Hi, this is Virgil and this is Bree, and this is a premium episode, if you want to listen to the full episode, go to Patchier Dotcoms Bad Faith podcast.

Tell you what, let's just use that dun dun.

He's some guy who sell, promotes and he posts. And this has gotten him into a little hot water.

It's drawn the ire of how shall I put this actual activists or actual socialists who read these puff pieces about him where he says like, yeah, abolish, I invented that. And then like, who the fuck is this guy who doesn't do anything except be quoted in news articles? I have a quote in front of me. And this is this is one of my favorite Sean McElwee quotes. This was from five thirty eight. I'll clearly support whoever the nominee is.

McElwee told me this is twenty eighteen.

I think all of these people can be moved their pieces on a chessboard that's so much larger than that. And I want to be helping move those pieces, not a chessboard.

I love his chess metaphors. He does this all the time. This is all twisted. I'm the puppet master, really thinks of himself as Peter Baylis. It's great.

So just ridiculous self promoter and just like a lot of cockamamie bullshit and probably just angling for a job.

At the end of the day, the counterpoint is going to be, you know, he was the chosen one. He is the one that the media reaches out to you and the rest of us are just salty for not having as much exposure. So what is it about him and his predictions that substantively makes him problematic?

So what I have done here with us, with this project and sort of my concern here is that with this project in particular, if you look at data for progress, put together a list of supposed candidates for Biden's office and the way they promoted it. They've talked about they want this to shape his decisions and inform them and stuff like that. So it's clearly supposed to be them introducing him.

Yeah, these are the progressive candidates. Yeah. That Biden could pick for his cabinet. They put out this booklet back in July. Yeah. For each cabinet position they offered like four or so options. Yeah.

But then when you look at it, it's just it's not serious at all. Like it's one of these like tweets you see every once in a while where somebody is rolling out their dream cabinet and they're like Michelle Obama for secretary of state and bring out Jimmy Carter from retirement or something.

You know, just like it's bizarre. Like they're you know, they're putting like Arcy as their delegate to the UN and stuff like that, or people just who have really no real background in any of these positions at just their progressive celebrity. Yeah.

And also some of them are not actually, you know, progressives as slippery as that term is, like Tom Steyer is one of them.

Yeah. Or I mean, I'm going through these I'm looking at them right now. So like, for example, Homeland Security, Julian Castro, like, why is he being promoted? What's his background with this?

It doesn't make sense.

Backgrounds haven't you know, the fact that people have been, you know, traditionally qualified? Her role certainly hasn't stopped Joe Biden from making all kinds of appointments so far.

You know, but a judge is being sent to China purportedly. You've got.

Oh, thank God. They will they will get his head straight. Oh, no. About damn time.

Who were in the language in about a week.

So that's what all the superfans are saying. Oh, it's going to be so annoying when he comes back speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese.

But, you know, they've got Marcia Fudge, who apparently is very qualified to be secretary of agriculture, being put in HUD, a move that a lot of, you know, the CBC is upset about and characterizing as kind of a racist move like, you know, where do you put black people? Labor, HUD?

Yeah, but here's the rub. Here's here's the controversy on that. So let me this list is this list is there.

And, you know, these again, these are self-appointed, you know, on the left think tank people who are like like hip on Twitter.

Yeah. Who I mean, I don't know who funds them also. That's the other thing.

I guess that's then we will we can we can get to that speculation.

But these are this was the attempt of saying that attempt at saying, you know, we're going to push by the left and here's how we're going to do it. You know, we're going to we're going to fight for, like, these nominees that we just, like, pulled from our frickin Twitter feeds.

Yeah. To be in his cabinet. Yeah.

And so you began a project a few weeks ago called the Data for Progress Cabinet Tracker, where they said, again, this was a little known document.

This is like some bullshit that data for progress turns out that all really proud of. And they want to be in a news article, just another political article about it. But you remembered it.

Yeah, and I. After buying one and he's you know, it started the news of his appointments started coming out and you started tracking how well of your progress has been able to influence the Biden cabinet.

Yeah, and like one of the big push backs I've been getting on this is people say, well, this person wasn't on the list, but they are they are progressive in some sense. But all I want to do is I want to have some way of measuring are they actually succeeding and what they've set out to do or not, this is their deliverable. This is what they have set out to say, OK, we're going to try to get these people in.

And so it's a very objective way of measuring how they're doing according to their own terms that they set. And whether other nominees are progressive in some sense is a completely different question. I want to know if they're succeeding in you know, in theory, they were they're like the guys who are in the room and they spend a whole lot of time ridiculing socialists and leftists who are too critical of Joe Biden by saying, you know, we're we're in the room because we aren't here attacking him constantly.

We have his back during the general election. We're playing the game.

We're working within the system. We know better than you.

So I want to see what results they're getting from this. And it doesn't seem like they're getting very many at this point, if you'd like to hear more.

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