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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Foreign.
- [00:22]
Cameron Casky
Hi, everyone. I'm Cameron Casky. I'm Tim Miller and this is FYpod, the bulwarks gen Z show where we're getting into the Gen Z news and trying to figure out what the hell's going on with our generation. We've got a big week talking about Tesla and protests and Elon buying elections. And Tim, you actually have a story to share with us.
- [00:42]
Tim Miller
I do, Cameron, and I love how you included me in our. As we're assessing our generation, even though I'm aging by the minute. I want to talk to you about a young man named Nicholas Jacobs. He's a Gen Z conservative, as you would have known from his Twitter feedback, where it says right there, Gen Z conservative. He's the chairman of the Wisconsin CRS and he's locked his Twitter feed because he's engaged in a little bit of a controversy right now. We have this election coming up tomorrow. If you're watching this and you're in Wisconsin, go vote. For the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. Elon has spent about 20 million at least of his own money trying to influence the race.
- [01:25]
Cameron Casky
And probably way more, by the way, like 20 million that we can track.
- [01:29]
Tim Miller
Correct. So he was in Green Bay yesterday. He put on a cheese head. He looked like the word that we can say again, but we don't say on this podcast. He looked very similar.
- [01:41]
Cameron Casky
Wait, wait. Pussy or retarded? I genuinely don't know.
- [01:44]
Tim Miller
He looked retarded. He did kind of look like a pussy, too.
- [01:46]
Cameron Casky
Just to be clear. That's not me endorsing, of course.
- [01:49]
Tim Miller
You're just trying to be clarity.
- [01:50]
Cameron Casky
Launching an inquiry.
- [01:52]
Tim Miller
Clarification is important. And he looked silly and. And he said he's going to give away a million dollars to somebody that voted. There are some real big legal questions on this, but the interesting thing that we've learned is that one of the two people, One of the two lucky winners of the $1 million jackpot was this Nick Jacobs. And he's there with the big check. Sebastian, I'll put this on the screen so you can see it smiling, getting his $1 million check. Elon didn't mention that the guy was the head of the College Republicans, so I don't know, Cameron, what say you? Does this seem like it's on the up and up?
- [02:28]
Cameron Casky
I'm not putting on my tinfoil hat here, but I think it's a real fucking coinky dink that one of the people who wins the million dollar, Elon Musk's Charlie and the Election Fraud Factory prize Happens to be a college Republican. Bull fucking shit. That was, that was a hoax. And this Nick guy, I mean, no wonder his Twitter is locked because there's definitely some like, memes of Pepe the Frog saying the N word or some shit, as is always the case with these young Gen Z Republicans. I mean, my God, the shit that I see on some of these guys Twitter accounts is nuts. So I have so many red flags here. The main one being you're not supposed to bribe people in elections. And you know, a lot, a lot of people were standing up against this in Wisconsin and it seems as though the Wisconsin judges just capitulated to Trump, as apparently everybody seems to be doing these days. But I would love, I wanted to deal with that.
- [03:27]
Tim Miller
I do, I do feel like there should at least be an active investigation into this. It's got. It was, it's interesting. There were the Wisconsin, Wisconsin Supreme Court, Supreme Court right now is 4, 3. And I apologize to whoever filed the lawsuit. Some Dem activist group in Wisconsin filed the lawsuit into this and, and they basically just turned down like looking into it, essentially.
- [03:50]
Cameron Casky
Yeah. I think at this point, any judges or lawyers or activists who stand up against Trump could very well get sent to like Guantanamo Bay or some shit, you know, Sounds like a jump, but how far of a jump is it? It's just weird. And Elon bribing people is weird. And I've spoken to a lot of Republicans about it because I'm like, how do you feel about Elon Musk offering people $1 million to vote against these so called activist judges and the Republicans I know are against it? And it raises this really interesting question where I'm like, okay, at what point is it going to be too much? Because I know some conservative people, some people from the American heartland who tend to veer to the right, who do have some gripes with Trump, but it never seems to be enough to really push them away from it. But they fucking hate Elon. And I'm like, okay, well, Elon is the guy calling the shots right now. Like, at what point are you going to say I don't love Trump more than I hate this elitist oligarch?
- [04:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah, I mean, I was intrigued by the other winner. It's a woman named Ekaterina Diestler. It's a great name. Ekaterina. My name is Ekaterina Diesler. I'm from Green Bay, Wisconsin. I did exactly what Elon Musk told everyone to do. Sign a petition, refer friends and family, vote. And now I have a million dollars.
- [05:13]
Cameron Casky
Diestler Sounds like the name of a, of a Nazi commander.
- [05:17]
Tim Miller
It does, but she's a graphic designer and, you know, seems to be attractive to me. Another younger person. I just, I. It's again, like this whole thing is like a total farce. It is a farce on our election laws. And it's kind of like, what is the point of election laws? Like, it doesn't really even seem like we have election laws in this country. And like these assholes, like, have, you know, have like figured out their cheat code is to just break the laws as ostentatiously as possible. Just be like, I'm just going to give a million bucks to a cute girl and the head of the College Republicans, we're just going to call it and we dare you to do anything.
- [06:01]
Cameron Casky
If she is as cute as you claim, part of me is wondering if this is the next in line of Elon Musk's sperm concubines. But I am sitting here being like, what if George Soros did this? Like, what if George Soros was offering a million dollars to one lucky coincidental president of the College Democrats to go vote against these so called activist judges? What if Jeffrey Katzenberg or Michael Bloomberg, there was some elected or some activist or whatever who was handing out like 50 cent cans of soda at some polling location and the Republicans lost their fucking mind. And we're talking about how the Democrats are trying to do election fraud. Do you know the story?
- [06:46]
Tim Miller
I did not know it.
- [06:48]
Cameron Casky
It's. Well, it doesn't seem like much, but it's just another example of how it's just, you know, with the Republican Party, it's do as we slay, not as we do, and they get to do whatever they want. And it's really fucking odd, but it just, it raises more alarming questions about what the midterms are going to look like. Should we have midterm elections? You know, how far are they going to go to buy these elections again?
- [07:14]
Tim Miller
If we can do them, we're going to have midterms. I had a very nice woman come up to me at the book festival in New Orleans saying that she was really worried about that. And I wanted to ease her mind. I do think we're going to have midterm elections. We've got a lot of other problems that we're worried about. You mentioned the Soros thing. This is actually an interesting substantive comparison. Right? So the Elon part of this, that is essentially an election crime. I mean, election experts say that this is a crime. Like you're not allowed to Bribe people to turn out and vote. You're not allowed to hold a fake lottery. It's fraudulent. So put aside the criming part. Just putting 20 million into a random. Not random, but into a very local judges race. Right. Which is like not a presidential race. Right. This is not too dissimilar from what Soros actually did, which was put. Or Soros and his groups was put a lot of money into like local prosecutors race to try to get more kind of liberal prosecutors elected in some of these places. And like the Republicans had a conniption fit about this. And it felt like one area where like good government liberals and like Republicans maybe could have been together. Where it's like, we really shouldn't have rich people like putting in tens of millions of dollars into random local races that like usually, you know, like it's very low money. Like usually there aren't even ads and like prosecutors and judges races and like now you have these rich people trying to manipulate them. Like you would think everybody could agree that is bad and yet. No, we can't.
- [08:43]
Cameron Casky
Can we do. Can we do an educational moment?
- [08:45]
Tim Miller
Sure.
- [08:46]
Cameron Casky
For our. Because I have some questions.
- [08:48]
Tim Miller
Are you educating me or am I educating you?
- [08:50]
Cameron Casky
You're educating me. The more I learn about Citizens United, the more I come to this conclusion that it is just basically a corruption law that allows elections to be bought and sold. You know, it's the reason why common sense Republicans, you know, have to bend the knee to MAGA is because MAGA will spend, spend, spend, attack, attack, attack. And certain groups with the money will be able to sway certain races. It's the reason that a lot of Democrats won't stand up to AIPAC is because AIPAC will spend record numbers of money buying seats. What was the argument for Citizens United when they introduced it? Why did people want that?
- [09:34]
Tim Miller
Yeah, well, the argument. So Citizens United. Okay, we're getting real nerdy here for a second. This is in my wheelhouse. Citizens United is the name of a conservative advocacy organization, was run by this guy David Bossi. Fun aside, I was in a conference room with David Bossi once where he started attacking gay people and making fun of gay people and making jokes about gay marriage, not knowing that I was gay because I'm so butch and. And some of the other people at the table got very uncomfortable about that. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. David Boss, he ran Citizens United. And their argument, which, like in a classroom, there's kind of something to be said for like, if you're just thinking about this in the abstract, not how it works in the real world, is like, if you have free speech rights as an individual, money is speech. And the government, not money, is speech, but ads are speech. And so the government should not be able to limit your ability as a rich person to run an ad. That's like, I think that the country should support this, or I think the country should support that. And you could be a liberal rich person or a conservative rich person. And so that was like the underlying thing. It wasn't like that anybody really wanted rich people to be involved that much in elections. It was a defense of the idea that everybody, anyone that anyone that wants to run an ad or send a mailer telling people that they should vote this way or that way, should be allowed to. And that was kind of what the start of it was.
- [10:53]
Cameron Casky
Yeah. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Citizens United isn't just about individuals. It's suggesting that organizations, groups of people together have free speech. So it's not the free speech of individual Americans.
- [11:07]
Tim Miller
It's the corporations are people, my friends, as Mitt Romney would have said. Yeah.
- [11:11]
Cameron Casky
Would Romney have said that?
- [11:12]
Tim Miller
Yeah, he said that. Exactly.
- [11:14]
Cameron Casky
Oh, my God. You see, I was fortunately too young to be tapped into that election. I remember I was like knocking doors for Obama when I was, sorry to say this, seven, and I was really hype about Obama versus Romney because at the time I was going to a private school, so most of the kids who were in school with me were, you know, talking about how they think Romney's great and not really having many talking points. And I was just like, oh, what do you guys think about gay marriage? And they were like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, should it be legal? And they were like, gay people can get married. And I said, okay, great, other eight year old, I'm going to move on. But I didn't really have to deal with that election. I mean, the first election where I was old enough to have anything resembling media literacy, which I hate to call my media consumption at 15 years old media literacy. But compared to what people have these days, I was a fucking academic, was Trump. And the whole time that election was happening, I said, somebody's going to step in and stop this, right? Like, he's not going to get that far. You know, he got the nomination and that was kind of crazy. But like Hillary Clinton, she's got all the qualifications. She's going to end up being president. Right. And lo and behold, that doesn't end up happening. And what I'm wondering is how people like Musk and Thiel and their whole cadre are going to use Citizens United and the rules that they kind of are allowed to break now in the midterms, you know, where are they going to be putting the money? What raises are they going to be focused on?
- [12:38]
Tim Miller
Well, this is a very big concern for the midterms. I think, like, not that that, like elections are going to be canceled, but that these guys are going to. Are going to monkey with it and, and certainly just by putting in big money, but. And also about, you know, on, on the platform. So, yeah, we can talk more about that. The interesting thing to me here, I hear listening to you talk is like, when I was growing up, it was like very popular for all outsider candidates in both parties to like, run against money in politics. And that kind of like, I don't know, I just said united. I guess everybody is just like, whoops, we lost that one. And like, people like stopped kind of talking about it. Like, it's not something that Kamala or Biden or Hillary really talked about. I maybe they mentioned it, but it wasn't like part of their campaigns. I do think it might be effective for like a Democrat going forward to kind of tie the anti oligarchy thing to also going back to this, like getting money out of Bernie talked about it. You know, kind of going back to more of a Bernie style message on that.
- [13:29]
Cameron Casky
The Democrats, we've said this before on the show and everybody say saying it. If we solidify ourselves as the firmly anti oligarchy party, we will be able to build grassroots support. That is the only way we'll be able to win another fucking election. Because we are not going to outraise the Republicans. That's off the table. The Republicans have all the money. Guys like Zuck and similar folks who might have been wolves in sheep's clothing, they are now wolves in wolf clothing wearing T shirts that say, I'm a wolf. I'm gonna eat you with a gold chain. Yeah, like, God, Zuck fashion. That's a whole other episode. We'll get into that. But we're not going to outspend them. The only thing we can do is build populist support. And I understand all these warnings against populism, but guess what? Sometimes you do have to fight fire with fire. Sometimes that's actually. If you look at wildfires, they very often burn controlled fires in specific places to fight the fire with fire. Like fighting fire with fire actually works sometimes.
- [14:30]
Tim Miller
Wildfire. Cameron casket. Okay, this is good because that gives us the other thing I want to pick your brain about, which was the Tesla protests. I love it. On fellow elder millennial John Lovett. And we discussed this on, on the daily Pod last Thursday, and he gave kind of an impassioned argument against the Tesla vandalism in favor of the Tesla protests. Essentially the short of his argument was that like, you can never out violence the fascists. You shouldn't try. And so it was more about how solidarity and protests like make a lot of sense, but the vandalism and stuff is backfiring. I'm wondering what you, as a more jaded zoomer, think about that.
- [15:07]
Cameron Casky
I think that the attacks on Tesla vehicles, while they've been very funny to watch, are definitely alarming because if you're committing crimes, the authoritarians are going to be able to use that as a means by which to punish you in a way that does not fit the crime. So they're calling this shit terrorism now, and it's obviously insane to do that. It's insane to say that people vandalizing Teslas are fucking domestic terrorists. That's the craziest shit I've ever heard. But they're getting away with it because the Tesla vandals are giving them something to chew on. And I don't think they're going to need very much to chew on when they're oppressing people in the days to come. But I don't think the vandalizations are going to help anybody. I do think that they're funny. I don't want to take away from that. It is very funny to watch it happen. And I, and I laugh and I kind of, you know, wouldn't hate to see more of it because it's funny. But in terms of form of protest, it's not going to be effective. The Tesla protests are about making Elon feel it in his pocket. They're about letting the Tesla shareholders know that Elon's behavior is not going to fly with a lot of people. Because the crazy thing is that Elon has veered so aggressively towards Nazi shit that people on the left are not going to want to buy his cars anymore. Buying a new Tesla is like an endorsement of Elon Musk at this point. But what does he think that like corn fed conservatives from fucking, you know, Arkansas are the people buying Teslas right now? Like Tesla as a company needed goodwill from liberal people. That was the lifeblood of their company. And now having a Tesla seems like a thumbs up to Elon Musk. So I don't know what he's Going for. But I hope the protests continue and I hope ideally he starts to feel it even more in his pocket the way that Tim Walls has been mocking him for. For a bit now, as a theater.
- [17:08]
Tim Miller
Kid, what do you. What do you make of, like, the dancing at the Tesla protest? Have you seen dancing videos?
- [17:13]
Cameron Casky
So I don't want to call myself a veteran of protests because I've never been. You know, you started one of the.
- [17:22]
Tim Miller
Largest protest organizations in the country, so I think you're a veteran.
- [17:26]
Cameron Casky
Yeah, but I feel like, you know, I've never been beat up by the cops or handcuffed or, you know, hit with tear gas. So protest veterans may be a little dramatic, but I've been to a lot of fucking protests in my life and there is just this really cringe shit that happens at protests where people start dancing and they start doing these chants that don't feel like some form of empowerment. They feel weird. And like theater games. Like a lot of shit that I've seen at protests has felt like the improv games that we played in drama class. I was at a youth power group that sounds kind of Hitler ish. I was at a group of young people meeting with each other from different communities to talk about how we've been impacted by gun violence. It was my white ass kids from Parkland and black teenagers from another community. I think it was like Minnesota maybe. And we had a community meeting. It went very poorly because we did not know how to communicate with people who are not from affluent areas. And it was very embarrassing. And we look like a bunch of assholes.
- [18:33]
Tim Miller
Were you dancing or it was just your.
- [18:35]
Cameron Casky
So at the youth activism meeting that was supposed to be about empowering young people, we go outside, we stand in a circle, and one of the youth organizers says, we're going to do this exercise that we like to do to cultivate power amongst us. Where we go, P O W E R. We got the power because we are the youth advocates. And then you repeat that again and then you say, my name is. So you'd say Tim, and I am next on the list. I got my reputation because I do it like this. And then you do a dance move, and then everybody else in the circle says, he does it like this. He does it like this. And I was sitting there being like, we're talking about fucking mass shootings and this is the shit you guys are doing to cultivate our young people power. Oh, my God. Literally fucking kill me. So, no, I think a lot of the things that are done at protests are just Cringe. I want to fight the power. I want people to take to the streets and be cautious and be safe and be wary of what, you know, the cops might do to fuck you up a little bit. But stuff like that, man, I've seen so much of it. I've seen so many things that feel like improv games.
- [19:53]
Tim Miller
Are you taking away people's joy a little bit though?
- [19:55]
Cameron Casky
Cameron, there's nothing joyous about that shit. Nobody was actually having fun, I guarantee you. Nobody in the Power Power Circle. And if somebody was convinced that this was some way.
- [20:07]
Tim Miller
It's like a top down thing where some organizer decided this was the way to like make people. It was like a trust fall type situation.
- [20:15]
Cameron Casky
It was really bad and I think it's bad for the party. But listen, it's like, you know, what are you supposed to do at protests other than hold up your signs and chant without those protests turning violent? And I don't think the answer is doing that shit that we saw at the Tesla protest. Sebastian, if you don't mind throwing up a video of it that looks like line dancing, which we can talk about this another episode. I fucking hate line dancing. I don't want to insult lesbians because I think lesbians are great. Although, you know, with Chapel Rowan, I think the lesbian community got really cocky and we can get into that another time. But line dancing to me is just the greatest of all evils. It's cult shit. And I'm the greatest of all evils.
- [21:01]
Tim Miller
Sorry, maybe a little hyperbole. I'm the greatest of all evils. I mean, we have, we have a lot of evils we're facing.
- [21:07]
Cameron Casky
Once they all start doing Jonestown shit, which I guarantee you they will because of these communities that I see, we'll take another look. Jonestown was the, the Kool Aid, drinking at the, at the cult that killed all those people. But Tim, my message to protesters is stand up, fight the power. Don't vandalize a Tesla because you might get disappeared to fucking Guantanamo Bay. But let people know that our protests are going to be focused on where the money is at. Because the only way to get people to move is, is to make them feel it in their pocket. Republicans very often laugh up their sleeves at protesters. We know this. A lot of, like, liberal people do it too. Like, you see protesters going crazy on the street and they think it's embarrassing and kind of funny. Fight the power. Stand up in the streets, be safe, be careful, and don't dance. Just don't fucking dance. If. If I'm robbing you of your joy by saying this. Sorry to you and your community, but the dances at the protests, it's just, I can't put up with it.
- [22:11]
Tim Miller
I think that's a great place to leave. That's good advice for people. We have. We do have a Gen Z News segment. We didn't get to it. We're having so much fun with Natalie from the band in War room. We didn't do Gen Z News last week.
- [22:20]
Cameron Casky
So to everybody who made it. To everybody who made it to the end of our last interview, I have to say you. If you had wine or Xanax, that might have made sense. But I watched the episode and I made it 20 minutes in and I said, I can't fucking put up with this.
- [22:35]
Tim Miller
Can I also say for some people, we love and appreciate our Boomer listeners and you can email bulwarkpodcasthebork.com if you want to be in next week's Boomer mailbag. And we love it and appreciate our Gen X listeners, but I do sometimes get feedback from people who I want to just reply very kindly, maybe this show isn't for you. It's okay if you don't want to listen to Natalie Winters giggle and rant about how people were mean to her in high school, but we're trying to engage some new people. We're trying to engage some new people who might want to watch Cameron and Natalie fight. And that's good. That's why we have a lot of different offerings here. And so we appreciate those who enjoyed it with a. With a gummy or a glass of wine. And for those of you that you know that it's getting. It's getting your blood pressure up. We'll see you next week. Not a big deal. We got a great one coming next week. Not a big deal. No pressure. So anyway, with that, Sebastian, take us to Gen Z News.
- [23:33]
Sebastian
In a new survey from Tubi, 84% of Gen Zers admit to streaming shows and movies while working from home. 48% have told their bosses that they don't do this, and 52% say they don't want to return to the office because they'd miss being able to stream throughout the day. Cam. Tim, do you stream shows and movies while you are in during work hours? And do you think Gen Z is right or justified?
- [24:00]
Tim Miller
I'm interrupting that question and I would like to throw it back to you. Sebastian, you are the one to answer that first as a producer. Producer, are you? Yeah. Are you streaming movies while you work.
- [24:10]
Sebastian
From Home, Tim, you work me to the bone. I don't have time to watch anything.
- [24:15]
Tim Miller
Cameron.
- [24:16]
Cameron Casky
I think that the giant streamer that doesn't get talked about in a lot of conversations about these streamers is YouTube. YouTube is the streaming service that I use the most. Mind you, I only watch one podcast. I watch our podcast so I could find which clips I want to post on social media. And, you know, I like the Tim Miller Show. It's just. I can't.
- [24:38]
Tim Miller
It's.
- [24:38]
Cameron Casky
It comes out so often. I can't. I can't really do. I love Sam Cedar. Do you ever do anything with Sam Cedar?
- [24:45]
Tim Miller
No. We need to have him on the Bulwark.
- [24:47]
Cameron Casky
We gotta have Sam on. He's so cool. He seems great, but other than that, I watch a lot of YouTube.
- [24:53]
Tim Miller
Cedar. Is that how you say his name? In my head, I've been pronouncing it Seder.
- [24:57]
Cameron Casky
Like in the Jewish. Yeah, as a Jewish person, you'd think I would say Seder. I don't know. Point is, I watch a lot of YouTube. I don't really watch it while I'm working because I say this pretty much every episode, but it's a big part of my life. I have adhd and therefore focusing on work and focusing on some sort of streaming doesn't really work with me. But I understand why some young people might do that because some jobs are just so menial that they can have something on to sort of distract them from the banality of the shit that they have to do. My last job, my current job is really fun. I do programming at a really fancy theater. My job is to go to agents, directors, managers and figure out which new pieces we could do at the theater, which plays, comedy shows, musicals, whatever it is. So I have a lot of fun doing my work and it feels awesome. But my last job, I was doing influencer marketing, and it was so drab and soulless and depressing that, yeah, I rewatched Game of Thrones while I was doing my work, because my work was me sitting on fucking spreadsheets and writing how many followers somebody had the URL to their Instagram page, what their audience might be interested in. Like, it was. It was shit that I didn't have to be thinking about. So while I don't normally stream while doing things for attention span purposes, the one last thing I would note is that nobody's streaming Tubi, even if their numbers are big. I don't care. I've watched Tubi's content. People aren't streaming that. I don't know what fucking survey they're doing, But I think YouTube is really kind of the new TV.
- [26:39]
Tim Miller
Here's my I give a very unsympathetic answer to Gen Z. At the last Gen Z news. I think it was about how they're getting ghosted or something. But in this one, here is my sympathy for everyone except for Sebastian. Sorry Sebastian, you work in a special job. But I do think that many people nowadays, which is different from even when I was working, but certainly when Gen Z or Boomer or excuse me, Gen X or Boomers were working. It's like if you started to work in the 1980s and you left the office at 5 o'clock, people did not have any way of contacting you. Your boss could not contact you until the next day at 9am unless it was like an emergency, right? Like there just was like no way to do it. And now I think a lot of people have jobs where while they work 9 to 5, like they're being contacted kind of a lot. Like outside of that, like they're getting emails or slacks or texts or whatever. And so they rationalize then those workers, I think rightly, you know, and we're talking mostly about desk workers here. Obviously people have way worse jobs than, you know, who are doing working class type jobs. But like desk job workers, middle, upper middle class workers, they are like, yeah, sure, I streamed fucking severance during the work day today because my boss was fucking messaging me last night at 8:30 when I was supposed to be off. And I think that we have, we've done a bad job of kind of maintaining work life balance. And I think bosses that complain that people are streaming during the day are also probably bugging people, not off hours.
- [28:09]
Cameron Casky
So that's my, my last note there is my boss is really great and therefore I am not really interested in complaining simply because there's nobody else I'd rather work for. But I email him every day during working hours and he emails me every day from the hours of 10pm to 4am and he emails me on the weekends and I keep track, I keep a log of every call he and I have so I can be aware every time I see him which conversations we've had and about what. And almost every single work call I have had with my CEO, who I love, has been on a Sunday. And with that I say thank you all for listening this week. We've got a great interview coming up on the weekend with a. I don't want to spoil it. Gen Zier, who is running for Congress so something very different from the co host of the Bannon War Room and something that might win back the favor of some of the commenters who were not so thrilled about last week's content. Thank you for listening and go find a protest to do the Sanki lag.