So, Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, folks.

So by way of introduction, I want to just sort of tell the story of how this panel happened.

It arose out of almost a throwaway comment that Jason made on an episode of the pod where

he was talking about, you know, lining up speakers for this event, and he said that,

you know, he was having a hard time getting liberals, and all he could find were, like,

right-wingers like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.

And in terms of just to explain their backgrounds a little bit, you know, Matt used to be the

– they’re both independent journalists who write phenomenal columns on Substack,

and all of you should check it out and subscribe, and by the way, they also do call-in shows

on a phenomenal podcasting platform that you should all check out.

But Matt was sort of like the left-wing firebrand, sort of populist firebrand on Writing for

Rolling Stone, who back in 2009 was asking the question why the people who caused the

great financial crisis, why no one was going to jail, and Glenn, you know, broke the Snowden

story about how the government was engaging in mass surveillance on all of us and raising

questions about the infringement of our civil liberties.

So you know, both these guys have, I’d say, you know, well-established bona fides, you

know, what used to be considered left-wing sort of liberal bona fides, but now today

somehow they’ve been read out of what you would call liberalism today.

And so that comment that Jason made sort of, I think there’s so much to unpack there

on how that happened.

What does liberalism today mean if it doesn’t include you guys?

And so maybe that’s the place to start, is trying to understand what has happened in

our politics that makes you guys not liberal anymore, and what is liberalism, and then

what is conservatism, and are we even thinking about the political divide in our country

the right way if left versus right doesn’t really capture it anymore?

So that was sort of the starting point for this.

Who wants to just react to anything I just said?

Yeah, well, first of all, it’s of course very gratifying to realize that your attendance

at a conference is due to a throwaway line from Gibson, so super honored to hear that,

that’s the reason why we were invited.

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, I guess we join a long list of other far-right luminaries

like Russell Brand, who has spent the last 15 years as one of the most vocal devotees

to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn, he’s now also on the right, and Joe Rogan, who just

18 months ago said to millions of people that his favorite candidate running for president

was Bernie Sanders, the socialist left-wing candidate from Vermont, and even now Elon

Musk, who voted for Barack Obama in 2012 over Mitt Romney and is one of the largest donors

to the ACLU, somehow he’s also on the far right, so in some sense it’s just become a

kind of punishing label that’s designed to stigmatize or demonize anybody who in any

way descends from or diverges from liberal orthodoxy, it’s just kind of an enforcement

or coercive label that has no meaning, just bereft of any actual substance, but I think

there’s a broader dynamic underneath it all, which is that, you know, it is true that

every five years, 10 years, what was once an issue at the forefront of our debates goes

to the background and other issues go to the forefront, so 10 years ago we were spending

a lot of time debating things like Obama’s drone program or Guantanamo not being closed,

or as you said, the work Matt was doing on derivatives and the fraud on Wall Street,

we don’t talk much about that anymore, we spend a lot of time now talking instead about

whether the internet should be this instrument of censorship and information control, whether

we should trust the US security state to dictate what is and is not disinformation, whether

we should be involved in very similar kinds of proxy wars like we spent the Cold War doing

over places like Ukraine, and so in one way it’s natural that political alliances shift

as different issues go to the fore and alliances change as a result, but I think something

much more important is that liberalism itself has changed largely by virtue of Donald Trump

because liberals, as a defining view, maybe as an overarching view…

Maybe Democrats, not liberals.

Yeah, by liberals I just mean kind of the mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, the

way Hillary Clinton calls herself progressive, so again, illustrating the bankruptcy of

these terms, but by liberals I just mean kind of like the Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Hillary

Clinton, Chuck Schumer wing, have come to believe that the overarching way to understand

politics is that there’s one primary menace and risk to the United States, which is Donald

Trump, his movement, and the Republican Party, and it’s not just that they have a bad ideology,

that they’re actual fascists trying to instill a white nationalist dictatorship, and if

you actually believe that, if that’s something that you genuinely believe, on some level

it becomes rational to start embracing authoritarian methods of resisting that, of combating that,

censoring, using due process-free processes to punish people and deprive them of their

liberty, and I think any time a political movement gets convinced that it is no longer

involved in a political debate but a historic war between pure good and pure evil, it starts

to turn to authoritarian tactics to win because it believes that’s justified or even necessary,

and those authoritarian tactics happen to be the ones that the left traditionally had

opposed and now are embracing, and I guess Matt and I didn’t decide that we were going

to change our views over the last 30 years about these issues, and that has caused this

organic breach, not just between us two but others like us, and as I said, anyone who

finds themselves outside of liberal orthodoxy automatically receives the far-right label.

Yeah, first of all, I agree with all that, and for me it’s even funnier because prior

to 2008 I would say that I was sort of like the triumphant, insolent comic dog of journalism.

Basically my job at Rolling Stone was to throw off one-liners about Republicans.

My editors almost never sent me to a democratic function because they didn’t want me describing

those events in a colorful way, let’s put it that way.

So I got sent to a lot of events where people like Sarah Palin or Fred Thompson or Mike

Huckabee would be speaking.

I actually won a national magazine award for a column about Huckabee called My Favorite

Nut Job.

But then after 2008, after Obama got elected, they assigned me to do a story, one story,

about the 2008 financial crisis, essentially with the idea of explaining it in terms that

people who are not financial professionals could understand.

So I did one story that was really about AIG, and we got this overwhelming response that

we’d never gotten before from readers we’d never heard from before, and that led to me

doing eight years of work instead of one story.

And one of the themes that came out of that reporting was that in the sort of post-bailout

economy, the wealth gap was widening.

And I just read a statistic that said that during the Obama years, the bottom 99% saw

their average wealth decrease by $4,900, whereas the top 1% saw its wealth increase by an average

of $4.9 million.

So I didn’t make that big of a deal of this in my reporting, but when 2016 came around,

in covering both the Trump and Sanders campaigns, it was abundantly clear that this widening

wealth gap and the stress that it had placed on populations on both the left and the right

was a significant factor in this race.

And when I started to write this in the context of covering Trump, rather than just doing

the usual thing of tossing off insults about the candidate, which is easy enough to do

with Trump, I started to say things like, well, there are reasons why he’s succeeding.

He’s attracting crowds that are not just the usual Republican crowds.

There are former union members here.

They have a lot in common with the crowds who show up at Bernie Sanders events.

And I started to notice a distinctly unpleasant reaction from people inside the business,

where it quickly became taboo to explain Donald Trump in any way other than this is a white

supremacist movement and he’s appealing to the lowest common denominator through that

kind of messaging.

I happen to believe that that was certainly part of what was going on, but it wasn’t the

whole explanation.

But I think Trump is the dividing line of what you’re talking about.

If you have a nuanced explanation for Donald Trump, then you can’t be part of the club

anymore because the dominant narrative requires that he be cartoonized in the same way that

we used to do it with figures like Saddam Hussein or Putin now.

We call it the Hitler of the month club.

If you’re not willing to just do that, and if you try to actually explain where are all

these orders coming from, why are they upset, what went wrong that this would happen?

Also known as the purpose of journalism.

Yeah, exactly.

Right?

Which is supposed to be our job.

I think both of us quickly learned that that was not welcome.

After Trump got elected, I think that instinct to crowd out anyone who was interested in

going there and trying to figure out what was wrong that it caused 2016 suddenly became

an apostate.

By the way, that includes some politicians.

Bernie Sanders, I think, was one of the people who was very interested in examining what

happened in 2016.

I think that’s one of the reasons why there was such a violent reaction to his candidacy

in both 2016 and 2020.

For me, I think that’s the dividing line.

It’s not like something’s changed so much with liberalism.

It’s really about Trump, I think, and journalism has adjusted.

We’ve gone from being people whose primary job is to be curious about why things happen

to being advocates who believe that certain people have to be opposed at all costs, even

if that cost is a little bit of the truth, or a lot of it, even.

Having ripped the umpire jersey off their backs to basically stop the Trump menace,

it seems like journalism can’t now go back to even a pretense of neutrality.

So it basically has happened now?

I think so.

I think you see that in what’s happening with the ratings at cable stations.

I warned about this in 2016.

I wrote a column that summer saying that a model where basically right-wing media wrote

about the evils of the Democratic Party and blue media wrote about the evils of the Republican

Party that just wouldn’t work audience-wise, because audiences would no longer trust either

source to be objective and to report the facts.

I think that’s where we are now.

We see the declining ratings of companies like CNN and MSNBC, which were previously

thought of as more kind of down-the-road, down-the-middle-of-the-road news agencies,

and now are thought of as politicized, and they’re having terrible trouble kind of going

back, because once you cross that line into politics, you can’t get your reputation back

as a neutral fact-finder anymore.

Yeah, I think people forget what things were like before Trump, since he’s such a kind

of ubiquitous presence, as Matt was saying, and for me, he also defines and is responsible

for most of the changes we’re discussing.

Back in 2015, most of these news organizations were on the brink of collapse.

Every MSNBC host was on the verge of being fired, a couple of months away from being

fired because nobody was watching.

The New York Times had severe financial difficulty.

There was talk about whether they would have to declare bankruptcy because their balance

sheet was so drowning in debt, and Trump saved them all.

He saved the entire industry.

They all owed their jobs, their second homes, the ability to pay off their IRS debt to Donald

Trump, because you can trace his emergence on the scene to when people started watching

those programs again, and what they did was they rebranded as the resistance to Donald

Trump, and they sacrificed any even pretense of journalistic function.

They know, and you just look at polling data, that 95% of the people who watch MSNBC and

93% of the people who read the New York Times and trust it identify as Democrats, so there’s

a completely polarized media.

One of the non-media examples is the ACLU.

There was an article in 2015 in the ACLU about the ACLU and the Washington Post that they

had to engage in mass layoffs of their staff because they had no money.

Trump gets inaugurated.

They start tweeting every day, we’ll see you in court, Mr. Trump, and stimulating the g-zones

of every liberal, and suddenly they’re drowning in money, like millions and millions of dollars,

you know, like building the ACLU.

You know, it’s always financially struggled, and as a result they’re completely captive

now to that kind of an audience.

You know, I have a friend, I guess I had a friend, who was a host of an MSNBC show, and

they once told me that they don’t get show-by-show ratings, they get segment-by-segment ratings,

and ever since Trump, they told me the minute you put on anybody who’s critical of the Democratic

Party anyway, you can just see the audience completely disappear, which you can imagine

a person in that position, what an enforcement mechanism that is, to know that they have

a salary and kids and the need to pay for college and their mortgage, and they know

if they do anything that deviates at all from Democratic Party doctrine, they’re going to

lose their audience.

The New York Times knows that, the ACLU knows that, and so yeah, I think they’re all not,

it’s not just that they’ve lost their credibility and can’t get it back, which is absolutely

true, as Matt said, it’s also that they’re now captive to this kind of prison cell that

they built for themselves, chasing the sugar high that Trump provided.

Just really quickly, I got to tell a story, in the middle of all this phenomenon, reporters

were arguing about whether or not we should be covering him less, because maybe we had

helped him get the nomination, you know, I cover Trump’s campaign, and this was a hot

topic on the bus at the time, but then it was sort of decided that, nah, he’s just making

us all so much money, let’s just go with it, and I remember being in Indianapolis when

Trump sewed up the nomination by beating Cruz, who still had a mathematical chance of winning,

I guess, if he had done well there, but Trump, if you remember, during that particular race,

accused Cruz of being the Zodiac killer, which was hilarious, because Cruz was born

two years after the killing ended, but there was one reporter I know who actually got the

nerve up to ask, I believe it was Cruz’s wife, about the accusations, like, what do you have

to say to the idea that your husband is the Zodiac killer, and he’s telling me the story

about this afterwards, and he goes, you know, I felt so dirty doing it, but I also felt

so great.

So I think that’s where they were, they were in that space for a long time.

The media and Trump had a weird codependent relationship.

Just in terms of trying to appeal to people out there who may not be Trump fans, or to

get through to them on this point, it just seems to me that when you lose an election,

anytime you lose an election as a party, you need to analyze what went wrong, and especially

when the candidate is a complete political novice, with no prior experience, and had

so many attributes that historically were considered extreme negatives, and it seems

to me that if you were just to look at what happened in 2016, Trump was able to ride

a few key issues all the way to the White House.

One was these foreign wars, these interventions that we’ve had in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria,

Libya, that were disasters.

We hadn’t gotten out of Afghanistan yet, but it was on its way to being a historic 20-year

failure.

He shattered the Republican Party with that message, no more Bushes.

He then took the issue of trade, and basically broke down the Democrats’ blue wall and the

Rust Belt, by basically pointing out the ways that our bipartisan trade policy, just like

our bipartisan foreign war policy, had led to the de-industrialization of the Rust Belt.

And then he also used the issue of immigration, which was sort of closely related to that

idea of creating wage pressure on the working class.

So you would think that having rode those issues all the way to the White House, that

there would be some sort of reappraisal, and instead it seems like what the elite did to

protect itself was create these mythologies that Trump somehow got elected, not because

the people of the country were fed up with the way that it had been run for 20 years

by both parties, but rather because the Russians somehow were behind it, or the country was

shopped through with white supremacy and that somehow explained it.

And so we never really got a true sort of accounting or reappraisal of what Trump’s

election meant, and instead the media turned to this hysteria, this mode that we’re not

even out of yet.

Your reactions to that?

No, I think it’s one of the most amazing things about the 2016 election, which is, first of

all, in a lot of ways, Barack Obama being this kind of once-in-a-generation political

talent papered over the incredibly serious systemic problems the Democrats had, even

while he was being re-elected underneath Obama and all his glitter and glamour, the Democratic

Party was collapsing.

They were losing state houses and congressional seats and governorships all over the country.

And the reason for that is the anger, the growing anger with the neoliberal policies

that the Democratic Party in the early 1990s had decided to embrace in lieu of the working-class

politics for which they had always been known.

The kind of Clintonian pronouncement that the Democratic Party needs to start embracing

corporate America instead of unions, that it needs to move much closer to this politics

that says, you know, we’re going to encourage corporate America, we’re going to embrace

the Pentagon and all of that.

And it radically changed the Democratic Party into this party of technocracy and the elites

culminating with the Obama presidency.

And what is amazing is, in 2016, the Democrats lost the White House to a game show host.

And so you would think they would wonder why that happened, as you were saying, right?

You would think they would wonder, what is it about us that caused us to lose to Donald Trump?

And instead they invented this long list of people that they decided were to blame instead,

Vladimir Putin principally, WikiLeaks, Jill Stein for having the audacity to continue

to run for president, you know, a whole long list of villains, essentially everybody except

themselves and the people who are responsible for it.

And I think the most toxic narrative is the one that said the only reason Trump won was

because the country is radically and fundamentally racist, and he capitalized on that.

And what’s so amazing about that is there are literally millions of voters, in excess

of 10 million, depending on how you count, but definitely in excess of 10 million, voters

who twice voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then in 2016 voted for Donald Trump.

There are increasing numbers of non-white voters all over the country moving to the

Republican Party under Trump and voting increasingly for Trump.

You had a larger share of black voters, Latino voters, Asian American voters than any Republican

candidate in decades, and those trends are only worsening.

And so you have this media that has no interest in and no ability to understand how the majority

of people in the United States live, because their lives are completely separate, lived

in these isolated enclaves, in this kind of liberal bubble.

And you know, just today there was this amazing article by Rolling Stone.

It was about what most of you have probably heard, which was this horrific mass murder

in Buffalo where an 18-year-old white kid feeding on this kind of ideology of racial

hatred that has become fringe but very dangerous around the West, went into a store that he

knew was predominantly black and shot as many people as he could, killing 10 of them.

And then the article by Rolling Stone that was published this morning was, he is not

a lone wolf shooter, he is a mainstream Republican.

So I think all of you should be very careful because you’re currently in a country where

half of the people in this country apparently are psychotic Nazis on the verge of some sort

of mass murder outbreak, including huge numbers of non-white Americans who are supporters

of the Republican Party.

And the more you kind of immerse yourself in a set of institutional beliefs and a kind

of ethos of your enclave, you know, just constantly hearing a belief reinforced and reinforced,

the more you believe it, the more you’re immersed in it, the more immune you become to facts

that negate it.

And so that’s the reason why the media is so incurious, because they’ve embraced this

narrative that the only reason anyone would vote for Republicans, the only reason anyone

would vote for Trump is because they’re racist or they’re fascist or they’re white supremacist,

and it’s left them completely unable to grapple with things like 10 million people voting

twice for Obama and then for Trump, or the fact, as Matt alluded to, there were all kinds

of people in 2016 who, if you asked them, they would say, yeah, I have two favorite

candidates this year.

And you’d say, who are they?

And they would say, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.

To a working journalist, most working journalists are pundits or political operatives, that

makes no sense.

And they can’t comprehend that because they see the world through this traditional left-right

prism that for increasing sections of the country, I would argue a majority, is no longer

applicable, is no longer how they see the world.

And this is so dangerous when you have this radical breach between the opinion-making

journalistic class and elite class on the one hand, and most of the population on the

other.

They just live completely different lives, work with a completely set of beliefs about

the world, have completely different sets of interests.

And if you look at countries throughout history where that has happened, where there’s been

this complete divergence between the people who hold power in the country and the rest

of the country over whom they exercise that power, instability at best and usually much

worse things inevitably arise.

And I really think that’s the point that we’re at.

Just quickly to piggyback on that, one of the big stories that went uncovered and continues

to go uncovered is the transformation of the Democratic electorate.

The last time I looked at this, 41 of the richest 50 congressional districts in America

had Democrats in those seats, and all of the top 10 richest districts were won by Democrats.

As recently as 1992, the split was more like 50-50.

If you live in an affluent suburb, the overwhelming majority of the voters there are going to

be Democrats now.

And the big divide in American politics is no longer about ideology, it’s significantly

about income and even more, education.

It’s a split between people who have high school degrees or less and people who are

college educated, and this is one of the reasons why Donald Trump was so effusive in saying

I love the poorly educated because they vote for him.

But this is another taboo subject.

Nobody likes to talk about this because it speaks to a transformation that happened in

the Democratic Party that began, I think, with Clinton when they went away from relying

on unions for financial support.

The DLC’s big strategic idea was let’s be more competitive on the fundraising front

by being more pro-business or pro-growth, that was the term that they used a lot.

And a couple of decades later, what you end up with is a party that no longer has any

real organic connection to working people of any kind.

And so I think that’s a massive factor in all of this, is that the reporting on class

politics has become taboo.

All you have to do is go to a Donald Trump event and you can see it clearly, that the

composition of the crowds is vastly different from what you see at a Democratic event.

And that’s one of the reasons why they hated the media, because they saw us as upper class

representatives of the coastal elite who all live in New York, L.A., and Washington,

which is true for the most part.

And it got increasingly hostile as time went on, and that’s why Trump was scoring so many

points going after us, because we were symbols of the upper class.

And that’s another reason why I think the divide is no longer neatly between left and

right anymore.

It has a lot more to do with class than it ever did before.

Okay, David.

I’m over here to your, hey, I know you wanted to take a question or two from the audience

as we wrap up.

Sure, yeah, let’s take some questions.

And I thought I would kick it off, great discussion about the left moving really far left and

taking advantage of the Trump bump in their ratings.

I’m curious, you kind of left out Fox News kind of mastering and Rupert Murdoch.

They kind of created this playbook in a way, and the left copied it.

Isn’t that basically how it happened?

People saw, wow, Fox News was making so much money by picking a side that the New York

Times and MSNBC, et cetera, all just said, you know what, we might as well pick the other

side and just take this playbook and get the money.

That’s kind of what happened, isn’t it?

I wrote a book about this called Hate Inc., which, yeah, that’s basically the thesis is

that Fox pioneered a new way to make money in media, which is sort of like the audience

optimization model.

You pick a group, a demographic, and then you try to dominate it by feeding it news

that you know that those people are going to respond to.

That was never the way things worked before for an ordinary news agency.

They would just cover what they thought was important and try to do the best that they

could.

Has anybody stayed neutral, Matt?

I mean, if you look at Reuters or AP, it’s clear the New York Times, MSNBC, they’ve just

gone full, subscribe to us if you hate Trump.

We’re going to give you what you want.

But is there anybody in the middle still, Matt?

Well, I think that’s one of the reasons why you’re seeing Substack do well, right?

It’s not so much that it’s left or right, it’s just that most people are not partisans.

Most people live somewhere in the middle, right, and have opinions that are all over

the place, and they cannot stand turning on the television and knowing exactly what they’re

going to say ahead of time.

So they’re looking for some place that’s different, where you have differences of opinion,

and that’s why I think independent media is doing better than ever.

I mean, the most influential person in media, even though the mainstream part of the media

never talks about him because he’s not part of them, is without question Joe Rogan.

He speaks to more people who are under 85 years old, which is the cable audience, than

anybody on television by far.

And it’s because, as Matt just said, you cannot pin him down ideologically, nor does he have

fealty to any one political faction or certainly to any political party.

He’s just a curious person, sometimes on the left and sometimes on the right and sometimes

neither, exactly like most Americans.

I mean, it’s such a great point, Glenn.

And in fact, if you were going to pin him, if you just looked at how he voted, he’d be

a Democrat.

And the fact that the Democrats have Joe Rogan and Elon Musk having been their supporters

and voting for them for decades, and they’re too stupid to pull them into their party,

is just shows how-

They do the opposite.

They say, no, Joe Rogan, we know that you love Bernie Sanders, the most far left candidate

ever to be viable in decades, but even though you love him, we’re going to demand that you’re

our enemy and call you a far right fanatic, even though you don’t think you are.

We’re going to demand that Bernie Sanders renounce Joe Rogan’s endorsement.

That’s our plan for winning the election.

I mean, Sax, as much as you and I go at it with how absolutely horrific the Republican

Party is, I mean, the Democrats are so incompetent to not court the two most influential people

in America today, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk.

I mean, it’s-

They’re alienating them.

They’re radicalizing them away from them.

It’s even worse.

I mean, is there any, I mean, Sax is just flabbergasted, but is there any way, Glenn,

you can comment on this and explain what you think the Democrats are thinking?

Or are they just not thinking strategically about winning elections?

You know, I think in addition to what you guys just talked about in terms of MSNBC and

CNN copying the model, there has been a radical change in the composition of the Republican

Party ideologically because of Trump, not because Trump is some sort of like disciplined

political theorist or deep thinker, but because he ushered in, as David was saying earlier,

he ran in 2016 in opposition to Bush-Cheney foreign policy, in opposition to Reagan economics.

He railed against the power of large corporations at the expense of the working person, something

you never would have heard from Reagan.

But he also ushered in a lot of hostility toward agencies like the CIA and the NSA and

the FBI, something that had always been the province of the left.

And so now you have an enormous amount of space opened on the right for all kinds of

views that had previously been closed.

And I think there’s just a lot more vibrancy on the right, a lot more internal debate,

whereas in the Democratic Party, it’s just a very much you’re either with us or you’re

against us mindset, and any deviation, as we were talking about at the beginning, automatically

results in them proclaiming you their enemy, which doesn’t seem like a very effective way

of doing politics to me.

Okay, let’s take a quick question from the audience.

Let’s talk about Elon behind his back before he joins.

What’s your guys’ take?

Is he serious?

Is he going to buy it?

And what is, you know, what do you think the fallout is going to be?

I don’t know if he’s going to buy it or not.

I think that I haven’t really gone into the details of that.

What I do think is fascinating is the reaction by people in media to even the proposition

that he might buy Twitter.

These are people who have been absolutely comfortable with, you know, a handful of people

controlling, you know, 95 to 98% of the media distribution in this country, you know, for

years now.

They never ever once complained about it.

Anytime you ever complain about censorship, they say, oh, that’s not censorship.

This is a private platform.

They can do whatever they want.

That’s always been the response.

Suddenly Elon Musk comes along and it’s, oh my God, the threat of an oligarch taking over

a media platform.

What are we ever going to do?

There were columns like that in the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

The idea.

And isn’t the New York Times run by a family of four?

That’s not really that poor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Five generations.

All right.

We’ll take a final question from the audience.

So I actually agree with a lot of what’s been said here.

And one of my questions is, you know, we were talking about, is Trump even ideologically

a Republican?

My question is, as long as one of them is winning, the Republicans or the Democrats,

aren’t both of them winning?

Like, do you guys have any thoughts on that?

Okay.

I didn’t hear the question.

As long as one of them.

As long as one of them, the Republicans or Democrats are winning, are they collectively

winning?

I guess.

Shouldn’t there be a third party?

I mean, isn’t that the issue that it’s such a binary polarized system?

I think Glenn said in the middle that we are really all more moderates.

That’s my belief.

But just curious.

No, I mean, it’s a great, you know, I think probably the worst media myth is that the

two parties can never get along.

There’s no more bipartisanship.

They’re so radically different.

They can’t agree on anything when the reality is they agree on most things.

It’s just that the only things we hear about are the times when they disagree.

But overwhelmingly on foreign policy and economic policy, Obama himself said the two parties

are essentially playing within the 40 yard line.

So the entire rest of the playing field is basically not part of the political process

because they have the same fundamental beliefs.

And I think one of the reasons why Trump was such a shock to the system was not because

the Trump administration itself was a deviation from the American political tradition.

It wasn’t.

But because some of the things he said, like questioning NATO and whether it has viability,

was designed to undermine that bipartisan consensus.

But I think in general, you’re right that the establishment wings of both parties are

far more in agreement with one another than they are different.

And I think you’re also right that as long as those two wings of each party continue

to trade power, the ruling class in the United States is very happy.

All right, let’s give it up for Glenn, Matt and Sam.

Thank you everybody.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just

like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What?

You’re a B.

What?

You’re a B.

B?

We need to get Merck.

Merck is our back.