.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Who feel like they have like some extra identity based obligation.
To defer to black women and show how supportive they are of black women and how they're going to leave everything out on the field for black women because black women, as Rory said, are the backbone of the Democratic Party and it's time for white dudes to show their appreciation
Electorally and get to work and sacrifice for others for once, just like black women have always sacrificed for white dudes.
So it seems like it's more like a racial karma ritual for a lot of these people than it is about governance or policy or Anything that would really substantively relate to Kamala Harris's conduct of the offices of the presidency?
The most powerful position in world history?
I mean, forget foreign policy.
Forget national security.
They don't give a crap about that, as far as I can tell.
It's all about, like, This racial trade-off, mystical kind of conception of how American politics works, that's what they're most fixated on by far.
And as a white dude, I know I'm here for it.
And just to end this tantalizing monologue, let's hear from our gender compatriots.
I'm going to make one exception.
I said this was a White dude only session tonight, inspired by the Democratic Party, but I couldn't resist.
White women also held their own Zoom, and it was also a joyous occasion.
And I want to share this with you because I feel like this will really ring in your heart for some time.
So let's hear this.
Ariel Fodar, affectionately known as Mrs. Frazzle to her combined audience of over 1.5 million followers, is here to help gentle parent us through this election.
Thank you.
Hi, everybody.
I am so honored to speak today.
I am like shaking to just be among such incredible company.
We are here because, as if you were here earlier, you've heard BIPOC women have tapped us in as white women to step up, listen, and get involved this election season.
This is a really important time, and we all need to use our voices and influence for the greater good.
No matter who you are, you are all influencers in some way.
So tonight, I'm going to share some do's and don'ts for getting involved in politics online and navigating the toxicity that comes with it.
Spoiler alert, as much as the toxicity.
Okay, I'm pausing it because I honestly, I think I would blow my brains out if I listened to that full clip.
So I apologize to our production team, but I really cannot bear to listen to that full thing, but you get the idea.
She says I'm shaking because she's so honored by being in the presence of all these illustrious people who were on the call.
I'm shaking too, listening to that, but for much different reasons.
I do appreciate, though, that she says we're all influencers.
She's a TikTok influencer.
She is a teacher, I guess, and she makes cute little videos about her classroom experiences.
But now she's a political mogul, I guess, or something.
And she wants to give us all tips on how we can best Share the message of Kamala in these tumultuous and turbulent political times.
And I know when I'm listening to that, I really do feel like I'm in a third grade classroom.
And I guess that's what a lot of people in the Democratic Party like now.
They want to feel like they're being educated in a third grade context because that's about the level of sophistication with which they're approaching this stuff.
Geez, white identity politics.
I mean, if this is up your alley, then, I don't know, you guys are on a different wavelength than me.
I find it really repulsive.
But now let's move on.
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All right, so I want to welcome John Ziegler.
He's a longtime media critic, I think it's fair to say.
Also, I would call him a journalist.
I'm not sure if you would appreciate that designation or not.
Sometimes journalist is not the most flattering title.
I'm even inclined to reject it myself, I find.
And also a longtime radio host.
He's a podcaster and so forth.
So let's go to John Ziegler.
John, how are you?
I'm doing well.
Thanks for having me.
So, John, I recall hearing of you first back in the day when you were a staunch defender for a while of Sarah Palin.
Obviously the vice presidential nominee in 2008 with John McCain.
So in light of that, I do want to get your take on something to do with J.D.
Vance, obviously the recently named vice presidential nominee for Donald Trump.
And let's go to this clip.
This is J.B.
Pritzker.
He's the governor of Illinois.
He was on ABC's This Week on this past Sunday.
I want to get your response to it.
I mean, on the other side, they're just weird.
The differences between these two candidates.
I mean, on the other side, they're just weird.
I mean, they really are.
The things that they stand for.
Donald Trump, of course, is afraid of windmills and, you know, he talks about all kinds of crazy stuff.
You know, his running mate, as you probably have heard, is getting known for his obsession with couches.
So, John, as best I can tell, when J.B.
Pritzker is invoking J.D.
his views on a woman's right to choose.
And then just broadly, the attack on people. - So John, as best I can tell, when J.B. Pritzker is invoking J.D. Vance having some weird fixation with couches, what he's referring to is a totally fabricated internet meme that people just what he's referring to is a totally fabricated internet meme that people just outright made up that then got turned into a news Vance, like, having sex with a couch.
I'm sorry I'm even having to say it here, but that was the genesis of what Pritzker was just alluding to, and you notice Martha Raddatz, who I think was the anchor of ABC News' This Week, on the Sunday show this past weekend, She doesn't catch it.
She just lets J.B.
Pritzker make this allusion to some literally made-up claim about J.D.
Vance to underscore this newfound Democratic talking point that J.D.
Vance is weird.
And now, I'm sure he is weird in certain respects.
In fact, I'm pretty certain that he is weird in certain respects.
But, you know, so am I. So are most Democrats.
John, I'm sorry to say, you might be weird in certain respects as well.
A lot of us are weird.
But to just let fly that just fabricated claim about Vance and having some sexual liaison with a couch, I don't know, this seems like it could raise your hackles a bit, given your experience in 08 with Palin.
Or am I drawing too loose of a connection there?
I think that's a pretty fair connection for people who probably don't remember.
I did a documentary film about the 2008 election called Media Malpractice, how Obama was elected and Pantlin was targeted and it featured the only interview that Sarah Pantlin ever did, extensive interview that she ever did about the media coverage of that election.
I did it from her home in Alaska right after the election.
It made a ton of news and I ended up on The View and The Today Show and a bunch of other The cable news programs as well, to talk about it.
Now, I no longer am a supporter of Sarah Palin and what she became, but the Sarah Palin that existed in 2008 was not the Sarah Palin that was portrayed by the news media, and they used a lot of the same tricks that they're using against JD Vance, and you just raised a pretty good one.
In fact, that reminds me a lot of what they did with Sarah Palin, where things that were said on Saturday Night Live ended up being used as news clips as if the Sarah Palin on Tina Fey's version on Saturday Night Live was the actual Sarah Palin.
And they were pretending as if they were actual quotes when, in fact, many times they were not actual quotes, that they were bastardizations or not even close to things that Sarah Palin had said.
If memory serves, that was infamously Tina Fey portraying Sarah Palin saying, I can see Russia from my house.
And I can recall people just in my own social milieu assuming that Sarah Palin had said that quote verbatim because they had heard it repeated ad nauseum on Saturday Night Live.
Michael, your memory is fantastic.
I wasn't even going to reference it because I wasn't sure you would remember it, but that's a great example.
I can see Russia from my house is what Tina Fey said.
We actually did a scientific poll after the election, scientific poll, asking voters who made that statement.
And the vast majority of voters thought that that was an actual statement made by Sarah Palin.
She did not say that.
She actually very accurately referred to the fact that you can see Parts of Russia from parts of Alaska.
Just to give a geographical context for how close Alaska is to Russia, because she was talking about her experience as governor of Alaska.
That was both relevant and accurate.
Most people don't know that, but you can, in fact, see Russia from parts of Alaska.
Yeah, at the very tip of the Aleutian Islands, you know, it's like a stone's throw away from the closest island in Russian territory, and there's a huge maritime border between Alaska and Russia.
I mean, we're getting a little bit far afield here.
But how do you relate this to, like, what's emerging as this attack line on J.D.
Vance, so that he's weird?
Again, I don't even necessarily discount that he is weird in certain respects, but to use an outright fabrication I mean, that seems to me to be crossing a line, just in terms of basic fairness, especially in a journalistic capacity, if you're allowing somebody to just rattle that off on ABC.
Well, they would certainly never do it with a Democratic vice presidential candidate.
And they know that they have fresh meat in J.D.
Vance, and they know that the vast majority of Americans don't know who J.D.
Vance is.
Therefore, they can define J.D.
Vance for the Republican Party in a negative fashion.
Now, they did it, I think, in a more dramatic fashion with Sarah Palin, because Sarah Palin was much more of a threat.
We have to remember that that was a huge part of the context there, because Sarah Palin was so new, exciting, interesting, different from Alaska.
She was good-looking.
She gave that amazing convention speech.
And that was the first time that John McCain took the lead over Barack Obama.
People don't remember that.
But after that convention, that was the only time McCain ever led.
And that was when the left-wing media said, OK, this woman is a threat.
We need to take her out.
That's almost exactly, word for word, what they said and did.
And so to a lesser degree, I think they see the same situation with Vance.
They clearly don't want Trump to be elected again.
And they're using him any way they possibly can.
And this is the simplest way they can do it.
And if they have to lie to do it, they don't really seem to care.
Because as my podcast states, my podcast is called The Death of Journalism, Journalism is dead, and it's more dead in 2024 than it even was in 2008.
In 2008, I'm seeing a lot of parallels between the way Kamala Harris is being treated in 2024 and the way Barack Obama was treated in 2008.
In 2008, I think they still pretended or liked to pretend that they were doing journalism.
Now they don't even pretend.
They're not even faking it now, and it's really remarkable to see.
Well, for my part, I'm trying to keep journalism alive in my own small way, but maybe I'm not succeeding, and it's only a drop in the bucket.
John, as a fellow white dude, I wanted to ask you if you are pleased that you're now being explicitly pandered to by the Democratic Party.
Isn't that fascinating?
Just a few short years ago, it would have been seen as inherently fascistic or dangerously white nationalistic for anybody to even reference white dudes as a cohesive political unit that one of the parties would be courting.
But the Democratic Party's doing it!
They held this big white dudes for Harris Zoom call, raised millions of dollars, supposedly, and they have, you know, all these Hollywood people, Jeff Bridges, uh...
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, we just played a couple of other people, Eric Swalwell, Adam Schiff, your fellow Californians, all declaring their fidelity to Kamala Harris because they're accepting their correct racial role as subservient to the newly anointed Queen of the Democratic Party, who is Kamala, despite not having won a single delegate or a single vote, Through an open public process in either 2020 or 2024.
So are you are you honored at this newfound attention that you and I are now receiving?
Even though I've never voted for Donald Trump, I don't think I'm the target demographic.
I don't think that I'll be voting for Kamala Harris either, and I don't think that I'm really who they think of when they think of white dudes.
I get your Larger, more important point, which is that this is all so ridiculous and and so contradictory and hypocritical based upon the things that we've been told in the past.
I also think it's just an indication of just how far backwards we have gone since the Barack Obama presidency, since we talked a lot about 2008.
And I think there's a lot of parallels now to what's happening in 2024.
I now look at the Barack Obama presidency as a bait and a lot of white dudes were were sold a bill of goods and white women especially in 2008 which was hey let's elect the black guy the quote-unquote black guy and we will fix Our racial problems forever will be able to get beyond our racial divide, we'll be able to heal our past sins, and we'll all be able to move on.
And by the way, I can understand why that was an enticing pitch to a lot of people.
I know a lot of people here in Southern California to whom that actually worked, even some pretty conservative people.
I mean, for instance, Adam Carolla, I think, ended up working with him in 2008.
It was quickly shown to be a lie.
And in fact, I think it was a damn lie because we are in far worse shape racially in 2024 than we even were before we elected Barack Obama, because I think what happened, and this is maybe a totally different topic, but I think that after eight years of Barack Obama didn't solve anything and didn't help black people in any substantive way, liberals just freaked out.
And decided, okay, the only explanation for this is that we live in a systematically racist society.
It can't be any other reason than that.
And so therefore we have to go back to, instead of nothing being about race, we have to make everything about race.
And that's how we're going to get, potentially, President Kamala Harris.
And another irony there, right, is that Barack Obama's rhetorical style was much different, at least on the surface, which accounts for something in terms of presidential oratory or presidential style, than the mode of racialist rhetoric that became predominant, particularly after 2020.
Although arguably it had precursors, but it really went overdrive after 2020 where you even had, and I mentioned this in the introduction, a concerted effort to try to cultivate white racial identity by white liberals Because their argument was that whites needed to be more conscious of their whiteness in order to better understand how they could empower blacks or defer to blacks or understand the grievances of blacks.
That really wasn't the rhetorical style of Obama in the main, anyway.
Obama would talk about transcending racial division.
You had a white mother.
He was raised by white grandparents.
He would talk about how, you know, everybody can transcend their kind of inborn racial traits.
Now, maybe what happened in terms of the political and cultural trend in the Obama era was different and did latch on to a more extreme racialist lens reviewing everything.
But the irony there is that Obama's rhetorical style really embraced more of a colorblind mentality, right?
And yet it just kind of diverged from where the culture went.
That's how he sold himself.
That's how he became the president.
And then as president, there were moments when he actually acted out on that.
But by and large, I think he was a disappointment when it came to, you know, actually bringing racial healing or racial unity.
It may not have been all his fault, but I think we're omitting an important part of this equation.
And I'm just as fault as you are for that.
And maybe it's because it's so obvious.
And that is that Obama was replaced by Donald Trump.
And that inflamed liberals, especially white liberals, in a very dramatic fashion, because it was seen, rightly or wrongly, a backlash among white people going against Barack Obama.
That white people said, OK, all right, we've had enough.
We're going with the list as a candidate, and we are going to elect a really The White House is not qualified in any real way, but he's the guy that was the the king of birtherism, which I do believe had a woman to it and was that crap crazy with regard to Barack Obama's birth.
And so you have, you know, Donald Trump for Barack Obama.
And I think that that helps send this end.
And that in the middle of the COVID pandemic, you have the George Floyd situation, which was manipulated by the media.
It's all set.
So, John, the Democrats now are scrambling to find their vice presidential nominee, again, through a totally closed process that's pursuant to Kamala Harris just being presumptively assumed and entitled to be the Democratic nominee.
So I want to show you somebody who's vaulted into front-runner status, we're told, or so it seems, and get your analysis of what his appeal might be.
Another white dude.
So you and I are in good company nowadays.
There's lots of white dudes who are in the spotlight, so I really feel cheery about it.
This is Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota.
So let's take a look at this.
So you've gotten some attention this week for calling Trump and Vance and Republicans in general weird.
And I think that you're the one that set this tone.
And there's this shift.
The Harris campaign seems to be following your lead, echoing this language.
Why do you think weird is a more effective attack line against Trump than what Democrats have been done previously, which is argue that he's an existential threat to democracy?
Yeah, and it's an observation on this, and I, you know, being a school teacher, I see a lot of things, but my point on this was is people kept talking about, look, Donald Trump is going to put women's lives at risk.
That's 100% true.
Donald Trump is potentially going to end constitutional liberties that we have, end voting.
I do believe all those things are a real possibility, but it gives him way too much power.
Listen to the guy.
He's talking about Hannibal Lecter and shocking sharks and just whatever crazy thing pops into his mind.
And I thought we just gave him way too much credit.
And I think one of the things is when you just ratchet down some of the scariness or whatever and just name it what it is.
I got to tell you, Jake, my observation on this is have you ever seen the guy laugh That seems very weird to me that an adult can go through six and a half years of being in the public eye.
If he has laughed, it's at someone, not with someone.
That is weird behavior.
And I don't think you call it anything else.
It is simply what we're observing.
So what strikes me about this, John, is that the Democrats or lots of Democratic operatives and celebrities and influencers and people are trumpeting Waltz because he has like an everyman way about him.
They view him as a moderately successful governor in the Midwest, and they see him as an attractive contrast potentially to J.D.
Vance, and they're also enthralled by Wall's Introducing this line where, you know, forget what the Democrats have been hysterically shrieking about Donald Trump for eight or nine years or however long it's been now.
We're no longer going to call him a fascist or an existential threat to democracy or name your other like histrionic, you know, proclamation about Donald Trump.
Now we're just going to call him weird and we're going to use JD Vance to underscore how weird the two of them are.
And that's a delicious irony for me, because it's just like a way for, I guess, Democrats to throw down the memory hole, all these overblown depictions of Trump, and maybe go with something that's a bit more appealing, potentially, at least as they see it, which is that they're just weird guys.
I don't know, what do you make of this?
I think you make a good point.
It's kind of like going after Hitler for his mustache, I guess.
I mean, right?
If you thought he was Hitler, then why is the weirdness such an important part of this equation suddenly?
I'm first to acknowledge, I think Trump is weird, but I think most people understand he's weird.
First of all, all billionaires are inherently weird.
They are not living in the same world we live in.
Donald Trump has not lived in the real world Since he was a very young person, so it's not surprising that he is quote-unquote weird.
I don't know that JD is necessarily that weird.
I mean, he comes from Appalachia, which is different than where most people in this country live, but some people might say that makes him normal.
But I do think the shift in messaging is notable and maybe an indication that they are acknowledging that the Hitler attacks don't work.
But I'm not sure the weirdness thing is going to work either.
However, as you may have already picked up on, I am I'm not particularly optimistic that they're going to fail in what they're trying to do here, because I think is doing to Kamala Harris what they did for Barack Obama in 2008.
And I don't think Trump is well equipped at all to combat it.
I don't think the Republican Party is well equipped to combat it, and I think Trump is in big trouble in this election.
I think that, you know, while it's dangerous to overreact to just a few polls, the post-withdrawal polling is stunning, and I think an indication that race prior to Biden leaving was completely misinterpreted, and that I think that Biden's unpopularity had much, much, much more to do with people already, prior to the debate,
Realizing he's way too old to do this job for another four and a half years than it had anything to do with people being upset with his policies, upset with the economy, with immigration, with inflation.
A lot of conservatives wanted to believe this was about policy.
I don't think it was.
And now that the age issue is gone, I think Trump is in big trouble.
Well, after the Trump assassination attempt, you even had anonymous House Democrats telling their favored media outlets that they were basically ready to concede the election to Trump.
Now, I guess that might have been recency bias as well, but, you know, I've always been of the mind, and this was even way before The whole debacle around Biden's debate performance and whatnot.
Even if you look at like the primary election turnout from this past year, it seemed like there was an enthusiasm advantage for Republicans over Democrats, at least to some extent.
And I kind of use that as a window into how to project forward into general elections.
It's a little bit of an obscure metric on my part.
But the point is, I had seen a bunch of Indicia, that did seem to me to indicate that Trump could be favored this year, and in particular that he has this status that is very unusual in American history, almost unprecedented.
You'd have to go back to Teddy Roosevelt, even that's not really apt, which is that he has a status of quasi-incumbent.
So he kind of has these built-in advantages of incumbency despite not being technically an incumbent.
Do you think that's negated by the switcheroo that the Democrats pulled?
I think this switcheroo has been way more effective so far than Democrats could ever possibly have dreamed.
I don't think they're smart enough to have planned all this.
I know a lot of conspiracy theorists have been saying this was all a big plot.
I think the media has played an enormous role in this.
I think we're Republican over Democrats.
It has played a huge role.
I think the Republican convention could well end up being seen as a colossal failure in missed opportunities because So whether or not God had saved Donald Trump from death and that was the theme of the Republic.
There was a going on that should have been primary folk convention and I think a lot of these escapees could have easily been closed off.
But there was no effort to do that, and even I, and I'm a pessimist by nature, never dreamed that the Democrats would be able to pull this off without paying some sort of price, whether it's, you've already alluded to the hypocrisy on the democracy issue, how you're the party of democracy, and you hand your nation to someone who has never received a vote for president ever in their life, and without even an open convention!
No open process whatsoever is mind-blowing to me, but there are so many other ways that Republicans could have caused damage during that Republican convention before the coup was realized, where they could have created separation and divide between They could have caused Harris to not be able to take flight.
They could have defined her before this honeymoon period of remarkably positive media coverage.
They did none of that.
And they did it, I think, out of overconfidence and distraction over the assassination attempt.
And yeah, I was one of those that after the assassination attempt, if you put Uh, Donald Trump against Joe Biden after that, especially when Biden got COVID, which I think played a role in the drawing because of the timing of that.
But you know, that contract was winnable for Republicans.
By the time November comes around, that assassination attempt is going to be completely irrelevant here.
And most bizarrely, I think Harris now has the mantle, in some people's minds, of the anti-establishment.
You said that Trump's the quasi-incumbent, but Harris somehow now is the turn-the-page candidate, away from the old white guy establishment.
It's bizarre since she took part in a cover-up to maintain the old white guy establishment on the Democratic Party side.
Along with Joe Biden, the charade of him trying to run for president at 81 in greatly diminished health.
I mean, it's just, it's mind-blowing.
That's where we are currently, and I'm not particularly optimistic for how this is all going to turn out.
All right, well, John, I share your general lack of optimism about most things in life at this point, so we're going to have to leave it there, but we appreciate you joining.
Thanks for having me.
Okay.
Joining us next is Bill Scher of the Washington Monthly.
He's the politics editor at the Washington Monthly, and I'm now going around to every camera and messing up, but hopefully people just find that amusing.
Hey, I'm a guest host, what can I say?
Bill Sherr, he's the politics editor at the Washington Monthly, and we're going to go to him now.
Hello, Bill, how are you?
I don't have Bill's audio at the moment.
Hopefully we can get that fixed.
Can you hear me now?
Yes, I can hear you now.
Perfect.
Excellent.
So Bill, I think it's fair to say that you have been a long time pro-democratic writer, pundit, whatever you want to put it exactly.
I don't want to be cheapen your contributions to our discourse, but that seems about right to me, having followed you for a while.
And there's something sticking in my craw.
I mean, we're only a little over a week removed.
From Joe Biden withdrawing from the race in, I think you would have to acknowledge, unprecedented fashion.
There really is no historical precedent for a major party nominee withdrawing that late in the cycle, having accumulated 99% of pledged delegates, having a glide path to the nomination, and just being replaced willy-nilly, it seems, by somebody who had to compete for zero votes
had won zero delegates, at least in state and territory, popular vote contests, either in 2024 or in 2020, where she also happened to have run.
And I just feel like this is being swept under the rug at breakneck speed because the media, as they want to do, just want to start rallying behind Harris and just pretend that Joe Biden wasn't just want to start rallying behind Harris and just pretend that Joe Biden wasn't adamantly insisting that he was going to run for a second term at age 82 and potentially be in Yes.
So I don't know.
What am I missing here?
Like why, why is this?
Why does it not sit well with me that we've all seen or the media has largely seemed to want to just have collectively moved on from this pretty staggering turn of events and I guess to crystallize it in the form of a question, would you concede that Kamala Harris is unique in at least modern American history in the lack of small d democratic legitimacy that she has acquired given her
Having had to obtain almost zero votes or delegates through popular vote in order to become the presumptive nominee of a major party.
No, I wouldn't accept that premise.
I agree this is unprecedented at the presidential level.
We have other cases down ballot where people stepped aside for scandalous reasons or for health reasons and parties had to make late switches.
This is just happening on a grander stage.
And if there was any inkling That ranking file Democrats were upset about this.
Well, there would be a place to fix that at the convention where the delegates are going to be this still the delegates have to do the nominating and the delegates were elected through the primary process.
And if things were if there was genuine upset.
With most Democrats, they wouldn't play ball.
But I think every poll shows there is just straight-up euphoria, just a huge amount of consensus around this.
And so it's why you're not going to see a lot of complaint.
This is somehow anti-small-D Democratic.
Okay, so let's just narrow it to the presidential level.
You're right, there are previous instances where for Senate races or House races or state and local races, there is a switch made at the last minute.
But the presidential race is on a much grander scale.
I think, as we can all acknowledge, it's much more at the forefront of our collective mythology and consciousness.
And just in the modern era, Kamala Harris has drastically less.
Democratic legitimacy in terms of the metric that we always go by, which is receiving popular votes and delegates through public nominating contests, caucuses, primaries.
Kamala Harris stands alone in the annals of major party nominees in having received remarkably few votes or delegates, at least through public nominating contests.
Is that not correct?
I mean, why can't that just be acknowledged?
I mean, keep in mind, you know, modern presidential primaries start in 72.
So we have a whole history.
But even if you go back to 68, well, not entirely, but there were beauty contest primaries.
There's a smattering of primaries, but still generally delegates on the floor.
I thought on historical diatribes on this show, people probably tuned me out.
But even in 1968, Hubert Humphrey had to go around and advocate for it.
He did not do a lot of primaries.
Well, he didn't do a lot, but he did some.
He did more than Harris has done.
Like, he had to go... I pulled up archives of, like, from the Vermont Democratic State Convention in 1968, where he had to go and send surrogates to campaign for his preferred slate of delegates, and then they won in Vermont.
That's just one example.
It's a minor point in the grand scheme.
But he had to do more than Harris did.
But even if you want to just...
Let's just put it at the 70s.
The advent of the modern primary era came in the 70s.
Let's just use that as a cutoff.
Would you acknowledge that Harris has the least democratic legitimacy, small d, of the modern primary era of either party?
I would not put it in terms of legitimacy.
There were delegates elected through the primary process.
The delegates hold the power.
If some other candidate wanted to raise their hand and say, I'm going to run against Harris, they're allowed to do so.
They didn't.
And we're calling it the presumptive nominee now because journalists called all the delegates to say, do you support Harris?
And a majority said yes.
And so that's why the media said this is a presumptive nominee, which is what they always do.
Just typically it's through in the middle of these electoral contests.
There are ways to stop Harris if Democrats want her to be stopped.
They don't.
And that's why this is going to be a legitimate process, even though it's not going through the traditional primary process as we know it since 1972.
But there's no way for voters to signal their preference for another candidate.
The primaries were over.
When the Democrats decided to pull this switcheroo.
Yes, you're right.
The primary voters and caucus goers elected delegates who were pledged to Joe Biden, not to Kamala Harris.
And this talking point that in electing Joe Biden, The Democratic primary voters were also, like, de facto electing Kamala Harris.
That's just not true.
There's no vice presidential primary.
There's a presidential primary.
Joe Biden would have theoretically been more than entitled to select a different vice presidential nominee if he had wanted to.
Now, in practice, he almost certainly would not have, but that would have been up to him.
So, I mean, when I say Democratic legitimacy, I'm talking in terms of Electoral input by the masses, you know, which is what the modern primary system was supposed to enable.
Right.
This was not... I'm not arguing that voters, when they cast their ballots in the primaries, did so knowing, I know if Biden drops out in July, it's going to be Harris.
That wasn't top of mind when the votes occurred at the time.
What I'm saying is, delegates are elected through those processes.
The process literally sends delegates to the convention.
The party rules allow those delegates to make different choices on the convention floor.
And those delegates have chosen to back Harris.
And because, you know, even though there's no voting process that's created post-primary, Politicians can read the room.
We do have polls.
We do have anecdotal data.
If there was a market for an alternative candidate, a politician would step into that vacuum and try to serve that market.
But every bit of data that we have is that that market doesn't exist.
So you're not finding Democrats saying, I'm mad about this.
This is illegitimate.
Everyone's like, let us go.
Let us get this done.
So I just don't think there's going to be a way for anyone to drive a wedge through the Democratic base to say you should be mad about this because the Democrats are not mad about this.
Okay, so let's go to this July 8th letter.
You probably recall this, that Joe Biden issued to congressional Democrats.
It was the same day that he turned in his defiant phone-in call to mourning Joe.
He also sent a letter to congressional Democrats, adamantly insisting that he was going to stay in the race, come hell or high water.
And he said the following.
This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run.
Only three people chose to challenge me.
One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as independent.
That's obviously a thinly veiled reference to RFK Jr.
Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated.
Another veiled reference to Dean Phillips.
The voters of the Democratic Party have voted, Biden says.
They have chosen me to be the nominee of the party.
Then he asks, do we now just say this process didn't matter?
That the voters don't have a say?
I decline to do that, Biden says.
I feel a deep obligation to the faith and the trust of the voters of the Democratic Party that they've placed in me to run this year.
It was their decision to make, not the press, not the pundits, not the big donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned.
The voters and the voters alone decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.
And here's the kicker, Bill, and I want your answer to this one here.
I want you to answer Joe Biden's question, not my question.
Answer Joe Biden's question.
He asked, how can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?
I cannot do that.
I will not do that.
So Bill, that was July 8th.
His argument did not carry the date, which is why he quit.
What's the answer today?
They're negating the entire process.
His argument.
He did not have a strong argument, which is why he quit.
People were, it was very evident That he was unlikely to win.
And I believe, and I realize that Biden has not copped to this publicly, there appears to be a health problem there.
I would prefer transparency in that regard that we're not getting.
I will concede that.
Everyone was pretty clear.
Most, I mean, I guess not everyone.
There's obviously were Biden diehards.
I'm quite aware of them on X. Clearly Biden had his inner circle.
I think Biden was slow to get to the place where he got.
I think that when he wrote that letter, I think that was probably written very sincerely in the moment.
But a whole lot of people recognized that he was not up to this task.
And then from what reporting we have, it appears that Once the internal polling was shown to Biden by people close to him, he had to accept that.
And so once he decides he is no longer running anymore, all those July 8th arguments are completely moot and obsolete.
He is literally just not the nominee anymore.
He's not a candidate for the office anymore.
And that frees up the delegates who were elected to choose who they want to choose.
And the majority of them would appear to be unanimously We want Kamala Harris!
Right, but the argument here is not just that the polls are showing me potentially losing to Trump.
The argument here was that if the donors and the press and all the know-it-alls try to coerce me out of the race, what they'll be doing is invalidating the democratic will of the Democratic Party's voters.
And that'll undermine we Democrats in our ability to make the case against Trump and the Republicans.
That we, quote, stand for democracy because it'll show that we're, quote, ignoring it in our own party.
So I don't understand how that same argument couldn't be made today because the exact thing that Biden was warning about has come to pass.
Whatever his poll results showed, the Democratic Party apparently in its upper echelons decided that it would be in their best interest to negate the results of the primaries.
So I don't see what is flawed about Biden's argument here in the sense that By negating those primary results, you're showing that the Democratic Party clearly doesn't have that same commitment to democracy that it likes to pontificate about.
Am I missing something?
It would be a valid argument if he was still standing for elections.
So it was valid on July 8th?
If he was standing for election at the Democratic Convention and the delegates who were elected to vote for him turned on him and elected somebody else whilst looking at Biden in the face, that argument would hold water.
That would be delegates not doing what they were elected to do.
However, Biden withdrew.
That changes everything about that argument.
And if Trump or anybody else wants to prosecute this case to say Kamala Harris is an illegitimate candidate because she did not go through a traditional primary process, every bit of poll data that we have suggests that that argument is going to fall extremely flat.
Almost every American, regardless of party, wanted Biden to not be in this race.
And as on the Democratic side is concerned, there is a massive amount of excitement that they have another alternative instead of Joe Biden right now.
And I say this as someone who was a very big Joe Biden defender pretty much up until the debate.
So I'm not someone who's had a real animus towards Joe Biden.
I'm just telling you what everything we're seeing in the past week shows just practically a euphoric sense of excitement for what is happening here.
And so I think being a kind of a sourpuss about the process just isn't going to get anyone very far.
Well, I guess I'm inclined to be a sourpuss about many things, and maybe including the Democratic primary process of 2024, which I actually covered, you know, in fair depth.
I went to New Hampshire.
I went to Iowa.
I went to, you know, lots of places.
You know, I was talking to people about the process.
In New Hampshire, you might recall, Biden actually wasn't technically on the ballot and they had a write-in Biden campaign because what the DNC under Biden's effective control wanted to do was rejigger the primary process in 2024 to put a premium on South Carolina or put it first chronologically because that was where Biden's more natural support base was and basically what they did that was incredible was they tried to
More or less disenfranchised New Hampshire, despite its vaunted first-in-the-nation primary status, by saying, look, the DNC sent a threat letter to the New Hampshire Democratic Party saying, you have to instruct candidates in this primary race that the outcome is going to be meaningless.
They used that exact word, meaningless.
I don't know, I guess I just remember this stuff and to just say it's all flushed down the memory hole with such abandon, I don't know, it just grubs me the wrong way.
You're probably right that this euphoria that's overtaken lots of democratic elites and people in the media and whatever probably is superior in their minds to like having any Cognizance of the bizarre process that got us to this point, but I still can't shake my curiosity about it.
And, you know, maybe it's because oftentimes I feel like I'm in the weeds of a lot of these procedural issues.
So I'm unusually interested, but I don't know.
I mean, do you sympathize with me at all on that score?
Well, let me say, let me say three things.
I'll try to say them quickly.
Number one, well, I think one, I think the euphoria we're talking about is not Strictly elites.
I think, again, polls suggest this is broad-based.
I think the average American, average American didn't think Joe Biden should be in the race.
Average Democrat, very excited about Kamala Harris.
It's not just Nancy Pelosi.
It's not just donors.
So that's number one.
Number two, I think the New Hampshire play by Biden was stupid.
I think the obsession with putting South Carolina first was stupid.
I've written about this in the past.
South Carolina had all the influence that you could possibly want batting cleanup.
Cleanup is a great place to be.
It's better than being first.
It was very this superficial notion that we shouldn't have a small white state go first.
We should have a probably African-American state go first.
Ignore the fact that the African-Americans in the Democratic Party We're picking the nominee out of South Carolina every single time as it was.
The whole thing was dumb.
But the third thing I would say is Donald Trump, when he was the incumbent, very much jerry-rigged the 2020 primary process to make that a non-contest as well.
It's hardly unusual for an incumbent president to have his thumb on the scale of the party machinery and make that a very smooth process.
So I understand it being off-putting, but hardly unprecedented and hardly unique to Democrats.
So Bill, as a fellow white dude, I'm curious for your thoughts on the Democratic Party's seeming embrace of white identity politics.
We saw this big Zoom call, white dudes for Harris last night, lots of big celebrities on the call, lots of white dude Democrats in Congress and so forth.
You had, who was the guy, Sam Wise from the Lord of the Rings movies.
You had Mark Hamill who recited his Luke Skywalker taglines and on and on and on.
And it seems like the Democratic Party is now going at it, and this got a ton of coverage.
So did the white women for a Kamala session.
So I've declared this particular edition of our show a white dudes only show.
Inspired by the Democratic Party's seeming recent turn toward white identity politics, are you gratified by this?
Do you welcome being so personally catered to by the Democrats as a cohesive racialized interest group?
Well, first, everybody does identity politics, and they've been doing it since the beginning of politics.
We just saw Donald Trump go to Turning Point's conference begging Christians to vote for him.
That's identity politics.
We've seen people stand behind Donald Trump with a Blacks for Trump sign.
That's identity politics.
So nothing new here, nothing surprising, nothing shocking.
I think this is a little bit different, this white dudes thing.
It's not, you know, it's not the official Kamala Harris campaign doing it.
It's something that sprung up on its own.
It's got a lot of celebrities involved.
I know some elected Democrats.
But Bill, you had every vice presidential nominee who could get a potential vice presidential nominee who could get on the call.
Tim Walz, JB Pritzker, Roy Cooper.
Yes.
They all fell over themselves to get on this.
So if even if it wasn't run by the Yeah, no one's disavowing it, of course.
But this is less about trying to tailor a message to a constituency as I think being it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
It's a little bit trying just to send a message to, you know, average white person.
You don't need to be Afraid, annoyed, put off by not having someone who has your demographic at the top of the ticket.
And I heard you talking about Obama with Mr. Ziegler before.
I mean, Obama was a master at navigating those racial waters and trying to not seem scary to white voters and did it as good as anyone could possibly do it in 2008.
This is sort of a different version of that.
But it's in the same vein.
It's just a way to say, look, this is not a candidate who's going to cater to a narrow slice of America.
We're trying to do things to show she's going to she's going to appeal to a broad swath of America.
And that's just the way politics works.
And it has since the beginning of time.
Okay, so final topic, Bill.
You've written for the Washington Monthly.
You called on Biden to withdraw on July 5th, but you also called him to resign the presidency.
You called for him to resign the presidency, and you followed this up by doing a long historical disquisition on Woodrow Wilson, which I found interesting.
People should read that article if they want to get some historical context on that.
Woodrow Wilson obviously was incapacitated effectively by a stroke.
As he was negotiating the potential entry of the United States into the League of Nations, which never happened.
In part it's suspected because Wilson became erratic and even lost some of his political acumen and therefore the Senate essentially rebelled against him and he could not get the treaty ratified that would have been required to admit the U.S.
to the League of Nations.
And you likened Biden's predicament to this.
Obviously, you can't make a perfect parallel for virtually any historical scenario.
But you've been saying that Biden shouldn't just withdraw from the race.
He needs to resign the presidency and make Harris the president.
Now, if we're taking Biden at his word, He's saying he's going to serve the next six months of his presidency.
He's not going to resign.
He's not going to heed your advice.
So, number one, isn't that a huge political liability for whoever the Democratic nominee is?
Obviously, it seems like it's almost certainly going to be Harris, but even if it were somebody else, I don't know, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, anybody, they would have to be answering for the fact that the current Democratic incumbent President is somebody who had to withdraw from the race on the grounds of diminished mental acuity.
You know, that became a consensus view within his own party, and yet he's persisting on in the office of the presidency, even in that diminished state, to the point that you, so diminished, in fact, that it led to you calling for him to resign.
So, isn't there a huge political liability there?
And what about on a substantive level?
I mean, shouldn't we, as Americans, Be a little bit worried about Biden's ability to, for example, I don't know, there could be a war breaking out as we speak, or at least an escalated war between Israel and Hezbollah in which the U.S.
is going to inevitably have a very intimate and direct operational role.
You never know what could spiral out of control with Russia and Ukraine, Taiwan, etc.
There are any number of obviously hugely consequential scenarios that could unfold that the president has to be alert and capable to manage.
And we have somebody in office who is saying he's going to be there for the next six months.
It's a long time.
A lot could happen in six months.
So what's your response to that?
Well, I think you raised the two relevant points.
What's the political risk and what's the substantive risk?
And I had concerns on both those counts when I wrote that.
In terms of the politics of it, so far, Democrats have navigated Biden staying in office, you know, without fault.
Biden hasn't copped to Any kind of health issue, any kind of neurological problem.
Republicans were the ones that demanded he resign.
Democrats shrugged it off.
Uh, and we aren't really talking about that all that much anymore.
So I think in the short run, they've avoided the, I mean, I was concerned that, uh, Harris would be bombarded with questions.
How can you possibly stand there while we have a sitting president who with an obvious health problem and you think that's okay?
Um, she hasn't been hammered with that question since no one has.
Why hasn't she?
I'm not, I'm not one to just flippantly line up with Republican grievances or conservative grievances about mainstream media, but shouldn't that be a pretty obvious question?
Like, shouldn't Karras had to have, wouldn't, wouldn't you think that at least on like, I don't know, one or two occasions since being crowned presumptive nominee, she would have to address that very straightforward question?
Were you aware of Joe Biden's diminished cognitive faculties.
Did it ever raise concerns for you?
But nobody's even mentioning it anymore because they're so overcome with this euphoria.
That seems a little odd to me.
I think she's going to get all those questions.
I don't think she's done.
I think when she has her first sit-down interview, which I don't think she's had.
Which is also a bizarre sign of how seamlessly she's been able to circumvent any standard hurdle to getting this nomination.
Like one of the points of a protracted primary process is not only that you'd have to compete for votes in delegates, but you'd have debates, you'd have to do interviews to scrutinize yourself before the public.
She's done none of that.
You're right, I don't think she has done an interview since Biden withdrew from the race.
And why should she?
The media is beside itself with euphoria, so she doesn't even have to do it, right?
I mean, they're giving her a pass. - Well, I wouldn't blame the media for that.
She was able to lock up that sufficient delegate support, which gets her crowned Presumptive Nominee by the media.
Why is the New York Times and CNN and the Washington Post and MSNBC and the Washington Monthly, why aren't they clamoring for her to do a sit-down interview ASAP?
I mean, I think this is going to happen.
I think it will happen, probably happen very soon.
This is literally a week ago, you know, or nine days ago.
So I think these things are going to happen.
I think she's going to get those questions and we'll see what the answers are.
I think there is a, well, let me shift to the substantive part of the question.
I think the Wilson history is instructive here.
They're two different people.
Their conditions are not necessarily the same, of course, probably not the same.
So I can't know exactly what is going to happen to Biden physically and mentally over the next six months.
But we do see, in the Wilson example, people may know that he had a very big stroke in October 1919, the seventh year of his presidency, left him basically incapacitated.
He did recover somewhat, but he never copped to it publicly fully.
There was no entertainment of him resigning, and he just powered through with the help of his wife doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
But there were signs of problems in the months before that, even in the years before that.
He was having mini strokes decades before, but never really had his underlying neurologic condition properly diagnosed.
He didn't have his high blood pressure properly diagnosed, so he wasn't being treated.
And so it was a very, very slow-moving progression of cerebrovascular disease.
And we had a point in April of 1919 when he's in France.
He's literally negotiating the treaty.
He's not delegating it to a secretary of state.
He's doing it.
He's there for months.
It's a very stressful endeavor.
He gets a very high fever.
He has bouts of delirium.
Delirium is different than dementia, but if you have early signs of dementia, it can exacerbate it.
He has a mini stroke after the fever.
And there are people that say, like Herbert Hoover, who was in his administration, that he wasn't the same person after that.
Now, it's not total night and day.
It's not like he didn't know up from down.
But he wasn't as sharp.
He wasn't speaking as well.
He had a harder time selling what was a controversial treaty when he came back to the States.
But he wasn't so bad off.
That even his defenders didn't want him to quit.
His defenders said, we want you out there.
We want you to go on a speaking tour.
We want you to sell this treaty.
We want you to sell the League of Nations.
And he booked an 8,000-mile, 29-city train tour, even though his doctor and some of his inner circle said, I don't know if you've got the strength for this right now.
But he felt he was the indispensable man.
He does it.
Some of the speeches were great.
Some of the speeches were not so great.
And then eventually he pushed himself too hard and he ends up having the full-blown stroke.
So where this is potentially relevant is, I don't think Biden is so off to lunch he can't twiddle his thumbs, can't do the basics of the job right now.
But we're seeing some signs of decline.
And I don't think There's been like a three and a half year cover-up.
I think something happened more recently, and I would very much like to have a fresh medical assessment so we can find out what that was.
Saying he got a test in February doesn't count.
I think something's happened since February, but I'm not a doctor and I can't diagnose from afar.
We should have a fresh medical checkup, in my opinion.
We haven't gotten that.
If you want to criticize that, I would agree with that criticism.
But from a substantive standpoint, he's running a risk that something else might happen between now and January that would make him worse off than he is today.
Today, can he handle the base of the job?
I think probably.
I can't know for sure, but I think probably.
But it may not stay that way.
And if something does happen that's very obvious to the eye, that might end up being a bigger problem for Harris politically.
Maybe that would actually precipitate a resignation if it got really bad.
So it does leave me with a bit of concern.
But as a political matter, as of today, it hasn't proven to be a problem.
Well, I tend to suspect that this outburst of euphoria over much...
Within much of the media over this coronation of Kamala Harris has suspiciously lessened the interest in Joe Biden's cognitive aptitude.
I haven't seen many thorough New York Times or Washington Post investigations or political leaks on Joe Biden's ability to conduct his basic duties of office in the past 10 days or so.
Maybe that'll pick up again, but it seems like it's been Set aside in favor of this cheerleading for Kamala Harris without, like we established, her even sitting down for an interview to answer some of these very fundamental questions.
But Bill, Cher, we're going to have to leave it there.
Thank you for joining us and thank you for joining White Dudes Summer here at System Update.
This is a whites only, white dudes only space, again, inspired by the Democratic Party.
So we appreciate you joining us.
My pleasure.
Take care.
All righty then.
Thanks, like I said to Bill, thanks for joining us on White Dude Summer here at System Update.
Update.
Thanks for watching another full episode.
Hope you enjoyed it.
If you didn't, too bad.
And stay tuned on Locals, where I'll be doing some sizzling extras.
We're gonna get down and dirty on the Locals extras, so stay tuned for that.
