1128: Graham Platner Isn't Backing Down

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Video is also based on vendors with Shopify. It can be helped to help a real help. Start the test after a long time for an EuroPrommoner to shopify.de/recorder. Welcome to Podsave America. I'm John Favre. Our guest this Sunday is Graham Platner, who's running for Senate in Maine.

He's currently in a Democratic primary race against Maine Governor Janet Mills,

that will be decided in June, and the winner will try to finally defeat Susan Collins in November.

Graham has been on the show before.

“You might remember that his interview with Tommy and October is where he revealed that he got a”

skull in crossbones tattoo as a young Marine, that he says he later learned was a Nazi symbol and right after his PSI appearance, he got the tattoo covered up. I've asked about that, but I mainly wanted to learn more about what Graham Platner actually believes about politics, what life experiences shaped his beliefs, what his theory of changes, what kind of a person he is, and what kind of a senator he'd be.

All important questions because despite the early controversies over the tattoo and his long trail of reddit posts, Platner didn't just decide to stay in the race, he's now the frontrunner, at least according to the polling averages and fundraising totals. At the very least judging by the crowds he's getting and the organization he's building, he will be a formidable challenger to Mills, and this will be a very competitive and much

discussed primary in the months ahead. With that said, I really enjoyed the conversation,

“and I hope you do too. Here's Graham Platner.”

Graham Platner. Good to see you. Thanks a lot. It's good to be here. Welcome back. It's good to have you here in person. No, it's an absolute pleasure, man. You've been running for Senate for six months? Yeah, we launched the campaign on August 19th. Okay. So yeah, whatever that is around that. You've gone from completely unknown challenger to rising star to scandal plagued candidate who faced calls to drop out to fundraising

leader and maybe if you believe the latest polls frontrunner. Yeah, it's been quite the whirlwind. How is your thinking about politics and campaigns and being in public life changed since you started running? What have you taken away so far from this journey? One I've taken away. I mean, I was already pretty cynical about money in politics, and that cynicism has just been supercharged.

I mean, it is like, in the problem is like you clearly need to raise money to compete for this

stuff. But there is just a whole apparatus that seems to exist just to suck up money. Yeah. And like in that has been really eye-opening. I mean, the political industrial complex, so the campaign industrial complex, what do you want to call it? And it is this kind of like, it's a wild thing to actually interact with personally. I mean, we're lucky because our fundraising has been some so much small dollar stuff and because frankly the establishment of even my party wants nothing to do with

me. It kind of keeps all of that at arms length, like automatically. So I'm not that mad. But you like just interacting with it is like, man, this is there's a whole industry around this stuff. Is it the time suck? That's really? It's the time, totally. And in like it's, I'm not going to say I understand why people go the kind of like corporate pack dark money route because I mean,

element where I can see someone who might not have the same, I like this sort of political

foundation that I have. Being a, I mean, if somebody comes along and says, hey, you never have to

make a phone call again. And you don't have to go back to anybody for money. I can see someone being like, oh, well, that would mean that I could do more other stuff, right? Although, I mean, to it's, I mean, that's not in any way, it should perform remotely worth it. But it's, uh, and then there's just the, there's just kind of interacting with the whole media landscape and political world as a pretty normal guy up until August. Uh, and so like, that's a whole wild experience.

And like, I'm like, open my phone and see my name. And I'm like, I don't, nope, no, no, no, I don't want to see that. Like, it's just, it's just this very, and it's not always good. Not much of good. No, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's such a, yeah, it's a very like, it's just very surreal. Yeah. And, and I, uh, I also very much understand why I guess the biggest lesson I have learned is structurally, it's borderline and possible for regular people to pull this off. Like, if you're

regularly human being, yeah, with not a lot of money and having lived a pretty normal life, who doesn't want to like just get your entire existence ripped to pieces. I can see why people

“don't want to do this. I think about that often because especially with people, uh, our age,”

yeah, and younger, like, and everyone younger, because we've, and if you look, if you've never

spoken about politics or posted about politics, your whole life and have lived a perfect life maybe, but, um, you've obviously found out. Yeah. You've said quite a bit about politics. Yeah. I mean, every time and everyone knows now. And everybody knows, I mean, like, and for me, like, it's a, when I got into this thing, I, I'm an elder millennial. I've spent most of my life on the internet. I was well aware when the moment I said yes to this whole experience that

somebody was going to come along with a bunch of resources and dig up every single thing I ever did on the internet and try to usually, like, I knew that was coming. Um, and when it came, I was happy to talk about it because quite frankly, I think it's a pretty standard story of people that aren't trying to get into politics or just regular human beings in general. You go through phases in life. Yeah. You believe things when you're younger, you say things, you do things,

and then you learn new things, and then you change, and then you become a different version of yourself. Which, I mean, in my experience, it's pretty much just like what most people go through. Um, so it was actually very kind of ironic that that whole thing blew up as if it was this

“huge scandal. And in reality, I think it actually really strengthened the campaign because a lot of people”

could, like, directly engage with that feeling of like, yeah, I have not, most of us have

not always been who we are today. Yeah. And we also have to very much understand that if we're going to

build a better future, we need to keep an opening for a lot of people to change. Because if we're all stuck right now on some ossified political thought and nobody's capable of changing, and then what's the point of doing any of this? Yeah. No, and look, we appreciate you coming out here and you talked to Tommy in an interview, which became part of the story because he asked you about a lot of the old posts. He also asked you, and then you talked about the

tattoo. Yeah. You've since had the tattoo covered up. Yeah, so I had a cover of like two days after that. I remember. I remember a few weeks after that, I had a main voter who I know say to me, I like Platner, I'm leaning Platner. I don't think he's a secret Nazi, but then they said, you know, my concern is I saw that a few people left his campaign. One of them said, Platner, knew the tattoo was a Nazi symbol when he started running. Yeah.

Someone else told CNN the same thing. I'm just wondering if I can trust him. Now, if you win the primary, because I'm sure you've probably met up been able to meet a lot of primary voters, just campaigning around Maine. It's totally fantastic. It's just a voter. It's not very big. Right. If you win, of course, superpacks will run millions of dollars of ads to this effect. Can we trust him? Is he telling the truth? What about all these positions? To reach voters who

aren't politically engaged or aren't as politically engaged or aware as maybe some of the voters

“who've come to your event? Yeah. What will your response be and what is your strategy to push back?”

So this response is going to be exactly what it was, which is like, I'm happy to talk about all this stuff. When that whole thing started, it never crossed any of our minds to run away from it. It was just kind of like, not me. This is part of my life. And in many ways, it's kind of part of my political journey. And so I'm happy to discuss it. One, what we're doing in Maine is we are truly trying to build a reel on the ground organized broad coalition of frankly working class power.

I'm going to have either directly connected with a substantial portion of the electorate or a

bunch of people who are just going to tell their friends. And the way Maine tends to work is that people trust their friends and their neighbors more than they trust TV ads from political groups. And part of our strategy quite frankly is just to cut through all of it by engaging as many people as possible. And personally, interacting with this amount, I do three to six public events a day. I mean, I do not sleep much. And that's fine. You might meet everyone in Maine then.

We very well might be everyone in Maine. And we go everywhere. I mean, this is not like, we're not doing some kind of weird math about like, oh, we, we've got our win number. And we're

only going to focus on that. Like, for me, we truly need to change politics. And to do that,

we have to engage with everybody, even people who we might not agree with, even people who might of initially be very either resistant or hesitant to even oppositional to the message, although we found that when we do engage with those folks, we have a lot of common ground. Have you had conversations with people who are skeptical about all the, the tattoo stuff for any of the old Reddit posts or anything? Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll cover those, go. They go great.

I mean, because I, I mean, it's because I explain it and frankly, most people are like,

“that all sounds, permanently reasonable. And it's, and I think in Maine folks,”

I mean, I don't know how to say this, but when people meet me, they tend to be like, okay,

so he seems exactly like a normal human being. So it's helpful. It's helpful. So there's that. And then, I mean, honestly, we're also just going to push back on TV. Primarily, like, with messaging, that's positive. I mean, I really, I'm, I know that once we get through the primary, that, you know, it, the whole thing's going to, I mean, there's so much money's going to get spun on this race, which, which drives me insane, because if I had my way, we would just take that money and like write

everybody and make a check. And frankly, we'd be better off. Every cycle, and you hear how much is being spun on the biggest center races, it's not just like, oh, what a fucking thing. Although I will say, for us, the way that we kind of fight back against that is we're like, we're building an on the ground, organizing apparatus. So a lot of, we hire miners. And we're going to, we're going to have miners learn how to be organizers in their communities and like,

have them on staff. Like, we want the money that we spend to primarily be spent in Maine, not just give it to some DC consulting firm that makes another stupid ad that we've all seen a thousand times. It just changes little things. But we all know exactly what they are. So by, by building that, in by sticking to a very like, cogent, constructive message of the kind of future we want to build, the kind of policies that are going to get us there. And a theory of

“power building that is also going to be necessary to get us there. I think that's how we push through”

all this stuff. And in my experience, a negative TV ads, I don't think they actually move the needle much in Maine. You know, in 2020, serigity and race, outspent the Collins race. I'm almost three to one. Yeah. It's a money leftover. It's money leftover. It in immense amount of money was spent on negative ads about Susan Collins. It didn't do anything. And honestly, living in the part of me and I live in which is which rural Eastern Maine, a lot of the negative ads about

serigity and also didn't change anything. It was really more about like a feeling on the ground, people couldn't really connect with, with the Democratic candidate, primarily because I think DC came in and ran the race like an old school DC race, which is not going to win against Susan Collins. And Collins was a known entity. And at that point, people could still sort of frame her as this sort of moderate. Row would not have been overturned, just really important to remember.

And I think that that to me just shows that it's not really about the ads or even the money spent. There's another, there's an X factor in there about connecting with people and about really being able to make people think that you are, we're not think, but letting people engage with you directly to show that you are like authentic. Yeah. And which is why, I mean, we hold, we've held 40 town halls. And we're going to hold 20 more before the primary. And we're going to hold a

bunch more after that, like making myself accessible in a way that isn't controlled, like we don't screen questions at these things. People just come and I literally pick on folks who raise their hands,

“who drives the comms team insane. They are terrified. But I think that's how you make yourself”

accessible. And we need politics to be accessible again, to regular folks. So you're running against

in comparison to other governors, even other democratic governors, big health care expansion for

community college, more school funding. What governing decisions has Jant Mills made that you

“disagree with? So if anything, I'm very much a labor candidate. I believe in the need to strengthen”

unions, I believe in the power of organized labor within our society to advocate, not just for like their union members, but kind of for the working class in general. The governor has effectively vetoed every single pro labor, a bit of legislation that's kind of cross or dusk. She's been an, an opponent of labor. I mean, right now I have, forget how many, but a bunch of union endorsements. By the time I get to the primary, we're probably going to have the vast majority

of unions in Maine, because they have a, not great relationship with the governor. And in your to me, like, we need to pass the pro act. We need to expand the NLRB, or have the, we need to expand the labor courts and have an NLRB that actually acts as a good faith in our mediary and like unfair labor practice disputes, which right now, I mean, it doesn't even have a core right now. So it's all not functioning. And like someone who's vetoed pro labor legislation over and over and over again,

to me is not someone that's like going to go to the mattresses to fight for it in DC. I also think that Maine has a very fraught relationship with the Wabanaccinations. We have a specific law from 1980, which does not extend to the Maine tribes. The same protections that all other 570 nationally federally recognized tribes get. So it means that the Maine tribes have to spend a much money on lobbyists in Washington, DC, because for it for legislation to impact them, they need to be named

specifically. So they have to have people in Washington to make sure that Malacet, Pinobscott, Passemaquadi, that that gets added as words into bills. They're been multiple attempts to fix this and the governor is opposed to all of them. Both as Attorney General and his governor. So to me, that is also a pretty fundamental difference around, I don't like a foundational political philosophy, like I do not see expanding tribal sovereignty in Maine as a bad thing at all.

“I think it's good. And I also think it's morally the correct thing to do since we have been”

not good faith actors in our relationships with the tribes. And so like there are in the last but not least, and rather big when I think is, I think we have to tax the rich. And the governor's vetoed multiple bipartisan bills, some written by Republicans, that we're trying to raise taxes on the wealthy in Maine, creating three new tax brackets, is completely reasonable. And the governor vetoed that. And again, that just doesn't show a commitment to going after where the money is,

which I think, as we move into this next phase in American history, I think that that's going to have to be like a pretty foundational element of our politics going forward. Potitive America is brought to you by fast growing trees. Did you know fast growing trees as America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants

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over 25 million windows making them the number one retailer of custom window treatments. Right now blinds.com is giving our listeners an exclusive $50 off when you spend $500 or more just use code crooked at checkout limited time offer rules and restrictions apply see blinds.com for details. I want to sit back and ask about how you came to believe what you believe about politics like when did you start paying attention to politics and what was your world view like

back then and sort of how has it evolved? I mean I've always been politically I was a big history

buff when I was a kid. Which in many ways kind of makes you sort of politically aware just because you're doing that. In high school I was really I was introduced to more critical thought like

“Howard's in and Chomsky. I you know at that point but I remember reading those things and like”

being like yeah some of this makes sense but I also still was very much like a bit of a patriotic young man so and I always wanted to join the military so I had this kind of like weird like militaristic bent that I really can't explain but since I was two I wanted to be a soldier. It was really after my military service that I began to think much more deeply about it primarily because I'm added four tours in the infantry and I fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and I really

came to believe that what we were doing was not what we were claiming to do. I could not figure out what the immense amount of violence I partook in what that did for the town of Sullivan Maine and like I into the state and once everybody explained to me. I do know that some people made a lot of money off the horse that I fought in and it wasn't the young men and women who did the fighting and it certainly wasn't the civilians that we inflicted just wild amounts of violence upon.

I it's defense contractors and it's it's folks in political power like it really is

and that that began so I became it became very critical of American foreign policy

which as I then that kind of just sent me on a road of being with an critical of foreign policy why is our foreign policy like this so I became more critical of our political structures and once you start being critical of the political structure you're like well why is our political structure like this and that takes you into like an economic critique and you start to realize that I like this whole system in many ways does seem to be built by people in power with wealth

to maintain or expand their wealth and power generally to the to the immigration or diminishment

“of regular working folks and and I think you know the reason my this campaign has sort of”

blown up the way it has is I think a lot of people are getting wise to this and a lot of folks

like I'm in a second like this stuff that we all thought for years we are getting a totally

different outcome from what we claim we're trying to do so are we actually trying to do the thing that we claim or is all of this doing something else and when you reframe the question of like does all of this exist just to like screw working people and make somebody else rich suddenly a lot of decisions we make begins to become a lot more clear you know I'm not this and so I that's kind of where I've it's been a long journey I mean it's it's definitely not been

I didn't like have a day or I'm like oh that's I figured it out but well and obviously so obviously you're like shape I your experiences in Iraq you come home all the everything you just said you know you could you could have found up I just being on the internet right and and reading about politics and reading the news but you decided before you long before you ran for send it to like get involved in community organizing which I find really interesting what got you into that like

did what did you want to change in your community specifically and like what did you find about the work what was challenging what was fulfilling number I forget what year this was but I read a book

ago which is the shame because we could use her now in it the the book really talks about

“the difference between organizing and mobilizing developing a deeper theory of power in which”

power really is accessible for people who are willing to organize and to take it in many ways in that we in our society even in like liberal circles still kind of have this vision that there is an elite who's like worthy of wielding power in the rest of us kind of have to like you know let them do it and her arguments like that's simply not true that really power is power is for everybody but it requires organizing to bring it around it requires trust building and relationship building

and I read that and it kind of changed my life actually because I began to think that

like I spent a lot of time especially coming back my last trip to Afghanistan was in 2018

and it was just to call it disillusioning would be an understatement I was there for six months

“hadn't been there in seven years and I was like okay well nobody has any new ideas this isn't”

saying and I came back and I was really kind of just at my at a loss of what to do and I decided to kind of opt out and I moved back to my hometown became an oyster farmer started working on the ocean and really wanted to just check out but while I did that I also began to connect to my community and I mean I live in a town of a thousand people it's the town I was born and raised in I wound up on the planning board I wound up in the harbor master and in doing all that I began

to see like really the the value of building trust and relationships and just organizing on the ground and I also began to realize that organizing is actually not that complicated it's just really hard and that there is no graduate version of it it's all 101 stuff and it's hard because it is

“difficult to get people to participate to care just to break down barriers and because you have to put”

a lot of time on paid labor into it you have to believe and you have to go out into your community and you have to tell people what you believe which is also hard and it requires you to kind of open yourself up to a lot of people who like like people who I know who you have to like kind of say like this is what I believe and sometimes people like I'm not into that and like you're my neighbor I that that buns me out but you have to do it and we had a number of issues in in eastern

main for instance there was a school board race and out of frankly an out of state pack came in with a bunch of money and back a very anti-trans Canada and somebody had been on the board for 13 years who was well-respected in the community who everybody liked lost to see and a month later the school district pulled back protections for LGBTQ kids that had been there for six years for no reason just besides hacketing involved in a local school board in

yeah technically and then yeah in Franklin but yeah it's like we have an RSU so a regional school unit and it was this moment for myself and a few other people where we we watched this happen and we it only happened because it was no organizing versus a little bit of organizing they had people in outdoors and this guy had himself a small town school board race and there was no apparatus to support him there was no way of like

getting people to knock doors for him he was calling around almost like frantic understanding what was happening like with a week until the election and there really wasn't anything that existed and so a number of us we'd already been we'd already formed like kind of a small community organizing group but we use this as kind of an example of we understood that if we don't have people who can make signs and put them up we don't have

people who can knock doors we can make phone calls in their communities talking to their neighbors people that they trust or people who would trust them if we don't build that then we're going to lose this kind of fight and so we just started to build it and we reached out to folks and we got a number of the other larger statewide groups we reached out to local democratic committee we reached out to Franklin there's a lot of individuals who we knew kind of had who were

worked up about this because every like a ton of people are angry but again there was no mechanism and we kind of we realized that especially right now after Trump's reelection people want to do

something they want to fight they want to get involved the problem is in a lot of places there

and once you build the room people come into it and they start talking to each other and they

start building relationships and I mean the way we did it was pretty non hierarchical so essentially like folks get together and be like this is the thing I care about it's because like I care about that too and like go forth and make that a campaign and it worked like we we actually wound up like winning the next school board race and like we and we're still like kind of now we're trying to get candidates to run for county commission or stuff like that so there is a to me that was a

direct it was a moment or at realize oh man this kind of power building is very real yeah uh it just requires people to really get out of their comfort zone and start building relationships

again and for me it's it's kind of it was the foundation of when the campaign started one of the

reasons I agreed to do this was purely to use it as a statewide organizing like vehicle with the visibility and the resources that we're going to get we can take that kind of strategy those kind of tactics that kind of on the ground trust building that we do and we can super charge it and we can get the labor unions involved and we can get all the other community organizations around the state involved and then we can bring in all these people who engage with politics of

via electoral campaigns and we can train them how to be organizers and activists in their community

“and I think that's that's how you build the apparatus to knock it enough doors talking”

of people and building up trust where I mean I'm pretty convinced we're not just going to beat

Susan Collins in November I think we're going to drown Susan Collins and if the worst thing happens and we have an election that is contested or called into question well we still have an apparatus to turn people out to actually have people mobilize and if we have to you know resist fascism in the streets with a mass movement which is really the only way you can and we're trying to build the apparatus to do both and when we're done we want it to stay I don't want any of

this to die because one single senate seat's not going to get as universal healthcare so we're going to need to have the power of people still on our side in order to like get the winds we're going to need down the road I'm a nerd so I looked up the election results in Sullivan for the last decade quite a bell weather barely goes for Trump in 2016 by like less than 1% although you said it's like thousand people yeah Jared Golden barely wins in 18 barely flips to Biden in 20 trump squeaks

out of wind in 2024 yep I'm sure you know most of the people there what are their politics like what are people believe there it's a I mean everybody works really hard eastern man is is economically depressed we have it's most it's commercial fishing it is a lot of construction mostly because we have some pretty substantial summer communities nearby which brings money and then across the bay from must be the Katie and National Park so there's a lot of folks

that work in industries that are related to tourism so it's a very it's a very working class area

“which is I frankly as I think why it is this kind of weird back and forth between like”

Trumpism and not Trumpism because I mean Trump I have a lot of friends who voted for Donald Trump three times and they hate billionaires they think corporate tech folks are like manipulating all of us they think they're corporate own agriculture and food systems are exploiting all of us and essentially placing us they think that hedge funds and private equity are like destroying working people's lives I agree with all of us one of the reasons they voted for Trump

is because Trump came along and he told them the one thing that they knew was true was true which is that they live in a system that is not built for them and somebody somewhere is robbing them blind and once he said that they were they were willing to kind of forgive all the other stuff because that was that's the core thing that people understand that we live in a political and economic system that does not have their best interest in heart when you tell people that

something they know when their bones is real they're willing to kind of go along with a lot more

“I think afterwards and what the biggest problem is we as Democrats have had is that we didn't have”

a counter to that we told folks that we had to protect the status quo yeah we told folks that no the economic system is actually doing great did you guys not see that the wall streets doing fight GDP looks great unemployment is record loads yeah but everybody works three jobs and they hate them so it doesn't matter if unemployment's low working people are working themselves to the

oligarchy that is how we kind of rebuild trust with working people and I mean I say this is not like

“a radical idea it's I mean honestly it seems pretty obvious but the Democratic party at least”

elements of it certainly in DC have sort of really walked away from that and I think working people walked away from them because of it. Potitive America is brought to you by stamps.com it is shocking it to this very day many small business owners are still making post office runs or stuck with expensive postage meter leases it's 2026 not 1926 that's right nail in ship when you want how you want with stamps.com with stamps.com you can send from your computer or phone 24/7 no

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plenty of time to see exactly how much time and money you're saving on every shipment that stamps.com code PSA that stamps.com code PSA so I want to talk about that a little more like what do you think happened because Hancock County where Sullivan is went for Obama by 17 points 2012 and obviously I've heard you say I get it that the Democratic Party has become too tied to corporate interests like we're specifically has the party gone wrong in the last decade in terms of

“policies decisions positions or other things you can point to we were like that's what I mean”

I absolutely to the the financial crisis bailing out the banks bailing out the big industry is letting people walk away with gold or jump away with golden parachutes while those banks still turned around at four closed on people's homes while the average working person saw there frankly their retirement savings just disappear and then we watched the political apparatus

back up the people that broke the thing in the first place I think that I think that was huge

that broke a lot of trust and and then further on you know like the so I so I was and I was there I was in the way that we sort of knew that this was going to happen we walk into the way it has bush had already done the bailout yep and we can't really undo at that point because you can't let the banks fail the whole system goes under and we make sure that the banks pay all the money back with interest right the fucking executives get away with the golden parachutes and I remember like

trying to remember talking to Larry Summers about it and he I was like he's like we it's contract law we can't claw back the bonuses like it's illegal we're not we're going to get fun or I'm like okay I mean he's like about contract law but there's like people with pitchforks outside the White House right um so like you know we're saying same thing with like why didn't anyone go to jail while the laws aren't there the DOJ right DOJ won't prosecute because the laws aren't

there and obviously we can't direct the DOJ to do anything anyway Obama gives an interview where we call these people fat cats he gets in trouble for calling them fat cats right let alone all the

“policies yeah I think looking back there's plenty of criticism over our housing policy that we”

even then at the time I remember them being like well we'd love to bail out people who like

lost their homes in this but what about we don't want to bail out the people who bought second

third homes that they knew they couldn't afford because then where we're awarding people who acted irresponsibly so there was all this we passed the Recovery Act we passed the Affordable Care Act we spent a whole bunch of money that then we lose the midterms over so yeah much money and I only bring this up not to not just defend any of it because I often look back on it and think like we're gonna have another crisis in another crisis and you get Republicans who are like

we'll let the whole fucking thing fail and we don't care and then we'll just blame the immigrants that's right and then you get the Democrats being like okay we're gonna try our best to solve the problem and it's not gonna be good enough and then everyone's gonna hate us and say

it's totally but I also think that that's why I just been entirely upfront I mean I think that's why we need to kind of change the political will of the Democratic Party to go a little bit further to actually go after I mean I people should have gone to prison I mean Iceland put people in prison and I understand that yeah I mean but you might I Trump administration's happy to abuse the justice department yeah and send them after folks they send them after like

“Komi because he hurt Trump's feelings I honestly don't think the American people would be angry”

if the justice department went after folks it like destroyed the retirement savings or kicked their neighbors out of their homes it's a and I and that's the problem I think before that like I mean I I assume yeah maybe they wouldn't be upset I assume we want to make sure the justice department only goes after people who actually but who actually broke the law of course then the question is like yeah but also we need to pass the fucking law that's it but that's

other that's the other like we need people in the Senate in the House who want to pass these laws and also frankly put enforcement mechanisms in place yes that's whatever biggest problems right now got lots of laws but then they get broken I mean the Trump administration breaks a lot every day and then a lot of people to stand around like well what do we do like what's the what's the mechanism to actually enforce the stuff and you know and again like I'm not I don't I don't

think that the criticism is always correct but the criticism is absolutely there and it's driven

“like the kind of narrative for sure and that's why I don't that's why I think that the only way”

to regain the trust of the American people as Democrats is to be radically different then what we've had to really become like there should be no such thing as a labor Democrat that should just be being in the Democratic Party yeah there we do need to cut ties with the I would say the larger the donor world that comes from the financial system the donor world that comes from Silicon Valley like that wants to use AI to either put us a lot of work or I guess maybe kill us

all as if they have it to say it's very insane we need to cut ties with that and I think we need to do it in a very clear public manner until we do I think a lot of folks are still going to

see Democrats as beholden to the same corporate apparatus that the Republicans are the problem is

is that the Republicans have the have the weapon of just blaming marginalized communities yeah blaming immigrants we need to blame the oligarchy we need to blame the corporate power that resulted in the deregulation of the banking system I mean that's a big one we we used to have laws in place there's a reason 2008 happened in 2008 and not 1994 I mean it's we changed rules and frankly a lot of Democrats supported that stuff and until we become a party that doesn't do

that until we become the party that that uses the tax code to go after the money that my opinion has actually been stolen from working people in this country over the past four decades until we use frankly like the anti monopoly laws we already have on the books we just have to

“stop having a Robert Borks wild reading of what a monopoly is until we do that I think people are”

going to trust us I guess a big question I've had for much of the last decade is like can Democrats win over people who have more culturally conservative beliefs with economic populism alone

because I very much want to believe that the answer is yes yeah I have not seen the evidence that

it can and I realize the sample size is small but like you know Bernie Sanders runs in 2016 Bernie Sanders runs in 2020 yeah gets a hell of a lot of votes still getting big crowds did not win either race obviously yeah friend shared brown yeah um who there's you know a perfect example of an economically populist Democrat who still holds you know liberal views on other issues has not tried to attack to the middle on any cultural views you know held out no

high of for a while and then just lost his last race and hopefully he wins again this year as well oh fingers crossed but um but what do you think about that I think that it's when I think the landscape has changed now I do fundamentally think that a lot of people even who hold culturally conservative views are realizing that they are in fact getting taken for a ride on the economic side hmm I think it's more clear now that it has been um also this could be

look but the Epstein files also are showing people of all political stripes that there is in fact a class of people who lives above accountability and lives above and kind of sees the rest of us

depraved lifestyles I think that's actually really helpful uh one because it's you know people are

realizing that it's true yeah but in my experience in Maine thus far I have a lot of people come up to me at events in a public who identifies Republicans identifies conservatives tell me straight up that they do not agree with some of the things I say but that they think the fact that I'm fighting back against the establishment of the system that that's more important and that's why they're going to vote for me and it's anecdotal but it's all but it also pans out in the polling I mean

they're we we do really well with independence for a long time the whole story was is that independence are this like magic moderate middle and that if you have any kind of sort of you know

populist or progressive as we define it views that you'll never appeal to those facts and it turns

out when you just go out there and talk about the fact that billionaires are robbing you a lot of

“folks like yeah that's what I'm here for that's the and so it's so I think the landscape is somewhat”

changed but like you know a shared brown shared was a victim of the larger failure of the democratic party he was not a victim of his own politics I think you know Ohio went from being a blue stronghold of unions to becoming this red stronghold of disenfranchised angry working class people who 30 years ago were Democrats because they were all in labor unions and then I mean it's not like in the 1990s it's not like the Clinton administration really stood up for labor right you know

it's it's we we the democratic party has a lot of a role to play in the diminishment of labor power in the free trade projects like NAFTA that really did in the end screw a lot of working Americans yeah you know I think that that when you put into the greater context I think that's what's happened and in this moment frankly just because of the material reality that people are living in it is becoming very clear to a lot of folks whether they're conservative or or liberal or whatever

you want it or just in the middle and don't even care about politics there's becoming a very clear awareness that they are in fact being taken for a ride by people with immense amounts of power and that those who are willing up willing to stand up to that power those are the people they're going to look to and support and I think they're willing to sort of not care actually about a lot of the culture war stuff which in my opinion I say this often I think was all invented

to keep us all from having the conversation about taxing billionaire wealth and breaking up corporate

“monopolies I think that's why we have to argue about all these culture war issues that in reality”

I mean it keeps us all divided but it doesn't reopen the hospital and it doesn't change the fact that your rent continues to go up or that your that the wages that you've been earning continue to stagnate while the prices of goods and services continue to rise all the culture war stuff is nothing for that and we need to be very clear and cogent and blunt about how we're going to change it and I think if we do that I do think that there is an opening to do this. Do you think

the democrats have I don't want to say take in the bait but engage too much in some of these culture wars and I think they have taken the bait and I'll be entirely honest I think some of them some of them don't even take the bait some of them rise to it on purpose because they don't want to have the other conversation I mean there is an element I see this all the time of you know more kind of establishment folks were like look I don't want to talk about this but they make me

talk about it and now I'm going to talk about how I don't want to talk about it for the next four

hours and I'll never talk about raising taxes on billionaires and I think there's an element

within the party that actually likes this stuff because it it gives them this ability to pretend they hate this but it sucks up all the oxygen so then you never have to get around to this structural or systemic reforms that we have to make. Sometimes I wonder if it's because the coalition of the democratic party is now more college educated and upper income than it's ever banned yep that like what gets people angry and what gets people like eager to participate in politics

are some of these issues which you know and I will say like I'm sure people feel strongly I feel strongly but a lot of stuff and I'm totally sure I'm not like I do not back away from things right I think all the wins we've made for justice and equality we take no steps back from any of the stuff but I'm also very aware as someone who like now has money that you're like oh

“when your life is like comfortable right then you can say that like yes it's important that”

people care about raising taxes and people care about health care but also are you going to be

engaged but I think for a lot of people who just show up at elections who are like more suburban

high upper income stuff like that who've been voting Democrat for a long time I wonder if it's like the driving force for that it might be but but we're not winning with that right I mean there's there's that there's that great Chuck Schumer line and we did everyone we lose every like for every working class person we lose like out in the country side we're going to gain two voters in in the suburbs and it didn't happen Donald Trump won and then he won again and we lost

“a lot of seats around the country like so clearly that math did not pan out I truly think that the”

only way forward for us as a party is to really become the real party of working people again and you know when you do that it doesn't mean you're like also not I mean look when I talk about working people I literally mean anybody that just makes money from wages yeah which is everybody yeah I mean I'll just like I've had a bunch of folks like what about the middle class I'm like yeah man in this American the middle class is the working class

but frankly somebody that's started a business and has just worked their asses off every day ever since and might now have like a bunch of money but still works they're way closer to someone working three jobs in poverty than they are to a billionaire like the like you like we're all kind of down here and when we talk about policies about clawing a lot of that wealth back we're not talking about going after small business owners we're not talking about going

after big business owners we're talking about going after the people who used their wealth and power to change policies in the political system to then consolidate more wealth and power they cheated and we need to use political power to call out that stuff back so I think that by becoming the party of representing working folks we really would be becoming the party of like really representing the vast majority of Americans and as people begin to realize that

this right-wing populism it's not making things cheaper right and it's not reopening hospitals and it's not making your health insurance company any less awful to deal with that realization will kick in and you know we won't get everybody but I think we will start getting folks back but we need to be there with open arms and we need to be there with policies that are very understandable I mean I think that's a big one positive America brought you by mitten mobile

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four to tax well i want to talk about medical for all yeah um because i know that's like central to your campaign and i had now feel like i have talked about health care for most of my life in politics and went through this in the 2020 campaign obviously had been there for ACA as well so i've dealt

“with a lot of health care politics i think insurance companies are horrible i think that the four”

profit system is insane and i think it is um a no brainer that if we were starting from scratch that we would write a single pair system or some version of a single pair system i think that the the figuring out how to win the political support to transition from what we have now to a single pair system Medicare for all or something like it is a political challenge that is made more difficult in large part by all the money that the insurance companies in everyone else has but

there are also some like real trade-offs and transitions that i think average people who very much dislike their insurance companies are still concerned about and you know like they tried they put it on the ballot in colorado in 2016 as a ballot initiative yeah Medicare for all fails

yeah and then they failed at implementation right what's the one is because it needs to be a national

“policy yes i mean like like especially small real states we don't have the money right i mean”

it's in many ways we're talking about building a national risk pool and the more people have an risk pool the more effective you i mean your insurance is which is really is what we're talking about here yeah i'll just use my own experience so i essentially get universal health care i'm disabled i'm a disabled combat vet and because of that i simply get free point of service care it allowed me to start a small business it allowed me to take some time to figure out what kind of

life i wanted to live after my combat service without it i would not have ever been able to be an oyster farmer because i would have had to work another job to have health care it gave me a real material freedom that allowed me to build something that today is a successful small business

that employees people in eastern man never would have existed without my health care that basic

element of foundational support just around health care is what allowed me to become a successful

“small business owner not only do i think that providing that is going to unleash a lot of”

productivity in the real world because this is important we have a system and we have a lot of metrics that we use to judge our productivity that frankly mostly seems to be fantastical in the financialized system but in the real world where people actually build things and exchange them with each other from money that in that world the i honestly do think that giving people just a simple foundational support is going to unleash a lot more productivity people have people at the freedom

to start small businesses or to engage in art to engage in things that i think actually elevate all of us as a society also we would take health care off the plate of small business owners which it's a nightmare you know if you're like a lot of small business medium size business owners they want to provide health care to their employees but i mean i've spoken to folks in man who like if you have a company 50 employees and up one of those employees job is to just deal with

the health insurance stuff pay in the premiums dealing with the companies it's a frig you take that off their plates well now they can just focus on what their businesses not also having to be this intermediary around health care i know that we can do it because the VA doesn't right this that's the program exists the VA only has problems when republicans cut its budget when we fund it and we resource it it doesn't spectacular job in main the VA is awesome and it's awesome because

we have a small population and the resources and employees the ratio for the people for the population that's serving it's a good ratio so it works i've lived in other parts of the country where the VA system is really hard to deal with because they don't get the funding and therefore the outcome it's almost as though you get what you pay for whoever would have guessed when i think about moments in american history where we had to address systemic problems

big ones there are always going to be times of experimentation and frankly growing pains

“and the only way it ever works is when you have people in positions of power who have the”

political will to try to drive it forward i mean this is what the new deal was the new deal was FDR having built the broad coalition having political power and then really just ramming things through making them happen some of them failed and then they changed they allowed to be a match they were imaginative they experimented things work things didn't work i mean the NRA worked for a little while and then it kind of didn't so they they got rid of it and it like in there is a

when we electrified all the rural america it was done within a ray of options whether it was public ownership or public private partnerships and sometimes just straight up private companies but we we used to use our imaginations to fix problems and i think our biggest problem recently has been we have a political class that has sort of forgotten how to dream big everything's a tax credit everything's a block grant everything's like something weird and we

try to explain it to people like you lose them in like five seconds because i mean it's like i don't even what is this weird wonky language you're using yeah which i mean it's one of my biggest biggest criticism of the Biden administration where they did a lot of amazing things and then

just never told anybody about them yeah and then we all sit around me like they're like why did

nobody like that we did this and like dude nobody knew and when you did explain it it was always

when it comes to health care i mean i'll be honest i think we have to do a lot of big things

“i i'm we're gonna need federal money to reopen hospitals yeah i think we need to start thinking”

about mental health care as being as much a part of health care as everything else and incorporating that into a larger system i mean we in rural man health care is collapsing now not next year not down the road it's already happened i know it's gonna say like one of one of the big problems or one of the challenges with mental care for all is that hospitals get a are open right now because they get reimbursed through right and if you suddenly

have every hospital go to the medicare reimbursement rate suddenly hospitals are closing all over the place i mean i think this is why bernie and his plan has like a transition period where four year transition for your transition and also i mean to be fair when you like i've read bernie's full bill and it's essentially universal health care with the name medicare for all right like as you really kind of get through a minute covers dental it covers vision medicare doesn't cover those things like

it's a there it it's an expanded program that really is just a single payer universal health care system that is based around basic things like you can still get insurance if for like higher level procedures that it doesn't cover but it does cover all the stuff like if you get sick or if you get injured and you just don't have to like think about it and i got to say having traveled a lot and been to a lot of other countries i just have this element of me where i'm like dude everybody else

does it differently they all figured it out and yeah of course it's never perfect these systems will

always have i mean we're talking about large bureaucratic systems they're gonna have some problems they have a lot more problems when you get neoliberal policies in place that start taking money away from them but everybody else has a better version of this and it's cheaper and the care in many ways is better for most people you know a lot of folks are always put along america you know like the rich come here to get great procedures and like that doesn't know good for somebody with

no money right like uh or who can't afford who can't even afford ACA coverage now because premiums have got up by like triple fold yeah and and i mean these are people i know this is my neighbors i mean my relative of mine had to drop her health insurance because her premium doubled because of the what the loss of the ACA extensions and i mean even that it's like we're just even if we keep expanding the subsidies and the credits for the ACA you're just like they're

“raising prices and we're all just subsidizing them like at some point you have to figure out how”

to contain the cost of health care so yeah and and as and i was just be entirely entirely upfront as long as there is a substantial profit motive with a substantial middleman we're just going to like unless we address that part of the problem subsidies won't be enough because somebody's going to figure out how to pull more money out of the cost will go up so i i think it's i do not pretend that it will not be a transition period i mean we're going to it would be one of the

largest projects we've really ever undertaken as a nation to transition from the health care system we have two a single pair universe of health care system but we also have to do it because what we're doing now is insanely expensive and it's terrible it's and in many places in rural America it's totally unsustainable yeah it's absolutely falling apart i want to ask you about this because it's in the news and by the time people hear this trump could have already launched a war

with Iran um i do want to get your response to what a white house source told political about selling the war quote there's thinking in the administration that the politics are a lot better if these

railies go first and alone in the Iranians retaliate against us and give us more reason to take action

“thoughts i hate everything i mean one i think it's disgusting that we've got people”

in the white house who are literally sitting around thinking about how do we sell a war i mean i i want we we went through the run up to the war in the rack at least then the bushing administration had the decency to really try to trick us yeah at least they like they really went out of their way they they they they made Colin Powell's silly his isn't his entire reputation at the u_n_ they like really they put the work in yeah and it's so i mean it's it's it's

own it's insulting to have these folks who are just like like oh we're going to figure out a war in a week like we're just oh well i'm in this abstain stuff's gotten out of control Iran we're going to invade Iran now we tried the Venezuelan thing like we did that now to it

Iran and i mean that's what they're doing all this is is is is posturing and as somebody who

“fought a war too it's it's disgusting uh and it also is i think for me i mean one of the reasons”

i want to go to the senate specifically is we need a senate who's really going to take their power back yeah when it comes to we're making i mean the constitution's pretty clear yeah i saw that the war that their the democrats think that the war powers resolution will now get a vote in the house yep i don't know if it'll pass cuz i think there's a few democrats who i mean this this is this is i mean this is and by the way you want to talk about like one of those

reasons why working people or regular people don't it's also because of this stuff because there is this connection like we just should be the anti war party i mean the fact that there is an element of the right that this kind of isolationist version of it that actually gets to almost take on the

“mantle of being that only works when we have elements of the democratic party that are like”

willing to go along with the stuff we shouldn't be fighting wars i'm sorry we should not be sending young american men and women off to kill a bunch of people in foreign countries i mean for essentially any reason i like i'm it is hard for me to see any intervention postworld war too that in the long run really worked out well korea maybe you can make the argument everything else though and it is a like i'm not a not a pacifist but at this point i've become essentially anti war

when it when it comes to like the nation writ large and how we use our power internationally because every time we do this when you when you go back and look at it in hindsight it's pretty

much always a bad idea but more importantly for me like there's a human cost to this stuff

“they've seen yeah my felt like i know what i know what it looks like when american”

made high explosive interacts with children like i've touched it it's a it's a horrifying thing yeah i i know what it feels like to have friends die and to have a lot of other friends of mine it myself included have to deal with the trauma of that for years afterwards we need more people in positions of power frankly who either understand it because they've experienced it or who are just kind of ideologically opposed and don't want us to do this kind of stuff and it's and it's not

just about like the moral component it's about the fact that like this stuff it doesn't make us safer it doesn't make the world safer it tends to to quote a famous famous marine who came long before me uh war is a racket and there are people that make an immense amount of money off of it and when you go look at a lot of the wars we fought frankly certainly my lifetime at the end of the day that's usually what happens and i do not see a war with Iran falling into a different category

in fact it seems to be almost like i mean i said this about Venezuela as well it's like a rack but drummer yeah but we need people and piss places at the political power who are really willing to call it exactly for what it is and to stand up against it i mean this can't happen yeah um last question hopefully a lighter note you easily took a campaign hide us to travel to Norway with your wife

yes uh to try IVF speaking of health care in the hotel yeah exactly in the hopes of having your first

child yeah can you talk to me about that decision and why Norway yeah so we've been uh amian i've had been dealing with infertility for about two and a half years now um and went through all the previous steps eventually got to the point where like alright IVF is the last thing and uh because of i mean the VA doesn't cover it and if it's not like clearly my problem and and he's not a vet so it doesn't cover her it's kind of weird which needs to be changed by

the way because to have children you do need both beings but whenever it's a whole other thing um i'm gonna work on that when i get to the center uh we uh her insurance didn't cover it um the VA stopped didn't cover it and so we started to look into doing it in the United States and it the cost is astronomical and in New England there's only one clinic so we in there only clinic is in Portland Maine which is three hours away from where we live so we'd have to be

traveling anyways we started to look into it we saw how expensive it was but we really weren't sure what else to do uh and then a friend of Amy's had a relative or someone who had gone to Norway

personal experience and so Amy reached out to a clinic in Norway like on a Monday and we had like an

“hour-long intake exam with the surgeon on Thursday and the moment I knew we were gonna go”

is that the end of an hour-long intake exam i was like okay how much do we owe you guys and they were like why would you give us money like nothing has happened and i'm like yeah we're definitely we're

gonna go away my yeah i mean this is uh that's like it was amazing and it was amazing it was

a an in the end even with the travel staying in an Airbnb for two weeks the plane tickets it was one quarter the cost of just the baseline of doing it here in the United States

“it's insane and you get treated like a human being like the clinic is small everybody's really”

nice to you they don't look at you is like just something to pull more money out of they

like treat you like a human being which is you're going through infertility yeah that's full

very helpful because it's an emotional experience and you know we developed like a really nice relationship uh with those folks and so it yeah it was a very we were still in it we're still kind of going through the process um but it's been we actually i mean i but talk about this we joke about it that even if it costs the same we still would have done the Norwegian version

because like it's just it's so it's so much more pleasant it's pleasant and you're going to

like Norwegian hospitals where you know literally no one is sitting there worried about how much this costs they fairly figured out in those Nordic countries yeah they shouldn't have been done mark they're pretty nice we should not convey done mark no war with Greenland yes that's good on top on top of all the other ones yeah no we're that one might be the most if we can get that we shouldn't definitely we should definitely not do that well good luck on

on your journey there and also thank god luck in the campaign and thank you for coming by

“oh thanks for having me i would appreciate it if you want to listen to pod save america add free”

and get access to exclusive podcast go to cricket dot com slash friends to subscribe on supercast sub stack youtube or apple podcasts also please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at cricket pod save america is a cricket media production our producer is Saul Rubin our associate producer is phara safari Austin Fisher is our senior producer rechurnland is our executive editor Adrian hill is our

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