All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - #AIS: Glenn Greenwald & Matt Taibbi discuss the new political divide, moderated by David Sacks

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

This conversation was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami! 0:00 David Sacks explains the origin of this panel on political discourse in America 2:56 Understanding the new political divide, how... Trump's victory impacted discourse 12:37 Can mainstream media ever get back to relative neutrality? 29:15 Audience Q&A Follow the guests: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald https://twitter.com/mtaibbi Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 So Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taiyubi folks. So by way of introduction, I want to just sort of tell the story of how this panel happened. It arose out of almost a throwaway comment that Jason made on episode of the pod where he was talking about, you know, lining up speakers for this event. And he said that, you know, he was having a hard time getting liberals and all he could find were like right wingers, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi. And in terms of just to explain their backgrounds
Starting point is 00:00:39 a little bit, Matt used to be, they're both independent journalists who write phenomenal columns on Substack and all of you should check it out and subscribe. And by the way, they also do a call-in shows on a phenomenal podcasting platform. You should all check out. But Matt was sort of like the left wing fire brand, sort of popular fire brand on writing for Rolling Stone who back in 2009 was asking the question, why the people who caused the great financial crisis, why no one was going
Starting point is 00:01:10 to jail, and Glenn broke this note in story about how the government was engaging in mass surveillance on all of us and raising questions about the infringement of our civil liberties. So both these guys have, I'd say, well-established Bonafidees. Used to be considered left-wing sort of liberal Bonafidees, but now today somehow they've been read out of what you would call liberalism today. And so that comment that Jason Maynard sort of, I think there's so much to unpack there on how that happened, what does liberalism today mean if it doesn't include you guys?
Starting point is 00:01:56 And so that, I mean, that's the place to start is trying to understand what has happened in our politics that makes you guys not liberal anymore and what is liberalism and then what is conservatism and are we even thinking about the political divide in our country the right way if left versus right doesn't really capture it anymore. So that was sort of the starting point for this who wants to just react to anything I just said? Yeah, well, first of all, it's of course very gratifying to realize that your attendance at a conference
Starting point is 00:02:31 is due to a throwaway line from the exchange. So, super honored to hear that. That's the reason why we were invited. What? What your winner's ride? Rainman David Sack. What? What? What? Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I guess we joined a long list of other far-right luminaries like Russell Brand, who has spent the last 15 years as one of the most vocal devotees
Starting point is 00:03:07 to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn. He's now also on the right. And Joe Rogan, who just 18 months ago, said to millions of people that his favorite candidate, running for president, was Bernie Sanders, the socialist-left-wing candidate, from Vermont, and even now Elon Musk who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 over Mitt Romney and is one of the largest donors
Starting point is 00:03:34 to the ACLU, sometimes somehow he's also on the far right. So in some sense, it's just become a kind of punishing label that's designed to stigmatize or demonize anybody who in any way just sense from or diverges from liberal orthodoxy, it's just kind of an enforcement or coercive label that has no meaning, just bereft of any actual substance. But I think there's a broader dynamic underneath it all, which is that, you know, it is true that every five years, 10 years, what was once an issue at the forefront of our debates goes to the background and other issues go to the forefront. So 10 years ago, we were spending a lot of time debating things like Obama's drone program
Starting point is 00:04:19 where Guantanamo not being closed. Or as you said, the work Matt was doing on derivatives and the fraud and Wall Street. We don't talk much about that anymore. We spend a lot of time now talking instead about whether the internet should be this instrument of censorship and information control, whether we should trust the US security state
Starting point is 00:04:40 to dictate what is and is not disinformation, whether we should be involved in very similar kinds of proxy wars, like we spent the cold war doing over places like Ukraine. And so in one way it's natural that political alliances shift is different issues go to the fore and alliances change as a result. But I think something much more important
Starting point is 00:05:02 is that liberalism itself has changed largely by virtue of Donald Trump because Liberals as a defining view maybe as an overarching view maybe maybe any Democrats not Yeah, by liberals I just mean kind of the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party the way Hillary you know Hillary Clinton calls herself aggressive So again illustrating the bankruptcy of these terms But by liberals I just mean kind of like the Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer-wing have come to believe that the overarching way to understand politics is that there's one primary menace
Starting point is 00:05:36 and risk to the United States, which is Donald Trump, his movement, and they're a Republican party, and it's not just that they have a bad ideology, but that they're actual fascists, trying to instill a white nationalistic tatorship. And if you actually believe that, if that's something that you genuinely believe, on some level it becomes rational to start embracing authoritarian methods of resisting that, of combating that, censoring, you know, using due process-free processes to punish people and to pride them of their liberty. And I think anytime a political movement gets convinced that it is no longer involved in a political debate
Starting point is 00:06:14 but a historic war between pure grid and pure evil, it starts to turn to authoritarian tactics to win because it believes that's justified or even necessary. And those authoritarian toxic happens to be the ones that the left traditionally had opposed and now are embracing. And I guess Matt and I didn't decide that we were gonna change our views
Starting point is 00:06:37 of the last 30 years about these issues. And that has caused this organic breach, not just between us two, but others like us. And as I said, anyone who finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically this organic breach, not just between us two, but others like us. And as I said, anyone who finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically receives the far right label. Yeah, first of all, I agree with all that. And for me, it's even funnier because prior to 2008, I would say that I was sort of like the triumph in
Starting point is 00:07:05 insolent comic dog of journalism. Basically, my job at Rolling Stone was to throw off one liners about Republicans. My editors almost never sent me to a democratic function because they didn't want me describing those events in a colorful way. Let's put it that way. So I got sent to a lot of events where people like Sarah
Starting point is 00:07:29 Palin or Fred Thompson or Mike Huckabee would be speaking. I actually won a National Magazine Award for a column about Huckabee called My Favorite Nut Job. And then after 2008, after Obama got elected, they assigned me to do a story, one story, about the 2008 financial crisis, essentially with the idea of explaining it in terms of people who are not financial professionals could understand. So I did one story that was really about AIG, and we got this overwhelming response that we'd never gotten before,
Starting point is 00:08:11 from readers we'd never heard from before. And that led to me doing eight years of work instead of one story. And one of the themes that came out of that reporting was that in the sort of post-bale-out economy, the wealth gap was widening. And, you know, I just read a statistic that said that during the Obama years, the bottom 99 percent saw their average wealth decrease by $4,900, whereas the top 1% saw its wealth increase by an average of $4.9 million. And so I didn't make that big of a deal of this in my reporting, but when 2016 came around,
Starting point is 00:09:02 in covering both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, it was abundantly clear that this widening wealth gap and the stress that it had placed on populations on both the left and the right was a significant factor in this race. And when I started to write this in the context of covering Trump, rather than just doing the usual thing of tossing off insults about the candidate, which is easy enough to do with Trump, I started to say things like, well, there are reasons why he's succeeding. He's attracting crowds that are not just the usual Republican crowds. There are former union members here.
Starting point is 00:09:48 They have a lot in common with the crowds who show up at Bernie Sanders events. And I started to notice a distinctly unpleasant reaction from people inside the business, where it quickly became taboo to explain Donald Trump in any way, other than, this is a white supremacist movement, and he's appealing to the lowest common denominator through that kind of messaging. Now, I happen to believe that that was part of certainly part of what was going on,
Starting point is 00:10:22 but it wasn't the whole explanation. But I think Trump is the dividing line of what you're talking about. If you don't have, if you have a nuanced explanation for Donald Trump, then you can't be part of the club anymore because the dominant narrative requires that he be cartoonized, in the same way that we used to do it with figures like Saddam Hussein or Putin now, we call it the Hitler of the Month Club. If you're not willing to just do that,
Starting point is 00:11:00 and if you try to actually explain where all these voters coming from, why are they upset? What went wrong that this would happen? Also known as the purpose of journalism. Yeah, exactly, right, which is supposed to be our job. I think both of us quickly learned that that was not welcome. And after Trump got elected, I think that instinct to crowd out anyone who was interested
Starting point is 00:11:34 in going there and trying to figure out what was wrong, that it caused 2016, suddenly became an apostate. And by the way, that includes some politicians, like Bernie Sanders, I think, was one of the people who was very interested in examining what happened in 2016. And I think that's one of the reasons why there was such a violent reaction
Starting point is 00:12:00 to his candidacy in both 2016 and 2020. So for me, I think that's the dividing line. It's not like something's changed so much with liberalism. It's really about Trump, I think, and journalism has adjusted. It is, we've gone from being people whose primary job is to be curious about why things happen, to being advocates who believe that certain people have to be opposed at all costs, and
Starting point is 00:12:32 even if that cost is a little bit of the truth, or a lot of it. So having ripped the empire jersey off their backs to basically stop the Trump menace, it seems like journalism can't now go back to even a pretense of neutrality is that so it basically has happened now? I think so I think and I think you see that in what's happening with the ratings at cable stations. You know I warned about this in, and I wrote a column in that summer saying that a model where basically right-wing media wrote about the evils of the Democratic Party
Starting point is 00:13:13 and blue media wrote about the evils of the Republican Party that just wouldn't work audience-wise because audiences would no longer trust either source to be objective and to report the facts. And I think that's where we are now. We see the declining ratings of companies like CNN and MSNBC, which were previously thought of as more kind of down the road, down the middle of the road, news agencies, and now our thought of his politicized, and they're having a terrible trouble kind of going back,
Starting point is 00:13:50 because once you cross that line into politics, you can't get your reputation back as a neutral fact-finder anymore. Yeah, I think people forget what things were like before Trump, since he's such a, you know, kind of ubiquitous presence as Matt was saying and for me, he also defines and is responsible for most of the changes we're discussing. But back in 2015, most of these news organizations were on the brink of collapse. Every MSNBC host was on the verge of being fired, a couple of months away from being fired because nobody was watching.
Starting point is 00:14:26 The New York Times had severe financial difficulty. There was talk about whether they would have to declare bankruptcy because their balance sheet was so drowning in debt. And Trump saved them all. He saved the entire industry. They all owe their jobs, their second homes, the ability to pay off their IRS debt to Donald Trump, because you can trace his emergence on the scene to when people started watching those programs again. And what they did was they rebranded as the resistance to Donald Trump. And they sacrificed any even pretense of journalistic function. They know, and you just look at polling data, that 95% of the people who watch MSNBC and 93% of the people who read the New York Times and trust it identify as Democrats. So there's a completely polarized media. One of the kind of non-media examples is the ACLU.
Starting point is 00:15:22 There was an article in 2015 in the ACLU about the ACLU and the Washington Post that they were mass layoff, had to engage in mass layoffs with their stuff because they had no money. Trump gets inaugurated, they start tweeting, every day we'll see you in court, Mr. Trump, and stimulating the kind of G-Zones of every liberal, and suddenly, they're drowning in money, like millions and millions of dollars,
Starting point is 00:15:47 you know, like building, like the ASLU, you know, it's always financially struggled. And as a result, they're completely captive now to that kind of audience. You know, I have a friend, I guess I had a friend, who was a host of an MSNBC show and they once told me that they don't get show by show ratings. They get segment by segment ratings. And ever since Trump, they told me the minute you put on anybody who's critical of the Democratic Party anyway, you can just see the audience completely disappear, which you can imagine a person in that position, what an enforcement mechanism that is to know that they have a salary and kids and they need to pay for college and their mortgage, and they know if they
Starting point is 00:16:29 do anything that deviates at all from Democratic Party doctrine, they're going to lose their audience. The New York Times knows that, the ACLU, you know that. And so yeah, I think they're all not, it's not just that they lost their credibility, you can't get it back, which is absolutely true, as Matt said, it's also that they're now captive to this kind of prison cell that they built for themselves chasing the sugar high that Trump provided. Just really quickly, I got to tell the story, in the middle of all this phenomenon, reporters were arguing about whether or not we should be covering them less because maybe we had helped them get the nomination.
Starting point is 00:17:05 You know, I covered Trump's campaign and this was a hot topic on the bus at the time. But then it was sort of decided that now he's just making us all so much money. Let's just go with it. And I remember being in Indianapolis when Trump sewed up the nomination by beating Cruz, who still had a mathematical chance of winning, I guess, if he had done well there. But Trump, if you remember, during that particular race, accused Cruz of being the zodiac killer,
Starting point is 00:17:38 which was hilarious because Cruz was born two years after the killingings ended. So, but there was one reporter I know who actually got the nerve up to ask, I believe it was Cruz's wife about the accusations. Like, what do you have to say to the idea that your husband is a zodiac killer. And he's telling me the story about this afterwards and he goes, you know, I felt so dirty doing it, but I also felt so great.
Starting point is 00:18:13 So, I think that's where they were. They were in that space for a long time. The media and Trump had a weird, co-dependent relationship. Just in terms of trying to appeal to people out there who may not be Trump fans or to get through them on this point, it seems to me that when you lose an election, anytime, you lose an election as a party, you need to analyze what went wrong. And especially when the candidate is a complete political novice, with no prior experience,
Starting point is 00:18:47 and had so many attributes that historically were considered extreme negatives. And it seems to me that if you're just to look at what happened in 2016, Trump was able to ride a few key issues all the way to the White House. One was these foreign wars, these interventions that we've had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, that were disasters. We hadn't gotten out of Afghanistan yet, but it was on its way to being historic 20-year failure.
Starting point is 00:19:15 He shattered the Republican Party with that message, no more bushes. He then took the issue of trade and basically broke down the Democrats' blue wall and the rust belt by basically pointing out the ways that our bipartisan trade policy, just like our bipartisan foreign war policy, had led to the deindustrialization of the rust belt. And then he also used the issue of immigration, which was sort of closely related to that idea
Starting point is 00:19:47 of creating wage pressure on the working class. So you would think that having rode those issues all the way to the White House, that there would be some sort of reappraisal. And instead, it seems like what the elite did to protect itself was create these mythologies that Trump somehow got elected not because the people of the country were fed up with the way that it had been run for
Starting point is 00:20:12 20 years by both parties, but rather because the Russians somehow were behind it or the country was shot through with white supremacy and that somehow explained it. And so we never really got a true sort of accounting or reappraisal of what Trump's election meant. And instead, the media turned to this hysteria, this mode that we're not even out of yet. Your reactions to that. No, I think it's one of the most amazing things about the twenty sixteen election which is first of all you know in a lot of ways
Starting point is 00:20:49 brok obama being this kind of once in a generation political talent paper over the the incredibly serious systemic problems the democrats had even while he was being reelected underneath obama and all his glitter and glamour the democratic party was collapsing. They were losing state houses and congressional seats and governorships all over the country. And the reason for that is the anger,
Starting point is 00:21:14 the growing anger with the neoliberal policies that the Democratic Party in the early 1990s had decided to embrace in lieu of the working class politics for which they had always been known. The kind of clintoniae pronouncement that the Democratic Party needs to start embracing corporate America instead of unions, that it needs to move much closer to these politics that says, you know, we're going to encourage corporate America, we're going to embrace the Pentagon and all of that.
Starting point is 00:21:43 And it radically changed the Democratic Party into this party of technocracy and the elites, culminating with the Obama presidency. And the only, what is amazing is in 2016, the Democrats lost the White House to a game show host. And so you would think they would wonder why that happened, as you were saying, right? You would think they would wonder why that happened, as you were saying, right? You would think they would wonder, what is it about us that caused us to lose to Donald
Starting point is 00:22:11 Trump? And instead they invented this long list of people that they decided were to blame instead, Vladimir Putin, principally, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein for having the audacity to continue to run for president, you know, a whole on list of villains, essentially everybody except themselves and the people who are responsible for it. And I think the most toxic narrative is the one that said, the only reason Trump won was because the country is radically and fundamentally racist,
Starting point is 00:22:39 and he capitalized on that. And what's so amazing about that is there are literally millions of voters in excess of 10 million, depending on how you count, but definitely in excess of 10 million, voters who twice voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 12, and then in 2016 voted for Donald Trump. There are increasing numbers of non-white voters all over the country moving to the Republican Party under Trump and voting increasingly for Trump.
Starting point is 00:23:11 You had a larger share of black voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters, than any Republican candidate in decades and those trends are only worsening. And so you have this media that has no interest and no ability to understand how the majority of people in the United States live because their lives are completely separate than these isolated enclaves in this kind of liberal bubble. And just today, there was this amazing article by Rolling Stone. It was about what most of you have probably heard, which was this horrific mass murder in Buffalo, where an 18-year-old white kid feeding on this kind of ideology of racial hatred
Starting point is 00:23:54 that has become fringe, but very dangerous around the West, went into a store that he knew was predominantly black and shot as many people as he could, killing ten of them. And the article by Rolling Stone that was published this morning was, he is not a lone wolf shooter, he is a mainstream Republican. So I think all of you should be very careful because you're currently in a country where half of the people in this country apparently are psychotic Nazis on the verge of like some sort of mass murder outbreak, including huge numbers of non-white Americans who are supporters of the Republican Party. And the more you kind of immerse yourself in an instead of institutional
Starting point is 00:24:39 beliefs and a kind of ethos of your enclave, you know, just constantly hearing a belief, reinforced and reinforced, the more you believe it, the more you're immersed in it, the more immune you become to facts that negate it. And so that's the reason why the media is so incurious because they've embraced this narrative that the only reason or any moment vote for Republicans, the only reason any moment vote for Trump is because they're racist or they fascists or their white supremacists, and it's left them completely unable to grapple with things like 10 million people voting twice for Obama, and then for Trump or the fact as Matt alluded to, there were all kinds of people in 2016 who if you ask
Starting point is 00:25:21 them, they would say, yeah, I have two favorite candidates this year. And you'd say, who are they? And they would say Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. To a working journalist, most working journalists or pundits or political operatives, that makes no sense. They can't comprehend that because they see the world through this traditional left-right prism
Starting point is 00:25:41 that for increasing sections of the country, I would argue a majority, is no longer applicable, is no longer how they see the world. And this is so dangerous when you have this radical breach between the opinion-making journalistic class and elite class on the one hand and most of the population on the other. They just live completely different lives, work with a completely set of beliefs about the world, have completely different sets of interests. And if you look at countries, throughout history, where that has happened, where there's been this complete divergence between the people who hold power in the country and the rest of the country over who instability at best and usually much worse things inevitably are eyes. And I really think that's the point that we're at.
Starting point is 00:26:29 Just quickly to piggyback on that, be one of the big stories that went on covered and continues to go uncovered is the transformation of the Democratic electorate. The last time I looked at this 41 of the richest 50 congressional districts in America had Democrats in those seats and all of the top 10 richest districts were won by Democrats. Whereas as recently as 1992, this split was more like 50-50. If you live in an affluence of the overwhelming majority of the voters are going to be Democrats now.
Starting point is 00:27:15 And the big divide in American politics is no longer about ideology. It's significantly about income and even more education. It's a split between people who have high school degrees or less and people who are college educated. And this is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was so fused up and saying, I love the poorly educated, because they vote for him. But this is another tab we subject. Nobody likes to talk about this because it speaks
Starting point is 00:27:46 to a transformation that happened in the Democratic Party that began, I think, with Clinton, when they went away from relying on unions for financial support, the DLC's big strategic idea was, let's be more competitive on the fundraising front by, you know, being more pro-business or pro-growth, that was the term that they used a lot. And a couple of decades later, what you end up with is a party that no longer has any real organic connection to working people of any kind. And so, I think that's a massive factor in all of this,
Starting point is 00:28:27 is that reporting on class politics has become taboo. All you have to do is go to a Donald Trump event and you can see it clearly that the composition of the crowds is vastly different from what you see at a democratic event. And that's one of the reasons why they hated the media, because they saw us as upper-class representatives of the coastal elite who all live in New York, LA, in Washington, which is true for the most part.
Starting point is 00:28:58 And it got increasingly hostile as time went on, and that's why Trump was scoring so many points going after us, because we were symbols of the upper class and That's another reason why I think the the divide isn't the longer neatly between left and right anymore It has a lot more to do with class than I never did before. Okay, David I'm over here to you. Hey, I know you wanted to take a question or two from the audience as we wrap it. Sure, yeah, let's take some questions. And I thought I would kick it off. Great discussion about the left moving really far left and taking advantage of the Trump bump in their ratings.
Starting point is 00:29:36 I'm curious, you kind of left out Fox News kind of mastering and Rupert Murdock. They kind of created this playbook in a way, and the left copied it. Isn't that basically how it happened? People saw, wow, Fox Media is just making so much, Fox News specifically, was making so much money by picking aside that the New York Times and MSNBC, et cetera, all just said, you know what, we might as well pick the other side and just take this playbook and get the money.
Starting point is 00:30:02 That's kind of what happened, isn't it? I mean, I wrote a book about this called Haydank, which yeah, that's basically the thesis is that Fox pioneered a new way to make money in media, which is sort of like the audience optimization model. Like you pick a group, a demographic, and then you try to dominate it by feeding it news that you know that those people are going to respond to. That was never the way things worked before for an ordinary news agency. They would just cover what they thought was important and try to do the best they could. Has anybody stayed neutral, Matt? I mean, like, would you look at Reuters or AP?
Starting point is 00:30:41 It's clear the New York Times, MSNBC, they've just gone full, subscribe to us if you hate Trump. You know, we're going to give you what you want. But is there anybody in the middle still, Matt? Well, I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing sub-stack do well, right? It's not so much that it's left or right or it's just that there's, there's, most people are not partisans. Most people live somewhere in the middle, right?
Starting point is 00:31:07 And have opinions that are all over the place. And they cannot stand turning on the television and knowing exactly what they're going to say ahead of time. And so they're looking for some place that's different where you have differences of opinion. And that's why I think independent media is doing better than ever i mean the most influential person in in media even though
Starting point is 00:31:30 the the the mainstream part of the media never talks about him because he's not part of them is without question joe rogan he speaks to more people who are under you know eighty five years old which is the cable audience then anybody on television by far, and it's because as Matt just said, you cannot pin him down ideologically,
Starting point is 00:31:50 nor is he, does he have field tea to any one political faction, or certainly to any political party? He's just a curious person sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right, and sometimes neither, exactly like most Americans. I mean, it's such a great point, Glenn point Glenn and in fact if you were going to pin him if you just looked at how he voted he'd be a Democrat and the fact that the
Starting point is 00:32:13 Democrats have Joe Rogan and Elon Musk having been their supporters and voting for them for decades and they're too stupid to pull them into their party is just show them. They do the opposite they say no Joe Rogan we know that you love them for decades and they're too stupid to pull them into their party is just show them the opposite they say no Joe Rogan we know that you love Bernie Sanders the most far left candidate ever to be viable in decades but even though you love him we're gonna demand that you're our enemy and call you a far right fanatic even though you don't think you are yeah we're gonna demand that Bernie Sanders renounce Joe Rogan's endorsement
Starting point is 00:32:46 uh... that's our plan for when the election i mean sacks as much as you and i go at it with like how absolutely horrific the republican party is i mean the democrats are so incompetent to not court
Starting point is 00:33:04 the two most influential people in America today, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. I mean, they're alienating them. They're radicalizing them away from them. It's even worse. I mean, is there any, I mean, Saxus, just flabbergastis, but is there any way, Glenn, you can comment on this and explain what you think the Democrats are thinking, or are they just not thinking strategically about winning elections? and explain what you think the Democrats are thinking or are they just not thinking strategically
Starting point is 00:33:25 about winning elections? I think in addition to what you guys just talked about in terms of MSNBC and CNN copying the model, there has been a radical change in the composition of the Republican Party ideologically because of Trump, not because Trump is some sort of like discipline, political theorist, or deep thinker, but because he ushered in, as David was saying earlier, he ran in 2016 in opposition to Bush-Chainy Foreign Policy, in opposition to Reagan economics.
Starting point is 00:33:55 He railed against the power of large corporations that be expensive, the working person, something you never heard from Reagan. But he also ushered in a lot of hostility toward agencies like the CIA and the NSA and the FBI, something that had always been the province of the left. And so now you have an enormous amount of space opened on the right for all kinds of views that had previously been closed.
Starting point is 00:34:20 And I think there's just a lot more vibrancy on the right, a lot more internal debate, whereas in the Democratic Party, it's just a very much, you're either with us or you're against us, mindset and any deviation as we were talking about at the beginning automatically results in them proclaiming either enemy, which doesn't seem like a very effective way of doing politics to me. Okay, let's take a quick question from the audience. Let's talk about Elon behind his back before he joins.
Starting point is 00:34:44 What's your guys' take as you serious? Is he going to buy it? And what do you think the fallout's going to be? I don't know if he's going to buy it or not. I think that I haven't really gone into the details of that, but what I do think is fascinating is the reaction by people in media to even the proposition that he might buy Twitter. These are people who have been absolutely comfortable with a handful of people controlling 95 to 98%
Starting point is 00:35:14 of the media distribution in this country. For years now, they've never, ever once complained about it. Any time you ever complain about censorship, they say, oh, that's not censorship. This is a private platform. They can do whatever they want. That's always been their response. Suddenly Elon Musk comes along and it's, oh my god,
Starting point is 00:35:34 the threat of an oligarch taking over a media platform, what are we ever going to do? There are columns like that in the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos. I mean, yeah,zos. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the idea of the... And isn't the New York Times run by a family for... That's not really that poor, the sole part of generations?
Starting point is 00:35:56 All right, we'll take a final question from the audience. So I actually agree with a lot of what's been said here. And one of my questions is, we were talking about, is Trump even ideologically a Republican? My question is, as long as one of them is winning, the Republicans are the Democrats. Aren't both of them winning? Like, do you guys have any thoughts on that?
Starting point is 00:36:17 I didn't hear the question. As long as one of them, the Republicans or Democrats are winning, are they collectively winning? I guess, shouldn't there be a third party i mean isn't that the issue that worse it's such a binary polarize system i think uh... glen said in the middle that we're really on more moderates that's my belief but i'll just curious
Starting point is 00:36:36 no it's i mean it's a great you know i think uh... probably the worst media myth is that the two parties can never get along there's no more bipartisan ship there's so radically different they can't agree on anything when the reality is the agree on most things it's as if the only things we hear about or the times when they disagree but overwhelming the unforeseen policy on economic policy obama himself said
Starting point is 00:36:59 the two parties are essentially playing within the forty-hour line so the entire rest of the playing field is basically not part of the political process because they have the same fundamental beliefs. And I think one of the reasons why Trump was such a shock to the system was not because the Trump administration itself was a deviation from the American political tradition it wasn't, but because some of the things he said
Starting point is 00:37:20 like questioning NATO and whether it has viability was designed to undermine that bipartisan consensus. But I think in general, you're right that the establishment links of both parties are far more in agreement with one another than they are different. And I think you're also right that as long as those two wings of each party continue to trade power, the ruling cost in the out of the States is very happy. All right, let's give it up for Glenn.
Starting point is 00:37:49 Matt, thank you, Glenn. Well, let your winners ride. Rainman, David Sack, I'm going on a beach. And it said we open-source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with her. I'm the West Coast. I queen of crazy with it I'm the west I queen of kino I'm going all the way What, what, what, what, what a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all just just like this sexual tension that we just need to release that house.
Starting point is 00:38:30 What your, that beat, what your, your beer beat. Beat, what? That's good for you. We need to get my, best keys aren't that bad. I'm going on, Leon. I'm going on, Leon. I'm doing all the...

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