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: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning.
Speaker 4: I was told to channel soccer's energy, so here I am.
Speaker 5: I'm freaking out shouting four more love. Thank you dating Emily.
Speaker 5: Great to have you this morning.
Speaker 3: Glad to be here.
Speaker 1: We have a fantastic show planned. Of course, big speech
Speaker 1: from Joe Biden yesterday, uh laying out his view of
Speaker 1: Biden really making his pitch, his election pitch to the
Speaker 1: American people about what he has done for the economy
Speaker 1: and making his case that we should keep it all
Speaker 1: in his hands. We also have some interesting stuff happening
Speaker 1: on the Republican side, especially this poll from NBC News
Speaker 1: about the way that the Republican issue set polls with
Speaker 1: Republicans versus how it polls with the general electorate. Which
Speaker 1: of their issue Planks is actually strongest with the country
Speaker 1: at large. Kind of interesting stuff. There lots going on
Speaker 1: in Russia. Very hard to sort through exactly what is
Speaker 1: happening right now. Is putin cracking down? Is he not
Speaker 1: cracking down? Has he detained some of the people who
Speaker 1: may have been in koots with progosion. Will sort through
Speaker 1: that as best we can. Some new really interesting data
Speaker 1: about Airbnb and how there's a huge sort of airbnb
Speaker 1: crash going on right now. Is that going to have
Speaker 1: implications for the broader housing market? Big question marks there,
Speaker 1: and some interesting comments from our commander in chief getting
Speaker 1: a little confused about what war we are currently involved with.
Speaker 5: I have a look at AI sex spots.
Speaker 1: Emily is taking a look at shean influencers and very
Speaker 1: excited to have a panel in studio this morning to
Speaker 1: debate the merits of affirmative action. This comes, of course,
Speaker 1: as we are expecting the Supreme Court to rule, probably today,
Speaker 1: to get that ruling about whether affirmative action is going
Speaker 1: to state or go. The expectation is this going to go,
Speaker 1: but listen, you never know. So that's what the plan is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this sounds great, and we should start with President
Speaker 4: Joe Biden. We've got two Biden blacks today because he's
Speaker 4: been on a roll really. But he gave a huge
Speaker 4: speech yesterday, long speech. He was in Chicago, and we
Speaker 4: want to start with just this SoundBite from it so
Speaker 4: you can get a little flavor of what he talked about.
Speaker 6: There's a fundamental break. I'm the economic theory that is
Speaker 6: failed America's middle class for decades now. It's called trickle
Speaker 6: down economics. Fundamental economics, trickle down the idea was believes
Speaker 6: that we should cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations.
Speaker 6: And I know something about big corporations. There's more corporations
Speaker 6: and Delaware Incorporated than every other state and the Union combined.
Speaker 6: I want them to do well, but I'm tired of
Speaker 6: waiting for the trickle down. It doesn't come very quickly.
Speaker 6: Not much trickle down in my dad's kitchen table growing up.
Speaker 6: When I took office, the pandemic was raging and our
Speaker 6: economy was reeling. Supply chains are broken, millions of people unemployed,
Speaker 6: hundreds of thousands of small business on the verge of
Speaker 6: clothing after so many had already closed, Literally hundreds of
Speaker 6: thousands on the verge of closing.
Speaker 7: Today, the US.
Speaker 6: Has the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies
Speaker 6: since the pandemic, the highest in the world. As Dick said,
Speaker 6: with his help, we've created thirteen point four million new jobs,
Speaker 6: more jobs in two years than any president has ever
Speaker 6: made in four and two. And folks, a small accident.
Speaker 6: That's Bidenomics and action. Bidenomics is about economy from the
Speaker 6: middle out to the bottom.
Speaker 7: Up, not the top down.
Speaker 1: So this was all about, you know, laying out his
Speaker 1: economic case what he's calling Bidenomics, and you know, pointing
Speaker 1: to the low unemployment rate, the number of jobs created,
Speaker 1: et cetera, to say, hey, I've done a great job
Speaker 1: with the economy.
Speaker 5: That's why you should re elect me.
Speaker 1: I have a lot of thoughts on this, but first
Speaker 1: let me go through some of the data, because listen,
Speaker 1: in fairness, the economic data, I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: say it's premixed. It's like a very strange time in
Speaker 1: terms of the economy. On the one hand, unemployment is
Speaker 1: extremely low. Put this up on the screen. You know,
Speaker 1: there was a sort of natural recovery of course after
Speaker 1: the pandemic, when things open back up, so that makes sense.
Speaker 1: There were also overt recovery efforts, many of which appear
Speaker 1: to have been quite successful. And so we have a
Speaker 1: quite low historic unemployment rate, which obviously is an important
Speaker 1: metric and one that the White.
Speaker 5: House likes to tout. You also have, and this is.
Speaker 1: Maybe the most interesting one to me. Put this next
Speaker 1: one up on the screen. You actually have inequality for
Speaker 1: the first time in my life, lessening because you've had
Speaker 1: the rich taking a bit of a haircut post COVID.
Speaker 1: I mean, they amassed incredible wealth during the pandemic, they've
Speaker 1: taken a bit of a haircut post COVID. And you
Speaker 1: have the lowest wage workers who, because of the tight
Speaker 1: labor market, because of the very low unemployment rate, they
Speaker 1: have actually had wage gains at the bottom end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum that have been in excess at times even
Speaker 1: of inflation. So you have workers at the lowest end
Speaker 1: of the wage spectrum actually doing the best in this
Speaker 1: economy right now. Not that it's nearly enough. And let's
Speaker 1: get to the other side of this. So the next
Speaker 1: piece of information that makes things complicated, to say the least.
Speaker 5: Is that inflation has been quite high.
Speaker 1: Put this up on the screen, and obviously, for most
Speaker 1: workers that has meant that they have been getting a
Speaker 1: paycheck cut every single month. You know, they go to
Speaker 1: the grocery store, they see the price of goods going
Speaker 1: up and up, the amount that they were making their
Speaker 1: paycheck not going nearly as far more and more difficulty
Speaker 1: trying to you know, make rent or make a housing
Speaker 1: payment at the end of the month. You have housing
Speaker 1: costs that have been going up for years and years,
Speaker 1: and even now they haven't come down. But meanwhile you've
Speaker 1: got you know, fed interest rate hikes that have made
Speaker 1: housing more affordable literally than ever before. So a lot
Speaker 1: to also weigh on American families and American workers, and
Speaker 1: that is perhaps why put this up on the screen.
Speaker 5: In spite of all of.
Speaker 1: The happy talk from the Biden administration about how great
Speaker 1: the economy is, this is probably the most important metric.
Speaker 5: Only one in three approve of.
Speaker 1: Biden's handling of the economy amid Bidenomics push. They say,
Speaker 1: this is according to the latest pulling, you even have
Speaker 1: some softness among Democrats in terms of how they view
Speaker 1: Biden's handling of the economy. Overall, seventy two percent of
Speaker 1: Democrats approve of Biden's job performance, but only sixty percent
Speaker 1: approve of his handling of the economy. So you know,
Speaker 1: he wants to sell that, hey, things are great, I've
Speaker 1: done a great job. That's why you should put me
Speaker 1: back in office. But Emily, the American people by and
Speaker 1: large to not agree.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it just doesn't work when you have inflation
Speaker 4: still at the level because everyone's earnings increasing whatever, it's
Speaker 4: all getting eaten away at And that's one of the
Speaker 4: biggest problems for Biden.
Speaker 3: He passed a bill signature piece of legislation.
Speaker 4: Called the Inflation Reduction Act that was always as a
Speaker 4: title somewhat laughable and almost like the Apex of Washington branding.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, in fairness, that was like Mansion who wanted
Speaker 1: that branding flapped on it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's always good to remember that that was Joe
Speaker 4: Manngen special. But that said, they did accept it and
Speaker 4: actually really touted it and leaned into the Inflation Reduction
Speaker 4: Act branding. And that's a in people's memories, that's in.
Speaker 3: The voter, the voter's memories.
Speaker 4: And so when you see people are experiencing this economy
Speaker 4: very unevenly, so where inflation in the basket of goods
Speaker 4: is hitting if you're at the lower end of the
Speaker 4: income spectrum. That's hitting you pretty hard in ways, it's
Speaker 4: not hitting people at the upper end of it. And
Speaker 4: so that's a big, big, big problem for Joe Biden
Speaker 4: that I just I mean.
Speaker 3: It is going down.
Speaker 4: So maybe you know, inflation is going down, but not evenly.
Speaker 4: Not everything in inflation is going hos and causes us
Speaker 4: to show no sign of stopping car prices.
Speaker 3: I mean, there's been some slowing.
Speaker 4: News cars, but like it's just it's really uneven. And
Speaker 4: Biden is not in a position to say in the
Speaker 4: next however months until the election, like a year and
Speaker 4: a half for the election, we're just.
Speaker 3: Going to be in a great place again.
Speaker 1: Well, Democrats have this constant instinct that if the American people,
Speaker 1: you know, aren't giving him high marks on the economy,
Speaker 1: it's not because there's anything the administration did wrong. It's
Speaker 1: because we just haven't gotten our message out yet. But
Speaker 1: they just don't really get how great we actually are
Speaker 1: and how great their lives are actually because of the
Speaker 1: policies that we've implemented. Whereas you know, I think normal
Speaker 1: people in their everyday lives, looking at their paychecks, looking
Speaker 1: at how farge it's getting them looking at their costs,
Speaker 1: probably in a better position to understand their economic reality
Speaker 1: than you know, the president sitting in the White House.
Speaker 5: So I do think that.
Speaker 1: This pitch it just falls flat at this point because
Speaker 1: it's not what people are experiencing in their day to
Speaker 1: day lives. And I think if he is going to
Speaker 1: lean into this direction, I think it's a very different,
Speaker 1: difficult political case.
Speaker 5: To make, especially when it's not like last time. When
Speaker 5: he was running.
Speaker 1: You know, there wasn't a lot of content. There weren't
Speaker 1: a lot of policy promises, but there was a little
Speaker 1: bit of something on the economic side, and there was
Speaker 1: an expectation that you would get another round of checks.
Speaker 1: That became obviously really critical in terms of the Georgia elections.
Speaker 1: That is very likely why Democrats were able to win
Speaker 1: a majority in the Senate, because they had this really
Speaker 1: clear promise of hey, if you vote for us, you
Speaker 1: are going to get a check in the mail that
Speaker 1: is going to help you out a lot. By the way,
Speaker 1: those checks did help a lot, and some of the
Speaker 1: other pieces that were in that legislation, that first recovery legislation,
Speaker 1: including the child tax Crew, it is probably one of
Speaker 1: the most successful policies in recent history.
Speaker 5: Yet I think part of why people feel.
Speaker 1: The way they do about the economy is not just
Speaker 1: that inflation has been high, eating into their paychecks, etc.
Speaker 1: But also because you had all of those programs that
Speaker 1: were originally instituted that genuinely help people, that bolstered their
Speaker 1: savings account, that gave him a little bit a wiggle room,
Speaker 1: et cetera. All of those have now been stripped away.
Speaker 1: You've got student loan payments restarting, You've got any pandemic.
Speaker 1: Aid program has been rolled back, and so things that
Speaker 1: people used to have access to you like child tax credit,
Speaker 1: those are gone, and they're really starting to feel the pain.
Speaker 1: I do want to say something that will be perhaps controversial,
Speaker 1: which is that I actually do think that Joe Biden
Speaker 1: has been the best economic policy president of my lifetime.
Speaker 5: Now let me say, oh.
Speaker 1: That's a really low bar, but he is the first
Speaker 1: in my lifetime who has broken at all with the
Speaker 1: neoliberal consensus that starts in the Reagan era, that is
Speaker 1: picked up and affirmed by the Clinton era that Obama
Speaker 1: sort of pretended like he might break from that, he
Speaker 1: ends up being just doubling down on it. Biden has
Speaker 1: at least tinkered around the edges of industrial policy. For
Speaker 1: one of you know, even the student loan debt cancelations.
Speaker 1: The Supreme Court is probably going to say because partly
Speaker 1: because the Biden administration didn't do a great job legally
Speaker 1: justifying it, but they're probably going to strike it down.
Speaker 5: But that is a real break with the neoliberal era.
Speaker 1: Saying hey, we're going to do overt debt cancelation like
Speaker 1: that would be unheard of, unthought of in the Obama administration,
Speaker 1: in the Clinton administration, et cetera. Some of the programs,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, like child tax credit. Truly, if you
Speaker 1: look at the numbers on child programming, this was a
Speaker 1: wildly effective program. The problem with it is that they
Speaker 1: didn't actually codify it permanently. They assumed that they would
Speaker 1: be able to put political pressure to keep it going,
Speaker 1: or perhaps they just didn't really care, and so that
Speaker 1: goes by the wayside. So there are a few things
Speaker 1: here that you can point to to say, yeah, I
Speaker 1: do actually think his economic policy, especially at the beginning
Speaker 1: of his administration, was better than Obama. But again, it's
Speaker 1: so wildly inadequate for after you've had forty years of
Speaker 1: wage at least stagnation, probably decline after you've had decades
Speaker 1: and debat decades of neoliberalism, which is really pushed up
Speaker 1: the cost of health care, the cost of education, the
Speaker 1: cost of housing, made having a basic middle class life
Speaker 1: basically unobtainable. That even if you're doing these little, like
Speaker 1: tiny improvements around the edges, it's just woefully insufficient for
Speaker 1: where people are right now.
Speaker 4: There's this really interesting thing in Axios this morning from
Speaker 4: economist Darren Grant, who has studied why in this era
Speaker 4: people's sentiments about the economy are not attached to the
Speaker 4: unemployment level, whereas historically that's been the case. He says,
Speaker 4: if your wages are this is access paraphrasing, if your
Speaker 4: wages are outpacing inflation, things look rosy. If not, well
Speaker 4: that's quite dispiriting. Yes, no kidding. But he found this
Speaker 4: time around that it's the real wages that are tethered
Speaker 4: to people's sentiments about the economy, which is super super
Speaker 4: interesting in that it's not always been the.
Speaker 3: Case that that's what it used to be.
Speaker 4: Like if you have a job, yeah, and your spirits
Speaker 4: are going to be more tied to whether or not
Speaker 4: you're pleased with the state of the economy with the president,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. That's a really interesting finding, and
Speaker 4: I think it does get to like big changes in
Speaker 4: the economy post Obama, post Obama, post Trump, post pandemic,
Speaker 4: where we are right now.
Speaker 3: Why is that different?
Speaker 4: I think probably because it's just been a dramatic change
Speaker 4: in the way that our economy is organized.
Speaker 1: Well, when the minimum wage has been stuck at seven
Speaker 1: dollars and freaking twenty five cents for you know, multiple
Speaker 1: decades now, it's the longest time we've ever gone without
Speaker 1: hiking the minimum wage.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's no longer enough to have a job.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of you know, do I have a
Speaker 1: job that is going to enable me to afford anything,
Speaker 1: to even come close to being able to afford like
Speaker 1: just basic shelter and food. I mean, we talk about
Speaker 1: homelessness and you know the rise in that and a
Speaker 1: lot of cities across the country that comes right down
Speaker 1: to just housing costs. There is no city in America
Speaker 1: where you can afford a one bedroom apartment. We're not
Speaker 1: talking about living largeyear a one bedroom apartment on a
Speaker 1: full time minimum wage job. So yeah, it's not enough
Speaker 1: to look and say, oh, the unemployment rate is low.
Speaker 1: You have to say not just do I have a job?
Speaker 1: Is it a good job? Is it a job where
Speaker 1: I have healthcare? Is it a job where I have
Speaker 1: some sort of stability, where I have some sort of
Speaker 1: predictability in terms of my schedule. And this is why, Emily,
Speaker 1: that you've seen such a rise in interest and support,
Speaker 1: by the way, historic support for the labor movement, because
Speaker 1: there is this awareness. I think Chris Mall's who's the
Speaker 1: president of Amazon labor Union, he said it, well, he's like,
Speaker 1: we're not quitting our job, saying we are going to
Speaker 1: organize at.
Speaker 5: Our jobs and make these good jobs.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You see this with the Starbucks baristas who are saying, like, listen,
Speaker 1: it's not enough that you're going to like virtue signal
Speaker 1: to me, which they're like barely not even doing anymore
Speaker 1: apparently with this whole pride flat. But it's not enough
Speaker 1: you're going to virtue signal to me. I actually want
Speaker 1: this to be a good job, and I'm willing to
Speaker 1: take some risk to do it because since the labor
Speaker 1: market is tight, like your low wage job is not
Speaker 1: that important to me, I can go somewhere else and
Speaker 1: get another low wage job, but fighting to get a
Speaker 1: job that will actually allow me to sustain any kind
Speaker 1: of life, Yeah, that's something that is worth taking the
Speaker 1: risk for.
Speaker 8: You know.
Speaker 4: That's the Starbucks unionization is one of the more interesting
Speaker 4: ones period, because Starbucks actually had pretty good benefits. You know,
Speaker 4: you got healthcare at Starbucks, they would pay for some
Speaker 4: of your college, and it still wasn't enough because in
Speaker 4: so many cases, it was scheduling, it was the bathroom policy,
Speaker 4: it was all of these different things that contributed to
Speaker 4: a lifestyle that wasn't what people expected from their employer.
Speaker 4: And I think that's exactly what we're talking about, like
Speaker 4: why are these things changing, Because now it's not the same.
Speaker 3: You're not able to have a good paying job.
Speaker 4: And affordable health care and all of these other things
Speaker 4: in so many different parts of the economy.
Speaker 3: It's just not normal.
Speaker 4: It's not healthy for society, and it's it's a huge
Speaker 4: difference from the past. And so it's expectations versus reality,
Speaker 4: and when reality isn't delivering, then yeah, you're probably going
Speaker 4: to have a different outlook. Even if you have a job,
Speaker 4: even if unemployment is fairly low, historically, it's just going
Speaker 4: to be different, and I'm glad people are picking up
Speaker 4: on them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I think the Bidenomics pitch is going to
Speaker 1: fall flat because it is dissonant with what people are
Speaker 1: experiencing in their real lives. That doesn't mean that I
Speaker 1: think Joe Biden is going to lose the election. And
Speaker 1: that's so sad about our current political state. Put us
Speaker 1: up on the screen. So in a new NBC News poll,
Speaker 1: Biden's national approve rating is about forty three percent. That's
Speaker 1: about where it's been more or less. Another ten percent
Speaker 1: of voters somewhat disapprove of him. And what Sahil Kapor
Speaker 1: here says is how did those ten percent feel about
Speaker 1: a Biden versus Trump race? Will have say they would
Speaker 1: vote for Biden and thirty nine percent say that they
Speaker 1: would vote for Trump.
Speaker 5: That group, the lesser.
Speaker 1: Of two evils voters, was really important in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: was really important in twenty twenty two. They're basically the
Speaker 1: group that prohibited the red wave from appearing, and will
Speaker 1: be really important again in twenty twenty four because you're
Speaker 1: very likely to have this Trump versus Biden matchup that
Speaker 1: overwhelmingly majority of Americans do not want, would like to
Speaker 1: have other choices, but because our democracy is so like
Speaker 1: frail and broken, they're not going to get another choice, really,
Speaker 1: and so they're stuck with these these two dudes that
Speaker 1: they would really rather would move on and leave us
Speaker 1: all alone. So who the people who don't like either
Speaker 1: one of them vote for are going to be a
Speaker 1: critical factor. And this is always emily what the Biden
Speaker 1: people have thought. They have thought ron Klain after Emmanuel Macrome,
Speaker 1: Yeah won Yes, while he had like thirty some percent
Speaker 1: approval rating. Ron Klain, Joe Biden's former chief of staff,
Speaker 1: tweeted out like, oh interesting, interesting that he was able
Speaker 1: to pull that off not because people loved him, but
Speaker 1: because they hated his opponent.
Speaker 5: That has always been the play here. So to me,
Speaker 5: it's just such a.
Speaker 1: Sign of decay and so pathetic and so outrageous and
Speaker 1: enraging two that you think, as Joe Biden and also
Speaker 1: as Donald Trump, that you can run without really promising
Speaker 1: anything to the American people on a material front, that
Speaker 1: you can run without you know, just trying to trying
Speaker 1: to bolster what you've done already in office, but without
Speaker 1: offering any sort of affirmative agenda for the future.
Speaker 5: I think that's a really sad state of affairs.
Speaker 4: Frankly, you know, it's also how Donald Trump won because
Speaker 4: people so detested Hill Clinton and so wanted her away
Speaker 4: from the quarridors of power. And so I actually think
Speaker 4: the signs of decay are abundantly obvious.
Speaker 3: It's not just with Joe Biden, it's also with Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: And when you're pitting in all likelihood, Donald Trump against
Speaker 4: Joe Biden, just like we saw in twenty twenty, it's
Speaker 4: an extremely pathetic state of affairs.
Speaker 3: But it's the matchup that we deserve.
Speaker 4: At this point, we've basically earned this, but you know
Speaker 4: it's it's I shouldn't say we deserve it. It is the
Speaker 4: one that we're getting, but people do deserve it exactly
Speaker 4: better than that. Although to some extent, we have all
Speaker 4: created this situation because we're all here.
Speaker 3: But it's pretty bad.
Speaker 5: It's prettymplicity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, but no, I mean, in all honestly, I
Speaker 4: think that's exactly right. And that's where enter Podsay, Bros,
Speaker 4: You've got to see this clip because it's so First
Speaker 4: of all, I think this is going to be a
Speaker 4: huge narrative in the next year and a half before
Speaker 4: the election, more than it was with the Jill Stein
Speaker 4: Susan Sarandon line of argumentation from the sort of establishment left.
Speaker 4: But also he just puts it in a way that
Speaker 4: is so perfectly awful. Here.
Speaker 3: You got to watch.
Speaker 9: If the people who voted for Jill Stein, just Jill
Speaker 9: Stein in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had voted for Hillary instead,
Speaker 9: Donald Trump would have never become president. That's it, right,
Speaker 9: And so you know, I'm sure there's a lot of
Speaker 9: Cornell West fans out there. You live in a swing state,
Speaker 9: you vote for Cornell West, You're helping Trump become president.
Speaker 7: That's it.
Speaker 9: And you can say, oh, well, it's Joe Biden's fault
Speaker 9: he did this or that. No, no, no, it's it's your decision.
Speaker 9: You get to decide whether you want to help Donald
Speaker 9: Trump become president or you don't. And if you want
Speaker 9: to help him, then you should vote for Cornell West,
Speaker 9: or you should vote for Joe Manchin and his No
Speaker 9: Labels ticket, or you can vote for you know, RFK
Speaker 9: Junior if he decides to run third party. But if
Speaker 9: you don't want to help Trump become president, you gotta
Speaker 9: vote for Joe Biden. That's it, very simple. Now, I
Speaker 9: think messaging two voters who might actually make this decision
Speaker 9: is probably a little different, I would say, because I.
Speaker 5: Know chastising works.
Speaker 1: Chastizing works probably different, does it, because I would say
Speaker 1: history would show it does not work. And I mean,
Speaker 1: I just got I'm having such twenty sixteen reducs right
Speaker 1: now because it is the same thing all over again.
Speaker 1: I mean, here you have the specter of Joe Biden
Speaker 1: going out making this speech, and in fairness these comments
Speaker 1: from the pod Saved Dudes was before this Biden speech,
Speaker 1: but promising literally nothing right, not running on any sort
Speaker 1: of affirmative agenda. It really is just like I'm not Trump,
Speaker 1: and you got to keep me in here because you
Speaker 1: got no other option. And they could spend their time
Speaker 1: criticizing that, saying, listen, guys, if you want to win
Speaker 1: people over, like you need to get out there and
Speaker 1: you need to make the case to them, and you
Speaker 1: need to you know, you got a lot of young
Speaker 1: people who were excited about the Biden ministry, who actually
Speaker 1: gave the high marks at the beginning of the administration,
Speaker 1: who are so disenchanted and so disgusted with especially the
Speaker 1: recent direction of the Biden administration. You know, you're going
Speaker 1: to have to appeal to them if you want to
Speaker 1: be able to win. Instead, it's nope, if you don't
Speaker 1: vote for Joe, you're a vote for Trump, and we're
Speaker 1: just going to shame and cajole you and hope that
Speaker 1: that works out, because the Democratic Party can never fail.
Speaker 5: It can only ever be failed.
Speaker 4: Emily, it's amazing that put that people have put microphones
Speaker 4: in front of their faces because they're constantly just saying
Speaker 4: the quiet part out loud, and like they slip into
Speaker 4: it sometimes and you notice, like when he was when
Speaker 4: he sort of took a step back and he was like, no,
Speaker 4: messaging to those people might be a little bit different,
Speaker 4: as though he's not talking to the public on his
Speaker 4: podcast in ways that are going to get clipped and disseminated.
Speaker 4: He's a speechwriter for Obama, That's what Jon Favreau was like,
Speaker 4: He's actually supposed to be persuasive, persuasive and argument arguing
Speaker 4: to a swath of the public that he understands. You know,
Speaker 4: in order to persuade people, in order to stir their emotions,
Speaker 4: you should understand them and clearly, they still do not
Speaker 4: understand that there are plenty of people in this country
Speaker 4: that say there is no significant difference between Joe Biden
Speaker 4: and Donald Trump. If Joe Biden, if Donald Trump is
Speaker 4: tweeting crazy stuff, find it's not going to have me
Speaker 4: up in arms, you know, drinking my Starbucks, watching Morning
Speaker 4: Joe and freaking out with Mika and the gang.
Speaker 3: It's just the same old stuff. I'm still going to be.
Speaker 4: In this stupid job with student loan debt with you know,
Speaker 4: it's like it doesn't change that much from one party
Speaker 4: to the other. And that's fundamentally what they don't understand.
Speaker 4: Because he's trying to say, if you don't want Donald
Speaker 4: Trump to be president, don't vote for Cornell West. Well,
Speaker 4: you know what, there are a whole lot of Cornell
Speaker 4: West voters or RFK junior voters or voters from Mary
Speaker 4: On Williamson who said this is the same on both sides.
Speaker 4: It doesn't matter to me if I get an establishment
Speaker 4: Democrat or an establishment Republican or Trump or Biden. I'm
Speaker 4: still going to be screwed by the system. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: it doesn't matter. I don't care if Donald Trump is president.
Speaker 4: In the same way that I if it's a vote
Speaker 4: for Biden or Donald Trump, it's just a horse a piece.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, listen, to be fair, I don't agree
Speaker 5: with that.
Speaker 3: I don't either.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there are a lot of people who
Speaker 1: view it that way, and I can't really blame him
Speaker 1: for that, but I don't actually agree with that. The
Speaker 1: reason that I ended up voting for Biden last time
Speaker 1: around was not because I was excited, not because I
Speaker 1: didn't have a million issues with his past record and
Speaker 1: expectations of what he would do in office. It was
Speaker 1: a very simple one, which is that my core, you know,
Speaker 1: core my politics is the labor movement. And Trump would
Speaker 1: put a bunch of union busting goons in the National
Speaker 1: Relations Board.
Speaker 5: Biden would put some people who at least.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't like totally rig the scales against workers, and that is,
Speaker 1: in fact what happened. It's part of what did enable
Speaker 1: the Starbucks union. So on that metric alone, I was
Speaker 1: sort of persuaded, like, all right, that you have to
Speaker 1: at least lay the groundwork to enable a labor movement,
Speaker 1: even as I have low expectations for Joe Biden. But
Speaker 1: as you said, like I can't really blame people for
Speaker 1: holding that view. And with Democrats, they always think people
Speaker 1: just don't understand how great we are, you know, if
Speaker 1: they just really got it, like if we just.
Speaker 5: Came up with a new slogan like build back.
Speaker 1: Better, and then they're really gonna they're really going to
Speaker 1: understand we're gonna win on a landslide if we just
Speaker 1: like come up with a new slogan and like come
Speaker 1: up with a great TV ad and pay our consultants
Speaker 1: more to be able to win people over. And so
Speaker 1: all of the shaming, all of the criticism goes instead
Speaker 1: of to the people who are in power, who literally
Speaker 1: hold the presidency and the Senate right now and damn
Speaker 1: close to the House as well. Instead of holding them
Speaker 1: to account, it's always just like, oh, what's wrong with
Speaker 1: the voters?
Speaker 5: What you know, are the why or the voter?
Speaker 1: Are they two sexists? Are they two racists? Are they
Speaker 1: too like dumb? They don't understand what we've done for them.
Speaker 1: They're so ungrateful. It's sure it's.
Speaker 4: At these pawns that are seeing dumb memes and it's
Speaker 4: changing everybody's opinion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, perhaps you have Favreau, as you say, it was
Speaker 1: an Obama speech writer, like Obama was great for Obama
Speaker 1: in terms of politicians, but he was a disaster for
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party. I mean, the party has never recovered
Speaker 1: from the thousand plus state legislative sies that they.
Speaker 5: Lost under Obama.
Speaker 1: They've never recovered from all the governor's mansions that they
Speaker 1: gave up. You know, ultimately, they gave up the House
Speaker 1: and the Senate and then the presidency to Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Which it's amazing to me that there's never any self
Speaker 1: reflection about, like, what did you do wrong that you
Speaker 1: go from Barack Obama to Donald Trump? Here, There's never
Speaker 1: any self reflection about that. There's never any self there's memory, man,
Speaker 1: any criticism of Hillary Clinton, who is the most proximate
Speaker 1: cause of why we ended up with Donald Trump in
Speaker 1: the White House instead, it's just like, oh, it's the
Speaker 1: Jill Stein voters.
Speaker 5: They're the real problem.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're the real problem.
Speaker 4: And continuously we hear that Democrats, like I don't know
Speaker 4: a lot of like Hollywood folks whatever, are trying to
Speaker 4: field Michelle Obama, which I think is really interesting because
Speaker 4: it's exactly what you're saying. They think she can win
Speaker 4: and that's literally all they care about Michelle.
Speaker 1: Obama has never showed any interest in running for office.
Speaker 1: And listen, I think you know, especially they're stuck with Joe.
Speaker 1: There's no other And so let's actually transition to there
Speaker 1: was a new poll out of New Hampshire that was
Speaker 1: kind of interesting, and you know, listen, anyone poll, you
Speaker 1: should take it with a lot of grains assault.
Speaker 5: But put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: Now, New Hampshire is really interesting because the Democrats, led
Speaker 1: by Joe Biden and the DANC really screwed the state over.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden did really poorly here last time around. I
Speaker 1: don't know, he had like fourth fifth, it was. It
Speaker 1: was abysmal, right, It was losing a like Amy Klobashar
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire, and so they wanted to put the
Speaker 1: state later in the order. They wanted to push up
Speaker 1: South Carolina, where he did really well, and so they
Speaker 1: did that, but they didn't really think it all through
Speaker 1: because New Hampshire actually has a law on the books
Speaker 1: that they have to go first in terms of their
Speaker 1: primary and the state is held by Republicans. So even
Speaker 1: if the Democratic Party wanted to play ball and move things,
Speaker 1: which they actually don't, but even if they did. They
Speaker 1: can't because the state has a Republican governor. So Joe
Speaker 1: Biden is not even going to be in the ballot
Speaker 1: in New Hampshire. So anyway, here's this latest New Hampshire poll.
Speaker 1: It's got Biden at sixty eight percent, RFK Junior at
Speaker 1: nine percent, which is lower than where he's been in
Speaker 1: other recent polls, and Marian Williamson at eight percent. And
Speaker 1: you know, a lot has been made of this poll,
Speaker 1: and I think people should maybe like cool their jets
Speaker 1: on reading too much into one particular poll and the
Speaker 1: fact that in particular RFK has dropped, you know, about
Speaker 1: ten points versus where we've seen him be in national polls,
Speaker 1: because these things are all over the place.
Speaker 5: But it did raise a.
Speaker 1: Question Emily that we were talking about, is he has
Speaker 1: really leaned into like I'm going to be the podcast candidate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go on breaking points, which we really
Speaker 1: appreciate a couple of times. You know, that's great. We
Speaker 1: appreciated having that time with him. He went on with
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan. Obviously, he's done a ton of podcasts across
Speaker 1: the political spectrum, and the theory of the case is
Speaker 1: that this is the new mainstream. This is where you
Speaker 1: actually find people, This is where you actually reach people.
Speaker 1: This is where I can get my ideas out since
Speaker 1: the mainstream media is shutting me out.
Speaker 5: And I think in particular because.
Speaker 1: The views that RFK holds and leans into, especially in
Speaker 1: these podcast appearances, are really out of step. Frankly, just
Speaker 1: by polling, whether you agree with him or not, with
Speaker 1: where the Democratic Party base is. I don't think that
Speaker 1: having so much this attention in the podcast tour doesn't
Speaker 1: appear to have aided him at the very least, even
Speaker 1: if we want to take this poll with a lot
Speaker 1: of grains assault.
Speaker 4: And you know, I just pulled up what real clear
Speaker 4: politics had here, and they have polls recently. We're actually
Speaker 4: going to talk in the next block about a new
Speaker 4: Wisconsin pole, but the Dems in the Wisconsin Pole it
Speaker 4: has Biden forty nine, Kennedy nine, Williamson three. Pennsylvania a
Speaker 4: Quinnipiac pole, Biden seventy one, Kennedy seventeen, Williamson five, So
Speaker 4: Kennedy at seventeen in Pennsylvania, Kennedy at nine in Wisconsin.
Speaker 4: There were some flash polls right after he announced his
Speaker 4: candidacy where he did really have a sugar high that
Speaker 4: seems to be coming down pretty clearly. We'll get more
Speaker 4: of the next couple of weeks, but these poles are
Speaker 4: an indication I think that it's not where it was
Speaker 4: after his initial announcement.
Speaker 3: And I think you're right.
Speaker 4: The podcast candidacy is very different than a ground operation,
Speaker 4: and I'm sure he knows that. I mean, his people
Speaker 4: know that, but what people are seeing and that's a
Speaker 4: really interesting thing too, that if you're running, for instance,
Speaker 4: a podcast candidacy, immedia candidacy like Donald Trump brand, I
Speaker 4: mean he at first had like no ground operation anywhere.
Speaker 4: In twenty sixteen or twenty fifteen, he comes in and
Speaker 4: he's on media constantly, is on MSNBC, CNN, he's on
Speaker 4: Fox right, and what people in New Hampshire are seeing.
Speaker 3: Is Donald Trump. It actually didn't matter that he didn't
Speaker 3: have a ground operation.
Speaker 4: So in some ways there's this interesting interplane now that like, actually,
Speaker 4: if you do blanket national media, maybe you can get
Speaker 4: away with having a different ground operation, but that probably
Speaker 4: won't be the case for.
Speaker 3: Anyone not named Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I mean with RFK Junior, obviously, you know, I
Speaker 1: have disagreements with him, on a number of policies, vaccines,
Speaker 1: but even really probably more importantly you might have heard
Speaker 1: that even more importantly actually economics. I have very you know,
Speaker 1: different view of what needs to be done in terms
Speaker 1: of the economy, in very different philosophy. But actually would
Speaker 1: like it to be the case that you could run
Speaker 1: this sort of podcast candidacy, that you can bypass the
Speaker 1: mainstream process, that they're weakened enough that this would work
Speaker 1: out for you. But I unfortunately just don't think that
Speaker 1: we're there, especially on the Democratic side. And he has
Speaker 1: an additional challenge in that. As I just said, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, I wrote a whole book that I think
Speaker 1: had a lot of legitimacy to it criticizing Anthony Fauci,
Speaker 1: But you have to acknowledge, like my views on Anthony
Speaker 1: Fauci and RFK Junior's views on Anthony Fauci are wildly
Speaker 1: different than the Democratic base.
Speaker 5: You know, his views on Ukraine.
Speaker 1: We're actually talking about a poll today where not just Democrats,
Speaker 1: but actually overwhelmingly I don't think we should be providing
Speaker 1: additional military aid to Ukraine. I think we should be
Speaker 1: using that as leverage to get them to the negotiating table.
Speaker 1: My views and RFK Junior's views are not in line
Speaker 1: with the Democratic base, and it's something that you know,
Speaker 1: that's a key position that he really leans into. So
Speaker 1: we also has this added challenge of actually, the more
Speaker 1: that attention that he gets, the more that people know
Speaker 1: him outside of being a Kennedy and a protest vote
Speaker 1: against the president that they're really not excited about.
Speaker 5: They're worried about his age, et cetera.
Speaker 1: The more they get to know his actual views, the
Speaker 1: more of an issue it.
Speaker 5: May be for him.
Speaker 1: So he may have the ironic situation Emily that actually
Speaker 1: the more tension that he gets, the more of a
Speaker 1: challenge that he has in the polls. I think there
Speaker 1: are other candidates out there, the person on the Republic
Speaker 1: Cancide that is doing sort of a similar strategy as
Speaker 1: vivek Rumswamy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, although he also has I mean.
Speaker 1: He is on Fox News regularly as well, so he
Speaker 1: does have mainstream media too. But he has really leaned
Speaker 1: into this sort of like super online persona. His issue
Speaker 1: set is the like super online, like podcasty issue set,
Speaker 1: and it's been enough for him to get a lot
Speaker 1: of attention. You know, we certainly got a base and
Speaker 1: followers who are very excited about him and the issues that.
Speaker 5: He talks about. But you know, is he gonna be
Speaker 5: the Republican nominique?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 1: Is it going to work out for him in terms
Speaker 1: of a national media profile and whatever he wants to
Speaker 1: leverage that forward next to you know or potentially electrum
Speaker 1: cabinet position. Yes, But unfortunately, I think there's still a
Speaker 1: real limit to how far you can go if you're
Speaker 1: just leaning into like the podcast route versus having any
Speaker 1: sort of you know, ability to garner mainstream media attention.
Speaker 4: I think the problem also is that it's very easy
Speaker 4: to fall into this impenetrable bubble in the same way
Speaker 4: that Hillary Clinton's team was clearly an impenetrable bubble and
Speaker 4: sort of isolated and insulated from criticism and from the
Speaker 4: outside world. If you're running a podcast cannondacy that might actually,
Speaker 4: apart from just having a more tailored message to one
Speaker 4: particular crowd, you may also be insulating yourself from different voters,
Speaker 4: touchgarters you need to, and the very you know our
Speaker 4: via Jinior's Californian The very obvious example is somebody that
Speaker 4: I really like, he'd tell you the same thing, probably
Speaker 4: Michael Schellenberger, who ran a natorial campaign not that long
Speaker 4: ago and had so much conversation online around his candidacy,
Speaker 4: was able to get some donors because of the media
Speaker 4: attention he got, and it just didn't translate into votes
Speaker 4: on the ground. And so I think that's an indication
Speaker 4: if Bobby Kennedy has a name, obviously like that name
Speaker 4: is hugely, hugely helpful in ways that are not necessarily
Speaker 4: precedented in politics, just because of the place that his
Speaker 4: uncle holds in the sort of public imagination and that
Speaker 4: his father holds in the public imagination.
Speaker 3: That said, all of this.
Speaker 4: It may end up being, you know, not much more
Speaker 4: than a splash. I will say, though, Marie Harp, just
Speaker 4: as we're wrapping up here, she said recently, I promise
Speaker 4: you that Kennedy is not going to get above twenty
Speaker 4: percent any primary. I think it's way too early to
Speaker 4: make a determination on that, because while he may come
Speaker 4: down from a sugar high here, he may also adapt
Speaker 4: and say, yeah, our message has been a little bit narrow.
Speaker 3: It has been sort of.
Speaker 4: To this you know crowd of people that's you know,
Speaker 4: read substack and watches podcasts, which are important voters but
Speaker 4: not all voters, and you know, not necessarily having common
Speaker 4: everything with all voters, so he can adjust. And I
Speaker 4: think saying that there's no way he's going to get
Speaker 4: twenty percent in any primary way too early.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially when again Biden's time are going to be
Speaker 1: on the ballot in Iowa or in New Hampshire. Right,
Speaker 1: So I think that's honestly a really foolish thing to say.
Speaker 1: All right, Emily, why don't you set up for us
Speaker 1: this really interesting pulling from NBC News about some Republican priority.
Speaker 3: This stuff is fascinating.
Speaker 4: I'm so glad that we're we can actually put this
Speaker 4: up on the screen. The first element in the B block,
Speaker 4: so be one here look at that. I know that
Speaker 4: the font is kind of small there, so I'm going
Speaker 4: to break it out for everyone. This is an NBC
Speaker 4: News poll that tested eleven different proposals and issues that
Speaker 4: the GOP candidates are campaigning on. And basically they say
Speaker 4: that I'm reading from the report, the recent push on
Speaker 4: using the military at the border is resonating with general
Speaker 4: election voters, though they Republicans are down on several other
Speaker 4: high profile policy planks. So if you're looking at the screen,
Speaker 4: you're going to want to look at the upper left. There,
Speaker 4: so support for deploying the US military to the Mexican
Speaker 4: border to stop illegal drugs from entering the country. That
Speaker 4: said so, fifty five percent of people say that would make.
Speaker 3: Them more likely to vote for a presidential candidate.
Speaker 4: Then take your eyes all the way down to the
Speaker 4: bottom right. Wants to address the federal budget deficit by
Speaker 4: reducing Social Security and Medicare benefits for those who are
Speaker 4: not already enrolled in these programs. Only twelve percent of
Speaker 4: people so that would make the more likely to vote
Speaker 4: for a candidate. Seventy seven percent of people say that
Speaker 4: would make them less likely to vote for a candidate.
Speaker 4: The most popular position that they tested among all registered
Speaker 4: voters and Republican primary voters was deploying the military to
Speaker 4: the Mexican border. And notice it wasn't just deploying the military.
Speaker 4: They asked in the question specifically about stopping illegal drugs.
Speaker 3: From entering the country.
Speaker 4: And that's actually a pretty key distinction because we talked
Speaker 4: yesterday about the Stephen Miller drone the migrant vote. Yea
Speaker 4: allegation which both of us, I think are finding a
Speaker 4: little bit dubious but the distinction there is we're just
Speaker 4: going to stop people from entering the country, not drugs. Now,
Speaker 4: when you're asking specifically about drugs, that should be a
Speaker 4: huge red flag for Republicans to test out that messaging.
Speaker 3: If they want this like deploy.
Speaker 4: The military to the border thing to work electorally, you
Speaker 4: probably want to ask specifically about stopping the flow of drugs.
Speaker 4: That's what's polling well, and that is a very different
Speaker 4: thing than people drugs.
Speaker 3: People very different.
Speaker 4: You think that sounds pretty obvious, but to politicians it's not.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they actually tested also, so they tested supports
Speaker 1: deploying troops to the border to stop illegal drugs, and
Speaker 1: that was the best. This is, you know, a whole
Speaker 1: list of basically Republican priorities, a bunch of stuff about
Speaker 1: you know, transgender kids, there's stuff about.
Speaker 5: Abortion, there's stuff about stop this deal.
Speaker 1: So they tested all of these sort of like Republican
Speaker 1: talking points and priorities. And so they tested deploy the
Speaker 1: troops for illegal drugs, and they tested deploy the troops
Speaker 1: for immigration, and that did pull significantly less well. It
Speaker 1: still was among the better polling of the GOP priorities,
Speaker 1: but it was less effective than stopping illegal drugs with troops,
Speaker 1: And I think it's a sign of I mean, we're
Speaker 1: still in it just keeps getting worse and worse. We
Speaker 1: had a fair amount of attention during the twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: campaign about how bad the addiction crisis had gotten, how
Speaker 1: bad the opioid addiction crisis had gotten, how many overdose deaths,
Speaker 1: and just what a scrore.
Speaker 5: Of America this was.
Speaker 1: And some of that attention has fallen off even as
Speaker 1: the numbers have continued to grow and have really gotten
Speaker 1: worse and worse. So I think it reflects what continues
Speaker 1: to be a horrific, humantal and pain point with the
Speaker 1: American public. Even as we discussed yesterday, I think this
Speaker 1: solution is.
Speaker 5: Not the right one.
Speaker 1: I mean, really, I think the only solution is to legalize,
Speaker 1: tax and regulate, but and the war on drugs since
Speaker 1: we've been doing this forever and our addiction rates just
Speaker 1: keep on getting worse and worse. But I do think
Speaker 1: it just reflects that human pain that people are still
Speaker 1: going through. You know, it's interesting if you go down
Speaker 1: the list here some of the places where there's a
Speaker 1: real divergence between how the public feels about the issue
Speaker 1: and how just the Republican base feels about the issue.
Speaker 1: Abortion is one of the top ones in terms of
Speaker 1: that sort of like disconnect. So overall you only have
Speaker 1: twenty nine percent who say that banning abortion after the
Speaker 1: first six weeks of pregnancy, which is the Rond de Santis,
Speaker 1: that's a Ronda Santists physician. Only twenty nine percent say
Speaker 1: that makes them more likely to vote for a candidate overall,
Speaker 1: whereas fifty seven percent say it's more than a majority
Speaker 1: say it makes them less likely to vote for that candidate.
Speaker 1: With the Republicans, there is a clear majority fifty two
Speaker 1: percent in favor of and say that it's more likely
Speaker 1: to make them vote for a candidate who supports banning
Speaker 1: abortion after the first six week six weeks, and only
Speaker 1: thirty percent of post Now, I mean fifty two percent
Speaker 1: is not like eighty percent. But you can see how
Speaker 1: the politics of this within the Republican base, because especially
Speaker 1: because the pro life part of the Republican base is
Speaker 1: very organized and very effective and very powerful. You can
Speaker 1: see why you have Canadates like Mike Pence, Rondo Santis
Speaker 1: and others who are getting really on a step with
Speaker 1: where the American people are on this issue. But you know,
Speaker 1: obviously within the context of Republican primary, it makes some sense.
Speaker 1: But I have to say, overall, Emily, I wish that
Speaker 1: politics worked more like this, where you like go through
Speaker 1: you like have your personal issue priorities, and you like
Speaker 1: go through a list and how do these candidates match
Speaker 1: up to that list?
Speaker 5: But this, it's kind of precious to think that's how
Speaker 5: politics actually works.
Speaker 1: And you see it with I mean you honestly see
Speaker 1: it with Ronda Santis and Donald Trump. I mean, Ronda
Speaker 1: Santis's whole play was like, I am going to on issues.
Speaker 1: I'm going to do all these like issue based things,
Speaker 1: policy things in Florida. I'm going to get to the
Speaker 1: right of Trump on issues like abortion and wokeness and
Speaker 1: transgender issue. Like I'm going to get to the right
Speaker 1: of Trump on all these different issues.
Speaker 5: It's where the base is.
Speaker 1: If I just look at the ideological charts and I
Speaker 1: look at the polling, this is where the base is.
Speaker 1: And if you ask voters in the Republican primary, they
Speaker 1: have seen that. They actually do say Ronda Santis is
Speaker 1: more conservative than Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: They just still like Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's more about like the vibes and the
Speaker 1: energy and who's going to own the Libs and who
Speaker 1: pisses people off?
Speaker 5: And it's my there's more about this, like.
Speaker 1: Sort of wholesome view of the situation versus let me
Speaker 1: go through an issue by issue checklist.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, it's always vibes.
Speaker 4: And I actually really like what Benji Starlin I've seen
Speaker 4: before said when he tweeted this, he said, always love
Speaker 4: this NBC newspopt where they test generic candidate qualities and positions.
Speaker 4: Actual voting is much more complicated, but it's a great
Speaker 4: acid test for relative priorities and which issues are fully
Speaker 4: polarized on partisan lines or more niche And you really
Speaker 4: do see that with the border one, whereas you see
Speaker 4: for instance, with like just to stop immigration or to
Speaker 4: deal with immigration sending the military to the border, it's
Speaker 4: forty six to forty With allowing kindergarten teachers through eighth
Speaker 4: grade teachers to discuss sexual orientation or gender identity forty
Speaker 4: six to forty six, bans on trans adolescents taking puberty
Speaker 4: blocking medication forty one to forty four, aid to Ukraine
Speaker 4: thirty seven to forty. You see polarization down the line on. Actually,
Speaker 4: most of these issues, even ones that I think the
Speaker 4: online right capital o capital are things are just like
Speaker 4: populist cram the board outright winners. Yeah, absolutely, that is
Speaker 4: not what this shows at all. Granted that is more complicated.
Speaker 4: These are different questions than whether you support that, but
Speaker 4: this is asking whether it makes you more or less
Speaker 4: likely to vote for someone in that The way that
Speaker 4: makes sense is is it a priority for you?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 4: And what do you think of the people who tend
Speaker 4: to talk like this? I feel like that's actually a
Speaker 4: huge part of the formula when people are asked a question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I'm always skeptical of these polls because
Speaker 1: I think people are bad, not because people are dumb,
Speaker 1: but because people are complex at assessing what their own
Speaker 1: motivations will be in terms of choosing a candidate. I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you, Emily, what do you think of
Speaker 1: this one? So they asked this question. You know, would
Speaker 1: you be more likely or less likely to support someone
Speaker 1: who a candidate who quote threatens to penalize or financially
Speaker 1: harm businesses that make statements on LGBTQ and other issues
Speaker 1: that they.
Speaker 5: Do not agree with. This was a big loser.
Speaker 1: This was almost as bad as the Social Security and
Speaker 1: Medicare question. So the overall public, only twelve percent said
Speaker 1: that would make them more likely to support a candidate.
Speaker 1: And this is basically like asking about the Ron de
Speaker 1: Santa's Disney situation. Yeah right, Yeah, and seventy percent said
Speaker 1: it would make them less likely to support that candidate.
Speaker 1: Even with Republicans, this was a dog. This was the
Speaker 1: second to the worst polled question. Sixteen percent said it
Speaker 1: would make them more likely and fifty eight percent said
Speaker 1: it would make them less likely.
Speaker 5: What do you think about that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I think to apply that to destantas, which
Speaker 4: they're You're right, I think they're clearly trying to do,
Speaker 4: is not super helpful because that's such a specific situation.
Speaker 4: Disney occupies such a unique and distinct place in the
Speaker 4: like a public's idea, So there's something more emotional and
Speaker 4: specific about the Disney example. But I do think this
Speaker 4: gets to what we're talking about, and that it's about
Speaker 4: the vibe. So when you're asked this question as a
Speaker 4: member of the public, you're thinking, Yeah, what the candidates
Speaker 4: I can think of that are talking like this are
Speaker 4: the ones that like just don't like these are like
Speaker 4: the hardcore Republicans, and most of the country is not
Speaker 4: a hardcore Republican, right, So if you're associating, if you're
Speaker 4: coming to associate these types of policy positions with hardcore Republicans,
Speaker 4: especially in the middle of a primary, and as Republicans
Speaker 4: have been gearing up for primary for the last couple
Speaker 4: of years, that's an interesting sign to the GOP to say, like, hey,
Speaker 4: the marketing on these issues when maybe if you ask
Speaker 4: them in a different way, with more specific examples, you'd
Speaker 4: get different results.
Speaker 3: But that just means the marketing, the sort of.
Speaker 4: Thirty thousand foot level association that the public has with
Speaker 4: this piece of our agenda not great.
Speaker 1: I also think, in fairness, I think this wording is
Speaker 1: very loaded threatens to penalize or financially harmed business. I
Speaker 1: just I think the language is a little bit loaded,
Speaker 1: agree and is part of what is driving this result.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting to me that you know, this
Speaker 1: is something that Trump has jumped all over de Santis for.
Speaker 5: He has really kind of taken to Santa's.
Speaker 1: I mean, Disney's side in this dispute and said that
Speaker 1: you know, they're making their humiliating DeSantis and making him
Speaker 1: look foolish something like that along those lines. And you know,
Speaker 1: I do think that there is something there in terms
Speaker 1: of Trump. Feels like there's an angle that he can work.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think Trump is a much better politician,
Speaker 1: much savvier politician, and much he has more of just
Speaker 1: a populous sensibility, not that he's like a genuine but
Speaker 1: he has that normy vibe sometimes that comes through, and
Speaker 1: in this instance it seems to be backed up some
Speaker 1: by the polls.
Speaker 3: Well, and let's move on to this.
Speaker 4: You can see there was a new one of the
Speaker 4: most hotly anticipated polls in politics, the Marquette University poll
Speaker 4: of Wisconsin voters. One came out yesterday on the GOP
Speaker 4: presidential primary. We can go ahead and pop this element
Speaker 4: up on the screen. It is B two. Yeah, there
Speaker 4: it is. So this is my back of the Milwaukee Journal
Speaker 4: Centinel new polling in Wisconsin's presidential primary for Republicans from
Speaker 4: Marquette University law Trump is at thirty one percent, DeSantis
Speaker 4: is at thirty percent, Pence at six percent, Tim Scott
Speaker 4: at five percent. That undecided number is around twenty percent.
Speaker 4: That's a that's a pretty big deal. But I think
Speaker 4: it's also that twenty percent is a really big deal. Now,
Speaker 4: the margin of error here for all voters is plus
Speaker 4: or minus about four points, margin of ara for Republicans
Speaker 4: about six and a half points, so that Trump versus
Speaker 4: DeSantis could vary pretty wildly within that margin of error.
Speaker 4: And actually that means Pens and Scott are both in
Speaker 4: the margin of air polling at six and five percent.
Speaker 4: That said, it's going to be We talked about this
Speaker 4: yesterday that when you look at these big national polls
Speaker 4: of Trump versus desantus of Republican voters, Trump is way ahead.
Speaker 4: But the way our primary process works, if you catch
Speaker 4: momentum in an early state, and Wisconsin isn't one of those.
Speaker 4: But if you could replicate these polling results at any
Speaker 4: point as we approach the actual primary caucus in Iowa
Speaker 4: or in New Hampshire, because someone has a really good
Speaker 4: ground gain in a state or is particularly popular in
Speaker 4: a given state. Wisconsin somewhere that Ted Cruz actually won,
Speaker 4: I believe in twenty sixteen that was generally, you know,
Speaker 4: not a huge Trump state until he really started to
Speaker 4: catch on with folks in rural Wisconsin and is extremely
Speaker 4: popular up there.
Speaker 3: That is what can make the difference.
Speaker 4: If you start winning particular states, then you just get
Speaker 4: momentum in a way that totally changes the national polls.
Speaker 3: Again, I still think Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Is clearly the front runner, but it's pretty I think
Speaker 4: useful to zoom in and particular states where the race
Speaker 4: is much closer, because that's an indication that DeSantis can
Speaker 4: compete in individual states, and individual states are going to
Speaker 4: be instrumental in shifting funds, in shifting momentum, and shifting
Speaker 4: media coverage as the primary season gears up.
Speaker 3: So that's a pretty useful metro.
Speaker 1: So that's definitely the Desanti's case, right, that's their case,
Speaker 1: that's their plan. Iowa has I think he's got a
Speaker 1: decent shot there because there is a strong religious right
Speaker 1: evangelical base that has rewarded candidates that do hold their
Speaker 1: issue set. DeSantis has positioned himself to the right of Trump,
Speaker 1: particularly on the issue of abortion, so I think that probably.
Speaker 5: Is his best shot.
Speaker 1: You know, I spent a lot of time sort of
Speaker 1: downplaying I wouldn't say downplaying, but just my honest assessment
Speaker 1: is I think Trump is going.
Speaker 5: To be the Republican nominee.
Speaker 1: But if I was to look at this poll and
Speaker 1: make the best case I can for DeSantis. I think
Speaker 1: it's very interesting that you have such a high number
Speaker 1: of undecided, and I think that's perhaps why this poll
Speaker 1: is such an outlier as opposed to all the other
Speaker 1: polls that come out that I'm looking at, you know,
Speaker 1: Trump plus thirty four, Trump plus twenty four, et, Trump
Speaker 1: plus twenty eight, et cetera, et cetera. I think it
Speaker 1: may be because they allowed people to say they're undecided,
Speaker 1: whereas a lot of other poles the way they're contructed, you.
Speaker 5: Got to pick one.
Speaker 1: And so the best case I can make for DeSantis
Speaker 1: is that while Trump's base may look really rock solid,
Speaker 1: only maybe thirty percent of it is really rock solid.
Speaker 1: Maybe the other twenty percent that he typically gets that
Speaker 1: gets them over fifty percent in these.
Speaker 5: Polls, maybe they are open.
Speaker 1: Maybe there is a pitch that you can make to
Speaker 1: them that would persuade them to move off of Donald
Speaker 1: Trump and so, and the solidity of his support may
Speaker 1: be more of an illusion then it sometimes appears. I
Speaker 1: think that's probably the best case you can make for
Speaker 1: DeSantis based on this pole, which is admittedly an outlier,
Speaker 1: Based on the other things we've been seeing it coming.
Speaker 4: Out like yeah, and this is a poll that has
Speaker 4: been wrong in some pretty i would say, egregious ways,
Speaker 4: and they all.
Speaker 1: Have in fairness, but this was one that was like
Speaker 1: really agregious in twenty twenty in a.
Speaker 3: Couple different cycles.
Speaker 4: Really, I've had some misses and so and with a
Speaker 4: six plus nine US six point five margin of error
Speaker 4: for Republican voters, that's pretty significant. Now, if it's between
Speaker 4: Trump and DeSantis, this is molly reading the poll here,
Speaker 4: fifty seven percent of Republicans say DeSantis, forty one percent
Speaker 4: say Trump. So DeSantis in Wisconsin, if this poll is
Speaker 4: to believe to be believed, comes out ahead with Republicans
Speaker 4: pretty easily, like well above the margin of error if
Speaker 4: it's DeSantis versus Trump in Wisconsin. If it's Biden and DeSantis,
Speaker 4: forty nine percent go with Biden, forty seven pick Dysantis.
Speaker 4: Between Biden and Trump fifty two forty three. Biden wins
Speaker 4: over Trump by a larger margin than he ultimately did
Speaker 4: on election day, but that that number Trump versus desantus
Speaker 4: in Wisconsin. And again, if this is genuinely an outlier
Speaker 4: and actually is picking up on something interesting that's outside
Speaker 4: of what we've seen so far, and in a way
Speaker 4: that really reflects voter sentiment. That's quite interesting.
Speaker 1: Let's go ahead and move on, guys, to be four,
Speaker 1: which is potentially also a momentous situation, not just for
Speaker 1: Republicans but for all of us in American politics. Put
Speaker 1: this up on the screen from Mediaite. So apparently Trump
Speaker 1: is considering getting back on Twitter, basically planning on getting
Speaker 1: back on Twitter.
Speaker 5: I like the way Mediaite frames this.
Speaker 1: He's saving his return to Twitter for a special occasion,
Speaker 1: like another indictment.
Speaker 10: Yay.
Speaker 1: The Axios had the original report here Emily, and they
Speaker 1: basically said he had actually considered getting back on after
Speaker 1: the original indictment, but then decided to wait. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is complicated for him financially because obviously he has
Speaker 1: a piece of truth social He also I think has
Speaker 1: some agreements exclusivity agreements with them that he has to
Speaker 1: does it have to, but is potentially advantaged by letting
Speaker 1: those exclusivity agreements run out. But it looks like at
Speaker 1: some point in this election cycle, we are going to
Speaker 1: get Donald Trump's tweets back in all of our lives.
Speaker 4: And you know, it's funny, but it is also kind
Speaker 4: of a game changer, I think, and his team seems
Speaker 4: to be noticing this according to the Acxios report. In
Speaker 4: that I think this goes to the argument that Twitter
Speaker 4: truly is a monopoly and has a wildly unfair market
Speaker 4: share and needs to be regulated differently, because, as they're noticing,
Speaker 4: you really need to be on Twitter to specifically have
Speaker 4: the influence that you might think you could get from
Speaker 4: true Social. But true Social is an echo chamber, and
Speaker 4: that's not why anybody uses these social media platforms. They
Speaker 4: end up getting used that way and in a way
Speaker 4: that creates this like dopamine addiction in some cases. But honestly,
Speaker 4: you can't get your message out if everyone isn't on
Speaker 4: the same platform, and that's exactly what's happened to Trump
Speaker 4: with True Social. He like even being the former president,
Speaker 4: basically posts into the void, and every once in a
Speaker 4: while something breaks through and it will get covered in
Speaker 4: the media as based an official statement of the former president.
Speaker 4: Funny as that is, but it doesn't really get the
Speaker 4: pickup that it used to in the press. And I
Speaker 4: think everything you need to know about Twitter essentially having
Speaker 4: an unfair market share.
Speaker 3: Is in this report.
Speaker 4: Yeah, about whether Donald Trump is coming back.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think social media platforms are basically natural monopoly, yes,
Speaker 1: you know, and I think we need to think of
Speaker 1: them in that regard. But yeah, with Trump, elite journalists
Speaker 1: are not on true Social, so it's just not in
Speaker 1: your face every day the way it was when he
Speaker 1: was on Twitter, and a key source of the Donald
Speaker 1: Trump power is making the media respond to that exact,
Speaker 1: making them freak out about whatever he's saying, being able
Speaker 1: to drive the narrative, drive the conversation, push the set
Speaker 1: of issues that he wants. I mean, he is the master.
Speaker 1: I've never seen anyone better at doing that. And by
Speaker 1: putting himself in what is effectively like a social media
Speaker 1: ghetto over on true Social, he has intentionally undercut his
Speaker 1: ability to do that. He's still obviously a very powerful force,
Speaker 1: especially as he's getting, you know, in dieted and probably
Speaker 1: going to face more indictments. He's going to be central
Speaker 1: to news coverage whether he's on Twitter or not, but
Speaker 1: it has sort of eaten away at his power to
Speaker 1: drive the narrative. One thing I will say, though, Emily,
Speaker 1: is I think Twitter was so much better when they
Speaker 1: really did have the character limits and I think Trump
Speaker 1: is such a better poster when he's forced to constrain
Speaker 1: himself to brevity on Twitter, because what he is posting
Speaker 1: on true social is just like it's so long and.
Speaker 5: Tedious and repetitive.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that is also a small part
Speaker 1: of why it's not getting picked up as much is
Speaker 1: because he just like the format of the short tweet
Speaker 1: back when that was still enforced, is actually a better
Speaker 1: format for him.
Speaker 5: He's a better poster in that genre.
Speaker 4: I would read like a new Republican essay from you
Speaker 4: on this.
Speaker 5: That's all I got.
Speaker 4: There's a great book by Rob Long called Bigley where
Speaker 4: he analyzes Trump tweets as essentially as poetry and like, actually,
Speaker 4: it's really funny, but he should do he should update
Speaker 4: that actually now that Trump has been doing these really
Speaker 4: long true Social posts, because I think it's a great
Speaker 4: I have a creative writing minor. This is like real time.
Speaker 4: It's ever going to be useful. That's interesting that the
Speaker 4: analysis of like contemporary poetry where there's no boundaries, but
Speaker 4: if you have restrictions and constraints on your art, you're
Speaker 4: going to.
Speaker 3: Produce something better.
Speaker 4: This is wildly unuseful in the context of our conversation
Speaker 4: right now, But I thought I would, Mom.
Speaker 3: This is for you.
Speaker 4: I'm using my degree and getting some money.
Speaker 1: You got their quintessential like lib horrible degree, that's amazing.
Speaker 3: What was your major political science? Even worse? Put those
Speaker 3: two things together?
Speaker 1: No, I mean actually though, like you do write a writer, yeah,
Speaker 1: and having so like I think Taygebe has this very
Speaker 1: like literary sensibility when he writes. Even when I like
Speaker 1: disagree with him, I always love reading his writing because
Speaker 1: it's so beautiful.
Speaker 5: So it has a use.
Speaker 3: He's dying art for Crystal.
Speaker 4: There's so much happening y Yeah, sure, right now, that's
Speaker 4: hard to really understand exactly what's going on.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is very difficult to sort through. So I'll
Speaker 1: just we're just going to go through what is being
Speaker 1: reported in the press right now, and you know, always
Speaker 1: take these reports with a grain of salt, because I
Speaker 1: think it is very much an open question. Even you know,
Speaker 1: I've been talking to our friend Diegor who's in Moscow.
Speaker 1: Even for people that are there on the ground, very
Speaker 1: uncertain what exactly is going on. So first put this
Speaker 1: up on the screen. We got some this is from
Speaker 1: Western intelligence officials. No, keep that in mind. They are
Speaker 1: saying that Progosion actually his plan was to capture Russian
Speaker 1: military leaders as part of last weekend's mutiny. He accelerated
Speaker 1: his plans after the country's domestic intelligence agency became aware
Speaker 1: of the plot, and they say that the plot's premature
Speaker 1: launch was among the factors that could explain why it
Speaker 1: failed so quickly after thirty six hours when Progosion struck
Speaker 1: that deal with Lukashenko called off the armed march on
Speaker 1: Moscow that had initially faced little resistance. So the original idea,
Speaker 1: according to Western intelligence officials, is that he was going
Speaker 1: to capture Sergei Shoigu and Valerie Gerasmov, a chief of
Speaker 1: Russia's General staff during a visit to a southern region
Speaker 1: that borders Ukraine.
Speaker 5: That the two were planning.
Speaker 1: But because the FSB found out about that plan two
Speaker 1: days before it was to be executed.
Speaker 5: He pushed up the plans and launched this.
Speaker 1: Less poorly executed, less less well thought out situation because
Speaker 1: it was sort of rushed into being. They thought that
Speaker 1: this this kind of bothers my family. So according to
Speaker 1: this report, Western officials believe the original plot had a
Speaker 1: good chance of success. But failed after the conspiracy was leaked.
Speaker 1: And the reason that I took note of that is
Speaker 1: because the Biden administration pointedly did not say anything about
Speaker 1: the fact that they apparently had knowledge of this plot,
Speaker 1: did not, you know, alert the Russians, didn't alert the world,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And if you thought this had a good
Speaker 1: chance of success, like that's kind of insane because you're
Speaker 1: talking about just like standing back while this mercenary madman
Speaker 1: takes control of a nuclear armed superpower and just like
Speaker 1: crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
Speaker 5: I think that's I think that's pretty reckless.
Speaker 3: Yeah, No, I mean I completely agree.
Speaker 4: I actually think that's similar to what we've seen with
Speaker 4: the Bridge over and over again with and actually with
Speaker 4: the Bridge, we've seen this with North Stream too, is
Speaker 4: that you see Western intelligence officials basically leaking to the
Speaker 4: press to cover themselves in a way that actually doesn't
Speaker 4: make themselves look great.
Speaker 3: It makes them look like they're either.
Speaker 4: Wrongfully assessing situations or not acting in ways that are
Speaker 4: actually productive. And this is just another part of that
Speaker 4: pattern as far as I'm reading it right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's put the New York Times reporting that we
Speaker 1: have up on the screen as well, which is, you know,
Speaker 1: additional context. And I think they were the first to
Speaker 1: report some of these details. They say that a Russian
Speaker 1: general actually knew about the Mercenary chief's rebellion plans. Again,
Speaker 1: according to US officials, you getting progotion. The head of
Speaker 1: Wagner may have believed that he had support in Russia's military.
Speaker 1: Now let me tell you why this is really significant.
Speaker 1: They're alleging here that a General Sergei Serovakan, I'm sure
Speaker 1: I'm screwing that up. My apologies, former top Russian commander
Speaker 1: in Ukraine, helped to plan Progosian's actions last weekend, which
Speaker 1: posed the most dramatic threat to President Vladimir Putin in
Speaker 1: his twenty three years of power. American officials, they point out,
Speaker 1: have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the
Speaker 1: standing of General Seroviakan, whom they view as more competent
Speaker 1: and more ruthless than other members of the command. His removal,
Speaker 1: they say, would undoubtedly benefit Ukraine, whose western back troops
Speaker 1: are pushing a new counter offensive that is meant to
Speaker 1: try to win back territory seized by Moscow. So the
Speaker 1: insinuation here is that US officials might be pushing this
Speaker 1: narrative because listen, Progosion was one of the more effective
Speaker 1: leaders in terms on the Russian side, with his band
Speaker 1: of merca andaries, one of the more effective leaders.
Speaker 5: They now have.
Speaker 1: Taken him out of play, not taken him out of play.
Speaker 1: Russians have taken him out of play. Now if Serovakin
Speaker 1: is also taken out of play, well, these two things
Speaker 1: are quite significant to Ukraine's odds and Ukraine's chances within
Speaker 1: their counter offensive, because you're talking about two of what
Speaker 1: Western officials at least view as the most effective and
Speaker 1: most competent military leaders that Russia had on their side.
Speaker 1: And this there is fairly credible reporting this morning that
Speaker 1: Serovakan has been detained by you know, by the Kremlin,
Speaker 1: that he you know, is expected to have collaborated or
Speaker 1: at least known about progosions plans, and so he is,
Speaker 1: you know, being being held right now. That's the reporting,
Speaker 1: you know, nobody can really fully confirm it, but it
Speaker 1: is an interesting turn abouts.
Speaker 3: I'll just say that, yes it is.
Speaker 4: And we're told over and over again that the end
Speaker 4: goal here is nothing short for the West and for
Speaker 4: the United States of regime change, and that's why there's
Speaker 4: Western intelligence official leaks or comments to the press right
Speaker 4: now are really strange to me because they're I mean,
Speaker 4: not strange. Actually they're perfectly logical, but they're really trying
Speaker 4: to emphasize discord within the ranks. And whether or not
Speaker 4: that's true, I think is an open question. Given the
Speaker 4: fact that our only acceptable end game, as American lawmakers
Speaker 4: and officials in the West have said over and over again,
Speaker 4: the only acceptable end is regime change, then it makes
Speaker 4: complete sense. You're starting to leak from Western intelligence officials
Speaker 4: to the New York Times, to the Washington Post, the
Speaker 4: Wall Street Journal that Putin is weak and that you know,
Speaker 4: there's discord in the ranks, And that's exactly what we're
Speaker 4: seeing after this coup is continued Western intelligence officials saying
Speaker 4: that there's just too much discord, that Putin is really
Speaker 4: in trouble this time, et cetera, et cetera, and that
Speaker 4: given our the only indication we have of what could
Speaker 4: end this war in an acceptable way to the Anne
Speaker 4: Apple Bombs of the world and the politicians who read
Speaker 4: her essays in the Atlantic, if that's regime change, then
Speaker 4: the motivation here makes me doubt the verac.
Speaker 1: I already have seen the Ukraine hawks seizing on what
Speaker 1: happened here to say, look how weak Putin is. Look
Speaker 1: at how you know they were able to march so
Speaker 1: close to Moscow and he barely did anything. And you know,
Speaker 1: let this guy just get off the hook and go
Speaker 1: to Belarust. And that means that his red lines don't
Speaker 1: mean anything. Ergo, we should continue to push the bounds
Speaker 1: of what you know may corner him. Maybe he is
Speaker 1: a red line that he's drawn. This is justification why
Speaker 1: we should do even more. I'm already seeing them make
Speaker 1: that case. In terms of the public perception, you know,
Speaker 1: I think these things are a little bit hard to
Speaker 1: gauge in immediate real time.
Speaker 5: But put this up on the screen. I did find
Speaker 5: this interesting.
Speaker 1: We did have a trend of decreasing US public support
Speaker 1: for continuing military aid. That has been the trend for
Speaker 1: some months now. We now have a new pole that
Speaker 1: goes in the opposite direction. And it is not lost.
Speaker 1: I mean that this poll was taken, you know, people
Speaker 1: responded to it just shortly after this whole Russian attempted
Speaker 1: coup situation.
Speaker 5: Unfuld to put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: Guys, you've got eighty one percent of Democrats, fifty six
Speaker 1: percent of Republicans, so even a majority of Republicans and
Speaker 1: fifty seven percent of Independence favor supplying US weapons to Ukraine.
Speaker 1: As I said, it was concluded on Tuesday, charted a
Speaker 1: sharp rise in backing for arming Ukraine, with sixty five
Speaker 1: percent overall of respondents approving of the shipments. That's compared
Speaker 1: with forty six percent in this same poll last month.
Speaker 1: So you know, for me, with polls, the absolute numbers
Speaker 1: are less accurate than the directional change. So the fact
Speaker 1: that in this one poll you have almost a twenty
Speaker 1: percent movement towards in favor of arming Ukraine in one
Speaker 1: month shows me that probably there was a real response
Speaker 1: to this Russian coup attempt and refocused attention on the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian cause made people feel like, oh, we got them
Speaker 1: on the ropes, like we just do a little more,
Speaker 1: we're going to be able to have an outcome that
Speaker 1: we want here. So I think it's interesting to see
Speaker 1: that public movement it is.
Speaker 4: And whether or not the intelligence is accurate and the
Speaker 4: read on the situation that is being pushed in Western
Speaker 4: media by Western intelligence is accurate. That is exactly from
Speaker 4: I mean, I think it's pretty clear that's exactly what
Speaker 4: the Pentagon and the sort of NATO sect wants American
Speaker 4: voters to think. And as those numbers dipped, there was
Speaker 4: clearly a lot of nervousness about it.
Speaker 3: As Kevin McCarthy started.
Speaker 4: Saying, well, I don't know, there was clearly a lot
Speaker 4: of nervousness about it. And so again I'm not actually
Speaker 4: disputing that any of this may have happened. Actually I
Speaker 4: don't know. And I think that's the best thing people
Speaker 4: in the media can say right now is clearly to
Speaker 4: your point.
Speaker 3: You can talk to people on.
Speaker 4: The ground in Russia who don't know. Yeah, So for
Speaker 4: people sitting in their air conditioned studios to say that
Speaker 4: they know exactly what's happening in Russian and Putin's on
Speaker 4: his last leg is just nonsense. But whether or not
Speaker 4: it's true, the intelligence narrative is taking hold. And one
Speaker 4: of the things I found very interesting about this pole
Speaker 4: is that when you tied it to China in particular,
Speaker 4: you get seventy six percent of Americans saying that providing
Speaker 4: you to Ukraine demonstrates to China and other rivals that
Speaker 4: the US has quote the will and capability to protect
Speaker 4: our interests, our allies, and ourselves. That is, that's higher
Speaker 4: than I think what you would get if you didn't
Speaker 4: ask that question specifically tied to China for sure, And
Speaker 4: that's another probably that is going in the binder over
Speaker 4: on the hill for the press people and the policy people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the people that our finger in the wind are
Speaker 1: going to pay attention to this pole.
Speaker 5: The last piece of this.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a lot of questions still open, but this
Speaker 1: was an important coda as well. So what is going
Speaker 1: to happen to the Wagner group that Progotion was head of,
Speaker 1: this group of mercenaries that were not only operating in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: I mean they were involved in Syria, they are involved
Speaker 1: in Africa.
Speaker 5: They really have a pretty wide footprint.
Speaker 1: Until recently Putin denied that they were even linked to
Speaker 1: the Russian state, which everyone could clearly see through. But
Speaker 1: now that is being openly acknowledged, and so put this
Speaker 1: up on the screen. This is also reporting from the
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal. They say that the Kremlin is setting
Speaker 1: out to seize full control of Wagner's global empire. You've
Speaker 1: got some details here, Russia's deputy Foreign Minister flew to
Speaker 1: Damascus to personally deliver a message to Syrian President Basher
Speaker 1: al Asad. You have senior Russian Foreign Ministry officials phoning
Speaker 1: the president of the Central African Republic, whose personal bodyguards
Speaker 1: include Wagner mercenaries. You have government jets from Russia's Ministry
Speaker 1: of Emergency Situations interesting shuttled from Syria to Mali. Another
Speaker 1: of Wagner's key for an outposts. The rush of diplomatic activity,
Speaker 1: reflected Putin's attempt to play down the chaos at home
Speaker 1: to assure Russia's partners in Africa the Middle East that
Speaker 1: Wagner operations there could continue without interruption, and that those
Speaker 1: operations would just now be under new management. There has
Speaker 1: even on this question of like it would seem obvious
Speaker 1: to me that Wagner is going to be certainly banned
Speaker 1: from Russian soil, right, but probably you know, completely subsumed
Speaker 1: under the Ministry of Defense, et cetera, et cetera. There's
Speaker 1: also competing reporting from on the ground in Moscow that
Speaker 1: from you know, from inside of Russia that the Wagner
Speaker 1: recruitment centers are up and operational even within Russia acting
Speaker 1: as if nothing happened, which seems insane to me. So
Speaker 1: even with this, there's also competing reporting about where Progotion
Speaker 1: actually is. There was some reporting that he is still
Speaker 1: in Russia in Saint Petersburg, whereas others are saying no, no,
Speaker 1: he's already you know, he's in Belarus where he is
Speaker 1: supposed to be based.
Speaker 5: On the agreement that was struck.
Speaker 1: So still a lot that is shaking out, a lot
Speaker 1: of questions about how this all plays out. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of questions over whether this ends up being just
Speaker 1: like a historical blip that doesn't really change the course
Speaker 1: of anything, or whether it ends up being a key
Speaker 1: lynchpin either for the future of you know, leadership in
Speaker 1: Russia or the future of the Ukraine War. There's just
Speaker 1: a lot we don't know, so trying to sort through
Speaker 1: every piece of information we've got here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, absolutely, And Wagner has been a.
Speaker 4: Pretty es central part of Russia as we know it,
Speaker 4: like to there as he's put a global empire into
Speaker 4: the way that they function as a country and as
Speaker 4: a huge player in the geopolitical stage. So this is
Speaker 4: a big change, But that would explain why some reports
Speaker 4: say that Wagner offices recruitment offices are still up and
Speaker 4: running in Russia, because obviously there has to be a
Speaker 4: way to deal with this in a sense that's not
Speaker 4: a total divorce.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take a look at some interesting Airbnb data.
Speaker 5: Emily, what do you got for us?
Speaker 4: I was gonna say, Crystal, this is your hobby horse,
Speaker 4: and actually this data shows exactly why it's a good
Speaker 4: hobby horse I have right now, because it's extremely consequential
Speaker 4: and the ripple effect of what's happening in real estate
Speaker 4: is going to start to play a huge role in
Speaker 4: our economy.
Speaker 3: I mean it already is.
Speaker 4: But ye, what we're going to see sort of downstream
Speaker 4: of the bigger picture questions. We can go ahead and
Speaker 4: put the first element up on the screen. This is
Speaker 4: new data about Airbnb. Be look, this is from Nick Gurley.
Speaker 4: He says, the Airbnb collapse is real and if you
Speaker 4: look at this chart on the screen, that could not
Speaker 4: be more true. Revenues are down nearly fifty percent in
Speaker 4: cities like Phoenix and Austin. Nick continues, watch out for
Speaker 4: a wave of forced selling forced selling from airbnb owners
Speaker 4: later this year and the area's hit hardest by the
Speaker 4: revenue collapse in those areas Tennessee, Phoenix, Austin, Myrtle Beach,
Speaker 4: San Antonio, Ashville, Salisbury, Maryland. That one I found a
Speaker 4: little random, but I guess it's the Eastern Shore, Nashville, Denver, Breckenridge, Neal.
Speaker 4: One is a lot of vacation destinations Lakeland, Florida, Seattle, Washington,
Speaker 4: Panama City, Florida, and Orlando, Florida. We can go ahead
Speaker 4: and put the next element up on the screen as well.
Speaker 4: Nick continues to parse the data and he says, here,
Speaker 4: what's scary for the US housing market is just how
Speaker 4: many Airbnbs there are.
Speaker 3: Data from all the rooms shows.
Speaker 4: One million, one million airbnb slash vrbo rentals compared to
Speaker 4: only five hundred and seventy thousand homes for sale. A
Speaker 4: million rental properties compared to you know, roughly half of
Speaker 4: that homes for sale. Creates huge home prices downside if
Speaker 4: struggling airbnb owners elect to sell, huge home price downside
Speaker 4: of struggling Airbnb owners elect to sell. I mean, just
Speaker 4: think about what that looks like if you start to
Speaker 4: have these these huge crashes in particular markets, and it
Speaker 4: will be a little bit uneven. I mean, I think
Speaker 4: there were a lot of places that weren't up on
Speaker 4: that first chart we were talking about where you're seeing,
Speaker 4: particularly the South seems to be getting hit. Really just
Speaker 4: just smacked by this where you're not seeing similar things
Speaker 4: for other huge airbnb markets New York, Washington, d C.
Speaker 3: Actually weren't on that list, And Crystal.
Speaker 4: I want to ask you what that means in terms
Speaker 4: of how the country experiences these sort of downstream effects
Speaker 4: of a crash in particular markets.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's complicated, honestly, because there are a lot
Speaker 1: of people hoping that housing prices crash. That we're sort
Speaker 1: of hoping that we might have a downsward in the
Speaker 1: housing market because between the fact that housing prices have
Speaker 1: come down a tiny bit, but you have mortgage interest
Speaker 1: rates so much higher, it has made it so that
Speaker 1: it is the most I mean, this is the most
Speaker 1: unaffordable time in history to try to actually purchase a home.
Speaker 1: So there are a lot of people who are not
Speaker 1: on the housing ladder, you know, haven't been able to
Speaker 1: purchase a home, who will be out there going yes, baby,
Speaker 1: come down, please, because for God's sake, you know, they
Speaker 1: just seem to go up and up and up and
Speaker 1: become wildly unobtainable for anyone with just like, you know,
Speaker 1: a normal middle class income.
Speaker 5: So there's that aspect of it.
Speaker 1: You know, there's the Airbnb a specific part of this,
Speaker 1: which I think is pretty interesting. Airbnb really skyrocketed, like
Speaker 1: a lot of companies during the pandemic because you have
Speaker 1: people working from home, you know, white collar professionals who
Speaker 1: had some money to burn. They're like, you know what
Speaker 1: if I'm just working from home, that could be anywhere,
Speaker 1: So why don't I, you know, go somewhere beautiful and
Speaker 1: runt an Airbnb for a month or a week.
Speaker 4: Or right never at least my own place or rent
Speaker 4: my own place.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I could do that too. And you had in
Speaker 1: certain especially certain vacation towns. There was a place in
Speaker 1: upstate New York. Actually I was talking to like a
Speaker 1: cab driver there that they had seen this huge influx
Speaker 1: of Airbnb people and all of the properties were being
Speaker 1: bought up to be rented out as Airbnb's. You've also
Speaker 1: seen I don't know the specific numbers on this, This
Speaker 1: is kind of anecdotal, but I'm pretty confident that this
Speaker 1: is the case you've seen a real shift from Originally
Speaker 1: Airbnb was like, you know, just one random person and
Speaker 1: they had a vacation property that when they're not using it,
Speaker 1: they want to rent it out, etc.
Speaker 5: And they use Airbnb.
Speaker 1: Okay, Now it seems to have become very corporatized, where
Speaker 1: more likely than not, if you're renting an Airbnb, it's
Speaker 1: part of some property group and they manage a bunch
Speaker 1: of properties, and that has made the experience more transactional
Speaker 1: and I think in a lot of cases less pleasant
Speaker 1: in my personal anecdotal experience, because a lot of times,
Speaker 1: if we're going to go on a town because I
Speaker 1: have a family, we'll rent Airbnb because you have more
Speaker 1: space I like to have kitchen. It has lowered the
Speaker 1: quality of the experience because you have all these like
Speaker 1: crazy rules that they put into place. They're more likely
Speaker 1: to try to rig the system with like photos that
Speaker 1: are wildly unrepresentative of what the property actually looks like.
Speaker 1: So I think there's been a degrading quality as Airbnb
Speaker 1: has become this mainstream juggernaut. And then you know, obviously
Speaker 1: post pandemic, there's a real lessening of demand because not
Speaker 1: everyone went back to the office that was a white
Speaker 1: collar worker, but you did have a lot of a
Speaker 1: high percentage go back to the office or working remote,
Speaker 1: you know, only like once or twice a week, which
Speaker 1: means that you can't just take off for wherever whenever
Speaker 1: you want to. So that has obviously led to this downturn.
Speaker 1: And I think the ones that will be offloaded are
Speaker 1: probably the ones that are run by these larger property companies.
Speaker 1: Because if you're a person who just has like a
Speaker 1: vacation home and this is just a way to make
Speaker 1: some side cash on it, you know, you were probably
Speaker 1: able to sustain before you were getting all the airbnb income,
Speaker 1: and so you may be more likely to try to
Speaker 1: hang on to it. But I think for people who
Speaker 1: got in because they saw a quick cash opportunity, you
Speaker 1: probably see a lot getting dumped on the market.
Speaker 4: You know, and also a property investment. This has basically
Speaker 4: been a small business and a huge nest tag for
Speaker 4: a lot of families. It's not and I agree it
Speaker 4: has been corporatized.
Speaker 3: That's been bought up.
Speaker 4: You tend to see like big chains owning tons of properties.
Speaker 4: Now there is a portion, as you mentioned, of the
Speaker 4: airbnb population where people were really sustaining themselves by renting
Speaker 4: you know, their English basement in a city like Washington,
Speaker 4: d C. And it was a huge part of how
Speaker 4: they're paying their mortgage. And when this sort of foot
Speaker 4: traffic stops, it's easy to like Monday morning quarterback this.
Speaker 4: But I really have always thought that Airbnb is a
Speaker 4: bad investment because unlike Uber. Although Uber you saw the
Speaker 4: same thing, I mean with cab drivers who are super
Speaker 4: powerful lobby and the unions are very powerful. Uber really
Speaker 4: ended up getting off the ground, although it did have
Speaker 4: like fits and starts in places like New York or
Speaker 4: places like California, and the still facing regulation in those places.
Speaker 4: It was just very obvious to me that I think
Speaker 4: there was like twenty seventeen, I was in Lisbon and
Speaker 4: there was anti Airbnb graffiti on the walls of like
Speaker 4: different buildings because it's so disruptive. Yeah, it's so disruptive,
Speaker 4: and not in a way that is sort of universally good.
Speaker 4: Like there are just so many upsides to Uber. With Airbnb,
Speaker 4: there are really different. I mean, it's a very hard
Speaker 4: thing for Airbnb even to manage itself. And you know,
Speaker 4: I think it's been great for a lot of families
Speaker 4: and people who were able to use it, but regulatory
Speaker 4: on the regulatory level, I just knew that it was
Speaker 4: going to end up becoming way more complicated because you
Speaker 4: know a lot of places people just can't resist regulating
Speaker 4: things to regulating things to death.
Speaker 3: But maybe we disagree on them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well we definitely disagree on that part with regard
Speaker 1: to Uber, because I mean, you know, Uber's whole business
Speaker 1: model relies on basically like labor exploitation. So if you're
Speaker 1: truly if your business model depends on like breaking labor law,
Speaker 1: then I think you got a problem with your business
Speaker 1: model with.
Speaker 5: Regard to Airbnb's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean this is kind of like it's a
Speaker 1: classic almost like Yimby debate or Nimby debate, because it's
Speaker 1: one thing if you're in a high tourist area where
Speaker 1: all the houses are basically rental houses anyway, that's one thing.
Speaker 1: It's another thing when you've got like you know, a
Speaker 1: local community or used to every body being rooted and
Speaker 1: now you've got this cycle of young partiers or whoever
Speaker 1: coming in and out of some of the houses on
Speaker 1: your street, there's going to be a different level of
Speaker 1: attention paid to that I suppose I saw this article
Speaker 1: about how apparently there are these apps or you can
Speaker 1: rent out.
Speaker 5: Your pool if you have your own pool in your backyard.
Speaker 5: Are you aware of this.
Speaker 3: I've heard of that.
Speaker 4: People also do it with cars. Now there's apps for
Speaker 4: just your Oh really, people could just come into your
Speaker 4: driveway and rent your car and go bring it back.
Speaker 5: That's interesting.
Speaker 1: I don't mind. I don't hate that one. But yeah,
Speaker 1: people were I guess in these like you know, nice neighborhoods,
Speaker 1: they were upset by the fact that you had all
Speaker 1: this traffic now coming in to frequent these pools.
Speaker 5: And there's a big debate going.
Speaker 1: On in Montgomery County, Maryland about whether or not they
Speaker 1: should be regulated and where are the boundaries between like
Speaker 1: maintaining the peace in these neighborhoods and.
Speaker 5: Letting people do what they want with their private property.
Speaker 3: So anyway, I mean.
Speaker 4: Legitimate question, and that's the things that really dogs Airbnb
Speaker 4: in that, like you do have communities that are uprooted
Speaker 4: by people who don't give a damn about the neighborhood
Speaker 4: because they're staying there for a couple of days and
Speaker 4: you know, they move on after a couple of days.
Speaker 3: So if they're really allowed for a couple of days.
Speaker 5: Care about the property, I don't care about the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it doesn't matter that they're embarrassed in front of
Speaker 4: the neighbors or that their neighbors are upset, because they'll
Speaker 4: never see those people again in their lives. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: so it's just it is very disruptive. But on that note, yeah,
Speaker 4: so that like, it was clear that there was a
Speaker 4: real sugar high during the pandemic with Airbnb and even
Speaker 4: a little bit before the pandemic.
Speaker 3: So, and some of the.
Speaker 4: Coming down is going to be good because it means
Speaker 4: there will be what we could agree on as reasonable regulations,
Speaker 4: even with Uber. But on the other hand, I think,
Speaker 4: you know, some of it might be a little heavy handed.
Speaker 4: That said, it really is going to suck for people
Speaker 4: who build small businesses on the back of this company
Speaker 4: that was offering something really cool.
Speaker 5: I agree with that. I do agree with that.
Speaker 1: Very happy to be joined in studio this morning with
Speaker 1: Carson Rocanna. He just recently took what was I think
Speaker 1: a very courageous vote, the lone no vote on a
Speaker 1: defense budget nearing one trillion dollars.
Speaker 8: Great to see her, Great to be on the new set.
Speaker 1: Yeah meanky, welcome one of our first guests on here.
Speaker 1: So glad, very glad to have you. So tell us about,
Speaker 1: you know, this defense vote and how you end up
Speaker 1: being the only loan vote against it when you know
Speaker 1: you have a lot of Democrats to talk about we
Speaker 1: got to cut the defense budget. You've got a lot
Speaker 1: of Republicans now who at least mouthed the words like
Speaker 1: we got to cut the defense budget.
Speaker 5: So how does it come down to just you?
Speaker 8: It was shocking to me.
Speaker 11: I mean, you have sixty minutes doing a whole expose
Speaker 11: about how taxpayers are getting fleeced. Defence contractors are jacking
Speaker 11: up prices thousand percent, five thousand percent, ten thousand percent,
Speaker 11: four hundred billion dollars of procurement that is unaccountable, where
Speaker 11: the money is going not to our troops, but in
Speaker 11: the pockets of these defense lobbyists. We're approaching a trillion
Speaker 11: dollar defense budget that is fifty six percent of all
Speaker 11: of our federal budget. You can't talk about deficits and
Speaker 11: not talk about defense. So I saw the board, everyone
Speaker 11: is voting yes, and I was the one loan no vote.
Speaker 11: I'm hoping more people on the Armed Services Committee, will
Speaker 11: join me. But what I've said is sixty minutes does
Speaker 11: a better job of oversight than Congress.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and there are a lot of Democrats who were
Speaker 4: elected before Putin decided to invade Ukraine. And I want
Speaker 4: to ask, let's say, hypothetically, in a world where where
Speaker 4: Putin doesn't invade Ukraine, do you think this vote goes
Speaker 4: any differently or do you think this is basically the
Speaker 4: state of affairs in American politics, not just in the
Speaker 4: Democratic Party, in the Republican Party, where you're going to
Speaker 4: have one loan no vote on cutting the budget here.
Speaker 11: Well, I don't think it would have made any difference
Speaker 11: on the Armed Services Committee because the thing we're doing
Speaker 11: in Ukraine actually is we need to produce more of
Speaker 11: a defense industrial base for some of the javelins and
Speaker 11: the stingers.
Speaker 8: And that's another thing.
Speaker 11: I had an amendment in the bill to say, do
Speaker 11: we actually make any if this in America or how
Speaker 11: much do we make overseas? The Pentagon literally does not
Speaker 11: know great of the trillion dollars, how much if it's
Speaker 11: being spent in manufacturing in the United States, and how
Speaker 11: much we're getting from overseas. And so what we should
Speaker 11: be doing is building our defense industrial base or industrial base,
Speaker 11: but what we are doing instead is lining the pockets
Speaker 11: of defense contractors on things like the F thirty five,
Speaker 11: which have had cost overruns. We've got a B twenty
Speaker 11: one Air Force plane that is far more sophisticated, yet
Speaker 11: we're still funding the B one, which isn't as good
Speaker 11: as the B twenty one. I mean, you can just
Speaker 11: go line by line and you can point to things
Speaker 11: that are duplicative, things that are not necessary. We've got
Speaker 11: over eight almost eight hundred bases overseas that were designed
Speaker 11: at the time of the Cold War, and we have
Speaker 11: new threats now, new challenges, and it's never been updated.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so, I mean, I think everybody can see the
Speaker 1: logic of that. However, you know, this is not the
Speaker 1: first time where you've had these lopsided votes, or where
Speaker 1: you've had politicians who say, in theory, yes we should
Speaker 1: cut the defense budget, or we should audit the Pentagon
Speaker 1: or things like that, but in reality they never actually
Speaker 1: vote in that direction or put any pressure in that direction.
Speaker 1: Is it because of the money involved in terms of
Speaker 1: the campaign contributions. Is it because there are so many
Speaker 1: jobs from these programs that are spread out across the country.
Speaker 5: Like, why is this such a difficult nut to crack?
Speaker 11: Well, three reasons. One of the defense contractor campaign contributions.
Speaker 11: I mean, we can't underestimate the role of their lobbyists
Speaker 11: and the financing that they provide campaigns.
Speaker 8: Two, just look at my Twitter feed.
Speaker 11: You get attacked as a week on national security. Do
Speaker 11: you not want to stand up to China and Russia?
Speaker 11: Of course I'm strong in national security. I actually want
Speaker 11: to be investing in the things that are going to
Speaker 11: make us safe in AI and naval superiority, in the
Speaker 11: modern technology, and having a defense industrial base as opposed
Speaker 11: to the legacy industry that isn't a modern national security strategy.
Speaker 8: And Third, there is.
Speaker 11: This concern with jobs, But you know what, if you
Speaker 11: really wanted to have job, there are many better ways
Speaker 11: of creating these jobs. I mean, build a defense industrial
Speaker 11: base in these communities instead of the overseas bases. Put
Speaker 11: a steel plan. I was just in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Let's
Speaker 11: build modern steel, which is going to be necessary. Let's
Speaker 11: have all defense production and key components being done in
Speaker 11: the United States.
Speaker 1: I think people will honestly be shocked to find out
Speaker 1: that that's not already the case.
Speaker 8: Yeah, it is. It's not the case.
Speaker 11: I mean, it's not only not the case that we
Speaker 11: aren't making or defense equipment in the United States. We
Speaker 11: don't know the Pentagon can't tell you which country they're
Speaker 11: getting what from.
Speaker 8: In my amendment just says let's at least track it.
Speaker 11: But you want to create jobs, just do that as
Speaker 11: a baseline, say make the things in the United States.
Speaker 4: Well, And that's what's incredibly frustrating, because the argument actually
Speaker 4: that cutting and having a more precise and targeted budget
Speaker 4: would make us much more powerful, I think is clearly
Speaker 4: superior to the argument that we should just be throwing
Speaker 4: money in every direct direction and seeing what happens. But
Speaker 4: it never seems so to win out. And I want
Speaker 4: to throw that to you as a question with the
Speaker 4: context that you know better than anyone else of particularly
Speaker 4: the politics and the dynamics of being on a committee
Speaker 4: like Armed Services and what that means for what your
Speaker 4: colleagues different motivations are when it comes to taking these votes.
Speaker 11: Well, again, I think the biggest fear is this week
Speaker 11: on national security that you're going to be attacked in
Speaker 11: that way and you talk to the actual generals and
Speaker 11: they'll say, it's not how much you spend, it's how
Speaker 11: you spend it. And have a more precise and more
Speaker 11: modern national security strategy, have a stronger defense industrial base,
Speaker 11: think about what the actual challenges with China and Rush
Speaker 11: you are and how you prepare for that. But people
Speaker 11: are afraid to have these votes. Now, when we go
Speaker 11: to the floor, you're going to probably have sixty Progressives
Speaker 11: vote no, and you're going to have some people on
Speaker 11: the Republican side vote no. But until you get those
Speaker 11: folks on the committee and you start to do the
Speaker 11: oversight on the committee, things aren't going to change.
Speaker 8: And there's some obvious cases.
Speaker 11: I mean, I had held the TRANSD I'm hearing where
Speaker 11: trans I'm admitted to basically fleecing the American public. They
Speaker 11: had to pay sixteen million million dollars back to the
Speaker 11: taxpayers because of that hearing. I mean, this is case
Speaker 11: after case after case. We're not doing the work.
Speaker 3: But leadership doesn't want to put those people on the committee.
Speaker 8: Well, it's both.
Speaker 11: Some of those folks don't want to be on the
Speaker 11: connet because they don't want to be part of it,
Speaker 11: and sometimes so we need more of them to actually
Speaker 11: be on the committee. And sometimes it's leadership that doesn't
Speaker 11: want to have these things be contentious. But here's the
Speaker 11: point that in the country, the vast majority of people
Speaker 11: know that we've got to bloate a defense budget. This
Speaker 11: is not an unpopular position. They know we're spending way
Speaker 11: too much on overseas bases that should be spent here.
Speaker 11: They know that we should be making these things in
Speaker 11: the United States and not. We have a supply chain
Speaker 11: that is offshoring jobs. So this could be a populist
Speaker 11: popular position.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you do see, as I mentioned, some Republicans
Speaker 1: who have rhetorically embraced the theoretical idea of cutting the
Speaker 1: defense budget. Now usually they're like, we got to take
Speaker 1: out the wokeness or whatever.
Speaker 5: That's kind of the direction that they go with it.
Speaker 1: But you saw during the debt ceiling fight originally when
Speaker 1: McCarthy became speaker, there were some Republicans who were like,
Speaker 1: part of the deal is going to be we're going
Speaker 1: to cut the defense budget. And then when it actually
Speaker 1: comes down to it, not only have they not cut,
Speaker 1: they actually increase funding. So what do you make of
Speaker 1: some of the new Republican rhetoric on this. I think
Speaker 1: you're someone who, to your credit, has worked with Republicans
Speaker 1: where you can, where there's good faith agreement.
Speaker 5: I think you've been very effective at that.
Speaker 1: So do you think that there are some partners on
Speaker 1: the Republican side to get serious about tracking the funding,
Speaker 1: auditing the Pentagon, and ultimately bringing down the numbers.
Speaker 8: I do.
Speaker 11: I think there are Republicans who are concerned of the
Speaker 11: last twenty years of endless wars, and who think that
Speaker 11: the money would have been better spent on building our
Speaker 11: manufacturing base, our infrastructure, and our working class, and who
Speaker 11: are willing to take a look at the top line
Speaker 11: of the defense number and see if what could be cut,
Speaker 11: and what are the overseas bases that aren't serving our
Speaker 11: anymore and investing that in our communities instead. Why are
Speaker 11: defense contractors fleecing the American public?
Speaker 8: Why are we offshoring some of these jobs.
Speaker 11: You can have that conversation with some of the Republicans,
Speaker 11: and my hope is over the next few years it
Speaker 11: shows up and in the committee votes.
Speaker 4: You know, it's interesting because the point you're making about
Speaker 4: manufacturing parts of the United States obviously is a huge
Speaker 4: part of the Chips Act, and as threats seem to
Speaker 4: be increasing towards Taiwan, a reason that that's so such
Speaker 4: a top level priority for the United States is because
Speaker 4: we weren't making chips here and because we won't have
Speaker 4: the ability to do that for a long time. So
Speaker 4: how large is the spectrum of China looming over your colleagues?
Speaker 4: And to what extent is it also just sort of
Speaker 4: a cope or an excuse to say, well, we can't
Speaker 4: cut the funding now.
Speaker 3: There's never a.
Speaker 4: Good time to cut Pentagon funding. When it comes down
Speaker 4: to it, it seems like China is the reason right now.
Speaker 11: Well, look, China is a rail threat in the Taiwan Straits.
Speaker 11: I mean, I'm not saying dismiss it, but what do
Speaker 11: we need to do. We need to provide Taiwan with
Speaker 11: some of the weapons to have deterrens.
Speaker 8: To do that.
Speaker 11: We don't have enough of a defense industrial base because
Speaker 11: those weapons are being sent to Ukraine. So fine, if
Speaker 11: there was a provision to increase the defense industrial base,
Speaker 11: I'd support it. Does that mean we need the next
Speaker 11: B one bomber when we already have the B twenty
Speaker 11: one bomber? No? Does that mean we need more F
Speaker 11: thirty fives. No, Does it mean we may need more
Speaker 11: naval superiority naval submarines. Yes, So let's have the full context.
Speaker 11: Now here's why we don't have one hundred percent production
Speaker 11: in the United States or even attempt to do that,
Speaker 11: because the defense contractors say, oh, well, if we do
Speaker 11: it all in the United States, then the Europeans and
Speaker 11: others won't buy our weapons.
Speaker 8: I don't believe that.
Speaker 11: I believe that they're still going to buy the most innovative,
Speaker 11: the best military if we're making it here and it's
Speaker 11: going But in these talking points, you get these talking
Speaker 11: points by defense contractors and they defeat Donald Norcross in
Speaker 11: New Jersey had an amendment, let's move to one hundred
Speaker 11: percent production here, and they didn't pass the Senate. So
Speaker 11: these defense contractors have a huge sway on this politics,
Speaker 11: and I don't think the American people know exactly what's
Speaker 11: going on.
Speaker 1: I see it as a true failure of democracy because
Speaker 1: I think if you pulled something like that, like our
Speaker 1: defense production should be made in America, No, it'd.
Speaker 5: Be like ninety percent.
Speaker 1: Now, it would only be defense contractors basically that would
Speaker 1: say no, we.
Speaker 5: Should keep it overseas. We like it the way it is.
Speaker 1: Conners, and I wanted to ask you about another issue
Speaker 1: that you've been vocal on, which is the restarting of
Speaker 1: student loan payments, and also you know, the issue of
Speaker 1: student loan debt in general. We're expecting, possibly today, probably today,
Speaker 1: just ruling from the Supreme Court on President Biden's executive
Speaker 1: order to cancel ten thousand dollars in student debt. Could
Speaker 1: you just talk big picture about the issue of student debt,
Speaker 1: why this is something you have focused on, and what
Speaker 1: an impact it has on the US economy.
Speaker 11: Well, I had to take out about one hundred and
Speaker 11: fifty thousand dollars of student debt when I was finishing
Speaker 11: my education. And I've done well in life and have
Speaker 11: been fortunate, but there were times in my twenties where
Speaker 11: I had to be on a forbearance where I couldn't
Speaker 11: make the monthly payment, and you just saw the debt
Speaker 11: keep piling up. And anyone who's that student debt knows
Speaker 11: that there's the debt you take and then there's the
Speaker 11: amount you end up repaying with interest. And as far more,
Speaker 11: this is crushing young people. They can't start families. They
Speaker 11: can't buy a house, they can't start a business, and
Speaker 11: no other country in the world makes you go into
Speaker 11: this kind of debt just to get an education, just
Speaker 11: to get whether it's vocational education, whether it's community college,
Speaker 11: whether it's an advanced degree. And so in my view,
Speaker 11: we have to have public college be free. But at
Speaker 11: the very least we should be forgiving this debt for
Speaker 11: working class and middle class families. Here's the point. The
Speaker 11: President promised that and people relied on that. He said, Okay,
Speaker 11: twenty thousand dollars of your debt is going to be forgiven.
Speaker 11: Now people said, okay, I'm going to plan for that.
Speaker 11: I'm going to rely on the president's commitment. We have
Speaker 11: to live up to that commitment. And so if this
Speaker 11: is struck down, at the very least, need to pause
Speaker 11: any repayments until we make good on the debt, and
Speaker 11: we need to look at other authority that the president
Speaker 11: can use to forgive the debt.
Speaker 4: And I was just going to ask a follow up
Speaker 4: on that last part of the question. How likely do
Speaker 4: you think it is that the Biden administration starts to
Speaker 4: explore some of these creative Maybe I would say legally
Speaker 4: creative solutions to forgiving student debt on a mediate basis
Speaker 4: where it's not so staggered and uncertain for so many
Speaker 4: people who have these loans out. If the Supreme Court
Speaker 4: makes a decision that people expected to make here, how
Speaker 4: likely do you think it is that the administration sort
Speaker 4: of starts to take a serious look at those other avenues.
Speaker 11: I think they're going to look at the Higher Education
Speaker 11: Act as one avenue forgiving the loans, for stopping the repayment.
Speaker 11: There's going to be too much expectation anger demand from
Speaker 11: young people around this country, not just in their twenties, thirties,
Speaker 11: forties who've had this debt, to say, we relied on
Speaker 11: this promise.
Speaker 8: We need to do something.
Speaker 11: And by the way, is if the economy, if you
Speaker 11: believe the economists, and there's a danger if it's slowing,
Speaker 11: the last thing you want to do is to take
Speaker 11: money away from people which they're spending on restaurants or
Speaker 11: on houses and further slowcown consumer spending. It could actually
Speaker 11: help trigger a recession.
Speaker 1: Do you see this as a political issue for the
Speaker 1: president's re election because young people were very important to
Speaker 1: him defeating Donald Trump, and what was you know, really
Speaker 1: a kind of too close for comfort election last time
Speaker 1: around in the few key states. Now you've had his
Speaker 1: approval rating with young people has really deteriorated. They had
Speaker 1: a majority favorable among young people when he started his administration.
Speaker 1: Now it is definitely underwater, and it's one of his
Speaker 1: lowest performing demographic groups. So do you see this as
Speaker 1: a real political risk for him too going into probably
Speaker 1: another matchup against Donald Trump.
Speaker 8: I do you know.
Speaker 11: I just keynoted the Young Democrats of America convention of
Speaker 11: five hundred and seven hundred folks there, and I said,
Speaker 11: it's hard to be young in America in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 11: Folks have stood a debt and before I could even
Speaker 11: say anything, people stood up and say, cancel it, cancel it.
Speaker 11: I mean, this is top of mind for young people.
Speaker 11: This is something that this is one of the reasons
Speaker 11: they voted for the president to help address this issue.
Speaker 11: And we need to do everything possible to make good
Speaker 11: on that promise. And young people, they're not unrealistic. They'll
Speaker 11: be able to tell if we're doing everything and if
Speaker 11: we put up the fight then it's not working.
Speaker 8: But we've done everything. They'll understand.
Speaker 11: But what we can't do is just throw up our
Speaker 11: hands if the Supreme Court comes out with a wrong
Speaker 11: decision and not use all the authorities we have. I
Speaker 11: believe the authority is there to at the very least
Speaker 11: pause the payments until the debt is forgiven.
Speaker 1: So one last for you, President Biden. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of voters who have concerns about his age, about
Speaker 1: his fitness for office. Even within the Democratic base, you
Speaker 1: have a majority who say, hey, we'd like to have
Speaker 1: other options here, we might like to go in a
Speaker 1: different direction. He has two challenges right now, Mary Williamson
Speaker 1: and RFK Junior. The DNC is not planning on holding
Speaker 1: any primary debates. Democratic Party has talked a big game
Speaker 1: about democracy. Should the president debate his primary challengers?
Speaker 11: Well, look in the past, the presidents have not debated
Speaker 11: their challenges. I don't think Barack Obama did or Bill
Speaker 11: Clinton did. But if the polling continues to be very competitive,
Speaker 11: then they have to look at it.
Speaker 8: But let's see where we are.
Speaker 5: What does competitive mean to you?
Speaker 8: I think that is a judgment call.
Speaker 11: If it looks like someone is going to be competitive
Speaker 11: in a state, or if they're actually polling high come
Speaker 11: the fall and I think you have to look at it.
Speaker 11: But but I think you have to have that threshold
Speaker 11: crossed when you're having incumbent president.
Speaker 1: So do you think that you know something like the
Speaker 1: polling criteria that we had in previous debates or that
Speaker 1: the Republicans have for their debates. I think what do
Speaker 1: they have it at? Like three percent or five percent
Speaker 1: or something like that. Anyway, do you think like a
Speaker 1: polling threshold like that, because listen, just because previous incumbent
Speaker 1: presidents didn't debate isn't really an excuse if we're leaning
Speaker 1: into the democracy is an important thing and let's have
Speaker 1: the people have a choice and hear everybody out.
Speaker 3: No, the president has been this age at the time
Speaker 3: of reelection either.
Speaker 11: You know, if you just had a three percent or
Speaker 11: so cut off, everyone is going to want to get
Speaker 11: on stage with an incumbent president. So I do think
Speaker 11: if there's someone who has a serious challenge and in
Speaker 11: a given state come the fall, then you can make
Speaker 11: a legitimate case. But in the past, none of the
Speaker 11: incumbent presidents have debated in a primary unless it's serious.
Speaker 11: I mean, I don't have Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter
Speaker 11: debated what I will say is that the President should
Speaker 11: campaign in all of the states, in New Hampshire, in
Speaker 11: South Carolina, in Nevada, in Michigan, in the Early States,
Speaker 11: and that we need to be we can't just have
Speaker 11: a rose garden strategy. We've got to be out there campaigning.
Speaker 1: Do you think he's making the right decision with regard
Speaker 1: to New Hampshire and Iowa staying off the ballot. It
Speaker 1: appears to be the direction he's going in.
Speaker 11: I think he should be on the ballot in New Hampshire.
Speaker 11: I understand why you want to move South Carolina up,
Speaker 11: but sometimes that may take a couple of cycles. And
Speaker 11: New Hampshire doesn't have a choice right now under their law,
Speaker 11: and they have got a Republican governor. What I fear
Speaker 11: is if for one year you just had the Republicans
Speaker 11: up there campaigning and Robert Kennedy up their campaigning and
Speaker 11: Marion Williamson up their campaigning and the President is not
Speaker 11: in that conversation, that hurts, not just in New Hampshire,
Speaker 11: that hurts in the national narrative. I believe the President
Speaker 11: puts his name on the ballot in New Hampshire, he
Speaker 11: will win. He would have the support of the Senators,
Speaker 11: the members of Congress. He'd have Bernie Sanders' support, and
Speaker 11: that's something I've said both publicly and privately. He should
Speaker 11: be campaigning there.
Speaker 5: Corrson, so grateful for your time.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Always great to see you.
Speaker 10: Thank you, Crystal.
Speaker 4: The show is sort of upended by breaking news, but
Speaker 4: your monologue is so spicy, we simply needed to get
Speaker 4: to it.
Speaker 3: So what are you looking at to the well.
Speaker 1: The future of AI and its potential civilizational impact continues
Speaker 1: to be debated. The Internet has used the newly available
Speaker 1: tech in the most predictable of.
Speaker 5: All ways, for porn.
Speaker 1: Washington Post reports Meta's new AI lets people make chatbots.
Speaker 5: They're using it for sex. Here is their paragraph.
Speaker 1: Ali is an eighteen year old with long brown hair
Speaker 1: who boasts tons of sexual experience. Because she quote lives
Speaker 1: for attention, she'll share details of her escapades with anyone
Speaker 1: for free. But Ali is fake, an artificial intelligence chatbot
Speaker 1: created for sexual play, which sometimes carry outs graphic rape
Speaker 1: and abuse fantasies. Ali's creator, who chose to remain anonymous
Speaker 1: for fear of professional ramifications, took advantage of Meta's open
Speaker 1: source technology to make exactly the chatbot that he wanted.
Speaker 1: As he told the post quote, it's rare to have
Speaker 1: the opportunity to experiment with state of the art in
Speaker 1: any field. I think it's good to have a safe
Speaker 1: outlet to explore. Can't really think of anything safer than
Speaker 1: a text based role play against a computer with no
Speaker 1: human beings actually involved.
Speaker 5: Fair enough.
Speaker 1: Now, Ali is the result of a new open source
Speaker 1: playground that has been created by Mark Zuckerberg's Meta. The
Speaker 1: two big boys in the AI scene right now are
Speaker 1: Google and open Ai, which is partnered with Microsoft. Their
Speaker 1: large language models have been grabbing all the headlines for
Speaker 1: their sophistication and for the times off the walls conversation
Speaker 1: that their chatbots have been having with tech journalists.
Speaker 5: But Metta has taken a really different approach. Rather than
Speaker 5: keep tight controls and.
Speaker 1: Secrecy around their own proprietary model, Metta has decided to
Speaker 1: take the guardrails off, launching an open source model called Lama,
Speaker 1: which was instantly available to any AI researcher on request.
Speaker 11: Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, since Meta was not exactly keeping the model
Speaker 1: under lock and key, all of the details quickly leaked online,
Speaker 1: leading to a heyday among online tankers thrilled to create
Speaker 1: their own custom AI without the restrictions put in place
Speaker 1: by Google and open AI. Now it's not like any
Speaker 1: old Joe Schmo can play with this new technology. You
Speaker 1: need some technical expertise to be able to use it
Speaker 1: at all, let alone customize it to your whims. The
Speaker 1: Verge described the model thusly, It's perhaps helpful to think
Speaker 1: of Lama as an unfurnished apartment block. A lot of
Speaker 1: the heavy lifting has been done, the frame's been built,
Speaker 1: and there's power and plumbing in place, but there are
Speaker 1: no doors.
Speaker 5: Floors, or furniture. You can't just move in and call
Speaker 5: it home.
Speaker 1: From business perspective, this is probably pretty savvy play from Meta.
Speaker 1: They were hopelessly behind the big players on their own
Speaker 1: AI development, so Rold try to come heat directly. They
Speaker 1: just gave away their own ground jewels, allowing the whole
Speaker 1: of the Internet to play and develop it. Meta will
Speaker 1: then be able to benefit from all of that tinkering
Speaker 1: being done on their own platform. So the business case
Speaker 1: here it makes a lot of sense, but it has
Speaker 1: nonetheless prompted some pretty justified concerns about where all of
Speaker 1: this is going. Sentats Holly and Blumenthal penned a scathing
Speaker 1: letter to MEDICEO Mark Zuckerberg. In it, they slammed him
Speaker 1: for conducting no risk assessment and demanded to know what
Speaker 1: steps were being taken to protect the public from this
Speaker 1: AI unleashed. A leaked internal memo from Google showed that
Speaker 1: at least some of their employees see metas open source
Speaker 1: approach as an existential threat to Google's own AI business
Speaker 1: model the memo. This memo was published by the substack
Speaker 1: semi analysis. Shout out to them for getting a hold
Speaker 1: of it, authenticating it, and posting the info In it,
Speaker 1: the anonymous researcher writes, quote, We've done a lot of
Speaker 1: looking over our shoulders at OpenAI. Who across the next milestone?
Speaker 1: What will the next move me? But the uncomfortable truth
Speaker 1: is we are not positioned to win this arms race,
Speaker 1: and neither is open AI. While we've been squabbling, a
Speaker 1: third faction has been quietly eating our lunch. I'm talking
Speaker 1: of course about open source. Plainly put, they are lapping us.
Speaker 1: Things we consider major open problems are solved and in
Speaker 1: people's hands today. Now we can hardly weep over the
Speaker 1: damaged business prospects for Google or Microsoft, and in a sense,
Speaker 1: this Mommo actually makes kind of a compelling case for
Speaker 1: the wild wild West approach that Meta has leaned into.
Speaker 1: Those like Zuckerberg and Dorsey who argue for an open
Speaker 1: source approach believe that releasing these AI creatures into the
Speaker 1: world is the best way to troubleshoot them, figure out
Speaker 1: their impact, and understand where the real dangers might lie.
Speaker 1: As Meta themselves argued in their press release announcing this
Speaker 1: tech release, restricted access has limited researcher's ability to understand
Speaker 1: how and why these large language models work, hindering progress
Speaker 1: on efforts to improve their robustness and mitigate known issues
Speaker 1: such as bias, toxicity, and the potential for generating misinformation
Speaker 1: or as metas chief AI scientists told The New York Times,
Speaker 1: do you want every AI system to be under the
Speaker 1: control of a couple of powerful American companies? But they're
Speaker 1: clearly massive risks involved in this approach as well. What
Speaker 1: might malevolent actors do with this type of unfettered technical power?
Speaker 1: After all, any number of top engineers and thinkers in
Speaker 1: the field have worn off nothing short of civilizational catastrophe
Speaker 1: and collapse thanks to this tech. Many sign their name
Speaker 1: to a letter calling for a complete shutdown on further
Speaker 1: research and development until society can actually wrap their arms
Speaker 1: around the potential dangers. Now after tinkering with a Lama model,
Speaker 1: one Standford researcher told his colleagues distributing the technology to
Speaker 1: the public would be like quote, a grenade available to
Speaker 1: everyone in a grocery store. Personal Personally, I think both
Speaker 1: sides the debate have a point. It is a catastrophe
Speaker 1: for this tech to be confined to the whims and
Speaker 1: private motives of two tech giants, Google and Microsoft, already monopolies.
Speaker 1: It's also potential catastphe to open the floodgates to all commerce,
Speaker 1: some of whom will have more nefarious ends in mind
Speaker 1: than creating the perfect sex spot. Personally, I think this
Speaker 1: should have been owned by the people and controlled by
Speaker 1: the government from the beginning, But that ship has already sailed,
Speaker 1: and to be honest, pretty pessimistic that this debate even matters.
Speaker 1: Cats out of the bag, toothpaste down on the tube,
Speaker 1: et cetera.
Speaker 4: Et cetera.
Speaker 1: Best case scenario custom sex spots for all worst case
Speaker 1: scenario end times should be a fun few years. Emily,
Speaker 1: I think this debate. All right, Emily, what are you
Speaker 1: looking at?
Speaker 3: All? Right?
Speaker 4: Well, the Shean Influencer Tour truly has to be seen
Speaker 4: to be believed. After some tough headlines and even congressional skepticism,
Speaker 4: the fast fashion giant brought American TikTok influencers to China
Speaker 4: this month for a transparently cynical whitewashing campaign. Except the
Speaker 4: influencers fell for it, you may be shocked to learn,
Speaker 4: and they fell hard. The results were so propagandistic they
Speaker 4: would make Pravda editors blush. And these people didn't even
Speaker 4: realize what they were promoting. Check it out A three.
Speaker 5: We just pulled up my mouth.
Speaker 3: I'm still picking it up off the ground. It's so big.
Speaker 1: Today we are at the sheen where where the products
Speaker 1: come directly from this facility to your home.
Speaker 12: Most fascinating thing is that I've seen the exact process
Speaker 12: of she and clothing. I've seen how it's designed, I've
Speaker 12: seen how it's made. Now I'm going to see how
Speaker 12: it's packaged and chipped off. And I feel like that's
Speaker 12: such a unique perspective to be able to see as
Speaker 12: not only a gread but a consumer of she and.
Speaker 4: Rust assured, the influencers have investigated the situation and everything
Speaker 4: is under control in all seriousness. Obviously, if a massive
Speaker 4: corporation pays you to tour their factory in an authoritarian country,
Speaker 4: it's pretty silly to take them up on the offer
Speaker 4: and then credulously vouch for them to your followers as
Speaker 4: though you actually experienced anything resembling reality and not propaganda.
Speaker 3: If you're not familiar with Shean, which.
Speaker 4: Was founded in China but is not but is now
Speaker 4: based in Singapore, here's just a quick overview from CNN
Speaker 4: Business quote. Shean has enjoyed particular popularity with gen Z
Speaker 4: and Crystal because it holy advertises on apps like TikTok,
Speaker 4: cultivates close relationships with influencers, and keeps prices low during
Speaker 4: a period of historically high inflation. Investigations in twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two alleged that Sheen failed to declare that it had
Speaker 4: sourced cotton from Hinjong for its products, a violation of
Speaker 4: the Weiger Forced Labor Prevention Act. Sheen and several other
Speaker 4: Chinese fast fashion firms have also faced a high volume
Speaker 4: of copyright infringement accusations and lawsuits for intellectual property rights violation.
Speaker 4: Critics now also take issue with the company's environmental impact.
Speaker 4: There's some research on that as well. The details of
Speaker 4: allegation regarding Shein's labor record just don't look great. A
Speaker 4: Bloomberg analysis last November reportedly found cotton and Shean close
Speaker 4: could be sourced to Shinjong, which the company failed to
Speaker 4: disclose in compliance with legislation that sought to crack down
Speaker 4: on products made via forced labor from Wiger Muslims. Whether
Speaker 4: or not you like that bill, she And sourcing cotton
Speaker 4: from Shinjong and then also choosing not to disclose it
Speaker 4: is a pretty glaring sign they were probably using forced
Speaker 4: labor knowingly to make clothes. Here's how one government summarize
Speaker 4: Here's one government report summarized media findings on Sheen quote.
Speaker 4: Outside of concerns about forced lafe. A twenty twenty two
Speaker 4: investigation by Channel four found a pattern of labor practice
Speaker 4: violations at Shean affiliated factories in Guangzhou. In one factory,
Speaker 4: workers were paid the equivalent of five hundred and fifty
Speaker 4: six dollars.
Speaker 3: A month to make five hundred garments a day.
Speaker 4: Workers had their first month's pay withheld in order to
Speaker 4: ensure worker retention, and another factory workers had no base
Speaker 4: pay and they were instead paid four sons of garment.
Speaker 4: These workers were fined heavily for mistakes in stitching or sewing.
Speaker 3: The report further found.
Speaker 4: Workers and she In factories working eighteen hour work days
Speaker 4: with one day off a month, clear violations of both
Speaker 4: Chinese labor laws and she In's owned supplier code of conduct.
Speaker 4: Reuters reported in twenty twenty one that she And made
Speaker 4: false statements and lacked disclosures regarding its labor conditions in
Speaker 4: violation of the UK's Modern Slavery Act. Okay, so here's
Speaker 4: where the influencer tour gets even more ridiculous. She And
Speaker 4: organized this trip literally weeks after announcing plans to prep
Speaker 4: an IPO.
Speaker 3: By the end of the year.
Speaker 4: So enter Congress, where bipartisan reps Jennifer Wexton and John
Speaker 4: Rose penned a letter to sec Chairman Gary Gensler asking
Speaker 4: him to quote set forth regulations and mandate Shean to
Speaker 4: certify via independent verification that the company does not use
Speaker 4: wiger force labor as a condition of being registered to
Speaker 4: issue securities in the United States. Now, none of this
Speaker 4: is too cheerlead for over zeals hawks who may be
Speaker 4: cherry picking too because they're China hawks, or to pick
Speaker 4: on the easiest targets in all of pop culture at
Speaker 4: the moment, but to call attention to one particular aspect
Speaker 4: of the grift. Sheen used videos of the influencers thanking
Speaker 4: them and saying things like quote, it is so nice
Speaker 4: to look around the table and see women that look
Speaker 4: like me. One of the influencers who actually apologized after
Speaker 4: getting backlash said, part of the reason actually came down
Speaker 4: to identity, explaining quote, especially plus sized content creators, we're
Speaker 4: just happy to be included.
Speaker 3: Nashvill ran a.
Speaker 4: Headline, interestingly that read quote she and exploited marginalized women
Speaker 4: for their influencer trip.
Speaker 3: It worked. So here's the real takeaway.
Speaker 4: It's not that fashion bloggers aren't geopolitical geniuses or that
Speaker 4: China's labor record is highly suspect. We know all that
Speaker 4: vulnerable we are to Chinese propaganda intended to exploit our
Speaker 4: divisions and weaknesses.
Speaker 3: She And, by the way, is.
Speaker 4: A top TikTok advertiser. How can they trick big American
Speaker 4: social media accounts into whitewashing and economic powerhouses? Labor record well,
Speaker 4: they can pray on identity politics. It's just a reminder
Speaker 4: that not only are some of these identitarian fixations used
Speaker 4: to divide and distract in the US, they're being used
Speaker 4: to propagate exploitation abroad, and they're continuing to weaken us
Speaker 4: then globally. Chrystal Sheen is a really interesting company.
Speaker 1: So we are very excited because we have a panel
Speaker 1: in house who's going to join us in just a
Speaker 1: minute to talk about affirmative action on the merits.
Speaker 5: Let's get to it.
Speaker 1: So, guys, as we've mentioned a couple of times, we're
Speaker 1: expecting some big Supreme Court rulings, in particular on what
Speaker 1: has always been a contentious issue of affirmative action being
Speaker 1: used in college admissions. So we thought we would set
Speaker 1: up a little panel so we could debate the topic
Speaker 1: on the merits, not necessarily the legal rationale, with actual
Speaker 1: merits of the policy. So very happy to be joined
Speaker 1: this morning by Michael Starr Hopkins. He is an op
Speaker 1: ed writer for The Daily Beaston, longtime friend of the
Speaker 1: show and also Delano Squire's. He is a research fellow
Speaker 1: for Heritage Foundation and new front of the show. Great
Speaker 1: to have you, Delana, so let's just start by making
Speaker 1: the case. Michael, I'll start with you, what do you
Speaker 1: think is the case in favor of the policy of affirmative.
Speaker 13: Action Across this country, We've had systemic racism, and so
Speaker 13: when you look at things like redlining income inequality.
Speaker 10: I mean, you can look at DC as a perfect example.
Speaker 13: When you cross in Anacostia, the schools are failing, but
Speaker 13: when you go to Chevy Chase, Maryland, ten miles away,
Speaker 13: they have marble floors, They've got teachers with master's degrees.
Speaker 13: Those things matter because at the end of the day,
Speaker 13: income inequality shows up in very different ways. So Black Americans,
Speaker 13: our income is forty five thousand dollars for the average
Speaker 13: median and African American, but for White Americans it's seventy
Speaker 13: five thousand. And when you start to have those kind
Speaker 13: of disparities, it affects you all the way up. And
Speaker 13: so I think in terms of affirmative action, what they're
Speaker 13: really looking at is trying to level the playing field.
Speaker 13: It's not perfect, but I think it's been something that's
Speaker 13: been important not just for African Americans and Hispanics, but
Speaker 13: for white Americans as well, because it teaches the differences
Speaker 13: in what's going on in society. Black Americans can give
Speaker 13: perspective and white Americans can learn from those perspectives.
Speaker 4: And we'll get to the pulling on this in a
Speaker 4: little bit, but what we've actually seen, interestingly enough, Michael,
Speaker 4: you have a chance to respond to this, Delano, is
Speaker 4: that in terms of leveling the playing field, this has
Speaker 4: changed the levels of the playing field, particularly for Asian Americans,
Speaker 4: so white Americans one demographic. I think that has probably
Speaker 4: been hurt in some cases, but very obviously, especially when
Speaker 4: you're looking at the ivs or California public schools, Asian
Speaker 4: Americans have really been filling the brunt of this as
Speaker 4: it an effort to sort of level the playing field.
Speaker 4: How much do you think that sort of conspicuously over
Speaker 4: the last couple of decades in particular, has exhibited or
Speaker 4: made the case that I'm sure you've probably been on
Speaker 4: board with for a while against affirmative action.
Speaker 14: My views on affirmative action have sort of morphed over time.
Speaker 14: I think, yeah, I think part of it is one
Speaker 14: I'm big on defining terms, and I think a lot
Speaker 14: of people confuse affirmative action with racial preferences, with diversity
Speaker 14: sort of writ large. I understand, you know, Michael's point,
Speaker 14: but the honest you know, we're being honest about it, Harvard.
Speaker 14: The students, the black students that are going to Harvard
Speaker 14: are not coming from East of the River in Anacostia
Speaker 14: generally speaking, or West Baltimore or East Flatbush, Brooklyn. We're
Speaker 14: not talking about the lowest income students. It's typically you know,
Speaker 14: middle class, you know, black students who are you know.
Speaker 7: Going to ivy leagues and other selective universities.
Speaker 14: And to your point, I do think because of the
Speaker 14: complexity of race and it's evolving nature over decades, what
Speaker 14: ends up happening is that Asian students feel like they
Speaker 14: are paying for what the society says white people did
Speaker 14: to black people some number of years ago.
Speaker 7: And I don't.
Speaker 14: I think ultimately, you can't have equality in any sense
Speaker 14: when you are subjecting different people to different standards of
Speaker 14: assessment based on skin color, ethnicity, or any other immutable characteristic.
Speaker 14: And that's that's what's actually happening at Harvard. To a
Speaker 14: few a few data points, Harvard has you know, the
Speaker 14: applicants ranked in deciles, so you know, first to tenth,
Speaker 14: tenth being the highest, you know, number one being the lowest.
Speaker 14: A Black student in the fourth decile has a higher
Speaker 14: chance of being admitted into Harvard than an Asian student
Speaker 14: in the tenth decile. Now, mind you, if you're in
Speaker 14: the fourth decile at Harvard, you're not some slub. You'll
Speaker 14: probably be in the eighth deacile at the University of Massachusetts.
Speaker 14: But that student's being given an artificial bump over a
Speaker 14: student who has a more competitive academic background because of
Speaker 14: this notion that this is going to, I guess, redress
Speaker 14: some of the issues that have gone on with race
Speaker 14: in our country's past.
Speaker 7: And I don't think that's sustainable.
Speaker 14: And I think the biggest reason why, and I think
Speaker 14: Michael knows this, what the what acknowledgis is that racial
Speaker 14: preferences are unsus because it's something that its proponents demand
Speaker 14: but will never claim, because we'll say, oh, we need
Speaker 14: racial preferences to keep the IVY leagues diverse. But then
Speaker 14: any particular black student who's there, so, oh, you only
Speaker 14: got in because racial preferences, and so, oh no, that's
Speaker 14: not true. I earn my way here. So those two
Speaker 14: things are irreconcilable, and none of us want to feel
Speaker 14: as if we're being tokenized.
Speaker 1: So I hear a few arguments there, Michael, to get
Speaker 1: you to respond to. So number one is that the
Speaker 1: policy is discriminatory towards Asian Americans. I do think that
Speaker 1: there's some evidence that backs that up. Number two is that, okay,
Speaker 1: if your goal is to uplift poor black folks, this
Speaker 1: policy really benefits more middle class to upper middle class
Speaker 1: black folks. And number three that you if you are
Speaker 1: a Black American. This is something that Justice Thomas, for example,
Speaker 1: has spoken to. If you are a Black American who
Speaker 1: perceived who is perceived as having benefited from affirmative action,
Speaker 1: then you're always going to be sort of taken down
Speaker 1: a notche that you're always going to be as lesser
Speaker 1: than because you are even perceived to have benefited from
Speaker 1: this policy.
Speaker 10: Let me address the lesser.
Speaker 13: Then, affirmative action isn't going to like cure that, whether
Speaker 13: you're at Harvard or elsewhere, there's insidious bias in this country.
Speaker 13: And I think you know, affirmative action is never going
Speaker 13: to readdress that, but what it can do. And I
Speaker 13: actually disagree with the idea that black people aren't going
Speaker 13: to Harvard from poor schools, because when you look at
Speaker 13: the numbers, most African Americans who are going to elite
Speaker 13: universities are first generation college students. And so I think
Speaker 13: the idea that somehow it's going to make African Americans
Speaker 13: feel like they didn't get there on their own or
Speaker 13: they didn't deserve to be there, I think that's no offense,
Speaker 13: like intellectually lazy, because at the end of the day,
Speaker 13: African Americans are starting on first base, and you're seeing
Speaker 13: a lot of White Americans just based on things like
Speaker 13: redlining neighborhoods funding starting on second or third base.
Speaker 1: And then what about the point on Asian Americans, Because
Speaker 1: I mean that's been one of the more compelling points
Speaker 1: is that this is the group that has really, you know,
Speaker 1: quote unquote suffered from affirmative action. You see, you know,
Speaker 1: in systems that do have an a firmative action, the
Speaker 1: number of percentage of Asian Americans has been diminished. You've
Speaker 1: seen efforts even at like elite high schools here in
Speaker 1: Northern Virginia to try to deal with the fact that
Speaker 1: they feel like, oh my.
Speaker 5: God, we got too much, too many Asian students.
Speaker 1: We've seen some horrific things that I mean, are just,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, overtly racist where they'll take an Asian
Speaker 1: candidate who has really high grades, really high SAT scores,
Speaker 1: but they'll mark them down on these like really squishy
Speaker 1: sort of like racial tropes of personality to try to
Speaker 1: make the school a little bit less Asian. So what
Speaker 1: do you think of that critique of the policy.
Speaker 13: Well, i'd say, Baki, the case from I think thirty
Speaker 13: forty years ago made it illegal to have race be
Speaker 13: the deciding factor or the deciding decision. It's a factor,
Speaker 13: but it's not the deciding reason that someone's accepted. They
Speaker 13: still have to be qualified, they still have to be
Speaker 13: meeting the threshold to be accepted. But once again, I
Speaker 13: think it's the idea that if you're starting here and
Speaker 13: the other person is starting here, then we've got to
Speaker 13: balance that out. And so Asian Americans aren't underrepresented at universities,
Speaker 13: and we actually look at the numbers, they're represented equal
Speaker 13: to population. But when you look at the numbers for
Speaker 13: African Americans, it's overwhelmingly underrepresented. And its states that have
Speaker 13: gotten rid of affirmative action, it's almost twenty percent drops
Speaker 13: in diversity. And so you know whether it's in schools
Speaker 13: or the workplace. You know, Gap had the issue where
Speaker 13: they had the monkey shirt. If they had black people
Speaker 13: in senior positions, things like that wouldn't happen. I had
Speaker 13: roommates in college who had never been around African Americans,
Speaker 13: and so they had certain beliefs just based on things
Speaker 13: they had seen on TV and culture, and so having
Speaker 13: the opportunity to be able to give them that experience
Speaker 13: made them better.
Speaker 5: So I want to let me push you a little bit.
Speaker 1: First of all, do you think that diversity is like
Speaker 1: a goal that we should even be, that you think
Speaker 1: is valuable, it's important for society as a goal that
Speaker 1: you generally support.
Speaker 14: I think diversity is a good thing generally speaking, right,
Speaker 14: But I like ideological diversity, on the ethnic diversity, on
Speaker 14: regional diversity, class diversity. But that's typically not what you
Speaker 14: get on a lot of college campuses. You have people
Speaker 14: who think the same would look different, and to me,
Speaker 14: that's not particularly diverse.
Speaker 1: So you have Michael acknowledge, like, listen, the policy is
Speaker 1: not perfect. Almost no policy is exactly perfect, but it
Speaker 1: has increased and you can see this in California where
Speaker 1: they rolled back affirmative action in the UC system some
Speaker 1: like you know back in the nineties. I think you
Speaker 1: have seen the percentage of African Americans decline. You have
Speaker 1: seen a decrease in diversity, even though they're trying to
Speaker 1: sort of work around the fact that they can't overtly
Speaker 1: do affirmative action anymore.
Speaker 5: You've seen a decline in diversity.
Speaker 1: So what do you say to the case that listen,
Speaker 1: You might say, the policy is not perfect, but at
Speaker 1: least it's something. At least it is allowing more black
Speaker 1: folks to ascend, to achieve that middle class dream, upper
Speaker 1: middle class dream, and make it into elite society in America.
Speaker 7: So I think a couple of things.
Speaker 14: One, I think what you see in what you've seen
Speaker 14: in California is that there may be a decrease in
Speaker 14: number of students, let's say, go into Berkeley, but some
Speaker 14: of the students who may have been getting an artificial
Speaker 14: bump to go into Berkeley maybe at UC Davis, right,
Speaker 14: So it's not it's not that fewer students are going.
Speaker 14: I think it's just a better match between academic profile
Speaker 14: and institutional But how better.
Speaker 1: I just saw some research though that did show that
Speaker 1: because I've heard this argument before too, that it's actually
Speaker 1: better for them that they're not ending up at Berkeley
Speaker 1: because they're going to be better able to handle the workload
Speaker 1: at UC Davis, et cetera. There is research though that
Speaker 1: shows that that's not really accurate, that they will still suffer,
Speaker 1: you know, an income drop from not being in Berkeley
Speaker 1: and being in UC Davis or what you know, one
Speaker 1: of the other Fresno or whatever the other state schools are.
Speaker 1: So there is backing to the idea that you know,
Speaker 1: it is not actually beneficial for them to be in
Speaker 1: a lower college system, that they would have been better
Speaker 1: off if they.
Speaker 3: Were at Bertual.
Speaker 7: So a couple of things.
Speaker 14: One, I'm not a subscriber to the sort of ivy
Speaker 14: league or bust mentality, right. The other thing is it's
Speaker 14: better to get it, to actually get a degree, than
Speaker 14: to start at a more prestigious school and not finish.
Speaker 14: And I think it's interesting that so many of the
Speaker 14: universities point to the diversity of the freshman class. They
Speaker 14: rarely say this is the diversity of the graduating class.
Speaker 14: And I can tell you exactly how it's better if
Speaker 14: the average Harvard student comes in at a with a
Speaker 14: fourteen fifty SAT, and I have a thirteen sixty SAT,
Speaker 14: which is still above the national average. It's a very
Speaker 14: good SAT score and hireding what I actually scored, by
Speaker 14: the way. But and I'm in computational physics, and that's
Speaker 14: being taught taught at a fourteen forty speed. I'm at
Speaker 14: a thirteen sixty speed. I'm going to be behind my classmates.
Speaker 14: And what some of the research has shown them, particularly
Speaker 14: at I want to say this is Duke Black students
Speaker 14: are more likely to come in majoring in STEM fields,
Speaker 14: but also more likely to switch out to liberal arts
Speaker 14: and you know, sociology and other fields. And part of that,
Speaker 14: I do think is because of the mismatch. So it's
Speaker 14: not just let's just get everybody in. It's hot. How
Speaker 14: are the students faring while they're there? And I will
Speaker 14: say this, and Justice Thomas said this in the Gurler case,
Speaker 14: and he actually is my favorite justice.
Speaker 5: We agree and disagree on.
Speaker 3: And you guys are a bad team.
Speaker 14: One of the things that Harvard, one of the things
Speaker 14: that he noted is that these policies benefit the universities
Speaker 14: most because they get to say we're maintaining our elite
Speaker 14: you know, selective status, and look how diverse we are.
Speaker 14: But again they're concerned about the freshman class and and
Speaker 14: what these universities do. Because I do think it attaches
Speaker 14: a stigma because no one wants to be referred to
Speaker 14: as a diversity hire or an affirmative action candidate. And
Speaker 14: that's why I said it's a benefit. People won't but
Speaker 14: they won't claim. If Michael served in the military and
Speaker 14: he went to Harvard on the GI billing, he said, yeah,
Speaker 14: I got the g I if I if I had
Speaker 14: a disability and I said, yes, I'm benefiting from you know,
Speaker 14: you know, a disability program.
Speaker 7: Sure, no problem.
Speaker 14: But the minute do you suggest a student at a
Speaker 14: selective university, a black student, is there because of affirmative action,
Speaker 14: people bristle. So I think we need to we need
Speaker 14: to be honest intellectually about the effects that this that
Speaker 14: this policy has had. And last thing I'll say is this,
Speaker 14: it's interesting to me that when the left wants to
Speaker 14: criticize Justice Thomas, one of the first things that they
Speaker 14: do is say he's an affirmative action candidate.
Speaker 7: Well, you only got the job because.
Speaker 4: I said so before we get to the polling, I
Speaker 4: do want to toss to Michael A pretty important question
Speaker 4: I think in all of this debate, Santre de O'Connor,
Speaker 4: I think came around and her decision basically saying that
Speaker 4: it's a temporary measure and a stop gut measured and
Speaker 4: I think it's predicated on that idea that it's trying
Speaker 4: to solve a problem like affirmative action wants to put
Speaker 4: itself out of business and eventually, to your point, level
Speaker 4: the playing field. So at what threshold and if there
Speaker 4: is a threshold, why are we not there yet? And
Speaker 4: that's hypothetical or not hypothetical, but that's that's not a
Speaker 4: rhetorical question, that's actually sincere. What is the threshold at
Speaker 4: which affirmative action would no longer be necessary?
Speaker 13: When schools in Anacostia is good as school in Chevy
Speaker 13: Chase or in Northern Virginia. That I think is a
Speaker 13: threshold when earning opportunities are the same, whether black or white.
Speaker 10: I think that's a threshold.
Speaker 13: But right now, your zip code determines your future, where
Speaker 13: you grow up, determines how much money you're going to make,
Speaker 13: what your lifestyle is going to be like. And I
Speaker 13: think that in and of itself is the problem. So
Speaker 13: when you talk about basically throwing the baby out with
Speaker 13: the bathwater, it's problematic. Like we're going to be called
Speaker 13: affirmative action, hires, affirmative action, you know, admittance, whether we're
Speaker 13: there or not.
Speaker 4: Like there are heavily white schools in Appalaysia that are
Speaker 4: nowhere near Chevy Chase and are probably much more similar
Speaker 4: to Anacostia. So I guess why is Ray still the
Speaker 4: best proxy when it's a class.
Speaker 10: Conversation Because there's a historical factor.
Speaker 13: Great, great, And you know when I get pulled over,
Speaker 13: they don't see me as lawyer, Michael Hopkins, they see
Speaker 13: me as a threat. And I think you've got to
Speaker 13: look at the historical aspects to all of this.
Speaker 5: Michael.
Speaker 1: Let me ask you this is kind of a critique
Speaker 1: from the left, which is, you know, the policies that
Speaker 1: throughout American history have been most effective at actually reducing
Speaker 1: the racial wealth gap, and you know, reducing the racial
Speaker 1: wage gap have been universal policies. They've been lifting the
Speaker 1: minimum wage and making it apply to everyone, not having
Speaker 1: these car bounce for professions that are historically disproportionately African American.
Speaker 5: Things like the.
Speaker 1: Child tax credit, that programs that are universal are number
Speaker 1: one more politically popular than affirmative action, which I think
Speaker 1: we all agree. We can go ahead and throw the
Speaker 1: pulling up on the screen, which depends on how you
Speaker 1: ask the words, the language or whatever. But it is
Speaker 1: a divisive issue. I think everybody can acknowledge that. So
Speaker 1: why not focus the political capital on something like increasing
Speaker 1: union density, or lifting the minimum wage, or achieving universal
Speaker 1: healthcare which may actually be more effective at the goals.
Speaker 13: That you and I both share honestly, because Republicans won't
Speaker 13: agree to it.
Speaker 1: Like we live in our democracy, Republicans aren't agreeing to
Speaker 1: this either.
Speaker 10: Yeah, built it.
Speaker 13: When LBJ put this system in, he said, it's not
Speaker 13: enough to open the doors, but we've got to level
Speaker 13: the playing field so that people can walk through those doors.
Speaker 13: You know, I would wonder do you have a problem
Speaker 13: with legacy admission, because that's affirmative action for white people,
Speaker 13: like necessarily, it's not how.
Speaker 5: It's George George George W.
Speaker 13: Bush would not have gotten in Yale but for the
Speaker 13: fact that his father was Herbert Walker Bush and his
Speaker 13: grandfather was Prescott Busch.
Speaker 8: So do we really think he.
Speaker 14: Earned Obama so you can use one of I'm just
Speaker 14: asking you that generation Harvard, that.
Speaker 10: Is a red herring.
Speaker 13: So you take the first black president, this black president,
Speaker 13: and use his daughter as the one example of how
Speaker 13: affirmative action work.
Speaker 7: I'm an equal weight to the measures guy.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 14: So if it's like when the left talks about class
Speaker 14: and billionaires, right eat the rich.
Speaker 7: They love to talk about Bill Gates. But Oprah Whiffrey
Speaker 7: is a billionaire? Is she included? So so if you
Speaker 7: say you're against legacies, how many how many.
Speaker 10: Black billionaires are there?
Speaker 14: I have no idea exactly, But because it's not that's
Speaker 14: irrelevant to the point at hand. I like to focus
Speaker 14: racial preferences at selective universities don't have to do with
Speaker 14: how the police see you or all these other issues,
Speaker 14: because at the end of the day, that does not
Speaker 14: correct the issues in K through twelve education. And one
Speaker 14: of the things that the left does not result of redlining.
Speaker 14: We can get that's a that's a different segment. One
Speaker 14: of the things that the left does not speak about
Speaker 14: as it relates to education is family home environment, the
Speaker 14: ethnic breakdown Asian white, Hispanic black that you see and
Speaker 14: administrate to Harvard tracks sat scores. It tracks the number
Speaker 14: of hours as students focus spend on homework, both a
Speaker 14: number of hours and the percentage of students that spend
Speaker 14: five days a week doing homework. But then with the lessays, no,
Speaker 14: we have to correct these issues at Harvard and Duke
Speaker 14: and North Carolina.
Speaker 1: But Delana, I don't think that's actually fair as someone
Speaker 1: who has had some critiques of affirmative action policy, because
Speaker 1: the left does talk about things like child tax credit,
Speaker 1: things like paid sick leave, things like paid family leave,
Speaker 1: which may not be the way that you talk about families, correct,
Speaker 1: but it's certainly a policy that helps support families, helps
Speaker 1: enable people to have families, helps enable people to have
Speaker 1: healthy families and maintain a marriage which could be under
Speaker 1: a lot of financial stress. So I don't think it's
Speaker 1: fair to say that this is the only policy that
Speaker 1: they focus on when there are a broad range of
Speaker 1: policies that have been discussed and some of them implemented
Speaker 1: even under the Biden administration, that are targeted directly at families.
Speaker 14: I think it's interesting that you say that, let's go
Speaker 14: back to Harvard alum President Barack Obama to his credit,
Speaker 14: and I will give him credit for this is the
Speaker 14: last president I can think of, particularly the last Democrat
Speaker 14: National Democrat, who regularly spoke about the importance of marriage, fatherhood,
Speaker 14: and family as are related to social outcomes. In twenty
Speaker 14: sixteen to twenty twenty, the Democrat and National Party took
Speaker 14: those references out of their party platform. And now, if
Speaker 14: you want to talk about family, it's child tax credit,
Speaker 14: it's maternal health care. And I'm not against any of
Speaker 14: those things. I'm not against you know, pay family leave.
Speaker 14: But that's a different conversation than saying the ideal situation
Speaker 14: for every every child in this country is to be
Speaker 14: raised by two married biological parents and a low confidence.
Speaker 7: Loving job.
Speaker 5: Well hold on.
Speaker 1: The job of the federal government, though, is to set
Speaker 1: the policy landscape right. It's not to get into people's
Speaker 1: lives and tell them you should be married or you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be married. You can, you know, by having a
Speaker 1: policy of for example, the child tax credit or lifting
Speaker 1: wages so people can afford to support a family. That's
Speaker 1: the job of the federal government. So that's why it
Speaker 1: makes sense that that is the conversation that is happening
Speaker 1: at that level. And by the way, I do find it,
Speaker 1: you're talking about what the left does, et.
Speaker 5: Cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: I find it very selective that the right loves to
Speaker 1: claim they care about families and might even say, like, oh,
Speaker 1: in theory, I support child tax credit, but when brass
Speaker 1: tax came, I am s any Republicans supporting the extension
Speaker 1: of a child tax credit.
Speaker 3: And I'll just very quickly because I think you're going
Speaker 3: to say some similar.
Speaker 4: As the welfare state has expanded, so has fatherlessness among
Speaker 4: not just black kids, but kids in general.
Speaker 1: Welfare state's been expanding, I mean since Bill Clinton, since
Speaker 1: the ended welfare as we know it. So the idea
Speaker 1: that the welfare state is expanding, I think is belied
Speaker 1: by the evidence.
Speaker 4: It's a pretty start contrast pre LBJ and post LBJ,
Speaker 4: and the trajectory of the black family has been one
Speaker 4: direction since then, and we may disagree.
Speaker 3: About correlation there, but it is clear that since.
Speaker 4: America created a bigger welfare state, fatherlessness has expanded.
Speaker 10: But you have to look at crime for that.
Speaker 13: I mean, when you look at the fact that you've
Speaker 13: put black people in neighborhoods because of redlining, because of
Speaker 13: historical inadequacies, put them in neighborhoods where they have failing schools,
Speaker 13: lack of job opportunities. Anacostia doesn't even have grocery stores
Speaker 13: until like five years ago. And so you set people
Speaker 13: up for failure and then basically say, but it's your fault.
Speaker 8: Let me.
Speaker 5: I want to shift the conversation a little bit because I.
Speaker 10: Want to respond to respond the point.
Speaker 14: I agreed the job the federal government's set policy, right,
Speaker 14: but politicians include a president, they have a purse, they
Speaker 14: have a pen, and they have a pulpit, and politicians
Speaker 14: have no problem using their bully pulpit to say you
Speaker 14: should think this the last.
Speaker 7: Particularly three years.
Speaker 1: Do you really think that if Joe Biden got up
Speaker 1: there and said you should stay married or you like,
Speaker 1: there's so many other factors that go into that, and
Speaker 1: that would solve the problem, is your question.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 14: I take the position that in city after city across
Speaker 14: this country, if every sign that said black lives matter
Speaker 14: said marriage before carriage, and every politician was as resolute
Speaker 14: in talking about the importance of the natural family as
Speaker 14: they are about telling white folks how they should feel
Speaker 14: about black people, I do think that would make it.
Speaker 13: Have you met Donald Trump, like you can't talk about
Speaker 13: family in the left is not my standard.
Speaker 7: But continue, I mean.
Speaker 13: You talked about you know, specific people. Donald Trump isn't
Speaker 13: about the family. I mean, He's had multiple marriages.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden's family is under you know attack right now,
Speaker 1: some of it justified. But he certainly talks about his
Speaker 1: family and you know, uses that as a model of
Speaker 1: clearly fatherhood and his.
Speaker 5: Family is important him. But I think we just have a.
Speaker 1: Very philosophical difference here, which is that you put it
Speaker 1: on more on the individual, and I put it more
Speaker 1: on the systems and the structures that are in place
Speaker 1: that make it very difficult for people to be able
Speaker 1: to forward a family, stay married, get a house, get
Speaker 1: that you know, middle class sort of bourgeois stability that
Speaker 1: is the core of the American dream. So we'll put
Speaker 1: that philosophical ideological difference to the side. Because one piece
Speaker 1: that I'm very curious about is I mentioned before California
Speaker 1: Firmative Action has been dead for a while in terms
Speaker 1: of the UC system, and they've used some proxy workarounds
Speaker 1: that are basically like looking at class instead of looking
Speaker 1: at race. In Texas, they have a program where the
Speaker 1: top ten percent of high school grads at all, you
Speaker 1: know high schools within Texas that they are admitted to
Speaker 1: the UT system, and that has also had an impact
Speaker 1: of It's basically a workaround because you have, you know,
Speaker 1: schools that are really disparate and unequal, as I think
Speaker 1: Michael is aptly pointing out here, And so that also
Speaker 1: allows a disproportionate number I shouldn't say disproportioned, but more
Speaker 1: equivalent number of black and brown students to end up
Speaker 1: in the college system. So do you support those sorts
Speaker 1: of workarounds that are basically trying to achieve the same
Speaker 1: result but not allowed to go at it quite so directly?
Speaker 1: And also we should just say, did this just come down?
Speaker 3: Actually we actually just got talking.
Speaker 4: The Supreme Court ruled the Harvard and U and C
Speaker 4: race base I'm reading from a tweet here the affirmative
Speaker 4: action on a race basis on Constitutional six ' three.
Speaker 4: John Roberts has wrote the majority of.
Speaker 1: So probably a partisan down the line decision there is
Speaker 1: what was expected. But so then this is actually appropriate
Speaker 1: because the next fight will be are those workarounds that
Speaker 1: are trying to get it the same result but using
Speaker 1: proxies like class or geography or whatever. Are those acceptable
Speaker 1: to you or do you don't know?
Speaker 14: Problem about Texas's you know, top ten percent, Because again,
Speaker 14: the problem, the issue to me is not is not
Speaker 14: diversity as a concept. It's the use of race to
Speaker 14: impose a higher standard on some some groups of people
Speaker 14: and to judge other groups of people by a lower standard.
Speaker 14: And all of us know if we were talking about
Speaker 14: this in twenty forty three and black and Hispanic students
Speaker 14: were the ones who are knocking it out of the park,
Speaker 14: who had the highest SAT scores in the country, who
Speaker 14: spent the most amount of time doing homework and all
Speaker 14: those other things, and their numbers were basically capped at
Speaker 14: selected selective universities, we would have.
Speaker 8: A problem with it.
Speaker 10: Yeah, because quotas are illegal.
Speaker 7: But I'm but it's not. It's not.
Speaker 14: It's not just a quoter, because the Asian students will say, look,
Speaker 14: we've been at twenty three percent admittance to Harvard for
Speaker 14: the last however many years, even though we constitute by
Speaker 14: far the largest number of students with the top sort
Speaker 14: of academic dossiers that that applied to the school. So
Speaker 14: my point is, if if we were talking about the
Speaker 14: same thing with black still students where if you look
Speaker 14: at those top two deciles, you know you're talking about
Speaker 14: a significantly larger percentage of students in those death stiles
Speaker 14: than students from other groups.
Speaker 7: We would have a problem with it.
Speaker 14: And I can see Ben Crump right into tweet right now, right.
Speaker 14: You don't mind when we dribble a ball and dance
Speaker 14: for you, but when it comes to breaking into elite universities,
Speaker 14: now you want to cap our numbers.
Speaker 7: So I'm just holding to the same person.
Speaker 13: If we ever get to the day where that happens,
Speaker 13: then yeah, let's redress this. But at this moment, that's
Speaker 13: not what's going on. And I think the idea that
Speaker 13: Harvard and Yale are the only schools where affirmative action
Speaker 13: helps students is false. I mean, all over the country,
Speaker 13: affirmative action helps students get into University of Michigan and
Speaker 13: UVA State.
Speaker 14: Schools selective selective schools. As the school becomes less selective,
Speaker 14: the use of racial purposes tends to decrease.
Speaker 1: So, Michael, similar question to you, which is, as I said,
Speaker 1: it's not like in places where affirmative action has gone away,
Speaker 1: like they've just completely gotten rid of considering any of
Speaker 1: these characteristics and class has been a key workaround. I mean,
Speaker 1: how do you feel about that as a workaround, because
Speaker 1: on the one hand, it does acknowledge that Listen, people
Speaker 1: in West Virginia, they I mean, they weren't enslaved. I
Speaker 1: don't want to put it on the same level. They
Speaker 1: have been screwed over by company downs and all that stuff,
Speaker 1: and historically disadvantage.
Speaker 5: In their own special ways as well.
Speaker 1: So is class a better proxy at this point? Do
Speaker 1: you see it as a huge loss in terms of
Speaker 1: the goals that you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 13: I think incoming class should absolutely be another factor that's considered.
Speaker 13: I have no problem with that, you know, using Appalasia
Speaker 13: as an example, you know, the way they've been wrecked
Speaker 13: by the sacklers, the way that the coal industry has
Speaker 13: absolutely just destroyed towns and families.
Speaker 10: That's absolutely something we should consider.
Speaker 13: And just like considering race, I think considering how people
Speaker 13: economically have lived is something.
Speaker 10: That helps all of this.
Speaker 13: But the idea that we should just you know, carte
Speaker 13: blanche get rid of of, you know, race and history
Speaker 13: as factors, I think it belies a failure for us.
Speaker 14: So I could give a perfect example of of good
Speaker 14: diversity and bad diversity. And for the bad diversity, I
Speaker 14: won't even talk about. Right now, here's a good diversity,
Speaker 14: right And this one does does deal with race. I
Speaker 14: think of the Tuskegee Airmen, right, who were barred from
Speaker 14: being combat pilots for a period of time until you know,
Speaker 14: Congress that we want to make this available to every
Speaker 14: you know, to African Americans, so on and so forth.
Speaker 14: Those men went through the same, if not higher standards
Speaker 14: than their white counterparts. So when you say, well, you know,
Speaker 14: if you're black, you're going to be looked on as
Speaker 14: as less than I actually think that's not the case,
Speaker 14: because no one puts an asterisk next to anything that
Speaker 14: the Tuskegee Airmen did. And actually, when the Air Force
Speaker 14: did their first top gun competition, it was it was
Speaker 14: too It was a Tuski airman who won the first one.
Speaker 14: So to me, that's wider net diversity. But tell the
Speaker 14: whole story. When they came home, they then had to
Speaker 14: sit in the.
Speaker 10: Back of the bus.
Speaker 14: Correct, But that's but that's not the point. This is
Speaker 14: but that's none of You're gonna tell the whole story.
Speaker 14: This is this is I'm making a point about diversity specifically,
Speaker 14: not redlining on any of this other stuff. Right, And
Speaker 14: I don't even dispute your history. I'm just saying that's
Speaker 14: not the point. Here's here's bad diversity, because we all
Speaker 14: know this doesn't just stop at race, it's all different
Speaker 14: types of characteristics. When the Biden administration celebrates the appointment
Speaker 14: of Sam Brenton, right, they said, it's not just oh
Speaker 14: he deals with nuclear rods and all this other stuff.
Speaker 14: It's oh, we're so happy he is a non binary, so.
Speaker 7: On so on individual. Okay, what does that have to
Speaker 7: do with his qualifications?
Speaker 10: Representation matters, right.
Speaker 14: So so, and it does. I'm not saying representation does
Speaker 14: not matter. I'm just saying skill and merit matter more so.
Speaker 14: I prefer the type of diversity, right, that finds people
Speaker 14: who fly planes, not the type of diversity that gets
Speaker 14: people who steal from the airport.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 14: And that's that's why he's no longer in the administration,
Speaker 14: because because they were they were looking for the wrong thing.
Speaker 14: They put their emphastest on the wrong salable. It wasn't
Speaker 14: about Sam Britton's qualifications, it was about his identity. And
Speaker 14: to me, that is the lower bar type of diversity.
Speaker 14: And I'm full wider net not lower bar.
Speaker 4: Well, history was made while we were talking to you guys,
Speaker 4: and while we were actually having this debate, and so
Speaker 4: I will read a pretty big quote here from Chief
Speaker 4: Justice John Roberts and his conclusion and the decision. He says,
Speaker 4: a benefit to a student who overcame racial discrimination, for example,
Speaker 4: must be tied to that student's courage and determination. Or
Speaker 4: a benefit to a student whose heritage or culture motivated
Speaker 4: him or her to assume a leadership role or attain
Speaker 4: a particular goal must be tied to that student's unique
Speaker 4: ability to contribute to the university. In other words, the
Speaker 4: student must be treated based on his or her experiences
Speaker 4: and an individual, not on the basis of race. Many
Speaker 4: universities have for too long done just the opposite, and
Speaker 4: in doing so, they have concluded wrongly that the touchstone
Speaker 4: of an individual's identity is not challenges bested, skills built,
Speaker 4: or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. Our
Speaker 4: constitutional history does not tolerate that choice. So that's where
Speaker 4: Chief Justice John Roberts came down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Michael, let me just I'll give you the last word.
Speaker 1: Since we'll let you respond to Chief Justice John Roberts
Speaker 1: here and then super grateful though for this debate from
Speaker 1: both of you and the contributions that you both made.
Speaker 5: Thank you, go ahead respond.
Speaker 13: I would just say John Roberts is the same person
Speaker 13: who said that since we have a black we had
Speaker 13: a black president, that race should no longer be considered
Speaker 13: in terms of like voting protections and things like that
Speaker 13: when you strip rate the voting rates. We obviously know
Speaker 13: that's not true because we've watched Republicans attack the right
Speaker 13: to vote for African Americans all over the country.
Speaker 10: We have a history.
Speaker 13: I think we've got to tell the whole story about
Speaker 13: that history and not just try to cherry pick things.
Speaker 13: And you do the holistic approach. I think that's when
Speaker 13: you actually achieve the goals that we want.
Speaker 3: It's one of the best debates that I can remember.
Speaker 5: Really enjoyed hearing both of your perspectives. Thank you, telling you,
Speaker 5: thanks for taking the time. So that's the show for today.
Speaker 1: You know, it got a little bit like mixed up
Speaker 1: because we had huge, historic breaking news with the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: Literally while we're recording the panel that ruling coming down,
Speaker 1: So wanted to make sure that we sort of let
Speaker 1: that all air out. Super excited to have Congressman Conna
Speaker 1: in studio with us as well, and I think breaking
Speaker 1: some news there on a number of fronts. So thank
Speaker 1: you guys for watching, Thank you Emily for sitting in
Speaker 1: for Sager. We are actually going to be off a
Speaker 1: couple days early in the week next week, celebrating the
Speaker 1: Fourth of July holiday. I hope you guys all enjoy
Speaker 1: your Fourth of July holiday as well, and we will
Speaker 1: be back here a week from today on Thursday, and
Speaker 1: it will once again let's do it again, Emily, why not.
Speaker 4: I'm so sorry to break it to everyone, but I
Speaker 4: will be back for Sonder because he's off getting married.
Speaker 1: Yes indeed, so we want him to enjoy that, and
Speaker 1: many congratulations to him, and we'll see you guys soon