Summary
Tucker Carlson is debuting on Fox`s streaming service next week on some kind of false flag conspiracy somehow perpetrated by the federal government. Today, he announced that he will not seek another turn and will retire from Congress making him the ninth congressional Republican to choose to pack up and leave Washington this cycle. Charles Munger donated $200 million to the University of California Santa Barbara to fund a new dormitory which he wanted to design himself. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces the world to the Metaverse.
Transcript
SEN. TED CRUZ (R-TX): Is doing a Nazi salute on elected official, is that protected by the first amendment?
MERRICK GARLAND, ATTORNEY GENERAL, UNITED STATES: Yes, it is.
CRUZ: OK.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
JOY REID, MSNBC HOST: Happy spooky Halloween. That`s tonight`s REIDOUT. "ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES" starts now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN.
STEVE BANNON, FORMER ADVISER TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: It`s not going to happen like you think it`s going to happen, OK. It`s going to be quite extraordinarily different.
HAYES: New clues in the coup plot investigation as the Murdoch empire invents its own fictional reality.
TUCKER CARLSON, HOST, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and now they`ve landed here at home.
HAYES: Tonight, Congressman Ruben Gallego on just how close we came to a Trump coup.
REP. RUBEN GALLEGO (D-AZ): In coups, when you leave the Capitol, you`ve lost. And so, I started texting every member I could, and all of our text chains were do not leave.
HAYES: Then the ominous purge of Republicans who would stand up to trump in Congress continues. Plus, the awful facts Ron DeSantis ignores on another COVID victory lap.
GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL): They`re a heck of a lot of students and a heck of a lot of families throughout the state of Florida that are better off today.
HAYES: And can Mark Zuckerberg escape whistleblowers, regulators, and accountability inside the Metaverse?
MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO, FACEBOOK: Yes, I just got to find something to wear.
HAYES: When ALL IN starts right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES (on camera): Good evening from New York, I`m Chris Hayes. The most powerful person in conservative America is 90-year-old Rupert Murdoch himself, not an American. He`s a founder and executive chairman of News Corporation. He controls Fox News, the overwhelmingly, almost monopolistically powerful right-wing cable channel where the vast majority of conservatives get their news.
Rupert Murdoch has done incalculable damage to this country in the world over the course of his career and he is ultimately responsible for what Fox News says and does. Rupert Murdoch is the person responsible for all of the anti-vaccine nonsense coming out of Fox that has led to untold thousands of unnecessary deaths.
He is responsible for the increasingly dangerous rhetoric around January 6 that Fox News is spewing it essentially seeks to either excuse the insurrection or to dismiss it as some kind of false flag conspiracy somehow perpetrated by the federal government itself. In fact, that is the topic of a special documentary series from host Tucker Carlson debuting on Fox`s streaming service next week.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The domestic war on terror is here. It`s coming after --
CARLSON: Half of the country. The helicopters have left Afghanistan. And now, they`ve landed here at home. They began to fight a new enemy in a new war on terror.
JOE BIDEN, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Not al-Qaeda, white supremacist.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: False flags have happened in this country. One of which may have been January 6.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: The trailer has rightly provoked outrage from all sorts of people. Tucker`s own colleague, Geraldo Rivera, tweeted "False flags? B.S." He was replying to a tweet from Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois who wrote, "Anyone working for Fox News must speak out. This is disgusting. It appears Fox News isn`t even pretending anymore."
As has Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming who Called fox out for "giving Tucker Carlson a platform to spread the same type of lies that provoked violence on January 6 as Fox knows the election wasn`t stolen and January 6 was not a false flag operation.
The Anti-Defamation League is urging Fox not to air the series saying in a letter to the company, we remain deeply concerned the false narrative and wild conspiracy theories presented by Carlson will sow further division and has the potential to animate violence.
But there`s no indication Rupert Murdoch plans on pulling it even though it`s wildly inflammatory. Why would he? He`s watched hundreds of thousands of people die and hasn`t done anything. One of the driving forces behind this series is the false flag conspiracy theory about January 6, and that comes from a man named Darren Beattie.
Now, that name may ring a bell obscurely, faintly. He actually worked in the Trump White House as a speechwriter. And he was fired in 2018 from the Trump White House for having ties to white nationalists. He then went on to work as a speechwriter for Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida. So, if you saw Matt Gaetz speech and you thought wow, that`s really well done, that was that guy.
And Donald Trump then welcomed him back into the fold of course because well, why not. Last year, nominating him to the board of the commission for the preservation of American`s heritage abroad. That`s the group that oversees U.S. holocaust memorials outside the country.
Now, Beattie is spreading lies about the feds being involved in January 6 on his so-called news site Revolver and on any podcast or tv show that will have him including, of course, Tucker Carlson`s show.
[20:05:21]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DARREN BEATTIE, REVOLVER NEWS: To what extent were the main militia groups imputed to the 1-6 so-called Capitol siege? To what extent was their infiltration of those groups by undercover agents or informants? And to what extent when we see the unindicted co-conspirators who occupy senior positions in those groups? To what extent are those people being spared prosecution on account of a prior relationship with the federal government?
Those two questions create a thread. And when we pull that thread, the ugly truth of that event and perhaps even the country we live in will be exposed.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, you see the technique there. It`s very familiar if you`ve ever spent any time in conspiracy theory circles. He`s just asking questions. Like, to what extent is it possible that all this was a false flag? Let`s pull the thread.
False flags are the most tried and true, also the laziest and dumbest form of conspiracy theories. There are a million examples of them from the 9/11 truther movement which I got to see up close a lot back in the day that believes the terrorist attack was in fact staged by the Bush administration, to right-wing radio host Alex Jones claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax.
There`s nothing new or interesting here. This is just the way that conspiracy theories work. But the intellectual incoherence about January 6 and the right has always been crazy. I mean they call the insurrectionist patriots who were in the words of Congresswoman Margaret Taylor Greene, standing up to tyrants, and also that it was a false flag, oh and also it was Antifa.
None of it has ever made sense together particularly when you listen to what Steve Bannon, one of Donald Trump`s closest advisors was saying just days before.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BANNON: It`s not going to happen like you think it`s going to happen, OK. It`s going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in. The war room a posse. You have made this happen and tomorrow it`s game day. President Trump`s presidency -- his first term`s ending with action and his second term is going to start with a bang, OK. That we can guarantee you.
And so the fight`s in. People are getting revved up, people are getting fired up, people are getting madder as they should. All going to converge on that point on the sixth. We`re all going to converge there. We just got to impose our wills.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: Now, we`ve learned a lot about January 6. We`ve studied it and reported on here on the show. And all of the information that we`ve seen, day by day by day, new information being revealed is that it`s exactly what it looked like, an organized attempt to overturn a democratic election through the force of the mob.
People who were inside the Capitol that day and saw what happened are very clear about that. Listen now to Congressman Ruben Gallego of Arizona described what he experienced that day in the new HBO documentary Four Hours at the Capitol.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
GALLEGO: I was an infantryman in the United States Marine Corps. I had to deal with some very aggressive crowds when I was in Iraq. Individuals themselves aren`t usually a problem. But when they get collectively together and they create a mob, the mob is the weapon. I was ready to fight.
I saw a lot of shit back in my day but I was not going to die on the floor of the (BLEEP) House of Representatives. Like, I was not going to get taken out by some insurrectionist bastard. My plan was to stab somebody in the eye and in the throat and take away their weapon and fight to survive.
I saw a bunch of buses pull up and there were buses to evacuate us. And let me tell you, in coups, when you leave the Capitol, you`ve lost. And so, I started texting every member I could. In all of our text chains, like, do not leave. Like, if they tell you to leave, like, do not leave. Like, you`re safer staying here. Like, if we get on those buses, there`s no guarantee we`re ever coming back.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: This was the most serious attempt on American democracy since the civil war. All you have to do is watch the footage or listen the first time accounts of what happened that day. It`s chilling. But Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch together as a pair, partners in a way, have in tandem created a world in which defending, excusing, or lying about January 6 is the litmus test for being a conservative.
Today, we learned that one of the few Republicans who has refused to go along with that, Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois is not running for reelection. To be clear, Adam Kinziger is a real Republican, like, has very right-wing conservative views. I don`t like his politics at all. I`ll just tell you. He voted with Donald Trump`s position 90 of the time.
I think there`s basically nothing redeeming about the substantive commitments he has for how the country should be governed except for the fact that he is anti-coup. He is pro-democracy. But that is now the defining issue for the conservative coalition.
Congressman Ruben Gallego is a Democrat from Arizona. You just hear him speak about his harrowing experience on January 6 from that clip from the new HBO documentary Four Hours at the Capitol. And he joins me now.
What does it mean, Congressman, to have lies about that event following the big lie about the election be used as the dividing line, the litmus test for what essentially participation and entrance into the modern-day Republican Party is?
[20:10:32]
GALLEGO: Well, it means that the coup is ongoing. It means that the coup has moved from, you know, the (INAUDIBLE), those losers, those wannabe terrorists that showed up on January 6 into the political realm which actually does happen a lot if you follow terrorism. They sometimes find themselves into politics and that there`s going to be another attempt at this at some point.
And you know, it will be in the courtrooms, it will be in the boardrooms as what you`re seeing with Fox News, or it will be uh in the voting booths where they make it more difficult for people to vote, or they`re just going to cancel altogether the results of elections. So, it`s a scary situation for this country.
The insurgency has moved on from a bunch of people wearing cammo pants to a bunch of men and women wearing Brooks Brothers, and it is probably more dangerous than what I saw on January 6.
HAYES: In terms of what you did see -- I was so struck by what you said to -- in that documentary. I just wanted to sort of ask a follow-up. I mean, this idea that the bus is going to evacuate you, that there was something in the moment a sense that you had deeply.
And I think there`s some reporting that indicated -- Mike Pence had this sense too I think in a slightly different way that the stakes of staying or going were higher than just the personal safety or the optics. That that staying in the Capitol or leaving the capitol meant something about the actual transition of power in the U.S. as a properly constituted democracy.
GALLEGO: It wasn`t symbolic for me. And what happened is -- the only reason I actually have view of the buses because I left the secure room to shelter some press that weren`t allowed in the secured room. And so, I was staring out my window trying to assess what was happening, I saw about -- the thing was like 68 buses and I realized what was about to happen.
But everything I`ve seen in the past, everything I`ve studied in the past, whenever the, you know, the duly elected -- you know, the duly elected representatives leave the Capitol, they lose. You can look down to Pinochet when he took over in Chile. You could see in other attempts across the country. And it also added up to a lot of other things.
The amount of rhetoric that I was hearing reminded me of the lead-up to Rwanda genocide. That was exactly the kind of what messaging you`re hearing right now by the way. There is just a lot of things that were adding up to me to the point where I knew that this was more serious than just a bunch of, you know, drunk wannabe militia members that were storming the Capitol.
HAYES: I mean, what you`re -- those comparisons are intense and heady ones. And what I`m hearing from you is that you feel quite clear that there is essentially a fundamentally illiberal authoritarian faction that`s formed that has gained control of the Republican Party that is not commensurable with liberal democracy in the way that we`ve understand it.
That its aims whatever methods it will seek to achieve them are fundamentally in tension with self-governance and democratic control.
GALLEGO: Correct. But this has been going on for a while, Chris. I think, now we`re just -- you know, a lot of people are trying to see it but let`s begin. You know, this goes all the way back even prior to this election. You know when you saw the tea party movement and you were at the protests of the tea party protest -- and I actually was at the first one observing them -- what you saw were people trying to overthrow -- start the advocacy of overthrowing the government because they didn`t like the fact that it was a Black president.
You saw the rhetoric they were using. If you saw the legislation they were putting in -- for example, when I was in the state house, they were putting legislation to overturn the right of citizens to vote for the U.S. Senate. They wanted to have the state legislators do that from now on.
So, this has been an existing part of the Republican Party. The problem is the Republican Party and the corporate overlords always thought they could contain it. But now, it has actually taken over. Now, Trumpism is in charge of that. And the corporate overlords, they -- the corporations, the businesses, they`re basically giving in.
They don`t care as long as they get their tax cuts. They don`t care as long as you keep getting the deregulation. They will destroy democracy in the process as long as they keep on -- you know, keeping -- are able to keep in their profit margins. And so, the only real way to defend ourselves right now is for us to have a very vigorous democracy where we get off the vote and we stop all attempts for them to actually disenfranchise us, because again, the coup is ongoing. It`s not armed but now it`s armed with actual legal briefs, it`s going to be armed with different ballot initiatives to diminish people`s vote, rights to votes, it`s going to be through other legal means that unfortunately couldn`t have very bad results more so than what we saw on January 6.
[20:15:10]
HAYES: Well, you`ve got a very high stakes election in your state for Secretary of State where there`s a candidate who`s been endorsed by Trump and you know, the understanding whether implicit or sometimes explicit it depends on the day from a Trump-backed Secretary of State candidate is I am backing them because I have full faith that they will do what Brad Raffensperger would not in Georgia, which is that I am -- I am backing you up with the understanding --
GALLEGO: (INAUDIBLE)
HAYES: Right. That but when the time comes, they will do what I want them to do.
GALLEGO: Right, they will. And like, I have no doubt that Mark Finchem who`s a recent transplant from Michigan -- we call him a fake cowboy. You know, he walks around a cowboy suit as if you know all Arizonans do that. We don`t actually do that, FYI. But he will actually -- if elected, he will corrupt our process. He will close down polls. He`ll do everything illegal he can to make sure that Donald Trump wins.
And there are many people like that all over the world. That`s why I`m telling you the insurgency, the coup, it`s moved beyond the streets, now it`s moving into trying to get some of these men and women elected into secretary of state`s office, county recorder`s office, everything they can basically. Because they know that they can`t win anymore on merits. They can`t even win on their ideas because they have none. All they have is like real hate and angst, and even then they know they can`t win.
So, all they can do really is corrupt the ballot and try to impose their idea of who should win against us, against us as in those people that believe in democracy. And this should cut across all politics at this point.
HAYES: Congressman Ruben Gallego, thank you so much for taking some time with us tonight.
GALLEGO: Thank you.
HAYES: Like I mentioned, Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger, January 6 Select Committee member and vocal critic of Donald Trump announced he won`t seek re-election next year. If this sounds like a familiar story you, it is because it is. Kinzinger joins a long list of MAGA detractors or MAGA skeptics who have left congress since Trump took office. The purge is continuing after this.
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[20:20:00]
HAYES: The Republican Congressional Caucus is shedding yet another member, Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a long-time Trump critic, one of just two Republicans on the January 6 Committee. Today, he announced that he will not seek another turn and will retire from Congress.
That makes Kinzinger the ninth congressional Republican to choose to pack up and leave Washington this cycle. He joins three other House members and five senators, all members that are by and large more standard pre-Trump Republicans I think you could call them.
Now, for some context, 10 House Republicans voted to impeach Trump the second time around. Kinzinger is now the second member in that group to retire and seven Republican senators voted to convict, two of them have decided to retire.
According to FiveThirtyEight, as of April, get this, out of the 293 Republicans in Congress when Trump was sworn in, 132 of them, about 45 are no longer in Congress or have announced their intention to leave.
Michelle Goldberg is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times who wrote about how the MAGA revolution is devouring its own back in December 2020. And Tim Miller is writer at large for the bulwark who called one Republican congressman`s decision to retire a slap in the face for delusional Republicans who want to pretend the GOP is anything but a pro-insurrection Trump cult. And they both join me now.
Tim, the Kinzinger news is not surprising, but it is -- it is clarifying because he has really tried to carve out an identity as a conservative Republican. Again, I said this in the last block. I do not like Adam Kinzinger`s politics, I don`t really agree with him on anything. I think they`re bad. I would vote the opposite way. I`d probably -- you know, if I was in the district, I`d be happy to have a Democrat-run against him.
But he is on the side of democracy and he tried to carve out this narrow space and it`s like the space just doesn`t exist.
TIM MILLER, WRITER AT LARGE, THE BULWARK: Well, I do like Adam Kinzinger`s politics, not all of them, but a lot of it. And I agree with you. I have a very slight disappointment that -- with the Democrats today for -- you know, this is -- he got carved out. So, this is a little bit different than the Gonzalez situation.
Gonzalez retires basically for fear of the Trump mob. He says that he`s tired of having to have security walking his kids to the airport because he voted on impeachment. The Kinzinger situation is a little bit different. But here`s the thing. You know, Kinzinger`s has been at the tip of the spear on this, on the anti-Trump stuff. He is with Cheney on the January 6 commission. And so, there is -- would have been no room for him. You know, and possibly maybe him and the Democrats cut a deal where he runs as an independent or something. But you know now we`re getting into West Wing fantasy a little bit.
HAYES: Right.
MILLER: Like, there is just no room for someone like this in the party anymore. And I think that to your -- to your intro, the more -- the additionally relevant part is it`s not just the courageous people like Kinzinger, it`s the uncourageous Republicans who went along with trump on basically everything except for overturning the election, those guys are retiring. You know your Rob Portmans and your Roy Blunt.
HAYES: Right.
MILLER: And they`re being replaced by your Josh Mandels and your Eric Greitens, your pro-insurrection MAGA Republicans. And so, when you have the Kinzingers gone and your not courageous normal Republicans and they`re all getting replaced by MAGA Republicans --
HAYES: That`s right.
MILLER: That`s a very different caucus.
HAYES: Well, it`s a great point and it`s also like there`s a bunch of different things at play here, Michelle. I mean, that 45 percent number has sort of stopped -- I mean, I`ve been thinking about it all day because that`s a -- that`s a big amount of turnover.
And even if you`re not Kinzinger or you`re not Cheney or not Gonzalez, who`s the guy that Tim just mentioned who`s retiring because he doesn`t want to face basically the Trump mob, even if you go along with it all, a lot of them hate the guy, clearly, and I think they kind of hate their own base to be totally honest. They have a lot of contempt for the people that are -- that are their base.
And they`re basically living this like double life that they find themselves like unenjoyable and they`re just going to -- it`s not sustainable what -- the only thing is sustainable is true believers. Like you`re going to get more Marjorie Taylor Greenes who aren`t playing the game.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, OP-ED COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Yes, it`s never -- I mean, it`s never been clear to me why I understand being in Congress is a good job. It`s never been clear to me why some people see it as such a good job that you would sell your soul and your country to stay there.
[20:25:00]
Look, I think that you know people like Adam Kinzinger got elected at a time when they had a very different idea of what the Republican base was. You`re right that he`s very conservative, but you know, he`s conservative in the way that we used to think about Republicans being conservative, right? He`s like -- he`s very hawkish, you know, kind of has -- you know, concerned about fiscal policy.
He`s not a sort of populist culture warrior. And what the Republicans have learned over the last, you know, five years now is that that`s what the party cares about. All that you know, kind of Captain America foreign policy stuff, all that low taxes and you know kind of worrying about deficits, it`s never been about that.
It`s always been about, you know, kind of culture war grievances. And so once Trump was able to articulate that, it`s not that he kind of changed the nature of the Republican Party`s base as much as he revealed the preferences that have been there for quite a long time.
HAYES: Yes. And Tim, you just mentioned -- I mean, the Ohio Senate Primary is a great example. I mean, it is such an embarrassing spectacle. It`s like -- it`s like -- I mean, really truly like cringe-inducing to watch these folks. And this has now become a thing. You`ve -- like all -- you`ve got this thing where the way to sort of get ahead is to be an elite product of like the pinnacle top of the meritocracy, your Tom Cottons, your Josh Hawleys, your Ted Cruzes, your J.D. Vances who then like dress up in the most preposterous aping of what they think like is the populist costuming.
And then it works. That`s -- that is the future. Like, that`s what -- that is what will ultimately be the entire caucus.
MILLER: Yes, look, I don`t think that on January 7th we would have sat around here Chris and thought, you know, boy, by 2023, the Republican caucus is going to be way more Trumpy than it was on January 5th, but that is exactly what`s happening.
And you`re right. I mean, what JD Vance and Josh Mandel are doing is a ridiculous show, you know, who knows what Herschel Walker is doing down in Georgia. But you have this -- there`s a guy named Sean Parnell in Pennsylvania who you know, also has committed sexual assaults and Eric Greitens who go along with this conspiracy-mongering.
So, you have that at the Senate. But then, take this down to the whole party. If you`re in the city council on a school board and you`re kind of a normal Republican who cares about tax cuts or whatever, are you going to stick around when you have a crazy mob yelling at you about the mask rules that you`re having?
HAYES: No.
MILLER: No, right? So, from the Senate all the way down to the city council, this turnover is happening. And you`re getting either the performative Mandel types or the -- or the Marjorie Taylor Greene types and like really what`s -- that`s a distinction without a difference.
HAYES: Yes. I don`t -- by the way, I don`t know about Parnell and the accusations there. I just want to put myself on the record as not knowing what the accusations are. I know there are -- there are accusations against Eric Greitens.
But let me just ask you this, Michelle. To Tim`s point, I mean, what you`re seeing when you take a step back aside from these individual moments and the two down eight to go, you know, Trump celebratory statement is a very efficient machine that is born of a whole bunch of things operating in parallel, Trump, and Fox, and the base to just grind everyone out who isn`t that kind of way to produce a 200-proof pure complete MAGA faction as one of the two major parties in America over the coming next two to three years.
GOLDBERG: Well, yes. Going back to what Tim said, I think a lot of people thought the day after January 6, you know, there was such a -- there was such a reaction against you know, people kind of looking at the MAGA movement straight in the face and reacting in horror. And there was a sense, a very brief sense that maybe the bubble had burst and you had people resigning and people denouncing.
You`ve had these moments sort of throughout Trumpism. But the fact -- the thing that they can`t change is the base and the base`s desires, right? And so, you know, this is the party of Tucker Carlson who is about yeah to come out with this documentary, you know, sort of suggesting that this attack was a false flag. There is not room for even -- there`s no anti- insurrectionist caucus in the modern Republican Party.
HAYES: That`s exactly right. And it`s also you realize the big lie serves this purpose because usually what happens to one term presidents is they are planted as losers and they become radioactive, and that`s the normal course of things. Like, well, I want to take Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter or George H.W. Bush`s advice on anything but that`s what -- that`s the purpose the big lie serves here. Michelle Goldberg and Tim Miller, thank you very much.
Coming up, what do the blueprints of a new college dorm tell us about the bleak vision of our billionaire-led future? It is a wild one, and I`ll explain right after this.
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[20:30:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
WARREN BUFFETT, CEO OF BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY: We have never had an argument in 62 years.
CHARLES MUNGER, VICE CHAIRMAN, BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY: Yes.
BUFFETT: And it`s not that we agree on everything. We literally in 62 years, we`ve never gotten -- we`ve never gotten mad at each other.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That is Warren Buffett, one of the richest men on earth, the billionaire CEO of the massive holding company Berkshire Hathaway talking about his right-hand man there on stage with him. His name is Charles Munger. Munger is a 97-year-old billionaire who is vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and he is a "amateur architect." He likes to design buildings in his spare time.
Munger donated $200 million to the University of California Santa Barbara to fund a new dormitory. Now, that`s the kind of thing that rich people do all the time. But here`s the catch. Instead of just naming the building after himself which is what most rich people want when they make that type of donation, no, no, no. Munger had another stipulation. He had to be allowed to design it completely.
[20:35:13]
He is the guy who wanted to design the dorm. And he made some pretty interesting decisions. The building is meant to house 4500 students. That`s a pretty large building. And take a look at the layout on the inside, crammed, full of these little suites as they are called.
Now, let`s be clear. Dorms can often be almost prison-like in design. They`re packing a lot of people in the small amount of area. That`s -- you know, that`s kind of what they are. But this is a real dystopian science fiction novel feel, tiny little pod bedrooms containing nothing but a bed, a little desk, and a fake window. That`s not a real window. There`s like light beamed through there.
In fact, 94 percent of the rooms will not have functioning windows. And the unpleasant accommodations seem to be part of the design. This is -- this is Charles Munger`s idea. "Munger maintains the small living quarters would coax residents out of their rooms and into larger common areas where they would interact and collaborate."
The whole ordeal was enough to make one of the consulting architects for the dorm resign in disgust, calling the project "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being." Saying, "as the vision of a single donor, the building is a social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves."
We reached out to Munger for comment on that statement. He said it is natural for architects to disagree. He told Bloomberg that prioritizing windows would have meant lowering the building`s capacity. Now, again, I don`t know a lot about architecture. I don`t really even know whether this would be a good or bad design -- it seems bad to me -- but this is kind of a glimpse of what it means to have a society and world run by billionaires our dystopian present if you will.
It`s not just dorms that look like holding cells on a moon colony, but the fact that at a certain point, our ultra-wealthy overlords just run out of things to spend their money on. You know, there`s only so much you can do after they buy their mansions and private jets and their yachts with helicopters and baby yachts to take them to the yachts. And so, what do they do? They drop $200 million to cosplay as an architect and design a horrifying nightmare building. Couldn`t Munger have just gone to space instead?
Speaking of billionaires, CEO Facebook -- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduces the world to the Metaverse, but is it the future of technological innovation or a sad Hail Mary from an increasingly out-of- touch social media platform? The truth behind Meta with Kara Swisher and Kevin Roose next.
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[20:40:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SY SPERLING, PRESIDENT, HAIR CLUB FOR MEN: I`m Sy Sperling, president of Hair Club for Men. These are just a few of the men who called our toll-free number for our booklet about thinning hair. Just call our toll-free number now and I`ll send you the new booklet. And remember, I`m not only the Hair Club president but I`m also a client.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: That was a kind of ad I saw growing up. Maybe a lot of people did -- everyone had versions of it. The guy who runs a business and wants to be in the commercials, the guy who`s got a furniture store or used car business. And so of course, because he`s the boss, he gets to be in the commercial even though maybe he`s not the guy that you would choose to be in the commercial.
And I thought of that when I saw this yesterday, Facebook`s rebrand as Meta unveiled after more than a month of some of the worst press that company has ever had. It stars a guy who whatever his other talents, is one of the least charismatic pitch men I have ever seen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MARK ZUCKERBERG, CEO, FACEBOOK: Today, we`re going to do something a little bit different. Rather than just focusing on this year`s products like a normal keynote, we`re going to talk about the future. So, let`s start by exploring what different kinds of Metaverse experiences could feel like starting with the most important experience of all, connecting with people.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hey, are you coming?
ZUCKERBERG: Yes. I just got to find something to wear. All right, perfect.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HAYES: There`s been a ton of reactions since the Facebook rebrand news broke, like New York Times contributing opinion writer Kara Swisher who suggested the rebrand moving Zuckerberg out of harm`s way and to the top of a holding company is perhaps the smartest strategy since he has like most founders become the personification of the problem.
And the Times technology columnist Kevin Roose wrote, if the rebrand works, the Metaverse would usher in a new era of dominance extending Facebook deeper into our lives. If it doesn`t, it will be remembered as a desperate costly attempt to give a futuristic facelift to a geriatric social network while steering attention away from pressing societal problems.
We`re very glad to have both Kevin Roose and Kara Swisher, incredible dynamic duo joining us tonight. Kara, let me start with you because your point about the sort of founder syndrome here I thought was really interesting.
And to me, the reason that we started with the size spurling thing was he is -- he is just so identified with the brand, and it does feel to me there`s a -- there`s a sense in which no one can tell Mark no, and that is shown by the fact that he keeps showing up in these things which I personally don`t find particularly compelling. And I wonder what it means that he remains so utterly central to this company.
KARA SWISHER, CONTRIBUTING OPINION WRITER, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Well, that`s it. He is utterly central to the company. He`s the controlling shareholder. He can`t be fired. He cannot be removed. He makes all the calls. And that`s -- then, therefore, he puts himself in the commercials, I suppose sort of styling himself after Steve Jobs except not, obviously. Steve Jobs was a compelling and interesting and passionate speaker when he would introduce products.
In this case, you`re right. He`s not very good at it. And that`s one of the problems he has throughout the rest of the of the company in that he`s making a lot of decisions that are rather serious for the company and some of them aren`t the best decisions over the many years that he`s been running Facebook. And now he`s talking about the future like Kevin wrote.
You know, it`s got a lot of -- I thought it had a lot of AOL vibes back in the day when they were trying to seem relevant. Microsoft has done this before when they were in trouble and here we are again with Facebook.
[20:45:19]
HAYES: Yes. That point about the future. Kevin, you wrote -- you`ve been writing about -- obviously, we`ve had the Facebook papers, right? And there`s been all this reporting about it. And you know, this is an amazingly powerful company. Mark Zuckerberg is an astoundingly powerful person. I mean he makes these individual calls about like well, should we do something about you know, election disinformation in Spanish, and where are we on the you know ethnic cleansing that`s happening in in Burma. I mean, it`s astounding to imagine it.
Your counter-intuitive take was that the paper showed in some ways weakness. It showed some desperation on the part of the company. And I could smell that coming off this video a little bit. Explain why you wrote that.
KEVIN ROOSE, TECHNOLOGY COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I mean, the whole video sort of seemed like Facebook`s like midlife crisis. Like, it`s trying to say look, we`re not the same old Facebook you`ve known. We`re cool now. We`ve dyed our hair. We`ve got a new wardrobe. We`ve bought a convertible. You know, this is the new -- this is the new Meta. And it wreaks a little bit of desperation.
I mean, what we saw in the Facebook papers was lots of really hard evidence, statistics, and data showing that young users especially are fleeing Facebook, and to a lesser extent, Instagram. And that`s been happening for several years but it`s really sped up at least in the U.S.
And so, what is worrying them i1nternally is that they can`t seem to get young people interested in their products. They`re losing to TikTok, they`re losing to Snapchat when it comes to young people, and that`s a really valuable market for them. That`s what advertisers -- that`s who advertisers want to reach.
So, this metaverse thing is sort of a -- in some ways it`s a -- it`s a play to say hey, we`ve got this new area that we think might appeal to young people. We`re going to put a lot of money and investment and resources into trying to make it work.
HAYES: Well, and that, Kara -- I mean, that to me is what is dangerous. I mean, the combination of power and desperation is always very dangerous, right? So, when you`ve got -- when you got a lot of power which Facebook has, but you also feel like you`re being stalked and you feel like you have -- like, that`s when you start to do everything in your power to juice the numbers. It`s when you start -- and we`ve seen some of that in the Facebook papers that when you`re -- when you`re thinking about you know we need to boost engagement, it it`s a kind of whatever it takes by any means necessary mindset, and that could really lead to some dark places.
SWISHER: Well, that`s always been their mindset. It`s not a new fresh idea. They`ve been a high-growth kind of mindset throughout their history, and they`ve had these, you know, small traffic accidents along the way, Usually, they are fine. Everybody else is injured.
I think one of the things that`s interesting here is the idea of a metaverse is a huge idea. And a lot of really creative people are going to contribute to it. It should be a much bigger thing than one company. One -- someone pointed out this is a big land grab on their behalf.
That said, you know, I meant -- showed this to my kids. They`re -- two of my kids are 19 and 16 and they laugh. They`re not going here. They`re not going to Mark Zuckerberg`s Metaverse. But they are going to -- they are -- you know, people are interested in this idea because it`s a big idea to combine physical and analog. Apple is working on stuff, Amazon is working on stuff. They`re all working on this idea. But it will come from someone not one of -- not Facebook, somewhere else, the concept of it which has been around by the way. This is not a new concept.
HAYES: Yes. I read -- I read an interesting piece in Atlantic about people working on something along these lines about all the way back in 1997. And Kevin, maybe you could just give a little bit of what it actually means. I think it is a little hard to get your head around, but my understanding is essentially sort of immersive virtual worlds in which you interact with other people and maybe there`s a sort of like, way that you sort of physically interact as well as virtually.
ROOSE: Yes. It`s a little confusing. The meaning has sort of shifted over time. The original concept was coined in a novel by Neal Stephenson, a sci- fi novel called Snow Crash decades ago. And it basically was sort of this immersive virtual world where you bought virtual goods and had virtual avatars and went to virtual parties. And it was like this sort of immersive VR-like world.
The way Facebook is using it basically it`s a little confusing but it sort of means VR and glasses that you`d wear that would, you know, project things onto the environment in front of you, the ability to kind of seamlessly, you know, flow between, you know, talking with your friends and, you know, going to a concert in VR and talking to dinosaurs and whatever else you`d be encountering there.
But this is basically their sort of catch-all term for things that are new to them, that they`re, you know, working on emerging technologies. And I agree with Kara. I mean, I don`t think this is actually going to appeal to young people, but I do think that ideas like this will happen and will come out in the next few years and it`ll be really interesting to see how Facebook reacts that.
[20:50:01]
HAYES: All right, Kevin Roose and Kara Swisher, thank both for your time.
SWISHER: Thanks a lot.
ROOSE: Thank you.
HAYES: Coming up, Florida governor Ron DeSantis actively undermined measures that would protect constituents from Coronavirus. Thousands paid the price for their lives. So why are conservatives trying to make him into a pandemic hero? That`s next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
20:50:00]
HAYES: Just a little follow-up on something earlier on the show. You may have heard one of my guest Tim Miller mentioned something about Sean Parnell who`s running for Senate in Pennsylvania in relation to sexual assault charges. I should tell you, we cannot confirm those charges. I just want to be very clear about that. I don`t know if Tim knows something we don`t, but there is no public record we`re able to find of that.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that he is in the process of a divorce and that a domestic dispute with his wife involving two protection from abuse orders were later lifted. He recently tried to seal his divorce records but a judge ruled that much of his records can become public.
[20:55:01]
Florida`s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has been congratulated in right- wing circles for the way he is handling COVID in his state. He rails against mask and vaccine mandates, he openly flirts with outright antivax sentiments. And he pushes antibody treatments which again are effective as far as we know for the sick but instead of pushing vaccines to prevent illness in the first place.
So, here`s a quick reminder of where DeSantis got the sunshine state. Florida is ranked seventh overall out of the 50 states for COVID deaths in this country. Nearly 60,000 Floridians have died from the virus under Governor DeSantis` watch. And many of them during a massive Delta spike that came after vaccines became widely available.
Thankfully after that big deadly wave, cases have significantly declined. And so, naturally, DeSantis is taking a victory lap. As the Orlando Sentinel editorial board puts it in a new op-ed today, "It`s like a firefighter tossing a bucket of water on a house that`s already been burned to the ground and declaring victory. What a fraud. What a phony.
Nancy Ancrum is the editorial page editor of the Miami Herald which also just published and op-ed decrying Governor DeSantis` descent into "Crazyville" and she joins me now.
Nancy, I have to say, you know, there`s always been a lot of attention on DeSantis and his COVID response. And I think earlier, there was a little bit of a case conservatives had which is that he had opened the state more than others had earlier and the state was middling. It hadn`t -- it hadn`t had the level of outbreak and death that you might anticipate given how, you know, how forward he was in opening things up. But it`s very hard it seems to me to defend the record now after what your state has just been through.
NANCY ANCRUM, EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR, MIAMI HERALD: Oh, absolutely. We have been through this, for now, the past 18 months. One of our first editorials in March 2020 was headlined, you know, People are dying from COVID in your state, governor. Act like you give a damn. And it has been just one abomination after another in terms of hiding data, manipulating data, protecting some businesses while throwing others under the bus, not talking up vaccines while making sure that people who do support him and support him with their dollars got vaccines first.
And now, we have someone who has actively tied the hands of local municipalities and their leaders from enforcing -- from imposing any kind of mandate on masks, on vaccines. And now he is looking to call a special session to make sure that businesses that do want to impose any kind of mandate can be held medically liable if someone gets sick from a vaccine. So, yes, Crazyville.
HAYES: I want to read from that op-ed. He has every motivation to ignore the fact and continue to stoke COVID denial anti-vax fervor. His policy proposals are usually followed by a fund-raising pitch from his campaign to potential donors as USA Today network has reported. That model has work for DeSantis who`s outraged his Democratic opponents in next year`s elections.
On the vaccine front, one of the things that I found really sick frankly is you know, it`s very hard to flirt with anti-vaccine mandate without being also anti-vaccine. But he`s now had two events where he is up next to a person. In one case, a random individual, and another his own surgeon general, basically making an explicitly anti-vaxxed case, not just the mandate, but saying something like we don`t know what`s in it and things like that.
Like, that is the messaging coming from the governor of your state, as far as I can tell, unless I`m getting it wrong and he`s doing lots of pro- vaccine events that we`re not covering.
ANCRUM: None that we have seen. And yes, he has aligned himself and surrounded himself with anti-mask, anti-vax leaders including our surgeon general Joseph Ladapo. Harvard educated, a doctor, but not educated, no experience in public health. And he too has gone down the path to Crazyville, refusing to wear a mask. I think earlier this week, maybe it was last week, when he was meeting with a Democratic state senator who is about to undergo treatment for breast cancer.So, she is very vulnerable, very immunocompromised.
And he has pushed alternative treatments. And he is just as we said, he is the perfect pandemic era surgeon general for the governor. But for the rest of us, not so much.
HAYES: Nancy Ancrum from the Miami Herald, thank you so much for your time tonight.
ANCRUM: Thank you very much, Chris.
HAYES: That is ALL IN for this week. "THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW" starts right now. Good evening, Rachel."
RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC HOST: Good evening, Chris. Have a fantastic weekend, my friend. Thank you.
HAYES: You too.