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So if you catch one of these viruses, you'll have milder symptoms, recover quicker and be less likely to end up in hospital. Get vaccinated. Get winter strong. Check your eligibility and book now at nhs.uk slash winter vaccinations. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Next Level. I'm JVL here with my best friend, Tim Miller, and subbing in for my other best friend, Sarah Longwell, who is on assignment, is Sam Stein of The Bulwark.
More than just an acquaintance at this point. More than just an acquaintance. I mean, we've lived through an election together. So my bosom friend, Sam Stein. Oh, wow. So it's been a week. I just love living in American meritocracy. Can I just say that? Meritocracy is the best. No more DEI. Nobody getting jobs based on their skin color or their sexual orientation.
It's just about whether or not you have a show on Fox. Every job in America right now is given to somebody based solely on the work they put in, their work product, the results that they showed. in those jobs how many big dick toilets they sold you know how many ring boys were molested like it's just boom meritocracy only
And I love that now, and I'm glad Elon Musk is in there to ensure that the meritocracy is happening. I love meritocracy. Look, we should just get into the show, but I do want to say that was one of the tenets of...
Old guard conservatism that I was always very... uncomfortable with like the i think it's the buckley line like i'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the boston phone book than the however fact and i always thought to myself are you fucking kidding me have you met anyone have you ever been to has bill buckley ever been to the dmv like you know like did bill buckley sit at the dmv looking around to his left and to his right and think to himself yeah
I'd like these people to have authority over me. I mean, I understand that he met people from the Harvard faculty lounge all the time and detested them. But again, I don't get the sense he spent a lot of time at the DMV. Did he drop that line before?
He met his brother-in-law's son l brent bozel maybe oh god oh god you know maybe that was it anyway i would like to start out today with rfk because i think that it is i think rfk is the most politically relevant in the sense of a person within the cabinet who has the potential to
actually shape electoral politics. And maybe I'm wrong, right? I don't think he'll be relevant in the... I don't think he'll be especially relevant in the sense of, like... lasting harms he can do to the governing structure of America in the way that Matt Gaetz could be or Pete Hegseth could be. But I think, you know, like RFK is going to move a lot of people who have been soft Ds.
and turn them into republicans there's so many places to go on that why don't you just sounds like you have a little riff why don't you do that and then me and sam can react to it No, I mean, I want to open this to discussion. As you mentioned yesterday on your show, Tim, RFK is incredibly popular and people like him in the...
The world is full of cranks. And I think one of the category errors we've made over the last 10 years was thinking that cranks made up like 10 or 15 percent of the country. And that's not right. It's like they make up like 35. percent of the country maybe more no but i'm not kidding though
No, I'm not either. I thought you were going to say 60. That was the mental number I had in my head. It's clearly 50, at least. And if he starts bringing them all... on which is what this is the anti-vax stuff right the anti-vax just 10 years ago was really split between left and right you had like the people who were militia members living on compounds in nebraska with ar-15s who were Right. Right.
polarized as a partisan matter, and that that is something that's meaningful. Yeah. Well, there's a lot to chew on here. Let me just point out that you're absolutely right about the history here. And I remember it being in newsrooms like five, 10 years ago, and we'd have these editorial discussions about whether to even write about the anti-vax movement.
And the reason we had those discussions is that, one, they were fringe, but two is you didn't want to, you thought it might be irresponsible editorially to elevate these people. Because if you treated them as a either or. then it would give credence to their beliefs, which were so empirically wrong and harmful. We're so far past that. I think that was a totally sensible.
policy yeah no and we had and you know i remember being you know i think it was like kevin stitt or something like that in oklahoma was saying some stuff about vaccines and you know we were just sort of like do we cover this like how do we cover this and you know i think we did cover it um but like it was
a legitimate debate and now of course you can't it's impossible not to cover and it'd be foolish to try not to cover it um i think to a degree i agree with what you're saying that um there's plenty of people out there crunchy lefty types uh who have not felt comfortable in the democratic party at all uh but have been there because it is closer to liberal values who will drift with him and who believe that trump is sort of a heterodox to begin with and that he's
He positioned himself as the anti-war candidate and the horseshoes connecting. So I do think there's a realignment that's happening, not one that will happen. Where I disagree with you is that I think... It doesn't take much to imagine a real world event really exposing this. Can we actually, let's pause on that because let's do the politics of it first and then we'll get to the real world potential damage of RFK because I think the politics is the most interesting and I've been...
I've been chewing on this for about 48 hours now. As you mentioned, at the end of the podcast, I did a riff on this that was not like, again, not in defense of RFK, but from just a purely political standpoint, a question of how the Democrats have been...
made a mistake in like this realignment between trust and distrust crank and what's the opposite of crank crank normie yeah crank and normie crank and elite crank and know-it-all about maybe crank and know-it-all like if you move if you realign into a place where all of the cranks are in one party And all of the...
All of our bettors, you know, all of the book readers, you know, who trust the experts, all of the Tom Nichols. We'll call them the Tom Nichols category. The Tom Nicholses who love the elites are in one party and the cranks are in the other. That is a losing trade.
a losing trade for Democrats. And to me, like for all of this, like post-mortem discussion and, you know, this is next levels where we kind of test out ideas of like, oh, we need to talk about the economy differently or we need to do this or we need to go on.
That trade like might be the thing that is actually the most significant because I'm sorry to some of our progressive listeners I've seen it in the comments don't like this. But like there were a lot of cranks in the Barack Obama Democratic coalition.
a lot. There was this particular brand of the kind of... health influencer health uh in quotation marks you know that like you know is into like strange ingredients in their foods and doesn't want as obsessed about gmos and like is very hippie-ish lefty
doesn't want vaccines and it doesn't want anything in their body that's not natural except for steroids and like that group was like most like there are a lot of lefties in that group it wasn't all lefties but there were a lot of lefties in that kind of space i mean the first anti-vaccine like little outbreaks that happened were in my old area, the Bay Area, right? It was not the conservatives in the Bay Area, right? So those used to be lefties.
a lot of and and working class people you know like who are the types of people that are like reading tabloids and like really into it you know it's not all again i'm not i'm not trying to make a judgment here about like college education versus non-college but again There's preponderance of them or working class voters that are into conspiracy theories. Who's into, oh, I don't know, the aliens and the UFOs? Sure, there's some college-educated people that are into all that, but it's...
I need to push back a little bit here. Because in the Obama era, the conspiracists were actually not... totally on the left like you had people of course not totally you i mean the whole glenn beck glenn beck took off in the obama era because he was drawing conspiracies on his whiteboard secondly is i don't think that there's that many people relative to the populace
who are purely anti-vax. I think there are people who couch it by saying they're anti-vax mandate, but I think when it comes down to, if you look at the polling data, people believe in vaccines. And thirdly, I would just make the case- For now. Yeah, that's true. I know it's true, though. And then thirdly, I would just make the case that the one complicating feature here is that I'm not sure that the current Republican Party is the home for them.
I mean, I've noticed that the people... Just look at the senators and the figures who responded to RFK. Yes, obviously Trump is a big fan and his people are a big fan. But like... The people who have spoken up in favor of his health stuff, just like the food stuff, are Jared Polis and Cory Booker. Cory Booker didn't mention him, right? But he basically agrees with that stuff. The people who have been skeptical of it are in the pockets of...
big big ag right like it's it's chuck grass he's like hey you got to come in here i tell you all about how great corn is and i just think there's a you know he's going to run into some obstacles as he pushes stuff because i don't think the republican party is fundamentally yet
A place where he has a home. I just wanted to. Trump is. Trump is. I think the party's going. Okay, so we'll get to where the party's going next. But on the Obama thing, just it was an important clarification. I was not saying that.
All of the conspiracy theorists were in the Obama coalition. I'm just saying like Obama had a big chunk of them. They were distributed more evenly, right? And some of this stuff isn't even conspiracy. When I say conspiracy, I'm lumping in conspiracy and lack of trust in institutions together.
People that are like, I don't know about big pharma. What are they putting in our system? I don't know about big ag. What are we putting in our system? All those people, like a lot of lefties, a lot of those people were lefties, right? In the past. And if the Democrats are now going to be the place.
of like we have we have to trust you know that the all of the institutions work and we have to trust the big core for the big corporations like like that is a loser like that like that that's gonna appeal to me i'm in that group right
I agree with that, yeah. Me and Tom Nichols, and I had Dan Goldman on the pod today. Like, there's a handful of establishment lives in us, and all of us could, like, have a meeting, you know, at the GW basketball gym and, like, not win any elections, right? So, like, you've got to have... some at least a welcoming to a flare of contrarian thinking in your coalition or else it's hard to get to a majority well i i mean i i want to the the decrease of trust
is so widespread and across the board. I think we need to narrow it and really... For the purpose of this conversation, we should probably focus on the vaccine stuff, because one of the things that I find interesting is that as the Republican Party has become a very natural home for vaccine skeptics. And people who are not skeptical but are just anti-vaccine, don't want vaccines of any sort, like MMR vaccines, they don't want. And I should say almost all of this is recent.
Right. There are people who's 10 years ago, 15 years ago, their kids got the hep A vaccine. They got the MMR vaccine. They got the chickenpox vaccine and was only with covid. That they then suddenly became anti-vaxxers. These are not like deeply held beliefs. It's all just political fadism. But what's interesting to me is that we are not seeing...
The opposite happening. So we do not see the influx in anti-vaxxers into the Republican coalition making normie Republicans go, I got to get out of here. And that is because of something we learned during the pandemic about America, which is that people don't actually care about life and they don't really care about saving lives. They only care about what they've got. And so if you like vaccines and you're a Republican, well, shit, your kids aren't going to get polio.
So what the hell do you care if, you know, if the Jim Bob next to you's kids get polio? Well, that's up to Jim Bob, right? The Hobbesian Republican elite. It is, but that is... from a coalition building standpoint is a huge advantage and i think it's something democrats should emulate that's what i think democrats should emulate that they should stop caring so much about what happens to people who don't vote for them
Yeah. Could I do the more positive version of that? Sure. They should not care so much if there are people that might vote for them that have views that are very bad. like this was really my main point about the polis thing it's like like polis endorsing him for for hhs was wrong and people should criticize him for that but then going to like you're an idiot you're a moron get rid of him is he a secret maga is he on the other side now like
All of that shit, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, you need the beef tallow, people. Kamala could have used a few more voters who believe that McDonald's should be beef tallow and that might not have been so keen on the vaccine. She might not have lost Michigan.
she had a few more vaccine skeptics in the tent. And so it's not like you don't need to put them in charge of HHS, but maybe have a more open-minded approach to that. So long as they're not stopping your kids from getting vaccinated. Right. I mean, you know, like reality imposes consequences for you. Right. But that's not real science, right? Like if you have if you have like an outbreak of measles.
before your kid can get vaccinated, like you're susceptible to it. And that's a problem, right? Sure. There will be collateral damage. Yes. And it could be your kid. This show is sponsored by Lumen, the world's first handheld metabolic coach. Lumen is a device that measures your metabolism.
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sponsoring this episode i'm kind of curious jv like so the biden idea was like uh on infrastructure spending for instance they were going to build all these projects set up all these factories in red areas rural america how'd that turn out and you know Should they have just not done it? Yeah. Yeah, they should just have not done that. I mean, I think it's just been proven that Biden had a theory of how American politics works and his theory was disproved. We tested it.
Yeah. See, I wonder how much of this is that. And my current thinking is that so much of our politics is just backlash to events, big events. So like everything that's defined this. transition period for Trump to me is distilled into two buckets. One is backlash to COVID and whatever health protocols were put in place around that. And you can see that in the appointment of RFK and others. And two is backlash to Me Too.
And you see that across the board. I mean, it is evident that people just got, at least on the right, just got completely fed up with the Me Too movement and with COVID protocols. And they... are having at it. And they're saying, fuck this. We're going to push back in the exact opposite directions. We're going to go with anti-vaxxers. We're going to go with people who have been credibly accused of sexual assault. And that's that.
I think two thoughts on that. One on the, should Biden have done the factory building? I mean, this probably doesn't really matter on the margins, but it's worth at least thinking about. One of the big crises for the Democrats we're going to be talking about over the coming years is their poor governance.
To be honest, in New York and California and Illinois is causing those places to lose Congress people in electoral votes. And come 2030, it's going to be actually the map gets worse for Democrats. And so might not have been a terrible idea for Joe Biden to actually be like, you know.
no, these factories are going to go into Illinois and California and New York, and we're going to try to revitalize the economies in blue states a little bit. That would have been a totally reasonable thing to do and maybe would have had some positive impacts.
Because he certainly didn't get anything out of building the factories here in Louisiana or in Ohio. Or Lawrence Town, Ohio. Yeah. The big Lawrence Town, Ohio factory. I looked this up because they literally had a factory promised to them by Trump. He told them. Not to move. The factory never came. Biden goes and puts an EV factory, 2,000 plus jobs. County votes 5740 for Trump.
Yeah, and obviously you've got the Haitians that took some of those jobs and the whole thing around it. So that's that. As far as the Me Too backlash, though, I mean, it's literally a Me Too cabinet.
Yeah. The cabinet is a Me Too cabinet. And they add Linda McMahon, which is the most recent one since we've last discussed. And like, I literally, she's in the middle of a lawsuit right now about the... boys that set up the ring who were sexually assaulted by um some of the gays that were working for vince mcmahon and um and and that they covered it up and didn't do anything and vince is under and her ex-husband husband are they still together um
at least live apart, is under multiple federal investigations for all of this for sex trafficking and sexual assault. But it's like she isn't directly under investigation, but it's like it was her company and her husband. And so it's like even the women that are.
being appointed to the cabinet have Me Too related issues. What killed me about this is it's not just even that. They take it a step further. Like Megyn Kelly... today i think said something akin to like it's the fact that people are mad at matt gates for these sexual assault allegations
that has driven her to support Matt Gaetz. It's almost like a badge of honor to be accused of sexual assault. Yeah, you're going to call me a Nazi? Well, by God, then I'm just going to... decide to be a nazi and so it's like signaling we've written about this it's like instead it's like i'm so annoyed about your virtue signaling that i'm gonna vice signal like being bad is good actually so this is what
What concerns me here is that these are the sorts of things that happen when a society is irrevocably broken. Why is that concerning? The way democratic societies work, right? is that the feedback mechanisms and the incentives are aligned to produce, in the long run, net-net good. Right. Not not all the time. Democratic government has tons of failings, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. One step forward, two steps back. Yada, yada, yada.
But we're at a point where people's electoral behavior is so untethered from reality, so untethered from economic reality, from any, we had, who is the guy? This was posted by Radley Balco. yesterday in his home county they just voted overwhelmingly for this this dude who had been uh arrested for sexual assault and everybody knew that it was maybe not sexual assault arrested for assault I don't know if you can find it Matt or it was it was it was assault yes assault sexual assault case yeah
And now it's come out that it was actually against his own daughter. But he won overwhelmingly. And everybody knew. And they didn't care. They knew about the sexual assault case after the election. It came out that it was against his daughter. And he's elected to the local county council. It's like, what?
What is going to happen here? But this stuff is all it's all broken. And except that we do have one party kind of behaving according to norms. Right. We had a bunch of Democratic voters who didn't show up because like inflation was bad. and so when you wind up with that i don't think that's true actually okay well maybe it won't be when we get all the validated voter surveys and we won't you know but it's it's problematic for any potential solution that gets proposed.
I think they all basically rely on the idea that the feedback mechanisms and the incentive structures still work. And I don't know that that's true. And this is my optimism. And this is why JBL, you and me get in trouble when we bring this up. Really, I think that the cleanest path out is this administration failing and like them just bungling everything in this total clown reality. Who disagrees with that?
Several people. Dan Goldman, I just asked today, and he's like, he thinks that the Democrats need to work with Republicans to deliver results for people. And I'm like, I don't think you do, actually. I said that to him on the podcast. I don't think you do. Those are not mutually exclusive. Like, fine. Get some money for your district. I don't give a shit. But like, obviously, the only way that Democrats come out of this is because Trump will.
bungle something or there will be an infectious disease outbreak or something very problematic happens in the first couple days with these mass deportations i mean That's the obvious answer here. Yeah, that is the issue with your feedback loop, JBL. It's like positive feedback loops that don't seem to be working, but negative ones do.
or half like like repelling some people yeah and this like that's at least the theory of the case that people upset about inflation at the margins at the margins because this is a key thing we'll see on the verified votes yeah we'll see on the verified votes but just really quick one point on this because If you're going to now analyze this, there's so much bad analysis out there. You at least have to recognize the fact, which is Kamala Harris got more votes than Joe Biden in six of the seven.
uh states uh the battleground states where the campaign was waged and more votes than the democratic senate candidate the beat the beat the Republican, and three of the four, only Gallego in Arizona got more votes than her. So it wasn't people not showing up. It was some percentage of people... from some combination of not liking trans people or being annoyed by inflation or just like really loving gold shoes or whatever it is like was like no no no no other side
I'm going back to Trump. That's my point. It's like every cycle now is backlash politics. I mean, Trump is a backlash to Obama. Biden's a backlash to Trump. Trump's a backlash to Biden. It's like, and we're going to keep going. And it's like, obviously, it's accelerated by.
the pandemic and what it did to us as a society and how that affected inflation and it's of course a response to me too uh because you see it in these selections but you know i think if you were a betting person the obvious next two, four years is that there will be a backlash to Trump.
because of what he ends up doing in office and frankly like if you look at these margins in the house and in the senate it was it was a fairly close election it's not like this was yes trump won all this all the battleground states but it's not like This is still a 49-51 country. I do have one annoying point on this. This is a little bit of liberal cope, which is like it was a very close election and people keep saying that. It was, it was, it was, it was. But it was like...
When people are like, why are people... I forget, was it Nate Silver that was like, Heather Cox Richardson was writing about how it was a surprise that Trump won. He's like, why should you have been surprised if you just looked at the data? And I was like, you should have been surprised because Donald Trump...
Trump was indicted by four times and tried an insurrection and is the stupidest person in the country and was a reality TV show. It was totally unqualified and it's absurd that he was the nominee at all. And like it would have been absurd for Kamala to win by one point. So like there's that element to it. I get that.
think is why it like leads to some of the jvl nihilism all right so can we talk a little bit let's move off the politics of the rfk thing into the real world things because this is the one cabinet appointment that i'm not worried about at all and in fact that I welcome and I hope he does all the stuff he wants because the truth is you know
Did you read the free press thing or whatever it was about, oh, compare them to Europe? Yeah, that's right. Oh, my God. I've not read it. I'm not a daily free press reader. Could one of you guys characterize it for me? It is. If we ignore all the insane things he says and we find five other things he said that are basically normal.
then we can just say that he's normal. This is the entire free press hermeneutic. Andrew Eggers is writing about this for tomorrow. Spoiler. That what they do, Barry Weiss's entire shtick is... She finds somebody who is an expert or elite at something and finds one error and then uses that to utterly disqualify them from everything. And then she finds somebody who is a crank and finds one normie thing they've said.
And holds that up and says, see, why are you listening to the elites telling you that this person is a crank? Here is this perfectly normal opinion they have. So in this piece, it's like, well, Germany doesn't have fluoride in its water, ergo. Bobby Kennedy's good. We can live with this. And it's like, no, that's not really how it works. How are the teeth in Bavaria? I've not spent a lot of time there. But this is my point. You know what?
Like if it's deeply important to MAGA to get fluoride out of water. Well, blue state governors can spend money to make sure that they can get fluoride treatments into the hands of parents. To make sure that their kids are mouthwashing with a fluoride mouthwash every night and stuff. Like these things are not foundational and they can all be reversed and they can be reversed very, very easily by the next administration. So these are superficial wounds.
Not stopping drug and infectious disease research for four years. I mean, yeah, sure, it could be reversed, but that sucks. That's a semi-permanent loss. Sure, you lose four years, but you lose four years of it. And sure, he can... Utterly destroyed the bureaucracy inside HHS, which would then have all sorts of downstream consequences. I mean, when you lose the institutional knowledge, admit it.
But again, none of those are structural problems for America. Those are all superficial problems for America. And they are problems for which most people can craft their own remedies. I disagree. Not everybody, right? If you're immunocompromised, then you rely on herd immunity.
You know, if you if you are one of the, you know, the small number of kids who can't get vaccinated for whatever, then you rely on herd immunity. And so for those people, they're getting the short end of the stick and it's terrible. And I'm sorry.
Well, let's just take the two examples that we just talked about, fluoride and infectious disease research. So on fluoride, if the solution is that blue state governors, first of all, I think blue state governors could probably... control their own water supplies so maybe that is fine but if the solution ends up being that they have to like individual parents have to make sure they have the right fluoride level in their own taps
That creates the exact problem that RFK was trying to avoid here, which is you're going to end up going above the acceptable level of fluoride in your water stream and you're going to end up worsening the situation. So it's idiotic to begin with.
On the infectious disease research, that is to me an institutional problem because what happens is if you cut off the spigot of infectious disease research at NIH for four years, but let's say they do it for eight because he said in his video, let's just pause it for eight years. It's not that we figure out what the hell is going on. Yeah, exactly. We got to stop this shit. But it's not just that you.
I mean, you're not going to actually lose in those eight years a breakthrough because breakthroughs take five, 10, 15, 20 years of research. What you will lose is you will lose the breakthrough 10 to 20 years from now. But more importantly than that. Anyone who's in the infectious disease research community has to go look for grant money somewhere. And they will go look at Canada, Korea, China, some of the European countries, and they will find people being like, ooh.
We can actually get a foothold in this industry. We'll develop the infectious disease breakthroughs in our country. We will then reap the benefits of that. And then suddenly they're incubators for the next round. And folks. We are not going to get less infectious diseases. We are going to get more coronaviruses. We're going to get more...
episodes of bird flu and H5N1, you are going to see this stuff worse and worse and worse because climate change is going to worsen it. And you want to be at the front lines of that. And to have someone just say, no, we're cutting it off is so idiotic. that it baffles the mind, and I do think that qualifies as an institutional damage. Yeah, but not the kind of damage that prevents... No, no, I see what you're saying, and I agree, but...
Not to the institution of democracy. Right. Having the Joint Chiefs of Staff be packed with guys who are going to be OK with the Insurrection Act. That makes like the transfer of power more fraught. Yes. Having an attorney general who's going to use the the Justice Department to. try to hobble any political opposition to Trump, that makes it harder to have elections. And so the institutions of democracy are not really threatened.
by HHS. And there will be terrible outcomes for people whose health circumstances are bad. And who are protected by the rest of the country behaving responsibly. But you know what? We don't live in a country with responsible citizens. We just don't. And...
Maybe we'll get some good out of it. Maybe we'll get some good out of it. We can just restructure the FDA, you know, kind of break through some of the things that are... uh you know uh sort of limiting uh innovation in that space you know kind of get us off of get us off of seed oils something like we get there could be some positive
But that's a difficulty. Yes, exactly. But this is the difficulty, right? Like the correct approach would be like more incremental change in progress at these agencies. But we've been reduced to this kind of like bifurcated either like. defend the agencies as is or throw them all out and it's like no there's this is actually a good this is actually a good point and the debt and and a lot of what i'm doing here is sarcasm
But the Democrats and Polis didn't really hit it right by endorsing him. But I guess my broader point about the whole Polis thing is like the Democrats could sure use some more prominent messengers that instead of their first instinct being like, defend the bureaucracy.
Democrats, defend the FDA, defend the ag companies. Like, that's like, you know, RFK is a freaking crank and a weirdo who is a brain worm and who exhumed his dead wife and put her in a different plot of land that she shouldn't have been in. And like, we shouldn't really try. Trust this person. He has no expertise. He has no skills. But you know what?
The FDA is kind of fucked, and big pharma and big ag do have problems, and we need to go fix that, and I'm a reformer who's going to take it on, and whatever. There could be more of that, and there is a natural instinct among Democrats. be like no defend the norms defend the system and like that is a loser
Yeah. Yeah. That's what Trump has done. Trump effectively has done that politically is that he forces you to defend these things. Yeah. Right. There is a thing that Democrats are not great at where they want. They want Democratic politicians in different environments to behave like the median Democratic politician. And that's a bad recipe. You need John Testers. You need Tim Ryan's. If Jared Polis has to do this to thrive in Colorado.
I mean, let's just pretend he's being totally mercenary. He doesn't believe any of this shit. I think he does believe it, but whatever. If this is what he needs to do to thrive politically... in colorado well okay that's good and democrats nationally ought to give their their elected officials a whole lot of leeway to do what they need to do to win because otherwise
I am sorry, but you're never going to get a Senate majority if you can't get a John Tester in the world. Right. I mean, how is that ever going to happen? Right. And so they need to be recruiting Democrats who don't look like. Normal Democrats and are going to have different positions than normal Democrats.
if they want to win in places that you need to be able to win if you are going to need some no fluoride in the water democrats john tester did not look like a normal democrat he had two fingers on one hand and and he definitely didn't take normie i mean it's much more especially in the last year much more you know centrist and even republican leaning and it got clocked
So Democrats are kind of fucked. They've got the Great Plain States. They're just fucked. It's like a huge swath of the nation. They're never going to have a Senate seat. Putting forth anti-fluoride candidates. It's just an idea. We're just throwing that out there. We'll see. Our next sponsor for today is Soul. What kind of night is it? A single? A double? A triple?
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for 35 off well i was going to move on to nancy mace oh great meritocracy hell yeah we don't we don't have to no let's do nancy mace we have some news about nancy mace have you seen this since we've been on i uh nancy mace made it happen nancy mace she's the woman It stands up for women, and as a result...
Speaker Johnson plans to ban trans women from the Capitol bathrooms. That will apply to bathrooms in office building, changing, and locker rooms. Per House Rules, Speaker has general control over the facility. these. So Sarah McBride, I don't know, is going to have to use a port-a-potty or something.
Or go in the boys' bathroom. I don't know. Maybe that's what Sarah probably should start doing. Get dressing up all girly and get up in the boys' bathroom and just kind of like stand right over the shoulder. of like some of the male politicians. Like, I don't know, like, well, who's in there these days? Like Lindsey Graham. Yeah, like right while Lindsey Graham's peeing, like while Lindsey Graham's peeing at the urinal, she should just stand right next to him. Stand and look over there.
back i'm sorry you wanted me in the men's bathroom i don't is is is behavior in the bathroom important or is it how you present because apparently it's not behavior because marjorie taylor green threatened to assault somebody in a bathroom and she still gets going to lemon's bathroom and so i thought sarah mcbride i'd think about going in there and just kind of mixing it up hey rick scott take a look at what you got going down there at the at the stall so is that wrong
Is that a wrong idea? It's wrong in my head. Sarah McBride's conduct over the course of this week has been unbelievably graceful. Her statement on this, every day Americans go to work with people who have life journeys different from their own and engage with them respectfully. I hope members of Congress can muster that same kindness. I mean, that's really, that's refreshing. It's nice to see. And I have long felt that like that is the way for trans rights to succeed in the long run. Not like...
militant confrontations. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm like an MLK. Maybe I'm a Professor X, not a Magneto guy on this. Yeah, you like that, Tim? Yeah. Oh, come on. X-Men. Let's go. But she's done good work, and I find the whole thing grotesque. Oh, yes. Nancy Mace.
who has on her website a piece talking about her deep respect for LGBTQ people and the need to balance dignity with freedoms and all like there there are there you can see a universe in which nancy mace could have engineered the exact same conflict over this one member of Congress's use of a bathroom in a way that would have been respectful.
and in good faith and maybe she would have been right and maybe she would have been wrong but none of this was that i mean she's like i'm going to drink your liberal tears with my pinot and it's just cruelty it's performative cruelty and bullying and uh spoiler she wins yeah right i mean we'll always win
Let me read the exact quote from Nancy Mesa's website. It's 2021, so not too long ago. I have friends and family that identify as LGBTQ. Understanding how they feel and how they've been treated is important.
Having been around gay, lesbian, and transgender people has informed my opinion over my lifetime. It clearly hasn't. To that end, if you were at a workplace... that wasn't congress and you had a colleague who was transgendered and you were uncomfortable with that person being in your bathroom you would do something like go to the boss quietly or even go to the person quietly and say hey
can we work something out? I'm not comfortable with this. Like, this just actually makes me uncomfortable. Like, I don't want to be offensive about it. And I know this is an awkward conversation, but like, let's find a workaround. Like that would be the human thing to do. But Nancy Mace, Nancy Mace is a political weatherman. And Nancy Mace saw that in 2024, Republicans spent tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads.
and did so successfully and she wants to stay in republican politics and what she did is she picked on uh the most vulnerable member of congress a freshman member who is the first transgender member of the house And she decided that she was going to absolutely scapegoat and bully this person in a despicable, hurtful way.
And I feel horrible about it. You watch it and Sarah McBride is just enduring. I mean, just go on any Twitter thread with Nancy Mason. Look at the comments. It's about as low as you can get. It's horrible, nasty, gross stuff. Just inhumane stuff. And it makes me feel like almost empty inside reading it. And I feel so bad for Sarah McBride, who has to endure this.
And who frankly has to mostly endure it alone because every Democrat now is too scared to stand up and say, no, this is wrong. Like the only Democrat who has stood up recently and said, no, this is wrong is John Fetterman, who's been like, to pick on trans kids makes you an asshole. And I know that everyone's scared about sticking up for trans people at this point, but like...
has some dignity, right? Like, what the fuck is going on? I don't think Democrats should be and should be scared. I think sometimes there's a misunderstanding. There's a lot more nuance in all these conversations than people want to have, right? Where if you say on a podcast, I don't know, maybe Democrats should back off the trans issue. That means you should never talk about trans people at all. It's just like, no. Maybe some of the things from 2019 where we're sending out questionnaires.
And you're asking Democrats to sign on to these obscure, you know, kind of like commitments to let undocumented immigrants, you know, have sex changes at the U.S. taxpayer dime. Federal prisoners, but yes. Sure, whatever. Maybe not do that. Maybe you don't need to have an opinion on such a topic. And we've seen the downside of that. But that doesn't mean that you can't stand up for Sarah McBride in this situation. And I think, frankly...
The big middle of the country, the big majority of the country is probably against taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners and probably wants Sarah McBride, as long as she is not creating any problems, to be able to go and... to the bathroom of her choosing. I think that that is probably a 60% issue in the country, and I don't know that Democrats need to tuck their tail.
I think so, yeah. There was huge backlash to all the trans bathroom bills. It's so crazy. Pat McCrory in North Carolina lost.
Like the conventional wisdom was the opposite six years ago in this issue, right? Where Pat McCrory lost because the trans bathroom bill in North Carolina, I forget it led to like the final four, not coming there or something. I forget what it was. Some, a big event. And so it was like, you know, there was a. blowback in the business community and people are like you're being an asshole and like you know so i just i i don't and there is a unfortunately large element
That is all inside the Republican Party that like wants that like being mean and cruel to trans people as a pro. So there's I don't want to understate the problem here. Like you certainly Nancy Mace is certainly a political winner within. GOP primary sense or from a tension economy within the conservative media sense. It's certainly a political winner. But... I don't think that $100 million... Let's just put it this way. If in 2028...
Whoever, J.D. Vance, Donald Trump Jr., with Donald Trump as his vice president, run $100 million worth of ads targeting Democratic nominee John Fetterman about how he wanted Sarah McCarthy. bride to use the to be able to use the women's bathroom at the hill i don't think that has the same salience that's all i'm saying and it's also the right thing to do maybe yeah it's like
First of all, yes, I totally agree. Secondly, to understand how far out there it is, Nancy Mace was actually criticized online. for whatever, 130 tweets she put up about this, because she didn't refer to Sarah McBride as a he. People were mad at her because she wasn't anti-trans enough. So there is that thread, which is nuts.
But there's nothing stopping Hakeem Jeffries from being like, look, we'll sort out this bathroom stuff and we'll make sure everyone feels accommodated. But in the meantime, stop being fucking assholes. Like she's your colleague. stop being pricks about it yeah like that seems to me like a decent and fundamentally right thing to do and i don't see how even if there were fuck political downside of that like just be human like just be human concur it is
There is no explanation for it other than cruelty. Yeah. She wants to be on the right side of Republican politics. But because the cruelty is a political winner. And that's that's deeply depressing. All right. Last last two, since we're doing Sebastian, this show should be called All the President's Men. Matt Whitaker taking over NATO and and then Linda McMahon.
You know, it's funny. I just did a show about Linda McMahon yesterday because I'm watching the Netflix Mr. McMahon docuseries. Yeah. And it was the episode that dealt with the Trish Stratus storyline in which... I don't know if you guys remember this, but in the storyline, the young diva wrestler, very attractive woman... Trish Stratus had come into the WWE and Vince McMahon was having an affair with her sort of out in the open and part of the storyline that was on television
was that Vince and Trish were drugging Linda McMahon into catatonia. And so she was wheeled around in a wheelchair as a prop and would just sort of sit there staring off into the distance. And this would happen. on Monday Night Raw every night. Like acting? Or is this real?
i don't really understand kayfabe it's all it's kayfabe i just want to make sure i don't really follow but uh you know so this woman who uh who used to sit in a wheelchair on a in a wrestling ring pretending to be drugged into catatonia while her husband stood over a young buxom half naked girl and demanded that she get on all fours and bark like a dog to please him. The woman in the wheelchair who was watching all that is going to be the secretary of education. Secretary of education.
I can't educate. I thought they were eliminating the department of education. I'm a libertarian. I always feel so uncomfortable in all these situations. I like raw. If you want to do fake. I do too. If you want to do sort of this like kind of weird lascivious cuckolding. kind of show for people okay but like not so okay if you want to turn the blind eye when young men are being raped um by your company that's not okay the sex trafficking of the women also not okay uh but like
The Secretary of Education? Like, do we have no standards? Is there no standard of the person in charge of the schools? Like, shouldn't the person in charge of the schools... There's nothing you can do that is disqualifying anymore. Except be nice to trans people. That's disqualifying. Like, what is her question? She's also 76.
We had the whole Joe Biden's too old thing. We have a 78-year-old president, a 76-year-old secretary of education who has no relevant subject matter expertise, who has massive scandals. hanging around Republican politics now for two decades. Longer, really. But, you know, she had her failed Senate run.
In Connecticut and was a donor to Trump and was, you know, she had, I forget what her job was in Trump 1.0. Commerce. It's an absurd thing. It's just like if you had idiocracy, if you went back to idiocracy and Hector Mountain Dew's... Macho's cabinet was like the head of the wrestling department, the quack doctor on TV, like the weirdest person in Congress, the morning talk show host.
And it's preposterous. So what is a big dick toilet? If Don't Look Up had done this, like if Don't Look Up, which was widely mocked by conservatives as being like, oh, this is liberal fantasy nonsense. Like, if this had been The Cabinet and Don't Look Up, you know, like, who's the movie reviewer at the National Review? Kyle, whatever his name is, would be like, this is ridiculous. The Hollywood left doesn't understand the right. National View. Who isn't?
Ross. I believe it's Ross Douthat. Ross. Yeah. Or Ross. It's ridiculous. So anyway, the Matt Whitaker thing, though. Can we talk about Matt Whitaker for a second? Yeah. So Matt Whitaker, an old friend of Tim's, is now the ambassador to NATO, which I... believe is a position that comes with both a driver and a personal chef. Not bad. All you have to do is live in Brussels. Before I talk about my relationship with Matt, I would like Sam, because in the green room, Sam made a joke.
About the big dick toilets, which neither Sebastian nor JVL were familiar with. And so I'd like Sandra Gale, JVL in the audience with the big dick toilet story. What is a big dick toilet? You're about to find out. It's something that many of us rely upon, but that's okay. Yeah, yours is in the mail, JV. So basically when he was appointed acting attorney general, I believe, I forget the year. It surfaced that he had once been on this advisory board for a company called World Patent Marketing.
Basically, they had designed a toilet to, quote, help well-endowed men go to the bathroom without their genitalia making contact with the porcelain. So Matt... or splashing in the water or splashing in the water which is like uh you know a thing not a problem for mike johnson so so this was always so he was always the big dick uh attorney general and now
The big dick ambassador to NATO. Did Arnold Palmer have one of those toys? Yeah, they call it the Arnold Palmer special. No, this is where we're at. You're missing an important element of the story. I want to pull this up. There's an important element here? I mean, I believe so, which is that the FTC ended up suing World Patent Marketing, and it was all a scam. Like, the big toy wasn't even really a thing. It was like a scam.
People didn't get what they had ordered, and they ended up having to pay $26 million, I think. That number is somewhere in my brain memory. I don't know if that's right. In fines. So he had a fake big dick toilet company. I got to read you the quote from the marketing company. The average, quote, the average male genitalia is between five inches and six inches. The invention marketing company said, quote, however, this invention is designed for those of us who measure longer than.
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One skin. I was going to say, like, well, it's a good thing he's at NATO and not at DOJ. But honestly, would he be worse than Gates? No, but would he be worse than Gates at DOJ? I don't know. Potentially. He's dumber. He's way dumber than Gates. So is that better or worse? I don't know. It kind of depends about how well you think. The point here is that Gates is an operative and a good political tactician. And Whitaker is just sort of a... Yeah, I guess...
My point is Gates might be more targeted at going after foes in a way that's kind of clever and may workable, and so that's a problem. But Whitaker might have been like, Mr. Trump wants me to sue Liz Cheney? Okay. There might have been more of that happening.
Whitaker Whitaker is a moron I just I cannot overstate this like he was a he was a Iowa football player who ran for office in Iowa based on his football lore promise uh yeah um and then like he had he was a total incompetent in his private sector career we mentioned the world patent marketing there were a ton of like dumb
you know, companies that didn't like really work that he was part of. And some of them were scammy companies that were investigated that he made money off of. And then I encountered him when he was named the head of a, like one of these astroturf.
groups in dc that's like job was to investigate democrats basically it was like a what is it crew you know the crew which is like a liberal group it was like it's supposed to be the counter the counter to crew but like more hackneyed and stupider you know um targeting democrats with stuff i encountered him there and that and he took a
salary from that i think that's how he made money during that period and then trump like makes him acting attorney general after sessions quits like just because he's so compliant and like he's looking for the person who will be the most pliant to donald trump's whims about the russia investigation and it's unclear what he's been doing the last few years but like I don't literally this man has in the press I did some googling in the press release there's no mention of foreign policy experience
I don't see any evidence that he's had a job related to foreign policy. I don't see any evidence. I wouldn't be surprised if his passports only stamp is Cancun. I don't know that he's actually even gone anywhere. There's no reason to blame. Can he name the NATO member states? No way. There's no way he can name the NATO member states. I refuse to believe that he could, or maybe they've briefed him now and he's been able to memorize them, but there's no way. It's a ridiculous choice.
They had to make him a mnemonic for it, like every good boy deserves a sponge so he can remember. On all standards, my dear Aunt Sally. And it's just like... You know, I mean, they're not even trying. They're not even trying. It's musical chairs, man. All these people have been in that orbit and they all kind of were waiting for a job. And then so you put the person who has no experience at education at education. You put the TV doc.
at cms and it's like oh wait we got we forgot whitaker what's whitaker gonna get you know it's like it's just it's silly i know i was joking at the top but there's no none of the people and this will be i'm i've sam harris on the on the pod tomorrow and so i'll be asking him about like
None of the people in that world, in the intellectual dark web, in the anti-woke world, in the Ben Shapiro's, the Marc Andreessen's, Elon, none of them have any concerns about this? The meritocracy crowd that are so mad? that woke meant that black people got to be in charge of companies and organizations now. They have no issues with the fact that people with no experience at all who are completely morons, who they would never even talk to in the Stanford cafeteria.
because they were only there visiting because their smarter sibling went to Stanford or whatever. There's no concern that we're going to have the stupidest people in the country running the government. It's almost like that whole thing was a smokescreen. I will just say I like this appointment for one reason. Great. So if you are thinking in accelerationist terms. Having Matt Whitaker be the U.S. ambassador to NATO will make crystal clear to our NATO allies that America cannot be counted on.
Because I think there's a danger that with Rubio, a sex state, they, you know, people who are alarmed in Brussels and Berlin and Paris and London could have talked themselves into. Well, I mean, look, Marco, we know that he's a hawk. He's one of us. And he, you know, he believes in American leaders. He wanted a new American century. And, you know, the Trump thing will pass. He really probably can't run again.
I think having Whitaker over there on a daily basis interfacing with NATO leadership will dispel any of that. And they'll realize we've got to start making plans for a post-American order. And the sooner Europe does that, the better. Because America is not a reliable ally. It hasn't been a reliable ally now for a decade. And we keep papering over this. But the truth is the American people are not willing to do any of the things that an ally has to do.
And the sooner that Europe and and then also the Pacific nations realize that and start acting accordingly. the better it is for world stability. Because what you don't want to do is find that out after the tanks roll into Poland. I think that's right. Do you remember who his first NATO ambassador was? Trump's first nanomaster? Yeah, I just looked it up. Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Kay Bailey Hutchinson! Serious person.
Kay Bailey Hutchinson, senator who cares about America's role in the world, American leadership, who traveled the world, smart person. Love Kay Bailey Hutchinson. Notice I didn't hear much from her, though, about like in 2020. 2024, about, you know, supporting other candidates. So whatever. But yeah, would have been a better pick. I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled. I just think the stupider, the better.
is where I'm at the stupider the choice the better and so using that rubric McMahon and RFK are good great and our real concerns are with Hegseth and Gates
Honestly. Tim and I did this already. My rankings were different than Tim's. This is a real question. If you had a button that could blow up only one of the cabinet nominees so far... their nomination their nomination i don't mean like a they have a neck bomb around them like in squid game or something um tulsi no not even tulsi no question for me Really interesting. Okay. Not even close, actually. Sam? Definitely RFK. Tim and I have already talked about this. I just have a massive fear.
Like a real massive fear in my mind that we're going to have a really bad public health episode and then suddenly we're going to be like, oh my God. this guy is running ship and, oh, he's going to lean on Dr. Oz to, like, you know, minister. I was like, oh, my. I think the Dr. Oz thing really kind of, like, threw me, too, because, and Tim and I talked about this yesterday, because the sort of idea was maybe you'd have, like, the.
really weird celebrity picks up top but like the next level would be kind of more professionalized and then now Trump's just being like you know what the next we're gonna find like even you know more celebrities for the next level and then like How far down are we going to go before we're like, oh, that's a real person. This person has subject matter expertise. There is no bottom.
Like, who's Matt Whitaker's deputy? The guy who actually patented the big dick toilet? Like, where are we going here? Who's yours, JVO? I think it's probably Hegseth. Hegseth is my second one. To be honest. I really... Wow, neither of you said Gates. You want to get dark? You want to get nuts? Let's get nuts. Sure.
We haven't gotten nuts yet. We still have a weekly standard ethos here. You know, there's still like a little bit of a remnant of that, Sam. It's not foreign policy. It's all domestic policy. I worry about Hegseth for domestic policy reasons because at the end of the day, whenever the Supreme Court finally has its big showdown with Trump, and it will, at some point there will be a real deal constitutional crisis showdown.
And the Supreme Court decision will be made in part by a calculation as to whether or not they can force Trump to comply. And if Trump has a pliant military, this is how all through history. Damn. Once the Democratic Party has control of the military leadership. The military decides who takes power next. This is how it is in Egypt. It's how it is in Syria. It's how it is everywhere. It's how it is in Pakistan. And it's how it will be in America.
if we no longer have a military run by people who are seriously committed to the constitution chain of command etc etc and instead are personally loyal at the top of the organization to trump Wait, and you don't trust the Fox News? What a podcast. I trust the Fox News guy to be very, very good about getting rid of the people who he believes are there for the Constitution. All right. We need Sarah back. Boy, we need Sarah back. Have a good turkey day.