Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: It's Wednesday, so welcome to Counterpoints. And actually, Ryan, I
Speaker 4: was just thinking, we are about a week shy.
Speaker 5: Of one year of counterpoints.
Speaker 4: The one year University of conference does it, and right
Speaker 4: now is perfect because the campaign seasons in full swinging.
Speaker 4: Congress is going crazy. There will be chaos in Congress
Speaker 4: those fall, so we're ready to.
Speaker 5: Cover all of them.
Speaker 3: Gearing up. Can't wait, Well, we should.
Speaker 4: Just start right away with some big news about the
Speaker 4: law fair against Donald Trump. We're also going to be
Speaker 4: talking about Elon Musk and the Anti Defamation League, which
Speaker 4: are in a really intense back and forth the two
Speaker 4: parties are.
Speaker 5: Right now, we're going to be talking.
Speaker 4: About China Huawei and semiconductor chip technology advancements that are
Speaker 4: a little.
Speaker 5: I don't know, Ryan, what's the word for this.
Speaker 6: It's a nice kind of cold war. Everybody throwing money
Speaker 6: at technology. That's one way to do it for things
Speaker 6: that don't like, necessarily have to blow.
Speaker 5: Up, they don't necessarily have.
Speaker 3: That's kind of nice. That's a good kind of cold war.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there was a big special election to fill a
Speaker 6: house seat in Rhode Island last night. Progressives got rinsed.
Speaker 6: It was an extremely disappointing result for the left.
Speaker 3: There. We'll talk about that a little bit later.
Speaker 4: Updates in the McConnell saga, and then we'll be talking
Speaker 4: about some big news.
Speaker 5: Tucker Carlson, it's going to be Viking later this week.
Speaker 3: I'll just leave it at that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 6: If the name Larry Sinclair means anything to you, you back
Speaker 6: from two thousand and eight, you've got a clue about
Speaker 6: what this is about.
Speaker 3: But we'll get into it later.
Speaker 4: I was going to say it's perfect subject for Ryan
Speaker 4: because he was covering all of this back then.
Speaker 3: Here we are again.
Speaker 5: Here we are circle and some of them.
Speaker 4: Maria is back with us on breaking points to talk
Speaker 4: about some developments.
Speaker 5: This is a huge.
Speaker 4: Fall for labor, not just for Congress but also for labor.
Speaker 4: A lot of stuff happening, and we want to ask
Speaker 4: so Rob basically, can the right put its money where
Speaker 4: its mouth is when it comes to weighing in in
Speaker 4: these disputes, in these battles and actually fully realigning. So
Speaker 4: that's the question we'll toss to so Rob when he
Speaker 4: joins us later today. But let's go to Mark Meadows
Speaker 4: because Politico had a really interesting story that made waves
Speaker 4: yesterday where they narrowed in on an exchange between Mark
Speaker 4: Metal's lawyer and the judge.
Speaker 5: I think it was the judge.
Speaker 4: We can put a one up on the screen here
Speaker 4: in a case the case down in Georgia last week.
Speaker 5: So this is I'm reading here for media.
Speaker 4: I A new report connected the dots among Donald Trump
Speaker 4: co conspirators for his indictment in Georgia and established a
Speaker 4: pattern of behavior indicting the former, indicating the former president's
Speaker 4: allies will turn against him to legally save themselves. Politico
Speaker 4: reported on Mark Meadow's potential legal strategy. Is the White
Speaker 4: House Chief of Staff faces chargers connected with Trump's alleged
Speaker 4: conspiracy to overturn Georgia's twenty twenty election results. The report
Speaker 4: referred to a court documents showing a strong likelihood that
Speaker 4: Metals will join Trump's other former allies who will blame
Speaker 4: the ex president and portray him as the primary driver
Speaker 4: of the racketeering enterprise they've been accused of. Okay, so
Speaker 4: here is the key exchange that Media I pulled out
Speaker 4: from Politico. Meadows is the person who arranged the call
Speaker 4: with Raffensburger, perfect call, the perfect phone call with Raffensburger.
Speaker 4: But Meto's lawyer who's named Michael Francisco, which always makes
Speaker 4: me think of the scene in Elf where he's like Francisco.
Speaker 5: That's a fun thing to say.
Speaker 4: He says, quote, there's a lot of statements by mister Trump,
Speaker 4: mister Meadows speaking rules were quite limited. He didn't make
Speaker 4: a request that you changed the vote totals, mister Meadows himself,
Speaker 4: and then he asked that to Raffinsburger, and Raffensberger says correct, right,
Speaker 4: So this is an exchange not the judge, that was
Speaker 4: between Brad Raffinsberger and the attorney for Marketmados. And he's
Speaker 4: getting him to say that Meadows didn't ask for the
Speaker 4: vote totals to be changed himself.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And there's another piece that adds a breadcrumb to that,
Speaker 6: which is around the fake elector's scheme. And this is
Speaker 6: this part's gone viral where he says he did something
Speaker 6: because he didn't want to get yelled at by the
Speaker 6: President of the United States. Yes, but the context for
Speaker 6: that is the fake elector's scheme. And so they said, well,
Speaker 6: why did you why did you go ahead and put
Speaker 6: these fake electors slates together? He said, well, in the
Speaker 6: event that we won the court case, I wanted to
Speaker 6: have them ready to go.
Speaker 3: You know, why did you want to have them ready
Speaker 3: to go?
Speaker 6: Well, because the President the United States would have yelled
Speaker 6: at me if I didn't.
Speaker 3: And to me, if he can convince.
Speaker 6: A jury of that that the only reason he was
Speaker 6: setting up the fake elector's slates was in anticipation of
Speaker 6: a legal victory. Then that falls within his proper duties
Speaker 6: as a White House chief of staff, because we do
Speaker 6: accept that you are allowed to challenge election results through
Speaker 6: the court system, like that's that's fine, that's fair, that's
Speaker 6: that's that's that's all, that's all in the game.
Speaker 3: You're like, you're allowed to do that. And so if
Speaker 3: if the.
Speaker 6: Jury believes, Okay, he was just putting these electors together
Speaker 6: in case the Wisconsin you know, in case the Georgia case,
Speaker 6: the Arizona case, whatever came, he's going to have. Yeah,
Speaker 6: he's gonna have a timeline problem in that they had
Speaker 6: lost most of these by this point. However, maybe it's
Speaker 6: enough to like cloud it for a jury, but it
Speaker 6: does show his strategy that he's saying, I was doing
Speaker 6: things all within the legal confines, Like nothing wrong with
Speaker 6: setting up a phone call with Raffensburger. It's the president
Speaker 6: who got on there and was like, find me eleven
Speaker 6: thousand votes. Not wrong with having alternative electors ready to
Speaker 6: go if the courts go with you. It was the
Speaker 6: president who tried to use them even after the courts
Speaker 6: shut them down. So that does imply that he is
Speaker 6: trying to distance himself here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and willis though, and that's why she, I think,
Speaker 4: brings in the racketeering charges. And that was very intentional obviously,
Speaker 4: because then you can charge all of these people with
Speaker 4: the sort of peripheral activities and behavior because it all
Speaker 4: goes into the racket, literally into the racket. That was
Speaker 4: the attempt to as she sees an overturn the election,
Speaker 4: as opposed to what Mark Meadows is arguing, which is
Speaker 4: that we were preparing for potential legal changes. And again,
Speaker 4: Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz disagree about what happened in
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty in Hawaii, and they disagree about what happened
Speaker 4: in two thousand and Florida. But there have been other
Speaker 4: legal theories that you need to appoint a separate slate
Speaker 4: if the vote totals get overturned so that they're ready
Speaker 4: to go and vote in the direction.
Speaker 5: That the vote totals have shifted to. So yeah, it
Speaker 5: makes sense.
Speaker 4: It absolutely is a legal defense makes sense what Mark
Speaker 4: Monos was doing. People were surprised, I think, not to see,
Speaker 4: first of all, to see that Mark Menos was indicted,
Speaker 4: and not to see more breadcrumbs that maybe he was
Speaker 4: flipping in the I think the original Willison indictment.
Speaker 5: Were you surprised by that? I think everyone thought he
Speaker 5: had larready, he.
Speaker 3: Had already flipped.
Speaker 6: No, because I have been hearing since day one of
Speaker 6: the Trump presidency that all of his people are going
Speaker 6: to flip on him, yeah, and turn state's evidence over
Speaker 6: to initially whoever it was and it's over to Muller.
Speaker 6: Then it's like on and on, Like the media has
Speaker 6: constantly been waiting for this kind of rollover on Trump
Speaker 6: and that it was always going to be the thing
Speaker 6: that was going to get him, because it also has
Speaker 6: a kind of narrative satisfaction to it because Trump is
Speaker 6: such a cruel person to people underneath him, and so
Speaker 6: like obviously disloyal to people underneath him, like so willing
Speaker 6: to toss him off that I think a lot of
Speaker 6: people see people in that situation and are like, if
Speaker 6: I were them, I would have no loyalty in reverse
Speaker 6: to this guy. So he must want to flip, And
Speaker 6: so I think people have been anticipating a lot of
Speaker 6: flips that haven't come. And so I'm not ready to
Speaker 6: believe a flip until they've actually stuck the landing on it,
Speaker 6: because you know, the football has been pulled away so
Speaker 6: many times on this particular point. But it still is
Speaker 6: the point that Trump has raised two hundred fifty million
Speaker 6: dollars and he's got some he's got some broke like
Speaker 6: co defendants, and he's not even helping them out with
Speaker 6: their legal bills. It's like that is that is a
Speaker 6: recipe to get somebody to flip on you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what happened to Nixon. Maybe Roger Stone needs
Speaker 4: to tell him that.
Speaker 6: And what we haven't had up until now is all
Speaker 6: of these felony charges, these actual criminal charges. So we
Speaker 6: had kind of rumors of charges, we had investigations, we
Speaker 6: had legal jeopardy, but now people have been fingerprinted and
Speaker 6: mugshotted and are facing actual prison time, like staring down
Speaker 6: their lives being irreparably changed.
Speaker 5: Michael Cone got him.
Speaker 6: Yes you did Yes, you did it, Michae Cone, right,
Speaker 6: and he turned into the biggest Trump critic out there, right, yeah,
Speaker 6: and yeah.
Speaker 4: And the significance of Mark Meadows is sort of similar,
Speaker 4: I would think to Michael Cone, whose testimony has created
Speaker 4: I mean, actually, I think probably the Alvin Bragg stuff
Speaker 4: is in some ways rooted in Michael Cone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. He's the star witness.
Speaker 4: Yeah yeah, right, yeah, So, and Mark Meadows was by
Speaker 4: Donald Trump's side throughout that fall of twenty twenty and
Speaker 4: into the winter of twenty twenty. So you can imagine
Speaker 4: you know, what might especially like Willis prosecutor like Willis,
Speaker 4: would delight in getting Meadows to flip certainly there would
Speaker 4: be a lot of questions that they would be eager
Speaker 4: to ask him in that context of having flipped.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Sure, let's turn to some twenty twenty four news.
Speaker 4: Because so Donald Trump obviously the Republican front runner, Joe Biden,
Speaker 4: I guess the Democratic.
Speaker 5: Front runner because we're not going to do a primary.
Speaker 4: I guess we're just not doing it, despite the fact
Speaker 4: that what seventy percent of Democrats want some semblance of
Speaker 4: a primary. But Joe Biden is getting ready to blanket
Speaker 4: the airwaves during NFL games with this ad.
Speaker 5: Take a look at it.
Speaker 7: They said millions would lose their jobs and the economy
Speaker 7: would collapse, but this president refused to let that happen. Instead,
Speaker 7: he got to work fixing supply chains, fighting corporate greed,
Speaker 7: passing laws to lower the cost of medicine, cut utility bills,
Speaker 7: and make us more.
Speaker 3: Energy and dependent.
Speaker 7: Today, inflation is down to three percent, unemployment the lowest
Speaker 7: in decades. There's more to do, but President Biden is
Speaker 7: getting results that matter.
Speaker 3: I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
Speaker 5: It's like AI Joe Biden. No, I actually real Joe Biden.
Speaker 4: But you never know these days so that's a twenty
Speaker 4: five million dollar ad campaign for battleground states during the
Speaker 4: NFL opener on Thursday. They plan to actually run that
Speaker 4: through December. Obviously, as everyone just go that was very
Speaker 4: focused on his economic record, Bidenomics the new hot phrase
Speaker 4: in Washington, and a Wall Street Journal poll is Axios
Speaker 4: notes found a majority of American voters disapprove of the
Speaker 4: President's handling of the economy and inflation. So it's obviously
Speaker 4: trying to get ahead of that. Had a little bit
Speaker 4: of trouble in the White House briefing room yesterday answering
Speaker 4: an interesting question on the World Bank from friend of
Speaker 4: the show, Philip Wegman of Real Clear Politics.
Speaker 5: Let's play that video.
Speaker 8: Last question, given.
Speaker 9: That you said ulster in the World Bank is not
Speaker 9: about countering China. In this country, credit card delinquencies have spiked,
Speaker 9: mortgage rates are through the roof, Inflation remain the same problem. Meanwhile,
Speaker 9: the federal deficit this year is almost tripled, and the
Speaker 9: President wants to increase funding to foreign nations through the
Speaker 9: World Bank. How is that fair to citizen and say Scranton.
Speaker 8: Look, I think citizens in Scranton recognize the problems that
Speaker 8: happen overseas, don't stay overseas. They come here too a
Speaker 8: great cost to working people. COVID came here from overseas.
Speaker 8: When there's massive debt or instability or conflict elsewhere, it
Speaker 8: has a drag on the global economy, and America is
Speaker 8: part of the global economy. So our perspective is that
Speaker 8: for a modest investment, from the point of view of
Speaker 8: the overall size of the US budget, to put into
Speaker 8: ensuring greater stability, greater prosperity, greater capacity in the rest
Speaker 8: of the world, that is going to end up reducing
Speaker 8: the costs and burdens on working people in Scranton or
Speaker 8: Minneapolis or any of all eural's hometowns. And frankly, that's
Speaker 8: not some novel idea. That has been a bipartisan commitment
Speaker 8: of the United States for decades, and even the last administration,
Speaker 8: the biggest skeptic of all of this made investments in
Speaker 8: foreign aid because those investments are in the naked self
Speaker 8: interest of the United States as well as being the
Speaker 8: right thing to do.
Speaker 4: And you can obviously envision as well Ukraine being roped
Speaker 4: into a similar line of questioning about the Biden administrations
Speaker 4: basically control of the purse, swings, perse strings. What do
Speaker 4: you make of the ad? What do you make of
Speaker 4: Jake Salvin's answer there?
Speaker 6: He got more and more honest towards the end of it.
Speaker 6: And I like the part where he finally said, we're
Speaker 6: spending this money in the naked self interest of the
Speaker 6: United States. Yes, And I think people just need to
Speaker 6: understand that this is not charity, Like what the US
Speaker 6: gives to the World Bank, and the World Bank then
Speaker 6: spends abroad or the IMF or even propping up the
Speaker 6: WTO This is not charity.
Speaker 3: This is not in foreign aid is.
Speaker 6: A deceptive term, like we're not out there just you know,
Speaker 6: trying to do the right thing by you know, peasants
Speaker 6: in Vietnam or whatever. Like what are we trying to
Speaker 6: actually do. We're trying to exert our imperial influence around
Speaker 6: the globe, and we're trying to extract labor and resources
Speaker 6: from the rest of the world, from the periphery into
Speaker 6: the center here.
Speaker 3: Which then, if you have a kind.
Speaker 6: Of a social democratic uh empire, benefits the working class
Speaker 6: inside the empire. If you have a more conservative and
Speaker 6: las a fair one, then it all flows up to
Speaker 6: the very top, but then trickles down and then then
Speaker 6: you tell people, and then you tell people that it
Speaker 6: trickles down exactly. So, for example, the World Bank might
Speaker 6: make a loan for a giant nickel mine, which then
Speaker 6: strikes contracts with American corporations which get cheap labor working
Speaker 6: in the mine, uh subsidized nickel that then come that
Speaker 6: then flows into whatever kind of battery uh kind.
Speaker 3: Of supply chain that we're structuring.
Speaker 6: Then people then buy evs and that we then also subsidize.
Speaker 6: So it's all for the United States. Now, then the
Speaker 6: fight becomes who in the United States is it for?
Speaker 6: But the idea that it's it's unfair to people in
Speaker 6: Scranton now like it back in the back in the center,
Speaker 6: people to fight over the spoils of war. But this
Speaker 6: is this is just war done by other means. It's
Speaker 6: not foreign aid. It's just extraction of wealth from around
Speaker 6: the world.
Speaker 4: And so do you think that the ad that we
Speaker 4: played a clip of airing during NFL games, you know,
Speaker 4: Battleground States, trying to get ahead of the fact that
Speaker 4: you have a lot of Americans saying, huh, I don't
Speaker 4: feel great about this economy, and I don't feel great
Speaker 4: about Biden's oversight of the economy. And you see a
Speaker 4: lot of people, especially sort of Democrat leaning or Democratic
Speaker 4: leaning economists, who are saying, what.
Speaker 5: Is wrong with people?
Speaker 4: The economy is doing better, there have been gains, and
Speaker 4: people aren't reflecting that in their sense of how the
Speaker 4: economy is going. So Biden comes in and says, basically,
Speaker 4: like everything is rosy.
Speaker 5: Is that gonna work?
Speaker 3: Well? I mean it's better than saying everything's terrible.
Speaker 6: Probably if you're the one that's in charge, Like, because
Speaker 6: you're in charge, you're going to get the credit of
Speaker 6: the blame for it, you know, no matter what happens.
Speaker 6: I think every president going forward is going to be
Speaker 6: in a tricky situation because because of the combination of
Speaker 6: just the general economic procarity, where at the flick of MBS's.
Speaker 3: Risked we can be paying four dollars.
Speaker 6: We're paying four dollars a gallon all of a sudden
Speaker 6: because NBS decided to restrict production. Why because a year
Speaker 6: ago I was telling me like twenty twenty four gas
Speaker 6: prices are going to go up because MBS doesn't like
Speaker 6: Joe Biden. And sure enough we're heading into twenty twenty four,
Speaker 6: gas prices are going to go up, and so people
Speaker 6: I think it gives you a sense of anxiety that
Speaker 6: you that at any moment you could start to see
Speaker 6: these wild swings, because we went through in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: twenty one, these big upswing And now it's nice that
Speaker 6: it's back to three percent, but I don't think people
Speaker 6: feel comfortable that it's going to stay there. Combined with
Speaker 6: housing like that, the inability of people to afford either
Speaker 6: to buy a home, or if they bought a home,
Speaker 6: they can't move because they're kind of locked into a
Speaker 6: low interest rate and prices have sword everywhere else, so
Speaker 6: they can't kind of go anywhere else.
Speaker 3: Or if they don't have a home, they're even worse off.
Speaker 6: And it's eating up more and more and more of
Speaker 6: people's income. And so while everything else is true, we
Speaker 6: have had a long run of adding jobs. You're seeing people,
Speaker 6: you're seeing you had the unemployment rate go up this
Speaker 6: last month because hundreds of thousands of people who had
Speaker 6: been out of the labor force came in because they're like, Wow,
Speaker 6: wages are up, jobs are available, I'm actually going to
Speaker 6: try to get a job now, Like we haven't had
Speaker 6: that practically since World War Two, and real wage growth
Speaker 6: is happening, but in the context of the amount that
Speaker 6: people are paying for housing and the kind of per
Speaker 6: carreity that people feel about the future, nobody's going to
Speaker 6: sit there and say, yeah, things are great, even if
Speaker 6: they're so much better than they were before.
Speaker 4: And gas prices are a huge part of that, and
Speaker 4: you disagree with us for environmental reasons. But Biden is
Speaker 4: going to have to answer to voters in Scranton about Keystone,
Speaker 4: the permit for revoking the permit for Keystone, which has
Speaker 4: given MBS even more power over our economy. And that's
Speaker 4: really I mean, it's another interesting part and we've talked
Speaker 4: about this a lot of the economy right now, which.
Speaker 5: Is gas prices in some parts of the country have actually.
Speaker 4: Been okay, not great, but okay, and then in other
Speaker 4: parts of the country they are horrific. It just depending
Speaker 4: on where you are, you're experiencing the economy differently.
Speaker 5: It's the same thing.
Speaker 4: You know, if you're in the market for a car,
Speaker 4: if you're in the market for a house, you're experiencing
Speaker 4: a different economy than if you're good on.
Speaker 5: Some of those things. And so it is.
Speaker 4: It doesn't surprise me because that also those sentiments kind
Speaker 4: of bleed into other things, and people all pick up
Speaker 4: on that feeling of malaise. Speaking of which we can
Speaker 4: put a four up on the screen here. This is
Speaker 4: from the New York Times. This is an upshot quote.
Speaker 4: President Biden is underperforming among non white voters in New
Speaker 4: York Times Stanate College national polls over the last year,
Speaker 4: helping to keep the race close. In a hypothetical rematch
Speaker 4: against Donald Trump. On average, mister Biden leads mister Trump
Speaker 4: by just fifty three percent to twenty eight percent among
Speaker 4: registered non white vot voters, and a compilation of polls
Speaker 4: from twenty twenty two to twenty three, which includes over
Speaker 4: fifteen hundred non white respondents, So that might seem like
Speaker 4: a big margin, but as the Times continues to say,
Speaker 4: the results represent a marked deterioration and mister Biden's support
Speaker 4: compared with twenty twenty when he won more than seventy
Speaker 4: percent of non white voters. So that's a seventeen percent dip,
Speaker 4: fifty three percent after he won about seventy percent of
Speaker 4: non white voters. Ryan those are really bad numbers for Biden.
Speaker 6: Those are and let me say at one point on
Speaker 6: the fossil fuel before we get to the voters. And
Speaker 6: I'm not celebrating this, but fossil fuel production is up
Speaker 6: from the Trump era. It's true that Nick's Keystone excel.
Speaker 6: It's true that he just passed a regulation saying you
Speaker 6: can't put liquid natural gas on trains. I think communities
Speaker 6: where trains go through are probably breathing a sigh relief
Speaker 6: over that those headlines are true. But overall, fossil fuel
Speaker 6: production in the United States is up significantly from twenty
Speaker 6: nineteen to twenty twenty. It's this weird kind of people
Speaker 6: think that Sunrise movement is kind of running the White
Speaker 6: House or something, and so therefore, you know, he's just
Speaker 6: kept everything in the ground. But if people can just
Speaker 6: google like the production numbers.
Speaker 3: We're pumping an enormous amount of files.
Speaker 6: Feel I think we have to solve it on the
Speaker 6: demand side, like we just have to get away from it.
Speaker 6: So that Muhammed bin Salman says, oh, yeah, well, you know,
Speaker 6: I'm taking a million barrels a month or a million
Speaker 6: barrels a day offline. We're like, okay, do whatever you want.
Speaker 6: We got we got windmills and solar panels. Over here,
Speaker 6: we got hydro, we got nuclear or whatever we like.
Speaker 6: We're fine, and we will still have needs for gas
Speaker 6: and for filesil fuels. But if it's if the demand
Speaker 6: is way down, then he can't really whip us around
Speaker 6: the way he is.
Speaker 5: Although yeah, and we don't.
Speaker 4: I guess I just say like things like KEISTO XL
Speaker 4: help us sort of ease into the transition. But anyway,
Speaker 4: the seventeen point dip among non white voters for Biden
Speaker 4: is significant.
Speaker 5: Again, he's still up by a big margin. I don't
Speaker 5: know if this is through anything.
Speaker 4: I mean, it seems like the New York Times reading
Speaker 4: of this is that it's not something that Donald Trump
Speaker 4: has done, because they're doing these hypothetical matchups. It's not
Speaker 4: just the favorability of Joe Biden. It's a hypothetical matchup.
Speaker 4: It seems like everyone's saying, well, this is a Biden problem,
Speaker 4: not a Trump solution.
Speaker 5: I don't know. I actually have no idea what's going
Speaker 5: on there.
Speaker 6: I wonder how much of it is like reverse magnetic
Speaker 6: where As Democrats increasingly become the party of kind of suburban,
Speaker 6: college educated voters and particularly white suburban college educated voters.
Speaker 6: If there's just something about that coalition that pushes then
Speaker 6: non white, non college educated and white non college educated
Speaker 6: voters out of the coalition because there's just the kind
Speaker 6: of cultural differences are so.
Speaker 3: Are the class strong.
Speaker 6: Yeah, class differences that manifest as cultural differences are so
Speaker 6: distinct that it makes it up. But on the other hand,
Speaker 6: you had a New Deal coalition that had, you know,
Speaker 6: the NAACP and outright white supremacists, because everybody was in
Speaker 6: it for higher wages, for union power, and for the
Speaker 6: kind of material gains that think that the New Deal
Speaker 6: coalition was pushing for. So it actually is not impossible
Speaker 6: to pull that coalition together. But there's something different about
Speaker 6: our kind of tribalized, social media driven era that might
Speaker 6: make it more difficult. But then the question will be
Speaker 6: what's the what are the policy implications of that? Because
Speaker 6: back in the mid nineties you had right wing Democrats
Speaker 6: who were pushing really hard to say, we need to
Speaker 6: move away from our working class base and we had
Speaker 6: to move to the suburban voter because the suburban voter
Speaker 6: is going to be more conservative.
Speaker 3: On economic issues and that's where.
Speaker 6: We need to be, and that that lined them up
Speaker 6: with their kind of corporate pack strategy, the Clintonian stuff
Speaker 6: that they where they wanted.
Speaker 3: To take the party today.
Speaker 6: Though if you survey suburban, white college educated voters economically,
Speaker 6: they're often to the left of non college working class people. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so you get into this really awkward place where as
Speaker 6: a party, to maintain a kind of left wing economic,
Speaker 6: material driven agenda, you have to override what a lot
Speaker 6: of working class voters are telling people non.
Speaker 4: Cultural issues too, social issues, Like it's the same problem
Speaker 4: that arises like when everyone tried to make LATINX happen
Speaker 4: and you're working classes panic voters are like, yeah, let's
Speaker 4: let's cool it with that.
Speaker 6: I think I think they're backing off that somewhat, and
Speaker 6: I think these numbers are a reason that they're backing off.
Speaker 6: Is like, oh, okay, we tried the Oberlin approach. Yes
Speaker 6: we tried, and the arrows just pointing down, So let's
Speaker 6: try not.
Speaker 4: You know, Actually, this isn't entirely dissimilar from what we're
Speaker 4: going to talk about in the next block, which is
Speaker 4: Elon Musk and the Anti Defamation League. It's a pretty
Speaker 4: interesting back and forth and not also dissimilar from the
Speaker 4: one we talked about recently with the Center for Countering
Speaker 4: Digital Hate.
Speaker 5: Which Musk.
Speaker 4: There's a lawsuit where Musk accused the Center for Countering
Speaker 4: Digital Hate of hurting X's basically relationship with the advertisers.
Speaker 5: And that's from the Guardian.
Speaker 4: But the Guardian also is now digging into what's going
Speaker 4: on with the ADL and Elon Musk, and it's very similar.
Speaker 4: It's about advertisers, so reading from them again, it says
Speaker 4: Elon Musk has threatened to sue the Anti Defamation League
Speaker 4: after accusing the US based civil rights group that campaigns
Speaker 4: against anti Semitism and bigotry of trying to quote kill
Speaker 4: his ex social media platform. The owner of X formerly
Speaker 4: known as Twitter, said the ADL was trying to shut
Speaker 4: down his company by quote falsely accusing it and me
Speaker 4: of being anti Semitic. In a series of posts, Musk said,
Speaker 4: advertising sales for the business we're down sixty percent and
Speaker 4: quote based on what we've heard from advertisers, ADL seems
Speaker 4: to be responsible for most of our revenue lost. He
Speaker 4: also said, quote, it looks like we have no choice
Speaker 4: but to file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti Defamation
Speaker 4: League dot dot dot oh the irony. He also said
Speaker 4: that he wants to be quote super clear he's in
Speaker 4: favor of free speech, but quote against anti semitism of
Speaker 4: any kind. Now, the ADL is saying that anti Semitic
Speaker 4: posts on x increase sharply after Musk bought the site
Speaker 4: back in October twenty two, and the platform subsequently reinstated
Speaker 4: extremists and conspiracy theorists while allowing the harassment of former
Speaker 4: members of its now dissolved Trust and Safety Council. A
Speaker 4: lot of money on the line here, Clearly, it does
Speaker 4: remind me of what some conservatives and argument you hear
Speaker 4: from some people on the right and in the center
Speaker 4: even about ESG that you can have one index that
Speaker 4: is following you know, whatever the rating system is, whatever
Speaker 4: the environmental score system is, and you know you'll get
Speaker 4: black rock embracing it. And this affects a wide swath
Speaker 4: of businesses. It really affects where money is going, It
Speaker 4: affects all of that sort of stuff. And so I
Speaker 4: think Elon Musk is making a similar thing that like,
Speaker 4: if people are funneling their ad decisions through the Anti
Speaker 4: Defamation League, then in the Anti Defamation League has a
Speaker 4: bias against him. If you buy that argument, which I
Speaker 4: mean I do, but we probably disagree on that. If
Speaker 4: you buy it, then all of these advertisers are going
Speaker 4: to be affected by one bias source that's not neutral.
Speaker 5: But I don't think they purport to be neutral.
Speaker 3: Leader right, Well, first of all, let's score the hypocrisy.
Speaker 6: Like, this guy is a free speech absolutist who is
Speaker 6: now trying to sue his second organization for their speech,
Speaker 6: and his top investors are recently Saudi Arabia recently implemented
Speaker 6: a death penalty for somebody for a retweet at eight
Speaker 6: followers a retweet, and this this is he has said
Speaker 6: nothing about that. Where Whereas if you're a business partner
Speaker 6: with somebody in a major enterprise and they use your
Speaker 6: activity on your business enterprise to give somebody a death
Speaker 6: penalty for a retweet, you're you're free to speak up
Speaker 6: and say, you know what, I can we not do that?
Speaker 6: How about not how about we don't kill that guy
Speaker 6: for a retweet? Since now that goes against my beliefs
Speaker 6: as a free speech absolutist anyway, So taking taking taking
Speaker 6: him seriously for a second, which I don't think he is.
Speaker 6: I think he just made a joke about defamation and defamation.
Speaker 6: I don't think he's actually going to just wanted the joke,
Speaker 6: but I think he also said that discovery as a
Speaker 6: part of this lawsuit will show whether or not it's
Speaker 6: true that the you know, ad L pressured all of
Speaker 6: these companies to pull out their advertising money. And then
Speaker 6: that's why you know, Twitter is worth half of them
Speaker 6: what it used to be worth. The idea that you're
Speaker 6: going to win your advertisers back by suing them and
Speaker 6: going through their emails is like, it couldn't be any
Speaker 6: more absurd.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like that that's how you're going to win your
Speaker 3: advertiser back.
Speaker 6: And secondly, the idea that anybody needed the ADL to
Speaker 6: step away from advertising on Twitter is also absurd. So
Speaker 6: his theory is that if not for the ADL privately
Speaker 6: reaching out to these corporations, these giant corporations Dove, Unilever,
Speaker 6: Coca Cola, all the others, would just be bidding against
Speaker 6: themselves to get their advertisement under cat Turd two's hundreds of.
Speaker 3: Millions of impressions.
Speaker 6: Like if the CEO, then CEO is just constantly engaging
Speaker 6: with cat Turd and all of his friends, it's very
Speaker 6: clear to the entire world what type of platform it is,
Speaker 6: and then advertisers can decide whether or not they want
Speaker 6: to be part of that. The fact that the ADL
Speaker 6: was saying the exact same thing that everybody else was
Speaker 6: saying about the platform. He also flamboyantly unbanned a bunch
Speaker 6: of people who have been banned for saying like viciously
Speaker 6: anti Semitic stuff.
Speaker 5: This is the true.
Speaker 6: So you're like, okay, like you're gonna blame the ADL
Speaker 6: for that. And I'm no fan of the ADL. I
Speaker 6: think that they have stretched the definition of anti semitism
Speaker 6: for political purposes in order to kind of shut down
Speaker 6: any criticism of the Israeli government for instance.
Speaker 3: However, in this case, I just don't think.
Speaker 6: I think if the ADL never even existed, people would
Speaker 6: have clearly seen the changes that he publicly said he
Speaker 6: was making at Twitter.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, I don't think that's wrong, although I do
Speaker 4: think the ADL and I think the SPLC, which we've
Speaker 4: talked about here before. The SPLC is in a pretty
Speaker 4: gnarly lawsuit where it had to admit that it wasn't,
Speaker 4: you know, totally neutral and non biased I do think
Speaker 4: those have had sweeping chilling effects on you know, not
Speaker 4: just conservative organizations, but some other organizations that said and
Speaker 4: that's true with that different Yeah it is, yeah, it is.
Speaker 4: But the definition inflation. It also reminds me of what
Speaker 4: we're talking about in the last segment. But this is
Speaker 4: where it's an impossible circle to square, because I think
Speaker 4: one of the things people loved about Twitter in the
Speaker 4: first place, in the Halcyon days where Jack Dorsey was
Speaker 4: you know, renegade, is that it was this open platform
Speaker 4: where people were dunking on racists and people with horrific arguments,
Speaker 4: bad ideas, and it was you know, there there was
Speaker 4: a time when Twitter wasn't really even quite that political
Speaker 4: and it was more just fun. But there was also
Speaker 4: time where like you went to Twitter and the level
Speaker 4: of open speech just embarrassed everybody who was remaining. You
Speaker 4: still have these like lingering, bigoted sentiments. They looked ridiculous.
Speaker 4: I mean, that was the beauty of these exchanges is
Speaker 4: that these minority voices, I think, if anything, were they
Speaker 4: were empowered by people who freaked out and tried to say, like,
Speaker 4: you don't belong on the platform.
Speaker 5: It was it was there was something really.
Speaker 4: Powerful about when they were on the platform and getting
Speaker 4: absolutely torched non stop, and there was something that people
Speaker 4: looked at that and was like, Yeah, this is what
Speaker 4: we do. This is what we can all agree the
Speaker 4: boundaries of decency and political speech are. We don't necessarily
Speaker 4: need big Brother in Silicon Valley or the government to
Speaker 4: make these decisions for us. But that's obviously not happening
Speaker 4: anymore because when you rely on corporate advertising dollars, it
Speaker 4: doesn't matter, like they don't want their content next to
Speaker 4: for instance, here's a good one, Libs of TikTok, I'm
Speaker 4: reading for my colleague David Harsani. He says elon Musk
Speaker 4: Contents that the ADL wants him to ban the Libs
Speaker 4: of TikTok, a popular account run by orthodox jew Chiareichick,
Speaker 4: who gained fame by reposting real leftists saying real things.
Speaker 4: It's certainly plausible, considering the ADL already has an entry
Speaker 4: for rightchick and it's quote glossary of terms. But well,
Speaker 4: Harsani says, I'm not a big fan of nutpicking. I
Speaker 4: haven't seen anything in her feet that could rationally be
Speaker 4: construed as anti Semitic and that speaks to the problem
Speaker 4: of who gets to decide what quote hate speech entails.
Speaker 4: And so it's fine, I mean that's a problem with Twitter.
Speaker 4: If you want to be in this business, you're gonna
Speaker 4: have a hard time being in the ad sales business.
Speaker 4: These two things seem utterly irreconcilable. Even though Twitter and
Speaker 4: we've talked about like making Twitter a public you know,
Speaker 4: utility before, because it's, you know, basically this de facto
Speaker 4: town square for a very particular kind of speech.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's it's a good like in this context.
Speaker 4: There's some good reason for that because if you're you're
Speaker 4: looking at this and you're expecting advertisers to prop up
Speaker 4: a platform where you necessarily, in order to be a
Speaker 4: fair platform allow people to speak their mind and say
Speaker 4: things that not everyone's going.
Speaker 5: To agree with. Who are you going to get to
Speaker 5: advertise there?
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, Yeah, I mean that's right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, make it a make it a public make an
Speaker 6: actual public square.
Speaker 5: An actual public square.
Speaker 3: I think my idea should be adopted.
Speaker 6: I already solved the cattle on independence crisis of the
Speaker 6: Twitter crisis, that's right.
Speaker 4: If you didn't catch Ryan solving the cattle in independence crisis.
Speaker 4: Just check out our video on the Spanish Soccer Federation ahead,
Speaker 4: because that's what you find it.
Speaker 6: You know, have Twitter b like owned by the Corporation
Speaker 6: for Public Broadcasting, and you have five board members. The
Speaker 6: right can pick two, the left can pick two, and
Speaker 6: then whoever wins the White House guests to pick one
Speaker 6: and then they kind of like battle it out. You
Speaker 6: Marjorie Taylor Green can be on there, Elon can be
Speaker 6: on there, whatever, and they just then they set they
Speaker 6: set policy and maybe they even have to run, but
Speaker 6: they have to.
Speaker 3: Get they have to get elected.
Speaker 6: So we can all kind of democratically weigh in on
Speaker 6: how we want this public square. And you and in
Speaker 6: order to be on you have to show your driver's license.
Speaker 6: I don't know MTG can figure this out when she's
Speaker 6: when she and like Van Jones are on the board
Speaker 6: together or whatever.
Speaker 4: Well, I mean, and this is the thing with Twitter,
Speaker 4: it's that nobody I mean, you can try to go
Speaker 4: to a subscriber model basically, which is you know, in
Speaker 4: some ways what substack is doing. You know, it's the
Speaker 4: New York Times thinks it's advertising revenue is going to
Speaker 4: be hurt because it now has this really small niche
Speaker 4: consumer base that's able to pay a lot of money.
Speaker 4: You know, you have these educated, sort of liberal people
Speaker 4: who have disposable income and can pay for the New
Speaker 4: York Times. They don't want to see Tom Cotton's at
Speaker 4: bed in twenty twenty in the New York Times. So
Speaker 4: the New York Times takes it down, not for any
Speaker 4: journalistic reason. I would argue that was a pretense, but
Speaker 4: they take it down either way, and you know, then
Speaker 4: you can go to substack, which is basically what I mean.
Speaker 4: Barry Weiss ends up at Substack, is doing fabulously well
Speaker 4: in Substack, and it solves the New York Times advertising problem.
Speaker 4: That's not great for journalism, and I don't think it's
Speaker 4: great for the public square either, if we can't you know,
Speaker 4: coexist together because we're all propped up by these niche
Speaker 4: you know, different advertising areas as opposed to I don't know.
Speaker 4: I mean, maybe a subscriber model can work for Acts,
Speaker 4: it's still very much influx and in transition between what
Speaker 4: it was and what Elon Musk wants it to be.
Speaker 5: So I guess we'll just have to wait.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we will.
Speaker 4: Well, we are not waiting to find out it's in
Speaker 4: the new Huawei phone that wasn't announced was announced. Actually
Speaker 4: why while Gino Raimundo was in China, right, they unreal
Speaker 4: the un uh unveiled.
Speaker 6: The Commerce secretary of former governor of Rhode Island was
Speaker 6: visiting China trying to cool tension, and yeah, they and
Speaker 6: they dropped this new phone that went viral over in China.
Speaker 6: It includes some type of uh, you know, I'm not
Speaker 6: even going to try to do the describe the technology.
Speaker 3: Just be a waste of every just be a waste
Speaker 3: of everybody's time.
Speaker 6: Super cool and fast phone basically operating on some cool technology,
Speaker 6: uh that Huawei has been able to develop despite and
Speaker 6: and perhaps in spite of or in the face of
Speaker 6: US restrictions on Huawei. So the US block Huawei from
Speaker 6: all sorts of kind of technological cooperation with UH with
Speaker 6: US and US aligned chip makers and processors, and so
Speaker 6: they kind of went back to their own drawing board
Speaker 6: and came out with this with his phone that they
Speaker 6: unveiled to time clearly with the Commerce Secretary going over
Speaker 6: to China people saying it operates faster than.
Speaker 3: Some of the best, you know, five G phones out there.
Speaker 6: I don't know how it seems cool, seems good and
Speaker 6: this is related to and we can put up this
Speaker 6: this first element Reuter's reporting Bloomberg confirming that China is
Speaker 6: seeking a forty billion dollar fund to invest in it.
Speaker 3: It's kind of on shoring of chip.
Speaker 6: Making, which would be cool because hey, China, go ahead
Speaker 6: develop a massive semiconductor industry on the Chinese mainland, then
Speaker 6: maybe we don't have to.
Speaker 3: Have a war over Taiwan.
Speaker 6: For Taiwan, which the whole thing is great, like the
Speaker 6: precision needed to produce these semiconductors suggest that a war
Speaker 6: zone probably is not good for business there. You think
Speaker 6: good thing, Like I said, not an expert, but I
Speaker 6: think probably blowing up the factories doesn't help with the development.
Speaker 6: Well unless you just said, that means you have to
Speaker 6: rebuild them. And that's how Japan Germany did so well
Speaker 6: after World War two.
Speaker 3: So maybe that's our plan.
Speaker 5: Well in China.
Speaker 4: On shoring chip technology also puts I mean it creates
Speaker 4: this or I think it exacerbates an existing tension in
Speaker 4: that European countries. Other people who are you know, for
Speaker 4: price competition reasons whatever, still relying on Chinese technology whatever,
Speaker 4: it is you can. I mean, they're creating more reasons
Speaker 4: like Germany with Russian oil, right, Like you're on the
Speaker 4: hook if you're really dependent on Chinese semiconductors because so
Speaker 4: much of the global semiconductor industry. If that's what happens
Speaker 4: with this forty billion dollar fund continues to be exploding
Speaker 4: in China at competitive rates, then it can just exacerbate
Speaker 4: the dependency problem, which of course some people see is
Speaker 4: a good problem to have because it will de escalate
Speaker 4: any actual military tensions.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure I buy that argument now.
Speaker 4: Reuter's quotes an analyst with Tech Insights who says this
Speaker 4: development is quote a slap in the face to the US.
Speaker 4: He said, Ray Mundo comes seeking to cool things down,
Speaker 4: and this chip is saying, look what we can do.
Speaker 5: We don't need you. This is also from the Reuters report.
Speaker 4: They say from twenty nineteen, the US has restricted Huawei's
Speaker 4: access to chip making tools essential for producing the most
Speaker 4: advanced handset models, with the company only able to launch
Speaker 4: limited batches of five G models using stock piled chips.
Speaker 4: And so now you put the sort of feet to
Speaker 4: the fire when it comes to tariffs. People are going
Speaker 4: to be saying US policy is counterproductive, that it's creating
Speaker 4: all of these different unintended consequences, when in fact, rian
Speaker 4: it is also these policies, whether or not libertarians want
Speaker 4: to admit it, are not just about low prices, of course,
Speaker 4: in this case, they're also about making sure that if
Speaker 4: there is an incursion in Taiwan, we have an ability
Speaker 4: to have not just phones, not just smartphones like this
Speaker 4: new Huawei one, but also military technology to be able
Speaker 4: to defend Taiwan.
Speaker 6: Right, And the kind of ban in the crackdown and
Speaker 6: Huawei also came because of these military connections. This wasn't
Speaker 6: just a kind of trade war between the US and China.
Speaker 6: Was also the US saying, look, we've we've discovered that
Speaker 6: Huawei is basically putting bugs and in a lot of
Speaker 6: this technology that's five G technology that that they're helping
Speaker 6: build around the world.
Speaker 3: And so they told all their allies as well.
Speaker 6: Don't know no Huawei technology, because you know, we believe
Speaker 6: that there were getting spied on, and US like we're
Speaker 6: the only ones that are allowed to spy on it.
Speaker 5: I was just going to say, I don't take that
Speaker 5: message to.
Speaker 6: Yeah exactly, And so that so that kind of fueled
Speaker 6: then this the trade implications here, which then result in
Speaker 6: Huawei uh coming through out with this breakthrough technology, which
Speaker 6: once again complicates this argument that the only way that
Speaker 6: you get innovation is through a kind of pure capitalist system.
Speaker 6: It's obviously the case that there's some significant, you know,
Speaker 6: market activity in China, but it's also very heavily directed
Speaker 6: by the state.
Speaker 3: It's it's not a remotely pure free market.
Speaker 6: And the fact that you can continue to get economic
Speaker 6: growth fragilize it is now and continue to get serious innovation,
Speaker 6: you know, really kind of undermines the kind of Western
Speaker 6: claim that the only way to do it is is
Speaker 6: through like you know, you know, tech bros taking acid
Speaker 6: in Silicon Valley and getting VC money or something.
Speaker 5: Well, yeah, I mean that's the whole DARPA story.
Speaker 3: If you like pulled, that's true exactly.
Speaker 6: That's a that's a great point that was state funded
Speaker 6: and produced.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, if you if you pull that thread.
Speaker 6: Long enough, general is taking acid, that's actually true.
Speaker 4: It is amazing how many rich and powerful people were
Speaker 4: taking acid.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, you wrote a book on it for
Speaker 5: those days.
Speaker 4: This is your country on drugs by dying gram available
Speaker 4: at a bookstore.
Speaker 3: You're probably not actually anymore, but probably find it in.
Speaker 5: Some maybe available at a bookstore here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's move on to Mitch McConnell, the big news
Speaker 4: of the week, and it is really big news, continuing
Speaker 4: to be really big news. Why because it's actually easy
Speaker 4: to forget this, but Mitch McConnell has been the Senate
Speaker 4: Republican leader.
Speaker 5: For sixteen years. Sixteen years.
Speaker 4: It's just mind boggling when you really think of how
Speaker 4: long Republicans have gone without having any leadership transition in
Speaker 4: the upper Chamber.
Speaker 5: It's actually shocking. I can't remember. I mean, Nancy Pelosi's
Speaker 5: reign in the House wasn't that long, am I? I mean,
Speaker 5: it's it's.
Speaker 3: Close the same, but she's gone.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so she she also took over in two thousand
Speaker 6: and seven seven, although she became leader.
Speaker 3: In two like two thousand and three.
Speaker 6: True, she was leader minority leader and then yeah, and
Speaker 6: then took which is similar. Or maybe maybe she took
Speaker 6: over in two thousand and five when Gebhart ran for
Speaker 6: president in two thousand and four and washed out.
Speaker 5: Oh cap heart.
Speaker 4: Well yeah, well that's what the first element up here.
Speaker 4: This is from CBS News reporter. It says Congress's in
Speaker 4: house doctor says he's examined Mitch McConnell, including a review
Speaker 4: of as MRI results, and says there's no evidence of
Speaker 4: seizure's disorder, stroke or Parkinson's. A lot of people immediately
Speaker 4: reacted to this by saying, that's incredibly hard to believe.
Speaker 4: It feels almost soviet in the level of like provda
Speaker 4: type spin that we're seeing, including it seems Senator rand Paul,
Speaker 4: we can put the next element up on the screen.
Speaker 4: Who is a doctor. He's an eye doctors, and he's
Speaker 4: an optometrist. He said, quote, I don't think it's been
Speaker 4: particularly helpful to have the Senate doctor describing this as dehydration,
Speaker 4: which I think even a non physician seeing that probably
Speaker 4: aren't really accepting that explanation. Yeah, I would think that's
Speaker 4: dead on. If most people see that letter versus the
Speaker 4: two videos, one from July and one from just what
Speaker 4: was last week, they're not going to look at that
Speaker 4: and say, ah, yes, dehydration is what caused him to
Speaker 4: pause uncomfortably for like a minute in both cases, not
Speaker 4: quite a minute, probably thirty seconds, But you know when
Speaker 4: those seconds are so painful it feels like ten minutes
Speaker 4: the thirty seconds does.
Speaker 5: But let's move on to the next element here.
Speaker 4: This is from The Hill which points out that editors
Speaker 4: of National Review which have come out and they said that,
Speaker 4: you know, Mitch McConnell is quote a legend of the
Speaker 4: US Senate and quote, one of the most effective leaders
Speaker 4: in memory. He should step aside from his post. And
Speaker 4: then we have D four. This is from the New
Speaker 4: York Times on potential replacements. From potential replacements to Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 4: which they list as the three Johns, and that is
Speaker 4: exactly what it sounds like. John Thune, John Cornyn, and
Speaker 4: John Morasso. They also float the idea of Jony Ernst
Speaker 4: and Shellie Moore Capito potentially going for that top slot.
Speaker 4: I have heard rumblings that Capito is a serious contender
Speaker 4: for that. Want to read a quote from a senior
Speaker 4: Senate staffer with some color here that says, basically, quote,
Speaker 4: it's an open field and there will be no coronation.
Speaker 4: So this is two breaking points from a senior Senate
Speaker 4: staffer who points out it's the first leadership transition in
Speaker 4: sixteen years. Whoever replaces McConnell has the opportunity basically to quote.
Speaker 5: Transform the Senate.
Speaker 4: And it looks like the Senate staffer is basically saying
Speaker 4: that John Thune is kind of doing the job of
Speaker 4: leader right now. And the more that Mitch McConnell seeds,
Speaker 4: the more ground McConnell seeds specifically to Thune, the more
Speaker 4: that there's just sort of the power of inertia moves
Speaker 4: in Thune's direction and gives him the clear advantage here.
Speaker 4: But John Cornyn really really wants it, is what I'm
Speaker 4: hearing from the source. And I definitely believe that John
Speaker 4: Cornyn really wants it. He's a good fundraiser, so he's
Speaker 4: definitely a potential candidate. But you know, I think that's
Speaker 4: where you get an edge from Jony Ernst and you know,
Speaker 4: Shelley Moore capit if they want to run. Is that
Speaker 4: the optics in twenty twenty three of the three John's
Speaker 4: being the potential heirs to the McConnell throne are not
Speaker 4: great for Republicans when they're trying to also say, I mean,
Speaker 4: Barasso and Cornyn are both seventy one. Soon is like
Speaker 4: sixty two, so he's slightly younger.
Speaker 5: But like a bunch of old white dudes.
Speaker 4: You know, those are optics that some Republicans who like
Speaker 4: to exploit the identity politics angle I'm a woman angle
Speaker 4: could have.
Speaker 5: A lot of fun with.
Speaker 6: And we have a profile of Cornyn a couple of
Speaker 6: years ago that we did over at the Intercept that
Speaker 6: if anybody's curious about this next potential leader, is a
Speaker 6: fun one to read. He's just a very affable, old
Speaker 6: school Texas oilman Republican like a Karl Rove basically recruited
Speaker 6: him into politics. So that's kind of what you need
Speaker 6: to know about him. Like, he's just a Rove guy
Speaker 6: who's like good with the lawyers, he's good with the oilman. Uh,
Speaker 6: and he's going to go like in whatever direction.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 6: He's like very much like a Chuck Schumer or Joe
Speaker 6: Biden in the sense that they're they're very good politicians.
Speaker 3: They're just and if the.
Speaker 6: Party is moving in one direction, they're going to move
Speaker 6: in that they move in that direction.
Speaker 3: Tune. Uh.
Speaker 6: You know, as he accumulates power, like you said in
Speaker 6: the Senate, he's going to be able to do favors
Speaker 6: for people, and he's going to be increasingly then able
Speaker 6: to get people you know on his side corner is
Speaker 6: very popular. It's Barasso though, that is more of the
Speaker 6: trumpy guy who tries to be more of the trumpet guy.
Speaker 6: You Neither fun nor Cornn are kind of obsequious Trump supporters.
Speaker 5: They're very similar to McConnell.
Speaker 3: Barasso is more of a kind of movement conservative. I
Speaker 3: would think.
Speaker 6: That's interesting about Shelley Moore Capito, uh you know, good
Speaker 6: friends with mansion, like the mansion more Capito dynasty. This
Speaker 6: has been this bipartisan West Virginia powerhouse for years and
Speaker 6: the Mores and the Capitol is actually and she combines
Speaker 6: them both there and so so you think that she
Speaker 6: has a real shot or I just.
Speaker 4: Think that's really easy to exploit the and if she
Speaker 4: wants it, I mean she's she's probably also pretty good fundraiser.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure.
Speaker 4: I would have to check on that, but like, if
Speaker 4: she wants it, the idea that you have these three
Speaker 4: guys who are also two of whom are in their
Speaker 4: seventies as well Thuhne, who's not exactly charismatic. If that's
Speaker 4: what you want in the Senate leader, it just depends.
Speaker 4: But I could see someone really exploiting the idea that listen.
Speaker 5: This has been sixteen years. You guys have been in leadership.
Speaker 5: I mean thun Corn and Barasso, they've been in leadership
Speaker 5: for a long time. And look where we are.
Speaker 4: I mean, Republicans in the Senate are not happy with
Speaker 4: where they are at all. And that's another interesting thing
Speaker 4: about this, where the more Mitch McConnell seems incapacitated, the
Speaker 4: more you have other people running the Senate, and the
Speaker 4: more people recognize exactly how poorly they think things have
Speaker 4: been led under Mitch McConnell. And that's not to say
Speaker 4: they aren't you happy with some of the winds McConnell
Speaker 4: has sort of earned over the years, whether it's you know,
Speaker 4: getting Merrick Garland no vote on Merrick Garland and getting
Speaker 4: all of these Senate seats pushing through cabin eugh, et cetera.
Speaker 4: So it's not to say that people aren't happy with that.
Speaker 4: But when you look around and someone else is running
Speaker 4: the Senate and there's a stark contrast with how it's
Speaker 4: been run, that's one of those things that makes you think, oh,
Speaker 4: actually the grass is really greener. That's a benefit for
Speaker 4: somebody like thun if they feel like things are going
Speaker 4: more smoothly under him now, but it's also an indictment.
Speaker 4: If he's someone who had been carrying out Mitch McConnell's orders,
Speaker 4: people might say, well, I don't trust you to actually,
Speaker 4: you know, in the long term do a great job.
Speaker 4: We're going to bring someone new and maybe Jennie Ernst,
Speaker 4: maybe someone from the outside.
Speaker 5: People are really unhappy.
Speaker 4: From what I'm gathering, people are now just recognizing how
Speaker 4: unhappy they are with how things have been running in
Speaker 4: the Senate in recent years. So that could be a
Speaker 4: problem for people, or it could be a benefit. If
Speaker 4: you know, you're junk in and you're having some fun now.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean Mitch McConnell gets selling rated as this,
Speaker 6: you know, absolute genius. And yeah, he was able to
Speaker 6: prevent Mark Carland from getting a vote.
Speaker 3: That's basically his legacy.
Speaker 6: That that plus what he was able to do abround
Speaker 6: campaign finance stuff. But yeah, his performance in twenty twenty one,
Speaker 6: and you know, the left, you know, thinks that Biden
Speaker 6: got nothing done. On the other hand, the Senate was
Speaker 6: divided fifty to fifty, Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinne being
Speaker 6: two of those fifty, and they pushed through like eight
Speaker 6: trillion dollars in spending American Rescue Plan, two trillion dollars
Speaker 6: the IRA. Then then he got played with that Chip deal.
Speaker 6: He's like, I'm not giving you that Chip deal if
Speaker 6: you're still doing the IRA, and we were like, we're
Speaker 6: not doing the IRA. Then the past two three hundred
Speaker 6: billion dollars and then Chip deal. That afternoon, Schumer and
Speaker 6: Mansion put out a statement. It's like, oh, we have
Speaker 6: a deal in the IRA too.
Speaker 5: That's true. I actually completely forgot.
Speaker 6: How much humiliated blew up in McConnell's face, just humiliated
Speaker 6: him for two straight years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before he fell on his head.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And I mean he had huge, huge problems during
Speaker 4: the Tea Party years sort of wrangling. Then what did
Speaker 4: John McCain say the wacko birds at the time was
Speaker 4: like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and maybe someone would
Speaker 4: put Marco Rubio in that sort of bunch.
Speaker 5: But it's never, you know, been smooth.
Speaker 4: He's never had a in the last ten years, at
Speaker 4: least a super easy journey with the conservative movement. Although
Speaker 4: it was you know, there were these sugar highs during
Speaker 4: the Supreme Court confirmation battles and he's had a good
Speaker 4: relationship with like judicial, the conservative judicial movement.
Speaker 5: That is really what people will see this legacy.
Speaker 4: All that is to say, though, this is this is
Speaker 4: years of discontent bubbling to the surface, and that could
Speaker 4: manifest in some interesting politics that really changed the way
Speaker 4: Republicans work in Washington, d C. Like, the implications for
Speaker 4: this I think are really serious and and as somebody
Speaker 4: that's like subs staunchly on the right, I would say
Speaker 4: it's a time for the Senate to really really run.
Speaker 4: Decide that it's running differently, decide that. You know, Kevin
Speaker 4: McCarthy is a great model for Republican leaders in that it's.
Speaker 5: An establishment guy.
Speaker 4: He's a politician almost corn and asque, although he was
Speaker 4: sort of changed by the Trump years. But he sees
Speaker 4: where the incentives are, and the incentives are, you know,
Speaker 4: not just paying lip service. They're not just saying X,
Speaker 4: Y and Z, They're actually taking action on certain things.
Speaker 4: So we'll see if that translates into the Senate. But
Speaker 4: for like legislation, people's daily lives, there is some stuff on.
Speaker 5: The line here in terms of how Republicans decide to
Speaker 5: manage the Senate.
Speaker 3: Right and McConnell.
Speaker 6: As you know, it was endorsed by Planned Parenthood when
Speaker 6: he first started running, Like that's how much people are
Speaker 6: willing to.
Speaker 3: Just move around.
Speaker 6: Planned Parenthood endorsed the person who re engineered the courts,
Speaker 6: so that rog got overturned.
Speaker 5: Well done, full circle.
Speaker 3: About that circle. It's next.
Speaker 6: We're going to talk about this this new Tucker Carlson interview.
Speaker 6: And at first I didn't even want to give this
Speaker 6: any oxygen, because yes, it's so absurd, But I think
Speaker 6: that it's worth talking about here because it's going to
Speaker 6: get oxygen no matter what we do. And I think
Speaker 6: there's some incredibly important context that people need to have.
Speaker 3: Before the full video airs.
Speaker 6: When I saw this going around on Twitter, Tucker put
Speaker 6: out this clip teasing this interview with a guy who
Speaker 6: says he had texts with brocken Bat, Like, wait a minute,
Speaker 6: guy looks familiar. Is that Larry Sinclair, this absolute notorious,
Speaker 6: fabulous and liar and con man from back in two
Speaker 6: thousand and seven, two thousand and eight days, And so
Speaker 6: I think it's Tucker has not put out the full interview.
Speaker 6: Maybe Tucker includes all that context and dismantles him by
Speaker 6: the end of it. It's not what it sounds like
Speaker 6: from the trailer that he put out, So play a
Speaker 6: little bit of that, and then we'll talk about who
Speaker 6: this guy, Larry Sinclair is and why it's important that
Speaker 6: we understand what his backstory is since this is probably
Speaker 6: going to get tens of millions of views on Twitter
Speaker 6: or if you believe that counter. But even if you
Speaker 6: don't believe the counter, you think it's inflated by ten,
Speaker 6: it's going to be a lot.
Speaker 3: And so let's roll a little bit of this clip.
Speaker 1: You're just a guy who's in town for the night,
Speaker 1: and it sounds like you're looking to parties.
Speaker 10: Yeah, pulled up in a bar outside, and there's this
Speaker 10: guy that's introduced to me as Barack Obama. I had
Speaker 10: given Barack two hundred and fifty dollars to pay for coke.
Speaker 10: I start putting a line on a cdtroit to snow it,
Speaker 10: and next thing I know, he's got a little pipe
Speaker 10: and he's smoking. So I just started rubbing my hand
Speaker 10: along his thighs to see where it was going, and
Speaker 10: it went the direction I had intended it to go.
Speaker 1: Even though you had sex with him twice, you did
Speaker 1: cocaine with him watching him smoke crack twice.
Speaker 3: You had no idea who he were. I had no
Speaker 3: idea who he was.
Speaker 1: He just asked the obvious question, what was Obama like
Speaker 1: on crack? Is it your sense that that sewerbamba is
Speaker 1: just transactional, or that he's bisexual, or like, what is that?
Speaker 10: It definitely wasn't Barack's first time, and I would almost
Speaker 10: be willing to betch it wasn't.
Speaker 1: As long the guy's running for president and credible information
Speaker 1: comes out that he's smoking crack and having sex with dudes,
Speaker 1: that seems like a story.
Speaker 10: Well it would be a story of the media really cared.
Speaker 6: I would hope that people could see that and just
Speaker 6: see how little sense all of it makes, Like paying
Speaker 6: he gave him two hundred and fifty dollars, like the
Speaker 6: meat outside of a bar. All of a sudden, he's
Speaker 6: giving him two hundred fifty dollars. Then somehow crack shows
Speaker 6: up like just the details on its own don't make sense.
Speaker 3: What didn't he go by Barry at the time, not
Speaker 3: for rock.
Speaker 6: So this is inside the four corners of the guy's
Speaker 6: story and the best parts that go up like it
Speaker 6: to me, it's not credible, like not making sense.
Speaker 5: From the trailer, just from the trailer, and he's dropping
Speaker 5: the interview. What Thursday so tomorrow? Is that what it is?
Speaker 3: That sounds right?
Speaker 6: Yeah, But now since Sinclair himself basically spent most of
Speaker 6: his adult life in and out of prison for fraud
Speaker 6: and for lying, for writing fake checks, for all sorts
Speaker 6: of other like.
Speaker 5: Stealing tax returns.
Speaker 6: Yeah, signature, yes, con Man type crimes. There's this is
Speaker 6: if you notice the byline on this. Spence Smith, my
Speaker 6: old colleague at Politico. I was at Politico Political at
Speaker 6: this time. The Politico his attorney or I don't think
Speaker 6: you'd call him attorney. I had to call him spokesperson
Speaker 6: because he'd already been disbarred at this point. At the
Speaker 6: time was Montgomery Blair. Montgomery Blair Sibley, who people can
Speaker 6: kind of google him too. Just an extraordinary kind of
Speaker 6: figure in our politics like this like Gadfly. He he represented
Speaker 6: the DC Madam, and I worked with him on a
Speaker 6: story back in two the Hound Steps. That's another reason
Speaker 6: I remember this, which involved me like calling him in
Speaker 6: him answering the phone like that's what I mean by
Speaker 6: working on the story, and he said a couple of
Speaker 6: funny things, and then I quoted him. He also told,
Speaker 6: and Ben has this in his story as well, he
Speaker 6: told a judge in two thousand and four or something
Speaker 6: that he couldn't show up for sentencing or couldn't show
Speaker 6: up for his trial because he had terminal disease.
Speaker 3: That was twenty years ago. Clearly he's still alive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I forgot about that part too.
Speaker 3: Like you couldn't.
Speaker 6: And he also so he booked a National Press club
Speaker 6: during the two thousand and eight campaign, trying to get
Speaker 6: the media to pay attention to him, and it didn't
Speaker 6: work because he was never able to produce anything that
Speaker 6: could even remotely show that he and Obama were even
Speaker 6: in the same area at the same time. You have
Speaker 6: to have something, and so not only did he have nothing,
Speaker 6: no corroborating witnesses, no people that he told over the years.
Speaker 6: If you were trying to construct the backstory of a
Speaker 6: non credible person, you couldn't do better than this guy
Speaker 6: who's spent most like spent, who's been charged so many
Speaker 6: different times for crimes related to lying and deceit.
Speaker 5: It's not a good start. It's not a good start.
Speaker 5: And the other thing is.
Speaker 6: That's why I wanted to talk about this because I think,
Speaker 6: as as kind of untoward as it feels to even
Speaker 6: air those allegations, they're going to get aired.
Speaker 3: And I think I'm curious for your taking this.
Speaker 6: I think it's a cynical move by Tucker Carlson here
Speaker 6: because he understands that in two thousand and eight there
Speaker 6: was the internet. He did put his stuff on YouTube
Speaker 6: and it got almost a million views or something, but
Speaker 6: the mainstream media and the conservative media as well, was
Speaker 6: still playing a gatekeeper role. And there are good elements
Speaker 6: and bad elements to this gatekeeping, yep. And I think
Speaker 6: Tucker knows now that the gate the gates are off,
Speaker 6: and that he's going to be able to like basically
Speaker 6: put this into the bloodstream and tens of millions of
Speaker 6: Americans are going to believe it without ever knowing this backstory.
Speaker 6: I mean, maybe he'll put it in the interview, but
Speaker 6: a lot of people won't even get to the end
Speaker 6: of it.
Speaker 4: And here's the interesting context. This is why I think
Speaker 4: the Barack Obama this is like we're going into the
Speaker 4: two thousand and seven and eight fever swamps. It was
Speaker 4: all all kinds of stuff circling circulating the primary. There's
Speaker 4: plenty of dirty tricks being played by the Clinton campaign.
Speaker 5: There was plenty of wild.
Speaker 4: Stuff coming out of you know, even conservative appo dives
Speaker 4: like crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Clinton oppo dies like crazy.
Speaker 4: Stuff was circulating around back then because Barack Obama's had
Speaker 4: like an interesting life. He lived in all kinds of
Speaker 4: different countries, and he was a new type of politician
Speaker 4: that you know, was like, first of all, he had
Speaker 4: been a senator for a couple of years and people
Speaker 4: were trying to vet his record, and some really crazy stuff.
Speaker 5: Came out of that.
Speaker 4: I can't imagine what it was like to start covering
Speaker 4: some of this stuff back in two dozens.
Speaker 5: It must have been wild.
Speaker 6: One whild I think it was Ben Smith who had
Speaker 6: the story that a bunch of his friends came out
Speaker 6: and publicly said that Obama was inflating.
Speaker 3: His drug use.
Speaker 5: I actually remember that it.
Speaker 6: Was the first presidential candidate in American history who was
Speaker 6: maybe falsely elevating. The people were like Coke Barry. I
Speaker 6: don't think so, I don't think so. Yeah, this smoked
Speaker 6: a lot of weed.
Speaker 4: But now we have Kamala Harris like on Breakfast Club
Speaker 4: being like Oh yeah, I smoked weed and it was
Speaker 4: just Charlaman being like when she's like that was listening,
Speaker 4: the Snoop dies that's right.
Speaker 6: So she's the second yes, and Snoop wasn't even like
Speaker 6: signed to a label yet at that point.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 4: So the reason that this has become is like sort
Speaker 4: of bubbled to the surface of discourse again, I think
Speaker 4: is in large part from this Tablet magazine interview that
Speaker 4: David Garrow, who's Obama's biographer, gave in early August, and
Speaker 4: he found here he talked about in his book, and
Speaker 4: the story just did get kind of buried that you know,
Speaker 4: this is this is I'm reading from a letter that
Speaker 4: Obama wrote to Alex McNair in November of nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 4: Quote in regard to homosexuality, I must say that I
Speaker 4: believe this is an attempt to remove oneself from the present,
Speaker 4: a refusal perhaps or perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life.
Speaker 4: You see, I make love to mend day, but in
Speaker 4: the imagination my mind is a drogynist to androgynist to
Speaker 4: a great extent, and I hope to make it more
Speaker 4: so until I can think in terms of people, not
Speaker 4: women as opposed to men. But in returning to the body,
Speaker 4: I see that I have been made a man, and
Speaker 4: physically in life, I choose to accept that contingency.
Speaker 5: Now that letter is at.
Speaker 4: I think it's actually at the it's in the Emory
Speaker 4: University archives. They don't let you take pictures. They don't
Speaker 4: let you take it out. But Garro's friend transcribed those
Speaker 4: paragraphs by hand. He wrote them down himself and then
Speaker 4: gave them to the New York Post. It ended in
Speaker 4: and Garro's a Pulitzer Prize winner. It ended up in
Speaker 4: Garro's book. People didn't notice it when it came out.
Speaker 4: In the book, it seems to like a thousand page book,
Speaker 4: and it seemed like that tablet article, which was also
Speaker 4: like a thousand pages, is what got people to pay
Speaker 4: attention to this, because you know, everyone started accepting it
Speaker 4: on Twitter. And so the bottom line is a people
Speaker 4: are gonna be like, first of all, why does it
Speaker 4: matter that Barack Obomba sounded like Judith Butler when he
Speaker 4: was writing to a girlfriend in nineteen eighty two, And
Speaker 4: what does it matter if Barack Obama was gay? I
Speaker 4: feel like that's pretty much what the public is going
Speaker 4: to say, other than the fact that there's some intrigue
Speaker 4: to the idea that you know whatever, there are questions
Speaker 4: of why, you know, the corporate media didn't dig into
Speaker 4: all of this, you know the letter, Where was the
Speaker 4: curiosity about this because it does seem strange for a
Speaker 4: man who's married to a woman. But then you get
Speaker 4: back to the bottom question of who cares? Yeah, like, yeah, again,
Speaker 4: who cares? But I think that's why Tecker Carlson, to
Speaker 4: your point, every interview that he's done so far with
Speaker 4: Tucker on X, which I still think like X itself,
Speaker 4: is this in this flux transition period has been essentially
Speaker 4: not like perfect, this like immaculate manifestation of journalism, but
Speaker 4: a giant middle finger, intentionally, a giant middle finger to
Speaker 4: the gatekeepers. I think that's very intentionally what he's doing
Speaker 4: and saying, Look, if the media didn't want to touch this,
Speaker 4: despite you know, having an actual letter itself that Emmer
Speaker 4: University is you know, not letting anyone. But if they
Speaker 4: don't want to touch it, I'm gonna have fun with
Speaker 4: it and screw you guys for not doing it. An
Speaker 4: understandable sentiment, I will say, I'm not sure this is
Speaker 4: the best use of Tucker's time though.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I can only imagine that. Yeah, he sees
Speaker 6: that tablet thing. He's like, oh yeah, there was that
Speaker 6: crank back in eight you know, he said he hooked
Speaker 6: up with Obama. Let's let's see if that guy's still alive.
Speaker 6: Said he was termally ill. Oh turns out, aren't we lucky?
Speaker 3: That was a lie? Yeah he's still he's still alive.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but yeah, and that's that like you read you
Speaker 6: read it. Obama's letters from that period, from the early
Speaker 6: nineteen eighties, they're all dripping with that philosophical just you
Speaker 6: can just see it's early twenties now, men working through,
Speaker 6: working through what it means to, you know, be a
Speaker 6: person in this world. And then and this was the
Speaker 6: period when letters were still a thing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you had to put everything down and write.
Speaker 6: And there was a there was kind of a cachet
Speaker 6: to being able to write, like these kind of profound
Speaker 6: sounding letters. People were kind of working out their identities
Speaker 6: through their letters. That's something that's basically gone. Now we're
Speaker 6: doing the same thing, but through like TikTok or Twitter
Speaker 6: or whatever.
Speaker 5: It's a shorter form too.
Speaker 4: It's more snippets that you know, you have to sit
Speaker 4: down and be really deliberate if you're writing a letter,
Speaker 4: as opposed to when you're just like.
Speaker 5: Firing off a text message.
Speaker 6: Yeah, but for hundreds of years, this was the thing
Speaker 6: that young men and young women would do.
Speaker 3: They would just.
Speaker 6: Write these like super purple letters exploring like the deepest
Speaker 6: thing He's like the philosophers and writers that he named
Speaker 6: checks in these letters are just absurd and over the top.
Speaker 4: And I think the bit yes, And I think one
Speaker 4: of the big narratives that this is framed within is
Speaker 4: that there were things about Barack Obama that people felt
Speaker 4: like were what's the word. I mean, he definitely was
Speaker 4: a new type of politician, and I think some folks
Speaker 4: felt like the media kind of glossed over some of
Speaker 4: these things that like if you go back to.
Speaker 5: Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers.
Speaker 4: And Obama coming out like genuinely coming out of the
Speaker 4: left in a way that I can't think of another
Speaker 4: like super mainstream politician after since I mean, like maybe
Speaker 4: the only other example would be Bernie Sanders in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: And Obama wasn't static. He changed after he came out
Speaker 4: of the left, very clearly, but he did have a
Speaker 4: huge sort of his genesis politically was in the organizing areas,
Speaker 4: the organizing community in Chicago of the left, and that
Speaker 4: was intriguing to a lot of people, and they felt
Speaker 4: like maybe didn't get quite the attention it deserved.
Speaker 6: In the media, although it was and it shows the
Speaker 6: paucity of the left at that time. And it was
Speaker 6: kind of like the Harvard law firm left, like the
Speaker 6: community organizing was done in like and garyl gets into
Speaker 6: this in the book in kind of collision with like
Speaker 6: these law firms, and it's it's it's it's not that
Speaker 6: the kind of it's not that the it's not the
Speaker 6: Black Panthers. That's it's a much different type of community
Speaker 6: organizing going.
Speaker 5: On the ag.
Speaker 6: Like the post Well, he ran against Bobby Rush. He
Speaker 6: ran against Bobby Rush, who was a leading black book
Speaker 6: but before that and then he was very big into
Speaker 6: the anti nuclear movement, anti nuclear proliferation. That's like that
Speaker 6: was a big niche issue for the left because they
Speaker 6: were they cared a lot about Latin Central America, like
Speaker 6: because of Reaganomics and Reagan like they had been so
Speaker 6: severely routed in the kind of new deal and anti
Speaker 6: anti war stuff that had kind of fueled what was
Speaker 6: a left, but there wasn't much left. It's like this,
Speaker 6: the left was left of the left, and so yes,
Speaker 6: he comes out of that. But it's a it's a
Speaker 6: it's a much kind of weaker and kind of more
Speaker 6: elite aligned movement.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, he's just a fascinating figure. So lots for
Speaker 4: David Garrett to work with. Regardless. All right, Ron, you're
Speaker 4: gonna take us through some election results from Rhode Island.
Speaker 3: What have we at so progressive?
Speaker 6: Aaron Regenberg was defeated in the Rhode Island House election
Speaker 6: last night, despite the support of Bernie Sanders and AOC.
Speaker 3: We can put up this first element.
Speaker 6: Biden and Obama official named Gabe Ammo ended up eking
Speaker 6: out a victory against Reaganberg. This came after consolidation by
Speaker 6: the establishment against Regenberg. A good example of it playing
Speaker 6: out here is from former Congressman Kennedy.
Speaker 3: If we can play this clip here.
Speaker 12: And I really hope this district takes Gabe and moves
Speaker 12: them on as their congressman because they won't go wrong
Speaker 12: with Gabe. I will tell you his opponents, especially the
Speaker 12: one that's in the front runner status right now. The
Speaker 12: notion that he would come out against the largest economic
Speaker 12: driver in the first district, the defense economy, left me flabbergasted.
Speaker 12: The notion that you can be a good Democrat and
Speaker 12: a liberal and not also support a strong national defense
Speaker 12: and good jobs here at home makes no sense. Gabe
Speaker 12: is a good Democrat and a strong liberal, but it
Speaker 12: doesn't mean he's not going to fight for Rhode Island jobs.
Speaker 12: And the way you fight for Rhode Island jobs is
Speaker 12: you don't cancel out Jack Reid, whose chairman of the
Speaker 12: appropriations for Defense spending. That's what Aaron Regenberg would do.
Speaker 3: So Aaron Regenberg.
Speaker 6: They're getting slammed by Kennedy, who seems genuinely angry because
Speaker 6: he recommended a significant but not that significant cut to
Speaker 6: the military spending budget. And and people need to understand
Speaker 6: that is the reaction that you that you get from
Speaker 6: even you're, you know, a standard establishment Democrat who will
Speaker 6: just publicly say, you know, how air you what on
Speaker 6: earth are you possibly doing now? Bernie Sanders Helper rally
Speaker 6: last Sunday in Providence, Rhode Island for Aaron who was
Speaker 6: a former state legislator who pushed through a sweeping set
Speaker 6: of kind of progressive legislation while he was in the
Speaker 6: Providence State House. But he didn't just have Kennedy and
Speaker 6: the establishment as his opponent.
Speaker 3: And this is the story we'll talk about here, and we're.
Speaker 6: Also going to get to the big mistakes that Aaron
Speaker 6: Regenberg himself made at the end of this. But what's
Speaker 6: amazing here is that for all of the anger that
Speaker 6: former Congress and Kennedy felt toward Regenberg, that was matched
Speaker 6: or even eclipsed by the anger of what you would
Speaker 6: call say the post left or maybe the online left, well,
Speaker 6: chaos left, I don't know, Emily. We got to come
Speaker 6: up with a name for them, non electoral left that
Speaker 6: believes that.
Speaker 3: We can put up this Boston Globe article.
Speaker 6: Who's led here by an organization that was called the
Speaker 6: co Op and then also Rhode Island DS which said
Speaker 6: that they were not they were not participating in this
Speaker 6: primary because they believe that Democratic Party is thoroughly corrupted
Speaker 6: and et cetera. To me, that is a perfectly defensible position.
Speaker 6: You don't want to participate in a Democratic primary, You're
Speaker 6: under no obligation to participate in a Democratic primary. You
Speaker 6: want to run a third party candidate. Wonderful, do that too,
Speaker 6: this is America, run a third party candidate. But they
Speaker 6: didn't do those things. The only they did participate in
Speaker 6: the Democratic primary, but the way they participated in it
Speaker 6: was by solely going after the most progressive candidate in
Speaker 6: the race.
Speaker 3: Like that was.
Speaker 6: They didn't have somebody else that they were supporting. They
Speaker 6: just didn't like Regenberg. And part of it is strategic,
Speaker 6: because the idea is that if you can elect kind
Speaker 6: of a if Bernie and AOC can team up and
Speaker 6: go to Rhode Island and elect a progressive legislator to
Speaker 6: the Rhode Island Congressional delegation, then that encourages more people
Speaker 6: then to participate in Democratic primaries and try to take
Speaker 6: over the Democratic Party from the inside. If you believe
Speaker 6: that that's a dead end and you want to build
Speaker 6: a third party instead, or you don't want to be
Speaker 6: involved in electoral politics at all, then you need that
Speaker 6: project to fail. And so in some ways it is strategic.
Speaker 6: I think in other ways it was just nihilistic. That
Speaker 6: there's a lot of bad blood between Regenberg and some
Speaker 6: of these other Rhode Island lefties, and so they just
Speaker 6: didn't want him to win, so they end up getting
Speaker 6: a Biden Obama official instead. This is a really kind
Speaker 6: of sad and ignoble end to a story that started
Speaker 6: out with a lot of promise in Rhode Island. If
Speaker 6: we can put up this next clip, run through this
Speaker 6: story pretty quickly, so this is from twenty twenty one.
Speaker 6: In twenty twenty, the kind of broad Rhode Island left
Speaker 6: came together and in September of twenty twenty ousted ten
Speaker 6: incumbents in the Providence State House and ended up bringing
Speaker 6: about a lot of progressive change in Rhode Island.
Speaker 3: And it was great.
Speaker 6: It was great to see because the idea was, look,
Speaker 6: a lot of working class people in Rhode Island. The
Speaker 6: Democratic Party, which is basically the only party in Rhode Island,
Speaker 6: is not responsive to working class needs. We don't need
Speaker 6: to collect that many votes to actually get these people
Speaker 6: out of the State House and State Senate. So let's
Speaker 6: combine our forces and let's take it seriously and let's
Speaker 6: throw these bums out.
Speaker 3: And they did that.
Speaker 6: Then in twenty twenty one, as I covered there, they
Speaker 6: put together a slate of kind of fifty where they're
Speaker 6: going to run a governor, a lieutenant governor up and down,
Speaker 6: they're going to take over the state House. Before that
Speaker 6: could happen, it just collapsed in drama, utter chaos. Some
Speaker 6: people who had been elected by this co op left
Speaker 6: the co op for all sorts of reasons, saying that
Speaker 6: the co op was a mess, the co op wanted
Speaker 6: to kick out some of the other members, and then
Speaker 6: and through this period DSA is kind of collapsing in
Speaker 6: its own acrimony, and recently the estate is size that
Speaker 6: they're not doing electoral politics at all, which although that
Speaker 6: wasn't sure, they're doing electoral politics, just not running candidates,
Speaker 6: just engaging in electoral politics.
Speaker 3: So we can put up this next clip.
Speaker 6: Dan Maren's over at huff Post kind of did a
Speaker 6: good story on this back in, you know, the end
Speaker 6: of twenty twenty one. If people want to read the
Speaker 6: kind of sad drama that brought this to an end,
Speaker 6: and that brings us up to the place where then
Speaker 6: in twenty twenty two, David Siegel runs in an open primary.
Speaker 6: He has the support of the CPC, of the support
Speaker 6: of Bernie Sanders. He ends up falling short. To Seth
Speaker 6: Magazine or who's now going to be in office as
Speaker 6: long as long as he wants. And then now Progressives
Speaker 6: have swung and missed at this. So they had a
Speaker 6: chance to have two Bernie backed members of Congress representing
Speaker 6: Rhode Island in Congress. Instead they will now have zero
Speaker 6: now not to let Aaron himself off the hook. If
Speaker 6: the election were held a couple of weeks ago, he
Speaker 6: probably wins. And that's why you hear so much panic
Speaker 6: in Kennedy's right there. At the last debate, he was
Speaker 6: hammered from all sides for a superpack that his father
Speaker 6: in law had funded on his behalf to the tune
Speaker 6: of about one hundred and twenty five thousand dollars, which
Speaker 6: is a small amount of money in today's politics, But
Speaker 6: when you only need ten thousand votes, you know, and
Speaker 6: you can.
Speaker 3: If you can get one hundred thousand dollars of mailing,
Speaker 3: it helps.
Speaker 6: So the question that people were asking of Aaron was
Speaker 6: did you coordinate with this super pack? And in the
Speaker 6: debate he was accused of having what's called a red box.
Speaker 3: We've talked about redboxes before.
Speaker 6: This is a little tiny piece on your campaign website
Speaker 6: where you click on it and it goes to it's
Speaker 6: messaging for a super pack, like what demographics you want
Speaker 6: to target and with what messages it's intended. And it's
Speaker 6: a way to get around coordination laws because as long
Speaker 6: as you have a link on your campaign website that
Speaker 6: somebody can find, then you're not coordinating because it's just
Speaker 6: public information and a superpack go out and find it.
Speaker 6: So Mattos challenged Aaron directly, you know, did you have
Speaker 6: a red box on your website? And he flat out
Speaker 6: lied in the debate and said no, he did not
Speaker 6: have a red box. They all it took was the
Speaker 6: way back machine, and Matos was able to show later like, no,
Speaker 6: he did have one. So there are a lot of
Speaker 6: different ways you can handle that if you're going to
Speaker 6: do a summer Lee did a super pack like candidates
Speaker 6: should not be. I mean, she didn't do a s
Speaker 6: There were super PACs working to benefit summer Ly. Summerly
Speaker 6: would not be in Congress right now if the Working
Speaker 6: Families Party, Justice Democrats you know, had not come in
Speaker 6: at the very end with this big outside spending which
Speaker 6: is called a super pac. But Summerlee was open about it.
Speaker 6: She's like, these super packs are supporting me. I don't,
Speaker 6: I don't I don't like this campaign system. But a
Speaker 6: pack is spending millions of dollars against me, So if
Speaker 6: they want to spend a million at the end, I'm
Speaker 6: not going to tell them not to.
Speaker 3: And she didn't lie.
Speaker 6: About whether or not she had a red box on
Speaker 6: her site and was coordinating with them the decision to
Speaker 6: have a father law do the super pac kind of independently.
Speaker 6: If I were going to be cynical about it, I'd
Speaker 6: tell them go give it to the Working Families Party, Go,
Speaker 6: you know, give it to some other organization.
Speaker 3: We'll just do your own super pac.
Speaker 6: And also don't lie, like, don't if you have a
Speaker 6: red box to be like, look, the talking point is
Speaker 6: out there. I'm not going to unilaterally disarmed like that's
Speaker 6: what everybody says, like I want the system to change,
Speaker 6: but until the system changes, I'm going to fight fire
Speaker 6: with fire, like that's all you had to do.
Speaker 3: Instead, he said no.
Speaker 6: And because turnout in this election was so small, that
Speaker 6: means it's a highly informed voter demographic so and a
Speaker 6: highly informed electorate, so they knew like this penetrated the
Speaker 6: consciousness of these voters. They're only thirty five thousand people
Speaker 6: that voted. Total in this primary. This was another case where,
Speaker 6: like with AOC, if the Left had been able to
Speaker 6: cobble together eleven twelve thousand votes, they win. I think
Speaker 6: we'll see what Amo winds up with, but I think,
Speaker 6: you know, eleven twelve thousand votes and he'll probably end
Speaker 6: up winning by two or three thousand votes against Reagenberg.
Speaker 3: And so a pretty pitiful end.
Speaker 6: To what began as a kind of hopeful moment in
Speaker 6: twenty twenty, which kind of sums up the left I
Speaker 6: think for.
Speaker 3: Over the last like three years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, that's interesting in the unilateral So there have
Speaker 4: been a lot of responses. There has been a lot
Speaker 4: of responses to Washington Post journalist Philip Bump's appearance on Gnomedwarman.
Speaker 4: He's the owner of the Comedy Sellers in New York,
Speaker 4: his podcast, and it was fodder for a lot of
Speaker 4: critics of media, especially to watch Bump have a very
Speaker 4: very difficult time defending his stance that Hunter Biden doesn't
Speaker 4: go to Joe Biden, so anything that sort of affects
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden. There's not enough evidence suggesting that Joe Biden
Speaker 4: was implicated and wrongdoing to basically draw conclusions about the
Speaker 4: President Dorman and says as he opens the podcast, Basically,
Speaker 4: I was looking for the smartest person who disagrees with
Speaker 4: me on Hunter Biden to come on and have a conversation.
Speaker 4: And basically I want to learn what the other side
Speaker 4: is and the best version of the other side, because
Speaker 4: I'm genuinely curious and want.
Speaker 5: To see how it holds up to scrutiny.
Speaker 4: Well, if you accept this as an experiment to test
Speaker 4: that question, how well does the defense of Joe Biden
Speaker 4: basically hold up to scrutiny? Uh, the video didn't go
Speaker 4: so well for Philip Bump, So let's take a look
Speaker 4: at a quick clip from how it went.
Speaker 11: What do you take from the text message to his
Speaker 11: adult daughter A hundred texts, I have to give fifty
Speaker 11: percent of my income to pop.
Speaker 13: I have no idea what that means. I don't. I
Speaker 13: have no idea what that means.
Speaker 14: It's it's it's.
Speaker 13: I know, it's circumstantial evidence, and you prefer that what
Speaker 13: what could be? I have no idea, but doesn't don't know. Well,
Speaker 13: I appreciate your.
Speaker 11: Has anybody has anybody asked her?
Speaker 14: I don't know, I don't know.
Speaker 11: Don't you think somebody should ask her.
Speaker 13: Okay, like, I'm not I just said I don't know,
Speaker 13: and I don't know what to make of it, so
Speaker 13: I have nothing I could say about it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you say there's no evident evidence.
Speaker 11: But then there's a text message where he says, I
Speaker 11: get top fifty cent of my money.
Speaker 3: That's that's evidence.
Speaker 13: Okay, well, okay, fine, fine, so evidence.
Speaker 3: I appreciate your.
Speaker 13: Having me up.
Speaker 11: It doesn't that's something like that. Who do you think
Speaker 11: is the more I saw? I lived at that I'm
Speaker 11: saying you cagure. I don't feel you want me to leave,
Speaker 11: Like just walk out in the middle of this. You
Speaker 11: can that way you can, you can go.
Speaker 5: Is this a standard?
Speaker 3: Really?
Speaker 11: This is the way the Washington Post handles people who.
Speaker 13: Disagree with When I agree to be on for forty
Speaker 13: five minutes and then I get on for an hour
Speaker 13: and fifteen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that is at the end of the interview,
Speaker 4: because Bump does get up and leave, but he had
Speaker 4: been there for some hour going back and forth with Dorman.
Speaker 5: You can actually watch the interview.
Speaker 4: I think it's very interesting because Philip Bump repeatedly says
Speaker 4: that he's kind of debunked.
Speaker 5: He uses the phrase debunked this idea that Joe.
Speaker 4: Biden is potentially implicated and Hunter's wrong doing. Dowrman there
Speaker 4: is referencing that text message from Hunter Biden to his
Speaker 4: daughter Naomi Biden that was found on his laptop suggesting
Speaker 4: he had been siphoning that his father had been getting
Speaker 4: money funneled to him from Hunter's work, and we know
Speaker 4: that his work was peddling essentially. So if you don't
Speaker 4: care about the Hunter Biden thing, I don't particularly blame you.
Speaker 4: I care about it because I like covering influence peddling.
Speaker 4: But what I want to get to the bottom of,
Speaker 4: whether it's on the left or the right, by the way,
Speaker 4: is what the real world serious consequences of the double
Speaker 4: standards in our politics are. And at this point I
Speaker 4: am talking about left and right, although I think it's
Speaker 4: particularly a problem for the left because the left is
Speaker 4: largely in charge of the media, and the media does
Speaker 4: largely purport to be a neutral arbiter of a lot
Speaker 4: of these things. You know, Philip Bump isn't out there
Speaker 4: saying listen, I'm a partisan Democrats, so take my perspective
Speaker 4: with a grain of salt. He's not saying that and
Speaker 4: I think that's a real problem. Let's put up the
Speaker 4: second element. This is a story that you may have
Speaker 4: also heard. I think Crystal and Sager covered it about
Speaker 4: this serious attempt to reign in corruption in Ukraine.
Speaker 5: So that's from Reuters.
Speaker 4: It says Ukraine lawmakers back antigraph disclosure rule Comma.
Speaker 5: But with loophole. I wonder how the loophole got there.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of money flowing in the United States
Speaker 4: in Ukraine, as we all know. We basically understand that
Speaker 4: at this point. But what I just want to focus
Speaker 4: our attention on for a moment is something a lot
Speaker 4: of the media isn't talking about when it comes to
Speaker 4: Joe Biden and when it comes to Ukraine. If we
Speaker 4: go back to when Joe Biden had Ukraine in his
Speaker 4: portfolio during the Obama administration, there's this serious question of
Speaker 4: him being sent over to Ukraine to have these conversations
Speaker 4: with Victor Schoken and whomever else. He's the prosecutor that
Speaker 4: Biden ended up firing about corruption in a foreign country
Speaker 4: when his own son is being paid tens of thousands
Speaker 4: of dollars a months, like eighty thousand dollars a month
Speaker 4: by Barisma by a corrupt oil and gas company in Ukraine.
Speaker 4: So this is America taking their credibility and all of
Speaker 4: their aid money back in the Obama administration over to
Speaker 4: Ukraine and saying, you guys, really got to clean up
Speaker 4: your corruption. The messenger for that really needed to clean
Speaker 4: up his own corruption, as even people in the State
Speaker 4: Department recognized when they realized what Hunter Biden was doing
Speaker 4: with the Biden family name back at the time. Fast
Speaker 4: forward to twenty twenty twenty three, Joe Biden is overseeing
Speaker 4: millions and millions of dollars going over to Ukraine, and
Speaker 4: he is completely compromised.
Speaker 5: There's just no other question.
Speaker 4: There's no question about it, because even Philip Bump recognizes
Speaker 4: that what Hunter Biden did with the Joe Biden family.
Speaker 5: Name was wrong.
Speaker 4: And whether or not you think Joe Biden literally profited
Speaker 4: from any of that, whether or not you think he's
Speaker 4: been honest, et cetera, et cetera, it is absolutely no
Speaker 4: questions asked affecting the way affecting the moral credibility of
Speaker 4: the United States as they say, hey, let's put a
Speaker 4: pause on some of this corruption. This is hard earned
Speaker 4: American tax payer dollars we're giving it to you to
Speaker 4: fight this war effort. We need to make sure that
Speaker 4: it's going to the right places. Our moral credibility is
Speaker 4: absolutely hampered by the reality that the Biden family name
Speaker 4: was being used to pedal influence for the last decade. Essentially,
Speaker 4: Now this goes in both directions. We can talk about
Speaker 4: Jared Kushner. For instance, you get to a place where
Speaker 4: basically the left has no ability on Jared Kushner. There's
Speaker 4: some serious problems there people on the left who don't
Speaker 4: care about Hunter but care about Jared, which I would
Speaker 4: argue is most of the left is in a huge
Speaker 4: credibility deficit once again, and I get that they'll say,
Speaker 4: you know, why should we talk about Jared? Or I
Speaker 4: get why people on the right would say why should
Speaker 4: we talk about Jared? When when it came to Hunter,
Speaker 4: you know, you had twenty twenty In twenty twenty, the
Speaker 4: intelligence community, you had top democrats, you had big tech
Speaker 4: rallying in this concerted effort to censor information about it.
Speaker 4: I get why conservatives don't want to touch the Jared stuff.
Speaker 4: But once again, if you are implicated in influence pedaling,
Speaker 4: as Jared Kushner has been, when it comes to Saudi Arabia,
Speaker 4: leaving the Trump administration with Saudi Arabian in his portfolio
Speaker 4: and then getting a massive influx of investment money from
Speaker 4: Saudi Arabia from the Saudi Investment Bank, then yeah, you're
Speaker 4: a huge credibility problem once again. And let's put up
Speaker 4: the next element, because this is another serious consequence of
Speaker 4: double standards. This is a New York Times headline, and
Speaker 4: if you're listening to this, I wish you could see
Speaker 4: the picture. It's a juxtaposition of Diane Feinstein and Mitch McConnell.
Speaker 4: The New York Times asks reluctant to require retire leaders
Speaker 4: raise a tough question how old is too old? Once again,
Speaker 4: a consequence of the double standard is that the left
Speaker 4: has no credibility saying that Mitch McConnell needs to retire, which,
Speaker 4: by the way, Mitch McConnell absolutely needs to retire, and the.
Speaker 5: Right loses credibility.
Speaker 4: Although most people on the right are not defending Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 4: as we talked about earlier in the show, most people
Speaker 4: on the right are eager for Mitch McConnell to go,
Speaker 4: but defenders of Mitch McConnell lose their credibility on Joe
Speaker 4: Biden and on Diane Feinstein if they are defending Mitch
Speaker 4: McConnell or not saying anything about Mitch McConnell. What is
Speaker 4: the consequence of all of this. That's the central point
Speaker 4: I want to make. This is not just a media
Speaker 4: play thing. It is not a political football that would
Speaker 4: just punt around to what about Jared Kushner, What about
Speaker 4: Hunter Biden? What about Mitch McConnell, what about Diane Fines's.
Speaker 4: This is a political football that's way too often treated
Speaker 4: like it's part of a game here in Washington, d C.
Speaker 4: But there are actual serious consequences to it, which is that,
Speaker 4: in a normal circumstance, you look at Joe Biden and say,
Speaker 4: it is abundantly clear this man should not be running
Speaker 4: for a second term as president. He wandered out of
Speaker 4: a medal of honor ceremony just yesterday in a painful way.
Speaker 4: It happens every week, seemingly every day, there's a moment
Speaker 4: that is just cringeworthy, and you feel badly for the
Speaker 4: man because perhaps you see some of your own relatives
Speaker 4: in him.
Speaker 5: We've all watched this happen before.
Speaker 4: And it's sad it belongs to nowhere near the presidency,
Speaker 4: and in a normal media atmosphere and a normal political discourse,
Speaker 4: we would know that we would understand it, and we
Speaker 4: would be able to have somebody, whether Democrat or Republican,
Speaker 4: who's at least more competent and able to have conversations
Speaker 4: with world leaders that they understand, is able to be
Speaker 4: trusted when they're negotiating with world leaders. That Okay, I
Speaker 4: believe Joe Biden heard me and understood me, and whatever
Speaker 4: we're working on, that'll be just fine. Same thing with
Speaker 4: Nann Feinstein, who's been and Senate leadership for forever, Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 4: who is Senate leadership for Republicans. It's a real problem
Speaker 4: for the United States both how we're negotiating with Ukraine
Speaker 4: and negotiating with Saudi Arabia that we lack credibility.
Speaker 5: On those two fronts.
Speaker 4: So all of this is just to point out that,
Speaker 4: you know, it's easy to do the what about thing,
Speaker 4: and I actually believe that there are some legitimate circumstances
Speaker 4: to do it, because again, well what about Hunter Biden.
Speaker 4: When people are bringing up Jared Kushner and you had
Speaker 4: all like this massive concerted effort to blott it, to
Speaker 4: block out some information on him. I get it, but
Speaker 4: I just wanted to pause for a moment as we
Speaker 4: kick around these things like political footballs, and realize that
Speaker 4: the double standards, I think, largely fueled by the media,
Speaker 4: fueled by people like Philip Bump, this hypocrisy actually is.
Speaker 4: It may not have real world consequences for reporters in Washington,
Speaker 4: d C. Who have comfy lives, but it does have
Speaker 4: consequences for the country in.
Speaker 5: The near term and in the long term. Ryan. It's
Speaker 5: just frustrating because I know it's also.
Speaker 4: We're joined now by Sarab Amari, the founding editor of
Speaker 4: The Great Compact magazine, which you should subscribe to if
Speaker 4: you're not already subscribed to it. He's also the author
Speaker 4: of the new book Tyranny, Inc. How Private Power Crushed
Speaker 4: American Liberty and What to do about it. We're going
Speaker 4: to get into the question of private power in just
Speaker 4: one second, but so Rob, first of all, thanks for
Speaker 4: coming on the show.
Speaker 15: Thanks for having me in. Good to see you Emily
Speaker 15: at a distance. Nice to meet you Ryan.
Speaker 3: Same here, same here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's start with this question of private power. Especially
Speaker 4: we can put the first element up on the screen
Speaker 4: when it comes to a couple of things that I
Speaker 4: think are creating a really important moment for the right
Speaker 4: this fall. Actually just this fall, we have real safety
Speaker 4: on the table. There's a bipartisan rail bill has been
Speaker 4: supported by the likes of jd Vance, but opposed by
Speaker 4: other people on the right. Actually, you know, John Thune
Speaker 4: comes to mind, somebody who was involved in the private
Speaker 4: power of the rail industry. Actually for a while has
Speaker 4: really stalled out in Congress. I think that's both due
Speaker 4: to corporate Dems and corporate Republicans, but truly on the right.
Speaker 4: This has created a huge debate. It should be on
Speaker 4: the table this fall, it may or may not be.
Speaker 4: And also if we go to the second element, the
Speaker 4: UAW we can talk more about this in detail, but huge,
Speaker 4: I mean the labor movement right now I think is
Speaker 4: creating in and of itself a put up or shut
Speaker 4: up moment for the right and.
Speaker 5: Digging into some of these disputes.
Speaker 4: So I want to get your take on the kind
Speaker 4: of confluence of these two things as Congress is back,
Speaker 4: you know, basically this week and they have a hugely
Speaker 4: chaotic fall in front of them.
Speaker 5: It's absolutely packed.
Speaker 4: Do you similarly see this as a kind of put
Speaker 4: up or shut up moment for the realigning conservative movement?
Speaker 4: The realigning right that now has this more working class coalition,
Speaker 4: especially among voters than it did in the past, likes
Speaker 4: to talk about the middle class a lot because of
Speaker 4: agreement consensus on some cultural issues, but you know, maybe
Speaker 4: hasn't taken the steps necessary. A lot of people in
Speaker 4: the left are skeptical that has taken the steps necessary
Speaker 4: to really support the working class on policy measures. So A,
Speaker 4: do you see it as a put up er shut
Speaker 4: up moment? And then B, how are Republicans faring in
Speaker 4: this test so far?
Speaker 15: Yeah, it's absolutely a put upper shut up moment emily,
Speaker 15: but it's not the first one.
Speaker 14: Certainly. There were many such tests that came even during.
Speaker 15: The Trump administration, and despite the Trump campaign's very pro
Speaker 15: worker rhetoric that was born out in some things like
Speaker 15: trade policy, but in many other instances, even the Trump administration,
Speaker 15: notwithstanding the president's own kind of sensibility and instincts, ended
Speaker 15: up acting like any other union busting type of conventional
Speaker 15: Republican party and its largest biggest legislative accomplishment, as you know,
Speaker 15: was a corporate tax cut engineered by then House Speaker
Speaker 15: Paul Ryan. But here we have another one, and I
Speaker 15: think it's it's a very important one, because the right
Speaker 15: made a lot of noise after East Palestine, Ohio, that incident,
Speaker 15: you'll remember, was framed in its typical kind of the
Speaker 15: right stance for the working class, for the heartland, for
Speaker 15: kind of the forgotten inner country. But right now, as
Speaker 15: you said, this reform legislation that's been pushed forward by
Speaker 15: actually Senator Vance and a number of Democratic allies he's
Speaker 15: found on the other side of the aisle is stalling
Speaker 15: mainly because of you know, Senator McConnell and other other
Speaker 15: kind of hardline free market Republicans who answer to the
Speaker 15: Chamber of Commerce more than they do to any other
Speaker 15: constituency in the United States. So I think, and it's
Speaker 15: very important to note what the what the cause was
Speaker 15: actually Senator Rubio, Senator Vance wrote a letter, you know,
Speaker 15: homing in on the fact that it's kind of this
Speaker 15: neoliberal model of absolutely minimizing labor costs so that you
Speaker 15: have ever more material on the nation's railways with ever
Speaker 15: fewer workers because they do this kind of just in
Speaker 15: time scheduling, which was popular especially before the pandemic, to
Speaker 15: minimize labor costs. But what that means is that each
Speaker 15: sort of ton tonnage of rail content has fewer safety
Speaker 15: professionals to deal with it, and therefore, if there is
Speaker 15: an accident, both they're more likely and more likely to
Speaker 15: be catastrophic. So yeah, it's a put up er shout
Speaker 15: up moment, and we'll see how the Republican Party fares
Speaker 15: the UAW. I could just briefly say, what the you know,
Speaker 15: there's an element of fears about what the green transition
Speaker 15: will mean, which I think are pretty legitimate, and I
Speaker 15: think Republicans can speak pretty cogently to that given.
Speaker 14: Their skepticism of.
Speaker 15: Some of the green agenda, and some of that skepticism,
Speaker 15: as you know, I think is well founded. But there's
Speaker 15: this other element that has to do with the fact
Speaker 15: that there are two tier contracts at the Big three automakers,
Speaker 15: where typically younger workers who come in don't get to
Speaker 15: benefit from the same sort of middle class stability and
Speaker 15: lack of precarity that used to characterize manufacturing jobs in
Speaker 15: the auto sector back in the day, and so the
Speaker 15: battle is over workers, including older workers, out of solidarity
Speaker 15: with their young successors on the factory line, demanding that
Speaker 15: there should be kind of uniform contracts that are you know,
Speaker 15: you don't have this tier model again if you have
Speaker 15: a Republican Party that claims to be pro worker, and
Speaker 15: you know, President Trump, as you know, won the highest
Speaker 15: marginal share of union households for any Republican nominee since
Speaker 15: Ronald Reagan in nineteen eighty four. He won those union
Speaker 15: households by precisely by speaking to you know, those kinds
Speaker 15: of workers. And so if it doesn't deliver for them,
Speaker 15: and continues for the most part, with few exceptions like
Speaker 15: Senator Rubio Vance Holly, for the most part gives workers
Speaker 15: the back of the hand, then I think that it's
Speaker 15: easy to predict those workers becoming apathetic again and certainly
Speaker 15: leaving the Republican Party or finding you know, their more
Speaker 15: comfortable home on the on the Democratic left, which is
Speaker 15: all sorts of other problems. But in short, I agree
Speaker 15: with you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so what what's going to shake things loose
Speaker 6: for the Republican Party. So next next week is the
Speaker 6: contract deadline for the UAW after which you could see
Speaker 6: a strike. And I'm curious if you think you're going
Speaker 6: to see support for let's if they do go on
Speaker 6: a strike, support for the striking workers like it.
Speaker 3: Are we at a point where you're.
Speaker 6: Starting to see a transition from Republicans saying that they're
Speaker 6: pro worker to Republicans also being pro union or is
Speaker 6: that too big of a bridge at this point because
Speaker 6: of the kind of you know, power base that you
Speaker 6: accurately identify in the Republican Party as the kind of
Speaker 6: you know, car dealer Republican, the small to medium time
Speaker 6: gold wall, you know, the same kind of force that
Speaker 6: fired Goldwater is filled so dominant within the Republican Party, and.
Speaker 3: They are you know, they hate nothing more than unions.
Speaker 6: So what you know, are you know, how how far
Speaker 6: do you have to go to you get from pro
Speaker 6: work at a pro union?
Speaker 14: Well, that's that's a really good question.
Speaker 15: I would say that as far as this battle coming
Speaker 15: up next week, you know, I can't predict what individual
Speaker 15: senators will do, but if you know, if the past
Speaker 15: is any precedent, you know, you'll remember when there was
Speaker 15: a the looming rail strike last fall.
Speaker 14: If I remember correctly, I think last November.
Speaker 15: Uh, you did have a number of Republicans in the
Speaker 15: Senate stepping in and saying no, Congress should not put
Speaker 15: a put a stop to their ability to to strike,
Speaker 15: actually going against the Biden administration in that case, that
Speaker 15: rare case. You've had Senator Rubio speak out for Amazon
Speaker 15: workers at at a warehouse in Alabama and Bessemer.
Speaker 14: Uh.
Speaker 15: So there are these kind of green shoots, and so
Speaker 15: we'll see how they react to this case. But more broadly,
Speaker 15: I mean, I think the dynamic is such that if
Speaker 15: the Republican Party doesn't deliver for the growing number of
Speaker 15: working class people who rally to it, often for cultural reasons,
Speaker 15: then you know they will become apathetic and begin to
Speaker 15: get disillusioned with the party. Now, one of the reasons
Speaker 15: that existing unions are so close to the Democrats is
Speaker 15: precisely because they've since the Nixon era. Nixon was the
Speaker 15: last president who actually competitively fought for their union vote.
Speaker 15: Since the next in era, the party has become much
Speaker 15: more again I use the term neoliberal, much more sort
Speaker 15: of resolutely just on the side of employers and corporations,
Speaker 15: and so unions keep getting the back of the hand
Speaker 15: from the Republican Party. Of course, they'll just cling ever
Speaker 15: more tightly to the Democratic Party. The reason that's the
Speaker 15: problem is because, first of all, it means that we
Speaker 15: don't have an independent labor movement. We have a labor
Speaker 15: movement that is deeply dependent on one side of the
Speaker 15: political aisle. It also means that we have a labor
Speaker 15: movement that, you know, becomes ever more culturally polarizing in
Speaker 15: a way that's not good for its larger cause. Right
Speaker 15: when the AFLCIO says we are basically maximal on abortion rights,
Speaker 15: you know, some workers might be pro abortion, but plenty
Speaker 15: are more conservative.
Speaker 14: They may not be, you know, utterly completely.
Speaker 15: Opposed to abortion, but they may want limits at fifteen
Speaker 15: weeks or twenty weeks or what have you. There's no
Speaker 15: reason why their labor union should take a stance on
Speaker 15: that that is so at odds with what they believe.
Speaker 15: But things will stay that way unless enough Republicans reach
Speaker 15: out to organized labor that it becomes possible for there
Speaker 15: to be for workers to have an organized voice in
Speaker 15: the Republican Party in the same way that, for example,
Speaker 15: small business has an organized voice within.
Speaker 14: The Republican Party.
Speaker 15: And then you can do coalitional politics, like you can
Speaker 15: between the various coalitions of the Republican Party and achieve
Speaker 15: things that are you know, maybe not everyone will be
Speaker 15: completely happy, but everyone will be somewhat happy.
Speaker 14: But in order to.
Speaker 15: Get there, you need the courage of a few Republicans
Speaker 15: who are willing to break with the orthodoxity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think this fall is such a big
Speaker 4: test of that. I want to get your temperature. My
Speaker 4: last question for your so, Rob is on the Trump
Speaker 4: I think this was a truth social post where he
Speaker 4: goes after the UAW and says, basically, Mexico and Canada
Speaker 4: love Biden's idiotic policy, Save Michigan and the other auto states,
Speaker 4: save the American consumer basically from electric cars. Trump says,
Speaker 4: you know, Sean Faine, the respected president of UAW, cannot
Speaker 4: even think about along all electric cars. They will all
Speaker 4: be made in China, and the auto industry in America
Speaker 4: will cease to exist. And you mentioned so, Rob, how
Speaker 4: a lot of union workers particularly flock to Trump for
Speaker 4: cultural reasons. Now, I think you'll probably have some people
Speaker 4: flocking or people posing the u a W if they
Speaker 4: give in too much to the kind of green agenda
Speaker 4: of the Biden administration. So how then do Republicans morally
Speaker 4: do the right thing when it comes to the UAW
Speaker 4: electric cars, the workers in Michigan, and then politically do
Speaker 4: the right thing. What is the answer to that kind
Speaker 4: of difficult balancing act.
Speaker 14: Yeah, well, first of all, I mean, if they're if Republicans.
Speaker 15: Are in the arena and not so utterly hostile the
Speaker 15: bulk of them to organized labor, then you can influence
Speaker 15: organized labor.
Speaker 14: Right, This is how kind of politics works.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 15: You know, if you have a stake in something, you
Speaker 15: get to have a say in it as well. And
Speaker 15: so you know, I think that that is a reasonable
Speaker 15: concern about Green, the Green transition threatening existing manufacturing jobs
Speaker 15: that are high, you know, relative hy wid and quite secure.
Speaker 15: And I do know that the UAW has made public
Speaker 15: noises about its concerns, you know, public it's concerns to
Speaker 15: the Obama sorrys of the Obama investration for Indian stuff.
Speaker 14: To the Biden administration about the transition.
Speaker 15: That said, I will say that, you know, I'm of
Speaker 15: the view that green needn't necessarily mean job killing it.
Speaker 15: You know, in other words, there's a tendency on the
Speaker 15: right when they look at something like the Inflation Reduction Act,
Speaker 15: and they think, oh, it's all green subsidies. The Green
Speaker 15: transition is something that a lot of our kind of
Speaker 15: rivals like China are putting enormous amounts of investment into
Speaker 15: because they see it as an industry of the future
Speaker 15: that's important. And so you know, you know, we should
Speaker 15: absolutely try to preserve existing auto manufacturing jobs. I'm in
Speaker 15: favor of that, but to look in a long term
Speaker 15: and think about what we can do industrial policy wise
Speaker 15: to bring these jobs, which can be high waged jobs,
Speaker 15: to the United States or more of them to the
Speaker 15: United States and take them away from China. I think
Speaker 15: that's part of this kind of industrial policy package. And
Speaker 15: when I compare, for example, how someone like National Security
Speaker 15: Advisor Jake Sullivan thinks and talks about this stuff with
Speaker 15: the republic Can Party, I can't but say that, Okay,
Speaker 15: this this, this is a serious party of government, the
Speaker 15: Democrats with which I have big disagreements, to be sure,
Speaker 15: and then you have a Republicans who are just I
Speaker 15: don't know, there's a kind of just nearly reactionary and
Speaker 15: saying like, well, they're going to take your jobs. You know,
Speaker 15: it's sort of lopsided you look in terms of seriousness,
Speaker 15: So anyway, I think that's a it's a hard needle
Speaker 15: to thread.
Speaker 6: No doubt, we'll say Sorbo Mari. The book is Tyranny, Inc.
Speaker 6: Thanks thanks for joining us. We'll be following the w
Speaker 6: strike closely. The rail fight hopefully isn't over yet. Appreciate
Speaker 6: you joining us.
Speaker 14: Thank you both, Thanks Ryan.
Speaker 4: Thanks so much so Rob. That does it for us today.
Speaker 4: We'll be back next week. And again, I think we're
Speaker 4: at the one year anniversary of counterpoints, so maybe we'll
Speaker 4: do something a little special for that.
Speaker 5: I don't know. Maybe you'll bring in brownies. Oh, there
Speaker 5: we go, who knows, we'll see, We'll see
Speaker 6: All right, stick around see you then, Ms.