May 3, 2024 • 54 mins
The Origin Story Podcast host Ian Dunt previews the massive victories Labor will soon achieve in the UK. Check My Ads' Nandini Jammi details her efforts to get the MAGA-loving disinformation site The Gateway Pundit kicked off ad exchanges. Congressional candidate George Whitesides details his run against extremely vulnerable Rep. Mike Garcia.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Wyoming has purged twenty eight percent
of its voting roll, kicking off anyone who didn't vote
in twenty twenty two. It's not how any of this
is supposed to work. We have such an amazing show
(00:21):
for you today. Check my ads non Dinny Jommy stops
by to tell us about her efforts to get the
mega loving disinformation site the Gateway Pundit kicked off the
ad exchanges. Then we'll talk to George Whitesides, who is
running for Congress in California's twenty seventh district against the
(00:41):
very vulnerable Mike Garcia. But first we have the host
of the Origin Story podcast, Ian Dunt. Welcome back to
Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Ian Well, I thank you very much, thank you for
having me.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm so excited to have you like I am such
a humongous fan of yours and I think are so funny.
And also because your country doesn't matter at all, we
can never have you on.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's extraordinary. There's a real pattern to your praise. I've
noticed your praise as soon as it begins. I think
there's a terrible black hole that's emerging in front of me,
and I'm about to fall directly into it. And once
again it's taken place.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So just catch us up and what's happening in the
most important European country after Germany.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
It's definitely not that. I mean, you certainly put France.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I was going to save Germany and France.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yes, yeah, I think Portugal arguably Spain. I mean I
think we're still more important than Italy. I think we
can make it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Congratulations, Yes, you you got Italy bead.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
We have decided to have as many prime ministers as
Italy on a monthly basis, but now way through people
at a kind of Italian pace really, so in a
way we really emulated them, except for you know, for
culture and the love of life, food yeah and the
two yeah yeah, and the history yeah. So but apart
from that, I think we're directing.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Them exact good exactly, But so catch us up. I
had the displeasure of seeing that your head of Lettuce,
I mean, former Prime Minister Liz trust whatever fucker the
that person was in America trying to sell a book
written about her ten days as Prime Minister.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, she's taking a route that is actually fairly common
for disgraced Brits, which is to see if they can
go to the US where no one's really heard of
them and stuff again. And the trouble is, there was
no reason that she would be stopped by virtue of
what she'd done in Britain. I mean that the main
obstacles to her succeeding in the US were precisely the
same ones that prevented her from succeeding in the UK,
(02:58):
which is that she has no cognitative ability, she has
no presentational ability. She's a kind of charisma black hole.
So you watch her and you feel it's almost that
you can feel your own will to live just soaking
its way into the marrow of your bones. And there's
an interview with her on Fox News that I saw
actually because you you retweeted it, which tried to promote Yes,
(03:21):
thank you so much for that. I really can't tell
you how that's right.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
With the book where she had a backwards You think, well, look,
so what you're going to do is you're going to
say anyway, it's not classy to have an interview on
a news channel and hold up your own book as
you're talking, like, what do you think you are?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Like pelling cars on a game, atrociously bad form, but
to not even do that correctly, to hold up the
book the wrong way, not once, but twice before succeeding
in holding it correctly. Is there no end to your
terminal inadequacy? And the answer back question is no, there
is no end. She is now exploring because she's decided that,
(03:58):
you know, maybe America is the forum for her particular
set of skills, a much more kind of dubious politics
even than the form that she used in the UK.
So she's taken, now that she's crossed the Atlantic, to
using phrases like the deep state, which are really not
used in British politics and which are taken as a
kind of red warning sign for the worst kind of
(04:19):
political lunacy. So she's really dredging the depth over there
in much the same way, but to a slightly more
extreme degree than she did here.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Right, So she's just trying to sort of find a
second act. I guess, but you have a prime minister
right now. You've told me he wasn't as bad as
she was discussed.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
He isn't. He's just I mean, but you know, we
need to be clear with I mean, I mean, he's
still shit, He's just not as shit as she is.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yes, However, I have.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
To say that his recent behavior has been so obscene,
so lacking in any kind of basic decency, that it
really is becoming difficult to even hand him that level
of credibility. The predominant form in which has taken place
is on refugees.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Jesse says mister Bean in a nicer suit.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I think that's very unfair to mister Bean.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yes, mister Bean is a beloved hero of British culture.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
He is, He's loved by many cultures, you know, Yes,
one of Britain's just the export. The exports quite well,
mister Bean, because in that way, Richie Sunak really does
not export very well, although we would really like to
export him, but ideally Silicon Valley, which is clearly where
he wants to be. So look, his recent activity has
(05:39):
been with refugees, and this has been taking on a
more stridently reactionary, i mean, really quite authoritarian, draconian streak
in recent days. The policy is the Ruanda policy, and
the Rwanda policy is basically to say we're going to
send anyone that gets to this country, to Ruanda, we're
not going to proce the asylum claim, so we're not
(06:01):
even going to We have essentially shut down our entire
asylum system and said, look, whoever comes, will send them
to Rwanda. Rwanda can process them, decide whether they're real
a refugee or a failed asylum seeker, and then they
will stay in Rwanda regardless of the outcome of that process.
So it's essentially giving up any kind of moral or
(06:21):
national responsibility over people that come here. Now, the vast
majority of people that come to the UK seeking asylum
are given asylum because they are from Eritrea, from Afghanistan,
from Syria, from Iran, from countries in other words, where
you're very likely to have your asylum claim accepted, because
they are war zones where you're very likely to be
subject to persecution. He is entirely forsaken any kind of
(06:42):
principle on this and decided to enact this policy this week.
That yesterday, the Home Office put out a video of
police smashing down the doors of asylum seekers, leading them
away in handcuffs, taking them to detention centers in advance
of a Rwanda export program. These are people who are
some of the most marginalized and bud people on the
face of the earth. They have committed no crime except
(07:03):
to come to the UK seeking help and believing in
its better nature, and that at the moment is the
kind of treatment that they're being handed by. Rishi Suna.
So right, I wish I had more good news here,
but I'm afraid that I don't. It's just a moral
chasm all the way down.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, sides being terrible that immigrants, you guys, also your
economy is completely fucked right, this is correct.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah, Yeah, We've been in stasis now for really very
long time. I mean really since the financial crash in
two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And this happened because you guys, you sort of enacted
republican part.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
That is entirely correct. Essentially, we had the same initial
problem that you had, which was that we were massively
exposed to the financial sector, and the financial sector was
heavily underregulated when it came to glatteridized debt, obligations, to securities,
to all sorts of dubious games that they were playing
with their products. So we shared that problem. The difference
is that after the financial crack, you guys did not
(08:01):
pursue an austerity program. You know, interest rates were low,
you were still able to borrow and to invest, and
you pursued a pretty moderate form of Kynesian stimulus. You
then pursued a much more substantial form of Kenjian stimulus.
Under Biden, we did the exact opposite. So, even though
interest rates were low, we brought in borrowing, we cut
down on spending at the exact moment that the economy
(08:23):
was in a moment of real difficulty of precisely the
type that economists have understood since the nineteen thirties, since
John Maynard Kines wrote the general theory of how you
deal with this kind of situation, which is to borrow
and spend to stimulate demand to get yourself over trouble.
This country did the exact opposite, under a form of
kind of Milton Friedman Frederick Hayek fiscal feticism, a kind
(08:46):
of BDSM fiscal policy, eventually and punished and destroyed our
own economy over and over again.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Laughing because it's funny, I'm laughing because it's tragic.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
No, I spent a lot of my life in a
sort of you know, that great zone in between tears
and laughter, wondering which it is I'm experiencing at any
given moment. Now I would now done that, you know,
really for about fifteen years, essentially for a generation. In fact,
you could even say that's the entirety of my career
has taken place in that period of economic stagnation. And
instead what we get, instead of any kind of viable
(09:17):
economic policy, which is just there to reach for if
you want to, is this constant right wing populist victim
game where someone else is always responsible for your own inadequacy.
And it can be immigrants, it can be europe, it
can be civil servants, it can be metropolitan liberals, but
it's always someone else's fault rather than you, the people
who have been in charge for the last thirteen years.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah. I think what happened in the States, which was smart,
was that we had seen in two thousand and eight
what it's like to not fund your stimulus right, to
only save the banks and the corporations, and so we
did a much more false pumping into the economy, which
ultimately ended up leading to a boom.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
The luck of the political cycle in the two moments
that you really needed people in the white House who
are going to stimulate the economy rather than put in spending.
They're in place at the right time. You also had
Keynesians around Obama, Roma in particular, and the same I mean,
I think with Biden you've seen a really quite I
mean from a European point. You know, back in the
day when I was growing up, it was you guys
(10:21):
that were the economically right wing guys, and Europe were
the ones that were the you know, the much more spendy,
you know, quasi socialists, left wing economic policy. Those roles
have now completely reversed. And that is not just the
UK US thing that that accounts for the continental Europe
as well. I mean, Germany, despite the factor, has a
center left government, is not expounding the kind of ideas
(10:42):
that are anywhere near as left wing economically as that
which is coming from the Biden White House. So I
have to say some of that's quite confusing for us
over here when we see the level of disenchantment, including
on the left in the US with Biden, so we
sort of think, you know, we wouldn't mind a bit
of that. Actually, that looks pretty good for us right now,
as do your economic res Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
You're going to be shocked to hear this. But you know,
I do all these interviews I said with these people,
they say, like the biggest environmental investment ever, right, climate investments.
We're building chips, we're building chargers, We're building high speed trains.
Well I don't know if they're going to be high speed,
but we're having trains. I mean, we're doing all the
stuff that should make everyone on the left happy. Now
(11:24):
we have some other stuff going on. I don't know
if you know that's problematic in other ways, but I'm
not even going to talk about it because I can't
even talk about it. I do think that some of
these investments are incredible, and I do think that they
will ultimately get us where we need to be.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, it's true. I mean there is an international consequence,
of course to what's happened in the US, and you
feel that in Europe quite quite starkly, you know, And
when we were brought up, you know, we were brought
up in a US created international order after nineteen forty
five with British contributions again from Mainard Canes. When you
look at you know, the creation of the Breton Wood system,
(12:03):
et cetera. But it was essentially a rules based order
that said, look, everyone benefits from free trade. As long
as we all stick to the rules and we do
not discriminate in our trading arrangements with each other, then
we will all ultimately benefit. Now that is not the
program that Biden follows at the current White House follows.
There's a much more. It's essentially a kind of left
wing nationalist economic program in that it's about, you know,
(12:24):
direct making sure that the supply chain is provided in
the US and with its trading partners, it is discriminating
in its trade arrangements, and it's freezing out China to
create a kind of dual block in the world, dual
trading blocks now in Europe, that obviously creates all sorts
of sentiments and has created a tremendous amount of resentment
of what Biden is doing, including among very reasonable and
(12:46):
impressive politicians like Emmanuel Macron in France. And what it's prompted,
and interestingly in a UK case, is having to think, well, actually,
what do we do then? Because we cannot source all
of our supply chain, we cannot secure it. Just in
the UK, we cannot make a car in the UK,
we make a car in the continents of Europe as
part of that supply chain. So I see in a
(13:08):
strange way towards Europe in a way that hasn't really
been politically understood on the side of the Atlantic quite yet.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
So that's where I wanted to go with this. Always
it's funny because it's like there's always this you know,
quiet conversation that people have with each other on the
left about what happens if Trump wins and New York
State and California are not, you know, they have to
then pay for Trumpism, right, So we're always there's always
(13:36):
sort of a thought process which is like, can we
get out? And the reality is this would be the
same as brexit. You know, it's more taxes and more
regulation put together. I mean, it's this same idea that
you don't like where you are, so you make life
much harder. And that's ultimately what's happened to you guys.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Right, yeah, except that there was nothing you know, the
distinction there is that there was nothing wrong with where
we were.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
No, no, certainly not yeah, yeah, no, no, We're much
more found to than you guys. And it was also
part of what happened was that the people didn't really
know what they were voting for.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
They didn't really they did know that they wanted less immigration.
They got the opposite. We now have more immigration, of course,
because this country requires immigration in order to survive. It's
just that instead of coming from Europe for immigration, those
numbers have fallen catastrophically. They're now coming from India, from Pakistan,
from all over the world. So I'm not entirely sure
that the average Brexit voter was really really intending to
(14:32):
swap Polish people for Indian people, but that's what they've
got now. They were lied to, I mean, they absolutely
were that. You know, the campaigns were all about you
will take back control, you'll have more money for your
health service. People have less control over their lives now
there is less money for the health service. The crucial thing, though,
is the pulling has changed on Europe completely. I mean,
the level of support for rejoining Europe is now very
(14:56):
very high, very very consistent play out over years. It's
almost i mean, it's not far off double the level
of support people saying that they want to stay out.
That is a really different thing, I think, to actually
being able to deliver on a referendum campaign. In which
you rejoin. There's very little appetite for that. People are
talking in abstract terms without the reality of it being
(15:18):
presented to them, and most importantly, without having to emotionally think,
oh fuck, we're going to have to have that conversation
again for year after year after year, talking about tariff
arrangements and customs checks and regulatory borders and all of
the most tedious sentences that are potentially formulated in the
human mind. But nevertheless, they are kind of open to
(15:39):
the idea. And demographically, that's where the real change is happening.
You know, young voters much more comfortable with multiculturalism, much
more comfortable with wanting to travel, have a much more
diverse sense of identity. They can be English, they can
be a Londoner, they can be British, they can be European.
All At the same time, those voters are obviously coming
(15:59):
online every day more and more of them turn eighteen
and older. Voters much more likely to be uncomfortable with multiculturalism,
much more likely to have voted four Brexit, are going offline,
shuffling off life's mortal coil every day time. So the
demographics have completely shifted. And even that alone, even if
no one had been convinced of the era, that alone,
(16:20):
at the moment would be handing us a significant polling advantage.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
But you have an election coming up, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
We do. We're going to come up sort of six
months was so, and the Conservative government is about to
get the most almighty biblical spanking of its very long life.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So what does that look like?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I mean at the moment, like there are polling forecasts
of the moment that are properly old Testament. They're like
the great the literally just the one that came out
today put the Conservatives on eighteen percent. The Conservatives I
don't think have been on eighteen percent at any point
in my life. I'm forty two years and I think
they've ever hit that number. Labor is currently polling between
(17:00):
twenty and twenty five points above them, very very big
gap between the two parties. To give you an impression
of how that plays out, you would have a sort
of as few as eighty to ninety Conservative MPs with
the rest of the chamber. That's six hundred and fifty
MPs in total, comprised of Labor and other parties. Let's
say maybe four hundred and fifty five hundred labor MPs.
(17:23):
The scale of it is so impossible to grasp. We
don't know how to fit them in the room in
the House of Commons. In our parliament. We have no
system that because we have to have them sitting opposite
each other. Right, if you have that few MPs in
the opposition party, you just have to start populating their
benches with the governing party's MPs. More than that, you
need them to shadow government departments. You need at least
(17:45):
one hundred MPs to be able to do that, and
the current polling indicates that the Conservatives will not have
that number. They are essentially polling so badly that they've
broken the operating mechanics of British democracy at the moment.
And unless something changes, and it may well change, but
it hasn't changed for quite some time, it looks like
that's the kind of really pulverizing result that they can
(18:05):
look forward to when they do eventually go for a
general election.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
This is like the greatest thing I've ever heard, And
there's no way you can do that here. What do
you mean, I mean, just transmit all of that sort
of energy for or winning, can you?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I would like to translate that you know what the
key thing, the key distinction between us and you, And
I think have noticed this a couple of times. It
was like it's the moment the spell broke. And for
a long time I thought Boris Johnson would have the
same spell over people that Donald Trump had, and he doesn't.
He didn't like when he in the end, when he
(18:45):
had a scandal, you know, having parties in Downing Street
during COVID going against the legislation he had himself written,
something just snapped in people. The people that supported him,
right wingers, reactionary you know, anti immigrant voters, they just
turned against him. You know, they had this sort of
innate sense of the injustice of that. Now I just
don't I don't believe for a second that if Donald
(19:05):
Trump had done that, had parties during you know, lockdown
people his supporters would have turned against him in any way,
There's something more profound in the link he has with
his base that Boris Johnson was just unable to secure.
And at that moment, the Tory polling died and it
never came back. It just gets well, I mean, obviously
it plummeted even further when Liz Trust came and catastrophically
(19:26):
blew herself up, you know, over the space of forty
one days. But nevertheless, it just got worse and worse
from that point. That mythic link with your support Trump
has it, Johnson didn't have it, and that is the
core reason that we've managed to turn things around.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Unbelievable. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Not at all. I'm glad that for the first time,
after talking to you for years, I finally have some
good news to report about what's going on in this country.
And maybe, just maybe, in four years, we won't start
one of these conversations with you telling me how catastrophically
shited is here. We'll find out.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah, it's the dream spring is here. And I bet
you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick
up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just
(20:18):
opened a news store with all new designs just for you.
Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags. To grab
some head to fastpolitics dot com. Non Denny Jommy is
the co founder of check my at. Welcome back to
Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Non to me, Hi, mom, so excited to be here today.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
We're so excited to have you. What you guys are
doing is amazing, So tell us about your organization and
then we'll go from there.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
Absolutely, So check my Ads is the digital advertising Watchdog.
We are a fully independent organization working to protect your
right to an Internet free from scam, lives and manipulation.
And we do that by working towards transparency and accountability
in the Internet economy, which is basically ads.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
So walk us through the thinking here, because this started
as people not knowing advertisers not knowing where their ads
were showing up.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Right, My work personally started in twenty sixteen with the
launch of Sleeping Giants, which was looking to demonetize Brightbart
and then after that was successful, we successfully lost them
ninety percent of their ad revenue in just three months,
just by alerting advertisers to where their ads were running.
I started to look at other websites, and Gateway Pundit
(21:37):
was one of them, and I found that interesting because
the ad agencies and ad exchanges, which are basically the
companies that run ads on behalf of advertisers, had been
doing a lot of work to say and to convince
their clients the advertisers that they were no longer running
ads on websites like Bredebart, and I was seeing ads
(21:59):
from big advertisers on the Gateway Pundit. That's kind of
where where my work led to tell.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Us what you did with the Gateway Pundit, This is a.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Long time coming.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
In the summer of twenty twenty, the Gateway Pundit had
a lot to say about the Black Lives Matter protests,
and around this time I started checking into them more
and I noticed that they were running ads from major
ad exchanges, and I basically started to contact these companies
which had previously dropped Breitbart, but we're still working with
(22:31):
this website, so it made no sense to me. So
what I did was I contacted each of these companies,
in some cases publicly, in some cases privately, and sometimes both,
and I asked them point blank, what are you doing
running ads for this website? And once that's on the record,
like once I've sent that email or that tweet.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
The balls in their court.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
And because ultimately they serve advertisers, they can't just ignore
me when I point out one thing that is detrimental
to their client, so they kind of have to respond.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So pretty much all of.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
Them, one by one confirmed with me that they were
dropping the Gateway Pundit.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
It was actually really easy.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So the Internet sucks a lot of times because there's
no government regulation.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Congress could have said, you have to have verified news sources,
you have to have content that's vetted, you have to
have Twitter can't link to sites that aren't true. They
could have made checks and bounces, but they decided not to.
But the only real ability that we have as a
(23:39):
country and as citizens to fight back againstuff like this
is legal, right.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
I would disagree that we want Congress to be the
ones to decide what is.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
I mean, they're not going to. I think they could
have years ago stopped a lot of the junkie stuff
on the Internet by saying that tech companies had to
really pay for content for magazines and newspapers. I mean
they didn't, but you you know, there's incentives for everything else. Right.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I think it's a bit more complicated than that because
a lot of these disinfo outlets that we see today
kind of snuck into the advertising ecosystem, the media eCos
by classifying themselves as the news and companies like Google
and all the other exchanges face I mean, I don't
want to speak on Facebook, but these companies just kind
of are working at scale and they don't want to
(24:32):
look into it both for you know, they don't want
to put the resources into it and they don't want
to have to make those kind of decisions.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
It was just kind of the result of I think
it just kind of.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Snuck up on the tech company well as as a society.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
But the thing that we can control.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
That's outside of the government that I think is very
very key to solving this problem. I mean, ultimately, this
problem is fueled by advertising. The Gateway Pundit was launched
twenty years ago, almost twenty years and their rise was
fueled by unbridled access to digital advertising revenues. We're talking
(25:12):
The Center for Countering Digital Hate did a study and
will never know the exact number, but they estimate that
in the twenty twenty elections leading up to the insurrection
that the Gateway Pundit made around one point one million
dollars in revenue from Google ads alone.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
I mean, Jim Hoft lives in a very very nice house.
Speaker 5 (25:31):
So that is where we can make a difference, and
we can do it because these ad exchanges all have
supply policies, and these supply policies are essentially an agreement
that they have with advertisers who do want to advertise
in as many places as they can, but they don't
want to end up on polices like Gateway Pundit. So
these exchanges, the vendors have explicitly written out in their
(25:56):
policies that they won't work with websites like the Gateway Pundit.
And by the way, a lot of these at exchanges
adopted this language after our Sleeping Giants campaign against Breitbark And.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I want to just pause for a second and talk
about Jim Hoff for one second. For people who are
not quite as read in as we are, Jim Hoff
is a guy who just basically makes stuff up and
it's all very crazy, Republican, trumpy kind of Can you
give us sort of an example of one of his stories.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I mean, where do I even again? I mean, they're
really really out there.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
He said a lot of stuff about I mean, he
was one of the biggest voices against COVID vaccines. And
the funny thing is he's now on the record thanks
to a documentary from a French filmmaker which I do
want to talk about shortly, that he doesn't believe anything
that he said.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Right, which is shocking because I always just thought he
was really stupid. But yeah, me and a lot of
just completely crazy just to have targeting people dominion staff
the whole nine yards. He now has declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
In the summer of twenty twenty, I successfully managed to
get Jim hoft Gateway Pundit kicked off of like three
or four AD exchanges, which was awesome because someone was watching.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
And that someone was a woman named aud Favra.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
She is a French content creator, documentarian, filmmaker, and she
contacted me to say that she was working on a
documentary about AD funded disinformation and then she was specifically
working on the Gateway Pundit. What I didn't know until later,
until almost before this documentary aired, was that she managed
to get a meeting with Jim Hoft, invited her into
(27:46):
into his home, showed her all his giant, magnificent rooms
filled with fancy chandeliers paid for by Google ads, where
he told her I.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Don't actually believe the stuff that I publish.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
In that same documentary, add also managed to get an interview,
an on camera interview. This is so unusual and rare
with a Google representative, and what she did was so smart.
Speaker 4 (28:11):
She took print outs.
Speaker 5 (28:12):
Of all the crazy stuff that that Gateway Pundit has.
Maybe not all, because that would be a really big folder,
but she got a really good samplus set of Gateway
Pundits articles and confronted the Google rep on camera with
printouts and says, don't these articles violate your policy your
supply policy? And the Google rep was just clearly flustered.
(28:36):
He was not expecting this. He thought this is going
to be a softball interview. Basically didn't know what to
say in the face of this clear evidence. There's no
other answer to this other than you're right, they should
not be monetized. And what happened was a few days
before this documentary was set to launch in France on
(28:56):
National TV, Google dropped the Gateway Pundit and flat out
just devastated the Gateway Pundit.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Again.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
I can't speak to the numbers, but we do know
for a fact that Google Ads is the biggest ally
and funder of disinformation in not just in the United States, but.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
In the world.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
So when you have ads, when you have access to
a Google Ads account, you have access to in theory,
unlimited funds, which is one of the reasons why Jim huffed,
you know, produces eighty one hundred articles per day, because
each one of those articles is money. I mean, he's
literally printing money. So getting him kicked off of those
ad exchanges, particularly Google, was huge. And while it did
(29:39):
not put him out of business immediately, what happen is
when he was sued by the election workers who he defamed,
he lost a lot of resiliency.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
That money isn't coming in anymore.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
I suspect that he can't afford to fight these lawsuits
because the money isn't coming in. Wow.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I mean the Gateway Pundit was also like a favor
of Trump. He fed a lot of the lawes that
then we saw. I mean, these far right content creators,
I feel like they are a mobius strip and one feeds,
the next feeds the next, and it ends up on
a way and right, I mean there's a whole sort
of there's a way this works, right.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
Absolutely, They feed off of each other, they cross link,
they feature each other on each other's videos. They're constantly
cross pollinating. And this is frankly, it's very good marketing.
And they're very smart and very good at what they
do and That's why they need to be That's why
these supply policies are so important because that because marketing
(30:42):
is great, but if you're but if you're marketing in
a way that is detrimental, dangerous, or derogatory, that needs
to be nipped in the bud.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Right and that is is the way to do it.
So in this country, three hundred plus million people, what
ten million read newspapers, I mean much less than that,
but a couple million watch cable television. There's a majority
of people in this country who are not getting their
news from cable television or from newspapers or magazines. So
(31:13):
are they getting it from these sites? I mean, what
are the numbers on this sort of traffic on these sites?
Speaker 5 (31:19):
I couldn't give you an answer to that specifically, but
but more generally, I would say that that the disinfo
outlets that were the most prominent in twenty twenty and
in the years before that are seeing a fairly significant
decline in traffic. That is because Facebook has been deprioritizing
(31:43):
news and political content in our news feed, so that
has had a really strong effect on these outlets. It's
unfortunately also had a strong effect on real news outlets.
The fact is that the tech companies refuse to differentiate
between disinformation and news. Let me tell you something that's
really interesting. Samsung. So if any of your listeners have
(32:06):
a Samsung TV and you watch Samsung TV live, turn
that on. There is various categories of channels that you
can watch, and one of those categories is New than Politics,
and on News and Politics, you'll be able to watch
channels like a cs NBC, ABC, and you'll also be
able to watch Steve Bannon's War Room on Real Am.
(32:28):
Really yeah, And what Samsung does is they bundle up
all of these channels under News and Politics and they
sell the bundle to advertisers to run their ads on.
So two years ago, Bannon was bragging to the Atlantic
about how he's doing so great that he's added another
hour to his show to accommodate his sponsors. And I
(32:51):
was like, what the hell is he talking about? So
I turned on my TV. I saw ads for Edsy, Volvo, Audi, Nissan,
and BMW. I mean, the biggest brands in the world,
Procter and Gamble brands tied and that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I have Evolvo.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Favo.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
What are you doing?
Speaker 5 (33:12):
They don't want to be on there, and that's the
thing these advertisers have already set. Etsy was one of
the first companies to block Breitbart back in twenty sixty.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
Yeah, so these guys, they don't want their ads on here.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
What's happening is that their vendors are feeling them, and
they do it through these sneaky, sneaky ways. So I
have asked Samsung, why is it that you have bundled
a news site with a disinformation outlet like Real America's Voice,
I mean Bannon's on in the morning, followed by Charlie Kirk,
followed by I don't know, Jack Pisobiac.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
This is not news. Whatever this is, it's not news.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
They just keep getting away with it.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
And so that's why what we do is so important,
because we work with advertisers. We talk to advertisers, and
we speak to marketing and brand representatives about what's happening,
because a lot of the time they aren't aware of
what is happening with their ads, and because there's constantly
new places for these bad guys to be expanding their
(34:10):
little empires into. Like Bannon is a great example. He
went from websites to a TV show on streaming TV
and streaming TV is like the wild West of digital advertising.
If you talk to any advertiser, they're going to be like, God,
I hope my ads aren't running on like it's on
rushing state TV because it's impossible to know what's actually happening.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
I think that it's right. And I also think that,
like what you're doing here, which I think is really important,
is everyone is so busy and everything is expanded so
quickly that there have to be people checking on what's happening.
And because and again I know that I said this
earlier and maybe you thought I was being a little
(34:52):
bit nutty about this, but I'm actually right, I promise,
because there's no regulation for any of this. There's no
one to regulate it, right, there's no industry, there's no
FDA for streaming.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
I do want to point out that regulation is very
important and core to what we're doing at check my ads,
but oura of regulation is slightly different.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
So we operate from the insight that I.
Speaker 5 (35:14):
Just said, which is that advertisers don't even know where
their ads are running, and oftentimes, almost all the time,
the ads that end up where they do happened without
the knowledge or consent of the advertiser. So imagine how
much money did Volvo fork over to Steve Bannon. I
bet they're not happy about that. What this really comes
down to is the fact that there is this six
(35:36):
hundred billion dollar digital advertising industry that is operating under
almost like just a cloak of darkness. We know how
money is being spent, so when it comes down to
an advertiser saying, or even if anyone ever mandated, you know,
don't run your ads on X or Y, there's no
(35:57):
way for us to verify that because the digital advertising
vendors are keeping that information advertisers, they.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Don't need to produce the transparency, so they're not going.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
To exactly And that's why this keeps happening. Because advertisers
can't see where their ads are going. They don't have visibility,
and so we're in a situation where billions of dollars
every year advertisers are just basically handing them over to strangers.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
I think this and Congress could say that there needs
to be clarity about that, and they could make finds,
but god forbid, I'm sorry, everybody's off. It's a Thursday.
Thank you so much. This is so important. I hope
you'll come back and talk more about all of your
victories and what an important service you're providing.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Oh well, thank you so much, Molly for letting me
talk about this today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
George Whitesidees is a candidate for Congress in California's twenty
seven district. Welcome too, Fast Politics, George white Side, Thank
you so much, Molly, it's great to be with you.
Explain to us what you're running for.
Speaker 6 (37:05):
So I am running for Congress, trying to bring a
voice for pragmatic leadership out in California's twenty seventh congressional district,
which is on the north side of La County, and
I'm running against super Maga Mike Garcia.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
You are a congressperson from Los Angeles running for a
seat that is occupied by a Republican make it make sense,
and a Maga Republican.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
It's absolutely nuts.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
Right, So just a little bit about me. So, I
am a space guy, right. I was chief of staff
of NASA for President Obama. Grew up wanting to work
in NASA and did that under the Obama administration absolutely fantastic.
Then went on to move out to the district to
run an aerospace company called Virgin Galactic did that for
about ten years. Amazing experience and help the community in
(37:57):
a lot of ways along the way, particularly in wilds
in COVID And we can talk about those things. But
you know, the crazy thing, Molly, is that on the
door side of La County is arguably the best chance
to flip a seat for the Democrats to help out
and flip the House in the entire country. And it's
this district that Biden won by twelve and a half points.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Jesus, how did Democrats lose this district in Sanitay.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Well, it's complicated.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It's okay, we don't have to go back there. Yes,
so explain to us how we got here, with why
you decided to run, and also tell me some horrifying
things about Mike Gercia.
Speaker 6 (38:38):
How we got here is we're in a purple district
that's trending blue. All of the underlying indicators of this
district are really heading in our direction, right, So voting
for Biden by twelve and a half points Democratic registration
advantage of twelve points. It's a district that voted for
Prop One, which was this California amendment protecting reproductive freedom
(38:59):
by almost twenty four points, right, and so all these
things are sort of, you know, indications that this is
a district that we should have, and yet we have
this representative now, Molly, who is stridently anti choice. Right.
He was one of the co sponsors of what we
call the National Abortion Band Life of Conception Act. He
was one of these guys who voted to you overturn
(39:21):
the presidential election in twenty twenty. And he votes to
cut the budget by thirty percent. It votes for Mike
Johnson and Jim Jordan and all these things. And so
we've got a great opportunity here to flip a seat
because like, our district is pro choice, it's pro Biden,
it's moving towards the Democrats, and it's kind of the
perfect time to flip one of these four seats that
(39:44):
we need in the country.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
So what is Mike Garcia like, he's embraced MAGA. Tell
us more about that.
Speaker 6 (39:51):
Well, he's just going to do whatever Donald Trump wants, right,
and so you know that's what he did back in
twenty twenty when they wanted to overturn the election. And
he's just really really out of touch.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
He also secretly sold Boeing stock ahead of a Dan report.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
Oh yeah, you heard about that. Yeah, it's actually absolutely bonkers,
right because you know, I worked in the Obama administration,
which had these super high ethical protections and did very well, right, Like,
we had very few ethics issues. If anybody had done
anything even vaguely like what Garcia has done, they would
have been so out during that time. But that's just
an indication of how crazy it is. Let me just
(40:28):
summarize what happens for your listeners. So basically, back in
twenty twenty, my boning Garcia was on the Transportation Infrastructure
Committee in Congress, which was investigating Boeing at that time
for those terrible accidents that they had, and so they
were about to come out with this very damning report
on Boeing as a company, and so right before then,
(40:50):
Garcia sold fifty thousand dollars worth of Boeing stock, And
that in itself is like totally unethical and terrible. But
more than that, he then didn't report it as he
was required to under congressional rules until after the election.
And this is an election that he won by three
hundred votes, So like, it is absolutely insane that he's
(41:11):
like essentially there because he was he seems to have
been hiding unethical stock creating behavior.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
I mean, I shouldn't laugh, but again, if you do,
when I'm going to make you promise me right now
that you will that you guys will work on this.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
We got to fix this.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Members should not trade stocks.
Speaker 6 (41:32):
It's just like bad idea jeans, you know, for your
older listeners. It's just a terrible idea. We got to
change that. We got to fix a lot of stuff.
And I mean, like that's what I'm a pragmatist, right, I'm,
you know, one of these guys who just wants to
get stuff done. And I am so disgusted by what
I see in Congress now under Republican leadership. It's just
(41:53):
so it doesn't do anything. And like that is one
of the things that we got to do. But I
think we got to go under the hood in a
lot lot of ways and really reform Congress because it's
just not up to snuff to answer the challenges of
you know, the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah, it is sort of shocking to me. And there's
so many things that this Congress does, like the Appliance
Messaging Bill, the anti science rhetoric. So here you are,
you were at Virgin Galactic, You've confronted science and you
believe in it. Talk to me about this. You know,
they want to make sure that Democrats can't ban gas
(42:31):
stoves because God forbid anything that. And Democrats don't even
want to ban gastobes. But the thinking mind this was
at gastoves and I have a gastobe. They league, but
the idea that this Congress would then run with it
as a sort of like tenant of the new Republican
Party seems nuts to met.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (42:51):
Part of the reason, a big part of the reason
why I'm running, is that I think we need more
people who are literate in science and technology in Congress
to address these huge challenges we've got coming down the road.
And so, like, what are those challenges, ai, you know,
the social media and how it affects our kids. I
have an eleven year old and a thirteen year old,
and I am just absolutely terrified about what's about to
(43:13):
happen over the next ten years in their lives. Climate change,
you know, healthcare. We have to have people who understand
this stuff, or at least understand it enough to like
address the fundamental issues and you know, I like to
say my favorite movie is Apollo thirteen, of course, and
there's this great scene in Apollo thirteen where you know,
the spacecraft is broken. It's out in lunar orbit or
(43:33):
whatever it is, and back on Earth, they like get
their smartest engineers together and they kind of throw on
the table all the stuff that they think is inside
the capsule and they say like, Okay, you got to
fix it, you know, with this stuff. And I kind
of feel like we're at that kind of moment with
American democracy. You know, it's like a failure is not
an option. We got to we got to take what
we have, and good people have to you know, run
(43:55):
towards the fire. Not to mix my metaphors, but I'm
also really into the wheld fire challenge we can talk about,
you know, like we have to have good people run
towards this dumpster fire that is the Republican led Congress
to fix it. Because these challenges that we've got, whether
it's technology challenges or whether it's housing or you know,
clean energy or affordable healthcare, Like we got to be
(44:18):
smart about addressing these things. And if we ignore the science,
if we ignore the facts, like we're just not going
to solve this stuff. And so that's that's a big
part of why I'm running it is.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
But the Biden administration, they've done sort of incredible generational
climate change legislation.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
Absolutely, I mean they have done amazing stuff, right and
you know we should give them do credit for huge,
huge things that they have done.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Will be the only people doing it, but yes, we'll
do it right now, very unshe.
Speaker 6 (44:47):
At least here you and I are going to give
them credit. And so I do that. I give them credit.
You know, I think back to the Obama instration administration
it's very similar, you know, like amazing people going into
work in the federal government. And by the way, we
need more people like that, right, Like we have to
inspire people that you can do good work inside the government,
right that you you know that it's not this thing
(45:08):
that you should burn down, because the government is going
to be a key part of the solution. I'll give
you an example at NASA, we really wanted to reinvigorate
NASA in a lot of ways, and not just increasing
the Earth Science budget, but also sort of like figuring
out how we can interact with the private sector in
ways that work better, and so we made some changes
under the hood, and now like great things are happening
(45:31):
in the American space industry. We're discovering all this stuff
in space, and our companies are doing really well, generating thousands,
tens of the thousands of jobs all across the country.
And we took some tough decisions back there. And that's
what we have to do, is we have to like
really be smart about these big policy problems. Certainly, the
Biden administration is doing awesome work in climate and healthcare
(45:51):
and many other things. And I'm just like terribly worried,
honestly about what this fall holds and the crucial importance
of Tea taking back the House not just for these issues,
but also for you know, the issues around democracy. Right,
Like I say to everybody, let's keep in mind, you know,
these are the people going to be certifying the election
in twenty twenty four. Yeah, I didn't go so well,
(46:12):
you know, I mean, it went fine, And imagine if
some of these people are in charge of that when
we get to that point, we can't have that right,
So we have to flip the House.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
One of the things I was actually thinking about when
we're talking was that if Democrats don't flip the House,
the idea that Mike Johnson, who Trump decided he was
his guy because of the briefs he wrote about the
twenty twenty election.
Speaker 6 (46:34):
Right, absolutely, this is what's so terrifying about this scenario. Right,
I mean, you play it out, and I mean you
are doing such a good job of exposing these issues
because we have to be really honest and focus on
the reality of what we're heading towards. We're heading towards
a reality where if we don't flip the House, we
have a bunch of election deniers in control of the House.
We're controllingscation, we have the possibility of a president who
(46:58):
could be the end of American democracy. I wrote a
note as I have a good friend of mine in
Congress today, a guy named Derek Kilmer. He's a really
amazing guy, represents Washington State, and he was, you know,
in Congress in twenty twenty. And I remember sending him
a text message in the middle of the afternoon on
January sixth, and I said to him, and we were
texting back and forth, he was alone in the Capitol,
(47:20):
and you know, of course number one, I was like,
you know, are you o pay. But number two, he
and I were talking about the importance of getting back
into the capital, you know, and certifying the presidential election.
Think of you know, if we had a Republican controlled
Congress or House at that moment in time, you know,
and how catastrophic that would have been at that moment.
(47:43):
So you know, this is really existential. Every election is
the most important election, Molly, right, but this really really is,
I think, and that's why I ran, you know, like
in twenty sixteen. It was so existential, right, We all
felt that concern and worry when Trump was elected, and
I didn't feel like I was at a point where
I could exactly step back from the company and stuff,
(48:03):
but I knew like I had to step up. That
we all have to step up. I mean, you step
up every week or you know, all the time. We
all have to do that right now because if we're not,
but we have serious problems if we don't flip the house.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
You know, it seems like such an existential threat. But
there really are people on the other side who really
believe in Trump and trump Ism And can we do
two seconds on climate change? Because you worked at Virgin
Galactu and you are coming from Los Angeles. Are you
shocked and how quickly it's happened around us? And also
(48:40):
are you shocked by how little people have admitted that
it Like there's a sense in which there's like a
faked in fatalism about it that I'm very surprised by.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (48:51):
So I have a degree in remote sensing, you know,
which is like satellite imagery of planet Earth. And you
have worked at NASA, and the data that we're getting.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Right now, Molly is very scary.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
You know.
Speaker 6 (49:03):
You look at the temperature of the oceans and they're
literally off the charts, like literally that is not an exaggeration.
They are off the charts of what they have been
over the last you know, ten twenty thirty years. And
that's where a lot of the heat you know, of
our planet is absorbed in the oceans. And if those
are now shooting up. But it's methane, right, It's a
(49:25):
lot of things. But the point is that the scary idea,
and it's not yet confirmed, but the scary idea is
that we may be on a new curve for warming
for planet Earth. And this is the way that I
bring it home for voters in my district. Because climate
change can seem sort of, you know, abstract to some people.
In our district, we have a huge threat from catastrophic wildfires,
(49:49):
which of course have you know, swept the American West
over the last five or ten years. And people are
worried about two things. They're worried about their homes burning
down and their commune unities burning up. My wife, by
the way, grew up in Santa Rosa where they had
a terrible fire where five thousand homes were burned. They're
worried about that catastrophic risk, but they're also worried about
the financial risk embedded in their insurance policies. So hundreds
(50:14):
thousands of Californians in our district are currently getting kicked
off their insurance because these private insurers are basically just
leaving the state or they're refusing to write new coverage,
and so what they're what our voters are being forced
to do is to get on a state backed plan
which costs thousands of dollars more. And what I say
to folks is like, this is really climate risk becoming
(50:38):
very real for all of us, and so we need
to have smart people who can actually address these climate
risk related issues. Like wildfires, like hurricanes, like other things,
and you look at the other side and they don't
take any of this seriously. My opponent doesn't think that
climate change has anything to do with wildfires, and that
(50:59):
kind of attitude, that blindness to the reality of our
world is really catastrophic and presents huge, huge problems for
our ability to use solve these issues.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah, I mean, what do you think those numbers are?
When you look at the new climate change track percentage warming?
Speaker 6 (51:20):
Unfortunately, it's it's quite clear we're going to exceed this
one point five degree celsius thing. You know, by the way,
we have got like a tactical mistake that we made
was to present all these numbers in celsius. It's really
like a three degree thing. But that's just like global average.
A lot of places will be looking at you know,
you know, ten degrees fahrenheit, fifteen degrees, twenty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
I live in New York. It goes from sixty to eighty.
You know, it goes from forty to eighty. I mean,
none of that is normal. We don't have snow anymore.
Speaker 6 (51:50):
It's really scary and so but we need to have hope,
right and This is not just in the area of
climate change. It's in the area of like democracy, it's
in the area of all these things that we need
to be thinking about. Like we need to have the
hope that we can solve these challenges. And I do
believe that we can, like if we get good people
into government, if we get good people into Congress, you know,
if we keep the White House, like we have the
(52:12):
capacity to solve these problems nationally, globally and locally. Like
you know, I talked to a lot of young voters
in our districts. It's just over at community college College
of the Canyons, and you know, some kids are really
bummed out now and I try to get them excited
that like, no, we can solve these problems, but we
got to address them honestly. We got to like look
(52:32):
at the facts and if we do that, we can
we can have a positive impact.
Speaker 4 (52:36):
We just can't lose hope.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
Yeah, it's really true. Thank you so much, George, and
good luck.
Speaker 6 (52:41):
Thanks Molly, it's great to speak with you.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
A moment.
Speaker 7 (52:48):
Jesse Cannon, Mally Jung Fast Trump particular with the Roe
versus weight, he really likes to pretend that public sentiment
is something that's not what are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (52:59):
So Trump says that a lot of people like it
when he floats the idea of being a dictator, again,
I don't like it. It's bad. American democracy is fragile.
Trump said that a lot of people like it, he
told the Times. This is from this Time magazine article
which has Trump talking about deportation camps. They're not for you,
(53:22):
or maybe not for you yet. And if states want
to monitor women's cycles, he's okay with that. Well. He
also wants you to know that people love his authoritarian rhetoric.
And not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy
been under insult at home as they are today because
of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the
(53:42):
very idea of American democracy and we're seeing it right here.
And for that Trump's authoritarian leaning and his belief that
people like it, that is our moment of our gray.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics, and every Monday,
Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics
(54:04):
makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what
you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep
the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening,
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Wyoming has purged twenty eight percent
of its voting roll, kicking off anyone who didn't vote
in twenty twenty two. It's not how any of this
is supposed to work. We have such an amazing show
(00:21):
for you today. Check my ads non Dinny Jommy stops
by to tell us about her efforts to get the
mega loving disinformation site the Gateway Pundit kicked off the
ad exchanges. Then we'll talk to George Whitesides, who is
running for Congress in California's twenty seventh district against the
(00:41):
very vulnerable Mike Garcia. But first we have the host
of the Origin Story podcast, Ian Dunt. Welcome back to
Fast Politics.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Ian Well, I thank you very much, thank you for
having me.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
I'm so excited to have you like I am such
a humongous fan of yours and I think are so funny.
And also because your country doesn't matter at all, we
can never have you on.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It's extraordinary. There's a real pattern to your praise. I've
noticed your praise as soon as it begins. I think
there's a terrible black hole that's emerging in front of me,
and I'm about to fall directly into it. And once
again it's taken place.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
So just catch us up and what's happening in the
most important European country after Germany.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
It's definitely not that. I mean, you certainly put France.
Speaker 1 (01:35):
I was going to save Germany and France.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Yes, yeah, I think Portugal arguably Spain. I mean I
think we're still more important than Italy. I think we
can make it.
Speaker 1 (01:49):
Congratulations, Yes, you you got Italy bead.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
We have decided to have as many prime ministers as
Italy on a monthly basis, but now way through people
at a kind of Italian pace really, so in a
way we really emulated them, except for you know, for
culture and the love of life, food yeah and the
two yeah yeah, and the history yeah. So but apart
from that, I think we're directing.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Them exact good exactly, But so catch us up. I
had the displeasure of seeing that your head of Lettuce,
I mean, former Prime Minister Liz trust whatever fucker the
that person was in America trying to sell a book
written about her ten days as Prime Minister.
Speaker 2 (02:36):
Yeah, she's taking a route that is actually fairly common
for disgraced Brits, which is to see if they can
go to the US where no one's really heard of
them and stuff again. And the trouble is, there was
no reason that she would be stopped by virtue of
what she'd done in Britain. I mean that the main
obstacles to her succeeding in the US were precisely the
same ones that prevented her from succeeding in the UK,
(02:58):
which is that she has no cognitative ability, she has
no presentational ability. She's a kind of charisma black hole.
So you watch her and you feel it's almost that
you can feel your own will to live just soaking
its way into the marrow of your bones. And there's
an interview with her on Fox News that I saw
actually because you you retweeted it, which tried to promote Yes,
(03:21):
thank you so much for that. I really can't tell
you how that's right.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
With the book where she had a backwards You think, well, look,
so what you're going to do is you're going to
say anyway, it's not classy to have an interview on
a news channel and hold up your own book as
you're talking, like, what do you think you are?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Like pelling cars on a game, atrociously bad form, but
to not even do that correctly, to hold up the
book the wrong way, not once, but twice before succeeding
in holding it correctly. Is there no end to your
terminal inadequacy? And the answer back question is no, there
is no end. She is now exploring because she's decided that,
(03:58):
you know, maybe America is the forum for her particular
set of skills, a much more kind of dubious politics
even than the form that she used in the UK.
So she's taken, now that she's crossed the Atlantic, to
using phrases like the deep state, which are really not
used in British politics and which are taken as a
kind of red warning sign for the worst kind of
(04:19):
political lunacy. So she's really dredging the depth over there
in much the same way, but to a slightly more
extreme degree than she did here.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
Right, So she's just trying to sort of find a
second act. I guess, but you have a prime minister
right now. You've told me he wasn't as bad as
she was discussed.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
He isn't. He's just I mean, but you know, we
need to be clear with I mean, I mean, he's
still shit, He's just not as shit as she is.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Yes, However, I have.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
To say that his recent behavior has been so obscene,
so lacking in any kind of basic decency, that it
really is becoming difficult to even hand him that level
of credibility. The predominant form in which has taken place
is on refugees.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Jesse says mister Bean in a nicer suit.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
I think that's very unfair to mister Bean.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Yes, mister Bean is a beloved hero of British culture.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
He is, He's loved by many cultures, you know, Yes,
one of Britain's just the export. The exports quite well,
mister Bean, because in that way, Richie Sunak really does
not export very well, although we would really like to
export him, but ideally Silicon Valley, which is clearly where
he wants to be. So look, his recent activity has
(05:39):
been with refugees, and this has been taking on a
more stridently reactionary, i mean, really quite authoritarian, draconian streak
in recent days. The policy is the Ruanda policy, and
the Rwanda policy is basically to say we're going to
send anyone that gets to this country, to Ruanda, we're
not going to proce the asylum claim, so we're not
(06:01):
even going to We have essentially shut down our entire
asylum system and said, look, whoever comes, will send them
to Rwanda. Rwanda can process them, decide whether they're real
a refugee or a failed asylum seeker, and then they
will stay in Rwanda regardless of the outcome of that process.
So it's essentially giving up any kind of moral or
(06:21):
national responsibility over people that come here. Now, the vast
majority of people that come to the UK seeking asylum
are given asylum because they are from Eritrea, from Afghanistan,
from Syria, from Iran, from countries in other words, where
you're very likely to have your asylum claim accepted, because
they are war zones where you're very likely to be
subject to persecution. He is entirely forsaken any kind of
(06:42):
principle on this and decided to enact this policy this week.
That yesterday, the Home Office put out a video of
police smashing down the doors of asylum seekers, leading them
away in handcuffs, taking them to detention centers in advance
of a Rwanda export program. These are people who are
some of the most marginalized and bud people on the
face of the earth. They have committed no crime except
(07:03):
to come to the UK seeking help and believing in
its better nature, and that at the moment is the
kind of treatment that they're being handed by. Rishi Suna.
So right, I wish I had more good news here,
but I'm afraid that I don't. It's just a moral
chasm all the way down.
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Yeah, sides being terrible that immigrants, you guys, also your
economy is completely fucked right, this is correct.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
Yeah, Yeah, We've been in stasis now for really very
long time. I mean really since the financial crash in
two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
And this happened because you guys, you sort of enacted
republican part.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
That is entirely correct. Essentially, we had the same initial
problem that you had, which was that we were massively
exposed to the financial sector, and the financial sector was
heavily underregulated when it came to glatteridized debt, obligations, to securities,
to all sorts of dubious games that they were playing
with their products. So we shared that problem. The difference
is that after the financial crack, you guys did not
(08:01):
pursue an austerity program. You know, interest rates were low,
you were still able to borrow and to invest, and
you pursued a pretty moderate form of Kynesian stimulus. You
then pursued a much more substantial form of Kenjian stimulus.
Under Biden, we did the exact opposite. So, even though
interest rates were low, we brought in borrowing, we cut
down on spending at the exact moment that the economy
(08:23):
was in a moment of real difficulty of precisely the
type that economists have understood since the nineteen thirties, since
John Maynard Kines wrote the general theory of how you
deal with this kind of situation, which is to borrow
and spend to stimulate demand to get yourself over trouble.
This country did the exact opposite, under a form of
kind of Milton Friedman Frederick Hayek fiscal feticism, a kind
(08:46):
of BDSM fiscal policy, eventually and punished and destroyed our
own economy over and over again.
Speaker 1 (08:53):
Laughing because it's funny, I'm laughing because it's tragic.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
No, I spent a lot of my life in a
sort of you know, that great zone in between tears
and laughter, wondering which it is I'm experiencing at any
given moment. Now I would now done that, you know,
really for about fifteen years, essentially for a generation. In fact,
you could even say that's the entirety of my career
has taken place in that period of economic stagnation. And
instead what we get, instead of any kind of viable
(09:17):
economic policy, which is just there to reach for if
you want to, is this constant right wing populist victim
game where someone else is always responsible for your own inadequacy.
And it can be immigrants, it can be europe, it
can be civil servants, it can be metropolitan liberals, but
it's always someone else's fault rather than you, the people
who have been in charge for the last thirteen years.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Yeah. I think what happened in the States, which was smart,
was that we had seen in two thousand and eight
what it's like to not fund your stimulus right, to
only save the banks and the corporations, and so we
did a much more false pumping into the economy, which
ultimately ended up leading to a boom.
Speaker 2 (10:00):
The luck of the political cycle in the two moments
that you really needed people in the white House who
are going to stimulate the economy rather than put in spending.
They're in place at the right time. You also had
Keynesians around Obama, Roma in particular, and the same I mean,
I think with Biden you've seen a really quite I
mean from a European point. You know, back in the
day when I was growing up, it was you guys
(10:21):
that were the economically right wing guys, and Europe were
the ones that were the you know, the much more spendy,
you know, quasi socialists, left wing economic policy. Those roles
have now completely reversed. And that is not just the
UK US thing that that accounts for the continental Europe
as well. I mean, Germany, despite the factor, has a
center left government, is not expounding the kind of ideas
(10:42):
that are anywhere near as left wing economically as that
which is coming from the Biden White House. So I
have to say some of that's quite confusing for us
over here when we see the level of disenchantment, including
on the left in the US with Biden, so we
sort of think, you know, we wouldn't mind a bit
of that. Actually, that looks pretty good for us right now,
as do your economic res Yeah.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
You're going to be shocked to hear this. But you know,
I do all these interviews I said with these people,
they say, like the biggest environmental investment ever, right, climate investments.
We're building chips, we're building chargers, We're building high speed trains.
Well I don't know if they're going to be high speed,
but we're having trains. I mean, we're doing all the
stuff that should make everyone on the left happy. Now
(11:24):
we have some other stuff going on. I don't know
if you know that's problematic in other ways, but I'm
not even going to talk about it because I can't
even talk about it. I do think that some of
these investments are incredible, and I do think that they
will ultimately get us where we need to be.
Speaker 2 (11:42):
Yeah, it's true. I mean there is an international consequence,
of course to what's happened in the US, and you
feel that in Europe quite quite starkly, you know, And
when we were brought up, you know, we were brought
up in a US created international order after nineteen forty
five with British contributions again from Mainard Canes. When you
look at you know, the creation of the Breton Wood system,
(12:03):
et cetera. But it was essentially a rules based order
that said, look, everyone benefits from free trade. As long
as we all stick to the rules and we do
not discriminate in our trading arrangements with each other, then
we will all ultimately benefit. Now that is not the
program that Biden follows at the current White House follows.
There's a much more. It's essentially a kind of left
wing nationalist economic program in that it's about, you know,
(12:24):
direct making sure that the supply chain is provided in
the US and with its trading partners, it is discriminating
in its trade arrangements, and it's freezing out China to
create a kind of dual block in the world, dual
trading blocks now in Europe, that obviously creates all sorts
of sentiments and has created a tremendous amount of resentment
of what Biden is doing, including among very reasonable and
(12:46):
impressive politicians like Emmanuel Macron in France. And what it's prompted,
and interestingly in a UK case, is having to think, well, actually,
what do we do then? Because we cannot source all
of our supply chain, we cannot secure it. Just in
the UK, we cannot make a car in the UK,
we make a car in the continents of Europe as
part of that supply chain. So I see in a
(13:08):
strange way towards Europe in a way that hasn't really
been politically understood on the side of the Atlantic quite yet.
Speaker 1 (13:14):
So that's where I wanted to go with this. Always
it's funny because it's like there's always this you know,
quiet conversation that people have with each other on the
left about what happens if Trump wins and New York
State and California are not, you know, they have to
then pay for Trumpism, right, So we're always there's always
(13:36):
sort of a thought process which is like, can we
get out? And the reality is this would be the
same as brexit. You know, it's more taxes and more
regulation put together. I mean, it's this same idea that
you don't like where you are, so you make life
much harder. And that's ultimately what's happened to you guys.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Right, yeah, except that there was nothing you know, the
distinction there is that there was nothing wrong with where
we were.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
No, no, certainly not yeah, yeah, no, no, We're much
more found to than you guys. And it was also
part of what happened was that the people didn't really
know what they were voting for.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
They didn't really they did know that they wanted less immigration.
They got the opposite. We now have more immigration, of course,
because this country requires immigration in order to survive. It's
just that instead of coming from Europe for immigration, those
numbers have fallen catastrophically. They're now coming from India, from Pakistan,
from all over the world. So I'm not entirely sure
that the average Brexit voter was really really intending to
(14:32):
swap Polish people for Indian people, but that's what they've
got now. They were lied to, I mean, they absolutely
were that. You know, the campaigns were all about you
will take back control, you'll have more money for your
health service. People have less control over their lives now
there is less money for the health service. The crucial thing, though,
is the pulling has changed on Europe completely. I mean,
the level of support for rejoining Europe is now very
(14:56):
very high, very very consistent play out over years. It's
almost i mean, it's not far off double the level
of support people saying that they want to stay out.
That is a really different thing, I think, to actually
being able to deliver on a referendum campaign. In which
you rejoin. There's very little appetite for that. People are
talking in abstract terms without the reality of it being
(15:18):
presented to them, and most importantly, without having to emotionally think,
oh fuck, we're going to have to have that conversation
again for year after year after year, talking about tariff
arrangements and customs checks and regulatory borders and all of
the most tedious sentences that are potentially formulated in the
human mind. But nevertheless, they are kind of open to
(15:39):
the idea. And demographically, that's where the real change is happening.
You know, young voters much more comfortable with multiculturalism, much
more comfortable with wanting to travel, have a much more
diverse sense of identity. They can be English, they can
be a Londoner, they can be British, they can be European.
All At the same time, those voters are obviously coming
(15:59):
online every day more and more of them turn eighteen
and older. Voters much more likely to be uncomfortable with multiculturalism,
much more likely to have voted four Brexit, are going offline,
shuffling off life's mortal coil every day time. So the
demographics have completely shifted. And even that alone, even if
no one had been convinced of the era, that alone,
(16:20):
at the moment would be handing us a significant polling advantage.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
But you have an election coming up, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:25):
We do. We're going to come up sort of six
months was so, and the Conservative government is about to
get the most almighty biblical spanking of its very long life.
Speaker 1 (16:36):
So what does that look like?
Speaker 2 (16:38):
I mean at the moment, like there are polling forecasts
of the moment that are properly old Testament. They're like
the great the literally just the one that came out
today put the Conservatives on eighteen percent. The Conservatives I
don't think have been on eighteen percent at any point
in my life. I'm forty two years and I think
they've ever hit that number. Labor is currently polling between
(17:00):
twenty and twenty five points above them, very very big
gap between the two parties. To give you an impression
of how that plays out, you would have a sort
of as few as eighty to ninety Conservative MPs with
the rest of the chamber. That's six hundred and fifty
MPs in total, comprised of Labor and other parties. Let's
say maybe four hundred and fifty five hundred labor MPs.
(17:23):
The scale of it is so impossible to grasp. We
don't know how to fit them in the room in
the House of Commons. In our parliament. We have no
system that because we have to have them sitting opposite
each other. Right, if you have that few MPs in
the opposition party, you just have to start populating their
benches with the governing party's MPs. More than that, you
need them to shadow government departments. You need at least
(17:45):
one hundred MPs to be able to do that, and
the current polling indicates that the Conservatives will not have
that number. They are essentially polling so badly that they've
broken the operating mechanics of British democracy at the moment.
And unless something changes, and it may well change, but
it hasn't changed for quite some time, it looks like
that's the kind of really pulverizing result that they can
(18:05):
look forward to when they do eventually go for a
general election.
Speaker 1 (18:08):
This is like the greatest thing I've ever heard, And
there's no way you can do that here. What do
you mean, I mean, just transmit all of that sort
of energy for or winning, can you?
Speaker 2 (18:24):
I would like to translate that you know what the
key thing, the key distinction between us and you, And
I think have noticed this a couple of times. It
was like it's the moment the spell broke. And for
a long time I thought Boris Johnson would have the
same spell over people that Donald Trump had, and he doesn't.
He didn't like when he in the end, when he
(18:45):
had a scandal, you know, having parties in Downing Street
during COVID going against the legislation he had himself written,
something just snapped in people. The people that supported him,
right wingers, reactionary you know, anti immigrant voters, they just
turned against him. You know, they had this sort of
innate sense of the injustice of that. Now I just
don't I don't believe for a second that if Donald
(19:05):
Trump had done that, had parties during you know, lockdown
people his supporters would have turned against him in any way,
There's something more profound in the link he has with
his base that Boris Johnson was just unable to secure.
And at that moment, the Tory polling died and it
never came back. It just gets well, I mean, obviously
it plummeted even further when Liz Trust came and catastrophically
(19:26):
blew herself up, you know, over the space of forty
one days. But nevertheless, it just got worse and worse
from that point. That mythic link with your support Trump
has it, Johnson didn't have it, and that is the
core reason that we've managed to turn things around.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
Unbelievable. Thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
Not at all. I'm glad that for the first time,
after talking to you for years, I finally have some
good news to report about what's going on in this country.
And maybe, just maybe, in four years, we won't start
one of these conversations with you telling me how catastrophically
shited is here. We'll find out.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Yeah, it's the dream spring is here. And I bet
you are trying to look fashionable, So why not pick
up some fashionable all new Fast Politics merchandise. We just
(20:18):
opened a news store with all new designs just for you.
Get t shirts, hoodies, hats, and top bags. To grab
some head to fastpolitics dot com. Non Denny Jommy is
the co founder of check my at. Welcome back to
Fast Politics.
Speaker 4 (20:34):
Non to me, Hi, mom, so excited to be here today.
Speaker 1 (20:38):
We're so excited to have you. What you guys are
doing is amazing, So tell us about your organization and
then we'll go from there.
Speaker 5 (20:45):
Absolutely, So check my Ads is the digital advertising Watchdog.
We are a fully independent organization working to protect your
right to an Internet free from scam, lives and manipulation.
And we do that by working towards transparency and accountability
in the Internet economy, which is basically ads.
Speaker 1 (21:06):
So walk us through the thinking here, because this started
as people not knowing advertisers not knowing where their ads
were showing up.
Speaker 5 (21:15):
Right, My work personally started in twenty sixteen with the
launch of Sleeping Giants, which was looking to demonetize Brightbart
and then after that was successful, we successfully lost them
ninety percent of their ad revenue in just three months,
just by alerting advertisers to where their ads were running.
I started to look at other websites, and Gateway Pundit
(21:37):
was one of them, and I found that interesting because
the ad agencies and ad exchanges, which are basically the
companies that run ads on behalf of advertisers, had been
doing a lot of work to say and to convince
their clients the advertisers that they were no longer running
ads on websites like Bredebart, and I was seeing ads
(21:59):
from big advertisers on the Gateway Pundit. That's kind of
where where my work led to tell.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Us what you did with the Gateway Pundit, This is a.
Speaker 4 (22:08):
Long time coming.
Speaker 5 (22:09):
In the summer of twenty twenty, the Gateway Pundit had
a lot to say about the Black Lives Matter protests,
and around this time I started checking into them more
and I noticed that they were running ads from major
ad exchanges, and I basically started to contact these companies
which had previously dropped Breitbart, but we're still working with
(22:31):
this website, so it made no sense to me. So
what I did was I contacted each of these companies,
in some cases publicly, in some cases privately, and sometimes both,
and I asked them point blank, what are you doing
running ads for this website? And once that's on the record,
like once I've sent that email or that tweet.
Speaker 4 (22:52):
The balls in their court.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
And because ultimately they serve advertisers, they can't just ignore
me when I point out one thing that is detrimental
to their client, so they kind of have to respond.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So pretty much all of.
Speaker 5 (23:05):
Them, one by one confirmed with me that they were
dropping the Gateway Pundit.
Speaker 4 (23:09):
It was actually really easy.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
So the Internet sucks a lot of times because there's
no government regulation.
Speaker 5 (23:18):
Right.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Congress could have said, you have to have verified news sources,
you have to have content that's vetted, you have to
have Twitter can't link to sites that aren't true. They
could have made checks and bounces, but they decided not to.
But the only real ability that we have as a
(23:39):
country and as citizens to fight back againstuff like this
is legal, right.
Speaker 5 (23:45):
I would disagree that we want Congress to be the
ones to decide what is.
Speaker 1 (23:52):
I mean, they're not going to. I think they could
have years ago stopped a lot of the junkie stuff
on the Internet by saying that tech companies had to
really pay for content for magazines and newspapers. I mean
they didn't, but you you know, there's incentives for everything else. Right.
Speaker 5 (24:11):
I think it's a bit more complicated than that because
a lot of these disinfo outlets that we see today
kind of snuck into the advertising ecosystem, the media eCos
by classifying themselves as the news and companies like Google
and all the other exchanges face I mean, I don't
want to speak on Facebook, but these companies just kind
of are working at scale and they don't want to
(24:32):
look into it both for you know, they don't want
to put the resources into it and they don't want
to have to make those kind of decisions.
Speaker 4 (24:38):
It was just kind of the result of I think
it just kind of.
Speaker 5 (24:42):
Snuck up on the tech company well as as a society.
Speaker 4 (24:46):
But the thing that we can control.
Speaker 5 (24:49):
That's outside of the government that I think is very
very key to solving this problem. I mean, ultimately, this
problem is fueled by advertising. The Gateway Pundit was launched
twenty years ago, almost twenty years and their rise was
fueled by unbridled access to digital advertising revenues. We're talking
(25:12):
The Center for Countering Digital Hate did a study and
will never know the exact number, but they estimate that
in the twenty twenty elections leading up to the insurrection
that the Gateway Pundit made around one point one million
dollars in revenue from Google ads alone.
Speaker 4 (25:28):
I mean, Jim Hoft lives in a very very nice house.
Speaker 5 (25:31):
So that is where we can make a difference, and
we can do it because these ad exchanges all have
supply policies, and these supply policies are essentially an agreement
that they have with advertisers who do want to advertise
in as many places as they can, but they don't
want to end up on polices like Gateway Pundit. So
these exchanges, the vendors have explicitly written out in their
(25:56):
policies that they won't work with websites like the Gateway Pundit.
And by the way, a lot of these at exchanges
adopted this language after our Sleeping Giants campaign against Breitbark And.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I want to just pause for a second and talk
about Jim Hoff for one second. For people who are
not quite as read in as we are, Jim Hoff
is a guy who just basically makes stuff up and
it's all very crazy, Republican, trumpy kind of Can you
give us sort of an example of one of his stories.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
I mean, where do I even again? I mean, they're
really really out there.
Speaker 5 (26:35):
He said a lot of stuff about I mean, he
was one of the biggest voices against COVID vaccines. And
the funny thing is he's now on the record thanks
to a documentary from a French filmmaker which I do
want to talk about shortly, that he doesn't believe anything
that he said.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
Right, which is shocking because I always just thought he
was really stupid. But yeah, me and a lot of
just completely crazy just to have targeting people dominion staff
the whole nine yards. He now has declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
In the summer of twenty twenty, I successfully managed to
get Jim hoft Gateway Pundit kicked off of like three
or four AD exchanges, which was awesome because someone was watching.
Speaker 4 (27:18):
And that someone was a woman named aud Favra.
Speaker 5 (27:21):
She is a French content creator, documentarian, filmmaker, and she
contacted me to say that she was working on a
documentary about AD funded disinformation and then she was specifically
working on the Gateway Pundit. What I didn't know until later,
until almost before this documentary aired, was that she managed
to get a meeting with Jim Hoft, invited her into
(27:46):
into his home, showed her all his giant, magnificent rooms
filled with fancy chandeliers paid for by Google ads, where
he told her I.
Speaker 4 (27:54):
Don't actually believe the stuff that I publish.
Speaker 5 (27:58):
In that same documentary, add also managed to get an interview,
an on camera interview. This is so unusual and rare
with a Google representative, and what she did was so smart.
Speaker 4 (28:11):
She took print outs.
Speaker 5 (28:12):
Of all the crazy stuff that that Gateway Pundit has.
Maybe not all, because that would be a really big folder,
but she got a really good samplus set of Gateway
Pundits articles and confronted the Google rep on camera with
printouts and says, don't these articles violate your policy your
supply policy? And the Google rep was just clearly flustered.
(28:36):
He was not expecting this. He thought this is going
to be a softball interview. Basically didn't know what to
say in the face of this clear evidence. There's no
other answer to this other than you're right, they should
not be monetized. And what happened was a few days
before this documentary was set to launch in France on
(28:56):
National TV, Google dropped the Gateway Pundit and flat out
just devastated the Gateway Pundit.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
Again.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
I can't speak to the numbers, but we do know
for a fact that Google Ads is the biggest ally
and funder of disinformation in not just in the United States, but.
Speaker 4 (29:14):
In the world.
Speaker 5 (29:15):
So when you have ads, when you have access to
a Google Ads account, you have access to in theory,
unlimited funds, which is one of the reasons why Jim huffed,
you know, produces eighty one hundred articles per day, because
each one of those articles is money. I mean, he's
literally printing money. So getting him kicked off of those
ad exchanges, particularly Google, was huge. And while it did
(29:39):
not put him out of business immediately, what happen is
when he was sued by the election workers who he defamed,
he lost a lot of resiliency.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
That money isn't coming in anymore.
Speaker 5 (29:51):
I suspect that he can't afford to fight these lawsuits
because the money isn't coming in. Wow.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
I mean the Gateway Pundit was also like a favor
of Trump. He fed a lot of the lawes that
then we saw. I mean, these far right content creators,
I feel like they are a mobius strip and one feeds,
the next feeds the next, and it ends up on
a way and right, I mean there's a whole sort
of there's a way this works, right.
Speaker 5 (30:20):
Absolutely, They feed off of each other, they cross link,
they feature each other on each other's videos. They're constantly
cross pollinating. And this is frankly, it's very good marketing.
And they're very smart and very good at what they
do and That's why they need to be That's why
these supply policies are so important because that because marketing
(30:42):
is great, but if you're but if you're marketing in
a way that is detrimental, dangerous, or derogatory, that needs
to be nipped in the bud.
Speaker 1 (30:51):
Right and that is is the way to do it.
So in this country, three hundred plus million people, what
ten million read newspapers, I mean much less than that,
but a couple million watch cable television. There's a majority
of people in this country who are not getting their
news from cable television or from newspapers or magazines. So
(31:13):
are they getting it from these sites? I mean, what
are the numbers on this sort of traffic on these sites?
Speaker 5 (31:19):
I couldn't give you an answer to that specifically, but
but more generally, I would say that that the disinfo
outlets that were the most prominent in twenty twenty and
in the years before that are seeing a fairly significant
decline in traffic. That is because Facebook has been deprioritizing
(31:43):
news and political content in our news feed, so that
has had a really strong effect on these outlets. It's
unfortunately also had a strong effect on real news outlets.
The fact is that the tech companies refuse to differentiate
between disinformation and news. Let me tell you something that's
really interesting. Samsung. So if any of your listeners have
(32:06):
a Samsung TV and you watch Samsung TV live, turn
that on. There is various categories of channels that you
can watch, and one of those categories is New than Politics,
and on News and Politics, you'll be able to watch
channels like a cs NBC, ABC, and you'll also be
able to watch Steve Bannon's War Room on Real Am.
(32:28):
Really yeah, And what Samsung does is they bundle up
all of these channels under News and Politics and they
sell the bundle to advertisers to run their ads on.
So two years ago, Bannon was bragging to the Atlantic
about how he's doing so great that he's added another
hour to his show to accommodate his sponsors. And I
(32:51):
was like, what the hell is he talking about? So
I turned on my TV. I saw ads for Edsy, Volvo, Audi, Nissan,
and BMW. I mean, the biggest brands in the world,
Procter and Gamble brands tied and that.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
I have Evolvo.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Favo.
Speaker 1 (33:10):
What are you doing?
Speaker 5 (33:12):
They don't want to be on there, and that's the
thing these advertisers have already set. Etsy was one of
the first companies to block Breitbart back in twenty sixty.
Speaker 4 (33:22):
Yeah, so these guys, they don't want their ads on here.
Speaker 5 (33:24):
What's happening is that their vendors are feeling them, and
they do it through these sneaky, sneaky ways. So I
have asked Samsung, why is it that you have bundled
a news site with a disinformation outlet like Real America's Voice,
I mean Bannon's on in the morning, followed by Charlie Kirk,
followed by I don't know, Jack Pisobiac.
Speaker 1 (33:45):
This is not news. Whatever this is, it's not news.
Speaker 4 (33:48):
They just keep getting away with it.
Speaker 5 (33:49):
And so that's why what we do is so important,
because we work with advertisers. We talk to advertisers, and
we speak to marketing and brand representatives about what's happening,
because a lot of the time they aren't aware of
what is happening with their ads, and because there's constantly
new places for these bad guys to be expanding their
(34:10):
little empires into. Like Bannon is a great example. He
went from websites to a TV show on streaming TV
and streaming TV is like the wild West of digital advertising.
If you talk to any advertiser, they're going to be like, God,
I hope my ads aren't running on like it's on
rushing state TV because it's impossible to know what's actually happening.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
I think that it's right. And I also think that,
like what you're doing here, which I think is really important,
is everyone is so busy and everything is expanded so
quickly that there have to be people checking on what's happening.
And because and again I know that I said this
earlier and maybe you thought I was being a little
(34:52):
bit nutty about this, but I'm actually right, I promise,
because there's no regulation for any of this. There's no
one to regulate it, right, there's no industry, there's no
FDA for streaming.
Speaker 5 (35:02):
I do want to point out that regulation is very
important and core to what we're doing at check my ads,
but oura of regulation is slightly different.
Speaker 4 (35:11):
So we operate from the insight that I.
Speaker 5 (35:14):
Just said, which is that advertisers don't even know where
their ads are running, and oftentimes, almost all the time,
the ads that end up where they do happened without
the knowledge or consent of the advertiser. So imagine how
much money did Volvo fork over to Steve Bannon. I
bet they're not happy about that. What this really comes
down to is the fact that there is this six
(35:36):
hundred billion dollar digital advertising industry that is operating under
almost like just a cloak of darkness. We know how
money is being spent, so when it comes down to
an advertiser saying, or even if anyone ever mandated, you know,
don't run your ads on X or Y, there's no
(35:57):
way for us to verify that because the digital advertising
vendors are keeping that information advertisers, they.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
Don't need to produce the transparency, so they're not going.
Speaker 5 (36:10):
To exactly And that's why this keeps happening. Because advertisers
can't see where their ads are going. They don't have visibility,
and so we're in a situation where billions of dollars
every year advertisers are just basically handing them over to strangers.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
I think this and Congress could say that there needs
to be clarity about that, and they could make finds,
but god forbid, I'm sorry, everybody's off. It's a Thursday.
Thank you so much. This is so important. I hope
you'll come back and talk more about all of your
victories and what an important service you're providing.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Oh well, thank you so much, Molly for letting me
talk about this today. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
George Whitesidees is a candidate for Congress in California's twenty
seven district. Welcome too, Fast Politics, George white Side, Thank
you so much, Molly, it's great to be with you.
Explain to us what you're running for.
Speaker 6 (37:05):
So I am running for Congress, trying to bring a
voice for pragmatic leadership out in California's twenty seventh congressional district,
which is on the north side of La County, and
I'm running against super Maga Mike Garcia.
Speaker 1 (37:21):
You are a congressperson from Los Angeles running for a
seat that is occupied by a Republican make it make sense,
and a Maga Republican.
Speaker 2 (37:32):
It's absolutely nuts.
Speaker 6 (37:33):
Right, So just a little bit about me. So, I
am a space guy, right. I was chief of staff
of NASA for President Obama. Grew up wanting to work
in NASA and did that under the Obama administration absolutely fantastic.
Then went on to move out to the district to
run an aerospace company called Virgin Galactic did that for
about ten years. Amazing experience and help the community in
(37:57):
a lot of ways along the way, particularly in wilds
in COVID And we can talk about those things. But
you know, the crazy thing, Molly, is that on the
door side of La County is arguably the best chance
to flip a seat for the Democrats to help out
and flip the House in the entire country. And it's
this district that Biden won by twelve and a half points.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
Jesus, how did Democrats lose this district in Sanitay.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Well, it's complicated.
Speaker 1 (38:25):
It's okay, we don't have to go back there. Yes,
so explain to us how we got here, with why
you decided to run, and also tell me some horrifying
things about Mike Gercia.
Speaker 6 (38:38):
How we got here is we're in a purple district
that's trending blue. All of the underlying indicators of this
district are really heading in our direction, right, So voting
for Biden by twelve and a half points Democratic registration
advantage of twelve points. It's a district that voted for
Prop One, which was this California amendment protecting reproductive freedom
(38:59):
by almost twenty four points, right, and so all these
things are sort of, you know, indications that this is
a district that we should have, and yet we have
this representative now, Molly, who is stridently anti choice. Right.
He was one of the co sponsors of what we
call the National Abortion Band Life of Conception Act. He
was one of these guys who voted to you overturn
(39:21):
the presidential election in twenty twenty. And he votes to
cut the budget by thirty percent. It votes for Mike
Johnson and Jim Jordan and all these things. And so
we've got a great opportunity here to flip a seat
because like, our district is pro choice, it's pro Biden,
it's moving towards the Democrats, and it's kind of the
perfect time to flip one of these four seats that
(39:44):
we need in the country.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
So what is Mike Garcia like, he's embraced MAGA. Tell
us more about that.
Speaker 6 (39:51):
Well, he's just going to do whatever Donald Trump wants, right,
and so you know that's what he did back in
twenty twenty when they wanted to overturn the election. And
he's just really really out of touch.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
He also secretly sold Boeing stock ahead of a Dan report.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
Oh yeah, you heard about that. Yeah, it's actually absolutely bonkers,
right because you know, I worked in the Obama administration,
which had these super high ethical protections and did very well, right, Like,
we had very few ethics issues. If anybody had done
anything even vaguely like what Garcia has done, they would
have been so out during that time. But that's just
an indication of how crazy it is. Let me just
(40:28):
summarize what happens for your listeners. So basically, back in
twenty twenty, my boning Garcia was on the Transportation Infrastructure
Committee in Congress, which was investigating Boeing at that time
for those terrible accidents that they had, and so they
were about to come out with this very damning report
on Boeing as a company, and so right before then,
(40:50):
Garcia sold fifty thousand dollars worth of Boeing stock, And
that in itself is like totally unethical and terrible. But
more than that, he then didn't report it as he
was required to under congressional rules until after the election.
And this is an election that he won by three
hundred votes, So like, it is absolutely insane that he's
(41:11):
like essentially there because he was he seems to have
been hiding unethical stock creating behavior.
Speaker 1 (41:18):
I mean, I shouldn't laugh, but again, if you do,
when I'm going to make you promise me right now
that you will that you guys will work on this.
Speaker 4 (41:29):
We got to fix this.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
Members should not trade stocks.
Speaker 6 (41:32):
It's just like bad idea jeans, you know, for your
older listeners. It's just a terrible idea. We got to
change that. We got to fix a lot of stuff.
And I mean, like that's what I'm a pragmatist, right, I'm,
you know, one of these guys who just wants to
get stuff done. And I am so disgusted by what
I see in Congress now under Republican leadership. It's just
(41:53):
so it doesn't do anything. And like that is one
of the things that we got to do. But I
think we got to go under the hood in a
lot lot of ways and really reform Congress because it's
just not up to snuff to answer the challenges of
you know, the twenty first century.
Speaker 1 (42:09):
Yeah, it is sort of shocking to me. And there's
so many things that this Congress does, like the Appliance
Messaging Bill, the anti science rhetoric. So here you are,
you were at Virgin Galactic, You've confronted science and you
believe in it. Talk to me about this. You know,
they want to make sure that Democrats can't ban gas
(42:31):
stoves because God forbid anything that. And Democrats don't even
want to ban gastobes. But the thinking mind this was
at gastoves and I have a gastobe. They league, but
the idea that this Congress would then run with it
as a sort of like tenant of the new Republican
Party seems nuts to met.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (42:51):
Part of the reason, a big part of the reason
why I'm running, is that I think we need more
people who are literate in science and technology in Congress
to address these huge challenges we've got coming down the road.
And so, like, what are those challenges, ai, you know,
the social media and how it affects our kids. I
have an eleven year old and a thirteen year old,
and I am just absolutely terrified about what's about to
(43:13):
happen over the next ten years in their lives. Climate change,
you know, healthcare. We have to have people who understand
this stuff, or at least understand it enough to like
address the fundamental issues and you know, I like to
say my favorite movie is Apollo thirteen, of course, and
there's this great scene in Apollo thirteen where you know,
the spacecraft is broken. It's out in lunar orbit or
(43:33):
whatever it is, and back on Earth, they like get
their smartest engineers together and they kind of throw on
the table all the stuff that they think is inside
the capsule and they say like, Okay, you got to
fix it, you know, with this stuff. And I kind
of feel like we're at that kind of moment with
American democracy. You know, it's like a failure is not
an option. We got to we got to take what
we have, and good people have to you know, run
(43:55):
towards the fire. Not to mix my metaphors, but I'm
also really into the wheld fire challenge we can talk about,
you know, like we have to have good people run
towards this dumpster fire that is the Republican led Congress
to fix it. Because these challenges that we've got, whether
it's technology challenges or whether it's housing or you know,
clean energy or affordable healthcare, Like we got to be
(44:18):
smart about addressing these things. And if we ignore the science,
if we ignore the facts, like we're just not going
to solve this stuff. And so that's that's a big
part of why I'm running it is.
Speaker 1 (44:27):
But the Biden administration, they've done sort of incredible generational
climate change legislation.
Speaker 6 (44:33):
Absolutely, I mean they have done amazing stuff, right and
you know we should give them do credit for huge,
huge things that they have done.
Speaker 1 (44:43):
Will be the only people doing it, but yes, we'll
do it right now, very unshe.
Speaker 6 (44:47):
At least here you and I are going to give
them credit. And so I do that. I give them credit.
You know, I think back to the Obama instration administration
it's very similar, you know, like amazing people going into
work in the federal government. And by the way, we
need more people like that, right, Like we have to
inspire people that you can do good work inside the government,
right that you you know that it's not this thing
(45:08):
that you should burn down, because the government is going
to be a key part of the solution. I'll give
you an example at NASA, we really wanted to reinvigorate
NASA in a lot of ways, and not just increasing
the Earth Science budget, but also sort of like figuring
out how we can interact with the private sector in
ways that work better, and so we made some changes
under the hood, and now like great things are happening
(45:31):
in the American space industry. We're discovering all this stuff
in space, and our companies are doing really well, generating thousands,
tens of the thousands of jobs all across the country.
And we took some tough decisions back there. And that's
what we have to do, is we have to like
really be smart about these big policy problems. Certainly, the
Biden administration is doing awesome work in climate and healthcare
(45:51):
and many other things. And I'm just like terribly worried,
honestly about what this fall holds and the crucial importance
of Tea taking back the House not just for these issues,
but also for you know, the issues around democracy. Right,
Like I say to everybody, let's keep in mind, you know,
these are the people going to be certifying the election
in twenty twenty four. Yeah, I didn't go so well,
(46:12):
you know, I mean, it went fine, And imagine if
some of these people are in charge of that when
we get to that point, we can't have that right,
So we have to flip the House.
Speaker 1 (46:20):
One of the things I was actually thinking about when
we're talking was that if Democrats don't flip the House,
the idea that Mike Johnson, who Trump decided he was
his guy because of the briefs he wrote about the
twenty twenty election.
Speaker 6 (46:34):
Right, absolutely, this is what's so terrifying about this scenario. Right,
I mean, you play it out, and I mean you
are doing such a good job of exposing these issues
because we have to be really honest and focus on
the reality of what we're heading towards. We're heading towards
a reality where if we don't flip the House, we
have a bunch of election deniers in control of the House.
We're controllingscation, we have the possibility of a president who
(46:58):
could be the end of American democracy. I wrote a
note as I have a good friend of mine in
Congress today, a guy named Derek Kilmer. He's a really
amazing guy, represents Washington State, and he was, you know,
in Congress in twenty twenty. And I remember sending him
a text message in the middle of the afternoon on
January sixth, and I said to him, and we were
texting back and forth, he was alone in the Capitol,
(47:20):
and you know, of course number one, I was like,
you know, are you o pay. But number two, he
and I were talking about the importance of getting back
into the capital, you know, and certifying the presidential election.
Think of you know, if we had a Republican controlled
Congress or House at that moment in time, you know,
and how catastrophic that would have been at that moment.
(47:43):
So you know, this is really existential. Every election is
the most important election, Molly, right, but this really really is,
I think, and that's why I ran, you know, like
in twenty sixteen. It was so existential, right, We all
felt that concern and worry when Trump was elected, and
I didn't feel like I was at a point where
I could exactly step back from the company and stuff,
(48:03):
but I knew like I had to step up. That
we all have to step up. I mean, you step
up every week or you know, all the time. We
all have to do that right now because if we're not,
but we have serious problems if we don't flip the house.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
You know, it seems like such an existential threat. But
there really are people on the other side who really
believe in Trump and trump Ism And can we do
two seconds on climate change? Because you worked at Virgin
Galactu and you are coming from Los Angeles. Are you
shocked and how quickly it's happened around us? And also
(48:40):
are you shocked by how little people have admitted that
it Like there's a sense in which there's like a
faked in fatalism about it that I'm very surprised by.
Speaker 2 (48:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 6 (48:51):
So I have a degree in remote sensing, you know,
which is like satellite imagery of planet Earth. And you
have worked at NASA, and the data that we're getting.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Right now, Molly is very scary.
Speaker 2 (49:03):
You know.
Speaker 6 (49:03):
You look at the temperature of the oceans and they're
literally off the charts, like literally that is not an exaggeration.
They are off the charts of what they have been
over the last you know, ten twenty thirty years. And
that's where a lot of the heat you know, of
our planet is absorbed in the oceans. And if those
are now shooting up. But it's methane, right, It's a
(49:25):
lot of things. But the point is that the scary idea,
and it's not yet confirmed, but the scary idea is
that we may be on a new curve for warming
for planet Earth. And this is the way that I
bring it home for voters in my district. Because climate
change can seem sort of, you know, abstract to some people.
In our district, we have a huge threat from catastrophic wildfires,
(49:49):
which of course have you know, swept the American West
over the last five or ten years. And people are
worried about two things. They're worried about their homes burning
down and their commune unities burning up. My wife, by
the way, grew up in Santa Rosa where they had
a terrible fire where five thousand homes were burned. They're
worried about that catastrophic risk, but they're also worried about
the financial risk embedded in their insurance policies. So hundreds
(50:14):
thousands of Californians in our district are currently getting kicked
off their insurance because these private insurers are basically just
leaving the state or they're refusing to write new coverage,
and so what they're what our voters are being forced
to do is to get on a state backed plan
which costs thousands of dollars more. And what I say
to folks is like, this is really climate risk becoming
(50:38):
very real for all of us, and so we need
to have smart people who can actually address these climate
risk related issues. Like wildfires, like hurricanes, like other things,
and you look at the other side and they don't
take any of this seriously. My opponent doesn't think that
climate change has anything to do with wildfires, and that
(50:59):
kind of attitude, that blindness to the reality of our
world is really catastrophic and presents huge, huge problems for
our ability to use solve these issues.
Speaker 1 (51:11):
Yeah, I mean, what do you think those numbers are?
When you look at the new climate change track percentage warming?
Speaker 6 (51:20):
Unfortunately, it's it's quite clear we're going to exceed this
one point five degree celsius thing. You know, by the way,
we have got like a tactical mistake that we made
was to present all these numbers in celsius. It's really
like a three degree thing. But that's just like global average.
A lot of places will be looking at you know,
you know, ten degrees fahrenheit, fifteen degrees, twenty degrees fahrenheit.
Speaker 1 (51:41):
I live in New York. It goes from sixty to eighty.
You know, it goes from forty to eighty. I mean,
none of that is normal. We don't have snow anymore.
Speaker 6 (51:50):
It's really scary and so but we need to have hope,
right and This is not just in the area of
climate change. It's in the area of like democracy, it's
in the area of all these things that we need
to be thinking about. Like we need to have the
hope that we can solve these challenges. And I do
believe that we can, like if we get good people
into government, if we get good people into Congress, you know,
if we keep the White House, like we have the
(52:12):
capacity to solve these problems nationally, globally and locally. Like
you know, I talked to a lot of young voters
in our districts. It's just over at community college College
of the Canyons, and you know, some kids are really
bummed out now and I try to get them excited
that like, no, we can solve these problems, but we
got to address them honestly. We got to like look
(52:32):
at the facts and if we do that, we can
we can have a positive impact.
Speaker 4 (52:36):
We just can't lose hope.
Speaker 1 (52:37):
Yeah, it's really true. Thank you so much, George, and
good luck.
Speaker 6 (52:41):
Thanks Molly, it's great to speak with you.
Speaker 2 (52:45):
A moment.
Speaker 7 (52:48):
Jesse Cannon, Mally Jung Fast Trump particular with the Roe
versus weight, he really likes to pretend that public sentiment
is something that's not what are you seeing here?
Speaker 1 (52:59):
So Trump says that a lot of people like it
when he floats the idea of being a dictator, again,
I don't like it. It's bad. American democracy is fragile.
Trump said that a lot of people like it, he
told the Times. This is from this Time magazine article
which has Trump talking about deportation camps. They're not for you,
(53:22):
or maybe not for you yet. And if states want
to monitor women's cycles, he's okay with that. Well. He
also wants you to know that people love his authoritarian rhetoric.
And not since the Civil War have freedom and democracy
been under insult at home as they are today because
of Donald Trump. Trump is willing to throw away the
(53:42):
very idea of American democracy and we're seeing it right here.
And for that Trump's authoritarian leaning and his belief that
people like it, that is our moment of our gray.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics, and every Monday,
Wednesday and Friday to hear the best minds in politics
(54:04):
makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what
you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep
the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening,
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