Speaker 1: I wanted to take a swing at the what do
we do question, because my answer to that question really
does change if I'm depending on what kind of audience
I'm talking to. Right when I'm talking to black folks,
my answer is, well, what you're supposed to do, brother,
is survive, right, because white folks have done this to
us before. We have seen this before, and we have
survived this before. As Karen was kind of alluding to,
we know what's about to happen. White folks is about
to happen. White folks is what's happening, and black people
need to survive this current eruption and fever in white supremacy.
White folks, when I'm talking to a predominantly white audience,
they have different responsibilities. You know, they have responsibilities to
get over themselves, deal with their own race. You know,
all the kind of usual stuff that you would tell
white folks in eighteen sixty two, that you would tell
white folks in nineteen fifty nine, Like it's the same
story that white folks have to deal you know, have
to learn shoot with their mouths closed and get over themselves.
But in this moment, black folks just need to survive
this because white. You know this. We are in a
phase that we have been in before, and we are
now what we are experiencing the white violence against us,
and we need to go into survival mode. But carry
your shaking here.
Speaker 2: I completely disagree, And I think the centering of whiteness
as a thing as if as if a group of
people that spend one point six trillion dollars and you
could ask target the impact of that, we maybe fifteen
sixteen percent of population, but can shut down a corporation
because we decide not to go there because we spend
more than any other group in this country. That's power.
So I'm not I'm not surviving this. I'm thriving in this.
I'm not surviving. I'm coming out the other side where
I'm not dependent upon a system that never considered me anyway.
So I'm not even centering whiteness. Do what you do
and see how it works out, because I guarantee you
just like building up this country. You needed us, then
go to need us again. And if we ever figure
out where the real source of power in this country is,
it's going to be a different ballgame. So I'm not
surviving this time. I'm thriving and building and not centering
anything that they're doing. We're going to figure out, neighborhood
by neighborhood what we need, and we're going to provide
it for ourselves. We're going to feed ourselves, We're going
to educate ourselves. Go ahead, tear up the education system.
You haven't really cared about our education anyway. Who gives
a damn go ahead, tear it all down. I'm like,
let's go not surviving, thriving And I feel like that's
a victim mentality that I will not ever ever it
here too.
Speaker 3: And why do you translate? How do you translate across
I mean, I love that and would agree with it
in large measure, but how do you translate that in
a way that it's actualized? Because, you know, telling people
to thrive in the face of what Ellie's describing becomes
in this day and age, largely because we are locked
in into the into these boxes that people see on
the screen right now. We are locked into a different
kind of social contract in which what are you know,
white and black grandfathers and great grandparents, uh, you know,
dealt with to thrive those aspects of our humanity of thriving.
I think have been morphed or changed in ways that
just that I think make that a little bit a
little bit more difficult. I'm going to give that Tomalin,
because I know you got to run, so to give
you the word on that before you go.
Speaker 4: I'm just honored to be with this group. I'm sorry
that I am a mass.
Speaker 2: And can I say it's nice to meet you. I
hope we can connect at some point. You have well
I I.
Speaker 4: Was listening to you and I was like, oh, I
got to get her on the podcast. And by the way,
like I do think I have been, there's been The
rev was also involved in the rever now was also
involved in the Target protest, and I remember when it started,
and like that is amazing, Like that is that is seismic.
And I do think we don't spend enough time talking
about like just how there is really good organizing going
there are really there is actual, really good organizing going on,
and like we get so stuck in all of the
bleakness of this moment. But the Target Protest is a
real example of just like with the lawyers, you know,
this is not going the way they want to go.
And I just one last thing before I go, Uh,
Trump made inroads with Latino voters. Right. Maybe you saw
yesterday the woman who runs Latinos for Trump not pleased
so as much as like there, you know, he's grown
his coalition, God knows how by I think there will
be a sort of lesson. I mean, I don't want it,
and it's terrible, but there is this way in which
he has you know, Democrats men all this time being
like how can we win back Latino voters? And he
is now jailing Latino voters. So that and that's so
I just think that's worth thinking about. I'm so sorry, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.
I appreciate all of you, and please keep sorry Mini.
Speaker 3: Donge faster everybody. Thank you so much Mony for being
with us. I really appreciate your time. So, but you know,
I think for me that you know, Karen raises, I
think a very interesting set of issues. They're not problems,
they're issues, and how how do you navigate? I tend
to align with Karen in that regard, in that I'm
just gonna do me because I'm not expecting anybody to
make it better for me, and so I've got to
create that lane. The question becomes when, if and when
the obstacles, John, are so high that you know you've
got bootstrapped thugs, you know, jack booted, you know, law
enforcement on the ground who are buying into this bullshit
You've got. You've got business leaders who want to strip
away your identity, your heritage, and your history because they're
afraid of dear leader in that bullshit. How do I
carve out that space where I'm going to create a
life for my family, grow the business that I have,
and continue to try to thrive in an environment that
is more and more repressive.
Speaker 5: I'm so glad you asked that question, Michael, because I
really want to talk to your viewers about bitcoin and
how it can change your life and change your entire
family's economy. And look, and I engulge h, Well, I
have an entire seminar at the Airport Radison just this
weekend about buying gold and the Church of Scientific You
need to.
Speaker 6: Clean my gutters out first, No, you need.
Speaker 5: To forget what you've heard about Dianetics and just read
the book for yourself and understand health. Well, we're gonna
make America great again, you see. And I'm here to
give you white people a sense of dignity and that's
how it works.
Speaker 3: Folks.
Speaker 5: Look, this guy's invoking the Insurrection Act like it's a
promo code. Okay, he's not fighting chaos, he's manufacturing it,
and most of us can see that. And the problem
is those charming, non college educated Caucasians and quite a
few of the ones with degrees, they don't mind it.
But that's the one insurrection that's actually underway. The California
thing's been brewing. I mean, cutting the UC research grants
like this should have outraged all white people. This is
gonna sabotage cancer cures, this is going to stop genetic breakthroughs.
But hey, you know, we're gonna own the Libs and
make Gramma die sooner. I mean, at some point, the
fact that all these policies are like sawing off your
own head because your brain disagrees with you is going
to weigh in on people.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 5: With California, they give the federal government eighty billion more
than it gets back. So you know, if Gavin Newsom
wants to take a break from prepping his new reality show,
Dancing with Fascists, I think Gavin's learned maybe that maybe
bagas aren't the pals he was hoping they would be,
but he can just come out and say, should we
reinvest that money? We could have sent the federal government
to welfare states back into our economy. I mean, that
whole thing was all rubbish. Congress controls the purse strings.
Trump couldn't do it. But it shows the media is
on the side of clicks. It's not that they're on
the side of Trump. It's that boring governance doesn't get
the eyeballs, so you can't count on the media. You
can count on journalists, but not the actual media. I
think this is another area where capitalism may save us,
where the market realizing this bullshit doesn't really help the
bottom line may save us. Elon's you know, Elon's realizing
that he's beholden to the shareholders even more than the
voices in his head. What I keep thinking of is
Berlin and those white people, and how those particular Caucasians
needed to see Berlin in rubble before they could believe
that their leader had not been straight with them. They
needed to see how much damage has been caused by
their believing in him, and that led to a national shame,
which is why they don't wave their swastika around like
we wave our Confederate swastik around in this country because
they actually had to face the consequences of their vote.
I think it's going to have to get worse before
it gets better, and a lot of good people are
going to be hurt. But I have no doubt whatsoever
that it is going to get better. The winner and
all of this may be the seven inches of plaque
around Donald Trump's heart, because that could be the game
changer any day here. But in the long run, you know,
we're going to need a democratic party that can at
least spell the words truth or reconciliation committee when this
is done, because this will not last. As Ellie said,
the incompetence is too great. This is a lot like Bush,
who who might still be worse than Trump because he
won't come out against him. But under Bush, the stupid
was always greater than the sinister, and that incompetence kept
us from a fascist state under Bush Cheney, that same
in competence may save our lives here. And of course
noble patriots like Rand Paul for opposing the stupid bill.
But Trump has got the losses. His base doesn't know
he has the losses because the media is not covering
the losses. But he's getting smaller and smaller and smaller
every day. And the people who own this country, the
oligarchs who use Trump's golf course and think he's cute,
They're gonna get tired of this too.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons, though, John, that the media doesn't
cover the losses is because the Democratic Party that you
alluded to, and whenever I hear that name now I
see read the Democratic Party that you alluded to is
the most incompetent opposition ruling in the modern world. Like
they are they are, they are beyond pathetic.
Speaker 4: La.
Speaker 5: If you talk that way anymore, I'm gonna write a letter.
I'm gonna write a letter.
Speaker 3: Podcast.
Speaker 2: I think I think I think that speaks to something Lucy
was saying. Was she mentioned the Republican Party? What's the
Republican Party? Who's the Republican Party?
Speaker 3: Is this?
Speaker 2: Are these Republicans? Are these Democrats?
Speaker 3: Like? Who's the Democrats?
Speaker 4: I don't know what the Democratic Party?
Speaker 3: I don't know who there are?
Speaker 1: Time?
Speaker 5: Democrats have time right now, Democrats have two years to
get this together.
Speaker 4: Ye are they?
Speaker 5: That's that's what they're gonna figure out right now. And
they're gonna have a big, big, crowded primary season as
soon as the midterms are over. Democrats have four years
to figure out who they are, and that process is
already underway. Let me just remind everyone. Vice President Harris
was in that race for one hundred days against the
most famous man of the world, and she got the
third highest amount of votes anybody's ever gotten in the history.
Kamala Harris got more votes than Ronald Reagan did both times,
than Bill Clinton than Barack Obama did both times. The
majority of Americans have shown up to vote against Trump
in twenty sixteen, twenty twenty, and twenty twenty four. There
is no mandate, There is no incredible bulwark of support
that can't be knocked down for this guy because the
majority of US three elections in a row have said
no to his agenda. He hasn't got the mojo going.
He's got the power, but he can't go long term
with this and it's going to collapse on him like
it did last time.
Speaker 6: But you know what, Democrats are not understanding that they're
in an asymmetrical warfare environment and Democrats are taking, in
my opinion, the wrong lessons from twenty twenty four, and
there have been many, many post mortems. They're conflating policy
with rhetoric. They don't understand. Actually, if MAGA shows you anything,
marginal voters who flipped this time, Actually, there are a
lot of progressive policies, a lot of policies that used
to be Democratic partied bread and butter that a lot
of people might really really like. I mean, I'm an
ex Republican. My politics are pretty centrist. I don't think
that my politics are where most Americans politics are at all.
I think that most Americans want to tap into something
much more populist. I'm not a populist, but there's a
form of populism that could be healthy. They want to
tap into some much more progressive and instead you've got
Democrats falling over themselves, like how do we win back
David Sachs and are you kidding me? Oh my god,
do you know what went wrong? Kamala Harris came out
in favor of rent control, and that's scared the titans
of industry, who are what anyone who's telling you that
that's why they didn't vote for her, They weren't voting
for her anyway.
Speaker 5: Rights on the issues, though, I'll stop with this on
the issues. Look at the issues that people care about,
and they go with the progressive issue. They paid family,
that's billionaires more. Medicaid should cover bi hearing in dental
I'm sorry under medicare. I mean issue after women's reproductive freedoms,
issue after issue. The people are already there. The Democrats
are walking around like Clark Kent without a phone booth.
Speaker 3: And to your point, John, if if republicans rank and file,
republicans were more honest about that, they they would show
through their words and their actions that they align with
the very things that you're talking about. Because they don't
want their grandmama's Medicaid to stop, they don't want their
their cousin's SNAP program to end. They don't want that
person who who's you know, helping them around the house
to be deported. They don't. But what they what they.
Speaker 5: Offer Democrats, sorry, go ahead, I'm gonna say.
Speaker 3: But what they're offering up, you know, to to Lucy's point,
is this sort of fake populism that somehow they think,
going back to your Berlin example, that that world is
going to be very different until it gets burned down
and then they realize, oh but at that point, it's
too late for you because Grandma's Medicaid has been canceled
and she gone now because she had no health care,
you know that program. And your kid is trying to
find out what they're going to eat for three square meals,
and the person who was helping you saw them carted
off by ice. So those realities are going to come home.
Speaker 1: But I want to try to answer Karen's point about
like who are the Democrats, because I actually I think
that's that's an incredibly important question, as you know, if
we're ever going to have an opposition party. And I
think that while we can debate should we be more left,
should be being more centrist? What policy agenda do we want?
I feel like what gets missed in those debates is
that the consultant class of the Democratic Party needs to
be like burnt out of the ground right, like needs
to be like ripped up root and stem. These people
are idiots. They've paid no price for frankly fucking up
three elections in a row, as as John saying there
is no way Trump should have one any of these elections.
And while it's fashionable to blame the women candidates, Hillary
didn't win a good campaign. CAMA didn't run a good game,
like who was advising them at point after point after
point And even if you look in our current primary process,
like who the fuck is advising Wes Moore and told
them to veto the reparations bill because that was an
idiot move. That was a Democrat consultant idiot move. And
so there's some level at which whoever the Democrats are
as a party, the people who are paid money to
tell Democrats what to do need to be stopped in
some like aggressive way.
Speaker 5: Pen effigies, effigies of Mark Penn hung from buildings.
Speaker 6: Oh my god, if the Demo, oh my god, Mark Penn,
don't even get me started.
Speaker 5: On That's what I was talking about.
Speaker 1: I like it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, democratic operatives, I will say this, I've worked on
both sides of the aisle. Now I spend all my
time trying to burn the Republican Party to the ground
and trying to get Democratic operatives to listen to me.
Republicans not top down. Actually they are like let all
flowers bloom, like, let's see what works. Throw that againy,
we'll speak whatsticks. Democrats are like anxiety cats. I mean,
I mean, just not to bore people with campaign tactics.
But like in the last election, they weren't even doing
voter contact by like a week to go because they
were still doing persuasion and they were like, let's centralize
all of our ads and we're just we're going to
test so much. Like I love political data, I love polling,
I love tactics. Like you know what ad is not
going to persuade anyone of anything, The ads you don't cut,
the ad that dies on the cutting room floor, the
ad that people never see. A couple of weeks ago,
I was at a thing in DC. It was a
meeting of It was a group that does a lot
of work with black and brown voters. There were people
who were social influencers who have multi hundred person followings
one hundred thousand, pardon me, multi hundred, multi hundred thousand
or million person followings, talking about how at the DNC
they were being given. I mean, these are people who
are like collecting information and some of them, by the way,
became social influencers because they were field organizers, like they
were like Black Lives Matter activists who got a big
following in the summer of twenty twenty who now have
a profession as a social influencer, and they were talking
about getting talking points from the DNC instead of the
DNC saying to them, like, what are you hearing? Right,
Like what's resonating with your people? It is so reversed
and crazy. On the other hand, Republicans, I mean not
to make people feel really all the ick, but I've
been trying to remind people of what Republicans do and
what Andrew Breitbart used to say to Republicans, politics is
downstream of culture, right, And Democrats think that they can
have culture be downstream of politics and be prescriptive. And
when you have a bunch of the sort of like
a sella corridor dem operatives whose entire experience with anything
in the field is that they went to Pennsylvania for
a weekend last fall to door knock making the playbook,
you're going to consistently get a really bad product. And that,
I mean, I couldn't agree with you more, Ellie. In short,
I hope that comes across. They're a disaster.
Speaker 3: It's a disaster in some respects. It kind of reminds
me and I've had this conversation with a number a
number of times with folks over the years. I remember
when I came into the in two thousand and nine,
we had just been selected in the eight elections, and
we had gotten our ass kicked in the six elections.
I know that well. I was on the ballot for
the US Senate, and the reality was as I walked
into the building, I was hemorrhaging donors, I was hemorrhaging
grassroots support, that the base was pissed as hell. There
was statewide disorganization. I found out out of fifty states,
only roughly twelve had websites that communicated with the American people.
And so there was this this feeling in the party
that it was over lights out. We we are being rejected.
We've been rejected by the American people. So for me,
it was a matter of tapping into that thing that
that would reawaken the imagination of the American people relative
to the party and the party relative to the American people.
I ran into a lot of resistance, a lot more
than has been recounted publicly about from the very people
that you guys are talking about, that that the culture
class right, the folks who believe that the country is
a far right country and it's not the political class
that is, that's living in a limbo land where they think,
to Lucy's point, that because they showed up for field
trip in Iowa, that somehow they've got political chops. The
certainly the K Street class, those folks who write the
checks and you know, try to persuade through their money,
were knocking on my door telling me I had to
pay for races. I didn't, they didn't need they lost.
Why am I paying paying for Well, it's a bonus.
I don't pay bonuses for losing races, right, So those
realities hit hard. So the problem the Democrats are having
are similar to the ones after the six eight elections
for Republicans, and that is finding that orientation. How do
you reimagine the conversation with the American people?
Speaker 5: May I on this, yes, because I'm upset. I'm not
a Democrat and I never have been. I do think
that mister Schumer is going to tastefully transition out of
leadership after the mid terms either way. And again, they've
got they've got three and a half years, Michael, to
begin this rebranding. They they do have time. I think
they noticed some degree what a mess it is. But
to Ellie's point, I don't know if the if the UH,
this class of consultants in their private jets, which eat
up donations and spit out bad advice, can ever be
saved in this party. But what I think they have
to do is start telling the truth and calling out
bluffs on immigration. I think they need to come out
and say that any Republican, any politician of any party
who talks about illegals but doesn't want to go after
the white people doing all the hiring, they're the problem
and they're the reason they're here. There's a gigantic help
wanted sign in our southern border, and white people put
it up, and there's no wall you can build that's
big enough to hide that giant help wanted sign, and
no Republicans are interested in taking down the help wanted signed.
By the way, friends and neighbors, have you noticed Donald
Trump won't go after the agricultural workers. He's already said
those illegals who pick your food, right, well, they are
a protected class because it's all about money. Now, Democrats
can come out and say we're all part of the
same hypocrisy. But if you like not paying seventy five
dollars for a salad, you can thank an illegal alien,
and so the smart Democrats can come out and risk
a lot of donor money, but say, we're all part
of this hypocrisy. I am submitting a law that makes
it a federal crime to hire any undocumented immigrants. That
would put Donald Trump behind bars because he's the only
president in history to hire illegal aliens because he didn't
feel like paying a living wage to American workers. And
Trump did it in two different centuries. Why the Democrats
are terrified to call this out is a microcosm of
the cowardice. But I also think and again Democrats who promise, hey,
law and order comes back. The Democrats who show up
in this campaign season and say the Constitution is back
in play. In January of twenty twenty seven, we are
having hearings in every member of this cabinet can make
all the money and insiders trading they want now, but
your hands go on bibles in January of twenty twenty seven.
Those are the guys and women who are going to
get the votes, and they're the ones who are going
to get the donations. People don't want to watch Gavin
Newsom give a pedicure to Charlie Kirk. They want to
know who's going to fight about this. And finally, I
want to see Democrats come out and have the guts
to say that Republicans aren't a party from men, not
real men, and Democrats who say that recognize being a
real man is not about how many people you can dominate.
Being a real man is about how many people you
can help. And it's not a hard message for Democrats
to link the Gospels, the Constitution, and their agenda in
one sentence. I want to see them do it and
start bringing back men and let Republicans keep the boys, guys, homies,
and dudes