Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 1: But enough with that, Let's get to the show. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to Counterpoints. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Kashinsky. Emily,
Speaker 1: how you doing great? Happy Wednesday? Everyone, Counterpoints Wednesday. Let's
Speaker 1: make that all right. We've got a lot to talk
Speaker 1: about today. We've got the FED is going to continue
Speaker 1: to check up interstraights to continue to drive up unemployment,
Speaker 1: according to Elizabeth Warren. We're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: concentration between her and Chairman Jay Powell. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the battle between the Biden administration and House
Speaker 1: Republicans over the future of Medicare and tax policy. We're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the new dominion documents that are out.
Speaker 1: Also the latest on the Tucker Carlson controversy. I guess
Speaker 1: we can just call it that and your showdown with
Speaker 1: Karie Jean Pierre in the White Rice Jumper. And also
Speaker 1: later today there will be a vote on the House
Speaker 1: floor on a War Powers resolution sponsored by Representative Matt
Speaker 1: Gates and also backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus to
Speaker 1: force Biden to end the occupation of Syria the roughly
Speaker 1: one thousand troops that are still there. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: that as well, But we wanted to start the show
Speaker 1: because we were lucky enough to get Politser Prize winning
Speaker 1: journalist Seymour Hirsch in for an interview. We talked to
Speaker 1: him about both his reporting on the North Stream pipeline
Speaker 1: and also his latest piece out today on his fifty
Speaker 1: year relationship with Dan Ellsberg, who recently announced that he
Speaker 1: has a terrible form of pancreatic cancer and has very
Speaker 1: little time left to live. So we're going to start
Speaker 1: with this interview. We're joined now by Puliter Prize winning
Speaker 1: journalist Seymour Hirsch, who is out with a new piece
Speaker 1: on his substack called My fifty Years with Dan Elsberg,
Speaker 1: also joining us to talk about his reporting on the
Speaker 1: nord Stream pipeline. Seymour Hirsh, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us. Oh, glad to be there, you guys, right,
Speaker 1: And so I wanted to I wanted to start by
Speaker 1: asking you what you thought of this new reporting from
Speaker 1: the New York Times and then also from the German press,
Speaker 1: which in some ways supports what you had reported about
Speaker 1: the nord Stream pipeline, in other ways contradiction. But first off,
Speaker 1: let's start with the sourcing. As a journalist, when you
Speaker 1: looked at the New York Times report, what jumped out
Speaker 1: to you about it? Well, first of all, my secret
Speaker 1: thought always has been with Somalia. I think Somalia, and
Speaker 1: then I learned it was on the Indian Ocean. So
Speaker 1: I now make it a Paul. What am I supposed
Speaker 1: to think about it? It doesn't you know, Ryan and Emily,
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what I think. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: either a story or it's not a story. And in
Speaker 1: the first place, the thing I'm accused of is not
Speaker 1: naming sources. And of course I noticed both the story
Speaker 1: in the New York Times in the Washington Post this morning.
Speaker 1: I still will get the papers in print. I like
Speaker 1: to see a paper. Both had no sources in it either.
Speaker 1: And when I worked for the New York Times for
Speaker 1: what seven years, during Watergate and Vietnam, I was hired
Speaker 1: to do Vietnam. I was actually working at the New
Speaker 1: Yorker and left the New Yorker to go work at
Speaker 1: the New York Times because at that point in seventy two,
Speaker 1: it was a straight newspaper. In other words, there were
Speaker 1: guys in Saigon Homer Biggert and Dave Albersam and Neil
Speaker 1: Shehaan who were doing great reporting. And the Washington Bureau was,
Speaker 1: as it always was in those days, very pro president
Speaker 1: and the government. And I was hired to go make
Speaker 1: whoopee there by Abrosenthal, and at that time it was
Speaker 1: a different newspaper. I just, you know, I wrote maybe
Speaker 1: a thousand stories in seven years, including stuff really important
Speaker 1: stories about Chile and the CIA at NSA, and ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent of them had no sources, but they all,
Speaker 1: you know, they trusted me. Even I wrote a story
Speaker 1: about domestic spying that I didn't tell the editors about
Speaker 1: on Friday, and I wrote seven thousand words that day
Speaker 1: and was on the paper Sunday, but mannor headlines and
Speaker 1: nobody seven unnamed sources. And one editor asked me a question,
Speaker 1: when so it's a It's just a silly thing to
Speaker 1: decide that because I don't name sources, or I don't
Speaker 1: put anybody in a meeting, which is a critical thing
Speaker 1: not to do, that it doesn't exist. That's just an excuse.
Speaker 1: And so just in you know, the New York Times
Speaker 1: has a lot of very good reporters on it, and
Speaker 1: I've you know, and ditto for the Washington Post. My
Speaker 1: argument has always been, since I left the newspaper business
Speaker 1: and I saw who got promoted and who did not,
Speaker 1: I'm convinced that we got rid of ninety percent of
Speaker 1: the edit we'd be much better off. Do you get
Speaker 1: the sense that your reporting shook the tree loose? To
Speaker 1: borrow a phrase that Ryan used earlier, on the rest
Speaker 1: of these stories that are now coming out where it
Speaker 1: seems that people in the intelligence community are either putting
Speaker 1: forward information that in some sense could fit into your
Speaker 1: reporting or an other sense could not. But do you
Speaker 1: get the sense, though, that some of these people are
Speaker 1: coming forward because your report really did shake the tree loose? Well,
Speaker 1: not here, not here in terms of the major media
Speaker 1: or even seeing you know, I think we're talking about
Speaker 1: post Trump, and post Trump really changed the media landscape
Speaker 1: you were a fox. You either fox or see it in.
Speaker 1: I'm in MSBC and you're either the New York Post
Speaker 1: and other papers like that or what that conservative, or
Speaker 1: you with the New York Times and Washington Posts. And
Speaker 1: so the papers just fell that way. And so when
Speaker 1: I come up with a story that's very anti Biden,
Speaker 1: Look what's going on now in this White House is
Speaker 1: terrifying to me. I don't know if anybody's paid attention
Speaker 1: to what the I think the Prime Minister of China,
Speaker 1: the number two guy in China, has been saying that
Speaker 1: they're writing us along. They've had it with our snotty
Speaker 1: comments and canceling meetings because of a balloon. You know,
Speaker 1: a Secretary of State canceling a meeting with his counterpart
Speaker 1: because of a balloon and publicly doing it and pointing
Speaker 1: his finger at a public meeting at a senior Chinese official.
Speaker 1: I can tell you. I know. I know Americans who
Speaker 1: have taken what Chinese is said in the government, who
Speaker 1: have taken diplomats abroad serious guys. And one thing you
Speaker 1: do is should never do what Tony Blincoln did at
Speaker 1: when he was in China, pointing a finger in public
Speaker 1: to his counterpart. You just don't do that. And so
Speaker 1: these guys, I don't know what Lincoln and Sullivan and Newland.
Speaker 1: I call him Lincoln, Blincoln and not. If you've ever
Speaker 1: had kids, you know what I'm talking about, the children's story.
Speaker 1: They're just out of their league here. They may have
Speaker 1: wonderful degrees in the Plomas and experience it, just out
Speaker 1: of their league. Do they really want to get into
Speaker 1: a NATO war? And there's no question we've been increasing
Speaker 1: the amount of American troops in Poland secretly and deploying
Speaker 1: much more force, many more arms up in that area.
Speaker 1: Obviously with the idea, I would guess that the President
Speaker 1: may authorize or they may push for NATO actually to
Speaker 1: make a physical presence. It's going to be over in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: It's just a question of when Putin pulls it. Whether
Speaker 1: you like Putin or don't like Putin? How can you
Speaker 1: like a guy that started most the bloodiest war in
Speaker 1: Western Europe since World War Two? We had the Balkans
Speaker 1: and jest now, but this is not Malise, so you
Speaker 1: have to fault him for that. But it isn't without
Speaker 1: some reason, or at least some provocation. We expanded NATO
Speaker 1: to the east. Everybody's watching a show knows what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. We also put what we call defensive missiles
Speaker 1: that can be turned overnight in the missiles that can
Speaker 1: throw a nuclear nuclear bombs into in the Moscow eight
Speaker 1: hundred miles away seven minutes, how far were to take.
Speaker 1: We've also escalated that escalated the rhetoric. And I don't
Speaker 1: know what the goal is. I don't know if they
Speaker 1: know what the goal is. You know, I guess historically
Speaker 1: presidents who have wars do better in elections. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just a fact that the public rallies around a president.
Speaker 1: I don't know what's going on in that White House,
Speaker 1: but it's very scary and very dumb. And then the
Speaker 1: story they put out yesterday is just another example of idiocy.
Speaker 1: It's not working. What happened here, well, let me just
Speaker 1: say this. What happened here with the press blackout did
Speaker 1: happen the rest of the world. It's all over the world.
Speaker 1: Joe Biden made a decision to blow up the pipelines
Speaker 1: because he was afraid that he learned then that there
Speaker 1: was a stalemate coming at best in or in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: He wanted more support from Europe, Western Europe and Germany,
Speaker 1: and historically since the Kennedy years, American presidents this is
Speaker 1: all part of the containment business that posts World War
Speaker 1: two Russia containing communism and business. Historically presidents have been
Speaker 1: frightened and worried about the Russian influence because of its little,
Speaker 1: huge amounts of natural gas and oil that they were
Speaker 1: selling in the Europe that always tried to stop it. It
Speaker 1: It is nothing new. So there you are. We're in
Speaker 1: a terrible place right now. The crap they put out
Speaker 1: yesterday isn't going to work. Nobody's going to believe. Nobody's
Speaker 1: going to believe that what there Zeits said. Some guys
Speaker 1: in a yacht dropped it. We're talking about Sea four
Speaker 1: with enough Sea four to blow up a major building
Speaker 1: in Washington or New York, even for each of the
Speaker 1: pipe clinees. Just go ahead. I'm sorry, yeah, yeah. You
Speaker 1: allude earlier to some of the criticism that that was
Speaker 1: coming at your story around not not naming the key
Speaker 1: source that it was based on. Are you are you
Speaker 1: working on any any follow ups longest and are you
Speaker 1: picking up dissent within the administration? Should we should we
Speaker 1: look for any additional reporting or are you hoping that
Speaker 1: the press more generally picks us up and follows it.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping that the major press is going to pick
Speaker 1: this up and follow it. I've had from the day
Speaker 1: I wrote me Li, I've I've had. I've had people
Speaker 1: for month's sake. Can't be true. When I wrote the
Speaker 1: story what was this? I mentioned the one about domestic spying,
Speaker 1: and I said the CEE I had been spying on
Speaker 1: literally hundreds of thousands of American anti war citizens and
Speaker 1: reporters and congress people and the Washington Post for three
Speaker 1: months every other week. My good friend Levy Ster and
Speaker 1: I adored him. Who is there, senior? One of their
Speaker 1: senior editors and reporters was right the stories. I mean,
Speaker 1: a buddy of mine saying Hirsh's dead. Wrong. It was
Speaker 1: the FBI. And then, of course, to his credit, Bill Colby,
Speaker 1: the head of the CIA, had a hearing told the truth.
Speaker 1: He said, yeah, there's something to it. But anyway, the
Speaker 1: bottom line is no, I'm not hoping for the American
Speaker 1: pression to do anything. The only thing that's going to
Speaker 1: happen is in Europe. You know, here's what the president did.
Speaker 1: As far as I can tell and by the way,
Speaker 1: I've been writing every Wednesday for my substack, and I wrote.
Speaker 1: One of the pieces I wrote was all about Norway.
Speaker 1: If you remember I said that Norroy was involved. I
Speaker 1: wrote a piece about how Norway worked with us early
Speaker 1: in the Vietnam War. We were going and provoking stuff
Speaker 1: in sixty in nineteen sixty four, before North Vietnam even
Speaker 1: got into the war. We were seals were working on
Speaker 1: Norwegian Norwegian boats, advanced p T boats, a large, larger
Speaker 1: PP boats than the one that Kennedy was in in
Speaker 1: World War Two. They were going in deep and they
Speaker 1: were driving up into on the coast of North Vietnam,
Speaker 1: dropping seals off, going in gutsy guys and blowing trying
Speaker 1: to blow up radar sites and military sites. And two
Speaker 1: of the guys even got wounded badly and crawled back
Speaker 1: and made it back and got medals of honors secrets.
Speaker 1: I wrote a piece about that a couple of weeks later,
Speaker 1: making the point that it's not unusual we have a
Speaker 1: history of working with Norway. I actually have a photo
Speaker 1: photograph of Bill calls Bill Colby, who was a lack
Speaker 1: of a lot of these guys in the CIE. He
Speaker 1: was in the Office of Special Services OSS and he
Speaker 1: was behind enemy lines in Norway working with special forces
Speaker 1: in Norway. Have photographs of him in forty five and
Speaker 1: forty four in the middle of winter doing all kinds
Speaker 1: of crap against the Nazis. I mean, these guys, Helms
Speaker 1: and Coolby. I wrote a lot of bad stories about him,
Speaker 1: and to their credit, I mean Helms before he died.
Speaker 1: He was ahead of the CI for many years and
Speaker 1: was involved in the Castro stuff and a lot of
Speaker 1: stuff for the President that he couldn't tell the Congress about.
Speaker 1: He called me in and we had a long talk
Speaker 1: before he died about what really was going on that
Speaker 1: I couldn't use. But you know, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: the CIA doesn't work for the Congress or for the Constitution.
Speaker 1: It works for the Crown, works for the president. Why
Speaker 1: does the president keep a CIA around? You got a guy,
Speaker 1: you know Obama, particularly this guy now Bien. He's not
Speaker 1: going to get his way in Congress, but he can
Speaker 1: take a walk in the Rose Garden with the head
Speaker 1: of the CIA. Somebody can be heard eight thousand, eight
Speaker 1: thousand miles away. That makes you feel pretty good. And
Speaker 1: so that it's all just we're in a mess, That's
Speaker 1: all there is to it. And we need a president
Speaker 1: that has more integrity than this guy does. And not
Speaker 1: that I'm all for his domestic program, but and but
Speaker 1: not not to go a piss on the head of
Speaker 1: the Chinese and quite as much as he did on Putin.
Speaker 1: Speaking of that go ahead, I was just gonna say,
Speaker 1: Putin couldn't have started that war three years ago. I
Speaker 1: was in Moscow four or five years ago. Nobody liked him.
Speaker 1: You had drinks with some businessmen, which I did. I
Speaker 1: did a lot of I was doing something interesting there
Speaker 1: and you see somebody in ne Polerbero. They all nobody
Speaker 1: liked the guy. We don't often don't like our presidents.
Speaker 1: But Moscow was doing trade with America. Americans are on
Speaker 1: the street. If they knew you were American, they said hello,
Speaker 1: thank you for being our friend. And so by being there,
Speaker 1: and I don't think he could have sold the war
Speaker 1: against Ukraine. Ukraine was always seen as a self culture
Speaker 1: by Russia. In nineteen thirty two, there was a famine
Speaker 1: and Stalin took all of the wheat from Ukraine and
Speaker 1: twenty or twenty two billion Ukrainian Star in the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty two it was. I mean, it's a great moment
Speaker 1: of history. What brutes they were, and always they viewed
Speaker 1: the Ukraines were they but they were also a buffer
Speaker 1: between them and the rest of Europe. Anyway, what can
Speaker 1: I tell you, It's just we're in a real crisis,
Speaker 1: and I don't know why the Posts and the Times
Speaker 1: want to keep on playing the game that everything's going
Speaker 1: to be okay, maybe in Ukraine, and that whatever the
Speaker 1: White House tells him in briefings is true. And to
Speaker 1: that point, well, excuse me, go ahead, No, I was
Speaker 1: going to say to that point about us just being
Speaker 1: in a mass and a crisis and maybe tomorrow a
Speaker 1: phrase a quagmire. I wanted to ask about this wonderful
Speaker 1: piece you have reflecting on your relationship with Daniel Elsberget's
Speaker 1: up on your substack right now. You talk about how
Speaker 1: some reporting that you did in the New York Times
Speaker 1: led to the establishment of the Senate's Church Committee back
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five. And one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: about that is Republicans, for obviously partisan reasons that stem
Speaker 1: from what I would argue were partisan five s of
Speaker 1: abuses in the last ten years have sought to recreate,
Speaker 1: let's say, the magic, to recapture the magic of the
Speaker 1: original Church Committee, and it looks like that's just not
Speaker 1: going to work. It looks like the country is not
Speaker 1: capable of hosting another Church Committee because the divisions are
Speaker 1: so strong in Congress right now. And I wanted to
Speaker 1: get your thoughts on that, as you've been reflecting not
Speaker 1: only in your relationship with Elsberg but on some of
Speaker 1: the reporting you were doing at the time. Do you
Speaker 1: think we're capable of recapturing the magic of the Church
Speaker 1: Committee or of hosting anything like the Church Committee right
Speaker 1: now in twenty twenty three. You know, it's such a
Speaker 1: good question because that's exactly what I've been thinking about
Speaker 1: a lot, because Church Committee has popped up quite a
Speaker 1: bit recently as a sort of a model. It was
Speaker 1: the first time to see I was ever investigated, and
Speaker 1: in the piece I wrote about Elsburg plays a big
Speaker 1: role with my relationship with him in a way too.
Speaker 1: One thing that came out of the Church Committee, a
Speaker 1: frank church was a model. It was a liberal, It
Speaker 1: wasn't very popular. Guess what, Like like a lot of
Speaker 1: the guys in the Senate. He got up every morning,
Speaker 1: he looked in the mirror of it and said, why
Speaker 1: not me. You know, his ambition was pretty much overbearing,
Speaker 1: but he was very bright and I actually I got
Speaker 1: to know him obviously very well and his staff and
Speaker 1: he did the investigation was amazing because one of the
Speaker 1: recommendations was for the House and Senate to have intelligence committees,
Speaker 1: and they were taken very seriously. They set up staffs
Speaker 1: and in the particularly in the seventies and eighties, who
Speaker 1: had people like Ben Bradley, basketball player. He lived down
Speaker 1: the street around the corner Ben Bradley for years when
Speaker 1: he was in the Senate. The kids used to play
Speaker 1: basketball outside. He walked by in the morning on summer
Speaker 1: mornings and they would beg him shoot take one, take one,
Speaker 1: you know, take a shot, and he would walk and
Speaker 1: finally he'd turn around and maybe from thirty feet just
Speaker 1: jump up and flip it right through the middle, never miss.
Speaker 1: Unbelievable for a neighbor, and very hart. When they ran
Speaker 1: those committees, mad men like me running around chasing stories.
Speaker 1: They would only talk to me on the record, which
Speaker 1: I thought was admirable. They really respected the boundaries and
Speaker 1: they had meetings, and they had intelligence, and they had
Speaker 1: between the Democrats and Republicans, there was a sense of unity.
Speaker 1: And just think of that now. I think I's been destroyed.
Speaker 1: We've seen the last years in that, particularly in the
Speaker 1: House Committee with Adam Schiff on one side and the
Speaker 1: Republicans on the other side, steaming and yelling about everything.
Speaker 1: There's no there's no comedy anymore, there's no need. The
Speaker 1: committees are useless the under the rules that were set up,
Speaker 1: anytime the special operations have put into effect, there has
Speaker 1: to be a finding, has to go to the Congress.
Speaker 1: There's a secret committee I know about in the in
Speaker 1: the in the House, I don't know how it works.
Speaker 1: In the Senate, there's a secret four man group off
Speaker 1: the in the House Appropriation subcommittee, one of them there's
Speaker 1: that meets but the clerk and they monitor and they
Speaker 1: take records. Can you can you believe that this White
Speaker 1: House had something they wanted to do, like blowing up
Speaker 1: a pipeline? Would they briefit to speak of McCarthy? Are
Speaker 1: you kidding? And by the way, terms when I was
Speaker 1: dealing with Vietnam in the seventies at the New York
Speaker 1: Times and writing a lot, and then the Democrats were
Speaker 1: supporting getting out of the war, along with many Republicans.
Speaker 1: There were a dozen moderate centrist Republicans. The War Powers
Speaker 1: Act of nineteen seventy three that forbid any more troops
Speaker 1: to be on the ground or even air in the war,
Speaker 1: was written by a moderate Republican and his staff. And
Speaker 1: now it's such a can you imagine Chuck Soumer now
Speaker 1: speaking that runs the Senate calling for an investigation of
Speaker 1: this of a Democratic president not a chance. And in
Speaker 1: the House, which has now Republicans in control, they're much
Speaker 1: more interested in chasing Hunter Biden, and then they are
Speaker 1: investigating anything seriously. I just don't imagine why this guy Jordan,
Speaker 1: I watched him in a hearing on financial matters, he
Speaker 1: actually does his homework. Why somebody isn't even on the
Speaker 1: Republican side, doesn't seem to want to jump on this.
Speaker 1: So there you are. We're in a quagmire. We're in
Speaker 1: a mess, and and this White House is making worse.
Speaker 1: I encourage everybody to read the read the latest piece
Speaker 1: my fifty years with Dan Elsberg as well, is of
Speaker 1: course the all the previous reporting. Now, thank you, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for joining us really appreciate it. We
Speaker 1: have an update from Germany on the pipeline explosion over
Speaker 1: the North Stream. So if we if we could put
Speaker 1: this first element up, so a coalition of German papers
Speaker 1: and you can just go ahead, you can Google this
Speaker 1: and just click English on the translation. It's it's so
Speaker 1: nice this like we have to acknowledge the things that
Speaker 1: have gotten better that you can now just read German papers.
Speaker 1: It's not going to be perfect, but you're gonna you're
Speaker 1: gonna very much get the gist of it. And so
Speaker 1: let's start connecting some dots here. So the other day
Speaker 1: you have the New York Times come out with its
Speaker 1: extraordinarily thinly sourced article that says, we don't really know
Speaker 1: anything and we can't say how we know anything, but
Speaker 1: we definitely know that there were no Americans or British,
Speaker 1: which is also quite specific. Yes, no Americans are British
Speaker 1: who participated in this pipeline bombing. But there's new intelligence
Speaker 1: which leads us to a pro Ukrainian group. Now there
Speaker 1: was zero details. The German press is out with what
Speaker 1: appear to be a bunch of the details that the
Speaker 1: US security services were referring to when they came when
Speaker 1: they said we have new intelligence. It seems like this
Speaker 1: is what they're talking about it would you say that
Speaker 1: is a fair two dots to connect. That was absolutely
Speaker 1: my interpretation of all of it. And remember this conversation
Speaker 1: had basically gone away until the Seamer Hurst story. And
Speaker 1: if you're watching this, you probably see seymour Hurst down
Speaker 1: on the lower bar. He is slated to come on
Speaker 1: the show. We're hoping everything goes yea right, he said,
Speaker 1: I'm running around this morning. Yeah, I'm gonna try to
Speaker 1: make it, so we'll see if you make tivdy. But
Speaker 1: all of this was just cracked wide open. Nobody was
Speaker 1: talking about this. None of those reports were coming out
Speaker 1: until the American government was implicated in Hershe's subsect post, basically,
Speaker 1: which renewed conversation about it. And that's where, again I
Speaker 1: think you start seeing these reports from the New York Times,
Speaker 1: reports from the German press. It seems like that created
Speaker 1: the momentum to get the intelligence community to respond, right,
Speaker 1: and so where the New York Times artc was lacking
Speaker 1: in details, the German press is kind of overflowing in details,
Speaker 1: and so we could read out a couple of fun ones.
Speaker 1: So first of all, they said that it's so. It
Speaker 1: was allegedly a yacht rented from a company based in
Speaker 1: Poland owned by two Ukrainians. So that's the that's their
Speaker 1: first clue that they say is pointing to the you know,
Speaker 1: a pro Ukrainian group. They say there were six people,
Speaker 1: five men and one woman. Now we're talking like a
Speaker 1: rather incredible level of detail, very specific, not just it
Speaker 1: wasn't us, right, but although carefully read each one of
Speaker 1: these articles for overlap between CIA US involvement and what
Speaker 1: they're saying. So because so far none of this actually
Speaker 1: contradicts it could the CIA or some other US you know,
Speaker 1: security apparatus rent a yacht from a Polish company that's
Speaker 1: owned by two Ukrainians. Like, absolutely, does the CIA have
Speaker 1: access to five men and one woman? Yes, presumably they
Speaker 1: could do this. We've seen their videos. They're all about conversity,
Speaker 1: so they certainly they certainly have women who can do diving.
Speaker 1: They said one of the one of the six was
Speaker 1: a doctor cias doctors for sure. But more seriously, they
Speaker 1: say that the equipment for the secret operation was transported
Speaker 1: to the port and a delivery truck. So again like
Speaker 1: more specifics, like we don't, they don't. They don't have
Speaker 1: much about the sourcing here. They're sourcing it back to
Speaker 1: kind of German investigators. But that level of detail is interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, how else are the explosives going to get
Speaker 1: there other than a truck? So perhaps that's just deduction,
Speaker 1: Like I mean, you're not gonna you're not gonna own
Speaker 1: fly him over and drop them into the yacht. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you're not gonna have a wheelbarrel either, probably right truck.
Speaker 1: So uh. The yacht was then returned to the owner
Speaker 1: in an unclean condition. The more details here, investigators found
Speaker 1: traces of explosives on the table in the cabin. Now,
Speaker 1: some German observers have raised the possibility that some of
Speaker 1: this was done to kind of bait people into thinking
Speaker 1: that this, you know, to throw breadcrumbs in a different direction. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like if it's the CIA, you know, they they
Speaker 1: probably either know how to clean up the explosives or
Speaker 1: if that's difficult, they just sink the boat like you know,
Speaker 1: or they blow it up like they don't, you know,
Speaker 1: they don't, they don't really, they're not. They're not that
Speaker 1: concerned about getting their deposit back on the rented yacht,
Speaker 1: like that's that's that's not the top ten you know
Speaker 1: mission list. They can item they can shake the piggy
Speaker 1: bank over the pentagony. Yeah yeah, yeah, figure as Kramer says,
Speaker 1: that's a rite off. Yeah, that's just a write off.
Speaker 1: And so interestingly, you know, some of this obviously conflicts
Speaker 1: with what Seymour Hirsch reported. On the other hand, a
Speaker 1: lot of it could align with it. And it is interesting.
Speaker 1: It does seem like Hirsh's reporting kind of shook the trees, yes,
Speaker 1: and got some of this out. Yeah, absolutely, And this
Speaker 1: creates I think new conversations between well, I'm curious and
Speaker 1: maybe if we back up a bit, how do you
Speaker 1: think Putin is going to start responding if he does
Speaker 1: start responding to this reporting. So interestingly, you know, Putin's
Speaker 1: claim was never that it was Ukraine that did this,
Speaker 1: and you know, Putin can say whatever he wants. He
Speaker 1: could like, he can say whatever he thinks is most
Speaker 1: advantageous to him. The Russians were blaming British operatives and
Speaker 1: Hirsh's article said no, it was actually actually the US
Speaker 1: to have alleged kind of pro Ukrainian group involvement in
Speaker 1: this I think makes it for very interesting politics, particularly
Speaker 1: in Germany, because if all of a sudd ud, you
Speaker 1: have a German public that says, wait a minute, so
Speaker 1: we're paying these high electricity prices by energy prices because
Speaker 1: the Ukrainians blew up the pipeline that we had been
Speaker 1: invested in building for all of these years, so that
Speaker 1: they would force us to then continue, you know, cooperating
Speaker 1: with their defense of the Russian invasion. You you know,
Speaker 1: if if this catches hold in Germany and if it
Speaker 1: and if it becomes kind of a settled fact that
Speaker 1: it was actually this pro Ukrainian group, although the CIA
Speaker 1: could also be described as a pro Ukrainian group, Uh,
Speaker 1: then uh then yeah, that that I think plays into
Speaker 1: the geopolitics and could sour you know, European public opinion
Speaker 1: on support for this war. So the fact that the US,
Speaker 1: by leaking this to the New York Times and the
Speaker 1: German German investigators, you know, uh, playing with the German
Speaker 1: press in this way suggest they're kind of really playing
Speaker 1: with public opinion fire a little bit. And somebody brought
Speaker 1: that information to Hirsh as well. So point yeah, public
Speaker 1: information fire. That's absolutely what's happening here. So I think
Speaker 1: you're right, this is a huge development. And again this
Speaker 1: is from German public prosecutors. It's a huge development geopolitically,
Speaker 1: So you can't really understate what we're learning day to
Speaker 1: day on this massively expensive pipeline that was I was
Speaker 1: gonna say that was geopolitically important for years before the
Speaker 1: war even broke out, and still is. And so latest
Speaker 1: update of the AP reporting this morning. Germany's Defense minister
Speaker 1: voiced caution wednesday over media reports that a pro Ukraine
Speaker 1: group was involved in blowing up the North Stream gas
Speaker 1: pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year. So you're running
Speaker 1: into one of these situations again where you have some
Speaker 1: elements of the German investigators kind of leaking information, then
Speaker 1: you have official elements saying, well, well, well, let's be cautious,
Speaker 1: we don't actually you know, our investigation remains incomplete, and
Speaker 1: so that you wind up with the public just kind
Speaker 1: of sorting into its own groups of who and what
Speaker 1: they're going to believe. Yeah, and I think that's going
Speaker 1: to be the case for decades to come. I don't
Speaker 1: think anyone's ever going to get to the real fact here.
Speaker 1: I don't think you know, you can make educated guesses
Speaker 1: based on the reporting that continues to come out, and
Speaker 1: by the way, I expect this information will continue to
Speaker 1: kind of drip out over the course of like when
Speaker 1: people start writing books about the war in Ukraine. It's
Speaker 1: like the details we get to CIA's behavior during the
Speaker 1: Cold War that either come out during church committee hearing
Speaker 1: or are fleshed out in someone's really well reported book.
Speaker 1: I don't think we're ever going to know some diver
Speaker 1: wants to write that memoir right well, the credit Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the near future, I don't expect we'll have any
Speaker 1: confirmation from anybody's government or anybody involved about what actually
Speaker 1: factually happened. And so moving on. The big economic news
Speaker 1: came out of the Federal Reserve yesterday. If we can
Speaker 1: put up a one here, this is a FED chair
Speaker 1: Jerome Pwell saying that he's actually going to be ramping
Speaker 1: up interest rate increases much more significantly than he had
Speaker 1: planned in the past to Congress yesterday and was grilled
Speaker 1: by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on what the implications would
Speaker 1: be for unemployment. Let's roll Warren here, Chair Pale, if
Speaker 1: you hit your projections do you know how many people
Speaker 1: who are currently working, going about their lives will lose
Speaker 1: their jobs. I don't have that number in front of me.
Speaker 1: I will say it's amended consequence, but it is and
Speaker 1: it's in your report, and that would be about two
Speaker 1: million people who would lose their jobs, people who are
Speaker 1: working right now making their mortgages. So, chair pal, if
Speaker 1: you could speak directly to the two million hard working
Speaker 1: people who have decent jobs today who you're planning to
Speaker 1: get fired over the next year, what would you say
Speaker 1: to them? How would you explain your view that they
Speaker 1: need to lose their jobs. I would explain to people
Speaker 1: more broadly, that inflation is extremely high and it's hurting
Speaker 1: the working people of this country badly. All of them,
Speaker 1: not just two million of them, but all of them
Speaker 1: are suffering under high inflation. And we are taking the
Speaker 1: only measures we have to bring inflation down, and putting
Speaker 1: two million people out of work is just part of
Speaker 1: the cost. Let me ask you about what happens if
Speaker 1: you do this. Since the of World War Two, there
Speaker 1: have been twelve times in which the unemployment rate has
Speaker 1: increased by one percentage point within one year. Exactly what
Speaker 1: you're aiming to do right now, how many of those
Speaker 1: times did the US economy avoid falling into a recession?
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's not as black and white as
Speaker 1: very just look at the numbers. It actually is pretty
Speaker 1: blacks written book on this end, there have been twelve
Speaker 1: times that we've seen a one point increase in the unemployed,
Speaker 1: in the unemployment rate in a year. That's exactly what
Speaker 1: your FED report has put out as the projection and
Speaker 1: the plan based on how you're going to keep raising
Speaker 1: these interest rates. How many times do the economy fail
Speaker 1: to fall into a recession after doing that? Out of
Speaker 1: twelve times, I think the number zero. I think the
Speaker 1: number is zero. That's exactly right. What I like about
Speaker 1: this is that it's a clash of of real conflicting values.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. On the one hand, Elizabeth Warren
Speaker 1: talking about the millions, you know, two million unemployed people
Speaker 1: that Powell's policy will produce, Like that's not only is
Speaker 1: that two million people who are who are now paying
Speaker 1: able to pay their bills, you know, finding dignity in
Speaker 1: their work that no longer can and no longer do.
Speaker 1: But then you then, you know, push fear all the
Speaker 1: way through the workforce, and you discipline the workforce, and
Speaker 1: a militant worker who might want to have wanted to
Speaker 1: organize the you know, into a union or push for
Speaker 1: a raise, or push back against sexual harassment or other
Speaker 1: abuse in the workplace. Now all of a sudden, hmm,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to be able to get another job
Speaker 1: if I lose this one, and so everybody's life gets
Speaker 1: worse versus the other value of prices arising too fast,
Speaker 1: and that sucks for people. Right. What was your response
Speaker 1: to that, Well, that's exactly what I was going to say.
Speaker 1: It's hard for me to give Elizabeth Warren the moral
Speaker 1: high ground in that question, and obviously that generally applies
Speaker 1: to conversations about politicians. But when you're saying, you know,
Speaker 1: how much spending, for instance, did Elizabeth Warren support that
Speaker 1: has been making working people's bank accounts bleed because the
Speaker 1: price of eggs is exploding, and it's not just eggs,
Speaker 1: of course, it's the entire consumer price in the X
Speaker 1: If you look at your basket of groceries the last
Speaker 1: several months, the last year and a half, basically, how
Speaker 1: much of the spending that contributed to those price hikes
Speaker 1: has Elizabeth Warren supported, and so part of this is
Speaker 1: putting everyone between a rock and a hard place. Either
Speaker 1: Jerome Powell and Elizabeth Warren like both of them between
Speaker 1: a rock and a hard place, because from Elizabeth Warren's perspective,
Speaker 1: and sometimes I think correctly, we need to spend more
Speaker 1: on X, Y and Z package, but we also know
Speaker 1: that we'll contribute in some ways to a rise in inflation.
Speaker 1: We're nowhere near a hike that looks like vulgar right like,
Speaker 1: we're not exactly back to that time period, yet we're
Speaker 1: not suffering under anything quite to that point. Hopefully it
Speaker 1: doesn't get to that, but the point is getting letting
Speaker 1: inflation get out of control, and supporting measures that let
Speaker 1: inflation get out of control. I don't think gives you
Speaker 1: the moral high ground then to go to Jerome Powell
Speaker 1: and say, basically, you're intentionally putting people out of work,
Speaker 1: because that's part of the story. It might be true,
Speaker 1: but it's part of the story. And to me, the
Speaker 1: problem here is that it's not necessarily the case that
Speaker 1: the treatment is going to cure the disease. And I
Speaker 1: worry that twenty years from now, if we have some
Speaker 1: more sophisticated economic modeling capacity. Maybe chat GPT can do
Speaker 1: that for us. We'll look back and be like, what
Speaker 1: were these economists thinking, Like, well, I mean, you'll have
Speaker 1: left wing economists saying, well, we know what they were thinking.
Speaker 1: They were serving the interests of the lead. But the
Speaker 1: ones who were saying, let's let's pretend and take for granted,
Speaker 1: they're actually trying to kind of manage the economy in
Speaker 1: the most effective way possible. It's almost as if these
Speaker 1: are doctors who are bleeding a patient because they have
Speaker 1: a fever. The know, the way that George Washington had
Speaker 1: like eight different doctors, you know that each individually bled him,
Speaker 1: and they would and then because you would have some
Speaker 1: people who recovered after they were bled, right you had
Speaker 1: the medical profession, You're like, well, you know, bleeding actually works.
Speaker 1: Look here this happens. And so the question that becomes
Speaker 1: how does kind of raising the unam employment rate affect prices?
Speaker 1: If prices are either related to you know, ecological or
Speaker 1: viral logical crises or to corporate greed. There's there have
Speaker 1: been reports out that's up to fifty percent of the
Speaker 1: price increases that we've seen have have come from corporations
Speaker 1: who have opportunistically raised prices and didn't have to because
Speaker 1: wholesale prices arising, So that's half. We also note if you,
Speaker 1: as an you know, you mentioned the eggs, well, the
Speaker 1: bird flu has wiped out like millions approaching billions of
Speaker 1: birds around the world, and there's no interest rate move
Speaker 1: And I think that makes us kind of sad as humans,
Speaker 1: as economists, because we want to be able to control everything.
Speaker 1: We want to think, well, if we, if we, you know,
Speaker 1: do something about our quantitative easing policy, then we're the
Speaker 1: avian flu. Avian flu. With what's seventy five percent confidence,
Speaker 1: we can predict that the avian flu will be negated
Speaker 1: by our interest rate measures, right. I think I think
Speaker 1: some pro Iranian militias launched some strike on a chicken
Speaker 1: farm in Syria, like maybe that'll do it, Maybe that'll
Speaker 1: do something about bird flu. But that happened pretty recently.
Speaker 1: But so this and the same is true when it
Speaker 1: comes to kind of ecological crises, that if the planet
Speaker 1: is not able just to function in the way that
Speaker 1: it does at this carbon concentration for these eight nine
Speaker 1: billion people, as it was for six billion people out
Speaker 1: of lower carbon concentrations. What does that do to our
Speaker 1: economic models? And what? You know, how does moving the
Speaker 1: interest rate and moving the unemployment rate actually help there? Well? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's there's the two million number, which he didn't
Speaker 1: even have off the top of his head. I think
Speaker 1: that was a pretty bad luck, first and foremost, that
Speaker 1: it was in his own report, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out,
Speaker 1: and Jerome Powell couldn't mention. Maybe he didn't want to
Speaker 1: say the number, but it seemed like perhaps he was
Speaker 1: just entirely ignorant of it, which I think is telling
Speaker 1: in and of itself, because it treats people or it
Speaker 1: contributes this idea that the mentality among people sitting at
Speaker 1: the FED is that people are numbers and numbers can
Speaker 1: be massaged and we can take care of this with
Speaker 1: the formula, which may or not be the case for
Speaker 1: everybody over at the FED. But when you don't have
Speaker 1: that number or from your own report, and you're unwilling
Speaker 1: to say it, then yeah, that's a problem. So but
Speaker 1: the question then, also, I think, becomes what does all
Speaker 1: of this do to wages? What does all of that
Speaker 1: do to corporate profits? To your point, I think that's
Speaker 1: one area of the right has totally missed an opportunity.
Speaker 1: Over the course of last year. There is good reporting
Speaker 1: on how corporate greed has contributed to all of that,
Speaker 1: and obviously Elizabeth Warren would be on the right side
Speaker 1: of that conversation. But I mean, their models can't really
Speaker 1: account for a lot of that's right, And just to
Speaker 1: underline the point about work or power, you often see
Speaker 1: a lot of people who will say, well, look, I'm
Speaker 1: sorry that one or two million people are going to
Speaker 1: lose their job, but three hundred and thirty million people
Speaker 1: are suffering through higher prices. Yeah, but the reason that
Speaker 1: unemployment drives down wages is because it spreads fear throughout
Speaker 1: the entire economy, like they're not just going to, you know,
Speaker 1: fire these one or two million people and then magically
Speaker 1: wages go down and prices go down. It's because they're
Speaker 1: firing those people as a warning to you. So every
Speaker 1: single person in the workforce, and every single person who
Speaker 1: depends on someone in the workforce, which almost gets to
Speaker 1: three hundred and some million people, is actually going to
Speaker 1: suffer from high higher unemployment rate. So I think, and
Speaker 1: perhaps we've had low unemployment now for so long that
Speaker 1: people forget that what that fear and what that pain
Speaker 1: is like, and they might regret getting what they asked for. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's not going to be some sort of like
Speaker 1: patriotic hug from corporate America to workers as a reaction
Speaker 1: to the organizing, which, like the numbers on the increase
Speaker 1: in organizing over year to year have been really really
Speaker 1: like staggering just and organizing exactly and a direct consequence
Speaker 1: of full unemployment. And that goes away when you lose
Speaker 1: full unemployment, which is why somebody liked Jeroam Pal would
Speaker 1: like to see the numbers go up a little bit.
Speaker 1: And he's not wrong that there are trade offs, and
Speaker 1: I think Elizabeth Warren is maybe glossing over that for
Speaker 1: the sake of asking those questions in a way, in
Speaker 1: a very particular way. But to your point, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a there's a broader aperture to make those trade offs
Speaker 1: with them. And speaking of trade offs, let's put up
Speaker 1: b one here. Joe Biden has put forward his plan
Speaker 1: both for defosit reduction and for shoring up medicare challenging
Speaker 1: Republicans to come up with their own plan. This flows
Speaker 1: from that kind of iconic moment in his State of
Speaker 1: the Union where Marjorie Taylor Green and others were saying,
Speaker 1: you're a liar. We don't want to cut Medicare and
Speaker 1: solid security, and Biden kind of paused the conversation and said, okay,
Speaker 1: so let me make sure everybody's on board here. So
Speaker 1: what you're saying is cuts to social Security and Medicare
Speaker 1: are off the table, and they all said off the table.
Speaker 1: And so he's like, okay, so here's how work. I'm
Speaker 1: going to shure up Medicare and basically has two He
Speaker 1: has two planks, very simple. One, he's going to allow
Speaker 1: Medicare to further negotiate drug prices, save some two hundred
Speaker 1: billion dollars over ten years, and all of that money
Speaker 1: goes to the Medicare Trust Fund to extend it. And
Speaker 1: then secondly, the ACA put in. And if you're rich,
Speaker 1: you know this and you're angry about it. Three point
Speaker 1: eight percent kind of basically investment tax over over four
Speaker 1: hundred thousand. If you make more than four hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars a year, you pay this three point eight percent hit.
Speaker 1: And he wants to raise that from three point eight
Speaker 1: to five percent. Now when they initially passed this three
Speaker 1: point eight percent thing. It was one of the most
Speaker 1: significant kind of class war things that was actually in
Speaker 1: the ACA, and it became the thing that Republicans worked
Speaker 1: to repeal incessantly and actually failed. Said that the sky
Speaker 1: was going to fall, the markets are going to tang
Speaker 1: like you're you know, we're not going to have We're
Speaker 1: not going to have a free market, and the kind
Speaker 1: of free people will cease to exist because of this
Speaker 1: three point eight percent. They'll fee that you're that you're
Speaker 1: attacking on top of people making four hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 1: on their investments. Here we are most people don't even
Speaker 1: know it exists. Markets have you done fine? And not
Speaker 1: done fine? It doesn't seem to have anything to do
Speaker 1: with that. So these are his two plans. This is it.
Speaker 1: The rich pay a little bit more and we're going
Speaker 1: to negotiate with big Pharma. And with that, the Medicare
Speaker 1: Trust Fund rolls out to twenty fifty. So now the
Speaker 1: shoe is on the foot of Republicans. Yeah, exactly, the
Speaker 1: balls in the court of Republicans use a better cliche. Sure,
Speaker 1: it's not a bad place for negotiations to begin, and
Speaker 1: that's what this looks like it looks like he's using
Speaker 1: the New York Times up ed to kick off and
Speaker 1: say this is point A, and negotiations obviously always are
Speaker 1: going to go from A to Z and his starting
Speaker 1: point here, it's really not bad you highlighted. And I
Speaker 1: think we have this element a Washington Post article on
Speaker 1: the advisor to Kevin McCarthy, who's formerly an advisor to
Speaker 1: New Ganger. So there's some great quotes from John Bayer
Speaker 1: in this article basically saying, you know, this particular advisor,
Speaker 1: Kevin McCarthy doesn't like to tell people know this isn't
Speaker 1: the piece, but he will Dale Meyer will, yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think that's actually probably accurate. But to your point, Ryan,
Speaker 1: there's this question about how Republicans can kind of make
Speaker 1: the math work on their end if they don't and
Speaker 1: a lighter but Republicans could possibly make this math work
Speaker 1: if they don't want to touch entitlements period that they've
Speaker 1: said it's off the table. They don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: If they don't want to, I'm sorry, strengthen entitlements our
Speaker 1: favorite euphemism. Hearing counterpoints, they don't want to strengthen entitlements,
Speaker 1: how do they make the math work. Now, what was
Speaker 1: interesting to me about this article is that russ Vote
Speaker 1: the Omb under Donald Trump has a plan on how
Speaker 1: Republicans can make that math work without touching entitlements. It's
Speaker 1: a really interesting plan. You can go and read it
Speaker 1: on the internet, and basically what it does is look
Speaker 1: for a bunch of that that can be trimmed bureaucratically
Speaker 1: around these sort of cultural leftist priorities some people may
Speaker 1: call them woke priorities, and he makes the math work
Speaker 1: that way. He's in charge of the budget during the
Speaker 1: Trump administration, knows his way around O ANDB obviously as
Speaker 1: a former head of it. What was interesting to me
Speaker 1: about the Washington Post article that you just saw on
Speaker 1: the screen by Jeff Stein basically is that Dan Meyer,
Speaker 1: I can only imagine it's not paying attention to that paper.
Speaker 1: And does he run that veterans group now, I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: a conservative veterans group, Yeah, I'm not sure, which would
Speaker 1: which would suggest that maybe he'll check out the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: look under that hood, see if there's a couple trillion
Speaker 1: that could come out of there. I would think that
Speaker 1: that Meyer will be looking wherever he can, because if
Speaker 1: he's going to make a good faith effort, which I
Speaker 1: think that's all he's going to do, is like and
Speaker 1: by good faith, I mean Clinton's old phrase where he
Speaker 1: used to say, I want to get caught trying, which
Speaker 1: meant you're actually not going to succeed, but you want
Speaker 1: to look like you're at least like, Look, I'm doing
Speaker 1: the best that I can, just to prove to you
Speaker 1: that my best is not good enough, because like you said,
Speaker 1: if you're not cutting the Pentagon, and if you're not
Speaker 1: cutting Social Security and Medicare, then there isn't the money
Speaker 1: out there to do what Republicans want to do. Now
Speaker 1: there is the money if you're willing to do what
Speaker 1: Biden is willing to do, and we can put this
Speaker 1: other one up there. This came out this morning in
Speaker 1: the New York Times. This is Biden previewing what his
Speaker 1: deficit reduction plan is going to be. And it's annoying
Speaker 1: that Biden is focusing on deficit reduction rather than actual
Speaker 1: investment priorities. But whenever, this is Joe who Joe Biden is,
Speaker 1: and it's the world we're in. If he's got to
Speaker 1: do it, I do like the way he's doing it.
Speaker 1: He suggests basically a wealth tax on everybody making more
Speaker 1: than one hundred million dollars or worth more than one
Speaker 1: hundred million dollars a year. I think it is rather
Speaker 1: than making more you would and you for those people,
Speaker 1: they have to pay on their asset growth, in their
Speaker 1: stock growth. So if you're Elon Musk and you're stuck,
Speaker 1: you know the value of your portfolio increased by fifty
Speaker 1: percent in a year, you have to figure out ways
Speaker 1: to pay on that. And so that that plus some
Speaker 1: other kind of corporate taxes and you know other like
Speaker 1: basic progressive stuff that just hits the rich and major corporations,
Speaker 1: he ends up reducing the deficit by two trillion dollars
Speaker 1: over like ten years, which is a big number, and
Speaker 1: which is a number that Republicans, unless you can think
Speaker 1: of some way they can do it, just simply can't
Speaker 1: meet because they're unwilling to raise taxes, unwilling to go
Speaker 1: after the Pentagon, and unwilling to and they'd love to
Speaker 1: go after Medicare and soeleecurity, but they've taken it off
Speaker 1: the table. Well, I was going to say, yeah, they
Speaker 1: may be willing to go after the Pentagon. We've seen
Speaker 1: even the President of the Heritage Foundation at this point
Speaker 1: calling for things to that extent, there's a real app
Speaker 1: for going after the Pentagon, at least in the conservative movement,
Speaker 1: if not in the Republican Party. I think it's basically
Speaker 1: impossible to take even if something that the president of
Speaker 1: the Heritage Foundation wants to do, and then when it
Speaker 1: comes to the Pentagon, push that through the Republican Party.
Speaker 1: So yes, I agree with that point, But it's also
Speaker 1: a matter of russ vote proposes is cutting the size
Speaker 1: of the federal guocracy and not just purely for the
Speaker 1: making the numbers all work out and just balancing balance,
Speaker 1: getting the balance sheet in order, but also for the
Speaker 1: sake of like, well, hey, how did they justify the
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine mandate in an obscure provision of the act
Speaker 1: that established OSHA. There's some of these things that are
Speaker 1: very real extra constitutional encroachments on the everyday American's freedom
Speaker 1: that can be paired back, and that can make some
Speaker 1: of this maths start to work without touching entitlements and
Speaker 1: maybe with you know, minor cuts the Pentagon or something
Speaker 1: something to that extent. I just don't have a lot
Speaker 1: of faith that that's what's on the table as Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy's office and his advisors are looking to make these
Speaker 1: balance sheets check out. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be notching
Speaker 1: some wins on immigration, and I'm curious how the right
Speaker 1: is viewing this. So recently the Biden administration flowed basically
Speaker 1: a trial balloon suggesting and this appears to be coming
Speaker 1: from Susan Rice, who people might forget, bizarrely is running
Speaker 1: domestic policy for the administration, foreign policy expert. Her entire
Speaker 1: career in BID's like, yeah, you'll do domestic policy. She
Speaker 1: has been one of the most hawkish internally when it
Speaker 1: comes to cracking down on the border, and so it
Speaker 1: is assumed that that's where this is, that this trial
Speaker 1: balloon is coming from, saying that the Biden administration is
Speaker 1: considering returning to family detention. Now, I know how a
Speaker 1: lot of progressives respond to this. They just kind of
Speaker 1: want to not think about it because it's just kind
Speaker 1: of too painful because it reminds them of all of
Speaker 1: the things that they said about Trump when he was
Speaker 1: doing things like this, and things they didn't say about Obama,
Speaker 1: things they didn't say about Obama, and then things that
Speaker 1: they would be forced to say about Biden if they
Speaker 1: focused on the issue. So they kind of just keep
Speaker 1: it moving and hope that maybe nobody presses them on
Speaker 1: it and they don't have to think about it. But
Speaker 1: I'm curious what the reaction among Republicans is. If it's
Speaker 1: some sense a vindication, or if there's a we told
Speaker 1: you so, or this is actually cynical and we don't
Speaker 1: believe you're going to do it. So how did Republicans
Speaker 1: respond to this trial balloon? Yeah, I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: on the right considers what's been coming out of Biden
Speaker 1: administration or anything like this will win. And I'm not
Speaker 1: saying that because I believe that they're just like heroes.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that because the numbers I don't think are
Speaker 1: going to be affected. So long as the Biden administration.
Speaker 1: Child separation is awful and one thing, but so long
Speaker 1: as the Biden administration continues its program of humanitarian parole
Speaker 1: right now, and humanitarian parole sounds like a really good thing.
Speaker 1: What it is basically is passage into the United States
Speaker 1: if you can turn yourself in at a border crossing.
Speaker 1: They took these steps basically to say people from certain
Speaker 1: countries and this is all over the last couple of months,
Speaker 1: will not be eligible for asylum if they're caught crossing illegally.
Speaker 1: What that is is like sort of a math trick
Speaker 1: to get it to look like the illegal crossings are
Speaker 1: lower while they're granting humanitarian parole to more and more people.
Speaker 1: It sounds again like a great thing. What it does
Speaker 1: is set people up for this like tragic existence in
Speaker 1: the shadows of America's civic civil society and is going
Speaker 1: to continue being a pole factor for millions of people
Speaker 1: coming up through Central America and Mexico. We've talked about
Speaker 1: this many times before. Everybody pays a cartel to get
Speaker 1: up there. The cartels then turn around and terrorize these countries,
Speaker 1: overrun these countries. Many people are sexually assaulted, kidnapped along
Speaker 1: the journey. So I don't think if you're not going
Speaker 1: to pair child separation with like a real closure of
Speaker 1: the border so that people don't believe what happens is
Speaker 1: people you know, WhatsApp everyone down the line back home
Speaker 1: and say you have to turn yourself in and you
Speaker 1: get a court date two years from now. But other
Speaker 1: than that, you can sort of exist in a sanctuary city,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. Even if you don't turn yourself in,
Speaker 1: you can exist in the sanctuary city. So unless it's paired,
Speaker 1: I think with some really like serious uniform legal policy
Speaker 1: in terms of what's happening when people do turn themselves in,
Speaker 1: I don't even think that's. What's even more sad is
Speaker 1: that they would be doing if they brought this back,
Speaker 1: which I doubt they will, they would be doing child
Speaker 1: separation with this other inhumane policy, and that is just
Speaker 1: the worst of both worlds. And maybe it's hard to
Speaker 1: figure out what's driving these types of decisions coming from
Speaker 1: this White House, but maybe they're doing that Trump thing
Speaker 1: where they try to make they try to kind of
Speaker 1: express toughness. Yeah, say like, look, I think they are like,
Speaker 1: it's a deterrent like this, it's trying to act as
Speaker 1: a deterrent to people even if they're not going to
Speaker 1: do it. I think that's totally right, and that is
Speaker 1: actually an important part of immigration policy. One pastor a
Speaker 1: shelter that I talked to him outa Mooros last year,
Speaker 1: said he begs people in the American government to put
Speaker 1: out a message in plane Spanish that was his quote
Speaker 1: saying don't come, and he said, we tell them that
Speaker 1: month after month in our meetings, and they never do it.
Speaker 1: It's obviously a very important part of immigration policy, the posture,
Speaker 1: and if you talk to migrants, they'll look to Joe
Speaker 1: Biden and say, no estrastica como Trump, He's not the
Speaker 1: same level of you can expect perhaps something almost like
Speaker 1: dhaka right under a Joe Biden administration. Migrants of agency,
Speaker 1: they know exactly what they're doing, and so they do
Speaker 1: pick up on that kind of posturing and signaling. So
Speaker 1: it is an element of that. But I think that's
Speaker 1: the same thing that he was doing with saying if
Speaker 1: you come from Venezuela or Cuba and you don't, you
Speaker 1: don't come in and apply for asylum, turn yourself in,
Speaker 1: you're not eligible for asylum. If you cross illegally, you're
Speaker 1: not eligible for asylum. It is part of a posture,
Speaker 1: but again it's also to make those numbers look different.
Speaker 1: And they also have implemented this new policy that you
Speaker 1: can't cross other countries and get asylum, which to me
Speaker 1: seems entirely counterintuitive. Like if if you're let's say you're
Speaker 1: in Guatemala, yeah, and you and you're trying to get
Speaker 1: asylum in the United States, how do you do that?
Speaker 1: You can't go to the embassy, Like that's basic, basic,
Speaker 1: That path is basically shut off. The only way is
Speaker 1: to go through Mexico and then apply for asylum there
Speaker 1: unless like charter a private plane. Yeah, that was great
Speaker 1: fly and that's the really the one vineyard, and it
Speaker 1: has happened. I mean, there there are flights that you
Speaker 1: can get from A to B without actually paying to
Speaker 1: go through Mexico on a bus or by foot some
Speaker 1: part of the way. But yeah, I mean it's just
Speaker 1: it's a this patchwork policy that's the problem. Like it
Speaker 1: is just completely inhumane to have such patrick policy. That again,
Speaker 1: when we're talking about like Cuban refugees, Venezuelan refugees, a
Speaker 1: lot of the Venezuelan migrants have lived in other countries
Speaker 1: for a long time before they're playing for asylum. I
Speaker 1: get it. It's the same thing with the Haitians. But
Speaker 1: what you end up doing is just closing the door
Speaker 1: to people. Our asylent policy exists to help. And going
Speaker 1: back to the Jpal point about unemployment, there's an irony
Speaker 1: that there seem to be a lot of people who
Speaker 1: will say, yes, we need to raise interest rates because
Speaker 1: we need to high unemployment rate, because inflation's out of control,
Speaker 1: we need to get that down. But those same people
Speaker 1: will not say, all right, well, then how about we
Speaker 1: bring in two million more workers? When the effect when
Speaker 1: the effect if you believe, I don't think it. I
Speaker 1: don't actually think it would have the effect on wages
Speaker 1: that people think it would. Because those workers produce economic activity,
Speaker 1: they increase GDP, and that increased GDP then results in
Speaker 1: higher wages out of that more economic activity. But obviously
Speaker 1: if you have there's some level at which you get
Speaker 1: so much immigration, so much competition for jobs, that you
Speaker 1: would see wages come down. But it's curious, why are
Speaker 1: people okay with wages coming down? Because you've disciplined the
Speaker 1: American workforce and fired millions of people and you know,
Speaker 1: stoked fear you know in workplaces across the country, but
Speaker 1: they're deeply hostile to producing you know, more labor through
Speaker 1: immigration policy. Like what like what's it? Why are you
Speaker 1: okay with one but not another? It's a serious problem.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a huge problem. And it goes to
Speaker 1: even like what people refer to as high skilled labor
Speaker 1: when we talk about semiconductors here. One of the biggest
Speaker 1: problems is that who are you going to get to
Speaker 1: manage the semiconductor like facility? Seriously, because our for years
Speaker 1: to get somebody from India to get in, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: and are so called like best and brightest now all
Speaker 1: work for Meta right, like all of people that could
Speaker 1: be doing this. We're funneled into Silicon Valley for years
Speaker 1: and years and are just making us worse people instead
Speaker 1: of making us more security as a country, and just
Speaker 1: to round out the block. I think that's probably why
Speaker 1: Susan Rice is on this issue. One thing the media
Speaker 1: doesn't report a lot. And believe me, I understand the
Speaker 1: terrorist watch list has plenty of its own problems, but
Speaker 1: there are dozens of people that crossed just last year
Speaker 1: that are on the terrorist watch list. There are reports
Speaker 1: every single month of people who we should be able
Speaker 1: to screen better. There's something like fifty one thousand known
Speaker 1: god aways last month alone somewhere around there, which is
Speaker 1: higher than about fifty thousand from the previous January. These
Speaker 1: are huge numbers, and when you're seeing the people who
Speaker 1: we're actually able to apprehend at the border, dozens of
Speaker 1: people on the terrorists watch lists that were actually apprehended.
Speaker 1: Your mind can sort of extend how many people might
Speaker 1: be in this country that we should at least be
Speaker 1: aware of them being in this country, let alone maybe
Speaker 1: have turned away from getting into this country. So it
Speaker 1: does make sense that Susan looking at the Biden policy
Speaker 1: and thinking what the hell are we doing here as
Speaker 1: a kind of hawkish person, but in general, our immigration
Speaker 1: policy is just not serving anyone. Well, I would agree
Speaker 1: with that, except for the fact that it makes sense
Speaker 1: that Susan Rice is looking at any domestic policy. What's
Speaker 1: she doing in domestic policy? Role absurd from the beginning,
Speaker 1: makes no sense. Let's move on to China, because I
Speaker 1: think this is a story that's playing out this week
Speaker 1: getting not enough attention in the press. Here's NPR. Chinese
Speaker 1: leader Sheijinpang name checked the United States and remarks during
Speaker 1: the annual session of Parliament underway and Beijing this week,
Speaker 1: saying it was leading Western countries in an effort to
Speaker 1: encircle and suppress China. This is a quote from Xi
Speaker 1: jinpaning Western countries, led by the US, have implemented comprehensive containment,
Speaker 1: encirclement and suppression against US, bringing unprecedented, severe challenges to
Speaker 1: our country's development. Now, on Tuesday, the Foreign Minister also
Speaker 1: criticized the United States by name. Here's a quote from him.
Speaker 1: The US claims it wants to compete to win with
Speaker 1: China and does not seek conflict. But in fact, the
Speaker 1: so called competition by the US is all around containment
Speaker 1: and suppression, a zero sum game of life and death.
Speaker 1: Why does the US ask China not to provide weapons
Speaker 1: to Russia, Well, it keeps selling arms to Taiwan. One
Speaker 1: more quote to hit you with here. When the US
Speaker 1: says it wants to install guardrails and have no conflict
Speaker 1: in China US relations, it really means that the US
Speaker 1: requires China not to fight back when hit or scolded.
Speaker 1: But this cannot be done. Now, China, you have two
Speaker 1: high ranking officials, including Xijen Ping himself, calling out the
Speaker 1: United States by name this week. By the way, as
Speaker 1: they continue to basically support Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This
Speaker 1: is a really big development. The Wall Street Journal has
Speaker 1: a long, long story out this week probing whether America
Speaker 1: is prepared in any capacity for a potential battle over
Speaker 1: Taiwan and what that could escalate into between in terms
Speaker 1: of a war between the United States and China, a
Speaker 1: hot war between the United States and China. So very
Speaker 1: very very very big deal that she Didn't Ping himself
Speaker 1: called the United States out by name, including the and
Speaker 1: the foreign ministers. While I've been reading actually a bunch
Speaker 1: of she Didn't Ping speeches this week, actually really over
Speaker 1: the last couple of weeks. The fact that he used
Speaker 1: the name the United States. Obviously a lot of China
Speaker 1: observers picked up on that right away. Ryan, what do
Speaker 1: you make of it? The argument that the Chinese are
Speaker 1: making is that the US says it has put up
Speaker 1: guardrails around it's kind of China confrontation that will prevent
Speaker 1: a cold war from developing into a hot war. And
Speaker 1: they're saying that, no, if you are barreling down the
Speaker 1: road out of control at this speed, there are no
Speaker 1: amount of guardrails that are going to prevent an accident.
Speaker 1: And I do think that the United States, the people
Speaker 1: of the United States, need to be deeply worried about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: At the same time, we shouldn't forget that the Chinese
Speaker 1: government around two thousand and seven, you know, two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, in the wake of the financial crisis, you know,
Speaker 1: seeing the United States weakening, you know, really it embarked
Speaker 1: aggressively on a policy, an intentional policy of confronting the
Speaker 1: United States and under and under and undermining uh, the
Speaker 1: United States. And it's in a significant way, you know,
Speaker 1: helping to know our our politicians participated in this eagerly.
Speaker 1: But uh, you know, there was a there was an
Speaker 1: explicit kind of goal to hollow out American manufacturing the
Speaker 1: middle class. And you know, and I think that you
Speaker 1: you occasionally see people talk about fentanyl in this in
Speaker 1: this context. But you know, an authoritarian country like like China,
Speaker 1: which is able to you know, so you know, effectively
Speaker 1: kind of monitor social media, uh, you know, keep control
Speaker 1: of their economy, isn't going to have a multi billion
Speaker 1: dollar fentanyl export industry operating without kind of the approval
Speaker 1: of the of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 1: Absolutely they know exactly how much of those precursor chemicals
Speaker 1: are being shipped to Mexico, right they could and you know,
Speaker 1: and you know, similarly to the United States having you know,
Speaker 1: some awareness, some involvement that oh, our allies are the
Speaker 1: ones that are actually shipping this in. Well, it's important,
Speaker 1: it's important for our allies to have this funding source.
Speaker 1: So we're going to kind of look look the other way.
Speaker 1: On the on the Chinese side, it's like, well this,
Speaker 1: you know, this is actually this is weakening our trade rival.
Speaker 1: It's helping to hollow out a manufacturing base. It's it's
Speaker 1: really efiscerating, you know, an entire generation of people. Uh so, uh,
Speaker 1: all of those things tied in, you know, make it
Speaker 1: make me, you know, look a little cynically at some
Speaker 1: of the complaints the crocodile tears from from the Chinese there, Well,
Speaker 1: the flirting with Vladimir Putin makes me look at all
Speaker 1: of it various weekly as well when we're talking about
Speaker 1: an actual invasion. Now what the Chinese scene in that
Speaker 1: is a rebuke to NATO, It is a rebuke to
Speaker 1: the West. It is a rebuke to what they see
Speaker 1: as Western expansionism. And so obviously it makes sense that
Speaker 1: they come in and look at Putin's invasion of Ukraine
Speaker 1: as a sort of strength, a powerful rebuke, something that
Speaker 1: can genuinely very much weak in the West. I want
Speaker 1: to ask about reports which I've seen some interesting debate
Speaker 1: over that China may be considering supplying weapons to Vladimir Putin.
Speaker 1: I've seen skepticism of those reports as basically saying this
Speaker 1: is unsubstantiated warmongering, and I'm entirely prepared to believe that's
Speaker 1: the case. It also wouldn't surprise me if it was
Speaker 1: true in some capacity as well, So all of this
Speaker 1: coming on the heels of that I think is relevant too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and what we can know for sure thanks to the
Speaker 1: Chinese diplomats here is that the US is in fact
Speaker 1: pressuring China not to supply weapons to Russia. Because the
Speaker 1: Chinese just complained that the US is pressuring China not
Speaker 1: to supply weapons to Russia. So how seriously China is
Speaker 1: actually considering doing that, I think it's an open question.
Speaker 1: I think it's clear that Russia has asked for that support.
Speaker 1: I think that that reporting is pretty solid, and it's
Speaker 1: also completely intuitive, like the manufacturing base of the Russian
Speaker 1: economy with under sanctions, is able to create only so
Speaker 1: many missiles, only so many tanks, only so much material
Speaker 1: for its invasion, So we're it would stand a reason
Speaker 1: that they would go to China, and so China this week,
Speaker 1: complaining that it's unfair, like how come you know, sounds
Speaker 1: like a seven year olds Wait, how come you get
Speaker 1: to fund Ukraine and you get to supply Ukraine with weapons,
Speaker 1: but we can't supply Russia with weapons? And there's actually
Speaker 1: no good answer to that other than because we're the
Speaker 1: empire and we say som h no, and the Chinese
Speaker 1: economy isn't. Keep in mind here obviously not where Hugen
Speaker 1: Ping would want it to be at this moment post COVID,
Speaker 1: but I would say when you look at the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal, reporter reporting and other reporting that we've covered
Speaker 1: here for a long time, one thing that worries me
Speaker 1: is this is coming. This could be coming faster than
Speaker 1: people realize. And I'm not talking about, you know, at
Speaker 1: the nuclear scale, just some level of conflict over Taiwan
Speaker 1: which could get which could escalate very quickly in the
Speaker 1: same sense that we are now dealing with those concerns
Speaker 1: in Ukraine. Any hot confrontation over Taiwan, obviously you have
Speaker 1: the same type of risk and that could be coming
Speaker 1: more quickly than people realize. Specifically because China understands we
Speaker 1: have a limited time frame or they have a limited
Speaker 1: time frame before we are able to rebuild our defense
Speaker 1: capacity to meet some of what would be needed in
Speaker 1: an amphibious sort of amphibious situation, hot war situation over
Speaker 1: those islands in the South China Sea, over Taiwan. That's
Speaker 1: a huge, huge, huge concerned. They know that that narrows
Speaker 1: every single month that they have in front of them,
Speaker 1: because the more that we're resupplying ourselves some of these
Speaker 1: weapons that have actually gone to Ukraine that would be
Speaker 1: useful in a hot confrontation over time. One the semiconductors
Speaker 1: that we're able to reshure again, that can happen in
Speaker 1: about three years as the estimate, and it started about
Speaker 1: six months ago. So these are things that genuinely keep
Speaker 1: me up at night. And one amendment to what I
Speaker 1: said earlier, you actually could you can make a plausible
Speaker 1: argument for why it's okay to fund obviously the defense
Speaker 1: of Ukraine versus the offense of Russia as Russia invaded Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Ukraine did not invade Russia. But from the Chinese perspective,
Speaker 1: and I think this is what's important. They don't see
Speaker 1: in any circumstance the United States acting as just merely
Speaker 1: you know, defensive and merely a defensive posture, like they
Speaker 1: see us offensive presence all over the world. And so
Speaker 1: every action that they see the United States taking they
Speaker 1: see as a projection of a mayor and power, not
Speaker 1: a defense of just ideals of liberty and democracy. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's this is world history and perpetuity for the future,
Speaker 1: by the way, because it's what happens in high tech
Speaker 1: nuclear order. No matter what, you're going to continue trying
Speaker 1: to like untangle and get to the bottom of who
Speaker 1: started what. But Belton Road is like a euphemism for
Speaker 1: Chinese expansionism. And euphemism I say that that's just the
Speaker 1: language itself, but the policy it's a friendly face for exactly.
Speaker 1: And again when you read speeches from hujin Ping, it's
Speaker 1: very clear how they see Chinese expansionism socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Speaker 1: It's sort of undermining the West, not just they talk
Speaker 1: about mankind and humankind a lot, not just undermining the
Speaker 1: United States, but spreading outside just China. And so when
Speaker 1: you have nuclear technology, everybody shares a border. The great
Speaker 1: powers share a border. If you have a nucle share
Speaker 1: a border with every single other country in the world.
Speaker 1: So we will if it feels like echoes of the
Speaker 1: Cold War, as people say over and over again, yes,
Speaker 1: but that's only because we are one hundred years into
Speaker 1: nuclear history. Human history looks like this. Nuclear technology changes
Speaker 1: and is just a straight line up, and we are
Speaker 1: in the very early stages of that era. So it's
Speaker 1: these echoes of the Cold War. Get used to it. Yea.
Speaker 1: And I wish Belton Road was the way that the
Speaker 1: US would express its power instead of just blowing up
Speaker 1: belts and roads, and we showed it worked with the
Speaker 1: Marshall Plan. Well, that was one of our most effective
Speaker 1: kind of diplomatic forays of the entire second half of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century rebuilding Europe. And then we pivoted to
Speaker 1: we're going to we're going to break unions, were going
Speaker 1: to break social democracies. We're going to keep wages low
Speaker 1: so that our corporations continue can continue funneling cheap goods
Speaker 1: into the country, so that we can then you know,
Speaker 1: suppress our own kind of discontent within the country, could
Speaker 1: buy you know, making sure that the price of TVs
Speaker 1: continues to go down. I mean Belton Road, there is
Speaker 1: debt trapped to Palmacy Base. We talked about the World
Speaker 1: Bank last week. I mean, it's it's debt trapped diplomacy
Speaker 1: that is used to blackmail developing countries. Not great better
Speaker 1: than death squad, That's what I would argue. You got
Speaker 1: to have one form or the other. Well, now in
Speaker 1: local news, we're going to be talking about the d
Speaker 1: C Crime bill that's grabbed national headlines for interesting reasons
Speaker 1: because the District of Columbia where we are right now
Speaker 1: is a federal district. Is the federal district that is
Speaker 1: in trend in the constitution. Ryan and I almost certainly disagree,
Speaker 1: al though I don't know that we've ever talked about
Speaker 1: this before, over the question of home rule in DC statehood.
Speaker 1: But the bill itself grabbed a lot of headlines because
Speaker 1: Republicans in Congress latched onto it after it looked as
Speaker 1: though and this is where I take issue with some
Speaker 1: of the media coverage, including from d CST which had
Speaker 1: a pretty good write up of at WMU DCUs that
Speaker 1: said the bill got scuttled by Republican backlash. Well, Mrel
Speaker 1: Bowser did not want to sign this bill. Joe Biden
Speaker 1: himself tweeted that while he supports home rule and DC statehood,
Speaker 1: I have the exact quote right here. While he supposed
Speaker 1: it supports home rule in DC statehood, he was also
Speaker 1: yet here said I support DC statehood and home rule,
Speaker 1: but I don't support some of the changes DC Council
Speaker 1: put forward over the mayor's objections, such as lowering penalties
Speaker 1: for carjackings. At the Senate votes to overturn what DC
Speaker 1: Council did, I'll sign it the Carjacking provision of this
Speaker 1: very complicated bill that over that attempts to make some
Speaker 1: modifications to a nineteen oh one criminal code. By the way,
Speaker 1: that's before people had cars to jack. Probably it's a
Speaker 1: car jack. Yeah right, it's totally been massaged, like any
Speaker 1: nuance has been out the window in this national conversation. Ryan,
Speaker 1: you have a good point to make though about the
Speaker 1: maximum penalty for carjackings being changed. Oh yeah, maybe we
Speaker 1: have that element here. But what's amazing is the way
Speaker 1: that this reduction in maximum penalties from what forty years
Speaker 1: to something like twenty four years is getting talked about
Speaker 1: as this lowering of penalties. Yes, like technically that's it's
Speaker 1: a lowering of penalties, as if it's going to spur
Speaker 1: some like soft on crime explosion of carjackings around Washington, DC,
Speaker 1: Something like ninety nine percent of the sentences that are
Speaker 1: doled out for carjacking now are significantly under what is
Speaker 1: the maximum, Like the current maximum allows for like forty
Speaker 1: years for an armed carjacking, and so they lowered that
Speaker 1: to like twenty something. The mandatory minimums for carjackings in
Speaker 1: DC currently and even in the new Criminal Code if
Speaker 1: it were enacted, would still be higher. And we were
Speaker 1: pointing us out. Then in say Tennessee, where Bill Haggerty
Speaker 1: is leading the charge against this thing, the Tennessee's law
Speaker 1: is more liberal when it comes to carjackings and armed
Speaker 1: car more liberal. Though it's basically just a normal penalty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a gigantic mandatory minimum that like set sixty years ago.
Speaker 1: People would be like, you're gonna that's insane, Like, how
Speaker 1: on earth you're going to put people in prison for
Speaker 1: that long. Now we just be like, oh, fifteen years
Speaker 1: for this. Yeah, you're gonna do fifteen years of this.
Speaker 1: So they're barely loosening the penalties, and it's in a
Speaker 1: rewrite of an entire code. And to have Joe Biden
Speaker 1: say I support a thing in principle, but not when
Speaker 1: it might cause me some short term political cost potential
Speaker 1: political costs because and he may now have brought more
Speaker 1: cost on himself because now everything the DC Council does,
Speaker 1: reporters are going to get to say, Hey, Joe Biden,
Speaker 1: what do you think of this, because there's a DC
Speaker 1: Council provision that is allowing non US citizens, would allow
Speaker 1: non US citizens to vote in local elections. To me,
Speaker 1: I think if you are subject to the laws of
Speaker 1: an area where you live, then principle says you should
Speaker 1: have some say, no matter what, even if you're in prison,
Speaker 1: you should have some say over what those laws are.
Speaker 1: But you can disagree with that. But now, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, that's gonna be something Joe Biden's gonna have
Speaker 1: to He's gonna have to answer for everything that the
Speaker 1: Council does. Yesterday I heard reporters on Capitol Hill asking
Speaker 1: Republican senators what do you think of allowing non citizens
Speaker 1: to vote? And me, a DC resident, thinking, oh, really,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. How about citizens who can't actually vote for
Speaker 1: senators or members the House? Resident, all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: you're you know, you're so concerned about the right to
Speaker 1: vote and they're like and they're shaking their head like
Speaker 1: don't don't. We don't approve of it. It's like, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't have to ask you, Like, it's one thing that
Speaker 1: we don't get to vote, you know, for House, for Senate.
Speaker 1: They have a workaround so that we can vote for president.
Speaker 1: But then you're going to come in and you're going
Speaker 1: to kind of line at it our criminal code and say, actually,
Speaker 1: twenty four years for carjacking. I think it should be forty.
Speaker 1: Like you get out of here, Okay, So getting we
Speaker 1: are hitting on where we disagree with this, because here's
Speaker 1: a National Reviewer go actually cited a Madison quote from
Speaker 1: Federalist forty three. Now I sound like a real loser.
Speaker 1: He says, the indispensable necessity of complete authority at the
Speaker 1: seat of government carries its own evidence with it. Without it,
Speaker 1: not only the public might be insulted and its proceedings
Speaker 1: interrupted with impunity. But a dependence of the members of
Speaker 1: the General Government on the state, comprehending the seat of
Speaker 1: government for protection and the exercise of their duty, might
Speaker 1: bring on the National Councils and imputation of awe or influence.
Speaker 1: Equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members.
Speaker 1: So I would just say of the Confederacy, this is
Speaker 1: in the era of the Federalist papers. So I think
Speaker 1: there's we could have a whole debate one day about
Speaker 1: home rule and DC statehood. But I do think the
Speaker 1: federal city should be subject to federal rule and by
Speaker 1: a wide scope. And this is in the broader context.
Speaker 1: And I think to your point actually about why this
Speaker 1: is such a ridiculous thing for Bill Haggerty from Tennessee
Speaker 1: to be swooping in and like line item vetoing City
Speaker 1: Council crime overhauls, is that it is obvious if you
Speaker 1: walk around the District of Columbia post pandemic, that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of recovery that needs to happen. It is
Speaker 1: obvious that we are dealing with particular crime surges, not
Speaker 1: across the board. Actually, violent crime did decrease from twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one to twenty twenty two according to Axios, though
Speaker 1: for the second year in a row, DC exceeded two
Speaker 1: hundred murders in twenty twenty two, and some crimes did
Speaker 1: we got chart, Yeah, we also have a chart. But
Speaker 1: that's where we are. So far in twenty twenty three
Speaker 1: here in the district. So in twenty twenty two, robberies
Speaker 1: were up two percent, car thefts were up eight percent,
Speaker 1: like in a lot of cities, and carjackings are up
Speaker 1: fourteen percent. If you look at the chart that's on
Speaker 1: the screen right now, you can see, for instance, between
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three, the same day
Speaker 1: in March March seventh, we are from twenty nine to
Speaker 1: thirty nine homicides. That's a thirty four percent increase three
Speaker 1: months into the year, one hundred and twenty percent increase
Speaker 1: in sex abuse theft in general, we're up to I
Speaker 1: can't read them and run the screen, but it is up.
Speaker 1: It looks like eighteen percent. Car theft up from auto
Speaker 1: twenty two percent. Who those were mined, Oh that's right,
Speaker 1: leave right alone. Motor vehicle theft up one hundred and
Speaker 1: ten percent. So again these are early number, but it's
Speaker 1: obvious to everybody why there is no appetite, even from
Speaker 1: the Washington Post, which editorialized that the bill would make
Speaker 1: DC quote a more dangerous city by decreasing quote punishments
Speaker 1: for violent crimes such as carjackings, home invasion, burglaries, robberies,
Speaker 1: and even homicides and tying quote the hands of police
Speaker 1: and prosecutors will overwhelming courts. That's other stuff in this bill.
Speaker 1: It's a very big bill that can be debated is
Speaker 1: what this would do to the court system. There are arguments,
Speaker 1: I think serious arguments that it would overwhelm the court
Speaker 1: system because of changes there. And so when you even
Speaker 1: have the Washington Post maryel Bowser coming out against a
Speaker 1: bill like this, I do think it signals despite this
Speaker 1: weird conversation about carjackings we've had, and especially when Republicans
Speaker 1: insert themselves national Republicans into this local conversation, there's just
Speaker 1: no appetite in so many big cities right now for
Speaker 1: criminal justice reform. Even if some of it, by the way,
Speaker 1: would reduce crime and would make cities safer, Nobody wants
Speaker 1: to talk about it period, because there's our cities do
Speaker 1: feel dirty to a lot of people, they feel less
Speaker 1: safer to a lot of people. And I think National
Speaker 1: Democrats have a lot to answer for, not just in
Speaker 1: terms of the criminal code, but really just in terms
Speaker 1: of the way they govern these cities. And you know,
Speaker 1: a significant bomb in the crime way came out of
Speaker 1: the pandemic, people frustrated that fewer people on the street,
Speaker 1: allowing people to commit more crimes of opportunity, but also
Speaker 1: arguably undercutting of police, both with rhetoric and legally well.
Speaker 1: Undercutting of police. Police having their feelings hurt and deciding
Speaker 1: not that they're not going to do their job anymore,
Speaker 1: I think is a serious thing, and we're having their
Speaker 1: power curtailed in neighborhoods by the way, were black residents
Speaker 1: said they wanted more police and not less police. As
Speaker 1: the national movement pushed a lot of people in places
Speaker 1: like San Francisco, even London breed walked back some of
Speaker 1: those policies. I don't think there's necessarily been any evidence
Speaker 1: yet that places that did criminal justice reform and police
Speaker 1: reform have had a different crime increase is then places
Speaker 1: that didn't. So like if you look at you know,
Speaker 1: if you look at like red states around the country,
Speaker 1: you see the same crime bump even in places that
Speaker 1: never had never got much police reform traction. What you
Speaker 1: what you did see is it did see a slow
Speaker 1: down in call response, and like Baltimore being like the
Speaker 1: most egregious response where they were like cool, you don't
Speaker 1: like the way we do our jobs. How about we
Speaker 1: just don't do our jobs at all? Or a lot
Speaker 1: of police departments are now severely hampered because nobody wants
Speaker 1: to work in them, given how demonized they feel. Recruiting
Speaker 1: as big as right, recruiting for any job anyone, which
Speaker 1: has become a problem, and it's acute within the within
Speaker 1: the police force. But yeah, now, Ryan, I'm excited for
Speaker 1: this next block because this is a Ryan Grim question
Speaker 1: and the White House Press briefing to Karine Jean Pierre,
Speaker 1: a question that I don't think anybody else or topic
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody else has asked about so far.
Speaker 1: You want to and you can see why based on
Speaker 1: her answer. So yeah, this is from this week and
Speaker 1: in the press briefing you might recognize this voice. Last week,
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice acknowledged that in twenty twenty they
Speaker 1: had used the FBI had used seven oh two authorities
Speaker 1: to illegally spy on a member of Congress. Can you
Speaker 1: tell us who that member of Congress was? Has that
Speaker 1: member of Congress been briefed by the White House? I
Speaker 1: would refer you to a Department of Justice. Just not
Speaker 1: going to speak to that from here again. Thanks. I
Speaker 1: think she so effectively calls on the next person, and
Speaker 1: then the next person has a question, so there's no
Speaker 1: room for a follow up, and I see very smooth
Speaker 1: she's like, I'm not going to answer that question. You
Speaker 1: go ahead, please ask a different one. And I feel
Speaker 1: like the White House Press Corps needs just so much
Speaker 1: better coordination and willingness to kind of work collectively that
Speaker 1: And you see this, You see this occasionally from the
Speaker 1: White House Press Corps. You'll see it on the Hill
Speaker 1: for sure, and you'll see it with foreign press corps
Speaker 1: where a reporter asked a question, the person that they're
Speaker 1: asking the question too, refuses to answer it, and then
Speaker 1: the next reporter, rather than the question that they had
Speaker 1: scripted ready for you know, the German chancellor or whatever,
Speaker 1: they will go back and they'll say, I would actually
Speaker 1: like first to ask you to answer that last question.
Speaker 1: You didn't answer that question, because you know, if nobody
Speaker 1: can get a follow up in, then all somebody has
Speaker 1: to do to dodge a questions just dodge the question
Speaker 1: once and they move on. And then there becomes a
Speaker 1: political cost to not answering the question. Like eight times
Speaker 1: and the press Corps knows how to do this. If
Speaker 1: you remember a year ago when the war drums were
Speaker 1: being beaten for fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine,
Speaker 1: when the press, when the White House Press Secretary said no,
Speaker 1: we're not we're not going to do that, then the
Speaker 1: next person would be like, so you said you're not
Speaker 1: going to send fighter jets over to Ukraine? How about
Speaker 1: sending fighter jets? What do you think of doing that?
Speaker 1: I'm going to give time for my colleague to beat
Speaker 1: the war drums. Yes, what if Estonia asked to send wardrump?
Speaker 1: That was one of the That was one of them.
Speaker 1: They were looking for every single way to ask a
Speaker 1: follow up. And while the substance of that I thought
Speaker 1: was deeply disturbing, the cohesion of it was impressive. It
Speaker 1: was like it was getting the Press corps to really
Speaker 1: push the administration on a question that they were actually
Speaker 1: happy to answer. Like she kept giving an answer. Of course,
Speaker 1: it just wasn't the answer that they wanted. In this case,
Speaker 1: She's just not answering. And I didn't ask if the
Speaker 1: Department of Justice had briefed Congress. I asked if the
Speaker 1: White House has brief Congress, and asked if she would
Speaker 1: tell us who the White House spied on, and this
Speaker 1: could be a situation where she just throws the Trump
Speaker 1: administration uder the bus, because like this was twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: this was the FBI under under the Trump administration. But
Speaker 1: maybe it was a Democrat, and so maybe it was
Speaker 1: a Democrat that was illegally spied on, and you could
Speaker 1: then kind of spin something up about that, but then
Speaker 1: you might not want to necessarily talk about it. Like
Speaker 1: so the speculation out there. All we can do is guess.
Speaker 1: But we know that kind of Eric Swalwell was in
Speaker 1: the news around that time for some liaison with the
Speaker 1: woman who turned out to be perhaps connected to Chinese intelligence,
Speaker 1: and so it wasn't that, But we don't know. That's
Speaker 1: absolutely pure speculation. We do know, based on Wired reporting
Speaker 1: that's based on an internal audit of FBI seven oh
Speaker 1: two practices, that they did spy on some unnamed member
Speaker 1: of Congress. We don't know the party, We don't know
Speaker 1: the name, and White House is declining to say who.
Speaker 1: If they were confident in their substantiation, I think they
Speaker 1: would say it, because especially if it was a Republican
Speaker 1: and they felt confident in their substantiation I think that
Speaker 1: they know the Democratic base at this point, is it
Speaker 1: going to be upset about exercising seven h two power too?
Speaker 1: And we saw this on of the course, nothing to
Speaker 1: worry about. Yeah, well, how much criticism did Carter Page
Speaker 1: get on MSNBC and CNN, Washington Post, New York Times
Speaker 1: for like years until they stopped talking about it? Basically?
Speaker 1: But I mean, if they felt confident in their substantiation.
Speaker 1: But I think you're touching on a really important point here,
Speaker 1: which is there is no cohesion on this question. And
Speaker 1: this is why I still like that the press briefings
Speaker 1: are televised, even though it feels like theater. I still
Speaker 1: like that they're televised specifically because they show where the
Speaker 1: priorities of the White House Press corps are and you
Speaker 1: get answers to questions like this one. Every once in
Speaker 1: a while, someone asks a really good question that the
Speaker 1: White House just doesn't want to answer, and you see,
Speaker 1: not only does she say the White House doesn't have
Speaker 1: a comment on that, she says, I'm going to refer
Speaker 1: you to the DOJ. When you didn't ask about the DOJ.
Speaker 1: You asked about the White House. And there's a reason
Speaker 1: nobody else in the press corps wants to talk about
Speaker 1: seven oh two powers. It's because either they don't care
Speaker 1: or they love that seven oh two powers exist. Because
Speaker 1: everybody that they talk to in the intelligence community is
Speaker 1: tripping in their ear about all of these false stories
Speaker 1: on how the country was saved from destruction by seven
Speaker 1: oh two. And that is I think very much worth
Speaker 1: televising these briefings. I love that we get to reflect
Speaker 1: on that when Ryan goes and asks a damn good
Speaker 1: question about seven oh two that nobody else wants to
Speaker 1: talk about. I did reach out to the Department Justice, said, hey,
Speaker 1: Kareine says you should answer this question, and what did
Speaker 1: they say? And yet I'll report back when I get
Speaker 1: something out of that, turning to the House of Representatives. Actually,
Speaker 1: while while we were while we're producing this show, very
Speaker 1: strange development in the world of kind of cross ideological coalitions,
Speaker 1: Matt Gates shared my Intercept story. This is really on
Speaker 1: Twitter basically, and he said, he says, contact you represent
Speaker 1: him today and ask them to support my legislation to
Speaker 1: withdraw US troops from Syria. Voting today with a link
Speaker 1: to an article that I have up in the Intercept today,
Speaker 1: which is responsible Statecraft wrote about this Matt Gates effort recently,
Speaker 1: So essentially there are there are still almost roughly nine
Speaker 1: hundred American troops helping to occupy Central Syria, along with
Speaker 1: an unknown number of contractors and other other kind of
Speaker 1: associated allies in the area backing up the Syrian defense forces,
Speaker 1: mostly mostly Kurdish element of what is is what remains
Speaker 1: kind of the opposition that isn't isis Yesterday evenings, as
Speaker 1: I reported, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent out a note
Speaker 1: to its membership urging a yes vote and noting that
Speaker 1: this that his legislation is similar to legislation that had
Speaker 1: been put forward on the NDAA by by Jamal Bowman previously,
Speaker 1: which had set a one year timeline. I also reported
Speaker 1: that Ambassador Robert Ford, who was the Obama administration's ambassador
Speaker 1: and who had previously been a staunch advocate of more
Speaker 1: and more kind of US intervention in the area, more
Speaker 1: support for the opposition, you know, in an attempt to
Speaker 1: get Asad to the negotiating table that would lead they
Speaker 1: would hope to Asad stepping down, so one of and
Speaker 1: he eventually resigned in twenty fourteen because he felt like
Speaker 1: the Obama administration wasn't being aggressive enough to accomplish the
Speaker 1: goal its goals. He's now supporting this Gates measure, and
Speaker 1: I interviewed him yesterday. I said, sounds like what you're
Speaker 1: basically saying is go big or go home, and if
Speaker 1: you're not going big, you might as well go home.
Speaker 1: He said, yes, he said, except I would add that
Speaker 1: you have to remember that going big is no guarantee
Speaker 1: of success either. If you look at the Iraq War,
Speaker 1: we went pretty big and what we got what he
Speaker 1: called mixed results. So the vote is going to be
Speaker 1: held this evening. When this came to the floor under
Speaker 1: Jamal Bowman, sixty percent of the Democratic Caucus voted for it.
Speaker 1: It'll be interesting to see if they pick some up
Speaker 1: because the CPC is officially calling for them to vote
Speaker 1: for it, or if they lose some because it's associated
Speaker 1: with Gates and that Biden is in the White House.
Speaker 1: Although Biden was in the White House for the last one.
Speaker 1: But I'm also curious on the Republican side, there were
Speaker 1: twenty five Republicans last time, twenty one the first time
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty one, then twenty five in twenty twenty
Speaker 1: two who voted to end the occupation of Syria. Do
Speaker 1: you think Gates gets more than twenty five or is
Speaker 1: he so toxic in the Republican Party that it's that
Speaker 1: he's not gonna be able to pull that off. What's
Speaker 1: your sense of how effective he'll be at doing kind
Speaker 1: of his part of this? Yeah, I think you good
Speaker 1: at some of that in your reporting, which is it's
Speaker 1: just the process even itself on how Matt Gates cobbled
Speaker 1: together the legislation and then was able to work with
Speaker 1: elhan Omar and cobbling together some coalition, some support. Right,
Speaker 1: his first version of this a couple of weeks ago
Speaker 1: allowed fifteen days fit troops, which you know, just you're
Speaker 1: isn't going to happen because nobody's going to support that,
Speaker 1: And he immediately dreamed to six months, right, And interestingly,
Speaker 1: Alan Omer worked directly with him, right and said, look,
Speaker 1: you got it, these are rookie numbers, man, or you
Speaker 1: got to bump these numbers up. And he's like, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: well let's let's let's do it to six months. Because
Speaker 1: she's like, you're just not You're not going to get
Speaker 1: any democratic support for this. So what would what's the
Speaker 1: point of doing this, You're going to you're able to
Speaker 1: get a floor vote, Like, why blow it on something
Speaker 1: that everybody's just going to vote against? And so they
Speaker 1: so they came up with this six month threshold. So
Speaker 1: does that signal that Matt Gates thinks there's no chance
Speaker 1: of getting significant support either from Republicans or centrist Democrats,
Speaker 1: so you might as well just put the fifteen days in?
Speaker 1: Or does it signal that someone on his policy team
Speaker 1: just and he just did something really dumb with the
Speaker 1: timeline the question The jury is still out on that question,
Speaker 1: but I would actually predict a slight increase in that number.
Speaker 1: I think that would probably tick up from twenty five,
Speaker 1: especially amidst problems in Europe, amidst problems in the staff
Speaker 1: trying to see I think, you know, there's a real,
Speaker 1: even among people who are more hawkish in the Republican Party,
Speaker 1: there's a real concern that we're expending military power in
Speaker 1: places that are draining military power that should be re
Speaker 1: prioritized and in places that should be reprioritized. So I
Speaker 1: actually would would predict you know, it's not a like
Speaker 1: solid prediction. I don't have any particular intelligence right now
Speaker 1: on this, but I would expect that number to be higher.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, that'll be nice to say it's unlikely
Speaker 1: to get to two eighteen. Yeah at this point, but
Speaker 1: you know, a serious show of force I think at
Speaker 1: least puts pressure. And Mark Millie was just there that
Speaker 1: I don't think that's a coincidence at all. You know,
Speaker 1: he went it's the first time he's been there in
Speaker 1: a very long time, and I think it was he
Speaker 1: was there to kind of, you know, show confidence in
Speaker 1: the US presence there, which also we should note is illegal.
Speaker 1: Like so there was. It's crazy I covered the vote
Speaker 1: or the whipping or the vote in twenty thirteen around
Speaker 1: this precise issue ten years. I've been doing this for
Speaker 1: too long. And Obama eventually pulled it off the floor
Speaker 1: after our whipcount showed two hundred and forty three nose
Speaker 1: and leaning nose. So he was going to lose. He
Speaker 1: was going to lose the vote. He wasn't going to
Speaker 1: get authorization for this use of force. Half posts whipcount, yeah,
Speaker 1: half posted, even like Daily Coast was doing its own
Speaker 1: kind of separate whip count back back in the days
Speaker 1: when there was a little bit more skeptical of US
Speaker 1: interventions and so there is not that authority. So therefore
Speaker 1: they're relying on the two thousand and one a UMF,
Speaker 1: the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which allows
Speaker 1: the US to go to war anywhere at once as
Speaker 1: long as it's against al Qaeda, and the Taliban was
Speaker 1: thrown in there as well, and they've since said, okay,
Speaker 1: well al Qaeda anybody kind of similar to al Qaida
Speaker 1: was hiding under the North Stream, right, Yes, well that
Speaker 1: was a pro Ukrainian group, and so the but the
Speaker 1: administration in the press has been saying that the purpose
Speaker 1: of this deployment of troops overseas is to counter Iran
Speaker 1: and pro Iranian militias in Syria. And there's just now
Speaker 1: if you were going to say, well, they're there to
Speaker 1: fight isis only then you could maybe say, okay, well,
Speaker 1: isis is derivative enough of al Qaeda that you know
Speaker 1: you're not going to win a court case over this.
Speaker 1: But there's just no interpretation of the two thousand and
Speaker 1: one AUMF that authorise as a president to go to
Speaker 1: war against Iran or pro run milits like that's just
Speaker 1: just can't do it. And so then the question is
Speaker 1: does that matter? Clearly doesn't. What about the rules based order?
Speaker 1: It clearly doesn't matter to the people who are acture
Speaker 1: us constantly about the rules based order, and like sure
Speaker 1: other countries about the rules based order. I know where
Speaker 1: suckers to even take it seriously. But yeah, what we're
Speaker 1: supposed to do this for the hell of it, pretend
Speaker 1: the rules based order matter. What's your point today? All right, Well,
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about Tucker Carlson and new
Speaker 1: Fox News reporting before Tucker started releasing new footage from
Speaker 1: the Capitol in January sixth. Just this Monday, he actually
Speaker 1: prefaced his show with an interesting admission. As he covers
Speaker 1: the video this week, Carlson said, many mystery mysteries will
Speaker 1: remain unsolved, and in fact, there were many examples of
Speaker 1: behavior we saw in those tapes that didn't seem to
Speaker 1: make sense. Men and civilian clothes holding doors open for protesters,
Speaker 1: escorting others through the capitol, et cetera. We would love
Speaker 1: to know who these people were, but as of tonight,
Speaker 1: we don't know. And because we don't know, we're not
Speaker 1: going to put their faces on the screen and suggest
Speaker 1: they were federal agents. So video of men and civilian clothing.
Speaker 1: Holding doors open for protesters and escorting others through the
Speaker 1: Capitol should have been explained by the Special Committee House
Speaker 1: Democrats and paneled to investigate January six. In new video,
Speaker 1: for instance, Carlson showed nearly ten officers calmly escorting the
Speaker 1: so called QAnon shaman around the Capitol building on January sixth.
Speaker 1: Maybe this was a crowd control technique. I actually have
Speaker 1: no idea, but I was there as a reporter, and
Speaker 1: right away it was clear to me that different parts
Speaker 1: of the building were experiencing very different versions of events.
Speaker 1: To be clear, I think the bottom line about January
Speaker 1: six is that a group of Trump supporters, not Antifa
Speaker 1: or the FBI, were so persuaded by the former president
Speaker 1: and so furious at the political establishment that they gave
Speaker 1: into mob mentality and violence, thinking it was their last
Speaker 1: chance to save the country. You could feel it snowballing.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean the FBI didn't have informants involved.
Speaker 1: We now know definitively they did, And it doesn't mean
Speaker 1: the media's coverage was true. We now know definitively it wasn't.
Speaker 1: For instance, here are some questions the media should be wondering,
Speaker 1: why does Tuck have videoed the January sixth Committee seems
Speaker 1: to have contradicted even though they had it in their possession.
Speaker 1: Why did attorneys for the January sixth defendants, as one
Speaker 1: said on Laura Ingram Show last night, not get that video?
Speaker 1: And why is the media more upset? And why are
Speaker 1: some establishment Republicans from Tom Tillis to Kevin Kramer to
Speaker 1: Mitch McConnell who trotted out a prop yesterday. Why are
Speaker 1: they more upset with Tucker Carlson than with the January
Speaker 1: sixth Committee or with the media that just completely swallowed
Speaker 1: the January sixth Committee's narrative whole cloth. So to pivot
Speaker 1: just slightly here, hundreds of pages of new documents in
Speaker 1: the dominion lawsuit against Fox News dropped yesterday, and there
Speaker 1: is surely plenty to dive into over the coming days. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: on Capitol Hill, as I just mentioned, Republican senators from
Speaker 1: Tillis to Kramer to McConnell have been whining about Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson's coverage of the January sixth tapes. Chuck Schumer actually
Speaker 1: called on Rupert Murdoch to yank Tucker Carlson off the
Speaker 1: air recently. You can see this tweet from Republican Senator
Speaker 1: jd Vance who said, today, I was asked by multiple
Speaker 1: reporters about Tucker's show last night. I was ast zero
Speaker 1: times about one of the most powerful figures in government
Speaker 1: actively promoting corporate censorship. Jeter said, censorship. But you can
Speaker 1: add the word corporate censorship of a media figure. The
Speaker 1: assault on quote our democracy is this again. He's asking
Speaker 1: questions about where Republican senators from Mitch McConnell to Kevin Cramer,
Speaker 1: A Tom Taylis and Mitt Romney are placing their priorities.
Speaker 1: And that is a useful question to apply to the
Speaker 1: media as well. And here's where it's useful to think
Speaker 1: about the balance overall in American media. Every single corporate
Speaker 1: media institution regularly attacks Fox News, sometimes with reason but
Speaker 1: other times without it. Plus nearly every single reporter now
Speaker 1: feasting on these dominion documents has helped spread destructive false
Speaker 1: narratives in recent years, and many of them have done
Speaker 1: it while deceiving their audience by pretending to be neutral
Speaker 1: and a political So you don't have to shed any
Speaker 1: tears for Fox News to recognize that While the network
Speaker 1: is powerful, the combined powers of their enemies is beyond
Speaker 1: Rupert Murdoch's wildest imagination. And those enemies are much more
Speaker 1: powerful and much more guilty because they feign superiority. So
Speaker 1: let's pivot for a minute again and enjoy this delightful
Speaker 1: clip of Russell Brand calmly making NBC analyst John Holman
Speaker 1: look foolish from last Friday's edition of Real Time. John,
Speaker 1: I've not known you long, but I love you already.
Speaker 1: But I have to say that it's disingenuous to claim
Speaker 1: that the biases they're exhibited on Fox News are any
Speaker 1: different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. It's difficult to
Speaker 1: suggest that these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces
Speaker 1: for their affiliate owners in Black Rock and Vanguard. And
Speaker 1: unless we start to embrace and it also mate like
Speaker 1: just spiritually, if I may use that word in your
Speaker 1: great country, we have to take responsibility for our own perspectives.
Speaker 1: I've been on that MSNBC, mate, it was propaganda. It's
Speaker 1: nut crackery. I went on a strength called Morning Joe.
Speaker 1: It was absurd the way they carried Morning Joe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know what it was. It wasn't morning. There
Speaker 1: was no one called Joe there, no one could concentrate.
Speaker 1: They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism. No one
Speaker 1: was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like
Speaker 1: Edward Snow. Then no one was willing to talk about
Speaker 1: Julian Assange and what he suffered trying to bring real
Speaker 1: journalism to the American people. And I think to sit
Speaker 1: within the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks Fox News is ludicrous.
Speaker 1: Make MSNBC better, Make MSNBC great again, Make MSNBC great again,
Speaker 1: make the entire media grade again. Maybe Brian's point came
Speaker 1: amid a discussion on the show of recent legal disclosures
Speaker 1: that are showing certain hosts and executives at Fox News
Speaker 1: were unhappy with other people the network's coverage of genuine
Speaker 1: disinformation about the twenty twenty election. Since I've written this
Speaker 1: script that I'm reading now, we're getting even more from
Speaker 1: the dominion documents. But as he was being criticized for
Speaker 1: misrepresenting facts, John Heilman, then mister represented the facts about
Speaker 1: the Fox lawsuit. But that's neither here than there. My
Speaker 1: only quibble with Brand's point is that Fox News recognizes
Speaker 1: there's money to be made by being the only corporate
Speaker 1: media outlet willing to air anti establishment voices. Unlike on
Speaker 1: MSNBC or CNN. These days, on Fox News, you will
Speaker 1: actually hear Glenn Greenwald and Tulsea Gabbard's perspectives. You'll hear
Speaker 1: absolutely forbidden critiques of the left's excesses like censorship and
Speaker 1: puberty blockers and neo racism. These are closer to the
Speaker 1: perspectives you'd hear in a bar in my Wisconsin hometown
Speaker 1: than anything on MSNBC or CNN. We're questioning the dogma
Speaker 1: of rich educated liberals is uncouth and bigoted and intolerable. Again,
Speaker 1: I'm sure Rupert Murdoch understands this fundamentally as a business strategy,
Speaker 1: not an altruistic one. Still over on MSNBC and CNN,
Speaker 1: and in the pages of The New York Times and
Speaker 1: the Washington Post and even Rupert murdocks Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 1: it's rare to hear serious critiques of the military industrial
Speaker 1: complex or corporate power, unless those critiques are about the
Speaker 1: military being racist or corporations needing bigger HR departments. Fox
Speaker 1: platforms warmongers too, that's true. That's true, but they know
Speaker 1: it's more entertaining than to air other perspectives alongside of them.
Speaker 1: So while corporate media winds about Kevin McCarthy granting Tucker
Speaker 1: Carlson access to the January sixth tapes, it's possible to
Speaker 1: question the decision but recognize that corporate media itself is
Speaker 1: the problem. That Tucker seeing the j six footage after
Speaker 1: a purportedly bipartisan select committee left relevant video out of
Speaker 1: their hearings and reports, and that media never questioned them.
Speaker 1: If you're talking about Fox and Tucker and not talking
Speaker 1: about the broader universe of other networks and journalists who've
Speaker 1: made a habit of lying and deceiving for partisan purposes,
Speaker 1: you're getting sucked into a stupid game. Just like all
Speaker 1: those Republican senators choosing to waste breath on Tucker, they
Speaker 1: would never use to critique the entire corporate press and
Speaker 1: intelligence community for exploiting the tragedy. Ryan, Again, there's a
Speaker 1: lot coming out of the dominion lawsuits. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us. As you may have noticed,
Speaker 1: if you're watching this on YouTube, we're doing something different.
Speaker 1: Posting just a couple of the clips. You can find
Speaker 1: the rest of them, as you know, on the podcast version,
Speaker 1: also on the premium version, you know, you get to
Speaker 1: part with ten year dollars every month to hear that,
Speaker 1: but then you get it add free, that's right, and
Speaker 1: you get it emailed into your inbox an hour early.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Its been a good show though, another
Speaker 1: typical Wednesday, meaning we are bursting at the seams with
Speaker 1: breaking news. There you go, exactly, all right, Well, we
Speaker 1: will see you guys next Wednesday.