Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready.
Speaker 2: Or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here
Speaker 2: at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can
Speaker 2: up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 4: But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody,
Speaker 4: Happy Monday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. What
Speaker 4: do we have Crystal?
Speaker 1: Indeed we do. Glad to have you back, sir, very
Speaker 1: glad to be back. We missed you on Thursday.
Speaker 3: I had a great time down in Austin. Lex Rereabing
Speaker 3: podcast will come out soon. I believe that Matt and
Speaker 3: Shaine Secret podcast will come out as well, so you
Speaker 3: guys can enjoy that.
Speaker 1: Can we reveal how long the lex rooting it is?
Speaker 3: It clocks in around five hours, so something like that.
Speaker 3: There are multiple bathroom breaks that we had to take
Speaker 3: for the Matt and Shane one. There are some great
Speaker 3: rants against marijuana and gambling, so I think people will.
Speaker 1: I geninitely like I think I would lose my boys up.
Speaker 4: At five hours. I did actually lose my I don't think. Oh,
Speaker 4: and that's funny. I had to I had to like
Speaker 4: recharge it for the next day. But we made it through.
Speaker 4: I mean, it was good. It was a great discussion,
Speaker 4: all right.
Speaker 2: Well, there are a bunch of things that I'm interested
Speaker 2: to hear your take on in the show. Since we
Speaker 2: haven't gotten you to weigh in on all of the
Speaker 2: different Trump cabinet picks. We've got some updates for you.
Speaker 2: There arek Junior in as nominated for HHS Secretary. We
Speaker 2: also have some updates on the gates and hegseth nominations
Speaker 2: as well, so we'll get into that. We've got some
Speaker 2: elon Musk news, as we do pretty much every day
Speaker 2: at this point, where he is now going on Twitter
Speaker 2: to bash tariffs, interesting since his guy is really in
Speaker 2: terriffs and also trying to put out there his choice
Speaker 2: for Chargery Secretary. Jeff Stein from the Washington Post has
Speaker 2: been doing fantastic reporting on all of these things, so
Speaker 2: he's going to break down for us what is going
Speaker 2: on there. Obviously, there's also a lot of battles going
Speaker 2: on within the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: Ram Em manual blasts from.
Speaker 2: The past, who's of course never really in the past,
Speaker 2: is being flooded as a potential future DNC chair. So
Speaker 2: I've got a lot to say about that, and a
Speaker 2: lot of interesting sort of battles that are unfolding there. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: we don't want to lose sight of what's going on
Speaker 2: in terms of foreign Paul see the Biden administration now
Speaker 2: authorizing the use of long range US missiles inside of
Speaker 2: Russia by Ukraine. Obviously an extraordinary development, so huge implications there.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that.
Speaker 2: Soccer's got a UFO update for me and everyone else.
Speaker 3: I missed the hearing. I was so sad not to
Speaker 3: be there, so many good friends that were in town.
Speaker 3: But some interesting stuff happens, so I'll recap it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm taking a look at why working class
Speaker 2: New Yorkers voted for Trump in their own words, Actually,
Speaker 2: it was kind of surprised by some of the analysis
Speaker 2: that they offered for why they voted the way they did.
Speaker 1: So we'll break all of that down for you.
Speaker 3: That's awesome, all right, So go ahead and sign up
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Speaker 5: Yep.
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Speaker 2: thank you so much to all of you for your
Speaker 2: support throughout this entire season. All right, let's get to
Speaker 2: the very latest RFK Junior being tapped for HHS Secretary.
Speaker 2: Let's put this up on the screen. This is the
Speaker 2: official Truth social from our Truth from Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: On truth, social whatever.
Speaker 2: I'm thrilled to announce RFK Junior as the US Secretary
Speaker 2: of Health and Human Services. For too long, Americans have
Speaker 2: been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies
Speaker 2: have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation. When it comes
Speaker 2: to public health, the safety and health of all Americans
Speaker 2: is the most important role of any administration. HHS will
Speaker 2: play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will
Speaker 2: be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and
Speaker 2: food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis
Speaker 2: in this country. Mister Kennedy will restore these agencies their
Speaker 2: additions of gold standard scientific research and beacons of transparency
Speaker 2: to end the chronic disease epidemic and to make America
Speaker 2: great and healthy again. So, you know, obviously it's been
Speaker 2: a quite a journey for RFK Junior, once you know
Speaker 2: solidly liberal environmental activists, was actually floidos of potential Obama
Speaker 2: administration casin sic. But that got spiked and then has
Speaker 2: sort of been part of this realignment to the right.
Speaker 2: So initially he runs as a Democrat in the Democratic primary,
Speaker 2: they shut him out as they shut out everybody. During
Speaker 2: that time, he'd already been kind of you know, you'd
Speaker 2: go on with Steve bann and he was the Right
Speaker 2: really liked him because at that point he was a
Speaker 2: useful weapon for them to use against Joe Biden. Then
Speaker 2: he decides to drop out of the Democratic primary and
Speaker 2: starts running as an independent, and the Right does a
Speaker 2: complete one point eighty switch in in terms of their tune.
Speaker 2: There's all these great clips now Sean Hannity like just
Speaker 2: limbasting him for all of his quote unquote liberal positions
Speaker 2: and Trump saying he's a radical and he wants the
Speaker 2: Green New Deal, blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And then again once Trump and him.
Speaker 2: Strike a deal and he drops out and is then
Speaker 2: in the Trump camp, then the tune changes once again
Speaker 2: and he's you know, the greatest thing ever again. So
Speaker 2: here we are with Trump basically baking good on what
Speaker 2: was probably pledged to RFK when he dropped down in
Speaker 2: the race, and tapping him for strej.
Speaker 3: We can't minimize ourrfk's endorsement and his role. You know,
Speaker 3: Dot Trump only won the presidency by two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty four thousand votes in the blue Wall state.
Speaker 2: I think it was determinative, to be honest with you,
Speaker 2: because if he stays in the race, you know, when
Speaker 2: he dropped down, it was quite clear that he was
Speaker 2: taking more from Trump. He was much more of a
Speaker 2: problem for Trump than he was for Biden then ultimately
Speaker 2: for Kamala Harris. When you look at those three Blue
Speaker 2: Wall states and you see how narrow the margin is,
Speaker 2: I think if he stays in the race, I think
Speaker 2: Trump loses.
Speaker 3: I agree with you, and especially if we look at
Speaker 3: Michigan where we saw a lot of Muslim voters go
Speaker 3: to Donald Trump and they voted as a protest vote
Speaker 3: RFK Junior. I mean, look, it's not like Trump and
Speaker 3: RFK Junior have particularly different stances on Israel. But if
Speaker 3: we're thinking of the Trump proxy vote as a protest
Speaker 3: from any of these Muslim voters in RFK Junior almost
Speaker 3: certainly would have gotten some percentage of that same If
Speaker 3: you look at the margin of victory at Michigan and Pennsylvania,
Speaker 3: remember that outside of Pennsylvania, the Democrats were able to
Speaker 3: win those Senate seats in those two states, so they had.
Speaker 4: Some margin of strength.
Speaker 3: So I do think r K Junior was incredibly determinative
Speaker 3: in the race in Nevada as well. Actually, we were
Speaker 3: starting to look at the final margins. One of the
Speaker 3: things that you know always happens after a presidential election
Speaker 3: is we actually minimize how narrow the gap was. We
Speaker 3: taught We tried to talk about a lot here on
Speaker 3: the show about what is the thirty something thousand votes
Speaker 3: that made Joe Biden the presidency. Here we're talking about
Speaker 3: two hundred and fifty four thousand votes in those states.
Speaker 3: May sound like a lot, it's actually not in terms
Speaker 3: of the overall tens of millions that were cast in
Speaker 3: the entire country.
Speaker 4: So it does. It is something that we should remember.
Speaker 3: And in that way, you know, he did need to
Speaker 3: make an actual overture to r K Jor. The question
Speaker 3: is is about how much of this is going to
Speaker 3: come into contention with a Trump coalition. And I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about this a lot. Let's go ahead and put
Speaker 3: for example, how Donald Trump is normally able to twist
Speaker 3: people into his own purposes.
Speaker 4: Let's put the image please up there on the screen.
Speaker 3: This is released yesterday, and this was RFK Junior forced
Speaker 3: to basically sit for a hostage photo a.
Speaker 4: Board Trump Force one.
Speaker 3: This is Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Junior, and
Speaker 3: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. The four of them
Speaker 3: other than Mike Johnson, who are sitting down and eating McDonald's.
Speaker 3: You can actually see RFK Junior there seated with McDonald's,
Speaker 3: a burger in his hand and a full sugar high
Speaker 3: fruit toast, corn syrup coke sitting there next. Not even
Speaker 3: a Mexican comes twenty four hours really after a clip
Speaker 3: went viral of recently of RFK Junior talking about how
Speaker 3: the food on board Trump Force one is quote disgusting,
Speaker 3: and how it is full of McDonald's. So you may,
Speaker 3: I personally think that Trump was punishing him and forcing
Speaker 3: him to eat the food, and he was like, put the.
Speaker 4: Burger in your mouth, Robert.
Speaker 3: He's like, you have to do it if you want
Speaker 3: to serve as my HHS secretary. The other big question
Speaker 3: is is that RFK Junior. You know, despite endorsing Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: he is a liberal on many issues, issues that may
Speaker 3: come into major contention with the Republican coalition.
Speaker 4: So let's think about a couple of them. Number one
Speaker 4: is abortion.
Speaker 3: We're going to spend a lot of time on that later,
Speaker 3: but I actually really think that the big tension will
Speaker 3: be in make America healthy again.
Speaker 4: So there are really two parts.
Speaker 3: Of MAHA, so called MAHA as I can understand it.
Speaker 3: One is a libertarian. I think this actually aligns quite
Speaker 3: well with the MAGA coalition. This is a barstool coalition
Speaker 3: of people who delivered the White House for Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: So these are people who are distrustful of institutions. So
Speaker 3: they want to burn down the FDA. Great, they want
Speaker 3: to burn down NIH and get transparency about the COVID,
Speaker 3: COVID lab leak about the COVID vaccine, release the data,
Speaker 3: all of the trials, fantastic, all that stuff.
Speaker 4: That's totally fine.
Speaker 3: But where I could see major tensions is really in
Speaker 3: like a Bloomberg nanny state style liberalism that comes from
Speaker 3: the European tradition of banning certain chemicals. Now I'm not
Speaker 3: you know, I'm not saying I don't even advocate for this,
Speaker 3: but I'm saying, if you look at the way that
Speaker 3: the American public has traditionally viewed efforts by Michelle Obama
Speaker 3: or Mike Bloomberg to ban what was.
Speaker 4: At large, SODA's in the City of New York.
Speaker 3: I mean there is like a deep nanny state element
Speaker 3: to this that this actually happened in the Biden administration.
Speaker 3: The Biden administration, under the guise of like black health,
Speaker 3: wanted to ban menthol cigarettes, and black groups were like, hey,
Speaker 3: you know, don't tell us what we can and can't smoke.
Speaker 3: They're like, we like menthol cigarettes. Leave us the hell alone,
Speaker 3: and eventually they were able to win that. Now there's
Speaker 3: no it's obvious that quote unquote banning menthol cigarettes would
Speaker 3: be definitely beneficial, like public health wise, but we do
Speaker 3: live in a country where people very much value their freedoms.
Speaker 3: So that's one of those where I could really see
Speaker 3: some elements, like for example, on Coca Cola, like banning
Speaker 3: high fructose corn syrup in favor of cane sugar, or
Speaker 3: reducing food dies and all these other things. I mean,
Speaker 3: the truth is is that while yes, it would definitely
Speaker 3: be quote unquote healthier, I guess, and somewhat of a
Speaker 3: balance is.
Speaker 4: That it still would probably drive up the price.
Speaker 3: And so that's a big question of like whether Americans
Speaker 3: a want to be told and what is not in
Speaker 3: their food, and then two, whether they would actually accept
Speaker 3: whatever the consequences are, and like look my own person,
Speaker 3: my bias is there on the table. I'm pro tariff
Speaker 3: and I'm pro mass deportation. I am going to fully
Speaker 3: acknowledge you that's going to increase a price. I think
Speaker 3: it has an overall benefit. Now you can make that argument,
Speaker 3: but for a lot of the libertarian coalition, and specifically,
Speaker 3: I mean, if we think about it, households under one
Speaker 3: hundred thousand dollars who majority voted for Donald Trump, these
Speaker 3: are the people who do eat McDonald's, and they eat
Speaker 3: McDonald's a lot. I mean, if you look at the
Speaker 3: statistics of the tens and millions of people in this
Speaker 3: country fast food on an almost daily weekly basis, you
Speaker 3: have to consider, like what fundamentally changing their menu, their
Speaker 3: food additives and all of that would look like the
Speaker 3: attendant price increased. You can make an argument for why
Speaker 3: it's good. I do think it'd probably be good, but
Speaker 3: I could see some major pushback on that.
Speaker 4: So I think there's like a.
Speaker 3: Big libertarian Uh, there's like a big libertarian kind of
Speaker 3: construct that that will come up against MAGA, and that
Speaker 3: really if it starts to if you really think about it,
Speaker 3: you know, one of the reasons that Biden's sunk was
Speaker 3: inflation and every time somebody goes to order fat.
Speaker 4: I was at Taco Bell yesterday, No, when did the
Speaker 4: burrito cost seven dollars? I was like, what, I remember?
Speaker 4: Ninety nine cents?
Speaker 3: Well, imagine if it goes from seven to ten because
Speaker 3: of the changes in food regulations.
Speaker 4: Do I think that's good? Yes?
Speaker 3: I can afford it, though a lot of people you
Speaker 3: know that increased from what is a nine nine cents
Speaker 3: to seven dollars, that's burned a lot, and you know,
Speaker 3: it's made it so it's basically impossible to aborder to
Speaker 3: eat out and be affordable.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean how much did like the price of
Speaker 2: the value menu at McDonald's figure? And yeah, absolutely, I
Speaker 2: mean that was a huge part the greatest sensitivity. And
Speaker 2: this is if you if you ask voters, if you
Speaker 2: look at the polls, if you you know, look at
Speaker 2: the dominant political conversation, Like, the biggest economic sensitivity that
Speaker 2: have right now is to prices. So if you're talking
Speaker 2: about you know, terrorist as you're talking about stripping away
Speaker 2: agricultural supports that are the reason why corn is so cheap,
Speaker 2: which is the reason why you have high corn syrup
Speaker 2: and all of these things, and if you go through
Speaker 2: like the middle aisles and the grocery store, everything is
Speaker 2: just basically like different ways of packaging corn. If you
Speaker 2: get rid of those supports, yeah, in a lot of ways, prices,
Speaker 2: prices are going to go up. I'm not sure that
Speaker 2: there is as much tension though, because my sense from
Speaker 2: talking to RFK and we interviewed with him a number
Speaker 2: of times here and we talked to him about health
Speaker 2: and we talked to him about health care and what
Speaker 2: his vision would be et cetera, is that he basically
Speaker 2: is more on the libertarian front, so you know, for example,
Speaker 2: on the left, like I support maticcare for all. I
Speaker 2: think that would be an incredibly important development in terms
Speaker 2: of you know, health and combating chronic disease, because then
Speaker 2: you're taking some of the profit motive out of the
Speaker 2: healthcare system, You're taking the health insurers out of you know,
Speaker 2: the middle between you and getting the care that you need.
Speaker 2: It would help incentivize preventive care, not just people who
Speaker 2: you know, only go to the doctor when they are
Speaker 2: absolutely desperate because they can't afford to before that. And
Speaker 2: so I asked him about that, and he wasn't in
Speaker 2: support of it. He's more of a tradition that I've
Speaker 2: actually been reading about, which is it's this back to
Speaker 2: the land movement of the nineteen seventies, where after the
Speaker 2: sixties are over, and you know, Rfk's father has been
Speaker 2: killed and MLKA has been killed, and Nixon is ascendant,
Speaker 2: and there's this retrenchment among the like left countercultural movement,
Speaker 2: and you had a lot of people who rather than
Speaker 2: continuing to engage in like mass protests and trying to
Speaker 2: change the national conversation, they sort of retreated into these
Speaker 2: like communes and these different alternative lifestyles. And the ethos
Speaker 2: there was very libertarian, and it was also very just
Speaker 2: rejectionist of anything that was mainstream. Good bad are indifferent.
Speaker 2: If it was mainstream, they didn't want it. Whether it
Speaker 2: was the nuclear family or modern medicine or using you know,
Speaker 2: modern farming technology. They'd rather get out a horse than
Speaker 2: buggy and try to figure it out. Because it was
Speaker 2: just anything that's associated with modern life, I'm just going
Speaker 2: to reject it.
Speaker 1: And you know that.
Speaker 2: Would that movement would have been in full of fact
Speaker 2: when RFK Junior was a young man, and I think
Speaker 2: a lot of his eCos seems to come out of
Speaker 2: the instincts of that era. Now, part of what happened
Speaker 2: to obviously this movement didn't last all that long. Part
Speaker 2: of what happened is that when you have this purely
Speaker 2: libertarian like, oh, everybody do what everybody wants to do
Speaker 2: next thing, you know, you have people who aren't carrying
Speaker 2: their own weight, You have conflict between what are the
Speaker 2: values and the structure, and the whole thing kind of crumbles.
Speaker 2: You also have outbreaks of preventable diseases like hepatitis, and
Speaker 2: you have staff infections and all those sorts of things.
Speaker 2: So all just a long way of saying, like, as
Speaker 2: best as I can understand rfk's ideology based on what
Speaker 2: he's said publicly and what he said in our discussions
Speaker 2: with him when we've pushed him on these things, like,
Speaker 2: I think he's much more of the direction of just
Speaker 2: burned down the FDA. Not in my opinion, what really
Speaker 2: needs to happen is you actually need to strengthen the FDA.
Speaker 2: You do need to break the corruption in terms of
Speaker 2: the revolving door and the way that's been incredibly destructive.
Speaker 2: You need to take the profit motive out of health
Speaker 2: care for sure, so that the primary impetus is people
Speaker 2: getting healthy and people being you know, well, we have
Speaker 2: terrible we do have a terrible chronic disease epidemic in
Speaker 2: this country. We have lifespan that is jordening. All these
Speaker 2: things are very real. But just a strictly libertarian approach
Speaker 2: to that is not going to get the job done.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, I think people will be like, you know,
Speaker 2: they'll probably push to like, okay, now you can drink
Speaker 2: raw milk. Sure, fine, that's all well and good. Is
Speaker 2: that going to really solve the problems that we have?
Speaker 5: Though?
Speaker 2: Ultimately no, So I think you're right that there is
Speaker 2: an instinct on the right just to like burn all
Speaker 2: of these institutions down, when actually all that burning the
Speaker 2: government institutions down does is empower the corporate for profit institutions,
Speaker 2: which are not really being attacked on the other side.
Speaker 2: And that's the danger of the libertarianism. Not to mention
Speaker 2: of cour Or, It's like, you know, vaccines have been
Speaker 2: an incredibly important modern health development, and you know the
Speaker 2: research that has been funded by the federal government. Actually,
Speaker 2: one thing we've talked about a bunch is that the
Speaker 2: drug companies buy and large are not developing new drugs.
Speaker 2: In fact, all of the new drug molecules that have
Speaker 2: been developed have been developed over the past twenty some
Speaker 2: years with federal government funding. Like that piece is actually
Speaker 2: really important, So I think it would be I think
Speaker 2: it would be quite disastrous if there's a rollback of
Speaker 2: that type of funding, if there's a rollback of that
Speaker 2: type of research, if there's an actual dismantling destruction of
Speaker 2: those government agencies, not just stripping out the corruption and
Speaker 2: putting people's health first.
Speaker 4: It's first and foremost before we play what he said. Yes,
Speaker 4: it's interesting.
Speaker 3: Again, I actually talked with some people who were in
Speaker 3: line to be FDA people under Donald Trump last time,
Speaker 3: and there are multiple schools of thoughts. So there is
Speaker 3: what you just said, which is basically like ramp up
Speaker 3: the FDA, push out the corruption. I think there's also
Speaker 3: like a quasi libertarian, almost capitalist element to this too,
Speaker 3: where the problem with the FDA is that it genuinely
Speaker 3: has been corporate captured. So one of the things that
Speaker 3: that RFK wants to do is to ban the pay
Speaker 3: for play model where the drug companies have to basically
Speaker 3: pay the bureaucrats to analyze their drugs. This actually keeps
Speaker 3: out new drug entrants, and it keeps the big companies
Speaker 3: very very large, which are able to basically push out
Speaker 3: and stifle all competitions. So if you look at Silicon
Speaker 3: Valley biotech startups, the FDA is the number one basically
Speaker 3: reason that many new drugs have not been able to
Speaker 3: be pushed from that way. Now, you could say that
Speaker 3: there is corruption and all that, and you would basically
Speaker 3: allow a new big pharma to arise, but the truth
Speaker 3: is we don't have competition in the pharma sector really
Speaker 3: at all. It's completely rolled up and it's actually weirdly
Speaker 3: controlled by these Eurokeyan conglomerates. So that's one, and I
Speaker 3: actually do think that'd be correct. What are the things
Speaker 3: we want to do is to change the drug development
Speaker 3: process and allow for more of less corporate capture that
Speaker 3: basically allows these big pharma companies do the pay for
Speaker 3: play FDA revolving door. And I think I do support
Speaker 3: that in terms of what he's looking at, because I've
Speaker 3: been hearing it from people who are like biotech founders
Speaker 3: now for quite some time. The interesting part also on
Speaker 3: the vaccine now, and we're going to play some of
Speaker 3: his comments here as I understand it, and this is
Speaker 3: the as reality. Despite what RK has said many times
Speaker 3: in the past, including no vaccine is quote safe and effective,
Speaker 3: he believes that you should have transparency on the safety
Speaker 3: and the efficacy of childhood vaccinations of which they currently
Speaker 3: are not allowed to release, that does not even run
Speaker 3: the trials, and that they are immune from what is
Speaker 3: it they are immune from prosecution under the I forget
Speaker 3: the exact piece of legislation. The change in the guidance
Speaker 3: would basically allow both the safety and the efficacy data
Speaker 3: to be released. Now, after a while and looking at
Speaker 3: all this, I think I have come down to his
Speaker 3: position simply because here's the truth. COVID vacs broke all
Speaker 3: institutional trust in the entire public health infrastructure, not just
Speaker 3: COVID vacs masking everything. The rise in vaccination and voluntary
Speaker 3: exemption has skyrocketed since COVID. People have legitimate questions because
Speaker 3: they genuinely don't try us the public health data and
Speaker 3: the infrastructure at this point. And this is something that
Speaker 3: Emily Oster, who is a professor at the I forget
Speaker 3: exactly which school, but she's written a couple of very
Speaker 3: interesting books about parenthood et cetera. She's considered like the
Speaker 3: godmother of parenting. One of the things that she really
Speaker 3: did well. She's a health economist, and when you read
Speaker 3: her books, what you see inside of them is everything
Speaker 3: is based on big longitudinal studies. Some of these do
Speaker 3: exist for the vaccine, however, or eight vaccines MMR, and
Speaker 3: many of these other that are included, but a lot
Speaker 3: of the safety and the efficacy data has not been
Speaker 3: actually released in terms of the trials, and actually many
Speaker 3: of them are not even allowed to be run. So
Speaker 3: what he I think, in practice, what it would look like,
Speaker 3: is effectively allowing that and giving quote unquote choice to parents. Now,
Speaker 3: obviously I understand that that is controversial because each state
Speaker 3: has to grapple with religious exemption, personal exemption, health exemption,
Speaker 3: the idea of her immunity, etc. But the thing is
Speaker 3: is that it's already happening. The vast majority of people
Speaker 3: do not trust the public health establishment after what happened
Speaker 3: under COVID. I personally include myself in them. I remember
Speaker 3: reading the approval process for the booster vaccine and I said,
Speaker 3: this is bullshit. I can't believe that you're allowed to
Speaker 3: be able to do this, and the justification was, oh, well,
Speaker 3: we do it every year for the flu vaccine, and
Speaker 3: I was like, okay, Well then I got some questions
Speaker 3: about the flu vaccine, and I never thought about the
Speaker 3: flu vaccine. I was just like, yeah, that's fine, but
Speaker 3: I never considered the actual backstory and all that that
Speaker 3: went into it. And you know, it's one of those
Speaker 3: where the questions around it are now so mainstream. I
Speaker 3: actually don't really think we have a choice to basically
Speaker 3: pursue his own agenda.
Speaker 4: So I am I again.
Speaker 3: I think that his libertarian minded elements of wanting to
Speaker 3: break up the FDA cartel how NIH works. Doctor j
Speaker 3: Boticharia apparently isn't in line to lead the Internettion. I
Speaker 3: think he'd be a fantastic choice, and he was a
Speaker 3: good controlling voice under COVID. Basically vaccine transparency, safety and
Speaker 3: efficacy data, a lot of that stuff that could be released.
Speaker 4: I think it would be really good.
Speaker 3: But again, think that the big tension will come with
Speaker 3: any sort of European style liberalism, where this is again
Speaker 3: a big part of like banning food dies and these
Speaker 3: these things would increase the price or you know, everyone's like, oh,
Speaker 3: the McDonald's taste better in Europe, which by the way,
Speaker 3: is not true. But what they say is, you know,
Speaker 3: if you go home and you look at Europe, they
Speaker 3: they explicitly cap the amount of sodium they are allowed
Speaker 3: to put into meat. They have very different standards about
Speaker 3: the way things are now. Again, I think that's great,
Speaker 3: but you know, are we going to deny that grass
Speaker 3: fed you know, grass fed beef and all that is
Speaker 3: not exorbitantly more expensive.
Speaker 4: I buy it. I think it's definitely a way healthier.
Speaker 3: But that's why you really need to think about what
Speaker 3: that would impact the consumer.
Speaker 2: That's why historically this has been a movement of like
Speaker 2: wealthy white liberals.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, in California, these are araone California shoppers.
Speaker 2: This is why you also had you know, it's been
Speaker 2: in like Hollywood where you've had people, you know, oh,
Speaker 2: vaccines aren't natural, so I'm not going to get my
Speaker 2: kids vaccinated, and then low and behold, you've got a
Speaker 2: measle down break. I mean, that's the thing is it's like,
Speaker 2: you know, RFK is not I know, he likes to
Speaker 2: use Oh I'm not anti VAXs, blah blah blah, he's
Speaker 2: anti vax Like if you're going to go out and
Speaker 2: say there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.
Speaker 2: I think definitionally you are anti vax now, the COVID
Speaker 2: piece that you're talking about. I think that the way
Speaker 2: that public health officials didn't think that the American people
Speaker 2: could be trusted with the actual like nuances of what
Speaker 2: this vaccine could and couldn't do and what it was
Speaker 2: and all of that, I think you're absolutely correct that
Speaker 2: that broke a lot of public trust, There's no doubt
Speaker 2: about it. But you know, when we look at where
Speaker 2: RFK and his organization, the children what's the name of it,
Speaker 2: Children's Health Defense, have been involved, like, they have left
Speaker 2: disasters in their wake, the most prominent of which is
Speaker 2: they played into these fears around the measles vaccine in
Speaker 2: Samoa and went in and basically misled people and fomented
Speaker 2: a whole panic that dropped measles vaccination rates to something
Speaker 2: like thirty percent. You had a big outbreak and eighty
Speaker 2: people died. Eighty plus people died, most of them children
Speaker 2: under the age of five. So this stuff has real
Speaker 2: life or death consequences. And when he's been when people
Speaker 2: have trusted him in these critical arenas it's been a disaster.
Speaker 2: So you know, RFK is like endlessly skeptical of anything
Speaker 2: that is like mainstream, settled science. And you know what,
Speaker 2: you should be skeptical of those things. You should ask questions,
Speaker 2: you should definitely look at like the monetary incentives and
Speaker 2: all absolutely. But then he's endlessly like credulous about any
Speaker 2: sort of you know, natural seeming, crackpot theory, conspiracy, et cetera.
Speaker 2: And you should be even more skeptical of that end
Speaker 2: of the spectrum. And so you know, that's where I
Speaker 2: have a lot like I think that the things that
Speaker 2: he did to stoke anti VAXX sentiment and other health
Speaker 2: lies using his organization, I think they were devastating. And
Speaker 2: that example in Samoa is just one. So no, I
Speaker 2: don't feel comfortable putting him in charge of this like
Speaker 2: massive federal bureaucracy where you have lots of power and
Speaker 2: this libertarian instinct, because libertarianism is all well and good
Speaker 2: until you've got a massive measles outbreak and you know
Speaker 2: your kid is in the hospital with an easily preventable
Speaker 2: disease that we should have that we eradicated long ago.
Speaker 2: You know, it's very likely it's very possible that we
Speaker 2: have there's already like an av some kind of avian
Speaker 2: flu that's spreading right now, monkey pops whatever, Like, it's
Speaker 2: very possible that we have some sort of significant outbreak.
Speaker 2: And rfk is does not really accept modern medical science,
Speaker 2: which has been a miracle in many ways. And then
Speaker 2: the other piece of this is, like, you know, the
Speaker 2: to me, the corruption is really the core part of
Speaker 2: the problem. But if you actually wanted to get like
Speaker 2: end the chronic disease epidemic, first of all, it would
Speaker 2: take way more than the you know, just making food
Speaker 2: more natural and having fewer ingredients blah blah blah, like
Speaker 2: the availability of highly dense caloric foods, the total sedentary
Speaker 2: lifestyle of Americans, like that plays all into it. But
Speaker 2: also the other thing you would probably do is a
Speaker 2: lot more people would take ozempic. And he's anti ozempic.
Speaker 2: So I genuinely would love to see someone who has
Speaker 2: his instincts when it comes to being skeptical of the
Speaker 2: corruption of these companies the impact they have throughout our
Speaker 2: healthcare system. But what I actually think he's likely to
Speaker 2: do is only to empower those forces more by undercutting
Speaker 2: the government agencies that are meant to regulate and serve
Speaker 2: as a check, a very imperfect check admittedly right now
Speaker 2: on those massive forces of corporate power.
Speaker 4: I could understand that. I mean, the Samoa thing is bad,
Speaker 4: like there's no getting around it. I don't.
Speaker 3: But this is again, though, where I have to put
Speaker 3: a little bit more trust in institutions and even just
Speaker 3: look at basically what in practice what he would say,
Speaker 3: it's like, okay, safety and efficacy of MMR vaccine and
Speaker 3: then allowing parents a choice. I mean, I don't see
Speaker 3: the issue broadly. If you're not banning the vaccine, if
Speaker 3: you're not underwriting it, people have a choice on what
Speaker 3: they can and can't do.
Speaker 4: I think the most liberating thing of.
Speaker 3: The RFK quote unquote philosophy, or even the whole like
Speaker 3: just asking questions thing is you do genuinely go okay,
Speaker 3: so why do you give a child like four vaccines
Speaker 3: on the exact same day when they're two months old?
Speaker 3: When the Europeans do it differently, which is better? Should
Speaker 3: we compare this versus this? Why is the hepatitis?
Speaker 7: What is it?
Speaker 4: B vaccine delivered on birth?
Speaker 1: To not does?
Speaker 2: But no, he raises those things to then just be
Speaker 2: like that's why vaccines are bad and cause autism, which
Speaker 2: is a bunch of which is like lies and bullshit,
Speaker 2: and it's not just on that. Like our friends at
Speaker 2: Jelani reported on a great piece about how his group
Speaker 2: also has backed this completely discredited mode of trying to
Speaker 2: communicate with people who are nonverbal autistic that involves using
Speaker 2: like you know, moderate who's supposedly helping them to be
Speaker 2: able to stabilize their hands so they can type out messages.
Speaker 2: And like I said, it's been like thoroughly debunked and discredited.
Speaker 2: His group pushed this as an actual model, and you know,
Speaker 2: in some severe cases, there was an instance where you know,
Speaker 2: a non verbal autistic person was sexually assaulted because their
Speaker 2: facilitator claimed that they were in some romantic relationship. Like
Speaker 2: it's there are so many examples where whatever it is
Speaker 2: he believes insane like crack put things. And so you know,
Speaker 2: it puts me in a difficult position trying to defend
Speaker 2: this because I have my own problems with these institutions,
Speaker 2: and I think part of why Democrats loss is because
Speaker 2: they were seen as being like the defenders of the
Speaker 2: institutions when people are like fuck these institutions. Basically in
Speaker 2: RFK is also like fucked these institutions. But the specifics
Speaker 2: of how you do it matter. And so if you're
Speaker 2: just taking a sledgehammer to regulatory agencies, that just means
Speaker 2: that there are going to be more snake oil salesmen.
Speaker 2: That just means they're going to be people hawking like
Speaker 2: supplements that claim to do X and y and z
Speaker 2: for you that are just completely fake in bogus. That
Speaker 2: just means you're going to have less regulation. So that
Speaker 2: just means you're going to have actually less investment in
Speaker 2: the type of research that generally has developed life saving
Speaker 2: new drug molecules and treatments, which is what the federal
Speaker 2: government has done amazingly well actually, I mean again, the
Speaker 2: drug companies are basically just like, buy up the research
Speaker 2: that our taxpayers dollars fund and our distribution mechanism. And
Speaker 2: you know, to me, what you would want is go
Speaker 2: in the exact opposite direction and have more of this
Speaker 2: actually owned by the government, having more government like options
Speaker 2: and competition like they are doing in California with their
Speaker 2: own like government produced insulin, reducing those costs. But I
Speaker 2: just you know, so I'm yeah, I'm I'm very like
Speaker 2: skeptical that our K Junior is going to do anything
Speaker 2: good that's actually going to improve public health.
Speaker 3: With put it this way, is that basically the reason
Speaker 3: why people like RFK or the reason why people voted
Speaker 3: for Trump at a very base level, They're like, things
Speaker 3: are so bad under the current system that blowing shit
Speaker 3: up is the only thing that's possible.
Speaker 4: So for me, I'm excited about the possibility.
Speaker 3: I think that safety, efficacy, standards, choice, and being informed
Speaker 3: consent is actually very important. I don't trust the public
Speaker 3: health establishment in terms of blowing up the FDA and
Speaker 3: seeing with the new regulatory regime, yeah, I think it. Honestly,
Speaker 3: what else could come from it for them? And if
Speaker 3: you look at the way that he Cali and Casey means,
Speaker 3: the way that they talk and the data that they
Speaker 3: have around autism, about childhood, obesity, about cancer, the current
Speaker 3: trajectory is death. It is a dying and obese civilization
Speaker 3: where seventy five percent of the population is currently overweight
Speaker 3: on ozempic. One of the things that I actually like
Speaker 3: about RFK Junior is that he's not a prescriber. First,
Speaker 3: he's not a prescription drug person. First, I have deep
Speaker 3: skepticism around statins, ozempic and all of these other things
Speaker 3: in terms of their long term overall effect and the
Speaker 3: general idea that you must rely for your entire life
Speaker 3: on a drug company to basically provide you with life
Speaker 3: because it's a very convenient economic relation ship between you
Speaker 3: and said think, we don't know what the overall impact
Speaker 3: is going to be on children who are taking oozebic.
Speaker 3: I mean, we're talking about literally slowing down someone's gut
Speaker 3: at age thirteen years old. At the same time, we're
Speaker 3: learning a lot about the gut brain you know, what
Speaker 3: is it the gut brain barrier, and the impact of
Speaker 3: the gut on mental health and depression and all these
Speaker 3: other things. He likes, and you know, advocates for natural,
Speaker 3: natural quote unquote remedies. I mean, even the whole raw
Speaker 3: milk thing. And this is where actually where I think
Speaker 3: he is generally correct on the public health establishment. There
Speaker 3: are some things like the public health people who are
Speaker 3: quote unquote banning raw milk and says it's like, look,
Speaker 3: if you look at the data, is it slightly more
Speaker 3: like unsafe? Yeah, But it's at the same time, like
Speaker 3: there's so many other things that are out there which
Speaker 3: are not banned after ten fifteen thousand times.
Speaker 4: People, if you want to drink raw mil let him drink.
Speaker 1: It and got diarrhea, Like my guy, No, but it's not.
Speaker 3: It's just that it's like, look, if they believe in
Speaker 3: the soak, I mean, there are like you just pointed
Speaker 3: out under FDA does not look at any of the stuff,
Speaker 3: but there are things you can buy over the counter
Speaker 3: which are ten to fifteen thousand time.
Speaker 2: But that's kind of my point, Sager, is that so
Speaker 2: RFK and people with his mindset and a lot of
Speaker 2: his supporters are endlessly skeptical of like, you know, actually
Speaker 2: FDA approved drugs which do have to go through a
Speaker 2: rigorous process.
Speaker 1: Is that process perfect? Is there? Of course?
Speaker 2: But there is a rigorous process in place to prove efficacy, okay,
Speaker 2: And then they're endlessly credulous about like some bullshit supplement
Speaker 2: because it's got like a natural health whatever or some
Speaker 2: weird remedy that they read on the internet that has
Speaker 2: absolutely no efficacy and is just being sold by a
Speaker 2: literal snake oil salesman. That's my issue, And you know,
Speaker 2: I mean with regard to RFK, like he doesn't He
Speaker 2: has been skeptical over whether HIV actually causes AIDS. He
Speaker 2: thinks COVID was caused created by Jewish people and Chinese
Speaker 2: people and doesn't affect them. He thinks wi FI causes cancer.
Speaker 2: He thinks different chemicals are making kids trans he's anti vacs.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just like he thinks anti depressants are
Speaker 2: the reason for mass shootings.
Speaker 3: There's just nothing that one there's the most efficacy for that, No,
Speaker 3: there's not.
Speaker 2: Probably most mass shooters are actually probably need to be
Speaker 2: on more meds.
Speaker 3: The real problem Actually most of them are addicted to
Speaker 3: weed and antidepressants.
Speaker 4: But that's a whole other story that people aren't ready for. No, no,
Speaker 4: but our depression.
Speaker 2: But I was critical of this when it was inside
Speaker 2: of the Democratic Party, to this complete rejection, like belief
Speaker 2: that anything that's natural like weed, must inherently be less
Speaker 2: harmful and less bad for you, right like if, oh,
Speaker 2: if nature provided it, it must be better for you.
Speaker 2: And that's just like that's just not true, and I
Speaker 2: think it can lead to very damaging outcomes as we've seen,
Speaker 2: Like I said, when RFK Junior has had impacts on
Speaker 2: people's health, you ended up with eighty some people in
Speaker 2: Samoa dying.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: So the thing is is that when you're talking about
Speaker 3: damaging outcomes, look at the damage of the public health
Speaker 3: I think structure, and I think ten it's a million times.
Speaker 1: I think you have to.
Speaker 2: Ask yourself, though, why if your goal is to improve
Speaker 2: people's health outcomes and lower like improve life expectancy, all
Speaker 2: of these things, why universal health care isn't a part
Speaker 2: of that at all? When that is the major thing
Speaker 2: that sets us apart from you know, the rest of
Speaker 2: the developed world who have not seen these massive declines
Speaker 2: in terms of their you know, life expectancy. And is
Speaker 2: it the only thing? No, but is it a critical part.
Speaker 2: Any honest conversation has to say that is a critical part.
Speaker 2: But that would require going after the health insurance CUD.
Speaker 2: That would require something other than libertarian like you can
Speaker 2: drink your raw milk and whatever approach and just destroying
Speaker 2: the FDA and like destroying the NIH and just burning
Speaker 2: it all down, as you said.
Speaker 1: And I do think there's a bit.
Speaker 2: I think you're right that there's a big instinct among
Speaker 2: the public that just like, screw all these institutions, let's
Speaker 2: just burn them all to the ground.
Speaker 1: And RFK channels a.
Speaker 4: Lot of that.
Speaker 2: But if you don't that's I mean, this is sort
Speaker 2: of like a core problem with libertarian as is that
Speaker 2: if you don't do the work to check corporate power
Speaker 2: and to actually have a government that is strong enough
Speaker 2: to act that is, you know, not corrupt, to act
Speaker 2: as a check on those corporate influences, then you're going
Speaker 2: to end up in a very bad place. And I
Speaker 2: think that's what his ideology is and certainly is what
Speaker 2: it's likely to be expressed as through you know, a
Speaker 2: trumpet mess.
Speaker 3: I mean, look possible in terms of corporate capture, cronyism, etc.
Speaker 3: He does also want to end a lot of the pharma,
Speaker 3: you know, corruption, and look, I have my own issues
Speaker 3: with RFK Junior, Okay, in terms of his California nineteen
Speaker 3: seventies liberalism and the way that it's applied to nuclear power,
Speaker 3: and just like the general way that he's like you know,
Speaker 3: you just said in terms of is very accepting of
Speaker 3: what three Mile island and the fact that it can't
Speaker 3: get an insurance policy. So I'm not saying he's a
Speaker 3: perfect person, but in the world where people have deep
Speaker 3: distrust of the medical establishment and of the healthcare system.
Speaker 4: R K Junior is the natural, you know, extension of this.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 3: Whether he gets confirmed or not, I don't know. But
Speaker 3: I have been thinking about it, and I think America
Speaker 3: actually does to see what it voted for. I've been
Speaker 3: thinking about this a lot. America voted for a blow
Speaker 3: up the institution's option. I think Matt Gates should be picked.
Speaker 3: I think or should get confirmed Pete hag Seth, RFK
Speaker 3: Junior and all of it. America should see what it's
Speaker 3: actually like. For years, we've actually wanted to blow shit up.
Speaker 3: Let's see what it looks like. If it's chaos, and
Speaker 3: if it's terrible, you're, you know, welcome to vote the
Speaker 3: other ways. But there is like a grotesque, weird thing
Speaker 3: happening here where we don't. In some ways, the Republicans
Speaker 3: are like trying to protect Trump from himself. It's like, no,
Speaker 3: he's a grown ass man and he knows exactly what is.
Speaker 3: But I also think people know what they voted for
Speaker 3: in a certain sense, and they want to see everything.
Speaker 3: You don't get burned to the ground. And I honestly
Speaker 3: I'm excited to see it too. I want to see him, like,
Speaker 3: are my instincts correct or am I totally wrong? And
Speaker 3: you know, even on the universal healthcare front, and this
Speaker 3: is the fundamental problem when you have lack of trust
Speaker 3: and institutions. Nobody including me, is signing enough for government healthcare.
Speaker 3: I'm not signing enough for a COVID vaccine. You know,
Speaker 3: Oh you can't go get your cold, you know, flu
Speaker 3: appointment because you didn't take the COVID.
Speaker 4: No, no, no.
Speaker 3: And then that's the issue, is that after a world
Speaker 3: where public health and all these other people have tried
Speaker 3: to impose a regime on our lives and they failed
Speaker 3: dramatically after their system has been crasically created in one
Speaker 3: of the most obese countries in the entire world. So
Speaker 3: what is it were we second to Katar, If we
Speaker 3: look at our childhood, obesity and all these other things
Speaker 3: are our food system, why would we trust to the government,
Speaker 3: you know, to take over it. So to solve that,
Speaker 3: you know, you really do actually need the safety of
Speaker 3: the transparency and a lot of the change in the
Speaker 3: system that I think to arrive at that would require
Speaker 3: actually a fundamental revolution in the American people's trust in institutions.
Speaker 4: Right now, that's rock bottom.
Speaker 3: RFK Matt Gates, p hegseeth all these other people their
Speaker 3: choice to have one thing in common, what they want
Speaker 3: to burn the bureaucracy to the ground.
Speaker 4: And frankly America voted for that.
Speaker 3: Donald Trump himself he doesn't care about anything except for that.
Speaker 3: So we should see it, like we should actually see
Speaker 3: what it's like in practice. And people can complain if
Speaker 3: you lose your I don't know, if no drug gets
Speaker 3: developed or whatever, it's like, Okay, well that is what
Speaker 3: you voted for.
Speaker 4: Let's be honest, like that's actually what we voted for.
Speaker 3: If the Department of Justice gets gutted and nothing, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever works for six years, where we get the Russigate
Speaker 3: and all that stuff out of there, frankly, I'd be
Speaker 3: fine with that. But the point is is that is
Speaker 3: what people voted for. So to a certain point, like
Speaker 3: we do have to respect quote unquote the will of
Speaker 3: the people and what they have been asking for it
Speaker 3: under Donald Trump, but also over the last twenty years,
Speaker 3: and that is an erosion of trust to the point
Speaker 3: where these institutions don't work for them, They don't trust
Speaker 3: a word that they have to say, and whether it's
Speaker 3: good for them or not. I mean in a certain
Speaker 3: sense that you have, like people have their destiny in
Speaker 3: their hands. That's what they decided to do at the
Speaker 3: ballot box. Donald Trump won the popular vote. I mean,
Speaker 3: at a certain point we just have to say, okay,
Speaker 3: you get what you want, you know, And I really
Speaker 3: think that's where I'm at with RFK Junior is look
Speaker 3: like I said, I have my own problems with them.
Speaker 3: I have a very different vision of what the government
Speaker 3: would and would run like not necessarily with RFK, but
Speaker 3: you know, under what quote unquote advance administration. But I'm
Speaker 3: not the median voter. You know, people voted for this,
Speaker 3: and that's what they that's what they seem.
Speaker 1: To I mean, I think I actually think that's there.
Speaker 2: The only thing I would say, like, you know, to
Speaker 2: read like an ideologically consistent mandate into any election result,
Speaker 2: I think as a fool's errand because I mean, if
Speaker 2: you ask people still, people are overwhelmingly in favor of
Speaker 2: universal health care, so you know, to just say, you know,
Speaker 2: what they just voted for was to burn it down,
Speaker 2: that's certainly one element of it. But I also think
Speaker 2: that there's a lot of ideological inconsistencies among the American people,
Speaker 2: to say the least. But the other thing that's funny
Speaker 2: to me to your point soccer is I think a
Speaker 2: lot of people, especially the sort of like more like
Speaker 2: billionaire or Wall Street backers of Trump, I think they
Speaker 2: really convinced themselves that he didn't really.
Speaker 4: Mean Yeah, No, they definitely did.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about that with Jeff.
Speaker 2: I mean you even expressed like, I don't think he's
Speaker 2: going to do it now he I think the assumption
Speaker 2: should be at this point he meant the things that
Speaker 2: he said on the trail.
Speaker 1: Like he meant it.
Speaker 2: And there was a clip of what was the sname,
Speaker 2: Howard Lutnick who's one of the co chairs of the
Speaker 2: transition on CNN, who is getting asked about RFK Junior,
Speaker 2: and Caitlyn Collins is like, you know, isn't it going
Speaker 2: to be a problem if he's HGS secretary And he's like,
Speaker 2: there's no way that's going to happen. She's like really,
Speaker 2: because that's what's being floated and he's like, no, not
Speaker 2: a chance. And this is one of the co chairs
Speaker 2: of the transition and here's r f K Junior. And
Speaker 2: I also think all the speculation and soccer I'm curious
Speaker 2: your perspective on this of like, oh, the Gates nomination
Speaker 2: is just like a distraction to try to really get
Speaker 2: heag set through whatever. Like, No, I think Trump wants
Speaker 2: these people. I think he wants all of them, and
Speaker 2: I think he plans to get them, and if you know,
Speaker 2: and I think he probably will get almost all of them,
Speaker 2: whether it's through acting appointments or you know, he's he's
Speaker 2: got to play and lay down where I don't want
Speaker 2: to get into all the technical minutia right now, but
Speaker 2: where he can actually use the powers of the presidency
Speaker 2: to force the Senate into recess and then get whatever
Speaker 2: appointments he won once and they don't have to face
Speaker 2: any sort of vote in a Senate. So, yeah, you've
Speaker 2: got a bunch of people out there who are like mom,
Speaker 2: RFK Junior is not pro life, And that's kind of
Speaker 2: a big problem for the pro life community because the
Speaker 2: FDA is very important in terms of the myth of
Speaker 2: pristone regulation. You know, most abortions in this country at
Speaker 2: this point are medication abortions mif of pristone. You know this,
Speaker 2: sobeig is the number one way like abortions have actually
Speaker 2: gone up post the overturning of Row versus WAD, because
Speaker 2: of the availability of myf of pristone, the FDA could
Speaker 2: roll back that authorization. So you know, the pro life
Speaker 2: community is not gonna be happy about the fact r
Speaker 2: FFK Junior at least seems to be more or less
Speaker 2: pro choice and is unlikely to use those agencies as
Speaker 2: a cudgel, which something you know that I'm happy about
Speaker 2: with regard to the choice of RFK Junior is not
Speaker 2: likely to use those agencies as a cudgel against abortion rights,
Speaker 2: but they may not really have their say. I think
Speaker 2: Trump wants these people, and I think he's probably going
Speaker 2: to get them.
Speaker 3: I think you are right, and that's another reason why
Speaker 3: I really just think they should all be confirmed. And
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess to wrap things up, I think
Speaker 3: in the big, big picture, there are institutions that will
Speaker 3: check Donald Trump. But also he is going to be
Speaker 3: the president of the United States, imbued with immense power.
Speaker 3: So the cabinet officials and the appointees and all that stuff,
Speaker 3: yeah they should. And then you know, and just in general,
Speaker 3: like for what the Republicans and all these other people
Speaker 3: are saying, like, oh, maybe we'll vote against some I'm like, listen,
Speaker 3: this is actually on ironically, this is what America wanted.
Speaker 3: They don't want Bush two point zero. It's pretty clear.
Speaker 3: I think you're doing a whole monologu about why I've
Speaker 3: both working class voters. I mean, not to give it away,
Speaker 3: but isn't it that a lot of them hate the
Speaker 3: system and they.
Speaker 2: Like, well that actually yes, but actually a lot of
Speaker 2: it had to do it with Gaza or It's like
Speaker 2: a surprising number that were like, actually Gaza was important
Speaker 2: to me, which even I was surprised by the number
Speaker 2: who have said that got it.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, of course that's a big part of it,
Speaker 3: but I would say like, in general, this feeling of
Speaker 3: this system is broken and we have to blow it
Speaker 3: up completely. Is the major through line between Tulsi. I mean,
Speaker 3: really think about it. You know, you asked me once,
Speaker 3: You're like, how how can we put together people who
Speaker 3: are warmongers and Tulsi Gabbard or whatever who are up
Speaker 3: there on the same stage, And I was like, it's
Speaker 3: about grievance, It's about blowing shit up. At the end
Speaker 3: of the day, MSG, that's what they wanted, That's what
Speaker 3: people actually voted for so I say that's what you
Speaker 3: should give them and then see if they like the
Speaker 3: consequences or not. I'm curious too, I've always wanted to know,
Speaker 3: like what would it actually look like. It's exciting, and
Speaker 3: so I think in general, just like looking at all
Speaker 3: of this, you know, and look the counter the real
Speaker 3: reason you should also want all these people to come
Speaker 3: through is if it's a total disaster, then honestly you
Speaker 3: can finally say it's been tried and it didn't work.
Speaker 3: And I think that's another reason why you know, people
Speaker 3: in certain sense, like who are trying to continue the
Speaker 3: permanent bureaucracy, you're actually undermining any counter case you could
Speaker 3: ever give to why these things won't work. You'll finally
Speaker 3: get to see what it's actually like in practice. We
Speaker 3: saw a little bit last time, but this time for real,
Speaker 3: like in the actual mechanisms of the government.
Speaker 4: So anyway, I know it's a long winded way. Do
Speaker 4: you have Jeff Stein standing by?
Speaker 8: So sure?
Speaker 4: Yeah, do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go and jump.
Speaker 4: To Jeff.
Speaker 3: Joining us now is friend of the show, Jeff Stein
Speaker 3: from the Washington Post. Good to see my friend.
Speaker 9: Thanks caving back.
Speaker 4: Absolutely all right, let's go and put this up there
Speaker 4: on the screen.
Speaker 3: You've been doing some incredible reporting about inside the Trump
Speaker 3: transition team and some tension between Elon Musk and some
Speaker 3: of Trump's advisors, including Trump himself. So Elon apparently has
Speaker 3: not left mar A Lago. Trump even name checked him
Speaker 3: in the speech and was like, I can't get him
Speaker 3: to get out of here.
Speaker 4: He won't leave me alone.
Speaker 3: You saw a clip of Trump actually smacking Elon while
Speaker 3: I was using his phone at the UFC. So there's
Speaker 3: some stuff going on behind the scenes. But for our purposes,
Speaker 3: it appears that Elon has intervened directly in a fight
Speaker 3: around tariffs and specifically the Treasury secretary. So what can
Speaker 3: you tell us about what's going on inside right now?
Speaker 10: So just outside quickly. Elon Musk tweeted yesterday that he
Speaker 10: thinks that it's really good that Argentina massively slashed tariffs, and.
Speaker 9: That was the first like what.
Speaker 4: Is going on we had that?
Speaker 3: Actually, can we put that on the screen. Continue to
Speaker 3: talk to so people can see.
Speaker 10: He's gonna be like the Trump co president. You can't
Speaker 10: go around saying actually, the number one domestic policy priority
Speaker 10: of the president is stupid, like it seemed like an
Speaker 10: incredible thing for him to be saying. And then a
Speaker 10: few hours later he went on X again and said
Speaker 10: something that I even more annoyed the people I talked
Speaker 10: to in the Trump or a bit, which was that
Speaker 10: Trump should pick Howard Lutnik, one of the two candidates
Speaker 10: for Treasury secretary. Up until really that point, Musk, you know,
Speaker 10: he is around mar A Lago all the time, He's
Speaker 10: around Trump all the time. There's a sense, you know,
Speaker 10: it's hard to tell with Trump personally, but certainly among
Speaker 10: Trump advisors that I've spoken to, they are already fed
Speaker 10: up with Musk. They think he doesn't really understand Washington.
Speaker 10: They think he doesn't really know what he's doing. Maybe,
Speaker 10: you know, from the perspective of people who want, you know,
Speaker 10: massive changes, that that is maybe an asset. That's what
Speaker 10: he's bringing, sort of fresh eyes, fresh perspective, not you know,
Speaker 10: burdened by by what has been but but so two
Speaker 10: moves by Musk in one day that said, you know,
Speaker 10: I have strong views that that are not sort of
Speaker 10: just falling in line with what the leader of this
Speaker 10: train is saying. And it's still early and there's I
Speaker 10: still think they're in the honeymoon romance period, but how
Speaker 10: long that goes on for when Musk is sort of
Speaker 10: famous to U sort of drop pet fascinations after a
Speaker 10: few months getting tired of them, It's true, will be
Speaker 10: a fascinating story.
Speaker 2: Trump Trump also known for dropping those pet fascinations, at
Speaker 2: least in the in when they're human beings. Tell us
Speaker 2: about these different potential treasury choices, and you know how
Speaker 2: they differ ideologically in what some of the policy implications
Speaker 2: could be.
Speaker 10: Yeah, it's a little tricky because I think some of this,
Speaker 10: you know, gets a little overdetermined, where it's like, because
Speaker 10: a candidate is not as strong on one thing, it
Speaker 10: becomes that that are weak on this thing. And so
Speaker 10: you sort of get these like over dramatized in the
Speaker 10: press and frankly in some of my stories versions of
Speaker 10: what each of the candidates represents when it's much more
Speaker 10: sort of contingent and hard to tell.
Speaker 9: The two candidates.
Speaker 10: As we were discussing, I feel like most people like
Speaker 10: go to sleep when I start talking about this. But
Speaker 10: Scott Bessen's is this hedge fund executive who, despite working
Speaker 10: for George Soros, which is kind of an amazing thing,
Speaker 10: has become one of Trump's most trusted economic advisors. As
Speaker 10: Sager and I were discussing before the show started, he
Speaker 10: is not just quite a normal Wall Street guy. He
Speaker 10: is quite strong on a lot of the trade stuff
Speaker 10: that Trump people.
Speaker 9: Have long wanted.
Speaker 10: But I think it's fair to say that they also
Speaker 10: worry that he's not quite as into let's say, universal tariffs,
Speaker 10: which would you create huge import duties on every US
Speaker 10: trading partner in Vestin's I think it's fair to say,
Speaker 10: or fair to wonder about his commitment to that cause.
Speaker 10: And then the second candidate is this guy, Howard Latna.
Speaker 10: He's been chaired co chair of the Trump transition team.
Speaker 10: Lutnick is also a Wall Street guy, so I think
Speaker 10: it's a little unfair to be like he is the
Speaker 10: trade hawk in the race, but he he has been.
Speaker 10: I think it's fair to say, more willing to embrace
Speaker 10: tariff's than that, and more and more sort of forthright
Speaker 10: in that. But I think, possibly even more importantly, Lutnick
Speaker 10: doesn't really have sort of the independent power base. Like
Speaker 10: if we're thinking of analogs to other Trump cabinet positions,
Speaker 10: I think Lutnick is much more similar to that Gates
Speaker 10: and that he is kind of with Trump or he's
Speaker 10: no one. Essen is a megabillionaire who has clout abroad,
Speaker 10: who has constituencies on the Hill, who has sort of
Speaker 10: you know, people that he can turn you to back
Speaker 10: them up that aren't just Trump. And I think there's
Speaker 10: a sense that, well Lutnick has the endorsement of Mosque
Speaker 10: and some others, he is is more of a sort
Speaker 10: of loyalist surrogate, you know, critics would say lapdog crony type.
Speaker 9: And so that's how this race is broken down.
Speaker 10: And Trump's seems to be just getting annoyed that these
Speaker 10: people just keep sniping at each other, taking pot shots,
Speaker 10: criticizing each other. I heard, we reported broke over the
Speaker 10: weekend that Besson's people went to Trump and were saying, hey, look,
Speaker 10: Lutnick hosted a Hillary Clinton fundraiser in twenty sixteen. Lutin's
Speaker 10: people were coming back and saying, Besson like works for Soros,
Speaker 10: He's like friends with like people in the deep state.
Speaker 10: He's not that serious about your trade stuff. And Trump
Speaker 10: seems to be like, you know what, screw both you guys.
Speaker 10: I'm going to look for a third candidate. The fundamental
Speaker 10: like as Christly, we were alluding to, like the fundamental
Speaker 10: structural problem for Trump is that he wants massive tariffs
Speaker 10: to rebalance global trade, which I think is an expression
Speaker 10: of like a genuine popular sentiment in the country. But
Speaker 10: he also, you know, wants line to go up, like
Speaker 10: he loves stomachs, Like Trump is a Wall Street guy,
Speaker 10: and so those visions are fundamentally incompatible. Someone who is
Speaker 10: very strong on trade will be someone who the market's
Speaker 10: freak out about, and someone who the markets won't freak
Speaker 10: out about will be weak on trade. And so how
Speaker 10: Trump reconciles both of those, I think it's going to
Speaker 10: be really hard to see.
Speaker 3: And getting to that, Jeff, you know, what are the
Speaker 3: tensions already in the economic team? So Larry Kudlow it
Speaker 3: appears as back of National Economics Council. Larry could not
Speaker 3: be more anti tariff in terms of all of his
Speaker 3: personal commentary and his background. Now we have two Treasury
Speaker 3: Secretary candidates that are talking here about tariffs, and then
Speaker 3: Bob Leitheiser, who is probably one of the most legitimate
Speaker 3: pro tariff's former US Trade representative, is allegedly in the mix,
Speaker 3: either for trade representative or possibly for trade secretary.
Speaker 4: So is it.
Speaker 3: Basically a repeat of last time around? How do you
Speaker 3: think it will happen this time?
Speaker 10: You know, if Trump had come out and picked best
Speaker 10: sent right away, I think you could see him have
Speaker 10: playing the same role essentially as Mnuchi, which was, you know,
Speaker 10: to kind of rein in Trump's impulses on tariffs and say, okay,
Speaker 10: let's like basically preserve the global financial order without like
Speaker 10: literally overturning the table. And the fact that Trump hasn't
Speaker 10: gone down that route I think based on my reporting,
Speaker 10: I mean this, this reporting is really hard because not
Speaker 10: you know, you talk to people who say Trump said this,
Speaker 10: and then you know he likes this candidate, and then
Speaker 10: you ask them like and then you know, your call
Speaker 10: your editors and say, oh this, I got this great intel,
Speaker 10: like this guy is supporting this candidate, like Trump is
Speaker 10: looking at him closely, and then you think about it
Speaker 10: more and then you're like, wait, who do you support?
Speaker 10: And then that person will often be supporting the candidate
Speaker 10: that they're leaking is in the mix.
Speaker 9: So it's this.
Speaker 10: Like weird delicate dance you have to do as a reporter.
Speaker 10: But my I think the evidence that the evidence I've
Speaker 10: gathered suggests that Trump Trump does not want a repeat
Speaker 10: of his first administration when they really just kind of
Speaker 10: tinkered around the edges of the global trade system. I
Speaker 10: think he wants to go big, and I think the
Speaker 10: Gates pick I think other things he's done suggest that he,
Speaker 10: like as you guys were discussing before I came on,
Speaker 10: he's serious about about this new world order, this this
Speaker 10: like very transformative moment, and wants to pursue that. And
Speaker 10: you know, is he willing to do that at the
Speaker 10: expense of the Wall Street of the stock market like that?
Speaker 10: We're gonna have to see, But he's he's definitely thinking
Speaker 10: about it.
Speaker 9: He's nothing toring with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask you about, Jeff,
Speaker 2: because you for a while been saying the Wall Street
Speaker 2: backers of Trump, or those even who just were sort
Speaker 2: of comfortable with another Trump term, they just didn't really
Speaker 2: take him seriously when he was like, no, guys, I'm serious.
Speaker 2: I want an across the board import tax on everything,
Speaker 2: ten twenty percent, maybe two hundred percent, Like I want
Speaker 2: to do this, and they're like, yeah, but Trump says
Speaker 2: a lot of things, and to your point, I think
Speaker 2: we now have every indication that, like, no, the things
Speaker 2: that he said, he genuinely is inclined to do. So,
Speaker 2: you know, do you think that there is what is
Speaker 2: the sense on Wall Street now that that's becoming increasingly clear?
Speaker 2: And if there is, what are some of the mechanisms
Speaker 2: he could use to not have to go through Congress
Speaker 2: to have a you know, massive implementation of some sort
Speaker 2: of terriffy and what do you think the impacts of
Speaker 2: that would likely be?
Speaker 10: Yeah, there are people in Washington, as you guys know,
Speaker 10: who get paid, you know, two or three times when
Speaker 10: I get paid, and their job is like to gather
Speaker 10: corporate intelligence for their clients. And I talk to them,
Speaker 10: and I think they are totally wrong about this because,
Speaker 10: as you were alluding to, congressional Republicans and corporate leaders
Speaker 10: and donors have been very convinced that Trump is bluffing
Speaker 10: with all this tariff stuff. They think it's a negotiating
Speaker 10: tactic to scare other foreign countries into doing what we
Speaker 10: want to do. They think that Trump, you know, is
Speaker 10: throwing red meat on the campaign trail to his voters.
Speaker 10: The way like if you listen to him, if you
Speaker 10: listen to what Trump says, I mean, again, I could
Speaker 10: be wrong, but if you listen to the words coming
Speaker 10: out of his mouth, he says tariffs are the greatest
Speaker 10: thing ever invented. He called them the best word in
Speaker 10: the dictionary. He said that there are no downsides to them.
Speaker 10: He said that they could pay off the national debt,
Speaker 10: fund a national childcare program, and allow us maybe to
Speaker 10: abolish the income tax. This is not a guy who
Speaker 10: is looking at this tool in uh, maybe it'll have
Speaker 10: some upside, maybe it'll have some downside. Way if if
Speaker 10: the reality proves to be that way, which I think
Speaker 10: it would, maybe he'll pull back from the brink. But
Speaker 10: the reality is every public, every evidence that he every
Speaker 10: piece of evidence that he's giving us, suggest that he's
Speaker 10: dead serious.
Speaker 9: To me about this, and a lot.
Speaker 10: Of the business leaders and big donors, they see Trump
Speaker 10: as a vehicle for tax cuts and are hoping that
Speaker 10: this is just kind of overstated. And that has always
Speaker 10: seemed to me to be like an incredibly rest risky bet.
Speaker 9: I mean, I don't have millions of dollars to give
Speaker 9: away on the.
Speaker 10: Campaign, but like it does seem like like like he's
Speaker 10: very serious. And to your legal question, Trump has national
Speaker 10: security authority under AEPA, the law that governs sanctions, to
Speaker 10: declare a national security emergency and impose traffs on who
Speaker 10: whatever country he wants.
Speaker 9: And that is something that the courts you could.
Speaker 10: Adjudicate, but it could take years, by which point all
Speaker 10: of the trade measures that Trump wants would already be
Speaker 10: in effect.
Speaker 2: Right, one more for you, Jeff from me. And I
Speaker 2: don't know if Soccer has anything else. But another piece
Speaker 2: of analysis that I've questioned, and I think maybe you've
Speaker 2: questioned as well, is that the DOGE agency that was
Speaker 2: given to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, which is kind
Speaker 2: of giving, like you know, Blue Ribbon commission, like here's
Speaker 2: the thing for you to play with and go away,
Speaker 2: that it may not be as meaningless as it has
Speaker 2: been portrayed at times. And that also this administration has
Speaker 2: explored ways that they could avoid having to go through
Speaker 2: a filibuster, et cetera to institute massive government spending cuts.
Speaker 2: That's something that most of the Republican Party would also
Speaker 2: be on board with. So what is your reading of
Speaker 2: the import of DOGE.
Speaker 10: Yeah, this is another thing I spoke to someone who
Speaker 10: works for a military defense contractor last week who was saying, like,
Speaker 10: we're going to be fine, like Congress needs to approve
Speaker 10: whatever Elon and Vivek come up with. Then I was like,
Speaker 10: how do you guys get paid so much to do
Speaker 10: this work that this is not necessarily true? If you
Speaker 10: look at Trump's omb chief, this is the person who
Speaker 10: oversees the budget.
Speaker 9: His name is Russ Vote.
Speaker 10: In the first term, it's a little unclear because he
Speaker 10: was associated with Project twenty twenty five whether he'll get
Speaker 10: that spot back, but assuming he does, which I think
Speaker 10: he will. He has spent the last several years in
Speaker 10: the Biden administration working on legal theories related to something
Speaker 10: called empowerment. Impoundment is the president's ability to say I
Speaker 10: don't want this spending program to continue because I think
Speaker 10: the original purpose that Congress authorized is no longer valid.
Speaker 9: And Russ Vote and.
Speaker 10: Some of the lawyers close to him who are already
Speaker 10: on the Trump team have spent a lot of time
Speaker 10: thinking about how do we use this legal theory of
Speaker 10: empowerment to stop spending on federal programs we don't like.
Speaker 10: And that is a huge potential constitutional showdown here because
Speaker 10: what it means is that the president could say Congress
Speaker 10: approved this, but I don't want to do it, and
Speaker 10: so I'm going.
Speaker 9: To stop this federal program.
Speaker 10: And that that means the Veka and Elonic if that's real,
Speaker 10: if they if they either win in the court or
Speaker 10: just want to try, that could change the entire complexion
Speaker 10: of a blue driven commission that puts up non binding
Speaker 10: recommendations to the Hill that the Hill just says like
Speaker 10: f off, like I already.
Speaker 9: Authorized these programs.
Speaker 10: And so I think people are really sleeping on the
Speaker 10: possibility that Elon and Vivek do much more than I
Speaker 10: think the conventional wisdom even among like well paid lobbyists
Speaker 10: in Washington.
Speaker 3: I think that's a really important point on both of those,
Speaker 3: which is that it's possible, and it would require novel
Speaker 3: legal theories. I know, and I've heard very much similar
Speaker 3: about the pursuit of this. That said, last time around, Jeff,
Speaker 3: you know, he didn't say many things about tariffs. He
Speaker 3: did back down, he did, you know, ultimately carried through
Speaker 3: some national security tariffs on soybeans, you know, et cetera,
Speaker 3: and a few other things. But by and large, there
Speaker 3: was a huge war with congressional Republicans day on. As
Speaker 3: you said about trying to divert funds. He tried to
Speaker 3: do that on the border wall. It was a colossal failure,
Speaker 3: got struck down by the court. So there are several
Speaker 3: systems in place which could seriously throw a wrench into
Speaker 3: his plans here.
Speaker 10: Now, no, that's totally true, and you know it's hard
Speaker 10: to you know, know how to wait these things. I
Speaker 10: think the impoundment thing, you know, they got a shot
Speaker 10: with the Conservative Supreme Court.
Speaker 9: My understanding is, you know from.
Speaker 10: People close to this that they're looking at sort of
Speaker 10: like what what is an example of an obviously wasteful
Speaker 10: program that like is spending money that the White House
Speaker 10: clearly has an interest in stopping. Can they get the
Speaker 10: Supreme Court to approve their theory in that case and
Speaker 10: then go and implement all these other ones that are
Speaker 10: maybe like more edge cases. In terms of the tariffs,
Speaker 10: whether he does an automatic twenty percent tariff on every country. Again,
Speaker 10: as you're saying, like there is a lot of resistance
Speaker 10: among Congressional Republicans to going down that route. My understanding
Speaker 10: from Trump transition officials that they are working on proposals
Speaker 10: to do that. So if they backed down when the
Speaker 10: Robert hits the road like, maybe they will and we'll
Speaker 10: hopefully you talk about it then, but I think they're
Speaker 10: going to try.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they certainly might, Jeff. We always appreciate your analysis, sir,
Speaker 3: Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 1: Great to see it, Jeff love being on.
Speaker 4: Thanks guys, Yeah, a pleasure. All right.
Speaker 2: So let's get back to some of the nominations that
Speaker 2: have already been made and curious for Soccer's reaction.
Speaker 1: To these as well.
Speaker 2: So we have Matt Gates, who has been nominated to
Speaker 2: serve as Attorney General of the United States. Let's put
Speaker 2: this up on the screen. There are some questions over
Speaker 2: whether or not mister Gates would be confirmed as Attorney General.
Speaker 2: He has been himself investigated by the Department of Justice
Speaker 2: for alleged sex trafficking. They drop that investigation. He's also
Speaker 2: been investigated by a Republican led House Ethics Committee into
Speaker 2: a similar allegation. And we can get into a little
Speaker 2: bit more of the specifics, but in any case, he's
Speaker 2: also just not really particularly well liked on Capitol Hill
Speaker 2: amongst anyone.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it has nothing to do with policy.
Speaker 3: It has almost all to do with well, the Kevin
Speaker 3: McCarthy thing, and being a grandstander.
Speaker 2: Is a hard person to get along with. Yeah, in
Speaker 2: my personal experience, personal experience, he is a difficult person
Speaker 2: to like as a human being. So anyway, according to
Speaker 2: NBC's report, I've seen some other reporting to this effect
Speaker 2: as well. More than half of Senate Republicans, including someone
Speaker 2: senior leadership, privately say they do not see a path
Speaker 2: for Matt Gates to be confirmed as Attorney general would
Speaker 2: not support him to lead the Department of Justice. While Gates'
Speaker 2: ability to be confirmed the right appears on the rocks
Speaker 2: amongst Senate Republicans, President like Trump's team remains confident he
Speaker 2: will eventually be confirmed, even if.
Speaker 1: It's after an ugly battle.
Speaker 2: NBC News spoke to more than fifteen additional Republican sources
Speaker 2: who agreed there are not enough votes in the Senate
Speaker 2: to confirm Gates, and some estimated that closer to thirty
Speaker 2: Republicans consider him an qualified In your thoughts.
Speaker 3: I mean this relates to the RFK junior discussion. I
Speaker 3: think this is what America voted for. I think Donald
Speaker 3: Trump was serious whenever he said schedule F fire. Everybody
Speaker 3: the Department of Justice is going to What did JD. Say,
Speaker 3: he's going to be the most important part of it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what Gates is. Gates is a loyalist on policy.
Speaker 4: I mean, he's actually an interesting guy, right, I mean, he's.
Speaker 3: I don't like that he's very pro weed, but he
Speaker 3: is very consistently pro weed. He's a lot more libertarian wants.
Speaker 3: What does he wants to pardon Julian Assange, to pardon
Speaker 3: Edward Snowden. He is genuinely anti war, has been worked
Speaker 3: with Rocanna previously in the past. So, I mean, if
Speaker 3: you were to ask me, like relative to some of
Speaker 3: the other picks, I actually don't think he's bad. Will
Speaker 3: he get through that is an open question in fact,
Speaker 3: But this is actually one two where we were talking
Speaker 3: about this on the phone, and I still it really
Speaker 3: remains to be seeing if Trump wants somebody through.
Speaker 4: I do feel like he's going to get intane.
Speaker 3: And the question around Gates is was this all some
Speaker 3: jiu jitsu maneuver to avoid the House ethics committed.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's certainly possible.
Speaker 3: Kevin McCarthy has been insinuating from the very beginning that
Speaker 3: this entire McCarthy coup was revenge against Kevin McCarthy because
Speaker 3: he's like, I've seen the text messages, I've seen the
Speaker 3: ethics report. I'm you know, whether any of that's gonna
Speaker 3: come to fruition. I mean, the charges against Gates, like
Speaker 3: the image of it is not great. I mean, I
Speaker 3: will say in his defense, the charges genuinely were dropped
Speaker 3: by the DOJ, and all the allegations and stuff were
Speaker 3: leaked against him. That's that even if what he was
Speaker 3: doing was legal, like honestly, let's be honest, like it's
Speaker 3: skeevie and it's gross, right, and even terms of even
Speaker 3: the legality of like what he was up to at
Speaker 3: that time, will it be enough to sink him? Come on,
Speaker 3: you know, in the age where first of all, you know,
Speaker 3: what did RFK tell me about skeletons in his closet?
Speaker 3: Like in the age where these people are knowingly put up,
Speaker 3: and especially in a backlash against me too, and then
Speaker 3: the post Kavanaugh era, I don't see some sexual harassment
Speaker 3: allegation or whatever against somebody sinking at it.
Speaker 4: I mean, I really don't.
Speaker 2: Well, there's a few things to say about that. First,
Speaker 2: First of all, the allegation that we could put let's
Speaker 2: put a seven up on the screen which has some
Speaker 2: of the details here of the allegations. A woman told
Speaker 2: the House Ethics Committee that she saw Matt Gates have
Speaker 2: sex with a minor. That minor alleged to be seventeen
Speaker 2: years old. You have both the minor herself and the
Speaker 2: client who allegedly witnessed this testifying to these events. You know,
Speaker 2: it is something that the Republican Party has been running
Speaker 2: around for years now talking endlessly about the Democratic Party
Speaker 2: being filled with pedophiles and the whole Qann conspiracy theory
Speaker 2: and obsessed with Epstein et cetera, et cetera. And then
Speaker 2: your literal candidate for Attorney General, chief law Enforcement officer
Speaker 2: of the United States is credibly accused of sleeping with
Speaker 2: a minor.
Speaker 1: So there's that.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, But on this front though, and I'm not
Speaker 3: diminishing the accusation, the DOJ investigated it, right, they dropped
Speaker 3: the allegation, they dropped the charges, Like if it was true,
Speaker 3: wouldn't they prosecute Look, nobody hates Matt Gates.
Speaker 4: It's very permanent.
Speaker 2: It's very I mean, it's very difficult to it's very
Speaker 2: difficult to acquire enough evidence to say beyond a reasonable doubt,
Speaker 2: but you can. I don't think that you would deny that.
Speaker 2: If you had a similar fact pattern about a Democrat,
Speaker 2: Republicans would be running wild with it. But the other
Speaker 2: point to be made here is, you know, all of
Speaker 2: these men were talking about Trump RFK Junior. R K
Speaker 2: Junior doesn't even really deny the sexual assault allegations against him.
Speaker 2: In the interview with you, he did not did not
Speaker 2: really deny them. So anyway, r K Jr. Trump himself
Speaker 2: gates and hegseeth all of them, at least somewhat credibly
Speaker 2: accused of sexual assault. And part of it is what
Speaker 2: you said, like the post me to era like that
Speaker 2: is part of what makes this not an accident that
Speaker 2: these men would all be put up. But it's also
Speaker 2: you know, with Trump, a lot of his picks are
Speaker 2: about loyalty and his ability to dominate and control them
Speaker 2: and guarantee that no matter what he wants them to
Speaker 2: do or what bridge he wants them to cross, that
Speaker 2: they're not going to you know, they're going to maintain
Speaker 2: their loyalty and they're going to do whatever he ultimately
Speaker 2: wants them to do, no matter what that is. And
Speaker 2: having a lot of dirt on someone, or having someone
Speaker 2: who is you know, compromised so much that the rest
Speaker 2: of like the mainstream world wouldn't accept them, or who's
Speaker 2: burned their bridges as RFK Junior and Tulsi did with
Speaker 2: you know, the other political party where they're never going
Speaker 2: to be accepted back across that bridge. Those are all
Speaker 2: insurance policies that those people are going to even if
Speaker 2: you ask them to do something illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, whatever,
Speaker 2: that they're going to stay the course and stand by you.
Speaker 2: So in that way, I don't think it's an accident
Speaker 2: that you have all of these individuals who have you know,
Speaker 2: who are kind of deeply compromised in different ways.
Speaker 3: Maybe that's part of it, Honestly, I think that look
Speaker 3: their own personal stuff and all that aside. And by
Speaker 3: the way, on the Gates case, we did a lot
Speaker 3: of our stuff on the Gate stuff.
Speaker 4: But something Glenn.
Speaker 3: Greenwell genuinely to convince me of is, like, you know,
Speaker 3: when we are just talking about allegations or whatever that
Speaker 3: were leaked from the DOJ and then they end up
Speaker 3: dropping the case like that is kind of a miscarriage
Speaker 3: at least of the way that the public has to
Speaker 3: look at this stuff. He was accused of sex trafficking miners.
Speaker 3: I mean, these are heinous, horrible charges that will lock
Speaker 3: you up for a long time, and the end of
Speaker 3: the day, they dropped it because of lack of evidence.
Speaker 3: Some people do deserve due process, and I think we
Speaker 3: should actually preserve that for a lot of people. And
Speaker 3: this is actually a big part of the backlash to
Speaker 3: the whole me too era and like what really constitutes
Speaker 3: a sexual harassment cancelation and all of that. So I'll
Speaker 3: just put that out there specifically on Gates. Whether this
Speaker 3: woman is lying or not, I have no idea, but
Speaker 3: you know, in general, when politicians are involved, like I'm skeptical,
Speaker 3: and if the Department of.
Speaker 1: Justice multiple women, that okay.
Speaker 3: But if the Justice Department says we don't have the
Speaker 3: evidence to prosecute you, I mean I'm inclined to go
Speaker 3: with it and just say, well, clearly there's not enough
Speaker 3: to back that up.
Speaker 2: So somebody says something the House Ethics Committee.
Speaker 3: Yes, I actually do, and see this will put me
Speaker 3: out the other side of MAGA and all people.
Speaker 4: Let's see it. Look, I mean, is it going to
Speaker 4: be good for Gates? Probably not. And that is what
Speaker 4: I mentioned.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's what's very noteworthy is he did not
Speaker 2: have to resign his seat.
Speaker 1: He resigned two days before the.
Speaker 4: Support because to be released the report from coming.
Speaker 2: Out, and so that the fact that he resigned, then
Speaker 2: they canceled the meeting where they were supposed to deliberate
Speaker 2: whether or not to release this report. So, okay, if
Speaker 2: there's a lack of evidence and there's no there there, then.
Speaker 1: People should be able to see the report.
Speaker 4: I agree with releasing the report.
Speaker 3: The reason they don't want the report released is because,
Speaker 3: like I just said, it's even if what he was
Speaker 3: doing this is like when we were talking about Dave Portnoy,
Speaker 3: it was like Dave Portnoy was you know, he had
Speaker 3: the me too allegation or whatever against him, and it's
Speaker 3: like in his his defense was that he was sleeping
Speaker 3: with girls who were twenty years younger than him, were
Speaker 3: dming him on Instagram.
Speaker 4: Legal, yeah, creepy, weird.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so that's the defense of Matt Gates is that
Speaker 3: he was knowingly engaged in like that, in like sex
Speaker 3: parties on boats with rich people while doing drugs and
Speaker 3: getting drunk, like straight up dgen behavior. And it's like,
Speaker 3: that's not something that a public official wants out of
Speaker 3: it with very young.
Speaker 4: With young women.
Speaker 3: People were like eighteen nineteen years old. So yeah, I
Speaker 3: mean that's sketchy and gross. But this technically legal, so
Speaker 3: it's one of those in the ethics report. I get
Speaker 3: why he doesn't want it out there. You know, he's
Speaker 3: married now and all of it. No politician would want
Speaker 3: you probably shouldn't be engaging that behavior. But I agree
Speaker 3: with you, actually, I think the report should be released
Speaker 3: if you want to be the top law enforcement officer.
Speaker 3: First of all, I mean you got to think about
Speaker 3: this in terms of blackmail and compromise, you know what
Speaker 3: people used to talk about a lot during the Trump era.
Speaker 3: You kind of do want all of your skeletons out
Speaker 3: at this point, and to be honest again, in the
Speaker 3: Trump era, like this stuff is not going to sink you.
Speaker 3: Will it be bad, But for Trump himself, will it
Speaker 3: really lead to him withdrawing his nomination?
Speaker 4: No? No, I don't see at all.
Speaker 2: And I do think like I do think if he
Speaker 2: he wants Gates, he's going to get Gates. And you know,
Speaker 2: I mean you made the point about like he genuinely
Speaker 2: on economics is like had sets likes Lena Khan and whatever.
Speaker 2: But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that
Speaker 2: that's why he got picked. He got picked because he's
Speaker 2: a loyalist. He got picked because whoever Trump wants Gates
Speaker 2: to go after, Gates is going to go after and
Speaker 2: you know, so that's why he's put in the position.
Speaker 2: And that is what Donald Trump talked about on the
Speaker 2: campaign trail. I disagreed that that's really what people voted for.
Speaker 2: I think people voted more for, like, hey, the economy
Speaker 2: was kind of good with him more so than like,
Speaker 2: you know, I want Matt.
Speaker 1: Gates to be Attorney.
Speaker 2: General in the United States. But you're right, it's not
Speaker 2: like he didn't. It's not like his statements on the
Speaker 2: campaign trail are inconsistent with this type of a choice
Speaker 2: for attorney generally the United States. I do think his
Speaker 2: statements on the campaign trail are inconsistent with like Marco
Speaker 2: Rubio and other neo cons being selept selective for key
Speaker 2: foreign policy positions.
Speaker 1: But no one should have been.
Speaker 2: Surprised about that either if you look at you know,
Speaker 2: how inconsistent Trump himself has been, what his first term
Speaker 2: was like etcetera, etcetera. So the other person we referenced
Speaker 2: here is Pete Hegseth, who has his own allegations that
Speaker 2: have just emerged against him. Let's go and put this
Speaker 2: up on the screen. He's of course picked for Secretary
Speaker 2: of Defense. Again, very important to know these things in
Speaker 2: terms of potential blackmail. And so the allegations here are
Speaker 2: that so we know that he did pay an accuser
Speaker 2: who said that he had sexually assaulted her.
Speaker 1: The story goes.
Speaker 2: That he was at some conference in California and there
Speaker 2: was a woman who was she's a conservative Republican who
Speaker 2: was staying at the hotel there with her small children
Speaker 2: and her husband, who was tasked with the unenviable task
Speaker 2: of trying to get Pete a drunken Pete Hegseeth back
Speaker 2: to his hotel room. Apparently a couple of other women
Speaker 2: that he was at the bar with were becoming kind
Speaker 2: of uncomfortable with him and his overtures that they were
Speaker 2: making to him. So this one was to asked with, Okay,
Speaker 2: let's get drunken Pete Hegseth back up to his room
Speaker 2: because he's got to make his flight tomorrow. And then,
Speaker 2: according to her at some point in the evening she
Speaker 2: received these texts from the bar. She says that she
Speaker 2: sensed Hegseth was irritated. What happened next is in dispute,
Speaker 2: they write. According to the memo, Jane Doe did not
Speaker 2: remember anything until she was in his hotel room, then
Speaker 2: stumbling to find her hotel room. Her memory of six
Speaker 2: to nine hours was very hazy. Her husband was searching
Speaker 2: for her and was relieved when she finally showed up.
Speaker 2: The following day, the woman returned home, had a moment
Speaker 2: of hazy memory of being raped the night before, had
Speaker 2: a panic attack, went to the emergency room, received a
Speaker 2: rape kit examination that was positive for semen. The woman
Speaker 2: gave county authorities a statement about what happened. According to
Speaker 2: the memo sent to the transition team, Hegseth says, this
Speaker 2: is all a lie that she concocted to try to
Speaker 2: save her marriage, and that the encounter was consensual. Obviously,
Speaker 2: you know her version of events is very different from that.
Speaker 2: We do know that he paid her some undisclosed settlement
Speaker 2: amount to keep this whole thing quiet. And then the
Speaker 2: other thing that we know we can put a nine
Speaker 2: up on the screen is that only the Trump team
Speaker 2: was caught off guard by this.
Speaker 1: They didn't know about this particular allegation.
Speaker 2: There is a police record of the you know, the
Speaker 2: that was recorded at the time of the alleged incident.
Speaker 2: And so they were kind of caught off guard and
Speaker 2: had some meetings about this and how serious it was
Speaker 2: blah blah blah. But like they seem to be standing
Speaker 2: by him, and that doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 4: No, it's air.
Speaker 3: Look, I mean again with Pete hagg Seth, it's his
Speaker 3: own personal life.
Speaker 4: It's not exactly like he was an angel.
Speaker 2: So yeah, and this is the guy that runs around
Speaker 2: with all kind of you know, ultra Christian tattoos and whatever.
Speaker 3: See even on that it's like, you know, everyone, what
Speaker 3: is a dous vault that everyone's making. It's like guys
Speaker 3: in the twenty tens that was huge in military culture.
Speaker 3: It has nothing to do like a crusader's cross on
Speaker 3: his chest, Yeah, which he got in Israel. That's actually
Speaker 3: a little weird if you asked me what. That's a
Speaker 3: separate conversation. The same thing about Pete hag Seth that
Speaker 3: I think about RFK and Tulsi and all these people.
Speaker 4: These people want to blow shit up.
Speaker 3: Pete hag Seth is an anti DEI warrior. People should
Speaker 3: go and listen to him on the Sean Ryan podcast,
Speaker 3: which he gave It was a couple of weeks ago,
Speaker 3: where he talked about his book. He's made it pretty
Speaker 3: clear like what he wants to do, and that's why
Speaker 3: Trump picked him.
Speaker 4: I would also say there's a huge part of revenge.
Speaker 3: And I was texting you guys whenever I was on
Speaker 3: the plane whenever he got picked, because I was like,
Speaker 3: people forget. They tried to pick him for VA secretary
Speaker 3: last time in twenty eighteen. The Pentagon and the bureaucracy
Speaker 3: hate peak eg Seth Pete. They specifically the Pentagon hates
Speaker 3: him because he circumvented the UCMJ or whatever and got
Speaker 3: Eddie Gallagher and those people out of prison and to
Speaker 3: get Trump to pardon them while he was in the military.
Speaker 3: So the brass despises him more than anything.
Speaker 1: Those are the criminals that he got.
Speaker 3: Allegedly, well he pardoned them. So look, actually the case
Speaker 3: is complicated. There's a good book called.
Speaker 1: Alphabet They were.
Speaker 4: People still go and read about it.
Speaker 3: No, I'm saying the book itself was end no, I'm
Speaker 3: saying the book basically it's questionable. At least in Eddie's case,
Speaker 3: it's a weird case. He should go and read about
Speaker 3: it Alpha Platoon by a New York Times reporter. By
Speaker 3: the way, he thinks Eddie is guilty, but at least he
Speaker 3: goes into the details. My point is is that on
Speaker 3: hag Sat, specifically, the bureaucracy hates his guts. He himself though,
Speaker 3: is I think he will be very popular with the
Speaker 3: rank and file. But really what it is is, if
Speaker 3: you combine this with the quote unquote like anti woke,
Speaker 3: anti four star agenda and people who are genuinely loyal
Speaker 3: to Trump, Hegseth is the correct choice. Hegsath is a
Speaker 3: former Fox News contributor. He We're being honest on ideology.
Speaker 3: This dude is all over the damn map. He's pro Israel.
Speaker 3: He was pro Iraq War. Then he was against the
Speaker 3: Iraq War. It was pro well you want pro war.
Speaker 2: He led an organization that was like pushing the Iraq war.
Speaker 1: I mean he was a cheerleader.
Speaker 4: And defend Pete. Hegsett's like pro Iraq.
Speaker 3: The best case I can give for you is Pete
Speaker 3: is a maga dude, And for people who know him,
Speaker 3: including some people I've spoken to, he fundamentally changes his
Speaker 3: mind when Donald Trump became the person who was in charge.
Speaker 3: He became a major Trump booster when he was on
Speaker 3: Fox and Friends on Ukraine, he has had a complete
Speaker 3: one eighty from an interview that I saw that he
Speaker 3: gave just a few months ago, So I can at
Speaker 3: least tell you on that front, he's good to go.
Speaker 3: But really what it is is that I actually don't
Speaker 3: think he's ideological on foreign policy as much as he
Speaker 3: is just a Trump.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean to be honest, like, you know,
Speaker 3: that's frankly best case scenario whenever you're thinking about somebody
Speaker 3: like Marco Rubio or Mike Waltz, who are for real ideologues,
Speaker 3: who really do have an agenda, who have people an
Speaker 3: entire like national security generation of people who are committed
Speaker 3: neo cons who they will bring in under their team.
Speaker 3: A key part that I talked about on the lextreaman
Speaker 3: podcast so give away some of it here for free
Speaker 3: is I was like Trump misunderstands bureaucracy and also his
Speaker 3: own role. So like Trump on Rogan, very interesting part
Speaker 3: of it where he was like, oh, I hired John
Speaker 3: Bolton because he makes people afraid. And people were like,
Speaker 3: oh see, he hires the Hawks strategically, and it's like, well,
Speaker 3: first of all, what you don't understand is that when
Speaker 3: Trump is not paying attention and watching Fox and Friends
Speaker 3: in the Oval office, is that John Bolton's in the
Speaker 3: situation room and he's running all that shit. So Bolton,
Speaker 3: there's a million things that are all happening that Donald
Speaker 3: Trump never ever touches right his desk. The inner agency process,
Speaker 3: that ideology that spreads through the government. Government is not
Speaker 3: one person, it's five thousand people, and you want all
Speaker 3: five thousand of those people to be united on an agenda.
Speaker 3: So when you intentionally pick people who don't agree with you,
Speaker 3: or even maybe they do agree with you, whatever the
Speaker 3: scary part of that is, but who have a real
Speaker 3: ideological agenda, you will have consequences for your actions that
Speaker 3: you may not even knowingly sign up for. So Marco Rubio,
Speaker 3: will Trump really give a shit about South America policy?
Speaker 3: Almost certainly not right zero in terms of its importance.
Speaker 3: You think Marko Rubio, the guy who literally wanted like
Speaker 3: a push in Venezuela for Juan Wide. Oh and once
Speaker 3: like a return to nineteen eighty style South American revolutionary
Speaker 3: or whatever stuff under Ronald Reagan. Yeah, I think he
Speaker 3: will care under the State Department, and he will install
Speaker 3: people under his turn you know, in his office who
Speaker 3: Donald Trump never even thinks about.
Speaker 4: But could we have tremendous consequence for policy.
Speaker 3: So that is a big problem with a lot of
Speaker 3: Trump's big ideological picks is he does not understand government
Speaker 3: at a fundamental level because he thinks that it's all
Speaker 3: about him, which, of course like serves his role.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but the inner agency process of.
Speaker 3: The people that you hire in others, when they are
Speaker 3: really ideological, it's a big problem. And they will, they will,
Speaker 3: They can cause colossal damage on the inside.
Speaker 2: I just think Trump doesn't really isn't really making these
Speaker 2: choices for primarily ideological reasons outside of I know that
Speaker 2: they'll be loyal to me and when push comes to show,
Speaker 2: they're going to do what I want them to do.
Speaker 2: And I'm not talking about like, you know, trade policy
Speaker 2: or whatever. I think that when you know, he wanted
Speaker 2: to overturn the last election and he met resistance from
Speaker 2: the Department of Justice, Matt resistance from military, met resistance
Speaker 2: from the Senate and his own vice president. He made
Speaker 2: sure he wanted to make sure that that would never
Speaker 2: happen again. So you put in you know, Gates at
Speaker 2: the Department of Justice, like Gates is going to do
Speaker 2: whatever Donald Trump wants him to do. You get JD
Speaker 2: Vance for a vice president instead of Mike Pence. And
Speaker 2: part of that audition process for JD was making sure,
Speaker 2: like you're going to backstop the steal and you're going
Speaker 2: to say you would have done what Mike Pence wouldn't do, period,
Speaker 2: end of story. Pete Hegseth at Department of Defense like
Speaker 2: very similar vibe, like I'm going to make sure that
Speaker 2: these major institutions that stood in my way last time
Speaker 2: are not going to stand in my way this time.
Speaker 2: And same thing with the Senate. Like in some ways,
Speaker 2: all of these confirmations are a test of let me
Speaker 2: put up, like in Matt Gates specifically, let me put up.
Speaker 1: The person that you all literally hate.
Speaker 2: Like the most like that you find to be like
Speaker 2: the most odious, And I'm going to force it through.
Speaker 2: And whether it's you all voting for it or me
Speaker 2: just doing it, anyway, you're going to see you will
Speaker 2: not resist me this time. And I'm and this was
Speaker 2: also important with the power play that he pulled with
Speaker 2: the advice and consent process, right because this is an
Speaker 2: important part of the Senate powers. They're very proud of
Speaker 2: their role in this, like this is a big deal
Speaker 2: for them, right. And you got John Throune now in there,
Speaker 2: who is going to be the Senate Majority leader, who
Speaker 2: is not the pick of Maga, not who Donald Trump wanted.
Speaker 2: He's like a Mitch McConnell type acolyte. But even with him,
Speaker 2: when Trump was like, we're going to do recess appointments
Speaker 2: and I'm going to get my picks, John Thune was
Speaker 2: right away like, yes, okay, we will do that. So
Speaker 2: a lot of these moves, Yes, there are different ideologies
Speaker 2: that he likes and in this way or likes this
Speaker 2: piece or whatever. The consistent through line to me is
Speaker 2: any institution that was an obstacle to my ambitions on
Speaker 2: not again, not really policy, but on like overturning the election.
Speaker 2: If you are an obstacle, then I'm going to make
Speaker 2: sure that those institutions are bent to my will this time.
Speaker 2: And you know that's that's what I see primarily in
Speaker 2: these picks, because there isn't an ideological consistency between Marco
Speaker 2: Rubio and Tulci Gabberty, right.
Speaker 1: That that is literally literally, yeah, that.
Speaker 2: Is the you know that is even between like a
Speaker 2: Pete Hexett and an RFK Junior. There's not ideological consistency.
Speaker 2: You know, it's about who is going to be there
Speaker 2: in these institutions that were previously an obstacle to me
Speaker 2: being able to, you know, do everything I wanted to do.
Speaker 2: How am I going to make sure that that doesn't
Speaker 2: stand in my way this time around? And you know,
Speaker 2: you've already got the Supreme Court in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: you know, not fully, but in many ways kind of
Speaker 2: you know, it's shaped by his choices that are on
Speaker 2: the court. He's likely to get at least one war
Speaker 2: Supreme Court pick. The Supreme Court has already said that
Speaker 2: he's immune for any quote unquote official acts. What exactly
Speaker 2: that means is yet to be adjudicated. But you know
Speaker 2: why bandwidth there for his own personal immunity. So I
Speaker 2: think there's going to be very little that stands in
Speaker 2: his way in terms of getting what he wants and
Speaker 2: when he wants it.
Speaker 3: I think, yes, and no in terms of this, for example,
Speaker 3: it gets down to what are we actually talking about here.
Speaker 3: So for let's say the DEI like woke thing, right,
Speaker 3: that's an area where Pete Hegsath is going to have
Speaker 3: the total backing of the president. Let's see also in
Speaker 3: terms of I think it really is just going to
Speaker 3: depend on a case by case basis. Because even for
Speaker 3: what you said about recess appointments, it may be true
Speaker 3: that John Thune said, yeah, let's do recess appointments. Guess
Speaker 3: what Mitch McConnell said today, We're not doing any research appointments.
Speaker 3: And John Thune was like, we don't have the support
Speaker 3: in the conference to do any recess appointments. Basically, they
Speaker 3: don't want a cave to the president because in the
Speaker 3: future they don't want Democrats when they have power to
Speaker 3: do recess appointments too, right, Which is funny, but it's
Speaker 3: you know, show you that they still have some auth word.
Speaker 2: But the Trump people have worked down this provision that
Speaker 2: they think that they could use where there's this technicality
Speaker 2: if the House in the center are in dispute about
Speaker 2: whether or not they're adjourned and in a recess, then
Speaker 2: the president can come in and say we're in a recess.
Speaker 2: And so that's the power that they plan to use
Speaker 2: to basically have this led from the White House, where
Speaker 2: it's like, we don't really care John Thune and Mitch
Speaker 2: McConnell whether you have the votes to go into recess.
Speaker 2: We're gonna do it and maybe ultimately through the courts
Speaker 2: and blah blah blah. Maybe there's some pushback, but you know,
Speaker 2: who knows. Trump's got a lot of his own judges
Speaker 2: on the bench at this point, and a Supreme Court
Speaker 2: that's quite amenable to him as well. But you know,
Speaker 2: they they have plans in place to get even someone
Speaker 2: like a Matt Gates or an RFK junior or who
Speaker 2: have Toulsi whoever you think is the most difficult to confirm,
Speaker 2: to get them through. Which is why I just think that,
Speaker 2: you know, I think that there is a I think
Speaker 2: there is a concerted plan to make sure that there
Speaker 2: is no institutional obstacle to Trump doing whatever Trump wants
Speaker 2: to do.
Speaker 1: What does that mean?
Speaker 2: I don't think we really know, because it's not like
Speaker 2: we could have predicted stop the stale in advance. It's
Speaker 2: not like we could have predicted you know, the Black
Speaker 2: Lives Matter protests and Trump saying, hey, let's just go
Speaker 2: and shoot the protesters and the legs. Like, I don't
Speaker 2: know that we know what that's ultimately going to mean
Speaker 2: in terms of how he uses the you know, the
Speaker 2: powers of the government and the military and whatever. But that,
Speaker 2: to me, getting all of those roadblocks that previously irked
Speaker 2: him out of the way is the primary thrust of
Speaker 2: both the sort of policy thinking that's going into the
Speaker 2: transition and certainly into these personnel choices.
Speaker 4: I don't think there's any policy going into the transition.
Speaker 2: You know, but I'm talking about, like, for example, the
Speaker 2: thing about the how we could use this policy to
Speaker 2: get into recess. Yes, you know those sorts of things
Speaker 2: how Jeff talked about. You know, actually there's you can
Speaker 2: use a national security emergency to institute all of your terrorists,
Speaker 2: Like there is there is thinking about how they can
Speaker 2: basically bypass any sort of thing that was a check
Speaker 2: previously and get done whatever the hell it is that
Speaker 2: they want to get done.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's an incorrect view of it. I
Speaker 3: think it will really come down. But first of all,
Speaker 3: Trump is a deeply capricious person who changes his mind
Speaker 3: literally constantly and depending on the last person that he
Speaker 3: spoke to. So anybody who thinks he has some concerted
Speaker 3: grand plan or any of that, I don't.
Speaker 4: Think any of that is true.
Speaker 3: I do think it's correct that the picks that he
Speaker 3: has gone with are based upon personal loyalty and basically
Speaker 3: nothing else. I think that could have great you know,
Speaker 3: that have a lot of pluses and minuses. In some cases,
Speaker 3: when he wants to do good things, it'll be fantastic.
Speaker 3: In some cases, whenever he wants to follow through and
Speaker 3: stop the steal or some other bullshit like that, it
Speaker 3: can be very detrimental to the American system. The question
Speaker 3: really will come down to what the institutional pushback within
Speaker 3: the permanent bureaucracy will look like, what Congress and its
Speaker 3: immense powers will be able to flex, and then of
Speaker 3: course the Supreme Court. I do think people overestimate the
Speaker 3: loyalty that the Supreme Court will give Donald Trump. Don't forget,
Speaker 3: while they do give him immunity under the last Roberts term,
Speaker 3: they shot down numerous attempts by him to bypass the
Speaker 3: interagency process from the Census, the so called travel like
Speaker 3: Muslim ban, and I can go on forever. I mean
Speaker 3: the Obamacare thing, even before that. So there are many
Speaker 3: examples of the of Trump trying to, you know, use
Speaker 3: this new legal authority where this is where I think
Speaker 3: Jeff is also underestimating, you know, what the legal the
Speaker 3: legal system and the Ninth Circuit and the way our
Speaker 3: entire appellate court work and the rents that they can
Speaker 3: throw in. You can, you know, theorize all day long.
Speaker 3: Joe Biden tried to do a lot of things under
Speaker 3: executive order like this, you know, the student loan and
Speaker 3: all other stuff is shit gets struck down constantly. You know,
Speaker 3: the appellate courts can come in and they can change things.
Speaker 3: So I wouldn't underestimate, on the other side what the
Speaker 3: institutional checks are, although it will be a much more
Speaker 3: of a loyalist administration.
Speaker 6: But I think we knew that going in. I think
Speaker 6: we also knew that going in. I'm certainly, but I
Speaker 6: think I knew that going in. I don't, like, I
Speaker 6: don't know if that's what like. I do think that
Speaker 6: there is a significant frustration with democracy in the public
Speaker 6: where the idea of like He's just going to be
Speaker 6: a strong man and come in and you know, he's like,
Speaker 6: I'm going to be a dictator on day one. Like
Speaker 6: for some people, for some people that was something they
Speaker 6: had to overcome to vote for him, and for some
Speaker 6: people that was a feature, not a bug, that was
Speaker 6: an affirmative part of the pitch of like, hey, democracy,
Speaker 6: like this doesn't seem so great. Let's just get someone
Speaker 6: in there who's gonna, like, you know, do whatever he
Speaker 6: wants to do. So yeah, in that sense, I think
Speaker 6: there is a chunk of the public that basically voted
Speaker 6: for like authoritarian power taking. And I think that's I mean,
Speaker 6: I think that's the plan and what we're seeing effectuated here,
Speaker 6: which yeah, it doesn't. I mean, it's entirely consistent with
Speaker 6: what he was saying and with the way he wanted
Speaker 6: to operate in the first term.
Speaker 2: And the other thing is and then well you can
Speaker 2: respond if you want, we'll move on, because we've been
Speaker 2: talking about this for a while. But you also see
Speaker 2: a number of previously like bastions of quote unquote resistance
Speaker 2: that have really, out of fear or necessity or whatever,
Speaker 2: have really capitulated to Trump. So even before the election,
Speaker 2: you saw Bezos being like, you know, Washington Post, We're
Speaker 2: not going to do an endorsement. You saw Zuckerberg, Sundhar Puchai,
Speaker 2: Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump calls him, all of
Speaker 2: them calling Trump, hey, big guy, just calling a check in,
Speaker 2: really excited for the next administration, trying to make nice
Speaker 2: with him because they know that the way that that
Speaker 2: he was going to get his loyals in place, and
Speaker 2: he was going to use the federal government to, you know,
Speaker 2: go after whether it's like Amazon, which has tons of
Speaker 2: government contracts, or cracked on on Facebook for any sort
Speaker 2: of like politics, political speech on there that he doesn't like,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera. Like the powers of the federal
Speaker 2: garmer in vast and he's not afraid to weaponize them.
Speaker 2: So there was a lot of already capitulation to that.
Speaker 2: And then one funny and annoying indicator of this as well.
Speaker 2: You had Morning Joe, Joe and Mika.
Speaker 4: We're going to cover it tomorrow, I think we have,
Speaker 4: but just to.
Speaker 2: Tease it for now, Joe and Mika making the trek
Speaker 2: down tomorrow Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring.
Speaker 2: And Steve Bannon is out there saying, hey, Matt Gates
Speaker 2: is he literally said mack Gates is going to prosecute
Speaker 2: MSNBC host like Ari melbur he named specifically don't go out.
Speaker 2: So you think Joe and Mika are thinking, like, hey,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe we need to get on the other
Speaker 2: side of this, just to be sure and hedge our bets.
Speaker 2: So I also think that some of the previous bastions
Speaker 2: of resistance in twenty sixteen we already know, are not
Speaker 2: going to be there this time around as well. And
Speaker 2: you know, I think the courts could also be part
Speaker 2: of that.
Speaker 4: It's certainly possible, I would see.
Speaker 3: The thing is is that this time around, the grounds
Speaker 3: or resistance are just not there.
Speaker 4: Trump is not a one off. He's that democratically elected,
Speaker 4: twice elected.
Speaker 1: Always grounds for no.
Speaker 3: But I'm saying, like the Russia Gate shock, the lack
Speaker 3: of the popular vote, all that stuff, last time around,
Speaker 3: it's gone, and I mean it should be gone. Trump
Speaker 3: has been literally elected with the popular vote with a
Speaker 3: mandate to govern, not for the first time of Republicans'
Speaker 3: two thousand and four.
Speaker 4: So you have to adjust your priors just like dramatically.
Speaker 2: And a lot of liberals have the view basically that
Speaker 2: you expressed hocer of like Hey, you people voted for this,
Speaker 2: get You're going to get what you deserve. Is the attitude.
Speaker 2: It's not like I think we frame it. I think
Speaker 2: that sound rageous, but that is that is what you know.
Speaker 2: There's like okay, you know, Latinos, you voted for mass deportation,
Speaker 2: Like okay, now you're this is what Joy Reed said,
Speaker 2: like now you're responsible for your mixed status family getting deported,
Speaker 2: Like okay, Muslim Americans, you voted for Trump, Like enjoy
Speaker 2: as your family members are slaughtered in Gaza and the
Speaker 2: West Bank, is you know, permanently annexed.
Speaker 1: Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: I think that that's personally from the liberal perspect I
Speaker 2: know you like come at this from a different different angle.
Speaker 2: I'm not from the liberal perspective. I think that that
Speaker 2: is disgusting to just like, you know, okay, you deserve
Speaker 2: what you get, et cetera, et cetera. But that there
Speaker 2: is that's part of the capitulation to this view is
Speaker 2: like we're not going to fight it, like enjoy you know,
Speaker 2: enjoy your new Muslim and enjoy your mass deportation. If
Speaker 2: you all voted for this, you get what you deserve it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, and mine is more of an affirmation. I'm like, look,
Speaker 3: I think they actually want it, and I think they
Speaker 3: should get it. And I also think that people for
Speaker 3: so long have been wondering, like, what's it like to
Speaker 3: actually blow stuff up? And it's like, let's find out,
Speaker 3: Let's see what happens. You know, it's not like the
Speaker 3: current system is working all that well. And look here's
Speaker 3: the craziest and most dangerous thing.
Speaker 4: What if it works? What if America likes it?
Speaker 3: I mean you were talking about our authoritarian tendencies. I
Speaker 3: wouldn't put it that way. I think people like a
Speaker 3: strong executive. People have wanted that for a long time.
Speaker 3: You know, America does like a monarch and name. But
Speaker 3: only they liked it under FDR. They liked it under Lbag,
Speaker 3: they liked it under Nixon. The crazy thing in America
Speaker 3: is we just get to change, you know, who are
Speaker 3: immensely powerful person is.
Speaker 4: And I think people genuinely do.
Speaker 3: You don't want to see us like a serious version
Speaker 3: of what they actually voted for in practice. The other
Speaker 3: side of this, and I could be totally wrong too,
Speaker 3: is that there are all these swing voters out there.
Speaker 4: Who believe in like checks and balances.
Speaker 6: Right, I'm a Democratic senator and whatever Republican president.
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, that's fucking stupid if you ask me,
Speaker 3: because it's like that means that you're just gonna get
Speaker 3: nothing done and you're actually voting for the status quo.
Speaker 4: But you know, you do what you want.
Speaker 3: So I do think though, that there are a large
Speaker 3: percentage of people, dramatic percentages of people who did swing,
Speaker 3: especially in these swing coalitions, who voted for Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: who want to like light the match and put it
Speaker 3: on the fire and just see what happens. And so
Speaker 3: in this respect like this, you know, you may call
Speaker 3: it authoritarian. I think he's like the vehicle. I mean,
Speaker 3: what did you say in his twenty sixteen inauguration. I'm
Speaker 3: forgetting the exact I am your retribution, right, I am
Speaker 3: your retribution.
Speaker 4: I think that's a.
Speaker 3: Real reason why a lot of people voted for Trump,
Speaker 3: and how it will manifest itself.
Speaker 4: I mean that's still a big in and open question.
Speaker 3: All right, everybody, we had to skip ahead to UFO.
Speaker 3: We just talked way too much. So the DNC and
Speaker 3: the Ukraine sections will be pushed to tomorrow, so Tuesday,
Speaker 3: don't worry we'll have a nice full show already stuff
Speaker 3: that we're going to discuss, but I did want to
Speaker 3: get into the show a little bit of a recap
Speaker 3: of the UFO hearing. There were some very interesting moments
Speaker 3: that happened there, so we've collated a few of them
Speaker 3: for you. The first that we want to start with
Speaker 3: is testimony and questioning from lou Elizondo, who was a
Speaker 3: part of the Pentagon and one of the people chiefly
Speaker 3: responsible for bringing to light the public to the public
Speaker 3: the existence of a lot of these UFO videos that
Speaker 3: existed inside of the Pentagon and for some of the
Speaker 3: transparency movement behind it. So he gave some really shocking
Speaker 3: testimony under questioning from Anna Paulina Luna.
Speaker 4: Let's take a listen.
Speaker 1: Would you agree that it's likely that they are being
Speaker 1: piloted by some mind body connection, ma'am.
Speaker 11: I think it is safe to presume here that they
Speaker 11: are being intelligently controlled, because some cases seem to anticipate
Speaker 11: our maneuvers and in other cases they seem to And
Speaker 11: I came across an email where the word stalked was
Speaker 11: used in a very secure email between Navy officers discussing
Speaker 11: their ships being pursued by a UAP.
Speaker 12: In our previous panel, we had Grush and he had
Speaker 12: testified to say that some of these were intered dimensional beings.
Speaker 4: Can you speak on that at all, ma'am.
Speaker 11: I'm not qualified, certainly as a scientist or otherwise to
Speaker 11: speculate points of origin. I looked at everything from a
Speaker 11: scientific perspective. So if you look at, for example, instantaneous acceleration,
Speaker 11: which was one of the observables of the program that
Speaker 11: I belonged to ATIP, the human body can stand about
Speaker 11: nine G forces for a short period of time before
Speaker 11: you suffer negative biological consequences blackouts and ultimately readouts and
Speaker 11: even death. Comparison, our best technology, the F sixteen, which
Speaker 11: is one of this older platform but one of our
Speaker 11: most highly maneuverable aircraft, manned aircraft made by General Dynamics,
Speaker 11: you can perform about seventeen or eighteen G forces before
Speaker 11: you start having structural failure, meaning that the airframe begins
Speaker 11: to disintegrate where you're flying. The vehicles we're talking about
Speaker 11: are performing in excess of one thousand, two thousand and
Speaker 11: three thousand g's.
Speaker 6: So are you I guess what'd be safe to infer
Speaker 6: that they're living craft.
Speaker 11: You know, I'm not prepared at this point to state
Speaker 11: for the record is something alive or not because even
Speaker 11: that definition, there was a time in science we thought
Speaker 11: that life required oxygen, and we now know that's not true.
Speaker 11: They are anaerobic bacteria that's thriving oxygen environments at lack oxygen.
Speaker 11: And also the same with photosynthesis. When I was in college,
Speaker 11: it was told everything is derived from photosynthesis as a
Speaker 11: form of energy, and reality that's not true. There are
Speaker 11: things that live off of chemosynthesis. So we're constantly having
Speaker 11: to reevaluate understanding of what the definition of life is.
Speaker 4: Three thousand g's let that one sink in there.
Speaker 3: And there's been some discussion previously, especially in regards to
Speaker 3: the tic TAC incident. Let's also go to the next
Speaker 3: one here, because this is a really critical part of it.
Speaker 3: This is specifically about the GOP overside and about some
Speaker 3: of the previous allegations that were happening in terms of
Speaker 3: budgeting and how previous ways that the Department of Defense
Speaker 3: can get around transparency and others is by piloting and
Speaker 3: pushing them through military contractors to avoid transparency, to avoid disclosure,
Speaker 3: it's also part of the reason the Pentagon literally cannot
Speaker 3: pass an audit.
Speaker 4: Let's take a listen to that section. To your knowledge,
Speaker 4: any communication with a non human life form.
Speaker 11: So the term communication is a bit of a trick
Speaker 11: word because there's verbal communication like we're having now. The
Speaker 11: problem is you also have nonverbal communication. And so I
Speaker 11: would say definitively yes, but from a nonverbal meaning. A
Speaker 11: Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US airspace, we scramble two
Speaker 11: F twenty two's and we are certainly communicating intent and capability.
Speaker 11: I think the same goes with this. We have these
Speaker 11: things that are being observed over controlled US airspace, and
Speaker 11: they're not really doing a good job hiding themselves. They're
Speaker 11: making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even
Speaker 11: interfere with our nuclear equities and our nuclear readiness.
Speaker 3: So two, you know, pretty interesting allegations there. So there's
Speaker 3: a look. In terms of the hearing, it was a
Speaker 3: lot about getting stuff on the record. There were some issues,
Speaker 3: as I was told, in terms of the Immaculate Constellation document,
Speaker 3: the twelve page document that was put into the congressional record.
Speaker 3: I won't go into all of that just yet because
Speaker 3: we're about to play a video. But overall, this was
Speaker 3: about getting lou Elizondo in questioning getting some of the
Speaker 3: things on the record going into the Trump administration. And
Speaker 3: that's one thing where look, Trump and RK actually Gates
Speaker 3: you know as well, have all said that they are
Speaker 3: at least you know, in favor of UFO transparent of disclosure.
Speaker 3: There is like some sort of horseshoe MAGA crossover currently
Speaker 3: with UFOs and Trump. So the question is is that
Speaker 3: are we going to get some of this to be released?
Speaker 3: You know, considering that Tulsa Gabbard's now going up for
Speaker 3: the ODE and I position, it's certainly possible in some
Speaker 3: sort of transparency laden effort to actually declassify a lot
Speaker 3: of these documents and actually just.
Speaker 4: Give it out to the general public.
Speaker 3: The other option is the permanent bureaucracy only burrows even
Speaker 3: further in and you're not going to get anything. But nonetheless,
Speaker 3: it was very interesting to see some of this going
Speaker 3: on the record.
Speaker 2: Was there enough for during the first Trump administration to
Speaker 2: get him to release this documents?
Speaker 1: And why why has he said that he.
Speaker 4: Didn't this year?
Speaker 3: So he said he did it at the request of
Speaker 3: Mike Pompeo, just like with the JFK.
Speaker 4: So let's you know first with that.
Speaker 3: Also, look, Trump doesn't care about the issue, and this
Speaker 3: is unfortunate. He's not somebody who has ever expressed a
Speaker 3: deep interest. The whole UFO thing has taken years to
Speaker 3: enter the public consciousness. Louel Zondo's one of those people
Speaker 3: who's chiefly responsible for getting these videos out to the public.
Speaker 3: He was there and name checked in the twenty seventeen
Speaker 3: New York Times article that started this whole thing. That's
Speaker 3: when people were like, holy shit, are UFOs actually real.
Speaker 4: In those videos? I could say that for myself.
Speaker 3: The problem with the legitimization is people kind of just
Speaker 3: saw it and then just moved past Louel Is onto
Speaker 3: himself was out of the government. Then what happened, you know,
Speaker 3: in the interim period of years is people like David
Speaker 3: Fraber came out and gave interviews. You had people now
Speaker 3: like David Grosse who have come forward. You've had almost
Speaker 3: eight years of the public reconciling himself to both the
Speaker 3: lies and the transparency, and people like Christopher Miller and
Speaker 3: others who have come forward and have spoken about this program.
Speaker 3: So I would say it is more primed I think
Speaker 3: both for the public, for the military, bureocracy, and also
Speaker 3: even members of Congress.
Speaker 4: You know, these are people. It is all a joke.
Speaker 4: Rubio is a UFO guy. That's very true. Well, okay,
Speaker 4: I'll put it this way.
Speaker 3: I don't know if he's a UFO guy in terms
Speaker 3: of he's a believer, but he was the head of
Speaker 3: the Intelligence Committee in the Senate, and his staff and
Speaker 3: others were always consistent that they were very concerned about
Speaker 3: the reports that they would get notice.
Speaker 4: And I think this is intentional.
Speaker 3: Is they always talk about readiness because the one way
Speaker 3: angle you can always get Congress and others to care
Speaker 3: about is like, hey, we literally have things that are
Speaker 3: flying around up there, and we have no idea what
Speaker 3: they are, including being able to disable like nuclear missile
Speaker 3: silos and submarines, and people have no clue like what's
Speaker 3: actually happening. So I think that's how it would contextualize
Speaker 3: this hearing. I will end with this part, but again
Speaker 3: I have to note that there were some issues with
Speaker 3: the enter of this into the record. So let's go
Speaker 3: ahead and get to Nancy Mace's questioning about the Immaculate Constellation.
Speaker 3: Program entered in the Congressional record. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 8: There is a document that will be entered into the
Speaker 8: Congressional record today. Mister Timberchat from Tennessee has this document
Speaker 8: and we just distributed it to every member up here
Speaker 8: on the dais of this document. But this is going
Speaker 8: to be the original document from the Pentagon about Immaculate
Speaker 8: Constant that Michael Schellenberger delivered to Congress today. So thank
Speaker 8: you mister Schellenberger for this information. We are all reading
Speaker 8: it in real time now and mister Burchett will enter
Speaker 8: it into the record. But twelve pages about this unacknowledged
Speaker 8: special access program that your government says does not exist.
Speaker 3: Like I said, in terms of that pro basically it's
Speaker 3: entered into the Congressional record, but as I understand it,
Speaker 3: like I said, there were some issues regarding the enter
Speaker 3: of that into the record, and this is part of
Speaker 3: the controversy and you know, things that have come out
Speaker 3: of it. My point just being that on the program
Speaker 3: itself in terms of getting things into the congressional effort,
Speaker 3: this was an effort to try and to enter Michael
Speaker 3: Schellenberger's original report, you know in there, so that people
Speaker 3: can read for itself, and because you want to get
Speaker 3: this stuff into the record, it allows for investigation public transparency,
Speaker 3: which is the ultimate goal.
Speaker 4: Of the project. Overall.
Speaker 3: I would not call it hearing like a tremendous success
Speaker 3: or anything like that, because nothing other than actual disclosure
Speaker 3: is I think it was just pushing the ball forward
Speaker 3: and setting things up for the next Trump administration and
Speaker 3: what that will.
Speaker 2: Look like gonna be interesting. I know I'm going to
Speaker 2: get Trump. At least I can get like JFP thousand
Speaker 2: and aliens.
Speaker 4: That's would be interesting. I mean, think about it.
Speaker 3: You know, if you if you ever wanted someone to
Speaker 3: meet an alien, wouldn't it be Donald Trump?
Speaker 4: Terms of the president, who would you want? Which which commander?
Speaker 2: Achievement have definitely not I'm sure this is something that
Speaker 2: I've really thought that that I'm prepared to find on.
Speaker 1: I haven't really want to go eat.
Speaker 3: There is a theory that Dwight Eisenhower once had a
Speaker 3: conference with aliens, but we won't get to that today.
Speaker 2: A socialist candidate for mayor of New York City took
Speaker 2: a unique approach to finding out why non white working
Speaker 2: class voters in the Bronx and in Queen's decided to vote.
Speaker 1: How they did? He actually went and awesome.
Speaker 5: Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
Speaker 4: I didn't vote?
Speaker 5: And why did you not vote?
Speaker 4: Because I don't believe in the system anymore.
Speaker 5: Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
Speaker 4: Yes?
Speaker 5: And who did you vote for?
Speaker 1: Trump?
Speaker 4: A million dollar question?
Speaker 5: Trump Trump?
Speaker 7: Donald Trump?
Speaker 13: Well, actually early voted. I voted for Trump.
Speaker 4: Honestly, I didn't vote.
Speaker 1: He voted for Trump.
Speaker 14: I voted for Trump.
Speaker 13: I vote for trumpet before I vote Democrats.
Speaker 12: At this moment, I voted Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx
Speaker 5: are two areas that saw the biggest shift.
Speaker 4: Towards Trump in last week's election.
Speaker 5: Even more residents didn't vote at all.
Speaker 7: They like Trump because they don't want the Palestinian the
Speaker 7: Brothers to kill the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 5: The Democrat is giving all the money in the water.
Speaker 5: This is no good. The swing is because people want
Speaker 5: lower prices.
Speaker 14: They probably believe that Trump will give them that.
Speaker 8: Market energy gas.
Speaker 7: Also, these people are working families. They're working one to
Speaker 7: two three jobs and rent as expensive, foods are going up,
Speaker 7: Utility bills are up, and.
Speaker 5: That's your hope to see a little bit more of
Speaker 5: an affordable life.
Speaker 14: Absolutely, what Trump did in the first four years fordham
Speaker 14: Road saw something where Kamala couldn't do that.
Speaker 6: There are young voters who didn't wrote for her because
Speaker 6: of the genocide and what wouldn't have about her if
Speaker 6: I did.
Speaker 1: But I did vote for her obviously because that comments on.
Speaker 5: Can you tell me a little bit more about why
Speaker 5: you didn't vote since you're out here, you know Gaza?
Speaker 5: Who should I vote either side?
Speaker 14: We'll go ahead, send bombs from here to kill my
Speaker 14: brothers and sisters.
Speaker 13: Palestine issue, and then the other issue is that, like
Speaker 13: Rassia and the Ukraine, he stopped that war.
Speaker 5: That's why I vote him.
Speaker 12: You can't say you're a Democrat and stand for the
Speaker 12: genocide that's going on in Gaza.
Speaker 1: Period.
Speaker 5: Practically, I like I like you, but I don't look
Speaker 5: like you.
Speaker 10: See regarda plot people have dying.
Speaker 5: Have you voted for Democrats in the past?
Speaker 4: I have?
Speaker 5: And what would it take for you to vote for
Speaker 5: a Democrat in the future.
Speaker 7: Being able to pay attention to the regular Americans and
Speaker 7: their economic needs.
Speaker 12: They shouldn't make economics the forefront of their campaign, the.
Speaker 1: People were not really feeling it in their pockets.
Speaker 13: I vote if for Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen. I
Speaker 13: voted against Trump also in the twenty eighteen midterms, insulting us,
Speaker 13: playing on our emotions. All they do is shame you,
Speaker 13: and they just want to use like see campaigns and
Speaker 13: I guess celebrities.
Speaker 7: It's like, if you're speaking to things that people want
Speaker 7: to hear about, I don't care what color you are,
Speaker 7: I'll vote for you.
Speaker 2: So obviously quite a number of voters they're expressing concerns
Speaker 2: about prices, the economy, etc. But I was actually genuinely
Speaker 2: surprised by how many brought up the issue of Gaza.
Speaker 2: Quote the Democrats are giving all the money in the war.
Speaker 2: Quote either side will go ahead and send bombs from
Speaker 2: here to kill my brothers and sisters. Quote you can't
Speaker 2: say you're a Democrat and stand for the genocide that's
Speaker 2: going on in Gaza.
Speaker 1: Period.
Speaker 2: This actually echoes what AOC heard from her own constituents
Speaker 2: who had backed her and Trump on the same ballot.
Speaker 2: Number of these AOC Trump voters said they felt she
Speaker 2: and Trump were both authentic or anti establishment. But again,
Speaker 2: Gaza came up a number of times in these responses,
Speaker 2: quote voted for Trump and you not genocide Harris. Democrats
Speaker 2: became the party that supports war and simply because of Gaza.
Speaker 2: None of this is scientific, of course, but there are
Speaker 2: some other indications that Gaza really was a significant part
Speaker 2: of Kamala Harris's loss. Remember, black and brown voters have
Speaker 2: always had more sympathy towards Palestine and supported a seize
Speaker 2: fire by larger numbers than white voters in general. It's
Speaker 2: plausible to think some of Trump's gains with these groups
Speaker 2: had to do with discuss with war in general and
Speaker 2: Gaza in particular. The other demographic group, of course, most
Speaker 2: disgusted with the Biden Harris genocidal policy was young people,
Speaker 2: and sure enough, this election saw a turnout collapse among
Speaker 2: the youngest group of voters. A lot of the post
Speaker 2: election conversation has been understandably centered around how much Trump
Speaker 2: improved his margins among young voters, all true young men
Speaker 2: in particular, But the more significant phenomenon may actually be
Speaker 2: how many of these young voters just simply decided to
Speaker 2: stay home. As Eric Blanc points out, when you look
Speaker 2: at the total number of eighteen to twenty nine years
Speaker 2: old who are eligible to vote. Trump, ever so slightly
Speaker 2: improved his standing from twenty twenty. In twenty twenty, he
Speaker 2: received eighteen percent of the total eligible population. This time
Speaker 2: he edged that number up by a single percentage point
Speaker 2: to about nineteen percent. On the other side of the ledger, however,
Speaker 2: Democrats collapse. They went from receiving about thirty percent of
Speaker 2: the eligible youth vote in twenty twenty to only about
Speaker 2: twenty two percent this time around. So Trump held on
Speaker 2: to his young voters and marginally even improved while the
Speaker 2: Democratic share plummeted.
Speaker 1: Was this Agaza effect?
Speaker 2: When you consider the youth activism around the issue and
Speaker 2: Kamala's absolute unwillingness to take a moral stand against genocide,
Speaker 2: you gotta think that discuss with her approach was a
Speaker 2: significant factor in this drop in turnout, her choice of
Speaker 2: Liz Cheney over Rashida Talib spoke volumes about her moral commitments.
Speaker 2: Of note on that choice. By the way, the Palestinian
Speaker 2: American who was blocked from speaking at the Dancy, actually
Speaker 2: improved her winning margin in her Georgia state House district.
Speaker 2: As she wrote on Twitter, quote, maybe does maybe voters
Speaker 2: appreciate when you speak out for the things you truly
Speaker 2: believe in. Perhaps discussed over, Gaza really was a significant
Speaker 2: and perhaps determinative factor in this election, something even I
Speaker 2: didn't anticipate, and it was a just rua who was rejected.
Speaker 2: On a podcast with Ronnie Colli, Conoors and Jamal Bowman
Speaker 2: revealed that his offer to campaign for Kamalin Michigan was
Speaker 2: also rejected. Listen to what they chose to do instead.
Speaker 14: I then told them I could share text with you,
Speaker 14: so you have evidence of this. I am ready to
Speaker 14: be dispatched in any parts of the country. Let me know.
Speaker 14: I want to go to Michigan particular, right. I told
Speaker 14: them this. They never get back to me. Even worse,
Speaker 14: they send Richie Trres, Bill Clinton, and Liz Cheney to Michigan.
Speaker 14: So again, and not only that, Bill Clinton is scolding
Speaker 14: Arab Americans.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like, yo, they were there first.
Speaker 14: Pretty much, they were there first. Y'all got to just
Speaker 14: deal with it or leave like this is what their
Speaker 14: campaign decided to do. Let's not send Jamal Bowman there.
Speaker 14: Who again, I have, thank god, you know a homdullah right, like,
Speaker 14: so much support in Michigan where like my opponent attacked
Speaker 14: me for it. Like he literally was like, I don't
Speaker 14: represent your district. You represent California and dearborn Michigan. My
Speaker 14: opponent said this shit in a debate. Wow, okay, so
Speaker 14: that is how And he said that because he knows
Speaker 14: that's an Arab American community.
Speaker 4: Yeah damn, that's like someone goes there.
Speaker 14: Yeah, right, you'll don't y'all ignore me, which tells me
Speaker 14: who you have around you in your campaign. But you
Speaker 14: said Bill Clinton, Richie Torrez.
Speaker 1: So that was the choice.
Speaker 2: Basically, Bill Clinton was Janne Richie Dorres, and not Jamal
Speaker 2: Bowman or anyone else who might have been able to
Speaker 2: help with a Muslim American or Arab American community. The results,
Speaker 2: of course, speak to this being an utter political catastrophe,
Speaker 2: not to mention a moral one.
Speaker 1: So what's the counter argument here.
Speaker 2: Well, if you look at exit polls, very few voters
Speaker 2: say that foreign policy actually drove their decision. Even among
Speaker 2: young voters, only four percent attributed their vote to foreign
Speaker 2: policy concerns. As with all voters, the top concern by
Speaker 2: far was the economy. But I've always suspected this was
Speaker 2: kind of the wrong way to think about the electoral
Speaker 2: consequences of the genocide in Gaza. There's a way in
Speaker 2: which Gaza undermines literally every argument that Kamma and the
Speaker 2: Democrats were attempting to make against Donald Trump. How can
Speaker 2: you posture is a clear moral alternative to Trump and
Speaker 2: trump Ism when you are backing a war in which
Speaker 2: seventy percent of those killed are women and children with
Speaker 2: starvation is being deployed systematically as a weapon of war.
Speaker 2: When we saw things this year like a child having
Speaker 2: their leg amputated with no anesthetic on a kitchen table,
Speaker 2: a body crushed like a bag of tomatoes under a bulldozer,
Speaker 2: an endless, ever expanding turn of death, carnish disease, rubble.
Speaker 2: But you want people to believe Trump's the unique evil,
Speaker 2: at the very least his evil, it's not looking so unique.
Speaker 2: How can you position yourself as the big tent party
Speaker 2: building a large unified coalition when your tent wasn't big
Speaker 2: enough for a single Palestinian American speaker at the DNC,
Speaker 2: When you couldn't do the basics of outreach to a
Speaker 2: Muslim community that was horror struck and utterly disgusted that
Speaker 2: the Big ten has room for Liz Cheney but not
Speaker 2: young people protesting a genocide or Arab Americans, some of
Speaker 2: whom had family members who were slaughtered in Gaza. Doesn't
Speaker 2: exactly send the open arms. Everyone's welcome that you think
Speaker 2: that you're sending. The party is open to you, so
Speaker 2: long as you agree not to breathe a word about
Speaker 2: these taxpayer funded whoors. And how can people trust that
Speaker 2: you're going to pay attention to their economic needs you're
Speaker 2: at home when you seem way more eager, way more
Speaker 2: interested in sending money abroad for wars in Ukraine, Gaza
Speaker 2: and the entire Middle East. I heard something similar to
Speaker 2: that sentiment from any number of voters to this cycle, Basically,
Speaker 2: why are you focused on all these global conflicts rather
Speaker 2: than our needs right here at home. Biden really leaned
Speaker 2: into this dynamic in a bad way, in particular with
Speaker 2: all his obsession with NATO and Aucus and inability to
Speaker 2: talk about the actually decent things that his administration did
Speaker 2: accomplish on anti trust, labor and industrial policy. Kamala was,
Speaker 2: of course saddled with this legacy and did.
Speaker 1: Nothing to break it.
Speaker 2: Even Trump's infamous They Them add plays into this sentiment
Speaker 2: that Kama and the Democrats are not really paying attention
Speaker 2: to what you care about. AOC herself made a version
Speaker 2: of this point.
Speaker 12: Take a listen all of this debate that people are
Speaker 12: talking about with this woke thing, right, Oh my gosh,
Speaker 12: it's because we care about trans people. And that's why
Speaker 12: only Donald Trump cared about trans people.
Speaker 6: Yes, he was the one running under the thirty million dollars
Speaker 6: at of ads.
Speaker 4: The Harris campaign said nothing about bus issue. That's right, that's.
Speaker 12: Right, And listen the ads. It's not to even deny
Speaker 12: the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas.
Speaker 12: What I think people are paying too much attention to
Speaker 12: is the first half of that ad, which says Kamala
Speaker 12: Harris is that said Kamala Harris is for the them.
Speaker 12: Everyone's focusing on that. They're not focusing on the second
Speaker 12: half of that ad where he said Donald Trump is
Speaker 12: for you. And Democrats very often in their messaging they
Speaker 12: speak and in this in terms and in concepts and
Speaker 12: not in the second person, I care about you, and
Speaker 12: political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate.
Speaker 12: Too often it.
Speaker 1: Gets pigeonholed like that.
Speaker 12: It is a race to convince a person about who
Speaker 12: cares about you more.
Speaker 1: In a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: Gaza is emblematic of democratic hypocrisy, moral collapse, and working
Speaker 2: class disengagement. Is it possible that Gaza alone costs the
Speaker 2: Democrats the election? I mean, if you think about it,
Speaker 2: Trump won Wisconsin by about thirty thousand votes, Michigan by
Speaker 2: only about eighty thousand votes, in Pennsylvania by about one
Speaker 2: hundred and twenty thousand votes.
Speaker 1: In the grins game of things, that's really not a lot.
Speaker 2: How many young people stayed home, how many Muslims switched
Speaker 2: to Trump in a vain hope that he'd make good
Speaker 2: on his pandering. How many working class voters could not
Speaker 2: shake the nagging sense that these wars were more important
Speaker 2: to Democrats than the price of ex Trump didn't deserve
Speaker 2: to win and has already nominated a bunch of neo
Speaker 2: kan warhowk Israel for psychos to key foreign policy positions.
Speaker 2: But for this and many other reasons, the Democrats they
Speaker 2: absolutely deserved to lose, And Sager I was initially.
Speaker 3: And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue,
Speaker 3: become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. All right, guys,
Speaker 3: thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. Sorry
Speaker 3: that we talked so much. We're going to talk a
Speaker 3: bit more tomorrow.