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Ashley Frawley
For everyone who solves crime from their
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Jeff Schulenberger
couch, knows more about forensics than their own job, and has trust issues with small town sheriffs.
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Ashley Frawley
Amazon Music's millions of podcast episodes are calling. Just download the Amazon music app and
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Jeff Schulenberger
start listening to your favorite true crime
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Ashley Frawley
podcasts ad free included with Prime.
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- [01:10]
Matthew Schmitz
Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss the fate of Harvey Weinstein, an attack on due process in the United Kingdom and a bipartisan housing bill in Congress. I'm joined by Ashley Frawley and Jeff Schulenberger. And I'm Matthew Schmitz. This week, the Hollywood Reporter trade magazine published a jailhouse interview with Harvey Weinstein. Its editor went to Rikers island and interviewed the former producer. The Harvey Weinstein case is one I've followed for a long time. I've written about it for Compact and before that for the American conservative. Reading this interview, I was struck just by the course of Weinstein's career and some of the changes that have occurred America over that time. One amusing passage Weinstein has described going to ground zero, bringing bagels to the first responders working at the site, you know, the kind of immediate aftermath of the attack. And at that time, you know, no one was allowed down near ground zero, you know, unless that person was a firefighter or policeman. And so Weinstein's ability to get there, unlike other civilians, was a kind of flex. And then while he was at the site, he demanded that his assistant give him a bagel with cream cheese. And someone said, but Harvey, they're, they're for the firemen. And he said, give, give it to me now with, with the cream cheese and just the, the, you know, 911 feels so long ago now. There are so many people who have no memory of it. But Weinstein was really this dominant cultural figure of my youth with his, the way he presided over Hollywood and especially the Oscars, producing these kind of more niche and prestige projects. We're far past that 911 moment. And obviously, with MeToo in 2017, we entered more fully into the woke moment. So I think, you know, kind of tracing the courses of Weinstein's career, you can really describe the movement from maybe the somewhat more morally laissez faire and potentially toxic culture of the 90s and early 2000s toward, you know, the more, the kind of more progressive and feminist kind of insistence on moral correctness that we've seen in more recent years. So kind of a long winded way to say that. It convinced me that Weinstein's case is important not just for what it says about kind of immediate due process, but also Weinstein himself really remains a significant cultural figure and one of the people whose life is the best and easiest, you know, provides the best and easiest way to trace the trajectory of our kind of prestige culture.
- [04:50]
Ashley Frawley
This, this interview was so, so interesting on so many levels that had like moments of accidental comedy, like, get me my bagels. And then. But also, but also like, you know what it reminded me of as I was reading how he was talking? It reminded me of the Divine Comedy, you know, like Dante's Inferno, where it's like all these people giving these like speeches about how they've done, you know, clear my name clear. And they don't realize that they're in hell. You know, they're just. It's like that moment is so long past. Or like the, you know, the famous section. And was it Francesca, this, this woman who's in this level of hell where because she's condemned due to her lust, you know, and she's sort of like blown about by lust and, and, and you feel bad for her, right? And Dante feels pity for her. And I feel, I felt so much, I actually felt really bad for Weinstein that he's sitting there like, well, you know, what I was really guilty of was that I was like too much of a. I was too lustful, essentially. Right. And it's like, it's exactly that. Like, I felt bad for him. But then I was thinking maybe that's the trap, you know, that he's, he's. I don't know, a part of me thinks that he became this symbol of a time when we had to begin to prosecute the gray area of legalism and morality. And because morality, that in a non legal frame has less and less meaning for us. Like, we can't hope he's going to go to hell, so we have to kind of like litigate it literally. And, and so it became rape when I, I know he was convicted of rape, so let's. But the other things, the other kinds of allegations and so on, it was. It was like he was a bad guy. And I kind of thought, he deserves to be in hell, but not jail, you know, And. And it was just. It was, I don't know, sad in a way. And also how much he did not realize where he was, how much he's like, if I ever get out of here, I'm going to buy the rights to that film and I'm gonna make it again. It's like. It's like, sorry to bring in another one, but, like, you know that Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine, where the main character is sitting on a park bench, mumbling to herself about the time that's long past? She's like, well, you know, we would love to go to the Azores, but, you know, we don't. The flies are just terrible. That's what it reminded me of. Like, dude, you're in hell. It's over. It's gone.
- [07:19]
Matthew Schmitz
He's never getting out of jail. No. His body is broken. He's.
- [07:23]
Ashley Frawley
You're gonna die there.
- [07:25]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah.
- [07:25]
Matthew Schmitz
And he's fantasizing about it and seems to really believe he'll be out one day. And there isn't even the slightest chance of that.
- [07:33]
Jeff Schulenberger
No.
- [07:33]
Ashley Frawley
And also the depth of delusion that he just. You can tell he still has that 90s mentality. He's trying to say. And I'm not even, like, necessary. I'm just describing it like, he's trying to say, oh, I'm. I'm really sorry. I want to tell these women sorry. But then a few minutes later, he's like, well, they weren't so innocent. They knew what was up. When you go to someone's hotel room at this time, you know what's going on, and. And it's like, yeah. But what he didn't realize was that's what people call rape.
- [07:59]
Jeff Schulenberger
Now.
- [08:00]
Ashley Frawley
He was. In his mind, rape is like, I. You know, like, held somebody down while they screamed. No. And he doesn't understand that, like, we've traveled so far from that, that. That just the power differential was enough, and he. He didn't get it. He didn't get it. And I don't know if I'm okay with that either. I think we're capitulating way too much. This kind of frail idea of womanhood where it's like, well, I know you didn'. But, you know you did. Well, no, you got to say no. You got to stand up for yourself. You know, we've created this kind of terrible Situation around consent where everyone's really quite afraid, but we're also not telling women to stand up for themselves. And, you know, you could see how he had lied to himself as well. He was like, look, I had a bit of charm then too. Not everybody was felt coerced by my power. Like, dude, no, you didn't, you didn't. Those people were not your friends. Those women did not want to sleep with you. You know, but how was he? You know, you have to feel maybe this is, this is me getting sucked in like Dante's Inferno. Like you kind of had to feel bad for him because he truly had deluded himself that those women wanted to sleep with him, that Gwyneth Paltrow really was his friend. You know, he, that's, that, that's an older mentality that I think wokeness is for better or worse, done away with now where it's like, no, you have to understand the power of differential means, that consent is problematic, et cetera, et cetera. And he didn't get that. And you could tell.
- [09:22]
Matthew Schmitz
Another thing in the interview that really struck me was, you know, him being asked what he thought of me too. And he said, yeah, well, I think it's a good thing. And this after he has spent this long interview arguing that he's absolutely wrongly accused, innocent of the crimes laid against him. And he's the primary target of Me Too. Of course, the, the whole MeToo movement began with allegations against him published in the New York Times and the New Yorker. So that's false, fake and bad. But, you know, Me Too is a good thing. So it's one of the funny aspects of Weinstein's career. And I think, I think this invites more reflection from liberals and people who are supporters of MeToo than it has received because Weinstein is himself a, a liberal feminist supporter of me too. In pre. In an interview some years ago in the New York Post, he talked about how he had, you know, I've done more for women than anyone in Hollywood and I always thought it was so important to empower them and to give them not, not just full role, you know, in complex roles, but, but behind the scenes roles in, in films and to support your projects of female filmmakers. So it's, it's just really, it's really funny. And I think typical too, that he is a target of Me Too is just a kind of very central and typical supporter of MeToo. And he would be cheering it on. He would not only be supporting it, but be cheering it on loudly if it weren't directed at him. So, yeah, I mean, that's quite striking as well. You know, maybe he has to say this, but I'm just struck by the fact that after all this time, he hasn't internalized the possibility that this movement has broader problems with due process and with the credibility of allegations. Because me too, if you kind of recall, it wasn't a moment at which everyone decided, okay, sexual assault is bad. It wasn't bad before, but it's bad now. It was set a moment where people came to feel that we were having so much trouble addressing this pervasive and lingering problem that we needed to overturn and trample certain protections on individual rights or kind of presumptions of innocence. We needed to play fast and loose with journalistic standards, as Ronan Farrow did in his reporting on it. And because really, there was a moral emergency. So when an emergency occurs, obviously you don't want to stand on formalities.
- [12:36]
Jeff Schulenberger
Right.
- [12:37]
Matthew Schmitz
Well. Oh, well, you know, I can't. This is not an on the source quotation, and I wasn't able to. You know, her friend had a quite different recollection of this, so I can't report it. No, if it's a moral emergency, you forget the fact, as Ronan Farrow did, that her friend had a very different recollection of it. You don't inform the reader of that. And, you know, what we saw in Weinstein's trial, why, why his initial conviction in New York was overturned by New York's highest court, was that the prosecutors and the judge just said that typical protections afforded to defendants, you know, didn't really apply here because, oh, there, you know, there are certain ways we respond to rape, to sexual assault that mean you can't just apply these hoary old legalisms. So, I don't know, just. Yeah, really, really rich and fascinating interview. Weinstein is going on trial for a third time in New York. After his conviction was overturned, he was put on trial again. He was acquitted on one charge, convicted on another, and had a mistrial on a third. So the charge that resulted in a mistrial is being tried again. I don't know, Jeff, you've got any thoughts on. On Big Harv or just suggest Ashley
- [14:03]
Jeff Schulenberger
and the literary slash cultural reference I thought of was the Book of Job. And this figure of the kind of fallen great man who's had everything taken from him, you know, who was at the top, who is enjoying all of the fruits of. Of success and fame and had, you know, everyone loved him. And then all of that is taken away. All of his friends have turned against him. And so I suppose, you know that this, this isn't to say that Harvey is some kind of paragon of, of righteous innocence. In fact, I sort of think Matthew's point about the, his. His sort of, you know, nominal or, or theoretical support for me too, even, even as he sees himself as a wrongly accused victim of, of it is. Is interesting in relation to the, the scenario of the book of Job is, is that you, you know, that Rene Girard compared it to the show trials of, of Stalin where, you know, the, the people put on trial were forced to denounce themselves. In other words, there was a kind of mob denouncing them, saying they must have done something wrong. And what they were forced to do was essentially publicly join the mob that was assailing them. And this was an important kind of ritual part of the process because it, it kind of closed the loop and ensured that the collective, you know, the, the sort of collective mob outrage was. Was consummated by its, its victims themselves joining in the mob outrage. And so it seems to me Weinstein, again, not. I'm not presenting him as, as a sort of perfectly innocent figure. And, and this isn't an important point.
- [16:20]
Ashley Frawley
No.
- [16:20]
Matthew Schmitz
To the producer. Please clip this and put it on social media. Jeff Schulenberger. Weinstein is a perfect.
- [16:30]
Jeff Schulenberger
Just cut.
- [16:31]
Matthew Schmitz
I'm not saying that. And only post Weinstein as a perfectly innocent victim and then me being like,
- [16:38]
Ashley Frawley
I feel bad for.
- [16:40]
Jeff Schulenberger
So. No, right, exactly. So I think the basic point here would be we have a social process that Matthew just described. The social process resembles many others in human history where a sort of collective consensus that certain people are not simply bad by virtue of some things they've done, but represent some sort of metaphysical evil that has to be purged from the community. And so in order to enact that purging, all kinds of normal safeguards have to be. Have to be pushed aside. And so that's, that's sort of the, the type of social process that he's been involved in. And you know, we could say about the victims of Stalin's show trials, many of them were not themselves paragons of innocence. Many of them had been involved in sort of political persecutions of other people in an earlier period of the Bolshevik regime had maybe been involved in sort of atrocities like forced collectivization. So the point is, you know, you, you can see people becoming victim to these kinds of social processes without saying that they're paragons of innocence or angels. And, you know, that's that's how I look at this. And the interesting thing about it is I don't think he's ape. And it's related to his. His sort of approval of me too, in theory, even if he dislikes its consequences for him in particular, that I. I don't think he shows an awareness or consciousness that. That this is the situation that he's in. And it's. It's true that in some sense it's. It's an impossible situation. I don't think it. It gives you an easy way out. In the book of Job, Job is, you know, of course, finally has his. His life restored at the end. Although that's in the part of the text that it seems to be kind of superimposed later on to give it a neater moral ending. But through the rest of it, he's. He's basically just completely alone and confronting not only the disapproval of his supposed friends, but also a, you know, the. The sort of fury of God himself against whom he has to defend himself. And so, you know, he's. He's in this kind of impossible situation and the only thing he can do is just sit there and endure it and refute and refuse to make himself part of the social process that has. That has swept him up in it. And so that's. I don't know. That's kind of one way that I read this. But I guess the other thing, though, is just to conclude on a lighter note, I like the part where he says, you know, that the reviewer, the interviewer, asks him if he's talking to any of the other inmates in Rikers about the movies. And he says, yeah, a lot of them like Pulp Fiction and talk about it, but this isn't a Shakespeare in Love crowd. The Riker Scrubs.
- [19:56]
Ashley Frawley
Oh, no. And. Or he's like, well, I was trying to be useful. So I wanted to set up a course to teach them how to turn books into movies. Very important information for them to know.
- [20:06]
Matthew Schmitz
I think the funniest thing, and in a way the most touching was him talking about how he still receives scripts from young people kind of asking for his advice. And I thought maybe he should dwell on that a little more because apparently there are people out there who think, well, Harvey Weinstein, he knows a lot about this, and I know his address, and he probably doesn't have much else to do, so I'll send him. Send him my script. But, I mean, there are certainly a lot of people. Weinstein's EI2, you know, really aren't called on to do anything in that way. So, you know, look, look on the sunny side, Harv. Why not? You know, really, in terms, as I, as I said before, I think I have really serious reservations about the way that Weinstein's initial trial in New York have proceeded. And there are related issues around due process surrounding all these other things and you know, more basic issues about, you know, credibility, corroboration. But, you know, he ultimately, he's a guy who acted badly, rubbed a lot of people the wrong way and over time became less profitable and useful to people around him. So that's, that's often not going to work out well for you, and that's what we saw here. But in a blessed Albion, surely due process is intact. It's not suffering the kind of backsliding that we've seen here in the U.S. is that right, Ashley?
- [22:06]
Ashley Frawley
No, no. I have some bad news for you. So yesterday the Courts and Tribunals bill passed the second reading in the House of Commons, but it was highly, highly controversial. And although labor presented the bill under David Lammy, a lot of at least I think 10 Labor MPS voted against it and a number abstained. And the reason why it was, it's causing so much controversy is that it is looking to reduce or, or limit jury trials, ostensibly in the name of efficiency and crime control, but I think stands in for a broader kind of erosion of due process and I think some of the standards and the belief about what is the role of the citizen, what is the capacity of the citizen that underlies a lot of the norms that we take very much take for granted in liberal democratic societies that are eroding now. So the idea is that, okay, there's this huge backlog in, in the courts at the moment because of COVID and people are not able to get a trial and jury trials take longer, although it's controversial like exactly how much this would actually clear the backlog. But you know, if we just have mainly judge only trials and don't have to faff around with the jury, then we're going to get through these things a lot quicker and, and it's going to be good for they say they framed it as for victims. Now I found that really, really interesting because that's the first kind of erosion right there. David Lammy put out a video on X where he starts talking about how offenders have been using jury trials to try and lengthen the time. And I beat down witnesses and it's bad for victims and so on. And the whole, all the language surrounding this is about offenders and victims, I'm sorry, if you haven't been convicted yet, are you an offender? And if you are, if this is all for victims, but those people haven't been convicted yet, are we really meant to be calling these people victims? This is a, I don't think people realize like what an incredible erosion of basic tenets of justice it is in terms of the presumption of innocence that a lot of the victims rights movement has caused. So it's like, oh, it's harder on, on victims to have, to, have to go through this process to wait a really long time. And there was one MP stood up and made a very good point. She, she waved her right to anonymity and talked about how she was a victim of rape, but, and, and how she had to wait, she says, a thousand days to get, get, get to court on this. And she says, but I, I still think that we need to have, we, that this is an erosion of basic rights and that my struggle is being weaponized for this political purpose. You know, that those who are accused and victims do not have to be necessarily pitted against each other, that someone who is accused of is, you know, could potentially be a victim as well of, of, of a miscarriage of justice. And that's something that we need to be able to, to fight against. And one of the basic things is to, to, you know, going back in, in the UK at least to at least the Magna Carta, like officially this idea of that you have a right to be tried by a jury of your peers. So what I think is, and, and the thing is the justification for this is this huge backlog in the courts. But this has a much longer pedigree, goes back at least 25 years to Blair, something that they've been pushing for quite some time. And yes, they, you know, reducing a defendant's ability to choose a jury trial was justified on efficiency grounds. But also I think it is rooted, as I started saying at the beginning, in this broader kind of erosion of this sense that ordinary people really are capable of making these kinds of judgments about really important things. And so we, we need to try and push people out. So if you see like for instance, a lot of the movement in rape trials, there's been a, an attempt to get rid of jury juries in rape trials because of so called rape culture and harmful myths. But the whole point of being tried by a jury of your peers is like, if I'm not like, do you, do we all have to be experts in rape? Do we in order to like be able to live in society. Should not my own common sense be judged by people who also have that same kind of common sense? And I think the difficulty here is that there's this sense that, that really only. Well, I think, as I've been saying, like the only people. The idea is the only people who are capable of making judgments are people who are, you know, educated and above the, the rabble and this sort of thing. But they're, they all, they're also mistaking education for activism. And there are so many judges who are activist judges, you know, and this is supposed to be mitigated against by having a jury of your peers. So I think, you know, there are obviously a lot of arguments, you know, that are just very basic around efficiency, blah, blah, blah. But I think this is really important to look at and think about, for what it says about a deeper erosion of that humanist basis to a lot of our, our basic conceptions of justice. And when we lose that, we, we've imperceptibly lost it. We haven't even noticed, I think in a lot of ways how much we've lost this belief in the citizen as someone who's capable of judging for themselves, who's capable of, of reason, you know, how much we lose of our entire system when that's gone. And it just, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't seem that controversial to anybody to lose that. And I'm seeing it all over the place, and America seems like the last bastion of a lot of this stuff and you've got to hold on to it, but it's eroding there as well, as we've just been talking about. And a lot of it is on this, on the basis of victims rights. And it's that kind of moral blackmail. Like, oh, are you, what do you, you know, you want victims to suffer and so on. We used to say, you know, famously, we would always say it was better for, I don't remember the exact quote, forgive me, but like 10, 10 guilty men to walk free than one innocent man be convicted or whatever it was. Now we're like, gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelette. You know, why, how many times do we see this? It seems like we just, we forget these basic things. And I think it's because we have this idea of like, human action as essentially negative. And so more and more of our justice system becomes about harm reduction and mitigation of harm as opposed to maximization of freedom.
- [29:04]
Matthew Schmitz
I wonder too how, you know, criminal justice penalties feed into this. I mean, in The US we see this phenomenon of kind of insistence that, you know, even violent offenders should serve shorter sentences, should be released without having to put up cash bail, things like this. And obviously the more easily people cycle in and out of the criminal justice system, the more times they'll have to be processed. So that, that's one potential contributing factor though far from the only one. Is that an issue in the uk? Have you had that kind of progressive, kind of soft on crime approach there? And is that playing into it?
- [29:56]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, I mean I wrote about this for Compact the public health model of speech suppression where I think there's definitely been this. You know, the criminal justice system has been very similar to other institutions in society where a public health model of like risk reduction and, and prevention has become the main area. And within that punishment is like, it's a failure, it's an afterthought. So part. And this kind of feeds into, I think implicitly into broader programs for prisoner release and early release and this kind of thing because like once you're already in prison, it's too late. The, the main purpose should be about prevention and in everyday society. And there's like within that deinstitutionalization as a movement for the mad, you know, for, for the mentally ill in society and deinstit. Institutionalization obviously. And they like abolish the person's movement. So you, these are the extreme version. Well, no, abolish the persons is an extreme version of a general kind of move towards the institutionalization. Now I don't know to what extent that would fit in here because presumably. Well, I mean, Mary Harrington made a post about this which I thought was right. She said, I would be willing to bet that, you know, if, if jury trials are going to be, you know, only for quote, unquote, serious offenses with you know, three years or more, with potential sentences of three years or more, then I bet free speech violations, sorry, you know, hate quote, unquote, hate speech. All of these trials are going to be set at two years and 364 days. That's the maximum sentence. So you will get judges passing their judgment on this to, to punish people. And that's really where they like their attention to be. You know, that's what they, they really like. But I'm not 100% sure because I'm not sure if if judges are. Would be necessarily more lenient or where they would be more lenient. It's. I hadn't really thought of that angle.
- [31:59]
Matthew Schmitz
In Congress, a bipartisan housing bill is advancing a bit of A surprise because I think of Congress as a place where hearings are held and then a budget of some kind is slapped together a little past deadline each year. But the idea of Congress as a lawmaking body is a bit foreign to me. So, Jeff, can you explain this housing bill and what its prospects are?
- [32:31]
Jeff Schulenberger
Sure. So it is co sponsored, interestingly, by Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott, the Republican senator from South Carolina. So it does seem to push forward some of Trump's priorities. But Scott isn't really thought of as a sort of hardline MAGA or sort of populist type figure in the gop. Nonetheless, it does express certain populist agenda items. Specifically, one that I interestingly noted a couple months ago was being proposed both by the Trump White House and by people in the Zoran Mamdani circle, which is limiting institutional investors such as BlackRock and entities like that from purchasing real estate or not, not entirely banning them as sometimes has been proposed. But this bill would, would restrict and limit their, their ability to, to do that. And so the idea there is that it would free up more, more housing for the regular folk. And so that, you know, that's been debated how big of a factor that is. But certainly it's an interesting case of some of, of a specific policy item where there does seem to be a, a right left policy convergence where it's unsurprising to find people on the sort of Mamdani DSA left arguing for things like this. But it is interesting to see Trump having picked up on this as a, a sort of economic populist position that he can kind of converge with them on. So it's interesting then that this bill, even though it, it contains that item, was not pushed forward by Bernie Sanders or by a more sort of MAGA aligned figure, populist figure in the, in the GOP Senate caucus, but by Tim Scott. So that, that does suggest a way that some of these more populist proposals are sort of percolating out. I mean, Warren is a kind of, you know, one of the versions of left populism, but generally considered more to the center than Sanders. But nonetheless, you do see the way some of these proposals have been percolating out and are being picked up by other figure, other lawmakers who aren't associated with the more radical wings of the populist factions in their parties. And so that does suggest gradually there are changes happening in terms of the types of proposals that, that mainstream lawmakers of right and left are willing to, are willing to entertain and put forward. But then the other Thing I thought was interesting about this is that it also, I would say embodies a version of this abundance agenda that center left pundits Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson put forward in their book Abundance last year, which I wrote about on the compact substack. People can go back to that. But you know, it's, it's a sort of argument that specifically Democrats need to focus on supply side production, particularly in areas like housing and other, you know, sort of middle class goods because places like California that have been, you know, sort of one party state for, for a while have, have become notoriously unaffordable and are bleeding population. And so the way that Klein and Thompson frame it is really as a, an agenda that will give the Democrats a way to push back against Trumpian populism by offering a sort of positive vision of, of middle class, you know, a sort of rising tide that will allow the American middle class to better its circumstances and those for its, for its children. And so that's another aspect of this bill that, you know, and historically, or I mean, over the past year or so since Klein and Thompson's book came out, you know, they've generally been seen as antagonists to the Bernie Populist faction of the Democratic Party. And you know, generally sort of the DSA and left wing publications like Jacobin have been pretty down on this abundance book. And, and this sort of politicians who have endorsed it, like you think of Colorado Governor Jared Polis might be a good example. You know, as, as these kind of, you know, this is just a kind of wishy washy rebranding of, of Clinton of, of Clinton third way, sort of neoliberal, you know, sort of capitalist politics. And the interesting thing in this bill is that it, it clearly channels both the kind of right, the kind of right and left populist currents by trying to take on institutional investors, at least to some extent, while at the same time adopting an aspect of this abundance agenda, specifically relaxing certain environmental review requirements and other sorts of restrictions on things like manufactured housing that have, have made it harder to increase the housing supply. And so there's a deregulatory aspect of the bill as well as a regulatory one. There's a part that's about relaxing the regulations that make it harder to produce more affordable housing for average people, while also an aspect that regulates who can purchase houses and tries to limit the role of institutional investors in the real estate market. So it's an interesting place where you see, and there are various reasons why it seems Trump may actually, even though it does seem largely to correspond with things that he's been supportive of. He may end up blocking it because he's trying to get this other bill passed, this voter ID bill. But it is an interesting case where, you know, beyond the implacable opposition of all these factions, you do see a kind of everything bagel, sort of vaguely populist, vaguely, you know, sort of abundance liberal, vaguely even sort of tech right, you know, sort of deregulatory, production oriented, you know, let's 3D print houses, you know, it. So it's a, it's an interesting synthesis of all these different agendas and it does seem to have, you know, very large majority support in the Senate. So it does suggest, okay, there is a kind of, you know, whatever we make of the specifics of this bill which I won't really respond to in detail. You know, there, there is basically a kind of reasonably popular bipartisan agenda that seems to be represented here that responds to a very specific problem of housing affordability that at this point ranks as one of the most consistently, you know, sort of highly rated concerns of much of the public. And so it's, it's kind of weird. I mean, as you said, Matthew, you, you tend to think of Congress as just completely stuck and unable to, to do anything and caught up in acrimony. And yet, you know, there is this bill, again, whether we like it or not, that seems to embody a relatively broad based agenda on an issue that most voters seem to regard as important and that has garnered support from the centers as well as the sort of populist flanks of both parties. So it's just kind of interesting to see that this is out there because it seems to, and has at least some chance of being passed into law because it just seems to go against the usual narratives of polarization and of Congress being completely broken and unable to, to do anything.
- [41:20]
Matthew Schmitz
I'd love to see a revival of Congress. So pretty much anything conducing to that, whatever the bill is, you know, let's see a little bipartisanship, let's see something happen. Yeah, but yeah, I mean, will, you know, will preventing these, you know, big corporations from buying home, single family homes really help with housing? You know, who knows, probably the effect isn't large, but yeah, I think it's an easy populist when I support it.
- [41:55]
Jeff Schulenberger
Yeah, it's, it's a, it's an interesting case where it's. Yeah, again, it's not entirely clear how, how much effect it will have, but I think you can at least say it, it defines a sort of agenda and priority that, you know, would make sense to most people regardless of whether it in effect does what it what it promises to.
- [42:20]
Ashley Frawley
Yeah, I guess you just need a dash of left populism and tech, bro. And then everyone's like, hey, this isn't the left I normally hate. And that's the magic recipe.
- [42:33]
Matthew Schmitz
Yeah, I I Blackstone literally is my landlord. So I live in the dystopia that may soon consume America. And it's dark. It's dark. So with that, thanks, Ashley. Thank you, Jeff. Thanks to our producer, Stephen Adubato. Support our work and read everything we do by going to compactmag.com subscribe subscribe.
- [43:23]
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