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Speaker 1: Breakingpoints dot com. All right, welcome back to Counterpoints. So
Speaker 1: we put a one up here. The global elites Emily
Speaker 1: have all gathered in Davos. Shouldn't we be broadcasting from there?
Speaker 1: You think I was going to pretend that we were here.
Speaker 1: We brought this up or it's a green screen. We're
Speaker 1: here at Davos. We just got eggs with Klaus Schwab.
Speaker 1: It's not the same this year without all the Russian
Speaker 1: oligarchs throwing their parties off the off to the side,
Speaker 1: because they really did throw the ragers, right, Really, have
Speaker 1: you been to Davos. I've never been to Davos, but
Speaker 1: that was always the word word on the street back
Speaker 1: when I was at the Huffington post. My old boss
Speaker 1: Arianna obviously was a celeb at Davos. I was going
Speaker 1: to say, that's absolutely love Davos. Yeah, And when I
Speaker 1: was there, it was Davos was still on the edge
Speaker 1: of like having some cred with like hipsters, because like
Speaker 1: people like the tech hipsters, like this was there's there
Speaker 1: was still enough of a whiff of utopianism in the
Speaker 1: tech world that that you'd have people people like talking
Speaker 1: earnestly about how they're going to make the world a
Speaker 1: better place. Actually today they're still over there talking earnestly
Speaker 1: about how they're going to make the world a better place,
Speaker 1: whether you want it to be a better place or not,
Speaker 1: or they're gonna make it one. Now very you know,
Speaker 1: basically nobody takes them seriously anymore. Now. They just see
Speaker 1: it as kind of what it is, a gathering of
Speaker 1: global elites trying to like keep together the structures that
Speaker 1: have propped them up. This theme, as as that article
Speaker 1: just mentioned, was how much they're failing and how it's
Speaker 1: all falling apart, and that they're trying to reglobalize or
Speaker 1: deglobalize and then reglobalize or stitch back together. This this
Speaker 1: dream that they had of this of this globalized world
Speaker 1: which only includes the flow of global capital and global elites. Yes,
Speaker 1: does not include kind of opening up the world in
Speaker 1: any kind of broader ways. Right now, that's a good point.
Speaker 1: And actually, on that point, we want to start with
Speaker 1: a clip from hilariously a panel on disinformation that was
Speaker 1: I believe, moderated by Brian Stelter. Now, this is funny
Speaker 1: for a couple of reasons. I have absolutely no objection
Speaker 1: to Brian Steltz being on a panel about disinformation. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think it's a great spot for Brian Steltzer to
Speaker 1: be on a panel. But if he's reckoning with the
Speaker 1: being a serious purveyor of disinformation throughout the course of
Speaker 1: the Trump administration, of course that's not what happened. Instead,
Speaker 1: it was a panel about how the global elites can
Speaker 1: rain in the masses via new censorship legislation. You had
Speaker 1: to have a Democrat pushing back. Weird. Check it out.
Speaker 1: Here's the clip. That's why you're saying, the rules have
Speaker 1: to be set up in a way not to be abused. Yes, Congressman,
Speaker 1: should we learn in the US something from the structures
Speaker 1: that the Europeans have adopted well, look, I think in general,
Speaker 1: the US has a lot to learn in terms of
Speaker 1: data regulation internet regulation. You're way ahead of us in
Speaker 1: that regard. But we believe very strongly in free speech.
Speaker 1: I believe very strongly in free speech, and I think
Speaker 1: there is a healthy concern in the United States that
Speaker 1: the EU might be be going a little too far.
Speaker 1: So I think you look at this from both perspectives. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're ahead of us, and they're doing some smart things
Speaker 1: that I know when I use the Internet in Europe
Speaker 1: and I get all the warnings about cookies and whatnot,
Speaker 1: that actually makes me feel safer. That makes me feel better,
Speaker 1: And a lot of American consumers want that level of
Speaker 1: security on the Internet for your own data, privacy and whatnot.
Speaker 1: The EU legislation I think should be a non starter
Speaker 1: at least in terms of censorship. And yet you have
Speaker 1: a journalist sort of like Brian Steltz kind of nod incredulously,
Speaker 1: like it's a very interesting conversation to be had. Were
Speaker 1: you surprised that Seth Moulton pushback, Well, yeah, and I
Speaker 1: think there's two points of European kind of Internet regulation.
Speaker 1: So on the one hand, like he said, the data
Speaker 1: stuff where big tech really is blocked or and it
Speaker 1: also required to do a lot more transparency around the
Speaker 1: way that they collect and cash in on your data.
Speaker 1: Surveillance capitalists. Right, that's some good stuff. They're pretty tough.
Speaker 1: So like big tech warning, l we're going to go
Speaker 1: out of business. We're going to be bankrupt if you
Speaker 1: keep doing this to us, Like whenever you hear those
Speaker 1: kinds of noises from big tech, like, Okay, well, maybe
Speaker 1: this is actually a regulation worth paying attention to. But
Speaker 1: Europe does not have the same kind of affinity culturally
Speaker 1: for free speech that we have in the United States.
Speaker 1: We're almost unique. We've seen that actually from Prince Harry
Speaker 1: and Megan Markle, who I believe they're on an Aspen
Speaker 1: Institute board that deals with these issues, and have said,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't know what the deal is with
Speaker 1: the First Amendment here in the United States, and what
Speaker 1: the heck is this. It's a very weird place to
Speaker 1: start from for a lot of people that wait, we
Speaker 1: start from the place that you can say whatever you want. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it sounds impossible. How can that be? That'd be so
Speaker 1: dangerous to society? How do you control the peasants? How
Speaker 1: do you control, yes, right, and so, uh, that was
Speaker 1: interesting to see Molton kind of saying, you know what,
Speaker 1: we got a a trivia question he ran for president.
Speaker 1: I actually completely it was on stage four the like
Speaker 1: Midnight Debate. Yeah, one or two of them. But I
Speaker 1: think you your preface to this conversation about the sort
Speaker 1: of arc of Davos makes a really good point, which
Speaker 1: is that what we've seen recently is I think a
Speaker 1: more naked, an intentional effort to rain in populace. And
Speaker 1: this is a sort of theme of Davos recently is
Speaker 1: you know, sort of how can we rig the system,
Speaker 1: how can we sort of uh copy, copy and paste
Speaker 1: laws from one place to the to the other so
Speaker 1: we can feel secure in the in the fact that
Speaker 1: we have these mechanisms in place to control people to
Speaker 1: our liking. And they obviously make this argument, and you
Speaker 1: can see one of the good things about Davos is
Speaker 1: that you can see many of them sincerely think this
Speaker 1: is for the greater good. They think they're speaking on
Speaker 1: half of the good of the public. And it's great
Speaker 1: because you can see that, you can see what they
Speaker 1: think they're saying, you can see what they're working through
Speaker 1: in their own heads and it's never airing on the
Speaker 1: side of freedom. Yeah, and at a minimum, they think
Speaker 1: that the reforms that they're offering up and the ideas
Speaker 1: that they're throwing out there are going to stave off
Speaker 1: this populist revolt. So oftentimes at Davos you'd have people saying,
Speaker 1: you might not necessarily want to do this thing, a
Speaker 1: wealth tax, you know, whatever it is, but you should
Speaker 1: do it or else the pitchforks are coming for you.
Speaker 1: That would that would often be their relationship with populism,
Speaker 1: And Davos has all sorts of kind of activists that
Speaker 1: come out there, often kind of foundation funded activists who
Speaker 1: are who then deliver that message to the elites, to
Speaker 1: the elites out there, but oftentimes they just don't know
Speaker 1: how to deliver it. And actually, if we could put
Speaker 1: up a three my colleague over the intercept Ken Kleepenstein
Speaker 1: Flag Flag disc panel on retirement the World Economic Form,
Speaker 1: what's their headline that we desperately need to disrupt our
Speaker 1: approach to retirement saving and nobody, I just don't I
Speaker 1: don't think that they understand how frightened people get when
Speaker 1: the global leites start talking about disrupting your retirement. They
Speaker 1: still have this attitude that they're going to do good
Speaker 1: for a great number of people and that and that
Speaker 1: they're going to say that and that we're going to
Speaker 1: believe it, rather than that we're going to say, oh, so,
Speaker 1: now you want to steal our retirement, like you see it,
Speaker 1: you see a profitable way to kind of siphon a
Speaker 1: little bit more blood out of out of this stone. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course they're not wrong that in general there's a
Speaker 1: retirement crisis, that people need more security. But their solutions
Speaker 1: that they that they talk about here are, you know,
Speaker 1: get banks to make more financial products, you know, for
Speaker 1: for working class people, which is going to translate into
Speaker 1: banks just hitting working class people with fees throughout their
Speaker 1: whole And this is why I was I think is
Speaker 1: increasingly used the word credibility earlier, like it's increasingly lost
Speaker 1: credibility because the same people who got us into the
Speaker 1: Great Recession are the same people who are trying to
Speaker 1: now get us out of this the growing pains of populism,
Speaker 1: or the cultural pains, the economic pains of populism. And
Speaker 1: you can see under the surface at things like Davos
Speaker 1: exactly where their motivations are for something like that. And
Speaker 1: in another let's let's actually roll this video because it
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting. If we roll a four it ties
Speaker 1: into all of this when it comes to social security.
Speaker 1: As congressman, I forget that some Republican, it's some Republicans public.
Speaker 1: Here's the video for what reason? The age of retirement.
Speaker 1: You know, that's interesting that you asked that question. People
Speaker 1: come up to me the act that's on the table.
Speaker 1: You're there, maybe I know, Okay, Literally nobody is saying
Speaker 1: that to him. That was Rick Allen. He's from Georgia.
Speaker 1: A chance he owns a car dealership. Yes, if you're
Speaker 1: listening and not watching, I think Rian just picked up
Speaker 1: on something esthetically that makes a lot of sense. Nobody
Speaker 1: is coming up to him and saying that. And you
Speaker 1: know what's interesting is that actually, at the same time
Speaker 1: Republicans are making this message nobody wants to work anymore.
Speaker 1: He's saying people want to work more. Now I agree
Speaker 1: that people want to work generally. I think the right
Speaker 1: overplays this idea that nobody wants to work. But you
Speaker 1: can't have both of those things at the same time,
Speaker 1: and I think I would be I would be shocked
Speaker 1: if more than just a couple of people who were
Speaker 1: in different sets of circumstances. Maybe they were tired, and
Speaker 1: then the market tanked because of the pandemic, which I
Speaker 1: know happened to a lot of people. But I would
Speaker 1: be surprised if any folks were genuinely coming to him
Speaker 1: and saying, let me work until I'm sixty eight. I
Speaker 1: just let me work until I'm seventy. Why not? I
Speaker 1: did Google? And then there is a Rick Allen who's
Speaker 1: the owner of a GDA vehicle Fleet sales in Atlanta, Georgia.
Speaker 1: If you're right about that, I think it's a different
Speaker 1: risk case. There are a bunch of members of Congress
Speaker 1: who have owned car dealerships and are still own car dealerships.
Speaker 1: But the right, of course, yes, like work often does
Speaker 1: provide meeting to people, and if people want to continue
Speaker 1: working longer into their life, of course, I don't think
Speaker 1: there's anybody who would really support a mandatory retirement, except
Speaker 1: for pilots or you know, other professions where you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe maybe it's time you do something else.
Speaker 1: You can keep working, just maybe don't fly, maybe don't
Speaker 1: fly the planes anymore. But I love how he goes
Speaker 1: from what you pointed out rightly is an obvious lie
Speaker 1: that people are coming up to him and saying, Congressman,
Speaker 1: I would just wish that I could work more. Is
Speaker 1: there's something that Washington can do about that forced me
Speaker 1: to force me to work longer into my life. I
Speaker 1: don't want to do it of my own volition. What
Speaker 1: I want is you to want to be incentivized. That
Speaker 1: he goes into and they says that you're going to
Speaker 1: use our head and we're going to incentivize people to
Speaker 1: work longer. And but what he means by incentivizing somebody
Speaker 1: to work longer is basically raising the retirement age of
Speaker 1: solid security and otherwise otherwise making people more economically insecure
Speaker 1: deeper into their life, because then they're incentivized to go
Speaker 1: out and get more money. And this is what the
Speaker 1: Davos blog posts that can picked up on is talking about.
Speaker 1: They're saying people are living longer, thus we need to
Speaker 1: create a pathway for people to work longer, as opposed
Speaker 1: to let me, let me just try something out on everyone.
Speaker 1: Maybe the benefit of living longer is having more time
Speaker 1: as you're older to make decisions about leisure, to actually
Speaker 1: like that's the point of the industrial system. You can
Speaker 1: debate all of these different things about industrialization, but one
Speaker 1: very clear point of the reform that have happened is
Speaker 1: that you earn a retirement. That is a huge part
Speaker 1: of our system that we have agreed as a society
Speaker 1: is a worthwhile ambition for people that they bust their
Speaker 1: butts for forty plus years, for decades, provide for themselves,
Speaker 1: provide for their families, provide for the communities, and then
Speaker 1: they retire as their body gets older, as their mind
Speaker 1: gets older, and they can enjoy life. So perhaps instead
Speaker 1: of saying the opposite, right, instead of saying, you know,
Speaker 1: we're going to make you work now that you're living longer,
Speaker 1: we have to find a way for you to work longer,
Speaker 1: maybe what we should think is, now that you're living longer,
Speaker 1: we have to find a way to make your decades
Speaker 1: of work sustain you into the future. And So to
Speaker 1: bring this back into the news cycle, you've got House Republicans,
Speaker 1: not just Rick Allen in the back bench there, well,
Speaker 1: you've got some leading House Republicans who've consistently flowed the
Speaker 1: idea that cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid ought to
Speaker 1: be part of some type of reckoning with the devasit
Speaker 1: and the dead around the debt ceiling that you had
Speaker 1: McCarthy say, I think during the election, like that's something
Speaker 1: we're going to look at. Yep, and been you had
Speaker 1: a lot of like Rachel Bouvart and other like what
Speaker 1: are you doing, Like we're done with this? Shut the
Speaker 1: hell up, stop, don't don't do this, don't talk about
Speaker 1: it like it's this is not a winner for you.
Speaker 1: People don't want people's And there's also so much more
Speaker 1: precarity than there was in people's lives even twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: It's getting to a place. And also people are older. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Republican basis older. The American public, it's older, like
Speaker 1: we're an aging society, and so they're going to go
Speaker 1: after people's retirement in this way, the way that Bush
Speaker 1: tried to do in two thousand and five after his
Speaker 1: election strikes me as a political blunder. But you know,
Speaker 1: the Trump's tax cut was a giant political blunder, but
Speaker 1: they did it anyway because it was what they wanted.
Speaker 1: So what's your sense on how serious they are about
Speaker 1: about really pushing forward on this in the context of
Speaker 1: a debt sealing crisis. I think this is really the
Speaker 1: thing to watch on the right right now because they're
Speaker 1: in this transition period and kind of developing a new prioritization,
Speaker 1: a new set of priorities. They sort of understand, at
Speaker 1: least people who are involved in the conversation about where
Speaker 1: the party should go, understand that Paul ryan Ism, like
Speaker 1: you were saying in the latter half of the Bush administration,
Speaker 1: was a political blunder. That the tax cut bill is
Speaker 1: a political blunder. That is basically a point of consensus
Speaker 1: in the conservative movement right now that the tax cut
Speaker 1: bill was completely misprioritized. That like, maybe that's fine, like
Speaker 1: it actually did. Millionaires are good with a corporate tax
Speaker 1: cit Like you can make an argument that it creates jobs,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. But we're in a state of
Speaker 1: cultural crisis, and if all you can talk about is
Speaker 1: cutting corporate taxes and just sort of doing Remember Paul
Speaker 1: Ryan said he was going to do this very populist thing,
Speaker 1: which would be to get the tax code downe to
Speaker 1: a postcard. You'd be able to file your taxes on
Speaker 1: a postcard. It didn't come anywhere close to that. Because
Speaker 1: as soon as you try to do that, lobbyists latch
Speaker 1: onto it. And if you're Paul Ryan, you don't know
Speaker 1: the power to resist that or the will to resist that.
Speaker 1: So what's happening is this question of priorities, and this
Speaker 1: narrative that is congealing on the right is that these
Speaker 1: spending cuts when you're talking about sequestration, when you're talking
Speaker 1: about negotiating tough with the debt ceiling, which is imminent,
Speaker 1: that's on the table, that's going to start happening, like
Speaker 1: now it is happening. What are you going to say
Speaker 1: that by an administrations thing? We're not negotiating period. Republicans
Speaker 1: are saying, well, how do we sell this because we
Speaker 1: are going to negotiate because there are serious arguments about
Speaker 1: spending there, like you said, aging population totally outpacing the
Speaker 1: growth of the economy in terms of social security, Medicaid, Medicare.
Speaker 1: And one of the questions is is this about tyranny?
Speaker 1: And that's the word that keeps coming statism, tyranny. That
Speaker 1: the gas stove argument, right, Jim Jordan tweeted last week
Speaker 1: God gun, guns and gas stoves, And that's the argument
Speaker 1: that they're starting to land on that a bigger government
Speaker 1: means more control in your life. Basically, that is not medicaid,
Speaker 1: that is not Medicare, that is not social security. So
Speaker 1: if your priority is cutting down big government tyranny or
Speaker 1: is it the debt? Right, which one is it? Because
Speaker 1: if it's big government tyranny, you're not going to want
Speaker 1: to start with that. There's also just such an extraordinary
Speaker 1: amount of blasphemy though, and that whole gat God, guns
Speaker 1: and gass, I mean God and then guns, like, okay,
Speaker 1: we love, we're all we're all one, we're all one
Speaker 1: people and guns. Then you're gonna slap slap that next
Speaker 1: to it. Okay, but that's fine, you've been doing that
Speaker 1: for long. And then gas dows. Doesn't that so radically
Speaker 1: diminish the like you're talking about the the infinite, the
Speaker 1: greatest like force on the planet God putting those on
Speaker 1: the same plane, the Trinity, the Holy Trinity. Yeah, like,
Speaker 1: come on, well, but that's what they're trying to do.
Speaker 1: This argument is that it's all part of the same thing.
Speaker 1: It's all part of the and Jim Jordan didn't say this,
Speaker 1: but it's all part of the Davos agenda. Jim Jordan
Speaker 1: on an acid trip. Think about it, all right. So,
Speaker 1: and by the way, we have an update. Rick Allen
Speaker 1: would have been my second guest. He owned a construction company.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's close. I was close. We got one
Speaker 1: more thing to show you, guys. Yes, this is a
Speaker 1: good one. And here's here's Davos in a nutshell, Kirsten
Speaker 1: Cinema and Joe Manchin surrounded by billionaires. Let's roll that
Speaker 1: difference for the American people in the last two years.
Speaker 1: We still don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster.
Speaker 1: That's correct, Thank you. They high fived if you if
Speaker 1: you're listening, what you what you missed is play that
Speaker 1: one back. Yeah, mansion jumping in and saying we still
Speaker 1: don't agree on getting rid of the filibuster. And then
Speaker 1: they just come together for a beautiful moment. Yeah, nice little,
Speaker 1: nice little high five. They're former Democrat Kirsten Cinema. Yes,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that. It's just the news cycle move
Speaker 1: so quickly. All right, let's move on to the news
Speaker 1: about Solomon Paya. This is a developing story that really
Speaker 1: caught a bunch of traction yesterday. So he was arrested
Speaker 1: by it b one here, yeah, b one. He's arrested
Speaker 1: by Albuquerque police on Monday. They call him the quote
Speaker 1: mastermind between behind a recent string of shootings that were
Speaker 1: targeting Democratic lawmakers' homes. I'm reading from the Albuquerque Journal
Speaker 1: right now. The suspect is a Republican who unsuccessfully ran
Speaker 1: for office. He ran for a state representative slot back
Speaker 1: in November and claimed that his election was rigged. He
Speaker 1: seems to have a peer. He seems to have been
Speaker 1: at January sixth. He's accused of paying four men to
Speaker 1: shoot at the homes of two county commissioners and two
Speaker 1: state legislatures. We actually have video of his arrest. We
Speaker 1: can roll that on the screen. You see right there,
Speaker 1: he's being arrested by a police in Albuquerque. Ryan, what
Speaker 1: do you make of the situation? So, I mean, first
Speaker 1: of all, people should understand that. So he got something
Speaker 1: like twenty five percent of the vote, and there are
Speaker 1: you know, maybe thousands, if certainly more than a thousand
Speaker 1: of these types of races around the country where you'll
Speaker 1: have a fringe basically a fringe candidate. The party doesn't
Speaker 1: want to put anybody out because they know they're going
Speaker 1: to get absolutely hammered. No people run. People who do
Speaker 1: run those campaigns kind of run them for practice to
Speaker 1: say like, all right, let me see what it's like
Speaker 1: to kind of hire a campaign manager to do call time,
Speaker 1: to go to town halls and eat the rubber chicken.
Speaker 1: Let me see if I let me see if I
Speaker 1: enjoy this knowing that I'm going to lose by fifty points.
Speaker 1: And then you're going to have some complete lunatics who
Speaker 1: are going to run for these positions. And so it
Speaker 1: appears that he was one of these. The police say that,
Speaker 1: or the New Mexico news media say that he may
Speaker 1: have even accompanied these hit men that he allegedly hired
Speaker 1: on some of these In one of the in one
Speaker 1: of the shootings, what ten or twelve year old girl
Speaker 1: sleeping in the sleeping in the home and three bullets
Speaker 1: went through the bedroom, which is just utterly horrifying. Nobody
Speaker 1: who is running for office signs up for that. Nobody,
Speaker 1: nobody deserves that. And so I do think we have
Speaker 1: to ask the question, like, what what is it that's
Speaker 1: that's driving this, this sense that the stakes are so
Speaker 1: high that it requires firing bullets off into people's houses.
Speaker 1: And there's got to be some mental illness I was
Speaker 1: going on here, but but as but that, We've always
Speaker 1: had mental illness, right, although we have higher rates, higher
Speaker 1: rates of it probably, but we've always had significant rates,
Speaker 1: you know, non trivial rates of mental illness iness country.
Speaker 1: So what what is it that's that's producing this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's one of the interesting questions that I was actually
Speaker 1: going to ask, is you know, whenever there's, like you said,
Speaker 1: a lunatic, you know, the shooting from the Bernie Sanders
Speaker 1: supporter of the congressional baseball practice, or the pipe bombs
Speaker 1: that were mailed to CNN or what I think there
Speaker 1: were pipe bonds that were mailed to the CNN, whenever
Speaker 1: there's a lunatic who appears to just sort of be
Speaker 1: somewhere on the map, maybe leaning left me, maybe leaning right,
Speaker 1: it gets really wrapped into this narrative about one side's
Speaker 1: deep seated problems. And this story absolutely had I mean,
Speaker 1: this was blanketing MSNBC yesterday, which I keep on in
Speaker 1: the background of course to see my girl Andrew Mitchell
Speaker 1: what she's up to, got to keep up with Stephanie Ruhle.
Speaker 1: But it's being used in that respect basically like this
Speaker 1: is indicative of a broader trend on the right, and
Speaker 1: whenever it's a lunatic, I just hesitate to do that.
Speaker 1: I think it's entirely fair to say January is indicative
Speaker 1: of something deep seated and something broader. I would say
Speaker 1: the same thing about riots in twenty twenty, and I
Speaker 1: think people on both sides would probably have no problem
Speaker 1: actually saying that in an honest conversation. But this guy,
Speaker 1: he's also a felon. And you have this red flag
Speaker 1: question that was raised actually by the House Republican leader
Speaker 1: who says, this is yet another example of a convicted
Speaker 1: fella unlawfully gaining access to firearms which they are barred
Speaker 1: from owning or possessing, and using the weapon in a
Speaker 1: manner that causes public harm. And we land again on
Speaker 1: this question of like, can we function as a society anymore?
Speaker 1: Can we do the basic things not just as a government,
Speaker 1: but as a society that are needed to have any
Speaker 1: sense of coherence, And it seems the answer to that
Speaker 1: is increasingly no. I think that point about the guns
Speaker 1: is a good one and goes to the question of
Speaker 1: why is this happening more? Because if you have if
Speaker 1: you have more anger, and you have either a stable
Speaker 1: or a slightly rising level of mental illness, but you
Speaker 1: have three times more guns than you had in the past,
Speaker 1: then you're going to be more likely to see gun violence,
Speaker 1: you know, flowing out of that and there it's kind
Speaker 1: of a fantasy to think that you could have three
Speaker 1: four hundred five hundred million guns in a country with
Speaker 1: three hundred and thirty million people and that you would
Speaker 1: then be able to precisely keep those weapons out of
Speaker 1: the hands of every single felon or every other person
Speaker 1: that hasn't Like, if you're going to have a culture
Speaker 1: that has that many guns, this is going to be
Speaker 1: a result of that. But you're right that in the
Speaker 1: wake of one of these shootings, you see everybody scouring
Speaker 1: kind of the social media feed of the person who
Speaker 1: did this, this one. They didn't have to go far
Speaker 1: because they're trying to divine where the political leanings are, Like, oh,
Speaker 1: ran for office as a Republican. He was out of
Speaker 1: January sixth, and it was gonna go ahead and put
Speaker 1: that one in the R column over here. But you're
Speaker 1: right that it is a it is a contest, and
Speaker 1: you'll see people saying like, oh God, I hope this
Speaker 1: wasn't one of our guys other whether that's left or right.
Speaker 1: You know, as as they're kind of waiting with bated
Speaker 1: breath to find information on the shooter set, then everybody
Speaker 1: can go into their battle stations and make their political points. Well.
Speaker 1: And you just also, I think, really, something that's you
Speaker 1: said earlier actually that he was what's the word you used? Oh?
Speaker 1: That this is? What is it? That? Is there something
Speaker 1: that's sort of seeding this more and more? And I
Speaker 1: do think there's plenty of reason to point to Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: specifically the lies that he told his own supporters between
Speaker 1: the election, the exaggerations and lies and like theories that
Speaker 1: he I think irresponsibly recklessly floated between the election and
Speaker 1: January sixth, and continues to float that I think is
Speaker 1: extremely serious. I mean, I'm on the right. I'm happy
Speaker 1: to admit that it's not even an emission. It's just
Speaker 1: like obvious reality. And when you have someone that powerful,
Speaker 1: that powerful using his power, I think recklessly, Yes, you're
Speaker 1: going to get more of this because none of us
Speaker 1: know who to trust anymore. And the people who come
Speaker 1: out and say you can't trust anyone are the ones
Speaker 1: that are going to get trust, and then if you
Speaker 1: abuse that trust, I think that is a really dangerous
Speaker 1: and immoral thing to do, and I certainly think we
Speaker 1: saw that. I think there are examples of that, you know,
Speaker 1: from folks on the left too, where there's just these
Speaker 1: nonsense narratives that aren't actually rooted in reality. But this
Speaker 1: is a really big one, and it is actually I
Speaker 1: think causing some serious cultural tension in ways like this, right,
Speaker 1: because if you believe that elections are legitimately being stolen
Speaker 1: by shadowy forces, then you can imagine why you would
Speaker 1: feel morally compelled to do something about that. That was
Speaker 1: one hundred percent the case on January sixth. You talk
Speaker 1: to folks who were there, it was this idea that
Speaker 1: like they really truly believed that Congress was stealing the
Speaker 1: election out from under their noses in that building, which,
Speaker 1: for the YouTube sensor, by the way, they were not. No,
Speaker 1: they were not election. Joe Biden lawfully won the election, Yes,
Speaker 1: thank you. And so a lot of that, you know,
Speaker 1: is completely downstream of somebody who's in a position of
Speaker 1: power and whose supporters say, well, he knows more than
Speaker 1: I do. He's the president, he has access to classified information,
Speaker 1: he has accessed to all these different things. So he's
Speaker 1: saying it, there's probably more legitimacy than even I know
Speaker 1: or the media knows. So it's just an abuse of
Speaker 1: that power. Speaking of YouTube. So Joe Rogan throughout an
Speaker 1: interesting theory we're going to bat around today. Let's let's
Speaker 1: take Let's listen to Joe Rogan on his take on
Speaker 1: this drip drip coming from the Joe Biden team around
Speaker 1: the classified documents that keep turning up in his garage,
Speaker 1: his closets, boxes elsewhere. I don't know. I don't even
Speaker 1: know jack about politics, but if I had to guess
Speaker 1: they're trying to get rid of him, that would my
Speaker 1: guess would be there trying to get rid of him,
Speaker 1: if all of a sudden his own aids are sending
Speaker 1: these instead of like taking these classified documents which you
Speaker 1: have located and go well, let's not do that again,
Speaker 1: and fucking locking them up somewhere his own aids self reporting. Dude,
Speaker 1: come that sounds suss well, no one self reported that
Speaker 1: fucking laptop. I know that was that was Russian disinformation
Speaker 1: that reeks eva. They got a hold of the social
Speaker 1: media companies and lied to them they did whatever the
Speaker 1: fuck they could to keep that from happening. And even this,
Speaker 1: they discovered this before the midterms. Yeah, so they didn't
Speaker 1: release the information until after the midterms. He picks up
Speaker 1: on something there. I think is important that the media
Speaker 1: is not picking up on, which is these these documents
Speaker 1: were discovered the first batch that we heard about at
Speaker 1: Biden's think tank on November second. When was the election,
Speaker 1: like that eighth or something something. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: few days later, so November second. We don't find out
Speaker 1: about any of this until January, and they turned them
Speaker 1: into the archives in a way, right, that's what they say.
Speaker 1: And then the Archives alerted the Department of Justice. Right
Speaker 1: in the Department of Justice eventually decides to appoint a
Speaker 1: special council. Yes, but not immediately. They didn't have the
Speaker 1: FBI director go out and hold a press conference like
Speaker 1: with Hiller Clinton. Yes, And so I think a big
Speaker 1: part of the story we don't know yet is how
Speaker 1: this became public, why it became public, how it did,
Speaker 1: and when it did. And then Walter Shaub is a
Speaker 1: sort of ethics analyst, ethics expert, told The Hill something interesting.
Speaker 1: He's saying, you know, one of the biggest problems for
Speaker 1: the White House here is that when they were asked
Speaker 1: about whether there were more documents, they said they just
Speaker 1: had the pen documents, and it turned out, of course,
Speaker 1: it seems they knew earlier than when they told the
Speaker 1: public that there were more documents, and that is the
Speaker 1: big remaining open question. So does any of this point
Speaker 1: in the direction of what Rogan is talking about that perhaps,
Speaker 1: you know, the Demmo private Party realizes that Joe Biden
Speaker 1: is potentially senile, he's sort of passed his prime, He's
Speaker 1: not their best, their freshest, youngest, most politically expedient face
Speaker 1: right now going into a presidential cycle, and they sort
Speaker 1: of see an easy way out given what happened at
Speaker 1: mar Lago, and I do. So let's take two of
Speaker 1: the other points that were made there, one of them
Speaker 1: being if this happened to a Trump kid, would the
Speaker 1: media go absolutely berserk on it? And I would say
Speaker 1: that it did happen to a Trump kid kid in law,
Speaker 1: and it didn't. They didn't go berzark on it. So
Speaker 1: I just pulled up so I could find the date,
Speaker 1: March twenty eighteen. I and my other colleagues over at
Speaker 1: the intercept reported there's our headline. Saudi Crown Prince boasted
Speaker 1: that Jared Kushner was quote in his pocket. MBS told
Speaker 1: Confidence that Kushner discussed the names of royal family members
Speaker 1: opposed to his power grab right before he then locked
Speaker 1: up a bunch of those same family members in the
Speaker 1: Ritz Carlton torture. They were a bunch were tortured. One
Speaker 1: died from torture. The Daily Mail subsequently also reported that
Speaker 1: Kushner had gleaned classified information on enemies or adversaries or
Speaker 1: skeptics of MBS within Saudi Arabia and given that intelligence
Speaker 1: to MBS, who then acted on it by rounding them up.
Speaker 1: So we don't have to ask the question of what
Speaker 1: would happen if one of Trump's kids had some classified
Speaker 1: document scandal and what the media would do. Media did
Speaker 1: almost nothing with that, And it gives you a sense
Speaker 1: of how little and how inbed the media is with
Speaker 1: the Gulf monarchies. That they hated, that they hated Trump
Speaker 1: so much and loved any story that they could find
Speaker 1: that was going to nail Trump. And then they have
Speaker 1: one where this guy's dead to rights, like taking US intel,
Speaker 1: handing it to NBS who then uses it and so
Speaker 1: at least one person winds up dead. Although MB is
Speaker 1: really the media really turned on MBS post Kashogi post kogi.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, But March twenty eighteen, they had, they had
Speaker 1: every opportunity to unleash on Kushner when we're doing this,
Speaker 1: and they covered it a little bit, and they like
Speaker 1: they would do a couple They did a couple of
Speaker 1: segments on our reporting, but it certainly did not become
Speaker 1: the kind of cycle that they could have that they
Speaker 1: could have made it into. Well, and that's a frustrating
Speaker 1: part of this story. Whenever there's an opportunity for the
Speaker 1: corporate press to like latch theatrically onto a narrative to
Speaker 1: make them look like they're really tough, like they they
Speaker 1: are not lap dogs, they're watchdogs. They just take it
Speaker 1: with a plum and then it's trotted out by them
Speaker 1: as evidence they're really tough. They did this with some
Speaker 1: of the Hillary Clinton stories and they're like, yeah, listen,
Speaker 1: we do this to everyone. It's like, that's utter nonsense,
Speaker 1: and you wrote it. And think about the stories that
Speaker 1: the corporate press latches onto and really really drive home.
Speaker 1: They are ones that are theatrical, but pure theater because
Speaker 1: they don't challenge any of the current power arrangements. They
Speaker 1: only kind of raify them in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: So when it came to twenty sixteen, going after Hillary
Speaker 1: Clinton's email scandal, they were fine, They're fine doing that.
Speaker 1: They lit her up for a year over whether she
Speaker 1: like you know, about her handling of classified information on
Speaker 1: this server. But who did that challenge? It challenged Hillary Clinton,
Speaker 1: but it didn't challenge any of the structural relationships that
Speaker 1: the United States has embedded with around the world. Russia Gate,
Speaker 1: what does that? Do you know? That just portrays Russia
Speaker 1: as malign and nasty and adversarial to the United States.
Speaker 1: Like that's already the status quo. Everybody already believed that
Speaker 1: that was the case. But if you have a story
Speaker 1: that is going to require you to go up against
Speaker 1: Saudi Arabia, that is challenging the status quo power arrangement.
Speaker 1: And to Rogan's point, it's a very precarious position for
Speaker 1: a party to be in when their president loses the
Speaker 1: internal party consensus. And Trump is obviously an exception, I
Speaker 1: think to a lot of this, But you really start
Speaker 1: to see things disintegrate when you whenever you have that, internally,
Speaker 1: the party is like, ah, what do we do with
Speaker 1: this guy? Which is interesting in Biden's case because if
Speaker 1: you are, you know, holding Biden to his own standards,
Speaker 1: He's passed a ton of legislation, some of his target legislation.
Speaker 1: He's he's made good on several big promises, and people
Speaker 1: feel like he's been productive, but also that he's sort
Speaker 1: of not very popular with the American people and is
Speaker 1: obviously struggling on a sort of mental level. So if
Speaker 1: you start to lose the support, you potentially can get
Speaker 1: things like I don't think anything was planted or planned here,
Speaker 1: but I do think you get people who are excited
Speaker 1: at the prospect of saying, well, maybe he just this
Speaker 1: gives him an exit to sort of gracefully bow out,
Speaker 1: and things can leaks start happening, things start snowballing, And
Speaker 1: I don't think that's a bad point. And Row, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think taken literally, you could kind of reject Rogan's hypothesis,
Speaker 1: but I don't think you should wave it away that easily,
Speaker 1: because if you don't take it quite as literally as
Speaker 1: he means it, but in the way that you mean
Speaker 1: that Biden's weakening power sets up what people would kind
Speaker 1: of badantically call like a permission structure for those underneath
Speaker 1: him to say, like, you know what, you know, if
Speaker 1: there's a choice of how to handle a particular situation,
Speaker 1: if somebody has an intense amount of power at the
Speaker 1: top and is cruising to re election, that changes your
Speaker 1: decision about you know what you're what you're what you're
Speaker 1: able to do, what you're willing to do in a
Speaker 1: particular moment. If you if you sense that somebody is weaker,
Speaker 1: almost a lame duck, and you're like, well, you know what,
Speaker 1: there's another document alert, you call the cops, Call the
Speaker 1: Washington Post, call the cops. Yeah, learning And Karine Jean
Speaker 1: Pierre keeps getting asked about this. If we could, let's
Speaker 1: roll this latest with this latest clip from her last week.
Speaker 1: We told everyone who the film that we all can
Speaker 1: assume mar people could assume that the searches were complete
Speaker 1: and all the documents that don't recovered. On Saturday, the
Speaker 1: White House Counsel's Office said that five digital clasified documents
Speaker 1: could be found. Is it safe to assume now that
Speaker 1: all the documents are have been recovered? All the official records.
Speaker 1: All the passite documents are the document the Council of
Speaker 1: the Antal Archives or more searches on your way to
Speaker 1: find out of your staming out there. So I understand
Speaker 1: your question. We have addressed multiple questions from here. Multiple
Speaker 1: questions have been answered by the President. I know that
Speaker 1: you all just spent about some of you, some of
Speaker 1: your colleagues, maybe you yourself. Seek was on the phone
Speaker 1: with my colleague for about forty five minutes. That addressed
Speaker 1: a lot of your questions. I'm just going to continue
Speaker 1: to be prudent here. I'm going to let this ongoing
Speaker 1: review that is happening, this legal process that is happening,
Speaker 1: and let that process continue under the Special Council. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to comment from here. Yeah, I don't envy
Speaker 1: the position she's in last week, this week, and the
Speaker 1: week's ahead. Yeah, it's like because the second that she
Speaker 1: says nope, we found every single one, be like up
Speaker 1: underneath the kid's bed, he found another box of memos.
Speaker 1: And then you get into the veep scenario where it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what did kjpo and when did she know it? Versus
Speaker 1: was she just intentionally kind of kept out of the
Speaker 1: loop or unintentionally kept out of the loop. And you know,
Speaker 1: again do not envy her position. Some of the Biden
Speaker 1: classified documents were about Ukraine, which brings us to our
Speaker 1: next next piece of news. Let's roll the clip here
Speaker 1: of the Polish Prime Minister warning of World War three.
Speaker 1: Ukraine's defeat may become a prelude to World War three. Therefore,
Speaker 1: today there's no reason to block support for Kiev to procrastinate. Thus,
Speaker 1: I called for decisive actions by German government on all
Speaker 1: sorts of weapons to be delivered to Ukraine. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this is they're calling for an increase in tanks. By
Speaker 1: the way, that has induced somewhat of a debate from
Speaker 1: Germany because Germany has to give permission the way this
Speaker 1: works for their tanks to be sent to Ukraine. If
Speaker 1: it's a German tank, then they have to give permission.
Speaker 1: It's so angs it's leaning in the direction that they're
Speaker 1: going to do it. So here's Ben Wallace, the British
Speaker 1: Defense Secretary, who says there's a debate in Germany at
Speaker 1: the moment about whether tank is an offensive weapon or
Speaker 1: defensive weapon. Well, it depends on what you're using it for.
Speaker 1: If you're using it to defend your country. I would
Speaker 1: wager that is a defensive weapon system. This is all
Speaker 1: coming on the heels. Is that just absolutely awful strike
Speaker 1: on the apartment building. We have some footage of that
Speaker 1: we can roll right now from Reuters. Look at that.
Speaker 1: How do you pronounce the name of the city, by
Speaker 1: the way, I don't. It's Apro, Yeah, denipro, yeah, den pro.
Speaker 1: So it's just incredible scene right there. There's actually video
Speaker 1: see that yellow kitchen that it just zoomed in on.
Speaker 1: Some news outlets got video from that kitchen before the
Speaker 1: strike of a girl's birthday party right blown out of
Speaker 1: candles and you can see that it's the same yellow Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a It's a pretty striking juxtaposition of how life
Speaker 1: can be so normal at one moment and then devastated
Speaker 1: in the next with these technologies that exist right now
Speaker 1: from distances, people can be struck. And you also had
Speaker 1: at the World Economic Forum you had Joe Manchin saying
Speaker 1: that the United States commitment to this war was indefinite.
Speaker 1: You had the Finnish Prime Minister saying that the only way,
Speaker 1: you know that the only way that this war could
Speaker 1: end is Russia loses it that your you have basically
Speaker 1: a global elite consensus on the in the West that
Speaker 1: negotiations around a ceasefire and talks to end this war
Speaker 1: are just not worth considering. It's just it's just not
Speaker 1: It's not not something that is going to be on
Speaker 1: a panel at Davos and kicked around as an idea
Speaker 1: that anybody should take seriously. It's quite striking, like the
Speaker 1: only you know, the only possible strategy, it seems like
Speaker 1: for the West here is relentless support of Ukraine until
Speaker 1: Russia is defeated. Right, that's without kind of anybody presenting
Speaker 1: a picture of what that looks like, like how does
Speaker 1: that actually happen? And you'll have people like the finished
Speaker 1: Prime Minister say, well, Russia could just leave. That is true. Ye,
Speaker 1: Russia could indeed leave, And I think that they should leave.
Speaker 1: I don't think they should have invaded in the first place.
Speaker 1: But we're also on planet Earth. They're not going to
Speaker 1: just pack up and leave. There is no realistic indication
Speaker 1: of that, and they continue to act. Their strategy is
Speaker 1: built around exactly that notion that someday the Russians can
Speaker 1: be induced to just pack up and leave, and you know,
Speaker 1: short of nuclear war, it's incredibly difficult in the real
Speaker 1: world to envision a scenario. And that doesn't mean appeasement.
Speaker 1: It really doesn't need to. It doesn't necessarily mean appeasement.
Speaker 1: But the solution cannot be a long drawn out quagmire
Speaker 1: that's much better for defense contractors than it is for
Speaker 1: people living in the region, right, I mean, it's insane.
Speaker 1: Strategy is insane because what they're really calling for is
Speaker 1: basically an endless kind of low grade war, right, and
Speaker 1: because they're fine with it now, because they make a
Speaker 1: bunch of money off of it, and it allows them
Speaker 1: to be the sort of theatrical warmongering on the sort
Speaker 1: of campaign stage. It allows them to funnel money to
Speaker 1: people who funnel money back to them, and it seems
Speaker 1: like an all around win win. And you know, obviously,
Speaker 1: obviously nobody would disagree that there's strategic importance of Ukraine
Speaker 1: to the West, that this is an incredible im moral
Speaker 1: devastation of innocent people and of civilians, and that what
Speaker 1: Vladimir Putin is doing is an atrocity and is incredibly wrong.
Speaker 1: But again, if you live in the real world, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean you just hope and pay defense contractors enough
Speaker 1: money that Vladimir Putin says, I'm out right, and it
Speaker 1: seems like both sides are kind of comfortable with this
Speaker 1: low grade war that's going to leave you know, thousands
Speaker 1: dead every single year and make reconstruction externally difficult because
Speaker 1: you'll continue to have attacks like the one you just
Speaker 1: saw in de Nepro. And Putin is just fine with
Speaker 1: it too, I think, because the big the big risk
Speaker 1: for Putin at this point because his main goal basically
Speaker 1: of installing a puppet regime in Kiev has failed, and
Speaker 1: so he doesn't want to come out a loser. He
Speaker 1: wants to be able to declare victory somehow, and so
Speaker 1: if the war never ends, then he then he never loses.
Speaker 1: So for that reason, he'd be okay, you know, with
Speaker 1: basically keeping this war that was going on at Dombas
Speaker 1: starting in twenty fourteen, going basically the rest of our
Speaker 1: lives and then some. But that's another really good point,
Speaker 1: which is if you want regime change in Russia, you
Speaker 1: can surely change the regime. Fine, Let's say you wave
Speaker 1: your magic wand and you do something extra judicial and
Speaker 1: you just change the regime whateverything's fine, or that's the
Speaker 1: outcome of a really a massive war that's waged. That
Speaker 1: doesn't erase sentiments in Russia, and it doesn't erase sentiments
Speaker 1: in the Dambas in Ukraine that are going to continue
Speaker 1: to be seeds of tension and turmoil over these sort
Speaker 1: of complications of this region and the battles. You know,
Speaker 1: like we can all agree about where we think the
Speaker 1: boundaries of Ukraine should be, we can all agree what
Speaker 1: is an illegal incursion. That doesn't change the reality that
Speaker 1: people there don't always agree that people in Russia don't
Speaker 1: agree with that, and they don't agree to the point
Speaker 1: that they're willing to to wage war over the territory
Speaker 1: to make that point. So, I mean, none of that
Speaker 1: goes away with the strategy. The strategy doesn't deal with
Speaker 1: any of that. And there's an argument, of course, that
Speaker 1: it's the thing that sort of creates that just totally
Speaker 1: destroys the incentive that Putin or anyone else would have
Speaker 1: to make illegal invasions and incursions like this. But I
Speaker 1: just don't see any evidence for that, because Putin is,
Speaker 1: he's taking losses and he's continuing to do it. If
Speaker 1: we could put up this next element too. Then this
Speaker 1: is among the fallout from this top top Zelenski advisor
Speaker 1: resigned in the wake of comments that he basically what
Speaker 1: he said he went on live television. He said that
Speaker 1: it looked like and missile had been intercepted. Russian missile
Speaker 1: had been intercepted, knocked off course and landed in this building,
Speaker 1: which is the death toll is up to forty four
Speaker 1: at this point, including five children, whereas other officials have
Speaker 1: pushed back and said no, the evidence is that it
Speaker 1: was a direct hit from a Russian battleship, that the
Speaker 1: damage the building shows that it was a direct hit
Speaker 1: rather than something knocked off course, and so the advisors
Speaker 1: stepped down as a result of this. Though I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's been conclusively shown what precisely happened. It's
Speaker 1: very very difficult to say. Yeah, well, we'll continue to
Speaker 1: follow that story. And speaking of Foreign affairs, let's move
Speaker 1: on to news about the Foreign Afair Committee's commitee. A
Speaker 1: final committeessignments were released yesterday by the new House Republican
Speaker 1: majority Slim majority, and there's some news on that front.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the Foreign Affairs Committee, let's put
Speaker 1: up the tear sheet there. You can see Marjorie Taylor
Speaker 1: Green received a slot on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Gosar
Speaker 1: got his committee back, and Foreign Affairs Committee, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: he's put on Homeland Security. If the debate is over,
Speaker 1: Ilhan Omar in Foreign Afairs, Marjorie Taylor Green is on
Speaker 1: Home the Homeland Security Committee, which is going to investigate
Speaker 1: and potentially impeach Alejandro Majorcas basically right away. Ghostar had
Speaker 1: also lost his committee assignments in the last Congress and
Speaker 1: has them back. Now. This is also on the heels
Speaker 1: of news that Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert we're
Speaker 1: fighting in the bathroom during Kevin McCarthy's speakership battle. Let's
Speaker 1: put that up on the screen. You can see. This
Speaker 1: is a story. I believe that this is a story
Speaker 1: from the Daily Beast. Yeah, the Daily Base had this
Speaker 1: very gossipy piece of information that says, according to another
Speaker 1: source familiar, well in the bathroom, Green asked Bobert, you
Speaker 1: were okay taking millions of dollars from McCarthy, but you
Speaker 1: refuse to vote for him for speaker. Lauren, the first
Speaker 1: source said, was in a stall and then upon coming out,
Speaker 1: confronted Bobert about taking that money, and the Colorado Republican
Speaker 1: that's Bobert was allegedly unaware that Green was also in
Speaker 1: the bathroom at the time, and that's when Bobert says, quote,
Speaker 1: don't be ugly, and according to another person, out like
Speaker 1: a little school girl. Debbie Dingle from Michigan was apparently
Speaker 1: a witness to this event and has said she stayed
Speaker 1: silent the same as Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert,
Speaker 1: except for adding that what happens in the ladies room
Speaker 1: stays in the lady's room. I guess that's a good rule,
Speaker 1: just sort of in general. But Ryan, the Marjorie Taylor
Speaker 1: Green Lauren Bobert drama played out during the speakership battle.
Speaker 1: Margor Taylor Green supported Kevin McCarthy ends up on a
Speaker 1: sort of plumb committee assignment. I'm sure that's very much
Speaker 1: what she wanted. She got a slot that she wanted
Speaker 1: Homeland Security because it's going to be a part of
Speaker 1: this high profile investigation into the that they intend to
Speaker 1: land on the peachment of all Hunter and Maorcis. They
Speaker 1: have not been quiet about that. Kevin McCarthy shifted from
Speaker 1: what he told me in an interview in September, which
Speaker 1: is that we don't start with impeachment. You know, Democrats
Speaker 1: made everything political. We're not going to do that, to
Speaker 1: a couple months later saying, yeah, maybe peach Mayorka. So
Speaker 1: this is going to be a really high profile Median
Speaker 1: narratives can be a really high profile set of hearings.
Speaker 1: And Marjorie Tiller Green got it, and it looks like
Speaker 1: her support for McCarthy, as was expected, paid off. But Bobert,
Speaker 1: too right, how do you mean she's getting on the
Speaker 1: she's getting on the Oversight Committee. And a couple of
Speaker 1: other couple of other of the McCarthy critics and who
Speaker 1: held his speakership up also were rewarded with seats on
Speaker 1: the Oversight House Oversight Committee. And it began, if you remember,
Speaker 1: with McCarthy telling them in a private meeting, if you
Speaker 1: come at me, I'm going to kick you off of
Speaker 1: your committees. And one of the pieces that they negotiated
Speaker 1: towards the end of it was you won't retaliate against us, right,
Speaker 1: not for this, And in fact looks like they're going
Speaker 1: to wind up with, you know, with some of the
Speaker 1: Plumb Committee asignments that they that they wanted. So McCarthy
Speaker 1: tells this story a lot that he when speaking of
Speaker 1: the Oversight Committee when when Jim Jordan Ranford speaker and
Speaker 1: Kevin McCarthy drops out, Paul Ryan ends up speaker, Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy goes to the matt for Jim Jordan going on
Speaker 1: oversight eventually, and McCarthy loves the story because for him,
Speaker 1: it shows the sort of wisdom behind his strategy, which
Speaker 1: is you give everyone a seat at the table. And
Speaker 1: he thinks of it in terms of, at least he
Speaker 1: said in an interview with me Moneyball, which is kind
Speaker 1: of interesting, but he thinks of it in terms of
Speaker 1: that you got all these great players, how do you
Speaker 1: make them work together? This I mean, he told me.
Speaker 1: And he wants to give people a seat at the table,
Speaker 1: make them feel heard. He meets with the Freedom Coccus people,
Speaker 1: he meets with the establishment you people, and makes them
Speaker 1: feel heard. And so it's fascinating. Your point about Bobert
Speaker 1: getting sort of rewarded too despite not being an ally
Speaker 1: of his, is that clearly what he's trying to do
Speaker 1: is make those build bridges right, build bridges so that
Speaker 1: when he needs the leverage to say we are not
Speaker 1: doing this debt ceiling thing over X, Y and Z,
Speaker 1: they have a relationship, an existing relationship, and the ability
Speaker 1: to have those conversations and to do those negotiations. Now,
Speaker 1: I don't know that that's going to work out for him.
Speaker 1: Maybe it makes sense and the sort of cost benefit
Speaker 1: sense to try, but I think that's probably what his
Speaker 1: idea is, like, these people do not want to get
Speaker 1: on board with me, so I'm going to, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of kill him with kindness in that sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's it. Yeah, Right, And he got the thing that
Speaker 1: he wanted, which is to be speaker, right, and he's
Speaker 1: going to get this thing that he also probably wants
Speaker 1: a little bit of a showdown, the debt ceiling, which
Speaker 1: we could talk about next. We got Alexander Hamilton. Let's
Speaker 1: talk about Alexander Hamilton. Help explain this. Why wouldn't we
Speaker 1: It's a Wednesday in January. Why not talk about Alexander Hamilton? Ryan,
Speaker 1: this is your point for today, although we're sort of
Speaker 1: gonna yes, this is this is my point for today.
Speaker 1: And so let's throw old Alexander Hamilton up there. And
Speaker 1: because everybody knows they ought to read the Federalist papers,
Speaker 1: right like, we all know that. Yeah, but it's not
Speaker 1: we'll get to it eventually. But today we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: gonna help people ACTU. We're gonna read a little bit
Speaker 1: of Federalist papers, number thirty. So Alexander Hamilton, who wrote
Speaker 1: almost all of the Federalist papers, it was supposed to
Speaker 1: be a joint project. The other guys just didn't do
Speaker 1: their assignments, didn't didn't turn their work in. He also
Speaker 1: was the first Treasury Secretary, and so you know his
Speaker 1: views on the debt ceiling are important, not you know,
Speaker 1: as both the treasure first Treasury Secretary and also as
Speaker 1: one of the framers of the Contentstitution. And so we
Speaker 1: put up number, you put up Federalist number thirty. Unred.
Speaker 1: Just read a couple of excerpts from this and get
Speaker 1: your take to see if there is any ambiguity here
Speaker 1: about whether or not the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. That's
Speaker 1: my take that there is There really can be no
Speaker 1: such thing as a debt ceiling given our constitution, in
Speaker 1: our framework. And so Hamilton writes, the federal government quote
Speaker 1: must embrace a provision for the support of the national
Speaker 1: civil list, for the payment of the national debts contracted
Speaker 1: or that may be contracted, and in general, for all
Speaker 1: those matters which we'll call for disbursements out of the
Speaker 1: national treasury money is, he says, with propriety considered as
Speaker 1: the vital principle of the body politic, as that which
Speaker 1: sustains its life and motion and enables it to perform
Speaker 1: its most essential functions. A complete power, therefore, to procure
Speaker 1: a regular and adequate supply of it, as far as
Speaker 1: the resources of the community will permit, may be regarded
Speaker 1: as an indispensable ingredient in every constitution. From a deficiency
Speaker 1: in this particular, one of two evils must ensue. Either
Speaker 1: the people must be subjected to continual plunder as a
Speaker 1: substitute for a more eligible mode of supplying the public
Speaker 1: once or the government must sink into a fatal atrophy
Speaker 1: and in a short course of time perish. So from
Speaker 1: there he goes on and he talks about, Okay, imagine
Speaker 1: that you're not allowing the government to have any access,
Speaker 1: any significant access to resources. What happens when a war comes?
Speaker 1: So he writes, to imagine that at such a crisis,
Speaker 1: credit might be dispensed with would be the extreme of infatuation.
Speaker 1: In the modern system of war nations, the most wealthy
Speaker 1: are obliged to have recourse to large loans. A country
Speaker 1: so little opulent as ours must feel this necessity in
Speaker 1: a much stronger degree. But who would lend to a
Speaker 1: government that prefaced its overtures by for borrowing by an
Speaker 1: act which demonstrated that no reliance could be placed on
Speaker 1: the steadiness of its measures for paying. What he's so
Speaker 1: way to saying there is that if you default on
Speaker 1: your loans, who's going to give you more money? What
Speaker 1: kind of a country could you be if people don't
Speaker 1: trust your word, Like, if you're setting your economic foundation
Speaker 1: on the idea that at any moment you could just
Speaker 1: decide for some political reasons that you're not going to
Speaker 1: pay back your debt, then you're going to You're going
Speaker 1: to be cast out basically of the international scene. And
Speaker 1: the way he puts it is quote the loans it
Speaker 1: might be able to procure would be as limited in
Speaker 1: their extent as burdensome in their conditions. They would be
Speaker 1: made upon the same principles that users commonly lend to
Speaker 1: bankrupt and fraudulent debtors with a sparing hand at enormous premiums.
Speaker 1: So what he's saying is like, you're not going to
Speaker 1: get rid of debt. The United States is still going
Speaker 1: to borrow. But what it's going to do is it's
Speaker 1: going to go out and borrow and people go like, okay,
Speaker 1: how's twenty five percent sound? And then that creates a cycle.
Speaker 1: Then because all of that, that's actually a cycle that
Speaker 1: HATI itself in because of the way that that France
Speaker 1: basically came back at them that all of their revenue,
Speaker 1: so something like three quarters at some point of their
Speaker 1: of their revenue was just going off the island to
Speaker 1: their creditors. And so when you do that, then you
Speaker 1: don't have anything to invest in developing your own country.
Speaker 1: And so it seems pretty clear just from that, and
Speaker 1: there's a little bit more we could get into. Seems
Speaker 1: pretty clear from that that Hamilton, the designer, you know,
Speaker 1: one of the designers of the Constitution and the first
Speaker 1: Treasury Secretary, would would scoff at the idea of a
Speaker 1: debt ceiling that you could just that Congress could just say,
Speaker 1: you know what, we have appropriated money lawfully, but we
Speaker 1: are going to then separately say that you can't come
Speaker 1: up with the money in order to cover the appropriations
Speaker 1: that we lawfully created. Hamilton, Like, that's no, there's no,
Speaker 1: We're not running a government that way. That's not like that.
Speaker 1: That's a joke. We're not doing that. And the argument
Speaker 1: from the right would be the debt selling was sort
Speaker 1: of lawfully constitutionally imposed through the system of government. And
Speaker 1: what you're saying, though, I think raises a question of
Speaker 1: the fourteenth Amendment, which was a huge debate over the
Speaker 1: course of the Obama administration. Bill Clinton, actually it was
Speaker 1: a debate in the Clinton administration. Clinton said, Hey, I
Speaker 1: actually think I've talked to my lawyers. I think this
Speaker 1: blow right through it. Actually we have that. Can you
Speaker 1: put up the final element? Yeah, there you go. The
Speaker 1: validity of the public debt of the United States shall
Speaker 1: not be questioned. That's the key part of it. Shall.
Speaker 1: Everybody who's into government will tell you the difference between
Speaker 1: you know, shall and any other work like shall is
Speaker 1: the strongest word that you can write into law. It's
Speaker 1: like that's it, Like this is it? This is how
Speaker 1: it shall be right or how it shall not be
Speaker 1: So what do you do with that, if you're the Republicans,
Speaker 1: the vality of the public dad of the United States
Speaker 1: shall not be questioned. So then is the debt ceiling
Speaker 1: of speaking of American pessimism? What's your point today? It's
Speaker 1: exactly that it's about American pessimism. And this is a
Speaker 1: basically Ryan and I are going to be doing something
Speaker 1: a little less scripted as we go. We go forward
Speaker 1: with the monologues, maybe on a weekly basis, maybe sometimes
Speaker 1: we'll write it all out, but just so that we
Speaker 1: can kind of talk through some of these issues in
Speaker 1: a more free flowing way. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: David Brooks's recent essay in The Atlantic in which he's
Speaker 1: basically saying, if Americans feel pessimistic, they're wrong. This pessimism
Speaker 1: that has descended upon the American population is unwarranted, and
Speaker 1: he gives a few reasons for that. First, he says
Speaker 1: it's a historical. He says, quote, the first problem with
Speaker 1: all this pessimism is that it's a historical. Every era
Speaker 1: in American history has faced its own massive challenges, and
Speaker 1: in every era the air has been thick with gloomy.
Speaker 1: Jeremiah's warning of catastrophe and decline pick any decade in
Speaker 1: the history of this country, and you will find roiling
Speaker 1: turmoil all all those same decades, you will also find,
Speaker 1: alongside the chaos and prophecies of doom, energetic dynamism and
Speaker 1: leaping progress. Of course, this is true that you will
Speaker 1: always find these things alongside each other in the United
Speaker 1: States of America. He then goes on to cite a
Speaker 1: Gallop poll where seventeen percent of Americans said that America
Speaker 1: was on the right track in today versus sixty nine
Speaker 1: percent in two thousand. Think about that personal satisfaction in
Speaker 1: the meantime. David Brooks points out your satisfaction with your
Speaker 1: personal life that stayed pretty stable in the mid eighties.
Speaker 1: About eighty five percent of people say that they're personally
Speaker 1: satisfied with their own life. So where satisfaction with the
Speaker 1: direction of the country plummets from sixty nine to seventeen percent,
Speaker 1: you have people remaining relatively satisfied with their own lives. Well,
Speaker 1: here's an important counterpoint to that, No pun intended. Arthur
Speaker 1: Brooks has written about the General Social Survey. He's also
Speaker 1: written about this in The Atlantic. He calls this one
Speaker 1: of the greatest paradoxes of our time. All of this
Speaker 1: that David Brooks rolls out on these reasons for American
Speaker 1: optimism and dynamism, et cetera. Many of them are correct,
Speaker 1: not all of them are correct. Many of them are correct,
Speaker 1: But Arthur Brooks points out that one of the biggest
Speaker 1: paradoxes is that as our material comforts have increased, our
Speaker 1: happiness has decreased. And a great source to look for
Speaker 1: this is at the General Social Survey, which has been
Speaker 1: tracking American happiness for a very long time, and Brooks
Speaker 1: points out that a long term, gradual decline in happiness.
Speaker 1: So this rise in unhappiness, both the decline in happiness
Speaker 1: and a rise in unhappiness, you can find in the
Speaker 1: General Social Survey from nineteen eighty eight to the present.
Speaker 1: So why on earth would that be happening alongside all
Speaker 1: of these these trends and rising material happinesses. And I
Speaker 1: think that's really where David Brooks is missing the point.
Speaker 1: He's saying that this is distorting reality. This is the
Speaker 1: second point that he makes, that the pessimism is unwarranted
Speaker 1: because things aren't all that bad. Well, first, of course,
Speaker 1: on the ahistorical point, maybe people are pessimistic because they're
Speaker 1: less happy. Maybe they have all of these material comforts
Speaker 1: and they're not making people happy. Therefore their pessimism is warranted.
Speaker 1: Now is it a distortion? Things are actually okay? This
Speaker 1: is what he says. The second problem with the decline
Speaker 1: narrative is that it distorts reality. He goes on to say,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm no Pollyanna. I basically think though that
Speaker 1: America today is objectively better than it was before, but
Speaker 1: subjectively worse. Objectively better, but subjectively worse. So this isn't
Speaker 1: the fault of the system. It's your fault for blaming
Speaker 1: the system. When everything is good, he says, we have
Speaker 1: much higher standards of living in many conveniences, but when
Speaker 1: it comes to how we relate to one another, whether
Speaker 1: in the realm of politics, across social divides, or in
Speaker 1: the intimacies of family and community life, distrust is rife,
Speaker 1: bonds are fraying, and judgments are harsh. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean the future isn't going to be brighter than the present,
Speaker 1: or that America is in decline. The pessimist miss and
Speaker 1: underlying truth. The society can get a lot wrong as
Speaker 1: long as it gets the big thing right. Thing is
Speaker 1: This is if a society is good at unlocking creativity,
Speaker 1: at nurturing the abilities of its people, then its ills
Speaker 1: can be surmounted. He talks about how it's so much
Speaker 1: easier to get water now than it was when you
Speaker 1: had to go. You just get it out of the
Speaker 1: tap now as opposed to go getting it out of
Speaker 1: the well. Productivity is up, the price and quality of
Speaker 1: education compared to others in the world is up. Long
Speaker 1: term longevity trends are good, which I don't think is
Speaker 1: necessarily true. We have innovation infrastructure, we have small businesses booming,
Speaker 1: we have carbon emissions down, economic expansion, cheaper goods and
Speaker 1: a small surge and manufacturing. This is ridiculous because he's
Speaker 1: cherry picking statistics that distort reality, right, Like you can
Speaker 1: cherry pick statistics that show decline or an increase, or
Speaker 1: the fortunes of America sort of increasing, but that's really
Speaker 1: not what's happening. Because I think the better statistics to
Speaker 1: look at is you have a reversal of life expectancy
Speaker 1: at birth and mortality about twenty five years in the past.
Speaker 1: We're like basically around the mid to late nineties on
Speaker 1: both of those measures. That has not happened. You saw
Speaker 1: a dip in that when you had the the after
Speaker 1: World War One and with the flu epidemic, the flu
Speaker 1: pandemic in the late nineteen tens and nineteen around nineteen twenty,
Speaker 1: that did happen. Then it didn't last that long. It
Speaker 1: started to tick back upwards. But what we're seeing right
Speaker 1: now is a huge drop. And it is not distorting
Speaker 1: reality to be pessimistic about that. It's not distorting reality
Speaker 1: to look at happiness dipping. It's not distorting reality to say,
Speaker 1: adult in childhood obesity rates have doubled in thirty years.
Speaker 1: How much of our health and happiness is connected to that.
Speaker 1: Things like heart disease, things like cancer, All of those
Speaker 1: things are directly, in many ways connected to those surging rates.
Speaker 1: We're talking about doubling in just thirty years. We're talking
Speaker 1: about rising loneliness, rising addiction on some counts, failing rates
Speaker 1: in marriage, births, religiosity. All of those things are associated
Speaker 1: in the United States with happiness. So it makes sense
Speaker 1: that as those have declined, happiness has declined. And David
Speaker 1: Brooks says, you're distorting reality. The system is fine, it's you.
Speaker 1: The problem is with so he thinks it's top down,
Speaker 1: that it's not bottom up. And this is also just
Speaker 1: totally conflating two different arguments, right, that reality can be
Speaker 1: trending bad, but you can still have reason for optimism,
Speaker 1: and he's saying those things are mutually exclusive. But those
Speaker 1: are different arguments, right, things can be bad and you
Speaker 1: can still have reason for optimism, as I think we
Speaker 1: have probably more reason for optimism in this country than
Speaker 1: in many other countries because we do still at present
Speaker 1: have the freedoms I think to correct the system. But
Speaker 1: because we have the freedoms to correct the system doesn't
Speaker 1: mean the system isn't broken, and it doesn't mean the
Speaker 1: system hasn't failed, and that people are right to be
Speaker 1: pessimistic about that. And that's what he totally totally misses.
Speaker 1: And this is the elite myopia, right that if you're
Speaker 1: experiencing hyper novelty as all of us are, the hacker
Speaker 1: that you all know as Guccifer, his real name is
Speaker 1: Marcel LeVar, was recently released from a Pennsylvania prison after
Speaker 1: serving time for his various various legendary exploits. He's now
Speaker 1: back in Romania, where he had launched his hacking career
Speaker 1: and was interviewed by my colleague at the Intercept, Sam Biddle.
Speaker 1: Sam joins us now to tell us more about Marcel. Sam,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us, my pleasure. And so
Speaker 1: back when you were at Gawker, Guchifer, So, how did
Speaker 1: Guchiffer get in touch with with you and with Gawker
Speaker 1: back then? Was there like an open tip line that
Speaker 1: was your email public? Like? What was and what was
Speaker 1: your interaction with him? Were you going back and forth
Speaker 1: back then with him? And then I want to get
Speaker 1: into who he is for people who don't remember. Sure,
Speaker 1: So it's it's it's funny you mentioned that because when
Speaker 1: I was interviewing him, when I was finally speaking with
Speaker 1: him on the phone after all these years, he said
Speaker 1: that he had the hardest time getting anyone in the
Speaker 1: media to notice him, to respond to any of his
Speaker 1: uh messages at all for a really long time. He
Speaker 1: said he was basically just like spamming not just Gocker,
Speaker 1: but the New York Times, Washington Posts, the Guardian, every
Speaker 1: outlet he could find in the English speaking world and beyond.
Speaker 1: And he just said that no one, no one cared,
Speaker 1: but yeah he would. He would send updates to Gawker
Speaker 1: and The Smoking Gun were his two favorite outlets, probably
Speaker 1: because we because you actually spot such a throwback refreshing
Speaker 1: Gawker and the Smoking Gun back in two thousand and nine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what were his messages like? Were they did? They looked
Speaker 1: arranged in all caps and that sort of thing. Or
Speaker 1: he would always they would always start with which I
Speaker 1: found to be very catchally with guccifer transmitting dot dot
Speaker 1: dot dot dog, which always which was like, you know,
Speaker 1: much like the name itself, just I think, a sort
Speaker 1: of stroke of self branding brilliance. But it was always
Speaker 1: very crude and sort of di y and that like
Speaker 1: the images he would share, which he stole a lot
Speaker 1: of people's email accounts, you know, he watermarked them himself
Speaker 1: with this very crudely done sort of looks like he
Speaker 1: had been done in Microsoft paint. He would sign the images,
Speaker 1: I think, often with the spray paint can tool, just
Speaker 1: saying guccifer. So you know, this did not have the
Speaker 1: trappings of like a sophisticated intelligence operation, which of course
Speaker 1: it was not. It was just a guy. And that's
Speaker 1: what I'm glad Ryan asked about the Gawker thing, is
Speaker 1: that's one of the things I picked up in this interview,
Speaker 1: which is not just an excellent interview but excellently written.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting, and the arc of this ban from
Speaker 1: from someone who's sending ostensibly weird email else to Gawker,
Speaker 1: to someone who had a huge influence just from his
Speaker 1: computer guessing passwords is incredible. So, Sam, if you could
Speaker 1: catch people up on the O G. Guchifer, this is
Speaker 1: not Guchi for two point zero. This is a very
Speaker 1: different situation than how it I guess how it became,
Speaker 1: how it evolved over the years. What's his backstory and
Speaker 1: what did you learn when sort of reconnecting with him
Speaker 1: after all of these years and after all these changes
Speaker 1: in American and world politics. Absolutely. Yeah. So he was
Speaker 1: a taxi driver in Romania in a city called a Rod,
Speaker 1: which is about the size of Syracuse, sort of industrial town.
Speaker 1: He has no technical training whatsoever, sort of just a
Speaker 1: computer amateur. But he was fascinated by and remains fascinated
Speaker 1: by American politics and American the power culture of the
Speaker 1: American elite. So he literally just started reading their Wikipedia
Speaker 1: entries and guessing their passwords. He had had a string
Speaker 1: of account break ins with some Romanian political figures, but
Speaker 1: in twenty thirteen, he started branching out significantly significantly to
Speaker 1: the US and had an incredible string of I think
Speaker 1: something like one hundred different targets victims and who's mostly
Speaker 1: AOL and Yahoo accounts he broke into. He was masterful
Speaker 1: and identifying people who were sort of adjacent to power,
Speaker 1: like Dorothy Cooke Busch, sister of George W. Bush. That's
Speaker 1: how we got the incredible George Bush oil paintings that
Speaker 1: became a sensation and I think really unprecedented look into
Speaker 1: a former it in Psyche. And you know, he also
Speaker 1: perhaps most famously, broke into the email of Sidney Blumenthal,
Speaker 1: a longtime Clinton advisor, which is how he I think
Speaker 1: inadvertently revealed the fact that she had a private email account.
Speaker 1: But you know, oh sorry, yeah, did he know that
Speaker 1: at the time, because it's it's fascinating how that came out.
Speaker 1: So Sidney Blumenthal basically was emailing with an account I
Speaker 1: don't remember it exactly, something like HDR twenty two ye
Speaker 1: or something like that Clinton a Clinton email or whatever.
Speaker 1: You know, Basically it alerted the world to the fact that,
Speaker 1: oh wait, Hillary Clinton has this personal email and then
Speaker 1: more importantly has this private server Clinton email dot com.
Speaker 1: So what else is on that did he did he
Speaker 1: notice that or was that just in the dump that
Speaker 1: was sent to you guys and then and then it
Speaker 1: was just figured out subsequently. So he had shared a
Speaker 1: cash of emails with Gawker and and you know, and
Speaker 1: also published served up on the internet. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: it wasn't exclusive to us. Uh, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: believe that he highlighted the fact of the of the
Speaker 1: email in that initial outreach. I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: the emphasis at the time was here are messages from
Speaker 1: you know, a close Clinton confidant, associated uh advisor. But
Speaker 1: I don't think that the existence, you know, it was
Speaker 1: supposedly about the substance of the messages, not the sort
Speaker 1: of metadata as it were that included her her contact
Speaker 1: for private contact. Well, and one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: you picked up on in in your piece is that
Speaker 1: there's this he obviously always had this kind of quest
Speaker 1: for notoriety, but he also kind of wants to be
Speaker 1: able to to be a private person and to i
Speaker 1: don't know, absolve himself of of wrongdoing. And he admits
Speaker 1: that it was wrong to you know, and get into
Speaker 1: people's property without authorization, et cetera, et cetera. But Sam,
Speaker 1: how is he reckoning with going from a dude who's
Speaker 1: guessing people's passwords to somebody who absolutely reshaped the world
Speaker 1: from behind his laptop. Basically, I think he's conflicted about it,
Speaker 1: which I think probably most people would be. I credit
Speaker 1: him for being sort of transparently an authentically self contradictory
Speaker 1: about it, right, Like he is, in a sense trying
Speaker 1: to have it seemed like he was trying to have
Speaker 1: it both ways. You would, you know, sometimes act contrite
Speaker 1: and then boastfull. And he also, you know, repeatedly downplayed
Speaker 1: his influence on recent history and then would take credit
Speaker 1: for things. I think that going to prison in the
Speaker 1: United States for four years, over four years is a
Speaker 1: you know, generally horrible experience, and to go through that
Speaker 1: as a foreigner probably even more difficult. I think he
Speaker 1: is now. He seems sort of discombobulated now back in
Speaker 1: Romania with his family that he spent eight years away from.
Speaker 1: I mean, his daughter grew up without him because he
Speaker 1: spent a prison term in Romania and was an extradited
Speaker 1: to the US. So he's been behind bars in one
Speaker 1: country another for a long time, and I think that
Speaker 1: experience of just suddenly being back with this family that
Speaker 1: you had been pulled away from for eight years is
Speaker 1: a really is a really devastating one. So, you know,
Speaker 1: it seemed to me like he was trying to sort
Speaker 1: of air on the side of being normal again, just
Speaker 1: being a nobody again. You know, if I can play
Speaker 1: sort of armchair psychologist, I might say that's sort of
Speaker 1: under That seemed understandable to me after what he had
Speaker 1: been through. He talked a little bit about his motive
Speaker 1: to you looking at you know, it involved the Iraq
Speaker 1: War and an American decline and the Bush administration. Talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about why he originally did this and
Speaker 1: how he viewed now how he views his motive. Sure,
Speaker 1: so you know, it's it's interesting because when he first
Speaker 1: was reaching out to us at at when he was
Speaker 1: reaching out to Gawker and other outlets, his emails were
Speaker 1: in terms of any kind of motive or ideology kind
Speaker 1: of incoherent. It was a lot of references to like
Speaker 1: really really worn out conspiracy theories, like you know about
Speaker 1: the Illuminati for example, and Blake. It was just sort
Speaker 1: of like throwback stuff. Uh and and you know, sort
Speaker 1: of our heart to take seriously. But ten years later,
Speaker 1: you know, like I say in the piece, he's still
Speaker 1: is in a sense of conspiracy theorists, and that he
Speaker 1: thinks there is an elite pulling the strings behind the scenes,
Speaker 1: but not in a way that is you know, kooky,
Speaker 1: the way Illuminati stuff is. Yeah, you knows, as you mentioned.
Speaker 1: He he says now that what he was trying to
Speaker 1: do all along was look for, essentially evidence of systemic
Speaker 1: corruption among the American elite. And he says that that's
Speaker 1: why he broke into the email of Colon pow and
Speaker 1: z that he Bluemanthal and Bushes and people who were
Speaker 1: famous in entertainment and and and so forth. He thought
Speaker 1: that watching from Romania, that the United States had lost
Speaker 1: its way. He described admiring the US deeply as a
Speaker 1: Romanian living under under communism, and that you talked about
Speaker 1: looking to the US for guidance, and then in the
Speaker 1: twenty first century seeing the US as something no longer
Speaker 1: to be admired, as a country that had sort of
Speaker 1: lost his way, and he thought he would find an
Speaker 1: explanation for what you call American decline. But I, you know,
Speaker 1: I think is the right term for that too in
Speaker 1: these emails, and he said, you know, he said openly
Speaker 1: on the phone, and he said, it was a failure.
Speaker 1: I never found what I was looking for. But that's
Speaker 1: what he says today was motivating him back then. Such
Speaker 1: a great line at the end of the piece where
Speaker 1: you say Lazar is a conspiracy theorist. It seems in
Speaker 1: the same way everyone became after twenty sixteen, I mean
Speaker 1: helped to build the time I think, so, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's incredible the extent to which he has.
Speaker 1: He said that he spent a ton of time in
Speaker 1: prison reading. But the books he was reading that I
Speaker 1: note in the piece are like these sort of memoirs
Speaker 1: of the deep status. Yeah, yeah, right, like the autobiographies
Speaker 1: of like Spy Agency, the Chiefs and like Mueller Report,
Speaker 1: uh Cinematic Universe people and like it was it was.
Speaker 1: These were all sort of like airport politics books that
Speaker 1: he was just guzzling in prison. And as a result,
Speaker 1: you know, he he sounds like someone who has been
Speaker 1: watching CNN or MSNBC or Fox for the past uh well,
Speaker 1: probably less Fox, but you know, someone someone who's been
Speaker 1: watching uh Trump Russia coverage obsessively and like tweeting about
Speaker 1: it for for years and years. Of course he wasn't
Speaker 1: he was in he was in prison, but you know,
Speaker 1: he he, he has sort of taken on this mode
Speaker 1: that I think, uh has become super popular in the
Speaker 1: US of you know, of believing in these great political
Speaker 1: conspiracies and you know, and as we've seen over the
Speaker 1: past several years, those often end up being, you know,
Speaker 1: if not as true as they were supposed to be
Speaker 1: at first, you know, having elements of truth in them.
Speaker 1: And one takeaway from story I think is that if
Speaker 1: your elementary school is on your Wikipedia page, don't make
Speaker 1: that one of the answers to your femail recovery question. Yes,
Speaker 1: as you said in the piece, he was using email
Speaker 1: recovery questions of these super famous people as a way
Speaker 1: to hack into their their emails. So if it's publicly
Speaker 1: findable information, pro tip right there, I'm going to check
Speaker 1: your factor a good factory. Sam, Thank you so much,
Speaker 1: my pleasure, Thanks for having me. Well, Ryan, we started
Speaker 1: the show with Davos, and we're ending on this note
Speaker 1: about Guccifer and how he was able to guess the
Speaker 1: passwords of sort of the Davos set and change the
Speaker 1: course of world politics by doing that behind his laptop screen.
Speaker 1: In Romania, he got locked up for years, he comes
Speaker 1: back out, and what we've seen transpire in the year
Speaker 1: since is the sort of desperate clinging to power. And
Speaker 1: that was some sort of a theme of today's show.
Speaker 1: I think that's fair, actually coherent show. How about that
Speaker 1: actually go here and show. Yeah, we can tie it
Speaker 1: all together. Yeah, don't get used to that. But we'll
Speaker 1: see you back here next week Wednesday. As as you
Speaker 1: can tell, we're here on Wednesdays. These days Wednesday. It's
Speaker 1: good to be here on Wednesdays. There's so much, so
Speaker 1: much news. So we'll see you then, see you later