We're back with another edition of The Federalist or Radio Hour. I'm Emilijashenski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. As always, you can email the show
at radio at the Federalist dot com, follow us on x at fdr LST,
make sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcasts, and of course to
the premium ad free version of the Federalist dot Com as well. I'm so
happy to be joined today by Ryan Grimm, who's the author of an excellent
new book, The Squad AOC and The Hope of a Political Revolution. Ryan
is the DC bureau chief over at The Intercept. He's the co host of
Counterpoints with Me, which you can subscribe to over on the Breaking Points Channel.
You can watch on the Breaking Points Channel, you can get it on
any podcast platform. And Ryan also has another podcast called Deconstructed, which goes
and does amazing deep dives into all kinds of topics. So Ryan, first
of all, thank you so much for joining us, and congrats on the
book. We have an amazing show today. Indeed we do is what I
think I'm supposed to say. There you go. I wore my Breaking Points
sweater to the mall yesterday. I was very excited. Did you get any
comments? No? No, I did not get any comments or was very
disappointed. So yeah, background on that is one of our producers over at
Counterpoints, Griffin created a sweatshirt that's like supposed to be an ugly Christmas sweater
with all of our faces on. Yeah. And Ryan and Christal Ball,
co host of at Breaking Points, actually did an event at Politics and Pros
here in DC and someone came up to them actually wearing their own faces,
which Ryan had have been surreal. Yeah, that was pretty weird. Okay,
Well, let's get to the book because I just recommend it to anybody
who's interested in politics period, doesn't matter if you're in the left of the
right. There's so much interesting stuff in here. It captures I think the
dynamics of Capitol Hill really well. But Ran, maybe a good place to
start is that this is a sequel, of sorts to a book you wrote
right before it. Can you tell us about going from We've Got People,
which was the book before this one, to the Squad and kind of how
you're bridging point A and point B together with these two books. Yeah,
We've Got People was a fun one because it was a way to kind of
build off of about at that point, maybe twelve years of reporting roughly from
two thousand and I've been covering the progressive world and the Democratic Party and the
fight between the two of them, starting in two thousand and six in those
midterms, and then in twenty eighteen when AOC and the rest of the squad
won their primaries. It really did feel like an arc, al a twelve
year arc that was identifiable, both in terms of all of the different forces
that were work, plus the actual peace people from you know, the activists
who started in their twenties and now we're you know, in more you know,
higher positions in their in their forties. Obviously many of them I kind
of knew, you know, I had gotten to know very well over that
twelve year period. Plus the politicians as well, who had you know,
gone in and out of different positions public to private life, and that that
two thousand and six moment really felt to me connected to the kind of two
thousand through the nineteen eighties kind of the very seeds of the of the pushback
against the kind of turn towards corporate power and corporate money in the nineteen eighties
where you had Burlington mayor Bernie Sanders getting behind Jesse Jackson for his presidential campaigns,
and it, you know, from this quixotic thing arose a real,
a real fighting force. And so that book has kind of a satisfying narrative
arc to it that were very familiar with the underdogs getting their act together and
you know, fighting back against the big bad death star and you know,
triumphing. And of course they didn't triumph though at the very end, what
they had done is I have just gotten themselves into a position to start to
have a fight on somewhat more equal terrain. So then the next book picks
up really with Bernie Sanders first presidential campaign kind of picks up at that moment
where now the now the fight is really on and they're actually contesting power at
the highest level you know, in the in the you know, symbolized by
Bernie Sanders campaign, which you came, you know, days away from snatching
the actual nomination. So the second book is much less satisfying in terms of
like a narrative arc, but I think I think more interesting. Well,
I was going to say, actually I want to pick up on the point
about Bernie, because the book is called the Squad and I'm looking at the
cover right now and has all the squad members, but Bernie looms so large
over this the narrative that you just mentioned, and I wanted to ask if
you could talk a little bit about this is like a two prong question.
One, as you were observing the twenty sixteen Democratic primary and then into the
general election as well, sort of someone who as someone who's followed this since
you know, two thousand and six, to your point were what were your
impressions of what was happening with the Bernie Sanders campaign? And then b how
did that and people should buy the book to get you know, a lot
of the answers to this question, but how did that sort of give some
room for the squad to kind of take off eventually? Like how did the
Bernie campaign make it possible for the squad to sort of come into Congress with
some momentum too? Yeah, you could have even had the cover with a
little faded kind of Bernie face in the background behind them, because you know,
his campaign, like you said, really did create a space for them.
You know, the the arc is really you know, the financial crist
you know, you get the Iraq War creating, you know, a huge
schism and a break with the Democratic Party for a lot of young people who
were like, this party does not represent us. That flows right into the
financial crisis and the rise of Obama, and you had this kind of hope
that there was going to be change, you know, that this is the
guy. The reason he beat Hillary Clinton was really that he had opposed the
Iraq War like that. Other than that, policy wise, there wasn't a
whole lot of difference between them, and there was a real hope that,
you know, the kind of online activism and the energy that had developed over
the years would then be marshaled by Obama to kind of really fight against the
corporate wing of the party like that. Of course, did not happen.
He ended up allying mostly with the corporate wing of the party, which then
produced some cynicism, but also some kind of real kind of efforts to challenge
the party from the left, and you get Occupy Wall Street out of that.
And Bernie Sanders had been using kind of the occupied language of the ninety
nine percent against the one percent, you know, for decades, talking about
the millionaires and the billionaires, and so when he ran, he expected that
he was going to just run the symbolic like protest campaign where he's going to
get left wing ideas into the conversation. But of course, you know,
Hillary's going to walk away with the nomination. He was. He was as
shocked as anybody else to find himself in a real competition, and coming in
then to twenty eighteen, with Trump in the White House, the entire Democratic
Party, like the base of it, really started to think that the establishment
wing was just not up to the job. If you remember back in twenty
like right after right after Trump won, like the party, like the Schumers
and the Pelosis of the world, were just completely on their heels, flat
on their back, had been just leveled by everything, and in a genuinely
grassroots way, like Democratic voters organized the Women's March for January if that was
January twenty first, like the day after Trump's nomination and Trump's inauguration, And
at first, like most Democrats didn't even want to have anything to do with
it. They didn't really know what it was. You didn't know who was
associated with it, and they only Democrats only kind of came around around reluctantly.
And then you ended up having something like five million people come into the
streets that that January twenty first day across the country, you know, thousands
and you know, you know, hundreds of thousands in DC, tens of
thousands, hundreds of thousands in other cities. And that really showed that there
was like a path around the establishment winging the party. And then this so
the squad in twenty eighteens comes to symbolize that. And then by the time
of the twenty twenty presidential election, you had all of these candidates just trip
over themselves to talk to try to out Bernie Bernie other than Biden, basically
pretty much everybody said that they were for Medicare for all. You ha had
Kamala Harris, if you remember that when one presidential debate, say that she
was for banning private health insurance. You remember a day or two later she
says, you misheard the question, which of course is absurd, but like
it shows, it shows the way that the kind of a democratic party at
large had had just decided that actually, this, this is where the energy
is, and we need to we need to head over here if we're going
to capture it. You know, one thing you hear a lot about on
the right is the sort of legend of Act Blue and how you know,
the Republicans have just never been able to muster a competitor to Act Blue,
and that raises all sorts of questions about is it the software platform or is
it you know, something on the grassroots level. Is there something about and
maybe yeah, can you explain to me, like why the right can't do
this because Act Blue we actually use it at the Intercept for our donations.
It's just a donation platform. It's like a PayPal, you know. It's
like you click a link and you donate, and it's and it asks the
information that you need for the FEC unless you're a nonprofit, which we are,
so then it asks different information. It makes sure you're not a foreign
citizen trying to donate, and then it collects what information it can on you,
you know, email, phone number, whatever, so that that you
can then kind of be targeted by campaigns later. But it's it's really rudimentary.
Like I feel like if somebody gave me a two hundred and fifty thousand
dollars grant or something, I could find engineers who could like build a serviceable
version of it. And I've seen a lot of that like like paranoia on
the right of like look at all this act Blue and you'll see like people
who don't know how to read FEC reports and they'll look and they'll see all
these act Blue things in there, like, oh, look at look this
organization called act Blue that is like funding all of these people. It's like,
no, imagine that said visa. It's just that's people giving thirty dollars
and then they figure out ways to make it easy to do monthly or whatever.
But I don't like it's so basic. It's just a very I mean,
the Democrats are managing to screw up a lot of their basic infrastructure lately,
so it's not as if anybody's got to totally figured out. But why,
yeah, why can't why can't the right just build a basic you know,
money collection bucket? Like it doesn't make it doesn't I don't quite understand
it. Yeah, there's wind Red, which was supposed to like initially be
the competitor to Act Blue, the parallel competitor, yet and it was breaking
or something or what was the you know, that's a great question. I
don't know if it, like if it's functional, has ever come to match
my impression is that it does at this point act very similarly to Act Blue.
But that's why I mean, I wonder if this is more of a
red Yeah, they could have just really gone for it. I wonder if
this is actually a conversation about the demographics, the donors, Democrats' ability to
fundraise digitally, at least on a sort of grassroots level. And that's where
I'm curious to your thoughts, Ryan, is this about left populism versus right
populism. Donald Trump was able to raise a ton of money and still is
actually able to raise a ton of money digitally and through his brand in the
same way that Bernie and sort of Bernie adjacent brands are able to raise a
lot of money. But nobody else on the Republican side has been able to
match that because frankly, they're not Donald Trump, Whereas with Bernie, it
seems to be Ryan that if you look at AOC resheet, it to Leeb
sort of other people in the squad area, they actually have been able to
like capitalize on the burning momentum, and it seems to be like Act Blue
is a part of that. It seems to me like maybe there's some demographics
that are part of that. What are your thoughts on how that kind of
infrastructure to the point you just raised this sort of organic grassroots momentum around the
Women's March. I mean, what's what happened on the left that allowed that
to just really bloom? I mean, for one, like there was like
this deep psychological shock, emotional shock going from nobody expecting Trump to be able
to win to then seeing Trump win, and millions of Democrats went through the
same kind of cycle of complete like depression and misery and like how tears and
like how could as possibly be happening? This isn't the country that I live
in, followed by kind of denial, like it went through all the stages
of grief and bargaining. Like you had them furiously trying to like lobby electors.
Remember they remember there was this whole faithless Electors thing where they were going
to go find, you know, people who were elected as part of the
electoral college and persuade them that because of Russia they should actually vote for Hillary,
even though it's we've all learned, don't do that. Don't do that.
I mean, they should have just come up with a whole other slate.
And these are the actual electors, but I mean there's a similar idea
trying to undermine the will of those those states voters. Then they gave millions
of dollars to Jill Stein, who who then kind of sued for a recount
in Michigan and I think Wisconsin too. Uh that those those failed as well.
So once they got done with the bargaining and the and all of that,
they became just fiercely determined to organize their way toward resistance to Trump.
And they and they very much for the first time in decades or or even
longer, they felt like the Democratic Party itself was useless and that they were
going to take matters into their own hands, and and did in a lot
of states, Like in a lot of states, these mostly women kind of
took over the the state apparatus of the state parties. They ran for a
lot of them ran for office and are now elected members of Congress. And
they're like it was you heard from a lot of them saying like I didn't
think I was qualified enough to like participate in this process, but if Donald
Trump can be president, then I am, then I am absolutely qualified.
And you know, I think there's probably more generally curious for your take on
this is probably generally, you know, from Howard Dean on more skepticism of
corporate power, or there was, at least there was then on the left,
and so there was an ideology to the small donor movement too. It
wasn't just like this is a way to compete at at scale and beat Republicans.
It was like, this is a way that we're going to get better
policies out of our politics, because if politicians are beholden to regular people rather
than beholden to corporate packs, then they're going to you know, produce better
stuff on the other side of it. So I think some of it was
that, but you know, Trump, like you said, has really been
able to raise enormous amounts of money from grassroots donors. And also I'm curious
how this fits into it, you know, because I've been doing a newsletter
for like ten years at this point, and a pretty big one. I've
talked to a lot of other people who do newsletters and run businesses off of
newsletters, and the sense is that, like on the right, if you
have a big newsletter, you can make a really an enormous amount of money
selling stuff, selling stock tips, like selling gold, selling like commemorative of
this or that. Basically listen to you know, Steve Bannon's podcast and like
whatever the ads are for that podcast. Those things are going to work extremely
well on conservative newsletters as well, whereas liberals have just not been able to
crack that. Like liberal readers are just not buying cold or or like get
rich quick stuff. They will probably buy some like you know, herbal stuff
or like lifestyle stuff, but they're not as Interestingly, it's interesting, they're
not as trusting, even though they trust institutions much more than the right,
Like they're much more skeptical of stuff that's being sold to them, whereas on
the right they really distrust institutions. But if Steve Bannon's like you need this
for your You're like, you need this gold product for your four oh one
K people are like, oh, yes, I definitely need that. He's
a wealthy man, he's doing quite well. Yes, So I don't know
how that plays into it, but there's something going on. The Watch Down
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I think that's what it is though. That like when you distrust institutions,
which is a reasonable perspective at this point, in a reasonable worldview, then
the people who are telling you you should distrust all of the institutions. So
the people who are the kind of gateway into the correct worldview, they sort
of have that trust built in because they're right about probably the one biggest question,
you know, can you trust institutions? No? Okay, I'm you
know, with him, or I'm not trust right right? So I do
wonder if that's part of it. One fun story on that I was at
the I was at the Huffington Post back when AOL bought AOL owned the news
organization and Rush Limbaugh. He got into this big controversy because he called some
random like student or something at Georgetown Sandra Fluck. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
because like and he started like it was he was like upset with her
because she was talking about birth control pills or something. It was really weird
thing. And then there was like this everybody should cancel their advertising with Rush
Limbaugh campaign. And for some bizarre reason, I wound up on a conference
call with AOL executives where they were telling us that they were going to like
withdraw there their sponsorship of Rush Limbaugh. And I was like, you know,
okay, that's interesting, we'll report on that. But I was like,
also, I'm curious, why why were you actually, you know,
running a sponsorship. Why are you advertising on Rush Limbaugh? Like your AOL,
What's what's going on? And they were like, oh my god,
it was. It was our most lucrative advertising campaign, Like we were selling
PC cleaner to his audience, which I don't even know if they still if,
like PC cleaner still exists, but it's like it was this product for
old people basically who would have problems with their computer. And for nine to
ninety nine a month, AOL would run a software program and then quote unquote
clean their computer like basically did nothing. And then once they once they still
had problems, then they would call AOL and then AOL would upsell them on
other products like just basically just robbing old people of money. And they're like,
yeah, there's They're like, there's no program in the country where we
can We're more able to like just siphon money out of the listenership than rush
limbaws. You know, sorry, sorry that you're walking away from that old
mind. That's actually kind of interesting because that it has been the case and
it still is. Really that could right of center audiences tend to be older
and wealthier and that doesn't mean like ultra rich obviously, but have disposable income
and does kind of make a gold mine, like it just really easy to
target ads to people who are older with disposable income. And I wonder,
actually, this is a bigger question about the story that you tell in the
Squad. A lot of people on the right think about how, you know,
white women are creating like this. I'm trying to think of the best
distillation of the argument are creating or driving the Democratic Party away from you know,
it's prior base of the white working class voters. You have like educated
white women who are making Democrats do things like say we need to abolish the
police or ice or whatever it is. And those movements have come and gone.
But that also is it does seem true that, you know, you
look at positions on salt and all of that, Democrats are really cleaning up
in certain areas of the country with educated suburban voters in a way that probably
does make it easier to sell products or to fundraise on different Can you just
talk to us a little bit about that, like the the realignment but not
the white working class realignments of the educated white realignment that has reshaped the way
that the party leaders actually think about this whole thing. And I write about
this in the book with regard specifically to Chuck Schumer, who was, you
know, one of the most kind of deft, like fingers on the pulse
politicians that you've got out there, just just very good at like the blocking
and tackling nuts and bolts of just actual just politics and campaigning and just agnostic
about you know, how Democrats are going to get it done. You know,
they're just going to beat Republicans one way or another, like that's that's
his mission. Kind of like a McConnell who's like started out with a plan,
you know, as endorsed by Planned parenthood, and then the party changes,
he's like, yeah, all right, I'll fill the Supreme Court with
people that will overturn abortion. Like he's not in it for a cause,
he's in it to just in it to like win. And so Schumer in
twenty eighteen in particular, saw the just incredible amount of money that just basic
democratic donors activists were kicking in. I mean they gave that Amy McGrath in
running against was a McConnell. I think in Kentucky they gave her like twenty
five million dollars just for fun, like just to like just because it felt
good to give money against Mitch McConnelly. Like some of them were fooled into
thinking that she had a chance. Others were like, I don't care if
she has a chance or not. It makes me feel good to give twenty
five dollars against Mitch McConnell. In every Senate campaign around the country, they
basically had more money than they needed. Like the woman who ran against Susan
Collins in Maine finished the and I think still actually has it in her account.
She finished that race with like fifteen million dollars in her bank account,
because you know, you can only spend so much money on TV and Maine
like there's only there's literally only so much ad space that you can buy,
and so they couldn't stop it all up. Now. Fascinatingly, the one
race they did underspent on later was Mandela Barnes of Wisconsin and then ended up
losing by what twenty thousand votes for something. So it didn't quite you know,
it hasn't it didn't totally last at the high level. It was when
Trump was in the White House in the twenty eighteen midterms. But so Schumer
saw this. Now they lost most of these races like Iowa, North Carolina,
Ducky, Maine, but they didn't lose because they were underfunded, and
you know, but then then they're able to expand the map and like spend
enormously in these places and also in like Arizona and Georgia and places where they
end up do winning where they do end up winning later. And so then
Schumer surveying this landscape changed his kind of politics. He's like all right,
So this is a better way of raising money than going to fundraisers. I
mean, he's going to continue to go to fundraisers, but when it comes
to priorities in emphasis, you can scale these the math on these small donations
to a much higher degree than you can these going to these party dinners.
Party dinner might raise half a million dollars, but it takes weeks of planning,
a lot of time on the part of the politicians and their staff.
Then you got to hire all the donors' kids to be interns in different places.
Like it's just just a huge hassle. Whereas the regular people who are
kicking in and now portly to your point, have more money than Bernie's people
who are giving him twenty seven dollars on average. Like these women just they're
they're older and they had just have more disposable income. So they're not just
giving twenty seven dollars so Bernie senters. They're giving fifty dollars, and they're
giving it to like ten different a Senate candidates. Every single time, you
know, Trump says something obnoxious and that and that amount of money is really
really adding up so trumor so so Schumer says like, Okay, what do
we need to do to make sure that this base, you know, stays
happy and feels like they're involvement in democratic politics was worth it. And he
really felt like he was putting together a coalition that was going to be a
majoritaryan coalition for a generation, and he was going to do that through basically
a lot of what you saw and build back better plus plus voting rights,
plus legalizing weed he wanted to do, and canceling he always wanted to do,
like fifty thousand students did a lot more than Biden. He felt like
that combination would keep you young people, upper middle class, college educated women,
and black voters together in a coalition that would increasingly become just kind of
unbeatable nationally. Something that was occurring to me as you were talking. I
wanted to ask you, you know, if people want to see Ryan's thoughts
or some of the way that he's thinking about the dynamic between economic issues and
cultural issues to the extent that those can be disentangled. He wrote, probably
a lot of you remember the elephant in the zoom, a really really good
deep dive into this in the intercept. I was curious Ryan how how you
would say the Squad is thinking through those issues. And also, just with
I want to preface that by saying, from the perspective of somebody on the
right, the Democratic Party of twenty twenty three, twenty twenty four almost now
is so is unrecognizable from the party of twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen when it
was Hillary Clinton is the standard bearer before she lost. These are two,
i mean almost completely different parties. And on those cultural and economic issues,
the Democratic parties platform consensus on consensus on some of these big issues, from
the perspective of somebody on the left, is kind of better all around.
You know, from a progressive It's not perfect, There's there's no way it's
perfect, but the kind of consensus positions on these things. You know,
you have Biden canceling student debt, as you said, you build back better,
a lot of priorities in there. How, how has the squad kind
of thought through strategy and thought through the difference between culture and economics. Thought
through this is a huge question obviously, but thought through you know, the
sort of I don't want to call it superficial because that trivializes it, but
that sort of cultural signaling versus you know, the pragmatism and all that.
What I've what I've found in kind of re reporting a lot of this is
that so much of it just happens kind of day by day and week by
week in kind of organic response and interaction with various kind of forces that are
coursing through politics, rather than kind of sitting down and kind of strategizing it.
But you're right that the parties upside down from where it was and upside
down and shaken up from where it was back in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen,
and a lot of the book focuses on this, on how that happened,
and it's this really fascinating kind of interaction where you have Occupy Wall Street,
followed by Black Lives Matter, joined by this huge kind of climate mobilization,
all of that then flowing into the Bernie Sanders campaign and mixing with the occupy
language, which then the Hillary Clinton campaign tried to absorb and refract back in
terms of kind of cultural and kind of social justice questions. And she kind
of I highlight her stump speech where she would say, you know, Bernie
Sanders is the one issue candidate. All he cares about is the economy,
but does breaking up the big banks? Is that going to end racism?
It was breaking up the big banks and sexism. And even the first time
she gave that some speech she's paused and she's like, now, of course,
let me be clear, I will break up the big banks if I
feel like I have to. Because she could she could even hear I think
in her own mind, how clearly it seemed like she was trying to distract
and like pivot away from actually addressing some of these material questions and substituting the
cultural questions instead. So she said, well, I'm going to do both.
He's just a one issue just a one issue candidate, and a lot
of that, a lot of that kind of attack landed. But also in
particular it's stung like for somebody like Bernie Sanders or for his supporters, you
know, who have been on the left wing of the political spectrum of their
whole lives, to be told that they are kind of racists or sexists or
reactionaries was like infuriating and painful at the same time. And so when the
Squad rose in twenty eighteen, there were a lot of people who loved the
Squad for their just generally for their politics, but also they liked being able
to win an online argument and say, see, I told you, like
you're the racist and sexist one, like why aren't you supporting AOC or Presley
or Rashida tu leeber ilan Omar islamophobe? What's wrong with you? And so
it played into those those debates, and what the members of the squad and
kind of adjacent politicians found is that when they would push material questions and issues
forward, they'd run up against resistance against the from the center left, the
corporate wing of the party. When they would push on cultural issues, they'd
have the support of the left, and they'd also have the support of the
entire kind of resistance democratic base, which hits a patheosis with the George Floyd
moment in the summer of twenty twenty. And so in some ways, like
through no, through nothing that they personally did, those issues of theirs become
more dominant because they're pushing through the institutions in a faster way than the material
ones are. Like you see a lot of like the Chris Ruffo book,
for instance, that we talked about on our show when we had him on,
We're just going to ask you about that. That's per yeah, he
he like focuses a lot on, you know, who first came up with
these ideas that then became dominant in a lot of liberal and mainstream institutions,
which is an interesting academic question of like who for who wrote the first paper
and what their influences are. But to me, the real question is not
who came up with the ideas or necessarily even why they came up with the
ideas. The real question is why did why did the ideas march through the
institutions in the way that they did, because they didn't do it. They
didn't they weren't forced through by these like faculty lounge people. The institutions themselves
found those ideas to be helpful to their own, you know, internal and
external missions. In other words, if like a company is, you know,
facing charges of sexism or racism, it's nice to have language from a
consultant h to to explain why this is just endemic to like all of society
and we need to you know, set aside a Friday afternoon or a whole
friday to like talk about this and interrogate, you know, why people are
this way and then people are like, wait a minute, didn't this whole
thing start because like this big this vice president was like actively racist to somebody
like yeah, but you know it's systemic, so don't worry about it.
We you know, we're we're interrogating that. And what that allows them to
do is then not actually address any of their the actual things that they're actually
doing. Universities, you know, in the in the seventies. You if
you told them, like, here's a way to get people to stop occupying,
you know, your administration buildings, it's like they're great. That sounds
wonderful. So these things like played into the like perpetuation of the very things
that they were claiming to undermine. And so I think that's why if if
the squad is pushing on everything at the same time, some of it gets
through and then some of it, some of it, the more material stuff,
ends up getting blocked. Okay, we could keep going for a really
long time on this, but I know you have to run. So my
last question is what is the squad going to grow? Like? This is
again I keep I'm not trying intentionally to draw parallels to the right on everything,
but it does remind me in some ways. Obviously we've talked about this
before, the Freedom Caucus, and they have this sort of secret membership kind
of know who's in it. Some people never confirm whether or not they're in
it. But it's been around now for what like ten years. We're coming
right up on twenty twenty four for so yeah, just about like ten years,
and it's still you know, it's not been static, whereas the Squad
it is, so it is so attributed to this very specific set of personalities.
So are there going to be more people? You know, Corey Bush
is an addition to the squad when she was elected in Missouri. She comes
in in a wave after AOC and is now part of the squad. On
the cover of the book, what does the sort of squad look like going
forward? We're going to we'll see what Apak has to say about that.
You know, there it's being floated that they're going to spend up up to
one hundred million dollars against incumbents who are in the Squad and the squad adjacent
and then also to like make sure that they don't grow. I cover it
in the book the twenty twenty two campaign, where they spent something like forty
million dollars, So that so one hundred million is not like absurd, it's
particularly post October seventh. And that's aside from Democratic Majority for Israel super PAC,
i've kind of loosely affiliated with APAC plus some other a constellation of some
other pro Israel groups. That really changed what seems possible in democratic primaries.
You know, if you are a candidate and you you're raising and spending like
a million or two dollars and then a superpack comes in and spends seven,
which happened in like multiple races, that just completely changes the game like that,
because and they're not spending the money for the most part on ads saying
that you know, so and so is is like soft on supporting our ally
Israel. They'll spend it saying like so and so like Donna Edwards, for
instance, Prince George's county is like she was. They said she was bad
at constituent service, Nina Turner. They said she was like overly critical in
a in a kind of profane way of Joe Biden, and so whatever,
like whatever polls, well, they'll they'll run on that summerly. They said
she wasn't a good enough Democrat and then ironically, after she won the primary,
they started spending money on behalf of the Republican in the general election.
It's like, I'm not so sure that you were actually concerned about how loyal
a Democrat Summerly was. I think something else might have been going on here.
Also, you like also spent and endorsed like for one hundred and ten
Republicans or something as well. So I'm not sure your your your partisan democratic
bona fides or that are that well established here. But so it's like the
Bachelor, like are you in it for the right reason? Yes? Are
you? Are you in it for love? I don't think you're in it
for love? Uh, And so that changes everything, Like because that amount
of money, just the left doesn't have that amount of money. Your your
listeners might be wondering where George Soro says and why he can't just just match
that dollar for dollar. But unfortunately, or fortunately for the Left, that's
that's not how it works. So they're going to be they're going to be
outspent, you know, maybe ten to one in some of these races.
And uh, like I summarily put it to me in the book, like
it's not accurate to say that we're losing on the politics and on the substance,
like we're just we're just losing on the resources, which is what happening
to the right on abortion. It's probably wild, wildly outspent in some of
those races. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. Yeah, right in that
college educated voter base with disposable income, which which sees that as like materially
affecting their lives, their daughters' lives. Like, yeah, they're gonna they're
gonna kick in in a way that I guess the right can't really match.
M Yeah, that is super interesting. Well, people should buy the book.
It's again it's called The Squad, AOC and the Hope of a Political
Revolution. You can listen to Rand's podcast Deconstructed wherever you get your podcasts.
You can listen to Counterpoints wherever you get your podcasts, and you can watch
it on YouTube. Ryan, I'm I have already given a copy of your
book as a Christmas present. It makes a great Christmas present. Like Senator
Ted Gunnie Relative, Yeah, he's a big he's a big Bernie Bru So
he was very excited to get a copy of the book. But yeah,
Ryan in a battle with Senator Cruz on Amazon. But you won, didn't
you. Well, we both lost. It looks like Liz Cheney came in
for the rafters and knocked them off. You won't be surprised. I got
off a plane in Boston on Friday, and first thing I heard was a
guy who's scouring the Hudson News store right outside the gate, an older white
man. You know, why don't they have the Liz Cheney book yet?
And sure enough, by the time I flew back on Sunday, they did,
and it was everywhere. But I'm not entirely surprised at here. She
came from the rafters there. She's number one, number one best selling book
in the country. Liz Cheney gradually sweet to her. Yeah, all right,
well, the squad makes a great Christmas present, right, Grim,
thank you so much for joining us. Right, thanks for having me.
You've been listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Emil Kashinski,
culture editor here at the Federalist. Will be back soon more. Until
then, be the lovers of freedom and anxious for the fray. I