#AIS: Glenn Greenwald & Matt Taibbi discuss the new political divide, moderated by David Sacks

This conversation was recorded LIVE at the All-In Summit in Miami! 0:00 David Sacks explains the origin of this panel on political discourse in America 2:56 Understanding the new political divide, how Trump's victory impacted discourse 12:37 Can mainstream media ever get back to relative neutrality? 29:15 Audience Q&A Follow the guests: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald https://twitter.com/mtaibbi Follow the besties: https://twitter.com/chamath https://linktr.ee/calacanis https://twitter.com/DavidSacks https://twitter.com/friedberg Follow the pod: https://twitter.com/theallinpod https://linktr.ee/allinpodcast Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://twitter.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://twitter.com/TheZachEffect

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

• 0:00David Sacks?

  So Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, folks.

• 0:07David Sacks?

  So by way of introduction, I want to just sort of tell the story of how this panel happened. It arose out of almost a throwaway comment that Jason made on an episode of the pod, where he was talking about lining up speakers for this event. And he said that he was having a hard time getting liberals. And all he could find were right-wingers like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. And in terms of just to explain their backgrounds a little bit, Matt used to be the... They're both independent journalists who write phenomenal columns on Substack. And all of you should check it on subscribe. And by the way, they also do call-in shows on a phenomenal podcasting platform that

• 0:52David Sacks?

  you should all check out. But Matt was sort of like the left-wing firebrand, populist firebrand, writing for Rolling Stone, who back in 2009 was asking the question, "Why the people who caused the great financial crisis, why no one was going to jail?" And Glenn broke the Snowden story about how the government was engaging in mass surveillance on all of us and raising questions about the infringement of our civil liberties. So both these guys have, I'd say, well-established bona fides. Used to be considered left-wing liberal bona fides, but now, today, somehow, they've

• 1:37David Sacks?

  been read out of what you would call liberalism today. And so that comment that Jason made, I think there's so much to unpack there on how that happened. What does liberalism today mean if it doesn't include you guys? And so maybe that's the place to start, is trying to understand what has happened in our politics that makes you guys not liberal anymore? And what is liberalism? And then what is conservatism? And are we even thinking about the political divide in our country the right way if left versus right doesn't really capture it anymore? So that was sort of the starting point for this.

• 2:22David Sacks?

  Who wants to just react to anything I just said?

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first of all, it's, of course, very gratifying to realize that your attendance at a conference is due to a throwaway line from Good Swing, so, um, super honored to hear that, that that's the reason why we were invited.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, it's interesting, I guess we join a long list of other far-right luminaries like Russell Brand, who has spent the last 15 years as one of the most vocal devotees to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn, he's now also on the right, and Joe Rogan, who just 18 months ago said to millions of people that his favorite candidate running for president was Bernie Sanders, the socialist, left-wing candidate from Vermont, and even now Elon Musk, who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 over Mitt Romney and is one of the largest donors to the ACLU, somehow he's also on the far-right, so in some sense it's just

• 3:38Speaker 01

  become a kind of punishing label that's designed to stigmatize or demonize anybody who in any way dissents from or diverges from liberal orthodoxy, it's just kind of an enforcement or coercive label that has no meaning, just bereft of any actual substance. But I think there's a broader dynamic underneath it all, which is that, you know, it is true that every five years, 10 years, what was once an issue at the forefront of our debates goes to the background and other issues go to the forefront. So 10 years ago, we were spending a lot of time debating things like Obama's drone program

• 4:19Speaker 01

  or Guantanamo not being closed, or as you said, the work Matt was doing 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 talking instead about whether the internet should be this instrument of censorship and information control, whether we should trust the US security state to dictate what is and is not disinformation, whether we should be involved in very similar kinds of proxy wars like we spent the Cold War doing over places like Ukraine.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And so, in one way, it's natural that political alliances shift as different issues go to the fore and alliances change as a result. But I think something much more important is that liberalism itself has changed largely by virtue of Donald Trump because liberals, as a defining view, maybe as an overarching view—

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Maybe Democrats not liberal.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, by liberals, I just mean kind of the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, the way Hillary Clinton calls herself progressive. So, again, illustrating the bankruptcy of these terms, but by liberals, I just mean kind of like the Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer wing, have come to believe that the overarching way to understand politics is that there's one primary menace and risk to the United States, which is Donald Trump, his movement in the Republican Party, and it's not just that they have a bad ideology, but that they're actual fascists trying to instill a white nationalist dictatorship. And if you actually believe that, if that's something that you genuinely believe, on some level, it becomes rational to start embracing authoritarian methods of resisting that, of combating that.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Censoring, using due process-free processes to punish people and deprive them of their liberty. And I think any time a political movement gets convinced that it is no longer involved in a political debate, but a historic war between pure good and pure evil, it starts to turn to authoritarian tactics to win because it believes that's justified or even necessary. And those authoritarian tactics happen to be the ones that the left traditionally had opposed and now are embracing. And I guess Matt and I didn't decide that we were going to change our views of the last 30 years about these issues, and that has caused this organic breach, not just between us two, but others like us.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And as I said, anyone who finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically receives the far-right label.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, first of all, I agree with all that. And, you know, for me, it's even funnier because prior to 2008, I would say that I was sort of like the triumphant insult comic dog of journalism. Basically, my job at Rolling Stone was to throw off one-liners about Republicans. My editors almost never sent me to a Democratic function because they didn't want me describing those events in a colorful way, let's put it that way. So I got, I got sent to a lot of events where people like Sarah Palin, or Fred Thompson, or Mike Huckabee would be speaking.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  I actually won a National Magazine Award for a column about Huckabee called "My Favorite Nut Job." And, but then after 2008, after Obama got elected, they assigned me to do a story, one story, about the 2008 financial crisis, essentially with the idea of explaining it in terms that people who are not financial professionals could understand. So I did one story that was really about AIG, and we got this overwhelming response that we'd never gotten before from readers we'd never heard from before.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  And that led to me doing eight years of work instead of one story. And one of the themes that came out of that reporting was that in the sort of post-bailout economy, the wealth gap was widening. And, you know, I just read a statistic that said that during the Obama years, the bottom 99% saw their average wealth decrease by $4,900, whereas the top 1% saw its wealth increase by an average of $4.9 million. And so, you know, I didn't make that much, that big of a deal of this in my reporting, but when 2016 came around...

• 9:01Speaker 02

  In covering both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, it was abundantly clear that this widening wealth gap and the stress that it had placed on populations on both the left and the right was a significant factor in this race. And when I started to write this in the context of covering Trump, rather than just doing the usual thing of tossing off insults about the candidate, which is easy enough to do with Trump,

• 9:36Speaker 02

  I started to say things like, "Well, there are reasons why he's succeeding. He's attracting crowds that are not just the usual Republican crowds. There are former union members here. They have a lot in common with the crowds who show up at Bernie Sanders events." And I started to notice a distinctly unpleasant reaction from people inside the business, where it quickly became taboo to explain Donald Trump in any way other than, "This is a white supremacist movement, and he's appealing to, you know, the lowest common denominator through that kind of messaging." Now, I happen to believe that that was part of,

• 10:20Speaker 02

  certainly part of, what was going on, but it wasn't the whole explanation. But I think Trump is the dividing line of what you're talking about. If you don't have, if you have a nuanced explanation for Donald Trump, then you can't be part of the club anymore. Because the dominant narrative requires that he be cartoonized, you know, in the same way that we used to do it with figures like Saddam Hussein or Putin now. You know, we call it the Hitler of the month club, right? If you're not willing to just do that, and if you try to actually explain, where are all these voters coming from? Why are they upset?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  What went wrong that this would happen? Also known as the purpose of journalism. Yeah, exactly, right? Which is supposed to be our job.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I think both of us quickly learned that that was not welcome. And, you know, after Trump got elected, I think that that instinct to crowd out anyone who was interested in going there and trying to figure out what was wrong that it caused 2016, you know, suddenly became an apostate. And by the way, that includes some politicians, like, you know, Bernie Sanders, I think, was one of the people who was very interested in examining what happened in 2016. And I think that's one of the reasons why there was such a violent reaction to his candidacy in both 2016 and 2020.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  So for me, I think that's the dividing line. It's not like something's changed so much with liberalism, or it's really about Trump, I think, and journalism has adjusted. It is, you know, we've gone from being people whose primary job is to be curious about why things happen, to being advocates who believe that, you know, certain people have to be opposed at all costs, and even if that cost is, you know, a little bit of the truth, or a lot of it even.

• 12:37David Sacks?

  So having ripped the umpire jersey off their backs to basically stop the Trump menace, it seems like journalism can't now go back to even a pretense of neutrality. Is that what basically has happened now?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  I think so. I think, and I think you see that in what's happening with the ratings at cable stations. You know, I warned about this in 2016, and I wrote a column in that summer saying that a model where basically right-wing media wrote about the evils of the Democratic Party and blue media wrote about the evils of the Republican Party, that just wouldn't work audience-wise, because audiences would no longer trust either source to be

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Objective and to report the facts. And I think that's where we are now. Like, we see the declining, um, the declining ratings of, of companies like CNN and MSNBC, uh, which were previously thought of as more kind of down the road, down the middle of the road news agencies, and now are thought of as politicized, and they're having terrible trouble kind of going back. Because once you cross that line into politics, um, you can't get your reputation back as a neutral fact-finder anymore.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people forget what things were like before Trump, since he's such a, you know, kind of ubiquitous presence, 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 back in 2015, most of these news organizations were on the brink of collapse. Every MSNBC host was on the verge of being fired, you know, a couple of months away from being fired because nobody was watching. The New York Times had severe financial difficulty. There was talk about whether they would have to declare bankruptcy because their balance sheet was so drowning in debt. And Trump saved them all. He saved the entire industry.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  They all owed their jobs, their second homes, the ability to pay off their IRS debt to Donald Trump, because you can trace his emergence on the scene to when people started watching those programs again. And what they did was, they rebranded as the resistance to Donald Trump. And they sacrificed any even pretense of journalistic function. They know, if you, and you just look at polling data, that 95% of the people who watch MSNBC and 93% of the people who read the New York Times and trust it, identify as Democrats. Um, so there's a completely polarized media. You know, one of the kind of non-media examples is the ACLU.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  There was an article in 2015 in the ACLU about the ACLU and the Washington Post, that they were mass layoffs, had to engage in mass layoffs of their staff because they had no money. Trump gets inaugurated, they start tweeting, you know, every day, "We'll see you in court, Mr. Trump," and like stimulating the, you know, kind of G zones of every liberal. And suddenly, they're drowning in money, like millions and millions of dollars, you know, like building, like the ASCLU, you know, it's always financially struggled. And as a result, they're completely captive now to that kind of an audience. You know, I have a friend, I guess I had a friend, who was a host of an MSNBC show,

• 16:02Speaker 01

  and they once told me that they don't get show-by-show ratings, they get segment-by-segment ratings. And ever since Trump, they told me, the minute you put on anybody who's critical of the Democratic Party anyway, you can just see the audience completely disappear. Which you can imagine, a person in that position, what an enforcement mechanism that is, to know that they have a salary and kids and the need to pay for college and their mortgage. And they know if they do anything that deviates at all from Democratic Party doctrine, they're gonna lose their audience. The New York Times knows that, the ASCLU knows that. 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 is absolutely true, as Matt said, it's also that they're

• 16:44Speaker 01

  now captive to this kind of prison cell that they built for themselves, chasing the sugar high that Trump provided.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Just really quickly, I gotta tell a story. In the middle of all this phenomenon, reporters were arguing about whether or not we should be covering him less, because maybe we had helped him get the nomination. You know, I covered Trump's campaign, and this was a hot topic on the bus at the time. But then it was sort of decided that now, he's just making us all so much money, let's just, let's just go with it. And I remember being in Indianapolis when Trump sewed up the nomination by beating Cruz, who still had a mathematical chance of winning, I guess, if he had done well there. But Trump, if you remember, during that particular race, accused Cruz of being the Zodiac Killer.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Which was hilarious because Cruz was born two years after the killings ended. But there was one reporter I know who actually got the nerve up to ask, I believe it was Cruz's wife about the accusations, like, "What do you have to say to the idea that, you know, your husband is the Zodiac Killer?" And he's telling me the story about this afterwards, and he goes, "You know, I felt so dirty doing it, but I also felt so great." So, I think that's where they were. They were in that space for a long time.

• 18:19David Sacks?

  The media and Trump had a weird, codependent relationship.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 18:24David Sacks?

  Just in terms of trying to appeal to people out there who may not be Trump fans, or to get through them on this point, it just seems to me that when you lose an election, anytime you lose an election as a party, you need to analyze what went wrong. And especially when the candidate is a complete political novice with no prior experience, and had so many attributes that historically were considered extreme negatives. And it seems to me that if you're just to look at what happened in 2016, Trump was able to ride a few key issues all the way to the White House. One was these foreign wars, these interventions that we've had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,

• 19:08David Sacks?

  Libya, that were disasters. We hadn't gotten out of Afghanistan yet, but it was on its way to being a historic 20-year failure. He shattered the Republican Party with that message, "No more Bushes." He then took the issue of trade and basically broke down the Democrats' blue wall and the Rust Belt by basically pointing out the ways that our bipartisan trade policy, just like our bipartisan foreign, you know, our war policy, had led to the deindustrialization of the Rust Belt. And then he also used the issue of immigration, which was sort of closely related to that idea of creating wage pressure on the working class.

• 19:50David Sacks?

  So you would think that having rode those issues all the way to the White House, that there would be some sort of reappraisal. And instead, it seems like what the elite did to protect itself was create these mythologies that Trump somehow got elected, not because the people of the country were fed up with the way that it had been run for 20 years by both parties, but rather because the Russians somehow were behind it, or the country was shot through with white supremacy and that somehow explained it. And so we never really got a true sort of accounting or reappraisal of what Trump's election meant.

• 20:32David Sacks?

  And instead, the media turned to like this hysteria, this mode that we're not even out of yet. Your reactions to that?

• 20:41Speaker 01

  No, I think, you know, it's one of the most amazing things about the 2016 election, which is, first of all, you know, in a lot of ways, Barack Obama being this kind of once in a generation political talent, papered over the incredibly serious systemic problems the Democrats had, even while he was being re-elected underneath Obama and all his glitter and glamour, the Democratic Party was collapsing. They were losing state houses and congressional seats and governorships all over the country. And the reason for that is the anger, the growing anger with the neoliberal policies that the Democratic Party in the early 1990s had decided to embrace in lieu of the working class politics for which they had always been known.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  The kind of Clintonite pronouncement that the Democratic Party needs to start embracing corporate America instead of unions, that it needs to move much closer to this politics that says, you know, we're going to encourage corporate America, we're going to embrace the Pentagon and all of that. And it radically changed the Democratic Party into this party of technocracy and the elites culminating with the Obama presidency. And what is amazing is in 2016, the Democrats lost the White House to a game show host. And so you would think they would wonder why that happened, as you were saying, right?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  You would think they would wonder, what is it about us that caused us to lose to Donald Trump? And instead, they invented this long list of people that they decided were to blame instead. Vladimir Putin principally, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein for having the audacity to continue to run for president. You know, a whole long list of villains, essentially everybody except themselves and the people who are responsible for it. And I think the most toxic narrative is the one that said, "The only reason Trump won was because the country is radically and fundamentally racist", and he capitalized on that. And what's so amazing about that is there are literally millions of voters, in excess of 10 million, depending on how you count,

• 22:50Speaker 01

  but definitely in excess of 10 million, voters who twice voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 12, and then in 2016 voted for Donald Trump. There are increasing numbers of non-white voters all over the country, moving to the Republican Party under Trump and voting increasingly for Trump. You had a larger share of black voters, Latino voters, Asian-American voters, than any Republican candidate in decades, and those trends are only worsening. And so you have this media that has no interest in and no ability to understand how the majority of people in the United States live, because their lives are completely separate, live in these isolated enclaves, in this kind of liberal bubble.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, just today, there was this amazing article by Rolling Stone. It was about, what most of you have probably heard, which was this horrific mass murder in Buffalo, where an 18-year-old white kid feeding on this kind of ideology of racial hatred that has become fringe but very dangerous around the West. Went into a store that he knew was predominantly black and shot as many people as he could, killing 10 of them. And then the article by Rolling Stone... That was published this morning was, "He is not a lone wolf shooter, he is a mainstream Republican." So, I think all of you should be very careful because you're currently in a country where

• 24:19Speaker 01

  half of the people in this country, apparently, are psychotic Nazis. On the verge of like some sort of mass murder outbreak, including huge numbers of non-white Americans who are supporters of the Republican Party. And the more you kind of immerse yourself in a set of institutional beliefs and a kind of ethos of your enclave, you know, just constantly hearing a belief reinforced and reinforced, the more you believe it, the more you're immersed in it, the more immune you become to facts that negate it. And so, that's the reason why the media is so incurious, because they've embraced this narrative that the only reason anyone would vote for Republicans, the only reason anyone

• 25:03Speaker 01

  would vote for Trump, is because they're racist, or they're fascist, or they're white supremacist. And it's left them completely unable to grapple with things like 10 million people voting twice for Obama and then for Trump. Or the fact, as Matt alluded to, there were all kinds of people in 2016 who, if you asked them, they would say, "Yeah, I have two favorite candidates this year." And you'd say, "Who are they?" And they would say, "Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump." To a working journalist, most working journalists, or pundits, or political operatives, that makes no sense. They can't comprehend that, because they see the world through this traditional left-right prism, that for increasing sections of the country, I would argue a majority, is no longer applicable, is no longer how they see the world.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  And this is so dangerous when you have this radical breach between the opinion-making journalistic class and elite class on the one hand, and most of the population on the other. They just live completely different lives, work with a completely set of beliefs about the world, have completely different sets of interests. And if you look at countries throughout history where that has happened, where there's been this complete divergence between the people who hold power in the country and the rest of the country over whom they exercise that power, instability at best, and usually much worse things inevitably arise. And I really think that's the point that we're at.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Just quickly to piggyback on that. One of the big stories that went uncovered and continues to go uncovered is the transformation of the Democratic electorate. The last time I looked at this, 41 of the richest 50 congressional districts in America had Democrats in those seats, and all of the top 10 richest districts were won by Democrats. Whereas, as recently as 1992, the split was more like 50/50. You know, if you live in an affluent suburb, the overwhelming majority of the voters there are going to be Democrats now.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  And the big divide in American politics is no longer about ideology. It's significantly about income and even more education. It's a split between people who have high school degrees or less and people who are college-educated. And this is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was so effusive in saying, "I love the poorly educated," because, you know, they vote for him. But this is another taboo subject. Nobody likes to talk about this because it speaks to a transformation that happened in the Democratic Party that began, I think, with Clinton, when, you know, they went away from relying on unions for financial support.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  You know, the DLC's big strategic idea was, "Let's be more competitive on the fundraising front by, you know, being more pro-business or pro-growth." That was the term that they used a lot. And, you know, a couple of decades later, what you end up with is a party that no longer has any real organic connection to working people of any kind. And so, you know, I think that's a massive factor in all of this, is that... The reporting on class politics has become taboo. All you have to do is go to a Donald Trump event and you can see it clearly. That the composition of the crowds is vastly different from what you see at a Democratic

• 28:43Speaker 02

  event. And that's one of the reasons why they hated the media. Because they saw us as upper-class representatives of the coastal elite who all live in New York, LA, and Washington, which is true for the most part. And, you know, it got increasingly hostile as time went on. And that's why Trump was scoring so many points going after us. Because we were symbols of the upper class. And that's another reason why I think the divide isn't longer neatly between left and right anymore. It has a lot more to do with class than it ever did before.

• 29:19Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, David. I'm over here to your... Hey, I know you wanted to take a question or two from the audience as we wrap here.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, let's take some questions.

• 29:26Jason Calacanis?

  And I thought I would kick it off. Great discussion about the left moving really far left and taking advantage of the Trump bump in their ratings. I'm curious, you kind of left out Fox News kind of mastering and Rupert Murdoch. They kind of created this playbook in a way, and the left copied it. Isn't that basically how it happened? People saw, wow, Fox Media is just making so much... Fox News specifically was making so much money by picking a side that the New York Times and MSNBC, et cetera, all just said, you know what? We might as well pick the other side and just take this playbook and get the money. That's kind of what happened, isn't it?

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I wrote a book about this called Hate, Inc. Which, yeah, that's basically... Basically, the thesis is that Fox pioneered a new way to make money in media, which is sort of like the audience optimization model. Like, you pick a group, a demographic, and then you try to dominate it by feeding it news that you know that those people are going to respond to. That was never the way things worked before for an ordinary news agency. They would just cover what they thought was important and, you know, try to do the best they could.

• 30:37Jason Calacanis?

  Has anybody stayed neutral, 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 to us if you hate Trump. You know, we're going to give you what you want. But is there anybody in the middle still, Matt?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Well, I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing Substack do well, right? It's not so much that it's... Left or right, or it's just that there's, there's, most people are not partisans. Most people live somewhere in the middle, right? And, and have opinions that are all over the place. And they cannot stand turning on the television and knowing exactly what they're gonna say ahead of time. And so they're looking for someplace that's, that's different, where, where you have differences of opinion. And that's, that's why I think independent media is doing better than ever.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I mean, the, the most influential person in, in media, even though the, the mainstream part of the media never talks about him, because he's not part of them, is without question, Joe Rogan. He speaks to more people who are under, you know, 85 years old, which is the cable audience, than anybody on television by far. And it's because, as Matt just said, you cannot pin him down ideologically, nor is he, does he have fealty to any one political faction, or certainly to any political party? He's just a curious person, sometimes on the left, and sometimes on the right, and sometimes neither, exactly like most Americans.

• 32:04Jason Calacanis?

  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 voted, he'd be a Democrat. And the fact that the Democrats have Joe Rogan and Elon Musk having been their supporters and voting for them for decades, and they're too stupid to pull them into their party, is just shows how-

• 32:25Speaker 01

  They do the opposite. They say, "No, Joe Rogan, we know that you love Bernie Sanders, the most far-left candidate ever to be viable in decades, but even though you love him, we're gonna demand that you're our enemy and call you a far-right fanatic, even though you don't think you are."

• 32:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, we're gonna demand that Bernie Sanders renounce Joe Rogan's endorsement. Uh, that's our plan for winning the election.

• 32:51Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Sax, it's, as much as you and I go at it with, like, how absolutely horrific the Republican Party is, I mean, the Democrats are so incompetent to not court the two most influential people in America today, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk. I mean, it's-

• 33:10Speaker 01

  They're, they're alienating them. They're radicalizing them away from them. It's even worse.

• 33:15Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, is there any, I mean Sax is just flabbergasted, but is there any way, Glenn, you can comment on this and explain what you think the Democrats are thinking? Or are they just not thinking strategically about winning elections?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  You know, I think in addition to what you guys just talked about in terms of MSNBC or MSNBC and CNN copying the model, there has been a radical change in the composition of the Republican Party ideologically because of Trump. Not because Trump is some sort of like disciplined political theorist or deep thinker, but because he ushered in, as David was saying earlier, he ran in 2016 in opposition to Bush-Cheney foreign policy, in opposition to Reagan economics. He railed against the power of large corporations at the expense of the working person, something you never would have heard from Reagan. But he also ushered in a lot of hostility toward agencies like the CIA and the NSA

• 34:08Speaker 01

  and the FBI, something that had always been the province of the left. And so now you have an enormous amount of space opened on the right for all kinds of views that had previously been closed. And I think there's just a lot more vibrancy on the right, a lot more internal debate, whereas in the 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 talking about at the beginning, automatically results in them proclaiming you their enemy, which doesn't seem like a very effective way of doing politics to me.

• 34:39Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, let's take a quick question from the audience.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  Let's talk about Elon behind his back before he joins. What's your guys' take? Is he serious? Is he gonna buy it? And what is, you know, what do you think the fallout's gonna be?

• 34:49Speaker 02

  I don't know if he's going to buy it or not. I think that, I haven't really gone into the details of that. But what I do think is fascinating is the reaction by people in media to even the proposition that he might buy Twitter. These are people who've been absolutely comfortable with, you know, a handful of people controlling, you know, 95 to 98% of the media distribution in this country, you know, for years now. They never, ever once complained about it. Anytime you ever complain about censorship, they say, oh, that's not censorship, this is a private platform, they can do whatever they want. That's always been their response.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Suddenly Elon Musk comes along and it's, oh my God, the threat of an oligarch taking over a media platform, what are we ever gonna do?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  There were poems like that in the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the idea of these.

• 35:47Jason Calacanis?

  And isn't the New York Times run by a family for...

• 35:52Speaker 01

  That's not really that poor.

• 35:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Four generations. All right, we'll take a final question from the audience.

• 35:59Speaker 05

  So I actually agree with a lot of what's been said here. And one of my questions is, you know, we were talking about is Trump even ideologically a Republican? My question is, as long as one of them is winning, the Republicans or the Democrats, aren't both of them winning? Like, do you guys have any thoughts on that?

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I didn't hear the question. As long as one of them...

• 36:19Jason Calacanis?

  As long as one of them, the Republicans or Democrats, are winning, are they collectively winning? I guess, shouldn't there be a third party?

• 36:25Speaker 05

  I mean, isn't that the issue? That it's such a binary, polarized system? I think Glenn said in the middle that we're really all more moderates. That's my belief, but I'm just curious.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  No, it's, I mean, it's a great question. You know, I think probably the worst media myth is that the two parties can never get along, there's no more bipartisanship, they're so radically different, they can't agree on anything, when the reality is they agree on most things. It's just that the only things we hear about are the times when they disagree. But overwhelmingly on foreign policy, on economic policy, Obama himself said the two parties are essentially playing within the 40-yard line. So the entire rest of the playing field is basically not part of the political process because they have the same fundamental beliefs. And I think one of the reasons why Trump was such a shock to the system was not because the Trump administration itself was a deviation from American political tradition, it wasn't,

• 37:18Speaker 01

  but because some of the things he said, like questioning NATO and whether it has viability, was designed to undermine that bipartisan consensus. But I think in general, you're right, that the establishment wings of both parties are far more in agreement with one another than they are different. And I think you're also right, that as long as those two wings of each party continue to trade power, the ruling class in the United States is very happy.

• 37:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's give it up for Glenn Mack.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Thank you, everybody.

• 38:13Speaker 06

  Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a piss in your driveway.

• 38:23Speaker 07

  We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just just like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 38:31Speaker 06

  What you're the bee. What you're the bee. Bee. What? We need to get mergies are back.