Speaker 1: Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.
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Speaker 4: Hi, good morning, and welcome to the Counterpoints.
Speaker 5: Emily, how you doing, ghead?
Speaker 6: It's really rainy here in Washington, DC, but it's that's
Speaker 6: December for you here.
Speaker 1: It is used to be snowy here in December, but
Speaker 1: not so much anymore anyway, Thank you for that. Exon
Speaker 1: wanted to start, wanted to start really quick?
Speaker 5: Himn hot just now.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's obnoxious on my way in. I'm like,
Speaker 1: this could be snow, and when I was a kid
Speaker 1: this would be snow. Instead, this is gross. But I
Speaker 1: wanted to update people real quickly on the thing that
Speaker 1: still told you about in the morning, where she encouraged
Speaker 1: everyone to buy Ray Fatt a layer's book of poetry
Speaker 1: and prose, which came out yesterday called If I Must Die.
Speaker 1: We've been pushing everyone to buy it over the last week,
Speaker 1: trying to make it a best seller.
Speaker 4: I just checked.
Speaker 1: It's number sixty three in the world right now. The publisher,
Speaker 1: as Crystal mentioned, told me that as of several days ago,
Speaker 1: already ten thousand orders had come in, probably closer to
Speaker 1: thirteen fourteen thousand by now, which means it has a
Speaker 1: real shot of making the New York Times bestseller list
Speaker 1: in its first week out. So basically, you have until
Speaker 1: Friday to put your orders in. It is completely out
Speaker 1: of stock. They sold out their entire first print run,
Speaker 1: but you're still able to order it.
Speaker 4: That just means you won't get it until they do
Speaker 4: another print run.
Speaker 1: So if you already ordered a copy, go get some more,
Speaker 1: because you know you have people in your life who need.
Speaker 4: A great book of poetry and prose.
Speaker 1: And it's a message to Ray Fott's surviving family and
Speaker 1: to the Palatine and people in general that he has
Speaker 1: not forgotten. He has not been forgotten. They have not
Speaker 1: been forgotten. We have nothing to do with it commercially.
Speaker 1: All the royalties go to a surviving family. We just
Speaker 1: would love to see this sor so, thank you for that.
Speaker 5: Keep calling poetry is a great holiday gift.
Speaker 1: It is, absolutely it absolutely is.
Speaker 6: We have a really packed show today, really packed show today.
Speaker 5: The news is relentless. We're going to start actually with
Speaker 5: a little news.
Speaker 6: I guess about Mitch McConnell, and we'll go then into
Speaker 6: the breaking story that's unfolding continuously about Luigi Mangioni. Kenklippenstein
Speaker 6: secured the manifesto, released the released the manifesto yesterday, so
Speaker 6: we have all kinds of new details to talk about.
Speaker 6: When it comes to the assassination of Brian Thompson. We're
Speaker 6: then going to talk about updates also relentless breaking news
Speaker 6: cycle from Syria. We're going to break down the Pete
Speaker 6: Hegseth rape allegations from the police report for everyone that's
Speaker 6: you came out a few weeks ago.
Speaker 4: But it looks like he might get through.
Speaker 5: He looks like he might get through.
Speaker 1: Oh, it's important for people to know whether or not
Speaker 1: they're depending on secretary as a rapist.
Speaker 6: And Ryan suggested we actually like kind of walk through
Speaker 6: the police report, so stay tuned to go through that
Speaker 6: with us. We're going to talk about the Trump Department
Speaker 6: of Justice getting caught by Michael Horowitz, Inspector General who
Speaker 6: produced actually a very good report on Russia collusion not
Speaker 6: that long ago, finding improper spying on journalists and Republican
Speaker 6: and Democratic lawmakers. So people, it was like twenty Republicans
Speaker 6: twenty one Democrats.
Speaker 5: Or maybe reverse twenty one Republicans and.
Speaker 6: Twenty Democrats, but absolutely improper spying on journalists to catch leakers.
Speaker 6: And we've got a great bill Mark clip. You're gonna
Speaker 6: want to stay tuned for the bill Mark Club.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the ethnic cleansing of Northern Gaza continues with
Speaker 1: these assaults on multiple hospitals, come a lott When Hospital
Speaker 1: and Anesian Hospital. We won't have a chance to talk
Speaker 1: about that day. I'll be on the show tomorrow filling
Speaker 1: in for Crystal. Sure, sure we'll get to that.
Speaker 4: For our Pakistani audience. We had a big.
Speaker 1: Story yesterday over a drop site. You can read that there.
Speaker 1: We don't have a chance to get to that one either.
Speaker 1: Maybe we can do that tomorrow. Basically, we according to Leeks,
Speaker 1: we got out of Pakistan. The November twenty sixth massacre
Speaker 1: that we covered was actually pre planned and it was
Speaker 1: basically an ambush. Just so maybe we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: more tomorrow. But so much going on in the world.
Speaker 1: Let's just get into it.
Speaker 5: Let's get into it.
Speaker 6: We're going to start with this first tear sheet and
Speaker 6: just do a kind of quick report from Capitol Hill
Speaker 6: where Mitch McConnell, who's no longer the Senate Minority leader,
Speaker 6: he had a fall.
Speaker 5: We can put a one up on the screen. This
Speaker 5: is from the Associated Press.
Speaker 6: He fell and sprained his wrist yesterday literally on Capitol Hill.
Speaker 6: There was you know, you could see medical personnel going
Speaker 6: into assist him in his office. And the reason we're
Speaker 6: talking about this is that Mitch McConnell is clearly too
Speaker 6: old to be in office. And by old, I mean
Speaker 6: there are people who are older than him. I think
Speaker 6: Bernie Sanders might be older than him. When I say old,
Speaker 6: I mean he's incapacitated. He's we're getting to Feinstein territory with.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, so I'm curious, do we know physical verse
Speaker 1: mental incapacity? Here.
Speaker 5: I mean mentally, he seems perfectly sharp.
Speaker 4: Right, he had that brain freeze, but he had.
Speaker 6: That brain freeze. Yeah, I shouldn't say perfectly sharp. He seems,
Speaker 6: you know, like an older man. But you know, he
Speaker 6: doesn't seem like Biden. I guess Biden is the comparison. Yeah,
Speaker 6: Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to have gone to Biden levels.
Speaker 1: Right, And what we can reveal here is that there
Speaker 1: are he's going to enormous lengths to basically cover up,
Speaker 1: you know, how physically frail at least he has gotten yes,
Speaker 1: which you know presidents like JFK and FDR all did
Speaker 1: you know, attempting a tempting to show more physical vigor
Speaker 1: than they had. But go ahead comes from this comes
Speaker 1: from your side.
Speaker 6: I was just gonna say, I mean, I think it's
Speaker 6: it's for the reason that you're saying it's important that
Speaker 6: we probe Mitch McConnell's health right now, because he's still
Speaker 6: incredibly influential in center Republican leadership. They're about to have
Speaker 6: the majority, so he's a very consequential figure. Still, he
Speaker 6: doesn't need to be in office. He's had physical medical challenges,
Speaker 6: and yet we can put a two up on the screen.
Speaker 6: This is actually an exclusive image that we have here
Speaker 6: at breaking points.
Speaker 5: This was the day after the election.
Speaker 6: Mitch McConnell at Reagan International Airport in a wheelchair being
Speaker 6: pushed by a staffer. That may not seem like a
Speaker 6: big deal. There has been reporting that he uses a wheelchair,
Speaker 6: and there may or may not be a couple other
Speaker 6: photos of him in a wheelchair floating around out there.
Speaker 6: I didn't see many, and that's because they're carefully trying
Speaker 6: to prevent these photos from being published because they to
Speaker 6: your point, Ryan, it's as similar to FDR and JFK.
Speaker 6: And not wanting to give any sense of incapacity, but
Speaker 6: Mitch McConnell is staying in the Senate too, As he said,
Speaker 6: make sure that the fight for Ukraine as he sees
Speaker 6: it is complete.
Speaker 1: As a sub committee chair of this important Armed Services panel,
Speaker 1: he has personally intervened. Probably you know, without Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 1: Ukraine may not have the funding that it has yes
Speaker 1: this point.
Speaker 5: He has made it a priority.
Speaker 1: Now I have my own piece of reporting that I
Speaker 1: can add to that. A source of mind flew next
Speaker 1: him on a commercial flight and when they arrived, there
Speaker 1: was a wheelchair waiting for him, but McConnell angrily kind.
Speaker 4: Of refused it.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's not that he's constantly in need
Speaker 1: of a wheelchair, and he's very clear, he's very cognizant
Speaker 1: of what it represents. His refusal to use it yesterday
Speaker 1: led obviously to his fall and to his injury, to
Speaker 1: the injury on his face and his wrists, I think
Speaker 1: more importantly from a political perspective.
Speaker 4: The source also.
Speaker 1: Said that he ate a tune a fish sandwich on
Speaker 1: this commercial flight, but he wasn't in first class. He
Speaker 1: was not in first class. And at that point, it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: your flying coach, despite the fact that you could fly
Speaker 1: first class, because you want to be with the people.
Speaker 1: You want to show that you're a man of the people.
Speaker 1: You sit down among these people of which you are
Speaker 1: one of the men, and you open up a tune
Speaker 1: of fish sandwich, go to first class. The level of
Speaker 1: take that to first class, the people will be okay
Speaker 1: without you being in there right, just get to come on.
Speaker 6: The level of out of touchness at that point is astounding,
Speaker 6: not surprising, but astounding.
Speaker 1: On the line, I try to not bring any like
Speaker 1: even like you know, fries or anything that's gonna even
Speaker 1: so if it smells good life fries, No nobody, nobody
Speaker 1: wants to smell your food.
Speaker 5: And it's just a small space anyway.
Speaker 1: That's why the world made like granola bars.
Speaker 5: That's true. Brian does love granola bars.
Speaker 1: That does the trick. You don't need a tune of
Speaker 1: fish sandwich.
Speaker 6: Mitch McConnell, Yeah, to write his point, has put himself
Speaker 6: in a position on a subcommittee chair arm service where
Speaker 6: he's and he said as much.
Speaker 5: He's not being quiet about this.
Speaker 6: He sees the reason that he's continuing to stick around
Speaker 6: the Senate des try having right. He had that brain
Speaker 6: freeze everyone remembers where he just sort of seems to
Speaker 6: pause in the middle of a sentence. Has actually it
Speaker 6: happened twice? He's clearly so. While he may be on
Speaker 6: a good day in perfectly healthy mental shape, he may
Speaker 6: feel like he's him his old self. We can put
Speaker 6: a three up on the screen. This is more examples
Speaker 6: of his physical health problems.
Speaker 5: You can see just as.
Speaker 6: Yesterday, Yeah, banded on his face and his wrist is
Speaker 6: really swollen and purple. But when I started this black
Speaker 6: by saying Mitch McConnell's too old to be in the Senate.
Speaker 6: I mean there are people who are older at this
Speaker 6: point who are probably sharper. I think Bernie Sanders is
Speaker 6: older than him.
Speaker 4: Although he were in Ukraine, they'd can script him to
Speaker 4: the front line.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he'd be ready to go.
Speaker 6: Bernie Sanders, I think also said yesterday in an interview,
Speaker 6: it's a little bit of breaking news too that this
Speaker 6: will probably be his last time.
Speaker 5: So it will be eighty nine when I get out
Speaker 5: of here.
Speaker 4: Because he was just elected. He got six years. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But Mitch McConnell, even after all of these health problems,
Speaker 6: refuses to resign and continues to put himself in powerful positions.
Speaker 6: He did step down as Senate minority leader and soon
Speaker 6: to be sent a majority leader, but he continues to
Speaker 6: put himself in powerful positions because he is clinging to
Speaker 6: his ability to continue funneling money to Ukraine. He sees
Speaker 6: it as an existential crisis for democracy. This is how
Speaker 6: he would phrase it. He's not been quiet about any
Speaker 6: of this, and we think that it's important that he
Speaker 6: should be transparent actually.
Speaker 5: About what his health is and how ill he is.
Speaker 1: And there you go, And from that perspective, I understand
Speaker 1: why he would stay in because when you're a senator
Speaker 1: and a chairman of a powerful committee that doles out money,
Speaker 1: it's not as if it's a constant intellectual contest.
Speaker 4: He's not playing speed chests all day long.
Speaker 1: He just needs to sit in that position, box everybody out,
Speaker 1: demand that they've moved the money that he once moved,
Speaker 1: and just stand there until it happens.
Speaker 4: So in that sense, as long as.
Speaker 1: You're with it a little bit out of the day
Speaker 1: and you can be wheeled in and out, you actually
Speaker 1: can do just as much for the most part in
Speaker 1: that position as you could as a thirty six year old, spry,
Speaker 1: young senator.
Speaker 5: Yep, yeah, no, it makes sense.
Speaker 6: Let's move on to the unfolding saga of Luigi Mangioni,
Speaker 6: whose manifesto was was first released in full by Front
Speaker 6: of the Show Ken Klippenstein yesterday. We can put V
Speaker 6: zero up on the screen. This is the manifesto itself.
Speaker 6: It's very short as far as manifestos.
Speaker 4: Go, and it has a manifesto.
Speaker 6: Barely a manifesto has a banger of a first line.
Speaker 5: Here to the Feds.
Speaker 6: I'll keep this short because I do respect what you
Speaker 6: do for our country. One of the weirdest openings that
Speaker 6: any manifesto in history. Ryan, you wanted to do a
Speaker 6: somewhat dramatic reading of this. We should add that MANGIONI
Speaker 6: had an extradition hearing yesterday's being extradited from Pennsylvania where
Speaker 6: he was caught at that Altoona, Pennsylvania McDonald's and he's
Speaker 6: being extradited to New York to face murder charges. So
Speaker 6: that's what was unfolding yesterday. He will play clips of
Speaker 6: this and everything. But Ken said a lot of people
Speaker 6: in media had this manifesto but were not publishing it.
Speaker 6: They were publishing just snippets of it and not releasing.
Speaker 5: It in full.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what's wrong with me? Why didn't I have
Speaker 1: this yet?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Who did? Why did nobody give this a riot?
Speaker 1: I mean, Ken has been Ken has been all over this,
Speaker 1: from being one of the first Edge lords to like
Speaker 1: celebrate the murder of Brian Thompson and since then has
Speaker 1: has got has gotten some videos out of United Health
Speaker 1: from you know, obviously leaked by United Health employees who
Speaker 1: agree more with Ken than Ken's critics, and then he
Speaker 1: then he got the manifesto as well.
Speaker 4: It is utterly bizarre.
Speaker 1: I can't even think of a reason why the mainstream
Speaker 1: press got their hands on this and didn't publish it,
Speaker 1: but did quote from it.
Speaker 4: Earth are you doing?
Speaker 1: It's like, I don't even see how this helps manufacturer consenter.
Speaker 1: It's such just just a just little manifesto. We read
Speaker 1: some more of it.
Speaker 4: This this hit.
Speaker 1: I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This
Speaker 1: was fairly trivial, some elementary social engineering basic caad a
Speaker 1: lot of patients. The spiral notebook, if present, has some
Speaker 1: has some stractly notes and to do lists that illuminate
Speaker 1: the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down
Speaker 1: because I work in engineering, so probably not much info there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll see about that.
Speaker 1: I do apologize for any strife of traumas, but it
Speaker 1: had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.
Speaker 1: And there's a TikTok going around of they had it coming.
Speaker 1: The song from Chicago with some nice edits a reminder
Speaker 1: of the US has the number one most expensive healthcare
Speaker 1: system in the world, yet we rank roughly number forty two.
Speaker 1: Roughly number forty two is kind of a funny phrase
Speaker 1: number you're either forty two or or not?
Speaker 4: You say roughly forty.
Speaker 1: If I'm doing edits of his manifests, I would say
Speaker 1: just say roughly forty because when you say forty two,
Speaker 1: that's implying some specificity.
Speaker 5: You should have submitted this to drop site.
Speaker 1: He should have United is the largest is the indecipherable
Speaker 1: largest company in the US by market cap. I don't
Speaker 1: think that's true. Oh, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. I'm
Speaker 1: here editing the guys.
Speaker 6: Everyone's in the process right now. You're seeing behind the curtain.
Speaker 1: It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy?
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 1: The reality is these indecipble have simply gotten too powerful.
Speaker 1: They continue to abuse our country for men's profit because
Speaker 1: the American public has allowed them to get away with it.
Speaker 1: Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not
Speaker 1: have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be
Speaker 1: the most qualified person to lay out the full argument.
Speaker 1: But many have illuminated the corruption and greed. E. G Rosenthal,
Speaker 1: Michael Moore, assuming it means Michael Moore there decades ago
Speaker 1: and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue
Speaker 1: of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.
Speaker 4: Evidently I am.
Speaker 1: The first to face it with such brutal honesty.
Speaker 6: You know, the last line is actually kind of I
Speaker 6: think central to the debate over ethics and people's reactions
Speaker 6: here in that. Brent, I'm genuinely surprised there haven't been
Speaker 6: similar acts of like anti health care terrorism, because that's
Speaker 6: how bad the health insurance system is. And I'm not
Speaker 6: saying obviously nobody is saying, well, maybe some people are.
Speaker 6: Obviously nothing is justified as a horrible thing to do.
Speaker 6: But I'm very surprised that we don't see like, actually
Speaker 6: more violent protests of how bad our health insurance system is.
Speaker 1: It is a little surprising in that sense, because being
Speaker 1: on the phone with these insurance companies and the best
Speaker 1: of times is a nightmare situation. Being on the phone
Speaker 1: with him when they are delaying your treatment for trivial
Speaker 1: paperwork reasons that obviously were manufactured for the purpose of
Speaker 1: delaying your treatment in the hopes that you either die
Speaker 1: or don't need the treatment. It moots the treatment at
Speaker 1: some point. Yeah, you would kind of think that somebody
Speaker 1: would have done this earlier. Yeah, I mean, it's kind
Speaker 1: of surprising in that sense. Yeah, So I.
Speaker 6: Was gonna say, we have a video of him being
Speaker 6: he shouted something that people we're trying to put together,
Speaker 6: and I think we have a decent transcript of what
Speaker 6: was said. This is Lui Jiman Mangioni yelling what you're
Speaker 6: what you're probably going to hear here is something to
Speaker 6: the extent of it's an insult to the American people.
Speaker 6: There's some debate about what he's actually saying. Ken says
Speaker 6: that it's him saying this is completely out of touch
Speaker 6: and an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
Speaker 6: So let's go ahead and roll this video experience.
Speaker 1: So his what his lawyer is saying is that they're
Speaker 1: strongly implying that a lot of evidence was planted on him.
Speaker 1: And what I think is going on there and with
Speaker 1: his this thing stinks here is that they want to
Speaker 1: give a jury a reason in the face of overwhelming
Speaker 1: evidence to acquit him. And so what what they're trying
Speaker 1: to do this is just my guess, is give the
Speaker 1: jury an excuse to do jury nullification. And people can
Speaker 1: look look that up. They probably a lot of people
Speaker 1: have looked it up. Really, jury nullifications when you you
Speaker 1: know that somebody did the crime, but you think it
Speaker 1: was either there's something wrong with the law or you
Speaker 1: think the crime was justified in that particular circumstance. And
Speaker 1: so the jury it's kind of I think it's even
Speaker 1: illegal to do jury nullification. But how they're going to
Speaker 1: prove it, And so the jurors will say, you know what,
Speaker 1: we find this guy not guilty. And so by saying
Speaker 1: that all this stuff is planted in this it would
Speaker 1: it would then give a juror who wanted to do
Speaker 1: that some read to hang on to. That's my that's
Speaker 1: my guess, because you know they're saying, he's caught with
Speaker 1: everything manifesto.
Speaker 4: We just read his alleged manifesto.
Speaker 6: He's on tape, allegedly on tape, you can't really see
Speaker 6: his face in the fuzzy CCTV.
Speaker 1: Video, but found him with a gun that like, you know,
Speaker 1: the right, you know, So if you believe that all
Speaker 1: of that evidence is is real and it's actually his
Speaker 1: like he's one hundred percent guilty. If you believe that
Speaker 1: and you don't want to find him guilty, then you say, well,
Speaker 1: maybe they planted it on him. That It's very similar
Speaker 1: to the kind of OJ defense that they did that
Speaker 1: they that they said, look.
Speaker 4: Maybe maybe they planted this glove, like these are.
Speaker 1: These these cops are racist, Like here they are saying
Speaker 1: the N word. And so for jurors who were like,
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of want to find him guilty,
Speaker 1: there was enough of they were able to say, look,
Speaker 1: maybe maybe this was planted. Because they because there was
Speaker 1: so much evidence, they couldn't say that the evidence.
Speaker 4: Wasn't beyond a reasonable that they had.
Speaker 1: They had to say, the evidence is itself fake.
Speaker 6: So his attorney, to Ryan's point, said you can't rush
Speaker 6: to judgment in this case or any case yesterday, and
Speaker 6: we can put the next element up on the screen.
Speaker 6: He is he was fighting his extradition to New York City,
Speaker 6: where actually Alvin Bragg will quote seek the Governor's weren't
Speaker 6: to secure his transfer. I'm quote coordinating with the DA's
Speaker 6: office and the assign a request for governors weren't to
Speaker 6: ensure this individual has tried and how the accountable.
Speaker 5: Public safety is my.
Speaker 6: Top priority, and I'll do everything in my power to
Speaker 6: keep the streets of New York safe, said Kathy Huckle,
Speaker 6: new York governor, in a statement. So that's he Menjioni
Speaker 6: is fighting this. He's not sort of just like give it,
Speaker 6: putting his hands up and being like yep, I wrote
Speaker 6: it all in the manifesto. I'm sorry if this causes
Speaker 6: any trauma, which, by the way, is a line from
Speaker 6: the manifesto. So it's kind of an interesting disconnect between
Speaker 6: what the manifesto says and.
Speaker 5: His approach to the case so far.
Speaker 6: Right, Yeah, the manifesto is literally I did this and
Speaker 6: I'm really sorry it had to be done.
Speaker 4: Gonna have some problems.
Speaker 6: That's a pretty significant disconnect between what he's saying, which
Speaker 6: is as an insult to intelligence American people. We don't
Speaker 6: quite know what that's referring to, but it sounded like
Speaker 6: he was, and we know from his attorney that he's
Speaker 6: fighting the charges. So anyway, all that is to say,
Speaker 6: that's a pretty significant disconnect.
Speaker 5: Obviously.
Speaker 6: Now this is a quote from an enepy see articles
Speaker 6: is B three.
Speaker 5: We can put this up on the screen.
Speaker 6: They're digging into his video game use so in the
Speaker 6: game call, well, I'll just read from this first graft
Speaker 6: Luigi and Manngioni once belonged to a group of IVY
Speaker 6: League gamers who played Assassins, a member of the group
Speaker 6: told NBC News. In the game called among Us, some
Speaker 6: players are secretly assigned to be killers in space who
Speaker 6: perform other tasks while attempting to avoid suspicion from other players.
Speaker 5: Ryan.
Speaker 6: On a scale of zero to ten, how newsworthy is this.
Speaker 1: It's not even on the scale. It's just funny. It's
Speaker 1: just hilarious. Like you've probably people watching this have probably
Speaker 1: played among Us. I've played it actually with my kids.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a little kids game, and it's just
Speaker 1: it's a silly game that you know, college kids play
Speaker 1: to you can play it as a grown up.
Speaker 4: Whatever.
Speaker 1: That's hilarious. That's utterly hilarious.
Speaker 5: Someone said to NBC News.
Speaker 6: I just found it extremely ironic that you know, we
Speaker 6: were in this game and there could actually be a
Speaker 6: killer among us.
Speaker 4: Okay, funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean if you're if you actually played among
Speaker 1: Us with the assassin, that is a fun story to
Speaker 1: tell your friends.
Speaker 6: I'll give them that is it aunt tell NBC News, yes,
Speaker 6: because they will.
Speaker 1: And then if your NBC News, it's fun to put
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the story. Yeah, it's I hope
Speaker 1: that they understood how ridiculous. They were sounding.
Speaker 6: Among us as a child friendly who'd done it? Game
Speaker 6: in which a group of friends run around several space
Speaker 6: light space station like maps. The crewmates, who are simply
Speaker 6: drawn cartoonish looking astronauts, run around the ship and complete tasks.
Speaker 6: The intent of the game question mark. One member is
Speaker 6: a killer and attempts to off the other crewmates.
Speaker 1: Actually, if you remember, Hassan Piker, AOC and ilan Omar
Speaker 1: played it on a stream together.
Speaker 4: Oh really back during the pandemic.
Speaker 5: Got to watch out for AOC?
Speaker 4: Interesting?
Speaker 6: Yeah, another New Yorker who's mad about the healthcare system.
Speaker 1: Just facts, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 6: Just just spit in facts now before. There's also some
Speaker 6: obviously probing of Fluiji Mangoni's Reddit history, so Forbes reports,
Speaker 6: UHG shooter Luigi Mangoni appears to have been a redditor
Speaker 6: and he researched back pain and backpacks.
Speaker 5: This is really sad, Brian.
Speaker 6: The more that we're learning about Mangioni's experiences with his
Speaker 6: own long term it looks like he had a chronic
Speaker 6: back problem. Again, this is all being pieced together from
Speaker 6: the trails, like the breadcrumbs that he left on the internet,
Speaker 6: But it's turning out to be an extremely sad story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, back pain, which thankfully I have not really had
Speaker 1: to suffer with in my life, but from people who
Speaker 1: talk about it is utterly debilitating.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it is.
Speaker 1: When it's not with you, you're thinking about it, thinking
Speaker 1: about the possibility one little tweak and it's going to
Speaker 1: be back. When it's with you, it is just absolutely
Speaker 1: all consuming. And the medical profession when it comes to
Speaker 1: treating back pain is.
Speaker 4: Just no better than random quackery, it seems like.
Speaker 1: And so he wound up getting these some screws put
Speaker 1: into his back that his family and friends say like
Speaker 1: ended up making them crazy.
Speaker 4: That's it.
Speaker 1: That's not an uncommon response from people who've gone through this,
Speaker 1: because it's just the grieving from the life that you
Speaker 1: had to the life that you now have, I think
Speaker 1: can send people around the bend.
Speaker 6: It's frustrating when you're trying to solve a problem and
Speaker 6: you're paying into a system and then the system is
Speaker 6: blocking you.
Speaker 5: And that brings us again to.
Speaker 6: Like, as awful as Maggioni's alleged decision seems to have been,
Speaker 6: it is surprising to me that we don't get more
Speaker 6: like domestic unrest from how bout our healthcare system is.
Speaker 5: Because it will drive people crazy, and I want to
Speaker 5: drive people crazy.
Speaker 1: And I wonder if psychologically it was a little bit
Speaker 1: harder for him because he grew up a rich prep
Speaker 1: school kid who is not used to being told no.
Speaker 6: Well, apparently his family owns a nursing home that is
Speaker 6: riddled with problems.
Speaker 1: Complaints, also called a nursing home.
Speaker 6: Right, yes, absolutely, yes, yes, but actually this one appears
Speaker 6: to be exceptional in rankings like national rankings.
Speaker 5: I can find out what we're talking, but yes, exceptionally.
Speaker 4: He went to this rich prep school called Gilman in Maryland.
Speaker 1: If you're from Maryland and you saw this, you're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: this tracks yeah Gilman kid, Yeah, Gilman Kid.
Speaker 4: Could Papa do this?
Speaker 7: Well?
Speaker 6: That's I just think it's an insane statement on not insane,
Speaker 6: it's like the least surprising statement actually, but it's a
Speaker 6: very powerful one on how horrible the healthcare system is. Is
Speaker 6: that you can come from a background of privilege, and
Speaker 6: unless you're like tippy tippy top of the one percent,
Speaker 6: you can have the same terrible experience with the healthcare system.
Speaker 6: It's like a shared socioeconomic experience. Now it's obviously much
Speaker 6: worse for people who can't afford health insurance and or
Speaker 6: struggle to pay their bills and have kids and are
Speaker 6: doing two jobs to have their health insurance.
Speaker 5: It's insane.
Speaker 6: But you can actually still be wealthy in this country
Speaker 6: and our health insurance system can utterly fail you in
Speaker 6: the most frustrating ways. And that actually goes to your
Speaker 6: point about how frustrating it must be if you are
Speaker 6: privileged and you're used to having everything be at your fingertips,
Speaker 6: you can see psychologically how that could drive you even crazier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And also, and not to undermine our man's fundamental
Speaker 1: point here, but the healthcare system is also not magic.
Speaker 1: Like there are there are some things that even the best,
Speaker 1: the best providers, the best physicians, with all of the
Speaker 1: money in the world can't fix. Like that's that's just
Speaker 1: a fundamental part of the human condition and it always
Speaker 1: will be right no matter what Peter Tiel tries to
Speaker 1: do with young people's blood or whatever.
Speaker 4: Just now we are we are we are so some level.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so his family, including his father there apparently this
Speaker 6: is just they own lore in health systems. It's a
Speaker 6: for profit nursing home they've been fine for health inspection
Speaker 6: violations according to records that have been posted as all
Speaker 6: of this has come out, and it's got like a
Speaker 6: two out of five Medicare rating Quality Measures rating of
Speaker 6: two out of five, so it appears to be you
Speaker 6: know not. Someone was posting about it saying that it
Speaker 6: was a measure of hypocrisy, and it's like, well, if
Speaker 6: Maggioni is guilty in this case, it may not be hypocrisy.
Speaker 6: It may be his partially psychologically and we're trying to
Speaker 6: do like armchair psychiatry here, but it might have been
Speaker 6: what drove him insane is that his own family and
Speaker 6: his own privilege was built on a system that was
Speaker 6: hurting him too.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's something that I can volunteered at.
Speaker 1: That he volunteered at that nursing home. Of course reports
Speaker 1: when he.
Speaker 5: Was in high school, right, so he may have seen
Speaker 5: it all up close.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, Bill Burr on his Monday Morning podcast went on
Speaker 6: a similar rant to the one that he went on
Speaker 6: over the weekend. To that Crystal and Sager covered Let's
Speaker 6: roll this clip of Bill Burr weighing in on the
Speaker 6: media coverage this time of what media coverage and just
Speaker 6: general people's general reactions to what's happened with MANGIONI.
Speaker 8: You know what's annoying me about this, this kid who
Speaker 8: killed this ceo is none of these news programs are
Speaker 8: talking about the incredible lack of empathy from the general
Speaker 8: public about this because of how these insurance companies treat
Speaker 8: people when they are at their most vulnerable. After we've
Speaker 8: all given them our money every fucking month and now
Speaker 8: we finally need you, and all you do is deny us,
Speaker 8: And then these pussies and all of these things are
Speaker 8: taking the pictures of their CEOs off their websites. You know,
Speaker 8: I gotta be honest with you, Okay, I love that
Speaker 8: the fucking CEOs are fucking afraid right now. You should be,
Speaker 8: by and large, you're all a bunch of selfish, greedy,
Speaker 8: fucking pieces of shit, and a lot of you are
Speaker 8: mass murderers. You just don't pull the trigger. That's why
Speaker 8: it looks clean. That's why these people look, oh my god,
Speaker 8: oh he was just you know, walking into a hotel.
Speaker 8: It's like, okay, but what was his job, what did
Speaker 8: he do?
Speaker 1: What was the results of it?
Speaker 6: The every man truly, and if you're not if you
Speaker 6: are horrified by that argument from Bill Burr and you're
Speaker 6: like a beltwey journalist or pundit, then you should go
Speaker 6: sit down at a bar in normal America and talk
Speaker 6: to people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a lot and a lot of the people
Speaker 1: who are saying, look, we have lower costs and these
Speaker 1: people with some of these some of these outcomes are better.
Speaker 1: And also the insurance companies are not. You know, the
Speaker 1: real problem the problems for providers. A United Health is
Speaker 1: a provider too, they own they're like massively involved in
Speaker 1: the provider side as well.
Speaker 4: But the CEO was making ten million dollars a year.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say, this is a really difficult
Speaker 1: problem to solve, and we're all trying.
Speaker 4: We're all working together to try.
Speaker 1: To make sure that we can give the best care
Speaker 1: to the people who need it. When you walk when
Speaker 1: you say that and then you walk out of the
Speaker 1: room with a bag filled with ten million dollars, people
Speaker 1: are going to give a little bit less credibility, yes
Speaker 1: to how concerned you are.
Speaker 4: And when that ten million.
Speaker 1: Dollars is just a little kickback for the billions that
Speaker 1: you're sending to shareholders who are also walking away with
Speaker 1: that money, you lose even more credibility around how serious
Speaker 1: you are about taking care of patients.
Speaker 6: I had Ken on actually Undercurrents to talk about Ken.
Speaker 6: I kind of disagreed with the way that you reacted immediately,
Speaker 6: but I also think it's really precious to see Chris
Speaker 6: Cuomo just retired to his fainting couch and clutch his
Speaker 6: pearls over the reaction of people like you and Taylor
Speaker 6: Lorenz because about just tone policing about the United Healthcare CEO,
Speaker 6: Like he doesn't have a leg to stand on unless
Speaker 6: he's using all of his journalistic resources to probe the
Speaker 6: corruption in the health insurance system regularly, which.
Speaker 5: He's not doing. He only cared when Ken was mean.
Speaker 6: To the dead CEO who was appears to be unjustly murdered,
Speaker 6: And so that's like, it doesn't make the murder right,
Speaker 6: but it also doesn't give you any more credibility when
Speaker 6: you're weighing in to tone police people who are upset
Speaker 6: about the healthcare system and you're not regularly concerned yourself
Speaker 6: about the healthcare system.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and Don Junior showed unusually poor instincts out of
Speaker 1: the gately on this. He did the whole put the
Speaker 1: image of the guy up and said, you know, Internet,
Speaker 1: do your thing, and his all of his replies are
Speaker 1: just like, I don't see anything done.
Speaker 5: He put an image of Mangionia, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, saying like the Internet do your thing, like go
Speaker 1: find this killer.
Speaker 4: Oh, and all of his followers were like, I don't
Speaker 4: see nothing. So that was it was.
Speaker 1: It was like, oh, I forgot, I forgot. Don Junior
Speaker 1: is a prep school kid, but not the kind that
Speaker 1: Luigi became, because he's really done a good job of
Speaker 1: of donning the garb of the populist and he missed.
Speaker 4: He missed. His dad would not have made that mistake.
Speaker 6: It would be interesting to see, I mean, because at
Speaker 6: first it started, nobody really knew what to make of it,
Speaker 6: and it started as an example of like disorder and
Speaker 6: chaos on the streets of New York City, right. It
Speaker 6: starts as a narrative like that, which, by the way,
Speaker 6: this as it unfolds, this is Gotham City, Like this
Speaker 6: is straight out of freaking Batman. Like that's how sad,
Speaker 6: and like Bruce Wayne this, yeah, it's insane.
Speaker 4: Bruce Wayne was the victim, not the killer.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but Bruce Wayne the richest man in
Speaker 1: the world, and all he wants to do is go,
Speaker 1: like round up a few muggers. How about you build
Speaker 1: a hospital, Bruce Wayne.
Speaker 6: Actually think i'd actually watched the Ryan Grim written Batman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Taxtatman. It's ridiculous, but.
Speaker 5: That is exactly what you're like. It is like ripped
Speaker 5: out of a Batman plot.
Speaker 6: But I mean it's just like if your energy, if
Speaker 6: your moral energy, is going to it is like more
Speaker 6: directed to being outraged at Edgelord's like Ken for like
Speaker 6: maybe being callous. You don't have to agree with the
Speaker 6: way Ken and Taylor Lorenz and others approached the initial
Speaker 6: reports to be like, hey, maybe the main story here,
Speaker 6: you know, it's like, don't don't kill people in the
Speaker 6: streets of Manhattan and cold Blood and uh, don't run
Speaker 6: a system and benefit from a system that is like
Speaker 6: sucking the life out of people. Seems like a fair
Speaker 6: two things can be true assessment here.
Speaker 4: Maybe Oh yeah, okay, I don't like killing. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 4: uncomfortable about killing.
Speaker 6: Okay, Well, we've established that everyone should see Ryan's belt today.
Speaker 6: By the way, it's very whimsical. It's not the belt
Speaker 6: of an edge lord in news out of Syria. We
Speaker 6: can put this first element up on the screen top.
Speaker 6: US Military Commander in the Middle East, General Michael Carilla,
Speaker 6: visited US commanders and troops as well as members of
Speaker 6: the SDF at several bases in Syria yesterday. That is
Speaker 6: cursy of reporter Jared Sezba and Ryan Also The New
Speaker 6: York Times was just like tallying up all the countries
Speaker 6: that are currently bombing in Syria yesterday worth mentioning. It's Russia, Aaron, Israel,
Speaker 6: the United States, and Turkey. So five countries right now
Speaker 6: actively bombing Syria.
Speaker 1: So you can understand everybody gets in Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 5: And C two, we want to put this up on
Speaker 5: the screen as well.
Speaker 6: US troops are staying in Syria, according to the White House.
Speaker 6: And I actually asked Rand Paul yesterday that that'll it
Speaker 6: will air today on undercurrins. I asked him if it's
Speaker 6: possible that we actually might up ending end up sending
Speaker 6: more troops to Syria as a result of this, because
Speaker 6: he's saying, you know, we do have nine hundred troops
Speaker 6: in Syria right now, at least that's the troops that we.
Speaker 5: Know about in Syria.
Speaker 6: Right now, and he was saying that's a target, that's
Speaker 6: not a detern. There's the line that he is totally
Speaker 6: fair assessment. But I asked, you know, some of your
Speaker 6: colleagues going to use the point that you just made
Speaker 6: us and excuse to bring more troops in. And I
Speaker 6: think the Reuter's article by Jeff Mason that we just
Speaker 6: had up on the screen seems like it's potentially going
Speaker 6: in that direction. I don't know, Ryan, do you think
Speaker 6: it's possible that we end up putting more troops actually
Speaker 6: in Syria right now amidst all of the chaos?
Speaker 1: You know, I think that they're much more likely to
Speaker 1: flood you know, weapons to our proxies and mercenaries and
Speaker 1: rather than try to deploy more troops, more US troops
Speaker 1: just before a new president comes in, because I think
Speaker 1: that's true, I think that's tricky politically. I don't know,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's play, let's play your Rampaul Cliffs.
Speaker 4: I think C three B.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: In the scuttle butt on Capitol Hill, of course and
Speaker 6: in beltwayh media is that this is just posing a
Speaker 6: real threat to Taulsi Gabbert getting confirmed as Trump's Director
Speaker 6: of National Intelligence. She's literally meeting with senators like yourself on.
Speaker 5: Capitol Hill this week.
Speaker 6: What do you think that this helps or hurts taulsy
Speaker 6: Gabbert's actual ability to be confirmed in any way, Senator Paul.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily.
Speaker 9: You know, I think that the history of Syria in
Speaker 9: the Middle East is such a complicated one that it
Speaker 9: isn't really clear. You know, Like I say, were there
Speaker 9: positive aspects to uh, the sod regime? You know, very few,
Speaker 9: but one of them was the protection of Christians. You know,
Speaker 9: Is there you know, pluses and minuses to Galani or
Speaker 9: this new offshoot of Alvenusra.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there certainly are.
Speaker 9: One they got rid of the dictator, but two will
Speaker 9: they replace that with a religious intolerance towards others? I
Speaker 9: don't know that it definitely change just her chances. I
Speaker 9: think her twenty year military career, she's a lieutenant colonel.
Speaker 9: The way she's been treated unfairly by the intelligence state,
Speaker 9: putting her on a terror watch list and obstructing her
Speaker 9: ability to travel, I think that she's gaining momentum. There
Speaker 9: was a rally recently with military veterans. There's a lot
Speaker 9: of senators that have come out for so I think
Speaker 9: they're gonna have a tougher time defeating her. They will try,
Speaker 9: and these are the people who are part of what
Speaker 9: they call the bipartisan consensus in Washington foreign policy consensus,
Speaker 9: which is one of, you know, give aid to everyone,
Speaker 9: give arms to everyone, and be involved in everyone's wars.
Speaker 9: It's a policy of you know, eternal intervention. And those
Speaker 9: people are always going to be opposed to anybody questions that.
Speaker 9: But I for want, am enthusiastic about her nomination and
Speaker 9: will do anything I can or everything I can to
Speaker 9: try to help her.
Speaker 1: I really like the music behind the clip that had
Speaker 1: me on the edge of my seat listening to Ram
Speaker 1: Paul like, where's this is really suspenseful.
Speaker 6: He's like, you're watching Jack. Yeah, it was a teaser clip.
Speaker 6: I was like, yeah, you're ready to yeah so. But
Speaker 6: but anyway, I think that gets to the point about
Speaker 6: the future of US involvement in Syria because the scuttle
Speaker 6: buck being that Tulsa Gabbert now she's just tanked. And
Speaker 6: I think, and I say this in an episode which
Speaker 6: is going to air in a bit that it's maybe
Speaker 6: more likely that Tulsa Gabbert gets confirmed as a result
Speaker 6: of this because now you have even people like Lindsay
Speaker 6: Graham talking about the problems with the rebels now that
Speaker 6: they're in power, and so it all becomes so apparent,
Speaker 6: like post Asad, the various factions, and the sort of
Speaker 6: ridiculousness of the United States arming Brandpa mentions.
Speaker 5: At one point in twenty sixteen, Elon.
Speaker 6: Musk tweeted this recently to an LA Times article about
Speaker 6: how the Pentagon and the CIA were funding different warring
Speaker 6: factions in Syria at the same damn time. It is
Speaker 6: so absurd and that will be in full bear now
Speaker 6: that a Sad is gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And the awkward part here is that, right, so
Speaker 1: has always had these these kind of complex politics that
Speaker 1: are not not squarely put into isolationists or anti war
Speaker 1: because she was a strong and relentless supporter of the
Speaker 1: global War on terror against you know what what she
Speaker 1: what whatever she wants to call it, like Islamic terrorism,
Speaker 1: whatever she is, like yes, like she seems like her
Speaker 1: her like hostility to Islamism and sometimes even Islam just
Speaker 1: shines through and like as powerfully as Air Towan and
Speaker 1: the Kurds, like you know, fine, you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's intense, and so now that those factions that she
Speaker 1: has been uh no, fighting against literally and and also
Speaker 1: politically for a decade have actually won, right before potentially
Speaker 1: she gets into the position, uh is she going to
Speaker 1: be trying to arm opposition groups to the new kind
Speaker 1: of dominant groups in Syria because she's so.
Speaker 4: Hostile to them, And it's going to be interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean, the whole thing is like, it's just absurd.
Speaker 1: Like there was a there was a New York Times
Speaker 1: report that said, in Washington, American policy makers are telling
Speaker 1: all of the kind of Jahadis groups or whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call them, that they better not ally with Isis,
Speaker 1: which means the American policy is basically coming down to,
Speaker 1: we draw the line at isis al Qaeda?
Speaker 2: You know what?
Speaker 1: Okay, al Kada offshoot former isis Okay, but isis absolutely not.
Speaker 1: We have we have it's the line in the sand
Speaker 1: is our red line. We're not allying, but yeah, we
Speaker 1: have standards. Meanwhile, literally, the al Qaida guy in Damascus, now, well.
Speaker 6: He has such an interesting story, by the way, and
Speaker 6: I was curious to ask you about this.
Speaker 5: His personal story is.
Speaker 6: In itself a testament to the follies of US interventionism.
Speaker 6: He was at least reportedly radicalized by US policy and
Speaker 6: Israel right.
Speaker 1: Well, Yes, his family was displaced from the Golan Heights
Speaker 1: in what sixty seven when Israel occupied the Golan Heights
Speaker 1: and then yes, and then he was radicalized further in
Speaker 1: two thousand during the Israeli crackdown on the Second Intifada
Speaker 1: and the collapse of the peace process there. And then
Speaker 1: he goes to Iraq to fight along with other insurgents
Speaker 1: against the against the American invasion of Iraq, and he
Speaker 1: talks about that in his CNA interview and elsewhere where.
Speaker 1: He says, basically what the argument that he's making.
Speaker 4: Is like, the US was wrong to invade.
Speaker 1: Everybody believed the US was wrong to invade and occupy Iraq.
Speaker 1: I went there to fight them, that was the right
Speaker 1: thing to do. But the way that many of the
Speaker 1: people who fought them did so deliberately killed civilians. He said,
Speaker 1: I never participated in that. Groups I was involved with
Speaker 1: did I have broken with them? And a lot of
Speaker 1: that is the ideological splits with al Qaeda and ISIS
Speaker 1: are overblown, Like the ideology is still pretty similar. What
Speaker 1: he has recognized is that politically speaking, this idea that
Speaker 1: you're going to create a caliphate in a world that
Speaker 1: is hostile, abjectly hostile to you, and that you're hostile
Speaker 1: to as well, is absurd and will never work, that
Speaker 1: the world will unite against you and destroy you. And
Speaker 1: so it is a pragmatic pivot to say, look, we
Speaker 1: just you can't do that. We don't have the assets
Speaker 1: to accomplish this goal. Therefore it's a complete suicide mission.
Speaker 4: And he was not interested in a suicide mission.
Speaker 1: So he understood good that he had to talk about
Speaker 1: recognizing all the different sects and ethnicities and religions in Syria.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, if he's going to get off
Speaker 1: the US terrorist and he had to pick the right enemies.
Speaker 1: What he did is he very strategically.
Speaker 4: Targeted.
Speaker 1: You know when after violently went to war with al
Speaker 1: Qaeda in ISIS in Syria and then and then kept
Speaker 1: coming back. This is what you were hearing from American sources,
Speaker 1: kept coming back to the US, Look, we're fighting your
Speaker 1: enemies here, aren't.
Speaker 4: We your friend? And they'd like yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't as if the US started arming necessarily
Speaker 1: this force, but they stopped trying to kill him and
Speaker 1: otherwise made it possible for him to have room to maneuver.
Speaker 6: Interesting other anecdote from his life or point for its
Speaker 6: it's probably more powerful than an anecdote, is that he
Speaker 6: was actually detained in Abu Grabe by when he went
Speaker 6: to Iraq, he ended up detained in Abu Grab by
Speaker 6: US forces. So he has his own history with American interventionism,
Speaker 6: and I think that's why it's sort of naive and
Speaker 6: probably why even the Lindsay Grahams of the world are
Speaker 6: now expressing sort of skepticism about how Golani governs as
Speaker 6: they're cobbling together a new government in Syria right now.
Speaker 6: So the pessimism is probably more warranted than any optimism
Speaker 6: we're hearing from people referring to the freedom fighters in
Speaker 6: Syria right now.
Speaker 1: And also we can get to some of that pessimism
Speaker 1: in this next point, which is that the two main
Speaker 1: invasions and incursions going on in Turkey now, I mean
Speaker 1: in Syria are being led by Turkey and by Israel.
Speaker 1: On the Turkish side, they've been relentlessly attacking Kobani, which
Speaker 1: was a symbol of Kurdish resistance to ISIS back in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen fifteen, and when the US got involved in
Speaker 1: that fight, bombing kind of isis positions as the Kurds
Speaker 1: held out in Coobani, that that ended up turning the
Speaker 1: tide and creating this and really cementing this alliance between
Speaker 1: the Kurds and the and the US in north in
Speaker 1: northern Syria. For our Friday show, we're going to interview
Speaker 1: an American who fought with the Kurds and was up
Speaker 1: was there even even fairly recently. So stick around for
Speaker 1: that for that Friday show to learn more about that conflict. Now,
Speaker 1: the American alliance with the Kurds appears to have led
Speaker 1: to and this is all developing now something of a
Speaker 1: ceasefire around Cobani in exchange for the Kurds withdrawing from
Speaker 1: mon Beach, which was another huge battle back back in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, which our guests actually participated in.
Speaker 4: So he can he can talk about that that the
Speaker 4: liberation of mon Beach by.
Speaker 1: The Kurds was was a pivotal victory. They are with
Speaker 1: this is this is what the news reporting is that
Speaker 1: the Kurds are going agreeing to kind of withdraw from
Speaker 1: Eastern Aleppo Province and from mon Beach in exchange for
Speaker 1: Airdwan calling off the massive murderous assault on on the Kurds. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll see how long that lasts. The Kurds nobody has
Speaker 1: been betrayed I think, in the region more times and
Speaker 1: by more people than the Kurds, who were absolutely screwed
Speaker 1: in Syke's Pico by the Kurdish. The Kurdish region UH
Speaker 1: covers deliberately Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. So if you
Speaker 1: if you if you look the map where those four
Speaker 1: where those four countries intersect, that's that's all a Kurdish region.
Speaker 4: They basically just drew a circle.
Speaker 1: Around it and divided them among those four different countries.
Speaker 4: The thinking being.
Speaker 1: Making these countries more ethnically diverse would make it easier
Speaker 1: for colonial domination of them UH, and then dividing the
Speaker 1: Kurds would make it harder for them to attain any
Speaker 1: any semblance of self determination or any nationality. And in fact,
Speaker 1: you know it has there are there is obviously a
Speaker 1: Kurdish you know, ethnic solidarity, but all of the different
Speaker 1: Kurdish groups of Iranian Kurds are racking Kurds, Syrians, Turks
Speaker 1: like they have their beefs inside a rack. You've got
Speaker 1: two Kurdish factions that are constantly you went to war
Speaker 1: with each other in the nineties, and it's and you know,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of kind of hostility among them, and
Speaker 1: you divide and rule, you know, classic British policy, updated
Speaker 1: updated for today. And so if if you want to
Speaker 1: bet on anything, you can bet on the Kurds being betrayed.
Speaker 1: The the more, the the the even more threatening assault
Speaker 1: on Syria has been coming from Israel, which and we
Speaker 1: can put this up on this screw means from drop
Speaker 1: site News, which is they have been just absolutely annihilating
Speaker 1: any semblance of Syrian self defense or sovereignty. They started
Speaker 1: by going after what they said was a chemical weapons depot,
Speaker 1: Like what, what do you want chemical weapons to wind
Speaker 1: up in the hands of ISIS or al Qaeda. I
Speaker 1: was like, okay, well, you've launched more than three hundred
Speaker 1: air strikes at this point according to the Syrian Observatory
Speaker 1: there and only a couple of those are at the
Speaker 1: alleged chemical weapons place. Otherwise you're going after radar, you're
Speaker 1: going after defensive weapons, You're going after helicopters, airplanes, airports
Speaker 1: like they're rapidly and systematically destroying the entire kind of
Speaker 1: infrastructure of this of the Syrian state while creeping further
Speaker 1: and further into Syrian territory around and beyond the.
Speaker 4: Goal on Heights.
Speaker 1: There was an opportunit unity to reach out. And even
Speaker 1: if you want to stick with the chemical weapons, the
Speaker 1: OPCW is there to deal with chemical weapons. This is
Speaker 1: the United Nations institution that has set up for this.
Speaker 1: Jolanni has made it very clear that he wants his
Speaker 1: group delisted from the terrorist that he wants to be
Speaker 1: part of the world of Nations. If the requirement is
Speaker 1: that you send in inspectors and you put the chemical
Speaker 1: weapons and trucks and you take them out, obviously he's
Speaker 1: going to agree to that.
Speaker 4: Instead.
Speaker 1: And so Israel had an opportunity, and Jolanni and the
Speaker 1: rest of this faction that took over Syria has been
Speaker 1: very clear that they don't actually have a beef with Israel,
Speaker 1: to the chagrin of the Access of Resistance, and so
Speaker 1: Israel had an opportunity to say, good welcome, give up
Speaker 1: those chemical weapons, sign a peece steel, and let's let's
Speaker 1: coexist here peacefully. Instead, immediately they send in the tanks
Speaker 1: and are just leading this kind of rampage across Syria.
Speaker 6: The infighting over chemical weapons is just such a disaster.
Speaker 5: Different factions they.
Speaker 1: Could easily just get the OPCW to come in and
Speaker 1: grab them.
Speaker 6: And different groups are getting bombed by other groups for
Speaker 6: taking the Asade what is said to be the Asade stash,
Speaker 6: and it's just a complete.
Speaker 5: Disaster, which is obviously what was always going to happen
Speaker 5: if ended up being toppled.
Speaker 1: But right, and remember in two thousand and three when
Speaker 1: the US invaded Iraq, the thing that we did was
Speaker 1: called deepathification, which meant we wiped out the entire Iraqi
Speaker 1: bureaucracy and military. Anybody who had anything to do with
Speaker 1: the military of the bureaucracy was fired. Done, you're out.
Speaker 1: And what did that do. It took tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of men, many of them young men, who were just
Speaker 1: punching cards, who were willing to work for whatever government
Speaker 1: came next, and it made them completely untouchable, and so
Speaker 1: they funded an insurgent, They joined an insurgency the state.
Speaker 1: If you collapse the state, some power is going to
Speaker 1: come in. So Israel by deliberately destroying the state capacity
Speaker 1: right at the outset is going to create a failed
Speaker 1: state and a civil war, and not a clean civil war,
Speaker 1: but just faction against faction. And clearly strategically they believe
Speaker 1: that a massively weakened and constantly fighting Syria is somehow
Speaker 1: geostrategically beneficial to them right across the border, rather than
Speaker 1: having an actual functioning state. But that misunderstands what has
Speaker 1: always come out of those types of situations. When you
Speaker 1: get your failed state in Afghanistan, you know, Alkaiti gets
Speaker 1: refuge there failed state in Iraq and Syria over the
Speaker 1: last ten fire, and then Isis blows up out of it.
Speaker 1: You don't know what you're going to get, so I
Speaker 1: guess good luck with all that. Like, but it seems
Speaker 1: like the only strategy they have is throwing more American
Speaker 1: bombs at wherever they feel like.
Speaker 6: Well, let's watch Matthew Miller, a State Department spokesman, respond
Speaker 6: to some questions along these lines. This was from yesterday.
Speaker 1: Ran.
Speaker 10: Yeah, a lot of sentiments have been expressed, such as
Speaker 10: Syrian lead, smooth transition, unified Syria, although we are seeing
Speaker 10: it being dismembered before our eyes, and so on. But
Speaker 10: nobody speaks of these Radi attacks three hundred, that they
Speaker 10: struck three hundred military sites. So why are you not
Speaker 10: talking about what Israel is doing to Syria? What it
Speaker 10: has done to Syria in the last twenty four hours,
Speaker 10: So destroyed the navy, destroyed all the air force and
Speaker 10: did all that is the purpose, and that is the
Speaker 10: purpose to have a the medathriized Syria.
Speaker 11: So I will let Israel speak to its own operations
Speaker 11: and what it is they are trying to accomplish. I
Speaker 11: will say that on behalf of the United States, We're
Speaker 11: going to discuss them, uh, these matters with them privately
Speaker 11: before I appine on them publicly. I would say that
Speaker 11: broadly speaking, we of course don't want to see any
Speaker 11: action that makes a Syrian lead process more difficult, and
Speaker 11: we ultimately want to see a peaceful process for not
Speaker 11: an escalation of the conflict.
Speaker 10: So you think what you're saying is that what Israel
Speaker 10: is doing, whether it's conquering the rest of the Gulan
Speaker 10: and so on, the attack that it's conducting it is
Speaker 10: like thirty five kilometers from Damascus and so on, that
Speaker 10: is a private matter. So is that a private is that?
Speaker 10: So is that decision no siety.
Speaker 11: First of all, let me just point out with respect
Speaker 11: to the location of Israeli forces, and I'm not attesting
Speaker 11: one way or the other. I know they are conflicting
Speaker 11: claims about where they are, and they have strenuously denied
Speaker 11: that they are close to Damascus. They have said that
Speaker 11: they are in the in their forces on the ground
Speaker 11: are in the buffer zone. And I spoke to this
Speaker 11: at length yesterday. But no, but when it comes to
Speaker 11: their operations, I think it's appropriate for us to speak
Speaker 11: to them privately first ascertain what it is they're doing
Speaker 11: before we you pine on that publicly. They are close
Speaker 11: ally of bars, and that's what we're.
Speaker 4: Going to do.
Speaker 1: This administration cannot leave stood enough. Well what have you
Speaker 1: been here for?
Speaker 5: They'll leave, and I don't think you'll like who replaces them.
Speaker 4: Ryan, No, I don't think so either. No, We'll be
Speaker 4: here to complain then too.
Speaker 6: Pete Haig Seth, obviously Donald Trump's nomination for Defense secretary,
Speaker 6: went on Hannity this week, and while the Trump campaign
Speaker 6: and Trump himself has been backing Pete Haig Seth pretty enthusiastically,
Speaker 6: along with basically the entire conservative movement in the MAGA movement.
Speaker 6: At this point, Hegseth went on Fox. Obviously his mom
Speaker 6: went on Fox last week as well, but he went
Speaker 6: on Hannity to offer obviously vigorous defense of himself. So
Speaker 6: let's go ahead and roll this clip of Pete Hegseeth
Speaker 6: on Sean Hannity's show.
Speaker 9: You had a consensual relationship, it was investigated, you were
Speaker 9: fully exonerated, and correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker 5: Here, wasn't there videotape evidence.
Speaker 2: That was largely responsible for exonerating you.
Speaker 12: I mean, in addition to personal personal witnesses and all
Speaker 12: of that. It was fully investigated at the time, years ago,
Speaker 12: and I was completely cleared. And that's why, Sean, you know.
Speaker 5: What I look forward to. I looked forward to the
Speaker 5: FBI background check. I look forward to the actual under.
Speaker 12: Oath conversations with senators as we go through the process.
Speaker 5: Because again, this is what the Left.
Speaker 7: Does, Sean.
Speaker 12: It's the anatomy of a smear. They take something and
Speaker 12: then they add anonymous sources and contortions and flat out lies,
Speaker 12: and then they try to try you in the media
Speaker 12: before you can even get into the doors with senators.
Speaker 6: So that's Pete Hegsath commenting on these rape allegations or
Speaker 6: this rape allegation from twenty seventeen, and now that his confirmation.
Speaker 6: Having met with Joni Ernst, jani ern saying she's had
Speaker 6: very good conversations with Pete Heggseth, herself a survivor of
Speaker 6: sexual assault.
Speaker 5: She says that she is now feeling good about the nomination.
Speaker 5: They're having good conversations.
Speaker 6: It looks like Hegseth is on a path to being confirmed,
Speaker 6: whereas a week ago people were more skeptical about whether
Speaker 6: that happened. I think it has always been likely that
Speaker 6: he was going to get confirmed, even if there were
Speaker 6: going to be troubles along the way.
Speaker 5: But Ryan, you.
Speaker 6: Thought it would be good now that it looks like
Speaker 6: Heigseth actually is going to be confirmed, and there's doubling
Speaker 6: and tripling down on the nomination to actually go through
Speaker 6: the police report from twenty seventeen, and you've pulled the
Speaker 6: relevant excerpts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in the spirit of treating our audience like adults,
Speaker 1: wanted to go through and and put forward the different
Speaker 1: pieces of the police report that would enable you know,
Speaker 1: Hannity and and Hagseth to make those claims and to
Speaker 1: be clear, none of what we're saying here is that
Speaker 1: this is a good guy. This is a good dude,
Speaker 1: this is a moral guy. He's not nominated for being
Speaker 1: a moral guy. He's nominated to run the Secretary of Defense,
Speaker 1: which is reminiscent of Arlo Guthrie's line in Alice's Restaurant,
Speaker 1: where you know he can't he gets a deferment to
Speaker 1: get drafted to go over to Vietnam, and he's like,
Speaker 1: you're telling me that I'm not moral enough to go
Speaker 1: burn babies, women and children over in Vietnam because I'm
Speaker 1: a litterbug. So that's that's a scale that we're talking
Speaker 1: about here. But the question is is he guilty of
Speaker 1: sexual assault and why we're charges not pressed? And I
Speaker 1: think if you go through the police report you can
Speaker 1: you can decide for yourself whether or not he should
Speaker 1: have been And I think, but I think you'll understand
Speaker 1: a lot more about it then then we get in
Speaker 1: the press was just kind of vague allusions to it.
Speaker 1: But the police report is out there. It's twenty two pages.
Speaker 1: It's not that long. You can read it. You could
Speaker 1: put up D two here, which is the beginning of
Speaker 1: this police report. Jane Doe in twenty seventeen goes to
Speaker 1: a hospital where she is from says that she was
Speaker 1: the victim of sexual assault about roughly a week earlier
Speaker 1: at a conference in Monterey. The nurse reports it to
Speaker 1: the police and put up D three here. Essentially, her
Speaker 1: version that she tells the police is that she's at
Speaker 1: this conference. She goes to a bar. She's hanging out
Speaker 1: with Pete Hegseth and another woman.
Speaker 5: Hexith is a speaker at the content at the conference.
Speaker 5: She's his handler.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and she winds up blackout, drunk, either drugged, some
Speaker 1: other situations. She has barely but any memory of it.
Speaker 1: The memories come back to her over the next several days,
Speaker 1: and then she goes to the hospital and reports this crime.
Speaker 1: So that's essentially her version of it. So to counter
Speaker 1: that version of it, Hegseeth or as defenders would basically
Speaker 1: have to show that she was not significantly intoxicated. And
Speaker 1: so the rest of the police report kind of invest
Speaker 1: basically investigates that question. And so we can put up
Speaker 1: the next element on the screen here.
Speaker 6: This is her saying she was in contact by text
Speaker 6: messages between Jane Doe and.
Speaker 4: They got at them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he was.
Speaker 6: Giving off quote creeper vibe, a creeper vibe. So to
Speaker 6: the point you were making Ryan, this is information about
Speaker 6: Pete Heiss like sort of being very flirtatious. He's a
Speaker 6: new baby at the bar with all of these women
Speaker 6: who are not his wife, and he is just giving
Speaker 6: off a vibe.
Speaker 5: He's trying to get people up to his room.
Speaker 6: Is what the kind of that's the gist of those memories.
Speaker 1: From the night, So you can put up the next
Speaker 1: element here. These are text messages that she exchanged with
Speaker 1: her husband, and you can you can read them for yourself.
Speaker 4: You can find them in there.
Speaker 1: And he's like whoa, He's saying, her world, it's like
Speaker 1: two am.
Speaker 4: You're usually not out at two am.
Speaker 1: She doesn't respond to him anymore after about two are
Speaker 1: you okay?
Speaker 4: Where are you? What's going on? And you can see that.
Speaker 6: He was at the conference. Her husband's also at the conference.
Speaker 1: Right, you can go to D six here. This is
Speaker 1: another person that was with them.
Speaker 6: She was aware of the situation. That's why that's her
Speaker 6: sort of use to the police report here. She told
Speaker 6: this person or the Jane Doe told the person that
Speaker 6: she must have fallen asleep.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 6: And this person said that the Jane Doe did not
Speaker 6: have a hard time walking and was slurring her words,
Speaker 6: which is.
Speaker 5: From HEGs Us.
Speaker 6: You can read that in different ways depending on how
Speaker 6: you're seeing the situation. You can say that means she
Speaker 6: knew exactly what she was doing, or you can say
Speaker 6: that means she must have been later drugged if she
Speaker 6: had no memory of the situation. But I think probably
Speaker 6: Hegsas sees that as sort notch in his corner.
Speaker 1: And so D six is the key spot here. That
Speaker 1: is kind of what Hannity and Hegsath they're referring to. There,
Speaker 1: they found a bunch of surveillance video from the hotel.
Speaker 1: So they're walking together kind of arm in arm neither
Speaker 1: you know, the morning. She doesn't appear to be intoxicated,
Speaker 1: because her assertion was that.
Speaker 4: She was blackout drunk.
Speaker 1: Video of her kind of arm in arm walking normally
Speaker 1: in the morning undercuts that. Basically, here they talk, they
Speaker 1: get surveillance video of them by the pool, and also
Speaker 1: looks like talk to a security guard who kind of
Speaker 1: went to break up kind of an argument that they
Speaker 1: were having by the pool. The security guard says that
Speaker 1: Hegxath actually seemed kind of drunk. He yells at the
Speaker 1: cop at one point, I have freedom of speech. It's
Speaker 1: two am and he's being told to quiet down at
Speaker 1: a conference.
Speaker 4: He's drunk, and he's like yelling at the.
Speaker 1: At a I've got free speech, but yelling at a
Speaker 1: mall cop that he has free speech. And this is
Speaker 1: going to be our secretary of defense. But what oh,
Speaker 1: none of this is funny except that part. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's pretty funny. The security guard says that Jane Doe
Speaker 1: was there and did not seem inebriate at all. So again,
Speaker 1: think about if you're a prosecutor, you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: bring all of these you're gonna have to bring this
Speaker 1: surveillance camera, you're gonna have to bring this security guard
Speaker 1: who was gonna say okay, she says she was blackout drunk.
Speaker 4: She did not look that drunk to me.
Speaker 6: And that excerpt also showed the police officer saying I
Speaker 6: found additional security footage of them walking arm and arms, smiling,
Speaker 6: and neither appeared to have an unsteady gait.
Speaker 5: That's the quote from the report.
Speaker 1: So was that so we could put up the next
Speaker 1: one here.
Speaker 5: This is at the bar.
Speaker 1: So basically what's going on here hexeth is Hexath is
Speaker 1: at the bar.
Speaker 4: And he's hitting on a woman.
Speaker 1: The woman wants absolutely nothing to do with him, and
Speaker 1: she goes and gets Jane Doe, which she tells the
Speaker 1: police she brought her in to be a crotch blocker.
Speaker 1: Now I think she was being polite to the police there,
Speaker 1: and in her description of that term, everybody knows what
Speaker 1: the arm is, we don't have to use it here, uh,
Speaker 1: And so so brings Jane Doe in there to just
Speaker 1: get get this creep off of me. And so then
Speaker 1: Jane ends up, you know, spending a lot of time
Speaker 1: chatting with him.
Speaker 5: Right the witness.
Speaker 6: She was hoping that Jane Doe's presence would detour Hexas attempt.
Speaker 5: To have sex with that witness. And he was touching
Speaker 5: her knee.
Speaker 6: It's uncomfortable apparently, and she said that he seth invited
Speaker 6: her back to the hotel room and she politely declined that.
Speaker 6: And this is where the Jane Doe gets involved.
Speaker 4: So we can go to D ten.
Speaker 1: Then this is Hegsas's version of the story, where he's
Speaker 1: basically saying that they walked back to his his room together.
Speaker 6: He doesn't remember even getting into that argument by the pool,
Speaker 6: but again that's there's witnesses.
Speaker 1: Right, so the guys seems like pretty drunk. Based on
Speaker 1: all of this. He says he's kind of surprised that
Speaker 1: she's coming back to the room with him. M hm,
Speaker 1: you know, because clearly like he was hitting on somebody
Speaker 1: else the whole night.
Speaker 4: He's like, what's going on.
Speaker 1: Like, how is this happening? So Hegsath independently, you know,
Speaker 1: told the police. Jane Doe stated that she would tell
Speaker 1: her husband that she had fallen asleep on a couch
Speaker 1: in someone else's room. Haggxath continue to ask Jane Doe
Speaker 1: if she was okay because he did not want Jane
Speaker 1: Doe to get in trouble. Haggxath told Jane Doe that
Speaker 1: she did not have to worry about him saying anything.
Speaker 1: Haggas stated Jane Doe showed early signs of regret. Haggath
Speaker 1: did not elaborate on the signs of regret. I think
Speaker 1: why that's why this part is relevant. The stated that
Speaker 1: she would tell her husband that she had fallen asleep,
Speaker 1: is that Haggxath would not have known that there were
Speaker 1: these other text messages where she's telling other people that
Speaker 1: she kind of fell asleep. That would be kind of
Speaker 1: corroborating evidence that she'd.
Speaker 4: Like, how would he have made that?
Speaker 1: Because that's that's a pretty specific detail. And then she
Speaker 1: did then go and say tell people like, look, you know,
Speaker 1: I fell asleep in somebody's room.
Speaker 4: Sorry.
Speaker 1: Elsewhere in the police report they quote the person that
Speaker 1: whose room she came back to saying that she got
Speaker 1: into the room with her own card, no problem, didn't
Speaker 1: seem drunk, and then then did not seem hung.
Speaker 4: Over in the morning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you know, nobody can know what happened in
Speaker 1: the room. But the claim was not that he, you know,
Speaker 1: violently kind of forced himself on her. The claim was
Speaker 1: that she was blackout, drunk.
Speaker 5: Or to consent or to inebriated to consent essentially.
Speaker 1: And you can see why there's so much evidence that
Speaker 1: would have been presented in court that would have undermined
Speaker 1: that claim.
Speaker 5: It would have been very hard.
Speaker 6: And this is what the this is what law enforcement
Speaker 6: in the area has since said, is that we would
Speaker 6: have to have had proved this but beyond a reasonable doubt,
Speaker 6: And this is very much he said, she said, situation
Speaker 6: with a lot of evidence against that. She said, part
Speaker 6: of it doesn't mean that's impossible. It doesn't mean her
Speaker 6: story is impossible. It just means that proving her story
Speaker 6: would be borderline impossible. So this is twenty seventeen. She
Speaker 6: gets a lawyer and starts making noise in twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: and it looks like we don't know the date of
Speaker 6: the settlement. Actually, it looks like it happened shortly after
Speaker 6: the lawyers got involved in late twenty twenty, So areund
Speaker 6: December twenty twenty, so I would assume that the settlement
Speaker 6: happened in early twenty twenty one. You can see why
Speaker 6: someone would try to make noise about a Fox News
Speaker 6: host that they had an encounter with. And obviously there's
Speaker 6: a police report in this situation. She got a rape
Speaker 6: kit the next morning and there was saman so you
Speaker 6: can understand why she would try to.
Speaker 5: Bring this up and why Heike Seth, who didn't want to.
Speaker 4: Set go public about it.
Speaker 5: She still we still don't know who she is.
Speaker 4: It's the situation, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, her husband's now being interviewed, and like her, her
Speaker 1: husband in this police report is presenting evidence that undercuts.
Speaker 4: Her own story.
Speaker 1: Yes, if you're reading between the lines, you're like, he
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to buy it. You could see it if
Speaker 1: you're reading this police report, read the met.
Speaker 5: Too part of this.
Speaker 6: Either way, you can say you can understand where it
Speaker 6: would galvanize her to say, hey, this powerful married man
Speaker 6: was being really creepy to me and it ended up
Speaker 6: in a tragedy for me, or you can see where
Speaker 6: it would be like, I bet I can get money
Speaker 6: at this point because he's not.
Speaker 5: Going to want this to be public.
Speaker 6: So you can read it in a couple of different ways,
Speaker 6: but I think the most important way to read it.
Speaker 6: Ryan said, it just can't be proven. Hegxeth has obviously
Speaker 6: copped to the adultery. He's admitted that.
Speaker 1: Right, and he literally had just had a child with
Speaker 1: the woman he had a fair on it was previous.
Speaker 5: Why, Yeah, it's really good.
Speaker 1: You can read the email from his mom. His mom's like,
Speaker 1: you're such a dog. Stop treating women so awfully. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really gross, and it's extra gross when he's then
Speaker 1: draped with all this like Christian morality and preaching.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, I will say a lot of people
Speaker 6: who are late in life converts to like zealous Christianity,
Speaker 6: like they're really on fire, have very hard backgrounds, and
Speaker 6: they tend to be people who are clinging to their
Speaker 6: faith because they feel so emotionally desperately in.
Speaker 1: Need of it self spiritual medication.
Speaker 5: Maybe, and it's kind of what it's there for, but
Speaker 5: it does. It's not to me.
Speaker 6: That's like not a surprising thing from somebody who's ardently Christian.
Speaker 6: I've interviewed Pete Hegseth and he's surprised me. I interviewed
Speaker 6: him last year and I was just surprised by how
Speaker 6: sort of I was surprised by.
Speaker 5: How intellectual he was.
Speaker 6: And that may sound ridiculous, but I know people kept
Speaker 6: biases against Fox and Friends hosts. I kind of did
Speaker 6: going into the interview because they turn on a lot
Speaker 6: of books that are you know, they're books to sell books.
Speaker 6: But he's he's more he's a more nuanced figure than
Speaker 6: I think people give him credit for being. But clearly
Speaker 6: a rampant adulterer, does not have a history of treating women.
Speaker 4: Well, he's a dog.
Speaker 5: He's a dog. Clearly drinks too much, but I also.
Speaker 4: Or drank too much.
Speaker 6: That night there was a there's right now a weaponized
Speaker 6: smear campaign that's very obvious to Republicans, and it's backfiring
Speaker 6: on people who don't want Pete hag Seth to be
Speaker 6: the Defense Secretary, including Jenny Ernst, who's very close. I
Speaker 6: think with people in like Pentagon circles who don't want
Speaker 6: a disruptor obviously to get in the middle of their system.
Speaker 5: Two things can be true.
Speaker 6: The system needs to be disrupted, and this particular disruptor
Speaker 6: might not be qualified. The thing I would worry about,
Speaker 6: I'm curious what you think about this is compromot blackmail
Speaker 6: on the head of the Pentagon. If he's been drinking
Speaker 6: and sleeping around for so long, that seems to be
Speaker 6: a pretty serious concern.
Speaker 1: I mean for the intelligence community. Yeah, that's a big concern.
Speaker 1: I have no interest in the Pentagon being a well
Speaker 1: functioning institution. It's a good line and like waging effective wars.
Speaker 1: So if he's compromised good, it's bad. Like it's a
Speaker 1: bad thing, it's bad for the world. Yeah. So if
Speaker 1: he's bad at running it good and maybe he'll bring
Speaker 1: a wrecking ball to some of the corruption in there.
Speaker 1: Maybe more likely he's just completely ill equipped to run
Speaker 1: an institution of this size, and the institution will eat
Speaker 1: him up.
Speaker 5: Who knows, we'll see.
Speaker 6: Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was picking FTC Commissioner
Speaker 6: current FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson to lead the agency, which
Speaker 6: is obviously now helmed by Lena Kahn, who would cover
Speaker 6: a lot on this show. Ferguson is kind of a
Speaker 6: known figure for people who follow these types of things.
Speaker 6: But let's go to the next element here. This is
Speaker 6: Trump appointing Andrew Ferguson.
Speaker 1: And this was being circulated by his yeah, allies, Ferguson.
Speaker 1: There's some question as to whether or not Ferguson himself
Speaker 1: was circulating this, but certainly, certainly his allies.
Speaker 4: We're circulating this.
Speaker 1: And if you're just watching it, I mean, if you're
Speaker 1: just listening to it and not watching it. Emily, this
Speaker 1: is kind of not if you like Lena Kon.
Speaker 6: It's a big chunk of text, but it says successfully
Speaker 6: fought to end the Biden FTC's anti business policy of
Speaker 6: refusing to end merger investigations early and allow firms to
Speaker 6: close their deals as soon as the FTC finds no
Speaker 6: competitive harm. Represented Virginia numerous other states in the landmark
Speaker 6: anti trust suit against Google's ad tech monopoly. So I
Speaker 6: just want to note those two things being literally together
Speaker 6: in the bullet points. This is the nuance of the
Speaker 6: rights opposition.
Speaker 5: To Lena Khan.
Speaker 6: There are some people on the right, including Jdvance, who've
Speaker 6: been very positive about Lina Khan, others who have been
Speaker 6: sort of in the middle about Lina Kon, and then
Speaker 6: a third group that are just absolutely opposed to Lina
Speaker 6: Con in every turn. Ferguson appears to be somebody in
Speaker 6: the middle. Yeah, So, like you can see, they're bragging
Speaker 6: there about him being part of the anti trust monopoly
Speaker 6: suit against Google. I'm sorry, the ad tech monopoly suit
Speaker 6: against Google. Obviously it's an anti trust one as well.
Speaker 6: But and then the next bullet point is about over reach, right,
Speaker 6: anti trist overreach, And that's sort of interesting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And they and that that a sheet talk that
Speaker 1: memo talks a lot about being too tough on mergers,
Speaker 1: that Lina Con is too rough on the business community,
Speaker 1: that they're going.
Speaker 4: To do a lot of deregulation.
Speaker 1: It's ironic that and almost poetic and anti poetic whatever
Speaker 1: that Trump made this move ousting Lena Khan and replacing
Speaker 1: her with Ferguson. On the same day, one of one
Speaker 1: of her most significant victories.
Speaker 4: Came through.
Speaker 1: If you can put up this this Fox Business article
Speaker 1: on the on the screen next the Kroger Albertson merger
Speaker 1: was was blocked as a twenty four billion dollar merger
Speaker 1: that that Lena Khan had had fought and arguing not
Speaker 1: just that it would be bad for consumers, there's kind
Speaker 1: of there's been there's agreement across the spectrum, even among
Speaker 1: the kind of pro business side, that if you can
Speaker 1: prove that there is going to be harmed to consumers,
Speaker 1: then then then you can block a merger. That's called
Speaker 1: the consumer welfare standard. Now, the if you can prove
Speaker 1: it is the part uh that the pro business side
Speaker 1: hangs her hat on and says and just constantly argues, well,
Speaker 1: all these mergers.
Speaker 4: Are going to be good for consumers.
Speaker 1: We're going to give you lower costs, and look you're
Speaker 1: going to it's going to be wonderful, trust us, and
Speaker 1: then it happens and then it's not and it's done,
Speaker 1: so you're screwed.
Speaker 4: In this case.
Speaker 1: She argued that actually additionally, the FTC and going back
Speaker 1: to its original meaning when you know when it was
Speaker 1: it was created, and so when some of these acts
Speaker 1: were created, that that enabled its powers, the power of
Speaker 1: workers and the and the well being of workers matters too,
Speaker 1: And so she argued that this merger would would depress wages,
Speaker 1: would make it and would would hurt worker power, which
Speaker 1: is also an interest of the federal government of the
Speaker 1: people of the United States, which is kind of a
Speaker 1: radical take, like, well, we're supposed to care about workers,
Speaker 1: but yeah, actually it's in the law, you're supposed to
Speaker 1: here she is, I love this talking to Hassan Piker
Speaker 1: on his stream about this this decision being blocked.
Speaker 13: What kind of labor protections does that offer to people
Speaker 13: that are working at these corporations.
Speaker 14: So one thing that our lawsuit alleged was that if
Speaker 14: this merger goes through, it's going to mean higher grocery
Speaker 14: prices for shoppers, but it's also going to be worse
Speaker 14: for the workers. And this is the first time that
Speaker 14: the FTC has ever sought to block a merger, not
Speaker 14: just because it's going to be bad for consumers, but
Speaker 14: also because it's going to be bad for workers. And
Speaker 14: you know, especially in recent decades, anti trust enforcers had
Speaker 14: not really been focused on the worker harms as much,
Speaker 14: and that's something we've really looked to change. So the
Speaker 14: complaint lays out how previously, when there was, when there
Speaker 14: has been competition between Kroger and Albertson's, that the workers
Speaker 14: at each store were able to use that competition as
Speaker 14: leverage when they were trying to bargain, and that if
Speaker 14: you allow these two companies to merge, that leverage that
Speaker 14: comes from having a potential alternative employer or an alternative
Speaker 14: store where customers can go if there's a strike, but
Speaker 14: eliminating that leverage point and bargaining leverage would ultimately be
Speaker 14: bad for workers. So again this is still being litigated,
Speaker 14: but that was in the complaint as an explanation for
Speaker 14: why this merger would be bad for workers. When the
Speaker 14: FTC team put on the trial, they actually had on
Speaker 14: the stand some of the workers that are currently employed
Speaker 14: by these stores so that they could also share their
Speaker 14: experience and just generally, I mean, there's a lot of
Speaker 14: empirical evidence that now shows that after mergers, workers have
Speaker 14: seen you pay cuts or a limit in any pay rises.
Speaker 14: You often see layoffs, you can see workers have less
Speaker 14: negotiation power to figure out well I even have a stable,
Speaker 14: predictable schedule. And so you know, these are all dimensions
Speaker 14: of competition on the labor front that are important to
Speaker 14: protect for people.
Speaker 1: First of all, it's pretty cool to have an FTC
Speaker 1: chair that goes on a Sundpiker's stream.
Speaker 4: We were four years in power. It was. It was
Speaker 4: quite a run.
Speaker 1: We'll see, we'll see where it goes from here. The
Speaker 1: big fear among supporters of the kind of Lena Khan
Speaker 1: approach to FTC was that Melissa holy Holyoak, who is
Speaker 1: a commissioner on the on the FTC, that she would
Speaker 1: get the chair gig. And she's as hostile as you
Speaker 1: can get to the kind of con canter wing wing
Speaker 1: of that bipartisan, transpartisan movement. So the fact that she
Speaker 1: didn't get it is something. But the fact that somebody
Speaker 1: got it who says that that she was too tough
Speaker 1: on mergers, like the day that she blocked this like huge,
Speaker 1: because what the Wall Street Journal would always say about
Speaker 1: her is she filed another frivolous BS case that's just
Speaker 1: gonna eat up money. And then when a judge, you know,
Speaker 1: gets this complaint, he's gonna knock it away because you know,
Speaker 1: this is a this is a child who doesn't even
Speaker 1: belong in this job, and she doesn't understand how the
Speaker 1: law works. And time after time after time, the judges
Speaker 1: are like, these are good points.
Speaker 4: This merger's blocked.
Speaker 6: Well, what she said on Hassan show there is like,
Speaker 6: so it's one of the reasons conservatives don't like hers, because,
Speaker 6: as Rachel Bovert has talked about to us and others,
Speaker 6: is the consumer welfare standard of Robert Bork was gospel
Speaker 6: on the right for a really long time, not just
Speaker 6: the political right, but just sort of the pro business
Speaker 6: community for a long time. The consumer welfare standard and
Speaker 6: what Lena Kahan was saying there is is not.
Speaker 4: When we're saying pro business, they mean pro big business.
Speaker 1: And also the mergers and acquisitions lawyers who make money
Speaker 1: on these.
Speaker 5: Mergers absolutely pro oh big business.
Speaker 6: And the consumer welfare standard is predicated on this idea
Speaker 6: that consumers will choose to shop at places where they
Speaker 6: treat workers well, and that is not the case when
Speaker 6: you have monopolies, right, Like, it's this ridiculous sort of cycle.
Speaker 5: And right, I just looked this up.
Speaker 6: Actually, we invited Andrew Ferguson to come on a Friday
Speaker 6: show with Matthew Stoller to talk about conservatives and antitrust
Speaker 6: policy back in June and never got a response. So
Speaker 6: your point about Lena Kon going on the Hassan Pikers
Speaker 6: stream is really interesting because one of the reasons Khan
Speaker 6: irked a lot of people in the business community is
Speaker 6: that she's just she's the new brand ician, right, Like
Speaker 6: she's actually like very much, very much in the moment,
Speaker 6: and that was irritating because it was a threat. It's like,
Speaker 6: this is a this is a popular movement behind Lena
Speaker 6: kan People seem to like what she's saying. There's a
Speaker 6: lot of media interest in her, and that poses a
Speaker 6: threat because it makes the right more interested in warding Lenacon.
Speaker 5: Matt Gates very supportive.
Speaker 1: For Lila Kon, for example, also a conservative.
Speaker 6: Conservative, so you can see why they would be threatened
Speaker 6: by Lena Kon like actually getting invitation even to go
Speaker 6: talk to Hassan Piker.
Speaker 5: I don't know which way it went.
Speaker 6: Maybe they pitched her to Hassan, but either way, Andrew
Speaker 6: Ferguson is going to have a slightly tougher for time
Speaker 6: on this one because Lena Kon obviously was popular in
Speaker 6: new media spaces like this one.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Indeed, let's move.
Speaker 6: On to this Inspector General report that was published yesterday
Speaker 6: by d j IG Michael Horowitz a familiar name to
Speaker 6: a lot of people because he published an Inspector General
Speaker 6: report on some of the Russia collusion, FAISA application, malfeasins
Speaker 6: that happened surrounding Carter Page and all of that stuff,
Speaker 6: and was popular on the right because of that report.
Speaker 5: Rightfully so, because it was a good.
Speaker 6: Report and needed to be done. But this next one
Speaker 6: maybe slightly less popular with the right. It was published
Speaker 6: yesterday and found that the Department of Justice under Donald
Speaker 6: Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr improperly spied on
Speaker 6: members of Congress, congressional staffers, and actually journalists as well,
Speaker 6: in an effort to track it down who was selectively leaking.
Speaker 5: We can put the first element up on the screen.
Speaker 6: This is a report from Politico. The headline is watchdog
Speaker 6: faults DOJ and Trump's first term for secretly obtaining records
Speaker 6: of lawmakers and journalists. It's a little bit more complicated
Speaker 6: than just having done it secretly, and we can go
Speaker 6: through some of the inspectors some of the Inspector General
Speaker 6: report Ryan, because I think it's fairly important now that
Speaker 6: we have another Trump administration suiting up, and before we
Speaker 6: do start going through it, we can put it up
Speaker 6: on the screen.
Speaker 11: Here.
Speaker 6: This is the E two tear sheet. You can see
Speaker 6: the PDF of the report itself.
Speaker 5: You can go through it yourself.
Speaker 6: It's very long, but very long and very detailed, sort
Speaker 6: of step by step process of how warrants were retained,
Speaker 6: how warrants were obtained or obtained poorly or improperly in
Speaker 6: many cases. But essentially, the Trump Air Justice Department was
Speaker 6: doing something that was I think perfectly reasonable and understandable
Speaker 6: for the Attorney General would do, which is tracked down
Speaker 6: the selective leaks that were coming out of classified information
Speaker 6: weaponized against Donald Trump. We now know for sure, and
Speaker 6: we knew this at the time in many cases that
Speaker 6: these selective leaks were giving a very false picture of
Speaker 6: what was happening with carter Page. They were leaking to
Speaker 6: show that carter Page and others were like definitively involved
Speaker 6: in some strange plot like ripped from a Clancy novel
Speaker 6: about Russia collusion that just there wasn't there, and so
Speaker 6: Bill Barr was trying to track down who was leaking
Speaker 6: this class fed information. His deputies were trying to track
Speaker 6: down who was leaking this classified information. So in the process,
Speaker 6: though the dj was not following the proper channels that
Speaker 6: you need to man the reading this report. One reason
Speaker 6: that's kind of an interesting read is that the bureaucratic
Speaker 6: process of obtaining these.
Speaker 5: Ports insane, which it should as it should be.
Speaker 6: Yes, absolutely, one hundred percent as it should be. Did
Speaker 6: were you going to say something ran?
Speaker 1: No, no, just yeah, like it's and uh. Eric Holder put
Speaker 1: this in took place actually after the DJU basically spied
Speaker 1: on James Rosen, the Fox News White House correspondent, who
Speaker 1: was working on a story with with a source regarding
Speaker 1: North Korea's kind of new something something involving North Korea,
Speaker 1: and they swept up his communications, and the entire media
Speaker 1: left to right stood up to Eric Holder and said,
Speaker 1: this is outrageous. Many of us call on him to
Speaker 1: resign over that, including us over the hoving impost. And
Speaker 1: in response to that pressure, he put in this new
Speaker 1: policy that if you're going to pick up the communications
Speaker 1: of a journalist, even if it's incidental in a report
Speaker 1: on a car, investigating a car teller or something. If
Speaker 1: you wind up, if you see a journalist there, you
Speaker 1: need to come to the Attorney General himself and make
Speaker 1: your case that this breach of our norms, because it's
Speaker 1: just norms. Legally, you know, if they get a warrant,
Speaker 1: they can go after anybody they want, but the norms
Speaker 1: are the journalists are to be protected, and so they've
Speaker 1: set up these special protections that also cover members of Congress,
Speaker 1: which to me, I think are also good. Like members
Speaker 1: of Congress, whether you're Marjorie Taylor Green or Adam Schiff
Speaker 1: or AOC, I think should be off limits.
Speaker 6: Dana Rhorbaker, Yeah, absolutely. So let's get into what Qurowitz
Speaker 6: found a little bit here. This is where we'll start.
Speaker 6: On page five, we can put the next element up.
Speaker 6: Says he found that the Department failed to convene the
Speaker 6: News Media Review Committee they have a committee committed to
Speaker 6: any such things to consider the compulsory process authorization requests.
Speaker 6: The Department did not obtain the required DNI certification in
Speaker 6: one investigation, and we were unable to confirm whether the
Speaker 6: DNI certification it obtained in another investigation was provided to
Speaker 6: the Attorney General before he authorized the request, and the
Speaker 6: Department did not obtain the Attorney General's express authorization for
Speaker 6: the ndos that were sought in connection with compulsory process,
Speaker 6: with compulsory process issued in the investigations. So that's from
Speaker 6: the executive summary basically. But yeah, on this next element,
Speaker 6: you can see they're talking specifically about the New York
Speaker 6: Times and the Washington Post. CNN is swept up in this,
Speaker 6: they say, as we describe in this chapter, chapter three
Speaker 6: of the report, the Department complied with some, but not all,
Speaker 6: of the then appical provisions of the news media policy
Speaker 6: in CNN and New York Times and Washington Posts, many
Speaker 6: of which provisions have been put in place beginning just
Speaker 6: six years earlier. That's what Ryan was referencing from twenty
Speaker 6: fourteen and twenty fifteen, which horror, which references a lot
Speaker 6: in this report. He says, in our judgment, this deviation
Speaker 6: from the Department's owned requirement indicates a troubling disparity between
Speaker 6: on the one hand, the regard expressed in Department policy
Speaker 6: for the vital role of the news media and American democracy. Yes,
Speaker 6: I know, the DJ loves that so very much, And
Speaker 6: on the other hand, the department's commitment to complying with
Speaker 6: the limits and requirements that it intended to safeguard that
Speaker 6: very role. So basically, if you go into the report,
Speaker 6: what happens with these journalist communications? These are non content
Speaker 6: communications requests, so they're trying to pull who the journalists
Speaker 6: were emailing and calling, and that in and of itself
Speaker 6: would be enough obviously to figure out who's leaking. And
Speaker 6: that's why you need to have the provisions that were
Speaker 6: put in place followed, because it's a very serious thing.
Speaker 5: When you're looking.
Speaker 6: At who journalists are talking to, you should be the
Speaker 6: absolute highest standard. And so when we have potentially cash
Speaker 6: Hotel coming into the FBI and a loyalist like Pambondi
Speaker 6: coming into the DOJ, Bill Barr was kind of a
Speaker 6: loyalist but ultimately really bucked Trump. So imagine what a
Speaker 6: loyalist who's even sort of more maga than Bill Barr
Speaker 6: might do in some of these situations, even if they're
Speaker 6: kind of swampy like Pam Bondi. Legitimately is these are
Speaker 6: really serious things, really serious powers that I would just
Speaker 6: tell the right canon will be abused against conservative media.
Speaker 6: Little guys like imagine, imagine right the slippery slope as
Speaker 6: these powers start getting abused, because there are and it
Speaker 6: always happens this way, there are rightful uses of these
Speaker 6: powers when selective leaks of classified information that can damage
Speaker 6: national security literally can Yeah, that's a reasonable use of
Speaker 6: trying to figure out who is leaking. I don't think
Speaker 6: it's necessarily a reasonable use of going after journalists communications,
Speaker 6: but it may be a predicate, a reasonable predicate for
Speaker 6: an investigation. And it is what convinces you to let
Speaker 6: those powers get bigger and bigger and bigger.
Speaker 1: And bigger, and the right exactly, and these norms get
Speaker 1: loosened in a ratchet effect. It moves one direction and
Speaker 1: only tends to move in one direction. So let's say, well,
Speaker 1: Adam Schiff is one of the members of Congress that
Speaker 1: they spied on here, and Swallowell like, let's say you
Speaker 1: hate Adam Shift.
Speaker 5: And Cash Pattel by the way, and Cash Battel twenty
Speaker 5: one Democrats and twenty Republicans.
Speaker 1: And Cash Betel is a great example here. So so
Speaker 1: take take Adam Shift. You hate Adam Shiff, you think
Speaker 1: he's a trader, you think he should be spied on.
Speaker 1: He's now an incoming senator, if there's a Democratic administration
Speaker 1: in the next ten to fifteen years, you know he's
Speaker 1: going to be likely CIA chief.
Speaker 4: He's going to be pissed. You spied on him.
Speaker 1: You want him with all these powers Now now he
Speaker 1: can spy on you in reverse.
Speaker 4: So that's my message to the right.
Speaker 1: Now, the message to the left would be like, all right,
Speaker 1: you spied on cash Pattel. The left, Yeah, yeah, Democrats
Speaker 1: spied on cash Pattel when he was a Hill staffer.
Speaker 1: Now he's gonna be running the FBI, and he's pissed.
Speaker 1: He's very pissed, like he has sued you know, everybody involved.
Speaker 1: His case got thrown out, but he's like, guys angry
Speaker 1: as he should be. You spy on a Hill staffer
Speaker 1: and so now he's going to run the FBI. Look
Speaker 1: what you did, Like, so don't don't do this stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's serious.
Speaker 6: I mean it is really serious when you start setting,
Speaker 6: when you let the precedent slip like this and don't
Speaker 6: get caught until there's an inspector general report a long
Speaker 6: time later. And part of this is you're supposed to
Speaker 6: give reporters enough time to respond, and that wasn't done
Speaker 6: in all of these cases to actually have a legal
Speaker 6: response to their communications being pulled to the government. As
Speaker 6: a journalist, I mean, right now, we've seen how crucial
Speaker 6: independent media has been and independent voices in Congress, like
Speaker 6: people who are willing to book the party line. We've
Speaker 6: seen how important that is to understanding like Cash Purtel
Speaker 6: as Matt TeV came on Undercurrents last weeked and made
Speaker 6: this point. He was like, the new nes memo that
Speaker 6: we were told by selective leaks, by the way, was
Speaker 6: absolutely wrong, was vindicated. And Cash Bettel was basically the
Speaker 6: author of the Neuns memo. Those independent voices have been
Speaker 6: like really important to understanding what's going on when nobody
Speaker 6: else in the Republican Party wanted to really talk about
Speaker 6: how bad the FBI was was were hesitant to question
Speaker 6: the Russian investigation. Initially, it's easy to forget there was
Speaker 6: even hesitation on the right about that, but there was
Speaker 6: These independent voices in Congress and in the media are
Speaker 6: some of the more important voices right now. There's a
Speaker 6: lot of literal disinformation coming from the establishment, and so
Speaker 6: as soon as these powers sort of slip into getting
Speaker 6: bigger and bigger without proper oversight. Then guess who's coming
Speaker 6: after independent media. It'll be Adam Shift, It'll be Eric Swallwell,
Speaker 6: it'll be those types of people, or maybe even like
Speaker 6: on the right. I think right now, people on the
Speaker 6: right are primed to over use these powers because they
Speaker 6: have good reason to want to know what happened. And
Speaker 6: that's how things end up getting expanded in very bad
Speaker 6: directions because it's like it's easy to convince people you
Speaker 6: should be going after and you should be using this power,
Speaker 6: and so you sort of feel like you have permission
Speaker 6: to make the power broader and broader.
Speaker 1: Yeah, got to protect what's left of this republic.
Speaker 5: Let's do it.
Speaker 1: And so it's been a bleak show. You know, we
Speaker 1: talked about war, ethnic cleansing, sexual assault, the selling out
Speaker 1: of the anti trust agenda. So let's do a little
Speaker 1: palate cleanser and talk about Bill Maher for a little bit.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about Bill Moore.
Speaker 6: And it's a palate cleanser because this clip is sort
Speaker 6: of delightful in some ways as either a point about
Speaker 6: cancel culture never existing or about cancel culture being over.
Speaker 5: So let's go ahead and.
Speaker 6: Roll Bill Maher talking to actor Zachary Levi on Club
Speaker 6: Random and Zachary Levi for Contacts, came out in support
Speaker 6: of Trump, like right before the election. It was a
Speaker 6: matter of days before the election, and he was talking
Speaker 6: to Bill Moore on Club Random. Let's go ahead and
Speaker 6: see how their exchange went.
Speaker 7: You got canceled for for basically say.
Speaker 1: Have I been canceled? Well, I hope I haven't been
Speaker 1: canceled yet.
Speaker 4: I mean, if it happens that happens, like.
Speaker 7: I mean, come on, didn't you lose jobs for that?
Speaker 7: Isn't that what canceling is?
Speaker 13: No for coming out and voting for Trump? Yeah, I mean, listen,
Speaker 13: I have yet to see what the ultimate effects of
Speaker 13: all that are going to be. I already had multiple
Speaker 13: jobs that I was in the process of shooting or
Speaker 13: that I have yet to shoot, and none of those
Speaker 13: have been compromised. All those like, none of my producers
Speaker 13: or any of these studios behind those films or projects
Speaker 13: have called and said, hey, listen, this is a you know,
Speaker 13: a lying too far and we can't have you associated
Speaker 13: with the project anymore. We're all still full steam ahead
Speaker 13: on those How it ultimately like plays out in the future,
Speaker 13: I don't know. You know, I'm going to sit down
Speaker 13: with my team.
Speaker 4: I have yet.
Speaker 13: I've been in Eastern Europe making this movie all during
Speaker 13: the election and everything. I mean, I was all, you know,
Speaker 13: kind of disconnected a lot from what was going on
Speaker 13: other than social media and following the news and kind
Speaker 13: of seeing the play by plays. But you know, I'm
Speaker 13: gonna sit down with my team and we'll talk about
Speaker 13: because I haven't talked to any of them. They might say, hey, listen,
Speaker 13: we've had some phone calls with some people and they
Speaker 13: don't want to work with you anymore.
Speaker 1: I don't know.
Speaker 7: I could have sworn that already happened.
Speaker 13: No, No, yeah, I think it was because when I
Speaker 13: did the town hall with Tulci and Bobby, so basically
Speaker 13: I was stumping for Bobby.
Speaker 4: I really wanted Bobby to be Bobby Bobby Kennedy.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he sat there, and you know, I don't agree
Speaker 7: with everything, but among people in my field, especially who
Speaker 7: were considered liberals, I have definitely been the most supportive.
Speaker 7: You know, his general view of health and medicine and
Speaker 7: how it all works and what's important is closer to
Speaker 7: mine than Western medicine.
Speaker 6: So I think funny thing there was zachar le By
Speaker 6: saying he hasn't yet lost jobs, and bellmart saying I
Speaker 6: could have swore that happened, because it takes us back
Speaker 6: to the central point of the cancel culture debate, which
Speaker 6: is are you just getting criticism or are you actually
Speaker 6: facing consequences?
Speaker 5: And I don't know, I.
Speaker 6: Think Ryan would probably agree, and it gets to your
Speaker 6: great essay Elephant in the zoom or reported essay Elephant
Speaker 6: in the zoom like part of cancel culture was absolutely
Speaker 6: absolutely real. There are people who said it never happened,
Speaker 6: it was never real, it was consequence called.
Speaker 5: It was sort of always incoherent.
Speaker 6: On the one hand, people were saying, it's just consequence culture,
Speaker 6: but also it's not real, right, like you're just you're
Speaker 6: just getting you're just facing consequences for your we would
Speaker 6: name it right, Yeah, exactly, you're just facing consequences for
Speaker 6: having unpopular opinions. But but also like, this thing is
Speaker 6: not really happening. It's it's not at all, you know,
Speaker 6: a problem, don't worry about it. There's nothing to see here.
Speaker 6: So that said, I think this is maybe becoming incoherent
Speaker 6: on the right because the second Trump administration or the
Speaker 6: second Trump election. What's interesting about it is you get
Speaker 6: the guy winning the popular vote, you do have sort
Speaker 6: of a broad swath of celebrities coming out supporting him.
Speaker 6: Still a lot of celebrities supporting Kamala Harris, no question
Speaker 6: about it. These tech guys now coming out support of
Speaker 6: Donald Trump. We talked about the Federalist headline like the
Speaker 6: day before the election, which was it's no longer there's
Speaker 6: no social stigma around supporting Trump anymore. So this is
Speaker 6: going to this could potentially be incoherent, right, like if
Speaker 6: the social stigma around supporting Trump is mostly gone, which
Speaker 6: I agree in the rest of the country outside you know,
Speaker 6: some type of like C suite at the thirty Rock building.
Speaker 6: If you say that, then it also says like cancer
Speaker 6: culture's kind of over.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a wave.
Speaker 5: It a wave.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm totally over and some I think I think
Speaker 1: the more hermetically sealed ecosystems are still operating under some
Speaker 1: of its ideological riggors. But in general, yeah, oh of course, yeah, yes,
Speaker 1: not so much. Yeah, there was a right and the rights.
Speaker 1: The rights probably isn't quite over yet because you guys
Speaker 1: were later and adopting it internally and so you've got
Speaker 1: to it's got to work through your system. They're your
Speaker 1: own like mirror world bizarro version of of cancel culture.
Speaker 5: Yeah it will.
Speaker 1: You're not sufficiently sufficiently anti woke like it like.
Speaker 5: This is a raging debate on the white right right now, yes.
Speaker 1: Which is which gets weird because it's like, you say
Speaker 1: anything related to racial justice, diversity, make any basic point.
Speaker 1: Tell me if I'm wrong on the right. People are like,
Speaker 1: DEI woke. Yeah, You're like no, no, no, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying, like, everybody should be treated with the equality.
Speaker 1: Did you say equality? This happened equity?
Speaker 6: This happened to me once when I was like, maybe
Speaker 6: the Conservatives should put a woman.
Speaker 1: On this cancel hert hancel this woman.
Speaker 6: I was like, it doesn't have to be any specific woman,
Speaker 6: but if you believe that men and women are different,
Speaker 6: then maybe a woman will have valuable takes on abortion,
Speaker 6: maybe maybe a pro life woman.
Speaker 1: Drag this woman. Yeah, it's been nice working with you. You're finished.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that is the kind of thing you say.
Speaker 1: You say anything that gets anywhere near it.
Speaker 4: It's like, whoa, yeah, we much.
Speaker 6: Well because and this is actually I think becoming a
Speaker 6: serious problem because there is a need, there's a legitimate
Speaker 6: need for litmus tests. If you're the Trump if you're
Speaker 6: the incoming Trump administration, you were trying to put all
Speaker 6: kinds of litmus tests. And this was a problem for
Speaker 6: Jonie Ernst about loyalty up on the hiring process or
Speaker 6: the confirmation process, because you know that the second somebody
Speaker 6: is like Bill barr And is not fully loyal to
Speaker 6: Donald Trump or Mike Pence is not fully loyal to
Speaker 6: Donald Trump, then boom, like your whole agenda could crumble.
Speaker 5: It could become a house of cards.
Speaker 6: So they're trying to not build a house of cards,
Speaker 6: They're trying to build a house of stone. And that's
Speaker 6: where their litmus tests are becoming important to them. And
Speaker 6: so they use these types of stand ins as litmus tests.
Speaker 5: And it can, like I think.
Speaker 6: Really poison or pollute I should say pollute the discourse
Speaker 6: because it's not honest.
Speaker 1: Always take it from me, it's toxic.
Speaker 5: Take it from Ryan, it's toxic. It's toxic.
Speaker 6: And so maybe the mainstream wave of cancel culture is
Speaker 6: coming to And there was a time when if Zachary
Speaker 6: Levi had just breathed so much in Trump's direction, he
Speaker 6: legitimately probably would have lost jobs in Hollywood. Maybe, yeah,
Speaker 6: it happened.
Speaker 1: I mean there were some pretty yeah. Twenty sixteen, Yeah, seventeen, twenty.
Speaker 6: Sixteen, seventeen eighteen. Trump is a Russian asset. You're yeah,
Speaker 6: one hundred percent, you're a trader, all of that. So
Speaker 6: this is sort of a fun note to end the
Speaker 6: show on Ryan.
Speaker 5: There you go, thanks for tuning in. I'm excited about
Speaker 5: the Friday show me too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you missed earlier on the show, we're talking
Speaker 1: to you basically an American leftist who went to fight
Speaker 1: for the the anikocamis the of the YPG, which good
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 6: It'll be interesting conversation, especially this week. So thank you
Speaker 6: so much for tuning in Breakingpoints dot com if you
Speaker 6: want to become a premium subscriber.
Speaker 5: There's also fun Christmas merch.
Speaker 6: I've enjoyed seeing everybody's pictures in their Breaking Points sweaters.
Speaker 1: I was wearing as Oh, you were all right, but
Speaker 1: it's like, is that you on the sweater the guys yes,
Speaker 1: today it's really.
Speaker 5: It is awkward. It is the same thing with the mugs.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, I'll be on the zoom call. Sometimes
Speaker 5: with the mug at.
Speaker 6: Home, I'm like, oh shit, cut my face.
Speaker 5: On a mug again. Not a good look. Not a
Speaker 5: good look.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you everybody, breakingpoints dot com as a reminder,
Speaker 6: and we'll see you back here on Friday.