Why The Virginia Governors Race Doesn't Mean What You Think
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Jared and Nick have a jam-packed show, with a discussion ranging from how bad a candidate Terry McCauliffe was, to Jenna Ryan's sentence for being part of the insurrection, and the evils of automation and AI algorithms.
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Listen, when we do these Weekender episodes, I almost always started with opening a beer and refreshing myself for the weekend.
It's been one of those weeks, Nick.
The beer is already opened.
The beer is already halfway consumed.
So all I can say at this point is cheers.
Welcome to the Weekender.
I'm Jared Yates-Exton.
I'm here with Nick Halseman.
We got a lot to talk about, as always.
It's a lot, man.
It's a lot.
Man, next time, just let me know.
I'll try.
I mean, it's funny.
I don't have beer that you crack open in a can, so we don't do that in LA, I guess.
But it's a refreshing sound on the podcast.
It is, it is.
I mean, I could try and do a soft drink and no one would know the difference, but... I would know.
I would know.
That's the difference.
Well, either way.
By the way, I stopped eating sugar.
I had a Diet Coke, I think, last night or two nights ago.
It was awful.
It really is amazing how it can change.
When you don't build up the tolerance for it, it tastes like pure chemicals.
And I don't know any other way to segue to what we have to talk about besides bad taste left in our mouths.
Obviously, you're listening to this.
You're in this for the long run with the rest of us, and we thank you for that.
But we've got to talk about not just what happened in Virginia with the governor's race between Terry McAuliffe and Glenn Youngkin.
We've got to talk about the Democratic Party.
We've got to talk about the media.
We've got to talk about CRT.
There's a lot to dig into here.
Nick, start us off.
What was your initial reaction looking at the results that came in on Tuesday?
I guess, I want to say mild surprise.
I thought maybe there was some hand-wringing here that was sort of going to be all for naught, kind of like with the recall in California with Newsom.
But, you know, what it sounds like is that the outright lying that the Republicans took to doing during the campaign really, really worked.
You know, it served to get enough of the people off of their butts into the ballot box to vote on the Republican side.
And that's really just too bad.
I don't know if it's endemic of what's happening across the rest of the country.
It seems like the Democrats have some cause for hope in other races across the country.
But this one hurts because of the methods and what seems to be where the Republicans are going with how they're going to run their campaigns.
Yes, so in order for us to have a full conversation about this that is actually in reality, and one of the things that we hope to do on this podcast is talk about things as they actually are, not going along with conventional narratives that a lot of people decide on.
We have to point out that Phil Murphy, Democrat in New Jersey, won re-election, which was not a foregone conclusion.
There were other instances where Democrats did quite well.
So the idea that the sky is falling is not the truth.
But there is a situation that has developed here, and I want to go ahead and I want to start about the race itself.
Terry McAuliffe was an awful candidate.
Just an absolutely grotesque candidate.
And for people who don't know McAuliffe's background, of course, he is the former one-term governor of Virginia.
Because you cannot serve consecutive terms, he came back for more.
McAuliffe is, how do I put this, the most party politician of party politicians that there is.
Former head of the Democratic National Committee, this is the guy who basically signed checks behind the scenes, facilitated deals, got people to agree to certain things for debates and races, you know, picked candidates.
He has never been what I would refer to as a firecracker.
He does not bristle with charisma on top of that.
And I wrote about this on my sub stack this week.
One Democratic strategist said to me that this was the saddest sack of shit candidacy that he can remember this side of Jeb Bush.
McAuliffe had nothing to offer.
There was no promise.
There was no agenda.
It was basically, hey, remember when I was governor?
Let's do it again.
And what happened was he ran into a buzzsaw of not necessarily Glenn Youngkin.
It's not like he is an incredible candidate.
It's the fact that, as you already mentioned, Nick, this critical race theory thing is going to pay dividends for the Republican Party if the Democratic Party does not figure out how to deal with it.
Well, let's not forget, before we completely, you know, chisel his face on the Mount Rushmore of awful candidates, or the worst candidates of all time, in your words, that's your imagery.
I think he was already chiseled in a few years ago, they're just putting on the final touches, and that's okay.
Well, it's worth going down memory lane a little bit to remind ourselves of what kind of candidate he was when he first ran and, you know, as a very wealthy guy who seemed, you know, to in earnest want to help the state and actually would be maybe unencumbered by corruption because, you know, he had money.
He didn't need to be like, you know, propped up by anybody.
So I feel like What he wasn't ready for now is, and I looked up his age and I wanted to say he looks older than 64 to me now.
I feel like he, you know, and he felt older and not ready for this fight.
And I hope it's not, you know, indicative of something else, but nonetheless, you know, it's a different landscape running now than it was then.
And, you know, it's hard to really parse exactly what was the most negative effect on the campaign from the other side.
But like, when you look at the thing, like they were able to make a case That somehow Terry McAuliffe allowed some sort of, in a high school bathroom, an assault to happen.
As if maybe he was the security guard on that floor when it happened.
And by the way, it was never how they characterized it.
It was not what really happened with this assault.
They knew each other.
This wasn't like a trans person lying in wait and being some nefarious person in the bathroom.
They turned that into a fever dream.
Right.
And here's the worst part, and this might be why it caught him so off guard and not prepared to deal with it, is that if you check the date on this assault, and you check the dates that McAuliffe was actually governor, McAuliffe is a candidate, in a way, and I think you put your finger right on it.
It's incredible how they were able to do that.
I have to believe that that was a really big thing to turn out voters against him and to get the narrative going.
It's hard to ignore that that was a driving force to what would sunk him ultimately. - McAuliffe is a candidate in a way, and I think you put your finger right on it.
It's almost like Frozen Caveman Lawyer from the Saturday Night Live days.
It's like he's not a modern candidate and this is a problem within the Democratic Party.
I think some of them do not understand what they're facing.
They do not understand that there actually is a rising authoritarianism in part because they're not among the people.
You know what I mean?
People like me who live amongst these people, who have dealt with them, communicated with them, those of us who deal with these people constantly, we know what's happening.
We know what this culture war is and what it signifies.
I think McAuliffe and people like him think if they get up in front of a crowd and they talk about vouchers or if they talk about rebates or whatever, it will somehow or another get them over the finish line or they can talk sense to people or whatever.
But what happened here with critical race theory, this is fascinating.
It suddenly went from being this amorphous blob that meant anything the Republicans wanted it to mean in terms of race to suddenly having to do with trans people in bathrooms.
It's the idea that America is being handed over to evil, satanic, dangerous forces.
And McAuliffe had nothing for that.
Literally nothing for that.
There was no way whatsoever for him to communicate this or even wrap his head around it.
And I'm afraid that a lot of Democrats are similarly in the dark about exactly what they're facing.
Right.
Why is it so hard?
Okay, there it is.
I wanted to see how close this race ended up being.
So it looks to me like Youngkin got 50.9% and McAuliffe got 48.4%.
So it was close, but not that close, right?
McAuliffe should have won this.
Yeah, well...
Yes, especially if you get the context of how much Biden dominated in his race, right?
It's not that long ago.
But there, I mean, the reason why Biden won in Virginia the way that he did is that people were going out to vote against Donald Trump.
I mean, the Democratic Party is screwed in this case, because not only are they having this giant gridlock, they got dealt a terrible hand.
They're the ruling party in a country that the economy is all messed up, the supply chain is all messed up, and COVID is resurgent.
I mean, obviously they're going to suffer some losses, but to lose like this, it shows that people are not voting necessarily for them, they're voting against something.
Right, but here's the problem.
By you saying that the economy is screwed up, it isn't.
But it's the message it is, because the Democrats need to explain to everybody that the market is doing really well, unemployment's down.
All the indicators that the Republicans would be crowing about right now are not sort of being felt mentally in people's psyches.
So that's a real problem as well, which has always been the problem with them.
Obviously, McAuliffe had tried, and I don't fault them for trying to tie Glenn Youngkin to Trump.
That was their main thrust of their campaign.
Can we take a quick moment and talk about the Lincoln Project bullshit?
Yeah, yeah.
I should have meant to make that on their list, but yes, let's talk about it.
Yeah, so those who haven't followed this, just to let everyone know, The Lincoln Project put on a stunt in which they paid a bunch of interns to get dressed up like the Charlottesville rioters and go and pose in front of Yunkin's RV or whatever in the hell it was, and immediately people, you know, were like, oh my god, look at this, and it turned out to be a stunt, which, what a ham-fisted, bullshit, rat-funking thing this is!
This is Karl Rove!
That's who these people are and that's who they're involved with.
It's so clumsy and stupid.
But that's why, see Karl Rove doesn't feel clumsy and stupid.
This was clumsy and stupid without question, but it was like there was a woman, there was a person of color, so like obviously the idea was that this was so clearly a stunt and yet what happened was it began to get reported on as if these people were really like Protesters, you know, who were Charlottesville kind of people, you know, white supremacists.
It was a shitshow and someone should have been like, um, let's think about this a few more minutes.
Maybe if this is a possibility, then maybe we shouldn't do it.
Um, but in the emails, did you see the emails that came out out of all this?
And like, they tried to prove it, like, you know, we just didn't really mean this to be this way.
And again, I get it, but it just seems stupid and, uh, and just not thought out.
Uh, do you, I don't know if that had any effect in anything in reality, but maybe.
No, I don't think it did either.
I just, it, Man, it just annoyed me this dark arts thing.
I hate it.
And I hate that people want to bring it under a different umbrella and embrace it.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend.
I just I think it's I think it's a toxic, poisonous type of politics.
I think it sucks.
But it's the performative part of the politics.
It's really where we're at now.
And it's encompassing everything now, from even the politicians who are used to being performers anyway, but now it's in the way you want to protest is now performative.
So we're now getting to the point where none of this really matters.
There isn't any principle behind a lot of the ideology, certainly from certain areas and certain sides of this.
And so as a result, it's really becoming – I remember being so concerned when Hillary was running against Trump how bad it was going to get in terms of misogyny and all those kind of things.
Man, was I naive to think that that was all I was worried about because clearly where we're at now six years later from 2015, it's only going to get worse and it's going to become – I mean, because they're folding every other outrage and performative outrage you can manage and they're going to invent all the other ones going forward too.
So, next thing you know, you're going to have, you know, candidates who are accused of, again, well, they already were.
They're already accused of pedophilia, locking kids in wells or, you know, behind, underneath, you know, pizza piers.
But that's just going to be normal.
And imagine what's going to be the next step and how they heighten that.
Well, and, you know, we were talking about this before we started recording.
I mean, you know, and we talked about it on a past episode.
Like, some of the January 6th, like, coup people were, like, broadcasting live advertising their businesses.
Yes.
Like, you know, they were like, oh, do you want to buy a home from somebody who believes in Donald Trump and is willing to overthrow the government?
Well, guess what?
I'm your realtor.
And it's funny that you mention Jenna Ryan because she just got sentenced to the longest sentence of any of these people so far at 60 days, which there's some outrage there that it's only 60 days, but it's still the longest anyone else has gotten for trespassing as a misdemeanor.
isn't it weird Nick by the way that like our judiciary and legal system isn't it weird that like things like this are happening where someone tries to overthrow the government and profit off of it that they only get 60 days or I don't know that a judge says that a teenager who killed a couple of people in Wisconsin is That those people cannot be referred to as victims, but they're looters or rioters.
It's almost like our legal system has inherent prejudice in it.
I don't know.
I mean, you know, that's OK.
It's going to be that way.
And I'm almost willing to deal with that.
You know, 60 days is not not a short amount of time to two full months.
You know, for someone who I guess, you know, for all accounts, she wasn't.
Short months.
Yeah, I mean, she's probably played tennis only, like, for only 10 of those days, so it'll be a problem for her.
But, you know, it's hard for me to reconcile because the judges are pretty harsh as far as the reactions to their manipulations, the defense's manipulations, and what they're trying to make it seem like.
That's good that they're taking this evidence and weighing it negatively against them, which, and the evidence being, like, yeah, her broadcasting, the things she said about it being an insurrection, and she recognized how violent it was and why she shouldn't be there.
But I think the icing on the cake, obviously, was the tweet, and she still hasn't deleted the tweet that acknowledges that because she is white, She was not going to go to prison.
This was probably an essential part of the prosecution, and it certainly weighed heavily with the judge.
Now, what's frustrating about her, and it kind of exemplifies all these people, is that there was a performative Mia Culpa for a little while there, back in like February, March.
Clearly she had talked to a lawyer who said, just be public with your apologies and that's why she won't go to prison.
That's what she was talking to her lawyer.
And then she gets sentenced and now she's back into being defiant, saying, I just went to prison for a tweet that I wrote.
That's what she thinks.
And it's all an act.
It's all an act, which gets back to, you know, one of the main theses of this show is like that division between the performative nature of our politics, what we give to the world and who we are and what we're afraid of and what we're trying to accomplish.
I mean, and nothing embodies that more than this critical race theory bullshit.
It's not real.
It's not real.
And again, like, just in case some out there is clipping and they want to make sure that this gets on the record, let's say it.
Critical race theory is something that is very, very specific that gets taught in places like law school, right?
Like, this is an acceptable type of academic theory.
What Republicans have turned it into is just a buzzword that encompasses white paranoia, white fear that There's going to be real history taught, or that you're going to read works and writing of people of color or marginalized groups.
And it's been weaponized to the point now, I mean, we can go ahead and say authoritatively, this is what won the race in Virginia.
It became a referendum on whether or not the people of West Virginia believed that there was a conspiracy in public education Towards you know trying to help people of color and and undoubtedly they think the traitors are doing this This is what QAnon is all about deep state new world order all of this We are going to watch exactly what you said This isn't going to stop and I have to tell you I pay enough attention to these people They're openly saying that
They're saying out loud, we know CRT isn't a real thing.
We know this is a total scam, but it's a winner.
It's a great cudgel.
It's a great weapon.
They are celebrating so hard right now that they have found what they believe to be the silver bullet that damns Democrats.
And Democrats are not prepared to have a discussion about this or offer anything alternatively.
to make the conversation change.
And those are the secrets.
You have to hit it head on and offer an alternative.
And the Democrats right now are simply incapable of doing that or unwilling.
I'm so glad you brought that up because that was the other cudgel.
They're going to lose the grip that they have on abortion because it's going to get overturned.
There's already movement that way.
So maybe people are kind of relaxing.
So this is the new way of filling that void is CRT.
It's perfect for them because it can get even more people outraged about it.
And yes, again, they were able to pin, somehow, Terry McAuliffe is CRT, and he's going to make sure that your white kids feel horrible about themselves when they learn that they were slavery.
That's basically what they want to argue.
I had shared on Twitter, and if you want to follow me, you can hear me on Smaj.
Tucker Carlson said that last night live on the air!
guy who was you know he seemed relatively smart he was probably in his 70s and they were interviewing him in Virginia about why he was against McAuliffe and he says because that CRT stuff I don't I don't like it I don't I don't stand for it and the guy says what is it he goes well I don't really know enough about it to be able to talk about what it is he goes Tucker Carlson said that last night live on the air Tucker Carlson said in so many words I still haven't figured out what CRT is right yeah well so he followed up he goes well well what is it what is there
anything that really like bothers you that you're saying it's It's really bothering you.
Like, is there one part of it that really bothers you?
And again, he goes, well, I just don't even know what it is, but I know it's wrong.
And then by association, I know that McAuliffe must stand for that.
Like, that's what they've convinced.
And this guy didn't appear in the minute and a half of the interview to be incapacitated or any kind of lacking any kind of intelligence.
But here's where we are, where it's enough to just have these three letters.
They're so good at that.
The Republicans at like boiling down these things into these little sound bites with no substance behind it.
And it's almost like it's human nature.
And they're willing to do it a lot more than I guess the Democrats will.
So it's again what Terry McAuliffe, you know, you hear Greg Youngkin's or Glenn Youngkin's rallies sound like Hitler Youth stuff where they're trying to ban books.
They're getting rid of certain words.
We want to make sure nobody gets to learn any of this stuff anymore.
They're going to rewrite history, basically.
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