John Reeves
speaker
1,814 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Feb 2025
John Reeves’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it really, it's like, until you've had $100 million to destroy you, it's a next level kind of thing. And then everyone was, they were saying, well, he's a vegetable, you know, he's a retard, or he's lost his brain and all kinds of things. And then that wasn't true. But but the kinds of terrible things and those kinds of very personal things. And it just got incredibly ugly in a way.
Yeah. The Senate, the whole Senate. Yeah. The whole Senate was. In fact, we actually we flipped that seat. And that's the first time I think in the 40s or 50s that we've had two Democratic senators in Pennsylvania. Usually it's been a Dem and a Republican. And now because we flipped that seat, that's it's mathematically it's possible to retain the majority in the Senate.
But it's going to be still fairly difficult because we have Montana represented. Very, very red state, obviously. And that's really what the Republicans have put a significant bet to make sure that they can flip Montana. And then if Montana falls, then they're going to get the majority unless there's like a really surprise one. But that may be more kind of difficult. Do you think that money is...
Yeah. I mean, just imagine if you were a movie studio and you're putting out a, you're going to put out a movie and a rival studio has a hundred million dollars to tell America that movie sucks, you know, that's shit. And it's crazy. And it's, it's, it's just, there's always going to be unlimited money because it's all about the control of the Senate or the house or the presidency. And,
And when money is speech, it's going to be unlimited. And what happens? It's like, well, that's TV and on social. And it's going to be how can I destroy and break this individual? And that's where it is. And it gets incredibly personal. And it has an impact. I mean, certainly it has for me. And until we have unlimited money, it's going to get more and more mean, personal, and expensive.
And if you look at the billions of dollars that's spent, how what we could have done for our society, the kinds of reels that we could build and other things, if we didn't spend all those money to tear each other apart.
Yeah, you have, you know, you take any—a quote— Take it out of context. Click that shit. Put $10 million behind that. And that's in front of millions of eyeballs right there spontaneously on that. And it's directly right at you. And it's unlimited money. I mean, when you look back on this race, it's like you are going to be stunned. Just how much money is put in that, how crazy those ads are.
And just you can't get away from it. Like Montana. Montana has, I think, six or seven hundred thousand voters and they've dropped a quarter of a billion dollars. I don't know how you could even spend a quarter of a billion dollars in Montana. It's like if you have $100,000 in cash, you have to pay that in going to a McDonald's.
I don't know how they do that, but I promise you everybody in Pennsylvania or in any of these kinds of contested states, they just can't get away from that shit. And at this point, they just stop paying attention to it. It's just, it's like, it's noise. It's toxic kinds of noise. And it does, it sets a tone for the whole country that we're willing to engage in this way. Oh, yeah.
No, it's like, that's the thing. It turns everything into a night vice or worse. Yeah. And it is about trying to destroy that person and to convince other people that you are the worst thing in the world. You're you're a Marxist, you're a communist or you're just all kinds of things. And it's the lowest, lowest denominator.
And if you really want to fix American politics, I mean, there's there are issues. But I promise you, if you removed that. That would be a dramatic kinds of thing. And we all have to play that game. Some of us, like myself, I got a lot more of my money from small dollar donations, like Bernie. Bernie, I know he's been on the show. Bernie.
But then other ones, it's like everyone chases the bigger checks. It's undeniable there, too. And it's so disingenuous and there's PACs and there's other kinds of organizations. One way or another, it's just the way to funnel tens of million dollars to just tear someone apart. What was your background before you got into politics? I was a social worker.
And I came to a very deeply broken and fractured community. And I actually started helping young men and women get their GEDs and just kind of getting their lives back on track in that sense. And then that's why I did that for several years. And then I decided I wanted to run for mayor and mayor of a small town.
And we had problems with inequality in a community that 90 percent of the population abandoned the community and left. And if anyone's aware of the U.S. Steel, I mean, I live right now across the street from that iconic steel mill. I mean, that's really that that used to be America's Silicon Valley, like about half of the world's steel used to be manufactured there. but now so much has changed.
And then I ran for mayor and a small town mayor. And then that turned into, well, I decided the kinds of issues that were meaningful to me and the personal kinds of experiences, I just thought, hey, I want to project my kinds of experiences and my values. And I ran for the first time in 2016. I ran for the Senate. I mean, it's pretty kind of strange that
You have a small town mayor running for the United States Senate. And but I mean, we had no money. I mean, zero, zero money on that. But we just we'd had a really like grassroots kind of a thing. And we got out across. Pennsylvania. And we came up a little short, but we pulled in 20% of the votes, which people thought that was pretty remarkable.
And I carried my home county, which is Allegheny, that's the second largest. And that really kind of set the stage to run for Lieutenant Governor a couple years later after 2016. But 2016, though, that was where America met Donald Trump. And I was early, you know, turning the alarm off saying, hey, we have to be concerned here.
Like, you know, Trump has connected with people in ways that it's like we have to be concerned. And I'll never forget. It was June in 2016. And I was a I was a I was a surrogate for for Clinton. And and Trump announced, hey, I'm showing up in a town called Manessen, Manessen, which is a small town. steel town in the valley down from Mars.
And I'm like, why is he showing up in, I mean, that's not, so either he's crazy or they've plugged into something. And like, I have to see that. So I tried to get into that just to kind of see what was going on. But they recognized me and they said, yeah, get the fuck out. Well, you're hard to hide. Yeah.
But they figured out that they have to connect and to make that kind of an argument to go to these kind of places. And it did. It resonated. And you started to see a lot of the signs and a lot of the energy. And it's like, hey, there's a problem. And the Clinton campaign, everybody assumed that she was going to run away with it.
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