#856 - Krystal Ball - Why Does The 2024 Election Feel So Fake?

25:44But even that, like the vancing that he wouldn't have certified the election in 2020, do you think that has made any impact? Does anyone even really care about that anymore? So there's two levels. Okay, so it doesn't matter that we have that piece of information about him. And frankly, I think that's the single most important piece of information as to why Donald Trump put JD Vance on the ticket because he wants to make sure that if it comes down to not that scenario may be exactly, but something similarly, you know, outrageous and unconstitutional, will this guy be loyal up to even to that point where Mike Pence said, that's it.

26:25I'm out, right? And Mike Pence now, you know, the right all hates him. This was the most loyal sur, soldier for Donald Trump right up until that moment. So I think it's important to, to have that on the record and for people to understand where JD Vance stands on that issue. Do I think it's electorally consequential? Probably not. Maybe a little on the margins because again, look, I, I want to be humble about my own predictions because I was wrong in 2022. I thought Red Wave. I thought Democrats are just running on like democracy and people want to know about their pocketbooks and whatever they're offering any kind of an economic program.

27:03But hey, it worked for them. It was enough. And it's very possible it's enough again. I do know people hate that Donald Trump won't admit he lost. They hate that he lies about the election. They hate the candidates who were election deniers in 2022 performed extremely poorly. And they will perform poorly again. I mean, Carrie Lake is running for Senate in Arizona. She is a foremost election denier there and her polling is abysmal. She's trailing Trump dramatically. She's almost certainly going to lose what should be a very winnable Senate race for her. So, you know, people do really hate this stuff.

27:37So maybe marginally to the extent that it reminds them of an aspect of the Trump era and the, you know, Trump himself that they really find distasteful that maybe on the margins. But, you know, on the other hand, it's like, well, who doesn't know at this point? What happened on January 6th and how they feel about it? So that's where I feel like it's probably unlikely to be electrolytic consequential, even as I think having the historic record to be able to look back on and increased understanding is important. One of my friends tweeted earlier on, the ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn't require years of patient work only a sufficient quantity of drama.

28:16It just feels like that's why sort of Twitter feels like to me at the moment And how, speaking of that, how influential do you think Elon Musk is? Very. It's an actual swaying of votes, changing the, the, the, well, here's the thing. How much do I think Twitter matters? I don't know. You know, you could actually, in my, my colleague Ryan Grim makes the case. And I think it's, it's compelling, although hard to say, that Elon Musk Twitter is actually in some ways bad for Republicans because it's created this just like right wing echo chamber where they think all of their worst opinions are super popular and creates a bit of a disconnected bubble where, for example, you can think it's a smart idea to lie about Haitian immigrants eating pets and think that this is going to sell nationwide and it doesn't.

29:02So, you know, there's a debate about whether Twitter, his stewardship of Twitter is effective for Republicans and for Trump specifically. But Elon Musk, according to Trump, is putting half a billion dollars into the Trump campaign. Could that not be hyperbole from Trump to just make it sound very possible? And that's the other thing about the American elections. Trump, Trump, Trump relies all the time except for this thing, which is like I don't want to believe. But we know it's tens of millions. We know it's an incredibly substantial sum. And we know that he's effectively moved to Pennsylvania and is running key parts of the Trump campaign.

29:41So again, I'll separate, you know, about electorally, will it make a difference? Hard to say, certainly having that money that helps Trump, more than not having that money, and Trump's little cash dropped, this election cycle. What matters more to me about Elon's influence is he's already been promised a plum government position with wide -ranging authorities as best we can tell. And Elon Musk, how do you feel about him? This is not a disinterested actor. Last year alone, just Tesla and SpaceX receive $15 billion in federal government contracts. US taxpayer dollars to the tune of $15 billion in a single year.

30:21He is one of the largest contractors to the Pentagon. Is that because he creates the best technology that's the most advanced? We've got Boeing stranding, making it a lot stronger. I'm not saying that he shouldn't be, but I am saying that if you are that, you should not be in charge of a large swath of the government because you have a massive conflict with the interest. There's a lot of those as you go up with people that have been in big farmer and then they end up working for the FDA. You've got the, you know, these are replete with these kind of issues. Absolutely. And you see it, you know, to make the parallel and democratic side because this is not meant to be a partisan point.

30:59It's meant to be a principled point about the corrupting influence of money in politics and the rising influence, specifically of billionaires in politics. I do think Elon is a uniquely extreme example pushing the boundaries of this in a way that there is no comparable other example and I can make that case in a moment. But to give you an example in Democratic side, Reid Hoffman, Liechten billionaire, Mark Cuban, who we all know who Mark Cuban is, they both are big Kamala donors. They haven't given as much to her anywhere close as far as we know, again, campaign finance being opaque, anywhere close to as much.

31:35But they're going out there and clearly trying to shape what she does next time around. They don't like the SEC enforcement on crypto in particular. So Mark Cuban is like, hey, I want to be SEC chair and there's been pressure around that. And then in addition, Lena Khan, who's been the head of the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and been very aggressive in terms of antitrust enforcement, which I think is incredibly important for competition. Wall Street absolutely hates her because she's putting a sort of icing a lot of mergers and acquisitions that are how a lot of Wall Streeters make fat bonuses and make a lot of money.

32:13And so both Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and a few other billionaires on the Commonwealth Harrier side have really been trying to use their influence and power to shape what that regime will look like next time around as well. So I'm not saying that there's like one party that is immune to this and the other is not. But because of the size of the dollar figures that we can tell in the level of involvement and the large government contracts, the fact that he does run a social media giant in addition. I think everybody should be deeply troubled by the idea of this one individual, regardless of how you feel about him or who he is or how brilliant he is or whatever, any one individual who is not being voted for having that kind of control in the federal government.

32:58What do you think is the downstream implication of having more siloed off social media platforms? You know, I would say that Twitter up until Elon took it over did seem to have not quite a mainstream media, but a bit of a left -leaning sort of partisan sensorial attitude. But now, I don't know how it works. You may know the ecosystem. Everyone on the left for whom Elon and Trump are too toxic of fucked -off to threads. And then there's Truth Social, which is like Twitter's Twitter. And then there's Twitter, which kind of does feel a little bit right of sent to now, but maybe that's just, you know, like putting a hand in cold water after it's been in hot water and it's because of comparatively to how it was before.

33:41What do you make of the increasing siloing, a compartmentalization of groups to a platform which only really reinforces what they believe? Yeah, I mean, I think it just makes everyone increasingly deranged, you know, if you're just like circle jerking all day on your own little siloed platform. And not to like, you know, this is very self -serving. But I'll give you an example in, you know, my own professional life. I work with soccer, Rico hosts a show, and you know, sometimes he'll bring stories to the table and I'm like, you know, did you see that there's a thing like that's not really what I, and I will also because of the, you could say, so my live -in brings some of the tables like, you know, did you see on the other hand, there's this point.

34:27And so, you know, as best we can, we kind of have to check each other, right? And so if you just have people feeding one another, what they want to hear, yeah, I think it ends up increasingly deranged. And I think we've seen that. I mentioned the Haitian pets thing that is a very prominent example. There's all kinds of stuff going on with people floating that Hurricane Helene was generated by Democrats specifically to target Republican areas. That's insane. That is insane. What is some of the ones going in the opposite direction that you found? I mean, listen, if you go back to Russia gate, there was a lot of derangement there.

35:11There is a very prominent liberal conspiracies right now about Donald Trump shitting his pants in public. I think. I thought that was a Biden thing. Was that another Biden thing? Oh, this is like a... No one cares about Biden anymore. He's old news. Right. We need to talk about that. Like, the guy that's running the country at the moment was, I think he was at the beach when the hurricane was happening recently. Is he just like nobody's paying real attention to him? And I think that this fits into a broader question that I've got about whether Kamala is a change candidate or whether she has incumbent legitimacy because it seems like the Democrats are trying to bifurcate off where they want her to have this, this degree of legitimacy, but also that we have got problems and I know and I'm going to fix it.

36:03And you know, the best point, the only really good point that Trump made in their debate was the very final one, which was you've had three years to do this. And what, what have you been doing all of this time? You can't talk about the problems that you're encountering while not pointing the finger at yourself. So how do you think that sort of circle is getting squared and what's the sort of modern role of Joe Biden for the rest of this? I want to, let me come back to that because there's one other point that I want to make substantive point on the conspiracy question, which is that I think genuinely the conspiracy issue is worse on the right right now.

36:39And the reason is because the right is more estranged from establishment institutions. And if you look at the polling of trust in the media, trust in government, trust in, you know, the, yeah, like every mainstream institution, you can imagine. Republicans don't trust them. And so it opens up a lot of opportunity for people to come in and say, well, they're not telling you this, but this is the truth. This is the real story of what's really going on. And so, you know, this is not about like Republicans being stupid or whatever, but because there is this deep mistrust, I think it's opened up more of a space for increasingly wild conspiracies like Democrats are controlling the weather.

37:27And then, you know, I think Twitter under Elon has helped to fuel that ecosystem and the siloing you're talking about. I think that helps to fuel that ecosystem as well. And so that's why I think, there's right now there's some story going around that was like just completely invented by this guy that previously fabricated other stories and got caught about Tim Walls that a lot of people are taking very seriously. So I do think right now it's more of an issue on the right but to go back to your question about. No, I've got no, I've got stuff on that one. Sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. On your curatorial point.

37:59Well, just that I was fascinated by this as well that we're talking about the election coming down to a nail biter. But pretty much anybody, I mean, you can even look at the campaign donations from big media organization employees. They skew massively left to the point where there's like, it's a very, very sort of biased in one direction. How different do you think the outcome of the election would be if you had more equal representation in legacy media, mainstream media, from a talking stamp. I mean, we've seen scientific American come out in support of Kamala Harris. We saw who is it that came out the other week Washington Post or who is that?

38:43I'm not sure. I mean, I'm sure they will. They haven't yet. But everybody has come out to endorse. No, it wasn't. It was not the spectator. What's the equipment of the spectator on the other side? The Atlantic. The Atlantic came out in support of Carol Harris, having only three weeks ago published an article titled Scientific American Didn't Need to Indoor's Anybody. So like this, I don't know, somebody applied the right amount of pressure to the right place. My point being big left -leaning influence when it comes to legacy media, mainstream media, how big of a difference would that make if we're on a nail -biter, if the scales had been evened a little bit in that regard, Do you think that that could change the outcome?

39:24Potentially. But I think that ignores that there is a large establishment at this point, conservative media media ecosystem as well. I mean Fox News continues to be the largest cable news outlet. Daily wire is massive and very influential. There's, you know, in independent media, it's dominated by right -leaning podcasts and influencer. Somebody would say, I wonder what does someone would say? Look at that you've had to kind of create your own ecosystem in order to be able to make this happen. When we talk about the more established, more mainstream, which presumably have a degree of legitimacy, maybe they reach more people, maybe they reach people that you can't get through independent media, that they do.

40:04Do they have a degree more legitimacy? That's exactly why I'm fortunate. Not anymore. Yeah, you probably will. Yeah, I mean, my, so I think it's absolutely fair to say that the legacy outlets certainly have a like liberal pro -democratic party bias. You know, I'm not a liberal. I'm a leftist. And I see, I actually feel like my perspective doesn't really exist in any of these places. And at least CNN will bring on like a perfunctory, you know, Scott Jennings or whoever to rep the Republican point of view. It is very rare that people with my political views are represented there at all. So I feel very erased in the entirety of the media ecosystem, but to be honest with you, the bias that concerns me more in all of these spaces, whether they're sort of elite conservative media or elite liberal legacy media, is more of a class and regional bias.

41:06Yes, because you have a lot of people who all went to elite, oftentimes Ivy League institutions who grew up with very similar backgrounds, many of them from either York, Boston, California, and nothing wrong with having that background. But it does mean that you're getting a very particular view of the world. And I think that probably has been more of an issue for them than anything in terms of getting some just key fundamental things wrong about their understanding of the country and about the way they frame coverage, the stories they choose to cover and all of those things. To me, that's a bigger issue.

41:45And unfortunately, especially as regional papers disappear and there's more and more media consolidation into it's like, it's just the New York Times and it's just the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal and these cable news outlets and that's kind of it. But the more you have that consolidation and that nationalization of the media environment, the more of that narrow, biased, like, you know, one sort of class identity view that you're going to get up the world. Well, being British, you know, we're obsessed with class, even when we think that we're not obsessed with class, we still are.

42:22And coming over here, it's really interesting to see people, nobody ever uses the word posh in the US. I mean, you can always, it comes from a quite posh family. They tend to go on holiday to like Santorini in the summer, whatever. So yeah, as a very scum of the earthworking classperson from the North of England, maybe that's a degree of hope for independent media that it is able to cut through class divides because you don't have the same kinds of gatekeepers in that sort of a way. I don't know what like Shapiro or Tim Poole or like fucking David Pakman's upbringing was, but you do have the opportunity in a relatively egalitarian market to have anybody rise to the top.

43:10It's basically pretty much exclusively based on talent. It's essentially costless to start and till it becomes very costly to run. So anyway, Camila Harris, change candidate or incumbent legitimacy. What is she and how does that circle? Well, I think that she should position herself as the change candidate, but I think she's utterly failed to do that. And I mean, one of her biggest mistakes on the campaign trail is going on the view. And they ask her this incredibly softball. Honestly, a question that's an opportunity for her to say, you know, I'm not exactly like Joe Biden, who was unpopular as we know.

43:43And she says that I can't think of a thing that I'd do differently and I think it's difficult. Obviously she looks different. Her identity is different. Her age is very different. That's important. That does matter. And I think people were really open. In fact, I think their default assumption was that she'd be a little bit different from Joe Biden. But she's been so terrified of the campaign has been so cautious. And she's been so terrified of this idea that people are going to a receiver is too liberal, that she's been afraid to articulate any specific differences really on anything. And I think that has led her to a very tiniest position in the polls now, because people want to change candidate.

44:30They aren't satisfied with the direction the country's had it in. And you need to be able to lay on a few specific things where you're going to push things forward in a way that Joe Biden didn't. I mean, one to me, because this is important to me, and a lot of other people besides very obvious example is, you know, you have a vast majority of a country that wants to see a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip that wants us to withhold weapons from going to, you know, Israel to commit more atrocities. And even there, there's zero willingness. You know, the politics of it pretty clear at this point for her on that side, zero willingness to create any separation there whatsoever.

45:10You know, it's a political failure, but more importantly, to me, it's a moral failure. It is kind of funny to think about the opportunities that politicians have to say stuff out front and then everybody talks about it as if it was a rational decision. The reason that for instance, Kamala decided to say or not say a thing on the view, what I'm mostly fascinated by, which we're never going to find out, is what is the interpersonal political dynamics inside of the party. Why did you buy and drop out? What was that conversation? What was the final thing that pushed him over the line to do that? Was it dirt?

45:49Is it some house of cards bullshit? Is that what went on or is it just that you can convince somebody through normal motivations? This is going to be better for you. A legacy and we'll give you a cushy position in the blah blah and whatever it is. But the same thing goes for every single conversation. Why JD Vance was picked? Why you don't go for Josh Shapiro, etc. All of that, to me is just so fascinating. I want to know what's good. I want to know, that's why I'm so keen to bring Bernie Sanders on, as basically the person who tried to flip the table over as much as you code on the left over the last few years.

46:23To be like, you're competing, then you're out of the tent, then you kind of half back in the tent, but also there's this sort of lingering, that guy's on our side type thing, the skepticism. I just want, because to me that seems, that's the most interesting thing, and it's a bit of politics that we never ever get to see, which is the interpersonal dynamics going on behind the scenes. And the same thing goes for the current Harris campaign. Like, are you really able to throw your boss, like the guy that's kind of still, like the actual president of the United States under the bus, while he's still in power?

46:53Like, can you do that? Well, you can, but like, what's the, what's the, what are the fallout? What are you trying to mediate from what's happening internally and externally? So, yeah, fascinating stuff that we never get to see. Yeah, I mean, as best I can tell from the, with the Biden dropout pressure, it really just got to be where Obama was against him, Schumer was against him, Pelosi was against him, and the money, that was another key part, the money dried up. And yeah, he's old in the CNIL, but he's also got some muscle memory in terms of being in politics for what, for 40, for again, 50 years.

47:31And so he knows the money dries up. That's kind of game over. So I think once he realized that they're not going to just forget it and fall back in line, you know, they're going to continue to pressure, continue to put the screws to me until I'm out. I think that's when he finally, you know, very reluctantly decided to hang it up as best I can tell. Talking about the opportunity, or the difficulty that some of the candidates have had with being when it comes to stating their positions. It does feel a lot to me like there is nothing that you can do to further your calls. You can just mess up sufficiently badly that the other side uses it in a campaign program.

48:15Like, you know, the Trump shouts interview within, I think it was 18 or 19 hours from publish. The Harris campaign had used... Yeah, they cut an ad. Yeah. They cut an ad from it. So what you're doing is it literally is a game of playing defense, which again causes each candidate to withdraw more, not necessarily from appearances or whatever, but they're more cagey with the things that they say. They use more obfuscatory language, they're caveating, etc., etc., etc. So yeah, that again, just that incentive, so funny, so different. Yeah, it's very troubling. There's a lot of fucked up incentives in politics because, for example, like Project 2025, you know, this big conservative blue point that's put together that Trump's very anxious to run away from at this point and fair enough his campaign didn't put it together on the other hand.

49:07Now, this is the sort of thing that conservative things tanks put together all the time and some of that will be implemented because it's the blueprint that's laying around. But he recognized immediately that actually having specific policy proposals out there. It's not a good thing because then people can dig in and they can criticize and they can pull out things that they don't like. For example, in that project 2025, they're like, we're going to ban porn and I don't think that's probably all that popular. So putting specific things down gives people an opportunity to attack those specific things.

49:39Doing interviews that even a relatively friendly setting still opens up a possibility that that you're gonna screw up in some critical way that your opponent can clip into an ad and use to their benefit. And that's why Kamala Harris for a long time was deciding like, I'm just not really gonna do interviews. Because I don't have to, the media's not pressuring me to. The public isn't actually really pressuring me to. And I know the type of person who might like well screw this up in a way that's kind of bad. And you know what, to be honest with you, she was kind of right. It's bad for democracy.

50:11She is impressively unimpressive on a long form interview. You know, she in that view interview again, friendly space gave them so much ammunition. You talk about, you know, the Harris campaign clipping an ad of up Trump with Andrew Schultz. They clipped an ad of Kamala saying I'm just like Joe Biden and are reportedly putting money behind it, playing at their rallies, et cetera. So, you know, I mean, you can't blame them for doing that. Like they're trying to win a campaign. But especially this is the downside of like the norms being broken. I'm not a big like lover defender of the norms as a leftist as someone who you know is sort of adversarial to both of these parties But there are certain things that were better.

50:53So for one one example We had this norm of a certain number of debates that wasn't a legal requirement But you just expected both candidates They're gonna subject themselves to three debates So we at least have that much time to evaluate what their answers are and compare them etc etc that norm is now gone. You know, we used to have a norm that was like, you would sit for the 60 minutes of you and the time interview and the New York Times editorial board and you would subject yourself to this sort of like rigorous adversarial press process and that's no longer the case. Now it's like, you know, I can go hang out with Alex Cooper on Caller Daddy, I can go hang out with the NELP boys and you know, do that thing and hey, that's a lot easier.

51:37It's a lot lower stakes. I'm reaching a large audience. I'm reaching demographic groups that are important to me. So why would I? So, I mean, that's the downside of the disruption of these quote unquote norms. I personally, I don't know if this is a radical view or not, but I personally think that candidates for office should be required to debate a certain number of times. I do think it should be a legal requirement because it's the very least that voters deserve in terms of making some sort of a decision. And in fact, going back to the point about Joe Biden, Joe Biden did have primary opponents.

52:12They were completely iced down from the media. One of them, Dean Phillips, who I disagree with on a lot of things. He's been on the show. Oh, how's it? I'm sure that was a great conversation. He's a nice guy. He was sounding the alarm. He's like, this guy is too old. We're going to lose. This guy is too old. And by and large, he was iced down from the media. The Democrats said we're not having primers. In some states, they literally just canceled the primary. Did not have any debates. And think about not only was that detriment to the American people and the Democratic Party, because they didn't have an opportunity to have a process by which they might vet a candidate and choose who they want to succeed Joe Biden.

52:50But it ultimately really hurt, you know, Democratic Party elites who want to presumably win this election, because if he had had to be subjected to a debate in a primary process, we would have seen much earlier like, oh, holy shit, there is no way this is going to work out. And then you've got time to not just go with who can we grab and like throw into this place, there's actually time to go through a process to generate excitement to see which candidate is going to perform the best. And I firmly believe that they would be in a much, much better position to win if they had gone through that price process and had an actual democratic process to choose Joe Biden's successor.

53:30Do you think there would be a 50. I think Kamala came in with a lot of advantages just because of her position. She also has a lot of advantages in terms of her fundraising base. She has from being a G of California. She's got a lot of Silicon Valley and Hollywood connections and money matters in American politics. There are a lot of people who are also excited about the idea of, you know, first black woman president. I understand that. Not denigrating that whatsoever. But there's also a reason why she didn't succeed last time around her, right? There's a reason why after voters saw her on the debate stage saw her in interviews where like, maybe we'll go in a different direction.

54:13So I sort of think it's 50 -50 whether you would have ended up with Kamala or someone else. But even if it was Kamala, she would have then had to go through that trial by fire. She would have, it's just like anything else, you put in your reps, you get better at it. She would be a more effective and better politician if she had had to go through that adversarial primary process. So I firmly believe they'd be in a much better place. Obama was unhappy with black brothers for not sufficiently supporting Kamala. Yeah, how about that? There's a lot to say about that. So there's a good bit of polling at this point that indicates there has been some shift among all men actually, but specifically among working class, black and Latino men, some shift away from Democrats towards Republicans.

55:04And, you know, to shout out one of those mainstream outlets, your time stood a deep dive into both the polling and also what's going on here, right? And none of the answers they came up with were Democratic politicians aren't lecturing them enough and scolding them enough about how they're failing. That was not one of the answers that they came up with. But there was a piece, there were a number of potential rationales. One of them though, I thought was really significant, really important, which is that when people voted for hope and change with Obama, and especially when black Americans felt like, okay, having a black man in the White House means that my interests are going to be represented in a way that they never have been.

55:51And then they're, I'm going to say nothing good, and you know, Obamcare improved things marginally, et cetera, et cetera, but nothing really fundamentally changed. And so there's a large percentage of black men and Latino men who say that they don't believe that Democrats keep their promises. And I think that's an important part of the story of how the Democrats have started to erosion in some of these key groups where, you know, Democrats are still overwhelmingly going to win Black voters, including Black male voters. It's still a question mark whether some of these polling trends really manifest on election day, et cetera, et cetera.

56:28But I do think that the failure to, you know, really offer and fight for a concrete economic agenda that again goes to those class interests over the racial identity interests has been a major failure of the Democratic Party and is open up space for another message from the Republican Party, one that I wildly disagree with, right? I do think that Trump in particular just loves to demonize immigrants and blame immigrants for every problem, but that's going to be a lot more compelling if you're not offering an answer on the other side. So I think is it the groups that we serve on the Harris -Waltz campaign funding website?

57:15And it's a list of every group in the world, except for men. And then there's another one which is a bunch of proposals and there's different examples. And it's like a black woman in a hard hat on a construction site. and it's a blob. And that group, not even Black men, there's just no men, no men at all on that. So it really does feel like I've had a number of conversations, Richard Reebes, if you know who that is, from the American Institute boys and men. Yeah, I do, we interviewed him as well. Yeah, he's very insightful. Phenomenal guy, but this election very much seems to have, at least on the left of the aisle, forgotten men.

57:47Well, there was the White Dudes for Harris organizing call. I don't know if you were on that. I wasn't on a head of few friends that were on. But I am actually curious for your view here, you know, you're more of the expert in the bro sphere of a. Correct. If there's any expertise, I've got it. Of what's going on because there's, you know, obviously there's a large gender gap. I think that the gender divide in this election may be the most profound one over, you know, perhaps any other identifying characteristic. I think part of that certainly is abortion being such a central message, but you also see the way that the Trump campaign is really playing into that, both with their media appearance choices, also with just the vibe at the RNZ Aminhole Cogren up there in Dana White and whatever, like playing into almost like a camp version of masculinity.

58:34But yeah, I wonder what you make of what's going on there under the surface. I think it's going to be very difficult to get men to feel supportive or welcoming when So much of their sex is sort of demonized in one way or another. And even if you can't point your finger to the precise Harris ad campaign that happened, there does seem to be a lot of sort of men bashing that happens on the left, whatever that means. However you want to define it, there often seems to be a sense of male privilege and sort of the diminishment of the issues that men have. Like I haven't heard anybody, not one, and this is both left and right, talk about male suicide.

59:16And Richard was telling me about the most recent set of stats that they've got out of the Institute for Boys and Men, which was if men had taken their own lives at the same rate as women from 1999 until today, there would be half a million more men here. Jesus. Which is more people more men than died in World War II. So it's like, it's just such an obscene number of people. And I don't know, there just seems to be, you don't feel particularly welcome by the left at best you feel like not demonized and then sometimes sort of outright do, especially if you're sort of a white guy at the top of the the privilege hierarchy.

59:54But then again, what were we talking about before that nobody's, nobody's discussing class? It feels strange to me that, you know, whatever appalachian or Cumbrian or sort of north east of the UK and person. Some guy is like, yeah, yeah, please tell me again about my like white male privilege that I've got. It just seems this the purity spiral doesn't seem to be particularly useful anymore. And I think that people are kind of they've got fatigue around that kind of puritanical approach to victimhood hierarchies. I think there's something to that. I will say I think that Kamala has done better than Hillary in not obsessing over Or Elizabeth Warren famously had a plan for rural, black, disadvantaged farmers and really slicing into these very specific racial or other identifying characteristics group.

1:00:51And she did just put out a plan that I find really important about that. Did you see the crypto one? The black met, yes. Yes, we got stuck with the crypto one. I will say that when she's got been asked, for example, about her own trailblazing status, she's very quickly pivoted to, this isn't about me, this is about you. She's diminished, diminished being black and diminished being a woman. Hillary really leaned into like, this is about me, this is about my ambitions, like it'd be cool if a woman, namely me. Well, what was that? I'm with her. I'm with her was the tagline, right? Exactly, yeah. And so I do think Kamala has done a lot better job in terms of that to mention, But that doesn't mean that there's not still, you know, quite a lot of overhang and this sense that, you know, issues that may be specific to men are not the focus of the Democratic party or there's just like not a sense of this is a place for us.

1:01:51If I put on, you know, if I take a step back from these two particular candidates parties, whatever. And I'll run this by you and you can tell me what you think. I think part of what is happening in society right now is in American society and Western society in general is people are much more precarious. It's very difficult to secure those basic trappings of middle class stability, the house, the education, the family, those things, even before the latest inflationary spiral. we're getting wildly more expensive over decades. I mean, housing is the main example, but college education, the price tag on that is insane.

1:02:36Healthcare, the price tag on that is insane. Child care, the price tag on that is insane. And so culturally, the classic view of the man is like the provider. The person who's going to be able to secure that lifestyle for themselves and their family. And so if over decades, both parties effectively collude to make that next to impossible, you're gonna have a lot of people who are unhappy and who are searching and who are manifesting, the higher suicide rates and all of those things that are very real. And so I think that if you just completely invisibleize that or just dismiss any man who explains that he's got, he has something that he's unhappy about or is struggling with or whatever, then, yeah, of course they're not going to come your way.

1:03:27They're going to search in a different direction. And you've had, I think this is maybe more of a symptom than a cause, but Hassan Piker talks about this. Basically, all of the sort of male hobby spaces have become more and more right way. So like if you're a gamer, right? There's a very right -wing gamer pipeline there. If you work out and are a gym buff guy, that space is increasingly right -leaning as well. As I mentioned before, most of the major podcasts, bro podcasts tend to be more right -linear. I suspect your audience is probably more right -leaning as well. And so whether that symptom or cause, I don't know, but that's the other thing is that's just the natural progression and pipeline for young men in particular, online pursuing whatever their hobbies and interests happen to be.

1:04:24Yeah, it's an interesting question. I've thought about it a lot. I'm sure you saw that famous Colin Wright image where he stayed in the same place and the left moved further left. And then the last like two and a half years has just been different polling and analyst companies trying to work out whether we have moved more left or we have moved more right or whatever it might be, there would be, I don't know where the data has come to settle on that. I don't even know if this is directionally correct, but I could see a world in which that was what men were all along and the political landscape has moved.

1:04:56So it's not that the target has moved, it's that the site that you're using to cite it with has changed. So that could be one potential reason for it. Another could be that, I don't know, I just, I was largely apolitical until like seven or eight I just had my head firmly inside of my own ass and was running a business and just doing stuff and then With no real sort of predisposition just came out and was like, okay, who speaks to me and I Do I just largely don't feel spoken to ever by the left like if it's the white guys for Harris thing which Like in many ways sounds like a struggle session like it felt like a fucking public a public humiliation ritual in lots of regards where you're talking about how we need to do this.

1:05:41It's never positive, it's never forward thinking, it's never inspirational or aspirational. And I understand that the right complaint to that in ways that are a bit cringey sometimes. But the most recent campaign ad that got cut for Kamala where it was like a black farmer in a hat going like, I'm man enough to vote for a woman and I'm man enough to know when I can change a carburetor and I'm man enough to do the rest of the thing. It's like that was so disjointed from pretty much everything left of center that I'd seen from a messaging perspective, that it just looked like what it was, which was kind of like shameless, hopeful, pandering to an audience that you think doesn't really care about you in the hopes that they're not going to remember that you've never spoken to them before.

1:06:20So yeah. I think contempt is a very, like, people feel that, right? Contempt is very powerful. And I think the Democratic Party, not just with regard to men, but with regard to any number of voting groups in the country, there has been an attitude, like from democratic elites, a sense of contempt. And, you know, my, my own view is that there are specific examples where it makes sense to have, you know, a policy that's targeted at a particular identity group or another. But we know if we go back and look at history at the policies that have made the biggest difference, for example, for black Americans.

1:07:07They've been universal policies. They've been actually increasing the minimum wage was one of the most successful policies at class base, not race based. That's right. And like I said, universal, right? So you mentioned the black male policy from from Kamala. One of the things was like more healthcare for testicular cancer or something like that. that's great, right? I certainly support people being able to get treatment for whatever kind of cancer they have, but we really got to slice and dice the body parts to be able to get universal alligway. Let's just have universal healthcare and then whatever kind of cancer you have or other illness you could get treated.

1:07:50And whatever group it is, especially when you have groups that are particularly marginalized in society, which certainly black men in particular, are still historic amounts of wealth inequality and these sorts of things. Those are the groups that benefit the most from universal policies like universal healthcare, lifting the minimum wage, increasing utilization through things like the pro -act, which just increases the level of democracy and power in the workplace, something that I think is really, really important. I focus a lot on. So if you pair those universal policies and perhaps some specific ones that make sense for different demographic groups, But with, you know, an attitude of acceptance and understanding and, you know, trying to meet people where they are, I think you're going to have a lot more success.

1:08:40And, you know, like I said, I do think Democrats will kind of recognize this. Obama's scolding, notwithstanding. You see, they're really trying to, you know, to send them out and talk in some of these male spaces, both Kamala and Tim Walls. I think they know that there's an issue there. And like I said before, I think Kamla's really toned down a lot of the like super identity focus like slicing and dicing type of policies, but you know these aren't these aren't things that get resolved overnight. It takes time to rebuild that trust with a community that feels like you just you know, you're not really for me.

1:09:16Do you think that the left's got a complicated relationship with God now? complicated. What do you mean? But by talking about it, you kind of play into what now has become a cliche sort of Republican, God country type position. I don't, I just haven't heard in the UK, for instance, we don't have a religious right. There's no religious right in in in Britain. That's that as a huge fuck off voting block, simply doesn't exist in the UK. So me coming over here and seeing, you know, an increasingly secular world across everywhere, but I haven't seen anything really to do with religion, except maybe like we're accepting of people of all faiths and so you like from a multicultural perspective, I haven't seen, and I imagine that because of the meme that is becoming increasingly prevalent of kind of the Bible bashing, right wing, you know, alligator swamp gun toad in person, that if you try and lean into the God -shaped hole in your campaign messaging, maybe it seems in some ways exclusionary to the group of people that you're trying to cultivate.

1:10:32That's why I meant by a complicated that it must be. I haven't seen much of it, and I have to assume that that's because it's difficult to thread the needle of talking to people on the left about God without seeming like you're making some sort of value judgment that's going to get you in trouble. I think you have to be, it has to be authentic. And if it's not, then stay away, right? And you know, there are more liberals, identifies, certainly, as like non -religious, then conservatives that means very likely you're going to have fewer, genuinely religious, democratic, elected politicians. And so, you know, it's funny, my husband, Kyle and I were talking about this just the other day, Bernie Sanders, who was Jewish, but not who will say himself, not like not particularly religious.

1:11:20He was asked about that back maybe 2016. And I was very upfront about like, listen, I'm not that religious a person, but here to me is what religion means is these like sort of core values of, you know, acceptance and kind of whatever he said, you know. And so So I think if you're not coming, I don't think everyone can pull that off. Like I think you have to be coming at it from a genuine place of like, this is my faith and this is important and this is how it informs me. And they're just probably, if you were messengers on the Democratic side who can pull that off, I'll tell you one person who does speak with that kind of religious moral authority is Dr.

1:11:55Cornell West. You know, that is very clearly authentic to him, to his tradition, to his ideology. But that's drain. I think it's fair to say that strain of leftism is somewhat less common than perhaps it once was, which is a reflection of the shifting society. I'm not myself religious. So if I tried to talk about it, like people would be like, what are you talking about? It was ridiculous. Like you don't care about this stuff. Speaking of the shifting society, did you see Anna Kasparian's sub -stack post? I did. What do you make of that? I like Anna, you know, and I have always had like a friendly relationship with her.

1:12:35You know, I, I guess I need to know more. I don't think that there's a lot of accusations being thrown. She's a grifter and she's doing the same thing that like, you know, Dave Rubin did, the same grift, Jimmy Doherty, whatever, pick whoever you want her, you know, to go back to the religious point like Russell Brand getting accused very credibly of rape and then doing this very demonstrative, Christianity, conversion is like okay. But I guess I'm a little bit confused about what where exactly she is. And it seems to me that as she's self -described her political evolution, which you know, it's fine for people to evolve their views, etc.

1:13:19It actually has put her more in line in some ways was sort of like the core Democratic party. So if I had to characterize Anna's views based on, you know, what she said publicly and what was in the sub -stack post, et cetera, it seems like she still has some like leftish views on social safety and that stuff, which, you know, you're definitely more likely to get on a Democratic party than the Republican party. And then she's moved right or is more vocally right on things like crime in the border. And the Democratic party, I mean, Kamala Harris has been running this very aggressive, like, border -hawk campaign and tried to pass this very aggressive border -hawk bill as well.

1:13:59So from what I can tell, it just makes her more actually in line with where the Democratic Party is. So I don't know. That's, I don't impute any, like, negative motivations. I think it's fine for her to shift. I'm just, like, a little bit still trying to figure out where she is exactly. I think people have got concerns around Kamala and the border because, again, like, you've been in power for so long. And it does seem like a, I mean, the vice president can't really do anything. Let's let's be real like they're having real power. But, but she not the borders are. What does that mean? What other word is that actually can I'm pretty sure it was retconned out of a New York Times post or something like that in retrospect.

1:14:38Yeah. I mean, listen, the thing is, I don't agree with the way the Democrats have positioned themselves. Personally, I'm in favor of a controlled border and a lot more legal immigration, but like a lot more legal immigration. So I think that the democratic messaging, which is just basically embrace the Republican frame of like immigrants are bad period end of story, I think that that's been a political and a moral failure. But you know, they genuinely did try to pass this bill that was very hawkish and abandoned in all of the previous, previous democratic commitment had been, we'll do the tight security, but we also want to path to citizenship.

1:15:21It's scuttled all of that, added a bunch new border agents, et cetera, et cetera. So they really did try to pass that, and Donald Trump really did try to stop it. So, you know, if that's your thing, if you're looking for the Democrats to move right on the border, like congratulations, they already have. Crystal Ball, ladies and gentlemen, Crystal, I appreciate you. It's fun to get to hear a different perspective, and I love your guys' show. I think it's... Thank you. What you do is really, really impressive. Where should people go? Don't want to keep up to date with the stuff that you've got going on?

1:15:49That's a good question. Just go to breakingpoints .com, you know, YouTube channel, whatever. If you want to get angry at me, you can look at my Twitter feed. But I want to thank you for inviting me on and the, you know, the back and forth. I really enjoyed it. You know, I hope your audience doesn't hate me too much, but I've had fun here. They won't. I appreciate you.