40% of Americans don't trust mainstream media. Why is that? How did we get here? Listen, we are seeing a huge loss in trust of all of our institutions. Steve Bannon once said the goal is to blow the whole thing up. There's a concerted effort to destroy the media. This is where I would push back. [00:00:19] MSNBC's Stephanie Ruhle had a sit down discussion about the media's failures with actor Rainn Wilson on his podcast, Soul Boom. And honestly, I was a little bit surprised at some of the takes coming from Wilson. [00:00:36] You know, he's been a defender of the Democratic Party in the past. I didn't know whether he would kind of go along with some of the talking points that Stephanie Ruhle is putting out there. But he did push back and I think he made some really good points. So let's start with rules. Grandiose thoughts on legacy media and their role in society. [00:00:56] President Trump won and tons of people were shocked or angry or frustrated and they're tuning out. And at the same time, you have the Elon Musk media machine because they want you to leave traditional media and they want you to go to X, which is a bastion of misinformation where there is no fact checking. [00:01:14] So it's a perfect storm of people saying, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm tuning out, I'm disconnecting, and then you have a force pushing it and and but even in the last two weeks, what we need to do is just cover what's happening in America. [00:01:31] There's that saying, you know, trust is gained in raindrops and it's lost in buckets. And it's not a yes. You're not incorrect that the media has lost trust. So before we get to Rainn Wilson's pushback on some of what Stephanie Ruhle [00:01:48] had to say there, I'm really curious what you think was because as I am, you're very, very critical of legacy media. And Stephanie Ruhle has a show on MSNBC of all places. So you want to talk about like, oh, it's so important. You know, truth telling is so important. [00:02:05] There was a lot of, cover ups happening in the lead up to the presidential election. Over at MSNBC, if I remember correctly. I mean, there's just so many ridiculous ideas that she's espousing there. I think people that like Ellen and some of the more out there stuff [00:02:25] on Twitter are people who just don't. They've already have a problem with institutions because institutions have shown to be untrustworthy over and over again now. Ellen is not some people loving populist right, but he's willing to take jabs [00:02:42] and digs at certain institutions, you know, legacy media, Hollywood being, you know, one of a few. Right. But the mainstream media, like, they are just status quo all the way. And that's what people are rejecting. The idea that everything is perfectly fine and doesn't need a sharp critique. [00:03:03] In fact, the only thing that needs critiquing are those people who are doing what Ellen wants them to do by leaving legacy media and taking their eyeballs and their attention elsewhere. Yeah. And look, obviously if you rely solely [00:03:21] on what you're consuming on social media, you're going to be misinformed on some things, but you're also going to be misinformed if you only rely on legacy media. It's not like out of nowhere, there's this like contagion of Americans [00:03:38] who suddenly distrust the media. The media has done a good job chipping away at its credibility for decades now. And when they start serving as stenographers for people in positions of power, when they engage in cover ups in order to protect political figures. [00:03:55] Yeah, people are going to leave them and look for some other source of news. And now you have this explosion of independent, you know, figures, media outlets, and some of them are great. Some of them are misleading, some of them are flat out liars. [00:04:13] And I will admit, if you're not careful, you could fall for a lot of misinformation or disinformation. But my issue with what Stephanie Ruhle had to say is just like the unwillingness to take any personal responsibility for your own failures, for your own inability to report stories accurately or more importantly, when you [00:04:32] realize it was inaccurate, correct it. Take ownership of the fact that you've made those mistakes. Because if you don't, you chip away at your own credibility. And they've been doing that. And like, it's amazing that at this late date, they still think all of these, [00:04:48] like they think they're heroes, but like it really rubs me the wrong way. They really think like it is us. The legacy media that's going to protect our democracy. Are you? Are you protecting democracy? Come on. It's just the problem for me is that they [00:05:07] don't understand that we are in a just straight up anti-establishment moment. If you can't point out the fact that say, I don't know, to name one elite institution, the Democratic Party has failed people before. Like, you literally won't go on MSNBC and say that, which is crazy to me. [00:05:27] I mean, MSNBC, like, I mean, are they not the biggest rushing gaters of all of them? Okay. Like you guys did Russiagate guys, you there was no mea culpa on that. And that's before we talk about the nastiness [00:05:43] that they did to people like Bernie. And, you know, people that supported and liked Bernie's policy positions. You are a socialist. You are a disgusting, sexist pig because you didn't think Hillary Clinton was the greatest thing since sliced bread. [00:05:59] I mean, this is MSNBC we're talking about and pretending that they're the purveyors of truth. And I think the other thing that kills me, too, about a place like MSNBC or CNN or a lot of the mainstream places, they will straight up have anybody with some kind of Washington [00:06:17] credential or prestige come up there and lecture American people. They will have so many people who orchestrated the Iraq war come on their airwaves and be like, no, we need to bomb Iran this time, and it's going to be great, I promise. That Iraq thing. Oh, don't don't think about Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. [00:06:36] Don't think about those debacles. No, we need to do the Iran thing again. Like, this is what you guys do and pretend that you're somehow the keepers of the craft. You're like these special people. It's ridiculous. I remember, so I got my master's degree in political science, [00:06:54] and the only reason why I'm mentioning that is because it wasn't a dissertation, but, it was like the final big paper that I had to submit and get approved. And in it, like, the main focus was this whole notion of the axis of evil, which was coined by David David neocon from who's been fully absorbed [00:07:16] into the Democratic Party. Cleansed. I mean, it's unbelievable to me that this man who was a speechwriter for Bush and who has cheerleaded, like, cheerlead every war you could imagine. It's amazing to me how his reputation was laundered by the Democrats, of course. [00:07:37] So that's what we're dealing with now, moving off of foreign policy for a moment. Let's get to Rainn Wilson again. I mean, this is a guy who has supported the Democratic Party as long as I've heard him talk about politics. And so I didn't know if he was going to be critical of left wing media [00:07:54] or left wing politicians. But get a load of this. This is where I would push back when I see this kind of insight and passion being directed at the current administration, and the lack of this kind of insight and passion being directed [00:08:09] at the previous administration, where again, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about left leaning news media organizations. - We're kind of like la. - La la la la. Everything's fine. Look, the environment's. - I mean. - Look, the economy's great. La la la. Immigration is not that much of a problem. [00:08:25] And really, being Cleopatra. Queen of denial. Thank you. - Boom. - I would push back on on immigration. I can specifically remember when Greg Abbott of Texas, Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida sent those busses of migrants to different cities, [00:08:44] different parts of the country, which ended up being politically genius for both of them. The media regularly talked about the fact that Biden was not doing enough in his first two and a half years on immigration. [00:08:59] Were they were they seriously were they? Because I didn't hear it. And in fact, I, I believed what every legacy media outlet was reporting at the time prior to DeSantis and Abbott doing what they did. [00:09:19] It wasn't until they did what they did in bussing and flying migrants to blue cities that people started to realize, oh wait, I guess there is a crisis at the border. Okay. That's what woke people up. It certainly woke me up. Now, that doesn't mean you have to be anti-immigrant, but it's important [00:09:37] to acknowledge the reality, because when you're not acknowledging the reality, think about the communities that were impacted by that. They're not going to trust your outlet if you've been reporting that there's absolutely no migrant crisis. And that's just fear mongering coming from, you know, xenophobes [00:09:54] and anti-immigrant scaremongers like, and I feel guilt because I went along with that unwittingly because I didn't know what the truth was. You get what I'm saying? Again, that doesn't mean you're anti-immigrant, but you should acknowledge be willing to acknowledge the reality on the ground. [00:10:13] And for Democrats, they should be willing to offer solutions. Instead, they neglected everything until the last year of Biden's presidency, in which he realized, oh, wow, this is a political liability. Let me do something about it right away. Let me work with Republicans in the Senate and give them everything they want [00:10:32] for immigration policy. And then Trump's going to come in and f me. And you know what? He deserved that he deserved that. You should care about the issues as they're impacting American citizens. You shouldn't just wait until it hurts you politically to do something. [00:10:48] And that's what Biden did. Yeah, I mean, immigration is just an obvious one, I think, like you. When, you know, because these people are always kind of it's almost like the boy who cried wolf in a bit, like the right is always crying about immigration. [00:11:04] So I just kind of took it on its face to be, all right, man, this is just more like hand wringing from the right who were just constantly crying about new brown people. But then I went to I actually went to New York and I talked to a few people [00:11:19] like that I'm close to. And these are not right wingers. These are not like immigration hawks. These are people who are actually the children of immigrants themselves who are just like, bro. Like we're it's we're kind of being overrun. We don't have the capacity. People that work in city government are like, we don't have the capacity [00:11:37] to deal with what's happening up here? Like, we we can't deal with all the people. These folks have to go stay in some makeshift shelter right now. As if that's anybody's idea of a good way to manage this thing. Where people are coming with their families [00:11:53] and they're sleeping on, you know, like makeshift beds and all of that stuff. And some, again, like a facility that was not erected in order to house migrants, but was just like slapped together at the last minute. [00:12:09] And these people have nowhere to go during the day. They don't they don't have an opportunity to work. Not that they don't want to, but there's just not the, you know, the sort of infrastructure to bring these people in and shelter them into good, nice, decent paying jobs. That's when I saw, I'm not going to lie. [00:12:24] That's when I realized that just talking to people who actually are in New York and work in city government. Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, look, I started watching city council meetings from Chicago, and you have black members of that community who have been totally [00:12:42] screwed over by that city forever. Nickel and dimed like crazy. They might need some help with, for whatever reason. Social safety net. Totally robbed of those opportunities. And then at the same time, they see an influx of migrants come in and, you know, [00:12:59] shelter space is obviously limited. And people were getting pushed out of shelter space to make room for the influx of migrants. And the federal government was nowhere to be found. Okay. Like it was ridiculous. And so these people are not bad people for raising, you know, [00:13:15] concerns over these issues. We're all trying to survive. These people are trying to survive. And there are finite resources that are being stretched thin. Because, again, you have this crisis and you have a federal government that's not acknowledging it, or at least wasn't acknowledging it for a long time, with the help [00:13:33] of the media that was providing cover for the Biden administration. So I think what Rainn Wilson was getting at here is super important. I'm so happy that there are others that are willing to say it out loud. So I'm going to leave with this one final video. Because I think this is an important message. [00:13:49] Let's watch. Most. Most people, a large majority of people who have a problem with the current immigration crisis and have for the last 5 or 10 years, are not racist, but often kind of tarred as racist by the liberal left. [00:14:05] I will tell you, if you go on, if you go on the internet, people, there's there's loads of, of of clips that will come after me. I've heard about this internet thing. What is it? After the election, I had a not a debate, but a conversation with a friend of mine who was on the show. And I was making the point that I do not think Donald Trump's win [00:14:24] means that half the country's racist. I don't believe that this person really, really came at me. That that's easy for me to say as a white woman of privilege, that the country's country is not racist. But I think that's a very quick way to alienate people. [00:14:40] And not only is it a way to alienate people, you're not engaging on the substance, right? So if someone has an issue with a massive influx of migrants coming in, or if they're concerned about the migrant crisis, [00:14:55] it's really easy to just brush them off and shut them up by calling them racist. It's much harder to do what let's say someone like Douglas Murray was unwilling to do when he was debating Dave Smith, actually contend with the arguments that are being made. [00:15:11] Listen to what the concerns are. And if you have a rebuttal, engage in the rebuttal. If you don't have a rebuttal, just simply calling people racist because you don't have an argument and don't want to contend with the substance of the argument is pretty weak. And I've seen a lot of that going on, to be honest with you. [00:15:28] And also, you got to remember, Anna, the brown people in Trump's coalition are self-hating brown people. So of course, of course. Yes. Yeah. And look, are there, anti-immigrant folks out there who voted for Trump and are racist? - Yeah. - Of course. [00:15:44] Absolutely. Racists exist. I'm not denying that. But to say half the country is racist is kind of crazy. Yeah it is. Listen, Anna, you'd be surprised how many people hold that view. I'm not surprised at all. And I think and I think, you know, I think people have been primed [00:16:04] to see things that way for, you know, let's face it, man, basically from 2012, 2011 on, you know, after Barack Obama where we just became like, [00:16:19] so obsessed with this identitarian stuff because it seemed so ascendant, right? Like we're passing gay marriage. We're, you know, we're electing black presidents. We're doing all of this cool stuff. And I think, you know, there was just a little bit of hubris attached to the movement, and it got out of control to the point [00:16:37] where people get socialized to think that, like anybody who could have even a any type of negative sort of opinion about immigration means that, you know, they they go to sleep with white sheets over their head at night. [00:16:53] And I think that's problematic and destructive and we need to do better going forward. I totally agree. And if you don't, if the left does not have an answer to Americans who are concerned about a migrant crisis, well, that creates a vacuum [00:17:11] and the right takes over. - And I think that's. - What happens has answers. It's called land acknowledgments. We need more of those. That will save the day. I'm looking forward to hearing one soon. Every time you ring the bell below, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true, but it does keep you updated on our live shows.