11/19/24: Libs Flee Twitter, Biden Escalates In Ukraine, Kamala Donors Blocked Winning Ad, Dem Civil War On Working Class

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So one of the responses from liberals post-Trump re-election that has been kind of interesting is some number of them have been leaving Twitter and fleeing to Blue Sky, the Twitter alternative. We can put this up on the screen in terms of the numbers. Blue Sky, apparently as of several days ago, had added a million new members as users flee X after the US election. Now they are up to 15 million, so adding a million more is significant.

given the comparatively small scale of blue sky at this point. And in this article, they point out this isn't the first surge that blue sky has seen based on like various indicators. So after rebranding to X, apparently there was a big shift to blue sky. And then they also picked up 3 million new users after X was suspended in Brazil back in September.

And then a further, this one was interesting to me, 1.2 million in the two days after X announced that they would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them. So those were some of the big triggers. I checked on the App Store yesterday, and Blue Sky is still the number one downloaded app right now. So there is something very real here, but it's also worth keeping in perspective, like 15 million users does not even come close to comparing to

Twitter, let alone Facebook or TikTok or any of the other large social media giants. I do think it's kind of an important indicator of how liberals are processing and dealing with the fact that a lot of these social media brands previously coded as more liberal.

Um, you know, Mark Zuckerberg running Facebook, certainly Twitter under Jack Dorsey. There was a sense that, you know, it was more on the Democratic side. And now that has totally reversed, not just on Twitter with Elon Musk's ownership, which there was a research showing that he did, in fact, use the algorithm to juice

Republican or pro-Trump accounts, and obviously including his own account, but also kind of across the board with a bunch of these social media apps. So liberals are taking a page on what conservatives were doing previously with parlor and gab and true social and whatever and saying, hey, we need our own space now to post Trump election.

Yeah, it's, I think, you know, the only reason, the major reason we're doing this story, not only is it interesting, but it's part of the liberal response, which is to shut off MSNBC and to kind of retreat. And I think it was a big mistake that a lot of Trump people made and right-wingers made in the Twitter era, 2018. And honestly, made people way crazier, right? Like the truth, social, parlor, GAB, and all of these other people's. We talk a lot about echo chamber. It's easy enough on a large enough platform to get yourself.

in an echo chamber, but I think it's a mistake because psychologically what they're trying to do is to recreate their own like world. And I think I sympathize with that on a certain level, but I also don't think it can promote like quote unquote understanding. Because if you're the type of person to have watched MSNBC or be on blue and on Twitter or whatever, like the truth is like you don't understand the world. And this isn't even in a denigrating way. In 2016, when Donald Trump won the presidency, I'm telling you, I was shocked, shocked.

to my core. It's the reason why I really am today. I sat down and I just said, all these people I read are wrong. I was at everything I've consumed, polling, ideology, how the world works, what Americans saying, like, oh, is it bullshit? I totally wrong. And I had to completely reevaluate all of my new inputs.

2020, I wasn't shocked by what happened. 2020's 24, I wasn't shocked by what happened. I can be a little bit surprised, but we have literally never consumed enough information that you're not truly surprised by an outcome. That was the biggest change I made from 2016 onwards. I encourage people to respond to elections that shock you in a similar way and be like, okay, let's seek some stuff out, because clearly, I don't know what the hell is happening here. I don't know if this blue sky thing is going to help that, is the way. And I don't think it helped Republicans either.

They overcame the stop the steal insanity of 2020. They got lucky, frankly, that people just like that moved on from it. But they paid a real price for it in 2022 as well. And I will not yet say that the fight is over like post Trump. What does it look like to have Trump endorsed style candidates without Donald Trump on the ballot?

Yeah. He over performed every Republican in the country, except for Larry Hogan. So are the incentives that, you know, it's like Obama. Are the incentives that worked for him? Are they the same for whoever comes next? I'm not so sure. I don't think so. Yeah. I think the retreat of conservatives to their own social media platforms, I don't think that that helped, like, yeah, parlor, social, whatever, didn't help them. It didn't really work. I mean, none of those platforms really gained massive influence in terms of the culture.

I think Elon buying Twitter definitely did help them. Exactly. And I don't think that. So, you know, these social media networks, in some ways, they're sort of like natural monopolies, you would call them because the whole value of the network is its size. You know, the value is the number of connections that are there.

the number of news outlets that are there. I mean, for us in terms of the job that we do, like, Blue Sky would not be that valuable because I just can't do the news gathering on there that I can do on Twitter, even under Elon's ownership. And so that's why these spin-offs have never really worked.

And even threads, which was the Facebook attempt to kind of recreate a Twitter-like thing. First of all, they completely suppress. They don't really want political content there. So they suppress political content, so it's not a real alternative. But also, it just doesn't have the juice that Twitter does in terms of the culture. So I don't think liberals are wrong.

to look at what happened and say, oh my God, Twitter ended up being very important in this election and we're in this sort of post-truth environment. And it is no longer the case that what happens online is not real life. Actually, what happens online kind of is real life. And that's the era that we live in.

There needs to be some sort of response to it, but I am skeptical that, you know, retreating into this more sort of niche ideological space is really going to be the answer. What is the answer? I don't really know because Ilana and Twitter now, like that genie is out of the bottle, that Pandora box has been open. There's no going back from that. And I think the other social media

outlets like Facebook is an important one. I mean, Facebook used to be more, you know, feel like it had at least somewhat of a Democratic inclination, although right when content has always done extraordinarily well on Facebook. But Zuckerberg himself obviously used to be more liberal, more pro Democrat. He's one of the people who before Trump was elected was making phone calls and trying to make nice.

and really trying to overcome this sense from conservatives that he and other tech oligarchs were, you know, in the bag for Democrats. I mean, Zuckerberg came under a lot of, he was part of the whole, you know, theory, the sort of like high-minded stop the steal theory. And so I think by working the rafts, Republicans really were successful in getting the type of content moderation that favored their content that they were looking for.

And under a Trump administration, like Zuckerberg's going to want to stay in good with, you know, the guy, the big guy who's in charge, who's capable of using the federal government, weaponizing it against him and his interests, etc.

And once again, facing the ire of an agitated conservative base. So, you know, like I said, I'm sympathetic to why people are moving to blue sky. I understand it, but I don't really think it's a response to the social media landscape being kind of overwhelmingly right-wing at this point. Yeah, they still get it. And, you know, I mean, it's complicated.

Because when people are like, oh, right-wing content is popular on Facebook, it's like, yeah, but that's because it's independent and user-generated, and the mainstream media is already liberal. So like, one of the vast majority of the culture is liberal, and institutional stuff is quote-unquote liberal, then yeah, user-generated content is going to be

predominantly right-wing. That's another reason why YouTube and others, because it's literally a distant space. It's one that doesn't exist for institutional, like, elite capture. If you want that, it already exists. There's an entire machine for it. So I wouldn't say that they worked the refs or whatever. I mean, there was an overwhelming amount of right-wing censorship that also happened under Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, the Hunter Biden laptop is the most famous example, but there was a lot of

you know, algorithmic preference and stuff that they put their own thumb on the scales. Twitter, obviously, you know, probably the most notorious platform prior to Elon Musk. And I think what happened ultimately is that, you know, when you say online is right wing, I think that's because America is a lot more right wing than people want to believe. I think that America, especially with the Trump victory,

and the popular vote, and the massive shift for a lot of these places, it's not the platform's fault. I think people themselves are responding to social, political, and economic incentives and have fundamentally changed. They're not right wing in the way that most people think, like they're not right in the way that you may think in the 1990s about gay marriage or

abortion even, but are they right wing on the trans question? Yeah, on immigration. Yeah, are they right wing in a sense that they hate institutions? Absolutely. In terms of backlash against me too, that's something we talked a little bit about yesterday. That is a sense in which being online is right wing, but this one's a tremendous amount of quote-unquote left wing content.

and a lot of left-wing social movements, which in and of themselves have their roots in online. So all online has done is it's niched, you know, most American society. That's how really what I would say the overall net effect of it is. And I think that's actually bad because outside of the whole echo chamber thing,

Again, exposure to different stuff that you must actually in an algorithmic world, I find it you must do it more so and more intentionally than ever before. You must intentionally seek out things that you not only disagree with, things that will rock your worldview so that you're never surprised by anything. And I have to read so much and talk to you and do a lot of other stuff just to be able to like still check my biases. And I don't think most people do that intentionally at all.

That's the real danger. That's why you shouldn't do this blue sky retreat. That's what the mistake is. Yeah, but I mean, I guess from the liberal perspective, they're like, yeah, but Republicans like shout themselves into a bubble and it worked out. Okay, for them. Okay. I think that's, I think that's a sense. You win sometimes and you also lose. Like the other thing I would say is in some senses, yes, like I think the country on certain issues is certainly an immigration has moved right, but Trump still didn't even win 50% of the vote.

Okay. So do you know when I also don't want to like, oh, the country like 75% they didn't vote, you know, 75% didn't vote for Trump. It was 49.8 or whatever kind of end up being. So it still is very much a 50 50 kind of a country. And when you look at a bunch of the more liberal ballot initiatives across the country, certainly the country's not right wing on abortion rights. Country is not right wing on, you know, minimum wage, not right wing on not having paid sick leave or things like that.

of that nature. So it's, you know, to me, it's not as clear cut. I think more to the point, Sagar, that you made the piece that resonated more with me was that liberals have always felt like they had their own spaces already. Like, they felt comfortable, comfy, with the New York Times and the Washington Post and the CNN and whatever.

I do think some of that has shifted. It's not as much antipathy towards those organizations as Republicans have, certainly, but there is a real shift among the liberal base that started even before Joe Biden got out of the race and, again, some of their critiques I agree with, some of them I don't agree with, but there has been a real breaking of the faith.

with liberals and the institutions where they have always felt like they totally comfortable and like they were, you know, their perspective was being held up and, you know, they could see themselves in the coverage there. And so it does create an interesting moment for, you know, different social media experiments for different, you know, podcasts and independent media, et cetera, that didn't exist before. So in any case, I kind of view this in the light of that new liberal experimentation and that new liberal break

with some of the institutions that they previously felt so confident and comfortable in during the last iteration. The one last piece we can show you here just to see this graphically of what it has looked like. We can put this D2 up on the screen so you can see a surge in blue sky daily visits right after the election and then you can also see

a huge search in X account deactivations. So there has just definitely been, you know, for people who are not like necessarily as into politics as we are, where they're just kind of like, you know, space is just not really where I want to be anymore. I think some of it is that too. Or it's just like, you know, I'm just kind of done here in the Elon Twitter Musk Twitter, Twitter Musk, Elon Twitter era. I'm just kind of done with this. And so there is, there is definitely something

happening here. And like I said, to me, it's just emblematic of this new landscape of like, okay, well, the things we did to respond to Trump last time didn't work. The institutions we relied on to help guide us through this time utterly failed us. So let's try some other things and see what's going on. Well, that actually can be very healthy. So I remember I would meet, like, predominantly old ladies who really hated Trump. And they were like, I fought him on social media. And like they believed that. They believed they were engaged.

in a war by retweeting Mueller she wrote and Seth Abramson and all these other, you know, Eric Garland and all these social media stars from last time around. And I think it may be healthy this time, but they're like, wait, no, that doesn't work. You know, there are a lot of people who live entire lives by a proxy. And that's the one thing I would beg you, don't do that.

You know, I noticed this with Ukraine. People literally believe that they're fighting on the front, you know, on the democracy front line or whatever by tweeting against people who disagree with their position on Ukraine or by like retweeting and reposting Ukrainian propaganda. Like, is that beneficial to their cause? Like maybe, you know, are you the same as a frontline soldier? No, absolutely not.

There's a big thing like that in political commentary and even just political stats and all that I notice on Twitter. There's an entire army of people who are on Twitter who believe that they're really impacting things for Donald Trump and his victory. Maybe 0.05% of them are. The rest, it's like you're just chaff, right? You're just retweeting and doing nothing mostly with your life. So I think that is also perhaps a healthy response because I noticed a lot of that.

You know, I've actually kind of shifted my view on that because I think that the posting was really important for Trump's victory. But that's a selection bias. It's the people who are good at it that work. The vast majority are reply guys. But you need the reply guys. You need the retweeters.

Like, that's part of what makes the ecosystem work. And so when you think of the story of this election, you know, one of the big divides that came out is that people who were hyper-engaged in political news, who were reading the New York Times, or even engaged in, you know, MSNBC, whatever, Fox News, hyper-engaged.

political news media consumers, they voted for Kamala. And people who were not hyper-engaged, who were consuming the selection more through just like memes and culture and vibes, they voted for Donald Trump. So I don't think I can say at this point that the posting doesn't matter. I think the posting was important. I think that the memes that came out of Trump at McDonald's and the

image that came out after the assassination attempt with his fists in the air and the garbage truck like all this stuff, which was just about online fodder and meme content. I don't know. I think posting actually ended up being important. I do think online is kind of the real world now.

And liberals do have to grapple with that. And people on the left have to grapple with that as well. So I don't think it used to be that. I think this is like kind of a new era we've entered into with the whole podcast election in the downfall of media ecosystems and the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. But yeah, I actually think they're right that they are engaged in a real social movement that had real world impacts because so much of our life does exist online now. And there isn't that separation there used to be.

Yeah, I guess that's a good counter. I hadn't thought about it, I guess. I think it's more existed and worked on the right because people are already not on mainstream media. And this comes to our MSNBC question, will they stay on mainstream media or not?

that I really don't know. I think they'll go back. I think they will. The online is the culture now. That's the bad. That's the thing. And so, you know, culture obviously feeds politics. So if you aren't competing in the online culture, like you're going to get your ask it. Yeah. Well, maybe we'll see.

At the same time, there's some very troubling news out of Ukraine. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. The Biden administration with less than two months left in office has dramatically changed U.S. policy in Ukraine, allowing Ukraine to use long-range U.S. missiles to strike inside of Russia. The president, for the first time, authorized the Ukrainian military to use the ATACMS

the atcams to help defend its forces in the cursed region. Now, this is particularly insane for a number of reasons. One is that this was considered a red line for Russian President Vladimir Putin, which he has said repeatedly and said if you do so, then NATO will be considered an active military target and participant in this war.

Second is if you actually look crystal at the military operation where this is happening, this is to support a Ukrainian invasion of Russia. So this is Ukraine's invasion of Kursk, where they crossed an internationally recognized border with the military operation and are now facing a Russian offensive of Russian troops and some 50,000 North Korean elite special forces.

We are using out these long-range missiles for Ukraine to strike inside of internationally recognized sovereign Russian territory. Now, two wrongs don't make a right, correct? If your entire case is, they illegally invaded us, they took our territory and all this, and you're like, oh, we're going to invade you to show you who's boss. It's like, okay, philosophically, I can understand that.

If your entire case is around having the entire world support your democratization project and all that, it's like, well, then it gets a little bit complicated. And so already we can confirm as of this morning that the first long-range missile was used inside of Russia. But second,

If you read inside of it, they say they do not expect this to change the course of the war. They do not expect this to change the course of this offensive at best, you know, you can kill a few more North Koreans or Russians. So it's not even strategically going to really change the outcome. And then finally,

I think this is a really disgusting move because what I think is happening is that they are trying, number one, Anthony Blinken said they're going to push every dollar out to Ukraine that they possibly and legally can while they're in office. And two, I think that they're trying to set the standard for Donald Trump and his administration in office so that they are then forced to try and get headlines in the media being like Donald Trump reverses the policy of missiles, long-range missiles that are being used

inside of Russia and allowed for the Ukrainian forces. It's a deep state, tried-and-true thing. They did it to Obama as well whenever he was coming into office. And so the entire policy is nuts. The entire policy is crazy. I think the idea is that Ukraine feels like if Trump is coming into office, there is a decent chance. We don't know for sure if this is going to happen or not, but there's a decent chance

that he's gonna force some kind of a peace settlement. And they want to be able to have something they can trade for their own territory in that settlement. And so the idea is if they can be successful in this, I'm not valid, I'm just explaining the logic, if they can be successful in this Russian attack and invasion and have some territory in Russia,

that they hold that they can use that as a bargaining chip to come out in a better position after these negotiations. So I think that's ultimately what's going on here. And that doesn't undercut what you said, Sagar, of the level of danger of allowing this to unfold. I do think it's unlikely that Putin, because he also was seeing the same landscape of like, let's wait and see what Trump does.

When he comes in, I think it's unlikely that he reacts in the most aggressive and hostile way of like actively attacking a NATO country or, you know, using nukes or something like that. But, you know, you're running a risk and that's kind of a wild thing to do. Look at already what they're doing. You know, again, Ukraine is losing. They have been losing territory consistently for months.

We've been focused on the election, so we haven't been able to cover it. But put this up there on the screen. I mean, the largest missile attack on Ukrainian infrastructure literally just happened a couple of days ago. It's a disaster over there for them. I mean, their population already, the latest poll that has come out, shows that 52% of Ukrainians want to pursue a negotiated settlement. That's up almost 30% over the last couple of years. Also, let's put this on the screen.

from the Wall Street Journal. Trump's push for the Ukraine peace finds, quote, growing acceptance in Europe. Germany, arguably the country with the most to lose and, you know, the balance of power and all that. Their chancellor has said, no way, we're not sending

more long-range missiles or escalating the war in Ukraine will provide them with basic military assistance, but their red lines, they're sticking to because they have real stakes. They also know they don't have the money to continue this war without the colossal amount of funds the United States has been pushing into this conflict. So all the signs point to what is obviously best for everybody, Ukraine, Russia, and for the entire world. Let's end the war now. Nobody is going to win the Russians or the Ukrainians.

Although, and I will at least give the counter case, John Mearsheimer doesn't believe a negotiated settlement will happen, because he goes, look, Russia's already winning the war. Why would they do it? Russia and the Putin regime, specifically the Putin regime, has very little respect for human life. They don't care, right?

A couple hundred thousand people are dead, whatever. For some reason, in Russia, they seem to be okay with that, especially the government. Well, now you've got these elite North Korean forces who are with you. You've got North Korea giving you ammunition. You've got Iran producing these suicide drones. You're actually rolling back the territory. You've got the sunk cost fallacy of a couple hundred thousand people. Maybe. We don't know what he knows the number, but have died.

on the front line. The Ukrainians are failing. Why would I negotiate now? Like in a certain sense, they have the least amount of incentive right now to negotiate. So I'm hoping that Donald Trump can actually change that and bring this to some sort of bigger settlement and convince Putin that it's not

in his best interest, but all the deck is arrayed against them. It has been for years. Nobody wants to listen. Today is the 1,000th day apparently of the Ukraine war, which is crazy. And if you consider, like all of the macro-strategic and economic picture points in one direction, more Ukrainian territory lost. The more that they pushed this, the longer that it prolonged,

You will see the age will continue to tick up with the Ukrainian military. The population will continue to suffer, you know, food, energy costs, all of this already. I mean, a huge percent of the country is left. You know, they're best in the brightest of left long ago. So they have massive problems and worse, you know, really.

Is the escalation trying to tie the Trump administration's hands? And like you said, pray and hope that this doesn't backfire. Do I think Putin is going to attack us over it? No. But do I think that it still crosses certain red lines and gives a lot of incentives inside of the Russian military for how they should think?

very differently about approaching the West and even any hope of a rapprochement with them that lasts longer than Donald Trump, which is what I think everybody should like to see. So I don't know. And the North Korea thing, just final point, we've talked about. The fact that some thousands of troops that are in Russia is a failure of Biden foreign policy. Donald Trump had a policy of engagement with North Korea.

That was great because we actually had good relations. There were no missiles flying around, whatever. Biden came in, we immediately reverted to maximum pressure in sanctions, and what do they do? Of course, they go to China and Russia right back to where they were, and now there's troops on the Ukraine front line. This could easily have been prevented. If we have diplomatic relations, then we're fine. You know, they're a nuclear program, by the way, nothing has happened to it.

plot twist over the last four years of maximum pressure on their thing. It's the same story with Iran, the Venezuela, after you reach a certain critical mass, it's not in sanctions on all this, it will do nothing. Yeah, I mean, how many years have we had sanctions on Cuba? What is that? What, 60? Yeah. Actually, maybe more. Yeah. It's just insane.

One last point on the European leaders and the call with the law Schultz and all of that because I think that's very significant is not only do they see the writing on the wall in terms of this war which has gone on for far too long where you know the US and the UK banded together to block any sort of potential peace deal at the beginning. I mean that really was the failure because that was the time

when Russia was in the most precarious position, or it was unclear how people would respond politically, or it was unclear how much the sanctions would bite, or it was unclear how much the loss of life would create instability within the country itself. They've weathered all those storms.

So that continues to have been the real failing and missed opportunity in this war. But I think also a lot of these leaders are looking at the fact that, you know, I did a monologue yesterday about how Democrats commitment to genocide and Gaza and also a number of voters mentioned.

the war in Ukraine was part of what turned them off from voting for Democrats again, because even as you still see pretty decent levels of support for Ukraine, like Americans are sympathetic to the cause, but they also got the accurate sense from Joe Biden in particular, but by extension Kamala Harris, that this is what he actually cared about.

He didn't really care that much that you couldn't afford groceries, that your budget was stretched tight, that you couldn't imagine ever even being able to become a homeowner. The only thing he could really talk about was NATO in August and this visions of grandeur with regard to this imagined fight between democracy and autocracy.

where we're the good guys when manifestly with regard to our actions in Gaza, we are not the good guys. So I think they also are reading the political tea leaves not just here of how this had an impact on the election and helped to bring Trump back to the White House, but you see parties throughout Europe

that are both on the right and on the left, who are critics of the European and the American policy vis-à-vis Ukraine, who are on the rise. And there's a number of factors that go into that, but Ukraine is certainly one of them. And so I think that's the other piece, is not only reading the tea leaves and the writing on the wall with regard to the status of the war and how things are likely to go in the future,

But also looking out for their own political survival and realizing that there's a real political backlash to this endless support for Ukraine and what is at this point of hopeless cost. Yeah, that's a good point. And ultimately, this just feeds more into the Biden failure.

his legacy was NATO, and now a guy is getting elected explicitly, at least with a pledge, we'll see what he does, to end the war that he said was so vital and critical to US policy and security. I will say, I am an achus fan too, so I love achus. But that's outside of a... I'm not an achus voter, I appreciate the angle of sphere, and I think that is how we should have

relations rather than some bullshit treaty from 80 years ago about why I'm supposed to go and die for North Montenegro or whatever. I think we should have just as a final closest. I think we should. And I think we both do have some skepticism of what Trump will actually do here. He has said a bunch of different things. Obviously, you've got Marco Rubio and a bunch of neocons that he's put into key positions.

There's a reason why, even though he made overtures to withdraw from Afghanistan, why he didn't do it? Because look at the political cost that Joe Biden paid for actually doing what voters had claimed they wanted and withdrawing from Afghanistan. Because guess what, anytime you try to disentangle yourself from one of these conflicts, it can be really ugly. And the press almost uniformly turns against you and the leaks from the generals about,

It could genuinely be damaging to his presidency, and he's no fool. So ultimately, he doesn't care outside of his own self-preservation. So if he looks at the landscape and is like, this isn't good for me politically, I don't think it's not crazy to imagine that he takes a very different approach than what he at times signaled on the campaign trail, and he wasn't even consistent in what he signaled on the campaign trail. That's right.

Crystal, what are you taking a look at? Well, the war is on in the Democratic Party to assign blame for Kamala Harris' loss and to help set the narrative for what will come next. To boil it down, you basically got a maintain the status quo faction going up against a burn it all down faction.

side, you've effectively got all the people who were most directly implicated in this loss. You've got the donors, consultants, operatives, and establishment Democrats who by and large authored this campaign and the media figures who helped to construct and enforce this iteration of the Democratic Party. They're complicit.

in destroying British movement, elevating Biden, blocking a 2024 primary, and setting the messaging direction of the Dem Party in general and the Kamala Harris campaign specifically. They believed that an anti-Trump coalition heavily reliant on suburban Liz Cheney voters could be assembled and activated and win. Harris campaign strategy was by and large designed to appeal to this imagined affluent coalition.

This group is interested in any and all arguments that can effectively maintain the current Democratic Party status quo. That includes punching left, which, again, is no different from the longtime Democratic Party status quo and denying that there's really any problem whatsoever.

At war with this camp are those who believe that the Democratic Party lost the working class and with it the election because they failed that working class. AOC, Bernie, Rokana, those are some of the proponents, but there have been a few surprising mainstream allies in the fight. People like Senator Chris Murphy and even to my absolute shock, David Brooks.

These folks have correctly suggested that Democrats take a lesson from Bernie Sanders, embrace real economic populism, piss off their high-income base and donor class, and lean into the politics of class war. This camp, in which I am included, is the most correct, but also has the biggest obstacles in front of it, since big bunny interests are not likely to just abandon their interest in the Democratic Party.

Well, folks, we got a new salvo in this war between the status quo and burnt-down factions in the form of the New York Times op-ed by John Fetterman's former chief of staff. In an op-ed titled, When Will Democrats Learn to Say No, Adam Gentleson argues that Democrats are losing because they cater too much to the world of left interest groups. In making the argument, he name checks ACLU, sunrise, justice Democrats, and working families party for pushing Kamala back in 2020,

to support the current law and surgeries for transgender prisoners, to decriminalize border crossings, and for generally attempting to push Democrats left on criminal justice reform. This op-ed postures as an argument for Democratic Party reform, but in actuality, it already reflects the 2024 reality of the Democratic Party. This analysis might have held more weight back in 2020 when those groups helped to shape the debate that happened inside of that Democratic Party primary, not in 2024 when they hold basically no sway.

Kamala abandoned all of the positions mentioned in their piece to the extent she ever really supported them at all. She ran on being a cop, adopted Republican immigration positions, embraced Liz Cheney, and literally never talked about trans issues at all. In other words, not only does this argument fail to threaten the status quo, it just reinforces it.

The argument also may have made more sense if rather than including a bunch of basically powerless groups that contrary to the title, Democrats have no trouble constantly saying no to, the op-ed looked at groups like APAC and the Democratic majority for Israel, who have actually been insanely influential in the 2024 world of politics. AOC made this point on Twitter and is now predictably being smeared as an anti-Semite.

She wrote, quote, if people want to talk about members of Congress being overly influenced by a special interest group pushing a wildly unpopular agenda that pushes voters away from Democrats, then they should be discussing APAC. She is obviously correct. Their money has shaped everything from the crackdown on campus protests to the defeat of even mild critics of Israel to the Kamala Harris' own refusal to break from Biden on one of his worst issues.

And it wasn't just these lefty groups that came in for scrutiny, though, in the pages of The New York Times. Gentlemen also takes a shot at the anti-trust movement. Here's the quote. By wishing away these complexities, a coalition-first mindset produces many candidates who are the inverse of what voters want. People with the cultural sensibilities of Yale Law School graduates who cosplay as populace by overrelying on niche issues like Federal Trade Commission anti-trust actions.

To start with, the structure of corporate power is far from a niche issue. In addition, it's truly funny that this line, including the Yale part, could just as easily describe the now victorious JD Vance as anyone inside of the Democratic Coalition, something that our friend and antitrust advocate Matt Stoller pointed out. But most importantly, this line is actually the key to unlocking an understanding of what is really going on inside of this article. The Biden antitrust agenda was hated by the Democratic donor class.

who went to war with Lina Khan in every way they knew how. So it is quite convenient that in this piece, attempting to blame the Lev for an election manifestly lost by the centrist, Jensen also seeks to throw overboard the parts of the Biden agenda, which actually did threaten the class interests of those in the status quo camp. In fact, as Jite here points out, a much larger problem for Kamala

was the fact that she let donors talk her out of highlighting the most potent parts of her economic platform, including backing away from the Biden administration's terrific trust busting record. Jeet highlights this New York Times reporting that Kamala's corporate allies and donors hated the price gouging ban and pressured her to limit its reach.

The Times reports, quote, the price gouging touched on a broader anxiety among Ms. Harris' corporate allies who were worried that her economic policies might cater to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. The article also notes the common backed off a hike in the capital gains tax to appease these donors and remain studiously ambiguous, their words, on a tax for the ultra-rich. Now, these are the freaking people the Democrats actually need to learn how to say no to.

Another New York Times report includes details about how Kamala's Super PAC found that an ad on price gouging tested through the roof in terms of effectiveness. Yet, it barely saw the light of day. Another memo issued days later pointed out very high-performing ads that have yet to get a big spend. One ad, Future Forward said, had ranked in the 100th percentile, meaning it was the most effective.

Yet it had virtually never been aired. So here everybody is the ad that Kamala's donors did not want you to see. I get it. The cost of rent, groceries and utilities is too high. So here's what we're going to do about it. We will lower housing costs by building more homes and crack down on landlords who are charging too much.

We will lower your food and grocery bills by going after price gougers or keeping the cost of everyday goods too high. I'm Kamala Harris and I approve this message because you work hard for your paycheck.

You should get to keep more of it. As president, I'll make that my top priority. The donors, the billionaires, the consultants, the corrupt establishment itself, those are the interests that need to be told no, that need to be purged wholesale. Any analysis that fails to make this case is nothing more than a defense of the Democratic Party status quo. And sorry, one of the things that got a lot of note in that. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at breakingpoints.com.

So as we have, of course, been discussing there is a big battle on for the future of the Democratic Party and also to understand how they just took such a shellacking. We're lucky to be joined this morning by Maurice Mitchell, who is the National Director for the Working Families Party, who has many thoughts on all of these topics. Great to see you, Maurice. It's good to be here. Yeah, good to see you. Of course. So just your top line thoughts. What happened and what should happen now?

Well, I want to caution everybody. There's literally votes still being counted in certain places. Not to sort of just jump into the hot takes. What we're doing is we're attempting to be reflective and humble. But what we know is that incumbent parties all across the world, right? A lot of them lost, including the Democratic Party. And to us, what that means is that working people in this country and elsewhere

are not happy with the political establishment and the economic establishment. And we need to listen to what people are saying. So I knocked on hundreds of doors in North Philly, Atlanta. And what I heard- Yeah, what did you hear at those doors? I heard a lot of things, but I heard deep skepticism.

about whether or not politics actually mattered in people's lives. And certainly, whether or not the two parties, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party would do anything to make a dent on the crisis of affordability that people are experiencing, the crisis of gun violence that a lot of people are experiencing. And what I believe folks need to do, and I'm building the Working Families Party, but

If I was to give free advice to anybody or the Democratic Party, it would be not necessarily to try to find easy solutions. I don't think the solution is in a one or two page memo that's been written over the past weeks or days. The solutions are in the people listening, right? So I think we need to put our hot take

sort of impulses on the backseat and make sure that our listening game is really strong. So that's my advice. And then there's a lot of talk that I think is obsessed with this left-right binary that I think kind of obscures what I'm hearing, right?

there is a top-down feeling that permeates throughout politics or political identity. A lot of people don't have a political identity, but they feel like somebody somewhere is taking from them. That somewhere, somehow, the system is rigged against them. There's a lot of people that feel that way. And they're looking for solutions. I think that there are some people that voted for Donald Trump

for all the horrible reasons that people might think they would vote for Donald Trump. But there's some people that just wanted change, and he was able to articulate that he might be a anti-institutional figure. I think a lot of those folks, even now, as they see some of his picks, are realizing that may and may not be true. I think certainly when he governs people will see that. Again, for the working families party, the thing that we're going to do is,

We're going to obsess and this is something that we said not just like after the loss, we said this in the months before the last years, years before the loss, obsess with the concerns of everyday working people and tell a story that is both true in our work and also rhetorically true about

who the villains are, right? So when people are experiencing this crisis of affordability, that is real in people's lives, right? Especially around housing, right? We name names and say who the villains are. And as political parties and organizations and politicians, it's your job to say who the heroes are, the working people, and who you're willing to fight for and willing to fight against.

Yeah, it's interesting. As I understand, working families parties, especially big in New York, New York is also the single largest state that swung to Donald Trump in this election. I think some 11% swing from 2020 towards the Republicans. So if you're thinking about what that looks like, what does a response to the shifts in Long Island and all across New York, including actually even in Manhattan and the Bronx,

Everywhere, urban, rural, et cetera, there was a major increase for Donald Trump. How can you win those people back? I mean, 11% in a single four-year period in a blue state is shocking. It's absolutely shocking. And New Jersey was number two, which is even crazier. So I think in our analysis, what's required is a lot of nuance, and it also requires us to actually look at each state. So I'm from New York. I actually grew up in

one of the working class suburbs that you're referring to that that uh swung last election swung from red uh red to blue and in this election actually swung back right so you talk about new york but like when we kind of look at the data the working families party

worked with folks in labor unions and folks in different organizations over the past two years in New York specifically on a project called Battleground New York that was successful despite those swings successful in a number of congressional districts to swing from red to blue. So the thing that I'm curious about in New York where that's the top line story in the nation where

we unfortunately became together, but didn't get the outcome that we wanted. What can we learn from the swings that happened in the neighborhood that I grew up in, that I returned to during COVID, the block that I live on, right? So there's data points, or in Connecticut, where the Working Families Party had a great election day, right? Interesting.

Many of our work in class candidates in purple districts, in this election, flipped those districts from red to blue. What can we learn about that? What kind of races? I mean, these are races where our candidates, our teachers, our

our labor unionists, our regular working people, right? We believe that there's a formula. It's not like, it's not one plus one equals three, but people who are from the district, who are people that you could identify as folks in your community. People like Kendra Brooks, who is a, by the way, in Philadelphia, is a WFP-only city council person who lives in nice town, North Philly, who governs the entire city of Philadelphia, or Nicholas O'Rourke,

who have long stories of being advocates and connected to their communities could swing people in their communities on the ground based on their story, based on their relationships, and based on issues that actually matter in their lives, not abstractions or at a certain level on the air with presidential candidates and presidential politics, a lot of that could get lost, which is why our bread and butter is the local politics. In this cycle,

in this election, 750 candidates. So I know a lot of politics, especially in the presidential years, the top of the ticket. In California, we have 100 WFP-aligned candidates. I think close to 70 of them won this cycle on the municipal level.

The thing that connects all these candidates are the fact that they're like regular people. They're not talking like DC wonks. They're in the lives of their communities. And on that level, on the city council level, on the county level, you're able to like swing people based on the issues that matter to them. Like I'll just give an example, housing.

which is something I'd come back to over and over again. So in Philadelphia, for example, we were able to, the Working Families Party through Kendra Brooks, pass a eviction diversion, permanent eviction diversion piece of legislation.

That started in COVID. We made it permanent. And in Philadelphia, there's a 41% decrease in evictions, right? That's keeping real families in their homes. Recently, we also passed, through the Working Families Party, a bill that prevents realtors from using AI and algorithms in order to artificially increase people's rentals. This is groundbreaking legislation. And the lobbies are very upset.

But because these are folks that we recruited and are not part of the political establishment, they're willing to take the fight to the lobbyists, right? So if I were to give the Democratic Party any notes, it's like politics are about fights. Who's the Democratic Party willing to take the fight to?

And so I could tell you who the Working Families Party is willing to take the fight to. And we have results even in this election where we came together and we joined the United Front and we lost at the top of the ticket, we have a lot of notes about how we might be able to rebuild on the grassroots level.

So, you all are taking strays in the pages of The New York Times. Adam Jelt Wilson, who was Chief of Staff to John Fetterman, I think previously worked for Harry Reid, is blaming interest groups such as the working family's party for pushing Kamala Harris too far left, they write

In that article, the same year, a coalition of groups, including the Sunrise Movement and the Working Families Party, demanded all Democrats running for president embrace decriminalizing border crossings. This is with regard to back in 2020. You know, what's your response to that? The idea that working families party and other sort of left aligned groups have polled candidates like Kamala Harris too far left and put them out of step with the working class?

Well, this was a presidential election where VP Harris' campaign raised and spent $1.5 billion. The super PACs associated with her raised and spent much more than that, billions of dollars.

Democratic party operatives, very senior Democratic party operatives, led these vehicles. And now some of them, not all of them, some of them are choosing to in the hours and days and weeks after this electoral loss that they participated in, because we were all part of it. They're choosing to attack relatively small interest groups.

I think that this might be an opportunity for reflection. I know that that's what we're doing at the Working Families Party. We're asking questions. We're curious. We're doing a lot of listening, especially to working people. We're in the field right now. We're having both big calls. We had over 100,000 person mask call that we did 48 hours after the election. We're also doing debriefs in community, and we're getting a lot of people coming in person in those debriefs.

Look, when I was at the doors, and I got the shoe lover to prove it, I heard a lot of things. Not once did I hear anybody suggest that what they were concerned with were some of these

Some of the issues in the breathless sort of think pieces, and it's kind of ironic we're talking about working people, but the way that some folks are trying to prosecute that argument is in op-eds in the New York Times, right? But they do kind of a point, right?

I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, I'm not sure what the specifics are, but if that's a position that you're pushing, that was a huge reason why she lost. I mean, I was in Pennsylvania. I saw that day them ad play all day long. I saw immigration play all day long, maybe North Philly. It's not the same, although there were a lot of what urban communities in Philadelphia as I understand it that moved to the right. Puerto Ricans, namely the most immigration probably had something to do with that. So I mean, I don't think Adam is 100%

wrong. So I think your point is correct. These super packs and all these people are full to blame. But if you're pushing candidates to embrace these positions, that's a problem. I would never say anybody that is attempting to figure out the wreckage of this election is 100% wrong and that there aren't many factors that might lead to it. And I would never argue that a particular ad

or a particular ad wouldn't be effective or not. But I think in some ways that the level of analysis is too low, right? Again, like I mentioned at the top of this conversation, this is a moment where incumbent parties around the world are being rejected by... Yeah, but immigration's a big part of that story too. A lot of factors are big party. You mentioned New York. I think you can't talk about New York without talking about

the fact that Eric Adams basically ran and governed every single day based on the premise that New York was a hellhole and that immigrants were somehow in a very binary way taking dollar for dollar from everyday people in New York.

You spent a lot of state resources on that point. To that point, Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, they basically adopted the Republican frame on immigration. She ran how many times did she talk about prosecuting transnational gangs, blah, blah, blah.

Now you could say, oh, there was an overhang from 2020 blah, blah, blah. But that overhang must have been much more present in 2020 when Joe Biden was able to win. So while I think that there, you know, I've been a critic of like, wokeness in the Democratic Party and like the word policing and the academic language and whatever. And I think that's fine. But it's very convenient for the people who ran the multi-billion dollar super PACs to be like, it wasn't our fault, it was their fault. We had nothing to do with it.

When she ran the platonic ideal of the centrist Liz Cheney anti-immigrant campaign that they would want her to run, it's just very convenient to then be like, no, because of something she said on a questionnaire back in 2020. That's the reason she lost. That's my point. For better or worse,

She ran the campaign that she wanted to run as a consensus-based sort of big tent Democrat that campaigned with Liz Cheney. But I also want to also be clear, the class de-alignment that's been taking place, like working people

leaving the Democratic Party. Not all of them went from going to Donald Trump, many of them dropping out. That's many of the people that I talk to every day, just dropping out of politics. That's been taking place for a long time. Kamala Harris didn't create that phenomenon. Her campaign certainly didn't solve it. I don't think anyone could solve it. But here we are.

And we need to be reflective, but I think a lot of these backwards-looking takes will have people fight the last battle instead of the future battle.

Maurice, let me ask you specifically about one of the big battles that is going on right now for the direction the Democratic Party takes is about who was going to be DNC chair, sort of this important proxy fight over whether there's going to be, hey, maybe we need to deliver for working families in the way that a Bernie Sanders imagined, or whether there's going to be more capitulation to the right and more shifts to the right going forward. One of the candidates who has been floated is Rahm Emanuel,

who was originally Clinton-aid, obviously present, leading up to enduring the Obama administration, actually pushed Obama not to do healthcare because he thought it would be too upsetting to the powers that be. David Axelrod was promoting him as potential DNC chair. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Here's what I would do if they said, well, what should we do? Who should leave the party? I would take Ambassador Rahm Emanuel,

and I would bring him back from Japan, and I would appoint him Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, because he is the most skillful political kind of in fighter in the Democratic Party. He's been, you know, he's been a member of Congress. He's been White House Chief of Staff. He's been the Mayor of Chicago. Now he's been Ambassador of Japan. And he ran in 2005 and sixth the campaign to take back the House.

when Democrats were trying to take back the House of Representatives. He knows how to do this, and he would be a presence in the media and so on, fearless about taking on Trump. I think that would be really smart with the DNC. How many people in this room know who Ron May was?

So in many ways, the party still is Rahm Emanuel's party in terms of the type of candidates, the type of messaging that they promote. What do you make of this push to put Rahm in as DNC chair? I mean, so again, I'm building the Working Families Party. If I was to give the Democratic Party any advice, I mean, what do I hear there? I hear a bunch of elites talking about the concerns of their party instead of the concerns of everyday people. If you want

to come out of the wreckage of this election, then every single thing your party does should reflect an obsession with being deeply in the lives of people who are experiencing the affordability crisis or experiencing just generally this

this crisis of legitimacy that all the institutions are experiencing. And all the conversations you have will reflect that. The choices of the head of your party will reflect that. We need organizers. We need people who are listening to lead us through what will be a very challenging four years. I know that's how we're thinking about it. And again, I just think that these really

these elite conversations about what you're going to do for your institution almost is like you're having the wrong conversation and we're on the verge of in this country experiencing

something that, look, I don't want to engage in hyperbole. When you look at Donald Trump's cabinet picks, we could imagine what this is going to look like. We need fighting organizations that are willing to take the fight.

aggressively to Donald Trump and MAGA and be in the lives of everyday working people. And so if the conversation isn't about that, if it's about some political insider who, I mean, I talked to people in Chicago who look at the results of what happened in Chicago and how we left that position, be curious about what his role was in all those positions that were named.

and also be more curious about what folks, like I live on a block, right? Like just a little bio, right? I'm not a pundit, right? I grew up as a working class person. The reason why I'm here is because both of my parents

got opportunities in unions. My dad was in sanitation at a school district, and eventually he was an electrician and got a union job. My mom was a union nurse. And I lived on a block that was multiracial, a lot of ethnic white folks and immigrants and black folks in the suburbs of New York that went blue and has slowly become contested politically. There is a huge Trump flag

on that block now, on the corner. Something I couldn't have imagined only a few years ago. I returned back to that community during COVID.

If you're not obsessed with what will make my parents who are retired folks who put their lives on the line to make sure that the trains ran on time and that people got the care that they needed, if you don't put your focus on them and you put your focus on who the chair of the Democratic Party would be or what this

relatively privileged Democratic party operative says in the New York Times, you've lost the plot. And we need a fighting movement that will be obsessed with putting at the center people like my family and people like my neighbors.

Maurice, thank you so much for coming in this morning. It's good to see you. Thanks, Maurice. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate you just programming note. I'm going to be in Japan. I'm really excited for it until for a while. Emily will be in for me. Delayed honeymoon, OK? Don't get mad at me. I actually put it off, which the wife was not very happy about. But certain, certain sacrifices had to be made for the breaking points audience until after the election. I'm excited to go, but I am going to miss you guys all this. Yeah, we're going to miss having you here. I'm sure when you get back, there'll be all sorts of

I'm sure I'm going to miss the biggest possible news of that. That's just my luck. Emily will be filling in, of course, for our saga. And she always does a great job, too. So enjoy your trip. Thank you. And for all of you guys, I will see you back here Thursday. Emily and Ryan will be here tomorrow. So see you again soon.