Russia's 2024 Election Influence & Our Debate Predictions ft. Symone Sanders-Townsend
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Do you love reading as much as we do? Well, you're in luck because we're launching our first ever Betches Book Club in partnership with Nutella Biscuits because they know the best moments are even sweeter when you share a great snack with your friends. If you're in New York City, come hang out with us IRL at the Betches Book Club.

On October 28th, Aileen, Sammy, and I are hosting a book discussion with author Margot Harrison, where we'll be discussing her brand new novel, The Midnight Club, and snacking on Nutella biscuits. No, I won't be sharing mine because I'm truly obsessed and they're actually my new favorite snack in the world. But don't worry, there's going to be plenty for everyone to share. Head to bit.ly slash book club IRL to grab tickets for you and your friends. That's

bit.ly slash book club IRL for tickets. Grab yours before they sell out. Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm Bea Spear. I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News, where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience. Hey, Bea. What's going on?

We are in the midst of quite a week. Right now, we are pre-recording this episode Monday morning, bright and early, because we are headed to Philadelphia for the debate.

tomorrow night for the listeners. It's tonight. I'm super excited for it. I came into Philly early so that I could test all of the cheesesteaks. And also because I've been on the road for like two weeks and I just needed time like completely by myself in a hotel with like a big bowl of ramen and no one to talk to. So it's been really nice.

It's good that we're getting there with time to settle in because, you know, just got recordings on recordings. Oh, it's going to be wild.

about the debate, talking about predictions, chatting about strategy, what to expect, what would we do if we were her? Well, not really what we would do, what Simone would do, because we have no experience on that. And she has quite a bit of experience. So very excited. We have...

So much to discuss today. I know. I feel like because we've been on the road, I've missed a whole bunch of crazy news stories. They're still looking for that shooter from the Kentucky shooting. This guy, Joseph Couch, he's 32, former National Guard member who used an AR-15 to shoot people who were driving on I-75.

That's sick. That is so disruptive to people's lives. I mean, this country is constantly traumatizing children without a thought. Okay.

We're going to get into it because today's episode, we are going to focus on Russian misinformation and some of the misaligned Russian interference that we see in our daily lives up through and including Russia's relationship with the NRA. That's where it all began. Nothing Russian would want more than to kill a bunch of Americans and have us turn on each other. That's their whole point, and they're doing it in more ways than just online. But there are massive bot attacks right now on TikTok. TikTok is having a really difficult time keeping up with it.

Midas Touch, which is a very progressive news network, has had their account banned. They've been like the victim on their personal accounts, like massive bot attacks.

And it's just, I'm nervous to post because you don't want to get caught in it. So I've been posting about like Broadway and women's history because I'm trying to like separate myself. Well, you know what's interesting? The Midas guys, that is a testament to their power. Yeah. If they're the one that gets targeted. It's not just them. There's a lot of creepy stuff going on with the media. I'm really worried in particular about what's going on at the Washington Post. Will Lewis is the new publisher and he's doing some super weird shit.

First, when he came in, when I was still there, he bought out all the old timers. And it was this idea where it was like, you could take a buyout or you'll probably get fired. So of course, everybody took a buyout.

But he's now redesigning the homepage of Washington Post. And one of the biggest changes they're making is moving the opinion pieces higher up the page. Well, didn't we kind of know this was coming? Is the Washington Post a rag now? They got rid of the help desk and the technology section. And they're replacing it with like a greater influence on opinion pieces now.

And I know that they want to sell more papers, but is this really the way they want to do it with opinion getting top billing? I just think it's crazy. Well, don't you remember that reporting? We've talked about The Washington Post on past episodes. And wasn't there a meeting where he spoke to the staff of The Washington Post and he was essentially like –

We can't just be taking losses all the time. Yeah, but then fund investigative. I mean, yeah, but it's expensive and they just don't. And that is, I think, one of the biggest dangers of the time we're in is that in terms of legacy reporting, resources are not being devoted to the type of news that they're supposed to be devoted to.

And yeah, to your point, it is more rag-like. It's definitely rag-like. And it's like, you know, the richest people with the worst ideas can pay to have their opinion published in the Washington Post or the New York Times. And now that we're going to prioritize that, I think it's shady. I also think it's deeply concerning that legacy media that's all like, influencers, man, you put your opinion in and now you're going to be in an opinion rag and you're going to replace true investigative, important journalists who cover beats and

the White House, you're going to knock them down the page so that we can hear from Marco Rubio or like some whack asses like opinion about stuff? No. Right. And they're incentivized to put the most controversial or clickable thing. I mean, that's how media works. But the thing is that they're supposed to have a duty to

to their own, you know, a fidelity to their own tagline, democracy dies in darkness. Well, it's about to get real dark. I don't think they're going to be the saviors. I think we are going to have to be the saviors.

And if Kamala Harris is elected, I hope that the first thing that they prioritize is tackling some of the biggest problems in our democracy, like the way that money is influential, the way that local reporting has just gone totally by the wayside. Think about how the Colorado Aurora opportunity

apartment building thing might have been influenced by really reliable local reporting. Right. Who could say, no, there's not Venezuelan gangs in here. That's crazy. Right. And who would have relationships with the people of the town so that when Fox News comes to town, it's

It's just a different need. Lastly, I am very excited for the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Me and Natalie are saving it for when I get home from this trip so we can just binge watch it.

I'm very excited for that too. I watched The Perfect Couple this weekend and that was really wonderful trash. So I am doing The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives next. Maybe when we're in Philly and I can't sleep or something. Yeah. We'll see. We've got to do it. Now I'm going to take you to see the small streets because that's what you were most excited about. And my friend Kira is taking me to get a cheesesteak at Jim's on South, which apparently is the good one. So we're not going to go to Pat's or Gino's like the Trump campaign.

We're going to go to gyms on the South. By the way, thank you to the American Fever Dream listeners who wrote in with your Philadelphia information and with your cheesesteak breakdowns. I forwarded them all to you. Did you see them? Yes, I know. I'm excited. Yeah, me too. Gyms did get good, good reviews.

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I have a pulse. You're going to be okay. Dr. Odyssey, Thursdays, 9, 8 central on ABC and stream on Hulu.

All right, should we get into our big story today? We have a huge story. So we're just covering one big topic today, Russian disinformation and the latest DOJ indictment. Feels like we're always covering disinformation on here because it's like this constant need to be like, this is all an illusion. So there is a huge story that broke last week after the DOJ announced a massive indictment against Russia.

Numerous Russian entities, people, businesses that were all working in concert to influence the 2024 election in favor of Donald Trump.

They ran a huge campaign known as Doppelganger, which involved creating sleeper cells on social media of fake accounts and bots on social media platforms, particularly in swing states, but heavily targeted at various communities that would activate at certain moments, depending on where the discourse online was. And

And they had a massive operation going to alter the United States media and social media environment that has been going on for at least two to four years. But the details of this indictment are so wide-reaching and involve so many prominent figures that

It is such a bombshell story that going through this 277-page indictment, it seems that there is nowhere in American life that was not affected by violence.

something that is discussed within this indictment against the Russians. So we're going to break it all down for you. And as Sammy is telling you the facts, I'm going to interject some color and opinion about these people because I don't know that everybody exactly knows who Tim Pool is or knows who Dave Rubin is. So we're going to give you the background on these characters, how they got to where they are, what kind of money they were making before this Russian interference drop came in for them, this windfall of millions.

Hopefully that helps us like put better understanding around why this happened and how it actually affected our reality. So last week, the DOJ announced sanctions on 10 individuals and entities.

as well as criminal charges against two Russian nationals, and they seized 32 internet domains. According to a statement that accompanied the indictment, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, three Russian companies had used fake profiles to promote false narratives on social media in order to elect Donald Trump at the

express direction of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I want to interject here because they say social media, but I'm wondering if they also mean things like Telegram. Yes. Because Telegram, you know, the CEO of Telegram just got arrested for allowing child exploitation on his platform, but also for not cooperating with government's

When Telegram is the preferred chat platform for the far right and for this kind of organizing, Telegram is also the number one chat platform in Russia. So I'm wondering if we'll find out that Telegram was involved here too and not just social media when we think of it like Facebook.

You're absolutely right. The founder of Telegram is Russian born, but has a number of citizenships within other countries. And you are absolutely right. Telegram was used. They were also infiltrating local group chats, like WhatsApp chats. I mean, I consider that to be part of social media just because it is within meta. But yes, to your point, that distinction is important. And it's also not just

media feeds, it's also websites. They manipulated a number of domains to either mirror what would be real websites or to create altogether fake sources. We talked about that on an episode too, where we talked about spoofing websites, where people would be like WashingtonPost.co and it would look like the actual Washington Post, but then it would be all this Russian propaganda. Oh my God, it's all coming back to me. I'm like Celine Dion over here. Exactly. It's all coming together. I'm glad that we put in the work.

of laying this foundation early. The criminal charges that were brought were brought against two employees of Russian state media network RT. They were indicted for allegedly being part of a scheme that funneled $9.7 million in order to set up a front company in Tennessee that would produce digital content with the intention of pushing Russian propaganda narratives.

They were targeting minority groups, specifically groups like gamers and users of Reddit, American Jews, US citizens of Hispanic descent. And they also mentioned that they would use Reddit as a vector for distribution. Wait, I want to talk about the gamers piece of this because we can understand them going after marginalized groups. But why gamers in particular? And for folks who don't game, there is a very fast-paced chat that accompanies the watching of the game, which is very addictive. Right.

So you can co-opt and build community opinions while that addictive gameplay is going on, one, to keep the audience there for longer, and two, to make it seem like everybody who watches this particular Twitch streamer agrees that Russia is our friend, right? A lot of the people who are watching this are young boys, and they're starting, before they're even able to vote, they're starting to build this opinion and this inherent hate and this manufactured consensus amongst young boys on the internet.

Yeah, and something that I think is important is that they weren't, it's not necessarily pro-Russia or anti-Ukraine necessarily, although there is a lot of rhetoric

about Russia and the Ukraine war. Part of this was literally just targeted to sow division. The idea being when you have more division, you depress electoral turnout. And because of how our electoral college system is, that would mean electing Donald Trump. And that's ultimately their main goal because Donald Trump will allow Vladimir Putin to do whatever he wants. And Iran and China and North Korea, the leaders of those countries view him as weak because

Because he will, he's susceptible to flattery if you haven't noticed.

Much like the people who took the Russian money that we're going to talk about now, these social media influencers, they're all the same. Yes. So a big piece of the strategy was using influence. You know, they're just like any other, you know, Fortune 500 business in America. They know the importance of using influencers and how those relationships can be so viral and so effective and engaging.

So one of the operatives that they used is this company called Tenant Media. Now, they were not specifically named in the indictment because the DOJ is very clever. And what the DOJ did instead was say a company that describes itself as, quote, a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.

Some very smart investigative journalists took that quote, put it in the Google machine, and it kicked out Tenet Media, which on their homepage says, we are a heterodox group of commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues. So that's how we know it's Tenet.

It's also not lost on me that this company is based in Tennessee. Now, most shell companies are based in Delaware because of the tax implications. Why is this one based in Tennessee? Spoiler alert, Marsha Blackburn will show up for us later. That is the former U.S. representative, now senator of Tennessee, who is very connected to Moscow and a lot of other shady weirdo stuff. So we'll get to her in a little bit.

But this tenant media company was headed by a husband and wife clique, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan. And what's extra annoying is Lauren Chen is Canadian. She's not even American. This isn't a homegrown thing. This is part of a group of Canadian weirdos who are obsessed and have inserted themselves in MAGA, but actually live or hold Canadian citizenship. They're not American citizens. They're just like agitators. Do you think that she knows B better? Yeah.

She probably does know B-Better, the downfall of Tenet Media, if only he was still on the air. Maybe he was one of the people who was getting the check. I mean, who knows? That downfall of Kamala Harris was full of Russian propaganda. I'd be interested to know if B-Better was involved or if he's just a

I think he probably was more likely fell for the propaganda narratives rather than was paid. Even if he wasn't paid to make these, the downfall of videos, which if you're not sure what that is, there was this Canadian gay kid that was making all these videos about like the downfall of Kamala Harris. And he got absolutely killed on the internet for it. Just, it was incredible to watch. He was awful, but like the older millennial, right? I highly doubt this figure, the older millennial who is this like, this,

the nutso bananas guy who constantly just espoused Trump rhetoric was getting paid either. He was following the lead of his heroes, which are people that were getting paid like Tim Pool. Now, if you've heard of Tim Pool before, he started off fairly well for a guy who left school at fifth grade. So remember, this is not a person who's educated, which there's nothing wrong with that. You can be a perfectly good person with lots of skills who didn't have a major education, but Tim Pool left school at fifth grade.

Got famous for going live during protests like the Occupy Wall Street protests. Ended up becoming like a legit journalist. Worked for Vice. Had a chance to be legit as this like protest combat zone journalist, but then got wrapped up with Alex Jones and Trump and started doing these fake investigations into Antifa.

Now, before the last two years, he reported that his media company was making about $65,000 a month in streaming, which is like, that's pretty good. That's a half a million dollars a year. Now, he'd have expenses. He doesn't get to keep all that money, but that's a good living. Tim Pool, in the last two years, has become a millionaire, a multimillionaire. So it's not like his content got more exciting or he was finding more followers because as we know,

Donald Trump just lost $4 billion off Truth Social because it turns out that these right-wing talking points aren't actually that compelling or good for selling advertising. So where was that money coming from? It was coming from this Russian deal. Truth Social is like a meme stock money laundering scheme. Let's be real with that.

But that's the thing, to go from $65,000 in revenue a month, which is very good, to millions and millions and millions at the drop of a hat, there's obviously something wrong there. They were being paid absurd amounts, like $400,000 for four videos a month. That is not a rate that people are being paid in media for anything unless you're maybe Kim Kardashian.

I'm going to tell you now. And he's not. I'll put this out there for the crowd. Just to give you an idea, the going rate for an ad or for a sponsored content is somewhere between $8,000 and $15,000 for someone who does political content. Now, if I did makeup or fashion, yeah, now we're getting into tens of thousands, if not more. That is true. The distinction is, well, political on...

Leaning towards either the left or towards just journalism. If I if I get if I get paid to do an investigation or look into something that's just the same way that the newspaper reporters get paid. There's like, hey, we'd really like you to look into this. And here is like a budget for which to complete that work.

That is the most that we could have expected from a Tim Pool because it's not like MyPillow was coming out and saying, hey, I'll give you $400,000 a month and you're going to run this number of ads on your channel. Anybody to say to you, I will give you money to say this script, that is deeply corrupt. That's not going to go well. They were given talking points around certain narratives.

Cut off the money. No.

It's the only way you get them to the table. As long as, I mean, we're literally creating the oligarch class of billionaire in Ukraine with whatever's being siphoned off, whether it's Zelensky, whether it's this, while they send young men to die as cannon fodder on the front lines because they couldn't care less. It's fucking disgusting what's going on there. It's allowed to happen that we shut down anything.

And then other narratives they were pushing were just narratives meant to divide Americans and make them fearful of each other, that your jobs are at risk. Immigrants are taking your jobs. The border is dangerous. Trans panic, all the trans panic stuff. Critical race theory. All of that is just meant to drive division and make the left or liberals seem evil.

Yeah. And these people were more than happy to do it because as we've talked about in previous episodes, there are people who are long-term thinkers and there are short-term thinkers. These folks had some money come across their desk and they're like, I could believe that. I could say that. I could authentically believe that. Why not? You're going to reinforce my bad opinion with some money. Sounds good. Right. I mean, well, to be fair, the indictment claims that the person out, like these individual influencers were not aware of the background and the intentions of the

where they were being paid through their bosses. I'm not willing to accept that. Okay. I'm not necessarily willing to accept it either, but we do have an innocent until proven guilty situation. So I will say that these people, to give them the benefit of the doubt, sure.

But the founders definitely knew because they were paid through a Canadian shell company via a front man named Eduard Gregorian, who did not exist. And that was easy to figure out that he did not exist if you would...

Google, even briefly. Let me tell you about Edward Gregorian. So when I get anybody who wants to give me money to do anything, I always research the hell out of it because, again, I'm a long-term thinker. I want a long-term career, and I never want to disappoint the audience or do something unethical. So you do a couple searches because you get hundreds of things a day that are like total bullshit.

So I was like, Edward Gregorian. To me, I'm like, okay, these have to be dog whistles because everything that Russia does because of their KGB-ness, I always think it's like spies, dog whistles. That's part of the fun for them. So if you look up Edward, right, I was like, Edwardian, no, that's not white supremacy enough. So I just Googled Eduard Nazis and

Eduard is a toy manufacturer that makes the replicas of the Nazi Air Force airframes and now makes the fucking MiG-21s, which are the goddamn Russian warplanes.

So I was like, okay, so maybe they use the toy manufacturer who makes right-wing toys because these are toys. You know, they were going to use these influencers as toys. And then I was like, okay, but let me just look up Eduard Putin. And it turns out Putin's very best friend in the whole world, his whole life is this guy, Eduard, I don't know, some Russian last name. It starts with a K, who is also the straw owner of the Russian oil company that is Putin's like prized possession. Yeah.

Yeah. So he, so on paper, Putin doesn't own anything so that people can't take it from him. It's his best friend who holds the oil company, which is his absolute like prize. It's like $500 million of his wealth. So it's like, okay, I could see that being where they got the first name. Now, what about Gregorian? And here's where we get like real conspiracy corner with Vee.

my Catholic upbringing kicks in and I'm like, does this refer to Pope Gregory VII, the notable tyrant that came up with exactly two things. One was celibacy vows and the fact that women should never have a place in church leadership. And two,

He centralized an ecclesiastical government in Rome where the Pope was both the clerical leader and the emperor. This is the ultimate Christian nationalist power structure where just as Pope Gregory ordered through the Gregorian reforms,

There is no separation of church and state. There is one guy who rules both the church and the state. And I was like, well, if I were a KGB person, I would put those together. But this is me just shit talking and speculating. And this is what you get when I'm in a hotel by myself in Philly. But I think it fits.

Even tenant media. So if we look at Lauren Chen and the places that she's worked within the right wing. And the thing is, this is the thing you got to understand. Anytime you're seeing right wing stuff, it's going to be loaded with dog whistles because part of the fun for them is like that they're in some secret special club that nobody understands but them. So if we look at Lauren Chen, who is the founder of this tenant media with her husband, and she really is the leader of it. He appears to be sort of like enabling to her. She's a leader.

She worked for a place called Evie Magazine, which was noted to be the Cosmo for conservatives. Evie is the nickname for Ava, like Ava Braun, Hitler's kind of wife. I don't know. Oh, yeah.

It was founded in 2019, and in September of 2022, Evie launched a femtech app called 28 by Evie that was later just named 28. The company 28 collects menstruation data and uses it to provide non-scientific exercise and diet advice because it really is just trying to collect menstruation data.

What is menstruation? Blood. What is 28? It is the white supremacist alphanumeric code for blood and honor. 2 is B and 8 is H, which is like Nazi thing, blood and honor, about like having a clean bloodline. And all of this was funded by Peter Thiel. Oh, and they want to track you. So here we have Peter Thiel showing up again. And it serves a dual purpose of helping them track your menstrual cycle so they can arrest you if they suspect you're pregnant or had a miscarriage. Yes.

Exactly. There's all these dog whistles and codes all throughout here. Now, the Evie slash 28 company only has 134 followers, and they're very smart about how they do it because they put in just enough realistic media that's almost BuzzFeed-y, and then they have the trad wife right-wing deeply problematic content. So if you followed because you just saw something interesting to you, like best lipsticks for fall, well, now they start feeding you all this right-wing nonsense Hitler-y stuff.

That is actually written out explicitly in their influencer strategy that they should only have 20% of false disinformation-related content and the rest should be regular, credible, normal content because the idea is that they are fronting as regular Americans who just happen to have these views. Well, they follow. Now, any normal person...

with the profile does not allow you to see who they follow or what they like, stuff like that, just because it's like a privacy thing. They do allow you to see who they follow. And this 28 company follows people like Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter and Sharon Says So, friend of the pod, Sharon McManus. Oh my gosh.

but then also follows Andrew Huberman, who is a right-wing figure, the hostage songbird wife of David Foster, Catherine McPhee. All the right-wing favorites like Jordan Peterson, the trad wife women, all that kind of stuff mixed into that are all these like normal pop culture people. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. This Lauren girl, she goes back to, for being a Canadian, she is a longtime friend and collaborator of Senator Marsha Blackburn. She's worked in communications for her in the past.

And she also worked in Paul Ryan's office as an intern. Now, how a Canadian works for a Republican's office as an intern, I mean, I actually don't know, but I find it kind of unusual. I've not heard of that before. Is she a dual citizen? She is not. She was born in Hong Kong and then lives in Canada. And her father, who often appears on her show and is also very right-wing, is in Hong Kong.

How did she get this job as an intern? I think we're going to start – I mean, the books are breaking open here. Okay. But Paul Ryan, he goes back to the early starts of the Tea Party movement, 2012, and that's when a lot of these people started to come up. That is actually kind of where it began, and Putin invaded Crimea around that time as well. Yeah. Yeah.

Can you tell us about Tenet Media and its background in Tennessee? This is what I was saying I think is so unusual because typically somebody who's moving this kind of money would do it through Delaware because of the tax haven that it has. And like, that's just what people do. To have it in Tennessee, particularly in Nashville, was unusual to me until you consider the fact that Nashville, the city...

is deeply corrupt and run by the right wing as well. And I don't want to get too specifically into it until we can have somebody with better lawyers investigate it more. But a lot of my friends own restaurants there, James Beard award winners, and they have talked about how it's run like a mafia for the right wing and the way that Nashville for being like, quote, this liberal city or this bachelorette city or this fun place is very quid pro quo.

and very like catering to right-wing people. So it makes sense to me that she was offered office space and like, you know, the ability to incorporate and run her money through Nashville, which apparently is, you know, fairly right-wing. And the home of country music, which we also, in our Beyonce Cowboy Carter breakdown episode, we talked a lot about

country music and how in Nashville and how it was intended to shut people out and that it was all about pushing conservative values. So that also kind of tracks to the only music and it's the only music genre that is centered in Nashville.

Well, if you're thinking about Nashville, you're thinking about downtown Nashville, you got to think about the suburbs and that's where these people fester. Okay. There's a town called Gallatin, which is just outside Nashville, which is like home to the most former KKK members per capita. It's deeply right-wing. It's deeply Trump. And a lot of their street names are things like Django Road and Confederate Boulevard. I mean, it's like openly, it is openly horrific. And again, it's extremely affluent. So it's not something that you hear about a lot.

because it's like this little secret town that these freakos live in. And in Nashville is a lawyer known as G. Klein Preston. And he is credited for introducing his client, Alexander Torshin, a Russian politician with close ties to Vladimir Putin, to the former NRA Association president, David Keene.

Preston is also a longtime lawyer and committee manager of Marsha Blackburn. He's been with her since 2005, and he represented her when she was facing campaign finance ethics violations for the way that she was maybe getting some foreign interference money. I don't know. That case went away pretty quickly.

He's donated money to her bid. He's really kept her afloat in many ways. And Preston, this lawyer, has six times served as a Russian election poll watcher on behalf of Putin. So Putin brings in these right-wing Americans to come watch his elections and see how secure they are and makes them feel like they're important and have a role in Moscow. It's like a tutorial. Right.

Yeah, this guy also attempted to lead the state-level challenge of the presidential election of 2020 in Michigan, trying to overturn the election for Trump. And he brought Russian programmers in to, quote, audit American voting machines that were in Tennessee. So...

There's a lot going on in Nashville, and it became less surprising to me that this Tenet Media Russian op thing was running out of Tennessee. Right. That is very suspicious. Don't forget about the Republicans that spent July 4th, 2018 in Russia. I never forget. Oh, my God. Seven Republicans who said that they went there to, like, tell Putin to leave American elections alone. No, you didn't. No, you didn't. I don't believe that for a second.

Yeah, also this Alexander Torshin, he was the head of the Russian central bank. And he's also the one who...

essentially was the link to the NRA. And the NRA was really kind of, I would say, the first organization that Russian interests were able to co-opt and infiltrate. They have since had some serious financial problems, but- They always get bailed out. Yeah, they always get bailed out. I would say they've sort of like lost a little bit of their effectiveness, but that is how they funneled donations to various Republican politicians because they were all getting money from the NRA. Right.

The other thing is that also last week, a man named Dmitry Symes was arrested. He is a Russian-born U.S. citizen, a former advisor to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. He also worked for RT, but...

More interestingly, and probably less known, is that he was Rand Paul's national security policy advisor for like 10 years. Well, Rand Paul opens up the right-wing light party, the Libertarians. And if we look at the Libertarians who claim to be far left-wing but are actually so far left that they hooked around to be right-wing again...

You can look at some more of these influencers that were named from Tenet Media as paid ops for the Russians, like Benny Johnson. Benny Johnson came from Breitbart, which was Steve Bannon's media company. He identifies as a libertarian. He worked at The Blaze, which is a conservative newspaper of sorts, works at Turning Point and has been accused of plagiarism like a billion times because these people are not smart.

He lost his original job at BuzzFeed. Something I did find very satisfying is that Eric Swalwell tweeted. So Eric Swalwell, people, you know, Republicans often accuse him of being like a spy for the Chinese. So Eric Swalwell tweeted, let me get this straight. For five years, at Benny Johnson has spun a fantasy he has about me and China when all the while he was being paid by Russia to spread disinformation to rich Americans.

Asterisk, Benny was fired from his last job for plagiarism. He was Russia's perfect mark. I want to remind you that Putin almost didn't graduate from college in Russia because he was accused of plagiarism so badly that they were like 15 pages of your thesis for your graduate degree is directly copied from American textbooks. These are not people who are smart, okay? And-

And now one guy who I actually do think is smart and so I think would be an interesting study because he was very smart and then he – it goes to show like bias and misinformation can come for us all is Dave Rubin. Dave Rubin worked at the Blaze, also worked at the Young Turks, which I do not consider liberal or progressive, but that is how they started. And Dave Rubin also started as a progressive. He's now a libertarian. Yeah.

But at the Young Turfs, at the Young Turfs, the Young Turfs, Anna, who's their main host, is a super turf. And that's something that they have found like common ground on with the MAGA crew is this trans panic. We hate trans people nonsense. Now, Dave Rubin started as a comic with Jon Stewart.

And he really fell off. He's into Turning Point. He's with Ben Shapiro. This Dave Rubin guy is gay. He has two kids, but yet said, quote, if I found out a teacher talked to my six-year-old about gender or sexuality, I might kill that person, which is crazy because, again, he's gay. Also, like, what do you think teachers are talking? It's ridiculous. What is this fantasy where teachers are, like, preaching to children about sex?

These things. They can't even get, like they say, I can't even get them to line up or stop talking to each other. Do you really think we're having deep sit down conversations about gender? We're not. Well, Donald Trump is peddling the idea that children are coming home from school with sex change operations. I know.

So this guy reported that he was making about $10,000 a month. And now, you know, all of a sudden, two years ago, started to be this big time millionaire. So these are things that I think were big red flags. And it's people who are so desperate to get what they think they're owed. This idea of like male entitlement results in violence or results in like desperation is absolutely true and scary. And then we have the women.

This girl, Lauren Southern, again, a Canadian who is obsessed with promoting a MAGA agenda, has always been wildly right-wing and conspiracy-driven. She's been demonetized on every single platform. She did this stunt one time where she changed her gender to male in Canada to show how easy it was to change your gender under the new gender laws in Canada, which are meant to be progressive and for people who need them. She did it, whatever. She works for a company called 314 Media.

The number 14 used by white supremacists as a shorthand reference for the so-called 14 words, which is the most popular white supremacist slogan in the world. Quote, we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children. You know, for such a popular slogan, I've I've never once heard that. But, you know, I guess it wouldn't exactly include me.

Yeah. You got to keep me out. You got to keep you out. Well, you know, you're Jewish, Sammy. I don't know if they're going to go for that. No, I know. The thing that was interesting about this Lauren Southern girl is she got to a point that some right-wing influencers do get to where they're like, I actually can't handle the hate and I don't want to do this anymore. And she left social media to like go have a regular life and denounced her hardline stances. Okay. Tell me why in 2023, she left her husband and came back.

Joined up with Tenet Media and resumed all these hardline stances. Her Canadian fellow friend, Lauren Chen, called her out of retirement. And this lady left her extremely Catholic husband to come back and be a right-wing propagandist. She left her husband for this?

I don't know that she left him for this, but she did leave her husband in 2023 when this money came through. We're going to keep hearing about this and hearing about more people so often. And the thing that is happening on TikTok and at the lower level social media influencer world is so many people are now accusing every one of these right-wing streamers of taking money from Russia. And they're like, no, I didn't. No, I didn't. Which almost makes you...

It reminds me of the meme where they're like, are you getting paid 300 million? You're getting paid 500,000. You guys are getting paid. Like the way that the trickle down doesn't work because I'm sure that the older millennial isn't getting paid.

even though he has over a million followers to spread right-wing nonsense. But he is looking at people like Tim Pool and the folks he thinks are successful, and he is parroting their talking points to try and be like them. And that's the thing. This would have never gotten so far without this infusion of cash. Yes, I believe these people actually think these things, but they wouldn't have been able to put up media companies, and they wouldn't have been able to distribute on the level that they did without this money. Right. Well, I think the other thing is that for...

a propaganda campaign on social media to be effective, you don't actually need to pay for or pay every single interaction or most of them even. You just need to sort of set off a domino that will

essentially yields predictable conversation at this point. They have influencers, but then they also have fake accounts. And then they also have bots, which are all working to elevate

those influencers and the narratives that people who they're not paying, but are aligned ideologically or just agree or have also been co-opted or feel strongly. And therefore they're just a regular person posting that all creates an ecosystem where all that content is popular. The way that like, if you post about Taylor Swift, all the Taylor Swift accounts are popular.

And to be honest with you, this is not new. They've been doing this since 2014, 2015, 2016. They understand the media environment better than the vast majority of Americans. I believe there are probably only a handful of people in the US who understand the media environment as well as they have because they have studied it and learned

Most of those people are like our age. It's like the random person. We're going to see this play out on the debate stage because at the heart of this, it is about distraction and manufacturing consensus, and it is not about truth and

And what we do wrong here is hold people all as if they're telling the truth the same way. People watch me and they're like, oh, that's the left-wing perspective on democracy. They watch some other right-wing guy. They watch Ben Shapiro and they're like, oh, that's the right-wing perspective on democracy.

We are not on equal footing. One of us is lying and one of us is telling the objective truth. But just like in the debate tomorrow night, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris will be treated the same as if they both come from a good place and as if they are representing the truth as it appears to their particular political ideology. And that's just not true. Putin is not a strong man, nor is he a smart man. He is a butthurt white dude who feels entitled to things that he never earned and that he doesn't know how to keep.

Ever since Putin came into office in 2000, he has lost significant favor for Russia. I mean, at one time, Russia was an American ally, and it was like a democratic country, or at least it was trying to be. It was working towards democracy, and now it's an authoritarian regime where life is hard there, as the MAGA people who moved there thinking that it was going to be like traditional values and so great have found out.

Bill Clinton and Bush, I think, were trying to actually have relations with Russia. And also, if you remember under the Obama administration, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, there was that whole idea of like a reset when Medvedev was the president.

Putin, you know, it's not like this has been a static situation in Russia either. Putin has consolidated power. If you remember, like there was the whole thing with Pussy Riot and now he's killed the main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. After quite a bit of time, Navalny had been in exile. He came back.

to run against Putin and had a lot of popularity. This is an autocratic country. They don't want Putin to be their leader either necessarily, but we can't know that because of state media, of the fact that a lot of times people just sort of submit to an autocrat. Well, and they have these poll watchers. When you come and vote, if you vote against him, they will mark your name down and harass you. Yeah.

Now, there used to be a thing when he first got elected in 2000, the president was only supposed to have two terms like most places. So in the beginning, he would like run for president, then he'd run for prime minister, then he'd run for president, then he'd run for prime minister. And now he's in his like fifth term as president. He just gave up on this idea of term limits. Exactly. And that's...

That's what Trump is saying he wants to do. Exactly. And also, if you're interested in learning more details about Putin and unpacking that whole lore, you should listen to the About a Boy podcast from journalist Julia Ioffe. It is so, so, so interesting. Really easy listen. The episodes are like a half hour and there's, I think, six of them. So I would definitely check that out.

I'm sure we'll be back to report more on this as well. And I posted a really long video. It's technically in two parts on my Instagram. My account is at Sammy, which dissected specifically the issue of how the Russian disinformation campaign

try to target Jewish Americans. It's quite long, so we're not going to tack it into this episode, but it does tackle a whole other piece of what we discussed today and gives a bit more background information as well. And so you should check that out as kind of a companion to this show if you're interested in learning more. We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, we'll have Simone Sanders here to talk about debate predictions, wishes, hopes, and dreams. We'll see you in a minute.

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Welcome back, friends. As promised, we have a super special guest. Ms. Simone Sanders-Townsend is here from MSNBC, NBC, all over your TV, all over everywhere. And she has made time for us today before the debate to give us her debate predictions. Greetings. Me and my fuzzy microphone are very happy to be here. We are thrilled to have you and to have this time with you. So let's just get right into it. You have prepped the vice president for her last debate, the vice presidential debate against Mike Pence.

Can you give us a little bit of insight into how a preparation like that goes down, how she will be preparing to debate someone like Donald Trump, which is quite different from someone like Mike Pence?

He's a tough guy to debate. He is. He is. What did what did the president say after his last debate? It's really hard to debate a liar. Yes. Yes. Yes. In fact, it is. So look, the last time I got with no morals. Well, you know, just these are just the facts.

You know, I was thinking about this this morning. In October of 2020, the vice president then at the time, Senator Harris, was camped out in a hotel ballroom in Salt Lake City, Utah, because that is where the then vice presidential debate was happening in 2020. And we called it a debate camp. And we were there for about a week.

And there in the room was a replica, if you will, of the stage that she would meet then Vice President Pence on later at the debate. And when we went through mock debates, she...

She sat on the stage, and I think it's been well reported now that Secretary Buttigieg played Mike Pence in that debate prep. And they really went through a full mock so that when the vice president stepped on the stage, then Senator Harris stepped on that debate stage. Finally, it wasn't the first time with the lights on. You know what I mean? It is really important that the candidate's preparation mirrors as much as possible, all the way down to the stage and the lights.

In addition to the content and obviously who is pretending to be their opponent, standing in for their opponent, that it all mirrors what the real experience will be because I believe practice is what you do. So practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes what you end up doing in a debate. So that debate camp, if you will, was very informative. And so obviously...

Vice President Harris is currently in Pittsburgh, held up in a hotel ballroom probably. And I have no doubt there is a duplicate or a replica of the stage that she will meet former President Trump on tomorrow night. So her debate prep is very similar to, I think, how she prepped for Senate hearings when she was a senator. And it all goes back to her time as a prosecutor, starting as the DA in San Francisco, that

That's also my experience when I worked for her, when we would be in briefings. And so it is really understanding what the argument is, what her argument is, what your opponent's argument is, and then how you will parse the two. I've worked for a lot of lawyers and, you know, sometimes the lawyer folks, I mean, you know, the lawyers want a lot of information, but it's important. I've learned because president, I've also worked for president Biden. He is the same way. It's important.

it's important for the lawyers that they get the details because you never know what is going to come up in the conversation. Just like you never know what's going to come up in court. You can anticipate it as much as possible, but you want to have all of the details, all the facts of the case, if you will. So that regardless of what argument is thrown out by, uh,

other party, if you will, in this case, Donald Trump, that you are very well versed in countering that argument or how you will speak to it, but you have to know what the facts are in order to do that. And that is how Vice President Harris, in my experience, has thought about her prep. So I have no doubt that that is what the team has been going through. But the day before a debate, you do a mock, but you don't overdo it. You don't overdo it.

I have a question about speaking to that point about how she knows all the details and she is so aware of all of the facts. And I've kind of, you know, as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, okay, what's the best case scenario and what's the worst case scenario? Best case is she has all of it just timed exactly. She gets off a shot at him early. He kind of gets flustered and goes,

crazy and says nothing of substance. And he basically just kind of performs the opposite of how he did with Biden, where he was a little more controlled than he usually was. But then I was thinking about what is the worst case scenario that he acts the way he did in June and she gets maybe a little flustered.

With her responses, because he overwhelms her, especially with the mics being being muted and it may not be apparent on television what's actually happening in the room. And people have said to have said of the vice president that she is overprepared. And I mean that and coming for me as a compliment.

But I could see a situation where because she has so many things in her head, there's this sense of like she's searching for the right way to phrase it and the right fact to bring and the right way to put it that.

then kind of comes out as maybe a bit of more of a word salad than intended, or it seems like she's hesitating. And that's my concern is that optically, because she is so, so knowledgeable and she's fighting essentially just a fire hose of ridiculousness, that the way it will optically come across to the American people, that is my like low bar of expectations I'm setting for myself. Let me dispel your concerns because I,

We have heard a lot in the lead up to this debate about how Donald Trump has more presidential debate experience than she does, that he has more presidential debate experience than any of the modern candidates because he's ran for president so many times and stood on these stages. And that may be true, but...

I don't think folks should discount the experience that the vice president herself brings. You know, she has been in public, elected public office since 2010. Therefore, she's had debates since 2010 as district attorney, as attorney general. Obviously, she stood on a number of presidential debate stages in a Democratic primary, and we can glean something from those as well. And obviously, that debate vis-a-vis former Vice President Mike Pence in 2020. And so from that

From all of those debates, the vice president has established a pattern. I've gone back and I've looked at some of them. There was the attorney general's race in California where she and her opponent, it was the end of the debate really towards the end. And her opponent in the race has asked a question about if he's going to double dip, if you will, by the moderator in terms of salary, something about pensions or whatnot. And

Her opponent goes in and gives the answer and basically says absolutely. And the moderator turns to the vice president, then candidate Harris, then D.A. Harris, actually, and asks her if she would like to respond. And she tells her opponent to have at it.

From that debate, ads are cut and her campaign uses those ads very effectively in the final weeks in that race. She went on to serve as the attorney general twice elected of California. And so for me, because I've just been looking through all of these past debates, I

I don't think the concern about having so much information being overloaded is what the issue will be. I think a valid concern could potentially be is she's going to needle Donald Trump. Donald Trump is going to needle her back. This is the first time they will be meeting face to face because...

Donald Trump did not attend the inauguration because he incited the mob that went to the United States Capitol to try to stop the certification of the 2020 election. Okay. So after that, he didn't come to the inauguration. So they had never actually met before. And so

He has been, what I said, what I described on Morning Joe this morning is like, you know, an internet thug, an internet bully. And will he be willing to say some of the very derogatory things that he has posted on social media to the vice president? And sure, once or twice saying that's not going to bother her, three or four times might not get a reaction out of her. What if Donald Trump keeps it up? And five, six, and seven, on the seventh time, are you going to get a very pointed comment from him?

The vice president. That's to her advantage. That's not my worry. Yeah. I think she's a great debater as well, but I think that is to her advantage to an extent. Just like in one of the primary debates in 2019, where the candidates on the stage were in a back and forth and she kind of jumps in and says,

Guys, Americans do not want to witness a food fight. They want to hear what you have to say about them. The concern that I think would be, I don't think the overload of information is a concern for the vice president because she has done this so many times. Really, it is not allowing Donald Trump to pull her into a back and forth, no matter what he says for too long, that then takes away from the focus on the American people. Unlike the other debates she's been in, there will be no studio audience.

there. Right. And so she had the debates are part policy, part performance. And when you do not have an audience, you are performing for the cameras at home. So remembering to turn and look into the camera and say, I know he wants to do like dismiss him and push him off, which she's been very, I mean, literally, if you look at how she has handled this general election campaign since she became the top of the ticket, truly it is a masterclass on not taking the bait.

But when you're on that stage, sometimes you get pulled into taking the bait. But that's something you go over in debate prep. Well, I got to tell you, as a person who lives and breathes on TikTok, where Kamala is queen and everyone is coconut pilled, I am very excited for the debate for those moments. And I hope that she is planning, as I'm sure that she is. How is this going to be clipped? What little under a minute and 30 second clips will we get that we can syndicate to reels? Like there's a whole true social media strategy about

there's going to be folks who watch the debate and there's going to be more folks who just watch the clip. Absolutely. And if Kamala is watching the clips, I hope she's seeing the, because I'm seeing hundreds of people go direct to camera and say, Oh,

Madam Vice President, please don't engage with him. We are sick of this silly ass man. We do not want to hear you debate him so much as we want you to use that time to speak to us, the American people. Tell us about your policies, hold it down, and maybe get in a couple of these things that we can turn into like viral sounds later. I mean, to me personally, if you could put in a word, those viral sounds will help my content so much. But like coming out of this, I don't see it as anything but more of a win for her to show this narrative of hope.

No matter what the traditional media or legacy media people say about who won the debate or where it went, I think if she continues this path of hope and joy and come sit over here, we're having a good time and we're ignoring that, she's at a better advantage to win. Do you think that that will see a lot of hope and joy on the stage in addition to that holding him accountable? I think you'll see a balance of both, right? This is, I mean, if you, I don't put too much stock in the polls, right?

But I have been out there talking to voters, along with my colleague Melissa Murray, for this special that we're doing about black women that is airing at the end of September on MSNBC on September 29th. And in these conversations, especially since the switch, because that's what the young people in the streets are calling it, OK, the switch at the top of the ticket when Vice President Harris became the Democratic nominee.

Since the switch, they are saying, we don't really know much about her. We don't know. They're admitting that they don't know what a vice president really does every day. So this stage, while the Democratic National Convention was the introduction for many people to voting,

who Kamala Harris is as a wife, as a stepmother, as a leader, what her record was in California, as a criminal justice reform advocate, as a fighter for people. That is what you saw on the stage as a commander in chief, right? As someone that brings coalitions together. That's what you saw on the Democratic National Convention stage, culminating with the vice president herself and her speech accepting the nomination. That's one piece. But there are still Americans out there that...

But they want to know more. I'm not talking about those, you know, these imaginary people in the middle, right? Even some base Democratic voters. And so because of that, she has to draw a contrast between herself and Donald Trump. And that's how she has been. You know, I think we're going to hear a lot of things we've heard on the campaign trail, right? So she says...

While she has never met Donald Trump, she says, I know his type. And then she talks about how she, throughout her career, has taken on fraudsters and the big banks who defrauded people. And she got all this money for billions, billions of dollars for homeowners in California. And then she juxtaposes that with Donald Trump. That is a twofold thing. That is one, her talking about her bio, right? Telling people who she is and what she has done. And also contrasting herself with Trump. So yes, she has to do both. But I do not think she can afford to completely ignore Donald Trump.

And the lesson in the previous debates that we see from that is everybody wants to talk about this moment with Congresswoman Tulsa Gabbard, right, in one of the Democratic primary debates. And I actually think people put more stock into it than they should. But the lesson from that debate is, because if you look at the interviews that then Senator Harris did after, she talked about how she couldn't believe that this

She called Tulsi Gabbard a tier two candidate. I was like, oh, Lord, the shade. She called her a tier two candidate. She couldn't she was just kind of shocked that this tier two candidate was coming at her. And she didn't want to she didn't want to give her the time of day, essentially. The lesson, I think, from that exchange or with a congresswoman with Tulsi Gabbard is, in fact, that you cannot just ignore the attack.

on your record altogether. You have to do a counterpunch and then pivot. And she pivoted without an effective counterpunch. And so for Donald Trump, she cannot ignore him altogether. He is going to attack her record. He's not just her personally, her record, the record of the Biden administration. So she will have to make decisions in the moment about how she's going to counterpunch and then where she's going to pivot. And you can't do, to your point, people don't want to be mired in the past. They want to look to the future.

But you just can't let some of this crazy go unanswered. One would hope the moderators would step in and do some of that, but you can never be too sure in this day and age. Can't count on them. Now, another thing that folks are really hoping you can give us some insight to is what the behind the scenes is like.

What is, what is vice president Kamala Harris like to have as a beverage before she goes on stage? What will she have for lunch that day? Is there a certain particular routine she has a prayer she does? Is there anything that we can know about like her behind the scenes, things that ground her that she'll be doing back there that like when we're all getting our snacks together, getting ready to sit down and settle in, we can imagine that she's doing back there and send her some good vibes. I am hard pressed to divulge her coffee order.

and her preferred lunch request. But I will just say that prior to on a debate day, that is a day that you want to be lighter for the candidate, whomever the candidate is. You do not want to overload your candidate with appearances and prep because when they stand on that stage, um,

They would have done all this stuff during the day, and then they're not ready, settled, and prepared. You wanted to have a lighter day, have some time with family. We saw she and the second gentleman going for a walk yesterday. I fully would expect that she gets a walk in, if not a workout in before. She works out almost every single day. That is something I think she's also said publicly. Just like Donald Trump. Well, well.

Well, she's on the treadmill every morning. Donald Trump is working them fingers on that keyboard. He's working that QWERTY board. She's on that treadmill. In the White House, you would know, make sure you've read the clips by five because the vice president will be up doing that workout reading those clips herself, honey. So you got to be prepared in case you get one of those phone calls as a clarifying question about what is going on out there. So I

I think that'll be kind of the routine. Her family, obviously, there will not be an audience at the debate, but I'm sure her family and advisors will be there. She will meet with some people prior to. A very small group, probably not the full debate prep team, because again, you want to keep it light. There are no notes that the candidates can bring on stage with them, but...

Again, usually what candidates do is you have your top things that you want to put your sheet on in your head. So when you walk out of there, you walk out, you give your waves to the crowd and then you often see the candidates start to write. I think we're going to see that from the vice president. But it'll be it'll be light, but still literally going over the notes, wanting to be prepared.

The second gentleman, I'm sure, will be there. Her sister, her close family members. But you want to just keep it just zen and cool for the candidates. You don't want any overload.

Do you think Tim Walls will be there to do the pep talk? And if he's not, does she need me to juice her up? Because I'm available. We'll help. You know, maybe we need to suggest to put the podcast out there and you'll send it to the folks and maybe they'll play the episode. We'll set the case for Kamala Harris episode. Yeah, look forward to right before the debate, maybe around like 4 p.m. when she's maybe taking a little snack break somewhere.

a full Riz up on Tik TOK of Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris doesn't strike me as someone who relaxes like, even if she has the chance, just like everyone else. I don't mean that in a bad way, but she just strikes me as someone who's like, even when she's sitting, she's reading something relevant. She's not just like fucking off. You know, I don't think I've ever seen the VP quote unquote F off, but I have seen her relax and,

And I do think that for every single candidate I have ever worked for, every single elected official, one of the things that I think people should remember is that they are regular folks just like us. Just, you know, these people are some of the folks that are making the decisions that will affect our everyday lives. And so that is something, frankly, that...

we've gotten a preview of that. The vice president is going to try to inject into this conversation. There's a new ads that her campaign released over the weekend about how Donald Trump got his money from his rich daddy. Literally the ad talks about a rich daddy. Uh, and this is, this is from an interview that she did with Univision. The host names was angel baby. And so she talks about how Donald Trump's, you know, knows about his rich daddy and that's what he knows. But I come from a middle-class family and she talks about her mom and buying and

and her mother buying her first house. Those are some of the things that she definitely needs to get out on the debate stage because people do need to know like, oh, the vice president is like me. Oh, the vice president went to her and her sister stayed with a family friend, Mrs. Shelton, when her mom was at work. Oh, she worked at McDonald's to earn a little extra money. Oh, she does know what it's like to rent or to have to move a lot. Oh,

because sometimes elected officials seem a little out of touch. That's a lot to do, frankly, in one debate setting on top of the policy. But those are the stakes here. Debates are just as much about performance as they are about policy. But I continue to believe that for a

Vice President Kamala Harris, this debate is an opportunity. And for Donald Trump, the stakes are very high because he has seemed, in my opinion, quite unwell. And that's just, that is not like hyperbole or me trying to be funny. The sentences have not been coherent. And so this is, he's going to be standing on the stage next to a much younger candidate, someone who has a much, much more experience than he has in terms of governing at various levels. And

and someone who had- And running a business. I mean, the state of California was a business, and she ran it well. I mean, the largest justice department in the country, second only to the United States Department of Justice. Donald Trump also has a lot of work to do here in this debate. And I think some of the analysis and the lead up to has kind of let him off the hook. And I'm like, well, hold on now. Childcare is the biggest bill for people in this

for many families, one of the biggest bills. And his answer last week at the New York Economic Club leads me to believe that he doesn't actually understand childcare. So how are you fighting for the working people? Yeah, you don't understand one of the working people's biggest bills. This is something that perhaps the vice president will bring up if the moderators don't.

Let's hope he doesn't. He does all that again. Let's hope he sounds just like he did that night. Right. Tonight. What do you think are her sort of standards for a win tomorrow night? Like, how will she consider it a success? In terms of when we would do. I'm thinking back to like the 2020 debate and then in all my debate preps with President Biden when he was a candidate in his 2020 race.

It is about what is doing well, like winning because like winners or losers on the debate stage. But like, did you did you hit your marks is really kind of the metric that the debate prep team would like to use. Like, did you hit your marks? Did we did we say what we wanted to say about topic A, B, C and D? Did you get off your three one liners that you know that we know we wanted to deliver? Did you find the opportunities to turn to the camera and look directly into the camera? So you're speaking to the people at home.

Did you, how was your performance, right? Did you feel comfortable? Did you look like you were in command? Did you smile for President Biden and for Kamala Harris? Like these were things that were discussed. Like, did you look like you were enjoying talking about the issues? Did you come, did you project what we wanted to project? Those are the metrics that are laid out in a debate prep. And then if you hit the metrics, all,

Then people, you know, the advisors will come out and say the vice president did what she needed to do. We are very pleased with her performance. The media apparatus will say so-and-so won or so-and-so lost. But I mean, going back to the last debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I don't think it's safe to say that Donald Trump won the debate. Joe Biden did not hit his metrics.

and did really poorly in that debate. Donald Trump, though, did not hit the metrics. But because of the president's performance, Donald Trump's performance was kind of overshadowed, but he was still not coherent, said a number of just crazy things, was just throwing, literally just throwing things at the wall, and nothing was sticking, but nobody was watching that side. So did he win the last debate? I personally don't think so. He definitely outperformed the president,

But that is very different than saying someone won. So that is how we look at it from like a debate prep perspective, you know, from advisors. But this is just, this is going to be unlike something than ever before. And remember, right after this, people will start voting in this country. Within the next week, early vote starts in some key places. By the end of September, in Michigan especially, early vote starts in Michigan, 40 days out from election day. Peace.

people will be passing their ballots. Voter registrations have increased in key battleground states from Pennsylvania to Arizona to even places like Iowa under key demographics, younger voters, black women, Hispanic voters. These are folks, especially new registrants, they're going to be tuning in because they want to see. They'll probably also be looking for the clips the next morning because maybe the debate's a little early for folks on the West Coast, maybe a little late for some people on the East Coast.

All of these things are factors that the prep team and the vice president herself are likely thinking about in terms of their strategy. And then who's in the spin room afterwards to talk about and reinforce or clean up for the candidates?

Me and Sammy got our own spin room going on TikTok after the debate. So we'll be riding. The last thing I want to ask you about is, you know, Trump has debated a woman in the past. Of course, he debated Hillary Clinton. And one of the things he did that was super creepy, but he was younger at the time, was kind of stalk her about the stage. Remember, they allowed them to stalk about the stage. Now, he's already made a very unusual comment saying that Madam Vice President looks like Melania Trump. Do you think when he starts to feel the heat of that he can't keep up with her,

he will devolve into more of these misogynistic attacks or try to be like creepy with her. And how would she handle something like that? Donald Trump has been wildly consistent throughout his political career, uh,

I mean, literally ever since he smashed onto the political stage with his birtherism. Right. So his current attacks are actually not anything new. They have just evolved from the first time we saw him, especially when he came down that golden escalator, speaking very derogatorily and just very, very just vile comments about people from Mexico. Right. Right.

So given that, because he's been consistent, we know that when his back is against the wall, he tends to get a little nastier than usual. He's like grasping for straws. Right about now, I feel as though what I am seeing from former President Trump is a level of desperation I have not seen before. That's what the IVF policy is about that he threw out there. About like, oh, yeah, IVF for everyone. The government's going to pay for it.

Okay. Many questions. First of all, how are you paying for it? But two, what are those evangelicals who are supporting you in these states say about that? Three, that's not what the platform of the Republican Party apparatus says. Four, since when did you develop this position? Five, what about the justices, the overturned Roe versus Wade? Like, I could go on. So, but he's desperate, literally. Now he's talking about, oh yeah, we're going tariffs on China and that's going to pay for the childcare. Sir, this is not a Wendy's. What is going on with this analysis?

So we know that when his back is against the wall, he will do and say anything. So if he's feeling the heat, he's going to call what he calls everybody. Every woman that's ever questioned him, a nasty person, a vile person. So he's going to refer to the vice president as a nasty person. I would suggest if I was, you know, someone asked my opinion, which you all just did.

The nasty person, the she's not nice, that is where you laugh at him and you just dismiss him offhand. It's like he's very triggered by the laugh. Laugh in his face. Talk about how he is unserious. However, what he is planning to do to our country is very serious. And we should talk about that. That pivots and gets you back to the issues. Do not get mired down in a back and forth with him. But he might say on that debate stage, she hasn't told us that she's really black.

I was going to ask that next. Do you think he will get in a place where he goes, well, you're not black or something? That's where the facial expression, we can say a lot with the face without saying anything.

That's definitely going to get me. Nobody's in the studio, but the people, this is, again, part policy, part performance. How you perform includes not just what you say, but how your body language. And those are things, that's why you do debate prep. Debate prep is not just about policy. It's about how we are coming off, what we look like, what we sound like when we are saying it, what we don't say, but we say.

Do you think we'll see Kamala Harris in a high heel? And I ask this specifically because he insisted as one of the rules that there not be lifts and that there not be boxes people stand on. Now, the vice president's, I believe, five foot two and Donald Trump is about six foot two. I think he says he's six six or something. But is he looking for some sort of literal height advantage over the high heels?

I mean, he has gotten so petty and crazy. He's just looking for any kind of itty bitty way to make himself bigger than what he actually is as an attempt to intimidate her. Right. But I mean, the lady has taken on the cartels, honey. I just I feel like the cartels did intimidate Kamala Harris. Donald Trump and, you know, his podium stance isn't going to do it either.

Just imagine what's going through that madman's head, though, where he's like, she can't stand on a box or wear heels. Like, this man is quaking. I also think that's an outdated – I think he's basing that on, like, an outdated and irrelevant comparison where people have said, like, oh, the taller candidate wins. That's because all the candidates have been two men already.

with the exception of Hillary Clinton. And I don't think people are expecting her to be taller than him. So it's not going to like matter. I don't think. It's also television. They're going to level us out. Yeah.

Also, though, I mean, some of it is about TV production, right? Like, I, again, hopefully NBC gets a debate. I know they'd love one. We want to see more debates. Who doesn't want that? But ABC is going to have to produce this debate. If you look back at the CNN interview that Vice President Harris and Tim Walz did with Dana Bash, in the interview, Dana and the vice president are, they're shorter, smaller people. Governor Walsh is, you know, he's kind of like towering. He's sitting in the chair, but looks...

the look of the feng shui of the interview as a former comms and press person who has had the interviews I was looking at it like now what

what? We need some pillows. We need to reposition. We need to lower his chair, you know, things like that. So I could imagine that Donald Trump, because, you know, he is, he's a number of things, you know, someone who, who has a loose relationship with the truth, someone who would, you know, was willing to do any, say anything to get elected and someone who has a strong track record on producing television. And so he knows about the performance as well. And he wants to come off again, looking good,

bigger and better in his opinion, right? It will look bigger and better for him than juxtaposing it with her. But at the end of the day, I really do think the people will be watching for the interaction between the two of them because no one has ever had, the only time they've ever been in the same room was for a State of the Union when Donald Trump was president.

And the vice president was then a senator and she was sitting in the Capitol. So this face off between the two of them, will they shake hands or won't they? If I was advising, if someone asked me, I would say, don't shake his hand. Walk out and give a strong nod and turn to the cameras and wave to the cameras and look and go to your podium. Don't shake his hand. He does not deserve the dignity of respect. But maybe someone else has advised her differently. We're going to see on Tuesday.

I cannot wait. Even beyond the fact that they haven't been in the same room because he did not want to attend the peaceful transfer of power, I think it speaks to her ethics more broadly that she has not encountered him in any of the years that

She was pretty prominent in California and he was prominent both in New York and California at a time when, you know, they could have interacted. They could have had a reason to interact and that she steered clear of him to me is a testament to the circles.

that she keeps herself in. Well, remember how Donald Trump came to power, if you will, came to rise on the political stage. It was challenging the authenticity of the... It was birtherism. It was literally challenging the authenticity of the first Black president of the United States of America, President Obama, who is a friend of...

Then DA Kamala Harris, I mean, she literally campaigned for him in Iowa in 2008, spoke at the convention in 2012. And so, you know, my experience with her, you know, people are her people. And if it were me and somebody that's coming for my people, I don't think I'd be seeking you out either.

But Donald Trump did. He did donate to one of her races. And so, you know, maybe he saw something that, you know, he obviously thought that she had a bright political future. I don't think he ever thought that that check that he wrote, one of two checks that he wrote, was going to be cashed on a debate stage in 2024. But here we are. Well, this has been just such a wonderful analysis.

We'd love to hear, you know, any final thoughts, anything that's anything else that's on your mind. And please tell us about your Black Women in America special, when we can find it, where we can find it and what we can expect. Yes. Well, look, Melissa Murray and I, we travel across the country from the cities to the suburbs and everywhere in between to talk to Black women. This election is going to be decided in the margins.

In the suburbs of Pennsylvania, and oftentimes you talk about the suburbs and women in the suburbs, people automatically revert to code for white women. But the suburbs over the last 10 to 15 years have become more diverse, right?

Black women, Latino women, Asian American Pacific Islander women. And so we went to a suburb in Pennsylvania, Butler County, that is going to make the difference in this election to talk to Black women about what they are thinking. We talked to young Black women across the country about how they're feeling about the switch and what they want to see. And I think that

What people will glean from our special is you think you know black women's voting patterns, right? You think you know black women's ideology. You think you know what they're going to do when it comes to the ballot box. But you actually have no idea. Black women are, like all voters, are not monolithic. They are multifaceted. And they are laser focused on the issues in this election. And they understand viscerally the state.

We talked to Kerry Washington, obviously, after she closed out the DNC, the Democratic National Convention, on that last night as a host. We spoke to her about a week and a half after that. And she's someone who's known the vice president for a very long time. But we talked to her about voter outreach and engagement. And she talked to... She told us about how the people, the voters are the Olivia Popes of their own lives. And the Black women voters across the country seem to be saying to...

the Democrats especially, but even there are some Republicans saying, earn me. And there's a famous line from Scandal for all the Scandal watchers out there. So you can tune in September 29th at 9 p.m. Eastern on MSNBC for our special Black Women in America, The Road to 2024. And then it will be streaming on Peacock the next Thursday.

day. And I just think that's a great place to end because again, the margins are really important. The margins could be won or lost, not just on a random policy paper, but what the candidates are telling people that they are going to do. And as people are now paying closer attention to this election, because they are about to start casting their ballots.

This debate is actually very, very important. So it's performance and it's policy. And we'll be watching to see how it shakes out. I can't wait. I'm excited. Peacock has some good programming, folks. So definitely check out Simone's program. They got a lot of good stuff right now. They're my streamer of favor at the moment. They're doing great stuff. We appreciate your time and your service.

Miss Sanders Townsend, it was a pleasure to have you. Thank you for making the time for us on your very, very busy schedule. We'll be tuned in to the debate tonight. Sammy and I will be in our own little spin room to give you our recap. And of course, wishing Madam Vice President well tonight. It's definitely must-see TV, for sure. This is something to watch, and folks can watch it on MSNBC. And we'll have analysis after the debate. So after they hit your spin room, they need to come on back to MSNBC and see what we're talking about. Perfect. Sounds great. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys.

American Fever Dream is produced and edited by Samantha Gatzik. Social media by Candice Monega and Bridget Schwartz. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Betches News and follow me, Sammy Sage at Sammy and me at Under the Desk News. And of course, send us your emails to AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com.