Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman begin the show discussing the polls and how Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg think they're all wrong. They move to Trump's appearance in front of a raucous Libertarian crowd that went terribly wrong before finishing on troubling news out of Missouri that the Attorney General there wants access to people's private medical records.
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I'm here on Memorial Day with my good friend, Nick Tots.
What are you doing, Nick?
I'm doing okay.
You have a stacked Memorial Day ahead of you.
I don't know anybody who does holidays more than you.
You're a holiday guy.
You get out there, you move, you shake, you eat, you have a good time.
Yeah, but we wring our hands for the days leading up to it, thinking that we're not getting invited to anything.
And then, sure enough, you know, something happens and people get us, you know, invite us to places.
So it feels good, but it makes us sweat a little bit beforehand.
You're popular.
That's what we're talking about here.
You're a holiday guest.
You're a delight.
I've seen you at parties, and the people come to you.
They gravitate toward you.
Well, I gotta tell you that if you're looking for a solution to the feeling that you might have out in the world about how everything's weighing on you, interacting with people in a setting like that is the best therapy there is possible.
Even if it's not even the fun part, you just get out there and make it fun.
Otherwise, you don't have the energy mixing, you don't have those things.
I can't tell you how important it is and how the isolation of our lives is making things worse.
I couldn't agree more.
It's the it's the antidote to everything that ails us.
I mean, not just personally, interpersonally, but also politically.
Good for you.
Well, I'm glad that you're doing it.
And I'm glad that you have a good day ahead of you.
And I hope everybody listening to this had a good Memorial Day.
It's a weird, I'll just say before we get into our stories, it's a weird day.
America has a fraught relationship with its military, with the fact that, you know, the powers that be have absolutely siphoned everything away from us and either put it towards, you know, helping billionaires or throwing it at the military-industrial complex, which last time I checked, Nick, was Helping billionaires and we do all this lip service for veterans and the people who have fallen.
But meanwhile, we don't really take care of them.
We push them out into the world in order to die and sacrifice their lives.
It's a really weird holiday.
And meanwhile, true American style, we've turned it into a day for like 25% off sales.
It's a very, very strange thing.
Well, you know, the connection in my mind to how the veterans are treated, especially when they're hurt and they need health care and then the health care in general, there's got to be some connection to that and how it's treated and how almost to the point where politicians will sort of just forget about it.
You know, things are busy.
They got a lot of things to do and then they realize it's been, you know, two years have gone by and they haven't touched it all.
Anything.
And then you read about these stories about how awful the healthcare is, how expensive it is.
And then someone always chimes in from England and says, I had to wait a couple hours at ER and they took care of everything.
I didn't pay one penny.
And then someone, you know, in Canada chimes in, you know what I mean?
So it's like, you get a glimpse into other places.
And I guess the only thing we need to do is figure out how will they treat their veterans in those countries.
I suspect it's a lot better too.
Well, by the way, speaking of England, I have a wild feeling we're going to be talking about England in the next couple of episodes in the upcoming election there and exactly, you know, how that's gone to hell in a hand basket.
But even my grandfather, who was a decorated veteran of World War II, and that was back when we supposedly treated veterans well, even he understood that he had been forgotten because it's a lot easier to talk about how much you support the troops and how much you care about them.
And when you use them up and you put them on the other side, you know, it is what it is.
Well, people, we have a stack show.
Here in the first segment, we're going to talk not just about the election in 2024, but I've had some pretty revealing conversations in the past couple of days with some strategists within the Democratic Party.
They've shed light on some of the things that you and I have talked about, and I can't wait to get into that.
Before we do, though, head on over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast.
Support the show, keep us ad-free, editorially independent, and growing.
We're going to be talking about the upcoming debates in a minute.
Nick, you and I on the 27th, which is a Thursday we just discovered, looking at a calendar, we're going to be talking immediately, if that debate happens, We're going to be talking immediately after, doing a live taping of the Friday Weekender episode.
And what do you want to do that Thursday, after you watch this debate, after you suffer through it?
You want to hang out with me and Nick?
You want to hear what we have to say about it?
Patreon.com slash What Great Podcasts Keep Us Growing.
You feel better yet?
You don't have to watch the debate.
Just come out and hang out with us.
Nobody is telling you that you have to watch the debate.
Nobody's making you, but don't you want to hear what we have to say?
I happen to think a lot of our people, Nick, don't watch the States of the Union.
They don't watch some of the things that we cover.
They want to hear our analysis, which you're not going to hear anywhere else.
You don't want to go over to one of these tired, old, stale media platforms.
Come hang out with us!
Yeah, we don't need the spin room afterwards.
It's all a bunch of hocus pocus.
We've already talked about it.
All people want to do is hang out with Nick.
They want to hang out with Nick.
They want to party with Nick.
Come party with Nick after this debate.
patreon.com slash moncraigpodcast.
Nick, watching this election start to heat up, there have been a lot of questions about what's going on, including polls, where things are heading, where the momentum is happening.
Again, I can't wait to talk about what I've heard from the strategist.
Kind of blew my hair back a little bit.
But another thing that blew my hair back, and we're always keeping our eyes out for articles like the one we're getting ready to talk about.
This was in The New Yorker, and this was by Isaac Chautner called, Is the Biden Campaign Running on False Hope?
This was an interview with strategist Simon Rosenberg.
And for people who don't know, Rosenberg is one of those sort of democratic creatures who has just been around for forever.
He cut his teeth on the Michael Dukakis campaign.
I don't know how people feel about how the Dukakis campaign worked out.
Probably one of the biggest black eyes of modern politics outside of Jimmy Carter being defeated by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
But Rosenberg is a Democratic operative who also has become popular because of a substat called hopium.
And for people who don't know, hopium is an online slang term which means giving people hope where maybe they don't deserve to have hope and selling it to them.
Nick, Rosenberg has some thoughts in this interview, and I think that it's important to take a look at them.
Thoughts are a way to say it, but I liked what he said, so I'm anxious to hear what you thought.
Yeah, so we're going to run through this a little bit.
I just want to go ahead and say this is the equivalent of the drill tweet.
I'm not mad.
I'm not mad.
Don't put in the paper that I was mad.
This is a very strange back and forth.
That in the very, very beginning, Chautner is asking about the polls, and Rosenberg immediately says that these polls are not correct.
Says, quote, they're not correct.
And Chautner says, hold on, let me finish reading.
And then Rosenberg says, they're wrong about that.
I mean, they're just wrong.
They're wrong.
I mean, I'm presenting you with facts.
How in the world could polling averages be correct if they ended up with 54 seats in the Senate in 2022?
And I have an explanation.
And before we've even gotten into this, Rosenberg says, quote, I'm ending the interview.
I'm ending the interview because what you're doing is ridiculous.
And we all all we're doing at this point is talking about the fact that Joe Biden is currently behind in poll averages.
And pretty much anybody who's been doing polling says that right now Trump is in the lead and maybe Biden should reconsider his strategy.
Right.
I mean, it's interesting because when somebody gets really focused on like a very singular something, it kind of makes you, you know, tilt your head a little bit, right?
So he's so focused on the 538 poll that had predicted 54 seats to the Republicans in 2022 in the Senate.
And because that didn't happen, ipso acto, quod erum, dis remonstrum, they're inaccurate.
Here's my problem is because Nate Silver likes to come out and insist on how accurate the polls were.
In fact, they tried to say that those polls were as accurate as the most accurate polling they had since 1998.
But I don't think FiveThirtyEight themselves should be the ones who are saying that they're the most accurate.
Some other independent group should be looking at this and telling us that because, right, it doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
They have every incentive to make sure that we think that they're accurate when they might not be.
Does that make sense?
It does.
And my God, I wish that there was some sort of independent operation out there, but it simply doesn't really exist.
I mean, if you want to start one, I would love it.
I would love if that's what you... But by the way, the sound of doing that, like, makes my soul die a little bit.
Right.
Well, you need math people, right?
They need to be able to look at the methods and then, you know, pull it, because it is, I think it's a little transparent.
They tend to give you a little bit of the method, but, but then they'll just say, gee, it's the D plus 2.1, blah, blah, blah.
And then next thing you know, they say it's the most accurate.
But I, you can't argue with the fact that they were not right.
Like the real clear political was wrong.
It wasn't accurate.
Right.
I mean, that's, that's, there are problems with it, but I will say, do you think that if Rosenberg was doing this interview and Biden was up in the polls, he would be talking about how the polls are wrong?
You know, that's why you're here, Jared.
And I'm sorry to say it, but that is one of the problems that we have, is we have an entrenched class of people, including people like Roosevelt.
30 years!
For the past 30 years, he's been involved in major Democratic politics.
Nick, how has Democratic politics, you know, capital D, Democratic politics, how have they done in the past 30 years?
Well, if you want to look at presidential numbers, raw numbers, and the popular vote, they've done pretty well.
Well, they've done fine in the popular vote.
How have Democratic politics, like what advancements have we necessarily had over the past 30 years?
We've had Obamacare, that is fair.
We've had some investment post-pandemic, but would you say that the Democratic Party has been wildly successful in the past 30 years?
No, you know, Roe v. Wade being the centerpiece of that.
But then the shift, I guess the point you could make is the shift back to the right, which is what the country is lurching towards and seems like based on this polling, is a fault of the Democrats and their message not being communicated well enough.
It's a big chunk of it, and you know, I think one of the problems is people like Rosenberg who are out there saying, please stop saying that this isn't working.
Right?
Like, please stop saying that this doesn't work, we know better, and then inevitably they get paid regardless of who wins and who loses.
I'm guessing he still cashed paychecks even though Dukakis got absolutely crushed, correct?
Yeah, that's that was a contract.
And that's the contract.
And that is one of the problems that that has happened is there is an entrenched class of strategists and consultants.
And I'll talk more about that in a second.
But as as we're getting into this, basically, what ends up getting asked is why he feels like something is actually better than it is.
And Chandler says, I saw you said Trump, to me, is a much weaker candidate than he was in 2016 and 2020.
Can you talk more about that?
And Rosenberg says much weaker.
He says, tell me more.
So I think, first of all, his performance on the stump is far more degraded, which, by the way, not wrong.
Not wrong.
He's clearly diminished.
Absolutely.
He's far more erratic.
True.
He's making a lot of mistakes that are hurting the campaign when he speaks.
Second, his agenda is far more extreme, more dangerous, and will be far easier to exploit by the Democrats.
And by the way, I think what Rosenberg is saying is not wrong, but I think what Rosenberg gets wrong is after 30 years in politics, he has overplayed how traditional politics are now playing out.
It really doesn't matter that Trump's more erratic.
It doesn't matter that he's more dangerous.
People who are going to vote for Donald Trump are not going to make a logical assessment of Donald Trump.
Is that fair?
Yeah, logic's out the window.
Logic's gone.
In fact, what Trump is doing is he's actually dragging people with him into eroticism and radicalism.
Fair.
Yeah, yeah.
Hatred is a strong drug.
Hatred!
He says, the assumption with everything I'm telling you is that what I believe is going to happen is the campaigns are prosecuted over the next five and a half months.
There are things now that are true about him that were not true in 2020 that all voters are going to come to know in the following months.
They are that he raped E. Jean Carroll, that he oversaw one of the largest financial frauds in American history and has been fined hundreds of millions of dollars for that, that he stole American secrets, he lied to the FBI, he shared those secrets with other people.
It's the greatest betrayal of our national security by a former president in all of American history.
He led an insurrection against the United States, he led an armed attack on the Capitol, and he's promised to end American democracy for all time if he's in the White House in 2025.
He and his family have corruptly taken more money from foreign governments than any family in American history.
And sixth, and this is really important, is that he's singularly responsible for ending Roe.
I agree with all that.
That is all accurate.
The question, though, at the heart of this is, is that enough to win a campaign in modern times?
And I don't feel particularly confident that it is.
Well, you know, what I get from what he said there, because he's not, all that stuff is true, but it feels like he thinks that the polling that we're talking about, people who are answering the phone and saying, oh yeah, I'm going to vote for Trump, he somehow thinks that there are people in that category that will read those sentences, that are very damning, and switch their vote.
That's what it sounds like to me, because we have to, you know, assume that if it's not, if he's not, Biden's not down, it's tied or whatever, it's really close, they need some extra votes, but they're not going to get them With this, this is not the campaign that's going to get them.
I think what you would probably tell them is, we need to present a better future going forward with policies that people will actually gravitate towards who are not quite in the Trump area, but would gravitate towards, and they weren't going to respond to the litany of lawsuits he's in the middle of.
That's not going to sway anybody who's already at least said they're going to vote for Trump.
And they need to, I don't even know, they don't need anybody in that group, do they?
I don't particularly think so.
You need to turn out votes.
You need to turn out votes and make sure the people who aren't going to vote for you, or who would vote for you but have decided not to vote for you, will come out and vote for you.
Like, you're not going to steal.
Like, I'm sorry, but Trump is a known property.
Nick, I don't want to shock you or our listeners.
We lived through four years of Trump as president.
It's only going to be worse if he wins again.
Correct?
Correct.
We all lived through that.
Everybody has seen this happen.
And anybody who is going to vote for Trump has already worked through the cognitive dissonance of all these things.
It's all fake news.
It's all conspiracy or a witch hunt or whatever we want to call it.
And Nick, I, so I'll go ahead and I'll start talking about, I reached out to a couple of Democratic strategists.
I talked to one person who has been working with the Biden campaign in an auxiliary role in sort of the orbit of it because there's a bunch of like, it's almost like a Voltron, right?
There's a bunch of different groups that are all working together.
I talked to another strategist who is currently working on a congressional campaign for a Democrat going into November.
And Nick, here's, we've talked about this and I sort of had suspicions, but here's what I've had confirmed to me.
One, that the Biden administration and campaign has looked at this as seasons.
They see the debate later on this month on the 27th.
They see that as the launching of the next part of the campaign.
The main emphasis of the Biden re-election strategy until now has been completely online and on social media, basically on Twitter.
And it's been focused on, first of all, trying to put forward memes that are, for lack of a better phrase, Biden's wins, right?
Celebrating Biden constantly, trying to sort of change the narrative around him, while also trying to neutralize any critics of him online that would come from the Democratic coalition.
Which basically means that you are spending a lot of time, campaign money, effort, money and resources and energy going after people who you should be trying to get to vote for you.
But instead, what you're trying to do is neutralizing those people so they won't do, quote unquote, damage.
So basically, they're going after the people that they would want to vote for them anyway, and basically alienating them as a campaign strategy.
Which, and by the way, I'm one of them.
That's the thing.
It's a really strange thing to have this apparatus that is not focused on Trump.
It's not focused on the Republican Party.
It's not focused on actual campaigning.
It's damage control at this point.
It's triage.
Right.
There's no looking forward, there's no progressive, you know, what can we look forward to, what can we do with another four years, which is what we used to do, right?
And this is what Trump probably has changed as well.
He's made it into a thing, which is why there's a built-in, like, I don't think going forward any sitting president, what happens to sitting presidents now is they will leak, you know, their popularity numbers over the course of four years down.
I don't think any president is going to ever be able to build going up anymore.
Because it's too easy to criticize and knock down the president in the White House, especially if it's a challenger who doesn't have anything, a care in the world that is not controlling anything.
And they can slowly erode point by point over time so that we know that the incumbent is always going to be in a situation now where their polls don't look good, the popularity numbers don't look good.
Well, the advantage that an incumbent has is the office, right?
It's being able to stand at a lectern that has, like, the presidential seal on it.
I mean, basically, any network has to air what you're doing if they care about it, right?
Like, you have the trappings of the office.
The problem now is that America is in such dire straits that being the incumbent doesn't really carry much of, like, a home court advantage anymore.
Right?
It's actually a detriment.
The other thing that comes with it, and this is what I'm hearing, is that they are still stuck in 2020 campaign mode.
Like, Biden is not out there very much, and it's really hard for an incumbent president To then say, hey, what worked four years ago, we now need to toss that out and try something new.
So instead, we basically have this, I guess, online campaign.
And Nick, listen, Twitter is an absolute hellhole at this point.
But it's also not real life.
You know what I mean?
Like, the vast majority of Americans are not on Twitter.
The vast majority of Americans are not checking out my Twitter feed and looking at my criticisms of Biden and deciding to stay at home.
There's a larger part of campaigning that is currently being just completely forgotten at this point.
And I'll tell you, the conversation I had with a congressional strategist, the Democratic, Congressional, and Senate candidates feel like they are completely on their own at this point.
Not only are there no, like, you know, there's no, like, tail for them to follow with Biden, there's no larger message.
Like, I couldn't tell you right now what the Democratic Party plans to do should they win Congress writ large plus the presidency.
I haven't heard anything about that, and that has been completely neglected, leaving all these candidates out there sort of fending for themselves.
It's truly frightening because that's the first thing that they should do.
And they probably will argue with you saying, oh, well, of course we've been saying it and you're not hearing it, you're not listening.
Well, guess what?
That's still their fault if that's the case.
Here's the thing that no one's talking about, though, is that in 2020, maybe they are, but I haven't heard it.
In 2020, we had the single largest participation in the presidential election ever in the history of our country.
Why?
Because we had a lot of accommodations for COVID.
Right.
And that was really key.
And what happened?
What was the result?
Not only the largest number of votes ever cast, but like a 10 million vote gap between Biden and Trump.
Right.
Because of that, we always knew that would happen when you get enough people coming out.
However, we don't have those accommodations anymore.
And in fact, the day after the election, Republican controlled states had been systematically trying to eliminate any possibility of any other accommodations that actually worked really well in the one of the most secure elections we've ever had in our lifetimes.
Right.
So That is a bigger issue in my mind, is that it's not going to be as easy to vote, and so all the people that they were able to get in 2020 might not vote, just because of the inconvenience of it that has been made more inconvenient by Republicans.
But still, that has to be a concern, and I don't know if anyone's ever really wrapped their head around that yet.
No, they haven't.
And what's more, and what you just brought up is really, really important.
The 2020 election is going to go down as historically one of the weirder presidential elections we've ever had.
Not only were both candidates completely limited in what they were able to do, we were in the middle of a generational pandemic.
We also had a generationally dangerous president at the time that everybody was fed up with, right?
The entire idea was that Biden was going to come in.
He was going to fix it.
We don't have to discuss that right now.
What we're talking about right now is that we have an incumbent president who has such a problem with his own base that they're spending most of their time and their resources trying to shore up what you have to call heavy users.
Right?
Like, just to go ahead and steal something, Morgan Spurlock just died, right?
You know, I don't know if you remember in Super Size Me, there was like that guy who ate a Big Mac every day for, I don't know, like 17 years, right?
If McDonald's has to try and keep the guy who eats a Big Mac every single day, as opposed to attract new customers, or people who wouldn't be walking by the restaurant and going inside, they have a problem.
Right?
So for instance, what's happening, and we've alluded to it a little bit previously, is that the Biden administration has not, or I keep calling it the administration, the Biden campaign has been putting so many resources into online accounts that try to basically go after critics while also using social media influencers, which we're not going to go into the particulars of who they are, but they're the ones who are basically speaking to people on Twitter who have like, riding with Biden.
As their name, right?
You know, they've got, like, all the iconography.
Like, their headliner is, like, Biden and Harris, right?
Like, they're trying to make sure that those people will come out.
But that's such a small segment of the electorate, not to mention the people who came out in 2020 who were tired of Trump and tired of the pandemic and wanted something different.
And the people I've talked to, basically every single call that they're on, they're screaming, you have to do something else.
There has to be some other component, and they keep telling them that it's going to launch with the debate going into the conventions, which makes sense.
But there's so much time that's being wasted right now, and so many resources, and it's not on real things.
This is not how you win an election.
Fair enough.
I do want to say that I wish this would be how we would run campaigns normally, where they don't start until June of the year.
By the way, a lot of other countries do this, where they cap the amount of money you can spend, they cap the amount of time that you're going to be running, so you can actually be doing the job that you've been elected to up until now.
You preach into the choir.
I would love that.
So, I mean, listen, I guess that'll never happen because they're each going to spend $500 million on the campaigns?
Because of people like Rosenberg!
Those people, that's their entire careers.
They're dragging down six figures by getting paid these contracts and by living off of this.
And you're right.
That is the type of season that we should have.
That, though, I guess this is a campaign that's trying to live in some sort of a fantasy where it's something like that.
But this is a wild thing, like usually a reelection campaign, the span of it, the full force of it.
And by the way, Biden is not lacking in money.
He has a ton of money.
Like you can go ahead and do all these things.
You can chew and walk gum and pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time.
There's tons of resources, but it's just not happening.
Should I go see Kimmel interview Biden and Obama with the special guest stars Julia Roberts and George Clooney?
I could go.
You know how much it is?
How much is that?
Well, for $6,800 a ticket, you probably get a lot of really special stuff.
But I will say this, the lowest ticket is $250.
Or 260.
That's not like crazy, out of this world, whatever.
Like, you know, do I really want to spend 500 bucks to go with him?
I don't know.
You know, and there's, you would get nothing.
You probably, you don't even get a chair probably at that point.
You just have to stand somewhere.
But yeah, it's when you start to process this and you realize this is gonna be a probably a big venue with a lot of people there.
It's staggering.
I think, I think he just raised 20 some million in the last one they did some other private one.
Well, which, by the way, is that is part of how this is supposed to work.
And this is what Democratic presidential nominees have done constantly.
The travel schedule you're supposed to have if you're an incumbent, right?
If you're a Barack Obama, if you're Joe Biden, you spend most of your time in the White House.
You fly off to California in order to get those sweet, sweet California dollars, just like you're talking about.
And then you go ahead and you go to like the big campaign battlegrounds.
Well, here's my question.
Where's Biden?
Where's Biden?
Let's go ahead and take that a step further.
Where's Obama?
What's he doing?
He's, like, probably nailing down a couple more Netflix development deals, right?
Like, that's what's happening.
And all these different apparatuses, and for the record, Nick, Like, we've talked about this.
There's like a weird divide between the Biden and Obama people.
Look what the Obama people are doing.
David Plouffe just launched a campaign manager's podcast with Kellyanne Conway.
What the hell is that?
You know, the Johns are either doing Pod Save America or they're going on Survivor.
Like, all of the people, and by the way, all you're hearing from are people like Rosenberg and James Carville.
Like, you're not getting the players in the field and doing what's supposed to be happening.
And I think that the feeling of anxiety that I'm having, you're having, and I think that like, you know, most of the experts that we talk to and discuss things with, the anxiety is coming from the fact that this is not a well-run machine.
This is not working the way that it needs to, it's not being handled the way that it needs to, and it's slipping out of their hands.
Absolutely.
I mean, I think we'd be surprised if we got to pull the curtain back on even the winning campaigns over the last 30-40 years.
You might realize how haphazard the whole thing had always been.
And they put on, you know, they put on the Axelrod.
Obama puts on this big, you know, front.
But, you know, I wonder just how much it's just sort of five out of the seat of your pants, just by your gut kind of making stuff up, hoping things work, and then... The Obama re-election campaign was not.
The Obama machine was like one of the most well-oiled, tech-driven, high-money machines that's ever... but by the way, he never shared it.
He basically took his ball and went home with it, and I don't think Biden has that stuff.
I think Biden won 2020 because of the very specific moment that it was in, and this campaign is just... it's not working well.
Yeah, and you know, maybe this appearance with Biden and Obama is the beginning of something they're going to do in LA, but I don't know.
I mean, you really think that Obama, if they had this incredible secret, simply just wouldn't share it?
Well, we've also watched, I mean, Obama basically relied on Google and a lot of Silicon Valley money, like in order to like move his campaign and sort of strategize it.
And I don't know if you've been paying attention to the podcast that we've been running for the past couple of years.
Silicon Valley has lost its freaking mind.
And like they're not, not only are they worth, I mean, we, this isn't the time to talk about, but like the Google search engine and the, the way that Google's being run right now is an absolute atrocity.
And like, on top of that, they've all become far right assholes.
So I don't know.
I don't even know if that's available anymore.
Right.
Yeah, and by the way, that's the other thing is, it's like, if you wanted to start a YouTube channel today, you wouldn't ask me how to do it because when I did it, it was, you know, 15 years ago.
I don't, I don't know what, how you do it now.
Anyway, I'm not the guy.
So that's another idea there.
Well, and by the way, Rosenberg isn't the guy either.
Like, I'm sorry, but, like, anybody who is off to the side being like, good job, Gov Dukakis.
You look great in that tank, pal.
You know, like, that's not who needs to be, like, really on the front lines of this.
Speaking of bad campaigns, Nick, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, went to the Libertarian National Convention.
We'll talk about why in a second, but let's listen to how it went.
Roy wrote, Donald J. Trump will address the Libertarian Party at his National Convention on Saturday.
The Libertarian Party should nominate Trump for President of the United States!
Whoa!
That's nice.
Yeah, that's nice.
If you can't quite tell, that's Booz when he announces he wants to be... If you can't tell, he's being treated like Mussolini after the Allied forces took it back.
Well, someone's whistling and someone's cheering.
A couple people in there.
Should we keep going?
You're going to make me listen more of this, aren't you?
Please.
That's nice.
Only if you want to win.
Only if you want to win.
Maybe you don't want to win.
Maybe you don't want to win.
Thank you, D. Roy.
By the way, he's in front of a sign that says, become ungovernable.
Wonderful.
Which is a nice libertarian touch because they don't want to be right.
They want to have their own independent freedom.
But I don't even know why that's there.
Do you have any?
Because he's in unkind territory.
All right.
And it's interesting fonts.
But here we go.
Thank you.
No, only do that if you want to win.
If you want to lose, don't do that.
Keep getting your 3% every four years.
I heard that.
Keep getting your 3% every four years.
Do we know what he's talking about?
He's talking about the fact that the Libertarian Party is... Oh, I see.
American politics.
Yeah.
He's trying to, you know what he's doing?
He's trying to absorb like the Borg, you know, this entity, right?
So they, they, this Trumpism will, will absorb another political group.
Well, what's fun about the Libertarians is that outside of the ones who obviously work with authoritarians and they're complete and, you know, utter hypocrites is like, there are some true quote unquote Libertarians who are not going to compromise their principles.
They see Donald Trump as a dangerous person who uses government strength and force and the power of the state in order to crush people.
They don't want this.
Trump is basically saying, oh you're not transactional?
Oh you don't want to win?
You don't want to like work with me?
And what's funny is that anybody thought that this was going to work.
I love that they thought that this was a good idea and somehow or another he was going to win over this convention.
Whoever decided that was absolutely out of their mind.
The reasons for doing so, policy and politics, are as solid as the Hope Diamond.
D. Roy says this.
Is very unprecedented, he said.
As the Cato Institute president, Peter Goettler, observed in Thursday's Washington Post, it will be the first time in U.S.
— think of this — first time in U.S.
history that a presidential candidate of a rival party will address the convention of a party that is presumably gathering to nominate its own candidate.
He loves the first, right?
He loves it.
And by the way, with this, he basically admits like he shouldn't be here.
Also, I love that he's just like the Cato Institute.
It's like these people don't want there to be institutes.
They don't want They don't want people.
Okay, so let's talk about why he's doing this and why this occurred and what are the larger implications.
The entire reason, Nick, is because nobody has any clue what in the hell Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
is going to do in November.
They have no idea.
And anybody who tells you different where the votes are going to come from, whether they're going to come from Biden or Trump, they don't know.
Both Biden and Trump are absolutely terrified that RFK Jr.
is going to cost them the election.
And quite frankly, both of them should be scared about that.
RFK went and talked to Libertarians, which is a wild thing because of some of the things he said, but they are going to nominate him.
They're going to go with him.
And, like, at this point, Trump, I guess, went out and decided to try and take a flyer.
For the record, by the way, Nick, it is starting to look like a real possibility that RFK is going to get the polling and ballot numbers necessary to participate in the debate in June.
Which, if RFK Jr.
participates in that debate, this thing changes in a major, major way.
I'm really in shock that he's been able to do this.
You know, he's been kind of marginalized.
I haven't even seen him be, you know, relevant recently.
And yet, I think the biggest fear for me, or not the fear would be, but that he should be taking a lot of the conspiracy theorists vote.
And you would think that that's sort of the MAGA side of things, I would think.
So in my mind, rationally, he might hurt Trump more than Biden.
But don't we think that he's a prop for Trump anyway?
Isn't that what the thinking is?
I think at times he has been.
And that's the problem here is I think that he has gotten a lot of Republican support, a lot of MAGA support.
And then on top of it, there's a segment of the Democratic base or Democratic voter that like is not happy with what has happened under Biden.
And that a lot of the things that we've talked about, that there's continuity.
Right?
Like we talked about the tariffs against China.
And on top of that, Gaza is another aspect of this.
But like, there are a lot of people who are just like, I'm done with this.
I'm done with going along with these two parties.
And the ground is ripe for a third party candidate to come in and just kind of wreck shit a little bit.
So we don't know where it's coming from.
We don't know where it's going to go.
But I think Trump going to talk to these people as badly as it went, I think is kind of an indicator that like, they're not sure either.
And they think that this is maybe part of the electorate that they need to appeal to.
For sure, and by the way, Kennedy's anti-backstance would have disqualified him from being a serious candidate until now, and after COVID and with the backlash against vaccines, he could cleave off Democratic voters too.
There is a subset there that are probably very suspicious of vaccines, don't want to give their kids, who are very progressive people, don't want to give their kids any vaccines, and then he is preaching to that.
That could get people on board who really, you know, once they get to that level of Um, of, of vaccination belief.
Uh, they'll, they'll, they'll, they're fervent about it and they would be willing to cast their vote for a candidate.
They know it's not going to win, but to take a stand, uh, and who otherwise would have probably been the democratic side.
So it is a concerning thing and just remarkable.
It really is.
And speaking of Trump's not-libertarian views, it has come out that back in May during a donor event, he said, One thing I do is, any student that protests, this is of course going back to the Gaza protest, I throw them out of the country.
You know, there are a lot of foreign students.
As soon as they hear that, they're going to behave.
This is one of those things, Nick, that has been gaining a lot of purchase among Trump supporters and the Republicans, which is the idea that anybody who protests at this point, or anybody that they see as dissidents, that They want to throw them out of the country.
In fact, the thing that has sort of been gaining purchase is, if you go ahead and protest and you say that you're supporting Palestinians, that you will be deported to Gaza or a similar country, whatever country you quote-unquote support.
Trump said this, and of course this is just him posturing a little bit, But unfortunately, there is historical precedent, which we'll get to in just a little bit.
And I kind of think that the Republican Party is trying to wind itself up into going towards some sort of policy that might look like this.
Again, this is what a desperate party looks like, right?
They need to be able to mine votes on the fringe of every different, you know, piece of the country.
And, you know, the hatred and fear that they can stoke knows no bounds, right?
And by the way, it's still not enough, right?
In theory, it's still not enough with what they're doing.
So it's going to get worse and worse.
And they're going to try to find more and more ways to figure out, you know, to stoke that.
I wish I could, I would feel, not that I feel good about it, I wish we can come up with like the most absurd prediction of where this is going to go and then feel great, feel, you know, knowledgeable when it actually is going to happen.
But that's how absurd it will continue to get even worse than this.
Well, what's scary about that, Nick, is you and I, over the course of this podcast, anyone who's been with us from the beginning, you and I have done that.
Right.
We've talked about the logical, or I guess you would call them illogical conclusions.
And then later on, months or years later, we had to be like, Hey, here's another one that we saw coming and was obviously happening.
And this is one of those things.
Yeah.
Like it would have to end up being like, if you have a rally against Trump, you get deported.
Oh yeah!
Listen, I don't want to shock our listeners, but the Supreme Court is currently considering whether or not Trump should have the power to assassinate his political rivals.
And like, what we're actually talking about, there are precedents of all of this.
Like, going back into the early 20th century, people might not know this, But during the first Red Scare, this is immediately after the Russian Revolution, right?
This is after communism takes over.
We had this moment where all of these different pressure points in the United States, this was during industrialization as the inequality gap got larger and larger.
You had labor battling in the streets, literally, not just protesting, but like getting in fights with, you know, these oligarchical people.
You also had anarchists, going back to our libertarian friends, who basically were saying that government control had gotten to be too much.
You had leftists, you had socialists, you had all these components in the country that were seen as undesirables.
One, the power of the state was levied against them.
The government put its power on behalf of the oligarchs, went after these people, used troops to kill Americans in cold blood, in massive numbers, to undermine their civil liberties, and then eventually, Nick, to round them up, try them, and then put them on a boat, and I'm not making this up for people who don't know this, they were literally sent to Russia.
Like, major American figures such as Emma Goldman were put on boats and sent to Russia because they identified as socialist.
So this type of stuff has happened, and this type of stuff has been under the purview of the American government.
It's not so far outside of the realm of possibility and imagination that such a thing could happen again.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I understand it, in the 20s, you could totally be out as a communist in this country.
Well, you could for a little while.
Right, and then right around when the Nazi party took over in the early 30s, this became all the other issues we saw with Oppenheimer in that movie, right?
The Jewish community then was really big on communism.
And they'd have camps like my mom went to the camp the communist camps and they would learn all about communism and how the beauty and you know the absolute you know we know that the pure unadulterated version of communism is a you know kind of a beautiful thing it could be a beautiful thing when it's not uh corrupted so uh but yes and then it very quickly as the Rosenbergs and all sorts of other places you know came out with uh and the McCarthy So I just find it is interesting.
There was a moment there where it wasn't a big deal.
You could be a communist and be out.
So it went in waves is how it worked with the first Red Scare, which, by the way, was used to go after African Americans who were, you know, calling for reform and civil liberties to be given to them.
That first Red Scare back in the early 20th century, immediately after World War I, you know, it resulted again in this mass deportation in 1919.
Then you get to the Second World War.
There's like a period there where, like, you could sort of, you know, sort of flirt with socialism or communism.
Immediately after, the second Red Scare is used to start dismantling the New Deal coalition, which, by the way, had a lot of social socialist and communist involved in it.
And then you start purging them.
And, you know, like you said, you have a lot of right wing movements that start finding like a sort of power and start gaining some popularity because of the vacuum and the lack of a left because it was destroyed, which leaves us where we are now.
We have another burgeoning leftist movement in this country that's And quite frankly, this is one of the reasons we're watching state power start to do what it's doing, is to go ahead and protect itself.
And it can start doing this.
So it's not, I just want to say, it's not far-fetched that this could happen.
You could see another sort of revival of those energies.
I mean, it could definitely happen.
Well, to circle back to what Trump was saying in his rallies and what the polls are, whether they're accurate or not, you know, the Trump campaign was trying to insist that there was, what did they say, 30,000 or 100,000 people at his rally in the Bronx.
And when they had the overhead shot of this while he was talking, you know, people, smart people could do the math and whatever, there was probably like 3,000 people there.
If we're generous, say it was 4,000 people.
Now, I know it's the Bronx and not like in a southern state or MAGA, you know, central, But there is a huge, huge contingency that are for Trump in those areas in New York as well.
So in my mind, it might not be resonating as much as we think, as these rallies are not being populated like we thought that they were.
Right?
Like that, you know, sometimes they get a certain shot and it feels bad.
It looks like a lot of people there, but when you realize it and you actually look at the numbers, it's like, it's a fraction of what we think.
So it is possible, you know, that's loud and it's fervent, it's energetic, but it's not numerous.
The question that I'm starting to sit with, we'll finish this up with this, and this goes back to the first segment on the show.
What I'm getting concerned with, Is that Trump is going to have MAGA voters, period.
They do not care what he's done.
They do not care how he's behaved.
The question now, and again, Nick, one of the major themes that we've had on the show is that the American voter is not logical.
They, you know, whether or not they're informed or not, many of them are not, many of them are filled with like false information and false beliefs.
The question is whether or not the vote in November could possibly be a protest vote.
And like we could even, this is shocking to say, we could see Trump outperform 2016.
Like that's within the realm of possibility.
People who say, I simply don't like what's going on right now.
I don't like the way the country is.
I'm given two choices.
Do I like Trump?
No, I don't.
I'm going to go down this road.
We don't know yet.
When you said 2016, did you mean 2016, not 2020?
I think there's a possibility he could outperform both.
Okay, because remember 2020 was the most votes anybody ever got and decided from Biden.
That's right, which I mean, I'm talking Electoral College wise.
It would not be crazy if the strategy doesn't change with the Biden campaign.
I would not be, and by the way, I've talked to other people who feel similarly.
You could watch Biden take some states that I think would really, really scare some people if they thought about it.
I don't think he's taking New York.
Yeah.
And again, we have to remind ourselves that none of these polls really matter.
It's the polls in the three states that we're going to decide this election.
The weird thing is, I can't quite figure out which three states those are going to be.
I mean, I suppose we have to say Michigan is definitely one of them.
It turns out it might be more than three states.
Three?
How many?
We might be looking at a seven or eight state battleground map.
And if that's the case, because I think I think after this debate, depending upon how the conventions go, how the debate goes, we might see some truly wild states start to show up in the categories.
And we don't even know, Nick, we don't have a clue where, you know, politics or current events are going to take us.
I mean, just to go ahead and put this out there, China is getting really weird with Taiwan right now.
Gaza continues to be an absolute bloodbath by the day.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
The last story we're going to cover today, this is truly disturbing.
In Missouri, Attorney General Andrew Bailey has opened an investigation into transgender care.
This is included looking into the Washington University's Transgender Care Center in St.
Louis.
He has gained medical records, access to medical records.
He's seeking access to their digital records.
He's investigating therapists and social workers to see how they've treated transgender patients or contributed to their care.
This is one of the most repellent and disturbing things I've seen in a little while.
You know, it just gets worse as you continue to read the article because it's like, you know, people who are doctors who are giving kids care are discovering that their records are already in the hands of government investigators.
um and in the article she even says that it's she had redacted all the names because you know obviously this is really important this is the Missouri Independent for people who want to read up on this yes yeah yeah and so it's like she redacted names when she when they came to interview her about and investigate like the names had been unredacted they were getting them from like somewhere else and they're not even quite sure where um so it seems like it's a complete and utter violation of everything that we you know listen you and I joke that like it doesn't matter anymore about What we are private information, right?
It's all out there.
Everyone's whatever.
The one area that I like to think that isn't out there is my medical records, you know, that there's a safeguard there.
The doctor seems to, you know, be on board with that, but that's doesn't seem to be the case either anymore either.
And that's really frightening.
Yeah, it's not going to be, unfortunately.
And I want to give a little bit of a 30,000-foot view of this thing.
This is taking place in Missouri, which is like one of the most reactionary states that we have.
In the work that I've done outside of the podcast and my writing, the organizing that I've done in some of these so-called red states, what I keep finding Is that these aggressive tactics, like they have carte blanche to do or whatever they want, and you have a lot of these, again, think Tanks and Institutes.
Some of the most active ones include, obviously, the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, you name it.
One of the plans that's been carried out is that the GOP in these Republican-controlled states are basically given a plan to make life as unlivable as possible in these states.
Right?
So, for instance, the idea that, like, you can't even live in the state of Missouri without having the state itself attacking you, investigating you, impeaching your civil liberties and your right to privacy and protection.
Like, it's supposed to make these people feel like they have to leave.
And when I talk to people on the ground who I'm trying to organize with, almost to a person, Nick, they always say, I don't know if I can stay here anymore.
And that isn't accidental, right?
This is supposed to move people out of the state of Missouri, the same way that they have actively moved people.
We've seen mass migration of political ideology.
We've seen it from people moving from California to Texas, right?
Moving from California to Florida.
People moving from Texas and Florida to California.
And in states like Missouri, like maybe you might decide you need to go across the border and go to Illinois.
Right?
Or maybe you need to go to California.
Maybe you need to go somewhere where your life isn't being made hell.
That's a political strategy.
It's supposed to create these strongholds in these states such as Missouri.
And the entire idea behind it, and this is all in the books, again, Heritage, Claremont, you name it.
Like, what it's trying to do is it's trying to make these little bastions of control that become solidly, solidly red.
They will never, ever be pushed against against.
And then you start going after some of the purple states, right?
Some of the states that are the battleground states that you and I talked about.
And so you use minoritarian rule, you use the Electoral College against itself, and you start taking something from a so-called red state like Missouri, and then you make it federal.
And that has been the plan that's been going on for a while.
This isn't accidental.
It isn't just like Andrew Bailey, who's a complete nutter asshole and monster.
It's not just him acting on his own.
It is like a well-oiled machine that has an endpoint to it.
And you have to understand why people feel like they might have to leave.
Like, that is a natural human feeling when it comes to this stuff.
Yeah, I just looked it up.
Missouri has 10 electoral college votes.
So I was looking at it and that's not insignificant.
You know, I know the New York's got, you know, 29 or whatever, but like 10 isn't enough.
You cobbled a few of those together and you get people out of the state they don't want.
And now you got a coalition that will block, that have minority rule forever.
Like you said, I mean, there's a tip line now, like where you can call in and turn people in.
This is just, and what's worse about it is that they, their mindset generally is, They don't want people in their business.
They want to feel like they are in control of their own lives and their own information, and they would shudder to think if anybody from the government would have access to their medical records on the GOP side, but they'd have no problem violating anybody else's if it goes against the smallest bit of their, I suppose, religious ideology.
Yeah, and it works on all fronts.
It's like, okay, so let's say, for instance, You've lived in Missouri your entire life, right?
Like, you've voted in one presidential election after another.
Your vote's basically been thrown away because the Republican is going to win the Electoral College, right?
Meanwhile, your life on the ground, whether you work in politics, which a lot of people I'm talking about do, or you're a teacher, Or you're a scientist, or you're an academic, or whatever it is.
There are all these different positions.
A poll worker, we've talked about this, right?
Like, any of these things that you might do, it makes sense that you might say, I can't do this anymore.
I have to go somewhere else.
It's for my health.
It's for my children.
Imagine being in a state like Missouri and having, like, a child who's transgender, right?
Like, what do you do?
And so, it's really hard because you have to go into these spaces.
I'm speaking as an organizer, my other role.
Like, you go in and they say that.
I can't tell the person, you have to stay in this state and go through this in order to try and change things.
Like, it is a natural sort of decision and hinge point that you have to face for yourself and your family and your community.
Like, what do you do?
And unfortunately, they've leveraged this.
It's state-sponsored terror, is what it is.
And the fact that they've been able to do this, Nick, the really scary thing is, going back to what we were saying about imagining these things, You have to be sadistic as shit to imagine doing this in order to gain control over things, in order to push, like, your political project and gain, you know, political control.
Like, this is almost so sadistic that it was almost impossible to imagine that they would do it.
And now that they're doing it, it makes it really hard to figure out, like, how to push back against it.
Well, the pushback or the solution would have to be that people like that would understand the circumstances around kids who are transgender and how that all that process plays out.
And then you're you are not receptive.
You are sympathetic and understand people's by the way, not even sympathetic.
It's simply the respectful of their own decisions in their own families, right?
But how do you do that?
Well, if you are in school and you learn a little bit about how we should accept everybody for who they are and who you can be, well, that would help.
And what's happening there?
They are also trying to ban any version of that kind of education, which is really frightening.
again, because it was tainted early on decades and decades and generations and generations ago, like that the only solution would be to try and help the younger kids who are not tainted yet to understand that everyone is a person who deserves their own path and their own way they want to go.
And and that's what's so dangerous is they're trying to change forever the education system because they know how important it is to get to the kids and teach them these terrible things before they get too old.
They totally understand that.
And what you're talking about and what we've been talking about, unfortunately, is like the the personal weight of this, right?
Which, you know, when I talk to people and they say, what can I do?
It's like, you have to show up for these meetings.
You have to show up to engage in the small d democratic process, right?
You have to.
You have to fight back against these people in any way that you possibly can.
The problem, to go ahead and bring this episode full circle, Nick, is that we do have an apparatus in place to keep this shit from happening.
The federal government is supposed to protect the rights and protections of the people.
Like, in this case, like, I'm sorry, but the President of the United States of America should not be allowing governors and Republican legislatures and people in power to do this type of stuff.
It's a distaste for these battles because of the electoral college model.
I mean, what DeSantis has done in Florida has not just been disgusting, but the fact that it's happened on the watch of a Democratic president and a Democratic administration.
That's the thing is, I don't think Biden has a taste for those battles.
Do you know what I mean?
I don't think he's interested in going after these states or going after these sort of aggressive and muscular sort of aggressive campaigns.
But that's what a federal government's supposed to do.
You're supposed to live throughout the country.
You're supposed to have inalienable rights.
And the government's job is to protect those rights And that's not what the government's been doing.
It's been allowing these little tin pot dictators to sort of like carve up the map.
And from one state to the next, like your life is incredibly different because you don't have that protection anymore.
That's unfortunate.
All right, everybody.
We're going to come back with our Weekender episode on Friday.
Reminder, patreon.com slash Montclair Podcast.
You want to listen to it.
By the way, a bunch of people, Nick, I'm just going to say, a bunch of people heard the call last week and they were like, you're right, Jared Yates-Axton.
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