After George McGovern won the 1972 Democratic nomination through popular support and then lost 49 states, the DNC created the superdelegate system — roughly 1,500 automatic delegates drawn from party officeholders. The result: states where Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 gave her every delegate anyway.
Where this was said
At 4:03 · chapter starts 1:55
The conversation begins mid-thought, with Kiriakou mentioning he has applied for a presidential pardon and is meeting with Tulsi Gabbard later in the week. Theo and Kiriakou riff on Gabbard's authenticity and the Democratic Party's historic hostility to genuinely independent figures. Kiriakou explains the superdelegate system — created after McGovern's 49-state 1972 loss — as a mechanism giving roughly 1,500 party officeholders the power to override popular primary results. He walks through how this same machinery was used against Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988, and how Debbie Wasserman Schultz giving Hillary Clinton debate questions in 2016 confirmed that 'the fix was in' against Bernie Sanders. Both men reflect on how the sense that American democracy might actually deliver for ordinary people has been replaced by a creeping uncertainty.
George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic nominee, lost 49 out of 50 states in the general election, a catastrophic defeat that led the DNC to create the superdelegate system.
The Democratic superdelegate system creates roughly 1,500 automatic convention delegates from officeholders, allowing party insiders to override the popular vote in primaries.
Fei-Fei Li went back to Stanford from Google in 2018 specifically to build a multi-stakeholder governance framework for AI. Her argument: market forces are not societal norms. Just as biology uses IRBs and cars have safety laws, AI needs layered oversight from educators, governments, and the public — not just a few industry titans.
Andrew Santino's personal MCU of political villains is collapsing. He and Bobby speculated that a circulating photo of Mitch McConnell with a Chinese official was AI-generated compositing two separate images.
Mass surveillance is here to stay. The real battle isn't stopping cameras — it's ensuring judges and laws keep that data out of family court and civil disputes, admitting it only for violent crimes and national security. The surveillance economy currently yields more upside than downside, but only if we build the legal guardrails now.
When people cite Scandinavia as proof socialism works, Galloway says they've got it backwards. Northern Europe runs highly competitive free-market economies with more competition in many sectors than the US — they just make sure taxes are actually paid and redistributed. Billionaires and universal healthcare can coexist.
Two percent adjustments to income tax and stamp duty tweaks are deck-chair rearrangements. The UK's competitiveness hinges on four structural levers: currency valuation, energy costs, regulatory burden, and tax rates. Devalue the pound, build 56 nuclear plants, slash red tape, introduce a flat tax — and the country transforms.
Lisbon had one of Europe's worst heroin crises. Then Portugal legalised drugs and redirected all enforcement money into rehabilitation and housing. Crime collapsed. Addiction fell. Then politics moved the money elsewhere, and the problem started creeping back. Chesterton's Fence: you forget why you were spending that money.
Congress passed the Boland Amendment 411 to 0, explicitly banning CIA and Defense Department funds for the Contras. Reagan signed it — then immediately moved the operation deeper underground, essentially responding to a bipartisan prohibition by going more illegal.
The CIA planted mines in Nicaraguan commercial harbors, wrote the Contras' press releases taking credit, and promptly blew up ships from four allied nations. The Wall Street Journal broke the story, Congress erupted, and the Boland Amendments multiplied.
Oliver North was a decorated Marine and devout Catholic with zero covert operations experience. He ran the entire shadow war against Congress — planes, airstrips, arms shipments, shell companies — learning on the job. And by every operational measure, he crushed it.
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