Midterm Reactions: You Have 1 Hour to Lib Out

Peter, Rhiannon and Michael discuss the Democrats’ midterms sweep, how the party needs to govern, how conservatives are coping, and more. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support. 5 to 4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Allison Rodgers. Leon Neyfakh provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our Sponsors: * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is close to an extinction level event for Republicans in many parts of the country, as we have seen probably in the last 100 years.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On today's special episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon and Michael are breaking down the midterm results, which have Republicans reeling and everyone on the left living out. The hosts will take you through the big races, dissect the narratives around voter motivations, discuss what Democrats must do now, and of course, talk through how this political paradigm shift could impact the court. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

• 0:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have drowned our civil rights like a blue wave drowning the nation. I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael.

• 1:02Michael Liroff?

  Hey, everybody.

• 1:03Peter Shamshiri?

  And from deep blue Texas, Rhiannon.

• 1:07Speaker 04

  I'm living out. I

• 1:10Peter Shamshiri?

  I wish you all could have seen the state of shock, of actual physical shock that Rhiannon was in last night, as she experienced for the first time in her life, a full live out.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  He's been governor. I know we're gonna get into it. He's been governor for 12 years.

• 1:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 1:28Speaker 04

  It's, I can feel my heart beat in my face.

• 1:32Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, it was watching her whole understanding of the world sort of implode too, though. Written all across her face. It was incredible.

• 1:40Speaker 04

  Well, we're gonna get to that. Yes, it was shocking. It was emotional. But has my entire view of American democracy changed in one night? Stay tuned.

• 1:49Peter Shamshiri?

  Stay tuned.

• 1:52Peter Shamshiri?

  No, I don't think that's what was happening, Ree, but certainly a gear was shifting. Something in your brain was shifting, and we were watching it on Zoom video on the Five to Four live election Zoom.

• 2:03Michael Liroff?

  With 300 subscribers.

• 2:05Peter Shamshiri?

  It was fascinating. It was medically fascinating to me to watch you go through it. Obviously, we are in the wake of the midterm elections, where the Democrats cleaned the fuck up in ways that were a little bit surprising. At the very least, they were sort of on one end of the plausible spectrum.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25Peter Shamshiri?

  And the big news, of course, is Texas going blue. Now, Ree, just walk us through it. Walk us through some of your feelings.

• 2:31Speaker 04

  Gosh, I hate to say it. My feelings are complicated. Obviously, like, I also feel like I am navigating like, blue wave, federal, national level politics, thinking about, like, what is possible? What is a win? What do we fight for now? What does a leftist movement, a leftist political apparatus, leftist masses, you know, what is there to demand right now? And what like is put forth as the vision, given the Democrats have this mandate? There's that, and I'm sure we're gonna get into that. Texas is like, it's still a little bit hard for me to understand. Every single statewide office went blue last night. Multiple very

• 3:12Speaker 04

  important judgeships, judicial positions in Texas state courts went blue last night. We'll get into the complicated nature of it all. Like, you know, is voting, does Democrats in leadership solve everything? Absolutely not. But like, locally, and I mean, like, the state of Texas local, there are real things in the short term that Democratic leadership can change, and it will really, really, really help people and like, help the situation. So I work at the University of Texas. So many students in the University of Texas system. The Board of Regents, you know, like, obviously nationwide, but Texas has been

• 3:55Speaker 04

  a leader in like, higher education transformation of the university, like, basically turning it into a right wing think tank. That happens because of the UT System Board of Regents. Those motherfuckers are appointed by the governor.

• 4:08Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 04

  And three of them are up for reappointment next year. Now, we have Gina Hinahosa, a former public school teacher, making these decisions. And frankly, I don't even think she should wait for when they're up for reappointment. I think she should fucking recall every single one of them and appoint who she wants her first day in office. She's already announced that she's gonna fire the Texas Education Agency Commissioner. I think that is an incredible net positive for the entire state. Then thinking about like, being part of a movement and community organizing over the past three years, in my situation for Palestine, obviously, and against genocide, it's like, you know, Texas has been investigating nonprofits, doing community justice work, immigrant justice work, racial justice work. Texas at the state

• 4:52Speaker 04

  level has been doing that. A Texas AG's office and the governor have been subpoenaing nonprofit organizations that like, support immigrants or whatever. I mean, across the board, so many of them. That not happening anymore is huge. There are things that are really tangible and real. And then I think you get to the demands, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But for example, I think Gina Hinahosa should end Operation Lone Star, which is like, $2 billion put into law enforcement, being staked out and militarizing our border. So there's big, big demands, and there's so much work to do. It's not a panacea, but it's huge. It's a different political landscape in Texas than has existed in the past 30-plus years, more than 30 years.

• 5:36Michael Liroff?

  I just wanted to build off what Rhiannon was saying about the AG and not like investigating these nonprofits and civil organizations and whatnot.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:46Michael Liroff?

  Texas is a major part of, at the federal level, like RAGA and the push in federal courts for the Republican agenda.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Republican Attorneys General Association, yeah.

• 5:56Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, they're the ones also who are like, trying to get records from out of state doctors and hospitals on like, Mifepristone, mail order abortion pills.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:06Michael Liroff?

  I believe they're also maybe trying to do stuff with, with trans kids' records as well.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:12Michael Liroff?

  You know, you can expect those to stop right there. And that's an immediate net benefit to the country. Those cases will be dismissed.

• 6:19Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I mean, the immediate benefit is that a lot of, a lot of these Republican operations, political operations, just immediately stop.

• 6:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:24Peter Shamshiri?

  And I mean, you know, there were trans people online yesterday being like, I was gonna flee the state, and now I'm not. Just like, immediate on the ground changes.

• 6:32Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Speaker 04

  Right. Or people with trans kids who were like, I was watching this, and we were gonna decide whether or not we needed to move or not.

• 6:39Peter Shamshiri?

  And to add on to what you're saying, Ree, I would imagine that the landscape shift is so considerable, in part because activist organizations in states like Texas are built to fight a big red machine. They're not organizations that are used to operating in a democratic controlled state, which requires different tactics, et cetera. In many ways, it's like a, this enormous weight being lifted off them. But in others, it's just sort of like, you need to sort of change your strategy. You're moving differently vis a vis the government.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And like, it has to be about action, and it has to be about receptiveness to a political vision that isn't just, we're not the bad guys. Like, we can, we can feel good now. Like, that's, that's actually not enough. The state of Texas invests so much money in Israel. Israeli private corporations right now are working on state government contracts to build desalination plants in the Gulf of Mexico off of Corpus Christi. Like, there's big stuff that like, a Texas blue government, a Texas blue-led government needs to actually step up on in real material ways and be brave and visionary. And obviously, that's connected to like, a federal blue wave as well, and like, what's gonna happen nationally, you know?

• 7:56Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Michael Liroff?

  One more thing that that needs to happen, I think, is the Dem who won Attorney General ran on investigating Musk's move to Texas and corruption involved in like, the sort of sweetheart deals he got. And like, he needs to follow through on that.

• 8:11Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 04

  That's what I'm talking about. Get Elon Musk the fuck out of Brownsville. We have the state house. Repeal the state abortion ban now, day one. Do it.

• 8:20Peter Shamshiri?

  So obviously, Texas is the big news, but news across the country. Michael, do you wanna just rip through the big races?

• 8:28Michael Liroff?

  Oh, for sure. Starting again in Texas, though, it's worth saying that Talarico, his margin is much bigger than what you'd expect in a Democrat plus 13 environment, which is what the national popular vote is at right now. And across the board, the Texas margins seem like bigger than the blue wave.

• 8:46Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, he's, he's plus 12.

• 8:48Michael Liroff?

  Right. Where it used to be plus 13 for Trump, right? So that's like a 25-point turnaround. So you wonder if these changes might be more durable than just in a big wave election, if something shifted. Maybe, maybe not. We'll see. You go to Georgia, where Jon Ossoff won reelection by like, a 20-point margin. Insane numbers for Democrat in Georgia.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:08Michael Liroff?

  And just as importantly, Keisha Lance Bottom won the governorship, which means in 2028, in what is expected to be a big swing state, where in the past, Trump has put pressure on the state government to deny certification of the electoral votes, there will be a Democratic governor. And in fact, I think there's gonna be a Democratic governor in every swing state from the last two election cycles. Arizona, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Ohio, Michigan, just across the board. So that's great. That's like, all like fantastic news. In the Senate, you also had Democrats winning in South Carolina, out of nowhere?

• 9:49Michael Liroff?

  What the fuck? Abdul El-Sayed won in Michigan. Fuck yeah. Fuck you, Haley Stevens.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And look, obviously, Haley Stevens is our personal friend, but we do not agree with her politics.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Can we just say, yeah, I think we do need to state publicly that we disagree with her moves here.

• 10:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, and that's what's great about friendship. You can still be friends, even though you have these disagreements.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  Oh, biggest political dumbass in our era, huh?

• 10:18Peter Shamshiri?

  One of the all time great dipshits.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  Ally, please, go on.

• 10:23Peter Shamshiri?

  Chime in.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  Earlier, I was like trying to study for the episode and I was trying to listen to advisory opinions. They spent 15 minutes praising Haley.

• 10:31Peter Shamshiri?

  No, Ally, I've repeatedly told you that you do not have to listen to advisory opinions. That is not part of this job and I don't want you, I don't want you to like move on from this job in a few years and be like, they made me listen to advisory opinions.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  No, I'm actually training for my next job because they're looking for a producer. And they're looking for a producer and, okay, but they spent 15 minutes being like, this is what we want out of politicians.

• 10:53Peter Shamshiri?

  We want them to just be mentally ill. We want them to have public breakdowns where they absolutely lose their minds, completely flip flop on all the issues they said were important to them and endorse a Republican who is an open bigot. That's politics. That's the beauty of politics.

• 11:15Speaker 04

  An open bigot who wants a national abortion ban, who wants mass mandatory detention of immigrants. This is being, is being, is sticking to your principles, right? To take $30 million from AIPAC in your primary.

• 11:29Peter Shamshiri?

  And you should go on Anderson Cooper and you should make the craziest faces of all time. And you should swish water around in your mouth while you're answering questions. Politics, that's what politics is. That is the beauty of democracy. 1776, you know, it's, it's the spirit of the nation is running through it, right? Ball eagle crying, folks.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  This morning, somebody interviewed her and she was like, it's a great time to be a Democrat.

• 11:58Michael Liroff?

  Say anything's happening.

• 12:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Oh, God. All right. So Abdul in Michigan, Susan Collins L. in Maine.

• 12:06Michael Liroff?

  Goodbye.

• 12:07Peter Shamshiri?

  Later, later.

• 12:08Speaker 04

  30 years in the Senate.

• 12:10Peter Shamshiri?

  One very quick thing about Michigan. That was the most openly racist, Islamophobic campaign that we have ever seen. Not even close. 25 years ago, that would have worked. And watching it fall on its face shifted my brain one gear in a direction that I didn't know it could go. I've always said that like Islamophobia, anti Middle Eastern bigotry is something that has really never gone away. And it, and has, there's never been any cultural reckoning with it post nine 11.

• 12:48Peter Shamshiri?

  And watching these despicable, disgusting pieces of shit in Michigan fail was very satisfying to me.

• 12:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was good.

• 12:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. I almost posted a joke about him just going like, hey, just kidding, you do have to say my whole name. And then he said his whole name in the speech and I was like, oh shit.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  He said his whole name, role in those hours, fully in Arabic pronunciation. Said, I'm changing my Inshallahs, which means God, God willing, I win, changing it to Alhamdulillah, which means thank God, praise be to God for the win. I just, you know, I'm not like a, obviously like just representation isn't going to save us. There are plenty, plenty of politically bad Muslims in this country who I would not want representing me. But to have faced and is, and like Islamophobic attacks like that, and then to have that like in your victory, a hijabi wife. And this is, I don't know, it's, it's really meaningful.

• 13:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. And I mean, a lot of people who are well meaning have faced attacks along those lines. And tried to concede a bit, you know, of, of who they are.

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 13:57Peter Shamshiri?

  And watching him stand tall made me feel good.

• 14:00Michael Liroff?

  We got to talk about Mississippi, where Scott Cologne, at the time of this recording, appears poised to win. He has a narrow lead, but there are not many votes left to count. This was out of nowhere, completely ignored by like the national party, the national press, everyone. Cool story about this guy. He was Biden's nominee to be a district court judge in Mississippi. And Hyde Smith, the Republican incumbent, withheld her blue slip so he could not be put up for a vote.

• 14:30Speaker 04

  Thanks, Democrats.

• 14:31Michael Liroff?

  Mistake, appears to be a huge mistake.

• 14:35Peter Shamshiri?

  Accidentally elevated your opponent. Uh, yeah, can't be doing that.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  But Michael, Mississippi, you have to say the quirk about Mississippi with a very close race like this. People are like, oh my God, is it going to go to a recount?

• 14:49Peter Shamshiri?

  So the margin right now, just under 2,000 votes, is that right?

• 14:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:53Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Peter Shamshiri?

  Okay, okay. And you would think, folks, recount time, right? That's what I thought when I heard this.

• 15:02Michael Liroff?

  But it turns out the state of Mississippi is the only state in the Union that does not have any statutory provisions for a recount. Instead, they allow you to petition to like examine ballots, to go into ballot boxes and look at them, which presumably is to gather evidence for the jury trial they provide for.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  The only way to resolve this.

• 15:29Michael Liroff?

  Is a jury trial to decide who got more votes.

• 15:32Peter Shamshiri?

  The only way that this is resolved in Mississippi, folks, is a jury trial. I cannot tell you, if there is a jury trial for a Mississippi Senate seat, folks, I'm going to be in the fucking, I'm going to be in the fucking gallery.

• 15:48Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh, field trip, 5-4 field trip to Mississippi for the trial, the recount trial.

• 15:53Michael Liroff?

  A hundred percent.

• 15:54Peter Shamshiri?

  If there's one thing on this earth that could get me to travel to Mississippi, it's going to be the recount jury trial. Let's get 12 morons on the case, folks. Who wins the Senate, Democrats or Republicans? Let's get 12 of the dumbest motherfuckers of all time. Let's go, baby.

• 16:13Michael Liroff?

  I will say, it would be very fun to watch. There are some questions as to whether it would actually be binding because Article 1 of the Constitution says the chambers are the final arbiters of who they seat. And the Supreme Court has said that their decisions are non justiciable. So in theory, there's a world where like, say Cologne has more votes. There's a jury trial and jury trial, the jury says Hyde Smith wins. And then a Democratic controlled Senate says, that's nonsense. Like, that's like, that's a possibility, which would be fascinating and generate so much content for us. So much content for us.

• 16:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Please, we're running low on cases. It's time for some absolute lunacy in Mississippi.

• 17:00Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, what about, let's talk Alaska.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  Alaska, two Dan Sullivans plus two other people on the ticket.

• 17:07Peter Shamshiri?

  How many Dan Sullivans does it take to win Alaska?

• 17:10Speaker 04

  More than two, because they didn't.

• 17:13Michael Liroff?

  Again, at the time of this recording, Mary Potola, the Democratic nominee, is ahead. I think based on outstanding votes, she's predicted to remain ahead. But she does not have over 50%, which in Alaska means they will go through their ranked choice voting system. I believe the, the procedure is you drop off the last place finisher.

• 17:34Peter Shamshiri?

  Then you run it again.

• 17:35Michael Liroff?

  A portion of their voters' second choices, et cetera, et cetera, until somebody gets over 50%. So hard to know how ranked choice voting shakes out. But I think people are bullish based on exit polling and pre-election polling and all that about Potola's chance.

• 17:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Michael Liroff?

  I mean, the bullish predictions going into this were like 53 votes in the Senate. Most people thought it was like maybe 51, maybe Democrats don't even get in control. Now they're looking at 55 or 56 seats. Insane.

• 18:05Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Michael Liroff?

  Insane.

• 18:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Pretty wild, pretty wild stuff. Ally, you had asked us, what does this say about the electorate?

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I was listening to the radio and they were interviewing people in line and they were all complaining. They were just like, it's affordability, man. Stuff's too expensive.

• 18:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I think it's a combination of things. I don't think you should get over your skis and assume that the reason that this happened was the same reasons that you had.

• 18:33Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 18:34Peter Shamshiri?

  When you went to the polls. There is a very energized Democratic base, that is without question. Some big chunk of voters were animated by what they've seen the Trump administration do.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 18:48Peter Shamshiri?

  No question about that. Does that mean that that is what was driving the blue wave? My best guess is no, that it's a combination of factors, right? It seems to me like we're in a state of like semi-permanent thermostasis. That's a phrase I'm copyrighting. There's a theory of politics, it's like the thermostatic theory of of elections is basically when people are unhappy, they vote the bastards out. They vote against the incumbents. We're in an environment now where people have been unhappy since COVID, where people have been unhappy about prices, unhappy in sort of general ways, concerned about the future of the country, et cetera. And that catapulted Trump into office in 2024,

• 19:33Peter Shamshiri?

  and it's wiping out Republicans in 2026, right? The same phenomenon is sort of inverting itself and operating in different ways vis a vis the parties from year to year, depending on who's in power. I think that's a huge part of what's happening here. I don't think that's a reason to doom and gloom. That's always what's happening behind the scenes. People are concerned about their pocketbooks. The average person, if you interviewed them about the news, it would shock you how stupid they are. It would shock you how little they follow it relative to you. That is the reality of elections and always has been. It's nothing particularly new. So it's easy to look at that and say, well, then this isn't really a moral triumph of any kind, right? Which is sort of true to some degree.

• 20:16Peter Shamshiri?

  But on the other hand, it also means that 2024 wasn't the country, you know, rising up on behalf of fascism.

• 20:22Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 20:22Peter Shamshiri?

  It evens out a little bit. I think that's what's happening. I think it's a combination of how publicly awful the Trump administration has been and just how much the average person feels like they're getting squeezed.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  We actually don't need to interpret this kind of win as a moral win primarily, because then it's being too idealistic. And I mean, in terms of ideology, right? We're actually not in a world of just ideas competing against each other and ideas beating each other out. It's actually like material conditions. It's actually like what politics means for real people. And that's what is moving history. That's what's moving politics forwards, backwards, round and round in the United States. It's not like, well, my idea about this or my idea about what's going on. I mean, just to play this out a little bit, we were talking about this, you know, today, obviously, the day after Election Day, like online,

• 21:15Speaker 04

  whether it's Chuck Schumer, J.D. Vance, journalists, The New York Times, whoever, there's like this like back and forth about like, what was the issue? Is it affordability? Was it the war in Iran? Was it something, something? And I actually think that like going back and forth and to the extent there's like a debate about this, it's not like really helpful. It's not really insightful. I think you're right, Peter, that it's like, it's obviously a combination of things. Like when I go vote, it's about issues that matter to me. And when my neighbor goes and votes, it's about issues that matter to them. And whether that's like sort of highly educated and highly intellectual is not really the issue. It's just what fucking matters to people. The last thing I'll say about this too is that like,

• 21:57Speaker 04

  you can see the parties moving around this, both of them, Democratic Party and Republican Party, identifying for themselves what they want to label the top issue as. And you have to interpret that as like, they're putting a spin on it. This is the political narrative that they're telling about what happened in the election last night. So that, for example, maybe they can be a little bit vague. Democrats can say, yeah, it was about affordability. It's about like, you know, dinner table issues, bread and butter stuff, cost of living. But do they have a vision beyond that?

• 22:32Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 22:33Speaker 04

  Republicans can say, you know, it's like the war in Iran. Like our own party was conflicted on it. But Republicans then don't have to say, people in a mass way were disgusted by immigration enforcement over the past year or two years.

• 22:48Michael Liroff?

  And I think to that point, it's also, it's different issues, but sometimes different issues are also the same issue. You're worried about affordability, but part of that is the cost of diesel, the cost of gas, which in turn is influenced by the war in Iran. You're worried about affordability and you're seeing low-wage workers kidnapped off the street by masked men and whisked away and never seen again. And that informs how people think about affordability. It changes who they blame for things being unaffordable, like the tariffs, you know, unilateral tariffs. I think probably even the ballroom, again, if you're like, does Trump care about,

• 23:31Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 23:31Michael Liroff?

  you know, me getting squeezed? Here he is walking around rambling about like the marble in the ballroom. Like all that shit matters. So if somebody says affordability, that doesn't mean they don't care about anything else. It's all a gestalt. And like Rhiannon said, trying to make it one thing as a politician is just a way of avoiding talking about other things that maybe you don't want to talk about.

• 23:56Speaker 04

  It's vague posting.

• 23:57Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah. To build on this a little bit, the reason that you get into power is something that everyone gets so fixated on. What you actually need to be thinking about is what you're going to do.

• 24:08Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 24:08Peter Shamshiri?

  When you get out, right?

• 24:09Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 24:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Because the reason that the Democrats got into power right now is probably shockingly similar to the reason that the Republicans got into power in 2024. Did the Republicans sit around wringing their their hands about the scope of their mandate, trying to figure out what the public was voting for exactly?

• 24:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:28Peter Shamshiri?

  No, they staked their claim and they tried to do as much as they could to enact their agenda. The Democrats seem to think the exact same way, or they will lose when the tides of politics turn against them, which might happen for reasons that are out of their control.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  And another thing the Republicans didn't do when they had their big victories two years ago is immediately impose a ceiling on their base for what they were going to do, right? So you have Hakeem Jeffries already out today, talking about like, we don't need to get revenge. The American people don't want us to like get back at them for being bad actors.

• 25:04Michael Liroff?

  Wrong, wrong.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  You're an idiot.

• 25:06Peter Shamshiri?

  It's not even about what the American people want in that case. And, you know, I was discussing the Barack Obama post. Barack Obama said that the American people sent a clear message tonight. They want a politics that brings people together rather than divides them. That is not what's happening in America at all. And what I said was that the country has been made materially worse by people who are bigoted, who are violent, who are vindictive. And those people need to be brought low. Those people need to be disciplined, punished, and other people need to see it happen if you want them to stay out of power. A party that doesn't understand that is not going to wield its power effectively.

• 25:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:51Peter Shamshiri?

  The only other thing I want to say before we move on is it's really, really hard to try to like pull a clear narrative out of an election. But every pundit tries to do it. Every pundit tries to say like, here's why this just happened in two sentences, in one article, whatever. And they are basically always wrong, because it's always more complicated than that. If you're trying to also craft a little soundbite narrative of what just happened, you will probably be wrong. Now, what's easier to do, though, is to see which narratives fall apart completely when you look at what just happened, right? When Trump won in 2024 and everyone was like, oh, this is a rejection of woke ideology

• 26:36Peter Shamshiri?

  and trans rights. And this was people who want to see authoritarian immigration policy, people who want Trump to rule like a strong man. Those are the sorts of narratives that you saw flowing out of 2024. Remember that every pundit on earth was writing about the vibe shift? Don't things just feel fascist? Didn't the vibes just get fascist? Ezra Klein was talking about how people were potentially responding to the feminization of politics by Democrats, right?

• 27:08Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 27:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Those narratives have collapsed completely.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:11Peter Shamshiri?

  It can't be that all that was true in 2024 and now we've seen a 25-point swing

• 27:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:17Peter Shamshiri?

  in the other direction in 2026. That does not make sense. That is not what happened. And I think that's what you should sort of keep an eye on. It's not easy to figure out what just happened and sum it up real quick, but you can see who's wrong. You could see who's wrong pretty easily.

• 27:38Peter Shamshiri?

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• 28:22Peter Shamshiri?

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• 28:45Peter Shamshiri?

  Let's talk about what Democrats should do.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:48Peter Shamshiri?

  You know, wherever this lands, you're looking at a fat margin in the House.

• 28:53Michael Liroff?

  Something like 260 votes.

• 28:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 28:56Michael Liroff?

  You only need 218 to have majority. So we're talking a major, major cushion.

• 29:02Peter Shamshiri?

  You're looking at a 40 vote cushion in the House. You are looking at a 10 vote gap in the Senate. Senate gets a little complicated because of the filibuster, but you know, that's the environment. You know, we'll sort of put aside the state level stuff for the most part, but you obviously have, like in Texas, Democrats taking over at the state level in certain states, or at least gaining power at the state level. Texas and North Carolina are the big ones, but you're seeing it in various places. The question is like, what do they do with this power? You're not going to get legislation through. You don't have a filibuster proof majority. You're not going to overcome a veto in most situations. And so what does that leave you with? What does that leave you with at the federal level? The basic answer is oversight.

• 29:48Peter Shamshiri?

  You can grind a lot of Trump's policies to a halt. And you can engage in oversight that sort of brings Trump's people to heel, puts a little bit of the fear of God in them, right?

• 30:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 30:01Peter Shamshiri?

  Think about, like, we're doing investigations now. Think about what's going to happen when there's a Democrat in the White House. Think about what's going to happen to you. So that's sort of the primary role that the Democrats will be playing for the next couple of years. They will be sort of preventing the implementation of much of Trump's agenda, which is happening passively and is a very good thing. You might not always see it, but it's there. And then they will be conducting presumably public investigations into the administration. The fact that like Hakeem Jeffries is already like, we don't want revenge.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 30:33Peter Shamshiri?

  Barack Obama is already talking about unity means we might need to scream at these folks a little bit.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is unacceptable.

• 30:40Peter Shamshiri?

  There's only so much you can do. And if you're already like, ah, do we really want revenge?

• 30:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:45Peter Shamshiri?

  It's not revenge, it's fucking justice. It's not, when someone murders someone on the street, it's not revenge to prosecute them. It's, that's not what's happening that, you know, we're not talking about getting revenge on these ICE agents. Not talking about getting revenge on Stephen Miller. It's about justice and accountability.

• 31:03Michael Liroff?

  I will say, I don't think these guys have their hands on the tiller of the Democratic Party at this point, which is a good thing.

• 31:10Speaker 04

  You mean like a Chuck Schumer, a Hakeem Jeffries?

• 31:13Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, yeah. I think both, you see it with like, you know, the incoming class. You see Penny Flanagan in Minnesota, Senator-elect, being like, we're going to fucking demolish ICE. You see James Talarico in Texas being like, you can't move forward without accountability. There needs to be investigations. There needs to be accountability. You see it with incoming Chair of the House Oversight Committee being like, lawyer up, bitches.

• 31:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 31:41Michael Liroff?

  I think his actual statement was lawyer up. There, the caucus is, I think, a head of the leadership here.

• 31:51Peter Shamshiri?

  And I mean, a huge problem with the party over the last couple of decades is that the leadership is the right word bound of the party.

• 31:57Michael Liroff?

  Yes, yeah. The leadership sort of fetishizes their centrist members, who they believe have like some special ability to win swing voters, rather than just riding waves like this one, right? Like, let's be real, like, somebody who won in a plus five red district probably isn't some miracle worker. They just rode a huge wave.

• 32:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Michael Liroff?

  Right?

• 32:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:19Michael Liroff?

  Who cares what their political instincts are?

• 32:21Peter Shamshiri?

  And guess what?

• 32:21Michael Liroff?

  It doesn't really matter.

• 32:22Peter Shamshiri?

  If the wave swings back the other way, they're going to lose. Their political magic will not work.

• 32:26Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, no matter what, no matter how mavericky they are.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  I'm sort of desperately hoping that Democrats internalize this mandate for what it is, which is not just, we want you to be in the role, right? We want you to be filling the seat. We want blue guy to be filling the seat, not red guy. It's actually about like what this mass blue wave is communicating from people in the fucking only, basically the only channel of government accountability they're told they can communicate through, which is the vote, right? And, and what is actually being communicated? And what is actually being communicated is we want a party, limited as you might be by like a Senate structure, or how the House works, or the fact that Trump is the president,

• 33:13Speaker 04

  and you're staring down a veto, right? Whatever the fuck, you need to be acting like we are fucking coming for you. When Republicans are in power and the majority is slim, or whatever, or Democrats have a slim majority, they're still proposing big legislation and they fucking fight about it, tooth and nail. And that's what Democrats should be doing. You don't just like, look at the numbers and be like, well, he can veto and not do it. That's not what the American people are like, asking you to do right now, demanding of you. But I will say also, in terms of the internalization of the mandate, that doesn't just happen with the vote. And I know, like, we all sort of learned that that's the way you express your political views and what you want in your representatives is through the vote.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  But this is a dialectic relationship. The people that we just voted into power have to be held to account to do what we want them to do. So when we're talking about ICE, we have to demand, you need to defund ICE. I want to see the bills. I want to see the proposals.

• 34:16Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 04

  Day one, I want to see it in January. You need to be trying to do it.

• 34:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Not just that. I mean, there are things they can do right now, vis a vis ICE. I want names. I want names of every agent who's killed someone. Now, most of that stuff is public information in the sense that it has leaked. I want the government to say it.

• 34:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:32Peter Shamshiri?

  I want someone in the government to publish their name.

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 34:34Peter Shamshiri?

  And say that when the opportunity comes, we're going to prosecute. I want prosecutors in Minnesota, given the tools that they need, the information that they need to prosecute at the state level. That shit can happen now.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:46Michael Liroff?

  Yeah. And I think to that point of like, fighting tooth and nail, seeing yourself as agents in the government, not just like passive participants, not just seat warmers, but people who have agency and an agenda that they work towards. And to Peter's point about the importance of oversight, last time the Democrats were in this position and they engaged in oversight, they issued a bunch of subpoenas and got stoned by the administration.

• 35:17Peter Shamshiri?

  Stonewalled.

• 35:17Michael Liroff?

  What's that?

• 35:18Peter Shamshiri?

  Stonewalled.

• 35:19Michael Liroff?

  Stonewalled, yeah. Got stonewalled. Yeah. They got stonewalled by the administration, didn't want to give over tax records, didn't want to give testimony. And what Democrats did there was essentially go to court to enforce their subpoenas. And that was a loser strategy, it turns out, even though they won a bunch of those cases. They took so long.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 35:46Michael Liroff?

  That either the political moment had passed, or the entire moment had passed, right? Like, Trump was out of office when they were winning some of these cases. Like, who gives a shit?

• 35:55Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 35:56Michael Liroff?

  At that point. Congress has an inherent contempt power. This goes way back. And basically, the chamber can find someone in contempt, and the sergeant-at-arms can detain them, and they can be held in the Capitol. Like, you can do that. Like, you don't need to go to fucking court. Like, put the fear of God into these people that if they don't listen, you're going to arrest them.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:19Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Michael Liroff?

  That's one way to be aggressive in oversight.

• 36:22Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the ICE stuff is such a good example because I don't know that the appetite is there to abolish ICE, right? Certainly it's there among the Democratic base.

• 36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:33Peter Shamshiri?

  But.

• 36:33Michael Liroff?

  Right.

• 36:34Peter Shamshiri?

  You can instill fear and discipline in ICE at relatively low cost politically, meaning you pursue some prosecutions, right? You make it clear, we'll be prosecuting bad actors. All of a sudden, these fucking psychopaths might not even want to join ICE, right? And the ones that do might be a little careful about how they behave, right? You reel them in maybe 5, 10% very quickly, just by saying, you go to prison if you fuck around. We don't need the executive branch to sign off on it.

• 37:08Michael Liroff?

  I will also say on legislation, there is, they have like, a kind of two big windows, I think, to actually do stuff, which is the General Appropriations Bill and the Defense Budget, which are two major bills that go out every year that basically need to pass for the government to keep running. And those are bills that, when you have 55, 56 votes in the Senate and 260 votes in the House, you should be attaching a lot of shit to.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 37:36Michael Liroff?

  And then be willing. To walk away from the negotiating table and let the government shut down if Trump vetoes it.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:43Michael Liroff?

  Be like, take it or leave it. This is, this is the bill.

• 37:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:47Michael Liroff?

  And, and putting shit in there, that's important. And that's another way you could, for example, constrain ICE. You could constrain the deployment of the National Guard. You could do all sorts of stuff. There are opportunities for an aggressive party.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:03Michael Liroff?

  To assert itself. They have standing now to sue when Trump impounds monies or, or misappropriates monies.

• 38:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Someone pointed out, and I hadn't really thought of this, but I, I think it's right. Engaging in investigations with the intent to prosecute Russ Vaughn, that is something that could have ripple effects. Russ Vaughn is the head of OMB and has really been the vanguard of Trump's efforts to revamp the executive branch, right? To hollow out the civil service, to subjugate appropriations to Donald Trump's whims, all of this illegal in various ways. And all of it very central to the right wing effort to sort of rebuild the federal government in the image that they want.

• 38:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:54Peter Shamshiri?

  And prosecuting him, making it clear that you can't engage in that sort of thing without real material consequences. That's the sort of thing that might send an actual message. All of these bad actors, the Doge kids, like make it clear, when you sign on to these fascist operations and you think that you have the mandate of heaven with Donald Trump behind you, you are fucked. Like you, if, if we say your name, put it in the record and start an investigation, Donald Trump's not going to save you. You're fucked.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? That message needs to be sent out.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And like, look, we're saying this, I'm, I'm saying these things knowing, like, and I'm sad to say this, that like, we are talking about the Democratic Party that has been as effective as it has been so far, which is not fucking effective at all, which is disappointing on every level.

• 39:48Michael Liroff?

  No expectation they'll do much of this.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  And so what we're saying is, we have, you know, like two brain cells of imagination, and that's what you need to be fucking applying in this situation. And I think, like, I agree with you, Peter, with what you're saying, which is like, you need to be thinking about effectiveness. Do the easy things that are super effective, but also do hard things. You need to be pushing, you need to be thinking big, you need to actually be visionary in the opposite satanic way that Trump and Vaughn and Stephen Miller are. I mean, we've talked about it before. Stephen Miller basically is like a receptacle. Bring me your cruelest fucking idea, we will put it in place. So what's the opposite? Do the fucking opposite. Not just fill the seat, right? But remember, like, everybody listening to this, the people we just voted into power,

• 40:36Speaker 04

  they're not going to do that unless it is demanded of them and demanded of them specifically and constantly. So we have to continue to politically organize. If you are somewhere that just flipped blue, you need to be talking to that representative at whatever level and asking questions and demanding and communicating what it was that you were saying you wanted with your vote. If you're upset about the war in Iran, okay, Democrats, like, what's the plan? Are you going to lift sanctions? Are you going to withdraw military presence in the Middle East, in the Gulf States? That's what ends the war. Everybody can fucking say, we want to end the war. Right? If you're upset about genocide, then what is the plan? Military aid to Israel, done, done. What is the plan?

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Do it, like, we need specifics. We need to know what the fuck you're going to do. Not just, like, this is sad and, and whatever, you know, the Israeli government, like, we don't really agree, blah, blah, blah, all that bullshit. You know, what are you doing about the bill currently ping ponging around Congress right now that proposes to merge the US and Israeli militaries? That's, make it fucking specific on immigration, all of this stuff. We can read the names. Ali, I'm super glad that you put these names in. People killed by ICE, right? Lorenzo Salgo Araho, Johann Sebastian Durangoero, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Ruben Ray Martinez, Jonah Neal, Sanchez Barbosa, Keith Porter, Silvero Viegas Gonzalez. Have you heard any of those names? We need to fucking hear about them.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  We need to know who killed them. You need to be doing specific things. 57 people have died in immigration detention since the beginning of Trump's second term. That's more than double the number of deaths recorded in the previous four years. Have you heard their names? Do you know why they died? There are 57 fucking investigations then. Full investigations of every ICE detention center. This is what we're talking about, right? So it's not like, love is revolutionary. Talarico said that last night in his speech. Love it, love those words. Also like what he said about like, you know, neoliberal, whatever the fuck, great. Do things, and they're only going to do things, guys, if we are demanding it.

• 42:44Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 42:44Peter Shamshiri?

  The cynical view of this, which is at least partially correct, is these are Democrats at the end of the day, right? There is a low expectation built in.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 42:51Peter Shamshiri?

  The less cynical read is, this is a new political environment. Not just that Democrats have reclaimed the Houses of Congress, but the Democratic base is not what it was the last time that this happened.

• 43:05Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 43:05Peter Shamshiri?

  The Democratic base looks very different.

• 43:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Right? The people within the Democratic base are asking for very different things.

• 43:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:13Peter Shamshiri?

  The centrists in leadership in the Democratic Party are a dwindling minority. They are struggling to hold on to their seats. They cannot keep a Muslim man out of office in Michigan despite trying. They are unable to exercise the kind of power that they used to be able to quite easily. There's an opportunity here, not for, like, big D Democrats in the establishment sense, but for the Democratic base to finish the job of seizing control of this party.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:50Michael Liroff?

  Right. Which to both those points, when you're calling one of your, or both of your senators, one of your specific asks should be Chuck Schumer is, is out as leader.

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:01Michael Liroff?

  Like, that is an absolute, just first principles, like, none of this shit happens with Mr. My friends across the aisle.

• 44:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Michael Liroff?

  Dinosaur.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:09Michael Liroff?

  In charge. You want a fucking attack dog there. You want someone who hates Republicans in their bones.

• 44:15Peter Shamshiri?

  His speech last night was one of the most bizarre things I've ever heard. I mean, and, and look, to be, again, to be maybe a little more optimistic, Hillary Clinton was like, we need answers, we need prosecutions. Hillary Clinton.

• 44:27Michael Liroff?

  Anybody with, like, even a modicum of political talent can read the, the winds here. They can feel the breeze on their face and they can tell which way it's blowing.

• 44:36Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. Hillary Clinton is going to go after them like a child who has shoplifted in 1997. Okay? She is all in.

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Like a super predator. No, anybody with any talent and, you know.

• 44:48Peter Shamshiri?

  And even Hillary Clinton. And also Hillary Clinton.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. Anybody with political talent, anybody with half a brain cell, you can see where the winds are at. But the question is, do they snuff out the winds? Do they put a lid on it? Like they are, want to do. The Democratic base has been transformed in many ways by the past, let's say, five years or even, let's say 10 years since Trump took office the first time. That transformation has to be reflected in our government. And there's like a signal towards that transformation, the desire for that transformation in government in the vote last night, but it doesn't happen unless the transformation is demanded. It has to be imposed.

• 45:28Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 45:28Michael Liroff?

  Another point on that, in the dialectic that, that Ree was saying earlier, there are going to be people who want to snuff out this energy or mollify you with bullshit. And, and so part of your job is to not be mollified. If you are demanding four seats added to the Supreme Court and they give you ethics reform, you can't be like, well, it's something.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:50Michael Liroff?

  If you are demanding that they defund ICE and they say, well, how about body cams?

• 45:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:56Michael Liroff?

  You can't say, well, I guess that's something, like, that's not, you, you have to, you, the listener here, have to be diligent yourself. You need to call them up when they're giving you bullshit and say, that's bullshit and I don't give a shit about it.

• 46:12Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah. All right. We will talk, at least briefly, about the Supreme Court. But first, let's have some fun, folks.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:19Michael Liroff?

  Hmm.

• 46:20Peter Shamshiri?

  Let's, let's run through some conservative cope, because there was a lot of it.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  I love to see evil people cry.

• 46:27Peter Shamshiri?

  A few years back, the take on Elon's purchase of Twitter was, wow, he just lit his money on fire, it lost a bunch of money. Then he turns it into a conservative propaganda machine, Trump wins in 2024, and the savvy take became like, oh my God, no, that wasn't, he didn't waste his money. He is helping Republicans win and enriching himself.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:54Peter Shamshiri?

  And, and that's what's happening.

• 46:55Speaker 04

  This is how politics works now, kind of thing. Yeah.

• 46:58Peter Shamshiri?

  I actually think, to be optimistic here, something else happened, which is that Twitter is just an inward facing, right wing echo chamber that maybe has no influence on politics or very little influence on politics, at least electoral politics, broader electoral politics. What we saw on Twitter, leading up to the election, was right wingers making Anakin Skywalker Darth Vader memes about how they related to young Darth Vader, and they thought that that was going to turn the election around. If you said that sentence to a normal person in America, their head would explode, they would, they would collapse inward like a dying star.

• 47:40Peter Shamshiri?

  These people are just living in Elon Musk's alternate reality and perhaps not really making serious contact with the outside world, which resulted in a ton of conservative cope. Laura Lumer, who's just a half Twitter lunatic, half actual presidential advisor.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Half the villain from Saw.

• 47:59Peter Shamshiri?

  Visually the villain from Saw, yeah. She said, I hate to say it, but America is over. The communists and jihadists are going to open our borders and replace our votes with votes from illegal aliens. We now have reps who openly speak about their hatred of America, their love of communism, and their support for Sharia law.

• 48:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:20Peter Shamshiri?

  We won't be able to undo the damage they caused on our country come 2028. Okay, by the way, they still have the presidency.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  She's so, I can't even say what I want to say.

• 48:30Peter Shamshiri?

  I mean, look, this is, this is someone who, if you put an eighth grade civics test in front of them, would tank.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, she can't do it. She went like full Nietzsche here. She also was posting, like, basically, "God is dead."

• 48:45Michael Liroff?

  "God is dead," yes.

• 48:46Peter Shamshiri?

  That's right. Someone posted, "The good news is that God is in charge." Ultimate conservative cope. And then Loomer responded, "If God is in charge, why did he let our country get taken over by Muslims and communists?" Something for people to think about, which-

• 49:01Michael Liroff?

  Is God dead?

• 49:02Peter Shamshiri?

  Appears to be her being like, "The midterms have gone so badly that I no longer believe in God."

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Didn't I, didn't I, didn't I tell y'all that conservatism, at the core, it's a rotten nihilism, you know?

• 49:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah.

• 49:15Speaker 04

  And Laura is, Laura is smoking on that Nietzsche pat, you know?

• 49:20Peter Shamshiri?

  "One thing has gone wrong for my political party. I no longer believe that God is real." Is so fucking funny. It's so fucking funny.

• 49:28Michael Liroff?

  So good.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  It's hilarious. It's hilarious.

• 49:30Peter Shamshiri?

  Libs of TikTok said, "Democrats imported millions of foreigners, handed them a bunch of free shit, and then registered them to vote. They have been planning this for years." Yes, only to strike in the midterms. Not, not two years ago when the presidency was at stake, but we waited until the midterms. Michael Knowles was on a Daily Wire panel, and he saw that the 18 to 25-year-old demographic had shifted blue. Of course, they were surprisingly red in '24, and he asked if that was because, quote, "Charlie is no longer with us."

• 50:09Michael Liroff?

  Joey Manarino said, "They murdered Charlie Kirk, and they got rewarded for it by sweeping the nation. What in the absolute fuck is happening tonight?"

• 50:20Speaker 05

  I have to say something crazy, which is, I went to private school with Joey Manarino.

• 50:25Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 50:25Peter Shamshiri?

  He went to a Quaker school?

• 50:26Michael Liroff?

  Incredible.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Joey Manarino and I went to a very liberal, left-wing, Quaker, private school, and I'm sure everyone is extremely ashamed of him.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  Oh, my God.

• 50:38Peter Shamshiri?

  Is that why you, you also asked us if it was because Charlie was shot?

• 50:45Speaker 04

  I had one tweet, I don't think this is from anyone famous, but it was, "What the fuck is wrong with Americans in Democrat states? You are really going to vote for a Muslim? It's your funeral. Thank God I live in Texas."

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I tweeted this morning, "It's a beautiful morning in Texanistan."

• 51:08Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, nice. I mean, this, these go on forever, all like this, just perfectly detached from reality. But then there's the sort of bigger issue of how does Donald Trump handle this? We had talked about, and many people had discussed, the possibility, especially if the midterms were close, that Trump could start crying fraud, try to gin up as much trouble as possible, get some recounts going, get some smoke and mirrors in the mix, and see what happens. Of course, they did not get close elections, they got blown out. And so Trump moved on to Plan B, which is to blame everyone else.

• 51:49Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 51:50Peter Shamshiri?

  He basically took the position that, like, he wasn't on the ballot, and that's why Republicans lost. These candidates, across-the-board bunch of losers, this has nothing to do with Donald Trump, of course. This was not a referendum on Trump's administration. This was just like the individual failures of each candidate. This gets laundered, by the way, into more mainstream and serious outlets as what you will see described as candidate quality. Conservatives will be like, "Is this just a candidate quality issue?" Meaning, like, we're running, like, Paxton, bad candidate, right?

• 52:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, people in the Republican Party even don't really like Paxton.

• 52:30Peter Shamshiri?

  Yeah, yeah. South Carolina, you had Darlene Graham, bad candidate, just a nepo sister Lindsey Graham. And that, there is some element of truth to that. Paxton is a notably bad candidate. Graham is a notably bad candidate. The thing is that this is a party built around the insane whims of Donald Trump and a nascent psychotic fascist movement. In order to fit within the fabric of this party neatly, you kind of have to be a bad candidate.

• 53:07Speaker 04

  You have to be a bad candidate.

• 53:09Michael Liroff?

  They're all weird.

• 53:09Peter Shamshiri?

  These are not separable things. You can't disentangle the bad candidate from Donald Trump and the Republican Party, right? They're bad candidates, like Ken Paxton, as he exists today, wouldn't really exist without Donald Trump. You can't separate those two things. Would he be there? Sure. But would he be what we understand as Ken Paxton? Probably not. This is how the Republican Party operates right now. Yeah, they're bad candidates. But that's a way of sort of removing the responsibility from the conservative movement broadly, and just placing it onto individuals, candidate quality.

• 53:45Speaker 04

  Trump's posts last night were wild. It was early in the evening, and he's already firing off on Truth Social, clearly coked out in a White House bathroom, just like screaming at Fox News, talking about how Fox News has terrible coverage now and therefore has terrible ratings.

• 54:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Because they were like, "Well, Trump's unpopular, I guess." And he's like, "I'll, I'll kill you all. I will drone strike you."

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Yes, and then pretty controversial and very much felt and celebrated by me in Texas and many others here. After Greg Abbott conceded the governor's seat in Texas, Donald Trump posts that he's a "RINO," R-I-N-O, Republican in name only, calls him essentially a bad candidate in Trumpian language. It's crazy. He was firing off shots. He's like, "My party is a loser fucking party right now, and none of you have it together."

• 54:36Peter Shamshiri?

  The thing about Trump in these situations, when you lose, he has no use for you, right? Until you prove yourself useful in the future.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:46Peter Shamshiri?

  Republicans are fundamentally psychological cucks. They will want to prove themselves, right? They don't get offended and say, "Well, fuck that guy."

• 54:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:55Peter Shamshiri?

  They're like, "Please, Daddy, I want you to love me," right? It's just the neglected child mindset. So they will most, for the most part, come crawling back to him. But this is basically a guarantee, if you're in Donald Trump's party. If you don't do well, he will call you a loser in public.

• 55:10Speaker 04

  I do want to talk about cope specifically on Paxton. The Vanity Fair article today that is a dispatch, basically, from Ken Paxton's watch party last night. Somebody, a Republican organizer in Texas at the party said, quote, "I'm not trying to crash out, but we nominated Hitler with Down Syndrome, and guess what? He lost, and now we lose a Supreme Court Justice. It's a fucking disaster." He's talking about Ken Paxton. Hitler with Down Syndrome. They, they were losing it. People were really, really fucking losing their minds, including the Austin Young Republicans, which today, I am looking at this on the Austin Young Republicans'

• 55:54Speaker 04

  Instagram stories right now, back to back. First up, there is a photo of the Texas Capitol completely engulfed in flames, and it says, "Texas has fallen." Do not despair, but Texas has fallen. The next one, you know, you just kind of click through the stories, there's a lot of them, you kind of click through. The next one is, "You matter. You are not alone. Call or text 988, the suicide and crisis lifeline. Support for emotional distress." They say that they know that a few hundred of their members, the Austin Young Republicans,

• 56:38Speaker 04

  have lost their jobs. "Your job," I'm reading from the fucking graphic, you guys, "your job does not define your worth. You don't have to face this alone." They're posting the National Suicide Hotline, which, which, you guys, Trump defunded.

• 56:55Peter Shamshiri?

  So good. So good.

• 56:57Michael Liroff?

  It's so good.

• 56:58Peter Shamshiri?

  Oh, my God. Also, I, look, I agree that their job does not define their worth. The fact that they are both jobless and worthless is a coincidence. That is something-

• 57:07Michael Liroff?

  Yes.

• 57:07Peter Shamshiri?

  That's just fate.

• 57:09Speaker 04

  It's-

• 57:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Well, that's, that's beautiful stuff.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  The cope, something to behold for real.

• 57:14Peter Shamshiri?

  There is something about the right-wing mind, they aren't always ready for defeat the way that the left is. Maybe it's because if you're like genuinely on the left, you have been on the outside of politics for your whole life. Or maybe it's just something in our psychology where we do revel in a little bit of doom and gloom. That might be it, too.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  I actually think it's because we have a coherent explanation for why the right wins.

• 57:41Peter Shamshiri?

  Maybe.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  There's an understanding of why politics is like this.

• 57:44Peter Shamshiri?

  Right. I mean, it's, it's just odd to me, because whenever shit goes wrong for the left, there's an undercurrent of like, fucking, of course. We're the sports fan who's just like miserable, like, we're like, of course, the fucking Bears, you know? Yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:00Peter Shamshiri?

  Another year, more bullshit.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:02Peter Shamshiri?

  The right is like, who could have seen this coming? Right? Like, what, what happened? What hap- I was just-

• 58:09Speaker 04

  God is dead.

• 58:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Anakin memes with my friends. I was at racist church this morning, and now I'm hearing that people don't like Ken Paxton? They are like literally in ontological shock. Laura Loomer is like, "I don't believe in God anymore because, because the Dems did like seven points better than she thought," or something like. Their, their brains cannot handle a little bit of defeat. It's, it's crazy. It's very, it's very fascinating to me. And I'm intrigued. If someone wants to hit me with the psychology there, would love to hear it. All right, before we go, we're a Supreme Court podcast. The way that Supreme

• 58:52Peter Shamshiri?

  Court reform happens is through legislation, right? There is no Supreme Court reform going through Donald Trump. That is pretty clear. But the fact that Democrats have made major gains means that 2028, the Senate is likely to be a little bluer than we might have thought. And moreover, there is an opportunity to start building momentum for Supreme Court reform. We don't need to get into this too much, because spoiler alert, we're going to be talking about it a lot next year.

• 59:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:27Peter Shamshiri?

  But there is an opportunity in front of us for the next two years to build the momentum for Supreme Court reform. That is going to be fleeting. If this is not done in the next four to six years, it almost certainly will not be done. Certainly not in this generation. And we will be hostage to the conservative Supreme Court, no matter what happens in elections.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  If it's not done, blue wave doesn't matter. People need to understand this. If it's not done, blue wave doesn't matter.

• 1:00:01Michael Liroff?

  You could get 400 electoral votes and 65 votes in the Senate and 300 votes in the House.

• 1:00:07Peter Shamshiri?

  The Supreme Court will make sure that all you can do is tinker around the fucking edges. There's no Medicare for all for the Supreme Court as it is. There's no-

• 1:00:14Speaker 04

  Climate justice.

• 1:00:15Michael Liroff?

  There's no new Voting Rights Act.

• 1:00:17Peter Shamshiri?

  There's no new Voting Rights Act.

• 1:00:19Speaker 04

  Student loan reform, none of it, none of it.

• 1:00:21Peter Shamshiri?

  All of that shit goes through the Supreme Court. Any Democrat who promises you that needs to know that you can't do it if the Supreme Court in its current state exists. That is not my opinion. That is a fact. That is a fact about how politics works in this country. There will be no nascent leftist political movement or even liberal political movement in this country unless there is Supreme Court reform in the next four years.

• 1:00:52Michael Liroff?

  There's been a lot of talk about whether Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas, but especially Alito, will retire in the lame duck. I think that's unlikely. I think Sam Alito talking about considering retirement was more in the hopes of ginning up turnout, letting people think, you know, oh, the Supreme Court's on the ballot.

• 1:01:10Peter Shamshiri?

  Finger on the pulse, Sam.

• 1:01:11Michael Liroff?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:01:12Peter Shamshiri?

  You really drove him to the polls.

• 1:01:14Michael Liroff?

  He doesn't seem like he's someone who actually wants to leave anytime soon. It's also difficult. Like, they have 53 votes, so they could do it. In a few weeks, that becomes 52 because Sherrod Brown won a special election and he won't be waiting till January to be seated. That happens nearly immediately. 52 votes, it's, again, doable, but every vote they lose is, it makes it a little tougher. And it would have to be very quick. We know they can do it very quick, but it would all have to happen like right now. If someone doesn't retire in the next, like, week, it's almost certainly not happening. I think far more likely is that Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas think that they can make it two more years. They can make it six more years.

• 1:01:53Peter Shamshiri?

  Also, I'm gonna float something, which is that it might be better for Supreme Court reform if Sam Alito does retire. And people continue to see the gamesmanship, right? To see them play politics with the court so openly.

• 1:02:11Michael Liroff?

  And the reality of like getting the perfect timing of like somebody falling ill during your term or dying to actually change the partisan makeup of the court, seeing how far-fetched that is. As the six-vote supermajority gets younger, right? That gets further and further out. Instead of 10 years, maybe it's 40.

• 1:02:32Peter Shamshiri?

  Right.

• 1:02:32Michael Liroff?

  Who are you waiting for there? Clarence Thomas, I guess, is the only one who seems like maybe on death's door.

• 1:02:37Peter Shamshiri?

  Thomas Roberts, maybe?

• 1:02:38Michael Liroff?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Peter Shamshiri?

  All right. Final thoughts. Talked about this last night during the elections. What are your hopes and dreams for Woke 3? What are you seeing? I've already stopped referring to my child by gendered pronouns, they/them, from here on out.

• 1:02:56Peter Shamshiri?

  Michael?

• 1:02:57Michael Liroff?

  Colin Kaepernick should be given an NFL team to run. Maybe, maybe the Cowboys. Maybe he should run the Cowboys.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  Fuck it, NFL commissioner.

• 1:03:04Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, fuck Goodell. Colin Kaepernick for NFL commissioner.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  Uh huh, I think that's great.

• 1:03:09Peter Shamshiri?

  Great.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  You know, Laura Lumer also posted last night, "I hope everyone is learning Arabic." And in Woke 3, we are. Mandatory Arabic classes at every public school from kindergarten, bitch. It's Alif, Ba'ta, Sa', not A, B, C, D anymore.

• 1:03:26Peter Shamshiri?

  Hey, listeners, off the dome, which way is Mecca? You better learn.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Mandatory, you need to know where Mecca is.

• 1:03:38Michael Liroff?

  Five to Four is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Alison Rogers. Leon Nafok provides editorial support. Our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY and our theme song is by Spatial Relations.