Executive Disorder: GOP Blame Game, Trump/Epstein Report, Paraguay Ousts President

0:08 Welcome to It Could Happen Here, Executive Disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, and what this means for you. I'm Gareth Sandavis. Today, I'm joined by Robert Evans and number one electoralist, Mia Wong. Who was so excited about the results that she couldn't even make it to our episode yesterday. She was too pumped.

0:31 We couldn't contain her. Up all night. Not even a joke.

0:36 I actually was.

0:38 She votes in 11 or 12 states every election. You just can't stop her from voting.

0:43 I'm from Illinois. I was raised on vote early, vote often.

0:50 Good stuff.

0:52 We do need to acknowledge that I think out of everyone's midterm predictions, Mia's was the most correct. Oh!

0:58 I want to grandstand for five seconds, which is very funny that I am the least electoral person. And you can pull the tape in early 2025, like March 2025. I am pulling the election results from like rural Iowa and going the Democrats are going to win by 20. You can pull the tape on it. I was there. Please sit on me.

1:24 See, I respect that.

1:25 I didn't even have the courage to really make any predictions. After the last, like, three elections, I was like, I don't know, man. Maybe the polls are right. Who the fuck knows?

1:34 My thing on that genuinely was that, like, I was doing the polls were cucked angle, which is that the polls, because the thing with the polls is the polls were all using the 2024 demographic stuff for, like, ages. And then they tried to modify it afterwards. But it's like, If you go outside, you can tell that, talk to any person in any state, you can be like, this is not 2024. Even by the time you're hitting early 2025, everything is just different.

2:03 Oh, no.

2:03 I mean, even out in the country, I spent a lot of time in rural Oregon, and the Trump signs have largely disappeared.

2:08 Yeah.

2:09 You've been seeing that a lot. A lot of reports from people who live out in the country noting that The Trump banners are no longer on the hay bales.

2:17 Yeah.

2:18 And I think we're going to be doing a full episode in like a couple of weeks on... how Trump sort of systemically went through and pissed off all of those people individually, because it's a truly like a masterwork in electioneering. The only person I've ever seen do it like this was former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, who just went like row by row down every single one of her constituencies and pissed them all off individually. Oh, it's incredible stuff.

2:49 This episode, we are covering the week of October 28th to November 5th. Yesterday, we covered the election results in a special edition of Executive Disorder. Today, we will be covering reactions to those results from the Democrats and the Republicans, as well as some other news stories. We'll start with a few small things at the top. Yeah.

3:13 And I promise this is not entirely an election episode. If you stick around long enough, you will get a one million person wildcat general strike. So hang in there, people who are sick of elections. Help is coming.

3:28 Last week, Mayor Mamdani quietly canceled New York City's own Cop City, a $ 225 million, quote, public safety academy that was slated to be built in Queens. It's something that Zoran talked about a few times during the mayoral primary, but has since then kind of receded into the background. In an interview before the launch of his campaign, Zoran told the outlet City & State, quote, we do not need to spend more than $ 200 million on a cop city training facility in Queens.

3:58 Good for him.

3:59 And last week, the mayor's office confirmed this plan is no longer going through.

4:03 Look, I've watched the NYPD at work. A few times.

4:06 And how much training do you need to teach guys to sit in a van playing Candy Crush on their phone until it's time to maybe go out and hit people?

4:14 Like, how much training does that really take?

4:16 It requires a lot of training to kettle people on the same bridge every single year.

4:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. Of course, of course. Do you need $ 200 million for that?

4:26 If Mamdani's promises a few weeks ago would come to fruition... We should also be getting an update on the timeline of the SRG dismantling in the next few days to weeks as well. It has been a good week for Mamdani overall. On Wednesday, an appeals court ruled that Mamdani can go ahead with the pita tear tax on second homes worth millions of dollars after a Staten Island judge tried to halt the rollout a few months ago. So that will be going ahead. And in fact, when Mamdani was on CNN talking about the election results, Jake Tapper was made a snide remark about the New York Knicks, and Mamdani's rebuttal was bragging about him paying the PETA tier tax. So, fuck you, Jake Tapper.

5:11 Good bit, good bit.

5:14 Last Friday, dock workers held a one-day strike action across 22 countries and more than 100 ports in protest against war and arms shipments. A coalition of unions released a statement beforehand, quote, Ports must not be used for the transport of weapons, ammunition, military equipment, and troops. Dock workers do not work for war. This action was originally called by the European Dock Workers Council, with unions in France, Italy, Greece, Spain, Turkey, and Morocco.

5:44 This has been something that's been a very big issue for European dock workers for a long time. I mean, you can go back and look at like 2010, you can find dock workers doing strikes about this. This is something that Yeah, so this is a long-running concern of European dock workers, particularly in Italy, Greece as well, and obviously France. And it's good to see more of it.

6:07 This is a nice little kind of warm-up action. This is just a one-day action. If this gets extended to a few days, it could really clog the gears. And so it's nice to see this happen, and hopefully more things like it will happen in the future with some more organizing. We will now turn to a special segment by James Stout. Take a listen.

6:30 Hey, everyone.

6:33 It's James.

6:34 Tragically, I lost a tooth to some Skittles about a year ago. And the thing that was on top of my tooth has fallen out again. So while my friends are recording, I am having someone drill into my face. I'm paying half a month's wages for the privilege. So I can't join them. But I did want to update you on a couple of non-election things as well as one election thing. So let's start with the election thing.

6:56 Last week, I said there were 53 counties in California. I just read the number that I had typed wrong. There are 58. Also, I wanted to talk a little bit more about California and specifically those 20,000 votes, right? The DOJ attempted to take their request to sequester ballots to the Supreme Court of the United States, which just like other courts did not cooperate, right? John Sauer, the Solicitor General, wrote, quote, Once California commingles the challenge ballots with lawful ones, there is no way to get the challenge ballots back. The only way to preserve the District Court's ability to grant relief to the United States to offer a full merit to proceeding, therefore, is to segregate the challenge ballots. That remedy would not cause undue hardship

7:36 to California. The Supreme Court disagreed. They turned down the government's request with a very brief unsigned 9-0 order. I think this is just illustration, right, that the government threw everything it had at suppressing the vote in this election and did not succeed. Even on election day, ICE posted that HSI had arrested a Canadian man who they claimed had registered to vote. Again, this is an attempt at making people afraid or intimidated to vote that very obviously did not succeed anywhere in the United States in numbers large enough to influence the outcome of the election. Moving on from the United States, I wanted to talk Briefly about Iran. The United States, right before the election, made

8:19 what it called a defensive strike, which Trump then went on to say was against Iranian air defenses. Evidently, it's very hard to make a defensive strike against someone else's air defenses, right? Unclear if that was a different strike or not, but Trump said they watched Iran rebuild their air defenses and then destroyed them, which is not a defensive action, right? Talking of Iranian air defenses, Iran took down another MQ-9 Reaper drone with what's called a 358. 358, I think we've talked about them on Executive Disorder before they released video in this case, but a 358 is a loitering munition. It's like an anti-drone drone. It's not capable of taking down jets. I mean, it's capable of doing it, it's just very unlikely it will be able to, right?

9:14 but it works very well for these drones. Iran's taken down a number of drones with these. They work in a similar way to the drones that the Kurdish freedom movement was using to shoot down Turkish Bayraktar and Akinchi drones. In fact, the SDF took out a US drone, presumably by accident, in Syria after the Assad regime collapsed. So not the first time these US drones have run into these kinds of loitering munitions. But it's indicative that the 358s are pretty cheap compared to more advanced air defense systems.

9:48 And as I said, they're not the best solution for fast attack jets. But it is one of these things that the Iranians have developed right that have been very effective for the money the other one being their Shaheed drones right and they have been able to take out a number of United States attack drones with these in this case the MQ-9 Reaper drone that they say they shot down over the Strait of Hormuz it's a little unclear you can't see in the footage where they shot it down but nonetheless I think it's reportable Staying on the topic of drones, the publication Intelligence Online is reporting that they have seen intelligence from a Myanmar armed resistance group that has identified four Russian drone operators deployed on

10:34 a long-term basis with garrisons of the Myanmar armed forces in southern Shan state. This has been a thing for a while, right? There have been Russian drone ops, Russian trainers deployed deployed with the Tatmadaw, along with the Tatmadaw using Russian technology for quite some time, right? But it's interesting that these guys are deployed long term and they seem to be rather than training, actually operating drones. If you remember the fall of the Assad regime, there were Russian drone ops there as well. Some of those guys had paid a bribe or had got this kind of posting that took them out of the meat grinder in Ukraine and they were doing these colonial wars for Russia, right?

11:14 That's what this is.

11:15 This is imperialism by another name. the Tatmadaw has benefited heavily from Chinese and Russian drone technology and drone tactics, right? They've been using drones much more effectively in the last, I guess, year or so than they previously had. And so it's not surprising to see. We also saw, like, sometimes you'll see Tat guys with Wagner patches, like what is now Africa Corps, right? The Russian private military contractor thing.

11:43 In that case, I'm pretty sure that at least In my experience, that's just them thinking that they're cool in the same way that you will see PDF guys sometimes with like a United States flags on their plate carriers, because that is an aesthetic and a thing they look up to, right? The US special forces guys, or you'll see like special forces tabs used. You'll see guys with things that look like Ranger tabs, but 99% of the time that's from the Free Burma Rangers. That's a different thing.

12:12 So it's nonetheless interesting to document the growing links between Russia and and the Tatmadaw. I would really love if some of the solidarity that we've seen with the people of Ukraine could be also directed to the people of Myanmar. I can't help but think if they were white and European and they were fighting for their freedom, they might get a little more support from the rest of the world.

12:32 That's what I got for you this week.

12:35 We are back. Now, I said this wouldn't be an election result episode, and that is mostly true. But I will update a few races because... There are still two races yet to be called, Alaska and Mississippi. An Alaska Democrat, Mary Paltola. Yes. Yes.

12:52 Let's engage in some racism here.

12:53 Going up against.

12:54 I forgot to do that joke yesterday.

12:56 Senator Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent. Not going to acknowledge that at all. Adam, leave it in. Right now, Paltola is up 600 votes with 25% of the vote left. So this still might go to ranked choice instant runoff if. If she doesn't reach 50% of the vote or more than 50% of the vote, still a lot of votes to be counted. We'll probably know more in a few days.

13:22 It's possible she does just pull ahead and this doesn't go to instant runoff.

13:26 We will see.

13:27 The biggest, biggest surprise, as I said yesterday, Mississippi with Scott Colum against Sidney Hyde-Smith, the Republican incumbent. Colum is a little less than 2,000 votes ahead. So he has gained in the past 24 hours with over 40,000 estimated votes yet to be counted. These are largely provisional or mail-in ballots, which according to Mississippi law can be counted till Saturday. These are expected to go mostly in Colum's favor, but this is still a super close, super close race, right?

14:00 This is like 49% to 48.9%. Very close, but he is expected to pull ahead.

14:07 I wanted to talk a little bit about this. It's like a very funny sort of revenge grudge match, which is that Scott Column was nominated to be a federal judge by Joe Biden in 2023. But there's a weird convoluted system where the senator from a state can block a nomination for federal judge appointments in their state. And the person who blocked that was Senator Hyde-Smith.

14:38 Uh-huh.

14:40 And this apparently was because Colum was, like, too pro-trans and also an unhinged thing about him getting money from George Soros.

14:48 Ha ha ha ha!

14:49 So this has been a years in the making revenge plot to some extent by Colin, who is now about to beat in Mississippi the senator who blocked his appointment for being too pro-trans in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

15:07 That is pretty wild.

15:08 That's great.

15:09 It's amazing. I have seen some sort of liberal pundits try to paint this as an example of of why it's better to nominate centrists or moderates, because otherwise there'd be no way for a Democrat to win Mississippi. People calling him a centrist just are not familiar with him or his platform. This is a firm anti-APAC Democrat running a lot of the same economic populism that we've seen across many candidates, including raising the federal minimum wage, anti-big tech stuff, a lot of the stuff that I think we're largely familiar with. Beyond just saying the word affordability, like actual actual policy proposals, not a centrist by by any means. And if he's prevented from being a judge in part by being too pro trans. And I think

15:57 that that kind of bolsters my my argument. Very funny.

16:02 Maybe stop from being from being a judge. Apparently not stop from being a senator. So that's right.

16:08 That's right. I do also want to mention a few of the DSA races a bit more in depth, because DSA now has an expanded block of eight representatives in the federal office. Rashida Tlaib was reelected in Michigan, and she'll be joined by a new block of DSA House reps, including Donovan McKinney from Michigan, Chris Rabb of Pennsylvania, Milat Kiros of Colorado, Angela Gonzalez-Torres from California, which is a really solid win here. That one was kind of more of a battle district. And of course, Daria Elisa Villachavier and Claire Valdez, who joined AOC in representing New York.

16:46 And so far, there's at least 93 DSA candidates who've won at the federal, state, and municipal level. And the vote still is being counted in few of those places, like in California, or at least the vote was still being counted by the time I wrote this last night. One of the big races that has not been getting actually a lot of attention is the LA mayoral race, which since yesterday... has been called for DSA-endorsed candidate Nithya Raman.

17:12 This is another thing that we should probably do a deep dive in the future. This was a close race with Raman pulling ahead by three points in the past day and a half. There's some interesting kind of background lore regarding Raman's DSA endorsement that I do want to mention here. A few days before the election, DSA's National Political Committee, kind of like their board of directors, so to speak, voted on whether to force the local DSA LA chapter to rescind their endorsement of Rahman based on perceptions from some out-of-state DSA members that Rahman did not support the BDS movement enough, boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.

17:53 During the election, Rahman stated multiple times that she supports BDS as a protest tactic, but there's disagreement in DSA National on the correct interpretation of a 2025 DSA convention resolution, against candidates opposing BDS, and whether that means holding candidates to implementing BDS once in office. So like on Sunday or Monday, like just days before the election, DSA's National Political Committee voted 14 to 13, very close, to not force the local chapter to pull their endorsement before the election.

18:32 This is like a razor edge vote here. And I think this general situation underlines some internal tensions within the DSA, especially DSA as a national body, not just big chapters like New York or LA.

18:46 Absolutely.

18:47 But there are these big tensions between the so-called mass politics wing, what I would kind of call the Zoranist wing of DSA, the Socialist Majority Caucus, Groundwork Caucus. versus the more kind of agitational activist side of DSA, characterized internally as like the quote unquote left wing of DSA, which focuses more on like abolitionism, anti-imperialism, and also has some more kind of like campist tendencies. I think that sort of agitational side has more representation on like the national body chapter than what they have in local chapters like LA and New York, where a bunch of members are concentrated. And because of that split, We're seeing this kind of drama play out between some of these bigger

19:28 chapters in the national organization.

19:30 Which I will say, SOC soak dams. Owl Power to the locals looking a lot better now, huh? Ah, okay. Decade, decade, decade old DSA drama aside.

19:40 Two other, not technically, I guess, DSA races, but DSA-like or like Bernie-crat conversations. of like races I want to mention. Justin Pearson, a Democrat in Tennessee, unfortunately lost by less than 3,000 votes to Republican Brett Taylor in a newly redrawn House district. This was redistricted into a Trump 22 district.

20:07 and Pearson ended up trailing by just a few thousand votes, like a very small margin. This one was quite sad to see. Pearson's great. Though in Michigan, in Michigan's 7th district, William Lawrence went up against Republican incumbent Tom Barrett. Lawrence is of the Sunrise Movement organization. This is a big swing district. Centrists, moderates were concerned that Lawrence was going to be too far left and would keep this district red.

20:34 Did not happen. Lawrence was able to pull this off despite over 20 million in GOP spending against Lawrence. So that is one of the more interesting results of the night. Let's go on an ad break and then talk about copium. Let's talk about the copium. OK, we are back. Do you know who's not back? The Republican Party. They are not feeling so hot. And it was it was really funny.

21:16 A few days before the election on Halloween, Mike Johnson made this proclamation.

21:23 I have been all over the country, my friends, and I'm feeling really good right now.

21:27 I'm telling you, the polls are wrong, OK?

21:30 We're going to defy history and we are going to be celebrating big victories on Tuesday night.

21:34 That's my prediction, OK?

21:38 Amen.

21:39 It's a spiritual battle.

21:40 Yes, ma'am.

21:41 Great prediction.

21:42 Hey, I mean, look, the first two predictions were true. The polls were wrong. They did make history. There were great victories, too, just not the ones he was anticipating. Unfortunately, the way you did it was by getting a historic ass kicking.

21:58 Yeah, beautiful. And losing your job.

22:01 But hey, that'll mean he has more time to monitor his son's erections, which we know is his passion.

22:06 Mike Johnson has indicated he will not be staying on as the does not intend to stay on as minority minority leader for the Republicans. So, yeah, he will have more time to monitor his son's erections.

22:20 Which I also want to mention here that this sets up a sort of fascinating race for who who who the minority leader is going to be to replace him. I think people have forgotten this. The reason Mike Johnson was elected in the first place was that the previous majority leader like couldn't survive a no confidence vote. It was really hard to find one.

22:40 Yeah. Yeah.

22:41 And they picked Mike Johnson because nobody had any idea who he was and they didn't realize how weird he was.

22:46 Which, by the way, is the same reason Dennis Hastert got his got Speaker of the House.

22:50 Yeah.

22:50 Right.

22:51 Was that like he he was considered safe. He wasn't seen as ambitious and no one knew anything about him. So he didn't seem to have any scandals.

22:59 So Mike Johnson's optimism in that clip there, delusional or not, was also promoted by Fox News' Jesse Waters before the election by casting serious doubt on the blue wave and predicting that the youth and Hispanic turnout would be low.

23:15 Here is the headline, Jessica.

23:18 There is no blue tsunami.

23:20 Yes, there is a maybe a three foot wave that's going to knock out a few sandcastles. But the Democrat narrative that this thing is going to sweep the nation.

23:30 Does not exist. The red wall is forming.

23:35 Older voters are showing up to vote against socialism and the youth and Hispanics are not showing up.

23:42 Sure.

23:43 Yeah, they didn't.

23:44 I just want to put on the record that the way that he said the Hispanics is.

23:49 Yes, that is. That is something he intentionally that's something he intentionally does consistently also by saying the blacks, also the whites. This is like one of his reoccurring bits almost.

24:01 Jesus Christ.

24:03 But basically everything he said in that sentence was completely wrong. And after the election, Waters sang a bit of a different tune, dooming how Republicans lost whites, men, Hispanics, and farmers. The coalition's totally collapsed.

24:22 I mean, we lost whites? Whites! You can't do that if you're a Republican.

24:27 Men, Hispanics, big time.

24:31 And so it's going to take a while to put the coalition back together because it was in the heartland. So what happened was so China, in order to pressure Trump in the trade war, stopped buying crops from the farmers. And then you do the Hormuz straight squeeze and fertilizer and diesel go up.

24:49 So, whoa, they move blue.

24:54 He's not wrong there, but, like, that was you guys. Like, you didn't have to do any of this.

24:59 No, none of this was necessary. I mean, and that's, like, they've been having to, like, J.D. Vance is kind of the closest people in high power to coming out and saying, like, this is just a horrible fuck-up. But Trump has even admitted, like, yeah, Iran is what screwed us, but we had to do it.

25:13 It was the only option.

25:14 They had to keep. So, since the results on Tuesday night, there's been a lot of, kind of, attempted explanations from the Republicans to figure out what the fuck just happened. One of them, coming from some Republican operatives, is that Trump got too friendly with Mamdani and that kind of sabotaged the Republicans' campaign strategy. To quote from the Wall Street Journal, quote, Republicans planned to make Zoran Mamdani, the 35-year-old socialist who became New York City's mayor last year, the face of a party that they would paint as out of touch with most Americans. In September, when Trump was in New York ahead of the UN General Assembly, Mamdani had a surprise announcement. He had invited Trump to meet. Republicans in

26:01 the House were apoplectic. House Speaker Mike Johnson told White House officials, An image of Trump being friendly with Mamdani would hurt Republican House candidates in New York who are running on an anti-Mamdani message. Trump aides didn't like the idea either, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump and Mamdani met at Gracie Mansion, the mayor's residence, just as the president wanted. Johnson later told others that it was an unforced error in a difficult election year, unquote.

26:29 Very funny, but definitely, definitely true. If you remember when Mamdani was elected, there was a lot of dooming on how this is now going to give Republicans this perfect talking point going into the midterms about how crazy the Democrats are. And because of how good Mamdani's poll numbers have been, how well he's just governed in general, which is kind of acknowledged in big parts by even Fox and Trump to some degree. That kind of threw a wrench in their plans to paint Mamdani as emblematic of the craziness of the Democrats. Instead, they kind of tried to do that with Al-Sayed, which also just didn't pan out for them at all either. There was some kind of early explanations from the, you know, Fox brain trust

27:11 as they saw results coming in. One being that youth just want instant gratification and can't commit to anything. They can't stick with anything. Like voting GOP.

27:22 Forever.

27:23 Yeah.

27:24 Forever.

27:25 This idea that I've been thinking about a lot, which is just this shortened attention span that everybody wants everything, you know, instantaneously. And, you know, I gave you my vote for two years and now I want to switch to somebody else. And a lot of these voters don't seem to be expressing what it is they think they're getting by switching over. And we'll see how it pans out tonight. But I think that's a change dynamic in America.

27:47 Well, I also believe that when you're scrolling, if it says Medicare for all, you're like, yeah, I'm for that.

27:52 OK, now you're moving on.

27:53 You're watching the football game and you're learning how to put a French hairpin in your in your hair. Like it's just like there's so much going on.

27:59 Yeah, that's it.

27:59 No, yeah, that's it. I think they got it. I think they cracked the case.

28:03 Yeah.

28:04 Oh, God.

28:05 They're on their damn phones too much, and the serotonin receptors are screwed. They just want everything super fast. They can't stick with a hard two more years, as Vance requested, of war with Iran. Skyrocketing prices.

28:21 Skyrocketing prices, yeah. And ICE raids, yes.

28:25 The youth should have just had the chutzpah to stick it out a little bit longer. See where that was going to lead.

28:29 Party discipline is the one thing that's lacking among youth.

28:33 You have to give people a reason to be loyal to a party. And that's like the antithesis of conservatism.

28:41 This really does highlight their sort of biggest frustration and their biggest miscalculation is that they thought the 2024 electorate is the new electorate. That's where the new lines are. The youth are going to stay with them. They did not realize that the people who ended up voting for Trump in really big numbers in 2024 were not doing it out of loyalty to Trump, but out of this huge anti-incumbent sentiments and major frustrations at the Biden administration.

29:06 And they thought that that then created loyal Trump voters. And no, those same frustrations then just got moved over to Trump because he continued all the same bad stuff and then added a whole bunch of new bad stuff.

29:19 Yeah.

29:20 Everyone suddenly remembered. Well, it's probably a combination of people remembering that living under Trump sucks and then people learning for the first time.

29:27 Like, this is awful.

29:30 It's even worse than the last time.

29:33 On Wednesday, Vice President J.D. Vance posted what I'll call a screed on X The Everything app. Yeah.

29:40 Is that about right?

29:42 Going over kind of his analysis of what happened and how much, maybe where Republicans kind of dropped the ball and how they were thinking about kind of what the voter composition would be, right? Is this electorate going to be the 2024 electorate again? And he talked about in this screed As the election date, as the midterms got closer, he started developing suspicions that, no, that's not going to be the electorate. And he started asking his polling guys what they think is going to happen. I will quote from his screed. Despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept telling us the same story. In some states, turnout was merely okay. In other states, it was downright amazing.

30:23 And in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team. Our people, our voters, are showing up. So I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? No, he told me. We might do better than the polls suggest.

30:39 They didn't.

30:40 But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump-Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us. Vance continues, Undoubtedly, there were places we could have done better on turnout, but the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump Vance 24 voted for Democrats in 2026. Then Vance listed the top four reasons causing this switch, quote, end the war, focus on cost of living and inflation, put America first and change our relationship to Israel. Which is very funny, because, like, three of those, like, end the war, cost of living inflation, and change your relationship to Israel, it's like, oh, so

31:27 you're the Mamdani campaign. Like, the Republicans are like, what if we did the Mamdani campaign, but, like, actually anti-Semitic? It's interesting. It's like, they might start kind of converging on a more kind of nationalistic form of socialism.

31:42 Yeah.

31:43 Yeah, yeah.

31:47 A kind of national socialism has never gone wrong before.

31:49 There's no precedent for this.

31:55 But Vance ended his screen, quote, Our voters showed up, and the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. I am open to the idea that we should change enforcement, immigration enforcement, by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night, unquote.

32:21 I like that he has to add in his little kind of ice soft defense there in his final point about the war costing them the election, which, yeah, the war was a huge part of that. The Trump administration saw some of this coming in the days before the election, because on the morning of Election Day, Trump told Fox News that the U.S. will stop sending $ 4 billion in aid to Israel by the end of this year. Did not matter. You can't just drop that on Election Day and think that's going to change the results. Also, no one believes you. But he did. He did say that in part to kind of defang the potency of candidates like El-Sayed, who campaigned in large part against sending money to Israel. Trump also said election morning in a bizarre

33:04 kind of final message before the midterms, quote, if people ever got tired of me in the US, I'll move to Israel and become prime minister.

33:14 Sure, man.

33:14 I don't know. We're moving from the settler colony to like a shittier, smaller settler colony.

33:23 I do want to mention one other Republican's reaction to the results. That's Ron DeSantis. Both we and others have talked about DeSantis calling Tuesday's election an extinction level event for Republicans. But I also want to highlight a later part of his speech where DeSantis identifies where he thinks Republicans got off track. Quote, I knew Republicans were in trouble when I was reading an overview of what they were running ads on. And they are spending hundreds of millions on transgender ads. That was not the issue motivating voters.

33:57 And it was kind of an attempt to just scare Republicans to vote. Now, the issues are different. And Republicans, it seemed like in some of the ads I was seeing, with how much money they were spending, they were really fighting yesterday's battle.

34:11 Unquote.

34:12 We're all looking for the guy who did this. Yeah. You're telling me, huh? Maybe it's not the issue motivating voters.

34:25 Yeah, you sure about that? You sure about that?

34:29 Which, look, at least the transgender community is getting a tiny form of revenge for all of the shit that we've had to go through and will continue to go through.

34:40 A revenge amuse-bouche.

34:42 Yeah, well, this is the reefing the whirlwind appetizer. We will get the main course in time.

34:48 Yeah, the whirlwind takes another 70 minutes to cook. It's like ordering the souffle.

34:54 I think one of the most sort of shocking results of this election cycle was a quite progressive trans woman winning a Alabama state house seat in Montgomery. She pulled a 22-point swing to win a district that was like Trump plus 16.

35:14 Also, her name is Montgomery. It's the same thing with the fucking Hungary guy. Her name is Alison Montgomery.

35:21 I should have put that together. That's hilarious.

35:27 Yeah.

35:27 And, you know, her opponents ran a whole bunch of anti-trans attack ads and she, you know, called them pedophiles and did a bunch of anti-data center stuff and stuff like that. And one in a place that is, you know, like there are obviously there's a lot of trans organizing in the Deep South. To the best of my knowledge, like Montgomery, Alabama is like not like this part of Alabama, like this part of the city of Alabama is like not a trans hub. This isn't a district in Atlanta or something. Or New Orleans. This is not that. This was deep Trump. Again, Trump plus 16.

36:07 She ran on an economic populist platform that most people can agree on. That it's a common sense anti-corporate platform.

36:16 Yeah. And I think this is a thing that you know, It's something I think Gary's going to talk about a little bit, but a lot of the narrative about sort of, like, ah, progressive candidates did worse than non-progressive candidates. It's like, trans women running on, like, the Bomdani platform are winning in Alabama. Like, eat shit.

36:34 Yeah, no, it's super absurd. Like, there's just no.

36:37 Get out of here.

36:39 This is my frustration, because the word progressive just doesn't mean anything. Like, does progressive mean that you're... A corporatist Democrat with good social policies? Does it mean you're an economic populist who doesn't really talk about culture or issues? Like, what does progressive mean?

36:56 Yeah. Does it mean you're Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was originally a progressive? Like, who knows? No meaning.

37:05 It is really frustrating. This whole narrative, I just don't find compelling at all because the vast majority of these swing state candidates won on economic populism. anti-corruption, stopping foreign wars. It's hard to characterize most of these candidates as centrists. Now, there are some moderates and more center-left Democrats mixed in there, like in Alaska. And there's a lot of issues with many of these candidates. They are not perfect by any means.

37:35 But when you're seeing liberal pundits really push this narrative that moderates are winning way better than progressives or winning way better than socialists, It's very clear that they're just setting up a narrative to crush any potential progressive, left-wing, or like a real populist from taking the lead in the primary to become president in 2028. They're running the same electability playbook, trying to convince people that candidates on the left don't stand as good of a chance as winning.

38:08 And this is all very silly to me because El-Sayed did win. He won. He is going to be the senator. Troy Jackson did win. But the only thing a lot of these liberal pundits can talk about is how El Sayed did not do maybe as well as some other candidates, especially compared to like Tallarico. And again, I think this is all very silly because Tallarico and El Sayed actually had very similar platforms. And these races had a lot of different parts. Ken Paxton is much more hated than Mike Rogers, who is generally one of the more liked Republicans in this midterm election. And prominent Democrats tried to sabotage El-Sayed for months from Neera Tanden, to comments made by Nancy Pelosi, and of course, Haley Stevens endorsing the

39:03 Republican days before the election. Also, just tons and tons of money was mobilized in Michigan. It was also mobilized in Texas, but way more was spent in Michigan than almost any other Senate race. And in the end, El-Sayed performed pretty similarly to other statewide Democratic candidates. He did perform slightly under the gubernatorial candidate, but performed better than the attorney general candidate. And there's a lot of just little differences in how states elect people sometimes. Like Maine, historically, has elected a much more Democratic governor than the representatives they've sent to D.C. And speaking of Maine, I do not think centrist moderates can really accurately say that a more moderate candidate would have won by more against Susan Collins.

39:53 Collins has shown herself to be incredibly resilient. Anyone running against Collins would have had a hard time. And it turned out a union populist candidate eventually was the guy to beat Collins. I think it's also very disingenuous to point to Florida when the Democrats just totally abandoned the race in Florida, leaving Angie Nixon to fend for herself.

40:15 And all things considered, I think Nixon actually did quite well having to run that entire campaign herself. And her opponent, Ashley Moody, had the highest independent favorability rating. So if you're going to evaluate the minute differences between progressives and moderates in these races, I think you actually have to look at the minute details of each individual race and not flatten things out into these generalizations that probably don't hold water when you consider things more closely. And keep in mind, this whole rhetorical game played by liberal pundits is in preparation of trying to crush any left-wing candidate for president in 2028. Anyway, let's get into some of the Democratic Party reactions to their own victory. And it's

41:01 interesting because this is all kind of in the shadow of Trump announcing election night on a phone call with Politico. that he is interested in working with Democrats to pass bills and doesn't just want to sit in the office for two years and veto everything. That was the way he put it.

41:15 Weak, scared.

41:16 He said it very scared in this clip. I may as well actually just play. It's only 15 seconds. He does sound very scared in this.

41:24 Well, we're going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country.

41:28 Very important.

41:29 They've already called and they want to work with me.

41:31 I have the right to veto everything.

41:33 But I don't want to be.

41:34 Just sitting there for two years vetoing everything. you want to see things happen.

41:38 Too does not sound does not sound happy.

41:43 Yeah that that is that is the sound of a man who was like oh fuck if i don't keep schumer in power i could go to prison yeah oh.

41:50 Speaking of schumer horrible speech election night brick wall in more than one way uh do you want to play this this this clip of schumer talking about his aspirations of becoming the speaker again How do you deal with those candidates who won, who said they're not going to vote for you? Adam Hamilton, Troy Jackson.

42:10 Again, to repeat the answer, the issue is not me. I'll be reelected as majority leader. But the issue is focusing on the American people and what they want.

42:26 I like that he slipped into saying minority leader because he's so used to being a loser. Yeah. No, Schumer should not be. Obviously not.

42:36 No, no, no.

42:37 He is.

42:38 He has.

42:38 He has been one of the key levers of power for the Republican Party in rallying the Democrats to vote for a bunch of the horrific shit that amazingly like this. Some of the stuff that lost Trump the election that was in the big, beautiful bill like passed because of Schumer, like whipping people in order to vote for it.

42:56 Yeah.

42:57 And Schumer himself also voted for that, too.

43:00 Since Tuesday, Bernie has started a push to get more Dems to sign on to Medicare for All, and he will likely become the new chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. Minnesota Senator-elect Peggy Flanagan has loudly proclaimed, we will rip ICE apart. And incoming House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chair Robert Garcia posted a two-word statement, lawyer up. And Oregon Senator Ron Wyden posted, subpoenas.

43:27 Yeah. Yeah.

43:28 In a strong one word statement.

43:31 Thanks, Ron.

43:33 So in terms of where where this is going, I think there was a very interesting report that was released, I guess, two weeks ago, Monday now, right about a week before the election where. The House Judiciary Committee released a genuinely astonishing document in which they accused Donald Trump of, and I am just going to quote from this document here, which again was released by the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, like with their House Judiciary Committee official stuff on it.

44:07 Seal.

44:08 Yeah.

44:09 Quote.

44:11 Above all, the evidence we have seen, as shared in the accounts of 11 women, each described below, indicates that Trump abused, assaulted, and even raped numerous women alongside and in coordination with the most infamous sex trafficker in history, end quote, that that most infamous sex trafficker in history would, of course, be Jeffrey Epstein, who they accused Trump of being, quote, a close friend and confidant of alongside the sort of aforementioned They furthermore accused the administration of, I think, doing a thing we've all known they were very obviously doing, which is stonewalling the investigation into the release of the Epstein files to conceal alleged crimes. So this report itself,

45:00 I think, was sort of planned as the, I guess, like October surprise that they ended up not really needing and was really like not covered by the media at all. But the report itself is interesting because it's a combination of information that had already been publicly available, but also stuff that had not really been made public before.

45:22 No, yeah, there's brand new revelations in this.

45:27 Yeah, and this is, and I say this quite genuinely, this is one of the most astonishing documents in the history of the United States. I cannot think of another time anything like this has ever happened. This is the members of the opposition party on the House Judiciary Committee accusing the president of the United States of participating in a sex trafficking ring and accusing the administration and the broader, the president and the broader administration of actively covering up those crimes. The allegations in here range from like bizarre redactions of the versions of the Epstein files that were released to the public that would, you know, that sort of withheld information that would implicate close Trump associates. Most notably,

46:12 Powell Zampolli, who was the global envoy for strategic partnership until October 15th of this year. The documents accuse Zampolli of facilitating and participating in sex trafficking. And the Democrats accused Trump of concealing this and also of in their questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell, who they also mentioned in this was like sent to a like really cozy club fed place.

46:37 prison by the administration. They accused the administration of deliberately steering interrogations of Ghislaine Maxwell away from discussing some very specific allegations that Ghislaine brought up by herself. And then the interviewers immediately were like, no, no, no, don't talk about that and moved her on to a different thing.

46:55 So the document itself, there's a sort of broad outline of the alleged shorted Trump-Epstein operation and how they allegedly used modeling agencies to work a sex trafficking ring. There are sections about the alleged cover-up by the Trump administration, the DOJ and the FBI. There's a lot of going through very harrowing accounts of specific allegations from different women.

47:18 I'm going to quote from this towards like at the very end of the document, quote, the stakes of the Epstein Maxwell conspiracy are monumental. Human trafficking, child abuse and rape are among the most serious offenses our law recognizes. government complicity and a cover-up to protect traffickers and rapists is criminal obstruction of justice and an intolerable offense against free society. Moreover, a president implicated in a sex trafficking operation is a president exposed, constantly vulnerable to blackmail by foreign governments and domestic criminals. The full extent of the President of the United States' involvement in criminal sex trafficking is inescapably to the utmost concern to Congress and the

47:59 American people. And the document ends with calling for an investigation of Trump and other Trump allies and appointing a specific independent counsel to carry out the investigation.

48:09 It is astonishing how little media coverage there was of this.

48:13 A few sites.

48:14 Yeah.

48:14 You know, I mean, a few outlets like New York Times was like on blue sky defending their coverage of it, in which they said that, you know, oh, yeah, there's a document released by the Democrats calling for an investigation investigation. there are like rape allegations in this that like have not really been made public before new.

48:33 Yeah.

48:34 And there, there was more coverage of Obama's joke about the cheesecake factory than there was 100%.

48:41 Yeah.

48:42 About the Democrats of the house judiciary committee, accusing the sitting president of the United States of being in league with Jeffrey Epstein, which I think, I think one of the things that it's kind of helpful to do was like, I don't know. We're in this era where everything is so insane that it's, very difficult to step back and think about what that would mean in literally any other period of american history and i think one of the things that's become clear in the aftermath of this election is that this does look like the angle of which they're going to go after trump right and so and as we're doing a sort of bringing Trump to justice thing, it looks like this is going to be, this is like at least how the House Judiciary Committee is going

49:28 to go after him. And I think this changes to some extent the dynamics of previous Democratic attempts to go after Trump because it's a lot harder to sort of brush this stuff off in the way that you could do with something like Russiagate. where regular people are pissed off about Epstein.

49:45 Yes.

49:46 And even Trump's base is pissed off about Epstein in a way that they could just not give a shit about Russiagate. And I think this being the angle of attack changes to some extent some of the dynamics around what the political contours of of a like actual prosecution of the Trump administration is. And also now that these people are in control of the judiciary committee, there's going to be a lot more stuff being revealed. They are going to have control to a much larger extent of the investigation. If they can get their independent console, like the stuff that has come out from the Epstein files about Trump already has been unbelievably damaging to him. And again, The stuff that we're getting is the like redacted versions

50:32 of it that that's the result of their sort of half ass cover up. The stuff that's going to be coming out of this, I genuinely can't even imagine. And so I think this is going to be in so far as the Democrats are like going after him. I think this is going to be the angle that they come at him for.

50:52 We'll talk a little bit more about that and then one other non-election story. After this ad break.

51:11 And we're back.

51:13 So I wanted to talk a little bit about what I think needs to happen in order for this like massive upset midterm victory to like matter in the long term.

51:23 Right.

51:24 Because this is this is good. And we've all spent our day or two celebrating what's happened. And I'm very happy that the Republicans got their asses kicked so badly. But we've also seen over and over again that like just beating them in an election, even like one that makes them very sad, does not bring long lasting victory.

51:42 Right.

51:42 We remember 2020.

51:43 You know, that seemed like a good election. It seemed like things were going to. at least move away from the Trumpy stuff. And then it absolutely didn't. It got much worse in 2024. And part of why it got much more, big part of why it got much worse is the Biden administration did fucking nothing to punish Trump or any of his people for the crimes that they committed in office for January 6th, for any of that.

52:02 Merrick Garland completely shat the bed and he was allowed to shit the bed because that was what Biden and the people in charge of the Democratic Party wanted. They did not want to risk going after Trump in a serious way and being seen as penalizing their political enemies. And that's become such a bugbear in liberal politics that like, well, that's just not what we do here in America. We don't punish, we beat them in elections, but we don't go after. I think Hakeem Jeffries had a quote that was along the lines of like, the American people don't want.

52:34 Us to get even.

52:34 Yeah, they don't want us to get even. They want us to govern properly. And governing properly means- It's not even about getting even. It means punishing people for committing crimes against your society, right? The Trump administration, this is not just a case of, oh, well, these guys were bad at governing. They broke the law. Trump is repeatedly, like massively engaged in fraud to the tune of billions of dollars that he has stolen from taxpayers and taken in foreign bribes.

53:03 We know this.

53:04 It's well-documented. We know that under his leadership, the Department of Defense, the Department of War, whatever you want to fucking call them right now, have committed crimes overseas.

53:14 The war against Iran is definitely illegal.

53:17 There's a number of policies that fucking Hegseth has been responsible for that also should be seen as potentially criminal. In addition to this, you've just got the fact that there is a broader conspiracy among the tech elite.

53:30 To get rid of democracy.

53:33 And they've been pretty open about what they wanted to do, about the fact that they are looking to create a new governing structure that does not give regular people any sort of say, right? Peter Thiel is open about the fact that he wants dictatorships, a bunch of them, balkanizing the United States. All of these things shouldn't be allowed to just sort of sit there. One of the things that does really worry me is that there's been some evidence that I've come across in the last couple of days that prior to the midterms, some people in Silicon Valley were have been reaching out to Democrats, right? Because they can see which side their bread is buttered on.

54:05 They know that things are like, that this was a bad bet and that's proven to be a bad bet by 2026. And they need some Democrats on their side because they want the government on their side. And like we, there's a lot of things we can't allow. We can't allow Trump to get away without accountability. We can't allow his kids to get away without accountability. We can't allow people like Pete Hegseth to get away without accountability. And we can't allow Silicon Valley to get away without accountability, right?

54:30 There need to be people in fucking cages, right?

54:33 At the very least, as the end result of this.

54:35 And that's not something I think is going to happen in the next year or two. But what they can do, what Congress can do right now, the House has the ability to subpoena and investigate. Democrats have certainly enough of a lead in Congress that they can start if they don't want to go for. And I can actually understand an argument for not trying to impeach Trump right now, given the fact that they tried a couple of times, although I kind of think they should try. But there are people they can't impeach, right? They can go after Hegseth, right?

54:59 They can go after RFK Jr.

55:00 right? Yeah.

55:13 Investigating SpaceX, investigating like fucking Anderson Horowitz. If I see stuff like that happening, if I see them at least trying to force RFK Jr. and Hegseth out of office, if I see them trying to prosecute Hegseth once he gets forced out, I will at least feel like, okay, maybe they're showing the kind of guts they need for 2028 to actually lead to a conclusive victory, right? because again, I don't think there's much of a possibility of punishing everyone who has broken the fucking law properly right now.

55:49 But I do believe there is the potential that if they start right now, and that if they begin that process, the Republicans have a lot more of an ability to obfuscate and interfere with that right now while they still have the presidency, while they still have the Supreme Court. But if the Democrats start fighting now and build that habit of fighting, then I will have a lot more faith that should they gain the executive branch, that they will start taking efforts to extend that and to make sure that we're actually properly punishing these people. Because again, it's not about even vengeance, not that vengeance doesn't feel good.

56:22 It's about self-defense. And the only real self-defense at this point is making sure that none of these people can ever get close to power again. And that doesn't just mean kicking them out of office. It means locking them up. It means doing worse in some cases because treason exists and there's a prescribed punishment for that. And it means taking away their fucking money, right? Especially when we come to the Silicon Valley, it means taking away every fucking ill-gotten dime they've gotten. And I think this is something that you can frame this in a way that does not sound like politics of vengeance to the average American conservative, right?

56:55 Because that's not the message you want. There's too fucking many of them for one thing. That's not the message that's going to win anything. I think the message that will win anything is if you talk to both your liberal, democratic, progressive constituency and the chunk of conservatives and centrists who have voted off and on for Trump but are not super committed far right and say, look, you are being hurt by these people. They have injured you. They have stolen from you. They have destroyed your livelihood. And we're going to not just hurt them for the sake of vengeance.

57:23 We're going to hurt them to take their money back. And redistribute it to things that can help you and that can fix and repair the systems that have been hurting you. That's not just, again, how you punish your enemy. That's how you build a long lasting coalition by showing that like, no, no, no. Number one, I'm not just going after people who piss me off politically. I'm going after enemies of the republic. I'm going after people who have hurt you and who have hurt all of us.

57:47 And I am going to stop them from being able to do that again. I'm going to punish them. I'm going to take what they've taken from you. And I'm going to give it back to the people. I think that's, That's a line that you can actually build a durable and loyal electorate over, right? One thing that Trump he airs should have taught Democrats is that vengeance is really good politics. People like being promised that you're going to fuck up someone who's hurting them. The big thing that the Trump administration does, they've just lied about who's causing the damage, about who's hurting Americans, about who's responsible for the problems in our society. They've blamed it on trans people, on migrants, on fucking Hollywood wokes or whatever. And that's

58:25 all fucking nonsense. But there are people who are continuing to cause tremendous damage to the average person in this country and to people all around the world.

58:33 And if you build a.

58:35 Politics of vengeance against the people who are actually destroying life itself, I think that's good politics. And it's also, again, just basic self-defense.

58:44 I think in terms of what the potential of this kind of politics is going forward, So one of one of the fascinating things about this election is that the Republicans were dealt this world historic ass kicking and the economy hasn't even collapsed yet.

59:00 That's the thing.

59:01 We we have not seen the bottom of the support for these guys.

59:06 Nope.

59:06 We still haven't seen that yet. Because they haven't had their 2008 yet. And that is coming. The day in which the AI bubble bursts is a thing that we are going to see. And if you are already set up and positioning yourselves as the people who are going after all of these Silicon Valley fascist freaks, who have been immiserating every single person in this country except for themselves and their narrow cadre of allies. And you are already doing that when everything blows up? That is an actual path to fundamentally changing the material balance of political forces in the US. Because those people are going to be, that is going to be the most vulnerable they have ever been since they came to power. is going to

59:52 be them in the position of, oh my God, we just blew up the entire global economy.

59:56 Yep.

59:57 And if you don't do the thing that Obama did, right, which was Obama went to the bankers after 2008 and told them, I'm the only thing standing between you and a guillotine.

1:00:05 Don't stand between them and a guillotine. Yeah. Right.

1:00:10 If you don't do that, and if you go after these people and destroy them, actually destroy them as a class, just like completely annihilate their ability to, Like materially affect politics, materially affect society. We can we can make this not happen again.

1:00:29 Yep. Yep.

1:00:30 Like there's a way to stop this.

1:00:32 And part of it is you have to fucking stomp these people out like embers on a fucking carpet.

1:00:39 Right.

1:00:39 Yeah. Like.

1:00:41 Anyway, so that's what I'll be looking for. If I see any signs at all that the Democrats are and I have seen some signs, at least in terms of like what people who have been elected and reelected have been have been stating recently. There are Democrats who want to do this right now. There's probably going to be a conflict within the Democratic Party about that.

1:01:00 Oh, yeah.

1:01:00 Right.

1:01:00 Like there's definitely going to be a conflict about like, should we do that? You can see that in what Hakeem Jeffries have said and how that sort of counters what people like Merkley have said.

1:01:09 There is definitely a debate between someone like Jeffries or even some things like Tallarico has been saying. Yeah. Tallarico said that he's, quote, not interested in retribution, is more interested on delivering economically for Texans, but has also talked about, quote, rooting out corruption.

1:01:23 Yep.

1:01:24 And I think the corruption angle is really the thing that can thread the affordability, cost of living stuff with the genuine need to punish the Trump administration and Trump himself for all of the stuff they've done the past two years. and this has been something we've been talking about a lot in our kind of privately in our own reactions to, to, to the results. Cause like one of my first reactions after seeing kind of the scale of the Democrats victory, the worst case scenario for me was that if Democrats get this huge mandate and then don't really do anything like material, like with it, if they just kind of coast on kind of bullshit, like performative anti-Trumpism doing like a here, like endless hearings or

1:02:06 kind of impeachments that go nowhere and, Because Democrats do really need to go after Trump, right? And they do need to shatter the mega movement, and they need to go after this federal administration, DHS, ICE, Department of War, right? And they need to do that while setting things up to take power in 2028 to then send even more of these fucks to prison. But I think this does have to be, I think, in tandem with also... doing the things they campaigned on, which is mostly on cost of living and affordability. Because I think if they don't at least put a focus on that, especially in like their messaging, but also that needs to be built on them actually doing real things. If that is not their focus,

1:02:48 and I think anything they do to hurt Trump could be seen as just like posturing. It could be seen as just trying to please liberal elites rather than like focusing on the concerns of people who cannot pay rent next month or can't afford groceries. So it is something that needs to, I think, be done carefully. And the anti-corruption aspect is, I think, the perfect way to tie these things together. Because the anti-corruption angle is a really easy way to talk about these economic and class issues, which is directly connected to all of the ways that Trump has been engaging in corruption to help his billionaire friends.

1:03:22 All the ways that Trump's sons have been doing insane corruption. Stuff that puts the Hunter Biden shit to absolute shame. Jared Kushner, all the ways that companies have been siphoning tons of money sent into DHS to set up these like private prisons. Like there's the level of corruption. We haven't even reported on it enough, frankly, on on this show.

1:03:44 But the level of corruption in the Trump administration is absolutely wild. And that's a very easy way to tie a four billion cost of living to the need to hold.

1:03:52 Yeah.

1:03:52 Trump accountable.

1:03:53 And I think beyond that, you also tie in the fact that fraud and scams have gotten so much massively worse. Silicon Valley is deeply tied. Fucking every AI company is complicit in massive fraud simply by making these models that are used to commit fraud on a massive scale.

1:04:11 Right.

1:04:12 Beyond that, every social media company is complicit in massive fraud, particularly meta. And then just beyond that, MLMs are the backbone in a lot of ways of Republican fundraising or one of the major backbones of Republican fundraising.

1:04:23 Well, Democratic fundraising, too, unfortunately.

1:04:26 And Democratic fundraising, unfortunately, too, which is why it's going to be hard to fucking go after them.

1:04:30 But we need to.

1:04:31 That's that's one of the fucking reservoirs of fascism in our goddamn society.

1:04:34 And we need to burn them out.

1:04:36 Yeah.

1:04:37 No, I think there's a way to do all that that doesn't get caught in this sort of like these ideas of like revenge or retribution, but just justice and accountability, which I think people will be able to buy into more, especially if it's coupled with delivering on economic issues. And this is something I think out of everyone, El-Sayed has kind of expressed this the most clearly in response to a question on Morning Joe. He laid out how to pursue efforts to hold the Trump admin accountable from investigations into what led to the war in Iran. how Doge totally destroyed the FDA.

1:05:10 We need to align everything we're doing with the goal of addressing the immediate pain that people are feeling at the pump, at the grocery store, in their lives. So there are investigations that are worth having. I want to understand exactly what led into the war in Iran. I think we need to understand exactly what that was.

1:05:27 Why?

1:05:28 Because it's costing us dearly in terms of the lives of our service men and women, in terms of the price of gas, in terms of the price of groceries. Similarly, you know, more niche story, but one that I've been paying attention to.

1:05:39 For a lot of reasons.

1:05:40 In Michigan, we were dodging lettuce all summer.

1:05:43 Why?

1:05:43 Because of a cyclosporiasis outbreak. And you think about that and you're like, OK, so what decisions were made to doge away the part of the FDA that is supposed to be the FDA?

1:05:52 Yeah.

1:05:53 Like make sure you're not eating lettuce that someone has defiled.

1:05:56 Right.

1:05:56 And then we ate, you know, people were eating that 8000 illnesses and the CDC's count was 2000 cases behind the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services count. I want to understand exactly what happened there so we can set up legislation to solve the problem. So long as people see our politics as being about this red versus blue retribution game, all of us collectively lose. If you are focused on addressing the ways that bad decisions were made so that you can solve them and then you solve them, that's where I think accountability has to stand.

1:06:27 It's funny because my kind of worst case scenario reaction was that, you know, Dems will just coast on performative anti-Trumpism. And if anything, I think pressure needs to be applied now maybe a bit more in the other direction. Now that I'm seeing more statements come out from senators-elect, there's a lot of focus on really trying to deliver on the affordability thing. And frankly, there might actually need to be some more outside pressure on really, really, really sticking it to Trump, DHS, Department of War. But I think there is a way to do both these things at the same time.

1:07:04 I think my other really big concern is that one of the structural problems of the Democratic Party is that in a similar way to the old Nationalist Party of China, the Kuomintang, the KMT, which was a party that had both Mao in it and also a huge block of China's landlords at the same time.

1:07:27 Yeah.

1:07:28 Where like you have like the most, like you have, you have the guy who is going to kill all the landlords and the landlords in the same party. And this is sort of the problem with like, with, with, with, you know, they're saying like delivering on affordability and the Republicans are saying this now, but like, OK, how are you actually doing that? Because the thing is, right, the people who the people who are making everything expensive and the people who are making it so you can't pay your rent in the grocery stores, like all the people who own those businesses, all of the people who like, you know, people who are driving rents up like they all make money and they're all friends of a bunch of people in the Democratic Party. And so I think

1:08:05 I think this is the other thing we're going to hit, which is there's going to be a battle over like okay, so we've all agreed we want price to go down, but how do you actually do that? What are the actual balance of class forces here? Because you're dealing with a situation where you have a movement that is based on working class anger that has delivered this victory, but then you have a party that is also, to a really, really significant extent, a representation of the people who are fucking over all of these workers. And that is, welcome to like the new terrain of class struggle, the 21st century.

1:08:42 No, I mean, it's exciting that we're even having these conversations more openly in a way that maybe we weren't 10 years ago. Something that like, you know, a lot of candidates did, or at least Tyler Rico did campaign on things like universal pre-K. Lots of candidates campaigned on ending, you know, wars, data center moratoriums, everything. these sort of like reforms, right, which will kind of chip away at certain things. But there are these like much larger issues.

1:09:07 And tackling corporate power is going to be, you know, bigger than just delivering universal child care, right? And that's something, both those things are things that the Tallarico campaign was based on. That was kind of his like, his initial kind of core agenda. plank was just like anti-corporatism. And once you're in office, you get hit with a lot of pressures that you don't get when you're just campaigning.

1:09:27 And that type of stuff usually slides away. The fact that Bernie is still kicking after 10 billion years is kind of shocking in a certain way.

1:09:36 Obama ran on getting rid of NAFTA.

1:09:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:09:39 And then spent his entire time in office trying to pass war-free trade deals. And then his solution to 2008 was to do robo-signing and just have the banks literally steal people's houses. Like, Yeah, this is the next fight.

1:09:51 This is the next scripted episode I am like working on. It's kind of is on this question because this doesn't mean that we just have to, you know, pray and hope and tweet blue sky post hard enough to keep Democrats to their promises or get them to fight capital. No, that requires real work and painful, painful work that we might not see the fruits of for a while. But I think there is momentum here and that momentum needs to continue. And there's even something, you know, this is more of like a non-reformist reform, but something like the Protect the Right to Organize Act, which is in the Senate, is gaining support. Even if that passes, right, that will strengthen the ability for workers to unionize in so many ways. Yeah.

1:10:29 Under tons of anti-union legislation from the past 70 years. And I think there is, you know, specific targeted things we can push for. to start kind of rolling this boulder further and further. But no, it's not going to be easy. It's not going to be quick. Do you want to, I guess, close by talking about some ways that people are doing things? Not in the electoral sense.

1:10:54 So let's talk about alternate ways to remove a president from office.

1:10:59 Yes.

1:11:00 Now, while the U.S. was having a very nice election, a bunch of other places in the world were doing other things. So let's begin with Paraguay in our dispatches from a world in revolt. So we have talked a lot on this show about about protests and the sort of uprisings that we've been seeing, how they've been this accumulation of economic grievances, right? There are these things where there are, you know, people's anger over worsening economic conditions and, you know, decades long neoliberal dismantlement of the education system.

1:11:32 Eventually a single event happens and it boils over into a mass protest. Now, While we've been talking about this, I said a few weeks ago, we have not seen the second kind of mass uprising yet, which is the kind of mass uprising sparked by the instant collapse of a national economy that either increases the price of bread by 300% or makes everyone unable to access their money.

1:11:50 And folks, we have our first the economy collapsed uprising that has very quickly removed the president of Paraguay. So let's talk about what's actually happening in Paraguay and how Right-wing President Santiago Pena is just gone. This is actually a very recent update. As of Thursday, November 5th, he just resigned. So massive, massive protests engulfed Paraguay after a bank called Unil Bank, which is used by 60% of the population of Paraguay, was taken over by the central bank because they didn't have enough money to cover their reserves.

1:12:32 Which is to say they didn't have enough money to cover the amount of money that everyone had put into the bank. This means that the bank is just sort of gone now, right? All the branches are shuttered. Their phone trees are down. And this means that an unfathomable percentage of Paraguay's population was left simply unable to withdraw their money from a bank.

1:12:54 Famously, something that never leads to anything bad happening. Or anything that leads to a general revolt. However bad you think this is, it is so much worse than that. Like, UNEO manages the state pension fund.

1:13:08 It manages the healthcare fund that, like, state workers and I think other workers, too, pay into.

1:13:12 Yeah.

1:13:13 And it also manages the fund that's paying for Portugal's dam system. It is a nightmare. And partially, so UNEO had been a bank before that, but it had sort of rebranded around the time that right-wing president Santiago Pena came to power. Pena himself is a longtime baker and financier who came under fire last year for holding a bunch of shares in this bank. and then also appointing the head of UNEO to be the head of the central bank, which is the bank that's supposed to be regulating UNEO, and they put the president in charge of the central bank. This has gone exactly as well as you would expect it to, and by as well as you would expect it to, I mean, UNEO then turned around and loaned tens of millions of dollars to businesses

1:14:05 of friends of the bank owners, and these loans just went belly up, because obviously they were not getting paid back. And so, you know, the bank went like really, really far below the mandatory reserve limit, which is the amount of money that you're just legally required to have on hand so that you don't get into a situation where people try to take their money out. You can't pay them.

1:14:26 They were also lying about their debts and assets. And there's a bunch of things that they were claiming were assets that are actually just they owe people money. So the central bank of Paraguay seizes control of the bank because they're like, oh, my God, you're under the you're massively under the reserves limit. You're going underwater. They look at the books and it's even worse than they thought it was. And they basically liquidate the bank and are like, oh, my God, we have to sell off all this bank's assets to try to give people their money back. But this has caused another crisis where the government was like, ah, the bank system is going to be fine. We're going to move all your people who only have your money

1:14:56 in this bank to other banks. But that meant that like 250,000 people were trying to pull their money out of other banks, which caused like some minor crises in those banks. You know, this obviously resulted in massive protests, a bunch of people lighting stuff on fire. Right. Pena resigned before he could be impeached. There was an impeachment vote coming. He also resigned before he could be hung from a lamppost. It's real bad. This is, I think, an interesting case of the kind of personalized corruption that we've been talking about that, you know, with the Trump regime, with their connections to big tech and with their connections to, you know, like Saudis and the UAE and all of these kinds of different tech and finance monopolies where, you know,

1:15:38 you have these regimes that are deeply connected to extremely risky loans in the finance sector. And then it's just, you know, the entire situation blows up in their faces. And I think we're going to see a lot more of like this specific kind of uprising going forward where Pena is out so fast, right? I think he lasted like five days of protests before he just had to resign because it was his guys who he put in power from his specific domain of expertise as a banker who just blew up the entire economy. I think we're going to see a lot more of like this kind of uprising going forward. And yeah, you can remove presidents through ways that aren't elections. And to sort of close things out here, let's talk about another thing that's not

1:16:17 an election. And let's talk about, finally, that one million person Wildcat general strike that I teased at the beginning of the episode. And that strike is going on in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is home to one of the world's largest and most important textile sectors. This is also a very kind of like low wage, high labor textile industry. And it has been one of the engines of the Bangladeshi economy, which is to say that it is an engine of absolutely heinous exploitation. People may be familiar with the horrifying Rana Plaza collapse, which killed over a thousand people in 2013.

1:17:00 And a lot of people who were killed were garment workers who were working at one of the five garment factories that was contained in this giant skyscraper high-rise thing that collapsed. This is also a sector where The buildings frequently light on fire and kill a hundred people. It is brutal and devastating. And that has led to a really quite militant labor movement, but not a labor movement in the way that you see it in a lot of other places. It is a lot of wildcat strikes.

1:17:29 It is a lot of like kind of old school, like stuff you would say in like the 1800s in the US of just like, fuck it, we're all walking off the job and we're all going to go fight our employers because they're killing us. As of Thursday, November 5th, people seem to be going back to work to some extent, but there was almost a million workers either on strike or unable to go to work because the strike had closed 500 of Bangladesh's 2,500 garment factories. Now, the government has been forced to appoint a minimum wage board. The specific demand here is they want to pay increase they want the minimum wage, which a lot of these workers are minimum wage workers, to go from $ 100 a month to $ 250 a month because of cost of living increases.

1:18:19 And like, this is a sector of 4 million people. This is a sector that is the size of like a small country. And these are people making $ 100 a month. They are working 50 to 60 hour weeks. And if you want to work out Whether or not that's more than the $ 2. 50 a day that's supposed to be the absolute poverty indicator, you can work that out yourself. It's it's horrifically bleak and they're asking for something that's so far from the american minimum wage that it breaks my fucking heart like they're talking about like you know maybe like ten dollars a day like not an hour a day right and obviously purchasing power is stronger there it's not.

1:19:04 That much stronger.

1:19:06 It's weird because they're largely described as protests, but if you read the actual accounts of what's happening, it's like, no, this is a general strike and people setting up roadblocks. It's still in a situation where there's been very heavy police repression. We're still in a situation where these could spark up at any time. So the government said it was going to do this wage board thing to look at the minimum wage, but they haven't committed to raising the wage. And they're trying to set this for December when they're hoping that these protests will have calmed down.

1:19:33 and that the workers in this strike will have gone back to work. We're going to see how this goes. And finally, we're going to talk about, briefly, I want to mention, this is probably going to get covered more next week, which is that there's one more general strike in France, which is an official, I think it's a one-day general strike that was called by a bunch of the sort of nominally left-wing unions. I say nominally left-wing because you could do an entire doctoral thesis on every single time that the UGC has specifically prevented, like, the world from being a better place. But yeah, the estimate, this is happening like as kind of as we speak, the estimates I think are like 600,000 people in the streets.

1:20:12 The unions are saying 1.3 million, which is conceivable. This is obviously like, this is another sort of like cost of living strike. That's also being done in sort of concert with the student movement. The student movement has, you know, they're still in the streets fighting. We're going to see to what extent this can be mobilized and, Somewhat counterintuitively, Macron has been trying to make sure that protests are sponsored by unions because the unions are people he can negotiate with to get people out of the streets. And so he's been attempting to pass measures to make it illegal to have a protest that's not sponsored by an NGO or a union. So there is an extent to which this strike can function as a way to contain

1:20:51 the energy of these revolts and a way to channel them into politics that doesn't do anything, which is kind of the UGC specialty, is get everyone out of the This is their famous strategy in 1968. Yeah, but we're going to see where this goes. And also, presumably, there's going to be a bunch of more protests over the weekend.

1:21:12 We don't know yet. We're recording this on Thursday. But we will update you on whether Macron is hiding in a bunker again.

1:21:22 That does it for us today. It's time to stop thinking about voting for at least the weekend, which will be nice.

1:21:30 Put a trans girl on your couch, and remember, only six years ago, our president was also hiding in a bunker from us.

1:21:39 We reported the news.

1:21:41 We reported the news.

1:21:42 We reported the news. Thanks for listening.