Sharon McMahon
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 25 Feb
Sharon McMahon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They've been showing clips of old debates. Yes.
No, you're totally right. It doesn't have to be this way. It's this way because we're permitting it to be this way and we're participating in it. People don't realize how much money there is in producing outrage content on the internet. They do not realize how lucrative it is to create this kind of division. And I'm not somebody who's out here like, oh, the media is ruining the world.
The media has an important job. Press has an important role in society. But you don't have any idea how some of these people who have very popular YouTube channels are making $20 million a year pumping out hate content. The idea that like it's somehow the media and what they mean by that is legacy media, ABC News or whatever, that it's somehow their fault.
When in reality, they are very willing to ignore the people who are getting paid $20 million a year to make fun of ABC News. This is somehow corrupt over here, but what you're doing is completely legit. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
Also, the idea that some people are getting paid $20 million a year to like roll clip and then they watch President Biden like stumble on the steps of Air Force One and then they spend 15 minutes making fun of what an old guy he is. Those clips that go uber viral, that is a tremendously lucrative line of work if you have enough eyeballs on your content. Oh, yeah.
And when you understand the business model behind the hate content that is online, it's very, very eye-opening. It pays far more to be a hyper-partisan pundit. I could make so much more money than I make right now getting a gig on some news network and talking about how shitty XYZ person is, why this person's an idiot, et cetera.
The amount of money that exists in that hyper-partisan space is so much more than somebody who exists There's not cash in common sense, right? And so if I have a choice between a giant check and having common sense, listen, it's very enticing to be like, I'll take the cash and I'll buy the sweaters.
The incentive structure.
Precisely. It's producing the exact result that is designed to produce. And everybody is willingly participating in it without even realizing what the incentive structure is. Yeah, right, right, right. And that's the problem.
I would love to.
Yeah, it is. So the legislative branch of the federal government is Congress. Congress has two houses in it, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate has a six-year term, and they're meant to be slow and deliberate. Every state gets two senators. And so consequently, small states like Wyoming get exactly as much representation as giant states like California get.
And a lot of people feel like, how is that fair? Wyoming has less than one million people in it and they get two senators just like California does. This is something they argued about when they were writing the Constitution. They fought like cats and dogs about this.
And the House of Representatives has allegedly proportional representation where a state gets a certain number of representatives based on their population. And all of those representatives serve two-year terms. So there's 100 senators and 435 representatives. And together, those 535 members make up the entirety of Congress. There are a few people, they have kind of more advisory jobs to Congress.
They're delegates to Congress. And they represent places that are United States territories, places like Guam or Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., places that are not states represented. They're allowed to go to committee meetings and make their voice known, but they can't vote on legislation.
So the problem with proportional representation is still that there is a finite pie that has to be divvied up. Every 10 years, they go through and re-divvy up the pie again, these 435 seats. After the 2020 census, California actually lost a seat in the House of Representatives, even though California is bigger than it's ever been, of course, right?
And that's because other places grew faster than California did. So the number of people that are being represented by one representative in Wyoming or North Dakota is much, much, much smaller than the number of people that are being represented by one representative in the state of California, for example.
That's one of the big criticisms of Congress is that the way people are represented is not equal across the entire country.
Yes, or at least relatively equally. Nobody's saying it has to be perfect, but get us in the ballpark here of one representative for every 500,000 people or, you know, whatever it is. So the way that it works, there's an actual commission that goes through and divvies up this pie of 435 people every 10 years.
Inevitably, some states are going to lose some people and some states are going to gain some people, but inevitably, Together, those two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, some of the roles they have are very similar, but they each have some specific roles. Like the Senate has to confirm the president's appointments. They have to confirm people to the Supreme Court.
They're meant to act differently because the House of Representatives is being reelected every even year. Congress is on recess right now until after the election. For six weeks, they're off of work.
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