 So I'm a little bit late to the party here in talking about this particular story because the news actually broke after I had finished filming last week's episode, but I still want to talk about this because I find it incredibly important and people need to know. So as many of you probably already know, the lineup for the second Democratic Party debate has been announced. It'll be airing next week, Tuesday night and Wednesday night. Of course, I'll be covering it and let's look at the lineup here. So on the very first night, we're going to have Warren Sanders, Klobuchar, Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Bullock, Ryan Hickenlooper, Delaney and Williamson, all facing off on night one and on night two, we have Biden, Harris, Booker, Castro, Yang, Bennett, DeBlasio, Gabbard, Gillibrand and Inslee all facing off. Now, conspicuously absent from both of these nights, Mike Gravel. Now, this is huge because he just met the threshold to qualify when it comes to individual donors. He passed 65,000 unique donors. This blows certain candidates completely out of the park. Steve Bullock, John Delaney, Bill DeBlasio, John Hickenlooper, nowhere near that level of small individual donations. Mike Gravel surpassed all of them. But yet, he's not going to be at any of these debates. And grassroots activists worked their asses off to get him on the debate stage. There was a huge last push to get him on and get him to qualify. And it doesn't matter. He will not be included, regardless. Why? Well, because he didn't meet the other criteria with which you have to qualify. So he wasn't polling high enough. Now, the problem with that is he was excluded from polls. So it's not his fault that he was excluded from polls, but yet he doesn't get included, even if he blew people out of the park when it comes to individual donations. So this is a slap in the face. We were complaining in 2016 that there were not enough debates. And now there's certainly enough debates. But the qualifications, they're changing the rules as they go. And they did this with Lawrence Lesig. If you recall, Lawrence Lesig was running in 2016, but he dropped out after he couldn't qualify for the debates because they basically changed the rules as they were going along. And they're essentially doing the same thing now to Mike Gravel. And that sucks, because even if he's not running to win, he has an agenda that needs to make it to the national stage. And that's exactly why they didn't want him there, because they don't want him to get on the stage and call out the other candidates for their corporatism. They don't want him to say, you know what, these candidates need to speak out against Israel's ethno-state and war crimes against the Palestinian people. We need to end the use of drones. They don't want him condemning capitalism and making them all look horrible. So of course, they're going to exclude his voice because if you're not running to win, you have nothing to lose. So you can be especially relentless and really change the dynamic of this debate by dramatically shifting the Overton window to the left. So my favorite part, though, about this story is in direct retaliation. In order to make room for Mike Gravel, somebody else has to drop out. So they have launched a dropout Delaney campaign that they actually got trending on Twitter for a number of hours. And John Delaney obviously was not too happy about that. He made some stupid statements where he got ratioed and condemned to people moving too far to the left. And really it shows the grassroots support that Mike Gravel has. Again, it doesn't matter if he's not running to win. You set out the criteria and he met the criteria as best as he could when he was included in polls. He was polling fairly well considering he's not actually running to win. And he definitely met the donor threshold, but yet people who didn't meet the donor threshold, like Bill de Blasio, they're included. Whereas he's not. So it's just it's a bunch of bullshit. It's arbitrary. And, you know, if the DNC wants to actually earn people's trust back, then they should be saying Tom Perez should come out and say, well, of course, this is unfair. We laid out the rules and we said this is the criteria. Mike Gravel absolutely surpassed that criteria. So he should be included. But of course they won't do that because, again, they don't want to allow someone like Mike Gravel onto the debate stage because they saw what he did in 2008. He called out Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and that was glorious. So do you think they want a repeat of that? Of course they don't. So when he started to get close to, you know, the donor threshold, that's when they probably stopped including him on polls. Now it's not the DNC to be clear that does these polls. But, you know, these companies that do conduct these polls, CNN, Morning Consult, they need to include people who are running for president. And regardless if they are in it to win it or not, if you're running for president, if you're a declared candidate, you know, that's not up to you to determine who is or is not included. You don't get to act unilaterally as gatekeepers. You just include who's running on polls. They should honor the people who donated, who want to see someone on the stage who they support. But they didn't do that. You know, and it's not surprising, but certainly whenever this happens, we should speak out about it. Because I mean, who even knows who Steve Bullock is? Nobody knows who he is. Tim Ryan, he got destroyed by Tulsi Gabbard. Why is he still running? John Delaney, his own staffers reportedly want him to drop out. So why is he still running? Michael Bennett, zero support for him, zero support. So, I mean, you're letting these people on who have no chance at all, but yet you're excluding Mike Gravel. It's just, it's arbitrary and it's bullshit. Plain and simple, it's complete bullshit.