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 2: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning everyone.
Speaker 4: Soccer is still out getting married in India, so I'm
Speaker 4: here wait for one more day, right, it's just so rude. No,
Speaker 4: he's excited to come back, Crystal. Thanks for having me
Speaker 4: once again. Huge though, because we were on a little
Speaker 4: bit of a break over the Fourth of July. I
Speaker 4: hope everyone had a great Fourth of July. But lots
Speaker 4: coming up on today's show.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, we missed a few of the major
Speaker 1: Supreme Court decisions, so we'll dig into the remainder of
Speaker 1: what those rulings were, including one on student debt, so
Speaker 1: that'll be interesting.
Speaker 5: In one on.
Speaker 1: LGBT rights and religious liberty, so we'll get into all
Speaker 1: of that. Also, there is a whole lot going on
Speaker 1: in the social media space. So threads the potential Twitter
Speaker 1: killer from Mark Zuckerberg that just launched, So we'll tell
Speaker 1: you about that. I actually tried it out, give you
Speaker 1: a sense of what's going on there. We also had
Speaker 1: another major ruling a judge, a federal judge actually saying
Speaker 1: that the Biden administration can no longer flag tweets another
Speaker 1: social media posts for censorship. So that is very interesting.
Speaker 1: We'll tell you about that. A lot going on in
Speaker 1: terms of the whole Disantas Trump wore pretty wild ad
Speaker 1: that the Santas team put out. They got a lot
Speaker 1: of reaction looming major strike from ups workers. This could
Speaker 1: be the largest strike or near the largest strike in
Speaker 1: American history, so something we definitely want to keep an
Speaker 1: eye on.
Speaker 5: There.
Speaker 1: A bit of a mystery unfolding at the White House
Speaker 1: as cocaine was found, law enforcement saying we may never know.
Speaker 5: How what got there.
Speaker 3: It's going to be like clue.
Speaker 5: We'll give you those details.
Speaker 1: Also, we have a great guest in the show to
Speaker 1: break down what is going on in Israel as they've
Speaker 1: launched the latest of their deadly raids on a Palestinian town.
Speaker 1: So we'll tell you about the fallout there. So let's
Speaker 1: to get to you this morning, but we wanted to
Speaker 1: start with those Supreme Court rulings the very latest, so
Speaker 1: to give you a kind of top line scoreboard of
Speaker 1: some of the major decisions that happened here. We've got
Speaker 1: some graphics from the New York Times about what some
Speaker 1: of the key rulings here were and how they broke
Speaker 1: down partisan lines or whether there was more overall new majority.
Speaker 1: Let's put the first one up on the screen. This
Speaker 1: one we did have a chance to talk about with
Speaker 1: our great panel. Thank you guys so much for the
Speaker 1: feedback on that. I thought both of those gentlemen really
Speaker 1: offered a lot of insight and represented their views well.
Speaker 1: Firmative action the use of race in college admissions struck
Speaker 1: down six to three, So this was a partisan vote.
Speaker 1: Let's go ahead and put the next one up on
Speaker 1: the screen. In terms of rulings, this one we're going
Speaker 1: to get into more so. President Biden's student loan debt
Speaker 1: cancellation program also struck down six to three. So again
Speaker 1: along those ideological or partisan lines. Let's put the next
Speaker 1: one up on the screen. This is another one we'll
Speaker 1: talk about today. So it has to do with a
Speaker 1: creator business owner who was requested maybe to create a
Speaker 1: website for a gay couple and did not want to
Speaker 1: do it because she said it violated her beliefs as
Speaker 1: a Christian. This one also was a partisan decision six
Speaker 1: to three. And let's put this last one up on
Speaker 1: the screen. This was an interesting one. You had state
Speaker 1: legislatures and federal elections.
Speaker 5: This was the independent state legislature theory.
Speaker 1: A lot of concerns here that this if the court
Speaker 1: upheld this idea of the independent state legislature, this could
Speaker 1: be used next time around if Trump tries to steal
Speaker 1: the election again, because this was some of the rationale
Speaker 1: that went into the last attempt to steal the elections.
Speaker 1: So you had some liberals joining with conservatives here to
Speaker 1: say no, we're not going in that direction, and also
Speaker 1: to maintain the power of the judiciary over state and
Speaker 1: federal elections. So an interesting one there, But let's go
Speaker 1: and dive into this student debt decision. Put this next
Speaker 1: element up on the screen that I just mentioned. So
Speaker 1: as you guys recall, Joe Biden issued an executive order
Speaker 1: to cancel ten to twenty thousand dollars in student loan
Speaker 1: debt for people below a certain income threshold. Major Biden initiative.
Speaker 1: You know, something that was promised on the campaign trail,
Speaker 1: something that was really pushed for by activists, now struck
Speaker 1: down six to three along partisan ideological lines. Here, So
Speaker 1: the details within this piece they talk about how the
Speaker 1: Court rejected the thinking because the language was not specific enough.
Speaker 1: You had Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority,
Speaker 1: saying that the court's precedent quote requires that Congress speak
Speaker 1: clearly before a Department secretary can unilaterally alter large sections
Speaker 1: of the American economy. The context here is student loan
Speaker 1: repayments are actually set to begin again at the end
Speaker 1: of August. That was part of that debt sealing deal
Speaker 1: that was struck with Kevin McCarthy after having been put
Speaker 1: on pause during the COVID nineteen pandemic. First payments not
Speaker 1: due though until October. So at a moment when student
Speaker 1: loan payments are about to restart, and when obviously you
Speaker 1: still have this massive amount of debt hanging over many
Speaker 1: former college and current college students, this plan has been
Speaker 1: struck down. Emily, the Biden administration has already responded they
Speaker 1: have a new plan in place. This is kind of
Speaker 1: the plan, the approach, so to speak, put this up
Speaker 1: on the screen. So, as I mentioned before, they had
Speaker 1: chosen to use the Heroes Act, which was this pandemic
Speaker 1: era legislation. It was always a little perplexing to me
Speaker 1: that they went in that direction. But as I mentioned before,
Speaker 1: they thought, all right, since Trump did it, maybe this
Speaker 1: is the easiest way to sneak one by the court.
Speaker 1: Now they're saying, all right, we're going to try it again.
Speaker 5: We're going to use the.
Speaker 1: Higher Education Act of nineteen sixty five. The language there
Speaker 1: is a little more clear. The Act says that they
Speaker 1: can compromise, wave or release student loans, so it's fairly direct.
Speaker 1: It says the Education Secretary has the authority to do that.
Speaker 1: The Higher Education Act of nineteen sixty five has.
Speaker 5: Been used in the past.
Speaker 1: To cancel some student loan debt, although admittedly not as
Speaker 1: sweeping a program as what the Biden administration is pushing here.
Speaker 1: In addition, he has also announced a twelve month grace
Speaker 1: period to help borrowers who might struggle after payments restart.
Speaker 1: There's some indication that there are quite a number of
Speaker 1: student loan debt holders who will have trouble making their payments,
Speaker 1: So there is a twelve month grace period. However, interest
Speaker 1: will continue to accrue. It will resume in September, So
Speaker 1: whether or not you are making payments, that interest is
Speaker 1: going to continue to mount. And there's another piece of
Speaker 1: this that I'll get into in a moment that's a
Speaker 1: little bit complicated, but basically, the bottom line is for
Speaker 1: this Higher Education Act the new direction to go through,
Speaker 1: it's going to be a lengthy process that is going
Speaker 1: to push this out almost certainly beyond twenty twenty four
Speaker 1: and p on the next election.
Speaker 4: And that's exactly what Biden seemed to be struggling with.
Speaker 4: His quote on this was basically, I think think using
Speaker 4: the Higher Education Act is going to take longer than
Speaker 4: the original plan. But quote, in my view, it's the
Speaker 4: best path that.
Speaker 3: Remains, providing as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.
Speaker 4: Now, the David Dayan peace that we had from Prospect
Speaker 4: up on the screen just a moment ago is fascinating
Speaker 4: because he makes a very persuasive case that this was
Speaker 4: always the way the Biden administration should have gone. And
Speaker 4: when you have people whose lives are on the line,
Speaker 4: and this is something I think conservatives get long get
Speaker 4: wrong a lot. They don't recognize how consequential the student
Speaker 4: loans are. They well, people made this decision, and they
Speaker 4: can deal with the consequences of it. Well, if you
Speaker 4: want people to buy homes and start families and join
Speaker 4: the middle class and be members of their communities constructively,
Speaker 4: you don't want them to be saddled with tens of
Speaker 4: thousands of dollars of debt just to get their ticket
Speaker 4: into the middle class. And so this is obviously hugely consequential,
Speaker 4: and Biden has left these people in the larch for
Speaker 4: years at this point and will continue to be years
Speaker 4: in the future. So not only I think is that
Speaker 4: election date important for Joe Biden, but it's just another
Speaker 4: indication of how I think silly sometimes this administration has
Speaker 4: been when approaching these questions.
Speaker 1: I never understood why they went in the direction of
Speaker 1: the Heroes Act. Their justification to make the case that
Speaker 1: they would make is that it would be quicker and
Speaker 1: that since Trump had used it to justify some student
Speaker 1: loan debt relief, perhaps the court would look more favorably
Speaker 1: upon it. I've always thought that was a little bit foolish,
Speaker 1: because you know, I view the Court as basically like
Speaker 1: a partisan operation, you know, to the extent that they
Speaker 1: tries to like balance their decisions, it is because Chief
Speaker 1: Justice John Roberts is afraid of their getting more win
Speaker 1: in the sales of something like court packing and you know,
Speaker 1: completely undermining legitimacy of the court. So I find it's
Speaker 1: sort of precious when people go in and like analy
Speaker 1: who was it correctly decided based on the Constitution, Because
Speaker 1: to me, the idea that they're just calling like legal
Speaker 1: balls and strikes here is completely farcical. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's some real questions. I think about how much Biden
Speaker 1: actually wants the student loan debt to be canceled based
Speaker 1: on his history, his ideological history. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: diavingable neoliberal debt cancelation not really something that neoliberals have
Speaker 1: historically been on board with. He was kind of drag
Speaker 1: kicking and screaming to this. Only the only reason he
Speaker 1: made this promise on the campaign trails because he was
Speaker 1: facing pressure from Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and others
Speaker 1: to do something. His plan was always the least of
Speaker 1: the crew in the twenty twenty primary, but he did
Speaker 1: make a really clear promise here, and then even once
Speaker 1: he gets into office, this is something he had the
Speaker 1: unilateral ability to effectuate.
Speaker 5: And still drive his feet drag his feet dragged his.
Speaker 1: Feet really reportedly was very reluctant to undergo any of
Speaker 1: this debt cancelation. Decides to do it using the Heroes
Speaker 1: Act for you know, the administration.
Speaker 5: Justifications that you would give.
Speaker 1: But even with the direction that they're going in now,
Speaker 1: David Dayan points us out in his piece, they want
Speaker 1: to issue it as a rule. And part of the
Speaker 1: reason why apparently they have to do that is because
Speaker 1: they want to do all this like complicated means testing
Speaker 1: and stuff, and so they feel like it may be
Speaker 1: on stronger legal footing. This is their their justification. If
Speaker 1: you go through the rule making process, now that requires
Speaker 1: a public comment period, It requires this like negotiated rule
Speaker 1: making period. It takes a lot of time. There is
Speaker 1: another way they could do it as an order, but
Speaker 1: it would be faster, but perhaps on less solid legal footing.
Speaker 1: Is the analysis now, Again, I think it's sort of
Speaker 1: silly to really imagine that the Supreme Court is just
Speaker 1: looking at this and calling you balls and strikes and
Speaker 1: analyze oh, this is on stronger legal footing, and this
Speaker 1: is on weaker ground. So in my opinion, they should
Speaker 1: push the you know, push the envelope issue and order
Speaker 1: cancel the debt as quickly as they possibly can. But
Speaker 1: if you want to be a little bit conspiratorial, or
Speaker 1: you know, consider Peter I guess a little bit cynical
Speaker 1: about this, you could also say, well, it's kind of
Speaker 1: convenient for them that this pushes it down past the
Speaker 1: next election, when this is a really critical issue for
Speaker 1: so many voters, very motivating for so many voters who
Speaker 1: feel direct, tangible material pressure and possible material benefit from this.
Speaker 1: So if you have this as a live issue going
Speaker 1: into the election, you can see how that might be
Speaker 1: appealing to them politically, above and beyond their rationalizations about oh,
Speaker 1: this is the best way legally forward.
Speaker 4: And they can continue to blame the court. They continue
Speaker 4: to can continue.
Speaker 3: To say, Joe Biden or I, if you're Joe Biden.
Speaker 4: Did everything in my power to give you this relief,
Speaker 4: and yet the Conservative Supreme Court blocked it. So right
Speaker 4: now what I'm doing is everything else that's in my power.
Speaker 3: I'm working really hard on it.
Speaker 4: And you can continue to make that pitch continue to
Speaker 4: make this issue part of that. Listen, I mean, I'm
Speaker 4: not I think what depresses me most about all of
Speaker 4: that is, you know, one of the reasons I oppose
Speaker 4: categorical relief or relief in ways like this is because
Speaker 4: the system is a joke. It's I mean, it is
Speaker 4: the neoliberal idea that you can take you know, that
Speaker 4: college education is your ticket to the middle class.
Speaker 3: Everything's going to be okay. That was a lie.
Speaker 4: It was a lie from our politicians, the entire political class,
Speaker 4: the media, it was a lie from.
Speaker 3: The culture for years and years and years.
Speaker 4: And college education has just gotten more expensive, so there's
Speaker 4: no incentives to take down the cost of it. And
Speaker 4: for me, what's really depressing about that is nobody even
Speaker 4: has the will like not only it's interesting because the
Speaker 4: Biden administration is sort of halfway approach, like we're not extreme,
Speaker 4: but we're also you know, not you know, super like
Speaker 4: we're not that liberal, but we're also going to do
Speaker 4: stuff for our activist base.
Speaker 3: We're also listening to Bernie et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 4: It's the worst of both worlds, you know, like go
Speaker 4: all in or go all out. Be honest, with voters
Speaker 4: say we're not actually going to do this, or yeah,
Speaker 4: we're going to do it and you're going to live
Speaker 4: with it, and a lot of people are going to
Speaker 4: like it, and a lot of people are going to
Speaker 4: hate it. But this, like split the baby approach by Biden,
Speaker 4: which he does not just this issue but other issues,
Speaker 4: is the worst of both worlds because now people's personal livelihoods,
Speaker 4: their material reality is in the lurch and will continue
Speaker 4: to be in the lurch for electoral reasons for years to.
Speaker 1: I think those are really important points, and I think
Speaker 1: all of that is fair. I mean, the reason I
Speaker 1: come down in a different place than you do and
Speaker 1: then that Soccer does on the actual possibility of debt
Speaker 1: relief is because listen, I would love it if there
Speaker 1: was broader reform on the table.
Speaker 5: I would love it if there was free public college
Speaker 5: and trade school on the table. There's not.
Speaker 1: So at least if there's you know, a little bit
Speaker 1: of relief that's on the table for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: that would make huge different in their difference in their lives.
Speaker 1: I'm like, all right, let's do that, because that's the
Speaker 1: best we can get right now. But the big picture
Speaker 1: here is a story of institutional failure. I mean, you
Speaker 1: have a White House that sort of bungled the direction
Speaker 1: of this from the beginning, that dragged their feet, that
Speaker 1: could have provided a lot more relief. So you've got that,
Speaker 1: You've got Congress is really the place where you should
Speaker 1: have broader legislation to deal with the fact that college
Speaker 1: education costs continue to skyrocket, that you even have a
Speaker 1: thing that is student debt, and that it is crushing
Speaker 1: for multiple generations, sets them back in terms of families,
Speaker 1: which you know you're talking about marriage today, in terms
Speaker 1: of being able to buy a house, in terms of
Speaker 1: being able to start a business and be entrepreneurs if
Speaker 1: that's the direction that they want to go in. So
Speaker 1: this absolute crushing level of debt, that's something Congress should
Speaker 1: be able to deal with. You know, that's the appropriate
Speaker 1: place to really formulate a comprehensive solution. No one has
Speaker 1: any expectation that that's coming anytime soon. And then you
Speaker 1: have a court that has, you know, its own massive
Speaker 1: corruption issues and total loss of credibility, that is not
Speaker 1: interested in calling bills and strikes, that is interested in
Speaker 1: advancing their own ideological agenda. So you just have like
Speaker 1: every branch of government kind of failures all around, and
Speaker 1: I think that's the big picture of student loan debt relief.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about this next decision though, and Amiliana,
Speaker 1: you have some interesting insight into this one. Gon put
Speaker 1: this next one up on the screen. This is this
Speaker 1: case of you know, tension between all right, where does
Speaker 1: where do religious rights turn into overt discrimination? And this
Speaker 1: is something that the Court has wrestled with, of course,
Speaker 1: many times.
Speaker 5: In its history. You have the Supreme Court.
Speaker 1: This is the ap headline ruling for a designer who
Speaker 1: does not want to make wedding websites for gay couples.
Speaker 5: Let me read you a little bit from this appiece.
Speaker 1: They see say, in a defeat for gay rights, the
Speaker 1: Supreme Court's conservative majority, and this was along partisan idy
Speaker 1: logical lines, ruled on Friday that a Christian graphic artist
Speaker 1: who wants to design wedding websites can refuse to work
Speaker 1: with same sex couples. One of the Court's liberal justices
Speaker 1: wrote in a descent that the decisions effect is to
Speaker 1: mark gays and lesbians for second class status, and that
Speaker 1: the decision opens the door to other discrimination. The decision
Speaker 1: to get into the specific s here suggests that artists, photographers, videographers,
Speaker 1: and writers are among those who can refuse to offer
Speaker 1: what the court called expressive services if doing so would
Speaker 1: run contrary to their beliefs. But that's different from other
Speaker 1: businesses not engaged in speech and therefore not covered by
Speaker 1: the first amendments, such as restaurants and hotels. So, Emily,
Speaker 1: I know you have actually spoken with this designer, so
Speaker 1: it give us.
Speaker 5: A little bit of the backstory on this particular case.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this is, as a lot of conservatives seen it,
Speaker 4: an attempt to really write the wrongs the Masterpiece cake shop,
Speaker 4: you know, the bake, the origin of the bake, the
Speaker 4: dam cake meme that is so popular now. So Jack
Speaker 4: Phillips who had a cake shop and said, I will
Speaker 4: serve absolutely everyone. I'm not going to make a cake
Speaker 4: for a gay wedding. I'll happily serve gay customers. This
Speaker 4: is a really similar situation, and it's basically a stress
Speaker 4: test of the laws that Colorado had in place after
Speaker 4: Masterpiece and Masterpiece was decided in a way that conservatives
Speaker 4: weren't entirely happy with. Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion, and
Speaker 4: it allowed Colorado and states like it to have laws
Speaker 4: that conservatives still felt, Christian still felt, were allowed the
Speaker 4: state to sort of infringe on their beliefs. And so
Speaker 4: Laurie Smith is a website designer. She just like graphic
Speaker 4: design basically, and because.
Speaker 3: Of Colorado's law, felt that she.
Speaker 4: Was going to be in a position where she would
Speaker 4: have to make or would be forced into the situation
Speaker 4: where she would have to make wedding websites for gay weddings. Now,
Speaker 4: this is where it gets interesting because recently, I think
Speaker 4: it was the Daily Beast dug into the original request
Speaker 4: that was cited in the lawsuit, and the customer's request
Speaker 4: basically turns out he was surprised to learn that it
Speaker 4: had been cited in the filing, the court filing. You know,
Speaker 4: his request for her to make it was like through
Speaker 4: the form on a website. Yeah, when you go to
Speaker 4: somebody's website and you just have to go through the
Speaker 4: form then you submit it. It wasn't ever, it looks
Speaker 4: like it wasn't never validated or verified.
Speaker 3: He says he's not gay.
Speaker 6: He's married to a for like fifteen years, right, And
Speaker 6: so there were a lot of laughs about that online
Speaker 6: and it is quite interesting but it also wasn't the
Speaker 6: basis for the original lawsuit.
Speaker 4: This is from the Associated Press. The would be customer's
Speaker 4: request was not the basis for St. Missile original lawsuit,
Speaker 4: nor was it cited by the High Court as the
Speaker 4: reason for ruling in her favor. The Tenth Circuit Court
Speaker 4: of Appeals, they said that Colorado had a history of
Speaker 4: past enforcement quote against nearly identical conduct, so masterpiece, and
Speaker 4: that the state declined to promise that it wouldn't go
Speaker 4: after Smith, So the state didn't prove that it would
Speaker 4: not go after her if she violated their law and
Speaker 4: said I'm not going to make this wedding website for you.
Speaker 4: So it is funny, but also wasn't really the basis
Speaker 4: for the lawsuit. And that said, I actually really think
Speaker 4: this should have been a nine to oh. I think
Speaker 4: if you flipped a nine zero decision, I think, you know,
Speaker 4: in a in a saner world, the ACLU would have
Speaker 4: been all over this. Just in the different in a
Speaker 4: different direction. I think if you flipped her Laurie Smith
Speaker 4: into if you turned her into a Muslim, or like
Speaker 4: in a hypothetical world, or somebody who was like episcopalian
Speaker 4: supported gay marriage, and was asked by a Christian to
Speaker 4: do an anti gay marriage cake. I think you would,
Speaker 4: actually would we would have our sort of ideological blinders
Speaker 4: off and say, yeah, that, like she's an artist, she's
Speaker 4: allowed to do what she wants. It's not Michaelangelo obviously
Speaker 4: creating wedding websites. But I think the left would be
Speaker 4: pretty defensive of her ability to create expressive websites, et
Speaker 4: cetera if she weren't Christian.
Speaker 3: I think that just like kind of changed everybody's.
Speaker 4: Uh, you know for and I get I get why
Speaker 4: people are suspicious of that, you know, after in recent history,
Speaker 4: but at the same time, I really think that they
Speaker 4: would be defending her ability as an artist to say, no,
Speaker 4: I don't want to make a website for an anti
Speaker 4: gay organization, or I don't want to create a website
Speaker 4: for the event of an anti gay organization. I'll make
Speaker 4: the people a cake for anything else, or I'll make
Speaker 4: the people a website for anything else, but not for
Speaker 4: this anti gay demonstration that they want to do. And
Speaker 4: that's where I think it probably should have been nine zero.
Speaker 5: So I also think it should have been nine zero.
Speaker 1: But in the other day the other direction, because I mean, listen,
Speaker 1: the bedrock of the civil rights era was the idea
Speaker 1: that you cannot discriminate against people in terms of public accommodations.
Speaker 1: And so while I acknowledge that it can be tricky
Speaker 1: to strike the balance between all right, where does religious
Speaker 1: liberty end and where does discrimination begin, I think at
Speaker 1: this point in American history, we've all acknowledged that, you know,
Speaker 1: discrimination against LGBTQ people is a thing that it should
Speaker 1: be prevented. This Court has affirmed us multiple times, and
Speaker 1: so you know, it's they're trying to draw this line
Speaker 1: of oh, this is expressive, and this is first this
Speaker 1: is a First Amendment free speech issue. But you know,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of things that could be theoretically
Speaker 1: construed as speech, including baking a cake, including making a website,
Speaker 1: including you know, printing up the programs for the wedding.
Speaker 1: Any part of that could theoretically be called free speech.
Speaker 1: And so I think this is much more about just
Speaker 1: you have an obligation as a business owner to serve
Speaker 1: the public, and you cannot fall back on your religion
Speaker 1: as your justification for discrimination. Because listen, the Bible has
Speaker 1: been used to justify overt discrimination many times in American history.
Speaker 1: I mean it was used arguments from the Bible were
Speaker 1: used to say, oh, this is God is.
Speaker 5: Against interracial marriage.
Speaker 1: So to me, this is you know, way over the
Speaker 1: line in terms of where religious freedom lies. But you know,
Speaker 1: court sees it otherwise, So we will, I'm sure, have
Speaker 1: additional probably legislation about what exactly the bounds are here.
Speaker 1: I do think the piece, you know, I hear what
Speaker 1: you're saying about this, The actual mechanics of how this
Speaker 1: request came to be didn't end up being central.
Speaker 5: To the decision.
Speaker 1: But I do think the fact that number one, she's
Speaker 1: actually never made a wedding website for anyone.
Speaker 5: She's never made one.
Speaker 1: She said, oh I might, I'm thinking about theoretically maybe
Speaker 1: getting into the wedding website business is like okay, And
Speaker 1: then the request itself is fake. I mean, this guy
Speaker 1: did not submit request. He's not gay, he's been married
Speaker 1: for fifteen years, and this is the only request that
Speaker 1: they could cite.
Speaker 5: So, I mean, listen, this is the way that our
Speaker 5: legal process works.
Speaker 1: Activists, you know, have something that they want to test,
Speaker 1: they look for a test case in order to do it.
Speaker 1: It's actually embarrassing and humiliating for the court though, that
Speaker 1: they never even did the basics that this got all
Speaker 1: the way to the Supreme Court without anyone doing the
Speaker 1: basics of checking in on whether this was actually a
Speaker 1: real request or not. So it is embarrassing. And I
Speaker 1: think also if the reality of that had come out,
Speaker 1: I don't know that the case would have gone any differently,
Speaker 1: because again I think this is more ideological than it
Speaker 1: is actually doing you know, any sort of real justice,
Speaker 1: ye legal analysis. But it may have called into questions
Speaker 1: some of the other arguments, It may have put it
Speaker 1: on sort of shakier ground when you have a designer
Speaker 1: who doesn't actually making websites with a request that isn't
Speaker 1: actually a real request, there's you know a lot of
Speaker 1: those pieces that kind of fall apart.
Speaker 4: So she was represented by Alliance Defended Defending Freedom, which
Speaker 4: has worked really closely with Jack Phillips. And my assumption
Speaker 4: is that so this is what's happened with Jack Phillips
Speaker 4: Christian Baker over and over again, that you have people
Speaker 4: on the left coming in and making obscene requests of him,
Speaker 4: and it just like things that I won't even describe here,
Speaker 4: like just obscene requests of him to test the system and.
Speaker 3: To test the law.
Speaker 4: And so I think it's it's really been happening in
Speaker 4: both directions. And my assumption is that, you know, that's
Speaker 4: that's sort of what we all understand is happening with
Speaker 4: these like speech laws in places like Colorado or Washington
Speaker 4: State where everyone's just sort of stressed testing the system
Speaker 4: and seeing where they can come out.
Speaker 3: And I think it was Elena Kagan that said in
Speaker 3: this term.
Speaker 4: I think she was referring to the student debt case,
Speaker 4: but she said, one of the interesting things actually is
Speaker 4: not the way the conservative majority ruled in the case,
Speaker 4: but their decision to take up the case at all.
Speaker 3: And I really think that's worth thinking.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is true because we've had courts ruled differently
Speaker 4: on affirmative action in recent years and sort of punt
Speaker 4: in different cases, you know, punt on Obamacare in a
Speaker 4: way that was really really displeasing to conservatives, like you know,
Speaker 4: a Chief Justice John Roberts. And so I think actually
Speaker 4: part of what's really interesting about this is that is
Speaker 4: the cases that the Court took up this session.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that that is very true. And you know,
Speaker 1: just my last point on this is I really do
Speaker 1: agree with the dissent that this puts gays and lesbians
Speaker 1: on kind of second class footing, because it's not like
Speaker 1: a gay couple that's looking to have a wedding website.
Speaker 1: It's not like they're trying to make some like activist
Speaker 1: ideological point.
Speaker 5: They're just trying to live.
Speaker 1: Their lives, right, and the fact that they are entering
Speaker 1: into a gay marriage makes it political. When you know
Speaker 1: a heterosexual couple that was getting married, it's seen as
Speaker 1: just like normal and non political. Well, these are all
Speaker 1: just people, not trying to be activists, not trying to
Speaker 1: make ideological points, just trying to live their lives. And
Speaker 1: now if you're a gay couple, you've got to sort
Speaker 1: through which vendors are going to be willing to serve you.
Speaker 1: And the Supreme Court has said that that is perfectly
Speaker 1: fine and that can be the law of the land.
Speaker 4: This is why my one remaining libertarian take on things
Speaker 4: is that I don't think marriage should be sanctioned by
Speaker 4: the government at all. But anyway, a lot, as Chris
Speaker 4: Well mentioned earlier in the show, we have social media
Speaker 4: on the docket today. Speaking of the court, let's talk
Speaker 4: about the social media docket because there was a huge
Speaker 4: ruling actually against the Biden administration when it comes to
Speaker 4: their meddling or their pressure on U. There's pressure on
Speaker 4: these major tech corporations to police speech. So a federal
Speaker 4: judge ruled on Tuesday that they're going to be restricting
Speaker 4: some agencies and officials. This is from reuters in Biden's
Speaker 4: administration from meeting and communicating with social media companies to
Speaker 4: moderate their content. According to to a court file filing,
Speaker 4: the injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by
Speaker 4: Republican Attorney's General in Louisiana, Mississippi, who alleged that US
Speaker 4: government officials went too far in efforts to encourage social
Speaker 4: media companies to address posts they worried could contribute to
Speaker 4: vaccine hesitancy during the COVID nineteen pandemic or.
Speaker 3: Up end elections.
Speaker 4: Now, the White House has said the Justice Department is
Speaker 4: taking a look at the order and is going to
Speaker 4: evaluate its options. But we actually got reporting just last
Speaker 4: night from the Washington Post that the Biden administration had
Speaker 4: canceled some of its meetings with these companies, which we
Speaker 4: learned from the Twitter files were regular. For instance, you
Speaker 4: regularly had Twitter meeting with the FBI in the lead
Speaker 4: up to the twenty twenty election, so that in and
Speaker 4: of itself is interesting.
Speaker 3: That it's already has some teeth to it.
Speaker 4: But of course this was not met with cheers by
Speaker 4: a lot of people in the corporate press. Let's run
Speaker 4: B two right now. It's a pretty hilarious freakout from
Speaker 4: I think this one's CNN, but it might be MSNBC.
Speaker 3: Take a listen.
Speaker 7: If they find something that you know, they're flagging this post,
Speaker 7: say hey, this, they're not explicitly saying you need to
Speaker 7: take this down. Often there's sort of an implicit implication
Speaker 7: there if saying just you know, bring this to your attention,
Speaker 7: and then the social media company can decide independently whether
Speaker 7: or not that violates their ongoing standards. But I mean,
Speaker 7: it's a really new area and a really complicated one,
Speaker 7: and one that there should be close guardrails on to
Speaker 7: make sure that the government is not overreaching. But the
Speaker 7: idea that the government can't have any communication with these
Speaker 7: social media companies, I don't think it's something as really
Speaker 7: a world that we would want to live in.
Speaker 4: It's not really a world world doesn't it sound nice,
Speaker 4: sort of utopian. At this point, let's put B three
Speaker 4: up on the screen, and this is from rubbiswave over reason.
Speaker 3: This is a great headline.
Speaker 4: The FBI frequently flagged stroke tweets and asked for moderation.
Speaker 3: Again, we know that this is the case.
Speaker 4: And actually what's kind of interesting here is that CNN
Speaker 4: had a similar sort of freak out panel. I genuinely
Speaker 4: don't know if the legal analysts that are overpaid at
Speaker 4: CNN and MSNBC have read stories like this, have like
Speaker 4: truly thoughtfully combed through the Twitter file. One thing that's
Speaker 4: a little bit frightening is that they very very well
Speaker 4: may have and they may actually think, yes, that the
Speaker 4: FBI should be policing jokes on Twitter, should be reporting
Speaker 4: parody accounts, all.
Speaker 3: Of those things.
Speaker 4: I think one of them was like a parody account
Speaker 4: about Joe Biden's niece or granddaughter.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we need it down immediately.
Speaker 4: And the entitlement that the government approached these corporations with
Speaker 4: that like you listen to us, we're bullying you into submission.
Speaker 4: That's part of what the judge is ruling on here
Speaker 4: is like, this is not the appropriate relationship between government
Speaker 4: and these platforms, But I honestly, honestly don't know if
Speaker 4: they actually realize the full extent of the censorship requests
Speaker 4: as laid out there. Like we're talking about jokes, We're
Speaker 4: not talking about matters of national security in every case?
Speaker 4: Are there some legitimate reasons that the White housemen want
Speaker 4: to fly something to Twitter?
Speaker 3: Sure? Is that really what they were doing?
Speaker 5: Absolutely not right? Well, because there's two levels here.
Speaker 1: There's like the amount that the government was communicating with
Speaker 1: Twitter in particular about Also we know, you know, Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg has sad things about their interactions at Facebook as
Speaker 1: well that is very dystopian and should be really unnerving,
Speaker 1: and you know, really came into play during elections during
Speaker 1: the Hunter Biden stuff, also during COVID. You know, these
Speaker 1: social media platforms were trying to try to really sort
Speaker 1: through fact from fiction during a pandemic when you know,
Speaker 1: science was unsettled and there were a lot of things
Speaker 1: that they just blatantly got wrong and ended up with
Speaker 1: egg on their face and really proved themselves to be
Speaker 1: poor at being able to handle that function. So there's
Speaker 1: like the dystopian aspect of it. Then there's also just
Speaker 1: like the farcical embarrassing aspect of it, which is that
Speaker 1: many of the tweets and posts that came out that
Speaker 1: they had flagged were obvious satire from accounts that had
Speaker 1: like three followers and clearly made no difference to anyone whatsoever.
Speaker 1: And it's like, what, like, there's there's real crime, there's
Speaker 1: really actual bad stuff happening in the country and in
Speaker 1: the world, and this is what you people are spending
Speaker 1: your time on. That's just that's embarrassing. So to give
Speaker 1: you one example, the fbid flagged a user named Claire
Speaker 1: Foster who tweeted, quote, I'm a ballot counter in my state.
Speaker 1: If you're not wearing a mask, I'm not counting your vote.
Speaker 1: Hashtag safety first. And also for every negative comment on
Speaker 1: this post, I'm adding another vote for the Democrats.
Speaker 5: Obvious satire.
Speaker 1: Right, it was an obvious, like maybe potentially lame joke
Speaker 1: that did not even get a lot of interactions. But
Speaker 1: this is the sort of stuff that they were spending
Speaker 1: their time flagging.
Speaker 5: But you know, the more important part.
Speaker 1: Is just the u when the government sends you a request,
Speaker 1: even if they don't it doesn't have the force of.
Speaker 5: Law behind it.
Speaker 1: Obviously, that is very heavy handed and it has obviously
Speaker 1: shaped the type of posts that were allowed on Twitter
Speaker 1: and on other platforms. And Emily, I think your point
Speaker 1: about the fact that many of these so called analysts,
Speaker 1: you know, former like deep staters that they pay now
Speaker 1: see it at an MSBC. I don't think they did
Speaker 1: engage with the Twitter files content, and listen, I had
Speaker 1: some issue with the Twitter Twitter files content as well.
Speaker 1: Obviously Elon was you know, kind of selective about it
Speaker 1: and did not provide like a.
Speaker 5: Full picture of everything that was going on.
Speaker 1: All of that transparency into the previous regime has not
Speaker 1: continued into the current regime.
Speaker 5: I think is probably the biggest critique of all of it.
Speaker 1: But there were some real revelations there that were actually important,
Speaker 1: and the fact that the mainstream press just completely ignored
Speaker 1: it means that, you know, they're ignorant of it, and
Speaker 1: their audience is also ignorant of it. I also think
Speaker 1: you can see in the reaction here the way that
Speaker 1: so much of the public discourse is just completely rotted
Speaker 1: by partisanship. If this had been during the Bush era,
Speaker 1: you would have had Democrats cheering on this decision, and
Speaker 1: you would have had Republicans lamenting it and saying this
Speaker 1: isn't the world we want to live in, and national
Speaker 1: security et.
Speaker 5: Cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Since it's the Biden era, you have the total reverse
Speaker 1: reverse reaction where Republicans cheer it and Democrats are wringing
Speaker 1: their hands.
Speaker 5: They're very concerned about it.
Speaker 1: And this all does really go back to the you know,
Speaker 1: Patriot Act and the type of surveillance that became mainstream
Speaker 1: during the War on Terror era. So in any case,
Speaker 1: bottom line is you should have a consistent principle here.
Speaker 1: If you are concerned about freedom of speech, if you're
Speaker 1: concerned about the First Amendment, this is a win for
Speaker 1: all of those things and hopefully will stand and push
Speaker 1: back on the government's ability to use a heavy hand
Speaker 1: to censor things that have no business whatsoever being censored, flagged.
Speaker 5: Monitored, etc.
Speaker 4: And I was gonna say, I mean, one of the
Speaker 4: best examples, here's the lab leak, the conversation about the
Speaker 4: lab leak, that people in our government, in our federal
Speaker 4: government were using their power to talk to these social
Speaker 4: media companies, the Hunter Biden laptop story, all of these things,
Speaker 4: they were exerting their power, wielding it over these tech
Speaker 4: companies that have proven they have gone from conspiracy theories
Speaker 4: so called conspiracy theories, to basically being substantiated by a
Speaker 4: lot of facts, a lot of reporting. And that's important
Speaker 4: because we have to be able to have those conversations
Speaker 4: to get to the truth. Something may sound shady, it
Speaker 4: may sound like a conspiracy theory, and it may well
Speaker 4: turn out to be true, especially if people in power
Speaker 4: are telling you look over there like this is no,
Speaker 4: this really isn't real, And I just want to read
Speaker 4: from Matt Tayibi. He had a really good article about
Speaker 4: this in Racket, obviously because he was doing a lot
Speaker 4: of the Twitter FILEWS work. He said basically that the investigation,
Speaker 4: which was led by these two Republican Attorneys General Jeff
Speaker 4: Landry and Andrew Bailey, produced documents showing overt government requests
Speaker 4: to censor people like RFK Junior, a White House official
Speaker 4: expressing frustration of Facebook they weren't removing bad information from
Speaker 4: the search and emails in which a Facebook official please
Speaker 4: with the White House to understand that they're already quote
Speaker 4: reducing the virality of often true content that might promote
Speaker 4: vaccine hesitancy, among many other things. So again, just some
Speaker 4: of this stuff. It doesn't even have to be a
Speaker 4: partisan issue. It's just that like, if we can't have
Speaker 4: these conversations, we're never going to get to the truth,
Speaker 4: and people in power will have a monopoly on what
Speaker 4: we believe is true and what we believe is not true.
Speaker 3: That said, there is.
Speaker 4: A new platform that everyone is clamoring for.
Speaker 3: Just so excited about this.
Speaker 1: Got a new oligarchic run Twitter competitor that we can
Speaker 1: get on board with.
Speaker 5: Guys, that's right, get excited.
Speaker 3: There's more. Okay, so let's go to befour here. This
Speaker 3: is from the Guardian.
Speaker 4: You know, it's it's worth noting the cage match is
Speaker 4: probably canceled, but as the Guardian says, quote, the real
Speaker 4: battle between the two billionaires will begin on Thursday when
Speaker 4: the soccer Perglan just threads his company's Twitter competitor.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: Crystal and I both jumped on threads last night.
Speaker 3: Pretty impressed with it. Aesthetically is good, Yeah, it looks good.
Speaker 3: It looks good.
Speaker 4: Michael Schellenberger actually already was reporting this morning that people
Speaker 4: conservative activist type posters are getting red flag warnings or
Speaker 4: people who try to follow them are getting red flag
Speaker 4: warnings that could be I'm not ready to say that
Speaker 4: they are, but they could be, you know, sort of
Speaker 4: being applied with a double standard conservative versus liberals, saying,
Speaker 4: are you sure you want to follow this this account,
Speaker 4: they've posted a lot of disinformation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And remember.
Speaker 4: Zuckerberg obviously has talked a big game about free speech
Speaker 4: in the past and has not Sometimes he's reflective about
Speaker 4: it after the fact, but he has not always followed
Speaker 4: through on that. Hunter By and Laptop is a great
Speaker 4: example of that. So again, there's a lot of reasons
Speaker 4: to be suspicious about this, but Zuckerberg is coming in
Speaker 4: hard and saying, you know, a lot of people are
Speaker 4: really frustrated with Elon's version of Twitter. Twitter is a
Speaker 4: hub for very powerful people, a lot of very powerful
Speaker 4: liberal people who are extremely frustrated with the situation, and
Speaker 4: they've been courting influencers like mega mega popular celebrities, saying,
Speaker 4: if we get you over here and we integrate it
Speaker 4: with Instagram, you know, we're not asking you do on
Speaker 4: something new like blue Sky or something totally foreign to
Speaker 4: you that you have to like download create an account,
Speaker 4: but it's just all of your followers are to be there.
Speaker 4: You can already follow the people that you're following.
Speaker 3: Can it work?
Speaker 4: I would say probably it can, like actually monk some
Speaker 4: competition on Twitter.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think you might be right about that.
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm kind of a boomer at this point
Speaker 1: terms of my social media uptick, Like I'm really not
Speaker 1: ready to learn a whole new.
Speaker 5: Platform TikTok or what I like. I'm old at this point.
Speaker 1: But I was able to All you do is you
Speaker 1: download the app if you're already on Instagram. I didn't
Speaker 1: even have to remember my password for it to like integrate.
Speaker 3: It was just like is this you?
Speaker 1: And I was like yeah, And then it asked you
Speaker 1: if you want to follow the same people you're following
Speaker 1: on Instagram? Said yes, and then you're off to the races.
Speaker 1: It looks exactly like Twitter, you know. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's a total carbon copy of Twitter, basically. And
Speaker 1: I think the reason that I feel like this has
Speaker 1: more of a shot than other efforts is just because, look,
Speaker 1: meta is huge, way more users on Instagram and Facebook
Speaker 1: than there are on.
Speaker 5: Twitter, way more orders of magnitude.
Speaker 1: More so, the fact that it's so easy for people
Speaker 1: that are already there to pick it up and that
Speaker 1: they seem to have been pretty strategic about making sure
Speaker 1: some of those big influencers, not even like political people,
Speaker 1: but you know I jumped on there and I saw
Speaker 1: Shack on there, threading or whatever. It shows you they
Speaker 1: put some strategic savvy thought into this, because the whole
Speaker 1: thing with the social media network is that you need
Speaker 1: people to be there. That's why they're kind of natural
Speaker 1: monopolies and why it's been hard to supplant Twitter even
Speaker 1: as you had free speech concerns or you know, concerns
Speaker 1: about Elon's management, et cetera, because it's just like, well,
Speaker 1: this is still where the people are, and I'm still
Speaker 1: getting some benefit out of.
Speaker 5: Seeing breaking news tweets or.
Speaker 1: You know, elite journalists or whoever the you know, political
Speaker 1: influencers that you find interesting. That's where they are, so
Speaker 1: I'm still getting that benefit. I mean, the other reason
Speaker 1: that this might succeed is because Twitter didn't have a
Speaker 1: good last week.
Speaker 5: Let's put this up on the screen. You guys might
Speaker 5: know about this.
Speaker 1: I mean, first there was a shut down, like it
Speaker 1: was not working at all, and then this is the
Speaker 1: headline here is Elon Musk tries forcing Twitter users to
Speaker 1: use less Twitter, and then people were getting these error
Speaker 1: messages that their rate limit had been exceeded, and they
Speaker 1: were like, what the hell's going on here? And then
Speaker 1: Elon tweeted that a parent currently they had put in
Speaker 1: these hard limits of you couldn't view not tweet, you
Speaker 1: couldn't view more than six hundred tweets unless you pay
Speaker 1: for the blue check mark, and then it was like
Speaker 1: six thousand, and then they up the limit a bit.
Speaker 1: But this Twitter is really run Most of the content
Speaker 1: is created by this small percentage of power users, and
Speaker 1: so you're effectively cutting them off in terms of revenue.
Speaker 5: And this is the total opposite.
Speaker 1: Direction of what every social media company wants to go in,
Speaker 1: because the whole thing is the money comes for advertisers,
Speaker 1: and for them to be able to serve their ads,
Speaker 1: you have to be on the platform. So every social
Speaker 1: media company, their whole goal is to keep you locked
Speaker 1: in on their platforms, scrolling endlessly. That's the whole goal.
Speaker 1: Is that good for us?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 5: But is that the business model?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: And so Elon and there's already a lot of reporting
Speaker 1: about how their revenues are way down, et cetera, et
Speaker 1: cetera for whatever reason. And there's a lot of speculation
Speaker 1: about the real reason why these were limits were put
Speaker 1: into place. Maybe didn't pay a server bill, or they
Speaker 1: were having tech issues or whatever the actual reason was.
Speaker 1: This is not a good direction to go in in
Speaker 1: terms of the business health of the site. And for
Speaker 1: people who you know, want to be able to scroll
Speaker 1: Twitter and want to use it for you know, like
Speaker 1: us use it for work, et cetera, this is.
Speaker 5: This really hobbles the site.
Speaker 1: It makes it a lot less useful for those power
Speaker 1: users who are again are like the core of the
Speaker 1: content creation and what makes this that useful and valuable.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's a completely like one of the things to
Speaker 4: remember about Twitter is that not only is its user
Speaker 4: base dwarfed by basically like by by Facebook and then
Speaker 4: Facebook's Instagram and TikTok et cetera, et cetera, the vast
Speaker 4: majority of daily users are a minority even of people
Speaker 4: who use the platform. So if you're one of the
Speaker 4: people that's on Twitter every day, you're in a small
Speaker 4: minority of actually even people that have an account on Twitter,
Speaker 4: let alone a small minority of the American population. And
Speaker 4: so for that purpose, like this is actually pretty bad
Speaker 4: timing for Elon Musk, right, when you have a competitor
Speaker 4: that's serious popping up. And by the way, let's yes,
Speaker 4: it's if we're going from a monopoly to a duopoly
Speaker 4: by you know, one, from one censorious oligarch to another.
Speaker 3: You know that.
Speaker 4: I guess that's that's how low the bar is for
Speaker 4: celebration at this point, that there's some measure of competition
Speaker 4: on one platform to be better, on another platform to
Speaker 4: be better.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's it's the world that we live in.
Speaker 4: Musk says that this is a quote temporary emergency measure,
Speaker 4: and it's aimed at getting rid of data pillaging by
Speaker 4: quote several hundred organizations who were quote scraping Twitter data
Speaker 4: extremely aggressively to the point where it was affecting the
Speaker 4: real user experience. I actually don't have a good idea
Speaker 4: of how it was affecting the real user experience in
Speaker 4: a way that is quite as conspicuous as the blocks
Speaker 4: the content limits for people who you know are scrolling
Speaker 4: didn't pay. You can't even go down their own profiles
Speaker 4: and look at their own property, essentially their own thought tweets,
Speaker 4: because they've exceeded the daily limit.
Speaker 3: And there's nothing you can do about that.
Speaker 4: So I think it's genuinely really bad timing for Elon
Speaker 4: Musk that Zuckerberg comes in with his competition, and Musk
Speaker 4: has been doing this sort of startup atmosphere. He's been
Speaker 4: like generating the startup atmosphere at Twitter, where it's like,
Speaker 4: we're going to experiment with things, We're going to try
Speaker 4: to address some of the stomach problems in Silicon Valley
Speaker 4: that made this platform unappealing, and that just drove this
Speaker 4: platform to a place where it was so much smaller
Speaker 4: than all the others. But at a certain point, you
Speaker 4: can't say, well, it's going to take another year, it's
Speaker 4: going to take another two years. When you're a year in,
Speaker 4: you have to actually have really, really conspicuously improved the
Speaker 4: user experience, and you have to be able to put
Speaker 4: your you have to be able to walk the walk
Speaker 4: and say that the product has genuinely been transformed. And
Speaker 4: I think he's coming up really closely on that sort
Speaker 4: of deadline or de facto deadline with a.
Speaker 1: Public Yeah, and obviously with threads launching like the sharks
Speaker 1: are circling, you know, and there's clear weakness to explore here,
Speaker 1: and you know, also, it just bears repeating that all
Speaker 1: the promises of this is going to be a free
Speaker 1: speech platform, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, even like
Speaker 1: putting these kind of limits on users is kind of
Speaker 1: antithetical to free speech. One of the theories about why
Speaker 1: they put these rate limits in place is another ploy
Speaker 1: to sort of force people into paying for the product.
Speaker 1: But he's also been so antagonistic towards the Twitter user
Speaker 1: base that it makes people out of spite not want
Speaker 1: to pay for the blue check mark and get your
Speaker 1: expanded rate limits and your whatever you know, whatever else
Speaker 1: you get with paying and your primary tweet placement and
Speaker 1: algorithmic benefits, et cetera, which again is also sort of
Speaker 1: contrary to the free speech thing.
Speaker 5: But listen, I can say.
Speaker 1: I'm like celebrating the idea that, oh, we've got another
Speaker 1: potential billionaire savior for us, because, as I've said a
Speaker 1: million times here before, whether it's Elon or Zuckerberger, Jack
Speaker 1: or whoever it is, no billionaire oligarch is going to
Speaker 1: secure our First Amendment rights because that's not what they're
Speaker 1: in for.
Speaker 5: They're in to make money.
Speaker 1: They're in for their own ego or narcissism or whatever.
Speaker 5: It's all about them.
Speaker 1: Their bottom line. It's not really truly about any sort
Speaker 1: of free speech or public town square, et cetera. Many
Speaker 1: of the factors that shaped the current censorship regime at
Speaker 1: places like Meta are also applied to Twitter, because it's
Speaker 1: not really about the laws, it's about the advertisers and
Speaker 1: what they are willing to accept. That's why so many
Speaker 1: of these censorship regimes end up looking basically identical, no
Speaker 1: matter which particular oligarch is in charge.
Speaker 5: But just in terms of.
Speaker 1: A business story, I think it's going to be fascinating
Speaker 1: to watch and see whether Threads can actually make a
Speaker 1: run at it, whether they could actually have a chance
Speaker 1: at reaching parity with or even taking down Twitter, and
Speaker 1: Elon has certainly left himself vulnerable to that kind of challenge.
Speaker 5: I guess that's what I'll say.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, Libertarians have said for years that Twitter's
Speaker 4: competition is Facebook, like these places have competition because there's
Speaker 4: Facebook and Instagram, so Twitter is not a monopoly. This
Speaker 4: proves that completely wrong, by the way, because Twitter is
Speaker 4: a very particular product. People go to Twitter for very
Speaker 4: different reasons than they go to Facebook or Instagram. Or TikTok,
Speaker 4: So it's never been true. That's always been a very
Speaker 4: dubious argument to begin with, but actually competing on the
Speaker 4: very same ground in a way that you know, if
Speaker 4: you have this natural monopoly on people's time, attention, and
Speaker 4: in this very specific way that actually I think we
Speaker 4: could be looking at it at a duopoly if this
Speaker 4: has legs, and I haven't seen any competitor, you know,
Speaker 4: whether it's parlor, whether it's truth social, and truth social.
Speaker 4: By the way, it's hard to find somebody who is
Speaker 4: as popular with a segment of the public than Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: I mean, you can maybe talk about like.
Speaker 4: Michelle Obama and Donald Trump is extremely polarizing, but with
Speaker 4: some like twenty percent of the population the general population,
Speaker 4: he's really popular. And he can't mount a successful competitor
Speaker 4: to Twitter, where you have people like actually coming over
Speaker 4: there and enough numbers to give something legs. It's again
Speaker 4: like between parlor, true social, blue Sky, whatever else is
Speaker 4: trying to do exactly what Twitter does, nobody's been able
Speaker 4: to do it. And so I think again, if if
Speaker 4: Zuckerberg is able to say I'm going to do exactly
Speaker 4: what Twitter does, and we're going to become a doopoly
Speaker 4: that again, like really shows a lot of those arguments
Speaker 4: were wrong from the very the get go.
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg claims that they got ten million sign ups in
Speaker 1: the first seven hours. Obviously that's pretty impressive number. You know,
Speaker 1: it remains to be seeing a lot of those people
Speaker 1: just be like.
Speaker 5: Me, like dry it out.
Speaker 1: See if I you know, I have yet to thread,
Speaker 1: so it's not like I'm an active user. I'm a
Speaker 1: full on lurker at this point. But you know, I
Speaker 1: just think we'll see what happens here. My fear is that,
Speaker 1: like the rest of our media ecosystem, we will increasingly
Speaker 1: separate into ideologically like safe spaces in terms of our
Speaker 1: social media preferences as well. You know, the right will
Speaker 1: stay on Twitter, go to True Social or whatever. The
Speaker 1: left will migrate over to Meta or Blue Sky or
Speaker 1: Masadon or whatever, and we'll have a duopoly, but it'll
Speaker 1: be purely like split down along ideological line, sort of
Speaker 1: the way that the cable news ecosystem or other media
Speaker 1: ecosystems are. That could be the direction that we're going in,
Speaker 1: and I think that would be a loss. And and also
Speaker 1: just in terms of enjoyment of the platform, I mean,
Speaker 1: part of the fun of Twitter is seeing what other
Speaker 1: people who disagree with you say sometimes like they're hilarious stupid,
Speaker 1: hilariously stupid things that they say, like the memes that
Speaker 1: they're sharing and what's going on in their little ideological niche.
Speaker 1: And so if you lose that, I do think it
Speaker 1: takes some of the some of the importance, some of
Speaker 1: the some of the power out of the site, and
Speaker 1: some of what made Twitter a compelling place for some
Speaker 1: subset of the population to start with.
Speaker 4: Yeah, agreed, Well, if you haven't seen this Rhonda Santus video,
Speaker 4: you're really missing out. We're going to talk about developments
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty four. Fourth of July weekend is always
Speaker 4: a big weekend for presidential candidates, and it's in general, yes,
Speaker 4: lots of parades, lots of parade outfits, which is another
Speaker 4: fun thing to just sort of analyze what this person's
Speaker 4: team thinks is a relatable Fourth of July parade outfit?
Speaker 3: How should we dress run DeSantis for a Fourth of July.
Speaker 4: But before we run this clip, because it is let's say,
Speaker 4: in a word, homo erotic, But before we run it,
Speaker 4: I want to say a lot of people said This
Speaker 4: was an ad created by the Dysantas campaign. It's slightly
Speaker 4: more nuanced than that doesn't necessarily make it better, but
Speaker 4: it was an ad the Dstantus war room. So their
Speaker 4: rapid response Twitter, which gosh, I don't even know why.
Speaker 4: That's the thing that has to exist. They tweeted this
Speaker 4: video out from like a random user who made it,
Speaker 4: which may explain I guess the production quality. But they
Speaker 4: still made the decision. The DeSantis campaign still made the decision.
Speaker 3: Embraced it. They embraced it. Let's just the video and
Speaker 3: we'll there'll be a lot to unpack. I will do
Speaker 3: everything in my power to protect our lg EGQ citizens.
Speaker 8: But Caitlyn Jenner were to walk into Trump Tower and
Speaker 8: want to use the bathroom, you would be fine with
Speaker 8: her using any bathroom she'd choose.
Speaker 1: Does that as correct in the future Karn's gender women
Speaker 1: compete in this union?
Speaker 5: Yes, make America greater.
Speaker 7: Sick.
Speaker 4: This isn't just offensive for being so online, like they're
Speaker 4: putting Christian Bale Patrick Bateman in American Psycho juxtaposed with
Speaker 4: pictures of Ron DeSantis in a way that only.
Speaker 3: Works if you're like a thoroughly.
Speaker 4: Irony poisoned Twitter using zoomer, but not if you're an avatar.
Speaker 4: You're like, why are you comparing Rond de Stantis to
Speaker 4: a fictional serial killer? There's nothing that's politically palatable about that.
Speaker 4: Before we I think unpack that, let's also run and
Speaker 4: we can talk about these two clips together. Let's run
Speaker 4: C two because this is reaction from CNN. A couple
Speaker 4: of women who are on CNN talking about their approach
Speaker 4: to DeSantis and maybe some places where there's a red
Speaker 4: line for them as moms when it comes to, you know,
Speaker 4: the balance between DeSantis pushing back on what they see
Speaker 4: as the excesses of wokesm but also being sort of
Speaker 4: a conventional conservative.
Speaker 3: Let's rull C two.
Speaker 5: I'm wondering if you think that DeSantis's you know, very
Speaker 5: public war on WOKE distracts from the message that you
Speaker 5: like about.
Speaker 3: It a little bit.
Speaker 4: I do, yeah, because I mean to be honest, I
Speaker 4: do feel like it would be really good to have
Speaker 4: a big public debate about what did we get wrong
Speaker 4: in COVID Like.
Speaker 5: The left doesn't want to have that debate. It'd sign
Speaker 5: a law that restricts transgender care for adults as well
Speaker 5: as kids.
Speaker 7: I have greater concerns about the six week abortion bad
Speaker 7: tell me about that.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: I think if he made.
Speaker 1: It clear that he's a states rights person and that
Speaker 1: he's not looking to kind of pass a national law
Speaker 1: in this regard.
Speaker 5: I think that's dangerous.
Speaker 9: That's something that I cannot get behind, and I don't
Speaker 9: think that's going to bode well for his presidential campaign.
Speaker 9: I think that that might be a real impediment to
Speaker 9: bringing in moderate women.
Speaker 4: Okay, so the first woman you saw there is Jennifer Say,
Speaker 4: and Sannon has this Chiron who said that says, you know,
Speaker 4: suburban moms, etc. I love Jennifer Say. She's a former
Speaker 4: executive at Levi's.
Speaker 3: She's great. People should read her book.
Speaker 4: Whether she's a representative of the average suburban mom as
Speaker 4: an executive at Levi's who now has a really big
Speaker 4: public platform, I don't know, But I do think she's
Speaker 4: she's speaking to something. Again, Like her book is really
Speaker 4: interesting on this how like during COVID and the way
Speaker 4: that people were talking about things, she sort of ended
Speaker 4: up getting getting pushed out at Levi's and has had
Speaker 4: a very very interesting career. But I think she's speaking
Speaker 4: to something that is real for a lot of women
Speaker 4: who look at, for instance, some of the things. This
Speaker 4: is why these two clips belong together. Some of the
Speaker 4: things that the first video is attempting to address, right
Speaker 4: like some of policies that your average mom probably does
Speaker 4: have a real problem with when it comes to locker
Speaker 4: rooms or bathrooms. Whether you agree with them on those
Speaker 4: issues or not, the country is pretty divided on them.
Speaker 4: So some of the things that video is trying to
Speaker 4: address while also being just completely.
Speaker 3: Off putting and in ways.
Speaker 4: Again I'm not saying Disantis, I'm I'm conservative, I'm you know,
Speaker 4: anti abortion. I'm not disputing what DeSantis did with the
Speaker 4: six week Band, But on the political level, that is
Speaker 4: a huge question mark, and whether or not he's able
Speaker 4: to sell it in a way that's politically popular is
Speaker 4: a huge question mark for him, and I think especially
Speaker 4: when you have a team that is so insulated in
Speaker 4: the online meme culture, that's like just the perfect example,
Speaker 4: Like if you're putting out ads like that, if you're
Speaker 4: reposting videos that are so deeply online that you're Jeux
Speaker 4: supposed DeSantis with a serial killer, your team actually might
Speaker 4: have very legitimate price like your ground game in Iowa
Speaker 4: can be really really good and you can be putting
Speaker 4: a lot of money there, which the Desantas campaign is doing,
Speaker 4: and you're going to have this stuff go viral. You're
Speaker 4: going to have certain things that if you just aren't
Speaker 4: on top of them and you aren't speaking to the
Speaker 4: average voter, it's going to not balance in the way
Speaker 4: that's politically viable for you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's I think a lot to say about this.
Speaker 1: So starting with the like anti gay, anti trans video,
Speaker 1: you'll recall that when DeSantis was doing the uh, you
Speaker 1: know what's been called the Don't Say Gay Bill, they
Speaker 1: were adamant that this wasn't actually about gay people, this
Speaker 1: was about parental choice. Yeah, for those of you who
Speaker 1: are just listening, if you watch that video, they're actually
Speaker 1: celebrating headlines that are like, yes, DeSantis passes the most
Speaker 1: extreme anti trans legislation in history, things like that. So
Speaker 1: instead of keeping their political framing of like, this is
Speaker 1: about parental choice, and this is about making sure that
Speaker 1: you know, parents know what's going on in their schools, etc.
Speaker 1: This isn't an attack on gay people, this is an
Speaker 1: attack on trans people. They're actually pulling the mask off
Speaker 1: and saying no, no, it is anti trans and not
Speaker 1: only that, we're really proud of that. We're going to
Speaker 1: we're going to celebrate that yet and it's funny, and
Speaker 1: you know, this is something that we're leaning into. So
Speaker 1: I've talked about this before on questions of you know,
Speaker 1: kids transitioning. Public pretty divided on questions of girls trans
Speaker 1: trans girls in sports. You know, this is an area
Speaker 1: where conservatives actually have the majority. However you feel about
Speaker 1: that question, Conservitives have the majority. So when you're staying
Speaker 1: on that ground, you're in a decent place politically, although
Speaker 1: I would say that leaning into that is a central
Speaker 1: issue is just not the core priority for most Americans.
Speaker 5: So I already think you're a little shaky there.
Speaker 1: But let's grant that those are areas where you have
Speaker 1: a majority of the public that might get behind your
Speaker 1: what your position is. When you get into i'm just
Speaker 1: against gay people, I'm just against trans people having equal rights,
Speaker 1: you are wildly opposite public opinion on gay marriage. You're
Speaker 1: actually opposite public opinion even within the Republican Party. So
Speaker 1: that's an example of these issues have become an absolute
Speaker 1: fixation for the online right. The fixation is at odds
Speaker 1: with the public, and the actual policy position is wildly
Speaker 1: at odds with the American public. So when you talk
Speaker 1: about being way too online, like, that's the specifics of
Speaker 1: the rub there. And why this video was I think
Speaker 1: such a problem for him is because it took away,
Speaker 1: it stripped away any pretense of moderation on the policy.
Speaker 5: So there's that piece. The other piece that I got
Speaker 5: from the quote unquote Suburban Moms, which.
Speaker 1: Was anytime you interview like two people like, take it
Speaker 1: all with a grain of salt. We're very careful about
Speaker 1: not taking anecdotes and extrapolating tone.
Speaker 5: But there is some polling to back this up.
Speaker 1: And I got a distinction that I hadn't really made
Speaker 1: a connection I hadn't really made before, which is that
Speaker 1: when Ronda Santis was really rising in popularity, and when
Speaker 1: you know, he was winning re election and his approval
Speaker 1: ratings and flour are really high, and he's rising and
Speaker 1: rising in the Republican primary, it wasn't so much when
Speaker 1: he was leaning hard into the culture war stuff. It
Speaker 1: was based on his COVID policies, and it was based
Speaker 1: on the fact that you know, at the time, there
Speaker 1: was you know, a stance that was taken from him,
Speaker 1: a public stance that was taken, and they decided to
Speaker 1: keep the schools open, and especially for parents. I mean,
Speaker 1: in retrospect, the school closures, especially the length of the
Speaker 1: school closures, just it's.
Speaker 5: An unmitigated disaster.
Speaker 1: It's one of the worst public policy decisions that's been
Speaker 1: made in quite a long time. So that was quite compelling.
Speaker 1: But we have now left the COVID era, so that
Speaker 1: stuff becomes less relevant. It's less you know, central to
Speaker 1: how people are making their political decisions, even among the
Speaker 1: Republican base that is both animated by COVID at this
Speaker 1: point by litigating COVID policies and what that looks like.
Speaker 1: Even for them, this is not a top priority.
Speaker 5: So as he's.
Speaker 1: Moved into okay, I'm going to lean into anti wokeness,
Speaker 1: I want to lean into anti trans I'm going to
Speaker 1: lean into anti abortion.
Speaker 5: That has been much that has not worked as well
Speaker 5: for him.
Speaker 1: And we see the way that the Poles are falling
Speaker 1: off in their Republican primary. Certainly, the way that the public
Speaker 1: image has changed and the questions that you know, some
Speaker 1: of these moms at least were raising to CNN, I
Speaker 1: think is reflected in also some of the polling of
Speaker 1: how Ronda Santis is doing and on how those various
Speaker 1: issues actually land with a general public.
Speaker 4: So this is a huge point because one of the
Speaker 4: things when you look at the COVID policy, when you
Speaker 4: look at, for instance, Glenn Younkin, who people compare Ronda
Speaker 4: Santis to a lot.
Speaker 3: They say, these are two people in purple states.
Speaker 4: I know, Florida, it looks like solidly read right now,
Speaker 4: but the demographics and like the way Florida has voted
Speaker 4: for a really long time, it's a purple set.
Speaker 3: I mean, Andrew Gillim almost beat Ronda Santis. I mean
Speaker 3: it was.
Speaker 4: Really really really close. Yeah, And people say, well, look
Speaker 4: at what Ronda Santis has done. He's turned Florida into
Speaker 4: a red state. And the big question was he was
Speaker 4: doing these anti woke policies, and it was more that
Speaker 4: it wasn't hurting the COVID sugar hide that he was
Speaker 4: on for having sane in reasonable COVID policies, just like
Speaker 4: Glenn Youngkin having sane in reasonable COVID policies.
Speaker 3: You could also do this sort.
Speaker 4: Of anti woke pro family or you know, however they
Speaker 4: want to pitch it legislation and you're not going to suffer.
Speaker 4: In fact, in some cases you may go up a
Speaker 4: little bit because people really like it. But it was
Speaker 4: always that way that like you can, you know, run
Speaker 4: a sane in reasonable economy, you can run a sane
Speaker 4: and reasonable like COVID regime.
Speaker 3: And still do this other stuff and be okay.
Speaker 4: And that to the right was what was really interesting
Speaker 4: is that you're not going to tank your prospects if
Speaker 4: you craft these policies and talk about them in a
Speaker 4: really particular way. Well, that really particular way is not
Speaker 4: Patrick Bateman and not sort of being cruel towards you know,
Speaker 4: in a country like they're getting dragged into this fight
Speaker 4: because they think it helps them against Donald Trump, to
Speaker 4: be like, we are more anti trans than Donald Trump,
Speaker 4: we are more so reasonable in these policies.
Speaker 3: Than Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: But just going full and using those headlines that you
Speaker 4: make around to stands that sound cruel. I understand they're
Speaker 4: probably like, this is about the media. We're showing that
Speaker 4: we don't give a damn about the media. Blah blah blah.
Speaker 4: It doesn't come across that way the average person whatsoever.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is like political maulpractice on another level,
Speaker 4: for the rapid response low a team to tweet this
Speaker 4: out because meme culture is really not the way when
Speaker 4: you still have a huge chunk of the voting population
Speaker 4: that are baby boomers and are right now sitting at
Speaker 4: home trying to figure out how to use threads.
Speaker 1: And we love you guys now they haven't even heard
Speaker 1: about it yet cultures.
Speaker 4: So anyway, just I think a really representative early misstep
Speaker 4: from the DeSantis campaign that gets symbolically to some of
Speaker 4: these other problems where they have this legion of online
Speaker 4: influencers that I think are going to do more harm
Speaker 4: than good in the long run, because they start to
Speaker 4: generate headlines like this video was covered in corporate press,
Speaker 4: the fact that they like it got coverage in legacy media,
Speaker 4: and so as normal people see stuff like that, they're
Speaker 4: just like, what the hell are you doing?
Speaker 3: I don't even speak this language, but it looks.
Speaker 1: Really dumb, right, Like I literally don't even know what
Speaker 1: is going on in this ad, but I don't like it.
Speaker 3: Wow, they're shirtless men.
Speaker 1: The Desanta's piece is the Youngkin piece is actually interesting
Speaker 1: to me because I always thought at the time when
Speaker 1: he won and beat Terry mccalliff. First of all, the
Speaker 1: downsides of Terry mccalluff were under sold. But second of all,
Speaker 1: I thought the critical race theory piece of Glenn Youngkin's
Speaker 1: victory was really oversold, and it was more about the
Speaker 1: fact that schools had been closed and parents wanted their
Speaker 1: kids to be in school, and it was more about
Speaker 1: the positioning on COVID policy. And I think as time
Speaker 1: has worn on and as Republicans have been unable to
Speaker 1: repeat the success of Glenn Youngkin and Ron DeSantis in
Speaker 1: Florida was an outlier in terms of the midterms, I
Speaker 1: think it has become clear that that was the piece
Speaker 1: that was really energizing. That was the piece that appealed
Speaker 1: to a lot of suburban moms who they had lost,
Speaker 1: you know, and during the Donald Trump years, much more
Speaker 1: so than the cultural pieces, because there was a lot
Speaker 1: of leaning into anti trans legislation, there was a lot
Speaker 1: of leaning into anti CRT legislation. In the midterms, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of money put behind it, school board races,
Speaker 1: all the rest, and it sort of fell flat. So
Speaker 1: I think at this point we've got a pretty good
Speaker 1: read on how the public feels about this landscape and
Speaker 1: which pieces are more appealing at which pieces are less appealing.
Speaker 1: The final final thing I want to say here is
Speaker 1: that you know this also example of like Trump can
Speaker 1: get away with things that other politicians, yes.
Speaker 3: Because it's not like Trump's true.
Speaker 1: I remember Trump after the dysantist failed launch thing, he
Speaker 1: posted something again that some other person had made, but
Speaker 1: he I think he directly reposted it, not even like
Speaker 1: his war room that was like a Twitter's faces with
Speaker 1: the Devil and Adolph Hitler.
Speaker 5: I mean it just like ridiculous.
Speaker 1: It was actually hilarious, but it was also totally over
Speaker 1: the top, totally ridiculous, and he can somehow get away
Speaker 1: with it because in addition to doing those things, he
Speaker 1: also sometimes has more of a normy sensibility where it's
Speaker 1: like he moderates on Social Security and Medicare, he moderates
Speaker 1: on issues like abortion where actually Republican activists and elites
Speaker 1: are at odds with a good part of the Republican
Speaker 1: base and certainly with the general public, and he just
Speaker 1: has He's one of those people that just has the
Speaker 1: chrismon and the skill to.
Speaker 5: Be able to pull some of these things off. That
Speaker 5: Ron de Sander's camp.
Speaker 4: And he spent the vast majority of his career outside
Speaker 4: of politics, and isn't pretending to be some sort of
Speaker 4: like extremely competent, like average politician, Whereas that's like part
Speaker 4: of the tension between DeSantis and Trump. Here he was
Speaker 4: going full Boom or Grampa over the weekend. I'm sorry
Speaker 4: to keep Harvey on boomers. It's just funny when we're
Speaker 4: talking about meme culture. He posted pictures of himself photoshoppedunder
Speaker 4: George Washington's body, all kinds of good stuff going on there,
Speaker 4: and just like an F Biden flag that again the
Speaker 4: media was very upset about.
Speaker 3: But again, if you're Donald Trump, you can do it.
Speaker 4: If you're Ron DeSantis, you really need to be a
Speaker 4: whole lot more careful because you did not host The
Speaker 4: Celebrity Apprentice, which I still miss to this day.
Speaker 3: Now, one person who was not doing.
Speaker 4: The sort of schlep the sweaty shlept down parades, although
Speaker 4: I think he did.
Speaker 3: Do a rally this weekend is Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: And this raises an interesting question that we wanted to
Speaker 4: talk about, which is, Uh, first of all, let's put
Speaker 4: up C three predict it, which I think is kind
Speaker 4: of a shameful company I don't think we should be betting
Speaker 4: our politics.
Speaker 3: I don't like that to begin with.
Speaker 5: Oh really, yeah, I don't.
Speaker 3: I don't like that.
Speaker 1: The free market on this one definitely not not really
Speaker 1: for the free market on gambling, period.
Speaker 4: But you see here that the odds of DeSantis unpredicted.
Speaker 4: So maybe you just predicted, maybe you don't. It's a
Speaker 4: it's like a New Zealand website that lets you bet
Speaker 4: on the outcome of elections and politics in general.
Speaker 3: They put the odds of.
Speaker 4: Gavin Newsom getting elected ahead of Ron DeSantis based on
Speaker 4: where things are right now.
Speaker 3: That's you know that people right now.
Speaker 4: The people who are predicted better is the group of
Speaker 4: people who are betting on that website. They're saying Newsom
Speaker 4: has a better chance. So DeSantis no dropped three cents
Speaker 4: and Newsom's have gone up a penny in recent betting.
Speaker 3: But on top of.
Speaker 4: That, the question of Fourth of July parades, you have Trump,
Speaker 4: as Axio says, we can put up the next I
Speaker 4: think this is C four actually says Trump is quote
Speaker 4: not campaigning at the pace of previous cycles, preferring to
Speaker 4: spend most of his days at mar A Lago and
Speaker 4: Bedminster that's in New Jersey rather than grip and grinning.
Speaker 4: In Iowa and other early primary states, their headline is
Speaker 4: Trump's basement campaign.
Speaker 3: The Trump team vigorously denies this.
Speaker 4: Acxio says that though that Trump campaign officials have said,
Speaker 4: part of the reason he is not holding many rallies
Speaker 4: is because they are expensive. Quote, they said something like
Speaker 4: half a billion dollars a rally, or not billion, half
Speaker 4: a million dollars a rally or something like that, like
Speaker 4: some crazy, crazy number. But Trump was He's held four
Speaker 4: events in Iowa, five in New Hampshire, two in South Carolina,
Speaker 4: and none in Nevada. DeSantis has had fifty five events,
Speaker 4: Nikki Haley has had fifty nine, Tim Scott has had
Speaker 4: thirty six, and the veck Wamaswami as an one hundred
Speaker 4: and two. But Trump has been at thirty despite being
Speaker 4: in the race longer than other people. So even so,
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, running what Access has dubbed a basement campaign,
Speaker 4: still has a really healthy lead over run DeSantis, who
Speaker 4: has a decent trunk of money and is heading these
Speaker 4: states really hard, and everyone else, In fact, everyone else.
Speaker 4: You can split up the votes and it's the opposite.
Speaker 4: We've talked about this before. Trump is still healthily in
Speaker 4: the lead as opposed to in the past. If you
Speaker 4: had combined all of those votes into one candidate, Trump
Speaker 4: would lose. It's the exact reverse of that this time around,
Speaker 4: and the guy's done thirty in person campaign events.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's a sign of the sclerotic
Speaker 1: decline of our nation that you've got two old men
Speaker 1: that the majority of the country don't want, that don't
Speaker 1: even feel the need to campaign or probably subject themselves
Speaker 1: to debate, and they're likely to win the party nominations.
Speaker 3: I mean, good point.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't know why Trump would do more events.
Speaker 1: He doesn't need to, right, I don't know why he
Speaker 1: would debate if he doesn't have to. He doesn't need to.
Speaker 1: I don't know why Biden would debate, you know, he
Speaker 1: feels like he doesn't need to. For all their talk
Speaker 1: of democracy, like when it comes down to it, they
Speaker 1: don't actually believe in it, None of them do. So Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's I think it's just a pathetic sign
Speaker 1: of the times. And probably Trump is correct in his
Speaker 1: analysis here. I mean, you've got the vacaramaswami running all
Speaker 1: over Iowa. If you look at that map, you know
Speaker 1: he's been there like eighty times or something like that.
Speaker 1: But you know, Trump just getting like getting indited and
Speaker 1: CNN doing lots of lots of panels outrage panels about him,
Speaker 1: which you know, listen, there's plenty to be outreached about.
Speaker 1: But that's all he really needs to do in order
Speaker 1: to secure the nomination. So, you know, on the predicted
Speaker 1: thing is also just sad. It's sad for ron It
Speaker 1: is obviously embarrassing for Rona Santis.
Speaker 5: But even the.
Speaker 1: Fact that people are floating Newsome, they must either think, like, nah,
Speaker 1: they really they.
Speaker 5: Can't just go with Bike.
Speaker 1: Come on, this guy can barely put a sentence together,
Speaker 1: like surely they're not going to stick with Biden.
Speaker 5: But guess what, guys, they are going to stick.
Speaker 1: With Biden, or they think it's likely enough that he
Speaker 1: would suffer some major health event or actually pass away,
Speaker 1: not something anyone is cheering for here, they think that
Speaker 1: is a likely enough.
Speaker 5: Outcome that they're like, and then I guess Newsum's in
Speaker 5: like the driver's seat. So yeah, it's kind of amazing.
Speaker 1: I mean, I don't think that Gavin Newsom has a
Speaker 1: better shot at being president than Ron DeSantis. But I
Speaker 1: also don't really think either one of them has much
Speaker 1: of a shot at this point.
Speaker 4: I wonder if actually it's not even a statement so
Speaker 4: much on Destantus versus Trump as it's a statement on
Speaker 4: Biden's health in the.
Speaker 3: Predicted odds, there's a real question.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I genuinely think that's also why you have
Speaker 4: a lot of Republican candidates who thought it was a
Speaker 4: lot of Republican candidates, and we're talking about this last week.
Speaker 4: A bunch of them are in the race more than
Speaker 4: people even like predicted would actually pull the trigger and
Speaker 4: jump into the race and like have a super pac,
Speaker 4: get the money whatever. I think that's partially the reason.
Speaker 4: Even on the Republican side. Donald Trump is also pretty old.
Speaker 4: He's facing a ton of legal challenges right now. I
Speaker 4: don't think anyone sees any one of those legal challenges
Speaker 4: individually is being something that could tank his campaign. He
Speaker 4: could do Don Blankenship right and probably still campaign in
Speaker 4: remprisent if any of these trials like progress to that point, right.
Speaker 4: But all that is to say, I actually think that's
Speaker 4: the reason why you've seen so many Republican candidates jump
Speaker 4: in too, because to your point, this is a really
Speaker 4: depressing sign of how sclerotic and just kind of.
Speaker 3: Productive how politics are.
Speaker 5: Right now, Yeah, all.
Speaker 1: Right, let's get to something that you know, we really
Speaker 1: want to keep our eye on here, which is potentially
Speaker 1: the largest strike in American history is looming in the
Speaker 1: next couple of weeks. This has to do with UPS,
Speaker 1: workers organized under Teamsters. Three hundred and forty thousand, I
Speaker 1: believe is the number of workers who could potentially be
Speaker 1: going on strike.
Speaker 5: Let's put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: So they've been in active negotiations with UPS. This is
Speaker 1: the largest private labor.
Speaker 5: Contract in the country.
Speaker 1: So this is huge and I don't have to tell
Speaker 1: you guys how UPS is to the workings of our
Speaker 1: economy at this point. You know, huge carrier, huge potential implications,
Speaker 1: and really huge for not just these workers, but also
Speaker 1: for really all of labor to see what they you know,
Speaker 1: what kind of conditions they would be able to secure
Speaker 1: and whether they can push back on years and years
Speaker 1: of neoliberal labor union decline. Okay, so leave us up
Speaker 1: on the screen. Let me read this here. This is
Speaker 1: from the Teamsters. They say after marathon sessions, UPS negotiations
Speaker 1: collapse around four AM, and I believe this was on Saturday.
Speaker 1: UPS walked away from the marketing table after presenting an
Speaker 1: unacceptable offer to the Teamsters that did not address members needs.
Speaker 1: The UPS Teamsters National Negotiating Committee unanimously rejected the package.
Speaker 1: Put the next piece up on the screen, and this
Speaker 1: was a Twitter thread they go on. Following marathon negotiations,
Speaker 1: UPS refused to give the Teamsters a last, best and
Speaker 1: final offer, telling the union the company had nothing more
Speaker 1: to give. This multi billion dollar corporation has plenty to
Speaker 1: give American workers. They just don't want you, said Teamsters
Speaker 1: General President Sean O'Brien. UPS had a choice to make,
Speaker 1: and they have clearly chosen to go down the wrong road.
Speaker 1: I think we have one last piece of the thread
Speaker 1: that we can read here for you, they say. The
Speaker 1: UPS Teamsters contract covering more than three hundred and forty
Speaker 1: thousand full in part time workers expires July thirty one,
Speaker 1: so we're coming down to the wire here. No additional
Speaker 1: negotiations are scheduled. The Teamsters have repeatedly made clear UPS
Speaker 1: members will not work beyond the expiration of the current contract.
Speaker 5: In June.
Speaker 1: Rank and file UPS Teamsters authorized a strike by an
Speaker 1: overwhelming ninety seven percent. Now some of the context here
Speaker 1: is the last contract that Teamsters signed with UPS was
Speaker 1: really concessionary, so it created a two tier wage system,
Speaker 1: all kinds of problems with it. Rank and file workers
Speaker 1: actually voted it down, and leadership at the time went
Speaker 1: over their heads and said, now we're going to take
Speaker 1: this contract anyway. Sean O'Brien, the new General President, was
Speaker 1: elected on a promise to be more aggressive, more militant,
Speaker 1: and more adequately reflect the needs and desires of rank
Speaker 1: and file workers in these varied negotiations. We also know
Speaker 1: that they have already extracted some concessions out of this deal.
Speaker 1: One thing that we reported on here is huge problem
Speaker 1: for delivery workers UPS workers, parcel delivery workers in general,
Speaker 1: is heat and UPS trucks have never had air conditioning.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about you know, you're in the summer
Speaker 1: in Arizona. You're going in the back of that thing.
Speaker 1: They're showing temperature readings over one hundred and twenty degrees.
Speaker 1: You actually had a UPS worker die because of heat
Speaker 1: related injuries. You've had heat exhaustion, major problems. So they
Speaker 1: were able to secure some air conditioning at least in
Speaker 1: new trucks, new fan.
Speaker 5: Installs, so that was reported out.
Speaker 1: They also were able to do a way we know
Speaker 1: with that two tier wage system. That is a huge
Speaker 1: deal because the whole reason that they try to get
Speaker 1: these two tier wage systems in places to break the
Speaker 1: solidarity of the workers. So getting that was a huge deal. However,
Speaker 1: it appears that UPS was still not willing to go
Speaker 1: far enough to provide adequate wages, adequate benefits for what
Speaker 1: these Teamsters workers actually wanted out of the negotiation. So
Speaker 1: now you're in a place where it's kind of a
Speaker 1: staring contest and a game of chick in and we'll
Speaker 1: see who if anyone blinks, or whether we are actually
Speaker 1: headed to this huge, very consequential strike that could come
Speaker 1: at the end of this month.
Speaker 4: And I think the teamsters are acting as they are
Speaker 4: because they have an enormous amount of leverage right now.
Speaker 4: So UPS says it covers about or it delivers about
Speaker 4: six percent of the GDP in the United States of America.
Speaker 4: And I'm reading from CNN here, so they're reflecting on
Speaker 4: that UPS strike back in nineteen ninety seven.
Speaker 3: Obviously, this would be the biggest strike.
Speaker 4: As you said, since nineteen fifty nine, the company was
Speaker 4: able to recapture ninety percent of its business once that
Speaker 4: strike ended. Back in ninety seven, he said it might
Speaker 4: be able to own to recover seventy percent of its
Speaker 4: business in a strike this time because of a greater
Speaker 4: number of alternatives. FedEx did not have a lower cost
Speaker 4: ground service in nineteen ninety seven, and the postal service
Speaker 4: was not set up to handle as many package deliveries. Amazon,
Speaker 4: of course, also has its own delivery service.
Speaker 3: Now. So when you see I think.
Speaker 4: You know the UPS has said, actually it's the team
Speaker 4: serters that have walked away from the negotiation, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera. But even just looking at that thread, the
Speaker 4: union is really throwing its weight around here, yea. And
Speaker 4: I think that goes directly to the extreme amount of
Speaker 4: leverage that they have. UPS has had a lot of
Speaker 4: profits that they're asking for more of those to be
Speaker 4: passed down to workers.
Speaker 3: Perfectly reasonable thing to ask.
Speaker 4: And again, when you have six percent of the GDP,
Speaker 4: way more competition with FedEx, with Amazon, actually now the
Speaker 4: Postal Service, good luck letting this go into a strike position,
Speaker 4: because it's immediately catastrophic It's not that there is no
Speaker 4: like gray area here.
Speaker 3: It's black and white.
Speaker 4: It will immediately in one day be catastrophe for UPS.
Speaker 4: They know that, and the union knows that. And this
Speaker 4: is going very well, i would say, for the union
Speaker 4: at this point.
Speaker 1: And not only that, So you're one hundred percent correct
Speaker 1: on that aspect of leverage. You also have a National
Speaker 1: Labor Relations Board under the Biden administration that is, you know,
Speaker 1: much more worker friendly than the Trump administration. The Republican
Speaker 1: administration is always put in like you know, union busting
Speaker 1: lawyers some on the national labor relations boards.
Speaker 5: You have a national labor relations board that is likely
Speaker 5: to be in your quarter. That's critical.
Speaker 1: You have record breaking profits for UPS and other companies,
Speaker 1: so they can't cry poor, they can't pretell oh, we
Speaker 1: just can't do it. No, you can do it, like
Speaker 1: it's really clear you could do it. So you've got that.
Speaker 1: You have a tight labor market where you know, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of issues inflation eating into wages. People don't
Speaker 1: feel like they're doing that well, but there are a
Speaker 1: lot of jobs. Those jobs may not be good jobs,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of jobs. And the fact
Speaker 1: that you have a tight labor market also helps to
Speaker 1: provide them with some leverage. And then of course, if
Speaker 1: you're Shot O'Brien and you were literally elected to this
Speaker 1: position on a mandate to take it to the wall
Speaker 1: and to be militant and be aggressive in these negotiations, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they feel like they have some room to work. And
Speaker 1: again on just reiterate last thing I'll say on this
Speaker 1: is that this matters obviously for these workers, and this
Speaker 1: is a lot of people, so that matters a lot.
Speaker 5: But you know, when the labor movement was at.
Speaker 1: Its height and at its peak, and hopefully what it
Speaker 1: could get back to. And I think why this would
Speaker 1: be impactful is because Number One shows to other workers like,
Speaker 1: this is why you want to be part of a union,
Speaker 1: because if you don't have this solidarity in this collective bargaining,
Speaker 1: you're not getting your air conditions, you're not getting your
Speaker 1: time paid, time off, you're you know, you're not getting
Speaker 1: increases in wages. You're getting these two you have no
Speaker 1: recourse basically, and then you also have this is going
Speaker 1: to cause competition among the other parcel carriers and among
Speaker 1: you know, the broader workforce. They're sort of lifting the
Speaker 1: floor for everyone so that's why this fight really matters.
Speaker 1: So we'll make sure and keep an eye on it.
Speaker 3: Next cocaine in the White House. I feel like Ron
Speaker 3: Burgundy right now, it's true. You've probably heard the.
Speaker 4: Story by now that there was cocaine found in the
Speaker 4: White House, actually in the West Wing on Sunday. Now
Speaker 4: we can throw this tear sheet up. Is the story
Speaker 4: continues to get complicated from Politico Dan Littman reporting here,
Speaker 4: quote law enforcement officials confirmed on Wednesday that cocaine was
Speaker 4: found at the White House over the weekend. So the
Speaker 4: confirmation came on Wednesday, But one official familiar with the
Speaker 4: investigation cautioned that the source of the drug was unlikely
Speaker 4: to be determined given that it was discovered in a
Speaker 4: highly trafficked area of the West Wing. Now you may
Speaker 4: think that sounds counterintuitive, because surely any highly trafficked area
Speaker 4: of the West Wing would also have a.
Speaker 3: Lot of surveillance.
Speaker 4: But no, this anonymous law enforcement official says. They said,
Speaker 4: quote it's going to be very difficult for us to
Speaker 4: do that because of where it was. Again, Politico says
Speaker 4: that it was found in a covey area. A quote
Speaker 4: small amount of cocaine was found in a covey area
Speaker 4: for storing electronics within the West exec basement entryway into
Speaker 4: the West Wing, where many people have authorized access, including
Speaker 4: staff or visitors coming in for West Wing tours. Quote
Speaker 4: again from the senior law enforcement official or the law
Speaker 4: enforcement official. Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you
Speaker 4: were waving in around, it may not have been caught.
Speaker 4: It's a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there
Speaker 4: all the time.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 4: White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre responded to reporters
Speaker 4: questions about this yesterday.
Speaker 3: She said, quote, let's let.
Speaker 4: The Secret Service do their job, which we believe and
Speaker 4: have all the confidence that they will get to the
Speaker 4: bottom of this episode. Okay, So the White House is
Speaker 4: also saying the Biden family was not in the White House.
Speaker 3: They were. They left Friday and returned Tuesday.
Speaker 4: So if the cocaine was found Sunday, again, I feel
Speaker 4: like I'm playing maybe a game of clue that it
Speaker 4: was Hunter in the library with the whatever.
Speaker 5: The bag of cocaine, with the bag of cocaine.
Speaker 4: But actually that's one of the things that's interesting about
Speaker 4: this is at least Miranda Divine in the New York
Speaker 4: Post has reported that it's rumored Hunter Biden this was
Speaker 4: at least as like a couple of weeks ago, was
Speaker 4: living in the White House, perhaps to dodge papers in
Speaker 4: his child support case, which has since been settled. So
Speaker 4: and Hunter Biden has been a camp David with the
Speaker 4: President recently, has been traveling within them recently, has been
Speaker 4: at state dinners recently.
Speaker 3: So there's a.
Speaker 4: Genuine question as to whether Hunter Biden, who we know
Speaker 4: has sadly suffered from serious substance abuse issues, is living
Speaker 4: in the White House and the cocaine belongs to him.
Speaker 4: I think also Naomi Biden and her husband are living
Speaker 4: in the White House. Obviously there's a lot of staff
Speaker 4: and guests that are coming in and out.
Speaker 3: I do, however, think the idea that.
Speaker 4: Secret Service or that a law enforcement official anonymously got
Speaker 4: cover to speak to Politico and say listen, to sort
Speaker 4: of lay the groundwork for nobody being caught on this
Speaker 4: is rather hilarious because I guarantee you like that sounds
Speaker 4: to me very very strategic to say listen.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't make any sense. We're not gonna be
Speaker 3: able to find it.
Speaker 4: That excuse makes no sense because there are cameras all
Speaker 4: over the West Wing, even in the visitor areas.
Speaker 3: There are cameras everywhere.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, as someone who supports the legalization of drugs, I
Speaker 1: sup no one being caught and turned in for this
Speaker 1: except the.
Speaker 3: Has also like not hired people, we just legal in DC. Well,
Speaker 3: that is true.
Speaker 1: They are total hypocrites on the issue, aren't they. I mean,
Speaker 1: and I've always thought this about Joe Biden is like,
Speaker 1: you know, your own son struggles with this, and you're
Speaker 1: still like this war on drugs, dude, it's disgraceful one
Speaker 1: hundred percent. So they say the small amount of cocaine
Speaker 1: is found in a cubby area for storing electronics within
Speaker 1: the West exec basement entryway into the West Wing, where
Speaker 1: many people have authorized access, including staff or visitors coming
Speaker 1: in for West Wing tours. So I guess this is
Speaker 1: an area where, like you know, people are coming in
Speaker 1: through tours, they go through this area, they stick stuff
Speaker 1: in the cubby. I don't know, haven't really spent any
Speaker 1: time in the White House, so I don't know how
Speaker 1: all this works. It's sort of the story kind of
Speaker 1: sent me on a mental journey though that I started.
Speaker 1: I seriously because I started wondering, like, I wonder how
Speaker 1: often there is cocaine in the White House, Like I
Speaker 1: wonder how often various residents of the White House are,
Speaker 1: you know, doing various illicit drugs. And then it got
Speaker 1: me thinking about Joe Biden and how he could use
Speaker 1: a little bit of a pick me up and maybe
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. It
Speaker 1: was the president he was actually protaking and had like
Speaker 1: maybe that would help him.
Speaker 3: It's like a dive bag with like a White House
Speaker 3: steal on it.
Speaker 5: I mean, listen, how many years old is he?
Speaker 1: Like, if you're not going to live a little right,
Speaker 1: maybe the problem is that there's not enough cocaine in
Speaker 1: the White House, Emily, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Whoa that's gonna take? That's a galaxy brain.
Speaker 4: Well, the other thing I thought about was the mid
Speaker 4: May break in at Jake Sullivan's house. So the National
Speaker 4: Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, who had I believe, like twenty
Speaker 4: four hour security production protection, including at his home, a
Speaker 4: drunk dude got into his house past the security agents
Speaker 4: that were outside, and basically nobody knew how that happened.
Speaker 3: And so I again like Listen, when.
Speaker 4: You have issues like this, if you shouldn't probably be
Speaker 4: able to bring cocaine into the White House. If the
Speaker 4: White House says you're not supposed to bring cocaine to
Speaker 4: the White House, right, that means they're failing at their
Speaker 4: own security protocols.
Speaker 3: And I don't think that's great like all around.
Speaker 4: Like, I don't really care about there being a small
Speaker 4: amount of cocaine in the White House, but if it's
Speaker 4: a pattern of like security failures, there's like a basic
Speaker 4: question of competence. I don't think anybody in the United
Speaker 4: States of America wants to see something happen to the
Speaker 4: NSA or to the President or to anybody in the
Speaker 4: White House. And that's like bad period. I mean, it's
Speaker 4: bad for the individual and the family's involved. It's also
Speaker 4: bad for the country. It makes us look like people
Speaker 4: who can't perform basic functions, which we increasingly know is true.
Speaker 4: And so if this is part of a pattern of
Speaker 4: security breaches on the part of Secret Service, that's pretty
Speaker 4: bad for Secret Service.
Speaker 1: Secret Services had a lot of scandals in recent years
Speaker 1: as well. I mean, I think that those points are
Speaker 1: fair because when this first was reported, they didn't.
Speaker 5: Know it was cocaine.
Speaker 1: You know, They're like, oh, a powdery white substance was found,
Speaker 1: and immediately you're like, oh, like anthrax, like right, like
Speaker 1: what's going on here? So the fact that you know,
Speaker 1: can willly nearly like bring your drugs into the White
Speaker 1: House apparently, and it seems like a somewhat of a
Speaker 1: security risk there.
Speaker 3: When they say they're trying to prevent you from doing.
Speaker 5: It, right, Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: So I mean I do, like, I just want to
Speaker 1: know the backstory.
Speaker 5: I do actually want to.
Speaker 1: I don't want anybody to get in trouble, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want them to be like thrown in prison
Speaker 1: for their infraction against our stupid drug laws. But I
Speaker 1: do want to know the backstory of how it ended
Speaker 1: up there, Like whose was it, why did they bring it?
Speaker 1: How did they get left behind? Did they notice it
Speaker 1: was missing? Did they know it was in their bag?
Speaker 3: You know what I mean?
Speaker 5: Like was it intentional? I just I do want to
Speaker 5: know the details.
Speaker 1: I find it very creatively interesting to imagine the sequence
Speaker 1: of events that led to this situation.
Speaker 4: Maybe it could be really basic too, because I think
Speaker 4: like both Snoop Dogg and Tommy Chong and maybe Willie
Speaker 4: Nelson's wife think this was undo. The Carner administration said
Speaker 4: that they've smoked weed in the White House, Like there
Speaker 4: are people many people who have said that they've smoked
Speaker 4: weed in a handful of people who say they've smoked
Speaker 4: weed in the White House. So obviously there's there's a
Speaker 4: way for people to get illicit substances into the White House,
Speaker 4: especially if they're sort of privileged, if they're a very
Speaker 4: important person of.
Speaker 1: VIPA, Yeah, they're not getting the full pat down or whatever.
Speaker 4: Maybe and if that's the situation here, I also do
Speaker 4: think there can be a lot of people who have
Speaker 4: relatives like locked up for quote small amounts of cocaine,
Speaker 4: who the Biden administration pays zero attention to, despite the
Speaker 4: fact that Hunter Biden himself has suffered with this and
Speaker 4: has not been prosecuted on different drug charges. The other
Speaker 4: reason that they might be laying the groundwork is that
Speaker 4: there's a real question as to whether, if it is
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden's his settlement, his recent settlement gets upended because
Speaker 4: he has a drug offense or a recent drug offense.
Speaker 4: So there are legitimate reasons that you could have an
Speaker 4: anonymous law enforcement official who's you know, speaking in the
Speaker 4: present tense and referring to us as like secret service,
Speaker 4: apparently implicitly in the Politico article, going out and talking
Speaker 4: to the press and saying these things that could be
Speaker 4: really shady and nefarious behavior on part of the White House.
Speaker 3: We don't know that it could be the case, and
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 4: Think there are a whole lot of people that if
Speaker 4: this belongs to someone in the Biden family or one
Speaker 4: of their rich friends, people are going.
Speaker 3: To want to know.
Speaker 4: And I just don't think we're going to get answers
Speaker 4: to it, despite the fact that, give me a break,
Speaker 4: you found the cocaine in a very particular area.
Speaker 3: You have cameras focused on that area.
Speaker 4: You can look at the people who've gone past that
Speaker 4: area taking stuff out of their bags, things falling out
Speaker 4: of their bags. I just think that entire excuse is nonsense,
Speaker 4: and it tells me that they know and that they're
Speaker 4: protecting something else.
Speaker 1: I just want everybody to get the forgiveness and forbearance
Speaker 1: that Hunter Biden has done with regard to his drug problems.
Speaker 3: That's it, Crystal, What have you got for us?
Speaker 1: Shortly after the Supreme Court issued their rulings, striking down
Speaker 1: affirmative action in college admissions. A frequently viral liberal tweeter
Speaker 1: named Erica marsh offered up this very eyebrow raising analysis quote,
Speaker 1: Today's Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on black people.
Speaker 1: No black person will be able to succeed in a
Speaker 1: merit based system, which is exactly why firmative action based
Speaker 1: programs were needed. Today's decision is a travesty. No black
Speaker 1: person can succeed on merit. Yike's talk about the definition
Speaker 1: of the bigotry of low expectations. The tweet was almost
Speaker 1: perfectly calibrated to validate conservative arguments that liberals are the
Speaker 1: real racists, looking at minorities as a faithless blob in
Speaker 1: need of charity to suage their own white liberal guilt.
Speaker 1: And so naturally the tweet took off was quote tweeted
Speaker 1: tens of thousands of times, viewed over twenty seven million times.
Speaker 1: Prominent Republicans people like Matt Gates stoked this fire, and
Speaker 1: for some group of people who saw the tweet and
Speaker 1: undoubtedly served to harden their minds, beliefs about what liberals
Speaker 1: really think, who they really are, came a minor building
Speaker 1: block and their little mental caricature of Democrats or liberals
Speaker 1: or the left that is constantly being chiseled out by
Speaker 1: partisan media and these sorts of viral social media posts.
Speaker 1: But in a plot twist that should surprise no one
Speaker 1: in our current era of KFA pretend politics, the account
Speaker 1: probably a fake Washington posted a little investigation of this
Speaker 1: Erica Marsh character and found that she does not appear
Speaker 1: to actually exist. The quote proud democrat in Washington, as
Speaker 1: she described herself on Twitter, doesn't show up in any
Speaker 1: local phone or voting records. The Biden presidential campaign, where
Speaker 1: she said she worked as a field organizer, has no
Speaker 1: record of her. Neither does the Obama Foundation, where she
Speaker 1: claimed to have volunteered. The photos that she used appeared
Speaker 1: to be digitally altered. She refused to respond to the
Speaker 1: post or provide any evidence of her existence as a
Speaker 1: real human being and not a character being crafted by
Speaker 1: God knows who with a goal of accomplishing God knows what.
Speaker 1: The account has since been suspended from Twitter, but in
Speaker 1: her relatively short time there on that platform less than
Speaker 1: two years, Erica had amassed a really large following by
Speaker 1: tweeting the most hilariously stereotypical liberal dribble that you can
Speaker 1: possibly imagine. One tweet proudly declared that she still wears
Speaker 1: two masks whenever I go out and support Ukraine. She
Speaker 1: also had a habit of copying verbatim viral tweets from
Speaker 1: other users to attention farm her own cloud.
Speaker 5: You get the idea.
Speaker 1: Now we have no clue who is behind this account.
Speaker 1: The Washington Post floats some sort of foreign malign influence campaign.
Speaker 1: Maybe other Twitter users have positive could be a right
Speaker 1: wing opt to make Democrats look as dumb as possible.
Speaker 1: It's also possible that Erica Marsh is a pseudonym adopted
Speaker 1: by a real person to share their actual views under
Speaker 1: a cloak of anonymity. We don't know, and in a
Speaker 1: certain sense, who really cares loosing out the real identity
Speaker 1: of some random lib Twitter account A worthwhile use of
Speaker 1: the journalistic resources of the Washington Post almost certainly not,
Speaker 1: and the instinct to hunt down the truth of Erica
Speaker 1: Marsh is almost certainly from the same reflex that led
Speaker 1: reporters to credulously believe that some bad Facebook memes from
Speaker 1: a Russian troll farm were determinative in electing Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: To me, the bigger puzzle, though, is what this one
Speaker 1: fake lib stereotype rage bita account says about us, about
Speaker 1: our political dialogue, the weird ways it turns in on
Speaker 1: itself and becomes increasingly strange from reality, but then also
Speaker 1: somehow leaks.
Speaker 5: Into that reality.
Speaker 1: After all, Erica Marsh is a fake person, but politicians
Speaker 1: and journalists who very much do exist engaged with this
Speaker 1: fake person genuinely crafting reality out of the fakery. The
Speaker 1: real question to me is how much of what we're
Speaker 1: doing in politics at this point is the equivalent of
Speaker 1: having arguments with Erica Marsh, fake debates with fake people
Speaker 1: or political ideologies, craft or respond to fake cartoon character
Speaker 1: ideological stereotypes that we have allowed, propagated and algorithms to
Speaker 1: build up in our own minds. What exactly are we
Speaker 1: really doing here? I'm genuinely puzzled by it. When Biden
Speaker 1: ran in twenty twenty, his campaign's best and most effective
Speaker 1: insight was that Twitter is not real life. They didn't
Speaker 1: respond to the reactionary online discourse of the day. They
Speaker 1: read the normy mood pretty well did enough at least
Speaker 1: to scrape together enough votes to win the White House
Speaker 1: Ron DeSantis, as we discussed earlier, polar opposite of that spectrum,
Speaker 1: hyper online rolling out campaign videos that would be downright
Speaker 1: incomprehensible to the overwhelming majority of Americans who do not
Speaker 1: spend their days tilting at Erica Marsh's. The politicians who
Speaker 1: are too online, too enmeshed in the fantasy world of
Speaker 1: the Erica Marsh type. They're hobbled when trying to win
Speaker 1: national elections, at least today, but it is a surefire
Speaker 1: way to attract Cloud. So yeah, Twitter is not real life,
Speaker 1: but some parts of Twitter escape into the wild into
Speaker 1: real life, smuggled out by the politicians who build brands
Speaker 1: and chase cloud in that world. And so we can't
Speaker 1: just dismiss the Erica marshes as inconsequential. When politicians and
Speaker 1: their most devoted followers and thinking and speaking and legislating,
Speaker 1: they're all doing this as if this is all actually real.
Speaker 1: And the truth is, we're easy prey. We're easy prey
Speaker 1: because we spend less time actually engaging in real life
Speaker 1: with people who are not ideologically aligned with us. We
Speaker 1: believe the caricatures because they don't have to bump up
Speaker 1: against reality very often, and because we've been persuaded to
Speaker 1: largely abandon politics as a real thing done in the
Speaker 1: real world with real people to achieve a real objective.
Speaker 1: In bowling alone, Robert Putnam tracks how we've received it
Speaker 1: from the active part of politics. We treat it more
Speaker 1: like a spectator sport, and of course spectator sports a
Speaker 1: lot more exciting, with great villains to play great heels.
Speaker 1: Even the real people. Though on Twitter and on social media,
Speaker 1: we are also playing a part, responding to the reward
Speaker 1: generated by algorithms and platform design in terms of service,
Speaker 1: treating ourselves on a daily basis to great moral conquests
Speaker 1: and pitch battles, and getting a sense that we're really
Speaker 1: doing something, approaching civic duty, playing our part in the
Speaker 1: great story that has our democracy, or at.
Speaker 5: LEAs so we imagine.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, the big decisions are being taken at the Fed
Speaker 1: or the Treasury, on Wall Street, or in corporate boardrooms,
Speaker 1: where very real people take action to achieve very real goals, most.
Speaker 5: Often at our expense.
Speaker 1: In other news, this July fourth was the hottest day
Speaker 1: and recorded human history, the ocean hotter than ever. Scientists
Speaker 1: are warning that the Earth's vital signs are flashing code
Speaker 1: read wonder what Erica marsh might have said about it, Emily.
Speaker 1: This one really really got me thinking, all right, Emily,
Speaker 1: what are you looking at?
Speaker 4: Well, there's new research on marriage, and I guess people
Speaker 4: not getting married.
Speaker 3: That's probably the best way to put it.
Speaker 4: I want to start by actually Washington Examiner article by
Speaker 4: Brad Wilcox with the University of Virginia and the Institute
Speaker 4: for Family Studies on this new Pew research. We'll get
Speaker 4: to the Pew research in a second, but I first
Speaker 4: wanted to read the way Brad put it because I
Speaker 4: think he adds really really important framing not just that
Speaker 4: the left misses, but also that the right misses and
Speaker 4: has missed for years and years and years. So Brad writes,
Speaker 4: a record high twenty five percent of forty year olds
Speaker 4: in the United States were never married in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 4: according to sobering new statistics from the Pew Research Center.
Speaker 4: That statistic, and this is really important, compares to just
Speaker 4: six percent of never married forty year olds in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 4: So twenty five percent now six percent in nineteen eighty. Now,
Speaker 4: Brad goes on to say, digging further into the Pew
Speaker 4: data reveals that this retreat for marriage and family has
Speaker 4: hit vulnerable populations and the hardest, including minorities, the working class,
Speaker 4: and poor Americans.
Speaker 3: The upper classes continue.
Speaker 4: To marry, forge stable unions, and enjoy reasonable, reasonably happy
Speaker 4: family life, with the lower classes drift into a world
Speaker 4: of relational chaos. So some folks might not agree that
Speaker 4: marriage is essential to happiness and stability, and we'll get
Speaker 4: to that in just a second. But first let's zoom
Speaker 4: in on Brad's framing about who's being hit the hardest
Speaker 4: by this decline in marriage, at least at the age
Speaker 4: of forty. So let's put Pew's data up on the screen.
Speaker 4: So this is as of twenty twenty one. According to
Speaker 4: a recent a new Ugh analysis of Census Bureau data,
Speaker 4: as of twenty twenty one, twenty five percent of forty
Speaker 4: year olds in the US had never been married. As
Speaker 4: Brad said, but that was just from twenty ten. You
Speaker 4: get a five percent increase. Now look at these demographics,
Speaker 4: So black forty year olds were much more likely to
Speaker 4: have never married than Hispanic, White, Asia and Asian forty
Speaker 4: year olds. Education level forty year olds without a four
Speaker 4: year college degree were much more likely to have never
Speaker 4: married than those who had at least completed a bachelor's degree.
Speaker 4: One third of those with the high school diploma or
Speaker 4: less had never married, compared with twenty six percent of
Speaker 4: those with some college education and eighteen percent of those
Speaker 4: with a bachelor's degree or more education. Now, the overall
Speaker 4: decrease in the shriff four year olds who have married
Speaker 4: is especially notable, Pew says because the shriff forty year
Speaker 4: olds who had completed at least a bachelor's degree was
Speaker 4: much higher. So there's more people in that position in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one than in nineteen eighty. That went from
Speaker 4: eighteen percent to thirty nine percent. So that's huge. It's
Speaker 4: a bigger group in a really powerful way. PW does
Speaker 4: conclude their article on this new analysis with some note
Speaker 4: of caution.
Speaker 3: They say, we.
Speaker 4: Can't assume that if someone is not married by age forty,
Speaker 4: they never will. In fact, they continue, about one in
Speaker 4: four forty year olds who had not married in two
Speaker 4: thousand and one had done so by age sixty. If
Speaker 4: that pattern holds, a similar sheriff, today's never married forty
Speaker 4: year olds will marry in the coming decades.
Speaker 3: That is a really big if.
Speaker 4: So while I appreciate Pugh, especially the social scientists at
Speaker 4: Pugh putting that in there, it is a really, really,
Speaker 4: really big if because of where we see the trend
Speaker 4: lines going. That said, it's still even if people are
Speaker 4: simply delaying marriage to forty or later, that can come
Speaker 4: with serious complications for their life and less than ideal
Speaker 4: complications for their life in ways that we're going to
Speaker 4: talk about right now, because that's what's really important. So
Speaker 4: education by social scientists is used as a really helpful
Speaker 4: proxy for class and you can see that born out
Speaker 4: in a whole lot of data. And so what we're
Speaker 4: really looking at here is exactly what Brad describes wealthy
Speaker 4: people who have taken to the pages of and I
Speaker 4: did a little look yesterday at some recent articles where
Speaker 4: marriage has been disparaged as an institution, disparaged as outdated
Speaker 4: and not of much use anymore, Business Insider, the Atlantic, Teen, Vogue,
Speaker 4: the New York Times. The people who are taking to
Speaker 4: the pages of those elite media outlets are actually getting
Speaker 4: married at higher rates and really always have been. My
Speaker 4: old boss Tim Carney over at the Washington Examiner wrote
Speaker 4: a great book called Alienated America which is always behind
Speaker 4: me on the shelf. Here on the new set, he
Speaker 4: wrote about what he calls the Lena Dunham fallacy, which
Speaker 4: is just a wonderful turn of phrase, but he also
Speaker 4: defines it in a really important way as quote, the
Speaker 4: tendency to attribute to decadent elites social phenomena really located
Speaker 4: among the working class, and the inclination to quote blame
Speaker 4: cultural shifts away from the traditional norms on highly educated,
Speaker 4: wealthy white liberals. So you know, we're typically people on
Speaker 4: the right, especially if you look at sort of the
Speaker 4: narrative in the language around like welfare queens. You say, oh,
Speaker 4: these welfare queens and welfare communities are destroying American culture,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. It's just a completely ridiculous argument
Speaker 4: because what you have actually are elites who are conditioning
Speaker 4: all of us over and over again with cultural messaging
Speaker 4: in media and elsewhere to say, oh, marriage not really
Speaker 4: that important, but it is.
Speaker 3: And this is where again.
Speaker 4: Maybe some folks agree, but I think it's really important
Speaker 4: to zoom in and realize that the bulk of research
Speaker 4: suggests that marriage and happiness actually are coordinated.
Speaker 3: They actually are. They go together.
Speaker 4: Marriage actually is a source of great happiness for people,
Speaker 4: even though you know, people have been told for a
Speaker 4: really long time that you can you find happiness outside marriage,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera. That's true, But the research shows
Speaker 4: us that marriage is one of the best predictors of
Speaker 4: happiness and also one of the best predictors of stability
Speaker 4: for children being raised in a household with two married parents,
Speaker 4: especially upward mobility. People who grow up with less money
Speaker 4: but in a household with two married parents are more
Speaker 4: likely to experience upward mobility and escape the cycle of poverty.
Speaker 4: And that's another essential element of all of this in
Speaker 4: the class framework that again the right misses and the
Speaker 4: left definitely misses. This is also from the Institute of
Speaker 4: Family Studies quote. The story is straightforward. They're obviously pro marriage,
Speaker 4: but taking a look at the sort of research here,
Speaker 4: they say married respondents are much happier, and consistent with
Speaker 4: prior research, parents are a little less happy than non
Speaker 4: parents provided they are unmarried. So parents are a little
Speaker 4: less happy than non parents when they're unmarried. And again,
Speaker 4: like this is sometimes very logical, it's really really hard
Speaker 4: to single parent, it's really hard to deal with the
Speaker 4: complications of you know, that entire system and to deal
Speaker 4: with you know, in so many cases, you know the
Speaker 4: pain that women experience when they delay marriage to the
Speaker 4: point where as Limeonstone has demonstrated for ifs as well.
Speaker 3: They're not having as many kids as they say they want.
Speaker 4: It's one thing for women to have fewer kids and
Speaker 4: to say, you know, women are able to exercise choice
Speaker 4: and are making these decisions on their own, and they're
Speaker 4: able to plan it thanks to technology in ways that
Speaker 4: makes them happier.
Speaker 3: Sure, but it's also a problem.
Speaker 4: When you get to the point where women want to
Speaker 4: have more children than they're actually able to have. In
Speaker 4: some cases, because let's talk about it, student loans, something
Speaker 4: the right doesn't want to talk about. Being saddled with
Speaker 4: tens of thousands of dollars of debt in student loans
Speaker 4: by a system that lied to you and so this
Speaker 4: was your ticket to the middle class. You graduate college
Speaker 4: with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, you're not
Speaker 4: able to buy a home, you don't feel stable, and
Speaker 4: in some cases, as polling suggests, you're putting off marriage
Speaker 4: specifically because you're saddled with a crazy amount of student
Speaker 4: loan debt. All of these things are contributing to a
Speaker 4: place where, you know, if P is correct and this
Speaker 4: trend picks up, you know, people are marrying after forty
Speaker 4: at a rate that's similar to in the eighties or
Speaker 4: even before that. We'll see that has yet to be determined,
Speaker 4: but even that is barely a positive metric, because you'll
Speaker 4: end up again worsening this cycle of women having fewer
Speaker 4: children than they want to and people experiencing a lot
Speaker 4: of really unhappy years, unnecessarily so because of the cultural
Speaker 4: and social conditions.
Speaker 3: That they were.
Speaker 4: Basically like that you should these are the waters that
Speaker 4: we swim in. As Crystal use that phrase in an
Speaker 4: earlier segment, this is not a culture. This is not
Speaker 4: a political system that incentivizes these things. It's not a
Speaker 4: political system or a culture that has created healthy conditions
Speaker 4: for any of it. And I think what's absolutely essential
Speaker 4: to realize is that this is a system being rigged
Speaker 4: by elites who are not themselves practicing what they preach
Speaker 4: to absolutely everyone else, which is marriage is and all
Speaker 4: that important. It's not essential to happiness. You can find
Speaker 4: your happiness in work. That's a huge Sheryl Sandberg line.
Speaker 4: That's what you hear all the time from corporate executives.
Speaker 4: And you see that even in Jacobin, a review of
Speaker 4: a new Pixar movie this month that you talked about
Speaker 4: how Pixar often depicts people finding their happiness in work.
Speaker 4: They compared it to like a Rand novel, which I
Speaker 4: think is maybe a little bit far. But the point remains,
Speaker 4: this is a culture that talks excessively about finding your
Speaker 4: happiness in work and not in family life. And that
Speaker 4: is the pendulum swinging way too far back in the
Speaker 4: other direction. And again, it is hurting the working class
Speaker 4: more than elites, and elites know that because they are
Speaker 4: not following the same patterns that they prescribe for everybody else. Crystal, Yes,
Speaker 4: this is frustrating.
Speaker 3: From the right, and.
Speaker 1: The nation of Israel just completed a deadly assault on
Speaker 1: the Palestinian city of Jeanine.
Speaker 5: Let's go and put this up on the screen from
Speaker 5: Common Dreams.
Speaker 1: Their headline here, catastrophic Israeli forces unleash humanitarian disaster in Janine.
Speaker 5: Let me read you a little bit of this. They say.
Speaker 1: Thousands of people who live in that city, in the
Speaker 1: occupied West Bank, are reportedly fleeing the poverty stricken refugee
Speaker 1: camp as Israeli military forces Tuesday continued to batter the cities,
Speaker 1: water power, and healthcare infrastructure. Mohammad Abu Talal, a resident
Speaker 1: of the camp, told Middle East I on Tuesday, a
Speaker 1: day after a large scale assault by the IDF left
Speaker 1: at least ten Palestinians dead and scores more wounded, that
Speaker 1: the refugee camps quote streets are all dug up and
Speaker 1: uprooted by bulldozers used by the Israeli forces. We're lucky
Speaker 1: to be joined by a great guest this morning who
Speaker 1: can help break down the situation and what we know
Speaker 1: at this point. O Marsha care serves as the Israel
Speaker 1: and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch. He investigates their
Speaker 1: human rights abuses in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Welcome, Omar, glad.
Speaker 3: To have you, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: So just tell us what we know so far?
Speaker 3: Sure, So, what we know.
Speaker 8: Is in this two day military incursion into the Janina
Speaker 8: refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, Israeli forces killed
Speaker 8: twelve Palestinians. Scores more were injured, including children. Children are
Speaker 8: among those killed. We know that more than three thousand
Speaker 8: five hundred Palestinians were displaced from their homes in the
Speaker 8: refugee camp. We know that thousands more had their access
Speaker 8: to electricity and water cuts, and we know that for
Speaker 8: long stretches, ambulances were blocked from entering the refugee camp
Speaker 8: to provide health services. Hospitals were struck by tear guest canisters.
Speaker 8: And this isn't some one off event. Janine has been
Speaker 8: for much of the last year and a half frequently
Speaker 8: targeted by the Israeli army. In fact, we're seeing unprecedented
Speaker 8: numbers of Palestinians gunned down in the West Bank. And
Speaker 8: this is in year fifty seven of an occupation that's
Speaker 8: been going on for far too long.
Speaker 3: So I want to ask about the counterpoint here.
Speaker 4: This is from Lisa Daftari, which is obviously she's a
Speaker 4: very vigorous defender of Israel. Her publication reported that Israel
Speaker 4: reviewed details revealed details about an underground terris route that
Speaker 4: was uncovered in a mosque. Lisa said, the mainstream media
Speaker 4: only times and now to tell you about the so
Speaker 4: called war crimes Israel's committed by going into Janine. They
Speaker 4: leave out these small details. So argument is that this
Speaker 4: is on the heels of a sort of broader assault
Speaker 4: on Israel and its retaliation, et cetera, et cetera. What
Speaker 4: is your response to that line of argumentation. I'm sure
Speaker 4: I disagree with it, but what are people who claim
Speaker 4: there's validity to that getting wrong?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 8: I think part of it is, like, you know, we
Speaker 8: see this argument being used all the time in Gaza,
Speaker 8: for example, and it's been seventeen years of continuous rounds
Speaker 8: of assaults and escalations.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: The reality here is this is part of a methodical policy.
Speaker 8: Human rights organizations, including Israeli human rights organizations Palestinian International
Speaker 8: upset that the Israeli government is committing the crime of
Speaker 8: aparthet against Palestinians. There is no security justification for Israel
Speaker 8: exproporating Palestinian land to build settlements. There is no security
Speaker 8: justification for giving building permits to build settlements which are
Speaker 8: illegal and denying them for Palestinians to add extensions to
Speaker 8: their own. There is no security justification for policies that
Speaker 8: deny residency rights for Palestinians to live with their Israeli
Speaker 8: partner in Israel, but allow it to foreigners of any
Speaker 8: other nationality. Security is frequently invoked. It's often pretextual, and
Speaker 8: even when security is part of the consideration, and of
Speaker 8: course there have been Israelis who have been who have
Speaker 8: been killed, the Israeli government goes so far beyond with
Speaker 8: international law authorizes, right, you know, actions that affect thousands
Speaker 8: of people, that displace them, that they no more justify
Speaker 8: these actions, you know, than torture invoked in the name
Speaker 8: of security would justify those particular actions.
Speaker 1: Talk to us a little bit about this current net
Speaker 1: Yahoo government, which has been described, I think justifiably so
Speaker 1: as the most far right, especially some of the coalition
Speaker 1: partners that are part of this government, and the most
Speaker 1: far right government in Israeli history. Do you see this
Speaker 1: action as a character different from some of the assaults
Speaker 1: that have gone on under previous administrations.
Speaker 8: So you're right to highlight the continuity these policies. I mean,
Speaker 8: the difference is one of scale, not kind, right, So
Speaker 8: I think this government has been very explicit. The founding
Speaker 8: texts that created the coalition sets out that their primary
Speaker 8: objectives ensuring the exclusive and that's in quotes right of
Speaker 8: the Jewish people to the land between the Jordan River
Speaker 8: and the Mediterranean Sea. The problem is half that population
Speaker 8: who lives there are not Jewish, They're Palestinian. And the
Speaker 8: government has been very explicit about expanding settlements, about demolishing
Speaker 8: Palestinian homes, about relaxing the use of force standards that
Speaker 8: make it more easy to kill Palestinians. They're not hiding it.
Speaker 8: They're saying that the current reality is the you know,
Speaker 8: is the final solution. There is no you know, sort
Speaker 8: of peace process.
Speaker 5: There is no plan.
Speaker 8: There's just a transparent policy to ensure the well being
Speaker 8: of the Jewish people at the expense of Palestinians. And
Speaker 8: more and more people are calling this out as apartheid.
Speaker 8: And that's sort of where the conversation shifting. I think
Speaker 8: in the US that conversation is not caught up with
Speaker 8: where it is in the rest of the world. But
Speaker 8: it's the transparent consensus within the human rights movement and
Speaker 8: by more and more voices from the former UN Secretary
Speaker 8: General to leading former Israeli government officials, to governments like
Speaker 8: South Africa and Indonesia, governments across the world.
Speaker 4: So what's the immediate future look like for Janine on
Speaker 4: the heels of all of this, you know, in the
Speaker 4: coming days, the coming weeks, the coming months, what can
Speaker 4: observers expect to see out of the region.
Speaker 8: I'm afraid I don't have much optimistic to share with you,
Speaker 8: because this situation is in some ways unprecedentedly bad. And
Speaker 8: the problem we have here is that when these cycles
Speaker 8: of violence take place, when war crimes and other abuses
Speaker 8: take place, and by the way, not just by the
Speaker 8: Israeli government, sometimes these abuses are committed by Palestinian actors,
Speaker 8: there is systematically no accountability, so that fuels a cycle
Speaker 8: of impunity. So we see the same kinds of things
Speaker 8: happening again and again. People forget that the Gene refugee
Speaker 8: camp twenty years ago was the site of an Israeli
Speaker 8: incursion that left scores of Palestinians killed. So until you
Speaker 8: actually address the lack of accountability and you deal with
Speaker 8: the root causes to the systemic violence, which include at
Speaker 8: its core, Israel's apartheid against Palestinians, I'm afraid you're going
Speaker 8: to continue to see cycles of these violence take place,
Speaker 8: more raids, more killings, you know, more limited collective punishment
Speaker 8: that amounts to less access to electricity, water, et cetera.
Speaker 8: The solution is to recognize the reality of systematic rights
Speaker 8: abuse and complicity and ensure accountability for those serious abuses
Speaker 8: and OMAR.
Speaker 1: Finally, we tracked closely here huge protests across Israel bringing
Speaker 1: together are a lot of different groups in reaction to
Speaker 1: what is widely seen and I think justifiably so as
Speaker 1: a sort of judicial takeover attempt from NETANYAHUU and his government.
Speaker 1: Do you see any signs of similar pushback against these
Speaker 1: types of deadly assaults? Is their widespread public support for
Speaker 1: these type of actions from the Israeli people.
Speaker 8: So look, there's a minority, but there is a contingent
Speaker 8: of Israelis that show up every week at these protests
Speaker 8: with signs that make the linkage between the judicial overhaul
Speaker 8: and the repression apartheid occupation of Palestinians. There's still a minority.
Speaker 8: The majority protest movement has largely focused on the issue
Speaker 8: of the judiciary, but more and more people are drawing
Speaker 8: the connections that understand that what's happening in Israel is
Speaker 8: the inevitable result of decades of illegality, in the West Bank,
Speaker 8: of impunity, and in many of these forces that have
Speaker 8: risen to power that are pushing the judicial overhaul actually
Speaker 8: you know, come from the settler movement, actually want to
Speaker 8: import you know, these values there. So some linkages are
Speaker 8: being drawn. It's not enough, and I think it's quite
Speaker 8: important that we continue to make the connection, you know,
Speaker 8: between these issues because ultimately, yes, the judiciary has been
Speaker 8: a rubber stamp on many if the abuse of policies
Speaker 8: of the occupation, you know, But at the same time,
Speaker 8: obviously removing even that limited check you know, could make
Speaker 8: the situation dramatically worse, and always Palestinians receive, you know,
Speaker 8: the brunt end of those kinds of of changes.
Speaker 1: Omar, thank you so much for taking the time to
Speaker 1: join us and break down this complicated and very time situation.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Thank you all.
Speaker 1: Right, guys, thank you so much for watching Emily. Thank
Speaker 1: you for filling in for Sager. You did a fantastic job.
Speaker 5: It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure.
Speaker 4: And as a viewer of Breaking Points, I'm honestly really
Speaker 4: excited to have soccer back.
Speaker 1: Soccer will be back, and we think at least on
Speaker 1: Monday it'll be a married man and we should have
Speaker 1: a normal shows next week with all the you know,
Speaker 1: normal hosts in the normal places, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 5: As far as I know, I've been Ryan yes, and
Speaker 5: Ryan is allegedly going to be.
Speaker 3: Back as well. Drag them back from Vermont.
Speaker 1: Thank you, guys so much again for making all of
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