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Speaker 1: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 4: We've got quite a packed show today, And Emily, I
Speaker 4: was just thinking that, jording to Biden era, you can
Speaker 4: actually kind of phone in the prep for these shows
Speaker 4: sometimes because it wasn't a whole lot emanating from that
Speaker 4: White House, not a whole lot, and also there wasn't
Speaker 4: a whole lot going on outside of the lines. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you just kind of they were just doing what they
Speaker 4: were doing, and they're doing in genocide over here. They've
Speaker 4: got to keep doing their genocide with this. You have
Speaker 4: to be like, wait a minute, is that legal everything?
Speaker 4: Then you look it up You're like, Nope, what they're
Speaker 4: doing here is definitely not legal.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to gonna have to flag that in
Speaker 1: the hall.
Speaker 5: It's funny you say this. I had the exact same
Speaker 5: thought this morning that under Biden, you know, this is
Speaker 5: the norm. This is the pre Trump norm. It was
Speaker 5: utterly predictable, and there would be something maybe out of
Speaker 5: the ordinary every week and you'd think, ah, what a
Speaker 5: crazy country. But it's back to the routine of you know,
Speaker 5: twenty seventeen through twenty twenty one here in Washington, which
Speaker 5: is that all of the different agencies and a lot
Speaker 5: of people watching this are like, yeah, this is this
Speaker 5: is what we voted for. All the agencies are in scrambling,
Speaker 5: they're in panic. But as a journalist, it's a different rhythm,
Speaker 5: that is for sure.
Speaker 4: Elon Musk used the word a revolution to describe what
Speaker 4: he and his is it dojay or doggy? I think
Speaker 4: we should go with I think it's o joj. Let's
Speaker 4: go with Dojay.
Speaker 5: This isn't Ryan's TikTok odyssey involves him try to pronounced
Speaker 5: that much.
Speaker 4: Musk described what his Doggie Committee is doing as a revolution,
Speaker 4: and I think that's an accurate way to put it.
Speaker 4: And that doesn't mean that we won't continue pointing out
Speaker 4: all the different federal laws that it's in violation of,
Speaker 4: because you know, we're reporters and that's what we do.
Speaker 4: This is here's a law. Here's what they're doing. They
Speaker 4: clearly are so far beyond caring about what the law
Speaker 4: is around this stuff that it almost feels trite to
Speaker 4: bring it up.
Speaker 1: But we're going to keep doing that because of.
Speaker 5: Contempt for it.
Speaker 1: There. Yes, yes, it's a it's a revolution.
Speaker 4: And you also look ridiculous as Democrats, now do you
Speaker 4: had democrats outside of USAID. You had the guy that
Speaker 4: beat out AOC for the Jerry Connolly saying, you know,
Speaker 4: if Elon Musk wants to run AID, then he should
Speaker 4: get nominated and get confirmed in the Senate.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And then Reuben Diego is like, if if Trump wants
Speaker 4: to octi Gaza, he should come to the Senate and
Speaker 4: ask for authorization for the use of military for like
Speaker 4: what he should.
Speaker 1: Okay, but it's this is a revolution. They don't care.
Speaker 4: But anyway, we're going to talk about the substance and
Speaker 4: the legality of all this. Of course, starting with Trump's
Speaker 4: bombshell announcement that we are just going to own Gaza. Okay,
Speaker 4: we'll get deeper deeper into that. We're going We're going
Speaker 4: to talk to Nathan Tankers as an independent reporter who's
Speaker 4: been talking to people inside the Treasury Department about what
Speaker 4: the Doggy Committee's lanyard kids, or maybe they don't even
Speaker 4: have lanyards, They just roll right in there. What these do,
Speaker 4: what these little hacker kids are doing inside the Treasury Department,
Speaker 4: and what they're not doing, what the what the risks
Speaker 4: of that would be? I talked to a very senior
Speaker 4: former Treasury official who's worked in this precise area last
Speaker 4: night that I can shed a little light on this as well.
Speaker 4: Trump is also saying that he's going to get rid
Speaker 4: of the Department of Education, which again that would require
Speaker 4: an Act of Congress. He's going to try to make
Speaker 4: progress toward that through through executive action.
Speaker 1: GOP. What is that one on that thing?
Speaker 5: I do remember that well, basically Republican's cave to the
Speaker 5: Republicans and.
Speaker 1: The Tulsi and RFK Junior cruising.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean this is they have complied with the
Speaker 5: demands of Mecca. Bill Cassidy was really on the line
Speaker 5: and could have yeah he's a doctor, but got actually
Speaker 5: some interesting concessions out of Robert F. Kennedy Junior, Tulsea Gobert,
Speaker 5: and RFK Junior's votes will be on the Senate floor
Speaker 5: next week. They're likely to pass. Actually there. Their hardest
Speaker 5: battle may have just been getting out of committee, which
Speaker 5: is unusual for cabinet nominees. So we're going to break
Speaker 5: down what happened in the Senate yesterday. We're also going
Speaker 5: to talk about housing.
Speaker 4: Ryan New York Times had a fascinating analysis in a
Speaker 4: story that it did with with Pro Publica where it
Speaker 4: looked at housing price trends all around the country and
Speaker 4: found that there's now a stark divergence that you're seeing
Speaker 4: in the data when it comes to home prices in
Speaker 4: places that face catastrophic climate threats and places like say
Speaker 4: the Midwest or New England that do not, and in
Speaker 4: the mid Atlantic to some degree as well.
Speaker 1: So if you own homes in those areas.
Speaker 4: They expect that you're going to continue to see your
Speaker 4: housing wealth and your housing prices grow. If you own
Speaker 4: homes in the other areas you're going to see your
Speaker 4: values crash, which they're forecasting could lead to like five
Speaker 4: million internal migrants over the next year, fifty five million
Speaker 4: over the next like thirty years, like going to have
Speaker 4: real structural implications for the population of the United States.
Speaker 5: Those have a fun Jasmine Crockett clip that we're going
Speaker 5: to play and see if maybe.
Speaker 1: Some never disappoints.
Speaker 5: No, no, see if we can maybe stave off some
Speaker 5: white tears.
Speaker 4: She is either four against mediocre white people. Were not
Speaker 4: quite clear, but we'll unpack it all.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we'll make sure to do that. Let's turn to
Speaker 5: the White House now, where an absolutely wild cascade of
Speaker 5: statements from President Donald Trump came during his meeting with
Speaker 5: Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahoo, who was in town
Speaker 5: last week meeting with Donald Trump, and Trump rolled out
Speaker 5: an absolutely shocking announcement actually was surprising even to his
Speaker 5: own White House. Just before we roll this clip front
Speaker 5: of the show, Phil Weigmann reported in Real Claire Politics,
Speaker 5: quote after Trump made his announcement, even some senior administration
Speaker 5: officials were surprised and still looking for answers. Quote that
Speaker 5: was interesting, one told Real Claire Politics after the press
Speaker 5: conference wrapped, asked what the plan would look like in practice,
Speaker 5: the official replied, quote, I need to get clarity myself, Ryan.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And so Trump in his press conference said that this
Speaker 4: is not a decision he came to lightly. This is
Speaker 4: some This is the results of great and extraordinary deliberation,
Speaker 4: which is undercut by the idea that it came as
Speaker 4: a surprise to senior administration officials and even seemed to
Speaker 4: take net Nyaho a little bit by surprise, like it's
Speaker 4: not clear how what how much of this came up
Speaker 4: in their conversation. Because we're about to play you some
Speaker 4: clips from their their little tete tet before the meeting,
Speaker 4: during which Netnyah who cannot wipe the smile off of
Speaker 4: his face, you'll notice that in the clips, and then
Speaker 4: their stand up press conference afterwards, during which nen Yahou
Speaker 4: looks a little bit shell shocked after getting news that
Speaker 4: he appeared not to have expected and doesn't quite I
Speaker 4: think know how to internalize or make of It'simir ben Gavie,
Speaker 4: you know, super far right guy who was abandoning nen
Speaker 4: Yahuo overstriking a ceasefire deal, tweeted Donald We're gonna have
Speaker 4: a wonderful relationship like this is a guy who was himself,
Speaker 4: like what, a convicted terrorist in Israel and has always
Speaker 4: wanted to, you know, ethnically cleanse Gaza, and he now
Speaker 4: sees trumping in his reflection. So let's roll a little
Speaker 4: bit of this and then try to unpack how serious
Speaker 4: he is and what the implications would be.
Speaker 6: The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to
Speaker 6: Gaza is they have no alternative. It's right now a
Speaker 6: demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every
Speaker 6: building is down. They're living under fallen concrete. That's very
Speaker 6: dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of
Speaker 6: a beautiful area with homes and safety, and they can
Speaker 6: live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of
Speaker 6: having to go back and do it again. The US
Speaker 6: will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do
Speaker 6: a job with it too. We'll own it and be
Speaker 6: responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and
Speaker 6: other weapons on the site. Level the site and get
Speaker 6: rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out, create an
Speaker 6: economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and
Speaker 6: housing for the people of the area. The real job
Speaker 6: do something different, just state than.
Speaker 7: Really demanding a path towards a Palestinian state or any
Speaker 7: other recognition.
Speaker 8: Everybody demanding one thing. You know what it is peace.
Speaker 8: We want peace. We want people to stop being killed.
Speaker 8: But everybody's demanding and he wants.
Speaker 5: So.
Speaker 4: Reporters had a lot of questions about that announcement that
Speaker 4: we were going to take over Gaza. Among them was
Speaker 4: will this involve US boots on the ground? And Trump said,
Speaker 4: if if that's what it requires, then it will require.
Speaker 1: They also ask because there were there were there obviously is.
Speaker 4: Enormous amounts of reconstruction UH and demolition work and removal
Speaker 4: of unexploded ordinance that needs to happen there, and so
Speaker 4: there does need to be some displacement, either internally or
Speaker 4: externally in the course of doing that. And so Trump
Speaker 4: was a asked, Okay, you're taking over Gaza. How many
Speaker 4: Palestinians do you expect will be removed from Gaza? Here's
Speaker 4: what he said.
Speaker 9: How many people? Who you're thinking about all of them?
Speaker 6: I mean we're talking about probably a million seven people,
Speaker 6: a million seven, maybe a million eight, but I think
Speaker 6: all of them.
Speaker 4: So all of them and notice there, and a lot
Speaker 4: of people have picked up on this. This is not
Speaker 4: the first time that he has flagged Gaza's current population
Speaker 4: at about one point seven million. It was two point
Speaker 4: three million when it started. The public figures are that
Speaker 4: just over sixty thousand were killed in the conflict. What
Speaker 4: we know about conflict is that there are usually four
Speaker 4: to five what they call indirect deaths for every direct
Speaker 4: killing in a conflict. And the indirect deaths you can
Speaker 4: just just use your imagination. These are people who die
Speaker 4: from treatable diseases, die of drive down nutrition, die of dysentery,
Speaker 4: or something something falls on them. Then they die an
Speaker 4: accident on death in a way that they would not
Speaker 4: have if they were not living in a war zone.
Speaker 4: So sixty thousand times four to five you can imagine that. Okay,
Speaker 4: So now the US is starting to admit that actually
Speaker 4: several hundreds of thousands of people were killed here. But
Speaker 4: then the final question, and then let's analyze this for
Speaker 4: a bit, is what would the Palestinians be able to
Speaker 4: return in this let's say fantasy scenario where somehow Trump
Speaker 4: manages to remove all one point seven million people, which
Speaker 4: we'll talk about how fantastical that idea is, But would
Speaker 4: they be able to return? Here's trump would Palestines have
Speaker 4: the right to return to Gaza if they left while
Speaker 4: the rebuilding was appening.
Speaker 6: It would be my hope that we could do something
Speaker 6: really nice, really good where they wouldn't want to return.
Speaker 6: Why would they want to return? The place has been
Speaker 6: the hell.
Speaker 10: It's been one of the meanest, one of the meanest,
Speaker 10: toughest places on Earth, And right now it's I've seen
Speaker 10: every picture from every angle better than.
Speaker 9: If I were there, and nobody can live there. You
Speaker 9: can't live there.
Speaker 6: It's too dangerous for people. Nobody can go there. It's
Speaker 6: too dangerous. Nobody wants to be there. Warriors don't want
Speaker 6: to be there, Soldiers don't want to be there.
Speaker 9: How can you have people go back?
Speaker 6: You're saying go back into Gaza now, the same thing's
Speaker 6: going to happen, It'll only be dead.
Speaker 9: The best way to do it is you go out
Speaker 9: and you get beautiful.
Speaker 6: Open areas with the sunlight coming through, and you build
Speaker 6: something nice, and they are.
Speaker 9: Not going to want to They are not going to
Speaker 9: want to go back to Ghaza.
Speaker 4: So the second half of that clip there was actually
Speaker 4: in response to a different question, which was would you
Speaker 4: support Jewish settlements in Gaza, which is what Ben Gavie
Speaker 4: and Smotrich and this kind of faction of settlers are
Speaker 4: pushing for, And he was saying it's too dangerous for
Speaker 4: them too. He's like, I'm not saying it's only too
Speaker 4: dangerous for Palestinians, it's also too dang.
Speaker 1: So at least he's being consistent there now.
Speaker 4: The other the line he said, where I want to
Speaker 4: make it so beautiful that they don't want to return,
Speaker 4: has been bouncing around my head because I'm like, that
Speaker 4: just doesn't make sense, and I think I finally unlocked it.
Speaker 4: I think he means they're going to make whatever refugee
Speaker 4: camp they send them to so beautiful and so amazing
Speaker 4: and so wonderful.
Speaker 5: Well, he said they're going to have beautiful houses.
Speaker 4: Beautiful houses that they won't want to leave that area.
Speaker 4: So he's not saying we're going to make Gaza so
Speaker 4: amazing they won't want to come back, which makes no sense,
Speaker 4: because of Gods is amazing, forget the heritage and everything else.
Speaker 4: If it's amazing, he want to come back. He's saying
Speaker 4: that wherever they send.
Speaker 1: Them So.
Speaker 4: There are layers of this going on here, and the
Speaker 4: kind of first one that we have to confront with
Speaker 4: Trump always is how serious is this on the complete
Speaker 4: total nonsense bluff spectrum to deadly serious plan that he's
Speaker 4: going to execute on Where are you on this on
Speaker 4: the Trump spectrum? There?
Speaker 5: I mean, I think you absolutely have to take him
Speaker 5: seriously because he's speaking as though, on the one hand,
Speaker 5: this is a fully fleshed out plan. Right, He's saying
Speaker 5: he had answers to all of these particular questions.
Speaker 1: There are things that hescept not where they're going to go.
Speaker 5: Well, he's so, but that hinges on what he's saying
Speaker 5: as an agreement in the works with other Arab nations,
Speaker 5: which is already done on arrival, because Saudi Arabia has
Speaker 5: said no. The Sovereign Wealth Fund that was announced in
Speaker 5: what the last forty eight hours, I suppose is potentially
Speaker 5: aimed at something like this.
Speaker 1: It seems to can redevelop God's I see right, Yeah.
Speaker 5: It seems like it was something that's cobbled together in
Speaker 5: the last forty eight hours, maybe with input from Jared Kushner.
Speaker 5: As Tara Palmry is reporting that you know, we covered
Speaker 5: this at the time, it didn't get a lot of
Speaker 5: pick up, but Kushner had sent something to the extent
Speaker 5: this was last year that Gaza could be developed, that
Speaker 5: it was like an amazing opportunity for real estate developers. Yeah, exactly, Riviera.
Speaker 4: So yeah, the Jordan and Egypt points are I think
Speaker 4: are worth pausing on for a second, because Trump seems
Speaker 4: to be so.
Speaker 1: Trump is saying, and he's going to meet soon with
Speaker 1: the King of Jordan. He talks.
Speaker 4: You know, you can get the as he calls him,
Speaker 4: the General in Egypt CC and get him on the
Speaker 4: phone when ever he once.
Speaker 1: Trump is saying that he's he compared them to Mexico
Speaker 1: and Canada.
Speaker 4: He's like, Mexico and Canada said they weren't gonna do
Speaker 4: anything about their border, and then I threatened tariffs and boom,
Speaker 4: all of a sudden, they're doing something about their border.
Speaker 4: Couple things there. Mexico and Canada never said they wouldn't
Speaker 4: do anything about their border.
Speaker 1: It was fairly easy.
Speaker 4: Oh, you want to send ten thousand National Guard to
Speaker 4: our border and you'll back off these terriff threats.
Speaker 1: Okay, fine, we will do that.
Speaker 4: That's a different concession than something that both CC and.
Speaker 1: The Royal family and Jordan believe would lead to their toppling.
Speaker 1: Think about this.
Speaker 4: They're much smaller countries than we are, and you're asking
Speaker 4: them to take a million people each. And these million
Speaker 4: people are more affiliated politically with Muslim brotherhood factions, which
Speaker 4: the hash of Mites in Jordan and the military and
Speaker 4: Egypt have done everything they can to suppress. So now
Speaker 4: you're just you're empowering them and destabilizing your country. So
Speaker 4: you're asking these rulers with threats of whatever economic threats
Speaker 4: that Trump is going to make on the one hand,
Speaker 4: and carrots on the other, we'll pay this, we'll do this,
Speaker 4: We'll give you all this money from the World Bank
Speaker 4: im and we'll build this. What does that mean to
Speaker 4: a ruler who thinks that the end result of accepting
Speaker 4: the deal is that within some period of time they
Speaker 4: will be overthrown, They will be out of power. Rulers
Speaker 4: are willing to take deals that are harmful to their
Speaker 4: populations if they think it's going to extend their power.
Speaker 1: Like that's just basic kind of power politics.
Speaker 4: So Trump is in a Trump thinks they're just being
Speaker 4: stubborn and that he can conjole them, but it is
Speaker 4: existential for.
Speaker 5: Them, and they actually also know. And this is worth
Speaker 5: pausing on maybe one of the most obvious points here.
Speaker 5: The reason that Trump is asking the question, why would
Speaker 5: you want to go back? It's a place of death
Speaker 5: and destruction? Well, they know that, they have known that
Speaker 5: for decades and they have not left. The whole point
Speaker 5: is the land. The entire fight is over the specific
Speaker 5: piece of land. So to say that why would they
Speaker 5: want to go back? I mean, this is the question
Speaker 5: that they have been answering definitively for decades. So in
Speaker 5: terms of in the pragmatic terms of what Donald Trump
Speaker 5: thinks will actually happen here, when you have Tony Blincoln
Speaker 5: saying just a month ago, less than a month ago,
Speaker 5: that three quarters of the Hamas fighters have already been replaced.
Speaker 5: They've already replaced three quarters of the people that Hamas
Speaker 5: has lost. You have a population that is clinging to
Speaker 5: the land and has been for years, for generations, over
Speaker 5: and over again, and a militant government that's US troops
Speaker 5: on the ground. There's no other way to put it.
Speaker 5: The other Arab countries wouldn't be able to just peel
Speaker 5: the population of Gaza away from Gaza without violence. There's
Speaker 5: absolutely no way that this happens without incredible violence. And
Speaker 5: likely if Donald Trump says we quote own the Gaza strip,
Speaker 5: if he says the US is just going to come
Speaker 5: in and take ownership and he thinks he can make
Speaker 5: a deal, this will be US troops. This would be
Speaker 5: kids from the Midwest, from everywhere, boots on the ground
Speaker 5: in Gaza, peeling people away from the land that they
Speaker 5: have spilled generations of blood to stay on.
Speaker 4: If they wanted to rebuild Gaza, Like, there are hundreds
Speaker 4: of thousands of residences that are still habitable, Like the
Speaker 4: entire thing is not on ahabitals. But let's say you
Speaker 4: do need a million people to go somewhere else. You
Speaker 4: could find some housing internally within Gaza for some portion
Speaker 4: of those. But there is another country that is right
Speaker 4: there that could take people for the time period.
Speaker 1: And that country's name is Israel.
Speaker 4: And that country also happens to be the one that
Speaker 4: made it uninhabitable. So if they're serious here about that, like,
Speaker 4: they could do that, and there's a step toward peace
Speaker 4: and coexistence. But I think it's worth underscoring a valid
Speaker 4: point that Trump makes and that is the absolute level
Speaker 4: of destruction. And Witkoff talked about this as well outside
Speaker 4: of the White House. So let's and you can see
Speaker 4: the real estate developer in him as he's talking about
Speaker 4: So let's roll eight A two here, and then I
Speaker 4: want to skip ahead on something go ahead.
Speaker 11: When the President talks about cleaning it out, he talks
Speaker 11: about making it habitable. And this is a long range plan.
Speaker 11: They've dug tunnels underneath there that have basically degraded the
Speaker 11: stone that you make that would form foundations. We have
Speaker 11: to examine that. You do it with borings, you do
Speaker 11: it with subterranean surveys, and this guy knows real it's
Speaker 11: years on top of years. The disposal effort in Gaza
Speaker 11: is we estimate three to five years just to dispose
Speaker 11: of all the things before you can look down but
Speaker 11: believe beneath the surface of the soil, and then before
Speaker 11: you get a master plan done. And the President is
Speaker 11: intent on getting it all done correctly. So to me,
Speaker 11: it is unfair to have explained to Palestinians that they
Speaker 11: might be back in five years. That's just preposterous and
Speaker 11: he's just taking common sense.
Speaker 4: So a few months ago I spoke to a un
Speaker 4: official whose job it was to do ordinance removal after
Speaker 4: the twenty fourteen war in Gaza, and what he described. First,
Speaker 4: first of all, there are not a whole lot of
Speaker 4: people able to do this in the world, like there's you.
Speaker 1: Know, small teams that specialized work.
Speaker 4: Second of all, he described it as painstakingly laborious stuff.
Speaker 4: So in general, as he was describing it to me,
Speaker 4: and I've since been able to confirm this with others.
Speaker 4: The munitions that Israel uses, oftentimes five to ten percent
Speaker 4: of those under the best of circumstances, do not explode
Speaker 4: upon impact.
Speaker 1: They are not operating in the best of circumstances.
Speaker 4: They're operating in this dense urban environment, which means you're
Speaker 4: going to have a much higher failure rate, which means
Speaker 4: you're going to have unexploded ordinance everywhere around around Gaza.
Speaker 4: Because if you know, the numbers are absolutely breathtaking when
Speaker 4: it comes to the amount of metric tons that have
Speaker 4: been dropped on gays. And so if you take ten
Speaker 4: to twenty percent of that and assume that that is unexploded,
Speaker 4: like that's that's the task. And he said that these
Speaker 4: are actually much more stable than you would think that
Speaker 4: doesn't probably wouldn't give me a whole lot more comfort,
Speaker 4: Coli comfort if it was in my own courtyard or
Speaker 4: in my bedroom. He said, For instance, they pulled one
Speaker 4: out of a kitchen, like it came to the roof,
Speaker 4: second floor, through the kitchen floor, and just getting that
Speaker 4: one single unexploded bomb out of that kitchen took them
Speaker 4: weeks because you got to first, you got to clear
Speaker 4: the door out, and you have to do all this
Speaker 4: gently because while they are stable, they become destabilized if
Speaker 4: if a bulldozer hits them or something else significant. And
Speaker 4: so our one of our correspondents in Gaza, Abubaker a
Speaker 4: bet who's been on this program a bunch of times.
Speaker 4: So yesterday he tried to get to Gaza City, couldn't
Speaker 4: get a ride, ended up in these a bunch on
Speaker 4: his Twitter agencies, ended up walking and took him like
Speaker 4: three and a half hours to walk to Gaza City.
Speaker 4: And we can roll a four here just to get
Speaker 4: a sense of the destruction. And at the end of
Speaker 4: this clip he stumbles on an unexploded mine. Just to
Speaker 4: just to underline that Trump's point that this is an
Speaker 4: extraordinarily dangerous situations let's play a four.
Speaker 5: Here.
Speaker 12: Here we are, it's just seven in the morning. Came
Speaker 12: Gaza City where all you can see is just total destruction.
Speaker 12: There are some buildings that have been destroyed during the genocide.
Speaker 9: So I think I found a line.
Speaker 12: Yeah, so I'm gonna walk away fixed. Oh my god,
Speaker 12: what this sound is?
Speaker 4: And we often get questions, by the way, about Aba
Speaker 4: Baker's British accent. He was a before the October seventh.
Speaker 4: His passion was doing journalism around football, European football, and
Speaker 4: so he picked up his British accent. He's never left
Speaker 4: gods in his life, picked up a British accent watching
Speaker 4: British footballers. But so you see there he's just stumbling
Speaker 4: along and oh, there's a mind like that that does
Speaker 4: have to be that does have to be dealt with.
Speaker 4: And I had the sense throughout this that Israel knew
Speaker 4: that that part of the carpet bombing of the entire
Speaker 4: thing of goz It was to make it uninhabitable, was
Speaker 4: to produce a reality that left you only bad options
Speaker 4: for the Palestinians, and one of them being all right,
Speaker 4: what a shame, love to have you stay. But now
Speaker 4: it's completely uninhabitable, You're going to have to leave. But
Speaker 4: like I said, if he was serious, there is a
Speaker 4: there is a plan where five hundred thousand, two million
Speaker 4: people can stay. Another one hundred get relocated inside Gaza.
Speaker 4: Those are the workers who are involved in this reconstruction.
Speaker 1: It's ridiculous.
Speaker 4: What's Trump's idea is going to kick all the Palestinians
Speaker 4: out and then bring like Indian or Thai construction workers
Speaker 4: in Like that doesn't make any sense. You've got people
Speaker 4: who could do the work, and then you could have
Speaker 4: the others internally displaced in the Negev desert or elsewhere
Speaker 4: in like in settlement camps, and with a promise that
Speaker 4: they're going to return when it's done. And that promise
Speaker 4: backed up by the prospect of a path towards statehood
Speaker 4: and normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Speaker 1: So all of that is pushing in the same direction.
Speaker 4: Instead, instead of Trump getting a Saudi Israel peace deal,
Speaker 4: in this path, he's more likely to see the Egyptian
Speaker 4: and Jordanian ones unravel, like they will stop recognizing Israel
Speaker 4: if they keep pushing this.
Speaker 5: That's a great point because this plan is I think,
Speaker 5: on the one hand hyper pragmatic and not pragmatic at all,
Speaker 5: Like that's the tension between this. On the one hand,
Speaker 5: he's saying he's making this very obvious point that everyone
Speaker 5: dances around, which is, okay, if this is a ceasefire,
Speaker 5: we're about to repeat a traffic cycle. He's making that point,
Speaker 5: everyone dances around it. But on the one hand, that's
Speaker 5: absolutely true, and it's from the sort of pragmatic lens
Speaker 5: of a non idea logue, and so he made that point.
Speaker 5: On the other hand, the idea of peeling people off
Speaker 5: the land that they fought generations to keep, there's nothing
Speaker 5: pragmatic about it unless you're willing to actually do a
Speaker 5: significant A Rock style nation building operation in the Gaza strip,
Speaker 5: which is what about the size of Las Vegas. If
Speaker 5: you want to go and do that and then have
Speaker 5: the US own a strip of land in the Middle
Speaker 5: East that is sacred to many many people, you're asking
Speaker 5: for again, generational nation building. And so it's exploded all
Speaker 5: of these typical I guess fault lines of what MAGA
Speaker 5: means to the Republican Party, but beyond that, what MAGA
Speaker 5: actually means, like to the American people, to the people
Speaker 5: who voted for Donald Trump. Is it about the sort
Speaker 5: of expansionism imperialism, or is it about actually, like quote
Speaker 5: unquote America First, Josh Holly right away told The New
Speaker 5: York Times, I don't think it's the best use of
Speaker 5: US resources to spend a bunch of money in Gaza.
Speaker 5: I'd prefer that to be spent in the United States. First.
Speaker 1: That's the logic of MAGA.
Speaker 4: So maybe which rows out of the ashes of the
Speaker 4: Iraq occupation exactly exactly.
Speaker 5: I mean, what about all of the tunnels. Just let's
Speaker 5: just take the point that you hear from Yahoo and yeah,
Speaker 5: all like, what does it look like if Hamas says
Speaker 5: you are not taking us.
Speaker 4: And if you tell them they're not right, If if
Speaker 4: you tell them right out front, okay, we're kicking you
Speaker 4: out and you're never coming back, then of course they're
Speaker 4: going to fight you.
Speaker 5: Yeah. But this brings us to your original point, which
Speaker 5: is how serious is what Donald Trump laid out yesterday
Speaker 5: And my impression is that this is something he's thought
Speaker 5: about for a while. With Kushner, they've kicked around this
Speaker 5: sort of like.
Speaker 1: Galaxy brain, real estate brain.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, it's sort of been kicked around and then
Speaker 5: just in the last few days they decided, oh, who's coming,
Speaker 5: we can like actually really do this. Let's see what
Speaker 5: we can actually put together. Because again, like actual people
Speaker 5: in the White House, senior officials were caught off guard
Speaker 5: by this. That much is very clear. So whether this
Speaker 5: is a starting point tariff style, twenty five percent tariff
Speaker 5: style or teriff style starting point is unclear. But Ryan,
Speaker 5: it's the same thing with the tariffs. I think he
Speaker 5: should be taken seriously because he's not He has not
Speaker 5: an ideal log. He's not ideologically committed to one outcome
Speaker 5: or the other. So when he does these negotiations, he
Speaker 5: could kind of land wherever he thinks it works for him.
Speaker 1: And confusing the situation further.
Speaker 4: He's now talking, as of this morning, his most explicitly
Speaker 4: about reaching a deal that he will celebrate with Iran,
Speaker 4: which obviously cannot happen if he engages in full on
Speaker 4: ethnic cleansing in Gaza. So let's put up a three
Speaker 4: here where he's talking about the role that Iran negotiations play.
Speaker 1: Here, Iran and their proxys who threaten to retaliate.
Speaker 4: Against you and your team by killing you guys or
Speaker 4: taking out solo.
Speaker 6: Well, they haven't done that, and that would be a
Speaker 6: terrible thing for them to do, not because of me.
Speaker 6: If they did that, they would be obliterated. It would
Speaker 6: be the end I've left instructions. If they do it,
Speaker 6: they get obliterated, there won't be anything left and they
Speaker 6: shouldn't be able to do it.
Speaker 9: And Biden should have said that, but he never did.
Speaker 9: I don't know what. Lack of intelligence perhaps, but he
Speaker 9: never said it.
Speaker 6: If that happens to a leader or close to a leader, frankly,
Speaker 6: if you had other people involved, also, you would call
Speaker 6: for total obliteration of a state that did it.
Speaker 9: That would include Iran.
Speaker 1: So that's the shot. So here's the chaser, and we
Speaker 1: can maybe add this. In posts on.
Speaker 4: Truth social this morning, Trump says this quote, I want
Speaker 4: Iran to be a great and successful country, but one
Speaker 4: that cannot have a nuclear weapon. Reports that the United States,
Speaker 4: working in conjunction with Israel, is going to blow Iran
Speaker 4: into smithereens all caps are greatly exaggerated.
Speaker 1: In other words, he's referring to his own comments the
Speaker 1: entire bluff.
Speaker 4: Yes, I would much prefer a verified nuclear peace agreement,
Speaker 4: and this is all caps. So that's VNPA, which will
Speaker 4: let Iran peacefully grow and prosper. We should start working
Speaker 4: on it immediately and have a big Middle East celebration,
Speaker 4: celebrations capitalized when it is signed and completed.
Speaker 1: God bless the Middle East.
Speaker 4: And so here you have Trump, who has been who
Speaker 4: has hired an enormous number of people who want to
Speaker 4: reach a piece deal with Iran and get back into
Speaker 4: the nuclear deal that Obama struck, that Trump ripped up
Speaker 4: in his first term. Here you have him the most
Speaker 4: explicitly stating it outright that that is a goal of his.
Speaker 4: And it comes after he threatened to obliterate them basically
Speaker 4: if they kill him, which fair right, you say, Look,
Speaker 4: you kill me, I've left instructions that.
Speaker 1: You're dead too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's a again, it's a hell of a bluff.
Speaker 5: But it all came on the heels of this New
Speaker 5: York Times report on Monday that because of all of
Speaker 5: the insanity going on sort of ended up being buried
Speaker 5: in the news cycle. The Times reported quote new intelligence
Speaker 5: about Iran's nuclear program has convinced American officials that a
Speaker 5: secret team of the country scientist is exploring a faster,
Speaker 5: if cruder approach to developing a toom weapon if Tehran's
Speaker 5: leadership decides to race for a bomb, according to current
Speaker 5: and former American officials. Now, if you are like many people,
Speaker 5: vague New York Times reporting about nuclear program sends a
Speaker 5: chill up your spine because you just don't know if
Speaker 5: you can trust it. But they are saying, essentially the
Speaker 5: timeline could be severely minimized or significantly minimized based on
Speaker 5: these new efforts, down to something like a month if
Speaker 5: Iron wanted to enrich uranium and have a crude nuclear weapon.
Speaker 5: So Trump is then asked, in this context, that was
Speaker 5: the broader thing that was happening when he gets these
Speaker 5: questions from Peter Doocy.
Speaker 4: And scientifically or practically, whether that's true, we don't know,
Speaker 4: but strategically we can see the internal logic. The deterrent
Speaker 4: that Iran had up until recently was it's massive sprawl
Speaker 4: of proxies throughout the region that could threaten Israel and
Speaker 4: threaten you know, US forces in Iraq or Syria if
Speaker 4: if Iran was attacked. Plus it's what they believe to
Speaker 4: be sophisticated air defenses. Israel apparently massively degraded their air defenses.
Speaker 1: With that counter strike.
Speaker 4: Leaving them significantly exposed to future strikes and their their
Speaker 4: own proxies.
Speaker 1: Are significantly degraded.
Speaker 4: Has has been in particular as well as as well
Speaker 4: as maas the who the these are still you know,
Speaker 4: very much capable of firing missiles out of their mountains,
Speaker 4: and that will be the case for the foreseeable future,
Speaker 4: no matter what Trump wants to do about it.
Speaker 1: So with those uh, with with those kind of.
Speaker 4: Thereo's protections so to speak, kind of beaten down strategically,
Speaker 4: you can understand why they say, okay, well all we
Speaker 4: have left then is a race towards a nuclear weapon,
Speaker 4: because they look around and they're like, who's not around? Like, oh, Gaddafi?
Speaker 4: Gaddafi struck a nuclear deal not long after that he
Speaker 4: was ousted.
Speaker 1: Who is around?
Speaker 4: Kim Jong un is around, and he for no other
Speaker 4: reason than he has a nuclear weapon. So you can
Speaker 4: understand the logic at least, even if we don't necessarily
Speaker 4: have to believe the precise contours of the reporting.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm trying to imagine Gadafi with a nuclear weapon,
Speaker 5: what you'd.
Speaker 4: Be imaginings as a man who's going to die of
Speaker 4: natural causes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's right. So before we wrap this up, it's
Speaker 5: also absolutely important to note that Trump was asked about quote.
Speaker 4: And by the way, Libya would be so much better
Speaker 4: off than it is now.
Speaker 5: The real Middle Eastern riviera is Trump is now saying
Speaker 5: Goza will.
Speaker 4: Be Libya completely destroyed by the US and NATO, like
Speaker 4: absolutely ravaged.
Speaker 5: Well on that point, though, I have to mention that
Speaker 5: Trump was asked about quote, Judea and Samaria, about his
Speaker 5: ideological disposition what he believes. If he believes that you
Speaker 5: in Samaria, that Israel has a biblical right to them,
Speaker 5: And we can put this vo up on the screen here.
Speaker 5: This is from the West Bank Trump essentially, this is
Speaker 5: a five. Trump essentially was saying, well, you know, we're
Speaker 5: going to make a big announcement about that in the
Speaker 5: weeks ahead. So Ryan as the.
Speaker 1: West four weeks or something three or four weeks.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, so as the West Bank is now these
Speaker 5: are startling images. If you're listening to it, you're seeing
Speaker 5: you know, the like familiar this is Gaza, but before
Speaker 5: you're seeing the familiar skyline of the West Bank with
Speaker 5: all kinds of explosions. That is huge and gets another
Speaker 5: one of those things that is keeps getting buried in
Speaker 5: these news cycles. But in a matter of weeks we
Speaker 5: could have some announcement that Trump also wants to do
Speaker 5: something significant, major with the West Bank.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he's saying he'll decide whether or not he's going
Speaker 4: to allow Israel to annex the West Bank. Which, again,
Speaker 4: you're not getting a piece deal. You're not getting a
Speaker 4: normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, you're not getting a deal
Speaker 4: with Iran. You might lose your deals that you already
Speaker 4: have with Egypt and Jordan if if you do that.
Speaker 4: But Jal Madison's widow, Miriam, had a hundred plus million
Speaker 4: dollars and asked him in return to allow for the
Speaker 4: annexation of the West Bank. Like that's as shocking as
Speaker 4: it is to say that that's the.
Speaker 1: Thing that happened.
Speaker 4: In twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, and so
Speaker 4: he may give it to them. And as an update,
Speaker 4: my colleague get Drops Site News Jeremy Skhill has an
Speaker 4: official statement from Bassam Naim, a spokesperson for Hamas, in
Speaker 4: response to Trump's claim. He says the US plan to
Speaker 4: seize God's and remove the Palestinians quote is a crime
Speaker 4: against humanity and a reinforcement of the law of the
Speaker 4: jungle at the international level.
Speaker 1: He goes on to say, the problem.
Speaker 4: Of reconstruction is not in the presence of the Palestinian
Speaker 4: people on their land, but rather in the continuation of
Speaker 4: the Zion occupation and the stifling siege of the Gaza
Speaker 4: Strip for more than seventeen years with American support unquote,
Speaker 4: the name called for quote urgent regional and international action
Speaker 4: to put an end to these malicious plans. Scayhell Wright
Speaker 4: says reports emerge at Nantahau intends to sabotage future phases
Speaker 4: of the ceasefire deal. NAIM reiterated Hamasa's position that it
Speaker 4: intends to abide by the terms.
Speaker 1: Quote.
Speaker 4: We demand that the mediators, especially the United States, oblige
Speaker 4: the occupation to implement the ceasefire agreement in its three
Speaker 4: stages without procrastination or manipulation. We are committed to implementing
Speaker 4: the agreement as long as the occupation commits to it
Speaker 4: in any manipulation and implementing the agreement may cause it
Speaker 4: to collapse. So interesting statement from Hamas because there are
Speaker 4: some people who think that Trump's bluffing here. To just
Speaker 4: make sure that the agreement actually does continue to be implemented,
Speaker 4: we'll see.
Speaker 1: Turning now back to.
Speaker 4: Why in which I was I was saying a moment ago,
Speaker 4: Chris Murphy said, oh god, the thing is just a
Speaker 4: distraction for what we're going to talk about in the
Speaker 4: next couple of blocks.
Speaker 5: We can do both at the same time.
Speaker 1: We can we can walk and we can shoot gum.
Speaker 4: So here is President Donald Trump being asked whether Elon
Speaker 4: Musk is a total rogue agent or not as he's
Speaker 4: as he's going about this doggie revolution and Kilan Musk.
Speaker 9: How often are you talking to him? And how there
Speaker 9: have been ideas.
Speaker 1: That he's brought to you that he said, oh no,
Speaker 1: this is going a little too far.
Speaker 9: Well, many ideas, but look he's done a great job.
Speaker 6: Look at all the fraud that he's found in this
Speaker 6: US aid it's a disaster. What the people radical left lunatics.
Speaker 6: They have things that nobody would have believed.
Speaker 9: The whole thing with.
Speaker 6: One hundred million spent on you know what, with money
Speaker 6: going to all sorts of groups that shouldn't deserve to
Speaker 6: get any money with the money, I'd like to see
Speaker 6: what the kickbacks are. How much money has been kicked back.
Speaker 6: Who would spend that kind of money to some of
Speaker 6: the things that you read about and I read about,
Speaker 6: and I see every night of the news and every
Speaker 6: morning when I read the papers.
Speaker 9: Who would spend money for them?
Speaker 6: I would say this, the people that get all that money,
Speaker 6: are they kicking it back to the people that gave
Speaker 6: it from government?
Speaker 9: No, that's to me, very very corrupt.
Speaker 4: They're really those engineers that Elon Musk has helping him
Speaker 4: brsy young as nineteen years old.
Speaker 13: Good.
Speaker 9: They're very smart, though, Peter. They're like you, they're very
Speaker 9: smart people.
Speaker 13: Thank you.
Speaker 10: Has he Have you met any of these guys?
Speaker 12: No?
Speaker 9: I haven't seen them. They work actually out of the
Speaker 9: White House. They're smart people.
Speaker 14: Unlike what they do in the control towers, where we
Speaker 14: need smart people. We should use some of them in
Speaker 14: the control towers where we were putting people that were
Speaker 14: actually intellectually deficient.
Speaker 1: Democrats, of course, are reacting quite angrily to this. Let's
Speaker 1: roll some of them.
Speaker 15: So today Leader Jeffries and I are joining together to
Speaker 15: push legislation to prevent unlawful meddling in the Treasury Departments
Speaker 15: payment systems and protect Americans across the country. Our bill
Speaker 15: aims to do a few simple things. One to deny
Speaker 15: access to special government employees, employees that don't have to
Speaker 15: disclose their conflicts of interest or any other ethic agreements.
Speaker 15: Two to deny access to anyone with conflicts of interest
Speaker 15: or lack of appropriate clearance. And three include personal tax
Speaker 15: information into existing privacy protections. We call our legislation stop
Speaker 15: the steal.
Speaker 7: They are raiding the government, attempting to steal taxpayer money.
Speaker 16: We don't pledge allegiance to the billionaires. We don't pledge
Speaker 16: allegiance to Elon Musk. We don't pledge allegiance to the
Speaker 16: creepy twenty two year olds working for Elon Musk. Repluge
Speaker 16: allegiance to the United States of America.
Speaker 17: Goddamn is shut down the citate. We are war anytime,
Speaker 17: anytime a person can pay two hundred and fifty million
Speaker 17: dollars into a campaign and they've be given access for
Speaker 17: access to the Department of Treasury of the United States
Speaker 17: of America, we are and war. Hi, thank you, We
Speaker 17: will see you in the courts, in Congress, in the streets.
Speaker 17: Elon Musk is a Nazi lopall baby.
Speaker 4: The thing that has Democrats most alarmed is what's going
Speaker 4: on at the Treasury Department, and we can put up
Speaker 4: this next element. Wired has been doing some really good
Speaker 4: reporting on who is actually involved in this. This DOJ
Speaker 4: committee is a group of kids that range in age
Speaker 4: from nineteen to twenty five. If we can get an
Speaker 4: Nathan Tankas on the line, we're going to talk to him.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, he just had to cancel the he's gotting a
Speaker 5: problem with this internet connection.
Speaker 1: All right, No, no, no, Nathan Tankas, he's been hacking him.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he's been working triple over time basically in the
Speaker 5: last several days.
Speaker 4: Yes, so Nathan, Thankas, and we could send people over
Speaker 4: to his his newsletter, which is called Notes on the
Speaker 4: Crisis or crisisnes dot com. He what he has been reporting,
Speaker 4: based on Treasury sources and which the Treasury so far
Speaker 4: has been denying, is that the DOJ team has what's
Speaker 4: called quote, read and write access inside the bowels of
Speaker 4: the Treasury Department. So very quickly Elon Musk's team went
Speaker 4: directly for the pipes, said, okay, who is pressing the buttons,
Speaker 4: Who's who's cutting the checks? Like, who's who's after After
Speaker 4: everything gets so, Congress approves the spending directs it. The
Speaker 4: agencies then confirm that this is how Congress intended to
Speaker 4: direct it, and then they tell somebody to send the checks.
Speaker 1: Musk is like, how is that? Where's the system that
Speaker 1: that is happening.
Speaker 4: They went to this system and the bureaucrat who is
Speaker 4: in charge of that, David Leick is that his name.
Speaker 4: He'd been a Treasury official since nineteen eighty nine, and
Speaker 4: he said, no, you cannot have direct access to this system.
Speaker 4: They insisted, and he resigned in protests, which really sent
Speaker 4: a shock through the Treasury department. Spoke with a former
Speaker 4: very senior Treasury official yesterday who worked directly with this guy,
Speaker 4: and he said he's the most like small c conservative bureaucrat.
Speaker 4: The absolute definition of a civil servant could be frustrating
Speaker 4: at times, because he's going to tell you, chapter and
Speaker 4: verse what the statute is that you need to comply
Speaker 4: with for him to do the thing that you're asking
Speaker 4: him to do. And you can imagine Elon Musk does
Speaker 4: not want to hear anything about statutes and laws.
Speaker 1: He just wants he just wants access.
Speaker 4: This is the guy who whose job it has been
Speaker 4: over the last decade to do what are called the
Speaker 4: extraordinary measures when we pierce the debt limit, which we
Speaker 4: already have, like it was in January we went we
Speaker 4: went through the debt limit. We're now in the period
Speaker 4: of what's called extraordinary measures, which means there isn't enough
Speaker 4: money in.
Speaker 1: The treasury to basically pay everything.
Speaker 4: So you and anybody who lives on the margins knows
Speaker 4: exactly how this works.
Speaker 1: You move, you move things around. You got this money
Speaker 1: coming in.
Speaker 4: Here's what's the latest I can pay this bill? What
Speaker 4: are the what are the late fees on this one?
Speaker 4: So I can move of this. So you're just trying
Speaker 4: to keep your head above water. And so right now
Speaker 4: they call it extraordinary measures. It's the treasury is just
Speaker 4: trying to keep its head above water and make sure
Speaker 4: that the must pay bills get paid.
Speaker 1: And the must pay bills.
Speaker 4: Are the treasury bonds and treasury like instruments because those
Speaker 4: are the collateral for the entire global financial system.
Speaker 1: So if you are due.
Speaker 4: Cash for your Treasury note and it doesn't come, then
Speaker 4: now your counterparty is screwed. That counterparty was counting on
Speaker 4: this thing that has never broken in the system. So
Speaker 4: this guy, as we've gone through debt ceiling crises under Obama,
Speaker 4: an under Trump, and now a new one and then Biden,
Speaker 4: then a new one under Trump. This guy has been
Speaker 4: the one that's made sure that all the payments have
Speaker 4: kept flowing, and people say it's like a magician. Like
Speaker 4: the his ability to do this is it leaves people
Speaker 4: utterly amazed. He's the one that has always briefed Treasury
Speaker 4: and also briefed Congress about how this is going, and
Speaker 4: everyone has always said, like God does just absolutely incredible
Speaker 4: job of it. The X date they're estimating is about
Speaker 4: six months from now, like we can move money around
Speaker 4: until then. In April obviously, when you guys saw send
Speaker 4: your checks in to the I R s, we're going
Speaker 4: to see a big plus up in the bank accounts
Speaker 4: and so that, and then June there's more money that
Speaker 4: comes in with the extensions and stuff like that and
Speaker 4: corporate corporate taxes, and so they think that maybe we've
Speaker 4: got till July ish, but we're not sure. That's when
Speaker 4: it's run meticulously. So now this guy's gone, and let's
Speaker 4: hope there's deputies and whoever's left know how to move
Speaker 4: this around.
Speaker 5: That's whoever's left whoever's left.
Speaker 1: That's kind of an aside.
Speaker 4: The other point that this that this your official made
Speaker 4: to me is that and it's one that you have
Speaker 4: probably already figured out the code and the hardware and.
Speaker 1: The software for this.
Speaker 4: These pipes that are the most important pipes in the
Speaker 4: global financial system are many decades old. Congress just does
Speaker 4: not has not appropriated money to redesign the pipes using
Speaker 4: modern technology. So my late great aunt Mimi, she started
Speaker 4: coding in the fifties and sixties and was doing some
Speaker 4: of it for the BA and for the government. Like
Speaker 4: it's the code that she was touching in the sixties
Speaker 4: is still there today, like sixty years later.
Speaker 5: Incredible.
Speaker 4: And so these nineteen year olds who have probably you know,
Speaker 4: they were taught about this stuff, they don't have I
Speaker 4: guess it's cobal they don't and they're I'm sure they're brilliant.
Speaker 4: Like these these kids, like one of them was the
Speaker 4: one who won the contest being able to figure out
Speaker 4: Julius Caesar's father in laws like Roman texts that were burned,
Speaker 4: Like he figured out using AI to like read some
Speaker 4: of these things. Like you know, some of the smartest
Speaker 4: people on the planet. I'm sure, being that smart doesn't
Speaker 4: mean you won't make mistakes. So according to Tankas and others,
Speaker 4: these kids now have the ability to push new code into.
Speaker 1: The system here, which.
Speaker 4: Is utterly alarming to any everybody who's familiar with the system,
Speaker 4: because if you do it wrong and not even necessarily wrong,
Speaker 4: like you could do it right, but like the system
Speaker 4: is such that it is that it can't handle this
Speaker 4: code that you've just pushed in there, and it breaks,
Speaker 4: like you don't know how it breaks it, where it
Speaker 4: breaks it, how to fix it. And then now you
Speaker 4: don't know who didn't get paid. Now, in your effort
Speaker 4: to clean up fraud, waste and abuse, you might end
Speaker 4: up costing the government so much extra money getting sued
Speaker 4: and then also trying to figure out which payments didn't
Speaker 4: go out and then being liable for all of the
Speaker 4: downstream consequences for the payments.
Speaker 1: That didn't go out.
Speaker 4: And there's also reporting that some of what the coders
Speaker 4: are trying to put in reduces visibility of what Musk's
Speaker 4: Doggie team is doing here.
Speaker 1: So in other words, this is.
Speaker 4: They're trying to pick a fight around the Empowerment Control Act,
Speaker 4: like they've been very clear about that Empowerment Control Act
Speaker 4: was brought in in the nineteen seventies by Congress to
Speaker 4: try to put a check on Richard Nixon, who was
Speaker 4: claiming that he, as the executive, had the power to
Speaker 4: just stop a payment. Congress says, we're going to fund
Speaker 4: this bridge building project over here. He signs that into law,
Speaker 4: and then he turns around and says, actually, we're not
Speaker 4: going to do that. And Congress is like, no, that's
Speaker 4: clearly not constitutional. You're the executive, you would execute our laws.
Speaker 4: And just to be clear, here's the Empowerment Control Act.
Speaker 4: Here are the circumstances under which you can do this.
Speaker 4: They're very carved out. Otherwise you just have to spend
Speaker 4: the money.
Speaker 1: Russ vote.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: The Republicans believe that the Empowerment Control Act is unconstitutional
Speaker 4: and they want a court fight. But in the meantime,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk is saying, Okay, well, if we're going to
Speaker 4: stop payments and these bureaucrats aren't going to let us
Speaker 4: because it's illegal, we just need to take the keys
Speaker 4: from them and start pressing the buttons ourselves and let
Speaker 4: it play out in court.
Speaker 1: Yeah, somewhat, let it play out in court, but also.
Speaker 4: Prevent it from getting to court in some cases if
Speaker 4: there's no visibility into who blocked the payment, who the
Speaker 4: payment was intended for. So a scenario that people have
Speaker 4: laid out. So let's say a member of Congress says,
Speaker 4: all right, this I want in my district this homeless
Speaker 4: shelter to be built and to get you know, fifty
Speaker 4: million dollars from the federal government, and then I'll vote
Speaker 4: for your spending package that passes into law, the President
Speaker 4: signs it.
Speaker 1: It's right there in the law. Treasury Department then says.
Speaker 4: Okay, here's the project that they're talking about. Here's the
Speaker 4: EI in of this of this organization we checked out.
Speaker 1: They're legit.
Speaker 4: All this tracks fifty million dollars, payment goes out. They
Speaker 4: send it to this system which is supposed to be.
Speaker 1: Separate from politics.
Speaker 4: Like half of it's in West Virginia, half of it's
Speaker 4: in Maryland, like some of some of it is in DC,
Speaker 4: but most of it is out in West Virginia, Maryland.
Speaker 4: And then they just they're like, okay, e I, and
Speaker 4: here it is. You know, payment goes What must team
Speaker 4: is trying to do is go in there and say, actually,
Speaker 4: I don't think we want to fund that.
Speaker 1: Homeless shelter and just stop it.
Speaker 4: So you either then get a court challenge when the
Speaker 4: homeless shelter realizes didn't get his money, or they're like,
Speaker 4: we just never got paid and they don't know why.
Speaker 4: And when you ask why, then there might not be
Speaker 4: an answer because it might be like, well, we don't
Speaker 4: know it's been approved. We don't get there eventually, and
Speaker 4: so the court might be like, well, come back to
Speaker 4: us when you've got some evidence that you're not going
Speaker 4: to get this.
Speaker 5: It'll definitely make it to court though in the first place.
Speaker 1: Eventually something's going to get to court. Something has to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely, and I think probably sooner rather later. Let's
Speaker 5: put the next element up on the screen, because it
Speaker 5: gets to the point that you were making Ryan about
Speaker 5: who is in charge here. This is a meme that says,
Speaker 5: who are these little boys and why are they in
Speaker 5: charge of our money? And it's running down the guys
Speaker 5: who are behind all of this, and they are young,
Speaker 5: but clearly to Ryan's point, brilliant it says, the US
Speaker 5: Treasury is usually run by grown up grown ups. Mama's
Speaker 5: come get your babies out of our government, you know, Ryan,
Speaker 5: I Actually I get that impulse. I think there have
Speaker 5: been people of similar age groups that have been behind
Speaker 5: some of the most important and like actually well respected
Speaker 5: political movements.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Uh, and in throughout history all the founding fathers are
Speaker 5: actually kind of young. Not all of them, of course, very.
Speaker 1: Young.
Speaker 5: But to that point, you also flagged this next element.
Speaker 5: We could put this Andrew Tate post up. This is
Speaker 5: something that one of them retweeted from Andrew Tate where he's.
Speaker 1: I missed this. I didn't flag this. Somebody else said
Speaker 1: it's interesting.
Speaker 5: Okay. So, yeah, the majority Filipino areas of the UK,
Speaker 5: it must look and feel British. This is, by the way,
Speaker 5: from January of twenty twenty five, the majority Indian areas
Speaker 5: of the UK must like can feel British. He's basically saying, immigrate,
Speaker 5: expect to adapt to British culture, no matter how small
Speaker 5: the norm. We like quiet Sunday mornings, problem leave. And
Speaker 5: what's interesting about that?
Speaker 1: Ryan, So Gavin Klegger is one of these kids.
Speaker 5: Yes, tweet What's interesting about that, I think is Ryan
Speaker 5: the even just like openly retweeting Andrew Tait totally common
Speaker 5: among young men. By the way, like horrifying to people
Speaker 5: in Washington. Not uncommon among young men who are trending
Speaker 5: further and further right. But yeah, not one of these
Speaker 5: young men is like holding the keys to like a
Speaker 5: significant portion of government and potentially outside the boundaries of
Speaker 5: the law.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, Yeah, this is.
Speaker 4: So like, you know, we just talked about the Framers,
Speaker 4: some of the Framers being very young when they built
Speaker 4: the Constitution. I've spent my entire life being lectured by
Speaker 4: the right about how brilliant the design of our constitution
Speaker 4: is and our checks and balances. And to now be
Speaker 4: told you, all.
Speaker 1: Right, get the Hall monitors out of here.
Speaker 4: Musk has good ideas and smart kids, so he's just
Speaker 4: going to clean this mess up. And this is what
Speaker 4: I voted for. Is kind of, you know, preposterously disorienting.
Speaker 4: It's like either you believe in representative democracy or you don't.
Speaker 4: And Musk very obviously does not. Like he's been He
Speaker 4: very much seems to be in one of those Curtis
Speaker 4: Jarvin camps. I know, Curtis yarm is all over the map,
Speaker 4: but in general, there's this like techno feudalist idea that
Speaker 4: we know better it should.
Speaker 5: Be run as this is directly from Curtis Yarvin, who
Speaker 5: was here for inaugural festivities, by the way, who believes
Speaker 5: in I think techno feudalism is a good word. I
Speaker 5: think he would say, almost like a corporate monarchy, that
Speaker 5: the United States should be controlled by a single monarch
Speaker 5: and run like a corporation CEO style. And it's something
Speaker 5: that gets kicked on, kicked around a lot in online
Speaker 5: right circles, the same places that Elon Musk seems to
Speaker 5: dwell when he's spending time on the internet. So it's
Speaker 5: not impossible that there's an actual sort of ideological strain
Speaker 5: being pulled from that into Musk's mind and the mind
Speaker 5: of some of these kids that seem to be pretty
Speaker 5: I shouldn't even call them kids. I mean they're adults,
Speaker 5: but they're young and they haven't been in DC long
Speaker 5: at all. One funny thing I saw being passed around
Speaker 5: like Capitol Hill circles is like people have said about
Speaker 5: the twenty five year olds running the government, wait until
Speaker 5: they find out about Capitol Hill. That's very funny because
Speaker 5: twenty five year olds have been running the government for
Speaker 5: a while and.
Speaker 4: For all those Although one of the one of the
Speaker 4: versions that I saw of that going around was they
Speaker 4: were saying, wait, wait, un till they find out about
Speaker 4: the rest of the government.
Speaker 1: And that's actually not accurate.
Speaker 4: It is one hundred percent true that if you go
Speaker 4: around Capitol Hill, it's there, you know, people are twenty
Speaker 4: five and under and hello to everybody on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 4: We have like I don't know how often you go
Speaker 4: to the House office buildings anymore. I practically have to
Speaker 4: stay out of there's so many like breaking points as viewers.
Speaker 1: To everybody there is twenty five and under.
Speaker 4: But in the actual government, you know, the Department's Education, Treasury,
Speaker 4: et cetera. Those those career people, they some of them
Speaker 4: are very young, but they stick around for twenty thirty years,
Speaker 4: which is what's so frustrating.
Speaker 1: The Musk too.
Speaker 4: It's like the only twenty thousand people have taken this
Speaker 4: fake buyout offer, so far out of the millions that
Speaker 4: they sent it out to, right.
Speaker 5: Right, Okay, well, let's take it this next. This is
Speaker 5: B six. There are sleep pods going around. They're not
Speaker 5: I think they're poorly described as pods because I looked
Speaker 5: into it and essentially what this is a wrap for
Speaker 5: a mattress that does seem pretty technologically impressive. It's it's
Speaker 5: sort of like a sheet you put over your mattress
Speaker 5: that can monitor your your they can track your sleep basically,
Speaker 5: and it can.
Speaker 4: Well there's no mattress. You have to put it over
Speaker 4: a mattress, So where's the mattress. Don't need a mattress to.
Speaker 5: Yeah, presumably they have mattresses in there, which is some
Speaker 5: of the reporting is that yes, they have been bringing
Speaker 5: basically like bedroom stuff into some of these buildings so
Speaker 5: that they can sleep and do this like Silicon Valley style,
Speaker 5: this hostile takeover Silicon Valley style, which I actually think
Speaker 5: is interesting Ryan because well, I mean for a lot
Speaker 5: of reasons, but from the perspective of like movement conservatives,
Speaker 5: they wanted a lot of this to be like done
Speaker 5: by conservative movement lawyers. Like first of all, this was
Speaker 5: always a fantasy that you would actually have this generational
Speaker 5: opportunity to start slashing and burning, and to do it
Speaker 5: without regard or even with content for the sacred norms
Speaker 5: that the political establishment revers. Like it's a literal fantasy
Speaker 5: of the conservative movement, just like overturning Row, Like, nobody
Speaker 5: ever thought they would actually have the opportunity to do that,
Speaker 5: or most people didn't really think they would have the
Speaker 5: opportunity to do that. Now Donald Trump has it. It's
Speaker 5: in the hands of an industry that just a couple
Speaker 5: of years ago Conservatives were at war with. But because
Speaker 5: of the vibe shift, you're able to take the pluck
Speaker 5: the you know, maga people out of Silicon Valley world,
Speaker 5: import them into DC and they have the support of
Speaker 5: the conservative movement, at least for now. So it's like
Speaker 5: this hostile takeover that was always planned to be ideologues
Speaker 5: from the conservative movement now being done by an industry
Speaker 5: or members of an industry denisms of an industry that
Speaker 5: was decried by the conservative movement that was at war
Speaker 5: with the conservative movement. So it's it's really an odd tension.
Speaker 4: And it's because it's really what it is is a
Speaker 4: dual personality movement. It's whatever whatever Musk says is good
Speaker 4: and whatever Trump says is good, and when the twain
Speaker 4: don't meet, we'll find out, you know, who can win.
Speaker 4: But as of now, Trump seems to be Musk seems
Speaker 4: to be taking the lead. Like over the weekend he's
Speaker 4: like I put us a I d in the wood chipper,
Speaker 4: and then on Monday, Trump's like, yeah, it's okay, you
Speaker 4: can do that.
Speaker 1: So it's like Musk is very much.
Speaker 4: Asking you know, moving first, and then you know he's
Speaker 4: asking for forgiveness rather than permission what seems to be clear.
Speaker 4: And then you know how much does Trump need him,
Speaker 4: care about him, like fear him because of his money,
Speaker 4: be amused by him. I don't know, we're gonna find
Speaker 4: out what and what happens if they do break the system,
Speaker 4: treasury system and the payments start.
Speaker 1: I'm not going out what happens if now.
Speaker 4: I don't think we're gonna have a debt ceialing situation
Speaker 4: six months.
Speaker 1: From now, because I think Trump will just ignore it.
Speaker 4: He'll say there is no such thing as a dead ceiling,
Speaker 4: like if you know he's not inclined to follow laws,
Speaker 4: it seems so Yeah, at that point Basin will be like, okay,
Speaker 4: I agree, which you know, when Obama was president, I
Speaker 4: argued that the fourteenth Amendment means that there is actually
Speaker 4: no death ceiling because the fourteenth Amendment says very specifically,
Speaker 4: the debts of the federal government shall not be questioned.
Speaker 5: So it's similar. No, I mean seriously, some of these
Speaker 5: are legitimate constitutional questions that need to be worked out
Speaker 5: in the courts. Like if russ Bote were here and
Speaker 5: he was arguing with us over impoundment, he would make
Speaker 5: a case that is substantial, and we may disagree with it.
Speaker 5: I'm honestly fairly persuaded by it, but either way, it's
Speaker 5: raises a legitimate constitutional question about separation of powers and
Speaker 5: how we have just by norms allowed the government to
Speaker 5: sort of be in a state of inertia in the
Speaker 5: executive branch because a lot of the just didn't get
Speaker 5: challenged and Congress increasingly relies on the executive branch to
Speaker 5: go through its power. But speaking of separation of powers,
Speaker 5: the US eternity, the US Attorney this is b seven
Speaker 5: initially this this is a weird subplot that we can
Speaker 5: get into maybe more next week, but said that our
Speaker 5: initial review of the evidence presented to US indicates that
Speaker 5: certain individuals and or groups have committed acts that appear
Speaker 5: to violate the law and targeting DOGE employees. So he's
Speaker 5: kind of agreeing with Musk there, But then at the
Speaker 5: same time, it's just unclear of where this is really
Speaker 5: where this is really going this is the US Attorney
Speaker 5: for the District of Columbia region. Because there were conflicting
Speaker 5: I would say, there's conflicting information about what he's actually
Speaker 5: talking about there.
Speaker 4: It could be straight up death threats, and I've seen yeah,
Speaker 4: I think on Blue Sky there was some circulating that looked.
Speaker 1: Like pretty patent threats and that.
Speaker 4: Those are you can't do that, yeah, obviously, and if
Speaker 4: there's a if there's a clear directed death threat, the
Speaker 4: FBI should get involved.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Must kind of took that and tried to suggest that,
Speaker 4: you know, any kind of aggressive criticism of of the
Speaker 4: Doejay boys is going to be illegal.
Speaker 1: We'll see.
Speaker 5: So finally, Kim Kelly reported that sources have told her
Speaker 5: that DOGE is going after the Department of Labor next.
Speaker 5: This is the final element for this block, and labor
Speaker 5: workers have been ordered to give Dose access to anything
Speaker 5: they want or risk termination, similar to what we heard
Speaker 5: about Treasury and USA I D We're supposed to have
Speaker 5: everything we're doing and do whatever the Dose kids ask.
Speaker 5: It feels dirty and illegal, that source told Kelly. So
Speaker 5: this is developing literally by the hour, so we'll obviously
Speaker 5: keep following it. Crystal Sager will be back here following
Speaker 5: it more tomorrow because we'll likely have there's more information
Speaker 5: on what's going on over at Labor.
Speaker 4: Kelly says there's a rally scheduled for three pm outside
Speaker 4: the Department of Labor, which is right near where we are.
Speaker 4: It's two hundred Constitution Avenue, So that's three pm, three
Speaker 4: pm the day, saying, you know, keep the DOJ kids
Speaker 4: out of the Department of Labor because they're having a
Speaker 4: kickoff meeting apparently at four pm between the Department of
Speaker 4: Labor officials and the DOJ folks.
Speaker 5: Well, so we've covered Treasury, USAID, now Labor and Ryan
Speaker 5: at this point we can turn to DOGE and Trump's
Speaker 5: plans for the Department of Education. Well, earlier in the show,
Speaker 5: Ryan made the point that Elon Musk is very intentionally
Speaker 5: using the word revolution for what is happening here in Washington,
Speaker 5: d C. Just in the early weeks of the second
Speaker 5: Donald Trump administration, and indeed one of the goals of
Speaker 5: the Reagan Revolution may be realized by the Trump Revolution.
Speaker 5: We can put c one on the screen. This is
Speaker 5: a post from Jeff Mason of the Associated Press, who
Speaker 5: reported a White House official says Trump will take steps
Speaker 5: later this month to fulfill a campaign promise to defund
Speaker 5: the Department of Education. Now, Trump was asked a bit
Speaker 5: about whether the Department of Education will shut her in
Speaker 5: the Oval office yesterday. Let's take a listen here, and.
Speaker 9: I'm the Education Department.
Speaker 4: Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department secretary
Speaker 4: if you're gonna cover to the.
Speaker 6: Education Because I told Linda, Linda, I hope you do
Speaker 6: a great job and put yourself out of a job.
Speaker 9: I want her to put herself out of a job.
Speaker 9: Education Department.
Speaker 13: So we're ranked number forty out of forty schools. Right
Speaker 13: we're ranked number one in costs for pupil, so we
Speaker 13: spend more for pupil than any other country in the world,
Speaker 13: and we're ranked at the bottom of the list.
Speaker 6: We're ranked very badly. And what I want to do
Speaker 6: is let the States run schools. I believe strongly in
Speaker 6: school choice, but in addition to that, I want the
Speaker 6: states to run schools, and I want Linda to put
Speaker 6: herself out of a job.
Speaker 7: With an executive order any longer they would like to
Speaker 7: be able to look if I could give the schools
Speaker 7: back to Iowa and Idaho, and Indiana and all these
Speaker 7: places that run properly.
Speaker 9: There's many of them.
Speaker 5: No Christmin Ronald Reagan took office, the Department of Education
Speaker 5: was not even really a decade old. It was something
Speaker 5: that was brought into existence by Jimmy Carter, and Reagan
Speaker 5: said the exact same thing about his first Secretary of
Speaker 5: Education that he wanted the Secretary Bell to put himself
Speaker 5: out of a job. So this is c three more perfect.
Speaker 5: Union noted a picked up on a Musk comment that
Speaker 5: looked back to Reagan, said, actually, that Musk is now
Speaker 5: saying Reagan campaigned on ending the department and Trump will
Speaker 5: succeed where Reagan failed. That was a criticism that was
Speaker 5: floated of Ronald Reagan during his administration from some people
Speaker 5: on the right that he didn't end up shutting down
Speaker 5: the Department of Education. He couldn't really get Congresses buy in.
Speaker 5: And Donald Trump might be in a position now where
Speaker 5: you look at what happened with USAID or what is
Speaker 5: happening right now with USAID. One of the ways that
Speaker 5: maybe skirting Congress is just by quote restructuring it and
Speaker 5: pairing it back to something very small under the auspices
Speaker 5: of the state department, so it's not shut down in
Speaker 5: a case like that, it's just been restructured to the
Speaker 5: point where it's tiny. Let's take a listen to how
Speaker 5: Ronald Reagan talked about this early in his presidency. We
Speaker 5: can roll this clip.
Speaker 18: We propose to dismantle two cabinet departments, Energy and Education.
Speaker 18: Both secretaries are wholly in accord with this. Some of
Speaker 18: the activities in both of these departments will of course
Speaker 18: be continued, either independently or in other areas of government.
Speaker 18: There's only one way to shrink the size and cost
Speaker 18: of big government, and that is by eliminating agencies that
Speaker 18: are not needed and are getting in the way of
Speaker 18: a solution. Now, we don't need an energy department to
Speaker 18: solve our basic energy problem. As long as we let
Speaker 18: the forces of the marketplace work without undue interference, the
Speaker 18: ingenuity of consumers, business producers, and inventors will do that
Speaker 18: for us. Similarly, education is the principal responsibility of local schools, systems, teachers, parents,
Speaker 18: citizen boards, and state governments. By eliminating the Department of
Speaker 18: Education less than two years after it was created, we
Speaker 18: can not only reduce the budget, but ensure that local
Speaker 18: needs and preferences rather than the wishes of Washington determine
Speaker 18: the education of our children.
Speaker 1: Ye.
Speaker 5: So you note there he was mentioning the Department of
Speaker 5: Education is like two years old because of something that
Speaker 5: Jimmy Carter brought into existence and at the time was new. Obviously,
Speaker 5: now it has been around for decades. So it's quite
Speaker 5: a different task to sort of wind down the Department
Speaker 5: of Education. In disclosure, I will say that's something that
Speaker 5: I'm generally supportive of, with one caveat, which is you
Speaker 5: need a significant off ramp. So if you have this
Speaker 5: idea about sending education back to the States, I mean,
Speaker 5: Trump is absolutely right about the disconnect between the amount
Speaker 5: of money we spend on students and outcomes. It is
Speaker 5: shameful and pathetic that it's this is what it looks like.
Speaker 5: This is how much money we spend and these are
Speaker 5: the outcomes that we get per student. It's awful. But
Speaker 5: if there is no off ramp to kind of helping
Speaker 5: the states re take control of education and make up ground,
Speaker 5: whether it's money or resources that the federal government had
Speaker 5: previously provided, and it's just kind of a quick severing
Speaker 5: of the ties, that is not great either. So you know,
Speaker 5: this is a significant question about everything that Elon Musk
Speaker 5: is doing, is whether you know it's worth it to
Speaker 5: just from even like an ideological conservative perspective, toss a
Speaker 5: hand grenade into everything, let it fall, let the chips
Speaker 5: fall where they may, and say it's okay, we'll pick
Speaker 5: up the pieces later. Probably not probably.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And Trump and Musk are both not well known
Speaker 4: for their kind of well thought out and smooth transition
Speaker 4: policies like these are.
Speaker 1: Much more hand grenade people.
Speaker 4: I think it's worth contextualizing this as quickly as we can,
Speaker 4: and you could probably do this better than me. But
Speaker 4: you know, the fight over public education has been central
Speaker 4: to our politics over the last one hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 4: Like when as the as the progressive era you know boomed,
Speaker 4: you know, that was really the advent of the idea
Speaker 4: of public education and the idea that every student had
Speaker 4: a right to a free public education you know, in
Speaker 4: their in their community. Uh free as in funded both
Speaker 4: though of course by taxpayers. That ran headlong into the
Speaker 4: you know, the religious institutions, which you know, Christian churches
Speaker 4: had been the ones that had you know, had run.
Speaker 1: Most of the kind of private schools up until that.
Speaker 4: Time, and and the the Betsy de vas Dominius types
Speaker 4: you know, very much argued that the public school had,
Speaker 4: unfortunately in there from their perspective, replaced the church as
Speaker 4: the central social organizing tool in communities that.
Speaker 5: The family as well.
Speaker 4: And and and to some degree of the family that
Speaker 4: because that you, from their perspective, you need the church
Speaker 4: to support the family. And so where it used to be,
Speaker 4: you know, people would go to church on Sundays and
Speaker 4: it'd be pot lucks and like, and everybody's kind of
Speaker 4: ethics and social lives would like flow through the local churches.
Speaker 1: Now pot lucks.
Speaker 4: Would be organized, you know, they'd be fundraisers for the school,
Speaker 4: or there would be being a night at the school,
Speaker 4: or everybody would go on Friday night to watch the
Speaker 4: teams play and so and certainly what with I've seen
Speaker 4: it in my own life with kids in elementary and middle school.
Speaker 1: You're you're the social fabric of.
Speaker 4: The community does actually, you know, organize itself around the
Speaker 4: public schools.
Speaker 1: But so that's the higher level than the mid level
Speaker 1: one is of.
Speaker 4: Course, it's it's it's integration with desegregation and the civil
Speaker 4: rights movement that inherent in this idea that you'd have
Speaker 4: private schools was the idea that you could have racial segregation.
Speaker 1: And after you know, Brown v.
Speaker 4: Board of Education, you have all these different efforts to
Speaker 4: like keep schools segregated despite despite the laws, fights that
Speaker 4: are still going on during the Carter years. Carter, you know,
Speaker 4: sec stickt the i R S in the on Christian
Speaker 4: private schools right during the during his term. And my
Speaker 4: understanding is that like it was that and then and
Speaker 4: there was and there was some desegregation element to that fight,
Speaker 4: uh that like those so not only are you not
Speaker 4: not only are you guys furthering segregation, you're getting involved
Speaker 4: in politics, you're and you're no longer really tax exempt organizations.
Speaker 1: And so he so he sends.
Speaker 4: The irs after these schools, and that, in my understand
Speaker 4: I'm curious if you're taking this really was the gasoline
Speaker 4: that kicked off the kind of right wing evangelical movement
Speaker 4: that like once once Carter came after the private schools
Speaker 4: like that that sent them wild. And it helps to
Speaker 4: explain Reagan coming in. He's and he you know, he's
Speaker 4: he's coming at both things at once. And the segregation,
Speaker 4: you know, brownbe Board of Education, and also this like
Speaker 4: what what they see is this attack on the Christian
Speaker 4: society and replacing it with this godless public education.
Speaker 5: I would say there is also, though, a more charitable interpretation,
Speaker 5: which is this was in the midst of a pretty
Speaker 5: rapid federalization of a lot of things that hadn't been
Speaker 5: federalized for many years, and that includes absolutely civil rights
Speaker 5: we didn't have prior to the Civil Rights Act in
Speaker 5: the early to mid nineteen sixties, this sort of federal
Speaker 5: hand in local private businesses. And you know, there are
Speaker 5: a lot of conservatives who will still argue brand Paul
Speaker 5: among them against like ideologically, against the Civil Rights Act
Speaker 5: of nineteen sixty four and the subsequent civil rights legislation
Speaker 5: in the same way that Barry Goldwater did. And Reagan
Speaker 5: really comes out of the Barry Goldwater movement, and most
Speaker 5: of the sort of people that staffed the Reagan administration
Speaker 5: and the campaign came out of that movement. And there
Speaker 5: was tension, There's no question about it. There was always
Speaker 5: a lot of tension about it. But this was this
Speaker 5: sort of ideological, i don't know, like shock to the
Speaker 5: conservative mind that suddenly for an extraordinarily just and important cause,
Speaker 5: which was civil rights. It's kind of what happens with
Speaker 5: the Southern strategy, Like it's sort of how things end
Speaker 5: up flipping and George Wallace comes along and all of that.
Speaker 5: You have conservatives some reacting by saying, this is going
Speaker 5: to put us in trouble down the road. This like
Speaker 5: Civil rights administration, it's rapidly being federalized from the Department
Speaker 5: of Education. Was one of the focal points for conservatives
Speaker 5: by saying, now you have the federal government with sort
Speaker 5: of its hands in every local school district, and that
Speaker 5: sounds great on paper, and it will backfire immensely eventually.
Speaker 5: And a lot of conservative looked at like the last
Speaker 5: five ten years in education and said, this is kind
Speaker 5: of whatever had always been talking about. Christopher Caldwell wrote
Speaker 5: a book called The Age of Entitlements back in I
Speaker 5: think that came out like in twenty sixteen, saying it's
Speaker 5: kind of making it like Goldwater is right argument all along.
Speaker 5: But no, I mean, I think that's the tension was
Speaker 5: between the conservative ideologues who, from a charitable perspective, just
Speaker 5: had this very deep revulsion to the idea of the
Speaker 5: federal government. Within a you know, period of twenty years,
Speaker 5: suddenly taking over so much from local control, and then
Speaker 5: people who actually were segregationists and racists, and that was
Speaker 5: significant tension. The Department of Education was very much the
Speaker 5: center of that.
Speaker 4: And so the reason Reagan failed is that you need
Speaker 4: Congress to get rid of the Department of Education because
Speaker 4: the Education Department is congressionally authorized and appropriated by Congress,
Speaker 4: so there are rules.
Speaker 1: This is not Vietnam, and so Trump.
Speaker 4: The reporting is that Trump's executive order is going to
Speaker 4: move elements of the Education Department that are not legally
Speaker 4: required to be under it elsewhere. And then, and as
Speaker 4: we talked about in the last block, he's using he's
Speaker 4: going to push the Impoundment Control Act powers as far
Speaker 4: as he can and perhaps just defund different programs which
Speaker 4: according to the current law would be illegal. Whether the
Speaker 4: courts let him get away with it is a different question.
Speaker 4: And if Elon Musk's hackers can like hide that you're
Speaker 4: even doing it, then then who knows. Now, there are
Speaker 4: also significant laws on the books that people will notice
Speaker 4: if he's breaking them. So I think there are roughly
Speaker 4: One of them is called the idea like Individuals with
Speaker 4: Disabilities and Education Act, and a lot of viewers are
Speaker 4: probably familiar with it because they interact with it.
Speaker 1: It is the.
Speaker 4: Federal law that says that public schools are required to
Speaker 4: teach and to basically cater to children who have disabilities,
Speaker 4: special education, or different types of contingencies that they would be.
Speaker 1: Offered within mainstream classrooms.
Speaker 4: Something like fifteen million students currently have protections under this law.
Speaker 4: And this can be a spectrum. This can can go
Speaker 4: from you can have extra time to take a test
Speaker 4: because you have ADHD all the way to you know,
Speaker 4: significant interventions in a special education classroom, or even funding
Speaker 4: to go to a school if the public school it's
Speaker 4: a private school, if the public school is not equipped
Speaker 4: to handle it. So you're running headlong. If you go
Speaker 4: after that, you're running headlong into many millions of people
Speaker 4: who are currently you know, fifteen million kids. You know,
Speaker 4: that's thirty million parents, that's fifty million aunts and uncles.
Speaker 4: You're running headlong into that. Then, of course there is
Speaker 4: tel grants, other financial aid for college that is required
Speaker 4: by law. Now can you move that under somewhere else?
Speaker 4: Then you have student loan repayments. Biden you may not
Speaker 4: have noticed, was not allowed, you know, people did notice
Speaker 4: that he was not allowed by the Supreme Court to
Speaker 4: kind of restructure and forgive some significant number of student
Speaker 4: loan debts. But what he did do is set up
Speaker 4: this repayment schedule that makes it actually genuinely affordable for
Speaker 4: people who are in enormous amounts of debt and caps
Speaker 4: what you owe the amount of income you have, like
Speaker 4: they're trying to make it a fair system. You know,
Speaker 4: if if you have a huge amount of debt, you
Speaker 4: have a small amount of income, then you owe this smaller,
Speaker 4: much smaller amount of money until when and when your
Speaker 4: ship comes in, then you owe us more.
Speaker 1: Like that's how a decent society kind of ought to
Speaker 1: be organized.
Speaker 4: If you get rid of the education Department, then who's
Speaker 4: collecting these loans, Who's who is implementing these programs?
Speaker 1: Do people just stop paying their loans?
Speaker 4: No, I doubt you know, that's that's highly unlikely. That
Speaker 4: would be incredibly ironic if the Supreme Court is like, no,
Speaker 4: you can't do this student loan payment policy, but yeah,
Speaker 4: you can actually go ahead and just get rid of
Speaker 4: the entire education Department. I mean wouldn't necessarily put it
Speaker 4: past them, but it would be it would be certainly
Speaker 4: the height of irony. Somebody joked on Twitter, like, let
Speaker 4: me get this right. So to do progressive legislation, you
Speaker 4: need sixty votes. To do national conservatism, you don't need
Speaker 4: any votes at all, Like that's the just so we're
Speaker 4: clear on the different rules that apply here.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, it is kind of what's funny in
Speaker 5: all of this. The extent we can find humor is
Speaker 5: that conservatives were saying, part of the problem with federalizing
Speaker 5: all of this is that at one point someone can
Speaker 5: just come in and flip a switch because it's so central.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk's boys have found the switches.
Speaker 5: Hey, they're looking for them. The maga the quote Maga
Speaker 5: chuds as Lomas said on Twitter. So there is a
Speaker 5: I should say, just as we were talking, I pulled
Speaker 5: up the Project twenty twenty five Education Department.
Speaker 1: Which, by the way, they assured us had nothing to
Speaker 1: do with Trump and would definitely not be implemented in
Speaker 1: any way, which, to be which we reported was a
Speaker 1: total lie.
Speaker 5: Yes, we covered that.
Speaker 1: Watch this show. You're not surprised by any of this, No.
Speaker 5: Not at all. We cover that extensively, and in fact,
Speaker 5: that was a huge part of my conversation with Ezra Clins,
Speaker 5: like they're of course going to be using Project twenty
Speaker 5: twenty five. Hello. Now that is to say Trump still
Speaker 5: had nothing to do with Project twenty twenty five. He wouldn't,
Speaker 5: like really care. I would spend like ten seconds reading
Speaker 5: what I'm looking at right now, and you'd be like Reenipedia.
Speaker 5: But they do have I mean a lot of this
Speaker 5: is kind of off ramp type stuff. So, for example,
Speaker 5: restore revenue responsibility for Title one funding to the States
Speaker 5: over a ten year period. Like if you're trying to conceptualize,
Speaker 5: as I am, what this would mean for your community,
Speaker 5: your local school immediately if it were to happen. The
Speaker 5: plan in Project twenty twenty five, which I'm sure is
Speaker 5: something that's on the desks of people Linda McMahon's circles
Speaker 5: and Elon Muss's circles because frankly was a mega friendly
Speaker 5: conservative plan that people put a lot of time into.
Speaker 5: It does look like it's significantly off ramping things and
Speaker 5: not immediately cutting them. But we'll have to I actually
Speaker 5: think we might be able to get the person who
Speaker 5: wrote this too good back to us.
Speaker 1: It's good.
Speaker 4: Look, yeah, and I mean we know we can also
Speaker 4: put up C five here, which is early indications from
Speaker 4: from Patty Murray, who would be the senator who kind
Speaker 4: of oversees this on the Democratic side. She's she's hearing
Speaker 4: that the doggy committee people have gone in so sorry
Speaker 4: DOJ Committee people have gone into veterans affairs now and
Speaker 4: are are thumbing through all of the kind of information
Speaker 4: around those payments.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 4: The VA is in the desperate need of reform. Veterans
Speaker 4: medical records are not in desperate need of DOJ Committee
Speaker 4: people thumbing through them. So this is something people are
Speaker 4: going to keep an eye on too, because these are.
Speaker 1: There's fragile and sensitive systems. And by the.
Speaker 4: Separately and actually relatedly, Musk is out here, by the way,
Speaker 4: if you haven't noticed, accusing everyone he sees on his
Speaker 4: website of breaking the law. He accused Milan Omar the
Speaker 4: other day of breaking the law because she was giving
Speaker 4: general advice to people here illegally about how to like,
Speaker 4: you know, not incriminate yourself. Be like saying that it's
Speaker 4: illegal to, you know, tell somebody about their Fifth Amendment rights.
Speaker 4: It is specifically illegal to aid a specific individual person
Speaker 4: here illegally like that that actually is a crime, but
Speaker 4: giving general advice is a First Amendment protected act. So anyway,
Speaker 4: and then anybody who says something mean about the Doggie Committee,
Speaker 4: he says, you're breaking the law, he should he should check.
Speaker 4: There are the federal the federal books are filled with
Speaker 4: laws around privacy and record protections that he and his
Speaker 4: DOJ boys seem to be breaking at a just absolutely
Speaker 4: relentless clip.
Speaker 5: A lot of this is going to be tested in
Speaker 5: the courts and already is to some extent, but we'll
Speaker 5: see if some of it ends up getting rolled back.
Speaker 5: But he's i mean his status as a special government employee,
Speaker 5: which is what the White House says he's taken on.
Speaker 5: If you go read the Justice Departments outlined restrictions for
Speaker 5: somebody who's a special government employee. Unless Elon Musk takes
Speaker 5: very quick and significant steps to deal with his financial
Speaker 5: conflicts he's in flagor violation or gets some type of
Speaker 5: special waiver for them, which as yet he doesn't have.
Speaker 5: He may be able to get that quick order now
Speaker 5: that Pambondi has been confirmed, but it's impossible to see
Speaker 5: how what he's doing sort of fits within those boundaries.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 4: I mean, which he you know, he called it a revolution.
Speaker 4: And so if the revolution fails, like if you come
Speaker 4: at the king and you miss, yeah, you actually in
Speaker 4: this country, you get a second shot, as we showed
Speaker 4: after January sixth, let's if you don't get.
Speaker 1: A third shot.
Speaker 4: Four people who are curious, buddy mine collected some of
Speaker 4: these eighteen USC. Fifteen oh five, fifteen nineteen, twenty seventy one,
Speaker 4: Federal Records Act, you get five USC. Five point fifty two,
Speaker 4: the e Government Act of two thousand and two, the
Speaker 4: Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, the Digital Accountability and
Speaker 4: Transparency Act, eighteen USC.
Speaker 1: Two eight eighteen USC. Two five. There's there's a.
Speaker 4: Ton of them, and each of them have, you know,
Speaker 4: the various penalties with them, and each record could be
Speaker 4: an offense. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of records. Said,
Speaker 4: this is not a time of home monitors. It's a
Speaker 4: time of revolutions. So if it moves back towards the
Speaker 4: time of home monitors, those are the crimes that we
Speaker 4: know you're committing, and they're probably a bunch of others.
Speaker 4: So I guess the advice would be your revolution better work.
Speaker 5: I wish we had your Lenin book behind us.
Speaker 1: I actually not have it back.
Speaker 5: We'll have to put it back up. But anyways, I.
Speaker 4: Feel like I feel like Kerensky being like the provisional
Speaker 4: government authority here is dually constituted by.
Speaker 1: The Duma, and you're not able to just take power.
Speaker 1: Proff is reading the book.
Speaker 4: It's an incredible book, that that biography of Lenin that
Speaker 4: was up there.
Speaker 5: So let's move on to Republicans actually embracing with some hesitation,
Speaker 5: fully embracing Tulsei Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Junior, and
Speaker 5: the Senate yesterday Robert F. Kennedy Junior and Tulsi Gabbard
Speaker 5: made it out of committees active committees that they're being
Speaker 5: considered before the Senate yesterday. And this is significant because
Speaker 5: there was a point about a week ago Ryan where
Speaker 5: it was seeming like because of Bill Cassidy in particular,
Speaker 5: who is a doctor and likes to have everyone know
Speaker 5: that he's a doctor, and Susan Collins, fairly hawkish Republican,
Speaker 5: it seems as though they might be so pressured out
Speaker 5: of voting for Robert Kennaji or actually they wouldn't have
Speaker 5: needed too much pressure in either direction. But because Susan
Speaker 5: Collins obviously represents a state that is not super friendly
Speaker 5: to Republicans always, she's up. So that looked like it
Speaker 5: pretty Jared Golden, But you know what I mean, Tulsea
Speaker 5: Gabbard I think probably plays well in Maine. This is
Speaker 5: a type of Democrat that probably plays well former Democrats.
Speaker 5: I should say that probably.
Speaker 1: Oh absolutely, this is a voting no.
Speaker 4: For Susan Collins would have cost her more with Trump's people,
Speaker 4: I think so. Yeah, yeah, I think that's Colin's obvious
Speaker 4: political choice was voting for Tulsi here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, I agree with that. But even Todd Young,
Speaker 5: who's somebody that was a fairly like red state Republican,
Speaker 5: he's from Indiana, had his famous back and forth we'll
Speaker 5: get into this in a minute with Musk right right,
Speaker 5: he was.
Speaker 1: Called like a deep state call him a deep state stooge.
Speaker 5: Yeah, stooge or something like that, and then flipped me.
Speaker 5: Musk flipped right away and said, my apologies. I talked
Speaker 5: to Todd Young on the phone, and he's a stalwart
Speaker 5: MAGA defender.
Speaker 1: Well, who flipped there? Sounds like Todd Young is the
Speaker 1: one who flipped.
Speaker 5: Well, he seemed to be planning the seeds of like
Speaker 5: possibly voting against gab.
Speaker 1: Right and then he was like no, no, no, never mind.
Speaker 5: And so I think the question here is similar to
Speaker 5: the question between Trump and the oligarchs that were sitting
Speaker 5: behind him on his inaugural dais is who conquered who? Right? Like,
Speaker 5: who is the conqueror in this situation? Was Tulsi and
Speaker 5: RFK Junior? Were they the ones who are now captured
Speaker 5: and in the pocket of the quote unquote deep State?
Speaker 5: And Bill Cassidy did RFK Junior Absolutely no favors in
Speaker 5: that direction. We can put D two up on the screen.
Speaker 5: Cassidy said he was able to get a significant number
Speaker 5: of concessions out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In exchange
Speaker 5: for his vote. He said that they're going to have
Speaker 5: monthly meetings. It was sort of like a babysitting arrangement,
Speaker 5: kind of said CDC will not remove statements on their
Speaker 5: website pointing out the vaccines do not cause autism. He'll
Speaker 5: maintained that he'll maintain the Centers for Disease Control and
Speaker 5: Preventions Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations without changes, and
Speaker 5: said he would not create a parallel structure for vaccine approval.
Speaker 5: There's a lot more, but these are already just sort
Speaker 5: of I've run through here fairly significant concessions. It's also
Speaker 5: worth noting that Tulca Gabbard basically flipped on Section seven
Speaker 5: oh two in order to and Snowden. In order to
Speaker 5: kind of Snowden. She refused to call him a trader, right,
Speaker 5: which I thought was I mean whatever. I actually thought
Speaker 5: that was a fairly principled mood. If it would have
Speaker 5: been pretty easy to say yes, you know, and say like,
Speaker 5: yes he was a trader for the reasons X.
Speaker 1: Y and Z, she didn't do that because she knows
Speaker 1: he's not.
Speaker 5: She does not believe in section seven or two or
Speaker 5: believe that Edward Snowden is a trader.
Speaker 1: So we will see how she asks to be clear
Speaker 1: on Snowden.
Speaker 4: The knock against him is that he's in Russia. Pardon
Speaker 4: the guy, and he'll come home like he's in Russia
Speaker 4: because the US stopped his plane on the ground in
Speaker 4: Moscow and basically forced him off the plane.
Speaker 1: Yes, so the US pushed him into into Russia.
Speaker 5: So and Telsea Gabbert I think also said she would
Speaker 5: do a very important thing if she's confirmed, which is
Speaker 5: have a direct hotline. This could go many different ways,
Speaker 5: but she said she would have a direct hotline to
Speaker 5: her for whistleblowers. And that is exactly how you prevent
Speaker 5: a snowden because he tried to blow the whistle, as
Speaker 5: many whistleblowers did, without success on what the government was doing.
Speaker 5: And that's actually a significant component of how that entire
Speaker 5: story unfolded. That gets completely right right.
Speaker 4: And also, like telling the government what they're doing when
Speaker 4: it is like top down, secret government policy and they're
Speaker 4: doing it on purpose is kind of pointless. It's like, hey,
Speaker 4: do you guys know that you are, you know, tapping
Speaker 4: everybody's phone here through these like underground cables and reading
Speaker 4: everybody saying well, yes, we know we're doing that.
Speaker 1: We're because we do it on purpose. It wasn't.
Speaker 4: Whistleblowing is effective internally against a rogue project, but not
Speaker 4: against a project that is in line with the actual
Speaker 4: top down policy.
Speaker 1: And so on.
Speaker 4: On doctor Cassidy, So he's a doctor. Uh, I'm curious
Speaker 4: for your take on the politics of what moved him.
Speaker 4: He committed the unforgivable sin. If I recall correctly, of
Speaker 4: voting for Trump's impeachment.
Speaker 1: He did, and so.
Speaker 4: He has a target on his back primary. Do you
Speaker 4: think that Trump and Musk promised to help him out
Speaker 4: if he would get on side for the next for
Speaker 4: the foreseeable future, Well.
Speaker 5: They definitely promised to make his life impossible if he didn't.
Speaker 5: So there were threats from Nicole Shanahan even like Megan McCain. Oh,
Speaker 5: that was a tulsy gabbard one. Actually never mind, so
Speaker 5: scratch that on Cassidy. But Nicole Shanahan and Elon Musk
Speaker 5: were Cassidy, by the way, already has a primary challenger
Speaker 5: who announced.
Speaker 1: The backlashes December. He gets ten million dollars Elon Musk
Speaker 1: and Trump's endorsement.
Speaker 5: Right, So did Cassidy not only manage to stave off
Speaker 5: potentially that scenario where there's a ton of cash going
Speaker 5: be infused into his opponent's coffers, but did he also
Speaker 5: secure significant funding from Trump and Musk and potentially stave
Speaker 5: off a mega challenge just in terms of like endorsements
Speaker 5: and resources. I don't know, it's entirely. He sort of
Speaker 5: likes to march to the beat of his own drum.
Speaker 5: He's from obviously a politically fascinating state, sort of thought
Speaker 5: of as a deep red southern state, but definitely more
Speaker 5: interesting than that.
Speaker 1: The Democrats governor's mansion, right.
Speaker 5: And it's a fairly recent like flip to we don't
Speaker 5: have to get into the history. But anyway, he feels
Speaker 5: more comfortable marching in the beat of his own drum.
Speaker 5: But that's what's interesting. I think about somebody like Robert F.
Speaker 5: Kennedy Junior, or Tulsa Gabbard and Susan Collins case. If
Speaker 5: you go out and talk to average people, some of
Speaker 5: them really hate Robert F. Kennedy Junior. A whole lot
Speaker 5: of them really love ROBERTIF. Kennedy Junr. And it's easy
Speaker 5: to rage against that from Washington, but it's harder when
Speaker 5: you're on the ground in your own state like Louisiana,
Speaker 5: to talk to especially Republican voters. He said, you know,
Speaker 5: you heard a lot from pediatricians that opposed Robert F.
Speaker 5: Kennedy Junior's nomination, and so as a doctor that was
Speaker 5: weighing on him, I may continue to weigh on him.
Speaker 4: But key concession, then, keeping the vaccine protocol as it
Speaker 4: is is a key concession to the pediatricians there.
Speaker 5: I would think that's enormously significant from their perspective. So, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is the question for Tulca, Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
Speaker 5: and the entire the.
Speaker 1: Anti Measles coalition coming together here.
Speaker 5: Well, the entire MAHA agenda hinges on Robert F. Kennedy
Speaker 5: Junior being doing sort of what Musk has been doing
Speaker 5: at other agencies to his own agency, significant radical reform.
Speaker 5: You know, when Brooke Rollins was confirmed as Secretary Department
Speaker 5: of Agriculture, a lot of people Matthew Stoller pointed this out,
Speaker 5: were wondering in the MAHA movement why she moved immediately
Speaker 5: to you know, force California to sell the meat of
Speaker 5: created pigs. Change in regulatory interpretation there. So yeah, I don't.
Speaker 1: And they backed off their promise to ban forever chemicals.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, it was.
Speaker 5: A Biden regulation the band forever chemicals that was rolled back. Yeah. So,
Speaker 5: and that's obviously not Kennedy's department. But how serious is
Speaker 5: Trump world about Maha? The voters, if you talk to voters,
Speaker 5: they're extremely serious about Maha. The ideological conservative movement is
Speaker 5: very serious now about Maha, partially because they know they
Speaker 5: have to be. But how serious will the administration be?
Speaker 4: I don't know when they come up in conflict with plastics,
Speaker 4: which is the oil industry.
Speaker 5: And whoever funds Bill Cassidy and pharma, which I should
Speaker 5: be more precise about. I don't have it in front
Speaker 5: of me. I assume that he gets significant money from them.
Speaker 5: So I think your theory is probably sound.
Speaker 4: Good place for a rubber meets the road metaphor robber
Speaker 4: meeting the road. It spits those forever chemicals right into
Speaker 4: your bloodstream.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the pfest rubbers meeting the road is meeting the
Speaker 5: pothole riddled road. Then Bernie, yes, Bernie did not just
Speaker 5: reluctantly say he was voting against Robert F. Kennedy Junior,
Speaker 5: somebody who you may know more about this than I do.
Speaker 5: I think Bernie probably for a long time. So Robert F.
Speaker 5: Kny Junior is sort of a coup in the Kennedy
Speaker 5: family from a leftist perspective, somebody who was an ally
Speaker 5: in the fight against like big corporations because of his
Speaker 5: environmental work. But Bernie Sanders put out a scathing statement,
Speaker 5: let's put D three on the screen, said, you know,
Speaker 5: we don't disagree on everything, but he said, I cannot
Speaker 5: in good conscious support someone who denies and will dilute
Speaker 5: our public health protections so distress in science and overseeing
Speaker 5: massive cuts to healthcare programs for vulnerable Americans. Vaccines were
Speaker 5: obviously friend of mine for Bernie Sanders, Ryan, do you have
Speaker 5: any other context you think is useful in the Sanders
Speaker 5: RFK jor war that's bloomed?
Speaker 4: And I feel like culturally Sanders has become a fairly
Speaker 4: normy Democrat, interesting and like culturally when it comes to
Speaker 4: the pandemic and the way that Democrats approached the pandemic,
Speaker 4: like you would have imagined a world in which he
Speaker 4: went either way on that, and he went the way
Speaker 4: that he went, And I think that and you know, also,
Speaker 4: I don't know how much of a role it played,
Speaker 4: but RFK Junior is like obnoxious and willfully dishonest attack
Speaker 4: on him as being in the pocket of pharmac CEOs
Speaker 4: and then seeing like so many morons like circulate that
Speaker 4: video as like evidence that, oh we discovered that Bernie
Speaker 4: Sanders is actually corrupt. And for people that didn't watch this,
Speaker 4: RFK Junior did this thing where he's like you said,
Speaker 4: you don't take money from you know, the pharma CEOs,
Speaker 4: but actually it says you took.
Speaker 1: A million plus dollars.
Speaker 4: It's like, bro, those are like pharmacists, those pharmaceutical reps.
Speaker 4: Those are people who work for in manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.
Speaker 4: Like the pharmaceutical industry is a multi billion dollar industry
Speaker 4: which contains workers.
Speaker 1: If you go and look go to like uh, go
Speaker 1: to go to Open Secrets.
Speaker 4: And look at Bernie's, like top industries and supporthim, it'll
Speaker 4: be like Amazon, Walmart, you know, the pharmaceutical industry, the
Speaker 4: plenty from the oil industry. Like that's because that's where
Speaker 4: people in our economy work.
Speaker 1: They are workers.
Speaker 4: It'd be like something and Bernie Centers is in the
Speaker 4: pocket of Amazon or Walmart, like because people at Walmart
Speaker 4: are giving him twenty five dollars. It's it's so dumb
Speaker 4: that it's like it crosses the threshold into being offensive.
Speaker 4: And so I could imagine that at Bernie's, like you
Speaker 4: know what f this guy, Which that's not how you
Speaker 4: should do politics.
Speaker 1: And you got to put the path go past those lights.
Speaker 4: But it's also so dumb that you're like, so either
Speaker 4: this guy is this deeply dishonest that he's going to
Speaker 4: make this a which is does not speak to qualifications
Speaker 4: for a secretary, or he's so dumb that he doesn't
Speaker 4: know what it means to get twenty five thirty dollars.
Speaker 1: Contributions from workers. Yeah, he knows, he.
Speaker 4: Would hope so because he himself ran for president, well
Speaker 4: he can go to open secrets and see his own
Speaker 4: top industry.
Speaker 5: He's a significant student, Like here's a long time student
Speaker 5: of money in politics, and he's serious about it.
Speaker 1: So then it'ses.
Speaker 5: He definitely knows. And I think in his case, he
Speaker 5: feels like a lot of the attacks on him have
Speaker 5: been dishonest, and there's just a lot of attacks on him,
Speaker 5: so of course some of them have been dishonest. But
Speaker 5: that seemed like an odd way to talk to Bernie Sanders,
Speaker 5: somebody who does have a lot of common cause.
Speaker 1: Was exactly.
Speaker 4: And by the way, if you're watching this clock in
Speaker 4: your mind, anybody that treated that as a serious attack,
Speaker 4: and do not listen to them about anything ever again
Speaker 4: because they think you're an idiot. If you are an idiot,
Speaker 4: then continue to listen to them.
Speaker 5: It is sort of a funny litmus test for people
Speaker 5: who don't like look at the FEC data a lot,
Speaker 5: right whenever someone does that.
Speaker 4: So I'm speaking to the not idiots who like and
Speaker 4: people who are casually following this and like like, oh wow,
Speaker 4: I didn't know that.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting to me.
Speaker 4: They are playing on you because they're playing you because
Speaker 4: they think that you're not going to look one layer deeper.
Speaker 1: So don't listen to them ever again, or some of them.
Speaker 5: Just don't know and are like new to this, speaking
Speaker 5: of which, by the way, can confirm that Bill Cassidy
Speaker 5: is a major recipient of donations, not merely from people
Speaker 5: who work in pharma, but from packs.
Speaker 4: So yes, there you go, right, there's packs, there's CEOs,
Speaker 4: there's executives. Those are the people that give you the
Speaker 4: max donations or the five thousand, six thousand dollars checks. Yeah,
Speaker 4: that's completely different than somebody cutting you thirty dollars and
Speaker 4: then it says employer you ever given money, It asks
Speaker 4: you your employer, and then that puts you into an industry.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, So if we gave money, we would put
Speaker 5: down journalists or media and then it would clock as
Speaker 5: if you're reading the FEC or for it's as hepathetically,
Speaker 5: Bernie Sanders just took money from the media media, and
Speaker 5: so it would look similar to if like funny enough,
Speaker 5: like the head of NBC News or the head of
Speaker 5: NBC Universal as a media company, it would look the same. Yeah, right,
Speaker 5: So anyway, you can find all kinds of strange stuff
Speaker 5: in there if you go into the FEC reports. But Ryan,
Speaker 5: you picked up on this really interesting report in the
Speaker 5: New York Times on housing that we want to get to.
Speaker 4: New article with Pro public in the New York Times,
Speaker 4: So you can put this E one up on the
Speaker 4: screen here. It's a deep look at the fluctuations in
Speaker 4: home values relative to regions in the country that are
Speaker 4: being hit or not hit by climate implications. So what
Speaker 4: this is doing, I think kind of for the first time,
Speaker 4: it's relying on a lot of data from the the
Speaker 4: Financial Street, which tries to figure out, you know, which
Speaker 4: direction how real estate prices are heading for their own
Speaker 4: kind of internal commercial reasons.
Speaker 1: They teamed up with ProPublica New York.
Speaker 4: Times to unload a bunch of their datas they could
Speaker 4: so they could try to clock it by climate and
Speaker 4: so what what they find. What they found shouldn't be
Speaker 4: surprising to anybody, but has deeply profound implications, and we
Speaker 4: can actually put up E.
Speaker 1: Two. They have a couple of these maps that that.
Speaker 4: May make clear what's going on. You can see the
Speaker 4: red there is basically a heat map of where you
Speaker 4: are screwed if you own if you own property, and
Speaker 4: the clearer it is, the better off you are in
Speaker 4: terms of climate implications. And so what they're what they're
Speaker 4: finding here is that over the next thirty years they
Speaker 4: expect home prices to not rise very you know, substantially
Speaker 4: on average. But when you break it out by climate implications,
Speaker 4: if you are in a place impacted by severe weather
Speaker 4: and flooding, you're looking at over the next thirty or
Speaker 4: something like a six percent decline, whereas if you're not,
Speaker 4: you're looking at something like a ten percent increase. The
Speaker 4: American dream has been built around the idea that home
Speaker 4: prices are going to continue to rise. That that's how
Speaker 4: you build your wealth, and that's the wealth that you're
Speaker 4: eventually able to pass down to your family. Something like
Speaker 4: two thirds of adults own homes, and more as you
Speaker 4: get as you get older, and they First Street is
Speaker 4: estimating that five million people will move this next year
Speaker 4: significantly as a result of these climate implications, and they're
Speaker 4: saying that along with kind of location, seafront view of
Speaker 4: that kind of stuff, and public schools, like the quality
Speaker 4: of the school in the area, climate is becoming for
Speaker 4: home buyers something that they are now actively considering.
Speaker 1: Anything in this surprise you.
Speaker 4: And more importantly, do you think the implications are going
Speaker 4: to be as profound as their forecasting?
Speaker 5: Yes, but probably from a different perspective here if we
Speaker 5: put the two back up on the screen. One of
Speaker 5: the interesting things here, we were just talking about Senator
Speaker 5: Bill Cassidy of Louisiana look at the dark red in
Speaker 5: southern Louisiana. Well, we were talking about what industries he
Speaker 5: takes money from. One of them actually is construction. And
Speaker 5: what's funny about that is almost a decade ago, is
Speaker 5: working on a story about flood insurance reform. That really
Speaker 5: opened up my eyes. So a lot of the ways
Speaker 5: that we subsidize rebuilding in areas like that, and Cassidy
Speaker 5: was sort of opposed to this very conservative, ideologically conservative
Speaker 5: idea about flood insurance reform. And you know in states
Speaker 5: like Louisiana, states like Florida. I remember when we talked
Speaker 5: about in Miami each when the condo complex collapsed several
Speaker 5: years ago. This is why I think the implications of
Speaker 5: it are going to be profound, because we've had these
Speaker 5: technological advances in the last one hundred years that have
Speaker 5: allowed us to feel like we conquered nature and to
Speaker 5: build in these areas that are vulnerable when the climate
Speaker 5: change is naturally or otherwise. And whether you believe in
Speaker 5: man made anthropogenic climate change, whether you believe that or not,
Speaker 5: the climate changes, like you don't even have to buy
Speaker 5: into the ideology of climate change to recognize that some
Speaker 5: of these developments, you know what's been built up in California.
Speaker 5: I talked to James Pogue and Leighton Woodhust about this
Speaker 5: on Undercurrents recently. This is new developments over the course
Speaker 5: of one hundred years that sprang up really quickly because
Speaker 5: we were able to build quickly. We were able to
Speaker 5: build clothes, we were able to build these areas that
Speaker 5: required conquering nature. And so that if you're somebody who
Speaker 5: doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change, the climate is going
Speaker 5: to change no matter what. So you have to have
Speaker 5: a plan for people's properties because that's important to them.
Speaker 5: It's what the American dream is, the cornerstone of the
Speaker 5: American dream, literally, the cornerstone of the American dream. So
Speaker 5: I totally agree that this is a significant, massively significant issue.
Speaker 4: And the phenomenon that this article zeros in on is
Speaker 4: the way that climate denialism, fueled by governments has blocked, interestingly,
Speaker 4: the market from producing the signals that it otherwise would
Speaker 4: have produced that would have driven home construction and population
Speaker 4: dispersal that would have been more in line with climate developments.
Speaker 1: In other words, in Florida is a good example.
Speaker 4: The insurance industry has been at the forefront of the
Speaker 4: climate science. They're like, have fun over here with your
Speaker 4: documentaries pretending that climate's not real. Like we have actual
Speaker 4: skin in the game, we have money on the line.
Speaker 4: We're going to study the actual implications of the changing climate.
Speaker 4: And they looked at these studies and they came back
Speaker 4: and they're like, Oh, this used to be one hundred
Speaker 4: year floodplane. This is a fifty year floodplane. This was
Speaker 4: a ten year flood this is now a two year floodplane.
Speaker 4: You're gonna get flood every two years. Therefore, here's what
Speaker 4: you're going to pay for your insurance. So insurance hazard
Speaker 4: insurance used to be they estimate about six percent of
Speaker 4: your overall kind of monthly mortgage payment, and so it
Speaker 4: was relatively trivial. It wasn't something that people really factored in.
Speaker 4: Now it's pushing closer to twenty and it is growing
Speaker 4: faster than inflation, which is which is the reason then
Speaker 4: that you have to factor it in as you're thinking
Speaker 4: about where you're going to buy.
Speaker 1: Well, people don't like to do that.
Speaker 4: People then complain to their county commissioners, to their state lawmakers,
Speaker 4: to their members of Congress, and those lawmakers say, that
Speaker 4: is really unfair of those insurance companies to be charging that.
Speaker 4: So we're going to subsidize it, and we're going to
Speaker 4: make a law that they have to do it, et cetera. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and so here I am on the left talking about
Speaker 4: the free market and its value in setting signals, and
Speaker 4: so then yeah, people are like, okay, great, thank you
Speaker 4: for that.
Speaker 1: We will build here.
Speaker 5: But it's not just about signals. It's about people's physical safety.
Speaker 5: And I remember that I was actually talking to Sean
Speaker 5: Duffy about this at the time. This was when I
Speaker 5: was doing a flod insurance reform story, the NFIP, the
Speaker 5: National Flundaform, right, yeah, yeah, Well, the NFIP subsidizes rebuilding
Speaker 5: homes and genuinely dangerous floodplains over and over again. So
Speaker 5: in Houston, for example, people who are like low income,
Speaker 5: middle income who own these homes keep rebuilding because it's
Speaker 5: subsidized in these very dangerous places. And it's a not
Speaker 5: ideal situation at all. And so there's serious problems with
Speaker 5: the programs that you get incentivized because of crony capitalism
Speaker 5: to keep redoing and redoing. And Duffy was trying to
Speaker 5: lead the charge against it at the time. Now he's
Speaker 5: Transportation Secretary. But it does create these really perverse systems
Speaker 5: of incentives, and so the insurance system, I mean, I
Speaker 5: think this Times report is interesting from the perspective of
Speaker 5: like where insurance companies are coming down on this and
Speaker 5: how they're looking to influence government policies amidst all of this. Like,
Speaker 5: there's serious problems with both people have genuine interests here
Speaker 5: in doing the wrong thing and genuine interested in doing
Speaker 5: the right thing. So how do you marry them.
Speaker 1: Well, ultimately, things that can't go on don't go on.
Speaker 4: And so the numbers that they're adding up in this
Speaker 4: article two hundred and fifty billion for the LA fires,
Speaker 4: you can call it climbing and call it, you know,
Speaker 4: poor fire management. Complain about Gavin Newsom nuts open up
Speaker 4: this biggots where it doesn't matter. It's going to cost
Speaker 4: two hundred and fifty billion with a B. On top
Speaker 4: of that, you've got tens, maybe hundreds of billions. If
Speaker 4: you combine western North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, these other storms
Speaker 4: that we saw very recently, you're very quickly getting towards
Speaker 4: half a trillion dollars.
Speaker 1: And damage is there.
Speaker 4: That threatens the entire stability of and solubility of insurance
Speaker 4: companies and reinsurance companies. And you know they say that
Speaker 4: when the floodwaters received, it's when you really start to
Speaker 4: see who you know, who's who's naked. And that is
Speaker 4: that is that we may find out that there are
Speaker 4: some budgetary gimmicks going on at the insurance and reinsurance
Speaker 4: companies such that when homeowners with valid policies, I don't
Speaker 4: know if it's going to be this time or next
Speaker 4: time or down the road, but at some point they're
Speaker 4: going to go to this insurance company and be like.
Speaker 1: Look, here's here's my valid policy.
Speaker 4: Here my claim I need I need to be paid out,
Speaker 4: and they can be like, yeah, sorry, we're bankrupt. We
Speaker 4: don't actually have that amount of money because the actuary
Speaker 4: actuaries weren't allowed to do the math accurately, and so
Speaker 4: we charged everybody less than we understood it would cost. Yeah,
Speaker 4: if we hit these worst case scenarios, and now we've
Speaker 4: hit them, and then you're then you kick it up
Speaker 4: to what's called the reinsurers, who are kind of the
Speaker 4: backstop for the insurance companies. And once you're in that world,
Speaker 4: who knows what kind of counterparty risk they have and
Speaker 4: whether or not they're completely solvent either, and then you're
Speaker 4: back to the federal government needing a bailout.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and so this is again the the I guess
Speaker 5: consequence of institutional trust, like having record low levels of
Speaker 5: institutional trust, is that you can't agree on the science,
Speaker 5: the capitalist science, whereas we call it the fauci because
Speaker 5: it's sort of interchangeable. He is the science and vice versa.
Speaker 5: But in all seriousness, when you can't agree on some
Speaker 5: basic well, you can't agree in some like basic research
Speaker 5: and it's been polarized and politicized. Then there are all
Speaker 5: kinds of things they get affected by that, including like
Speaker 5: insurance rates and people's decisions about where to build and invest,
Speaker 5: like individual homeowners' decisions about these things. So we sort
Speaker 5: of think about institutional trust as a very abstract conversation,
Speaker 5: like this is just something that the you know, professors
Speaker 5: talk about in with their tweed elbow patches, But it's
Speaker 5: really like consequential people's everyday lives. And this is a
Speaker 5: good example, by.
Speaker 4: The way, I understand why you would need elbow patches
Speaker 4: like I need them already.
Speaker 1: Get a little faith.
Speaker 5: We're going to come in next week with their elbow patches.
Speaker 4: Up next, Jasmine Crockett, congress when from Texas, has thoughts
Speaker 4: on mediocre white men. If you are a mediocre white
Speaker 4: man or you who are friends with mediocre white men,
Speaker 4: stick around for this one.
Speaker 5: Congresswoman. Democratic Congresswoman Jasmine Krockett had some thoughts about quote,
Speaker 5: mediocre white boys on CNN. Let's take a listen to
Speaker 5: what she said the other name.
Speaker 19: I am tired of the white tears. Listen, if you
Speaker 19: are competent, you are not concerned when I walk into
Speaker 19: Congress every single day. You know why I don't feel
Speaker 19: away and why you can't make me doubt who I
Speaker 19: am is because I know that I had to work
Speaker 19: ten times as hard as they did just to get
Speaker 19: into the seat. When you look and you compare me
Speaker 19: to Marjorie Taylor Green or me to Lauren Bobert, there
Speaker 19: is no comparison. And that is the life that we
Speaker 19: have always lived. So the only people that are crying
Speaker 19: are the mediocre white boys that have been beaten out
Speaker 19: by people that historically have had to work so much harder.
Speaker 19: This is why they don't want us to have education.
Speaker 19: This is why they are trying to literally say we
Speaker 19: won't fund the HBCUs because they know that if they've
Speaker 19: already gone after affirmative action and they're saying, you know what,
Speaker 19: don't allow them to come into say these pwis as
Speaker 19: we call them, don't allow them to come into these institutions.
Speaker 19: We know why they created the HBCUs in the first place.
Speaker 19: It was because they wouldn't allow us into the white institutions.
Speaker 19: And so now they're not allowing us in, and now
Speaker 19: they're saying, you know what, we're also going to defund
Speaker 19: the HBCUs. You know why, because they don't want any
Speaker 19: more Kamala Harris's. They don't want any more Jasmine Crocketts.
Speaker 19: But I got news for them. I don't care what
Speaker 19: they do. We will fight to the end to make
Speaker 19: sure that we get our due. Because again, if you
Speaker 19: want to talk about the people that shouldn't be in
Speaker 19: this country, you probably need to look in the mirror,
Speaker 19: because the last time I checked, the Native Americans who
Speaker 19: summer Ice have been rounding up, or the Puerto Ricans
Speaker 19: who are absolutely Americans. Listen, the only people that came
Speaker 19: and colonized this place are your ancestors.
Speaker 5: Trump, I don't know Ryan well.
Speaker 4: By the way, for people just tuning in, PWI BPS
Speaker 4: of PWI stands for predominantly White institution.
Speaker 1: So so people can keep up there. Now.
Speaker 4: Not only did this spark controversy, there was a sub
Speaker 4: controversy that we can get into in a minute where
Speaker 4: the DNC's rapid response yes, shared this, which I think
Speaker 4: is and and then was attacked pretty viciously by the
Speaker 4: left saying like DNC, what are you trying to do?
Speaker 1: Like who are you? Who are you winning over by
Speaker 1: pushing this content out? Like who who? Is who is
Speaker 1: this for?
Speaker 4: And you can be you can even be smug about
Speaker 4: it if you want, like and the smug the way
Speaker 4: to be smug about it would be the quote that
Speaker 4: at at least that famous, at least Stevenson line, the
Speaker 4: guy who the Democrat of an egghead who ran for
Speaker 4: Congress I mean, I mean for ran for president a
Speaker 4: whole bunch of times in the mid twentieth century lost
Speaker 4: every time. He famously, perhaps apocryphally, said on somebody yelled
Speaker 4: at him and said, you have the votes of every
Speaker 4: thinking man in this country, and Stevenson yelled back, yeah,
Speaker 4: but I need a majority, which is funny and everybody
Speaker 4: laughs at it.
Speaker 1: But it also.
Speaker 4: There's a through line from that all the way through
Speaker 4: to this today's party, which runs through Barack Obama's guns
Speaker 4: and religion and the whole which you know, you kind
Speaker 4: of talk about this in this good, new, great new
Speaker 4: essay that you wrote. What's it called the point of
Speaker 4: the point about the kind of cultural elitism that that
Speaker 4: kind of seeps out. It used to come from white eggheads,
Speaker 4: like at least Stevenson, you're gonna say, like Obama, now
Speaker 4: it comes well half white egg and now it's now
Speaker 4: it's from somebody like Jasmine Crockett. But to take it
Speaker 4: on his own terms, we all we actually should all
Speaker 4: care about all mediocre people like this. There was this
Speaker 4: joke where they nominated a moron to the Supreme Court.
Speaker 4: I forget the moron's name, people can remember the comments section.
Speaker 4: And the defense of him was, well, you know, idiots
Speaker 4: need representation too, and the counter argument was, okay, but
Speaker 4: not necessarily on the Supreme Court.
Speaker 5: Is this maybe the one place representation doesn't matter.
Speaker 4: Let's get the smart cats on there. But mediocre is
Speaker 4: another word for average. Average is a word for in
Speaker 4: the middle. Like people who are in the middle, their
Speaker 4: grievances are or entirely legitimate, period, so to say. And
Speaker 4: so I think there are a lot of obvious things
Speaker 4: you can say about what Crockett said. I'm trying to
Speaker 4: say the non obvious thing, and the non obvious thing
Speaker 4: would be, if you are an average person in this
Speaker 4: country and you feel like you're being screwed over, then
Speaker 4: that's probably a legitimate grievance.
Speaker 5: Well, also if you are because.
Speaker 1: The country should be fair for everybody, including the Yog people.
Speaker 5: But that was the sort of victory of the Civil
Speaker 5: Rights movement is why there are a lot of people
Speaker 5: who were involved. I mean, the civil Rights movement veterans
Speaker 5: are sort of split on these questions, but there are
Speaker 5: a lot of people who are involved are deeply uncomfortable
Speaker 5: with where DEI has gone. And actually this was in
Speaker 5: your great story a couple of years ago on the
Speaker 5: Elephant in the Zoom that people have sort of seen
Speaker 5: unintended consequences as the experiment has played out in ways
Speaker 5: that create more rancor and are not as fair. And
Speaker 5: it's not just mediocre white boys. It's also Asian Americans
Speaker 5: who get short the short straw and a lot of
Speaker 5: these situations, it's not it's it's it's not it. This
Speaker 5: is not it. This is not the right Democratic answer
Speaker 5: to Dee. And I get the Jasmin Crockett is a
Speaker 5: representative of a blue area around Dallas, like I understand
Speaker 5: that there are a lot of people in blue enclaves
Speaker 5: that are offended by the walk away from DEI. As
Speaker 5: an increasingly prominent spokeswoman for the Democratic Party, mocking people
Speaker 5: who are upset about Dei is probably not the way
Speaker 5: to go now.
Speaker 4: To try to defend the impulse that Crockett is coming from.
Speaker 4: There is something I think interesting and insightful that she's
Speaker 4: trying to get at, which is basically that So what
Speaker 4: she's arguing, if you shared of a lot of the.
Speaker 1: Rhetoric, is that there are a lot of people.
Speaker 4: Who are much more talented over the last one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty two hundred years who have been kept out
Speaker 4: of positions of prestige and authority because of their race
Speaker 4: and gender. That is true, and we should absolutely acknowledge,
Speaker 4: like that is a fact, and that racial engender, SegReg segregation,
Speaker 4: and exclusion did in fact allow mediocre white men to
Speaker 4: get into positions that if they had, if they had
Speaker 4: to compete with the entire population of men and women,
Speaker 4: black and white and brown.
Speaker 1: Would have been harder for them.
Speaker 4: That's like that, that is a that is a fact,
Speaker 4: and we and we should all acknowledge that. And so
Speaker 4: because that is because that is a fact, it is
Speaker 4: the case that some people who feel like they deserve
Speaker 4: positions are not getting those positions, and now they're angry
Speaker 4: at the women and the black people who.
Speaker 1: Are getting those positions.
Speaker 4: So I actually think like on one level she's making
Speaker 4: she's making a point that is that is accurate, and
Speaker 4: it is getting it something, and it's getting it something real.
Speaker 4: But to kind of blanket just go after like all
Speaker 4: mediocre white men or white boys, it is not very
Speaker 4: effective weighted it well.
Speaker 5: And to assume those are the only people who are
Speaker 5: concerned about de I, or maybe not to assume, but
Speaker 5: to argue those are the only people who are concerned
Speaker 5: about DEI is just not correct. And I think Democrats
Speaker 5: choosing to fight bitterly back in the culture war over
Speaker 5: DEI is in normal like it actually bums me out
Speaker 5: as somebody who's more on the right, because I think
Speaker 5: one of the reasons that there's going to be overreached
Speaker 5: from Donald Trump is that there's just not a potent
Speaker 5: opposition party. And part of that is because what we
Speaker 5: saw from the DNC election over the last couple of days,
Speaker 5: where you have Jonathan k peart asking you, you know
Speaker 5: what actually happened, dear, Oh, there's just a bunch of
Speaker 5: racist and bigots that made sure Kamala Harris didn't get elected.
Speaker 5: And I'm paraphrasing kind of you know that was age. Yeah,
Speaker 5: it wasn't the most charitable interpretation, but it wasn't entirely disaccurate, inaccurate.
Speaker 5: So anyway, all that is to say, I think Jasmine
Speaker 5: Crockett's message is not the one Democrats should for moral
Speaker 5: reasons or political reasons be landing on here.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: In politics, you're supposed to pander to people, not insult them. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like less than one Yeah, And another word for like
Speaker 4: I was saying earlier, mediocre would be like regular. Like
Speaker 4: we're just talking about regular people, okay, And you want
Speaker 4: to reach out to regular people, like you don't you
Speaker 4: don't want to just like aggressively assault them. I think
Speaker 4: that Obama's guns and religion argument, he like he was
Speaker 4: saying and he was making a cultural connection to as
Speaker 4: you talk about in your peace, a cultural connection to economics.
Speaker 4: He was saying, as as people saw the economic rug
Speaker 4: being pulled out from under them because of NAFTA and
Speaker 4: offshoring and collapse of manufacturing and the collapse of the
Speaker 4: American dream, that one thing they retreated to was guns
Speaker 4: and religion. That's where the clean guns and religion, bitterly
Speaker 4: it comes from, bitterly clinging to guns and religion because
Speaker 4: we're upset about the direction of the world. Like there
Speaker 4: is an analysis that's it's vulgar, but like you can
Speaker 4: see it and it's directionally, there's there's some insight into it.
Speaker 4: But even Obama as a politician is like, it's not
Speaker 4: good to talk about people.
Speaker 1: In those bitter terms.
Speaker 4: It's much better to talk to them as part of
Speaker 4: a collection of us who's going to like work together
Speaker 4: to overcome this in the way that like a Bernie
Speaker 4: Sanders would talk about it, like, yes, we are bitter,
Speaker 4: but we're bitter at the one percent who has done
Speaker 4: this to us. And work, work, and together, mediocre and
Speaker 4: excellent people together, black, white, brown men and women. We're
Speaker 4: going to come together and make the world better for
Speaker 4: all of us. And there's no all of us in
Speaker 4: the way that Crockett is talking there.
Speaker 5: Right, And I don't know that she buys into the
Speaker 5: I guess ideological leftist argument about capitalism being the real enemy,
Speaker 5: but this is really to the extent that she does,
Speaker 5: or to the extent that she did, you would recognize
Speaker 5: from that vantage point that mediocre white boys, this is
Speaker 5: the argument you're saying, are a victim of that system,
Speaker 5: in the same way that people you're trying to help
Speaker 5: with DEI are a victim of that system. So it
Speaker 5: doesn't it's not coherent, it's not helpful, and you know,
Speaker 5: maybe Democrats should take a step back from the Jasmine
Speaker 5: Crockett train if that's where if this is an intentional strategy,
Speaker 5: promise she rates. I believe she probably gets fun. She
Speaker 5: probably brings money into and we saw that throughout the resistance,
Speaker 5: the same thing with the Lawfair people. Everyone who was
Speaker 5: engaging in the Lawfair was raising money for Democrats. Yeah,
Speaker 5: see how that worked out anyway.
Speaker 4: And she had that, like what would Democrats really right
Speaker 4: want right now is somebody who's willing to just punch
Speaker 4: Republicans right in the face, like they're hungry for rhetorically,
Speaker 4: hungry for somebody rhetorically to just scream like and just
Speaker 4: take them down.
Speaker 1: And she's and she's and she's delivering that in that sense.
Speaker 4: If you will go find that she had that was it,
Speaker 4: Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Bulberg, She had some like poetry
Speaker 4: slam esque griff.
Speaker 5: Just like yeah, it was Margine Tayler Green.
Speaker 1: Just and she delivered in blonde.
Speaker 5: Beach built Butch Buddy.
Speaker 1: Just delivered it impeccably.
Speaker 4: And you're like, I don't know politics aside, just the
Speaker 4: performance was just utterly impeccable.
Speaker 5: Yeah there was something else. Oh yeah, yeah, I un
Speaker 5: ironically loved that exchange. So great place to land on
Speaker 5: at the end of today's edition of Counterpoints.
Speaker 1: Yeah, just let it.
Speaker 5: Sometimes you just have to let them yell at each other.
Speaker 1: We would, we would play that out at a moment.
Speaker 5: Of such a thing. Does he still do that?
Speaker 1: I don't know. I don't think so. It's probably Comedy
Speaker 1: Central's back on Comedy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe he does. We'll have to check it out.
Speaker 5: We will report back. We will figure that one out.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much everyone for tuning in. Breaking Points
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Speaker 4: On Friday, we were so Thursday, It'll come on Thursday
Speaker 4: afternoon for premium subscribers. We're going to have Natalie Winters,
Speaker 4: who is I told my wife this this morning, I said,
Speaker 4: Steve Bannon's White House correspondent.
Speaker 1: She's like, I'm sorry, what like I said, it's Steve.
Speaker 1: She's Steve Bannon's white House course.
Speaker 4: And she's like, yes, I heard you. What on earth
Speaker 4: are you talking? How does Steve Bannon have a white
Speaker 4: house course?
Speaker 13: Well?
Speaker 4: I was like, so, Steve Bannon has a podcast called
Speaker 4: war Room. The podcast has a white house court. She's like, oh, okay,
Speaker 4: interesting times we're living in. I was talking to Crystal. Yes, yes,
Speaker 4: we were talking about how Friday Morning should we also
Speaker 4: do like an a block because there's just so much
Speaker 4: news that's going from like Thursday to Monday, so we'll
Speaker 4: put out the Friday Show. If Emily is around, we'll
Speaker 4: and I'm from around wallso we'll also do like a
Speaker 4: you know, wrap up some news for you too, because like,
Speaker 4: good lord, there's a lot going on
Speaker 5: So much going on, but looking forward to that for sure,
Speaker 5: So make sure you stay tuned and if you want
Speaker 5: it early, Breaking points dot com