Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
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Speaker 4: All right, good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. The Hunter
Speaker 4: Biden fallout continues. We're going to start with that. We're
Speaker 4: going to talk a little bit today about what Barack
Speaker 4: Obama has to say.
Speaker 5: Ryan, I think you have some thoughts on this.
Speaker 6: He said wealth got concentrated and it just caused to
Speaker 6: promise him that wealth.
Speaker 3: It just got concentrated.
Speaker 4: We'll see Brian's been spending some time with Sager this week,
Speaker 4: so I'm curious to see if he's been radicalized in.
Speaker 5: The other directions.
Speaker 3: We'll see.
Speaker 5: Maybe I'll be on the left in that one and Ryan.
Speaker 3: Will be on the right. Maybe.
Speaker 4: And then we're going to get to Donald Trump. There's
Speaker 4: a court date that was announced for his documents trial
Speaker 4: and all kinds of stuff continues to happen in the
Speaker 4: twenty twenty four campaign because he sat down with Brett
Speaker 4: Baer for a pretty interesting interview.
Speaker 5: So that is coming up.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk about the ruling that is expected
Speaker 4: on student debt from the Supreme Court next week. We're
Speaker 4: gonna talk about Andrew Taits case. Ryan has a great
Speaker 4: monologue prepared for everyone on Venezuela. I'm going to talk
Speaker 4: a little bit about the tragedy unfolding at sea right
Speaker 4: now as the Titanic rescue efforts continue, and we're super
Speaker 4: excited to be joined once again by Justin Goodman from
Speaker 4: Whitecoat Waste, who's going to talk to us about more
Speaker 4: lablaque evidence that Whitecoat Waiste and others have been uncovering.
Speaker 5: Ryan, that's a lot. That's a lot for one.
Speaker 6: Day, but the news doesn't and the Supreme Court is
Speaker 6: possibly a gut the administrative state. Yes, make sure you
Speaker 6: don't get student debt relief and eliminate affirmative action.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about their upcoming cases.
Speaker 4: Yes, we're expecting Supreme Court cases next Thursday, I believe
Speaker 4: starting next Thursday, and that'll all be going on next week.
Speaker 4: So but some big changes could be happening to the
Speaker 4: country in the next week or so. You wanted to
Speaker 4: mention a little bit about Virginia at the top here.
Speaker 6: Oh yeah, real quickly. And so in Virginia, there were
Speaker 6: primaries last night. The Working Families Party endorsed seven candidates,
Speaker 6: which is a pretty decent proxy for kind of the
Speaker 6: progressive verse, kind of centrist, moderate pro business wing of
Speaker 6: the party. And of those seven, five of them swept,
Speaker 6: including knocking out a couple incumbents who had been there
Speaker 6: for a very long time. One of them called himself
Speaker 6: a Joe Manchin Democrat, and other of whom have been
Speaker 6: pretty right wing Democrat. The Virginia Senate Virginia House are
Speaker 6: going to be much different than they were before. Dick Saslaw,
Speaker 6: who's the I think has been Senate President since Thomas
Speaker 6: Jefferson founded that state, probably even before that, is retiring.
Speaker 3: He had this amazing quote in the Washington.
Speaker 6: Post where he said, why do you want to run
Speaker 6: these people out of office? He's talking to the voters
Speaker 6: about these incumbents that are getting beaten, and he says,
Speaker 6: vote for me.
Speaker 3: I'm different their whole thing.
Speaker 6: So he's angry that these candidates ran saying that they're
Speaker 6: going to do something different and that voters elected them
Speaker 6: on that platform.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's confounding, really why people want something new.
Speaker 3: It's so crazy. It just might work.
Speaker 5: I think Barack Obama might have an answer for him.
Speaker 4: Yes, we'll get to that in the next segment, but
Speaker 4: for now, the fallout from Hunter Biden. Again, Ryan and
Speaker 4: Sager covered this yesterday, but he is going to plead
Speaker 4: guilty to two tax misdemeanors. He struck a deal with
Speaker 4: federal prosecutors where they are resolving that felony firearm charge
Speaker 4: and that was all announced by the DOJ yesterday. They're
Speaker 4: going to recommend a sentence, just a probation for those
Speaker 4: tax charges that was in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen.
Speaker 4: He owed like some hundred thousand dollars in federal taxes
Speaker 4: in twenty seventeen and then yeah, at least one hundred
Speaker 4: thy in twenty eighteen as well. So this is you
Speaker 4: know that you have right off the bat, Tucker Carlson,
Speaker 4: He's got his new show on Twitter, comes out swinging
Speaker 4: with an episode, and we have some sound from that.
Speaker 7: Here this morning. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to pretty much nothing.
Speaker 7: Biden pled to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges, then entered
Speaker 7: a diversion on a federal gun charge.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 7: As far as Merrick Garland's Justice Department is concerned, Hunter
Speaker 7: Biden is done. There was no pre dawn raid carried
Speaker 7: live simultaneously on CNN. There was no purp walk, no handcuffs,
Speaker 7: no press conference. Above all, there was no felony. Hunter Biden,
Speaker 7: who broke federal gun laws can still carry a gun.
Speaker 7: It's like it all never happened. In fact, the Justice
Speaker 7: Department just baptized Hunter Biden. A lifetime of sins washed
Speaker 7: away in an instant. It was a secular miracle. Most
Speaker 7: miraculous of all, Hunter Biden somehow escaped a farret charge.
Speaker 7: Farah is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and it is
Speaker 7: exactly what its name suggests. Under federal law, if you
Speaker 7: are acting as an agent of a foreign nation in Washington,
Speaker 7: you were required to register with our government to let
Speaker 7: everybody know.
Speaker 8: So.
Speaker 4: Paul Maniford was locked up on a fair charge not
Speaker 4: too long ago. On the other side of the aisle,
Speaker 4: I think Tony Podesta was hit with one but didn't
Speaker 4: get any time, and I want to say Gates did
Speaker 4: as well.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and I think somebody else he mentioned somebody else
Speaker 6: from the Trump campaign who wound up getting hit with
Speaker 6: one as well. Oh, Elliott Broydy. It was kind of
Speaker 6: Trump Trump fundraiser.
Speaker 5: Entirely fair, fair charge and all.
Speaker 6: Yes, okay, some of these some of these folks are right.
Speaker 6: And it raises the question, then, well, what was Hunter
Speaker 6: Biden doing other than kind of lobbying. The only possible
Speaker 6: defense I could imagine consultant for him would be that
Speaker 6: he was such a bad lobbyist that he actually never
Speaker 6: did any lobbying, and that prosecutors looked for any contact
Speaker 6: that he made between himself and anybody in the government
Speaker 6: to actually do the things that he told his clients
Speaker 6: he was going to do and maybe couldn't find it,
Speaker 6: because you do find you do see a lot of
Speaker 6: emails where he's sending notes to his colleagues saying, Hey,
Speaker 6: get this meeting for this guy, get this meeting for
Speaker 6: that guy. It would be funny if the reason they
Speaker 6: didn't charge him was because he just shirked his job.
Speaker 6: Like I mean, we know that he was on a
Speaker 6: year's long bender at this time, that he was supposed
Speaker 6: to be doing foreign agent work, but literally he was
Speaker 6: doing work for foreign governments, and not just foreign governments,
Speaker 6: but like Burisman is not a foreign government, but it's
Speaker 6: linked to the government, and it is.
Speaker 3: You still have to register as a foreign agent.
Speaker 6: If you're just serving on the board and giving them
Speaker 6: advice on how to build a pipeline in Ukraine, then
Speaker 6: you don't actually have to register. But that's not what
Speaker 6: he's doing. He's not like an expert when it comes
Speaker 6: to natural guests. His whole thing is influence. Maybe it's
Speaker 6: just look, we got his name, he doesn't.
Speaker 3: Have to do anything.
Speaker 4: I mean, that's an interesting point because he obviously was incompetent.
Speaker 4: But at the same time, there are photos of his
Speaker 4: clients on the golf course with his dad.
Speaker 3: Or they got there. They clearly got there somehow and
Speaker 3: they paid him and got there. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And we have evidence of him email wise setting
Speaker 4: up meetings the Cafe Milano meeting for instance, which is
Speaker 4: a super swanky restaurant in Georgetown, that his dad was
Speaker 4: at the same place with his client. So I just
Speaker 4: have a really hard time believing they didn't find any
Speaker 4: reason to charge him with a fair violation they claim,
Speaker 4: by the way, that the investigation is ongoing, so we'll
Speaker 4: see if anything else comes of that. I also think
Speaker 4: Tucker raises an interesting point of tension with the lefts
Speaker 4: I guess stance on gun controls and gun control laws
Speaker 4: and drug violations where it puts Hunter Biden right now.
Speaker 5: For instance, Joe Biden himself has lobbied.
Speaker 4: For people to have more to have more of a
Speaker 4: stringent approach to if you are charged with a drug
Speaker 4: and a firearm violation, that's actually a huge swath of
Speaker 4: you know, of problems in the country, a huge swath
Speaker 4: of crime. Is that combination of violating both a weapons
Speaker 4: law and druggle at the same time. It's a combination
Speaker 4: that Democrats and a lot of Republicans as well would
Speaker 4: say should be a very big problem for someone who's
Speaker 4: being charged in court and he's basically getting.
Speaker 5: A slap on the wrist there.
Speaker 3: And if we can actually put up a four on this.
Speaker 6: You heard from Kodak Blacks lawyer, and you heard it
Speaker 6: from a lot of different people. Wesley's you know people
Speaker 6: we've mentioned Wesley Snipes on the show yesterday who went
Speaker 6: to jail for not paying taxes, but here's Kodak Blacks
Speaker 6: lawyer saying, look, you commit this crime, you're looking at
Speaker 6: several years in jail, in federal prison.
Speaker 3: Like that's it is extremely unusual.
Speaker 6: Now, I think that on the left, at least now
Speaker 6: maybe among the kind of democratic party, there's a lot
Speaker 6: of resistance to seeing Hunter go to jail. I think
Speaker 6: on the left, if you locked Hunter Biden up for
Speaker 6: a gun charge or for foreign agent, you know, not
Speaker 6: registering as a foreign agent. Okay, good, you got him,
Speaker 6: try it, try lock him up.
Speaker 4: The real life is not our boy, not the establishment democrat. Yes, yes,
Speaker 4: of course, this is actually from the federalists. In twenty
Speaker 4: twenty one, fewer than one percent of cases filed by
Speaker 4: US attorneys and federal court resulted in the kind of
Speaker 4: pre trial diversion offered to Hunters. So fewer than one
Speaker 4: percent of cases. This is from Brett Tolman. He says,
Speaker 4: if Hunters were a typical case, we would have expected
Speaker 4: a much more aggressive deo j response. Mixing illegal drugs
Speaker 4: and firearms is usually a quick trip to the land
Speaker 4: of five or seven year mandatory minimum sentences. And again,
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden is looking at probation essentially.
Speaker 6: And I think the real story is that normally they
Speaker 6: wouldn't have prosecuted it at all. They're only going after this,
Speaker 6: They're only going after Kodak because.
Speaker 3: It's like a famous rapper.
Speaker 6: And if Biden hadn't run for president in twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: they probably never looked at this even at all, and
Speaker 6: so then when they finally had to look at it,
Speaker 6: they're so reluctant to bring charges that they get this thing,
Speaker 6: like you said, less than one percent. Just absolutely appalling
Speaker 6: for anybody who thinks that there's kind of equal protection
Speaker 6: under the laws. Joe Biden, who has consistently said my
Speaker 6: son has done nothing wrong.
Speaker 5: Which is now at odds with Hunter saying.
Speaker 6: It felt like a lie, so brazen that it wasn't
Speaker 6: a lie. It's like, it's like we have photos of
Speaker 6: him doing things wrong all the time. And so for
Speaker 6: you then say he wrote about it in his book,
Speaker 6: for you to tell us to our faces that he
Speaker 6: did nothing wrong, we know that you're either completely delusional
Speaker 6: or you're just saying this because it's because your son. Anyway,
Speaker 6: he was asked about it at an event about artificial
Speaker 6: intelligence yesterday, and here here's what he said, real quickly
Speaker 6: to day two.
Speaker 5: I'm very proud of my song.
Speaker 3: Donald Trump had a slightly different reaction. We can put
Speaker 3: up a three.
Speaker 6: Here's the Trump's truth social mostly all caps. The Hunter
Speaker 6: Joe Biden settlement is a massive cover up and full
Speaker 6: scale election interference scam in quotes the likes of which
Speaker 6: has never been seen in our country before, a quote
Speaker 6: traffic ticket, and Joe is all cleaned up and ready
Speaker 6: to go into the twenty twenty four presidential election. And
Speaker 6: this as crooked DOJ state and city prosecutors, Marxists and
Speaker 6: communists all hit me from all sides and angels with bull.
Speaker 4: Angels with bull he means angles with bullshit, but he
Speaker 4: said angels with.
Speaker 6: Bulls all sides and angles with bull bleep. I see
Speaker 6: America great again.
Speaker 4: I would listen to like asmr Ryan Grim reading Trump
Speaker 4: social media boks.
Speaker 6: I just accepted truth socials cookies. I wonder what I
Speaker 6: don't wonder what weird virus. I'm going to wind up
Speaker 6: on my luck on my laptop here. I mean, this
Speaker 6: is bonker stuff. But he's not wrong that this is
Speaker 6: not the kind of proportionate response a Department of Justice
Speaker 6: is normally going to give to a defendant, but like Trump.
Speaker 4: Also wants two tiers of justice for I'm sure Jared
Speaker 4: Kushner and I'm sure himself in different cases and people
Speaker 4: associated with him in different cases. And by the way,
Speaker 4: there are two tiers of justice in the sense that
Speaker 4: we've talked about this last week. There are charges in
Speaker 4: you know, violations of the Espionage Act that Donald Trump
Speaker 4: is being hit with that you could technically also probably
Speaker 4: get Joe Biden with. Whether the case would have been
Speaker 4: brought without the obstruction is another question. So in that sense, yes,
Speaker 4: sometimes there are two tiers of justice. The entire Russia
Speaker 4: collusion narrative.
Speaker 5: Was spun up. The pis a warrant.
Speaker 4: The lack of punishment for people, you know, you basically
Speaker 4: just have Kevin Klinsmith getting in trouble. But that's sure,
Speaker 4: we can all agree that's wrong. But that doesn't mean
Speaker 4: that people in positions of power who are hit with
Speaker 4: partisan justice really want there to be one.
Speaker 5: Tier of just right.
Speaker 3: Everybody wants there to be two tiers.
Speaker 6: They just disagree on who belongs in which tier, and
Speaker 6: they all agree that they don't belong in jail.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, yeah, that's true. The New York Posts I
Speaker 4: think raised a good question. They actually wrote an editorial
Speaker 4: and they raised a question about the timing. So they say, again,
Speaker 4: this investigation began back in twenty eighteen, and we know the.
Speaker 5: Fed soon had enough evidence to convict them.
Speaker 4: The chargers finally brought perhaps before and surely soon after
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty election. Are we supposed to believe they
Speaker 4: held off so long because they were looking into more
Speaker 4: consequential crimes, only to suddenly decide that they couldn't prove
Speaker 4: anything else. I think this coming a week after the
Speaker 4: Trump charges down from Jack Smith, it is you know,
Speaker 4: you were in the new election cycle.
Speaker 5: It eerily.
Speaker 4: Jonathan Turley predicted last August, so August of twenty twenty
Speaker 4: two that the Hunter Biden chargers would end in quote
Speaker 4: controlled demolition.
Speaker 5: That's exactly what this feels saying.
Speaker 6: What's so frustrating is that their added statement that the
Speaker 6: investigation remains ongoing, because I don't really believe that it's ongoing.
Speaker 3: If it were ongoing, great, can you know, continue.
Speaker 6: To prosecute because there's a lot of stuff, like you
Speaker 6: said the Cafe Milano meeting, like check that one out.
Speaker 3: Did he arranged for that? If he did?
Speaker 6: If you can prove it foreign Agent Registration Act violation.
Speaker 6: But by saying that the investigation is still ongoing, what
Speaker 6: it allows them to do is not comment on that
Speaker 6: ten twenty three, that Comer is all Comber and Grass
Speaker 6: are all fired up about, and anything else that involves
Speaker 6: the case, well, we can't comment because.
Speaker 3: Ongoing investigation. What can I do?
Speaker 4: Yeah, And on that note, that's another interesting point because
Speaker 4: it's this entire, this entire question about Joe Biden twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four election, Hunter Biden, the controlled demolition question, Like
Speaker 4: all of this.
Speaker 5: Is not improving anybody's.
Speaker 4: Faith in our institutions, in our law enforcement, in the FBI.
Speaker 4: And so now you have the very obvious controlled demolition
Speaker 4: of Hunter Biden and the real question over and over again,
Speaker 4: and Republicans that are sort of thirsty for, you know,
Speaker 4: the bloodlust for the Biden family. They're not even great
Speaker 4: at doing this themselves. This is about Joe Biden at
Speaker 4: the end of the day. And right now all we're
Speaker 4: talking about is Hunter Biden. And that's fine because there's
Speaker 4: a good reason to talk about Hunter Biden. But the
Speaker 4: Cafe Milano meeting, all of these different things that tend
Speaker 4: for the big guy that's about the sitting president of
Speaker 4: the United States, and all of that is first.
Speaker 5: And foot and should be first and foremost on our mind.
Speaker 4: But Hunter is such an easy side show because we
Speaker 4: have the pictures from the laptop, and it's much easier
Speaker 4: for the media to talk about Hunter Biden and for
Speaker 4: Joe Biden to say he's proud of his.
Speaker 5: Son and that's fine, he's a father.
Speaker 4: Then actually focusing on what the sitting president of the United.
Speaker 5: States might have been doing, it's a sideshow.
Speaker 6: I think the silver lining from all this, though, is
Speaker 6: that all of the existential angst of an anxiety of
Speaker 6: going through this process is going to help Hunter produce
Speaker 6: some of the greatest artwork that he's made in his career.
Speaker 5: Maybe, so, let's hope.
Speaker 6: And then again, those prints will be available for sale
Speaker 6: for the low price of seventy five thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: We should get one for the seven.
Speaker 6: We're to a fundraiser from the audience. We're we try
Speaker 6: to raise seventy five thousand dollars so that we can
Speaker 6: get at least one Hunter print.
Speaker 5: And maybe some access to Ukrainian oligarchs.
Speaker 6: That's right, Oh, it'll pay for itself many times over.
Speaker 3: Well, it's help absolutely.
Speaker 4: Let's move on to his new comments made by former
Speaker 4: President Barack Obama, who is on obviously the podcast circuit
Speaker 4: right now, because what else.
Speaker 5: Do you do?
Speaker 3: Which is slaying in Netflix? His Netflix documentary?
Speaker 4: I don't even know, so he's obviously not doing a
Speaker 4: good enough job pedaling it.
Speaker 3: Why isn't he here?
Speaker 5: He can't be far. He must be in DC. He's
Speaker 5: certainly close.
Speaker 3: I'm sure he's doing by zoom.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well that's well, I guess yeah, you're probably right.
Speaker 4: So on that note, speaking of which, if he is
Speaker 4: doing it by zoom, his audio is fantastic. Let's listen
Speaker 4: to this sound by a former president Barack Obama on
Speaker 4: David Axterrod's podcast.
Speaker 9: The crisis in democracy that you're seeing not just in
Speaker 9: the United States but around the world is not solely
Speaker 9: an issue of economics, but it is partially. These huge
Speaker 9: economic disruptions. The speed with which wealth got concentrated, the
Speaker 9: speed with which people's lives were disrupted, made people worried
Speaker 9: and scared. And when people are worried and scared about
Speaker 9: not just their future but their kids' futures, then the
Speaker 9: appeal of right wing populism, the appeal of sort of
Speaker 9: a more cynical view of the social order, and it's
Speaker 9: dog eat dog, and you've got to kind of choose
Speaker 9: up your tribe because it's a zero sum game. All
Speaker 9: that stuff accelerates and expresses itself in our politics.
Speaker 4: Okay, So he just said right wing populism there by
Speaker 4: the way, which is really interesting from the man who
Speaker 4: when he was leaving office his own.
Speaker 5: Party rigged a primary.
Speaker 4: And still you have the surge of a populist like
Speaker 4: Bernie Sanders that is able to nip at the heels
Speaker 4: of the former Secretary of State, former first Lady who
Speaker 4: has basically the entire apparatus of the party behind her.
Speaker 4: And he's just talking there about the concentration of wealth
Speaker 4: accelerating a rise of right wing as he says, populism,
Speaker 4: and not looking at the other side of the coin
Speaker 4: in that analysis at all, which I actually think is
Speaker 4: pretty interesting.
Speaker 6: And what's interesting too is that, and I cover this
Speaker 6: moment in my last book, is that he sounds a
Speaker 6: lot like Elizabeth Warren in of twenty eleven talking to
Speaker 6: Barack Obama.
Speaker 5: Right, So, Occupy Wall Street is happening at that.
Speaker 3: Docum Wall Street.
Speaker 6: He brought her in to set up the Consumer Financial
Speaker 6: Protection Bureau, and then she left to go after it
Speaker 6: was set up to go run for Senate in Massachusetts.
Speaker 6: And so Obama and Warren had kind of an exit interview,
Speaker 6: first time really that she gets some actual time with Obama,
Speaker 6: and she says, basically this to him, that wealth, the
Speaker 6: wealth concentration, wealth got concentrated, the concentration of wealth that
Speaker 6: he's allowing and engineering to happen is going to produce
Speaker 6: an inequality that is itself then going to express itself
Speaker 6: in our politics in the form of right wing popular
Speaker 6: and that's the kind of thing.
Speaker 3: She was saying. And she zeroed in on housing because this.
Speaker 6: Is at the height of the eviction crisis, of foreclosure crisis,
Speaker 6: and that has been the thing that has ripped.
Speaker 3: The fabric of our society, you know, the.
Speaker 6: Most completely, is the inability of people to live that
Speaker 6: American dream. The social contract is always involved being able
Speaker 6: to own a home and grow your wealth through that home,
Speaker 6: and then the American people then, you know, look the
Speaker 6: other way on all of the other terrible things that
Speaker 6: are happening, because that's the thing that is kind of
Speaker 6: the promise in return, you're going to be able to
Speaker 6: retire on that you can pass it down to your
Speaker 6: kids whatever. Now you can't even afford rent. Ten years
Speaker 6: on from her warning after that meeting, and she said,
Speaker 6: you've got to do something policy wise about about where
Speaker 6: this is headed.
Speaker 3: And he's like, I love to hear your ideas are
Speaker 3: out of time here.
Speaker 6: Email me and and we'll talk, you know, and you know,
Speaker 6: my secretary will give you my personal email. As she
Speaker 6: as she leaves, she tells the secretary what he said.
Speaker 6: She's like, yeah, just just email me. I'll make sure
Speaker 6: he gets it. And they basically never talked about that
Speaker 6: ever again.
Speaker 3: But it's so it's.
Speaker 6: Funny to hear him say it now. But I'm curious
Speaker 6: for your take on this, because I think feel like
Speaker 6: you somewhat disagree with what he's saying here. There are
Speaker 6: a lot of Democrats who also disagree and feel like
Speaker 6: he is downplaying the role of kind of racism and
Speaker 6: hostility to immigrants and migrants that fueled right wing populism
Speaker 6: around this time. And I get beat up every time
Speaker 6: I point to, you know, economic cataclysms as producing some
Speaker 6: of these anxieties that, as he says, express themselves in
Speaker 6: our politics.
Speaker 3: So curious where you come down on that.
Speaker 4: I think it's definitely the combination. I think you would
Speaker 4: still have it. Without one, you would still have the other,
Speaker 4: and you would still have.
Speaker 6: I think without without the economic crisis, you'd still have
Speaker 6: right wing populism, and.
Speaker 4: Without the cultural changes you would still have populism, because
Speaker 4: both are pretty severe. I see, because the rapid concentration
Speaker 4: of wealth happened very quickly and especially hit certain era
Speaker 4: is in the Ross Belt, for instance, and Obama actually
Speaker 4: was reacting to that in two thousand and I actually
Speaker 4: thought in this clip he was going to go into
Speaker 4: clinging to guns and religion, one of the most famous
Speaker 4: quotes that he had based the same thing, almost exactly
Speaker 4: the same.
Speaker 3: He's on the same theme, Yeah, almost.
Speaker 5: Exactly the same thing.
Speaker 4: And interestingly enough, he was the other side of that
Speaker 4: coin back in two thousand and eight when he was
Speaker 4: sort of casting aspersions at right wing populism. He was
Speaker 4: doing this populism that was left wing but really more
Speaker 4: palatable to everybody kind of across the board, like a
Speaker 4: very sort of centrist hope and change type populism, talking
Speaker 4: about any of the war things that everyone was in
Speaker 4: agreement with.
Speaker 5: At the time.
Speaker 4: And then on the other side of this, he you
Speaker 4: could just look at the mergers that were allowed to
Speaker 4: happen under his watch that as Matt Stoller I think
Speaker 4: really appropriately points out, this was not just an economic
Speaker 4: disruption to borrow the president's word, this was also cultural disruption.
Speaker 4: So as you have wealth concentrating via these mergers, you
Speaker 4: also have power over speech concentrating, and you create ideological monopolies.
Speaker 4: So both are happening at the same time. You know,
Speaker 4: when you create economic concentration, you're also when you create
Speaker 4: wealth concentration, or you allow it to happen just sort
Speaker 4: of passively, as he says, it just it just happened.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't have had anything to do with that.
Speaker 4: When you do that, you're also concentrating power. And I
Speaker 4: think when I look at the Culture War, for instance,
Speaker 4: those Dear Colleague Letters on Title nine that created basically
Speaker 4: kangaroo courts on college campuses, that were these he I mean,
Speaker 4: those were sparks of the culture War flame.
Speaker 5: That's where you end up hurdling into gamer Gate.
Speaker 4: That's where you end up hurtling into the Dear Colleague
Speaker 4: letters on Title nines that said gender identity would be
Speaker 4: conflated legally with biological sex. And that was just via
Speaker 4: a letter from the Department of Education under Barack Obama,
Speaker 4: that was his policy.
Speaker 5: Kimiopolia at the.
Speaker 4: Time said she was like, that's when I knew that
Speaker 4: Hillary Clinton was losing the election. I saw the Obama
Speaker 4: administration did that.
Speaker 5: Because it's just so divisive.
Speaker 4: There was his immigration policy, where he basically just waived
Speaker 4: a magic wand and used executive powers in a way
Speaker 4: that a lot of people on the left encouraged him
Speaker 4: to that.
Speaker 5: I mean, I would argue, you probably just agree with
Speaker 5: this created de facto open borders.
Speaker 4: The Beer Summit, which was I think a way that
Speaker 4: handled the skip gates, the Henry Lewis Kates thing an
Speaker 4: incredibly divisive way. I think he really fanned the flames
Speaker 4: on a culture.
Speaker 3: Though it's like the Summit bringing people together over beer.
Speaker 5: He didn't have to weigh in on it.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think that's why the entire weighing in
Speaker 3: on right.
Speaker 4: But it wasn't an easy position for him to be in.
Speaker 4: I like, actually was just talking about this yesterday. He
Speaker 4: was in one of the least enviable positions as the
Speaker 4: first black president, and there was never going to be
Speaker 4: an easy way to sort of weigh in on those issues.
Speaker 4: I think a lot of what he did was counter productive,
Speaker 4: But you know, I don't begrudge him.
Speaker 5: I don't.
Speaker 4: I think those pretty difficult position to be in. But
Speaker 4: on a lot of different levels, he fanned the flames
Speaker 4: of both I think wealth concentration and that sort of
Speaker 4: ideological monopolization that came to dominate elite circles by the
Speaker 4: end of his presidency. And you have both Bernie Sanders
Speaker 4: and Donald Trump as a reaction to both of those things.
Speaker 4: You know, Bernie Sanders did not go on Broad City
Speaker 4: like Hillary, but that would be mine takeaway.
Speaker 6: And I don't want to defend Barack Obama, but on
Speaker 6: the on the question of kind of black lives matter
Speaker 6: and racial justice and the way that he interacted with
Speaker 6: that rising energy, I feel like he gets a bump.
Speaker 6: You're giving him a bum rap there in the sense
Speaker 6: that for the first like four or five years of
Speaker 6: his administration. And I was critical of him at the
Speaker 6: time for not saying enough, for being somebody who and
Speaker 6: as he's talked about since, because he was the first
Speaker 6: black president, he felt like he couldn't say things that
Speaker 6: perhaps even Joe Biden would have said. And then some
Speaker 6: things just get to a point where you're just being
Speaker 6: irresponsible if you don't weigh in on it, or or
Speaker 6: you get asked about it.
Speaker 3: And you answer the question like this.
Speaker 6: You know, there was this famous case if people want
Speaker 6: to go back and look it up, where Henry Louis
Speaker 6: Gates as Harvard professor's in Cambridge. He's coming back from
Speaker 6: a trip, He's got his luggage on his porch and
Speaker 6: he locked himself out and the Cambridge police arrest him.
Speaker 6: Which two people like Barack Obama who have been followed through,
Speaker 6: you know, a Macy's for no doing nothing different than
Speaker 6: white people walking through a Macy's. They hear that and
Speaker 6: like enough of this, Like let's let's let's say something
Speaker 6: about this. Maybe we maybe we're at a place where
Speaker 6: we can actually talk about this and move beyond it.
Speaker 6: And a lot of people on the left like ridiculed
Speaker 6: the whole idea of a beer summit like that, it
Speaker 6: didn't even deserve that level of like why are you
Speaker 6: coddling this kind of attitude rather than just denouncing it.
Speaker 6: But yet, and it shows how intractable this stuff is
Speaker 6: that that if it's if it's the case that from
Speaker 6: the right, that was viewed as like, how dare you, like,
Speaker 6: why are you instigating?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 3: Why just just leave just leave well enough alone.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I think so we definitely don't need
Speaker 4: to religate the beer some myself probably.
Speaker 3: That I remember it was the cop got a blue moon.
Speaker 6: I respected that because it's like that's like oftentimes a
Speaker 6: politician who is like trying to be working class but
Speaker 6: really wants a blue moon isn't going to.
Speaker 3: Do It's not gonna put fruit in their beer. But
Speaker 3: you're confident about your your social status and your working
Speaker 3: class status, and give me the blue moons. It's paid
Speaker 3: for by the White House. I'm getting the blue moon. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you have the bud light enjoy you can't have the
Speaker 3: bud light anymore.
Speaker 4: Though I thought, I don't like indulging. I don't think
Speaker 4: that there was I think what we learned, I think
Speaker 4: was that basically there was no racial animus in that situation,
Speaker 4: as entirely understandable as you said for people who have
Speaker 4: been followed through Macy's, Henry Lews Skates or Barack Obama.
Speaker 5: As entirely understandable as that is.
Speaker 4: I think having the commander in chief indulge charges of
Speaker 4: racism for a cop who was just doing his job
Speaker 4: as representative as that actually is that you have sensitivities
Speaker 4: on both sides, from people that were defending the police
Speaker 4: and people who were defending skip Gates. I completely get it,
Speaker 4: but I think elevating that to the level of the
Speaker 4: White House was a telling mistake that Obama made early
Speaker 4: in his presidency. And again I don't envy him at all.
Speaker 4: That was an incredibly difficult position to be in, but
Speaker 4: when I look back on that, I think there was
Speaker 4: sort of indulging the language that has come to be
Speaker 4: really divisive.
Speaker 5: Not an easy thing for him to do, though I
Speaker 5: don't know.
Speaker 3: It just doesn't seem fair to say you just can't
Speaker 3: talk about this that It's like.
Speaker 4: I think the way he talked about on the campaign
Speaker 4: in two thousand and eight was really unifying, and then
Speaker 4: I think something shifted after he was in office and
Speaker 4: he was being forced to respond to cultural things that
Speaker 4: were happening the people that he wasn't in charge of
Speaker 4: in the media, for instance, who spread abject lies about
Speaker 4: what happened in Ferguson for a really long time. He
Speaker 4: was then forced to grapple with that in a way
Speaker 4: that was unfair to him, But I think he made
Speaker 4: some tactical errors that did inflame tensions.
Speaker 6: It's also the case that the country is often willing
Speaker 6: to speak about kind of racial harmony in general terms,
Speaker 6: but then when it gets to specifics, everyone's like, huh, yeah,
Speaker 6: I'm not so sure about in this case, but generally speaking.
Speaker 6: I was listening to that actle Rod interview, and one
Speaker 6: thing that struck me about it was they start the
Speaker 6: conversation going back over his two thousand and four convention
Speaker 6: speech with the famous lines, you know, there's no liberal
Speaker 6: or American conservative America, or no red states and blue states.
Speaker 3: There's the United Dates we all worship blah bla blah.
Speaker 6: Today on the left, you would get canceled for yes,
Speaker 6: for saying that. To say that there's no white American,
Speaker 6: no black American, no brown America, no like that, that
Speaker 6: would be erasing identities.
Speaker 3: And it reminded me.
Speaker 6: Of how close to the nineties Obama's kind of rise was,
Speaker 6: Like Obama's a very is a creature of the nineties,
Speaker 6: which very much did have that attitude. This two thousand
Speaker 6: and four that he's given his speech. But you wouldn't
Speaker 6: have a presidential candidate talk that way on the Democratic
Speaker 6: side anymore. Now, that would be much more kind of
Speaker 6: Republican rhetoric, cynically, kind of weaponizing that Martin Luther King
Speaker 6: same as Martin Luther King line.
Speaker 4: Yes, well, Martin Luther King has some lines that would
Speaker 4: get him canceled from the left as.
Speaker 6: Well, and probably probably also had some lines that gotten killed. Yes,
Speaker 6: But anyway, Supreme Court, or do we have Trump that.
Speaker 4: We've got Trump next, because we have to keep talking
Speaker 4: about Trump.
Speaker 5: Otherwise we as people in the media, we shriple up
Speaker 5: and die. We don't get our Trump picks.
Speaker 4: Speaking of which, Donald Trump has a court date August August,
Speaker 4: Judge Eileen Cannon, I'm mean from the Washington Examiner.
Speaker 5: Right now, we can put that element up on the screen.
Speaker 5: Set the date.
Speaker 4: The first court date for the former presidents classified documents
Speaker 4: trial a little over a week before the first GOP
Speaker 4: primary debate. It's in the US District Court for the
Speaker 4: Southern District of Florida. That is going to begin on
Speaker 4: August fourteenth, twenty twenty three, per a court filing that
Speaker 4: hit on Tuesday. She said, in the filing that the
Speaker 4: deadline for both parties to submit pre trial motions and
Speaker 4: motions in le mean, am I saying my Latin correctly,
Speaker 4: That means in the beginning is July twenty fourth, twenty
Speaker 4: twenty three. Now, CBS News makes a really good point
Speaker 4: and says, quote that date is likely to change as
Speaker 4: Trump's legal team files requests with the court that could
Speaker 4: result in the trials. So that July twenty fourth pre
Speaker 4: trial motion deadline is really important because they are expected
Speaker 4: to file before that. There's expected a file motion before that,
Speaker 4: which would change the date from that week before the
Speaker 4: first debate. So the trial date is August fourteenth. This
Speaker 4: is actually it sounds counterintuitive, but this is a if
Speaker 4: you're Donald Trump, this is a blessing going into the
Speaker 4: first debate.
Speaker 5: This is such a gift.
Speaker 4: You're like, I'm going to be in court a week
Speaker 4: before the first debate.
Speaker 5: Bring it on.
Speaker 4: That puts me front and center in the conversation. Nobody
Speaker 4: else will be able to get any oxygen. And I
Speaker 4: am going to be once again the avatar of normal Americans.
Speaker 4: As he says, They're not coming after me, I'm just
Speaker 4: they're coming after you.
Speaker 5: I'm just in the.
Speaker 4: Way what gives them a better platform to make that
Speaker 4: message then coming out of court and into the debate.
Speaker 4: But it actually looks like that debate that date before
Speaker 4: the debate probably won't happen because they'll probably be submiting
Speaker 4: pretrial motions.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 6: And also, the process for these cases is first of all,
Speaker 6: wildly unconstitutional but has never been tested at the Supreme
Speaker 6: Court because it is so slanted against defendants that defendants
Speaker 6: always take plea deals in these situations. But basically, because
Speaker 6: there are classified documents involved, the jury is restricted on
Speaker 6: what it's able to see, even though the jury has
Speaker 6: to then make its decision based on what it's not
Speaker 6: able to see. And so the process to allow attorneys
Speaker 6: to view the documents, to allow the judge to see
Speaker 6: the documents to then write their briefs from secure areas
Speaker 6: ends up adding exponential complications to this process, which is
Speaker 6: another reason that this could get punted well into the future,
Speaker 6: particularly since this judge, Judge Cannon, doesn't have much experience
Speaker 6: doing trials period I think like five days or something
Speaker 6: of criminal like trials. Right, Trump appointing at the very
Speaker 6: end of his term, so therefore has very little experience
Speaker 6: with criminal trials and none with these kinds of trials.
Speaker 4: So Donald Trump has been The foctions has been airing
Speaker 4: in two parts. Donald Trump's interview with Brett Baerr. He
Speaker 4: sat down with Brett Bearer for a pretty long interview
Speaker 4: and some new clips came out last night. Hard to
Speaker 4: pick from the best, it really is, because one we're
Speaker 4: going to play in a minute is almost unbelievable.
Speaker 3: But oh, the death penalty for the drug dealers. That's
Speaker 3: a fun one, right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he weighs in on Alice Marie Johnson and Brett
Speaker 4: Baarer pushes him a little bit. But let's start with
Speaker 4: Donald Trump being pushed on the nickname d sanctimonious.
Speaker 5: You can roll that.
Speaker 8: Because he has bet apr than other governors. But other
Speaker 8: governors did a better job than run to Sanctimonious. So look,
Speaker 8: why did you use that name? Because I got him
Speaker 8: elected and I thought it was very disloyal, And he said, yes,
Speaker 8: I got him past two racist, I got him past
Speaker 8: the primary because he was losing by thirty points or more.
Speaker 5: So, he's a soyalty question. Yeah, I'm a big loyalist.
Speaker 8: Yes, some people say, some people right here in this
Speaker 8: room have told me, sure, don't worry about loyalty. Loyalty
Speaker 8: doesn't mean anything in politics. I said to me, it does.
Speaker 5: I got the guy elected.
Speaker 8: He came to see me, let's say, weeping, because he
Speaker 8: was dead.
Speaker 5: He was getting out of the race.
Speaker 8: He was looking for jobs already, probably at law firms
Speaker 8: or wherever he's going to look. He was totally dead.
Speaker 8: He ran a horrible campaign. He was running against Adam Putnam,
Speaker 8: the Agriculture commissioner, who was running for that position for
Speaker 8: eight years. Putnham at thirty eight million dollars. Ron had
Speaker 8: nothing zero. Putnam was at forty percent. Ron was at
Speaker 8: three percent. It was like a white pant. The election
Speaker 8: was going to be very soon. I said, you're dead.
Speaker 8: If George Washington endorsed you, you're not going to win.
Speaker 8: He said, sir, if you endorse me, I think I
Speaker 8: could win. And he fought for me, along with Jim
Speaker 8: Jordan and hundreds of other people. In all fairness, he
Speaker 8: was fine, but he fought. But I would see him
Speaker 8: everyone sort of fighting on the impeachment oaks. So I
Speaker 8: didn't know Adam Putnam, so I said, let's give it
Speaker 8: a shot. I endorsed him, and it was like a
Speaker 8: bomb went off. As soon as I endorsed him. He
Speaker 8: won the primary.
Speaker 7: It was over.
Speaker 8: He won by a landslide. But then I had him
Speaker 8: to get him past gilm who is a rock star.
Speaker 8: He was going to be the next president of the
Speaker 8: United States. He was the biggest guy in the party.
Speaker 8: Him and female very Stacy Abrams. Right, these are the
Speaker 8: two hottest politicians and the Democrat Party. And Ron said,
Speaker 8: there's no way I can beat him. I said, you're
Speaker 8: going to beat him. I did three rallies.
Speaker 3: God bless you, thank you so much.
Speaker 8: So we had big, messive rallies for three of them.
Speaker 8: I said, you're gonna win. He ended up winning. He
Speaker 8: ended up winning by and the three years later they
Speaker 8: say to him, then, I didn't do it.
Speaker 3: I didn't know him that well three years later, but
Speaker 3: I got him elected.
Speaker 8: But I did that with other people too. But you
Speaker 8: know what, just out of respect, So I said, three
Speaker 8: years later, they asked him, are you going to run
Speaker 8: against the president? He said, I have no comment.
Speaker 5: I said, no comment. No comment means he's going to run.
Speaker 5: I said, this guy's gonna run.
Speaker 4: So Donald Trump is actually one hundred percent accurate in
Speaker 4: saying that his endorsement was crucial to Ronda Santas and.
Speaker 3: Be off on the numbers slightly, but maybe slightly.
Speaker 4: But Ron de Santis knows that because he ran ads
Speaker 4: at the time emphasizing over and over again how close
Speaker 4: he was and how Maggie he was. Basically, there's that
Speaker 4: famous out of him with his kids in his living room.
Speaker 5: Where isn't the.
Speaker 3: Kid building a wall with blocks building a wall?
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's very clearly Ron de Santas endorsing the argument
Speaker 4: that Donald Trump just made about the Trump endorsement being
Speaker 4: absolutely critical. The loyalty part is really interesting because I
Speaker 4: would say Trump doesn't hold up his end.
Speaker 5: Of the bargain.
Speaker 4: I'm a loyalty question of people in Republican politics learned
Speaker 4: that lesson the hard way that when Donald Trump says
Speaker 4: loyalty is really important to him, he does think it's
Speaker 4: important to him. I think very clearly Donald Trump thinks
Speaker 4: loyalty is important to him, but it seems like a
Speaker 4: one way street when you look back on his history
Speaker 4: with certain advisors.
Speaker 5: What did you make of that clib.
Speaker 6: One quick ironic interlude here, which is that the DeSantis
Speaker 6: and Gillham election one of the great hingch points in
Speaker 6: American politics because this came down to just thirty thousand votes,
Speaker 6: like an extremely close race. The only reason that DeSantis
Speaker 6: ends up winning this election is because of FBI election interference.
Speaker 6: There's your iron there's your irony, and where's Trump and
Speaker 6: denouncing this. FBI came in and leaked that there's an
Speaker 6: investigation into Tallahassee, but that it was focusing on Gilham
Speaker 6: because Gillam got some Hamilton tickets through his brother, and
Speaker 6: that Gilliam said he thought his brother had reimbursed the
Speaker 6: person that he got the Hamilton tickets from, but apparently
Speaker 6: his brother did not or cousin or whoever did not reimburse,
Speaker 6: so they went to Hamilton and they didn't pay for
Speaker 6: their tickets.
Speaker 3: And this became a gigantic.
Speaker 6: Scandal in like a week or two before the election,
Speaker 6: and you can and you can see his momentum kind
Speaker 6: of dampen, and you can imagine that the tiny margin
Speaker 6: point four percent that Desanta's won by was made up
Speaker 6: entirely by the FBI creeping in and flipping that election
Speaker 6: to the Santa. Now later, Gilim has had a lot
Speaker 6: of personal problems.
Speaker 3: We wish, we wish him well, and those you can google. Those,
Speaker 3: we don't. We don't need to get you need to
Speaker 3: get into all that.
Speaker 6: But Trump is right that he was next president of
Speaker 6: the United States level level rock star, and that if
Speaker 6: not for that uh last minute FBI election interference, he
Speaker 6: probably wins. But broadly speaking, yeah, Trump is just he's
Speaker 6: just shocked that somebody would challenge him.
Speaker 3: How dare he right?
Speaker 4: Well, and it's not even so much a lack of
Speaker 4: loyalty as it is in politics. People obviously have different
Speaker 4: reasons for I mean, running against someone I guess.
Speaker 5: Is a breach of loyalty.
Speaker 4: But people believe in their own careers and their own missions,
Speaker 4: and that's obviously baked into politics, and Trump is sort
Speaker 4: of rejecting that when it comes to him. Interesting enough,
Speaker 4: Now this next clip we teased it.
Speaker 5: You're going to enjoy it.
Speaker 3: It's wild, it's wild. So this is so just to
Speaker 3: set this up, because the.
Speaker 6: Whole exchange with between Bear and Trump on the question
Speaker 6: of capital punishment for drug dealers is worth watching.
Speaker 3: It's way too long to play the entire thing. So
Speaker 3: to set it up, Bear is they're into it a
Speaker 3: little bit.
Speaker 6: Trump earlier had been talking about Alex Johnson, who he
Speaker 6: loves to bring up because, you know, helping get her free.
Speaker 6: She was facing a fifty year sentence for drug dealing.
Speaker 4: Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner, UNKA Trump all team up, get
Speaker 4: the First Step Back.
Speaker 3: First Step Act.
Speaker 6: And so it's this weird exchange between Baron Trump where
Speaker 6: Bear is pointing out to him that he's getting criticized
Speaker 6: from the right for being too soft on criminal justice
Speaker 6: because of the First Step Act. Well, meanwhile, he's sitting
Speaker 6: there calling for the people that he freed to be executed.
Speaker 6: And so let's see how he sorts this out in
Speaker 6: his mind.
Speaker 5: So even Al Shotson in that ad, she can't do it.
Speaker 8: Okay, by the way, if that was there, no, she
Speaker 8: wouldn't be killed. It would start as of now, so
Speaker 8: you wouldn't go.
Speaker 5: To the head.
Speaker 8: But your policy, no, I'm starting now. Yeah, But she
Speaker 8: wouldn't have done it if it was death penalty. In
Speaker 8: other words, if it was death penalty, she wouldn't have
Speaker 8: been on that phone call. She wouldn't have been a dealer. Now,
Speaker 8: she wasn't much of a dealer because she was sort
Speaker 8: of like I mean, honestly, she got treated terribly she
Speaker 8: was treated. She was treated sort of like I get treated,
Speaker 8: but Bret, she was treated very unfairly. But she got
Speaker 8: forty eight years and that was Ben. Now today, if
Speaker 8: I did what I say that you have to do,
Speaker 8: and again, I'm not sure the country is ready for it.
Speaker 8: You know, China was hugely one hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 8: China was taken over by much lesser countries because they
Speaker 8: were all drugged out on the opium and.
Speaker 5: All the problems Communist regime. They well, they drove the hammer.
Speaker 8: They were all drugged out and they were totally they
Speaker 8: were a disaster. They were taken over by other smaller countries,
Speaker 8: large sections of China, and then things happened and they
Speaker 8: had strong leadership and they put in the death penalty
Speaker 8: and they've become they've been able to build. But if
Speaker 8: you speak to the president, he will tell you without
Speaker 8: the death penalty, we would have a non functioning country.
Speaker 6: So the earlier part is wild, where he's talking about
Speaker 6: capital punts for the drug dealers and Brett bears like
Speaker 6: even Alice Johns.
Speaker 3: He's like hmm.
Speaker 6: He starts to think like they said, well, she wouldn't
Speaker 6: because she'd be so scared of me that she wouldn't
Speaker 6: deal the drugs in the first place. And then as
Speaker 6: you see, he transitions into the most praise that anyone
Speaker 6: has given Chairman Mao from either party since the founding
Speaker 6: of the Chinese Communist Party.
Speaker 3: I would suspect, say what you will about Mao.
Speaker 5: He had control, he did, he.
Speaker 3: Did have controls.
Speaker 5: Basically, yeah.
Speaker 6: And it's funny because she she uses this phrase change
Speaker 6: is not seen in one hundred years, changed in one
Speaker 6: hundred hundred and fifty years. And what he is saying there,
Speaker 6: what she has pointed to the exact same thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, that that China.
Speaker 6: Was getting beaten down by the by the world stage,
Speaker 6: pieces is getting taken by Japan, and this.
Speaker 5: That, and then everyone's high.
Speaker 6: Everyone's high because because the British forced opium onto the population,
Speaker 6: and when the Chinese resisted it, the British went to
Speaker 6: war Low opium war to force them to continue to
Speaker 6: buy opium to fund the kind of British imperialism, British colonialism.
Speaker 6: And so then Mao takes over and they become they
Speaker 6: you know, they return to the place and they're on
Speaker 6: their way to return to the place that they feel
Speaker 6: like they've always belonged on the stage. So to hear
Speaker 6: Trump kind of celebrating that all the way through and
Speaker 6: linking it to the death penalty for drug use just
Speaker 6: kind of wild. And so I'm curious. On the Republican side,
Speaker 6: we're what eight years into Trump on the national political stage,
Speaker 6: so we're used to this sort of stuff, but this
Speaker 6: is whiplash of kind of an even greater degree. Does
Speaker 6: or does it not matter?
Speaker 3: How does it?
Speaker 6: Does it matter that he's on the one hand defending
Speaker 6: the First Step Act and on the other hand saying
Speaker 6: that maybe if the country's ready for it, but they're
Speaker 6: probably not ready for it, but if they are, maybe
Speaker 6: we should execute drug dealers.
Speaker 5: I think it matters only on the margins.
Speaker 4: So I think there's a chance that seeing Donald Trump
Speaker 4: look so unfamiliar with his own legislation and touting Alice
Speaker 4: Johnson's story and Brett Bair, who I think conducted a
Speaker 4: great interview pushing back and saying she was running a
Speaker 4: cocaine ring essentially, and that doesn't reflect on my stance
Speaker 4: about her sentence, But that's what Donald Trump is being
Speaker 4: confronted with, right, and that might not have been what
Speaker 4: Jared was telling him but or what Kim Kardashian was
Speaker 4: telling him, but by his own sort of standards of
Speaker 4: death penalty or not. It just made him look like
Speaker 4: he lacked leadership skills because he didn't He wasn't even
Speaker 4: familiar with his own laws and how they would be applied.
Speaker 4: And then got you know, really, and that's when people
Speaker 4: do interviews with Donald Trump that aren't policy focused.
Speaker 5: It's such a disservice to.
Speaker 4: The public because you can really learn so much about
Speaker 4: Donald Trump when you ask him specific questions about policies.
Speaker 4: And that's what Brett Bair does in this interview, like
Speaker 4: I think really gets to the bottom of the way
Speaker 4: Trump sees drug policy, for instance, and that's very useful.
Speaker 4: The DeSantis team definitely thinks that the First Step Act
Speaker 4: is of vulnerability for Donald Trump. Now I believe Desanta
Speaker 4: has actually voted for the First Step Act he was
Speaker 4: still in Congress.
Speaker 5: But because Donald Trump.
Speaker 4: Made a big deal of it, and did you know,
Speaker 4: head Kim Kardashian there and has touted it for a
Speaker 4: long time and was really the person who is his administration.
Speaker 4: You know, shepherded this through Congress. Because crime has become
Speaker 4: a really huge hot topic for Republican voters. They believe
Speaker 4: this is a vulnerability for Donald Trump that if they
Speaker 4: can get him to talk about the First Step back,
Speaker 4: this is Pedro Gonzalez talking about this is someone who
Speaker 4: is he's with the Claremont Institute, I believe, and he says, quote,
Speaker 4: this is someone Trump who has no idea how government
Speaker 4: cannot accept the fact that he made mistakes.
Speaker 5: And if Trump cannot admit fall on.
Speaker 4: Something like the First Step Act, he is completely incapable
Speaker 4: of leading. And so Trump critics see the First Step
Speaker 4: Act in particular as vulnerability. I would say expect it
Speaker 4: to come up more often during the primaries.
Speaker 6: Right, and because it freed what a thousand, it barely
Speaker 6: freed anybody. Like the frustration among criminal justice reformers was
Speaker 6: that all of the energy that went into passing this
Speaker 6: act could have just been spent on commuting sentences of
Speaker 6: individual people one by one, because it freed so many people.
Speaker 6: But it sounds like that somebody who got freed was
Speaker 6: in the Latin Kings or something and went on and
Speaker 6: committed a crime, killed somebody in a bar.
Speaker 3: But he had he had been in for drugs.
Speaker 6: Because like, if you free several thousand people from prison statistically,
Speaker 6: Statistically like some out of thousands of people, some people
Speaker 6: are going to commit crimes in the future, whether they
Speaker 6: were in prison before or not. If they were in prison,
Speaker 6: they're probably slightly more likely to commit crimes, not necessarily
Speaker 6: because they are criminals, but because they have just spent
Speaker 6: years in an institution surrounded by criminals. And so yeah,
Speaker 6: so I guess you're going to see like Willie Horton's
Speaker 6: style stuff of like, look, individual crime happened the criminal
Speaker 6: was in jail, wouldn't have happened if he was still
Speaker 6: in jail. Therefore Trump is responsible for this like that
Speaker 6: that'll kind of be the argument.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so here's Pere should he's with the Charlomagne Institute
Speaker 4: and Chronicles magazine, not Clermont, but he said he brings
Speaker 4: up this old Tucker Carlson report. In twenty nineteen. Of
Speaker 4: the twenty two one hundred roughly inmates twenty two hundred
Speaker 4: and forty three inmates released under for as Step, only
Speaker 4: nine hundred and sixty were incarcerated for drug related offenses.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, four hundred ninety six were in
Speaker 4: prison for weapons and explosive related crimes. Two hundred and
Speaker 4: thirty nine for sex offenses, one seventy eight for fraud,
Speaker 4: bribery and extortion, one hundred and eighteen for burglary, larcenary larceny,
Speaker 4: and one hundred and six for robbery. According to the data,
Speaker 4: another fifty nine were imprisoned over homicide aggravated assault, forty
Speaker 4: six for immigration related defenses, nine for counterfeiting embezzlement, and.
Speaker 5: Two for national security reasons.
Speaker 4: So that is again like expect to hear more of that,
Speaker 4: for sure, because I think Trump opponents see that in
Speaker 4: particular as crime has risen in some cities unevenly of course,
Speaker 4: but as that has happened, and as you have had
Speaker 4: you know, the sort of left wing prosecutors respond to
Speaker 4: it in a way that you see maybe a cause
Speaker 4: and effect in places like San Francisco and the pivot
Speaker 4: from London breed. That's where folks that are running against
Speaker 4: Donald Trump, I think see a.
Speaker 6: Real soft spot, and he thinks he can harden that
Speaker 6: up by saying, well, kill him.
Speaker 3: I'm just going to kill them all.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh.
Speaker 6: By the way, I forgot to mention, at the very
Speaker 6: top of the show in Fairfax, they went after the
Speaker 6: reformist prosecutor and lost. So another case of the media
Speaker 6: kind of blaming criminal justice reformer prosecutors for you know,
Speaker 6: people being anxious about crime and then voters going to
Speaker 6: the polls and reelecting those very same people in blue areas.
Speaker 4: Exactly in blue areas. It's not always the golden ticket
Speaker 4: that I think people on the right believe it to be,
Speaker 4: depending on the location and depending on the messaging. Obviously,
Speaker 4: speaking of crime, let's move on to the news about
Speaker 4: Andrew Oh.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, Supreme Court Court.
Speaker 4: We're going to get to crime and entertain in just
Speaker 4: a moment. But the Supreme Court as.
Speaker 5: Riots then on a crime spree.
Speaker 4: From a conservative perspective, this is why it Ryan says
Speaker 4: crime spree. There are a lot of decisions that could
Speaker 4: be coming out of the Supreme Court basically the next week,
Speaker 4: on student loan debt, on the Chevron doctrine, which is
Speaker 4: something you'll hear tossed about in beltway circles or ivory towers,
Speaker 4: but is hugely consequential for the executive branch, and on
Speaker 4: affirmative action. So when Supreme Court decisions from this last
Speaker 4: term are announced in the coming days, this is a
Speaker 4: hugely consequential moment for people, obviously who have outstanding student
Speaker 4: loan debt. It will be a big deal for the
Speaker 4: executive branch and probably a very big deal for people
Speaker 4: in college admissions offices and students around the country.
Speaker 5: Start with student loan debt. We can put up the
Speaker 5: tear sheets.
Speaker 3: C one.
Speaker 4: This is from CBS News. The finances of about forty
Speaker 4: million Americans with college loans are hanging in the balance
Speaker 4: as borrowers await the Supreme Court's ruling on the legality
Speaker 4: of President Biden's plan to forgive up to twenty thousand
Speaker 4: dollars in student loan debt. Borrowers could face a double
Speaker 4: whammy the summer Supreme Court rules against the debt forgiveness plan.
Speaker 4: As the Court's decision is likely to land just before
Speaker 4: the pause on debt repayment lifts in September, the Court
Speaker 4: is scheduled to release its next decisions on Thursday morning.
Speaker 4: In the worst case scenario, CBS continues, borrowers will face
Speaker 4: restarting their loan payments in September without any debt release.
Speaker 4: This is being challenged in a couple of different ways.
Speaker 4: And you'll remember back when Oral arguments happened in the winter.
Speaker 4: The Supreme Court was very hostile to what the Biden
Speaker 4: administration did. As far as you can read the tea
Speaker 4: leaves from the questionings in the hearing, it was pretty favorable.
Speaker 5: It seemed to be.
Speaker 4: Pretty unfavorable to the Biden administration. But they're being challenged
Speaker 4: on basically this question of you're using an emergency declaration
Speaker 4: to pass the student debt forgiveness and to sort of
Speaker 4: waive the wan and say it was going away. And
Speaker 4: you have states Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
Speaker 4: You have a lawsuit from the Job Creators Network Foundation
Speaker 4: or Conservative group. They're saying basically this was illegal, this
Speaker 4: was Actura constitutional, and those Republican states were saying it
Speaker 4: was a financial setback for them because you're going to
Speaker 4: get quota reduction in business. This from CNBC among the
Speaker 4: companies that service federal student loan debts in their states,
Speaker 4: So that would be, for instance, the Missouri Higher Education
Speaker 4: Loan Authority couldn't meet its financial obligations to the state,
Speaker 4: is the argument because of that decreased revenue.
Speaker 5: And there's also a question of standing that.
Speaker 3: Could hurt as related to that right.
Speaker 4: Yes, So this is there's a lot on the line basically,
Speaker 4: and the Supreme Court decision is imminent.
Speaker 6: And what this really shows is how bs all of
Speaker 6: the kind of legal arguments are on both sides. Because
Speaker 6: to me, just objectively speaking, if you step back and
Speaker 6: look at the Heroes Act that this was written under,
Speaker 6: this was a kind of post nine to eleven law
Speaker 6: that said, in the event of a national emergency, the
Speaker 6: Department of Education has the ability to pause, suspend, or
Speaker 6: cancel student debts. And so we had a national emergency COVID,
Speaker 6: it was declared as a national emergency and as a result,
Speaker 6: as a policy response to Department of Education under Trump
Speaker 6: paused the student debt, and then the Department of Education
Speaker 6: under Biden determined that the smartest policy would be to
Speaker 6: cancel a certain amount of it using the authority that
Speaker 6: was created in two thousand and one or after the
Speaker 6: two thousand and one attacks, and to invalidate that to me,
Speaker 6: says that you're requiring then Congress. You're basically telling Congress
Speaker 6: that they're not allowed to anticipate future events and put
Speaker 6: laws in place to allow a government to react to
Speaker 6: those events. If you can't say in the event of
Speaker 6: an emergency, you have this authority because you have to
Speaker 6: come back twenty.
Speaker 3: Years later and say no, no, no.
Speaker 6: When we said emergency, we actually meant all emergencies, like
Speaker 6: not just this emergency, but other declared emergency, even though
Speaker 6: the law says, you know, declared emergenci. It's like, it's
Speaker 6: very clear, but I don't think it matters the Supreme
Speaker 6: Court if they don't want to allow it, they're just
Speaker 6: gonna not go ahead and allow it. To your point
Speaker 6: on standing, there's been this fun whack a mole between
Speaker 6: people who are trying to strike down the law or
Speaker 6: the executive action for political purposes because they don't like it,
Speaker 6: and the problem that they need to find somebody who's
Speaker 6: harmed by it. It's exactly how do you find somebody
Speaker 6: who's harmed by other people just not having to pay
Speaker 6: their debts. And so at first they found somebody who
Speaker 6: because they got their debt.
Speaker 3: Waived, now they owed some taxes.
Speaker 6: They're like, oh, I hate taxes, so I'm suing, so
Speaker 6: I don't so I can pay the debts instead of
Speaker 6: the taxes. And the Biden administration quickly said, Nope, that's moot,
Speaker 6: because now it's optional.
Speaker 3: You don't have to take this free money that we're
Speaker 3: giving you.
Speaker 6: Therefore you have no tax obligations like ah dang and
Speaker 6: I forget. There was another one and then they and
Speaker 6: then they wound up with this one where they went
Speaker 6: to this Missouri company which has not paid its quote
Speaker 6: unquote obligations to the state of Missouri for fifteen years.
Speaker 6: And so the state of Missouri is saying, well, now
Speaker 6: it's not going to be able to pay its obligations
Speaker 6: to the state to us, but they haven't paid for
Speaker 6: fifteen years and you haven't cared. And the company itself,
Speaker 6: there's a great story if you can put up the
Speaker 6: second tear sheet here. Employees at this company are all
Speaker 6: furious that they've been roped into this. Mohila itself is
Speaker 6: not participating at all. Amy Cony Barrett said during the trial,
Speaker 6: or said during the oral arguments, if Mohila was here,
Speaker 6: they would have standing. Mohila is very conspicuously not here,
Speaker 6: like they're not interested in this. One of the employees
Speaker 6: is probably in their slack or whatever, said are we
Speaker 6: the bad guys? Like how on earth are we being used?
Speaker 6: And so basically Missouri's argument this triple Bank. Shot is
Speaker 6: that Mohila would have more business if you keep more
Speaker 6: people burned with debt. And if Mohila has more business,
Speaker 6: then there's a better chance that Mohila then kicks money
Speaker 6: over to Missouri, even though Mohila has not kicked money
Speaker 6: to Missouri for fifteen years. So it's all commpletely fake
Speaker 6: and just political.
Speaker 4: So what's actually really interesting about that is it's not
Speaker 4: entirely dissimilar from what's on the table with Chevron, and
Speaker 4: the Chevron doctrine.
Speaker 3: Is a explain that.
Speaker 5: So Chevron.
Speaker 4: With Chevron, this is a huge, huge, First of all,
Speaker 4: it was a huge boon to the left, like this
Speaker 4: was a really big gift to and I don't mean
Speaker 4: that in a sort of pejorative sense, like this basically
Speaker 4: created the administrative state. This basically allows the administrative state
Speaker 4: to use executive powers in a very broad scope to
Speaker 4: do some really everyday governing at for instance, the EPA
Speaker 4: or the Department of Education. Because this I'm reading from
Speaker 4: Cornell Law School, which has a lot of really helpful
Speaker 4: legal information, but just so we have a precise definition
Speaker 4: from them. In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a
Speaker 4: legal test as to when the court should refer to
Speaker 4: the agency's answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference
Speaker 4: is appropriate where the agency's answer was not unreasonable. And
Speaker 4: here's the key part, so long as Congress had not
Speaker 4: spoken directly to the precise issue at question, this is
Speaker 4: where the Heroes Act is actually pretty interesting as well.
Speaker 5: From the student debt question, you see the executive.
Speaker 4: Branch using that deference, that question of deference to the
Speaker 4: Secretary of Education that was granted in the hero Act,
Speaker 4: and you see people on the right saying, well, this
Speaker 4: is clearly extra constitutional.
Speaker 5: This was never a constitutional.
Speaker 4: Power that should have been delegated to the Education secretary,
Speaker 4: and this is an inappropriate use of it anyway. But
Speaker 4: because we have, for instance, we've talked about this a lot,
Speaker 4: the vaccine mandate requirement that Joe Biden implemented was he
Speaker 4: used an obscure provision from the OSHA legislation, the legislation
Speaker 4: that Richard Nixon pass that essentially created OSHA. You can
Speaker 4: sort of pull out from these things and stretch them
Speaker 4: to meet different authorities from the executive and on the
Speaker 4: left mint the coin for instance, like there's all of
Speaker 4: this sort of creative ways that you can get from
Speaker 4: point A to B with executive power and actually do
Speaker 4: things in the absence of Congress's ability to do anything
Speaker 4: anymore because of tribalism and partisanship. That has a deadlock,
Speaker 4: maybe a Madisonian deadlock, but a deadlock nonetheless. And so
Speaker 4: that's why Chevron is, I would say, in terms of
Speaker 4: conservative efforts target the administrative state, that is like number one,
Speaker 4: Chevron is, this is like a gift, like you're putting
Speaker 4: Chevron on a silver platter for the Supreme Court or
Speaker 4: the with the divide that's at that it has right now,
Speaker 4: the division between conservative and liberal justices.
Speaker 5: This is a really big deal.
Speaker 4: It's a very big deal for agencies that have been
Speaker 4: doing sort of business as usual for a long time,
Speaker 4: taking these authorities where Congress, to borrow the fresh from Cornell,
Speaker 4: had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question.
Speaker 4: They'd been taking that authority upon themselves could be tied
Speaker 4: up in tons of legal battles. That every day functioning
Speaker 4: of these agencies is on the table in a way
Speaker 4: that you know, I think we've dramatically expanded the scope
Speaker 4: of regulatory power of the administrative state in ways that
Speaker 4: why we're talking about gas stove bands. Why we're talking
Speaker 4: about you know, the way Title nine functions in very
Speaker 4: specific ways and very specific schools has been harmful.
Speaker 5: But the way this is on the table is vast.
Speaker 3: I think they're going to do it.
Speaker 5: Yes, I guess would be Yes.
Speaker 3: They're going for it.
Speaker 5: There's a question as to whether they.
Speaker 4: Go all the way or they just sort of nibble
Speaker 4: around the edges of Chevron as.
Speaker 6: We know it, whether they want war or they want
Speaker 6: guerrilla war against the state. I think they want war
Speaker 6: against the state, but I think that they're not sure
Speaker 6: if they have the troops for it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it's this would be a big change
Speaker 4: to the everyday function of Washington, DC. I mean, these administrations,
Speaker 4: these administrative agencies have exploded really because of Chevrone deference, and.
Speaker 6: It would hasten I think the constitutional conflict with the Court.
Speaker 6: I'm like, yeah, like the Court is already teetering on
Speaker 6: it's on the authority that it that it kind of
Speaker 6: spent on overturning Roe v.
Speaker 3: Wade.
Speaker 6: Yes, And so if they then say, oh, and also,
Speaker 6: by the way, the EPA is not allowed to function,
Speaker 6: You're going to take Democrats who are just normally rank
Speaker 6: and file folks, We're like, you know what for at
Speaker 6: the Supreme Court? Ignore it. We're done with the Supreme Court.
Speaker 6: And I'm reading what's the line he's made for that?
Speaker 6: Andrew Jackson said, he made his ruling, I'll let him
Speaker 6: enforce it.
Speaker 5: Let him enforce it.
Speaker 4: Well, I'm reading here from a Federal Society block where
Speaker 4: they they call Chevron quote the most notorious decision in
Speaker 4: administrative law. And this is Remember, the Federal Society had
Speaker 4: a lot of say in the judges that court. And
Speaker 4: I don't mean that in a Sheldon white House sense
Speaker 4: where it's like, you know, he's doing the Charlie Kelly
Speaker 4: on the whiteboard, like this is all a grand conspiracy
Speaker 4: of Federal Society money going to the Supreme Court. It's
Speaker 4: this idiological miliu that, you know, the Federal Society I
Speaker 4: think has the right stance on Chrevron. But I imagine
Speaker 4: if we're trying to guess where the Supreme Court is
Speaker 4: going to land on Chrevron, I imagine it's it's going
Speaker 4: to go in one very particular direction. And that ideological
Speaker 4: milieu is basically at a consensus on affirmative action, and
Speaker 4: that's on the table as well.
Speaker 3: So some really kind they'll win that one.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, absolutely, because Santra de O Connor herself, in a
Speaker 4: pretty important decision on this question, said it is a
Speaker 4: temporary It's meant as a temporary measure to achieve, you know,
Speaker 4: to get from A to B. And so when you
Speaker 4: have that as precedent, yeah, I think it's very vulnerable.
Speaker 4: And again they're coming from an ideological milieu where there's
Speaker 4: basically a consensus on Chevron Chevron and affirmative action.
Speaker 3: And there's an interesting argument made on the left. I
Speaker 3: think it's by Richard Collenberg.
Speaker 6: People can search that up that that argues that if
Speaker 6: affirmative action is overturned, because it is still a value
Speaker 6: held by so many institutions and universities, the value diversity,
Speaker 6: that they will that they will be forced to rely
Speaker 6: on class diversity in order to achieve identity diversity because
Speaker 6: we are so far away from an equitable society that
Speaker 6: it is the case that black students are much more
Speaker 6: likely to be poor in working class than white students.
Speaker 6: And so if you then use a class lens, which
Speaker 6: is constitutional and legal, in order to increase the number
Speaker 6: of working class and poor people, that you have in
Speaker 6: your institution. You will also, as a function of that,
Speaker 6: increase the number of black students that you have as well.
Speaker 4: Some more just mechanism to get to the point anyway
Speaker 4: from my perspective, but.
Speaker 6: A lot of these institutions don't want poor in working
Speaker 6: class people, so it will be the values that they
Speaker 6: have intention and we'll see how they sort that out.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they meet their quotas through for instance, boarding schools.
Speaker 4: We're going to take you know, people from the spoorting school,
Speaker 4: but we're going to make it diverse.
Speaker 3: Matthew Iglesias jokes that he like, he went to.
Speaker 6: Harvard and one or both of his parents are like
Speaker 6: Cuban descended, and so he's like they were able to
Speaker 6: check a box because of Matthew Iglesias, and nobody, as
Speaker 6: he would acknowledge, nobody pretends that like that is the goal, right, Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, that's absolutely true. So I am looking forward to it,
Speaker 4: but you may not be.
Speaker 5: Moving on.
Speaker 4: We're going to talk right now about Andrew Tate. There's
Speaker 4: been some developments in Andrew Tate situation. This is from
Speaker 4: the last of post Romanian prosecutors announced Tuesday that Internet
Speaker 4: personality and self described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother
Speaker 4: have been indicted on charges of human trafficking, rape, and
Speaker 4: forming an organized crime group. I'm going to keep reading
Speaker 4: from the post here because it's very specific and it's
Speaker 4: useful to be precise. The indictment marks the end of
Speaker 4: a criminal investigation into Tate and two Romanian associates, as prosecutors.
Speaker 5: Referred the case for trial.
Speaker 4: The prosecutor statement said the injured parties were quote sexually
Speaker 4: exploited by group members and forced to produce online pornography
Speaker 4: through acts of quote violence and mental coersion. The legal
Speaker 4: team for the Tape brothers described the move as quote
Speaker 4: undoubtedly predictable. They're putting forward this basically stance that they're
Speaker 4: kind of excited and eager to confront these charges because
Speaker 4: quote it will undoubtedly substantiate the brothers claims of innocence.
Speaker 4: To remember, they were arrested in Romania in December. They
Speaker 4: do have dual British and American citizenship. They were moved
Speaker 4: to house arrest back in March. Prosecutors are saying that
Speaker 4: they these four Tait and his brother and the other
Speaker 4: two formed a crime group for human trafficking in Romania
Speaker 4: Britain and the United States.
Speaker 5: Here's more from the prosecutors.
Speaker 4: The injured persons were recruited by the foreign nationals by
Speaker 4: misleading them about the intention to establish a marriage slash
Speaker 4: cohabitation relationship and the existence of real feelings of love.
Speaker 4: That one of the suspects charged with rape in relation
Speaker 4: to two incidents back in March of twenty twenty.
Speaker 5: Two, so over a year ago, according to prosecutors. What
Speaker 5: do you make of it?
Speaker 6: Ryan, You know, it's important to keep in find the
Speaker 6: whole idea of innocent until proven guilty. But these guys
Speaker 6: look guiltier than Trump, even on the classified documents charge.
Speaker 3: You know, we'll see what evidence comes up. But we have.
Speaker 6: Their own testimony kind of through their videos that they
Speaker 6: do where they talk about ways that they groom young
Speaker 6: women and traffic them basically over to Romania and then
Speaker 6: persuade them into into staying and becoming basically sex slaves.
Speaker 6: Now they're arguing that that is all done consensually. They
Speaker 6: prosecutors also have what at least seven witnesses, and so
Speaker 6: depending on what you hear from those witnesses, if they
Speaker 6: can add even one notch to what they have already
Speaker 6: said publicly. They then you have a pretty slam pretty
Speaker 6: slam dunk case.
Speaker 4: So there are messages where tit has explained to one
Speaker 4: of the women that he used a webcam business to
Speaker 4: quote launder money, and that he'd been teaching men to
Speaker 4: start their own quote. It's all a cover, he wrote,
Speaker 4: Washington Post said, assuring her she could trust him. He
Speaker 4: told the victim that he'd meet her in Romania after
Speaker 4: taking care of some work in Prague, and spoke about
Speaker 4: the prospect of marriage.
Speaker 5: This is from a tape message.
Speaker 4: I want to know that you are determined serious about marriage.
Speaker 5: So all of that is very is obviously very critical
Speaker 5: to the case.
Speaker 3: The boyfriend method.
Speaker 6: Yes, there's some question about if that's all it is,
Speaker 6: if it's just hideous and disgusting, or if it's a crime.
Speaker 6: I'm fine these guys getting locked up for even just
Speaker 6: what they've been saying publicly, But it does appear that
Speaker 6: it goes even beyond that. That there's you know, the
Speaker 6: charges talk about you know, violence, it's not just mental
Speaker 6: COORDI but also violence.
Speaker 4: And you know this is this is going to be
Speaker 4: a real going forward and already we've already seen it happen.
Speaker 4: But the proliferation of hardcore pornography has made this a
Speaker 4: real problem for the coast. So both the proliferation of
Speaker 4: hardcore pornography and the proliferation of sort of text message
Speaker 4: based sexual relationships and relationships in general brings this evidence
Speaker 4: in and then the tape brothers can claim this is
Speaker 4: consensual and that in some sense it was part of
Speaker 4: the sexual relationship to if the women claim otherwise, there
Speaker 4: and they're in a lot of trouble and it appears
Speaker 4: like that's likely that the women will claim otherwise. Well,
Speaker 4: and that's what's so I think disturbing is that you
Speaker 4: can have evidence of something being on its face problematic,
Speaker 4: and people can claim that it's consensual, and you know,
Speaker 4: if that is popularized and becomes sort of normalized, it's
Speaker 4: it's a very serious problem for both men and women
Speaker 4: as that kind of stuff happens in the future. It's
Speaker 4: a big problem for courts in our legal system. It's
Speaker 4: a big challenge for courts in the legal system. But
Speaker 4: it's not great for men or for women because it
Speaker 4: makes it really really hard to get justice.
Speaker 3: Related to this. I wanted to get your thoughts on
Speaker 3: a new piece.
Speaker 6: If you can put up this second element here as
Speaker 6: a tweet from my colleague Martaza Hussein, who's sharing a
Speaker 6: new article in New Lines magazine which is headlined how
Speaker 6: Andrew Tate and the far right made common cause with Islamists.
Speaker 6: Subhead Western groups find in Muslim communities what they believe
Speaker 6: is a prototype for a social contract free of wokeism
Speaker 6: and women's liberation. Story by Rassha al Akadi and Lydia Wilson.
Speaker 6: I suggest people check it out, but it opens with
Speaker 6: a couple examples of things that we've probably all we've
Speaker 6: all seen kind of as we've watched watched online culture evolve,
Speaker 6: which is dudes who started out as like proud islamophobes,
Speaker 6: whether in post nine to eleven or more recently burning
Speaker 6: the Qouran, you know, warning of the kind of the
Speaker 6: Muslim hordes are going to take over Europe in the
Speaker 6: United States and the Hamas is coming through the southern border,
Speaker 6: and those same not just that, not just that political tendency,
Speaker 6: but that too, but those same dudes now completely lining
Speaker 6: up with a kind of much with a very conservative
Speaker 6: interpretation of Islam and going to protests where o Kurana
Speaker 6: is being burned and protesting that saying how dare you
Speaker 6: and seeing in their warped vision a like based like
Speaker 6: as they describe a prototype of a society that's free
Speaker 6: of Wolchism and the dudes over at Chopo trap house.
Speaker 3: Since elsewhere I have been like, have been predicting this arc.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that a lot of these right wing influencers are like,
Speaker 6: why don't they just just cut out the middleman and
Speaker 6: go straight to kind of far right Islam?
Speaker 3: And here we here, we're seeing it develop.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, this is another really interesting tweet from Martaza. He says,
Speaker 4: when I first moved to the US, I was actually
Speaker 4: surprised how many Muslims were sympathetic to the GOP, even
Speaker 4: in post nine to eleven years, and in places like
Speaker 4: Chicago and Michigan suburbs, they were just waiting for a
Speaker 4: moment they became ten percent less hostile to return. And
Speaker 4: the Michigan suburbs have been interesting Deerporn area because we've
Speaker 4: seen the conservative Muslim communities in the Dearborn area make
Speaker 4: common cause with They.
Speaker 3: Had that Pride fight recently.
Speaker 4: Recently Pride fight, but also the books and schools like
Speaker 4: it was in the fall around an election coming together
Speaker 4: and making a very robust protests, and I think a
Speaker 4: morally correct protests would probably disagree on that against books
Speaker 4: in schools, And then you had the American Federation of
Speaker 4: Teachers on the other side of it, siding with the schools,
Speaker 4: and it's just like, Yeah, these things getting mixed up
Speaker 4: is completely fat, fascinating and blended together.
Speaker 5: There's some talk in sort of conservative circles.
Speaker 4: About the phenomenon of young men following Andrew Tait. I
Speaker 4: don't think it's Tate specific. I don't think it's Islam specific.
Speaker 4: I do think you're going to see healthier this kind
Speaker 4: of two sides of the coin, like people's angs, especially
Speaker 4: young men's angs, and anguish in this world where it's actually.
Speaker 5: Very difficult for young men and young women too.
Speaker 4: If we're seeing depression rates increase, we're seeing all kinds
Speaker 4: of really bad metrics increase when it comes to mental
Speaker 4: health and physical health. Some people are going to take
Speaker 4: that out in a healthy way. Some people are going
Speaker 4: to find really unhealthy ways to channel it, and misogyny
Speaker 4: is going to be one of those ways. And I'm
Speaker 4: not saying that's affiliated with religion at all. I'm saying
Speaker 4: it's affiliated with in this case entertate, and that that
Speaker 4: sort of version of masculinity that's less less than healthy.
Speaker 4: We'll say, toxic masculinity is a real thing. It's not
Speaker 4: masculinity itself. And I think that's a mistake the left
Speaker 4: off and makes when they talk about mass toxic masculinity.
Speaker 4: They act as though masculinity is necessarily toxic. There are,
Speaker 4: of course, expressions of masculinity and femininity that can be toxic.
Speaker 4: And I think the more we see people try to
Speaker 4: find relief from the pains of living modern life, they're
Speaker 4: going to go in both unhealthy and healthy places, and
Speaker 4: entertate would be an unhealthy place right.
Speaker 6: And Islam, just like Christianity, you know, lives on a
Speaker 6: spectrum from you know, liberal to almost secular, all the
Speaker 6: way over to the far to the far right. And
Speaker 6: I'm curious if the kind of Republicans are seeing a
Speaker 6: real opening here because it has always struck me as
Speaker 6: an odd alliance that you had so many kind of secular,
Speaker 6: borderline atheist liberals allying with explicitly conservative Muslims in ways
Speaker 6: that they would not align with.
Speaker 3: Explicitly conservative Christians.
Speaker 6: And I feel like maybe they felt comfortable making that
Speaker 6: alliance because the numbers were so.
Speaker 3: Small because it was politically convenient, right, and they weren't.
Speaker 6: They could be for pluralism as long as the conservative
Speaker 6: Muslim portion of their coalition stayed below twenty percent or
Speaker 6: something like that. And pluralism's fine if they're fifty plus
Speaker 6: percent and have voting power. And you saw some liberals
Speaker 6: in that Michigan town saying, wait a minute. When we
Speaker 6: were in power, you know, we were pluralistic. You know,
Speaker 6: we made sure that there were ordinances that allowed for
Speaker 6: the call to prayer to happen five times a day.
Speaker 6: Now you're in power and you're not operating in a
Speaker 6: pluralistic way.
Speaker 5: But what is pluralism.
Speaker 3: Well, I think pluralism is fairly Polarism is kind of like, I.
Speaker 4: Don't know, because you can't have pluralism if you're saying
Speaker 4: that it's hate speech to refuse to use compelled speech
Speaker 4: so like preferred pronouns for instance, and you disagree on.
Speaker 3: What it is that wouldn't be pluralistic intolerant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, based on like our interpretation of civil rights law
Speaker 4: and where that conversation is going. So it's almost like
Speaker 4: you can't have this concept of pluralism that in the
Speaker 4: aughts made a little bit more sense. The formula made
Speaker 4: a little bit more sense when you start to have
Speaker 4: what I would argue is sort of an intolerant approach
Speaker 4: to religion, or an intolerant approach she's more tribal.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you try to have a coalition of tribes,
Speaker 6: which is those are not very stable.
Speaker 5: This is like the biggest, deepest coalition.
Speaker 6: Of interest groups is one thing, coalition of tribes. It's
Speaker 6: only going to last so long.
Speaker 5: Well, Ryan, what is on what's your point.
Speaker 3: To michaelas is on here? Read my point.
Speaker 6: There's long been a saying in American politics that our
Speaker 6: elections begin in Iowa and end in Florida, and the
Speaker 6: result was that our political system disproportionately handed out goodies
Speaker 6: to just those two states. It didn't make much sense,
Speaker 6: but it did make us obese, with massive corn subsidies
Speaker 6: for Iowa and sugar subsidies for Florida, and of course,
Speaker 6: whatever the bloodthirsty diaspora in Miami wanted was theirs from
Speaker 6: both parties, with no questions asked about whether it was
Speaker 6: actually in our regional or national interest. How else can
Speaker 6: you get a counterproductive embargo of Cuba to last this long,
Speaker 6: but Iowa and Florida are now both solidly Republican states.
Speaker 6: The silver lining for the rest of the country is
Speaker 6: that we can now start to make policy decisions based
Speaker 6: on whether or not something is a good idea, rather
Speaker 6: than pandering to a few vote in South Florida. Now,
Speaker 6: if you remember, back to the last State of the Union,
Speaker 6: Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic button holing
Speaker 6: Bob Menendez, who's the Cuban American chair of the Senate
Speaker 6: Foreign Relations Committee and the chambers most aggressive Cuba hawk
Speaker 6: on the Democratic side.
Speaker 3: He said, he wanted to talk.
Speaker 11: To talk to you about Cuba.
Speaker 6: I'm now there's movement in Venezuela too. Late last month,
Speaker 6: the newly restored Brazilian President Lula de Silva made a
Speaker 6: big shift in foreign policy toward the South American country.
Speaker 6: Instead of recognizing this guy Wangguido, the man the US
Speaker 6: sort of pretends as president of Venezuela, he invited the
Speaker 6: guy who actually governs the country, whether we like it
Speaker 6: or not, Hugo Chavez successor Nicholas Mandoro. Yet, Venezuela hit
Speaker 6: with some of the toughest sanctions in the world remains
Speaker 6: an economic basket case. The result has been a staggering
Speaker 6: outflow of refugees, with nearly two hundred thousand winding up
Speaker 6: at our southern border last year. Former Obama National Security
Speaker 6: advisor Ben Rhodes, now with PODSEV of America, responded to
Speaker 6: Lou's recognition of Maduro.
Speaker 3: Recently and when it.
Speaker 6: Comes to sanctions on Venezuela, the Biden administration has clearly
Speaker 6: lost the Podsave bros.
Speaker 3: Take a listen.
Speaker 10: Clearly, the US has to make a pretty big shift
Speaker 10: in its Venezuelan policy because the idea of like just
Speaker 10: not recognizing this guy's president doesn't work. And meanwhile, we've
Speaker 10: exacerbated humanitarian crisis there their sanctions that has contributed significantly
Speaker 10: to people coming to our border.
Speaker 3: A quarter of the population has left the country.
Speaker 10: We need some agreement that lifts a whole bunch of sanctions,
Speaker 10: that sets an election that we promised to actually respect
Speaker 10: the result of, you know, even if we don't like
Speaker 10: the results, and hopefully we do like the results, you know,
Speaker 10: but that allows for kind of a reset of what's
Speaker 10: happening between the US and Latin America. Generally, Venezuela specifically,
Speaker 10: I would hope again that Cuba is a part of this.
Speaker 10: Lula also I think could be a source of useful tension.
Speaker 10: But keep in mind a lot of people want to say, oh,
Speaker 10: this is just Lula.
Speaker 6: Ben also made the point that the US isn't just
Speaker 6: out of step with one leftist leader in Brazil, but
Speaker 6: we're basically losing the entire region.
Speaker 10: A lot of people want to say, oh, this is
Speaker 10: just Lula.
Speaker 3: It's not.
Speaker 10: It's Lula in Brazil, it's Borech in Chile, it's Petro
Speaker 10: and Colombia, it's Amlo in Mexico, it's all the major
Speaker 10: Latin American countries. There is nobody with us in this
Speaker 10: kind of weird, Miami driven hardline policy.
Speaker 3: So this.
Speaker 10: Meeting somewhere in the middle between where we currently are
Speaker 10: in Merlula is is I think the smart way to go.
Speaker 10: And honestly, this kind of pressure is not the worst
Speaker 10: thing to try to shake that loose.
Speaker 6: So in Congress, four Democrats are circulating a letter that
Speaker 6: I obtained that sort of calls on the Biden administration
Speaker 6: to lift sanctions on Venezuela. The letter is written by
Speaker 6: Jim McGovern. Greg Meek's Joaquin Castro and Barbara Lee, and
Speaker 6: it reads because we share your view that human rights
Speaker 6: should be at the center of US foreign policy. We
Speaker 6: have been deeply troubled by the extens of reporting on
Speaker 6: the indiscriminate and counterpardductive impacts on the Venezuelan people of
Speaker 6: the secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: These kinds of sanctions.
Speaker 6: Have often been found to be ineffective in achieving their
Speaker 6: objectives and are profoundly incoherent from a human rights perspective.
Speaker 6: In our view, to purposely continue contributing to economic hardship
Speaker 6: experienced by an entire population is immoral and unworthy of
Speaker 6: the United States. That is why many of us have
Speaker 6: previously called on your administration to pursue a better strategy
Speaker 6: to address the rollback of democracy and the severe violations
Speaker 6: of fundamental rights committed by the Maduro government. Now all
Speaker 6: that is good, and it makes a strong case to
Speaker 6: immediately and unilaterally lift the sanctions, which makes a line
Speaker 6: in the last paragraph of the letter strange when it
Speaker 6: adds quote overcoming Venezuela's multifaceted political and human rights crisis
Speaker 6: and facilitating the country's desperately needed economic recovery must go
Speaker 6: hand in hand unquote. Now, typically what a sentence like
Speaker 6: that means is that sanctions will only be lifted if
Speaker 6: Venezuela makes political concessions. Yet the lawmakers just acknowledge in
Speaker 6: the same letter that sanctions are inhumane and don't actually
Speaker 6: work to pressure political change anyway. It's a measure of
Speaker 6: how addicted to sanctions the US is that language like
Speaker 6: this shows up even in a letter designed to move
Speaker 6: in the right direction, and one signed by people like
Speaker 6: Barbara Lee and Jim McGovern who've spoken eloquently about the
Speaker 6: cruelty of sanctions. Now, the letter appears to be something
Speaker 6: of a response to pressure that McGovern has been getting
Speaker 6: from anti war activists back home, and.
Speaker 1: He has not taken action. He has not signed this
Speaker 1: letter calling up for an end to the sanctions, after
Speaker 1: telling us for years he's committed to stopping endless and
Speaker 1: needless deaths in Venezuela. Again, this is confusing and it's
Speaker 1: also inexcusable.
Speaker 6: So emily, these activists have been calling on him to
Speaker 6: sign on to a what point are you looking at all?
Speaker 4: Right, Well, we're going to talk about the tragedy unfolding
Speaker 4: at sea because there's I think maybe an interesting lesson
Speaker 4: in all of it. And to be clear, this is
Speaker 4: a story that's changing minute by minute, and as we're
Speaker 4: recording this, the latest is that some of the folks
Speaker 4: on the rescue mission have heard sounds that are like
Speaker 4: a banging noise coming from the area that they're searching.
Speaker 4: The actually efforts to sort of pinpoint target the location
Speaker 4: of that sound have been unsuccessful.
Speaker 5: And this is the.
Speaker 4: Story of five people being lost at sea in the
Speaker 4: titan submersible that was on a tourist expedition to view
Speaker 4: the Titanic costs about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: and these folks right now are entirely lost at see.
Speaker 5: They have about from what.
Speaker 4: We know, twenty four hours at most until about Thursday morning.
Speaker 4: We're here on Wednesday until about Thursday morning, with the
Speaker 4: amount of oxygen that people estimate is in that submersible
Speaker 4: before they run out and are not able to survive,
Speaker 4: So the window is narrowing. Experts say the longer it
Speaker 4: takes to locate people, the less chance that they have
Speaker 4: of survival, which is tragically logic, but it's not really
Speaker 4: a good time to play. You know, armchair scientists from
Speaker 4: inside a news studio or pile on the decision to
Speaker 4: sort of.
Speaker 5: Go on this expedition, but you know, it's a good.
Speaker 4: Time to pray for their safe return and an unfortunate
Speaker 4: i would say, opportunity to reflect on humans evolving, ever
Speaker 4: evolving relationship with risk itself. So just again some quick
Speaker 4: facts from what we know right now. Within about two hours,
Speaker 4: Ocean Gate Expeditions, that's the company that puts together these excursions,
Speaker 4: they lost contact with the Titan.
Speaker 5: It's a twenty one foot submersible vessel.
Speaker 4: As far as we know, it's about nine hundred miles
Speaker 4: east of Cape CODs. They're searching an area that's roughly
Speaker 4: the size of Kinetic, about nine hundred miles off east
Speaker 4: off the coast of case Cape Cod and about thirteen
Speaker 4: thousand feet deep. You have four passengers that were on
Speaker 4: board and the pilot that are now lost. The New
Speaker 4: York Post says that this rescue, if it is successful,
Speaker 4: would be the deepest recovery mission in history, the deepest
Speaker 4: recovery mission in history. So they're about twelve thousand, five
Speaker 4: hundred feet below the surface, and that's obviously an incredible task.
Speaker 4: Not only to take people down to that level for
Speaker 4: the viewing of the Titanic, but to then have search
Speaker 4: and rescue crews basically trying to find a needle in
Speaker 4: a haystack in this vast expanse of the ocean. It
Speaker 4: seems maybe like it should be very easy because we
Speaker 4: know where the submersible went down, we know when it
Speaker 4: went down, and that seems like it should be easy
Speaker 4: to kind of pinpoint the location. But of course it's not,
Speaker 4: and people have at this point been running or have
Speaker 4: been trying to find it for days. Safety concerns had
Speaker 4: been raised in the past. This is CNN, they write.
Speaker 4: In twenty eighteen, de Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee of the
Speaker 4: Marine Technology Society penned a letter expressing concern over what
Speaker 4: they referred to as ocean Gate.
Speaker 5: Again that's the company.
Speaker 4: Their quote experimental approach with the titan the vessel that's
Speaker 4: now lost, and its planned expedition to the side of
Speaker 4: the Titanic wreckage quote. Our apprehension is that the current
Speaker 4: experimental approach adopted by ocean Gate could result in negative
Speaker 4: outcomes from minor to catastrophic that would have serious consequences.
Speaker 5: For everyone in the industry.
Speaker 4: That's a quote from the letter, and of course, tragically
Speaker 4: that seems to have been pressient. We're going to find
Speaker 4: out more and more in the days ahead, and this
Speaker 4: story is evolving again very much. But if we put
Speaker 4: up an archived version of the website again, I think
Speaker 4: this is at the very at least as of now,
Speaker 4: an opportunity to reflect on our as human beings, our
Speaker 4: relationship with risk.
Speaker 5: That's from the archive version of the website.
Speaker 4: You can go now and actually look at how they
Speaker 4: advertised this Titanic expedition. There they say right there, explore
Speaker 4: the Titanic, and it costs. In their FAQ they say
Speaker 4: it costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
Speaker 5: We can also roll some.
Speaker 4: Footage from an ad that was on their website as well.
Speaker 4: You hear them say quotes like this is not a
Speaker 4: thrill ride for tourists.
Speaker 5: Quote, it's not a ride at.
Speaker 4: Disney and quote it's very engineered and very safe. Again,
Speaker 4: it's eerie to reflect on all of this now, and
Speaker 4: no matter you can be the safest thing in the world,
Speaker 4: there's always some risk involved in even driving a car
Speaker 4: or taking a bike.
Speaker 5: There's always risk.
Speaker 4: That's going to be involved, and so you know when
Speaker 4: you're taking when you're viewing something like the Titanic some
Speaker 4: thirteen thousand feet under the sea, of course, you're always
Speaker 4: going to have to accept that there's a level of danger,
Speaker 4: and we do that every single day with everything that
Speaker 4: we do. You can never fully eliminate risk. But this
Speaker 4: is a lot of to take, and it's a lot
Speaker 4: of money.
Speaker 5: To spend on a risk. So it's more.
Speaker 4: Than what an average American makes in a year, by far,
Speaker 4: much much more than what an average American makes in
Speaker 4: a year, and just for a brief window of time.
Speaker 4: So out of curiosity, after I saw that two hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand dollars price tag, I looked up what
Speaker 4: the most expensive ticket was on the Titanic itself, and this.
Speaker 5: Is really interesting.
Speaker 4: It's kind of hard to nail down an inflation adjusted
Speaker 4: price for that most expensive ticket, but none of the
Speaker 4: estimates that I saw put it very far north of
Speaker 4: one hundred thousand dollars. So in twenty twenty three, people
Speaker 4: are paying more than double the price of the people
Speaker 4: who perish in the Titanic to tour their graveyard. It's
Speaker 4: a really strange arc of history right there, They're paying
Speaker 4: more than twice the price to see something that is broken,
Speaker 4: to see something that has failed.
Speaker 5: It's like an inverse, a weird inverse.
Speaker 4: And it's especially interesting when you consider what one economist
Speaker 4: related back in twenty twenty one. Yahoo Finance reported at
Speaker 4: the time on those numbers. I'm reading from this report
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirteen, so that's at the end of the
Speaker 4: Gilded Age, and the year after the Titanic sank. In
Speaker 4: nineteen twelve, the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families names
Speaker 4: all tied to monopolistic power, held point eight five percent
Speaker 4: of the country's total wealth.
Speaker 5: The richest point zero.
Speaker 4: One percent around eighteen thousand US families have also surpassed
Speaker 4: now the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These
Speaker 4: families hold ten percent of the country's wealth today. By comparison,
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirteen, the top point zero one percent held
Speaker 4: nine percent of US wealth and a mere two percent
Speaker 4: in the late nineteen seventies, two percent in the late
Speaker 4: nineteen seventies. So that's a swing from the Gilded Age
Speaker 4: to the late seventies, and then a swing from then
Speaker 4: until now. Now. Ryan and I would probably disagree on
Speaker 4: the morality of these different levels, these varying levels of
Speaker 4: income inequality. But compared with nineteen twelve, financialization completely dominates
Speaker 4: our economy at this point, and so so much of
Speaker 4: that wealth isn't even tied up in industries that actually
Speaker 4: build and create, but industries that sort of shuffle data
Speaker 4: and shuffle money around. Now, morbid curiosity is a very
Speaker 4: real thing. It's inevitable and sort of understandably so whenever
Speaker 4: it's monetized, it can be really gross, but it's not
Speaker 4: sort of categorically bad or new. What's different now is
Speaker 4: our daily levels of comfort here in the West. That's
Speaker 4: different in the history of human existence. I don't mean
Speaker 4: that psychologically either. I think it's pretty clear, as Arthur
Speaker 4: Brooks has calculated that as we have gotten more materially
Speaker 4: comfortable over the last half century or so, we've actually
Speaker 4: gotten increasingly less happy. But we need certain things that
Speaker 4: we're now rich enough to avoid in many many cases,
Speaker 4: so physical labor, natural sunlight, fresh food that we grow ourselves.
Speaker 4: We labor to grow ourselves, and losing these things is
Speaker 4: driving us crazy in some respects, and we're so desperate
Speaker 4: for relief. We're so desperate for meaning and for purpose,
Speaker 4: that we're looking to really unhealthy solutions. Speaking about risk,
Speaker 4: my colleague Malli I'm away almost ten years ago now,
Speaker 4: back in twenty fourteen, wrote a column with this very
Speaker 4: arresting headline quote, we need to get more comfortable with
Speaker 4: people dying in space.
Speaker 5: I'm going to read this quote.
Speaker 4: Part of the reason why the American public was so
Speaker 4: upset by the loss of the Columbia crew back in
Speaker 4: two thousand and three is because they were perceived to
Speaker 4: have died for something trivial. The trip was mostly known
Speaker 4: for performing children's science fair experiments. She wrote a private
Speaker 4: or public exploration and settlement program based on larger ideals
Speaker 4: national security, advancing the human condition, fleeing from religious persecution,
Speaker 4: or even just to test the limits of human accomplishments
Speaker 4: would change the risk calculus. Now, she was clear that
Speaker 4: that wasn't to downpla any the tragedy is involved, and
Speaker 4: that it would be absolutely wonderful if we made every
Speaker 4: new discovery, not just in space, but here on Earth
Speaker 4: without losing anybody. It's obviously unrealistic. We need bravery, we
Speaker 4: need a thirst for adventure. We need a healthy relationship
Speaker 4: with risk to advance forward we always have. But our
Speaker 4: comfortable current risk averse society could very quickly become a
Speaker 4: risk hungry society, and that can go in very different directs.
Speaker 4: So the ultra wealthy elites who shelled out two hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand dollars to take part in an experimental
Speaker 4: excursion to the mass grave of prior adventurers, that could
Speaker 4: be a sign that we're not prepared to channel the
Speaker 4: restlessness of modern life here in the West in a
Speaker 4: way that is healthy at all.
Speaker 6: We are now four days after a deadline has passed
Speaker 6: in which Congress had statutorily required the Biden administration to
Speaker 6: declassify all information that it has related to COVID origins,
Speaker 6: and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We're joined today
Speaker 6: by Justin Goodman of the White Coast Whitecoat Waste Project
Speaker 6: to talk about the reporting that his organization has been
Speaker 6: able to do over the last couple of weeks related
Speaker 6: to COVID origins, and also this surprising delay on the
Speaker 6: part of the Biden administration and what that mean given
Speaker 6: the fact that it is that he is in as
Speaker 6: we sit here, in violation of a statute.
Speaker 3: So justin thank you for joining us.
Speaker 11: Pleasure to be here.
Speaker 6: As viewers of this show know, Matt Taibi and Mike
Speaker 6: Schallenberger maybe a week and a half ago. At this point,
Speaker 6: we're able to identify the names of three researchers at
Speaker 6: the Wuhan Lab who US Intelligence believe were hospitalized with
Speaker 6: COVID like symptoms in November twenty nineteen, which not only
Speaker 6: kind of upends the timeline of the Hunan seafood market
Speaker 6: argument that it's spilled over from some type of a
Speaker 6: pandulin or pangolin or bat or something else, that whatever
Speaker 6: the claim was at the time, that would require there
Speaker 6: to be a time machine involved, and so pushing it
Speaker 6: back to November, if that's confirmed, eliminates that possibility, and
Speaker 6: if if these workers themselves were the one second, that
Speaker 6: also increases the circumstantial evidence that it had something to
Speaker 6: do this lab and the specific identity of one of
Speaker 6: the researchers, Ben who has been the focus of subsequent
Speaker 6: reporting both by me over at the Intercept and also
Speaker 6: at the Wall Street Journal since then, because Ben who
Speaker 6: was a researcher on projects that involved manipulating coronaviruses so
Speaker 6: that they would be more infectious toward humans, And so
Speaker 6: can you talk a little bit about what you found
Speaker 6: in the paperwork that you had gotten from the federal
Speaker 6: government through foul work, and how that became much more
Speaker 6: important given the revelations of the names of these researchers.
Speaker 12: Absolutely, you know, the wet market proponents who have been
Speaker 12: pushing that fake news for three years have been saying
Speaker 12: to follow the science. But what we've been doing since
Speaker 12: late twenty nineteen is following the money. We followed the
Speaker 12: money from the NIH to the lab. We followed the
Speaker 12: money from the NIH to gain a function.
Speaker 11: Of the Wuhan lab, and now we followed the money
Speaker 11: from NIH to possible patients zero.
Speaker 12: Ben Who Who, if you look at the preceding years
Speaker 12: leading up to the pandemic, basically had laid out the
Speaker 12: blueprint for starscov two. The documents we have directly tied
Speaker 12: Ben Who to two different US grants that we know
Speaker 12: we're funding gain of function experiments at the Wuhan Institute
Speaker 12: of Brology, one from doctor Fauci's National Institutes of Allergy
Speaker 12: and Infectious Diseases and one from USAID's PREDICT program. Ben
Speaker 12: Who was a co listed as a co investigator on
Speaker 12: those grants. Paperwork that Peter Dasher personally filled out describing
Speaker 12: his collaboration with the Wuhan Lab, identifying Ben Who as
Speaker 12: a co investigator on those two US grants that totaled
Speaker 12: forty one million dollars in Pact payer funds. Now, a
Speaker 12: Government Accountability Office report that came out last week detailed
Speaker 12: that about one point four million dollars of that forty
Speaker 12: one million dollars in tax tailer money went to the
Speaker 12: Wuhan Institute. We're trying to figure out exactly how much
Speaker 12: went to Ben Who specifically. But if Ben Who is
Speaker 12: determined to be patient zero, then our documents are the
Speaker 12: smoking gun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, absolutely, it sounds like that. And there are
Speaker 4: critics who would say, for instance, this money, even if
Speaker 4: this money was going to Ben Who, Ben Whose research
Speaker 4: couldn't have possibly created a lab link that spreads COVID
Speaker 4: and Justin you study this very closely, and you have
Speaker 4: been now for years.
Speaker 5: What do you say to that argument?
Speaker 12: So, actually, the thing that first tipped us off to
Speaker 12: the Wuhan labs relationship with the National Institutes of Health
Speaker 12: back in late twenty nineteen, and remember we met with
Speaker 12: the Trump administration in January twenty twenty, before there was
Speaker 12: even a pandemic, declared to point out that there was
Speaker 12: this relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Lab and
Speaker 12: that they should look into it. There were crickets at
Speaker 12: that time from the administration just for the record. So
Speaker 12: we were first tipped off by a twenty seventeen paper
Speaker 12: that Ben Who was the lead author on with Peter
Speaker 12: Dashik and others, detailing how they were captured. They were
Speaker 12: collecting wild back coronaviruses around China in remote parts of
Speaker 12: the country and then.
Speaker 11: Bringing them back to the lab and engineering them. But
Speaker 11: not only that, not only.
Speaker 12: Is there this published paper trail of Ben Who's involvement
Speaker 12: in back coronavirus experimentation and creating these superviruses, these chimeric superviruses.
Speaker 12: He was one of the people involved in the infamous
Speaker 12: diffuse proposal that was denied by the Defense Department in
Speaker 12: twenty eighteen, which was a blueprint for exactly but creating
Speaker 12: the exact virus that caused the covid pandemic stars Kobe
Speaker 12: too by inserting the spike protein onto the wild back coronavirus.
Speaker 12: Ben who was involved in the creation and conception of
Speaker 12: that virus got denied by the Defense Department, gets sick
Speaker 12: a couple of years later, and then of virus is
Speaker 12: unleashed in the city of Ulan at his doorstep. That
Speaker 12: resembles exactly the virus he described in this proposal that
Speaker 12: you wanted to create with US tax dollars. So, I mean,
Speaker 12: at this point, there is not a doubt in my
Speaker 12: mind that a lab late is the cause of this pandemic.
Speaker 12: I mean, there's literally no evidence to support a web
Speaker 12: market theory, unless, as Ryan suggests, there was a time machine,
Speaker 12: because all the wet market theories propose that the virus
Speaker 12: broke out in December twenty nineteen. Here we have been
Speaker 12: who and others sick in November twenty nineteen, possibly before that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I think it's worth lingering on the diffuse proposal
Speaker 6: for a moment, because as we await the declassified information
Speaker 6: that we're hopefully going to get, and we're going to
Speaker 6: continue to put pressure on the administration until they release
Speaker 6: this information, you're going to start seeing kind of a
Speaker 6: battle royale, I think between multiple different camps within the
Speaker 6: United States, but then also camps within China, each trying
Speaker 6: to blame each other for the research that ended.
Speaker 3: Up leading to this league.
Speaker 6: Let's let's say everybody eventually stipulates that, Okay, it was
Speaker 6: actually research that we were doing over in this lab.
Speaker 6: Uh You're going to see Americans, I think, saying well,
Speaker 6: this was a Chinese kind of military project and that
Speaker 6: there was Chinese and and it is the case that
Speaker 6: there were you know, there was Chinese military funding of
Speaker 6: Uhan lab, and so there's some evidence, you know that
Speaker 6: there's some plausibility to that argument. At the same time,
Speaker 6: you have you have been who you have Peter Dashik
Speaker 6: others applying to the Pentagon for for money. So I'm
Speaker 6: already I'm already kind of finding it rich that we're
Speaker 6: going to see the arguments that, well, this is kind
Speaker 6: of this was military funding. How dare you when they
Speaker 6: were actually trying to get US military funding and did
Speaker 6: get US AID funding, which is kind of the kind
Speaker 6: of sketchy agency that is always involved when when you
Speaker 6: sort of want to layer between what's going on and
Speaker 6: what's actually going on, and so can you talk a
Speaker 6: little bit about this this DARPA U this attempt to
Speaker 6: get DARPA funding.
Speaker 12: Sure, I mean, I'll start by saying I mean, shipping
Speaker 12: tax dollars to a military linked animal laboratory run by
Speaker 12: a foreign adversary was a recipe for disaster from the
Speaker 12: very thoughts.
Speaker 11: Yeah, whether the money was coming from the DoD.
Speaker 12: The State Department, or the NIH or anybody else for
Speaker 12: that matter.
Speaker 5: I think you guys just questioned the science.
Speaker 3: The scientists, question the scientists.
Speaker 11: Yes, yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 12: So I mean, going back to the diffuse proposal, I mean,
Speaker 12: this is to me, this is just these these experimenters
Speaker 12: kind of being honest about what their intentions were was
Speaker 12: to create the supervirus. And I think you know, the
Speaker 12: the fact that they did apply to the United States
Speaker 12: Department of Defense to create, depending on what your point
Speaker 12: of view, is a bio weapon gives some insight into
Speaker 12: the nature of these programs. I mean, ultimately, we're looking
Speaker 12: at a situation where, you know, the Chinese and the
Speaker 12: American government might agree that, okay, let's do this together,
Speaker 12: because if there's something goes wrong, there's mutually a short
Speaker 12: destruction and also mutually uh mutual mutually distribute a blame.
Speaker 12: You know what I mean exactly, because right now US
Speaker 12: and China are going to be equally to blame if
Speaker 12: it's a lab lead, and you're not really going to
Speaker 12: be able to hold anybody accountable. And I think that's
Speaker 12: exactly why the Diviiden the administration is dragging its feet
Speaker 12: right now. I mean, all signs point to a lab
Speaker 12: league and if it's true, it's their fault and they're not.
Speaker 11: And they don't, you know, so they don't.
Speaker 12: And the fact that Democrats are in the White House
Speaker 12: and running the center right now, I mean, no one
Speaker 12: really has an appetite for.
Speaker 11: Beating up on the NIH or the State Department in
Speaker 11: terms of you know.
Speaker 12: So, I think that the timing of this is unfortunate,
Speaker 12: but I think the timing of this is also it
Speaker 12: was designed to be this way, that this information came
Speaker 12: out at a time where it really doesn't benefit anybody
Speaker 12: at this point.
Speaker 11: It's only going to cause.
Speaker 12: Harm to China US relate, and that's again I think
Speaker 12: part of the point of all this.
Speaker 4: And I think it looks like increasingly the Trump administration
Speaker 4: was dragging their feet as well because they had information
Speaker 4: implicating our government and we didn't get any of this
Speaker 4: information as much as Republicans are posturing now back then,
Speaker 4: probably because their intelligence agencies were aware of some of this.
Speaker 4: Justin over at Whitecoat Waste, you guys are tracking sort
Speaker 4: of money being sent with no accountability for crazy projects.
Speaker 5: And labs around the world.
Speaker 4: And on that note, I want to ask what we
Speaker 4: know about gain of function right now? The state of
Speaker 4: US funding for gain of function research, especially in places
Speaker 4: like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where we don't really
Speaker 4: have a lot of oversight, We're not seemingly even interested
Speaker 4: in providing oversight after all of this, Where does this
Speaker 4: where is this money going right now? If anywhere?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 12: Great question, Lee, And I just want to start by
Speaker 12: saying one more thing that I forgot. We have emails. Actually,
Speaker 12: the same trands of emails that gave us the ben
Speaker 12: who records him to these brands were also the original
Speaker 12: emails showing that Fauci's division at the NIH were actively
Speaker 12: conspiring with Peter Dashchik and the Wan Institute in writing
Speaker 12: in twenty sixteen to bypass the gain of Function band
Speaker 12: that was in place by the Obama Biden administration. So
Speaker 12: again there's a lot of evidence that we were very
Speaker 12: intentionally trying to make this project happen in China, bending
Speaker 12: over backwards to send money there and get approvals to
Speaker 12: do this dangerous animal experimentation at the Wan Institute. In
Speaker 12: terms of where things stand now, there's lots of legislation
Speaker 12: out there looking to crack down or outright band gain.
Speaker 11: Of function research. Here's what we've done to date.
Speaker 12: We've spent the last three years trying to find exposed
Speaker 12: defund these foreign labs China and otherwise. In the federal
Speaker 12: spending bill last year, we were able to cut funding
Speaker 12: for gain of function research in what they call countries
Speaker 12: of concern also known as foreign adversaries Russia, Russia, China.
Speaker 12: Really those were the only countries that were receiving money
Speaker 12: at that time. So we've also now disqualified the Wuhan
Speaker 12: Institute from getting any future funding from the NIH. We're
Speaker 12: hoping to make that permanent, so Wuhan is disqualified, the
Speaker 12: Wuhan Lab itself is disqualified from future taxpayer funding. No
Speaker 12: gain of function funding is going to go to foreign
Speaker 12: enemy laboratories. However, there are still twenty seven other laboratories,
Speaker 12: including other CCP run laboratories animal laboratories in China that
Speaker 12: are eligible to receive money from the NIH and that
Speaker 12: are receiving money from the NIH We also just finally
Speaker 12: cut off money to Russian laboratories. Until recently, taxpayers were
Speaker 12: funding laboratories in Russia as well. So we've cut the
Speaker 12: money for gain of function in foreign countries, but there's
Speaker 12: no restrictions on gain of function here in the United
Speaker 12: States beyond what existed already that allowed some of these projects.
Speaker 11: To go forward.
Speaker 12: So we're working with Congress to permanently defund all animal
Speaker 12: experimentation in countries are concern like Russia and China. Obviously,
Speaker 12: we know what happened in the Wuhan Institute should be
Speaker 12: a signal that this is a bad idea. And we're
Speaker 12: also trying to crack down on gain to function in
Speaker 12: the United States because some people are arguing that we
Speaker 12: instead of offshoring it, we should bring in here where
Speaker 12: we have better oversight.
Speaker 11: But again that's just as bad.
Speaker 12: I mean, that's basically looking to create a WU arm
Speaker 12: the West out here in the United States, and it's
Speaker 12: going to happen, it's just a.
Speaker 11: Matter of time.
Speaker 12: So we're doing everything we can to make sure that
Speaker 12: taxpayer funding is not going to these foreign countries that
Speaker 12: don't have our best interest in mind and for dangerous
Speaker 12: fermentation that can cause a pandemic on our shores.
Speaker 6: And it's good that NIH funding to the Wuhan Lab
Speaker 6: is being cut off, and it's good that there's kind
Speaker 6: of being pressure being applied, But I'm curious are those
Speaker 6: labs going to keep running?
Speaker 3: Because let's say.
Speaker 6: That the NIH doesn't fund the Wuhan Lab anymore. But
Speaker 6: if the CCP is like, you know what, we actually
Speaker 6: kind of think that that research is still useful to
Speaker 6: us for whatever reason, like as people who have respiratory systems,
Speaker 6: like we're we don't really care. I mean, we want
Speaker 6: to know the answer to who funded this, and we
Speaker 6: want one reason. We want to notice so that we
Speaker 6: can kind of target it and there can be accountability,
Speaker 6: But we also don't want there to be pandemics, Like
Speaker 6: we don't.
Speaker 3: It doesn't really matter.
Speaker 6: You know, who paid for that day's work of labor
Speaker 6: for the lab worker who then you know, sneeze at
Speaker 6: the wet market or whatever and ended up with you know,
Speaker 6: twenty plus million people dead and lives up ended and
Speaker 6: immense trauma and the world changed.
Speaker 3: Like so what what are are what's the.
Speaker 6: Path toward just stopping that research globally, because you know,
Speaker 6: we have to be lucky every single time.
Speaker 3: The virus only has to be lucky once.
Speaker 11: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 12: I mean, I think there's been conversations about weapons conventions
Speaker 12: and things like that, carvering these type of uh you
Speaker 12: know this.
Speaker 11: I mean, I would argue that.
Speaker 12: This, you know, crosses the line into buyer weapons research. Again,
Speaker 12: it's all in the ivy beholder and what their intentions are,
Speaker 12: and I think we need stricter rules. Certainly in the
Speaker 12: United States we shouldn't be funding this stuff, but certainly
Speaker 12: globally we should probably agree that this is bad for everybody.
Speaker 11: But if you have ill intentions.
Speaker 12: And you want to create a bio weapon, there's going
Speaker 12: to be plenty of opportunities to do it. It's very
Speaker 12: inexpensive to do you can do it very secretively, and
Speaker 12: to be totally honest, I wouldn't be shocked at the
Speaker 12: US's secretively trying to figure out ways to fund this
Speaker 12: stuff overseas. There's already dangerous loopholes that don't track subgrants.
Speaker 12: So after Eco Health gives money to Wuhan, Wuhan can
Speaker 12: rebrant that money somewhere else and we would have no idea.
Speaker 11: So I think there's also a lot of spending.
Speaker 12: Accountability and transparency that has to happen in the United
Speaker 12: States to make sure we can follow the money where
Speaker 12: it's going and ensure we're not funding these projects life
Speaker 12: Fauci did secretively and Wuhan in the first place that
Speaker 12: brought us this pandemic that we're still dealing with.
Speaker 4: Ryan reported a great story out over at the Intercept
Speaker 4: on all of this. Justin, we really appreciate you coming
Speaker 4: on as well, Senior vice president over at Whitecoat Waste.
Speaker 4: Your insight is always so appreciated, and so is your
Speaker 4: FOYA acumen.
Speaker 5: You guys get everything.
Speaker 12: We've gotten a good attorney on retainer.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Without without an attorney nowadays you get zero from Foyle.
Speaker 6: Yeah that's nothing, absolutely nothing.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, Well, justin, thank you so much. We always appreciate it.
Speaker 11: Thank you both.
Speaker 5: That does it for us.
Speaker 4: On today's edition of Counterpoints, the second edition of the
Speaker 4: show in the new Studio, again, big thanks to McGriffin.
Speaker 4: I heard someone in the comments refer to mac and
Speaker 4: Griffin as McGriffin, and I think that's really beautiful and adorable.
Speaker 5: So they are McGriffin from now on.
Speaker 4: And we are very grateful to them, and very grateful
Speaker 4: to all of you for your help and for watching
Speaker 4: every week programming.
Speaker 3: Note I'll be gone next week. That's why I was
Speaker 3: here yesterday.
Speaker 5: He's just never here anymore.
Speaker 4: You should see his notebook right now, by the way,
Speaker 4: if you've ever wanted a glance and said Ryan Grimm's
Speaker 4: fame notebook, it just says.
Speaker 5: Obama coming to Obama.
Speaker 3: What was I going to say about Obama?
Speaker 5: Nobody?
Speaker 3: I don't remember.
Speaker 5: It's not important.
Speaker 3: But anyway, Crystal will be here, so you'll have a
Speaker 3: ladies day on Wednesday.
Speaker 5: That's right, sounds fun.
Speaker 4: We'll do the Today's Show fourth hour thing with two
Speaker 4: glass of white wine on excellent. All right, well, Ran,
Speaker 4: we'll see the week after that, and we'll see everybody
Speaker 4: next week.
Speaker 5: Back here for counterpoints