How Democrats Abandoned the Working Class with More Perfect Union's John Russell

(soft piano music) Lemonade. - Thanks for listening to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know. Listen to and follow, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know, add free on Amazon Music, or just ask Alexa. Alexa, play the podcast, Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. Also, with Amazon Music Unlimited, you can now listen to your favorite music, podcasts, and audio books, all in the Amazon Music app. Listen to Hussam Minhaj Doesn't Know on Amazon Music. - Imagine setting your makeup, then forgetting it's even theirs. Meet new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. Gel to mist technology locks in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day comfy grip. No tightness, no stickiness, no residue. Just plump, dewy, hydrated skin that still feels like your skin. Try new groupie setting mist from Mavily New York. - Maybe it's Mavily. - Folks, it's midterm season, and there is one target audience that Democrats are desperately trying to pander to. I'm not talking about Subaru moderates, granola, NPR whites, or Cupertino lizard people. I'm talking about the working class. - The working class, the working class. - In the working class, neighborhoods, I represent. - Regular working class, folks. - What is he done for the working class? - So who are the working class? And why are Democrats so thirsty to prove that they are the true party of working class Americans? - Now some terms show up in political discourse gradually, like neoliberalism or polyamory. But working class had a very specific moment it entered the mainstream. 135 AM Eastern Standard Time on November 9th, 2016. - Some big news here, Megan, the huge news, actually, huge, huge. - The AP now projecting that Donald Trump has won the state of Pennsylvania. - That is the race, frankly. - It's been almost 10 years since Trump broke through the blue wall, winning Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, in liberal suddenly remembered that everyone can vote. And it's not just a capital one rewards perk. For months, the media fanned out across rural America to study working class Trump voters like guerrillas and captivity. Like small business owner, want banana? Me, solid dad, O'Brien, me, friend. Reading Hilbilly Elegy became doing the work. That book actually shot back to number one a week after Trump's inauguration. Liberal guilt made JD Vance so famous that depending on how bad Katari engineering is, this guy might be president soon. - The man and woman who raised me. Ma'am on papal said we're for Democrats because Democrats are for working people. I don't think that's true anymore, my friends. - Now, Krifter Huckleberry Finn is getting at something very real here. Since 2016, there's been a lot of debate around what the working class even needs. But it used to be very simple. Working class people got a paycheck. They had a boss, they were probably in a union and they almost definitely voted Democrat. Ever since FDR and the New Deal back in the 1930s, workers were a core part of Democrats's identity as a party. In 1935, FDR signed the Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining. Republicans at the time tried to smear it as socialist, but Dems didn't give a fuck. They passed Social Security later that year and were like, "Yeah, Social Security, Social." We put it right in the name, bro, "Come at us." In 1938, Democrats created the minimum wage in the 40-hour work week. And in 1965, they started Medicare. This was a party unafraid to fight on the side of workers and against capital. And it made states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, which were built on manufacturing and agriculture, Democratic strongholds, places that Democrats could count on. Maybe even take for granted. I mean, why would Hillary even need to visit Wisconsin? Now, I know what you're thinking, really. Husband, you're gonna relitigate 2016 all over again. I'll be honest with you, I feel like relitigating 2016 is kind of hack as a concept. So what I'm gonna do is relitigate the 1990s. It was Hillary Clinton's husband, jazz icon Bill Clinton, who pushed Democrats towards more business-friendly practices and away from labor. Bill Clinton's 1992 platform was silent on antitrust and monopoly power, which had been a party plank for Democrats for over a hundred years. In the next year, he signed NAFTA, which enshrined into law that investor rights would get priority over labor rights. This was all happening as inequality was getting worse in leaving the working class behind, which was totally understood at the time by the people inside the Clinton administration. In fact, this is Clinton's labor secretary, Robert Reich, speaking in 1994, just a year after NAFTA was signed. - My friends, we are on the way to becoming a two-tiered society. Composed of a few winners at a larger group of Americans left behind, whose anger and whose disillusionment is easily manipulated. Today, the targets of those raids, that rage are immigrants. And welfare mothers. And government officials. And gays. And an ill-defined counterculture. But as the middle class continues to erode, who will be the targets tomorrow? - Don't worry, Rob, it's still the same people. But Clinton didn't just stop at NAFTA. In 1996, he signed the Welfare Reform Act, ending cash assistance for millions of people in poverty, and then bragged about it in campaign ads. - He signed tough welfare reform, work requirements, time limits, forced teenage mothers to stay in school or lose benefits. - Yeah, Bill, I'm sick of these welfare queens, not finishing the great Gatsby. Here's what's crazy about that ad. Those aren't even black teenagers. Do you know how Republican you have to be to go after white teen moms? Now once Bill was done handcuffing the working class, he unleashed the investor class, repealing Glass-Steagall and passing the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which basically turned Wall Street into a giant casino. Now, there's a reason people look back fondly on the '90s. This actually worked for a while. There were budget surpluses, economic growth, soared, millions of jobs were created, housing prices went up and up and up. What could possibly go wrong? Believe in brothers, a 158 year old firm filed for bankruptcy. The house passes a sprawling $700 billion government rescue of the financial industry. 2.6 million jobs were cut from the economy last year. That's the greatest decline since 1945. - Why were we bailed out? - That live grenade of financial deregulation that Bill Clinton left in the economy, it all blew up in 2008, right when I was graduating college. And thanks to the Week in Social Safety Net, further Week in by George Bush, millions of people were pushed into poverty. And by the time Barack Obama came along, things were starting to get a little awkward. Even though anger at Wall Street was spiking, it was still an important source of funding for the Democratic Party. Now, Obama at least gestured towards fighting on behalf of the working class. - But let's be clear who Senator McCain's fighting for. He's not fighting for Joe the plumber. He's fighting for Joe, the hedge fund manager. But on Obama's watch, no bankers went to jail and any quality kept skyrocketing as union membership continued to fall. And when all that hope he sold didn't come through, it curdled into cynicism. Working class people kept going into the voting booths, pulling the lever in nothing changed. In fact, a 2014 study of policy outcomes over 20 years found that economic elites have substantial independent impacts on US government policy while average citizens have little or no independent influence. It was basically a math proof that the 1% ruled in the 99% drooled. So unless your dad works for Blackstone or BlackRock, you're fucked. So it's no coincidence that two years later in 2016, the two most popular presidential candidates were people who could credibly claim that they weren't in Wall Street's pockets and would fight for the working class. - Special interests, lobbyists, donors, they make large contributions to politicians and they have total control over those politicians. I don't want anybody to control me, but the people right out there. - We need a political revolution where millions of people stand up and say loudly and clearly that our government belongs to all of us and not just a handful of wealthy campaign contributors. - Of course, we all know what happened next. The Democratic Party backed Hillary Clinton whose campaign followed the usual playbook ignoring working class voters and focusing on suburban moderates. That is not a conspiracy theory, okay? Chuck Schumer literally said it out loud three months before the election. - For every blue collar Democrat, we will lose in Western PA. We will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. - 2016 was the year the suburban strategy stopped working. It was the Democrats' worst turnout for union members in rural voters since Walter Mondale in 1984. So that brings us to today, 10 years after 2016 and the Democrats still have not figured out how to win back all those working class people that they lost. Now, I've heard the ideas. We should run the SA candidates. - Great. - We should shut off about trans rights. It's not great. And we need a Joe Rogan of the left. What the fuck does that even mean? But it's clear that there are millions of Americans who still feel politically homeless. A recent poll showed that 43% of Americans are not happy with either party. Honestly, I thought that'd never be higher. The way this is always framed by the media is a blue versus red problem. The country has never been more divided. We've never been more divided. Our politics has never been more divided. Our country has never been more divided. Our country's never been more divided than this today. This country has never been more divided. But there are ways in which the working class is very united. They are united in hating the billionaire psychos, running the economy. They are united in their opposition to the Scrooge McDuck Corruption in Washington. And now we're seeing the rise of maybe the most energetic bipartisan working class coalition that we have seen in a generation. We're all saying in unison, fuck AI data centers. The backlash against AI data centers is growing with protests from coast to coast in dozens of states today. The issue uniting many Americans across the political divide. We don't want this. It is not going to benefit us in any way. We are not going to pay double the amount of our utility bills. Do you understand that? We don't get anything for it. Other than we're losing land, we're losing water, we're losing air quality. What are you protecting? To talk about this more, I reached out to a media outlet whose mission statement is building power for the working class. Since 2021, more perfect union has been doing on-the-ground reporting, focusing on labor unions, inequality, and corporate power. And maybe no other media outlet out there right now is doing more reporting on the backlash to AI data centers. So I sat down with one of their reporters, John Russell, a West Virginia native, someone who has spent years having real conversations with working class voters, trying to genuinely connect with them in good faith. We talked about the bipartisan coalition forming against Big Tech. It's a mask off moment where people can see what side you really are on. How he connects with people who maybe don't share his politics. If they know you're coming from a genuine place, you're not trying to hide something, you're being upfront about who you are, that can kind of set the tone for a conversation. And as someone from Appalachia, I got his take on the vice president. What is your take on JD Vance? No. Trash. Trash. I mean, what's everyone's problem with JD Vance? Other than all the stuff he says, and does, and is, and of course, his face. West Virginia is one of those states that your hand is a map of it. And it is a middle finger, and it's, it's, it's perfect. So this, literally, this is West Virginia, Eastern Panhandle. You got Maryland down here. Yeah. You have Morgan Towne. So Wheeling's right here. This is Ohio. I grew up here, but it's like Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, all these states, like this area is where, like, generations of my family's strong. The cuts for us there is this place called the pits. They want to currently build a three gigawatt data center on the pits. Yeah. What the pits is is thousands of acres of absentee land, like in the hills, that for decades, like an outlaw dirt bike culture has taken over. Oh, shit. East of the Mississippi, if you want to go crazy off-roading, look this up on the internet. You go to the pits outside of Wellsville, Ohio. And it's like there are no rules. Nobody knows who knows who owns the land. It's like a dirt bike gang has taken us out. So X Games meets the lost boys from Peter Pan. And I'm seeing this like, you know, data centers are uniting left and right. Yes. In crazy ways. Yes. And I'm watching, like everybody I grew up with in high school who I saw, like, send a dirt bike off a cliff, like organizing petitions against data centers and there's something to work with you. Yeah. Totally. High school Johnny Knoxville. Yeah. I get this. Out of here, dude. That would dismantle it. Okay. One of the things that I love about the videos that you do for more perfect union is you actually go out into the field and you do practical reporting. You are not a cable news pundit sitting on a round table, basically arguing with someone before commercial break. Yeah. I want to chat with you. Let's break down a few words that get thrown around in media circles oftentimes. Let's start with rural America. If you're living in rural America, I think one of the things it's defined by, regardless of where you go, is extraction. Like if you are in the middle of the country, like large scale monoculture, agriculture, where monopolies are owning all the inputs, that's kind of the economy that you deal with. If you're in the mountains of West Virginia, it's been the extractive industry of coal. That's rural. If it takes a while to drive to go get groceries, rural, there's all of these indicators that fall on a spectrum from the city center to the suburbs to the excerpts to where it takes a while to get to Walmart. But I would say the extraction economy is a major theme in the rural coverage that I do. That always comes paired with, I think of the coverage we did of West Virginia data centers, like they are such a push to put these things in communities that have already had most of their wealth taken out of there. Yeah. They're used to it. And so the next way that this wealth extraction is something like data centers, and I think that's a uniting thing. For the people in my audience who perhaps have family members that voted for Donald Trump and see these people as irredeemable, in your reporting, what would you like them to know? I think the way that we consume, the way we talk to our family members, first of all, check where you're coming from because if you're just trying to defend a political party, I think you got to go deeper than that to rescue people who are a little too far gone. You have to get back to shared values. And there are a lot of people in Trump country that share the value of wanting to hold it. They wanted to hold the Epstein Class accountable, that was the whole thing with their base, right? You can get in there and relate on that thing. But if you're just trying to come in and say your party's bad and my party's good, they're prepared for that. And you got to go on values. I mean, speaking of values, naturally, you lean a little bit more left. How do you unlock people who have more conservative positions than you? Is it the mullet doing the worst because it's the most like what's it is? Like a little bit of this. No, you're clearly affable. You genuinely come from a play security, but what did you find was the way that you connected with people that don't vote like you or perhaps share the same values that you do? Well, it does help to look like that. But I did find growing up where I did before I got hired at more profiting and I worked at a dive bar, shout out to Johnny's bar, and that's where I learned something to help me in my work all the time, which is, I just, I wear my politics on my sleeve and I don't try to hide that with people. And I think that if they know you're coming from a genuine place, you're not trying to hide something. You're being upfront about who you are. That can kind of set the tone for a conversation. And that's what I always did in Johnny's bar, like before I got hired at more profiting and I was making tick talks about like, you know, we should all join together as people in the same boat here and maybe take back some of our power. I talk left-wing politics in my small town bar with people mostly whose idea of a leftist is the actual devil. Was there a moment that inspired you to start making those videos? Like what, you know, not to like heroes journey this, but what was the inciting incident? What was the moment that made you go like, oh, I actually, I want to go to the cesspool that is social media, like talk about politics and perhaps reach out to people that feel unheard. And I've always been angry about how this billionaire-owned media lied to the people I grew up with. And I've always believed in the possibility of them joining together with other people who are in the same boat so that we can end some of this suck that we're currently in. And I was like, there's got to be a way to do this. And everyone's on their phones, so why don't we pump out some stuff and see what happens, you know, maybe suggest, hey, we should all get together on this. So this idea of joining together, right? People talk about coalitions all the time. It's something that you've really focused on. A thing that gets talked about in lefty politics is the idea of building coalitions around the working class. How would you define working class? Yeah. Anybody who doesn't make their money from owning stocks, anybody who makes their money from selling labor, anybody who, like if you can't call Howard Lutnik, you're working class. Got it. The thing that you say in public moves markets or start wars, starts wars, you know, then you might not be working class. You know, this is the first time I've actually really heard this articulated well this way. You're basically talking about labor that perhaps works for companies. You could work at a grocery store. You could work at a variety of different places. but if you are not part of the equities class. - Yeah. You're part of the working class to me to me. Yeah, if you if you get your money by selling your labor It most of your money by selling your labor to me. You're working class and I think that doesn't strike people because we're the the assumption is like a white guy in a heart hat Yeah, you know a doctor and a lawyer, you know, we kind of separate that in the public, but I don't think we should Like dentist. Yeah working class man and like dude who bags groceries at Safeway where I used to work Yeah, it was fired which is some fucked up shit. You gotta tell me. I thought it was a pretty good employee I didn't want to work there, but I did worked I'm on your side. I thought I did I thought I was decent I didn't want to do it safe. I was I was Accuracy clerk, okay, which is I bag groceries. Yeah And yeah, essential work. Yeah essential working shout out to my boy who got me the position I still owe you a huge thank you shout out to Chris. Thank you for getting me that job Way to go Chris. I fucked it up It wasn't and you vouched for me and I fucked it up and I still live with that but me and Chris our boys Let me let me get us back on track So so are you're basically saying Hey my cousin who's a dentist. Yeah, and plumber. There's a connection here Yeah, and I think we need to update that now because you look at the scale of wealth in America and we have a trillionaire We have a trillionaire. We have Close to a thousand people with a billion dollars, you know for for me I'm always trying to get people to think about the difference between a million and a billion. Yeah A million seconds is 11 days a billion seconds is 32 years holy shit a trillion seconds is 32 thousand years We have a trillionaire man, and you think like being a dentist is closer to being the guy with a trillion dollars and it is a working class now It's like the to me in America right now with wealth inequality as bad as it is you're all working class now It's not to like flatten the difference between a lawyer and Someone bagging groceries. There are differences there, but for the purposes of fixing our problems Which I view as mostly being caused by people with too much money and power making all the decisions? We are all working class politicians always use this phrase. We want good working class jobs Yeah, and and they always phrase it like People love their jobs. Yeah, I think most jobs suck. Yeah, I've done food service. I've done I've worked at grocery stores I've worked at office max selling printers all my jobs that I've had Outside of comedy pretty much suck. There's common comedy comedy. I like I mean I'm I'm lucky enough to do what I'm passionate about. Yes, okay I feel that way too, but every but every other job that I had fucking sucks I was a stump grinder. Oh shit. Yeah, yeah, that takes the cake. I don't even know what that is You have like a giant diesel machine, and then you blast a tree stump into dust seven years Why do you have to do that though? I was good money. No, but people wanted that like there's like that stump needs to go Be surprised that the amount of stumps in America. So like here's the thing and like Are you a homeowner? I have a home. Yes, okay a yard of any kind. We have a yard. We have a front yard I don't know the situation in New York City, but like you're owning a yard out there if you're renting a yard sure You'll end up with a tree stump in your yard, and then people will go try to like set it on fire drill holes And they're like dig it out. There's no better way to get it out than then blasting it out with a diesel machine and someone like me You know, I've got a children must have loved you like my son. What are you just described? He's six. It's very Bob the bill Yeah, he would have fucking loved it. Yeah Most of my demographic is just you know children and thralled by machines. Got you To get us back on point what I'm saying is is We don't need to romanticize jobs per se Yeah, but what I think we need to focus on is Common human dignity. Yeah, and the way people are compensated for their labor gives them the dignity to provide for their families Pay for health care send their children to school totally if a loved one gets sick take care of them Get the bag take care of grandma be able to look out for my mom and dad my sister if someone's in a bind I can help them I can see that on the bumper sticker right now like get the bag. Yeah, so I get to grandma like a chill Yeah, yeah, be able to help my sister out of something bad happen back. Yeah, yes grandma chill one of the great things about my job right now As I get to kind of drop into locations and see how things are going there We did a piece in Italy about work our own cooperatives because not only do I think we should stop like romanticizing jobs But we should think about how jobs are organized because we're used to one way here in America where most of them suck. Yes We'll still like in Italy. So we did a story where like a fifth of the economy in this region of Italy and Northern Italy Comes from companies that are owned by the people who work there This and I remember we were standing on the floor. Wait. How does that work? Okay, so the workers own the company they can hire and fire their boss and Like wait, is this like the way the the green Bay Packers are owned by this? Yes, I never understood this concept. Yes, okay, so break this down for me So now I can't I can't see I don't know the details of the Packers, but basically a cooperative, right? This is a company like any company you would work for but instead of being owned by one guy and shareholders in a board Okay, the workers are the shareholders the board and they make the decisions to run the company you can hire Somebody to be CEO and you can also fire them and it was mind blowing to me to go over as an American to Italy Stand on the floor of a factory where 2,000 people worked just like the ones that closed down After NAFTA in the Ohio Valley where I'm from they got a 2,000 person factory It's doing manufacturing. It's owned by the workers and I'm standing there with the boss of the company and Three workers and I asked the workers What would you do if your boss made 300 times more than you make and they were like we would fire him the workers are highly paid They work in manufacturing. They control who runs the company. They make the products and then they go sip a espresso at 4 p.m And be reasonable. Yeah, there are different ways to do job. What's the catch here? Like the way you describe? I was like, no, no, there's a catch though. What's the catch? There's there's you know, nothing's perfect Okay, how long do you have to work there to be able to vote or the moment day one you're you're essentially on the quote-unquote board So this is this would be a plug to watch the video because we had a worker who had just joined all the way up to somebody who'd been there a long time First of all, you have far less turnover. You have far more expertise Sure, yeah, you've been incentivized staying there. Yeah, and there's a clear path from the guy we were talking to is 20 years old To spend a short amount of time and become you know a worker owner Would you say kind of the core tenets of the videos that you work on for more perfect union? Are they essentially about labor solidarity? Yeah, it's about strength and numbers. It's about solidarity. It's about different ways to organize The economy and work. One of the things I hear in media reporting all the time is here is how the Democratic Party abandoned the working class. Yeah What does that mean? Yeah, well that makes me think of Elliot County we did a piece. Yes for more perfect union Yes, this was this was the Emmy award-winning piece that you made about it Yeah, we did we won two Emmys and shout out I should say shout out to the whole team at more perfect union like anybody any video that I'm on There's a whole team behind that Josh Herschfeld-Crow and Meg Herschlein Fast fast Josh Miller Lewis will get down the whole list and take too long, but Elliot County is the only county in America. This is Eastern Kentucky Only county in America that voted 144 years in a row for Democrats before flipping to Trump by one of the largest margins talk about fumbling in the bag there They fumble the bag 144 years. You're running it up and then to just and then to flip your entire base But here's they to your question. I would say the Democratic Party was responsible for fumbling that bag because What we found there of course a lot of people who voted for Democrats forever and then flipped to Trump But you can trace through the history of the Democratic Party. It used to be very much FDR And then it switched to you know, Bill Clinton and corporate donors and And the Democratic Party that we know today that we see In a fight with these primaries in a real contest for the direction, you know like someone like Zera Mamdani or more of what we've been used to It is the FDR labor party that kept places like rural Kentucky voting for it forever because they knew the deal You vote for Democrats because they're for the working man, but eventually they Lost those roots and and we suffered a pretty large Consequence for that of people in your reporting what specifically did the Democratic Party do To betray the working class that made people say fuck it. I'm changing my vote. Yeah Well, you know, I target the Democratic Party a lot, but I this really counts for both parties and our politics on the whole sure But they just got you know, we over the course of getting Thousands of billionaires now both of our parties have just switched to exclusive exclusively serving their agenda I think about this um Report that came out more than a decade ago from Princeton, I think Where it's like you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows their conclusion of this report was that The American people have little to no control over the Policies passed by either party or either administration So I think you can say about the Republicans that they've always been for Corporate control and for the agenda of really large money But for the long time you could say that less about the Democrats and then they started you know going for NAFTA and free trade and in the Arab citizens united they're relying on corporate donations too much and you get let that happen for years. Well aside from corporate donations is stupidity also a part of it because there's this clip of Chuck Schumer from 2016 where he's talking about the Democratic Party's sort of national strategy and I think about this at least twice a week. Let's take a look. For every blue collar Democrat we will lose in Western PA. We will pick up two, three moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin. This is my sleep paralysis demon. That's actually on a loop in my nightmares. Oh God. I've watched it many times. That's your Freddie Krueger. Yeah it is. Oh God. It is. Yeah I wake up in a cold sweat every night as Chuck Schumer just somehow goes out. Yeah I think right there you can see the strategy of trying to go after suburban wine moms and such and I think that is because we they really lost their roots. Right. And they're trying to reconstruct a base that goes well and doesn't offend corporate donors. So they say like let's try to hunt for that base in the suburbs of all these cities because those people will kind of get on a cultural agenda that doesn't offend our donors. All these major corporations can slap a pride flag onto a pretty terrible agenda but not really be there to stand up for policies that represent people. And unfortunately I think there hasn't been a change from that strategy. I mean Schumer still leads the party. This is the thing I cannot understand. How is that possible? There's no gravity. There's no consequences. Kolkata Chai has brand new tea bags. It is so easy. I literally don't have to think about it. Hot water? Tea bag? Mug? Done so. Okay but what do I think about now? But real talk, what is a microwave? Actually. Sometimes it dings, it spins, but what is making the food hot? Screw you countertop Chernobyl. Hard pass. Okay. Just enjoy this moment. For one second without, ooh hello fridge. Oh my chilly little frenemy. I tolerate you but I do not trust you. Do you remove heat? Or do you add coal? Ew. I'm getting coal just thinking about it. You know why should make some chai to warm up? Stupid person. You're already making chai. But I forgot about it because these tea bags are literally doing all the work. Wait, is it a tea bag or a chai bag or a chai tea? Nope. No, no, no. Not going there. Just add hot water, milk and sweetener of your choice. Honestly. It's the best chai in the game. I should go tell someone. Something very unique has happened over the past 30 years where a disproportionate amount of power in capital has been allocated to two different things and I call it more broadly tech in Wall Street. The amount of sort of both political capital and capital capital, those two buckets have, there is a particular LinkedIn class that is connected to both tech in Wall Street. And now tech is Wall Street. Yes. Look at the, you know, seven companies that are driving the S&P 500 growth and it's all these. It's Silicon Valley now. Correct. It goes up in the areas where I grew up with the physical infrastructure of data centers. And you know, right now, that was one vision of putting together a political coalition that we know fails now. Yes. But when you have Wall Street and tech building out these data centers in all of the places where the Democrats lost, I am seeing a coalition of people coming together that is right and left saying no to big tech, no to flock come cameras. And if the Democrats don't pay attention to that and realize that there is a coalition right there in the places you have lost, but you got to take up, you got to take a stand against a corporate donation against corporate donors against tech. It's right there for the taking. That is the strange vent diagram that I have seen where both left and right, it can be hardcore red, hardcore blue, both sides are equally like fuck AI data centers. Based on your reporting, what is that? What is this huge middle finger to these, essentially, these big ass server racks that suck up all this water? There's no other issue where the mask has been completely off and the agenda of these companies is totally visible. Give another example for coverage with more perfect union. We go to cover a data center proposal going into Mingo County, West Virginia, Mingo and Logan County. Yes. These are the co-fields. They are used to big companies coming in, taking all the wealth and leaving a mess. In the process of shooting that piece, we spoke to a woman in a minivan pulled over on the side of the road with a big five gallon jug, getting water out of a pipe, coming out of a mountain, and that is the only drinking water, she comes there three times a week to get drinking water for her family. That's how she gets drinking water in the co-fields of West Virginia. They want to stick a data center there and say, "Hey, you go get your water out of a mountain, we're going to give all the clean water that you've been denied for decades to a data center." It's a mask off moment where people can see what side you really are on. I also think it's the first time we've seen technology be presented in such a way where people are like, "No, I get how AI makes you rich. How the fuck does this make me rich?" Yeah. Think about it, man, it's like, you know, I see people like, "Oh, well, this is how companies operate." Right. They come to areas where they already made a mess where people are desperate for jobs and a lot of people will say, "Hey, we need these jobs." But AI data centers are literally a job-killing supercomputer. Totally. That's what it does. Yeah. That's how they sell it on Wall Street. And people know this. There's no jobs in there, man. There's things. So if you're a grocery store worker, you work at a fast food company. You, you know, even do clerical work at your local school or dentist's office. Here's my question. And you're reporting, right? You're speaking with all these Trump voters. But if you remember the inauguration, essentially the fang stocks were right behind it. Right there. And you would think the way Donald Trump positioned himself, it would be like, "Cowboy hat, no shade do you mullet, dude." Like, you don't have like, like, he would have signaled like, "Hey, here you are." Yeah. You always say to him behind me, like, "I'm America's team." But he basically had the top 10 companies in the S&P5, like Elon Musk is a little tweaking out on ketamine. Sure. Zuckerberg, thousand-yard stare. But just weird things. But the head of Apple. The head of Amazon. Do you know what I'm saying? Ten Apple. Ten Apple. Ten Apple. But my, so my question is, is that when, when you talk to the people that voted for Donald Trump and they watched the inauguration, that scene signaled something to me. What did that scene signal to them in your reporting? Well, that's the thing that a lot of people assume, a lot of people assume that doesn't land with Trump voters. It absolutely does. But for it to mean anything politically, you have to have a political movement that's pointing that out. That says, "There they are on his side, and here I am on your side." Yeah. Is it a Democratic party doing that? Or are they kind of trying to hold on to this coalition that's now lost umpteen elections? And avoiding taking a stand against the people who are standing behind Donald Trump, I think you have to draw it in a line in the stand. But thankfully, now we've seen a movement of that happening. I mean, you have Zora Mondotti winning in New York City, but it's not only that, but now we see candidates from that model succeeding everywhere, Michigan, you know, Colorado. And I think that can succeed everywhere. And you know, something that's been less examined is the fact that there are little blue cities all over red states, where you can make government deliver for people, where you can take back some of the public sphere and say, "You can expect excellent public services." And we're also going to take a stand against data centers and flat cameras coming into town. And I think that would sweep Huntington, West Virginia, Wheeling, West Virginia, Little Towns, all across this country. And you know, that's something I haven't seen a wave of it happening, but I think it's possible. So I got a question for you. I don't have the answer to it, but there's two states that like our suit, hey, look, it joined me, man. Yeah. Hopefully it's, well, there's two states that I don't fully get, but I'd love your analysis on. If you look at two states, there's North Carolina and there's Kentucky. Those are two states where the governor will be Democrat, but the state voted for Donald Trump. Yeah. What do you think's happening there? Yeah. I can relate that back to covering Elliott County and Kentucky because Andy Bashir, at the same time that Elliott County voted, that's 144 years for Democrats than Donald Trump. Same time they voted for Donald Trump, they also voted for Andy Bashir. That Kentucky governor Andy Bashir, a Democrat, has been reelected. This is a very significant win for Democrats Bashir who ran as a defender of abortion rights in a largely Republican Commonwealth, Kentucky, is defeating Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron. Now, some people will point up Bashir and say, that's the way to go. That's the way to win. But I think it's important to also realize that Bashir is losing those counties just at a slower pace. So he's being better than other Democrats on this. But to really start winning those back, I think it comes down to taking a clear stand for working people on an agenda that delivers and holding the Corporate Bad Actors accountable. Thankfully, that's going to be a lot easier to do because now you have this data center push going everywhere. It's an easy stand to take. So I want to get to you do this great piece with Bernie Sanders, where you actually took in. And you had to meet different Trump voters. But here's the thing that I can't understand. I totally get, hey, the Democrats have abandoned us. But the thing that I don't get is like, this guy, like billionaire Scrooge McDuck, I'm only out for myself, Donald J. Trump. That's the guy. Because if you think about what even he's doing, cutting Medicare, cutting Medicaid, how is that in interest of workers? Yeah. And that's also something that people get very angry about. You know, I run into Trump voters all the time who will tell me like, it's not right to cut our Medicaid down here. They get very angry about these things like disability and Medicaid, social security, things that people rely on. They know when those things get cut and they're very angry about it. But you have to have somebody standing up on that. The other thing is it goes back to the media takeover. We can sit here and look at Donald Trump and say, I can't believe you'd be voting for this guy. But you have to be in the media bubble that a lot of people are to realize they're just overwhelming it with culture war issues to keep people divided. And that's what you have to break through in order to make any kind of change. And I know you've spent a lot of time in the Fox media bubble. Have you like turned on Fox News and watched it lately? I can't, bro. Yeah, I can't. It's crazy. No, but I want to focus on what you were talking about, which is, there are these moments of unity that people aren't focusing on. And I want to focus on one moment from your Elliott County interviews that you were doing. This is a video where you're talking to a Trump voter about immigration. Let's take a look. When it's people coming across the border versus say billionaires or something like that, who's got the most influence over the problems that you think we're facing as a country. Millionaires. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think you have more in common with migrant from Mexico or Donald J? Great question. A migrant from Mexico. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because we're out here working to survive to feed our family. So she straight up sounds like Bernie Sanders. Yeah. How common do you think this perspective is amongst the Trump voters that you've interviewed? I see it all the time. And that was Nea Maya Stark behind the camera who asked that question and it was key, but I see that all the time. Also in Elliott County, there's a Mexican restaurant in town. And it is 99% white in that county. People love the Mexican restaurant. One of the things I'll do is, you know, I ask in that piece, what's the top issue for you? People say the border. We're in Kentucky. Thousands of miles away from the border. And that's only been a priority for like two years. But if you go and say, okay, the border is a problem. Why don't we start by kicking out? The guy runs the Mexican restaurant in town. The answer you always get is no, no, no, not that guy. He's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking about everybody else who's doing crime and fraud and all of this. But those are boogie men that are made up by the media that are keeping those people voting in a way that serves the folks who own the media that's filling their head with lies. Yeah. I mean, so this happens all the time. And I've, I've had this conversation with people all the time as well. When I had to go do field pieces for the Daily Show, cover different conventions. But I've told people this before and sometimes there's an overlap and sometimes there's two different things, which is there's ignorant people and then there's like bigots and racists. Yeah. Sometimes there's both. Yeah. Sometimes they're both ignorant and they're bigoted. But sometimes it's just an ignorance thing. Yes. I think that I think that's the biggest bucket there is ignorance. But that's something that you can, you can unwind ignorance. It's not going to be easy. So one time I went to the Republic of National Convention. This is when the Muslim ban was happening. Okay. This was in the zeitgeist. Yes. So I, so I did this field piece. It was basically, it was called like Hassan's Goodbye Tour. So I basically went to the delegates from every state. And I'm like, Hey, you're the delegate from Montana. Tell me what big sky country is like. And he's like, big sky country is great. You should go to Yellowstone Park. And I'm like, well, I'd love to go to Yellowstone. I can't. Why? You know, the guy you're voting for wants to ban Muslims from the country. And then he was like, Hassan's Goodbye Tour, right? And then I like, I hug them. I'm like, goodbye from Montana or whatever. So that's the joy that I get right now. That was the joke. I met this very lovely lady. We have the tape. We could play the tape. But she was like, that's not going to happen. Donald Trump's not going to do that to you. You're one of the good ones. And I was like, you're one of the good ones too. And we hugged. But that is a part of my larger point, which is there's there's a group of people that I feel there's a chasm in between these two things. There is this MS 13 Taliban, Boogie Man that they see in the media. And then there's their day to day neighbor. There is their Latino colleague at work. There's the Muslim dentists that that works in town. There's the, you know, Bengali cardiologists that they are getting a hard example with. But let me ask you this, there is this narrative within media circles that the Republican Party in the current MAGA movement is a white Christian nationalism movement. And all the states that you go to, do you see them as part of this movement? Or is it not about that for them? There, it's a big country. I'm sure there are parts where it's like anything else. There are parts for which that is true. But that's not my experience on the whole. One of the things that I, you know, think is so interesting to that population of people. I try, you know, I try to have revealing conversations with Republican voters. And I try to point out that, hey, you might be rooting for what ICE is doing right now. But be careful because you might find out that this standing force is also for you later on down the line. And I think how do you make that connection, though? So right now, you have NSPM 7, you have Rubio going out there and putting people's name on a list. And what they're doing is saying anybody who does these things, they're part of the far left that we have to root out. Who's a threat to America, which is so audience knows what is NSPM 7? It's a national presidential security memorandum 7. Okay, because the way you said it so fast, it was like, I'm just, I was like, he just said a K-pop group. Yeah, not a long that I don't know, but I don't know. So I just want to be like, because I didn't know, yeah, I didn't know Huntricks for a long time. And then my daughter was like, you don't know who Huntricks is. And I was like, I'll fuck. I have no reason that it is. Yeah. K-pop demon hunters, movie on Netflix. If you have children or daughters, they're super into it. And this is much more sinister and more serious. Yeah, no, I don't know. Hey, they're fighting demons just so you know, okay, super fucked up to ICE and some of the demons that they're fighting. But all the demons aren't bad. Anyways, I'm going on one of my tangents again, back to you. NSPM 7 is what? This is a presidential memorandum that directs the full weight of law enforcement in the United States towards targets for enforcement. And they list out some of those targets. And they all have that kind of under the umbrella of this far left threat. Attorney General Pam Bondy's ordered the FBI to compile a list of what the Justice Department is calling domestic terrorist organizations. And one of the buckets of people in this memorandum is folks who are anti big tech. So if you are a Republican going out and say you get a crazy idea and you cut down a flock camera, there's all kinds of news stories out there of people doing that with thousands of comments of people cheering them on. And maybe you're a Republican in doing that. This is what's left of a flock camera. If you're on Claremont Avenue, it's one of several investigators say retarded by vandals. Houston police said they're investigating as eyewitness news now has found that at least half a dozen flock cameras destroyed across the city this week. Well, man has been arrested for damaging close to a dozen flock cameras in the city of Suffolk. Well, you might not realize is that you just landed yourself on the far left terrorist list, you know, according to NSPM 7. And this standing force that is totally unaccountable that is murdered Americans ice, you might find yourself on that list eventually if you are standing up against the priorities of big tech, big capital in the people that they elect. Just so our audience understands what this is, what is a flock camera? That is one of these surveillance cameras. It's a corporation called flock putting them out. They have blown up all over the country, thousands, you know, very short amount of time and they read license plates and they are able to put that in and track your larger movements, know where you're going, know if your car is getting hot. They know all kinds of stuff about you by simply putting these cameras up. Small towns, big cities, it's a massive expansion of the surveillance state, which is already too powerful in my opinion. And furthermore, that's kind of backed up by all of this artificial intelligence. infrastructure. Right? It's a huge privacy and security issue. Yeah. I don't know. This is some George Orwellian. It's very well. Yeah. And if you were a Republican, you go out there and you really resist that, you might find yourself on the side, on the wrong side of the security state with all the other leftists that ISIS is supposed to be rounding up, etc. In your reporting, when you went and you interviewed all sorts of different people, did you find that they all, in addition to AI data centers, they were also like, fuck these flat cameras? Oh, yeah. Or did they think that, like, no, big brother is going to keep me safe. And these flat cameras are going to find MS-13. From where I am, I would say, people are against these flat cameras. Understood. In your most popular video from a more perfect union, you took Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Around your home state, West Virginia, to talk to voters. That state was blue for 80 years and is now the second reticent in the country. Yeah. I want to show a clip from that video of Bernie talking to a Trump voter about health care as a human right. Let's take a look. You're so reasonable. Like, they've painted you in a bad light and it actually makes me very angry because, you know, you see things that you believe it. I'll just be honest. I haven't really seen you talk before. I haven't really, like, followed, I don't follow politics that much. And so the last couple days before this, I started watching some of your speeches and I started watching your interviews and I was shocked. I was like, oh, not as bad as they are told you. This is not how he's portrayed in the media. Yeah. There you go. You know, you meet people face to face. They know clearly what side you are on. And you can watch and I've seen this all throughout my reporting. You can just watch the decades of propaganda fade away right there. So you have a movement at scale. Bernie's one guy and he's old. Not to be honest. No, no. He has no shade, but he's very. Absolutely. He kept the flame alive forever. Yeah. But if you have the movement at scale, he's been cooking for a long time. He has been cooking. Let me just say this. The message of what that video is doing is I think you're establishing two things. And this isn't common in discourse. Like, John, I want you to know this. You're doing two things here that are very important. Number one, I think you're showing that people are reachable and people are redeemable. Would you agree with that? I would. And not to oversimplify. Like, there are some people who are not redeemable in this in this mega movement, but they're not the majority. So you've obviously seen this talking point that's made its way around the internet. You hear it all the time of there are 75 million people that voted for Trump. Leave them behind. Fuck them. Acosta them at Thanksgiving. Like, yeah, take the news and let them hang themselves. What? What do you have to say to that as just a general political strategy? You're not going to get very far in a movement to return power to working people. If you don't figure out how to get those people under your movement because to unwind the level of corporate power we have, you're going to need everybody who's in the same boat as you and it is on the people building that working class movement to reach out to the people who are reachable and build bonds to get them on your side because it's strength and numbers. The story that I see is that woman that's in that clip that we just showed. There's a lot of people like her. Yeah, and the saddest part is those people are being erased. Their story, their perspective, isn't being told. Yeah. And I think the majority of the media's narrative is built around. I call it. I hate my brother-in-law who voted for Trump. Yeah. And I'm going to accost him at Thanksgiving, syndrome. That's essentially what it is. Like, there's some family member that didn't vote the way you like that sugar something within you. So fuck my brother-in-law. Yeah. And that's totally cool. You may not like a brother-in-law. Like that's- I understand that position. But I think that shift in mindset has to happen around building larger coalitions. And to be like politics is just the way we think about politics in the way that most conventional candidates talk about it. I think as our problems, we have like several existential crises happening at once. And what would you say those are? Like in the country. You have simultaneous error. Trillionaires in equality is one. You have climate, which is just totally evaporated. But you know, I was just breathing in wildfire smoke. Yeah. You have the rapid build out of AI totally unaccountable. You have, I differentiate between Trump voters and elected people that know what they're doing, but you have fascism on the march that's mixed in with all of this. And you know, there are some others in there as well. Yeah. Right. That's not even getting into the substance of healthcare and wages and all of this. Right. But that is clear to people now. And I think when you see people talking about the news and it doesn't match the sky being on fire, people are like, what are you talking about? What are we doing here? Right. You know, so I think when a real one comes and sits down, that's a moment where all of this propaganda fades away and you can start to see a spark of the unreachable become reachable when you're really talking about, hey, what do we do about the smoke in the sky? What do we do that this AI data center is getting water and you're getting it out of a pipe and a mountain? Yeah. We got to start talking about real stuff here. And politics and media has for the longest time just been left right. Red blue is a better term just, you know, course race. Yeah. Game of tug less and less represents what people can feel in their life. So we clearly have seen MAGA 1.0, right? We're now seeing MAGA 2.0. Let's look ahead to the midterms. So right now, Trump's disapproval rating keeps coming up. Does that mean anything? Yeah, you know, I think that it means he's unpopular, but what you do with it is a different thing. You know, I think we look too much at Donald Trump to define what the agenda should be and not enough at what people like Kristen are feeling down in West Virginia. You know, getting her vote, I think, has less to do with Donald Trump being unpopular and more to do with the fact that she has real problems. So speak to those and that's going to open it up. You're asking for politicians to have original thinking or a set of moral clarity around human beings and representing their constituents. I actually actually do think it's too much, because the incentive structure so off, yeah, meaning the center of power when it comes to technology, media, Wall Street, that's now all kind of lumped into one. Only works for a handful of people, aka the donor class. Yeah, but I, but you're right. I do think there are politicians that are changing that narrative. Let me ask you this as an Appalachian. What does your take on JD Vance? Oh, trash, trash. What do you mean trash? He sold out his people for his own political career. Okay. You know, he sold a narrative that we were helpless that we chose all of the problems. You're talking about Hillbilly Elegy. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. From the very, from the very jump. You kind of, from the moment you, from the very jump, you were like, I'm not buying that. Yeah. Because it was just, it was a way to use the pain of an entire population to start his own political career where he is now delivering for the corporate class that caused all of those problems that he wrote about. And he never really accurately challenged power in that book. And instead suggested it was people choosing to be this way. Okay. This is really interesting because I want to introduce a new segment on the show that we've never done. But I've always wanted to do it. Tracking JD Vance. It's not that weird. No, no, no, no, no. We can, all that title. But the title of this segment is called, hey, whatever happened with that. Yeah. So the first big story that you reported on for more perfect union, you remember the story? You spouted. He's posting. Okay. This was the railroad disaster. Yeah. Which happened in the county that you were born in. Yep. Okay. In a county. Look at those flames. Look at that. She tells us under a state of emergency, after 50 train cars do rail, causing a massive fire a half mile long, which lit up the night sky and burned for hours. Once the news cycle passed, most Americans totally forgot about it. Yeah. Give us an update. Whatever happened with that. Well, the thing to realize there is that that detonation that everybody remembers from the news wasn't how they told us it had to happen. What happened? The narrative was that there are cars full of hazardous chemicals that might spontaneously combust so that so we are going to blow them up first. Yeah. So it can be a controlled detonation. Yeah. It was called the controlled burn. Yeah. Right. Okay. We later found out that there was data, temperature and pressure data from the actual cars in question full of those chemicals that show the chemicals cooling down, not spontaneously combust. And the railroads make the pitch that look this is the situation that temperatures are rising. We believe that polymerization is imminent. And the best course of action is to do a vent burn. And unfortunately, while they're making these decisions, the temperatures of the cars are actually starting to trend downward. So that calls into question one of the major narratives of why they had to detonate that in the first place. Now, we don't know what the actual motivation is behind that. This is a major rail corridor. So the quicker it gets cleaned up, I imagine the better to keep these rail corridors open. But that was a major point that wasn't covered in the initial reports that people really need to to know about the decision to. have that chemical exposure that caused acute risks that we know about, but bigger ones that we're going to find out about over the long term and we might not know about yet. So you follow up on this two years later, and my question is, was justice eventually served to the citizens in the town, the people that were affected by the chemicals that were burned off? It's really fucked up. What ended up happening? I would say justice was not served, the payouts were, this is a multi-billion dollar corporation, the payouts are capped at a laughable level and tens of thousands of dollars in the best case scenario. We talked to a man with advanced congestive heart failure, half a mile outside of the derailment zone, completely messed up his life, and nowhere near the amount of compensation that a multi-billion dollar company could provide, nowhere near that, and that's just for the people who are closest to it. This is a wide-ranging thing, and for the most part, once you get out behind the narrow bounds where they offer to pay even a little bit, people beyond that get basically nothing. This is on top of a legacy of this part of the country having to deal with dirty industries in a collapsed economy, and addiction was huge in the area. This is my home county. I had 250 people total go to my high school. Almost a dozen of them have died from addiction. This is years ago, but that's a flavor of what people deal with in this area. I remember there's a bar we went to when we were covered in East Palestine, a woman worked there, and she lived right by the tracks years before that derailment happened. Her child was killed by a Norfolk Southern train. They come through town. They're always trying to run the trains longer, faster, and with less people. That's part of the reason why this disaster happened. Her child was killed by a train that was going way too fast. They offered to pay her $6,000 for the death of her child and said, "If you push beyond this, we're going to go after you, and we're not going to pay that." Be happy with $6,000 for the death of a child. She was telling me this, that was years before the derailment. The derailment happened. She lives right next to the tracks, and she's exposed to this. We find out that the father of that child is someone I graduated with, and he was struggling with addiction. That's one bartender in East Palestine, with generations of corporate negligence in this area that has only continued since that derailment. One of the politicians that was at the time being very vocal about this was JD Vance. How were Trump voters in East Palestine feeling about JD Vance these days? Do they see him as an ally, or do they now see him accurately? I think they, from that disaster, basically every politician that came through town, people felt about them the same way. You're here for a photo opportunity, and we're not expecting much, and unfortunately that was accurate. But again, you can't beat something with nothing. It's not enough for JD Vance to be absolute ass. You have to be better than JD Vance. That's the bar. You have to actually hold a Norfolk Southern accountable. Hey, John, thank you so much for coming on this day. Thanks for having me, man. Pleasure. The largest labor uprising in American history, like in the largest armed conflict of working people since the Civil War in American history, happened at Blair Mountain in the coal fields of West Virginia. This is where striking miners, multiracial, white, black, tied red bandanas around their neck, and they took up arms against the government and coal companies in a strike for dignity, for fair labor practices, for a lot of the things that we take for granted today that are under assault, and they were called the Redneck Army. I think that is what the definition of redneck should be. It should be rooted in solidarity in our labor history that, by the way, has never taught in schools around the area because that might be dangerous to the agenda of corporations. Like, tell the Miss Technology, lock in your look for up to 24 hours, with flexible all-day-gum-view-grip. Try new, groupy setting mist from Mavily, New York.