← Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
6/5/26: Graham Platner Scandal, California Elections, Screwworm Outbreak & MORE!
02:22:02
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- [00:00]
Ryan Grim
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:02]
Crystal Ball
Guaranteed Human. Want to get more work done with less effort. On TikTok, creators are sharing AI automation tips that save time and deliver better results. Tap to discover. Try TikTok now.
- [00:20]
Ryan Grim
Hey guys, it's us, the Jonas Brothers.
- [00:22]
Crystal Ball
I'm Joe.
- [00:22]
Ryan Grim
I'm Kevin. And I'm Nick. And guess what? We created our own podcast called hey Jonas. We invented a podcast. Well, we didn't invent it, we just contributed to it. We're the first people to do podcasts. We get to ask other people questions. Cause we're sick and tired of being asked questions. Well, sick and tired is a strong way to put it, but you know, tired and sick. Tired and sick. Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just listen.
- [00:47]
Oliver Larkin
We don't care where you hear it.
- [00:49]
Crystal Ball
Hey everyone, this is Teddi Mellencamp and
- [00:51]
Ryan Grim
Tamara Judge from Two T's and a Pod.
- [00:54]
Emily Jashinsky
There's been one scandal that's consumed our
- [00:56]
Crystal Ball
lives the these last couple of months. We're recapping the three part summer house
- [01:00]
Ryan Grim
reunion and as always, we're being brutally honest. We're dissecting timelines, receipts, blind items and previous episodes.
- [01:09]
Crystal Ball
Amanda and Wes, watch out. We're not going to be easy on you.
- [01:12]
Ryan Grim
Listen to two T's in a pod on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
- [01:16]
Oliver Larkin
wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:19]
Emily Jashinsky
Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here.
- [01:21]
Crystal Ball
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for
- [01:27]
Emily Jashinsky
the future of this, where you can
- [01:29]
Oliver Larkin
find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
- [01:34]
Crystal Ball
So if that is something that's important to you, Please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows unedited ad free and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
- [01:45]
Emily Jashinsky
We need your help to build the
- [01:46]
Oliver Larkin
future of independent news media and we
- [01:47]
Emily Jashinsky
hope to see you@breakingpoints.com Happy Friday everyone.
- [01:51]
Crystal Ball
Ryan, great to see you.
- [01:53]
Ryan Grim
Good to see you too.
- [01:54]
Crystal Ball
So we have a little bit of timing challenges today. I have to leave here shortly and Emily was doing another podcast that has to come in late, but we wanted both of us have things to say about this whole Grand Planner situation. So we're going to sort of split, split the the Grand Platner segment in two. Ryan will be there throughout the the whole process to guide us through so we could get this covered from all aspects. But didn't want it just to be two lefties. But also Emily actually knows this, the woman who is the main accuser in the story against Graham Platner. So definitely wanted to get her view on what is going on there. We're also going to update you on the California election results, which continue to shift in very interesting ways. We're going to update you on Screwworm as well. And I had an interview with Oliver Larkin, excuse me, this week, who is challenging Jared Moskowitz in a Florida district in the Democratic primary. Moskowitz, in my opinion, has been a real villain. You can, he's certainly, he's proud to be a top, a PAC candidate. He defends taking those APAC dollars. He says basically it's, he doesn't understand why they're singled out for, for scrutiny. Ryan, I'm sure you have some, some thoughts about his, his comments on that. But in any case, Oliver Larkin challenging him from the left and you know, has a very interesting story and very compelling in his own right as well.
- [03:11]
Ryan Grim
Yes, yes, indeed. And you know, the, the news gods gifted us with a slow news day, one of the first in, in months. So that allows us to spend some, spend some quality time with this New York Times investigation, which I think is useful not just for what it says about Platner or, or for this particular Senate race, but it's a really, it's kind of a snapshot of, of our moment in time in a really interesting way.
- [03:40]
Crystal Ball
I completely agree. So let's go ahead and dig in. This is the New York Times piece and we should say before we jump in that there were rumors flying all week that some major scandal was going to break about Graham Platner above and beyond the, you know, sexting revelations that had come out. Was that early this week or last week, I can't even remember at this point. And so this appears to be what the rumors were about. So the. Go ahead, Ryan.
- [04:09]
Ryan Grim
No, it definitely is. The rumors were that the New York Times had this story and they had, they spoke to a bunch of his ex girlfriends and it was going to be kind of devastating. And the, the senators, Democratic senators, when Platner came down to D.C. i believe it was on Tuesday, even asked him, you know, are there assault and abuse allegations coming? And he said no, no credible ones.
- [04:36]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, no one can guarantee what someone is going to say about them. But.
- [04:39]
Ryan Grim
Right. It turns out, you know, we, there weren't any period. Unless we'll, we'll get it. We'll read through the piece. There's this one Grabbing the shoulder thing that you could say, well, that's physical and that there's touch. Like Representative Luna was, you know, badly assaulted by Medea Benjamin, as, as we'll talk about later in the program as
- [04:59]
Crystal Ball
well, thoughts and prayers.
- [05:01]
Ryan Grim
So any, any contact can be considered over the line. So. But we'll, we'll go through it. Yeah.
- [05:09]
Crystal Ball
All right, so the headline here is several women, by the way, they news alerted this. Just so people know, which means you get it on my phone, I got a news alert that this story had broken, which is what they reserve for what they consider to be their sort of most important or most explosive stories. Several women who dated Graham Platner recall, quote, unsettling behavior. The Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine could be charming, women said in interviews, but some found his actions intimidating and disturbing. And so if you go through this piece, they speak with, I think, six different Platner ex girlfriends. The primary accusations here, in fact, really any of the accusations that have any sort of detail to them come from one woman. We'll get more into her background. And Ryan has done some reporting on that. And as I mentioned before, Emily actually knows, knows this woman Lindsay, who leveled the, you know, most serious allegations against Graham in this piece. She does work for right wing causes. And to me, the headline after I read it was very, was kind of misleading because even though they say several women, which led me to believe as I dug into this, that you're gonna have multiple stories with specific accounts, it's really only this one woman who says anything even remotely specific. The other two say things like, well, he came home drunk one time and I found his behavior settling and I cut off contact, that sort of thing. But no real specifics and certainly no allegations of anything that would approximate, quote, unquote, abuse.
- [06:39]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, yeah, we can also do interesting and well, yeah, we can parse it because, yeah, you, they say three said X, but then when you go through it, you're like, well, who are the three?
- [06:49]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, and actually the, the primary accuser here is taking issue with that as well because she's saying she was told that there would be other women making similar allegations. And she was very surprised when she read the piece and it was all about her. The byline here is Katie Glueck and Lisa Lehrer. What do we know about them as reporters, Ryan? Because I know you, you have experience with both of them in some regard.
- [07:13]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, Lisa was a colleague of mine back at the, when I was at Politico, back now, almost 20 years ago at this point. I think she's a great reporter. And I had told somebody close to Platner, I was like, you know, if. If Lisa, if Lisa on her own takes you down, you probably deserve to go down. Like, she's a very good reporter. And, and, and I think you can really put a lot of faith in, in what she. And what she reports and writes. Katie is, Is different. Katie. Katie's a little like me on the, on the reverse side, like both a journalist and somebody with a sense of politics. And she is, for her entire career, been pretty, you know, strongly pro Israel. In college. She was. I forget what was the organization, you know, that she. She was president of, like, Friends of Israel or whatever it was that, like, won an award from apac. So, like, fine. Like, go ahead. That's fine. Like, I don't. I think it's you. We should all, you know, as long as what you're telling is true is, you know, you can back up what you're saying. But it's been interesting to see people now slamming the New York Times as, like, this is a catch and kill. Like, these reporters were, like, in the tank for the Platner campaign. It's like, do you have any idea, like, what Katie's politics. Are you insane? Like, yeah, you could.
- [08:39]
Crystal Ball
She writes some of the critical pieces about Zoran during his campaign.
- [08:42]
Ryan Grim
Yes, yes. The one. Some of the most egregious. Yes. So if you had Katie as your lead byline here, and this is what you got, you, like, you're not going to do any better. Like, there's just no world in which you can say that she is biased here for Platner.
- [09:00]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah.
- [09:02]
Crystal Ball
All right, let's get back to the actual text of this. And I'm just going to read through this, and we'll just, like, pause and comment where we think appropriate on Tuesday evening. Because I don't want to, you know, I don't want to mischaracterize what the report says. We'll give you the actual language that's in the report. On Tuesday evening, after whirlwind day in Washington, Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, rushed home. Rumors were spreading from Portland to the Potomac about Mr. Platner's messy personal life. After news reports that he had sent sexual messages to women while married Democratic senators were pressing him about whether more damaging revelations were coming. Journalists were swarming, staking out his hometown. Amid the turmoil, Mr. Platner worked the phones, rolling through calls to ex girlfriends who might publicly acknowledge that while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy. In interviews with the New York Times on Wednesday, several women did just that, describing Mr. Platner as a fun and caring partner and saying they felt safe with him. Some remains remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationship ended. But in extensive conversations over the past two months, three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and, quote, toxic relationships that were unsettling and at times, emotionally wrenching. Mr. Platner could be charming and charismatic, they recalled in interviews, but also demeaning to women, in at least one case, even physically threatening. He drank heavily and was regularly unfaithful. Mr. Platner, 41, a combat veteran, has spoken openly about grappling with PTSD, depression, and drinking that he said has resulted from his time in the military. As revelations about him have surfaced, including his dismissive remarks online about rape and and derogatory comments about women, as well as a tattoo he had that is widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. He has said his past behavior does not reflect who he is today. Mainers, he has urged, should not judge him for the worst thing I said on the Internet on my worst day 14 years ago. The critical accounts provided by three of the women interviewed by the Times who were each in romantic relationships with him for years, give a fuller picture of Mr. Platner's life. They shed light on an earlier era when he has acknowledged intense struggles, but also raised questions about his more recent years in Maine, which his campaign has presented as a period of healing and personal redemption. And again, Ryan, when I read this portion, I really fully expected to get, like, a, you know, detailed accounts from all three of these women, which is not what you end up getting in this piece.
- [11:24]
Ryan Grim
No. Yeah, you get the M. And maybe we should do those first, because I know you got to leave in five minutes. Maybe we take a. Take a look at. Yeah, let's take a look at the accounts from the two that aren't Lindsay, because I've seen people saying, oh, what? You. Okay, you don't believe the Republican operative. But what about these other two women? It's like, well, believe what? Like what? Like, prepared to believe, you know, or not believe. Or evaluate claims and allegations or accusations. But what. What are they? Like what? Like, literally, like what? So, yeah, Jenny, I can read this.
- [12:03]
Crystal Ball
So here we've got Jenny Rasicow, 41, main Democrat. Said she dated him casually, said the post deepened her belief he did not respect women. When I saw the old comments he made Online, I recognized a version of him that I had experiences with.
- [12:18]
Ryan Grim
So that. So, like, what. What is a reader supposed to take from that? Is there. And is there anything else from her? Is she the one where he showed up drunk at the house?
- [12:27]
Crystal Ball
Let's see, they say. See, they say these vague things. The three described him in similar terms. Spending time with him could be exhilarating, they said. They also recounted patterns of heavy drink and womanizing. I mean, think Graham's owned up to all of this, by the way, this aspect of it. You know, I think that was already on the record that he had a drinking problem and the womanizing problem. As to sum up how he treated her, the third woman, I think that is the main Democrat, said she felt like collateral damage to the world. That is his. Yeah, okay, sure, I believe her. I believe that she felt that way.
- [13:01]
Ryan Grim
All right, so here's from Rasico. This is the. This is the allegation, and this is the part that winds up in the headline as unsettling. Razico also said that in 2021, he arrived at her house drunk after she had asked him not to come over. She declined to elaborate, but said she cut off contact soon after that episode and found his behavior, quote, reckless and, quote, unsettling. So to let you in on the journalism here, as you're doing interviews and then packaging a story, unsettling wound up in the headline of this article. And this is where it comes from. Usually if you're going to put that in the headline, you're going to quote the person. Like, you'll. You'll do the entire thing that she said. Instead, here it's paraphrased and then. And then thrown into a quote. So you don't know. Like, sometimes a journalist will say, well, was that unsettling? And Razko could say, yeah, it was unsettling. And. And so then it winds up like this. But, okay, so he showed up as they.
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Crystal Ball
They all said that. The same thing, that he's unsettling.
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Ryan Grim
And so she. He showed up drunk after she said, don't come over. And then she didn't elaborate on that. So it looks like, well, then I guess he left. Like, I mean, I mean, we can. I guess we can guess that, you know, she didn't want to talk about whatever happened after that, but that's it. So when. When people are like, well, what about her allegation? It's like, okay, I totally believe 100%. I'm. This sounds like a credible claim. I don't think Platner has Denied this.
- [14:25]
Oliver Larkin
Did she say.
- [14:26]
Ryan Grim
Did he say, I'm gonna come over, you know, when I'm done with the bar? And she said, don't come over. And he came over anyway, like, quite possibly. How is this in the New York Times? Is the. Is kind of my question there?
- [14:42]
Crystal Ball
Yeah. Well, and I. I did want to ask you, Ryan and Emily, welcome. We started diving into the. The article because I'm gonna have to jump, and I wanted to get a little bit of my 2 cents in here. And we definitely wanted your 2 cents on this story, given that, you know, Lindsay. So we started going through, actually, the other. The other two women that are in this piece which are, you know, which I don't think Graham denies and which are consistent with things that he said about his, you know, what he describes as negative content contact conduct from a previous era of his life. But, you know, Ryan, I wanted to ask you because you've done reporting on alleged sexual assault, and I never have. You know, I found it to be shocking just to get to the main claims in the story from Lindsay, who, by the way, does not allege sexual assault. You know, the most egregious thing that she alleges is that he grabbed her by her shoulders, that he yanked her by her hand out of a cab, and that there was an incident where he put her arm behind her back, pushed her into her room, closed the door and locked the door. He, by the way, completely denies this. The time says they were not able to independently corroborate it, you know, in. In any way. It's just basically her word against his word. And so what. But I was fairly shocked that they printed this, given that not only do you not have corroboration, but you also have an actor who is. Does have a potential political motivation here, given that she, you know, worked for Heritage and is a right wing operative. But I wonder, as someone who's done this sort of sensitive reporting, how you viewed that aspect of it. And, you know, to be clear, you were involved in the reporting on Kavanaugh allegations, on Tara Reid's allegations against Joe Biden. So how do you weigh how to do that reporting and what meets the standard of printing something publicly?
- [16:26]
Ryan Grim
I think because the allegations are at a low level, the bar then becomes kind of lower for them to be included. Like, the higher the offense, then the higher the bar for corroboration. So. Because you can also imagine, like, so basically what she's saying is they were having a fight, and she has, I think, discussed this elsewhere. They're having a fight. And he kind of like pushes her into the, or moves her into this room, closes the door and says, like, stay in here until you calm down. And she says, like, it hurt when he pushed her in there. And then. But then she fell asleep in the, in the room. So it's like, it also, it's like most people in relationships can picture some version of that.
- [17:14]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [17:15]
Ryan Grim
And so it's, so it's a, so it's easier to include. I think what happened is that they had a lot, they had heavier allegations that they couldn't substantiate or corroborate. And so they whittled it down, whittled it down, whittled it down until they had what they published and if, if they originally would have pitched to their editors. So here's what we have. We have, you know, three women who say unsettling stuff. One of them, he came over drunk at the house when I asked him not to. The third one said he was demeaning towards women. I don't, I think the third one has no, no, no accusation specifics at all. Just kind of he was disrespectful towards women, which he had disrespectful things to say about women in his Reddit posts. Like that. No, that tracks. And then the third one saying he kind of pushed me into a room during a fight and pulled me out of a cab by his wrist. Like, I, I don't have a hard time believing that he might have grabbed her wrist and pulled her out of a cab. Like, and sometimes, like, you often will help someone out of a cab. And if you're angry, maybe like, yank, like, totally plausible accusation there, but also not remotely kind of debilitating to the campaign. So I think it's easier then to get it in. But I think if they could pitched it as that, like, this is what we have, the editors would have said, no, that's. You don't have a story there. But once the entire country is talking about your story and there are all these rumors going around, you got to publish something, is my guess.
- [18:48]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing to me is like, okay, well, if it's not that serious of an allegation, then why are we digging into past relationships from over a decade from, you know, years ago? And if it is a serious allegation, then how are we printing this without any corroboration, given the likely, the, the clear cut political motivation here? And you know, as I said before, he completely denies it. In fact, maybe I'll go Ahead and play a little bit of his denial here. Emily, while I'm pulling that up, you want to just react a little bit and tell us a little bit about what you know about Lindsay and your experience with her.
- [19:28]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah.
- [19:28]
Crystal Ball
Well.
- [19:28]
Emily Jashinsky
And have you guys mentioned her post this morning yet?
- [19:31]
Ryan Grim
Not yet.
- [19:33]
Emily Jashinsky
Okay. So this is also worth mentioning on the corroboration point. So she and I guess some of her friends and I'm out in West Virginia and was driving all night so I may have missed some stuff, but I've seen what her friends said. By the way, we do have some mutual friends and some, I think some close mutual friends. I've met her a handful of times and am not personal friends with her, but I know her and not well, I should say, but we do have some close mutual friends. I am also a, actually, I don't even know this for sure. I think I'm still a fellow at Independent Women's Forum. They don't pay me for anything. It's a, it's kind of like a brand ambassador thing for some people. I would describe it as, I think they said she was paid 15 grand over the course of a couple years in the early 2021, 2022 time period. But I don't think I've seen her in like five plus years. So she is now saying, and some of her friends are saying that they offered to provide corroboration. I don't think they have specifically, unless I've missed something, said what they would have provided that corroboration for. Would it be for the arm twisting incident, for the wrist incident. But there's, I just, there's no way right now to know what was happening behind the scenes of the reporting. All we can do is like read the tea leaves. And it's just a strange, strange story for the New York Times all around. It is just an incredibly strange story for the New York Times. And Crystal, you have up here some of the stuff from the women. Is that what that is?
- [21:01]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, we, we had, this is one of Lindsay's posts. The other post that she put up. The other post that she put up said that yes, she felt misled by the Times that they came to her and were like, we have these other women who are going to also go on the record with significant allegations and that her impression was she was not going to be the only one because she expresses in the piece she understands like, look, people are going to look at this, I'm a Republican, like operative. I'm, you know, they're going to see psycho, bitter ex Republican girlfriend and be like, what are we talking about here? And so I, you know, I don't rule out that the Times came to her and in order to encourage her to put whatever she was going to say on the record, that they claimed they had more than they actually claimed than they actually had. And that also makes sense, like you were saying, Ryan, in terms of the editors green lighting this, you know, if they were portraying to them as well, like, oh, we've got these, you know, we've got these multiple women, and they're all going to go on the record. And at the end of the day, you just have one political operative who was literally, you know, involved with the organization that helped shepherd through Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and coach Susan Collins on what to say in order to help get him through. You know, the editors probably would have, I don't know, like, I'm not sure this is strong enough. So it does seem like there are some other things that are going on here behind the scenes. I do want to. Quickly. And then I probably. I probably gotta run. I want to get Graham's voice in here a little bit because he did do a lengthy interview with Chris. Chris Hayes last night. And, you know, the first portion of this, I'll play for you just his reaction. And just to generally characterize the interview, he acknowledges, yeah, I was a bad boyfriend. I've spoken about this. I've tried to be transparent about the man that I was and the man that I've become.
- [22:55]
Emily Jashinsky
And.
- [22:56]
Crystal Ball
But on the issue of any sort of physical altercation or harm, he categorically denies that. So let's go ahead and take a listen to the beginning of this interview so you can hear that portion.
- [23:07]
Oliver Larkin
Good to have you on. Thank you so much for doing this.
- [23:10]
Ryan Grim
Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. I just want to say at the start that, like, you know, we've had you on before, and I think you and I are both people that in
- [23:18]
Oliver Larkin
other contexts talk about income into quality
- [23:20]
Ryan Grim
and healthcare and all those issues which
- [23:22]
Oliver Larkin
are extremely important and we devote a
- [23:24]
Ryan Grim
lot of time to on this program. We are. This is not, you know, the thing
- [23:26]
Oliver Larkin
that we spend a lot of time chasing.
- [23:28]
Ryan Grim
But, you know, there's some serious stuff there I want to go through with
- [23:31]
Oliver Larkin
you, I think, right. Know about it. And I want to start with what Ms. Fifield says about being rough is the term the Times were.
- [23:39]
Ryan Grim
And I'm going to just read you
- [23:40]
Oliver Larkin
the account so you have it. This is from the Times, Mr. Platner.
- [23:44]
Ryan Grim
Could be rough with her, Ms. Fifield
- [23:45]
Oliver Larkin
said, particularly when they were drinking, leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid. In the interviews, she grappled with how to process her experiences. She was quick to know he never hit me, never punched me.
- [23:53]
Ryan Grim
She said he regularly grabbed her by
- [23:55]
Oliver Larkin
the shoulders, sometimes hard enough to leave marks. On one occasion, yanked her out of
- [23:58]
Ryan Grim
a cab by her wrist after an argument.
- [24:00]
Oliver Larkin
She wanted to stay in the car.
- [24:02]
Ryan Grim
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted
- [24:04]
Oliver Larkin
her arm behind her back, shoved her
- [24:05]
Ryan Grim
into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn't get out, telling her to remain
- [24:09]
Oliver Larkin
there until she was calm. Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
- [24:13]
Ryan Grim
It hurt, she said. But she added, it didn't cause any injury.
- [24:16]
Oliver Larkin
It didn't break my arm.
- [24:18]
Ryan Grim
Did that happen? No, it did not. There are some allegations in this piece that I just want to be kind of unequivocal about are simply not true. Anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was.
- [24:36]
Emily Jashinsky
These are the statements of someone who's politically motivated.
- [24:40]
Ryan Grim
In this piece, there's a lot about my struggling not being a good boyfriend, certainly self medicating with alcohol. And I've been very upfront since the beginning of this campaign. That was a pretty dark period of my life, life after I came back from my combat service. And that's what that combat, that's what that kind of life looks like. And so there are things in this that I absolutely will take responsibility for and have been speaking about openly for months now. But those serious allegations are just not true.
- [25:11]
Crystal Ball
So there you go. That's. And that's kind of the tenor of what he says. He also makes a point at one point that I think is worth noting, which is he's like, look, this is why people don't run for office. Because, I mean, look, I don't know about you guys, but if reporters went and talked to my exes, I don't know that you'd get a very flattering portrait. Let's just be very clear. So, you know, I, I think many of us can look back and imagine the way others in our life may view us and sorts of things that they may, you know, tell to the press if they wanted to, to, you know, hurt you and take you down and say that might be a little uncomfortable for me.
- [25:47]
Ryan Grim
So throw in that one of them's a Republican operative and you're running as a democr Democrat.
- [25:52]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, literally. I mean, actually, it's funny you mentioned just a very quick digression you know, I. When I ran for Congress, the stupid photos were released of me. Like, at this, you know, triple Xmas party. I'm dressed up, and at the. Now it's, like, so tame that it's ridiculous to even talk about. Right. But at the time, it was a scandal, and I was young and. Yeah, Ryan remembers. Well, I'm sure I was young and, you know, I have this weird name, and it was a whole thing. Okay, well, I'm pretty sure that the person who released the photos was my friend who hosted the party's Republican Heritage staffer boyfriend at the time.
- [26:27]
Emily Jashinsky
So.
- [26:27]
Crystal Ball
Yeah. So I feel the story deep in my bones is what I'm saying. I just would say, listen, Heritage staffer would never. Yeah. In the case of. Case of Graham, in the case of Zoran, you see the level before there was an Abdul El Sayed reported scandal of, like, he didn't finish his residency, even though he's like, an MD at a PhD, like, super decorated and accomplished person. One of the pieces of this is who is the scrutiny applied to and why? And Katie Galuk is an ideological actor. That just is what it is in terms of her reporting. Obviously, the Republican here is also an ideological actor as well. And so I think that is, for me, the main media takeaway is, look, there's. There's things on the record that suggest Susan Collins had an affair in the 70s. Have we had any reporting about that? And what that says about her character and voters are grappling with it. Have we interviewed all of her exes? No. Graham Platner challenges power. He challenges the oligarchy, and he challenges the powers that be on Israel. And we know that is a recipe for people coming after you and doing whatever they can to try to tarnish you and ultimately take you down. So, anyway, that's what I'll. Those are my thoughts that I'll sort of leave us with and I'll let you guys continue on. You can talk about the tattoo and all the things, but. But, you know, that's where I get angry in this story, is it's not that they're. You know, that it's not unreasonable to report on Graham and his struggles in his past and whatever, but when you see how selectively this level of scrutiny is applied and the type of things they will print out about him that I do not think they would print about, you know, a Chuck Schumer if you had a similar uncorroborated, ideologically motivated allegation against him, that's where it, I think, is very Biased and in my opinion, egregious.
- [28:22]
Emily Jashinsky
All right, well, you gotta run, Crystal.
- [28:24]
Ryan Grim
Happy travels.
- [28:25]
Crystal Ball
Thank you, guys. Can't wait to watch the rest of your coverage.
- [28:29]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, I've got a lot more to say, Ryan. I was just going to jump in and say I kind of wish Crystal was there because I was going to say actually a lot of what she just laid out. And I have also done some me too type reporting. And this was the stuff that drove me crazy during Kavanaugh is I would say the powers that be did not want Roe v. Wade overturned. And I saw so. And this is driving me crazy about the right at this moment too, but also a little bit about the left. Like, I feel like I'm. My head is about to explode because it is frustrating to see the Michael Avenatti allegations of what was it like the Devil's Triangle gang rape in the New York. It was New York magazine, I think, that first reported that. That is to me that was clearly done with political motivations by Julie Swetnick, I think was who clear had clear political motivations.
- [29:19]
Ryan Grim
It was also just a fabulous. It seems like, yeah, right.
- [29:23]
Emily Jashinsky
And so I think this is a good moment because it tests everybody's priors. The right now is valorizing and pumping up a story that I think if it were published about Pete Hegseth, who did challenge power at the pentag. He's not anymore. But when before he was confirmed, he was saying he was going to do all these big reforms at the Pentagon and the like. I really think Republicans, if this story were about a Republican, would be saying this is more thin MeToo reporting. I genuinely firmly believe that. On the other hand, I think one of the reasons Republicans are running to the story is because they're trying to. They're like, well, you guys set these rules. And so now if we're playing by these rules, he's screwed. And so they're kind of reveling in that. And it's so, so infuriating to see this. Like, it's driving me insane because there is a way to have consistent standards across the board. And I don't feel like anybody is doing that in this now. I shouldn't say anybody. I'm not speaking with proper nuance when I say that because obviously, you know, I'm talking to somebody who I think is being very nuanced on this. But it's just like maddening to see the whole thing. Like, it was Katie Glueck probably. I bet she was. I bet Crystal Siri is correct. She probably was like Selling this to the people to entice them to participate by saying that it was. Or implying that it was a much more serious story. But I don't know, maybe they did have other people. Like, what's your sense of how true it might have been that there were other people they were talking to that had more serious allegations? I don't know.
- [30:56]
Ryan Grim
So Lindsay said this morning on Twitter that she's. She's in touch with these two other women who spoke with the. Maybe I can find it. Who, who spoke with the New York Times and whose stories were not included. And she said she is. They are. They are considering what to do. Oh, here it is. She says she said, thankfully, I'm connected to two of them and we're deciding what to do next. They're much more vulnerable than me, and it's not an easy decision considering what New York Times just did to us. Slash me. The Daily Caller last night, straight up wrote a piece saying that the Times had two women who were accusing some level of abuse that they. That they did not. That they did not run. Which is an interesting kind of way around, kind of defamation law to. I don't know if it is a way around actually to say, like, because you're not saying that the things happen. You're saying the Times had this thing that they didn't publish. So we haven't heard the last of this for sure.
- [32:00]
Emily Jashinsky
Which is interesting to me because your original. You were literally the first person who broke that. There was something coming with Kavanaugh, and it was that the Feinstein office seemed to be sitting on it.
- [32:07]
Ryan Grim
Right, right. That was an end run around it in that sense, too. There's this kind of. There's a meta level of coverage which says. So you know, what I reported is that Feinstein had a letter, you know, from a woman that she was under pressure to circulate among Democrats. And she. And she was. And she was not doing so, but that the rumors about this letter had circulated around Capitol Hill and it was not clear what was in the letter, just that it was something explosive. And then. And then she shared the letter and then Christine Blasey Ford ended up. Ended up testifying. So, yeah, in that sense, that's. That's a kind of similar thing. But so, yeah, it is interesting because, like, when as I read Lindsay's, you know, quote unquote accusations, I'm like, I don't net like people saying, oh, you don't. What about believe all women? I kind of believe him. Like, like, did he grab her by the wrist out of a cab. I don't. I don't know. But, like, it's not an insane thing to think that that could happen. Like, I. I know, and I think there's this weird distance between the way that we in the media and the media broadly kind of talk about life and the way life actually unfolds in the real world. Like, two volatile drunk people who are in a. This emotional relationship. Like, did he grab her by the wrist at one point or, like, kind of tell her to go in this room, like, room and slam the door and keep it closed and say, don't come out of there until you're calm? Like, that's a rather believable story. But on the other hand. So is he lying when he's saying it didn't happen? Maybe. Maybe he doesn't even remember it. He's saying he's drunk at the time. On the other hand, the gap between how the media talks about things and how things unfold in real life is so great that in the middle of it, it's unbridgeable. So let's say he said, yeah, you know what? I think, you know, I probably did, you know, push her into the room and close the door. Like, the headline would be. Because now you've crossed that gap between real life and. And the way media covers life. The headline would be, Graham Platner acknowledges, you know, physical abuse. And it's like, oh, then he has to drop out of the Senate race. So we've kind of like, cornered people into being unable to talk about life in all of its messiness and complication. Even me just saying this here. People are like, oh, look at him defending, like, domestic abuse. It's like, bro.
- [35:05]
Emily Jashinsky
What?
- [35:06]
Ryan Grim
No, nobody's defending it. I'm like. It's just acknowledging that, like, that's this is a plausible thing that has, like, lot that lots of people cannot imagine.
- [35:18]
Emily Jashinsky
Yep.
- [35:19]
Ryan Grim
And when people lose their temper. I happen to not have, like, much of a temper. So, like, it's not something that, like, believe it or not, my emotional registers from, like, here to here.
- [35:32]
Emily Jashinsky
Well, I wonder who's. I wonder who's been arrested more, you or Graham, right?
- [35:37]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, probably me back in your.
- [35:39]
Emily Jashinsky
Your youth.
- [35:40]
Ryan Grim
No, no. Violent. No violence, though.
- [35:43]
Emily Jashinsky
No, no, no, no, no.
- [35:45]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. And so, well, you.
- [35:46]
Emily Jashinsky
I mean, you've punched.
- [35:47]
Crystal Ball
Meanwhile.
- [35:47]
Ryan Grim
Meanwhile, his. For his life was violence. Like, his profession was. Was state sanctioned violence. So anyway, that. It.
- [36:00]
Emily Jashinsky
It's.
- [36:01]
Ryan Grim
But I think we're the kind of show that should be able to talk openly about that stuff.
- [36:05]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, I Agree and openly about where we disagree too. And I think that's good. And my, like, it's. I've. I've actually dropped me two stories that I've. One particular story that I spent a ton of time, like, talked to dozen people spent like. And I've dropped it, not published it. And I don't think I agreed with my editor at the time. But the way that I look at this story is if I were an assignment editor, like, hypothetically at a fantasy world, I put myself in the shoes of an assignment editor at the Daily Mail or the New York Post, probably the story, you'd be like, okay, that's kind of a New York Post, Daily Mail story. The New York Times to frame the story as it did, as it, as it was printed is very bizarre. The whole thing is strange. And I just, like, I really believe, as somebody who's been like, the E. Jean Carroll allegations are completely politicized. They were used as a cudgel and a weapon by people like Rachel Maddow. I don't know if Rachel Maddow genuinely believes E. Jean Carroll, but I don't think most people who have read E. Jean Carroll's story look at that and say, as she is describing it, this probably happened. It's a very thin allegation. Maybe it did happen. I don't know. I'm not saying one way the other. I don't think it did. That's my guess. But, like, it was so, so politicized. And the sad thing about all of this, and I sensed it happening about a month into the MeToo movement, I don't know if you had a similar sense, Ryan, but like, covering these stories really closely as a media writer at the time, it was going to permanently destroy our ability, well, not permanently, but indefinitely, and destroy our ability to actually find stories that should reflect on or that should influence voting choices. Because somebody has a serious allegation, a character allegation against them that they abused a woman. And because of the way so much of that reporting was done, it has made the public, put the public in a position reasonably so, where they don't trust a lot of these stories anymore. And again, I think that's reasonable from the position of the public. And so for Republicans, I think it makes sense right now that they're jumping all of the story politically. I get it. But at a certain point, it doesn't make sense because people right now have gas, four plus dollars a gallon. They are looking at an unpopular war. There's so many different things happening in the country right now that to take this fairly thin story from 10 years ago, before Graham Platner said he got help, which he said happened in 2017. He started going to the VA. Now there are some weird Reddit posts and some of the allegations about him being a bad boy or after that, we,
- [38:49]
Ryan Grim
we, we can generously call it a journey. Like, and, and to be fair, like, nobody, you don't snap overnight and get help, and all of a sudden you're good. But like, yeah, like, yeah, the dog, the dog behavior creeped into the beginning of their marriage as he has 2020, which is recent.
- [39:06]
Emily Jashinsky
Which is recent. Yeah. And so is there, I think there's a. Honesty is going to be important question for him. He has to, to come across like he's not lying. I think there have been some cases where it looks like he was fudging again to be charitable on that. And I think that's a real problem for populist candidates because they have to come across as though they are the anti like all the others. Yeah, yeah. And you're the anti Paxon, if you're James Talarico, you are the, the anti Susan Collins if you're Grandpa, the anti establishment, you're going to do things differently. You're not someone who's been bought by Washington, et cetera. And so lying is. That is like such a red flag for voters with a candidate like that. So I think that's really, really important. On the other hand, I think another part that we wanted to or that you and I should mention is the Jewish Insider story about, quote, unquote, my Totenkopf. That now looks like Lindsay Fifield was the person who was talking to Jewish Insider, which I think calls into question how the New York Times story came to be, which is a meta question, I get it. But yeah, that is also interesting.
- [40:09]
Ryan Grim
You have two elements here. Let me put up. Yeah, so here's Bethany Mandel, who's her, her, her co host of the Lady Brains podcast. She says she came forward with the Totenkopf many months ago, naively believing that a Nazi tattoo would be disqualifying. Unfortunately, that was not a bridge too far, much to our dismay. And so, yes, the. My Totenkopf story was in Jewish Insider. And also Kaczynski at cnn, very good reporter. Had.
- [40:40]
Emily Jashinsky
But it was anonymous, right?
- [40:42]
Ryan Grim
It was anonymous. It was called an acquaintance when it was in acquaintance from the tune in is how Lindsay was described in the Jewish Insider. And then Andrew Kaczynski had said that he saw a text Message exchange among friends, talking about it, like, before it came out, which clearly is. That's the text message exchange that she shared with the New York Times. Pretty obviously when people thought, oh, well, now she's backing up these previous sources. It's like, okay, well, now we know who the source was for this in, in the beginning. And, and then one other, one other point. Let me find this, because I actually tend to maybe I think I kind of believe her on the Totenkopf story.
- [41:28]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, yeah.
- [41:29]
Ryan Grim
Like, we can talk about how the wedding still complicates it for me. The 2015 wedding where he took his shirt off in front of a bunch of Jewish family members. So it's like, could he really have known and done that? He's like. And also that he passed these two security clearances. Anyway, the other related thing here, so this Senate Leadership Fund, the day. This is April, the day that Janet Mills withdrew the Senate Leadership Fund, which is Mitch McConnell's kind of super PAC that elects Senate Republicans, they start their statement by saying, Graham Platner is a silver spoon charlatan who fantasizes about sexual assault, admires Nazi. Nazi Stormtroopers, blah. And then goes on to the other stuff. And when that came out, I remember being like, what? So we now know, we now know that this Nazi Stormtrooper thing is something that the Free Beacon published just a few days ago where he doesn't admire Nazi Stormtroopers. There's a photo of Swedish volunteers who are under the command of a Finnish unit who are fighting the Soviets using American weapons, a bar and a German helmet. And Platner writes on Reddit, cool photo. Now the, like, Nazis were also fighting the Soviet Union. So in the Free Beacon article, they say Nazi Allied troops. It's like, okay, these are Swedish and Finnish troops who are fighting the Soviets. And they had a German helmet, an American gun. So it's like a fascinating photo. And he says, cool photo, cool pick. That becomes, in SLF's words, admires Nazi Stormtroopers. Anyway, so we know that SLF was. Had that oppo at the time. That's, that's where they get this admirers Nazi Stormtroopers thing. The, the one that really raised eyebrows at the time was fantasizes about sexual assault. Because people are talking like, wait a minute, I don't remember that being in any Reddit posts. Like, what, what, what are you talking about? And so now we know that Lindsay has been talk. Had. Had been talking to slf. Like, that's the only place that could have come from. And so let's put up this, you know, this moment from the article
- [43:55]
Emily Jashinsky
where
- [43:55]
Ryan Grim
the heck I have so many tabs. It's brutal.
- [44:03]
Emily Jashinsky
Well, while you look for it, I'll
- [44:04]
Ryan Grim
just say, shoot, I accidentally closed. I accidentally closed the New York Times thing. Yeah, you go. You can respond while I go look for it.
- [44:12]
Emily Jashinsky
Well, yeah, because I was gonna say, I actually think this is an important point. The Nazi tattoo point is an important one, because when Bethany Mandel says, you know, Lindsay thought the Nazi tattoo thing would be disqualifying. Well, what's so interesting about both of these things is that an argument. And I think actually you'd be open to this, if not fully in agreement. But there was a real problem during, like Capital PW Peak, woke, whatever the hell we want to call it, where allegations of sexual assault and racism, whether it was with the MeToo movement or whether it was with sort of BLM era political correctness or. I hate using the word wokeness, but I guess everybody kind of knows what I mean by that. But where these allegations would be based on something sort of thin. And a lot of that was coming
- [45:00]
Ryan Grim
from like how you, how you experienced it.
- [45:03]
Emily Jashinsky
It. Right, exactly. Yes, very much. Yeah. Your truth.
- [45:06]
Ryan Grim
I felt traumatized by your behavior.
- [45:10]
Emily Jashinsky
Right, exactly. And so what that did was set a very low bar. And it was mostly pushed by the left and in the media. And a lot of leftists were upset with that at the time. And I think conservatives made common cause with some of those leftists. But part of the problem here is that the right has been enormously frustrated by weaponized allegations, particularly of conservatives Republicans who are not genuine secret Nazis. Not to say that there aren't some actual racists and bigots. Of course, of course. But people who aren't and clearly aren't, but get these weaponized allegations of Nazism or of sexual assault, most of which was pushed by the kind of center left in the media. And now they're like, well, if we were playing by these rules, of course you'd have to disqualify Graham Platner. Of course you'd X, Y and Z. And so part of this is Republicans now saying, well, screw it, I'm throwing up the rule book, which I don't think is correct. But I also, it's frustrating because some of this does stem from that, like five year period, maybe 10 year period between like, I don't know, like 2013 and 2023 of hysteria, cultural hysteria.
- [46:21]
Ryan Grim
That's true payback. Yeah.
- [46:23]
Emily Jashinsky
And which is itself, by the way, rooted in. Yes. Not that long ago our country had a horrible history of racism and sexism. We've made enormous progress in that direct. Which is kind of what was frustrating to me about that 10 year period. But nonetheless, that's the immediate context here. And it is frustrating to see from my end a little bit of like the both parts of it. And it's very disappointing to see. I think some people on the right then be like, oh, this story is disqualified because nobody believes Grant Platner is a secret Nazi. Nobody believes that.
- [46:55]
Ryan Grim
That's. That that is a key point actually. Yeah, no, here. So here's a good example of the rights kind of deployment of left wing therapy. Speak. Bethany Mandel, her good friend and podcast co host. She says, I've been close friends with Lindsey Fifield for 15 years. I've known about Graham since they began dating. She carried a lot of trauma from their time together. I'm so proud of her for her bravery in coming forward. It's very left wing coded and it, and it feels like purposely so to like kind of get back at the left for like. Okay, you say that so and so was guilty because you felt you carried. Carried a lot of trauma. Well, now we're gonna say it as well.
- [47:41]
Emily Jashinsky
It does sound like it was kind of Right. Well, I was gonna say, like you said, I do believe that it was a traumatic relationship. It sounds like it was a mess.
- [47:47]
Ryan Grim
It sounds like a mess. Sounds like a total mess. So she. So she let's. You want to go through a little bit of her own post. So. So she says this is so she'd shut down all of her social media and now she brought it back on, which is a very Washington operative thing to do. Like we, we in Washington. We can't stay off social media.
- [48:17]
Emily Jashinsky
Well, I also love your recent searches, looking for your own posts on. Yeah, it's hilarious.
- [48:26]
Ryan Grim
So I do that all the time. Let's see. So she says anyone who has ever, ever extracted themselves from a relationship with a narcissistic abuser knows it isn't clean or easy. And so this is the kind of thing that the right would have just been livid about if the left was doing it. Just, just throw out words like abuser after saying in the times like he never hit me. Okay. He grabbed my shoulders and he pulled my wrist. But I think she's clearly using the word abuser or an abusive in the sense of emotional, kind of emotionally abusive.
- [49:03]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah,
- [49:06]
Ryan Grim
but the way that headlines are written. Oh, it's, it's hard to keep that distinction.
- [49:14]
Emily Jashinsky
Agreed.
- [49:16]
Ryan Grim
So they says they connected me to two of the other victims so we wouldn't feel so alone. I insisted to each of them that I trusted the New York Times journalists and that we were doing the right thing, despite their sadly very accurate sense that something was wrong. One of the victims and I realized our relationships with Graham overlapped completely. He had been cheating on both of us the entire time we were together. And this goes into something I had posted yesterday. The word cheating suggests they were exclusive. My understanding is that they like they, they were not that, you know, Graham was a dog at the time. She's saying this went until 2016. In 2018, she just does that famous podcast where she's talks about breaking off her wedding. And she had been in a long term relationship for, you know, several years before that. So the timing is off here to say that there's. That cheating could even be possible given, given what seems to have been going on here. And then she was, I, I blocked. So then, so then. This is more about the New York Times. The weeks dragged on. They kept coming back to us saying the editors needed more, I needed to go on the record. We need more screenshots. I met every benchmark, they said, eager to provide more sources as, as, as evidence. Why does it say nobody could corroborate when I offered them sources that could corroborate? And we don't, we don't know exactly what I suspect we may learn soon what, what she's talking about in the Daily Caller or somewhere or somewhere else. Why did they include that? An out of context quote from a friend joking, do not call Graham after I called off my wedding. Where were the screenshots they said they would use? Or, or the mention that I'd supported local Democrats and that most of my family and husband are liberal.
- [51:06]
Emily Jashinsky
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean much when you're a, you work for the Nikki Haley campaign in the Heritage projects. But anyway.
- [51:12]
Ryan Grim
Right, yes. So I, again, I actually believe her here. Like, I think that the reporter probably did make a lot of promises like that, you know, reporters do that to try to draw out their sources. So again, like within the article itself and her and that claim there that like the time's kind of misled her, I actually believe, you know, I, I tend to believe her. But I, and I think, but I think main, main voters, which are only, the only ones that matter, aren't going to find anything in that that, you know, fundamentally changes their impression of who Graham is or, or the kind of arc that he's that he's telling some people. I think it's going to damage him because I think some people will. And we can talk about the, the tattoo. Think that he's not being straightforward here, because. So it. Chris Hayes asked the question on the chronology if, if she was talking about in August, and you said you didn't learn about it in October, like, how did she know about it now? Like, clearly. And her. What her argument is, is he told her about it. Now, I've also been told on the Internet that everyone knows what this is, that, that it's the most common Nazi symbol after the swastika. So if that's the case, everybody who saw it, I don't, I don't believe that. I didn't even know what it was when I saw it.
- [52:48]
Emily Jashinsky
Yes.
- [52:48]
Ryan Grim
And I'm not, I'm not a World War II buff, but I've done, you know.
- [52:51]
Emily Jashinsky
You're deep.
- [52:52]
Ryan Grim
Half buff. Yeah. I didn't know it. And people were like, oh, it's on that meme. Are we the baddies? It's on the guy's collar. Like, okay, I don't, I don't study. Study these memes. But the, that. So that to me seems plausible. I saw Zed Jelani saying, look, let's, let's assume that his, that he didn't know what it was when he got it, which all of the. His fellow Marines say, but that he learned at some point later what it was. It does stand to reason that you wouldn't get it covered up if you're just a regular person and you're just keeping your shirt on. Like, let's say he learned after he was at this Jewish wedding. Right? That's the part it's like, okay, two security screenings, plus to get it, you know, to, you know, reenlist and. And then also taking his shirt off at this wedding, famously. But let's say he learns after that what it is. But he's not running for office. You know, he had it has a connection, like, he got it with his comrades to honor, not because they were anti Semitic, but to honor their fallen comrades, people who had died. Like, that's why they say they got it. So to get it covered up would be then. And I'm just, you know, putting myself in. Who knows? To get it covered up could. Would be its own kind of traumatic moment to feel like a betrayal of your. Of your friends, both living and dead. And also, just politically, is it any better to be like, yeah, it's true. I had a Nazi tattoo for 14 years, but I've had it covered up for the last three. I don't think anybody who's mad about it would give him any grace over that. So my sense is he probably knew about it, like, at some point in the last several years. It's hard to imagine Lindsay making that up. But there's a lot, you know, But I kind. I don't know. I wouldn't want to bet my life on it. I also think, just as a political matter, it's that part of it is kind of baked in and that it's too far into the weeds. The timeline is too far into the weeds.
- [55:08]
Emily Jashinsky
Agree.
- [55:09]
Ryan Grim
For normal voters who, like, have heard about the tattoo and they're like, well, we all make mistakes. So I don't know where, where you come down on. On that timeline and what it says.
- [55:22]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, I think, I think you're right. It's hard to believe that at some point he didn't realize it was a Nazi tattoo. I think you're. I, I believe that he was absolutely hammered and split at Croatia on leave with his Marines Marine buddies and did it without knowing. So I believe that. I believe he probably did know at some point. I do think, again, like, just the dishonesty is a problem. I've been saying this with Talarico, too, where Tallarico is on tape saying, of course there are at least six biological sexes. And now he's saying, of course there are only two biological sexes. I just think the basic honesty thing is what makes it hard if you're trying to be the anti Paxton or anti Susan Collins, because it becomes a litmus test for voters as to whether they feel like, you know, voters feel like they've been duped by this time and again. George W. Bush running and saying, we're not going to do nation building and then becoming the king of nation building. I think that's. It's just, it's a litmus test for voters. But honestly, I think the big picture from all of this, again, I wish, I wish Crystal is still here because her story is going to be. I think that actually might historically be the beginning, because at the time, you remember how it was covered, Ryan, this was. She was like the millennial Facebook candidate.
- [56:32]
Ryan Grim
And they produced a lot of hot takes to that point.
- [56:34]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, right. And so what, what we're now in is this weird adjustment period where people who started living their lives online because so much of our personal and professional lives were exported to the Internet, particularly starting in the mid aughts. When that happened, you then have all of this evidence that's going to get thrust in the court of public opinion without context, often, sometimes with it, but often without context, without any nuance being weaponized. And sometimes it's legit, sometimes it's stupid. But when people who have lived their lives online, not like political candidates, not like people who are going to run for office, but over the course of 10 plus years into their adulthood, this for some people in the future is going to start when they were literally kids on Roblox. Like, are we legitimately going to be have like Roblox screenshots from 13 year olds, 14 year olds in our politics 10 years from now when 25 year olds are running for a house?
- [57:32]
Ryan Grim
We should set a, we should set a line now. Is it 12 and under? You can actually. They went after mom, Donnie's wife for posts when she was 13 or 14.
- [57:44]
Emily Jashinsky
Teenager. Yeah. And so I just think this is
- [57:46]
Ryan Grim
early teens, not even like 17. And Kavanaugh was 17, allegedly. Well, he was 17 when he allegedly assaulted.
- [57:54]
Emily Jashinsky
And none of that was. And none of that was Internet. That was still like hard. Diaries, calendars and that type of thing.
- [58:00]
Ryan Grim
The diary with square squeak. Remember squeak?
- [58:06]
Emily Jashinsky
Who could forget? But like it 10 years from now, like, this is already bad because we're taking scraps of people's lives and thrust it. And this is why, like I wrote a ton about this. I did like a lot of stuff spilled way too much ink during like the peak woke era on this stuff because I think it's very interesting and I think it's a tech story, I think it's a human story, it's a meta media story. We're taking these scraps of people's lives and thrusting them into partisan politics. And it's changing the way that we look at each other, relate to each other, that we live our lives and it's just getting worse by the year and we are not learning, and this is a moment, if there ever were one, to learn like a little bit about what we should be doing in the media as journalists, what should be taken in one way or the other way, but instead it's just going in the opposite direction and it's only going to get worse.
- [59:04]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. I wonder how, how do you think Republicans are going to respond to this over the next week or two? Like, are they going to be like, go like just try to get these three people, Lindsay and the two others, and force that some out of the public. And then like, what's your. How do you think they'll handle this?
- [59:27]
Emily Jashinsky
Looks to me like, they're all in. You know, the first press release, and I think we might have even been on air because I think I sent it right away. The first press release I got from the NRSC after Janet Mills dropped out was calling Platner a Nazi. And that was actually very interesting to me because it suggests they think they have a really big weapon to use against him in an election where people will probably be going to the polls with gas prices north of $4 a gallon, probably. And, and I honestly like, Right. And so like Platner, we've interviewed him. You know him, I think he seems like dude who would be very interesting to have a conversation a beer with he. Or maybe not a beer now, but he is by Republican standards extreme and by the average voters standards extreme on certain issues. The guy referred to himself as a communist. He referred to himself as a socialist. He says neither of those things are true. But it's very telling to me that Republicans are focusing on the Nazi stuff and not saying this guy is a communist who's going to make inflation worse. And again, just like Steel Manning, what the Republican argument could be is going to make inflation worse. He's going to make your standards of living worse. He's an extreme on trans issues, et cetera, et cetera. They barely even talk about that stuff. It's all just been Nazi, Nazi, Nazi instead of something that is closer to the average voters, like immediate concerns. And I think that's why my expectation is that they're going to go all in on this going forward. Also because Lindsey knows a lot of people in D.C. republican circles. People are like kind of excited to have something that they feel like is electric from someone they know is plugged into the network. It's different than somebody who you've never met. And so I, that's my guess of what happens. Yeah.
- [61:26]
Ryan Grim
Before we wrap, I. There was one. What I thought was an error in the piece that. But, but you know this IWF better than I do. So here, let me put this up here. So, so at the. She says so Ms. Ms. Fifield said she had no connection to the campaign of Senator Susan Collins, Mr. Platner's likely Republican opponent. She acknowledged that independent women had been supportive of Ms. Collins, but said she had not been active with the organization recently. And however, so on April 16, April 15, here she is quoted at a. A House Republican event described as Stay at Home Mom, Independent Women's Forum. And she. And she gives a quote, I have 13 friends who It's a WIM. You know, it's a whim. It's a conservative women's rights like event this is. And it's something about probably a pronatal policy, something I probably like actually. But so, so, so here she is three, what, six weeks ago, identifying herself in a political, at a political event as IWF after telling the Times she hadn't done anything political with them for years.
- [62:57]
Emily Jashinsky
And what was the year that one?
- [62:59]
Ryan Grim
2026.
- [63:00]
Emily Jashinsky
2026?
- [63:02]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, that's six weeks. Yeah, we're talking six weeks ago. Go.
- [63:05]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, I mean, I would say that's, that's typical because the way that it's their like kind of fellow thing is structured is that it's. I was saying this earlier with Crystal. It's kind of like a brand ambassador thing. There are some people who are fellows there who are like full time on staff and there are some people. I legitimately don't even know if I'm still technically a fellow there. But I, I was at one point I might still be listed as a, a fellow. Now I haven't taken money for them. I've spoke for them, them without getting paid like a month ago. But other than that, like not much in the last several years. And so the way that it works is that like IW gets their, their branding basically for some people who, who use it a lot to go on Fox News and they'll book some people on Fox News, Fox Business or radio interviews or they'll place op EDS for them. Again, that is not the case with me, but that is how some people use it. And the, the conceit of the program is that conservative women are underrepresented. These are underrepresented voices, especially like moms underrepresented voices. IW doesn't take a position on abortion, which is really interesting and frustrating for some conservatives, but they're like very hard line on that. They won't go one way or the other on it, but they. The goal of the program is just to like get more conservative women into media. But they also do have, I think if I'm remembering correctly, they have a C4 arm that is like a, an actual political. Because you're not, if you're C3, you're not supposed to technically be political. It's a legal distinction, meaning you can't be involved in partisan politics, Republican, Democrat, et cetera, but you can be involved in ideological like politics in a different political sense. It's just not supposed to be partisan electioneering type stuff. And so that's, I don't know if she's affiliated with the C4 at all. I put all of this on my website, by the way. People can. Can look at. I just keep a running list of groups that I've spoken to for and disclosures. It's on. It's a link to my ex bio. But that may mean that she was just leaning into the brand ambassador part of it or it could mean that there's. There was something more formal. IW says it was only. I think in the New York Times they said she made like 15 grand between 2021 and 2022. That's would be very typical. And there, there are people who are just sort of like raising their kids and refer to themselves as their. With their IW Fellow title at public speaking events. Because IW also sends people to go speak. Speak for things. So that would be my best guess. It's kind of like complicated inside baseball stuff, but it's a. That's just how it works.
- [65:38]
Ryan Grim
The. The thing I had just put up there, like she has an author profile on her visiting fellow page and the most recent post was from October 2025.
- [65:50]
Emily Jashinsky
Oh, so she was still writing for them.
- [65:52]
Ryan Grim
So she was writing for them as recently as October and identifying herself with them him at a public event six weeks ago. And I understand why she wanted to say I'm, you know, I'm just now Virginia. Like I'm not a Republican operative, but like it's. It. It goes to a little bit of credibility to when. When she is also like. I think both sides here are kind of shading and fudging things. That one seemed like an actual material.
- [66:25]
Emily Jashinsky
It looks like I am technically still a senior fellow. I'm still on the website.
- [66:28]
Ryan Grim
Senior fellow.
- [66:29]
Emily Jashinsky
Well, look, it's still got counterpoints with Ryan Grimm there. Let's see. What is it? Yeah. Oh yeah. I was on this podcast a lot several years ago. Okay. Anyway, just, just like I literally didn't even know that that existed. So just to make the. To make the point that it is used as like, for some people it can mean something more formal. For other people it can just be like an affiliation them.
- [66:51]
Ryan Grim
Yep, that makes sense. And in the way some of these. The way. The way they. I don't know if IW does this, but just to let people in on how some of these things work. For some, like say New America foundation, the person is responsible for raising the money. So like the fellow.
- [67:10]
Emily Jashinsky
Oh, wow.
- [67:11]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. Yeah. So the fell. Well, sometimes New America will have its own pot of money and accept applications for fellowships. Other times you go out, let's say you ran a big nonprofit and you built some good relationships with donors. When you leave that organization, you go to those donors and say, hey, I'd like to do a fellowship or I'm going to, you know, write a 50 page paper about how we're going to save climate. And you get a climate donor to give 200k or whatever to New America. New America takes a third for its administrative costs and the desk and Internet and overhead, whatever, and then they give you the title New America Fellow and move, move the cash then through to you. I mean, I, I smart like, hey, okay, so we get 50 grand and we get like this nonprofit person's name, name and picture on our website. So not only is it free for us, we make money.
- [68:14]
Emily Jashinsky
Right.
- [68:14]
Ryan Grim
So yeah, that's a thing that happens in Washington.
- [68:17]
Emily Jashinsky
And C3s are really supposed to be like about influence and the entire C3 structure, like some of it is just like I'm, I'm actually here for another C3. Like I'm in West Virginia for a C3. Again, I have these all listed. But like C3 structure sucks. It needs to be changed. It allows for way too much grift and graphics. It is a disaster. I think it is like sucking the life out of American politics in many ways. So you just have to be kind of conscious of which. And like C4s are very different than C3s.
- [68:47]
Ryan Grim
C4s are also very tax deduction for a C4. Right, right.
- [68:51]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah. And C4s are very sneaky ways to be influential. Like that's actual. I would call that dark money. Do you think it's fair to say C4S?
- [68:59]
Ryan Grim
It is, it is totally dark money because you can.
- [69:01]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, yeah.
- [69:02]
Ryan Grim
You can get it from dark vehicles to the point where you never have to.
- [69:06]
Emily Jashinsky
Right.
- [69:06]
Ryan Grim
Disclose. Yeah. If you have enough layers of, of darkness, it's very hard to get the light through. Yeah.
- [69:15]
Emily Jashinsky
Which is why I think it's best to just disclose it all if you have any. But I learned that from Tim Carney, who's my old letter. I think you know him, right? I know you know him, right?
- [69:22]
Ryan Grim
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.
- [69:24]
Emily Jashinsky
But anyway, if you're like an ideological person on one side or the other, it's hard to avoid coming into contact if you want to have like a normal middle class journalism lifestyle. But any. All that is to say, that's like way inside baseball. But it all that is to say, she's definitely a political operative and it's foolish to act like otherwise. We both know that political operatives can have true stories like it doesn't necessarily mean it's not categorically BS because it's coming from a political operator, but it obviously is a fair question. Agree.
- [69:58]
Oliver Larkin
Want to keep up with everything trending
- [70:00]
Ryan Grim
from breaking news to shareable jokes, pop culture bites to viral food spots.
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Oliver Larkin
It's all on TikTok.
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Ryan Grim
Download TikTok now to explore number one hits.
- [70:14]
Crystal Ball
Millions of records sold, awards sold out tours. You think the Jonas Brothers are satisfied? Nope. It's podcast time.
- [70:20]
Ryan Grim
We get to ask other people questions because we're sick and tired of being asked questions.
- [70:24]
Crystal Ball
Hey Jonas is available now, and their first guest is a big one, Paul Rudd.
- [70:28]
Oliver Larkin
You know, Steve Carell is a great singer.
- [70:30]
Ryan Grim
Didn't he tell you not to audition the Office or something?
- [70:32]
Oliver Larkin
I told him, whoa, we were filming Anchorman. Clearly I was the idiot. Thank God he didn't listen to me right.
- [70:38]
Crystal Ball
Listen to hey Jonas on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [70:44]
Ryan Grim
Hi everyone.
- [70:45]
Crystal Ball
I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.
- [70:48]
Emily Jashinsky
I'm excited to share that I have
- [70:50]
Ryan Grim
a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers,
- [70:56]
Oliver Larkin
and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner
- [70:59]
Crystal Ball
landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats.
- [71:05]
Emily Jashinsky
I also bring a bit of advice
- [71:06]
Ryan Grim
into the mix so we too can
- [71:08]
Oliver Larkin
better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges.
- [71:13]
Ryan Grim
Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We come now into this world fighting for our lives.
- [71:18]
Oliver Larkin
All I'm gonna do is pull out
- [71:20]
Crystal Ball
what you already got inside. We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that is not like a your story versus my story.
- [71:27]
Emily Jashinsky
You're gonna walk up and over that dang mountain.
- [71:29]
Crystal Ball
You're not just gonna put your mind over it.
- [71:31]
Ryan Grim
Yep, yep, exactly.
- [71:33]
Crystal Ball
And if I can't walk up and
- [71:34]
Ryan Grim
over it, I'm gonna go through it.
- [71:35]
Crystal Ball
Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday
- [71:38]
Ryan Grim
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
- [71:41]
Crystal Ball
wherever you get your podcast.
- [71:42]
Ryan Grim
Podcasts.
- [71:44]
Crystal Ball
Quick update on the California results, which continue to come in and continue to actually pretty dramatically shift the possibilities of what might happen. Election night looked very much like the top two in the LA mayor's race were going to be Karen Bass and Spencer Pratt. In the California governor's race looked very much like it was going to be Javier Becerra and Steve Hilton, the Republican second, with Tom Steyer coming in third. Nothing is certain yet. Well, I Shouldn't, I shouldn't say that. Actually two things are certain. Karen Bass will make it through in the LA Mayor's race and Javier Becerra will make it through in the California Governor's race. But the top two slots are now significantly up for grabs because as predicted as WAR ballots are counted, the later ballots are favoring the left wing Democrats. So Steyer is closing the gap on Hilton and Nithya Raman is closing the gap on Spencer Pratt. Let's go ahead and put this analysis up on the screen just so you guys can see the numbers here. This is from Zachary Domini who's been tracking all of this, or Domini for Vote Hub. And this is the, the LA Mayor's race. So in the late mail you can see that Nithya Raman is performing quite well. In fact, she's very close, close to Karen Bass in terms of her positioning in some of this late mail. And his analysis here is that Ramen is hitting her benchmark to overtake Pratt. At this point, it's fair to say she is favored. Though outstanding turnout remains uncertain, the race is still tracking toward a very close finish. And Ryan, my understanding is part of what has shifted the analysis too is that they underestimated the number of ballots that remain to be counted here. The more ballots that are left, the better that is obviously for Nithya Rahman in LA and also the better it is for Tom Steyer statewide wide.
- [73:35]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. Yes. And credit to Dave Dayan who you know warned us on Monday. He said be careful like there's going to be an enormous amount of Democratic vote share that is outstanding and it's going to be counted over the, the coming days and on election night it's going to look like the Republicans are doing much better than they will end up doing. Credit to me, I think I said if I would rather be Rahman than, than President Rat on even as really impressive at me.
- [74:06]
Crystal Ball
Good job big guy.
- [74:07]
Ryan Grim
There you go. The governor's race, I'm like, I, I feel like such a, like east coast chauvinist and I apologize to I, we have a huge audience in California. I just, they're, there's. That state just politically frustrates me. There's like this one party state which is dominated by corporate interests and doesn't have the same kind of urban cores that allow like a DSA style movement that you have in like a Philadelphia or a New York to take hold like the DSAs in California. I think car culture, you know, damages them and the NIMBYism that that comes along with, you know, having such, you know, having the kinds of cities that they have there. I think also that then, you know, you know, poisons the ability to kind of organize in the same way that you get in, like a Chicago too, for instance.
- [75:01]
Crystal Ball
I think so politics may be more akin to like Westchester or like Long island than like New York City.
- [75:09]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. So, but Raman, you know, looks like she's going to make the top two here. And Karen Bass, you know, former what, trained with Cuban revolutionaries, as the Republicans reminded us, you know, down the stretch. But the implication for the billionaire tax are significant.
- [75:28]
Crystal Ball
Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Because. And, and especially for the, the statewide top two, because if you do end up with a Democratic shutout and there's no Republican on the ballot there and no Republican on the ballot in la, which obviously a very large city and consequential in terms of the political dynamics in the state of California, Republicans are going to be pretty unmotivated to come out and vote like, oh, do I want it to be Karen Bass or Nithya Ramen, you know, do I want it to be Javier Becerra? Times Tom Steyer? And so you would expect that disproportionately Republicans would be the ones voting against the billionaire tax. And I think there are a number of other ballot initiatives where this could be consequential. Also can be very consequential for the congressional races because just like the statewide, you know, it's this jungle primary system, so they're, you know, you're going to have a sort of lack of motivation to come out at all and vote for Republican candidates who are down ballot too. My understanding is that based on the numbers and Mac, maybe you can put this next element up on the screen here that Steyer is gaining on Hilton and exactly what he needs to happen is happening, which is that the longer the count goes on, the closer they get to, you know, the latest ballots that came in win, the more the shift is going towards Steyer and this other Republican candidate, Chad Bianco, who, you know, is kind of, you can imagine, is taking votes away from Hilton, seems to be hanging in there more or less with his vote total, because that was another danger that if he just totally collapsed in the final days and everybody voted for Hilton, who was a Republican, that would make it more difficult for Stier to catch up. However, based on the analyses that I'm seeing, it is more likely that Ramen ends up in the top two in LA than it is that Steyer ends up in the top two Statewide. Although that is also appears to be basically a coin flip at this point. It's going to be very close based on everything I've seen.
- [77:26]
Ryan Grim
Well, I guess for the political consultants out in California, we hope that the. And for the influencers and the, you know, the tiktokers, the Instagrammers, all the paid influencers, tweeters, like we can root for, for. We can root for Styr's, you know, many, many, many millions to continue to flood our social media feeds if he wins.
- [77:48]
Crystal Ball
Also caught doing that too though.
- [77:51]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, he had a whole astro turf to like social media campaign that as soon as Swalwell was out, like all of a sudden it's like the Sarah Mentum.
- [77:58]
Crystal Ball
And then people are like, who. I'm sorry, what? I asked.
- [78:02]
Ryan Grim
This is the guy Javier's Hellraisers. And then all of a sudden it just vanishes. Like, where did Javier's Hellraisers go? Well. Huh. Just left with Styers influencers here. It's. Even though Steyer says like everything I kind of agree with generally. I'm like, he's still a billionaire. And it's, it's like better I guess that a billionaire buys it than like other billionaires buy it on their behalf.
- [78:29]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [78:30]
Ryan Grim
But good lord, is this, is this what we have to deal with? Speaking of billionaires though, trying to buy stuff. Stuff. Let me put up. Let me put up Rokhana's district real quick. How much did these all in goons and the rest of these or I don't know about the all in guys specifically, but how much they. They put in a lot of money behind an opponent to Rokhanna who doesn't
- [78:52]
Crystal Ball
even show up there in that.
- [78:53]
Oliver Larkin
You have to because you.
- [78:54]
Ryan Grim
All candidates to see him. Ethan Agarwal. I. I'll, I'll check the FEC and the super PAC stuff later to see like what they spent on behalf of this guy. But at 4,000 so far, 4,896 votes. Like you could have paid everybody a thousand dollars or something to vote for your guy, Ethan, and done better maybe than. Than what they spent so far. And so it looks how as we
- [79:24]
Crystal Ball
got closer to this contest, I heard less and less from them about they did. They were like, yeah, this candidate. Suddenly it got very them on the spread.
- [79:33]
Ryan Grim
Data driven, gentlemen. In the end, yes, they saw that. This saw the data not going their way. But now speaking of wasting enormous amounts of money, you remember we had Randy Viegas on the show, community college professor, auto shop owner from Bakersfield who had the Support of like Justice Democrats and Working Families Party. Bernie Sanders, aoc, like that whole Congressional Progressive Caucus, I think even the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, because it's a Hispanic district, like got behind him and the DCCC and DMFI Democratic majority for Israel came in and dropped like more than $5 million on his, for his opponent and coming after him with millions of dollars of attack ads, basically calling him like a child sex abuser in like incredibly gross ways, you know, none of it true, but like the, the kind of like 30 second ads where you, you're
- [80:26]
Emily Jashinsky
like, wow, that's awful.
- [80:28]
Ryan Grim
And they spent millions and, and look at him, he's up right now 2,100 votes. 5% as the votes keep coming in. So it's, it's hard to see how Jasmine Baines overcomes this. Jasmy Baines, you guys may remember, she's the one who said, well, she sponsored a resolution in the California legislature condemning a genocide of between 30 and 50,000 Sikhs in India. So she understands how to condemn a genocide. She was asked at a forum if she thinks that Israel's committing a genocide in Gaza. She said yes. Then DMFI and DCCC get behind her and she said, oh no, I misheard the question. I don't think it is. And here she is now, now may, may fail to make the, the top two. And in the process all Democrats will have done is spend millions of dollars of Democratic money damaging their own candidate. Yeah, David Velato is the Republican incumbent here and this is to me a super important race because it's, it's an attempt by like Bernie to show like I'm not just Vermont. He loves doing that, like going to Vermont, going to Montana, like where they got behind the union smokejumper out there who won and saying like, no, my stuff can work in Bakersfield too.
- [81:54]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, I think that's never been more true than this moment as well. You know, I think there were other times when maybe that was more of a stretch, but now for sure he has that appeal and his style of politics have that broad ranging appeal. There's no doubt about it. What do you think in terms of. Let's say that it does end up Bass and Ramen in the LA mayoral race? You'd have to think that Bass is favored in that circumstance. Right. Do you think Ramen has any. Nithya Rahman has any shot? And just for people to know, she's not backed by the dsa, but she is, you know, certainly seen as more left wing than Karen Bass had. Relatively unimpressive campaign, struggled in the debates, etc. But obviously looks like it's going to be enough to. To knock Spencer Pratt online phenom out of the top two. But in any case, do you think. You think she has any shot in the general or do you think that in either case Karen Bass kind of has this thing locked up?
- [82:46]
Ryan Grim
I don't quite know enough about, you know, people there think. Seem to think that Karen Bass like, you know, I would trust people there more than my own instincts on this.
- [82:59]
Crystal Ball
It's hard to knock out an incumbent. You know, the fact that it even went to a runoff that she didn't get the 50% on night one is very unusual.
- [83:07]
Ryan Grim
And I think, I think Pratt voters, even though a lot of them are like upset the apple cart kinds of voters, like they don't want to upset the apple cart with a DSA member.
- [83:16]
Crystal Ball
Right. Probably just stay home now.
- [83:21]
Ryan Grim
They're interesting one unfolding in. Was it California? I think this is seven or we covered the Doris Matsui Mae Vang race where Doris Matsui's in her 80s and has spent 40. Her and her husband for more than 40 years have had this seat. She spent and her. Her backers put together a super pack to lift up like a Republican college kid to get it, try to get him into the top two. And they're close to getting there. I don't think they're going to make it, but. So this kid Zach wouldn't is currently ahead by just 200 votes or so over Mae Vang who's a. You know, I think she had Justice Democrats, basically the whole left wing.
- [84:11]
Crystal Ball
You're right. Yeah.
- [84:12]
Ryan Grim
Apparatus. We had her on the program. She seemed, she seemed really impressive. And I. And Matsui agrees like that's why Matsui has, you know, desperately spent and loaned her campaign tons of money to try to keep Mayang from making. From making the. The top two. And the fact that he's only up by couple hundred votes with like half the votes still to go and all of the Democratic votes are the ones that are outstanding, suggest that Matsui is probably going to lose like I think in a. In the general. So that'll be one of the few incumbents that actually gets knocked off. And she's. You also. Did you see the Jimmy Gomez scandal, speaking of sex scandals?
- [84:56]
Crystal Ball
No, I don't think I did.
- [84:58]
Ryan Grim
So and it. Consensual stuff. Little bit of. Well, whatever. People can decide what they want. Jimmy Gomez, the New York Daily News or is it the Post? The Post now has like an LA tabloid And they've just.
- [85:16]
Crystal Ball
Didn't Daily News, like, not exist anymore?
- [85:18]
Ryan Grim
Right.
- [85:18]
Crystal Ball
Didn't Kushner, like, buy it and kill it or something like that?
- [85:20]
Ryan Grim
And anyway, I think there's like four reporters there left, but they're going, they're going hard at Gomez because he got caught making out with Eric Swalwell's chief of staff a couple years ago at some party in California. And turned out they were in a long term thing while he was the chair of the dad's Caucus and like doing this whole I'm such a great dad and blah, blah, blah. So he's getting busted. He's getting busted for that. Now it's all. No, no abuse. Alleged. It's all consensual stuff. You know, that's between him and him and the Lord and his wife or and his mistress or whatever. But he has a Justice Democrat opponent who did make it into the runoff.
- [86:11]
Crystal Ball
Oh, interesting.
- [86:12]
Ryan Grim
Angela Gonzalez Torres. And they waited, it seems like the Los Angeles Post or whatever this New York Post knockoff in, in LA is, waited until the primary was over to like start dropping this. And they're pro. They're probably just gonna, like, they've been putting him on the COVID and like, it's gonna get ugly. I think they're just gonna dog him, you know, for the. Throughout the summer and fall. And AIPAC in the past has spent millions to kind of bail him out from progressive challenge. But a lot of people think that this is, this is the year that he go. That he goes down. So that's at least. That could be two incumbents that get knocked off. But wow, we miss it because it happens on election Day in November and everybody's focused on like the general election.
- [87:05]
Crystal Ball
Is there a dumpty party? Yeah. Yeah. One other question for you. What statewide, if. I mean, I don't think anyone thinks that Steve Hilton is going to be governor, says pretty clear if it's Hilton versus Becerra, Becerra is going to be the next governor of California. If it's Becerra versus Sty, though, you think Styer has a shot? Because I actually kind of do. You know, Becerra is not an impressive candidate. He is very corporate backed. Like every major corporate interest you could imagine has basically gotten in behind him. Even some of his Biden administration colleagues have come out and been like, this guy was a terrible cabinet secretary. So it seems to me like more time for voters to process the choice between these two candidates could actually benefit Tom Steyer. You know, I don't know how much like the identity politics plays into it. Obviously there's a large Hispanic population in California. Does that make them more inclined to vote for Becerra? I don't know. I tend not to really buy into that line of thinking, but that is an argument that's out there. But what do you think?
- [88:07]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, I think Steyer has a, has a real shot also. Like the endless money is, is going to help. So yeah, I, I, I think it's a, I would put it at a toss up if it becomes Steyer and Becerra. The other fascinating statewide race is. Did you follow the Jane Kim insurance commissioner race at all?
- [88:27]
Crystal Ball
I did. I did not.
- [88:28]
Ryan Grim
We should, we should actually have her on next week. So she won one and she put it up here. Like this is actually quite something for California because it's such a corporate dominated state. So she, she ran as you're, you're seeing here. Like if you look at her, if you Google her, it says Jane Kim endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Like that's, that's like her tagline for who she is. Affordable available insurance for all. All. And so she's, she's really trying to bring kind of state power to bear, to try to like fix the, the brokenness of California.
- [89:13]
Crystal Ball
And are we talking about a, like property insurance, all, all insurance? I guess because I know they've got, you know, property insurance or sorry, yeah. Homeowners insurance issues in a way that like Colorado and Florida and other states do as well.
- [89:28]
Ryan Grim
Well that's why we need to have her on. What on earth kind of jurisdiction does she have? And, and what can she. Because you know, they've been pushing. Yeah. Disaster. Here's disaster insurance which, you know, disaster insurance is becoming like audio auto insurance, Medicare for Kids, you know, flood insurance, disaster insurance, all this earthquakes. Like this is all becoming, with, with climate existential for.
- [90:06]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [90:08]
Ryan Grim
Places like Florida and California.
- [90:11]
Crystal Ball
This is actually something I, we have an interview with Oliver Larkin who's challenging Jared Moskowitz in the Democratic primary. And first of all, Jared Moskowitz, such a villain. It's unbelievable. And when you learn all the things that you, he's done and said and describing himself as a Ron DeSantis Democrat and all these things. But in any case, one of the things that Larin was also highlighting is what a crisis this is in Florida as well. I think it's probably more of a crisis in Florida than anywhere else. And it's. Their real estate market is a mess right now in part exactly. Because of this issue. So it's a major, increasingly major concern in a wide variety of states across the country. And then the other thing just to note, you know, to go back to the Styro Becerra Ray, since you mentioned mentioned insurance, I mean sty support Medicare for all in the state of California. And you can imagine because this is one of always one of the knocks on Medicare for all. It's like, well, you know, no state has ever tried it. It's never been successful. No one can pull this off. It was condom. You know, they tried to do it in Vermont and they failed. And they it basically got killed by Gavin Newsom without getting into the legislative weeds in California, even though it had a lot of momentum behind it. So if he was actually able to, you know, successfully implement universal healthcare in the state of California, which already is pretty close to having universal coverage, it's one of the top states in the country in terms of healthcare coverage. But that would be an extraordinarily significant development that I think, you know, would a lot of people would take notice. And also if it didn't work out and it had all kinds of problems, people would definitely take notice of that too. Probably more so than even if it's successful.
- [91:42]
Ryan Grim
Yes, indeed.
- [91:44]
Crystal Ball
So wanted to update everybody on a crisis that is developing here in this country in the beef. We can put this up on the screen from NBC News. So they say that flesh eating screwworm has returned to the US after 60 years, threatening the cattle herd. The case of New World screwworm was confirmed in a three week old calf in La Prior, Texas near the US Mexico border. According to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, flesh eating parasite that had been kept out of US Livestock for decades has been detected in Texas, threatening the nation's cattle industry and food supply at a time when prices are already already high. They say that the parasitic flies larvae feed exclusively on the living tissue of warm blooded animals. While the fly is capable of infecting humans and pets, such cases are rare and pose little risk to the broader public. The para site does not pose a food safety threat. But a wider outbreak could still cost the livestock industry billions of dollars and put additional pressure on beef prices that are already at record highs. They go on to say. It follows months of warnings from US And Texas agriculture officials and cattle industry leaders as the pest steadily move north through Mexico toward the American border. This is a quote from the Texas Agriculture Commission, Sid Miller. He said for months the screw worm has rapidly advanced through Mexico in spite of the USDA's existing game plan. Instead of using every available tool, USDA moved too slowly and relied solely on a partial solution that takes years to fully implement. So I, I don't know much about Texas Ag Commissioner Sid Miller. Ryan, I'm going to guess he's probably not a, not a libtard, I'm going to guess probably relatively right wing fellow who is criticizing the Trump administration here for their, their lack of concern and their lack of, you know, fully addressing this situation and allowing it to get to this crisis point. And to that point, if we can put this Forbes article up on the screen here as well. Well, they did, you know, a look at. Okay, well who is to blame here? You know, is it fair to blame DOGE for their cost cutting? And basically the answer here is yes. Screw Screw Worm and Texas cattle could drive up beef prices after Doge A prevention efforts. They go on to say that containment efforts may cause the government to implement widespread cattle movement restrictions. The return of Screwworm comes after the musk led Department of Government Efficiency Agency cut funding last year for a project dedicated to monitoring and containing new world screw worming Central America. So DOGE cut that funding. That funding was apparently axed days before the US ended a temporary suspension of cattle imports from Mexico, meaning livestock was then allowed to cross the border without any of the monitoring previously funded by the usaid. So not only did they cut the funding for this project to monitor it, days later they said, come on, you know, we can, we can let more livestock across the border. And they also cut the funding for the USAID that would have been used to track that livestock going across the border. So truly, truly a perfect storm here that has resulted in this, you know, this development.
- [95:01]
Ryan Grim
And at the time you had a bunch of, you know, American, American cattle ranchers and processors freaking out about allowing in the Mexican cattle and arguing like this is going to bring in Screwworm. And it's so ironic because Trump's entire shtick is that he's protecting American manufacturers and American industry. Yet when it came to, to beef in particular, he was, I guess it's the, he's just trying to get down the price of beef rather, you know, you could get down the price of energy inputs and that would do more. But, and then he wanted to help out Argentina, so he also brought in a bunch of Argentinian beef. And the end the, the American cattle. Cattle ranchers will also point it out that because of the way that they determine what is American and what's not American, you can actually get a bunch of, of like labels that say, you know, made in the USA on beef that isn't at all Made in the usa.
- [96:06]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [96:06]
Ryan Grim
It, it's also this a really prime example of the way that business really does require good government to operate. Like, there's this like fantasy idea that, you know, business would do so much better if it could just, if government would just get out of the way way, like get rid of the red tape. Like let the, let the free market do its thing. And you know, the, the screw worm has something to say about that.
- [96:36]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [96:37]
Ryan Grim
And so the, the, and no individual company can address the screw worm problem. Obviously that has to be a public like hemispheric wide approach. It's, it's just, it's just infuriating and depressing. And the, you couldn't predict exactly what the Doge cuts were going to do, but on this one you could actually predict exactly what it was going to do. But overall you couldn't predict which ones were going to manifest. This was one of the most predictable of them. Like, it's like these screw worms are,
- [97:10]
Crystal Ball
they were marching north.
- [97:11]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [97:12]
Crystal Ball
Everybody, they knew this was happening. And you're like, at that time, you're like, you know, we're going to defund that program and we're going to let more livestock across and we're going to defund the program to track that. Livestock. Livestock.
- [97:22]
Ryan Grim
Yeah. You know, and now the response effort is, is hamstrung too by, yes, all of the cuts to the, to the agency and the demoralization and the loss of expertise and talent. Well, and these are the same people that like don't want lab grown meat, but they also want to destroy the capacity to do the factory farming. So I guess this, they're probably just like Trump is ushering in the era of kind of clean energy energy by blowing up the fossil fuel industry. He's ushering in the era of lab grown meat by, by just destroying the, the factory farm system.
- [98:00]
Crystal Ball
Yeah. And obviously beef is already extraordinarily expensive. You know, we talked a while ago about how the Costco, one of the Costco executives, I think it was the CEO, came out and said, you know, first we saw people shift from beef to ground beef and from steak to ground beef and chicken. Chicken. Now we're seeing them shift to like canned meat, canned tuna, canned chicken, just looking for the most inexpensive form of protein that they can possibly find. Yeah. So this is another situation where, you know, things that we sort of took for granted as kids that, you know, you could, as a middle class family or working class family, you could enjoy a steak. Now and again, men is going to become increasingly A rarefied thing that only the, you know, the wealthy and the upper middle class are able to even, even contemplate and certainly not as a part of their, their normal diet. The other thing, I saw someone make this point on Twitter and I think this is a really important one too. Your screw arm is the sort of thing that it would be good for none of us to have to know about this. Right. This is not a topic that I particularly want to have to study and be aware of. It's the sort of thing that in an era of a functioning government, government, you just take for granted that there's someone who is an expert on this, who is spearheading a project to make sure that this isn't a problem. And it's the way that good government becomes sort of invisible when it's actually functioning. This was working for what, 60 years. We didn't have a problem. Those people who were doing the work, they weren't celebrated. We didn't know about it, but it was actually a good use of money. And it's only now that that has been dismantled by a bunch of arrogant idiots who think that nothing matters and nothing ever happens and you can just go in and smash things without any sort of real consequence. It's when that happens that you go, you know, we probably should have a screw worm tracking program that was probably actually a good use of tax dollars. So it's only in the absence of those things functioning that you recognize how important these programs truly are.
- [100:02]
Ryan Grim
Yep. Yeah, exactly. It's, it's utterly, really utterly infuriating. Yeah, the, the arrogance combined with the, the fact that the people who drove this are going to be fine. Like they can, they can get steak, they can get burgers, they can get, they can get whatever they want. It's everybody from the consumers to the ranchers to processors to everybody involved in the industry. And yeah, it's, it's like it's an un, it's an indefensible industry other than the fact that burgers are delicious and steak is, you know, like, it's utterly indefensible, like how, you know, horrifyingly cruel it is to these living creatures. And so yeah, maybe this is Musk's long game. Maybe he's a secret kind of vegetarian that's been, that's pushing to end the factory farming system all along.
- [100:54]
Crystal Ball
Five 5D chess from, from.
- [100:56]
Ryan Grim
He's always a few steps ahead because he needs that lab grown meat to really develop so he can take it to market.
- [101:01]
Crystal Ball
Mars, right, yeah, that's, that's great point. Yeah, I, I can, I can imagine the Fox News segment during the Doge era where they're going through all the ridiculous things that the government is spending your money on. Like, I can imagine them being like, screw worm. Studying the mating habits of $100 million for screw worm. What even is that? You know, I mean, you can just imagine the.
- [101:28]
Ryan Grim
And they were probably lit. They were probably literally studying the mating habits of screw worms, which is even, even funnier. But of course you would do that. Like, how does it reproduce? Like, that's a rather, that's a rather important thing to know. But yes, if Jesse Waters and God
- [101:45]
Crystal Ball
forbid, they did a transgenic study on it, then forget about it.
- [101:50]
Ryan Grim
Right? It was, it was a trans, like continental mental problem. And they're like, oh, get rid of this.
- [101:58]
Crystal Ball
We laugh. That literally could have happened. Literally could have happened. Because, you know, I did this podcast with Matt Bernstein, the bit Fruity Pod, and we went through the, the testimony of these DOGE guys who were being sued, and that was how they went about it. They typed into, they, they fed. Fed the programs into Chat GPT, I think it was. They didn't use Grok, which is amusing anyway, into Chat GPT. And then, you know, it would spit out like, here's the ones that have something woke in it. And they'd be like, okay, check the box. Like, they don't know anything. They're just going through letting a chat bot pick out the words that they thought were like, woke and objectionable and then tossing out programs. That is the way that this operated.
- [102:42]
Ryan Grim
A guy in the Navy told me that they came after a program that had non binary in the name because it was about game theory and decision making. And it was a non binary choice in a. Not in a naval battle. Right. There was like non binary. There were multiple different things that you could do in this moment. And they were like, you have to cut this. And they, he said they stood their ground and. But it was a massive fight. They're like, we are not cutting this and we're not changing the name because this is English and we speak English. And they eventually won. But. Yes, but that was. They had a lot of power and there. So. Yep. So they did actually come for some of these Pentagon people. Say they didn't go for the Pentagon. They actually did come for some of the Pentagon stuff.
- [103:26]
Crystal Ball
Yeah.
- [103:27]
Ryan Grim
Searching for non binary and stuff in the Pentagon. Getting rid of anything that they thought was dei.
- [103:34]
Crystal Ball
What a joke. What a joke. And here we are having to now deal with the Consequences. Who could have imagined?
- [103:40]
Ryan Grim
Indeed.
- [103:43]
Crystal Ball
So, guys, we've covered a lot of important political campaigns throughout the cycle. We're going to continue to do so. But rarely do you have so many of the most central stories of our politics come together in one race like we do with this one. You've got the dumb Tea Party. You've got an APAC backed candidate who is losing support. You've got the redistricting wars. You have an Hasan Piker endorsement thrown in there for good measure. So joining us now to talk about his campaign for Congress in Florida's 25th district against Jared Moskowitz is Oliver Larkin. Great to see Oliver.
- [104:15]
Oliver Larkin
Oliver, great to see you again, Crystal.
- [104:18]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, of course. So you've been running against Moskowitz for a while. We've spoken before, but the whole thing got kind of turned upside down because Florida decided to completely redistrict everything. So bring people up to speed, just a little bit of your background. We'll get into Moskowitz in a moment. And what the redistricting did to your campaign, how it's all shaking out there.
- [104:39]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah. So I'm running in this race as the only candidate who's organized a work union in my workplace place with the News Guild Communication Workers of America. So I'm a union organizer, I'm a former Bernie Sanders campaign staffer, and I'm someone who's not taking any corporate PAC money in this race. And that's something we're really proud of. It is quite unique in South Florida, which for so long has been dominated by establishment politics. But we're showing that something different is possible and it's never been more needed. As we've seen the bottom fallout for the Florida Democratic Party. And that's really left us powerless to this latest redistrict that Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have embarked on against the Florida Constitution and the fair districts amendment. And what it did was it split our district into three new ones. So we're running in the new 25th district, which constitutes about 50% of the old district. But we've seen Republicans just try to grab at more and more seats. We've gone from a state that was 16 to 12, a pretty even partisan redistribution. Now we've seen it go from a 20 to 8 map. Ron DeSantis drew the maps in 2022 to behind closed doors. Usually when you do redistricting, it's done in the legislature, it's done in the light of day. It's subject to legislative review. But because of fair districts and that amendment in the Florida Constitution. Ron DeSantis knows that the partisan redistricting scheme that he's embarked on, if it was seen in the light of day, would be completely illegal. So that's why they've done it behind closed doors and they've just gone even further at Donald Trump's behest.
- [106:05]
Crystal Ball
So this district, is this supposed to have been drawn in this redistricting to be a Republican seat? And I know you have some, some polling showing whether that's going to work out or not.
- [106:16]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah. So this is absolutely one that Republicans wanted to draw to advantage themselves to win in November. This is a seat that Donald Trump won by 9 points in 2024, but Joe Biden won it by 5 points in 2020 and in 2018 when the state of Florida was decided at the gubernatorial and U.S. senate election by a 1 point margin of victory victory, Democrats also would have won us won the seat in that race. And we've done polling that shows me ahead of the two leading Republican contenders by 9 points and 12 points respectively. Democrats have a 12 point generic ballot advantage. People are so upset with the cost of gas, groceries, housing. People are actually leaving South Florida in a reversal of the COVID trend because it's becoming so unaffordable down here. And so we have an advantage to press and we see non party affiliated voters breaking towards Democrats, Democrats. And this is our moment that we need to assert the strongest candidate possible to motivate the Democratic base. We cannot miss this opportunity because again, if we nominate the same milquetoast centrist candidates that we've been doing, then we're going to see more of the same in Florida. So we're really trying to turn our state around.
- [107:18]
Crystal Ball
All right, so let's talk about your Democratic primary contender. So you're running against Jared Moskowitz. He is a current incumbent member of Congress. I think he would probably describe himself, himself as proudly pro apac. I'll play clip in a moment of him saying, of course I'm going to continue to take APAC money and how dare you even question those of us who are recipients of these funds. He also describes himself, I think, as a Ron DeSantis Democrat, which is something I've never heard of before. So that's very innovative on his part. Voted for the Lake and Riley Act. He called Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey's Iran War Powers Resolution the Ayatollah Protection Act. He is, I think, you know, pretty steadfastly one of the most pro Israel Democrats in Congress, certainly. So let me go Ahead and play this clip that you shared recently of him getting asked about his AIPAC funds and whether he'll continue to take them. And then we can get your reaction on the other side.
- [108:16]
Ryan Grim
I think one of the areas that
- [108:18]
Oliver Larkin
some people may, may end up criticizing you on is you are someone who
- [108:22]
Ryan Grim
do do accept donations from apart. Are you going to continue to take money from aipac? And what do you say to those
- [108:29]
Oliver Larkin
critics who say that AIPAC has been a malevolent force here in the United
- [108:33]
Ryan Grim
States in many congressional races?
- [108:35]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah.
- [108:36]
Ryan Grim
Am I going to take donations from Jewish Americans?
- [108:38]
Emily Jashinsky
Yes, I am going to take donations from Jewish Americans. Okay.
- [108:43]
Ryan Grim
And that's what AIPAC is.
- [108:44]
Emily Jashinsky
It is not anything other than Jewish
- [108:46]
Ryan Grim
Americans donating through an organization. Just like there are a number of
- [108:50]
Emily Jashinsky
PACs, very progressive pacts, by the way, in which very progressive people donate through a pac. And that PAC gives. And so this is part again of
- [108:59]
Ryan Grim
the singling out of just the Jewish
- [109:01]
Emily Jashinsky
organization, by the way. I don't even think they make the top hundred of PAC donations in the country yet.
- [109:08]
Ryan Grim
They're being singled out. So, yes, Jim, I will continue to
- [109:11]
Emily Jashinsky
take donations from Jewish Americans who care about America.
- [109:15]
Crystal Ball
Your response, Oliver?
- [109:18]
Oliver Larkin
He can't actually say he takes AIPAC donations because he knows how political toxic it is. And I just want to set the record straight for people across the country who have any misconceptions about South Florida. In this new district in the 25th district, one of the highest representative Jewish congressional districts in the country, with about 25% of respondents in our poll in both the primary and general election, 86% of Democratic primary voters, 86% want to place conditions or even cease entirely military aid to issue Israel. One in every two Democratic primary voters wants, at minimum, conditions placed. One in three wants to cease U.S. military aid. And this is a winning general election argument as well, because 68 of general election voters, Democrats, Republicans and Independents want the same thing. So we talk about how support for Israel is a 9010 issue where the people of the United States want to see these conditions placed or cease military aid entirely, which is my position, position. And AIPAC would have us believe differently, but it is not true. There is a majority all across this country that is disgusted by what our members of Congress on both sides are enabling by taking these AIPAC donations. And as Jared Moskowitz has done, authoring the House resolution to bar the State Department from citing data from the Gaza Health Ministry, it's literal genocide denial. And then he's gone ahead and censured Rashida Tlaib, as you mentioned, with his opposition to the War Powers Resolution, his four purchases of Lockheed Martin stock stock hit an all time high on the market the Monday after Donald Trump launched these illegal strikes. So there's a tremendous amount of corruption. And just to set the record straight about AIPAC as well, this is a group that supported 109 insurrectionists in the 2022 midterm. So this is not simply about, you know, Israel. It is about AIPAC's corrupting influence in our country and what they are empowering with. The fascist. Right.
- [111:07]
Crystal Ball
Yeah, well, and when he says, oh, it's just support from Jewish Americans, I mean, that's not actually what it AIPAC's mission is whatsoever. It's to enforce the lockstep support of the positions of the Israeli government. And, you know, has many supporters that are not, in fact Jewish. And there are many Jewish Americans who of course oppose deeply what AIPAC is up to and the, the positions that they support. Tell us a little bit more about Jared Moskowitz. What does he mean when he calls himself a Ron DeSantis Democrat? How has he positioned himself himself politically?
- [111:41]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah, so the reference to being a DeSantis Democrat is Jared Moskowitz was politically appointed twice, not once, but twice by our governor, once to the Florida Department of Emergency Management and then to the Broward County Commission. So Ron DeSantis has been Jared Moskowitz's stepping stone to Congress. And it's why he's so reluctant to criticize the governor when he's gone after Pride Flag street art in the city of Fort Lauderdale, in our district and in other states, cities across the state. Jared Moskowitz has not spoken out against it. When Jared Moskowitz went to tour Alligator Alcatraz, which was set up by the DeSantis administration, Jared Moskowitz said, don't call this a concentration camp as he is literally taking max out donations from the private security contractors working not only at Alligator Alcatraz, but that we're also putting in bids for the Gaza Board of Peace. So Jared Moskowitz owes his political career to Ron DeSantis and that is how he is positioning himself. He doesn't have a bad word to say about any Republican. If you've heard him in some of his viral clips on the House committees, he is saying, not that Donald Trump can fail, only that he can be failed by his subordinates like Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem. Jared Moskowitz was considered to be Trump's FEMA pick, the only Democrat in Trump's Cabinet. And the day that we launched this campaign, a poll went out in our district after asking if the election were held today. And the candidates were Jared Moskowitz, a Republican with Donald Trump's endorsement, and Oliver Larkin, the Democrat. For whom would you vote? So Jared Moskowitz, I fear very much, is someone who could be a turncoat after winning this election and crossing over to the other side. And again using the excuse of anti Semitism on the left. I just saw before we jumped on here that he's once again criticizing Hassan Piker. This is someone who is punching left reflexively and doesn't have a bad word to say about the fascist right that is driving our state and our country into the dustbin.
- [113:32]
Crystal Ball
My recollection is he takes big tech and crypto money as well.
- [113:37]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah, he took over a quarter of a million dollars from Sam Bankman fried's pack in 2022. He also is very much enmeshed in, in the artificial intelligence kind of support. I mean, Palantir here just moved their corporate headquarters to South Florida, to the city of aventura in the 25th district. So it is open season for these fascist collaborating organizations and corporations to move down here. We've got the headquarters of the Geo Group, the private prison corporation headquartered in Boca Raton, right across the street from Florida Atlantic University in our district. And we can talk about how Jared Moskowitz publicly recommended a GeoGroup private prison executive to lead a public university in our district. As we now see, see the new ICE director, the acting director was a 12 year executive at Geo Group. And we see the controversy around their administration of Delaney hall in New Jersey. We are at the epicenter of this in South Florida. And we cannot allow Democrats to be paying lip service to these corporations that are increasing mass surveillance over Americans, that are violating our civil and constitutional rights. We have to make a stand and it has to be human here in this primary.
- [114:49]
Crystal Ball
Let's talk a little bit about you and your journey. I was reading a profile of you that you were working for a political consultancy. You found yourself, like, sending out all of these Adam Schiff fundraising emails and you had kind of like a what, how did I end up here? Moment. When you were at a fundraiser for him, there were Gaza protesters outside, and you're like, wait, I'm on their side. What am I doing here? Can you talk just a little bit about what that journey has been for you and what made you decide to want to jump into this. This race?
- [115:17]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah, absolutely. So when I was 23 years old, I was graduating from college with a mountain of student loan debt. And I was working for 8 bucks an hour as a line cook in my college campus restaurant. And I saw Bernie Sanders Talking about a $15 minimum wage and Medicare for all and college for all. And for the first time in what felt like my life, I heard a politician describing the material conditions that I was working under and providing a path for forward to make my life better. So I was so inspired by that as he was down 50, 60 points in the polls that I actually quit that job as a line cook. And I drove to New Hampshire just to show up at the office and show up every single day until I could get a job on his campaign staff. And I traveled the country with the Sanders campaign. After that campaign was over. I went to the digital marketing agency that the campaign used. I helped organize a union as a member of the organizing committee Committee, one of the first political consulting firms to win a union in in tandem with my comrades efforts to establish the Campaign Workers Guild to unionize the political campaign industry and that 2018 cycle. But you go into politics with this belief that you are fighting for something greater than yourself, that you're fighting for your ideals. But in this corrupt campaign finance industry and in the kind of corporatized and business like political campaign industry, we just see these recurring themes of layoffs, of taking advantage of these young bright eyed campaign staffers, laying them off and then having them start over from scratch after election after election. And so after having gone through that a few times and really just ultimately for my own job security, taking a position and finding myself at the same time that I was working to oppose Donald Trump Trump and was hired to start working with Adam Schiff two months after the January 6th insurrection. I felt like there was a tremendous amount of importance in what I was doing. But at the same time I felt that I'd strayed so far from the original values that brought me into politics in the first place. And after we saw, just as in 2016, in 2024, everything that you are told to accept as a matter of course, everything that you are told to tolerate from this Democratic Party establishment establishment in pursuit of a larger goal of defeating fascism, of defeating Donald Trump, we saw that that just was not true. And you're exactly right, Crystal. When I found myself at a fundraiser for Joe Biden in South Florida and I saw three Palestine protesters on the other side, it was clear to me that I was so far from where I had originally entered in politics to affect the kind of work and change that I wanted to see. And then when I saw my congressman, Jared Moskowitz, blaming progressives for why we lost the 2024 election in the same breath that he is becoming the first Democrat in Congress to join Elon Musk's Doge Caucus, I just knew that I did not want to go back and continue to do more of the same. I actually was offered a position to do Jared Moskowitz's emails, but instead of doing that, I decided to stand up to him because we have to change this campaign finance industry. It's gone from the empowerment of small dollar donations against the corporate PACs and the super PACs to now this just total invasion of privacy, where we see big tech rearing its ugly head and creating more and more incentive not to affect political change, but to raise the stakes of the kind of partisan furor that is really driving people so crazy with our politics. And I just needed to break out of it and really return to my roots that I found on the Bernie Sanders campaign and be that kind of change agent that I wanted to see for over a decade in South Florida, where I grew up. And this is the race where I had to make that stand.
- [119:01]
Crystal Ball
Can you give people a little bit of a window into the sausage making of that campaign fundraising industry? Because, you know, I ran for Congress at this point. It's been a million years ago in 2010, and obviously fundraising dominates your day. You got, at the time, you got all these call sheets. You're just calling through donors endlessly. It gives you some, like, data on them and what they've given to you before. We were, you know, we're sending out emails. This was really pre text messages, but we're constantly trying to come up with like, okay, what's the email that's going to grab their attention? And there's almost like this arms race of attention grabbing. What does it look like today when you were doing fundraising for Adam Schiff? What was the sort of like, mindset that you had as political events would unfold? Or if Trump, like said his name or called him in name? How were you thinking about how do I maximize what I can pull out of people's in the grassroots pockets?
- [119:53]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah, it's all about that rapid response. As soon as Donald Trump tweets something, as soon as there's a breaking news event, you are going into the text messaging platform, you're going into the email platform and you're sending it out. And we even see how this is used now to prop up establishment candidates. And there's one very prime example here. In south Florida, Florida, with the senate candidate that's running against Angie Nixon in our u. S. Senate primary. There are D.C. politicians, establishment Democrats that just select at the very start of a cycle. This is the person we're going to get behind. We've seen how Chuck Schumer has done that with Janet Mills in Maine, with a candidate out in Iowa who's up for election today against a more progressive candidate. And they just funnel all of this energy, all of this money, money into pre selecting for us rather than letting the voters decide. These are the people that we're going to boost and to elevate. And there's a tremendous amount of violation of our data privacy. I remember when I got into political fundraising, you would run petition campaigns on Facebook to sign up in support of medicare for all to get on Bernie Sanders email list and affirmatively opt in. Now, with the way that the political finance industry works, you're just seeing who ran for my seat last time. I'm going to buy their entire list. And before you know it, you donate to one candidate and you end up on the fundraising list of 12 that you've never heard of before. And it just becomes an overwhelming, oversaturated, politicized kind of effort that really does not directly connect with people the way that they believe they should when, when a candidate reaches out and asks them for money. So what we're trying to do is, is very different running on this grassroots fundraising model. Of course, course I don't have any politicians in Washington D.C. that are boosting my campaign from the very start. This was grassroots from the beginning. And the only way that we've been able to grow it is by just going out there and speaking the truth. And I think one thing that I've been really proud of on this campaign, when I went on Hasan Piker's stream, Wired wrote an article after the fact to say this is how political fundraising is changing. In this new environment where people expect a greater degree of accessibility, they don't want to see, see. And I'm sure candidates, including myself, don't want to spend all day, every day on the phone. So if we can speak to mass audiences and connect on issues and discuss ideas and also use that as a means of fundraising, that's I think, the, the recipe to at least elevate more grassroots candidates. But then when we get in there, we absolutely need to enact campaign finance reform with public financing of elections. We cannot continue to ask people across the country, country to donate 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 20 bucks for what is this the most important election of our lifetime for the fifth cycle running. I mean, we need to change and actually move forward and overturn Citizens United and return our democracy to something that's more participatory and less, you know, subject to whether or not you pay at the door.
- [122:47]
Crystal Ball
I'd never been more convinced that that is absolutely existential. If we're going to continue forward with anything approaching even like a semblance of democracy, it's just gotten so incredibly out of hand. I wanted to ask you a little bit about Florida and this issue in particular. This is something that Sagar and I have covered a bit, which is the housing market in Florida. And someone shared with this with me recently. I wanted to get your reaction to it. So this says, as of this morning, 12 of Florida's for sale homes are in active fire sale territory. That means they've been sitting on the market, the sellers actively cutting prices and increasing the frequency of those price cuts. Pressures mainly concentrated Tampa and Fort Myers, where fire sales now top top 30% of listings in some submarkets. That means sellers cannot find buyers even though they want to. And the angle that Sagar and I have covered is how difficult and expensive it is increasing and sometimes impossible to get homeowners insurance in Florida primarily because of climate change and hurricane and flooding risk in vulnerable communities. And so I wonder what you can tell us about the housing market in Florida and much that comes up on the campaign trail for you also.
- [123:53]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah, it comes up all the time. And running a grassroots campaign, I'm out there canvassing every weekend. I'm talking to voters face to face. And I've been in workingclass communities in our old district in Margate. I spoke to a Puerto Rican Marine Corps veteran who's over the age of 65. He's on Social Security on a fixed income, and his homeowner's property insurance doubled from $3,000 to $6,000. And the math just doesn't add up. And so people, people are now fleeing the state of Florida and looking for more affordable places in the country to live. There's long been this narrative since COVID and since Ron DeSantis was campaigning on the free state of Florida, that we were having an influx of in migration and the population is growing. But we've seen in recent reporting by the Wall Street Journal and other outlets that people are now fleeing South Florida because the property insurance crisis is so bad. And this is connected to other parts of the country. In Florida, we suffer from hurricanes, from flooding. But if you go out west, it's wildfires, it's extreme drought, and it's really precipitating a need for a national homeowner's insurance solution to lower costs and get control of these rates. But Democrats like Jared Moskowitz aren't helping. If you look at Lennar Homes, the private home construction industry, their top three donation recipients in the 2024 cycle were Jared Moskowitz, Jared Moskowitz's PAC, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. So if that doesn't tell you where Jared Moskowitz's priorities lie when it comes to affordable housing, this is who we have as the Democratic Congressional Committee boosts Moskowitz in our primary as a frontline candidate despite being the least effective Democrat in Congress. And it's directly tied to his inability to address the homeowner's insurance crisis. Crisis, his inability to address the rise of utility rates as he's taken over $27,000 from the parent company of Florida Power and Light, not only to mention Southern Company and Duke Energy and NextEra Energy, FPL's parent company is now trying to merge with Dominion in a multi, multi, multi billion dollar deal. Jared Moskowitz is not addressing these, these concerns, but we need to lower the cost of housing. And it has to include, include repealing the Faircloth Amendment and passing legislation like Ilhan Omar's Homes for All act to really build, you know, millions of new affordable homes across the country because the cost of housing in Florida is far too high and climate change is only making it worse.
- [126:22]
Crystal Ball
And then my last question for you is about the Democratic Party in Florida obviously hasn't done very well in recent years. I'm old enough to remember when Florida was the ultimate swing state. No longer. What did Trump win it by? Double digits? I know, like 13 points this last time around. Ground. Ron DeSantis seems to be dominant. But I have seen some polling recently that shows both the Democratic gubernatorial candidate and the Senate candidates are in range of, you know, having a shot. So I wonder if you think that that is a possibility, why you think Democrats have, you know, fallen off so hard in the state of Florida and what you think needs to be done to, to write the course, if it's possible. Possible.
- [127:04]
Oliver Larkin
Yeah. I was having a conversation about this with Richie Floyd, who's another Democratic Socialist who was recently reelected unopposed to the St. Petersburg City Council. And we had a call on Florida Emancipation Day. And we were reflecting after I had worked on 2018's Amendment 4 campaign to restore voting rights to over a million Floridians in that Next election Ron DeSantis was making political propaganda out of arrest recently returning citizens with the recently restored right to vote. Of course, the Florida legislature passed what amounts to a poll tax after by requiring that returning citizens with their right to vote restored would have to pay for court fees before they were actually eligible. So they're creating political propaganda to discourage recently re enfranchised voters from participating in the process. Of course, they have purged the voter rolls and made people who are inactive voters just purging them from the rolls entirely. So Republicans have been touting this one and a half million, dollar one and a half million voter registration advantage, but it's not actually reflective of how people in our state feel. And right now, the way that we feel after 30 plus years of unified Republican governance in Tallahassee and a trifecta in Washington D.C. is that our problems amount to the Republican Party's leadership. And so we are looking for alternatives. There is not a tremendous amount of trust in the Florida Democratic Party party, which is why campaigns like ours are so important to show people that are sick of both parties that we're asserting a new vision for our state. I do really feel like there is a chance to win more seats in Florida this cycle. We've seen in our polling non party affiliated voters are breaking, in some cases 20 points towards the Democratic Party. And this is a state where NPAs make up, I believe, more than both Republicans and Democrats independently. This is a working class state. It's a state that is rejecting partisan politics. And I think that's why we're seeing this kind of movement. But to again take the greatest advantage of it, we cannot simply kowtow to what the Washington D.C. corporate Democratic establishment wants because what they've prescribed for us over the past decade has only led us to more and more failure. So we need something different.
- [129:14]
Crystal Ball
All right, Oliver, tell people where they can support your campaign if they are so inclined.
- [129:19]
Oliver Larkin
Www.OliverForCongress.com that's where you can find us on social. You can donate some money and if you're in Florida, you can volunteer.
- [129:26]
Crystal Ball
And primary is August, am I right about that?
- [129:29]
Oliver Larkin
August 18th.
- [129:31]
Crystal Ball
Okay, so you got, you still got a little bit of time, but it's fast approaching. I'm just thinking about, you know, all these campaigns that are coming up like this week and next week and whatever, but certainly in the home stretch here. Oliver, thank you so much for taking the time. It's great to reconnect with you.
- [129:44]
Oliver Larkin
Thank you so much, Crystal.
- [129:46]
Emily Jashinsky
All right, Ryan, first AMA question we have here is from Andrea who says can we see Ryan on Theo von Would that be a possibility? I think you guys would find vibe that that would be good. R. I think that would be a good vibe.
- [129:57]
Ryan Grim
That would be fun. Yeah. I Theo, Theo's got a call. I'm not pitching.
- [130:02]
Oliver Larkin
But
- [130:04]
Ryan Grim
where, where is, where does he tape? Is he a Texan? What's his story?
- [130:08]
Emily Jashinsky
He's Nashville, I'm pretty sure.
- [130:10]
Ryan Grim
Okay, hang on.
- [130:12]
Emily Jashinsky
This is a funny one from Lee. Well, I guess it's, it's kind of funny, but it's, it's also kind of serious. Lee says, why is China not making Cuba a solar powered circuit state?
- [130:22]
Ryan Grim
So I actually have an interview that I need to get up with the Cuban official who oversaw or is overseeing the energy transition. And it's fascinating to clean energy and she said that it, it's China. Like China is totally responsible for what they've been able to do and at times they're getting to 25, maybe 25% renewal renewable generation. But China could be doing a lot more. Like they have, they have so much stuff and they could, they also have so many people. Like if they, they can apparently build a city of 10 million people in like six weeks. Like they could send over a couple thousand people plus just flood it with the panels and set it up. Like they could, could. So the fact that they haven't like they've, they've been very helpful. Cuba would be screwed without them, but they could do so much more. And you know, I think they don't want to poke the US Bear like that. They, their approach has always been to just focus.
- [131:30]
Emily Jashinsky
They've been a bit careful in Iran too.
- [131:32]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, they, they don't. They, they are the opposite of the US when it comes to how, how we kind of engage with the world.
- [131:39]
Emily Jashinsky
World.
- [131:39]
Ryan Grim
We're everywhere all the time and violently. They just want to like come in, build a road, get you on the hook, extract your resources. Like the road collapses. Like too bad got your resources
- [131:56]
Emily Jashinsky
and, and they have like this minimal like intel footprint. But they probably don't want to jeopardize that because what that could mean, I mean the foothold for them in the future could be really important. So I, I guess maybe they wouldn't want to have some type of full scale military. It, it wouldn't be in their interest if there is some full scale like military blowup over Cuba because then they probably, if, if Trump does to Cuba what he did to Venezuela, then there's no Chinese foothold there, I guess.
- [132:20]
Ryan Grim
Right. It is sad because like, you know, the island is a wash and sun.
- [132:25]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah.
- [132:25]
Ryan Grim
They should not be relying on oil.
- [132:30]
Emily Jashinsky
This one is from Benjamin T. Who says, do you think Massey could still win his congressional seat by running as an Independent? My first answer to that would probably. My instinct is, I wouldn't say it's impossible, but it's just a very. I mean he lost the Republican primary in a very Republican district. So do I think there are probably some like independent Dem leaners who could help get him? I mean he was 45% in the Republican primary, so it's I think mathematically possible, but I would just say probably unlikely because all that same money that came in this first time around would come in even hotter. They've got plenty of money to spend against him. So. So, and he had, he did well raising money, small dollar money in particular. But I don't know, Ryan, what do you think about that?
- [133:14]
Ryan Grim
You know that district? Much better. Yeah. So yeah, it would be really tough given all the money. Would the Democrat drop out is. I assume there's a Democrat who won the nomination but has no chance.
- [133:28]
Emily Jashinsky
That's a good point. That's a good point actually because I bet, you know, there's. Even if there's 20%, 15%, like hardcore dumb voters in that district, they're probably not going to vote for Massey, so.
- [133:38]
Ryan Grim
Most of them, yeah. Right. If, if you're a national Democrat, you like Massey because he's been bucking the Republicans. If you're a local Democrat, you probably are annoyed at him for like. Cause you know him better and you know the Freedom Caucus history.
- [133:54]
Emily Jashinsky
He's never been HFC technically. I used to like always have to get reminded by HFC by that all the time and be like, hey, you guys have. Yeah, anyone. But he was HFC attorney. Curious.
- [134:04]
Ryan Grim
Yeah.
- [134:04]
Emily Jashinsky
Yes, yes. He hung out with them. This one, I'm, I'm curious. Joe says, what's your take on Zoro Ranch? Epstein, New Mexico. Cover up allegations. And Ryan, I'm very curious what your take is on that because I don't know that you. I've ever heard you talk about it, but that story is endlessly fascinating.
- [134:19]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, I don't know enough about it, but yeah, like again, like very little investigation. Speaking of the New York Times, like, come on, like there's a lot, like if you're going to put months of resources from your top reporters into like investigating something, I don't know if Graham Platner's ex girlfriends are the place you're going to strike gold, like send them out to the ranch. Like. Yeah, like there's a lot to uncover still when it comes to, to the behavior of Epstein and his cohort.
- [135:01]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah.
- [135:02]
Ryan Grim
What do you think?
- [135:03]
Emily Jashinsky
I mean there's so much.
- [135:05]
Ryan Grim
What's the craziest part to you about it?
- [135:09]
Emily Jashinsky
How incurious New Mexico officials were about it for so long. Very, very, very, very bizarre. Just I, I went on Google Earth and spent like a, honestly like way too long, probably like an hour one day scouring around the ranch because the ranch's address was in all of the emails. So I popped it into Google Earth and just was like, it is so, so remote. And from what we know they knew all of these high wealth people were coming in and out and it's in the middle of absolutely nowhere. It's just so, so strange. I don't know that there's going to
- [135:47]
Ryan Grim
be any one on this Albanian island.
- [135:51]
Emily Jashinsky
Right? Yes. That story. Tom Elliott had an interesting breakdown on his subsect. People could go read about that.
- [135:56]
Ryan Grim
Good piece.
- [135:57]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, it was quite an interesting piece. So if we do. I don't know if you have any more thoughts on that, Ryan. I can pull up one more ama if not. Okay, so this one is. Okay, so we'll, we'll end it on this one from Robert who says pundits are always comparing the conditions in the USA to the fall of Rome. I'd like to hear them compare conditions here to France before the revolution. Can you, Ryan? That's a, that's a great question for you, I think.
- [136:23]
Ryan Grim
Wait, what was that one again?
- [136:25]
Emily Jashinsky
So pundits are always comparing the conditions Robert says in the USA to the fall of Rome. I'd like to hear them compare conditions here to France before the revolution.
- [136:35]
Ryan Grim
The conditions in France before the revolution were that the food prices were going insane and inflation was bankrupting the country. And that's specifically why they called the National Assessment assembly to enact some type of policy to turn, turn around the inflation and the, and the bankruptcy. And once the, once the assembly was gathered they were like, how about we go a little bit further and do, do the whole. You know, it took took many years for that to unfold. So yeah, ironically you know this we have the same blue red situation where the rural areas of France were not at all keen on, on how the, how Paris was going about this. And in fact the like the bloodiest part of it where you know, they say 20,000 people were killed or whatever in the, in the terror, like almost all like there were a decent amount, you know, beheaded by the guillotine in Paris a lot. But almost all of them were killed in the Vendee. These Catholic kind of opponents of the revolution and the revolutionaries went out there and just slaughtered them by the, by the thousands. I saw Twitter keeps sending me an ad for some right wings wing film about the von Day. Have you seen this?
- [138:15]
Emily Jashinsky
No. That's so niche.
- [138:17]
Ryan Grim
I'm like man, I want to. I actually want to see this like. And look, I will cop. What the left did to the right in the V is horrifying. Down in the south they were putting Catholics on barges and sinking them.
- [138:33]
Emily Jashinsky
The Spanish Civil War too. That's how. Yeah, that's was a huge component of the. That too.
- [138:38]
Ryan Grim
But so you know there, so there was a. And basically that was, that was actually draft related that, that wasn't like. They weren't, they were like okay, revolution, whatever they want. The Paris wanted them to serve in the, in the wars and also they were coming after the Catholic priests and making them sign loyalty oaths and if they wouldn't sign loyalty oaths, basically killing them.
- [139:04]
Emily Jashinsky
Them.
- [139:06]
Ryan Grim
It was, it was ugly. I want to. I gotta go see this movie. Let's. Let me see if I can find it.
- [139:11]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, I mean there's always this debate about, you know, is, is Rome about the fall of the. Is it about economics? Is France about economics? Is Rome about economics? Is Weimar Germany about economics? And I think it's. Or is it about culture? And I think it's like very obviously always a combination of like you have this. There is this thread of elite cultural decadence that you always see that seems to always pre sage the fall of an empire. But I don't think it's just one or the other. I think Weimar you clearly see economics and culture. I think that's the same thing with Rome. I think it's probably the same thing with France. You have de sad and all that stuff happening as people can't afford bread. And so I mean actually you could probably talk. Well I was going to say Russia but that might be more debatable. But that's. Go ahead.
- [140:02]
Ryan Grim
You want to watch the trailer?
- [140:04]
Emily Jashinsky
Let's do it.
- [140:05]
Ryan Grim
It's called, it's called Victory or Death. And this is about the reactionary Vendee region. So this is a right wing attempt at a film. Let's see. See how. The right wing's doing it in French. I can't believe they're doing it in French.
- [140:41]
Emily Jashinsky
It's all French.
- [140:46]
Ryan Grim
They're now here come the revolutionaries going out into the countryside. Now the rural folks are about to start fighting back.
- [141:15]
Crystal Ball
Wow.
- [141:22]
Ryan Grim
Contact. I think we're going to have to do a screening of this. We need to stop
- [141:39]
Oliver Larkin
Victory or death.
- [141:42]
Emily Jashinsky
I mean listen January, I'm watching that and I'm thinking as a non Catholic I'm, I'm still frightened that you're going to put me in a camp, Brian. But I, I, that is, that is interesting that they're doing a film on that. That there's like a right wing film on that now.
- [141:59]
Ryan Grim
It was a indefensible slaughter and overreach by my comrades, my citizen comrade. I cannot defend it.
- [142:10]
Emily Jashinsky
It's always, I mean that's why I
- [142:12]
Ryan Grim
wouldn't make a good revolutionary because like it, it was like essential I guess to like locking in the gains of the revolution solution. I would, I, I don't have the stomach for it.
- [142:21]
Emily Jashinsky
Which, well, but that's also.
- [142:22]
Ryan Grim
Critic of mine knows it knows that too much of a switch.
- [142:26]
Emily Jashinsky
Well there's, yeah, you get dangerous when you start getting to ends justify the means territory which is kind of the theme of the whole show. Like even when we're talking about on a much, much, much smaller, smaller scale. Platinum stuff like that does get, you don't want to be on the per. You don't want to be the person who's causing people to throw out the rulebook or the person throwing out the real the rule book, if that makes sense. Like because what happens is you get Donald Trump saying he who saves his country violates no law in all cap freaking true social. Which is maybe an apocryphal Napoleon quote but attributed to Napoleon nonetheless. And so that's maybe the theme of the show today.
- [143:01]
Ryan Grim
Let's see. 1793, French Revolution. For three years now, Charet, a young man retired from the Royal Navy has been back home. Not yet. You got to have the retired guy who just wants to be left alone in the country. The anger of the peasants. Romans. Rumbles they call on the young retiree to take command of the rebellion. The fight for freedom has only just begun. Oh yeah. So it's got that thing where they're like, he's like I'm, I'm out of the game, son. Don't, don't bother me with this rebellion. And no, the radicals, they're coming for us. They're coming for our way of life. And they literally were coming for their way of life. Like they were trying to. Yes, they were trying to, to kill all the priests. They replaced the calendar. Yes, they, they replaced the week.
- [143:51]
Emily Jashinsky
They don't want that Christian calendar.
- [143:52]
Ryan Grim
They got rid of the week. They made it a 10 day week because they were like this whole seven day thing is irrational. We're doing 10 days. They. Yeah, they, they.
- [144:04]
Emily Jashinsky
Anyway, there's a good Rest is history series on the French Revolution. Tom Holland and Dominic Sambrook if people want to brush up.
- [144:15]
Ryan Grim
So, yeah, I'm gonna watch that.
- [144:17]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, looks good.
- [144:18]
Ryan Grim
How is Mel Gibson not involved in that? I do not know.
- [144:22]
Emily Jashinsky
Yeah, it's like French Revolution. Apocalypto.
- [144:24]
Ryan Grim
Yeah, he. I'm actually, he's probably involved somehow. There's no way. No way he missed out on that.
- [144:31]
Emily Jashinsky
Oh, man. Well, Ryan, I guess we could leave it there. We did our. Our amas and I love the amas, so that was a little bit of fun. Actually, not really that much fun because we were talking about revol. But anyway, we'll let everyone enjoy their weekends on that note. Anything else, Ryan?
- [144:48]
Ryan Grim
I think that's it.
- [144:50]
Emily Jashinsky
All right, well, thank you everybody so much for tuning in. We're going to be back, of course. We're always here over the weekend if there's breaking news, so stay tuned. If there's a major story, you can bet we'll be on it. And we will come to you with the news as soon as we can. Otherwise, we will see you back here. Crystalline Saga will be in Monday, so we'll see you then. This is an I heart podcast.
- [145:09]
Crystal Ball
Guaranteed human.