For centuries, capitalists ruled the world. They crafted a dystopian healthscape and commodified everything.  Facing extinction, a rebel group emerged to challenge the capitalists. The online left, a group of deviants, zoomers, and millennial misfits devoted to shitposting their way to a better world. One tweet at a time. Will they put aside their hatred of one another to defeat their capitalist common enemy? Find out now on dystopian times. Having a wonderful day, I just want to let you know how much I love you. I could be outside touching grass right now, which I desperately need to do. I could be playing the legend of Zelda, Skyward Sword, and getting through like the later half of the game. But I'm here because I love you, and I hope that you know that. This is self-sacrifice. So we have a really great show planned. We have a phenomenal panel planned for you this week, and we have lots of incredibly dystopian depressing topics to talk about. But we have a surprise at the end because we will have the pet segment coming back. And I think we literally have like hundreds of submissions of cat and dog pictures. So folks, we're going to work through all of the sadness and the misery together. So without further ado, let me bring on my panel. So this is a veteran to the Human Support Podcast. I brought her on possibly at least a billion times. Folks, it's Sarah Smith. Sarah, welcome. Hi, thank you for having me. I'd never seen your intro for this before, and I was laughing up backstage because it was fantastic. It's already outdated because even the prospect that the left coming together is like laughable at this point. But I still think it's a really good jam. And Tony Tigg like crushed it. So I'm glad that you liked it though. Keep the dream alive. That's what I say. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, folks, the next individual that I'm bringing on, I'm not going to lie. I try to not associate with people who have better beards than me because I try to keep like the beard hegemony on the show. Like I want to make it seem as if I have the best beard in all progressive politics. But unfortunately, that's not the case. I have found someone who has a better beard and a beard cam. Folks, we've got a doctor in the house. It's Dr. Heen Doud. Heen, welcome. Oh, you are muted. Oh, there I am pro streamer here. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm so I'm so hype. And yeah, I do have a beard cam and I do have the fastest growing beard on Twitch. So some people say they have the fastest growing stream. I have the fastest growing beard. So I'm really excited. And you know what? I'm a little bit sad and disappointed that I didn't think of the beard cam myself. Like on my Twitch streams, I have the dog cam. But if I knew that like beard cam was a thing and I just trimmed mine. So it's it's so beta compared to yours. I respect the beard. Like, absolutely everybody, everybody has a dog, but not everybody has a beard. That's true. That's true. All right, folks. Well, the next person is another veteran to the Human Support Podcast, a former and current congressional candidate who I brought on the program, basically an expert to politics. Folks, it's Donna. I'm Donna. Welcome to the show again. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. I really, really appreciate it. And I hope today for everybody, you know, who might not be having the greatest week that I can bring some cheer. And, you know, I'm always that person that's not just a glass half full, but it's like if that glass was smaller, that would be full. And this is why I love you so much because at times when I'm like overly emotional and you could tell I haven't like gone outside in weeks, like you have the perfect thing to say to bring me back to reality and help me recalibrate. So, Donna, I am truly appreciative of everything that you do for the left and for me personally. So, thank you so much. Well, folks, the final panelist here is one of my favorite people on the planet.  Welcome to the show. Hey, what's up? I don't know why I didn't get the beard intro. Come on now. Look, I got a good beard. No, you know what, David? Once you got rid of your Justin Trudeau look, that was it for you.  It had to go. It had to go. It looks good either way. Although on my Twitch stream, I don't remember who asked, but somebody brought up who has like the best pandemic hair and like hands down. Everyone was like David Dole, David Dole, David Dole. And I'm glad that like they were all focused on you because I've been cutting my own hair since I haven't gone to a barber and I've been trying to give myself fades.  So I'm glad that they haven't noticed. And you've kind of taken the focus off of progressive hair and you've kind of been the one there. You know what the good thing about giving yourself a fade is as someone who used to do it before I went bald? If you mess it up within three or four days, it'll kind of blend itself in and just kind of stay inside for three or four days. That is exactly it, which is why I always cut my hair on Fridays. So that way by the time Monday comes around and I'm back on camera again, you can't even tell. You can't even tell.   You won't ever be able to notice. So I'm going to bring up the comments here. So folks, I'm going to start with a topic that I think we're all thinking about. I basically got four hours of sleep if I'm being charitable because all I could think about was how distraught I was that Nina turned her lost. And, you know, I just kind of want to open up this discussion about like, what are your general thoughts? For me, I kind of feel like this is an important moment for the left. I want us to use this, myself included, as a moment to be introspective, really look at some of our strategies, see what was working in the past and what wasn't working. And yeah, I mean, if anybody has thoughts, feel free to jump in because this is something that I know a lot of people watching are just feeling awful about. Can I start with the hot? Oh, go ahead. No, please go for it. Yeah, I have a main thoughts and I'm loud and a fast talker, so please. Okay, I'll start it off. I think this is probably going to be my hottest take on this panel. I'm a progressive, full disclosure. I think that like Nina Turner is an awesome person. I always liked her rhetoric a lot. And I think that like having those kind of people in Congress or in positions of power in general is a fantastic thing to push everything a little bit to the left. As someone who lives in Canada, I have healthcare covered and many things that seem like pipe dreams in the US. And to me, that's unbelievable that this is the case. However, I wasn't as invested into the Nina Turner election because most of the things I cover recently have been COVID related stuff. I'm super focused on debunking COVID misinformation and stuff. So the Nina Turner thing, I left it to other people. However, since I knew it was going to be a topic here, I looked into it a little bit and there's a couple of things that didn't seem to fit the regular narrative when it comes to the establishment stomping on the progressive. So one of the things I saw was that they raised roughly the same amount of money and I know that Chantal Brown got a massive infusion in the last few days. But I mean, hey, you could say, why didn't Nina Turner save her money for the last few days? It comes down to how you spent that money as well. Obviously, you should save some money for the last few days when you could still have effect. The other thing, and this is the most heartbreaking part, besides the fact that Chantal Brown got endorsements from Hillary Clinton, James Clyburn, and all these other people, only 70,000 people voted in the selection in a district that houses almost 700,000 people. Let's say 200,000 of those are kids and ineligible to vote. That means 500,000 people could have voted and just only 70,000 voted. The margin of victory was 4,000 votes, I think, and the winner got, I think, 37,000 votes. That could literally be 37,000 diehard Hillary Clinton fans that live in Cleveland. I can see that being a possibility. So I think, yes, it's heartbreaking, but I like to look at things from a very logical analytical point of view and think, okay, what actually happened here? Is it the same as other situations where the establishment steamrolls with money?  Or is it just the case that we had low voter turnout? Or that maybe it could be even the case that that district isn't as progressive as we like to think that it is. And that's just the sad reality, whether it's like people watching Fox News or sipping up mainstream news too much or whatever, scared of socialism, scared of Bernie Sanders, whatever it is, sometimes I think there are some districts in the United States where there's just centrists. And this is what the kind of takeaway I had. I look forward to hearing from you guys who have been more invested into this and maybe we can have a little bit of back and forth on this. Yeah, no, I like that you said that actually because I'm very, very strong of the belief, I should say, that we should never pretend as if we did everything right just because we want somebody to go in their guns blazing and be hyper-progressive. That doesn't necessarily mean that voters in that particular district are going to like that. So if there's ways that progressives can adapt, I think that's really important to discuss. So I mean, one example is Adam Christensen who ran in Florida. He was a progressive, but he knew that in his district it was more purple. And so what he tried to do was adapt and basically rather than pitching Medicare for All as like free healthcare for everyone, he sold it as like a small business tax cut. And so I like that you brought that up, because I think it's really important that we have these conversations. If we basically bury our heads in the sand and every single time we lose, we claim that we did nothing wrong, we will never win. So I'm glad that you brought that up because introspection is incredibly important. And by the way, I just have to point out that the Cabernacle was joking about David Dole saying, he just got by and elected it and went to brunch. I think he's made the same joke about me as well. Yeah. I asked David to go to brunch. She said, no, he's too busy making YouTube videos. Thank you. Thank you.  I have a socialist fist tattoo.  So I, yes, I'm far leftist. But also like, I think I think people didn't realize, especially when I was running on my own campaign, is like, I am a by any means necessary shark. I think progressives, we struggle so hard with understanding that like, you have to message to the electorate. You have to message to the district. So where someone is a progressive and they're running and they're talking about like, they have Medicare for All on their website.  They can't do that in a purple district because if we want power, we have to win power and we have to message to the district in order to gain power. And while it's really nice to like, get these blocks of progressives that are able to come in and guns blazing and be like, Cory Bush and be like, you know, we're going to fight eviction. We're going to fight this struggle. There are progressives that can't use that messaging and keep their seats. And if we want to take seats and keep seats, like we have this vision of what we want elections to become and how we want elections to be eventually and how we want to free up people's ability to vote better and vote more in line with their conscience in the future. But the fact is we don't have that right now. So we can't pretend like we can play in a power structure that doesn't exist. The power structure and the power dynamic for elections and being strong in elections is what it is right now. We have to focus on seizing power. And sometimes that means helping candidates carve messaging out for progressive policies that works in their districts. Like I love couching conservatives or couching progressive policies in conservative language. Like you'd be so surprised at how easy it is. But because it's conservatives people are like, oh no, they're not a real progressive because they're using this word or that word. But the fact is like they have to use certain language and certain messaging tactics in order to be successful. And like I love that you brought up that it could be that her district might just not have been as progressive as we thought. Because like not every district is gonna be deep blue but you can convince people to come over to deep blue policies by using the right messaging. Like people are naturally risk averse. They are naturally afraid of taking risks. That's why in common advantage is such a big deal. So when you're messaging to your voters you have to message to your voters. You can't message to your Twitter followers. You can't message to your YouTube subscribers. You can't message to your Facebook followers. You have to message to the people who are going to vote for you in that district. Because a like and a share is great but being screened out by people on the left for using different language calling it access instead of single payer because they have to because of the district that they're in. Like that's not useful. Like you're just yelling at them online. They're not messaging to you. They're yet messaging to the people that they're going to be voting for them. And like part of me wonders if maybe you're right if maybe like we underthought how far left the district is. But also like that mass influx of cash at the end. Like by the time like the you know those ads had gone around the world twice by the time Nina got her shoes on and she was already being slammed. I read I think it was Jordan Sheridan was tweeting about how like the TV was rife with these ads and these billboards. And like it was rough. The influx of cash was a big deal. But also like as progressives we got to be introspective. Like when we use our messaging are we messaging to the online left or are we messaging to the people who are actually going to get us elected. I think you're right Sarah about messaging. The issue with Nina Turner though is that she was already a known quantity and there's you know there's four years of her on her on camera saying she sports Medicare for all supports all these you know Bernie Sanders. I mean she's a big Bernie Sanders backer right.  But they were even running I mean they're running ads against her that made it sound like she was more conservative than she actually was. Like saying that she was against raising the minimum wage that she was against universal health care. That she was against immigration reform. So it's like they almost they realize that these are popular policies in that district. So we have to pretend she's actually conservative when it comes to at least these issues.  That's I agree that's correct. But you know if she knew she was going to run in a race in the future then you have to be a little more aware that you know especially if it's a district that that is a little more centrist that you have to be a little more aware of your language before you go in there right now. It's possible she had no idea she was going to run for Congress and didn't even think about this. She's I mean she's a very honest open person so she she never really you know brought her language down in any of these appearances. But at the same time that came back to bite her I think maybe they ran that again and again apparently on television and radio ads and I think that hurt her and but at the same time I mean we can't ignore all the money poured into this into this race that was just attacking Nina Turner. And I do agree though I think they could have spent Nina's campaign probably could have saved a little money till the end spent a little better. I think they underestimated the power of Chantel Brown or not really her power but the power of the money behind her and we're I think caught off guard at the end with the amount of attack ads that that were coming out and the amount of support that came out for for Chantel Brown and you know once Clyburn got into it I think that you know really got the the wheels in motion and brought all this money in that really eventually I mean it was still it was a close race Nina I think still could have won if she if they that campaign had done the right things but there was so much money poured into the the race against her that it was really a almost an uphill battle by the end of it. Yeah yeah and to to speak to both of your points about the the pro-democrat basically sentiment in this district so I believe it was Jordan Sheridan who tweeted about how if you drive through portions of Ohio you see that comment you know voting for Biden it's like a half eaten bowl of shit on billboards and they really use this against her and so to Sarah's comment about the online left and how you really have to kind of ignore the noise and focus on your voters there's an area or a portion of her race that was really frustrating to me and it was when she tweeted out a quote of Barack Obama and she you know attributed it to Barack Obama and on the left it's obvious there's issues with that Barack Obama is there's a lot of problems with that like this is not the progressive that you know he anyone thought he was but you know a lot of people on the online left suspected that that was like evidence that she sold out when in actuality I think that that was her trying to drive a point home to people in this district that she's not like this democratic party hater she has respect for figures in the democratic party but she sees that there are issues with it um and so this is why I do think introspective introspection is really important because I think that we've kind of we've over emphasized how influential the online left will be and it can be great like coming on on shows uh when you first start out to get a little bit of a boost in in campaign money is super super important and crucial but people at the end of the day have to really build up a connection with their own constituents and that's why I wanted to go to Donna Iman because you were running in this red district that was on the cusp of flipping you made it to the runoff in Texas and ultimately you you didn't win but I think that your insight you know into what needs to be done to reach out to people who aren't necessarily receptive to the left wing message is crucial so what are your thoughts on this Donna so you know I I have a little bit of a inside of perspective right so I ran a race and my race had a dozen people in the race and six people on the ballot so I was a first time candidate with no political background so I knew it was a big uphill battle and and there's two big things if you're running a race that you have to focus on one is making sure people know who you are increasing your name ID and then the next thing is you know getting your message communicating your message to your voters and that hurdle is all about money because if you don't have money then you can't get your message to voters but there's a third part and this part is really important the message that you bring to your voters has to be a message that not just people like or resonate with it but it motivates them to say I'm going to go out and vote for Donna Iman because there's something in this candidate for me she's going to do things that are going to change my life for better in some way shape or form right so these are the three things from inside a campaign that you're trying to accomplish as a candidate so I have the fortune of you know winning the primary you know with a 13 point lead and then of course losing the general which everybody in Texas unfortunately lost in 2020 because Trump was just able to bring out so many more of his followers but from the winning side I'll tell you this that in a in a primary you already have very low voter turnout so if you look at our voter turnout in the primary we increased it by more than double like two and a half times but even then the number of people that came out in our primary was somewhere around the number of people that came out in Ohio 11's Democratic special primary so this is not just a primary this is a special primary so just do the math in your head in a March 3rd primary in Austin, Texas area we're talking about Super Tuesday so this is not where we're doing down ballot only this is presidential election at the top of the ballot and the number of people who turned out for the Democratic primary is about the same number of people that turned out in the Ohio 11 Democratic primary special so actually they got pretty decent turnout so so everybody knows in a special election the turnout is even worse so the one thing that you have to do in a primary is you want to you want to bring out the folks that support you the most and I want to tell just a little story here in the runoff where we won by 13 points because remember when we ran the primary in Texas if you get the most number of votes you don't win you have to get over 50% so first we made it to the runoff we came in actually second and when we were in the runoff we not only you know won by 13 points but the number of votes that our campaign got in the runoff was about the same number of votes that we got on Super Tuesday now that is unbelievable because a lot fewer people came out to vote right so we had to accelerate the number of people who came out and you have to find those people that are really motivated to come out and vote for Donna so that was our whole message and we targeted the folks that we could bring out and the little story that I want to tell you is this one of my volunteer phone bankers called somebody and they was like are you going to come out and vote for Donna and they're like yeah I voted for Donna in the primary and of course you know I want her to win I love her platform I love her and it's like do you have a plan to come vote and this was remember July 14th 2020 this was in the middle of the pandemic Texas was partially shut down and he said I wasn't planning to go vote and the volunteer person on the phone goes hey we need you to come out and vote like do you really need me to come out and vote for Donna it's like we need every single vote you have no idea low voter turnout and we communicated this message over and over again to our supporters and you know what that guy said he said I haven't been out of the house for three months since you know March 6th when the shutdown happened but if you guys really need my vote this will be the first time I go to go out of my house I get my groceries delivered and I get my food at my door I will go out and vote for Donna so this is the kind of message that you have to really get your supporters out and this is the tough part about special elections they're really easy to lose if you don't get your biggest supporters out can I ask you a question why is it that special elections have such low voter turnout especially if this is like this was like a national you know nationally headlined election it was the only one on its day first one since Biden you know all these things that made it a unique Nina Turner like David said is one of the household names in progressive politics we've all been knowing so I don't know why the assumption is that a special primary would always have a lower voter turnout than a regular primary you know why that is yeah absolutely so when you think about March 3rd if you turned on the news if you turned on just you know local network TV you would see ads telling you to come out and vote in the primary like the Democratic Party actually ran ads this year March 3rd no I'm talking about you know when we had the last primary for the Democratic presidential election right super Tuesday right that's the biggest that's the biggest day where multiple states across this country all come out to vote for the president right now for many of us online who follow Democratic primaries it seems like we're hearing about this race all the time but the average voter is not tuned in to special elections in fact I can bet you that if you stood outside a grocery store in Ohio's 11th and you asked a hundred people if they knew there was a special election going on you'd be lucky you'd be lucky to find 25 people I think that would even know there's a special election going on some of us who are who love politics and follow politics or are following this stuff around but the average voter even not in a special election I'm talking about Democratic primaries look at the Democratic primaries across this country if you look at the data you'll see it's less than 25% turnout for sure yeah but it seemed like you were trying you were making the case that like if you're comparing my regular congressional race compared to a special election that the special election would have even lower voter turnout than a regular election that's correct that's correct because the special election is not talked about it might be talked about in the evening news but you're not getting as much bombardment it's just one race whereas if you have multiple races on the ballot more people are communicating to you about it can I push back a little bit more I'm sorry I love to push back on people so I would say wouldn't that make it easier for Nina Turner because Nina Turner isn't going to get that mainstream mainstream media attention anyways so this would make the mainstream attention go down and it would give Nina Turner a better chance or any progressive a better chance to it's a yes that is a great question and you are right that it so I'm not going to talk specifically about Ohio 11 but it is easier to win primaries and this is why left groups like Justice Democrats focus on blue districts and they focus only on primaries because you have to spend so much less you have less than 100,000 people that will come out in a primary if you look at the original primary in New York 14 for example you will see less than 50,000 people probably even less than 40,000 people came out to vote for that we had a special election here in Texas 06 less than 40,000 people came out vote in that special election right that is why people target primaries you're absolutely correct now is it easier to win not necessarily because there's always the factor of persuasion you still have to persuade your voters your fans to come out and you don't necessarily know who they are they don't come out and say I voted for Donna I'm a I'm a Donna voter but I mean I guess I would that's even more of a reason why like something like saying Joe Biden is a half a shit sandwich or something is basically like stabbing yourself in the heart like why would you or like if she says that she should maybe just like skip this election like she you know what I mean like if you're just putting out ammu opponents to attack you you can't then be surprised that they attacked you on it well I think that to be fair they so she did say this before the actual election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump before she would have known that like Marcia Fudge would have been appointed but I think that honestly like even though that was really the biggest thing that was weaponized against her they would have used something else to try to prove to voters in that district that she's not sufficiently loyal to the Democratic Party and another thing that they tried to you know push is that well you know that there's evidence that she didn't even vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and that she voted for Jilce so I think that ultimately weird at the end of the day they would have they would have found something because at the end of the day this district is very very like pro-democrat I think it's like a D plus 30 something so that they already already knew the attacks on her was predetermined although I will say that's not to detract from how devastating that particular comment was to your point Heme because it absolutely like for voters in this district they see that as an attack on on Joe Biden who just delivered us a victory who saved us from Donald Trump so they don't view her as like an ally and so when you have that in conjunction with these like mailers that DMFI sent out saying that or suggesting that she doesn't support Medicare for all or $15 an hour minimum wage if you don't necessarily know very much about these candidates because not everyone is as terminally online as like us then go for the sound bites you go for the sound bites and the endorsements what's amazing though like Chantel Brown was backed by literal Republicans like right Republican support like Trump supporters but yeah put board money into her campaign like if that's if there's one thing that Nina's campaign should have hit on again and again it was that like they should have hammered home this is not a real this is she's backed by Republicans backed by you know Big Oil back by Fox News donors as well like the she could have I think that should have been the focus if they're going to say that she's a fake Democrat then say that Chantel Brown's are Republican I mean that's kind of angle you have to and this this kind of comes back to like a little bit about what I was talking about when it comes to like messaging and messaging to your district and messaging to the voters and things like that like part of what you have to do is like when when she knew she was going to run or when she'd made the decision to run like what I would have recommended as like and Donna you probably people talk about this too you got to figure out the spin right you've got to figure out the spin she's got to have known and like I think this was her weak point she has to have known that that comment was going to come back and there was no spin like they did she should have said like yeah you know when speaking candidly that's what I was talking about because you know really what it comes down to is like voting between these two and the the perception of a lot of people's eyes is about harm reduction more than about supporting one person more than another or like more than you know she could have explained it away any number of ways and like brushed it off and like I was talking about harm reduction in a really candid way with voters but they she just like ignored it and like it came back to bite her and when you make these comments like you have to assess controversial things that you said like when I'm working with with candidates I'm like what's in your closet what have you said online what just write it all down no judgment let's talk about how we can explain this to people in a way that's more relatable than like oh my god she called him half his shit sandwich it's much easier to be like well yeah she did but she was talking about in the sense of harm reduction for like society like societal contract harm reduction like making sure less people were like experiencing harm at the hands of like a harmful of a hurtful president and like that could have been spun any number of ways and I think that like one of the weak points of Venus campaign is that they never confronted it head on like that and they really should have like shying away makes people feel like you're hiding something like it's always better to just own something and be upfront about it and just address it head on because like the more you try to avoid it or hope it goes away the less likely it's going to go away even with messaging and especially in politics well the other thing is it true and again you guys you all know more about this than than this race and I do is it true that Nina Turner said she doesn't want to do negative ads or something like this she doesn't want to I think so yeah she didn't go negative like this in my opinion is naivete like you're playing politics one of the dirtiest games you're supposed to club people in the back of their knee when they're not looking don't be nice it depends on how like it depends on how because like when I was running I didn't really I don't like going negative did your opponent go negative at you because we can be a fair race between two right to be fair I was a young woman running against an old white man so it's in a predominantly district full of like it's predominantly people in color in my district like him attacking a young woman would have been really terrible objects yeah was this a congressional race Sarah the Washington's 9th so the 9th congressional district it was a congressional race right yeah it was congressional for me too and so like when when we're talking about like this kind of messaging like she didn't go negative until like I think this someone said like a month or two before before the the special election date but it was already it was too late she was running those ads on loops those billboards were already up and going so like I think like it sucks and you don't want to go negative but like if they're going to come at you you got to do something yeah one one thing about negative negative advertising I just wanted to chime in here because I'm of the opinion that negative advertising doesn't really help especially when you're trying to run any primary among Democrats remember you're trying to persuade Democrats to vote for one Democrat over the other Democrat right it's a Democratic primary but the second thing is this right let's see for example you're you're gonna go out you're gonna vote for Donna or you're gonna go out and vote for candidate eight right and if you see negative negative advertising against candidate eight right the thing is all that the question is will that negative advertising knowing especially primary voters are quite actually they know exactly what's going on right so they're actually quite well informed they're not low information voters general voters tend to be low information voters they tend to know the top of the ticket but not down ballot so when you see something negative you know this is politics right so you might take it with you will take it for the great with a grain of salt the question is are you motivated to go out and vote and in most cases the whole point of negative advertising is to make sure that the person that's gonna come out and vote is stays at home right that they're so discouraged that they stay at home so I completely agree with Sarah that I think negative advertising is not effective but I want to say one thing here you know in a congressional race with less than 100,000 people coming out and most sorry in a primary most primaries have even less than that right less than 75,000 people coming out once you have a certain amount of money like for I'll give you just a simple simple you know a number here for every dollar you can communicate to every voter one time so if you have a hundred thousand dollars okay you can communicate to a hundred thousand people one time easily if you have a million dollars you can communicate to 10 times now that doesn't mean they're gonna see see your communication all 10 times you're hoping they see it once or twice or three times and they're like oh I like this message I'm gonna go vote for this person but when you have a certain amount of money it's you you're at a point of diminishing returns so you can have all this money and you can run ads you know four or five you know in a row where which is what happened in Ohio is 11 this is my understanding from people in the district but at some point you get diminishing rate of returns and in terms of persuasion I'll tell you this you can't persuade people on the day before they go off to vote and I'm telling you this from my from a candidate that really fought hard to win the nomination but then lost persuasion has to start early early voting in this race started what two three weeks ago you have to have already persuaded people so a lot of times you know in big in big races like this people want to come in from the outside people are like we want to pull work we want to go canvas on the last day on the last day on the last week two weeks before the election if it's too late guys believe it or not you have to start persuasion three months you know ideally four months ahead and this is what a lot of people don't understand when when they donate you know they're like oh you know I'll donate whenever and a lot of people by the way they donate at the last minute they'll give you these big checks you know the day before a week before seven seven days before and I always tell donors that money is literally useless you can run TV ads with that but you with TV ads all you do is increased name recognition you cannot persuade if you want to persuade you have to start early and early money you have no idea it's like gold it has three five times ten times the effect of late money and it also goes to the importance of early endorsements as well right I mean if you if you're running in a race you want say if Bernie Sanders is going to back you you want you want him to back you when you launch your campaign I imagine to get all that money start rolling in as opposed to you know backing you a month beforehand and same with AOC and the other big names so I'm sure though I think Bernie did back Nina early as well as AOC but I know there was some late endorsements that I imagine may have helped Nina more if they came a little earlier can I just ask a couple of things two things so these people and you guys know Donna and Sarah you hire like advertising agencies to help you right you can so there's some some people do like political advertising you usually like shoot an ad and then you buy ad time so you usually have like someone come in to just film your ad you're hiring like an AV team okay I just saying like I feel like nobody would run negative ads if they weren't effective like they must be effective if they run right and it also depends on the kind of negative ad and that was like my half big thought earlier so like when I would go negative it's not that I would attack the person it's that I attack the policy so he had a policy track record so I'd attack the policy track record and like it depends on what like how you go negative and like it is effective to the degree that like because people are naturally risk averse and because voters are naturally risk averse when you lean into like Nina actually like doesn't really support this she just says she does like it's enough of a boogie man most of the time for people to be like oh oh my gosh and then if they don't see any kind of like combative comeback out of like Nina Turner walking slowly through a crowd of people shaking in kissing babies look how amazing she is she loves a medical bra actually they're relying to you if there's no counter to that all they have is that like fear response and that's the only thing they remember when they go to fill out their ballot so it is like they are and aren't effective in the diminishing return sense like Donna said and then I have to say I would love to answer this for you so I I vehemently disagree that negative advertising works at all and here's why and so it's really it's a really great question to ask like why do people do it right so there was a big study done by three universities about advertising in general does advertising really work right and after spending millions of dollars trying to figure out if you run TV ads if you run magazine ads walk work they found absolutely there was no way to know if you're advertising produce sales because most people would advertise before Christmas during Valentine's Day etc etc and they could never correlate if advertising on TV specifically on TV works so that was a big study but here's the here's the here's the incentive for running negative advertising when you have millions of dollars by the way to run a congressional campaign you need very little money to effectively communicate by mail or even by digital digital is literally very very very inexpensive okay what is the biggest expense in a campaign of any kind is TV advertising so when you buy TV advertising ads most congressional campaigns go through a media company that media company takes 15% off the top period of every single dollar you spend so if you spend a million dollars they get 15% of that but guess what if you spend two million dollars they get another 15% of that extra million that you just spend and so on and so forth so if you have millions of dollars you literally cannot spend it on digital or mail or anything else unless you you know you know are hiring many many many people and the fact is that most you know consultants will tell you to run TV ads and run negative ads because they stand to benefit from it they get a nice big cut okay so bottom line is would you say the same thing about general products well I just gave you the the study on general products oh okay I've never heard this before that advertising doesn't work no it's not that it doesn't work I'm just saying that you can't directly correlate it to sales so you can't directly say that negative advertising works and that's why people do it the point is people don't do something because it works we assume that people do something because it works does that make sense I just want to talk about Walker on here because he said he volunteered for me I love you Walker thank you for volunteering for me there we go yeah Donna that's I I love that that's really awesome and I think about like how myself when it comes to advertisements and every time I hear like an ad interrupting Hulu I'm like I'm 10 times less likely to buy your service because you're looking at my time too so look how many people are like meaning with like politics but it's kind of terrifying right like I don't think about it stressing me out yeah so I wanted to jump in about hemes question about negative political ads because now this story that I'm going to cite or the study I'm going to cite is a little bit dated I think it's from 2011 so there's been studies on this about what types of ads that are negative ads are the most effective and so basically the general rule of thumb is you want to avoid negative ads if you're ahead because negative ads they actually turn people off to the candidate who's pushing the negative ad but simultaneously they'll bring down the person who's ahead so if you're like 20 points behind and you do a bunch of negative ads that will change the perception of you in that district negatively but also bring down the amount of support for that front runner so there's also really interesting ways that you can do negative ads so like Sarah referenced like policy ads but people get even more turned off when the attacks are personal and you focus on like really not necessarily ad hominem attacks but like family related issues like oh well this person gave their son money it's a bad example but people are so sensitive that even if you zoom in really close to a candidate's face that can trigger a really negative psychological response to where they dislike that candidate even more so I know that the consultants like they all know this and I know that they they're not going to go negative until the last minute because the minute that they do that it will bring down the perception of Nina Turner I think that the issue with this race is that it was all a little bit too late like she was riding high and she had that 35 point lead and then within the last couple of weeks that's when it really changed pretty quickly so by the time they actually went negative which is when I think they needed to then it might have been a little bit too late in my opinion and by the way every time you run a negative ad against your opponent you're increasing their name ID you are giving right it might be negative but you're saying their name over and over again on tv so so then we can't complain about Nina Turner getting negative ads then because then it increased her name as well right you can't have it both ways where like it's either one or the other it either helps the difference is she was already more I think a young quantity okay like I think yeah this is the kind of you know the place that the Turner campaign was stuck in where Shantel Brown wasn't as prominent yet in the race at the time because Nina was so far ahead that if they started attacking her closest competitor who was maybe at 15 20% compared to Nina at like 40% then they may be increasing her Shantel Brown's recognition and it may actually come back to hurt her the other issue with negative ads is Shantel Brown because she had all this outside spending that were actually they were the ones doing the attack ads there was never the tag at the end saying you know this is a whatever approved by Shantel Brown whereas Nina Turner's ads they had like they were negative against Shantel Brown and then Nina Turner saying I approve this message so I think it almost in a way that could also hurt her being like hey Nina Turner is the one doing this attack whereas Shantel Brown or a attack on Nina Turner yeah it's like who's doing this attack who knows but yeah yeah Nina Turner sucks like if I yeah if I had to guess like one thing I will say is that I bet you it wasn't the negative ads I bet you they actually spent money to bring up people who would vote for the person who would win text messaging phone you know dialing them though those have huge impact by the way and we only see what's on TV you're not seeing that private call between one person and another person where they're persuading them to come out and vote too so there was definitely definitely that happened can I can I also say one more thing I earlier Donna you said that the persuasion needs to happen like weeks in advance right but I think of anything this Nina Turner race is an example of where people are constantly changing their mind because Nina Turner had a massive lead and then it just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and like I disagree that's not true if you look at the data that's not what happened in the early voting no in the early voting she was behind by 13 points when the early voting results came out the it online it showed it was 1% but that was all of early voting at no point she was the have you favorite she became the favorite after election day voting data started dropping which would which would imply the data would imply I know people want to believe a lot of stuff but the data would imply I just look at the polling she was yeah she would no the polling was absolutely wrong so I'm a big disbeliever in polling I'm the only person who ran a congressional campaign and won the nomination with zero polling by the way I think out there but bottom line is the polling was completely off and if you look at the data early voting data Nina was behind she was in fact behind by 13 points and she kept making that up when you say data what do you mean when you say early early data if it's not polls so so all the early voting yeah go ahead so all the early voting the first I don't know how many weeks of early voting Ohio 11 had it was maybe two or three weeks all of that is dropped as soon as the polls close so the first data that you see the 20,000 votes that were dumped that was all early voting data right and then they continued to drop early voting data because they they've had that for you know for three days remember voting probably ended I don't know Saturday or Sunday I'm not sure in Ohio 11 exactly when it ended so they had all of Monday to get all of the early voting data ready it was ready to go so when when polls close early voting data is ready to drop the rest of the data that comes is election day voting so it comes from precinct by precinct by precinct that's what I mean okay so I want to jump in right here and just kind of one by one ask if you all have any like closing thoughts on this and particularly like to viewers because I know that whenever we have one of these losses which we all expect they're an inevitability but I mean there's always this instinct I think in a lot of people myself included to kind of just check out and like try to do something different because electoral politics it's really difficult when we are kind of like perpetually the underdogs in a lot of these races where you know we're outspent and the Democratic Party establishment brings out like the big names to endorse against you know rather than checking out like what would you say to folks instead of checking out like how would you think they can most effectively direct the energy that that's currently there I will start with Sarah Oh I love that you asked this oh my gosh so I could like talk about how like there are certain folks that capitalize on the outrage fatigue cycle because it keeps you for like don't go out doing stuff like stay here and be outraged with us and fatigue keep clicking this and they don't want you to know that like there are options to go out and do things that are actually regenerative and rejuvenating and restorative about your faith and democracy so like try and break out of your outrage cycle and it's one of the hardest things to do but like after these big losses these big losses suck they suck and they hurt and they suck and they sing and they suck but like put yourself into something where you have more powers like really focus on your power look up local elections like go get started volunteer for the general in a in a city council race or a county council race or a state legislative district race go put your energy into like a candidate that you want to unseat someone bad or a candidate that you like more than another that local stuff has more of an impact like federal is really important but the the shit that actually I don't know if I can swear can I swear I'm here it's encouraged actually I was gonna I was gonna ask that earlier too and I forgot that I'm like we're obligated to say at least two F bombs throughout the duration Mike next I'll stand and do that Mike in your invites you should tell people this in the future I will there's been a lot of I assume but like yeah like this this shit really sucks like just go the shit that matters is your local elections like federal is great and flashy but oh my god it moves at the pace of molasses coursing through the sands of time like the shit that actually gets done where you can make real change is state and local elections so like don't feel discouraged just say okay well next you know that sucks but the real change is made here because you're gonna be more energized you're more likely to be victorious you're more likely to find progressives you're more likely to find people that align with your values and then you can actually put them in a seat of actual power in your daily life so like obviously I'm huge on self-care give yourself a couple weeks to like mourn let yourself go through the grieving process but jump into a local race you'd be shocked how many more connections you make how much more fun it is and it makes way more change than federal does any any given day yeah yeah uh David I would just say look at just base level look at victories that that have happened I mean look at someone like Corey Bush who in 2018 lost to to Lacey Clay and then comes back you know two years later and beats him and you know understand that the we have to go through these really shitty times these losses to really appreciate the victories and I think if you look around understand that like look at there were there were no progressives in congress before 2016 I mean I'm sure there were a few but it was very they weren't really there and now there's a big voice like there's there's constant discussions about about you know Medicare for all raising wages you see the power that someone like Corey Bush can have by by protesting in front of the capital building and then forcing Biden to to extend the eviction ban so understand that you know these moments really suck they're horrible and yes I go through times where I'm like why am I covering this I'm in Canada I can be covering you know anything else like I can be happy every day but the understand that like victories happen and these losses are going to happen and we we have to learn through them from them and and also it's important and I have to also realize this as well that it's it's really easy to blame everything else it's really easy to blame big money as I did in most of my video on this campaign but understand that there are lessons here there are mistakes that the need to turn to turn a campaign made and there are always mistakes in these sorts of losses that we can learn from and and grow yeah and Dr. Heem so okay let me try to say this in the best way possible so I got into politics I big Bernie Sanders supporter big progressive I still consider myself an extremely progressive person social issues economic issues whatever but as I get more into politics I realize the value in things like incrementalism in things like just being able to get past what you can get past if Joe Manchin doesn't want to vote for a $15 minimum wage pass a $12 minimum wage pass a $10 minimum wage just keep the ball moving forward and I think progressives need to do a better job at hiding their power levels we see sometimes where progressives win elections and then become centrist afterwards we should do the reverse go in as a centrist candidate say I'm not for Medicare for all I maybe public option who knows whatever and then once you get elected show your power levels and I think that's actually some some good advice there's no reason for you to come out and be like $15 minimum wage isn't enough we should have $25 minimum wage you're never going to win like that and I'm in I like winning elections because you can actually get shit done when you win elections so I think that like we should embrace incrementalism a little bit more and hate to say it a little bit of centrism and like a little bit of analytical analysis on these kinds of things and realizing that every race is not the same you can't compare one race to another the demographics are different the times are different so many things are different between these races and you should just look at the race itself and in this Nina Turner case is one example where I think a lot of mistakes were made and it doesn't seem like money was a big factor it wasn't like Chantel Brown raised 10 times more money and in closing I want to say sorry if I was too had too many hot takes on this issue I'm sure we'll agree on the next issue this was a good convo I didn't say I didn't say be a centrist I said embrace the the kind of aesthetic it's fake I'm glad that you said that I'm glad that you said that because I actually had this weird thought I'm like what if somebody like ran as a republican and they were like super like CRT is communism and then they got an immediately like embrace the national health system and went full communist that would be the most funny like fuck yeah amazing me ever we take all their money take the big donor money pretend you're a centrist and then as the end just flip yeah exactly if by any means necessary method like say what you got to say to get elected like you guys we gotta abandon this concept of like be pure in every community exactly they're not pure with us we don't need to be pure with them see what you got to say to get elected and then do what you got to do to be progressive exactly that's it you gotta have power to use power it's like I see some people shitting on AOC and stuff now and it's like ridiculous to me like she's got to get things done she's not just there to be like a puppet for progressive movement she's there to actually try to pass legislation have a future in the democratic party and these things are so important and it bothers me that sometimes progressives undervalue the importance of these these kind of tactics yeah I mean it's about you know recalibrating once in a while and trying to make sure that we're not purifying ourselves into oblivion if I can quote I think it was Ben Dixon who said that yeah you know and just to add to your point Heem I don't disagree with you about like embracing incrementalism sometimes that doesn't necessarily mean that you fold immediately right that doesn't mean that you go in there and you announce to everyone hey folks I just want to let you know I support a $15 an hour minimum wage but I'm definitely going going to cave to 10 I think it is is a matter of like trying to do what we can in this terrible late stage capitalist society to make any progress that we possibly can so I think that the nuance is really important because even myself like I get a little bit too fired up and I even find myself like looking at candidates looking for things in an emotional way kind in an emotional way exactly and it's like you kind of like I think that we're all we're all human beings so oftentimes we have to really recalibrate and remind ourselves listen this is a really long game electoral politics is hard not everyone is perfect I don't have to have a candidate that checks every single box but so long as I think they're going to get in there and fight and be progressive then really that that's all that I could hope for it's it's it's a tough battle and we'll we'll we'll go to Donna with some basically words of encouragement I guess for the people who are who are disillusioned and they just worked out hey if you're disillusioned I have really really amazing news for you here's the data and it will blow your socks off the data is all on our side single pair health care is going to lower the cost of health care for every single person in this country and not only I know you guys know this so I'm going to I'm going to end this with an anecdote I live in you know in northwest Austin and my district is gerrymandered goes all the way up to the one of the largest military base in the united states so I went to many many veterans meetings and when you go walk into a veterans meeting this is not a democratic meeting this is not a republican meeting it's a mix in your and you're out there just telling about yourself the very first time I met this gentleman who was a screen right wing he came up to me at the end of the meeting and he said I am going to do everything in my power to make sure you do not win funny enough I went to many many you know veterans events and I explained single-payer healthcare over and over again remember these are two most people who have already healthcare right they have the VA system but the third time I met that gentleman he came up to me and he said I want to talk to you and I told one of my volunteer friends that was with me I said hey can you talk to him because I'm not going to win his vote he's just he just wants to you know harass me here and and he and he told that guy he said I know Donna doesn't want to talk to me but I really want to talk to her and so after everybody left because you know I would stand around and talk to everybody he was still there and I was dreading it I was like oh my god I have to go talk to this guy and he was and he came up to me and he says so you mean and then he explains Medicare for all to me in detail back to me and he says you mean this is what you're proposing and I said yes that's exactly what I'm proposing and he ended the conversation with I can get on board with that wow that's amazing that's great that's like the perfect story to end this whole thing with not the whole show but like this segment all right goodbye everyone take care I'm like don't leave yet oh my god no because I that's drop the mic yeah that's the thing it's like sometimes you know we have to like step back and acknowledge that we're dealing with human beings and there's no perfect answer really so everything that we're talking about here we can cite studies and data but a lot of it at the end of the day is it's tough because it is human beings and one thing that I've seen that's probably the most common in terms and I guess this is my words of encouragement not that I have much because I'm in doom remote right now but my one thing that I would say is a lot of people feel like okay Nina Turner losing this just further solidifies this idea that there's going to be no progress within the Democratic Party and to that I say I hear you I've been one of the loudest people I think on the left fighting for a third party and a fourth party but the problem is that you can't just start with having a third party because we already have hundreds of third parties literally hundreds that exist and if we want to actually do that there is really great legislation that will change electoral politics in America get us electoral reform so right now we all elect one person we have a district magnitude of one in the United States one representative but if we can increase that to two to three change our district so gerrymandering is no longer a thing move to proportional representation this is specifically how you actually get more parties so if you truly feel like the Democratic Party is just like a dead end for movements I mean for me I feel like sure I would love to have third parties I think capitalism ultimately is going to corrupt any party that you bring in but if you want third parties I'm with you and I think it's a really important cause HR 4000 is one of the most important pieces of legislation because this would actually facilitate electoral reform that would make it so that way there isn't just two dominant parties and electoral reform is difficult right but anytime there's a town hall I speak to one of the individuals who are closest to me I feel like I have two representatives because I'm like on the border of a district and one of them embraced HR 4000 and co-sponsored another did not and it hasn't been reintroduced this is bill or legislation by Don Byers Jr and what I will say is that if you truly genuinely feel like you're done with the Democratic Party and you don't want to support any Democrats in the future because you don't think any progress can be made fair vote.org HR 4000 these are things that you can do that will actually facilitate multiple parties winning now it's hard because countries like New Zealand and Japan have actually done electoral reform they passed laws expanding the amount of parties that they have and it doesn't always take effect like in Japan for example they've had a one party system and basically there's just like a lot of factions in Japan and so they finally got you know electoral reform and then they had a different party win for the first time and I think decades but guess what the next election cycle everything kind of went back to the way it was electoral reform is one of the most complicated things ever but what I will say and just to kind of not because I already know I'm rambling in order to get multiple parties we have to defeat Duverger's law Duverger's law is not an actual law you're not going to find it on the books but what this law is is it posits that any system where it's majoritarian for as fast as the post wouldn't take all you're always going to have two systems and more insufferable enough these parties are or two parties excuse me and more insufferable than that is that these parties are almost always going to be centrist they're going to stick as close to the center as they can possibly be and sometimes it gets even worse than that because the center gets skewed to the right as is the case in the United States so a lot needs to happen but if you if you truly want to change the system and get more parties directed into an actual piece of legislation by Don Byers Jr. who's who's great at this who can who can affect change but folks what we are going to do now is move on to the next story if you're feeling a little bit inspirational after you know hearing from everybody with their closing thoughts let's let's let's let's temper that because I wanted to bring in a doomer story about the United States so there is a new report by the Commonwealth Fund and what they find is that the United States of America ranks dead last in both health care outcomes and overall spending when it comes to health care in the United States of America now what they say here is that there's a couple of reasons why some systems health care systems perform better than than ours so they provide universal coverage and remove most cost barriers they invest in primary care systems to ensure that a high value services are equitably available in all communities to all people they reduce administrative burdens that divert time efforts and spending from health improvement efforts and they invest in social services especially for children and working age adults now I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from this story because I think that most of us on the panel already know the fundamentals about American health care and how broken it is but this is from Jake Johnson of Common Dreams who's brilliant by the way so basically using a range of criteria to evaluate the health care systems of 11 countries Australia, Canada, France, Germany the Netherlands New Zealand, Norway Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom and the United States the Commonwealth Fund's latest analysis shows that the U.S. once again ranks last on access to care administrative efficiency equity and care and health care outcomes the lone bright spot for the for-profit U.S. health care system there is a bright spot according to the new report is in a category dubbed care process which includes measures of preventative care safe care coordinated care and engagement and patient preferences so that I mean there's some good right there's no question our cruel for-profit health care system is broken representative primarily Jayapal chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and lead house sponsor of the Medicare for All Act of 2021 said in a response to the report it's time to fix it Jayapal added it's time to guarantee health care as a human right it's time for Medicare for all so what I want to do and I've done this on the program before I think the very first time I ever spoke with David Dole I asked like what's it like in Canada if you if you need to go to a doctor and I always want to like if I'm talking to someone who doesn't live in the United States I always encourage them to share their experience because I just I genuinely don't believe that our peers in America understand what we're missing so we'll go to David and then he about your health care stories because I think this is really important yeah so the first thing I always tell Americans is that I never think about health care and that's the biggest benefit of having a single pair system is you just never think like there's no reason to think about health care unless you need it so and when I need it if I need to go to the doctor I we all get a health card you walk in you show your health card they you know they check the computer you go in and then you go home like that's the entire process and so it it it's it's I should be clear here I mean Canada ranked second last on that list for good reason we don't cover dental care we don't cover farm and care home care isn't covered long-term care like retirement homes aren't covered so there are serious gaps in our system for sure but it's because our system doesn't go far enough so in fact Bernie's Medicare for all plan if enacted would go further than the Canadian health care system so there's definitely downsides to our system because it doesn't go far enough but just basic you know basic care going to your your your family doctor is a very simple streamlined process I had surgery once same thing I mean it was booked it wasn't a you know a anything urgent so it was booked three months ahead of time I went on the day I walk in again show my health card they they bring me in had the surgery I came home there's no you know on the phone with insurance companies none of that's going on it's all just covered all free and the only time I ever had to actually pay for health care is is um for prescriptions but they're always I mean at least to in in my case they've always been you know minuscule like you know 20 bucks for a month of of medication for something but uh you know other people have had you know worse stories in Canada with farming care because they have a lot more to pay for so it's it's different depending on your experience but um yeah I mean the biggest benefit is you just never think about it yeah I'm curious he I and this is kind of hard to assess but in the event there were you know there was a party if um I don't know the Liberals in Canada they proposed an American-based health care system private model how do you think that would go over in Canada even the conservatives here don't push for that kind of model and even in the UK too the couldn't they'll push for like maybe defunding it a little bit but it's so popular here that and it started on a provincial level and then spread across the rest of the country and it's never looked back since and it will I don't think it'll ever change hopefully fingers crossed I will say I'll David brought up some amazing things not worrying is a huge one just to give a little insight about my experience so I do cancer research for my PhD and and I have family members that are in healthcare and one thing that's very important to point out and to push back on people who are anti universal healthcare is to mention that they're still incentive for doctors to make money so how it works is when David shows up to his to the office with his health card the doctor just the the secretary whatever will scan his card or his code and his number and they will build the government so the doctors are actually private contractors a lot of the time and so they can work as much or as little as they want and make as much or as little money as they want most of our doctors here aren't actually publicly employed employees so here in Ontario we have a list that we publish every year called the sunshine list which is like people who make over a hundred thousand dollars a year and work in the public sector so it could be like energy workers police officers things like this and very few doctors are actually on this list very few like radiologists and stuff that that are employed by the hospital but other than that most doctors run a private practice so that's the one thing that I think is is a nice benefit that Canada has maybe over the UK because we still have the incentivization that people always rip on and say like oh who's gonna want to become a doctor so that's one thing the other thing I will say is like David said I have had the similar experience one day I woke up and I had an extreme pain in my back I went to the emergency room I got surgery that night so it's not like this long wait time fucking craziest thing in the world like most places in the world they just triage you based on how bad you need care if you show up and you're gushing blood they're not gonna be like okay you have to wait seven hours like I don't understand this caricature that people make sometimes like and I've heard I don't know maybe I've seen I've heard David make this or maybe Kyle Kalinsky where they say in America you triage too you just triage based off of who's got the money or who's got the coverage and one last thing lastly on this is as we learn more about medicine we realize how important preventative care and early diagnosis is your outcomes if you get prostate cancer at stage one diagnosed versus stage four diagnosed are worlds apart right when it comes to mortality rates five year 10 year mortality rates the sooner you can detect these things the better outcomes you have the less it's gonna cost the entire system down the line it's much easier to do a quick surgery or radiation on a small tumor versus like multiple rounds of chemotherapy because now the cancer is metastasized all over your body so it's another really important point is the fact that in America right now you have people who will get a little bump on their arm or in their breast but they'll be too scared to go to the doctor they'll put it off put it off put it off put it off put it off no it's not that bad it's not that bad I don't want to pay the copay I don't want to pay the and then it's too late right so that's another massive thing and I think I touched on the things I wanted to touch on and I think there was one other thing but I forgot for now we can talk about amazing yeah yeah I love I think that you're like you guys sharing your experiences is really really crucial because I don't know if Sarah and Donna have the same experiences as me but people are genuinely afraid of the prospect of universal health care here people that I've talked to even family members because they feel as if it's you know it's foreign first of all right it's literally a foreign concept because we don't have that here but I try to make it more familiar right I talk about Medicare Medicaid like these types of programs that have existed in the United States that are loved you know if you're a veteran in the United States you kind of have a version of you know universal health care so trying to like make it seem less foreign and more familiar is important and like getting Canadians and British people to weigh in I think is honestly one of the most historically effective it's so effective yeah good on you yeah Mike I have a story I'd love to share with you to give contrast to this sure so a lot of people don't know about this but when I was a kid I lived in New Zealand my dad is a scientist and he was doing research there and so my mom tells me the story and I contrasted it with what happened to her during 2019 Christmas and here's here's what happened my mom had one of my siblings in a c-section and not only is everything you know completely paid for at you know point of service which means you're not paying anything out of pocket after she had the c-section she was sent home and she was also sent home with a helper that came in every day to help her with certain things move certain things around because when you have a c-section for several months you're not allowed to lift heavy things and so this is healthcare in New Zealand okay healthcare in New Zealand now contrasted with this with the United States Christmas the day on Christmas Eve my mom hurt her knee while she was climbing up the stairs and we took her into you know an orthopedic care place and there is a when we go in there the doctor came in looked at it says we need to do an MRI and I said that's great there's this huge window there's a big MRI machine here I was very happy let's go do it and you know he was like okay let me go get the setup and then they come back 30 minutes later you know how they make you sit in the room forever and ever and they say well the doctors in network but the MRI machine is not oh I didn't know the MRI machine didn't take its licensing test I kid you not I think that was the day I was like you got to be kidding me because she can't walk she hurt her knees wow and and you know what's crazy you bring up MRI machine I I went to a patients chart like I think two weeks ago you would not believe one patient had 70 different treatments imaging MRI PET scan CT scan radiation chemotherapy imagine if all of these things fell on the shoulder of one person to have to financially pay for or even pay partially for right it's like unfathomable and that's and as again you saw in the last topic I'm kind of like maybe not as left as some of you guys are and some like economic issues but on this one issue when it comes to healthcare because of the cost that because of the burden that it has on one person the cost has to be spread around and that's why I'm super pro universal healthcare because that cost has to has to has to get spread around and like you said the MRI machine being out of network David and I have never had to worry about we could go anywhere in the country get false false sick and that's right right David like even though we have OHIP we can get sick in any province yeah it's still I think it's still transfers yeah and I forgot to mention I mean I had a kid six months ago and we were thank you and we were we had to be in the hospital for you know a couple of extra days and then most people do in that process and still like you know of course no bill nothing they took care of us great and it's just we go home and we have our child and there's no worried about we're not worried about you know the bills or anything it's it's peace of mind that universal healthcare gives you that you know Americans really have to understand that yeah and even if you have insurance that doesn't necessarily mean that you're like protected because my dad was a veteran so he basically had universal healthcare but there were ambulance rides that he took he'd go to hospitals that weren't the VA's hospitals but then you know there he it could be covered by Medicaid and so there's a lot of overlap but then there's a lot of parts that are left out so like after my dad passed away last year my mom got bill after bill after bill and it's probably about 80 to 100,000 dollars worth of medical bills and in terms of like which one she has to actually pay she's like I have no idea I don't know if these bills are actually covered by insurance the ones that we that we have or the VA but you but you get them anyway and it's kind of like this well you know you cross your fingers and hope that you don't you don't get sued your social security doesn't get you know garnished it's it's so even like even if you're covered there's still like that piece of mine in America is just it's not there and it's it's bizarre Sarah have you have the same conversations that I've had where people genuinely feel frightened by the prospect of universal healthcare so I well we all say that we're the worst but I say we're first worst so we're first we're number one of the worst healthcare good for us we did it America great again so I've had like I grew up with my dad's from the UK so like he had universal healthcare has always been like a thing in my house my dad's like I don't understand why we don't just have universal healthcare because he grew up with it and I've run into it we're like people don't it's so misrepresented that they're like oh but it's going to cause like taxes and I like the freedom of choice that I have and I don't want to lose my doctor and I don't want to lose my network because they all have this like weird envisioned like moment that like and it says a lot about both veterans care that I feel like people have this and a lot about American healthcare they feel like they're gonna be corralled and forced to go like a VA hospital instead of their regular doctor and like first of all that says a lot about what you think about veterans care second of all that's just it just isn't the case like the choice doesn't change like it's you're still gonna have access to whoever you want to go to like your job all the doctors become a network like I watched my my buddy was like trying to find a general practitioner and he spent like two weeks calling and calling and calling trying to find someone in network and they were all like it's say yes for part but no for other parts and like it took him two weeks to find a general practitioner and like I have to explain to people do you really think that's like better than being able to call any doctor and go and not have to worry about it and think about it like you rather call like 900 providers and like I had a healthcare story too so I had a healthcare when I was I think it was before I was running but I started having this like colossal like sharp pain that started at the back of my head and it just like spread and to the point was like debilitating like I couldn't walk and I couldn't breathe so we called ambulance and the ambulance came and took me away to get from my house at the time to get to the to get to the emergency rementrance was less than half a mile it was like a third of a mile it was a 940 dollar ambulance bill to go a third of a mile and my insurance was like we did cover part of it they covered it apparently 900 was the bill for me to pay the total bill was like $3,000 and like utterly ridiculous nonsense and so when I hear this and I hear people like talking about healthcare and they're so afraid of healthcare costs I'm like what if like imagine a world where you're like oh wow I feel this weird pain in my neck and you don't have to write it out you can just go to any doctor and it's covered and then we all move on because like I've tried to explain to people the concept of the social contract and this might be a little bit too meta I don't know but like when you live in a society yes I see you participating in the society when you live in a society you you engage in an unspoken social contract with your neighbors like you all recognize that living in a society has lots and lots of benefits like you have access to stores and bars and restaurants and people to work for you and people to do your roads and police officers and Zaboo and fire departments and you have access to all of these resources that you collectively shares a community so you're responsible for each other's safety and you're responsible for each other's like ability to get to and from work you're responsible for each other's ability to work for each other's businesses and things like that why the fuck wouldn't you also be responsible for each other's good health and like the healthier your workers are the more they they can come in like on time the less sick days they take the more people are healthy in our society the more people's health is cared for the better our society ultimately becomes and the more fulfilling that social contract becomes and we get to focus on other benefits in society like spending our money that we're is no longer $600 a month on private insurance on things like saving for a house things like I don't know paying credit card debt things like spending money in the economy and like people's struggle to wrap their head around this concept of that social contract but I'm like the very fact that you live in a house and have neighbors next to you you're engaged in a social contract like whether you like it or not you're you're gaining benefit from society collectively from living in one and you can't get far enough away to escape that social contract so why don't we just shut up engage the social contract and care for each other's well-being all the way down instead of like cherry picking like weirdos I think a really good a really good comparison that I make sometimes and I've heard other people making this as well is like we don't have privatized police really like we have security and stuff but you know for the most part you just dial 911 if you need help you don't have privatized fire department because you don't want one person's house to burn down and burn the entire neighborhood down yet for some reason when it comes to health care the line is all of a sudden drawn so I think and I when I was sometimes when I debate with like and caps and stuff they'll try to make an argument that like you could have a privatized the fire department or something like this and the entire argument just falls apart and then you draw the connections to that between to the health care and you see how absurd it really is to at least not have a public option like I'm not saying like that it has to be Medicare for all or bus but like everyone should be covered and everyone should have a public option if you're a millionaire billionaire you want to have some you want to go get an MRI every morning go ahead and get one but like you know what I mean it's really close to like yeah your body you want to get a hundred vaccines I don't care go ahead go for it yeah I mean in Canada we still have private supplemental coverage like on top of our existing system a lot of it is for the gaps that we have like like dental care but then there's things like I don't know private hospital rooms that you don't really need but I guess if you want to pay into what you can so that's still you know if you for some reason needs a private option for something you can still have that but it's just it there's no reason for it to for that there's no reason to have that for general care it makes absolutely no sense and I there's actually something I wanted to bring up to like really really really badly and I was like so excited because we got to this point in the conversation I was like yeah I want to bring this up so like I know we all talked about like I'm about to get a lot of hate I know and I'm sorry for like the direct subject change but like just bear with me and like follow my training thought for a minute so like we had like a lot of people doing a lot of work and a lot of organizing around Medicare for all recently and like I think part of part of the struggle the wall that we hit is like when you just have an event for something and you don't have a place to direct it like you're just not you're not really doing anything without energy and so you don't really have like you're just doing a thing you're like showing up and doing a thing but you're not like making any radical change or doing any radical change and I'm so sad because like one of the main organizers and I can say who it is because I don't know if she's like they're okay with me saying their name but I saw them like I wish that they had centered this particular action all of these events because I could have been like hell yeah that's so creative it's so cool they suggested I don't know is their suggestion or I just happened to see it from them they suggested potentially taking the United States of America suing them in the UN courts for failure to provide adequate health care to suffering citizens during the pandemic and like failure to provide a public option and I'm like oh my god that is such a creative like cool awesome it's boring takes forever it's arduous but like oh my gosh the idea of dragging the United States in front of the rest of the developed world and saying you are failing your citizens in such a catastrophic way that it is now a national crisis that the globe gets to weigh in on whether or not you're handling it right like that should have been at the center of all that work because I think that is such a creative action and like such a good action to start moving towards like use of shame America hates feeling shame shame the shit out of America for the entire world for not having a public option like that should have been I think America's shameless we already know yeah I just want to like it we hate being judged so stick us in an arena where everyone's like shame on America and we'll be like we should do it at the Olympics maybe after every podium yes just like boo you don't have health gear yeah exactly it was such a cool action like I wish that those actions like those individual events had like centered that is the next step because like that would have been just such a cool springboard for that energy and like I really want to draw attention to that because I saw them saying this and like I just thought that was super like I never would have put that together and my mind was like blown and I'm like what a good idea see yeah I saw I love that idea and to the point about shaming like I want other developed countries to bully the United States never gonna happen out of us I'm doing it if you listen if you got to threaten to bomb us I'm okay with it no you don't mean it I won't go that far listen you have a Middle Eastern guy on this panel be careful okay I don't want to get my channel deleted into it like that okay I don't endorse anything that these panelists are saying right I can only speak for America okay it's nothing but love between the United States and Canada just bully us a little bit maybe like not just in the right direction one of the challenges you know that we have with healthcare like I think we're also under the impression that somehow single-payer health care or Medicare for all would solve all our challenges and what we don't realize is that even if we had single-payer health care we would have some major challenges and one of the big challenges is that the United States has a huge lack of primary care physicians I don't know if many of you are aware but right now there are I think over 80,000 physicians that are trained and educated in India that are in the United States that came here after they got their medical degree and they're practicing here because there's such a huge lack of doctors and unless we you know I think one of you maybe it was David or Dr. Heamed out that said you know preventative care is a huge deal in ensuring that the outcomes are better and you know that is the most important part of this entire discussion that in the United States we actually have no preventative care because it is so difficult to go see a primary care physician whenever you need to because if you're under insured or if you have a huge deductible if you go see a primary care physician you're talking about $300 out of pocket and not everybody has $300 just lying around to just go yeah if you're lucky it's $300 my friend I asked him he said it was like $5,000 or something as the deductible I mean it's the deductible is high I'm just saying if you wanted to go to a primary care physician you'd have to pay all of it out of pocket is what I'm saying none of that 300 would be covered because your deductible is $5,000 you're absolutely correct but the challenges we don't have enough primary care physicians in this country and unless we as a country understand this and put more primary care physicians in the pipeline we're going to have a challenge even if we go to single-payer healthcare and you might be asking so why don't we have you know primary care physicians and the reason is primary care physicians in the United States don't really make a lot of money compared to the amount of investment that they put in to become a doctor so many doctors have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt anywhere between $100,000 to $300,000 in debt and if you're a primary care physician if you're like a pediatrician you may start out at $110,000 or $150,000 now for many of us we we think oh a six-figure salary is a big salary but when you have a mortgage size student loan debt that you have to service which you're not going to make that $110,000 until you finish your residency that's a huge extra debt that you would have on top of someone who graduates from school with no debt so what doctors in the United States tend to do is they specialize because if you specialize you can make $400,000 you can make $450,000 if you're a specialist surgeon you can make millions of dollars right and they specialize so we don't have enough primary care physicians and this is something if we as a country don't energize don't invest in people in the United States our students in the United States to go into primary care we will not solve this healthcare problem because at the end of the day we have to lower the cost of healthcare and the way you lower the cost of healthcare is with preventative care which was pointed out preventative care is what really lowers the cost of healthcare and we don't have enough primary care physicians and this is something that we really should be paying attention to if we want Medicare for all to be successful because guess what people who have those gold plans in the United States somehow they lucked out they work in a union that negotiated for them or they're working a you know a top 10 tech company they have these really nice healthcare plans they're literally scared that they're gonna lose the quality of service that they have if we get single pair healthcare and that fear as much as I like to say is unfounded because we can solve for that we can definitely solve for that but we're not doing anything to solve for that and I think that is something that is something good to think about that we really have to ensure that people who go into primary care that they graduate debt-free the United States you know investing in adopters education like if you go into primary care physician you would graduate debt-free we would get lots of primary care physician and the last thing I want to leave with is this is a lot of black Americans specifically black Americans but also Latino Americans they tend to not want to visit their primary care physicians if they're not of the same ethnicity and it comes from in you know a long background of distrust of of the medical system and imagine if we allowed you know going to primary care becoming a primary care physician and that was you could graduate debt-free we could encourage so many people from small towns to go into primary care and then go back to their communities and look after their communities people would love to go back to where their you know grandparents are their families live and take care of their communities and this is something that needs to be part of our healthcare solution yeah yeah well said so we're definitely not going to get to everything on the panel today but I really like I enjoy these really long like nuanced conversations I think that this is really important and it's lacking usually in political discourse like on the online life so this is great but before we go on to the next topic I do want to get to our featured content creator to give the panelists myself included a little bit of a break so this week we have a really exciting featured content creator so this is an individual that has been producing really quality content specifically as it relates to media bias using basically manufacturing consent by Noam Chomsky but I'm just going to let him explain it because I think he does it the best folks here's our featured content creator of the week called you a snake they use the snake emoji Medicare for all is crazy I just saw it with my twins they love the Trump cameo that was one of the most interesting parts of the movie my name is Spencer and I think the news sucks not indie news not indie media but corporate and mainstream media they clearly suck and with my channel I try to explicate how and why they suck and for me and what I do an important framework for that is the propaganda model laid out in manufacturing consent see there are five filters that ultimately orient mainstream news the first being ownership hey look we're at the corner of Fox Square and Fox Square Fox News which is owned by Fox Corporation let's cross the street to Rockefeller Center NBC News which is owned by Comcast and Vanguard which owns about seven percent of both next is advertising cable networks need to bring in more than a million dollars a day in advertising loss and viewership equals lower ad rates therefore stories which challenge your audience are a tantamount to burning money sources determining the credibility of which can cost time and money but official sources are already deemed credible and look at this nice press room they set up for us it's so easy black is when we punish the media this is anything from complaining on twitter to seeking the extradition of a publisher and the last is ideology whatever cultural theater of war we might be engaged in there is a unifying ideology that transcends it and will kill us all Fox and CNN may not agree on critical race theory or trans rights but if there's a telecom merger or some crazy old guys talking about getting rid of fracking or abolishing private insurance the networks will come together abolishing private health insurance those are crazy ideas and one natural outcome of these filters is the separation of victims into worthy and unworthy columns did you know that the new york times wrote a small books worth of articles on election fraud in Belarus so why does Belarus get that kind of treatment but never central or south america or why did the coup in Bolivia and the farmers strike in india mostly get ignored there are pretty concrete answers for all of these things i also do interviews book reviews and sometimes dives into the media of other countries and i would be incredibly grateful if you gave some of it a watch but thank you for your time and mike i've been watching your videos for years now i think what you do is really valuable especially promoting candidates thanks for all you do and i'll see you all in the next one well folks you can uh check out this person's channel they're just over 1000 so we want to get this person to 10 thousand subscribers it's a bit of an ambitious goal i think we can do it though let's let's support independent content creators and if you're watching on means tv you'll have to find them on youtube but if you're on youtube thankfully there will be a link in the description box i just want to remind everyone that the last day to submit your channel is september or excuse me the last day of august because the season finale of dystopian times is september 8th i believe so after that i won't i won't be doing anymore dystopian times until next year maybe i'll do something else but i'm going to shift to interviewing candidates so at least get your submission and not going to cover everyone but i want to give you the chance folks so now donna had to dip out here um she was only going to be able to stay for a little bit thank you so much to donna um and folks i just want to lighten the mood a little bit because we've talked about some really like heavy topics you know healthcare in the united states nina turner's loss but i actually have very good news for you so i know currently right now you're wondering who's going to be the next progressive champion to run for president well folks fear not because q and on congresswoman to appear at key iowa event sparking speculation of a white house run i think i found my 2024 candidate folks q and on believing representative marjorie taylor green may be gearing up for a run at the white house bloomberg news jennifer jacob's reports that green is scheduled to appear later this month at the iowa state fair which she notes is a traditional venue for politicians contemplating presidential campaigns jacob's adds that it's not get clear whether marjorie taylor green will speak at iowa state fair or just attended and she notes that the Des Moines register this year isn't organizing a soapbox which politicians in the past have used to raise their profiles for a national campaign green so far has served less than one term in the united states house of representatives where she has been removed from her committee assignments over her past calls to have house speaker nancy pelosi executed among other reasons so i mean long story short she very likely will run for president so this is the question that i want to ask the panel viable or not i have my answer but he can she win in the united states of america no shot no shot no shot maybe like she could run cause a stir and then like future like open the path for other q and honors in the future you know she could be the q and on trail blazer but uh i don't think similar how to how bernie sanders got so close but never actually became the progressive champion we wanted uh this yeah i don't think she has a chance but someone in my chat did say hell yeah margin charge and i feel like if that would be her slogan when she runs for sure margin charge no stop it sarah in the united states of america i honestly feel like your answer to this question is a gauge of the amount of trust you have in like your fellow americans is she viable yes or no sorry i'm not very like hiding my feelings that's one thing that i like stopped having to do after i can't let it rip yeah now i'm like um if you had asked me in like three years ago i would have been like no but let me tell you something not taking i have like two key points on this like not taking nutter butters seriously wound us up with um donald dj trompeau for four freaking years because no one took him seriously we're lazy about campaigning hillary was lazy about campaigning everyone was like oh it's just donald trump no way in hell and that didn't go over very well so do i think she has a chance um i don't think she doesn't have a chance but the other thing that like to keep in mind and this is so cool if you've never read like i'm just gonna plug a book i'm reading so like i'm sorry like not allowed so i'm reading culture warlords by tally labin if you have not read it it is such beautiful insight on like anti-semitism and white supremacy and in like the underbelly of these circles and like what it looks like in white supremacist circles like part of the reason donald trump was able to to sail these horrible things and be this horrible goblin um and he's able to like bridge shrolls way to the white house is because he was a white man saying it but white supremacy and misogyny go really really closely hand in hand and so having a woman try and say the same crass things violates this like white supremacist idealized perfect woman narrative in their heads so she can't get away with saying the same things and capture that same vote that got him elected so i i think she's unviable in the sense that to capture those white supremacist crowds she as a woman can't come out and just espouse all these things like and she's not like she doesn't um she's trying to say what they consider masculine things as a woman like they're not gonna that's not gonna fly in those crowds and they're the reason donald trump was elected so i don't think she'll be able to capture the base she would need so i don't think so but i also think it would be lazy and stupid to not at least pretend to take it seriously yeah yeah don't don't downplay the threat i just watched the first episode of the human support on the last twitch stream and in that first episode i covered donald trump's campaign launch and you know i i asked myself this question does donald trump have a chance should we be worried and my answer no not at all he doesn't have a so now i've learned that that he did it i've learned that last you guys donald trump has a chance the second time i do no i don't i don't actually i don't think he does i do you do the only reason that i say that is because like i um my partner's parents are like deeply deeply deep homes he was homeschooled all the way up through the church conservative he became a dirty disgusting super left socialist so he's fine but um both our kids are now totally socialist it's so wild but so he's from that community i use them as a gauge for like what's going on because they're so in the rabbit hole the amount of betrayal people feel in that community by donald trump like we don't see it because we're not in those communities like they feel the same level of betrayal that some of these very online turbo leftists feel about aoc for some reason she wasn't able to change the tides of hundreds and hundreds of year old she's not the queen of america after three years she can't change a 250 year old system that's been marginally oppressing people like her forever get around there and designed to be incremental exactly and like so that's why a lot of people i think don't realize that but they don't but like they think it's like why can't we just get everything done it's like the the systems literally there's same reason that donald trump wasn't able to undo everything that's half decent in america is the same reason why progressive struggle to get progressive policies it's literally meant to be incremental and slow at the institutional level like that's that's that's one thing i really think is an important point institutionally speaking by design like this is all like rapid change in the united states is very very rare and that's why we look to you know the 1930s like the green new deal as times of like rapid change because they're so infrequent but before we get too far down that rabbit hole i've got to ask david dole margaret green can she win i think she can win the nomination i think it also depends on on competition i hadn't thought about until sarah brought it up that the how conservatives would feel about you know a a woman saying these things as opposed to you know donald trump saying and getting away with it so i because you brought that up i think she would have a harder time i think if you know if desantis and florida ran he would have a better shot than greenwood also assuming trump doesn't run i think if trump runs i i think he gets a nomination i mean based on i mean i know we can't put too much trust in polling but if polling does seem to lean conservative so if the polling is to be believed they still side with him for the most part but yeah i think she has a shot absolutely if she ran i do have a question for sarah though why do they feel betrayed by trump what's what's the betrayal there so like the weird thing is like they think that because he's like he stopped carrying the torch of the like election fraud like the the big lie and all that stuff and and that are that like the anti-vax community has like this weird like overlap with these these people and like they feel like because he suddenly just took the covid vaccine that like he's now betraying the values that he pretended to embracing the deep state wow yeah he's part of the deep state and microchipped and if you've ever watched your like dog get microchipped did you know fact that needle would have to be to fit a freaking microchip in your body oh my god but anyway that would god digress but like so they feel betrayed by him because like they now it's like Mike Lendell the pillow guy who's like handling all of this like election fraud stuff he's kind of phased himself out and he's not really fighting as they see it so they feel this level of like betrayal that's happened and so there is like there is conservative in fighting and there is conservative drama just like there's leftist drama we just aren't in the circles to see it so I have to like gaze through their facebook unfortunately to be able to see it let me ask you guys a question since marjorie Taylor green has said a lot of anti-semitic things Jewish space lasers famously and what was the recent thing she said about the vaccine and the oh she said it was basically comparable to the Holocaust and then she had to come out and say no the Holocaust was actually worse or some some stupid she like she learned about the Holocaust for the first time ever she went to the museum she went to the Holocaust and I was like what I what I wonder is like with with Israel supporters hop off of her all together and say she's an anti-semite I would say no because the support for Israel in the United States is largely based off of evangelicals so they they don't necessarily care about Israel and so far as like they're they're worried about Jewish people they just like they view Israel as a means to an end and the the end being like you know Jewish people have to overtake Israel and that could trigger like Jesus coming back it's really like deep and it's it's very like hyper religious but I don't necessarily think that her anti-semitism surprisingly and contradictory seemingly so yeah what would count her out because you know they they they view that as well we don't really care I think there's a lot of even like anti-semitism within the evangelical community that is very you know vocally pro-Israel so I think that there's some hypocrisy they don't care about hypocrisy at all I mean no Trump was anti-semitic I mean he's made right many statements that were anti-semitic in speeches and and so they didn't care about that that yeah hypocrisy they don't care all about very yeah ultimately like it all just comes back to like they have this like oh my gosh I learned so much from like being with someone that was so deep in the church it's like it hurts my head some days but like he like they're so they're obsessed with Israel in so far as its relationship like Mike said to Jesus Christ but as far as like the as far as its relationship like the Jewish people like they don't see like they see that it's totally fine to be anti-semitic but protect the homeland of Jesus and like that's how they look at it so they they are it's it's just a mess and like they don't really care about it in the sense of the how the the Jewish people care about Israel they care about it in the sense of how like oh Jesus is homeland the second coming like the great hereafter is coming paradise is coming and it's just a total loony to his theology but like I just don't a dude who was high on mushrooms wrote a book at like hundred true and they're like it's real and I'm like I should have written a book like two weeks ago most of the people who believe in this have never tried shrooms by the way so to them it is magical they need shrooms yeah like maybe they'd be like hey this is actually all that crazy I can maybe do it and then like having and I'm just gonna be honest I'm again like not sure how real I can be like having done them I'm like people believed like if people just did these they'd turn around and look at revelations and be like oh maybe not maybe dragons aren't gonna fly through the sky in the dead of night yeah yeah that that if you watch I'll have to reach out to you Hema afterwards there's a documentary I watched on American evangelicals that even like growing up evangelical in this community there was so much that I wasn't aware of and it's it's mind blowing I'll have to see if I could find it but it's I love that because I grew up secular so religion religious fanatics fanaticism is uh very interesting dynamic that we're going to explore um if it does if you guys I don't know if you take this no offense to anyone who is religious or has faith like by all means blessed have faith whatever floats your boat the sect with the sharpest decline of membership is actually evangelicalism now so I saw because they're being silenced by the mainstream media oh that's yeah that means I saw this religiosity chart though that showed like the religiosity of all the different generations and like you've like boomers and then you'd like Gen X right here and then millennials are like down here and we drop off and then Gen Z literally just goes so Gen Z is over it and like it's just I'm really interested to see what happens next I think if I recall all poli in general like as people get older they embrace their it's like they're afraid of dying or something and they get more religious like younger generations are always less religious but somehow religion continues right like this current young generation grows up religions over and then they grow up and some of them become conservatives and some of them become religious and yeah like Nancy I had a reminder Nancy Pelosi used to be like considered the most progressive member of the house she was like a founding member of the progressive caucus like so you know she just got close to death and something changed introspection she got real estate what happened she got real estate and money yeah so on this note of like crazy people I think that's the perfect segue into our weekly dose of stupidity and it's very appropriate that we have a doctor on for this week's segment folks in a world of politics dominated by the strange the deranged the rage is out right inside insane will now will now will now will take a moment to shine a light on the craziest craziest what politics what politics has to offer this is your this is your weekly dose dose stupidity stupidity so I've been focused on vaccine hesitancy on this channel and the rhetoric for vaccine hesitancy or in anti-vaxxers is getting increasingly increasingly deranged not that you know being anti-vax in and of itself is an issue but the rhetoric is getting increasingly absurd and now there's a subset of the right that wants to characterize people who are anti-vax as like this new marginalized group and they're trying to make it seem as if this is a civil rights issue and that you know being anti-vaxx is an immutable characteristic I'm going to just shut up and let you watch there's there's going to be a lot here to unpack when it's done but we'll just try to get through the whole thing and this this man right here is going to drop a nuclear take at the end so wait for it great advice because so many pastors don't want to get involved in these kind of fights but this really is a fight for religion as well we know the left is waging war on those who want to believe in God to believe in religion let me play from you from Joe Biden just to show you how far this goes I want to be crystal clear about what's happening in the country today we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated that means if you're unvaccinated you're much more likely to one get COVID-19 two get hospitalized and three die if you get it how dare you yeah they're playing this comes straight out of the Marxist handbook right we try to set as many different I never got that yeah let's go back in the handbook we can tear it apart and rebuild it in the image you want at first in America it was it was racial tension black versus white now we're moving from vaccinated to the unvaccinated and I'll tell you it's scary because whenever you see guys saying you see leaders saying you can go to the gym if you have the vaccination you see the president talking about the problem that is the unvaccinated these things have played about before in history where you take a certain group of people and demonize them and I'll tell you what it is it's a framework for animosity between two groups at best it's coming it's a framework for a future genocide we need to stand up and speak out against this kind of stuff this isn't even FDA approved it is insanity well look pastor I appreciate you coming on the program with this strong voice because I think others will learn from you and I think others who who are pastors as well will learn from this and their strength in numbers and so I appreciate you laying it on the line for us God bless you sir we'll talk again soon okay so I just first question I want to ask David after watching that how could like why should I not like jump off of a cliff well luckily I don't think most people think that way that I mean so he's he claims here that the unvaccinated are there's going to be like a genocide of the unvaccinated they're committing it against themselves by not getting the vaccine like right that's the genocide you're and comparing it to to skin color you're not born with the vaccine you're like the way you're born black or what it's it's so it's so incredibly stupid I can't this is my biggest issue I did not I have no conservatives in my family I didn't grow up conservative I grew up like kind of religious but not like you know completely off off the deep end religious through this bullshit like I really have a hard time understanding how someone can watch that and be like that guy's exactly right you know being being black just like being unvaccinated like how do you how do you make these comparisons with the straight face I don't understand how people can do this yeah yeah Dr. Heem I've got to ask you because you are like in your this is your field so how like does your head like is it going to explode like I'm honestly speechless like I can't find the words like after after I watched that by IQ score like dropped significantly okay so first of all quick criticism of Joe Biden here I don't like that he said that we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated that just seems like you're down playing the term pandemic there's definitely a better word out there that you can use instead of pandemic of the unvaccinated so that's just the first thing right away I'm super nitpicky when it comes to vaccine rhetoric and choosing your words carefully there's a lot of problematic things not not just that this guy said that I've been hearing a lot lately for example and I got into politics because I like to watch Jimmy door but he said this recently on Joe Rogan he said it's a experimental vaccine experimental vaccine to me is one of the most harmful pieces of rhetoric when it comes to vaccine research or this vaccine why because it was experimental when they were doing human trials the human trials are now finished like this no longer an experimental vaccine we've it's been studied it's 400,000 people and enlisted for I think Pfizer phase three trial and now it's been like a year since people have been vaccinating this idea that it's experimental or another one that it's not FDA approved as though there are some testing that the FDA didn't do or like that they're still expecting to do before they pass the FDA approval the FDA approval from what I've seen the only difference between the emergency use and the actual FDA approval is like paperwork and kind of like bureaucratic things I didn't see any like specific this test wasn't done or something like this and I think these kind of things are so dangerous and a lot of people say how can I be anti-vax I got the vaccine you can be anti you can push anti-vax rhetoric without being a without without actually being anti-vax yourself it's why we have to be very responsible when it comes to this stuff and you know there's people even in healthcare that are I don't know like maybe negligent or not quite as careful as they should be when it comes to the rhetoric on this stuff I debate COVID deniers on my stream all the time it's like one of my features and it blows my mind that this kind of stuff is so widely accepted and what really really hurts me is that pro-vaccine people aren't charismatic they're not out here making YouTube videos that get shares tons and tons of shares the people who are charismatic are the COVID deniers the social media influencers who have a vested interest in in peddling this misinformation because it gets tons of fucking clicks scientists who are actually doing COVID research don't have fucking YouTube channels to come in and do this shit they maybe they should though that should be part of the the screen is on to talk think about it think about how we still rely on Bill Nye the science guy for a lot of our scientific communication and this is actually one of the shortcomings of the scientific community at like one of my PhD courses is scientific communication because the scientific community has realized that like in the last few decades we've really fucking there's a big gap between lay understanding of science and the scientists perception of what people understand like people go to you know all kinds of conferences give these crazy elaborate talks but no one's listening because they're so caught up in their own jargon and that's a push that's being done in the academic field now is like listen you don't need to be of the craziest smartest nerd in the world what you need to be able to do is convey your message to people on a stage talk to people and you know have a personality to go along with your facts and I think I hope that like we learn a lot from this pandemic and you know this is not going to be the last pandemic probably and that we can take some lessons away from this yeah Sarah how about what are your thoughts on this because I feel like even though I'm relatively desensitized to this kind of like bombastic rhetoric I still like somehow they managed to like out crazy what I thought was like the ceiling like they burst through that ceiling and I just it's really exhausting to the point where there's so much misinformation like what he was talking about it's hard to keep up right because I mean I certainly have been trying to tackle anti-vax sentiment on my channel I know David has been doing that as well it's just it's so hard because one of one of the issues with anti-vax people I've seen this firsthand is that if you show them like a human support or a David Dole video or if you show if you send them like these debates with Dr. Hemel I'm sure like obviously is prevailing in these debates it still doesn't matter because it's about trust and they're not going to trust someone who they don't know and so people in my family who are conservative who are anti-vax they didn't actually change their mind until they saw firsthand how COVID affected one of our family members and you know it's things like that so I don't I think that public health messaging is is super complex and Hemel touched on it's like the CDC had this issue with you know the mask mandate and whatnot before Delta hit the United States how to draft public health messaging that's concise and clear and doesn't drive more hysteria but Sarah what are what are your thoughts on on overall like the level of ferocity of anti-vax in the United States I feel like it's it's making me feel stupid so there's I have like so many thoughts and some of my tricks are about to be a little spicy so I'm sorry everybody I've had it we love the price I mean I say I'm sorry but am I really sorry don't be sorry so like one of the things that like this just hearing the clip like it's always these like white conservative men who are like we're on the brink of genocide it's gonna be a tool of genocide this concept of like governmental genocide is like you don't think about it in these terms but like it's so deeply rooted in the concept of white supremacy like it's not that they think there's gonna be like a genocide it's that they're so afraid of losing that inherent white privilege that they equate having to do anything responsible or having to be responsible for anything including like their own bodies and their neighbors that like they equate that with like a loss of privilege and they don't view it as like they they couch it in these like sneaky white supremacist terms like scare people into not getting the vaccine and like a lot of people really haven't done the internal work to like recognize that stuff and learn to dismantle their internalized white supremacy learn to dismantle their internalized misogyny and like you know we find it on the left too like you have anti-vaxxer leftists too and like people think they adopt this label leftist and they're like I'm good I don't have to do the work anymore but like they don't do that inner soul work of like oh my gosh like is this how is this enabling white supremacist systems in America because ultimately people of color are the ones that are dying and suffering the most because of the because of COVID so when you hear these like oh it's going to create tools for genocide they're really just talking about a loss of white privilege and a loss of whiteness but there is like a liberal question buried in here like I know we all hate the word liberal and I mean like politically liberal question here and it is worth asking about and I think it's ultimately what these people are trying to get to is like the concept of government overreach is really more what they're they're talking about but it's so couched in fear of vaccine and all this vaccine fear mongering because like people's if you read George like coffee talks about like people's conservatives fear centers are literally bigger in their brains than liberals like there are actual like biochemical differences in the brains it's so cool read George like off so you get this like these people that are like they're actually trying to ask the question about government overreach more than they're trying to talk about like the vaccines and like this is where I start to get people's like you're so scared of it being like microchip and stuff like that but like ultimately this tech bro stuff that we worship is already overreach the NSA is already overreach like if you're going to talk about like these overreaches into our health the government getting involved in vaccinations like you are walking around tagging yourself paying off every cell phone tower the government can turn on your Alexa and find your Netflix history if they want like you've all and now people are these same people are also screaming to put cameras in schools so we can watch what our kids are being taught like they're asking for more facial recognition software they've stopped talking about like the hyper militarization of the police as like a national security issue and like we've allowed ourselves to be stripped of these securities that like they're kind of they're struggling to reconcile like the the problem is actually their question of government overreach but they can't like understand that we've already allowed it to happen and this is just a version of government overreach that's creating public good because at the end of the day like forcing people to get vaccinated if we're being honest really isn't even about the unvaccinated people getting vaccinated it's about the healthcare workers that have to be manning those beds around the clock that be doing that work nurses are quitting left and right we're using healthcare you should see how low the morale in the hospital has been it's entire pandemic because we used to look at each other in the hallways and smile or you know a quick chat now everyone's masked up everyone's working crazy hours we're social distancing in our offices so the morale has been brutal and and like yeah it's it's been a it's been very taxing on on I mean and listen I don't even work in the COVID I'm I do research so like I can only imagine if someone has to wear the face shield the mask the everything for that you know endless hours it's it's 15 hour days and like it's and we're losing healthcare staff left and right and like and people didn't understand the beginning either like because they didn't literally see people dying in the streets of their city they didn't understand the hospitals were overwhelmed and the the reason we were masking and quarantining wasn't because people were like collapsing it wasn't like the stand where people are coughing themselves to death and then they're dying in the streets if that they're dying in the hallways of these hospitals but where to removed from that so we didn't see it and the healthcare staff were burning out and frying and that's why it was so hard for people to make that decision and start trying to pretend it was about government overreach but like the the right is so good at fear messaging like he might love that you're talking about like healthcare messaging and like really getting in there as scientists because I as much as I love my science my friends that do like science work I'm like I love you you should never speak in front of a crowd you have like the speaking energy of like a piece of toast and I love some people I know events but like it's not just the energy too it's also like the some of the concepts are really difficult to explain if you haven't actually thought about how you would explain it to like a fourth grader or something like that you know what I mean yeah like if I come out here I'm like yeah you need to have the mRNA be translated and then you need the spike protein and antigens like people are just like in one year out the other year right I want to give you guys in my recent COVID debates I've been using this example and I like it a lot and I'll hand this over to you guys you can use it in your future COVID discussions I tell people you don't trust the government on this COVID stuff right they're like yeah I'