Well, well, well, you didn't listen, did you? You didn't listen. You didn't listen to Bri.This is what happens when you don't listen to Bri. Bernie Sanders found out the hard way. And now so has Tom Perez.

Virgil, you know exactly what's going to set my Leo heart aflight. I don't, I don't feel good about this liminal space we're living in as a nation.But I would be lying if I didn't admit to being gratified to some extent in having identified at very least, how crucial black and brown voter outreach were going to be and how Joe Biden was failing in that outreach and in taking those votes for granted in a million observable ways. Starting with a failure to invest early and heavily in Latino communities across the country, I live streamed for a little while last night with a colleague from the campaign who works for Chuck Roach's consulting firm now, who is doing work for Biden and who has been screaming at the top of his lungs about how they need to invest more. She noted her name is Eileen Garcia. She noted that the Trump campaign got a one month head start with Spanish language Spanish language ads in Florida.

They were,

Yo soy Trump.

Completely uncontested for a month before Joe Biden got his act together, where there were what were local community efforts, local organizations who were on the ground early in Arizona. Biden has been doing better with Latino voters. Whether or not he wins, that state is still in the balance, as were recording this. But you know, where you invest, it pays off. And Bernie Sanders saw that very clearly. The media didn't care about the 10 percent of non-white voters in Iowa, but the Bernie Sanders campaign did care, invested heavily in those communities, not all of which were Latino, but won them in a landslide. Something like upwards of 90 percent of all nine non-white people in Iowa voted for Bernie Sanders. Why? Because the Bernie Sanders campaign sent workers, campaign workers to stand outside of meatpacking plants at four o'clock in the morning when workers were getting off of their shift, including Amhara speakers and Spanish speakers who could communicate with the communities that were working those kinds of jobs. And people felt seen, people felt heard and they felt like their exigent needs are going to be addressed. Moving on to Nevada, if you recall, after after Bernie Sanders won Nevada handily with 70 percent of the Latino vote, Chris Matthews described Bernie supporters as brownshirts and warned that there would be beheadings in Central Park. They weren't brownshirts, my friend. They were just brown people who overwhelmingly went for Bernie Sanders.

How long is how long have you had that one in your pocket, Bri?

I have been in my my sleepless fever haze today.

Little information here. This is from the provisional exit polls. And these do include canvassing of mail in ballots, of early votes. Donald Trump in 2016 got 32 percent of Latino men. 20, 35 percent. He improved his standing among Latino women by three percent. Among black men, his support increased from 13 percent in 2016 to 17 percent in 2020 and among black women. His support doubled from four percent in 2016 to eight percent in 2020. These are this is from the consortium Edison exit polls.

Somehow that's Ice Cube's fault.

Is it Ice Cube's fault?

Yeah, some

And your's?

It's it's definitely it's definitely my fault. I mean, look, I joke, but obviously I'm referencing

Are you four percent of black women? I don't know, how many black women are there?

Well, I didn't I didn't vote for Donald Trump. So that's that's not the issue. But obviously, there's been a lot of discourse about how black women hold it down and black men are complete and abject failures for only voting, you know, eighty six percent for the Democratic Party every year. And a lot of these prominent rappers, not Ice Cube, who did not endorse Trump, but little little pimp and 50 Cent and some other folks actually have put MAGA hats on or endorsed Trump. And a lot was made over the last couple of weeks about how these people were an embarrassment to the community and black men with a weak link and all of this kind of stuff when the reality is both black women and black men went up the exact same amount, four percentage points for Donald Trump. Donald Trump won with the lowest percentage of white voters and like 60 years or something, right?

Yes, that's correct. I've seen one data. I've not have a chance to verify this, but the GOP share of the non-white votes, this presidential election. Twenty six percent, the highest since Richard Nixon in 1960.

There you go. There you go. And so what a lot of the pundit class, predictably, is doing, is basically attacking Latino voters. Some prominent pundits basically want to vote Latinos off the island of POC, knuckleheaded Jones, The New York Times, went a long screed about the diversity of Latino voters and how white Latino voters do vote like white voters, which is true, which is something that I've been talking about for a long time. And I've been making the argument for a long, long time that Democrats are putting false hope in this demographics as destiny argument, like, right, that we can just wait to until America get sufficiently brown and then we'll just start winning all of these elections. But I don't know how many of these things we have to lose before people realize that these voting groups are not homogenous. And you can't depend even on black voters to fall in line all the time if you don't start delivering. And, yes, you know, the country is going to be a minority-majority, eventually, but it's still 70 percent white if you include white Latinos. And I don't know why this is such a wake up call for folks, but it also shouldn't justify people attacking Latino voters. You shouldn't be attacking voters under any circumstance. You should be trying to talk to them and figure out what's going on, because obviously screaming Orange man racist for four years wasn't enough to convince even the people who are the targets of his racism that that is enough for them to pull the lever for crime bill, Anita Hill attacking, Strom Thurmond eulogising, Joe Biden. You know, these things, just because they're not discussed on MSNBC doesn't mean that these aren't central to the conversation that people are having on the ground. As we saw in last week's episode or Monday's episode where we talked to people who were familiar with the state of play on the ground in a predominantly black city like Philadelphia.

You know, I've watched for the past several months you, Briahna Gray, raise the alarm about Biden standing among non-white voters. And I've seen you be dismissed. At every point as a Bernie or Buster, as a

Gadfly

As a secret, a secret Trump supporter for pointing out, for doing really nothing more than pointing out that, oh, hey, this is really bad for you, Joe Biden.

Yep.

It would be, it would be very smart of you to address this matter. You were you know, you were you were ignored or called a crank. I ignored you, not because I disagreed with you, but because I was just not the sort of person who needed to hear that. I'm not I'm not really in charge of anything. I'm just kind of some guy who does whippets. So, I mean, so I ignored you. So, I mean, I'll apologize anyway for, for kind of zoning out when you would say the thing. I mean, if it... I mean, if there was ever a point where you said Virgil you have to do this, you know, I would have done it, but you never made the ask. So, you know, whatever. OK, but is there anyone else you'd like an apology from, Bri?

I mean, look, it's it's not so much that I want an apology. I but I want the right lesson to be taken from this. And I'm I'm looking at Twitter and I'm seeing that that is not what's happening. I'm seeing

What's the lesson what's the lesson that they're taking from this?

Well, they're taking no lesson. What they're doing is being overly self-congratulatory about the fact that if Biden pulls this off, it will be because black voters and urban areas came out to the poll polls and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat in states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. And to the point Kendra Brooks made on Monday's episode, a lot of that organization, what is being done not by the Biden campaign, but by local organizers who appreciated the value of those black votes more than. The party did, and I you know, I went on Democracy Now this morning, and I've been made a similar point that that over and over again you saw in these urban areas that there had been neglect and that it had been local activists of color who picked up the flag. I even heard Amy Klobuchar at MSNBC about an hour ago. She's always a little bit salty and she can barely contain that. She feels like she should be the nominee. And so she said a bunch of snide things, one of which was like, yeah, we picked up the flak in Minnesota because we weren't a high priority when compared to other folks you saw reporting out of the intercept that showed that had Talib and Omar, both in their districts, pushed door knocking, even though the Joe Biden campaign declined to make that kind of effort. Meanwhile, the Donald Trump campaign was knocking millions of dollars a week. You know, so, you know, these things matter. These were all things that not just me, but many people on the left were calling out as problems, the lack of face to face communication, the overreliance on dialing, the lack of outreach, not just the lack of outreach to black and brown communities, but the active thumbing your nose at the disrespect and disregard that was being shown to these communities as they were participating in the largest social justice movement in American history, to then go and not only have them settle for the man who wrote the crime bill and who had never meaningfully apologized for it. But then he went and turned around and picked a woman who self-described as California's top cop for his VP, a woman who zero black people voted for zero because she was polling so poorly in her home state, she had to drop out before voting started. She was pulling behind Andrew Young in California, a woman for whom there was a lot of very organic contempt and frustration in her state because of her record of criminal justice malfeasance. That was supposed to be what black people got in return. And frankly, that's all they're going to get in return for the Herculean effort they're showing right now in pulling this victory out of out of the ashes of a second Trump term.

Now, this was a campaign that said to people that the Black Lives Matter protesters, hey, you shouldn't be shutting down traffic. You're being very irresponsible. You should be doing is sending text messages for Joe Biden right now.

Yep.

And the message was rather explicitly well you've got to vote for him, the alternative is worse, and that's it. You don't see, the thing is, I would say to you, well, of course, this campaign knew. That it was reliant on black Latino voters to make its margins. Surely this would not have been a big blind spot for them.But then again, the strategic doctrine of the Biden campaign was to appeal to these never Trump Republicans

Right and it didn't work.

To responsible conservatives. And it didn't work.

There were none of them.

Trump got a bigger percentage of the Republican vote this time around than he did last time.

Well, that didn't work.

All of that fucking guy, the guy who fucking poisoned Flint's water supply. Right.

Whose endorsement the Biden campaign accepted because he was a responsible Republican who would pied piper, other responsible Republicans into voting for Joe Biden didn't work.

Did you look at a state like Florida where the 15 dollar minimum wage passed?

A progressive issue is a progressive issue, that it's part of Joe Biden's platform, but which he never talked about, did not talk about as much as he'd like to say the words law and order over over again, or I am not a socialist.

I beat the socialist, which is a great way to get people to stop thinking about you as a socialist and say socialist over and over again.

You know, all of these progressive, all of these ballot measures to legalize marijuana, progressive measures, one over and over and over again in states where Joe Biden lost or is holding on by the skin of his teeth. And yet still, the punditry is out there saying that the reason that Joe Biden lost is because he because of because Bernie Sanders exists, I guess, in his like, molecules are in the ether. He has tainted Joe Biden as a socialist candidate.

And it caused him to struggle. Never mind the idea that instead of fighting for these voters who were never going to come for you, because why would you vote for Republican lite when there's an actual Republican option on the ticket? You could have actually galvanized voters who desperately needed you to fight for them at this moment in American history, where 30 to 50 thousand people are facing eviction, when 12 million people have lost their employer based health insurance, as we're heading into winter, the holiday season and half of this country is a tundra and they're going to have heating bills that they're not going to be able to manage because Democrats started to gamble on some kind of covid relief because they presume that Joe Biden was going to win, nevermind that he wasn't going to be able to do anything until January.

And now it's looking like he won't even have a united Democratic Congress to back him up. So we still going to have to play this dance with the Republicans to figure out what kind of relief we're going to get. So what do we gain in all of this? What do we learn in all of this? Well, here's what we gained, we gained more days of the election, we gained a whole election month, so, you know, the good times keep rolling.

Let's be clear about what happened Tuesday. This has been an historic disaster for the Democrats. This has been a categorical, absolute disaster.

They have lost seats in the House. Their backbenchers in the House are pissed because they had been operating under the assumption that they would be in the driver's seat come January 20, 21. And this is not going to be the case. The Senate is virtually out of their hands at this point. Susan Collins won re-election in Maine. Every poll had her down throughout the year.

It looks that, Tom, that race has been called and she won by a good margin there. Thom Tillis in North Carolina, that race has not been called, but he is in a very, very good position to win when the final votes are counted. Every other other than Democrat pickups in Colorado and Arizona, every other seat that they targeted, Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, Montana, and keep in mind, these are Ritsch states, to be sure.

But in the final days of the ratio, some of them virtually tied. Those were all lost by double digit margins, Michigan.

A seat that. Was Republicans targeted that was presumed to be safe, the incumbent Democrat there, Gary Peters, barely won. The networks call that race for him barely won against a right wing black Republican. He also underperformed Joe Biden in that state. It looks like control of the Senate is going to come down to. The two Senate seats in Georgia, which will be going to a runoff, which I would strongly bet the Republicans will win both of those seats if history is any guide, particularly as it looks like Joe Biden will be losing that state by a slim margin, though, that is still up in the air.

And as of right now, the networks have called Florida, Texas, Ohio, Iowa. For Trump, as we record right now, Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have not been called. Right now, what looked to be an easy Biden victory and keep in mind, he was leading in the polls by double digits going into Election Day.

It appears that this is going to be a slim victory for him.

He has won the popular vote, but by not by 10 points. I think when all is counted, probably in the neighborhood of four percent, perhaps that after every single vote is counted and as well, the race is close enough that the litigation has begun.

And as we've talked about on this very program, Trump is attempting to, you know, have hundreds of thousands of ballots thrown out and steal the election. It's it's a catastrophe in the best case scenario right now, really is Biden barely wins. And there is a Republican senator, Mitch McConnell, keeps control of the Senate with with 52 seats, which is something that some, quote unquote, Democrats are relishing. Did you see that? There's a category of tweet that's like, well, great, now we can have balance restored a Democrat in the White House, a Republican Senate, and now we can have the kind of moderation that America really craves.

Yeah, we're not going to pack the courts.

We're not going to ban saying we're not going to we're not going to get rid of private and we're going to profit out of health insurance. Right.

That was and of course, those are those are perverts saying that those are sick brain people.

Those are those are evil, maniacal people not worthy of your esteem.

But right now, the it's pretty clear that the next two years are going to be an utter disaster for the country and the world, for all of us.

And so I would anticipate the Democrats doing very badly in the midterm elections come twenty, twenty two.

And I would imagine.

The Democrats would have a very hard time keeping the White House should Joe Biden win in twenty, twenty four and this is this is not what I predicted would happen. I predicted that Democrats would come out with 53 Senate seats, and that is 100 percent not going to be the case. And I predict that Biden would win by a comfortable margin. That's not going to be the case either.

So which which were the Senate seats that you were banking on or that you were predicting to go the other way and why?

I believe that, well, you had the four the four ones that I anticipated being wins, basically Arizona and Colorado, which did go Democrat, but also Maine and North Carolina, which look, Maine called for Republican. North Carolina looks like it's going to be the Republican. I also anticipated Iowa going Democrat. It did not. I also anticipated one or two of the seats going as well. I thought Georgia, at least one of the seats would go Democrat.

Looks like neither of them will.

I thought I thought South Carolina was very much so in play. It was not.

And I just want I mean, just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this failure in South Carolina, I believe the most expensive Senate race in American history.

Jamie Harrison raised one hundred nine million dollars. To be Lindsey Graham, and he lost by 11 points, Amy McGrath raised ninety million to beat Mitch McConnell. He she lost by 20 points. Sarah Gideon raised 70 million in Maine in a state that Joe Biden won. And she lost by looks like about nine points.

So if if if Bernie Sanders were on the top of this ticket, I don't think it's a stretch to say that the argument being made in this scenario would be that he hurt down ballot candidates. You know that somehow these the failures, the congressional failures that we are seeing down ballot were would be attributed to the fact that this crazy socialist man was at the top of the ticket. Do you think it's fair to attribute these losses, the the wild departure from what people predicted that we've just seen to the fact that Joe Biden was potentially an uninspiring candidate?

Do I think that the very poor result for the Democrats in the Congress? Do I do I lay the blame at Joe Biden?

Do you think it's a fair argument? Is there any evidence? I would I would lay the blame of Joe Biden? I would say that ultimately ultimately it's at this stage in our elections, it's the top of the ticket that determines the tone of these races. And what we have seen from the Senate results is not a lot of deviation from the top ticket results, some deviation, to be sure, but not a lot of it at the end of the day.

You know, these races, these these local races get nationalized, especially when you have a high turnout election and all of this mobilization from people wanting to vote for or against the incumbent president, I think at the end at the end of the day, these races are nationalized and it's about the national message. And I think it's pretty clear that the Democrats failed to articulate a national message.

That would they fail to make the argument that if you elect us at every level, you know, you're going to get X, Y and Z? They put all of their stock in a an argument that was similar to their argument in twenty sixteen, which was, you know, look look how bad this guy is, you can't vote to re-elect him.

You can't do it.

And I and I thought this time around I honestly I thought this time around that was a that was a compelling enough argument.

When you consider how badly Trump has governed, when you consider his overt corruption, when you consider the, you know, two hundred forty two hundred fifty thousand deaths to the coronavirus when you consider the state of the economy right now.

All right. So let's talk let's break down some of that, because I want to I want to like not just breathe over all of these things. So one is I wanted to make the point that it's especially notable, given how well progressives did in their individual races. The squad not only all got comfortably re-elected, but they expanded. They doubled in size. And there was this presumption that, you know, you said Trump governed poorly and that that was going to come back to haunt him.

But it depends on what you count as him governing. So, you know, there is an argument that when you look at the polls that show, are you were you better off now than you were four years ago? Majorities of Americans say yes, despite everything.

Not not a majority. Not a majority. This is so this is from the exit polls. Forty one percent.

And, you know, it's interesting, we were looking at these polls before the election, but from the exit polls, 41 percent say that their family's financial situation is better today than it was four years ago of that group. Seventy two percent voted to re-elect Donald Trump.

Right, and I think that Democrats are really they really oversold the extent to which they could lay blame for covid at Trump's feet.

I think that there is a tension between.

Folks who are feeling the economic pressures and the kind of physical threat of the illness and who might be are, you know, frustrated that Trump hasn't, you know, implemented policies that could better meet the needs of the moment, but also don't really see a very clear plan laid out for Biden that differs meaningfully from what Trump is doing. I mean, saying I believe science is not a plan. And as you know, not at all. Kind of pointed out at the VP debate, when Kamala Harris was asked to describe what Joe Biden's covid response plan was, he was like, you just copied exactly what I said.

The main difference being mask mandates and mask mandates are helpful. We all understand the extent to which mass prevent the spread of the thing. But that's not getting you to a place where people are able to figure out how to be insured when 12 million people have just been laid off or lost their employer based health insurance.

That's not a plan to address the eviction crisis. That's not a plan.

That's really it. That's there's nothing there was honestly the Colvert argument so aggravated because it was always bullshit.

Bullshit. This is really top to bottom. Joe Biden has never once articulated support for a monthly covid relief check.

He has never been pressed on this by the media and all of the interviews that he's done and the last six or seven months when he has been the Democratic nominee during a global pandemic, he has never said, hey, if you elect me, I'm going to send you a monthly twelve hundred dollar check.

You're going to take the money. Any kind of Joe Biden bucks, you get the Biden bucks, you will elect us all.

You're getting the Biden bucks. You're getting the health care and you're getting the mass. You're getting all the shit. We're going to give you the shit. There was nothing. There was never a tangible thing, a tangible proposal about his is like how was he going to do better with Colbert? I don't listen to the scientists. All right. Whatever. That's it.

Which he obviously there's a tangible thing because if you listen to the scientist, you have a very different position on global warming. So shout out to the person who tweeted, you know, I'm so glad that Joe Biden was so, you know, was hammered out in the message about banning fracking or not banning, you know you know what the like the one tangible thing was typically walk back.

It was said we're going to have nationwide mask mandate. And then, you know, they got nervous about it and said, no, actually, you know, it's not it's not really going to be a nationwide mass.

And then later, you know, as the cases went up, they said, yeah, we're going to do the mass mandate. Actually, it was just a fucking mess.

So I want to ask you, Virgile, Chris Hayes did a tweet thread that a lot of lefties got upset about.

And at the end of this thread, he argued that basically leftists are wrong to presume that things would have been different if their policy pet projects had been adopted by the Biden campaign. He tweeted, It's worth really reassessing the analytical foundations of the idea that there is some big enduring New Deal level Democratic coalition out there for taking if Dems would just all caps do it the right way, is it worth reassessing the idea that the way forward, the way toward a big multiracial coalition, the likes of which could actually unite the country, is to back New Deal level democratic interventions?

I think it's not a matter of we're going to win on policy. It's a matter of winning on principles. And the Biden campaign failed to articulate any concrete principles.

And that's really it with someone like, you know, Bernie Sanders, for instance. OK, the principles are very clear, OK, health care is a human right and we are going to provide health care for every single person in the country when provided without deductibles, co-pays and all that ticky tacky bullshit. And you never have to deal with health insurance company ever again. It's just not going to exist. OK, that's tangible. It's controversial, but it's tangible.

It's real. It makes sense. It's like, here's the thing we want to do and here's how we're going to get there with Biden.

You did get he did keep saying health care is a human right and then with nothing at all.

Yeah. I mean, did you see those Fox News polls? Fox News, all the leftist, again, were thrilled about this because they pulled changing and changing to a government run health care plan. Seventy two percent in favor. Twenty nine percent opposed supporting a path to citizenship for the undocumented, 72 percent in favor support Roe v. Wade, 71 percent in favor, increasing government spending on green and renewable energy, 70 percent in favor, stricter gun laws, 55 percent in favor.

This is not what a divided country looks like.

No, not at all. It's what a country with a corrupt two party corporate system looks like who is intentionally dividing folks along bizzaro ideological lines that have very little bearing on what their lives are like and what they actually mean. And we keep falling for it because there are pundits who respond, respond to a moment like this, like our friend Zerlina Maxwell, who says this election wasn't about policy. This election was about racism. Racism, a brand new burgeoning phenomenon that just tore onto the scene in 2016 and changed everything about the American dynamic racism which didn't exist in 2008 and 2012, magically manifested itself.

So how is it about to keep a white woman down? How is it about racism?

Of all the race, gender, demographic groups? Trump did better among literally all of them, except for white men, white men. Well, Trump got 62 percent of white men votes in 2016. He got 57 percent in 2020. Yeah.

So the argument isn't, of course, that racism doesn't exist or that racism doesn't impact voter behaviors or anything like that. But the reality is, when you have Donald Trump getting larger and larger percentages of the non-white vote, despite being really unsubtle about his racism, you have to start to ask whether there are things other than Donald Trump's bigotry that are attracting voters. That is especially true since as much as I would like it not to be the case, none of us have the power to end racism or meaningfully put a dent in it before the next election cycle.

So the question is, how do you appeal to voters despite their racism? How did Barack Obama how to Barack Hussein Obama, our first black president, managed to get all of those voters who later turned to Donald Trump? Right. It's not that those voters can't be racist, but obviously they prioritized something over their racism and chose to support Barack Obama. And the Democratic Party needs to be working on what they can offer to voters to make that happen again instead of castigating voters for not sharing every aspect of their moral worldview.

Because guess what? None of y'all shared the moral, more moral worldview of leftists who actually believe it. Let me say, health care is a human right, but it's our job to convince you of that to make an argument. Politics is about persuasion, not about poll testing and trying to twist yourself into the form of this abstract candidate. This abstract political persona that actually maps on to zero people in the United States of America outside of the the the title head of the Lincoln Park project.

Right.

And look, racism obviously permeates American society. And here's to American politics. Nobody's disputing that. But this was not a particularly racism based election. And it's a bit rich to suggest that.

And, you know, the evidence for that is the fact that Donald Trump improved his standing among non-white voters and in fact, reached historic highs for a Republican nominee in the non-white vote. I think generally I mean, here's what I really think happened. And this is you know, this is just my hunch.

Take it for what you will, my hunches have not been very good lately, to say the least, yours have been great, but I'll just so I'll give you my hunch and maybe you can you can score my hunch.

I think that to the degree that there were coherent messages in this election, you had one message from Donald Trump, which was one of vague economic nationalism, and you had a message from Joe Biden, which is an equally vague managerial, technocratic, you know, we're going to come in.

We're just going to fix the problems. Don't worry about it. And between those two, I think. People, by and large, simply went with how they perceived their own personal circumstances.

Again, that datum that I read to you, that is that's highly predictive right there.

Of your 41 percent of voters said they're better today than they were four years ago, 72 percent of the vote for Trump. Half of that said they're worse off today.

And they voted for Biden. The people who think they're about the same, they voted for Biden by a two to one margin.

So you said, you know, I don't I don't there's a particularly racist, you know, racialized election. I don't know that I would go that far because Donald Trump does always foreground his dog whistle, so much so that the term dog whistle seems antiquated and like not really appropriate.

But the problem becomes, if you have any kind of historical long game, like if you if you care at all about a candidate's record, which, as we all know, Julian Reid explicitly said that she doesn't and nobody cares after the last Democratic primary debate. But if you don't think that, you know, Joe Biden sprang from his head six months ago and actually care about who he's been for the last 40 years, then you would recognize. But few people have.

Run as racist campaigns and never had as racist legacy as he has, and this is something that you're welcome Democrats, I have not said until now because I was holding my tongue because, you know, Joe Biden needs to get elected and I have some respect for that. But the reality is this is a man who eulogized Strom Thurmond, who attempted with Strom Thurmond and the other segregationists to pass harsher versions of the crime bill for years under Republican administrations.

And it wasn't until Bill Clinton and his feeling that he needed to pacify right wingers in order to get elected. Did his right wing, racist, intentionally harmful policy managed to get a hearing? He demoralized Anita Hill.

He ravaged her on the public stage and participated in in that disgrace, that national disgrace, all to hope to to to encourage and help and and submit Clarence Thomas, his role on the Supreme Court.

He has been in the wrong place at the wrong time at every moment in American history, and this is the person that we're supposed to be like while Trump's a racist. So I got to go with this guy. I'm sorry, but tit for tat life for life. You'd be hard pressed to get me to agree that Donald Trump has been worse for black people than Joe Biden. I'm sorry. It's not true. It's not true.

Donald Trump has been worse for some communities in this country than then then Joe Biden has. And that's certainly true for potentially immigrant groups, kids in cages, although, you know, Joe Biden was right there constructing those cages with Barack Obama, the deporter in chief. So that's a toss up, too. But the reality is for black people, which, again, we didn't get talked about in this election because it was presumed our votes were guaranteed for black people, tit for tat.

There is a real argument that that Joe Biden has done more harm to our communities than Donald Trump. And I'm tired of us having to pretend that that's not the case.

And if you want to keep relying on the black vote to date the Democratic Party out of whatever shit pit that it has dug for itself this time around, you're going to have to start giving returns. And the black people and black leadership in particular, because I think that black voters understand this a lot better. But black leadership has got to stop sheepherding black voters toward these corporate candidates.

People like James Clyburn, who has taken more pharmaceutical money than anybody else in Congress, have got to stop siphoning voters into this this institution that does nothing but harm them.

And we need more black people in leadership willing to call out that behavior.

Look what happened with with Proposition twenty two, Uber and Lyft one, Prop 22 in a landslide. This is from Lee Fong. Not only by paying the California NAACP president for an endorsement that appeared in TV ads aimed at Democratic leaning voters but paid off Latino and Asian civil rights or for hyper targeted outreach across the state.

How many times do we have to see this happen? How many times? My critique of identity politics is this. It's not that I haven't an ideas, bad or wrong or organizing around the harms that have been done to your group is bad or wrong. Leftest, some of you need to hear this. The issue is when identity is cynically wielded in this way to hurt the groups, that it's that the people who are representing themselves as spokesperson for these groups, you know, the very groups are supposed be protecting.

They're actually doing all the damage to Hamen. And that identity alone isn't in and of itself enough to determine whether or not someone's politics are good or bad. You actually have to look, oh, what do you know what they actually do say I believe in. And this stuff is disastrous.

And people like Zerlina Maxwell. This isn't personal, but who wrote a book called The End of White Identity Politics and who see everything through an identity lens when everything is when you have an identity hammer, everything looks like an identity nail. And she literally can't process the historical moment with any kind of accuracy because she doesn't understand anything other than black good, white bad.

I'm rooting for everyone black. It's ridiculous. It's childish. You know what it is?

It's not it's not identity politics. It's patronage. That's what it is. These are just patronage networks.

Well, here, here's what I don't think. I think that Zerlina and a lot of these people I don't mean to keep focusing on her. She's just an avatar for a broader phenomenon.

But I think that people genuinely believe they genuinely love black people. They genuinely want to support their community, and they genuinely think that they're doing the right thing. No, I believe this to be true. I think that Zerlina thinks that it's actually good for black people to have Kamala Harris, because to her, the main concern is representation, being able to walk into a room and feeling like she's not going to be asked if she's the waitstaff. Brown faces in high places do make the lives of someone like Zerlina and even myself, who are already very accomplished better.

Because the worst kind of racism that I'm going to, you know, experience, generally speaking, in life is that I'm going to walk into some professional environment. People are going to disrespect me because they presume I don't belong there.

Boohoo.

I mean, so yes, having Barock and Khonsari for sorry for the bad faith when the bad faith security guard asked for your I.D. on your first day here, I mean like that.

Make sure that won't happen again. That's not hurtful and sad. And that's not to say that that doesn't you know, it's just real.

That's a real sure. But it's just so far down the the like when when when the woman in, you know, Ann Taylor Loft asked me if I can find some pants in her size.

I am frustrated, OK? I am frustrated because I'm wearing a winter coat talking on the phone and carrying a purse. And she should know that I don't work here because I'm wearing a winter coat, talking on the phone and carrying a purse. However, that is not what I build my political philosophy around or what I'm looking for, for a presidential candidate to cure.

I just I just help the person.

If they think I work, they're just. You know, I got so, yeah, I got some dance right here. I will, yeah, you just go back and take a look. You're going to look you look great in these. You know, I do want to go back to something you said earlier about Joe Biden.

And it's very true that in his long career in Congress, he is responsible for the destruction of many lives, of families, of communities.

That's not an exaggeration. And he personally, politically profit off that destruction. But doesn't everyone have a pretty woak period?

Yes, he said this. He said this year. He said this year and last like he has.

How many genders are there anything now or at least three probably. You know, he said, you know, all that stuff I did, I've grown.

I'm a different guy now. I'm going to do the good things now. Don't worry about it. Look, and that is the thing, I mean, the critique that lefties get is that we're purity police and that we don't acknowledge growth. And I really resist that because I wanted to be really clear that Joe Biden has not apologized. He was asked at the start of his campaign to apologize for his treatment of Anita Hill, and he wobbled back and forth and said he didn't really feel like he had to and gave all these half apologies.

And eventually the pressure mounted. And apparently he called her directly but didn't actually say I'm sorry. And she said, OK, I accept it, I guess. And then he you know, it was it was it was a deeply unsatisfying and only under the pressure of some real harm to his presidential aspirations. His third time's the charm, presidential aspirations. Did he finally, after 30 years, do what he should have done in the first instance? And the same is true of the crime bill.

And we saw it in 2016, too. Eventually, under pressure, Bill Clinton was kind of forced to apologize, but he was back on the campaign trail a month later talking about how he shouldn't have had to.

You know, this is who these people are. There is no growth. I haven't seen any growth from Kamala Harris either. So this is the more schools, not jail, mocking protesters who sincerely understand that we need more schools, not jail, that to that woman is and we run around with these signs, build more schools, less jails, build more schools, and we walk around everywhere, build more school.

We protest, build more schools, less jails. Put money into education, not prisons. There's a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion. And it's this I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.

I mean, I do think at the end of the day, that's based on the message from the Democratic campaign overall and based on the types of candidates that they ran. And that includes the top of the ticket.

I think I think there is just a fundamental trust deficit.

I think that a lot of people looked at Biden and Harris without even necessarily knowing the granular details of their records and thought, I just don't trust these people.

I don't trust what they're saying. I don't see how this is supposed to appeal to me as an individual. I don't see how this will help me as a person.

I mean, certainly some people did feel that way. Certainly, I think the message connected in some way. But though, I mean, frankly, it seems to me that the majority of Biden voters were people who just showed up to vote against Trump and he received an historic amount of votes. The negative mobilization is real. Most people do recognize I mean, he won the popular vote. Most people do in any civilized society and a fairer society. He would be installed president based on that alone.

But the fact that it's so close. Frankly, suggests it suggests an utter failure and utter breakdown. I mean, you have it's you have a rudderless Democratic Party. It's a party that doesn't stand for anything.

And, you know, saying I mean, it's not like when FDR ran in 1932, he said, OK, here's what I'm going to do. You know, I'm going to do X, Y, Z.

I'm going to you know, I'm going to seize the gold and I'm going to you know, I'm going to do with the New Deal. No, he didn't say so.

You know, Happy Days are here again. And this is I mean, this is the other thing. This is the other thing from Tuesday that is that is genuinely concerning.

That's very troubling, which is that it seems that politics has just fallen into devolved into the realm of the spectacular to such a degree that there's not even a matter of basic responsibility anymore where you can be a colossal fuck up as president and just get away with it, nearly win, maybe even steal it in the courts.

I mean, I'd say there's a non-zero chance of that happening. I doubt that will happen, but I'll leave the door open for it.

Yeah, I have to watch more coverage because, you know, my prediction was that it if it goes beyond the first couple of days that that the Democrats are going to have to claw back, that if Trump decides he wants this and just ramrods it through the courts, that he can be successful if he wants it. And I and I am not entirely I'm not unconvinced of that from what I've seen in the last 24 hours.

But I I'll tape I'll reserve judgment on that. I'm sure and as well, keep in mind, if it really does go to the nuclear scenario where there are competing slate of electors right now, there is no situation where Democrats will be in control of the Senate and come early January before Inauguration Day.

So, you know, keep that in your pocket. There's a six three conservative majority on the Supreme Court.

But, you know, I don't want to fall too deep into that kind of speculation.

I would say that what was so aggravating about this entire campaign, about the Biden campaign. And this is not to be unexpected, to be sure from a fellow like that man who is essentially a conservative.

Is that there are real problems right now. It may not always be apparent, but there is there was a real violence in the society. There was violence that hurts the most vulnerable populations in the society. There is a problem of collective action. That's the covid crisis has laid bare where I would say that people who are wealthier and better off are just not afraid of it anymore. And of course, the primary victims are minorities or the poor, the undocumented people, the prisoners and things like that.

And as ecological crises accelerates. The weight of this will be borne on that that most vulnerable 25 percent and it is a really scary thought. That's OK the most. Selfish, exploitative and evil instincts that people are capable of having will be enough to win elections, like Republicans can win elections, they can win elections, and there is not a party that's finished at all, period. It has not been repudiated. And more critically, that message has not been repudiated.

And the only way to fight that, the only way to fight.

I mean, you want to call that racism, you call that class and call that whatever. I mean, it's a problem.

The only way to fight that is to articulate a radical new ideological direction. And that is why people like you and I had so much hope for the Bernie Sanders campaign, because that is what he was doing.

That was the he it was a radical message, was that none of the twenty nine other suckers he was running against were capable of articulating.

And the farther and farther away we get from that message, from having that national message, the deeper this hole that we're digging for ourselves, for, frankly, our civilization. GATT's and. Right now, what we are facing is a catastrophe.

A Republican Senate, a narrow Democrat House majority and a Democrat president who did not win by a big margin, who will be reviled for a variety of reasons from day one, by, you know, what would Trump supporters and adherents of the opposite side, who has conservative instincts, who will now have a both a scapegoats in Mitch McConnell for his refusal to do anything?

That might move the country to the left. Anything that might improve the lot of the most vulnerable in the society, should he even have that inclination, not only provide a scapegoat, but he will also have an opportunity to.

Enforce a.

What could be a brutal austerity regime in the midst of a continuing pandemic, in the midst of an economic crisis, in the midst of what is not just a matter of the stock market going down or people losing their jobs, but it's also a matter of wages going down.

It's a matter of unions being crushed. It's a matter of labor protections being taken away.

And it's going to be bad, it's going to be worse than we thought. I mean, there was I mean, there was the door was open.

I would say, if there had been a real blue wave, the door was open for maybe sneaking in some progressive policy.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, the pushing them to the left, you know, whatever you want to call it, that doing activism as as Professor Chomsky said, to get things like a green new deal, to get things like, you know, say, I don't know, do you know, to to rein in the fucking racist police to to decriminalize drugs to.

Increase, I mean, not Medicare for all at this point, but at least increase access to health care.

Fine, if that's the best we can fucking do and just get money in people's pockets, pay people to stay home so that they don't get sick and die.

We don't have any of those opportunities anymore.

And I think that the political situation is just going to be so muddled. And so discordance. That's. I mean, before this election, I had no hope for the Democratic Party and after it, I it's pretty much the same deal.

I just think there's now a greater urgency to destroy the Democratic Party than it has to.

It can it has to be supplanted by something else, by a real. Called it working class movement. That's where we started, Virgil, but that but that a party that actually articulates an alternative, I don't know what the Democratic Party does, which is not which is not what liberalism does or can do.

OK, I'm just I'm tired of the doom and gloom.

Like I'm tired of it, like. What the situation described is a situation that we knew existed the second that Joe Biden won the nomination. There was never I participated in that. We're going to push him left dialogue because I was trying to extract some leverage at the time when there actually was leverage, if people were willing to withhold their votes for him in the lead up to the primary. Now, we can all just be really honest about the fact that if the largest protest move in the history of American history is not going to move Joe Biden an inch on any issue, much less criminal justice, much less any of the issues that are overwhelmingly popular and could have gotten him elected more soundly without this nailbiter that we're all enduring right now, then nothing is going to do it.

There could be 50 million people standing outside of the White House. And he's not going to do Jack, because what what, what? Why would he? Why would he? You can't get him out of office. That's how it works. He said he's got a a a fire viable, free job unless he goes out and does the monuments crap or, you know, some some committed impeachable offense.

He's in there for the you know how you know, how those get punished. And he was probably planning to stay for the four years after that anyway. So here here we are. You know what I mean?

So I, I, I'm a little I'm a little frustrated.

Like, I don't think it's our job to sit here and be like things are dire. I think that people know that things are dire. And what I was going to say earlier in what you just said was that watching the television, what's so fascinating is how the pundit class is working overtime to act like everything like this is like something that we should all be happy about. Like this is a good day, like, oh, yeah, total dunk.

Joe Biden just won Trumps out of office. Let's all celebrate. Why is everybody being so lachrymose? Like it's there's like an obvious concerted effort to pretend like this outcome, presuming that Joe Biden wins is a net positive and just sweep his colossal failures under the rug to sweep the fact that he's been a toxic influence on down ballot races under the rug to sweep the fact that that neoliberalism was on the ballot and it failed horribly under the rug. And I think that the hope that we should have in this moment, what the progressive should be focused on is to exploit this moment for all of its rhetorical value.

They are going to try to if this were Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders had caused such a disaster car wreck of a down ballot outcome, you would never, ever hear the end of it for you, Joe, this is Joe Biden's monstrosity and the reason they're not letting any progressives on TV, the reason why you have this, like rotating carousel of nincompoops offering their failed prescriptions for what should come next after having absolutely no predictive savvy. And what has happened is because they know if they let us on, there will speak the truth.

And the truth is that this has been an abject failure for neo liberalism. And all of the all of the rhetoric that led up to this, where we weren't supposed to talk about Joe Biden's real failings or we we couldn't handicap his campaign, undermined his campaign in any way because Trump is worse and Trump is a fascist and Trump is going to get my friends deported. I respected that enough to be running a twenty five percent, but now I'm running at 100 percent.

And to the extent that people is plugged in and he is not on low power mode and people thought I was going to be annoying before, I promise you, I'm about to be so obnoxious.

You're going to pray for the days that I was, quote unquote on the payroll.

Right. And I think that every other leftist should do the same thing. And we are going to be pilloried. We are going to be attacked. People are going to say that we are somehow trying to undermine the democracy, but they don't even have the specter of an upcoming election to use to threaten us at this point. Now they're going to have to look at themselves in the mirror. And we need to be able we need to be willing to wield the gross dissatisfaction with the outcome of this election to our favor and make the very persuasive case that if good policies have been on the ballot, we wouldn't be in this position.

I'm so tired of the status quo, enforcing nimrods, acting as though like like here. Here's what maybe I should keep this for our good faith.

Bad faith. I'll keep up our good faith by the point of the matter is, I think that there's an opportunity here and we got a t we got to tease this stuff.

Yeah, that's going to be the premium. Now, I think we should do a good faith.

I'd pay for this episode when I pivot to that next. But I just I just wanna say, I don't know. In some ways this outcome for the left is ideal. And let me tell you why. Because obviously, if Trump were to have won. We would get blamed for it and it would be an impediment to us advancing our issues without being just perceived as gadflies who don't have the interests of the Democratic Party at heart.

Well, hang on. That's not that there's a kind of a contradiction there. We're just gadflies. But we also dictated who won the election.

Well, that's the contradiction that neo libs lived with, live with every day of their lives. So that's the reality.

I mean, if they I mean, Trump, like Trump steals it and wins and we get blamed for it. I'm just going to say. Yeah, yeah, OK. But that's not my control reversal.

You can try to sculpt reality, OK, but from a commerce perspective and outside of the world of Internet snark, that's not helpful to us. So that would have been one outcome. The other outcome is if Donald if if I had won by a landslide, then they would say that that was a referendum on neoliberalism and that neoliberalism is great and progressive need to just go back on our whole and cry about it, you know, hashtag coke or whatever.

We did that. What did that happen? What did I feel like?

I'm just seeing everywhere now. Well, I'll explain this to you. OK, all right.

So now we are in a situation which is obviously terrible. Nobody wanted to lose seats in the House and failed to claim the Senate. But this kind of mixed bag result where Joe Biden still can't even claim victory at 11, 14 on Wednesday night is and it gives us the window to make our case and make the case for why we should not have ever been in this situation.

I think we should not hesitate to call this an abject failure on the part of the Biden campaign at the same time that we don't get kind of the negative backlash for for for Trump actually having won.

And obviously, all the people who would be harmed by a Trump presidency don't have to experience that as well. Hopefully, again, we don't actually know the outcome of this thing as yet. So that that, I think, is the silver lining to this whole thing for those who listened for an hour into this and are really hoping for something hopeful to give you something that's not hopeful.

Get ready to hear this for the next two years. You know, Biden trying his best, but he can't do anything. It's the Holman's Mitch McConnell.

You know that. You know that.

And at this I mean, at this point, like, it's you know, it's time's up for humanity at this point. And we can't have another two years of this silly fucking bullshit. And, you know, we're going to hear that, you know.

Well, of course, Joe Biden has to deport those children because Mitch McConnell has the son. You know, of course, you know, Joe Biden can't, you know, pardon.

He can't just pardon people convicted of drug crimes. You know, that's ridiculous. It might hurt his electoral standings among conservatives.

And it's all Dritz old drivel. It's all a fucking shell game. And this is what's been laid completely bare.

I this is why, like, it has to be it for the Democratic Party, because the Democratic I think the thing that like, we hate the Democratic Party, but the thing it's the thing that it's supposed to do is stop the Republicans.

That's it. That's the job. That's your one job. And you can't fucking do it. You can't do it. You just got fucking divided government. They're still in charge. Yeah. Mitch McConnell, is it going to fucking. He's not going to be is he going to fucking vote on it if I can put any of Joe Biden's fucking judicial nominees to a vote.

Yeah, yeah. Adorable. Adorable.

He's fucking laughing all the way to the fucking bank. So there can't there can't be this party. There can't be this this party that that obfuscates in the midst of all these things, that that is a sink for hundreds of millions of dollars. That goes to fucking loser creeps like John off Soph and Amy McGrath and Jamie Harrison like it just it just can't exist.

And if the argument against a third party is, well, it's going to split the vote. Well, how is this good that you guys are losing already? What, you're going to lose twice as hard now.

So do you think people should be paying more attention to to efforts like the People's Party?

Because here's the thing that I also hear from the left Virgile the I it's really boggles my mind how dismissive. I hear a lot of leftists being including like serious ones with their own, like streaming channels of third party efforts. And it's like they sound exactly like the folks in twenty sixteen who said Bernie can't win because no one's going to vote for Bernie. And it makes me crazy because they're people who are supposed to be progressives and our thought leaders and all of the stuff, and they turn up their nose at efforts like the Green Party.

They turn up their nose or show kind of wanton indifference to the People's Party. They just want to talk about how they know better than everybody else. And they're serious people, so they can't take serious party seriously. And it's like it's like it's just a circular logic that we can never get out of it. I'm tired of it. If you say, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

We're going to have we're going to be focusing on this issue. We're going to have very smart people on to talk about this issue. I just want to say that my instinct right now is, you know, I'm not a supporter of the Green Party.

And I think that's something that has to happen and something has to happen to actually create a third party.

And a third party requires an actual base of support. That is, it can't just be, you know, some lefty intellectuals who can't just be some people on Twitter and have to have like an actual real support base that is not currently represented by the two parties.

And as long as the Democratic Party can pretend to represent most people in the country, then it's going to be hard to.

We get, you know, get people to stop viewing the Democrats as their protectors, as the ones who hold the Republicans at bay. So if there is anything to do rhetorically, I mean, if there's anything to that, that is the rhetorically valuable right now, it is to say, you know, here, here's your here are your protectors. Here's your knight in shining armor. They just let Mitch McConnell sneak away with the fucking Senate.

And no other circumstance do lefties, media personalities pull punches about what they think should happen because it's kind of like unlikelier, somewhat implausible if you think that the Green Party isn't what it needs to be, make a concerted critique of the Green Party and advocate for reforms to make it better. One of those reforms, I would argue, would be encouraging people to vote for the Green Party so they're better funded and put forward better candidates and have more successes. Also, the Green Party, we had people like Jabbari Bridport on.

We just had Kendra Brooks on. There are third party candidates who are making inroads at the local level. And I don't like this dismissive tone. And I know this isn't like you are trying to do. But more broadly, there's a dismissiveness about the Greens that I think is directly in conflict with everything that we say about how contemptible the Democratic Party behaves in many instances like like in this past electoral cycle. You can't have it both ways.

You know, if we're willing to participate in Democratic politics and vote for Democratic candidates to make sure they win, to get Trump out of office and celebrate the squad, given all of the failures of the Democratic Party, that's a system they're all operating within. I don't understand why it's anathema for the majority of media leftists to admit that they are actually the ones that are squandering their vote in these deep blue and deep red states by voting for someone like Joe Biden, who is frankly contemptible over someone like, you know, these Green Party candidates who at very least you will be using your vote to secure a real tangible reform.

If they get to five percent, they get federal matching funds, they get ballot access that matters for the potential growth of this party. These things can happen. At the same time, you can both advocate for reforms and also do tangible things like vote in a way that makes them more able to do better next time around.

I don't see a conflict in criticizing the Democratic Party and criticizing the Green Party. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this right now. I mean, because it is something we'll talk about on this show, because it is something that's very important. I will just say that I think that one precondition for a left third party is that the left most segment of the Democratic Party. Make a concerted effort to split from the Democratic Party, and that's very that's that's very hard to do.

I don't see someone like, for instance, AOC saying I'm resigning for the Democratic Party. I'm switching my affiliation to this new, you know, Socialist Party. This is new working class party. I don't see it happening right now, particularly one. And but, you know, that's all that's old path dependency.

That's all just, you know, her personal ambitions or her view that, you know, I can be more influential working within the system, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But, you know, that's that's a longer conversation.

I don't I don't think, you know, we need to have it out right now. Um, did you want to do a good faith? Bad faith?

Uh, yes. But I'm not done time at this. I think that my main point.

Would you like. I don't get to just tell me. I don't I brought the subject up for a reason. And the main reason I brought the subject up is because I brought up the Peoples Party and I haven't heard there's a lot of oh, wow, the Democrats suck. But I'm not hearing the mainstream leftist podcast host giving airtime and support to something like the People's Party. And if they don't like the People's Party, if they think they're doing something wrong, have them on, talk about it, offer support.

But I do think that there is this cynicism in this like nihilism that is too prominent on the left. And I would like to say in this moment, this is like this is supposed to be my good faith. And this moment, I think that there are opportunities and there are opportunities to really maximize shine the spotlight on the Democratic Party's failures and offer a counterpoint, a beacon of opportunity, an alternative party system that can actually meet the needs of the people.

There is no better time to be amplifying that sort of effort right now.

And I hope that we do very soon have someone from the People's Party on and some of them agree, some people from the Green Party on it as well, to talk about how we very tangibly go about doing that.

Let's do it if you want. My good faith. Bad faith.

They're both from California. Yeah. Good faith is Anthea Raymond has one. I believe her city council race, the one that's fantastic.

She was running against this real scumbag who was endorsed by Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. That's for a little old city council race in Los Angeles.

So that can that is an indication of how much of a threat to the system in L.A. City. Raymond is a big congratulations to all of our friends in Los Angeles. Well done. Know a lot of people who fought on this campaign for well over a year.

Bernie Sanders, who endorsed her, uh, bad faith, pretty much all the evil ballot propositions in California passed, including Prop twenty two.

But, you know, there's a chance to overturn it. There's a chance I mean, it is it is it is a really it is a genuinely repugnant, evil thing.

Anyone who worked on the pro twenty two campaign, anyone who took money from those people is just absolute scumbag, should be exiled to an island and just, you know, put a dungeon somewhere with fuckin manacles and the fucking marketing creeps.

They force their own drivers and delivery people to campaign against their own interests as a condition of their employment. That's how ugly that is. That's how which just profoundly evil that is. I mean, we're talking just modern Pinkerton shit and, uh, also another bad faith.

Sarah, I enthrone ran a good campaign, but she lost to incumbent Ted Wheeler.

Sorry to have to give you that, uh, news. She was I was impressed by her interview with her. And, you know, I wish her the best. I think she ran I think she ran a good campaign. And, you know, with the hand that she was dealt, there was this late breaking story showing that in 2016, she wrote in for all the races, things like Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro.

And that just sealed the deal for me that I want her to win.

I, like you voted for you wrote in all the cool guys you were.

There were people who were like concerned that her reluctance to identify as a democratic socialist in the show meant that that she wasn't a real one.

And it turns out that she was just trying to tiptoe around the fact that she has this, like, open record is being really actually very, very far.

Well, she was also I mean, there is there was a thing and, you know, I don't want to get to know one, I guess doesn't really matter because race is over.

But she was a little context. She was being attacked. Yeah. The most press she was getting was from the fucking all right. Press. Yeah.

They were attacking her as the antiwar candidate and she, you know, like, you know, wanted to to to kind of.

You know, maybe maybe not make any ideological commitments along those lines that might feed into that narrative, whether or not she's a socialist. I don't know. She didn't. It's not like, you know, we turn off the camera and said, OK, yeah. What's the real deal? What do you think about the commodity forum? We should abolish it, right? I think she went.

I think what she said, she's not a socialist. I do believe that's the case.

But I think, you know, I think there are so there is such a thing as, uh, the what you call it, a worthy non socialist out there who might be deserving of our support.

So, you know, that's a bad faith. So there's a lot of bad faith going.

There is a lot of bad faith. I had two quick ones and they're based on two quick ones.

So one was Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker who tweeted, The future of American democracy depends right now what black people in the hoods across the country did yesterday. Not false. I don't have a problem with that tweet on its face. However, it's part and parcel of a whole genre of tweets that basically applaud black people for, quote unquote, doing the right thing with the presumption that they should do so without getting anything in return and in a way that feels very much like, you know, like good, good, good Negro, like pulling your weight on the farm where you're always supposed to do right.

And it makes me sick. The worst example of this was, I think and, you know, I hope to have missed on the show some time because I think that he has a lot of good commentary to add. But he said so here's the narrative. All caps black people and the Midwest and South showed out while Latinos in the South and mid-Atlantic voted for asshole and the white working class once again went with their racist God King. All caps wonder who the Dems should listen to.

Wonder who the Dems should listen to. Who who should the Dems listen to? What like which race we should listen to.

Like this one which races which races in for twenty, twenty one. And it's like the Chinese zodiac.

There is this weird racial comparison. All of these black pundits seem to want some kind of pat on the back for black voters, like doing what they had to do to survive, even though it's crappy that we live in a system that is like so dependent on us and that doesn't give us anything in return. Besides which literally trying to answer the question, this rhetorical question, he asks at the end, who should the Dems listen to? They should not listen to the group that's going to vote for them no matter what.

And they don't. They should listen to Latinos are they're going to have to report. I have to court them next time around if they have any chance of winning as a party going forward. And that's what's going to happen. And so black people, this black pundits, if you're listening, if you want black people to have power, the the answer isn't just to applaud the faithfulness to a party that isn't faithful to you anyway any more than you would applaud your girlfriend going back again and again to the person who abused them.

Because isn't it great? You know, you made a promise to me. It just got to stay in the relationship. Like valuing fidelity without more isn't good. It's not a value. There's no ethics in that. And moreover, it's strategically empty. Wonder who the Dems should listen to, not you, because they don't have to. And this kind of bad faith argument is being twisted into the most gross, like racial infighting, like which race is better than the next race.

Like like the and it's the antithesis of the Solidaire Ristic impulses that we need to foment if we're going to get out of this thing. So please stop doing it. I don't think you're actually doing it in bad faith, but it is helping the enemy in a way that you don't want to be doing right now. And the question should be, why not? What's wrong with Latino voters? But why do even four percent of black men and this is for Jemele Hill, four percent of black women to go for Trump, four percent more than went in, two thousand twenty sixteen.

Yeah, it's a good it's a good question. It's a question that you have been asking about. It's a question that some of the guests on our program had been trying to interrogate, describe, articulate.

And, um, what do you know?

What we've been ignored. You've been ignored. I have not been looking into these matters with the fervor that you have.

Yes, I've been doing whippets.

You know, maybe someone should also just bring it up, see if a sorry people told me to stop talking about Noam Chomsky.

But I feel like he should probably when you say this is probably not going to stop to make us stop doing that.

Well, I mean, hey, you know you know, we had him on the show.

He made his laid out his case to vote for Biden. He said, everyone go vote, takes ten minutes while everyone did vote.

Oh, you got you got you got what you wanted. But it's real monkeys.

Paul right there. Bri, I think we ought to call it quits for this episode. Let's wrap it up. We were going to have a lot more to talk about later this week.

No panel today. Because, you know, sometimes it's just nice to have me and every conversation I just want about. Yeah, yeah, I was going to I was going to ask you an intimate question. Oh, my God. What people want to know, people in the and chat want to know how you came to be called Virgil Texas.

So when I signed up for Twitter, I needed to pick a screen name and I didn't, you know, didn't want to use my real name because what losers do.

So I picked the name Virgil Texas, and then so I could, you know. Oh, wait, wait. So where did it come?

Cyberbully people online. Is it a freebie? True. Yeah, it comes to the movie True Stories. It's a great movie. Popcorn classic. Definitely watch true stories. It was the only movie that David Byrne ever directed.

Why that character? True story? Is it going to reveal not a character story? It's not it's not a character really in the film. I mean, in a way it is. What is the main character of the film?

It's the city in the film, and it is. This was also John Goodman's first leading role. So memorable in that film. Spalding Gray has a memorable side role in that film all around.

Excellent film. The songs are great, too.

You know, you might have heard the album, The Talking Heads album I story have not have you have a lot of classics on that one wild, wild life, you know, wild, wild life.

Have you ever had any regrets? Um, I mean I presume at the time you didn't expect to become a wildly successful media personality and the name would really stick.

Have you ever had any regrets about your choice?

Well, I haven't been, like, sued by David Byrne yet.

No, I mean, did you did you know that, you know, we were committing to a new moniker for basically the rest of your professional life?

I like it. It's a fun name. It's fun, I mean, I like it, too, it's just, you know, like like I offhandedly, I you know, I picked my Twitter handle because I was working at the Boston Children's Hospital Legal Department. I went all summer when Twitter came out. OK, so humble brag right here. OK.

Unless you were suing the others who were suing the children for not their pills.

I mean, I was like ostensibly working on some bioethics, but it wasn't important. It was like a gap filler job for your one else summer. But one of the things I wanted me to do as a young person in the office was to figure out what the social media, what social media was like, all these burgeoning new social media outlets were like, and to figure out what the hospital's policy should be because they had an incident where a patient had started a Facebook page for the hospital before the hospital had a Facebook page.

And it looked so official that people thought it was the Boston Children's Hospital and they had been like giving out there like hipper information on this page. And the page was really being read by like some 14 year old girl.

And they were trying to figure out how to kind of wrest control of the page from her without upsetting her and her going on some tantrum and like what the legal exposure was going to be out to get it. So Twitter was new and they asked me to, like, make a Twitter account and figure out how Twitter worked and like advise them on what their Twitter policy should be, which I didn't really do.

That's how it started. I made this a cow. That's free origins.

SPRAYBERRY Joy Like, I never thought I was going to use it. I didn't think about it again. And I didn't tweet between 2009 and 2015, I don't think. But yeah, I do now definitely have regrets about using bribery, Joy, because everyone who wants to do Eracism at me on the Internet chooses to call me Bruriah Cheese.

And on one level it's nice.

What? I'm sorry I called you. What?

Bri Bri or cheese.

Bri Bri or cheese?

Yeah, like so for example, brie, it's you know, I don't know if you're familiar with it, Virgil Texas, it's a kind of cheese.

Oh, right. So they they make fun of your your nickname, OK.

Right.

So, that's not, wait, is that racism?

No, but I think that they are patronizing to me and dismissive of me the way they aren't of other people.

Oh yeah, yeah.

For example, this brain genius, I had to dunk on him while we were recording just now in the background. Um, he he's a member of the Biden campaign or a Biden surrogate. Let me, let me not misrepresent that. Let me be, let me be, have some journalistic integrity in this moment.

Let me be clear.

So this guy, his name is Chris D. Jackson. He is a platform committee member, party chair, twenty two thousand twenty DNC at Joe Biden. OK, this is an official guy. He tweeted, Has anyone checked on Ryan Knight, Krystal Ball, and Bri Bri lately? Right. I'm always Bri Bri. If you Google like cheese, like half of the people talking about cheese on the Internet at any one time are just talking about me but afraid of getting, you know, ratio'd.

So, you know, it's frustrating, but also it allows people to reveal themselves. So it's a mixed bag. But I was just I was just curious. I try to give the listeners a little bit of, you know, the real [unintelligible]...

There you go there you go. Our first for our first free episode of the month, we've met our monthly quota of talking about our personal life, intimate question. And that is that is all you get. I think that about does it. I want to thank everyone to listen to this and also let them know that this is a show that you can subscribe to and you can subscribe to it on Patreon, Patreon.com/badfaithpodcast where you get all kinds of crazy content that's good and engaging and fun smart and people will get mad that it's paywall. But hey, we've got to pay the bills. And

That's the truth.

You know, I, so that's again that's patreon.com/badfaithpodcast. Pay our bills please. And also, you know, I'll tell you this, you probably don't need to hear it, but. I think right now, if you're pretty pissed about what's going on, as you should be, uh, consider joining the DSA, which is zeroing in on getting 100,000 members, which would be historic for a socialist organization in this day and age.

I'm a card carrying member Virgil.

You could find them by you can find them by asking anyone with the Rose Emoji. And they're explaining on Twitter that they'll let you they'll point you in the right direction. And, you know, the last thing I want to say is Bernie would have won. Bernie would have won. It would not have been close. There wouldn't be this ticky tacky court bullshit. Bernie would have won. He would not have won Florida. It would have lost Florida buut the Midwest, Bernie would have won Ohio. Bernie would have won Pennsylvania would not be in question. Iowa, none of this early know "oh we got to count the early returns". No, day of Bernie would have won.

Bernie would have won

Bernie would have won. Bernie would have won. Bernie would have won. You pick Joe, you picked Joe. Hey, out of my hands. You got your guy. You got your message. You got your campaign. Look what I got you. Two more years, at least, of Mitch McConnell. Honestly, probably 20 more years of Mitch McConnell is what it got you.

I don't know about [inaudible].

So there you go. Bernie would have won.

Keep the faith.

[closing song]