Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the current state of the Biden campaign and what they're willing to do to attack the Trump campaign. Lara Trump has announced an army of over 100,000 poll watchers to wreak havoc on our election system and Jared and Nick say: "What could go wrong?" They shift to the violent protests in France and what the US can learn from them before ending on a new push from the Surgeon General to put warning labels on social media.
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I'm here with my good friend and co-host Nick Hausman.
Nick, it's hot out!
Is it really bad where you are?
It's hot!
It's very nice here, but yes, I hear Chicago's 100 and whatnot.
I suffer from perpetual seasonal amnesia.
When summer rolls around, I forget what it feels like, what it's like to go outside and go for a run and feel like it might be your last.
I'm sweating, man.
I'm sweating.
Yeah, that's too bad.
We're finally getting the nice, decent, warm weather I've been waiting for.
How dare you?
I know, but I can't complain.
That's just awful.
Please stay cool, please stay out of the heat if you can out there.
Well everybody, if you want to complain about Nick's absolute L.A.
bullshit, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
Support the show, that way you can leave comments on our Patreon episodes, you can listen and join in on our live episodes, and also go to our Discord and say, Nick, quit it.
Quit lording over us with your Los Angeles idyllic Climate that you get to think about while the rest of us are out in the rest of America sweating our asses off.
I'll be reading them at the beach.
How dare you?
But yeah, and by the way, a reminder, we're supposed to have a debate next week.
If this debate happens, which I am still skeptical of, Nick and I are going to go live, talk about it afterwards, give you our exclusive analysis.
I promise you it's going to be better than anything you see on cable news or anywhere else.
And that's patreon.com slash my great podcast.
Well, hang on.
Jared, what do you think it is?
What's the countdown here?
At what point is it too late to back out for Trump?
Minutes before.
You really can go that deep into the count?
Oh, wait a second.
I'm sorry.
I'm getting a transmission from the future.
It's Jared from next week.
Apparently Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president, walked into the stage, looked around, touched the podium, and walked right out and said he's not going to do it.
I'm sorry, I just got that transmission.
Alright, good to know.
I mean, do you doubt that?
That's Donald Trump bullshit.
You painted a picture right there.
Yeah, that's how it works.
Speaking of this campaign, we have a lot that we need to get caught up on.
We're in the mix right now.
And one of the things that has happened, and this is something I'm going to talk a little bit about conversations I've had with a couple of Democratic strategists.
This was something that was in the mix for a couple of weeks.
Of course, we went live after Donald Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York State.
We talked about that.
And one of the things that we talked about then, and we've talked about since, is that the Biden campaign wasn't sure if they were even going to utter the words convicted felon.
And what we're about to play for you is a brand new ad that came out from the Biden campaign.
It's called Character Matters, and this is their newest attempt going after Donald Trump.
In the courtroom, we see Donald Trump for who he is.
He's been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and he committed financial fraud.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden's been working, lowering healthcare costs, and making big corporations pay their fair share.
This election is between a convicted criminal who's only out for himself, and a president who's fighting for your family.
I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
Well, that is different, and it is certainly a welcome change in tone.
There we have it, a convicted criminal.
Not just the felonies he was convicted of, but liable for sexual assault, you know, financial fraud.
This is somewhat taking the gloves off.
There's a reason that this happened.
There's been a lot of debate behind the scenes that I'll get into in a second.
But Nick, I have to say, I think it's an effective ad.
I assume that you feel like it is as well.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you have to remind everybody of a couple different things here on both sides of the equation in terms of who Trump is and then what you've done.
I guess the one question is, do you want to lead off with what you've done and then hit the Trump stuff?
We discussed this earlier.
And again, not to pat ourselves on the back, but there are a few strategists and members of the Biden administration and campaign.
You know, we talked about that.
We talked about how you necessarily do it.
We talked about how maybe you go ahead and call him a convicted criminal, comma, and it's weird how that happens.
But yeah, that is something that you have to have a conversation about.
For sure.
And this is really all about who is this for, right?
Who are they making this for?
They're not making it for me.
You know, they don't need me to watch this.
We fully understand that Donald Trump is a convicted felon and criminal and fascist.
We get that.
Right.
And so if you got the curious people out there that are a little bit on the fence, Right, that was probably why they were wringing their hands a little bit about how deep they wanted to get into the criticism of Trump and his, or exposing his, what are the, piccadillos, we'll call them.
And so it's an interesting tightrope you have to walk on this one because you got to get enough of those people just to kind of be like, yeah, yeah.
Oh, actually, let's talk about this for a second.
Are they going to get him to come over to Biden because they like what Biden's done or because they really don't like Trump?
Either one I think will satisfy the Democratic Party and Joe Biden.
And what is the solution?
There's got to be one or the other.
They have to really choose, right?
I think you've got to try and get both.
I think you've got to try and walk and chew gum at the exact same time.
All right, fair enough.
So I've been talking with some strategists, of course, about this campaign.
A lot of people have been frustrated.
The one thing that keeps getting said is this needs to be felonies and abortion, abortion and felonies.
That needs to be basically the main thing, which is, what is it that Joe Biden has done?
What is it that Donald Trump has done in order to land him convictions?
And also, what can we do beyond Donald Trump?
Right?
In some way, shape, or form, that sort of messaging.
Nick, have you noticed that Barack Hussein Obama II has been making some appearances recently with Joe Biden?
I've noticed.
I almost went.
I was almost there.
Yeah, we're going to talk about something that came from that particular fundraiser, but it's weird that Obama sort of got off the sideline recently, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, listen, I'm sure that somebody must have thought, hey, we could use somebody that could help us a little bit with the PR.
Gosh, who could that be?
Nick, do you think that before a former president and a major surrogate joins a president running for re-election on the campaign trail, do you think that they have meetings to discuss messaging and also the types of things that are expected from each party?
Yes.
That's weird because one of the things that we've been covering on this show is that Obama world, all of his strategists, all of his communication experts, all of them have been more or less sort of ignored by Joe Biden and his re-election campaign.
Have we not?
Right.
Yes.
It's almost like this change in direction and tone and communication corresponds with Barack Obama suddenly showing up for a bunch of fundraising events and It's almost like this got pressured from the Obama camp trying to get Biden to change the tone and tenor of his re-election.
I don't know.
I'm just saying things, Nick.
I'm just throwing things at the wall here.
You know, and listen, if you were in Biden's re-election campaign, the writing was on the wall like you needed some help.
You might listen!
I don't know if people know this, but Barack Obama was elected with a major mandate in 2008 and then re-elected with another mandate in 2012.
Yeah, I mean, like they know what they're doing in terms of communication.
Governance is another thing that we could talk about.
It needs more nuance.
But this was one of the moments that the Biden re-election campaign had to start listening to Obama world in terms of communication and strategy.
And what happened here?
Is it shifted because eventually they felt the pressure and the need to have Obama on the campaign trail?
Oh my God, the O.A.
campaign that Obama ran could be studied, you know, in classes.
It is!
Oh, it is?
Okay, good.
Well then, that's also great.
I mean, listen, it helps when Hillary compares, I guess, sort of compares Obama to RFK, what happened to him.
That didn't help her.
But yeah, listen, the way they ran that campaign was absolutely flawless.
He came out of nowhere, basically, to beat the machine.
So I would listen to them if I had a chance.
I would.
And again, I'm in the business often of offering free advice.
I just want to go ahead and say for the record, this isn't the first time I've suggested this, but this is the first time I've used this platform to do so.
Just release a 60 second, even a 30 second ad of just some of the most ridiculous, dangerous shit that Donald Trump has said on the campaign trail over the past few years.
Just put it together.
And at the end, say I'm Joe Biden, I endorse this message.
And by the way, not only will that eat into the cognitive decline argument, also point out how dangerous Donald Trump is, and by the way, just remind people, what is it like to have this guy's voice in your ear for a while?
And I promise you, between sharks and electric motors, his rants about Hannibal Lecter, it never ends.
The stuff that this guy says is poisonous.
Remind people what it is, put that ad out there, and he makes the argument for you.
It certainly don't need you don't even need that in a world-gone-mad narrator.
Don't even have the narrator guy.
Just have Trump narrate it.
But I think you might have answered my earlier question then.
I think what you're going to go after are the people who are just sick of Trump and cannot have him.
They recognize that he's not worth voting for.
If, and matter of fact, if you want to, if you want to juice it up a little bit, just between clips or while the clips play, just have a black screen with some of the accomplishments that Biden has had as president.
Yeah.
Just, just, just intersperse that.
I mean that, that right there, it does itself.
You don't have to pay a lot for that.
Although, going along what you said earlier then, maybe it's just Trump doing his thing and then intersperse abortion rights titles on the screen as well, and then focus on abortion and Trump.
That might be a nice one-two punch as well if you're gonna go that route.
Because again, I don't know if people are gonna, you know, the Democrats are terrible at it anyway, but like, you know, Being able to take the credit for things that they do that are well, it never seems to work that well.
It doesn't stick.
It's easier to criticize when you're on the other side, the Republican side, and just, you know, tear them down.
People are like, oh yeah, this huge infrastructure that's going on around my door, that doesn't happen.
It's not really, oh, Trump must have done that, you know, two years ago before he left office, whatever.
That keeps happening.
I keep reading about these things where people think that Trump did shit that Biden is doing.
It's incredible.
Before we switch our focus across the fence, I just want to point out, Nick, something that we talked about a couple of weeks ago when strategists were telling me that one of the main focuses on that chapter of the reelection campaign was going after quote-unquote leftist and Democrat critics of Biden, and that was like the main thing.
I think right now we're seeing the beginning of the next chapter, and I have a wild notion that going into the possible debate next week, which we'll be covering, patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, That you're going to start seeing a change in tone and tenor.
Speaking of one of the more noxious sort of gross things to come out of that joint appearance between Biden and Obama and also Jimmy Kimmel, and I know that you almost went to this thing.
Man, that sounds awful.
That sounds absolutely awful.
Well, in the future, that's a bad way to spend the night.
There's what's called a cheap fake.
And instead of a deep fake, which uses AI to create fictional things, you sort of edit something, you take something out, you move things out of frame, we're starting to see a lot of cheap fakes that are showing up on the campaign trail.
From that Hollywood fundraiser, there is an out-of-context sort of edited clip that makes it look like Joe Biden sort of froze up and Obama had to lead him off the stage.
It turns out, what was he doing?
He was just interacting with the crowd.
Biden goes to the G7 Summit, which is a disastrous thing, and my god, it's like looking at photographs before World War II.
There's an out-of-context clip that makes it look like he wandered off sort of aimlessly, had sort of a senior moment.
It turns out he was talking to like a parachutist.
This was spread by no less than the New York Post.
But this is becoming one of the favored tactics of the right and their media ecosystem.
Pretty gross stuff.
You know, and it's probably direct response to what was said about Trump while he was in office.
And so it's like they just need to simply lash it back out at somebody else.
And, you know, they don't even need to do the deepfake, to be honest with you, Jared.
Like, he is old.
He does shuffle a little bit now and stuff like that.
It's like you don't even need to edit stuff and frame it differently.
And there's probably some slow-mo going on there, I think, like extending these moments longer.
But this is the future.
So if we're complaining about what it is now, You know, it's going to be infinitely worse in another year or two or three, whatever it is.
And that's, I think that might be the most, the thing I'm most frightened about.
I so we're gonna we're gonna jump off the ledge here in a second and talk about things getting worse, particularly in this campaign and situation.
But Nick, if I said to you right now, that before the 2024 presidential election is over, that we will have a major deepfake controversy that possibly alters the trajectory of the election, would you bet on that being true?
Or would you bet on that not happening?
I would totally bet on that being true.
Yeah, I would too.
It feels like it feels like the stage is set for something like that to happen.
I would be shocked if 2024 gets past us without one of those.
And the thing with Trump is you don't need to do any of that because he just says this stuff out loud anyway.
So, you know, in fact, we have a... Yeah, so speaking of Donald Trump, you know, as this campaign is going forward, as we're moving towards this supposed debate, Trump's rhetoric is just getting weirder and weirder, the things that he's promising.
Nick, roll this beautiful bean footage.
On day one, I was signed a new executive order to cut federal funding.
For any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto the lives of our children.
And I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate.
And I will keep men out of women's sports.
I just love how they keep getting back to women.
Men and women's sports.
Nick, just a pop quiz.
How many public schools in America do you think have vaccine requirements?
All of them.
All of them, because there are vaccines that are required for your child to go to school.
Well, you know, come on, we know what he's talking about.
Oh, we know, we know, but I mean... Yeah, but it furthers the whole mistrust of these things.
And I don't want to go back to having, you know, the Black Plague, you know, in America.
I would, yeah, I would rather not have smallpox making its rounds in like, you know, JFK Elementary.
Which, by the way, is what these people absolutely want.
Meanwhile, they're going to use all of this, Nick, as a weapon.
They are absolutely going to go after public education And it's not even just who has quote-unquote CRT or transgenderism or any of those things.
Basically, this is a stick that will try and make every school in the country automatically adopt whatever curriculum they want, to teach whatever they want, move things around, fire, hire, you name it.
And Nick, we've already seen how many people, how many states, how many corporations have already anticipated What the laws will be or what they'll expect.
So what are we going to see around the country?
We're going to see one school after another simply lay down and do what Trump and the Republicans want them to do.
They know what they're doing.
They know what this weapon does.
And quite frankly, it would be incredibly, incredibly useful.
I wonder what the parents will do of kids, you know, who are progressive parents who, you know, want to send their kids to public school and get a good education.
I would wonder if that would become an exodus as well.
I don't know where they would go.
Well, do you know where they would go?
Well, it wouldn't be Catholic schools.
They would go to private schools.
There's no other choice.
Or homeschooling, I suppose.
Well, I have to imagine.
And either one, by the way, drains funds from public education, which is what the Republican Party wants to do on behalf of their billionaire benefactors, because it is a trillion dollar industry in the waiting.
They've already, like, they basically already demolished most of it.
They're ready to just sort of clean it out, you know, and sort of raise a Fuddruckers on the ruins.
Like, this situation is, and again, Trump didn't come up with this.
You know, he didn't stay up all night studying these issues.
Like, this is the type of stuff that places like the Heritage Foundation and all of these think tanks and institutes have put together, and we have to listen to what he's saying.
They will do this.
Oh yeah, and the creationism will come back in.
I have no doubt they're gonna, we're gonna, I'm serious, we're gonna go back to some stuff, you know.
I wouldn't even think that it'd be beyond certain states, maybe in the South, to change the way they teach the Civil War, you know?
Sure!
I mean, we're talking War of Northern Aggression stuff here.
We're talking Scope's Monkey Trial.
Absolutely.
That is what we're looking at, yes.
Speaking of efforts to destroy everything, Laura Trump over at the RNC, the Republican National Committee, is putting together a giant army of quote-unquote poll watchers and lawyers.
We're talking over a hundred thousand, if not more, in anticipation of the 2024 election.
Nick, we've talked about this for God, the last four years, more or less.
We've been telling people since 2020 what were the Republicans going to do.
They were going to do what they did in 2020, but they were going to do more of it, and on top of it, they were going to intimidate voters and election officials, and it looks like they're putting together the people to do it.
Well, here's the thing.
My first reaction and my only reaction probably would be, if you're going to get to 100,000 poll watchers, which is a massive amount of people to try and organize, there will be no vetting.
No, no, no, no.
You know what I mean?
So you don't know you know some of the pictures were already interesting in that article like the people who walk in there are going to be the kind of people who probably aren't trained have no sense of what they're supposed to like barely and I would be worried about that for a lot of reasons because you don't I mean listen there's a certain There are people who are, who have records, you know, like, you know, you probably don't want them, you know, whatever.
I don't want to cast aspersions, but there's... No, you're not wrong.
I want to lay out a scenario, Nick.
I love to get in these brain palaces and walk around a little bit.
So you've been raised in this environment, someone who would volunteer to be a poll watcher for Laura Trump's RNC.
You've been bathed For years, in the idea that the election of 2020 was stolen.
And by the way, it wasn't just stolen by Joe Brandon, right?
Who was it stolen by?
The Chinese Communist Party, right?
Deep state pedophile groomers, right?
The massive, most evil conspiracy of all time.
You've been told that for years.
You volunteer to be a poll watcher.
I don't know.
Let's say you're in a state like Texas or you're in a state like Arizona.
If you think that you're fighting the evil deep state, and by the way, they've murdered people, Nick.
I mean, they haven't just murdered Vince Foster on a park bench.
They've murdered millions in the pandemic.
You think they're not going to murder you?
You might need to bring protection.
Am I right?
Yeah, yes.
And you don't even have to conceal it.
Oh, you might.
Some places you don't even have to conceal it.
So we're talking about a group of apocalyptic, paranoid people who are signing up for what they think is the most important election of their lifetimes, thinking that the evil deep state might be out to get them.
That is a recipe for disaster.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, no doubt.
And, you know, intimidation, all sorts of things.
What's it called?
Vigilanteism.
I mean, it's going to be bad.
And it's going to add a whole other layer of security necessary from the normal apparatus.
If we get it.
Yeah, if it's available.
Yeah, I mean, we've already talked about this, who would ever want to do this job anymore, right?
Who would want to be the poller and the ballot people count?
And now that you have people that they're harassed in the parking lot, no doubt doxxing, all that stuff is on the table with the people like this.
And so, you know, it's going to take, these are the real patriots who are going to be willing to do that and go through all that and actually count the ballots.
I have not thought about this until right now.
And this might be Nick, this might be the worst idea that I've ever had.
Or it might be brilliant.
I mean, we're doing a podcast.
That's what we do, right?
Some things might be brilliant, they might be stupid.
Are you ready for this?
I am.
Do you know what might be the solution to what you just brought up?
Because in the past, you relied on senior citizens.
You relied on, like, you know, local retirees to come in and hand out the ballots and give you the sticker.
We might need to create like jury duty for election observers and poll workers.
We might need to change to something where literally every couple of years your name gets drawn, you have to come in for like a two-hour shift and watch after this stuff.
Because you're exactly right.
Who's going to volunteer for this anymore?
We might need to do something like that.
Wow.
But the second, right before you actually said your idea, I kind of thought maybe you were going to say we need the National Guard to do it.
That, by the way, that has problems.
You know, but like.
Real issues.
At least with the National Guard, there is a vetting process there.
I don't know.
I don't remember if you have to be like having gone to college or whatever, but like, you know, there needs to be some sort of aptitude to be able to handle how to do that in training.
And it's like, I don't know, you know, but then again, it's the same thing with being on the jury.
It's like, because anybody is eligible for that as well.
So, you know, I don't know.
I agree.
I think something needs to be done.
It's not a bad idea, by the way, to do so.
I don't know.
Like I said, it might be brilliant.
It might be stupid.
I'm going to sit with it.
Right.
Or we get more and more robot, you know, candidates.
No!
No!
I'm going to get a spray bottle, Nick.
No!
The loud can that shakes loudly.
No!
No!
No robots.
Speaking... I don't know how to segue from robots to this.
In France, we've been covering this story.
Things have gotten weird.
After the EU elections, national rally, the proto...
They have roots in proto-fascism.
They are a neo-fascist group.
They've been gaining popularity and standing, leading to President Emmanuel Macron calling for snap elections next month.
The polls are bad, Nick.
Macron's party right now is running in third place.
But what we have seen with the ascent of National Rally, which is a white supremacist, neo-fascistic group, as they have grown in stature, we've seen the construction of something called a Popular Front.
And I'll talk more about what that means here in just a second.
But basically, it is a grouping, it is a partnership of the left that has come together and said that this is not okay.
We have to do something about it.
And what have we seen?
Nearly a half a million people marched in France in protest this last weekend.
It was raucous.
We saw it in over 150 plus locations.
We saw clashes with police.
We saw property damage.
It was a massive, massive event and a show of force against fascistic forces.
There's some historical stuff we need to get into here, some contemporary stuff that needs to get into here.
But Nick, one thing I have to say is, as I've said on this show before, we have a lot to learn from the French citizenry.
This is the type of stuff that should be taking place in America.
Well, that's the first thing I jump out at me.
It's like, listen, they're having a massive rally before the election.
This is not like a reaction afterwards.
We're mad about Trump doing the, you know, the ban on people coming into our country, anything like that.
This is before, and I agree, this summer should be the summer of protests.
But it needs to be on that massive scale.
We need half a million, a million people, and it needs to happen more than once.
I was saying that before in 2020, and it didn't really happen, right?
And yet they were able to make it work, especially with the COVID.
Well, it happened in 2020 under different auspices.
It happened with BLM.
It did?
Oh, okay, fair enough.
Okay, I can see that.
But I'm talking about, you know, March on Washington to the, what's it called?
You know, where the The monument is help me the mall.
The mall.
Thank you.
Gosh, and I'm so jealous.
I did two people.
I know who I am.
I like it connects.
My family are all going to Washington for a week on trips to visit everything and I did it for a quick weekend once and I need to get back there.
I want to go back and visit everything and anyway, but the point being that yes, we need we need that.
We need more of that now.
And I think that would that would go a long way.
So, a couple of things I just wanted to put into historical context, but also contemporary context.
First of all, these types of popular fronts are what stood up to fascism and Nazism in the early to mid-20th century.
This is where socialists, socialists, democrats, you name it, like basically anybody who is involved in the left They say, hey, we need to come together in order to form this popular front that can overtake the centrist and the right.
One of the reasons that this holds so much power right now is before something like World War I, there was a massive popular front pushing against this.
And by the way, a lot of the capitalist forces wanted World War I. They thought it would be fantastic for business and resources and power and you name it.
Eventually, that is what led, of course, to some assassinations.
That's what ended up leading to the breaking of the left.
Eventually, you see this before World War II.
This is one of the reasons why the predecessors to the National Rally were put down, because people would show up in the streets and say, we are not going to put up with fascists.
We're not going to allow this to take hold.
And then, of course, those people came out of the woodwork whenever the Nazis took over and they said, congratulations, Nazis, we can't wait to work with you.
The Popular Front, of course, was also one of the things that took place before the Cold War started and everything went to hell, of course.
I also want to point out contemporarily that one of the things that I've been keeping my eye on recently, Nick, is what was thought of as a conspiracy theory, but it turns out to be well-founded, which is the horses.
It is an idea in France that centrist and, you know, center-right liberals particularly, people in Macron's cabinet and in that sort of area, that a lot of them are starting to welcome the right.
They think that their alliances are best served by working with national rally, allowing them to come into the government, which might explain partly why these elections are taking place the way that they are.
And there's a lot of elites who are doing that.
Unfortunately, Nick, that's taking place in America as well.
We are seeing a lot of people who are moderates, liberals, you name it, who are starting to become very, very comfortable with the right and even working with them and even espousing some anti-liberal ideas.
And what France is showing us is when you see those things, when you know that they're there, it's not enough to simply go to an election.
It's important to go to an election.
You need to create coalitions in order to fight back against this stuff, but you have to show a populist force.
If you don't, things continue in the direction they are, and America needs to learn from this.
Oh, you know, as they, I guess, as we learned from their, oh no, France, as France learned from us and our revolution, forgive me, we need to now learn from them what they did in the late 1700s.
I agree.
I think that, yes, because we know that they work, right?
The kind of, when enough people stand up and say we're not going to take them anymore, it has an effect.
You know, and whether it's long lasting or not is another question, but it can have an effect.
It could change votes.
It could change the way, you know, who gets elected.
And that's important.
Yeah, and there's also, I don't want to underplay this because it's important to give people the broader context.
One of the things that happens when the left comes together and they show populist force, like what we're talking about here, is a lot of the time the center, which is already flirting with the right, they're already thinking of forming their own sort of coalition with them, they are met with violence.
They are met with oppression and violence and force and the state pushes back and oftentimes the trajectory of the country moves further right until the left pulls it back to the left or the center or whatever you want to call it.
It does lead to clashes.
Do not get me wrong.
It is not easy.
It is not simple.
It is clear.
If we did have a million person march, I mean, look what happened with BLM.
Those people were brutalized.
All over the country.
We'll never know the full extent of the violence and state violence that was that was meted out.
But this is the type of thing that the current moment requires.
And that isn't good.
It doesn't feel great.
It's not comfortable.
But I think what's what we're seeing in France is a demonstration of how a healthier society deals with these things.
Right, and listen, things get chaotic and things get, you know, vandalized to some degree, but it doesn't have to mirror what BLM's protests were then.
It could very well be like those peaceful marches that Martin Luther King led in the 60s that we can get back to a little bit more, and the focus on having a unified voice to stand up to the government.
So, I don't know if anyone's even organizing anything here, you know, and How are they organizing?
We need to probably take one more page from France to figure out how they're making that happen.
So first things first, I wouldn't mind if it mirrored the BLM protest.
I wasn't that troubled by it.
I will say this.
I'm trying to be very careful here because I have been in some conversations.
I don't want to give away everything.
There are people who are working on protests right now.
There are some groups that are coming together.
I'm not going to say it out loud, but I think you can piece some of it together if you want to read between the lines.
I don't want to say it in so many words, but there are some groups that are attempting to put together some leftist leaning protests leading into November.
The question, as we saw, I mean, recently, you know, we saw with protests just in the last few months, is that that violence is growing.
And it's not just law enforcement.
It's also institutions.
It's also paramilitaries.
It's also gangs in the street, which is what happens when the left and the right start combating each other in the streets.
I mean, that's what comes with it.
But there is some stuff that's in the works.
If you want to read between the lines of what I'm saying, feel more than free to do so.
I just don't want to give away sources at this point, but there is some stuff that is in the works.
The question is whether or not it will come to fruition.
Right, because remember, like, a Million Man March doesn't just organically happen, you know, in the street one day.
Yeah, it takes money, takes a lot of organization, Well, and by the way, Million Man March and all the civil rights stuff, don't forget, it's not like they were left unmolested and just let to do what they wanted to do.
The powers that be coalesced against them.
And, by the way, used a lot of right-wing lunatics and people to, like, you know, go in and create subterfuge.
They violated every one of those civil rights leaders' civil rights in doing the whole thing.
It isn't just a clean, easy thing.
There's always going to be altercations.
There's unfortunately going to be blood spilled.
There's a lot of stuff that comes with this, and it's dirty business.
Absolutely.
But it's necessary, unfortunately, to stand up to what we're talking about.
And also to maybe inspire more people who either wouldn't have voted or, you know, could hear what the protest is about and be swayed to vote a different way.
And that's also very important.
Absolutely.
And speaking of important things, our last story today, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has come out now and advocated for warning labels on social media that would mirror what we see on cigarettes and alcohol, that would warn that social media is detrimental to young people's mental health.
This is something I happen to agree with Murthy on, following my own research and the research that I've been paying a lot of attention to.
He said, quote, I don't think we can solely rely on the hope that platforms can fix this problem on their own.
I would go so far as to say that not only would they not fix the problem on their own, but that they don't want to.
And it is absolutely an incentive toward everything that they do.
Nick, how do you feel about the possibility of warning labels on social media?
Me part of me kind of wanted to shrug, but part of me also realizes that it did have an effect like for cigarette smokers in theory over enough time.
I mean for whatever reason.
The percentage of smokers went down significantly, right?
So that's that's something and it would probably take a while, right?
People would slough it off.
I've you know, I've been on this for 12 hours today.
I'm not turning off now, but maybe you know, the six-year-old seven-year-olds eight-year-olds see that over enough time and then it has the effect when they become nine or ten get their own phones, whatever that is and then they don't do it.
So I am all for curbing without question screen time and whatever the format takes and certainly social media is The top of the list of why that's such a dominant problem to have.
So yeah, but you know, it's interesting who's in charge, who's supposed to be in charge of that.
Well, I mean, it's supposed to be the U.S.
government.
I mean, Congress is supposed to approve it and put it into place.
Good luck getting this Congress that is funded by tech money to put those warnings in place.
Well, the warnings are one thing, but aren't the parents supposed to be in charge of the kids?
I mean, technically, sure.
But, I mean, this whole thing is so weird.
It's so...
It so mirrors what happened with tobacco, but there's also so many different types of things that are taking place here.
First things first, I mean, kids are active on social media, Instagram and TikTok especially, but my God, does this generation of young people care about mental health?
And I think that they know that social media does this, but as like awareness starts to grow about this, I think it's really important that they do look at this.
Also, social media is in decline.
It just is, and there's no other way to talk about it.
Like, we're on the precipice of something else.
We don't know what it is yet, but it's probably not social media.
It's probably some sort of new iteration.
But we also need to take a look at one big thing here, Nick.
Eventually, the tobacco companies, it was found out, what did they do?
They lied for decades.
About what they were putting into cigarettes and what they were doing to people.
Eventually, they were found liable for $246 billion in damages, right?
And by the way, not nearly enough money.
I mean, the damage that tobacco did to Americans, I mean, we can't even calculate what it should have done, much less all of the things they even did to past generations and not to mention slave trade.
We don't have time to get into all of it.
Quite frankly, what the tech industry has done, they know what they've done.
They've done this intentionally.
We've seen reporting that these places are completely aware that not only is their moderation not up to snuff, but that their algorithms are completely preying upon people's mental health, which is what American capitalism does constantly.
This right here is the beginning of going down a road in which the tech companies will be liable for something like the tobacco settlement.
Because one of the things that happens, and Murthy, by the way, is smart.
He wants to put these warnings on, which means this is a dangerous product, right?
The next thing that it would do is he wants it to be made for independent audits, in which the government would go in, look under the hood and see what's happening in these companies, but also where they can review the data.
And if they can review the data and the internal documents, Nick, you know as well as I do, and everyone listening knows this, you will find a crime scene.
That's what has happened.
And these tech companies have been left unregulated for so long.
And he says, you know, they had their chance.
They've had over 20 years on this thing.
And he's right.
It's 20 years of organized, intentional, malevolent crime.
They have known what they have done, and if this went through, and I don't think it will.
That's the scary thing, is I don't think this will actually happen.
It should, but it won't, in large part because tech owns so many of our politicians and so much of the wealth and power in this country.
But if it started, that ball would not just roll down the hill, it would fall off the cliff.
It would be a huge step, but I don't think this is going to happen.
Interesting, I don't know.
Why don't you think it's going to happen?
Only because it would require, you know, both parties to somehow come together on something that nobody wants to appear like they're helping each other out?
I want you to imagine, let's go back to when we took $246 billion from the tobacco industries.
I want you to imagine that the tobacco industry owned almost all of the means of communication.
You know what I mean?
Like almost all of the avenues in which people got the news, opinions, news stories, entertainment.
Imagine that they had control over all of this.
How do you think the tobacco industry would have reacted?
Oh, they would have made sure that this didn't happen at all.
They would have made sure that this didn't happen whatsoever.
And as we're watching, I mean, I'm sorry, but Big Tech isn't just fascist curious at this point.
They're in a long-term relationship with fascism.
They love it.
They want it.
They don't trust liberal democracy.
They don't trust government oversight.
I think that this is going to be a little bit of a game of chicken.
And I do not think that, first of all, the Democratic Party has not shown the ability to go after this stuff.
Also, the Democratic Party is in bed with these people.
We talked about the Obama campaign earlier.
Obama would not have won the elections that he won if it wasn't for Google and big tech and their partnership back and forth.
I don't see this thing getting across the finish line, but personally, I'm very happy to see Murphy putting himself on the line, saying what needs to be said, and going from there.
But no, I don't see it happening.
Yeah, fair enough.
I mean, all of that is good, you know, to somehow figure out if we can get some more support.
Listen, I'm the worst person to be talking to in terms of kids and social media.
And I think that they're somewhat well-adjusted, but there's no question that there are moments here that are direct.
Listen, I'm suffering.
I need to get off of social media.
We all are!
No, it's not just kids.
We all are.
Yeah, I mean, my heart races.
I get stressed from, you know, from a freaking Twitter reply.
Like, it's terrible.
So we all need this help.
And I don't know what's going to happen.
There might be a breaking point, God forbid, it'd be some terrible thing.
But something needs to, a reckoning has to happen at some point where we can kind of, you know, get back to hugging trees, reading books, being outside.
Something that's not on our damn screens anymore.
And I, you know, I actually, it's funny you say that, like I got away for the weekend.
I went out in nature.
I didn't have access to my phone for, I don't know, it was like 60 hours or so.
And one of the things that really sat with me, Nick, is like, I didn't, I wasn't craving it.
I was relieved.
Do you know what I mean?
I was so relieved to not have access to it and not deal with it.
And one of the things, and this is part of the research I've been doing on my next project and a lot of what I've been looking at, the technology overpowers us so much.
And it's run through with the poison of insecurity and competition and alienation.
In the same way American capitalism works, it makes you feel worse while giving you dopamine hits that occasionally make you feel better and then dropping you down and back and forth and back and forth.
Like, what they have created, a lot like tobacco, Nick, We didn't understand what the tobacco companies put in their cigarettes.
We didn't understand all the additives, all the chemicals that they created the perfect addictive substance.
And by the way, it's not just cigarettes.
It's not just tech.
It's our food.
It's our media.
It's how all of this stuff works.
Our country and our economy is wired to be bad for us.
And quite frankly, it shouldn't have been allowed to happen.
That's what we have a government for.
You're not supposed to have corporations that can run roughshod.
And personally, I wish somebody would do something about it.
I just have doubts about whether or not you can get that, like, horse back in the barn.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
I mean, the forces that are out there put a lot of pressure on these politicians.
Maybe this is the one time where they can kind of wiggle their way around and say, hey, this is for the children.
And maybe tech companies can figure out a way to profit off of that as well, which would be something.
I wish that the only thing about that is that that should be what happens with guns, you know, and meanwhile we have a Supreme Court that just like brought back bump stocks.
You know, basically it's like Zardoz.
It's just like they're just like outside just shoveling semi-automatics with like banana clips.
I had that one clip we want to share, but like there was when you hear the difference between a semi-automatic where you have to pull the trigger every time.
That sounds pretty fast, man.
Like a lot of bullets are flying out of there at a fast rate.
And then somebody said, well, here's what a bump stock looks like.
That thing was like it was it was frightening to me how fast that was that can't be any slower than like a machine gun as far as I know and and like you know and here are these assholes you know who are in the middle of doing this by the way we should be having um marches against them uh every day too uh for what they've been doing to their country
Well, and I want to point out, and I'm so glad you said it that way, Nick, I think regardless of politics, when I say there should be people in the street, I'm not saying that people should be marching with, like, banners of Joe Biden, you know?
People should be marching in the street about things that most Americans agree about.
That aren't even controversial, right?
Like, I'm sorry, but women's reproductive care is not controversial.
It was made controversial, by the right, for very specific reasons.
On top of that, like, keeping kids, like, safe from gun violence and mass shootings and, you know, like, tech companies, what they're doing.
I'm sorry, but even something as much as, like, how much of our lives now are scams?
You know what I mean?
Phone scams, email scams, social media scams, hacking scams, whatever it is.
All of this stuff is wildly unpopular and it has only happened because our government has been completely corrupted by the influences that we're talking about.
That's a basis for an actual movement.
To say enough is enough.
Things are getting worse.
We should come together and do this stuff.
That's, I agree with you.
I think that we should be having marches for exactly that.
Right.
Like, okay, government's ineffective.
We can't get through the red tape bureaucracy.
Let's figure out a way to fix that.
Let's not sit there and complain about it or throw up your hands.
Like, I can remember the Clinton, I think it was a famous Clinton picture, maybe like six months after he got elected, right?
And they came in there, they were so excited, 92, they're going to make this whole thing work.
And you could see on his face, he just couldn't believe how even probably the littlest things couldn't get done.
Well, he met with Alan Greenspan and like he was, he was read the riot act and he's basically like, Hey, you have a decision to make.
You're either going to play ball with us or you're not.
And it was, well, I guess we're playing ball.
I guess my entire presidency is going to be completely, like, dedicated to helping the market and also, like, you know, cutting the social safety net under the auspices of, you know, reining in the deficit.
And you're right.
They went there thinking they were going to do one thing, even though they had certain proclivities, and then they got read the right act.
And that was where it was at.
Sprinkle a little deregulation in there and then you have some.
You go to town, right?
It's like when you dump the sea monkeys into the water and you wait to see what happens.
The sea monkeys haven't just grown up, but they've created their own giant unregulated system that is just rotting brains out as they sell you snake oil.
Wow, a good pull on the sea monkeys.
I wasn't anticipating that.
Listen, these episodes start and you don't always know where they're going to end up.
Let's be honest.
All right, everybody, we will be back with The Weekender on Friday.
If you want to listen to that, and obviously you do, you listen to the previews, and we want you to come along.
We want you to join this community.
We want you there after this supposed debate.
I still don't.
I don't know that it's going to happen.
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