Factually! with Adam Conover - Elon Won

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Congratulations to Elon Musk on his historic White House win, this definitely won't be bad for all of us!Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story. Subscribe for 50% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Elon, I gotta hand it to you, buddy. You know, I've been making fun of you in my videos for two years now. For your dumbass fake robots, your broken ass cars, and the fact that even your own kids don't love you. I called you dumb because you lost billions of dollars buying Twitter. But you know what? I was wrong. You didn't do it for money. You did it for power. And you got that shit. You took over the world's dominant social media platform for breaking news and bent it into your personal

megaphone that you used to get your only friend elected to the presidency, all so he could hand you billions of more dollars in government cash. And it fucking worked worked and now you, Elon Musk, are going to be, God help us, running the federal government. Let that sink in to the White House. You won, dude! You might be a moron in a bunch of ways, but I have no choice to admit that you are a genius at turning other people's money into power. I'm not too big to admit when I've been cucked. Time for me to lease a Tesla and sign up for a Neuralink implant so you can issue firmware updates directly to my brain. Oh.

Oh, I just got updated with full self-voting. Now I don't even have to choose a candidate. Elon tells me how best to please him. And it's not just Elon who won last Tuesday. The entire billionaire class is thrilled that one of their own is finally running the show. Jeff Bezos, who recently stopped his newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris to avoid a perception of bias, immediately dropped that high moral stance to congratulate Big Daddy Trump, AI

slop peddler Sam Altman wished Trump huge success, and even Tim Cook, who you know always struck me as a relatively decent guy for a tech executive and happens to be one of the only openly gay CEOs in America joined in on the love fest. I mean look at that exclamation point He's so excited for Trump to take his rights away What we are all about to live under is a government for billionaires by billionaires. In the 48 hours after Trump won the 10 richest people in the world made a record 64 billion dollars. So of course these guys are kissing Trump's ass. He's shitting gold into their mouths. Trump's literal plan is to

hollow out or destroy the government agencies that regulate corporate America and let the billionaires merge, union bust, and scam money out of the pockets of working people like never before. We already lived under a corporatocracy, but under Trump, the iron fist of capitalism is about to punch us in the throat over and over again. And that is good. It is a good thing that Elon is my master now. By the way, if you want to support the channel, head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And if you want to come see me do stand- up comedy live, tomorrow I'm going to be in

Denver, Colorado. This weekend I'm going to be in Austin, Texas. And next weekend I'll be in Batavia, Illinois. Head to adamconover.net for tickets. I think it'd be nice to be around people right now. So Democrats are throwing around a lot of blame right now. What a shoulda coulda. What if Kamala had gone on Rogan?

What if she had denounced Israel's massacre of the Palestinians? What if Joe Biden had dropped out earlier, like he said he was going to? Well, all those things might have helped. But Trump won so decisively that it's hard to say if any of them, or even all of them together would have really changed the outcome. Because Trump not only won every swing state, he was the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. Hell, even New York City swung right by 12 points. Did New Yorkers suddenly become 12% more racist than they were four years ago? No. The real cause of the swing was

inflation and the economy. In exit polls, two-thirds of voters said they thought the economy was bad, and 69% of those people voted for Trump. I mean, nice, but also that sucks. This time, the Democrats can't blame Russian interference or third parties or even the New York Times, because you know what? Millions of the people who voted for Donald Trump don't read the New York Times.

Instead, they woke up on election day, literally Googled who is running for president, filled their car up on the way to the polling place, decided gas was too expensive, and voted against the incumbent party. And they were not alone. The exact same thing happened this year. In England, France, Japan, India, Poland, Botswana,

in fact, every single incumbent who has faced election in a developed country lost vote share this year, and the only thing those elections had in common was inflation. Now, I'm not saying that made victory impossible, unless you did what the Democrats did and deny that there was a problem to begin with. They spent the entire election saying the economy was actually great and remarking about how strange it is that people didn't believe it. I mean, even I did that sh**. A week before the election, we released a podcast episode called, If the Economy is Good, Why Do We Feel So Bad? And you guys, my own audience, smacked me down and told me I was out of touch

for even entertaining that question. Danny Slag wrote, "'I just got laid off from a job I was amazing at "'and had spent 15 years working my way up to, "'all so the CEO could give himself a 42% raise. "'Tell me again how great the economy is.'" And Stephanie C. 3022 really broke it down. She wrote, "'We live in two separate economies. "'One is doing great.

"'That's the one the corporations and billionaires and economists rave about all the numbers being high because their profits and pay have increased exponentially. But the second is the economy of working class Americans who can't afford anything because prices continuously increase. And Stephanie, that is true. Average Americans are getting screwed and they are suffering. and you cannot argue with that by showing them a stat Because suffering is a feeling and feelings are real. Ben Shapiro actually has it backwards Feelings don't care about your facts. If you tell someone in pain that they shouldn't feel so bad They say fuck you and they go to the next guy and the next guy Trump spoke to that emotion

He said I know that you're getting screwed and I know who's to blame Immigrants he repeated that over and over and over again And even though it's false even though immigrants are not the cause of the suffering by any measure Because he was offering a story and a solution it's stuck and in return the Democrats offered no story at all and by any measure because he was offering a story and a solution, it stuck. And in return, the Democrats offered no story at all. And, you know, I think they could have. They could have said, for instance, yes, you are getting screwed.

And you know who's actually to blame? The megacorporations and the billionaires who are jacking up prices and who have fought for 50 years to reduce your wages and take away your labor rights. And you know why I think that could have worked? Because it's f**king true. And it also would have made the public angry at Trump and his billionaire buddies because they're the ones who did that s**t. But the Democrats didn't make that argument because that would have pissed off their rich

donor base. Instead, they kept whistling past Joe Biden's grave, pointing at the stats, and pretending that everything was going to be okay. This is the f***ing problem with liberals. They're always like, why do the working class vote against their interests? But they never learn the answer to that question because they never ask the working class voters what their interests actually are because they don't f***ing know any. The Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the working class, but until they actually start listening to the people they seek to represent, they will continue to lose over and over again.

And by the way, if you want a first step to getting out of your media bubble, you should check out our sponsor, Ground News. They don't just show you the news, they show you how each story is being covered by the left, the right, and the center. For instance, even today, this story about how Trump's election is the revenge of the working class is barely being covered on the left, and ground news shows you that. So if you woke up the day after election day feeling like you're in a completely different world from other Americans, ground news can help you get outside of your bubble and make

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which means they put your needs first. That's groundnews.com slash factually. So my last video was called why I'm not Worried About the Election, and after the election, people predictably flooded to my comment section asking, hey Adam, are you worried now? Are you worried about the election now? And no, I'm still not worried. Because worry is an emotion you feel when you're unsure if something bad is going to happen. In this case, I know that it is. My industry, Hollywood, is going to be hit with even more pointless and destructive mergers that will put even more friends and family of mine out of work.

Lena Kahn was fighting to stop them at the FTC, but Donald Trump is going to fire her and end antitrust enforcement in the US, which will let coyote killer David Zaslav free to do more mergers and lay more people off. And you know how I know that? Because he literally said that's what he's going to do. And that is just the tip of the sh**, Burke. Trump says that he's going to deport 20 million immigrants, which is going to hurt and kill millions of people.

He's made it very clear that he's going to persecute trans Americans who want nothing more than to live in peace and plus RFK Jr. is going to be running the FDA so I'm pretty sure we're all gonna be getting mandatory brain worms. Oh hey maybe the brain worms can fight the Neuralink implants. Go brain worm go! So no I'm not worried. What I feel is more like grief. Grief for the America that I hoped for, and the America that I've been fighting to bring into being with my own work.

But, you know, I've actually had a lot of grief in my personal life this year. And I've learned that the hardest thing about grief is the realization that you just have to wake up every day in your new reality and keep living. There's no fix, there's no pep talk. You just open your eyes and say, oh, fuck, here I am again.

And then you gotta get up and go to work. And it's brutal. But I've also learned that there's strength in that because you have no choice but to find a way forward. That's just how time works. Look, I'm not gonna tell you what to do, but I will tell you what I'm going to do. I'm gonna keep working here on this channel.

I'm gonna keep telling the story of what actually happened to the American economy and who is actually screwing us. Now that Elon and his billionaire buddies are running the show, I think we're gonna need a little bit of that, and I'm not gonna stop until the implant in my head marches me straight to Elon's re-education camp. And you know what?

I'm gonna keep telling the story of what happens when we stand together in solidarity and actually look out for one another across race, gender, and class. You know, Trump and Elon wanna divide us. They want us to throw immigrants and trans Americans under the bus to placate the worst elements of our society. But if enough of us say no, we are not going to do that. Instead, we're going to actually listen to each other and stand up and protect each other and show that doing so works.

Maybe a new politics will start to emerge. And if you look around, there were glimmers of that new politics in last week's election results. Despite the Republicans spending hundreds of millions of dollars on hateful ads that demonize trans people, this year Sarah McBride became the first openly transgender person ever elected to Congress. Voters in three different red states passed paid sick leave,

and Missouri voters even chose to increase the minimum wage. This proves that as much as the American people can be driven by the economy or inflation, or yes, sometimes even racism and hate, they are also capable of choosing to stand with each other when the option is presented to them. So look, it's gonna be a rough couple years. Things are gonna get a lot worse before they get better. But you know what? We're gonna stand together and support each other

because we have no other choice. And because even though Elon and the billionaires may have won this round, there are still a shitload more of us than there are of them. I love you all and I'll see you in the next video.