Democrats’ left wing was on a roll. Then came Wisconsin. Let’s go Off Script

Welcome to Unbiased Update's Offscript

This week, we're opening it up to everyone, giving you a look at what we're building for our subscribers

The headlines tell you what happened. Offscript is where we go further and talk about what's behind them

Coming up on the show today, progressives have been racking up wins. Then came Wisconsin

A Democratic socialist loses a race she was expected to win. So what happened

Plus, how much does the Internet actually know about you? We decided to find out by buying the personal information of 60 strangers

And what we got back was pretty remarkable. Every time you visit a website, every time you download an app

every time you get a cheeseburger delivered to your door, right, your information is being tracked

And a mother admits she killed her three young children. But that's not really what this trial is about

The question for jurors, was Lindsey Clancy criminally responsible for what she did

Let's start where we always do, with what matters, then go a step further

The Democratic establishment got a win it badly needed Tuesday night, and in a place where progressives thought they had the advantage

Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong went into Wisconsin's primary for governor, leading in the polls, including one that had her up 22 points

Instead, moderate David Crowley won after dropping out of the race last month, then jumping back in

And Wisconsin was not the only place where voters pushed back against the expected result

Our senior politics reporter Ozzie Pabra has been looking at what happened and what these results actually tell us about where both parties are right now

This tells us two things. Number one, that moderates are serious about consolidating around candidates who do not carry what Republicans say is the baggage of extreme economic and social policies

Hong had made a comment about wanting to cancel Thanksgiving and she had walked away from her earlier comments about defund the police, which Republicans and moderate Democrats say, hey, look, that's something that could alienate voters in the general election

It also says something about polling so far this year, which has overestimated the strength of some progressives

And by the end of election night has shown that moderates are actually stronger than what polling is indicating

Does this give Democrats a better chance in November? Because it seemed that Republicans actually wanted Hong to win

Republicans spent money, quote unquote, attacking Hong. But what they did was spend money during the Democratic primary

And those attacks that called her too liberal did nothing more than elevate her stature among Democratic primary voters who are pretty receptive to the message of someone being too liberal, according to Republicans

Hong also, it should be noted, was endorsed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialist Association, but not the national chapter

And key figures in that movement, like Senator Bernie Sanders, whose presidential campaigns inspired the movement, and AOC, the Republican congresswoman, who's a part of her New York City chapter of DSA, they did not endorse Hong

They made it pretty clear that they were keeping their distances. Now, they didn't attack her or trash her, but they were clear that they were going to keep her distance and focus elsewhere

Having said that, does Hong's defeat stop the momentum of the left flank of the party

It definitely adds more ammunition to moderates who say that the progressives are getting too far ahead of themselves and are overestimating their strength, possibly relying on feedback they get online, which is where more dedicated supporters on either party are often active

and that moderates can point to these results and say when actual people show up with their feed and vote

it's moderates who are carrying much more weight than you can imagine if you only look online

All right, let's go to neighboring Minnesota. Some interesting results there, and for progressives at least, a better night if you consider the fact that

the Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan defeated a House member, Angie Craig, in a Senate primary

What does that say, Ozzie? So that race was falling on the lines of issues of immigration, but also sort of

Minnesota politics versus Washington, D.C. Nobody really likes an establishment, but the one further away is usually the one you like least

So the lieutenant governor who is a paragon of progressive ideas including expanding the social safety net expanding child care access and health care access she a lieutenant governor and was supported by leading Democratic figures So in some ways she an insider but she also a progressive sort of mixing two things that don always go along

And Representative Angie Craig, she cast a vote in favor of a Republican-led bill to support

some Trump policies on immigration. That in Minnesota, where two citizens were shot and killed by immigration federal officials

was an incredibly difficult issue for Craig to overcome. Now, she ran as a moderate

She ran as someone who was apart and arms distance away from the fraud scandal

that took place while Flanagan and Governor Waltz were in office. So there were insider-outsider arguments, progressive versus moderate

There was immigration and there was this unique Minnesota fraud scandal that all played a factor into Flanagan coming out ahead

Okay, Ozzie, let's talk about the race for governor and the Trump effect, if you will, in Minnesota

Mike Lindell, he of MyPillow founding and fame, if you will, and an assaunch Trump supporter, lost to Lisa DeMuth

Give us some ysis and tell us what this specifically means up in Minnesota

The election denier denied losing the election. That's the case with Mike Lindell, who said that even though he only got about 30 percent of the vote, he is coming out saying that his campaign needs to sort of examine the results

Now, what's fascinating here is that Lindell also owns a network called Lindell Television, and their reporters are now going to report on his claims and misstatements about election regularities, which have led to multimillion dollar settlements at Fox News and other outlets

So that'll be fascinating to watch. But he lost to the House Speaker Republican Lisa Demut

Now, she got a lot of endorsements from local Republicans, although not the state party, which went with a candidate who came out of the private sector

But this really shows that in Minnesota, a place that Donald Trump has not won, Republicans there are not following his endorsement recommendations

and someone who is as well-known as Lindell can only go so far with candidates who are looking towards November

Our thanks to our senior politics reporter, Ozzy Paber, for his insights

There's no shortage of opinions online. What's harder to find are answers

Let's go now to you, where we take something you said about one of our stories and keep the conversation going

The first one came after our story about Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong's run for governor in Wisconsin

Marco Polo 5123 wrote this. Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic Socialist, was one of our greatest presidents

Well, certainly a lot to unpack here. FDR certainly changed the role of government in American life

The New Deal gave us Social Security, major public works programs, and new protections for workers and labor unions

And yes, his critics called many of those policies socialist. But Roosevelt himself was not a democratic socialist

He was a Democrat who believed government needed to play a much bigger role in protecting workers

and providing economic security while keeping America's private capitalist economy in place

So there is a connection between FDR and today's democratic socialists. Politicians like Bernie Sanders have explicitly claimed the New Deal was part of their political heritage

But calling Roosevelt himself a democratic socialist, that's where the history doesn't quite line up

OK, on to the next one. After our story about the ongoing dispute over the Strait of Hormuz, this viewer wrote

when I was a cadet at USMA, meaning the U.S. Military Academy up at West Point

we talked specifically about how easy closing the Strait of Hormuz would be

It really raises a good question. How does Iran actually close one of the world's most important shipping routes

Well, first, geography does a lot of the work. At its narrowest, the strait is only about 21 miles wide

and commercial ships travel through designated lanes that are just two miles wide in each direction

separated by a two-mile buffer. Mines, missiles, drones, and fast attack boats can all threaten shipping

But Iran doesn't have to completely seal the strait, making it dangerous enough that commercial ships and the companies that insure them

think twice about going through. That's a much lower bar. And that's why this relatively small stretch of water

has so much leverage. Roughly one-fifth of the world's petroleum liquids consumption

passed through Hormuz in 2024. So the viewer is right about the basic military problem

Hormuz has been known as a choke point for decades The hard part is keeping commercial traffic moving when someone decides to exploit it Keep those comments coming to us here at Straight Arrow

You can leave them on our Straight Arrow YouTube page or email us at offscript at san.com

Okay, let's go inside the story now. You can read the headlines on Straight Arrow

but this is where we go a step further, talking to our reporters about the details

that didn't fit and the questions that came up. You probably know that every time you buy something online

download an app, or even play a game on your phone, you're leaving behind information about yourself

And data brokers are in the business of collecting it. But how much do they actually know about you

And how easy is it for someone else to buy that information

We decided to find out. Straight Arrow Media Bias and Algorithms reporter Mark Keierlieber

went online looking for a very specific group, wealthy cigarette smokers in suburban New York

For $161, he bought a list of 60 people, including their names and contact information

along with details about their income, politics, marital status, and buying habits

Every time you visit a website, every time you download an app

every time you get a cheeseburger delivered to your door, right, your information is being tracked

if you download a solitaire game on your phone, it might be free to you, right? But actually

you are not the customer to that solitaire app. You are the product. And all of those apps on

your phone are constantly collecting little packets of information about you. That can be

your name, your address, and your location data, and your web browsing history, anything that it

can to ultimately get you to open your wallet, right? To identify exactly who you are as a person

and to create targeted advertising that might entice you. Yeah. And you point out in your article

that the apps sell the data about you or me to data brokers. And it's like following the bouncing

ball. Now from there, if the apps sell our data about us to the data brokers, what do the data

brokers then do with that data and all that information about us? Yeah, so there are hundreds

and perhaps thousands of different data broker companies that exist. And some of them are major

companies. You've maybe even heard of them before, like LexisNexis or Experian, right? The credit

monitoring companies as well. Those are data brokers. And the purposes of these companies can

differ and be used for various purposes like credit monitoring. But one of the key

purposes of these companies is targeted advertising, right? To amass large profiles about all of us and

and essentially serve as a middleman. What about regulations? You get into federal as well as state

Obviously, there's a difference there. And if I'm watching this at home going

well, where are the regulators? How is this stuff legal? Yeah, I mean, under federal law, it's all completely legal

Despite some efforts over the last many years, there is no federal data privacy law

And data brokers, to some degree, operate a little bit like it's the Wild West

There are state laws, however, that are increasingly being passed. Those allow people to demand that data brokers delete their personal information

And those laws vary pretty significantly from state to state. And one of the biggest hurdles is, like I mentioned, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these individual data brokers

So under a lot of state laws, one of the biggest challenges is even identifying which companies have your information

Some of our readers might be surprised that you got in touch with exact data

They didn't hang up the phone on you. In fact, you told them you were a journalist, and you said that they became even a little bit more aggressive

Yeah, I mean, so one of the more fun parts of this story for me was actually going through the process of purchasing data from one of these data brokers to figure out how easy is it for anybody to, you know, basically purchase lists of everybody's sensitive information

And it turns out it really just took a credit card. So I went onto the web portal of a company called Exact Data

and I created a hyper list I targeted wealthy New York suburbanites who smoke cigarettes And once I entered my credit card number I was on the phone with a salesperson at Exact Data He wanted to

call me and chat with me to make sure that I had a legitimate purpose for purchasing the data

which I'm a journalist. Some said that, you know, some privacy experts said, hey, maybe that wasn't

a legitimate purpose, testing it out. But either way, the next day, I'm looking at a spreadsheet

that has, you know, 86 individual data points on all of these individuals in this suburban New York

town, wealthy individuals who apparently smoke cigarettes. But it's not just their names that

were included or their addresses or the fact that they smoke cigarettes. It was 86 data points about

their behaviors, about whether they had children, about whether they had a mortgage on their house

And yeah, it turns out that anybody can get a list like that with a little more than a few dollars

If you would like to read Mark's story, check it out on the site or on the Straight Arrow app

We can't fit all the stories we see into unbiased updates. So here are a few we think are also worth

your time. We've heard a lot lately about food-borne illnesses, but here's one that can

come from simply getting in the water. A potentially deadly bacteria called Vibriol

vulnificus is showing up along the Gulf Coast. CNN reports Louisiana has confirmed nine cases

this year. All nine people were hospitalized and five have died. Vibriol naturally lives in

warm coastal waters, especially saltwater and brackish water, where fresh and saltwater mix

It can enter your body through an open wound, and that can be something as small as a cut or scrape or even a recent piercing or tattoo

You can also get it from eating raw or undercooked seafood, especially oysters

The CDC says about one in five people who get a Vibrial vulnificus infection dies, sometimes within a day or two of becoming sick

So if you have an open wound, the advice is simple. Stay out of salt or brackish water or keep that wound completely covered

Well, there's a difficult and fascinating case playing out right now in Massachusetts

At the center of it is a question about mental illness and criminal responsibility

Lindsay Clancy is on trial for the 2023 deaths of her three children, ages five, three, and eight months

Prosecutors say Clancy strangled the children inside their Duxbury home, then jumped from a second-story window

She survived, but suffered spinal cord injuries and is now paralyzed. The question for the jury is not whether Clancy killed her children

Her defense does not dispute that. The fight is over whether she was criminally responsible for what she did

Her attorneys say Clancy was suffering from severe postpartum mental illness and was over-medicated, pointing to numerous prescriptions

her medical history, and journal entries documenting suicidal thoughts. Prosecutors argue she knew what she was doing and planned the killings

The trial is now in its third week, and the jury will ultimately have to decide

whether Clancy was legally responsible for the deaths of her three children

And finally today, here's the kicker. If you're doing yard work this weekend, maybe take a quick look around before you start moving things

Here's why. A woman in Freehold, New Jersey, was just watering her flowers

when she found, get this, an eight-foot Burmese python in her shed

And getting it out was not exactly easy. The Monmouth County SPCA says the woman's neighbor, who happens to be a contractor

had to take apart the floor of the shed so they could reach the massive snake

And that wasn't the only surprise. The python had a very full belly

A trip to the vet revealed why. It had recently eaten an opossum

All right, the good news is the snake is now with an experienced reptile handler who can properly care for it

And no, an eight-foot Burmese python is not something you normally find in a New Jersey shed

The species is native to Southeast Asia. So maybe give your shed a knock or a walk around before you enter this weekend

My goodness, can you imagine that? I mean, if I see a gardener snake in my backyard, I recoil like two feet

If I saw like a Burmese python, I think I would freeze. I don't think I would scream or anything

I might even pass out. Yikes. All right, that's it for this week. Thanks for watching Unbiased Updates Offscript

If you've made it this far, please email us. Let us know what you think. Offscript at san.com

We love hearing from you. We'll read them all. For all of us here at Straight Arrow, I'm Craig DeGrelli

We'll see you next time. All right