Speaker 1: Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.
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Speaker 4: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints Sentily.
Speaker 5: How you doing.
Speaker 6: I'm good. We've got Tager on deck.
Speaker 7: Don't we Yes, We've got a great slate of guests today,
Speaker 7: Slash co host, So we've got Sager who's going to
Speaker 7: join us for about half of the show. After that,
Speaker 7: we're going to be joined by one of the two
Speaker 7: victims of the assault in Crown Heights last week. This
Speaker 7: woman was a random bystander who was just checking out
Speaker 7: the scene. Somebody started filming, so she put us kind
Speaker 7: of scarf over her face and Instantly, this crowd of
Speaker 7: pro Israel people is like, Oh, she must be anti
Speaker 7: Israel because she's got a scarf on.
Speaker 4: Her face and.
Speaker 7: A harrowing scene emerge. This will be her first on
Speaker 7: camera interview. Eric Adams has actually asked her to come
Speaker 7: forward so that he can press charges against the people
Speaker 7: who were involved with this. We have new video footage,
Speaker 7: and we have her video footage which has not been
Speaker 7: seen before, so you're going to see this mob kind
Speaker 7: of from her perspective. We're also going to talk to
Speaker 7: African journalist churn Oba. He's going to talk about the
Speaker 7: what's going on in Africa post USAI D. He has
Speaker 7: been a longtime critic of American interference in Africa and
Speaker 7: USA I D. So he's gonna he'll talk about that
Speaker 7: and a bunch of other things. GDP numbers came out
Speaker 7: this morning, so we'll talk about that. Last night, Donald
Speaker 7: Trump did an interview with Terry Moran, Wild, interview with Wild,
Speaker 7: interview with Tam Moran, a rally, he met with Gretchen Whitmer.
Speaker 7: I think the theme of today's show is the break
Speaker 7: with reality in a way that we haven't really seen in.
Speaker 4: Our politics before. There's just some it's just getting weird.
Speaker 6: Didn't that happen in like twenty fifteen?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 7: Ish, Well, well, when you start to hear Donald Trump talking,
Speaker 7: let's see if like these aren't even lies, these are
Speaker 7: just like this guy.
Speaker 8: Okay, there are some particularly interesting moments actually in that context.
Speaker 6: Also the influencer briefings.
Speaker 8: We're going to do battle over the influencer briefings because
Speaker 8: I'm out numbered on this.
Speaker 6: Ryan and Sager want to tear them apart.
Speaker 7: And you know what the White House is bringing in
Speaker 7: social media influencers and hosting like parodies of press events.
Speaker 8: Yeah, some of them definitely deserve to be torn apart.
Speaker 8: So we will get into all of that. Trump also
Speaker 8: held a rally last night in addition to this interview
Speaker 8: with Terry Moran. He's celebrating his first one hundred days
Speaker 8: in the style Ryan, So we have soundbites from that
Speaker 8: and the who the these you you want to give
Speaker 8: us an update on.
Speaker 7: Going to do it, a wide update on the war
Speaker 7: in Yemen. A one of our seventy million dollars fighter
Speaker 7: jets fell off an aircraft carrier.
Speaker 4: We'll talk about that.
Speaker 7: B It appears that Scentcom is now taking targeting and
Speaker 7: information from random ocent people. Sager is going to like
Speaker 7: this one random ocent people on Twitter and just killing
Speaker 7: innocent people because they're not double checking the work of
Speaker 7: these amateurs from like Europe and Houston.
Speaker 4: And along the way.
Speaker 7: They bombed an African migrant detention center. So far, sixty
Speaker 7: eight people have been killed in this strike. They said
Speaker 7: it was some hooty base, it was actually actually a
Speaker 7: detention center.
Speaker 4: A quick health update on the Grim family.
Speaker 7: We can bring Sager in here because Sager will appreciate this.
Speaker 7: When there was the overhead cam a couple weeks ago,
Speaker 7: I noticed I was going bald and a lot of
Speaker 7: braking points.
Speaker 4: Viewers said, you got to get this hymns monoxidil thing.
Speaker 4: I started doing it. Are you serious?
Speaker 3: I don't know, Ryan, you got to You got to
Speaker 3: check your testosterol levels on that one.
Speaker 1: You should watch out.
Speaker 4: So that my tea levels are going to collapse.
Speaker 7: The other the other health update, my wife's pathology report
Speaker 7: came back and no residual cancer.
Speaker 4: Answer free.
Speaker 7: There'll be some radiation and some other things, but uh,
Speaker 7: real light at the end of.
Speaker 6: The tunnel and a big relief for yeah, all of you.
Speaker 7: Fuller head of hair, no cancer like. Things are looking up.
Speaker 6: Life couldn't be better for Ryan right now.
Speaker 3: I'm so glad to hear it. Ryan, And thank you
Speaker 3: guys for having me. I appreciate it, Oh.
Speaker 4: Appreciate appreciate you being here.
Speaker 7: We're going to start by talking about, uh this the Amazon,
Speaker 7: the up and down with Amazon. Oh so, so Amazon
Speaker 7: begins the day with reporting and punch.
Speaker 4: Bowl that there's going there.
Speaker 7: They're going to start listing the extra price that you're
Speaker 7: paying based on the tariffs. The end of the day
Speaker 7: without that, and throughout the day. I think it's a
Speaker 7: lesson in our contemporary politics. But let's roll this first side.
Speaker 4: So it was.
Speaker 9: Reported this morning Amazon will soon display a little number
Speaker 9: next to the price of each product that shows how
Speaker 9: much the Trump tariffs are adding to the cost of
Speaker 9: each product. So isn't that a perfect crystal clear demonstration
Speaker 9: that it's the American consumer and not China who is
Speaker 9: going to have to pay for these policies.
Speaker 10: I will take this since I just got off the
Speaker 10: phone with the President about Amazon's announcement. This is a
Speaker 10: hostile and political act by Amazon. Why did Amazon do
Speaker 10: this when the Biden administration height inflation to the highest level.
Speaker 6: In forty years.
Speaker 10: And I would also add that it's not a surprise because,
Speaker 10: as Reuters recently wrote, Amazon has partnered with a Chinese
Speaker 10: propaganda arm. So this is another reason why Americans should
Speaker 10: buy American. It's another reason why we are on shoring
Speaker 10: critical supply chains here at home to shore up our
Speaker 10: own critical supply chain and boost our own manufacturing here.
Speaker 5: Zo is still a Trump supporter.
Speaker 10: Look, I will not speak to the President's relationships with
Speaker 10: Jeff Bezos, but I will tell you that this is
Speaker 10: certainly a hostile and political action by Amazon.
Speaker 7: All Right, So, this allegedly hostile act was first reported
Speaker 7: by punch Bowl after that White House interaction. You've moved
Speaker 7: now to A three very quickly. Here's Jeff Stein reporting
Speaker 7: on an Amazon statement. Quote, the team that runs our
Speaker 7: ultra low cost Amazon Hall store has considered listing import
Speaker 7: charges on certain products. This was never a consideration for
Speaker 7: the main Amazon site, and nothing has been implemented on
Speaker 7: any Amazon properties. But wait, there's more. But wait, there
Speaker 7: is more. Donald Trumps asked about this back and forth.
Speaker 7: Let's roll Trump.
Speaker 11: Great. Jeff Bezos was very nice, he was terrific.
Speaker 5: He solved the.
Speaker 11: Problem very quickly, and he did the right thing, and
Speaker 11: it's a good guy.
Speaker 8: So when from punch bowl to the briefing, to Jeff
Speaker 8: Stine to Donald Trump himself, Sager, what did you make
Speaker 8: of that play by play in the I think all
Speaker 8: of that went from like eight am to one pm.
Speaker 7: With Amazon stock moving as a result the whole time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think my meta takeaway from all
Speaker 3: of this is just how different and how frankly a
Speaker 3: weak this is compared to the Chinese system. I want
Speaker 3: to remind everyone whenever we were covering this stuff last
Speaker 3: week on the Chinese version of Amazon, they are actually
Speaker 3: advertising state subsidized discounts. They're calling them patriotic discounts, saying, hey,
Speaker 3: Chinese people, if you are patriotic, stand up to the
Speaker 3: United States, buy Chinese. Here's a discount from the state.
Speaker 3: We must save our supply chains. Meanwhile, here we are
Speaker 3: in our country where the price is going up no
Speaker 3: matter what. Except the President and Bezos, you know, the
Speaker 3: one of the richest men in the world and the
Speaker 3: President of the United States are basically coming together to
Speaker 3: make sure that the label is not there to say
Speaker 3: that this is as a result of the tariffs. I
Speaker 3: also want to say this as well. The White House
Speaker 3: might be trying to do some sort of political layoup
Speaker 3: in the future. They're going to say, look, Amazon prices
Speaker 3: have not gone up all that much. That is just
Speaker 3: categorically not true. The reason why is that while the
Speaker 3: price may remain the same on Amazon, Amazon is currently
Speaker 3: engaged in economic warfare against all of its suppliers.
Speaker 1: I was just reading yesterday.
Speaker 3: Amazon is demanding in the same way that Walmart, Target
Speaker 3: and all the other large retailers are. They are saying
Speaker 3: to their suppliers, you are eating the margin. We are
Speaker 3: not touching one dollar of this. They have the power
Speaker 3: of that because of the reliance of those platforms, of
Speaker 3: those suppliers on their platform. This is the problem. So Amazon, Target,
Speaker 3: and Walmart, they are all going to be generally fine. Yes,
Speaker 3: there may be some little bit of increase in price,
Speaker 3: but the real crime here is for the small business
Speaker 3: let's say that relies on Amazon. Let's say they sixty
Speaker 3: or seventy percent of volume. I don't know if you
Speaker 3: guys saw this as a viral image going around of
Speaker 3: somebody who bought something from Hong Kong where they paid
Speaker 3: like two thousand dollars for the product, and their custom
Speaker 3: duty charge is over the price of the good, right,
Speaker 3: so twenty five hundred. So just imagine if you're one
Speaker 3: of these smaller suppliers E commerce company. There's so many
Speaker 3: of these companies out there. They're relying on Amazon almost entirely.
Speaker 3: And Amazon is telling them no, no, no, no, you're eating that,
Speaker 3: and so Costco, Walmart, Target, and Amazon, the big four
Speaker 3: like major retailers, they have the power to tell those
Speaker 3: suppliers to eat margin. And that's great for them, but
Speaker 3: you know that can result both in a wipeout of
Speaker 3: a lot of these suppliers, right because they can't have
Speaker 3: any profitability, and then worse, it can even manifest in
Speaker 3: empty shelves and less inventory. So we really are the
Speaker 3: ones who are losing here. And I just want to
Speaker 3: highlight the difference in these two state strategies, Like, on
Speaker 3: the one hand, you have a state over in China,
Speaker 3: which is not just really because they don't care about
Speaker 3: Amazon in their own way, right because they control it. Instead,
Speaker 3: they care about the suppliers that I just talked about.
Speaker 3: Those are the backbone of the United States economy and
Speaker 3: they're the exact people who are not being helped right
Speaker 3: now by government policy. In fact, they're the ones with
Speaker 3: who are freezing cash flow, have a lot of inventory uncertainty.
Speaker 3: They're the ones who are not placing right They're the
Speaker 3: ones not placing their orders in this dramatic freight drop
Speaker 3: off from China. And so watching that, I actually in
Speaker 3: a lot of ways, it's just like COVID, all the
Speaker 3: big companies, the Fortune five hundred, they made off like bandits.
Speaker 1: You know, who are the people who went bankrupt? Small business?
Speaker 3: You have restaurants, you know, employees or five you know,
Speaker 3: contractors and others.
Speaker 1: Those are the people that really suffer in something like this.
Speaker 3: And so that's where I want to zoom out of
Speaker 3: even just Trump and Amazon, and like this is about
Speaker 3: meta high level strategy, and just watch at who's playing
Speaker 3: the game and who's actually winning that game.
Speaker 7: And in the war with reality is this is a
Speaker 7: serious skirmish because think about what the administration is objecting to.
Speaker 7: If there are increases that are the direct result of
Speaker 7: the importers having to pay this tariff, they're saying, you
Speaker 7: cannot convey that reality to your consumers. We will not
Speaker 7: allow it. Yet reality exists, and so we can put
Speaker 7: up a five. So UPS announced that, despite having strong
Speaker 7: profits for the first quarter, it's planning in the future
Speaker 7: going forward to cut twenty thousand jobs. Part of this
Speaker 7: is these are companies that are always looking to lay
Speaker 7: off workers for any excuse they can find.
Speaker 4: But the excuse that they're.
Speaker 7: Finding here is that their main client, Amazon isn't shipping
Speaker 7: as much stuff.
Speaker 4: And so while Amazon is.
Speaker 7: You're right going to be able to tell that its
Speaker 7: suppliers we will not be accepting price increases. I've seen
Speaker 7: some of those emails that have gone around. It's an
Speaker 7: amazing thing to read we will not be accepting price increases.
Speaker 7: How cool would that be to be able to walk
Speaker 7: into a store and be like, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 7: just I don't accept price increases, So just gonna I'm
Speaker 7: just gonna pay what this used to cost.
Speaker 12: Uh.
Speaker 7: Despite that power, they're still shipping less stuff because they
Speaker 7: don't have complete absolute control over everything, and as a result, uh,
Speaker 7: there's less for UPS drivers to do. And so that's
Speaker 7: just that's just one of the many kind of to
Speaker 7: borrow a Reagan phrase, trickle down effects, that we're gonna
Speaker 7: that we're that we're going to see from this, uh
Speaker 7: the other uh you know reality uh interferences is best
Speaker 7: at getting asked about you know, where they are with
Speaker 7: China at this point.
Speaker 4: So let's let's roll the Treasury secretary.
Speaker 6: The Chinese continue to say that the US and are
Speaker 6: not engaged in any consultation or negotiation on tariffs.
Speaker 13: You recently said you've talked to your counterpart, but.
Speaker 6: It's more about quote traditional things like financial stability. So
Speaker 6: can you clarify is the administration talking to Beijing specifically
Speaker 6: about tariffs or not.
Speaker 14: Well, we're not going to talk about who's talking to whom.
Speaker 14: But I think that over time we will see that
Speaker 14: the Chinese terraffts are unsustainable for China. I've seen some
Speaker 14: very large numbers over the past few days to show
Speaker 14: if these numbers stay on, Chinese could lose ten million
Speaker 14: jobs very quickly, and even if there is a drop
Speaker 14: in the tariffs that they could lose five million jobs.
Speaker 14: So remember that we are the deficit country. They sell
Speaker 14: almost five times more goods to us than we sell
Speaker 14: to them, So the onus will be on them to take.
Speaker 5: Off these tariffs.
Speaker 14: They're unsustainable for them, and they are saying, you guys
Speaker 14: are not talking about it, So is that true? They
Speaker 14: have a different form of government, They're playing to a
Speaker 14: different audience. So I'm not going to get into the
Speaker 14: nitty gritty again of who's talking to whom. But as
Speaker 14: I said, I believe or the Chinese, Uh, these terrorifts
Speaker 14: are unsustainable very.
Speaker 8: Quickly two days ago that you didn't know if President
Speaker 8: Trump had spoken to Sheeting King.
Speaker 11: Do you know?
Speaker 13: Now?
Speaker 14: Again, I would say, Caroline and I have a lot
Speaker 14: of jobs around the White House running the switchboard in
Speaker 14: one of them.
Speaker 1: Did you still have switchboards switching?
Speaker 6: That's actually a really good question.
Speaker 4: Did she come to the switchboard?
Speaker 8: I know?
Speaker 13: God does she?
Speaker 6: I know?
Speaker 4: I meant to ask, did he talk to she?
Speaker 6: Shoot?
Speaker 4: I saw him, and I forgot to ask.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Well let's interpret they're not talking. They're not talking
Speaker 3: at any at any level. It's not happening. Go ahead
Speaker 3: of one.
Speaker 6: Well no, that's exactly what I'm just gonna say. Framing
Speaker 6: the whether they're.
Speaker 8: Even talking to China as the quote unquote nitty gritty
Speaker 8: is completely wi. There's nothing nitty or gritty about that question.
Speaker 8: It's really the question for the entire global economy right now.
Speaker 8: And they don't have an answer to it, which is
Speaker 8: why they are framing it as the nitty gritty.
Speaker 6: Anyone else went away, And before we go to Howard Lutnik.
Speaker 3: I mean, I just think broadly again, like, this is
Speaker 3: why we've seen such wild market swings, is that the
Speaker 3: administration just is addicted to floating these things which are
Speaker 3: just not true. Like anybody with any expertise China launcher
Speaker 3: the Chinese fact. But this the other You don't need
Speaker 3: to speak Chinese. The Chinese Foreign Ministry puts out statements
Speaker 3: in English. We've never talked, we're not talking. We have
Speaker 3: nothing to discuss. Take the tariffs off and that's it.
Speaker 3: By the way, it's not just China. And this is
Speaker 3: actually what's concerning me the most. Remember in Japan, Japan
Speaker 3: was held up as the first trade deal. They came
Speaker 3: here first, the Japanese Prime Minister giving a speech in
Speaker 3: the parliament. We are not going to concede to aggressive
Speaker 3: US demands. In fact, the current position of the Japanese
Speaker 3: Economic Ministry is you must take the tariffs off before
Speaker 3: we're able to talk. Okay, that's the Japanese. Those are
Speaker 3: the people who we are friends with. The administration is
Speaker 3: not floating some trade deal with India. You know what's
Speaker 3: really funny about that too, is it reveals how much
Speaker 3: of this is bullshit, because Scott Bessen actually said, actually,
Speaker 3: a trade deal with India is a lot easier because
Speaker 3: they have lots of tariffs, but less non trade bearer
Speaker 3: non tariff barriers, right, And so he's like, we can
Speaker 3: actually come to some sort of negotiation. But the problem
Speaker 3: is that the administration does not have any genuine definition
Speaker 3: that they can even point to of a non tariff barrier.
Speaker 3: They're basically like going back through their records and trying
Speaker 3: to make stuff up. And it comes back to the
Speaker 3: way that they talked with the Japanese. Remember, the Japanese
Speaker 3: have a zero let me reiterate this, a zero percent
Speaker 3: tariff on American cars. It is not because of tariffs.
Speaker 3: There are a lot of non tariff barriers. We can
Speaker 3: talk about that if you want. But then, you know,
Speaker 3: whenever the Japanese came here and they're like, so what
Speaker 3: do you want You guys said this is reciprocal tariffs,
Speaker 3: and they're like, well, what are you offering? They're like,
Speaker 3: I can't even do how am I supposed to do
Speaker 3: business with you? So I mean, just what I wanted
Speaker 3: to highlight is that Scott Bessett and Howard Latnik and
Speaker 3: others are complete and Trump are just completely schizophrenic in
Speaker 3: their messaging. And then I mean broadly, I know you
Speaker 3: guys have been talking about this is it is going
Speaker 3: to set in for people very soon. That freight drop
Speaker 3: sixty percent that's showing up, okay sometime in June. Uh,
Speaker 3: you know, it's it's very You know, my wife, you know,
Speaker 3: obviously we're doing with all this baby stuff right now,
Speaker 3: she's like, hey, should we order that infant car seat?
Speaker 3: You know, and it's not about the tariffs. Are we
Speaker 3: going to be able to get one six months from now?
Speaker 3: What about diapers? You know, I'm going through researching where
Speaker 3: the diapers that we're going to buy are made, just
Speaker 3: to make sure, Hey, should I go in stockpile right now?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: Ninety nine percent By the way of kids toys, Ryan,
Speaker 3: as a parent, when do Kisney toys?
Speaker 1: Actually, Mary, I.
Speaker 7: Mean you can get the ones stuff in their mouth
Speaker 7: like almost immediately, like the little kankeys and stuff like
Speaker 7: pretty right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, guess what over ninety five percent of that is
Speaker 3: made in China, right, you know, ninety five percent, So
Speaker 3: you know, I hope my kid there's a luddite, you know,
Speaker 3: just deal with the no toys, or maybe it's maybe
Speaker 3: they're better off, right, Maybe I should, you know, go
Speaker 3: back to hand whittling, and.
Speaker 7: Yeah they're reasonable. My reusable diaper are good. They've gotten
Speaker 7: they've gotten a lot better. And they're probably made in
Speaker 7: China too, so you better.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, Yeah, those are also made. Go ahead.
Speaker 8: Well, I was gonna say to Sager's point, We have
Speaker 8: a clip of Howard Lutnik. This is Sager's point about
Speaker 8: how the administration is addicted to floating things out into
Speaker 8: the public and maybe it is just the sort of
Speaker 8: online addling of the American mind where they love seeing
Speaker 8: the market shoot up, so they say stuff like this
Speaker 8: on CNBC. But Howard Lutnix apt for a long interview
Speaker 8: on CMBC yesterday, and we have some clips of that
Speaker 8: where he's talking. He's pushed on the question of these deals.
Speaker 8: Let's take a listen to what he said.
Speaker 15: If we get a headline that we've signed some deal
Speaker 15: with China and whatever, you know, the markets are going
Speaker 15: to rip so or actually I.
Speaker 16: Should say, would you say that well, Treasury Secretary Vestent
Speaker 16: is focused on China. That's his that's his portfolio. He's
Speaker 16: got to get something done with China. And my portfolio
Speaker 16: is the rest of the world's trade deals. So they
Speaker 16: are coming portfolio. Oh, it's it's the greatest thing because
Speaker 16: we have every country in the world, just like Donald
Speaker 16: Trump has said, wants to do a deal with us.
Speaker 16: Now here's the point. I have a deal done, done,
Speaker 16: done done, but I need to wait for their prime
Speaker 16: minister and their parliament to give its approval, which I
Speaker 16: have country shortly.
Speaker 13: I'm not going to tell you what country.
Speaker 3: Let the president.
Speaker 15: It's just you and me here and have a couple
Speaker 15: of million people.
Speaker 16: Hopefully I'll have the president decide so and then there
Speaker 16: are a country after country where we're just working through
Speaker 16: the details. But you have to remember they have prime ministers,
Speaker 16: they have parliament, they have to work through their process.
Speaker 16: But all of these are going to be coming, and
Speaker 16: what they're going to be is they're going to be
Speaker 16: incredibly smart. And key is where are you going to.
Speaker 13: Find the people to work here? Right, you're north of Phoenix.
Speaker 13: Where are they're coming?
Speaker 16: Does you go to the community colleges and you train people.
Speaker 16: So all the community colleges around here, Arizona State's on
Speaker 16: a Grand canyon. All these community colleges here are training
Speaker 16: people right now, technicians. And these are really good paying jobs.
Speaker 16: You started seventies eighties, ninety thousand dollars. These are trade craft.
Speaker 16: It's time to train people not to do the jobs
Speaker 16: of the past, but to do the great jobs of
Speaker 16: the future. You know, this is the new model where
Speaker 16: you work in these kind of plants for the rest
Speaker 16: of your life, and your kids work here, and your
Speaker 16: grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants
Speaker 16: go overseas right now. You should see an auto plant.
Speaker 16: It's highly automated. But the people, the four five thousand
Speaker 16: people who work there, they are trained to take care
Speaker 16: of those robotic arms. They're trained to keep the air conditioning.
Speaker 12: You take it.
Speaker 8: So, who wants to take a guess at what Howard
Speaker 8: Lutnex deal that he referenced there is, because I don't
Speaker 8: think we.
Speaker 1: Know, No, we don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean, look, all the current reports are that it's India,
Speaker 3: and you know, I've even talked about this. Look the Indians, Yeah,
Speaker 3: they'll offer you some like fake tariffs and all these
Speaker 3: other things. But this is also the inconsistency that drives
Speaker 3: me crazy. India is one of the most protective developing
Speaker 3: economies in the entire world. We're talking about Japan non
Speaker 3: trade tariff barriers. That's a joke compared to what India does.
Speaker 3: I mean, listen, don't ask me. Go and ask anybody
Speaker 3: who's ever tried to go scot business over there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: just talking about yesterday, any of these folks. It's true.
Speaker 3: I mean, listen, I no hate. They're doing what they
Speaker 3: need to do because they believe in the protective economy.
Speaker 3: They don't want another country to be able to have
Speaker 3: any say over its global affairs. I respect that, but
Speaker 3: let's be serious here and not say that this is
Speaker 3: not one of the most difficult markets in the entire
Speaker 3: world for any US company to do business in.
Speaker 1: That is just obvious.
Speaker 3: And yet you know they're willing to take reciprocal tariffs
Speaker 3: maybe there, but they're not willing to take it over
Speaker 3: with Japan. The whole thing is just preposterous. And you
Speaker 3: know the level of uncertainty that they've injected now you know,
Speaker 3: into the small business supply chain, and honestly, even the
Speaker 3: pain that they are already. Listen, the tariffs go off tomorrow,
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter. That's still an entire what month, maybe
Speaker 3: quarter of economic growth wiped out like that. And for
Speaker 3: a small business, I mean, look it's only what seven
Speaker 3: to ten percent, But I run a small business here
Speaker 3: with Crystal. I mean, could we really go a quarter
Speaker 3: with like no money? I don't really know business that
Speaker 3: could do that, you know, or if you can, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe you can make it work.
Speaker 1: But that's that's a lot of stress. That's that's a
Speaker 1: heart attacks.
Speaker 3: That's you know, people getting fired, having to ask people
Speaker 3: to take you know, okay, can I can I pay
Speaker 3: in sixty days?
Speaker 1: You know that type of thing. You don't want to
Speaker 1: be doing that to your vendor.
Speaker 3: That has all cascading effects all throughout the economy.
Speaker 7: If you think about the blood, sweat and tears that
Speaker 7: has gone into so many of these businesses, when you
Speaker 7: talk about the pain, like that's the part that has
Speaker 7: really been been hitting me. And actually over at Dropside,
Speaker 7: I think we've seen a plateauing, you know, even though
Speaker 7: we're not like importing anything, but just just as people
Speaker 7: I think, are you know, pinching their pennies more because
Speaker 7: the consumer confidence has completely collapsed.
Speaker 4: It's so hard to build.
Speaker 7: A small or medium sized business, and people put their
Speaker 7: entire lives into it, and then their lives depend on it,
Speaker 7: and sometimes their own the rug just being ripped out
Speaker 7: from under them is just brutal.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and sometimes small towns are revolving around these small businesses.
Speaker 8: And to Howard Lutin's suggestion that we are bringing all
Speaker 8: these jah blah blah blah, this administration has no industrial
Speaker 8: policy to train these workers to augment changes in the market,
Speaker 8: to augment what might happen to small businesses.
Speaker 6: They actually have nothing.
Speaker 8: And so I think it's fairly audacious for Howard Lutink
Speaker 8: to come out and talk about all of these things
Speaker 8: that should happen that are going to happen, while the
Speaker 8: administration really it's a soccer.
Speaker 6: Maybe I've missed something.
Speaker 8: Are they doing literally, are they putting any policy forward
Speaker 8: that is helping workers and helping communities and helping the
Speaker 8: economy broadly shift to meet the changes that they're inducing.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, I've been off the grid last couple
Speaker 3: of days dealing with all this stuff, but lesson anything
Speaker 3: he's broken in the last four days.
Speaker 1: You know, you can enlighten me.
Speaker 3: I mean, the current position of the United States government
Speaker 3: is that you will be charged a massive surcharge if
Speaker 3: you do if you import anything of broad even if
Speaker 3: you build it here in the United States, and thus
Speaker 3: it is incumbent upon you to eat into your margin
Speaker 3: to invest here in America. Okay, I mean, look, we
Speaker 3: could talk numbers. Let's say ten for ten, as in
Speaker 3: I would take ten percent of my margin, and you
Speaker 3: give me a ten percent break on taxes. Everybody wins, right,
Speaker 3: you know, I invest a little bit here. Kapax is
Speaker 3: super expensive. Ask anybody who's ever built anything in the
Speaker 3: physical world. And so I don't see I don't see
Speaker 3: one single proposal. In fact, the only civil war that
Speaker 3: I can see happening right now in Congress for Republicans
Speaker 3: is whether or not to cut Medicare or Medicaid.
Speaker 1: That's that's a whole other discussion.
Speaker 3: But we're not even talking about tax breaks for people
Speaker 3: who are small businesses, or write offs or anything if anything. Actually,
Speaker 3: as I understand it, they want to take a lot
Speaker 3: of that away. It's called for it's like forty five acts.
Speaker 3: I think it is a manufacturing task credit, which was
Speaker 3: built into the Inflation Reduction Act. They want to get
Speaker 3: rid of that, okay, and that was one of the
Speaker 3: only things that got you know, some of these companies
Speaker 3: to actually build a fact Now listen, it's fine.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: The objection from the Republicans is like, oh, that's all
Speaker 3: this green energy bs fine, Expand it for everything, make
Speaker 3: it for oil.
Speaker 1: I don't care, you don't do whatever.
Speaker 3: Just just make sure that it builds something here in America,
Speaker 3: if anything you'd like, Yeah, you're right, it shouldn't be
Speaker 3: totally restricted to renewables or whatever. Build it for everything,
Speaker 3: you know, for the entire you know, made in America.
Speaker 3: And then the green the green energy can get it.
Speaker 3: Everybody can get it. Fine, if that's what we want
Speaker 3: to do. But you don't even hear that, right because
Speaker 3: it's this is why it's just all it's it's just
Speaker 3: there's nothing to it beyond the service level.
Speaker 7: And on your Medicaid point, oh no, on your Medicaid
Speaker 7: point real quickly, Bernie Moreno Ohio Republican new you know,
Speaker 7: Freshman Center just came out and told the House forget
Speaker 7: it with your Medicaid cuts, Like those are cuts you're.
Speaker 4: Calling them, not cuts.
Speaker 7: We see them as cuts, and we're not doing it.
Speaker 7: So you know, the nose always win Congress, So even
Speaker 7: that is struggling. I wanted to finish though with speaking
Speaker 7: of reality.
Speaker 4: Usually we go.
Speaker 6: To which have you put Chinese propaganda in the road?
Speaker 12: Down?
Speaker 17: Usually we go down honestly this time right, so, but
Speaker 17: usually when it comes when it comes to the US side,
Speaker 17: you're you can disagree or agree with him, but it's
Speaker 17: more likely to be based in reality.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: And the Chinese are the ones that are going to
Speaker 7: give you just flagrant nonsense propaganda.
Speaker 13: Uh.
Speaker 7: In this case, this is what the Chinese are putting
Speaker 7: out in English through their Ministry of Foreign Affairs website,
Speaker 7: basically in response so trying to buck up the entire
Speaker 7: world against us, but also in response to the claims
Speaker 7: from the United States government that there are some deals,
Speaker 7: you know, they're conversations happening there, getting down to the
Speaker 7: nitty gritty. So this is a much longer video, but
Speaker 7: just a little slice of it. Watch this and then
Speaker 7: ask yourself, is this a video made by a country
Speaker 7: that is engaged earnestly in negotiations with in a good
Speaker 7: faith way with a partner at the moment.
Speaker 4: So let's let's roll this.
Speaker 7: From the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Speaker 5: The US has.
Speaker 15: Stirred up a global tariff storm and deliberately targeted China,
Speaker 15: playing a ninety day pause game with other nations, forcing
Speaker 15: them to limitrade with China. This is just like the
Speaker 15: deadly trap of the eye of the storm. Bowing to
Speaker 15: a bully is like drinking poison to quench thirst. It
Speaker 15: only deepens the crisis. The US once accused Japan of
Speaker 15: dumping semiconductors and crushed companies like Toshiba. Later, it forced
Speaker 15: Japan to sign the Plaza Accord, pushing the economy into
Speaker 15: decades of anemic growth.
Speaker 4: The US also used long arm.
Speaker 15: Jurisdiction as a weapon, breaking up France's industrial giant Allstons,
Speaker 15: robbing the country of a national champion. History has proven
Speaker 15: compromise won't earn you mercy. Kneeling only invites more bullying.
Speaker 4: China won't kneel downright, Sager.
Speaker 7: So does that sound like a country that's taking Trump's
Speaker 7: calls right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just not. I mean, and you're right, you know.
Speaker 3: The other final irony here is about TikTok. Like I
Speaker 3: didn't want to highlight that Donald Trump is trying to
Speaker 3: save TikTok, and the Chinese are like great, and so
Speaker 3: they are flooding TikTok with stuff like that and targeting
Speaker 3: America's I mean, I warned this, what happened.
Speaker 1: We tried to ban it.
Speaker 3: You were the one who decided you were a king
Speaker 3: and that you were just going to subvert you know,
Speaker 3: US law and say that I'm not going to ban it.
Speaker 3: It's like, you know what, I just feel like that
Speaker 3: scene in The Joker, I'm like, you get what you deserve. Man.
Speaker 3: You know, you have the entire population. You have the
Speaker 3: entire population, which is getting China pilled. I personally really
Speaker 3: like this guy, but we played him here on the
Speaker 3: show and he was like, hey, America, here's how many
Speaker 3: things made in my house from America? He goes, do
Speaker 3: you have anything made in your house from China? I
Speaker 3: love this dude. I watched all his videos because so.
Speaker 6: You only have a house because of America though.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, but you know he's he actually used to
Speaker 3: live here, and so he understands us. And he'll just
Speaker 3: constantly be hitting back and someone will be like, hey,
Speaker 3: what about nineteen eighty nine, and he's like, this is
Speaker 3: so he goes, you are so imbued with propaganda, and
Speaker 3: then he'll list off like Kent State and all these
Speaker 3: other and I was like, hey.
Speaker 1: Listen, I mean, the guy has a point, you know
Speaker 1: what kind of saying.
Speaker 4: Well as Trump says, now you think we're not killers?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you think we're no what do you say? We
Speaker 3: think you're so innocent? You think we're so innocent? And
Speaker 3: there's something just refreshing. I think about watching that now Pervade,
Speaker 3: because look, I mean I don't even think it should
Speaker 3: be here, but Trump is actively as the person who
Speaker 3: wants to save it and is now you know, paying
Speaker 3: the price for the very thing that he that he
Speaker 3: that he's now.
Speaker 1: Trying to do with respect to tariffs. It's just amazing.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: I wasn't able to join you guys for the one
Speaker 3: hundred Day episode, and it's like it's crazy, you know,
Speaker 3: to watch them in the same breath.
Speaker 1: This is the most successful one hundred days ever.
Speaker 3: You know, I have a great FDR one hundred day
Speaker 3: book behind me, and I'm like, this is a joke compared.
Speaker 1: To I mean, what a joke.
Speaker 3: All we have seen is just I mean, Doge is
Speaker 3: a massive listen We'll take their claim I like to
Speaker 3: take people's claims and take the take the subjectivity out
Speaker 3: of it, and just be like, Okay, you said you're
Speaker 3: gonna cut two trillion, Now it's gonna be like fifteen
Speaker 3: billion at best, right at best in terms of because
Speaker 3: they said one fifty and of that actually one hundred
Speaker 3: and thirty five is fake.
Speaker 1: So fifteen billion.
Speaker 3: Wow, congratulations, that's like maybe what less than a day
Speaker 3: of the overall.
Speaker 6: I feel like I do that the budget?
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, so thanks, Then what mass deportation? Nope, numbers
Speaker 3: are exactly the same as Obama and okay, and does
Speaker 3: Bush instead, you know, even ignited all of this. Basically,
Speaker 3: you've had opened a massive credibility gap with the whole
Speaker 3: enemy's aliens Act. Trump is out there actually claiming that
Speaker 3: the MS thirteen things is real on a break a
Speaker 3: guard see his knuckles like that. That's the level of
Speaker 3: discourse which we've been subjected to. Signal Gate, the ceasefire
Speaker 3: and Gaza you know, fell apart the ceasefire in Ukraine.
Speaker 1: Nothing there is currently happening.
Speaker 3: I mean, honestly, the only I would say there are
Speaker 3: only two like a grades from my perspective, again in
Speaker 3: terms of what they said they were going to do.
Speaker 3: One is the Iran negotiations, which as you and I know,
Speaker 3: very tenuous and that could blow up at any time.
Speaker 3: And the border crossings they actually did accomplish that. Beyond that,
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know. I would probably give him
Speaker 3: an f on every single one of the ways that
Speaker 3: this has been implemented, again both by its success, it's implementation,
Speaker 3: and then sinking your goodwill with the overall American public.
Speaker 1: Now it's Trump. Can he come back?
Speaker 14: Yeah?
Speaker 3: You know, listen, you know you beat an idiot at
Speaker 3: this point to count him out entirely.
Speaker 1: But I don't know. I don't really know where things go.
Speaker 7: From here, and Trump seems to not be Usually Trump's
Speaker 7: genius is a tactile feel for where the American public is.
Speaker 7: He seems to have completely lost it and he seems
Speaker 7: to be in a bubble. And we'll talk about that
Speaker 7: more in this next segment. We'll have ADP jobs where
Speaker 7: we'll have GDP numbers, and we've got Trump's interview with
Speaker 7: Terry Murran.
Speaker 4: Stick around for that.
Speaker 7: GDP and job numbers are out and neither are looking
Speaker 7: very good. Let's put his first element up on the
Speaker 7: screen economists that expected something around one point four percent
Speaker 7: a year over year increase. Instead we got a zero
Speaker 7: point three percent dropped, the first contraction of the economy
Speaker 7: since the pandemic since the pandemic. ADP private payroll numbers
Speaker 7: also came out. They rose at only sixty two thousand jobs.
Speaker 7: Dow Jones and others had been expecting more like one
Speaker 7: hundred and fifty thousand.
Speaker 4: Jobs added to the payrolls, So.
Speaker 7: Only sixty two is being received by the markets as
Speaker 7: a huge problem now, Saga. The GDP is interesting in
Speaker 7: the way that it factors in imports. Obviously, the D
Speaker 7: stands for domestic, and so imports are kind of subtracted out.
Speaker 7: What you saw in March was this massive surge in
Speaker 7: purchasing of imports to get ready for Liberation Day because
Speaker 7: Trump said Liberation Day is coming, so everybody batten down
Speaker 7: the hatches. And so it's not supposed to count around
Speaker 7: GDP because you know it counts and then it gets
Speaker 7: subtracted back out. But money that you would spend on
Speaker 7: imports is money that you just buy definition don't have
Speaker 7: to spend on something else. You know, think about it
Speaker 7: in terms of a household. If you if you need,
Speaker 7: you know, to do some landscaping and you need to
Speaker 7: buy a new refrigerator, and all of a sudden, you
Speaker 7: got to buy the fridge, You're not going to do
Speaker 7: the landscaping or whatever like So, so some domestic things
Speaker 7: didn't get done because of the imports. So that did
Speaker 7: play a role. But what do you make of the
Speaker 7: first contraction? And this is March, so we're we're talking
Speaker 7: about ending March thirty first, so these numbers do not count.
Speaker 6: April Liberation Day was actually April.
Speaker 7: April second, per second souse. They didn't want it to
Speaker 7: be the April Fool's Day.
Speaker 6: That's right.
Speaker 3: I want people to not pay attention to the top
Speaker 3: number and instead look at the trend. So the overall
Speaker 3: trend is that yes, it was because of good imports,
Speaker 3: but it was consumption slowed to just one point eight percent,
Speaker 3: down from four percent at the end of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: So that shows almost what is one hundred percent reduction
Speaker 3: in consumption that happened in just a three month period.
Speaker 3: That's devastating, you know, to a lot of businesses. And quote,
Speaker 3: final sales to domestic purchasers came in at just two
Speaker 3: point three percent, down from about three percent at the
Speaker 3: age of twenty twenty four. Those two things are what matter,
Speaker 3: I think, even more than the import craziness, because this
Speaker 3: is from Heather Long. If you set aside the import craziness,
Speaker 3: the economy slowed in the Trump early days, but it
Speaker 3: didn't collapse. That said, the risk of recession is now
Speaker 3: real with the hefty tariff. So for me, the decline
Speaker 3: in consumption is the number one story. It fits with
Speaker 3: the consumer Confidence index falling to twenty twenty two, and
Speaker 3: it also just shows us you know, what a contraction
Speaker 3: can look like, because if you have high impoort duties,
Speaker 3: low consumption, mass layoffs or at least some sort of layoffs,
Speaker 3: you have high uh you know, unemployed, higher unemployment, and
Speaker 3: interest rates have to remain high because technically inflation will
Speaker 3: still remain at least you know, baseline of kind of
Speaker 3: where it is right now, You're gonna have the stagflation
Speaker 3: type scenario, which is externally affected and I actually don't
Speaker 3: even think it fits that neatly into a box. The
Speaker 3: consumption figure screams volumes, because that is uncertainty. That's you,
Speaker 3: that's me, that's Ryan Emily and all of us where
Speaker 3: even subconsciously, right before we're about to make a purchase,
Speaker 3: Do I really need this right now? Should I just
Speaker 3: be putting this in the bank? Should I keep keep
Speaker 3: doing this?
Speaker 6: Women?
Speaker 4: Oh? Oh really, you're just buying it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean honestly, I noticed I didn't include my wife.
Speaker 1: Yeah, women be shopping women, all right?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Is uh?
Speaker 3: The point is that as that manifests across the economy,
Speaker 3: you see the ups you know style stuff, you see
Speaker 3: a few of the plants and these other things, layoffs
Speaker 3: began to happen. Consumer retail is going to start to
Speaker 3: get slowly dragged down. And that is when you see,
Speaker 3: you know things I always think about gift shops, candle
Speaker 3: shops in a nice tourist area.
Speaker 1: You're dead.
Speaker 3: If you see twenty percent, you know, reduction in overall
Speaker 3: visitors and the people who are visiting have like have
Speaker 3: you know, on a tighter budget, you're.
Speaker 4: Done in your inventory?
Speaker 3: Upstate New York, Yeah, You're inventory costs twice as much.
Speaker 3: If you're in upstate New York or in Washington and
Speaker 3: you're heavily reliant on Canadians, you're dead.
Speaker 1: Are you guys seeing this stuff?
Speaker 3: Out of Vegas about how Vegas is devastating right now,
Speaker 3: absolutely devastated. They're like, their occupancy rate is apparently low.
Speaker 3: I just thought Nate Silver, he was like, Oh, I'm
Speaker 3: booking my rooms for the WSOP that's coming up, and
Speaker 3: it's some of the lowest rates that I'd ever seen.
Speaker 3: A lot of it is from international travel and also
Speaker 3: just broad consumption.
Speaker 7: And the tourism point is a key one because the
Speaker 7: biggest bright spot in the jobs report was in leisure
Speaker 7: and hospitality.
Speaker 4: So that's March.
Speaker 7: We know for a fact that in April the biggest
Speaker 7: bright spot turned very dark.
Speaker 4: It is getting quite ugly.
Speaker 7: And we can put up this chart, which I believe
Speaker 7: is B two, which goes exactly to Sager's point. This
Speaker 7: is a consumer confidence index. Obviously, sometimes there are material
Speaker 7: reasons for the number going from straight downward towards the floor.
Speaker 7: If you look at two thousand and seven, eight nine,
Speaker 7: we know why it crashed back. Then we look at
Speaker 7: twenty twenty, we know why it crashed. Then that's the pandemic.
Speaker 7: This one is completely driven by decisions just made for
Speaker 7: effectively very little reason by Donald Trumps decided to do
Speaker 7: this thing, and as a result, you see this number
Speaker 7: just spiking down to the floor. And when the consumer
Speaker 7: economy makes up so much of our economic capacity and
Speaker 7: you have people pulling back, that has a that has
Speaker 7: a ripple effect that's going to be felt throughout the economy.
Speaker 6: Futures are sliding.
Speaker 8: Dow is down about three hundred and fifty points since
Speaker 8: the news came out, and.
Speaker 7: I would think that who knows how the market's going
Speaker 7: to handle it, But you would think that Trump's interview
Speaker 7: last night as well would not inspire much confidence in
Speaker 7: the markets.
Speaker 4: Let's let's play just this this one.
Speaker 7: Thought uh B three from Terry Moran and Donald Trump
Speaker 7: last night.
Speaker 18: We basically have an embargo on China. Look to say,
Speaker 18: something's gonna happen. No, okay, well, thing's going to happen.
Speaker 13: You know business. Now I want to ask you, I
Speaker 13: do no business.
Speaker 18: And so one hundred and forty tariffs on China, and
Speaker 18: that is that basically an embargo. They it'll raise prices
Speaker 18: on everything from electronics to clothing to building houses.
Speaker 13: You don't know that.
Speaker 11: You don't know whether or not China's mathematics. China probably
Speaker 11: will eat those tariffs. But at one hundred and forty five.
Speaker 11: They basically can't do much business with the United States,
Speaker 11: and they were making from US a trillion dollars a year.
Speaker 11: They were ripping us off like nobody's ever ripped us off.
Speaker 11: And by the way, we have other countries that were
Speaker 11: just as bad. If you look at the European Union,
Speaker 11: who is terrible what they've done to us. Every country,
Speaker 11: almost every country in the world was ripping us off.
Speaker 13: But they're not doing that anymore.
Speaker 4: I want you to think that inspire any confidence.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, you're right, Ryan, I mean it's one of
Speaker 3: those where really what you're watching.
Speaker 1: I mean what Trump.
Speaker 3: Also says is he'll be like, oh, we're having all
Speaker 3: these jobs come back, and they're telling me it's amazing.
Speaker 3: It's like, there's not what that's not true. You literally
Speaker 3: listen to the CEO Walmart Target. They're like, we told
Speaker 3: them it would be devastating. That's what they said. It's
Speaker 3: smpirical about I mean, you know, the other really gross
Speaker 3: part about all this is how the auto manufacturers are
Speaker 3: basically just shaking Trump down for exemptions when she announced
Speaker 3: in Michigan, and it's like, okay, so what are we
Speaker 3: doing here?
Speaker 4: Exactly?
Speaker 3: So we don't have exemptions, or actually we do. And
Speaker 3: by the way, the tariffs are also going to apply
Speaker 3: to Toyota if they build in America. So why would
Speaker 3: Toyota continue to build in America? Can anyone riddle me
Speaker 3: that one? If your toy if your Toyota, I just
Speaker 3: like screw it. You know, I'm done. Why would I
Speaker 3: even want to keep doing business here? It just it
Speaker 3: does it's preposterous and it doesn't really make a whole
Speaker 3: bunch of sense. And broadly that continues to shine through
Speaker 3: in Trump's interview. I mean, look in a certain way,
Speaker 3: like you get, you really get exactly what he should like.
Speaker 3: What he is on the screen is exactly how he is.
Speaker 3: I can testify to that, you know, on a personal level,
Speaker 3: having met him a couple or interviewed him a couple
Speaker 3: of times. And so anybody who's thinking like it's a
Speaker 3: performance or whatever, it's like his life is a performance.
Speaker 3: That's how he actually is in all of these meetings.
Speaker 3: So we'll see the one.
Speaker 4: The one that scared me was when he said that
Speaker 4: tourism is way up.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, it's just us.
Speaker 7: Terry moransay, Yeah, I'm sorry, what No, it's not it's
Speaker 7: way down. Like these are not differences of opinion here,
Speaker 7: like either Las Vegas is a ghost town or it's not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well in payroll, yeah, Brian, he should ask Steve
Speaker 3: wick Coough, the.
Speaker 6: Developer, Well, tasty property in Vegas.
Speaker 3: That's true. Yeah, check the Trump numbers in Vegas. Actually, honestly,
Speaker 3: someone should go and track where the room rates at
Speaker 3: the Trump International in Vegas and see how they have
Speaker 3: trended from November all the way until today. That'd be
Speaker 3: a good like chatchypt task or something. I mean, look,
Speaker 3: I could be wrong only because it is Trump and
Speaker 3: there's a lot of maga boomers out there that will
Speaker 3: pay a premium just to stay at a Trump property.
Speaker 3: But you know, I wouldn't be surprised if they're not
Speaker 3: completely insulated from any sort of economic downturn.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So ADP their report showed private payroll growth slowed in
Speaker 8: April to sixty two thousand. The Dow estimate for that
Speaker 8: was one hundred twenty thousand, So another negative indicator. But
Speaker 8: if you're worried about all of us, I have good news.
Speaker 8: We can roll the final stot Chuck Schumer is on
Speaker 8: the case.
Speaker 6: Let's play before of.
Speaker 13: All the crazy things the Republicans want to do. Now
Speaker 13: they want a car tax.
Speaker 6: Hell no, hell no, to the contacts.
Speaker 1: I'm inspired. I'm personally inspired.
Speaker 6: I feel good.
Speaker 4: John, there is done. Let's move on to the influence influencers.
Speaker 8: Well, the White House started its influencer briefings this week.
Speaker 8: I think we're two influencer briefings in there.
Speaker 6: There have been.
Speaker 8: There was one on Monday, one on Tuesday. We'll see
Speaker 8: where they go going forward. Now, there are some moments
Speaker 8: from these briefings that are going massively viral because they
Speaker 8: are cringe inducing, painful, and nobody is wrong to cringe
Speaker 8: at them.
Speaker 6: My very unpopular take is.
Speaker 8: That the moments that aren't going viral have actually not
Speaker 8: been bad. So before I make my very unpopular argument
Speaker 8: and do battle with Ryan and Sager, let's roll I don't.
Speaker 6: Even want to do it. Let's roll this cop see
Speaker 6: one of the influence in briefing at the White House
Speaker 6: with Caroline love It.
Speaker 19: Over the first one hundred days, the majority of policies
Speaker 19: that we've seen from the Trump administration have been either
Speaker 19: targeted at foreign affairs, such as bringing the American hostages
Speaker 19: home or attempting to end the war between Ukraine and Russia,
Speaker 19: or long term goals such as cover cutting government spending
Speaker 19: with DOJE. What policies can we expect to see rolled
Speaker 19: out over the next few months that Americans will directly
Speaker 19: feel the effects of in order to secure the twenty
Speaker 19: twenty six midterms for the Republican Party and keep his
Speaker 19: approval rating historically high.
Speaker 20: This in the first hundred days is that the White
Speaker 20: House is crawling with kids. You have a young, beautiful
Speaker 20: baby boy. There are babies everywhere. There's so many young
Speaker 20: folks on staff who have kids. But the last four
Speaker 20: years under Joe Biden, parents are really stressed and ravage.
Speaker 20: They had to take on two or three extra jobs.
Speaker 20: Depression rates were up, suicide rates were up. Very high
Speaker 20: profile young mother who seems to juggle and balance it
Speaker 20: all beautifully. What advice do you have young parents out
Speaker 20: there who are starting their careers, having kids, building families
Speaker 20: and trying to find that balance so desperately.
Speaker 10: Yeah, well, it's a great question, and first to the
Speaker 10: heart of your premise, It's true the president has empowered
Speaker 10: not just me as a young mother in this role,
Speaker 10: but there are so many new moms and dads on
Speaker 10: our senior staff in the West Wing, but also across
Speaker 10: the entire administration.
Speaker 8: Can't forget that there's one from the first briefing on
Speaker 8: Monday that we're going to roll. We've got some more
Speaker 8: information on this influencer. Let's go ahead and play see
Speaker 8: two here.
Speaker 21: Thank you for having us here. I've noticed this is
Speaker 21: kind of like a repeat of twenty sixteen. The Legacy
Speaker 21: medy has gone back to not reporting anything on President Trump.
Speaker 21: At the beginning, we had them reporting everything that he
Speaker 21: was doing. Now they're kind of going back again to
Speaker 21: not reporting everything that he is actually doing. I'm kind
Speaker 21: of the nerd when it comes to reporting. I'm off
Speaker 21: the headline newsgirl. I'm the nuts and bolts. I'm the
Speaker 21: policy type nerd. So what direction do you advise kind
Speaker 21: of me to go into like the White House files
Speaker 21: that y'all send out every single day, because that's what
Speaker 21: people are used to when they want to ask me
Speaker 21: questions they want to know, kind of like the nuts
Speaker 21: and bolts of earthing.
Speaker 6: Okay, guys, go ahead and react where.
Speaker 4: We want to start.
Speaker 3: That reminds me of Brian Stelter asking Jensaki, what can
Speaker 3: we as the media do better? And that was ridiculed
Speaker 3: then and it should be ridiculed now. And look, I
Speaker 3: think brought Emily.
Speaker 1: This is the thing.
Speaker 3: I'm not objecting to everybody in the briefing room. I
Speaker 3: am friends with a lot a lot of those people.
Speaker 3: I mean, my man pomp was there sitting in the background.
Speaker 3: But my point is not about that. It's actually a
Speaker 3: philosophical thing where the White House is just here's my
Speaker 3: main message to a lot of these influencers.
Speaker 1: You are being used. They think you're a fucking joke.
Speaker 3: I just wanted to be honest with you, because let's
Speaker 3: let's talk about this. Who did Donald Trump choose to
Speaker 3: give his one hundred day interviews to The Atlantic Time
Speaker 3: magazine and Terry Moran at ABC News for an oval
Speaker 3: office sit down. Yeah, they'll invite you to your city
Speaker 3: little briefing so you can glaze them about babies or
Speaker 3: whatever is going on. They don't respect you at all.
Speaker 3: So even though Trump will sit there and be like, wow,
Speaker 3: what a great question, Trump understands the optics are humiliating
Speaker 3: to actually sit down with somebody like you, and the
Speaker 3: White House does too. You're a pond, You're a joke,
Speaker 3: You're somebody there just to take up space and to
Speaker 3: piss off the media. Now, if you want to actually
Speaker 3: do your job, you should ask them questions which are
Speaker 3: critical and Ryan, I mean, I really think it's important
Speaker 3: for you to be able to talk about this because
Speaker 3: you were once in a similar position in the Huffingon Post.
Speaker 5: And what the.
Speaker 3: Huffington Post expertly did under Barack Obama is they challenged
Speaker 3: Barack Obama from the left. And so the mission of
Speaker 3: conservative media should not be to glaze the Trump administration.
Speaker 3: It should be to challenge the Trump administration to say,
Speaker 3: why haven't you done these things that you promised on
Speaker 3: campaign traill? Why are you allowing this? Why are you
Speaker 3: not doing You should find internal contradictions. And I'm telling
Speaker 3: you this is the way that I operated in the
Speaker 3: White House, and hey, what do I know. I only
Speaker 3: got to interview the president four times in the Oval Office.
Speaker 3: The reason why I did it is not because I
Speaker 3: glazed them. In fact, I'll just reveal it public privately.
Speaker 3: They would all say, yeah, we can't give this to you. Know,
Speaker 3: whoever is a is a like is glazing us because
Speaker 3: we would look stupid. They're like, when we bring you in,
Speaker 3: you're actually going to ask them critical questions. They they
Speaker 3: don't want the critical question, but they understand that that's.
Speaker 1: Part of the back and forth.
Speaker 3: So Ryan, I think you should really go off on
Speaker 3: this a little bit because you had the experience.
Speaker 1: Oh sorry, Emily too.
Speaker 8: No, I just want to interject to say my entire
Speaker 8: argument is what the point that you are making here
Speaker 8: is that there actually were questions that didn't go viral
Speaker 8: from some of these influencers people I don't even know
Speaker 8: who were coming at it from the right, and actually
Speaker 8: Sean Spicer, of all people, ask Caroline Levitt why Donald
Speaker 8: Trump is sitting down with Jeffrey Goldberg and other people
Speaker 8: in the corporate press, which I meant to post this,
Speaker 8: but like I do a lot of like helping.
Speaker 7: I was watching that, I was like, is that Sean Spicer? Yes,
Speaker 7: hell is he doing in there?
Speaker 8: But this is the thing, like I have I don't
Speaker 8: know how many like young conservive journalists. I've said exactly
Speaker 8: what you just said, Sager too.
Speaker 6: And I was meant to.
Speaker 8: Send that from Sean Spicer and be like, he under
Speaker 8: he actually understands this. This is the only way that
Speaker 8: you get respect is asking serious questions. So there were
Speaker 8: questions about Trump's promise for national reciprocity for gun owners,
Speaker 8: a great example of something that nobody in the mainstream
Speaker 8: media would ask about, holding him to account for a
Speaker 8: promise from the right that nobody in the corporate press
Speaker 8: would ask about. Very legitimate question, newsy question, when would
Speaker 8: the when will the wall be built? Another great question
Speaker 8: that one didn't go viral. There was a question this
Speaker 8: was from DC Dreno about the timeline on the Epstein files.
Speaker 8: There was a question about reorganizations of the irs. There
Speaker 8: were some genuinely decent questions that didn't go viral. Now
Speaker 8: to everyone's point, I just want to say, I agree
Speaker 8: that those viral moments speak to something really like rotten
Speaker 8: in conservative media mega media. And I'm also very curious
Speaker 8: to hear Ryan's thoughts on this, because he actually did
Speaker 8: exactly what you said, Sager, which is the right way
Speaker 8: to approach this job, not just for being more successful,
Speaker 8: but also just doing your damn job and respecting your
Speaker 8: viewers and your audience.
Speaker 7: So Ryan tell us, oh, yes, Sager has this exactly right.
Speaker 7: That if you are a journalist with a perspective, whether
Speaker 7: you know you guys on on the right me on
Speaker 7: the left, it's actually easier to do your job when uh,
Speaker 7: there's a center left. If you're a left wing journalist
Speaker 7: and there's a center left president in power, attacking them
Speaker 7: from the left is kind of a lot easier to
Speaker 7: do real interesting work than it is when there's a
Speaker 7: right wing president, because it's not interesting that like the
Speaker 7: Huffet and Post thinks that Donald Trump is wrong about X, Y,
Speaker 7: and Z, because they also think he's wrong about A, B, C, D, E,
Speaker 7: f G.
Speaker 4: Everything. But when it comes to somebody that.
Speaker 7: You're a little bit closer with, you're able to earnestly say, hey,
Speaker 7: you ran on breaking up the big banks, and now
Speaker 7: we're hearing that Larry Summers is saying you can't break up.
Speaker 4: The big banks.
Speaker 7: You know, you ran on making sure that there is
Speaker 7: a public option for people who can't afford insurance.
Speaker 4: We hear that you're.
Speaker 7: Talking a big farm about getting you know, making sure
Speaker 7: that that's not even in the bill. And finding the
Speaker 7: gap between what they ran on and what they're actually
Speaker 7: doing is where is where the good good journalism is.
Speaker 7: You drive that wedge in there, and you can do
Speaker 7: it more effectively if you actually care.
Speaker 8: And it's your value, right, because you're filling blind spots.
Speaker 8: The entire point of this, that's why I actually like
Speaker 8: the National Reciprocity for gun owners question. Was I thought
Speaker 8: such a good illustration, like this is your value in
Speaker 8: the briefing room is that you are bringing a perspective
Speaker 8: that is underrepresented in the media despite being represented more
Speaker 8: evenly throughout the rest of the population. Trump voters care
Speaker 8: about the promise he made on gun reciprocity, they care
Speaker 8: about the border wall, but their questions aren't represented in
Speaker 8: the briefing room. So it's not only a value add
Speaker 8: for you to be tough on some of these questions
Speaker 8: from the right, it also will be more successful. So like,
Speaker 8: if you want to be successful, you're being stupid by
Speaker 8: being a lapdog.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, And that's the thing they just don't understand.
Speaker 3: And again Trump understands this. That's why he at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, is not choosing any of these
Speaker 3: people to sit down with. And you know, I just
Speaker 3: don't know because I wonder also if it's an audience thing,
Speaker 3: because there has been so much of a magapill taken
Speaker 3: by a lot of people who are influencers online where
Speaker 3: you know, because they've created a feedback loop through which
Speaker 3: everything all they do is glaze Donald Trump all the time,
Speaker 3: that they don't even have the space or the trust
Speaker 3: with their audience to be able to challenge Trump and
Speaker 3: so that they find it existentially dangerous. I mean, I
Speaker 3: think it would be fascinating to watch any of these,
Speaker 3: like former free speech warriors, go in there and ask
Speaker 3: about the Palestine thing, right, because that would throw them
Speaker 3: off their game too. They Here's the other thing too
Speaker 3: that people need to understand. It's also about mindset. So
Speaker 3: the mindset of White House pres sectery. When they walk
Speaker 3: into a normal briefing room, it's war. It's literal warfare.
Speaker 3: They're prepared, they're ready to do battle. But when she's
Speaker 3: walking in there, let me guarantee you, she's not doing
Speaker 3: the level of preparation that they are. Whenever they go
Speaker 3: into the briefing room, that's when things get interesting. That's
Speaker 3: when things are very interesting, when you can hear what
Speaker 3: they actually think. I remember once in the first Trump administration,
Speaker 3: there was this great reporter I think his name was
Speaker 3: Olivier Knox, I forget who we worked for at the time,
Speaker 3: and he was in a back and forth with Spicer
Speaker 3: and he was just like, Hey, what does victory look
Speaker 3: like in Afghanistan? Spicer was like stable and I was like, oh, interesting,
Speaker 3: he don't even know. I was like, what a great question, right,
Speaker 3: you know, because it was it was so fascinating because
Speaker 3: he hadn't prepared for it at all and hit him
Speaker 3: with something and he actually had to think on the spot.
Speaker 3: It might be one of the few honest moments of
Speaker 3: his entire career. That's actually one of the best things
Speaker 3: that you could get. I mean, Ryan, you can talk
Speaker 3: about this too. Didn't Obama call you guys out specifically
Speaker 3: on like his first press conference in nine and He's like,
Speaker 3: I could hear a cancer and the Huffingon post would say,
Speaker 3: you know, I didn't do enough.
Speaker 7: It was even better, he said, He said, if I
Speaker 7: were if the huffingon posts were covering Abraham Lincoln when
Speaker 7: he did there and when he did the Emancipation Proclamation,
Speaker 7: they would have highlighted the fact that it didn't apply
Speaker 7: to a few counties and US Virginia and to other
Speaker 7: counties under Confederate.
Speaker 1: By the way, that's actually fair. That is the Oberator
Speaker 1: and those people said, just so we're aware.
Speaker 7: Mister yes, and we actually then wrote that article just
Speaker 7: for him, uh, because all of the radical Republican papers
Speaker 7: at the time said the same thing, why are you
Speaker 7: so late on this? And why doesn't this cover everybody?
Speaker 7: And that's the role of that press. So it's like,
Speaker 7: yes and yeah. He would call us out. He would
Speaker 7: call us out pretty regularly, and we ate it up.
Speaker 7: And what my favorite part time was when the New
Speaker 7: York Times editorialized against Larry Summers for FED chair. But
Speaker 7: we had been just absolutely hammering him at the Huffington Post.
Speaker 6: You were very pro Larry Summers for FRED chair and uh, he.
Speaker 4: Did not get He did not get it.
Speaker 7: And in a private meeting with Democrats, Obama complained about us,
Speaker 7: uh and Larry Summers and not the New York Times
Speaker 7: because the New York Times at a total page wasn't
Speaker 7: moving the needle.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 6: That's very interesting, right.
Speaker 1: That was what was crawl see and that's power and
Speaker 1: then that look, I mean, that's to your point.
Speaker 7: These influencers think that they're going to get access by
Speaker 7: asking these glazing questions when in fact, as you found
Speaker 7: with Trump, it's being adversarial and building your own authority
Speaker 7: that then forces them to answer your questions and otherwise
Speaker 7: they're totally embarrassed. So it was the power that we
Speaker 7: built that forced them. They didn't love us, hated us,
Speaker 7: hated us more than they hated the Daily Caller, probably
Speaker 7: because they're like, oh, yeah they call.
Speaker 4: Of course they're going to beat us up.
Speaker 3: But god post they don't listen. And you know, Emily,
Speaker 3: like you said, I have been on the phone with
Speaker 3: half of these people. They don't listen. They're taking their
Speaker 3: advice from social media, and I just I think, not
Speaker 3: only is it going to age poorly, Like remember all
Speaker 3: of the stars of twenty seventeen in the briefing room
Speaker 3: April Ryan, Jim Acosta. How did it work out? You know,
Speaker 3: I mean these people are jokes. We remember it as
Speaker 3: a joke. So yeah, they got rich, you know for
Speaker 3: a year or for two Jim A. Costallary got fired
Speaker 3: from CNN, humiliating, you know, as part of his brand.
Speaker 3: Nobody looks back on his whole like fight resist, what
Speaker 3: was the whole like grabbing the microphone away from the intern.
Speaker 3: It's just like it literally is like mass psychosis, right
Speaker 3: that that was even considered acceptable.
Speaker 1: I think that's how most of these mega media.
Speaker 3: People are going to look, they won't age and you know, look,
Speaker 3: I mean, will they get away with it? Yeah, they
Speaker 3: definitely will. I mean I've been watching to see the
Speaker 3: reception they get on social media. I think it's insane.
Speaker 3: I honestly, I don't really understand it.
Speaker 8: Well, that's the point that I wanted to make because
Speaker 8: I think the distinction between influencers and journalism is quite
Speaker 8: interesting as well, because to the point you were making
Speaker 8: about whether this is audience capture, that's really interesting because
Speaker 8: I think with some of these influencers, it's not even
Speaker 8: audience capture.
Speaker 6: It's that they want this access.
Speaker 8: That's not about getting journalism right because they're not journalists,
Speaker 8: so they're not trying to like break stories and move
Speaker 8: the ball forward. What they want is more access for
Speaker 8: social and that's a very different set of incentives. You know,
Speaker 8: they want to be able to go with like Kai
Speaker 8: Trump and Don Junior and like be behind the scenes
Speaker 8: at all of these events.
Speaker 6: Because that's just sort of where their bread is buttered.
Speaker 6: Right now.
Speaker 8: They can get maybe sponsorships with it, and it's a
Speaker 8: it's a different I agree that it's a different set
Speaker 8: of incentives than breaking news. And obviously those incentives have
Speaker 8: crept into journalism itself too. But if you don't even
Speaker 8: think of yourself as a journalist, it's true that you
Speaker 8: have important, big audiences. So there's a there's theoretically a
Speaker 8: case for these influencer briefings, but they're not going to
Speaker 8: be the same as the White House press briefing. Nevertheless,
Speaker 8: if you have serious questions, then you should ask the
Speaker 8: serious questions because it will be better off. You will
Speaker 8: actually be respected, Your audience will be interested in it
Speaker 8: because they are following you in that they think you
Speaker 8: are one of their like they're a fellow conservatives, so
Speaker 8: they're probably have the same questions that you do about
Speaker 8: when the border wall is supposed to be done despite
Speaker 8: all of the promises. So, I mean, it's it's obviously, yes,
Speaker 8: it's silly. I hope some of these good questions keep
Speaker 8: getting asked even if they're not going viral, because this
Speaker 8: really ties a bow on everything.
Speaker 6: We've just talked about. You don't go viral for asking
Speaker 6: a good question about sometimes.
Speaker 3: You do, though you can actually sometimes you do. Yeah, right, right,
Speaker 3: what the That's what these other people don't get. It's like,
Speaker 3: if you want real fame or like success or any
Speaker 3: of the stuff. You can get it by doing kind
Speaker 3: of what you're trying to do. But it's just it's
Speaker 3: harder whatever, it's much harder. It takes a level of
Speaker 3: intellectualism and history and of knowledge, you know, to get there.
Speaker 3: But you know, they've chosen their path, and I mean,
Speaker 3: I think they just look like a joke and that
Speaker 3: you know, four years from now, they're not going to
Speaker 3: be able to even have a career.
Speaker 1: And from that point forward, like you got to.
Speaker 3: Ask existential questions because look, all the warning signs were there,
Speaker 3: and they're just feeding into this mass hysteria at the moment.
Speaker 1: So we'll see, we'll see how it goes.
Speaker 7: Yeah, guys, so stop embarrassing yourself. So let's move on
Speaker 7: now to Donald Trump's rally last night.
Speaker 3: By the way, guys, thank you, thank you very much
Speaker 3: for you know, dealing with my absences. There's a couple
Speaker 3: of just personal medical things going on. But everything is
Speaker 3: fine for right now, and we are anxiously awaiting our baby.
Speaker 3: The kid is already a pain in the ass and
Speaker 3: he's not even or he or she has not even
Speaker 3: been born yet, and so I'm sure that will manifest
Speaker 3: in their personality going forward. But just in case, this
Speaker 3: might be the very last time that you guys see
Speaker 3: me before labor and you know, I'll take a few
Speaker 3: weeks off and all of that.
Speaker 1: So just thank you very much for bearing with me.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you all, And back to Ryan and Emily.
Speaker 8: President Trump went to Michigan yesterday, had a little encounter
Speaker 8: with Gretchen Whitmer. But he was doing a rally on
Speaker 8: the occasion of his one hundredth day in office, and
Speaker 8: the crowd was sort of a.
Speaker 6: Typical Trump rally crowd.
Speaker 8: But given what's happened over the course of the first
Speaker 8: one hundred days, there was one particularly interesting moment.
Speaker 6: We have a couple that we're going to run. But
Speaker 6: let's play this first clip.
Speaker 8: After Donald Trump showed video of the allegendbus thirteen members
Speaker 8: heading to Al Salvador ending up at Seacott.
Speaker 6: This is what happened, and the worst.
Speaker 11: Of the worst are being sent to a no nonsense
Speaker 11: prison in El Salvador.
Speaker 13: Why don't you watch watch this, watch this, take a look.
Speaker 6: So there were USA USA chants.
Speaker 8: Now Donald Trump also floated well, he first said that
Speaker 8: he was going to serve two terms. Here's what's happened,
Speaker 8: Here's what happened after that. Let's roll this club.
Speaker 11: It was so important to win because they used to
Speaker 11: say the fake is to be a great president, you
Speaker 11: have to serve two terms.
Speaker 13: So now we're going to serve two terms.
Speaker 11: Now they've taken that work of crush, right, right Oz?
Speaker 13: Trust that one off?
Speaker 1: Trust that one off.
Speaker 5: No, they say it all the time.
Speaker 11: When I was out, they say, well, then they.
Speaker 6: Go, is it a fever dream?
Speaker 8: When he says, right, doctor Oz, right, doctor Oz, what's happening?
Speaker 8: But the crowd was chanting three if you couldn't hear that,
Speaker 8: Then Trump said, thank you, we actually already served three.
Speaker 7: Then one more clip, This one is he was elected
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty.
Speaker 4: Is that what he means?
Speaker 6: I think that's what he means. It's genuinely hard to say.
Speaker 5: This is.
Speaker 8: His part of his interview. So the rally is happening.
Speaker 8: He's also sitting gun.
Speaker 6: For an interview with Terry Moran on ABC again to
Speaker 6: mark the one hundredth day of the administration. Let's roll
Speaker 6: this clip D three.
Speaker 13: But the court has warned you to facilitate that you're
Speaker 13: not the one making this decision. We have lawyers.
Speaker 11: I don't want to do this, but the buck stops
Speaker 11: eyes on now, No, no, no, I follow the law.
Speaker 13: You want me to follow the law.
Speaker 11: If I were the president that just wanted to do anything,
Speaker 11: I'd probably keep them right where it says what the
Speaker 11: law is.
Speaker 22: Listen.
Speaker 11: I was elected to take care of a problem that
Speaker 11: was it was an unforced era that was made by
Speaker 11: a very incompetent man, A man that turned out to
Speaker 11: be incompetent that you always said was wonderful, great genius.
Speaker 13: Right, and now you find out all of.
Speaker 11: The media now they're saying, what a mistake they made.
Speaker 11: A man who was grossly incompetent allowed us to have
Speaker 11: open borders where millions of people float in. I campaigned
Speaker 11: on that issue. I wouldn't say it was my number
Speaker 11: one issue, but it was pretty clear I campaigned on
Speaker 11: that issue. I've done an amazing job. I have closed borders.
Speaker 11: He said you couldn't do it, and you wouldn't be
Speaker 11: able to do it, it would never happen.
Speaker 13: Well, it happened, and it happened very quickly.
Speaker 11: Wait a minute, when we have criminals, murderers, criminals in
Speaker 11: this country, we have to get him out, and we're
Speaker 11: doing it, and you'll pick out one man. But even
Speaker 11: the man that you picked out, he's got a key,
Speaker 11: said he wasn't a member of a gang.
Speaker 13: And then they looked and on his knuckles.
Speaker 11: He had MS thres there it Wait a minute, he
Speaker 11: had MS thirteen.
Speaker 13: We had some tattoos that are interpreted that way. But
Speaker 13: let's move on. Wait a minute, I will tear it Terry, Terry,
Speaker 13: he did not have the letter MS one. It says
Speaker 13: MS one three. That was photoshop. So let me do
Speaker 13: his photoshop. Terry, you can't have that.
Speaker 11: Hey, they're giving you the big break of a lifetime.
Speaker 11: You know you're doing the interview. I picked you because frankly,
Speaker 11: I never heard of you.
Speaker 13: But that's okay. I picked to you, Terry. But you're
Speaker 13: not being very nice. He had MS thirteen texts will
Speaker 13: agree to disagree. I want to rive on to something else, Terry.
Speaker 13: Do you want me to show you the picture? I
Speaker 13: saw the picture. Well the photoshop. Here we go. Here
Speaker 13: we got photoshop, but go look at his hand he had.
Speaker 13: He did have tattoos that can be interpreted that way.
Speaker 13: I'm not an expert on them. I want to turn
Speaker 13: to Ukraine, I.
Speaker 11: Want to get to No, he had MS as clear
Speaker 11: as you can be, not interpreted. This is why people
Speaker 11: no longer believe well the news because when photogl.
Speaker 13: In El Salvador, they aren't there. But let's just go
Speaker 13: they aren't there when he's in there now right, No,
Speaker 13: but they're in your picture.
Speaker 11: Terry Ukraine sir, he's got MS thirteen on his knuckles.
Speaker 13: All, okay, we'll take such a disservice. Will take a look.
Speaker 13: What did you just say it? Yes, he does so.
Speaker 8: Donald Trump clearly believes that he deported someone with MS
Speaker 8: thirteen tattooed on his knuckles, the letters MS and then
Speaker 8: the numbers one three tattooed on his knuckles. That would
Speaker 8: be Kilmore Abrego Garcia, who does have tattoos that experts,
Speaker 8: some have said, resemble what gang members might have. But
Speaker 8: to be very clear, Trump thinks it's said MS one
Speaker 8: three on his knuckles. What actually happened is that the
Speaker 8: White House put MS. They photoshop. They actually did, to
Speaker 8: Terry Marrin's point, photoshop MS thirteen onto by picture of
Speaker 8: kill More Abrego Garcia's knuckles to sort of demonstrate they
Speaker 8: enhanced the picture of his knuckles so that the tattoos
Speaker 8: were more clearly visible, and then MS thirteen on it.
Speaker 8: And there was debate when the White House released that
Speaker 8: photo as to whether they wanted people to believe it
Speaker 8: was photoshopped or wanted people to believe.
Speaker 6: That MS thirteen actually had been tattooed on his knuckles.
Speaker 7: Donald Trump seems to have been maybe he was the
Speaker 7: tartop of this hoax, seriously.
Speaker 8: Because there, I mean, there was this this actually somewhat
Speaker 8: interesting debate when that happened last week about whether or
Speaker 8: not people would actually believe the photoshop or that it
Speaker 8: was very clearly indicating that they were just enhancing the picture.
Speaker 8: I was actually in the camp that was like, oh,
Speaker 8: this is so obviously photoshopped that what they're trying to
Speaker 8: do is just make it a graphic that indicates the
Speaker 8: tattoos or MS thirteen, not that this is like because
Speaker 8: they were like extenciled letters, like you know, just it
Speaker 8: didn't look real.
Speaker 6: But I guess if you're a sorry boomers, but I
Speaker 6: guess if you're a social.
Speaker 4: Media boom without your focals.
Speaker 8: He was, he was duped by the photoshop and genuinely
Speaker 8: believes that Kilmer abrego Garcia, all of this uproar. I mean,
Speaker 8: that changes the story significantly that Donald Trump believes the
Speaker 8: man has MS thirteen tattooed on him, because that's a
Speaker 8: confirmation clear as day that he is MS thirteen. Meaning
Speaker 8: the Democrats that are fighting to keep him, the media
Speaker 8: that is fighting to keep him is coming from a very.
Speaker 7: Different place right from Trump's addult perspective. He literally thinks
Speaker 7: that Abrego Garcia has has MS thirteen tattooed on his fingers.
Speaker 7: And then he's like, god, what is wrong with these
Speaker 7: democrats in the media right that are like fighting over
Speaker 7: this guy.
Speaker 8: Publicans by the way, who were unhappy with the direction.
Speaker 4: Twenty fifth Amendment time, Like.
Speaker 7: Whoever is the marshal of the Supreme Court like from
Speaker 7: this first term, who never showed up to arrest Trump?
Speaker 4: Like twenty fifth Amendment?
Speaker 8: Man?
Speaker 4: Like this is this man is utterly delusional?
Speaker 6: Am I wrong? That that picture was very obvious?
Speaker 7: It was obvious because I think if you can see it,
Speaker 7: I think I think maybe his eyes aren't good enough.
Speaker 4: And Steven Miller just lied to him.
Speaker 7: I mean, and somebody's lying to him, like and we'll
Speaker 7: talk about this that at the end of this clip
Speaker 7: with his answer on tourism, he's he's watching television and
Speaker 7: reading some things, so he has some like access to
Speaker 7: outside information. But clearly his circle of advisors are either
Speaker 7: afraid of him and or are just outright lying to
Speaker 7: him to cynically manipulate him. Stephen Miller is the one
Speaker 7: with the most access to him as deputy chief of staff,
Speaker 7: who would have a vested interest in lying about whether
Speaker 7: or not he has MS thirteen tattooed.
Speaker 4: On his hand. And also it doesn't. The whole thing
Speaker 4: falls apart.
Speaker 7: He has a marijuana leaf and then a smile, and
Speaker 7: then a smile like okay, well even in Spanish, you
Speaker 7: know you can that's there's an MS there. Then there's
Speaker 7: a cross, which is like okay, it's not a one,
Speaker 7: that's a cross. And then and then there's a skull,
Speaker 7: and that's where it's like, where do you have three
Speaker 7: out of a skull? And people are like, well, you
Speaker 7: can draw a three somewhere onto the skull.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 7: Now you're just in fantasy land, like it's it's like,
Speaker 7: you know, smok smoking weed makes me happy, love the
Speaker 7: Lord till I die, Like that's a thing that's out
Speaker 7: there like that actually makes a little bit of sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it makes a little bit of sense, but I'm
Speaker 6: not MS thirteen. Also tattoos either.
Speaker 4: Also MS thirteen.
Speaker 7: If you've seen go google image MS thirteen tattoos, they
Speaker 7: say MS thirteen on their face or on their back and.
Speaker 8: Like, yeah, they're usually in like old timy old script,
Speaker 8: but it's clear.
Speaker 4: It's clear.
Speaker 7: But you'd be thrown out of the gang, Like, hey,
Speaker 7: you're supposed to tattoo MS thirteen on yourself, Kilmart and
Speaker 7: he's like, oh, yeah, I did this.
Speaker 4: It's really fancy. See how the M s And.
Speaker 7: Then this is sort of like a one and this
Speaker 7: is a skully be like you're you're you're afraid to
Speaker 7: announce your support, your your your membership in MS thirteen,
Speaker 7: So you're out like like that, that's not how it
Speaker 7: works anyway, that it matters, because none of this matters.
Speaker 4: This was photoshop. He's wrong.
Speaker 8: It was very obvious. It was like a USARAH font
Speaker 8: with it didn't look like it was natural on the skin,
Speaker 8: like a tattoo.
Speaker 4: It was he's wrong put.
Speaker 8: Onto the image in a way that is just mind
Speaker 8: blowing that you would interpret that as someone's actual MS
Speaker 8: thirteen tattoo. I'm not ready to rule out what's on
Speaker 8: Timar Arbrego Garcia's knuckles as being potentially gang related, but
Speaker 8: that's at this point, beside the point because Donald Trump
Speaker 8: thinks that an obvious photoshop is really, he clearly thinks
Speaker 8: that it's really.
Speaker 6: Did you get the sense that he was lying to
Speaker 6: Terry Moran's face? I didn't. I think.
Speaker 7: He seemed to, and he seemed to be like really
Speaker 7: frustrated at Terry Moran, for like, his ability to take
Speaker 7: in information seems gone.
Speaker 4: And at the end he says, why won't you just
Speaker 4: say to me?
Speaker 22: Yes?
Speaker 7: He has MS thirteen on his knuckles, which is clearly
Speaker 7: that's what he wants his sick of fans around him
Speaker 7: to say, just tell me yes.
Speaker 6: Let's skip ahead to D five.
Speaker 8: This is going to be the thought about tourism because
Speaker 8: I think that is actually an interesting theme from some
Speaker 8: of the clips that we played, so the MS thirteen
Speaker 8: clip but also the two versus three terms clip.
Speaker 6: Let's roll. Tourism is way up D five.
Speaker 13: And Canadians, many of them, are really angry furious.
Speaker 18: About your talk about We're going to take over Canada
Speaker 18: is going to become the fifty first state, and it
Speaker 18: kind of is of a piece.
Speaker 13: A lot of travel is down into the United States
Speaker 13: from around the world. We're doing it's like there's been
Speaker 13: reputational team. He's doing great well.
Speaker 11: Prices it down, not the touristling's down. Energy's down. Tourism
Speaker 11: is going to be way up. Wait do you see
Speaker 11: the numbers. The tourism is way up now now, Canada
Speaker 11: tourism is doing very well.
Speaker 13: We're doing very well. We're doing very well.
Speaker 11: Wait do you see the real numbers come out in
Speaker 11: about in six months from now?
Speaker 13: Where do you see the numbers? But do you think
Speaker 13: we're gonna ask you?
Speaker 8: So he's saying two things there, on the one hand
Speaker 8: that numbers are fine now and the other that the
Speaker 8: numbers will go up.
Speaker 4: Wait wait, wait you see the numbers.
Speaker 6: Well, this is.
Speaker 8: According to c NBC, foreign visitors to the US by
Speaker 8: air fell nearly ten percent in March from the same
Speaker 8: month a year earlier, and nearly thirteen percent from before
Speaker 8: the pandemic to four point five four million people. That's
Speaker 8: what the that's where this information that we have as
Speaker 8: right now? Yeah, that's mark wait.
Speaker 4: To see April. Yeah, so well, according to Trump, wait
Speaker 4: to see April like, who's lying to him? Like I don't.
Speaker 7: I don't like Trump's judgment in general, but I would
Speaker 7: like his judgment to be acted upon reality, Like I
Speaker 7: want him to have accurate information and then and then
Speaker 7: I disagree with or agree with what he's doing. I'd
Speaker 7: rather his advisors tell them, hey, man, tourism's way down.
Speaker 7: Do we care or is this all part of the plan,
Speaker 7: rather than this, Hey boss, everything's great.
Speaker 4: Tourism is up. Cheese on the phone.
Speaker 7: That MS thirteen is tattooed on his fingers, like you're
Speaker 7: killing it, boss, So everybody loves you.
Speaker 6: CNBC also says, including land work crossings, okay.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and we're going to get the Fox News polster fired.
Speaker 7: That's what Steve Miller said yesterday.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he said that.
Speaker 8: I actually think that there are probably some legitimate questions
Speaker 8: about the accuracy of the.
Speaker 7: Fox News pul They're in line with everybody else's plot
Speaker 7: right now.
Speaker 6: They are.
Speaker 8: Yeah, these if you look at all the polling aggregations, yes, so,
Speaker 8: including land border crossing. CNBC says inbound visitors to the
Speaker 8: US fell fourteen percent in March from last year. According
Speaker 8: to the US Travel Association, So an industry that's down
Speaker 8: trade group.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's very obviously down.
Speaker 8: Now this clip, I want to say, Ryan, I think
Speaker 8: that sounded to me possibly just like regular Trump talking
Speaker 8: his way into success, like I hope, fluctuating between. They're
Speaker 8: fine now, but they're going to be fine, Like it
Speaker 8: just was. I felt like that was just Trump kind
Speaker 8: of bullshitting. The MS thirteen one is the one that
Speaker 8: really concerns me. Also, I don't know what he was
Speaker 8: talking about when he said two terms and then he
Speaker 8: said three terms. Yes, it's possibly twenty twenty, but he
Speaker 8: said we already served three terms.
Speaker 6: So it's all.
Speaker 7: It's very it's a time traveler. I've never been on
Speaker 7: the you have this very like traditional understanding of time. Yes,
Speaker 7: whereas he moves about it freely, he's.
Speaker 8: Sort of a higher plane. But no, I've never been
Speaker 8: on the bandwagon ever. Like up until this point of
Speaker 8: people who thought that Trump had some type of like
Speaker 8: medical mental aging condition, you know, that was something the
Speaker 8: Biden team tried to push. There's obviously something going on
Speaker 8: up there, whether or not it's aging. I've never been
Speaker 8: on that bandwagon, to be honest. But the MS thirteen
Speaker 8: one now that one has me really.
Speaker 4: Idiocy and capacity.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I could just be idiocylied to him.
Speaker 6: To your point, I guess it is possible that somebody
Speaker 6: relied to him.
Speaker 8: Now, to put that in stark relief, take a look
Speaker 8: at what Donald Trump said about negotiations with Vladimir Putin,
Speaker 8: just for a reminder that the man who believes his
Speaker 8: thirteen was tattooed on Kimora Bergo's Gerty's hands is negotiating
Speaker 8: the end of a potential.
Speaker 6: Or of a war involving a nuclear power. So go
Speaker 6: ahead and roll D four.
Speaker 11: He's willing to stop the fighting, don't you begin he
Speaker 11: wants You think Vladimir Putin wants peace?
Speaker 13: I think he does. Yes, I think there is I
Speaker 13: think people's a reigning missiles. I think he really his
Speaker 13: dream was to take over the whole country. I think
Speaker 13: because of me, he's not going to do that. Do
Speaker 13: you trust him? I think? Do you trust him? I
Speaker 13: don't trust you. I don't trust I don't trust a
Speaker 13: lot of people. I don't trust you. Look at you.
Speaker 11: You come in all shooting for bear, You're so happy
Speaker 11: to do the interview I am, and then you start
Speaker 11: hitting me with fake questions he saw telling me that
Speaker 11: a guy whose hand is covered with the tattoo doesn't
Speaker 11: have the tattoo.
Speaker 13: You know, I mean you're being dishonest.
Speaker 8: No, I'm not.
Speaker 13: Lem is not so I trust. I don't trust a
Speaker 13: lot of people, but I do think this.
Speaker 11: I think that he let's say, he respects me, and
Speaker 11: I believe because of me, he's not going to take
Speaker 11: over the whole, but his decision, his choice would be
Speaker 11: to take over all of Ukraine.
Speaker 8: Okay, again, there's a charitable reading of this where he's
Speaker 8: said this before. He's not going to talk and Wikoff
Speaker 8: has said this, he's not going to talk trash about
Speaker 8: Putin in a way that would hamper his ability just
Speaker 8: to kind of virtue signal to American neo cons in
Speaker 8: a way that would hamper the actual peace process.
Speaker 6: So on that part, I get not taking Terry Moran's bait.
Speaker 8: On the other hand, Ryan, he's still going back to
Speaker 8: the MS thirteen tattoo.
Speaker 7: So he's like, yeah, I can't trust you because you
Speaker 7: think that wasn't photoshop Yeah, or you think that was photoshopped.
Speaker 6: Wow, things are fine. We're a hundred days in. Everything
Speaker 6: is preceding apace everyone's happy. Tourism is up.
Speaker 4: It feels like a lifetime good lord.
Speaker 8: Yeah, anything else on the Terry Moran Now, just twenty
Speaker 8: fifth Amendment and look I was I was for it
Speaker 8: with Biden, So you can't get me on.
Speaker 4: Can't get me on that hypocrisy. So important now, President Vance,
Speaker 4: get ready, lace up Lisa.
Speaker 8: All right, let's move on to the Housies, Ryan, because
Speaker 8: another quite an interesting l for the good old US
Speaker 8: of A here.
Speaker 4: This week. And we can put this first element up
Speaker 4: on the screen.
Speaker 7: An Fa eighteen fighter jet fell off the side of
Speaker 7: a US aircraft carrier.
Speaker 4: And sunk to the bottom of the Red Sea.
Speaker 7: What we know from reporting out of the US from
Speaker 7: the Navy is that or they claim this is what
Speaker 7: they claim.
Speaker 4: We'll talk about this.
Speaker 7: They claim that the aircraft carrier was making a sharp
Speaker 7: movement to avoid hoothy fire. Now we know from hooty
Speaker 7: officials that they did indeed say that they launched a
Speaker 7: drone and missile attack on the Truman carrier group. And
Speaker 7: I spoke to somebody who served on an aircraft carrier
Speaker 7: and he said, yeah, those things I think thirty thirty
Speaker 7: knots like they get they get moving at a serious
Speaker 7: clip and when they start to I don't know if
Speaker 7: you can totally come about in an aircraft carrier, but
Speaker 7: when those when they start to turn, they do bank
Speaker 7: and you have to have everything kind of secured. According
Speaker 7: to the Navy, they were hauling this thing out of
Speaker 7: the hangar a hangar at the time when it started
Speaker 7: to bank, because I guess they weren't planning on banking. Now,
Speaker 7: these are super fast missiles, so it's kind of I'm
Speaker 7: a little skeptical that even the fast aircraft carrier can
Speaker 7: move fast enough to get it out of the way
Speaker 7: of a missile.
Speaker 4: Who knows, what do I know?
Speaker 7: All we know is that this seventy dollar fighter jet
Speaker 7: is now at the bottom of the Red Sea. So
Speaker 7: we don't have health care, yeah, but we do have
Speaker 7: now we raises sunken fighter jet. It raises a lot
Speaker 7: of questions. Do we have fighter jet insurance? And were
Speaker 7: we current on it?
Speaker 6: Yes, that is one of the questions that comes to mind.
Speaker 4: Was it paid off.
Speaker 6: From Progressive?
Speaker 4: What if we had just finished paying this thing off
Speaker 4: when it rolled off.
Speaker 8: The side the all stick guys should start doing commercials.
Speaker 4: And you know how you know, that's how it goes.
Speaker 7: When you have a seventy million dollar fighter jet, the
Speaker 7: second you make your last payment, it rolls off the
Speaker 7: side of the aircraft carrier.
Speaker 6: Many such cases.
Speaker 4: Just for fun, let's put up E two here. This
Speaker 4: is the War Powers resolution.
Speaker 7: It is not actually okay, constitutionally for this carrier group
Speaker 7: to even be in these waters. According to the Constitution,
Speaker 7: the Congress is vested with the power to declare war.
Speaker 7: According to the War Powers Act, you cannot enter into hostilities.
Speaker 4: You can't do this. So beyond that, you can't do this,
Speaker 4: I'm just saying you can't do this. So and what
Speaker 4: they are entered into hostilities right now?
Speaker 7: They are in a place where they know they're going
Speaker 7: to get shot at, and if they don't want to
Speaker 7: get shot at, they're able to leave that area like
Speaker 7: there's no reason they have to be there or Congress
Speaker 7: has not authorized it. Now, maybe that implicates the insurance policy.
Speaker 7: Insurance policy. You probably have to be current on your
Speaker 7: alignment with your constitutional war powers, and so the insurance policies,
Speaker 7: they're not paid. They're not paying for this FAA team.
Speaker 7: When All State gets the bill, do.
Speaker 8: You say that this is they'll claim this under the
Speaker 8: umbrella of an AOMF, like a twenty plus year old AOMF.
Speaker 4: I don't even know if they bother anymore.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, yeah, And our allies aren't there. So the
Speaker 7: au m F authorizes us to fight al Qaeda wherever
Speaker 7: we find them. The problem in Yemen is that our
Speaker 7: allies are al Qaeda. Al Qaeda are fighting the houthies.
Speaker 7: So that's not that's not going to fly either.
Speaker 6: Well you'd think, did you just say that's not going
Speaker 6: to fly? Pretty good?
Speaker 7: I did not even I did not even do that
Speaker 7: one on purpose, but wow, it really worked. Less amusing
Speaker 7: but even more disturbing perhaps development out of Yemen.
Speaker 4: We can put this next element up on the screen.
Speaker 7: So there are as you know, as everybody knows, a
Speaker 7: bunch of amateur ocent people out there who go around
Speaker 7: around monking with Google Earth, posting things that they find
Speaker 7: and declaring them to be interesting to the world. If
Speaker 7: that's your hobby, fine, enjoy yourself, you know, social media,
Speaker 7: go ahead. There are some people who have been going around,
Speaker 7: uh looking at Google Earth images of Yemen and claiming
Speaker 7: to have been able to spot hothy missile launch sites
Speaker 7: or hoothy bases.
Speaker 4: Okay again, I guess.
Speaker 7: Like, if that's how you want to spend your time,
Speaker 7: go ahead and do that. So a couple of accounts
Speaker 7: posted the the exact coordinates of what they said was
Speaker 7: a missile you know, some type of base slash missile
Speaker 7: launch situation in.
Speaker 4: A quarry in Yemen. We can put this next element
Speaker 4: up on the screen, and the US struck that precise
Speaker 4: coordinate killed.
Speaker 7: The reports are and uh Shuey al malwassee who's our reporter?
Speaker 7: And Sanas confirmed for us that this that this area
Speaker 7: just outside of Sana was was struck. A significant number
Speaker 7: of civilians were killed. The reporting is eight uh. And
Speaker 7: so we know that this person posted this image, post
Speaker 7: posted these coordinates and then the US struck these coordinates
Speaker 7: and that there was nothing there.
Speaker 4: Like we all know this now.
Speaker 6: What was the time lapse between the couple of weeks?
Speaker 4: And so the question then is is this the strangest
Speaker 4: coincidence ever?
Speaker 7: Or is sentcom pulling targets from random Twitter users? Weird're
Speaker 7: striking them?
Speaker 8: Weirder possibility what if somebody at centcom has a burner
Speaker 8: that they're floating coordinates out onto.
Speaker 7: I think this is a person that's in Holmn. They
Speaker 7: know who this person is. It's like a woman who's
Speaker 7: just interested in this stuff.
Speaker 12: Like.
Speaker 7: Also, they're wrong, like they blew it like this they
Speaker 7: killed civilians like they didn't they didn't get this right.
Speaker 7: So this person posted screenshots of donations that she made
Speaker 7: to Doctors Without Borders and a Yemeny charitable group as sorry.
Speaker 7: So to start, I have made two donations, one to
Speaker 7: MSF Meslan Frontier and one the Yemen Data Project, totaling
Speaker 7: five hundred euros, like as an apology basically for accidentally
Speaker 7: getting some people killed. Now, I'm not even that angry
Speaker 7: at this person because it's sentcom that should not be
Speaker 7: grabbing information for this person.
Speaker 6: This is a really weird account. I'm going through it
Speaker 6: right now. Yeah, lucky it han.
Speaker 4: It's very strange.
Speaker 6: It's very very weird.
Speaker 5: It's like.
Speaker 6: It's almost like a belling cat type.
Speaker 4: But it's just a random person ish but who knows.
Speaker 7: The response that mirrors the way I feel about it
Speaker 7: was from somebody who said, we don't want your donations,
Speaker 7: we don't need them. Just stop publishing false aerial photos.
Speaker 7: You're publishing civilian areas as military zones and causing the
Speaker 7: killing of our people. Even if we assume that they
Speaker 7: are military zones, Why are you hostile to us? What
Speaker 7: is your interest in this? And so that's actually the
Speaker 7: question I have too, It's like, why are you doing this?
Speaker 7: So I reached out to this account. They did not
Speaker 7: hear back. I did not hear back. I also reached
Speaker 7: out to Sentcom to ask if it's the case, and
Speaker 7: there was another account as well that had posted the
Speaker 7: same quarry. So I reached out to ask, is it
Speaker 7: the case that you're pulling these from Twitter?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 4: It it certainly is the case. We know that at
Speaker 4: least for some of their and we know this from.
Speaker 7: Sources around the Pentagon that they are pulling. We do
Speaker 7: know for sure they're pulling some of their damage assessment
Speaker 7: from Twitter, because that's that has circulated in the Pentagon.
Speaker 7: Like after a strike, there'll be some social media account
Speaker 7: like posts from that are not US you know, government
Speaker 7: or US military accounts, just random people. Some of these
Speaker 7: some of these are just strident, like anti houthy partisans
Speaker 7: and they'll say this is what happened in the strike
Speaker 7: and that and saidcom will.
Speaker 4: Use that in there now.
Speaker 7: So we do know that they are willing to use
Speaker 7: what they euphemistically call open source intel and whatever.
Speaker 8: I mean, presumably whatever led this open source intel collector
Speaker 8: who interestingly has ceasefire now.
Speaker 7: And I saw that, Yeah, fire aware in the bio,
Speaker 7: the bio of where do they want.
Speaker 4: To seize fire?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's very odd ym So presumably obviously whatever led
Speaker 6: this account to that spot could potentially be leading sentcom
Speaker 6: to that spot. I mean, it wouldn't necessarily have to
Speaker 6: be a coincidence.
Speaker 4: Except it was the total blunder, Like it was right,
Speaker 4: it was just a misreading.
Speaker 6: It's very very weird. It's an incredibly deeply strange story.
Speaker 6: I'm glad that you asked the government about it, because.
Speaker 8: If they're pulling this stuff and it's wrong from Twitter accounts,
Speaker 8: I mean, I guess it's one thing.
Speaker 6: If it's right, it's still very odd.
Speaker 8: If it's right, if they're actually getting it from Twitter
Speaker 8: and not just sort of following the same breadcrumbs, but
Speaker 8: a deeply deeply strange situation, and you can understand how
Speaker 8: it's going to land with people in Yemen. I mean,
Speaker 8: it's it looks to people in Yemen like complete casual destruction.
Speaker 7: Yes, and it's also completely ineffectual. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 7: effective at killing innocent people, but when it comes to
Speaker 7: actually degrading the capacity of the Houthis to fire at ships,
Speaker 7: it's simply simply not effective.
Speaker 4: We just they just.
Speaker 7: Tilted an aircraft carrier and knocked a what do they
Speaker 7: call it a hornet whatever, to the bottom of the
Speaker 7: bottom of the Red Seas seventy million dollar seventy million
Speaker 7: dollar plane. Meanwhile, the houthis in an interview with shoe Abe,
Speaker 7: a top official there, was effectively responding to Trump and
Speaker 7: Hegseeth who said that if the Hoothies stopped shooting at
Speaker 7: American ships, we will stop shooting at them. This Hoothy
Speaker 7: political leader on the record told drop Site News, we
Speaker 7: will stop you stop attacking us, and then we will
Speaker 7: stop attacking you. Done agreement. Our problem is with Israel,
Speaker 7: and they're not even asking Israel to enter into a
Speaker 7: ceasefire at this point. They launched this renewed siege of
Speaker 7: shipping because Israel was blocking.
Speaker 4: AID into Gaza.
Speaker 7: So if Israel would just allow AID back in now
Speaker 7: at this point, they want Israel to return to the
Speaker 7: ceasefire terms that they had agreed to.
Speaker 4: But that's it. Their beef is with Israel, not with us,
Speaker 4: and so they have accepted our offer.
Speaker 7: Yet here we are bombing innocent people, trying to degrade
Speaker 7: their capacity, not doing it. And right now, it's just
Speaker 7: kind of funny that this ship, I mean's sort of
Speaker 7: funny that the ship fell off the aircraft carrier. Trump
Speaker 7: could get somebody killed. Also, that could have been a
Speaker 7: lot worse.
Speaker 8: I just found at Vlecki Han sited in West Points
Speaker 8: a report from West Points Combating Terrorism Center.
Speaker 6: So interesting, a reliable the quote ever resourceful analyst at
Speaker 6: Flecki Han.
Speaker 4: This is a west Point paper.
Speaker 7: Yeah, all right, well this is pretty confirmation that this
Speaker 7: account is considered credible. What was it called, it's ever reliable,
Speaker 7: ever reliable, ever reliable, well not ever resourceful, ever resourceful. Yes, okay,
Speaker 7: they're resourceful. They're using Google Earth.
Speaker 8: This was in the case of it says the ever
Speaker 8: resourceful analyst at Lucky Han's use of purchased commercial satellite imagery.
Speaker 8: And this is from last year, so it's not like
Speaker 8: an old paper or anything. And it's cited actually in
Speaker 8: the footnotes of this report from West Point.
Speaker 7: So yeah, so okay, they so they are they do
Speaker 7: actually think this person is credible that that ups the
Speaker 7: likelihood that they relied on this person's Google Earth imagery
Speaker 7: to launch this erroneous and deadly air strike close to
Speaker 7: one hundred percent.
Speaker 8: So what this means is that the military is paying
Speaker 8: attention to this particular open source account, right, so it
Speaker 8: would make it that's much stronger.
Speaker 4: I mean, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 7: Separately and also relatedly, and we won't We were going
Speaker 7: to put up some of this video, but we decided
Speaker 7: we decided not to because even even blurring it it's
Speaker 7: just too it's just too graphic. But the hooth He's
Speaker 7: announced that one of the air strikes, and we don't
Speaker 7: know where they got the coordinates for this one that
Speaker 7: the US had said hit a Hoothy base actually hit
Speaker 7: an African African migrant detention center, and so far the
Speaker 7: death toll is at least sixty eight. Like, we struck
Speaker 7: a detention center filled with people, and the images that
Speaker 7: have come out of it of bodies mingled with the
Speaker 7: rubble are just are gruesome and horrifying. So you can
Speaker 7: go find them if you want to. We were going
Speaker 7: to play it just so that you didn't have to
Speaker 7: take our word for it, but I think you probably
Speaker 7: trust us enough at this point that we can tell
Speaker 7: you that it happened.
Speaker 4: We did that.
Speaker 6: I mean, the video is people, go pull it up.
Speaker 4: You can find it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, you can find it. Recommended viewing, unfortunately, in a
Speaker 6: very very tragic way. Recommended viewing.
Speaker 7: So up next, protests and counter protests in Crown Heights
Speaker 7: in Brooklyn on Thursday night led to what became was
Speaker 7: becoming a national scandal, the way that a mob of
Speaker 7: pro Israel protesters assaulted two different women. One of them
Speaker 7: is going to do her first video interview and share
Speaker 7: some of her own footage that she captured while this
Speaker 7: mob was pursuing her, so stick around for that. So
Speaker 7: on Thursday night, It'samar ben Gevie appeared at a synagogue
Speaker 7: in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he was met by protesters
Speaker 7: as well as pro Israel counter protesters. As you may
Speaker 7: have heard, because it's become a national story by this point,
Speaker 7: two women were chased and assaulted that evening. Eric Adams
Speaker 7: has since come out and said that he wants to
Speaker 7: press charges, but the women have not come forward publicly.
Speaker 7: One of those women was just simply a neighborhood resident
Speaker 7: and a bystander she's joining us today. She wants to
Speaker 7: continue to remain anonymous, and she's also provided us for
Speaker 7: the first time some video footage that she took from
Speaker 7: her perspective. You've probably seen a lot of the footage
Speaker 7: of the crowd kind of assaulting her and harassing her
Speaker 7: as she's separated from the rest of this protest. But
Speaker 7: you'll be able to see some of this shortly. But
Speaker 7: let's bring in our Crown Heights resident. Welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 5: Us, Thank you for having me, Thank you for interest
Speaker 5: in that story.
Speaker 4: Yeah for sure. So first of all, can you tell us,
Speaker 4: like how you wound up Thursday evening.
Speaker 7: At this protest? How did you How did you know
Speaker 7: that there was a protest going on?
Speaker 5: Sure? Yeah, so you know, kind of later in the evening,
Speaker 5: around ten ten thirty and a helicopter had been hovering
Speaker 5: over my building for around thirty minutes. So I went
Speaker 5: outside to see what was going on, and I encountered
Speaker 5: the aftermath of a protest when I arrived at Kingston
Speaker 5: Avenue in Eastern Parkway, right where the Chabat is.
Speaker 4: And so, yeah, so what happened next?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I was standing on the sidewalk. There were
Speaker 5: tons of people, hundreds of people in the street and
Speaker 5: on the sidewalk pretty much only Orthodox Jewish people, mostly men,
Speaker 5: and then there were some other neighbors like myself standing
Speaker 5: on the sidewalk just watching, just watching the scene to see.
Speaker 8: What was going on. And I want to say, that's
Speaker 8: an point because actually we had reported earlier that you
Speaker 8: were a pro Palestine demonstrator, and that's not the case.
Speaker 8: To be clear, you were just sort of a bystander
Speaker 8: who was watching the chaos unfold in your neighborhood, right.
Speaker 5: That's right, and so.
Speaker 7: I understand that, Well, why did they mistake you for
Speaker 7: somebody that needed to be assaulted?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So what happened, and it happened really quickly, was
Speaker 5: that people near me began filming and I didn't want
Speaker 5: to be on anyone's camera rule, so I pulled up
Speaker 5: my scarf over my face. And I just want to
Speaker 5: be clear that it was not a cathea. It wouldn't
Speaker 5: matter if it was, but it wasn't, and that was
Speaker 5: really that just escalated things. Almost immediately a woman began
Speaker 5: screaming at me. She was already screaming at the police.
Speaker 5: Then she started screaming at me for me that they
Speaker 5: needed to get me out of there, and almost immediately
Speaker 5: a group of like one hundred guys encircled me and
Speaker 5: just started shouting like just vile insults at me. They
Speaker 5: were saying, you're a waste of seeming or a failed abortion.
Speaker 5: They were threatening to rape me, they telling me to
Speaker 5: go back to Palestine. And I also just want to
Speaker 5: say that I was standing right next to a long
Speaker 5: line of police, and as this began to happen, I
Speaker 5: moved closer to the police because I thought that that
Speaker 5: would afford me some safety. And I was wrong, because
Speaker 5: they did not do anything to intervene, and they really
Speaker 5: just stared straight ahead with their eyes glazed over, as
Speaker 5: if no crime, nothing was happening before their eyes.
Speaker 4: I want to play a little bit of the footage
Speaker 4: here if we can roll that control room.
Speaker 19: See the fact that you guys, lets the fact.
Speaker 13: You guys want.
Speaker 23: You're again, I live here to be here, that you
Speaker 23: want someone to bend you over and like the dorn
Speaker 23: of the Jews in Palestine.
Speaker 8: Guys, and you can see in that video the police
Speaker 8: standing there. You pay taxes to be protected by the police.
Speaker 8: They're standing there in that video, And so how did
Speaker 8: you end up getting out of the situation? Was anybody
Speaker 8: other than the police trying to help?
Speaker 6: What happened? As you you tried to get away from
Speaker 6: uh that harassment?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so asn't tried to leave the situation and to
Speaker 5: get away. Another officer from somewhere else on the street
Speaker 5: came over and he saw this mob following me, and
Speaker 5: he tried to escort me home, and so we walked
Speaker 5: in the direction of my home and this just this
Speaker 5: mob of men followed and as they followed, they were
Speaker 5: again saying go back to Palestine and in Hebrew, shouting
Speaker 5: death to Arabs. They were kicking me in the back repeatedly.
Speaker 5: They were throwing things at my head. They hurled the
Speaker 5: trash can at me, They threw a traffic cone at me,
Speaker 5: they were spitting It was just it was really scary,
Speaker 5: and at a certain point.
Speaker 13: I realized that.
Speaker 5: I couldn't leave this mob to my home, that that
Speaker 5: wouldn't be safe for me. And I turned on a
Speaker 5: different street in a way from the direction of my home,
Speaker 5: where they kind of cornered me and this one officer
Speaker 5: against a building, which is where they were started like
Speaker 5: throwing the trash can and the traffic cone at me,
Speaker 5: and I really just I didn't know what to do
Speaker 5: or where to go because they couldn't go home, and
Speaker 5: the police weren't there to stop. I mean, they were there,
Speaker 5: but they weren't stopping this, and it was really terrifying. Finally,
Speaker 5: as we're like cornered against this building, a cop car
Speaker 5: pulled up in the middle of the street, and I
Speaker 5: just ran for my wife through this crowd of men
Speaker 5: who were shouting get her, and jumped in the back
Speaker 5: of the police car. Who and then those police drove
Speaker 5: me into my house.
Speaker 7: So what were you thinking as you're kind of going
Speaker 7: down the street and the mob is around you, Because
Speaker 7: I'm reminded of this time where I got jumped by
Speaker 7: three guys in an alley behind my apartment, and I
Speaker 7: remember thinking, remember, don't go down. Don't go down, because if,
Speaker 7: like I knew that, if I went down onto the ground,
Speaker 7: then you know, then then you're dealing with feet rather
Speaker 7: than just rather than just fists. And I was eventually
Speaker 7: able to get away without actually going down onto the
Speaker 7: onto the onto the floor of the alley. So I'm
Speaker 7: wondering if there were any thoughts going through your mind
Speaker 7: as you're like getting hit, kicked in the back and
Speaker 7: like things are getting thrown at you of what you
Speaker 7: needed to do to like get yourself out of this situation.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, I will say I have a very
Speaker 5: strong fight instinct and I was fighting very hard to
Speaker 5: repress it in those moments because I knew that they
Speaker 5: wanted me to respond.
Speaker 6: In that way.
Speaker 5: They wanted me to fight back so that they could
Speaker 5: escalate things and have an excuse to hurt me further.
Speaker 5: And it was and it was just like I really
Speaker 5: had to have to rep us that the whole time
Speaker 5: and instead put my mind to keeping myself safe. And
Speaker 5: there wasn't a lot of conscious thought outside of don't
Speaker 5: don't react physically and don't leave them to your home,
Speaker 5: you know. Outside of that, it was just like a
Speaker 5: lot it was a lot of terror. It was just
Speaker 5: this feeling of terror that was that was there for me.
Speaker 6: And what response have you received since all of this happened.
Speaker 8: I know Eric Adams has sort of put out an
Speaker 8: attempt to get in contact.
Speaker 6: Have the police followed up? What's what have you heard
Speaker 6: in the last several days.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, I'm in such a tricky position here
Speaker 5: because I want to call out all of the all
Speaker 5: of the police in action and lies that they've been telling,
Speaker 5: and at the same time, I really want them to
Speaker 5: take action on my behalf and the people of New
Speaker 5: York's behalf and think those two, those two desires of
Speaker 5: mine are in conflict with each other. And so but
Speaker 5: I'm going to say anyway, like the police didn't do anything.
Speaker 5: Nobody tried to get in contact with me. They were
Speaker 5: saying that they reached out to me, and I filed
Speaker 5: the report and that was a lie. I eventually did
Speaker 5: get in touch with a detective a couple of days ago,
Speaker 5: and I was able to file a report. And yeah,
Speaker 5: and I think that the police have just been spreading
Speaker 5: a lot of misinformation about what happened. And that's really
Speaker 5: frustrating for me.
Speaker 7: And so you did speak to a detective, would you
Speaker 7: testify if they were able to find you, know, able
Speaker 7: to identify these these men who did this?
Speaker 5: I would Yeah. Yeah, it was.
Speaker 7: It was interesting to see Eric Adams finally come out,
Speaker 7: because there's a it took a way. It took a
Speaker 7: significant amount of time for Adams to say anything publicly,
Speaker 7: and it seems like there's this attitude that if somebody
Speaker 7: is a kind of pro Palestine demonstrator, the kind of
Speaker 7: rules don't apply.
Speaker 4: They can just get beaten up.
Speaker 7: And I wonder if them finally realizing that you actually
Speaker 7: weren't you were just a person who lives in the neighborhood,
Speaker 7: if that played some role. Did you get any indication
Speaker 7: from the detective of how important kind of that his
Speaker 7: bosses see this case and what it was that moved
Speaker 7: them kind of to actually do something.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I think I talked to the detective on
Speaker 5: Monday afternoon and they seem to really be scrambling. He
Speaker 5: had told me that they had only just gotten the
Speaker 5: directive that they were going to be investigating this like
Speaker 5: a couple hours prior. So this all happened on Thursday night,
Speaker 5: where the police again watched it happen, and they didn't
Speaker 5: take any action until this video went viral over the
Speaker 5: weekend and the pressure and then there was pressure on
Speaker 5: the mayor and the NYPD.
Speaker 7: And not that any of this matters because you were
Speaker 7: just you were just there. But I'm curious, are you Jewish?
Speaker 7: Are you Christian? And you atheist? Apathysts?
Speaker 4: Like what's what? What's and do you have a view
Speaker 4: on the politics here.
Speaker 7: Like I said, it doesn't matter, nobody should beaten up
Speaker 7: no matter what they think, any wherever they are on
Speaker 7: the spectrum, and you were just there.
Speaker 4: But I'm also just curious.
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, I'm not religious at all, and I do
Speaker 5: support the rights of Palestinians to live in a free
Speaker 5: state of their own. And I think, like you know,
Speaker 5: what happened to me, it really gave me a glimpse
Speaker 5: into the daily reality of Palestinians under occupation. Just they're
Speaker 5: subjected to violence, to humanization, abandonment, and and what happened
Speaker 5: to me isn't isolated. It's part of a broader system
Speaker 5: of violence, and that needs to be that needs to end.
Speaker 8: My last question is about the situation in Crown Heights,
Speaker 8: and people are sort of familiar with the historical tensions
Speaker 8: that have simmered over in Crown Heights, and what's very frightening.
Speaker 8: One of the many things that's very frightening about your
Speaker 8: experience and about the video is how is this anger
Speaker 8: seems to be bubbling into something very very dangerous right now?
Speaker 8: So I wanted to ask, I mean, this is kind
Speaker 8: of a meta question, but there's a reason that you
Speaker 8: want to speak out anonymously, and I imagine.
Speaker 6: That it has to do with your safety.
Speaker 8: So if you could speak to that and the situation
Speaker 8: in Crown Heights, whether you see it as something that's
Speaker 8: very dangerous right now, that would be much appreciated.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Sure, Yeah, I'm absolutely afraid for my own safety
Speaker 5: in the neighborhood I lived in and have lived in
Speaker 5: for almost a decade. I'm afraid of being recognized. And yes,
Speaker 5: there's a long and fraught history of tensions involving this
Speaker 5: community in Crown Heights. I would say, like two weeks ago,
Speaker 5: members of the Orthodox Jewish community brutally beat an elderly
Speaker 5: black man in a wheelchair and threw him to the sidewalk.
Speaker 5: Earlier that night, you know, you mentioned it before, Like
Speaker 5: that same mob that attacked me, They threw a brook
Speaker 5: at a brick at a woman's face. They assaulted an
Speaker 5: anti zion As Hasidic man that night, also throwing into
Speaker 5: the ground and removing his religious head covering. And like
Speaker 5: you know, I've lived here for a long time, I
Speaker 5: know the history, Like the Orthodox Jewish community rings terror
Speaker 5: on this neighborhood with impunity and I don't normally feel
Speaker 5: that tensions walking through the street as a white woman,
Speaker 5: but I am aware of it. I am aware that
Speaker 5: they are afforded certain privileges that not everyone else in
Speaker 5: the neighborhood is.
Speaker 7: As we saw Thursday, the event happened Thursday night in
Speaker 7: full view of all the police, and nothing happened until
Speaker 7: Monday until the you know, there's a spotlight put on it.
Speaker 7: So thank thank you so much for you know, sharing
Speaker 7: your your perspective, the videos and and your side of
Speaker 7: this this terrifying event.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we really appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 7: Joining us now is Turnobob, editor of the Africanist Press.
Speaker 4: And also we can put this element up on the screen.
Speaker 7: The author of the tremendous book The Ebola Outbreak in
Speaker 7: West Africa, Corporate gangsters, multinationals and rogue Politicians.
Speaker 4: We spoke with Turno a year or two ago.
Speaker 7: About the Abola outbreak in West Africa, and we can
Speaker 7: put a link to that interview that we did down
Speaker 7: in the down in the show notes. Embarrassed say, I
Speaker 7: hadn't read the full book by the time that we
Speaker 7: had you on then, because we were moving fairly quickly.
Speaker 7: But I've since read it. It's really a masterpiece. I
Speaker 7: would recommend it to every It's it's also a fairly
Speaker 7: short books. There was no excuse that I hadn't read
Speaker 7: it yet. But it runs through the history of kind
Speaker 7: of multinational, corporate and colonial involvement in medical research in Africa,
Speaker 7: and then you know, leads up into Ebola and the
Speaker 7: and the response. And I'll let you talk about it
Speaker 7: a little bit because we want we're going to talk
Speaker 7: about some other things in this in this segment, but
Speaker 7: you know, you you basically demonstrate with authority that the
Speaker 7: story that we're told about how the Ebola outbreak happened
Speaker 7: is ludicrous as no evidentiary basis, and that the more
Speaker 7: likely cause is the shoddy lab that was doing a
Speaker 7: bola research in Sierra Leone and anything you want to
Speaker 7: add about about that.
Speaker 22: Yes, it's been ten years now.
Speaker 12: Since I published that book, or since I wrote that book,
Speaker 12: and it's interesting to see that the conversation that we
Speaker 12: started ten years ago still is relevant today, especially when
Speaker 12: we talk about COVID and the pandemic. It was five
Speaker 12: years before COVID at the time when the outbreak happened.
Speaker 12: The official narrative was that the outbreak started in Guinea,
Speaker 12: and they identified Emily woman way two years old or
Speaker 12: less than two year old child an eighteen year old
Speaker 12: boy as the index case of the outbreak. They alleged
Speaker 12: that the child had participated in the hunting and grillion
Speaker 12: of a bat. So my book challenge is that what
Speaker 12: we call the official narrative raising questions that would have
Speaker 12: allowed people to look into the biodefense research operation that
Speaker 12: was happening in eastern Syrallian dating back to two thousand
Speaker 12: and four, ten years before the outbreak. But I think
Speaker 12: ten years ago when the book came out, it was
Speaker 12: very difficult to have that conversation because any attempt to
Speaker 12: have a conversation that challenged the dominant narrative as we
Speaker 12: called it then, was considered a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 22: So very few people were willing to have that kind
Speaker 22: of conversation.
Speaker 12: So I travel around the world at the time, going
Speaker 12: to Europe, across the United States, and in some African countries.
Speaker 22: To promote the book. You know, ten years down the line,
Speaker 22: I think now we.
Speaker 12: Have some kind of a significant amount of people who
Speaker 12: are perhaps willing to listen to that kind of you know,
Speaker 12: the possibility that the outbreak that killed thousands of people
Speaker 12: in West Africa and still has a lingering socio economic
Speaker 12: impact and psychological impact on the population of West Africa.
Speaker 12: Talking about people who lived in Strira, Lian, in Liberia
Speaker 12: and Guinea, the epicenter of that epidemic, are still unaware
Speaker 12: of the causes and origin of that. We've had so
Speaker 12: much about COVID, which happened five years and afterwards. There
Speaker 12: has been some kind of congressional discussion, some kind of
Speaker 12: White House conversation around COVID, but no such conversation has
Speaker 12: happened for the victims of the epidemic in West Africa.
Speaker 12: And I had said in my book that what we
Speaker 12: witnessed in West Africa in twenty fifteen was a prelude,
Speaker 12: was address reheaursal to what the world will face with
Speaker 12: this whole idea of pathrogens being part of warfare, bioterrorism
Speaker 12: and all these kinds of things. So I'm happy that
Speaker 12: we're still talking about this ten years later. I'm hoping
Speaker 12: that this conversation will loom large, that the victims of
Speaker 12: the bold outbreak would get justice. At least we'll be
Speaker 12: able to understand how that outbreak that killed their family members,
Speaker 12: their relatives, their friends and neighbors. We need the truth,
Speaker 12: We need some kind of a disclosure of information around
Speaker 12: what corporations we are doing, what universities and the research scientists,
Speaker 12: because we're talking about the same institution, same individuals who
Speaker 12: are involved with COVID where the ones who get involved
Speaker 12: in West.
Speaker 4: Africa, and it's it's relevant.
Speaker 7: The conversation is relevant today, I think for a lot
Speaker 7: of reasons, but one of them is that here here
Speaker 7: in the West, the debate around what we call quote
Speaker 7: unquote foreign aid is that the Democrats will say, you know,
Speaker 7: kind of foreign aid is good and we should do
Speaker 7: it because it's it's it's good and also it helps
Speaker 7: the United States, you know, with our soft power, and
Speaker 7: people love us because we do it. The Republicans will
Speaker 7: say foreign aid is good because you know, it's charity
Speaker 7: and it helps people, but it's not our business, like
Speaker 7: we we don't need to do it. They need to
Speaker 7: take care of themselves. But there's really no debate over
Speaker 7: whether or not. You know, it's it's fundamentally a good thing.
Speaker 7: So that's why I wanted to have have you on
Speaker 7: today because obviously, you know, somebody who is getting you know,
Speaker 7: access to HIV HIV treatment like they need that treatment
Speaker 7: as a as a particular individual. But taking it from
Speaker 7: a micro case to to a macro case, let's talk
Speaker 7: about what the what the fallout has been in the
Speaker 7: regions where you cover to both you know, the the
Speaker 7: pulling back of U S A I D, but also
Speaker 7: UH what has happened in the wake of some of
Speaker 7: these some of the the quote unquote aid or investment
Speaker 7: UH projects that have that have rolled out through d
Speaker 7: f C or MCC. Will talk about those separately. First,
Speaker 7: what was your reaction when you saw the you know,
Speaker 7: the cuts to the U S A I D. And
Speaker 7: from from your understanding, what what have been you know,
Speaker 7: how how is Africa responding?
Speaker 13: Well?
Speaker 22: I think the problem here.
Speaker 12: We entered into a problem because when these real conversations
Speaker 12: that affect people's lives. We're talking about women and men,
Speaker 12: you know, children who have suffered from dictators, from bad government,
Speaker 12: from corruption in Africa. And when we we have this
Speaker 12: kind of conversation, risk is that when it becomes partisan,
Speaker 12: we lose the importance of scrutinizing international relations. To what
Speaker 12: extent has international relations affected the lives of ordinary people.
Speaker 22: In the case of Syralan, we've been raising these issues.
Speaker 12: We've said clearly that we are not against what you
Speaker 12: might call for indirect investment or genuine solidarity and support
Speaker 12: that applics people. But what we've witnessed in the last
Speaker 12: sixty years is a kind of relations that has undermined
Speaker 12: the real development. Not only that that has imposed huge debts,
Speaker 12: non transparent debts and contracts that have affected lives. You know,
Speaker 12: we raise in the last five years, for example, the
Speaker 12: US International Development Finance Corporation in Sralian acquired you know,
Speaker 12: huge contracts in infrastructure projects, telecommunication projects, and these are
Speaker 12: amounts of money ranging to four hundred and twelve million
Speaker 12: in one case for an electricity project that was never constructed.
Speaker 12: And the processes through which that you know, these contracts
Speaker 12: were awarded. We also did not comply with even US
Speaker 12: laws regarding foreign direct investment in in Africa or point
Speaker 12: other places we raise these questions, nobody listened.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 12: The same thing with the Millennium Challenge Corporation that claimed
Speaker 12: that they've signed a compact agreement with Relion to support
Speaker 12: the energy sectorance volume with one undred and eighty million dollars,
Speaker 12: and even as we speak today, more than ninety percent
Speaker 12: of the Saliny and population do not have access to electricity,
Speaker 12: They do not have access to safe and pure drinking water.
Speaker 12: The healthcare system is broken. So when you talk about
Speaker 12: us AID, DFC and MCC giving money or loans of
Speaker 12: credit or charity to countries like Relion, the citizens would
Speaker 12: be wandering where this money is going, because there's no
Speaker 12: evidence of that on the ground. So I would say
Speaker 12: that rationally speaking, if we remove the partisan aspect of
Speaker 12: this conversation, we have to look at the real impact
Speaker 12: of these so called development assistance or loans or credit
Speaker 12: or charity, whatever you might want to call it. But
Speaker 12: it hasn't translated into real development. It hasn't changed the
Speaker 12: living conditions of the people of many of these countries.
Speaker 12: So it's one case, but there you can find this
Speaker 12: in any African country. This is why many African citizens
Speaker 12: do not you know, are not really affected by these
Speaker 12: The politicians, the corporations, the companies who have been benefiting
Speaker 12: from the advance that have been complaining and unfortunately we
Speaker 12: do not have an opportunity of speaking to the people
Speaker 12: who are directly impacted by these developments. When these conversations
Speaker 12: are being you know held, they are always we always
Speaker 12: listen to opinion leaders or representatives of these corporations who
Speaker 12: tend to complain about the withdrawal of so called aid
Speaker 12: and charity that has not really benefited the millions of
Speaker 12: people across Africa and in other places on whose names
Speaker 12: and conditions these supposed charitable programs have been done. So
Speaker 12: we have to in order to get at this conversation,
Speaker 12: we have to have this conversation outside of the Democrats
Speaker 12: or the Republicans or whatever party. When issues of development
Speaker 12: and human rights and peace have been discussed and we talked,
Speaker 12: we bring these partisant issues into the conversation, we risk
Speaker 12: losing the reality and the impacts that these situations tend
Speaker 12: to have on the real lives of people. I have
Speaker 12: been one individual that has reported on corruption and human
Speaker 12: right violations in West Africa for more than twenty years
Speaker 12: and one of the issues we've encountered every time we
Speaker 12: raised this is raised these questions to US officials. For example,
Speaker 12: in the last administration, we help countless meetings with the
Speaker 12: State Department representatives of diplomats who were in charge of
Speaker 12: West Africa. They ignore these questions. They ignore the fact that,
Speaker 12: for example, have been in exile for more than five
Speaker 12: six years, have been her ass transnationally by for just
Speaker 12: raising these issues of corruption, that moneys that have been
Speaker 12: awarded to corrupt through gyms in West Africa, affecting human
Speaker 12: rights defenders, affecting journalists, affecting independent media, our ability to
Speaker 12: hold leaders accountable. Every time we raise corruption issues. In fact,
Speaker 12: the that's when the governments received more money. In fact,
Speaker 12: you have a situation where politicians in West Africa would
Speaker 12: tell us that the more you write about corruption, the
Speaker 12: more we get money from Western countries, including the United States.
Speaker 22: So this was a very problematic situation. It's not just
Speaker 22: the US.
Speaker 12: You also look at organizations like the IMF, the World
Speaker 12: Bank who've been imposing debts, non transparent debts on these country.
Speaker 12: So we have millions of hundreds of millions and billions
Speaker 12: of dollars in debts and so called aid that has
Speaker 12: not changed the conditions Inure. It's more than sixty five
Speaker 12: years now. So youon just celebrated what the gos sixty
Speaker 12: four years independence and when you look at the country,
Speaker 12: the indices of povertier and the development are very stuck.
Speaker 22: You know, you don't need to go too far.
Speaker 12: You just need to have someone on the street and
Speaker 12: ask them how do you feel about what your government
Speaker 12: is doing. They will tell you the government is corrupt,
Speaker 12: the government is not responsive to their needs, and.
Speaker 8: Lots of I was going to say, Turner, let's talk
Speaker 8: more about that, because a lot of people here in
Speaker 8: the United States. When USAID, for example, was on the
Speaker 8: sort of cutting table in the early days of Trump's
Speaker 8: second administration, the media portrayed this as the sky was
Speaker 8: falling in the United States. This was, you know, taking
Speaker 8: a racking ball to lowercase deed democracy in human rights.
Speaker 8: And there are you know, obviously cases where people's livelihoods
Speaker 8: and health and safety were affected by it, no question
Speaker 8: about it. But your experience suggests that this relic of
Speaker 8: the Cold War era that was meant to be a
Speaker 8: bulwark against the Soviet influence around the world is always
Speaker 8: the aid is always coming with strings attached. That you know,
Speaker 8: the question of democracy is not the pure question at
Speaker 8: hand when aid money is distributed or when yeah, well,
Speaker 8: I mean even when when aid money is distributed and
Speaker 8: NGOs non governmental organizations are bolstered by that aid money
Speaker 8: and when when they are chosen. Uh, there's there's always
Speaker 8: a strategy that is very particular and not just about
Speaker 8: lowercase D democracy.
Speaker 6: Your experience speaks to that.
Speaker 8: So can you tell our listeners and viewers a little
Speaker 8: bit about the reality behind the curtain of USA I,
Speaker 8: D and foreign aid.
Speaker 12: Well, I think what what you call development as systems
Speaker 12: of foreign aid did in the case of Stalin. We
Speaker 12: take the last four or five years of the the
Speaker 12: current government in power, is that it emboldened them. It
Speaker 12: emboldened them to you know, ignore to violate human rights,
Speaker 12: to suppress citizens, including journalists, independent journalists like myself, with
Speaker 12: impunity because they believe that they were backed by an
Speaker 12: administration that kept giving them money. When we raise the
Speaker 12: issues of corruption regarding the non transparent acquisition of contracts
Speaker 12: by corporations and companies funded by the DFC, the State
Speaker 12: Department went ahead and signed a funded an eighty million agreement,
Speaker 12: a compact agreement MCC agreement with this Ilan government. This
Speaker 12: was less than a year ago, and this was for
Speaker 12: an electricity project that they've been talking about for fifteen years.
Speaker 22: And we've counted more than almost a billion.
Speaker 12: Dollars in debts or loan or credit, whatever you might
Speaker 12: call it, that for the construction of a power plant
Speaker 12: that has never been built. And even as we speak,
Speaker 12: more than ninety percent of the population of Sweet Town,
Speaker 12: the capital of Syralon, do not have electricity. And we
Speaker 12: have it on the records that the MCC and the
Speaker 12: DFC has given Syrallon four hundred and eighty million in
Speaker 12: one case FO hundred and twelve million. We're talking about
Speaker 12: more than eight hundred million dollars of US tax payers moneys,
Speaker 12: you know, given to a government for the construction and
Speaker 12: provision of literacy supply that.
Speaker 22: Has never been provided. The service is not available.
Speaker 12: So if you talk about it withdraw out of funding,
Speaker 12: in that case, people are not even going to be
Speaker 12: bot at because the money that was announced was not
Speaker 12: has not done anything on the ground. So the people
Speaker 12: who would be offended or who be affected by that
Speaker 12: situation will be the politicians and the corporations and the
Speaker 12: companies and the contractors who we are benefiting from these
Speaker 12: rogue relationships and investment agreements that we are non transparent,
Speaker 12: that even violated US laws because you cannot on the books,
Speaker 12: you cannot spend US tax payers money in the country
Speaker 12: that doesn't respect human right, that doesn't respect the freedom
Speaker 12: of his own citizens. So the governmental stralium felt emboldened
Speaker 12: by these corporate relationships financial inducements to disregard accountability questions.
Speaker 12: And it's not just Relion. You can find this across
Speaker 12: many of the other countries in Africa. And if you
Speaker 12: look at the people who have been complaining, they are
Speaker 12: not regular African citizens, right.
Speaker 4: And your workers and right, that's what I ask you about.
Speaker 7: So the aid gets sent by let's say, USA, I,
Speaker 7: d MC, c DFC and some of these international development
Speaker 7: finance corporations or institutions, so that it gets sent out.
Speaker 7: In your experience, and you've done so much corruption reporting
Speaker 7: in your experience, how much of that money gets kind
Speaker 7: of stolen by African elites, the early on elites, and
Speaker 7: how much of it gets stolen by Western elites who
Speaker 7: so it never even arrives for it to be stolen
Speaker 7: by the elites in Africa.
Speaker 22: Yeah, that is the question.
Speaker 12: In fact, three years ago we've developed what we call
Speaker 12: it the African experce and Illicit Financial Fluids Project. Why
Speaker 12: you know, when we look at the corruption on the ground,
Speaker 12: the amount of money, whether as from the IMF and
Speaker 12: the World Bank that has been given and we don't
Speaker 12: see the development. We decided to look at the transnational
Speaker 12: dimension of this corrupt arrangement because when you talk about corruption,
Speaker 12: in most cases, it tends to be localized, being seen
Speaker 12: as these government's given money and the African politicians and
Speaker 12: African bureau class advance that are still in these money.
Speaker 12: And what we've come to realize is that much of
Speaker 12: that money, even the African politicians themselves are just pawns
Speaker 12: in this whole arrangement where these moneys have been shipped
Speaker 12: into offshore accounts and tax heavens and all of that.
Speaker 22: So we've been mapping and developing a database of these.
Speaker 12: Movement of transnational fonts and how African governments themselves are
Speaker 12: just part of an auxiliary of points in this whole
Speaker 12: international cricketer in enterprise that has developed, you know, for
Speaker 12: at least in.
Speaker 22: The last.
Speaker 12: Sixty years or sixty five years, So we're looking at
Speaker 12: Africa from ninety seventy five to present. So it's difficult
Speaker 12: to even assign a percentage in this case, and we've
Speaker 12: been that's the troubling question. How much agency can we
Speaker 12: are signed through the African politicians themselves who are roped
Speaker 12: into these international corruption enterprise and this deals with sovereignty issues,
Speaker 12: it deals with elections and democratization. We are leaders who
Speaker 12: do not play along these lines fall out of favor
Speaker 12: with governments and they are easily kicked out of power.
Speaker 12: And those who agree to be used to participate in
Speaker 12: this international process are aided and are bettered in rigging
Speaker 12: elections and consult and the consolidate dictatorships. We saw that
Speaker 12: in elections in Srilon in June twenty twenty three, where
Speaker 12: people voted against the government and elections. People went to
Speaker 12: vote and elections the results are still absent. If the
Speaker 12: US election monitors themselves said the elections we are non transparent,
Speaker 12: but the DFC and MCC continued giving money or signing
Speaker 12: finance agreements with the salutant government.
Speaker 22: So this speaks to the.
Speaker 12: Question is something that is that is new that people
Speaker 12: need to look into, inviting journalists now increasingly to you know,
Speaker 12: to reverse the scale and begin to look at transnationally,
Speaker 12: not just on the local African context.
Speaker 22: How much money has been stolen.
Speaker 12: You take the case of Ibula, much of the funds
Speaker 12: that went to roll back in Bula and West Africa
Speaker 12: was taken back by international organizations. Some of that is
Speaker 12: in my book the non source agreement that it's difficult
Speaker 12: to even compute them now.
Speaker 7: Now, maybe that's something that we can work on together
Speaker 7: and real quickly. Last question for you. I don't know
Speaker 7: that Emily has anything else. My sense of how this
Speaker 7: plays out on the ground, and here's for your take
Speaker 7: on this is that the corruption that this produces ends
Speaker 7: up kind of crushing democracy in at least to two
Speaker 7: different major ways.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 7: One is the one that you've talked about, that the
Speaker 7: governments that are in power don't feel any obligation to
Speaker 7: respond to the will of the public and make reforms
Speaker 7: and improve their lives because they know that they have
Speaker 7: the backing of these US institutions whether they do it
Speaker 7: or not, so why bother with it? But then secondly,
Speaker 7: by by infecting the system with so much corruption, it
Speaker 7: reduces the amount of engagement I would think that regular
Speaker 7: people have with their government, because you can have a
Speaker 7: social democratic reformer who says he's going to do X
Speaker 7: y Z when he gets into office, but the regular
Speaker 7: person just thinks he's just as corrupt as anybody else.
Speaker 7: And so when he gets in, he's going he's it's
Speaker 7: just a different flavor of stealing from me. And so
Speaker 7: when what that does is it breaks that bond between
Speaker 7: the people and the government and makes and makes democracy
Speaker 7: just a just a bunch of elections. And then if
Speaker 7: the elections don't go the right way, they just changed
Speaker 7: They just change accounting like they did in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 4: And we had you on to talk about that at
Speaker 4: the time.
Speaker 7: So is anything is that sense that I have roughly
Speaker 7: accurate and like, how would you characterize it?
Speaker 22: Yeah?
Speaker 12: Absolutely, It just empowers citizens because when you go to
Speaker 12: vote and you find out that your vote doesn't count
Speaker 12: and your voice doesn't count, it silences people.
Speaker 22: It makes mockery of democracy.
Speaker 12: It turns neo liberal democracy into a facade where people
Speaker 12: do not believe in the electoral process. And this is
Speaker 12: dangerous because it opens up ideas people begin to think
Speaker 12: about how to actualize their own citizenship, their right to
Speaker 12: have a say in government. The key to governance is trust.
Speaker 12: There has to be a fundamental trust between citizens and
Speaker 12: those they elect, where supposedly elected leaders cannot be held
Speaker 12: accountable and they cannot be punished when they violate the
Speaker 12: social contract between them and electorate.
Speaker 22: It is a major problem.
Speaker 12: And in the case of Africa, it's not just robbing
Speaker 12: African countries of their own sovereignity, their inability to have
Speaker 12: a say on the global stage, but also it empowers
Speaker 12: regular citizens, especially when countries like the United States back
Speaker 12: autopractical leaders in Africa who steal money, who steal votes,
Speaker 12: and also steal the lives of their own people. You know,
Speaker 12: people feel this empowered, they lose faith in government, they
Speaker 12: lose trust in their own leaders, and once that happens,
Speaker 12: it opens the way for conflict of all kinds. And
Speaker 12: this is why you have this instability on top of
Speaker 12: the other development and the horrible conditions of poverty. There's
Speaker 12: no stability in Africa because people are constantly thinking about
Speaker 12: how to get rid of this burden that they've been
Speaker 12: dealing with for the last sixty five years or more
Speaker 12: since so called independence, the transition from direct colonialism to
Speaker 12: what we have today. We're in the generous African politicians
Speaker 12: from our own communities get elected into offices and they
Speaker 12: do not serve the interest of their own people, and
Speaker 12: they do not even listen to the interest of their
Speaker 12: own people.
Speaker 22: That do not care.
Speaker 12: They serve the interests of foreign, foreign corporations and those
Speaker 12: are the people their account that they are worried about.
Speaker 12: They're worried about whether they will be on the good
Speaker 12: books of the United States. Right now, many of the
Speaker 12: African leaders are worried. They're constantly thinking about hiring lobbies
Speaker 12: to be on the good books of the current administration.
Speaker 12: Especially in the case of Australian the government that enjoyed
Speaker 12: treatmendous goodwill from the Biden Harrison administration. Now they're constantly
Speaker 12: thinking about how to recalibrate their entire program to be
Speaker 12: on the good books of the current new administration in Washington,
Speaker 12: because they need that to be able to undertake these
Speaker 12: you know, to continue on the road to dictatorship and authoritarianism.
Speaker 12: So the United States need to retink it's own relations
Speaker 12: with these countries. And this is not a partician conversation.
Speaker 12: It is way beyond republican or democrat. It deals with
Speaker 12: real people's lives. It deals with independence and selfdetermination and
Speaker 12: the lives of women and children who have been suffering
Speaker 12: for many, many years, who have no other opportunities. All
Speaker 12: they want is just peace, to be let alone. To
Speaker 12: be able to work, free to leave, you know, to
Speaker 12: have the minimum standards of existence, electricity, good roads, healthcare.
Speaker 12: These are basic human needs and we should be able
Speaker 12: to look at this problem beyond outside of these boxes.
Speaker 12: Now we've placed ourselves dispartisan boxes. I think that is
Speaker 12: the issue. That's the message. Nobody in Africa is against
Speaker 12: foreign relations. What we are against is that foreign direct
Speaker 12: investment or foreign relations should not be conducted at the
Speaker 12: expense of the lives and liberty of African citizens. In
Speaker 12: the case of Australian we're saying that any such engagement
Speaker 12: should have at its call the protection of the lives
Speaker 12: and liberty of all salunions, including those of us who
Speaker 12: want to hold leaders accountable to the minimum standards of
Speaker 12: good governance and accountability. They should not be for anyone,
Speaker 12: the godless of your party, ideology or persuasion. You should
Speaker 12: be able to support this kind of a human demand.
Speaker 12: It's a demand for freedom and liberty which everybody around
Speaker 12: the world, you know as bis.
Speaker 7: Yes, sounds sounds reasonable to Met Chernoba, journalist at the
Speaker 7: Africanist Press.
Speaker 4: Editor.
Speaker 7: I'm an author of the great book The Ebola Outbreak.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much for joining us very much, appreciate it.
Speaker 22: Thank you for having me.
Speaker 4: All Right, that's it for us today. You in here tomorrow.
Speaker 6: I don't know, we don't know. Actually Sager doesn't know
Speaker 6: what his schedule is.
Speaker 4: That's true.
Speaker 6: Nobody knows anything.
Speaker 4: So just you have to you have to tune in
Speaker 4: to find out. Will definitely be here Friday.
Speaker 8: It has been fun like having three people, then that
Speaker 8: one Friday we had four people. We're just mixing everything up,
Speaker 8: having a blast over here. First one hundred days. You
Speaker 8: never know what you're going to get from Breaking Points.
Speaker 5: That's right.
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Speaker 6: That's right. And you know now that we're we're on Fridays.
Speaker 8: One of the things we do on those shows is
Speaker 8: kind of catch up on some of the big picture
Speaker 8: things from the week, and because the trends of the
Speaker 8: last week are sort of clear by the Friday news cycle.
Speaker 6: So I love doing those.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you don't want to miss that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you know we'll save some of the best
Speaker 6: for the second half.
Speaker 7: Of course, exactly exactly, yeah, tune in phoning it in
Speaker 7: the first half. The premium subs get the good stuff.
Speaker 6: Breaking Points dot Com.
Speaker 8: And we don't know who will be back here tomorrow
Speaker 8: because Sager is awaiting his baby, but we will certainly
Speaker 8: have someone here for you.
Speaker 6: Make sure to tune in for that. We'll see you
Speaker 6: back here soon.
Speaker 4: I see you later.