11/7/24: Biden World Blame Game, Bernie Shreds Dems For Abandoning Working Class
33:03 Share

Hey guys, Ready or Not 2024 is here and we here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show.

So, of course, the recriminations have begun within the Democratic Party, where they are desperately trying not to learn any of the actually correct lessons about what led to their failures. However, we wanted to go through some of the finger-pointing that is going on here. Let's put this up on the screen. Apparently, you got a bunch of folks out there who are mad at George Clooney.

for being part of the charge to push Biden out of the race. We can put this element up on the screen, guys. The Daily Beast wrote this up. Apparently, George Clooney facing a backlash from demoralized Democrats for demanding that Joe Biden quit the presidential race. And I do want to say I got the election wrong, but I did predict that there would be some subset of Democrats who were like, you know, geez, if we had just stuck with Joe Biden

then we would have won. If they stuck with Joe Biden, they would have lost New Mexico and they would have lost the popular vote by like 10 million votes, not the current 5 million votes that they're currently on. It would have been like a 400 state blowout instead of a 312, or sorry, 400 electoral blowout instead of 312 electoral votes. The whole thing is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And you know, the other thing, because I was

thinking about this. I was like, okay, so let's think about the alternative universe where, you know, Joe Biden just stays in. And in a sense, it would have been like less painful for people because they would have just expected to lose. But I think they also then would not have, they would have just blamed the loss just on Joe Biden's age. Right. That's right. And it would not have been evident that like, no, there's a deeper fundamental underlying issue here that if you all don't reckon with, you are just going to continue to lose from here on out.

So you all should still be thanking George Clooney et al. for helping to persuade the party to move Joe Biden out of the race, even though where they...

The original sin is, of course, well, they're not the original sin, but in this particular cycle was just deciding not to have a Democratic primary at all. Like the terror of democracy is what ultimately leads to this place. And, you know, I fully believe if they had actually had a Democratic primary, I think Kamala would have been in it. I think Gavin Newsom would have been in it. I think other people would have jumped in. Gretchen Wimmer, who knows, Pete Buttigieg and others.

Maybe, I think it's possible that Kamala comes out of that primary process because just as being the vice president, you have a lot of advantages. I don't think that would have happened, but I think it's possible. But even if that was the case, she would have had more democratic legitimacy. She would have been more tested. She would have had to improve her skills in adversarial situations.

And she would have had an entire primary process to lay out why she would be different from Joe Biden. And so, you know, I think Biden is in part to blame, of course, for not sticking by his pledge to be a one-term president or at least leading people to believe that he would be a one-term president. But also all the Democratic Party elites who circled the wagons and protected this guy from having to face any sort of an adversarial process like you

You need to realize that you all screwed yourselves with that. That was a devastating error on your part. It's so obvious. And what's actually even crazier is the level of pull that these Biden people still have, despite their illegitimacy. Can we put the next tweet up there on the screen, please? The Obama staffers blaming Biden. So David Plouffe actually tweeted.

about how they were starting from behind and how they've had like an insurmountable problem. And, you know, Jackie Heinrich, she tweets here, she shows that Obama staffers are trying to plan the blame on Biden for Harris's loss. Biden world said that Plouffe was sanctimonious asshole. He says, I find this so unproductive. Joe Biden is the president of the United States and won without you. He successfully beat Donald Trump, something he never did.

But here's the thing. David Plouffe has now literally, Crystal, deleted his account. I was just looking that up. He was forced to delete his entire account from Twitter because of the pylon from all of the Biden war. So it shows you that acknowledging reality even today after this devastating loss by the Democratic Party is still...

still not possible in Biden's Washington. And that actually gives me less faith than ever that they will ever do anything about it because it's clear now like the internal cult behavior and the self-reinforcing mechanisms are just too damn strong.

Even when they forced Biden out, it was he's the greatest president ever. Of course. Selfless, God fearing, great. Jesus Christ. Moral. Yeah. You know, all this. And thank you for going away. But it's like, you know, no, Ben, you are hands down. I'm going to say this of the modern era. Other than George W. Bush, I think he's the worst. Right. I mean, I don't think he can come away from it. I'm not talking about just policy level. Like, look at what he did. Like in terms of.

his stated goals. His stated goal was never to really do anything for the country. It was just, I will save you from Donald Trump. It was to end the Trump era. Yeah, that was his, that's it. And I've talked about this a million times. The very first model I ever did for rising was about Joe Biden and how

All he ever talked about was defeating Donald Trump and how he never presented any faith, which is kind of crazy in retrospect. And now to sit here on the other side of his now humiliation and now this loss in the popular vote to Donald Trump, you are an unambiguous failure. Like, honestly, Jimmy Carter was more of a successful president than you were, dude. And a better person.

Yeah, not only a better person, but literally a better president in terms of what he was able to do. And even in terms of his loss, like you could at least say, like Jimmy won a primary. He also ran on, quote unquote, like healing us from the Watergate agent. He was actually primarily successful in that. You know, in terms of Biden, like the one,

thing that he set out to do, he failed at dramatically, historically, not to mention all the policy stuff that also went wrong under him. And the one area where we rely on the president of the United States for judgment, he failed on that too, where he's old and people who have real faith, like we know, you know, everybody knows old people. Uh, and many of them had great

Humility, and we're just like, there's no way that I could be present. There is not possible for me. I need to know that sometimes it's, you know, my time in the sun is up, and that's okay. And his narcissism around his family, around himself,

led to the place of where we are. And so really, not since George W. Bush have we suffered so deeply as a country because of one man's narcissism, and also not since George W. Bush has one man's narcissism and frankly, idiocy has doomed his national party to such a historic failure. I think that is all correct. I just, I would assign equal amount of blame though, to the Democratic Party elites who are around him, who protected him from it.

as well because listen, he's a president, you know, and he's been seeking the presidency for his entire life. No one should be surprised that he's such a narcissist that he's not going to let go of the breast ring. Like that's incredibly predictable.

And so you had to have people around him who were willing to, you know, go against the party and facilitate a democratic process. And we can put the next element up on the screen from Politico, because even though Plouffe was apparently forced to delete his Twitter account for, you know, barely, barely criticizing Joe Biden. What do you mean, see Biden's Twitter?

Behind the scenes, this is kind of, this is the conversation that is playing out in Democratic elite circles. So this is Politico. They got this guy, Jim Manley, a top aide to former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to go on the record. He said he shouldn't have run. This is no time to pull punches or be concerned about anyone's feelings. He and his staff have done an enormous,

amount of damage to this country. And, you know, they had a bunch of other quotes, most of them anonymous from other party officials, consultants, et cetera, who were saying very similar things because, you know, it's very obvious at this point. But, yeah, it's easy to it's easy in retrospect for them to point fingers. But these are some of the very same people who were in a position to know the level of his decline. And instead of, you know,

enabling a democratic process by which democratic base could choose who they wanted to be their standard bearer this time around. Instead, they circled the wagons and, you know, there you go. Here we are. And there's no guarantees that another nominee with more time

could have succeeded, but they wouldn't have been in a much, much better position if they had gone in that direction. Absolutely. Yeah. And just with all of this, it's just so transparent. Their attempts to rewrite history are going to be, you know, legend for when Biden eventually Fs off to Delaware and to the beach, he'll write his memoirs and they'll be just as ridiculous and hagiographic as Barack Obama's were. But

The attempts, I think, and I also wonder whether there may be too much blood on everybody's hands because it's not just Biden. It's a lot of people in Congress. So maybe there's this memory hole of the entire thing. Like, yeah, it was a crazy thing. Donald Trump. We got to move on. You know, that's one of the favorite pastimes of theirs is we have to move on. Remember how mean they were to Dean Phillips? Oh, my God.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I actually, you know. You guys all owe him an apology. I still kind of stand by this. At the time when Biden dropped out, I was like, you know, Dean, he's kind of like Obama. Because what people don't really remember, a lot of the key Obama lore is that Obama, when he was a nobody, literally nobody even gave a shit what he had to say. I think he was a state senator, and there was one guy with a freaking video camera, so thankfully for Obama. Obama gave a speech against the Iraq war, and that was unbelievable.

massively influential for all of the young people who caucused for him in Iowa and for a lot of the early online energy around his campaign. And so Dean, I mean, we have to give the man credit. Like he was the first of all of them, the sitting, like actually a sitting member of Congress who bet the farm and he's like, Biden's too old. We got to move on. And he tried. So to be honest, I think Dean, like he's got a case.

for I was right and all of you were wrong. And like I said, to the Democratic mind, the elite mind in particular, like the voters, the base, the MSNBC, the one credit you do have to give them is they do want to win. They love they hate losing what they actually care about is winning. And so if we correctly can diagnose this as a major Biden problem, I think Dean has a very, very bright future ahead of him. I do. We'll see. I don't know. Yeah.

I don't know. Because there's also short memories, you know, the Democratic coalition and lots of contenders for the, you know, the happiest people right now in Washington are obviously the Republicans. And then the list of 2028 would be contenders, you know. But not any of the women because Democrats are never going to nominate a woman again. So.

So sorry, Gretchen Whitmer. Sorry. You should have taken your shot this time, sister. Big Gretch. Yeah, yeah. Honestly, though. You should have taken your shot. There's lessons in this. Gavin Newsom should have taken your shot. There are lessons in this world for politicians. Timidity never gets rewarded. Chris Christie absolutely could have been president in 2012. I have no question in my mind. I think he could have won.

and could have beat Barack Obama. He decided to stay in. He was like, oh, I'll try in 2016. Bridgegate happens and he gets his ass blown out by Donald Trump. Humiliated and now on ABC. He missed his shot. Gretchen Whitmer, you had a chance. If she was like Joe Biden or Kamala, I'll see you at the convention. I think she would have

I really do. Not the presidency per se. Maybe she would have lost. I don't know. I can't say any of that, you know, after the results. But they would have had a shot. And for Gretchen, like your time, it will never come again. You're done. You know, this whole TikTok female thing, like good luck because the retcon on this is we need the bros back. And a white dude is the light. Yeah, I think your call is correct. The first female president will be a Republican, like a conservative. Yeah, I put my money on somebody like Sarah Sanders.

somebody like that. Could be. I mean, I just, I do think like the problem for democratic women is that you have to overcome this stuff like, oh, they're weak. They're not strong enough, blah, blah, blah. They're too liberal. You know, that's like the image. And so, yeah, I think it's, it will be easier for a Republican woman ultimately to get elected. But, you know, like I said, I think even they won't say this publicly. They'll say the thing about like, oh, the country is too sexist to elect a woman. But privately, the lesson that will be taken is we just can't nominate a

woman ever again. So any, you know, Gretchen Whitmer obviously is the biggest loser on that front. But I also think, I think Gavin Newsom really missed, he was super hot right now. And, you know, the fact that he's from California is going to be a problem for him. The fact he's not going to be in office anymore is going to be a problem for him. Like, I think he missed his shot as well. So there's, but we'll see. We'll see how it all pans out and what the shape of the world is by then. Because if there's one thing we've learned, many things...

can change. Absolutely. All right, let's go ahead and get to David Sirota from Lever News to get his reaction to Bernie Sanders' letter and his assessment of what went wrong for Democrats this week. Lucky to be joined this morning by the always insightful David Sirota of Lever News. Great to see you, my friend. Good to see you, man. Good to see you, too. So in your view, what the hell happened this week? Well, I mean...

I mean, first of all, the Democrats got destroyed. I mean, let's just put that on the table. They got destroyed. It really wasn't close. I think that, look, I think they had a lot of structural challenges beyond just Joe Biden not running and the switch of the candidate late. I think the inflation situation redounded to the incumbent party. I mean, those are all baked in opportunities.

obstacles in this election. But I think the party clearly didn't take those obstacles nearly as seriously as they could have. And when you look at the class realignment in the election, I think what you see is the Democrats are perceived as an elite, culturally and economically elite party that is completely out of touch with where the country is and what the country wants.

And I think that that was shown by the results. And when you have a party that doesn't seem to be speaking

to the material day-to-day interests of the country and is instead its economic message is basically like everything is okay or everything is is look at what we've already done and not sort of channeling the grievance the the legitimate grievance of people in a dystopian economy uh then that's what's going to happen now I just want to add one thing when I say a dystopian economy look

I want to be clear that the macroeconomic numbers are decent and they could be a lot worse. It's the day-to-day lived reality under the macroeconomic numbers that I think is what we see in the discontent, whether it's inflation, whether it's health care, whether it's housing, essentially the ability to afford necessities.

And it's not like the Republicans are speaking so clearly to those problems either. But you can say this about the Republicans. They are naming villains. They are naming enemies. They are naming – they are diagnosing the problem. Maybe their diagnosis isn't exactly right.

The Democrats basically aren't really doing that as a party. And I'll just add one last thing about that. The thing that people liked about Bernie Sanders rallies is always funny when people – well, why do people like Bernie Sanders rallies in 2016, 2020?

My take on that was always that they like to hear at least one politician calling out villains, calling out perpetrators, calling out the specific essentially economic evildoers in the economy. And they like to just hear that. And that's not something the Democratic Party does. And that is something that Donald Trump and the Republicans do. And there are the election results to show you that that's what the public wants.

That is interesting. We have a letter from Bernie Sanders I want to get your reaction to. Let's put it up there. On the screen, he says openly, quote, "It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working class people, should find that the working class has abandoned them. Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn from any real lessons from this disastrous campaign?"

You were a veteran of the Bernie Sanders campaign, David, and we've talked a lot about, I think, over the years about what went wrong also inside the Sanders campaign and really inside of the Sanders movement itself to where it stands. But do you see any avenue and acceptance of this message amongst the Democratic Party today?

Here's what my fear is. First of all, I think Bernie is 100 percent right. I mean he's not saying anything he hasn't said before, and he's exactly right just as he has been. I think that the problem is or the fear is, is that the consultant class of the Democratic Party, the operative class of the Democratic Party, and frankly the pundits and the sort of affiliated Democratic media have an economic and financial incentive problem.

not to talk to the working class in the sense that the political class of the Democratic Party is tied to the donor class, to the corporate class. And so what I fear—

what Bernie Sanders is saying, which is correct. What I fear that it will be, how it will be interpreted is we have to move only culturally right. We have to go back to Bill Clinton, you know, school uniforms, like the whole cultural triangulation while continuing to push neoliberal economics. I mean, that was Bill Clinton's innovation, right? I mean, and I put that in quotes, but, you know, uh,

move culturally to the right while pushing neoliberal economics and that defines what so-called centrism is instead of What centrism was under the sort of the New Deal Democratic Party which was

to populist economics and sometimes you'd have people in different parts of the country, elected officials, who were culturally somewhat different from Democrats' liberal orthodoxy. That has completely flipped and I think the question is whether the consulting class,

the people who make decisions about what the party's brand is, whether they're too essentially tied to the corporate class and the donor class that are at the center of the problem. I guess I'll put it more briefly, which is to say if you're trying to both speak to working class voters—

and appease and enrich and satisfy the donor class, you're going to either sound incoherent or you're only going to talk about a narrow set of issues that doesn't really tap into the real economic grievances of the working class because you're too busy trying to appease the donor class that's creating those economic problems.

So the pushback that I've gotten within my own household to my analysis, which is similar to yours, similar to Bernie's, that like y'all screwed up when you killed the Bernie Sanders, you know, evolution in the cradle. Like when you spent the last 10 years as your primary political focus being to crush any semblance of a left populist class first movement, like

Like, that's where you're really screwed up, and that's been ongoing for years and years. Now, the pushback I get is, okay, but look at the Biden administration. Like—

Great on antitrust. Great on labor. Bernie Sanders was influential. Ron Klain, Bernie Sanders, you know, you had the whole build back better effort. They did do some stuff. Kamala ran on price gouging. She wasn't the focus of her paid media, like her earned media campaign, but the paid media was overwhelmingly sort of like class war-ish.

And one of the things that I've used to rebut this notion is something I've been talking about for a while, that, you know, while the antitrust and the labor stuff is really important sort of medium to long term, the real story of the Biden administration is the cutting of the social safety net that was erected under COVID.

And there was a chart. We can put this up on the screen, guys. This Biden admin shifted from Build Back Better to austerity chart that shows, you know, yeah, in the beginning parts of the administration, look at what all the fight was about. It was about a lot of the sort of Bernie Sanders ish elements of, you know, a social safety net embodied by Build Back Better. And then they shifted in 2022 to just talking about austerity, effectively national debt deficit daily mentions.

The other piece though, I think is really critical what you were naming, which is that it's one thing to have as Kamala did like a list of economic policies that are good, that are genuinely good, were genuinely popular, et cetera. It's another thing to have a story.

and a narrative about what has gone wrong in the country, who the villains are, who the heroes are, how we're going to fix it, et cetera. And to me, that's really the core of what they're missing and what Bernie Sanders was very authentic and compelling and credible in identifying. Look, the Democratic Party does not like to name the villains because the Democratic Party is in a lot of ways- In bed with the villains. Yes.

like there's a hesitancy to specifically name the villains because the villains are in the house right right yeah that's right they're they're afraid of that i think

Your point about what the Biden administration did, I mean, there's two important points that relate to that, which is, one, there's a somewhat unique situation in the sense that Joe Biden's cognitive decline made it much harder for Joe Biden to sell the policies that Joe Biden was doing, sellable policies about Biden.

the economy. So I think, you know, one thing that's important to remember is that

Three quarters of the job of being president is not sitting in the situation room making decisions. It's actually selling your policies and telling a story about your policies. And the Democrats, the president, was simply not able to do that. So I think it's not a great test case to say, oh, well, you know, he put forward all these, he did these good things on the CFPB at the FTC Department of Labor, and the voters sort of rejected that. No, those policies basically weren't even sold.

They weren't even pitched to the public as part of a story, really, of what the White House was doing. The second point, though, is when the American Rescue Plan passed, that's when Biden's poll numbers were the highest, when there was a creation of a real social safety net, a real investment in the working class. And guess what? Biden was popular. The problem is, is that then it expired and people got cut off.

And so when people get something, realize like life can be a little bit better, that the government can actually do something, and then they wake up a year later and it's like, psych, we're just going to rip that away. Guess what? Lots of those people that might have swung over to you in the election, they're not going to be happy.

And I think that it's not to say that that's the reason this election happened, but it is to say all of these things kind of pile up. You don't sell your agenda because of the situation in the White House. You've torn away benefits that people liked having and realized they could have, but the government isn't providing that to them. The party's not naming villains. The other guy is naming villains and is promising some kind of change. So guess what? Here we are.

David, one thing I wanted to get your take on. I'm sure you'll love this. Can we put the Ezra Klein says that Bernie was right? Let's put this up there on the screen. There's been a lot of discussion here about Joe Rogan, by the way, which is very annoying because it's not about Rogan the man. Obviously, it's just about the like speculations.

What that represents. What that represents. He says, Rogan was symbolic of something bigger. There is an alienation that has grown between young men and much of the Democratic Party. For years, there has been no real way of talking about masculinity in liberal circles that didn't attach the word toxic before it. There has been a reveling in growing female strength and a deep critique of male culture. You can have any view you want on the merits, but it had its consequences wherever you think of walls. He's a vice presidential pick, and that's not part of the ticket that people vote for.

I'm just curious, you know, you lived through a lot of these fights and the Rogan one I remember quite well because it was a big schism, I think, online. I remember AOC coming out and denouncing Rogan after Bernie Sanders' appearance when obviously the whole case for him going on was, look, you know, I'm trying to win. I'm trying to reach as many people as possible. So what do you make of this now that the retrospective has proven obviously that correct strategy?

Well, look, I had hoped after the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2020, I had hoped that we were going to win. We didn't. I had hoped that Bernie Sanders would play a role and would become a figure analogous to Barry Goldwater in 1964.

as Barry Goldwater was to the Republican Party. Not to say that Bernie Sanders is Barry Goldwater like on policy, but the story of the Republican Party is essentially Barry Goldwater was the intellectual anchor, the ideological anchor of the Republican Party, a sort of guiding light. And from there came acolytes who later were able to win office, Ronald Reagan as an example.

So I had hoped that that's what would happen after 2020, and it really didn't happen because the dynamics inside the Democratic Party are fundamentally different than the Republican Party. The Republican Party has become more of a revolutionary party in the sense of there's turnover, there's an internal battle. The Democratic Party really has become much more top-down, really much more in some ways –

It's not exactly a cult, but sort of a machine that isn't really a forum for that discontent to birth something new. And so what happened is that Bernie Sanders was essentially laughed at, scoffed at, mocked by the media elites that are aligned with the Democratic Party, by sort of the Democratic noise machine. He was brushed to the side. Maybe he's kind of a, you know, pacifist.

I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party. I'm not sure that Bernie is going to be the leader of the party.

I don't know what it will like if it didn't happen before. Why is it going to happen now? Yeah, but maybe look, maybe maybe getting your ass kicked so badly like they did this week. Maybe that will shake something, shake out something. I don't know. I

I think it's worth interrogating, though, why the Republican Party was able to be overthrown by the Trumpist movement and why the Democratic Party was totally unwilling and moved heaven and earth and used tactics both legitimate and illegitimate to make sure that they stamped out the Bernie Sanders movement.

And it's because fundamentally, you know, the Trump movement is friendly to capital, you know, at least any sort of like CEO who's willing to be loyal and friendly and not speak ill of him. Like he gave them a giant tax cut. They, you know, they were happy with the stock market performance. They're happy to go back to that. They hate the Biden administration and their attack on, you know, their move towards trust busting and embrace of labor, et cetera. You know, Trump, he did all the like union busting and tax cut giving and whatever. So, you know,

So when it came down to it, even though a lot of Wall Street and CEO types, like they didn't like this sort of chaos, they didn't like his vulgarity, but he didn't really threaten their class interests.

Whereas on the Democratic Party, you have a lot of, you know, similar wealthy, the Mark Cubans of the Democratic Party and, you know, those sorts of people whose class interests were actively threatened by the Bernie Sanders movement. And so it created a much more intense backlash and ultimately a much more effective war on that, you know, on that movement and democracy.

None of that has changed. Like that landscape is still there. It's not gone away. So that's why I'm, you know, I'm not hopeful that it'll be different this time around. Right. And the politicians and the political actors inside the Democratic Party ultimately rely on that donor class for the resources to buy second beach houses and mansions and everything.

I'm joking, sort of. You're not joking. That's real. It's also true. And for super PACs and for ad spending, right? So there is a financial iron triangle there inside the Democratic Party that is structurally aligned against Bernie Sanders and a class-based politics. And I

We're about to see whether that iron triangle can withstand even a shellacking like that happened, an electoral shellacking that so obviously proves the Democrats have a massive political problem. So the last thing I just had to get to your quick reaction to is David Brooks is even now like, huh, maybe that Bernie Sanders was on. Can we put this element up on the screen? Because this is just incredible. He wrote this in the pages of The New York Times article.

Maybe the Democrats have to embrace a Bernie Sanders style disruption, something that will make people like me feel uncomfortable. And it's like, I'll just let you react to it, because I know when I first shared this with you, you were you had to go and look it up to make sure that this is actually real because it's so real.

It's so unbelievable from this particular individual. - I mean, I toggle when I see stuff like this. I toggle between, I'm so glad this is such a wonderful realization for you. You're such a genius. How did you arrive at this brilliant revelation that all of us for the last 30 years have been saying? I mean, I have gray hair on my head

And I look 10 years older than I am because I've been saying this kind of thing for 30 years only to be laughed at and scoffed at and vilified and ostracized by the same kind of people as David Brooks essentially, right? So I toggle between sort of eye-rolling but also – also listen.

Better late than never, right? Like, hey, you're late to the game. You're 30 years late. It's fine. That's what the New York Times does. They show up to a story 30 years late and pretend it's a great revelation. OK, that's their business model. But like, hey, welcome, right? Like if everyone's realizing this now, you know, there's still a future here that we have to fight for. So better late than never. Yeah, of course. You know, if there were on the

off chance that there was a Sanders-esque movement that arose from the ashes, David Brooks would be first in line to crush it and stamp it out once again. 100%. David, always great to see you. Always love your insights. Tell people where to support Lever News, which you guys definitely should be doing. One of the most important, I think, independent media outlets that is truly out there with the investigative reporting that you all do, which is pretty

pretty unmatched across independent media. You guys have now dropped site news, both doing a fantastic job.

Thank you. Everyone can go to levernews.com and become a subscriber. I would really appreciate that. And I should say, if you want to know how we got to this moment, especially the moment of big money politics, go subscribe in your app to Master Plan. It's our podcast. It's about the 50-year history to legalize big money politics. Highly recommend. Yeah, highly recommend. It's truly essential listening to understand how we got to this particular political moment. So once again, great to see you, David. Good to see you, man. Thanks to both of you. Appreciate it. Our pleasure.

Thank you guys so much for watching. It's been a really fun week to cover and experience this with all of you. I know for you. It's fun even when you lose, you know, come on. You got to be a good sport. It's all right. Yeah. I'm not going to lie about my emotional state. The best is yet to come. Crystal. That's what Kimberly Guilfoyle told us. And she was right. The best is yet to come for breaking points, at least. So thank you, guys. We love you. And if anything breaks over the weekend, we'll see you. Otherwise, we'll see you on Monday.