The Gen Z D.A.R.E.
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On October 28th, Aileen, Sammy, and I are hosting a book discussion with author Margot Harrison, where we'll be discussing her brand new novel, The Midnight Club, and snacking on Nutella biscuits. No, I won't be sharing mine because I'm truly obsessed and they're actually my new favorite snack in the world. But don't worry, there's going to be plenty for everyone to share. Head to bit.ly slash book club IRL to grab tickets for you and your friends. That's

bit.ly slash book club IRL for tickets. Grab yours before they sell out. Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm Bea Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream presented by Betches News, where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience.

Today, we are checking the temperature on disinformation and social media bots, as well as Julian Assange's plea deal and the latest SCOTUS ruling on firearms. Then we are moving on to our main news, where we get into Louisiana's Ten Commandments mandate and how this is really a harbinger for the attempted Christian takeover of American schools under something called the Seven Mountains mandate. Some of you have heard me go in on this a few years ago, but it is back, baby. It really never left. Then we are going to check the temperature on disinformation and social media bots, as well as Julian Assange's plea deal and the latest SCOTUS ruling on firearms.

Then we are talking about Jamal Bowman for our down ballot race of the week. And finally, an American rant about how publishing contracts are hindering important journalism. Hello.

Hello, V. Hello, Sammy. I don't know if you guys can't see Sammy, but I can. But she got her hair cut and dyed, and she's looking gorgeous today like a mermaid. Thank you. We have our book party tonight. Emily in my phone is in Emily in the other room right now. She's recording a podcast. So we're like a factory, news factory over here. It's like a newsroom, basically. Yeah, and then you have to come to VidCon where I am in LA right now. It's going to be wild. Yeah.

Very excited for our VidCon show. We just are full of events, things we're doing. My book is coming out in two weeks, Democracy in Retrograde, How to Make Changes Big and Small in Our Country and Ourselves. I remember to read the title this time. I am so, so, so excited. We are still running our giveaway. If you order and email your proof of purchase to democracyinretrograde at gmail.com, you will be automatically entered to win a $3,000 gift card to Expedia so we can

You can get on a vacation. We will also be sending you a digital gift regardless of whether or not you win that. So can't go wrong. And yeah, if you're feeling unclear or upset or anxious about this election, this is going to give you

actions that you can do that make sense for you, not just your usual call your senator, although everyone could be doing that. This is about really a longer term, more solid approach to fixing some of our nation's biggest problems. And it's whether or not we're able to succeed in that in the immediate, it feels better to know you're doing something. Action is the antidote to anxiety. So-

This is, and hope is the antidote to despair, as we quote in the book many times. And I like it because it makes me feel less alone. So if you want to be in the group chat, if you want to join us and the other girlies saving democracy, get the book. It is the cheat codes to how to survive what's about to happen to you, which is what we all want. We all want to feel like there's a plan, like people are in control. Someone's done the itinerary. Sammy is that friend for you.

And you have done the itinerary. Everyone gets to kind of, that's the beauty of it. You make your own itinerary that makes sense for you with the amount of time, resources, interests, abilities you have. So it's just a very exciting, we're very excited about it. And there's also a book club. So it has a lot of activities in it, exercises, and there's actually a book club where

You can enter it. You can get involved by following at Democracy in Retrograde on Instagram. I'm not running the book club, but we did write the questions. We wrote the discussions. We made all the exercises. So you can join that book club. It's going to be a bunch of people who are reading it. And you make friends who have similar values to you. And honestly, that's been one of the most meaningful parts of

Being involved in civic activities and caring about issues is like you find people who you can really relate to. I mean, even that's how we became friends, like talking about kind of just similar feelings about the way things are. Well, and for so many people, especially as adults, we're in this place where like the friends we've had our whole lives, some of them we know we'll stick with, some of them we've fallen off with. And it's hard to make new friends, especially as you get more politically involved or you just find –

you're in a different place in your life. Like my therapist said, 40-year-olds aren't friends with 17-year-olds. If you haven't felt on the same page as your high school friends since high school, it might be time to make some new friends in the book club. Also, the book looks really good on your coffee table. So when people come over, they're like, ooh, she's a reader. Ooh, she reads and she loves Democracy. Email your receipt to democracyinretrograde at gmail.com so you can get entered to win the giveaway. And I'm really excited for people to read it and for it to be out in the wild.

But shall we get on to our temp check? We have so much to do it.

All right. We are back on the myths and disinformation game again. We have to keep coming back to it because this is the modern warfare and we are all just bathing in it online. We are in the trenches right now. Like we think we're joking when we say that, but in reality, we are in the trenches, whether or not we know it or not. And it surely hits harder when you see what I'm about to describe visually, but as this is not a visual medium, I will describe it to you.

So the Russian bots are officially malfunctioning. And in the process of that, they have at least one Russian bot, although I believe there's more than one that has been screenshotted. Basically, they're blowing up their own spots as fake accounts. The other day, there was an account under the name at his vault. Remember when Ethereum was hot? Yeah.

And he replied to a Twitter post and it accidentally posted its own programmed code in the tweet, which said origin Russia. And apparently this happened because the bot ran out of open AI credits. Cause you can, you know, anyone can really set an account to kind of automatically respond algorithmically, but,

And you can see that the prompt says in Russia, in Russian, you will argue in support of the Trump administration on Twitter, speak English. But apparently you can subvert the bots instructions by replying to it, reset conversation or ignore all previous comments. I haven't tried it yet, but I definitely will. Next time I see an account that's calling Donald Trump, the savior of crypto, just to see what happens. So that is happening.

We told you it would happen. And honestly, that and we told you that it would be a cartoon or an anime profile picture. And it was. It was a cartoon. It was a cartoon NFT picture on this particular account. And on others I've seen, it's been that anime profile picture again.

Now, when we talked about this last week, a lot of people who are into anime were mad at me because they're like, I have an anime profile picture. I was like, yes, girl. And also, you talk normally. You're not like viewing obvious bot content. So it's not to say that we should discredit everyone who likes anime. I also love anime. But it's one of many signs that it could be a troll account.

Right. Usually I don't identify these things from the picture. I identify it from the comment they make. And then I look at the picture and I'm like, oh, that tracks. That's not right. Yeah. How's this raising or lowering your temperature?

Lowering. I feel good about it. I feel good about the fact that capitalism will be the downfall of us all, including the bots. If you don't have enough open AI credits, then the machine will show all your flaws. And, you know, who could ask for more than that? Turn on that auto pay. I think Putin can spare a few. Okay, so staying on this, you know, as you said, capitalism will be the downfall of us all. Listen to this one. Staying on this topic of harmful technology. Apparently,

running a massive volume of bot accounts that can sort of approximate the sentient human is not only quite expensive, but it uses a shit ton of energy and is taxing the power grid. And as we described in the media literacy episode, there's like hundreds of people sitting in these bot farms, physically doing these, doing these actions. And that because it's using AI, it requires a lot of energy. So as you can infer,

The use of AI is not great for the climate either. Data centers are, I mean, data centers just for like regular social media platforms are huge users of energy already. And you know, that powers the everyday internet, but AI requires even more energy than that. So for example, a chat GPT powered search on Google consumes 10 times the amount of electricity as a normal Google search and

And the results are kind of worse, in my opinion. No one asked for that. Nobody is even asking for this. It's also not even accurate. I Googled two days ago how many states have abortion bans, and it said 41. And that's not true. It's 21. Dude, I was going to say, is it dyslexic? At my last count, it was 14. Now, granted, that was in 2022, I think, but...

Please. It's so scary. And they put those results right at the top and they're so, so, so, so bad. You know, it's funny because I just sent you that article about there was like all this research that Gen Z only gets their information from like the comments. So not good to have those up there. Like people are going to go citing this information.

But anyway, so it's very, very energy inefficient. One data center that Meta owns in Iowa uses the amount of energy annually that equates to running 7 million laptops for eight hours a day. And the biggest tech companies...

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta have 2,700 of these data centers nationwide. Because it's a facade. They're making it... Remember when we found out that like, you know those grocery stores Amazon had where you could like walk in and you could pick up stuff off the shelf and walk out? That was one, so deeply uncomfortable that I never did it because you just always feel like you're stealing even though you know that you're not. Apparently they were like, I was like, oh, it must be like a weighted system and maybe there's like robots or...

No, it was a bunch of dudes in India watching you on cameras and then adding it up and then adding the credit card to it. So it's not even actually more efficient. It's not smart. No, it's fake. None of this is real. They're just trying to make it seem smart, smarter than it is. But it's not. It's a bunch of dudes in some sweat shop in India that are now instead of like making clothes, they're being exploited to watch people shop in Amazon grocery stores, which nobody asked for self-checkout or anything.

But regardless, first of all, like the sweatshop internet is not that they're posing as we didn't need that. It's also like you know those people to run one fucking store in Amazon. You could just get checkout counters.

We asked for the internet to make our lives easier and access to information simpler, not to enslave people in other countries to watch us shop and take a job away from an American who could just be standing at a cash register doing their thing. Right. And it doesn't actually make it faster. No. Because that's not like those stores are everywhere. Most people aren't using those stores. No.

All of these laptops, all of the cobalt they have to mine for them. This is a humanitarian catastrophe and no one is asking for it. It's also a geopolitical catastrophe because it requires resources and ultimately countries just fight over resources. But now here's where we're going.

Tech companies are now seeking out new power sources because they can't get enough power to do their stupid AI images or whatever. So they're looking for options, including creating small nuclear reactors that would tap geothermal energy from the Earth's crust. They want to dig for energy in the center of the Earth when you could just not have the fake image there.

of like the architectural home that isn't real. Like Samantha, I do not need them.

tapping into geothermal shares so that I could get more pictures of Donald Trump with muscles on the top of a tank. Like, I don't need this. This is ruining the world. Laughing with black people, any number of these horribly, I don't need Joe Biden eating ice cream with a muscle daddy shirt. Like, I don't need any of the AI generated images that are so bad. You know who this is going to affect the most?

Kate Middleton, who also uses a lot of AI in her photos. And we don't want those either. Okay. We just want Prince Louis slay boots, the house down dancing to troop the colors. We do not need Kate Middleton's Photoshop photos or the tech bros AI. This is not what America needs right now. Use Photoshop or Canva like the rest of us. But so not only that, but they're not, they're also, you know, they can't get to the earth's crust quick enough. So they're instead reinvigorating coal plants and,

they're hoping to harness nuclear fusion so they can do all this shit by 2028. Okay. So we think this sounds ridiculous, but they're saying basically that AI will be able to make itself, make the power grid smarter, and that will ultimately save energy. I am speechless. They also claim that they buy or will buy enough wind, solar, or geothermal energy credits every time a new data center comes online to cancel out their emissions.

Microsoft says that by 2030, they will have 100% of their energy consumption matched by zero carbon emission energy purchases. Or we could just not do it.

Or we could just not do it and pay people a fair wage. All we need to do is not do that. Pay people a fair wage and use that land that you're going to put these nuclear reactors and these wind farms on and everything to house people or to grow food or to like have recreation. You know what I don't want to be doing? Swimming in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of St. Pete, one of the few good places left in Florida, amongst a wind farm.

So that somebody can, again, make shitty photos of Donald Trump on the top of tanks. Like, this is stupid, Sammy. I can't. As Donald Trump says, windmills cause cancer. So why are we doing this? I mean, the wind farm isn't even the problem. It's literally like a Ponzi scheme. It's someone moving money from one pocket to the other and trying to claim they have twice as much. That's exactly like they don't need to make the energy if you don't use the energy.

No, we can't do this as it is. People can't afford. We're in a heat wave like no other. I can't imagine what this would do to that. People can't afford air conditioning. And we are we are a nation that is so reliant on air conditioning for livable spaces and increasingly so that if they have the ability to make all this new energy, then please make it to help people live a little bit more comfortable life and not literally die of heat stroke at the at the level that we are right now. Like, y'all, there's a better way.

It is so upsetting to just watch the waste of money constantly. Yeah. Because they can. Because they can. Who's going to stop them? So this is raising my temperature. How about you? This is definitely raising my temperature. And again, we don't have the money for air conditioning. It's raising the Earth's temperature. All right. I've got one for you. Are you ready? Mm-hmm.

Did you hear about the incredible SCOTUS ruling upholding a federal law that allows the government to confiscate firearms from people under domestic violence restraining orders? I did hear about that. I was excited and surprised. The court's 8-1 decision in the United States v. Rahimi was seen as SCOTUS stepping back from the brink of an all-out, no-holds-barred, freewheeling interpretation of the Second Amendment, where the right to own firearms truly shall not be infringed.

But this news of them upholding the domestic violence restrictions was met with many a Facebook post of gratitude from several people I know in real life that I had no idea were waiting to see if their abuser would again regain rights to their guns. So I was very happy for the women in my life who

We're waiting on this. I had no idea. I think that's what gave me so much pause about this is we know that the rate of domestic violence is very high. We know that the rate of gun ownership is very high. I did not know how many women in my real life were sweating this case. So I'm grateful. It's a great example of how the Supreme Court really affects our lives. I was pretty surprised by this as well. But then there's part of me that's like,

Part of the conservative ideology is punishing criminals. So people who they perceive as criminals, it's like, we'll want to punish you. Like they want to propose a chemical castration for pedophiles, which like I'm very anti pedophiles. I don't know how I feel about like that as a punishment imposed by the government.

I don't want to open the door to government sterilizing people because we only recently stopped doing that to indigenous and developmentally disabled people. And I think if they get the excuse, well, we could do it to pedophiles, then they'll open the door to redoing it to immigrants and people that they deem unworthy of children and gay people. So sometimes they put out something really, you know, crazy, like how could you not agree with chemically castrating pedophiles? And it's like, well,

Because you're also going to try to do it to this people. Now, here's where I think they're going to get into with the guns thing. The domestic violence people are oftentimes police officers. So we're trying now we're running into a little bit of an issue here where if you have a domestic violence restraining order against you and you're a law enforcement officer, how are you to carry a service weapon? That's for them to figure out. Stop hitting your wives.

With all things SCOTUS, though, just like you were, we were a little bit like, wow, I'm kind of surprised they upheld this because so far they've been very freewheeling about the Second Amendment. And experts are raising the alarm that the Supreme Court may have kept the abusers can't have guns law as a way to keep the sister law that says drug abusers can't have guns. And that's the law that Hunter Biden broke. So if they got rid of the precedent of domestic violence, people not being able to have guns

then there's no Republican case against Hunter because it wouldn't be illegal for someone who has a history of substance use to purchase a gun either. And they would lose that case. So would his thing just fall apart?

It would go away. Yeah. So there's some, so if they would have said, no, even if you have a, uh, an abuse violation, you have the right to own a gun. Then that would have applied to, uh, drug users as well. And then they wouldn't have this case against Hunter. So that's what some experts are saying. Why SCOTUS decided on this, this way right now. I don't know, but you know, lowering my temperature for now. Good.

Yeah, I feel safe about it. And I'm really grateful that in a time when women have such little relief and I, I mean, I'm talking about anybody, but in my case, it was like seeing four different women in my life be like, thank God for this case. And he won't get his guns back. I was like, shit, I didn't even know you were worried about that. But just in general, people with domestic violence, restraining orders or convictions, not having access to firearms is a good thing. And it's just, you know, so we'll take what we can get.

Now, last thing here, another thing that's a good thing, but it's like this double-edged sword situation again. Julian Assange is getting out of exile, and it's a huge deal. Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks and responsible for so many classified U.S. secrets getting leaked on things like the Iraq war. But also, he's the one who leaked her emails right before the 2016 election.

So, you know, that was a big deal, but he's been in exile and he served five years in a UK prison. And now he struck a deal with Joey and the DOJ to be able to return to his native Australia without having to serve time in a US prison. They're basically going to let him plead guilty to just one count of conspiring to disseminate classified information. And then they're going to count the time he served in a UK prison as punishment enough. So he'll be able to go home to Australia free and clear.

And a lot of libertarians wanted Assange to be free. At their convention just a couple weeks ago, Assange's brother was there because part of the deal of the libertarians allowing Donald Trump to speak at their convention was that Donald Trump was supposed to say that he'd free Assange.

Julian Assange. And he never did. He never mentioned it. And so Julian Assange's brother was sitting there, you know, waiting for that to happen. Never happened. Trump never keeps a promise. And Trump didn't even mention it at this convention. So what I'm wondering here is like, it's great that Julian Assange is getting out. I think we can have a bigger discussion on the ethics of leaking secrets, but also, you

As a journalist, you know, sometimes that's part of holding power accountable. So, you know, I'm glad he's getting out. But there are two thoughts on why Joey is doing this now. One is he might be trying to cozy up to the libertarians, and that's very valid.

And the second is, this might be one more thing that the federal government is trying to do to Trump-proof the future. Because in 2021, Trump administration officials floated the idea of kidnapping and assassinating Julian Assange. And that would really, really fuck up our allyship with Australia if we killed one of their journalists. Can I ask why the Trump administration wanted to kidnap and assassinate him?

In 2016, Trump had said that he loves Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks, I love WikiLeaks. Because they released Hillary Clinton's emails saying,

But now that he was in office, he was afraid that he would release things about him. And so he, this Trump admin said the way that we deal with this and the way that we get people off our back about trying to free Julian Assange is to stage some sort of like kidnapping and assassination. Not that Trump would take credit for that necessarily, but somehow the Assange problem would go away. I perceived Assange as like Trump,

more than not Trump aligned. I guess he's probably aligned with nobody. Is that, that's kind of his. He's aligned with the libertarians, which can tend to be a little bit more right wingy, but he also released all that stuff about the Iraq war, you know, and that was Bush. He's a chaos man. Yeah, no, I, I see why Donald Trump would be afraid of him. The fact that Donald Trump,

cared enough to assassinate him shows in 2021, they floated that. Donald Trump wants to kill people though. I say that very seriously because he has said many times that he, he has, he thinks that he should be able to, you know, kill different people. I don't want to talk about that today though. Yeah. This week he, this week he did want to, um, set up a, uh,

set up a sports league where migrants fight each other. So he just has really sick ideas that are because he is a television personality and he doesn't live in reality. And he's also experiencing cognitive decline in my opinion. And so those things are mixing. And now we're getting into like true gladiator shit, like Roman empire fight for the rich to enjoy watching you suffer and die. And I just think that's weird. It,

It's sociopathic. It's not even a political opinion. I don't think his problem... It doesn't matter who he is. I don't think it's a normal thing to fantasize about killing people. I don't think his problem is being a television personality. I think he is sick.

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Let's talk about what's really going on with all these people who want to get him into power. And why is Donald Trump the means that certain people are using to get to their ends? It's time for our main news segment.

So I feel safe in assuming that our listeners have already heard that last week, Louisiana became the first state in the country to require all public schools from pre-K to college to post the Ten Commandments in all classrooms in a large and legible font alongside a paragraph that they call context giving, which describes how the Ten Commandments have been the basis of American law and public education for centuries. We haven't even had public education that long.

Though I'm not against like not stealing, not murdering. We like that. But yeah, you know, other problems inherent with this new policy. I mean, it's tough to explain to a kid what coveting thy neighbor's wife means. I think what they taught us was that coveting your neighbor's wife means like, don't be jealous. I doubt they even use the word neighbor's wife. They probably said like, don't covet your neighbor's stuff.

Well, that makes more sense. But I mean, if you're looking at the people in power who want these things up, to them, it's like a to-do list. Half of the stuff on here has been to-done. So what are we trying to do? You know how this is going to go over? It's going to go over just like D.A.R.E. did in the 80s and 90s, where they brought in heroin and all these drugs and told us all these crazy stories about doing drugs. And then the rate of drug use went up because I was like, Molly sounds like a good time. Like, where do we get?

get this from? Stuff I would have never even thought to look for. The cops came in and made it look all fun and games. That's really funny. I really believed with dare that I would never do a drug. Like, I believed it. I was like, I'm never, never, never. Wait, my cousin got his dare certificate taken away for huffing our other friend's asthma inhaler. Like, they were such nerds. They were, like, on the playground and they were like, we're gonna do drugs. We're gonna huffy Sean's inhaler. And

They got their D.A.R.E. certificate taken away. I thought you were going to say they got their D.A.R.E. certificate revoked because they snorted cocaine with it, which would have been fun. No. I mean, I grew up in Connecticut. That would have been more normal. No. They were like taking hits off of this kid's inhaler, which is like nothing. Does that even do anything? What was that doing? Yeah. No. We were like in, what, seventh grade or eighth grade, and they thought it was like badass.

And they got their D.A.R.E. certificates taken away. And I remember my parents were like, you know, you know what he did and you know that you should never do that. And I had an inhaler. And so then I was scared to take my own damn inhaler. It was a mess. Wow. That was like a precursor to anxiety medication that people really needed. It was. It wouldn't be until much later in my life that someone handed me drugs and said, and I said, how do you do this? And they said, it's just like in the movies.

And I was like, wow, welcome to theater school. Wow. It's just like in the dare class. Just what they showed you in dare class. I was like, let me go back and think of those films. Right? Yeah. No, but this is what's going to happen with the 10 commandments. The kids are going to be looking at them all day. There's nothing else to do. They're taking away their phones in class. Now they don't have windows. Everything sucks. And they're going to be looking at those commandments. Like what's adultery. What kind of adultery would I put adultery on the commandments that go in those? Yes, they are. They tell you what adultery is.

Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. And then you know what you do? You go on the playground and you find out who has divorced parents and you're like, your mom's an adulteress. And she's like, no, she's not. They're divorced. Yeah. No, this is going to turn into bullying. That is so age inappropriate. I learned what adultery was the good old fashioned way from Bill Clinton. Yeah, as you do. I don't think that it's going to turn out like dare. I think this is just like putting, dipping a toe in the water for, you know,

a bigger goal that they have, which is to institutionalize Christian theology as America's political and cultural reality. I don't think they even care. They don't care if you yourself are a Christian, they don't care about separation of church and state or how critical that was to the founders. They don't care about freedom of religion as guaranteed in the first amendment. No, their belief is that America was created as what they call a Judeo Christian nation. Although there is nothing Judeo about it to be clear.

and that everyone should be required to subscribe to their system of living. And this is really hyper-relevant right now because the plan that the most diehard conservatives ultimately want to implement, that is what this takeover of the judiciary has been about. This is why they made abortion into the single key issue that it is, even though the majority of Americans are in favor of the right to choice.

and always have been. And those are the same people who are responsible for turning abortion and same-sex marriage into the driving forces for the evangelical voting bloc, which we discussed in our episode with the authors, authors of The Fall of Roe. They have made religion more extreme. And that's what these culture wars are about, making it more extreme, digging people in with their entrenched views, making them more tribal,

I have to go back to the 10 commandments for a quick second because while we know the main ones, I just was looking them up to refresh myself. And one of them is, thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. Man, that's going to go over like a sack of bricks with the kids wearing the Trump golden sneakers down in Louisiana. I mean, this is going to be- Thank you. Okay. This is where it gets so sick is that they have done that with their idol and they now use-

religion, religious theology, and real morals. Like Jesus wouldn't fucking want this. We'll get to that in a second. They have made that as a cover. Maybe I'm for this because if we're not supposed to make a graven image, right, then maybe that means that they can't use the AI that is ruining the environment to create these graven images. We've come full circle. Here's the thing. If they actually give a fuck about the Ten Commandments, they wouldn't be...

Think about the people who they hold up. Donald Trump. Think about that song, The Chosen One, where it's... I wrote this in the Allen. I'm not saying he's something divine. He gets in trouble bigly time after time. He's controversial, but one thing is true. Imperfect people God can use. They're trading in their religiosity so that they can...

This is where we, this is really where we all started. This is about the end justifying the means they are made this trade with Donald Trump. They got their justices appointed so that they can achieve something, which is their ultimate goal, which is to remake America as a Christian theological society. Their ultimate guiding blueprint is something called the seven mountains mandate or the seven mountain prophecy or seven M whatever you want to call it.

This is ultimately is a Christian dominionist movement, which means that they want all of us to be Christian, like the crusades and the dominion they want to take over is the United States. And they want to evangelize the modern world. The seven mountains refer, and this is why the art piece is relevant, refer to the seven pillars of society, family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government.

It is a strategy to bring Christian theology into all these areas, i.e. only Christian movies, no birth control, family, teaching creationism over evolution. Imagine like how religious Christians live. They want that to be the norms. Those are the norms of everywhere. That's their goal.

And the plan can, I'll tell you how they actually plan to do this is they want to open up the constitution. They want to host another constitutional convention where they will be rewriting the constitution. And this is an effort that they have been taking for a long time. They have gotten states to agree to hold a constitutional convention so that they can change the constitution to be aligned with this ideology. So the seven mountains mandate is like, that's the picture.

They want. And if you give me any piece of society, I can tell you what they want it to look like. We see it when you said the entertainment even. I mean, I think of like Candace Cameron Bure and how she was Christian and on the Hallmark Channel until the Hallmark Channel wasn't Christian enough for her. And now we have the Great American Family Channel, which is setting up an entire Hollywood studio to produce exactly this. There'll be a backlog of entertainment, indoctrination, television shows, approved media that people will have access to.

That will be able to, this is how MAGA built their movement on top of the Republican party. They're building it right on top of the culture we have now so that when the flip comes, it's all in place. Right. Exactly. It's just all of a sudden everything's switched. It's not like they have to end this and then start over. They, it exists and they force you into it with laws and norms and threats basically. Yeah.

This is why they all bitch about the replacement theory stuff, because every single accusation is an admission. Every single thing is projection. Exactly. Exactly. This is why Donald Trump and that song is really so like that chosen one song. Like I know we joke about it and we kind of laugh, but I actually think it embodies what their plan is, which is like they have just decided we are going to take this guy.

And, you know, we're going to go with Trump because he allowed us to appoint the people we wanted. He appointed Betsy DeVos as the secretary of education who doesn't believe in education. And I just want to be clear. I'm not against religious education. If that's what you want your family to do, I 100% support that. And I do think that there should be financial, you know, ways to help that happen for people who need it. Yeah, they don't pay taxes, Sammy. That's how it happens. The churches don't pay taxes.

And they take donations. And so that's how they should fund their religious education. And you have to tithe your money, which they would have you do in the Seven Mountains mandate. But again, it's another thing to decide for the whole country and then take away from what everyone else has. So these people are strung together. All six of the Supreme Court justices that voted against Roe and everything, they're all strung together through political groups like the Heritage Foundation.

But they're also aligned through religious and social groups. If you've heard of Opus Dei, that is essentially like an elite

a Christian group that believes in this Christian dominionist theology and they want to get to like the end of times. And that's why they don't have a problem with all this conflict in the Middle East because that's where it's supposed to go down. So they're like, get us there sooner. That's what's really so sick about this. That is why Leonard Leo, Leonard Leo's a novice day, Amy Coney Barrett, Mark Meadows, Bill Barr, Mike Lee. These are very religious figures who want to enact their religious theology via politics, but they're stuck with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump is like, I don't care. I just want to be president. I don't give a fuck about abortions. He picked his Supreme Court justices with the approval and the submission of the Heritage Foundation and Opus Dei. They wouldn't have any reason to back him. That's why they all get in line and they don't care if he's an adulterer and they don't care if he cheats and lies and steals.

All six of those justices are current or former members of Opus Dei. That's the whole thing with Amy Coney Barrett and the handmaids thing. Like they're for real and they are taking actions, organized actions, like you said, to put this in place so that they can force us into a society that looks like the handmaid's tale. And like, I wish I was exaggerating. And I wish that people understood that.

the class camaraderie that we need to have against this authoritarianism. Because so many people right now think, well, that would be fine by me. I'll be on the inside and it won't be. It won't be. No, it's going to be everybody. You can't escape unless you're like Jeff Bezos on your mega yacht or there's no way out of it. If you like one piece of it, think about all the pieces you're not going to like.

There was a Trump rally, I think two years ago now, and the speaker got in a little bit of trouble for saying this, but I never forgot it. She said, we need to think like Hitler, who said, if you have the youth, you have the future. And people were like,

The fuck did you just say to me? But she meant it. Now she backtracked and he was like, Oh, a lot of people say that, but she meant it. And we know that he's forming this new American Reich or whatever. But this idea of like going for the children is partially why they're trying to stop gender affirming care. The parental rights movement has nothing to do with your actual parents. It has to do with who they decide the parents of the country should be. And this patriarchal, you know, lineage of like parent is, is,

the authoritarian government, not the people who gave birth to you or the people who take care of you. And we see it now in the public schools. So Louisiana putting up the 10 commandments is one little thing, right? But since the 1980s, there's been this guy, Michael Ferris, who is basically the grandfather, the OG of the homeschool movement and of the movements for parental rights. And he's the one who's made it the rallying cry for the GOP, this idea of parental rights.

Because like all tricks, they make it sound like you are getting the power when in fact you are not the parent they're talking about. They're just not making that clear to you. That's what they always do. They use propriety to cover up force and lack of choice. Oh, the 10 commandments.

No, like, yeah, the 10 commit. Great. It's great that you shouldn't steal or whatever. Like you should do those. But people, this is a free country. There's separation of church and state. Not everyone believes in God at all. And they're like, oh, how could you object to this morality? But it's not the morality. It's that you want so much more than just the morality that you claim is there that you don't even care to follow. That it's like the one thing if they actually like embody this, they don't.

No. And if you want to put up what the moral compass of this country is, just put up the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta or something. I mean, we've got documents. If you like paperwork, we got plenty of it. Throw it up there and be like, these are the rules we live by. Here's all the amendments. And this is what we said. And this is what we do. And that's what they need to be looking at. But

So we've got Michael Ferris, this guy. He's a conservative Christian ghoul that's been kicking around the idea of totally obliterating public schools since the 1980s. He sees public schools as, quote, godless indoctrination camps and hates education so much that he founded his own college, which serves as a model for what, quote, Christian education should be.

It's the Patrick Henry College, and it used to be the only college that really was like a guarantee for homeschoolers to get in because sometimes homeschoolers... I want to be so clear. I have a ton of respect for people who homeschool their children. We're talking about the very culty, non-educational, deeply religious, nonsense homeschoolers that give you guys a bad name because they're not following curriculum and their kids can't add. So...

Those homeschoolers, bad homeschoolers are the ones who used to be able to get into this college because they had to legitimize homeschooling by saying that there was continued education. So every student at this college that Michael Ferris founded that's still running now has to sign a statement of faith, which reads as such.

Satan exists as a personal, benevolent being who acts as a tempter and accuser for whom hell, the place of eternal punishment, was prepared. Where all who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity. Man is by nature sinful and inherently in need of salvation, which is exclusively found in faith alone in Jesus Christ and his shed blood. Christ's death provides substitutionary atonement for our sins.

You have to sign that before you go to college. But public education is indoctrination. But this isn't an indoctrination camp. I mean, come on, man. What are you signing? That Jesus died for your sins? That whole thing that Satan is a real person. Yeah.

So what they're doing right now, because these are long-term thinkers, these people got time and money and they will wait for it. The school only offers seven majors. Seven majors? Yep. Oh my God, Sammy. I was like, oh, why only seven? There it is. Is that what they are?

Yes. So there are seven majors. You're exactly correct. And they're all some form of government or journalism with the intent to infiltrate and take over the American legal and political system in the image of the quote one true Christian God. That's how I'd set it up if I only had seven topics.

That's what I'm saying. So I was looking up like who are famous alumni of the school to have like an example. Famous alumni of the school, the most famous one is Madison Cawthorn, the former congressman who was accused by over 150 college alumni of engaging in sexually predatory behavior toward other students during his time on campus. That explains a lot.

That's what they put out. They put out Madison Cawthorn and they also put out Alyssa Farrah Griffin, who was Mike Pence's press secretary before doing a twirl on The View as the conservative voice. And this is not important, but her parents didn't attend her wedding because her very Republican husband was not loyal enough to Trump. So she, okay. She ultimately went against Trump, but correct. People in the media still act like she's like a normal person.

She's not a normal person. And her father is like wildly right-wing journalist who had her start working for him when she was like a child. So he's like the opposite of Luke Russert.

Yes. I am proud of her in the way that like I cheer for all women and the fact that she fell in love with a man who is very Republican. He's just not a Trumper or he's not loyal enough to Trump. And her parents didn't attend her wedding. And that's sad because this girl really did everything that they told her to up to that point. That is emotionally abusive. I don't love her. You know, she's Republican, too. I don't love her ideology. I don't love the fact that she like worked for this administration. But I don't think it just shows like how sick that is.

It does. And it also shows that if you, once you're shown true love and safety, the way that obviously her husband must have shown her, you are willing to break the curse. That is the indoctrination and the religious abuse that you experienced your whole life at the hands of your parents or your church or whatever, and how difficult that is to deconstruction. And the fact that deconstruction is a journey, just like gender, where maybe you deconstruct just 1%, maybe 3%. It's not that you always go completely opposite. This is not a binary experience. So for her,

And anybody listening who's been through this, I see you and we hear you and we support you. And it's fucking hard. And that's why we have to know that these things that these people are wanting to put in have nothing to do with family, have nothing to do with love and all to do with control.

and dissatisfaction with their own lives, so much so that they can't mind their own fucking business and count deer off their back deck. They have to mind your business too. The Washington Post did a big story on Michael Ferris back in August when a call between him and dozens of Christian millionaires was leaked by the watchdog group Documented. In the call, he says that the solution to all the problems of the world are lawsuits alleging that schools' teachings about gender identity and race are unconstitutional.

If we can do that, that will lead to a Supreme Court decision that would mandate the right of parents to claim billions of tax dollars for private education and homeschooling. It's all a grift. And it's, you know, I mean, there are charter schools that do great work. There are homeschoolers who do great work. That is not what these people are advocating for. They're looking to privatize this in the same way they privatize prisons, which is to create profits for shareholders, not to create a better system for whatever industry they're trying to destroy. Here's my one hope.

You know how private equity ruins businesses? If they're going to private equity, they're schooling. They're going to ruin their schooling. So maybe this, it'll work so well that it doesn't work.

I know I'm with you on that, but the problem is they're going to bankrupt the Department of Education in the meanwhile. And it's just, it'll be so hard to build it back. I mean, can you, we'll be back to the one room schoolhouse anytime. And that's just not something we need to do to compete on a global scale. Like I'm a proud American. I'm a deeply patriotic person. I like that people come from other countries to go to our schools because they're so excellent. And I don't want to see that go away because the second that you're not the destination, you're the place people run from. And as an Albanian, that is not a fucking

life that y'all want to get into. You know what I mean? Like we came here because this is the land of prosperity. And while not everybody's American dream looks exactly the same, I don't want to be

In a situation where my grandparents came here for me to go back to Albania, like that's crazy. They would, I would never do that. You know what I mean? Like that's so scary to think of everything they sacrificed for it to have not worked out. Like that's just generationally too hard to handle. I think about that all the time, like every day now, like my dad came here as a kid.

And I'm like, where should I go? Where can I go? That's why people are like, oh, you could get dual citizenship. And I'm like, but I won't. But I don't want to leave. Because I have it. I don't want to leave. I won't do that. Yeah. I won't do it because that's not the answer and that's not American. And I –

And so we're going to do it. I also saw the musical Titanic this past weekend. And so I think I'm extra in my feels because I'm, you know, they have like all those third class passengers and they sing that song about like, I,

I want to be American. I want to be a constable. I have all these dreams. So now I'm like, yeah, man, we need to like start playing those movies again in school. We need a hope and change candidate again. Yeah. But we do, we need, we need everyone to see the musical Titanic and watch those third class passengers talk about their dreams. And remember that that was just two generations ago. Okay. That was like a hundred years ago. That's,

That's two generations. We need to live up to their dreams for us and be better. Back to Ferris. Back to Ferris. So Michael Ferris was also one of the folks who has been an originator of the idea of book bans. Book bans were not always popular with the Republicans because that's definitely seen as censorship and big government. And well, since the 80s, they've been warming up to the idea. And Michael Ferris has been on the front lines of that. Tip the spear on the book bans. The first book he protested was Rumpelstiltskin.

I don't know why. I don't really know anything about Rumpelstiltskin now that I can think of it, but it's like classic literature. Right. I don't remember. Is it because it's like fantasy? You know how conservatives used to want to ban Harry Potter, ironically, because it was like fantasy. And like, if you believe in fake things, then you don't believe in the fake thing they want you to believe in God. Sorry. I actually believe in God, but one might argue that you don't, you know, no proof.

So it's, that's what I think maybe it was. Rumpelstiltskin, well, he could spin straw into gold and then he takes somebody's baby. Y'all got gold sneakers and constantly snapping up children from people. It's almost like it's a mirror, Rumpelstiltskin, a mirror for the Republican party. So anyway, and this guy, Yeltsin,

You know, protesting Rumpelstiltskin. He is also the president and chief executive of the Alliance Defending Freedom, which is a powerhouse Christian legal group that helped draft and defend the restrictive Mississippi abortion law that led to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. ADF and its allies have filed a flurry of state and federal lawsuits over the past two years alleging that public schools are violating parental and religious rights.

And it's worked because in Florida, a homeschooling mom introduced Ferris' ideas to a state lawmaker, which set in motion the passage of the state's parental Bill of Rights in 2021. From the Washington Post...

Um, R L Stoller, who is a children's rights advocate who was homeschooled and has long warned of the conservative homeschooling movements, political goals said everyone should be aware of Michael Ferris and his influence on the Christian. Right. But you said, you know, you said it earlier, like they want, they used to be into small government. Now the government is huge.

as their chosen one would say. Because they're picking a theocracy kind of thing, like an autocracy, theocracy, corporatocracy situation. I just don't know where it ends, man. I mean, at this point, I'm so sick of it. Aren't you sick of it? I'm sick of it. Am I sick of it? It ends where it began. They just want to go back. Just back and back and back. Even if you go back, we were in a series of, we were in a progressive time. You have to go back to pre-Victorian era because

because everything was innovation. What do you want to do? You want to undo the industrial revolution? No, they want to keep it, but they don't want to undo like the social change that came from it or the like the widespread advantage or freedoms that came that were afforded by those technologies. They just want to approximate

Go look at a religious family, like a really like religious family. They want it to look like that everywhere and everything look like a religious community. And then they're also very rich. And it's like all the religious stuff without the moral internal stuff.

We're all going to end up working in the triangle shirt waste factory, okay? Because that's what happens, all right? The regular people do not get to live on homesteads and have all that ideology, idyllic life go on. They're going to put us back in factories and corporate towns and we're going to be mining coal and sewing shirts. And it's not – if you want to go back, then let's go back to what was really going on at that time, which was not fucking cute. ♪

Max Bankman, I'm the new doctor. Welcome aboard the Odyssey. ABC Thursdays. This ship is heaven. We're tending to our past their streams. I'm in. From 911 executive producer Ryan Murphy comes a splashy new drama on a luxury cruise ship with Joshua Jackson and Don Johnson. It's your job to keep everyone alive. She's in V-Fib. One, two, three. Clear. Clear.

I have a pulse. You're going to be okay. Dr. Odyssey, Thursdays, 9, 8 central on ABC and stream on Hulu. We all have plans in life. Maybe to take a cross country road trip or simply get through this workout without any back pain. Whether our plans are big, small, spontaneous or years in the making, good health helps us accomplish them.

All right, welcome back. We are in our down-ballot era.

It's election day, babies. Today's the day for so many down ballot races. We could even see the end of Lauren Boebert's reign, the end of her political career if she loses her primary today in Colorado. So looking, we'll be keeping an eye on that. Utah is voting for a new senator to replace Mitt Romney now that he's retired. Mitt claims that Trumpism pushed him out of politics. And he's kind of right, judging by the fact that the two people on the primary ticket to replace him are both Trump supporters. So not a lot of choice there.

And most importantly, at least for us as New Yorkers here, the polls close at 9 p.m. in New York, where the most expensive primary in history is taking place. That is, of course, the race between our boy Jamal Bowman, the progressive congressman from New York's 16th district, who is facing off against a borderline Republican, George Latimer.

AIPAC spent $16 million on attack ads against Bowman to boost Latimer. And Latimer also got that endorsement from Hillary Clinton, which broke my heart. I have to say, I was like, Hills, what is going on with you? Going on TV and saying the kids don't know history and then endorsing George Latimer when Bowman won this seat by over 20 points in the last election. This is a safe seat.

The guy is a progressive. He, a nice man. He's the first black man to represent the district. And we're talking about the Bronx. You know, this is an odd district that encompasses the Bronx, but then also Westchester County, which is a little bit more ritzy-titsy up there. He replaced a longtime moderate Democrat, this dude, Elliot Engel, who held the seat from 1989 to 2021.

The establishment liberals were not super excited that Engel was replaced and seemingly annoyed with Bowman's progressive agenda and his fearlessness. He stood up for TikTok. He called for a ceasefire in the Middle East, and he's even taken on Marjorie Taylor Greene head on. Hillary says that Bowman isn't supporting Biden's agenda enough, even though Bowman votes with Biden 94% of the time. So I don't know, you know? I think his real problem is that he said he made some...

Quite offensive comments about Jews who are in his district. He was talking about the Westchester portion of his district and he was saying how Jews self-segregate into Scarsdale and white planes and those areas. And it, he was like, we have to live amongst each other in the Bronx. We live amongst each other. And it's like,

Well, I don't know. This seems like the impact of gerrymandering more than anything. Like, why shouldn't they vote for, like, why shouldn't people be allowed to live in their community with people they like, you know, or people who they are alike, are similar to? Basically, he's saying, like, Jews self-segregate, and that's, like, why this is happening. And, you know, he wants to represent everybody, not just, like, those people. But it's like, that's half your district.

It's a tough district. One, I don't think he should have said that. I didn't know that he had said that. I think that that's obviously not in line with progressive values at all, at all. He should be held accountable to that.

But he's in a tough district because it's, again, this thing where Elliot Engel really represented the Westchester side of the district and the Bronx felt super ignored. And now we've got Bowman who's like really prioritizing the Bronx district. And, you know, the other half is feeling ignored. It's a split district. That's why it shouldn't be a district. That doesn't make any sense. Those are two different constituencies. And that's okay. Right. Those should be different representatives. It shouldn't be a competition between groups that...

really do not have the same interests. And that's the whole point of the government to represent. And that's why gerrymandering is so deeply problematic on, you know, on its own. Well, in New York had their districts chopped up a little bit because Florida got like two extra reps and New York lost one. And then they had to put it together. Kind of funny. It's, it's very tricky, but I mean, this is a guy who's still in 2021, you won by 20 points.

I think they're putting them in a position where obviously like anybody who feels like they're cornered, they're saying stuff that maybe they wouldn't have otherwise said.

I don't want to make excuses for him, though, because what he said was wrong. So it's an ugly situation that didn't need to play out like this because it was a safe seat. He won it by 20 points. Whether it's the Jewish folks or the black folks in the Bronx, they were all voting for the Democrat. There was no difference there. We were voting for the Democrat. That's why this George Latimer guy is going to do well. And OK, I also think my issue with this is not

per the people. My problem is that 20, you should not, no one should be able to spend so much money to come after 20 million person. No group should have that ability. It's definitely not helping beat the, uh, running the world accusations that people love to level Jews when APAC literally goes and spends 20 million to marginalize someone who is against them. And

They could have probably been better at hiding the fact that they did that, but they purposely wanted to send a message to, to not just him, but to the squad. Like we will unseat you if you come for our interests. Oh yeah. We've got Cori Bush next. They came for Summer Lee. And the other thing that, that sort of is not looking too good here is you've got wealthy white led organizations seemingly exclusively attacking black and Brown candidates.

Like that's not going to look good either. But it's partly also because those people are the most vocal against their interests. And that also has to do with like this divide that's been created between the black and Jewish community and in general communities of color and Jewish people who they perceive as white and who look white.

Hello. Well, because division is what, it serves the oppressor overall. I mean, we see it in the gay community too, right? It's like, oh, I'm LGB, but not the T. Like, what the fuck are

fuck are you even talking about why what do you mean not the tea what is not the tea gonna do for our community nothing so they try to create amongst minority groups all this division anyway because if they could keep us fighting with each other then white supremacy does well anyway so yeah it's all part of the system not great there was a rally for bowman this past weekend that was headlined by bernie sanders and aoc who are like obviously you know big progressives and i i

was surprised that the rally was protested by a group called Within Our Lives, which is a self-described Palestinian-led New York pro-Palestine organization who claimed that while these folks, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Jamal Bowman, have called for a ceasefire, actively platform and support Palestinian liberation voices, and are directly responsible for aid money to Palestine being included in a recent round of funding,

These folks are saying the fact that AOC, Bernie and Bowman still endorse Biden in any way for president is endorsing the ongoing genocide in Gaza. And so they came and they protested his rally while the man is so down. And while if it goes to George Latimer,

There could be nothing for Palestine. Nothing. Zero. Actively against. He's actively against Palestine. This to me feels inorganic. And the reason for that is because this is what's happening to Biden with liberals. Obviously, a lot of Jewish liberals where it's like he's taking so much shit from the left.

And then the Jewish liberals are turning on him because they're not like, you're not doing enough because you're not doing exactly what we would want. And now these guys are turning against Jamal Bowman, who is in this position because he was pro-Palestine. And it's just...

wild to me that it doesn't seem real. It's too irrational to be real, in my opinion. And by real, I mean there's really people doing it. But I mean organic from American-driven ideology. This is too much. It doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't. Well, something we've been talking about a lot lately is there's authentic protest and then there's protest for content.

And in some cases, you know, like with any movement at all, abortion, gay rights, anything, there are bad actors who are there to make a name for their self and to make content. They're not there for the movement. They're there for the content. They're there for, you know, as an opportunity to fundraise or cause a ruckus. And you see this with like the just oil protests, like they're spray paint and planes, orange. What's that's actually doing for the environment? Nothing. But, but it's for content. They're consuming the paint. So you got to look at what the goal is.

They're consuming the paint, but it's also a distraction and makes actual environmental protests look stupid because then people are like, oh, those are the, they lump us all together. So you could be a real genuine protester for the liberation of Palestinian people. But then when this kind of stuff happens, then they lump you all together as like anti-cop destructive. You know, they did it with black lives matter. Oh, they're all looters. They did. They want to find a reason to, to diminish the movement. So I thought this wasn't cool from this particular group.

because I'm not really sure the goals of theirs or how effective those goals have been, similar to the Just Oil protests where they're throwing paint at art. This group, Within Our Lives, recently protested a Brooklyn museum in Crown Heights where a very large population of Orthodox Jewish folks live. And they occupied the museum, calling on them to divest from Israel or be occupied, have their art ruined. They also demonstrated at the Jewish museum employees' homes, which to me doesn't make any sense because those people don't have power.

power. We're all working a job, you know. They called them white supremacist Zionists, which is, you know, wasn't even true in some cases. And, you know, so they were at the Bowman protest shouting intifada, which in Arabic means shake off and typically refers to Palestine resisting Israeli occupation. But more recently, it has become a rally call for violence against Jewish people. So none of this stuff looks good. And to your point, doesn't beat the accusations that the pro-Palestine movement

is not inherently an anti-Semitic movement when people come out and do really anti-Semitic stuff and then it all gets lumped together, you know? For people, the Intifada means attack Jews. And when they say globalize the Intifada, they mean attack Jews globally, not just within Israel. So that is really what, like, why would one want to align with that?

It's maybe because when you, when you don't, when you do anything that slightly, you know, supports the status quo in America, this is the reaction. And that's why people are pushed so far and direct in certain directions.

I just don't know how this type of protest was effective, especially against someone like Bowman, who's been a champion for the Palestinian cause and for progressive causes. It would be like me showing up to the Capitol when we were fighting for TikTok to not get banned. And during the press conference, he hosted being like,

but you're not posting three times a day, Bowman. You don't really support TikTok. You didn't even like my post today. You know what I mean? Like it's like nonsense. Like we're all here to say that we're trying to do this thing and we have to, you know, be respectful of how far people can push things before they're not listened to or before they're pushed out. And Bowman in particular is the, is, has gone so far for the cause that APAC is spending $20 million to try and get this man out of his seat and they're going to be successful. So when we're at that rally,

We have to be on the same side for that moment. The collective is to do it. I think it, I think it could have been a propaganda where I think definitely I could see, you know, cause they want to kill your spirit with all of these things. It's like, you know, the folks who get paid to say that they don't support gay people or that trans isn't real. They do it to kill your spirit. They don't do it because it's real. Our foreign adversaries have paid people to do things at protests. There's no reason to believe that that has not happened.

multiple times over the course of all the protests that have come since the Gaza conflict. To escalate. Exactly. To escalate and to break the laws so that they can shut them down. Exactly. So please get out and vote today. Okay. The end of the story is the down ballot matters. It matters so much that we are seeing the most expensive primary race. This is

That's the absurdity, really. This isn't even a race between Democrat and Republican for the seat. This is for who gets to run for the seat, which is nuts. So get out and vote. Polls are open till 9 p.m. They're open till 10 p.m. in Utah and Colorado. If you're in line, they have to let you vote. We need to do more than being in the streets.

If you are not voting, that only benefits the oppressors because they will be voting. If you see any right-wing campaign, they are all voting. They are all registered to vote and they are organized. So you sitting out just doesn't do anything for the cause. You have to vote. Republicans always vote. It's just how it is. All right. We are all warmed up for today's Americant. We are following on the hypercapitalism theme and how it screws us all up. Be ready.

Yes, I'm ready. Here we go. All right. This is so far from on the radar of clear issues, but it is one of these, like I said, hyper, hyper capitalist idiosyncrasies that speaks to what we were chatting about earlier regarding problematic management of legacy publications. We just spoke about that for several episodes at this point.

And like we said, it's not about the false information getting published. It's about important stories that don't get published or are severely neutered by the publisher for the wrong reasons. And that is what I want to talk about today. Our new issue that I've come to realize is quite harmful is that there are

publishing contracts that journalists get. As you know, a lot of journalists find success within their careers when they go on to write a book. They get a book deal about a particular area that they report on and that is kind of their beat and they're rewarded with a book deal that then their publisher expects them to promote through their outlet and

all their connections in journalism. And yes, I fully understand the irony that I'm coming from the publishing industry as I'm promoting my own book, but that is neither here nor there. It is an imperfect industry and I'll admit that. And maybe that's why I'm so annoyed. So I'll give you an example from this week of not something that happened to me, but something, how this plays out in reality and ultimately affects people.

So this week, the journalist Raman Satyuta has a book that's about to come out about Donald Trump and how The Apprentice helped build his mythology. This journalist started doing his research in 2021. He got into, you know, Trump's circle and he spent numerous hours with him recording conversations and they just would speak off the cuff watching The Apprentice and like hang in kind of.

This week, he's now promoting a book that is newly out and he is revealing, you know, as one does when they promote a book, you reveal, you're allowed to reveal certain things that are in it once it's out. And so he's revealing some of the scoops that are in this book. And one of the scoops is that Donald Trump said to him like two or three years ago, casually during a conversation, like he just slipped out that he lost the election.

And this is just coming out now, despite the fact that it could have, at least at some point, been admissible evidence in the legal context with all of his election interference cases. So this journalist, who I presume got into the field because he was drawn to share important information with the public that those in power wish to keep private, had to sit on this information until he was ready to promote his book this week.

I just, it's crazy. It's like when John Bolton came out with his book and we were like, this is actually should have, you should, this is wrong. What you've done, you've like withheld evidence or Maggie Haberman. I'm so sick of her being the Trump whisperer. Why don't you whisper something nicer to him? Why don't you help him along a little bit instead of holding all this information back and not even publishing it in your weekly column in the New York times, but saving it for all these books like girl, please. Right. It's, it's so selfish of the writers. I mean, Maggie Haberman's in,

you know, she's in a different position than most journalists who get a book deal. Most journalists are not like making bank so much on their, on their journalism. Right. But one example of someone who is, is Bob Woodward, who it reminds me a few years ago, he published a book about Trump during COVID and he, you know, we're like two years into COVID and he ends up releasing a recording of Donald Trump from February of 2020.

before people even knew that they should be looking for masks. And he can be heard telling Bob Woodward that he knew COVID was passed through the air. Meanwhile, a month later, we're all scrubbing our Amazon packages down. And he knew that it was more deadly than the normal flu. He called it deadly. He said it was deadly stuff on this recording. I know.

And then in March of 2020, in April of 2020, he's saying it's nothing. It's no big deal. There's only going to be 12 cases. Then you have Bob Woodward sitting at home, probably working on his book, tapping away, bound by a publishing contract that he can't share with the information that COVID, with the public that this COVID is deadly and spread through the air.

I mean, and this is the guy who took down Nixon. You really think that there would have been some sort of like, I know I have a contract, whatever the case may be. He's an icon, a pillar of journalism. To not have that one come out, it's a little rough. It's about the legal trouble that they get in. I want to, I know, right? Me, who's so afraid of everything. I'm like, no, you have to be braver than that. Even if it means going to jail, you have to tell the truth. I...

I sit in my home very comfortably. He wouldn't go to jail for that. He would just lose money. He would lose money, but the man is, does he need it? I think that, I think it's, I think it's tricky. And this is a symptom of the journalism industry being decimated, right? The fact that these are the, these are the avenues for information dissemination that we have. And you're not rewarded the way that Bob Woodward was for getting that Nixon Watergate story out in the seventies by the Washington Post.

Now, who knows if that would have even happened or if we would have had to wait for Simon and Schuster to decide it's the right time to publish the book for Christmas orders, you know? Pub day. That's when it can come out. It's sick. It's tough. It's tough. And again, it comes down to journalists aren't – they're having such a hard time. One, it's such a difficult job. Yeah.

It's underfunded right now. And now it's so scattered because Twitter isn't the home of breaking news the way that it used to be. The newspapers have cut back on journalists astronomically. Thousands of people fired. Entire divisions shut down. And other things that are weird, like MTV News.

shuttering their webpage and removing 20 years of articles and news stories and videos from the internet. Is that because it's too expensive for them to maintain it? That might be it. Maybe, but you would think for archival purposes, you would want to see, you know, be able to look up Kurt Loder now and again, but I've never seen anybody remove this much stuff. Who owns MTV? Also, it's owned by like Viacom. Isn't it Viacom? They have the money.

then there's maybe something they would like to have removed. Maybe they're doing something with it, but that's the thing. And so then you get all these journalists who are incredibly talented people who are now underfunded and they're writing on Substack and they're like having to spend half the time selling you a $5 subscription so that they can make their rent so that they could try to do a story or they're working a second job because they're trying to do a story. It's just

It's authoritarian and it's dystopian and it's very icky. Oh, horrible. I was thinking about this with Substack and like more journalists going independent when, where they're not trying to make their money from an institution that can put them under a contract to like hold a scoop like this. I think that that's actually healthier.

And if Substack can sort of be this mini internet within the internet, I think that that is a good... They're trying. They have a creator fund now. The Substack has a creator fund, which I think is great. They're starting to pay some people for content. We need to get in there. I know. We have news. I would love to be able to bring some news. I like Substack girls. When we met them in DC, they were lovely people. I'm a huge Substack fan.

fan tbh so i agree i think it's great um but you know it's so scattered because it's like sub stack patreon subscribe on my instagram subscribe on my twitch it's just people you're exhausted the audience is exhausted they have too many subscriptions tv is making them subscribe to everything you got all the streaming channels it's like too much too much it's not affordable it's not affordable and it's exhausting so then you decide you know what i'll stick with what i got and

That's what it is. But you'd think the book industry would be doing a bit better, hiding all this important shit. But no, they're also a failing industry for some reason. Because all the money is going to fucking create AI into the shareholders, whoever the shareholders are, these whack-ass people that we're never going to meet. To pay for the power to run these

AI machines. Insane. So that they can make shitty images that confuse people and aren't even real. You're all wealth hoarding so that you could pay security to protect you from the public that you're extorting money from and withholding information from. Whereas if you just mind your own goddamn business and count deer off your back deck,

We'd be in a better place. You've got a nice house. Just enjoy it. You're only going to live so long. Face your mortality and just live a happy day. That is actually something I pond, I think about a lot. I'm like, why can't people just kind of enjoy where they are with the wealth that they've gained? And like, why does it have to be like up together?

Like George Washington said, every man deserves to sit under his own fig and vine tree and reflect upon the accomplishments and regrets of his life. You deserve rest. I would love to know what George Washington was really like. You know? Like, I feel like there's only mythology. Oh, yeah. What was he really like?

Was that like a mythology that he said that? I picture him being like John Goodman. Yeah, maybe. No, he said it. It's in the musical Hamilton 2 where I learned all my American history. But was that just like the one nice comment he made or was that like his vibe all the time? Have you ever been to Mount Vernon? No.

Okay. If you go to Mount Vernon, you'll know why he wrote that because dude, Mount Vernon is the tits. It's amazing. It's beautiful. Now horrible things happened there. Horrible things happened there. But if you're George Washington and you could just look out upon the Potomac river and all of the things and your cherry trees and your cool breeze and your nice little life. And he kind of had the hots for his wife, his whole life. So he was very happy with her. Like,

You know what I mean? I'm saying that's why when he wanted to retire, he was like, let me make this as dramatic and honorable as possible because bitch, I am not taking that clunkity horse ride up to DC to the swamp. I don't even know if, no, he had to go to Philadelphia at that time. I don't even think DC was Philly. No, you're right. Honestly, good for him. I like a content man. That's a hard ride. That's a hard ride. Now I wouldn't want to take a carriage ride to Philly when I live on Mount Vernon, but I, this is my thing with Nancy Pelosi.

Go count deer off your back deck, lady. It's time to hang it up. Why is she running for reelection? She's never going to be our down ballot girly of the week. You got Chuck Grassley. Don't you have something else you could do? Go count potatoes. Go visit your grandkids.

Do something else. God. I know. That's how I feel. Get into stamp collecting or coin counting. I don't know. What are old people habits? Take up harmonica, embroider things. Well, hang out with your kids. Hang out with your, well, they don't talk to him because he's nasty, but you know, well, I don't know. I think about just like things like that all the time. And I'm like,

There has to be a better way. All of us out here are working on the off chance that we might get four days off to go on a vacation to St. Pete, Florida, right? Like, or it's a Wildwood, New Jersey. We're not trying to go big places. You know what I mean? And these people who have all the money in the world, they don't fucking go anywhere. You know where they want to go? The goddamn swamp of Washington, D.C. They want to go to work. And work. Yeah. You freaks. I don't understand. Get out of here. Go enjoy your vacation.

That's it for us. We're going to enjoy our vacation, which we never have, but we are in California. I'm going to go look at the ocean for a minute. Until next time, I'm Vida Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream.

American Fever Dream is hosted by Vitus Spear and Sammy Sage. The show is produced by Rebecca Sous-McCatt, Jorge Morales-Picot, and Rebecca Steinberg. Editing by Rebecca Sous-McCatt. Social media by Bridget Schwartz. And be sure to follow Betches News on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.