Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
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Speaker 4: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: All right, Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 5: Before we get into the show today, I wanted to
Speaker 5: do a quick update from last night. The crackdown on
Speaker 5: campus protests continues that we can actually roll. We have
Speaker 5: some footage from a GW University student that was sent
Speaker 5: to us last night. Here's police resting a student in
Speaker 5: a wheelchair, putting him in the Pattio wagon. There here
Speaker 5: as a miner who was also participating in the protest
Speaker 5: that they put into the police car.
Speaker 3: There.
Speaker 5: There was also a crackdown at FT Fashion Institute of
Speaker 5: Technology up in Manhattan. Also, UMass Amherst saw their encampments
Speaker 5: swept in what was a pretty severe crackdown. So these
Speaker 5: are unfolding day after day. Our Counterpoints Friday show is
Speaker 5: going to touch on these campus protests. So we're going
Speaker 5: to have Glenn Greenwald in debate with Iliya Shapiro, and
Speaker 5: I think it's going to be a fascinating one. Shapiro
Speaker 5: has been basically called like one of the lead champions
Speaker 5: of this crackdown, and Greenwald has been one of the
Speaker 5: lead opponents of the crackdown. All but extra interesting, I
Speaker 5: think because Shapiro himself was canceled, yeah back in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty two, not.
Speaker 6: Long ago, and recently wrote a fairly moving essay about
Speaker 6: the experience of cancel culture. They're also both lawyers, so
Speaker 6: I think that's going to be pretty interesting from a
Speaker 6: legal perspective what the limits are free speech are.
Speaker 5: And so if you want to get that early, it'll
Speaker 5: be out Thursday evening. You have to go to Breakingpoints
Speaker 5: dot Com become a subscriber. Most of you probably are
Speaker 5: already subscribers, like how could you not be? But if
Speaker 5: you're not going to bring woys dot com subscribes, you
Speaker 5: can get it earlier in your inbox.
Speaker 3: Otherwise that show will be out to you Friday morning.
Speaker 5: We're going to talk about the ongoing Israeli invasion of
Speaker 5: RAFA and the US response to it.
Speaker 3: And we've also got the Trump trial because it's getting fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6: Stormy Daniels testified for the prosecution in the hush money
Speaker 6: trial yesterday in New York. Donald Trump, Man, do we
Speaker 6: have some interesting updates from inside the courtroom because Donald
Speaker 6: Trump was reprimanded, and we'll tell you why we do.
Speaker 5: Indeed, as Crystal would say, TikTok is suing under the
Speaker 5: First Amendment to overturn the attempted ban or we're going
Speaker 5: to get into why. I think we both think they
Speaker 5: have a pretty strong case. There was an assassination attempt
Speaker 5: against Zelensky. We'll get into that and its implications, as
Speaker 5: well as a new report on gen Z debt.
Speaker 6: You know, and I think there's a media story on
Speaker 6: gen Z debt as well, because just a couple of
Speaker 6: weeks ago, you probably remember, there were viral charts showing
Speaker 6: how great gen Z is doing compared to other generations.
Speaker 6: So we'll dive into all of that. But Ryan, let's
Speaker 6: start in RAFA where we have images we can start roll.
Speaker 5: This is this first yeah, first tear sheet here from
Speaker 5: out to zero that the US has been saying that
Speaker 5: this invasion of Rafa, and this has been interesting to
Speaker 5: watch un faults. So if Israel finally launches this much
Speaker 5: awighted invasion of Rafa, the response from the United States
Speaker 5: has been to say that actually, this is not really
Speaker 5: an invasion of Rafa.
Speaker 3: This is a this is a targeted assault.
Speaker 5: The surgical operation aimed at disrupting Hamas infrastructure and also
Speaker 5: particularly went after the Rafa border crossing.
Speaker 3: We can roll some of the footage from this.
Speaker 5: Yesterday, they went after the Rafa border crossing, and the
Speaker 5: argument was that Hamas as the de facto government, has
Speaker 5: been running this border crossing and as a result, has
Speaker 5: been collecting customs revenue, and their customs revenue, then you know,
Speaker 5: fuels Hamas's infrastructure and existence, and so therefore Israel's going
Speaker 5: to go in and it's going to seize the border.
Speaker 5: That the border crossing is not that deep into Gaza,
Speaker 5: you know, so you can do a kind of targeted
Speaker 5: operation there. At the State Apartment yesterday a number of
Speaker 5: reporters were asking, Okay, you're saying this is not a
Speaker 5: major military operation, that these are just a collection of
Speaker 5: small military operations.
Speaker 3: Isn't there a point at which a lot of small.
Speaker 5: Operations add up to a major military operation, and they
Speaker 5: acknowledged yes. So it became this like philosophical debate about
Speaker 5: you know, how many angels can dance on a pin
Speaker 5: when it moves from a targeted surgical operation, how many
Speaker 5: targeted operations become until they become a major military operation.
Speaker 5: So we can put up this next element from this
Speaker 5: is from the Wall Street Journal here.
Speaker 3: So this the rift that is developing between the.
Speaker 5: United States has to do with the insistence over months
Speaker 5: and months and months that Israel not launched an invasion
Speaker 5: into Rafa yet that entire time, Biden continued sending weapons
Speaker 5: up until just last week when apparently roughly three thy
Speaker 5: five hundred bombs were withheld because the US finally started
Speaker 5: taking Israel at its word that they actually did plan
Speaker 5: to launch this invasion which they had been saying that
Speaker 5: they were going to launch for a very long time.
Speaker 5: At the States Department yesterday, I asked, you know, what
Speaker 5: went wrong internally, Like you're going to review your process,
Speaker 5: Like how do you end up accidentally arming an operation
Speaker 5: that you say that you oppose?
Speaker 4: But how does that surely not the first time we've
Speaker 4: done that?
Speaker 5: Well, interestingly, so we can move to this next element.
Speaker 5: The Politico and others reported that the State Department is
Speaker 5: indefinitely delaying the release of its National Security memo that
Speaker 5: is aimed at determining whether or not Israel has committed
Speaker 5: war crimes with American weapons if they conclude that they did.
Speaker 3: This report is supposed to be due today.
Speaker 5: If they conclude they did, the US would have to
Speaker 5: stop sending Israel weapons. So they they said, we're actually
Speaker 5: not going to submit this on time.
Speaker 3: They say they hope they're going to get it done soon,
Speaker 3: but it's an awful lot of work.
Speaker 5: And at the briefing yesterday they said it was the
Speaker 5: first time we've ever done something like this, so it's
Speaker 5: taking a little longer than we expected. Matt Lee, the
Speaker 5: AP's State Department reporters will wait a minute, Hold on
Speaker 5: a second. Did you just say you've never put together
Speaker 5: an investigation into whether the countries that you're arming have
Speaker 5: committed war crimes?
Speaker 3: Reports efort have committed.
Speaker 5: War crimes, like you've never done that before. Said, well,
Speaker 5: we've never done it.
Speaker 4: Like this, And this is all related to the lay
Speaker 4: he law.
Speaker 3: Right, This is right.
Speaker 5: There are laws on the books that say the State
Speaker 5: Department is supposed to care Josh Paul quit because Josh
Speaker 5: Paul's State Department employee. His job was to kind of
Speaker 5: investigate and certify whether or not the arms that were
Speaker 5: going out the door were going to be used to
Speaker 5: commit human rights abuses. He said that during after October seventh,
Speaker 5: all checks on that were eliminated. In any effort that
Speaker 5: he made to interrogate whether or not this was going
Speaker 5: to go to a unit or to be used in
Speaker 5: a way that was against international law would be just
Speaker 5: bulldozed and the arms will grow out the door.
Speaker 3: That's why he famously kind of quit in protests.
Speaker 5: So we're not sure when we're going to get this
Speaker 5: report on Israeli war crimes.
Speaker 3: All of this coming to a head.
Speaker 5: At the exact same time, I was at an event
Speaker 5: last night where Representative Rocanna spoke, and this is my
Speaker 5: fancy camera work here. He criticized the State Department in
Speaker 5: the administration for this delay of this report and said
Speaker 5: that he'll be introducing legislation to block offensive weapons shipments
Speaker 5: to Israel while this RAFA assault is ongoing.
Speaker 3: We can roll this clip from Rocana.
Speaker 7: And our entire Youngerman has said going into Rafa would
Speaker 7: be a catastrophe. So I will be introducing an amendment
Speaker 7: again in the House Armed Services Committee on made twenty
Speaker 7: second to stop again eddie offensive weapons going in to
Speaker 7: that until the invasion stops.
Speaker 8: And there.
Speaker 7: I'm very very disappointed that the administration is not coming
Speaker 7: out with its report that was due to the United
Speaker 7: States Congress on whether there were human rights violations in
Speaker 7: international law violations that have been committed in Gaza. That
Speaker 7: report was supposed to be to Congress on May eighth,
Speaker 7: and it has been even definitely delayed. No explanation of plot.
Speaker 7: So I know where America talked about climate but of
Speaker 7: course receiving the dysfunction of our planet because on one
Speaker 7: can't help but think of the interconnection between the two.
Speaker 5: That was at an event for the Youth Climate Group
Speaker 5: Climate Defiance Rocanna, they're talking about the decision not to
Speaker 5: release this report yet or the failure to release report
Speaker 5: at this point, Emily, where do you come down on this?
Speaker 5: Are we looking at a major military operation invasion into Rafa,
Speaker 5: which in which has included shelling.
Speaker 3: There's there's footage of tanks shelling tents there.
Speaker 5: There have been air strikes that have killed a number
Speaker 5: of civilians, as well as the taking over of the
Speaker 5: border crossing, which a source confirmed to me did result
Speaker 5: in the destruction of about three to four eight major
Speaker 5: AID trucks. There have been reports that it was many more.
Speaker 5: My source who does work on the ground there, says
Speaker 5: that no, it's three to four AID trucks. But when
Speaker 5: you have miles of AID trucks, every every AID truck
Speaker 5: that you blow up and don't move out of the way, uh,
Speaker 5: just delays AID getting in further. Israel so far just
Speaker 5: completely blocked in gress and egress at the Rafa border
Speaker 5: crossing as full blown famine has reached has reached the north.
Speaker 6: So this is where I would say that major is relative,
Speaker 6: you know, because I don't know that.
Speaker 3: There's feels major.
Speaker 6: I don't know there's any military encourasion into Raffa that
Speaker 6: can be anything button major. And that is a concession
Speaker 6: I think Israel implicitly makes when they say this is
Speaker 6: necessary to quote unquote eradicate Hamas. And meanwhile, by the way,
Speaker 6: I think this is one of the strangest things it's
Speaker 6: happening right now. Not strange and that it's unexpected, but
Speaker 6: strange in that it just peaques your curiosity as to
Speaker 6: how they are quote eradicating Hamas while also negotiating a
Speaker 6: peace deal with Hamas and while the RAFA. So they
Speaker 6: say they killed what twenty militants over the last forty
Speaker 6: eight hours something like that, it might be more Hamas
Speaker 6: obviously was that Sunday that they got four Israelly.
Speaker 3: The the cormcial crossing right.
Speaker 4: Right, they killed four soldiers.
Speaker 6: But there's just no way, I think, specifically with RAFA,
Speaker 6: that you can do anything there that isn't major. And
Speaker 6: one question I had for you, Ryan, you had mentioned
Speaker 6: that you were at the State Department proofing yesterday, and
Speaker 6: we went through both the Al Jazeera article in the
Speaker 6: Wall Street Journal article about how the Biden administration obviously
Speaker 6: has always said that this would be a sticking point.
Speaker 6: Now whether they're able to actually execute on being a
Speaker 6: sticking point when they're so deeply entangled in this conflict
Speaker 6: is a different question.
Speaker 4: What sense do you get?
Speaker 6: I mean, just having been in the room at the
Speaker 6: State Department yesterday asking questions, Matt Lee pushing the State
Speaker 6: Department as well, that these are genuine frustrations. I actually
Speaker 6: think in this case they seem to be genuine frustrations.
Speaker 3: And it may be from a lot of officials.
Speaker 5: Sometimes the inexorable force of American policy is one thing
Speaker 5: and what some mid level officials want it to be
Speaker 5: is another thing.
Speaker 3: And I think that might be the case here.
Speaker 5: There does seem to be you know, they continue to
Speaker 5: say that they do not want Israel to launch an
Speaker 5: invasion of Rapha, that they oppose such an invasion. They
Speaker 5: were clear that so they suggest that Israel urged one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people to flee to a different zone. State
Speaker 5: Department yesterday was clear they don't believe that the area
Speaker 5: that they are sending those people to is adequate because
Speaker 5: they're sending people to just giant piles of rubble, like
Speaker 5: in their current situation is one of the only places
Speaker 5: that has not been reduced to rubble. And so where
Speaker 5: they're currently sheltered, you might have say, three hundred people
Speaker 5: for one bathroom, and everybody might have one, you know,
Speaker 5: an average about it seems like a one liter of
Speaker 5: water a day for all uses, you know, hygiene and
Speaker 5: drinking and cooking.
Speaker 3: They're now being asked, urge told.
Speaker 5: Forced to move to this rubble strewn area that has
Speaker 5: zero bathrooms, zero access to water zero. You know, humanitarian
Speaker 5: aid facilities set up to receive those people. And as
Speaker 5: the State Department accurately pointed out, you might tell one
Speaker 5: hundred thousand people to move, but once you start bombing,
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands of people are going to move there
Speaker 5: and you're going to have you know, firefest but actually
Speaker 5: dangerous for people.
Speaker 6: I believe about half the population of Gaza, roughly half
Speaker 6: the population of gazas around Rafa, but at least before
Speaker 6: recent evacuation started in Obviously Israel did the sort of
Speaker 6: usual leaflets and text messages and all of that.
Speaker 4: But the point, from some genuine complaints in the.
Speaker 6: United States is but to where you know, if you're
Speaker 6: dropping leaflets, where are you telling people to go? And
Speaker 6: Israel will come back and say what I mean, we're
Speaker 6: doing what we can do.
Speaker 5: Right, They bought a bunch of tents and they put
Speaker 5: them back by the rubble, right, and anybody with any sense,
Speaker 5: it's like, that's okay. That that might be okay for
Speaker 5: like an hour. You can't live like that. Ware's what
Speaker 5: if you get thirsty?
Speaker 3: What do you do? What if you go to the bathroom?
Speaker 5: Yeah, like what if you have to do all the
Speaker 5: things that humans do when they're trying to stay alive.
Speaker 6: And again, the negotiations were just a sloppy disaster this week.
Speaker 6: I know Crystal and Sager covered this as well, but
Speaker 6: Israel and the United States were on completely different pages,
Speaker 6: and this is the way the deal fell apart. Whether
Speaker 6: there was even a deal that was workable, we still
Speaker 6: honestly don't really know what happened with that. But all
Speaker 6: of this is again the name of quote eradicating Hamas well.
Speaker 6: They're negotiating a peace deal with Hamas So I just
Speaker 6: think that tells you a lot in and of itself
Speaker 6: about what's happening right now.
Speaker 5: And the State Department was yesterday saying, and so was
Speaker 5: John Kirby over at the White House, that they they
Speaker 5: have a lot of hope that the deal will be
Speaker 5: overcome because the difference is between the deal that the US,
Speaker 5: you know, called extraordinary and worked out with Israel and
Speaker 5: presented to Egypt and Kutter, which presented it to pass,
Speaker 5: are trivial like they are they are, they are minor differences.
Speaker 5: And those two two minor differences are uh and do
Speaker 5: we have do we have the net yahouh? Because we
Speaker 5: could we can start with net Yahu here if we do, yeah, roll,
Speaker 5: this is this is his This is basically the argument
Speaker 5: that he's making. And if you can just read the
Speaker 5: translation on on this if if you're watching it otherwise,
Speaker 5: Basically what he's saying is that there was no sea
Speaker 5: fire deal on the table, you know, for Hamas to
Speaker 5: accept in Hamas made changes to the deal, and the
Speaker 5: changes were major, and that it was a gigantic ruse
Speaker 5: to make Israel look like it doesn't want peace when
Speaker 5: in fact Israel does uh want want peace, although he
Speaker 5: contradicts himself because he says, you know, Israel you know,
Speaker 5: does not want peace if it means that any formation
Speaker 5: of Hamas you know, remains in you know, in in Gaza.
Speaker 6: Right, but yeah, I mean it's absurd when you're negotiating
Speaker 6: that way right there, negotiating are in northern Gaza once again,
Speaker 6: yeah right.
Speaker 5: And so basically the differences were around the definition of
Speaker 5: sustainable calm. The New York Times and others have have
Speaker 5: reported on the slight tweaks that Hamas did make to
Speaker 5: the ceasefire deal that they then accepted, and so uh,
Speaker 5: Israel had not defined the phrase kind of sustainable calm
Speaker 5: in the document, and sustainable calm is the phrase they're
Speaker 5: using to repla place permanent ceasefire, because permanent ceasefire has
Speaker 5: become toxic and they're fighting over it.
Speaker 3: And so that was the substitute.
Speaker 5: The kind of US Israeli gip came up to, Okay,
Speaker 5: let's let's agree to a sustainable calm, and Hamas basically
Speaker 5: defined sustainable calm as something like a permanent ceasefire, and
Speaker 5: the US had agreed to that. The US privately had
Speaker 5: assured Hamas, okay, yes, like if you do get through
Speaker 5: all these different phases, then yes, we will assure you
Speaker 5: that Israel will not relaunch a war in you know,
Speaker 5: four or five months or whenever this is over. The
Speaker 5: other difference was that the initial phase of hostage release
Speaker 5: was supposed to be in the first proposal six weeks.
Speaker 5: Hamas slowed that down in its response to you know,
Speaker 5: three three hostages every week, and which adds up to
Speaker 5: more than six weeks. And Hamas also said, all of
Speaker 5: these thirty three that you want are actually alive, and
Speaker 5: so we can't guarantee that. And so while that is
Speaker 5: a big difference, if that's true at this point, there's
Speaker 5: nothing a moss can do about that, like they know
Speaker 5: they have the living hostages that they have. Israel's persuasive
Speaker 5: counter argument to me is those who are in ill
Speaker 5: health like need to be released as fast as possible,
Speaker 5: exactly like they need to get out because they are.
Speaker 5: They're dying. Everyone in Gaza is dying. The conditions are horrific.
Speaker 5: Not only are they do they risk getting blown up
Speaker 5: in a bombing, but there's no you know, there's no
Speaker 5: medical system to speak of. There's little access to clean water,
Speaker 5: and there's very little food. So if you're a hostage
Speaker 5: who was an ill health and elderly like you, just
Speaker 5: like everyone else in Gaza is suffering. Even though ironically
Speaker 5: and paradoxically, the hostages have more value probably to Hamas
Speaker 5: than a random Palestinian civilian. They're going to be traded
Speaker 5: for Palestinian hostages that are in Israeli administrative attention. The
Speaker 5: one other thing that Hamas said was that Israel had
Speaker 5: wanted to take like two hundred people off the list
Speaker 5: that they would not release, and Hamas said, no, don't,
Speaker 5: you can't.
Speaker 3: Don't take anybody off the list that you're not going
Speaker 3: to release.
Speaker 5: But Ultimately, of course, it's up to Israel who they
Speaker 5: let out of their prisoners. So no matter what they
Speaker 5: agreed to and then off with the last agreement, they
Speaker 5: went out. Israel went out and rearrested a bunch of
Speaker 5: the people that they arrested because they know where they are.
Speaker 6: Also, in all of this, the broader geo political ambitions,
Speaker 6: I think even here in the United States, you hear
Speaker 6: way too little about the remaining American hostages. I believe
Speaker 6: they're five remaining American hostages. And President Biden was giving
Speaker 6: remarks in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. He had a
Speaker 6: long speech, and we have some video of that speech
Speaker 6: that we can roll right now. This is President Biden,
Speaker 6: and it should be a seven.
Speaker 9: Twenty twenty three, on a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist
Speaker 9: group Romas on least the deadliest day of the Jewish
Speaker 9: people since the Holocaust, driven by ancient desire to wipe
Speaker 9: out the Jewish people off the face of the earth.
Speaker 9: Over one thousand, two hundred innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents
Speaker 9: slaughtered in the kibbutz, massacred at the music festival, brutally raped, mutilated,
Speaker 9: and sexually assault It thousands more carrying wounds, bullets, some
Speaker 9: shrapnel from the memory of that terrible day they endured,
Speaker 9: hundreds taken hostage, and Mike commitment to the safety of
Speaker 9: the Jewish people, the security of Israel and its right
Speaker 9: to exist as an independent Jewish state, is ironclad. Even
Speaker 9: when we disagreed. My administration is working around the clock
Speaker 9: the free remaining hostages. Jess, we have free hostages already
Speaker 9: and will not rest until we bring them all home.
Speaker 9: On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking
Speaker 9: to class, anti semitism, anti Semitic posters, slogans calling for
Speaker 9: the annihilation of Israels the world's only Jewish state. But
Speaker 9: there is no place on any campus in America, any
Speaker 9: place in America, for anti Semitism or hate speech or
Speaker 9: threats of violence of any kind.
Speaker 4: Okay, so he did obviously mention the hostages there.
Speaker 6: But Ryan, we also heard from house speak Mike Johnson,
Speaker 6: let's roll clips of let's throw this clip of Mike Johnson.
Speaker 10: German universities like those at Strausburg were at the heart
Speaker 10: of renaissance and intellectual life, but it was at those
Speaker 10: same elite centers of learning where Jewish faculty and students
Speaker 10: were suddenly expelled, where anti Jewish courses were introduced, and
Speaker 10: where professors performed horrific pseudo science experiments on Jewish people
Speaker 10: brought from nearby concentration camps. We remember what happened then,
Speaker 10: and now today we are witnessing American universities quickly becoming
Speaker 10: hostile places for Jewish students and faculty. The very campuses
Speaker 10: which were once the envy of the International Academy have
Speaker 10: succumbed to an anti Semitic virus. Students who were known
Speaker 10: for producing academic papers are now known for stabbing their
Speaker 10: Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags and with
Speaker 10: our survivors before us. If you close your eyes and
Speaker 10: the quietness of your own heart, you can almost hear
Speaker 10: the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers. You could
Speaker 10: see fathers being executed at point blank in the ghettos.
Speaker 10: You can feel a brother's hand slipping out of his sisters,
Speaker 10: as men in uniforms separate them into lines, and they
Speaker 10: can only mouth to one another everything will be okay,
Speaker 10: hoping that it would be. You can hear screams coming
Speaker 10: from the gas chambers, and it's in these troubling times
Speaker 10: we must look to this audience, to the survivors of
Speaker 10: the Holocaust and their descendants to help us remember and
Speaker 10: to bear witness. Several weeks ago, I am very proud
Speaker 10: to report to you that the United States Congress overwhelmingly
Speaker 10: passed security assistance to Israel.
Speaker 6: All right, So, meanwhile, Code Pink caught up with a
Speaker 6: Republican representative, Brian Mast in the halls of It looks
Speaker 6: like it was one of the house buildings. Interestingly enough,
Speaker 6: Code Pink and Brian Mass both tweeted this video. We
Speaker 6: should mention that President Biden and Mike Johnson were speaking
Speaker 6: at the same Holocaust remembrance event in those last two clips.
Speaker 6: But let's roll media Benjamin and Brian Mass here.
Speaker 8: Now that Hamas has agreed to a ceasfire.
Speaker 11: I think the Reults should go in there to kick
Speaker 11: the ship out, just absolutely destroy them, their infrastructure level,
Speaker 11: anything that they touched.
Speaker 12: Is there enough?
Speaker 8: Congressman, the world is calling for a ceasefire. He used
Speaker 8: to say a Mass' we'll agree to a ceasefire. Hamas
Speaker 8: had just agreed. It was a proposal cut forward by Egypt. Cutter.
Speaker 8: You know CIA director William Burns has been there negotiating.
Speaker 11: Oh, if there's an American or somebody else be in help,
Speaker 11: there should be every expectation that Americans women killed them
Speaker 11: as well.
Speaker 4: There's an American being helped, we should go kill the
Speaker 4: people that are Why are you so hateful? It's not hateful.
Speaker 3: It is because my people are Palestinian. You're killing my
Speaker 3: people with our tax dollars.
Speaker 4: And you saying that everything.
Speaker 11: Should associated themselves are terrorists. They shouldn't vote terrorists into office.
Speaker 4: Israel is the terrorist, israel Is, the.
Speaker 13: Terrorists lions almost please say to you every single times,
Speaker 13: but people are children, They're the ones that are wearying
Speaker 13: the RUNA.
Speaker 3: Say that's very clearly. I literally don't believe a word.
Speaker 8: That you say.
Speaker 5: I think what you see there is the narrow spectrum
Speaker 5: of political opinion within the power center here in the
Speaker 5: United States, from from Biden to Johnson to mast not
Speaker 5: a whole lot of different differences between them, but not
Speaker 5: a whole lot of uh daylight, and we can we
Speaker 5: can go over each of them. But did Mike Johnson
Speaker 5: basically compare campus protesters to Nazis? Like that's that was?
Speaker 5: Like you you walk around these campuses and you can
Speaker 5: hear the screams from the gas chambers.
Speaker 6: If it wasn't if it wasn't direct, it was certainly
Speaker 6: getting close to it. And I actually agree with you
Speaker 6: about the narrow spectrum of opinion, because, first of all,
Speaker 6: Mike Johnson repeated the I stabbing claim the flag.
Speaker 4: Did you hear mention that? Well?
Speaker 6: What I find interesting about that is you have Republican
Speaker 6: speech writers the highest, the upper echelon of their career,
Speaker 6: and they're clearly not even listening because you wouldn't want
Speaker 6: to embarrass your boss by putting that in a speech
Speaker 6: or something that's been putting that in this speech. Surely
Speaker 6: you could find another example. In fact, we've talked here,
Speaker 6: We even talked with a student about some of the
Speaker 6: legitimate examples that are problematic. You can find something, but
Speaker 6: I think it just speaks to how uninterested in dissent
Speaker 6: on this they are, how uninterested they are and looking
Speaker 6: at it through any lens of good faith, rather than
Speaker 6: just dismissing everyone as Nazis, as anti semites, et cetera.
Speaker 6: And we can talk about this in the Tech Talk book.
Speaker 6: I know that we're going to, but this is one
Speaker 6: of the I think biggest problems on the right. But
Speaker 6: it's not just on the right, it's sort of the
Speaker 6: center left to this pro Israel center left that is
Speaker 6: now dismissing a lot of you know, very deeply held
Speaker 6: sentiments among gen Z as bigotry when it's it's something
Speaker 6: different for many of them. That's not to say there
Speaker 6: isn't any legitimate bigotry, of course there is, but to
Speaker 6: dismiss all of it, to paint it with a broad
Speaker 6: brush as bigoted, that's actually reflective. I think of a
Speaker 6: deep problem for the right and the pro Israel center.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and Biden who continues to attack campus protesters as
Speaker 5: just filled with anti Semitism, like refuses to acknowledge that
Speaker 5: they may have genuine concerns with what they're seeing.
Speaker 3: On Fold and Rafa.
Speaker 5: You know, he talked about babies killed on October seventh.
Speaker 5: October seventh was a day of deep trauma. Nearly seven
Speaker 5: hundred civilians you know, were killed, just horrifying, you know,
Speaker 5: day from start to finish. There were three babies between
Speaker 5: the ages of zero and three who were killed on
Speaker 5: October seventh, three too many than should have been killed.
Speaker 5: Last night in Rafa. I can read this from doctor
Speaker 5: Mustafa L. Marcy el Masri. He says, I am utterly
Speaker 5: heartbroken to announce the tragic loss of my dear colleague,
Speaker 5: a devoted psychologist and psychotherapist, along with her four children
Speaker 5: in an Israeli airstrike on their home at dawn yesterday,
Speaker 5: more children than he described there. So the President of
Speaker 5: the United States is not going to talk about the
Speaker 5: four children who were killed last night in Rafa. He's
Speaker 5: not going to talk about it the day after it happened.
Speaker 5: He's not going to talk about it six or seven
Speaker 5: months later. The gap between his willingness to express his horror,
Speaker 5: legitimate horror over what happened on October seventh, and his
Speaker 5: refusal to acknowledge any of the horror that is being
Speaker 5: visited upon Palestinians on a daily basis. It strikes people
Speaker 5: as just deeply immoral. And then to have him also
Speaker 5: lecture the protesters and tell them that they are in
Speaker 5: fact simply driven by anti Semitism.
Speaker 3: It's just beyond the pale. You know.
Speaker 6: It's interesting that I keep going back to us that.
Speaker 6: Brian mast also tweeted the video that code painting.
Speaker 3: Oh he loved it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so Brian Mass.
Speaker 6: By the way, if you weren't level everything they touch,
Speaker 6: if you weren't watching it, you're not familiar with Brian Mast.
Speaker 6: He lost both of his legs in AFGHANISTANUS I think
Speaker 6: he was in kandahart clearing IDs in twenty ten, and
Speaker 6: he then tweeting the.
Speaker 4: Video to me. Ryan.
Speaker 6: It reminds me a lot of the sentiments around the
Speaker 6: hard hat riot. Remember in nineteen seventy you have all
Speaker 6: those construction workers in New York City, like the blue collar,
Speaker 6: proud Nixon construction workers, just absolutely unloading on people associated
Speaker 6: I think it was with student strikes back in nineteen
Speaker 6: seventy and that dynamic. You can just see it becoming
Speaker 6: just blossoming right now in American politics. It's not in
Speaker 6: nineteen sixty eight rhyme, but it's close enough to nineteen
Speaker 6: sixty eight, especially with the Chicago convention approaching and lots
Speaker 6: and lots of protests planned that you just have this
Speaker 6: Joe Biden, for instance, going after the campus protesters. You
Speaker 6: have this kind of cultural dynamic where he doesn't want
Speaker 6: to be seen as being on the side of disruptors,
Speaker 6: being on the side of sort of the far left
Speaker 6: in an election year, and the politics of this are
Speaker 6: pretty fascinating in and of itself when you think about
Speaker 6: what's going on. You know, the image of the custodian
Speaker 6: at Columbia getting pinned against the wall by a protester,
Speaker 6: and the Free Press has had more articles with a
Speaker 6: couple of different custodians that have come out in the
Speaker 6: last week. It is an interesting dynamic that's being set up,
Speaker 6: and I think the politics of that are Brian, what
Speaker 6: Biden is responding to, what Brian mass is responding to,
Speaker 6: what Mike Johnson is responding to. There's something there. But again,
Speaker 6: I think it's a much bigger problem to dismiss everyone
Speaker 6: as big when some of these really deeply held opinions
Speaker 6: are coming from a place that if you dismiss it,
Speaker 6: you're never going to persuade people away from Aria.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because it just comes back around the Biden administration
Speaker 5: and withholding three thousand, five hundred bombs from Israel will
Speaker 5: get attacked as being anti Semitic for being insufficiently supportive
Speaker 5: of Israel, and those are the terms of the debate
Speaker 5: that Biden himself is established, and he would the more
Speaker 5: that he becomes critical of Israel's operation in Rafa and
Speaker 5: in general, which he's going to have to do because
Speaker 5: he has set himself up, because he has publicly said
Speaker 5: so many times that he is opposed to an invasion
Speaker 5: of Raffa, which at Yahoo seems intent on carrying out. Anyway,
Speaker 5: he's going to speak out against it, and then his
Speaker 5: own words we used against him, and he will be
Speaker 5: told that he's anti Semitic, and because he's insufficiently supportive
Speaker 5: of Israel's right to quote unquote defend himself.
Speaker 6: So and by the way, she mentioned the hardhet right
Speaker 6: was in the wake of Kent State, so very on
Speaker 6: the nose. Actually, looking back on that, you might think,
Speaker 6: why would anyone want to be affiliated with people, you know,
Speaker 6: getting letting themselves loose on students who were protesting after
Speaker 6: Kent State. I think this is a very similar dynamic
Speaker 6: playing out exactly right now. You say, these students are
Speaker 6: just they genuinely are opposing a mascre for students, for
Speaker 6: if there are other fellow students. These students are, you know,
Speaker 6: in some cases very genuinely protesting what they see is
Speaker 6: a genocide, in many cases very genuinely protesting that why
Speaker 6: would you want to be affiliated with the crackdown? And
Speaker 6: I mean, I think there are pretty obvious political reasons
Speaker 6: that we're going to see either Joe Biden continue to
Speaker 6: distance himself from that, but also Republicans embrace the crackdown
Speaker 6: run on the crackdown.
Speaker 5: I think that the difference will be that there's always,
Speaker 5: there is always a bellicost nationalist element of the working class,
Speaker 5: and that's and that's what Nixon, you know, was channeling
Speaker 5: at the time, and that's what was behind that kind
Speaker 5: of hard hat riot. Currently there's a Democrat in the
Speaker 5: White House, and it's hard to identify the nationalist impulse
Speaker 5: right here. It's not like the kids aren't even protesting
Speaker 5: an American war. Like the kids are protesting an American
Speaker 5: fueled and funded and armed war. And so I think
Speaker 5: that the nationalist impulses that do exist in some elements
Speaker 5: with the working class will be blunted by the fact
Speaker 5: that why are they going to stand up for a
Speaker 5: foreign country? Like standing up for the stars and stripes, Okay,
Speaker 5: one thing, standing up for a foreign country's right to
Speaker 5: wage this war with our money harder to I think,
Speaker 5: get regular people to rally around.
Speaker 6: And just one final point because again these you know,
Speaker 6: the rhymes of history here are pretty strong because the
Speaker 6: union representing the custodians has actually been putting the screws
Speaker 6: to Columbia over letting. They're creating an unsafe situation for
Speaker 6: their employees. Union later, after the hard hat riots said
Speaker 6: the union's had nothing to do with it.
Speaker 4: The men acted on their own.
Speaker 6: They did it because they were fed up with violence
Speaker 6: by anti war demonstrators, those who spat at the American
Speaker 6: flag and desecrated it. And again this lumping together of
Speaker 6: legitimate violent protesters that we see today with the actual
Speaker 6: peaceful practitioners of civil disobedience, that is a problem that
Speaker 6: it's not going to get better if you don't deal
Speaker 6: with it by lumping everyone together as a bigot.
Speaker 4: Right now, that's I think, in the long.
Speaker 6: Term, a serious issue for the right and the sort
Speaker 6: of pro Israel center. But even just like the pro
Speaker 6: Western center, you can't if you just continue toss people
Speaker 6: simply as bigots rather than people with a deeply held,
Speaker 6: vastly different worldview, it will not pan out well in
Speaker 6: the long term.
Speaker 5: And one thing that we skipped over, but it's worth
Speaker 5: just keeping an eye on and Powrets reported that it
Speaker 5: has agreed to interesting language allow basically an American company
Speaker 5: to occupy the row of port. At the State Department
Speaker 5: briefing yesterday, a reporter asked the spokesperson Miller about this
Speaker 5: report and he said they had nothing to add to it.
Speaker 5: Was not familiar with what, you know, Howrettes is talking
Speaker 5: about here, But it is interesting that this is being
Speaker 5: floated through Harets that Israel might attempt to maintain kind
Speaker 5: of indefinite control of the Rafa border crossing by outsourcing
Speaker 5: operation of it to an American mercenary company.
Speaker 3: Just just a strange development to.
Speaker 5: Keep an eye on, especially as the US, you know,
Speaker 5: as is building a port outside Gaza as well, amid
Speaker 5: all of the fears that the occupation that is underway
Speaker 5: is not going anywhere like that, they're just going to
Speaker 5: try to lock this area down.
Speaker 6: So meanwhile, two huge development stateside. Because former President Donald Trump,
Speaker 6: the Republican nominee for president, continues to be in court
Speaker 6: in the hush money trial. He was face to face
Speaker 6: with the porn starring Core yesterday. But at the same time,
Speaker 6: we're going to get to this in just one moment.
Speaker 6: One of his biggest trials. A classified document case was
Speaker 6: indefinitely postponed by Eileen Cannon yesterday. So let's start first
Speaker 6: in New York where Stormy Daniels, who is alleged to
Speaker 6: have had an affair with Donald Trump in two thousand
Speaker 6: and six in Lake Tahoe.
Speaker 4: Looks like that affair likely happened. I don't know that
Speaker 4: we need the allegedly, but.
Speaker 6: But that is of course part of the case, which
Speaker 6: is why she was testifying on behalf of the prosecution.
Speaker 6: So we can go ahead and put the first element
Speaker 6: up here. We're going to roll a clip. This is
Speaker 6: a clip from CNN of people just talking about what
Speaker 6: was happening in the courtroom yesterday.
Speaker 14: One thing that I've been sort of noticing as this
Speaker 14: has gone on is that there have been a couple
Speaker 14: times where she seems to be cracking a joke trying
Speaker 14: to get a reaction from the jury, and our reporters
Speaker 14: in the room have noted that the jury hasn't seemed
Speaker 14: to respond. I mean, what do you make of that.
Speaker 1: Humor is risky in the courtroom, especially if you go
Speaker 1: in with lines like it looks like Stormy. If something
Speaker 1: happens spontaneously if an easel falls over, people will laugh.
Speaker 1: They're human, but it's never going to work if you
Speaker 1: go in there like I'm going to amuse the jury.
Speaker 1: I'm going to sort of say this clever thing.
Speaker 6: So as Jake Tapper Casey Hunton, I think Eli Hoenig,
Speaker 6: a CNN senior legal analyst, talking about what was happening
Speaker 6: in the courtroom yesterday, and actually it was a pretty
Speaker 6: interesting scene in the courtroom yesterday. The judge at one
Speaker 6: point actually admonished Donald Trump for cursing. And this is
Speaker 6: a judge, one.
Speaker 5: Merchant cursing about like in response to probably just saying bs,
Speaker 5: probably because there was some reporting that people could audibly
Speaker 5: hear him saying BS.
Speaker 6: And that's right, and that's what the judge again, one
Speaker 6: merchant was saying. You know, I think he said something
Speaker 6: like I don't want you, know, you to continue, like
Speaker 6: I don't want you to embarrass yourself. Basically a patronizing
Speaker 6: yeah approach from the judge. But he said something like,
Speaker 6: you're audibly cussing. And Stormy Daniels meanwhile was regaling the jury,
Speaker 6: or as Casey hunt was kind of describing their attempting
Speaker 6: to regale the jury in very colorful terms about what
Speaker 6: happened allegedly in two thousand and six, going into intimate details,
Speaker 6: quite literally intimate details about all that. The judge actually
Speaker 6: cut her off at one point. CNN's analysis said that
Speaker 6: it seemed like the prosecution was trying to focus Stormy
Speaker 6: Daniels on this now substantively. An interesting part of her
Speaker 6: testimony is that she said her publicists had been trying
Speaker 6: to sell a story about the affair around the time
Speaker 6: of the twenty sixteen election, but didn't.
Speaker 4: Really get any.
Speaker 6: Interest until after the Access Hollywood tape came out, at
Speaker 6: which point they were able to sell it to what
Speaker 6: Ami I think is the formal company that was the
Speaker 6: David Packer and David Packer who has already testified as
Speaker 6: well the catch and kill attempt, and that's what this
Speaker 6: hush money trial is about, that there was a hush
Speaker 6: money arrangement, catch and kill arrangement with this one hundred
Speaker 6: and thirty thousand dollars payment to Stormy Daniels over what happened.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 6: She is going to be back in court on Thursday.
Speaker 6: The judge seemed to be pretty displeased with how everything proceeded,
Speaker 6: and I think at one point said, of these details
Speaker 6: needn't have been in court. The point of Stormy Daniels
Speaker 6: the prosecution getting Stormy Daniels to talk about in detail.
Speaker 6: You know, she talked about spanking Trump with a magazine.
Speaker 6: She talked in very, very great detail about what she
Speaker 6: says happened that night. The point is obviously to establish
Speaker 6: that it was something that was real. Thus, here's the
Speaker 6: incentive for the hush money payment.
Speaker 4: You know, if it.
Speaker 6: Wasn't a real, gripping story, why would Donald Trump pay
Speaker 6: this money? Now Trump would and will obviously argue that
Speaker 6: he paid the money because you know, he's trying to
Speaker 6: silence somebody who's spreading a vicious lie about his marriage.
Speaker 6: That's going to be the argument. That has been the argument.
Speaker 6: But Ryan, that was just quite a scene in the
Speaker 6: middle of an election.
Speaker 3: It's yes, and it's just wild and right.
Speaker 5: Like you said, Eileen Cannon, who was Trump appointed as
Speaker 5: bad as seems about as Trump friendly a a judge
Speaker 5: as you could possibly get, just basically said never mind
Speaker 5: about this trial.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is too well.
Speaker 5: There be and we got to do all this discovery
Speaker 5: and there's a lot of work to do, and so
Speaker 5: we're just gonna punt this and we'll get back to
Speaker 5: you about when we're gonna when we're gonna have this
Speaker 5: the one that he seemed that is moving the fastest
Speaker 5: and that he seems to be the most obviously, I
Speaker 5: mean a bunch of them. He's kind of obviously guilty
Speaker 5: of everybody gets their band court.
Speaker 3: But come on, like, uh.
Speaker 6: Well, whether he's legally guilty or like ethically guilty.
Speaker 3: Is exactly like did he do this thing?
Speaker 5: Like did he have an affair with Stormy Daniels and
Speaker 5: then direct hush money payments to silence it in the
Speaker 5: middle of the campaign?
Speaker 3: Yeah, like he did that?
Speaker 6: Is it an illegal campaign expense? That's honestly a much
Speaker 6: tougher question.
Speaker 3: Right, because it's this, it's this. They have to prove that,
Speaker 3: you know, he did that.
Speaker 5: He did it, you know, for the campaign reason, and
Speaker 5: not because he just was embarrassed.
Speaker 4: Only for the campaign reason. It can't be for anything.
Speaker 3: How do you get inside his head?
Speaker 4: Like, does anyone want to get inside his head?
Speaker 3: What's going on in there?
Speaker 5: And so, yeah, he did the thing, but also so
Speaker 5: it's the least he's in the least peril. Yeah, Like
Speaker 5: it's not the only way to me that I can
Speaker 5: see him going to jail as a result of this
Speaker 5: Stormy Daniels trial is is through contempt conviction, which almost
Speaker 5: feels like.
Speaker 4: He wants to Yeah, and he could go to jail.
Speaker 3: Judge that throw him in Rikers for a day or
Speaker 3: two and he could have it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I agree with that.
Speaker 6: I completely agree with that, because he might see that
Speaker 6: as something that makes it even ratchets up the stakes
Speaker 6: even higher for anyone else to throw him in prison,
Speaker 6: if you know, you sort of test the country's reaction
Speaker 6: to a former president actually being thrown in Rikers. And
Speaker 6: it could just be for a lunch hour, it could
Speaker 6: be for a day or two in the contempt for
Speaker 6: him not listening to the instructions of the judge not
Speaker 6: too you know, yesterday I think he came out of
Speaker 6: court and said something very vague, like any honest reporter
Speaker 6: would say that was a.
Speaker 4: Crazy day in court, something like that.
Speaker 6: But if he keeps pushing this judge who Trump is
Speaker 6: probably eager to push because again, his daughter is it
Speaker 6: works for a public relations firm in Chicago who's like
Speaker 6: top client is Adam Schiff.
Speaker 4: You know, it's at they.
Speaker 3: Found somebody with liberal family in New York.
Speaker 6: Yes, yes, but I mean you can see how Trump
Speaker 6: would seize on that, and you know, it's I kind
Speaker 6: of agree with you that he's intentionally pushing this potentially
Speaker 6: to the brink of going to Jill.
Speaker 4: He's He's not far from it at this point at all.
Speaker 4: And even in.
Speaker 6: This case, you've had The New York Times publishing lawyers
Speaker 6: on the left, progressive attorneys saying that the Brag case
Speaker 6: is weak. So does Donald Trump want to push the
Speaker 6: Brag case since it's first here front and center to
Speaker 6: the brank, get thrown in jail and then sort of
Speaker 6: see what happens in the rest of the cases. Dare
Speaker 6: everyone else to, you know, push the country in that direction.
Speaker 6: I actually think that could possibly be part of the strategy.
Speaker 5: And Trump going to wrikers would not only be amazing
Speaker 5: for the drama, but it would also have potentially long
Speaker 5: lasting implications for his approach to criminal justice reform.
Speaker 3: Every basically every.
Speaker 5: Politician who ever goes to jail comes out changed as
Speaker 5: they see the criminal justice system plago yah let from
Speaker 5: left to right because experiencing it firsthand, experiencing the incredible
Speaker 5: dehumanization that goes on in our criminal justice system and
Speaker 5: experiencing it with other humans who you come to recognize
Speaker 5: as just.
Speaker 3: People you know who've had it, who've had a who
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 5: Some of them did horrible things, others didn't and just
Speaker 5: got caught up in the system, but they're all all humans.
Speaker 5: And then to have yourself lumped in with them in
Speaker 5: this dehumanizing system, it changes people and it changes the
Speaker 5: way they think about the criminal justice system. Now, Trump
Speaker 5: is not a normal human, so it might be impossible
Speaker 5: for him to absorb the same kinds of lessons that
Speaker 5: other people do, given whatever weird kind of psychology goes
Speaker 5: on inside that that nogat of his.
Speaker 3: But it's it's possible.
Speaker 4: Anything is possible is possible.
Speaker 6: So just a couple of quick bits about the Aileen
Speaker 6: Cannon case.
Speaker 4: So, I don't know, like the a lot.
Speaker 6: Of people on the left seeing this is a an
Speaker 6: in sort of center analyst a big win for the Trump.
Speaker 3: This is the documents one where he like classified document
Speaker 3: let's all the boxes of documents and stuff, right.
Speaker 4: Mar Lago classified documents.
Speaker 6: And you know, again a lot of people saying there's
Speaker 6: a win for Donald Trump's a straight win for Donald Trump. Well,
Speaker 6: maybe Team Trump thinks that, and maybe you know anti
Speaker 6: Trump people think that, but this could push the case
Speaker 6: to August and September. So that's where the Trump people
Speaker 6: right now want the case to land. The prosecution is
Speaker 6: pushing for a July trial start date to begin. There's
Speaker 6: going to be a hearing on June twenty fourth, and
Speaker 6: this is what looks like a win for Team Trump.
Speaker 6: They wanted to sort of have a conversation or have
Speaker 6: a hearing about Biden records, essentially Trump's request for Biden's records,
Speaker 6: and Aileen can't actually agree to that on June twenty fourth,
Speaker 6: So that's something coming up fairly quickly, just a little
Speaker 6: bit over a month away. But the May trial date
Speaker 6: now will be pushed either to midsummer if the prosecution
Speaker 6: gets its way, or late summer early fall, within months
Speaker 6: of the election. And whether or not that's good for
Speaker 6: Donald Trump, I actually think is an open question.
Speaker 4: Aileen can and did.
Speaker 6: I think she makes it an interesting point when she
Speaker 6: says that this is this case presents some serious novel
Speaker 6: is the word she used, challenges with classified information, No
Speaker 6: question about that. So it doesn't seem like an insane
Speaker 6: decision to me. But pushing it into late summer early fall.
Speaker 6: I don't know that that's even helpful for Donald Trump,
Speaker 6: to be honest.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting point, yeah, because.
Speaker 6: That's when things are going to be really heating up.
Speaker 6: A lot of the other legal dates are coming up
Speaker 6: around that time period too, and that's when he has
Speaker 6: to be campaigning. You know, from just pure political strategy perspective,
Speaker 6: that's when you would want to be. It's more important
Speaker 6: to campaigning then than it is in May.
Speaker 5: So who knows, Yeah, and what about and so then
Speaker 5: the Georgia case is just petering along because of the prosecution,
Speaker 5: and then Jack Smith, what happened to that guy? Still
Speaker 5: out there like he had a case? What happened his case?
Speaker 3: I mean, it's is that case coming?
Speaker 4: It's still out there.
Speaker 6: The full timeline is like almost impossible to keep track of,
Speaker 6: and because honestly, precisely, because it keeps changing all the time.
Speaker 6: I'm looking at it right now. If you get into
Speaker 6: the fall, So if you push, for example, this one
Speaker 6: into the fall, CNN has a crazy calendar here. So
Speaker 6: Fulton County prosecutors proposed trial data is August fifth, which
Speaker 6: is literally like three weeks after the Republican convention right
Speaker 6: ahead of a week.
Speaker 3: It's about a week before the dem convention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, about a week before the den convention.
Speaker 5: So his trial would still probably be going on during
Speaker 5: the Democratic convention. So you'd have a split screen of
Speaker 5: Democrats giving their speeches in Chicago, protests roiling Chicago, right,
Speaker 5: and Trump getting prosecuted.
Speaker 15: Right.
Speaker 6: And remember also that's that would be if Trump's team
Speaker 6: gets their way, then he can he would be pivoting
Speaker 6: right before Labor Day or potentially right after Labor Day
Speaker 6: from that trial back to the Eileen Canon trial. I mean,
Speaker 6: it's just really crazy, this timeline into the fall, especially
Speaker 6: if this one changes. And this, by the way, we
Speaker 6: should mention is what a lot of legal analysty is
Speaker 6: by far the most serious case.
Speaker 3: Against Donald Trump, the Jack Smith one.
Speaker 4: The classified documents case.
Speaker 5: I mean, it does seem like a slam dunk. But
Speaker 5: also you're going to you can lock him up for that.
Speaker 5: I mean, they certainly have locked up plenty of whistleblowers
Speaker 5: for it.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Actually, it's just impossible for me to believe they'd lock
Speaker 5: up anybody with any power for that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean I don't, I'm I mean, I don't
Speaker 6: disagree with that. But whether the legal case is probably
Speaker 6: the best for the prosecution, I guess because they've had
Speaker 6: some success with the Espionage Act.
Speaker 4: Over the years, which is of course what Trump has
Speaker 4: tried with.
Speaker 5: And also he so flagrantly did it, you know, and
Speaker 5: he's like telling like people, he's like, there's audio of
Speaker 5: him telling people this is classified. You can't shouldn't have this.
Speaker 5: It's like like just hilariously like guilty stuff.
Speaker 6: Billionaire white collar criminals going to rikers is typically delicious.
Speaker 6: But if it's going to be Donald Trump, you know,
Speaker 6: I would really like to see Hillary Clinton too.
Speaker 4: If we're going to do this, let's do it.
Speaker 3: Lock them all up, let's do it.
Speaker 4: Let's yeah, lock them all up.
Speaker 3: Put bars around this whole city.
Speaker 6: Yeah, probably probably fair. All right, let's move on to TikTok,
Speaker 6: because Ryan, you actually have some original reporting here. This
Speaker 6: this is unraveling in a crazy direction, and you have
Speaker 6: some audio actually.
Speaker 5: Yes and so, and it backs up this this crazy
Speaker 5: exchange that between Secretary Saint Anthony Blincoln and Mitt Romney
Speaker 5: over the weekend, in which apparently they were they forgot
Speaker 5: that they were speaking in front of a live audience
Speaker 5: and were being recorded and just got super honest. So
Speaker 5: now that the audio that we have, you could to
Speaker 5: excuse them a little bit because they did not think
Speaker 5: that they were not in front of a kind of
Speaker 5: public audience. But somebody leaked it to us. We'll play
Speaker 5: that in a moment. But first, here's Romney and Blincoln.
Speaker 16: Why has the PR been so awful? I know that's
Speaker 16: not your area of expertise, but you have to have
Speaker 16: some thoughts on that. Which is I mean, as you said,
Speaker 16: why has a mass disappeared in terms of public perception?
Speaker 16: An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire,
Speaker 16: and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It's like,
Speaker 16: why aren't not screaming about Amas except the ceasefire? Bring
Speaker 16: over the hostages? It said, It's all the other way around.
Speaker 16: Typically the Israelis are good at PR. What's happened here?
Speaker 2: How have they?
Speaker 16: How have they and we been so ineffective communicating the
Speaker 16: reality is there and our point of view?
Speaker 15: How this narrative has evolved. Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 15: I don't have a good answer to that. There one
Speaker 15: can speculate about what some of the causes might be.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 15: I can tell you this. We were talking about this a
Speaker 15: little bit over dinner with Cindy. I think in my
Speaker 15: time in Washington, which is a little bit over thirty years,
Speaker 15: the single biggest change has been in the information environment.
Speaker 15: And when I started out in the early nineteen nineties,
Speaker 15: everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning,
Speaker 15: you opened the door of your apartment, your house, you
Speaker 15: picked up a hard copy of the New York Times,
Speaker 15: to Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and then if
Speaker 15: you had a television in your office, you turned it
Speaker 15: on at six thirty or seven o'clock and watched the
Speaker 15: National Network News.
Speaker 3: Now, of course we are on.
Speaker 15: An intervenience feed of information with new Impulse's inputs every millisecond,
Speaker 15: And of course the way this has played out on
Speaker 15: social media has dominated the narrative. And have a social
Speaker 15: media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost
Speaker 15: and the emotion the impact of images dominates. And we
Speaker 15: can't discount that, but I think it also has a
Speaker 15: very very very challenging effect on.
Speaker 12: The narrative.
Speaker 16: A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there
Speaker 16: was such overwhelming support for US to shut down potentially
Speaker 16: TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look
Speaker 16: at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions
Speaker 16: of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly
Speaker 16: so among TikTok broadcasts. So I know that's a real
Speaker 16: interest and the President will get the chance to make
Speaker 16: action in that regard.
Speaker 5: Now, normally, after a clip like that, we'd like to
Speaker 5: help youeople read between the lines, because sometimes politicians speak
Speaker 5: in code not there. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they tell
Speaker 5: you exactly what they're thinking. Another case is Representative Mike Lawler,
Speaker 5: who was recently in a private meeting with the organization
Speaker 5: No Labels, which kind of a pro corporate group that
Speaker 5: tried to recruit Joe Manchin and a bunch of other
Speaker 5: people to run for president. He met with some No
Speaker 5: Labels donors in a private zoom with Josh Gottheimer, who
Speaker 5: is another of leader of No Labels. And this was
Speaker 5: what Mike Lawler had to say about his role and
Speaker 5: Congress's role in the TikTok ben. This audio was obtained
Speaker 5: by the Intercept. My colleagues of Kale Leasy and prim
Speaker 5: Tucker wrote about this wrote wrote about his comments, also
Speaker 5: calling for the FBI to like investigate all campus protests.
Speaker 5: But he also spoke about TikTok, which they mentioned. But
Speaker 5: I wanted to play this clip here.
Speaker 12: As Josh pointed out, when you have amas Iran China
Speaker 12: endorsing these protests, it speaks volume to the absurdity of them.
Speaker 12: It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill
Speaker 12: in the Foreign Supplemental Aid package, because you're seeing how
Speaker 12: these kids are being manipulated by certain groups for entities
Speaker 12: or countries to foemen hate on their behalf and really
Speaker 12: create a hostile environment near.
Speaker 9: In the US.
Speaker 5: So all of this is relevant because as we can
Speaker 5: put up this third element, TikTok has now sued as
Speaker 5: was expected to overturn the law on constitutional grounds. First
Speaker 5: Amendment is very clear. It says Congress shall make no
Speaker 5: law bridging the freedom of the press. Shall make no law.
Speaker 5: I guess a bunch of Bill of rights are confusing
Speaker 5: and vaguely written. What does it mean that a well
Speaker 5: regulated militia allows you to keep in bare arms like
Speaker 5: you know, even arguing about that for hundreds of years.
Speaker 5: Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of the
Speaker 5: press is pretty straightforward and culturally. The First Amendment has
Speaker 5: been upheld by kind of the American people who deeply
Speaker 5: believe in this idea that Congress shall make no law
Speaker 5: bridging the freedom of press. So, according to Mitt Romney
Speaker 5: and Mike Lawler, Congress made law to abridge the freedom
Speaker 5: of the press.
Speaker 6: Well, what's interesting about that is they seem to be
Speaker 6: talking about TikTok as though it is. And Blinken is
Speaker 6: especially interesting in this context. He's comparing TikTok directly to
Speaker 6: newspapers and as he says, news networks. Now, I would
Speaker 6: actually disagree with that, And I think Section two thirty
Speaker 6: is one of the big questions here about what constitutes
Speaker 6: a publication, what constitutes a news outlet. If you're just
Speaker 6: a platform, do you have the same roles and responsibilities
Speaker 6: as a newspaper. I think that's genuinely a major question,
Speaker 6: and I think it's heavily implicated in this conversation about
Speaker 6: the First Amendment and TikTok. The government is going to argue,
Speaker 6: for example, that you can say whatever you would say
Speaker 6: on TikTok. Nobody's right to say it. Whatever you were
Speaker 6: going to say on TikTok, nobody's.
Speaker 4: Saying you can't say that. You can just say it
Speaker 4: in another form, just not on this forum.
Speaker 6: But that becomes again a pretty serious discussion about what
Speaker 6: the First Amendment actually means. It is again fascinating as
Speaker 6: what we talked about in the Israel Block and actually
Speaker 6: we've talked about all of this, or we talked about
Speaker 6: this all the time. How avoiding the issue saying everybody
Speaker 6: is either a bigot or they've had their brain poisoned
Speaker 6: by bigots, as you heard Mike Lawler argue.
Speaker 4: In that auditulating the young people, Yes that.
Speaker 6: It's not none of these sentiments are legitimate or part
Speaker 6: of sort of deeper worldviews. That is a huge mistake
Speaker 6: from Republicans and from sort of center pro Israel people
Speaker 6: to just dismiss this either as bigotry or purely manipulation.
Speaker 6: And that's exactly what they're doing. I have like actual
Speaker 6: serious national security concerns about TikTok. I've had that conversation.
Speaker 6: We've had that conversation many times. But to be so
Speaker 6: dismissive is a huge not just a tactical error, but
Speaker 6: an ideological one too.
Speaker 5: And at least Lawler's comment are a little bit less
Speaker 5: reckless than Blincoln's when it and Romney's when it comes
Speaker 5: to kind of a legislative intent perspective in when it
Speaker 5: comes to like giving away the game, because at least
Speaker 5: he's sticking to this idea that actually is Hamas and
Speaker 5: Iran and China that are using the platform to manipulate. However,
Speaker 5: the laws, like the law is specific to like China
Speaker 5: and a couple other countries. What he's really talking about
Speaker 5: the content. What's so clear is that this really is
Speaker 5: content based, Yeah, and that means it's a violation of
Speaker 5: the First Amendment.
Speaker 6: And you may remember when the Osama Bin lad Laden
Speaker 6: letter went viral just a few months ago, and there
Speaker 6: was this panic about how the algorithm may have been
Speaker 6: tweaked by Beijang to get all of these young Americans
Speaker 6: to discover the bin Laden letter and post about how
Speaker 6: it really changed the perception of the US negative direction.
Speaker 6: And I think part of the problem here is that
Speaker 6: is entirely possible and entirely problematic. That should be something
Speaker 6: that legislators are concerned about and they deal with, and
Speaker 6: that is front and center on their minds.
Speaker 4: But there was some.
Speaker 6: Really excellent reporting tracing the arc of virality in that
Speaker 6: particular place, and it looks like it had nothing to
Speaker 6: do with TikTok, tweaking the algorithm, and everything to do
Speaker 6: with organic sentiment among young people who were discovering the
Speaker 6: bin laden letter for the first time and saying, oh,
Speaker 6: my goodness. You know, was it totally naive from my perspective, yes,
Speaker 6: but saying, oh my goodness, this completely radically changed my
Speaker 6: perception of the United States. The evidence that it was
Speaker 6: organic and then maybe it had like a streisand effect
Speaker 6: is yes.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, you know what really happened, I think
Speaker 5: from from watching that whole bin laden letter virality take off.
Speaker 3: Yeshar Ali, Yes, remember this.
Speaker 5: So he's a power Twitter user who identified this phenomenon.
Speaker 4: International amount of mystery on.
Speaker 5: TikTok and he found like three clips of people doing
Speaker 5: this on TikTok, and he brought it over to Twitter, yes,
Speaker 5: and shared it with the boomers on Twitter.
Speaker 3: Yes, And the Boomers had a moral.
Speaker 4: Panic streisand effected it.
Speaker 15: Yes.
Speaker 5: And so then that moral panic is what poured the
Speaker 5: gasoline on a couple of sparks.
Speaker 4: It's a good Washington Post article on this.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So the idea that China did it is kind of
Speaker 5: undercut by the fact that we know who did it. It
Speaker 5: was your shar It's like he's the one that super
Speaker 5: charged it. And I don't think did he respond to that, like,
Speaker 5: I'm not sure. I think he said, well, look, I
Speaker 5: was identifying a real phenomenon. It's not my fault that
Speaker 5: you all panicked and freaked out about it.
Speaker 6: The same thing, though, is true if you look at
Speaker 6: the one thing that people like Lawler will point to
Speaker 6: is the breakdown in posts that are pro Palestine versus
Speaker 6: pro Israel on TikTok. To the extent that we can
Speaker 6: actually break that down, it's dramatically different. You know, more
Speaker 6: pro Palestine posts on TikTok than there are pro Israel
Speaker 6: posts on TikTok, and that is pointed at and said,
Speaker 6: this is evidence of form manipulation. Again, it's entirely possible
Speaker 6: that is true, but there's significant evidence that shows that
Speaker 6: breakdown looks a lot like how young people view the
Speaker 6: breakdown themselves. And there was an interesting poll this week
Speaker 6: that found that the issue is not rated among the
Speaker 6: most important for college students, so they're more likely to
Speaker 6: say the most important issue to them is healthcare and
Speaker 6: education financing and all of that doesn't mean that they
Speaker 6: don't think that the United States and Israel are wrong
Speaker 6: in the conflict, because public opinion polling on that shows
Speaker 6: they do, and that the TikTok breakdown actually matches the
Speaker 6: opinion breakdown better than anything else.
Speaker 3: Right, And it's all relative.
Speaker 5: So for Romney to say, you know, there's more pro
Speaker 5: Palestine stuff on TikTok than there is anywhere else. Two
Speaker 5: things on that people who post all the time about
Speaker 5: Palestine on TikTok will tell you, like, there is still
Speaker 5: significant censorship.
Speaker 3: There's so much censorship.
Speaker 5: On TikTok of pro Palestinian content that people you know
Speaker 5: who were told that, you know, the Chinese must be
Speaker 5: you know, juicing the stats for hamas or like, are
Speaker 5: you crazy, Like you go on here and try to
Speaker 5: post pro Postinian content and see what happens. But it's
Speaker 5: relative to these American companies, right that massively put their
Speaker 5: thumb on the scale. So China kind of just has
Speaker 5: their thumb on the scale against Palestinians less than the
Speaker 5: American and other platforms, which make it, you know, very
Speaker 5: very difficult to push pro Palestinian content through without being
Speaker 5: censored and shadow band and so on. Setting that all aside,
Speaker 5: the way that Blake and Romney frame it is just
Speaker 5: kind of.
Speaker 4: Incredible, just a pr problem.
Speaker 3: How did we just how did we lose the narrative?
Speaker 4: Should have hired Don Draper just appear.
Speaker 5: It's not the thirty four thousand plus killed. It's not
Speaker 5: the more than thirteen fourteen thousand children killed. It's not
Speaker 5: it's not blocking humanitarian aid. It's not deliberately targeting a
Speaker 5: world's central kitchen staffers.
Speaker 3: It's none of that.
Speaker 5: It's the fact that we used to have the New
Speaker 5: York Times, Watch Post and Wall Street Journal and evening news,
Speaker 5: and we could then shape the narrative that was being
Speaker 5: delivered to people. Now they can see for themselves what
Speaker 5: is going on that they then followed that up with therefore,
Speaker 5: that's why we banned that and are trying to go
Speaker 5: back to where we could put things in a bottle.
Speaker 5: Is a moment of just such absolute self unawareness, just
Speaker 5: a word, self awareness.
Speaker 6: Obama pining for like the position that she didn't ping
Speaker 6: was in the reserve of a big this is this
Speaker 6: is what he did Trump agree on, yes, and this
Speaker 6: is blinkin pining for like the days of John Foster
Speaker 6: Dulles where he could just just call Climb magazine, which
Speaker 6: he still can you know, he's he's still but it
Speaker 6: doesn't have the same Yeah, exactly, it doesn't have the
Speaker 6: same power. The last time I say on this is
Speaker 6: it's also people are making the mistake of assuming this
Speaker 6: was the same thing with like the Russian interference that actually,
Speaker 6: like to the extent that it did happen, it was
Speaker 6: those silly viral memes and everything that what China would
Speaker 6: want to do is to strictly advance the Palestinian cause
Speaker 6: in the United States as opposed to destabilized public opinion.
Speaker 6: That's really what Russia was trying to do back in
Speaker 6: twenty sixteen. Was so discord you know, they were of
Speaker 6: the memes. There were some really cheesy, awful pro like
Speaker 6: right memes and some really cheesy awful pro BLM pro
Speaker 6: left memes. So even what their conception of what might
Speaker 6: be happening here is just in this sort of box
Speaker 6: that it's either going to be China wants us all
Speaker 6: to be pro Palestine because China supports the Palestinians. China
Speaker 6: just wants us at each other's throats if anything like
Speaker 6: that looks like the strategy looks like the long term
Speaker 6: strategies to weaken Americans love of America frankly, and to
Speaker 6: sow discord, which is similar to how Russia has approached
Speaker 6: it for decades.
Speaker 5: Too, and how Voice of America approaches it.
Speaker 4: You know, radio free are all of these Yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: not wrong, it's not right.
Speaker 5: We love the so descent also and prop up like
Speaker 5: civil society organizations that profess to have concerns about human
Speaker 5: rights and so.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, now he's doing anything new, No, not at all.
Speaker 4: We will never escape the Cold War.
Speaker 6: Vledi Mcputin's inauguration is happening right now in Russia. I
Speaker 6: don't know if you caught this big news, Ryan, but
Speaker 6: Steven Sagal is there. He was there to support Vitamin
Speaker 6: Lutin as his inauguration unfolded this week.
Speaker 4: It's his fifth term.
Speaker 6: I think by the end of this term he will
Speaker 6: actually have been in power in Russia longer than Stalin
Speaker 6: was so huge news.
Speaker 4: Also, this is the New York Times.
Speaker 6: Just as we were talking, reports a large Russian missile
Speaker 6: and drone assault caused serious damage to several power plants.
Speaker 6: Across Ukraine early Wednesday. According to Ukrainian officials, it's Russia's
Speaker 6: fifth attack, The New York Times says on energy facilities
Speaker 6: just in this last month and half. Part of their campaign,
Speaker 6: as The Times describes it, to cut off electricity to
Speaker 6: the big swaths of Ukraine and to make life harder
Speaker 6: for Ukrainian civilians. Meanwhile, Ukraine is saying that it arrested
Speaker 6: two kernels. We can put the first element here up
Speaker 6: on the screen, two colonels who had taken money from Russia. Allegedly,
Speaker 6: according to Ukrainian prosecutors, charged them with treason, charged one
Speaker 6: of them with a terrorist act, a terrorist act, attempted
Speaker 6: terrorist act. They had allegedly taken drones and ammunition from
Speaker 6: the FSB to assassinate Vladimir Zelenski, President of Ukraine. Obviously
Speaker 6: this is that they had taken money from the FSB,
Speaker 6: So those drones, those ammo money. There were assassination attempts,
Speaker 6: I mean there have been. Zelenski has had a number
Speaker 6: of close calls of course of the war. Sometimes that's just
Speaker 6: from him like going to the front lines, but there
Speaker 6: were also attempts last August and in April. According to
Speaker 6: officials on Zelenski's life. It's some amazing how many brushes
Speaker 6: with death that Selenski's had. Ryan This one is particularly
Speaker 6: interesting given that the allegation here is Russia paid to
Speaker 6: Kernels to assassinate Zolensky, which means that Russia's penetrated.
Speaker 4: The inner circle of Zelenski.
Speaker 6: Also interesting because it means potentially people on the American
Speaker 6: payroll in some indirect way or potentially direct way, depending
Speaker 6: on how you look at our funding, were paid by
Speaker 6: the FSP to assassinate Zolensky.
Speaker 5: And one more reason that, as Trump said to the Israelis,
Speaker 5: is you need to wrap up your war?
Speaker 3: Like, yes, a good reason to wrap up this war.
Speaker 5: Like the American advisors to the Ukrainian forces at this
Speaker 5: point are chiefly and almost solely focused on advising the
Speaker 5: Ukrainians how to hold the territory that they currently have.
Speaker 5: The idea that they are going to be able to
Speaker 5: put together enough of a a manpower and military power
Speaker 5: structure to wage a counter offensive and retake territory is
Speaker 5: no longer taken seriously by American advisors who are basically
Speaker 5: running the strategy for the Ukrainians. So if they have
Speaker 5: acknowledged that, then why keep fighting if it is possible
Speaker 5: to get a deal, Like if peace defends the same
Speaker 5: territory that you currently have, why would you not choose
Speaker 5: that rather than war, which comes at a much higher
Speaker 5: risk of collapsing. Now, a peace deal can collapse. Peace
Speaker 5: deals throughout history eventually always have collapsed, Like we always
Speaker 5: get another war at some point, But the current war
Speaker 5: has significant risks to the Ukrainian front lines and forces
Speaker 5: who could collapse at any point and then could see
Speaker 5: major Russian gains. And now you're negotiating from an even
Speaker 5: weaker position, and you may even have you know, Zelenski assassinated.
Speaker 5: And there's why at this point are we continuing this
Speaker 5: other than the fact that the money was appropriated and
Speaker 5: it's got to be spent.
Speaker 3: Maybe I just answered my own question.
Speaker 6: Well, and the assassination of Zelenski isn't just about Zelensky. Potentially,
Speaker 6: if it were to happen tragically, it would mean complete
Speaker 6: destabilization of the government and already unstable government. There's also
Speaker 6: worth mentioning that the energy attack that Ukrainian officials say
Speaker 6: happened just today while we were taping this comes as
Speaker 6: Ukraine is looking for more air defense, basically the air
Speaker 6: defensive weapons, its ability to protect its energy sources, and
Speaker 6: amid all of that, it's asking I think Spain maybe
Speaker 6: even like a couple of other countries directly for this
Speaker 6: right now, talking about Romania also has been in talks
Speaker 6: about this.
Speaker 4: So I agree with everything you just said. Ryan.
Speaker 6: Here's an interesting quote from Zelenski. He said, today, everyone
Speaker 6: who so this is right as Russia is about to
Speaker 6: commemorate World War two, Ukraine is commemorating World War two.
Speaker 6: Zelenski says, today everyone who remembers World War Two and
Speaker 6: has survived to this day feels a sense of deja vu.
Speaker 6: Russia has brought the terrible past back into the daily lives,
Speaker 6: proving into the daily news, proving with each crime that
Speaker 6: Nazism has revived. Surely Lant Putin is going to also
Speaker 6: invoke Nazism tomorrow from the other side of the conflict.
Speaker 4: Just really ugly, really ugly stuff.
Speaker 5: So Zelenski's saying Putin's a Nazi now, yes, And Mike
Speaker 5: Johnson is saying that the camp's protesters are Nazis.
Speaker 3: There's Nazis everywhere.
Speaker 4: Everyone is a Nazi.
Speaker 3: Nazism, everyone is either Hamas or a Nazi.
Speaker 4: Did you see that?
Speaker 3: Maybe both?
Speaker 4: Did you see Tom Brady?
Speaker 12: Oh?
Speaker 3: Actually there is a whole Hamas or Nazis thing.
Speaker 4: Oh? Absolutely? Did you see the Tom Brady roast?
Speaker 6: No heard Tom Brady he's a Nazi hitler.
Speaker 4: Yeah it was. That was a bit by Tom Sugura
Speaker 4: and Bert Krischner.
Speaker 3: I heard it was good. I gotta go back it is.
Speaker 4: I think you'll like it. I think you'll like it.
Speaker 4: But yeah, everybody's a Nazi. We can't escape the Cold War,
Speaker 4: we can't escape World War two.
Speaker 6: We are perpetually reliving the twentieth century for partisan football game.
Speaker 5: Right, and as crystalin Soccer covered, the UK Foreign minister
Speaker 5: recently said that it's okay for Ukraine to use its
Speaker 5: long range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, and Putin
Speaker 5: responded by saying if they do that that he considers
Speaker 5: the UK a legitimate target, and also launched a tactical
Speaker 5: nuclear weapons scenario planning strategy gaming out which he said
Speaker 5: was in response to this Western provocation. And you have
Speaker 5: to say that he's correct to say that it is
Speaker 5: Western provocation. To shift from it is not okay to
Speaker 5: launch you Western long range missiles into Russia. To say
Speaker 5: actually it is okay to launch like that is an
Speaker 5: escalation and a provocation. Yeah, why at this date, like
Speaker 5: how it almost feels like the West just hates Ukraine
Speaker 5: and is baiting Russia to just overruns it's decrepit front lines.
Speaker 6: Well, it's it's constantly living at the end of World
Speaker 6: War two in the Cold War. I mean, that's where
Speaker 6: people like the and Apple bombs of the West and
Speaker 6: the Tony Blinkns of the West are focused like just
Speaker 6: it's it's only the end of World War two, the
Speaker 6: beginning of the Cold War. Those are the only possible dynamics.
Speaker 6: And that's why NATO needs to expand all the way
Speaker 6: to Ukraine. That's why it needs to you know, bring
Speaker 6: in Finland, and that's why it needs to.
Speaker 4: Move further and further towards Russia. Essentially, is because we're still.
Speaker 6: At the the dawn of the Cold War era after
Speaker 6: World War Two, the stakes are at the exact same
Speaker 6: and in some respect it is true the stakes are
Speaker 6: the same, like nuclear war, same stakes, but we've now
Speaker 6: had one hundred years nearly to learn from.
Speaker 4: Actually, we've had just under one hundred years to learn,
Speaker 4: which is interesting you itself.
Speaker 6: How new the technology is how to navigate these waters,
Speaker 6: and we refuse to learn those lessons, are constantly stuck
Speaker 6: exactly before any of those lessons could have been learned.
Speaker 5: So you wanted to talk about a new phenomenon around
Speaker 5: gen z debt.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so the Wall Street Journal had to report we
Speaker 6: can put this up on the screen because I want
Speaker 6: to juxtapose it with something that went viral just a
Speaker 6: couple of weeks ago. Ryan, I don't know if you
Speaker 6: remember this headline from the Economist. We'll get to it
Speaker 6: in a second, but here's the Wall Street Journal. They
Speaker 6: say gen Z sinks deeper into debt and all a
Speaker 6: little bit from the beginning, bless you. They say young
Speaker 6: Americans are starting out with more credit card debt than
Speaker 6: generations before them. That financial burden can have long lasting effects,
Speaker 6: no kidding. The rising debt load largely reflects a surge
Speaker 6: in prices for food and shelter, food and shelter at
Speaker 6: the start of their careers, coupled with a larger percentage
Speaker 6: of gen Z who graduated with student loans. Now, the
Speaker 6: average credit card balance for twenty two to twenty four
Speaker 6: year olds was two eight hundred and thirty four dollars
Speaker 6: in the last quarter of last year, compared with an
Speaker 6: average inflation adjusted balance of about twenty two hundred dollars
Speaker 6: in the same period in twenty thirteen. That's according to
Speaker 6: TransUnion data from TransUnion.
Speaker 4: Younger people with.
Speaker 6: Higher debt are more delinquent on credit card payments and
Speaker 6: need to rely on family for help if they lose
Speaker 6: their jobs. They economists and financial advisors. They also often
Speaker 6: delay life milestones, including home ownership and marriage, say the economists, Yes, obviously,
Speaker 6: now right, it was up about ten percent, a little bit, yeah,
Speaker 6: ten years, Yeah, about ten percent and ten years.
Speaker 4: They also compare it though with boomers.
Speaker 6: Another new zeala that compared gen Z to boomers recently
Speaker 6: was the Economists, and this one fairly viral on Twitter.
Speaker 6: There were a lot of conversations. It looked like libertarian
Speaker 6: Twitter was just gloating over this. Gen Z is unprecedentedly rich.
Speaker 6: That's the headline from the Economist. Just a couple of
Speaker 6: weeks so. That was published on April sixteenth, and the
Speaker 6: economists wrote gen Z is taking over in the rich world.
Speaker 6: There are at least two hundred and fifty million people
Speaker 6: be towarnt between born between ninety seven and twenty twelve,
Speaker 6: about half renown a job in the average American workplace.
Speaker 6: The number of gen Zers working full time is about
Speaker 6: to surpass the number of full time baby Boomers, those
Speaker 6: born between forty five and sixty four. America now has
Speaker 6: more than six thousand Zoomer chief executives and a thousand
Speaker 6: Zoomer politicians.
Speaker 4: And they're saying that, you know, gen.
Speaker 6: Z's full time employment makes them puts them ahead of
Speaker 6: boomers and millennials. I would assume Ryan, that's mostly due
Speaker 6: to women in the workforce.
Speaker 5: And millennials because of the two thousand and eight financial
Speaker 5: crisis and the massive recession. Because what well, y'all gen
Speaker 5: Z people don't remember is what.
Speaker 3: It was like to have high unemployment.
Speaker 4: And you know, except for COVID, although a lot of
Speaker 4: them were still in.
Speaker 5: School, right and you got and there was a six
Speaker 5: hundred dollars a week, you know, unemployment bonus on top
Speaker 5: of your regular unemployment. So, but the idea of looking
Speaker 5: for a job and being unable to find it, it
Speaker 5: is something that people obviously still experience, but nowhere near
Speaker 5: at the scale that they experienced in the twenty tens,
Speaker 5: and then also in like the late seventies, eighties into
Speaker 5: the early nineties, which is and it's a tragedy that
Speaker 5: there's been this kind of cultural memory holding of the
Speaker 5: pain of unemployment because we have been grappling with the
Speaker 5: pain of inflation instead, and it has made people kind
Speaker 5: of forget how good it is to be able to
Speaker 5: tell your boss to f off and go to another job,
Speaker 5: to tell your boss that you and your coworkers have
Speaker 5: organized the union and there's nothing they can do about
Speaker 5: it except recognize it, and so on.
Speaker 6: So the journal goes on to talk about credit scores.
Speaker 6: So as interest rates have climbed over the past two years,
Speaker 6: those credit scores have taken a hit. The drop was
Speaker 6: most drastic for millennials with credit scores between six sixty
Speaker 6: and seven nineteen, who scores fell by twenty six points.
Speaker 4: Gen Z wasn't far behind.
Speaker 6: The average credit score change for gen Z with credit
Speaker 6: scores above seven twenty fell twenty four points during that
Speaker 6: time period, according to credit Karma.
Speaker 4: Now another thing.
Speaker 6: Forbes wrote about this recently. They said, eugen Z is
Speaker 6: not just doing okay, we're actually the authors a zoomer,
Speaker 6: actually really well off as a whole. In twenty twenty two,
Speaker 6: nearly a third of twenty five year old Americans. We're
Speaker 6: already homeowners, outpacing both millennials and Gen X at the
Speaker 6: same age. Our luxury spending is expected to grow three
Speaker 6: times faster than older generations. So if we do ex
Speaker 6: suppose that luxury spending with credit card debt, that's an
Speaker 6: interesting thing too. It depends on how you're classifying luxury spending, obviously,
Speaker 6: but there's also just this moment of really cheap luxury
Speaker 6: that's accumulated in the wake of you know, China and
Speaker 6: flooding our market with all kinds of different goods, with
Speaker 6: influencer culture and all of that.
Speaker 4: It's just like people spend.
Speaker 6: Because if you can't afford a home, and I think
Speaker 6: that's part of what this is speaking to. I'm curious
Speaker 6: what you think about this. Ran is people are having
Speaker 6: dramatically different experiences, and that was true of millennials. Obviously,
Speaker 6: this is always partially the case, but I think it's
Speaker 6: especially been it's been acute for millennials and Gen Z,
Speaker 6: where you whether you're doing well or poorly, you're going
Speaker 6: to be doing really well or really poorly, that there's
Speaker 6: this sort of polarization of people's experiences. And for gen Z,
Speaker 6: if you're not in that third of homeowners, you know,
Speaker 6: probably to get by, you are loading up on credit
Speaker 6: card debt, and you probably are purchasing what might be
Speaker 6: classified as a luxury. And we've seen this kind of happening.
Speaker 6: As luxuries get cheaper more affordable, it's easy to kind
Speaker 6: of load up on them just to get by in
Speaker 6: the misery of like being a renter perpetually and trying
Speaker 6: to dig out of the hole when you feel like
Speaker 6: there isn't a lot of room for upward mobility. You
Speaker 6: may be employed, but you may not feel like you're
Speaker 6: in a space where there's a lot of room for growth.
Speaker 6: You were, you know, promised that college education was your
Speaker 6: ticket to the middle class, and instead I've heard this
Speaker 6: from some of my friends that you just you already
Speaker 6: have fifty thousand dollars in debt, so why not take
Speaker 6: the vacation. And we may disagree with that, and you know,
Speaker 6: we could get Dave Ramsey here and he could disagree
Speaker 6: with that, but the justification for it is fairly obvious.
Speaker 5: And one thing that doesn't get talked about a lot
Speaker 5: is that millennials also got subsidized services. They were subsidized
Speaker 5: by the federal reserves, like zero interest rate policies. It's
Speaker 5: quantitative vis and it pumped Silicon Valley full of money.
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley was then willing to lose lots of money
Speaker 5: on these different apps services, uberft, uber eats, food delivery,
Speaker 5: like all of that stuff was losing huge amounts of money.
Speaker 5: And they were able to lose that money because they
Speaker 5: were trying to grow their membership, and that was entirely
Speaker 5: subsidized by the Federal Reserve. It was just handing money
Speaker 5: to these Silicon Valley executives who then believed that they
Speaker 5: were geniuses, you know, for making an app that helps
Speaker 5: you get food, you know, from McDonald's to your house.
Speaker 5: And so it was so cheap to get an uber
Speaker 5: and to get uber eats and the rest of it
Speaker 5: that it became embedded in the culture that gen Z
Speaker 5: then inherited. Yes, then they turned the spigot off, and
Speaker 5: the price of ubers and lifts and and the meal deliveries,
Speaker 5: you know, went up to a place where the companies
Speaker 5: are actually trying to make profit instead of just relying
Speaker 5: on the on the Federal Reserve doal that money is
Speaker 5: coming out of gen Z budgets. That's point in a
Speaker 5: way that millennials didn't have to pay it before, and
Speaker 5: it's kicked off this like really you know, crazy discourse
Speaker 5: around food delivery and such. But underlying it all is
Speaker 5: a real structural change in the economy that people may
Speaker 5: not necessarily identify as having occurred on their watch.
Speaker 3: But they feel it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that they feel it at the end of the
Speaker 5: month when they're like, oh, my credit card debt is
Speaker 5: higher than it was last month and higher than it
Speaker 5: was before, and I just cannot make things work anymore.
Speaker 3: Why, What's what's going on? What am I doing wrong?
Speaker 4: I'm really curious.
Speaker 6: Actually, that's such a good point, because I'm really curious
Speaker 6: how many of those kind of gig economy expensive are
Speaker 6: classified as luxury expenses in the calculations that Forbes was citing,
Speaker 6: Because if you're classifying uber eats as a luxury expense,
Speaker 6: but you know, at this point, you're somebody whose entire
Speaker 6: life has been sort of built around like maybe you
Speaker 6: don't have a car because you've always relied on fairly
Speaker 6: cheap Uber eats delivery before you know, maybe prices keep
Speaker 6: going up higher and higher. You just didn't get a car.
Speaker 6: You live in a city and you didn't need a car,
Speaker 6: You didn't need to go take a bus to go
Speaker 6: to this restaurant. Or whether or not this is wise
Speaker 6: spending is a different question than whether or not people
Speaker 6: reasonably came to rely on it because prices were lower than.
Speaker 4: They're getting now. So I think that's it.
Speaker 6: And even Uber in and of itself, maybe you didn't
Speaker 6: buy a car because Uber was really cheap and easy
Speaker 6: to use and the car that you were in the
Speaker 6: city that you lived in, is that classified as a
Speaker 6: luxury expense or how is that? How are prices going
Speaker 6: up in some of these things that have become really
Speaker 6: baked into the lifestyles of a lot of younger people
Speaker 6: because it was like there that they breathed, It's the
Speaker 6: way that the city worked.
Speaker 4: How was that being classic?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the car point is a much stronger
Speaker 3: one just from a.
Speaker 5: Food delivery sympathetic perspective, because it's like, yeah, like you
Speaker 5: budgeted the past, it was going to cost you x
Speaker 5: amount of money to take ubers and so as a result,
Speaker 5: you're like, you know what, there's also subways and buses
Speaker 5: and and I'm going to cobble that together, and I'm
Speaker 5: not going to get a car, So you don't get
Speaker 5: a car. Then the cost of ubers goes through the roof,
Speaker 5: while at the same time, the cost of audio insurance
Speaker 5: and the costs of cars has gone through the roof.
Speaker 3: So you're kind of stuck either way.
Speaker 5: As a gen xer, I see the food delivery debate,
Speaker 5: and I'm like, come on, you look, get on your bike,
Speaker 5: go walk to the place and pick your own food
Speaker 5: up or cook it home like you can.
Speaker 3: Like there's lots of YouTube videos you can learn. You know,
Speaker 3: you can cook something.
Speaker 4: So I hear you.
Speaker 5: But but even as somebody with antipathy to that whole position,
Speaker 5: I recognize that the rug was pulled out from people
Speaker 5: in the sense that culturally and economically it was dirt
Speaker 5: cheap to get all this stuff because of the FED. Yes,
Speaker 5: and now all of a sudden it's not cheap, and
Speaker 5: you've built your life.
Speaker 3: So I can I can tisk people.
Speaker 5: But things did change, yes, yes, and it change up
Speaker 5: boiling the frog kind of way and just slowly getting
Speaker 5: more and more expensive, until all of a sudden you're
Speaker 5: like whoa, Right, this was forty dollars for this bowl,
Speaker 5: right and then yeah bowl?
Speaker 6: But come on, and obviously before and after the pandemic
Speaker 6: some of this is different. But I think the point
Speaker 6: about Uber is a really really interesting one. And you
Speaker 6: think about, like, for example, Spotify, I bet that's I
Speaker 6: bet that's classified as a luxury good. Would they have
Speaker 6: classified a Wall Street Journal subscription twenty years ago as
Speaker 6: a luxury good? Because honestly, a lot of people subscribe
Speaker 6: to Spotify for their playlists, but also because it's probably
Speaker 6: their primary source of news.
Speaker 4: Is probably where they.
Speaker 3: Get the podcast or else you're going to get breaking points.
Speaker 6: That's right, Well you can get it everywhere that you
Speaker 6: download your podcast and that you stream your podcast.
Speaker 16: Right.
Speaker 6: But seriously, I mean there's all of these kinds of
Speaker 6: things that are just different than they were in previous generations.
Speaker 6: That Spotify is profitable, I believe, but Uber is still
Speaker 6: not a profitable.
Speaker 3: Company, which is insane to me. Full of Uber does nothing.
Speaker 5: Uber has, like Google Maps and like PayPal, laid over
Speaker 5: each other with a chat app in there, and they
Speaker 5: don't do anything after that. The driver, you know, buys
Speaker 5: the car, puts the gas in the car drives the car,
Speaker 5: the user connects with the driver. How this middleman can't
Speaker 5: figure out how to make a profit.
Speaker 4: They can, they just don't want to.
Speaker 6: They want to keep writing it out because they can
Speaker 6: keep getting the money.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's it's a vicious cycle.
Speaker 3: Anyway.
Speaker 6: Anyway, that's enough of us doing the Simpsons meme of
Speaker 6: old man yelling at cloud.
Speaker 4: Probably for this wednes there.
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 4: Probably.
Speaker 6: Yeah, make sure to subscribe so that Ryan can continue
Speaker 6: getting like colored blue suits.
Speaker 3: Well it's the same one for Lemon. Yeah, should I
Speaker 3: get one more?
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: It's probably enough.
Speaker 6: We'll start to gofund me actually instead of a go
Speaker 6: fod to, just subscribe.
Speaker 5: To and what you'll get is the debate that we're
Speaker 5: going to post on Thursday night Friday. If you're not
Speaker 5: a subscriber, it's going to be between Glenn Greenwall and
Speaker 5: Ilia Shapiro arguing the right to protest on campus and
Speaker 5: everything related.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm really excited about that one.
Speaker 6: You can also get these fun counterpoint counterpoints mugs there
Speaker 6: you go on breakingpoints dot com. But make sure, yes, subscribes,
Speaker 6: you get that Friday show early.
Speaker 4: We've been having a lot of fun with the Friday show.
Speaker 5: These are classified by the Wall Street Journal as necessity
Speaker 5: rather than a luxury.
Speaker 6: Yes, by Forbes, you mean, how dare you two very
Speaker 6: different right Forbes Patience. Yes, but we've been having a
Speaker 6: lot of fun with the Friday shows. We appreciate all
Speaker 6: the feedback, all the support for it. Appreciate Crystal and
Speaker 6: Sire continuing to support the show. Last week's debate got
Speaker 6: some Between the Don Lemon interview, the debate with Destiny
Speaker 6: and Omar, things have been off to hell of a
Speaker 6: Star at Ryan So been a lot of fun.
Speaker 4: We have a lot more fun planned to.
Speaker 3: It's been interesting. So I guess we'll see you on Friday.
Speaker 4: See you then,