Despite the right’s complaints, there really isn’t a liberal media, why not?

Flux Podcasts (Formerly Theory of Change)

Episode Summary

After she became the Democratic Party's standard bearer, Kamala Harris didn't make sweeping changes to the campaign infrastructure that she inherited from Joe Biden. But there is one critical difference between the two campaigns, and that is that Harris’s team, and possibly the candidate herself, seems to have realized that the mainstream media is not her ally, and that news organizations that refuse to state the obvious truth that Donald Trump is a moronic authoritarian who has stage managed to By people who hate American democracy, are themselves not interested in protecting the country from him.

The lesson that Harris appears to have learned has been one that Democrats should have learned decades ago. The Republican party is not interested in serving the public, and its policies are about enriching the billionaire oligarchs who control its policymaking apparatus.

But there is one group on the political left that learned this lesson a long time ago, the podcasters and writers who came on the scene in the mid 2000s as the liberal blogosphere. And my guest on today’s episode, who goes by the pseudonym Driftglass, was one of the earliest liberal bloggers and is the co-host of the Professional Left Podcast.

I personally was there in the beginning of right wing blogging as well, so I thought it would be fun for us to compare notes about how things went back then and how both the left and the right have responded to blogging since that time.

The video of this discussion is available. The transcript of audio is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:04 — The rise of political blogging

07:39 — The legacy media's resistance to change

10:36 — When it came to blogs and new voices, the American right was much less conservative than Democrats were

15:54 — The "both sides" do it framework benefits the status quo in media and among Democrats

32:25 — How the migration of ousted Republicans into the Democratic party made it more conservative

34:33 — Democrats' struggle with messaging

37:25 — Challenges in enacting progressive policies

40:26 — Has Kamala Harris learned from past Democratic mistakes?

42:03 — The importance of liberal media infrastructure

45:44 — Why policy is not as important as political junkies often think

54:28 — Russian influence in right-wing media

01:02:46 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

SHEFFIELD: So both you and I started in the blog world in its very earliest days, and it still exists now, and but things are different in terms of how the left and the right. And so in my case, I started in 2000 running RatherBiased.com criticizing Dan Rather as a right wing blogger.

And after that happened, after he basically refused to acknowledge that his documents that he used were fake and everyone knew they were fake. And it was obvious he lost his career at CBS because of that. And everybody on the right, I think, eventually realized, Oh, wow, there's a lot we can do with this stuff. Right wing organizations. And I had an entire pretty big business built off of helping them do that.

Whereas on the [00:04:00] left, that is not how things kind of worked with the blogosphere. And you were there, so—

DRIFTGLASS: I was. I was, not there at the creation. I was, there at day six of the creation, not day one of the creation. So I was a newbie, and I, still think of myself as a, junior varsity blogger, even though all the varsity members have gone on to greater and better things. Yeah, no I got involved in blogging.

My wife started blogging in 2004 because 2004 was, the D-Day. For most of us, it was the, oh my God, George Bush just got reelected. How the hell did this happen? And I started commenting in 2004 and then eventually. I, was a regular over at Steve Jilliard's blog, who was the first front page blogger that Daily Kos ever started featuring on Daily Kos.

So he left to do his thing, I visited his place, he basically told me, you have to get out of the comments section, I'm sick of pulling your stuff up and posting it, go get your own goddamn blog, and we'll link to you. So I did that. And that's how we got started. And it was it were heady days, because it really, for a while, looked like We were gonna bend the curve on the legacy media because there was like Ned Lamont. Ned Lamont was the blogosphere candidate that beat Joe Lieberman in a democratic primary. And that looked like, holy crap. The, first Netroots Nation I went to was the one just prior to the 2008 election. And every democratic candidate save one was there. I'm courting the bloggers and there were 200 something international press in attendance and so forth.

So it looked petty. It looked like this was the direction we were going because the media was so clearly broken and so clearly unable to cope with what was happening during the Bush administration and the collapse of the economy. And, Katrina comes along and the only people talking in plain, simple blunt [00:06:00] language with details, some of whom were really excellent writers were the bloggers.

So. But the reaction to Ned Lamont winning the democratic primary against Joe Lieberman was a hysterical column in the New York times by David Brooks calling us the Tom delays of the left. And we were just the Sunni and the Shia. It was Tom delay, corrupt monster on the right and the net roots on the left.

And we were a threat. And I have up on my tab up here somewhere, just because I was doing research today earlier, he was on the hardball show. With Chris Matthews talking about how, yeah, you have the crazies on the right and you have the Netroots crazies on the left. And the Netroots crazies are crazier. And they're all laughing and joking about how nuts the liberals are for saying things that turned out two years later to be absolutely true. And the thing that, that shocked us the most was all of the people who were the, shut those people down, shut them up. They're crazy, they're crackpots, they're nuts. All those people still have their jobs and nothing ever happened to them. There was no market correction. There was no, gee, we really screwed up the Iraq war badly, we're we're sorry. I caught Mr. Brooks's act. I think I mentioned this the last time we talked at the Hammerschmidt Auditorium in Evanston or Elmhurst, Illinois in 2010 and a nice lady in the audience stood up and asked him about all the terrible columns he'd written about liberals and how monstrous we were and how he bashed us and he just stood up there in the pulpit and said, never said that. never, don't remember ever saying anything like that. And he just went gliding around on paths. And he is still the premier conservative writer at the New York effing times.

The legacy media's resistance to change

DRIFTGLASS: So the thing we underestimated was how hard the legacy media would work to protect itself from reform and how much effort they would put into legitimizing the right, because it was very important once you lost the, left are all crazy. Doctrine, you had to find a new one [00:08:00] because clearly the George Bush administration was a catastrophe. There's no getting around that. So what's the next move? Well, the next movie as well, both sides are crazy. Both sides are bad. And it became this fetish, which became the state religion of the legacy media. And they're still doing it to this very day. You can watch the New York times, barbering what Donald Trump says, this incoherent gibberish coming out of his mouth, that if you were there, you'd go, the guy's a lunatic. But if you read it in the times, it's like, well, he has a policy proposal for childcare. And so there's this straight line where we just underestimated how tenaciously the legacy media would dig in and just refuse to reform itself. And that's where it all sort of fell apart. That's where it broke into pieces because that's what we, well, we lost, it did remind me a little bit of the hippie movement in the sixties, which I did not go through.

But once. It turned out that, like, they were willing to shoot people on campus. And the Chicago cops were willing to crack heads in the streets. And they weren't going to reform, and they weren't going to change. And the Pentagon was not going to be lifted up by love. The movement fell apart. Because there was no plan B. And, so a lot of legacy bloggers are still out there. But, we're still doing what we were doing. But we're watching this circle come all the way around. Which is kind of interesting and exciting and depressing all at once. We'll

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, we'll I definitely want to talk about, the present moment later on. one factor also I think that happened was the rise to prominence and power of Howard Dean. But then after he. Got out as the DNC chair. I think that also probably was a impact guys as well.

DRIFTGLASS: It absolutely was. he, screamed that one time that his candidacy was over and although there, there—

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but his DNC can candidacy was after that

DRIFTGLASS: Oh yeah.

SHEFFIELD: He still had some juice after that.

DRIFTGLASS: There was a lot of a lot of hope for the OFA Obama for America, Obama for America. [00:10:00] that transition would take place and there'd be this sort of infrastructure for And that just sort of, fizzled out and went away as accommodations were trying to be made.

And I, think I have lots of thoughts about Barack Obama. He announced his presidency about two miles from where I'm sitting or his, run for office in here in Springfield and I supported him twice, but God damn, that guy just never learned. He just, he kept trying to pretend the Republican party was something other than it really was. And it cost him dearly because he wasn't ready for what they were going to do to him. And he. Was on his back foot almost from day one.

When it came to blogs and new voices, the American right was much less conservative than Democrats were

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he was. And then beyond the sort of the party apparatus, It is interesting to look at the way that the, let's say, the larger media organizations exist on the left and the right, after blogging

was, became a thing that pretty much now if you go to any right wing website that's of any size, their articles are basically blogs.

DRIFTGLASS: Oh, yeah. Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: that's, what they are. Whereas number one, there isn't hardly any actual left wing media. And, committedly. I mean, like there's just as an example. So like, you've got the daily wire, you've got daily caller, you've got a heritage foundation, daily signal, you've got of course, Fox news has a bunch of different properties.

And then you've got all these other,

DRIFTGLASS: Free beacon.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, the free weekend, another one. And but then all these video platforms as well, like real America's voice, Newsmax they've just started another one called the first and then of course you've got the, Christian nationalists over at Salem Media with their town hall and red state and twitchy and hot air.

And it is, and then by comparison, there's what? Talking points memo Mother Jones.

DRIFTGLASS: [00:12:00] Well, I got a plug crooks and liars because my wife is an editor for crooks and liars And they had the distinction

of being the first video place on the web before anybody had embeddable video They were doing video. So

SHEFFIELD: before YouTube, yeah. Yeah, and what's different though is that all these places that I mentioned, or Washington Monthly was another early blogging site, is that all of these were independently financed. And, to the extent that there were other things that were maybe somewhat lefty sensibility, they were corporate owned.

So Daily Beast or Vanity Fair, um, things like that, that, their, goal isn't to be progressive. Their goal is to um, and that's, like that there's a paradox because I think that the left media ecosystem is more capitalistic and more dog eat dog than the right wing media ecosystem, which operates, hugely outside of, and I can say this, having, been inside the right wing ecosystem.

I was there, like, these guys are not capitalists. Like, your average right wing commentator, like Ben Shapiro or any of these other They don't know anything about history, they don't know anything about policy, they don't know anything about campaigning. They don't really know much of anything about anything.

And, but, what they do is they repeat the talking

DRIFTGLASS: yes, they do.

SHEFFIELD: And that's enough, and that's enough for them. Whereas on the left I think that people who can, have the money on the left are like, They think that the general public just kind of will figure things out by themselves. They don't need to be exto behave everything broken down for them and drilled the message into it. They don't think that.

DRIFTGLASS: That is a common lament. I don't think that they talk to the public very much. The people who have money don't seem to understand. This was the the reaction to let's dump Joe Biden. There were a [00:14:00] lot of people on the left who got columns all of a sudden in the New York times, freaking out and just demanding that Joe Biden stepped down immediately. Aaron Sorkin got himself a column, and then George Clooney got himself a column, and they were just like hysterical. And I don't think they're coming from a bad place, but they weren't listening to the base who were like, he's our leader, he's the president, he will make up his mind, quit screaming, and calm the f**k down. And then it was, well, we should do a, like a speed dating thing or a convention thing. Like, no, it's Kamala Harris. That's the vice president. That's the person. And so there's all this,

SHEFFIELD: people actually voted

DRIFTGLASS: who people actually voted for and liked. And, the people who were, getting themselves in the paper or getting themselves op eds or getting themselves on television because they're celebrities or they're well known. I think Aaron Sorkin suggested that Mitt Romney be the vice presidential candidate or something like that. I mean, he was just, he was writing a West Wing, script in the New York Times. And we were laughing at him because the base didn't want any of that. And there's, there is this weird parallel between the two sides in that the Republican Party lost itself because it didn't know what the base was.

You get all these conservative elites now who are like never Trumpers and run the bulwark who all swear to God they never had any idea how bad the base really was. And we knew, we were telling you, we were telling you for 20 years, but they didn't want to hear it. They didn't want to listen. And there's still this fantasy that somewhere there's a pony that if we just keep digging through the crap, there'll be a diamond there somewhere.

There's a hidden Republican party way over there. And once Trump's gone, we'll recapture it. No.

SHEFFIELD: The fever will break.

I'm so sick of that

DRIFTGLASS: 10th year of the fever will be, and even before that, Barack Obama was talking this way during his presidency.

SHEFFIELD: He was,

DRIFTGLASS: And.

The "both sides" do it framework benefits the status quo in media and among Democrats

DRIFTGLASS: But he operates at their level of, they don't talk to the base. I mean, they [00:16:00] communicate with us and we have votes and we basically ground policy, but the right elites claim to never have understood their own base.

And Stuart Stevens is pretty honest about this when he says it was all a lie. All the stuff we said we believed in, turned out they didn't care about any of that stuff. The same is true in the less destructive way on the left. The people who were at the top and who were. Tastemakers and influencers had no idea the base didn't want to hear Screaming freakouts over Joe Biden and didn't want to hear let's get anybody in there, but Kamala Harris Let's find a way to sort of juice the system and we'll have a speed dating or whatever the hell it was And we'll have Oprah and Michelle Obama have a super fast convention And they weren't listening to the base because they don't understand us.

They don't come out in the middle of America and talk to actual voters. They don't know what we think. And I think there's this

disconnect where if I get my op ed in the New York Times I will have talked to the people I need to talk to. And the answer is no. We think the New York Times is a joke. And there, so there's no need to spend money on a liberal media because they think they already have a liberal media. Whereas on the right they

SHEFFIELD: absolutely. Yeah, no, you're, 100 percent right about that, and and, yeah, and they don't, they haven't understood that the mainstream media, while they are not, let's say, screaming reactionaries who want to burn the government to the

ground, they're not that, like, that's fair to say that they're not,

But, their business model is not to be a progressive advocacy organization.

That's not their point. That's not how they see themselves. And that isn't how they conduct themselves. And they never have

conducted

themselves. Like Republicans in my former world of the media bias, right wing media bias industry they, they, basically convinced, it's ironic, they convinced Democrats That the media was liberal

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah, they convinced, [00:18:00] and, there is something about and this is something that I've talked about with my wife, we've talked about with her dad on Zoom. We have a regular Zoom date where we play the New York Times crossword puzzle every Thursday and Sunday, and he's 80 something, sharp as it, as can be.

But he is, he in his generation. To be a well educated, well rounded person, a learned adult person, meant you, you took the New York Times. That was part of your personality. It was wired into who you were. You crack the New York Times open, and that's how you know what's going on in the world.

You watch PBS, you read the New York Times, you read the, what's on the book list. And the idea that the Times is just rotten, when it comes to opinions and things, is, like heartbreaking to these people. They don't want to hear it. And I mean, I don't know if you saw this comment or this column yesterday.

The Washington Post, A. G. Schulzberger. He had his column in the Washington Post yesterday. It was a very nice long column about the threats to free speech in India and Brazil and Turkey. And very well put. But there's a paragraph smack at the top going, But I'm not in the politics business. I'm not in the advocacy business.

And I think it's basically ridiculous to suggest that we're at any kind of risk. Like these countries are. So I'm not gonna, I'm not in that business. I don't advocate for stuff. It threatens my status as the steward of an independent media company. Like, dude. You are living in a dream world. You're living in the 70s.

You're living through your ancestors who ran that thing. And that's the problem, is because the, conception of what an independent media means, means both sides. Both sides are always the same. Journalism means both sides. And that, even people who've worked in the media Mark Jacobs, who was a editor at the Chicago Sun Times and Tribune, just is on TwitterX everyday screaming, Stop it. This is not, you're screwing up. Don't you understand what's going [00:20:00] on here? And they don't

understand. So they have their own religion and their religion dictates that if there are two candidates who are old and two candidates that seem a little bit infirm, it's okay to just bash the crap out of Joe Biden because age and infirmity are an issue. Joe Biden leaves the race suddenly. It's not an issue because I can't both sides anymore. So it's not an issue anymore. And if, Donald Trump spews a string of incoherent gibberish, we're going to write it up as a serious policy prescription and compare it to Kamala Harris policy prescription, because that's fair. And if Donald Trump just lies all the time, and Kamala Harris doesn't, we're just not going to talk about his lying. Because to do that would violate our dogma of it's always got to be both sides. Because if it's not both sides, if it's only one side, That means we've been wrong about everything since, let's see, 2004. A really long time. We've been screwing up for a really long time and we're absolutely not going to look in that mirror. So, that's what we're stuck with.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it's also that they've, they have this institutional bias to, to think that, well, I am above it all. I, am not a prisoner to partisanship. I, am, I'm, I'm beyond that. I'm my own thing. I exist in this savvy world of. I don't believe anyone. I'm just cynical.

And, it's like, they haven't understood that cynicism is ultimately the best attitude for reactionary fascism

DRIFTGLASS: totalitarians

love cynics. Because they just

give up.

And, I don't know if you, were you reading my blog today? Because I wrote a whole

thing about how fighting,

SHEFFIELD: actually but I'm glad you did.

DRIFTGLASS: Look, I,

SHEFFIELD: Great minds think

DRIFTGLASS: I got up early and I, wrote this thing that, A. G. Scholzberg is, I'm glad he finally admitted that he thinks that [00:22:00] fighting for democracy is beneath him. It's

just so dirty and grubby getting in there and fighting for democracy. We're above that. We're the New York Times. And we are eternal, presidents come and go. Governments come and go. Countries come and go. But the New York Times is eternal. Therefore, we don't need to worry ourselves about Which is the antithesis of democracy. Getting in touch with the actual human beings in the world. They sent, when it was Donald Trump, man, they sent caravans of people to the middle of the country to do what I called magic ruralism, which is find that Ohio diner, find that Trump voter, because we are blown away these people exist.

We never knew they existed. I mean, we haven't gotten past the Hudson in 40 years, so we didn't know any of this stuff. Cool. All right. Where are the vans? Coming up to my house, asking me as a midwestern guy living, ten, ten miles, five miles from a cornfield middle class, middle age, white guy, my opinion.

Why aren't you, why aren't you as, curious about democratic voters in the world as you were about republican voters in the world? And that's because, well, republican voters are interesting and alien to us, but we know all about democrats. Democrats are, the people we dine with, and the people we know, and the people we schmooze. And so, it's this complete lack of interest in the country you live in, and its state, because you, transcend all that. You are above all that. Which is, you know, and you know what? It comes, it goes before the fall.

SHEFFIELD: a haughty spirit.

DRIFTGLASS: yeah, exactly. So,

SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, yeah, it's and in the case of like those Cletus safaris as they are sometimes called there's there's nothing wrong ipso facto with doing

but as, as long as the other side is being done with it, but, and, of course they don't do that. And, but, and I will say, like, I think that the re, part of the reason that became a genre of journalism is that for, that, [00:24:00] the DC, New York, Acela Corridor,

Republicans, not just the, media, but like, None of them actually knew what the base

DRIFTGLASS: No,

they didn't.

SHEFFIELD: And so like, that's what part of what these Cletus safaris were about was to say, Oh, wait, these people, they actually do not have these dogmas about free trade and, cutting the department of education and all

this, stuff that, that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were all

about, in a tizzy about they never heard of it or, and they don't even like it if they have heard of it

and so.

It was like, to me, it was very shocking that this was basically people whose job for decades was to report on politics. This was them inadvertently saying, I don't know about what I've been telling

DRIFTGLASS: yes,

in, I've been telling

you about this in, I've been telling you about this in declarative sentences for decades, and I didn't know anything about anything, and what they reported back on was, I I wrote a thing, I don't know, a million years ago it seems like, and I likened it to, like, dime novels from the frontier days, these are, this is if you ever saw Unforgiven, the Duke of Death, And these are all these lurid fictions from out in the country, where wild Indians ride, there's buffalos, and there's, diners full of people with red hats.

And it was all this sort of high adventure fiction that was being paid for and subsidized and turned into a genre by media companies who were located in the greater metro sprawl of the East Coast. For the entertainment and titillation of their readers, because it was far away in a strange world. And, again, inadvertently, they sort of Confessed that they had no idea what was going on in this country, ever. And again, they never change their certainty. They simply broaden the dogma under which they operate. So again, under the Bush administration, it [00:26:00] was Liberals are cranks and crackpots and un American and terrorist loving, America hatin scum. And when the Bush administration fell apart, it's like, well, isn't it a shame that both sides are crazy? And they've, and that's been the through line for 20 years. And they're not changing anytime soon.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and with this whole genre, I mean the, it became not just about articles, it became a book

DRIFTGLASS: Oh

yeah, yes it, sure as hell did, yes. I wonder if Ron

Howard is having second, I wonder if Ron Howard

is having second thoughts now about, maybe I shouldn't have done that. Because that wasn't a great idea. but it was his entree. It was, he wrote his book, and his book was his entree into the, big world of venture capitalism. And that was, and he blew that, and that was his entree into politics. So, worked out great for him.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, the book it seems like this was a book that a lot of people bought, but no one read,

Because. If you actually did read it, which I have, it is no different in any way from standard issue Republican dogma. It's basically the thesis of the book, Hillbilly Elegy, is these people that I grew up around are lazy and they're shiftless.

Bums who won't work and that's why they're poor. So f**k them

They need to pull their pants up and go to work at walmart for three dollars an hour

That's

the thesis of the book.

DRIFTGLASS: And that's standard issue, Republican. Usually it involves skin color. But yeah, it's standard issue. Those people are lazy. And they're in bad circumstances because of bad morals. They're, if, they would just be better people, they would be less poor and disadvantaged. Here, pass out copies of Atlas Shrugged down at the local, read, I don't know, We The Living, or read, The Fountainhead.

That'll save ya. Yeah. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and there's an [00:28:00] irony also though is that I think a lot of Those attitudes did creep into the democratic party and this is something that I wrote about a little while ago about, with these, as the Republican party became successively more reactionary through waves, such as the Goldwater people, the Reagan people, the Pat Robertson people, the Tea Party people, like, and then now onto the Trump people, like as these waves of far right freakazoids kept flooding into the Republican party, some of them started saying, okay, well, I, can't take this anymore.

I'm going to go be a Democrat, but I'm not going to change anything that I believe.

DRIFTGLASS: Why would I do that?

It's not, I'm

not the problem. My belief structure's not the problem. Those people are the problem. And, okay, if that gets you through the night, but that's not my experience. My experience is the, you created a magnet by your ideology. I don't mean you, but Republicans created an ideology that became a magnet for people who were terrible and had terrible beliefs and believe terrible things.

And the more the party came to depend on pandering to those people. And they didn't do it directly. This was, Trump's genius. It used to be done, They used to job it out to someone else. It was someone else's job to go get the base fired up. It was Rick Wilson's job. it was Lee

Atwater's job. Bill Buckley. Yeah. Their job was to go out, Yeah.

and I mean there's a whole, multi billion dollar industry of getting the rubes to the polls, hating the right people at the right moment. Donald Trump just caught the middle man. He just started talking like Rush Limbaugh talked. And the base loved him, and he did the other thing that was terribly important to them. He absolved them of responsibility for George Bush. He said, you are not responsible for George Bush. George Bush lied you into a war. And he screwed up real bad. And there's his brother right there. You don't want to elect his brother, do you? It's just another goddamn Bush. And the base, at that moment, [00:30:00] became magnetized to him. Because what they were seeking the entire time the Tea Party was up and while they were freaking out about Barack Obama and so on and so forth was, we don't want to take responsibility for all the s**t we just did eight years ago. We don't want anyone reminding us of the Bush Cheney signs in our yard.

We don't want anybody telling us that, well, reminding us we were on the radio screaming about liberals being dirty America hating terrorist loving scum. We want someone to change

the dialogue.

Oh, the Iraq war was great.

Iraq War was great. It was

great.

SHEFFIELD: perfectly.

DRIFTGLASS: It was going perfectly and I've likened it to Germans, after the fall of Berlin, burning their uniforms. They didn't want to take responsibility. We were in Switzerland the whole time. We had nothing to do with that. So suddenly you have a brand new party called the Tea Party, who'd never heard of George Bush, and were independent constitutional conservatives, not Republicans. Why would you call me a Republican? And they were desperate for someone to come along and tell them they weren't responsible for their lives and the decisions they'd made. And liberals kept telling them that they were. End. Donald Trump said, you're not responsible for anything. In fact, you're the patriots, and they're the

awful people. You're you are

absolutely the victims.

yes, and you're the victims of those people over there. And, I know I've said this before, we tried an eight year lab experiment of not being offensive, and reaching with an open hand, and not being judgmental, and let's all get this together, and it was called the Obama administration. There's, no red states or blue states. There's purple states and there's a

mighty God.

SHEFFIELD: plan is, Mitt

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah. And, they had an eight year racist primal scream and then they elected Donald Trump. It's like, at that point, I'm like, don't you get it? That's the party. This is what they've chosen.

This is who they are. Quit trying to pretend they're not this way. And that's where most NeverTrumpers and I part company, because they really want to continue to believe that it wasn't their fault, that Or they had nothing to do with it, or it was just a fluke, or it's just a fever, or [00:32:00] sometime we'll be able to reclaim the party.

We'll be able to come back to the

SHEFFIELD: Or it's just Trump. It was

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah, it's just Trump One

bad apple and a couple of guys around him, and once he's gone, everything's fine. That's not true. And, after Trump, there's going to be a whole lot of toxic waste out there that someone's going to want to build a party out of. That's not going to look a damn thing like the Dwight Eisenhower Republican Party of the 1950s.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. No, not at all. But you know, so

How the migration of ousted Republicans into the Democratic party made it more conservative

SHEFFIELD: as that sort of migration of former Republicans into the Democratic Party happened, it did make the Democratic Party more conservative.

DRIFTGLASS: did.

SHEFFIELD: And, this wasn't, this is a thing that happened over decades. I mean, Hillary Clinton herself is a former Republican.

DRIFTGLASS: girl. She was a Goldwater girl, right?

SHEFFIELD: right. She was, yeah. And, there were other former Republicans who, you know, or if they weren't Republicans, they were the it's, I mean, it's odd that I don't hear people say enough how neoliberalism is basically just libertarian. That's what it is. And, and so, you They flooded into the Democratic Party and, made them not do what needed to be done.

And basically, the thing is though, there were enough of them that Democrats could get just slightly past the 50 yard

And instead of doing what they should have done, which is, Try to activate the, 70 million, 80 million, depending on the election, 70 to 100 million people, adults, who could vote, but don't.

And they never ask them, well, why don't you vote? And like, so, to the extent that they did, they would focus on voter registration problems.

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: the polling is in now, and people who don't They say it's easy to register, and they could if they wanted

DRIFTGLASS: Solving the wrong problem. Yep. Yep.

SHEFFIELD: They choose not

to,

DRIFTGLASS: now, why do They choose not to,

Now, why do they choose not to? That's a very interesting question.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and, there is multiple [00:34:00] reasons, but yeah, like, and in a lot of elections, the people, the, what they call the un, and I, have an entire episode on this called The Unlikely Voters, actually.

DRIFTGLASS: it. you're a podcaster. Plug that episode. Go right ahead.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there we go. But yeah, it's so, there, there's, yeah, there's polling done by David Paley Logos the pollster, and he, surveyed these people over the decades, and for many years, they've all, they've preferred the Democratic candidate.

and an unfairly elected White nominee for President. And so it's because well, it's in other words, if they were forced to choose someone, they would choose the Democrat.

Democrats' struggle with messaging

SHEFFIELD: And but they don't because, the Democrats either haven't talked to them or are not forcefully cause like, going back to the idea of, cynicism and complacency.

A lot of people really do think that both parties are the same in the media, of course, tell us but at the same time, Democrats also are not out there saying, Hey, we actually are different than those guys. And here's what we're going to do for you. They don't do that. Like they, they've been so focused on, just getting past the 50 yard line.

That's all we have to do. And, the thing is, you can't do that with this Trumpist fascism. They have to be crushed. They have to be crushed, and you have to, like, if you say that democracy is at stake, then you actually have to f*****g mean it and do something different

DRIFTGLASS: you

do.

SHEFFIELD: what you've been doing. And, for the longest time, they didn't change

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah. Well, I think there's a lot of psychology going on there. First is. You take big swings and if you miss, you end up with Donald Trump as dictator for life. So risk averse Democrats got burned, starting with Reagan. This was, we're losing, my God, we're losing.

We keep losing. There was an SNL sketch with Dana Carvey playing George H. W. Bush. And his opponent, it was a debate, going, [00:36:00] I can't believe I'm losing to this guy. How am I losing to this guy? Well, you, did lose. And so, they were desperate for some kind of formula to win the White House. Not to win the hearts and minds of the American people. And Clinton comes along and says, well, we have this DLC thing. We're going to triangulate everything. We're going to find a sister soldier and we're going to punch her. We're going to show people that we're centrist and that we can work with the other side of the aisle.

We're And a whole lot of activists I know just threw up their hands and said what the hell am I doing? I fought to get you elected so you could get back, for me, the necessary things I need to serve my population. And you're giving half of it away. Your, priority is kicking people off welfare anti gay legislation, and balancing the budget, all of which he did. So he should have been, he should be on Republican Mount Rushmore. He gave Republicans everything they asked for and they f*****g impeached him and you know over nonsense, so It took a long time. I think for Democrats to learn a hard lesson Which was not just you know, there's a progressive farm movement.

You could reactivate this country that goes back a hundred and fifty years There's, there are progressives under every rock out there. There are people who think, Medicare for all is a really good idea, and there's a lot of places out there in the world where it works pretty well. Or an equivalent.

Challenges in enacting progressive policies

DRIFTGLASS: And there's all these polls showing that basically progressive issues are popular with, somewhere between 55 and 75 percent of the population. A majority, a working majority. But the only,

SHEFFIELD: a lot of Republicans. Also,

DRIFTGLASS: yeah, but the only time Democrats have been able to enact those is with supermajorities.

Roosevelt and and Johnson. That's the only time they've been able to get through lots of progressive stuff that everybody likes, that everybody ended up liking, rather than, instead of the Vietnam War, which everybody hated. So, Johnson's burning in hell for that. But, the Great Society was, had a lot of good features to it. And, [00:38:00] The problem is now, is that I think a lot of people feel trapped in this cage of, well you need 60 votes in the Senate, we'll never get there. And we have this electoral college, and we have a Supreme Court that's locked down for 30 years. How do, where do we start? And I think you start with, you gotta have a liberal megaphone, big enough to reach into the heartland, to activate people, to do the work.

Because and those people have been told, for a generation, two generations, Matthew, this is a center right country. This is a center right country. I don't know if you've heard this, but we're a center right country. Everyone on the editorial board of the New York Times agrees this is a center right country.

And you know what? Both sides are basically the same. Both sides are the same. I don't know if you know this, but both sides are the same.

DRIFTGLASS: And the king of doing that, in 2016, is now an MSNBC employee. So, Matthew Dowd was the worst offender. The absolute worst offender during the 2015 2016 election. He actually He fought with me on Twitter, called my listeners stupid, called me.

I didn't like the facts because I told him this, every venue you're in, you're screaming that, Donald Trump is bad. Hillary's just as bad. Donald Trump is bad. Hillary's just as bad. And we have to break the corrupt duopoly. We have to, I'm voting third party. I'm voting independent.

And you're the ABC news director, man. And you're using your voice to tell people that there's not a dime's worth of difference between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And it turned out there was. And, what happened to Matthew Dowd? Well, he just went radio silent for a while. And then he appeared on MSNBC, going, You know the problem with the media? It's this whole both sides thing. Man, where did that ever start? Why are people doing that? That is so irresponsible of people. And I just, I go, you know what? The whole thing is screwed. We have a

saying on the left that MSNBC is not our friend. So the only closest thing we have to a liberal media is like an hour and a half a day in the evening and that's it. And sometimes it's not that great. So number one, I think is [00:40:00] where you started, which is there's a lot of independent operators on the left doing a lot of things. There's no liberal media. There's no liberal megaphone. And there's no way to reach those people and tell them any different in a massive way without that. And, I'm, doing my bit with my little tip jar on my blog, but I don't know, I got a lot of great ideas, but, so do a lot of people.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Has Kamala Harris learned from past Democratic mistakes?

SHEFFIELD: and, it is, it's interesting, though, that I do think that, it seems like that Kamala Harris campaign is, Has slowly been reorienting in the correct direction with this

and we can see that both with how because the interesting thing about comparing the campaign operations of Biden versus Harris

is it's mostly the same people, actually, it's almost entirely the same people, but there is one person who is missing and that is Anita Dunn. The communications chief, basically, for Biden. And just her absence has done a lot of

good, like, because essentially, there's all kinds of smart, creative funny, interesting people who are over there at Kamala HQ.

And Now they can do what they

DRIFTGLASS: They're fast, their response

is

SHEFFIELD: they're doing

DRIFTGLASS: The response. they do the, press releases. They release the videos. They release fast, fast, Funny, smart, incisive. You're like, oh, okay. This, you're acting like bloggers now. This is great This is, I recognize this voice. This is the, voice I hear in my head.

This is the voice that people out there that I read speak in. It's this quick, authoritative, bring the receipts. Take no prisoners. And move on to the next thing approach to politics that you know, you come at them with a sword in both hands And I don't know who said it's [00:42:00] all gas no brakes And that's terrific.

The importance of liberal media infrastructure

DRIFTGLASS: it's a breath of fresh air and the best thing she's doing as far as the because i'm speaking now for the entire liberal republic, democratic base, you know that right? I mean I speak with authority for 60 million americans That the smartest thing she's doing is telling the media to screw off You know, because everybody hates them.

Everybody thinks, because the minute they get a chance to ask questions, it's like, Did you hear what Donald Trump said about you? What do you think about what Donald Trump said about you? I think this is a waste of my time. And why don't you ask me about, I don't know, policy. Yeah, Donald Trump said this about policy, but he said it in a mean way.

What do you think about that? And she's like, that's it, you had your shot, and now we're done. And everyone else saw that and saw, Oh, I get it. You're not wasting our time or your time talking to people who are basically working for the high school gossip rag. And it's might have a big gray headline.

It might be very impressive on the outside, but that's all there. That's all they care about. Is that nonsense? It's like, yeah, that's the press corps right now. That's the Washington political press corps right now. So yes.

SHEFFIELD: Like So the interview that harris and tim walz did recently with cnn's dana

bash, which you're kind of referencing

there you know after it was over. She basically got Criticized by a lot of people on both the, the right wing was saying, Oh, you didn't go after her enough or whatever.

But

then people on the left were, saying, well, you just asked her nonsense.

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and she was like, Oh, well, both people are criticizing me. So I must've done something

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah. That's that's the Chuck Todd line. That is Chuck Todd's gold standard for I'm doing a good job is that both sides hate me. No. The right hates you because they have always hated you. And the left hates you because you don't do journalism. You're not interested in journalism.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. The right hates you because you're not a fascist.

So that doesn't mean you're doing a good job. And and, yeah, so, [00:44:00] so the Harris campaign has finally figured out that the media, the mainstream press has a different business

DRIFTGLASS: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: Than what they want. And. You don't need them.

You can do your own thing.

And that's something that Republicans figured out

decades Yes.

DRIFTGLASS: A hundred percent.

SHEFFIELD: ago. Now, of course, the next step. So, Republicans figured out two things that Democrats missed. One was that mainstream media isn't your friend. And then two is, you have to create your own media. They've done both of those things very

DRIFTGLASS: Third thing.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, you got a third

DRIFTGLASS: You gotta spend, you gotta spend money. you gotta be willing to dump billions of dollars into all of your operations, into this spider web of think tanks and websites and

media platforms and Newsmax and you have to spawn them and you have to get your bench trained. You gotta bring people up from the dregs all the time and spin them up and let them go and make sure they have money in their pocket.

And that's the one thing the Republicans are willing to do is, the, I used to call the patient capital of fascism. They're willing to spend money over decades to make sure that the media is Corroded and destroyed and the fundamentals of democracy are taken out and we I mean We just don't do that at all and you can tell and it's still this kind of well If we just get a plucky band of rebels together for one more election and we'll knock them down.

no this is the fight of generations And if you don't

spend the money and focus on what's important Way over the horizon, 20 years from now. And I keep watching people making mistakes. So, well, once we win, we'll fix it. Like, dude, have you been sleeping the last 20 years? Anyway,

Why policy is not as important as political junkies often think

SHEFFIELD: and they also think that policy alone is, the way to run a

Because, and not realizing that most people, I mean, well, I'm not saying most, but a huge percentage of people don't know anything about

and don't want [00:46:00] to know anything about policy. They just want to know, what's wrong with this other person.

And you know what? And, And I know that's a lower standard, perhaps, and not very intellectual, but you know what? They still vote.

DRIFTGLASS: They do. and, there's something about that. I mean, I worked for the city of Chicago for 10 years and worked with a lot of very good people who did a lot of very good work. And. They were progressive, and they, had great programs, and they helped ex offenders, and they helped women who were in shelters, and they got people jobs, and we did a whole bunch of cool stuff.

But getting them to summarize what they did in English language, and tell the rest of the world, here is what we did, and you know what, we're proud of our work, was like pulling freaking teeth. They, were just, didn't have the mindset of, you, you bake the cake, then you have to sell the cake. And then you take the credit for the cake, which, Means you get to buy enough ingredients for two cakes next time.

Isn't that great? They just didn't get it. They just wouldn't talk about themselves in those terms. And I think it's just something wired into a lot of progressives brains that, the, act itself should be enough. The work itself, the work should speak for itself. And it doesn't. It just doesn't.

Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: it doesn't, because most people are just trying to survive in this

world. And You know, they have to work, two or three jobs because the state they live in has a, seven, 25 hour minimum

wage. And so they don't have time to read your policy paper.

never going to,

DRIFTGLASS: That's right.

SHEFFIELD: And they're not going to read your New York Times op ed.

They're not going to read,

watch a video on your website about how great, your, policies are. They're never going to go to your

DRIFTGLASS: Well, and, good policies,

SHEFFIELD: to reach them where they are.

DRIFTGLASS: good policies are invisible. When I go to the DMV here is great, by the way. It works smoothly. It works terrific. They don't make any headlines because they're doing exactly what they should do and they're doing it very efficiently and well. My post office works great.

No one's going to [00:48:00] write stories about how well the post office is working. So when public policy actually does what it's supposed to do, then it's invisible, and that's terrific. But when you get Republicans in office who are, trying to break the system. This is something that Republicans really do I want to get into government to break government to show people government doesn't work. Look, see, look how terrible FEMA is. Well, yeah, you put a lunatic in charge of it who had no qualifications. Yeah. But FEMA is bad. Government's bad. Government failed you and enough. You start convincing enough people that government is broken and can never be fixed and it will always be your enemy.

And there's taking your money, your good, hard earned

tax money.

SHEFFIELD: the cynicism. Yeah.

DRIFTGLASS: So, and that's, that can, these are human problems and a, there is a solution to them. The solution, however, is boring. It is having your own giant megaphone with hundreds of voices, thousands of voices all over the country, speaking more or less from the same playbook, which is the progressive playbook, and reaching people where they are and doing what unions used to do. Going into neighborhoods and talking to people where they live and getting to know them and getting to. So they're comfortable with your face, like beat cops used to do when I was a kid. You knew who they were, and you knew that they were trustworthy. And if they had an opinion about something, you would listen to it, because they're decent guys, and they took care of my mom.

This is what Chicago aldermen knew. You give them a turkey at Thanksgiving and a ham at Christmas, and you'll get their vote next time the polls come up. And it's, it's politics 101, but it requires, sadly, because of a lot of reasons, including Citizens United, a s**t ton of money. I'm glad that Kamala Harris raised 370 million in the last 20 minutes. It's insane that elections cost 370 in that field other than the very wealthy.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. But you gotta do something with that money after you raise it, like that, to go back to the Organizing for America thing, like, cause that was also a thing with the Howard Dean campaign, they had created our [00:50:00] revolution based out of his, former campaigns, and that also went nowhere

in large part because people line their pockets with the money rather than actually doing something with it, I will say.

DRIFTGLASS: I, I, will, I

keep missing the, I keep missing the part where I, I get my big sorrows checked. So I'm obviously not sleeping with the right

people or something. So.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. What, and here's the paradox is though, that because progressive policies are more popular from a crowdfunding standpoint there shouldn't be a money problem for independent media on the left.

It's just that the people who are raising that money, they flush it down the mainstream media toilet on

DRIFTGLASS: Yes, they do.

SHEFFIELD: then there's nothing to show, like, after the election's over, almost all the money was spent. And there's no infrastructure. That is put in place. There is no, career paths for people to come afterward to advocate for the ideas or even, or hell, even the candidate themselves, like, you would think that if you win the White House, that you would want to have some people out there that are saying, Hey, this person's pretty good.

You should like what they're

doing. Think about voting for him next time. Like,

that.

DRIFTGLASS: would think so. And one of the things, I will put this to bed at the end of this decade. One of the things that just irked that crap out of me, but made me laugh a lot, was that, a handful of former Republicans called the Lincoln Project, popped up out of nowhere, and basically repurposed, in my opinion, liberal talking points about the Republican Party. In short videos, which is something liberals do and liberals have done, but they had something we never did, which is they had 24 hour a day access to the cameras at MSNBC and CNN. They got to be the people who were speaking for the resistance and the revolution. And they, and liberals wrote them a ton of money.

They made a s**t ton of money writing, as far as I can tell, they didn't move the needle at all. They [00:52:00] might have, but there's no objective evidence as far as I can tell that they did. What they did do was write a bunch of ads that made liberals all warm and sticky inside. Like, ooh, he's saying Trump's an a*****e.

That's great. Let's have more of that. And so you had people in Hollywood writing checks to them. Big checks. Checks that would sustain me for two or three years. To do more of these ads that were designed to make liberals happy. It was, I called it porn hub for, liberals. It was cool, 20 second, 30 second, half an hour porn that made us happy, but it didn't do anything.

It got shown on television. It got free rides all over cable news and it didn't go anywhere. I'm like, you know what? Here's a clever idea. Why don't you take all of that effort and time and money and focus on building something that will be an infrastructure for actual liberal messengers. Past the end of the campaign. And how about you stab it with at least a couple of people who didn't used to work for Ron DeSantis. and Jeb Bush. How about you put a couple of liberals in charge of that or at least part of the crew. And it, it bothers me that there is a willingness to spend money in, over very short bursts of time. We need to spend a lot of money in the 90 days before the election with a lot of ads. And you're willing to spend all kinds of money to do that, but not build the kind of infrastructure that you need to sustain that voice and those messages over the course of 10, 15, 20 years, like the National Review did, like the Weekly Standard did. The Weekly Standard never had, what, more than 50, 000 subscribers, right?

SHEFFIELD: And they never had a huge staff,

it couldn't have taken that much

DRIFTGLASS: No. But they were

incredibly

influential. And Bill

Crystal is still,

Living off that lunch, still dining out on him. His former editorship there, and it was Rupert Murdoch money. Murdoch showed up on his buying spree and bought a bunch of [00:54:00] conservative

SHEFFIELD: Before he started, he actually paid for it from the

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: But

DRIFTGLASS: yeah,

no, he didn't buy that.

He, built that, but it was, he was willing to spend the money to hire a bunch of people and put him to work messaging at the very high end, the intellectual high end. And there is a. There was an understanding that if you're gonna take on the evil liberal media, you had to do it at every level. And there's, no understanding of that as far as I can tell among liberals with deep pockets.

There just isn't. So.

Russian influence in right-wing media

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and then there's another obstacle for progressives versus the right wing, which is that Russia,

DRIFTGLASS: Oh yes.

SHEFFIELD: Of course, loves right wing media. And we just saw that,

This week as we're recording that the department of justice indicted two Russian nationals who were working for Russia today, AKA RT. And they are standing accused of funneling. 10 million to a a company called Tenet Media. And they paid people the again, more generic ignorant dipshits, right wing losers, Tim Poole, Benny Johnson. And they did it through this woman named Lauren Chen, who has lately her, project has been to rehabilitate and mainstream Nick Fuentes, the Nazi.

That's her objective, and, like, that's, it's, I mean, this is a huge issue as well, like, cause, and, Tim Poole I don't know if you saw the clip of him saying recently where he said, if, somebody was a foreign agent and they wanted to subsidize someone, they could do it just through YouTube advertising, and no one would know that it happened,

DRIFTGLASS: Sounds

SHEFFIELD: And like, and I'll say just before you, I'll let you jump in that

When I wrote for Salon a few years ago, this was when the Russians had hacked the Democratic National Committee.

And there was plenty of evidence that they had, in the days [00:56:00] afterward. But the government released the documents. Something immediately thereafter, which told absolutely nothing about the allegation, and they are just, it was literally just an appendix, mostly of terms of what terms were or who different groups

were, and it offered zero evidence.

So I wrote a column for Saman saying this. Thing that they put out was trash. And that was one of the most popular things I ever wrote because the Russians latched onto my column and they were flooding

DRIFTGLASS: Way to go. Way to go, Matthew.

Way to go. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And then on top of that, then they invited me onto RT afterward after they saw it.

And then I showed up on RT and I said, oh, and by the way, the Russians obviously did hack the Democrats, and there's lots of evidence. Microsoft has released this and this. Five points. And they were so shocked that I had done this to them, and of course, they never invited me back on their

air, like, I know I'm

shocking, right, but like, this is a serious issue, like, oh, there's, if you actually are patriotic.

and you care about this country, the reactionary media, these people are anti American.

They hate this country, and they want to destroy it,

and that's why Russia likes

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah. Yeah. Or they're willing to do anything for money. Which is, again, that dimes with the difference. There's no difference between the two. I forget, it might have been Keith Olbermann talking to Sean Hannity like a million years ago. They were at some dinner together.

He tells a story every now and then about how, they pretend to hate each other. They hate each other. And, They're, opposed to each other, whatever, but when the cameras go off, whatever it was, like, I think it was Hannity, don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure it was, he said, but you know, you know that this is just BS, right?

It's just TV. This is just TV. This is, it's just a performance. It doesn't matter. I'm, just putting on a costume and doing my thing. And a lot of these people, I swear to God, are just, Floating from one identity to the next, [00:58:00] looking for the next paycheck. And whatever will pay the rent, and give them a house in California, and give them a vacation home, and pay for their mistress, they'll do it. And they don't really care one way or the other. They're incredibly amoral, and there's a big audience out there, as long as they stick to the subject. And a friend of ours, who's also an OG blogger, who goes by the title Batochio, Told us, 2004. Team Evil pays really well. And Team Angels doesn't.

And it really comes down to that at the end of the day a lot more than anybody wants to believe. And yeah, Russia's, willing to dump a Whatever amount of money, and the thing is, I understand that the FBI has a much longer list of co conspirators or suspects or suspected people who've been touched by Russian money. They're running to like 2, 000 more people, and 800 of them live in the United States or so. So, I've been going through my checkbook, and I haven't taken any Russian money recently, so I think I'm in the clear. I, you've got an honest face, I assume you're in the clear too, but I have in my mind a list of about six people who suddenly and drastically took a turn from one perspective to a radically different perspective that I kind of think might be on that list.

And I won't speculate, but I'm sure in my mind at least one of them might have worked for the Rolling Stone for a while. Thank you. And one of them might have worked for the Intercept for a while, maybe two, maybe three.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, hell, you can just say their

names.

DRIFTGLASS: some of them might be the close personal friend of Ed Snowden, who I haven't heard about in years. I have no idea what Ed Snowden's doing these days, other than he's in last I heard he was in Mother Russia, living a fairly nice life. So

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Well, and that's, yeah, and you raise a point that maybe we can kind of wrap on it, which is that that, Russia also is very keen on pushing [01:00:00] kind of, delusional leftism, fanfiction leftism. And that goes nowhere, and because it's so, naive and foolish and ignorant. It never goes anywhere.

And then eventually collapses into nihilism,

DRIFTGLASS: yes, absolutely,

SHEFFIELD: you right wing. Because, hope is about, is as much about determination as it is about, wanting something better and thinking

DRIFTGLASS: absolutely,

SHEFFIELD: This is how I will do it. And none of these people ever did that. They never had a, you look at Jimmy Dore or something with his force the vote stuff about, Medicare for all.

Like, that was never going to do anything. It was obviously stupid from the very beginning. But the goal was to make people think that having something better and deserving something better and working toward it is impossible.

And so therefore, Trump wants to burn it all down too.

Maybe he can't be so bad.

DRIFTGLASS: yeah.

SHEFFIELD: That's where it ends up. That's where it ends

DRIFTGLASS: Oh, and, my, one of my tests for this is Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders believes in Medicare for All. Bernie Sanders didn't burn it all down. Bernie Sanders went

to work in the Senate, and Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden twice, and has endorsed Kamala Harris. And now a lot of the people who thought Bernie Sanders was the beginning and the end of all things because he was going to snap his fingers and change the government hate him now. Because he sold out. And I'm like, wow. So the conspiracy is so big that it includes, who? Hillary Clinton? And Joe Biden and Noam Chomsky, they're all in it together. How is that

even possible? And hey, let's see how they just keep getting to people. And because there is this, the, I forget the introductory sentence, but the slow boring of hard boards. it is a slow grinding process that takes generations to accomplish anything. And, the thing that we have as a legacy is that we have the legacy of all the accomplishments of [01:02:00] Roosevelt and Truman. And Johnson to look back on and say, things can get done and things do get better if you're willing to work for them, but you gotta dig in man, this is a long, hard fight and it won't be over, it won't be over until long after you and I are gone. And that is something that is just not appealing to anyone who thinks, Well, it's so obvious that this should be this way, And if it's not, there must be a conspiracy to stop it, And why even bother? So, burn it all down. And, there's a big market for taking those people's money. And If I were less of a person, I would be tempted.

Because there's a lot of easy money to be made Skimming from rubes who believe crazy s**t.

SHEFFIELD: It is. And and Russia will help you out with it

DRIFTGLASS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: you want. Seems that way. So, all right.

Concluding thoughts and future outlook

SHEFFIELD: so, let's wrap it up here then. Thanks for being here.

So tell people Where they can keep up with your

DRIFTGLASS: Oh, Lordy, it's such a long list. We have a media empire that's growing every day. You can find me at driftglass. blogspot. com. You can find me at the Twitter X at Mr. Electrico, that's at Mr. underscore Electrico. Cause the Drift Glass title was taken. And I'm a believer in property rights. I don't believe in taking things from people that, who don't want to give them up. You

can find.

SHEFFIELD: though you're a communist,

DRIFTGLASS: though I'm a filthy communist. You can find my wife and I have a podcast called The Professional Left. We do two episodes a week. We used to split them up into one on politics on Thursday. Every Thursday for the last 14 years. And one called No Fair Remembering Stuff, which is where we provide historical context for things like third party voting and the history of Chicago politics, things like that are interesting, but they do bear on modern politics, but they give you like, Oh, this is how we got here.

Oh, this is what happened. And we have a lot of fun doing that. My wife just started a knitting class. Podcast, which that's where I'm sitting right now in the spot where she does her knitting podcast because she is a awesome Superior knitter. She is the editor [01:04:00] under blue gal at crooks and liars And I'm sure there's ten other things we do on a bunch of other platforms But at the moment, I'm very tired and getting over a cold and I'm drunk on coffee and good feelings being on this podcast I'm just high being here with you there Matthew

SHEFFIELD: Well, sounds good, man. I appreciate it. We'll make sure to get everybody to check those out, so, and I'll, have links to 'em as well.

All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate everybody joining us for the conversation. And you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange. show. You can get the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And my thanks especially to everybody who is a paid subscribing member. You get a little bit extra access to everything.

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