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Unknown A
This is a great bit. I need to give AOC more credit. You know, I feel like sometimes I'm kind of a little bit oppositional because I'm annoyed that whenever I say we need a new presidential candidate who wasn't Kamala Harris Buttigiege or whatever, the people are like, aoc, aoc. And then I have to explain why that's a terrible idea, and then everyone gets mad at me. But I do like her.
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Unknown B
It has all of our support for folks following at home. Democrats supported it, Republicans supported it. So why isn't this moving? It's not because there's no substance for it. All four witnesses testifying today are in support of it.
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Unknown A
Oh, to be clear, she's talking about pharmacy benefit manager reform.
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Unknown B
Republicans are in support. Democrats are in support. So what happened? Well, on December 17th, at 4:15 in the morning, Elon Musk began firing off a barrage of social media posts opposing pharmacy benefit manager reform, PBM reform. And all of a sudden this bill that had almost unanimous support fell apart in man in a matter of hours. And the vote was postponed. On that day, after he tweets, it gets canceled, Elon Mus tweets, We have nearly 435 members of Congress all on board of it. He sends one tweet and all of a sudden everyone backs off and it kills. Drug pricing reform that saves people money on their insulin, on their.
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Unknown A
It is like insane how quickly he took control of the entire party. I guess. I mean, this is one of the genuinely. This is one of the problems with an extremely authoritarian, cult like dynamic within a party, which is that you can take control of everything, like instantly. You literally just take control of the head and then you're done. This couldn't really happen with the Democrats because the Democratic Party, like the constituency, the voter base, isn't a cult. You know, I obviously disagree with the general tendencies both of the DNC and of a lot of their voters, but it's not a cult. Nobody acts that way, or at least not enough people act that way. You couldn't really have this happen. You couldn't have. Give me a person, I don't know, Bill Gate or what. Bill Gates. Who is the. I'm blanking on the name.
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Unknown A
Who's that one billionaire who's like the nice one, active on social media, anti Trump. You know what I'm talking about? Mark Cuban. Thank you. If Mark Cuban pulled this gambit that Elon Musk had, you would not get this level of uniformity. You don't have that kind of cult of personality business. So I'm really glad that AOC is talking about it directly because you have to, you have to like, you have to humiliate in order to win this. It's not enough to say Republicans are evil. We know that. And they know that. It's not enough to say what they're doing is bad or irrational. They know. They don't care. Okay? You have to lay on the point over and over. You are cucked. Like, you are completely cucked. You have no independent decision making capabilities. You are absolutely subservient to the people who pay your paychecks or who run your party.
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Unknown A
You know, you have to rub their noses in it. You have to make a spectacle of how captured they are. That's the thing you have to lean in on. And I'm glad that AOC's talking about it because so often when Democrats talk about this, I, I think they presuppose something when they say, why does Elon Musk get to make these decisions? Why is Elon Musk the one running Doge? Why does Elon Musk, an unelected official, get all this power? And I think you're skipping a step, which is, why are you, the Republicans, letting him, like, okay, why does he get all that power? Sure. But it's kind of a rhetorical question. I want you to ask it directly. Why are you letting this one guy blow over all of you?
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Unknown B
You know, on their asthma, inhalers, health, everything that they need, and then to kick it off five days after he kills. Pharmacy benefit manager reforms.
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Unknown A
I love this.
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Unknown B
We get this tweet from Elon Musk. What is a pharmacy benefit manager? This was at 1:02am on December 31st of 2024, five days or so, a couple days after he kills the bill.
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Unknown A
So me, when I ban a chatter and then look at their logs and see the context that vindicates them, the.
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Unknown B
Problem here is not a.
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Unknown A
The woman laughing is the mo. Wait, I missed it. I missed it.
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Unknown B
20, 24, five days or so, a couple days after he bill.
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Unknown A
Yeah, what can you even say?
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Unknown B
The problem here is not a substance issue.
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Unknown A
Like, again, like, this is what I mean. And AOC has been doing this better than anyone. You have to call Elon stupid too, because the idea, and respectfully, I disagree with Bernie Sanders very much on this. The idea of Bernie Sanders being a very talented engineer, very smart, sweaty boy, you can't do that. You have to be like, no, he literally, he's like an idiot. Like, this isn't just like, caus it's just a modern version of what the Nazis did, which is that when you called the Nazis evil, misspoke. You know what I mean? When you call the Nazis evil, Nazis online are like, yeah, we're like, huh, Epic, evil, stoic, cold, hard, unrelenting. Yeah, we're evil. Like in a cool way. They love that shit. They get off to it. In reality, they were like, you know, a bunch of weird, drugged up petophiles who got lucky on an economic bounce back that every other country got and managed to benefit from being the first to step into a new modality of warfare.
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Unknown A
It's happened many different times across history, but they love it. They love jerking themselves off and how cool and evil they are. Yeah, we're evil. We're like the empire in 40k. Yeah, evil, but like for humanity. Wa f you cut that shit out, okay? Elon's not smart to not get censored in the halls of Congress. You can point out that he's an unexceptional person and yes, French vanilla. Thank you. I post. I procrastinated long enough for somebody to find the link.
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Unknown B
Doge did not exist two years ago. 19 year olds were not raiding the treasury two years ago. People who have no idea with medical background have not been hauling in and creating kangaroo courts for scientists to dismiss them. Two years ago that started happening. Now, Elon Musk is not a scientist. He is not an engineer. He is a billionaire con man with a lot of money.
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Unknown A
That's good.
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Unknown B
He does not have this kind of good background.
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Unknown A
And in fact, and even this is a light touch, by the way, but it's still more than what a lot of Democrats say. Democrats call him evil. They forget to call him stupid or, you know, uneducated or whatever. They also Democrats have an obsession with calling him unqualified, which I think is really bad because it feeds into Republican messaging that the Democrats are a bunch of like institutionalist technocrats who are obsessed with technical credentials but not with actual, you know, competence, which is true. They are that. That is a correct assessment on the Democrats. I don't give a f if Musk is qualified. If he had a technical qualification, do you think that would make any of this okay?
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Unknown B
Anyway, it's not a process issue. It's an oligarchy issue. It's a power issue. And this room is where the power of the people of the United States reside. Whether you're a Democrat or you're a Republican. Everyone here was elected to be accountable to the people of the United States, not to be governed by tweet, but to be governed by their duly elected representation. And so we can get this done because there are more of us than there are of him. So I would love a commitment.
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Unknown A
This tweet is so funny. Need the Democrats need to start printing out more Elon Musk tweets and holding them up while they. While they talk in Congress from.
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Unknown B
From our Republican counterparts who we agree with on this issue to just put it on the floor and let us vote for it where there is bipartisan agreement and we can actually get a result of. For the American people by booting this guy out from political influence. And with that, I yield back.
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Unknown A
Thank you. Aoc. Is there just a Kinkos s in Congress? Where do they get these boards? You. It's literally the job of congressional staffers to just like run around DC Doing whatever they're told to do. Get coffee, get this printed out, get it on a phone board, whatever. Like, that's their job. You know, it's good that she said political influence on political power. I agree. I agree. Yeah, for sure. I was speaking of effective messaging. Minnesota governor Tim Walls caught on tape saying America has been stolen by fascists and Nazis. Tim Walls, how dare you be so correct.
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Unknown C
See the nonsense that'being put forward on that. We're gonna need your voice there because I would just end with this. And we're seeing at these town halls that charismatic is not going to come there. You know, I see the pundits on tv. What's wrong with the Democratic Party? What's wrong is our country being sold.
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Unknown A
By fascists and Nazis.
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Unknown C
And we re trying to do all.
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Unknown B
We can.
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Unknown A
Actually, like a big hope pill that I remember back in 2016 that referring to Republicans as Nazis was basically a no CE selll with mainstream Democrats. And nowadays I feel like you could. You could go to a mainstream Democratic event and talk about Republicans the way a third worldist would talk about the United States of America. And they'll like, cheer for you. Yeah. Alpha News is a Minnesota local Nazi news organization. I mean, it's called Alpha News. So based. How's this con on tapey speaking to a live audience? Well, we're not seeing a recording, so in all likelihood, this was a private meeting of some kind that somebody recorded audio for and leaked to a Nazi group to present. Unfortunately, Tim Walls only said base true and correct pilled things, so there wasn't much to go off of. You know, walls 28. How about you guys let things develop a little bit more organically, okay?