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