00:00:00
so glenn greenwald i met taibi folks so by way of introduction the the i want to
00:00:10
just sort of tell the story of how this panel happened um it arose out of almost
00:00:15
a throwaway comment that jason made on an episode of the pod where he was talking about you know lining up
00:00:21
speakers for this event and he said that you know he was having a hard time getting liberals
00:00:27
and all he could find were like right wingers like uh glenn greenwald and matt taibi
00:00:34
and in terms of just just to explain their backgrounds a little bit you know matt
00:00:40
used to be the they're both independent journalists who write phenomenal columns on substack and
00:00:46
all of you should check it on subscribe and by the way they also do call-in shows on a phenomenal podcasting
00:00:52
platform you should all check out but but matt uh was sort of like the the left-wing fire brand for populist fire
00:01:01
brand on writing for rolling stone who back in 2009 was asking the question why the people who caused the great
00:01:08
financial crisis why no one was going to jail and glenn you know broke the snowden story
00:01:15
about how the government was engaging in mass surveillance on all of us and raising questions about the infringement
00:01:22
of our civil liberties so you know both these guys have i'd say uh you know well-established bonafides uh
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you know who used to be considered uh left-wing sort of liberal bonafides but now today
00:01:36
somehow they've been read out of what you would call liberalism today and so that comment that jason made sort of i
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think there's so much to unpack there on how that happened what does liberalism today mean if it
00:01:53
doesn't include you guys uh and and so that maybe that's the place to start is trying to understand
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what has happened in our politics that makes you guys not liberal anymore and what is liberalism and then what is
00:02:07
conservatism and are we even thinking about the political divide in our country the
00:02:12
right way if left versus right doesn't really capture it anymore so that was sort of the the the starting
00:02:21
point for this uh who wants to just react to anything i just said yeah well first of all it's of course
00:02:27
very gratifying to realize that your attendance at a conference is due to a throwaway line from
00:02:36
super honored to hear that that's the reason why we were invited [Music] [Music]
00:02:56
yeah you know it's interesting i guess we join a long list of other far-right luminaries like russell brand who has
00:03:03
spent the last 15 years as one of the most vocal devotees to the socialist jeremy corbyn he's now
00:03:10
also on the right and joe rogan who just 18 months ago said to millions of people that his favorite
00:03:17
candidate running for president was bernie sanders the socialist left-wing candidate
00:03:23
from vermont and even now elon musk who voted for barack obama in 2012 over mitt
00:03:30
romney and is one of the largest donors to the aclu sometimes somehow he's also on the far right so in
00:03:37
some sense it's just become a kind of punishing label that's designed to stigmatize or demonize anybody who in
00:03:45
any way descends from or diverges from liberal orthodoxy it's just kind of an enforcement or coercive label that has
00:03:52
no meaning just bereft of any actual substance but i think there's a broader dynamic underneath it all
00:04:00
which is that you know it is true that every five years ten years what was once an issue at the forefront of our debates
00:04:11
goes to the background and other issues go to the forefront so 10 years ago we were spending a lot of
00:04:16
time debating things like obama's drone program or guantanamo not being closed or as you said the work matt was doing
00:04:24
on you know derivatives and the fraud on wall street we don't talk much about that anymore we spend a lot of time now
00:04:29
talking instead about whether the internet should be this instrument of censorship and information
00:04:34
control um whether we should trust the u.s security state to dictate what is and is not
00:04:42
disinformation uh whether we should be involved in very similar kinds of proxy wars like we spent the cold war
00:04:50
doing over places like ukraine and so in one way it's natural that political alliances shift is different
00:04:57
issues go to the fore and alliances change as a result but i think something much more important is that liberalism
00:05:03
itself has changed largely by virtue of donald trump because liberals as a defining view maybe as an overarching
00:05:11
view maybe maybe democrats yeah by liberals i just mean kind of the mainstream wing of the democratic party
00:05:17
the way hillary you know hillary clinton calls herself progressive so again illustrating the bankruptcy of these
00:05:22
terms but by liberals i just mean kind of like the nancy pelosi barack obama hillary clinton chuck schumer wing
00:05:28
have come to believe that the overarching way to understand politics is that there's one
00:05:34
primary menace and risk to the united states which is donald trump his movement in
00:05:40
the republican party and it's not just that they have a bad ideology but that they're actual fascists trying to
00:05:45
instill a white nationalist dictatorship and if you actually believe that if that's something that you genuinely
00:05:51
believe on some level it becomes rational to start embracing authoritarian uh methods of resisting
00:05:58
that of combating that censoring um you know using due process free processes to punish
00:06:05
people and deprive them of their liberty and i think any time a political movement gets convinced that it is no
00:06:12
longer involved in a political debate but a historic war between pure good and pure
00:06:18
evil it starts to turn to authoritarian tactics to win because it believes that's justified or even necessary and
00:06:24
those authority authoritarian toxic happens to be the ones that the left traditionally had opposed and now are
00:06:31
embracing and i guess matt and i didn't decide that we were going to change our views of the
00:06:37
last 30 years about these issues and that has caused this organic breach not just between us two but you know others
00:06:43
like us and as i said anyone who finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically receives the far-right
00:06:49
label yeah um first of all i agree with all that and um you know for me it's even funnier
00:06:57
because uh prior to 2008 i would say that um i was sort of like the triumph the insult comic dog of journalism
00:07:07
uh basically my job at rolling stone was to throw off one-liners about republicans
00:07:14
my editors almost never sent me to a democratic function because they didn't want me
00:07:19
uh describing uh those events in in a colorful way let's put it that way so i got
00:07:25
i got sent to a lot of events um where people like sarah palin or fred thompson or mike huckabee would be speaking i
00:07:33
actually won a national magazine award for a column about huckabee called my favorite nut job
00:07:42
and um but then after 2008 uh after obama got elected they assigned me to do a story one story about uh the
00:07:54
2008 financial crisis essentially with the idea of explaining it in terms of people who are not financial
00:08:01
professionals could understand so i did one story that was really about aig and we got
00:08:08
this overwhelming response that we'd never gotten before from readers we'd never
00:08:13
heard from before and that led to me doing eight years of work instead of one story and one of the themes
00:08:22
that came out of that reporting was that in the sort of post-bailout economy the wealth gap was widening
00:08:32
and um you know i just read a statistic that said that during the obama years the bottom 99
00:08:39
saw their average wealth decreased by 4 900 whereas the top 1 percent saw its wealth
00:08:47
increase by an average of 4.9 million dollars and so you know i didn't make that much that
00:08:54
big of a deal of this in my reporting but when um 2016 came around um like in covering both the trump and
00:09:05
sanders campaigns it was abundantly clear that this widening wealth gap and the stress that it had placed on
00:09:15
populations on both the left and the right was a significant factor uh in this race
00:09:22
and when i started to write this in the context of covering trump rather than just doing the usual thing of
00:09:29
tossing off insults about the candidate um which is easy enough to do with trump
00:09:35
uh i started to say things like well there are reasons why he's succeeding he's attracting crowds that are not just the
00:09:43
usual republican crowds they're former union members here they have a lot in common with the
00:09:49
crowds who show up at bernie sanders events and i started to notice a distinctly
00:09:56
unpleasant reaction from people inside the business where it quickly became taboo to explain
00:10:04
donald trump in any way other than um this is a white supremacist movement and he's appealing to you know the
00:10:12
lowest common denominator uh through that kind of messaging now i i happen to believe that that's that was
00:10:19
part of certainly part of what was going on but it wasn't the whole explanation but i think trump is is the dividing
00:10:26
line of what you're talking about if if you if you don't have if you have a nuanced explanation for
00:10:33
donald trump um then you you can't be part of the club anymore because the uh the dominant narrative requires
00:10:44
that he be cartoonized um you know in the same way that we used to do it with figures like saddam hussein or putin now
00:10:53
you know we call it the hitler of the month club all right uh if you're not willing to just do that
00:11:00
and if you try to actually explain where all these voters coming from why are they upset
00:11:06
what went wrong that this would happen also known as the purpose of journalism yeah exactly right which is supposed to
00:11:11
be our job [Applause] i think both of us quickly learn that there that was not welcome
00:11:26
and you know after trump got elected i think that that instinct to uh crowd out anyone who was interested in going there
00:11:35
and trying to figure out what was wrong um that it caused uh 2016 you know suddenly became an apostate and by the
00:11:44
way that includes some politicians like you know bernie sanders i think was one of the people who was very interested in
00:11:50
examining what happened in 2016 uh and and i think that's one of the reasons why there was such a violent
00:11:59
reaction uh to his candidacy in both 2016 and 2020. so for me i think that's the dividing line
00:12:07
it's not like something's changed so much with liberalism or it's it's really about trump i think
00:12:15
and and journalism has adjusted it is you know we've gone from being people whose primary job is to be
00:12:24
curious about why things happen um to being advocates who believe that you know certain people have to be
00:12:31
opposed at all costs and even if that cost is you know a little bit of the truth or a
00:12:36
lot of it even so having ripped the empire jersey off their backs to basically stop the trump menace it seems
00:12:44
like journalism can't now go back to even a pretense of neutrality is that so what basically has happened now
00:12:51
i think so i think and i think you see that in in what hap what's happening with the ratings at cable stations
00:12:59
um you know i warned about this in 2016 and i i wrote a column in the in that summer saying that a model where
00:13:08
basically right-wing media wrote about the evils of the democratic party and blue media wrote about the evils of the
00:13:15
republican party um that that just wouldn't work audience wise because audiences would no longer
00:13:22
trust either uh source to be objective and to report the facts and i think that's where we
00:13:28
are now like we see the declining um the declining ratings of of companies like cnn and msnbc
00:13:38
uh which were previously thought of as more kind of down the road down the middle of the road news agencies and now
00:13:45
are thought of as politicized and they're having a terrible trouble kind of going back because once you
00:13:51
cross that line into politics um you can't get your reputation back as a neutral fact finder anymore yeah i think
00:13:59
people forget what things were like before trump since he's such a you know kind of uh ubiquitous presence
00:14:06
as matt was saying and for me i you know he also defines and is responsible for most of the changes we're discussing but
00:14:14
back in 2015 most of these news organizations were on the brink of collapse every msnbc host was on the verge of
00:14:21
being fired you know a couple of months away from being fired because nobody was
00:14:25
watching the new york times had severe financial difficulty there was talk about whether they would have to declare
00:14:31
bankruptcy because their balance sheet was so drowning in debt and trump saved them all he saved the entire
00:14:39
industry they all owed their jobs their second homes the ability to pay off their irs debt to donald trump
00:14:48
because you can trace his emergence on the scene to when people started watching those programs again and what
00:14:53
they did was they rebranded as the resistance to donald trump and they sacrificed any even pretense of
00:15:03
journalistic function they know if you and you just look at polling data that 95 of the people who watch msnbc and 93
00:15:11
of the people who read the new york times and trust it identify as democrats um so there's a completely polarized
00:15:18
media you know one of the kind of non-media examples is the aclu there was an article in 2015 in the aclu about the
00:15:25
aclu and the washington post that they were mass layoffs had to engage in mass layoffs of their staff because they had
00:15:30
no money trump gets inaugurated they start tweeting you know every day we'll see
00:15:35
you in court mr trump and like stimulating the you know kind of g-zones of every
00:15:40
liberal and suddenly they're drowning in money like millions and millions of dollars you know like
00:15:47
building like the asclu you know it's always financially struggled and as a result they're completely captive now to
00:15:54
that kind of an audience you know i have a friend i guess i had a friend um who was
00:16:00
a host of an msnbc show and they once told me that they don't get show by show ratings
00:16:06
they get segment by segment ratings and ever since trump they told me the minute you put on
00:16:13
anybody who's critical of the democratic party anyway you can just see the audience completely disappear
00:16:18
which you can imagine a person in that position what an enforcement mechanism that is to know that they have a salary
00:16:24
and kids and they need to pay for college and their mortgage and they know if they do anything that deviates at all
00:16:30
from democratic party doctrine they're going to lose their audience the new york times knows that the clu knows that
00:16:37
and so yeah i think they're all not it's not just that they've lost their credibility and can't get it back which
00:16:41
is absolutely true as matt said it's also that they're now captive to this kind of
00:16:46
uh prison cell that they built for themselves chasing the sugar high that trump provided
00:16:52
just really quickly i got to tell the story in the middle of all this phenomenon reporters were arguing about
00:16:59
whether or not we should be covering them less because maybe we had helped him get the nomination uh you know i covered
00:17:05
trump's campaign and this was a a hot topic in on the bus at the time um but then it was sort of decided that now
00:17:13
he's just making us all so much money let's just let's just go with it and uh i remember being in indianapolis when
00:17:22
trump sewed up the um the nomination by beating crews who still had a mathematical chance of
00:17:28
winning i guess if he had done well there but trump if you remember during that particular race accused
00:17:35
cruz of being the zodiac killer uh which was hilarious because cruz was born two
00:17:43
years after the killings ended so but there was one reporter i know who who actually uh got the nerve up to ask
00:17:52
i i believe it was i believe it was cruz's wife about about the the accusations like
00:17:59
what do you have to say to the idea that uh you know that you know your your husband
00:18:04
is this is a zodiac killer and he's telling me the story about this afterwards and he goes you know i felt
00:18:10
so dirty doing it but i also felt so great so i think that's where they were they were
00:18:18
in that space for a long time the media the media and trump had a weird codependent relationship
00:18:25
just in terms of trying to appeal to people out there who may not be trump fans or to get through them on this
00:18:31
point it just seems to me that when you lose an election anytime and you lose an
00:18:36
election as a party you need to analyze what went wrong and especially when the candidate is a complete political novice
00:18:45
with no you know no prior experience and had so many attributes that historically were
00:18:50
considered extreme negatives and it seems to me that if you're just to look at what happened in 2016 trump
00:18:57
was able to ride a few key issues all the way to the white house one was these you know foreign wars these
00:19:04
interventions that we've had in afghanistan iraq syria libya that were disasters we hadn't gotten out of
00:19:10
afghanistan yet but it was on its way to being a historic 20-year failure he shattered the republican party with that
00:19:17
message no more bushes he then took the issue of trade and basically broke down the democrats
00:19:26
blue wall and the rust belt by basically pointing out the ways that our trade our
00:19:30
bipartisan trade policy just like our bipartisan uh foreign you know our war policy
00:19:36
had led to uh the de-industrialization of the of the rust belt and then he also used the immigra the
00:19:44
issue of immigration which was sort of closely related to that idea of creating wage pressure on the working class so
00:19:50
you would think that having rode those issues all the way to the white house that there would be some
00:19:55
sort of reappraisal and instead it seems like what the elite did to protect itself
00:20:02
was create these mythologies that trump somehow got elected not because the people of the country were fed up
00:20:10
with the way that it had been run for 20 years by both parties but rather because the russians somehow
00:20:16
were behind it or or the country was shot through with white supremacy and that somehow
00:20:22
explained it um and so we never really got a true uh sort of accounting or reappraisal of
00:20:31
what trump's election meant and instead the media turned to like this hysteria this mode that we're not even out of yet
00:20:40
your reactions to that no i think you know it's one of the most amazing things about the 2016 election which is first
00:20:46
of all you know in a lot of ways barack obama being this kind of once in a generation political talent papered
00:20:53
over the the incredibly serious systemic problems the democrats had even while he
00:20:59
was being re-elected underneath obama and all his glitter and glamour the democratic party was collapsing they
00:21:05
were losing state houses and congressional seats and governorships all over the country
00:21:10
and the reason for that is the anger the growing anger with the neoliberal policies that the democratic
00:21:17
party in the early 1990s had decided to embrace in lieu of the working-class politics for which they had always been
00:21:22
known the kind of clintoniae pronouncement that the democratic party needs to start embracing corporate
00:21:29
america instead of unions that it needs to move much closer to these politicist politics that says you know we're going
00:21:36
to encourage corporate america we're going to embrace the pentagon and all of that and it
00:21:43
radically changed the the democratic party into this party of technocracy and the elites culminating with the obama
00:21:49
presidency and the only and what is amazing is in 2016 the democrats lost the white house
00:21:58
to a game show host and so you would think they would wonder why that happened as you were saying
00:22:05
right you would think they would wonder what is it about us that caused us to lose to donald trump
00:22:12
and instead they invented this long list of people that they decided were to blame instead vladimir putin principally
00:22:17
wikileaks jill stein for having the audacity to continue to run for president you know a whole long list of
00:22:23
villains essentially everybody except themselves and the people who are responsible for it
00:22:28
and and and i think the the most toxic narrative is the one that said the only reason trump won
00:22:35
was because the country is radically and fundamentally racist and he capitalized
00:22:40
on that and what's so amazing about that is there are literally millions of voters
00:22:46
in excess of 10 million depending on how you count but definitely in excess of 10 million
00:22:52
voters who twice voted for barack obama in 2008 and 12 and then in 2016 voted for donald trump
00:23:01
there are increasing numbers of non-white voters all over the country moving to the republican party under
00:23:09
trump and voting increasingly for trump you had a larger share of black voters latino voters asian-american voters than
00:23:15
any republican candidate and decades and those trends are only worsening and so you have this media that has
00:23:24
no interest in and no ability to understand how the majority of people in the united states live because their
00:23:30
lives are completely separate lived in these isolated enclaves in this kind of liberal bubble and you know just today
00:23:37
there was this amazing uh article by rolling stone it was about what most of you have probably heard
00:23:43
which was this horrific uh mass murder in buffalo where an 18 year old white kid feeding on this kind
00:23:51
of ideology of racial hatred that has become fringe but very dangerous around the west
00:23:59
went into a store that he knew was predominantly black and shot as many people as he could killing 10 of them
00:24:05
and then our the article by rolling stone that was published this morning was he is not a lone wolf shooter he is a
00:24:13
mainstream republican so i think all of you should be very careful because you're currently in a
00:24:19
country where half of the people in this country apparently are psychotic nazis on the verge of like some sort of mass
00:24:26
murder outbreak including huge numbers of non-white americans who are supporters of
00:24:32
the republican party and the more you kind of immerse yourself in an instant in a set of institutional
00:24:39
beliefs and a kind of ethos of your enclave you know just constantly hearing a belief reinforced
00:24:46
and reinforced the more you believe it the more you're immersed in it the more immune you become to facts that negate
00:24:52
it and so that's the reason why the media is so incurious because they've embraced this narrative that the only
00:25:00
reason anyone would vote for republicans the only reason anyone would vote for trump is because they're racist or their
00:25:05
fascists or their white supremacist and it's left them completely unable to grapple with things like 10 million
00:25:13
people voting twice for obama and then for trump or the fact is matt alluded to there were all kinds of people in 2016
00:25:20
who if you ask them they would say yeah i have two favorite candidates this year and you'd say who are they and they
00:25:26
would say bernie sanders and donald trump to a working journalist most most working journalists are pundits or
00:25:34
political operatives that makes no sense they can't comprehend that because they
00:25:37
see the world through this traditional left right prism that for increasing sections of the country i would argue a
00:25:43
majority is no longer applicable is no longer how they see the world and this is so
00:25:49
dangerous when you have this radical breach between the opinion making journalistic class and elite
00:25:57
class on the one hand and most of the population on the other they just live completely different
00:26:02
lives work with a completely set of of beliefs about the world have completely different sets of interests and if you
00:26:08
look at countries throughout history where that has happened where there's been this complete divergence between
00:26:14
the people who hold power in the country and the rest of the country over whom they exercise that power
00:26:20
instability at best and usually much worse things inevitably arise and i really think that's the point that we're
00:26:27
at just quickly to um piggyback on that the one of the big stories that went uncovered and and continues to go
00:26:36
uncovered is the transformation of the democratic electorate um the last time i looked at this
00:26:43
41 of the richest 50 congressional districts in america had democrats in those seats and all of the top ten
00:26:54
richest districts were won by democrats whereas as recently as 1992 the split was more like 50 50.
00:27:05
you know if you if you live in an affluent suburb the overwhelming majority of the voters
00:27:12
are there are going to be democrats now and the big divide in american politics is no longer about ideology it's
00:27:20
significantly about income and even more education uh it's a split between people
00:27:27
who have high school degrees or less and people who are college educated and this is one of the reasons why
00:27:35
donald trump was was so effusive and saying i love the poorly educated because you know they vote for him
00:27:41
but this is a this is another taboo subject nobody likes to talk about this because it speaks to
00:27:46
a transformation that happened in the democratic party that began i think with clinton
00:27:51
when you know they went away from relying on unions for financial support um you know the dlc's big strategic
00:28:01
idea was let's be more competitive on the fundraising front by um you know being more pro-business or
00:28:09
pro-growth that was the term that they used a lot and you know a couple of decades later
00:28:14
what we what you end up with is a party that no longer has any real organic connection to to working people of any
00:28:22
kind and so you know i think i think that's that's a massive factor in all of this
00:28:28
is that in the reporting on class politics has become taboo um all you have to do is is go to a donald trump
00:28:35
event and you can you can see it clearly uh that the the composition of the crowds is vastly
00:28:41
different from what you see at a democratic event and that's one of the reasons why they hated the media because
00:28:46
they saw us as upper class representatives of the coastal elite who all live in new york la and washington
00:28:55
which is true for the most part and you know it it got increasingly hostile as as time went on and that's why trump was
00:29:03
scoring so many points going after us because we were symbols of the upper class and
00:29:09
um that's another reason why i think the the the divide is no longer neatly between left and right anymore it's it
00:29:16
has a lot more to do with class than i never did before okay david i'm over here to your hey i know you
00:29:22
wanted to take a question or two from the audience as we were sure yeah let's take some questions and i thought i
00:29:26
would kick it off great discussion about the left um moving really far left and taking advantage of
00:29:34
uh the trump bump in their ratings i'm curious you kind of left out fox news kind of mastering and rupert murdoch
00:29:41
they kind of created this playbook in a way and the left copied it isn't that basically how it happened they people
00:29:48
saw wow fox media is just making so much fox news if it was making so much money by
00:29:54
picking a side that the new york times and msnbc etc all just said you know what we might as well pick the other
00:30:00
side and just take this playbook and get the money that's kind of what happened isn't it
00:30:05
yeah i mean i wrote a book about this called hate inc um which yeah that's basically basically the thesis is that
00:30:12
fox pioneered a new way to make money in media which is sort of like the audience
00:30:17
optimization model like you you pick a group um a demographic and then you try to
00:30:22
dominate it by feeding it news that you know that those people are going to respond to
00:30:27
that that was never the the way things worked before for an ordinary news agency they
00:30:32
would they would just cover what they thought was important and you know try to do that has anybody stayed neutral
00:30:38
matt i mean like if you look at reuters or ap it's clear the new york times msnbc they've just gone full subscribe
00:30:45
to us if you hate trump you know we're going to give you what you want but is there anybody in the
00:30:50
middle still man well i think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing sub stack do well right is
00:30:56
it's not so much that it's left or right or it's just that there's most people are not partisans most
00:31:04
people live somewhere in the middle right and and have opinions that are all over the place and
00:31:10
they cannot stand turning on the television and knowing exactly what they're going to say ahead of time and
00:31:17
so they're looking for someplace that's that's different where you have differences of opinion and that's that's
00:31:22
why i think independent media is doing better than ever i mean the most influential person in in media even
00:31:28
though the the part of the media never talks about him because he's not part of them is without
00:31:36
question joe rogan he speaks to more people who are under you know 85 years old which is the cable audience than
00:31:44
anybody on television by far and it's because as matt just said you cannot pin him down ideologically nor is he does he
00:31:52
have fealty to any one political faction or certainly to any political party he's
00:31:57
just a curious person sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right and sometimes neither exactly like most
00:32:03
americans i mean it's such a great point glenn and in fact if you were going to pin him if you just looked at how he
00:32:10
voted he'd be a democrat and the fact that the democrats have joe rogan and elon musk having been
00:32:17
their supporters and voting for them for decades and they're too stupid to pull them into their party
00:32:24
is just sure if they do the opposite they say no joe rogan we know that you love
00:32:29
bernie sanders the most far-left candidate ever to be viable in decades but even though you love him we're going
00:32:34
to demand that you're our enemy and call you a far-right fanatic even though you
00:32:39
don't think you are yeah we're going to demand that bernie sanders renounce joe rogan's endorsement
00:32:48
that's our plan for winning the election exactly i mean sacks as much as you and i go at it with like
00:32:55
how absolutely horrific the republican party is i mean the democrats are so incompetent to not court the two most
00:33:04
influential people in america today joe rogan and elon musk i mean it's they're they're alienating them they're
00:33:12
radicalizing them away from them is it's even worse i mean is there any i mean sex is just flabbergasted but is there
00:33:18
any way glenn you can comment on this and explain what you think the democrats are thinking
00:33:23
or are they just not thinking strategically about winning elections i you know i think i think in addition
00:33:29
to what you guys just talked about in terms of nbc or msnbc and cnn copying the model there has been a radical
00:33:36
change in the composition of the republican party ideologically because of trump not because trump is some sort
00:33:41
of like disciplined political theorist or deep thinker but because he ushered in as david was saying
00:33:48
earlier he ran in 2016 in opposition to bush cheney foreign policy in opposition
00:33:54
to reagan economics he railed against the power of large corporations at the expense of the working person something
00:34:00
you never would have heard from reagan but he also ushered in a lot of hostility toward agencies like the cia
00:34:07
and the nsa and the fbi something that had always been the province of the left and so now you have
00:34:13
an enormous amount of space open on the right for all kinds of views that had previously
00:34:19
been closed and i think there's just a lot more vibrancy on the right a lot more internal debate whereas in the
00:34:25
democratic party it's just a very much you're either with us or you're against us mindset and any deviation as we were
00:34:31
talked about at the beginning automatically results in them proclaiming either enemy which doesn't
00:34:35
seem like a very effective way of doing politics to me okay let's take a quick question from the audience let's talk
00:34:41
about elon behind his back before he joins what's your guys's take is he serious is he going to buy it and what
00:34:47
is you know what do you think the fallout's going to be you know i don't know if he's going to buy it or not i
00:34:52
think that i haven't really gone into the details of that but what i do think is
00:34:56
fascinating is the reaction uh by people in media to even the proposition that he might
00:35:03
uh by twitter these are people who have been absolutely comfortable with you know a handful of people controlling uh
00:35:12
you know 95 to 98 percent of the media distribution in this country you know for years now
00:35:18
they never ever once complained about it at any time you ever complain about censorship they say oh that's not
00:35:24
censorship that this is a private platform they can do whatever they want uh that's that's always been the
00:35:30
response suddenly elon musk comes along and it's oh my god the the the threat of
00:35:35
an oligarch taking over a media platform what are we ever going to do there are columns like that in the washington post
00:35:42
which is owned by jeff bezos i mean exactly the idea and isn't the new york times run by a family
00:35:52
for that's not really that poor yeah five generations all right we'll take a final question from the audience
00:35:59
so i actually agree with a lot of what's been said here and one of my questions is you know we
00:36:05
were talking about is trump even ideologically a republican my question is as long as
00:36:10
one of them is winning the republicans or the democrats aren't both of them winning like do you guys have any
00:36:16
thoughts on that okay i didn't hear the quote as long as one as long as one of them the republicans or democrats are
00:36:21
winning are they collectively winning i guess shouldn't there be a third party i
00:36:25
mean isn't that the issue that we're it's such a binary polarized system i think uh glenn said in the middle that
00:36:32
we're really all more moderates that's my belief but uh just curious no it's i mean it's a great you know i think um
00:36:39
probably the worst media myth is that the two parties can never get along there's no more
00:36:45
bipartisanship they're so radically different they can't agree on anything when the reality is they agree on most
00:36:50
things this is that the only things we hear about are the times when they disagree
00:36:54
but overwhelmingly on foreign policy on economic policy obama himself said the two parties are essentially playing
00:37:01
within the 40-yard line so the entire rest of the playing field is basically not part of the political process
00:37:07
because they have the same fundamental beliefs and i think one of the reasons why trump was such a shock to the system
00:37:13
was not because the trump administration itself was a deviation from american political tradition it wasn't but
00:37:19
because some of the things he said like questioning nato and whether it has viability
00:37:24
was designed to undermine that bipartisan consensus but i think in general you're right that the
00:37:30
establishment wings of both parties are far more in agreement with one another than they are different um and i think
00:37:36
you're also right that as long as those two wings of each party continue to trade
00:37:42
power the rolling cost in the united states is is very happy all right let's give it up for glenn
00:37:48
mack thank you everybody let your winners ride rain man david said we open source it to the fans and
00:38:02
they've just gone crazy with it [Music] besties [Music] we need to get back [Music]
00:38:46
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