Bernie vs. the Robots

28:03And hopefully the day will come when Israel will elect people who understand that we need to they need to be working with their neighbors and not just simply trying to dominate them in terrible ways. What do you say to to younger people, especially younger Jews who now feel, you know, they they grew up seeing in Israel led by Netanyahu. They've watched these atrocities unfold over the last few years, and it's led them to believe the problem just isn't Benjamin Netanyahu, that there's something fundamentally wrong about the project of Israel. I don't have a magical answer to that right now. But right now, what I am trying to do is to make sure that the United States government is not complicit in the horrific acts of the Netanyahu government.

28:52We can talk about, you know, where we go from there. But that's where I am right now. What do you think if you saw that 20-something Bernie Sanders on a kibbutz and you said, hey, 60 years from now, I'm going to be fighting in the Senate against the robots? Well, it's kind of—and by the way, I will tell you when I was, you know, I don't know how much you know about the history of the kibbutzim formed by, you know, Jews who left the anti-Semitism of Europe. But when I was, these were very, very progressive entities. Women, you know, it was democratically owned and controlled. Women had rights that they didn't have in the United States.

29:33Were leaders in a way that was not true. Older people were playing an active role. It was an interesting and novel model, which I happen to believe in. But obviously, that is not what Israel is about today. And going from where I was as a kid to being a United States senator dealing with these issues, it's been a long journey, to say the least. Senator Sanders, thanks for your time. Good to talk to you. Thank you, John. Thanks to Senator Sanders for joining us. When we come back, I talk to Peter Hamby.

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33:21Peter, welcome back to the pod. Good to see you. Good to see you, John. All right. So I want to start with your piece on political violence. You wrote, Democratic elected and other party leaders vehemently condemn political violence all the time, but many on the left have become too comfortable celebrating violence or bad luck that befalls their Trumpian enemies. They are too loose with their language, too cozy with conspiracies that can lead to a dark place. Now, you're very clear in this piece, which you wrote after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent Center, very clear about the ways in which the right looks past Trump's calls to violence, exploits tragedies to target the left.

33:55Thank you for saying that. But even still, I am sure there are people hearing this and thinking the most powerful person on the earth, encouraged an insurrection, seeks to jail his enemies, celebrates the deaths of people like Robert Mueller and Rob Reiner, and you're talking about random people on the internet. So what are you seeing and why do you think it's important? I think the phrase random people on the internet actually matters, first of all. And I do want to say thank you for saying that, acknowledging that part of the piece, because I felt like I wrote 10 paragraphs about Caroline Levitt mischaracterizing or lying about how various people, Hakeem Jeffries, used terms like warfare, quote unquote, to refer to redistricting, the redistricting wars.

34:35I mean, We've both been in politics for a long time. People use terms like combat or murder-suicide or just violent martial terms. This comes up in sports commentary all the time. Shakespeare was familiar with metaphor as well, I think. Yes, yeah. And I consider Hakeem Jeffries the Shakespeare people that do the alphabet. Yeah, I do too. I consider the loss of people who do the alphabet. He would like that reference. I think that the random people on the internet thing matters. And I thought about this with Jon Favreau, other Jon, who, after Charlie Kirk was killed, noticed, yes, random people on the internet, random TikTokers celebrating his death.

35:13And even as I was walking in here, Taylor Lorenz posted a tweet, or maybe not a tweet, maybe a blue sky or a thread, that people are using the sound of Charlie Kirk getting shot the gunshot to do quick cut edits of outfit changes and that just again diminishes i think what what happened and like you don't have to like charlie i don't this is our thing john i know coming in here like this is a founding principle of crooked media and i feel like this came from john lovett brain which is the dc media's tendency to both sides thing that is not me and for the people listening i'm not that journalist um but i was there in the ballroom And part of it, too, is I've read polls, right?

35:58Like in the first Trump term, obviously in the Obama years, you know, people blamed Trump and Republicans for the crazy, for the conspiracy theories. Voters did. um npr had a poll i think in 2017 saying 70 of voters blame trump and republicans for the toxicity in our politics and you know there was a moral and intellectual high ground i think long in the democratic party there hasn't been widespread political violence coming from the left since the 70s with the weather underground black panthers etc there's obviously been anti-government violence you've got like black block antifa types and whatever but there has been an uptick in partisan motivated, not just violence, but plots.

36:42There was somebody who showed up at the Capitol last year wanting to kill Pete Hegseth. That person was arrested. There's obviously two of the three assassins, attempted assassins on Donald Trump sounded like they had left-leaning political views. And again, back to the random people on the internet thing, it's not coming from Democratic politicians. It's not, it's really not. Now there's like Jasmine Crockett posted conspiracy theory the other day that the attack on the Washington Hilton might have been a false flag or whatever. The problem is the diminishing power of people like me and the mainstream press and the diminishing ability of normie politicians to, you know, get out there in the information ecosystem and have people hear them.

37:25That stuff is being replaced just by noise and slop on the internet. And it does seem like to me, and I think the evidence in the polling bears this out, that, you know, liberals and progressives. And by the way, some of these people might just be fake bots. They might be, you know, J.D. Vance likes to totally, in the right, completely exploit, you know, even the fringiest thing that you found on the internet and pretend it's like the mainstream view of the Democratic Party. And I make clear in the piece, as you read, Democrats aren't the ones saying this. It is, though, kind of ambient on the internet.

38:00And I think, I actually wanted to ask you about this the michelle obama they you know when they go low we go high thing that's that feels dead and gone and like millennial cringe at this point in the second trump term there has it has been celebrated that like we're going to fight dirty uh it's and i'm not i'm not trying to be civility police either dude at all but like people just feel like okay we're going to play on their terms get in their sandbox we're going to throw punches call names and then you know then maybe maybe Maybe you end up with a guy who's got a screw loose, who hears all this stuff on the internet and thinks, I've got to go kill the rapist, fascist, pedophile in the White House.

38:40I just think that it's easier to hear the crazy stuff that the algorithms have poured gasoline on than it ever was. And you just hear it more on the left than I think you used to. Yeah, it's like there's so many parts that you have to tease out, right? And there's a big distinction. It isn't coming from the vast majority of Democratic politicians, right? And there is just a distinction between how responsible elected Republicans are, including the president, versus how responsible elected Democrats are. Even this week, we saw what is obviously a ridiculous prosecution of James Comey, the number of Republicans refusing to criticize that or openly embracing that.

39:18People go, members of Congress saying, well, look at all the other bad things Jim Comey did, right? It is distinct from political violence, but embracing the jailing of your political enemies on specious reasons is adjacent to a politics in which people can celebrate political violence. But the challenge is most Americans deplore political violence. All the mainstream politicians on the left can deplore political violence. 95 % of people say the right thing. then the next day 100 of people spend the day talking about what the five percent said and how heinous it is and how it's actually justified and all the rest you know we at crooked media i i feel like we take some flack from all directions for this but we obviously denounce republicans when they try to exploit political violence we also uh try to uh go after what we see people when we see people justifying it.

40:13John, as you mentioned, did that as well in the piece. But if everybody but a few are doing the right thing, but we end up talking about what the wrong thing is, like, I don't know what the right thing, how do you respond in a media environment like that, in which we try to model best behavior, the Democrats say the right thing, but you have Republicans that are going to pull out the worst comments from the internet. You have an algorithm that's going to elevate the most exciting and morally depraved comments. Like, what do we do? Okay, I agree. There's a problem. What do we do? Yeah. Well, that's getting you to say that.

40:47I know, I mean, you're a sophisticated thinker about this stuff. So it is important to say that there was a problem. And I want to say this isn't just my feelings. This is me being a hack political journalist. I should point out also in the piece, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has measured this and has kept track of incidents, 2025 was the first year ever that left-wing violence and plots and or plots surpass right-wing violence and or plots say that's only eight plots that's only a plot and this is another thing i need to say um again like the left was there was no violence no plots for like 30 years most of the actual deaths from political violence in this country over the last 30 years have come from right-wing political violence and we're talking like in the hundreds okay and so yes the baseline for democrats and the left whatever the coalition is was very low it just has ticked up and i but i think you're though right john i remember when i worked at cnn back when you were in the white house in the 2010s there was this like do you remember watching like cable news in that era and cnn where i worked or whatever they like a random republican state legislator in missouri would say something loony about abortion or something racist about Obama.

42:05And we would all elevate it. We'd be like, this is an example of the Republican Party being nuts. And while the Republican Party does have a tendency to accommodate, and by the way, this is just history, you know, the Birchers and the conspiracy theorists and whatever. You'd hear from someone on Capitol Hill, like someone from like John Thune's office, like, why the fuck are you talking about this random guy? in Missouri. And so that is a absolute attentional problem that the press has and kind of always has. By the way, since then, that random state senator in Missouri is now probably on Capitol Hill in the mainstream of the Republican Party.

42:48I just think it is what you guys do. It's that you have to call it out and say there's no room for it. And the other thing we're talking about isn't just violence it is the conspiracy theorizing uh and those two are not the same but they are connected you know the people who i think tend to commit acts of violence in the name of politics like seize on conspiracy theories they do and i noticed this on snapchat when i put i work at snap and like posted on snap i had a bunch of people in my comments being like fake stage whatever but it's not we don't know that those people are even democrats they could just be some teenager like sitting in their basement somewhere.

43:29But this has been happening. Again, this gets to the higher intellectual standard that I think Democrats used to hold themselves to. In Obama's term, at some point, some press conference in the tan suit era, it might've been like Ed Henry. It was like in the White House briefing room. And there was the latest outrage of the day. Whatever somebody wanted Obama to be outraged about. I think it was Ed Henry said, Mr. President, why any more outrage? And I tried to look this up before coming in. I couldn't find it. Someone listening, please find it. It's probably in Favreau's encyclopedic brain. But Obama looks at him and goes, because I haven't read the briefs.

44:07And that was Obama being a lawyer, but it was also just a smart person who hewed closely to facts and didn't want to spout off on something where he didn't know the baseline information. And we've come a long way on the internet since then like social media has rampantly changed how people's uh instincts when it comes to responding gathering facts and you know i think that's hurt everybody it's hurt everybody across the board and and um you know i just think that uh you see it more now on the left than you used to i sting out that article with a quote from isaac asimov who was a became a big Democrat later in his life, hated Nixon, like just a raging Democrat.

44:51And he said like the anti-intellectual strain in this country was always on the right. And liberals would fight ignorance with knowledge and conservatives would fight knowledge with ignorance. There's a lot more ignorance out there, man, on the left now. I'm sorry. There just is. And like, maybe I'm just being idealistic about, you know, the great thinkers of the American left and what they cared about compared to the right. But it just feels like the fever swamps of the internet are just grabbing otherwise normal people and yanking them in. And it's depressing to me. Yeah. I don't know. It's hard to be nostalgic for how we used to have information.

45:32Look, I see it too. And I do think it's more than just a few random people. There is something that has happened and it isn't coming from the politicians. I do think there's a bigger shift. And I think it's important, as you pointed out, political violence in our country still is very, very rare. And so I feel like there's these two ideas you have to have in your mind at the same time, one being that we can't allow acts of violence by individuals who are united, regardless of ideology, by a willingness to do violence, right? That's the most important thing about a mass shooter, about the person that shot Charlie Kirk, this person, the person that shot at Gabby Giffords, right?

46:16That they are willing to go to this extreme and do violence. And sometimes their rationales are cogent. Sometimes their rationales are nonsense. It's the act of violence that unites them. And there's something rising, whether it's people willing to shoot up a school, people wanting to go out a blaze of glory. And we cannot arrange our society around that. We can't allow that to warp our politics too much because it is so rare in our society. But at the same time, like it does seem to be like an emergent property of the amount of vitriol, hate, lack of empathy, cruelty on the Internet and beyond.

46:58I think that Trump is both a cause of and a symptom of. And I struggle with how you think about those two things. But the comfort that people have, right, whether it's the shooting of the United Health Care CEO or the killing of Charlie Kirk, that is morally wrong before you even get to whether it will encourage future violence. It said something really ugly about our politics and our culture. And I do think that that is real. Yeah. So that's the thing I struggle with. There's something else interesting. I just – this is an obvious thought, but I just thought about it. when you think about luigi you think about the butler shooter we don't know his politics um and the guy from the hilton um all these people and and the charlie kirk shooter are young and like obviously there's the the idea of the school shooter and the serial killer and the lone wolf killer out there you tend to be white men but all of these examples are people who grew up online we grew up online but like in middle school and high school i just had aol like these people grew up with phones in their pockets and so that they have so many more touch points to dark places on the internet or but in dark places that's sort of what i'm talking about it's that you know like jennifer welch on the i've had a podcast the other day was entertaining these conspiracy theories about how trump was like this was a false flag so he could develop ballroom i'm not saying she's spreading hate speech but like that's one of the ascendant podcasters on the left like i just there aren't any real epistemological boundaries i feel like at this point and you know you can be a liberal and listen jennifer welch or this or go on a twitch stream or whatever um but all of those young people did they like you said i'm not being nostalgic for an old media time necessarily i'm just like I call myself a student of media history but they don't know a time of like monoculture Walter Cronkite anything there's no shared facts and like all you know it just the conspiracy depresses me yeah like the conspiracy theory embrace that we see across the board I do think there's something about some people think it's just fun by the way like I have friends who like conspiracy theories are fun yeah there's something about the way in which the internet encourages you that we're all being encouraged to embrace easy and quick comfort across our lives.

49:29And social media does that, right? Like you don't have to have any discipline of attention whatsoever. You can just get a jolt of something fun, something funny, something outrageous, whatever. Get a quick like hit of an endorphin or an emotion. You don't have to leave the house to see a movie. You can just stay in bed, whatever. You can have food come to your house. Like we have, we're very, we're easy, easy to satisfy discomfort, uncomfortable with any kind of discomfort. And when there's something horrible that happens, like the killing of Charlie Kirk, in which you, I think, morally are called to denounce the killing of someone you found reprehensible, that tiny bit of friction, that tiny bit of discomfort, the whole, there's a whole algorithm that's telling you, you don't have to feel that anymore.

50:16And the same thing with someone trying to assassinate Donald Trump because of views you might agree with. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way you didn't have to sit with that for even a moment? Well, guess what there is? Because it turns out maybe it was staged. and we live in a crazy world in which there were legitimate news stories that in Hungary, Trump's ally, there was a plan to stage an assassination attempt to help Viktor Orban in the final days of the election. That is real reporting about something real that very well could have happened in the world. There's also a conspiracy theory that Trump wouldn't leave office if he lost.

50:51Of course, of course. And there was a conspiracy theory that a powerful cabal of abusers were protecting Jeffrey Epstein. Like a lot of people have come to believe that conspiracy theories had some merit. And the truth is the great conspiracy theories always do begin with a kernel of truth in them or a lot of the great ones do. So I understand like where that impulse comes from and I understand how the internet feeds it. Yeah, I just think that it is incumbent upon Democratic politicians to try so hard to keep the, what was Ernie in the trash can? Like whatever, just like push it down. Like Mark Kelly came out with the, was that Ernie?

51:38Oscar was the grouch. Oscar, right? Ernie's, or Bert and Ernie. They're just a happy gay couple. Oscar was the grouch. Yeah, I see. Sorry, no offense to the happy gay couple. No. Mark Kelly put out, I mean, who cares what Mark Kelly thinks, but like a sub-step. I care. Sure, I care. I care what Mark Kelly thinks. I care. and I think you said the other day on this podcast referencing Chris Murphy talking after the United Healthcare murder. I forget the anecdote. Why did this come up? I think like Nate Silver wrote about it that he sort of said like I acknowledge why people like hate insurance companies.

52:10What did Chris Murphy say? I don't remember. I was referencing people who had, I was referencing that someone I think like a prominent conservative had said that the shooter at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, his rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of Chris Murphy as if that's an indictment of Chris Murphy. Got it, got it. That's what I was referring to, I believe. I think, I don't want to pair, like miscast what Chris Murphy said, he's probably listening. But again, the press certainly has less power than we used to. And, you know, maybe wrongly, the press was the arbiter of common decency for many decades in this country.

52:45but you know politicians are akin to where people get a lot of news now influencers creators they're famous people on the internet that's who they are and they have a responsibility to call it out when it happens it's just really hard like again this is in a leaderless party you know what like attention matters getting attention matters this is one of my beats like roe connor can call it out Chuck Schumer can call it out. Alyssa Slotkin can call it out. But, you know, which random normie in Ohio is listening to any of those people? Well, look, I think sometimes in our politics, we treat Democrats like the protagonist with agency and Republicans are the villains who will do what villains do.

53:28I sometimes think we do the same thing with people on the Internet now that, of course, Democratic politicians are going to say the same thing. But there's nothing we can do about the influencers. But influencers have responsibility. And I think part of this is, I think, as— There are some insane YouTube tiles out there, man. There are some wackadoodle ones. But the—I don't know. I think sometimes we have to—if the people who are going to be helping to shape what people view as the kind of bounds of appropriate political discourse, if that's not going to be coming from politicians or mainstream media, if it's going to come from people on the internet, then that comes with responsibility.

54:05You know, like in 2024, I think a lot of people felt like you had people in the kind of manosphere, the kind of independent kind of right adjacent podcast world embracing their power, but not their responsibility, right? Their power to influence, their power to get big people on, their power to reach tens of millions of people, but not their responsibility. Yeah, they're just an unfrozen caveman lawyer. They don't know what's going on. Right. Yeah, yeah. I'm just a big chicken, you know, I'm just a big chicken. but you know what's funny about that I have some data on this this week the AP came out with a poll about media habits and it's a really interesting poll because they also poll teenagers but all the elite sort of things that we do as former DCers and political junkies listen to podcasts subscribe to newsletters I'm trying to think of some other ones oh pay for subscribe to news vast majorities of Americans don't do those things they really don't and by the way podcasts are a little different because they'll also watch it on YouTube or whatever.

55:06But the one thing that has really popped is influencers and creators. For a long time in these polls, could be Pew, could be AP, that asked people how they got their news. Social media was just sort of an umbrella term. That could be Snap, it could be YouTube, it could be Meta, whatever. It could be clips of mainstream content, by the way, as well. Totally. But they actually asked specifically about influencers and creators. And near majorities of Americans say they get news from influencers and creators. now and that's a huge shift in just a few years and so that gets to what you're saying about responsibility influencers and creators are now on the par on par with according to this poll local tv news radio terrestrial radio still matters search engines still matter uh way more than like ai um and like television and so like that's just really really taken off and i agree with you you've seen that with theovan and andrew schultz after the election when you know they're deporting uh rounding up and deporting people and separating mothers from their children uh or whatever doge i didn't vote for this um because i was just playing the humble unfrozen caveman lawyer uh but they have i i think they're becoming more responsible actually at least in terms of acknowledging their power these people were at the inauguration for the president united states and but and i and i i do think that we were due for a similar turn on the left of people with big platforms, you reach a big audience, viewing a responsibility.

56:35And we're here and we try to have honest conversations, but I think part of what being responsible is you try to be honest, critical where you think it's helpful, critical maybe where you think it's unhelpful, but needs to be said at times, but view what you're trying to do as more than just saying what you happen to to think or feel in that moment, right? Like that's what I think the difference is between what Obama did in that press conference you're talking about and what a lot of members of Congress do every time a camera comes in front of their faces, which is just take a moment and say, you know what?

57:11I'm gonna take a beat and make sure that I'm sharing good information or like interrogating a bias for one moment. Or knowing that even if I feel something in the moment that I believe is true, I know that I have a responsibility to my audience to not become a tool of the right. Yeah. I also think I really want to pay you guys a sincere compliment. And I'm friends with you. We live in the same city. We socialize. I get that. I still listen to this podcast despite knowing how personally annoying each and every one of you is because you are willing to interrogate collective assumptions on the left.

57:49You are willing to tangle with those ideas. you know we saw it this week with the ken martin interview but you you guys frequently will have people on and i i think this a lot about um a variety of left-leaning media um you don't just tell people what they want to hear you tell people sometimes sometimes maybe not as much as other news organizations what they need to hear and i think that's really important because I do think that maybe this is the Obama, you know, example, but like wrestling with ideas is like really good. It's really good and healthy and not, there's just such blind partisanship now.

58:30And this is where I will say on both sides that, you know, the battle for ideas is hard. It's hard to inhabit, uh, not the middle, but it's hard to present nuance to people. That's why I wrote 10 paragraphs in that freaking Puck article before I could get to the point because I had to say over and over again, Trump inspired January 6th. Trump inspired mail bombers. The Trump Republican Party welcomed Nazis and liars and mainstreamed this poison. But, you know, social media has taken it to another level and other people are getting yanked into it. I think what we're talking about, and that's very nice of you to say, it is not my experience that there's a lot of blind partisanship on the left.

59:18My view of where we're at right now is actually - But sorry, blind negative partisanship. Negative partisanship, that's for sure. No, I agree with that. But what I was gonna say only is that I think like what we're circling, which I think relates to the conspiracy theories, the willingness to celebrate or kind of tolerate or kind of even just sort of minimize political violence. Like it's forbearance, which is just the idea of restraint and being like kind of willing to lose and willing to take a shot to your ego at times in politics. This is why us old millennials are the best generation. We are, you know what?

59:59We are the best generation. We are the best generation because - by george w bush continue we had debates in our dorms you know at georgetown we had something called red square which was a free speech zone i know that sounds anathema now but like you could have debates and interrogate things you didn't have social media poisoning it you know i don't know maybe that's an elite view but baby boomers went to the right gen x is the last redoubt of of donald trump right now well boomers by the way boomers are i wrote about this last year boomers have drifted to the left because boomers now are hippies boomers are our parents but so they still still hold on to some you know pluralistic values gen x is the bad one because they were alex p keaton like the thing that happens is your politics in your 20s like that's what it generally is later in life and so gen the gen x folks you know put aside all the rock music and pop culture like those were the alex p keaton and so yeah the gen x is really kind of moved to the right but then Also, some of the Gen Z has moved a bit to the right.

1:01:02And millennials are actually not moving to the right at the same degree over time as previous generations have. The millennials are holding out greatest generation. Thank you. All right. Hear that bro call? Yeah, whatever. What happened to him? All right. Before we go to break, I want to thank everybody who has become a friend of the pod subscriber. And if you haven't subscribed yet, please, please, please become a friend of the pod. Join this community. You get our special episode, Pod Save America Only Friends. That's where we really let loose with our Pod Save America episode that's just for subscribers.

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1:04:43All right, let's hit some more topics. Plattner, Janet Mills out. Political reported yesterday on calls from Democrats for Schumer to drop his involvement in the Iowa and Michigan primaries. What was your reaction to the Mills news and the general state of play in these primaries? Surprise, but not surprise. I think Mills got in late. Plattner got in what, last August, September, went super vile, raised a lot of money. Great vibes for the moment nationally for Democrats, you know, raging against the establishment. I am more looking forward than thinking about the surprise because he was up 33, 40 points in the most recent, I think Emerson had him up 33 at the end of april um this is a jump ball race like it's going to be very hard and they are grand platner does have baggage it's not even the the totem conf tattoo or whatever it's the reddit post i think we saw uh an article in the free beacon today which is an oppo dump for republicans um showing that platner you know paid for his house with a loan from his wealthy father they're not the VA like he said I just think there's lots of stuff there and by the way all this is to say he can still win Trump's at like 33 34 percent approval um I think Maine is tougher than certain states and here's why and again he can win a lot of times you win with a pure contrast and she's unpopular Susan Collins I think her own faves are like 57 percent um uh they gotta win there they got to win alaska they got to win ohio and iowa and all these places maine is the oldest electorate in the country so it's also not very partisan you've got a third of the state is independent john so um you know that helps someone like platner i think like i'm not from the system that could appeal you've got that main second congressional district which was represented by jared golden for a while who's a moderate and differently like platner's a lib golden was a moderate.

1:06:38Both have tattoos. But he won in Maine, too, which is a district Trump has won in the last two presidential elections by being just a purebred moderate, Jared Golden. So, you know, putting on Reddit that black people don't tip, that women shouldn't get so drunk that they get sexually assaulted. Honestly, I love this episode that I forget which content it was from Crooked Media, but Pfeiffer and Alex Wadner did a piece on this a couple weeks ago. And it was really interesting listening to Alex and I thought she was very sharp because I think a lot of the initial commentary supporting Plattner when jumped in the race was coming from men.

1:07:13And when these posts came out, not that Alex Wagner wouldn't vote for Graham Plattner versus Susan Collins, but like, I think women might be a little squeamish about this, about him in a race against a woman that, you know, has successfully won over and over and over again. Also brought some reporting to the show uh i learned from journalism some republican pollsters that they had 12 to 13 percent of uh susan susan past susan collins voters going for janet mills in this election so that plays to what schumer was probably thinking about like this is an independent older state and we need someone safe to run against someone who's been reliably re-elected so platner's got some work to do, I think, to reissue.

1:07:56He's a young millennial with tattoos, a history of inflammatory Reddit posts. We don't. Clearly, I think Republicans are sitting on more stuff. That's why I brought up the Free Beacon example. And he's got to convince voters in a state. It's like an old state. And that's it's going to be tough for him. But in this environment, Trump's approval ratings are absolute dog shit. That's why we're talking about Alaska. That's why we're talking about Maine. That's why we're talking about even Ohio and Iowa. We're in the homestretch here of the California governor's race. The two highest vote getters will move on to the general.

1:08:29Post-Smallwell, we've seen polls that show Becerra rising. CBS poll this week had Steve Hilton leading with 16, then Steyer at 15, Becerra at 13. Other polls have Becerra higher. Where's your head at on this race right now? I think someone smartly framed it this way to me. And look, nationally, you might not care about a governor's race. California matters. Gavin Newsom will set a tailpipe emission regulation and the rest of the country will follow like that's that's what california is so um yes these candidates are underwhelming someone compared to the 2020 presidential primary where you've got not just tom steyer once again uh spending a lot of money but you've got all these candidates who fail to catch fire they pop in certain moments and fade javier becerra is just sort of emerging the last four polls too independent i think and too sort of partisan have showed him climbing uh and having clear momentum steyer and katie porter having a very hard time connecting with high information voters there's their negatives are very high for all the money that tom steyer is spending he's they kind of are hitting a ceiling but sarah has kind of come from behind to go to the front i didn't quite get it either it kind of came out of nowhere organically he's not hasn't spent a lot of money on television i believe he spent he spent the money he has i think he's spent yeah he went up on tv like three three or four weeks ago at a key moment when he had dropped he right well i think as swallow was dropping before swallow drop he's up on the air yes and so he's up on the air at a moment where all of a sudden there's all these voters saying whoops yes and javier becerra is a boring person um javier becerra i talked to someone in the Biden administration about this other day.

1:10:11Kind of aloof as HHS secretary. Not incompetent, but just sort of like he's not lighting the world on fire. Okay. But he does have two things going for him right now in this governor's race, which is, but the primary is in June. There's a lot of confusion among voters. People don't like the choices and they're just kind of falling back on him, which is sort of similar to the Biden experience in 2020, right? you just you can win the primary at 23 % of the vote 25 % of the vote um I'm not saying it's totally the same um and he's Latino I mean a third of the state is Latino and I think the first part of that spot that went on TV about a month ago it wasn't like prop 50 it wasn't like Adam Schiff versus Katie Porter like we gotta stop Donald Trump it wasn't like Swalwell it was um my parents for immigrants.

1:10:59And it leads with bio and then it gets into, you know, working class, affordability issues, healthcare, prescription drugs. And so for all of the, forgive my term, lib slop that you see in some of these TV ads and campaigns, like just raging against Trump and trying to go after the hardcore college educated white MSNBC viewer voter, you know, he reaches a different kind of voter than just that. And that's the thing, like Porter, Steyer, Swalwell, there was no data suggesting they had any numbers of people of color in this state. And so Becerra is just emerging as like a safe choice right now. Steyer's going after him already.

1:11:43He's not a great debater. There's two debates coming up this coming week, I think CNN and NBC. So we'll see if he can make it all the way to June. But he is the one with momentum right now, but it's sort of like boring momentum. I don't even know the word for it. Yeah, I know. I watched the last debate. There was another debate this week. Oh, it was terrible. The first debate. And there was a moment where they were all asked if they would support a per mile tax for electric vehicles because California has a very high gas tax. I think it's like 60 or some odd cents a gallon, maybe a little more now.

1:12:18And so there's this idea that, well, if we switch to electric vehicles, then no one's going to be paying for the roads, even though California has the worst roads in the country. and we pay the highest gas tax in the country. And so the question was, would you support a per mile tax for electric vehicles? And it got to Becerra and Becerra said, well, it's definitely something we ought to perhaps take a look at. If that's something the voters are interested in, then I could get behind it. And then you go to, I think it was one of the Republicans and they're like, you're gonna make everybody log all their miles?

1:12:49Hell fucking no. And I was like, that makes it, like there's like the passion on that stage. I talked to Katie Porter about this in my conversation with her, that California isn't an emergency. We are losing people. We are losing our industries. And the only people up there that seem to have fire about it were the Republicans. The right-wing sheriff guy was, like, talking about the humanitarian crisis of homeless people. And, like, again, his ideas are probably not great. But, like, he had passion. And you nailed it. I was meant to say this about Becerra, actually. None of these people have big ideas.

1:13:23Because Steyer's like, we'll break up the utilities, pass a billionaire's tax, whatever. Like, there was a question. This was a moderator issue, actually, in the CBS debate where they said, what are the first things you would do in the event of an earthquake? Like, as governor, you're governor, you're in that seat. What are the three things you're going to do? You know, the thoughtful political leader would have said, well, like, let's think bigger. Like, how do we not get in that position in the first place? But they were all very content to be like, Becerra included, well, we'll call in the first responders.

1:13:52and I'll call the federal government and then we'll figure it out. You know, like just, that's the other thing. Beyond all the charisma and the horse race stuff that has characterized this race, nothing exciting. Like big ideas are powerful. I mean, I know Bernie's on this episode too. Like there's, Steyer's trying to sort of be in that lane a little bit, but everyone else is just sort of like, Katie Porter is a bit too. We'll figure it out. Well, this is where I press Katie Porter on as well, because she's talking about this plan to exempt$100 ,000 from, or people making up to$100 ,000 from the state income tax.

1:14:27And she has a way to pay for it. And fine, like help people, California is very unaffordable, but like the problems are so kind of up river from that. Like the reason California is unaffordable when it has, like the income tax rate hasn't gone up. What's gone up is the cost of housing. What's gone up is the cost of living in our state. what's gone up is and what's gone down is the availability of jobs for in hollywood and other industries and and you know i talked to housing by the way the housing conversation at least in the cbs debate i watch was infuriating i mean matt mahan at least was like here's what he did in san jose i want to build this many units tom steyer said the same thing to build housing but like that people just say like via ragosa we need to build more housing no shit yeah like i don't know there's just not there just weren't a lot of compelling ideas there.

1:15:14Yeah. It's been pretty frustrating, but I had a good conversation with Porter. I hope we get to talk to Becerra. And so I think I'm going to talk to Steyer next week. So we're going to talk to all those candidates. Last question. Why, hey, why'd they call it Puck? Is it after, is it after the Midsummer Night's Dream? Yes. Yeah, yeah. So it's a puckish, it's a puckish organization. It's a mischievous literary inspiration. Okay. But I think John John Kelly, who created Puck, very literate man and thought Puck would be an inspiration because we like to be a little mischievous, I guess, in what we do.

1:15:51Yeah, you're Puckish. Please subscribe, thank you. You as a person, I would have called you - How would you describe Puckish, the adjective? How would you define that?

1:15:59Mischievous is a very good word for it. I would say mischievous with a joyful quality. Aww. Is what I would say. I like that, my wife liked that, thanks. You're in, you know, a little stinker, you know, kind of energy. Peter Hamby, thank you so much. Good to talk to you. Good to see you, man. And that's our show. Thank you to Senator Sanders. Thank you to Peter Hamby. We will see you with a new episode on Tuesday. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad-free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to crooked.com slash friends to subscribe on Supercast, Substack, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.

1:16:32Also, please consider leaving us a review. That helps boost this episode and everything we do here at Crooked. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farrah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Cherlin is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Ben Hefcoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pellaviv, David Tolles, and Ryan Young.

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