September 9, 2024 • 30 mins
Mia and Robert discuss an unlikely electoral program to defeat the far right: an MLM crackdown, supplement regulations, and legalizing direct car sales.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to it could Happen Here, a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I'm your host bo Wog. With me is Robert Evans.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Woo woo.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So we have spent a lot of time on this
show talking about the rise of the far right and
what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in
the streets, and the sort of you know, deleterious effects
that it has had on effectively everyone in the US.
This is going to be a little bit of a
different episode. We've talked about a lot of the responses
(00:35):
to the far right, sort of you know, in terms
of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. We
haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally.
And I do think that a significant portion of the
far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a
series of things that are not particularly complicated. But the
(00:57):
problem is that defeating feeding the far right means going
beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is
the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you want
to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is
not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with
Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every election
into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral
(01:20):
victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat the
base of the far right. When the Republican Party held
power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party.
They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to
ensure unions would no longer be able to provide the
(01:40):
ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If
we are going to defeat the far right, we need
to wage the same kind of campaign against them. Now.
Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need
to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs
of the far right out from under them. There is,
in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement
(02:03):
to defeat the far right that is very simple. It
has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that
drives them effectively completely underground.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing for these
appearance schemes right, which are a major source of funding
for the fire right. I mean, this is where Trump
comes out of right, this is why he did that
fake university like, this is a big part of his base.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah. Yeah, we're going to get more into that in
a seconds. The second, very important one is a regulatory
overhaul of how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which
sounds like it. Yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but
supplements are another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get
their shit.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, yep, yep. And the third is another kind of
wonky change that will be extremely important, which is making
sure to allow car companies to make sure rec sales
to customers, thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful
base of right wing American car dealership owners.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any
other career field in this country.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from
this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms
EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial
and political base of the far right that they will
at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term,
becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now.
(03:34):
So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as
Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably
the most famous and the one that Robert has done
an entire show on. So go listen to that if
you want to really actually in detailed thing on the
history of Amway, Mway and the sort of political family
(03:57):
the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part
of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously,
Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of
prince family is embedded into this. And Amway famously used
its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates
(04:20):
and also uses its base and also directly its own
funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of
Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that
is true of all of these reforms, is that everything
we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
own right, right, MLMs are scams. They're extremely exploitative, and
(04:41):
their rule, I think in the far right is a
lot more important than people understand. Even if you just
look at the money, you're sort of missing part of
what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot.
They're part of how the far right builds his ideological base.
Teach you to convert all of your personal relations into
(05:03):
potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a
moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level.
The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious
relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world,
and this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.
Once you've been trained that literally everything, even in your
(05:24):
sort of closest friends, and you know your dearest relationships
with your family, are just business opportunities, it's extremely easy
to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform.
In the same way the experience of being in a
union and organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out
the ideological base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous
political basis for the right and Unfortunately, this sort of
(05:46):
ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able
to get out of MLMs, or especially if they're sort
of cast out of mlems because they've simply are broken
brand of money and are in debt. The isolation and
alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single
relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell them
soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and makes
(06:09):
them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this is
why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way to
sort of cost Republican party money, because that's not enough
to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources of money.
What you need to do is systematically remove parts of
(06:29):
their political base. And when I say your roofports to
their political base, what I mean is you have to
go after the systems that are creating more members of
the far right. Going after MLMs is a way to
do that. Now. The FTC has gone after m lms before.
They sort of famously, as you talked about in that
episode an mway, they went after a bunch of MLMs
(06:50):
in the eighties, but this sort of caused MLMs to
get smarter and has you know, has been pretty effective
in in sort of warding the FTC off from really
going after MLM since then.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were
just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the
minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them,
you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in
which this sense of impunity has developed among the people
who run and participate in these things due to their
capture of the legal system is also a part of
(07:27):
like why the far right works the way it does,
that sense of impunity.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that
impunity is is just the way the FTC goes after
these companies, right, I mean there was in the in
the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light,
which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But
the way they went after them was they issued them
a two hundred million dollar fine and that's a lot
of money, but it didn't drive Neutralight out of business.
And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government
(07:55):
regulation just means setting fines and if the finds still
all the business to make more money than they lost
from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these
businesses and the worst that could happen to you is
the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know,
two thousand and eight right where all these banks know
(08:16):
they're going to get bailed out and they know the
worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just
the government taking a small cut and they can go
back to just making all their money. So in order
to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
the FTC. You know, even if if you were to
sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that
was were willing to go after stuff. There needs to
(08:37):
be actual regulatory change here, and that is possible but difficult.
But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious
about wielding political power to defeat the far right and
to keep them from re emerging and to keep them
out of power generationally, then this is the start of
what we have to do. So we mentioned neutral Light,
(08:58):
which is you know, a very very power. NEUTRALI is
important because it is actually two kinds of business that
are extremely important to the far right at the same time,
it is part MLM, but is an MLM that also
sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from these ads,
we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated
(09:20):
dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right
more broadly, and we are back. Oh boy, Yeah, the
supplement market. There is a lot less that has been
(09:41):
written about this than there should be. So dietary supplements
are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting scammed
all over the place. Enormous numbers. I mean, I've seen
numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million people
take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things
like sort of vitamin gummies, et cetera, etc. This is
an enormous This is an enormous business. I'm going to
(10:04):
read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an article about
supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health. If
you're going to read this, By the way, this is
slightly out of date because the next year, I don't
know if this is part of this. The next year
at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations. But
here is star quote. The dietary Supplement Health and Education Act,
(10:25):
which is the big thing that sort of deregulated supplements,
prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows
the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue immediate
bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes the
FDA to implement current good Manufacturing Practice guidelines. The law
also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements, defines
(10:48):
supplements that were not marketed in the US before October fifteenth,
nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary Supplement Health
Education Act went into effect. Products violating these regulations are
deemed dangerous, adulterated, and miss it, or otherwise unlawful. And
that all sounds well and good until you get to
the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need not
be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety
(11:11):
are required for new supplement ingredients.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah. So, like, you're not supposed to let people sell
dangerous supplements, but we're all also not supposed to check
to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Yeah, yeah it as the FDA itself admits that even
the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that
the FAA in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to
like notify the FDA if you put new ingredients.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But like even that just isn't happening. These companies just
don't care. They're just not either' not even like doing
the little tiny legal mandate stuffy're required to.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I should also note a large part of the blame
for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLM's actually
they play a role in it too. It's the state
of Utah.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
By the way, the political power of the State of
Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are
a massive fuck industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So,
by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where
they like kidnap your children and torture them, these are
all things that the State of Utah and specific will
fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any
(12:15):
way shape or for.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary
Supplement Health Education Act, that is the baby of Utah
Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing
force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch
has been this effective, and the fact that Utah serves
as such a powerful base. Here demonstrate something that's important
about this political strategy, which is that it has to
(12:37):
be a federal level political strategy because there are a
lot of seats the Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need
to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block
of sort of political power in these states. I want
to read a little bit more from that article by
Star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements
because I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote,
(13:01):
manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all
ingredients supply to them.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Sure why they need to do that?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Unbelievable, And they're not required to followup river how I
talked about. There's current good manufacturing practices guidelines. Following those
guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover,
unlike drugs, which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they
do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US
(13:30):
pharmacopia and national formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by
US pharmacopia, so they don't have to work. They can
choose whether or not they want to be submitted to
see if any of this stuff works now in theory, also,
(13:52):
the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated
by the FDC, But like, is the FDC regulating all
of these false class people are making with their dietary elements? No,
of course they're not doing that. So why do we
care about supplement market Robert has kind of has talked
about this at the very beginning of the episode. The
easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets
(14:13):
is simply the figure of Alex Jones, who, you know,
we have talked about extensively on this show. It's been
behind the Bastards. If you want to really, really in depth,
look at who Alex Jones is. The podcast and Knowledge
Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has
ever created. Yeah, it would be hard to beat. Yeah,
it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know,
(14:36):
as an individual figure, has done more to sort of
spread the ideology the far right and turn this country
into what it is now than maybe almost any other
single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he is
probably most well known now as quote the Sandy Hook guy,
which he's extremely mad at all people calling him, but
he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a bunch
(14:58):
of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flat
And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems,
which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company.
Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about
eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now,
these court records come from one of a number of
(15:21):
lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the
victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are serty for defaming
the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
And you know, in the process of discovery, we got
a bunch of information about how Alex Jones's internal media
empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over
(15:44):
the years, you know that he's hawked everything from silver
to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements that
actually sell. Right, As an MPR article said, about eighty
percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. This is
not a sort of small independent media outlet right free
speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was worth hundreds
(16:07):
of millions of dollars, this is an enormous far right
media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing figures like
Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes
a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage
pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against Tucker Carlson
for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed
them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on Fox before
(16:29):
he got kicked off, and what do you want to
fund this? And you know that was actually a sort
of effective strategy. But you know, the funny part about
this is if you look at the end of Tucker
Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show were ads
from the my Pillow guy who was a far right
extremist in his own right and a very important election denier,
(16:51):
and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a
durable and renewable grift because there's a ready an extensive
network of suppliers and distributors right wing brands who want
to make a bunch of money can just sort of
slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
and then they can market them to their viewers, and
(17:12):
this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding.
And this is used all over the place.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Right Again, it impacts what they say and like how
they like the obsession they have with like seed oils
and what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all
of these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know,
what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all
of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right,
(17:40):
Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust
and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
own profit. And so it's not just a matter of
like this is how they get money, but this also
is why they do some of the things that are
so harmful.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, And as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the
incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies
and selling more and more of the supplement things. It's
a spiral. It keeps on just increasing in size and
increasing in size due to the feedback loop from the
incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this is
(18:15):
actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to just
completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about,
I think is actually a much harder political fight, But
a lot of the market for this can be defeated
by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way
they do drugs because, and this is really important, these
(18:36):
supplements are being marketed as drugs, right The advertisements that
these people are already doing are already illegal. The FTC
is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this.
They shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this. And
this is again, as with banning MLMs, this is something
that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement
(18:56):
market exists after sort of a massive regulatory even crackdown
will be much safer, it will be much more effective,
and it will also destroy the base of far right media.
If you can cut the knees out of this sort
of far right media ecosystem, you can go an enormous
way towards solving the crisis of the far right that
has been brought upon this country. Speaking of crisis, Yeah,
(19:20):
we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads, and
then we're going to come back and close by talking
about car manufacturers in the American gentry.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah, we're back, and this is a fun one. This
is also like one of my particular favorite things to
hit because I don't think a lot of people know
how much the Republican Party is just a party of
(19:49):
used car dealers YEP.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really
fully about car dealerships, but it mentions the sort of
political effect and the kind of class that they belong to.
Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in
the last decade, at least one of the best things
they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry
by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that huge swaths
(20:15):
of America are ruled by what he calls the local gentry.
These are millionaires, and notably, these are not billionaires. These
are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction
from the surrounding communities. In places like Wyman's childhood home
of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous local power over
the territory. They rule like the landed gentry of old.
(20:38):
Here's Wyman quote. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet setting
cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, but they are
far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed league group,
one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies
that govern life for tens of millions of people. Donald
Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting as
(21:00):
he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct, when he
crowed about his quote beautiful boaters, lauding the flotilla of
his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor,
or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January sixth
crowd that included people who had flown to the event
on private jets. He knew what he was doing. Trump
(21:22):
was courting the support of the American gentry, the salts
of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders
in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of a once
great nation.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Wyman is largely focused on the agricultural gentry because that's
you know, the sort of the sort of agrobarons who
are very important to this story, but are are kind
of are are kind of auxiliary to this and that
you know that that's largely because he's talking a lot
about the places where he grew up, which are which
are agricultural pubs. But a very critical component of this
(21:56):
American gentry, of this local elite class are card dealership owners,
and their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated. The
journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate
in twenty twenty three. Quote auto dealers are one of
the five most common professions among the top point one
percent of American earners car dealers, gas station owners, and
(22:18):
building contractors. It turns out, make up the majority of
the countries one hundred and forty thousand Americans who earn
more than one point five million dollars a year. Crunching
numbers from the US Census Bureau, data, scientists and author
Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent of car dealerships
in the US have an owner in banking more than
one point five million a year, which is absolutely absurd.
(22:42):
That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who, really,
when you think about it, don't do anything like what
is the actual service that a car dealer is doing.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I mean, the primary thing that they do is rip
people Offcause the entire way that car sales work is
based on fraud, ye right, Like it's based on getting
you to buy things that do not actually work, like
service packages and whatnot that you often will not get
any benefit from. And it's a lot of it is
(23:11):
based around also just outright scams, you know, altering the
information buyers have access to so they don't realize like
problems with a used car or whatever. Like, it's it's
all fraud, right Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters,
scammers and people who are just their entire existence is
dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political
power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same
article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one
hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of
(23:44):
around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became
one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with
sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five
hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual Nauta
(24:05):
convention became routine for presidential hole fuls, and even Presidents
Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended
ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
after they left the White House. And the fact that
Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a
moral level. Right, This is an entire organization of fraudsters
(24:26):
and it doesn't even work.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
But they really want that one.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's the same thing with like you've got Schumer going
out for the crypto caucus now, where like, yeah, well
only a fraction of those guys are going to donate
to DIMS, but it's all scam. He doesn't really care
as long as some of it goes to him.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah. Now.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
The thing that's more that's dangerous about these people, and
I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money,
is that these are local elites, right, and they are
dispersed enormously across the country. This is this is something
that Salmon is very sort of specific about is somebody
that comes up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up
if you do any research about this at all. A
huge part of the power is because these people are
(25:09):
spread geographically across the country, and because they are the
richest people or among the richest people in the sort
of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts
of political power. And because they are again unbelievably wealthy,
they can funnel this money directly into local politics on
a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of
(25:30):
grassroots organizations. This allows them to buy everything from city
council's to seats in Congress.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
And they effectively unionize. Like in Portland, They've got the
Portland Business Association right, which is to a significant extent
allied with the police, and like dominates local politics. They're
the ones who buy the mayor's election, Like, They're the
ones who make deals with the Portland Police Officers union.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Like.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
This is the way in which a lot of power
gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, and they've also been doing things like coordinating and
doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. I mean, this is
why most of these big associations were formed was specifically
to destroy unions in the early twentieth century. And you know,
I mean the Autolobbying group was formed to do autolobbying
because these car dealerships don't have unions. That's another thing
that we'll come back to it a little bit. But yeah,
(26:26):
these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful for
us in electoral politics, and they deliver seats and this
is the most important thing if you're an electoralist, right,
these people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an
amount of money into local races that people can't compete with.
And because of this, they miserate the lives of hundreds
of millions of people. And they can also largely be
(26:47):
destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe oversalling it a
little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous
array of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales
of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing
with local retailers. And this is something that the autolobby
has been you know, the Auto Association Lobby NA has
(27:08):
been fighting for for ages. They've gotten it in an
enormous number of states.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms
of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big
part of like how Tesla is different from other auto
manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where
they're not allowed to do this, but in most states
they sell directly to the customer, which is like back
before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a
major reason why these people didn't like him.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing,
is what the thing I want to close on here. Yes, yes, yes,
these people still hate Musks and they hate electric cars
because electric cars to a large extent are both a
being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to
you actually have to do service on them in a
way that makes it more expensive for these these companies
(27:54):
to write about this. This is something that Semon has
written about extensively. So they absolutely despise elect cars. And
this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because
Elon Musk now is again one of there is I
think he's still the richest person in the world technically
until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is
an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right,
(28:16):
because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have
are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other
parts of the Republican base. Right, Elon hates them. Actual
car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like,
oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is
also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this,
(28:38):
and this is one of the few times libertarians are right.
They look at this and go, oh yeah, Well, these
people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a
lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there,
if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things.
So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions
of the Republican base who oppose these companies. And if
you can, you can use this as a wedge issue
(28:59):
to split the Republican base. And that's sort of where
I want to close on. As much as I've been
talking about these three very specific things, right, banning MLMs
or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns
on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales. What
we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of
(29:20):
the money that supports the far right. We're trying to
destroy their institutions, and we're trying to fracture their base. Right.
Going after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce
more produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more
people in the far right from these MLMs. Going after
supplements is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem,
which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.
(29:41):
And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
coalition by pitting two parts of the Republican base against
each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon and versus
the auto manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This
is again something we're going to continue to talk about
because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
these three things don't solve every problem with the far right,
but this is like, if you could actually like packaged
these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the
(30:13):
equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Think this is a smart thing to be hitting. We
will continue to talk about this in more detail, but
you know what we're done for the day. Go do
something else.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
It could happen here as a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from pool Zone Media, visit our website
poolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to it could Happen Here, a podcast about things
falling apart and how to put them back together again.
I'm your host bo Wog. With me is Robert Evans.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Woo woo.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
So we have spent a lot of time on this
show talking about the rise of the far right and
what that's looked like electorally, what that's looked like in
the streets, and the sort of you know, deleterious effects
that it has had on effectively everyone in the US.
This is going to be a little bit of a
different episode. We've talked about a lot of the responses
(00:35):
to the far right, sort of you know, in terms
of sort of direct actions and sort of confrontations. We
haven't really done is talked about what can be done electorally.
And I do think that a significant portion of the
far right can be defanged and eventually defeated through a
series of things that are not particularly complicated. But the
(00:57):
problem is that defeating feeding the far right means going
beyond simply trying to win every single election, which is
the current sort of democratic strategy. Right If you want
to actually defeat the far right, winning every election is
not a viable strategy. We've seen this fail already with
Hillary Clinton. We cannot rely on simply winning every election
into the future. You have to go beyond mere electoral
(01:20):
victory towards using your electoral victory to actually defeat the
base of the far right. When the Republican Party held
power for twelve years following the ascension of Ronald Reagan,
they did it by destroying the political base the Democratic Party.
They shattered America's trade unions and rebuilt the economy to
ensure unions would no longer be able to provide the
(01:40):
ideological and financial support the Democrats had relied on. If
we are going to defeat the far right, we need
to wage the same kind of campaign against them. Now.
Luckily for us, unlike Ronald Reagan, we do not need
to completely rebuild the American economy to knock the legs
of the far right out from under them. There is,
in fact, a pretty minimal program that we can implement
(02:03):
to defeat the far right that is very simple. It
has three components. First, a crack down on MLMs that
drives them effectively completely underground.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Yeah, by which we mean multi level marketing for these
appearance schemes right, which are a major source of funding
for the fire right. I mean, this is where Trump
comes out of right, this is why he did that
fake university like, this is a big part of his base.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
Yeah. Yeah, we're going to get more into that in
a seconds. The second, very important one is a regulatory
overhaul of how the FDA regulates supplements. Oh boy, which
sounds like it. Yeah, extremely technical and nerdy thing, but
supplements are another enormous cash spigot for the far right.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
Yeah, this is where Alex Jones and Joe Rogan get
their shit.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah, yep, yep. And the third is another kind of
wonky change that will be extremely important, which is making
sure to allow car companies to make sure rec sales
to customers, thus undercutting the enormous and extremely politically powerful
base of right wing American car dealership owners.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yeah, who donate more money to political causes than any
other career field in this country.
Speaker 2 (03:12):
Yeah. And you may not believe us yet just from
this sort of basic introduction, but these three simple reforms
EML and regulation, regulation of dietary supplements, and the direct
sales of cars will destroy so much of the financial
and political base of the far right that they will
at least temporarily and in the sort of mid range term,
becomes significantly less of a threat than they are now.
(03:34):
So we are going to start with MLMs. Yeah, as
Robert has sort of alluded to, MLMs are a very
very important political base for the far rights. I'm probably
the most famous and the one that Robert has done
an entire show on. So go listen to that if
you want to really actually in detailed thing on the
history of Amway, Mway and the sort of political family
(03:57):
the devices that they've generated are an incredibly important part
of the emerging far right. I mean, obviously, most famously,
Betsy de Vos, who married into the Klan, was our
Secretary of Education under Trump. You know, the sort of
prince family is embedded into this. And Amway famously used
its own internal communications to stump for Republican Party candidates
(04:20):
and also uses its base and also directly its own
funds to fund the Republican Party and a bunch of
Republican congressional candidates. Now, obviously, and this is something that
is true of all of these reforms, is that everything
we're doing here, they're morally and politically good in their
own right, right, MLMs are scams. They're extremely exploitative, and
(04:41):
their rule, I think in the far right is a
lot more important than people understand. Even if you just
look at the money, you're sort of missing part of
what's going on with MLMs. MLMs aren't just a cash spigot.
They're part of how the far right builds his ideological base.
Teach you to convert all of your personal relations into
(05:03):
potential assets for sales. This is obviously evil on a
moral level, but it's also insidious on an ideological level.
The MLM logic of turning all of your most precious
relationships into sales vectors changes how you see the world,
and this is why Republican recruiting inside Amway works so well.
Once you've been trained that literally everything, even in your
(05:24):
sort of closest friends, and you know your dearest relationships
with your family, are just business opportunities, it's extremely easy
to convince you of the rest of the Republican Party platform.
In the same way the experience of being in a
union and organizing with your coworkers once reliably turned out
the ideological base of the left. MLMs have generated enormous
political basis for the right and Unfortunately, this sort of
(05:46):
ideological threat doesn't just go away if people are able
to get out of MLMs, or especially if they're sort
of cast out of mlems because they've simply are broken
brand of money and are in debt. The isolation and
alienation that comes from pushing away, you know, every single
relation that's close to you, from attempting to sell them
soap or whatever, makes people isolated and alienated and makes
(06:09):
them more vulnerable to far right radicalization. And this is
why driving these MLMs under isn't just a way to
sort of cost Republican party money, because that's not enough
to defeat the Republicans. They can find other sources of money.
What you need to do is systematically remove parts of
(06:29):
their political base. And when I say your roofports to
their political base, what I mean is you have to
go after the systems that are creating more members of
the far right. Going after MLMs is a way to
do that. Now. The FTC has gone after m lms before.
They sort of famously, as you talked about in that
episode an mway, they went after a bunch of MLMs
(06:50):
in the eighties, but this sort of caused MLMs to
get smarter and has you know, has been pretty effective
in in sort of warding the FTC off from really
going after MLM since then.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
Yeah, which is by the way, like another you were
just talking about how the way MLMs impact like the
minds of the people participating in them, like prepares them,
you know, for the far right. Yeah, the way in
which this sense of impunity has developed among the people
who run and participate in these things due to their
capture of the legal system is also a part of
(07:27):
like why the far right works the way it does,
that sense of impunity.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Yeah, And part of the reason why they have that
impunity is is just the way the FTC goes after
these companies, right, I mean there was in the in
the mid twenty tens, the FTC went after neutral Light,
which is one of the biggest and oldest MLMs. But
the way they went after them was they issued them
a two hundred million dollar fine and that's a lot
of money, but it didn't drive Neutralight out of business.
And as the anthropologist David Graeber pointed out, if government
(07:55):
regulation just means setting fines and if the finds still
all the business to make more money than they lost
from the fines, then that's just the government taking a cut.
It's not actual regulation. And if you're one of these
businesses and the worst that could happen to you is
the government takes a cut, you end up with, you know,
two thousand and eight right where all these banks know
(08:16):
they're going to get bailed out and they know the
worst punishment that's going to happen to them is just
the government taking a small cut and they can go
back to just making all their money. So in order
to actually go after MLMs, we can't simply rely on
the FTC. You know, even if if you were to
sort of put in charge a more militant FTC that
was were willing to go after stuff. There needs to
(08:37):
be actual regulatory change here, and that is possible but difficult.
But if we actually want, if we're actually deeply serious
about wielding political power to defeat the far right and
to keep them from re emerging and to keep them
out of power generationally, then this is the start of
what we have to do. So we mentioned neutral Light,
(08:58):
which is you know, a very very power. NEUTRALI is
important because it is actually two kinds of business that
are extremely important to the far right at the same time,
it is part MLM, but is an MLM that also
sells dietary supplements. And when we come back from these ads,
we will be considering the role of the virtually unregulated
(09:20):
dietary supplement markets in the rise of the far right
more broadly, and we are back. Oh boy, Yeah, the
supplement market. There is a lot less that has been
(09:41):
written about this than there should be. So dietary supplements
are barely regulated by the FDA. People are getting scammed
all over the place. Enormous numbers. I mean, I've seen
numbers that we're suggesting. I mean two hundred million people
take some kind of dietary supplement if you include things
like sort of vitamin gummies, et cetera, etc. This is
an enormous This is an enormous business. I'm going to
(10:04):
read from Johnny R. Starr, who wrote an article about
supplement regulation in the American Journal of Public Health. If
you're going to read this, By the way, this is
slightly out of date because the next year, I don't
know if this is part of this. The next year
at FDC a little bit overhauled their supplement regulations. But
here is star quote. The dietary Supplement Health and Education Act,
(10:25):
which is the big thing that sort of deregulated supplements,
prohibits supplements that pose a substantial risk of injury, allows
the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue immediate
bands on substances that are imminent hazards, and authorizes the
FDA to implement current good Manufacturing Practice guidelines. The law
also requires pre market notification for new dietary supplements, defines
(10:48):
supplements that were not marketed in the US before October fifteenth,
nineteen forty four, which is when the Dietary Supplement Health
Education Act went into effect. Products violating these regulations are
deemed dangerous, adulterated, and miss it, or otherwise unlawful. And
that all sounds well and good until you get to
the next sentence, which is quote, However, supplements need not
be evaluated for efficiency, and only limited data on safety
(11:11):
are required for new supplement ingredients.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Yeah. So, like, you're not supposed to let people sell
dangerous supplements, but we're all also not supposed to check
to make sure the supplements are safe or work.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
Yeah, yeah it as the FDA itself admits that even
the little tiny notifications for things like new ingredients that
the FAA in posts of twenty sixteen, you're supposed to
like notify the FDA if you put new ingredients.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
But like even that just isn't happening. These companies just
don't care. They're just not either' not even like doing
the little tiny legal mandate stuffy're required to.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I should also note a large part of the blame
for particularly the supplements, but also I mean MLM's actually
they play a role in it too. It's the state
of Utah.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
By the way, the political power of the State of
Utah is a huge part of why, because supplements are
a massive fuck industry in Utah. So are MLMs. So,
by the way, our team treatment facilities, the ones where
they like kidnap your children and torture them, these are
all things that the State of Utah and specific will
fight like hell to stop from being fixed in any
(12:15):
way shape or for.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, and that bill I keep talking about the Dietary
Supplement Health Education Act, that is the baby of Utah
Senator or In Hatch, who is a terrible right wing
force in American politics. And the fact that orin Hatch
has been this effective, and the fact that Utah serves
as such a powerful base. Here demonstrate something that's important
about this political strategy, which is that it has to
(12:37):
be a federal level political strategy because there are a
lot of seats the Republicans effectively have strangleholds. You need
to use the federal government to bypass the unbelievable block
of sort of political power in these states. I want
to read a little bit more from that article by
Star about what kind of regulations are required for supplements
because I think it's extremely dire in and of itself. Quote,
(13:01):
manufacturers are not required to confirm the identity of all
ingredients supply to them.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Sure why they need to do that?
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Unbelievable, And they're not required to followup river how I
talked about. There's current good manufacturing practices guidelines. Following those
guidelines does not guarantee the absence of all contabinants. Moreover,
unlike drugs, which are considered unadulterated or misbranded, if they
do not achieve compliance with national standards set by US
(13:30):
pharmacopia and national formulary, dietary supplements may choose to be compliant.
Only six brands of dietary supplements are currently verified by
US pharmacopia, so they don't have to work. They can
choose whether or not they want to be submitted to
see if any of this stuff works now in theory, also,
(13:52):
the marketing of dietary settlements is supposed to be regulated
by the FDC, But like, is the FDC regulating all
of these false class people are making with their dietary elements? No,
of course they're not doing that. So why do we
care about supplement market Robert has kind of has talked
about this at the very beginning of the episode. The
easiest answer for why we should care about supplement markets
(14:13):
is simply the figure of Alex Jones, who, you know,
we have talked about extensively on this show. It's been
behind the Bastards. If you want to really, really in depth,
look at who Alex Jones is. The podcast and Knowledge
Fight is the single best resource I think anyone has
ever created. Yeah, it would be hard to beat. Yeah,
it's it's unbelievably detailed. But Alex Jones has, you know,
(14:36):
as an individual figure, has done more to sort of
spread the ideology the far right and turn this country
into what it is now than maybe almost any other
single person other than someone like Trump. Right, he is
probably most well known now as quote the Sandy Hook guy,
which he's extremely mad at all people calling him, but
he's why everyone thinks that not everyone, but a bunch
(14:58):
of people think that Sandy Hook was a false flat
And importantly, here's from NPR quote most of Free Speech Systems,
which is Alex Jones, the corporate name for Alex Jones' company.
Most of Free Speech System's revenue to this day, about
eighty percent comes from dietary supplements, according to court records. Now,
these court records come from one of a number of
(15:21):
lawsuits against Alex Jones for defaming the families of the
victims of the Alex Jones shooting. Are serty for defaming
the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting. Sorry, yeah, yeah.
And you know, in the process of discovery, we got
a bunch of information about how Alex Jones's internal media
empire actually works. Now, if you followed Alex Jones over
(15:44):
the years, you know that he's hawked everything from silver
to satellite phones. But it is the dietary supplements that
actually sell. Right, As an MPR article said, about eighty
percent of his revenue comes from dietary supplements. This is
not a sort of small independent media outlet right free
speech systems. Again, as Alex Jones' company was worth hundreds
(16:07):
of millions of dollars, this is an enormous far right
media empire, and supplement sales allow right wing figures like
Alex Jones to bypass the reliance on ads, which removes
a lot of potential leverage from activist groups who wage
pressure campaigns against you know, dated this against Tucker Carlson
for example, where people went after their advertisers and showed
them the stuff Tucker Carlson was saying on Fox before
(16:29):
he got kicked off, and what do you want to
fund this? And you know that was actually a sort
of effective strategy. But you know, the funny part about
this is if you look at the end of Tucker
Carlson's show, right, the ads on that show were ads
from the my Pillow guy who was a far right
extremist in his own right and a very important election denier,
(16:51):
and a bunch of supplement companies. Supplement sales are a
durable and renewable grift because there's a ready an extensive
network of suppliers and distributors right wing brands who want
to make a bunch of money can just sort of
slap their name onto existing supplements that they buy wholesale,
and then they can market them to their viewers, and
(17:12):
this gives them an extremely profitable and lucrative source of funding.
And this is used all over the place.
Speaker 3 (17:19):
Right Again, it impacts what they say and like how
they like the obsession they have with like seed oils
and what's destroying your ability, like your testosterone and all
of these like different far right conspiracy theories about you know,
what kind of stuff you shouldn't be eating, Like all
of this stuff is related to the supplement business, right,
(17:40):
Like they are trying to drum up and destroy trust
and public health and drum up conspiracy theories for their
own profit. And so it's not just a matter of
like this is how they get money, but this also
is why they do some of the things that are
so harmful.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
Yeah, And as you're saying, this is cyclical, right, the
incentive structure for going further and further into these conspiracies
and selling more and more of the supplement things. It's
a spiral. It keeps on just increasing in size and
increasing in size due to the feedback loop from the
incentive structure that's selling these supplements creates. Now, this is
(18:15):
actually not an enormously difficult sort of feel to just
completely shut down the next branch we're going to talk about,
I think is actually a much harder political fight, But
a lot of the market for this can be defeated
by just having the FTC actually regulate supplements the way
they do drugs because, and this is really important, these
(18:36):
supplements are being marketed as drugs, right The advertisements that
these people are already doing are already illegal. The FTC
is not supposed to allow people to sell supplements like this.
They shouldn't be able to be manufactured like this. And
this is again, as with banning MLMs, this is something
that helps the consumer because it'll mean that whatever supplement
(18:56):
market exists after sort of a massive regulatory even crackdown
will be much safer, it will be much more effective,
and it will also destroy the base of far right media.
If you can cut the knees out of this sort
of far right media ecosystem, you can go an enormous
way towards solving the crisis of the far right that
has been brought upon this country. Speaking of crisis, Yeah,
(19:20):
we're gonna let the ads talk about the ads, and
then we're going to come back and close by talking
about car manufacturers in the American gentry.
Speaker 3 (19:27):
Yeah, we're back, and this is a fun one. This
is also like one of my particular favorite things to
hit because I don't think a lot of people know
how much the Republican Party is just a party of
(19:49):
used car dealers YEP.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
Probably the most famous piece that talks it's not really
fully about car dealerships, but it mentions the sort of
political effect and the kind of class that they belong to.
Is maybe the best thing The Atlantic has published in
the last decade, at least one of the best things
they've published, and it's an article on the American gentry
by the journalist Patrick Wyman. Wyman argues that huge swaths
(20:15):
of America are ruled by what he calls the local gentry.
These are millionaires, and notably, these are not billionaires. These
are multi multimillionaires whose wealth derives from immediate wealth extraction
from the surrounding communities. In places like Wyman's childhood home
of Yakima, Washington, these elites have enormous local power over
the territory. They rule like the landed gentry of old.
(20:38):
Here's Wyman quote. The conspicuously consuming celebrities and jet setting
cause of politans, if popular imagination exists, but they are
far outnumbered by a less exalted and less discussed league group,
one that sits at the pinnacle of the local hierarchies
that govern life for tens of millions of people. Donald
Trump grasped this group's existence and its importance, acting as
(21:00):
he often does, on unthinking but effective instinct, when he
crowed about his quote beautiful boaters, lauding the flotilla of
his supporters trailing MAGA flags from their watercraft in his honor,
or addressed his devoted followers among a rioting January sixth
crowd that included people who had flown to the event
on private jets. He knew what he was doing. Trump
(21:22):
was courting the support of the American gentry, the salts
of the earth, multimillionaires. You see them as local leaders
in business and politics, the underappreciated backbone of a once
great nation.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Now.
Speaker 2 (21:34):
Wyman is largely focused on the agricultural gentry because that's
you know, the sort of the sort of agrobarons who
are very important to this story, but are are kind
of are are kind of auxiliary to this and that
you know that that's largely because he's talking a lot
about the places where he grew up, which are which
are agricultural pubs. But a very critical component of this
(21:56):
American gentry, of this local elite class are card dealership owners,
and their wealth and influence literally cannot be overstated. The
journalist Alexander Salmon wrote this in an article in Slate
in twenty twenty three. Quote auto dealers are one of
the five most common professions among the top point one
percent of American earners car dealers, gas station owners, and
(22:18):
building contractors. It turns out, make up the majority of
the countries one hundred and forty thousand Americans who earn
more than one point five million dollars a year. Crunching
numbers from the US Census Bureau, data, scientists and author
Stephens Devotowitz found that over twenty percent of car dealerships
in the US have an owner in banking more than
one point five million a year, which is absolutely absurd.
(22:42):
That is an unbelievable amount of money for people who, really,
when you think about it, don't do anything like what
is the actual service that a car dealer is doing.
Speaker 3 (22:51):
I mean, the primary thing that they do is rip
people Offcause the entire way that car sales work is
based on fraud, ye right, Like it's based on getting
you to buy things that do not actually work, like
service packages and whatnot that you often will not get
any benefit from. And it's a lot of it is
(23:11):
based around also just outright scams, you know, altering the
information buyers have access to so they don't realize like
problems with a used car or whatever. Like, it's it's
all fraud, right Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:24):
And as as is becoming ever true of American life, fraudsters,
scammers and people who are just their entire existence is
dedicated to ripping you off have more and more political
power in this country. Here's a salmon from that same
article quote. As of twenty twenty one, the top one
hundred dealership groups in the US had annual revenues of
(23:44):
around one hundred billion dollars, more than any company that
actually makes cars. The National Automotive Dealer Association NADA became
one of the most influential lobbying entities in Washington, with
sixteen thousand dues paying members spanning thirty two thousand, five
hundred franchises. Soon enough, a stop at the annual Nauta
(24:05):
convention became routine for presidential hole fuls, and even Presidents
Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Hillary Clinton all attended
ahead of presidential runs. Bill Clinton and both Bushes came
after they left the White House. And the fact that
Democrats are showing up to this is appalling on a
moral level. Right, This is an entire organization of fraudsters
(24:26):
and it doesn't even work.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
Right.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Car dealers donate six to one for Republican causes.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
But they really want that one.
Speaker 2 (24:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:33):
It's the same thing with like you've got Schumer going
out for the crypto caucus now, where like, yeah, well
only a fraction of those guys are going to donate
to DIMS, but it's all scam. He doesn't really care
as long as some of it goes to him.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah. Now.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
The thing that's more that's dangerous about these people, and
I think it's even more dangerous than something like crypto money,
is that these are local elites, right, and they are
dispersed enormously across the country. This is this is something
that Salmon is very sort of specific about is somebody
that comes up in Wyman's piece, and somebody comes up
if you do any research about this at all. A
huge part of the power is because these people are
(25:09):
spread geographically across the country, and because they are the
richest people or among the richest people in the sort
of small areas that they dominate, they have unbelievable amounts
of political power. And because they are again unbelievably wealthy,
they can funnel this money directly into local politics on
a scale that cannot be matched by your sort of
(25:30):
grassroots organizations. This allows them to buy everything from city
council's to seats in Congress.
Speaker 3 (25:35):
And they effectively unionize. Like in Portland, They've got the
Portland Business Association right, which is to a significant extent
allied with the police, and like dominates local politics. They're
the ones who buy the mayor's election, Like, They're the
ones who make deals with the Portland Police Officers union.
Speaker 4 (25:55):
Like.
Speaker 3 (25:56):
This is the way in which a lot of power
gets exercise that actually impacts your daily life.
Speaker 2 (26:03):
Yeah, and they've also been doing things like coordinating and
doing strategy sharing about defeating unions. I mean, this is
why most of these big associations were formed was specifically
to destroy unions in the early twentieth century. And you know,
I mean the Autolobbying group was formed to do autolobbying
because these car dealerships don't have unions. That's another thing
that we'll come back to it a little bit. But yeah,
(26:26):
these car dealerships are a durable and extremely powerful for
us in electoral politics, and they deliver seats and this
is the most important thing if you're an electoralist, right,
these people consistently deliver seats to Republicans by flooding an
amount of money into local races that people can't compete with.
And because of this, they miserate the lives of hundreds
of millions of people. And they can also largely be
(26:47):
destroyed in a single stroke. That's maybe oversalling it a
little bit, but their power largely rests on an enormous
array of state level monopolies that ban the direct sales
of cars to consumers or prevent car companies from competing
with local retailers. And this is something that the autolobby
has been you know, the Auto Association Lobby NA has
(27:08):
been fighting for for ages. They've gotten it in an
enormous number of states.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Yeah, and this, by the way, you know, in terms
of abilities to like disrupt things, this is a big
part of like how Tesla is different from other auto
manufacturers is in most states. There are some states where
they're not allowed to do this, but in most states
they sell directly to the customer, which is like back
before Musk became as political a figure, was actually a
major reason why these people didn't like him.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Well, they still don't. This is actually a really interesting thing,
is what the thing I want to close on here. Yes, yes, yes,
these people still hate Musks and they hate electric cars
because electric cars to a large extent are both a
being directly sold by companies and B it's harder to
you actually have to do service on them in a
way that makes it more expensive for these these companies
(27:54):
to write about this. This is something that Semon has
written about extensively. So they absolutely despise elect cars. And
this is actually a political opportunity for us, right because
Elon Musk now is again one of there is I
think he's still the richest person in the world technically
until sort of all his stocks implode. But this is
an opportunity also to split parts of the Republican base, right,
(28:16):
because the local government monopolies that these car dealers have
are actually enormously unpopular among a lot of the other
parts of the Republican base. Right, Elon hates them. Actual
car manufacturers hate it. No one likes car dealers, like,
oh yeah, and this is everything you know. This is
also something that libertarians hate because libertarians look at this,
(28:38):
and this is one of the few times libertarians are right.
They look at this and go, oh yeah, Well, these
people have been literally granted market monopolies. There are a
lot of places where if there's already a car dealer there,
if you're a car company, you can't compete with these things.
So these are state sanction monopolies. So there's large portions
of the Republican base who oppose these companies. And if
you can, you can use this as a wedge issue
(28:59):
to split the Republican base. And that's sort of where
I want to close on. As much as I've been
talking about these three very specific things, right, banning MLMs
or at least having extremely large regulatory crackdowns, regulatory crackdowns
on supplements, and legislation to allow direct car sales. What
we're trying to do here isn't just getting rid of
(29:20):
the money that supports the far right. We're trying to
destroy their institutions, and we're trying to fracture their base. Right.
Going after MLMs destroys their ability to sort of produce
more produce more Republicans from these MLMs and produce more
people in the far right from these MLMs. Going after
supplements is a way to destroy the right wing media ecosystem,
which has been crucial to the rise of the far right.
(29:41):
And going after cars can help split the emerging Republican
coalition by pitting two parts of the Republican base against
each other, pitting these car dealers versus Elon and versus
the auto manufacturers.
Speaker 3 (29:53):
Well, Mia, great episode, This is a nice starter. This
is again something we're going to continue to talk about
because I really think we can't hit enough on this. Obviously,
these three things don't solve every problem with the far right,
but this is like, if you could actually like packaged
these together into a legislative agenda, it could be the
(30:13):
equivalent of like the nuclear option for these people.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3 (30:18):
Think this is a smart thing to be hitting. We
will continue to talk about this in more detail, but
you know what we're done for the day. Go do
something else.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
It could happen here as a production of pool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from pool Zone Media, visit our website
poolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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