Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
Speaker 2: We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
Speaker 2: the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent
Speaker 2: coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about,
Speaker 2: it just means the absolute world to have your support.
Speaker 2: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning, Welcome to Counterpoints.
Speaker 4: How you doing, Emily, He's so excited to be back.
Speaker 3: Excited.
Speaker 4: I'm so excited to have him back. And Ryan's back,
Speaker 4: which means the giant Lenin book is back to just
Speaker 4: haunting every shot of Counterpoints. But really, it's great to
Speaker 4: have you back.
Speaker 5: And you were in Vermont, which is is now underwater.
Speaker 3: It's actually brutal conditions.
Speaker 5: People can search they can't search threads yet, but they
Speaker 5: can search Twitter or search online or reach out to
Speaker 5: anybody in front. Brutal conditions. It's being compared to the
Speaker 5: flooding after Hurricane Irene in twenty eleven. Montpelier, the state
Speaker 5: capital underwater, just devastation, like top to bottom.
Speaker 3: But really hitting the center in the south of the state.
Speaker 4: Just a couple of days or a couple of months
Speaker 4: of rain in the matter.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but it's what's scary is how fast it can happen,
Speaker 5: because it was already saturated and then you had basically
Speaker 5: a day of super heavy rain in upstate New York
Speaker 5: and Vermont and the next thing you know, the streets
Speaker 5: are turned into creeks.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, we'll be following that situation, will perhaps even be
Speaker 4: covering that situation in the days ahead. We're going to
Speaker 4: start by talking about the NATO summit, which has been
Speaker 4: going on for days now, and some interesting developments just yesterday.
Speaker 4: Then Ryan called this Tommy tuber Bill Store Tommy Turberville's
Speaker 4: story too, my attention. So we'll be talking a little
Speaker 4: bit about him in a back and forth about white nationalism.
Speaker 4: He's also in a back and forth with the Marines
Speaker 4: over military confirmations and abortions. So we'll try to break
Speaker 4: down that story. What else we got today, Ryan, We've
Speaker 4: got the Hunter Biden informant, which is an incredibly weird story.
Speaker 5: It's such a great story because the guy who was
Speaker 5: saying that he's a whistleblower that has evidence against Hunter
Speaker 5: Biden found out to be a Chinese spy, which actually
Speaker 5: might buttress his credibility.
Speaker 4: I'm not sure that this is going how the media
Speaker 4: thinks it's going.
Speaker 3: Funny.
Speaker 5: People are like, Aha, this proves that this person couldn't
Speaker 5: be a credible source about the whistle blowing he's doing
Speaker 5: on Chinese influence on hind because he's a Chinese spy. No,
Speaker 5: I think actually not good for him. No, because now he's,
Speaker 5: as he says, he might be on the run for
Speaker 5: the rest of his life. But it's actually probably good
Speaker 5: for his case. We'll get it adprisingly, and then we
Speaker 5: have the activision. If you see Call of Duty on
Speaker 5: the bottom of our prompter there active the active vision
Speaker 5: Microsoft merger has been challenged by the FTC, A Biden pointed,
Speaker 5: judge is allowing it to go through.
Speaker 3: They're going to appeal.
Speaker 5: We're going to talk about that and what it means
Speaker 5: for not just the world of video games and Call
Speaker 5: of Duty, but what it means for anti trust policy
Speaker 5: and also for union density in that sector, because there
Speaker 5: was just a big union win all Sega workers becoming
Speaker 5: CWA workers at big CWA election.
Speaker 3: That we'll talk about.
Speaker 4: Yes, there's a lot going on there. It's not going
Speaker 4: to be Ryan and Me playing Call of Duty, but
Speaker 4: hopefully it will be better. Andrew Tate sat for a
Speaker 4: two plus hour interview with Tucker Carlson. We're going to
Speaker 4: be breaking down some of the high highlights on that.
Speaker 4: I'm going to be talking about the meme of the summer,
Speaker 4: Barbie Oppenheimer and in a way that I'm actually curious
Speaker 4: to get you a reaction to. You're going to be
Speaker 4: talking about the COVID hearing low lights, and then Turnoba
Speaker 4: will be on the show once again.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker 5: If you guys remember Chernobo, he's the Sierra Leonian report
Speaker 5: who wrote a book on the Bola outbreak.
Speaker 3: He is going to talk.
Speaker 5: He's going to update us both on what he thought
Speaker 5: of the hearing yesterday, which had a mention of Sierra
Speaker 5: Leone and Bola, and also the deep regularities going on
Speaker 5: in the Sierra Leonian election. We had promised we'd have
Speaker 5: him on after that election and make them good.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we're looking forward to that. Let's start though, with
Speaker 4: the NATO summit and developments out of Ukraine. You can
Speaker 4: go ahead and put the first element up on the screen.
Speaker 4: This is quite interesting. I'm reading from NBC News here
Speaker 4: for a President. Donald Trump on Tuesday condemned President Joe
Speaker 4: Biden's decision to send cluster munitions as part of a
Speaker 4: new US aid package to Ukraine, warning that it could
Speaker 4: lead to World War III. This is the Trump quote
Speaker 4: you see up there. Joe Biden should not be dragging
Speaker 4: US further toward World War three by sending cluster munitions
Speaker 4: to Ukraine. He should be trying to end all caps
Speaker 4: of the war and stop the horrific death and destruction
Speaker 4: being caused by an incompetent administration. Now, Biden's argument, of course,
Speaker 4: is that cluster munition are going to be what does
Speaker 4: ultimately stop the war. That if you don't use cluster munitions,
Speaker 4: it's not going to give Ukraine so the so called
Speaker 4: sort of fighting chance that it needs right now in
Speaker 4: the middle of this offensive. And this is Biden's quote.
Speaker 4: He said, the Ukrainians are running out of ammunition. He
Speaker 4: told Freied Zakaria this earlier this week. This is a
Speaker 4: war relating to munitions, and they are running out of
Speaker 4: that ammunition and we are low on it. So Trump
Speaker 4: says response to more directly to that point, It certainly
Speaker 4: means we should not be sending Ukraine our last stockpiles
Speaker 4: at a time on our own arsenals, according to Crooked
Speaker 4: Joe Biden, are so perilously diminished. Trump also criticized Biden
Speaker 4: for potentially revealing confidential or classified information when he said
Speaker 4: that we are low on munitions and that Ukrainians are
Speaker 4: running out of ammunitions. Quite an interesting little back and forth.
Speaker 4: As Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Zaalinski is in
Speaker 4: back and forth with everyone, seemingly right now with NATO.
Speaker 4: He's said just yesterday that the United States and NATO
Speaker 4: allies are present projecting weakness by not having a stronger
Speaker 4: approach to Ukraine joining NATO in during the war, as
Speaker 4: NATO signals that it's not wise to join in the
Speaker 4: middle of the war.
Speaker 5: It doesn't seem like Trump is necessarily divulging classified information
Speaker 5: because you can learn Biden, yeah, oh oh, Biden releasing
Speaker 5: classified But either way, if anybody said that we're low
Speaker 5: on ammunition, you could get that just by watching this
Speaker 5: show or by reading reading the newspaper. Like it's also
Speaker 5: you can just get it by extrapolation, like it's rather clear.
Speaker 5: And you're having people on background make the argument that
Speaker 5: one of the reasons they need these cluster munitions because
Speaker 5: they're running out of their regular munitions. So the gnarly
Speaker 5: your argument, the more disgusting argument that you're hearing being made,
Speaker 5: is that, look, Ukraine has already desiccated anyway, but all
Speaker 5: of this land is already covered with land mines that
Speaker 5: the Russians have used cluster munitions that are going to
Speaker 5: sit there and blow up kids for cas to come.
Speaker 5: So what's a few one hundred thousand extra cluster munitions
Speaker 5: tossed around the bread basket? That's really the argument that
Speaker 5: it's being made. And if I would just say to
Speaker 5: people that if you're making that argument, like if you're
Speaker 5: working that through in your head, stop to think where
Speaker 5: you are and step back a second. That if something
Speaker 5: so bad that therefore your arguments we got to make,
Speaker 5: it's okay to make it worse, like you might you've
Speaker 5: taken a wrong turn somewhere. Probably what will be interesting
Speaker 5: to watch is whether or not.
Speaker 3: Trump jumping on this.
Speaker 5: Blunts the bipartisan momentum that was building against sending cluster
Speaker 5: munitions over to Ukraine. Just at the end of last week,
Speaker 5: Sarah Jacobs, represented from California, and Ilon Omar introduced an
Speaker 5: amendment to the NDAA to say there will be no
Speaker 5: cluster munitions transfers anywhere, not just Ukraine, but anywhere. If
Speaker 5: you had nineteen Democrats that on Friday, you set a
Speaker 5: letter of the administration makes been making basically the same point.
Speaker 5: In order to get onto the floor, they need Republican support,
Speaker 5: and so that started to come first in the form
Speaker 5: of Representative Matt Gates.
Speaker 3: Let's roll Gates here.
Speaker 8: Democrat Congresswoman Sarah Jacobs, who we've criticized a great deal
Speaker 8: on the show for some of the reviews. She's probably
Speaker 8: criticized me a great deal for some of mine. But
Speaker 8: she has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization
Speaker 8: Act that reads, notwithstanding any other provision of law, no
Speaker 8: military assistance shall be furnished for cluster munitions, No defense
Speaker 8: export license for cluster munitions may be issued, and no
Speaker 8: cluster munitions or cluster munitions technology shall be sold or transferred.
Speaker 8: And what I'm here to tell you is that I
Speaker 8: am going to be the Republican co sponsor of the
Speaker 8: Jacob's amendment before the House Rules Committee. We have an
Speaker 8: opportunity with bipartisanship to stand against the war mongering bidence
Speaker 8: and these cluster bombs will not end the war in Ukraine.
Speaker 8: Let's look at the countries where cluster bombs have been
Speaker 8: used Laus Lebanon, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria. Cluster bombs are features
Speaker 8: of the world's bloodiest and most inhumane wars, some.
Speaker 3: Of the longest. It's hardly the cornerstone of a path
Speaker 3: to peace.
Speaker 5: One side note on journalism Todays, I was working Monday
Speaker 5: all day on reporting out this story, and I'm hearing
Speaker 5: from Capitol Hill sources Matt Gates might be willing to
Speaker 5: co sponsor this, and so I'm looking for extra sources.
Speaker 5: He going to try to report this out. And then
Speaker 5: somebody's like, I think he's saying it on his podcast
Speaker 5: right now? What do you mean his podcast?
Speaker 3: The world?
Speaker 7: Is this?
Speaker 3: What am I even here for? Yeah?
Speaker 4: Just go away?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like my role here is done.
Speaker 5: Yeah, He's just gonna grab his mic and just break
Speaker 5: the news right there on his little podcast, which is
Speaker 5: I was still able to sort of break the news,
Speaker 5: and like, I went and found his podcast and he
Speaker 5: quoted his podcast.
Speaker 3: But it's different than you know.
Speaker 5: When reporters are getting in the Hallway talking to people
Speaker 5: and getting news.
Speaker 3: It's just it's uh, I don't know, man, what are
Speaker 3: we even doing anymore?
Speaker 4: This is the best news ever for people in Capitol Hill,
Speaker 4: like members watching this, they're like Ryan Grimm gives up
Speaker 4: on journals.
Speaker 3: Done. I can't anymore with this.
Speaker 5: But so so with Gate supporting Jacob's amendment, that means
Speaker 5: that it has a better chance of getting through the
Speaker 5: Rules Committee, but it also needs Democrats on the Rules Committee.
Speaker 5: Good news for opponents here is that Jim McGovern is
Speaker 5: the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee. We talked about
Speaker 5: him recently and he was going a little bit wobbly
Speaker 5: on some sanctions positions, but here here he came through
Speaker 5: for them.
Speaker 3: Let's let's roll McGovern.
Speaker 9: Either of you have an opinion of whether or not
Speaker 9: the House should be able to debate the issue of
Speaker 9: cluster munitions or not. But if you have an opinion
Speaker 9: of love to.
Speaker 3: Hear it with me, honest me too.
Speaker 9: I mean I hope then, I hope it's made in
Speaker 9: order we'll be able to have that debate in that vote.
Speaker 7: Oh.
Speaker 5: Now, I do have a role as a reporter here.
Speaker 5: I can tell you that the people on the other
Speaker 5: side of the camera. There were Mike Rogers and Adam Smith,
Speaker 5: who are the top Republican and top Democrat on the
Speaker 5: House Armed Services Committee, And so for mc governor to
Speaker 5: get them on record say you know what, we're fine
Speaker 5: with having this vote means that it has a better
Speaker 5: shot of being quote ruled in order. What they adjourned
Speaker 5: after about eleven o'clock last night, and they're going to
Speaker 5: allow all of the uncontroversial amendments to go through on
Speaker 5: an uncontroversial vote, and then for the rest of the
Speaker 5: week they're going to hash out these controversial amendments.
Speaker 3: So it's unlikely that you're.
Speaker 5: Going to have a majority in the House that's going
Speaker 5: to be able to block the munition's transfer. And also
Speaker 5: it would be difficult to get the two thirds you
Speaker 5: would need to override a Biden veto. But it is
Speaker 5: I think the biggest concentration of kind of opposition to
Speaker 5: any kind of Ukraine Ukraine arming policy that has threatened
Speaker 5: to develop since the beginning of the war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and we can go ahead and put the next
Speaker 4: element up. This is Jensaki responding to questions. Obviously a
Speaker 4: long time ago, because Trensaki has been gone for as it.
Speaker 3: Was about a year ago.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, probably a little bit more than a year ago.
Speaker 5: I guess like maybe spring early twenty twenty two, Yeah,
Speaker 5: early twenty twenty two.
Speaker 1: Take a look, silence will be tolerated against civilians in
Speaker 1: this manner that's illegal and potentially a war crime.
Speaker 10: It is, it would be, I don't have any confirmation
Speaker 10: of that. We have seen the reports. If that were true,
Speaker 10: it would potentially be a war crime. Obviously, there are
Speaker 10: a range of international fura that would assess that, so
Speaker 10: certainly we would look to that to be a part
Speaker 10: of that conversation.
Speaker 5: Well, it's Jensaki being asked about and at the beginning
Speaker 5: of the question, wasn't there, But that's her being asked
Speaker 5: about Russia's use of cluster munitions, yes, in war, potential
Speaker 5: war crime.
Speaker 4: February twenty eighth, twenty twenty two, February twenty eighth. And
Speaker 4: so will they still be looking to the range of
Speaker 4: criteria that she referenced just there to determine whether or
Speaker 4: not there was to determine whether or not there's a
Speaker 4: war crime should this go ahead.
Speaker 5: And the funny thing about this is that there is
Speaker 5: a convention against cluster munitions that was signed in nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety seven.
Speaker 3: More than one hundred countries have endorsed it, but I
Speaker 3: guess it.
Speaker 5: Doesn't count as the international rules based order because we
Speaker 5: didn't sign on to it. China has not signed on
Speaker 5: to a RUSH, has not signed on to it. Turkey
Speaker 5: has not signed on to it. Ironically, Turkey playing you know,
Speaker 5: every side in this war, has been sending cluster musitions
Speaker 5: to Ukraine, so they have some of these already, So
Speaker 5: those countries have not signed on to the treaty, which
Speaker 5: makes it international in the sense that more than one
Speaker 5: hundred countries have tried to ban cluster munitions because if
Speaker 5: people don't quite understand how they work, they launch exploding
Speaker 5: clusters and then hundreds and thousands of them in small
Speaker 5: numbers spread spread across the field, and the ones we're
Speaker 5: talking about sending have like a six percent dud rate,
Speaker 5: which means that with the numbers that we're talking about setting,
Speaker 5: there could be about four hundred thousand unexploded munitions in
Speaker 5: the ground just as a relative a result of what
Speaker 5: we send, not counting what Turkey sent to Ukraine or
Speaker 5: what Russia is firing.
Speaker 4: Well in Turkey. Is a great transition here back to
Speaker 4: the NATO summit, because Erdawan had quite a showing at
Speaker 4: the NATO summit, cleared the way basically for Sweden to
Speaker 4: join NATO. Had a very friendly relationship with Biden on
Speaker 4: display over the course of the NATO summit, and that
Speaker 4: has been the NATO summit over the last few days.
Speaker 4: I think it's obviously no coincidence that this conversation is
Speaker 4: transpiring at the same time because there are new commitments.
Speaker 4: So this is Germany, France, Norway at the NATO summit
Speaker 4: announced new military aid to Ukraine. We can put the
Speaker 4: New York Times element up here. They promised tanks and
Speaker 4: longer range missiles. They so, I mean, that's obviously a
Speaker 4: pretty big deal, just from their point of view. NATO
Speaker 4: put out a statement saying that quote Ukraine's future is
Speaker 4: in NATO, and you know this is just an attempt
Speaker 4: as a show of force to say but without opening
Speaker 4: the way for Ukraine to be NATO. As you see
Speaker 4: here on the screen, quote conditions are met. When conditions
Speaker 4: are met, that's when Ukraine gets its membership. This is
Speaker 4: not good enough for Zelensky. But at the same time,
Speaker 4: NATO over the last few days has been making a
Speaker 4: very big deal to show solidarity and their alliance with
Speaker 4: Ukraine stopping short of what Zelensky wants, which prompted him
Speaker 4: to kind of lash out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we can put his lashing out here.
Speaker 5: He posted on Twitter on the way to the thing
Speaker 5: that the next element here and he says, you know,
Speaker 5: he says, basically, we're still going to go to the
Speaker 5: NATO summit. But then he says, but Ukraine also deserves respect,
Speaker 5: he says, Now on the way to Vilnius, we receive
Speaker 5: signals that certain wording is being discussed without Ukraine, and
Speaker 5: I would like to emphasize that this wording is about
Speaker 5: the invitation to become NATO member, not about Ukraine's membership.
Speaker 5: It's unprecedented and absurd when timeframe is not set neither
Speaker 5: for the invitation nor for Ukraine's membership, while at the
Speaker 5: same time vague worrying about conditions is added even for
Speaker 5: inviting Ukraine. It seems there is no readiness neither to
Speaker 5: invite Ukraine to NATO nor to make it a member
Speaker 5: of the alliance. This means that a window of opportunity
Speaker 5: is being left to bargain Ukraine's membership in NATO. In
Speaker 5: negotiations with Russia, and for Russia this means motivation to
Speaker 5: continue its terror. Uncertainty is weakness, and I will openly
Speaker 5: discuss this at the summit. So Zelensky livid that there
Speaker 5: are conditions being put on even an invitation into NATO.
Speaker 5: But the problem here is that if you're in an
Speaker 5: active war with Russia and you become a NATO member, instantly,
Speaker 5: all of NATO is at war with Russia.
Speaker 3: And Zelenski has to understand that.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, he understands that, but he like again, this is
Speaker 4: one of the things criticizing Zelenski. I think we criticized
Speaker 4: Zlensky rightfully here a lot. The man, you know, whether
Speaker 4: or not we can criticize him from the Western perspective,
Speaker 4: is mired in war, and so from his perspective, it
Speaker 4: makes sense that you would push for Ukraine to have
Speaker 4: NATO membership, although I would argue it doesn't really make
Speaker 4: that much sense because it's basically inviting even more death
Speaker 4: and destruction to Ukraine into the entire region. So, you know,
Speaker 4: and especially I think the amount of support that he's gotten,
Speaker 4: not just from NATO but particularly from the United States.
Speaker 4: Let's put let's roll this clip of Actually, Anthony Blincoln,
Speaker 4: who was on the Sunday Shows, made his rounds on
Speaker 4: the Sunday shows this weekend and had some comments about
Speaker 4: this too.
Speaker 11: Well.
Speaker 3: It sends two messages.
Speaker 12: First of all, our alliance is stronger, gets bigger with
Speaker 12: two new members Finland and now Sweden, and it's more
Speaker 12: united than ever. And in terms of Russia's aggression against Ukraine,
Speaker 12: it's sending a very strong message to Putin that he's
Speaker 12: not going to outlast us. He's not going to outlast Ukraine.
Speaker 12: And the sooner he ends this war of aggression, the better.
Speaker 4: Okay, So I was wrong. That wasn't the Sunday shows.
Speaker 4: That was CBS this morning after the new members admitted, Yeah,
Speaker 4: you sorry. I was thinking Biden was on Faried Zakaria
Speaker 4: on Sunday, but blink in there saying he's trying to
Speaker 4: do exactly that. He's trying to say, you know, we're
Speaker 4: sending a strong message against Putin. But Zelenski's version of
Speaker 4: a strong message against Putin is Ukraine admission into NATO
Speaker 4: full stop.
Speaker 5: And I have sympathy here for Zelensky in this sense
Speaker 5: that and we reported on this recently on the show
Speaker 5: that if you go back to the March twenty two
Speaker 5: negotiations that were going on in Turkey between Russia Ukraine
Speaker 5: and being broken by Airdawan. The basic outlines that we
Speaker 5: understand now or Russia would claim territory that it had
Speaker 5: had prior to February twenty first, so that includes a
Speaker 5: little bit of the donbas in Crimea, and in exchange,
Speaker 5: Ukraine would be allowed to have security guarantees from the
Speaker 5: West that would kind of lock in that status quo.
Speaker 3: But the West said, no, we're.
Speaker 5: Not giving you those security guarantees, and so without those,
Speaker 5: we want you to continue to fight and drain Russian.
Speaker 5: Russian power is the Western powers according to this reporting,
Speaker 5: like the way that this was going for Russia, which
Speaker 5: was not as well as Russia to hope. You know,
Speaker 5: that's seventy two hours Kiev had not fallen, et cetera.
Speaker 5: And so this question of security guarantees, had it been
Speaker 5: answered in March twenty twenty two, may have ended the
Speaker 5: war at that point. Yeah, and so I can I
Speaker 5: can see why you know this this further, this much
Speaker 5: further into the war, after this much pain, misery, trauma
Speaker 5: and bloodshed that Zelensky would be throwing his hands.
Speaker 3: Up, like, what are we going to do here?
Speaker 7: Right?
Speaker 3: When is this? When is this going to end? When
Speaker 3: are you going to get off the pot?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 13: Yeah?
Speaker 4: No, I think that's exactly exactly the way to look
Speaker 4: at it, because and again, that doesn't mean that Zelensky
Speaker 4: is completely correct on a strategic level to say X,
Speaker 4: Y and Z is best for us, But it does
Speaker 4: mean that that sort of line that they're trying to
Speaker 4: toe would be frustrated from his perspective. And also, I
Speaker 4: think it's abundantly clear at this point. You know, there
Speaker 4: were a lot of arguments made a year into the war,
Speaker 4: six months into the war that Biden was you know,
Speaker 4: from a bipartisan perspective, he was doing all right, that
Speaker 4: is absurd to make that argument anymore. I think that
Speaker 4: becomes more clear every single day.
Speaker 5: All Right, So we got some bizarre Tommy two Reville
Speaker 5: news this guy good lord. So I have a clip
Speaker 5: that I want to help that I think helps frame
Speaker 5: this conversation that we can get into in a second.
Speaker 5: But can you set up the fight that he's currently
Speaker 5: having with the military, because I think that that is
Speaker 5: also some type of playing into this somehow.
Speaker 4: Yes, So Tommy Turberville has Establishment Republicans extremely upset. He
Speaker 4: has the Biden administration extremely upset because he's been blocking
Speaker 4: senior military promotions that are confirmed in the Senate over
Speaker 4: the Pentagon's abortion policy, which is they will pay for
Speaker 4: their employees to travel for abortions. And so Tarbraville has
Speaker 4: for a very long time said, we are blocking these promotions.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to allow them to go through as
Speaker 4: the Senate works, you can have one person sort of
Speaker 4: coming up the works like that. And his argument is
Speaker 4: that the Biden administration could drop this policy, like they
Speaker 4: don't have to be funding abortion travel. So if they
Speaker 4: are clinging to this idea that they're going to be
Speaker 4: paying for abortion travel at the Department of Defense with
Speaker 4: tax payer money, why are you blaming me? Why are
Speaker 4: you not blaming the Biden administration. And the head of
Speaker 4: the Marines was forced into retirement this week. I saw
Speaker 4: forced into retirement. I don't know what the circumstances are
Speaker 4: between going into I think we had something to do
Speaker 4: with like it was nothing like super interesting or nefarious,
Speaker 4: but retired this week and they needed to appoint someone
Speaker 4: to that position. And so that's where this is all
Speaker 4: coming to. A head this week because people are really
Speaker 4: frustrated that they can't name a new head of the Marines.
Speaker 4: While Taberville continues to block this, he says, it's not me,
Speaker 4: it's the Biden administration. Conservative movement is rallying behind Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 4: John Thune are not. They are really really upset about it.
Speaker 4: And again this is all coming to a head. And
Speaker 4: now that sets up the Tuberville CNN drama.
Speaker 5: And to me, it seems like if Tubberville or any
Speaker 5: other senator like wants to unilaterally kind of set policy,
Speaker 5: that kind of intricate policy for the military, they should
Speaker 5: run for president and become commander in chief. To me,
Speaker 5: it's like, come on, get out of here, like, this
Speaker 5: is not how we this is not how we run
Speaker 5: a military. But anyway, so to the white nationalism question
Speaker 5: that he has now gotten himself tangled up in, I
Speaker 5: wanted to play one clip of him.
Speaker 3: This is from October of twenty twenty two.
Speaker 5: This is at a Trump rally, which I think puts
Speaker 5: into context some of the comments that he made recently.
Speaker 13: Democratic Party they have a majority, they could stop this
Speaker 13: crime today. Some people say, well, they're soft on crime. No,
Speaker 13: they're not soft on crime. They're pro crime. They won't crame.
Speaker 13: They won't crime because you want to take over what
Speaker 13: you got. They want to control what you have. They
Speaker 13: want reparation because they think the people that do the
Speaker 13: crime are owed that.
Speaker 7: They're not.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 5: So here listen to that as context for a recent
Speaker 5: conversation he had on a podcast where he said, some
Speaker 5: people call them white nationalists, I call them Americans. So
Speaker 5: he then goes on CNN where Caitlyn Collins presses him.
Speaker 5: You said, this pretty crazy thing. Can you please kind
Speaker 5: of elaborate what did you mean by this?
Speaker 3: And here he is on on CNN.
Speaker 1: That's not identity politics. You said, a white nationalist is
Speaker 1: an American.
Speaker 3: Identity politics, you said, a white.
Speaker 4: Nationalist is an American.
Speaker 1: But a white nationalist is someone who believes horrific things.
Speaker 1: You don't, do you really think that's someone who should
Speaker 1: be serving in the military.
Speaker 3: Well, that's just a name that has been given.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's not it's a real definition. There's real concern.
Speaker 14: You're going to with most white people in this country
Speaker 14: out of the military. We got huge problems. We got
Speaker 14: huge problems, not people.
Speaker 5: Who are white.
Speaker 4: It's white nationalists that have.
Speaker 14: A few probably different beliefs, right, they have that have
Speaker 14: different beliefs. Now, if racism is one of those beliefs,
Speaker 14: I'm totally against it. I am totally against racism.
Speaker 3: But there's a lot of people that is racist.
Speaker 14: Senator, Well, that's your opinion. That's your opinion. But if
Speaker 14: it's racism, if it's racism, I'm totally against it. I
Speaker 14: am totally against any type of race or any any
Speaker 14: type of racism. I don't care what it's in.
Speaker 5: So he's okay with white nationalism as long as it
Speaker 5: doesn't involve racism.
Speaker 4: So bad, so bad, So bad.
Speaker 5: Mitch McConnell got pressed on it at his uh at
Speaker 5: the Sticks yesterday on Capitol Here.
Speaker 3: Here's here's Mitch McConnell grappling with this question.
Speaker 6: Do you any concerns that you're a member of your conference,
Speaker 6: Senator Tuberville's it seems to have a hard time denouncing
Speaker 6: white nationalism, especially as a past white nationalism in the military.
Speaker 5: You know, white supremacy is simply unacceptable in the military
Speaker 5: and in our whole country. Mitch, Yeah, And so I
Speaker 5: saw Eric Erickson saying, you know, Tommy Tuberville is the
Speaker 5: hero we need talking about.
Speaker 3: His fight with the military right now.
Speaker 4: So, how is this.
Speaker 5: Just horrifying moment of racism from Tulberville colliding and coinciding
Speaker 5: with this kind of stand he's taking with the kind
Speaker 5: of evangelical movement to support their kind of preferred abortion
Speaker 5: policy in the military.
Speaker 7: Is it?
Speaker 5: Is it causing consternation that oh boy like in order
Speaker 5: to like or these are these things mingling together?
Speaker 3: What's going on on the right.
Speaker 5: As as they as people have to grapple with this
Speaker 5: guy's refusal to say.
Speaker 3: To just denounce white nationalism.
Speaker 4: I think it's it's an attempt and I would imagine
Speaker 4: coordinated on Capitol Hill to undercut his credibility. And if
Speaker 4: you can undercut his sort of moral credibility, then do
Speaker 4: you have the conservative.
Speaker 3: Moods like maybe somebody leaked that podcast.
Speaker 4: Someone Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised by that.
Speaker 5: It could have been brought him on the CNN and
Speaker 5: then he refused to just put it out by say
Speaker 5: apologizing it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And Mitch McConnell and John Thune have or McConnell
Speaker 4: at least you've seen that there have taken the opportunity
Speaker 4: to jump in but I would say this is actually
Speaker 4: kind of interesting. Some people might think this is a
Speaker 4: charitable read untopable, but I think it is. It is
Speaker 4: not charitable. I think it's the least charitable read on him.
Speaker 4: I genuinely think that he is trying to push back
Speaker 4: on this this definition inflation in a way that this
Speaker 4: is not defensible. And that's my point. He like genuinely
Speaker 4: doesn't understand that white nationalism is inherently racist. He like
Speaker 4: actually thinks that it's just a label democrats are throwing around,
Speaker 4: because like, let's be real, that does happen. There are
Speaker 4: labels that are thrown around, you know, ridiculously willy nilly
Speaker 4: in a way that like cheapens it. But he genuinely
Speaker 4: seems to not understand what white nationalism is. And I
Speaker 4: think obviously, for any publican senator right now, you should
Speaker 4: have a pretty clear understanding that white nationalism is absolutely racist.
Speaker 4: And I honestly like, I think that's what explains this
Speaker 4: bizarre clip of him saying, listen, if it's racism, I
Speaker 4: denounced that racism is terrible. He's like aggressively denouncing racism
Speaker 4: and then shrugging out of white nationalism. I think he
Speaker 4: is genuinely confused, and I think that's fairly shameful.
Speaker 5: It is. It is interesting that if you get down
Speaker 5: into the fever swamps of the white nationalism and white
Speaker 5: supremacy world, you will find all sorts of people who
Speaker 5: self identify as white nationalists who say that they are
Speaker 5: not racist, yes, because they are not white supremacy, right exactly.
Speaker 5: And they will point and they will say, actually, we
Speaker 5: think Asians are like they literally like, this is a
Speaker 5: very common you'll they'll vouch for me that, right, He's
Speaker 5: a common.
Speaker 4: Thing, well on the right so much as like super
Speaker 4: free right whatever you would want to call that.
Speaker 3: And so I actually thought it was interesting.
Speaker 5: I'm curious if McConnell was doing some weird code switching
Speaker 5: there when he was asked about white nationalism answered about
Speaker 5: white supremacy, right, because he whistling to people to say
Speaker 5: that I know the difference, and I'm willing to announce
Speaker 5: white supremacy, yeah, but not white nationalism there like as
Speaker 5: somebody like, did you notice that code switch to yeah?
Speaker 4: I did, And I think it's exactly what Caitlin is
Speaker 4: getting at with Coverville. She's and he comes out and
Speaker 4: again it's this weird thing where he's saying if it's racist, no,
Speaker 4: it's it's bad. But and this is again like, this
Speaker 4: is not a charitable defense of him, because I think
Speaker 4: it's shameful that a Republican senator or any senator would
Speaker 4: be confused on that level about white nationalism. I just
Speaker 4: think it's insane. Ryan. Though you're correct, like white nationalists
Speaker 4: will say, we're not racists, we're separatists. Essentially, would believe
Speaker 4: that homogeneous sort of like ethnically in like ethnic homogeneity.
Speaker 4: It's it's always, I would argue, as always pretty racist. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like baked into the cake of white nationalisms.
Speaker 5: And I think it also exposes how victimized that that
Speaker 5: element of our politics is becoming, because what they'll often
Speaker 5: say is that, well, what about black nationalism. You often
Speaker 5: hear that from them, that's if we are a racist,
Speaker 5: isn't it isn't that racist?
Speaker 7: Yes?
Speaker 5: That well, black nationalism arises from hundreds of years of
Speaker 5: oppression and a way to try to reclaim an identity
Speaker 5: into the melting pot of the United.
Speaker 4: States, when it is predicated on going into the melting
Speaker 4: pot as opposed to like separatism.
Speaker 5: Yes, I agree, right, And it's right, but otherwise it
Speaker 5: could just be separatism. And so that means that these
Speaker 5: folks are claiming the same amount of oppression. And I
Speaker 5: think in their hearts like they feel it, but they
Speaker 5: look around and feel that amount.
Speaker 3: Of pression and the rest of the world is like,
Speaker 3: you guys have lost your mind. You're not the oppressed
Speaker 3: class here.
Speaker 7: What is it like? What is like?
Speaker 5: How did you get to a place where you can
Speaker 5: justify that feeling despite like all of the abundance that is, like,
Speaker 5: you know, within within your reach.
Speaker 3: But uh, so, I I think you're right.
Speaker 5: That's and and I don't think Tommy Tellerville has equipped
Speaker 5: kind of disgusted he was he then he then did, uh,
Speaker 5: the incredible version of some of my best friends are
Speaker 5: black was he was asked if he's racist, and he said,
Speaker 5: I I used to be a football coach, and I
Speaker 5: dealt with more minorities. It's like dealt with like you're
Speaker 5: It's like the contempt is seeping through when you say
Speaker 5: dealt with like you deal with like deal with and
Speaker 5: and in one of the interviews, he caught himself after
Speaker 5: he said dealt with right and and rephrase it too.
Speaker 5: Had the privilege to be around because he could hear
Speaker 5: like what had subconsciously, you know, crept into the into
Speaker 5: the conscious had how it sounded to people deal with.
Speaker 4: I agree that he's like just fundamentally not equipped to
Speaker 4: have that conversation at.
Speaker 5: All, but you know, maybe he is, and we're hearing
Speaker 5: his real thoughts as real feelings if you can't.
Speaker 4: If you if you say that you're denouncing racism, and
Speaker 4: you don't seem to be convinced that white nationalism is racism.
Speaker 4: But not even with the like potential nuance of a
Speaker 4: white nationalist who claims that they're also not a racist,
Speaker 4: that you just describe it.
Speaker 5: I'm a white nationalist and blah blah blah. It's like, okay,
Speaker 5: well that's terrible and awful. Yeah, but you're at least
Speaker 5: saying that he's he's I don't even say.
Speaker 4: The last time I say is just It is a
Speaker 4: very serious problem on the left of inflating the definitions
Speaker 4: of terms like racism and white nationalism. And that is
Speaker 4: not an excuse for Tommy Tupperville here, but it is
Speaker 4: a point about how sometimes like it has allowed people
Speaker 4: to get confused like this, and I like, sincerely again,
Speaker 4: I think it is shameful for United States senator if
Speaker 4: he is confused and not you know, genuinely trying to
Speaker 4: do code switching or whatever, then you know, I think
Speaker 4: it's shameful either way. But I do think that it
Speaker 4: has caused a lot of confusion in the country. I
Speaker 4: think it has been because it is sometimes so objectionable
Speaker 4: where you have decent people who are being smeared as
Speaker 4: white nationalists simply because they're conservative. That allows more of
Speaker 4: this to happen. And I do think it's a really
Speaker 4: serious problem. I don't think that's an excuse for Tuberville.
Speaker 5: And I think a parallel to that, if the left
Speaker 5: ones help understanding, would be the way that some reflexively
Speaker 5: pro Israel forces have weaponized anti semitism to the point
Speaker 5: where they're going to the UN and trying to redefine
Speaker 5: anti Semitism as criticism of Israel, like not even doing
Speaker 5: it in like a kind of just subtle way anymore,
Speaker 5: but just saying like no, this, we are literally redefining
Speaker 5: that if you criticize Israel, that you are anti Semitic.
Speaker 5: And so as a result, people on the left have
Speaker 5: started to take anti semitism less seriously than they ought to,
Speaker 5: and you'll see and you'll see people dipping into genuine
Speaker 5: anti Semitism because they feel like that there is no
Speaker 5: anti Semitism anymore, because it's been so kind of destroyed
Speaker 5: as a concept by people who've cynically weaponized it. When
Speaker 5: it's like, no, you got to be No, it's still
Speaker 5: a real, live, malign force in the world.
Speaker 4: And there are people who can who criticize the definition
Speaker 4: inflation on behalf of the left from the right and
Speaker 4: do exactly what you're.
Speaker 3: Talking about too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's move on to Hunter Biden. I want to
Speaker 4: start by reading from the Daily Beast. Here we can
Speaker 4: put the tear sheet up on the screen because I
Speaker 4: actually think, to the point we mentioned as we were
Speaker 4: opening the show, this framing is really amusing. So the
Speaker 4: Daily Base rates the quote missing witness, long touted by
Speaker 4: Republicans in Congress as the missing link to their probe
Speaker 4: into alleged Biden family corruption, was accused Monday of being
Speaker 4: an unregistered for an agent for China and international arms
Speaker 4: trafficker traffic Our while violating US sanctions on Iran and
Speaker 4: lying to investigators, among a laundry list of other federal charges.
Speaker 4: This is about Gal Luft. It's a name you may
Speaker 4: have heard who And this is a continuation of the
Speaker 4: Daily Bast article. Quote had already skipped out in his
Speaker 4: bailwell in Cyprus awaiting extradition to the US for a
Speaker 4: separate case in March. So he alleges that the sprawling
Speaker 4: case against him represents political persecution and retaliation by the
Speaker 4: Biden administration against a potential witness. So these charges against
Speaker 4: Luft he's accused of, you know this twenty sixteen planned
Speaker 4: to quote, recruit and pay a White House advisor to
Speaker 4: support pro China stuff without registering under Farah. I mean,
Speaker 4: this is just like extremely convoluted. There's a million different
Speaker 4: countries that are in the mix of UAE, Kenya, Libya, China.
Speaker 4: He's in Cyprus right now. But I do think the
Speaker 4: tone of the Daily Based article that is sort of smug,
Speaker 4: as though this is a real l for Republicans, when
Speaker 4: in fact, actually what we're learning more and more like
Speaker 4: this guy Gal Luft was working with the former CIA
Speaker 4: director James Woolsey. He was basically the head of Woolsey's
Speaker 4: think tank after he left the CIA. This is not
Speaker 4: some like crazy person. I mean he mayn't be crazy,
Speaker 4: but he's not like some fringe Internet weirdo. He was
Speaker 4: working for the former CIA director and is now making
Speaker 4: these claims the.
Speaker 3: Other way around. It seems like the former CIA director
Speaker 3: was working for him.
Speaker 4: That was the Yeah, that's an allegation of the plan.
Speaker 4: So federal prosecutors I'm reading from the Washington Free Beacon
Speaker 4: now they say that CEFC China Energy. So this is
Speaker 4: a Hunter Biden connection. Hunter Biden was working with CEFC.
Speaker 4: They funded a scheme to quote recruit former CIA director
Speaker 4: James Woolsey. This is where Luff comes in. He was
Speaker 4: the co director of Wolvesey think tank. And again, when
Speaker 4: you put all of that in perspective, not such an
Speaker 4: l for Republicans yet, because to the point you were
Speaker 4: making earlier in the show, it's really not a like
Speaker 4: tanking the credibility of Luft that he's that he's being
Speaker 4: alleged to be compromised by foreignate interest.
Speaker 5: And the irony here is that what we're talking about
Speaker 5: is basically I think that something that everybody stipulates across
Speaker 5: the board, which is that Hunter Biden absolutely traded on
Speaker 5: his name in order to cash in with foreign governments.
Speaker 3: There still remains questions and about whether or not Joe.
Speaker 5: Biden knew anything about it, met with anybody, did any
Speaker 5: did anything you know that that was you know, furthering
Speaker 5: of this kind of business enterprise that was going on.
Speaker 5: And this is this is twenty seventeen, so this is
Speaker 5: when Biden is out of office. But CEFC is the
Speaker 5: is the company where the big guy quote comes from
Speaker 5: ten percent for the big guy that everybody loves. And
Speaker 5: so the fact that Luft was involved with CEFC puts
Speaker 5: him at the center of all of this exactly, rather
Speaker 5: than kind of undermining his credibility.
Speaker 3: The irony that.
Speaker 5: Hundred defenders would say, well, this guy is now discredited
Speaker 5: because he's been indicted as a Chinese spy for working
Speaker 5: with CFC. They missed the fact that, well, okay, Hunter
Speaker 5: Biden was also working with CEFC as part of its
Speaker 5: influence operation. So why wouldn't Hunter Biden be indicted as
Speaker 5: for failing to register? Because this is paperwork stuff, But like,
Speaker 5: this is paperwork that matters, Like if you're representing a
Speaker 5: foreign government when you're writing in the Washington Post or
Speaker 5: you're sending out emails to reporters or you or you're
Speaker 5: hosting events. We want to know, like, now these think
Speaker 5: tanks come in and this would become interesting if if
Speaker 5: it ever went to trial. It sounds like this guy
Speaker 5: is gonna have to be brought in by Jack Ryan
Speaker 5: or something out there. So it doesn't there may never
Speaker 5: be a trial. But you know, funding think tanks to
Speaker 5: get around farah is you know foreign influence one oh one,
Speaker 5: which is and then there's a constant push and pull
Speaker 5: around disclosure versus versus you know, opacity there where with
Speaker 5: the think tanks constantly kind of muddying things and trying
Speaker 5: to not you know, say when they testify, you know,
Speaker 5: whether or not their think tank gets any funding, and
Speaker 5: on and on. So to me, the fact that this
Speaker 5: guy is indicted for being involved with CEFC, the company
Speaker 5: at the center of this, yeah, actually makes me a
Speaker 5: lot more interested in what he has to say.
Speaker 3: That final point he.
Speaker 5: He says in a statement that he released that he
Speaker 5: he voluntarily reached out to the FBI in twenty nineteen
Speaker 5: to warn the FBI that there were that there was
Speaker 5: this influence operation that involved a presidential candidate, Joe Biden.
Speaker 5: And he says that after that, that's when they started
Speaker 5: coming after him. The FBI says that he made false
Speaker 5: statements at the time, said he was not involved in
Speaker 5: arms trafficking, et cetera, which I believe.
Speaker 3: I'm ready to believe that.
Speaker 5: Okay, you're sitting down with FBI agents and in cafe
Speaker 5: and Brussels, and they ask if you're an arms trafficker
Speaker 5: and you're an act and you actually are, and you're
Speaker 5: also a spy and you know in this nefarious world
Speaker 5: of of of brokering all of these different arms.
Speaker 3: Chance that he lied about that?
Speaker 4: Hi, So here's where.
Speaker 3: But does that mean that, like he's not an interesting
Speaker 3: source on this now?
Speaker 4: No, I mean he's a hugely interesting source because, as
Speaker 4: you say, this really puts him at the center of
Speaker 4: all of this. Prosecutors are also saying that. So Patrick Hull,
Speaker 4: that's a name that some people may have heard. He's
Speaker 4: you know, infamously when he was a wrested by the FBI,
Speaker 4: his first call was to James Biden. James Biden tells
Speaker 4: The New York Times he thought that Hoe was It
Speaker 4: seems that Hoe was trying to contact Hunter because Hunter
Speaker 4: agreed to represent Hall, like actually signed an agreement with him.
Speaker 4: Who was this guy was involved with CEFS.
Speaker 3: I'm halfway down the rabbit hole.
Speaker 4: Well, and that's the thing is, like it's not even
Speaker 4: a rabbit hole in that this is all conspiratorial. It's
Speaker 4: just so convoluted and intentionally.
Speaker 3: That's how this stuff works.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like these these lobbying agreements and legal agreements are
Speaker 4: intentionally super convoluted. But Hoe also asked gal Luft to
Speaker 4: recruit Woolsey so that Wolsey would write, according to prosecutors,
Speaker 4: articles for Chinese state media promoting promoting belt and Road.
Speaker 4: And that's where Yeah, CFC ended up paying Woolsey six
Speaker 4: thousand dollars a month according to the indictment. So Wolsey
Speaker 4: left and the Bidens are looking really bad in all
Speaker 4: of this. And the more we learn about Galt Luff,
Speaker 4: the more we're going to learn about both both the Wolzies,
Speaker 4: the Wolsey influence here and the Biden influence here. And
Speaker 4: none of it is good. But you can see I
Speaker 4: think sadly the media taking the bait from the White
Speaker 4: House and just being like super smug about Left getting
Speaker 4: stuck in Cyprus. And I don't know whether his allegations
Speaker 4: that he's under you know, political he's being blocked for
Speaker 4: political reasons, that he's being kept overseas for political reasons.
Speaker 4: I don't know if those are true. They sound at
Speaker 4: this point plausible given the extent of what he knows.
Speaker 4: But you know, maybe he actually did genuinely engage in
Speaker 4: wrongdoing and they're suddenly super eager to crack down on
Speaker 4: everyone involved in Pharaoh, you know, violations, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 5: The way that he could have gotten caught doing this
Speaker 5: with absent a kind of I'm a whistleblower being persecuted claim,
Speaker 5: would be that the China desk over at the CIA
Speaker 5: all of a sudden starts seeing Wolsey writing op heads
Speaker 5: Belton Road is like, what on earth is going on here?
Speaker 5: Like anybody who sees that happening knows that Wolsey is
Speaker 5: not like sitting at home in retirement just pondering like
Speaker 5: the beauty of the Belton Road initiative, And it's like,
Speaker 5: what friends do I have over in China that would
Speaker 5: run my freelance pieces celebrating this stuff. So as soon
Speaker 5: as you see that in print, you're like, okay, this
Speaker 5: is an operation. Who's paying for it six thousand a month?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: And so which is also peanuts.
Speaker 4: Yeah, although they're just slapping in.
Speaker 3: This elite world, that's true.
Speaker 4: That's actually a good point. Woolsey, Come on, man, so
Speaker 4: you're worth more clean in for.
Speaker 3: Six thousand bucks.
Speaker 5: And so you know, the CIA is always looking to
Speaker 5: roll up these foreign intelligence operations. So they see that,
Speaker 5: then they're like, Okay, let's figure out who's Woolsey working for.
Speaker 5: It's like, oh, it's this think tank, who runs this
Speaker 5: think tank. Oh it's this guy who's this guy in
Speaker 5: communication with And so I think you could get yourself
Speaker 5: busted that way, absent everything else.
Speaker 3: But it doesn't it.
Speaker 5: But like I said, it doesn't actually bear on whether
Speaker 5: or not there's some credibility around the Hunter allegations, other
Speaker 5: than maybe actually making them more credible.
Speaker 4: I was gonna say it.
Speaker 3: Actually it does bear on it. It bears on it
Speaker 3: in that direction.
Speaker 4: Moving on now to the call of duty block on
Speaker 4: our screen, which again doesn't mean that Ryan and I
Speaker 4: are going to use these giant screens.
Speaker 5: Behind us to like, oh that would be kind of
Speaker 5: cool hours, right, isn't that what streamers do? They just
Speaker 5: do it just for hours or just I think that's
Speaker 5: what Mac.
Speaker 4: And Griffin do when nobody's taping in here.
Speaker 3: They just come in and play call of Well they
Speaker 3: should put that on Twitch.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we'll look about the terror screen. Tear sheet up
Speaker 4: on the screen. This is from Politico. I'm reading from
Speaker 4: this article Microsoft's fortunes and it's hotly condested to take
Speaker 4: over a video game company, Activision. Blizzard dramatically improved Tuesday
Speaker 4: after a federal judge sided with the companies over the
Speaker 4: FTC's attempt to block the deal, and after a UK
Speaker 4: anti trust regulator signaled it's receptiveness to reversing its own
Speaker 4: decision against the merger. That's a ruling from US District
Speaker 4: Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley, who you can imagine Matt Stoller
Speaker 4: has some harsh words for. We'll get to that in
Speaker 4: a second. Political caused this. A stinging rebuke for the
Speaker 4: FTC and a kind of a rebuke against Lena Kahn
Speaker 4: as well. I think that's probably fair. Now, the FTC
Speaker 4: is trying to determine whether Activision is going to give Microsoft,
Speaker 4: So say, Microsoft, you know, mergers with Activision an unfair
Speaker 4: advantage in the world of video games games. You know
Speaker 4: the xboxes three behind PlayStation and Sony and so, according
Speaker 4: to Politico, the agency fts.
Speaker 3: Sony PlayStation and Nintendo right now.
Speaker 4: So the FTC is arguing Sony and other video game
Speaker 4: companies would be significantly disadvantaged if Microsoft made hit games
Speaker 4: like Call of Duty exclusive to its platforms. This is
Speaker 4: part of the ruling. Corley gets in to what Microsoft
Speaker 4: and Activision, or Microsoft in particular, says is going to
Speaker 4: happen in that situation, and enter Matt Stole.
Speaker 5: I'll read from some of those. So for put up
Speaker 5: Stoller here, a friend of our show. He's probably I'm
Speaker 5: sure he's going to do a segment on this soon.
Speaker 5: He said, I'd guess it was gonna this was going
Speaker 5: to get appealed. It became very opposite trial that judge
Speaker 5: jaquill and Scott Corley is your standard boomer moron. Hard
Speaker 5: to imagine she didn't make significant legal errors. So as
Speaker 5: always subtle analysis from our from from Staller, uh and
Speaker 5: uh So he then does actually go through and finds
Speaker 5: a lot of these errors that she that and she
Speaker 5: even in the ruling Stoller notice said, hey, I was
Speaker 5: rushed on this, so there's going to be citation errors
Speaker 5: in this.
Speaker 3: As Stolar rightly points out, she wasn't rushed. You know,
Speaker 3: she could have delayed.
Speaker 5: She decided to go on Microsoft schedule, so you know,
Speaker 5: the the errors are her own fault. But the favorite
Speaker 5: thing for me that he that he flagged in this
Speaker 5: ruling is this next element. If you can put this up,
Speaker 5: this is basically accepting as fact that don't worry. They
Speaker 5: promised that they're going to behave so right rite Fourth
Speaker 5: Microsoft witnesses, this is the judge writing. Microsoft witnesses consistently
Speaker 5: testified there are no plans to make Call of Duty
Speaker 5: exclusive to the Xbox. Mister Nadella testified he would one
Speaker 5: hundred percent commit to continuing to ship Call of Duty
Speaker 5: on the Sony PlayStation. Mister Spencer testified, my commitment is
Speaker 5: and my testimony is to use that word that basically
Speaker 5: I'd be humiliated if I didn't do it. And they
Speaker 5: said seventh, Microsoft anticipates irreparable reputationable reputational harm if it
Speaker 5: forecloses Call of Duty from PlayStation. Spencer testified, us pulling
Speaker 5: Call of Duty from PlayStation, in my view, would create
Speaker 5: irreparable harm to the Xbox brand. After me in so
Speaker 5: many public places, including here, talking about and committing to
Speaker 5: us not pulling Call of Duty from PlayStation. Activision CEO
Speaker 5: Bob Katich confirmed Microsoft concerns are not unfounded. If we
Speaker 5: were to remove Call of Duty from PlayStation, it would have,
Speaker 5: you know, cause problems.
Speaker 3: So basically they're saying trust us.
Speaker 5: And the judge took their trust us quote and put
Speaker 5: it in her in her ruling and said, look there,
Speaker 5: they're not going to make Call of Duty exclusive. They
Speaker 5: because they told us that they're not. Why would they
Speaker 5: Why would they ever do that?
Speaker 7: Now?
Speaker 3: Will they? Will they go to Nintendo?
Speaker 5: Will they go to Sony and say, uh, you have
Speaker 5: to pay us extra for this in including whatever your
Speaker 5: profit margin is on it, or or we will do
Speaker 5: this uh. And separately, you can't make a legal argument
Speaker 5: based on I promise I won't do this this time
Speaker 5: because there will be other games now hopefully Now if
Speaker 5: they become too much of a monopoly, there might not
Speaker 5: be the other games. Like this is you know, they'll
Speaker 5: they'll update present games and like continue to produce some,
Speaker 5: but like, uh, they would have they would have much
Speaker 5: less incentive to produce you know, more and better games
Speaker 5: because this is what you get. Yeah, like that, you
Speaker 5: know you're gonna get it here or you're not gonna
Speaker 5: get it anywhere else.
Speaker 4: So Installer does have something up on this at the
Speaker 4: Big Newsletter dot com, and that's actually the name of
Speaker 4: the newsletter, The Big Newsletter dot Com, where he's talking
Speaker 4: about how Corley, Who's son, by the way, apparently works
Speaker 4: for Microsoft, which is a little bit of the conflict
Speaker 4: of interest to begin with, maybe she shouldn't have been
Speaker 4: hearing the case, but that she essentially had to rewrite
Speaker 4: the Clayton Act in order to narrow, he says, narrow
Speaker 4: the stakes for the merger.
Speaker 3: And that's because I.
Speaker 5: Think the law says may cause you know, competition problems,
Speaker 5: but they should change it too, will probably.
Speaker 4: And you can see yeah, and so you can see
Speaker 4: actually in for example, the call of duty question exactly
Speaker 4: that like she's reading, she's sort of being credulous what
Speaker 4: Microsoft says.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they're good.
Speaker 4: This is what they're doing.
Speaker 3: You can keep getting called duty, they say.
Speaker 4: Right, whereas the FTC is saying, you know, there's plenty
Speaker 4: of evidence here the Microsoft is intentionally buying up competitors
Speaker 4: to be like a Netflix so that they can then
Speaker 4: exclude people that they don't want to and have more
Speaker 4: control of the market. I'm with Matt, I think this
Speaker 4: is a pretty obvious case. But even actually, and this
Speaker 4: is a this is an interesting find yesterday because part
Speaker 4: of this conversation we wanted to have was about the
Speaker 4: fact that you have now a union at Sega. This
Speaker 4: is a new decision before Yeah, so Sega of America
Speaker 4: their workers voted to forming union. Ninety one employees voted
Speaker 4: yes out of two hundred and twelve. So the Allied
Speaker 4: Employees Guild Improving Sega that's known as AGUS CWA is
Speaker 4: now the fifth video game union in the United States
Speaker 4: and the largest multi department video game union. That is
Speaker 4: all according to the Verge. At the same time, CWA
Speaker 4: the Communication Workers announced that this is the next element.
Speaker 4: Claude Cummings from Houston won a runoff election over Mooney
Speaker 4: to become the first black president of CWA. CWA then
Speaker 4: interestingly actually supported the ft I'm sorry, supported Corley's decision
Speaker 4: against the FTC and cheered the merger essentially, which was
Speaker 4: an extremely I thought that was extremely interesting. Let me
Speaker 4: see if I can find the quote here. They say,
Speaker 4: by accepting Judge Corley's decision and allowing this merger to
Speaker 4: move forward, the FTC has an opportunity to transform the
Speaker 4: video game and tech labor market by providing a clear
Speaker 4: path to collective bargaining for almost ten thousand workers.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I think what people need to understand is
Speaker 5: that a union exists to represent the interests of the
Speaker 5: workers in that union, and that's it. Now, when union
Speaker 5: density gets to a big enough place in our economy,
Speaker 5: often they exert positive influence, some times on deliberately, other
Speaker 5: times just by kind of driving up wages for the
Speaker 5: rest of the working class. And that's one of the
Speaker 5: great things about kind of the union movement. But ultimately
Speaker 5: you have to remember like they're they're looking out for
Speaker 5: their union, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 3: That's that's what that's what that's what a union is.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 5: It is in their benefit to have bigger businesses business.
Speaker 5: And this goes back to the kind of economic orthodoxy
Speaker 5: that was that reigned supreme in the mid twentieth century,
Speaker 5: led really by Cain's and John Kenneth Galbraith. That was
Speaker 5: about kind of the combination the working together of kind
Speaker 5: of big government, big business, and big labor, like a
Speaker 5: gigantic bargain to make sure that everybody is taken care
Speaker 5: of and nobody gets too powerful, and you'd have these
Speaker 5: countervailing forces that would be able to check each other.
Speaker 3: Now, eventually big.
Speaker 5: Business was able to kind of defeat in the nineteen
Speaker 5: eighties both big labor and government, and then that's what
Speaker 5: produced the kind of neoliberal area era. But that, but
Speaker 5: that this, this reminds us that unions are not just
Speaker 5: out here supporting every kind of progressive idea, Like they
Speaker 5: don't care if.
Speaker 3: You can ship call of duty.
Speaker 5: If they can get more high paying union jobs by
Speaker 5: you not getting shipped call of duty anymore, then.
Speaker 3: They're going to be for that.
Speaker 5: C w A is one of the most progressive unions
Speaker 5: in the kind of a f l c IO, but
Speaker 5: famously was a huge enemy of the of the left
Speaker 5: on net neutrality in that in that big fight over
Speaker 5: Internet freedom because they were with the telecoms, they wanted
Speaker 5: more power for the telecoms. More power for the telecoms
Speaker 5: meant kind of, uh, better wages for union workers. And
Speaker 5: people need to understand that there's a there are always
Speaker 5: going to be those contradictions in there. Uh quick word
Speaker 5: on that election, it's really interesting, really interesting to see
Speaker 5: it unfold this way. Because this was a a two
Speaker 5: person race that Claude Cummings was not even part of.
Speaker 5: Like he was considered he's seventy one years old, he's
Speaker 5: considered to be retiring, Like this is cool.
Speaker 3: He's going to run for president.
Speaker 5: Everybody likes him, but he's not gonna be not gonna
Speaker 5: be president, Like he's just he's just running.
Speaker 3: It was really between Sarah Stephens and this guy at Mooney.
Speaker 5: Sarah Stephen's represented the the the Newspaper Guild, which has
Speaker 5: seen the most growth. Basically, the most growth of the
Speaker 5: CWA has come from the News Guild and from grad
Speaker 5: students and some other other kind of elements that are
Speaker 5: not you know, directly related to the core kind of uh,
Speaker 5: you know, work that you see people doing on the
Speaker 5: streets that you associate with with the c w A.
Speaker 3: And so you saw that, you saw the rise of
Speaker 3: this element of c w A.
Speaker 5: And these are also the most left wing elements, the
Speaker 5: news Guild, the grad students, others, and so they rally
Speaker 5: behind Stephens.
Speaker 3: She apparently ran up awful campaign at Mooney.
Speaker 5: Kind of the is kind of the right wing old
Speaker 5: school building trades type of candidate who I incidentally and
Speaker 5: strangely had actually, never mind, we don't really.
Speaker 3: Need to get into that.
Speaker 5: The amount of drama in this in this race would
Speaker 5: take like an hour to get into. Basically, what ended
Speaker 5: up happening, it seems like is people were like, you
Speaker 5: know what, Claude Commings is great and we're sick of
Speaker 5: both of these people, right, and he wanted He ended
Speaker 5: up winning in a landslide. You know, Stephans didn't even
Speaker 5: make the runoff, and then he crushed Mooney in a
Speaker 5: in a landslide, and he pledged only to serve four years.
Speaker 5: And I don't see it as like a gigantic wind
Speaker 5: for say, a left wing union democracy movement, but it
Speaker 5: is definitely a rejection of the old guard, and it's
Speaker 5: an opportunity over the next four years for the CWA
Speaker 5: to figure out kind of what it wants to be
Speaker 5: and where it wants to go from from here.
Speaker 4: Especially so many changes happening in their industry.
Speaker 5: Right because these unions are all constantly figuring out, you know,
Speaker 5: how they're going to continue to grow members, Like the
Speaker 5: UAW organizes a ton of grad students too, Like it's
Speaker 5: not it's autoworkers, so it's not just you know, you
Speaker 5: don't stick to where you know what you're what you're into.
Speaker 5: You gotta gotta get a pivot in the parlants of
Speaker 5: Silicon Valley, right.
Speaker 4: Gotta pivot to video.
Speaker 3: Got a pivot?
Speaker 4: Okay, So let's talk about Andrew Tate. Tucker Carlson dropped
Speaker 4: a very long interview we're talking more than two hours
Speaker 4: long with Andrew Tate from Romania. Tucker Carlson flew to
Speaker 4: Romania and dropped this for Tucker on Twitter because he
Speaker 4: was assured sounds like directly from Elon Musk, that it
Speaker 4: wouldn't be censored at all. I imagine if he had
Speaker 4: uploaded this full two plus hours YouTube, there would be
Speaker 4: some real problems.
Speaker 3: He's been banned from YouTube, right, Tate?
Speaker 4: Probably he has. I don't know if interviews with him
Speaker 4: have been though, So like, is it different if you're
Speaker 4: actually interviewing I don't know, but I would imagine that
Speaker 4: it would have been more.
Speaker 3: That's an interesting question.
Speaker 4: I don't know, Right, So let's just get straight to
Speaker 4: some clips here, because again we're talking about a two
Speaker 4: plus hour long interview and there's just a ton of breakdown.
Speaker 4: They talked about a lot of different stuff as you
Speaker 4: can imagine. So let's roll E one right off the bat.
Speaker 15: Up until this point, never really commented too heavily on politics. Yes,
Speaker 15: but I understand very well. I like to believe what's
Speaker 15: happening with Ukraine and Russia. And what I will say
Speaker 15: to the people who are watching this at home is
Speaker 15: that if you are naive enough to believe that there
Speaker 15: are good guys and bad guys in wars and it's
Speaker 15: as simple as good and bad, and that the bad
Speaker 15: guys are crazy, the good guys want freedom, then you
Speaker 15: need to do a little bit more investigation into what's
Speaker 15: really happening. And when you look at the vested interest
Speaker 15: of any country or any person, kind of.
Speaker 11: Just ask you to pause and just comment, that's the
Speaker 11: truest thing what you just said. That is that and
Speaker 11: anyone who doesn't understand that should shut the fuck up.
Speaker 3: And I mean, having seen war, looks like they're wearing
Speaker 3: matching the first Do you think they planned that?
Speaker 4: I hope not. That would be a little too that'll
Speaker 4: be a little too weird.
Speaker 3: That would be one fact check.
Speaker 5: Though what he seems to be saying, what Tucker is
Speaker 5: saying is that the Ukrainians are not the good guys
Speaker 5: in this war. But hasn't Tucker said that the Russians
Speaker 5: are the good guys in this war? They was rooting
Speaker 5: for the Russians, like, you can't have it both ways.
Speaker 5: If there's no good guys, then it's Tucker finally acknowledging
Speaker 5: that the Russians are also not the good guys.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he said at one point, I'm trying to find
Speaker 4: the exact quote. He says, like it almost makes me
Speaker 4: a root for Russia or root for Putin, something like that,
Speaker 4: And it was sort of a rhetorical thing where he was,
Speaker 4: you know, you know, back and forth.
Speaker 5: I think there's an element of the that that calls
Speaker 5: itself anti war, that is legitimately straight up just rooting
Speaker 5: for Russia and calling Russia good guys this war. So
Speaker 5: now I guess you're crosswise with Tucker and Andrew Tate
Speaker 5: if that's your position and no good guys.
Speaker 4: So not only did they talk about Russia versus Ukraine,
Speaker 4: they kept going that was actually even later in the interview,
Speaker 4: I think, but we can roll so number two here.
Speaker 11: You too, So what is it about your message do
Speaker 11: you think that infuriates certain people?
Speaker 15: Well, my message traditional, my message is traditional masculinity. My
Speaker 15: message is to stand up and say what you mean
Speaker 15: and mean what you say. And even going to the
Speaker 15: gym nowadays is an act of defiance because when you
Speaker 15: have a man who's built with any degree of principle,
Speaker 15: you say no to things. And I think, if I
Speaker 15: have to analyze my message and why I'm so disliked
Speaker 15: by the people who dislike me, it's not the things
Speaker 15: I'm saying. It's the fact that if you adhere to
Speaker 15: my principles, and you adhere to the things I say,
Speaker 15: you end up being the kind of person who will
Speaker 15: resist certain ideas. You say no. What kind of man
Speaker 15: never says no? Name a man who never says no?
Speaker 4: Men say no?
Speaker 15: Right men, Men wake up and say no, I don't
Speaker 15: think that should be done this way. No, my children
Speaker 15: will not be taught that.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 11: Father's primary job.
Speaker 15: Absolutely, So when you say to men, listen, you're allowed
Speaker 15: to have an opinion, You're allowed to have standards, You're
Speaker 15: allowed to have boundaries and barriers. Allowed to get up
Speaker 15: and become important and work hard and try hard and
Speaker 15: become the kind of man who can't be controlled. Then
Speaker 15: you're seen as an enemy. And I, especially with the
Speaker 15: massive influence I've gained. I think they look at me
Speaker 15: and go, ah, he's helping men resist the slave programming.
Speaker 15: We don't need him around. We need to empty their
Speaker 15: brains so we can inject the slave programming and convince
Speaker 15: men to be eunix.
Speaker 3: Because once you're uniqued, then you're not a threat.
Speaker 4: Every time you say no, I'm going to think of
Speaker 4: it in a different context.
Speaker 3: Now that's what men say, Well, what do you make
Speaker 3: of this guy?
Speaker 4: There's so much to there's so much to say. Why
Speaker 4: don't we roll the next clip and then we can
Speaker 4: break it all down? This is E three.
Speaker 11: It's one of those charges that kind of sells itself.
Speaker 15: Oh absolutely, And it doesn't matter if you're found guilty
Speaker 15: or not right, you're a human trafficker forever. But I
Speaker 15: do think that public consciousness is changing.
Speaker 3: I think with things like.
Speaker 15: There's been some very large court cases recently involving some
Speaker 15: very famous people in which women were caught lying, trying
Speaker 15: to slander men's names for rape and these kinds of things,
Speaker 15: and I.
Speaker 4: I don't think people believe it anymore.
Speaker 15: But that scares me to a degree because I think
Speaker 15: that the typical weapon the standardized playbook is now failing,
Speaker 15: and I don't know what the new playbook's going to be.
Speaker 15: It's almost like better the devil. You know that you're
Speaker 15: too famous, you're too successful. We don't like you call
Speaker 15: him a rapist or a human draft or put them
Speaker 15: all over the news slander's name, try and wreck his life.
Speaker 15: Now that nobody believes it's what's the next move? What
Speaker 15: are they going to try next?
Speaker 11: Wouldn't it just have been easier to commit like a
Speaker 11: massive financial crime and defraud people of billions, come up
Speaker 11: with like a fake cryptocurrency, call it like I don't
Speaker 11: know FTX, or just give a name to it, yeah something, yeah, random,
Speaker 11: you know, steal billions, Yeah, and get your parents involved
Speaker 11: and buy a bunch of real estate and the Bahamas
Speaker 11: and then like you'd be sort of a hero, right.
Speaker 15: Oh, absolutely, And I would have certainly made a lot
Speaker 15: more money than TikTok, because I don't think TikTok even
Speaker 15: pays you for views, and it certainly does. I never
Speaker 15: got a single transaction from it, so it's a very
Speaker 15: interesting scenario. But if I was accused of a financial crime,
Speaker 15: my name would not be slandered.
Speaker 5: Well, of course, not at first all he's talking about
Speaker 5: Sam Bangman freed. Yeah, and I keep hearing this from
Speaker 5: the right that it's it's so unfair the way he
Speaker 5: you know, he got treated guys under indictment and might
Speaker 5: spend the rest of his life in prison.
Speaker 7: That.
Speaker 4: I'm treated to freed.
Speaker 5: Aren't Aren't they going to update that that talking point
Speaker 5: at some point based on the fact that he very
Speaker 5: likely might spend the rest of his life in jail.
Speaker 4: I assumed what Tucker meant was he'd.
Speaker 3: Be celebrated by the media.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that he had you know, was being fitted and
Speaker 4: had you know, Bill Clinton and whomever else at the
Speaker 4: ft X conferences before, even though it was sort of
Speaker 4: transparently upon.
Speaker 5: You've got that Bankman free quote where he told Wired
Speaker 5: you say, or you told maybe as a reporter at
Speaker 5: Vox that you say these shibboleus so that.
Speaker 3: People will think so basically saying that.
Speaker 5: But okay, So the last the last clip is on
Speaker 5: on the charges, and it just does not feel like
Speaker 5: a very hard hitting interview on when you have someone
Speaker 5: who is uh charged with rape and human trafficking in
Speaker 5: front of you, he just sort of is like, so,
Speaker 5: didn't do this stuff?
Speaker 3: Right, and he's like, no, I didn't do this stuff.
Speaker 5: And then oh, well, all, if you didn't do that stuff,
Speaker 5: then there must be a conspiracy about uh. And then
Speaker 5: let's unpack this conspiracy. What is it that has them
Speaker 5: coming after you rather than pressing like you?
Speaker 3: According to the news.
Speaker 5: Reports, there are there are women who say that you
Speaker 5: rate them beyond beyond the the foul, nasty kind of
Speaker 5: recruiting that he has openly said that he does, where
Speaker 5: he kind of uh would recruit women to come over
Speaker 5: like get the boyfriend, met the go, get him to
Speaker 5: fall in love, and then and then kind of turn
Speaker 5: them out into like porn stars, like he's said that
Speaker 5: he does that. But beyond that, there are people accusing
Speaker 5: him of straight up rape, and he's that he's been
Speaker 5: charged with in Romania and so any everyone's innocent until
Speaker 5: proven guilty, but these are very serious charges that he
Speaker 5: that took. It just seems to kind of just wave
Speaker 5: away and then work to kind of explain as a
Speaker 5: conspiracy among a feminized world that doesn't like him standing
Speaker 5: up for traditional masculineus thing.
Speaker 3: I think there might be a little bit more than
Speaker 3: that going on.
Speaker 4: Tate reportedly tells Carlson that he is that the women
Speaker 4: who accuse him. I actually don't like that the government
Speaker 4: has trumped up the charges. I think it's it's possible
Speaker 4: that some of the charges against him are trumped up,
Speaker 4: and he's saying that the government can't find women who
Speaker 4: truly claim that this was non consensual, and the government
Speaker 4: is reading into it by using the human trafficking charge.
Speaker 4: But I think the broader point is that the legal
Speaker 4: questions of Andrew Tate are different than the moral questions
Speaker 4: from Andrew Tate. I actually have zero problem with Tucker
Speaker 4: engaging with him. I think some of those questions should
Speaker 4: have been a lot tougher.
Speaker 3: I don't have to think an interview.
Speaker 5: I think Peter berg and interviewed Osama bin Laden right,
Speaker 5: maybe for NBC News or Wall Street Journal. I forget
Speaker 5: who it was celebrated for landing that interview, Like so
Speaker 5: Simon Lauden, one of the most evil people of the
Speaker 5: last fifty years.
Speaker 4: Megan Kelly interviewed Putin right, you.
Speaker 5: Should interview bad people, Yeah, Like the bad people are
Speaker 5: part of the world, and it's important to know and
Speaker 5: get insight into their mentality.
Speaker 4: And I also don't have a problem with one person
Speaker 4: in the media taking Andrew Tits seriously and saying, this
Speaker 4: is a guy who has a ton of sincere followers,
Speaker 4: and we obviously have a masculinity crisis. There's a great
Speaker 4: Christine mbsay in the Washington Post actually about that very
Speaker 4: topic this week, what can I learn from a good
Speaker 4: faith engagement with him? And there were some interesting parts
Speaker 4: of it, but I do find it, you know, I
Speaker 4: don't know if strange is the right word. I don't
Speaker 4: know what is the right word, but it's it's very obvious.
Speaker 4: I mean, this is a quote from Andrew Tate's website.
Speaker 4: I've been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade.
Speaker 4: I've had over seventy five girls work for me, and
Speaker 4: my business model is different than ninety nine percent of
Speaker 4: webcam studio owners. Over fifty percent of my employees were
Speaker 4: actually my girlfriend at the time, and of all girlfriends,
Speaker 4: none were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me.
Speaker 4: My job was to meet a girl, go in a
Speaker 4: few dates, sleep with her, test if she's quality, get
Speaker 4: her to fall in love with me where she'd do
Speaker 4: anything I say, and then get her on a webcam
Speaker 4: so we could become rich together. The moral element of
Speaker 4: that is very clear, Like that's sort of all out
Speaker 4: on the table. That's immoral, especially, I think from the
Speaker 4: perspective I say this as a fellow Tucker's fellow Christian conservative,
Speaker 4: like that's absurd, And if you want to engage seriously
Speaker 4: in a good faith conversation about that, I actually think
Speaker 4: that's constructive.
Speaker 3: A whole lot of family values going on there.
Speaker 4: But the masculinity question. We were actually talking about this
Speaker 4: earlier when we were talking oddly enough in the Tommy
Speaker 4: Turberville segment, when it's like why is Tommy Turwverville flirting
Speaker 4: with this question? Like why is he even taking white
Speaker 4: nationalism seriously? While there are probably a lot of places
Speaker 4: in rural and Alabama to your point about you know,
Speaker 4: why are so many white men in America like suddenly
Speaker 4: seeing themselves as victims on par with people who were
Speaker 4: trapped into slavery and kept in bondage for hundreds of years.
Speaker 4: It's not comparable if you go to places in rural
Speaker 4: Alabama that have been hollowed out by NAFTA and wto
Speaker 4: that people are dying of fentanyl overdoses addicted to pornography,
Speaker 4: numbing themselves with weed. Tucker actually prefaced his interview with
Speaker 4: Andrew Tate on with a sort of a monologue on that.
Speaker 4: I think you can understand why Tate is appealing. Why
Speaker 4: then ideologies like white nationalism are appealing, And the problem
Speaker 4: is that too few people in the media take any
Speaker 4: of that seriously. The problem then becomes that to balance
Speaker 4: it out, you end up getting Andrew Tate.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, the left has long had a critique of this
Speaker 5: quote unquote family values traditional conservatism as simply a mask
Speaker 5: for misogyny and racism, right, And I think both the
Speaker 5: Tubberville and the Tate clips here help helped pull the
Speaker 5: mask off off of that and say that there is
Speaker 5: a lot. There is a lot going on there, and
Speaker 5: I do think it's really important to try to understand
Speaker 5: Tate and and the and the tens of millions of
Speaker 5: people behind them. But on the other hand, I think
Speaker 5: some of it is simple, and I think it's misogyny
Speaker 5: sells like we are we are still a very misogynistic world.
Speaker 4: It's an easy pitch to men to say, like, the
Speaker 4: way to feel better about yourself is to do something
Speaker 4: that makes you feel really good.
Speaker 3: Control women, women, women, are your problem. Girls are your problem.
Speaker 3: That's it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, uh, control women, use them as sexual objects, et cetera.
Speaker 3: Right, So I think that he gets a little.
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously, there are a lot of people selling misogyny,
Speaker 5: and he's selling it better than anybody else in the
Speaker 5: world at the moment.
Speaker 3: So in that sense, he's a talented misogynist.
Speaker 5: But but I don't think there's any creative creativity in
Speaker 5: the idea of wow, I can get rich by, you know,
Speaker 5: telling men that women are awful.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's something I think interestingly reactionary about what he
Speaker 4: specifically gets into. Has turned to Islam. We talked about
Speaker 4: that on a previous edition of the show and had
Speaker 4: an interesting conversation about it.
Speaker 5: So I think he's because he has he fully made
Speaker 5: that turn yet I'm not sure it's coming. I think
Speaker 5: he has though, if it hasn't come yet, it's coming.
Speaker 5: All these like all of these influencers are who root
Speaker 5: their stuff in traditional values and misogyny, I think are
Speaker 5: just They're just bound for their own twisted version of
Speaker 5: some weird sectarian Islam.
Speaker 4: I mean the Tate direction. It's the Tate trajectory supports that.
Speaker 4: Although I do think you know, actually, Jordan Peterson, there
Speaker 4: are other people who were unfairly, so he'll wind up there.
Speaker 4: I think Dan Peter Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 3: Some mystical version of it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think he's he's been studying Christianity really closely.
Speaker 7: But he.
Speaker 4: People can watch his speech just commencement address that he'll
Speaker 4: still gets into some interesting.
Speaker 7: Stuff on that.
Speaker 4: But he is someone who was so unfairly I think
Speaker 4: torn down. He was sort of a center left like
Speaker 4: academic who is pushing him back against these things, and
Speaker 4: that I think nudged him in a direction where he
Speaker 4: does occasionally I think dip his toes and waters that
Speaker 4: are probably not great. But on the whole, I feel
Speaker 4: he actually has been good for so many men. And
Speaker 4: the fact that he gets attacked over and over and
Speaker 4: over again in ways that are unfair. There's always fair
Speaker 4: criticisms of people who speak so much in the public domain,
Speaker 4: but he gets attacked on things that are so unfair
Speaker 4: so many times that this is how you end up
Speaker 4: with just enter Tate like. He becomes an influencer, not
Speaker 4: that we need, but the influencer we deserve because we
Speaker 4: can't have constructive conversations anymore since we're all doing it
Speaker 4: on Twitter and Instagram whenever else, which incentivizes the worst
Speaker 4: of human debate.
Speaker 5: Well, either way, we can put this up here. It's
Speaker 5: getting an insane amount of traction on Twitter. As of
Speaker 5: this morning, it's forty two point eight million views. I'm
Speaker 5: seeing now a ton of that is inflated that, but
Speaker 5: if it's ten percent of that, that's still four million
Speaker 5: more than that I'd want absorbing this what I consider
Speaker 5: to be just deeply kind of toxic way to think,
Speaker 5: and and a in an opiate, a soothing message to
Speaker 5: two men that there that they can find their problems
Speaker 5: outside of themselves by just identifying them and the women
Speaker 5: around them, and that that's if they if they just
Speaker 5: understand that, then they're going to feel better about themselves.
Speaker 4: I am the problem with this show.
Speaker 3: That's right now, there you go. What's your point.
Speaker 4: Today, Well, if you watch an old movie, especially one
Speaker 4: before the Second World War, you'll have a hard time
Speaker 4: spotting one particular thing plastic. Look around you now, don't
Speaker 4: even think about technology, think about things like clocks or
Speaker 4: cookwar furniture. We are drowning, drowning in plastics. Our suburbs
Speaker 4: are designed around the freeway system, and then without cars
Speaker 4: they wouldn't work. Those all of those things have one
Speaker 4: particular thing in common. We'll get to that in just
Speaker 4: one minute. Cars and plastics help usher in a new
Speaker 4: era of convenience and prosperity. That much is clear when
Speaker 4: we look back United States history of the last one
Speaker 4: hundred years or so. But without access to vast quantities
Speaker 4: of that one thing, oil, none of that would have happened.
Speaker 4: That's why our politics now revolve around it. And unlike
Speaker 4: in previous eras where politics revolved around other commodities, this
Speaker 4: time there's another really big difference, and that would be
Speaker 4: nuclear weapons. That's basically the latest chapter in human history.
Speaker 4: In a nutshell. The Cold War was hyper modern in
Speaker 4: the sense that it forced these desperate alliances between cultures
Speaker 4: and countries and peoples who had previously been separated by
Speaker 4: major journeys months, weeks, in some cases years around the world,
Speaker 4: and they were all then in the Cold War, tied
Speaker 4: together under the threat of instant destruction. That's very new
Speaker 4: in human history. And this is why Barbie Oppenheimer is
Speaker 4: more than just a hilarious meme, and the meme is
Speaker 4: truly hilarious. Two of the biggest movies of the summer
Speaker 4: coming out on the same day, but with laughably different subjects.
Speaker 4: It's funny. I get it, and it's actually already on
Speaker 4: Wikipedia as Barbenheimer. We can put that up on the screen.
Speaker 4: And also, yeah, so you can see it there they
Speaker 4: did the little side by side we can also put
Speaker 4: up on the screen. My personal favorite of the Barbenheimer memes,
Speaker 4: this is a really good one. If you're listening, I
Speaker 4: will do the very cool thing of describing a joke
Speaker 4: to you. It's a pink cloud, like a pink mushroom
Speaker 4: looking cloud, hovering over a freeway and it says the
Speaker 4: Barbie oppenhe Heimer crossover has beengun picture. I think it's
Speaker 4: a real picture. I don't know its a gender reveal.
Speaker 4: I don't know. I didn't do the due diligence.
Speaker 3: I didn't do it.
Speaker 4: I didn't do real I didn't do the journalism of
Speaker 4: verifying the picture and the joke. But maybe I should
Speaker 4: have because it is a good meme. But the punchline
Speaker 4: is again obviously about Barbie and Oppenheimer being completely different.
Speaker 4: You have this sort of like hot pink comedy and
Speaker 4: very dark biopic same day they're coming out on the
Speaker 4: twenty first. Totally different in tone and subject, but actually
Speaker 4: they're tied together in a really, really important way that
Speaker 4: explains basically all of the last one hundred years. Our
Speaker 4: victory in World War Two paved the way for American
Speaker 4: consumer culture. Plastic makers who had been working on wartime
Speaker 4: supplies shifted to consumer goods. Plentiful oil supply secured by
Speaker 4: the post war American dominance in the Middle East, particularly
Speaker 4: in Saudi Arabia. The groundwork to that was laid by
Speaker 4: FDR in particular, even before the war had ended. That
Speaker 4: kept the tap flowing, and flow it did. Soon we
Speaker 4: were so dependent that these military relationships became essential and
Speaker 4: nuclear threats loomed large. That's still where we are today, basically,
Speaker 4: even if it's not at the fever pitch of different
Speaker 4: points during the Cold War. I want to read an
Speaker 4: anecdote actually from PBS quote. A few days before the
Speaker 4: nuclear explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, JW. McCoy, a DuPont
Speaker 4: vice president, addressed a manufacturer's workshop on converting factories from
Speaker 4: military to consumer production. After the war, business would be good,
Speaker 4: he predicted, due to quote, a great backlog of unfulfilled wants.
Speaker 4: Satisfying American consumers desires for cars, washing machines, radios and
Speaker 4: other products would create quote an upward spiral of productivity,
Speaker 4: raising the standard of living, increasing the national income, and
Speaker 4: making more jobs. But McCoy warned a satisfied people is
Speaker 4: a stagnant people, and suggested manufacturers would have to ensure
Speaker 4: that Americans were never satisfied. Well, that turned out to
Speaker 4: be incredibly prescient, and again it explains why when you
Speaker 4: have Cold War proxy battles in oil rich regions, you
Speaker 4: have both of these things inextricably tied together because we
Speaker 4: are now completely dependent. Circus University, which actually has a
Speaker 4: whole plastics center, I think it's funded by some people
Speaker 4: in the industry you'll be surprised to learn, but has
Speaker 4: some interesting research on the history of plastics, which is
Speaker 4: fairly new as we're talking about. They go on to
Speaker 4: have a really interesting particular observation about the post war
Speaker 4: period of plastics. They say, quote, the development of durable
Speaker 4: and easily motable plastics and the metal shortage of the
Speaker 4: nineteen forties triggered the plastic toy revolution of the post
Speaker 4: World War two years when deprived of the military market,
Speaker 4: producers shifted production to consumer goods. The baby boom then
Speaker 4: provided millions of children as potential customers, accessible through the
Speaker 4: new medium of television advertising and Syracuios goes on to
Speaker 4: name Barbie as one of the toys that benefits from
Speaker 4: huge trend. Barbie was not wooden. Barbie was debuted in
Speaker 4: nineteen fifty nine, made of plastics in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 4: This is another interesting observation. The La Times described Barbie's
Speaker 4: parapatetic multi country path from her raw material source in
Speaker 4: a Saudi Arabian oil field to Aisle twelve Sea of
Speaker 4: a southern California toy store. According to Mattel, the La
Speaker 4: Times article continues, all Barbie dolls are made in four
Speaker 4: Asian factories. This is of nineteen ninety six, two in China,
Speaker 4: and one each in Indonesia and Malaysia. Barbie has never
Speaker 4: been made in the United States. The first doll was
Speaker 4: produced in Japan in nineteen fifty nine, when that country
Speaker 4: was still struggling with its post World War II economic recovery.
Speaker 4: The first Barbie again was made in Japan in nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety In nineteen fifty nine, in the years after atomic
Speaker 4: weapons and World War II changed that country forever. We
Speaker 4: could also talk about Barbie and the Barbie's Movie, Barbie
Speaker 4: Movie's connection to feminism and the women's movement that got
Speaker 4: a boost from World War two. Absolutely that parallel could
Speaker 4: be drawn. But the Oppenheimer connection here is really really direct,
Speaker 4: and it's still undergirds basically every moment of our geopolitics.
Speaker 4: It all comes down to nukes and oil, in particular
Speaker 4: the combination of those two things every day economically, militarily,
Speaker 4: and even culturally. And that's why I think that as
Speaker 4: funny as the Barbie Oppenheimer the Barbenheimer memes actually are,
Speaker 4: it's also to me sort of telling that we see
Speaker 4: these things as so completely different, when in fact they're
Speaker 4: really part in some very fundamental ways the same chapter
Speaker 4: in human history. And again even today, our relationships with
Speaker 4: so many countries around the world are dominated actually with
Speaker 4: basically every country around the world because the nuclear threat
Speaker 4: and our utter dependence, I mean basically the complete and
Speaker 4: utter dependence on both oil and the plastics that are
Speaker 4: downstream of oil that completely controls our geopolitical our geopolitical relationships,
Speaker 4: and the nuclear threat that looms large over them changes
Speaker 4: the way for example, even even if plastic was just
Speaker 4: a commodity think like gold and we were in years past,
Speaker 4: when you add nuclear technology to that sort of commodity dependency,
Speaker 4: that changes the way, for instance, that the United States sees.
Speaker 4: Let's go back to the Cold War Iran, the Shaw
Speaker 4: of Iran, that changes all of these different calculations in
Speaker 4: ways that still today are They're not just sort of
Speaker 4: like these aren't stretches like gymnastics to get from point
Speaker 4: A to point B. They're direct connections that are driving
Speaker 4: our geopolitics right now. So it is somewhat interesting we
Speaker 4: see both Barbie and Oppenheimer as like these these two
Speaker 4: completely different things, so much so that it is funny
Speaker 4: and with you, it's funny when in fact they are
Speaker 4: so closely tied together in the post war period. Ryan,
Speaker 4: what have you got for us.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm looking at the COVID hearing.
Speaker 5: Yesterday, this House Subcommittee on COVID Origins met and invited
Speaker 5: every author of the Proximal Origins paper. That's the influential
Speaker 5: paper that effectively discredited the idea of a lab league
Speaker 5: early in the pandemic, that stemmed from a conference call
Speaker 5: conversation with Anthony Anthony Faucini and a variety of international experts.
Speaker 3: In the field, and so I wanted to play one
Speaker 3: clip that I thought.
Speaker 5: Was fairly representative from that rather disappointing hearing, because every
Speaker 5: Democrat that got up basically just yelled about how this
Speaker 5: was a partisan witch hunt and support and gave evidence
Speaker 5: for the why they supported the zoonotic theory of the
Speaker 5: natural origin, while being clear that they believed that this
Speaker 5: is still an open question, which was not okay to
Speaker 5: say a year and a half or so ago. Every
Speaker 5: Republican got up, you know, strongly argued on behalf of
Speaker 5: the kind of the lad League theory and the idea
Speaker 5: that like every person on their own just happened to
Speaker 5: arrive at this completely uh you know, separate partisan conclusion.
Speaker 5: It's just impossible to believe in it, and it and
Speaker 5: it highlighted once again how how absurdly partisan this has gotten.
Speaker 5: Republicans Meanwhile, focused, you know, heavily on on China, which
Speaker 5: I thought kind of overlooked a lot of the the
Speaker 5: global and.
Speaker 3: US problems that are that are interrelated with this.
Speaker 5: But because of the way it works, everybody gets five
Speaker 5: minutes and then you get you know, there's there's very
Speaker 5: little time for questioning. A lot of the questions just
Speaker 5: went like this. This one from Representative Michael Cloud, a
Speaker 5: Republican in Texas. It was maybe one of the kind
Speaker 5: of cleanest back and forth that we're going to get.
Speaker 5: He's talking here to doctor Christian Anderson.
Speaker 16: You said it was because of some new data that
Speaker 16: came available on the pack the penguin, and doctor Anderson
Speaker 16: you agreed with this. In a interview in The New
Speaker 16: York Times. You said, for example, we looked at data
Speaker 16: from COVID being found in other species, such as bass penglins,
Speaker 16: which demonstrated that other features first appeared unique to cod
Speaker 16: were in fact in other related diseases. But during the
Speaker 16: peer review part you said that was not data that
Speaker 16: was included, that the pengelin information had no leaning into
Speaker 16: the conclusion you made.
Speaker 3: Is that correct?
Speaker 17: So the timeline keeps changing here. First it's two days,
Speaker 17: and it's three days, it's four days. It's actually forty
Speaker 17: five days when we were talking. It's forty five days
Speaker 17: before the draft was published. I think it's a peer
Speaker 17: review period.
Speaker 16: And within two days the conclusion had changed from oh,
Speaker 16: this is not going to to, oh, it's impossible that
Speaker 16: this could have happened.
Speaker 5: All right, So what he's talking about there is this
Speaker 5: movement from on February first, twenty twenty, you had Anderson,
Speaker 5: Gary and others saying that the way that this emerged
Speaker 5: seemed clearly to them to have come from a lab.
Speaker 3: After this conference call, they do a one one.
Speaker 5: Hundred and eighty degree pivot and wind up concluding the
Speaker 5: opposite and then writing their proximal origin paper. And you
Speaker 5: see a little deceptiveness on the part of doctor Anderson.
Speaker 5: They're saying it was no, it's forty He's saying, look,
Speaker 5: because what he wants to ask is how did you
Speaker 5: change your mind so quickly? What happened in just a
Speaker 5: couple of days that changed your mind. He's like, well, no,
Speaker 5: it was forty five days. But of course, as as
Speaker 5: representative Cloud says, it was not forty five days that
Speaker 5: you changed your mind. Forty five days that when the
Speaker 5: paper was published. But in that time period there's there's
Speaker 5: peer review, there's revisions, there's writing it. So it's actually
Speaker 5: only a day or two during which you change your mind.
Speaker 5: And the pangolent theory is the thing that these virologists
Speaker 5: had cited as a reason that they had changed their
Speaker 5: mind so quickly, But as the as they hear and
Speaker 5: got into later, it later emerged that this claim that
Speaker 5: there was a virus that was ninety nine percent similar
Speaker 5: to stars COVID two in panglins turned out to be untrue.
Speaker 5: And so if that's the case, the thing that got
Speaker 5: them to change their mind was actually fake news. Now,
Speaker 5: the hearing also spent a lot of time around the
Speaker 5: question of whether or not there were financial incentives at play,
Speaker 5: and I want to dive deeper into this, but first
Speaker 5: here's here's Anderson kind of refuting the allegations that there
Speaker 5: was financial pressure from the niaidea that from the NIH
Speaker 5: on them to get in line with a natural origin theory.
Speaker 17: Some have alleged that I have received a federal grant
Speaker 17: in exchange for the conclusions made in our approximal origent paper.
Speaker 17: There is no connection between the grant and the paper.
Speaker 17: Funding decisions on grant were made before the pandemic, months
Speaker 17: before the February one conference call, So.
Speaker 5: That's a pretty clear assertion that he's making to Congress there.
Speaker 5: Funding decisions for the grant were made months before the
Speaker 5: conference call. What he turns out to be referring to
Speaker 5: are preliminary reviews of a funding application, not the final decision.
Speaker 5: And we know that because the NIH, to its credit,
Speaker 5: is fairly transparent about the way it issues these awards.
Speaker 5: So if we can put up this element, this is
Speaker 5: the award he's talking about. Now, my glasses on, So Emily,
Speaker 5: can you read that May twenty verst of May twenty
Speaker 5: twenty here, okay, May twenty first, twenty twenty. You guys
Speaker 5: can pause this and take a close look at that
Speaker 5: if you want to. If you want to fact check
Speaker 5: my reading of this document, you can also go to
Speaker 5: you can search. You can easily find the website here
Speaker 5: to search this type in Anderson twenty twenty, and this
Speaker 5: will pop up the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center.
Speaker 5: This is the center that he was hoping to get.
Speaker 5: That he that they were hoping to get this millions
Speaker 5: in funding from the NIH four and so they had
Speaker 5: been preliminarily approved. This is true, but they were at
Speaker 5: a crucial junction. The staff had recommended that this money
Speaker 5: go through. It was now up to Fauci and Collins
Speaker 5: whether or not to actually deliver the money. And if
Speaker 5: you hear from Anderson in this hearing, he's saying, well,
Speaker 5: that's just a formality at that point.
Speaker 3: No, it's it was. It was baked in.
Speaker 5: But if you talk to scientists who are who have
Speaker 5: also applied for monies of this size, that's not at
Speaker 5: all the case. If this was a thirty thousand dollars
Speaker 5: grant for a grad student to do a project and
Speaker 5: the staff approved it, you know, NIH and I aid
Speaker 5: they're going to sign off on that, no problem, multi
Speaker 5: million dollar you know, multi country grant. They're going to
Speaker 5: take in other considerations so we can put up this
Speaker 5: this other element. You can find these all over the
Speaker 5: NIH saying the main ANIAID Advisory Council must recommend an
Speaker 5: application for funding before we can award a grant, although
Speaker 5: the institute makes the final funding decision. They say that's
Speaker 5: clearly all over their website. And if you talk to
Speaker 5: scientists they will say that, you know, particularly in cases
Speaker 5: that involve kind of geopolitical sensitivities that involve and involve
Speaker 5: funding priorities, like are what are the current priorities? It's
Speaker 5: not enough just this has scientific value, does it fit
Speaker 5: the current funding priorities? And that's as it should be.
Speaker 5: The leadership of these organizations ought to make the final call.
Speaker 5: So to be clear that Democrats made a lot of
Speaker 5: hay over the fact that Anderson said that the funding
Speaker 5: decisions were made before this conference call, when in fact,
Speaker 5: the funding decision was made after this conference call. Are
Speaker 5: we going to be talking in this segment about the
Speaker 5: recent elections in Sierra Leone, But we wanted to start
Speaker 5: speaking of the COVID hearing that took place yesterday with
Speaker 5: a reference of Sierra Leone that came in the opening
Speaker 5: statement by virologist Bob Gary.
Speaker 3: Here's role this.
Speaker 6: For nearly twenty years, I've worked closely with scientists and
Speaker 6: clinicians at the Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. KGH
Speaker 6: is a major site for research on the virus that
Speaker 6: caused his last the fever. Ten years ago. Ebolavirus emerged
Speaker 6: just fifty miles from Kinema. Ultimately, this abola outbreak would
Speaker 6: claim the lives of thousands of people, including dozens of
Speaker 6: healthcare workers at the Kenema Government Hospital.
Speaker 5: So we're going to be joining this segment by Sierra
Speaker 5: Leonian journalist churn Oba, who many of you may remember.
Speaker 5: We interviewed him several months ago about his book on
Speaker 5: the Abola outbreak in Sierra Leone, so I wanted to
Speaker 5: ask him about this first chourno.
Speaker 3: Welcome to the program, Thanks much for joining us.
Speaker 7: Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure
Speaker 7: to be here.
Speaker 5: So what did you think about hearing Gary bring up
Speaker 5: the lab in Sierra Leone? And particularly I noticed that
Speaker 5: he referenced the work that the lab does on the
Speaker 5: Lassa virus, which nobody asked him what kind of work
Speaker 5: was going on in that lab.
Speaker 3: There's been an enormous.
Speaker 5: Amount of reporting yours, most prominently that there was a
Speaker 5: lot of a Bowler research going on in that lab
Speaker 5: as well. Papers were written by scientists from that lab
Speaker 5: about that a Bowler research.
Speaker 3: Did it strike you the same way it struck me
Speaker 3: that he got.
Speaker 5: So specific about the Lassa virus work being done in
Speaker 5: that lab.
Speaker 18: In my book, I had even mentioned the fact that
Speaker 18: the CDC had been present in the region since the
Speaker 18: nineteen seventies, doing lots of FIFA work and funding lots
Speaker 18: of FIVA resides. So in fact, that was what we
Speaker 18: got my interest in investigating the ebolar outbreak and arguing
Speaker 18: or pointing to the fact that we cannot understand the
Speaker 18: causes of the e boler outbreak without looking at what
Speaker 18: the viral Homlogic Fever consultant was doing in the region
Speaker 18: ten years preceding the outbreak.
Speaker 7: So it did not surprise me that.
Speaker 18: Any effort to understand COVID will have to first start
Speaker 18: with the same, you know, kind of work that was
Speaker 18: done in West Africa, because we're talking about the same
Speaker 18: individuals and the same groups of science organizations that were
Speaker 18: involved in So we have been calling for an investigation
Speaker 18: into the Ebola outbreak, and unfortunately since the outbreak, this
Speaker 18: is the first time we are have in some kind
Speaker 18: of hearings that appear to reference the outbreak in West Africa.
Speaker 18: We're hoping that a similar kind of investigat at least
Speaker 18: I hear in that drills into the questions that we
Speaker 18: have been asking years ago might happen.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and for people who missed it, will put the
Speaker 5: link to your previous interview in the in the notes
Speaker 5: to this one. But today we wanted to talk about
Speaker 5: the election, the presidential election in Sia Loan, which you
Speaker 5: mentioned in your in your last interview, So can you
Speaker 5: bring us up to speed. What what are the kind
Speaker 5: of political parties and political formations in Sieri early on
Speaker 5: that we're competing in the selection.
Speaker 18: The politics empower and Salion has been dominated by two
Speaker 18: major factions as I call them, of the elite, divided
Speaker 18: into two parties known as this relion People's Party the
Speaker 18: SLPP that is currently in power and the major opposition
Speaker 18: party the All People's Congress that was previously empowered before.
Speaker 7: This current party that's in power.
Speaker 18: In fact, the a PC was in power when the
Speaker 18: Bulla outbreak that we just mentioned happened. So it peers
Speaker 18: that these two parties have been there for the modern
Speaker 18: sixty years now since the transition to what we call independence,
Speaker 18: and they have dominated. The elites of these parties have
Speaker 18: dominated and monopolized politics for the last sixty years. There
Speaker 18: has been no all independent effort to organize against these
Speaker 18: two factions of the middle class as I call them.
Speaker 18: Over the years have not been you know, have not
Speaker 18: succeeded in this placing them. Part of the reasons that
Speaker 18: there seems to be some kind of arrangement. We are
Speaker 18: the rotate power after every you know, ten years, and
Speaker 18: this is the first time where individuals, groups of regular
Speaker 18: citizens mobilized to vote against a government that has openly
Speaker 18: become dictatorial and repressive.
Speaker 7: Over the last five years.
Speaker 18: Dozens of people have been killed and no you know,
Speaker 18: investigation or hearing has been done on that situay, and
Speaker 18: we have highlighted corruption and the dictatorial tendencies of the government.
Speaker 18: So the elections that happened, the current president declared himself
Speaker 18: or was declared the winner of the elections. When the
Speaker 18: elections we are incomplete, votes we are not fully counted.
Speaker 18: They were not fully tabulated, and pretty much every organization
Speaker 18: that has been or that was present during the voting process,
Speaker 18: and this includes the Catch Center and the European Union
Speaker 18: and various other international organizations that supposedly when there to
Speaker 18: monitor the elections have classified them as non transparent elections.
Speaker 18: But we are pointing to the fact that it's not
Speaker 18: just a question of lack of transparency, but there is
Speaker 18: illegality surrounding the way the elections we are conducted.
Speaker 7: So in a general sense, we had no proper elections.
Speaker 18: They just decided to allow the president to continue because
Speaker 18: there appears to be a consensus among these parties, both
Speaker 18: the opposition party and the ruling party to allow the
Speaker 18: president to continue for two times because that appears to
Speaker 18: be the only time to shift power amongst themselves.
Speaker 4: You report extensively on this corruption and your article, and
Speaker 4: we can put that up on the screen. That's the
Speaker 4: next element I want to ask her, not about what
Speaker 4: the hope is and what the next steps are for
Speaker 4: people outside of the ruling party and the opposition party,
Speaker 4: who you say they've reached a consensus allowing corruption to
Speaker 4: continue festering and illegitimate elections to be rubber stamped. What
Speaker 4: does it look like for people who have hoped for
Speaker 4: democracy that looks less corrupt than this going forward.
Speaker 18: Well, that is what we have been putting forward. If
Speaker 18: they agree that the only legitimate means of changing the
Speaker 18: government is through the ballot box, and groups of organizations,
Speaker 18: including the United States, governments around the world who are
Speaker 18: partners of the corrupt politicians in SRIL, you know, we'll
Speaker 18: not just call that kind of facade as an election,
Speaker 18: because where an election is where people are allowed to
Speaker 18: really participate. We have a lot that was brought in
Speaker 18: in Parliament a year before the election that gave the
Speaker 18: Electoral Commission and the current president the power to determine
Speaker 18: how the elections would be conducted and the program the
Speaker 18: political environment in a way that we will have the
Speaker 18: current outcome that we have.
Speaker 3: So we expect.
Speaker 18: These individuals who claim that's the only way to compete
Speaker 18: for power to respect the rules that they have developed
Speaker 18: for them, you know, for these kinds of competitions. But
Speaker 18: they have openly allowed the subversion of that kind of situation.
Speaker 18: And as we speak right now, there has not been
Speaker 18: any significant efforts to call into question the current situation
Speaker 18: in Isralia. What we hear is just issues of transparency.
Speaker 18: It goes way beyond that. We have to talk about
Speaker 18: the responsibility of these individuals, both the United States, Europe
Speaker 18: and the politicians in Surralians, you know, in holding each
Speaker 18: other responsible for denying cerel unions the right to decide
Speaker 18: the kind of government under which they want.
Speaker 3: To leave Charnel.
Speaker 5: Can you give us a couple examples of the kinds
Speaker 5: of irregularities that have been uncovered.
Speaker 18: Well, they include virtually the failure of the Electoral Commission
Speaker 18: to count, to properly count the votes, to properly tablet
Speaker 18: the elections board open above that the law requires that
Speaker 18: an order for a presidential election to be for a
Speaker 18: for a winner of a presdential election to be announced,
Speaker 18: they have to account the ballot at the votes in
Speaker 18: the opoling stations, then at the district level, at the
Speaker 18: regional level before the results are collated and tabulated at
Speaker 18: the national office.
Speaker 7: And that was not done.
Speaker 18: In fact, individuals who supervised the the elections citizens, ordinary
Speaker 18: citizens and including political parties complained that in fact, district
Speaker 18: returning of a regional officers have not completed their own
Speaker 18: tabulation process, their own calculations when the presidential election results
Speaker 18: were announced. So that means that what the Electoral Commission
Speaker 18: announced was basically the result of the result of numbers.
Speaker 18: They just came out with their own numbers that do
Speaker 18: not reflect the actual votes that the people who accounted,
Speaker 18: so up to now we have been asking for you know,
Speaker 18: we're are the votes of the people. And even international
Speaker 18: organizations are so embarrassed to the point that they are
Speaker 18: now asking for disaggregated, for the numbers to be disaggregated,
Speaker 18: basically for the Electoral Commission to show how they came
Speaker 18: up with the figures from the pulling stations to the district,
Speaker 18: the district centers and the regional centers and that has
Speaker 18: not been done.
Speaker 4: You mentioned this earlier, but what more can you tell
Speaker 4: us about how the West and the United States and
Speaker 4: other international organizations are reacting to the results. I should
Speaker 4: say that in air quotes out Australia.
Speaker 18: Well, they are basically just classified elections as non transparent elections.
Speaker 18: But we are saying that it goes way beyond just
Speaker 18: the question of transparency, that the electual commission organizing the
Speaker 18: elections in a secret fashion or not allowing people access
Speaker 18: to monitor the elections. It deals with a range of
Speaker 18: irregularities and illegalities where the elections that you know, we
Speaker 18: are not conducted following the public elections laws. So an
Speaker 18: election does not conform to the rules and regulations that
Speaker 18: we have in that country for the conduct of elections.
Speaker 7: It's basically an illegal arrangement.
Speaker 18: So any government that results from the illegal conduct of elections,
Speaker 18: it's an illegal regime. So it has to be called
Speaker 18: that way. But when you just describe the situation as
Speaker 18: non transparent, it is an ambiguous way of basically, you know,
Speaker 18: it opens the discussion to conceptual issues rather than the
Speaker 18: actual crime that has been that has been committed. But
Speaker 18: it's so unfortunate because on June thirtieth, the US International
Speaker 18: Development Finance Corporation approved one fifty million dollars loan to
Speaker 18: the Suma Group, which is a private company that's in
Speaker 18: charge of running the national airport in Isralon. And that
Speaker 18: airport was built by that company through a contract awarded
Speaker 18: to them by the current government and the Parliament without
Speaker 18: proper scrutiny and without citizens being aware of the details
Speaker 18: of that of that agreement. So such kinds of funding
Speaker 18: that goes to fund projects and programs undertaken by the
Speaker 18: Government of Australian by the United States and Europe, even
Speaker 18: as we speak of these kinds of illegalities and discrepancies
Speaker 18: in voting processes and the way the country has been run,
Speaker 18: emboldened dictators and leaders like the current President Australian who
Speaker 18: is openly stealing vote. We have a year ago, we
Speaker 18: have in the African space, we've published the fact that
Speaker 18: the current government cannot win a free and fear election
Speaker 18: based on the objective conditions on the ground, the desperate
Speaker 18: economic situation, the economic crisis, coupled with the dictorial tendencies
Speaker 18: of the government, detroitarian nature of how the brand the
Speaker 18: government corruption that we've reported about so we knew that
Speaker 18: the only way the government is going to retain power
Speaker 18: is by rigging the elections. And we have also pointed
Speaker 18: in advance that they cannot rig the elections without the
Speaker 18: complicity of the opposition parties on the ground, and which
Speaker 18: is why we have been calling for effective international monitoring
Speaker 18: of the elections. And it ended up in the situation
Speaker 18: where the politicians can not to steal the popular mandate
Speaker 18: of the people in front of the whole world. So
Speaker 18: we believe such kinds of governments cannot be funded. The
Speaker 18: US and the European partners cannot continue to give taxpayers
Speaker 18: money to politicians who steal elections, because any individual who
Speaker 18: steals ational election cannot be trusted with the with the
Speaker 18: management of the national economy, let alone being awarded loans
Speaker 18: and grants more debts from international organization like the US
Speaker 18: International Development Finance Corporation. So the US has to hold
Speaker 18: itself accountable to its own its own standards of governance
Speaker 18: that it claims to promote around the world, which is
Speaker 18: what we that's the message we want to call We
Speaker 18: we expect them to be able to impress upon their
Speaker 18: partners around the world, including the government Australia and the
Speaker 18: need to maintain human rights, they need to respect the
Speaker 18: freedoms of its own citizens, and not only that, to
Speaker 18: impress upon them the minimum standards of good governors and accountability.
Speaker 18: So when they fund, when they give loans like the
Speaker 18: current credit that they've approved for the funding an expansion
Speaker 18: of the of the Salinar Airport, it emboldens leaders like
Speaker 18: Julius ma W who has hijacked demandate of the people
Speaker 18: and you know, the plants from the country in the
Speaker 18: colony of Gangstans.
Speaker 5: And two final questions for you, uh, you know, as
Speaker 5: as socialist, you've been critical of of both of these parties.
Speaker 5: I remember you were hopeful that the elections might lead
Speaker 5: to some pathway toward the end of your exile. You're
Speaker 5: currently joining US, uh, you know, from Chicago rather than
Speaker 5: Sierra Leone because of the work that you've done uncovering
Speaker 5: corruptions serially. And so I'm curious one and what what
Speaker 5: do you think these elections results mean for you personally?
Speaker 5: But then also too what do they mean for the
Speaker 5: long term future of Sierra Leone. If if people decide
Speaker 5: that democracy is just a facade, if there's no point
Speaker 5: in participating in it.
Speaker 3: Are they going to seek channel channels outside of.
Speaker 5: Electoralism that could that could lead toward h toward violence
Speaker 5: and other other ways of enacting policy change, or that
Speaker 5: they that they're clearly as demand for.
Speaker 18: Yes, the entire West African region is prone to conflict.
Speaker 18: If you look around West Africa now you have crices
Speaker 18: andical conflict in Guinea conacred as a result of elections.
Speaker 18: We look at the unstable situation in Nigeria and we
Speaker 18: have elections coming up in.
Speaker 7: Liberia.
Speaker 18: So every course was recently faced with the same kind
Speaker 18: of political crisis. We have Mali and the entire region
Speaker 18: is in conflagration. We have the same kind of issues
Speaker 18: they were dealing with in arm Senegal, not to love
Speaker 18: in a few weeks ago, where masses of young people
Speaker 18: who are out on the street the money from an
Speaker 18: accountab leadership and effective participation. So what these kinds of
Speaker 18: situations when you have regular citizens men and women who's
Speaker 18: who are living on trading foods and vegetables that you know,
Speaker 18: the tutality of which is not more than five dollars
Speaker 18: living that and then standing on queues for the rest
Speaker 18: of the day and trying to see if the battle
Speaker 18: boss can serve as an instrument to make their voices.
Speaker 18: Had to deny that opportunity, then you open up the
Speaker 18: space for the kinds of possibilities people might think of
Speaker 18: other ways to actualize their own citizenship. And we most
Speaker 18: remember the fact that Sralian not too long ago, that
Speaker 18: entire region librarian.
Speaker 7: So I don't we're in conflict.
Speaker 18: We entered into civil war for ten years because we
Speaker 18: had a dictatorial one party state that was there from
Speaker 18: nineteen from nineteen seventies right up to the nineteen nineties.
Speaker 18: By nineteen ninety one, we had a conflict that ended
Speaker 18: in two thousand and one. And we're hoping that we
Speaker 18: cannot have the same groups of organizations that led the
Speaker 18: country to war programming the country and to add the
Speaker 18: part way to more conflict and the possibility of crisis.
Speaker 7: So that's what we've been warning against.
Speaker 18: Personally, I have been affected by that situation because I
Speaker 18: am currently unable to go back home for doing nothing
Speaker 18: other than just highlighting and advocating that governments must be
Speaker 18: transparent with the you know, leaders should be held accountable
Speaker 18: to the basic principles of governance and transparency, and we
Speaker 18: cannot have a handle full of people less than one
Speaker 18: percent of the population holding onto the state and using
Speaker 18: it as a basis of personal aggrandizement instead of providing
Speaker 18: basic economic and social services for the rest of the population.
Speaker 18: As we speak now, major parts of Servilian lacky lift
Speaker 18: systm supply more than ninety percent of the country. Of
Speaker 18: all the country's population do not have the basic conditions
Speaker 18: of human existence absence of adequate housing facilities.
Speaker 7: Healthcare is a problem, education is a challenge.
Speaker 18: You know, some of the worst statistics when it comes
Speaker 18: to infant and maternal mortality rates. These conditions are the
Speaker 18: result of corruption of mismanagement that has been ongoing with
Speaker 18: impunity by the politicians of the two dominant factions. And
Speaker 18: we were hoping that at this time the elections, these
Speaker 18: elections that just got rigged openly in front of the
Speaker 18: whole world, would have empowered citizens with the belief and
Speaker 18: the fit that at least the ballot box can answer
Speaker 18: to their own problems, can serve as a check to
Speaker 18: these kinds of politics of a bandit tree that we
Speaker 18: have experienced for the last sixty years. But unfortunately, while
Speaker 18: these politicians are looting public funds, they openly ganged up
Speaker 18: to loot the votes of citizens people. You know, they
Speaker 18: just announced results without properly counting the votes. It cannot
Speaker 18: get worse than that.
Speaker 5: Well, churn Obi, thank you so much for your reporting
Speaker 5: and thanks for joining us on our show Turno as
Speaker 5: an editor of Africanist Press, Thanks again for joining us,
Speaker 5: and then I'll do it for us today.
Speaker 3: Thanks everybody for watching Counterpoints.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, Ryan, it was great to have you back.
Speaker 3: Good to be back and we'll see you next week
Speaker 6: At the expected to s