2/19/26: Saagar Rips Trump Degeneracy, Dem Voter Revolt, Trump Voters Rail On AI

25:00Bernie has said the same thing since the 80s. You've got to tax the billionaires. You've got to tax the upper class. He's never changed. That's the messaging. You've just got to drill it into them. and Zoran did it, man, it's beautiful. Diane, 72, said, Mike said it pretty clearly and I can't really think of anything to add to that. And there was another person further down the list who also was like, yeah, Mike said what I was going to say. Now, I will temper that, Zagar, with the fact that the other two names that came up organically in the course of the conversation as like Democratic candidates that they were excited about were Jasmine Crockett and Pete Buttigieg.

25:32I wanted everyone to be very careful because - So what a progressive is, is very contested. Right? As we have all discovered over the years of this show, and I have no hate for the average American, but it's not like people are very good at self-identifying. Somebody will be like, I'm a conservative, but that means I want to tax billionaires. You're like, wait, what? You're like, what are you talking about? Right? And then somebody, look, people are complicated. They don't think much about terms. When they hear the word, I mean, when I say the word progressive, what do they think? I want to move forward.

26:00Right? I mean, it can mean a lot of different things through the activist class, to the leftist base. that's an actual identity. So like when I say I am a rightist, that's because I've read a lot about politics. I don't identify as a small C conservative. That's really not something that is like, that doesn't encompass like a belief, right? Like I would put myself much more in the vein of like a European rightist, but most people don't think about politics like that. They don't read a lot about definitions to them. Progressive means going forward. Great. Awesome. Right. Can I just add to that?

26:31Um, at least one of them, but maybe a number of them brought up Joe Manchin as why they do not want a moderate. And so I think the combination of him, Kyrsten Sinema, and maybe a handful of others, but those two being the primary villains, they really destroyed the moderate label within the Democratic Party. Because now moderate just seems like, oh, you're just going to obstruct anything good happening. You're just going to sell out to various corporate interests. So no, of course we don't want that. And then the other thing, and this is where, you know, where it's dangerous is there is a, the Democratic base is united in wanting to fight harder against Trump, right?

27:06They want someone who's pushing back effectively and is out there and taking risks and is meeting the moment in terms of the threat that they perceive to the country. Sometimes though, that can be very amorphous. That's how you end up with someone like Jasmine Crockett being named as like, she's a fighter. Well, she is very rhetorically gifted. She's very sassy. You know, she gets out there. She's like quick with the quip, undeniably like talented and charismatic. But if you dig underneath the surface, there's some real problems there in terms of who she's taking money from and the positions, how far she's willing to go.

27:37She's pro crypto. She's identity politics. She's calling James Tallarico a racist. You know, she's the worst if you ask me. But that's the issue. But that's, that's the challenge. That's the question mark to me is not do Democrats want to fight? They do. There's no doubt about it. You know, that argument has been won. And I think the argument also has been won about, like, we're not listening to these establishment boys. Like, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, go fuck yourself. We don't care what you have to say. Even liberal, you know, media institutions, I think there's been a really breaking of the trust.

28:06But what it means is being a progressive, is that Gavin Newsom being on Twitter and doing his, like, trolling routine? Or is that, you know, a Zoran Mamdani type of politician where not only do you have— I mean, Zoran actually doesn't do a lot of like Trump clap back or whatever, but where you have an aggressive social media posture, but it's backed up by specific policies as well. And so that's the piece that, you know, I think sort of remains to be determined. And we're going to see. I think we'll get a lot of indication of that from some of the primaries that are going to play out, going to play out right now.

28:40And then certainly, obviously, the biggest test of that will be in 2028, whether someone like Gavin Newsom is going to be able to position themselves as a quote unquote progressive, even as he is out there standing with billionaires to oppose a wealth tax in his state. I am personally actually hopeful that some of those things will be a problem. Like you can see them mention in a bunch of the responses throughout this. They talk about taxing the rich as it's kind of like a litmus test issue. And that would be a very hard one for a Gavin Newsom-style candidate to, you know, obviously he's like already on the wrong side of that issue.

29:16So I am hopeful that there actually will be a substantive policy lens that the term progressive will be viewed for. But I fully acknowledge that that is still a question mark for sure. As I have learned over the years and have watched the words working class came to mean very different things. to remember Ted Cruz used to say that we're a working class part. Ted Cruz calls himself a working class politician. Okay. And if you were to ask people, some of the people who voted for him, they might even say, oh yeah, he supports the work. Like, be honest. Like, is there a huge disconnect for all of them?

29:48I've seen the term bastardized about populism or working class now in the Republican party. And it can be true at a rhetorical level, wrong at a policy level. Turns out a lot of people don't care about the policy level at the middle of an election. You could very easily see how it could be bastardized. And I mean, for the people who watch our show, it's going to be tough because these, you know, you guys, if you're watching this, you're in the top two, five percent of people who consume politics. You got to think about your uncle or somebody who really doesn't pay that much attention and is pissed off about Trump because of the White House lawn or something like that.

30:20You know, somebody who's cranky about decorum. What does the term progressive mean to that? Probably nothing. And so when a Pete Buttigieg can say that famous Hillary line, I'm a progressive who likes to get things done, it might land. Same with Gavin Newsom. Nobody's done more on climate than me. The billionaire question, he's a very savvy political operator. Sometimes, but other times he's falling on his face. I'll give you some hope. I'll give you some hope, which is for the Democratic base. Because the Democratic base is now more overwhelmingly college-educated than everyone else, they are going to be a lot more well-read and grammatically – let's think about the best way to phrase this.

31:01They're going to be a lot more educated and a lot more – have much more of an ability to parse language and actually think about what these terms mean as opposed to what the current existing Republican base is going to be. Much heavier news consumers paying closer attention. We're more weird news consumers, much more well-read whenever it comes to politics, probably care much more about policy. Richard Hanania has the famous thing about how conservatives watch TV and liberals read. That actually does matter whenever it comes to policy prescription and other things. Because if you're going to read a policy position, that already puts you pretty dramatically out of step with some of the other base that is voting.

31:37I mean, I'm just being real here in terms of how that will look. So I think it will actually look quite different. But the other thing that I'm not – I don't want to underestimate for a lot of people who are also Democrats is you should – don't forget, South Carolina could be the first state. And that's a very different Democratic primary. And then if you have lower propensity voters who are upset at Trump who come out to vote – Although those people in South Carolina did not mess with Pete Buttigieg. So I'm not worried about him doing well there. But they could mess with Jasmine Crockett, right?

32:07I could see that very simple. I mean you think she's going to run for president? Maybe. Why not? I mean you've got an arch narcissist. You have to win, you know, Texas, like, be a senator from Texas. Beto failed. He ran for president. Yeah, but how did that work out? Sure, he got 2%, but it's not nothing. Yeah, I don't know. All you need is Jim Clyburn to come in and make you a king. Remember, there's no Iowa. There's no New Hampshire clearinghouse this time. Well, it's not. It's actually not clear what the order of the states is going to be. Some of that is still up for grabs. South Carolina will certainly be early and important in the process.

32:34But, I mean, here's what I would say. My own prediction is that there are going to be a few issues that are litmus test issues. I think they're money from APAC. I think they're taxing the rich. And I think it's abolishing ICE. I think those three things are going to be actual litmus test issues. And candidates who can't give clear-cut answers on that are going to struggle. And I think the testing ground for that has been that I've had at podcasts, where you've got, you know, you've got – I mean, Jennifer and Pumps at this point have really shifted a lot to the left, right? These were Hillary supporters who are now like, you know what, Bernie was right and we should have been there a lot.

33:07So they have shifted significantly. But, you know, their audience is very reflective of kind of like the core liberal base of the Democratic Party. And they are not speaking of not having they have not having it with Cory Booker coming on and doing his little tap dance or Rahm Emanuel, whoever. They are not having it with these people. And so, you know, that tells me there is kind of a hard line and an expectation of we want to hear not just you, you know, with a bunch of word salad trying to massage an answer. We want to hear yes or no answers to these few questions. The other thing that gives me some hope, especially on the identity politics front, is there is also the level of trickery that Hillary Clinton was able to engage in in her campaign against Bernie, where she was positioning herself like using identity politics to pretend like she was the more progressive candidate.

33:56I think people see through that garbage entirely at this point, as evidenced by the fact that Haley Stevens, who is a Michigan member of Congress, she's in the House right now and is running for Senate. And it's like the conservative or moderate candidate in that race, backed by Chuck Schumer, et cetera. She went toward an ICE facility. And when she came out, she was like, oh, I felt better because we've got female ICE agents who are running the place trying to do like a girl boss ICE agent situation. and people were not buying this whatsoever. This is F5, let's take a listen. Of note, there are female leadership here.

34:32There's female leadership. And there are women who walked with us today and explained on the intake process how important it is to treat people with humanity. And that obviously really stuck out to me because some of the things that we are witnessing before our eyes in our neighborhoods, in our streets is really a lack of humanity. So people were, you know, this did not land. This did not land with the Democratic base whatsoever. Just don't giggle. I mean, it's the meme, right? It's like, you know, they're bombing, but they're - But at least they're female violence. Right. They're female and they're flying the gay pride flag.

35:09It's like, no, no, no. We see through that now. We're not doing this anymore. Hey, listen, I would welcome nothing more. More recently, there's been a gay - She's amazing, that lady. There's been a sassy gay ICE agent who's gone viral on the road. Oh, I saw that guy. Which I loved. Same thing. If we could turn them against identity politics, no one would be happier than me. Oh, that was great. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

35:48In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

36:36What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins and if you can hear me is where culture meets the soul a place for real conversation Each episode I sit down with people from all walks of life celebrities thinkers and everyday folks And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us what shapes us and what gives us hope We get honest about the big stuff identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore loss that changes you purpose when success isn't enough peace when your mind won't slow down, faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers.

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37:34China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. This MSS officer has no idea the U.S. government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the Sixth Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question, of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets.

38:24Listen to The Sixth Bureau on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

38:33All right, let's get to the next one. Yeah, so this is an interesting story. it kind of dovetails with some of the, you know, some of the cross-coalitional, I think, backlash against the push towards gambling. But the most clear place where we've had this cross-partisan backlash is in the fight against AI more broadly, but specifically on the front lines with regards to data centers. And we can put this up on the screen. This is a scene from Claremore, Oklahoma. This is like a local Oklahoma town meeting where this person who was in Oklahoma says, people are being arrested for speaking out against AI data centers.

39:06please keep standing up for your community. There's another video that's gone viral this morning that I saw, you guys can take this down, that I saw of another place, I'm not sure if it was a red state or not, but where there had been significant protests against a data center and ultimately the town backs down. The backlash against these places is really building. And I was just listening to, the New York Times actually did a deep dive into a town in Indiana that has become a hotspot for a bunch of these data centers. And the first ones kind of got built and people just like accepted it. And there wasn't, they didn't need any zoning approval.

39:39So the town council, like it just kind of sailed through. And now people are experiencing all of this increased traffic and noise and they're starting to research, okay, what even is AI? And what is this gonna mean? And what's it gonna mean long-term? And how many jobs are even really created? And what is this gonna mean for our community? And now there was a huge backlash to this new data center that they were trying to place there that did require a zoning change, which meant that the town had a chance to weigh in. So they held meetings overnight and they first called for, okay, who's in support of this?

40:11And people got up and they spoke for, there were like, you know, enough to fill about 25 minutes. Then they opened it up for the opponents. The opponents, there were so many of them that the meeting went on until 4 a.m. That's awesome. Ultimately, and this is a small town, right? And ultimately the town council is like, okay, yeah, we're not gonna do this. And so you are seeing this huge backlash. And a lot of these data centers are being located in red states and red areas because rural areas have more space and rural areas tend to be more Republican. Let's go and put G2 up on the screen. This was a fantastic report from the Financial Times.

40:46They say Donald Trump's AI pushed fuel's revolt in MAGA heartlands on a cold Tuesday evening last week. About 200 Missourians, Missouri being another hotbed of AI development and also backlash, crammed into a Methodist church to share a message. The AI revolution embraced by Trump's White House did not have their unqualified support. Quote, I voted for this administration and didn't really think about AI until it started to affect me, said Lisa Garrett, who lives beside the site of a rapidly greenlit$6.6 billion 400 acre data center development in the satellite city of Independence, just east of Kansas City.

41:21A worker for a local ministry, Garrett's unease extends beyond the project's demand on local water and electricity supplies to the broader social impact of the industry it is being built to support. I have grandchildren. It does concern me that they're being drawn into a world that isn't real, she said. Her concerns, which poll after poll has shown are shared by much of Trump's base, are increasingly at odds with the posture and policies of his administration. And actually, Sagar, I mean, it is very, like, cross-partisan, the concerns here about data centers in particular. But the recent polling that I saw showed that the concerns were actually higher on the right for reasons that you can understand, because there tends to be more, you know, more of a rural base, more concern about, okay, what is this community going to be?

42:02And more like sort of like this rootedness in a certain place. And so, and more quote unquote conservative views of like, we aren't, we are a little wary of change. We don't necessarily want the world to be turned upside down, not just in our local community, but by whatever this means. So, you know, I think this is one of the important fights as we contemplate what AI is going to mean for our social contract. And one of the places where you can sort of like, you know, throw sand in the gears and at least slow the process down so that there is more of a chance for democracy to be able to catch up.

42:35Yeah, I just think it's amazing. Like they're literally organic movements, people with their children, no data center. Because again, everyone can feel this encroachment in their lives, especially if they have a child. So there's all these viral threads that are going around now about Spotify, for example. Someone was like, you know, I'm so careful. I don't allow video. And then what ended up happening is I gave my kids access to my Spotify account. But now Spotify is including music videos and it was like a workaround. And he's like, now I have to take Spotify away. It's like at every level, you have parents who are bombarded doing everything they possibly can, having to pay attention to like every facet of modern life.

43:14More recently, you know how they would give out Chromebooks or computers? You have teachers or you have parents who are turning them in. They're like, I can't have my children on this. They're using it as a workaround, their screen time and all this. They're demanding that schools go back to paper because they're like, we have to just get rid of all this technology. Nothing is good coming from this. It's rotting my child's brain. And then you put the AI data center stuff into this. And then you have to look at the promise. What are we getting? More clawed agents that might like automate all of the jobs or more slop that children can watch on YouTube or YouTube shorts.

43:50More – now there's all these new AI movies that people are competing for. Everyone's like the bargain is not worth it. Higher electricity price, trying to take my job, which you increasingly brag about. And then general – also just like propping up a sham stock market all at the same time. It's just ridiculous. On top of corrupting a local community, energy usage, power bills, it's all about control. And yeah, the most conservative impulse of all time is to like the famous lines like stand thwart history and yell stop. And like that's how a lot of people feel right now. I feel that way right now.

44:21I feel that way because listen, I, you know, I think the technology is cool. Like I've been playing around with Claude. I think the advances over the past year, the more I dig into it, the more I realize it is genuinely extraordinary. You know, the things you're able to feed in, the hallucinations have been diminished, the level, the ability, this part I haven't been able to figure out yet. But, you know, you hear people who are not technical people who are able to just go and like create an app and it doesn't even take very long. And Claude spins it out in a few minutes. This is something, this is astonishing.

44:54And if it was – if the ownership was done correctly and the democratic control was done correctly, you can imagine a society that was not structured like ours where this would just be beneficial, where it would just be exciting. And we would figure out how to manage the resources. I mean the other risk that some of the community members in Indiana were talking about is they're like, we looked into this and there are a lot of models coming out of China that are much less resource intensive. So you're going to build all of these data centers out. Are they even going to be needed in the future as these things become more and more efficient?

45:29So even that, you know, and then we're left with this big, hulking, you know, decaying husk in our community. And what does that ultimately look like? So in any case, you know, we would need to have massive Democratic input on the resource usage, on the capital expenditure, on how this is deployed, on how it is used, on, you know, how the fruits of this alleged productivity gains are going to be distributed. I mean, that's like the essential question in my view. But obviously, we don't have any of that, which is why, again, I think these fights against data centers on a local basis, like that is the most likely place where you can have any sort of pushback, any sort of slowdown in terms of this development.

46:12Because in terms of, you know, from this administration's perspective, it's just off to the races. And, you know, the dystopian parts of this are becoming are increasingly here. Let's put G3 up on the screen. We covered this before. there's this fight between Anthropic and the Pentagon where they're threatening to cut off Anthropic in what is being described here as an AI safeguards dispute. And the TLDR is that the Anthropic people got concerned about the way that Claude was used in the Venezuela raid. Now, they have some sort of partnership with Palantir. And Claude and Anthropic's products are generally more advanced in terms of government application.

46:50So they have a big contract with the Pentagon. And they're saying to the Pentagon, look, we have two red lines. Number one, we don't want CLAW to be used in any sort of like autonomous killer robots. And number two, we don't want it to be used for mass surveillance against American people. Now, I'm not sure why you have this tie up with Palantir if you have these concerns. But that's where they're trying to draw a line. The other AI companies do not have such moral red lines. And I don't want to give Anthropik too much credit here because I think it's incredibly, incredibly naive to think that you would be able to hold the line on these things.

47:25And you as individual like business owner or capitalist are going to be able to tell the Department of War and the United States government how your technology gets deployed. Like I think that was a very fanciful notion. But you can see how already the Pentagon's like, no, we're not going to listen to you. Not only are we not going to abide by your little moral red lines against killer robots and mass surveillance, but we are going to punish any company that does work with you because you have the audacity to even try to put any sort of red line on how your technology can be deployed. So, you know, there was Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.

48:06He was talking about a year ago saying that, you know, one of the things that all the AI CEOs were basically in agreement with is if this starts getting deployed in killer robots, they would pull the plug. But what you realize is like, you don't actually have the ability to pull the plug, even if you wanted to. And already they've all abandoned that and like, hey, well, maybe kill a robot. Okay, maybe it's fine. No big deal. We can work around it. But even if they did hold to their moral standards, once that technology gets out, once the Pentagon has access to it, like you're so cute to think that you're going to be the one in charge to be able to pull the plug on it.

48:40Yeah, it's always been like that, is that once you unleash the technology, once people get normalized, so it can get open source, they can work from it, the government can use however they want. This is the big danger in all of this for defense technology. And ultimately, like maybe, you know, it was never really solvable. Like once the tech exists, it will always be used for the lowest common denominator. Like there's just no really way around it. It's basically always been that way. War, often like blood is the only thing that moves the wheels of history. Let's put G4 up there on the screen, Just to give an example here, SpaceX is now going to compete in the contest for autonomous drone technology.

49:19And this is the next frontier, you know, drone swarms and competition for AI targeting. And then who will build the targeting software? And there's always one company that's going to be willing to play ball and to make money. So there's really no way around this. And also, there's a competitor aspect. Like China has been heavily invested in drones and drone swarms, and it's often been like one of the dangers for some of these bigger U.S. carriers and U.S. Navy destroyers or U.S. Navy vessels that one of the pain points that they see. And so then the U.S. says, well, now we need to create our own drone technology, our own counter drone technology.

49:59This is the danger in this entire thing. And we know this. It will be used to some effect. They already used Claude. with Venezuela. We may be going to a major war with Iran. There's going to be a ton of AI whenever it comes to it. And we know how it was deployed in Gaza, in Palestine, and the way it is deployed also in the West Bank. And in a lot of ways, Gaza is the testing ground for mass surveillance. Palantir, Microsoft, a bunch of these companies have been caught involved in the Gaza genocide. And so that has been the testing ground. I think that helped to accelerate the incredibly dystopian place that we're in.

50:34The last thing I'll say is, Novara Media had a good piece on this, and they were saying, you know, when scientists were building the, you know, were developing nuclear weapons, like, you know, Oppenheimer, they were not so foolish as to think that they, as the developers and creators of this technology, were then going to get to tell the government how it gets deployed. Well, actually, Oppenheimer was foolish enough to think that, but a lot of the other people. But I mean, I think he knew at the end of the day, the president of the United States is going to say how this is used, not me, right?

51:03And so he made his case. But, you know, I don't think they they thought that like, oh, we're going to get to control how this how and when and wherever. Now, many of them organized afterwards to try to, you know, check nuclear proliferation and try to check the use and spread in advance of this technology. But there was a much clearer understanding of like, no, we're developing this for the U.S. government and they're going to get to have the say over what comes. And I, you know, because we've lived in this like free market capitalist sort of like delusion where government just cedes control to capitalists and to markets, I think these guys did delude themselves into thinking like, oh, we're going to get to figure out how this is deployed.

51:46And it's like it doesn't work that way. So, you know, when you did your tie up with the Pentagon and now you want to set a moral red line. And I think they did have that red line from the beginning. You're a fool if you think that they're going to abide by what you want. They see themselves as in this race with China, and they're going to win at all costs, at all costs. And that's where we are. Look, war with Iran, who knows how it's going to go. It could spiral. It could go into this, go into that. Next thing you know, these things are going to get nationalized. The Defense Production Act, your data centers and all of that will be seized and be put to force.

52:17I mean that can happen like this in wartime. Read a book about World War II. Dude, look how quickly you went from private industry to literally the war production board managing what the Ford factory is pumping. What, you think they're not going to do that with AI and with everything else? If things get truly existential, the law's already on the books. They have monarchical powers if they want to. You're right. This is deeply naive. All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. Please support us if you can. If not, Friday's show tomorrow. See you all then. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama?

52:54This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019. And that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul.

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