Speaker 1: Hey guys, Saga and Crystal here.
Speaker 2: Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election,
Speaker 2: and we are so excited about what that means for
Speaker 2: the future of the show.
Speaker 3: This is the only place where you can find honest
Speaker 3: perspectives from the left and the right that simply does
Speaker 3: not exist anywhere else.
Speaker 2: So if that is something that's important to you, please
Speaker 2: go to Breakingpoints dot com. Become a member today and
Speaker 2: you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad free,
Speaker 2: and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
Speaker 3: We need your help to build the future of independent
Speaker 3: news media and we hope to see you at Breakingpoints
Speaker 3: dot com.
Speaker 4: All right, good Wednesday morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. Emily
Speaker 4: is joining us from Waukesha County, Wisconsin, where Elon Musk
Speaker 4: told us the fate of Western civilization was going to
Speaker 4: be decided on Tuesday night. We're now in a post
Speaker 4: Western civilization moment. I for one, am looking forward to it. Emily,
Speaker 4: how's the mood in the post West environment?
Speaker 5: Welcome to the future, Ryn, there are there's a lot
Speaker 5: to talk about from the election results last night, just
Speaker 5: here in Wisconsin. Interestingly enough, where you know to precinct yesterday,
Speaker 5: turnout was really high. We'll get into why that didn't
Speaker 5: make up the difference for Elon Musk and the right
Speaker 5: here in Wisconsin, but also election results that are worth
Speaker 5: talking about in Florida, in Louisiana. So we have all
Speaker 5: kinds of good stuff to get through. At the top
Speaker 5: of the Today's Show.
Speaker 4: Ryan, Yeah, at four o'clock today, I guess the West
Speaker 4: is going to try to make a comeback. Donald Trump
Speaker 4: is going to announce massive tariffs. This is going to
Speaker 4: be Liberation Day. I see a lot of people joking
Speaker 4: that it's liberation from your four oh one k day.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk to Barat rom Mardy, who was
Speaker 4: the number two basically economic official to Biden administration.
Speaker 1: He's going to talk. He's going to give us his take.
Speaker 4: On Trump's tariffs and also his critique of this abundance
Speaker 4: agenda that friend of the Show Ezra Cline, has introduced
Speaker 4: to the United States, along with instantly like seven different
Speaker 4: thing organized around this idea of an abundance agenda.
Speaker 1: Luigi Manngion, alleged to have done.
Speaker 4: Something wrong, is going to get the get death penalty
Speaker 4: if Pam Bondy gets her way, we'll talk about that
Speaker 4: the deportation scandal has broken through. Now to Joe Rogan,
Speaker 4: we're going to play a clip of him asking, wait
Speaker 4: a minute, why are we Are we sure we're supposed
Speaker 4: to be sending like gay Barber's have nothing to do
Speaker 4: with MS thirteen to Dungeons and El Salvador?
Speaker 1: Is that really what we signed up for here?
Speaker 4: I think it's interesting that this has kind of moved
Speaker 4: beyond just the kind of inside the Beltwaigh conversation. Corey
Speaker 4: Booker wrapped up his twenty five hour record breaking takathon
Speaker 4: on the Senate floor, and Jefferson Morley and Oliver Stone
Speaker 4: testified yesterday in front of a House panel on that
Speaker 4: was looking into the new releases as it relates to
Speaker 4: the j k assassination, and the Democrats embarrassed themselves to
Speaker 4: a level that I did not think was even previously achievable,
Speaker 4: And we'll place some of those clips.
Speaker 1: Emily any quick thoughts.
Speaker 5: Wasn't exactly a shining example of republican government from the
Speaker 5: right either at that hearing, because of course there was
Speaker 5: that moment.
Speaker 6: If you haven't seen it yet, go.
Speaker 5: Ahead and google it of Lauren Bobert confusing Oliver Stone
Speaker 5: and Rogerstone, which is very beautiful.
Speaker 4: Anything you know, that's a mistake that can happen. We'll
Speaker 4: let that one slide. So a bunch of elections last night,
Speaker 4: two critical ones in Florida where Republicans were defending, you know,
Speaker 4: seats that Trump had carried by thirty plus points. This
Speaker 4: is Matt Gates and also Mike Wallas, though both went
Speaker 4: into the administration. Matt Gates never made it all the
Speaker 4: way in, but decided he didn't want to take his
Speaker 4: keep his Panhandle seats. So both of those held special elections.
Speaker 4: But let's start in Wisconsin. We can This is Susan Crawford,
Speaker 4: liberal judge wins in just a complete landslide, only just
Speaker 4: only a few months after Donald Trump carried the state
Speaker 4: of Wisconsin. Democrats look poised or liberals or whatever you
Speaker 4: want to call them in this non partisan judial race
Speaker 4: to win some by something like eleven points.
Speaker 1: Here's Susan Crawford the winner.
Speaker 7: Last night Today, Wisconsin nights spended off an unprecedented attack
Speaker 7: on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court.
Speaker 7: And Wisconsin's stood up and said loudly that justice does
Speaker 7: not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.
Speaker 4: So Wisconsin voters are getting used to these supreme these
Speaker 4: pivotal Supreme Court elections. With that victory, the liberals, the Democrats,
Speaker 4: whatever you want to call them, will can the Supreme
Speaker 4: Court going forward. We had significant lines at the polls. Emily,
Speaker 4: we can roll this a one vo here, But Emily,
Speaker 4: what did you see when it came to turnout an
Speaker 4: enthusiasm in the state for this off year election.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I was out here in Waksha County yesterday and
Speaker 5: turnout was you know, the poll workers were talking about
Speaker 5: how high turnout was and you could see it. I mean,
Speaker 5: it didn't really look like a spring Supreme Court election,
Speaker 5: le will turnout, it wasn't quite presidential, but turnout turned
Speaker 5: out to be very high as the information started coming in. Now,
Speaker 5: there was a state Supreme Court race, which in Wisconsin,
Speaker 5: by the way, isn't Republican versus Democrat.
Speaker 6: It's conservative versus liberal.
Speaker 5: And people sort of know that the parties are respectively involved,
Speaker 5: but it's not technically partisan. So there was a race
Speaker 5: back in twenty twenty three where it was also at
Speaker 5: the time breaking spending records. Last night's election turned out
Speaker 5: to be the actual most expensive judicial race in US history.
Speaker 5: About one hundred million dollars poured into this. The conservative
Speaker 5: candidate had a bit of a cash advantage.
Speaker 6: They both were around.
Speaker 5: I think the Susan Crawford who ended up winning was
Speaker 5: around forty five million dollars and Brad Schimmel was somewhere
Speaker 5: north of fifty million dollars. On the Crawford side, you
Speaker 5: had Soros, Pritzker, and I think Reid Hoffman getting involved,
Speaker 5: and then Musk, Dicky Line, some others were involved.
Speaker 6: On the conservative side.
Speaker 5: Musk tried to run his Pennsylvania Playbook because it worked
Speaker 5: when Trump's name was at the top of the ballot,
Speaker 5: and he gave out a couple million dollars to different voters,
Speaker 5: pay people one hundred bucks for signing a petition against
Speaker 5: activist judges. They put a lot into this race, where
Speaker 5: the margin now is about ten points for Susan Crawford.
Speaker 5: She wins, and that's similar to what the margin was
Speaker 5: for the liberal candidate back in twenty three, which is
Speaker 5: all very interesting because it tests a couple of things. One,
Speaker 5: what happens in states like Wisconsin swing state in a
Speaker 5: presidential election, but historically a blue state. What happens ken
Speaker 5: Elon Musk sort of flip a switch, run the playbook
Speaker 5: back every time they want to win a crucial election,
Speaker 5: and it's worth x amount of dollars. At least as
Speaker 5: of last night, the answer to that question is no,
Speaker 5: if Trump's name is not on the ballot, what does
Speaker 5: that do? My source, one of my sources has had
Speaker 5: a really interesting reaction round last night, said that Republicans
Speaker 5: slipped or conservative slipped in rural areas and quote, only
Speaker 5: Trump himself truly brings out the working class. So I
Speaker 5: think that's going to prove to be a really significant
Speaker 5: challenge for Republicans, Republicans conservatives in states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania particular,
Speaker 5: going forward.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it was reported Musk had spent seventeen million
Speaker 4: dollars and that several days, with several days still left
Speaker 4: to go in the elections, of the final total certainly
Speaker 4: is going to be a lot more than that. And
Speaker 4: then there were the famous you know, one hundred bucks
Speaker 4: if you sign this petition and get other people to
Speaker 4: just sign it, which is sometimes he was careful to
Speaker 4: uh not break election bribery laws, other times he was
Speaker 4: not at all careful, and now the Attorney General is
Speaker 4: kind of looking into whether or not he was he's breaking.
Speaker 1: The law there.
Speaker 4: He also did a lottery where he gave out, you know,
Speaker 4: I think two million, you know, million dollar checks to
Speaker 4: two different people who participated in this thing.
Speaker 1: And you're right, it wasn't it wasn't enough.
Speaker 4: And so there is a there's a theory on the
Speaker 4: left which I want to get your take on, because
Speaker 4: I wonder if this is going to become something that
Speaker 4: gets talked about in Trump's circles. The theory is is
Speaker 4: a little bit crazy, but it's just just a theory,
Speaker 4: and it's it's about it's not about an election being stolen,
Speaker 4: but it's about what Trump thinks about twenty twenty four.
Speaker 4: So there's a theory among some liberals who you know,
Speaker 4: saw the anecdotes about Musk and Trump spending election night
Speaker 4: together and Trump being just utterly mystified by Musk's uncanny
Speaker 4: ability to know ahead of time exactly how the numbers
Speaker 4: were going to come out in like Pennsylvania and Michigan,
Speaker 4: and you know, Musk, very very early in the night
Speaker 4: was like, this is done.
Speaker 1: Here's why it's done. Here are the numbers that are
Speaker 1: going to come in.
Speaker 4: Now, he can easily, from my perspective, have a program
Speaker 4: that analyzes turnout in different key precincts, compare it to
Speaker 4: twenty twenty, and then run a projection and just analyze it.
Speaker 4: This basically the same way that The New York Times does,
Speaker 4: but a little bit more sophisticated, Like I don't think
Speaker 4: it requires him to have any inside information or to
Speaker 4: be inside like the vote counting machines. The theory on
Speaker 4: the left is that Trump doesn't understand that and thinks
Speaker 4: that Musk had something going in Pennsylvania, and that that
Speaker 4: has something to do with the deference that he has
Speaker 4: been giving to Musk, which requires some extraordinary explanation, like
Speaker 4: just because it's so kind of obviously not great for
Speaker 4: him necessarily to be co presidenting with this deeply unpopular guy.
Speaker 4: So they think it has something to do with that.
Speaker 4: They're like that musk knew something, did something. Now, that
Speaker 4: doesn't mean he did. It just means that Trump might wonder.
Speaker 1: If he did.
Speaker 4: Now watching elon Musk face plan, like if it was
Speaker 4: true that Trump thought Musk had some magic up his sleeve, Well,
Speaker 4: there was no rabbit in the hat in Wisconsin. So
Speaker 4: I wonder if this is going to cool things between
Speaker 4: Musk and Trump and between Musk and the Republican Party.
Speaker 5: It's a really interesting question because I think one of
Speaker 5: the reasons Elon Musk started pouring millions into this race,
Speaker 5: not that you know, fifteen million is is that much
Speaker 5: to him, but roughly fifteen million is that much to him.
Speaker 5: But I think one of the reasons he started pouring
Speaker 5: money into it is in order to prove a point
Speaker 5: that he could be a net like he's an asset
Speaker 5: to the Trump administration and to the MAGA movement. Even
Speaker 5: as Doge starts slipping in the polls, Musk himself has
Speaker 5: approval or favorability rating that starts slipping in the polls.
Speaker 5: Then you're able to go into Wisconsin, flip the switch
Speaker 5: with the money, with the pack, with the rallies, with
Speaker 5: the get out the vote operation that maybe looks like
Speaker 5: Pennsylvania twenty twenty four, and all of a sudden, you
Speaker 5: give Trump more and more incentive to never ditch you.
Speaker 5: I think there's probably part of that. I mean, there's
Speaker 5: the Tesla case, but I don't think Elon Musk really
Speaker 5: that's pending or could be pending before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: I don't think that matters too much to Elon Musk,
Speaker 5: to be honest, I don't think that's the business that
Speaker 5: they would get out of opening Tesla dealerships in Wisconsin.
Speaker 5: I don't think is going to dramatically change Elon Musk's
Speaker 5: net worth.
Speaker 4: But I think it would be a hilarious move to
Speaker 4: try to take over the country just to open up
Speaker 4: more Tesla dealerships in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: I'd be amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that would be something. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 5: here in this is where it was also really interesting.
Speaker 5: So like here in conservative, relatively suburban counties, they were
Speaker 5: feeling Republicans Conservatives were feeling really good yesterday because of
Speaker 5: the high turnout. They had the sense that maybe Elon
Speaker 5: Musk had actually done something very very impressive with the
Speaker 5: petitions against quote unquote activist judges. And you know that
Speaker 5: actually high turnout had conservatives feeling good. But as David
Speaker 5: Shore recently posited, when you look at the twenty twenty
Speaker 5: four election results, if those low propensity voters had turned
Speaker 5: out in higher numbers, if there had been higher turnout
Speaker 5: in the presidential election, Trump would have won by more.
Speaker 5: And here in Wisconsin, if there had been higher turnout
Speaker 5: that was on the level of a presidential which you're
Speaker 5: never going to get for Supreme Court race, you could
Speaker 5: end up with Republicans narrowing the gap, Conservatives narrowing the gap.
Speaker 5: Right now, it's ten points. You know, it's not to
Speaker 5: say Wisconsin is, you know, the same thing as Massachusetts.
Speaker 5: For example, voter ID passed by sixty two percent and
Speaker 5: about actually about sixty three percent. That's a higher margin
Speaker 5: than Susan Crawford, interestingly enough, so you know it just
Speaker 5: I think your point is a really interesting one that
Speaker 5: there was this idea Elon Musk himself could be a
Speaker 5: singular force, almost like Trump, who can go into these
Speaker 5: states and flip the switch. And if Trump thinks that's
Speaker 5: the case, or if Elon Musk believed that was essential
Speaker 5: to Trump's view of him, then they're going to need
Speaker 5: to put a whole lot more work into it because
Speaker 5: it did not go their way here in Wisconsin. By again,
Speaker 5: they didn't change the margin from twenty twenty three. Maybe
Speaker 5: narrowed it a little bit when all of a sudden done,
Speaker 5: but ten points, so not much changed, even though there
Speaker 5: was higher turnout.
Speaker 6: It just it wasn't enough.
Speaker 4: And for many decades, Democrats have been the party of
Speaker 4: working class voters, and working class voters are less likely
Speaker 4: to have their IDs just as a as a percentage,
Speaker 4: and you know, small percentages can change. You know, if
Speaker 4: you're a college educated mom in the suburbs, you've got
Speaker 4: your ducks in a row.
Speaker 1: If you're not, you're less likely to.
Speaker 4: And so for many years Democrats defended the ability of anybody. Hey,
Speaker 4: here's your address, show you tilly bill, whatever, just sign
Speaker 4: your name.
Speaker 1: If you're registered, you can vote. Now.
Speaker 4: It's taken Republicans so long to start winning on voter
Speaker 4: ID it's going to end up perhaps hurting their voters more.
Speaker 1: As you said with me, the David Shore analysis that.
Speaker 4: If you have voter suppression of any degree across the board,
Speaker 4: you're more likely to suppress working class voters.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 4: Anyway, that's just an interesting kind of irony there, and
Speaker 4: I think it's also why you're finally seeing Democrats kind
Speaker 4: of roll over on voter ID like, Okay, you know what,
Speaker 4: our voters all have ID now, so fine.
Speaker 1: We'll go ahead and do it.
Speaker 4: And that's the thing you have to remember parties are
Speaker 4: amoral vehicles for power, Like they don't have any principles
Speaker 4: on anything. The only principle is they want to win,
Speaker 4: and so they don't have a principle on what the
Speaker 4: actual you know, identification you need. Trump said the way
Speaker 4: that he wrote his executive order recently around around election reform,
Speaker 4: So if there was a way to read it that
Speaker 4: would say you could only vote if you had a passport,
Speaker 4: I think that was poorly written and I don't think that's.
Speaker 1: Going to hold up.
Speaker 4: But if that were of the law put into place,
Speaker 4: Democrats would win in a landslide, probably, Like Democrats are
Speaker 4: more likely probably to have valid passports than Republicans at
Speaker 4: this point, which is which is a shocking testament to
Speaker 4: the realignment of the parties that the Democrats have more
Speaker 4: upper class, upper middle class voters than in the past.
Speaker 4: Speaking of working last district, there are two in Florida,
Speaker 4: so let's let's let's move there. The net you put
Speaker 4: up a four Randy fine deeply unpopular, apparently local local
Speaker 4: election official. Seems like even Republicans don't really like the guy.
Speaker 4: He ended up winning by ten points against Josh Wheel
Speaker 4: in a race that you know went you know, thirty
Speaker 4: plus for Trump. So this ended up, you know, it
Speaker 4: ended up being close ish, but it's not like you know,
Speaker 4: and Democrats spent what tens of millions of dollars on
Speaker 4: this seat, Like enormous amounts of money were raised and
Speaker 4: spent to try to make this a competitive race. And
Speaker 4: it's much closer than Republicans would like to see. And
Speaker 4: I know that there were some Republicans in Washington who
Speaker 4: were actually hoping for a close race so that it
Speaker 4: would be like a brushback pitch to Musk.
Speaker 1: They wanted a close race, but not but they didn't
Speaker 1: want to lose it.
Speaker 4: I don't think we have an element for this, but
Speaker 4: in the Panhandle and Matt Gates's seat, the Democrats actually
Speaker 4: overperformed the other Florida special election, still lost because it
Speaker 4: was such such a massively Republican district. And one of
Speaker 4: the theories I saw kicking around last night curious for
Speaker 4: a take on this, is that Democrats should just not
Speaker 4: even do any do any like advertising during the special election,
Speaker 4: because if you're a Democrat in an off year, like
Speaker 4: you're locked in, like you're googling and finding when the
Speaker 4: races are, who's running and you know, making sure you're
Speaker 4: ready to vote, and you're going out and you're going
Speaker 4: from the Tesla protest right to the right to the
Speaker 4: ballot and making sure you making sure you cast it.
Speaker 4: And the more salience you increase, the more likely as
Speaker 4: Republicans are going to learn about it and come out
Speaker 4: of vote. Now, this doesn't bode well for four years
Speaker 4: from now, but it does bode well for Democrats for
Speaker 4: a midterm. So what do you make of this massive
Speaker 4: Democratic overperformance in Florida, which is which is lining up
Speaker 4: with their overperformance in special elections not just in Wisconsin
Speaker 4: but around around the country.
Speaker 1: And while you're talking, you can put up a five.
Speaker 4: Over the weekend in Louisiana, they were the right put
Speaker 4: up four constitutional amendments and all four of them were
Speaker 4: beaten back.
Speaker 6: And there was a Pennsylvania race that was what now,
Speaker 6: two weeks.
Speaker 4: Ago, two weeks an Amish country in Lancaster, the Democrat
Speaker 4: actually won in an area that is definitely not Democratic country.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I'm looking at this posts by Matthew
Speaker 5: Klein right now Political Report, and he suggested last night
Speaker 5: one reason that Florida's first district might end up relatively
Speaker 5: better for Democrats than Florida's six, despite getting no money
Speaker 5: and attention. He says education Florida one has a bachelor's
Speaker 5: degree attainment of thirty three point three percent. In Florida six,
Speaker 5: it's twenty seven point one percent. More college education equals
Speaker 5: more politically engaged and also more democratic. So I think
Speaker 5: what we're seeing in some of these early results is
Speaker 5: just that new reality be underscored. And actually it makes
Speaker 5: the point that you were just making about voter idea
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 6: But that's like a very very.
Speaker 5: Interesting shift for Republicans to start dealing with in some
Speaker 5: of these different places. And it looks like, I mean,
Speaker 5: some of this really does look like twenty seventeen, some
Speaker 5: of those races we were watching back then early to
Speaker 5: see what would happen in the twenty eighteen midterms that
Speaker 5: went well for Democrats. So I'm hesitant to read too
Speaker 5: much into this being like a specific rebuke of Doge
Speaker 5: and Elon Musk, but it was a failure, at least
Speaker 5: in Wisconsin. It was absolutely a failure for Elon Musk,
Speaker 5: particularly because he was like a personality that almost injected
Speaker 5: himself onto the palate. So I think it's a reference
Speaker 5: on Trump. I think it shows that you're similarly. Democratic
Speaker 5: voters are very energized, the Democratic base is very energized.
Speaker 5: I just I guess I just don't think that's totally
Speaker 5: different than where things were also in twenty seventeen. Right now,
Speaker 5: So you know, I think Musk has a lot to
Speaker 5: prove for Trump. And I'm not saying that he's like
Speaker 5: a super popular figure, just that some of this is
Speaker 5: there's still a lot of hostility to Trump in America.
Speaker 5: There's still a lot of hostility to Maga Republicanism and
Speaker 5: to the agenda. And I'm sure the tariff and market
Speaker 5: volatility aren't helping with that. But I think it's more
Speaker 5: like culture, the sort of culture war quote unquote resistance
Speaker 5: that a lot of Democrats were mustering back in twenty
Speaker 5: seventeen around the Russian investigation. Now, I think Doge and
Speaker 5: Musk are the mobilizing Maybe baits is the right way
Speaker 5: to put it, like that's what's getting people into the streets.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so let's move on to the tariffs. Donald Trump
Speaker 4: at four pm today will announce Liberation Day. So we're
Speaker 4: going to have Barat Romamurti to talk about that. Our
Speaker 4: today is l day, Liberation Day here in the United States.
Speaker 4: Liberation from what remains slightly unclear. This Fox News clip
Speaker 4: suggests that you might need to liberate yourself from your
Speaker 4: attachment to your four oh one k Let's roll this.
Speaker 8: And those four oh one k people who are depending,
Speaker 8: those retirees, all of that, just talking plane speak with them. Look,
Speaker 8: when this nation used to go to war, people in
Speaker 8: this country would support the war effort with their materials
Speaker 8: at home and making things for weaponry and all of that.
Speaker 8: We got to do one hundred percent buy in over
Speaker 8: this bumpy period.
Speaker 1: Just communicate. You can put up B two.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump will be speaking precisely at four pm from
Speaker 4: the Rose Garden, which is the moment that the bell
Speaker 4: will be ringing the New York Stock Exchange. He knows that, uh,
Speaker 4: he chose that for a reason. He's gonna sit back
Speaker 4: and watch the chaos all day as uh And even
Speaker 4: if you don't have money in there, it's kind of
Speaker 4: gonna be.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be. It's gonna be a ride, that's for sure.
Speaker 4: So uh So to talk about this, we're joined by
Speaker 4: barat Ram Murty, who was the uh deputy director of
Speaker 4: the nee C at the at the Biden administration, and
Speaker 4: and I think from the left as as good a
Speaker 4: person as we could get to be sympathetic to the
Speaker 4: broad idea behind tariffs and behind rebuilding America's manufacturing class.
Speaker 4: There was a strong faction you know, there's a strong
Speaker 4: faction in the Democratic Party within the Bide administration that uh,
Speaker 4: that aligns with that, that that broad idea like that. Yes, uh,
Speaker 4: neoliberalism was awful. It hollowed out our country. We need
Speaker 4: to we need to be able to build things again.
Speaker 4: Uh So from a sympathetic perspective, when we get your
Speaker 4: take on where on where you see this going? And
Speaker 4: so the question that the genuine question I have, like
Speaker 4: because I don't know the answer to it, is on
Speaker 4: the one hand, you've got what Robert Leitheiser, who is
Speaker 4: pretty well respected kind of trade policy maker, who was
Speaker 4: the USTR rep for Trump in the first termament is
Speaker 4: still his seems to be his senior advisor on this question.
Speaker 4: Democrats have always said to me, Leitheiser, this guy knows
Speaker 4: what he's doing and he has the best interest of
Speaker 4: American workers in manufacturing at heart. On the other hand,
Speaker 4: you have Trump who seems to think that tariffs are
Speaker 4: just a way to rake in a whole lot of
Speaker 4: money for the treasury at no cost to anybody. And
Speaker 4: so and it seems unclear where this is going, Like
Speaker 4: so from people in this policy world, where do you
Speaker 4: where do you see this going?
Speaker 1: Like, what's what's going on here? Who's in control? Is
Speaker 1: it Lightheiser? Is it Trump's kind of amalpination of what
Speaker 1: it is?
Speaker 5: Yeah, go ahead, Emily Frank can just jump into say
Speaker 5: it's actually a big deal that Trump did not bring
Speaker 5: Bob Laiteizer back into this administration.
Speaker 6: He has Navarro around him, but reportedly a.
Speaker 1: Lot of this sort of advising or no he's not.
Speaker 5: He's he's not formally in the administration, And it's kind
Speaker 5: of a sore spot for the like tariff the protectionists
Speaker 5: on the quote unquote new right, because he was seen
Speaker 5: as somebody who could potentially be even in a Commerce
Speaker 5: or Treasury secretary role and who wasn't.
Speaker 6: But speaking of.
Speaker 5: Commerce secretary, reportedly Howard Lutnik is driving a lot of
Speaker 5: Trump's very particular strategy here, which is interesting.
Speaker 1: So anyway, sorry, no, thank you, that's very very helpful.
Speaker 4: Like I still see Lightheiser a lot commenting on this
Speaker 4: and like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but that, but that's a very good amendment. Yes
Speaker 1: he's not, like in the room.
Speaker 9: Yeah, Well, first of all, happy Liberation date.
Speaker 1: Happy Liberation Day. Celebrate.
Speaker 10: So look, you're right. I think that there is a
Speaker 10: strategic case. Both a national security and ECONO make a
Speaker 10: security case for tariffs, but you have to use them
Speaker 10: in a certain kind of way for them to make sense.
Speaker 10: So the entire theory of how tariffs work, right, is
Speaker 10: that it's a tax on imports.
Speaker 9: It's a way to think about it.
Speaker 10: And so by driving up the cost of importing goods
Speaker 10: into the United States, it encourages investors and other businesses
Speaker 10: in the United States to look for domestic options instead.
Speaker 9: That's the basic theory.
Speaker 10: Right, because those will be relatively cheaper to what's coming in.
Speaker 10: But if the goal of all of this is to
Speaker 10: revive certain domestic industries, which is a goal that I support,
Speaker 10: Let's say you want to build more washing machines in
Speaker 10: the United States, and the problem is that you can
Speaker 10: import really cheap washing machines from abroad right now, and
Speaker 10: nobody's going to build them here because of that. Think
Speaker 10: about this from the perspective of an investor right who's saying,
Speaker 10: you know what, I have a bunch of money. Should
Speaker 10: I put it into making it a washing machine manufacturing
Speaker 10: or should I put it into this other goal or
Speaker 10: this other.
Speaker 9: Goal, well, washing machine manufat.
Speaker 10: Actually maybe there's an opportunity now because the tariff means
Speaker 10: that the important good has been more expensive. That has
Speaker 10: to be in place for years in years for that
Speaker 10: and with certainty for that investor to make a decision
Speaker 10: that this is a good use of my money. And
Speaker 10: the problem with the Trump tariffs is that they're completely
Speaker 10: unstrategic and there's no plan for how long they're going
Speaker 10: to be in place and what the triggers are for
Speaker 10: having them go up or go down or anything like that.
Speaker 10: So it doesn't provide any certainty to any investor in
Speaker 10: the United States about what to do. I mean, there
Speaker 10: have been instances where Trump says on one day, I'm
Speaker 10: imposing a twenty percent tariff on everything from Canada, and
Speaker 10: then two days later is saying, actually, the Canada tariffs
Speaker 10: are off because I had a good conversation with the
Speaker 10: Prime minister, or because they decided to do something on
Speaker 10: Fentanel completely unrelated to the goal of economic revitalization in
Speaker 10: the United States. So it's not going to have the
Speaker 10: intended impact because there's no discipline, there's no certainty, and
Speaker 10: there's none of the other supports that you would need
Speaker 10: to actually revive domestic industry in the United States.
Speaker 5: I want to ask about first in the Senate, we
Speaker 5: can go through some of these next elements. We can
Speaker 5: start with B three. This is Donald Trump going after
Speaker 5: Tim Kaine, who has sought to perhaps put legislation together
Speaker 5: that would undermine the Canada tariffs.
Speaker 6: And obviously, if people are familiar with the.
Speaker 5: History of tariffs, that is very much an Article one power.
Speaker 6: So kind of sympathetic to this myself.
Speaker 5: But Lisa Murkowski, we can put B four up on
Speaker 5: the screen, has said indicated that she's sympathetic to this.
Speaker 5: She says, QUO, I'm looking at my state's interests and
Speaker 5: it seems to me that his resolution makes sense about
Speaker 5: the Kane resolution. And then finally, if we put B
Speaker 5: five up on the screen. Donald Trump has been unloading
Speaker 5: on Republicans like Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski, on True Social
Speaker 5: as well, who have indicated they are not on board
Speaker 5: with the particular the particulars of the Canada tariff agenda.
Speaker 5: I'm sure Rand Paul is somebody who very much believes
Speaker 5: that this is a congressional responsibility and is opposed a
Speaker 5: tariffs period. So what do you make of the pushback
Speaker 5: here on the Canada tariffs in particular, because it seems
Speaker 5: it's it's easy to push back on the tactic as
Speaker 5: you just kind of laid out why, the unpredictability maybe
Speaker 5: undermining it.
Speaker 6: But if you were looking at Canada.
Speaker 5: Tariffs, would you suggest any sort of walls that should
Speaker 5: be built around industry with Canada at all? Because most
Speaker 5: of the left are saying now Canada is an ally
Speaker 5: leave Canada alone. I think from a sort of war
Speaker 5: and Usk position, there's a decent argument for some targeted
Speaker 5: tariffs here.
Speaker 9: Yeah, again, there are two interesting things.
Speaker 10: Number one they're talking about and across the board tariff
Speaker 10: right on every single thing. And you know, if there's
Speaker 10: a case to be made on dairy, you know Canada
Speaker 10: imposes a tariff on US dairy that's exported to Canada.
Speaker 10: Maybe we need to put something on our imports from
Speaker 10: Canada to try to let the playing field there.
Speaker 9: There's always interesting.
Speaker 10: Contain right now a big issue, right you know, is
Speaker 10: there something about autos and auto parts? Those are sector
Speaker 10: bi sector, and you would want to figure out what
Speaker 10: is a nuanced tariff that makes sense given what the
Speaker 10: tariff is that the other country is imposing and the
Speaker 10: relative cost of the goods and across the twenty percent
Speaker 10: across the board twenty percent tariff or by definition, is unstrategic.
Speaker 10: It's not based on protecting specific sectors. It's not about
Speaker 10: evening out the playing field on specific products that are
Speaker 10: subject to a higher tariff. The other important thing in
Speaker 10: that is that the entire basis for the tariffs that
Speaker 10: Trump is laying out is fentanyl. It's not about protecting
Speaker 10: domestic industry, growing dairy production in the United States, making
Speaker 10: sure that domestically sourced autoparts are being used instead of
Speaker 10: autoparts from Canada. It's about apparently, fentanyl coming across the border.
Speaker 10: So again, if you're a domestic producer and saying, should
Speaker 10: I put more money into dairy or into domestic auto
Speaker 10: parts if the bas for the tariff is fentanyl coming
Speaker 10: across the border, and a week later, Trump says, guess what,
Speaker 10: They've come reached an agreement with me on fentanyl because
Speaker 10: they put more Mounties at the border. Then what are
Speaker 10: you going to do? You know that you haven't that
Speaker 10: you haven't achieved the economic goal of doing that. So
Speaker 10: that's the thing. Hour by hour, and I'm not exaggerating, literally,
Speaker 10: hour by hour, the size of the tariff changes, the
Speaker 10: rationale for the tariff changes, the explanation for what it
Speaker 10: would take to remove the tariff changes, and there's just
Speaker 10: no way that any economic actor can respond to those
Speaker 10: tariffs by trying to make the investments that are necessary
Speaker 10: to actually revitalize American manufacturing and production.
Speaker 4: And now the Biden administration left some of Trump's China
Speaker 4: tariffs in place. Why was that and why were those
Speaker 4: tariffs worth worth leaving?
Speaker 10: I mean, look, there are one of the key purposes
Speaker 10: of tariffs is to correct a trade imbalance. And if
Speaker 10: you look at what China is doing, obviously they have
Speaker 10: much much lower labor and environmental state in China, they
Speaker 10: can manufacture things much more cheaply because they pay people
Speaker 10: two dollars a day and they don't care how much
Speaker 10: pollution they put into the water into the air. The
Speaker 10: other thing is that they have enormous state subsidies. Right
Speaker 10: in many cases, state run companies but other ones that
Speaker 10: are getting huge amounts of money from the government, which
Speaker 10: again makes it much easier for them to produce things
Speaker 10: at lower cost and then what's called dump them into
Speaker 10: other foreign countries at very low cost to start dominating
Speaker 10: those markets. In the case of the China tariffs, who
Speaker 10: want to say there are certain things that we think
Speaker 10: are important to have in the United States, steel production,
Speaker 10: aluminum production. If we have a tariffy in China that
Speaker 10: says imports of those particular products are going to be
Speaker 10: a little bit more expensive so that we can protect
Speaker 10: domestic production, that makes both economic sense and national security
Speaker 10: sense from my perspective.
Speaker 9: So yeah, it made sense to keep those in place.
Speaker 11: Though.
Speaker 10: You know, we did an intensive review of every single
Speaker 10: tariff in twenty twenty one twenty twenty two when inflation
Speaker 10: was quite high, and said do all of these make
Speaker 10: sense or not? And we decided that a lot of
Speaker 10: them made sense and protected important interests. But remember that
Speaker 10: was on something like zero point eight percent in imports
Speaker 10: from China those tariffs. Trump is talking about one hundred
Speaker 10: percent of imports from China, from the EU, from Canada,
Speaker 10: from Mexico. Those are our largest trading partners and so
Speaker 10: basically it's just a guarantee that costs you're going to
Speaker 10: go up. But I mean, one way to think about
Speaker 10: it is that it's basically a sales tax on every
Speaker 10: single good that is important in the United States.
Speaker 5: Leaving those tariffs in place mean that they have now
Speaker 5: been in place for almost I mean, we're coming up
Speaker 5: on a decade, not quite a decade, but we're coming
Speaker 5: up on a decade the China tariffs. And I'm curious
Speaker 5: because I've seen some libertarian or I should maybe just
Speaker 5: say like anti protectionist economists, which is just saying economist basically, Yeah,
Speaker 5: push back and say, well, the China tariffs haven't worked.
Speaker 5: There's your case study. China tariffs have been in place
Speaker 5: for a long time. There hasn't been significant protection of
Speaker 5: American industry. It hasn't you know, revitalized American manufacturing. And
Speaker 5: so what's your response to that. Are the China tariffs,
Speaker 5: you know, proof of concept or proof of concept in
Speaker 5: the other direction against the I guess efforts of the
Speaker 5: ambitions of the terrors.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 10: The thing about tariffs, and honestly with all policy making,
Speaker 10: is that you have to compare it against a world
Speaker 10: in which they didn't exist, and it's hard to know
Speaker 10: exactly what that world looks like. So for those who
Speaker 10: say things haven't gotten haven't improved as much as you
Speaker 10: would have liked, my question to them is what would
Speaker 10: things look like if we hadn't had them in place?
Speaker 9: How bad would things have gotten without those in place?
Speaker 10: And so, you know, the folks at the White House
Speaker 10: and the US Trade Representative and others who were most
Speaker 10: involved in all of this, they did a very careful
Speaker 10: review and determined that it was worth it overall to
Speaker 10: keep them in place because again, they were on a
Speaker 10: relatively small portion of goods and they're directly related to
Speaker 10: Chinese activities that they felt like were basically unfair trade practices. So,
Speaker 10: you know, I think that there's a strong case for
Speaker 10: keeping them. I think that there are more opportunities again
Speaker 10: if Trump had come out and said I want to
Speaker 10: really focus this on China, which is engaged in all
Speaker 10: sorts of unfair trade practices that's hurting US manufacturing. And
Speaker 10: there's one really good example of that, by the way,
Speaker 10: there's something called the Deminimus exception, which is basically something
Speaker 10: that allows China to bring goods into to export goods
Speaker 10: into the United States that are below a certain dollar value,
Speaker 10: and those things are not subject to any tariff, and
Speaker 10: they're not subject to any customs inspection. And you know,
Speaker 10: all the TMU and all that stuff that comes into US,
Speaker 10: the cheap goods comes in through that exception. And it's
Speaker 10: a way that a lot of fentanyl comes into the
Speaker 10: United States.
Speaker 9: Noubt right, right.
Speaker 10: Trump initially said I'm going to do something about this,
Speaker 10: I'm going to close the difference, and then he pulled
Speaker 10: it back. You know, one thing that actually would have
Speaker 10: made a lot of sense. If you care about fentanyl,
Speaker 10: if you care about US domestic production, if you care
Speaker 10: about protecting US consumers, all of that would have made sense.
Speaker 9: But it's the one thing that he hasn't done when
Speaker 9: it comes to tariffs.
Speaker 1: Do you know why?
Speaker 9: I have no idea?
Speaker 12: Like was it?
Speaker 4: I mean I know that right after he did it,
Speaker 4: you started having people complain that, like other the thing
Speaker 4: that they had ordered, like wasn't showing up fast enough?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 9: Could it?
Speaker 1: Was it really that quickly that he felt the pressure?
Speaker 1: You think or I don't know?
Speaker 9: It looks yeah. The thing about.
Speaker 1: Trump, well, Bezos would have loved it.
Speaker 4: It's because it's protectionism for Amazon, well, well they bring
Speaker 4: a lot of crap Inso you know, the thing is
Speaker 4: with Trump, and again there's a case for tariffs if
Speaker 4: it is done in a thoughtful, discipline, long term perspective
Speaker 4: kind of way.
Speaker 10: And all of those things are the opposite of Trump
Speaker 10: right in terms of he'll have a good conversation with
Speaker 10: a world leader and totally change his policy towards that person.
Speaker 10: You know, some event will happen, and you know they'll
Speaker 10: they'll capture somethentyl coming across the border and say this
Speaker 10: is an example of what I'm talking about.
Speaker 9: The tariffs are going to go up. Right.
Speaker 10: There's no predictability, and I know that sounds boring, but
Speaker 10: that's really important if you're trying to make business decisions
Speaker 10: and make investment decisions over a long term horizon.
Speaker 4: The counter argument on China would be that it was
Speaker 4: true for many years that they were, you know, the
Speaker 4: source of like all cheap labor, et cetera. But now
Speaker 4: they're so automated and their factories are so efficient that
Speaker 4: you know, if you want cheap labor, you're going maybe
Speaker 4: to like Vietnam or somewhere else whereas China now is
Speaker 4: competing because they've invested so much, you know, with our
Speaker 4: trade imbalance into their manufacturing capacity. There was this crazy
Speaker 4: video going around of US production of one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty five millimeter shells and Chinese production of one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty five millionaire shows the Chinese one just whipping
Speaker 4: through with these robots, and in the US it's dudes
Speaker 4: with the goggles and the spray paint and the gloves
Speaker 4: just and it's like, WHOA, if these countries ever go
Speaker 4: to war, I don't have much of doubt which one
Speaker 4: is going to be able to produce more shells long term.
Speaker 4: So how much of how true is it still of
Speaker 4: China that it's really a labor question?
Speaker 10: Yeah, you're right, a lot of the quote unquote low
Speaker 10: skill manufacturing has migrated to Southeast Asia in particular.
Speaker 9: But it gets to a point about.
Speaker 1: Those Chinese companies often though, right.
Speaker 10: Yes, what kind of manufacturing do we want in the
Speaker 10: United States? Is it important that we literally make every
Speaker 10: kind of product here for either strategic economic or national
Speaker 10: security purposes? Or is it the case that we both
Speaker 10: because they're good jobs and because they're important, we want
Speaker 10: to really focus on high end you know, sophisticated manufacturing, right,
Speaker 10: And I think our argument would be, we really got
Speaker 10: to make sure that we're doing that stuff or we
Speaker 10: have the capacity to do that stuff in the United States.
Speaker 10: And if you look at one of the big things
Speaker 10: that we did in the BUYD administration was was the
Speaker 10: Chips Act, Right. We invested a lot of money and
Speaker 10: having domestic production of chips. You know, mycroprocessors that go
Speaker 10: into almost everything these days, cars, appliances, a lot of
Speaker 10: electronic products, and we saw during the pandemic that the
Speaker 10: lack of access to those because a lot of the
Speaker 10: foreign factories shut down, meant that our domestic car manufacturers
Speaker 10: couldn't make new cars because these cars have dozens and
Speaker 10: dozens of these ships in them. And what happened to
Speaker 10: the price of cars? They went up because supply had
Speaker 10: gone down. We all remember how expensive both new cars
Speaker 10: and use cars were in twenty twenty one and twenty
Speaker 10: twenty two. So we made a decision it's important to
Speaker 10: have that production in the United States. We put a
Speaker 10: lot of money into it, and now we have TSMC,
Speaker 10: the world's biggest chip maker, opening a fab in Arizona.
Speaker 10: Micron's doing a big thing in Idaho. So we've seen
Speaker 10: that those kinds of efforts can result in improved manufacturing
Speaker 10: in the United States, but it has to be a dedicated,
Speaker 10: long term effort.
Speaker 9: You can't.
Speaker 10: It's not just doing the tariffs, it's also supporting it
Speaker 10: with public funds.
Speaker 4: Any response to that, Emily, I know that right kind
Speaker 4: of now hates the Chips Act, Is that right?
Speaker 5: I mean, well, yeah, I think a lot of people
Speaker 5: read see the Chips Acts as something that has ultimately
Speaker 5: been vindicated because they're China hawks and know how important
Speaker 5: it is to entre some of that. But I know
Speaker 5: we're going to get into this and the abundance discussion.
Speaker 5: But my response to that would be, there were some
Speaker 5: examples of hurdles that Democrats added to the Chips Act
Speaker 5: that companies push back on that were sort of at
Speaker 5: the time DEI related and added costs and steps that
Speaker 5: you know, were making the process inefficient for them on
Speaker 5: showing some of that tech.
Speaker 6: I don't know if you have a response to that,
Speaker 6: but I think and.
Speaker 4: I would add to that a bunch of buybacks that
Speaker 4: the companies did, Like the companies would get the subsidies
Speaker 4: and then quickly like just basically funnel the money directly
Speaker 4: to shareholders.
Speaker 1: How do you balance those two criticisms?
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, I would say there're were a lot of
Speaker 10: criticisms when the rules for this Chips program were announced,
Speaker 10: because it said, for example, you got to pay workers
Speaker 10: a certain amount of money and provide certain types of
Speaker 10: labor protections. The big one that attracted a lot of
Speaker 10: attention was if you're gonna get this money, you have
Speaker 10: to provide some kind of affordable childcare for the people
Speaker 10: who work there. And actually Ezra Kline wrote a whole
Speaker 10: piece in The New York Times called the problem with
Speaker 10: everything bagel liberalism right, put everything on the bagel, and
Speaker 10: it slows things down, and this was his example.
Speaker 9: At the federal level.
Speaker 10: Well, all of that, I think has been proven to
Speaker 10: be misplaced, because all of the money in that program
Speaker 10: has gone out the door. All of the major companies
Speaker 10: that we wanted to be building in the United States
Speaker 10: met the requirements and have started building. As I mentioned,
Speaker 10: TSMC and Micron and Intel are all taking money and
Speaker 10: building stuff in Columbus and in Arizona and an upstate
Speaker 10: in New York and so on.
Speaker 9: And they met the requirements.
Speaker 10: It didn't turn out to be that hard for them
Speaker 10: to say, oh, you know what, we'll have a care
Speaker 10: center at our factory so that we can.
Speaker 9: Actually have a diverse workforce.
Speaker 10: So I actually think that that's in a good example
Speaker 10: of how this abundance critique has been off the mark,
Speaker 10: because when we when push came to shove, the attraction
Speaker 10: of the federal dollars was enough that they were able
Speaker 10: to meet the requirements. And look, I wish that we
Speaker 10: had put stronger buyback protections in there. That was a
Speaker 10: big negotiation during Build the Republicans. You know, we don't
Speaker 10: want to tell.
Speaker 1: How our friends Mansion and Cinema were friendly on that.
Speaker 10: Yeah, the Republicans, to her credit, I think Secretary of
Speaker 10: Commerce Raymondo, who was responsible for administering the program, tried
Speaker 10: to get some of that into the rules, you know,
Speaker 10: not the actual statute, but the rules for the program.
Speaker 10: It probably wasn't as effective as getting it a law
Speaker 10: that said if you take this money, no buybacks for
Speaker 10: five years period, but then take the money.
Speaker 9: Yeah, but you know that's the thing.
Speaker 1: We're not here to build things.
Speaker 4: We are here to just take money and gred it
Speaker 4: to our sharehold But look, you misunderstand the nature of
Speaker 4: our project.
Speaker 10: I think that that is, you know, go to mush
Speaker 10: this together with the abundance debate. There's I get frustrated
Speaker 10: a lot about the various inefficiencies in these types of projects, right.
Speaker 1: And you know.
Speaker 10: What what one person will call, you know, uh produce
Speaker 10: that you know, providing support for an important domestic industry
Speaker 10: is another person's corporate welfare.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 10: And I hate the fact that basically some percentage of
Speaker 10: these public dollars are going to be wasted in the
Speaker 10: forum of you know, going into buybacks or higher executive compensation.
Speaker 9: We should be doing.
Speaker 10: I think it is up to us to do our
Speaker 10: very very best to make sure that every single dollar
Speaker 10: is spent as efficiently as possible. And I think that
Speaker 10: means fighting against some of the process, you know, a
Speaker 10: completely extraneous requirements that come in. It also means fighting
Speaker 10: against corporate interests who want to use this money in
Speaker 10: ways that aren't compatible with the public interest.
Speaker 9: It requires doing both.
Speaker 10: And I you know, this whole debate that has emerged
Speaker 10: about abundance, it seems to be kind of like a
Speaker 10: false choice, right, But yes, we all we should try
Speaker 10: to pair down these steps and these requirements to really
Speaker 10: do the things that we want to focus on. But yes,
Speaker 10: we should also make sure that we're we have an
Speaker 10: understanding of corporate power and how they seek to distort
Speaker 10: these processes and how they seek to take public dollars
Speaker 10: and not do public interested things, and figure out ways
Speaker 10: of stopping that too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, if you're if there are two complaints to choose from,
Speaker 4: and one of them is a corporation just taking the
Speaker 4: money and handing it to its shareholders without building anything.
Speaker 4: And the other complaint is that you're asking them to
Speaker 4: build a subsidized daycare center or not even necessarily subsidized,
Speaker 4: which is a daycare center you're convenient to the factory.
Speaker 4: To get angry at the childcare part just feels like
Speaker 4: reactionary right wing populism, or not even populism ractionary, just
Speaker 4: right wing stuff. And it's weird to see kind of
Speaker 4: ezra on on that side, like Emily right. If you
Speaker 4: had if those are the two things to complain about,
Speaker 4: wouldn't the populist complain about the corporate executives who were
Speaker 4: like walking away with the money, like I wish that
Speaker 4: was easy, like the thing that landed easy more easily
Speaker 4: with the public.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean also, I think that's why some on
Speaker 5: the right look back at Chips and say, because there
Speaker 5: were Republicans at the last minute who had been supportive
Speaker 5: of the legislation and ultimately voted against it, and populist republicans,
Speaker 5: they should say, and they're probably very happy. They may
Speaker 5: not say this publicly, but they're they're probably very happy
Speaker 5: to have the manufacturing, the Chips manufacturing come to the
Speaker 5: United States and probably say, in the aggregate, it was
Speaker 5: the cost benefit analysis works out on the side where
Speaker 5: the benefits outweighed the costs.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we're not China. We can't just do good things.
Speaker 4: We have to buy off our corporate class to ask
Speaker 4: them to give us permission.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and I would lets say one last thing, which
Speaker 10: is that again, I'm not defending every single government program
Speaker 10: as perfectly efficient, but it's not like the private sector
Speaker 10: does everything perfectly efficiently, right, And so you know, and
Speaker 10: whenever people will complain to me about, oh, you know,
Speaker 10: I had to wait in line at the DMV, or
Speaker 10: my IRS refund is taking a week to come to me,
Speaker 10: it's like, have you ever dealt with Comcast? Have you
Speaker 10: ever dealt with any of these companies? That had to
Speaker 10: complaint with them. You know, are they perfect at dealing
Speaker 10: with your issues? The point is it's hard to do
Speaker 10: some of these things. These are complicated things. There's going
Speaker 10: to be some inefficiency in the process. There's going to
Speaker 10: be some slippage. It's up to us to minimize that
Speaker 10: as much as we can. But we should hold ourselves
Speaker 10: to a reasonable standard that's at least roughly equivalent to
Speaker 10: what the private sector does, and we should be clear
Speaker 10: eyed about the fact that there's a lot of inefficiency
Speaker 10: there too.
Speaker 4: Well, let's talk more about this in the next segment
Speaker 4: that where we're going to go deeper into the debate
Speaker 4: over this abundance agenda. Ezra Klin has been making the
Speaker 4: media rounds for his new book on a Bunnets and
Speaker 4: is getting very little pushback. So we're going to give
Speaker 4: him a little bit of that here today. The tiniest
Speaker 4: little poke that he got came from the pod Save Bros.
Speaker 4: Who characterized some of the criticism that's coming his way
Speaker 4: from the left. But if you'll notice in this answer,
Speaker 4: he doesn't really address it.
Speaker 13: But let's roll this clip here. You mentioned some of
Speaker 13: the critique from the left. I'm sure you've read all
Speaker 13: of it, or read.
Speaker 1: Most of it.
Speaker 13: I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr teach Out review
Speaker 13: of Abundance. I wanted to get your reaction to one
Speaker 13: part of that because I think it summarizes a lot
Speaker 13: of the criticism on the left. I mean, you mentioned
Speaker 13: the Bernie side. There's also a warn S critique as well,
Speaker 13: and she writes I still can't tell after reading Abundance
Speaker 13: whether Klein and Thompson are seeking something fairly small, bore
Speaker 13: incorrect we need zoning reform, or non trivial and deeply
Speaker 13: regressive we need deregulation, or whether there's room within Abundance
Speaker 13: for anti monopoly politics and a more full throated unleashing
Speaker 13: of American potential. Matt Brunig has a similar critique. He
Speaker 13: says it would be a huge mistake to sideline whatever
Speaker 13: focus there is on welfare state expansion and economic egalitarianism
Speaker 13: in favor of a focus on administrative burdens in construction.
Speaker 13: It's not a book about like monopolists power practices in
Speaker 13: corporate concentration.
Speaker 9: So I get that.
Speaker 13: I guess to the question that teacher, i'd ask, is
Speaker 13: there room in Abundance for a critique of concentrated economic
Speaker 13: power and anti monopoly politics and all that.
Speaker 14: Trying to think about the nicest way to say this,
Speaker 14: my friends, in the whole problem is oligarchy part of
Speaker 14: the party, and I believe a good part of our
Speaker 14: problems are oligarchy. But there are certain kinds of problems
Speaker 14: here then willing to see, and certain kinds they're not
Speaker 14: as willing to see. So in housing, I find a
Speaker 14: lot of them get obsessed with this idea that private
Speaker 14: investors are buying up a bunch of rental housing and
Speaker 14: this is an extremely small part of the market right now,
Speaker 14: and it is just not the main problem in housing,
Speaker 14: but because it is the villain they are comfortable having,
Speaker 14: it is where they want to put their focus. Kamala
Speaker 14: Harris I was very excited when she brought out her
Speaker 14: big plan to build three million units of housing, but
Speaker 14: our plan never would have achieved anything like it. It
Speaker 14: did have a big thing about trying to do something
Speaker 14: about this private investor up housing issue, though, so you
Speaker 14: can really get I think, taken off the track. A
Speaker 14: thing I found like really interesting in Zephyr's review was
Speaker 14: that is it something good and small like zoning reform,
Speaker 14: and like, try doing zoning reform if you think it's small,
Speaker 14: right or something bad like the regulation Okay, interesting, right, Yeah.
Speaker 14: Deregulation is a word that I think shuts liberals down
Speaker 14: a bit, and it shouldn't a lot of what we're
Speaker 14: pointing out in the book is it The player that
Speaker 14: is often most regulated is not the market, it's the
Speaker 14: government itself. If you want to understand why the government
Speaker 14: can't build public housing effectively, I mean, in many ways
Speaker 14: the federal government building public housing is now functionally illegal.
Speaker 14: It's been regulated out of possibility. If you want to
Speaker 14: know why we didn't build California high speed rail, if
Speaker 14: you want to know why it's so expensive build affordable housing
Speaker 14: in a lot of liberal jurisdictions, when you trigger public money,
Speaker 14: it is because of the regulations we put on government.
Speaker 4: Now, one of the key arguments in Ezra's book is
Speaker 4: that liberals have kind of wrapped the government, tied the
Speaker 4: government up with too much regulation, and that's keeping it
Speaker 4: from allowing the abundance to flow. And one of the
Speaker 4: ten poll case studies that he uses in the book
Speaker 4: is the billions that were appropriated by Congress to lay
Speaker 4: out royal broadband and the lack of any royal broadband
Speaker 4: resulting from that. There was a viral a John Stewart
Speaker 4: clip that where he kind of lays out this this
Speaker 4: byzantine and ridiculous process. When we come out of this clip,
Speaker 4: we're going to talk to the Biden administration official who
Speaker 4: was probably the most intimately involved in this project, to
Speaker 4: get the kind of the other side of the story
Speaker 4: of what happened here. But first let's roll some of
Speaker 4: this clip from the John Stewart interview. And if you
Speaker 4: haven't seen this, this the whole thing's kind of funny
Speaker 4: and worth watching, even though there's a glaring hole in it.
Speaker 9: Go ahead.
Speaker 11: So for a royal broadband, for instance, what you end
Speaker 11: up having is a fourteen stage process, Like there's a
Speaker 11: period where the Commerce Department needs to drop a map
Speaker 11: of which parts of the country don't have the right
Speaker 11: amount of broadband, and then there's a challenge period on
Speaker 11: the map and da da da da da da da,
Speaker 11: and states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money,
Speaker 11: and again this passes. At the end of twenty twenty one,
Speaker 11: they have time. By the end of twenty twenty four,
Speaker 11: three have got into.
Speaker 1: The end of the process.
Speaker 11: They were trying.
Speaker 4: Three of these fifty six Yes, end of the process,
Speaker 4: meaning they've actioned it, they've built it, or they've now
Speaker 4: they've gotten done.
Speaker 11: Of course I didn't mean they thought that, John, Sorry,
Speaker 11: I was so okay, I confused you. They just got
Speaker 11: to the point where in theory they could get the
Speaker 11: money to build.
Speaker 1: They had been approved for the money.
Speaker 9: Yes, yes, basically Okay.
Speaker 4: So we have a running kind of series on this
Speaker 4: program where we try to treat our viewers like adults,
Speaker 4: and so we're going to do that today. And so
Speaker 4: we're joined by Barat Rommerty, who was a top Biden
Speaker 4: administration economic policy official, deputy director of NED.
Speaker 1: Is that any c any c.
Speaker 4: And to contextualize you in the spectrum kind of a
Speaker 4: Warrenite like former what Elizabeth Warren person and one of
Speaker 4: the people that Wall Street would be angry at the
Speaker 4: Biden fort saying, you know, you're ruining what should be
Speaker 4: a glorious administration by bringing in all these people who
Speaker 4: are so skeptical of corporate power and being so being
Speaker 4: so rude to us, and so as it goes on
Speaker 4: at length in that in that interview and in his book,
Speaker 4: laying out really what is an outrageous and absurd process,
Speaker 4: Like people who want royal broadband, would like Congress to
Speaker 4: appropriate money and would like broadband to be built so
Speaker 4: that they can plug their laptop in work from home
Speaker 4: in a nice wooded area, or they can you know,
Speaker 4: or if you live there.
Speaker 1: You can stream.
Speaker 4: People want one the damn broadbands and then they didn't
Speaker 4: get it. So what is what is being left out
Speaker 4: of this question? Why did they do something so dumb?
Speaker 9: Yep? Well, I would say a couple of things.
Speaker 10: Number One, if you look at both the answer that
Speaker 10: Ezra gave on Podz and his answer there, the clear
Speaker 10: implication is silly liberals. They designed this complicated fourteen step
Speaker 10: process all by themselves because they're obsessed with making sure
Speaker 10: that every single group in the United States has an
Speaker 10: opportunity to weigh in, and they don't prioritize actually building
Speaker 10: things as somebody who was directly involved in both negotiating
Speaker 10: this and then ultimately try and implement it. A lot
Speaker 10: of those steps, almost all of them came from Republicans. Now,
Speaker 10: remember this came out of the Bipartisan Infrastructural Law. You
Speaker 10: needed sixty votes in the Senate to get that through.
Speaker 10: So you needed to work with Republicans in order to
Speaker 10: get the bill.
Speaker 4: Passed because Mansion and Cinnemon insisted on pulling it out
Speaker 4: of reconcising exection. For those who remember that whole process,
Speaker 4: the reconciliation would have meant fifty votes. Democrats do it
Speaker 4: on their own. Mansion and Cinema insist on pulling it out.
Speaker 4: Now you need Republicans go ahead.
Speaker 10: So we're stuck in the situation where we need to
Speaker 10: get at least ten Republican votes. Okay, and where did
Speaker 10: those specific steps come from? For example, Ezra pointed out,
Speaker 10: you needed to complete this map, not actually the Commerce Department.
Speaker 10: The SEC had to complete a map which says, here's
Speaker 10: where broadband is and is in the entire United States
Speaker 10: of America. We told them, look, it's going to take
Speaker 10: at least eighteen months for the SEC to complete this map.
Speaker 10: It's a complicated process to literally figure out whether every
Speaker 10: location in the United States has broadband or not.
Speaker 9: But Republicans insisted that that map.
Speaker 10: Be comed completed before we even allocated a single dollar
Speaker 10: to a state to build this stuff. And the challenge
Speaker 10: process he brought that up to who pushed for the
Speaker 10: challenge process.
Speaker 9: The big incumbent internet providers.
Speaker 10: Why did they push for that because the thing that
Speaker 10: they are most afraid of is the federal government spending
Speaker 10: money to build the new broadband that would directly challenge
Speaker 10: and compete with the broadband that they're already offering in
Speaker 10: certain places. So they said, we got to make absolutely
Speaker 10: sure that not a dollar of federal money is spent
Speaker 10: to build infrastructure where we already provide some broadbands service.
Speaker 10: And so we need a lengthy challenge process to make
Speaker 10: sure that we can say this household you say doesn't
Speaker 10: have internet access, actually we provide it with internet access.
Speaker 10: So of course that takes time too, or we even
Speaker 10: planned to. We have an expansion plan such that in
Speaker 10: the next year we will be providing service to it.
Speaker 10: So a lot of these steps came from the industry
Speaker 10: working through this set of negotiating Republicans to put these
Speaker 10: hurdles into place. And now, so the next question, not
Speaker 10: to anticipate what you're saying, but the dexter is probably
Speaker 10: why do we agree to do it if we thought.
Speaker 9: This was such a silly process. Two reasons.
Speaker 10: Number one, we already had ten billion dollars through an
Speaker 10: earlier bill that we passed that was moving much more
Speaker 10: quickly because it was a democratic only bill operating through
Speaker 10: the Treasury Department that was providing internet service. And that
Speaker 10: bill has already provided connections to hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 10: households that really needed it. So we said, we have
Speaker 10: this bridge basically a programs providing internet in the short term.
Speaker 10: We can afford to do a longer term process. And
Speaker 10: if you look, we weren't out there saying this is
Speaker 10: a shovels in the ground tomorrow type program. From the
Speaker 10: very beginning, we said, this is about connecting households by
Speaker 10: twenty thirty and doing it in a thoughtful, step by
Speaker 10: step way. If we're up to me, we would have
Speaker 10: done it faster. But the point is number one, Republicans
Speaker 10: were the ones who put those barriers into place. And
Speaker 10: number two, it's still this isn't an example of government waste.
Speaker 10: It's not like we've spent forty billion dollars and we've
Speaker 10: built and nothing has happened. The money's just sitting there
Speaker 10: in the treasury waiting to be deployed until we have
Speaker 10: completed these steps.
Speaker 1: So republic go ahead. Yeah, Emily job Right.
Speaker 5: I was just jump in because I could maybe channel
Speaker 5: Ezra and Derek Thompson here and say, you know, they
Speaker 5: look at the red the blue states. The book focuses
Speaker 5: on what's the difference between California and Texas, And my
Speaker 5: question based on that would just be to what extent
Speaker 5: did Democrats or did the I guess left's push for
Speaker 5: more regulation, which I think is being defended by some
Speaker 5: people as abundance comes out for totally reasonable justifications, meaning
Speaker 5: you know, what case of which regulations do you want.
Speaker 6: To get rid of?
Speaker 5: And in this process you want to get rid of
Speaker 5: some of these good regulations. So what from your perspective
Speaker 5: did the left, Like what culpability does the left have
Speaker 5: in the broadband case, more specifically for extending the process
Speaker 5: if anything? Or was it really I mean many such
Speaker 5: cases of industry getting these carveouts that make us wildly
Speaker 5: less than efficient on a bipartisan basis, But what did
Speaker 5: the left do that may have extended the process here?
Speaker 10: I would say that in terms of that fourteen step
Speaker 10: process that Ezra highlighted, those steps came from Republicans. And
Speaker 10: the reason I feel confident saying that is because the
Speaker 10: Democrats went into those negotiations with a bill, a bill
Speaker 10: that was broadly supported in the Democratic Caucus by Senator
Speaker 10: Klobachar and Representative Clyburn that was a much faster acting
Speaker 10: bill and didn't have any of these fourteen steps included
Speaker 10: in it, and those steps came in in their negotiations
Speaker 10: with Republicans.
Speaker 9: I will admit there were things.
Speaker 10: That that we in the Biden administration and the left
Speaker 10: more generally were pushing for in that process.
Speaker 9: And let me give you a couple examples.
Speaker 10: Number One, we wanted to make sure that if we
Speaker 10: were going to build this broadband that it was actually
Speaker 10: going to deliver affordable service.
Speaker 9: To middle class families at the end of it.
Speaker 10: So we put in a regulatory requirement that when states
Speaker 10: applied for this money, they had to show how this
Speaker 10: progress a process was going to produce broadband for that
Speaker 10: was affordable to middle class people. Why did we do
Speaker 10: that because we had stories from across the country, especially
Speaker 10: at the state level, where states had spent a lot
Speaker 10: of money trying to build out broadband to rural areas
Speaker 10: and the broadband got built and then what ended up happening.
Speaker 10: These are by definition areas where there's only a single provider,
Speaker 10: so they were charging one hundred and fifty two hundred
Speaker 10: dollars two hundred fifty dollars a month for service.
Speaker 1: How useful is that people either pay or you don't
Speaker 1: get it?
Speaker 10: Yeah, and how useful is that to people if you
Speaker 10: spent a bunch of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband
Speaker 10: and then people can't really afford it. So this was
Speaker 10: actually pushed for by John Tester not exactly here the left,
Speaker 10: because he'd had this experience in Montana try to serve
Speaker 10: a lot of rural households. So that requirement came in,
Speaker 10: and of course that's going to take a little bit
Speaker 10: of extra time, and it's going to take a little
Speaker 10: bit of extra process for states and for working with
Speaker 10: their private sector partners to say, here's our actual plan
Speaker 10: for making sure that a family that makes forty five
Speaker 10: thousand dollars a year can afford this service. But to me,
Speaker 10: there's no point in building out infrastructure if people can't
Speaker 10: afford it at the end of the day and actually
Speaker 10: use it. So I'm not going to say that there's
Speaker 10: nothing that we put into it, but in terms of
Speaker 10: the actual the length of time that it took to
Speaker 10: get from step one to the end. Almost all of
Speaker 10: those steps came from the Republican negotiators.
Speaker 4: And when we say Republican negotiators, we're really talking about
Speaker 4: the cable and you know, the ISP's internet providers.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to yes.
Speaker 10: A lot of it, especially the stuff about the challenge
Speaker 10: process was because of corporate interest wanting to make sure
Speaker 10: that we didn't quote unquote overbuild.
Speaker 9: That's the term that they use a.
Speaker 4: Lot, because they're very concerned about waste expire dollars, right exactly.
Speaker 5: Which, by the way, is interesting as Republicans become dominant
Speaker 5: in rural America, right, Like, that's a fairly interesting political
Speaker 5: dynamic as well, that there's still Republican politicians are still
Speaker 5: overly responsive to that industry completely.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 10: But the other thing is that look, as I said,
Speaker 10: there's a lot of examples in West Virginia and Montana
Speaker 10: in Maine of states trying to build out broadband and
Speaker 10: it didn't actually produce usable broadband for people. And the
Speaker 10: thing is, once you put a little bit of money
Speaker 10: into it and you start building it out, and then
Speaker 10: let's say they don't complete the project, they really have
Speaker 10: you over a barrel, because they're going to say, don't
Speaker 10: you want to give us another ten million dollars to
Speaker 10: actually complete.
Speaker 9: This thing at this point? Right?
Speaker 10: And so a lot of these folks were burned by
Speaker 10: efforts at the state level. So I want to give
Speaker 10: them some credit and say they were actually focused in
Speaker 10: some cases on let's make sure that we think about
Speaker 10: this and do it efficiently at the end of the day.
Speaker 10: And I think that that sort of gets into the
Speaker 10: broader abundance debate, right, because sometimes efficiency means fast.
Speaker 9: I agree with that.
Speaker 10: But the same folks who who will say let's do
Speaker 10: this as quickly as possible, will come back a year
Speaker 10: later and say, why did you waste so much money?
Speaker 9: Right, because you went so fast.
Speaker 4: So the abundance argument from Ezra and Derek Thompson's zero's
Speaker 4: in a lot on housing, because like I think that's
Speaker 4: the that's the place where you can really kind of
Speaker 4: nail some of these nimbi's who were just you know,
Speaker 4: throwing up obstacles because they legitimately don't want something built
Speaker 4: like right near where they live. And but then he
Speaker 4: extends that to the whole country and to other policies
Speaker 4: without explaining how those are similar, similar situations, and never
Speaker 4: talking about the role of corporate power and corporate and
Speaker 4: corrupt and what is effectively corruption, Like it's not Democrats
Speaker 4: and when they're drawing this bill were not stupid, they
Speaker 4: were corrupt, and Republicans were not dumb. They didn't didn't
Speaker 4: not know what was going to happen here. They were
Speaker 4: taking money from corporations who got a vested interest in
Speaker 4: having this play out in a certain way. Have you
Speaker 4: have you seen other instances of the way that corporate
Speaker 4: power and corporate concentration contort and distort policymaking and make
Speaker 4: it look like and produce regulations that the public is like, god,
Speaker 4: stupid liberals, but they're actually designed by corporations to protect
Speaker 4: their own.
Speaker 1: Monopolies. Absolutely, and look any other examples.
Speaker 10: I'm more familiar with a federal level because that's where
Speaker 10: I've spent my life in policymaking, and I don't want
Speaker 10: to deny the idea that, especially at the state level,
Speaker 10: there's lots of barriers that are imposed and maybe a
Speaker 10: lot of them come from sort of house interesting, yeah,
Speaker 10: but look on housing in particular. Let me just make
Speaker 10: a point, if the if The issue is as as
Speaker 10: in that pod safe clip, you want to do zoning reform.
Speaker 9: You know, as you said, I worked for Senator Warren.
Speaker 10: We wrote a big comprehensive housing bill and introduced it
Speaker 10: in twenty eighteen, long time ago, and a key part
Speaker 10: of that was federal money for new housing, but a
Speaker 10: big pot of money for zoning reform, basically a race
Speaker 10: to the top process. That said, any state or any
Speaker 10: locality that changes zoning requirements gets access to this big
Speaker 10: pot of money and they can use it to build
Speaker 10: new parks and roads and whatever. So that's been on
Speaker 10: our radar and something we've been pushing for for a
Speaker 10: long time. I think the question is are they talking
Speaker 10: about more than that? And let's think about what those
Speaker 10: barriers are. Are we talking about labor laws, laws that
Speaker 10: prevailing wage laws, Davis Bacon, you know, child labor laws.
Speaker 10: You know, we could build a lot faster if we
Speaker 10: allowed fourteen year olds to work. Is that something that
Speaker 10: we should be in favor of? You know, environmental protections.
Speaker 10: Are we going to be more willing to accept dirty
Speaker 10: water or polluted air because we want to build faster?
Speaker 10: I think those are the actually hard questions and it's
Speaker 10: not clear to me what their answer is on those
Speaker 10: types of questions. To your point, at the federal level,
Speaker 10: in almost every instance, the actor that is slowing down
Speaker 10: the government from acting is a corporate interest. You know,
Speaker 10: there's this thing called the Administrative Procedures Act. It basically
Speaker 10: governs how the federal government can issue new guidelines and rules.
Speaker 10: And the way it works is that you have to
Speaker 10: issue if you're trying to do something, you have to
Speaker 10: issue something a proposed rule. You give the public an
Speaker 10: opportunity to comment on it. The agency has to come
Speaker 10: back and respond to those comments and make sure that
Speaker 10: incorporate those comments into whatever their final rule is.
Speaker 9: And if you don't, you can get sued.
Speaker 10: Who are the people who are submitting comments saying this
Speaker 10: goes too far, this is too quick, this is inefficient.
Speaker 10: Almost always corporate interests in their lobbyists. Regular people like
Speaker 10: you and me aren't sitting there looking at the Federal
Speaker 10: Register and submitting a twenty five page comment on a
Speaker 10: potential rule. And who is it who's suing the government
Speaker 10: saying you didn't quite follow our comments and therefore you
Speaker 10: should stop doing this rule. It's corporate interests, Time after time,
Speaker 10: so I agree with the broader project of abundance here.
Speaker 10: I would love for the government to move more quickly.
Speaker 10: I would love to build more housing, more energy, everything,
Speaker 10: But we should be clear eyed about what it is
Speaker 10: that stops that from happening, at least at the federal level,
Speaker 10: and more often than not, it's incumbent corporate interests who
Speaker 10: like things the way that they are right.
Speaker 5: Now, Well go ahead, Emily, Well yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 5: was just gonna say, I think sometimes like this sexually,
Speaker 5: something that miss is missing on the right a lot,
Speaker 5: which is this obvious reality that corporations sometimes will push
Speaker 5: for regulations, like there was a point where Facebook came
Speaker 5: out totally in favor of Section two thirty because they
Speaker 5: knew they could handle the regulatory burden of Section two
Speaker 5: thirty always that any other potential competitors, not really that
Speaker 5: they have potential competitors, but hypothetically could not handle.
Speaker 6: And so I think that's true.
Speaker 5: I just wonder if you think that the left is
Speaker 5: sometimes overly responsive to those pushes from corporations because there's
Speaker 5: this there's habitual, I guess, reflex to say, well, yes,
Speaker 5: it's appropriate for the government to step in, and then
Speaker 5: they just kind of stack up on top of each
Speaker 5: other in ways that are inefficient.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I'm just curious that, like, genuinely what you think of that.
Speaker 10: Look, I don't want to make it seem like I'm
Speaker 10: trying to absolve the left from culpability here.
Speaker 9: There is.
Speaker 10: I can think of a handful of instances in my
Speaker 10: personal experience where there is a bit of an obsession
Speaker 10: over doing the process right. I think people think of them, so,
Speaker 10: you know, on the left, thinking themselves as the good
Speaker 10: government people, people who want government to work, and they
Speaker 10: sometimes conflate that with the idea that that means that
Speaker 10: we should take into account every single piece of feedback
Speaker 10: that we get and make sure that we're accounting for
Speaker 10: every single possible argument that anybody could have with something,
Speaker 10: and then trying to come up with something, and that
Speaker 10: is a deterrent to speed and in many cases efficiency. Look,
Speaker 10: I'm from the side of the party that wants the
Speaker 10: government to do more stuff, and so I think that
Speaker 10: it's really important that we show that government can move quickly,
Speaker 10: can move efficiently, and I agree with all of those
Speaker 10: end goals that I think the diagnosis of what is
Speaker 10: stopping us from doing that is lacking a little bit
Speaker 10: in the abundance books because they're putting it all on
Speaker 10: sort of liberal interest groups. And again at the federal level,
Speaker 10: that has not been my experience.
Speaker 9: It has been in.
Speaker 10: Many cases both the right and the left being very
Speaker 10: attentive to corporate interests and to incumbent large corporations in
Speaker 10: particular in what they're pushing for.
Speaker 4: Kind of a separate but related question, isn't this all
Speaker 4: mooted by starlink?
Speaker 1: Like can't they just do?
Speaker 4: Like it feels like that that product is getting quite good,
Speaker 4: and it's like, you know what, maybe actually give up
Speaker 4: on the whole laying broadband everywhere?
Speaker 1: Look, or am I wrong about Like I'm.
Speaker 9: Not a I think that.
Speaker 10: You know, we did an extensive amount of analysis about
Speaker 10: the right way of serving these households, and if you
Speaker 10: look at both a technical analysis and sort of a
Speaker 10: basic cost benefit analysis, trying to lay fiber optic cable
Speaker 10: to as many of these households as possible is the
Speaker 10: right way to go. It saves money in the long term,
Speaker 10: it's basically a future proof product. You do it now,
Speaker 10: you don't have to come back in five or ten
Speaker 10: or fifteen years. And dig it up and do it
Speaker 10: all over again. Whatever development's happened in the world of
Speaker 10: delivering internet to people having fiber optic cable going to
Speaker 10: these houses can do that right now.
Speaker 9: Starlink.
Speaker 10: Sure it is a pretty effective product, but number one,
Speaker 10: it hasn't been shown to be able to consistently deliver
Speaker 10: the kinds of speeds that you need to do what
Speaker 10: you talked about, stream video, do telemedicine, all the stuff
Speaker 10: that we actually want to do to make sure that
Speaker 10: rural communities are fully linked into the economy. Second of all,
Speaker 10: I don't know about you, but I would have real
Speaker 10: concerns about putting internet access for ten, fifteen, twenty million
Speaker 10: households completely in the hands of one guy who's already
Speaker 10: shown that he's willing to take the network on and
Speaker 10: offline depending on his own personal whims and so I
Speaker 10: think that that's a concern too.
Speaker 1: And also there's a limit to how much junk you
Speaker 1: can have flying up there completely. There's that too.
Speaker 9: There is.
Speaker 4: So fascinating conversation, and I guess last question here, in
Speaker 4: responding to some of the pushback that they've been getting,
Speaker 4: they've said, all right, we're gonna come out with a
Speaker 4: little bit more substantive analysis that takes into account some
Speaker 4: of these critiques of corporate power, which like, okay, maybe
Speaker 4: that could have been in the book, but I will
Speaker 4: take it. We'll take it now. One of the things
Speaker 4: they said, well, well, okay, the vibes from the administration
Speaker 4: were such that they weren't really pushing that hard and
Speaker 4: they were throwing up obstacles that they weren't necessarily required
Speaker 4: to throw up by the statute.
Speaker 1: Yep, I'm sure you.
Speaker 4: Saw that argument well as somebody who watched it happen, like.
Speaker 1: Is that true?
Speaker 4: Like why didn't why didn't you guys push harder despite
Speaker 4: the law that was in place?
Speaker 10: Yeah, I mean, look, I I'm trying not to take
Speaker 10: offense at that as somebody who after the statute was passed.
Speaker 10: In the broadband case, with all these steps, we would
Speaker 10: have regular meetings with the FCC and the Commerce Department
Speaker 10: and others, and the entire purpose so those meetings was
Speaker 10: how do we speed this up? Okay, so FCC, you're
Speaker 10: saying you need eighteen months to finish this map, can
Speaker 10: you do it in twelve months? If we, for example,
Speaker 10: go out there and encourage all of the states and
Speaker 10: all of the big interliners to you know, out they
Speaker 10: had to submit data about where they have coverage.
Speaker 9: You know, they had ninety days to do it.
Speaker 10: Let's push them, if they can voluntarily, to do it
Speaker 10: in thirty days so you can start reviewing this stuff
Speaker 10: more quickly. We did that, and we got the incumbent
Speaker 10: ISPs to actually submit data more clickly, more quickly than
Speaker 10: they otherwise would so and we did cut that timeline down. So, look,
Speaker 10: I think there is I'm not going to defend every
Speaker 10: step of this process. We were stuck with a statute
Speaker 10: that was less efficient than it could have been. But
Speaker 10: the idea that the administration didn't care about moving quickly,
Speaker 10: I think is false. And I think that from Secretary
Speaker 10: Raymondo onto the chair of the FCC on down, there
Speaker 10: was a real commitment to try and get this done
Speaker 10: as quickly as possible.
Speaker 4: Right, well, thanks so much for joining us up.
Speaker 1: Next, we're going to talk about Luigi. They're trying to
Speaker 1: kill them, that's right, and utter outrage. How can they
Speaker 1: do this?
Speaker 15: All?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: Stick around?
Speaker 5: Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday announced that she was instructing
Speaker 5: prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangioni in
Speaker 5: the murder trial over Brian Thompson. We could put the
Speaker 5: first element up on the screen. Pam Bondi did this
Speaker 5: with a statement yesterday that said Mangioni's murder of Brian Thompson,
Speaker 5: an innocent man and father of two young children, was
Speaker 5: a premeditated, cold blooded assassination that shocked America. After careful consideration,
Speaker 5: I have directed federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty
Speaker 5: in this case as we carry out Trump's agenda to
Speaker 5: stop violent crime and make America safe again. Now, Olivia
Speaker 5: Ryan gold Over at the Free Press has some feelers
Speaker 5: out in Mangioni world, in the world of Luigi fandom,
Speaker 5: and she checked in on some of the most intense
Speaker 5: Luigi followers. We could put the next element up on
Speaker 5: the screen. Who were, you know, pretty pretty disappointed by
Speaker 5: a Pam Bondi's announcement, although that's not entirely surprising. One
Speaker 5: thing that I wanted to ask you about, Ryan is
Speaker 5: if your sense is that the Mangioni heads are more
Speaker 5: left or right, I think it's pretty obvious that, like broadly,
Speaker 5: a lot of the outpouring of support for ledged murderer
Speaker 5: Luigi Mangioni on videotape. Obviously, in this case shooting Brian
Speaker 5: Thompson in cold blood. A lot of the sport is
Speaker 5: I mean, I think it's broadly coming from the left.
Speaker 6: At the same time, I.
Speaker 5: Wonder how much of this also was coming from like
Speaker 5: anti establishment, Maga online, Maga world.
Speaker 6: It's kind of interesting.
Speaker 1: Was it cold blood? I think is there's some hot
Speaker 1: bloodedness going on there too.
Speaker 5: Definitely hot bloodedness, cold blood in the circumstance, the physical
Speaker 5: circumstance where Brian Thompson was just walking on the sidewalk,
Speaker 5: they were like fighting or anything.
Speaker 1: Yeah, fair enough.
Speaker 4: No, he himself is from the like what do you
Speaker 4: call it, like the Kaczynski libertarian right, Yeah, roughly, and there's.
Speaker 1: A lot of that. There's a lot of anti establishment
Speaker 1: right and yeah, every not.
Speaker 4: Though you know, young young people day you got you
Speaker 4: guys watching this show. You know you're you're you have
Speaker 4: curious cross spectrum politics. But a lot of it is
Speaker 4: organized around knowing that there's something barbaric about the system
Speaker 4: and also knowing that the levers of uh democratic control
Speaker 4: have been have been broken, that they're that in many ways,
Speaker 4: they're an illusion that you can that you can flip
Speaker 4: flip a switch, but if you actually could look behind
Speaker 4: the wall, that switch is unplugged from the wires. There's
Speaker 4: not nothing's going on back there, and the switch is
Speaker 4: just there for you to mess around with and and
Speaker 4: and keep the kind of rats.
Speaker 1: Busy in the cage.
Speaker 4: So I think whether that's a left wing anti establishment
Speaker 4: or right wing anti system message, I don't know. And
Speaker 4: it depends on kind of where it's channeled and what
Speaker 4: energy exists at the time to kind of channel it
Speaker 4: in a particular direction, and it shifts over time, as
Speaker 4: we've talked about with the kind of the Bernie to
Speaker 4: Trump pipeline or the Hippie to Que pipeline or whatever
Speaker 4: you have. You know, when you don't present people with
Speaker 4: coherent mechanisms to have their grievances heard, you're going to
Speaker 4: wind up with, you know, pretty psychedelic politics.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So Playbook yesterday put an item out that said, quote
Speaker 5: how Trump loses gen Z And that was their little
Speaker 5: blurb about Pambondi's announcement that she was instructing prosecutors to
Speaker 5: seek the death penalty for Mangioni and some people on
Speaker 5: the right pushing back on that.
Speaker 6: And you know, I.
Speaker 5: Also think there's some truth that seeking the death penalty
Speaker 5: in this case juxtaposed with you know, you had Bill Cassidy,
Speaker 5: what was he on Newsmax the other day talking about
Speaker 5: cuts to Medicare and then corrected himself and said reforms.
Speaker 6: Was it Medicare or Medicaid?
Speaker 5: Probably yeah, And so he caught himself referring to quote
Speaker 5: unquote cuts and then sort of smiled at the camera
Speaker 5: and said, I'm sorry, I mean reforms. I think when
Speaker 5: you juxtaposed the death penalty in the super high profile
Speaker 5: case of someone who's become a meme, uh, And I
Speaker 5: think some of the love for Luigi is is genuine.
Speaker 5: A lot of it is like kind of pop culture
Speaker 5: meme energy. But when that's powerful in and of itself,
Speaker 5: and when you juxtaposed that with a Republican party that
Speaker 5: still has no answer on healthcare other than quote unquote
Speaker 5: reform of things like Medicaid, it's actually not a good
Speaker 5: combination politically, Like that Luigi is such a high profile meme,
Speaker 5: is something that's absolutely on the pop cultural radar that
Speaker 5: you're looking to use the death penalty in this case,
Speaker 5: and also at the same time not having like a
Speaker 5: humane solution to the healthcare crisis in this country is
Speaker 5: genuinely a politically difficult message to carry out, and it's
Speaker 5: such a high profile case that I think it does matter.
Speaker 4: And they also are just stripping their own moral authority.
Speaker 4: Their previous argument was, Okay, you have a legitimate grievance
Speaker 4: that these for profit corporations are making life and death
Speaker 4: decisions so that they can, you know, so that they
Speaker 4: can talk a bigger game at their next quarterly conference call.
Speaker 4: But you shouldn't kill somebody over that. However, we're going
Speaker 4: to kill this guy over that.
Speaker 1: And maybe I'm just.
Speaker 4: So divorced from regular American politics and the values that
Speaker 4: drive it that that won't even be a problem for
Speaker 4: the people making the argument. But I think for regular
Speaker 4: people it's like, wait a minute, you just said that
Speaker 4: he has legitimate grievances, but you shouldn't kill the person.
Speaker 4: So you have legitimate grievances against him. He allegedly killed somebody,
Speaker 4: but you're gonna kill him. So now, if we're all
Speaker 4: back on the same moral plane, he allegedly killed one people.
Speaker 4: The insurance companies are killing countless people. So if you're
Speaker 4: going to give up the moral authority of killing. You
Speaker 4: are not fighting then from a very strong ground.
Speaker 5: I don't think, you know, I'm not obviously a death
Speaker 5: penalty person. A lot of the country is, though, and
Speaker 5: I think there's still you know, they would say, go
Speaker 5: ahead and put Brian Thompson on trial, don't shoot him
Speaker 5: in midtown, and so I think.
Speaker 4: That's but then would he get the death penalty after
Speaker 4: you tried him?
Speaker 5: And your point makes sense to me that it's like,
Speaker 5: if you look at the way Brian Thompson is treated
Speaker 5: versus the way Amangioni is treated, or other people who
Speaker 5: are convicted of murder are treated, there's this just glaring
Speaker 5: disparity in the way that white collar criminals are either
Speaker 5: never brought to trial and never treated like criminals.
Speaker 6: I think that's absolutely true.
Speaker 5: And again that's one of those things that the Trump
Speaker 5: era Republican Party was supposed to kind of have an
Speaker 5: answer to this.
Speaker 6: High level of elite corruption, and it just never I.
Speaker 5: Mean, now you have billionaires running around, you know, doing
Speaker 5: liberation and doge, and it's it's not a it's not
Speaker 5: the same I think MAGA that it was in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 5: twenty sixteen. So anyway, that's I think there's something to that.
Speaker 4: And yeah, meanwhile, some of his supporters aren't taking it. Well,
Speaker 4: we can put up the second element here. This article
Speaker 4: goes through the kind of misery being felt by those
Speaker 4: who you see in Luigi, some type of at least
Speaker 4: vengeance being exacted on their behalf. I wonder at the
Speaker 4: same time if this could backfire. The number one hope
Speaker 4: of people who support Luigi is that there would be
Speaker 4: some sort of jury nullification where this case would be
Speaker 4: prominent enough that everybody going in would know the contours.
Speaker 4: Jury nullification usually can't work because juries are barred from
Speaker 4: hearing from a defendant you know why they did a
Speaker 4: certain thing, if they did it, if they did it
Speaker 4: for reasons of conscience, like in general, the judge will
Speaker 4: prevent a jury from hearing that and just require the
Speaker 4: jury to adjudicate the case.
Speaker 1: Just based on the facts.
Speaker 4: Facts being guy who's on the street, here's the video,
Speaker 4: here's what happened.
Speaker 1: But so many people.
Speaker 4: Have become familiar with this story that the jurors are
Speaker 4: going to know what's going on here.
Speaker 1: If the jurors are also and this is the hope
Speaker 1: I'm talking about.
Speaker 4: On the on behalf of his supporters. If the jurors
Speaker 4: know that a guilty verdict is going to mean a
Speaker 4: death sentence, I wonder if that actually increases the likelihood
Speaker 4: from slim to just a little bit less slim of
Speaker 4: jury nullification.
Speaker 1: What do you think.
Speaker 5: No, that's a really interesting point because it's going to
Speaker 5: be and that's I think it's the political calculation of
Speaker 5: this too, is this trial is going to be so
Speaker 5: high profile. It is going to be like massive media coverage.
Speaker 5: Gen Z's going to be paying attention to it. Every
Speaker 5: time I'm Luigi's face, people get a glimpse of Luigi's face,
Speaker 5: it becomes another like iconic meme in the saga of
Speaker 5: Luigi Mangioniu.
Speaker 6: So it's also going.
Speaker 5: To like remind people over and over again that the
Speaker 5: Trump administration is seeking the death penalty, as Pam Bondi
Speaker 5: put it there, part.
Speaker 6: Of Trump's agenda.
Speaker 5: They see this as like an agenda item to seek
Speaker 5: the death penalty in the case of Mangione And they
Speaker 5: still don't have an actual answer. In healthcare, if anything,
Speaker 5: they're making cuts. So I mean, I think, yeah, when
Speaker 5: you're looking at this teenage, well not teenager, this twenty something,
Speaker 5: or maybe he's in his early thirties now, who suffered immensely.
Speaker 5: There's some part of the reason Luigi's story pops is
Speaker 5: that there's some genuine sympathy for him based on his
Speaker 5: story doesn't justify anything, but it resonates with a lot
Speaker 5: of people who have also been pushed to the brink
Speaker 5: of sanity by the misery of the American healthcare system.
Speaker 5: And I think when you have a resonant story like
Speaker 5: that and you elevate it to a death penalty case,
Speaker 5: there's something to what you're saying.
Speaker 1: Right now politically speaking.
Speaker 4: And I'm not saying this is what the Vondi or
Speaker 4: the Trump administration are doing. If I were them and
Speaker 4: I were deeply cynical and just playing this for politics,
Speaker 4: I might throw the case. Trump actually might benefit from
Speaker 4: an acquittal and from the shock that that would create
Speaker 4: among his supporters. And because if you look at the polling,
Speaker 4: young people bio plurality are supportive of Luigi, but the
Speaker 4: overall electorate is not. And a lot of the overall
Speaker 4: electorate is appalled at the people who were.
Speaker 1: Supportive of him.
Speaker 4: And so if you got an acquittal and you had
Speaker 4: all these celebrations in the street, and they would find
Speaker 4: you know, blue haired kids with like eight ear rings
Speaker 4: out there celebrating, and they would runt those on Fox
Speaker 4: News and so that they would elevate that and say, look,
Speaker 4: this is the country that the Libs want, and so
Speaker 4: just trying to further feed a backlash. So, uh, yeah,
Speaker 4: if if if you were a deeply cynical political actor
Speaker 4: in the Trump administration, you might actually figure out a
Speaker 4: way to uh to kind of.
Speaker 1: Yeah, to throw this one those contradictions.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like what do you care, you know, if you
Speaker 4: if if you can gain political advantage, what do they
Speaker 4: care if they actually execute Luigi or keep them in
Speaker 4: prison or let him let him walk free. And then
Speaker 4: if he's free, every time he's out speaking, he's angering
Speaker 4: all of the people that you know, are are likely
Speaker 4: to support some type of reactionary backlash against that. So
Speaker 4: he's he then becomes a gift to the right that
Speaker 4: keeps on giving. I mean, you're playing with fire, obviously,
Speaker 4: but that's what cynical actors do.
Speaker 6: Well, Ryan, you know this better than I do.
Speaker 5: But we would have to be talking about probably like
Speaker 5: a Trump fifth term for Luigi to actually be executed you.
Speaker 1: Know under Trump, chance that he outlives Trump is high.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, because this, I mean, the court battle is
Speaker 5: going to play out and it's going to be very
Speaker 5: high profile, like in the near future. But then there's
Speaker 5: appeals and all of that in a death penalty case
Speaker 5: that could drag on for years and years, So we'll
Speaker 5: see what happens.
Speaker 4: All right, Let's move on to you see Rogan up
Speaker 4: here on the screen the deportation scandal involving and I
Speaker 4: know some people don't like when I call it scandal,
Speaker 4: They just like, what do they want to call it?
Speaker 4: The deportation celebration with the story of the Venezuela is
Speaker 4: getting rounded up along with some MS thirteen members and
Speaker 4: sent down to Nayabukelli's dungeons down in El Salvador broke
Speaker 4: through to the Joe Rogan podcast partly thanks to front
Speaker 4: of the show Glenn Greenwald. Let's roll this and then
Speaker 4: and talk about the residents here.
Speaker 16: You got to get scared that people who are not
Speaker 16: criminals are getting like lassued up and deported and sent
Speaker 16: to like El Salvador prisons, like that kind of shit.
Speaker 16: Because I'm I read some story it was a Glenn Greenwald.
Speaker 17: Yeah, yeah, gay bob a guy, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's Is that true?
Speaker 6: Is that story accurate?
Speaker 17: I don't think we know For people who don't know, well,
Speaker 17: from what I read, I think it was in Time magazine. Jamie,
Speaker 17: if you can pull it up and maybe we can
Speaker 17: get an accurate But basically, with the bunch of these
Speaker 17: trend to a Agua guys, allegedly they got one guy
Speaker 17: who at least one guy who wasn't a criminal, who
Speaker 17: was just a gay boba who I think, according to
Speaker 17: the story, came here legally. He was here legally, that's
Speaker 17: what they said. Don't know if car I don't know
Speaker 17: what the details are. Maybe Jamie can find it. No
Speaker 17: criminal record from what it's said in that story. Now,
Speaker 17: this is the problem, right, because the mainstream media has
Speaker 17: been putting out so much shit. I don't know what
Speaker 17: to believe anymore, Right.
Speaker 6: I feel the same way.
Speaker 17: It's and so it's difficult. But it's something that we
Speaker 17: actually brought up in one of our conversations. We enter
Speaker 17: it the guy from the Heritage Foundation. We brought this
Speaker 17: up because I think we talked about this with those
Speaker 17: as well. When you do things quickly and you do
Speaker 17: things aggressively. That's how you get shit done. But that's
Speaker 17: also when mistakes get made. And I think a human
Speaker 17: being being plucked out of nowhere and ending up in
Speaker 17: a country's never been in, in a maximum security prison
Speaker 17: with gang members seems like a bad thing to happen
Speaker 17: to me.
Speaker 16: It's horrific. It's horrific.
Speaker 17: I don't think that should be controversial.
Speaker 16: No, that's not controversial at all. And this is the thing,
Speaker 16: you know, measured twice, cut once. This is the like,
Speaker 16: this is kind of crazy that that could be possible.
Speaker 16: That's horrific, And that's again that's bad for the cause.
Speaker 16: Like the cause is let's get the gang members out.
Speaker 16: Everybody agrees, but what's not innocent? Gay hairdressers get lumped
Speaker 16: up with the gangs, and then like, how long before
Speaker 16: that guy can get out? Can we can we figure
Speaker 16: out how to get him out? Is there any plan
Speaker 16: in place to alert the authorities that they've made a
Speaker 16: horrible mistake and correct it.
Speaker 17: Well, if you think about it from a government perspective,
Speaker 17: and this is where I think it gets quite sinister
Speaker 17: is once you've done that, the incentive structure is never
Speaker 17: going to be to admit that and deal with it.
Speaker 17: The incentive structure is to say nothing, to cover it up,
Speaker 17: to pretend it didn't happen.
Speaker 4: So if you somehow missed this particular story, this is
Speaker 4: a This is about a man named Andre Jose Hernandez Romero,
Speaker 4: Venezuelan man who came to the United States in August.
Speaker 1: He said he was fleeing political persecution.
Speaker 4: He had he made an asylum appointment, made came to
Speaker 4: that appointment. When he got there, they noticed on his
Speaker 4: arm that he had a tattoo of a crown. And
Speaker 4: this is from the court documents related to his asylum appointment.
Speaker 4: It says, detaining Hernandez ports this is.
Speaker 1: It's sick, it's an error. Don't know what ports like.
Speaker 4: These ice agents are not necessarily the best writers. Detaining
Speaker 4: Hernandez has I guess they mean, Uh, tattoos crowns that
Speaker 4: are consistent with those of a trend DEG member. That's
Speaker 4: that's somebody at the Meson Detention Center put put that
Speaker 4: into his documents, that that stealed his fate. Now we
Speaker 4: also know that apparently no Venezuelan gangs use tattoos.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 4: Whether that's true or not, somebody can maybe fact check
Speaker 4: me and find some small gang that does trend. De
Speaker 4: Aragua does not use tattoos as identifying marks for its members.
Speaker 4: Like that is just a a basic fact that is
Speaker 4: acknowledged across the spectrum about Trinda Iragua.
Speaker 1: Other gangs do.
Speaker 4: Somehow, the some people in DHS got the idea in
Speaker 4: their head that there were crown tattoos associated with this
Speaker 4: with this gang, and so anybody from Venezuela who had
Speaker 4: a crown had to wound up getting classified as a
Speaker 4: member of this gang. We reported earlier about the man
Speaker 4: who was a professional soccer player from Venezuela who had
Speaker 4: a crown over a soccer ball which was which was
Speaker 4: a reference to Real Madrid's logo, Real Madrid being his
Speaker 4: favorite team. He's a professional goalkeeper. Venezuelan authorities. You know,
Speaker 4: he got all of his paperwork, showed you absolutely no
Speaker 4: gang connections, you know whatsoever. He also was scooped up
Speaker 4: and said to be this this gang member.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 4: I think Rogan makes a very easily understandable point, and
Speaker 4: a lot of people are agree that this is a
Speaker 4: case met measure twice cut once like that that's the
Speaker 4: perfect cliche to drop on this situation. Because once you cut,
Speaker 4: and this is why you measure twice. Once you cut,
Speaker 4: that's it. You've cut.
Speaker 1: Once.
Speaker 4: You have sent this guy to this El Salvador in dungeon.
Speaker 4: You've done that. Even if even if they sent him
Speaker 4: there for one hour and he was beaten up and
Speaker 4: then returned. That is it's a situation so traumatizing, it
Speaker 4: would define the rest of your life. One hour there,
Speaker 4: he's still there. That and that, to me is what's
Speaker 4: so startling about this situation. So not only did you
Speaker 4: you know you measure twice, you cut once. Sometimes you cut,
Speaker 4: if you if you if you if you cut too
Speaker 4: far this direction, you can actually recut it, like there's
Speaker 4: so the cliche can be overused. But they're not even
Speaker 4: trying to recut here. They're not even trying to fix this.
Speaker 4: So does this matter? Like is there enough of a
Speaker 4: kernel of sense of justice and humanity left that it
Speaker 4: can penetrate the kind of Stephen Miller bubble or is
Speaker 4: he so locked in on kind of revolutionary mode that
Speaker 4: he's just plowing ahead.
Speaker 5: I mean, I thought that was a very incisive exchange
Speaker 5: between Rogan and Constantine kissin partially because of what Constantine
Speaker 5: said at the end where he said the incentive structure
Speaker 5: is not to correct the errors. And that's really important
Speaker 5: here because you have support for mass deportations when it's
Speaker 5: polled quote unquote mass deportations sort of in theory. So
Speaker 5: the abstract idea of mass deportations pulls extremely well in
Speaker 5: those country is majority of people want that, and so
Speaker 5: Stephen Miller, Trump and others in the administration have christinoam
Speaker 5: have looked at that and said, this is our mandate
Speaker 5: to do mass deportations, and the only way for us
Speaker 5: to do mass deportations this is a logical leap that
Speaker 5: I think is insane, but is to screen for these
Speaker 5: tattoos and to take these kind of bubble case is
Speaker 5: and just everyone goes to Al Salvador if Venezuela won't
Speaker 5: take them. And the public is so opposed to the
Speaker 5: Democrats policies, to the Biden administration's policies, that we can
Speaker 5: get away with these extreme measures because the alternative is
Speaker 5: so much worse. And so to Constantine Kissing's point, that's
Speaker 5: part of the background of why the incentive structure is
Speaker 5: not to say, all right, we made a mistake. The
Speaker 5: incentive structure is to double triple quadruple down. And yet
Speaker 5: what we've seen is the administration failed to supply additional
Speaker 5: evidence that let's talk about the barber in this case,
Speaker 5: he's like significantly linked to Trende Arragua and was a
Speaker 5: case that you know, demanded deportation to al Salvador. There's
Speaker 5: still a trunk of the public that has absolutely no
Speaker 5: sympathy for this guy. You know, they just say, it's
Speaker 5: of course, I mean, if you're not a citizen, the
Speaker 5: administration can take you and move you and get you out.
Speaker 5: You know, you don't have the same level of due
Speaker 5: process and et cetera. That's not going to fly with
Speaker 5: the majority of Americans. It may, you know, still be
Speaker 5: powerful with a group of the American people, but where
Speaker 5: what we're seeing here in the Rogan clip is that
Speaker 5: you will start to lose people. It's going to start
Speaker 5: to look insane and un American. And so the the
Speaker 5: thing on that we have this next thot of Caroline
Speaker 5: Levitt getting questioned, this is going to be E two.
Speaker 5: It's it's also happening with the student deportations. Like it's
Speaker 5: a very similar dynamic playing out I think in both cases,
Speaker 5: and the administration has to start ponying up the evidence
Speaker 5: that the problem for them is they don't seem to
Speaker 5: have it in some of these really high profile cases.
Speaker 6: So let's take a listen to Caroline Lovett here. This
Speaker 6: is E two.
Speaker 9: Just changing subjects for one second.
Speaker 15: The administration has expressed a complete confidence in how all
Speaker 15: the deportation flights to L.
Speaker 9: Salvador were a conducted.
Speaker 15: But now that the administration has conceded that there was
Speaker 15: an error of one Salvadoran national, will there be any
Speaker 15: reviews conducted? And does the President express any thoughts on
Speaker 15: the one error that it was disclosed in court last night.
Speaker 18: Well, first of all, the error that you are referring
Speaker 18: to was a clerical error, it was an administrative error.
Speaker 18: The administration maintains the position that this individual who was
Speaker 18: deported to L. Salvador and will not be returning to
Speaker 18: our country was a member of the brutal and vicious
Speaker 18: MS thirteen gang. That is fact number one. Fact to
Speaker 18: number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this
Speaker 18: individual was involved in human trafficking. In fact number three,
Speaker 18: this individual was a member, actually a leader, of the
Speaker 18: brutal MS thirteen gang, which this President has designated as
Speaker 18: a foreign terrorist organization.
Speaker 5: So ran I think the best that the furthest you'll
Speaker 5: see Stephen Miller and his sort of fellow travelers go
Speaker 5: in this administration is to slow down and start being
Speaker 5: more judicious in the deportations and maybe just hope it
Speaker 5: fades into the background of the news cycle. But this
Speaker 5: case that they're referring to is really interesting. We can
Speaker 5: put E three up on the screen. This is a
Speaker 5: thread from Will Chamberlain, who people have seen on the
Speaker 5: show a couple of times, very staunch conservative, pro Trump
Speaker 5: attorney who dug into the story of this Maryland Dad
Speaker 5: as The Atlantic called him, who ended up being accused
Speaker 5: of being in MS thirteen and deported by the Trump administration.
Speaker 5: The Trump administration admitted he was deported due to a
Speaker 5: clerical error.
Speaker 6: And this gets us.
Speaker 5: It will go through the case and I think found
Speaker 5: legitimately a lot of things in the case of this
Speaker 5: man that The Atlantic, just from a journalistic perspective, left
Speaker 5: out of the story. Its audience would have been better
Speaker 5: served knowing the full saga of this guy's pinging through
Speaker 5: the American court system non citizens pinging through the American
Speaker 5: court citizen system. Why he claimed he suddenly needed an
Speaker 5: asylum after being here for close to the better part
Speaker 5: of a decade. So this is a it's an interesting case,
Speaker 5: but it's one that gets us back to the Constantine
Speaker 5: Kiston point where it's like the media has not done
Speaker 5: a good job of covering these things up until now,
Speaker 5: and so the Trump administration knows it can get away
Speaker 5: with more because there's so little trust in the media
Speaker 5: that could turn around.
Speaker 6: Though.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and so that case and Will's threat is interesting
Speaker 4: because Will kind of allies throughout the whole point or
Speaker 4: kind of sidesteps has an important issue the fact that
Speaker 4: this guy was sent to this El Salvador and torture chamber,
Speaker 4: and Will, in his threat acknowledges that he should not
Speaker 4: have been, that that was wrong, that legally he should
Speaker 4: not have been sent there. Yet he says, well, that's
Speaker 4: kind of a that's kind of like a minor point here,
Speaker 4: and I feel like they're kind of Will's kind of
Speaker 4: missing the losing the thread here. So basically what happened here,
Speaker 4: I think, So the guy came. It appears clear that
Speaker 4: he came illegally sometime around twenty eleven, twenty twelve something
Speaker 4: like that too. From Elsa Abador to the United States
Speaker 4: in twenty nineteen. He was picked up at a home depot.
Speaker 4: And home depot is where day laborers, you know, gather
Speaker 4: and subcontractors go by every day.
Speaker 1: You know, I have your own tools. I need people
Speaker 1: on a site. Come on. So he gets picked up there.
Speaker 4: He was wearing a Bulls jersey, and so they said
Speaker 4: the Bulls jersey was MS thirteen, which is kind of ridiculous.
Speaker 4: But then they also said they had a confidential informant
Speaker 4: who had knowledge of MS thirteen who said this is
Speaker 4: so and so this is his name in the gang,
Speaker 4: this is his rank, and this is where he operated
Speaker 4: as a gang member.
Speaker 1: Turns out he never been there.
Speaker 4: The confidential most you know, confidential informants are are literally
Speaker 4: paid to lie. Like the confidential informants are not remotely trustworthy.
Speaker 1: But this didn't get adjudicated. It just goes into a hearing.
Speaker 4: He went into a bail hearing and the police said, look,
Speaker 4: this CI says that this guy is in MS thirteen,
Speaker 4: and so the judge is like, all right, well you don't.
Speaker 4: You can't rebut this, and so therefore I'm not going
Speaker 4: to give you bail. He spent year, year and a
Speaker 4: half in you know.
Speaker 1: Locked up.
Speaker 4: Eventually they concluded that this guy was lying, he was
Speaker 4: not an MS thirteen member. He got out on and
Speaker 4: he has you know, various court dates and then he
Speaker 4: goes into that very long, you know, immigration process, which
Speaker 4: I think everybody across the spectrum would agree is this
Speaker 4: is far too long, and he reapplies at that point
Speaker 4: for asylum, saying that his and this is what will
Speaker 4: gets into that his family's Papoosa business had run a
Speaker 4: foul of eighteen Street gang down in down at L.
Speaker 1: Salvador. They were extorted, you know, he was threatened.
Speaker 4: It does appear that his brother like that definitely happened
Speaker 4: to his brother, and his brother fled. So there is
Speaker 4: some real truth to these claims. The question of whether
Speaker 4: you know, ten years later, the threats are still live,
Speaker 4: that's an open one, and that's the kind of thing
Speaker 4: that you then kind of adjudicate in an immigration hearing. Instead,
Speaker 4: it seems like what they did is they were just
Speaker 4: looking for anybody with any gang affiliations, and I guess
Speaker 4: he popped up in the computer because of his old
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen confidential informant claim that he was in the gang,
Speaker 4: which had since been basically rejected, and because he was
Speaker 4: moving forward with his asylum claim, effectively there was an
Speaker 4: order that he not be deported to El Salvador, and
Speaker 4: they ignored that order. And so that's what they're saying
Speaker 4: was the clerical error.
Speaker 1: They're saying.
Speaker 4: What they're saying is they should have been able to
Speaker 4: deport him somewhere, not to El Salvador. And there they'll say, well,
Speaker 4: that's that's you know, mistakes happen. It's like, okay, but
Speaker 4: that's a pretty huge mistake. And also secondly, like you
Speaker 4: sent this guy to a dungeon from which he may
Speaker 4: never emerge, like for what, like, for for what crime.
Speaker 4: Let's say you don't like that he entered the country illegally. Okay,
Speaker 4: then you to deport him. You don't like that you're
Speaker 4: barred from deporting him to El Salvador. Overturn that, say,
Speaker 4: look the gang Eighteenth Street gang, but Kelly wiped them out.
Speaker 4: We can now deport him. So fix that paperwork and
Speaker 4: deport him into El Salvador, where he then continues his
Speaker 4: life as a as a free person in El Salvador.
Speaker 1: To put him in chains and fly him down to
Speaker 1: this Dungeon.
Speaker 4: Uh, that's the part that like you're saying, is that
Speaker 4: that's that should be Unamerican.
Speaker 5: And at the same time, I look at The Atlantic
Speaker 5: as someone on the right and think, why was so
Speaker 5: much of the story left out, even in the interest
Speaker 5: of time, And I feel like that's where things to
Speaker 5: the point Constantine Kisten was making in the clip earlier,
Speaker 5: end up getting locked up because to me, it's very
Speaker 5: important that these stories are told correctly, because there are
Speaker 5: cases that are more sympathetic than these people who claim
Speaker 5: to asylum.
Speaker 6: Right away and do have credible fear.
Speaker 5: You know, this is more credible fear than this, even
Speaker 5: if there's some evidence that he may have had fear.
Speaker 5: You know, we're ten years as your point, as you said,
Speaker 5: ten years beyond that point. So it's a different calculation
Speaker 5: than some others.
Speaker 6: And so it's.
Speaker 5: Hard for people on the right then not you know,
Speaker 5: I'm happy to say it. I'm not in the administration,
Speaker 5: but for the administration, they feel like politically they can
Speaker 5: get away with doing these things because people care when
Speaker 5: the media botches it. And you know, Biden lets a
Speaker 5: net eight million people into the country and basically nobody
Speaker 5: talks about it except for you know, the media ignores
Speaker 5: it for a long time or relatively ignores it for
Speaker 5: a long time.
Speaker 6: And doesn't tell the story.
Speaker 5: So anyway, all this is to say, I think you
Speaker 5: know this is the what's likely to the best case
Speaker 5: scenario is that they start to slow down and be
Speaker 5: more judicious about this. And Ryan, one of the things
Speaker 5: I wanted to ask you is that all it reminds
Speaker 5: me of your story, the drop site story about the
Speaker 5: guy who book La did not want and maybe you
Speaker 5: can I know you've talked about it, But like, what
Speaker 5: if they accidentally do that accidentally?
Speaker 6: What if one of those guys gets caught.
Speaker 9: Up in this?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 4: So yeah, so we did this story jos Er Olivrs
Speaker 4: and I over a drop site.
Speaker 1: It's it's a fascinating piece. He took. He took the
Speaker 1: lead on it.
Speaker 4: Going through court records relating to some of the MS
Speaker 4: teen members that were deported down to El Salvador. And
Speaker 4: there's an absolutely fascinating story behind it. And it's not
Speaker 4: what anybody would expect from what they hear about Trump
Speaker 4: and b Kelly. Bu Kelly when he first came to power,
Speaker 4: negotiated and denies this, but everybody knows that it's true.
Speaker 4: Negotiated a secret deal with MS thirteen where they would
Speaker 4: agree to reduce levels of violence in exchange for some
Speaker 4: daytime with the state and some improvement in prison conditions
Speaker 4: for MS thirteen leaders who were already in prison. At
Speaker 4: some point, Eventually this piece accord with MS thirteen broke down,
Speaker 4: more violence broke out. Bu Kelly launched his kind of
Speaker 4: more aggressive crackdown on them. But before that happened, MS thirteen,
Speaker 4: as part of its deal with him, pledged election support,
Speaker 4: and his landslide election victory was significantly a result of
Speaker 4: this secret deal that he cut with MS thirteen. This
Speaker 4: secret deal is talked about a lot in El Salvador,
Speaker 4: but is and is very, very unpopular, but he maintains
Speaker 4: a complete denial of it to this day. One of
Speaker 4: the people who was involved in those negotiations, his gang
Speaker 4: name is Grenas. He's here in where he was here
Speaker 4: in the United States, charged with rico and all the
Speaker 4: different things you charge a gang member with, and he
Speaker 4: was headed to federal court where he was expected as
Speaker 4: part of his trial, to tell the full story of
Speaker 4: these secret negotiations that bu Kelly had with MS thirteen.
Speaker 4: Bu Kelly has desperately been trying to get his hands
Speaker 4: on Grainyas and there has been this push and pull
Speaker 4: where the US has been trying to get its hands
Speaker 4: on people that they know were involved in this deal
Speaker 4: and vice versa. That one of them was in El
Speaker 4: Salvadoran prisons. Would we write about in the article the
Speaker 4: US had an extradition request out for him.
Speaker 1: Instead, bou Kelly just let him go.
Speaker 4: And bu Kelly's top official who had negotiated this secret deal,
Speaker 4: drove the guy to the border to get him out
Speaker 4: of the country. He then gets caught in Mexico and
Speaker 4: then El Salvador in the US have a fight with
Speaker 4: Mexico over who can get this guy, because everybody wants
Speaker 4: these top MS thirteen leaders who know the story of
Speaker 4: what bu Kelly did, and so now Trump has now
Speaker 4: sent some of them.
Speaker 1: So that was bu Kelly's price.
Speaker 4: He's like, ah, I'll charge with the very tiny fee.
Speaker 4: He's not looking for dollars to house these Venezuelans that
Speaker 4: the US is deporting there. His price was He's like,
Speaker 4: I want these guys that know too much about my
Speaker 4: dealings with MS thirteen. I want them under under my control.
Speaker 4: So Trump has sent some of them, but we've still
Speaker 4: held on to others as sort of blackmail against bu Kelly.
Speaker 4: So the story is always a little bit more complicated
Speaker 4: and interesting than than you're being told.
Speaker 5: But when you're starting to use humans as ponds like
Speaker 5: this at a rapid clip, it's it's well, we'll see
Speaker 5: our some of those cases end up going. It was
Speaker 5: a great story out Just before we leave this block,
Speaker 5: there's another case. We could put the four up on
Speaker 5: the screen of a Minnesota student from Cato who's now
Speaker 5: been caught up in these ice deportations.
Speaker 6: Ran, do you have any insight on this?
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's actually kind of hard to keep trying.
Speaker 4: There's another another student who, you know, some very minor
Speaker 4: protest activity presumably appeared on some list that are pro
Speaker 4: Israel group sent to UH, you know, sent to the administration,
Speaker 4: the Canary Mission, Batar and others, are you know, very
Speaker 4: proudly advertising that they are producing lists of students that
Speaker 4: they that they want that they want kicked out of UH,
Speaker 4: that they want kicked out of the country for for
Speaker 4: protesting against the war and the war like that is
Speaker 4: like they're very clear, like they're they're not claiming we
Speaker 4: have evidence that this is the person that was swinging
Speaker 4: the hammer that smashed the glass, and that hinds all
Speaker 4: like they're not I'm not saying that, they're saying that
Speaker 4: this person wrote this op ed, as in the case
Speaker 4: of oz Turk, or this person you know, came to
Speaker 4: this encampment, or this person tweeted this thing. Uh and
Speaker 4: and then uh kicking kicking them out of the kicking
Speaker 4: them out of the country. And Rubio has said that
Speaker 4: he's canceled, you know, upwards of three hundred student visas
Speaker 4: and is continuing to do it every every single day,
Speaker 4: despite you know, when when you apply for a student visa, Uh,
Speaker 4: there's there. It doesn't say anywhere that when you get
Speaker 4: to the United States, these certain liberties that we hold
Speaker 4: deer for persons in the United States do not apply
Speaker 4: to you if you are protesting US funding Israel's war
Speaker 4: and Godza, like there's.
Speaker 1: That was never said. If that's the new rule.
Speaker 4: Now, obviously you could it's quite okay if you're here
Speaker 4: on a student visa to protest for the war. It's
Speaker 4: not that you can't weigh in, not that you can't
Speaker 4: have an opinion on what's happening in Gaza. As long
Speaker 4: as your opinion is that it is good and the
Speaker 4: US should do more of it, that's fine. It's if
Speaker 4: you are critical of what the United States is doing
Speaker 4: with its support of Israel, then according to Rubio, that
Speaker 4: is cause for you to be immediately deported. Well, not immediately,
Speaker 4: that would almost be more humane. First, they're sending these
Speaker 4: people to detention centers, completely harmless people, having them sit
Speaker 4: in these brutal detention centers for very long stretches of
Speaker 4: time before then deported.
Speaker 5: And with those three hundred, With that three hundred number,
Speaker 5: I mean, we've seen maybe half a dozen really big
Speaker 5: cases so far. But what that means is there's going
Speaker 5: to be a trip trip And again, maybe this will
Speaker 5: happen with immigration, maybe it will happen with students, and
Speaker 5: the administration will try to move it to the background
Speaker 5: and be you know, quieter about it, be slower about it.
Speaker 6: Who knows.
Speaker 5: But the drip drip is coming no matter what, because
Speaker 5: they've staked a lot on these efforts, so it's it's
Speaker 5: not going to end. We'll continue to see cases like
Speaker 5: this one, all.
Speaker 4: Right, Senator Corey Booker, broke strom Thurman's record for longest
Speaker 4: speech in the United States Senate. I think it was
Speaker 4: twenty five hours and five minutes.
Speaker 1: This was.
Speaker 4: This was Booker's response to a deeply frustrated Democratic electorate
Speaker 4: that it's like, isn't there anything that you can do?
Speaker 4: Something like nothing, like, you can't you can't even negotiate
Speaker 4: a slightly better cr with these fascists that are rounding
Speaker 4: people up and destroying you know, the country is far
Speaker 4: as we're concerned. And so Booker, you know, came to
Speaker 4: the floor and said, Okay, I'm going to show that
Speaker 4: we're at least trying to do something. Let's roll a
Speaker 4: little bit of you know, only a few seconds of
Speaker 4: this twenty five hours.
Speaker 12: Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. We need
Speaker 12: that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment.
Speaker 12: It's not left or right, it's right or wrong. It's
Speaker 12: getting good trouble. My friend, Madam President, I yield the floor.
Speaker 1: Put up the next element on the screen.
Speaker 4: So this is, says Corey Boker's officially delivered the longest
Speaker 4: sentce speech. That is that is that's strom Thurman in
Speaker 4: his earlier years. Actually because I think what he died at,
Speaker 4: like one hundred and one or something like that.
Speaker 1: Like he was in.
Speaker 4: Congress, like when I was covering Congress, and he set
Speaker 4: his record filibustering the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights Act.
Speaker 1: So that's how long this guy.
Speaker 4: Served in the United in the United States Senate, one
Speaker 4: of the like most one of the most vitriolic segregationists
Speaker 4: in the United States Senate. There's a I forget what
Speaker 4: book it's in, but there's a scene where there are
Speaker 4: a couple of you know, hardcore white supremacist Democrat senators
Speaker 4: in like the nineteen forties or fifties are watching a
Speaker 4: strong therm and speech and one of them, you know,
Speaker 4: says to the other They're like, my god, this guy
Speaker 4: really believes this stuff.
Speaker 1: Like the racists thought that this guy was like two
Speaker 1: over the top, and it is.
Speaker 4: It has always been a real crawl or thorn in
Speaker 4: the side of Democrats who are now on the other
Speaker 4: side of this white supremacy question.
Speaker 1: That he held this record.
Speaker 4: So so it wasn't just pushing back against the job
Speaker 4: administration Booker, and Booker has said as much. He very
Speaker 4: much wanted to knock this guy off the pedestal, and
Speaker 4: he successfully did it with several hours still to go
Speaker 4: until he until he broke the record, he was saying
Speaker 4: like he was on the floor saying, I don't think
Speaker 4: I have enough gas in the tank, like I don't
Speaker 4: think I don't think I'm going to be able to
Speaker 4: make it. And the galleries filled up. A ton of
Speaker 4: senate Senate Democrats came to the chamber, which is very unusual,
Speaker 4: the chamber is almost completely empty, and sat there to
Speaker 4: kind of give him a little bit of gas to
Speaker 4: kind of get across the finish line. And when he
Speaker 4: finally made it, you know, you know, you know, gave
Speaker 4: him a rousing, rousing applause and around the country you
Speaker 4: can put up put up F three.
Speaker 12: It did.
Speaker 4: It did capture a lot of people's imaginations, like like
Speaker 4: the the TikTok.
Speaker 1: Numbers were were wild, the the kind of.
Speaker 4: Live streaming numbers that you know, he said he got
Speaker 4: enormous numbers of calls to to his office. You know,
Speaker 4: you it's like you know, in a in a dark time,
Speaker 4: even though even a tiny little bit of light is
Speaker 4: something that a lot of people are going to fly toward.
Speaker 4: Did you follow this as it was going on and
Speaker 4: what what what are? What are Republicans they kind of
Speaker 4: just amused by this or do they see this as
Speaker 4: a little little flickering of life from the opposition?
Speaker 5: Well, I mean the point you just made about even
Speaker 5: when you're in a period of darkness, even a tiny
Speaker 5: little bit of light can bolster your spirits. I think
Speaker 5: that the little bit of light here was very, very
Speaker 5: tiny in substance. It's unfortunate that for Democrats like Corey
Speaker 5: Booker wasn't filibustering something I think more substance to this
Speaker 5: was a huge boost in the Tea Party years for
Speaker 5: Ted Cruz. I think Rand Paul at one point too,
Speaker 5: drones right right, right right, and so it was shutdown. Yes,
Speaker 5: and there was the green eggs and ham breeding that
Speaker 5: was much derided at the time. But that's where I
Speaker 5: want to go with Booker actually is like I just
Speaker 5: find him rhetorically insufferable, and I don't think his tone.
Speaker 6: Is like generally lands.
Speaker 5: It might land with the Democratic base, but the clip
Speaker 5: even that we just played of him ending the filibuster
Speaker 5: a feet, no doubt, like an impressive feet at that,
Speaker 5: But it just especially because it's not organized around a
Speaker 5: substance of like, uh, policy, Like what's the right word?
Speaker 6: A goal?
Speaker 5: Right? Like there wasn't a thought he wasn't blocking X
Speaker 5: or shutting down Y.
Speaker 6: So I just it's all.
Speaker 5: But at the same time, those numbers that we just
Speaker 5: showed are really significant. You know, there's an F four.
Speaker 5: This is just the voicemail numbers. We put this up
Speaker 5: on the screen, the voicemail numbers, which sounds silly, but
Speaker 5: Booker's team just told them SNBC they've gotten fourteen thousand
Speaker 5: voicemails from people for people supporting Corey's filibuster and sharing
Speaker 5: their stories, and another two hundred and eighty million people
Speaker 5: have liked his speech on TikTok alone. So even when
Speaker 5: these stunts feel insufferable, they in this case, I think
Speaker 5: this one is as tempted as I was to dismiss
Speaker 5: it and laugh at it and roll my eyes. He
Speaker 5: designed it in a way that actually from TikTok in particular,
Speaker 5: but also on other platforms, I think was a real
Speaker 5: shot in the arm for Democrats who are looking to
Speaker 5: rally a very disillusion base. The base is more disillusion
Speaker 5: than it was in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen because
Speaker 5: Trump came back and won again after of their best
Speaker 5: efforts to stop him. So I think, you know, that's
Speaker 5: it works with the base and that's what really matters
Speaker 5: right now heading into a midterm cycle.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and for the parliamentary details, like you really can't
Speaker 4: do a filibuster anymore for the most part, because if
Speaker 4: if you, if the other side gets sixty votes, they
Speaker 4: can they can they can move to a final vote,
Speaker 4: and if they don't, they can't. Whether you're whether you're
Speaker 4: talking or not. And so this was just kind of
Speaker 4: an open session where he just kind of grabbed the
Speaker 4: floor and what what you can still do in the
Speaker 4: Senate that you can't do.
Speaker 1: In the House, Like you wouldn't be able to do
Speaker 1: this in the house.
Speaker 4: In the House, you get a minute, you get five minutes,
Speaker 4: you get an hour or like whatever you get, you
Speaker 4: get and when you're and when that's up, you're done.
Speaker 4: Whereas in the Senate, if you can keep going, you
Speaker 4: can keep going under certain circumstances. What he would do
Speaker 4: in order to give himself a slight break is he
Speaker 4: would say somebody would come to the floor, say at
Speaker 4: Chris van Holland or somebody and say, you know, well,
Speaker 4: the senator yield and he would say, you know, I
Speaker 4: yield to the senator for a question, you know, but
Speaker 4: I'm holding onto the floor. And so he would yield
Speaker 4: to another Democrat who would then ask him like a
Speaker 4: fairly long winded question which would allow him to at
Speaker 4: least give his give his voice a break. But he
Speaker 4: wasn't allowed to leave, was allowed to sit down, so
Speaker 4: he'd kind of just be shuffling from one foot to
Speaker 4: the other, leaning over. We had Manu Raju from CNN
Speaker 4: answer the question that everybody's wondering, which is how did
Speaker 4: he not go to the bathroom for twenty five hours?
Speaker 4: And according to Booker, this was not some secret diaper
Speaker 4: that he brought onto the floor that he stopped eating
Speaker 4: on Friday, and he stopped drinking about, you know, twelve
Speaker 4: to twenty four hours before going on to the floor,
Speaker 4: so he kind of emptied his body out ahead of time.
Speaker 4: So he went on there, which is you know, smart
Speaker 4: for those for the purpose of not having to other bathroom.
Speaker 1: It would also make the.
Speaker 4: Stamina much more difficult, you know, to be able to
Speaker 4: stand there for twenty five hours.
Speaker 1: How long how long a speech you think you would
Speaker 1: give on the on the Senate floor.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is an impossible question because I would
Speaker 5: never want to be giving a speech on the Senate floor.
Speaker 6: What's your answer, right, I don't.
Speaker 4: Oh, man, I think it'd be pretty hard to go
Speaker 4: twenty five hours like That's I don't think I could
Speaker 4: get anywhere near that.
Speaker 6: And yet at the same time, I know.
Speaker 1: What I have to say.
Speaker 4: I mean, you know, I've got maybe a half an
Speaker 4: hour stuff to say.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, well you can always read green eggs and
Speaker 5: ham over and over again.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how many. I
Speaker 1: guess I could do a few hours. I don't know.
Speaker 6: Impressive, It's definitely.
Speaker 1: We should do it. We should do a show where
Speaker 1: we just just go.
Speaker 5: Actually we could probably first losing money off that. We
Speaker 5: probably make money off that. Well, Brian, should we move
Speaker 5: on to the front of the show. Jefferson Morley's testimony
Speaker 5: at the John F. Kennedy assassination hearing yesterday, And just
Speaker 5: as we move into this block, I want to give
Speaker 5: a tip of the hat to Ryan and Sager, who
Speaker 5: Jefferson Morley the premiere JFK researcher was very impressed with
Speaker 5: after his interview last week, which was really widely circulated,
Speaker 5: and Morley left that saying it was he'd done tons
Speaker 5: of interviews in recent days and he thought that one
Speaker 5: really was the best, and I couldn't agree more.
Speaker 6: So well done.
Speaker 1: Yeah, people go back and watch that.
Speaker 4: It's like a twenty minute interview, and I think it'll
Speaker 4: get you pretty up to speed.
Speaker 1: On the situation.
Speaker 4: I feel like nobody on the committee watched that interview,
Speaker 4: or read any of the documents or has any idea
Speaker 4: what they're talking about. Let's roll through a bunch of
Speaker 4: these clips from this super embarrassing hearing as quickly as
Speaker 4: we can.
Speaker 1: So here's Jeff Morley.
Speaker 19: It's an honor to testify before you. It's a solemn
Speaker 19: responsibility to report on the disturbing new revelations that have
Speaker 19: emerged from the newest JFK files. And it is a
Speaker 19: grave matter to assert that CIA officers were culpable or
Speaker 19: complicit in the death of a president. So I want
Speaker 19: fact checkers to have all the evidence that I'm used
Speaker 19: to support my testimony. Today, the new fact pattern leads
Speaker 19: to a new conclusion. We know now what they knew
Speaker 19: about Oswald and when they knew it. We know now
Speaker 19: that Richard helms, James Angleton, and George Joannidi's were responsible
Speaker 19: for or complicit in the death of the president, either
Speaker 19: by criminal negligence or covert act. My recommendations to the
Speaker 19: task force are one, secure and release the personnel file
Speaker 19: of George Johanned's and two ask the CIA to provide
Speaker 19: a public statement answering the question why did these three
Speaker 19: men lie to JFK investigators. The answers will help fulfill
Speaker 19: the task force goal, the President's goal and the people's
Speaker 19: goal of full and complete JFK disclosure.
Speaker 4: And what he means by criminal negligence there and he
Speaker 4: expounds this in his interview with US, is that Angleton
Speaker 4: was getting regular updates based on their surveillance of Oswald
Speaker 4: and still somehow let the guy kill Kennedy.
Speaker 1: Let's roll one more clip from Morley here.
Speaker 20: You actually had written an article specifically addressing a whistleblower
Speaker 20: that had reports at the CIA potentially showing information that
Speaker 20: Oswald was in Mexico City.
Speaker 1: Can you speak more to that.
Speaker 19: I was approached a few years ago by a man
Speaker 19: who had worked inside the CIA, had a very high
Speaker 19: security clearance, and in twenty eighteen he came to me
Speaker 19: and said he was concerned that there was a JFK
Speaker 19: assassination document.
Speaker 1: That he had read while he was working.
Speaker 19: At the CIA, and he was afraid that it would
Speaker 19: never become public. The man was taken considerable legal risk
Speaker 19: by talking to me. He was talking about classified or
Speaker 19: potentially classified information. So I published his story last year
Speaker 19: without his name, which is not something that I usually do.
Speaker 19: I don't like stories with anonymous sources. But I felt
Speaker 19: that it was important to get out, and he felt
Speaker 19: it was important too. I have spoken with him and
Speaker 19: he says he is willing to come public and tell
Speaker 19: his name under his own story, with assurances that he
Speaker 19: will not face legal retaliation. I hope that's something that
Speaker 19: can be arranged in the near future.
Speaker 1: That is something that we will definitely follow up on.
Speaker 4: Let's play a one more Morley clip and then move
Speaker 4: to some of the some of their reaction.
Speaker 20: So who do you think fired the shot?
Speaker 6: You don't know, but you don't believe it was Lee
Speaker 6: Harvey Oswald.
Speaker 19: Oswald was not the intellectual author of Kennedy's death, even
Speaker 19: if he fired a gun.
Speaker 6: That who do you think was the intellectual author of
Speaker 6: Kennedy's death?
Speaker 19: Kennedy's enemies high in his own government is as specific
Speaker 19: as I can be based on the available evidence, probably
Speaker 19: CIA and Pentagon.
Speaker 4: And now so here's Jasmine Crockett and Lauren Bobert. You
Speaker 4: embarrass themselves in a different way. I think Crockett's is
Speaker 4: more embarrassing for what it says about the Democratic Party
Speaker 4: that it now feels itself to be in a genuine
Speaker 4: coalition with the CIA, such that even when the CIA
Speaker 4: is being criticized for something that happens sixty plus years ago,
Speaker 4: they feel like they need to leap to the agency's defense.
Speaker 4: It's absolutely mind boggling. But let's and then bow were
Speaker 4: just being dumb.
Speaker 6: Go ahead, I say, and vice versa.
Speaker 5: Republicans latching onto the CIA sind as the CIA became
Speaker 5: anti Republicans right now, right.
Speaker 4: Now, all of a sudden, Yeah, they're like, yeah, anyway,
Speaker 4: so yeah, let's so let's roll.
Speaker 21: These previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and
Speaker 21: show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy. But what I
Speaker 21: find funny about this hearing is that the Republicans are
Speaker 21: here relitigating whether CIA agents lied sixty years ago, but
Speaker 21: aren't doing anything about the CIA director lying to Congress
Speaker 21: just six days ago, we should be having a hearing
Speaker 21: on the fact that the unqualified Secretary of Defense and
Speaker 21: other senior Trump officials were carelessly discussing classified military plans
Speaker 21: over an unsecured signal group chat. And instead of providing
Speaker 21: oversight over the administration's handling of classified information, the Republicans
Speaker 21: have spent a week trying to convince the American people
Speaker 21: that the military plans were not classified. So instead of
Speaker 21: giving a platform to conspiracy theories, and let me be clear,
Speaker 21: there are holes. I don't want you all to think that.
Speaker 21: I don't think that there are holes. But when we're
Speaker 21: looking back, we need to look back so that we
Speaker 21: can look forward and hopefully do better.
Speaker 22: You had something to add on that.
Speaker 19: I think you're confusing mister Oliver Stone with mister Rogers Stone.
Speaker 19: Yet sorry, it's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the
Speaker 19: Assassinators of the President.
Speaker 22: It's not my friend that Oliver Stones were there. I
Speaker 22: may have misinterpreted that, and I apologize for that. But
Speaker 22: there's seems to be some elluding of like you said, incompetence, got.
Speaker 4: A misinterpretation, and then she talks about incopetence right after that.
Speaker 5: But she was asking oliver Stone about his theory that
Speaker 5: LBJ had been behind the assassination, and Oliverston was confused
Speaker 5: because he was saying LBJ may have had knowledge of
Speaker 5: or complicity in the Warren Commission, adding Alan Dlles to
Speaker 5: the Warren Commission. But LBJ, He's like, I've never said that,
Speaker 5: And Jeff put the pieces together and said, oh, I
Speaker 5: think you're confusing him with Rogerstone, which is somewhat hilarious.
Speaker 5: And if you weren't watching, if you were just listening
Speaker 5: to the clip of Jasmine Crockett, you could see Oliver
Speaker 5: Stone with his head.
Speaker 6: Carried in his hands.
Speaker 5: So she was doing this like brain dead analysis of
Speaker 5: like the signal chat being somehow relevant to even bring
Speaker 5: up in this kind.
Speaker 6: I mean, it was just pathetic.
Speaker 4: And what I want to know is who wrote that.
Speaker 4: Staffers write these questions almost all the time. What I
Speaker 4: want to know is who wrote that question? Was this
Speaker 4: a leadership staffer, this committee staffer?
Speaker 12: Was this?
Speaker 4: I don't think it would be somebody from Crockett's office,
Speaker 4: because I think somebody from Crockett's office would have better
Speaker 4: political instincts than that. And In fact, what's so revealing
Speaker 4: about that clip is that you can see tell me
Speaker 4: if I'm analyzing this wrong. You can see Crockett's own
Speaker 4: political instincts kick in as she's getting to the end
Speaker 4: of her own question, where she's like, oh my god,
Speaker 4: I just called these folks at this hearing conspiracy theorists
Speaker 4: talking about the Kennedy assassination when everyone in this country
Speaker 4: believes that a conspiracy was behind. People have different theories
Speaker 4: about which conspiracy, but everyone thinks that some type of
Speaker 4: conspiracy was involved in killing Kennedy. And I just mocked
Speaker 4: that because Democrats are just so ready to instantly shoot
Speaker 4: first at any conspiracy and then ask questions later about
Speaker 4: whether or not it's true.
Speaker 1: In her and you can see her mind where she's like,
Speaker 1: oh god, that was stupid. And so then she.
Speaker 4: Puts the question down that was written for her and says,
Speaker 4: not that I'm.
Speaker 1: Staying there are holes, there are holes. There are definitely holes.
Speaker 4: So and she even she used the word platform, which
Speaker 4: is like a classic kind of you know, mid twenty
Speaker 4: tens democratic phrase, we're here platforming conspiracy theorists, And that's
Speaker 4: when her mind was like, did I just say we're
Speaker 4: platforming conspiracy theorists in relation to the literal one conspiracy
Speaker 4: that everyone in America believes should be platformed and talking
Speaker 4: to like and say what you want about Oliver Stone.
Speaker 1: He's fascinating.
Speaker 9: Guy.
Speaker 4: Jefferson Morley is a very very sober journalist who's who's
Speaker 4: covering this, and he's not going to stay more than then.
Speaker 4: The fact pattern will allow him to, and the documents
Speaker 4: and almost exclusively on the record sources will allow him to.
Speaker 1: But she seemed to catch herself.
Speaker 4: But to me, the whole thing was revealing of how
Speaker 4: how woven now the Democratic Party is to the CIA
Speaker 4: and the deep State that.
Speaker 1: They feel like they even need to defend Alan Dulles.
Speaker 6: Right, who Democrats for Dulles, who like.
Speaker 4: If they exhumed him, he'd like put them in the
Speaker 4: grave if he had a chance.
Speaker 6: Yes he would. He would deport all.
Speaker 5: Of the students, Yes would, And so would his brother.
Speaker 1: At Angleton, who was like the you know, handling the
Speaker 1: Israel file.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, if Jasmine Crockett's political instincts were.
Speaker 5: Truly legendary, she would have known that this hearing was
Speaker 5: coming up, and Democrats in general would be trying to
Speaker 5: take this issue off the table for Republicans. I mean,
Speaker 5: it was Republicans for a very long time who were
Speaker 5: on the wrong side of this, and for Democrats, they
Speaker 5: could be out there saying Democrats have a long proud
Speaker 5: history of trying to shed light on what happened to
Speaker 5: this democratic president, a Democratic standard bearer, and we absolutely
Speaker 5: are just as eager as are Republican counterpoints at counterparts,
Speaker 5: if not more eager to get to the bottom of
Speaker 5: it and ask really smart, insightful, savvy questions.
Speaker 6: But they did not do that yesterday.
Speaker 5: They used it as a sort of culture war platform
Speaker 5: to go after Signal, to go after Signal Gate, and
Speaker 5: align themselves with the actual like Deep States CIA intelligence apparatus.
Speaker 5: It was really unfortunate, although I think, and one of
Speaker 5: the reasons I was excited for this hearing is that
Speaker 5: Morley and Oliver Stone have had a couple of weeks
Speaker 5: to digest this insane volume of new information, which is
Speaker 5: I mean, it's going to take very long time to
Speaker 5: put all of these puzzle pieces together, but they've done
Speaker 5: the Lord's work. Morally, has done the Lord's work trying
Speaker 5: to piece this puzzle together quickly, and his voluminous knowledge
Speaker 5: of the case has allowed him to do that. So
Speaker 5: all of that said, to see these things being aired
Speaker 5: in the halls of Congress, I still thought was really powerful.
Speaker 5: I mean, we have Twitter now and we've seen some
Speaker 5: of this play out in real time. But Oliver Stone's
Speaker 5: nineteen ninety two congressional testimony was critical. I mean, it
Speaker 5: took a long time for the country to catch up,
Speaker 5: but looking back, it proved to be a really important
Speaker 5: point because there was legislation that came out of Congress
Speaker 5: that led to declassifications, and.
Speaker 6: So I thought that that was really important.
Speaker 1: Ye it was.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So his movie on Kennedy, Oliver Stones movie on
Speaker 4: JFKU basically produced the legislation that produced the records that
Speaker 4: we got just recently and that we've been getting over
Speaker 4: the last decades. So yeah, that is kind of a
Speaker 4: fascinating arc to see. And the last point on this is,
Speaker 4: like democrats may not understand why I'm harping on this,
Speaker 4: Like people who don't follow politics closely create heuristics about
Speaker 4: who's with them and who's against them, and who is
Speaker 4: right and who's wrong about particular issues. So like the
Speaker 4: a proxy for a lot of people would be are
Speaker 4: they credible? Are they are they open minded about the
Speaker 4: Kennedy assassination? Then they don't have to necessarily agree exactly
Speaker 4: with what you think on it, but like or are
Speaker 4: you just lying and mocking anybody who believes in a
Speaker 4: conspiracy theory. So if people who don't follow Publicis closely
Speaker 4: see these clips circulating online of Democrats making fun of
Speaker 4: anybody who thinks there was a conspeak behind the Kennedy assassination,
Speaker 4: they're going to just reject and dismiss anything else they
Speaker 4: hear from those Democrats because that's and that's rational.
Speaker 1: That's a rational approach.
Speaker 4: When you have a limited amount of time to invest
Speaker 4: in and analyzing the political situations like, oh, these people
Speaker 4: are liars or stupid like one or the other. Either way,
Speaker 4: I don't want to hear anything else from them. So
Speaker 4: not helping themselves with regular people by by this performance needlessly.
Speaker 6: So it's just so easy for Democrats to.
Speaker 1: Don't be afraid of Allen Dallas anymore. He's gone, it's crazy,
Speaker 1: he's gone.
Speaker 6: No reason.
Speaker 5: I mean, maybe it right, Maybe there is something substantive
Speaker 5: about their ties now to CIA world and Intel world,
Speaker 5: meaning that they don't think the sort of cost benefit
Speaker 5: makes sense for them to start going in on the CIA,
Speaker 5: because the CIA still obviously does not want a lot
Speaker 5: of these pieces to be put together. It doesn't want
Speaker 5: to see the puzzle come together. So maybe this is
Speaker 5: actually not just politics.
Speaker 4: But yeah, anyway, I hope you had a good time
Speaker 4: in Wisconsin. Thank you for joining us from all the
Speaker 4: way out there. Very much appreciated. See you back here.
Speaker 4: We'll do a Friday show again. You'll be back in
Speaker 4: here DC, I assume for that.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, absolutely looking forward to it. We look forward
Speaker 5: to those Friday shows a lot now, and I hope
Speaker 5: you guys do too.
Speaker 6: There are a lot of fun.
Speaker 5: Just as a reminder of Breakingpoints dot com to now
Speaker 5: a premium membership, premium subscription. Appreciate everyone tuning in. Thanks
Speaker 5: for letting me.
Speaker 6: Zoom in here.
Speaker 1: Ryan all right, and we'll see you on Friday.