Pod Save America - “Republicans have an O’Reilly problem.”

Episode Date: October 23, 2017

Congress wants answers on Niger, Fox News defends O’Reilly, and Trump pushes a $6 trillion tax cut for the wealthy. Then Alabama Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones talks to Jon, Jon, and Tommy a...bout his race against Roy Moore, and DeRay McKesson joins to discuss his conversation about the EPA with Christine Todd Whitman. 

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. Oh, we started. It's Jon Leavitt. I'm Tommy Vietor. We've only been waiting here a couple minutes. You just dove right in. Usually, you know, there's a chance to take a drink or something. But no, let's keep it in. Keep it all in. It's fine. On the pod today, the Democratic candidate for Senate in the Alabama special election, Doug Jones,
Starting point is 00:00:25 and the host of Crooked Media's Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. Love it. Now is the part of the show where we ask you to promote your podcast. Oh. Which one? You have a show? We had an awesome Love It or Leave It with Jenny Slate, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Jenny Yang. Really worth listening to. We had a conversation about Me Too, and i wasn't sure if we were gonna talk about it because we had talked about the wine scene scandal the previous week but i'm
Starting point is 00:00:49 really glad we did it's really worth listening to and we have another great love it or leave it this friday so you know we're just great episode after great episode also a great anti love it rant on avatar that's true which i like that the guests on love or leave it are now coming on and ranting against the host. That's something I support, of course. I prefer when someone comes in with a rant the following week as opposed to what has also happened, which is someone interrupts me mid-rant
Starting point is 00:01:14 to do the opposite rant and really takes the wind out of my sails. Again, that would be my favorite scenario. So future Love or Leave It guest. Anyway, listen and subscribe, alright? And also while you're at it, go subscribe to Crooked Conversations. we're a couple weeks away from the first episode very exciting and sign up at crooked.com where there's all kinds of great pieces and all kinds of other stuff so there you go all right let's get into the news yesterday a funeral was held for sergeant le
Starting point is 00:01:40 david johnson who died along with three other American soldiers during an ambush in Niger. Look, I don't want to spend another week on the fact that Donald Trump made a belated call to the widow of a fallen soldier, which left her deeply upset and offended, a fact that no one disputes, including the widow herself, Maisha Johnson, who was interviewed on Good Morning America today. But I do want to spend a few minutes on what happened in Niger, because I think that's a story that, because of the Trump feud, has gone a little bit under the radar. So I had no idea that there are around 1,000 American troops in the country, which is apparently something I have in common with Lindsey Graham
Starting point is 00:02:21 and Chuck Schumer and other people in Congress. Which is strange because you both have, I guess, well, maybe you have the same level of oversight in front of the Constitution. I don't remember. Well, they both said on the Sunday shows that they had no idea we had 1,000 troops in Niger. Tommy, what do we know about what our troops are doing in that country? I, too, do not want to talk about this controversy
Starting point is 00:02:42 over the phone call ever again, but I do think it's worth noting that the account that it was relayed by Rep Wilson has been confirmed. And it was reported last week that not only did Donald Trump not called every family of individual service member who had fallen, that Trump administration had to call over to the Pentagon to actually get the list. call over to the Pentagon to actually get the list. So I think that's relevant just because it speaks to the character of the president and his team and the things that the links they're willing to go to lie about. After he said it, they frantically reached out to Pentagon to try to get a list because they not only had he not been making all the calls, they weren't even keeping track. And this is not like a background source said.
Starting point is 00:03:21 It's like there's email traffic confirming this. So the story of last week is that the president deeply upset a widow of a fallen soldier and that he and his team lied repeatedly. That is the story. It's not the New York Times story about both sides in these political times getting into a feud.
Starting point is 00:03:37 It's none of that. And John Kelly and Donald Trump... The toxic climate didn't lie in the briefing room. And Donald Trump and John Kelly owe Frederica Wilson an apology because they have lied about her. Yeah, Congressman Wilson's – John Kelly said she said something in a speech that she didn't say. There's video. Anyway, okay.
Starting point is 00:03:54 Stop it. Enough. You know, what these troops are likely doing is a counterterrorism mission where we train up local forces to deal with various bad actors in the region. There is Al-Qaeda. There is ISIS. There's Boko Haram. Like, Algeria is a very dangerous area. Mali had a huge problem.
Starting point is 00:04:11 Niger is constantly fighting with extremist groups. So, you know, what is likely is that, you know, there's a, well, I think what I've read about these thousands troops is some of them are probably these, like, Green Berets were specially trained to train other forces and embed with them and go out on missions. And it sounds like this was the 29th mission of this sort where they were patrolling or, you know, doing sort of counter extremism work. Sounds like a lot of the other forces are in country to potentially build a drone base, which would, you know, give us better, you know, maybe a kinetic capability to like fire from drones and take out bad guys,
Starting point is 00:04:46 more likely a surveillance platform to gather intelligence. But, you know, we have troops in all kinds of far flung places. And a lot of what they're doing is trying to build up local forces so that they can take on these counterterrorism fights themselves that we don't have to send much larger groups of folks forces to, you know, like we did in Afghanistan or Iraq to take care of it ourselves. That said, like, there's nowhere near enough oversight or accountability. The fact that Lindsey Graham doesn't know of all people is crazy. Well, so the Defense Department is conducting an investigation into what happened. The FBI has joined the investigation. Members of both parties in Congress now are demanding
Starting point is 00:05:19 answers. One issue they've raised that goes beyond the specifics of what happened in this ambush, which is, you know, we want to know those answers as soon as possible. An issue that's been raised is whether the 16-year-old authorization for the use of military force, known as the AUMF, that gave George Bush broad, very broad war power after 9-11 should be revisited. Tommy, what's the debate around reauthorizing the AUMF? Well, there literally is no debate. I mean, this authorization was passed right after 9-11, and it has been used and interpreted to basically go after terrorist groups that literally didn't exist at the time that it
Starting point is 00:06:01 was passed. So I had a long conversation with Senator Tim Kaine about this on Pod Save the World, who has a bill he put forward that's trying to re-up this debate and actually get Congress to take on a very hard conversation about when we should wage war, because the administration has brought authorities under Article II to conduct military operations at various places, but Congress is supposed to authorize wars or have oversight over these wars. And they've essentially abdicated this responsibility. You know, this is an instance of we should maybe be careful what we wish for with this current iteration of Congress, because God knows what would come out of an AUMF reauthorization with this group of bozos.
Starting point is 00:06:41 Right. But I mean, the fact that like, they don fact that they literally don't know what's going on is an enormous concern. Yeah, I mean, look, at the time when the AUMF was passed, there were those who were critics of it who said this is unlimited, the scope of this is too broad, there's no sunset provision, this could go on forever, and that's exactly what's happened.
Starting point is 00:07:00 I mean, it's become just, it's the idea that, you know, it was in response to 9-11. If you can use it against groups that did not exist when those attacks took place, you have basically stretched the words beyond beyond all meaning. And this is another thing I'd say, too, is that this is a bipartisan problem. You know, when Barack Obama was deciding whether or not to take military action in Syria, he, you know, some would say infamously, famously decided to go to Congress, right? He was going to commit to military action, then he decided to go to Congress. And in his speech, saying that he was seeking action from Congress, he made a point of
Starting point is 00:07:36 saying that he didn't actually feel as though it was legally required. Yeah, check that legal box. Right, to say that I want authorization from Congress, but I don't need it. And this sort of this dance we've been doing between the administrative state and between Congress on legislative authority over war, I think has gone so far in the direction of the administration and allowed Congress to just sort of, you know, throw spitballs from the sidelines without actually having any responsibility or investment in what the administration does. Yeah. I mean, at the very least, this episode should highlight that if we have almost a thousand troops there that most people didn't know about, including members of Congress, and like you said, it was the 29th mission of its kind. about what missions our troops are going on, if they are potentially dangerous missions,
Starting point is 00:08:26 which, of course, this one was, before we just let it happen and have it go under the radar and then we don't hear about it until something horrible like this happens. Yeah. I mean, no one thinks that any time that the president needs to conduct a military operation that he should go to Congress and ask them for help because those guys, like, they can't get anything done. A lot of these things are timely. Like, Libya is another instance where there is a lot of consternation about Congress's role. But if you look back at that operation, like,
Starting point is 00:08:53 Gaddafi's forces were moving to, you know, take out everyone in the city of Benghazi, which then wasn't a bad word. It was just a city full of innocent people, and Obama intervened to stop it. So, like So there are instances like that where you need to act quickly. That said, you're right. I mean, we should be talking about what these missions are, how much it's costing, why we're doing it, where we're doing it. The fact that this is so shrouded in secrecy is bizarre to me. The other thing I'd love to see come out of this conversation is, you know, how are we treating families two weeks from now after they lose a loved one? How are we treating families two weeks from now after they lose a loved one?
Starting point is 00:09:32 How is the VA working for service members who become veterans and need health care and other essential services? That's a conversation you never hear. You brought up Benghazi. Yesterday, Congresswoman Federica Wilson tweeted, Niger is Donald Trump's Benghazi. He needs to own it. This came a few days after Rachel Maddow, who usually does very thorough and excellent reporting, floated a theory about what happened in Niger that was a little sloppy. The segment that it was loosely suggested that Trump's adding Chad to his travel ban may have set in motion a series of events that led Chad
Starting point is 00:10:04 to pull out their troops from Niger, which may have had something to do with the ambush, even though the only troops that Chad deployed in Niger were hundreds of miles away from the ambush. So I have all sorts of problems with the Benghazi analogies here. But, Tommy, you were in the White House when Benghazi happened. You dealt with this. What did you think about this? Like, you know, he needs to own this. This is his Benghazi happened you dealt with this what did you think about this like you know he needs to own this this is his Benghazi the travel ban did hurt relations with Chad and and curb military cooperation I don't know the specifics of where they had guys doing and what they were doing so
Starting point is 00:10:35 I just have no idea what she was talking about to me what Benghazi means is a highly politicized moment, you know, used for maximum political gain. It was tragic that four individuals were killed in Benghazi. There was not nearly enough security to protect them or to help rescue them. But it was never an issue about protecting diplomats. It quickly became about these talking points and what the administration said afterwards. And that was the thing that got politicized and was just, it was bullshit. It was bullshit. From minute one, Mitt Romney politicized it and Congress ran with that for years and years and years. So this is an instance where we need to be better than them. We should not politicize what happened in Niger. We should absolutely get to the bottom
Starting point is 00:11:23 of it. If they were sent on a mission that was inherently unsafe, there should be accountability for that. If they're lying about what happened or trying to cover up the truth, there should be accountability for that. But, like, I don't want to be the party that politicizes the death of people serving abroad. These are inherently dangerous jobs. We have to let the investigation find the facts first,
Starting point is 00:11:41 which is what they didn't do in Benghazi. And they assume because there was a changing explanation about whether it was a video, whether it was a terrorist attack, that that automatically must mean there was a political cover-up and not that the facts were changing on the ground and we just had to use the best intelligence we had. Well, but also, this is what drives me crazy. I know. It was the fucking video.
Starting point is 00:12:01 I know. There's quotes from people who were there that day who said, I am here because I'm angry about this web video that insulted our profit. So some people were there. Doesn't mean they were just innocent folks off the street. What we were wrong about was that this was a peaceful protest that bubbled over. And that was the result of bad intelligence. I remember talking to the head of NCTC, the National Counterterrorism Center, that coordinates all the intelligence from the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus.
Starting point is 00:12:24 And he told me they had that from every single source, human intercepts, news reports, all of it indicated that the YouTube video played a role. I know it's been since demagogue because it was seen as an excuse. It was part of why people took went after the embassy that night. Yeah, I mean, you know, when someone says, you know, it's ridiculous for a member of Congress to say, this is his Benghazi own it. It's a silly, silly thing to say, because Benghazi wasn't Benghazi. It was a way of turning what is a tragedy and what does inherently represent a failure, which is, with rare exceptions, if Americans in service to this country are dying, are being killed, something went terribly wrong.
Starting point is 00:13:07 Yeah. Every time. I mean, with exceptions that there have to have been things you could have done differently. People dying as diplomats or in a dangerous place where we could have secured them. That is something you need to learn from and investigate every single time. They took that, which is obvious and true, and turned it into this partisan cudgel, specifically by using, you know, the developing story as a means of saying, oh, they were lying, and they were covering up, and to repeat over and over again for years, we need to get to the truth, we need to get to the truth. But of course, they weren't really
Starting point is 00:13:36 trying to do that. And there was no explanation that would ever satisfy. And so you end up kind of fencing with like clouds of dust, because there's just nothing to grab onto. And it was an extremely, and we should just, it was effective. It was a damaging and long-term strategy to manipulate the facts and use a tragedy in Benghazi for political ends. And it was effective. And so any Democrat who looks at that and says, oh, I want to do the same thing because it was so effective, it's just wrong. And we know what you were saying is true because Kevin McCarthy, who is the number three in the house at times said, look, we held all these hearings to drive down Hillary Clinton's approval rating and it's working. And he said it on TV and his reward for stating the obvious was he was removed from that leadership. Well,
Starting point is 00:14:15 I love it. You just said, cause I saw this on, on Twitter, a bunch of Democrats were saying, well, you know, it was effective what they did with Benghazi and we play too nice and, and, you know, we should do the same thing. And it's wrong, like you said, but it's not just wrong. It's not smart either. Conspiracy theories work better for Republicans because they make people distrustful and cynical about their government. And Republicans don't want people to trust their government. That's sort of part of their ideology.
Starting point is 00:14:43 We want people to trust their government we want we it's not going to work as well for us to have a conspiracy theory you know about you know republic the government always screwing up and the government always having nefarious actions that they're doing around the world i think you're right long term i think obviously it is not in the long-term interest of democrats you're trying to build faith in institutions and and the government that it can do a job to be fanning the flames of conspiracy theories. And it's morally reprehensible. What Republicans did for years on Benghazi was morally reprehensible. But I think it's a little too easy to say not only would it be morally wrong, it would be ineffective. I think we should
Starting point is 00:15:16 be able to say, you know what, if we have the stomach for it, and I don't think Democrats do, which is not in our nature, as a party, as institutions. MSNBC is not Fox News. If we had the stomach for it, if we could pull out, if we could get ourselves to do something so gross, we could spend the next two years turning Najera, this death into into his Benghazi. Maybe it would really work. And we should say, even though we think that we are not, we're not going to do it. That's all. I just think there's plenty of fights to pick about things that affect people's lives every single day that matter to them about policies that he's passing that are actually going to move voters a lot more. Yeah. I don't if you asked if you asked the Romney campaign, if you asked Stuart Stevens who ran
Starting point is 00:15:51 the Romney campaign, whether he thought it was a good idea for Romney to go after Obama on Benghazi, he will tell you today that it was a bad idea that he wanted economic issues. He wanted to focus on Obama's policy failures and that he thought that Benghazi was a distraction that was being whipped up by a lot of the folks on the right. Yeah. With Hillary Clinton, it became part of she's untrustworthy. And here's one more example of why she's untrustworthy. They spent years using it on her.
Starting point is 00:16:16 They spent years using it on her. And yeah, sure. Maybe it wasn't as effective in 2012 against Barack Obama. And, you know, you lose and you look for every reason that they lose. But I mean, come on. I mean, it's not as though Hillary Clinton would say, oh, if Hillary could not have the Benghazi cloud hanging over her for two years, I'm sure she would have appreciated that. It made a difference. It affected her campaign. It was not a helpful thing. It did. It did become one of the many, many things she had to constantly argue against.
Starting point is 00:16:40 And no, it wasn't a positive message. But years and years of this steady, steady, just these nicks and cuts from Benghazi day after day after day, hearing after hearing, having to drag herself out there for 12 hours. It worked. Yeah, but just be honest about that. It only worked because Fox News was another arm of their strategy. And they reported on Benghazi constantly all day every day. And not only that, they got major things wrong that made it sound so much worse than it was. For example, the idea that Barack Obama watched this operation happen via some drone feed in the Situation Room. Not true. Crazy. Made up. It was reported repeatedly. They made it sound like there were forces that could have been sent in to rescue people that were called off by the White House for political reasons. Absolutely not true. The whole problem with this, this controversy is there was this
Starting point is 00:17:29 assumption that the motivation behind the White House was to protect the president's record on counterterrorism. That to me just like it was so ridiculous, because I don't think anyone votes on whether or not you're safe from al-Qaeda in Libya. You know what I mean? If there was a strike on the homeland, yes, that would be a massive political issue. But this thing was just like a sidebar. But even if you read like David French or all the conservatives
Starting point is 00:17:54 that we've come to think are our friend now, they still think that this was some great big lie cooked up by the administration to hide something. I lived every fucking minute of this, and it was not. It was ridiculous. I promise you, it was not. I don't think we disagree. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:08 No, it's just, I just think that Benghazi was a stand-in for all the same attack they threw at her. Because when Benghazi was out of the news, it became emails. When the emails momentarily were out of the news, it was the Clinton Foundation. It was just, they were going to try to do whatever they could to show people that she was untrustworthy, and they used whatever issue they could find. And it's funny. Sorry, but they switched too.
Starting point is 00:18:28 Like part of the reason it was less effective. Yeah, of course, because they didn't care. No, no, no. But part of the reason it was less effective against Obama is I feel like the original sin that they were really trying to get at is they had a belief that Barack Obama didn't understand terrorism, didn't believe it was a real threat, never took it seriously, didn't want to call it by its name. And so when you blame a video, right, they're blaming a video because they want to not admit what's really going on here. They're just angry that Barack Obama was president when Osama bin Laden was killed and that he was taking credit for that. And they thought this would be the way to get it back. Just a reminder that this, oh, how could you blame a video? That video led to like hundreds of thousands of people
Starting point is 00:19:05 to take to the street in dozens of countries. I remember there was a protest, an angry mob in Australia. That's how far this thing reached, let alone Pakistan, Yemen, where there was another assault on our embassy there. I guess it all just boils down to Benghazi may have been an effective attack for Republicans against Hillary Clinton.
Starting point is 00:19:24 The notion that we could turn this into Trump's Benghazi may have been an effective attack for Republicans against Hillary Clinton. The notion that we could turn this into Trump's Benghazi is meaningless nonsense, the wrong thing to do, and we're Democrats. It's cynical. It's not our way of doing business, so it wouldn't work. Put me down for I don't think we should make shit up. I don't care. You can tell me it's effective or not. I don't think we should make shit up. I'm not going to change that position.
Starting point is 00:19:40 I don't care. You can tell me it's effective or not. I don't think we should make shit up. I'm not going to change that position. And by the way, anyone who questions whether these guys were sincere about Benghazi, look at the budget they put forward for protecting diplomats. They got slashed all over the place. But that's the point, right? I don't think it's right when people are like, it's not effective.
Starting point is 00:19:58 Maybe it is. We don't make shit up. That's the only point I wanted to make. We should not be in favor of making shit up, and we don't have to convince ourselves it's because it doesn't work. Just wrong. Speaking of making shit up and we don't have to convince ourselves it's because it doesn't work. It's just wrong. Speaking of making shit up, over the weekend, a New York Times bombshell revealed that a month
Starting point is 00:20:12 after Bill O'Reilly paid a $32 million settlement with a Fox News analyst who accused him of repeated sexual harassment, a non-consensual sexual relationship, and sending her all kinds of sexually explicit material, $32 million. A month after this, Fox News knew about the settlement and still offered O'Reilly a four-year
Starting point is 00:20:31 contract extension worth $25 million a year. Even after O'Reilly left the network, Hannity invited him on his show just the other week. What did you guys think about this story? It's like, there's so many different parts to unpack. First of all, there's the thing itself, which is that like Fox News was this, had this despicable culture that went all the way to the top, right?
Starting point is 00:20:53 It went from Roger Ailes all the way down. And it was everything from they're demanding that women show their legs on television to removing the things in front of the desk so that women's legs could be visible, right? The objectification of women on the air to a culture of harassment and misconduct from the top to their hosts, clearly just a massive cultural problem there with Gretchen Carlson has talked about. And then so you deal with that. And then you turn on Fox News, and they've spent the last month saying that Democrats don't care about harassment.
Starting point is 00:21:26 So Brian Boitler wrote about this, our editor-in-chief, in a piece on Cricket.com last week, that calling what they've done last week with Weinstein and the Clintons, the Fox News, for like every show, every host, it was the Weinstein scandal and how it related to hillary clinton and the democrats because he was a donor to democrats this was their whole the basic you couldn't turn on fox without seeing this and brian said that calling this hypocrisy doesn't quite get it what it really is here that it's not just your typical hypocrisy which happens in politics all the time that it's something deeper that it's that it's actually a concerted effort it's propaganda and it's a concerted effort to make people distrust the mainstream media and to also
Starting point is 00:22:10 sort of neutralize a liability that donald trump and other republicans have which is treating women like shit what did you guys think about that yeah it seems pretty true i mean there's it's a morally bankrupt organization fox news is morally bankrupt they sow racial discontent they have a culture where they sexually harass and objectify women they lie about democrats constantly and like what's remarkable about people like from harvey weinstein to bill o'reilly to roger Ailes to Donald Trump, is they all think they're the victim. It's remarkable the degree to which these guys think they're aggrieved, they're making hundreds of millions, if not billionaires, and they think that someone's out to get them.
Starting point is 00:22:57 And it's just like, it's the most pathetic possible reaction from these individuals, and it's good for the New York Times for getting the goods on Bill O'Reilly once again. I wish more people cared. Think about the fact that there are women who were harassed by people within Fox News who still work at Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is pushed out for that harassment
Starting point is 00:23:17 and then he just comes in to do an interview and they chum around and you know like it's a... Stop karate chopping. I'm hitting the table with anger but you have bill o'reilly sitting there with sean hannity like just shooting this shit like a couple little pals like nothing ever went down they spent so much money to cover up his abuse and his crimes in that building it is staggering it is shocking somebody said this yesterday nobody pays 32 million dollars uh for something they didn't do.
Starting point is 00:23:45 I think that was Gretchen. Gretchen Carlson. Yeah. So Roger Ailes wasn't a donor to Donald Trump. He was a close advisor to Donald Trump. Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity are still close advisors to Donald Trump. Fox News is in kind contribution to the Republican Party is more valuable than any donor. Absolutely. Gift of anywhere in history. And now we have this huge, rich, powerful, influential media organization that has covered up numerous allegations of sexual assaults, sexual harassment against their own female employees, and their hosts say nothing. Tucker Carlson is sitting in Bill O'Reilly's fucking chair.
Starting point is 00:24:21 He's sitting in the chair being like, why won't they talk about Weinstein? Man, these Democrats, they sure have this Hollywoodllywood culture you know they there's a tinsel town we haven't heard a word from anyone in the republican media and the conservative media about this we haven't heard any republican politicians who've been on fox who go on fox all the time be called upon to denounce their association with this company that covers up sexual harassment that covered up sexual assault for a lot of years. We don't see Chris Silliza tweeting,
Starting point is 00:24:48 Republicans have a Bill O'Reilly problem, like he did when he said, Democrats have a Harvey Weinstein problem, as soon as that happened. The mainstream media, as soon as the Weinstein thing came out, it was immediately, Democrats have a Weinstein problem.
Starting point is 00:25:00 I'm not seeing a bunch today that Republicans have a Bill O'Reilly problem. It's weird. There is not a major Republican figure who hasn't spent time with these people, been on these shows. Roger Ailes ran Trump's debate prep, hung out with them. But, you know, you even go be Trump, who is a sexual assault, a harasser, an assaulter himself. So you can go beyond Trump, every single one, even the reasonable Republicans. They have they have all made the same dirty deal. I mean, look, their refusal to speak out against Fox News on this, about the disgusting culture inside the building, about what Ailes did to women, about what O'Reilly did to women, it is part of a larger story about Fox News, which is they all know that they've been riding a tiger with this thing, that they have used Fox News to stoke the base and make people angry and animate racial grievances for years and years and years.
Starting point is 00:25:45 And they know it's wrong, but it's useful to them. And they're afraid to push back against it. And that's true for the garbage that Fox puts on the air. And now it's also true for their failure to speak out about the culture inside that building. What a toxic, despicable, evil institution it is. It is one of the most destructive forces in American life. It is one of the most destructive forces in American life. And all these guys behind the scenes, the same way they would denigrate Trump, would say the same about Hannity fucking in cahoots with Assange, about the dumb dumbs on Fox and Friends.
Starting point is 00:26:16 They would all say it behind closed doors. Same way Bob Corker says Donald Trump will launch World War III. You know Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. They know these guys are despicable, dangerous morons, but they won't say it because they've all made the same Faustian bargain and it is destroying our culture and it is destroying our politics every single day. End of rant.
Starting point is 00:26:35 Jesus. What? That's why we did this. To all rant about it. Tell me. What's frustrating as a Democrat who worked in politics for like the last decade is how paralyzed Democrats have been about how to deal with Fox and how schizophrenic we were. Because we went in knowing full well that they were just going to demagogue Obama and question where he was born and demand his birth certificate. And then we went through a period of time where we said we wouldn't do Fox because it was an arm of the Republican Party. And then fast forward a couple of years
Starting point is 00:27:08 and he's doing an interview with fucking Bill O'Reilly at the Super Bowl, the biggest ratings moment there is. And it's just, it speaks to their power and their influence and how much harm it has done to us as a party, to our politics generally. I'm so glad that all of this is out there
Starting point is 00:27:24 for everyone to see now because I think it's important and we should call for what it is. So question, what can we do about it? When the allegations against Ailes and O'Reilly first popped up, there was a push to get companies to stop advertising on O'Reilly's show.
Starting point is 00:27:37 I think that worked really well. It did work really well. And Sleeping Giants has done a lot of good work on that. They're doing something else now on another right-wing media organization. There was a story on ThinkProgress last week that we didn't get to cover about how Robert Mercer, who funds Breitbart and Bannon and Milo and the other white supremacist Nazi sympathizer crowd, he made his money as co-CEO of a hedge fund.
Starting point is 00:28:01 Tommy, do you want to talk about the story a little bit? Yeah, I mean, Robert Mercer is a billionaire. He's the co-CEO of Renaissance Technologies or Rentech, which is a big quantitative fund that uses computers to make a ton of money. And so some of their funds are private funds just for employees, but some of them are big public funds that have major institutional investors. And what ThinkProgress did, which I thought was very smart, was just go through a bunch of forms that public institutions, many of them nonprofits, many of them for the public good, have released that show their investments in Renaissance technology. So it was organizations like the Public School Employee Retirement System of Missouri, Columbia University, Michigan State University, the Los Angeles Water Power Employees Retirement Plan. There will be many,
Starting point is 00:28:45 many more. But I think these sort of acts of transparency, just so people know, if you're a graduate or a current student at Columbia University or Michigan State, some of your endowment money is invested with a guy that funds the worst hate groups in America. People like Milo, people like Breitbart, which is a garbage news outlet. And if that bothers you, you should write a letter to the editor or call the school and ask them to divest. This public pressure works. Michigan State released a pathetic, tepid statement that essentially skirted the issue. You should keep the pressure on and just call them out. If they think it doesn't matter, if they think profits are more important
Starting point is 00:29:24 than what Mercer does with his money, that's fine. But they should just say it. Yeah. Spartans, if you're hearing this, go blue. Okay. I learned something. You learned something.
Starting point is 00:29:35 You learned something. That was good. Yeah. No, but I think it's important. I think it's important to keep this public pressure on people who have financial ties, people like the Mercers, people like Fox News. Because we can sit here and yell about it again like we always do. Or we can try to start doing something about it. And these campaigns worked when a lot of advertisers...
Starting point is 00:29:53 I mean, that's why O'Reilly had to leave in the first place. It wasn't because Fox News, out of the goodness of their heart, decided to let him go. It's because there was pressure. But the National Academy of Sciences has $31 million invested in Renaissance Technologies Equities Fund. Wow, science is doing well. Yeah, they're a nonprofit dedicated to research and public advisory on subjects like math, engineering, medicine, and science.
Starting point is 00:30:15 That climate change boondoggle is really paying off. Things that Breitbart and the right wing of the Republican Party are undercutting every day. That's an odd alignment of their investment priorities, their fiduciary and their moral priorities. I would also say, like, you know, some of the issues around where people spend their money, they rise up to the surface in a strange way. You know, you're not wanting to say spend at Chick-fil-A because of the causes that the owner of Chick-fil-A supports because they've been anti-gay. The larger forces in our economy around where investment goes has a much bigger impact. And Charlottesville, the rise of the alt-right, all of it didn't happen
Starting point is 00:30:54 in a vacuum. It happened because of a massive, well-funded, secret architecture. And that architecture took not just, you know, that took a huge, huge amount of money, and it took deep pocketed billionaires. And the Mercers have been quieter about it than the Koch brothers, but the Mercers make the Koch brothers look like Soros. And they are a dangerous little faction, and they deserve this attention. Oh, yeah. Okay, before we get to our guests, let's talk about tax reform. Something that's going to happen in Congress that's going to affect millions of people's lives. Literally all of us.
Starting point is 00:31:28 And the entire country. So we should probably spend some time on it here. Trump's big push for his six trillion dollar tax cut has begun. He had an op-ed in USA Today. I'm sure he wrote it himself. He did an interview yesterday. I would love to watch Donald Trump
Starting point is 00:31:44 type at a keyboard. I would love to watch Donald Trump type at a keyboard I would love to watch the hunt and peck of those tiny little hands that broke in mind like losing track halfway through his sentence do we know that he types with his fingers maybe the golf caddy is behind it dictated but not read
Starting point is 00:31:59 to a moron he did an interview yesterday with Maria Bartiromo speaking of in-kind contributions to the Trump campaign. Man, she is captured. She was found by Roger Ailes when he was running CNBC. Right. And where, of course, Trump again said the tax cut would pay for itself by spurring all kinds of economic growth,
Starting point is 00:32:17 something that has never happened in the history of huge tax cuts. So the Senate last week passed a budget that paves the way for a tax cut that would increase. So the Senate's budget said it is okay if we pass a tax cut that increases the deficit by $1.5 trillion. And to do that, the budget also paved the way for massive cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. So that's lovely. So now the question is, can this thing pass? So they still have to pay for $4 trillion, about $4 trillion worth of the tax cuts.
Starting point is 00:32:52 To do this and to make it real tax reform, they have to find tax breaks in the tax code right now to get rid of. This has become a problem because their whole promise on this is that they will only have tax reform that helps the middle class that doesn't raise taxes on the middle class. But now they can't say that if they eliminate some of these tax breaks,
Starting point is 00:33:14 like if they pare back the mortgage deduction, if they get rid of the deduction for state and local taxes, that this isn't going to actually raise taxes on some middle class people. So they have these two factions in the party now. They have the deficit hawks, people like Corker. Bob Corker said he will not vote for a tax package that increases the deficit by a dime.
Starting point is 00:33:32 So bad news for Bob Corker on this. And there's some people in the Freedom Caucus in the House that are saying the same thing too. And then you've got like the no tax increases crowd, which is, you know, Rand Paul said he wouldn't vote for anything that increases middle-class taxes. Trump keeps walking back all of these reports about middle class. Trump was reportedly upset about the proposal to end deduction for state and local taxes. He tweeted this morning that they will not be limiting contributions to your 401k plan,
Starting point is 00:33:57 which was the most politically unpopular thing I could imagine that leaked out, that they were going to try to limit the deductions you can take on your 401k plan. While cutting taxes for the investment income of those at the very, very top. Yeah. And ditching the estate tax. Yeah, it's pretty. So what should our message be here? What should Democrats be saying about this?
Starting point is 00:34:16 I think that the- Because I think this is a big, big opportunity. I think that the four Schumer principles, I think, are right. And the four Schumer principles are no tax cuts for the rich, no increase in the deficit, no tax increases for the middle class, and regular order, which would mean, you know, you need 60 votes, which is not going to happen. Yeah, I would say, I would say, you know, you get rid of the process stuff. And I think you just say, Democrats have a simple rule, we are not going to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy by raising taxes on the middle class or
Starting point is 00:34:43 cutting health care for regular people. I think that's a pretty simple message. I think probably it would be good to go even a step further and say, Democrats are here to work with you to reform our tax code. We'd love to help make taxes simpler and easier for people to pay, but we don't think that should be done on the backs of working people. We think that wealthy people have done really well and that if we're going to reform our tax code, it starts with them. The Democratic messaging is going pretty well, right? Because according to CBS News tracker poll, 58% of Americans think the current proposals would favor the wealthy, which is correct. Right. For once, people understand the implications of policies in
Starting point is 00:35:16 a way that's accurate. And you can tell that's actually gotten into Trump's head, because Maria Bartiromo kept asking him incredibly leading, pathetic questions about this. And he's upset that Senator Schumer would dare to say the fact that this is actually going to overly help the 1% or the 0.1%. I do think it's good to zoom in on bite-sized pieces like the estate tax. I thought back in the day when Democrats called the estate tax the Paris Hilton tax, that was pretty good. We're going to need to pick a new relevant celebrity. Yeah, in 2017. But that kind of stuff tells a story.
Starting point is 00:35:48 Yeah, sorry, Paris. It's been a long time since that show. What was that show called? Keeping Up with the Paris? Paris is Burning? That's wrong. I think there's a couple things you got wrong. There's a little confusion.
Starting point is 00:36:01 No, so obviously, Tommy, it's interesting you say that because Republicans are obviously worried about this. There's talk now that they are floating a proposal so that they will have no tax cuts for anyone making over a million dollars. So plenty of tax cuts from like $500,000 to $999,000. And then, of course, there's the pass-through tax cuts. There's the estate tax cuts all that kind of stuff the coke brothers are like this is not what we paid for that it's true yeah right they paid they did the coke brothers paid for all the research that led to the ryan plans all the
Starting point is 00:36:33 polling all the fucking focus groups all the think tanks that they funded and propped up for decades to get us to this moment sorry i've been reading too much of jane mares fantastic book oh my god there you go how's your job at penguin press doing? But like you just, people need to understand that this policy is bought and paid for by the people that would benefit, like $200 billion worth of money will go back to the richest Americans if they repeal the estate tax. This is what they want. Sorry, John, I cut you off. I was going to say Grover Norquist, our friendly tax expert, is already upset about this.
Starting point is 00:37:03 He's like, I think this is one of the top 20 stupidest ideas I've ever heard. So they're not going to be able to get this through easy. And also, but we should just know that if you hear a big report that, oh, now Republicans are saying no tax cuts for millionaires, it's not correct. They're trying, it may be true if they put in a provision for your individual tax rate, but what they're going to do with the estate tax,
Starting point is 00:37:24 what they're going to do with corporate pass-throughs, investment tax, all the other stuff. It's a win for most of this. The large, large, large majority of this tax cut is for people who are making at least $500,000 or more, which is not most Americans. This is not just a Republican problem either. Reforming the tax code is something we should do.
Starting point is 00:37:44 It's really hard to do because all the ways in which the tax code is larded up with deductions and breaks and benefits, they're all really popular. Like the economists will tell you that the mortgage deduction doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's really, really popular. You know, there's lots of things that we would want to not have. So, so Republicans have walked themselves into this corner because not only are there the inherent problems of reforming the tax code, even if you were going to be revenue neutral, right, even if you're just going to move money around and not increase the deficit. But on top of that, they have all this pressure from their donors and from the far right of their base to not just reform the tax code, not just simplify the tax code, but use the tax code as
Starting point is 00:38:21 a means to starve the beast and get money out of the government. So they're sort of blocked in from both sides. Yeah. So we should keep pushing this message and we should keep pushing it through all the other crap that Trump tweets about. No cuts to health care to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. Pretty simple. Pretty simple, guys. It's just, it's so funny the way deficits only count for Republicans if they come from spending.
Starting point is 00:38:43 I mean, the Tax Policy Center thinks that we'll reduce federal revenue by $2.4 trillion over 10 years and $3.2 trillion over the next 10 after that. It's an insane amount of money, and they just don't care. And the whole Tea Party, remember how it started? Because Obama was a profligate spender and the deficit was going up? And no one cares. And that wasn't just a Tea Party thing. That was all of centrist Washington and all the pundits and thinkers.
Starting point is 00:39:06 And, oh, and they all prayed to the altar of Bull Simpson and the deficit reduction. And, oh, Obama doesn't care about the deficit. And if we were- Why can't the people come together to cut Social Security and- Who will look out for the op-eds that have been written? Why won't they bend the cost curve in the out years, John? Don't they know that unless we do a tiny fix, Social Security will run out of money in 2097? It may be true that the Republican Party is being taken over by a bunch of racists and white nationalists,
Starting point is 00:39:38 but at their core, there are people like Paul Ryan who just care about the deficit. They care about these things. Yeah, okay. No, absolutely. They care about these things. Yeah. Okay. No, absolutely. You're right. You're right. I'll see you next Sunday at the round table.
Starting point is 00:39:50 I enjoy your fucking op-ed. No, none of these people. Roy Moore, a stone cold authoritarian lunatic, is their nominee. And there's still none of those people, the Bull Simpson people, the we just need to come together people, will ever acknowledge the fact that there is one governing party in this country, and
Starting point is 00:40:08 that's it. I like that there are a lot of people listening to this who are like, what the fuck is Bull Simpson? Who are these nerds talking about? No, no, we're not going to explain it. We're not going to Google it. No, we're not going to do that to them. Guys, guys, guys.
Starting point is 00:40:17 Go Google it. If you want to be bored, Google it. It was our private hell in 2010 and 2011. Here's the deal. Official Washington-dom came around to a consensus that was very dumb. Not the first time and not the last time
Starting point is 00:40:29 that that will happen. But it was a consensus around what the American people are really clamoring for are cuts to Social Security and a balanced budget in 2047. Yeah, it was a consensus that prioritized
Starting point is 00:40:40 cutting the deficit over managing 9% unemployment, which makes no sense. And the one thing that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agreed on in 2016 was not to run on that. So there you have it. There it is. Good idea. Okay, when we come back, we will have the candidate for the Alabama Senate race,
Starting point is 00:40:59 Democratic candidate for the Alabama Senate race, Doug Jones. Doug Jones! On the pod today, we have the Democratic Senate candidate for the special election in Alabama, Doug Jones. Doug, thanks for joining us. Hey guys, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Awesome. Well, so Alabama has not elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1992. Trump beat
Starting point is 00:41:30 Clinton by almost 30 points in 2016. What made you say this is the year? All right, well, a couple things. First of all, you know, it was before 1992, it was 100 years before Republicans had ever elected a United States senator. So there's a time and a season for everything. And it seemed like that now people are hitting political reset buttons. I think the health care debate obviously helped that, where people are looking at a lot of issues. And when you focus on issues, I think the time is now to have people have a real voice. They're tired of the chaos in Washington.
Starting point is 00:42:04 They're tired of the dysfunction that, quite frankly, can come from both parties. And they want somebody who can reach across the aisle, somebody that will have dialogues instead of monologues and try to work to get things done rather than just, you know, drawing a line in the sand and crossing it. I think that's what people have been looking for in Alabama. And it was just time to give that voice out there and to air that voice and to let people move forward. to come in and sort of support the race and talk about Roy Moore. Do you think those efforts are helpful? And can you talk a little bit about Roy Moore's views on social issues and whether or not he's too extreme for the state? Well, I think that this race is going to be about an Alabama race. I mean, it has obviously had a lot of interest across the country, but this is an Alabama race with Alabama issues, what we call the kitchen table issues about health care,
Starting point is 00:43:06 about education, about jobs. Those are kind of issues, though, that cut across from state to state. Everyone is concerned about those issues. And it's just simply the best way to get people to focus on those, which is, I think, what our campaign is doing. And you contrast that with a guy who has been removed from office twice, elected twice of chief justice, removed from office twice for following his own agenda rather than the rule of law and obeying his oath that he took to the people of this state. He is a divider. He's, I think, a figure that is really divisive in this state. People don't want that. He talks a lot about, you know, his religion, but yet at the same time, he doesn't practice the same kind of religion that I grew up with in the Methodist church in Alabama. And so I think people want
Starting point is 00:43:58 to go past that. But again, when you look at that history and when you see the just incredibly divisive lack of respect, lack of equality, a message that he has across the spectrum, people don't want that. They're tired of that. They want someone who can work across the lines, somebody that can have a conversation because they know that finding common ground is really the only way to move Alabama forward. So, Doug, it's pretty clear that if you're in this race, you're going to need to pull in people who maybe haven't voted Democrat in a while. And you're on the ground, you're talking to people. What opens people's minds to maybe voting in a way they haven't before? Is there anything that surprised you when you're, say, talking to an independent or a conservative-leaning person who maybe all of a sudden you realize you've kind of broken through with? Is there anything that you think people ought to know about that?
Starting point is 00:44:46 Well, you know, it's been interesting to me, I think, in terms of surprises. I think what I've been surprised at is that the number of people that have decided to look past party labels to try to talk about issues and to get things done. You know, we're bringing along with us, and people are calling us, in numbers that I just didn't dream that we would see. We're always hoping for those numbers. But, you know, and it's across the spectrum. I've got business leaders who believe a figure like Roy Moore is bad for business. And if it's bad for business, it's also bad for the working men
Starting point is 00:45:26 and women. So we've got an interesting dynamic, I think, right now where you've got a candidate who is talking about being a unifying force. And on the one hand, you've got business leaders lining up to support. And on the other hand, you've got organized labor and hardworking folks out there. You've got a diverse group of people from all races and religions that are lining up. This is a really unique situation, I think, for Alabama and really to some extent for the country because we have been so divided. I believe that we've got an opportunity here in this state to reset the buttons and to make sure that people have a unifying voice. People are looking for that as much as they like the fact that folks believe in principles.
Starting point is 00:46:13 They also know that in order to get things done, you don't have to compromise those principles, but you just have to reach common ground. I think that voice in the South is a voice that can accomplish that. And I think people in Alabama right now are beginning to see that and they don't want to throw someone in Washington like Roy Moore who could just who will just contribute to the chaos. Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. When you look around today at what happened in Charlottesville or some of the people Donald Trump and Roy Moore associate themselves with, do you see progress on race? Do you think we're still stuck with the same prejudices and divisions? What do you think? Well, I think we have made tremendous progress in this country, and particularly in Alabama. If you look around, we've made tremendous progress. On the other hand, we seem to be taking steps backward, and that is for political reasons,
Starting point is 00:47:12 whether it's denying people access to the ballot box, restricting their rights to vote, any number of things. And it's very disturbing to see the white supremacists walking through the streets of Charlottesville with tiki torches and all of their chants. I'm not going to throw stones at who is causing that rise, but I know this. I know we've got to stop it. I know we've got to dial that rhetoric back. We've got to learn the lessons of history from the past, and I think we did that in Alabama with my cases. I've traveled all across this country over the last 15 years talking about those cases and talking about how we've moved forward. We need to make sure that we remember those, what happened and the sacrifices that were
Starting point is 00:47:58 made so that we don't continue to have sacrifices that we saw in Charlottesville with an innocent person who was there to just simply counter the white supremacists and the Nazis. Those are voices that have no place in the United States of America. How do you think Jeff Sessions is doing as attorney general? Obviously, he was a popular politician in Alabama and has been fairly controversial since Donald Trump appointed him. What are your thoughts about Sessions? Well, I think that Jeff's doing what he absolutely set out to do, and that is to kind of take a look back into the 1980s on the war on drugs and other things. I disagree with him on many, many points on how to best, our criminal justice system can best go forward.
Starting point is 00:48:46 our criminal justice system can best go forward. You know, he's had a really rough start between a relationship with him and the president, which made things very difficult, I think. But if you just look at some of the policies, I'm concerned about those policies. I don't think that it is taking us forward. I think it is taking us back to in those days when he was the United States attorney. But we've moved so far past all of those issues. I think now that if folks can look and see where we should be going, that hopefully Congress will intervene and can come up with some reasonable plans that we can both keep America safe, but not necessarily incarcerate a whole generation of Americans. So Doug, a lot of Democrats running in the Deep South take pretty conservative positions on both cultural and economic issues. You are running as a mainstream Democrat. You've been unapologetic about your positions on choice, on climate change.
Starting point is 00:49:35 What made you go this route? Well, because, you know, that's number one, it's the things that I believe in. And I think for too long, I think too many people running for office and, in fact, too many people who get in office sacrifice those kind of things that they truly believe in in order to gain a political advantage or to remain in office or to get elected. That's really not who I am. I am who I am. And I have beliefs and principles that I like to talk about. And I think that if you look at historically, those voices need to be heard in the south.
Starting point is 00:50:14 They need to be heard in the west. They need to be heard in the north and they need to be heard in the east. And people should not be afraid to stand up for the things that they believe in. But again, the problem is not standing up for what you believe in. The problem is where someone just draws a line in the sand and dare someone to cross it. And it's either my way or the highway. I'm absolutely convinced. And I think my history in my career, both in private practice as well as an assistant U.S. attorney and U.S. attorney. And going back to my days with Senator Howell Heflin in his first term in the Senate has been
Starting point is 00:50:51 one to stand for your principles and to explain those principles and not give in, but to try to find the common ground and understand that there are opposing views out there that you need to talk through to try to make things go forward. Doug, what does Alabama make of professional fascist Steve Bannon jumping into the race and making this one of his causes this cycle? I don't know. I think that that remains to be seen. Obviously, he gets a fair amount of the news. You know, the way I see this is that, candidly, I think he's just taking advantage of a situation. Steve Bannon didn't make Roy Moore. Roy Moore made Roy Moore.
Starting point is 00:51:32 And he is who he is. And that hasn't changed since Bannon got into this race and got involved. I think he sees it as an opportunity and is claiming the mantle for himself when, in fact, he really had nothing to do with Roy Moore or winning the Republican nomination that Roy Moore won. It was all about a history and a base of support that everyone knows that Roy Moore has built up. Doug, thank you so much for joining us. Good luck with the race. The election is on December 12th. To succeed Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate, we wish you all the best.
Starting point is 00:52:10 Guys, thank you so much for having me. It was a real pleasure. Hope to do it again. Take care, Doug. Mm-hmm. On the pod with us today, the host of Pod Save the People, DeRay McKesson. DeRay, how's it going? Hey, guys.
Starting point is 00:52:29 Good morning. What up, DeRay? Hey. This is on the pod. I have my first Republican. You guys have had a Republican before, haven't you? What is a Republican? We have had a few Republicans on Pod Save America.
Starting point is 00:52:43 No elected Republicans. Tommy has on Pod Save America. I've had an elected Republican. I feel very good about it. Tommy's running Meet the Press over there. Who do you have, Tommy? Congressman Adam Kinzinger, who's a congressman out of Western Illinois who served in the Air Force and is very thoughtful on military issues. So it was cool talking to him.
Starting point is 00:53:00 So who do you have, Dre? Chrissy Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey and the former administrator of the EPA. And we talk about this current administration and her worries about Trump and his pattern to the base and what's happening to the EPA around climate change. And it was fascinating because, you know, I don't often hear those views expressed from their side. And she was just very critical. I learned a lot. Now, she's a throwback Republican who actually believes in climate change, right? Yeah, she very much believes in climate change,
Starting point is 00:53:31 very much believes that this administration is putting us all at risk and that there'll be a price to pay for it. Climate change isn't like a Democrat or Republican issue. This is like everybody suffers. We also talked a little bit about what happened, what the EPA should be doing in Puerto Rico, which I hadn't thought about, and what the EPA should be doing with the fires in California,
Starting point is 00:53:53 which I also hadn't thought about. Is the EPA doing anything in Puerto Rico right now? I know that some of the water, I mean, there are obviously water issues. I saw some report that they were worried that people were going to have to drink water from Superfund sites, which are toxic sites. What is the EPA doing right now? Did you get any sense of that? I know what the EPA should be doing. I think that because
Starting point is 00:54:14 FEMA is sort of a nightmare in coordinating things that it's unclear what the agencies are doing, but she did talk about what ideally should be happening, and she made it seem like the people who are probably leading that are still there and still strong, despite the incompetence of the current administrator. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:54:31 I don't know if you guys saw, but there was this piece in the New York Times over the weekend about how, it was the New York Times report, that there was an executive from the chemical industry who is now in charge of the regulations for hazardous chemicals at the EPA. Well, that's just smart because he knows about it. He knows all the ins and outs. She. I guess they let women be polluters now. It's 2017. It's one of those scandals of lobbyists now working in the jobs they used to regulate
Starting point is 00:55:03 that I think would have been an enormous scandal in any other administration. And now it's par for the course, buried under 15 tweets attacking a Gold Star family or whatever Trump was doing over the weekend. It is a challenge to keep up with this. Did you read that story about the people who, it's like the four people who haven't been confirmed by the Senate but are working and nobody knows what to do about it? Yeah, they're just doing the job they're just pretending it never happened it's nuts
Starting point is 00:55:27 that is a deep dive into fascism oh yeah I was going to say I will say from we've worked at the White House like we had people
Starting point is 00:55:33 who couldn't get confirmed because Mitch McConnell's Senate wouldn't confirm them forever and it just had those agencies had to run without those people
Starting point is 00:55:40 the number two or number three of the agency had to be in charge they couldn't walk in the building they didn't do all those things and it really held up a or number three at the agency had to be in charge. They couldn't walk in the building. They didn't do all those things. And it really held up a lot of our
Starting point is 00:55:48 agenda because we had to wait for those people. Apparently the Trump folks think that they don't need to wait. Why do you think the base just is like letting this happen? Do you think that people just feel like, I don't know. It's not on the news. It's not on the base's news. It's not Fox and Friends and John Hannity do not cover
Starting point is 00:56:03 lower level appointments to the epa or hud you know they're covering the nfl and whatever the fuck i'm also increasingly swayed by the opinion that these people just want him to burn down washington and that anything you can sort of fit into the frame of trump is sticking it to the establishment people will generally support so it's like oh yeah he's sticking to the senate because they won't confirm his people, so they're just doing their job anyway. I think folks are going to be in favor of that. Whereas the convention was, not only were you not allowed to go into your job and work in that role until you were confirmed, you weren't even allowed to speak in the press on the record.
Starting point is 00:56:38 Right. Well, and speaking of that, the response from the EPA spokesperson to that chemical story in the New York Times was, no matter what information we give you, you're not going to print the facts. All you want is clickbaity stuff. It was the craziest response from an agency spokesperson. Those people are not supposed to be political. And this person is just attacking the New York Times in the response. That's one reason why the base doesn't actually hear this stuff. In what universe is an EPA administrator spokesperson just going off like an RNC campaign spokesperson?
Starting point is 00:57:15 Insane. I don't know what four years of this looks like. No, that is a... Well, it's a scary thought because I think every day we're always worried that trump is going to do something horrible that's big right but there's many things happening in these agencies that are just slowly chipping away at you know not just the progress that you know obama made over the last eight years but the progress we made on some of these issues in all the years before that. And a lot of people at agencies can do this stuff sort of quietly behind the scenes. And that's worrisome because it doesn't, as Lovett was just saying, it doesn't make the headlines.
Starting point is 00:57:53 You worked on the inside. You can do a lot of damage in four years, you know, like very quiet that nobody sees. And all they see are security clearances. It's like, what do you know? What did you take? You can only make so many political appointments at the agencies and that's why we have, that's why it's good that we have career civil servants who can't be replaced as easily, depending on which new administration comes in. I think
Starting point is 00:58:15 that's a good thing. But, you know, the Trump administration is certainly going to try to keep chipping away at this. On that note, good stuff. Happy Monday, everybody. Well, I think note, good stuff. Happy Monday, everybody. Well, I think it's hopeful that you talked to a Republican who, you know,
Starting point is 00:58:28 believes in climate change and wasn't afraid to go after her own party there on some of the stuff that's happening at the EPA. So that's a hopeful sign. Awesome.
Starting point is 00:58:36 Well, good to talk to you guys and I will see you soon. All right, Dre. All right, Dre, take care. See you soon, buddy. All right, that's all the time we have for today.
Starting point is 00:58:41 Thanks again to Dre McKesson and Doug Jones for joining the pod. Doug Jones! Doug Jones! Doug Jones! Maybe we'll win a seat in Alabama. That'd be very cool. Maybe.
Starting point is 00:58:48 Come on, people. Do your part. Do your part. Volunteer, donate. And also do your part in Virginia. Virginia's coming up soon. We're going to be there in a few weeks. We're going to help GOTV.
Starting point is 00:58:57 Oh my god, we leave next week. That's right. Back on tour, guys. I like it. I like the tour lifestyle. We have some great guests, too. Blade Runner 2049. Great members of the Crooked Media extended family
Starting point is 00:59:06 who are going to be with us in all these different stops. Activism. It's important to this company. I'm aspiring action. Go see Blade Runner 2049. If you want good, smart sci-fi in the world, you got to support it. Cool.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Otherwise, everything's a fucking superhero. I'm not listening to your recommendations until you watch BoJack Horseman from a higher home. Come on, man. The best show on screen. I know. It's insane that you haven't watched that i have i am also being hectic within my relationship at home about needing to watch bojack okay okay okay all right
Starting point is 00:59:33 everybody calm down i like this outro good enthusiasm last night too i'm saving those telling you john love it and larry david very close don't you i really don't like that there was something he said i mean i love larry he said last night's episode that you actually say. And I couldn't remember what it was. But Emily was laughing really hard. Oh, no. She texts me that. She texts me things that are not meant to be insulting, but often are.
Starting point is 00:59:58 Like Molly asking me the rules about Dungeons and Dragons, just assuming. I don't know. I've never played that game. All right, everyone. I think outro's over, right? Probably I don't know. I haven't played that game. Alright, everyone. I think outro's over, right? Probably. We'll see you next time, guys. Bye.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.