Briahna Joy Gray on Dems in Disarray, the "Big Beautiful Bill," Biden Cover-Up Receipts, and More; Plus: Interview with Journalist Katie Halper
Bad Faith podcast host Briahna Joy Gray chronicles the Democrats' latest acts of self-destruction: from the 2024 primary, to the Biden mental decline cover-up, to the party's quixotic quest to find the next "Joe Rogan of the left." Political commentator and podcast host Katie Halper joins Briahna to unpack the future of the Democrats as they fail to mobilize against Trump's policies. ------------------------------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
It's Tuesday, March 28. 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.
Now, Glenn Greenwald is away this week.
I'm Breonna Joy Gray.
You might know me from my own podcast, Bad Faith, or from my previous hosting responsibilities over at The Hills Rising, less of a free speech platform than this one.
Now, today I'll be walking through the implosion of the Democratic Party, the pathetic hunt for a Joe Rogan of the left, the party's instinct for corporate self-preservation over real populist reform, and the media cover-up of Biden's I'll be joined by independent left podcaster and co-host of Useful Idiots podcast,
Katie Halper, to continue the conversation about how the DNC is continuing to try to rig elections in favor of incumbents, even as they repeatedly keep dying in office, and the likelihood that there might be more independent third-party runs in 2028, a la RFK Jr.'s 2024 attempt.
Now, let's get right into it.
you For a decade now, corporate Democrats have been warning that Donald Trump presents an existential threat to the Republic.
Now, during Trump's first term, much of that hand-wringing seemed to be hyperbolic.
Trump derangement syndrome, if you will.
His big legislative accomplishment was in line with the policy priorities of your typical establishment Republican, a $1.7 trillion tax cut that went Overwhelmingly to the rich.
Now, there was some good stuff, too.
Unlike Biden, he didn't start any new wars.
And while he continued to fund Israel's genocide in Gaza and crack down on free speech rights of Americans who protested said genocide, Trump did accomplish the temporary ceasefire that AOC merely claimed Kamala was working tirelessly.
To achieve.
But now that President Trump is finally following through on some of his less popular and less populist policy commitments, like the Medicaid cuts included in his big, beautiful bill, which passed the House last week, or throwing markets into disarray with his erratic application of tariffs, which can be good policy.
Establishment Democrats seem almost happy to have something to justify their hatred of Trump.
Populous Trump behaves, the more it disguises the Democrats' own failure to meet the needs of the people.
And some Democrats are outright advising that the way they should respond to this alleged existential crisis is to simply do nothing.
Just sit back and wait to benefit from the backlash.
Now, you don't have to take my word for it.
Listen to veteran DNC advisor James Carville describe the strategy.
The question is, how should Democratic politicians respond to this?
And what I think they should do is what we call, in rural America, play possum.
Just let it go.
Don't get in the way of it.
Or as we like to say, don't just stand there.
Do nothing.
Let this germinate.
We don't need to get in front of it.
This freight train is moving.
Let's just get out of the way, and then we're going to have time.
Fiddle while Rome burns, the expert says, then exploit the tragedy.
But so far, the backlash isn't coming.
A new Economist YouGov poll out yesterday shows that while GOP favorability is low at negative 11 percent, Democrats are doing even worse at negative 21 percent.
41% of Americans still view Republicans favorably, while a mere 36% of Americans view Democrats favorably.
Now, these polls come as no surprise to those of us who consume independent media.
I mean, just look around.
Democrats are in the throes of a credibility crisis that arose out of Joe Biden's obvious unfitness to run for president.
They're trying to distract from their complicity in the cover-up, but going all in on the idea that it was Biden himself, his family, and his closest advisors that hid his decline from the party and the public until it was too late, not the liberal media.
But it's hard to call Biden's infirmary a cover-up when it was out in the public for all of us to see and comment on.
The president was confusing Haifa and Rafa, mixing up the president of Egypt and the president of Mexico, and he even dodged culpability in the classified documents case on the basis that he didn't have the mental competence to knowingly take the files.
He even seemed to wander off at the G7 conference a year ago like a distracted child.
His mental lapses were evident as far back as the 2020 primary, during which presidential candidates Julian Castro and Cory Booker had the temerity to call him out for not remembering what he had just said at the primary debate.
This clip is from way back in 2019, when Dem still could have avoided the albatross of a historically old and declining candidate around their necks.
What did they do instead?
Disappear both Castro and Booker, once rising stars.
From the ranks of up and coming leadership.
We have been talking about, you know, Julian Castro when he called out Joe Biden saying, well, you don't remember what you said two minutes ago.
Senator Klobuchar was just here telling us she thought it was a very uncool moment and rather Trump-like.
What did you think in that moment?
Well, if you saw Senator Klobuchar, we were on the end, I think, a lot of the debates.
She and I just stepped towards each other and just talking about these notes.
Is that the cheap shot you were referring to?
I think that, look, I think that we are at a tough point right now.
Because there's a lot of people who are concerned about Joe Biden's ability to carry the ball all the way across the end line without fumbling.
And I think that Castro has some really legitimate concerns about, can he be someone in a long, grueling campaign that can get the ball over the line?
And he has every right to call that out.
The mainstream media accused anyone who noticed Biden's obvious decline as being motivated by Trump-like conservative politics.
Believe our Trump derangement syndrome, not your lying eyes, they seem to say.
Reuters reported the story about Biden wandering off at the G7 as lacking context.
Meanwhile, his inability to finish sentences was contextualized as a mere stutter.
Jake Tapper, one of the authors of the book Original Sin, which sheds light on the extent of Biden's mental infirmary, was himself one of the original apologists for Biden's cognitive decline.
Watch one of the few good mainstream pundits on MSNBC question Tapper's co-author on Tapper's own complicity.
Only politicians.
But I wanted to get your thoughts about the book specifically and the mea culpa within it.
Let me play for you some of the comments that your co-author Jake Tapper has said about this issue on his show.
I think what we see on stage with Joe Biden, Jake, is very Very clearly, a cognitive decline.
That's what I'm referring to.
I think you have absolutely no standing to diagnose somebody's cognitive decline.
I chastised Laura Trump two Sundays ago for diagnosing Joe Biden's cognitive skills.
Obviously, she has no training to do so.
He's sharp physically.
I mean, mentally.
I think the question is physically, right?
The Democrats have been involved in a big cover-up here.
Calling it a cover-up, it's pretty strong words.
You've used the word cover-up in the book, more or less.
And I'm curious to get your thoughts on, you know, the Columbia Journalism Review said it's not mentioned in the book.
You don't really take account for what the media has done in this part.
I want to give you a chance to respond to that.
I mean, why not address it in the book, that the media was a part of the mistake?
Oof.
That is some good questioning.
And I gotta say, I don't think we need medical degrees to be able to accurately Observe what was going on with Joe Biden.
And we didn't need this new book to know the truth either.
Independent media, along with the voters, knew what was going on for years.
Look, Biden's midterm rating was worse than any other elected president on record.
And back in August of 2023, polls showed that 77% of Americans, including 69% of Democrats, thought Biden was too old to be president.
That Democrats wouldn't listen, or rather, they simply didn't care.
Now, as part of the media's effort to whitewash its own complicity, the same media figures who were involved in the cover-up are claiming, well, they had to defend Biden's mental competency because no one else primaried him.
They were stuck with him as a candidate.
Even as the party shut down the possibility of a primary from the jump.
Now, look, contrast former DNC chair Jamie Harrison making that incredible claim that anyone could have primaried Biden if they wanted to, followed by Biden-Harris spokesperson turned MSNBC journalist, Simone Sanders, proclaiming that under no circumstances will there be a primary.
If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody that told them that they couldn't.
The sitting president of the United States of America is a Democrat.
A Democrat that would like to run for re-election so much so that he has declared a re-election campaign.
In that case, the Democratic National Committee will not facilitate a primary process.
There will be no debate stage for Bobby Kennedy, Marianne Williamson, or anyone else to stand up.
So we're going to have another Bobby Kennedy in an empty chair in the debate, right?
There will be no debate.
If folks wanted to primary Joe Biden, there was nobody to tell them that they couldn't?
Is he serious?
The mendacity is frankly shocking.
As Simone admitted, Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson did throw their hats in the ring, as said RFK Jr.
And you can hear how much respect they got for doing so reflected in Simone's snide tone and her inability to pronounce Marianne's name.
And don't forget, RFK Jr. also ran as a Democrat before the party pushed about.
And it's no surprise why he left the Dems.
The Democratic Party, its pundits and politicians, were simply all in behind Joe Biden, no matter how ill-fated his electoral chances were from the get-go.
And while they want to memory hole their role in setting Dems up to fail, I have the receipts.
Take Pod Save America, one of the most popular liberal podcasts in the country.
These former Obama speechwriters turned media moguls finally admitted that Biden wasn't fit to lead.
After Biden's disastrous debate with Trump.
But hindsight is 20-20.
Listen to how hostile they were in conversation with moderate primary candidate Democrat Dean Phillips when he joined their show during the primary season that wasn't.
I don't know why there's so much consternation about practicing democracy.
It's as simple as that.
You know, we don't have consternation about that.
Then what's the consternation?
You're the guy to do it.
If the goal here is to win, if the question here is electability, why on earth would I take a chance on someone who's never run outside of this one specific place and is untested on the national stage?
How many presidents in recent memory, did Bill Clinton run anywhere besides Arkansas?
Were his numbers even as high as mine right now, just one month into my— You know the truth about this.
By the way, I flipped a red district that had been in Republican hands since 1958, beat a guy who had won by 14 by 12. I know how to do this.
But it was a D plus 8 district.
I mean, it was a lean Democratic race.
Come May, June of next year, let's just see what the head-to-head polls say.
If I'm ahead of Donald Trump and President Biden is behind, what would you guys say then?
And we're the only two in the race.
Would you say that I'm the better choice or he is still?
Yeah, no.
Well, you're talking about May or June.
At that point, most of the delegates will have been awarded, so one of you will be the winner.
At that point, I'd say whoever got the...
Phillips and I do not share the same politics, but he was right.
At a certain point, internal polls show that Biden could not win.
According to Original Sin, the Jake Tapper book, Biden trailed in every battleground state, and the race had tightened in states he won comfortably back in 2020.
But the voters don't matter.
The polls don't matter, not to Democrats.
What matters to the Democratic Party elites is who they choose to top the ticket.
As Bernie Sanders' former national press secretary in 2020, I know this all too well.
In two back-to-back election cycles, the Democratic Party ignored polls that showed Bernie was more electable than Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden against Donald Trump.
Now, this is not some Monday morning quarterbacking from a disgruntled leftist.
Democratic Party insider Donna Brazile admitted the primary was rigged back in 2017, and Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson admit as much in Original Sin, in which they write, quote, I've got news for the Democratic establishment.
They can't stop us!
Sanders proclaimed this before the Democratic establishment successfully rallied to stop him.
Many top Democrats, including Obama, believe that a Democratic Socialist like Sanders could not beat Trump and would hurt Democrats down-ballot.
The fading of more moderate candidates, such as former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, Biden became a candidate of last resort for the establishment.
At root, politics is a numbers game.
Biden could get Black candidates in big numbers and others couldn't.
Party leaders, such as South Carolina Congressman James Clyburn, threw their support behind Biden just before that state's primary and propelled him to a commanding win.
They admit it!
The election was rigged.
But even with all of the faux mea culpa happening around Biden's lack of mental fitness, the Democrats still refuse to act any differently going forward, to learn a lesson from their past mistakes.
Tapper and Thompson write that Bernie was perceived to be unable to attract Black voters.
But Bernie was the only candidate in 2020 who matched Biden's popularity with that group, while also outstripping the field when it came to Latino voters.
And Bernie remains popular.
Not only have he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez been turning out tens of thousands of voters across the country during their anti-oligarchy tour, including in deep red states, Bernie's recent appearance on the flagrant podcast with Andrew Schultz had a whole room of popular podcast bros clamoring for the exact democratic socialism establishment Dems insisted would turn off the public.
You know what your reflection is, and Bernie said it all flagrant.
Everybody's to fucking blame.
This ain't a Democrat thing, it's not a Republican thing.
This is government has failed the people.
We live in a capitalist society where you got all of these motherfuckers with all the wealth.
Elon Musk has more wealth than 50, more than half of the bottom of America?
Like, come on!
Like, there's no way we live in a society that claims to be the most wealthiest society on the planet, and we can't fix homelessness.
Well, in that case, the Democrats...
Yeah.
Which I'm fine with.
Yes, they should.
That's what everybody's saying.
That's what everybody's saying.
Because the Republican solution to what you just described is going to be more capitalism.
Deregulation.
Everybody's saying it.
Look, it seems obvious that left populism is the way for Democrats to push back against Trump's right populism, which, unfortunately, is increasingly informed by the tech billionaires that funded his campaign rather than the working class real populist who voted him into office.
You gotta ask yourself, is pardoning reality TV stars convicted of tax fraud really improving your ability to support your family?
What about growing the military budget and the deficit at the same time while cutting special education funding?
What about shifting wealth from the bottom 60% of working-age households to the top income brackets?
Look, no matter what your politics are, two parties that are competing for support of working-class Americans instead of aligning with corrupt billionaires would be a good thing.
But you can't convince someone of something they're paid not to understand.
Which is why Democrats are, instead of embracing popular policies like Medicare for All or a tax on billionaires, are choosing to spend millions of dollars to figure out how to get this.
Speak to American men.
I really wish I were kidding here.
According to the New York Times, Democrats have spent $20 million with donors and strategists holing up in luxury hotel rooms, brainstorming how to convince working-class men to return to the party.
You really can't make this stuff up.
Dems are obsessed with finding the Joe Rogan of the left, but they could not be barking up a wronger tree.
Hilariously, they seem to be tapping one of their most insidious surrogates, Olivia Juliana, to message better on men while continuing to treat Sanders, the man who was literally endorsed by the actual Joe Rogan back in 2020, as a pariah.
What about AOC and Bernie?
You make the point- All we talk about is AOC and Bernie, but go ahead.
Let's continue to talk about AOC and Bernie.
I'm only asking about it because- Okay, right.
I understand.
Because they are doing something.
They're clearly putting themselves out there.
You know what they don't do?
Win elections.
Okay?
And that's- And to be clear, Carville hasn't won an election since Bill Clinton in the 90s, but I digress.
The reason why Democrats' mission to find their own Joe Rogan will fail is obvious.
To be a credible interlocutor in the political space, you have to be willing to say the true thing when it's hard, even when it's critical of your party, especially when it's critical of your party.
Popular Manosphere podcaster Andrew Schultz, he gets it.
Do you need a liberal Joe Rogan or do you just need to come on podcasts?
Yeah.
That you avoided.
That's a great fucking point.
That you were asked to come on.
Great fucking point.
It's not about having a liberal or conservative, it's about coming on places that are curious.
They're not trying to like pit you as a specific thing or getcha or edit an interview to make you look bad so that the people that are consuming that network's content feel good about their political opinions.
An honest conversation is what people are going to enjoy.
And that happens.
And like, I literally saw the media from the Pete interview.
was like, Pete goes on right-wing pod and has great conversation and totally convinces them stuff.
And then after the Bernie one happened, you start to see the conversation go from extreme right to just like, Bernie has fantastic conversation on flagrant podcast, even the way we're seen.
It's like, well, yeah, maybe if you continue to do that.
Now, if Kamala came on, people would know she sucks because she sucks.
But that's on her.
But that's on her.
She's just a very unpopular candidate.
I just wish they didn't lie.
We asked so many times to let her expose her to her.
She sucks.
They'll lie.
Or...
Thank you.
Do you think they even have the stomach for it, though?
I mean, what it actually requires to allow someone to be successful in that platform.
Because while Joe Rogan may now be, you know, aligned with much of the right, he actually disagrees with them on plenty of issues still.
And he's not controlled by, like, the RNC is not, like, giving him talking points where all his guests come on.
Same with others, like Theo Vaughn as well, you know?
The DNC does not have the best history of letting, you know.
Parts of their faction come forward and speak very freely.
I just don't see them being comfortable having someone who's going to take risks in that platform that very much requires you to be authentic and willing to take risks.
Right.
We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.
I don't know.
Bill Maher exists.
He was associated with Democrats.
See, right there at the end is a great summary of the impossibility of what Democrats think they're going to achieve.
We need an authentic voice that's going to become popular organically, and we need to control them.
Good luck with that, Democrats.
Good luck with that.
We're going to be back after a brief break to talk to Katie Halper.
Stick around.
Here's a news story.
Treasury Secretary Scott Benson says the growing recession fears are, quote, "media driven." We've all seen how mainstream media often manipulates public opinion.
We just spent an hour showing you on that.
They push their narratives that serve their interests.
They tell one side or one part of a story.
That's why I started this show and then partnered with Ground News.
They're a platform built on the belief that you deserve to see the whole truth without corporate filters or political censorship.
For every story, their app and website pulls in every single report from across the political spectrum.
So all I have to do is swipe through coverage with tags exposing each outlet's bias, credibility, So take that story I mentioned about Scott Benson and Trump's tariffs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Benson called out the media for fueling unnecessary recession fears because the fundamentals of our economy are strong.
But when you look at who's actually reporting on it, every single outlet is coming from the right that's promoting that narrative.
There's almost no coverage from mainstream and liberal media on that.
And you know there's something strange going on when a story is being actively ignored by half the media.
That's why Ground News built It exposes stories that either side of the political spectrum isn't reporting on so you can actually see the world as it is, not just the version they want you to see.
Ground News is rebuilding trust in news by giving power back to the public rather than concentrating them in the hands of media leads.
That's why they're completely independent and funded by readers like us.
But I got my viewers 40% off the same vantage plan I've been using to get unlimited access to all of their features.
So you can go to ground.news.gg or scan that QR code and check out the link in the description and it will take you right to them.
value what we do here on this show, I think you'll find Ground News a very worthwhile resource.
Back Welcome back with Katie Halper.
You know her from the Katie Halper podcast and also co-host of Useful Idiots with Erin Mate.
Welcome to System Update.
Thanks, Bree.
Thanks for having me.
Excited to be here.
Katie, it's a pleasure.
I can't wait to pick your brain about some of the viral clips, especially from this sort of Manosphere podcast arena, that have gone viral precisely because of how well Bernie Sanders himself and his ideas have translated into a sphere that Democrats have insisted were so right-wing and so far gone,
and they spent so many years vilifying, but now seem to be trying to I mean, I think it's funny because, of course, Brie, not to be self-promoting, but they're searching for the, what is it, left-wing Joe Rogan.
What about Breonna Joy Gray and Katie Halper to take the mantle?
But no, it is ironic that, you know, the same people who were throwing Bernie under the bus, smearing him, attacking him, are now saying that he has I think it's
safe for them to praise his ideas because they actually are either just paying lip service to it, or they're afraid of Bernie's more progressive stances that actually challenge the status quo.
Yeah, I think that really gets to the core of the issue, that the Democratic Party for years has managed to try to frame themselves as some way different than the establishment wing of the Republican Party, despite having the same, substantively the same corporate donors.
Now, there's been a backlash against that.
they're saying, okay, well now we gotta find some other messaging prong.
When the whole reason why they went all in on identity politics and now we're going all It's because they're allergic.
Their corporate base makes them allergic to actually advancing the kind of ideas that made Bernie popular in the first place.
Acting like this guy was somehow a ball of charisma as much as, you know, I liked his sort of like a grumpy, straightforward persona.
he wasn't winning hearts and minds because he you know was a charm generator it was because as joke and He's a man that's been saying the same thing for the last 40 years, and he has credibility.
He's trustworthy.
And it's amazing to rewatch that endorsement now that the Democrats are in the middle of this incredible credibility crisis.
I want to ask you specifically about this book, Original Sin, by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson.
I don't know if you had seen that clip before, that supercut that Eamon put together on MSNBC, of Jake Tapper.
Jake Tapper doing exactly what is sort of criticized in this book, although I will say this book stays away mostly from media criticism and focuses on the idea that it was Biden and his inner circle that knew the truth and were just lying to everybody else and everybody else was sort of deceived by them, including the liberal media.
What do you make of that sort of framing there?
Is Jake Tapper really an innocent, like, in all of this?
Right.
I mean, I joke that, you know, Jake Tapper was well-positioned to write a book about a cover-up because he participated in the cover-up.
So he does probably have some inside knowledge and real insight into it.
But no, I mean, you alluded to this and the mash-up that Ayman played.
You know, Jake Tapper was doing the exact kind of cover-up and running of interference that you and I have commented on the media doing for Joe Biden, for the DNC, for centrist Democrats that we know that they do, they love to do.
And so it is rich seeing someone who participated in that cover-up.
profiting off of a book about a cover-up, and he's hawking that product on his shows and on the various CNN shows that he appears on and all the appearances he's been doing.
And I think, you know, at the end of the day, it really is, once again, kind of, it's fine for people to make these Somehow it never happens in real time.
And, you know, he keeps making these media appearances and talking about how he has a great humility, and his co-writer talks about the humility, which is, I guess, as close to a mea culpa that we'll get.
But that's not, you know, that's...
I'm always so frustrated when people say humility.
I'm truly humbled by insert whatever praise.
So that's a...
But yeah, I think that Jake Tapper, like much of the media, they keep making the same mistakes.
They're warmongers for every war.
I mean, Jake Tapper, the cover-up is disgusting.
But another thing that's disgusting is that he has spread so many lies about Palestinians and has run so much interference, much like he ran so much interference for the Biden campaign.
He's running so much interference for the IDF.
And he and Dana Bash have done such a disgusting job at vilifying Palestinians, Palestinian-Americans like Rashida Tlaib, but all Palestinians, and taking every single rumor and fabricated narrative and running with it and never correcting it.
And, you know, he and Dana Bash really pushed the mass rape Hamas narrative that has been totally debunked.
They've never corrected it.
And at the same time, they've never once acknowledged the fact that there is video footage of Israeli soldiers actually But I think to be consistent, we should say hostage.
And it's one thing to push a debunked narrative and never correct it, but at least acknowledge the fact that we do know of people who are raped by Israelis.
But the fact that they don't acknowledge that and that this is something that mainstream Israeli media covers shows that they really don't care about sexual violence.
They don't care about rape, and they're happy to be doing PR for a genocidal state.
Sorry, we were talking about cover-ups, but they're related.
That's a really important point because there is something deeply ironic and dissonant about Jake Tapper.
I don't know that Alex Thompson can be similarly described as hypocritical, but Jake Tapper for sure doing the press round about a cover-up while still actively participating in a misinformation campaign, at least as significant as the lies about the Steele dossier or claiming that Hunter Biden's laptop was misinformation.
Someone else did another supercut.
sort of juxtaposing what he's saying now about Hunter Biden with what he said back then about Hunter Biden and framing any and every criticism of Joe Biden or just observation from people who actually love Joe Biden that doesn't seem to be up to his best.
He's not the same Joe Biden that was vice president back in the 2008, 2012 cycles as somehow being Trumpy.
And, Katie, this is what's so frustrating about Democrats and, frankly, my concern with some folks on the left who seem to be taking this sort of measured praise for the enthusiasm Bernie and AOC are capturing on these anti-oligarchy tours.
Predicting that there's going to be real change to the Democratic Party this time.
How optimistic are you that we're likely to see the Democrats learning from the lessons of the past?
And if not, why aren't you optimistic?
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I think that unfortunately the Democrats would really rather lose to Trump than have someone like Bernie in power.
But you're asking a slightly different question, right?
Suggests that the Democrats will deliver anything, even with these good messaging that Bernie and AOC are bringing.
And certainly they leave a lot to be desired when it comes to Gaza.
But sure, on economic issues, Bernie especially is excellent.
I think that the problem is, you know, and you've spoken a lot about this, Bree, you know, it's great to have fresh ideas, fresh policies.
Fresh, but also consistent.
I mean, as you alluded to earlier, Bernie's been saying the same thing for decades.
And that is something that I think endears him justifiably to lots of people.
But the question is, will the Democratic Party actually allow for any of these policies to take hold?
They actually, you know, Joe Biden, for instance, never whipped anyone into shape like.
Wonkish, bureaucratic things happen to block the things that he allegedly wanted.
Rotating villain phenomenon, right?
So I think that the Democrats really love to pretend that they can't get things done, that they'd love to get things done.
But the truth is they just don't want to get them done.
They don't want to see these things because they're as beholden to their donors as the Republicans are.
They're just better on social issues often.
And to the extent that they're better on social issues, they certainly are willing to sacrifice these social issues in the name of fundraising, which is why, for instance, you know, neither Obama nor Biden codified Roe v.
Wade.
Thank you.
Yeah, I'm glad you brought up Roe v.
Wade because I have seen more optimistic folks on the left side of the aisle saying, oh, you know, the spin away strategy, whatever you think of it, it's likely to work because look at how well Joe Biden did in midterms.
And I think in retrospect, and I think some of us at the time reported that we suspected that the There not being a red wave in 2022 was not a signal that voters were actually secretly happy with Joe Biden.
Polls at the time showed, as I said in my radar, that he had historically low favorability at that time.
What people were coming out to vote for was not Joe Biden.
It was for Roe v.
Wade.
It was to express their discontent with Roe being overturned and abortion, anti-abortion laws being put into effect all over the country.
Majorities came out to defend those kinds of formerly constitutional rights.
I want to ask you, though, about this particular clip where Chuck Todd, even someone who is very much an establishment pundit, seems to think and maybe even seems to hope that there will, unlike in 2024, when the Democrats completely shut down a primary.
That there will not just be a primary, but that there will be independent third-party-style candidates a la RFK Jr. running in that race.
Let's take a look.
I continue to assume we're going to have a viable independent or third-party challenge in 28 because of this.
Okay, let me ask you a question.
Who do you think it would be?
And that's the issue, is that there's no obvious person.
I mean, I was a Bill McRaven guy the last cycle.
I do think a military veteran is the way to go.
And the messaging can't be, I'm for something.
These guys are broken.
The two parties need a timeout.
I'm here to get to solve problems again, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's the...
But there's no obvious person.
I don't even know where to start with that, Katie.
Why a military guy?
Why this Bill McRaven person who apparently is the former chancellor of the University of Texas system?
And why the optimism that we're going to have someone operating outside of the two-party system from this person who is very much an establishment pundit?
Right, and who really, I think, took part in a mocking of third-party candidates that so much of the corporate media took part in.
I think that, you know, it's interesting you asked about why does it have to be a military figure, and I think this speaks to how much the media and our political elites are so obsessed with optics and messaging and so inattentive to substance.
So it's not about what this person is going to offer.
It's not about the changes that they're going to bring to people's lives in any qualitative or meaningful way.
It's about whether they can tap into people's, I don't know, like crushes on military figures or tap into our militaristic society.
It just it does have a bizarre obsession, I think, with optics that, again, I think is because no one who is.
So they just want to have kind of like different presentations that get people excited, but nobody wants to see the actual changes happen.
Yeah, it's a different kind of identity politics.
It's the same thing as like, yeah, like the Joe Rogan of the left thing.
It's like they think that they can find a podcaster who lifts enough weights.
I guess that's why we're disqualified, Katie.
We're not, we don't lift heavy enough.
Yeah, I know.
We do a lot of repetition of whiteweights, right?
You know, it's totally vibe-based.
Now, look, of course, there is a substantive claim for having a veteran, but I think it also misses the mainstream pundits missing how much we are in a sort of anti-interventionist slash isolationist slash anti-war moment in both parties.
And that's exactly why someone like, you know, Trump, who definitely ran as an anti-interventionist and didn't start any new wars, at least in his first term, Was so popular.
So they're saying a military guy.
I mean, I think someone like Matthew Ho, who ran on the Green Party for a Senate in North Carolina some years back, could be exactly that kind of guy because he served and learned from his service exactly why we shouldn't be sending troops to fight pointless wars and ruining lives, all because young kids see no other avenue to access things like health care and a quality education.
That could be your guy.
But we know Chuck Todd isn't going to throw his hat in behind a Green Party leftist, you know, kind of Bernie style candidate like Matthew Ho.
I mean, I think you're right that it would be great to have a military figure who was anti-war.
I mean, those are extremely powerful voices and they have a lot of credibility.
And of course, more importantly, they're anti-war, which is something that wins votes, but also is obviously good for the planet and good for all people on the planet, except for people who work in the arms industry and people who support genocide.
But I think that it is interesting.
To see people, again, the very same people who, I mean, I think it was Chuck Todd said Bernie Sanders would get hammered and sickled.
He actually said that to him.
See them wax poetic about working outside of the duopoly.
They acknowledge that the two-party system doesn't work.
But what were they doing except for running interference for this two-party system?
Yeah, absolutely.
And just the final nail in the coffin, which is perhaps a metaphor now that I said it out loud that's in poor taste, is this piece.
Of the puzzle where we have had, if we pull up the graphic, a significant number of Democrats who have quite literally died in office, a margin that would have prevented the Democrats or enabled the Democrats to block the passage of Biden's big, beautiful budget bill in the house had they stayed alive.
Now remember, DNC Vice Chair David
And for that, Democrat elites have Rally the ranks to literally push him out of his position at the DNC and are frankly using sort of identity politics as a lover to get him out, even as Democrats are unable to whip sufficient votes to block priorities precisely because their members are so old and enfeebled that they are quite literally dying in office.
What do you make of it?
Yeah, I mean, of course, the final nail in the coffin was the perfect turn of phrase.
But, you know, what better represents the narcissism and selfishness and moribund nature of the Democrats than the way that they are refusing to resign?
Because, again, this gets back to the idea of, you know, the Democrats are constantly fear-mongering.
And I want to be clear.
I mean, Trump is something to be feared.
I mean, he is not an anti-war candidate.
He is terrible for many reasons.
The Democrats often criticize him for the things that aren't even that bad, which is another irony.
But, you know, they fearmonger.
They say he's an existential threat.
He's a fascist.
And yet, if they're so worried about this, why don't they retire so that they have a better chance of having someone from the Democratic Party who can vote against his bill?
I mean, literally, his bill passed because Democrats refused to resign despite having—being— Very sick or old.
And it reminds me also of the way that if Kamala Harris cared so much about defeating Trump, if this was the most important election ever, then why didn't she listen to the base, which was clamoring for her to depart from Biden on several issues, and most notably on Gaza?
We know now that from someone who worked with her, it was because she didn't want to be rude.
And it's gauche to depart from your president's policies when you're the running mate.
We also know that Joe Biden said, we don't want any, I don't want any daylight between us, kid.
And so for Biden, his legacy is, For Kamala, not, I guess, ruffling feathers was more important or not upsetting donors or not being able to run around with Liz Cheney or not incurring the wrath of AIPAC.
So it just belies the whole claim that this is something that is an existential threat.
I mean, we are facing existential threats.
We're facing existential threats that neither party is willing to deal with, especially when it comes to climate change.
But it's very hard to convince people that you're taking this seriously as an existential threat when you don't do the minimal things needed to either win an election or prevent a Republican from taking your seat in the case of people who are not resigning.
I mean, the outrage around inflation, cost of living, housing prices, gas prices, food prices, education prices, these are the sectors that are driving We're good to
go.
But again, they're not backing any of those policies.
You're still getting Democrats out here arguing against baseline things like raising the minimum wage, which hasn't been raised since Bush was in office.
The longest period without a minimum wage raise since it was invented in the 1930s.
And meanwhile, Americans are struggling.
So this huge lane is opening up.
Meanwhile, on the right side of the aisle, I think people who voted for Donald Trump in good faith, hoping that he was going to follow the sort of Bannon wing of his party and do real economic populism, are seeing that Bannon is engaged in a battle with the other wing of the party that frankly bought the election, the tech wing, the Elon Musk,
the Marc Andreessen, the folks who are very openly saying we need to do AI, we need to put the public out of business, we're going to make all of these arguments that legitimize Defunding the welfare state that so many Americans, including so many Americans in very low-income red states in the South and elsewhere, are relying upon to survive.
And we can do that because we literally bought this election.
And I'm afraid that that technology, What do you think?
I think it's a justifiable fear and I think what you're saying, it really does ring true.
Again, we've seen in the cases of Of the leadership of both parties, we've seen a real embrace of anti-populism, right?
And one of the most frustrating things was To see people equate Bernie Sanders with Donald Trump.
Because there's a big difference between actual populism and pseudo-populism.
Just like there's a big difference between being anti-war and being pseudo-anti-war.
And Trump is great at appealing to populist sentiments.
But of course he's not someone who cares about the working class, the middle class.
He is someone who in some ways is more dangerous than traditional Republicans.
because he talks a good talk.
He knows how to sound like he's a, But of course, in some ways, the most dangerous thing to have is someone who substantively is status quo, but performatively and stylistically is not.
Yeah, it is interesting to see him float things like, we're going to do a tax on the rich, right?
But then walk it back.
And you can read that in a couple of different ways.
You can say, He never met in the first place.
Or you can read it as, well, he actually is someone who's got a good sense of where the wind is blowing and what the base wants.
And maybe he would be happy to do a little bit.
You know, he's a billionaire himself.
You know, I wouldn't take it too far that he would be willing to do too much redistributive justice to return the hard working, increased productivity of the working classes back into their pockets the way that it was 50 years ago or so before a bunch of laws redistributed it to the very top, including Trump's own 2017 bill.
need to get the masses a little bit to keep them on your team, and that the corporate interests within his own party won't even let him do the bare minimum.
And so it's not clear to me how much there is a real war between the Steve Bannons who seem to be...
And just like the raw, open, you know, we don't need workers anymore.
We're going to do AI.
We're going to feed you cricket slop and you're going to like it.
We don't need humanity.
We're going to be on the moon types.
And like my concern, you know.
I don't know how to read it, but if I had to pick, I would much rather the Steve Bannon's wing of the Republican Party went out.
The problem is the Steve Bannon wing of the Republican Party didn't spend half a billion dollars electing Donald Trump.
Right.
And I think he also doesn't appeal to certain segments, demographically speaking, who are very powerful.
I mean, again, I think that, I hope that Steve Bannon and Wayne wins.
But, of course, I do think that even a—I think that populists, you can work across the aisle with economic populists on certain issues, whereas there's nothing you can work with Elon Musk types about, right?
They are scarier in many ways.
The policies are scarier, and there's very little overlap between, you know, the populist left and the populist right, to the extent that you can even have a populist right.
But yeah, certainly I think that the Elon Musk wing is more frightening than the—I mean, they're both frightening.
But yeah, I guess if—I mean, Bree, you're not someone who likes the lesser of two evils, but maybe that's the furthest I can say, is that Steve Bannon is the lesser of two evils when it comes to the Bannon wing or the Elon Musk wing.
Amen to that.
I can't disagree.
Katie, I really appreciate your willingness to talk through some of this with me.
This was cathartic for me because watching all of this happen in real time has been difficult, and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it with you, talk about it here on Glenn's amazing platform, and to continue to follow the Democrats' self-destruction cycle and incredible cope over their complicity and the great Biden cover-up.
