Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So, gerrymandering is the best way to rig an election. That way the politicians pick their voters, instead of the voters picking their politicians. So, all these districts are so heavily gerrymandered that the incumbent almost can’t lose. They’ll push most of the voters into one district, most of the voters in another district, because they don’t want competition. So, then you’re screwed. The vote isn’t rigged, but the district is rigged, so that the incumbent wins almost no matter what, right? So that’s why we’ve gotten so polarized, because the gerrymandering creates like 90% of seats that are safe. So, they don’t have to compromise. They don’t have to get to a middle. They could just be extreme on either side because they already locked it up. Okay. So, that’s the number one way to rig an election. Now, finally, the last part of it, maybe the most important, maybe even more important than gerrymandering, and that’s the media. So, it just happened to RFK Junior. It happened to Bernie in 2015. It happens to any outsider, right or left. The media if you’re an outsider will say, “Well, radical…” Number one, they don’t platform you, right? So they’re not going to have you on to begin with. Nobody’s even going to find out about you. If nobody finds out about you, you’re done for, right? So Bernie broke through that because- … about you’re done for, right? So Bernie broke through that, because he was so popular, and the rallies were so huge that local news couldn’t help but cover him. Jesus Christ, what are all these people doing in the middle of the city? And he slowly broke through that. But do you know that in 2015, as he’s doing this miraculous run against Hillary Clinton, nobody thinks he has a chance. And here comes Bernie, and he’s almost at 48%. He had seven seconds of coverage on ABC that year. They just will not put you on. That is the number one way they rig an election. Bobby Kennedy, Jr. sitting at 20% in a primary, no town hall. 20% is a giant number. And you’re not going to do a town hall. You’re not going to do a debate. 12% in the general election. A giant number in a general election. No town hall, no debate. If no one finds out about you, they don’t know to vote for you, if they don’t find out your policies. Corporate media rigs elections more than anything else in the world. Now, this is something you’ve been a bit controversial about. But the general sort of standard belief is that there’s a left-leaning bias in the mainstream media, because as I think studies show a large majority of journalists are left-leaning. And then that there’s a bias in Big Tech. Employees of Big Tech companies from search engines to social media are left-leaning. And there that’s a huge majority is left-leaning. So the conventional wisdom is that there is a bias that was the left. Yeah.…

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