The Twitter Files Nothingburger With Pete Dominick
Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman welcome on the show Pete Dominick, of "Stand Up With Pete," as they dissect what is really going on with Elon Musk's "revelations" of Twitter correspondence during the 2020 presidential campaign. They then the Georgia election and if it is a sign that America is ready to stand up to fascism, before finishing off with the ramifications of Apple pulling out of China.
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Also, by the way, Pete Dominick of Stand Up With Pete Dominick.
I gotta tell you, we are three boys who are just ready to vibe out.
All of us are on varying levels of caffeine and medication.
We're ready to rock and roll.
How we doing, fellas?
Great to see you guys.
I'm so happy to be back on with you.
I love you guys a lot.
I love listening to you.
And I'm psyched to, what did you call it, vibe with you.
Let's vibe.
I have a lot of Duncan.
I run on Duncan all day long.
Well, listen, we're just three grown boys ready to hang out and have a great time.
Right, Nick?
That's how I do it, I guess.
I wasn't ready to be called on.
I'm sorry.
You caught me.
It's alright.
We got a jam-packed show, man.
We got all kinds of things.
Power going down in North Carolina.
We've got Apple weighing in on a weird globalization trend that we kind of predicted but we gotta get into.
We've got the Georgia special election.
But guess what, guys?
The Republicans?
They got Hunter Biden.
It's done.
It's all locked and loaded.
It's all over.
Matt Taibbi released on Friday what is now being called the Twitter Files.
And I love that we had to name this fart in church.
Uh, this was something that went up.
I want to say it was Friday at like 6 p.m.
Eastern, which is where you basically do a Friday news jump that you hope nobody hears about.
Tayibi had to agree to quote-unquote certain conditions with Elon Musk in order to run these files.
We can talk about the specifics of what was actually seen.
I thought it was a pretty embarrassing thing.
I have my own opinions on Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Pete, what were your reactions to this story as it unrolled?
Did it feel like Woodward and Bernstein to you?
It felt like sadness to me personally because I used to be really close with Matt Taibbi, and I had a lot of admiration for Matt.
The way I saw this playing out, his own substack to his readers, I subscribed with a free subscription to his substack, and he basically apologized that he was doing this on Twitter and not to his paid subscribers, so he was compromised to some extent there, but that's okay.
He can do that.
He can do whatever he wants.
He's independent now, but the actual reporting was at such...
They were unethical.
They were breaches of ethics.
I mean, he doxed people with their own names out there.
Even Elon Musk said, maybe we should have redacted those names.
I mean, that's an unethical thing for him to do.
And it was just bad reporting.
And it was just one side of things.
And there were so many things that were left out.
And that's certainly not his style in the past.
But whatever's happened to Matt, and why he chose to do this, and why Elon Musk chose And the larger, more important story, which, hey, listen, we're all interested in knowing that if Joe Biden, when he was the vice president, his son was using his name and giving him kickbacks.
If that was the case when he was a vice president, that's certainly a valid story.
There's just no evidence of that yet.
And it's been very deeply investigated by all the cartoon villains who would love, you know, the same people who threw out Joe Biden's daughter's Tirey entries would more than happy to have evidence.
And even the lady who wrote this for the New York Post, Miranda Devine, went on Tucker Carlson and she's like, there's nothing much here.
Will Kane, there's nothing much here.
Right wing extremists who will say anything to get clicks and ratings were basically saying this, as you said, Jared, was a fart in church.
Well, I'll say this, you know, I don't know if it was bad journalism because they spent an extra hour and a half making sure Elan delayed the release in the mail because they wanted to research, Pete.
So this wasn't, you know, completely shoddy journalism.
It took another 90 minutes before they released all this information.
That's what they teach at journalism school, Nick.
It's a 90 minute fact check.
That's hard and fast in all of journalism.
By the way, somebody went through, because he included links to the tweets that were requested from the Biden... I say this very carefully, not the Biden administration, the Biden campaign.
This is not anybody from the government.
This is a buddy calling another buddy.
And I just want you to know, I've seen most of the Hunter Biden tapes, so you don't have to.
Have you guys?
I don't think you've seen him.
No!
Because, like, you know, I know that Hunter Biden is left-handed, and I don't, no one else has to know that, okay?
But this is what happens when you, you know, they want this stuff taken down.
There's, you know, this isn't a huge deal, you know, of... Are there shapes of him painting?
Yes, he's painting.
He might not be using a paintbrush, but he's painting, and I gotta tell you, it's prolific.
He really filmed a lot of things, and you would think at some point he'd say to himself, maybe I shouldn't film this, but he did, and hey, it's artistic nonetheless.
I don't have a, it's like, that's the thing.
I don't think anybody cared that they wanted to take some of that Link stuff down so that it's not all that, you know, all the sexual stuff that he's doing easily accessible to people on Twitter.
So I want to go on the record here, and I've said this on this podcast and we've talked about it ad nauseum.
This is not a partisan shill podcast.
We're not going to sit here and launder people.
You know, if somebody broke the law, if somebody is engaged in corruption, my God, I hope that they are caught.
You know what I mean?
Like, if it comes out, Pete, I'm with you.
If it comes out that somehow or another Biden or his family were engaged in, like, crooked schemes, my God, find it out!
If Hunter Biden broke the law, punish him.
I have no problem with that whatsoever.
It is this farce.
Is what it is, right?
This is... It's the same thing I was telling with this last night on the livestream.
It's the Clinton crime family, right?
It's the Clinton body count.
It's this thing where there's absolutely... It seems like nothing there.
We've heard people on both sides of the aisle say that there's nothing there.
Meanwhile, it's more of a fishing expedition.
It's the exact same thing that happened with the Clintons, right?
You go from a land deal corruption case and all of a sudden you end up with Monica Lewinsky.
And if you don't have that, at least you're filling hours on Fox News.
At least you're giving people on talk radio something to talk about.
And you can say, oh, what about Trump being indicted?
Well, what about Hunter Biden's laptop?
I think the really interesting, important thing, guys, to talk about is how these kinds of narratives have been being created.
You're talking about the Clinton crime family, but you could also talk about the investigations.
I covered all of these.
At SiriusXM, the Benghazi investigation, the IRS investigation, the Fast and Furious, but it's important to talk about, and I talked to you guys about this last time I was on with you, how they use these kind of tactics and techniques locally too.
So in this case, you know, they have these documents, it's just internal moderation, and they put up screenshots and they write things around it to create a narrative.
That's what happens at the Board of Education elections.
They create these controversies.
They foiled the board.
They got these documents.
And then they write whatever narrative they want about it.
And a certain high percentage of people believe in it.
They get outraged by it.
They're activated by it, and we can talk about what happens, but it's important to talk about how they do this so that folks are aware that they do it at every level of government.
And everybody should be critically thinking and curious and unbiased.
If your site's corrupt, and they often are, then they should be run out on a rail.
They should be investigated.
They should be taken to task.
But if it's made up, Almost out of thin air with just a grain of truth to create a narrative to create enough doubt Then we have real danger and people need to be Critically thinking and understanding the sources of their information where they get this because you could believe anything you want as you guys talk about all the time And by the way, you're already prefacing what's going to happen in Congress with January 6th as they get all the raw intelligence that they have.
They're going to copy and paste two different things together and make it seem like there's all this corruption and all these things they hid.
So it is definitely a thing that as long as you're predisposed to believe these things from one side or the other, then it's going to be red meat.
You're going to just gobble up in love and use it, you know, as ammunition.
Well, and I want to say Republican rhetoric, and this is from a linguistic standpoint, like it literally, if you study it, and I have, and I know people who have, it is so base level reptilian.
It is.
And by that, I mean, it is deep in terms of how they react to it, but it's so shallow, right?
There's not a lot to it.
There's not a lot of complicated patterns.
There's not a lot.
It's simply saying Hunter Biden is a criminal.
And as a result, that makes anything legitimate around it, whether or not it's locking people up or opposing agendas or any of that.
I also want to talk about, very quickly, a couple things that have not been examined within this.
Because, you know, this story, you know, even Sebastian Gorka was like, this is deeply disappointing, you know?
And like, it's this awful situation, but it also revealed a couple of things.
Everyone right now on one hand is saying, Elon Musk, it seems like he's flirting with the right.
He's gone.
He's on the right.
This is deeply, deeply Republican right-wing online behavior.
This Hunter Biden thing is basically the shibboleth that people are able to shake hands and they're like, hey, we read the same sites and we visit the same sites.
The second thing I want to talk about, and Pete, I want to hear your perspective on this.
The Matt Taibbi thing is really interesting.
Matt Taibbi has made his entire career off of seemingly being an independent, contrarian reporter, right?
He is the one who will question sort of conventional narratives.
He'll go ahead and he'll call out liberals and Democrats or whatever.
He made his current career on opposing a story, which I think we should talk about for a second.
It's important.
This idea of Russian collusion around the Trump campaign in 2016.
And we like to go deeper on this podcast, deeper than other people do, and so do you, Pete.
If you get in the weeds of this, the problem is that post-2016, a lot of liberals wanted to blame the loss completely on the Russian collusion story, right?
They would say, oh, it was just Russia that took it.
Meanwhile, there was one campaign mistake after another in the Clinton campaign.
Also, the material conditions were leaning towards Trump.
There's a whole host of things that happened there.
They were the most hated candidates ever to run.
Absolutely.
And Taibbi and someone like a Glenn Greenwald were able to say, hey, we'll stand up and say that this was all a hoax.
Meanwhile, it's not a hoax whatsoever.
The Trump campaign on the record was trying to collude with Russia and actively colluded with Russia.
Whatever role that played.
I have my thoughts on what has happened with Tayibi and what has also happened with Greenwald and what's happening within this media environment.
Pete, what is your take on both Elon Musk and where he is right now as the richest man and one of the most powerful men, but also what has happened with Tayibi and Greenwald?
Well, I talked to Jeff Charlotte, who's got a great new book out.
And, you know, really, I think a very well respected reporter.
He writes for Vanity Fair now.
I mean, he was just openly calling Elon Musk a fascist, working with fascists, conducting fascism.
And I hear a lot of people loosely throwing that around now.
And I generally agree with it.
I don't know if it's a word that convinces everybody.
I think it needs to be unpacked.
I think when we use these words that We're used to describe Italians and Germans in the 30s and 40s, you know, when it was a lot of different circumstances.
Sometimes people say, well, that's not exactly what it.
OK, well, I don't know what you want to call it.
Christian nationalism, fascism, white supremacy.
You've written all about this.
I've learned so much from from you and listening to you guys talk about it here.
But I think that Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Kanye West And to some extent, Nick Fuentes over the last few weeks, they've all kind of done something similar.
They've really controlled our attention with their behavior, with their antics.
And it's important when it's Donald Trump and Elon Musk, because they both have a tremendous amount of power.
Trump is president and former president and cult leader, and Elon Musk is richest man in the world and now owner of our precious Twitter.
And so I think that It's really important to talk about what they're doing and how they're controlling the narrative and how much attention we should or should not be paying to it.
But Twitter is such a valuable tool for so many reasons and now it being owned by Elon Musk and almost uses his own media outlet and we've already touched on his beliefs but they are right wing?
They are.
Patriarchal, they are racist, they are all kinds of problematic and he's now the editor-in-chief of Twitter and using it as his own news source and failing miserably with his first attempt at teasing and then releasing a story.
But it's unfortunately really important to see day-to-day how this plays out and needs to be kind of covered day-to-day to an extent to know what Twitter is.
Is now and becoming.
That's my feeling on Elon Musk, but I want to know your guys.
Well, Pete, remind me.
Forgive me if I can't remember.
Were you on Air America?
I mean, I guested on it, but I never hosted a show.
How is it doing now?
Well, all of its alumni are doing pretty good.
Al Franken, Sam Seder, Rachel Maddow.
Well, my point is, is that, like, you know, I think that the main reason why a lot of times people do these kind of shifts is because it's money, right?
There's so much more money to be made, it seems, in the right-wing sphere of talking and publishing.
It could have worked.
There was a lot of mismanagement at that place.
I'll say that.
We can talk about money in liberal media, but are you saying that Elon Musk cares about money?
Well, I think here's what I'm getting worried about, is that this is starting to feel like it's transcending money now, and it isn't necessarily only about that.
Being in control of the conversation, having the entire world looking at him, That's what Trump did every day.
That's what Elon Musk is doing.
That's what Kanye did the other day.
That's what Alex Jones, that's what any entertainer wants to do.
But it's, that's what he's doing.
But Kanye, I think, believes the anti-Semitism that he's doing.
I don't think he's trying to build a new brand and try and get more people to buy whatever his stuff is.
And that's what makes me a little bit concerned is because I think that there is some belief going on in here that transcends just the money grab that a lot of people would normally do.
Well, and I want to go ahead and put this out there.
Everyone was talking about Elon Musk having to pay $44 billion for Twitter.
I thought it was a steal.
This was never about turning it into a profit center.
This is about literally controlling one of the narrative-making weapons, probably one of the greatest ones that has ever existed.
Well, it's like owning all of Fox News, Murdoch Empire, plus the NBC News, CNN, CBS, AP.
It's like owning all of the major corporates and then all the independents.
You own everything if you own Twitter.
I would go so far as to say that you don't even own all of those things.
You own the interior space and imaginations of everybody.
I mean, like, that's literally what Twitter does.
It creates the narratives that all the other networks sort of feed from.
And also, I want to say this, Kanye absolutely believes what he says.
He's a narcissist who believes, he has a messiah complex.
And meanwhile, there's a whole group of people who are making incredible money off of him.
Elon Musk has reached the point, and I don't think people get this, As the wealthiest man in the world, and also as the chief, like, priest of long-termism, believing that he is the person who's responsible for the future of the human race, he has literally reached that transcendent level where he has to go ahead and get rid of any impediments to him gaining more power and more wealth, and Twitter is one of the ways to do that.
I mean, yes, but I would love to know what you guys both think about what he thinks about what other people think about Free speech.
What is free speech?
Cause that thread has been lost and people think you can say whatever you want, wherever you want.
And it turns out, it turns out that if you're about to get on a plane and you go nuts at the gate and start screaming that you're a Nazi, all of the other passengers, or actually, you know, it turns out that if you are at a gate with an airplane and you even act a little weird, like you're just shaking a little bit, Or you're sweating, or your bag is misshapen.
All the rest of the passengers, all the rest of us, they'll be like, ah, I don't like that guy.
So the guy goes crazy at an airport last week, talking about Hitler, and talking about just some random guy.
And then, the police take him away.
Or, this happens on planes all the time, and, you know, the pilot, you know, the passengers and the pilot duct-take him to his seat.
I had this happen on a plane one time that I was on years ago, and I was the hero, and I got very little respect or credit for it, and I'm still a little jaded by it.
No news media for me when I save the plane.
But the point is, you can't say anything you want wherever you want.
And if you do, there might be consequences.
You're not going to make this flight.
That's one scenario I'm saying, but I'd love to hear from you guys about Elon Musk and free speech and just everybody thinking they can go anywhere, to any school board meeting, to any school, anywhere they want, your mother's funeral, and say whatever the hell they want.
I want to say something real fast, and I want to bring Taibbi back on this, because this is actually one of the main sticking points.
And I want to be frank about this.
Matt Taibbi has been revealed to be a complete and utter slimeball.
And not only is his push against so-called wokeness and cancel culture corresponding with the rise of the possibility that people like him might face consequences, Elon Musk, and by the way, Pete, I don't know if you listened to this episode, one of the most amazing moments in the Muckrake podcast history was the day that Nick and I were recording an episode and Elon was starting to move further and further right, you know, in this like obvious way.
And Nick said, and I swear to God this took place an hour before it came out, that he tried to buy a woman off with a horse.
Nick said, I bet in the next couple of days it'll come out that Elon Musk has some skeletons in his closet that he's running from.
We finished recording, I went out and had a beer, and we had to record a follow-up that basically was like, I'm sorry, Nick is Nostradamus.
And the whole point of it is, these are terrified men who want to scream about free speech, but that's not what they're actually talking about.
The free speech thing sounds great.
You know what I mean?
It's a great pitch.
It's a great piece of rhetoric.
They want to control the narrative in order to protect themselves and their power and their influence.
And I think that's the ideology that they hide behind.
Nick, what do you think?
Well, I think it's interesting because there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what canceling is or what suppression of free speech is.
I think that to the right, the criticism, just the criticism is in their minds silencing.
Even though I'm hearing you loud and clear.
I'm hearing you complain about it loud and clear.
You're not silenced.
You're not, you know, cancelled.
But in their minds, the pushback, which is supposed to be the normal consequence of hate speech or misinformation, to them is the silencing.
And that's what they can't handle.
Probably because they hadn't really been silenced before.
They're hanging out with their buddies and they're talking like Kanye was probably... I said this before in the last pod.
Canceling doesn't exist now.
around talking about this kind of stuff so matter-of-factly that it was easy for him to go on Alex Jones and just sort of say this like it sounded very rehearsed like he'd been talking about that a lot so that's the difference there is that no one is canceled they're just being criticized like they should be and to them it's like an affront to their their whole being canceling doesn't exist now it's actually a parallel shadow economy what they're talking about is widespread profit and acceptance now Now, if you get cancelled, and by the way, Pete, you've seen this with a bunch of comedians.
If you are a cancelled comedian, you go get the gigs with the right-wing people, and you go tell them terrible jokes.
I mean, Jim Brewer is a walking, talking example of this.
A completely washed-up comedian who made a new career for himself going out and making jokes about masks.
Yeah I mean another real disappointment in my life someone who I was pretty close with who during I don't know at what point in the pandemic was I just got a random text from someone and I look at my phone and it's just as JB because you know I don't put all my famous friends in my phone by their name you know and so I'm like who is this and he's like screw you with your prick And he was referring to the shot, something about that.
And I was like, what is this?
And then I look into it.
And my old friend, Jim Brewer, who, by my opinion, was one of the funniest live performers.
The last time I saw him live, he just killed talking about taking care of his elderly dad and him crapping his pants and all this family stuff that was like clean and hilarious and really good, like at his best comedy.
He just fell right off.
And started talking, Trump radicalized him, the pandemic radicalized him, religion radicalized him, and now he'll complain.
Yeah, I've been canceled.
No, dude, you had a solid hour of the funniest, most undivisive material, and you gave it up to be crazy.
By the way, real fast, speaking of Trump, we have to talk about this for just a quick moment.
After the Twitter files go over, which, you know the thing that we haven't discussed yet is that it was literally just a social media platform making spur-of-the-moment decisions about what to do with content and, you know, Conspiracy theories.
The actual Twitter files.
That's what they, that was a conversation about what to do with something.
And by the way, if you have a problem with that, I will join you on the steps at the Capitol talking about, let's go ahead and break these people up and like, let's get some legislation.
I'm all about that.
But meanwhile, Donald Trump reacts to it with, I don't know, gabber, social profile, truth,
distortion whatever it is that's up and running today and it'll break down tomorrow and he comes out and he says not only should the 2020 election be rescinded he also and and i find this kind of amusing because uh you can't help it he kind of sort of advocates destroying the constitution which again shows not only what his impulses are he is an inherent uh instinctual fascist But also a total misunderstanding of what he's saying at any given moment.
I know it's disturbing and it makes good headlines, but this isn't anything that we haven't known for a while, right Nick?
Oh absolutely and it's funny because I like I'll play games with my seven or eight year old nephew now and you score on him and he wants a do-over he refuses to acknowledge that he's losing and it really is startling when you have to deal with that because it sounds exactly like what Trump is trying to do and by the way I gotta tell you I don't like to lose I'm I beat this kid every time we play these games I will dominate a child in a game.
And he's going to learn how to graciously lose.
And that's what no one ever did.
That was Trump, I suppose.
But I was going to ask you about that because do the Twitter files give you the impression that, yes, they were effing around with the algorithm and they were suppressing certain, you know, either the left or the right?
Because that's a big argument that the right has.
They're being suppressed somehow in the algorithm.
They don't even understand what it is.
But you know what I mean?
I got the sense that there might have been this notion that they could decompress, or whatever that word is I'm looking for, you know, certain tweets and certain, you know, keywords so people don't see them as much.
So, Pete, do you have a thought on this?
Because I think I understand what has happened here.
I think that there is all kinds of manipulation on every social media platform, and so much of it is not nefarious.
And then some of it is by consequence nefarious in terms of what the outcomes are and how they are manipulated by users oftentimes, by bots even.
And I think they're trying to control for a lot of those things.
I don't know enough and haven't read the reporting internally about whether Twitter or any other social media platform Uh how they manipulate and why they manipulate but you know it's also simple things like if on Twitter I say hey listen today's episode of Stand Up With Pete Dominick and I include a link, Twitter and Facebook and any other social media rightfully, evilly, doesn't want You just blew my mind.
their Twitter site.
So when I put a link in, it's not as likely to be seen.
So I have to trick it by saying, oh, the link is in the replies.
So there's all kinds of things like that.
They just want you to keep using the platform.
But Jared, what were you going to say?
Probably something far more intellectual.
But you just blew my mind.
I've been tweeting wrong this whole time.
I've been putting links in my tweets and that's, oh my God.
Yeah.
And in Facebook.
By the way, that's my guess.
I'm pretty sure that's true though.
All right.
By the way, I want to point out the only thing that we have are guesses.
One of the main problems in our current culture, we have no idea how the hell any of this works.
We're not, we're not Twitter engineers.
We're not coders.
I actually am.
Part of the problem is that we do live, and I want to make this clear, when the Republicans and the Conservatives are yelling about shadow bans, yes, are they pathetic whiners, right?
Yes, they are.
But they're also speaking to a deep anxiety that we all have.
This is how our economy works.
And no one besides the people, who by the way, many of them don't even understand the machines that they're running, people don't know this, Financial firms that basically decide how our economy works and how everything functions, they don't understand the algorithms.
The 2008 meltdown happened in part because they didn't understand what their algorithms were doing.
And the next thing you know, everything falls apart.
Here's another thing.
I know this is going to shock people.
Journalists And tech people aren't actually objective.
They are subjective human beings.
Elon Musk right now, this is the great irony, is showing incredible subjectivity and showing incredible manipulation of Twitter.
And yes, they were refs that had been worked.
Nick, you know how this is.
If you yell at a ref and say, hey, you're not calling things my way long enough, eventually the ref is going to call something because, unconsciously, they want to prove that they're not biased.
And guess what happened in 2016?
The tech platforms, they let this stuff run rampant, and they made a mint off of it.
And so, yes, before 2020, they probably looked at the Hunter Biden laptop story and said, this is a conspiracy theory, let's go after it.
That happened Twitter, that happened the New York Times, that happened Washington Post, you name it.
And they were trying, they were basically answering the working of the refs.
Oh, and then to piggyback on that, the Hunter Biden story was supposed to be Hillary's emails that was going to sink Biden, just like the emails sank Hillary Clinton.
And that's what the right is really having a hard time about, because it was a perfect plan.
And it would make sense, having seen 2016, that of course we're going to really use this.
To kind of wrap your head around the fact that maybe Facebook and maybe, you know, Twitter suppressed some of this from bubbling up completely like it would normally do, is an affront which is making you seem like the whole election was now scandalous.
And that's what Trump is basically saying.
He's like, you didn't let me use the Biden dirt like we use it on Hillary, so that's why I lost.
Which is probably true, right?
And the reason why they didn't want to amplify the Hunter Biden sub was because we found out how much bullshit the email shit was in the first place anyway, and they were reluctant to amplify that again.
I don't think I'm speaking out of turn.
I think that's exactly what they did.
I mean, it's all that I think is all those outcomes are possible.
I mean, and I think that you just give a lot of context there as well, Jared.
But it's it's it's just I think one of the unforeseen consequences or circumstances that I keep thinking about is How does this affect, like, all of our lives and businesses and livelihoods if we can't advertise, promote, connect, use Twitter as the tool we have become fairly reliable, reliant on, and not expecting that it would disappear?
And, you know, are we just screaming into the void then?
Like, what am I going to do if I can't see Jared's texts?
Well, what am I going to do when the Midnight Kingdom and History of Power Paranoia and the Coming Crisis comes out in January and there's no Twitter there?
I'm going to set up a thing where I'm going to have you text me what you would have tweeted.
I'll pay you a few cents per text.
It'll add up.
I love it.
I love how this is going.
By the way, that's Elon Musk's whole plan, in case it wasn't clear.
I don't think I brought this on the show yet.
He is increasing engagement and he keeps tweeting about it.
Oh my god, we've never had as much and more sign-ups, whatever.
Because he's going to make the whole thing pay.
And the conversion rate on that is usually like 2% or less, so he needs to get a huge pool so the 2% that stay are paying the $8 a month or whatever.
That, if they have millions and millions, that actually might pay some bills if they can do that.
But man, what a horrible, you know, scape that would be.
So, speaking of horrible things, boys, people are going to be listening to this on December 6th, which brings us to the Georgia special runoff election.
I don't know how y'all are feeling about this.
We need to discuss it.
First things first, I anticipate, and I have to assume that both of you do, that Raphael Warnock is going to win this.
There are multiple reasons for that.
Personally, I, as a longtime resident of Georgia, somebody who's paid a lot of attention to this race and also cares about, I don't know, basic human decency and intelligence in politics, I cannot wait until this thing gets covered up like a turd in kitty litter and we can move on from it and hopefully learn from it.
Pete, how are you feeling about this thing?
Well, I mean, I think it's important to just recognize that once Herschel Walker hopefully goes away, and boy did he not know what he had signed up for.
I mean, if someone had told him, listen, you're going to run and then you have to run again right after that and you're going to lose.
And all of the terrible, terrible things you did to women and your own family, it's gonna destroy everything that's good in your life right now.
There's a guy named Roger Sullenberger out there, friend of the pod, who is going to hell.
I've joked on Twitter how that reporter, Roger Sullenberger, the Daily Beast, who has broken so many of these stories from Hershel Walker's exes and kids and so on, that, like, Hershel Walker Here's that name, Sollenberger, and it just will haunt him for the rest of his life.
But I mean, like, we're going to see other of these types of candidates.
I think it's important, and I'm sure you guys have talked about this and have plenty to say about it, that Hershel Walker is the white supremacist Christian nationalist candidate.
And the prime minister in Italy, Melania, I think her name is, she is the candidate also of patriarchy.
Like, just because A black person is the first person or a woman is the first person to break this glass ceiling in this office.
Doesn't mean it's good for, in this case, black folks or women.
It's actually that he's just being used.
He's just being used by white folks because, well, for all the reasons we know.
And the same to be with this woman in Italy.
And I think it's just important.
They're going to keep trying to do this.
But in this case, Raphael Warnock, aside from him and his strengths and minor weaknesses, in my opinion, People are voting against Hershel Walker.
And there are huge lines, which is emblematic of the problematic new laws that they passed.
People try to say it's not suppressing the vote.
It's hugely problematic, we've seen the lines, the whole situation that Stacey Abrams and others have been fighting for.
Those are my thoughts on it.
And the next one, who is it going to be?
It's going to be some other potentially black or female right-wing celebrity that they're gonna put out there.
We're gonna have to hear them not know how to speak and communicate clearly and have to hear all the terrible ideas or lack of ideas that they have and they'll have to have Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham sitting to either side of them to speak for them.
It's gonna be somebody else is all I'm saying.
Dr. Oz is done.
Hershel Walker is hopefully done.
Who's next?
Sorbo?
Kevin Sorbo?
Well, it's Elon Musk is next, right?
This is all what this is building towards, as far as I can tell.
He is trying to do, you know, Trump was able to make his name on TV with The Apprentice, and then that really catapulted him into the political sphere.
You know, you have to get famous first.
Ricky Schroeder?
It's Rick.
Oh, Chachi?
By the way, Jared, I wanted to ask you, I came across a really good thread yesterday from a guy talking about how hard it is to vote in Georgia.
And he walking us through, and like, there's rooms they bring you to, and you gotta wait there first, then they have to show your ID, then they check something else, and then 20 minutes later, then they bring you somewhere else, get a piece of paper.
Is it really, like, in L.A., you walk in, they give you, you say your name, they check it off, they give you the thing, you vote.
Is that really not that way when you were in Georgia?
Nick, I'm going to give you a quick little answer on that, and that is, it depends on where you are.
And this is the problem with Georgia.
Georgia has this incredible gene pool.
I read this, is this right?
In certain affluent suburbs of Atlanta, they carry you in a chariot To the polling place, and those people are actual former felons who they don't allow to vote.
Well, it's a carriage, Nick, but I repeat, but it's an 1867 carriage, so they don't feel bad about it.
Oh, God.
No, it's the situation where it is this state.
It has this genteel veneer, and it really wants to pretend it's more progressive than it is.
And meanwhile, as they're doing that, and Brian Kemp is like the avatar of this, they are just absolutely running things behind the scene.
And I have to tell you, so I had a conversation a couple days ago with a, how do I put this, I don't want to blow anybody up, a higher up in the Republican Georgian party.
And they were talking about Herschel Walker, and they said, you know, they were really relieved because the circumstances right now are such that they didn't have to really support Herschel Walker.
Him getting elected or not getting elected really doesn't matter in the balance of things at this point, but also it's important because as we talked about on election night, Nick, That would mean six years of Herschel Walker, and then he would run for re-election after six years, right?
That is a long time to be chained to somebody.
I mean, you know, going off what Pete had said, God knows how many more families we're going to find.
God knows how many more skeletons are in that closet.
And this person said to me, I want to get this quote right, because I've been laughing about this for days.
He said about Herschel Walker, the relief of it was it, quote, it's like a heart attack.
you just have to wait for it to go away.
- This erection is more incursable.
This erection is about the people.
- This erection is about the people.
This is a situation where the Georgia Republican Party understands that they not only got this wrong, Donald Trump used their system against them.
It gave them an unwinnable, absolutely unacceptable candidate.
They're ready to move on beyond it.
Even Trump knows!
Trump is doing an appearance at a rally by telephone!
He's in Florida!
He's in Florida!
That's just over there!
And like, this is an understandable thing, but it is important to point out, and this goes back to what you were saying, Pete, this is a low-point American democracy.
It really, truly is.
I mean, like, it really is that this person could have got to this point and could have actually had a chance at winning this thing.
But I think at long last, and Nick, I'd love to hear what you have to say, I think it's done for Herschel.
I think Raphael's gonna win this thing.
How do you feel about it?
You want me to?
OK.
I mean, listen, we kept saying before this with all these candidates that it didn't matter to the Republican Party.
They want a rubber stamp.
Remember the robot thing?
Pete hasn't heard my robot thing, but you know.
Pete, Nick really wants to replace all of our politicians with robots.
It's been problematic.
Right.
Because all we want to do is rubber stamp exactly what we want them to vote for.
So why do they have to be human at this point?
Well, I think they should be replaced by the product or service that they take the most money lobbying from.
So, you know, in West Virginia, you just have a bag of coal.
In Arizona, maybe like a magazine of bullets.
Maybe that'd be better for Texas.
Maybe it's just like a roller of Amway boxes.
How do you make them vote?
There's a visual here, right?
You got to have something that picks the stamp up or whatever and then stamps it or whatever.
That's what I'm thinking.
But either way.
But the point being that, like, yeah, they don't give a shit about whether these people are good people or whether they live a pious life, right?
They don't care.
And, you know, maybe they do.
Maybe this is what this is saying, right?
Even though, how many million are going to end up voting for Hershel Walker?
I forgot the numbers here.
It's tens of millions, right?
It's a lot of people.
Too many people.
It's frustrating, but maybe not as frustrating as it should be because he's losing or he's not going to win and Oz didn't win.
Somehow we stood up to this a little bit.
Maybe 2022 was the stand that we made.
Maybe.
What do you think?
Was this election our last stand against authoritarianism?
I'm optimistic.
I think that this election outcome, this is my big takeaway from it.
is a predictor of what we're seeing more, we're gonna see more to come, which is they've gone too far.
They're too extreme.
The vast majority of Americans at this point still believe that the moon is not made of cheese, that climate change is real, that vaccines work, that Joe Biden won, and that abortion is okay and necessary even, and that guns are, you know, a lot of the things that they have
believe that are so extreme and conspiratorial a lot of Americans have said no especially and most importantly young people so I think that the future is going to be we're going to you know be on the precipice and if we can never stop fighting and and making ourselves aware and obviously they've got the courts and what's happening in the Supreme Court this week is horrible and so there's going to continue to be violence and all kinds of
Horrible situations, especially for anybody who's living in any kind of marginalized or compromised situation, life financially, health-wise, whatever.
But I do think that young people spoke really loudly in November, and I think that mattered, and I'm counting on it.
You're talking about the website designer in Supreme Court right now who didn't want to make a website for gay people, right?
I'm talking about that case, and more importantly, Harper, what is it, Moore, more the the North Carolina Republican legislature case that would be really consequential for the future of democracy in terms of how elections at the state level and the president are are predicted confirmed etc so well I would go ahead and I would I would say a couple things first First of all, it's bad enough that the stolen Supreme Court operates the way that it does.
I don't need Alito making jokes about young black children in KKK rooms.
I'm not caught up on what he said today, but I know all of my con law scholar Supreme Court fellows were outraged by Alito's hypothetical situations that he was making during today's arguments.
But go ahead, I don't know.
And I want to point something out.
I've been trying to tell people this.
Election denying is not about winning elections.
It actually runs counter to what you want.
It tells people that elections don't matter and that their votes don't matter.
What it does is prepare them for solutions outside of elections.
And I'm with you, Pete.
I am more optimistic than I have ever been simply because of the different material conditions that are in place right now.
Young people saying no and also engaging in labor and solidarity.
I think that's huge.
The question at this point is, will there be some sort of an economic or some sort of a geopolitical shock that will make this more popular?
Or are these people simply going to whittle away using, you know, non-democratic institutions like the Supreme Court and possibly, going back to what we've been talking about, making voting irrelevant or fixing things just at the margins enough to go ahead and try and take power and then hold on to it?
What we keep hearing and what I keep seeing within the right wing right now They know that they're kind of cooked for elections.
They're not interested in making a widespread appeal.
They have actually basically said at this point, dictatorship is the only way that we can do this, and there has to be a soft dictatorship at first, which is controlling education, which is controlling elections, which is also controlling culture, which is one of the things that Elon Musk is doing with Twitter, for the record.
And that sort of a soft dictatorship then leads to a hard dictatorship, and over time it might become popular through indoctrination.
That's the main conversation on the right now.
Yeah, go ahead.
I just want to say, and I said this the last time I was on with you guys, I think that I agree with everything you said.
I think there's a lot of different possible outcomes.
You know, could there be another pandemic, another major economic Crisis, war with China, or something like that.
I mean, all these different kinds of things and things that I didn't say, a whole list of them, are very possible.
That's why uncertainty stresses people out so much.
But I do think that if you want to have some sense of control in this crazy world, mindfulness is a really important practice that I do every day.
But more importantly, getting involved locally and controlling where you can has given me such You know, there is no perfect place to live.
But if you want to have an effect, you can have an effect locally and at the state level to fight back against some of these larger trends.
And I think that's obviously what's happening.
There are certain states, guys, obviously that don't allow abortion.
Life is much different in certain places and states and communities than others.
And you can be involved and you can organize.
And frankly, you kind of have to if you want to Have a place to live that suits what you've grown up needing and wanting and desiring and whatever your definition of happiness and free of suffering and joy is.
It gives me great purpose and we have a lot that we can do locally.
I just wanted to put out that PSA.
Positive influence.
I couldn't agree more.
Go ahead, Dick.
Oh, well, I'll just piggyback on that.
I just had five new neighbors who moved into our street in the last year over to our house.
And just that for a few hours of community was really, you know, battery charging.
The whole neighbor is going to come over for a social event, you know, next week in a way that we can organize that and then start to work.
I think you're taking it too far, Nick.
I'm not saying to have people over.
Oh, well, I think you should go to their homes.
Well, you know, I had this home and, you know, it's like, you know.
No, I love it.
I think it's great.
I think that's great.
It's exactly what I'm talking about.
I went for a walk with three people in it.
That's like my thing.
Like, but absolutely what I'm talking about, doing what you're doing and organizing and having those thoughtful conversations.
That's great.
And my point is, is that because of COVID, how we were so isolated for so long, we were not having these interactions.
And life felt really helpless and hopeless.
And that our, you know, our government was going to just topple over.
And at least in the same version of what mindfulness does, it does give you some relief, even if it's temporary, to break that up a little bit.
And that's really important.
And then, then you can start to tackle some of these issues at whatever level.
So on that note, I want to say I completely agree with both of you.
I think that this is the basic day-to-day thing that we can do to begin striking back against this.
I also want to point out that I wanted to talk about this very quickly because I actually think this is I think it's a component of what we're having a discussion about.
You know, PETA brought up the possibility of increasing tensions with China.
What we're talking about here is also neoliberalism.
There's a reason why the tensions are happening.
It's not just that we don't like each other as people.
There is an economic competition that's starting to grow.
And neoliberalism, I think, is what has eaten away at a lot of our communities, a lot of our relationships, and kept us sort of feeling alone and powerless.
I want to take a look very quickly before we wrap this thing up.
Something has happened that is, I think, really, really important that isn't getting a lot of attention, except for maybe in the Wall Street Journal, where people are thinking about their stocks.
Apple, which is one of the main links from the United States to China economically, and for people who aren't aware of this, this has been a company that has relied on China to globalize the production line.
Because of what's happening in China, both with COVID, but also with recent protests, Apple is now pulling up a lot of stake out of China.
We're talking about upwards of 30 to 40 percent of their production.
That's not going to be the end of it.
They're going to be moving to India and Vietnam.
One of the things that we're seeing here is that globalization, neoliberal globalization, as we've talked about, Nick, as we've predicted on this show, is starting to roll back a little bit.
As America is being sort of challenged by China economically, what do you think this looks like going forward?
Like, how is this going to end up sort of affecting us?
What do you think, Pete?
Well, I'm not sure if China is going to be challenging us economically as much as they had been and had been predicted to because of their own demographic issue.
As well as the concerns that you're seeing there with unrest there and with Xi's leadership.
And you're seeing Apple move factories to India that built like a huge part of that economy.
I mean I was reading today at The Economist that the world's biggest technology company, Apple, extraordinarily successful past two decades, revenue up 70-fold, share price up 600-fold, a market value of $2.4 trillion, partly the result of a big bet on China.
Apple banked on China-based factories, which now churn out more than 90% of their products, which I didn't know, and is crazy.
They wooed Chinese consumers as well, so they're selling them to them.
And now Apple is shifting their manufacturing potentially to India and other countries.
And what does that mean for China's economy?
So, you know, I think that our economic competition is going to continue to come from all over the world, including China.
But I'm not sure if they're going to continue to be the player that they were predicted to be over the last decades by a lot of smart economists.
I don't know.
Well, before I talk about Apple, a full disclosure, I was given two shares of Apple stock in 1985 for my bar mitzvah, and it's... Mazel tov!
Thank you, I really... It's so Jewish.
Yes, but do you realize what that means?
Because it's split a number of times.
Nonetheless, here's what I don't think anyone's talking about enough, is that These workers who decided to stand up for better conditions under the threat of death basically in China have now the victory they got was losing their jobs as Apple leaves.
So this is a weird thing here where I don't know if we're supposed to be happy with this.
No, but I'm so glad you brought that up because here is what globalism and neoliberal globalism has put in.
It's like the redundancies in our supply chain, like leave us basically, you know, they've been cut down into efficiency, right?
Where if one thing goes down, suddenly babies don't have formula.
But I'll tell you what they do have redundancies for.
That is workforces.
And if something happens in China where all of a sudden you have thousands of people who are clashing with guards and police, you can pull up stake and go over here and exploit these other people.
The big problem with all of this is exactly what you just brought up.
This is a growing movement where people are saying, this is enough.
China, Iran, America, Russia, you name it.
But this system is just relentlessly exploitative.
And that's what it does, is it pits not just countries against one another, it pits the people of the countries against one another.
So we're sitting here talking about Foxconn, which goes back, Nick, or Pete, what you were saying about the number of Apple products that are being created there, so that you and me and Nick can all have it for cheap, right?
That's why it happens.
Now, it just so happens that because the people stood up for themselves, they're going to pick up shop, go over here, which is what they did to Americans, which is what they do to populations all around the world.
Well, yeah, I mean, I'm sure that there's a lot of truth to that, and I wouldn't push back on any of it.
I just don't know.
I mean, I wonder how much of Apple moving their factories has to do with any number of other circumstances as well as that unrest, because You know, companies, I talked about uncertainty for individually in your own soul and your own your own life.
But companies obviously make billions being able to get the future right and predict uncertainty.
And I think that that's what Apple is trying to do.
And I think that's what the U.S.
government, to some extent, is trying to invest in with, you know, their that this legislation to invest in building Microchips say here in the US and it's an it's an interesting bet that people are that countries and leaders are making and taking and it's all It's all as a result of the pandemic.
I mean, it was all going to happen, but all sped up as a result of the pandemic.
And, you know, from you mentioned formula to antibiotics, and I don't know why I pronounced it that way.
That's amazing.
We knew what you were talking about.
I guess I'm in the pocket of some major pharmaceutical company.
To obviously microchips, like all of these things matter.
the raw materials the the future of uh electric propulsion and lithium and all of it it's super super important and like you said these major major companies are always going to do whatever they can to exploit humans well and part of it real fast just to remind people or maybe who haven't heard me talk about this before globalism was a side effect of american hegemony it
It was basically the American system of capitalism and production that spread all over the world as America became the sole superpower.
Guess what?
It's like a tide.
It reached its highest point.
It spread around the world.
Now that America is sort of in decline and it's sort of, again, wrestling with everything from China to Russia pushing us the world order, all of a sudden now it's coming back.
That investment in conductors and microchips, that's about re-establishing production in America.
So that's going to define world politics and world movements for the next couple of decades, just like globalism did, just like, you know, industrialization around the world did.
I'm convinced we're at a precipice here where things are going to change for the better for workers because, you know, what I've been hearing are the rich people at the five-star resorts are very upset that they're not getting misted enough with a spray mist and the pina coladas are only coming once an hour instead of twice.
They're very upset about this.
And the reason is because the people they can't find people to do those jobs anymore because they get paid so little and they're treated so horribly so I truly believe that at some point in the next as we morph out of this era that you know people are gonna have to pay more to hire people to get better competent I guess I also just learned that I'm a rich person.
It's all good, at least for the common person in America.
And I think there's no choice.
I think they're gonna have to do that, otherwise the customer experience is gonna suffer so much in all these different places. - I guess I also just learned that I'm a rich person.
I like to be misted.
Oh yeah!
Are you kidding?
Missing.
The Pina Colada is a little bit more partial to it, to be honest.
I like how somebody missed it.
By the way, I don't want to go off on a tangent, but if you haven't seen the Jerry Falwell Pool Boy documentary... Oh shoot, I haven't watched it.
Damn.
I will say, real fast, and we gotta bring this plane in for a landing, Pete.
I loved that documentary.
I really did.
Why is there music playing the entire time?
Why does everybody gotta play music underneath things all the time?
I'm so tired of it.
It's infinitely watchable and that's what they want you to do.
God forbid.
It's actually a pretty important documentary.
If you bind in a narrative that Jerry Falwell's endorsement helped get Trump elected, then Trump appoints whatever judges the Heritage Foundation told him to appoint, then abortion is repealed, which is Jerry Falwell Sr.'s dream, and then Jerry Falwell is destroyed because he let his wife sleep with a pool boy and got into business with him and in bed with him.
And now he's destroyed and can't go back to Liberty University where his parents are buried.
Wow.
I heard they're going to take that documentary and make it into White Lotus Season 3.
Right?
Speaking of this thing.
Yeah.
So I can't wait to see both versions of that.
Well, Pete, we need to do this way more often.
It was an absolute pleasure.
Can you tell the people where to find you if they don't already know?
Stand up with Pete Dominick every day.
I'm obsessed with talking to smart people, so I put it out every day.
Two guests a day, almost every day.
It's wherever you find your podcasts.
Thanks, boys.
I love talking to you.
Do you have an IV hooked up to you?
I don't know how the everyday thing works.
How do you do that?
I did daily at SiriusXM.
I did daily live, you know, but I had four people in a huge network of people supporting me.
But, you know, now it's just like it's just me and my shed.
My kids are older.
I've got people's numbers.
I call them up.
Will you please talk to me?
I record it.
I post it.
And it's a lot of work.
But hey.
I love it.
Hardest working man in show business.
Whenever I think about Pete Dominick, he's on a stage.
A man is putting a cape on him, but the beat just keeps him going.
That's how I imagine it.
Oh, I like it.
I like it.
Thank you guys very much for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Love listening to you and love being a part of the conversation.
All right, everybody.
That's going to do it for us.
We will be back on Friday with The Weekender.
If you want to get a hold of that, go over to patreon.com slash MikeRigPodcast.
Keeps us editorially independent.
Keeps us ad-free.
Just keeps us rolling.
It's the support that we need.
That's patreon.com slash monkrakepodcast.
If you need us before then, you can find Nick at Can You Hear Me?
