Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
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Speaker 1: But enough with that, Let's get to the show. All right,
Speaker 1: Welcome back to Counterpoints. Everybody, all right? Last night, President,
Speaker 1: former president Donald Trump appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, The
Speaker 1: Man who says he absolutely despises him or whatever. Trump
Speaker 1: complained apparently to Tucker like, how could you say that
Speaker 1: about me? Man? And I can imagine that the exchange
Speaker 1: from there was like, why don't you come on my show?
Speaker 1: And it work and boom, he's got another interview. So
Speaker 1: we're going to play some clips for that. Inflation numbers,
Speaker 1: March inflation numbers are coming out this week. That has
Speaker 1: a lot of implications for what the Federal Reserve is
Speaker 1: going to do going forward. You're going to be talking
Speaker 1: about Title nine later today, right, and we have news
Speaker 1: from Elon Musk and Matt ta Abi's ongoing feud. We'll
Speaker 1: be covering some big developments in investigations into the collusion
Speaker 1: between Silicon Valley and our federal government. And you've got
Speaker 1: some Julianssange stuff to talk. Yes, the squad plus Greg
Speaker 1: Kasar put out a letter to Merrik Garland asking for
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Juliana Song.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about that and some other international
Speaker 1: efforts to release to get to get the extradition effort dropped.
Speaker 1: And also, as you can see at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the bar that we're going to have Mary and Williamson
Speaker 1: to talk about her the marian mania that has gripped TikTok,
Speaker 1: believe it or not. And I had to be told
Speaker 1: this because I don't know. She is an absolute phenom
Speaker 1: on TikTok and it's showing up in polls, as Crystal
Speaker 1: Lencheon earlier this week showing up in polls. So we're
Speaker 1: going to talk to her about why that is and
Speaker 1: what that means. But first, let's roll a little bit
Speaker 1: of this Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview. What I
Speaker 1: thought perhaps the most newsworthy element of it was his
Speaker 1: comments about the Russian role and the US role in
Speaker 1: the blowing up of the North Stream pipeline. Let's play
Speaker 1: a four here. Who blew up the North Stream pipeline.
Speaker 1: I don't want to get our country in trouble, so
Speaker 1: I won't answer it. But I can tell you who
Speaker 1: it wasn't was Russia about when they blamed Russia's you know,
Speaker 1: they said Russia blew up their own pipeline. You got
Speaker 1: to kick out of that one too. It wasn't Russia.
Speaker 1: So first of all, it's not as if he was
Speaker 1: in the planning if the United States did this of
Speaker 1: the blowing up of the North Stream pipeline. But he
Speaker 1: is somebody who plausibly has connections to people who would know.
Speaker 1: He's also not necessarily the most credible source for information.
Speaker 1: But he did say he was going to get arrested,
Speaker 1: and he did get arrested. He called that one, So
Speaker 1: he's on a roll. So what you make of his
Speaker 1: claim here that basically he's saying the United States did this?
Speaker 1: So I want to Actually I just looked this up
Speaker 1: as you were talking. Biden barred Trump from getting intelligence briefings,
Speaker 1: So I had forgotten that little tidbit which is pretty
Speaker 1: crucial president since the era of the deep state, to
Speaker 1: get cut off by the deep state, And it's a
Speaker 1: pretty crucial element of how we interpret this right here now.
Speaker 1: As you say, it's entirely plausible that he has he
Speaker 1: knows somebody who knows I mean, he knows a guy,
Speaker 1: he knows a guy who maybe knows a guy. But
Speaker 1: either way, it's entirely plausible that he does have insider information.
Speaker 1: Here he said, I don't want to get our country
Speaker 1: in trouble. That's a big one. That's a big one,
Speaker 1: don't you think, Yeah, Yeah, And then very later at
Speaker 1: the end he says, he says, even more firmly, Russia
Speaker 1: did not blow it up its own popeline, which everybody
Speaker 1: kind of understands at this point. There was i mean
Speaker 1: US intel that Russia was out shopping for contractors to
Speaker 1: get estimates to fix this, and it was something like
Speaker 1: five hundred million dollar, like an extraordinary amount of money
Speaker 1: to patch this up and get it moving again. And
Speaker 1: so that just further undercut the claim that Russia would
Speaker 1: have blown it up, because if they're finding Russia out
Speaker 1: privately trying to figure out how to fix it, it
Speaker 1: just strains to the breaking point of credibility that they
Speaker 1: would have blown it up in order to then figure
Speaker 1: out how to fix it. Yeah, and you're right. I
Speaker 1: think this was the newsiest bit from the entire interview.
Speaker 1: Tucker just comes out and asks who blew up the
Speaker 1: nord stream, which was one great way of getting it
Speaker 1: at the question. Actually, but he also he dow who
Speaker 1: killed Kennedy? Come on, right, he should have just like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: he should have like John Stossel did to my Pompeio recently,
Speaker 1: which was pretty well done. But he also got Trump
Speaker 1: to sort of talk about his experience in the courthouse
Speaker 1: in Manhattan last week. So let's roll a one. Tell
Speaker 1: us from your perspective what that was like. They were incredible.
Speaker 1: When I went to the court, which is also a
Speaker 1: prison in a sense, they signed me in, and I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, people were crying. People that work there, professionally
Speaker 1: work there, that have no problems putting in murderers and
Speaker 1: they see everybody. It's tough, tough place, and they were crying.
Speaker 1: They were actually crying. They said, I'm sorry they were crying.
Speaker 1: Were they crying? They were actually crying? What do you think?
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's too hard to say. I mean,
Speaker 1: anything's possible, Maybe anything's possitively I could believe this guy.
Speaker 1: It'd be so fun to like have him as a
Speaker 1: reliable narrator of his life. But then he wouldn't be
Speaker 1: who he is. No, yes, he was. Can't have one
Speaker 1: without the other. But you know, there are obviously people
Speaker 1: who are They have in the same sense, with a
Speaker 1: lot of populist, charismatic figures over the course of world history,
Speaker 1: American history that are very deeply emotionally connected for some
Speaker 1: very understandable reasons to Donald Trump, who believe that absolutely,
Speaker 1: to that that we know that, we know for sure,
Speaker 1: it's not impossible to me that people would be crying.
Speaker 1: But as you say, not the most credible narrator. And
Speaker 1: so Trump has been asked before about Putin the war
Speaker 1: in Ukraine. This to me was slightly different than and
Speaker 1: a little bit more than we've gotten from him in
Speaker 1: the past. Let's let's roll a little bit of this
Speaker 1: on Putin and Ukraine. R ask you talk to Putin
Speaker 1: about Ukraine? What did you say to him? I could
Speaker 1: see that he loved it, and I said, he loved Ukraine.
Speaker 1: He considers it to be a part of Russia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I said not when I'm president. We had a very
Speaker 1: good relationship, he was. I mean, look, I was the
Speaker 1: worst thing that ever happened to him. I closed up
Speaker 1: this pipeline. You never heard the word the words nord
Speaker 1: Stream two until I came along. Nord Stream two is
Speaker 1: the pipeline. And I had a great relationship with him.
Speaker 1: But it was very tough because they had a fake
Speaker 1: Russia investtigation. And I told him, and he told me,
Speaker 1: he said, it's very hard for us to deal. Don't
Speaker 1: you think I said, very hard because we have a
Speaker 1: fake investigation that turned out to be a fake for
Speaker 1: two years it went on. Donald Trump is actually right there.
Speaker 1: He's completely correct about Nordstream. He's completely correct about how
Speaker 1: he handled Ukraine and during his own presidency it's different
Speaker 1: than how the Biden administration handled Ukraine, and Nordstream is
Speaker 1: a part of that, and so he's not off the
Speaker 1: mark on that point. Again, his relationship with Putin, We've
Speaker 1: talked about this before you get to the Madman theory
Speaker 1: of international relations that if you have somebody like Donald
Speaker 1: Trump who's sees this as transactional in a business relationship,
Speaker 1: which a lot of countries will be ess about like,
Speaker 1: look at Macrone in China this week. He's just completely
Speaker 1: bullshitting everybody in the way that politicians do diplomacy. It's
Speaker 1: not how Donald Trump did diplomacy, did diplomacy like a businessman,
Speaker 1: and it had some strange consequences at times. The amendment
Speaker 1: I would make to that is that his doing business
Speaker 1: at doing diplomacy as business had a knock on effect
Speaker 1: of actually ending up arming Ukraine to the teeth in
Speaker 1: a way that the Obama administration didn't do. And that's
Speaker 1: a weird history of this is that you had Ukraine
Speaker 1: up through the Obama era, particularly after twenty fourteen, with
Speaker 1: the kind of US supported coup flipping at the government
Speaker 1: there and then Russia annexing Crimea. You had Ukraine pushing
Speaker 1: the Biden administration for all sorts of weapons, javelins and
Speaker 1: billions in weapons flows that had not been coming previously.
Speaker 1: The Obama administration actually said, no, we don't want to
Speaker 1: antagonize Russia over here. When the Trump administration came in
Speaker 1: because and Trump talks about it, because of all this
Speaker 1: Trump Russia stuff, Trump I think was more eager to
Speaker 1: be tougher on Putin as a result, and then he
Speaker 1: also saw that Ukraine wanted something from him, and this
Speaker 1: is where the business side comes in. Ukraine wanted weapons
Speaker 1: from Does Trump care why Ukraine wants weapons or whether
Speaker 1: Ukraine should have weapons, No, he doesn't care. What he
Speaker 1: knows these people want something from me. I want something
Speaker 1: from them. And that's when he had his perfect phone
Speaker 1: call with Zelensky where he's like, look, you guys want
Speaker 1: these weapons, here's what I want. I want you going
Speaker 1: on TV saying that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are
Speaker 1: corrupt and you know, the whole thing that led to
Speaker 1: his impeachment. And so as a result, what comes out
Speaker 1: of that is Ukraine getting tons of weapons, right, and
Speaker 1: Russia feeling antagonized. Well, so Russia not moving in until
Speaker 1: Joe Biden's president, though yes, we don't know whether or
Speaker 1: not he would have moved in when Biden, but it
Speaker 1: is a matter of historical record that it ended up
Speaker 1: being Trump that armed Ukraine in a way that Obama
Speaker 1: did not, which is which complicates the whole question. Although yeah,
Speaker 1: I still think there's an argument that Zelensky or that
Speaker 1: Putin doesn't move under Trump because he sees all of
Speaker 1: the weapons flowing and realizes the United States would probably
Speaker 1: under Trump have a different approach, which it turned out
Speaker 1: to be different though right like, Trump turned out to
Speaker 1: be tough in terms of sending the weapons, even while
Speaker 1: he talked one way about Putin and then when the
Speaker 1: war actually kicked in the high gear. For all kinds
Speaker 1: of political reasons, Donald Trump has been one of the
Speaker 1: people basically in the Republican Party breaking the near kon consensus. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, the argument that Trump seems to be making
Speaker 1: is that he's so crazy that Putin was afraid of him.
Speaker 1: And I don't think we have this clip queued up,
Speaker 1: but there's this exchange back and forth where he says,
Speaker 1: I told she, if you go after Taiwan, and I
Speaker 1: told Putin, if you go off for Ukraine, I'm going
Speaker 1: to do something that's so terrible that we can't even
Speaker 1: speak about it. And later he calls it the N word,
Speaker 1: which he says nuclear. And so he's like, and she
Speaker 1: and Putin they didn't believe me, but they believed me
Speaker 1: ten percent. Yeah, and that ten percent was enough to
Speaker 1: keep them out of Taiwan, to keep them out of Ukraine.
Speaker 1: So his argument is reading between the lines that he
Speaker 1: threatened to nuke them if they stepped over the border,
Speaker 1: and as a result, they stayed back, and that that
Speaker 1: ten percent of a question in their mind of is
Speaker 1: this guy mad enough to do this is what held
Speaker 1: them back. I don't know how sustainable that is as
Speaker 1: a farm policy, right exactly, and again not impossible. There's
Speaker 1: truth to it, and we've talked about it before. So
Speaker 1: we also have one more clip of him talking about
Speaker 1: he's asked sort of what the biggest threat to the
Speaker 1: United States is. Let's roll a three. I often say.
Speaker 1: They said to me the other day one of your
Speaker 1: fellow journalists said, who's the biggest problem? So is it China?
Speaker 1: Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? And
Speaker 1: now I said, the biggest problems from within? It's these sick,
Speaker 1: radical people from within. Because we can handle if we're smart,
Speaker 1: we can handle Russia. China. I did. I took him
Speaker 1: bidding and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars from China.
Speaker 1: No other president took in anything. And they respected me.
Speaker 1: He's the same thing, you know. I told him you
Speaker 1: can't go into Taiwan. You can't, you can't do it.
Speaker 1: I won't tell you exactly what I said, but it
Speaker 1: was something that probably a lot of people wouldn't like
Speaker 1: if they heard it, But it was very tough. Don't
Speaker 1: go into Taiwan. If you do, we're going to have problems.
Speaker 1: Other than that, we're going to be great relationship. We're
Speaker 1: gonna have a great relationship. And he said to me
Speaker 1: when I said we're going to do something, if he
Speaker 1: goes no, no, no, you wouldn't do it, I'll do that.
Speaker 1: I swear I do that. And he didn't believe me,
Speaker 1: but he believed me ten percent. The same thing with Putin.
Speaker 1: I said I was going to do something really nasty
Speaker 1: if he goes into Ukraine. He said, no, no, You're
Speaker 1: not going to do that, and I said, so we
Speaker 1: did have that clip. I didn't realize it was the
Speaker 1: same one where he talks about the radical siccos yes,
Speaker 1: but yeah, so is that you're read too that he
Speaker 1: basically threatened to nuke them? Is that what he's trying
Speaker 1: to say? Yeah, No, I think it's absolutely And again
Speaker 1: it's not. I mean that threat is always looming over.
Speaker 1: That is our threat, Like, that's the whole reason we
Speaker 1: have a nuclear arsenal to make that threat. It's been
Speaker 1: the world order for one hundred years now. Like that's
Speaker 1: how international It is the single biggest thing that looms
Speaker 1: over international relations period, and people don't say it aloud.
Speaker 1: I think for some defensible reasons. People can correct me
Speaker 1: if in the comments or whatever, I'm wrong. But I
Speaker 1: think China has signed a no first strike pledge, but
Speaker 1: the United States has not and refuses to. If everybody
Speaker 1: would sign a no first strike pledge, we wouldn't be
Speaker 1: one hundred percent out of the woods, would We'd be
Speaker 1: much further out of the Woods's certainly such a hippie. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I think avoiding nuclear annihilation is pretty rad man.
Speaker 1: I just I don't believe anybody, you know, back into
Speaker 1: a corner. And again this is madman theory. With you
Speaker 1: talk about North Korea, you can talk about all kinds
Speaker 1: of places are on where nuclear weapons are on the table.
Speaker 1: In the same way that they might not trust Donald
Speaker 1: Trump with what he says, but just trust him that
Speaker 1: ten percent, you know, signing a no first strike treaty
Speaker 1: and getting everyone on board with that, then you're putting
Speaker 1: a lot of trust in the hands of people we
Speaker 1: don't necessarily treat as good faith actors. But it would
Speaker 1: would prevent you, at minimum from I think making those threats,
Speaker 1: like if you said, if you go into Taiwan, we're
Speaker 1: going to New qub Like you signed up. Are you
Speaker 1: breaking your pledge here? Yeah? I don't just scare with that. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: we might get another shot at four years of Trump.
Speaker 1: He's still climbing in the polse and he's looking good.
Speaker 1: He's not looking good in the general election, but he's
Speaker 1: looking good in the primary. In the primary. This is yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: and Tucker, we should say this was obviously taped at
Speaker 1: mar a Lago, was aired last thing on Fox News,
Speaker 1: he said, before tossing to the first commercial break of Trump.
Speaker 1: For a man who is caricatured as an extremist, we
Speaker 1: think you'll find what he has to say moderate, sensible,
Speaker 1: and wise, which the media contrasted with. As you mentioned earlier, Ryan,
Speaker 1: those text messages where Tucker just said he despises Trump,
Speaker 1: He's excited to get wait to never talk about him again.
Speaker 1: You never have to talk about Donald Trump again again. Understandable,
Speaker 1: life comes at you fast. Yes, I don't necessarily think
Speaker 1: those are mutually exclusive things. I think he can say
Speaker 1: that Trump in this interview sounded moderate sensible, and he's
Speaker 1: a moderate sensible madman, except where he gets to wise.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure that I would use the word wise
Speaker 1: in that context, but it's definitely he sends, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you this, wiser than a whole lot of our foreign
Speaker 1: policy elites who sound like absolute morons when they talk
Speaker 1: about this stuff and continue to dig us deeper into
Speaker 1: holes that we're already in. So on that note, at
Speaker 1: least he's wiser. I guess everything's relative. And speaking of
Speaker 1: his own legal jeopardy, news out of the prosecution of
Speaker 1: Donald Trump, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA is now suing
Speaker 1: Jim Jordan to try to block where you put up
Speaker 1: that first element here, to try basically to try to
Speaker 1: keep Jim Jordan out of this case. He went for
Speaker 1: a temporary restraining order to prevent Jordan from subpoenaing former
Speaker 1: prosecutor in his office, who Elijah Orlans talked about in
Speaker 1: our interview last week. He's written a book kind of
Speaker 1: playing up his role as a prosecutor, resigning in protest
Speaker 1: because Bragg wasn't going in the direction he wanted. Jordan's
Speaker 1: trying to subpoena him Jordan is otherwise trying to get
Speaker 1: all sorts of information about roughly five thousand dollars in
Speaker 1: federal money that Bragg has spent in the tax part
Speaker 1: of the investigation so far. And Bragg is straight up
Speaker 1: calling this substruction of justice, Like you said, you're obstructing
Speaker 1: this investigation. I want the judge to stop it. The
Speaker 1: judge has rejected the temporary restraining order request but has
Speaker 1: said that Jim Jordan needs to reply by I think
Speaker 1: April fifteenth or seventeenth for a hearing around April nineteenth.
Speaker 1: So this is moving quickly because it raises all sorts
Speaker 1: of separation of power and questions and so independence of
Speaker 1: the judiciary, Like can you subpoena and publicly attack a
Speaker 1: prosecutor in the middle of a prosecution in a deliberate
Speaker 1: effort to slow down the prosecution like that to obstruct,
Speaker 1: like they're trying to obstruct. They won't even say they're
Speaker 1: doing anything other than trying to obstruct the prosecution, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean so, Jim Jordan says, first they in died
Speaker 1: a president for no crime. This is what he tweeted yesterday.
Speaker 1: Then they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask
Speaker 1: questions about the federal funds, they say they used to
Speaker 1: do it. So, yes, he's using that roughly five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars as a I think you can understand why it
Speaker 1: falls into the oversight umbrella. He's using it as well.
Speaker 1: You used, yeah, exactly five thousand dollars. I don't think
Speaker 1: he's deeply concerned about the five thousand dollars, but he's
Speaker 1: using it as his in to then file this. And
Speaker 1: I saw experts quoted, I think in Axios this morning
Speaker 1: saying listen, Bragg does not really have a shot here,
Speaker 1: but his goal is likely to slow it all down,
Speaker 1: to tie it all up. And I think even John
Speaker 1: Deane tweeted that it was like a genius move or
Speaker 1: a brilliant move I have about and Bragg defiled this
Speaker 1: just tangle him up in court rather than having to
Speaker 1: keep going. Yeah, I guess sure makes sense. So in
Speaker 1: related news, the Gang of Eight, which is known as
Speaker 1: the kind of two heads, and we put up this
Speaker 1: second element. The two heads of the intelligence committees on
Speaker 1: both sides of the Capitol, and the leaders of the
Speaker 1: Senate and the House are now in possession of the
Speaker 1: classified documents that both Biden and Trump intentionally or unintentionally
Speaker 1: scrolled away into their garages and their resorts, and so
Speaker 1: they now know what was missing, what was purloined, you know,
Speaker 1: what kind of leaked out. I have always said the
Speaker 1: way to resolve this is to basically show the public
Speaker 1: everything except the stuff. I guess it would get somebody killed, yes, immediately,
Speaker 1: and then let people judge like, was this did they take,
Speaker 1: you know, the CIA's stupidly classified Soup of the Day menu,
Speaker 1: or was this something related to nuclear technology that the
Speaker 1: UAE was going to pay for? Because those are completely
Speaker 1: different questions about whether or not the public should consider
Speaker 1: this to be something they care about exactly. And we
Speaker 1: have some indications that the documents at morologually we sort
Speaker 1: of know that some of those are highly classified. We
Speaker 1: know that some of those because there were pictures that
Speaker 1: were filed. Obviously we can sort of make conclusions from that.
Speaker 1: But still having that lack of information between the Pence documents,
Speaker 1: the Biden documents, and the Trump documents, it's a world
Speaker 1: apart based on Soup of the Day, which is a
Speaker 1: joke but also not really, I really do that, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they really do that. Between that and between like actual
Speaker 1: nuclear secret stuff. And we've been having this conversation for
Speaker 1: coming up on what this was last August, so coming
Speaker 1: up on a year now, we've been having this conversation
Speaker 1: about the Trump documents, totally in the dark about exactly
Speaker 1: how bad they are. Again, we have some indications, but
Speaker 1: without knowing exactly what that is. And this gets us
Speaker 1: closer to that process, obviously, because as senators see things,
Speaker 1: they say things and just sort of gets the ball rolling.
Speaker 1: The closer that we get to that, the more we
Speaker 1: can as the public make judgments about this, because it's
Speaker 1: actually really hard to say. Knowing that the documents removed,
Speaker 1: knowing that Trump was trying to obstruct the words seemingly
Speaker 1: was trying to obstruct the collection of the documents, it
Speaker 1: makes a world of difference what was in those boxes,
Speaker 1: and we haven't known for almost a year. This is
Speaker 1: also a good excuse for me to bring up beef
Speaker 1: I have with the way the Congress does this. The
Speaker 1: idea that you have a gang of eight, that you
Speaker 1: have eight elected members of Congress who have this kind
Speaker 1: of special ability to see intelligence material that other members
Speaker 1: of Congress who have also been elected by equal districts
Speaker 1: around the country or states that are equal in the Constitution,
Speaker 1: creates a situation that puts Congress in this subservient role
Speaker 1: to the intelligence community. To me, if you are a
Speaker 1: member of Congress, the people have invested in you their
Speaker 1: trust and the power and authority that comes with that trust.
Speaker 1: Like if you believe in a democratic republic, then you
Speaker 1: have to I think give everyone that the people send
Speaker 1: to Washington the same access. Otherwise you wind up with
Speaker 1: this power imbalance where even people who are on the
Speaker 1: Intelligence Committee, Republicans, Republicans, even yeah in the majority on
Speaker 1: the the Intelligent Committee, don't have access to some of
Speaker 1: this stuff. And I think that's important because part of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about here is that we have indications
Speaker 1: not just from those pictures, but via leaks to the
Speaker 1: media about the Trump files, and we saw that of
Speaker 1: course of the Russia collusion investigation. We saw that with
Speaker 1: the Iraq War. Leaks to the media are often dramatically
Speaker 1: out of context. The media will contextualize them exactly as
Speaker 1: their national security sources want them to contextualize them, and
Speaker 1: that can mean that soup of the day is alluded
Speaker 1: to in media reports as something much more serious than
Speaker 1: it actually is. And you can come up with a
Speaker 1: million different ways to do that. You could say, you know,
Speaker 1: highly classified information about the personal decisions made by national
Speaker 1: security officials, when that is actually just the soup that
Speaker 1: they ate for lunch, but that it's really really misleading
Speaker 1: when we play this leak game with national security, and
Speaker 1: again we have a million different examples to show us
Speaker 1: that very clearly at this point. And so that's part
Speaker 1: of the reason why having not just the Department of
Speaker 1: Justice know what's in those documents is so important, even
Speaker 1: if it is senators from both the Democratic and Republican party,
Speaker 1: and that gets it closer to the public having and
Speaker 1: understanding of it. You then have competing interests that are
Speaker 1: they both know what's there, and they can be they
Speaker 1: can bring us slightly closer to an accurate or balanced
Speaker 1: perspective of what's there, even if we can't see it ourselves.
Speaker 1: And I feel like those competing interests should have should
Speaker 1: have the legal ability to use their own judgment for
Speaker 1: what they believe they ought to share with the public.
Speaker 1: Like I think it's wild that the Speaker of the
Speaker 1: House and the leader of the Senate can be told
Speaker 1: by a bureaucrat it wasn't elected what they can share
Speaker 1: with the public, And it shows a kind of split
Speaker 1: between the faith that a lot of Americans. If you
Speaker 1: take like an extreme like libertarian, right wing approach to
Speaker 1: the market, they'd say, we don't need you know, don't
Speaker 1: we don't need an FAA because if an if an
Speaker 1: airplane crashes, then consumers are just going to not fly
Speaker 1: on that one, and so that people are then incentivized
Speaker 1: to build safer airplanes like that. That's that that's the
Speaker 1: kind of faith that some people will put into a market,
Speaker 1: but they don't put that same faith in voters. Like
Speaker 1: if a Speaker of the House recklessly released classified information
Speaker 1: that the public felt should not have been released, you
Speaker 1: can vote him out of office. You can vote their
Speaker 1: party out of office. So if you believe in the
Speaker 1: kind of the wisdom of the crowds that make up
Speaker 1: a market, why not put the same vest the same
Speaker 1: authority and dignity into the people who elect our members
Speaker 1: of Congress. Well, this is a little bit of a
Speaker 1: preview of the title name segment. But before we get
Speaker 1: to that, Mediaite also was reporting on a leaked Nikki
Speaker 1: Haley memo that went after Trump for being indicted, which
Speaker 1: is an interesting development. This is a memo to donors
Speaker 1: from Nikki Haley Donald Trump had a pretty good Q
Speaker 1: one if you count being indicted as good. Media continues.
Speaker 1: Her campaign also claimed Trump only promised more drama quote
Speaker 1: more drama in the future as his legal woes continue
Speaker 1: to mount. The other candidate to get mentioned, media says
Speaker 1: is DeSantis. It accuses him of making numerous quote missteps
Speaker 1: since officially launching his twenty twenty four campaign with a
Speaker 1: book tour. Here's the quote. Ron Desantus essentially launched his
Speaker 1: presidential campaign with a national book tour during this period
Speaker 1: and made one misstep after another, confirming what many observers
Speaker 1: have long suspected. He's not ready for prime time. It
Speaker 1: continues to say. And then there are the others. Wait
Speaker 1: what others? Just really clever stuff from whoever wrote the
Speaker 1: donor memo? Who? How is Nicki Haley being received on
Speaker 1: the right? Is she's just nothing? Do people think she's
Speaker 1: running for something else? For a future? I'd like to
Speaker 1: just raise her profile, Like, is what's the kind of
Speaker 1: right kind of conventional wisdom about what the Nicki Haley
Speaker 1: campaign is? Yeah? I think it's that she's not being
Speaker 1: well received by the conservative movement. But Republican voters are
Speaker 1: a totally different question than that. You know, your average
Speaker 1: Republican primary voter is not what is called a movement
Speaker 1: conservative on the right. That's just not the case. So
Speaker 1: sort of institutional conservatives, movement conservatives look at Nikki Haley
Speaker 1: grassroots and say she's totally behind the curve, like she's
Speaker 1: she's running a campaign from twenty twelve. I would argue
Speaker 1: that's close to the truth in twenty twenty two. And
Speaker 1: at the same time, Nicki Haley's going to say, well,
Speaker 1: I can connect with suburban women, I can connect with
Speaker 1: you know, your soccer mahams. Yeah, it's a totally different
Speaker 1: demographic than your your sort of grassroots Republican activist or
Speaker 1: your movement conservative who is pretty averse to this Ni
Speaker 1: Chele campaign not cheb. Yeah, they're and they're tied up
Speaker 1: obviously in the Trump DeSantis feud. The conservative movement is
Speaker 1: very tied up in the Trump DeSantis food feud. Speaking
Speaker 1: of which, we have polling. This is a New Morning
Speaker 1: Console poll. This was published on Tuesday, of thirty six
Speaker 1: hundred potential Republican primary voters, almost sixty percent according to
Speaker 1: media again said they preferred Trump to DeSantis in a
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four matchup sixty percent. Trump tops the poll
Speaker 1: with fifty six percent in the survey, DeSantis is behind
Speaker 1: him with twenty three percent. That is a thir thirty
Speaker 1: three point margin. Nicky Haley, Mike Pence and Nicky Haley
Speaker 1: are following Trump and DeSantis at seven percent and four percent.
Speaker 1: Liz Cheney's in there with three percent, and every other
Speaker 1: option is at one percent or less. Salon is reporting
Speaker 1: that support for former President Donald Trump fell rapidly after
Speaker 1: five appear. Yeah, that was the good news. Here's that bad.
Speaker 1: Here is another poll thirty four Felon accounts, obviously from
Speaker 1: last week, his his support in an ABC News IPSOS
Speaker 1: poll dipped pretty heavily after that. Salon is pointing out that,
Speaker 1: you know, Trump says he thinks the indictment could help
Speaker 1: him by boosting his support in election. The poll found
Speaker 1: that a majority of Americans fifty three percent believe he
Speaker 1: did something illegal, eleven percent say he acted wrongly but
Speaker 1: not intentionally, twenty percent believe he was not culpable at all.
Speaker 1: CNN poll released last week, so that sixty two percent
Speaker 1: of independent voters approved of the indictment. That ABC News
Speaker 1: poll from this week found fifty percent of people believe
Speaker 1: that Trump should be charged with a crime. Thirty three
Speaker 1: percent think he should not. Nearly have a respondent said
Speaker 1: Trump should suspend his campaign in the wake of the indictment.
Speaker 1: That was up from forty three percent before the indictment. So,
Speaker 1: as you said, Ryan, a little good news, a little
Speaker 1: bad news. But this is a perfect contrast between primary
Speaker 1: and general election. The poll of Republican primary voters has
Speaker 1: him up at nearly sixty percent with thirty three points
Speaker 1: over DeSantis, who's at twenty three points. Whereas when you're
Speaker 1: looking towards the general election, you have that broader pool,
Speaker 1: not just a Republican primary voters saying, eh, this might
Speaker 1: actually change my mind. What's amazing is that you have
Speaker 1: Biden's approval rating in here at thirty four percent, and
Speaker 1: you have him up almost ten higher than Trump, whose
Speaker 1: approval rating is sitting at twenty five percent. Now, as
Speaker 1: Ron Klain famously tweeted after McCrone won with like a
Speaker 1: thirty percent approval rating, he was like, he did iball emoje.
Speaker 1: He's look at that turns out you can win an
Speaker 1: election with thirty percent approval rating. Somebody has to win
Speaker 1: like that. That is the actual way that we do elections.
Speaker 1: So it's at this point it looks like it's either
Speaker 1: going to be somebody with a twenty five percent approval
Speaker 1: rating or somebody with a thirty four percent approval rating,
Speaker 1: unless entering the chat is Tim Scott, South Carolina Senator.
Speaker 1: I've put up b six here, who just formed an
Speaker 1: exploratory presidential committee. He's been kind of flirting with a
Speaker 1: presidential run for years now. Yeah, and kind of. But
Speaker 1: so I'm curious again on the right, what's the conventional
Speaker 1: wisdom about Tim Scott. I think it's the exact same
Speaker 1: as Nikki Haley, except he panders less, at least overtly
Speaker 1: to that sort of soccer mom crowd. You know, there
Speaker 1: was a lot of cringing over Nikki Haley's response to
Speaker 1: Don Lemon where he made the horrible gaff saying that
Speaker 1: she was passed her prime. It was just bizarre. It
Speaker 1: was again said pastor Prime, said Nicki Haley was pastor prime.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, if you miss this, you got to
Speaker 1: go back and watch the cook because it's absolutely hilarious,
Speaker 1: But it wasn't a gaff either. It was just Don
Speaker 1: Lemon being Don Lemon, and Nikki Haley just responded to
Speaker 1: it and I think a pretty cringy way. And Tim Scott,
Speaker 1: you know, has had less opportunity to do that as
Speaker 1: of now. I think he's probably ideologically similar. Obviously, they're
Speaker 1: both South Carolina Republicans, people that would have really excited
Speaker 1: I think the Tea Party wing of the party back
Speaker 1: in twenty twelve, twenty sixteen, but have adapted to the
Speaker 1: Trump era by not really adapting. Have adapted to the
Speaker 1: Trump era, maybe by changing the way they talk about
Speaker 1: the media, maybe by changing the way they talk about
Speaker 1: rural America and forgotten Americans, but policy wise really hasn't
Speaker 1: been a ton of shift from then to now. They
Speaker 1: say that's good, right, that's the thing that allows them
Speaker 1: to connect and communicate with suburban voters, your typical Republican voters,
Speaker 1: people that Democrats pander to when it comes to you know,
Speaker 1: certain like the Gottheimer wing of the Democratic Party rights
Speaker 1: that a whole wing, do we have to call that
Speaker 1: not a whole wing actually, but it's a well funded
Speaker 1: wing that funded the Gottheimer the Gottheimer Democrats could be
Speaker 1: Nikki Haley Republicans, right, like that's or Tim Scott reports, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the problem Solver's caucus and No Label's crew, like that's there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is. I mean we might see it in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four with No Labels spending seventy million dollars to
Speaker 1: get ballot lines everywhere, Salt deduction voters, yeah, like Mansion Haley. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and again there is a It depends on the economic climate,
Speaker 1: It depends on the cultural climate. People have good reasons
Speaker 1: for being interested in different things depending on where they're
Speaker 1: coming from, depending on what their interests are. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a their their betting that you can you can
Speaker 1: make the pitch. But when you have Donald Trump up
Speaker 1: right now, things change. But when you have him up
Speaker 1: over DeSantis on that level, I mean, it just looks
Speaker 1: like twenty sixteen again, where it's Donald Trump and everyone
Speaker 1: else and the vote against Donald Trump. This time, maybe
Speaker 1: it's only forty percent. I doubt it stays exactly sixty forty,
Speaker 1: But you're either voting for Trump, you're voting against Trump,
Speaker 1: just with a different flavor of voting against Trump, and
Speaker 1: that makes him it's a glide path for the nomination
Speaker 1: to him, And y'all couldn't beat Trump in twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: when you had sixty to sixty five percent of the
Speaker 1: party against him in primaries. Now you have like forty
Speaker 1: percent against him. So and he's dominating the media because
Speaker 1: one of the biggest news stories in the world is
Speaker 1: this indictment. I'm a former president, so he's going to
Speaker 1: eat up all the airtime as will be looming over.
Speaker 1: There's two other cases, three other cases actually this Documents case,
Speaker 1: the Georgia case, and there's one that I'm forgetting, But
Speaker 1: the one that he was indicted on last week I
Speaker 1: don't even think is going toc court until December. So
Speaker 1: good luck. There you go. Well, let's move on to
Speaker 1: the brewing substack and Twitter battle, which goes back to
Speaker 1: this an exchange between Matt Tayebe and Twitter CEO and
Speaker 1: SpaceX CEO and Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, which Elon Musk
Speaker 1: bizarrely and for some reason felt wise to share on
Speaker 1: Twitter and then quickly delete screenshots last forever. So we
Speaker 1: have some of these here we can put to the
Speaker 1: first element. I think the account hall all flow may
Speaker 1: have been one of the first to post this, so
Speaker 1: you can find the full exchanges over at his account
Speaker 1: and elsewhere to read something. So Matt basically reached out
Speaker 1: to him and said, hey, He says, you're taking down
Speaker 1: all of my Twitter files threads because you're mad at
Speaker 1: me personally for not leaving the company where I was
Speaker 1: already employed. Really Elon Musk writes back, No, this shouldn't
Speaker 1: be happening, will be fixed tomorrow. But then he seizes
Speaker 1: on something in Matt's tweet text and he says, you're
Speaker 1: employed at substack and from there tell you me. Then
Speaker 1: explains to him he says, my subscribers there employ me,
Speaker 1: and I have a great thing going there. I also
Speaker 1: have loyalty to the company which did originally hire me,
Speaker 1: and if I moved to Twitter, it would have been
Speaker 1: a major optics issue for us both. But this isn't
Speaker 1: related to the threads being removed, so this is going
Speaker 1: to be fixed. Musk tells him it's going to be fixed,
Speaker 1: and then Tyev explains to him that he was using
Speaker 1: the word hired loosely, and he says, I was never
Speaker 1: a substack employee. I was one of the first substack
Speaker 1: pro contributors, which is a guaranteed return system. For the
Speaker 1: first year that was known publicly. Like tayeb has been
Speaker 1: very transparent, Substack was offering deals to all sorts of
Speaker 1: different writers in order. Yeah, it's a contract they offered
Speaker 1: me one several years ago where it's like, we'll give
Speaker 1: you because if you're going to leave your full time
Speaker 1: job based on the hope that people are going to
Speaker 1: fund your you know, at five six dollars a month
Speaker 1: fund your substack, then what they were doing is they
Speaker 1: were giving a kind of yes, here's a minimum to
Speaker 1: make sure you pay your mortgage and entice you to
Speaker 1: come over. They don't do that anymore. What they found,
Speaker 1: I think is that a lot of people were coasting.
Speaker 1: Like it worked for some of the biggest names like Iglesias, Tayibe,
Speaker 1: Andrew Sullivan, like did he take one? I don't remember
Speaker 1: if he took one to that it worked for them
Speaker 1: because they ended up bringing in a lot more you know,
Speaker 1: readership than the minimum paid out. So it was a
Speaker 1: gamble like am I going to get? Because if you
Speaker 1: end up getting if they offer you two hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars and you make a million, but they keep most
Speaker 1: of that extra. But if they offer you tw hundred thousand,
Speaker 1: you're only bring in fifty. Well, now you didn't get
Speaker 1: evicted because you didn't get four clothes on. So anyway,
Speaker 1: these substackt deals were widely known. Musk then tweeted, if
Speaker 1: you remember, apparently Matt Tabee is or was employed by substecs.
Speaker 1: So he read this full exchange that he had privately
Speaker 1: with Mett and then publicly tweeted that he was employed,
Speaker 1: which is which wasn't true, as though he had inside
Speaker 1: secret information that Matt had told him he was somehow
Speaker 1: actually employed, he had some other source like when in
Speaker 1: fact the source was Matt. He was telling him the
Speaker 1: truth about how substack. And to me, it seems like
Speaker 1: Musk is having a hard time understanding a company that
Speaker 1: pays its creators, or that has a relationship that sends
Speaker 1: money to creators, rather than one that the relationship goes
Speaker 1: the other way. Give us your eight dollars a month. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it might be like that. I mean, I also think
Speaker 1: he just has a million pots on the stove right
Speaker 1: now and is very transparently working through his different issues
Speaker 1: on public forums. He tweets this, then deletes it, I think,
Speaker 1: and this is in the broader context of him being
Speaker 1: upset that Substack launched a notes feature that he thinks
Speaker 1: is competitive with Twitter, which is where the whole feud
Speaker 1: between Musk and Tayebe started. That's because he tweeted that
Speaker 1: Tybee was apparently an employee of Substack to undercut Tayeebee's
Speaker 1: points about out why he was not going to be
Speaker 1: on Twitter anymore, was not going to be working on
Speaker 1: the Twitter files anymore, and so that was where Musk
Speaker 1: was coming from in tweeting that out. I really just think, like,
Speaker 1: honestly goodness, I think Elon Musk is working on like
Speaker 1: huge all of these huge, different projects he's trying to
Speaker 1: make Twitter he now says he has it in shape
Speaker 1: to break even instead of running that like three million
Speaker 1: dollar annual deficit that he said it was running when
Speaker 1: he took over. And he's just he's so public in
Speaker 1: dealing with these different workplace issues, like he's actually dealt
Speaker 1: with basically human resources issues on Twitter, and so when
Speaker 1: you can see it all playing out in real time
Speaker 1: for someone who's extremely busy, sort of aggressive and combative,
Speaker 1: it's just weird. And I think that's where you get
Speaker 1: to him deleting this because it's he's inaccurate. He's interpreting
Speaker 1: this stuff inaccurately. He probably realized that he shouldn't have
Speaker 1: tweeted this out. It got members of Congress to say, well,
Speaker 1: now we know when Matt Tayebi wouldn't give up his
Speaker 1: sources when they were pressing him for sources in that
Speaker 1: absurd congressional hearing where Democrats beclowned themselves about a month ago,
Speaker 1: they were like, well, now we know Musk is tayebe source.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, well, what took you off? It's great work,
Speaker 1: you guys. And since now everybody apparently knows that Musk
Speaker 1: seems like he's the only one who didn't know that.
Speaker 1: His relationship with Tayabe is one as a source to
Speaker 1: a journalist, and so many sources just don't understand what
Speaker 1: that is like. So git here, if you could put
Speaker 1: up this second element, put up one of my favorite
Speaker 1: quotes out there. Every journalist who is not too stupid
Speaker 1: or full of himself to notice what is going on
Speaker 1: knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is
Speaker 1: a kind of confidence man preying on people's vanity, ignorance,
Speaker 1: or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Speaker 1: That's an iconic quote from the book The Journalist and
Speaker 1: the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, and he goes into the
Speaker 1: psychology and the psychopathology of the relationship between sources and
Speaker 1: journalists and just how amazing it is the way that
Speaker 1: sources kind of open up to journalists expect that there's
Speaker 1: this like two way relationship when the source is also
Speaker 1: often a subject, and the journalist is going to take
Speaker 1: take what they can and need from that source and
Speaker 1: pull in from other sources as well, and produce journalism
Speaker 1: that is not necessarily going to be exactly what the
Speaker 1: source wanted, and the source will then be shocked that
Speaker 1: the journalists when the story is over, it's like no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I'm going to notes. Yeah, we're not friends. Well, and
Speaker 1: it's also, I mean, the vast majority of the Twitter
Speaker 1: files reporting has been document based. It hasn't been relying
Speaker 1: on unnamed sources or there's been some lots of there's
Speaker 1: been reporting, but it doesn't seem like it was going
Speaker 1: to Musk because Musk wasn't there right the time. You
Speaker 1: wouldn't know. But they did interview a lot of of
Speaker 1: like former vice presidents and former engineers and that sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah, they've they've gotten information from them. But
Speaker 1: I feel like the backbone of every ting I've learned
Speaker 1: from the Twitter fows is document based. You see it
Speaker 1: in everybody's own words. And it's true that must gave
Speaker 1: them access. That's publicly knowledge. We know that must gave
Speaker 1: them access because he talked about how he gave them access,
Speaker 1: and Matt talked about how he gave them access. So
Speaker 1: none of that is like shocking. And for people to
Speaker 1: say like this is a dunk on Tayibe, I think
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. What you see here is some decent source
Speaker 1: massaging where he says, understandably, if I was at Twitter,
Speaker 1: it would have been a major optics issue for us,
Speaker 1: both right, and he's not wrong about that. It would
Speaker 1: have looked ridiculous. He couldn't He honestly couldn't have reported
Speaker 1: that story if he was totally beholden to Twitter as
Speaker 1: an employee or anything like that. That's totally journalism. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that's not journalism. So, speaking of notes, if we can
Speaker 1: put up this this stir one here so no it
Speaker 1: has rolled out. This is substack basically version of Twitter.
Speaker 1: Are you on substack? No, you can get on substack.
Speaker 1: So I'm on substack. I've been on there since like
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen or something. Yeah, you're an early adopter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: my newsletters called bad News. I mean, I think it
Speaker 1: might change the name back to just Ryan. Maybe I'll
Speaker 1: stick with bad news anyway, go find bad news on there.
Speaker 1: I've been doing a newsletter since before Substack. I've been
Speaker 1: talking to these guys since the very beginning. I'm really
Speaker 1: proud and excited for, you know, what they've been able
Speaker 1: to build. And I think they've done a really actually
Speaker 1: good job of creating space for free and open expression
Speaker 1: without kind of getting pigeonholed as kind of reactionary right wing,
Speaker 1: like has happened to a lot of other platforms that
Speaker 1: tried to do that. And I think that's like impressive
Speaker 1: on their front because it's so it is so important
Speaker 1: to end the value of open expression is not inherently
Speaker 1: right wing, and so for them to have been able
Speaker 1: to swim against that, I think has been impressed. And
Speaker 1: you can imagine when you look at this notes app
Speaker 1: why Elon Musk is like, hmm, that looks a lot
Speaker 1: like Twitter. Oh yeah, I still don't think it's really
Speaker 1: a competitor to Twitter, though, because in the same sense
Speaker 1: that like, it's hard for us to apply our definition
Speaker 1: of monopoly to Facebook or Instagram, because people would say, well,
Speaker 1: Twitter is a competitor. Up here, people want to see
Speaker 1: what it looks like. Yeah, take a look at this.
Speaker 1: If you're watching this is what Yeah, you can see
Speaker 1: how it looks similar to Twitter. I mean, it actually
Speaker 1: does really look similar to Twitter. And it makes sense
Speaker 1: that Elon Musk would retaliate. That's how business goes. He says,
Speaker 1: I'm drawing a red line in the sand here. It's
Speaker 1: weird to pick on Tayibi out of all of that,
Speaker 1: but that is to say, the point of Facebook isn't
Speaker 1: really a competitor to TikTok. As a competitor in your time,
Speaker 1: but you can't like the point of Facebook is that
Speaker 1: every person is on the same platform. Every person is
Speaker 1: on the same platform with Twitter, every person is on
Speaker 1: the same platform. When it comes to TikTok, that's the
Speaker 1: point of your feed. Your feet is supposed to be encompassing.
Speaker 1: So I don't necessarily know that it's a good apples
Speaker 1: to apples to say that this is a competitor. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I think you're right that what
Speaker 1: substack has done is so impressive as a business, and
Speaker 1: part of it is a good lesson I think to
Speaker 1: other people in C suites, which is they just draw
Speaker 1: redline on content. They say, we are not getting involved
Speaker 1: in content decisions. And I think being upfront about that
Speaker 1: and being very bold about that, never ever wavering on
Speaker 1: it is so so important because when you do that,
Speaker 1: it gives you cover when stuff comes at you from
Speaker 1: the left, when stuff comes at you from the right.
Speaker 1: It's a good lesson for Twitter actually too, because I
Speaker 1: think it's what Elon Musk sort of aspires to be.
Speaker 1: But Twitter still can't quite do because it gets involved
Speaker 1: in content moderation more than it should. And what Substack
Speaker 1: I think is trying to do is what Jack Dorsey
Speaker 1: suggested in a post that you just put up I
Speaker 1: think last night, if we could put up the fifth
Speaker 1: element here, which is basically to say that you should
Speaker 1: not be able to, you know, take content that a
Speaker 1: creator created and put on the Internet. Nobody else but
Speaker 1: the creator of it, the author of it, should be
Speaker 1: able to take that off the Internet. Where the where
Speaker 1: the role of the Internet and the public comes in
Speaker 1: is how you how you moderate and how you amplify
Speaker 1: those comments. So in other words, it might it's okay
Speaker 1: to leave terrible things up. Yeah, the problem comes if
Speaker 1: you're taking terrible things and just shoving them in everybody's face.
Speaker 1: And so what subsect tries to do is allow you
Speaker 1: to curate very carefully, you know what it is that
Speaker 1: you want to see. Uh. Elon Must did an interview
Speaker 1: with the BBC last night on spaces and it became
Speaker 1: this big fight between the BBC reporter and Musk where
Speaker 1: BBC reporter was saying, my for you tab is just garbage.
Speaker 1: It's like a bunch of trash that I don't want,
Speaker 1: and he said that I'm seeing a lot of things
Speaker 1: that are he used the phrase hateful, and then Must
Speaker 1: ask him to define that. He was like, well, they're
Speaker 1: slightly sexists and slightly racist, and Must is like, give
Speaker 1: me some examples, and he's like, I haven't looked at
Speaker 1: the for you tab for three weeks because it's just
Speaker 1: a stream of garbage. And Mast's like, aha, you say
Speaker 1: that they're slightly racist likely sexist. Things in the for
Speaker 1: youtab but you can't name a single example of it.
Speaker 1: But what he's trying to get at is something deeper,
Speaker 1: which is their BBC reporter, which is that he didn't
Speaker 1: want all this for you stuff. It's Twitter that was like,
Speaker 1: we think this stuff is for you, whereas what substack
Speaker 1: is saying, and what Jack Dorsey's suggesting is give people
Speaker 1: more of an ability to choose their own algorithmic experience.
Speaker 1: Like he said, you should there should be a g
Speaker 1: rated algorithm that you can choose from the other, and
Speaker 1: then other algorithms that were you can transparently decide this
Speaker 1: is the way that I'd like to have my feed
Speaker 1: shaped and these are the people that I want to follow.
Speaker 1: Because social media companies, YouTube among them, have gotten away
Speaker 1: from the idea that if you click subscribe or you
Speaker 1: click follow, that that means anything. They don't care. They're like, no,
Speaker 1: we know what you're going to interact with better than
Speaker 1: you do, and we think engagement is more important than
Speaker 1: your own conscious choice of what you want. And that's
Speaker 1: what really pisss me off about the four you tab
Speaker 1: on Twitter, which will just you get toggled onto by default.
Speaker 1: It tries to insane right right, right, right, because you
Speaker 1: get pushed way more divisive content and this is just
Speaker 1: my interpretation, more divisive, viral, annoying content than what you've
Speaker 1: curated for yourself. Which is the cool thing about Twitter.
Speaker 1: It's one of the coolest ways to curate news because
Speaker 1: it's exactly what you're asking for. It's you know, you
Speaker 1: can follow all of the different outlets that you really like,
Speaker 1: that you really trust, whether they're on the left or
Speaker 1: the right. You can pepper some celebrity content, some Vanderbunkerules
Speaker 1: content in there, the promo content that Ryan lives be it,
Speaker 1: let me choose it, yes, right, right, right, And it's
Speaker 1: there's no algorithm that's going to do that because it's
Speaker 1: not me. No matter how much it thinks it's me,
Speaker 1: it's not so anyway. And it's all just a great
Speaker 1: reminder that we are are guinea pigs in the real
Speaker 1: time process of theorizing how some of this technology is
Speaker 1: best employed, the sort of capitalistic philosophy behind the ethics
Speaker 1: of it. And you know, it's a reminder like what
Speaker 1: brandeis when he's writing about privacy, he's writing about photography, right,
Speaker 1: the ethics of photography, And that's really wasn't all that
Speaker 1: long ago. So in the same way that people who
Speaker 1: were suddenly being photographed and immortalized, there were big philosophical
Speaker 1: privacy questions about that. There still are. That's a lot
Speaker 1: what we're getting into right now with the content we
Speaker 1: self publish online and real quickly. I'll just read from
Speaker 1: Jack Dorsey because two interesting things where he waiting. One
Speaker 1: he said everything that happened to Twitter is my fault.
Speaker 1: He's like, in twenty twenty, we had an activist investor
Speaker 1: who came on to the board. If you're watching Succession,
Speaker 1: you guys know how this works. They didn't like the
Speaker 1: way that I wanted to approach free expression and the
Speaker 1: user's relationship to the algorithm, and I gave up and
Speaker 1: made my exit strategy. I left Twitter, and I feel
Speaker 1: terrible about that. So that's that's part one of what
Speaker 1: he says on the On the Twitter files, he says,
Speaker 1: I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files,
Speaker 1: I wish they were released wikileague style with many more
Speaker 1: eyes and interpretations to consider, and along with that commitments
Speaker 1: of transparency for present and future actions. I'm hopeful all
Speaker 1: of this will happen. There's nothing to hide only a
Speaker 1: lot to learn. The current attacks on my former colleagues
Speaker 1: could be dangerous and doesn't solve anything if you want
Speaker 1: to blame directed at me and my actions or lack thereof.
Speaker 1: And he's he's his full piece, which you can get
Speaker 1: up at Abla dot news is called a Native Internet
Speaker 1: Protocol for social media, which is laying out the kind
Speaker 1: of intellectual rationale for his basically new kind of attempt
Speaker 1: at building the social media company or organization that that does.
Speaker 1: He what he's talking about gives freedom to users to
Speaker 1: post basically whatever they want, but then gives other protocols
Speaker 1: the ability to moderate and amplify that in ways that
Speaker 1: are hopefully creating a better experience for people. Do we
Speaker 1: have inflation numbers? By the way we do there we
Speaker 1: go okay, So inflation numbers are out. Bapasani is a
Speaker 1: CNBC reporter. He calls it Goldielocks CPI. Just the markets
Speaker 1: are very, very excited by these numbers. So he's March
Speaker 1: core CPI. So core CPI. That's Those are the inflation
Speaker 1: numbers that do not include kind of volatile fuel and
Speaker 1: food prices are up zero point four percent month over month,
Speaker 1: which is in line with expectations. Last month it was
Speaker 1: zero point five percent, So that's actually a significant drop
Speaker 1: when you go from point five to point four. That
Speaker 1: that meant that year over year, year over year inflation
Speaker 1: was five point five percent. The expectations have been five
Speaker 1: point six percent, So it's cooling at an even faster
Speaker 1: rate than people expected that it would. As a result,
Speaker 1: the market is rallying on that because they think that
Speaker 1: that means that the Federal Reserve is then going to
Speaker 1: ease off on its interest rate cuts. One reason they're
Speaker 1: easing off on their interest rate cuts, though, ironically, is
Speaker 1: at the point of an interest rate cut is to
Speaker 1: restrict lending, restrict credit, and banks have been doing that
Speaker 1: on their own because they're like, oh, whoops, we're about
Speaker 1: to get a bank run and collapse, and so you're
Speaker 1: functionally you're getting a lot of the same thing. Basically,
Speaker 1: my read on this, and I'm curious for your take,
Speaker 1: is that this is just an extraordinary vindication for they
Speaker 1: basically Knesian style Bidenomics that rushed out of the gate
Speaker 1: with the one point nine tillion dollar American Rescue plan,
Speaker 1: with the hundreds of billions in what the Chips Act
Speaker 1: and You've got the IRA, which was you know, something
Speaker 1: like seven hundred billion dollars over a couple of years
Speaker 1: of spending. You had from the kind of Reaganomics Obama
Speaker 1: nomics types, Larry Summers types saying this is going to
Speaker 1: create runaway inflation. Barry Summers said, We're going to have
Speaker 1: you know, endemic endless inflation as a result of this,
Speaker 1: and that Biden's American Rescue Plan and his other spending
Speaker 1: are going to go down in his treers one of
Speaker 1: the great economic mistakes because they produced way too much
Speaker 1: demand in the economy, and Biden was saying no. Jennet
Speaker 1: Yellen was saying no, saying no, we like, we believe
Speaker 1: this is this is transitory, and they get mocked a
Speaker 1: lot for that because transitory if if the next week
Speaker 1: it's still going people were like, you said this was
Speaker 1: going to be over and say, well, we didn't mean
Speaker 1: it was going to be over in a week. So
Speaker 1: to be to be heading this consistently down for about
Speaker 1: a ye year now, I think demonstrates that there was
Speaker 1: a lot more capacity in the economy to be invested
Speaker 1: in and to produce than people thought. Now separately, and
Speaker 1: I think it's important to separate this out. Housing prices
Speaker 1: are still killing people, but I don't think that's either
Speaker 1: fiscal or interest rate right now, you can say it's
Speaker 1: interest rate relating in a sense that it's pushing up
Speaker 1: asset prices. But if you don't ever build any new housing,
Speaker 1: then you're just and the population keeps growing and wages grow,
Speaker 1: even if they grow in line with inflation, you're going
Speaker 1: to have runaway housing prices. So that's I think you
Speaker 1: have to have a separate housing policy that addresses that.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so that so my read on this is
Speaker 1: that it's a vindication for a kind of progressive economic
Speaker 1: vision for the economy. What's the Do you have the
Speaker 1: breakdown of where it's I'm trying to look for it now,
Speaker 1: but these numbers are coming out as we're speaking here,
Speaker 1: so it's always interesting to see where CPI is, like
Speaker 1: it's uneven in some cases, and to your point about
Speaker 1: interest So right, so headline inflation even better, zero point
Speaker 1: one percent in March, practically flat and five percent year
Speaker 1: over year, which is you know, that's not the nine Like,
Speaker 1: that's not the nine percent that you can kind of
Speaker 1: scare people with. I think people now, people I think
Speaker 1: still are feeling a lot of pain because of basically
Speaker 1: because of rent and housing prices. So is it the
Speaker 1: soft landing that was much mocked so far? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: so far you do have and we should get you know,
Speaker 1: we could get stoler back on here. I'm sure he'd
Speaker 1: like to do a victory lap over because if if
Speaker 1: you can continue to have wages at the bottom quintile,
Speaker 1: because that's what that's what people need. If you look
Speaker 1: at the data, people say, well, who wants is better off?
Speaker 1: Since Biden became president, everybody in the bottom twenty percent
Speaker 1: has seen like significant wage increases over inflation. Now, if
Speaker 1: they're facing if they're facing rent problems, if they didn't
Speaker 1: have a locked in lease, or they're you know, otherwise
Speaker 1: screwed when it comes to housing, they're not appreciating those
Speaker 1: wage increases in the way that they would otherwise. But
Speaker 1: that's why I'm saying those are separate things. In some ways,
Speaker 1: you have to figure out ways to deal with the
Speaker 1: housing crisis that are independent of this, the broader wage
Speaker 1: fight that we're having. Well, and I was going to say,
Speaker 1: speaking of an even this, I'm looking at the breakdown now,
Speaker 1: like Brian said, these were breaking as we're talking, which
Speaker 1: is why we wanted to cover it live. But grocery
Speaker 1: prices is from the Hill drops substantially to an eight
Speaker 1: point four percent annual increase from ten point two percent
Speaker 1: last month. Food prices, which are some of the inflation
Speaker 1: that consumers feed most fuel most acutely. They read it
Speaker 1: as feed most acutely, which is kind of funny, are
Speaker 1: still running much hotter than inflation. Overall, fruits and vegetables
Speaker 1: drop by one point three percent of the month, will
Speaker 1: meets declined by one point four percent. So obviously there's
Speaker 1: still stuff that consumers are going to be feeling pretty badly.
Speaker 1: And so that's where the Biden administration their attempts to
Speaker 1: say we're handling this, there's just so soft landing here
Speaker 1: get really tricky. It's not to say there isn't truth
Speaker 1: to it, it's just to say it's a tough sell
Speaker 1: political right, some other context. This the headline increase was
Speaker 1: the smallest since June of twenty twenty one, which is
Speaker 1: when you really saw the kind of the economy reopening
Speaker 1: and inflation really kicking off. You also found what they
Speaker 1: call shelter costs, rent and housing the smallest gain since November,
Speaker 1: so a point six percent increase, but that still resulted
Speaker 1: in prices rising eight point two percent on an annual basis.
Speaker 1: And so that's where you see this increasingly difficult society
Speaker 1: to live in, because if you continue to have shelter
Speaker 1: costs rising at over eight percent and wages rising at
Speaker 1: less than that, because shelter makes up an increasing amount
Speaker 1: of your monthly income, the rest of the rest of
Speaker 1: the inflation numbers coming down don't help you as much. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I think that's true. There's also, I mean, there's just
Speaker 1: so much going on here in this conversation because you
Speaker 1: can you can also look at obviously we've talked about
Speaker 1: corporate greed increasing inflation over the course of the last
Speaker 1: year or more, and we've also talked about rising wages
Speaker 1: for the bottom you know, quintile or quartile and quarter
Speaker 1: quarter the coffee. By the way, this morning, jet Fields,
Speaker 1: So I've only about halfway done of it, halfway done
Speaker 1: with it. Jacked up it came out, but not because
Speaker 1: I don't think I can drink. It came out looking
Speaker 1: like hot fudge. But anyway, all that is to say,
Speaker 1: I hope that some of the rising or the price
Speaker 1: gouging has contributed to rising wages. I hope that that's
Speaker 1: the case, but there's also also serious case that a
Speaker 1: lot of bidings, biden spending put consumers in this position
Speaker 1: in the first place. And I think a good takeaway
Speaker 1: from all of that is our system is way too
Speaker 1: concentrated in the hands of small groups of powerful, powerful people,
Speaker 1: and the system is completely perverted because of that. And
Speaker 1: when they try to reverse engineer the things that in
Speaker 1: some cases they caused. I mean, inflation isn't great for
Speaker 1: every person in a C suite across the country, when
Speaker 1: they try to reverse engineer it, they find themselves just
Speaker 1: they're so hapless, right. And also when the one tool
Speaker 1: that they have raising interest rates, also it cools the
Speaker 1: housing market in a good way in the sense that
Speaker 1: it pushes down asset prices. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: rising asset prices are a signal to builders to build
Speaker 1: more housing. And so if now interest rates are going
Speaker 1: up and uh, and you're putting off, you're putting kind
Speaker 1: of a hold on a bunch of projects. That's that's
Speaker 1: the opposite of what you need, Like you need to
Speaker 1: figure out a way you can pull asset prices down
Speaker 1: but also produce more housing. And if you only rely
Speaker 1: on those two tools, then you're not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to do that. But if you say no, as as
Speaker 1: a as a public, we want to invest in this
Speaker 1: like housing is basically one hundred percent creation of government policy,
Speaker 1: like from the from the New Deal till now, the
Speaker 1: thirty year mortgage, all the other regulations, the back, the
Speaker 1: back we we we developed, the suburbs, we developed. All
Speaker 1: of this was by design. You can't have it without highways,
Speaker 1: right and we can. We can. So if it's done
Speaker 1: by design, we can. We can redesign it and we
Speaker 1: and we have to do that because even if wages
Speaker 1: are rising at the bottom by five or six percent,
Speaker 1: if housing it even at this pace, is rising by
Speaker 1: eight percent, people are still falling behind. And and it
Speaker 1: hits people very, very differently. People don't get necessarily an
Speaker 1: average every month increase in their housing costs. It's like
Speaker 1: you got your lease for a year, and then when
Speaker 1: you've got to find a new place, now you're paying
Speaker 1: twenty percent more than you were before. Well, and this
Speaker 1: is where I give credit to libertarians, because they have
Speaker 1: an ideologically consistent and I think more more credible response,
Speaker 1: which is, it's nonsense to pretend that the free market
Speaker 1: is what's distorting and creating problems in housing. It's the
Speaker 1: combination of this like faux free market with massive subsidies
Speaker 1: in government design that has things completely jacked up. And
Speaker 1: so I think your response would be to have more
Speaker 1: government design to have If the government is going to
Speaker 1: be involved, which should be, it should make it smart,
Speaker 1: like this policy should actually be workable and benefit consumers
Speaker 1: and benefit voters. I would suggest probably rolling back government
Speaker 1: intervention in housing because I think it probably produce better results.
Speaker 1: But either way we can What we can agree on
Speaker 1: now is again you're at the worst of both worlds,
Speaker 1: where you have crony government policy and crony capitalist policy,
Speaker 1: and it's just terrible. And we can't get a chance
Speaker 1: to talk in today's show about the big news out
Speaker 1: of Colorado, which is the Biden administration has put out
Speaker 1: a different a couple different policy proposals around the Colorado River,
Speaker 1: one which would basically say Arizona doesn't exist anymore. Another
Speaker 1: would say that we're going to be in court with
Speaker 1: California for the next several decades over their water rights.
Speaker 1: And so it is funny to think about interest rate
Speaker 1: policy as our number one tool for prices when you're
Speaker 1: running and when the Colorado River is running dry on
Speaker 1: the Hoover Dam is like on the brink of no
Speaker 1: longer producing hydro electric power. It's like there's nothing the
Speaker 1: Fed can do with interest rate policy or quantitative easing
Speaker 1: that is going to do anything about that. Like, these
Speaker 1: are problems that our are constantly growing economy is going
Speaker 1: to have to address as it impacts reality. I can't
Speaker 1: get over how bad this coffee is. Moving on to
Speaker 1: big tech. Let's put this up on the screen. This
Speaker 1: is actually a report from the Federalist this week that
Speaker 1: I think deserves more attention. This is quoting from Margo
Speaker 1: Cleveland's reporting here, the federal government pedal technology to big
Speaker 1: tech companies to assist them in censoring American speech on
Speaker 1: social media in the run up to the twenty twenty election.
Speaker 1: That is according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in
Speaker 1: their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. We've covered
Speaker 1: that suit. There's some interesting stuff coming out of it,
Speaker 1: and this is no exception. Margo continues to say, specifically,
Speaker 1: the State Department marketed the censorship technology through its Global
Speaker 1: Engagement Center. If you've been following the Twitter file as,
Speaker 1: you recognize the GEC. If you've been following the State
Speaker 1: Department for years, you recognized the name of the GEC.
Speaker 1: In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the
Speaker 1: development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the
Speaker 1: regime's narrative, they also paid for government employees to act
Speaker 1: as sales reps, pitching the censorship products to big tech. Now,
Speaker 1: there's some emails that show in twenty twenty, federal government
Speaker 1: employees were contacting social media platforms to promote the GEC's disinfocloud,
Speaker 1: and they were promoting it like sales reps for a
Speaker 1: product basically, and GEC represented this government product and it
Speaker 1: was saying it would give quote companies, technology companies, technology
Speaker 1: and tools to assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation,
Speaker 1: and then it gave some of these private tech companies
Speaker 1: access to disinfocloud. That's really similar to how GEC was
Speaker 1: describing infocloud and congressional testimony recently. And even the State
Speaker 1: Department's website marketed as quote a one stop shop to
Speaker 1: identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation,
Speaker 1: which they were relying on NewsGuard ratings partially. I think
Speaker 1: that's an important part of this report. NewsGuard ratings probably
Speaker 1: better than some other groups. They're relatively willing at least
Speaker 1: to engage with different publications, but still downvote publications that
Speaker 1: promote information that dissents from sort of the official narrative.
Speaker 1: And when you again, that's fine as a private business
Speaker 1: if NewsGuard wants to do that, but when you end
Speaker 1: up colluding with the federal government, the State Department in
Speaker 1: election related issues, that's where you get into problems. Because
Speaker 1: we know this never just stops, as Lefong is reported,
Speaker 1: I think really powerful in the intersept It never just
Speaker 1: stops with actual propaganda. What we've seen over the last
Speaker 1: five ten years, longer than that you count the years
Speaker 1: after nine to eleven, is this lumping in of legitimate
Speaker 1: American speech with propaganda that they cannot help themselves from doing.
Speaker 1: We have run that experiment, we know the results. We
Speaker 1: know that they're not just stopping with legitimate Russian, Chinese propaganda.
Speaker 1: It's not happening. They are lumping other legitimate speech into it.
Speaker 1: So I think this is really concerning and you couple
Speaker 1: that with something we can put up on the screen. Here,
Speaker 1: a Daily Caller report that found Google, Twitter, Meta and
Speaker 1: TikTok's executive ranks have included over two hundred former employees
Speaker 1: of surveillance government agencies, creating an employment pipeline between the
Speaker 1: government and big tech companies. That's according to the Callers investigation.
Speaker 1: They basically scraped linked in and found that those tech
Speaker 1: companies recruited two hundred and forty eight employees from the DOJ, FBI, CIA,
Speaker 1: and dh AS between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two
Speaker 1: for the most part. And they're feeling, you know, as
Speaker 1: the caller says, top director positions with people who spent
Speaker 1: more than a decade in some of those agencies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm kind of pessimistic that we're going to ever wind
Speaker 1: up in any neutral space when it comes to this.
Speaker 1: It feels like to me that and I think that's
Speaker 1: because you know, as we have this hyper polarization kind
Speaker 1: of whoever, you know, as you move, even if you
Speaker 1: move from you know, big tech into government or government
Speaker 1: into big tech, if you feel like your team blue,
Speaker 1: then you're going to bring that kind of tribal attitude
Speaker 1: with you. If you're feeling your team red, you're going
Speaker 1: to bring that attitude with you. But is it more
Speaker 1: team Natsck like, isn't it? That's what I which is
Speaker 1: increasingly blue. It feels like right, because it's Peter Struck
Speaker 1: and Lisa Page, it's Andy McCabe, it's you know, they
Speaker 1: may actually vote for George Bush or Jeb Bush, but
Speaker 1: they're never going to vote for it, probably Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1: They're never going to vote for Donald Trump. And again,
Speaker 1: like everyone is fine to make those personal decisions for
Speaker 1: themselves and to vote in their different ways, but when
Speaker 1: you're carrying that water on behalf of the government and
Speaker 1: then bringing it into the corporate sector, the same that
Speaker 1: we've seen the revolving door be problematic with the FDA
Speaker 1: and what you know over the course of American history
Speaker 1: the last one hundred years, Basically, when you see that
Speaker 1: happen in these these companies that are doing something unprecedented
Speaker 1: with surveillance capitalism, with data that is insane, and I
Speaker 1: think it's worse that it's not strictly Team Read and
Speaker 1: Team Blue. They aren't, I would say, increasingly team Blue.
Speaker 1: Even though in the past, they were starkly team Red.
Speaker 1: That is terrifying and I feel like and we probably
Speaker 1: got to get move into your title nine thing pretty soon.
Speaker 1: If we're going to get to Marianne and Julian asangent
Speaker 1: time to me. I guess my final take on this
Speaker 1: will be if the government is going to participate in this,
Speaker 1: they're only the only thing they have left to do
Speaker 1: is be just one hundred percent fully transparent about it. Like, look,
Speaker 1: you're the dhs DJ whoever, and you have thoughts on
Speaker 1: what information is flowing around. Post it, yeah, post it,
Speaker 1: and post your citations. Tell us that you think this
Speaker 1: this person in Kansas who really likes Donald Trump and
Speaker 1: doesn't care that he's you know, that press conference with Putin.
Speaker 1: Tell us why you think they're working for Russia. Say
Speaker 1: it with your chest, give us some citations, and then
Speaker 1: let us decide. Rather than in this back channel thing
Speaker 1: where you have a portal where you can tell you
Speaker 1: employees a Twitter who then are then are stuck in
Speaker 1: the position of either rejecting the most powerful government on
Speaker 1: the planet's request or accepting their request and censoring some
Speaker 1: type of account. Just let go and then and then
Speaker 1: people if they want if they trust the DHS and
Speaker 1: DJ they can use that information to kind of curate
Speaker 1: their own information diet. But I think they have lost
Speaker 1: if they ever had the ability to do this with
Speaker 1: any authority, kind of surreptitiously well and again like just
Speaker 1: just surround this out. That's why relying on NewsGuard is
Speaker 1: such nonsense, because the corporate press completely botched got Pilitz
Speaker 1: surprises for batching the Russia collusion investigation the Federalist which
Speaker 1: obviously has we wigh fewer resources and money. So we
Speaker 1: can't be in Ukraine, we can't be in Moscow, we
Speaker 1: can't be everywhere doing all of the sort of international reporting,
Speaker 1: and we don't have bureaus all over the country. But
Speaker 1: we got that much much much more accurate then the
Speaker 1: vast majority of corporate media, even though NewsGuard will penalize
Speaker 1: us in ways that they won't penalize the corporate media.
Speaker 1: So when the government is relying on NewsGuard to in
Speaker 1: its software and to help tech companies censor propaganda, you
Speaker 1: see exactly how it's a vicious cycle. And the Times
Speaker 1: is a big thing. The Times should have put in
Speaker 1: ken Vogel's work on Ukraine. Yes, for its Pultzer. They
Speaker 1: should have that. He was way ahead on that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was, he was. Title nine. There are new rules
Speaker 1: out and you've got some You've got a breakdown, Yeah,
Speaker 1: a little bit of a breakdown here. As we were
Speaker 1: actually prepping counterpoints last week, the Biden administration ruled out
Speaker 1: it's long away to Title nine rule related to athletics.
Speaker 1: It's a proposal, it's more than one hundred pages long,
Speaker 1: and it marked a slight departure from what I expected,
Speaker 1: at least in style, if not in substance. So we
Speaker 1: took a breath and dug in before going too wild
Speaker 1: with it. So as a quick reminder, Title nine, as
Speaker 1: you know, is a Nixon era law nineteen seventy two
Speaker 1: that has come to dictate policies on everything from sexual
Speaker 1: assault to sports. It was just one short part of
Speaker 1: a larger bill, so we can read the full text here.
Speaker 1: Here's what it says. No person in the United States shall,
Speaker 1: on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in,
Speaker 1: be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination
Speaker 1: under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
Speaker 1: For years, Title nine was best known for its controversial
Speaker 1: effect on men's sports. But in the Obama era it
Speaker 1: became a lightning rod when the Education Department issued a
Speaker 1: series of Dear Colleague letters on sexual assault and gender identity. Essentially,
Speaker 1: they made federal funding contingent on schools reading sex and
Speaker 1: Title nine as gender identity and on conforming their sexual
Speaker 1: assault policies to standards that bipartisan experts eventually denounced as
Speaker 1: kangaroo courts. Plus, Dear Colleague letters are anti democratic expansions
Speaker 1: of executive power that allow unelected DC bureaucrats to legislate
Speaker 1: via a letter. So on both counts it was a mess,
Speaker 1: So much so that when Betsy Devas walked back the
Speaker 1: sexual assault policies, even the editorial board of the Washington
Speaker 1: Posts and a lot of other people on the left
Speaker 1: sided with her. When it comes to sports, I expected
Speaker 1: the Biden administration to basically revert back to pretty much
Speaker 1: what Obama did and simply stay sex is gender identity.
Speaker 1: Therefore there can be no legal distinctions between the two
Speaker 1: in sports, or locker rooms or anywhere else. This is
Speaker 1: basically what the boss Stoc decision that Neil Gorsuch wrote
Speaker 1: the opinion for did with Title seven when it comes
Speaker 1: to employment. Now, when it comes to sports, that reading
Speaker 1: is totally backwards. Title nine is remembered as an achievement
Speaker 1: of the American Women's movement because it gave women greater
Speaker 1: access to athletics. I've talked to at least three different
Speaker 1: kids involved in legal battles who all told me the
Speaker 1: gender identity interpretation is costing girls scholarships, as single male
Speaker 1: athletes can dominate in regional leagues. It can also, of course,
Speaker 1: girls in danger when they're forced into contact sports with
Speaker 1: people who are at least on average stronger. But instead
Speaker 1: of going down the Obama route, Biden's Education Department devised
Speaker 1: what they probably think is a very clever workaround. As
Speaker 1: you read the proposed rule, you realize they're essentially creating
Speaker 1: burdens for schools who wish to prevent discrimination on the
Speaker 1: basis of sex. As title line says, this is where
Speaker 1: I'm glad we waited to cover the rule, expecting something
Speaker 1: more along the lines of what Obama did. Immediate reactions
Speaker 1: to the proposals seem to suggest it marked some kind
Speaker 1: of compromise that's really only true on the most superficial level.
Speaker 1: If gender identity is the exact same thing as sex.
Speaker 1: Then it makes no sense whatsoever to say, Hey, schools
Speaker 1: can discriminate on the basis of sex if they can
Speaker 1: prove it's actually good. You either believe that gender identity
Speaker 1: and sex are the same or you don't, and placing
Speaker 1: the burden on schools who are actually trying to follow
Speaker 1: the spirit of the original law by preventing sex discrimination
Speaker 1: to prove that they should be able to do that,
Speaker 1: just reinstating the Obama rule with packaging that's meant to
Speaker 1: be kind of distracting. Here's how the New York Times
Speaker 1: interpreted the rule. Quote. Elementary school students would generally be
Speaker 1: able to participate on teams matching their identity. But as
Speaker 1: students get older and go through puberty, and as competition increases,
Speaker 1: schools and athletic organizations would make a multi pronged assessment
Speaker 1: of whether or not to restrict transgender athletes from playing
Speaker 1: on their preferred team. The age of the students, the
Speaker 1: level of the fairness, and the nature of the sport
Speaker 1: would be among the considerations. All right, so that sport,
Speaker 1: the age of the students, all of those things. Let's
Speaker 1: consider that phrase. The New York Times used multi pronged
Speaker 1: assessment for just a moment. If the rule remains unchanged
Speaker 1: after the thirty day comment period, we're now in. That's
Speaker 1: what schools are going to have to undergo to do
Speaker 1: what feminists in the seventies fought for, the multi pronged
Speaker 1: assessment on all of those counts, age, sport, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So that shows us clearly it's the exception and not
Speaker 1: the norm. Theoretically, the Biden administration wants to argue that
Speaker 1: it's created a pathway for schools to do what they
Speaker 1: think is best, but in practice, we have no idea
Speaker 1: how often those quote multi pronged assessments would be approved.
Speaker 1: Plus it's absolutely absurd to force schools to ask the
Speaker 1: Department of Education for permission to discriminate against women. But
Speaker 1: of course, even this radical definition of sex as gender identity,
Speaker 1: except when a school can prove to the federal government
Speaker 1: it should be otherwise, did not satisfy professional activists. On Monday,
Speaker 1: trans lawmakers from around the country sent Biden a letter quote.
Speaker 1: While we understand the administration may have been attempting to
Speaker 1: provide legal protections and clarity, in actuality, this proposed rule
Speaker 1: changes will simply provide those who seek to deny us
Speaker 1: are write a roadmap for how to do so. The
Speaker 1: letter read. The decision was criticized by everyone from HRC
Speaker 1: to AOC. Well, why, I mean, first of all, again,
Speaker 1: you either believe sexist gender identity or you don't. And
Speaker 1: the Biden administration hedging and that makes no sense. But
Speaker 1: if it did, if this rule provides quote a roadmap,
Speaker 1: as that letter argues, really have to squint. Here is
Speaker 1: exactly what the proposal reads. The proposed regulation would require
Speaker 1: that if a recipient adopts or applies sexuated criteria, that
Speaker 1: it would limit or deny students eligibility to participate on
Speaker 1: a male or female team consistent with their gender identity.
Speaker 1: Such criteria must for each sport level of competition at
Speaker 1: greater education level, one be substantially related to the achievement
Speaker 1: of an important educational objective, and two minimize harms to
Speaker 1: students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female
Speaker 1: team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.
Speaker 1: The proposed regulation would not affect a recipient's discretion to
Speaker 1: offer separate male and female athletic teams when selection is
Speaker 1: based on competitive skill or the activity involved as a
Speaker 1: contact sport. So not only do you have to meet
Speaker 1: all of that criteria, you also then have to minimize
Speaker 1: harms and meet criteria to do that. If you don't
Speaker 1: do this to the satisfaction of the Education Department, you
Speaker 1: risk losing your federal funding. The incentive for schools to
Speaker 1: test those limits is remarkably low. It's also absurd that
Speaker 1: we're so accustomed to federal power graphs right now that
Speaker 1: executive branch issues aren't even a part of this conversation.
Speaker 1: It's worth remembering that the Obama era Dear Colleague Letter
Speaker 1: on gender identity made decisions for schools everywhere from Brooklyn
Speaker 1: to rural Kansas, dramatically changing their day to day operations
Speaker 1: in one fell swoop. We have the system of federalism
Speaker 1: we do in order to avoid precisely this, and what
Speaker 1: happened in the subsequent years is why this is key.
Speaker 1: Rather than allowing communities to sort these different, these extremely
Speaker 1: difficult questions and issues out on their own democratically and
Speaker 1: come to the right consensus, Washington did it for the
Speaker 1: whole country at once. Gender identity is just not as
Speaker 1: clear cut a category. It's just not the same thing,
Speaker 1: and that by its very definition, and that's by the
Speaker 1: very definition its proponents advance, one that seeks to radically
Speaker 1: change the way we understand biology and psychology. It's crucial
Speaker 1: to protect children dealing with gender dysphoria and the enormous
Speaker 1: pains that it can bring with it. Legislating with letters
Speaker 1: and administrators rules thrusts kids into awful political debates where
Speaker 1: they become pawns in national partisan games. This will make
Speaker 1: that problem worse as schools around the country are expected
Speaker 1: by stakeholders on both sides to push schools into going
Speaker 1: one way or the other, forcing the Education Department to
Speaker 1: settle the fights, and putting kids in the middle of
Speaker 1: all of it. All. Right, Ryan, I think you have
Speaker 1: some assange reflections to share with us this morning. What
Speaker 1: are you at? So we have a new letter from
Speaker 1: Democrats in Congress, actually seven Democrats in Congress, and we
Speaker 1: can put up this tweet from Congressman Rashida Talib who
Speaker 1: led a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that
Speaker 1: he end the prosecution of Julian Assan for publishing classified
Speaker 1: documents and and the extradition attempt. It was signed by
Speaker 1: the kind of six members of the squad. That's talib Omar,
Speaker 1: Jamal Bowman, Corey bush Aana Presley, who did I leave
Speaker 1: out I'll see you a Bowman, Yeah, and Greg Kassar,
Speaker 1: who is a freshman who represents Austin, Texas. So the
Speaker 1: only one outside of the squad to jump on was Gazar.
Speaker 1: You might have expected maybe Summer Lee, who is kind
Speaker 1: of also considered to be part of this kind of
Speaker 1: growing squad. You might have expected maybe Adli Ramirez. You
Speaker 1: may have expected Rocanna or Promeila Jayapaul, both of whom
Speaker 1: have spoken in favor of this position that charges should
Speaker 1: be dropped. But it appears like the Congressional Progressive Caucus
Speaker 1: probably wanted this to be more of a squad letter
Speaker 1: than to be a Progressive Caucus letter. Now, according to
Speaker 1: Gabriel Shipton, who is Juliana Sanchez brother, he tells me
Speaker 1: that there are there are other letters coming as well,
Speaker 1: one one from Australia, which has forty eight members of
Speaker 1: what do they have a parliament there? Whatever they have
Speaker 1: down under forty eight forty eight of those many times
Speaker 1: more than the United States. In the UK thirty five
Speaker 1: members of parliament. Letters also coming from Mexico and Brazil,
Speaker 1: with combined more than one hundred legislators, all calling for
Speaker 1: the end of the end of this prosecution, the protection
Speaker 1: of a free press, and the dropping of the extradition
Speaker 1: attempt against Julian Assange. Now my understanding is that this
Speaker 1: letter was circulated among Democrats because there is a a
Speaker 1: because we're in a hyper polarized environment, and b because
Speaker 1: the administration that is prosecuting him is democratic, And so
Speaker 1: the thinking is that there are more. You know, it's
Speaker 1: more useful to have Democrats pressuring a democratic administration and republicans.
Speaker 1: So I think that's why there are zero Republicans on
Speaker 1: this letter, even though some have publicly called for these
Speaker 1: charges to be dropped. What did you make of you know,
Speaker 1: as as shipped and put it to me, he's there
Speaker 1: excited that it is a start from the outset tie.
Speaker 1: People must say it's frustrating that there are only seven
Speaker 1: Democrats who are willing to stand up for this issue.
Speaker 1: But your interpretation is more that they kind of wanted
Speaker 1: to keep it to the squad. I don't think the
Speaker 1: squad did. I think the rest of the the rest
Speaker 1: of them. I think the rest of Caucus doesn't just
Speaker 1: simply Democratic Caucus doesn't want to be associated with Julian Assange.
Speaker 1: So this is interesting because it reminds me of what
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier in the show, in the
Speaker 1: context of you know, the National Security State being team
Speaker 1: Red or Team Blue, or actually just being team Nats,
Speaker 1: being team Blob. And I think this is a good
Speaker 1: example of how their team blob, where you have the
Speaker 1: Obama administration resist going after Assange in the same way
Speaker 1: that Trump administration did. The Trump administration figures out, you
Speaker 1: know that they don't really care about the so called
Speaker 1: New York Times problem that the Obama administration identified, and
Speaker 1: the Biden administration now is overseeing the case against Assange.
Speaker 1: And it shows you, I think, even when you know,
Speaker 1: in this evolution post Obama, when Assange kind of fell
Speaker 1: out of the news in the same way, he's definitely
Speaker 1: out of the news in not in the same way
Speaker 1: that he was in the news in the Obama administration,
Speaker 1: the early Trump administration twenty sixteen Russia collusion wiki leagues
Speaker 1: type time. Now that he's fallen out of the news,
Speaker 1: Democrats are like, we can be team Blob, we can
Speaker 1: you know, it's sort of in the same It's a
Speaker 1: reverse of how Donald Trump had this weird patchwork of
Speaker 1: people that were team Blob but also like team populist
Speaker 1: isolationist almost you have like John Bolton working alongside random
Speaker 1: other Trump people who seem decide more with Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: and you know, Rand Paul on foreign policy. It's like
Speaker 1: the reverse of that, where you have this strange, like
Speaker 1: leftist some people in the Biden administration being kind of leftist,
Speaker 1: but the security establishment being security establishment, and they're in
Speaker 1: control now, They're firmly in control, and that's who I
Speaker 1: think democrats ultimately listen to. They don't want to go
Speaker 1: against them on those big questions because then you get
Speaker 1: you face the media pressure that Obama based during the Assinge,
Speaker 1: the initial Assinge era, right, and the charge the specific
Speaker 1: charges relate to the leaks by Chelsea Manning, including the
Speaker 1: kind of collateral murder video if people remember that, which
Speaker 1: which showed evidence of video evidence of US troops massacring
Speaker 1: civilians and a Reuter's photographer. The only people charged in
Speaker 1: connection with that mass murder have been Julian Assange and
Speaker 1: Chelsea Manning. Also the State Department cables and some other
Speaker 1: things that that Manning leaked. So those are the charges
Speaker 1: from that period of time, But it is really his
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen reporting and publishing John Podesta emails, you know,
Speaker 1: and the Hillary Clinton speeches that were embedded in the
Speaker 1: John Podesta emails. That really is the thing I think
Speaker 1: that has Democrats in the anti Assange camp, like they
Speaker 1: still blame him for acting Trump and Assange was privately
Speaker 1: supportive of of Trump, he thought, and he thought that
Speaker 1: it would be better for the rest of the world
Speaker 1: if Trump were president, and they thought that Democrat his
Speaker 1: his reasoning was that Democrats would be so reflexively anti
Speaker 1: Trump that they would constrain his imperialistic tendencies, and so
Speaker 1: US Empire would be constrained by that kind of push
Speaker 1: and pull between the two parties. That kind of frankly
Speaker 1: reasonable ish take like that, and he's entitled to his
Speaker 1: take like that. It's not it's not a crime for
Speaker 1: a journalist to have a position in an election one
Speaker 1: way or the other. And he was asked, why didn't
Speaker 1: you kind of leaked Trump's emails, He's like, nobody gave
Speaker 1: me Trump's emails. Well, that's the thing. If he got
Speaker 1: if somebody leaked him Trump's emails. Trump doesn't use email,
Speaker 1: but let's say Donald Trump Junior's emails, he'd have dumped them,
Speaker 1: like we we can be we can be very confident
Speaker 1: of that, Like that's that's what he does. And but
Speaker 1: I think it's that stigma associated with Trump that has
Speaker 1: Democrats unwilling to go anywhere near him because then they're
Speaker 1: going to face all kinds of blowback from their kind
Speaker 1: of their democratic voter base, who is also very hostile
Speaker 1: to assange. So I wonder how it would shape out
Speaker 1: if it was just the blob, just the CIA. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And I don't totally know. Well, and maybe like that's
Speaker 1: that's the thing, Like, is it potentially true that some
Speaker 1: agents of Russia leaked this information to Wiki League? Sure
Speaker 1: could be. That's not the point. And that published information
Speaker 1: that was allegedly uh you know, leaked or hacked by
Speaker 1: other foreign governments, not Russia, but uh, other other governments.
Speaker 1: If it's true and we can authenticate it, yeah, still journalism,
Speaker 1: it's newsworthy. And that's a complete distinction that gets glossed over.
Speaker 1: And that's where this case is so frustrating. Before I
Speaker 1: also published plenty of stuff off the wiki League's cables,
Speaker 1: which according to them, came from Russia. So I have
Speaker 1: done that. So yeah, you also count accused of working
Speaker 1: for the CIA. So I think someone just needs to
Speaker 1: get their story straight about who you work for, whether
Speaker 1: you work for Russia, Yeah, the same thing is there's
Speaker 1: something much bigger going on. Yeah you work for cloudshoss No.
Speaker 1: I think that's what's so frustrating about this is that
Speaker 1: if you have evidence that Julian Nossange stole state secrets
Speaker 1: by all means, but their evidence for that is such
Speaker 1: bullshit that it actually does endanger other journalists. It's a
Speaker 1: ridiculous case. And again, if you have that case, make it.
Speaker 1: But they don't. This is their like they've they've already
Speaker 1: devised their genius way of getting Julian massage. And it's
Speaker 1: not like a slam dunk case. It's a ridiculous case
Speaker 1: that implicates other journalists. And that's the problem. Like you
Speaker 1: can think what Julian Nossange did was wrong, you can
Speaker 1: think that he shouldn't have published what looks like it's
Speaker 1: possibly propaganda to destabilize the United States. That's not a
Speaker 1: question of journal in news. That's a question that's a
Speaker 1: separate question. But what he published was obviously newsworthy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no question about it, no question about it whatsoever. Wouldn't
Speaker 1: have been news all over the world if it wasn't, ye, nope, nope.
Speaker 1: So next up, we're going to be joined by Maryann
Speaker 1: Williamson to talk about her the TikTok Marion mania that
Speaker 1: has gripped the nation. Yes, looking forward to that coming
Speaker 1: up right next, Well, if the presidential election were held
Speaker 1: today on what is one of the biggest social media
Speaker 1: company platforms in the country, in fact, the biggest certainly
Speaker 1: under people among fifty years old, the winner of that
Speaker 1: prize would be none other than Mary Anne Williamson. That's right,
Speaker 1: what do you mean close? Absolute landslide blowout. So we're
Speaker 1: joined by the president elect of TikTok now herself, Maryann
Speaker 1: Williamson joins us. Now, Marianne, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: And so what do you make of this Marianne mania
Speaker 1: that has been gripping TikTok And how did you learn
Speaker 1: actually that you've become such a kind of cultural phenomenon
Speaker 1: on this app Well, you know, part of my decision
Speaker 1: making about whether or not to run. Had to do it.
Speaker 1: Taking a college tour. I spoke at eight colleges and
Speaker 1: universities because I wanted to get a sense of where
Speaker 1: younger people were and whether they would see me and
Speaker 1: whether I would see them, and whether there would be
Speaker 1: any connection in terms of what I wanted to do
Speaker 1: as a candidate and hopefully one day as a president.
Speaker 1: And so i'm I feel I understand the alignment between
Speaker 1: what I have to say and younger people. You know,
Speaker 1: gen Z, they're not even twentieth century people. Most of
Speaker 1: these kids in college today weren't even born in the
Speaker 1: twentieth century, or if they were, they just hung out
Speaker 1: there for a few years as babies. And so they
Speaker 1: have a visceral sense that they are living their lives,
Speaker 1: that the effect of bad ideas left over from the
Speaker 1: twentieth century. Every generation wants to individuate. Every person does
Speaker 1: this generation. It's individuating from a century and from a millennium.
Speaker 1: They want to build on what worked, and they want
Speaker 1: to cut the cord and start over again with a
Speaker 1: lot of things. And that's my that's my agenda. And
Speaker 1: they hear me, and the fact that their pain is
Speaker 1: recognized by my campaign. They don't want to hear this
Speaker 1: bs about how the economy is doing well. You know,
Speaker 1: last night I spoke to Yale at Yale University. I
Speaker 1: said something at Yale, and I also said at Stanford,
Speaker 1: and I saw all these kids on their head. I said,
Speaker 1: even with a degree from one of these schools, you know,
Speaker 1: you're not going to be able to afford the house
Speaker 1: that your parents had. You know that it's going to
Speaker 1: all of this neoliberal trickle down economic theory that so
Speaker 1: holds down the majority of people on some level, it
Speaker 1: will hold you down to and even if the system
Speaker 1: says to you, oh, we'll let you in because it
Speaker 1: needs the best and the brightest to perpetuate itself. Don't
Speaker 1: allow yourself to be seduced, because it's not okay for
Speaker 1: you to live your life where everything's okay at the
Speaker 1: expense of pain and suffering for the majority of people.
Speaker 1: Young people hear that, and I'm glad that they do.
Speaker 1: And there are a bunch of different types of clips
Speaker 1: of yours that have gone viral. Some are kind of
Speaker 1: speeches of yours from the nineteen eighties and nineties. Some
Speaker 1: of the clips from the twenty twenty your twenty twenty
Speaker 1: presidential campaign. I want to play one here though that
Speaker 1: this is from the current presidential campaign been viewed, you
Speaker 1: know millions, many millions of times's let's play that one here.
Speaker 1: What are you going to do when you first get there?
Speaker 1: First thing I'm going to do is cancel the Willow Project.
Speaker 1: I'm also going to cancel all student debt. I'm going
Speaker 1: to declassify marijuana from a Schedule one drug. In addition
Speaker 1: to auditing the Pentagon. Oh, also I want to cancel
Speaker 1: We're going to immediately cancel all government contracts with union
Speaker 1: busting companies. And we're going to really bolster the NLRB,
Speaker 1: and we're going to really bolster everything involved with supporting unions.
Speaker 1: One of the first things I'll do is put together
Speaker 1: a conference where I hear from the best experts in
Speaker 1: this country on everything related to childhood. You know, John
Speaker 1: Kennedy said in ten years will land a man on
Speaker 1: the moon. You know what I'm going to say to you.
Speaker 1: Within ten years, every public school, this is my vision
Speaker 1: that every public school in the United States would be
Speaker 1: a palace of learning and culture in the arts. Well,
Speaker 1: what struck me about that clip? Is it? It kind
Speaker 1: of combines cultural critique and cultural issues with kind of
Speaker 1: with class war, with corruption, and with a pro worker agenda.
Speaker 1: You don't see, you know a lot of candidates talking
Speaker 1: about an LRB or getting into the weeds on the
Speaker 1: way that the federal government could cancel contracts with union
Speaker 1: busting or non union non union firms. So is that
Speaker 1: Are you finding that the combination of those is resonating
Speaker 1: or is one of them kind of hotter than another
Speaker 1: to your audience. Now, my political campaigning is no different
Speaker 1: than my writing. I say what I believe needs to
Speaker 1: be said. You know, many years ago I read a
Speaker 1: quote by a man named Arnold Patton. He said, if
Speaker 1: you genuine have something you need to say, there's someone
Speaker 1: out there who genuinely needs to hear it. I'm not
Speaker 1: filtering myself. Well do they want to hear that? Will
Speaker 1: they like it? If I say that? Will there be
Speaker 1: a demographic who hears that? I'm saying what I believe
Speaker 1: needs to be said in order to repair the country,
Speaker 1: which I also believe is what needs to be said
Speaker 1: in order to win the presidency in twenty twenty four. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of people on the left,
Speaker 1: on the right everybody's in these silos. And I think
Speaker 1: this goes back to gen Z. I think gen Z
Speaker 1: are among millions of Americans who can we break out
Speaker 1: of the silos? Please? Can we realize that in many
Speaker 1: issues it's both and it's political and it's cultural, it's
Speaker 1: policy change, and it's personal change. I think that's what
Speaker 1: the twenty first century demands. This thinking that's sort of
Speaker 1: the stale thinking, Well, if you talk about if you
Speaker 1: talk about the NLRB, you're not also going to be
Speaker 1: talking about cultural issues with children. Well, actually maybe you will.
Speaker 1: And I think that that's where people are ready to be.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna say, totally unshackled by that binary
Speaker 1: that it's either politics as personal. It's either left or
Speaker 1: it's right. And on that note, what I like about
Speaker 1: that clip is, you know, it's one of the same
Speaker 1: things I like about looking back at Ronald Reagan's rhetoric
Speaker 1: is that it's kind of soaring and optimistic. When you
Speaker 1: look back at how Americans talked about the future in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties, or successful American politicians talked about the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties they were seeing something on the horizon, or
Speaker 1: in the nineteen sixties, Kennedy, like you said, and I
Speaker 1: want to ask you know, in some sense, it seems
Speaker 1: to me, really that this stuff resonates because gen Z
Speaker 1: is in a lot of pain because they want they're
Speaker 1: desperate for something to be optimistic about, because they're just
Speaker 1: sort of drowning and pessimism because they are in a
Speaker 1: lot of personal pain for both political and cultural reasons.
Speaker 1: But I wonder if if that's your take on this too,
Speaker 1: that they really aren't in pain, and so part of
Speaker 1: why your message resonates with them is is sadly because
Speaker 1: of that. Absolutely they've been sold a bill of goods
Speaker 1: that success means making it within what is ultimately a
Speaker 1: meaningless universe. I mean, if all the system can offer
Speaker 1: is a way to have success within a hyper capitalist system,
Speaker 1: that will have you, you you know, like just every single
Speaker 1: day trying to struggle to make it more and at
Speaker 1: the expense sometimes of the things that matter most in life.
Speaker 1: They understand that something's wrong with that. I think millions
Speaker 1: of Americans understand that something's wrong with that. People understand
Speaker 1: that this country has swerved away from very essential things
Speaker 1: and even people. You know, one of the things we
Speaker 1: were talking about last night, because a lot of these
Speaker 1: kids are into economics, you know, in political theory, and
Speaker 1: I pointed out that Adam Smith, himself, the primary architect
Speaker 1: of free market capitalism, said it cannot exist outside an
Speaker 1: ethical universe. So the country, whether you're on the left
Speaker 1: or the right, knows that there's a soullessness at the
Speaker 1: center of how we're operating. There's a lack of ethics.
Speaker 1: I mean, look at what's happening in this country. I
Speaker 1: don't care what your politics are. Something's wrong at the
Speaker 1: heart of things. And I believe that it is time
Speaker 1: for a president who is willing to name that and
Speaker 1: speak to it in a meaningful way, not just as
Speaker 1: a slogan, but actually connecting the dots between the way
Speaker 1: we operate politically and economically with the suffering of so
Speaker 1: many human beings, both those who are making it and
Speaker 1: those who are not. And pekingbacking on what Emily said,
Speaker 1: I want to play one other clif that's been circulating
Speaker 1: on TikTok, let's roll that one. People these days talk
Speaker 1: about how traumatized they are by the Trump phenomena. I'm
Speaker 1: just so traumatized by it. Do you think that people
Speaker 1: who walked across the bridge at Soma were not traumatized.
Speaker 1: Everybody said, I'm so anxious. It's just this whole thing
Speaker 1: has been so anxious. Really, what about those women standing
Speaker 1: up at a wrong right now? We need to toughen up.
Speaker 1: Butter cups everybody in this room. However pushed down we are,
Speaker 1: is nothing compared to how push down the air ononians
Speaker 1: are right now, and they are showing up. So I
Speaker 1: think we have gotten to a point where we're toddling
Speaker 1: our neuroses a little too much. Right now we need
Speaker 1: to say, meditate, take a shower tray in the morning,
Speaker 1: and kick ass in the afternoon. Paste not to minimize
Speaker 1: the pain. Sometimes you call your girlfriends, you call the
Speaker 1: people in your life, can I share my pain? And
Speaker 1: then that call is over and the person who loves
Speaker 1: you on that call says, promise me, you're going to
Speaker 1: get out there this afternoon and show them what you've got.
Speaker 1: You and I were talking the other day for an
Speaker 1: article I'm working on for the Intercept on this same phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and I put to you kind of controversial idea and
Speaker 1: I want to get your take on it here too,
Speaker 1: which is that I see some parallels with early Jordan Peterson.
Speaker 1: I like that that you couldn't You could end up
Speaker 1: filling the same void that Jordan Peterson before he before
Speaker 1: he drifted off into what he's doing now filled for
Speaker 1: a lot of a lot of young people in this country.
Speaker 1: And I thought in that clip, you saw some of
Speaker 1: the closest parallels, uh, both both inspirational but also not
Speaker 1: pandering and not taking responsibility away from people, you know,
Speaker 1: to you know, go out there and kick ass in
Speaker 1: the afternoon. So what what's your take on that kind
Speaker 1: of out out there comparison that there could be some
Speaker 1: overlap there. Well, I think the significant word is early,
Speaker 1: you know early Jordan Peterson. I thought, oh, this is good.
Speaker 1: He's really telling people to stop being such precious, entitled,
Speaker 1: you know, spoiled brats. He's really telling people to toughen
Speaker 1: up and be mature. And then he took this this
Speaker 1: just this dive, this turn into a direction that I
Speaker 1: find kind of frightening. Actually, So yes, as long as
Speaker 1: you make it very early Jordan Peterson, but where he
Speaker 1: has gone with it is very very very different, complete
Speaker 1: opposite from where I would go. You must, as you
Speaker 1: become more mature, become more compassionate, more humble, and you
Speaker 1: must see your politics that way as well. And I
Speaker 1: he's become very, very different than anything on whatever any
Speaker 1: direction I would ever take at who he is now.
Speaker 1: And it's an interesting question because, yeah, early Jordan Pearson
Speaker 1: was telling people basically make your bed, take control of
Speaker 1: your life. And what I like about what what you
Speaker 1: were saying in that clip, Marian is it's it's not
Speaker 1: denying that people are in pain. It's not denying that
Speaker 1: there's some suffering, but it's putting it in perspective and
Speaker 1: empowering people to deal with it differently. And and on
Speaker 1: that note, I would be vermisfitted and asked, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think TikTok is part of some of the mental
Speaker 1: health crises that people are having. They did they just
Speaker 1: spend too much time on TikTok uh. So on that note,
Speaker 1: what would what would you say to some of the
Speaker 1: zoomers who this is really resonating with on on TikTok?
Speaker 1: What would you say to them about, you know, their
Speaker 1: their strategy for balancing you know, political activism on TikTok
Speaker 1: and political activism in the real world support for someone
Speaker 1: like you on TikTok versus support for someone like you also,
Speaker 1: you know, in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina.
Speaker 1: What do you think the right balance should be there? Well,
Speaker 1: I think young people as well as the rest of
Speaker 1: us are reading all the articles, we are understanding the
Speaker 1: very very deleterious effects mentally and emotionally psychologically on too
Speaker 1: much social media use. I mean, everybody gets that, But
Speaker 1: to me, the fact that somebody is on TikTok doesn't
Speaker 1: of itself logically mean that they're on it many, many
Speaker 1: hours a day. I think we're all recognizing now the
Speaker 1: addictive qualities of social media and the damage that it
Speaker 1: does to our lives if we're on those tablets too
Speaker 1: long every single day. But the fact that younger people
Speaker 1: are looking for different ways to share information to get
Speaker 1: information is a separate issue from surveillance capitalism. For whether
Speaker 1: it has to do with TikTok or an American company
Speaker 1: and lot of that. This is where they are, this
Speaker 1: is what they're going to be doing, regardless of what
Speaker 1: we think about social media, it's here to stay. This
Speaker 1: is an example where the answer is not only government regulations. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there's some serious questions going on there and serious issues
Speaker 1: to balance about free speech versus all of those things.
Speaker 1: But a lot of it does have to do with
Speaker 1: personal change all of us, whether it has do with
Speaker 1: TikTok or our phone or anything. I mean, mature conscious
Speaker 1: people are saying, I got to put this thing, that
Speaker 1: thing down. I should not be spending so many hours
Speaker 1: on that. We're recognizing the addictive qualities, and I trust
Speaker 1: America's young people to recognize it as well. And you know,
Speaker 1: as as your campaign picks up steam, you're going to
Speaker 1: start coming under more scrutiny. To the extent that you
Speaker 1: have gotten any coverage from the mainstream corporate press, it
Speaker 1: has been critical of your previous treatment of staff. So
Speaker 1: I'm curious, One, if you've heard that from people that
Speaker 1: you that have come up to you on the campaign trail,
Speaker 1: They've asked you about those claims from past staff, And two,
Speaker 1: you know, how do you respond to those? I get
Speaker 1: those Politico or maybe there's another article from former staff
Speaker 1: saying that you're a rough boss to work for. A
Speaker 1: lot of people have worked for me for years and
Speaker 1: think I'm a nice person. I think that if you know,
Speaker 1: I wish I could speak always in those deals, in
Speaker 1: those zin calm, loving tones of all the men who
Speaker 1: run Washington. I'll try to be more like them. Look,
Speaker 1: I've raised my voice at times, and I'm sorry. And
Speaker 1: if anybody has ever experienced me as less than respectful
Speaker 1: to them, then I am sorry. And if ten percent
Speaker 1: of that is true, it's something to look at within myself.
Speaker 1: And I think that's true. But those stories are so overblown,
Speaker 1: planted smear hit. I've never thrown a phone or anything
Speaker 1: like that. So if I lost my temper a few
Speaker 1: times in the office, absolutely, But the picture of me
Speaker 1: is that has been painted is beyond mischaracterization, and I
Speaker 1: think most people know it most importantly, even people who've
Speaker 1: read the articles. What I find out in those states
Speaker 1: you were talking about are people who want healthcare, they
Speaker 1: want child care, they want pay family leave, they want
Speaker 1: a livable wage. They want to be able to send
Speaker 1: their kids to college. You know, in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: they could. In the nineteen seventies, the average worker could
Speaker 1: afford to send their kids to college, could afford a
Speaker 1: yearly vacation, could afford a home, could afford these things
Speaker 1: that are now like some past middle class that used
Speaker 1: to exist almost in some fairy tale. That's what people
Speaker 1: want to talk about, not the games of how the
Speaker 1: DNC is going to plant stories about me because I'm
Speaker 1: inconvenient to the system. People see beyond that. I know
Speaker 1: that people who actually are meeting me in these in
Speaker 1: these in these other states are beyond that. But of
Speaker 1: course the DNC is having their you know, they're having
Speaker 1: their desired effect. Throwing a lot of fairy does a
Speaker 1: lot of people's eyes almost blackout in certain media outlets.
Speaker 1: But that's why these young people and they're and such
Speaker 1: as yourself independent media giving me a chance so that
Speaker 1: the American people can see what does this person offer me?
Speaker 1: What would this person do as president? And for that,
Speaker 1: I just want to add one thing I have been
Speaker 1: I have witnessed a sitting president get upset, No more
Speaker 1: upset than I've gotten. And you know what my thought
Speaker 1: about it was at the time, well reason to be angry.
Speaker 1: Sorry guys, anybody who thinks that anyway, I think I
Speaker 1: made my point. And last last question is this is
Speaker 1: the TikTok phenomenon translating into kind of small dollar donations
Speaker 1: into the campaign. I don't see a lot of ways
Speaker 1: on TikTok, like the way that you would see on
Speaker 1: say Twitter, YouTube or Facebook in the past to channel
Speaker 1: that into the campaign. Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't
Speaker 1: have a way of knowing. I see a lot of
Speaker 1: five dollar donations come in. I see a lot of
Speaker 1: ten dollar donations come in. I see a lot of
Speaker 1: three dollar donations come in, but whether they came from
Speaker 1: TikTok or not, you know. I was watching an article
Speaker 1: on TV last night, a segment on television last night
Speaker 1: about the twenty twenty two elections and how the accepted
Speaker 1: wisdom has been the young people don't vote. This generation
Speaker 1: of young people, sure as heck, does vote, and they
Speaker 1: prove that in twenty twenty two, and they prove that
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin the other day as well as Chicago, obviously,
Speaker 1: because they know that their lives are on the line
Speaker 1: for this younger generation, whether or not they have healthcare,
Speaker 1: whether or not they can get rid of these college
Speaker 1: loan debts, whether or not they can go to college,
Speaker 1: whether or not they're going to have a habitable planet.
Speaker 1: They are recognizing the importance of politics, and they say,
Speaker 1: why should somebody who's only going to be here for
Speaker 1: maybe ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years longer get to have
Speaker 1: such an undue influence on what happens forty years from now,
Speaker 1: and they are getting that, so we know that their
Speaker 1: interest is translating into into voting. Whether or not it's
Speaker 1: translating into into financial giving, I don't know. I hope
Speaker 1: that they will understand that they're five dollars, certainly in
Speaker 1: a campaign like mine, obviously not corporate backed, run on
Speaker 1: small dollar donations. I can only hope that they're recognizing.
Speaker 1: You know, I didn't say it last night, but what
Speaker 1: I was thinking is if each of you kids, you know,
Speaker 1: gave me three dollars, it would be a good day
Speaker 1: in fundraising. So well, there you go, Marian, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you.
Speaker 1: It's always nice to be with you guys. Thank you.
Speaker 1: You got it. And Emily, is there is there a
Speaker 1: conservative parallel, any any kind of right wing politician who's
Speaker 1: lighting up TikTok in the way that Mary and Mania
Speaker 1: has gripped it. I don't go on TikTok because, as
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not in my thirties as of last month,
Speaker 1: so I'm too old for TikTok. Yeah, No, I mean,
Speaker 1: I actually don't go on TikTok. But I think the
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson comparison is a really interesting one because and
Speaker 1: also one thing that it makes me think of is
Speaker 1: I've said for a long time, it's just it honestly
Speaker 1: puzzles me why there hasn't been kind of a Ralph
Speaker 1: Nader running on issues with sort of like technology and alienation,
Speaker 1: and you really like the there hasn't been a candidate
Speaker 1: like that in a really long time. And I think
Speaker 1: Marian sort of is someone who's prepared to talk like
Speaker 1: that about alienation, about psychological problems that the country is
Speaker 1: facing in mass health problems that the country is facing
Speaker 1: in mass But on the right, I just hear way
Speaker 1: too little of that. So no, I don't think there's
Speaker 1: anything like that, and I do want to see that
Speaker 1: on the debate stage really badly. I can imagine Nator
Speaker 1: doing well on TikTok. The Native would do great on
Speaker 1: He almost says the Bernie esque quality right, like he's
Speaker 1: kind of commugionally. I sold I sold Ralph Nader T
Speaker 1: shirts in two thousand. Of course he's Madison Square Garden rally.
Speaker 1: Of course you did. He also was supposed to STEALT
Speaker 1: T shirts at Woodstock ninety nine. I'm not making this up.
Speaker 1: Weren't you You were supposed to be part of the
Speaker 1: volunteer staff. That's right. I was gonna sell T shirt
Speaker 1: Kindness t shirts that would talk ninety nine, and I
Speaker 1: backed out at the last minute. I eagerly await the
Speaker 1: Ryan Grim memoir. Glad I didn't what they have burned
Speaker 1: down the Kindest T shirt stand. That's the question. Didn't they?
Speaker 1: I think he didn't go because I didn't go. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they probably would have. Actually later made a T shirt
Speaker 1: where I had a friend draw Ralph Nader's face on
Speaker 1: that iconic Shade portrait. It's a great T shirt. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, it's funny. Well, that's a great place to
Speaker 1: leave it. There you go. Make tune in next Wednesday
Speaker 1: for more bizarre stories from the life and times of writing.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll talk to you later. Take it easy.
Speaker 1: To see you next week.