“Hold my putter.”

Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm John Favreau. I'm a very reflective John Lovin. I'm Tommy Bitor and I too feel very reflective on this President's Day, unlike a very insecure Oprah Winfrey. On the show today, we'll be talking to New York Times writer Zane up to Fetchy about Facebook's role in the Russian indictments and whether mass shootings are contagious.

Guys, we're back in the studio. Ah, feels good. We haven't been here in a while with three of us. Look at us.

We have drivers making everybody come in on President's Day. Yeah, that was mistaken. I'm excited. Not everyone.

Just the people that need to help us with the podcast. Just the skeleton for real. We've got Elijah, we've got Michael, we've got Rich here. And we have a big announcement.

We do. Tommy, do you know what the announcement is? I do. I read the tweets.

We are launching a newsletter at crooked.com. The newsletter is called What a Day. What a Day. What a Day.

What a Day. And it will deliver everything you need to know about what happened in white matters to your inbox at the end of every wonderfully awful day here in the age of Trump. Please go to crooked.com and sign up. We're going to test it out for a little while.

So it's going to be a couple weeks away. March 5th. Well, the people who just got nervous about that date that we announced, the people who were writing the newsletter, Priyanka Arabindi of our Crooked Media, Brian Boiler, editor in chief of crooked.com. These three of us, the whole crooked team, that's the newsletter crew.

Yeah, so we've been thinking about this for a while. And basically, we've been talking about what we would want to see at the end of the day, on the days when we were insanely busy and not able to totally keep up with the news. That would help you figure out what happened that day. Yeah.

You can expect the same kind of tone that you get here in POD Safe America, same kind of information. Listen, warm up, you're unsubscribed. Click OK, because you're not going to get any other newsletters once you read this bad boy. That's true.

That's it. Once in a while, we'll be listening. People's birthday here at Crooked Media. And we're in the people where that are Los Angeles, if you find that interesting.

We'll be inhaling Steve Bannon's breath. What's going mind mails? OK. All right, guys, let's sign up.

Sign up for the newsletter. We're not using other newsletters anymore. That's it. That's the only slogan we need.

Other housekeeping. Love it. How did the show go on Friday? We had an awesome, love it, or leave it, with Amani, Roxanne Gay, Solomon, Georgio.

We ran through the week's news. We ran through the Mueller stuff. We also had a big announcement of a contest that you can all participate in right now. If you go to portraitmode.crickit.com, you can submit your official portrait of Donald Trump for the Smithsonian.

We are accepting submissions for two weeks going right now. We are going to select some of our favorites. We have a panel of interns and art historians. We're going to post our favorites.

And what we're going to do is we're going to choose some winners and one winner. And then we're going to print them up on shirts, on hats, on mugs. We're not sure exactly what we're going to print it up. But we're going to sell them.

And all the proceeds are going to go to arts programs in public schools. So be creative. If you're wondering to what end we use the resources we have here at Cretid Media, this is your answer. Is it?

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize that John didn't support art in public schools. That's something I learned. Tommy, weren't you shocked?

I was well-versed in his nature of the arts. I'll give money directly to the arts. Tommy, how was I today in the world this week? It was great, John.

Thank you for asking. I interviewed a very, very smart journalist named Steve Call. He's written some of the best books about the war in Afghanistan. Ghost Wars.

Ghost Wars, director of the S's latest one. It's about the CIA's role, the military's role, all the challenges in the region, why we're still there after 17 years. So we tried to make this conversation a little different than your standard. Should we send more troops or not to discussion about Afghanistan and really focus on Pakistan and their nuclear weapons program, because that's really the reason why we're there.

And if you don't get that, you don't really understand the internal machinations of policymakers in the administration. So give it a listen. It'll make you smarter. He's a great journalist.

Excellent. Let's get to the news, guys. On Friday, the Department of Justice charged 13 Russian nationals and three companies with conspiracy to defraud the United States. They're a campaign of information warfare that was designed to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump.

Mission accomplished. Happy presence. Well done. The entire US intelligence community came to this conclusion a year ago.

But this is different. This is the United States government stating that it can prove the existence of the Russian operation in court beyond a reasonable doubt. The operation included identity theft, wire fraud, breaking US election law, buying political advertisements and posting fake messages on social media platforms like Facebook, staging political rallies in the United States, and coordinating political activities with unwitting Trump campaign officials. Is that a bit redundant?

We still have to find a winning Trump associate. Just to give some a few examples of how this operation played out, some of these groups, they posted on Facebook. And there's a lot of focus on the Facebook advertisements. But most of the Facebook activity was post, and they pretended to be different political groups.

Or sole identities as real Americans. Or sole identities as real Americans. They encouraged African Americans not to vote or vote for third parties. There was an Instagram account called WokeBlax sample ad.

We cannot resort to the lesser of two devils. Then we'd surely be better off without voting at all. And Jews peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote.

There's another group called United Muslims of America that said American Muslim voters are refusing to vote for Hillary because she wants to continue the war on Muslims in the Middle East. And so on and on it went with groups like this. Guys, I want to spend plenty of time on Trump's reaction to all this. But what were your first reactions to the substance of the indictment on Friday?

What were your any holy shit moments? I mean, it's fascinating to see something that was probably a counterintelligence investigation or an intelligence-based deep dive into what happened in the selection, get spelled out and indictment in these clear terms like that. I think the fact that we can now point to these specifics with 37, 36 page indictment, I think, really bolsters the case. The thing that has bothered me, not just about the Trump response today, but all along is all of this was noble to him, probably through various intelligence means, counterintelligence, the CIA's work, what the FBI was looking into on a regular day or course of action.

So the system shouldn't be surprised by these indictments in any way. It's just, I think, for all of us to see it spelled out is striking. It was both not surprising and then also so disconcerting to see it all laid out in such exquisite detail. I mean, the reaction I had when I was seeing the charges and seeing the indictments was, indictments don't have feelings.

Like, Sean Hannity can make like, Septigenaarian racists. I think they don't matter. He can make them scared or angry. But you can't make indictments that are angry.

Indigiments are reality. You can't trick the indictments into not existing or into not charging the people responsible. Like, this is the world. This is what happened.

And we're lucky that we still have institutions strong enough that someone like Robert Mueller isn't going to be intimidated out of putting forward the charges he wants based on the evidence he has. Yeah, it's fascinating because I mean, the truth is none of these Russians will ever really see the inside of a US courtroom. They're not going to get extradited. And so you might say, well, then why did Mueller do this?

It is the year of knowing that the intelligence community has been saying this hadn't really sunk in as much as the, and it's not everyone says it's Mueller's indictments. It is the Department of Justice. It's the United States government saying we can prove in a court of law that United States laws were broken by these foreign nationals who tried to subvert our election. I mean, the entity that did this, the internet research agency, was the subject of a really fascinating 20, 2015 profile in New York Times.

So we've known that this bureaucracy existed to just fuck with people on the internet. What Mueller did is he established a criminal conspiracy with these Russians. And phase two will be if you can tie US persons to it, like little Donny Jr. or anyone that Paul Manafort's about to flip on, or Rick Gates or any of these folks.

So anyone who thinks that this is over is probably not correct. There seems like there could be a whole other phase here. Yeah, no. And so I want to talk about the Trump reaction next.

But did you hear that crackling on the phone line? It's like someone got patched in and we didn't do it. We weren't sure this would be possible today, but we actually we have one of the Russians charged in the indictment with us today on PODS AVE America. Are you there, sir?

Justice, man. This is not funny anymore. Joe America in big trouble. Joe America needs help.

Joe America can summon if you hear this. Please call making murder. Call serial. Please call serial.

I'm laughing. Joe America is very scared. He said, you'll come. You'll have fun in America.

Go to Miami Beach. Dried Jetsky. Leave him big. Leave him big.

He has no one pays for anymore. And you'll Brown Lons. But you keep your house. Are you still in Marlago?

No, I can't say where I am exactly. It is gray. They brought me this phone. They look very cross with me.

They say I can turn on someone. But I feel it. I feel it. Anyway, Joe America, a bit like Dog that caught car.

And anyway, again, if you call that small non-suites or random ones played, what's her name? The woman she advocates very tough, very small. Find her, someone please. Give me Alan Dersch with.

I don't care. Get me a sleaze back. Get me a Lenny Davis. I don't care.

Give me the lowest of the low. Get me the scumbiest lawyer. Give me Michael Cohen. Please, somebody.

Call Michael Cohen. Please, I sign anything. Give me David Pekker at National Inquirer. I sign whatever.

Give me help. Anyone, please. It's Jordan America. Good man, the American person.

Long time American. Love America. Red, white, and blue USA. Go, go Eagles.

Help. Please, help. Well, they're laughing their asses off in Moscow. That's right.

Oh, God. OK. Thank you, Joe. We'll check in with you later when you are arraigned.

So the Trump people cherry pick two parts of the indictment to claim indication. And I want to take both separately. First, the White House pointed to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein's comments that there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participated in the alleged scheme. Guys, I said Rosenstein and scheme.

I know he did. Anyway, I think of that. Yeah. An hour later, a person with knowledge of the special counsel's probe told Bloomberg that Mueller has included his investigation into whether Trump or any of his associates helped Russia interfere in the election.

Obviously. What's going on here? It was interesting. The word unwitting is doing a lot of work in the indictment.

It was almost as if it was there to say it was clean. It was saying, I'm going to lay out the interference case. And it's not going to be touched by any of the other facets of the investigation right now. And Mueller has been so sophisticated in how he has laid out his charges.

He is very carefully constructing a building that isn't finished. And so we don't know what exactly it's going to be. But he starts by showing that he has people who are willing to plead guilty. He now is moving on to the actual parts of it that are true interference, the unassailable evidence of interference by Russians.

It leaves open other facets of the investigation. Fascists like collusion. Fascists like obstruction. And then the final piece of it, other crimes that have been uncovered, that Trump is financial crimes, what have you.

But so he's still leaving him. And on top of that, the other forms of interference like hacking that we yet to know more about. That's a very big point that hacking was not included. We know that that's out there.

We know that Russia sent over agents to America to gather intelligence. Now, if they sat down with the gang at the hotline or the political report, to kind of get the lay of the land, certainly those people wouldn't be charged as part of a conspiracy. They were just doing a background briefing. But that doesn't preclude.

We know that Don Jr attempted to meet with Russians to get dirt. We know that all this hacking occurred. If it's what you say I love it, especially later in the summer. If it's what you say I love it.

What you say I love it. These guys just cling to whatever desperate little fact they can at any moment to get them through the next two hours of news cycle. And that's fine. I don't feel the need to fight every one of these battles.

That is exactly right. I was thinking the same thing. They do this all the time. It's the worst political instinct that other political people have had forever, which is just get me through the news cycle.

And I'll worry about bad things later. So things might be coming in the future that are bad for them. They don't care. They just need to get through the day.

They just need to stop Trump from screaming at them. And so they'll say whatever they need to just celebrate and move on. But that's the point. This is where their ability to shape the news doesn't matter at all.

There is value for them to getting through the day. There's really nothing they can say to fend off whatever is coming in the next few weeks or months. So in a lot of ways what they're doing, getting Sean Hannity out there to say that Trump was vindicated by this has some value for this period of time. Because three months from now, when they're off to the next whatever form of misinformation to deal with, however worse this has gotten, they'll just try doing the same thing again.

Rick Wilson always says this, which is, but Mueller has a royal flesh and the Trump team is just playing with a pair of twos. Yeah, it's like, this is all they can do. They've got the cards they've got. They're playing Go Fish.

Right. You guys, something funny. They interviewed one of the, the Washington Post interviewed one of the trolls and asked him to think it worked. And the guy said, the guy's job was to write stupid comments under news articles in Russia about Russia all day.

He wasn't transferred to the Facebook wing where they screwed with the American because he didn't have good English. And the guy's response was, who really reads the comments under news articles anyway, especially when they were so obviously fake? These were mechanical texts. It was a colossal labor of monkeys.

It was pointless for Russian audience at least. But for Americans, it appears it did work. So they have built up an immunity to propaganda when we don't have anybody yet. I want to talk about what this indictment actually said in the type of charge in the indictment, because I find this fairly interesting.

Bob Bauer, who was the Obama White House counsel, he's one of the best Democratic election lawyers in the country, maybe the best. Do you remember the scandal he went through where he found out that the staff secretary had been a serial spousal abuser and then he didn't tell any about it? You're not wrong way, has counsel? Oh my god, that's not again a problem.

I just assumed that. So the charge that Mueller used with the Russians was conspiracy to defraud the United States. Also, the charge that he used in the Manafort case. So Bauer argues, Mueller didn't charge them with campaign finance law violations, even though foreign national spending money to influence the US campaign is clearly against the law.

It's clearly a violation of campaign finance law. Instead, he used conspiracy to defraud, which alleges that the Russians conspired to obstruct the ability of the federal election commission to enforce the law. In this case, the active obstruction was the Russians' failure to report their legal spending. Now, why would he do that?

Bob thinks that if there are American co-conspirators, that Mueller's going to charge, it would be difficult to charge them with violating the law that prohibits foreign national spending money to influence a campaign. But it would be much easier to charge the American co-conspirators with an active obstruction, in this case, preventing the government from doing its job. So the idea is that the backbone of the and Marcy Wheeler wrote about this as well. Bob Bauer's got to go back to law school.

This is garbage. I have no idea what he's talking about. It sounds fascinating. It's also, I think for people listening at home, I don't think you're reading the full treatment because John is in a trench coat and sunglasses, and he has a lot of red yarn in his hand.

I am. Look, I went over this in detail this morning with Luis Menge. Can we talk? No, it's a questionable question.

But conspiracy to defraud is looking like the backbone to this case, which is interesting because it also goes to the question of everyone keeps talking about collusion, collusion, and collusion. And collusion is not the charge here. The charge is a conspiracy. And the charge could be that anyone in the Trump world who knew that Russians were influencing the US election and decided to hide that fact from the US government are guilty of a crime.

So this goes to the Don Jr meeting. This goes to Donald Trump writing a statement lying about the Don Jr meeting and obstruction justice. So the question is, he's obstructing justice. He's obstructing.

The Trump people obstructed the ability of the government to know that the Russians were influencing the US elections. And that's what Manafort was doing with money laundering as well. Yeah, I think this is also. It's a good reminder that, again, we don't know what Mueller knows.

We have been six to eight months behind what Mueller knows. Think about the things we have learned after the fact, months after the fact, what Mueller has been doing. So what he has uncovered about the machinations inside the Trump campaign, we don't yet know. The larger thing here, too, though, that may be the underlying crime Mueller is going toward.

But you've kind of seen a lot of reporting in the last few days that says, OK, OK, OK, we know that they may have had the meeting, but that's not necessarily collusion. Or we know that Trump told Lester Holt, obstruct justice, but that's not necessarily obstruction of justice. I think that there is the still to be uncovered actual nuts and bolts details of what constitutes some kind of a crime. But the reality we're living in is the reason these indictments don't seem shocking to us is because the crime was conducted in public.

It's still the same part. The scandal is known. We know what we don't want to tell them and say, go wild. Two stories that really drive home that should drive home for even the most skeptical people about this, that they could have committed a crime are the Don Jr.

meeting and Papa Doppelis getting drunk and saying that, oh, yeah, by the way, I know that the Russians are sitting on a bunch of hacked emails. And also, the most basic theory they teach you in law school that everyone knows is ignorance of the law is no excuse. Just because these people are fucking incompetent doesn't mean that they didn't break a bunch of laws. If being stupid was a defense, stupid people would use it more.

I agree that Trump and Putin probably weren't on the phone coordinating this whole thing. It's a good likelihood that that doesn't mean that he didn't break the law. Right. Right.

The discussion, I think, that I'm sort of seeing more and more. And I have a disagreement with our colleague Brian Boyt, where I'm this is like, well, it didn't impact the election. And I'm very firmly in the camp that we don't know if it impacted the election. We never will know.

And it's probably a gigantic waste of time to spend effort trying to prove that the Russians move the needle one way or the other. The first use is a very imperfect analogy. You can't try to rob a bank. It doesn't matter whether you succeed or not.

The fact that they invaded our system in this way and did it with a criminal conspiracy is a problem that needs to be deterred. We need to respond in some way that's meaningful to country and just start the conversation right there. I think those are the two things that I think are so important about this that really aren't getting discussed enough. Because Donald Trump views everything through the lens of how it affects him personally.

He's taking this entire investigation and everything we know personally. And so he cannot bring himself to do what it takes to prevent interference in the future, because A, it helps him. And B, it reflects poorly on him. That's number one.

So we're not doing anything right now to get ready for this possibly happening again. And two, the other piece of this, which we are not grappling with, is the fact that we were so vulnerable to this kind of propaganda, that we were just primed to be abused in this way. Well, I wanted to say. So the second part of the indictment that the White House is sort of claiming is vindication is Rosenstein's statement that the indictment contained no allegation that Russian interference altered the outcome of the 2016 election.

And of course, like you said, Tommy, that's not a legal scientist. Of course that fact is unknowable. But Brian Boyler wrote a piece on this in Kricket.com. You should all go read it today.

And Brian says, we can't run the election over again without Russian interference to see how things would have played out differently than its absence. Of course. But the argument turns on whether we think influence operations of the type Russia ran can change human behavior at all. Clearly, we think it can.

Or we wouldn't care. Well, and the Russians wouldn't spend a million dollars a month doing that. Well, that's what he says. So basically, with a budget of over $1 million a month to target swing state voters with disinformation on social media, multiple tropes containing thousands of stolen emails, news outlets like RT at your fingertips, and the complicity of a major political party nominee, could you move 80,000 votes in three states?

Of course. We don't know. But it's definitely not crazy to think that. It's just I think the hindsight definitive answer will never come to us.

It's an annoying waste of time that people are spent on. But they did this in Ukraine. They do this in their own population. They spew propaganda on them all day long.

Because it's effective. Right. It's a waste of time to go back and figure out did it really happen or not. It's not a waste of time to assert that it could possibly happen.

Because that's how we stop it from happening in the future to admit that our minds could be changed by propaganda. Of course. Which seems basic, but a lot of people don't seem to be. Yeah.

Well, first of all, what is certainly true is there was a massive propaganda effort of which the Russians were only one part. And the misinformation led by the Russians, the misinformation by places like Breitbart, the misinformation of places like Fox News, the misinformation of places like Infowars, these guys don't need to be coordinated to have a massive impact to fog up the debate to make it impossible to figure out what's true and what's not true. And I think given that this election was swung by 80,000 votes, it seems hard to argue that this giant apparatus had such a tiny impact, that all of these forces altogether that have fundamentally changed the debate in this country didn't shift the outcome. I just think it's impossible.

A world with which Fox News is being propaganda 24 hours a day, and there's no Breitbart, and there's no Infowars lying to people and scaring people. And the Russians aren't there. You don't think that's 100,000 votes? How is that the bible?

There's a reason that for decades campaigns spend millions, millions of dollars on political advertisements. They work. And super PACs do. There's a reason that companies spend millions of dollars on advertisements because it works.

No one likes to imagine that an advertiser works, but it works. This is why the Facebook response has always been stupid and frustrating and offensive because they acted like they are a company that is going to be worth a trillion dollars someday because they saw the most effective ads on the planet. And all of a sudden, they were suggesting the idea that ads on Facebook couldn't really move the needle, or the idea that your newsfeed on Facebook couldn't move the needle and change the way people vote, suggested a lack of empathy and understanding for the Trump voter was the initial Zuckerberg comment that he has, to his credit, walked away from. Yeah, to his credit.

Although this weekend, Rob Goldman, the VP of ads at Facebook, started tweeting about this and said, I've seen all the ads. Swain the election was not the main goal of the Russian ads. And by the way, the majority of ads have been happening after the election. He was then retweeted by Donald Trump, which I'm sure the Facebook people really loved.

But it's so ridiculous. Like, of course, look, it wasn't just the ads. It was the Facebook groups that they were making. It was the posts.

It was like, it was everything. And the $126 million people saw the Facebook ads. Well, of course it fucking did something. This is something I talk about with Zain up in the interview.

But this is a fundamental problem Facebook doesn't have to solve, which is that it's unsafe at any speed. Either their ads work or they don't. Either Facebook's effective at driving behavior or it's not. They claim on one hand that it is on the other hand.

It's not the other piece of this, by the way, is let's say you don't think that Facebook ads that have Bernie Sanders with a six-back saying, vote shall sign are very effective. Or Hillary Clinton with deviliers. OK. Do you believe that Jim Comey would have sent that letter?

If there hadn't been six months of propaganda designed to make the email scandal equivalent to Donald Trump's scale? Do you think that Jim's Comey, bit of performative bipartisanship, would have been as necessary in a world in which the email story wasn't hammered for political purposes for months and months. I think the answer is obviously no. This is a suppose-o.

44% of the ads were before the election. Just because the Russians were the only shit that worked. And they poured gasoline on the fire afterwards to continue to ferment discord and hatred in our country doesn't change the fact that those ads existed beforehand. And so his whole thing was such ridiculous bullshit.

If you really want to see a greater predation, check out our friend Cara Swisher's Twitter feed. Oh, yes. Because some other guy named Bos apparently. He's not a linebacker from the 80s.

He's another engineer, responded and started engaging with her. And she said to him, just the pro tips, since you think using Twitter will make you seem more approachable, you all are coming off like the arrogant, out of touch tech execs that everyone imagines you are, quote, parenthetical, not my take since I do know folks at Facebook. So yes, they all like everyone. They're just fucking spinning.

They're still spinning. Stop spinning. And again, as we said, the indictment doesn't include any of the hacking activities. And if you don't think that made a difference, as Chris has tweeted many times, publish your inbox and see what happens.

Yeah, see the effects you want to publish the company. If you don't think the hacking of the Clinton emails and the Democratic National Committee's emails made a difference, go ahead and publish all the contents of your email inbox. See what that does to you. For you to believe, I mean, imagine Sean Hannity not saying that the election wasn't stolen for Hillary Clinton if the reverse was going on.

Right? Imagine a world in which the right wing media wasn't hammering every single day that this election was illegitimate, because you look at all these pieces of it. The hacking made no difference, and the Facebook post made no difference. Are you crazy?

We spent the email story made no difference. Are you crazy? We spent six months with the drip drip of information outside of the DNC, and John Podesta's email else, all of which was accentuated by the same Facebook place that were designed to make people stay home, make people not vote, make people disengage from the process. And if you look at the result of the election and think it didn't work, you're crazy.

Everyone should read the end of the first book because it's very smart on this. But at one point along the way, Facebook had a bunch of human beings curating news, what was trending, were hot topics, and they were accused of suppressing conservative news and people's news feeds in the trending news department. They lost their goddamn minds when that happened. Mark Zuckerberg called in a whole bunch of conservatives because the sin of being seen as partisan in their minds was bigger than the sin of having a platform that shoots garbage down your throat in the form of some like Breitbart article or some other piece of shit.

Like a lot of these right wing news sites aren't getting pushed forward because they're not quality news. They're made up. Like the idea that the lowest learner IRS scandal story should be fed to people is undercut by the idea that those stories were made up. They were nonsense.

And again, look, not saying this to excuse any of the weaknesses of Hillary Clinton's campaign. Saying this and arguing this because we have to figure out how to stop this when it happens again, not if it happens again, when it happens again. The Russians will do this again in 2018. They will do it again in 2020.

That was about Trump's intelligence. So says Trump's intelligence. Exactly. And so we as a country have to figure out how do we stop this from happening again to other candidates in possibly both parties?

And I don't know if you guys have ideas. Well, look, but it is the thing. We are not doing either. On the one hand, we are not doing the kind of work that we should be doing right now to not just protect ourselves from Facebook posts, but to insulate our voter registration system, insulate our voting systems.

Probably need some backup paper ballots. Backup paper ballots. Get rid of the fucking electronic ballots. You were like that.

Get rid of the electronic ballots. What was this idea that we were going to save money? It's so crazy. We don't need to scale up voting.

It's the same number of people every year. Check a fucking box and have people counted up. It's worth the money. What were we saving for?

It is so crazy. Electronic ballots are so fucking stupid. It's so crazy. We get rid of them.

Paper ballots. Paper ballots. And also, John. Second, we really need to focus on the brittleness.

Sibilty. Let's start. The brittleness and the kind of anger that people bring to the conversation on Facebook. No, but seriously, the second piece of it is the harder part, which is, as a culture, we are atomized and partisan and narcissistic and vulnerable to people telling us exactly what we want to hear, whether it's inspiration or outrage or novelty, something that I talk about in the interrelated, but what figured out the political erogenous zones of human minds and it has been extremely destructive.

Media literacy. You can't just say media literacy. Yeah. Thank you.

I think two things. One, they should be sanctioning the people who did this. I don't know why Trump has not followed through in those sanctions, but that's a very obvious point. There should be a cost to the Russians who engage in these activities.

There should be a massive COVID action program going on that's making clear to them that if they pull the shit on us, it's going to happen to them back. And two, there's so much talk about media literacy. But I don't think that voters were smarter 30 years ago. I think you had outlets with guardrails.

I think we're like, I think people were dismissing him as like, well, you really got to study that. But there's no way you would know that a Denver post headline is real and a Denver Tribune headline is fake, unless you're fairly sophisticated. So I think what's happening is the way people get news. It's not the New York Times delivered at your doorstep or CBS at night.

It's Facebook or Twitter. And they need to set up some guardrails to help people sort out the garbage from not. And that involves making choices that might be construed as part of it. And they need to have the balls to do it.

I completely agree with that. The onus is on, if you're going to be a media company, the onus is on you. And by the way, Facebook doesn't like to think of themselves as such, but they are a fucking media company. And so is Twitter.

And so is all these platforms. Maybe they didn't start off that way, but they've become that. So they have to have the same kind of guardrails and editorial judgment that media companies do. And that's where the onus is.

But I got dangerous too though. But that's dangerous too. Because I don't know what to say. No, no, no, no.

You'll notice that you know at a no. Right. I mean, this is the thing. Facebook isn't just a media company.

They are sucking up Facebook and Google together, sucking up a huge percentage of advertising dollars. They are far bigger than a traditional media company. And for Facebook to be adjudicating our political debate is also really dangerous. And really risky.

I don't know the answer. But when we say that Facebook needs to show editorial judgment, we should just be nervous about the amount of power that puts in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg to be. I'm not saying that this article is right and that article is wrong. But there are, I think, objective ways to decide of an outlet is quality or not.

Are you worried about it? Have a black crime section. They're well-known propaganda armed. They said that their admitted stated goal by their way to correspond in is to destroy traditional media outlets.

I mean, I think that. Also, we place that kind of editorial judgment in the hands of the publisher and editor of The New York Times, The Washington Post, like a whole bunch of things. Of course, of course, you can't invest too much. This is why it's a balance between making sure that the owner is on these media companies to exercise some editorial judgment and the readers to have the knowledge of, I mean, it's both.

You have to have a balance of both of them. I don't know where the other options are. I don't know where the other answers are. I don't think the publisher and the consumer both have some obligations here.

I think it's recognizing that Facebook is not just The New York Times. It's The New York Times and The New York Times. And also, it's all of them. It's The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, NBC.

All of them added together and funneled through one place. And so I think one of the hardest parts we're going to have to grapple with is how do we diffuse that power? And I think that starts to become a conversation about monopoly. It starts to become a conversation about the manipulation of consumers, about whether or not these companies should both be able to retain all this data without telling us how they're using it.

There's lots of larger conversations about the system that they've built that's less about editorial judgment on specific articles. And more about saying, how do we take some of the power away from these companies? OK, so that's good. That is the third area.

I think it's regulation. It is regulation of some of these media companies. And that you say that we can't expect Mark Zuckerberg himself to be this benevolent CEO who's going to fix the problem on his own that just like we've regulated other monopolies and other businesses in the past throughout our country's history, so should we start to think about rules in place of these platforms. But on just the issue of the narrative issue of political ads, now they say they're going to start requiring a snail mail postcard that you send in when you want to purchase a political ad on Facebook that contains a specific code that shows that this postcard came from within the continental US or whatever the US was sent and confirms that you're an American.

They're still not going to apply that ruling to issue-based political ads. So to me, that's a giant carve-out that will allow manipulation on this platform to go completely unhindered. And I think that's very trouble. And everything they do is fucking have measurable shit.

There's bills in Congress right now, too, that haven't moved anywhere where you're supposed to know the origin of these political ads, stuff like that. And at least there's some legislation that can start taking us in the right direction here. And it goes beyond ads. I think that's exactly right.

That they're not willing to do some of the things that need to be done because they don't want to spend the money. Or they keep saying, it's amazing to me what a company like Facebook says is possible and what's impossible. Possible, building one of the most sophisticated algorithms in history designed to target us individually with all kinds of information. Very successful, very effective, impossible.

Running out parts of that that are dangerous. What I would like to know is what happens if you fill a warehouse with people and spend tens of millions of dollars on this problem, not half measures, not sending out a release, not doing a straight-to-camera announcement that you put together a blue ribbon commission. But show us that you are putting the same attention into the problems you've created as you put into building this massive, massive system. They were all built on this idea that you can be agnostic and create this tecutopia where ideas are shared in conversations flourish.

And that's just not human nature. Yeah, they're running up against the fundamental problem of human beings. And they have to face it. Other than you need governments and larger business community that are willing to publicly report when these influencer operations are happening, which we also don't have right now.

And by the way, never forget Mitch McConnell. Obviously, it's so much. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, I've never had the Mitch McConnell stymied efforts to speak more clearly publicly about what was happening before the election.

And he deserves so much blame for the outcome and the recriminations of all the time. Basically, like, you know, blackmailing the Obama governor. Threatening, I'm saying, you put out a statement, we'll say it's partisan. Which is classic Mitch McConnell.

As he was holding open the fucking Supreme Court seat for Neil Gorsuch, he was also saying, you tell anyone that this is happening, that Russia's trying to influence the election, I will say that it's partisan. And by the way, you're trying to put it. That's why Facebook is scared. But just one other thing too on this.

Fuck this, McConnell. It's also an irony about what Facebook has done, which is one of the reasons we're vulnerable as a culture. To this kind of propaganda is the way we're talking to each other has become so attenuated and strange. We communicate with each other via Facebook.

We communicate with each other via Twitter about politics. We communicate with each other in this remote way. And our lack of contact with one another, with people with which we disagree, with nuance, with just human beings face to face, has meant that the way we argue about politics online is so fucked up and strange and we're so willing to believe the worst things about one another, which is a culture that Facebook helped create, which thereby made us vulnerable to these kinds of Russian ads and Russia propaganda on Facebook itself. Notice how some homes sell faster in your neighborhood?

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Each office independently owned and operated. So let's get to Donald Trump. So Trump originally thought this indictment exonerated him because, of course, he did. But then he decided to spend all weekend holed up at Mar-a-Lago watching television since his aides convinced him not to golf 40 miles away from the scene of a high school massacre.

And the television made him very angry, as it often does. He tweeted 10 times in a 12-hour period. Some of the craziest. General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only collusion was between Russia and Kricket H, the DNC and the Dems, didn't know they were different organizations.

Remember the dirty dossier uranium speeches emails in the Podesta company, just words. He also said, now that little Adam Schiff, the leak and monster of no control, is starting to blame President Obama for rushing meddling in the election. He's probably doing so as yet another excuse that the Democrats led by their fearless leader, Kricket H, lost the 2016 election. But was it not a great candidate?

No, you weren't. Adam Schiff, a quick introduction, should make a leak and monster of no control t-shirt and I will buy it and wear it every single day. Or maybe we can do it. More tweets.

The very worst. I'll just do the very worst sweep because we'll get us off another conversation. Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable.

They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. There is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud. What the fuck is wrong with him?

He just set the scene. Imagine him staring out the window, wishing he could golf, complaining to Geraldo and Eric and Don Jr. about how he's being mistreated and just fucking raging. I mean, the last tweet you read, the notion one for all, like there's 35,000 employees, the FBI, they have different divisions that work on things like the shooting in Florida or counterintelligence investigations.

The idea that one was distracting them from the other is so dumb and so offensive and so fucking nakedly political, it took my breath away when I read it. The idea that the person running the Mueller investigation is also manning the national tip line at FBI headquarters is fucking insane and everyone knows that. Except everyone on Fox News who started this conspiracy theory 24 hours before the president decided to tweet about it, which is what always happens. It's just like this guy.

He's just a sad angry person. He's sitting at Mar-a-Lago, his wife's mad at him because there's reports that he was having affairs with playboy models, porn stars, all this kind of stuff. So she's mad at him. He's sitting there.

He's pissed off. They can't golf because there was a school shooting. And so he's just watching TV getting angry because he thought this fucking indictment accelerated him. Yeah, I would say first of all, we're in desperate need of the cat and the hat.

When he is stuck inside on a rainy day or he's not allowed to golf, we need to send in a mischievous cat with a hat to distract him. That would be where just the cat and the hat if you're out there. The country needs you. So that's number one.

Of course. Number two, the absurdity of it of him deciding to use this as an opportunity to hit the FBI. It broke my brain a little bit because normally I'd be angry and I saw you guys were tweeting angrily and I was angry. And I was like, you know what?

I'm not mad anymore. This is him. This is him. He has no scruples.

He has no morals. He doesn't care. You went to the second order anger of being angry. Paul Ryan.

I went to Paul Ryan. I said, let me put this theory at someplace useful, which is Donald Trump tweets this because it helps him. He thinks it helps him because he only watches Fox News. But also because Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Republicans of Congress have created a culture in which Donald Trump pays no price for this kind of stuff.

The Barack Obama ever said anything heff as bad as this. There was a hearing, so be consequences. We talked about it. As it is, we know that Paul Ryan, who joked about it at the ultimate dinner saying, what tweet can I pretend to not have seen today?

And then one other to small point. Donald Trump should not be picking more fights with the FBI. He does not need to remind them that he is not on their side and that they're not on his. And as far as I'm concerned, that is valuable.

It is quite nice that Donald Trump doesn't, that if there's anybody inside the FBI that forgot that Donald Trump is anti-American and hates all of our institutions and does that for know him himself and is a criminal, that tweet just was a booster shot. Yes it was. But that's, I mean, it's a good point. Love it.

You know, you want to keep Donald Trump busy and not see tweets like that again? Give him a Democrat of Congress. That'll keep him busy. You know who's going to keep him busier than Devin Nunes?

Adam Schiff. You know who's going to keep him busier than Paul Ryan? Nancy Pelosi. You know who's going to be who's not going to blackmail administration is not talking about Russian hacking?

Chuck Schumer. When he's the majority leader. Give him a fucking Democrat of Congress. Then you won't see those tweets.

It's just so amazing. There was a horrific school shooting. Horrific school shooting. So his team was like, sir, the optics of golf looked pretty bad.

He should probably stay inside. And he was like, hold my putter. I'm going to turn something so much worse than the optics of going golfing. Hold my putter.

Let the man go. Hold my putter. Yeah. The other part too, just on the substance of it also, the idea that what we had, there may very well have been a breakdown here where the FBI should have been able to isolate this guy and realize that he wasn't genuine threat.

I don't know the answer to that. I don't know when a troubled kid saying crazy shit rises to the level of intervening. In part because there are so many kids saying crazy shit. And it's this backwards thing where, because we know that the AR 15s are everywhere, because we know that the guns are everywhere, because they know that they're everywhere.

And now we're left at this whole thing of like, well, the kid can always get the guns. We have to stop him before he gets the gun. And every single high school in this country has a troubled kid or two who are going through something. Some of them have violent fantasies.

And then some tiny section of them, some subset of them are going to act on those fantasies. If the answer to mass shootings with weapons is creating a police state, because we're so afraid to take the guns, it is. There was an armed guard at the entrance of the high school. I want to talk about the aftermath of the mass shooting at Stone and Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

The surviving students have now kept the story in the news longer than just about any mass shooting since Newtown. Part of the reason is how they've been speaking out in a real forceful and inspiring way. We have a clip of student Emmigans' Alice's speech, which went viral over the weekend, I think we can play. Politician, it seems funded by the NRA.

Nothing could have ever been done to prevent this. We call BS for gun laws to not decrease gun violence. We call BS. Bad guy with a gun.

We call BS. They guns are just tools like knives. They're as dangerous as cars. We call, they say that no laws could have been able to prevent the hundreds of senseless tragedies that have occurred.

We call BS. So the big question here is, will this time be different? Feels like could be. I know it.

It's going to be different because I'm so sick of the cynical response on these questions being the one everyone defaults to because it's hard. Everything in politics is hard. So let's just hope that after schools and churches and movie theaters have been shot up this many times, that we can find the courage to require background checks and ban fucking AR-15s and other assault rifles and consider getting a buyback program out there to get guns off the streets and out of circulation and that we ignore these like cynical proposals from people like John Cornyn that are going to try to make this about better enforcement of current law or stigmatizing people with mental health issues and all the things they try to do to keep up real gun control solutions from getting talked about. No, Alec McGill always talks about this journalist and there's this liberal fatalism when it comes to gun violence where it's an extension of the LOL nothing matters view of the Trump era, which is nothing gets done.

And the truth is maybe nothing gets done in this Congress, but that doesn't mean this time can't be different in terms of starting a movement that actually changes the laws that starts at a local level, that starts at the state level, that elects a new Congress, that ultimately elects a new president. I mean, we got to start the movement now and we got to grow the movement now and we've got to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and when legislation dies in Congress, you elect a new Congress and then you keep going. You know, this is a long road on this, but you start now. It is a bit like climate change in that climate change is hard to wrap your head around because there is no one solution and solving it since really hard.

But then you look at the data, you look at what you can do and you start to piece together the solutions from smaller policies, smaller reductions, smaller adjustments in our missions and slowly but surely you make big changes. It's going to take a really long time for America to have a less violent gun culture than it has right now. It's going to take decades to slowly and actually get those murder rates and suicide rates and mass shooting rates down. But we have to start, we have to start doing the work of making changes.

Now, conservatives will say, oh, this wind have made a meaningful difference. Oh, this, you know, you look at this and you look at the mass shooting statistics and the majority of the guns are bought legally and that's an argument against gun control, but then also the ones that are about illegally and that's also an argument against gun control. Every specific case, there's a way in which that person would have been able to acquire that weapon. But if you slowly but surely make access to these weapons harder to require more of people for their arm, you will slowly but surely see a reduction in gun violence, which we've seen over and over again at the state level that when you put in place smarter gun laws, there are fewer gun deaths.

It is unequivocal. Courageous people will stand up. There's a big Republican donor, so he's not cutting another check until there's action on gun control. I'm not going to ask you any questions.

I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question that needs for some of the automatic rifles. If we can get those voices to drown out the epic fucking cowards like Marco Rubio who literally said, if one person decides to do it and their committed to that task is a very difficult thing to stop, that logic would never ever be applied to terrorism. And terrorists are very determined to and it doesn't mean we don't try to stop them.

So we should hammer, hammer cynical fatalistic people like Marco Rubio and when kids in Florida are seeing these tweets from Donald Trump or seeing comments in Marco Rubio and saying, you know, that's outrageous. I think that is very powerful. I was going to say, I was going to talk to these students because the kids at Newtown, the kids at San Diego and the school were too young to really speak out and be politically active. The difference here is these are high school students in that speech also talks about how they've actually had debates about gun violence and gun control in their classroom.

She said there was actually one going on while the shooter was there. These kids just sort of fly right in the face of all of the arguments that millennials, that young people in this country don't care that they're not engaged, that they're tired, that they don't care about political involvement. These kids, they are engaged and they're angry and they're also hopeful at the same time as being angry and they're going to fucking change this thing. This generation is not going to 2018 and 2020 are not going to be like 2016.

You can tell. It's fascinating. First of all, just hearing the speeches, it's moving and inspiring. We've talked a lot about what's going to break the cycle.

We have a mass shooting and then people talk about it for a day and then nothing happens. What's going to break the cycle? We've evolved a response system that repeats and repeats and repeats and it turns out the kids were watching that cycle too. They were on Twitter and they saw it every time.

They know all the moves too. They know the NRA's moves too. They know Marco Rubio's moves too. They know all the moves.

They know all the moves. They know all the moves. They know all the moves. They're interjecting in the middle of the loop we have.

They're saying no, no, no, not this time. They're going to be the school that keeps popping up. And they're not cynical yet. And the other thing too is one advantage to having a dumb fuck president who watches the news all day and doesn't actually read his briefs and has no idea what's actually going on in the world is protest or a TV medium.