Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. As you can see
Speaker 4: that we're building out the studio right now, so here
Speaker 4: we are working from home.
Speaker 3: Emily, how you doing this week?
Speaker 5: Good?
Speaker 6: I'm in pajama pants, not just kidding, but it's great
Speaker 6: to have you back.
Speaker 7: Ryan.
Speaker 6: It was a blast to have Crystal here, but we.
Speaker 7: Missed you for sure.
Speaker 4: Lady's Day seemed like a great show. The pro shows
Speaker 4: have been fun. But yes, it's good to get back
Speaker 4: on track here today. We've got two new people jumping
Speaker 4: into the presidential election. We've got Chris Christy and Mike Pence.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk about that explosive news out of Ukraine.
Speaker 4: Also the PGA basically getting taken over by the Saudis.
Speaker 4: We can go into the details of this shocking deal
Speaker 4: that emerged yesterday.
Speaker 3: Emily. What else we got.
Speaker 6: Today, Well, Tucker Carlson's back, so we're going to talk
Speaker 6: about that as as part of the Ukraine blocks, some
Speaker 6: interesting stuff going on there.
Speaker 7: We're also talking.
Speaker 6: About AI deep fakes, the twenty twenty four election, which
Speaker 6: does feel like the twenty twenty four election has officially
Speaker 6: kicked off, and so, of course so are concerns about
Speaker 6: generative AI and the election, but Europe is handling them
Speaker 6: in a different way than we probably will, and so
Speaker 6: we're going to talk about that also, Ryan, you're going
Speaker 6: to be talking a little bit about Julian Nassan. I'm
Speaker 6: going to be talking a little bit about FBI and
Speaker 6: the whistleblower, trying to break that down. And we have
Speaker 6: a huge guest, Ryan, because you scored a heck of
Speaker 6: an interview.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're gonna have an interview later in the show
Speaker 4: with Imran Khan, who's the populist former Prime Minister of
Speaker 4: Pakistan who is basically currently surrounded in his home in Lahore.
Speaker 4: His party has been the target of one of the
Speaker 4: most incredible kind of crackdowns that you could imagine since
Speaker 4: he was ousted in April twenty twenty two. He's he's
Speaker 4: going to talk about what he thinks the US role
Speaker 4: was in his ouster, what he thinks of the US
Speaker 4: ought to be doing. Now, stand up for rule of
Speaker 4: law and democracy. Stick around for that for sure. But
Speaker 4: to startles, let's play our boy.
Speaker 3: Chris Christie.
Speaker 4: This is the former New Jersey governor announcing that he's
Speaker 4: jumping into the twenty twenty four race for the Republican nomination.
Speaker 3: Let me tell you something, everybody.
Speaker 8: The grift from this family is breathtaking. It's breathtaking. Jared
Speaker 8: Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House
Speaker 8: and months later get two billion dollars from the Saudis.
Speaker 8: Two billion dollars from the Saudis. You think it's because
Speaker 8: he's some kind of investing genius or do you think
Speaker 8: it's because he was sitting next to the president. If
Speaker 8: it stays for four years too, it favors for the Saudis.
Speaker 8: That's your money, that's your money. He stole and gave
Speaker 8: it to his family. You know what, That makes us
Speaker 8: a ban out of republic. That's what makes us so
Speaker 8: he may get thirty percent again I'm not sure. Maybe
Speaker 8: he'll get more, maybe he'll get less. But let me
Speaker 8: tell you what he'll know in twenty twenty four that
Speaker 8: he had no idea of in twenty sixteen. He's in
Speaker 8: for a fight to get it.
Speaker 7: It's like a high school theater teacher.
Speaker 4: But on the substance, he's not wrong about any of that.
Speaker 4: And you and you and I have talked about this,
Speaker 4: and I know you agree on those points. That the
Speaker 4: that the level of grift represented by that two billion
Speaker 4: dollar payment from the Saudis to the Kushners immediately after
Speaker 4: leaving the White House is absolutely extraordinary. Like in the
Speaker 4: realm of foreign policy corruption, I can't think of anything
Speaker 4: bigger than that. You know, doesn't mean that smaller levels
Speaker 4: of corruption from Mania or from Ukrainian gas companies or
Speaker 4: whatever are less, you know, are not themselves evidence of corruption,
Speaker 4: but good lord, two billion dollars to a family that
Speaker 4: is trying to get back into the White House just incredible.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and it's interesting. I know, we have a lot
Speaker 6: of clips, so we keep it moving. But just a
Speaker 6: quick thought is that it's interesting, particularly because no other
Speaker 6: Republican candidate goes after Trump on that question of corruption.
Speaker 6: They watched everyone else basically try it in twenty fifteen
Speaker 6: and twenty sixteen, and so they're hesitant to wade back
Speaker 6: into those waters. They don't want to offend Trump suppurters
Speaker 6: whose votes they need, and they also know it's kind
Speaker 6: of baked into the Trump cake. But as unseerious I
Speaker 6: think of a candidacy as Chris Christie's is that's one
Speaker 6: of the more interesting things. If this is a Kamakazi
Speaker 6: mission for Chris Christi to exact vengeance on Donald Trump
Speaker 6: and take him down. I mean, the difference between what
Speaker 6: happened in twenty fifteen and twenty sixteen is that he
Speaker 6: wasn't president yet and now this is actually like a
Speaker 6: grift that happened as president of the United States who
Speaker 6: can't paign to drain the swamp? Do I think it's
Speaker 6: a fatal bloat, Not even close. But I do think
Speaker 6: it's interesting to see Trump actually to see him actually
Speaker 6: talk about that.
Speaker 4: And for people who don't know the backstory, it's not
Speaker 4: as if Chris Christy has some unique level of purity
Speaker 4: on this question.
Speaker 3: Here.
Speaker 4: It's that he prosecuted Jared Kushner's father and Jared Kushner
Speaker 4: paid him back by making sure that Chris Christie's life
Speaker 4: in the Trump orbit was miserable, blocking him from appointments
Speaker 4: and otherwise undermining him during the Trump presidency. And so
Speaker 4: Christy has always had a feud with Jared Kushner. And
Speaker 4: so that's where this is coming from, not any kind
Speaker 4: of innate kind of disgust that he might have at
Speaker 4: how MBS spends his bribe money.
Speaker 6: Yeah, right, And it's not like Chris Christy really has
Speaker 6: a leg to stand on when it comes today either.
Speaker 6: So let's roll the next clip from again. This was
Speaker 6: Chris Christie's Tuesday night presidential announcement in New Hampshire.
Speaker 8: Here he is again, beware of the leader in this
Speaker 8: country you have had the leadership to who has never
Speaker 8: made made a mistake, who has never done anything wrong,
Speaker 8: But when something goes wrong, it's always someone else's fault,
Speaker 8: and who has never lost I've lost you. People did
Speaker 8: that to me in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 3: That's good, right, he done funny.
Speaker 6: He also referred to Trump as a quote lonely, self consumed,
Speaker 6: self serving mirror hog and said, quote, we can't dismiss
Speaker 6: the question of character anymore, everybody. If we do we
Speaker 6: get what we deserve, and an advisor to the campaign
Speaker 6: told Mike Allen of Axios that Christie's campaign will emphasize
Speaker 6: authenticity and quote be willing to admit mistakes, be accountable,
Speaker 6: and share why he keeps showing up even when it
Speaker 6: seems hard. Obviously for somebody now running on authenticity against
Speaker 6: corruption and grift, he might have some Bridgegate explaining to
Speaker 6: do if anybody really cared about his candidacy.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, indeed, but it probably doesn't get to that point.
Speaker 4: Trump did not go with the Bridgegate rebuttal, let's play
Speaker 4: the response from the front runner for the Republican nomination
Speaker 4: to the entry of Chris Christy into the race's role.
Speaker 8: At and it was about our country and its future,
Speaker 8: and I wondered what our choice was going to be.
Speaker 8: We're going to be small or are we going to
Speaker 8: be big?
Speaker 6: Okay, that's the president of the former president of the
Speaker 6: United States, just winning the meme more left and right.
Speaker 6: A lot of people online did pick up on Christy
Speaker 6: repeatedly using the words small.
Speaker 7: It seemed intentional.
Speaker 6: I thought the entire rollout from Christy was just sort
Speaker 6: of cringe and more than I expected it to because
Speaker 6: more than I expected it to be because he actually
Speaker 6: when he first became governor of New Jersey, he clearly
Speaker 6: had some political talent. And I mean that in the
Speaker 6: sense of like political the political theater. He wasn't bad
Speaker 6: at it, you know, he would He really was one
Speaker 6: of the first people to maximize the power of a
Speaker 6: viral clip. Uh at the time it was probably like
Speaker 6: people pinging in around on list serves, but of him
Speaker 6: just like laying into teachers unions. It was, you know,
Speaker 6: the political theater part wasn't that bad. This feels like
Speaker 6: you know, an eighties hair metal band trying to you know,
Speaker 6: stay alive and play all the hits for you know,
Speaker 6: a big boomer concert crowd, because it just it's like
Speaker 6: so badly done. The you know, when he's getting in
Speaker 6: people's faces and walking over to them, it felt like, yeah,
Speaker 6: middle school theater.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I do think of him during his time as New
Speaker 4: Jersey governor as sort of like a proto Trump. Like
Speaker 4: he he didn't he didn't necessarily see Trump coming, but
Speaker 4: he understood that that's where the energy of the Republican
Speaker 4: Party was going, and so he and he so he
Speaker 4: fed them that type of spectacle where he was, you know, attacking,
Speaker 4: attacking the media, and attacking his political enemies without any
Speaker 4: type of headge, any efforts to you know, appear like
Speaker 4: a you know, a reasonable center who's like going to
Speaker 4: sit down with the teachers unions and going to work
Speaker 4: something out. You know, he famously would just yell at
Speaker 4: the teachers unions, and you know, if he was fortunate
Speaker 4: enough from his perspective to have a teacher come and
Speaker 4: confront him, he delighted in that. And then and he
Speaker 4: would grab the cameras and he would and he would
Speaker 4: go after them, and the Republican base then would would
Speaker 4: celebrate that. But I feel like there's something that Christy
Speaker 4: can't match when Trump came and kind of topped a
Speaker 4: proto Trump.
Speaker 3: Like, if you're proto Trump and you meet Trump.
Speaker 4: Himself, it's very difficult for you to kind of up
Speaker 4: your game to a level that is going to get
Speaker 4: the same reaction out of the crowd then you can
Speaker 4: with the headline act.
Speaker 6: I think that's a really good point, and there's no
Speaker 6: reason that it'll be different from twenty sixteen, I don't think,
Speaker 6: except for one interesting perhaps development, which is that Chris
Speaker 6: Christie some indications point to him really being on a
Speaker 6: Kamakazi mission and saying, you know, I know my political
Speaker 6: future is in the rear view mirror, and what I
Speaker 6: want to do is take down Donald Trump. As opposed
Speaker 6: to in twenty fifteen twenty sixteen, the guy clearly wanted
Speaker 6: to work in the White House. He wanted to be
Speaker 6: a cabinet officially, want to be chief of staff. He
Speaker 6: wanted a major appointment, so he couldn't go full Kamakazi
Speaker 6: and totally run against Trump. In fact, what he did
Speaker 6: was basically Kamakazi the rest of the Republican field and
Speaker 6: go after Marco Rubio. And this is you know, Chris
Speaker 6: Christy knowing he really had no chance. I think that
Speaker 6: Rubio debate moment that people remember was in New Hampshire,
Speaker 6: and Christy is sort of uniquely suited to the New
Speaker 6: Hampshire audience, at least in his performance. I don't know
Speaker 6: if actually policy wise, he's probably not the best fit,
Speaker 6: but he is somebody who's like kind of an unorthodox
Speaker 6: coastal establishment Republican that also has this brash populist energy
Speaker 6: but no populist policy. Is he's just a weird candidate.
Speaker 7: In twenty twenty three.
Speaker 6: But and I don't think any of his Kamakazi plans
Speaker 6: seem to be what actually will go after Trump. But
Speaker 6: to the point about the Kushners, nobody else is talking
Speaker 6: about that, so I say, bring it on.
Speaker 3: Oh for sure.
Speaker 4: I actually think Christy gets a little bit too much
Speaker 4: credit for that debate performance, because all he did was
Speaker 4: point out that Marco Rubio had said the same grammatically
Speaker 4: awkward line, you know, three times within like a ninety
Speaker 4: second window that I think the entire audience recognized. Also,
Speaker 4: and all Christy had to do is kind of just
Speaker 4: point to the guy tripping over his own shoelaces, and
Speaker 4: people like, Wow, what a knockout blow from Christy. It's like, no,
Speaker 4: the guy just the guy just fell over on his face.
Speaker 6: I agree.
Speaker 4: But if he's going to do a Kamakazi mission, the
Speaker 4: question is who does that serve, Because, like you said,
Speaker 4: he kamakazi himself through the primary electorate, serving Trump, hoping
Speaker 4: that he would, you know, could get some type of
Speaker 4: position within that administry. Now, maybe it's a CNN contributor,
Speaker 4: some some type of institution or audience that will celebrate
Speaker 4: a kama Kaze mission in the Republican primary. But speaking
Speaker 4: of Kamakazi missions, I think we might have another fighter
Speaker 4: in the air who is similarly kind of nose diving
Speaker 4: toward a Trump battleship. And that's that's Mike Pence, who,
Speaker 4: you know, after breaking with Trump a number of times,
Speaker 4: we put up I think a two. Here Pence is
Speaker 4: filing the paperwork news that I was actually.
Speaker 3: Shocked to see.
Speaker 4: I think was broken by the Messenger, which is that
Speaker 4: new kind of Hill knockoff news outlet. A couple days
Speaker 4: ago they announced that he'd be jumping into the race
Speaker 4: within two weeks. He has filed the paperwork to run.
Speaker 4: What's what's your read on what kind of moment this
Speaker 4: is for Mike Pence.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's it's interesting. So it felt to me like
Speaker 6: this last week, the Joni Ernst Rost and Ride event
Speaker 6: out in Iowa was the kind of unofficial kickoff to
Speaker 6: the twenty twenty four presidential primary season.
Speaker 7: And it's hard to always know.
Speaker 6: It's like the you know quote about pornography, right, like,
Speaker 6: you know what, when you see it, that's what it
Speaker 6: is about. That's what it is with the primary season.
Speaker 6: And I feel like it's actually like, you know, you
Speaker 6: hear people I'm going to announce, they launched their pack,
Speaker 6: they file their paperwork. But with Christy and Pence making
Speaker 6: their announcements this week, Pence is making his official announcement today.
Speaker 6: He's already rolled out a video. He's going to be
Speaker 6: doing a CNN town hall. It feels like now it's
Speaker 6: really happening. They're you know, Rona Santisus been in Iowa,
Speaker 6: South Carolina, New Hampshire, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, the Hesa Hutchinson.
Speaker 6: I don't know why I felt compelsive you mentioned him there,
Speaker 6: but it does really seem like it's in full swing now,
Speaker 6: and with Pence entering this week, it's interesting.
Speaker 7: In his announcement video, he.
Speaker 6: Said, quote, I'll always be proud of the progress we
Speaker 6: made together, referring to try for a stronger, more prosperous America.
Speaker 6: But different times call for different leadership. I have faith
Speaker 6: God is not done with America yet. So you see
Speaker 6: how he his Trump's strategy, his Trump messaging strategy say,
Speaker 6: I was proud of the administration. Now we're in a
Speaker 6: different time, need a different guy. And it's definitely not
Speaker 6: the Christie strategy. It may or may not be similar
Speaker 6: to the DeSantis strategy. We still don't really know. That's
Speaker 6: a little preview of how Mike Pence plans to deal
Speaker 6: with it. I will say for all of the people
Speaker 6: just quickly wondering why on earth is Mike Pence getting
Speaker 6: into the race?
Speaker 7: Two things.
Speaker 6: Ben Dominich made a really good point, which is that
Speaker 6: you know, take Mike Pence seriously when he says he
Speaker 6: prayed about it and that his faith is really is
Speaker 6: really real. And if he believes that through prayer he
Speaker 6: came to the decision he should run, then that's probably
Speaker 6: why he's running. And secondly, I was talking on Megan
Speaker 6: Kelly show about this, like these candidates are old, Trump
Speaker 6: and Biden are old. There is an element of a
Speaker 6: totally unexpected potential situation that could unfold in a year
Speaker 6: and then things would be why the race would just
Speaker 6: be blown essentially wide open if something were to happen
Speaker 6: health wise, and then you're in the race and you
Speaker 6: have a real shot at becoming president if everything is
Speaker 6: suddenly blown open.
Speaker 4: And there are criminal cases underway that that'll matter too.
Speaker 4: And but before we move on to the next segment,
Speaker 4: I did want to ask you one question. I noticed
Speaker 4: that at least one high profile Republican on Twitter recently
Speaker 4: was talking about how excited they were about RFK Junior's
Speaker 4: Twitter spaces, and I've seen some other kind of populist
Speaker 4: righte enthusiasm around r f K Junior. So I'm curious,
Speaker 4: from your perspective, what would happen if he had jumped
Speaker 4: in the Republican primary instead. Do you think his numbers
Speaker 4: would be, you know, lesser, equal, or greater than in
Speaker 4: the Democratic primary.
Speaker 6: I would say lesser. I think the abortion issue would
Speaker 6: be a real one. I think he would have to
Speaker 6: talk a whole lot more about like the kind of
Speaker 6: cultural issues that he sort of steered clear and steered
Speaker 6: clear of, because right now he's trying to draw contrast
Speaker 6: with Biden, and that's really interesting. I don't know, but
Speaker 6: I think there's something also very alluring to a lot
Speaker 6: of people on the right about the sort of Democratic
Speaker 6: candidate who's running. I mean, that was a whole Trump thing,
Speaker 6: is that he was trying to appeal to these sort
Speaker 6: of old school russ Belt Democrats and he pulled a
Speaker 6: lot of them over. So I think there's something very
Speaker 6: alluring about that too. I think that's probably why there
Speaker 6: are a lot of people on the right that are like,
Speaker 6: oh rfa, he's talking about being like a sixties democrat,
Speaker 6: a Kennedy Democrat.
Speaker 7: So that's probably part of it from my perspective.
Speaker 3: Gotcha, all right? Sounds sounds right to me.
Speaker 4: The Washing Post is out with new reporting based on
Speaker 4: the Discord leaks, that the Ukrainians had actually been plotting
Speaker 4: to blow up the North Stream pipeline, and that the
Speaker 4: United States learned about this conspiracy months before the pipeline
Speaker 4: was actually blown up, as came from a human source.
Speaker 4: Tucker Carlson came back to Twitter with his show What's
Speaker 4: It Called? Emily Tucker on Twitter, Twitter, Tucker Twitter on
Speaker 4: Tucker Tucker on Twitter. He's back with it was his
Speaker 4: first segment that he posted last night, and he dipped
Speaker 4: into this news roll that here.
Speaker 1: No one who's paid to cover these things seem to
Speaker 1: entertain even the possibility it could have been the Ukrainians
Speaker 1: who did it. No chance of that. Ukraine, as you
Speaker 1: may have heard, is led by a man called Zelenski,
Speaker 1: and we can say for a dead certain fact that
Speaker 1: he was not involved.
Speaker 3: He couldn't have been.
Speaker 1: Zelensky is too decent for terrorism now you see him
Speaker 1: on television. That's true, you might form a different impression,
Speaker 1: sweaty and rat like a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor
Speaker 1: of Christians, a friend of black Rock. But don't believe
Speaker 1: your own eyes. Actually, miss Zelensky is a very good man,
Speaker 1: the best really. As George W. Bush once noted, he
Speaker 1: is our generation's Winston Churchill. Of all the people in
Speaker 1: the world, our shifty, dead eyed Ukrainian friend in the
Speaker 1: tracksuit is uniquely incapable of blowing up a dam well.
Speaker 1: A former Air Force officer who worked for years in
Speaker 1: military intelligence came forward as a whistleblower to reveal that
Speaker 1: the US government has physical evidence of crashed non human
Speaker 1: made aircraft, as well as the bodies of the pilots
Speaker 1: who flew those aircraft. The Pentagon has spent decades studying
Speaker 1: these otherworldly remains in order to build more technologically advanced
Speaker 1: weapons systems. Okay, that's what the former intel officer revealed,
Speaker 1: and it was clear he was telling the truth. In
Speaker 1: other words, UFOs are actually real, and apparently so is
Speaker 1: extraterrestrial life. Now we know in a normal country this
Speaker 1: news would qualify as a bombshell. The story of the
Speaker 1: millennium in our country, it doesn't.
Speaker 6: And I think what's really interesting there is you see
Speaker 6: him tying this extended argument about the Washington Post discordly
Speaker 6: reporting on Nordstream, and as Soccer points out, we can
Speaker 6: put up b three here. Soccer points out, you look
Speaker 6: at that and you see that we were basically our
Speaker 6: government knows all of the Sager says, let's this think
Speaker 6: and the Biden admin had intel that Ukraine had a
Speaker 6: plot to blow up Nordstream and still lied. Slash tried
Speaker 6: to insinuate that Russia was responsible in real time. So
Speaker 6: we've had months of deception basically from our government at
Speaker 6: this point. And Tucker then ties that his monologue starts
Speaker 6: with Ukraine and ends on UFOs. It's about ten minutes long.
Speaker 6: It's on Twitter if folks want to check the whole
Speaker 6: thing out, and he has a line where he says,
Speaker 6: even a Yak herder in Tajikistan knows who blew up
Speaker 6: the Nordstream pipeline. And he's drawing contrast between American audiences
Speaker 6: and everyone else in the world. He's like, the American
Speaker 6: people might be the least informed in the world at
Speaker 6: this point, because when you look at how our media
Speaker 6: react to just like an incredible revelation about alien life
Speaker 6: forms in our government, when you look at how our
Speaker 6: media reacts with a kind of a shrug as our
Speaker 6: presidential administration initially was really deceptive. In fact, they actually
Speaker 6: said it was a crazy conspiracy theory at first, in
Speaker 6: an echo of the lab leak narrative. It was a
Speaker 6: crazy conspiracy theory that Ukraine may have had anything to.
Speaker 7: Do with this.
Speaker 6: So I thought it was a pretty interesting piece of
Speaker 6: argumentation from Tucker.
Speaker 7: I thought the show looked good.
Speaker 4: What'd you think, Ryan, Yeah, So, I mean, let's let's
Speaker 4: take the Ukrainian piece first. This is this is fascinating
Speaker 4: reporting coming out of these these Discord leaks, And it's
Speaker 4: interesting that the Washington Posts kind of held back the
Speaker 4: country that initially discovered this intel and then shared it
Speaker 4: with the United States. The United States then shared it
Speaker 4: with its its German partners and others, because if it's
Speaker 4: in the Discord leagues, presumably you would think that other
Speaker 4: foreign intelligence operations, including the Russians, already have access to it.
Speaker 4: So you can kind of withhold the country's name from
Speaker 4: the public. But I'm not sure what good that's doing,
Speaker 4: you know from a from a counter intelligence perspective. But
Speaker 4: what's interesting is that they are there are some real
Speaker 4: specific details about that. They list about this Ukrainian operation.
Speaker 4: They say they're going to be kind of six operatives.
Speaker 4: They're going to rent They're going to rent a yacht
Speaker 4: uh and then they're going to go out and use
Speaker 4: submersibles to blow it up. Now, according to the German
Speaker 4: investigative reporting, it was there were six people who rented
Speaker 4: a yacht uh and they they dove, which is I
Speaker 4: don't know if that's what they mean by submersibles. There
Speaker 4: was there was a reference to helium being used by
Speaker 4: both because it's such a deep dive that you need
Speaker 4: you know, helium to maintain clarity and to keep keep
Speaker 4: you safe at the that that level of depth.
Speaker 3: And so the idea the end. Oh.
Speaker 4: They also said that they were going to do it
Speaker 4: around is June operation uh, where there were there were
Speaker 4: you know, a naval operation.
Speaker 3: Uh. So that didn't happen.
Speaker 4: There was some speculation in the article that they learned
Speaker 4: that their operation had been compromised and had been had
Speaker 4: been leaked, and so they postponed but these but it
Speaker 4: was still done right around a giant naval operation. So
Speaker 4: basically all the details that the intelligence community had before
Speaker 4: the operation was carried out actually panned out.
Speaker 3: One point.
Speaker 4: Don't'm curious for your take on this. This would undercut
Speaker 4: Seymour Hirsch's reporting in the sense that he reported that
Speaker 4: it was this, you know, this crew of Americans out
Speaker 4: of you know, working out of this gutless school and
Speaker 4: the Gulf uh that carried it out. My guess would
Speaker 4: be what Hirsch learned about was a plan that was
Speaker 4: trained for but ultimately not carried out, and instead this
Speaker 4: Ukrainian operation was carried out. And I'm curious what you
Speaker 4: think about the way that this conflicts a with everything
Speaker 4: the intelligence community has said publicly. You know, they had
Speaker 4: that leak to the New York Times to try to
Speaker 4: counter Seymour Hirsch, but it also does conflict with Hirsch's reporting.
Speaker 7: That's an interesting point.
Speaker 6: I hadn't thought about it, and folks can watch our
Speaker 6: whole interview with Seymour Hrsch from shortly after that bombshell
Speaker 6: was published not too long ago. But I've always thought
Speaker 6: with his report that it may be through the telephone
Speaker 6: chain official affiliations are getting confused or are getting intentionally
Speaker 6: obfuscated and hard to totally pin down, which I think
Speaker 6: gets us to Obviously, one of the biggest problems with
Speaker 6: this in power war is that we don't know what
Speaker 6: our country is involvement in operations like nord Stream, like
Speaker 6: anything that's being used inside of Russia in Moscow, regardless
Speaker 6: of what our government says. It's hard to trust what
Speaker 6: our government says. They don't seem to know the extent
Speaker 6: to which our personnel and our equipment is being used.
Speaker 6: So and things that we've sold Ukraine are being used.
Speaker 6: So I've always wondered if there was more, if there
Speaker 6: were just like affiliations that were already loose when you're
Speaker 6: using maybe mercenaries, and it's unclear where the money, the support,
Speaker 6: or the go ahead was given.
Speaker 7: I don't know. I think maybe that's possibly an explanation.
Speaker 4: And as as for Tucker's show, I think he's right
Speaker 4: that it's wild that there isn't kind of wall to
Speaker 4: wall coverage of this whistleblower intelligence community allegation that the
Speaker 4: US has in its pre in its possession basically alien
Speaker 4: aircraft like and some of the reports, some of the reporting,
Speaker 4: you know, seems to confirm that like that, that to
Speaker 4: me is shocking, Like that is something that I would
Speaker 4: expect we would be covering wall to wall on his
Speaker 4: on his show itself, just as a person who's involved
Speaker 4: in progressive media. It's it's intimidating. You know how dominant
Speaker 4: the right is getting when it comes to the media ecosystem.
Speaker 4: How many views does this sucker have by now? Probably
Speaker 4: fifty million or maybe far more than that. This that
Speaker 4: comes after the what is a Woman documentary?
Speaker 3: Got? Good?
Speaker 4: Lord knows how many viewers on Twitter even if you
Speaker 4: think that they're counting is an order of magnitude off.
Speaker 4: You're still talking about millions and millions of people, you know,
Speaker 4: gobbling up this content. And the progressive kind of media
Speaker 4: ecosystem is just not even if you include c A,
Speaker 4: MSNBC in that, which I wouldn't, but even if you do,
Speaker 4: it's not even remotely comparable. Do you can you on
Speaker 4: the right, do you like kind of feel a burst
Speaker 4: of energy when it comes to audience that that wasn't
Speaker 4: there before? Or is this kind of manufactured through the
Speaker 4: hostile takeover of an algorithm?
Speaker 6: I think independent media has a burst of energy, not
Speaker 6: so much conservative media. If that makes sense because I
Speaker 6: just checked. The Tucker video does have, according to Twitter's numbers,
Speaker 6: sixty one point seven million views, so that's about twelve
Speaker 6: hours in about twelve hours, And it may be orders
Speaker 6: of magnitude off. It may just be when people scrow
Speaker 6: through the video one million, right, which is higher than
Speaker 6: his audience on Fox News. And I think that ten
Speaker 6: minute format is smart. It's really targeted. You can write
Speaker 6: a really sharp, clever monologue. I thought the writing of
Speaker 6: the monologue was excellent, just from like the art of
Speaker 6: writing standpoint, sort of very typical Tucker. He's a great
Speaker 6: writer and his good writers on his staff. So I
Speaker 6: think that's where I think the format is very He
Speaker 6: found a format that's going to work very well for him.
Speaker 7: But I also thinks it's.
Speaker 6: True that like real leftist media, meaning like actual you know,
Speaker 6: critical of our foreign policy, critical of the economic consensus,
Speaker 6: leftist media. It's it's sort of like similar to where
Speaker 6: conservative media has always been, Like there's just there's not
Speaker 6: a ton of like money and energy behind that in
Speaker 6: profession and the professional political class.
Speaker 7: But what's interesting is that the.
Speaker 6: Establishment media, the legacy media, is so culturally leftists. Now,
Speaker 6: I shouldn't say left us so culturally progressive now that
Speaker 6: it's it's the it's created the lane. And when I
Speaker 6: say culturally, I don't just mean on the sort of
Speaker 6: woke agenda, because yes, they're they're really far to the
Speaker 6: left when it comes to a lot of those things,
Speaker 6: but also just in like censorship issues, like they're completely
Speaker 6: pro censorship. They're pro like X, Y and Z, And
Speaker 6: that creates the lane from Matt Walsh to come in,
Speaker 6: That creates the lane for Tucker Carlson to come in.
Speaker 6: And then those are the same people in legacy media
Speaker 6: who decry populism, and all they do is empower populist
Speaker 6: by giving them very real ammunition. So you can't like
Speaker 6: complain about Tucker having a sixty million video viewership in
Speaker 6: twelve hours when he is basically right on the substance
Speaker 6: of the question that you're not doing your job very
Speaker 6: well if you aren't wallwall coverage about governments lies on
Speaker 6: UFO craft, and governments lies on you know, this entire
Speaker 6: nord Stream bombing and the entire war.
Speaker 4: Really and Tucker had a really interesting kind of inversion
Speaker 4: of a Bernie Sanders line at the end of his
Speaker 4: monologue which people can finance. Around the like nine and
Speaker 4: a half minute mark or so, where he says something like,
Speaker 4: don't ask why we're all so rich, go worry about racism,
Speaker 4: which is essentially out of kind of left wing populism
Speaker 4: over the last one hundred and fifty years. That the
Speaker 4: argument is that, you know, race and racism itself was
Speaker 4: kind of constructed back in the sixteenth seventeenth century in
Speaker 4: order to, you know, allow elites to divide the working
Speaker 4: class in a way that will allow them to rule
Speaker 4: over them. He's sort of using it a slightly different angle.
Speaker 4: He's arguing. He's arguing that, I guess there isn't there
Speaker 4: isn't racism, and so the elites are saying, look, there
Speaker 4: is racism, so you need to fight about the question
Speaker 4: of whether there is racism. But it's fundamentally the same
Speaker 4: point that he's making, that that that has been made
Speaker 4: for you know, hundreds of years by people on the
Speaker 4: left saying that that it's a it's a tool that
Speaker 4: the ruling class uses to kind of divide everyone underneath
Speaker 4: the rule the ruling class, and.
Speaker 3: That is was that an iteration and an evolution at.
Speaker 4: All of his politics that he's edging closer to that,
Speaker 4: or do you think that there's there's been a kind
Speaker 4: of an element of that from.
Speaker 6: The beginning the speech he gave it the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 6: right before, and reportedly this may have had some impact
Speaker 6: on Rupert Murdoch's thinking. He made a speech of the
Speaker 6: Heritage Fundation's fiftieth anniversary gala the friday before he got canned,
Speaker 6: on a Monday, and he talked like, very honestly about
Speaker 6: his ideological evolution going from sort of more libertarian to
Speaker 6: now more of like populist conservative. And yeah, I think
Speaker 6: that absolutely represents an evolution is thinking. And I wish
Speaker 6: the again speaking of how there's like a lane created it.
Speaker 6: I actually really wish that the left talked more like that.
Speaker 6: And I think the right is needs to internalize and
Speaker 6: learn the lesson too about how the ruling class uses
Speaker 6: those questions to distract, because they're actually still they're using
Speaker 6: like very real concerns people have about what their children
Speaker 6: are being taught in school and using it as fodder
Speaker 6: to just create complete distractions. That doesn't mean that people
Speaker 6: on the right or the anti woke left, center whatever
Speaker 6: shouldn't talk about that at all.
Speaker 7: I mean it doesn't.
Speaker 6: Invalidate those concerns, but it is important to recognize that
Speaker 6: there does, there does need to be a balance, because
Speaker 6: there is a balance for your average voter, your average
Speaker 6: person who you know, relies on the media, the political class,
Speaker 6: the political universe to create a safe and prospering society.
Speaker 4: Well, let's let's move on to this incredible basically takeover
Speaker 4: of golf by Muhammed bin Salma. Now it's being reported
Speaker 4: as a merger between the PGA and Live Golf, which
Speaker 4: was the Saudi funded rival that went around and was
Speaker 4: posching a whole bunch of players in order to create
Speaker 4: like a rival tour, you know, massively overpaying them and
Speaker 4: then you know, with the idea that they're going to
Speaker 4: you know, create this competition. PGA Tour was responded by saying, basically,
Speaker 4: these are terrorists. You know, you've never had to apologize
Speaker 4: for being part of the PGA. You're gonna have to
Speaker 4: apologize constantly if you're part of the Live tour. If
Speaker 4: you do that, you are a complete sellout. And and
Speaker 4: then next thing, you know, PGA Tour is selling out itself.
Speaker 4: If you look at if you look at and Ben Walsh,
Speaker 4: there has some of the details of the contract. The
Speaker 4: PGA will still technically have the kind of voting majority
Speaker 4: on the board that governs this, but the Saudis, through
Speaker 4: their their sovereign wealth fund, will have the exclusive right
Speaker 4: to invest. In other words, they will own it like
Speaker 4: they are the owners. And so what does it even
Speaker 4: mean at that point that the PGA players have a
Speaker 4: voting membership if it's completely funded and owned by the Saudis.
Speaker 4: This seems like just a complete victory for them as
Speaker 4: far as I can see.
Speaker 3: What's your read on it?
Speaker 7: Oh?
Speaker 6: Absolutely, I mean the memes on this were incredible. First
Speaker 6: of all, who knew that golf Twitter was so funny?
Speaker 5: Not me?
Speaker 6: And speaking of which, speaking of Twitter, let's roll the
Speaker 6: next element.
Speaker 7: Let's just put C two up here.
Speaker 6: This was a pretty interesting take by Senator Mike Lee
Speaker 6: where he said, the PGA Golf Tour is buying Saudi
Speaker 6: backed lip Golf Tour. Looks like a long established dominant
Speaker 6: incumbent is acquiring a Nason competitor, one that has been
Speaker 6: challenging its dominant positions.
Speaker 7: So there you see.
Speaker 6: A counter argument from actually an anti trust angle, which
Speaker 6: is pretty interesting too.
Speaker 7: Matt Fuller.
Speaker 6: Then we can put the next element up here as
Speaker 6: we roll through a lot of the amusing reactions, had
Speaker 6: this great tweet where he's like doing this transcript of
Speaker 6: a conversation between Saudi Arabia and the PGA tour. Hey,
Speaker 6: PGA golfers, we have a bunch of money to offer
Speaker 6: you for a new league.
Speaker 7: PGA.
Speaker 6: You're ruining the game in sportswa washing your reputation of
Speaker 6: human rights abuses. Okay, but what if we offered you
Speaker 6: a lot of money. PGA today we'd like to announce
Speaker 6: a merger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, basically, and then.
Speaker 6: There's just an incredible confluence of events here, so we
Speaker 6: can put the next element up. This is a Wall
Speaker 6: Street Journal story about Secretary of State Anthony Blincoln. He
Speaker 6: goes to Saudi Arabia and we're reportedly he's going to
Speaker 6: say that human rights are in the are. He's going
Speaker 6: to take up the issue of human rights with the Saudi's,
Speaker 6: which of course is what the Biden administration wants to posture.
Speaker 6: As we'll see how substantive that ends up being. And
Speaker 6: then finally, this is maybe my favorite element of the story.
Speaker 7: C five, we can put this tweet up. This is a.
Speaker 6: Tweet from Timothy means of a Donald Trump truth from
Speaker 6: What Yeah July eighteenth, twenty twenty two, where he basically
Speaker 6: predicted this is pretty crazy, where he said all of
Speaker 6: those golfers that remain quite loyal to the very disloyal
Speaker 6: PGA and all his different forms will pay a big
Speaker 6: price when the inevitable merger with Live comes and you
Speaker 6: get nothing from but a thank you from PGA officials
Speaker 6: who are making millions of dollars a year. Ryan, My
Speaker 6: question to you is Trump's There's nobody who knows corrupt
Speaker 6: business deals better than Donald Trump? Is this not him
Speaker 6: just having the perfect experience to predict the moment?
Speaker 4: This was entire This was crystal clear to him, and
Speaker 4: he from his perspective, he probably couldn't see how other
Speaker 4: people couldn't see where this was going. He's like, what
Speaker 4: part of this don't you guys understand? Like they have
Speaker 4: an enormous amount of money that they're willing to spend.
Speaker 3: People like money.
Speaker 4: They will eventually take the money and they will own
Speaker 4: you and I like the way that he will like
Speaker 4: isn't the right.
Speaker 3: Word for it.
Speaker 4: The way that he addresses love right, The way that
Speaker 4: he addresses the players who are trying to take a
Speaker 4: stand against this is just amazing, saying like, look, you
Speaker 4: guys are the fools, because you're eventually going to be
Speaker 4: in the pay of MBS anyway, and all you're not
Speaker 4: even All you're going to get is a pad on
Speaker 4: the head from the PGA, while the PGA is eventually
Speaker 4: going to sell out take the money. All these other
Speaker 4: players that are selling out are going to take the money,
Speaker 4: and you're still going to end up working for the Saudis,
Speaker 4: but just at the same pay or even less than
Speaker 4: you're getting now. And tragic as it is, that turns
Speaker 4: out to have been basically one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 6: So we have now Anthony Blinkin going to Saudi Arabia
Speaker 6: and Ryan you know these you know this particular issue
Speaker 6: area very well. Of course, the Biden administration wants to posture,
Speaker 6: and they got their ws, they got their Wall Street
Speaker 6: Journal headline, assuming this is the one that they wanted.
Speaker 6: As Blincn visits Saudi Arabia, human rights are back in
Speaker 6: focus sub having Biden officials have pushed the Saudis to
Speaker 6: lift travel bands on American citizens. So Blincoln is prepping
Speaker 6: to visit Saudi Arabia this week and prepping a human
Speaker 6: rights message to the Saudis. How confident are you that
Speaker 6: that actually comes to fruition in a substantive way.
Speaker 4: Not very because as you saw, MBS basically jacked up
Speaker 4: gas prices right right ahead of the announcement of the
Speaker 4: of the PGA takeover. So it's it's almost inaccurate to
Speaker 4: say that the Saudis are are buying the PGA. We
Speaker 4: are buying the PGA, you know, with the money that
Speaker 4: we're putting into our gas tanks and then sending over
Speaker 4: to MBS that he's then using to buy PGA, And
Speaker 4: he's restricting oil production in order to drive up gas
Speaker 4: prices to help offset the tiny amount that he's going
Speaker 4: to spend for the PGA, so blink and is going
Speaker 4: to have that that he's going to have to negotiate.
Speaker 3: He's he's also.
Speaker 4: Going to be pushing and he said for MBS to
Speaker 4: release a bunch of American residents, you know, who are
Speaker 4: being who are not allowed to being kept illegally in
Speaker 4: the country, a lot of them for social media posts
Speaker 4: on a social media platform. At Saudi Arabia is a
Speaker 4: significant owner of Twitter, you you constantly see news stories
Speaker 4: of people being arrested and sentenced to insanely long sentences
Speaker 4: for something that they said on Twitter. A significant number
Speaker 4: of those are American residents, are American citizens, and so
Speaker 4: Blankin is going to be taking up their cases. So
Speaker 4: those are those are a couple of things he's going
Speaker 4: to have to push. Meanwhile, they're pushing a cruel and
Speaker 4: absurd Yemen policy while they're there, and that is probably
Speaker 4: the real driver of Blncoln's visit, which is to try
Speaker 4: to undermine these talks that are ongoing directly between Saudi
Speaker 4: Arabia and the Hoho Thies because the US says that
Speaker 4: they want a kind of quote unquote U N broker peace,
Speaker 4: and by U N broker they mean a huge a
Speaker 4: huge role for the United States in the in those talks.
Speaker 4: The US is deeply concerned about the fact that China
Speaker 4: was able to and we've talked about this before on
Speaker 4: the show, that China was able to reach this kind
Speaker 4: of datan between Iran and Saudi Arabia and as a result,
Speaker 4: you wound up with these with these peace peace talks progressing.
Speaker 4: So Blinkin is going to try to make sure that
Speaker 4: those peace talks jump from there over into basically a
Speaker 4: U Brokeren situation that would then the US hopes, you know,
Speaker 4: continue to give them access to the Gulf of Aiden,
Speaker 4: which is, you know, controls something like forty percent of
Speaker 4: the maritime economy, you know, oil and shipping all flows
Speaker 4: through there and into the into the Mediterranean.
Speaker 3: So that's that's really what's going on. And so.
Speaker 4: You know how much of a role is are human
Speaker 4: rights going to play into that?
Speaker 3: We'll see, And what.
Speaker 6: Do you make, lastly of Mike Lee's antitrust argument in
Speaker 6: this case?
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess it's funny.
Speaker 4: You know, it'd be funny if Lena Khan FTC chair
Speaker 4: was able to come in and say, you know what,
Speaker 4: actually we're not going to allow this. We want more
Speaker 4: competition in our in our golf leagues.
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't see that happening.
Speaker 4: And also it doesn't he had to kind of contort
Speaker 4: what really happened in order to make it fit his
Speaker 4: hit his kind of joke there, because it doesn't actually
Speaker 4: seem like the income dominant player acquired an upstart competitor.
Speaker 4: It seems like the upstart competitor acquired the incumbent, right,
Speaker 4: but whatever, like close enough for close enough for a.
Speaker 7: Joke, It goes enough for a joke.
Speaker 6: And it also is true that you have these like
Speaker 6: two whether or not it's an upstart, like two hugely
Speaker 6: groups that have a big swath of the market.
Speaker 4: Up and people probably know this, but like the NFL,
Speaker 4: Major League Baseball, those types of entities have carve outs
Speaker 4: to anti trust policy, like written into law, like they
Speaker 4: are legally allowed to operate illegally like that. And in
Speaker 4: order to have that cartel, you know, to have this
Speaker 4: monopoly on baseball, the where we as a public are
Speaker 4: then able to regulate baseball and football and basketball in
Speaker 4: ways that we otherwise.
Speaker 3: Wouldn't have wouldn't have been. We have breaking news.
Speaker 4: Chris Licked is out at CNN following that devastating Tim
Speaker 4: albert a profile.
Speaker 3: In The Atlantic.
Speaker 4: Emily, what is your reaction to this extremely short tenure
Speaker 4: of the new CNN head.
Speaker 6: Chrislick's tenure at CNN was always fascinating because he came
Speaker 6: from Stephen Colbert and he was producing the heck out
Speaker 6: of that Stephen Colbert show to where it was both
Speaker 6: the least funny show in late night and the most
Speaker 6: highly rated show in late Night for a long period
Speaker 6: of the Trump administration, a very far cry from the
Speaker 6: Johnny Carson days. In the same way that CNN during
Speaker 6: the reign of Jeff Zucker was a very far cry
Speaker 6: from the version of CNN in the eighties and nineties
Speaker 6: and the aughts, when it thrived as a news network
Speaker 6: that people saw as truly being kind of down the middle.
Speaker 6: It was the only place that could really pull off
Speaker 6: hosting a show like Crossfire, and Chris Lickt desperately wanted
Speaker 6: to restore that, which is funny because when you're tapping
Speaker 6: slicked for this job, he was producing Mourning Joe. He
Speaker 6: is a very successful sort of mastermind of what happened
Speaker 6: over at Morning Joe in the early days of that show.
Speaker 6: That's a very niche product. Colbert is a very niche product.
Speaker 6: And so on one hand, he really knew the market.
Speaker 6: He knew that because corporate press is dying, that what
Speaker 6: it needs to do is corner these very particular niches.
Speaker 6: But in that sort of direction, he never seemed to
Speaker 6: know then how to implement that. He in the Tim
Speaker 6: Alberta profile, is repeatedly shown as straining to get his
Speaker 6: staff to be on board with his mission of what's
Speaker 6: derided in the press now both sides is you know,
Speaker 6: having Republicans on your air and giving them room, you know,
Speaker 6: giving them tough interviews, but like actually letting them on
Speaker 6: air and letting them say things you may think are
Speaker 6: horrible about the election, but at least letting them say
Speaker 6: that so that you can grill them and you can
Speaker 6: have the contrast. That's what Chrislick really wanted. So I
Speaker 6: actually my contrarian take is I probably would have kept
Speaker 6: CNN Plus because I think, you know, the future is
Speaker 6: in that space, definitely not in the sort of airwaves.
Speaker 6: And I think I never would have sat for that
Speaker 6: Tim Alberta profile, which was unbelievable, and it seemed like
Speaker 6: Licked had long been protected by a good relationship with
Speaker 6: Zaslav and maybe that has come to an end in
Speaker 6: the light of the Alberta profile. But just a lot
Speaker 6: of fascinating I think failures of people to reckon with
Speaker 6: the new media atmosphere in which audiences desperately want independent news,
Speaker 6: but that doesn't mean they want people to lie to
Speaker 6: them and say they have no biases. And that's what
Speaker 6: CNN wanted to do. It wanted to get people up
Speaker 6: there with a straight face, like with Caitlyn Collins and
Speaker 6: Donald Trump, and say I'm just going to be right
Speaker 6: down the middle here, and then you'd be fully from
Speaker 6: the left.
Speaker 4: And it seems even in the way that you're describing it,
Speaker 4: that it was just a fundamental contradiction that couldn't be
Speaker 4: worked out because he wants to do two things that
Speaker 4: are in conflict. One he wants to bring back CNN,
Speaker 4: you know, to its glory day is when it was
Speaker 4: trusted by tens of millions of people across the political spectrum.
Speaker 4: Yet he also understands that that doesn't exist anymore, and
Speaker 4: that the spot for that type of media is a
Speaker 4: niche market, and I don't. And sometimes the smartest people
Speaker 4: on the planet will get themselves stuck in these fundamental
Speaker 4: contradictions that can't be worked out and then just frustrate
Speaker 4: themselves endlessly because they're intelligence and they're hard work. Just
Speaker 4: can't seem to unbundle this contradiction because it just simply
Speaker 4: can't be unbundled. If I were given Chryslick's job and said,
Speaker 4: all right, you need to fix CNN, what I would
Speaker 4: to actually do is I would have gone to Crystal
Speaker 4: and Saga and be like, I want to hire you guys,
Speaker 4: and I want to I don't want to produce kind
Speaker 4: of left right, but not cross fire television all day long.
Speaker 3: No centrists.
Speaker 4: We're getting like, the centrists can come on as guests,
Speaker 4: just as we want to hear what these kind of
Speaker 4: zook creatures.
Speaker 3: Have to say about their view of politics.
Speaker 4: But but we're not going to try to pretend like
Speaker 4: we have some magical center that we're going to channel
Speaker 4: and be trusted by everybody. What I'm going to get
Speaker 4: is some people you like, some people you don't like,
Speaker 4: and you can hear from all sides.
Speaker 3: Uh and and see and see if that works.
Speaker 4: I think I still think there's actually an opening for
Speaker 4: a mass media that that does that. Whether it can
Speaker 4: do that and be trusted on a corporate platform, it
Speaker 4: remains to be seen. Although there are so many different
Speaker 4: platforms now, like you said, it's it's streaming, it's cable,
Speaker 4: it's you know, their their clips are on YouTube, We're
Speaker 4: on We're on YouTube. YouTube's corporation. So you know, the
Speaker 4: jury's out on that. But that's that's that's the route
Speaker 4: I would have gone. Also, would not have sat with
Speaker 4: Tim Alberta for a fifteen thousand word Atlantic profile and
Speaker 4: take them in as gym and whatever else he did, right.
Speaker 6: He took him to the gym and said, quote, Zucker
Speaker 6: can't do this when he was lifting, this is like
Speaker 6: my favorite thing I've ever seen in a profile that
Speaker 6: somebody you know willingly sat for.
Speaker 7: And that just brings us to I think one of the.
Speaker 6: The other fundamental parts of the story, which is, no
Speaker 6: matter how badly you want to kind of restore some
Speaker 6: of these institutions, they are We're actually talking about this
Speaker 6: in the next block too, because it relates back to
Speaker 6: that fantastic story you wrote last year when you raise
Speaker 6: a generation or two of people with this, I don't
Speaker 6: know this idea that people need to be protected from
Speaker 6: bad arguments like they actually need protection from bad arguments.
Speaker 6: You can't trust the public to deal with those bad arguments. Well,
Speaker 6: that's baked the CNN's cake now. And even as the
Speaker 6: CEO Chris Licked could not deal with that, he couldn't
Speaker 6: like actually control employees who said, I don't want to
Speaker 6: have Republicans on our airwaves. I don't want to air
Speaker 6: these arguments. I don't want the contrast was never able
Speaker 6: to like actually fix that even as the top guy
Speaker 6: at the company. I think that's a huge takeaway when
Speaker 6: people say, you know, some of the stuff, the pendulum
Speaker 6: will just swing back. Well, no, because there are a
Speaker 6: whole lot of especially younger people, who for whom these
Speaker 6: ideas are really central to their worldview and to their
Speaker 6: like self esteem in so many cases, because it's how
Speaker 6: they measure, you know, whether or not they have the
Speaker 6: right ideas about the world. That You're not just going
Speaker 6: to come in and have Chris locked bulldozed this like
Speaker 6: deeply bad, this deeply seated ideology that so many people have.
Speaker 7: It just doesn't work that way anymore.
Speaker 6: And you know, even if you look at something like
Speaker 6: a top podcast like The Daily, that's not monoculture, Like
Speaker 6: you can't just be like, you know, walking maybe if
Speaker 6: you walk into a Whole Foods, you'll find someone else
Speaker 6: be like, hey, did you hear what was on the
Speaker 6: Daily this morning? But but like it's not like that.
Speaker 6: In the rest of the country, there really isn't monoculture anymore.
Speaker 6: So it's that that clash between trying to make monoculture
Speaker 6: with a generation that really isn't capable and also trying
Speaker 6: to make monoculture when that's not really what you know
Speaker 6: the It's just really hard to do that because I
Speaker 6: agree with you that the audience does want it. But
Speaker 6: if you're not willing to like really go there, you're
Speaker 6: not gonna be able to do it.
Speaker 4: Yea rough ride for Chris licked. He's been put out
Speaker 4: of his misery. Stick around, We'll be back with more.
Speaker 3: Right after this.
Speaker 6: A store in The New Yorker by Emma Green profiling
Speaker 6: the Arc of Fair, a group that was started by
Speaker 6: Barry Weiss and some other sort of dissident people on
Speaker 6: the right and the center, maybe a few on the
Speaker 6: center left. The Arc of Fair became fodder for this
Speaker 6: fairly interesting New Yorker story, and the story reminded me
Speaker 6: pretty immediately actually of Ryan's story from last summer in
Speaker 6: the Intercept that was also very very viral and especially
Speaker 6: viral and sort of DC and Beltwegh circles about how
Speaker 6: UH ideology has paralyzed a lot of nonprofits on the left.
Speaker 6: The story in The New Yorker was really about how even
Speaker 6: anti woke and anti woke group Fair, in the words
Speaker 6: of some of the people that were really involved, was
Speaker 6: supposed to be kind of a counterbalance to the a
Speaker 6: c LU, like an idea of a group that could
Speaker 6: really stand up for civil liberties where you see them
Speaker 6: coming under siege. I would argue correctly that, I would
Speaker 6: argue that they're correct that some civil liberties have come
Speaker 6: under siege by the I don't want to call it
Speaker 6: woke ideology, but that's sort of far left. I don't
Speaker 6: even know Ryan, how right? How do you describe it? Like,
Speaker 6: what's a better word than woke?
Speaker 4: I mean, woke kind of gets you there, it does.
Speaker 4: It's until people until people ask you to define it,
Speaker 4: and then you go viral because because it's hard to
Speaker 4: hard to pin down. But you know, that's that's kind
Speaker 4: of it. Weiss herself wrote an essay uh in was
Speaker 4: it tablet?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 4: You know that kind of inspired this organization in some ways,
Speaker 4: and the New Yorker New York talks about that, and
Speaker 4: even her description of it lumps together, you know, you know,
Speaker 4: post modern post structural uh, combined with some you know,
Speaker 4: identity politics. It's it's like, it's it's very hard to
Speaker 4: kind of boil down into a single word. Well, you know,
Speaker 4: it's probably decent if you can take away some of
Speaker 4: the stigma and pejorative nature of it, because it's you know,
Speaker 4: it started out as an UH as a moniker that
Speaker 4: people were adopting.
Speaker 3: On their own.
Speaker 4: But I think there's a couple of interesting layers of this,
Speaker 4: this piece that we can that we can disentangle here.
Speaker 4: On the one hand, and you and I were talking
Speaker 4: about this, some of this is just kind of silly
Speaker 4: naivete among some people that just don't seem to understand
Speaker 4: how UH non nonprofits work. And we're frustrated at that,
Speaker 4: and you see that at so many different organizations. That's
Speaker 4: just that is what it is, and that's but that
Speaker 4: is also the responsibility of good managers to work through
Speaker 4: like it. I think too many managers think that everybody
Speaker 4: is just kind of born knowing how organizations work, how
Speaker 4: nonprofits work, what nonprofit structures are like, and they're not.
Speaker 4: They like people have to learn through the process of
Speaker 4: doing and through the process of you know, interactions with
Speaker 4: management of these types of organizations. And so you can't
Speaker 4: just throw your hands up and say, kids today, they
Speaker 4: just don't have any idea what's doing. It's it's also
Speaker 4: your responsibility to make the case for why the structure
Speaker 4: that you have and the mission that you have is working.
Speaker 3: So that's that's one side of it.
Speaker 4: The other is the kind of interesting substantive ideological question
Speaker 4: at the heart of this piece, which is, as they
Speaker 4: ask it, can you be moderate and be anti woke?
Speaker 4: I'd kind of frame it as, you know, what, does
Speaker 4: this kind of world, which we could broadly call anti
Speaker 4: anti woke maybe stand for.
Speaker 3: Rather than stand against?
Speaker 4: And And that's the that's the point that the one
Speaker 4: of the co founders who went on to run the
Speaker 4: organization was making himself his names Bien Bartning, and he
Speaker 4: didn't want it to be just anti this and anti that.
Speaker 3: He wanted to stand for something.
Speaker 4: The problem is what he decided it stood for was
Speaker 4: kind of cringe and silly pro human went with pro human,
Speaker 4: which I think is not a is not his fault
Speaker 4: for being unable to accurately message. I think there isn't
Speaker 4: actually a substantive politics there for him to name, because
Speaker 4: there's so much disagreement within within the space that is
Speaker 4: coalescing and organizing around the idea of anti woke. It's like,
Speaker 4: if you're an anti fascist front in UH in Spain,
Speaker 4: let say you encompass everybody from the center right to
Speaker 4: the far left, and so you don't you're a front
Speaker 4: that is against a thing you don't actually stand for.
Speaker 4: All of you don't stand for the same thing, so China.
Speaker 4: So trying to narrow it down is basically impossible because
Speaker 4: it's going to eliminate some people who don't agree with
Speaker 4: certain things. And it really seemed to come to a
Speaker 4: head around gender ideology. What was your what was your
Speaker 4: read on that substantive question of what kind of tore
Speaker 4: this group apart?
Speaker 6: That's clearly where it crumbled. And to your point about
Speaker 6: anti pro I mean antie is baked into the name.
Speaker 6: It's called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism. And the
Speaker 6: relevance of the story again is that Barry Weiss admirably
Speaker 6: had ambitions of this to be something that really counters
Speaker 6: the ACLU, and it's clearly not headed for that trajectory.
Speaker 6: It seems to be at this point a shell of
Speaker 6: its former self and a shell of its ambitions. It
Speaker 6: had money, we learned in this profile from Harlan Crowe,
Speaker 6: which some folks will remember from recent stories about the conservative.
Speaker 7: Legal movement and Clarence Thomas.
Speaker 6: It got like a million dollar donation from one high
Speaker 6: level donor who started to become disillusioned on the group herself,
Speaker 6: particularly around this issue of.
Speaker 7: Sex and gender.
Speaker 6: And that's what's so interesting about this story is that,
Speaker 6: you know, the intolerance part of fair obviously, I think
Speaker 6: in this climate, I mean, one of the reasons I
Speaker 6: don't like to use the word woke is because I
Speaker 6: think it's almost too narrow. That a lot of this
Speaker 6: is is really broad. These questions about like what is
Speaker 6: a woman? That's so much broader than woke, if you
Speaker 6: even want to use the like Matt Walsh framing, there's
Speaker 6: so much more going on in that. And I think
Speaker 6: if you say you're pro human and you're against intolerance,
Speaker 6: that's almost just getting to like the censorship question, and
Speaker 6: that gets to the you know, like Twitter for a
Speaker 6: while not letting you weigh in on the issue of
Speaker 6: you know, defining or referring to biological women by the
Speaker 6: biological sex. Twitter says you can't do that. That's an
Speaker 6: entirely different question. Question whether Twitter and the government collude
Speaker 6: to say you can't do that, then whether you should
Speaker 6: actually morally refer to a biological woman as a woman,
Speaker 6: or if you should go along with preferred pronouns, or
Speaker 6: if you should say that you know, people actually really
Speaker 6: can change the biological sex, or that biological sex is inconsequential. Like,
Speaker 6: these are completely different questions, And I think part of
Speaker 6: the problem that the so called anti woke movement has
Speaker 6: is that the censorship question is the gateway for a
Speaker 6: lot of disillusion people on the left and then they
Speaker 6: have to make you know, Chris Rufo, for instance, was
Speaker 6: part of this group. So you have people coming from
Speaker 6: the dissident left and then they have to make common
Speaker 6: cause with somebody like Chris Rufo, who, by the way himself,
Speaker 6: I would argue was pretty much has been center left
Speaker 6: at different points in his life. And if you can
Speaker 6: come together on the censorship question, it doesn't mean that
Speaker 6: you can come together and all of the other questions.
Speaker 6: And that is probably one of the biggest problems that
Speaker 6: the so called anti woke movement has, and in general,
Speaker 6: the sort of like I actually think those that common
Speaker 6: cause is essential in the same way that I think
Speaker 6: our common cause on for instance, like pentagon funding and
Speaker 6: welfare and all of these other things is essential. But
Speaker 6: if you if you can't get past that, your advocacy
Speaker 6: group might not work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it suggests to me that kind of gender
Speaker 4: ideology is becoming, on probably both sides, a black hole
Speaker 4: that has so much centrifugal force that nobody is able
Speaker 4: to kind of stay out of it and stay out
Speaker 4: of the question. Because Bartning, he argued internally that some
Speaker 4: of these questions were not properly addressed by fair advocacy
Speaker 4: or fair policy. What he would say is, we don't
Speaker 4: support any censorship. Like he would say, if we don't,
Speaker 4: you know, it might be cruel to misgender somebody, but
Speaker 4: it is not illegal and it should not be banned,
Speaker 4: you know, So they would they would, they would oppose
Speaker 4: is that. But when it came to the question of
Speaker 4: gender affirming care for minors, for instance, he would argue,
Speaker 4: that's not our business. That's that's up to the that's
Speaker 4: a political question that ought to be worked out through
Speaker 4: the political system. And we are here to defend kind
Speaker 4: of fundamental principles of free expression. We're here to create
Speaker 4: the playing field on which those decisions can be made
Speaker 4: fairly by by a population that can that can you know,
Speaker 4: come together and argue it out. Whereas that that that
Speaker 4: major donor for instance, Ruffo and others were saying absolutely
Speaker 4: not like you need to take a stand against against
Speaker 4: this care like that you have that this is an
Speaker 4: issue that requires your your intervention. And so they they
Speaker 4: basically went to Barry Weiss and the other co founder
Speaker 4: and Bartning without their knowing it had made them board members.
Speaker 4: There were three board members of this New York nonprofit.
Speaker 4: And when they discovered that they were on the paperwork
Speaker 4: as board members, two of the three board members, they
Speaker 4: were like, oh, well, we didn't really want to be
Speaker 4: on the board here, but now that we are, we
Speaker 4: actually have the votes. And they just called him into
Speaker 4: a meeting and and made a motion and booted him out.
Speaker 4: He then kind of basically counter sued, saying, if you're
Speaker 4: going to do board business, you need ten days. And
Speaker 4: then it gets and then it gets into this ten
Speaker 4: days notice, and it gets into this extraordinarily boring kind
Speaker 4: of bureaucratic bickering over it, but but which underlies a
Speaker 4: real ideological fight over the over the direction of the organization.
Speaker 4: But I'm curious if you think that that's right, that
Speaker 4: that that organization that you know, an organization that wants
Speaker 4: to be kind of a center right a CLU can't
Speaker 4: actually do that anymore because it has to become involved
Speaker 4: as a fighter in the these battles, particularly over gender.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think the acl you benefited from a real
Speaker 6: social consensus that started to coalesce in the middle of
Speaker 6: the twentieth century where people in remarkable and beautiful ways
Speaker 6: had had their minds changed about certain like extremely important issues,
Speaker 6: and the ACLU you really for you know, more than
Speaker 6: fifty years, I think benefited from that version of the
Speaker 6: country where people had like really come on to the
Speaker 6: same page about racism and the legal system and sexism.
Speaker 7: Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 6: And I don't think that the people involved in fair
Speaker 6: would say they wanted a center right ACLU. They would
Speaker 6: say they wanted like a center, like they wanted something
Speaker 6: that was genuinely neutral, and that that ambition of neutrality
Speaker 6: is not only impossible now, but I don't know that
Speaker 6: it ever. I mean, it was maybe possible for a
Speaker 6: very fleeting moment world history in the mid century to
Speaker 6: millennial America, and I just don't see that being possible.
Speaker 7: Here's a quote.
Speaker 6: People were afraid, this is from The New Yorker to
Speaker 6: voice their disagreement because of how they would be portrayed
Speaker 6: by bartning behind their backs. They feared being fired, disparaged,
Speaker 6: or other forms of retaliation. So it's like, on the
Speaker 6: one hand, this may not be you know, the big
Speaker 6: Maybe the narrative isn't super neatly wrapped up in the
Speaker 6: story because this is deeply I think, intertwined with personnel issues.
Speaker 6: Like clearly, first of all, nonprofit structure in this country
Speaker 6: is a byzantine, bureaucratic nightmare that lends itself, I think,
Speaker 6: towards corruption and inefficiency. Secondly, maybe this guy was just
Speaker 6: really wrong for the job. But I also think the
Speaker 6: narrative questions are fair. That's my perspective. I don't know
Speaker 6: about you. I think it is fair to like pull
Speaker 6: some stuff away from this because clearly personnel issues aside
Speaker 6: that they were all accelerated the sex question like gasoline
Speaker 6: on the fire, there were these like you can see
Speaker 6: in the story, there were these existing fissures, and then
Speaker 6: when they were forced to litigate internally whether or not
Speaker 6: they would take a stance on all of the issues
Speaker 6: that you raised pertaining a biological sex, it crumbled. They
Speaker 6: couldn't do it without being afraid to talk openly. That's
Speaker 6: just like pretty amazing takeaway.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 4: I think everybody should read the piece because it's as
Speaker 4: you described it. I think that's right. It's they tried
Speaker 4: to be the hetero. These are heterodocs thinkers, These are
Speaker 4: anti tribalism folks. And I think the reason The New
Speaker 4: Yorker was excited to do this story is because they
Speaker 4: loved the delicious irony of the heterodox folks raising the
Speaker 4: question of how orthodox they need to be on a
Speaker 4: variety of different issues. And they quote somebody saying, you know,
Speaker 4: we tried to fight tribalism and in doing that, we
Speaker 4: formed our own tribes. And I think it is a
Speaker 4: reflection of where we are today and our kind of
Speaker 4: social construction that everybody is retreating into their different tribes
Speaker 4: and if you don't, you kind of just get ripped,
Speaker 4: ripped apart, and pieces of you go in every direction.
Speaker 6: Agree and just really quickly before we wrap. I would say,
Speaker 6: that's why it's just a breakdown and social trust. You know,
Speaker 6: even people who can find common political cause can't organize
Speaker 6: and trust each other in I think a high tech
Speaker 6: social media opticon pen opticon environment and the way that
Speaker 6: they used to, you know, say even twenty years ago.
Speaker 6: And secondly, just a quick question before we run, did
Speaker 6: this remind you of your story from last year that
Speaker 6: saw just like leftist groups being paralyzed by that breakdown
Speaker 6: and social trust.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, you know, you had different different kind of
Speaker 4: tools and weapons that were being used internally by the
Speaker 4: combatants in the office politic just because those are tools
Speaker 4: that are you know, constructed out of whatever whatever your
Speaker 4: particular politics are. But the methods and the machinations were
Speaker 4: were all basically the same. So yes, you're and I
Speaker 4: think you're seeing some of this on the right as well,
Speaker 4: in you know, with you know, a lot of church
Speaker 4: groups are you know, breaking church organizations kind of in turmoil,
Speaker 4: with everybody accusing each other of being kind of too
Speaker 4: woke or or to have have embracing you know, crypto
Speaker 4: dei type tendencies and using whatever the language is, whatever
Speaker 4: the ideology is, that kind of your organizations organized around
Speaker 4: you then grab the mantle of the purity of that
Speaker 4: and then and you beat up your internal enemies. And
Speaker 4: so I think the left kind of pioneered that over
Speaker 4: the last ten years or so. But I think you're
Speaker 4: going to see it in organizations like fair and everywhere else.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know right wing organizations a lot better
Speaker 3: than I do.
Speaker 4: But have you have you started noticing that you're seeing
Speaker 4: people accuse each other of kind of cryptowolkness that you
Speaker 4: know if when in reality they're just kind of expressing
Speaker 4: power struggles for you know, for dominance of the organization.
Speaker 7: It's definitely in the churches. I don't know that.
Speaker 6: I feel like wokeness is a litmus test on the
Speaker 6: right in general. Now, so even like kind of like
Speaker 6: Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah, when he gave us
Speaker 6: preferred pronouns on a zoom call with students, I mean
Speaker 6: that was well, he was just discredited by basically everybody
Speaker 6: in the right as soon as he did that. So
Speaker 6: I think it's generally a litmus test like on the
Speaker 6: political right, but in cultural spaces like churches for instance,
Speaker 6: I think you definitely, definitely, definitely see it. So it's
Speaker 6: not an issue that is going anywhere at all.
Speaker 4: We have some news on the case of Juliana Sange.
Speaker 4: So for a while there's been a lawsuit that's been
Speaker 4: going on that people may or may not be aware of,
Speaker 4: where a group of attorneys and journalists are suing the CIA,
Speaker 4: and also suing a former CIA head, Michael Pompeo, for
Speaker 4: basically illegal surveillance UH and searches within the Ecuadorian embassy.
Speaker 4: There's been some incredible UH new revelations from the Spanish
Speaker 4: news organization l PAISE that they are now including in
Speaker 4: a new filing opposing basically the CIA's attempt to get
Speaker 4: this case thrown out of court.
Speaker 3: UH.
Speaker 4: And first of all, I wanted to show some of
Speaker 4: the surveillance footage. You can roll this uh just kind
Speaker 4: of in the background. This is this is the footage
Speaker 4: that the that a contractor who was working for the
Speaker 4: Ecuadorian embassy, you know, had access to. And we now
Speaker 4: know that that contractor had uh had connections to the CIA,
Speaker 4: and that the CIA was able to exploit their relationship
Speaker 4: with with this contractor to constantly surveil not only Assange,
Speaker 4: but other people who came into who came into the embassy, UH,
Speaker 4: one of which was was me At one point. I
Speaker 4: wonder if there's footage of me when I when I
Speaker 4: interviewed as songe there just just just wandering around that embassy.
Speaker 5: UH.
Speaker 4: People could find this on I think it's el Pais's
Speaker 4: You can find a fuller video on el Paisse's YouTube page,
Speaker 4: and it does give you a real look at the
Speaker 4: Ecuadorian embassy that he was living in uh for years.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 4: And I was startled when I went there because it's
Speaker 4: this basically a railway apartment and in London that looked
Speaker 4: to be only two or three bedrooms, uh and maybe
Speaker 4: one or two bathrooms. And that that little living room
Speaker 4: area that you see.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 4: And not only was he there for years, but so
Speaker 4: was the Ecuadorian embassy staff. Just just an incredible situation
Speaker 4: that and he wasn't able to leave for anything, which
Speaker 4: is because if the second he would have left, he
Speaker 4: would have been picked up.
Speaker 3: So it's which must be.
Speaker 4: You know, psychologically torturous to know that if you need
Speaker 4: medical attention, that that is it for you, Like you're
Speaker 4: not going to make it even to the hospital, uh
Speaker 4: before before you're uh before you're detained. H. But so
Speaker 4: the new piece of information uh that emerged that the
Speaker 4: the the c i A or this contractor was supposed
Speaker 4: to turn over you know, all all all of its
Speaker 4: data from various kind of electronic equipment.
Speaker 5: UH.
Speaker 4: There was a technical problem to the judge ordered them
Speaker 4: to try again, and when they when they did it again,
Speaker 4: and we can put up this L L paise article. Uh,
Speaker 4: they accidentally shared what well they were supposed to do it,
Speaker 4: but I think that they were trying not to share it.
Speaker 4: A file, uh that is listed as c I A,
Speaker 4: like the the file, like the direct file. It's just
Speaker 4: it's just named c I A.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 4: Richard Roth of the Roth Law firm, who's who's representing
Speaker 4: the plaintiffs, he said in a in a comment to me, said,
Speaker 4: these startling new revelations, as reported by l pays demonstrate
Speaker 4: that you see global unlawfully surveiled, unknowing Americans when they
Speaker 4: met with Assange. The initial concealment and then revelation of
Speaker 4: this new information, if true, is proof that the plaintiffs'
Speaker 4: claims are legitimate. The CIA's motion to dismiss should either
Speaker 4: be denied or plaintiffs should be allowed to replead to
Speaker 4: bring in these new facts.
Speaker 3: So literally, they busted this.
Speaker 4: Contractor with a file called CIA, while they have, you know,
Speaker 4: all sorts of other evidence that they were that the
Speaker 4: CIA was worthing. Meanwhile, Emily, what are you what are
Speaker 4: you taking a look at what's your point.
Speaker 6: I'm also talking about things related to the surveillance state
Speaker 6: today because it's sort of inescapable. I wanted to do
Speaker 6: a breakdown on the question of the FBI whistle blower
Speaker 6: that's being sort of ping ponged around in the media.
Speaker 6: It's really hot in conservative media, but I think a
Speaker 6: lot of people don't know exactly what to do with
Speaker 6: it because Democrats and Republicans and the House of Representatives
Speaker 6: have come away with different ideas after they've they've viewed
Speaker 6: this document that's at the center of the whistleblower controversy.
Speaker 6: On the Senate side too, they've come away with just
Speaker 6: different ideas of what's actually going on here. So with Republicans,
Speaker 6: led by James Comer actually saying this week that his
Speaker 6: Comer is the head of the House Oversight Committee, he
Speaker 6: said that they're going to convene contempt of Congress hearings
Speaker 6: for FBI Director Christopher rad later this week over his
Speaker 6: unwillingness to provide the committee with this document. So the
Speaker 6: basics year just to go, just to go up to
Speaker 6: this thirty thousand foot level, is that there is a document.
Speaker 7: From an FBI whistle blow.
Speaker 6: That has information was given by a confidential human source
Speaker 6: to the FBI, and I'm reading from the Federalist here
Speaker 6: a story by Margot Cleveland.
Speaker 7: Over at the Federalist.
Speaker 6: This is a quote from Margo regarding this is that
Speaker 6: form data June thirtieth, twenty twenty. So this is an
Speaker 6: FD ten to twenty three form included detailed information from
Speaker 6: a confidential human source the FBI regarding an agreement by
Speaker 6: now President Biden to deliver preferred foreign policy positions for
Speaker 6: a five million dollar payment. It's an absurd possible. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's not an absurd possibility, but it's an absurd allegation.
Speaker 6: Not that it's absurd in the realm of being implausible
Speaker 6: or being anything like that, but it's ripped straight from
Speaker 6: the pages of a novel or from a movie. Basically
Speaker 6: that you would have a president of the United States,
Speaker 6: a former vice president, longtime senator, just taking money for
Speaker 6: foreign policy position. But the reason this is so important
Speaker 6: and the reason that Republicans are right to demand this
Speaker 6: form is because of what we talked about last week.
Speaker 7: The Durham Report.
Speaker 6: I really see this as a coda to everything in
Speaker 6: the Durham Report, where it says Basically, Durham, I think
Speaker 6: really in great detail showed that James call me Peter Struck.
Speaker 6: Everyone who was working on the cross for our hurricane
Speaker 6: investigation into the allegations of Russia collusion applied an incredibly
Speaker 6: different standard to Donald Trump than they did to Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 6: Meaning they subjected claims about Clinton's alleged corruption to much
Speaker 6: higher scrutiny than they did claims of Trump's collusion with Russia.
Speaker 6: So if Hillary Clinton was alleged to have the server,
Speaker 6: and did she know about it, did she not know
Speaker 6: about it, how was this involved, they were going to
Speaker 6: subject any claims about that to a really high level
Speaker 6: of scrutiny because actually, as you see them saying and emails,
Speaker 6: Durham saw they were like, well, she's probably the next
Speaker 6: president of the United States. We don't want it to
Speaker 6: turn on the DOJ or the FBI, And that really
Speaker 6: informed the way they went about the investigation into her
Speaker 6: private server, whereas with Donald Trump, they were a as
Speaker 6: Kevin Klinsmith did, He's actually he pleaded guilty to this
Speaker 6: fudging information to surveil campaign volunteers advisors. So it was
Speaker 6: definitely a double standard, and that's why Republicans. This is
Speaker 6: Chuck Grassley. He chruck. Grassley goes on Fox News last
Speaker 6: week and says, we aren't interested this is a really
Speaker 6: interesting quote. We aren't interested in whether or not the
Speaker 6: accusations against then Vice President Biden are accurate. Well, that
Speaker 6: seems so ridiculous, and the media has run with it
Speaker 6: and said, what do you mean you're not concerned about
Speaker 6: whether they're accurate. Bill Hemmer asks how damning is this
Speaker 6: document to the sitting US president. Grassley replies, I don't know.
Speaker 6: He's stressed that. Well, this is from Marco.
Speaker 7: Quote.
Speaker 6: There's accusations in the FBI report. The Congressional Overset Committee
Speaker 6: concern is whether quote the FBI does its job. That's
Speaker 6: what we wanted to know. That's what we want to know,
Speaker 6: Grassley said. An entirely fair question. This is the bottom line.
Speaker 6: That is an entirely fair question. Given the mountains of
Speaker 6: evidence in the Durham Report, the IG report that even
Speaker 6: James Comy himself recently has been saying, you know, it
Speaker 6: did uncover some real problems in the FBI. This is
Speaker 6: critical after all of that, after years of the Russia
Speaker 6: collision investigation, after John Durham pulls out. I think pretty
Speaker 6: clear evidence of a double standard. Chuck Grassley is right
Speaker 6: that this document is relevant, that Christopher Ray should turn
Speaker 6: it over, whether or not the allegations that a vice
Speaker 6: president sitting vice president took five million dollars to change
Speaker 6: his foreign policy position. Congress needs to perform its job
Speaker 6: and provide oversight, and the way to do that is
Speaker 6: to see the document on their own and to gauge
Speaker 6: the potential accuracy of it and to gauge whether or
Speaker 6: not the FBI, which had this document and is day
Speaker 6: to June of twenty twenty, and they have a confidential
Speaker 6: human source we know now was seen as quote highly credible.
Speaker 6: That's actually from what we know that the FBI had
Speaker 6: a confidential human source they considered highly credible. Total contrast
Speaker 6: with Igor Danchenko, who they Igor Danchenko, who they used
Speaker 6: as their confidential human source and crossfire or hurricane again.
Speaker 6: I said this last week, My eyes glaze over when
Speaker 6: you talk about all this stuff. It is intentionally confusing
Speaker 6: and complicated on the part of the FBI, the surveillance
Speaker 6: state because they want your eyes to glaze over. It
Speaker 6: helps them get away with these things. But this whistleblower
Speaker 6: document is not nothing. It is not something the media
Speaker 6: should shrug at, because Congress has a very real duty
Speaker 6: to ensure that the FBI is performing its role equally,
Speaker 6: that it's upholding the rule of law, and that it
Speaker 6: is using its vast, are too vast powers in a
Speaker 6: way that is at the very least responsible. Durham gave
Speaker 6: us plenty of reason to doubt that the FBI is
Speaker 6: doing that, and this, this document is well within the
Speaker 6: purview of Congress to take a look at. So with that, Ryan,
Speaker 6: I want to pivot to you on the question of
Speaker 6: the accuracy of the document. What Chuck Grassley is saying,
Speaker 6: I think is important, But then also whether or not
Speaker 6: the document is accurate is ultimately the key question. It
Speaker 6: sounds sensational and absurd that Joe Biden as a vice
Speaker 6: president would be like, yes, the price for my foreign
Speaker 6: policy position is five million dollars, So take that for
Speaker 6: what you will, highly credible, confidential, human source. I don't
Speaker 6: know exactly what that means in the standards of today's FBI.
Speaker 6: What do you make of the sort of central claim
Speaker 6: of the document. We mentioned this at the top of
Speaker 6: the show, but you landed a really big interview that
Speaker 6: we're super excited to bring to the counterpoints and breaking
Speaker 6: points audience here today. Tell us a little bit about
Speaker 6: what we can expect to hear from m Ron Khan.
Speaker 3: Yes, so extraordinarily important.
Speaker 4: You know, because the nation of Pakistan is a nuclear
Speaker 4: power with a population of two hundred and fifty million people. Today,
Speaker 4: you know it's facing an existential crisis as the country's
Speaker 4: military establishment is rapidly consolidating power and cracking down on
Speaker 4: the most popular political party, which is known as the PTI,
Speaker 4: headed by for former Prime Minister Imran Khan. Now, Khan
Speaker 4: is an unusual politician. He's going to be our guest
Speaker 4: in just a moment through a pre taped interview. And
Speaker 4: for decades, Cohn was the nation's most famous cricketer before
Speaker 4: transitioning into the there's Cohn wrapping a cricket ball or
Speaker 4: whatever the word is for what he's doing there. Before
Speaker 4: he transitioned into the world of philanthropy. He's well known
Speaker 4: in Pakistan for building hospitals, for supporting universities. From there,
Speaker 4: he moved into politics, founding the PTI and sweeping into
Speaker 4: power as a populist in twenty eighteen, but he had
Speaker 4: a slim majority, and he was ousted in a no
Speaker 4: confidence vote by April of twenty twenty two. Since then,
Speaker 4: he and his party have been the target of a
Speaker 4: relentless crackdown by the nation's military, which has ruled the
Speaker 4: country directly or indirectly for decades.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: My earlier attempt, if you remember this, to schedule an
Speaker 4: interview with him was foiled when he was arrested on
Speaker 4: May ninth by the military and held for four days
Speaker 4: while the country erupted in protests, after which the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court ruled his detention illegal. Some of the protests turned
Speaker 4: violent and directly targeted officials. High officials in the military,
Speaker 4: and the military establishment responded by arresting most of Khan's
Speaker 4: senior leadership and forcing them to resign from the party
Speaker 4: under pressure. Now thousands of rank and file party workers
Speaker 4: have also been jailed. Kahn, meanwhile, is hold up in
Speaker 4: his home in Lahore, sifting through some one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty charges of corruption and other offenses that have been
Speaker 4: leveled at him, charges he and his supporters dismissed as
Speaker 4: politically motivated.
Speaker 3: Yesterday, there were.
Speaker 4: Suggestions that they're even going to charge him, perhaps with murder.
Speaker 4: Yet Cohn remains a popular political figure heading into elections
Speaker 4: that are scheduled at least for October. We'll see if
Speaker 4: they actually happen.
Speaker 3: So in the.
Speaker 4: Interview, and actually I can we could place some of
Speaker 4: this interview now and then we can come out and
Speaker 4: talk about it. So here's here's Imran Khan. Were you interrogated?
Speaker 4: Were there any any threats direct or veiled made about
Speaker 4: your future role in Pakistani politics?
Speaker 5: I think they know me. You know, this country knows
Speaker 5: me for fifty years. I mean for twenty years, I
Speaker 5: was the leading sportsman in this country and cricket is
Speaker 5: the biggest sport and I was kept for ten years.
Speaker 5: So I was in the media for a long time,
Speaker 5: and then I went into Forendthropy and built up the
Speaker 5: biggest charitable institution, which are council hospitals and that university.
Speaker 5: So people know me for a long time. They know
Speaker 5: that I'm not going to do a back down. But
Speaker 5: what they're doing is, you know, I mean they have
Speaker 5: clearly stated to me, the establishment that whatever happens, you're
Speaker 5: not going to be allowed to get back into power.
Speaker 5: So what they're doing now is that they are dismantling
Speaker 5: the party, but dismantling the biggest political party, the only
Speaker 5: federal party in Pakistan, is dismantling our democracy. And actually
Speaker 5: that's what's going on all the democratic institutions. The judiciary
Speaker 5: it is, I mean, the judiciary today is totally inputed
Speaker 5: in stopping this violation of fundamental rights. The Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: We went to the Supreme Court according to the constitution,
Speaker 5: the elections in Punjab, the biggest province which is sixty
Speaker 5: percent of Pakistan, was supposed to be held on the
Speaker 5: portrenth of by the government refused. So I mean, when
Speaker 5: the Supreme Court orders are are not listened to, the
Speaker 5: judges giver give people bailed there the police picks them
Speaker 5: up on some other cases. So this total violation of
Speaker 5: fundamental rights which is going on, I think this is
Speaker 5: it's all an attempt to weaken me and my party
Speaker 5: to the point that we will not know, not be
Speaker 5: able to contest the elections because all the opinion polls
Speaker 5: show that we will win a massive majority in elections.
Speaker 5: Out of the thirty seven by elections, my party has
Speaker 5: swept thirty of them despite the establishment helping the government parties.
Speaker 5: So therefore they know that in a free and fair election,
Speaker 5: we will just sweep. Hence, all these efforts are being
Speaker 5: made to completely dismantle my party and weaken it to
Speaker 5: the point that it will not be able to contest elections.
Speaker 4: This is a dark moment for your country, for your party,
Speaker 4: as you said, for you yourself personally. But I'm curious,
Speaker 4: what are you looking forward to in a best case scenario.
Speaker 4: What's the path out of this crisis.
Speaker 5: It's like a crossroads. One road is leading back to
Speaker 5: the barrel days of military dictatorship, because that means, you know,
Speaker 5: we will regress the whole movement for democracy, which gradually
Speaker 5: evolved over a period of time. Media really, i mean
Speaker 5: struggle valiantly for their freedom, and we had one of
Speaker 5: the freest medias uh. And then a judiciary in two thousand.
Speaker 5: Judiciary was always subservient to the executive, but in two
Speaker 5: thousand and seven started a movement called the lawyers movement,
Speaker 5: and for the first time we the judiciary asserted its independence.
Speaker 5: So the whole pillars of democracy now are being rolled back.
Speaker 5: The whole evolution, the steady move towards a democratic country
Speaker 5: is now all at stake. So either we allow this
Speaker 5: to go where it is going towards a military dictatorship.
Speaker 5: The other is, you know, we all try and all
Speaker 5: the democratic forces get together and strive for getting back
Speaker 5: to rule of law, democracy and free and fair elections.
Speaker 4: As you confront this potential long term military dictatorship, how
Speaker 4: does it make you think back on your own support
Speaker 4: of the military in the you know, the purpose situation,
Speaker 4: the coup of Purpose Mishar or or having the military's
Speaker 4: you know, indirect support in your own election. But do
Speaker 4: you feel like there was a way to accomplish that
Speaker 4: without the military, or is Pakistan in a situation that
Speaker 4: that reform is only possible through that institution?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, just to make a correction. Minus the
Speaker 5: only party that was never manufactured by the military People's
Speaker 5: Party Zulfikarli Berto. He served a dictator for eight years
Speaker 5: before he formed his party. The other the second party
Speaker 5: is PM Mellen. The head of PM Mellen was actually
Speaker 5: nurtured by General Za's dictatorship. I mean he was a
Speaker 5: non entity, so he was actually a product of his
Speaker 5: military dictatorship. Minus the only party for twenty two years
Speaker 5: from scratch, I started and actually broke through a two
Speaker 5: party system in the twenty eighteen election. The army didn't
Speaker 5: oppose me, but they didn't help us in winning the elections.
Speaker 5: The elections weren't rigged, because it should be now obvious
Speaker 5: now despite the army the establishment standing behind the government,
Speaker 5: we've swept thirty out of thirty seven by elections and
Speaker 5: all opinion polls show that we are way ahead of everyone,
Speaker 5: allust sixty to seventy percent rating. And the other thing
Speaker 5: I want to say is how is it different When
Speaker 5: a Yukhn't the first military dictator took over the majority
Speaker 5: of the population backed him because at that time we
Speaker 5: were very insecure and the army was the bestion of security.
Speaker 5: When Ziaulaka deposed Zulfakari Botto, the second military dictator, half
Speaker 5: the population supported him. Half the vote was for Boto,
Speaker 5: about half the vote went against him. When General Musherav
Speaker 5: wound up our democracy in ninety nine, he had eighty
Speaker 5: percent rating in Pakistan because he came on an anti
Speaker 5: corruption platform. But this is a unique time in Pakistan.
Speaker 5: The almost the entire country is standing now for democracy.
Speaker 5: They are no takers for military dictatorship anymore. So it's
Speaker 5: a unique situation because we are thought processes evolved to
Speaker 5: the point now where there's a consensus in Pakistan that
Speaker 5: a bad democracy is better than a military dictatorship.
Speaker 4: It feels like the military may see this crisis and
Speaker 4: this conflict as existential for them, that given what you've
Speaker 4: said that the country, the population has now turned against them,
Speaker 4: if they lose power, they may be pushed off the
Speaker 4: stage entirely and so cornered that you may that may
Speaker 4: explain some of the reactions that you're seeing. So how
Speaker 4: do you how do you navigate that situation where they
Speaker 4: currently have you literally and politically surrounded, but if you escape,
Speaker 4: they face an existential crisis.
Speaker 5: When I was in three and a half years in power,
Speaker 5: I mean, I recognize that, you know, you can't wish
Speaker 5: away the military. You know, you have to work with them,
Speaker 5: because they've been entrenched for seventy years directly or entry directly,
Speaker 5: they ruled this country. So I work with the army chief.
Speaker 5: And apart from the fact that he would not he
Speaker 5: did not understand what rule of law meant or didn't
Speaker 5: want to understand. Apart from that, we sort of, you know,
Speaker 5: we had a working relationship. When and why he decided
Speaker 5: to pull the rug under my feet. I still don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, at what point he decided that this is,
Speaker 5: you know, I was dangerous to the country. Why he
Speaker 5: decided to change horses Because he backed the current prime
Speaker 5: minister who was facing massive corruption cases. And so why
Speaker 5: he decided to do that. I think my hunch is
Speaker 5: that he wanted an extension and the and the current
Speaker 5: prime minister had promised him that. I guess that's the reason.
Speaker 5: But really he's the best he would know why. I
Speaker 5: don't know why. So my point is, you know, the
Speaker 5: way Pakistan has been run a hybrid system. It just
Speaker 5: cannot be run like this anymore. We are now facing
Speaker 5: the worst economic crisis in our history. And my point
Speaker 5: is that, you know, when I've said, I've offered talks
Speaker 5: to the to the military, I've said, look to the
Speaker 5: army chief, but so far there's no response. My point
Speaker 5: is that the hybrid system cannot work any longer because
Speaker 5: if a prime minister has the public mandate and the
Speaker 5: responsibility to deliver, he must have the authority. He can't
Speaker 5: have a situation where he has the responsibility but the authority.
Speaker 5: Most of the authority lies with the military establishment. So
Speaker 5: a new equilibrium has to be made. You have to
Speaker 5: have some sort of an arrangement where you know, certain
Speaker 5: issues just have to be delivered in Pakistan. Pakistan cannot
Speaker 5: do without rule of law now, because we cannot get
Speaker 5: out of this economic mess unless we attracted an investment.
Speaker 5: But investment from abroad does not come to a country
Speaker 5: where people do not have confidence in their justice system
Speaker 5: and the legal system and their contract enforcement. And therefore
Speaker 5: they go Pakistani go and invest in the Way and
Speaker 5: other countries. But the plan invest in this country. We
Speaker 5: have ten million Pakistanis. If we could only get five
Speaker 5: percent of them invest in this country, we wouldn't have
Speaker 5: any problems. But they do not have faith in our
Speaker 5: justice system. We are out of the one hundred and
Speaker 5: forty countries and the rule of law index Pakistan is
Speaker 5: one twenty nine. So with that sort of you know,
Speaker 5: a lack of rule of law, I'm afraid the country's
Speaker 5: survival did that stake. So hence a new equilibrium has
Speaker 5: to be made with the military establishment.
Speaker 3: Final question.
Speaker 4: I know you said that you believe that the driver
Speaker 4: of your ulster was clearly internal and not driven from outside,
Speaker 4: But I'm also curious given that the US expressed its
Speaker 4: private approval for you to for you to be pushed
Speaker 4: out of office through a no confidence vote. I'm wondering
Speaker 4: what it was that you think drove the United States
Speaker 4: that position. Do you think it had something to do
Speaker 4: with your willingness to work with the Taliban after the
Speaker 4: Taliban took over, to think it had something to do
Speaker 4: with the war in Ukraine, or what is your read
Speaker 4: of the geopolitics that would have led the United States
Speaker 4: to go from supportive to willing to see you thrown out.
Speaker 5: Well, for a start, you know the war. Trump administration
Speaker 5: acknowledged that. I was the one who consistently kept saying
Speaker 5: there was not going to be a military solution in Afghanistan.
Speaker 5: It's because I know Afghanistan. I know the history and
Speaker 5: the province, the Pushtun province. Remember Afhanistan as fifty percent Pushtoons,
Speaker 5: but the Pushtun population is twice as much in Pakistan.
Speaker 5: And my province where I first got into Paris is
Speaker 5: the Pushtun province bordering Afghanistan. So I kept saying there
Speaker 5: would not be any military solution. Trump administration acknowledged it,
Speaker 5: and they finally went when he decided to the withdrawal,
Speaker 5: he understood there was not going to be a military solution.
Speaker 5: But I think this was taken wrong by the Biden administration.
Speaker 5: There someone thought I was critical of the Americans and
Speaker 5: I was sort of pro Taliban. It's total nonsense. It's
Speaker 5: just simply that anyone who knows the history of Afghanistan
Speaker 5: just knows that you will they have a problem with outsiders.
Speaker 5: So the same happened with the British and the nineteenth century,
Speaker 5: the Soviets in the twentieth century, exactly the same was
Speaker 5: happening with the US. But it's just that no one
Speaker 5: knew that, and so I think that was one reason. Secondly,
Speaker 5: I was anti the War on Terror in Pakistan because
Speaker 5: remember Pakistan. Pakistan first of all, in the eighties created
Speaker 5: the Mujahideen mujai Deen who were conducting a gorilla warfare
Speaker 5: against the Soviets. So it was from Pakistani soil. And
Speaker 5: we we told them that doing jihad, Jihad means fighting
Speaker 5: foreign occupation. Is is your heroes, It is a you know,
Speaker 5: we encouraged it. Now come ten years later, once the
Speaker 5: Soviets had left the US lands in Ughanistan, you're told
Speaker 5: that this was heroism to fight foreign occupation. How are
Speaker 5: you going to tell them that now that the Americans
Speaker 5: are there, it's terrorism. So that's what happened. The moment
Speaker 5: we joined the US War on Terror, they turned against US.
Speaker 5: Eighty thousand Pakis died. I mean Pakistan. No ally of
Speaker 5: US has taken such heavy casualties as Pakistan did. And
Speaker 5: in the end we couldn't help the US either, because
Speaker 5: we were trying to save ourselves. There were forty different
Speaker 5: militant groups. At what point working against the government. Islam
Speaker 5: Wa was like under siege, their suicide attacks everywhere. We
Speaker 5: had no investment coming in the country. Well, economy tanked.
Speaker 5: So I think my opposition to the war on terror
Speaker 5: also was perceived as being anti American, which is not
Speaker 5: is just being nationalistic about your own country. With Taliban,
Speaker 5: I mean, when the Taliban took over. Frankly, whichever government
Speaker 5: is in Afghanistan, Pakistan has to have good relationship with them.
Speaker 5: We have two and a half thousand kilometer border with them.
Speaker 5: We have three million Ofvan refugees here. And when the
Speaker 5: RUnni government before that, I went to Afhanistan Kabul to
Speaker 5: meet him, I invited him to Pakistan. We tried our
Speaker 5: best to have good relationship with them. So whoever is
Speaker 5: in power in Afghanistan Pakistan has to have good relationship
Speaker 5: because at one point during the previous government, there were
Speaker 5: three different terrorist groups using Aflhan Terror to attack Pakistan,
Speaker 5: the isl Pakistani Taliban, and the Baloch Liberation Organization. Three
Speaker 5: different groups were attacking us. So therefore you need a
Speaker 5: government in Afghanistan which which would be helpful. So it
Speaker 5: was not pro Taliban, It's basically pro Pakistan, as any
Speaker 5: anyone who cares about his country would make those decisions.
Speaker 4: For a full transcript of my interview, you can find
Speaker 4: that over at the Intercept dot com. You can listen
Speaker 4: to the entire interview over at my Intercept podcast, which
Speaker 4: is called Deconstructed. In that interview, he made claims against
Speaker 4: former Pakistan Ambassador to the United States Hassan Hakani. Hussein
Speaker 4: Hakani my apologies and I reached out to him for comment.
Speaker 4: He denied Khan's allegation that he had lobbied the United
Speaker 4: States against Khan. I also reached out to the State
Speaker 4: Department for comment, and I will read that here. The
Speaker 4: State Department says, quote, our message has been clear and
Speaker 4: consistent on this. We support the peaceful upholding of constitutional
Speaker 4: democratic principles, including respect for human rights. We do not support,
Speaker 4: whether it's in Pakistan or anywhere else around the world,
Speaker 4: one political party over another. We support broader principles, including
Speaker 4: the rule of law and equal justice under the law.
Speaker 4: On the War on Terror and the Taliban, United States
Speaker 4: and Pakistan have a shared interest in ensuring the Taliban
Speaker 4: live up to the commitments that they have made.
Speaker 3: Terrorist groups that may be active.
Speaker 4: In Afghanistan are no longer able to threaten regional stability.
Speaker 4: Emily Imran Khan fascinating political figures in some ways kind
Speaker 4: of I would think, maybe an ideal populist right candidate
Speaker 4: that you guys might wish you had somebody like that
Speaker 4: over here in the United States.
Speaker 6: Fascinating and just I think your interview really brought that
Speaker 6: side in Immran Khan to the forefront, because it's also
Speaker 6: a personality thing and the sort of politics that he espouses.
Speaker 6: Then to see that translated through I think the political
Speaker 6: personality is just it is a very interesting combination. He's
Speaker 6: such an important international figure that gets I think probably
Speaker 6: too little attention on the world stage. Is probably one
Speaker 6: of the more if you follow foreign policy stuff. I mean,
Speaker 6: people know his name, but his central importance to world
Speaker 6: politics right now I think is disproportionate to the media's
Speaker 6: interest in his story. So I thought that was fantastic interview,
Speaker 6: and I'm so glad that you were able to bring
Speaker 6: it to the audience here and just a small process.
Speaker 7: Note, folks can imagine.
Speaker 6: How interesting it was for you to negotiate getting an
Speaker 6: interview with somebody who is in a position like him,
Speaker 6: Ron Khan. I mean you can see it like in
Speaker 6: the internet a little bit. You can see it in
Speaker 6: just some of your questions.
Speaker 7: Not an easy.
Speaker 6: Interview to land, but also just not an easy interview
Speaker 6: to make happen when you have so many obstacles, political
Speaker 6: obstacles to just like using the internet and talking to journalists.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think part of it is that he's so
Speaker 4: constricted in Pakistan that one of the few avenues for
Speaker 4: him left is to start doing these kind of international interviews.
Speaker 4: So I think our ability to kind of get him
Speaker 4: had to do with how cornered he is politically back home.
Speaker 4: So next week we'll be back in our brand new studio.
Speaker 4: I was in Boyertown, Pennsylvania for my cousin Lady Grimm's
Speaker 4: high school graduation this weekn and met a guy named
Speaker 4: Justin who was maybe he's watching now.
Speaker 3: He's a big Counterpoints fan.
Speaker 4: I was able to show him pictures of the studio
Speaker 4: and he's like, wow, I didn't even have to pay
Speaker 4: for this, And so everybody's going to get to see
Speaker 4: the new studio next week. What's what's your take on
Speaker 4: what you've seen so far?
Speaker 6: I think it's amazing and thank you so much to
Speaker 6: the viewers who make it possible. It's you know, I
Speaker 6: think it's soccer always makes a really important point about, uh,
Speaker 6: the why we need to take on not just be someone,
Speaker 6: you know, sort of broadcasting from their basement with an
Speaker 6: xbox headset. I don't mean to be offensive at all,
Speaker 6: but like we're here in d C, and uh, there
Speaker 6: are people, because of the rise of independent media, who
Speaker 6: are going to have conversations with the Breaking Points team
Speaker 6: and you're going to see some of those big names
Speaker 6: next week. And the new set design is just a
Speaker 6: real l vation that I think is going to allow
Speaker 6: Breaking Points to keep growing and to draw big names
Speaker 6: more viewers. So we're just beyond grateful to all of you,
Speaker 6: and so excited for you to see it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we could keep the bricks around and still
Speaker 4: do kind of moonlight with an open mic comedy night
Speaker 4: or something, and Washington DC.
Speaker 7: It'll be like.
Speaker 6: How you know, various museums have different pieces of the
Speaker 6: Berlin Wall. We'll give different places epting.
Speaker 3: Wait, these are fake bricks. This is outrageous.
Speaker 6: We could have just poked holes in it the whole time.
Speaker 4: Yes, all right, Well, we'll see you there in studio
Speaker 4: next week