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: But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody,
Speaker 2: Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today.
Speaker 2: What do we have, Krystal?
Speaker 1: Indeed we do. Lots of interesting things happening in the world.
Speaker 1: Russia Gate is back. I guess I never really left
Speaker 1: us and it is more deranged than ever.
Speaker 3: So I show you.
Speaker 1: The very latest if you don't want to miss this.
Speaker 1: The callog CEO is now pushing cereal for dinner as
Speaker 1: a cost saving measure. Doesn't sound great. AI is really
Speaker 1: going through some things. Chat GPT went off the rails
Speaker 1: and there's a lot going on. I don't even know
Speaker 1: what to say about the inability to accurately portrays basic
Speaker 1: things like a European family. We'll get into all of that.
Speaker 1: Dems are freaking out about voters voting uncommitted in the
Speaker 1: upcoming Michigan primary. Top Democrats are really sounding the alarms
Speaker 1: there over Biden's incredibly unpopular among the Democratic base policy
Speaker 1: of unconditional support for Israel. Speaking of that, it has
Speaker 1: been a big week for the US running cover for
Speaker 1: Israeli atrocities and a United States congressman saying to an
Speaker 1: activist that we should kill all the children in Gaza.
Speaker 1: I'm not even kidding you there. We also have a
Speaker 1: reporter who is on the ground in the UK for
Speaker 1: Julie Nosanche's appeal trying to block extradition to the United States,
Speaker 1: so he is going to give us an update. Looking
Speaker 1: forward to that. But before we get to any of that,
Speaker 1: thank you to all of you who have supported us
Speaker 1: through a premium subscription. It has made all the difference
Speaker 1: in the world to us, and we have some exciting
Speaker 1: things coming up for you.
Speaker 2: That's right. So, as we mentioned, we're going to have
Speaker 2: a State of the Union live stream on March seventh,
Speaker 2: and actually, just to tease us a little bit, we've
Speaker 2: decided up the even a little bit. If you are
Speaker 2: a premium subscriber, we will have a private live stream
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Speaker 2: can go in and sign up Breaking Points dot com
Speaker 2: and support us. But with that, let's get to Russiagate,
Speaker 2: as you said, which is somehow in the last week
Speaker 2: or so, the bat signal has gone to really revive
Speaker 2: the what does Russia have on Trump? You may think
Speaker 2: I'm exaggerating, I truly am not. Here is Jensaki, the
Speaker 2: former White House Press secretary, now on MSNBC State TV,
Speaker 2: joined by Nancy Pelosi, the former House Speaker, being asked
Speaker 2: and floating genuine, deranged conspiracy theories live on television. Here's
Speaker 2: what they had to say.
Speaker 4: What do you think we're all wondering this question, Speaker Wilise,
Speaker 4: What do you think Puttin has on him? I mean,
Speaker 4: it sure seems like something, as you've said a few times,
Speaker 4: given that he refuses to criticize him, that he seems
Speaker 4: to be a fanboy.
Speaker 3: On him, had the honor of serving in the White House,
Speaker 3: didn't consider it an honor, didn't consider his oath of
Speaker 3: office to protect and defend the Constitution, and on this week,
Speaker 3: speaking out the way he did about Navone shows you
Speaker 3: that he is person without values. He looks like he's
Speaker 3: going to be a person without dollars either. But the
Speaker 3: values are what concern us.
Speaker 2: Yes, the dollars, I don't know.
Speaker 3: What he has on them, but I think it's probably financial.
Speaker 3: I think it's probably financial, either something financially has on
Speaker 3: or something on the come.
Speaker 2: What was that at the end there, But listen, something financial.
Speaker 2: It's like crystal after all of the investigations, the Mueller,
Speaker 2: the Congress, the what was that whole bank theory, Alpha Bank?
Speaker 5: Yes, right, server paying after all of.
Speaker 2: These that we have been subjected to, now over the
Speaker 2: years seven and a half years or so into the
Speaker 2: Trump era, this is still alive and well on MSNBC
Speaker 2: being floated. As you said, probably something financial. I mean,
Speaker 2: then go ahead and reverse it. It's like it's just
Speaker 2: is deranged, you know. Whenever people are like I think
Speaker 2: Biden is being personally paid by China, it's like, listen,
Speaker 2: you gotta have evidence for stuff that you're going to
Speaker 2: say now at this point, and frankly, there's probably a
Speaker 2: better case for that via Hunter than there is for
Speaker 2: any of this, just because this has been investigated ad nauseum.
Speaker 2: The world's journalist in the world's journalists have all obviously
Speaker 2: been desperate for it, the world's all of the intelligence services,
Speaker 2: the US Intelligence Service, if there was even a scrap there,
Speaker 2: we would know about it by now.
Speaker 1: I'm so sick of this crap I cannot even tell you.
Speaker 1: And it's worth remembering. This is also the woman Nancy
Speaker 1: Pelosi that floated that ceasefire protesters were potentially being paid
Speaker 1: by Russia or and needed to go back to their
Speaker 1: handlers in China. I mean, she thinks nothing of floating
Speaker 1: the most insane and completely baseless conspiracy theories. But because
Speaker 1: she has so much power and access in Washington when
Speaker 1: she says it, a lot of gullible people think there
Speaker 1: must be some there, that she must know something that
Speaker 1: we don't know. She's just making crap up. Because if
Speaker 1: she wasn't, is she actually had some evidence of like
Speaker 1: some financial whatever that they quote unquote have on Trump,
Speaker 1: she would put it in front of the American people.
Speaker 1: So that's number one. Number two, we have now lived
Speaker 1: through a Trump administration and we know what his policy
Speaker 1: was Vza VI Russia and Visa v Ukraine. And while
Speaker 1: yes he would say some sort of weird fawning things
Speaker 1: about Putin as he still does, and yes he was
Speaker 1: critical of NATO before he became president, the reality is
Speaker 1: when he actually governed, he was very hawkish towards Russia,
Speaker 1: more so than Barack Obama had been. NATO expanded. The
Speaker 1: bulk of his critique about NATO still is pushing for
Speaker 1: Europeans to pay more, which means NATO would be actually
Speaker 1: better funded for the future. So the reality of what
Speaker 1: the policy was does not at all match up with
Speaker 1: these continued elaborate Russia Gate conspiracies. And finally, the thing
Speaker 1: that really pisses me off about this too is that
Speaker 1: it distracts from actually the much more credible and much
Speaker 1: more real Trump corruption, like the connections with Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 1: You know, the money he's taken from Live Gulf as
Speaker 1: a primary example, all the money he got through his
Speaker 1: hotel chains. Instead of focusing on something that is real
Speaker 1: and proven, they instead go with this thing that is baseless,
Speaker 1: and then that makes it easier for Trump to dismiss
Speaker 1: all of their critiques as ridiculous, a witch hunt a conspiracy, etc. Etc.
Speaker 1: And this has screwed up our foreign policy. I mean,
Speaker 1: the level of Russia derangement that came out of the
Speaker 1: original Russia Gate moment is something that we are still
Speaker 1: living through and coping with and has confused the American
Speaker 1: people about what our foreign policy priorities and reality should
Speaker 1: actually be.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely right. There's no way that our policy in
Speaker 2: Ukraine would be as deranged as it is without Russia Gate.
Speaker 2: I'm absolutely convinced of that. It probably instigated at least
Speaker 2: parts of the war itself in terms of not forcing
Speaker 2: Trump he's a grown man, but at least for him
Speaker 2: trying to appear tough by shipping all these weapons to Ukraine,
Speaker 2: and all of that in the first place, then adopted
Speaker 2: and pushed even further by the Biden administration. And just
Speaker 2: so you know, this is not just Nancy Pelos, we
Speaker 2: have two other instances that we can show you. Here
Speaker 2: is Representative Dan Goldman, the Democrat, heir to the Levi
Speaker 2: Strauss fortune, now making the same case, not even about Trump,
Speaker 2: but about the entire Republican caucus. Here's what he has
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 6: Not only is there no evidence of any wrongdoing by
Speaker 6: President Biden. But it now appears as if the House
Speaker 6: Republican majority is being used by Russia to interfere in
Speaker 6: the twenty twenty four election on behalf of Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: If they continue with this investigation, they are simply doing
Speaker 6: the work of Vladimir Putin to help Donald Trump win
Speaker 6: an election in November.
Speaker 2: That's where we are. What he's getting at there, Crystal
Speaker 2: is we'll get to this in a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 2: about the indicted FBI in format, But you know, you
Speaker 2: made a good point the last time we talked about this.
Speaker 2: You could make the exact same case about the Steele
Speaker 2: dossier and for all of the Russian connections that were
Speaker 2: included in that and Christopher Steele and all the other nonsense.
Speaker 2: Did you not then you know, fall prey to a
Speaker 2: foreign intelligence basically yes, And you know, gaslight the American people.
Speaker 2: That's why, you know, all of these accusations do a loyalty, treason,
Speaker 2: et cetera. They need to be founded in like actual evidence,
Speaker 2: not just thrown about willy nilly. And you know, I
Speaker 2: think a perfect point is, Look, the American people have
Speaker 2: had their say on what they think about Donald Trump
Speaker 2: and the Republicans and what actually pisses them off about it.
Speaker 2: Number one, abortion, You guys led your show yesterday with
Speaker 2: that Alabama Supreme Court that is fifteen to twenty thousand
Speaker 2: times more important for the election than any of this nonsense.
Speaker 2: But that's why it is a brain worm. This is
Speaker 2: a mental disease that these people suffer from. They would
Speaker 2: rather talk about that than or about this than they
Speaker 2: would about Alabama abortion, stop the steal, any of the
Speaker 2: things that most Americans are genuinely pissed off about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Trump, I think they actually believe it. I think
Speaker 1: they actually have like drank the kool aid like people.
Speaker 1: Not Pelosi. Pelosi is just like a genuinely nefarious actor
Speaker 1: who will make up anything that she thinks serves her
Speaker 1: in the moment and for political ends. Just see you
Speaker 1: know what she did to Diane Feinstein there end if
Speaker 1: you want to know anything about that woman and her
Speaker 1: moral character. But I think a lot of these people,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the MSNBC hosts, I think they
Speaker 1: really believe this stuff because they sort of had to
Speaker 1: have this commitment to it over so many years.
Speaker 5: And you know, when you really need.
Speaker 1: To believe something for your job, lo and behold it
Speaker 1: becomes much easier to actually convince yourself of those things
Speaker 1: than to you know, hold the space for just like
Speaker 1: I'm going to out and outlie to the American people,
Speaker 1: it's a more comfortable place for them to sit. So
Speaker 1: I think they've been convinced of the most insane and
Speaker 1: elaborate conspiracy theories. I don't think they really took in
Speaker 1: any of the evidence of you know, the problems of
Speaker 1: the Steel dossier, or hey, by the way, what happened
Speaker 1: to the p tape with Donald Trump that was supposedly
Speaker 1: out there. I mean, they just never really took in
Speaker 1: that so much of this, the most far reaching conspiracies
Speaker 1: had been completely debunked. And I want to say, like,
Speaker 1: none of this is to cover for Putin to cape
Speaker 1: for him to say this is a good guy or
Speaker 1: he's a good actor, we should trust him. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a man who, as you know, Navalney's like
Speaker 1: death is on his hands. And you know, whether you
Speaker 1: love Navalney or had issues with him or not, he's
Speaker 1: a political prisoner who is now dead. Like that is
Speaker 1: not a thing to accept or to cover for, or
Speaker 1: to say, is you know good in any way? Is
Speaker 1: Russia interested in like quote unquote meddling in our elections
Speaker 1: and screwing with us. Sure, so are a lot of countries.
Speaker 1: We do the same shit all around the world, by
Speaker 1: the way.
Speaker 2: And probably successfully, yeah, and more.
Speaker 1: Successfully, and to probably a much greater degree than Russia
Speaker 1: at this point good even dream of. So none of
Speaker 1: this is to say like Russia is great and everything
Speaker 1: they do is wonderful. No. I think that the invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine was illegal. I think it was horrendous. I
Speaker 1: think that they are responsible for starting this war. Now
Speaker 1: we are responsible in a lot of ways for continuing
Speaker 1: that war, for creating the context that led to that war.
Speaker 1: All of those things do not absolve us either. But
Speaker 1: you can have a realistic view of your adversaries without
Speaker 1: delving into elaborate conspiracies that do nothing but confuse and
Speaker 1: lead us away from pursuing what is in our interest,
Speaker 1: in Ukraine's interests, in global interest.
Speaker 2: And speaking of realistic view, it might help to not
Speaker 2: confuse the current Russian regime with communists. Apparently that's not
Speaker 2: something that MSNBC's Morning Joe is capable of. Here's what
Speaker 2: he had to say.
Speaker 7: The message that she is getting right now from Mike
Speaker 7: little Mike Johnson and Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: It's just devastating.
Speaker 7: And the message is this Republicans, who for the past
Speaker 7: fifty years have been the main force to push back
Speaker 7: hard on communism, They've surrendered to the communists.
Speaker 2: They've surrendered.
Speaker 7: Mike Johnson surrendered to the communists, to the ex communists,
Speaker 7: to the wanna be communists. Mike Johnson surrendered. Donald Trump
Speaker 7: surrendered a long time ago to Vladimir Putin, surrendered to
Speaker 7: she a long time ago. He has nothing but praise
Speaker 7: for She, for Kim john Un these communist leaders, Mika,
Speaker 7: and that is a message that she is receiving loud
Speaker 7: and clear, that it's not just Donald Trump now it
Speaker 7: is the Republican Party. What's the bulwark against communist aggression.
Speaker 7: It is the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan's old party that
Speaker 7: is now collapsed.
Speaker 8: It's completely gone. And this is a terrifying inflection point.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 8: And for anybody who doesn't take it seriously or think
Speaker 8: the election doesn't matter, or says, oh, he's not serious,
Speaker 8: you're out of your mind.
Speaker 2: You're out of your mind if you confuse communism with
Speaker 2: the Putin regime, who himself is probably one of the
Speaker 2: biggest critics of the Soviet Union. That's the great irony
Speaker 2: of the entire thing. It's just like, dude, what are
Speaker 2: we doing here? And also, you know, yeah, Reagan was
Speaker 2: anti communist in the eighties. It's been a long time
Speaker 2: since that happened. It's this literally hasn't even occurred in
Speaker 2: my lifetime, and yet it's still somehow, you know, on
Speaker 2: the cable news here, and it just demonstrates to people,
Speaker 2: you know, you're anti intellectualism that is all wrapped up
Speaker 2: in their prestige, but which is fundamentally just you know, collapses.
Speaker 2: You articulate a very nuanced position about Russia. I basically
Speaker 2: agree with everything you said. It's like, yeah, Putin is
Speaker 2: a bad guy, Okay, you know, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: bad people on earth. That doesn't mean that you could
Speaker 2: sit there just because you don't want to like kill them,
Speaker 2: take them out of the office, and put regime change
Speaker 2: that you co sign that behavior. That's right, But it's
Speaker 2: we're incapable of nuance here. Something that actually, if you
Speaker 2: go back and you look at the Cold War, there
Speaker 2: were often many times where you had to make a
Speaker 2: decision between balancing risks of nuclear war and quote unquote
Speaker 2: doing the moral thing to deal with real world constraints,
Speaker 2: which these people are completely unable to do, which is really,
Speaker 2: frankly just its downstream of how much privilege that they
Speaker 2: really have and the US and how much little danger
Speaker 2: we've actually been in now for quite some time. Let's
Speaker 2: put the final thing up here on the screen, just
Speaker 2: to give people a taste of where all of this
Speaker 2: is coming from. It says that the man a Cubs
Speaker 2: last week we did an entire segment about this in
Speaker 2: our earlier show, says he was delivering quote false allegations
Speaker 2: to federal investigators about Hunter Biden. He told officials about
Speaker 2: his arrest that individuals quote associated with Russian intelligence. We're
Speaker 2: tied to apparent efforts to pedal a story about the
Speaker 2: first son. The federal prosecutors revealed. So, according to them,
Speaker 2: the guy who was caught lying to the FBI and
Speaker 2: to federal prosecutors about an alleged bribe, a ten million
Speaker 2: dollar bribe from the Ukrainian government to the to the
Speaker 2: Biden family was somehow connected to Russian intelligence. Number one.
Speaker 2: We're you know, we're talking taking the word here of
Speaker 2: a person who's admitting here lying in terms of his
Speaker 2: in terms of he said second, okay, like you said,
Speaker 2: that's probably true. Maybe it's true, but it's one of
Speaker 2: those where does that mean it's a direct like Russian
Speaker 2: effort to influence the election or are they just just
Speaker 2: creating chaos, you know, to created in the same way
Speaker 2: that they have done far before the Biden minstrass, Russia
Speaker 2: Gate and all of that. And you know, I even think, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's bad. You know, you can be okay, this is
Speaker 2: very bad. Is this like some sort of grand, big
Speaker 2: plan to try and shape and change the election? Nobody
Speaker 2: with the brain actually believes that, unless you know you're
Speaker 2: one of these people.
Speaker 1: I mean, it goes back to twenty sixteen and the
Speaker 1: fact that yeah, there was a Russian influence operation that
Speaker 1: was you know, putting up these like cringe weird Bernie
Speaker 1: Sanders means, you know, like like pushing these Donald pro
Speaker 1: Donald Trump Facebook groups with like terrible broken English. It's
Speaker 1: not that these things don't exist, But think about our
Speaker 1: presidential campaigns.
Speaker 5: Think about how much money.
Speaker 1: Like billions of dollars that are going to be spent
Speaker 1: trying to manipulate and shape and convince the electorate. And
Speaker 1: even with that much money spent and so much over propaganda,
Speaker 1: it is so difficult to shift what people's views are
Speaker 1: and move them in one direction or another. So we
Speaker 1: understand that when it comes to actual campaigns that are
Speaker 1: being but somehow we think like a Russian Facebook group
Speaker 1: is so it's suddenly going to like flip a switch
Speaker 1: in the electorate and throw it to one side or
Speaker 1: to the other side, And it's just, you know, it
Speaker 1: freaks people out in a way that we should be
Speaker 1: more realistic about. So do the Russians have some interest in,
Speaker 1: you know, who was the next president of the United States?
Speaker 1: Putin says he.
Speaker 5: Prefers Joe Biden. Actually do I believe him?
Speaker 2: I don't know, but that's.
Speaker 1: What he says. But you know, do they have one
Speaker 1: preference or another?
Speaker 6: Yes?
Speaker 1: Do they, you know, have some sort of operation to
Speaker 1: try to influence that outcome as best they can?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Should we be terrified by that? Should we take this
Speaker 1: piece of information which we don't even one hundred percent
Speaker 1: know is true and then can cock from that and
Speaker 1: elaborate conspiracy theory? Manchurian candidate, they must have something on Trump,
Speaker 1: and they're just like, we're just you know, puppets on
Speaker 1: a string dancing to Putin's tune. No, no, that's not reality.
Speaker 1: It's just as preposterous as imagining that some Facebook book
Speaker 1: memes back in twenty sixteen, or the reason that Donald
Speaker 1: Trump got elected in the first place. So everybody relaxed,
Speaker 1: It's okay, We're going to be fine in terms of,
Speaker 1: you know, the Russian influence operation, and just take it
Speaker 1: for what it is. It's not that it's not concerning,
Speaker 1: it's not that it's something that we should just like
Speaker 1: ignore and push to the side. But is this one
Speaker 1: hundred percent dictating our politics? And it's a red alarm alert,
Speaker 1: and it proves the most deranged conspiracy theories. You know,
Speaker 1: they're going back to the Hunter laptop now and saying
Speaker 1: this is proof that the Hunter laptop was in fact
Speaker 1: a Russian influence operation, and all those Intel officials instead
Speaker 1: of bears the hallmarks of a Russian operation and then
Speaker 1: had to like apologize for it that actually they've been
Speaker 1: proven right, So just don't take it for more than
Speaker 1: what it is.
Speaker 2: Is all I would say, let's move on to the
Speaker 2: next part here, because this is equally part of the
Speaker 2: whole Russia op. Let's put this up there on the screen.
Speaker 2: This has become the latest cause US Warren's allies, Russia
Speaker 2: could put a nuclear weapon into orbit this year. The
Speaker 2: American assessments are divided. President Vladimir Putin denied having such intention,
Speaker 2: saying that Russia was category quiteigorically against it. It would
Speaker 2: be against one of the treaties that we've all signed
Speaker 2: with respect to space, not necessarily meaning that they wouldn't
Speaker 2: do it. But the reason why I think that this
Speaker 2: is important is this is all traced back to the
Speaker 2: congressman who ignited a you know, domestic fervor when he said, Crystal,
Speaker 2: there is a dangerous intelligence that needs to be declassified
Speaker 2: and made known to the American people. At the exact
Speaker 2: same time that there was a huge push in the
Speaker 2: House of Representatives to reauthorize FAIZA and spying powers by
Speaker 2: the National Security Agency and lo and behold. Ever since
Speaker 2: that leak, now the space nuke has become like the
Speaker 2: latest reason why we all have to be terrified. We
Speaker 2: need to get into an arms race. And what nobody
Speaker 2: ever declines to tell you is this number one. Even
Speaker 2: if the alleged device is real, and if it is,
Speaker 2: you know, ever or launch it is not capable of
Speaker 2: like launching from space to the Earth. It is specifically
Speaker 2: an anti satellite weapon. Now, let me again clue everybody
Speaker 2: into this, as everything in space is quote unquote dual use.
Speaker 2: If you have a satellite, for example, that you can
Speaker 2: course correct, let's say you know this way or that way,
Speaker 2: you also technically have a satellite which you could course
Speaker 2: correct into another satellite if you want to. It doesn't
Speaker 2: matter if it's a nuke or not. All of us,
Speaker 2: the Chinese, Russians, Americans, even the commercial space companies, we
Speaker 2: have the capability to screw each other's calms up if
Speaker 2: we want. In a lot of ways. It's mutually to
Speaker 2: shirt destruction, because if we do it to them, then
Speaker 2: they might do it to us. This does not really
Speaker 2: change any strategic position in space at all. That's number
Speaker 2: one from an actual space point of view. Two, it
Speaker 2: is so obviously an effort in recent days to gin
Speaker 2: up even more like being terrified of Russia as some
Speaker 2: sort of military power where and this is where again
Speaker 2: I can't square it. On the one hand, we're supposed
Speaker 2: to support Ukraine like this Pitoley army, which is literally
Speaker 2: incapable of producing its own bullets because the Russians are
Speaker 2: so weak and they're able, they're going to crush them
Speaker 2: and moving past their borders. And then on the other
Speaker 2: it's the new Soviet Union. It's nineteen fifty six or whatever.
Speaker 2: We have Sputnik and we need all this on. It's listen,
Speaker 2: you're being propagandized, like nobody's being honest with you about
Speaker 2: what actual real threats or any of that look like.
Speaker 2: And yet you know, here we are, and you got
Speaker 2: the New York Times. That's a front page of the
Speaker 2: New York Times, just so everybody knows. And the national
Speaker 2: security people are freaking out about this. They're jinning up
Speaker 2: why we need more weapons, Why you know, somehow we
Speaker 2: can defeat the space nuke if we defeat Putin in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: It's like they're shameless, yeah, you know in the way
Speaker 2: that they do this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they wanted, you know, to use this not
Speaker 1: only to scare people into okay, we got to, I
Speaker 1: guess ship the Ukraine funding, but also we need to
Speaker 1: reauthorize warn't less surveillance on Americans. That's the sort of
Speaker 1: use that this fear is intended to be put towards.
Speaker 1: So you are being manipulated. I mean, the syaps around
Speaker 1: Russia are so much more powerful with the American public
Speaker 1: than the actual Russian influence operations are. And also, to
Speaker 1: be to be clear about this potential capability, even American
Speaker 1: intel agencies that we're talking in the New York Times
Speaker 1: were very split and divided on the reality of what
Speaker 1: is going on here. There's also a reality that you know,
Speaker 1: if Russia was theoretically to use some space nuke, that
Speaker 1: they would likely be taking out their own satellites in
Speaker 1: addition to our satellites. So in any case, it's it
Speaker 1: sounds very very scary, Like if you say Russian space nuke,
Speaker 1: that sounds terrifying. The reality is a lot is you know,
Speaker 1: not something to say like okay, we can just handwave
Speaker 1: away and it's no concern whatsoever. But it isn't categorically
Speaker 1: different than the current status quo reality. So you know,
Speaker 1: again take these things in context of what they actually
Speaker 1: mean and also what they're being pushed to the public
Speaker 1: in order to try to compel you to accept. You know,
Speaker 1: anytime a politician really pushing fear the way that these
Speaker 1: you know, national security hawks on the Republican side in particular,
Speaker 1: in Congress, we're pushing you need to ask what their
Speaker 1: goal is and what they're trying to get you to swallow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's the thing. Nobody's honest with you about space.
Speaker 2: Like I just said, we already have the capability to
Speaker 2: all destroy each other satellites we want to. America has
Speaker 2: a program called, which is actually pretty cool, call the
Speaker 2: X thirty seven B, which is like a robotic spacecraft.
Speaker 2: It just flies around up there. It's been flying around
Speaker 2: on the fore we none of us have any idea
Speaker 2: what it does. It drives the Chinese and the Russians nuts,
Speaker 2: so it's not like all of us aren't doing the
Speaker 2: exact same thing. And it fits also into a broader
Speaker 2: program where we're just supposed to accept, you know, the
Speaker 2: established policy response from Washington with no question. Put this
Speaker 2: up there. The latest one President Biden, after he said
Speaker 2: that there would quote be devastating sanctions if Navalney died,
Speaker 2: is now saying that he will pit Russia quote with
Speaker 2: major sanctions in response to the death of Navalney. Now
Speaker 2: here's the thing. It says the new sanctions are designed
Speaker 2: to hold Russia accountable for what happened to Miss navalney,
Speaker 2: as well as all of its actions over the course
Speaker 2: of this vicious and brutal war. Here's the issue. We've
Speaker 2: already sanctioned this economy to hell. There's like not a
Speaker 2: living Russian who's even connected to the government that can
Speaker 2: set foot in the West now at this point access
Speaker 2: a bank account. You know, you can't sell them weapons
Speaker 2: or anything. What else are we supposed to do? You know,
Speaker 2: in terms of our sanctions and how well have they worked,
Speaker 2: Russian war material is an all time high. They're buying
Speaker 2: as many things as they want from the North Koreans,
Speaker 2: the Chinese, and the Indians are floating their a totll economy,
Speaker 2: clearly saying sanctioning them is actually frankly just made them
Speaker 2: more self sufficient away from the entire Western system. So
Speaker 2: it just belies the question of do we just do
Speaker 2: these things to make us feel better? Because I'm pretty
Speaker 2: sure that's the answer.
Speaker 5: Yes, yeah, correct, I mean, what is this doing.
Speaker 1: That's like all of our foreign policy at this point,
Speaker 1: Like why are we hitting the houthies. It's not like
Speaker 1: we think that it's going to change the status quo.
Speaker 1: We know that the problem is all because of Israel's
Speaker 1: sold on Gaza. But yeah, we do them to say
Speaker 1: that we did something, you know, I mean it, we
Speaker 1: acknowledg there's no military solution to Hama. What the hell
Speaker 1: are we doing then? What are we supporting? But it
Speaker 1: again is just like you know, the sort of k
Speaker 1: fave and it's the same thing here. Russia is already
Speaker 1: you know, one of the most sanctioned countries in history,
Speaker 1: and they not to say it hasn't had any impact,
Speaker 1: but they had the ability to plan to be sanctioned
Speaker 1: in the future because they've been sanctioned in the past
Speaker 1: and prepare for it. And their economy is actually doing
Speaker 1: much better at this point than Israel's economy, to use
Speaker 1: another example. So most likely these sanctions will probably rather
Speaker 1: than targeting the you know, oligarchic elites in Russia, they
Speaker 1: will very likely be the because you know, the oligarchic
Speaker 1: elites are already heavily sanctioned. These are probably going to
Speaker 1: be the sort of things that hurt ordinary Russians who
Speaker 1: you know, have nothing to do with an autocratic leader
Speaker 1: and his prerogatives and priorities. And just you know, the
Speaker 1: last thing that I have to point out about Navalni
Speaker 1: because we're covering Juliana Sanche's you know, continued extradition appeal.
Speaker 5: Going on in the UK.
Speaker 1: Julian Assange is in very poor health. He's been so
Speaker 1: weak that he was unable to participate in these hearings
Speaker 1: even remotely, even by zoom. So you know, his family
Speaker 1: has been telling us for a long time now that
Speaker 1: his life is truly in jeopardy and on the line
Speaker 1: directly because at this point of the Biden administration started
Speaker 1: under the Trump administration, but now the continuation commitment of
Speaker 1: the Biden administration to prosecute this man because he revealed
Speaker 1: the secrets of American elites and embarrassed them and was
Speaker 1: in many ways and you know, a dissenting and oppositional figure.
Speaker 1: It's not that different from these circumstances surrounding Navaldi's death.
Speaker 1: So there is so much hypocrisy too with regard to
Speaker 1: the Biden administration and their purported commitment to freedom of
Speaker 1: the press and not jailing, you know, persecuting political opponents,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So I just wanted to make that notice. Well,
Speaker 1: while we're thinking about sanctions and vaulting here you.
Speaker 2: Should and unfortunately it's something that putin throws in our
Speaker 2: face also every time absolutely that it gets Okay, let's
Speaker 2: move on to the economy. There were some major news
Speaker 2: that happened just yesterday that it wanted to give some
Speaker 2: points to. Let's put this up there on the screen
Speaker 2: because it's absolutely fascinating. Nvidia has now reported fourth quarter
Speaker 2: results that have topped Wall Street expectations at the top
Speaker 2: and the bottom line. The chip giant has reported a
Speaker 2: stunning adjusted earning per share of five point five dollars
Speaker 2: and sixteen cents. But the more important thing is that
Speaker 2: their revenue was twenty two billion dollars this quarter compared
Speaker 2: to estimates of twenty point four billion. That is the
Speaker 2: data center revenue specifically that has topped all of their expectations.
Speaker 2: Their CEO, Jensen Wong, says that accelerated computing and generative
Speaker 2: BAYI have hit the tipping point and demand is surging
Speaker 2: worldwide across companies, industries, and nations. The reason why all
Speaker 2: eyes were on the Nvidia earning reports Crystal I was
Speaker 2: kind of telling you about this before they came out yesterday,
Speaker 2: that Nvidia at this point has become so dramatically valued
Speaker 2: in the S and P five hundred that basically the
Speaker 2: hopes of the US tech sector. And it's not an exaggeration.
Speaker 2: A huge portion of index funds and thus all four
Speaker 2: oh one k's retirement accounts for the vast majority of
Speaker 2: people are writing in some ways on this one stock
Speaker 2: and the stock itself for the earnings of this company.
Speaker 2: We're talking about something that has seen like orders of
Speaker 2: magnitude exponential growth in just the last decade, and it
Speaker 2: is blied by the fact that they make the infrastructure,
Speaker 2: the chips that are what many of these large AI
Speaker 2: companies are then using to power their data centers and others.
Speaker 2: So their earnings and their ability to generate revenue and
Speaker 2: to continue that increase is kind of a bet on
Speaker 2: AI as a backstone, as a backdrop of the US
Speaker 2: economy and the changing nature of where a lot of
Speaker 2: capital and other things are flowing. So it is a
Speaker 2: bright spot if you are a stockholder, but it is
Speaker 2: also indicative of how much money continues to flow into
Speaker 2: AI and why, you know, as we cover all of
Speaker 2: the social changes that happen as a result, there's no
Speaker 2: there's no stopping it. And I think the CEO is
Speaker 2: definitely correct, like it is a tipping point in that
Speaker 2: you know, this is one of the most powerful, one
Speaker 2: of the most powerful valuable companies now on Earth that
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say it was virtually unheard of ten years ago,
Speaker 2: but it was not even close to the power of Google, Facebook,
Speaker 2: Microsoft and all that that it is now. I mean
Speaker 2: it's now valued up near like Exon in terms of
Speaker 2: in terms of a company that almost frankly almost came
Speaker 2: out of nowhere. And so it shows us like where
Speaker 2: the power in the US economy is going.
Speaker 1: So according to CNN, Nvidia makes up seventy percent of
Speaker 1: AI semiconductor sales, to show you how dominant they are
Speaker 1: in the industry and how critical they are to it.
Speaker 1: And I guess, Sager my understanding was part of why
Speaker 1: people were watching closely to see this earnings report was
Speaker 1: basically to get a sense of whether the AI boom
Speaker 1: is real or if just as like a bubble that's
Speaker 1: sort of you know, been over hyped and eminently about
Speaker 1: to bust. And also to see whether the Biden administration's
Speaker 1: restrictions on exports of chip sales to China, whether that
Speaker 1: had significantly curbed in video's growth.
Speaker 5: And I guess the answer is not so much.
Speaker 9: It did not.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean everything that we're able to see here,
Speaker 2: I'll give everybody example. So in twenty twelve, the annual
Speaker 2: revenue for Nvidia was three point nine billion. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty four, it will be sixty point nine billion. Last
Speaker 2: year in twenty twenty three they did twenty six billion,
Speaker 2: and then you know if just five seven years ago
Speaker 2: in twenty eighteen they did nine billion. It's like one
Speaker 2: of the most insane rises in revenue for a US company,
Speaker 2: or yeah, for a US company. I believe. They're headquartered
Speaker 2: in Santa Clara, ever, and it's one of those where
Speaker 2: it has come to now encompassed so much of the
Speaker 2: S and P five hundred of the tech sector as
Speaker 2: kind of an indicator of where all these things are going.
Speaker 2: And honestly, kind of I find it kind of exciting,
Speaker 2: you know, to have a company like this just come out.
Speaker 2: We're so used to the Googles, the facebooks, the Exxon's,
Speaker 2: Microsoft and all of that, that all of a sudden,
Speaker 2: out of nowhere, you have this freaking, you know, insane
Speaker 2: company with all this productivity, This new CEO the back
Speaker 2: he's like holding the back of the US economy, you know,
Speaker 2: on top of him. But also do you want to
Speaker 2: caution everybody that you know, the gains and the wealth
Speaker 2: that is all being generated here is pretty highly concentrated
Speaker 2: only in tech and the better, honestly, the better that
Speaker 2: they do, the more we need to watch for the
Speaker 2: social implications of white collar work that gets cut off,
Speaker 2: and you know, whatever the in terms of lawyers and
Speaker 2: all the other industries of which this is set to disrupt,
Speaker 2: Like this is the backbone the chips that are going
Speaker 2: to power much of the software revolution that will come
Speaker 2: on the back.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna raise those concerns because you had
Speaker 1: an announcement two days ago that Google, in spite of
Speaker 1: earning record profits, is still laying off thousands of employees
Speaker 1: twelve thousands more employees after already laying off twelve thousand,
Speaker 1: and so that shows you the way that this is
Speaker 1: further concentrating wealth in the hands of a very few people.
Speaker 1: So you know, even the companies that are most directly
Speaker 1: participating and most directly benefiting from this AI boom, I
Speaker 1: mean some ways, they're also the ones that are first
Speaker 1: to shed employees because of the gains and the technological
Speaker 1: advances that are being made here. With AI, So I
Speaker 1: am really concerned about that. I think you can already
Speaker 1: see those developments happening right now in real time. So
Speaker 1: it's great for you know, people who have stockhold significant stockholding.
Speaker 1: It's great for people who are at the top of
Speaker 1: these companies who don't feel like their jobs are at risk.
Speaker 1: But for a lot of white collar workers, I'm sure
Speaker 1: they should and probably are looking on at these developments
Speaker 1: with a lot of concern. And we're going to about
Speaker 1: to talk more about AI and what the ELL's going
Speaker 1: on there, because there are a lot of other concerns
Speaker 1: obviously about the development of AI and whether we as
Speaker 1: a society and as humanity are ready for and certainly
Speaker 1: whether our political system is ready for, to which the
Speaker 1: answer is certainly no.
Speaker 2: We may have great chip, but if the programmers aren't good,
Speaker 2: as we'll show you with Google, there's not a lot
Speaker 2: you can do. Let's go to the next part here,
Speaker 2: because this is like the perfect thing as S and
Speaker 2: P five hundred pops. As the tech sector continues to
Speaker 2: boom and video earnings and all of that, there is
Speaker 2: a huge crisis for our food affordability here in the
Speaker 2: United States, best exemplified by the CEO of Kellogg, who
Speaker 2: is now pushing cereal for dinner as a way for
Speaker 2: cast strap families to feed themselves as they struggle in
Speaker 2: paying for the grocery store. Here's what he had to say.
Speaker 10: The cereal category has always been quite affordable and it
Speaker 10: tends to be a great destination when consumers are under pressure.
Speaker 10: So some of the things that we're doing is first messaging,
Speaker 10: we've got to reach the consumer where they are, so
Speaker 10: we're advertising about cereal for dinner. If you think about
Speaker 10: the cost of cereal for a family versus what they
Speaker 10: might otherwise do, that's going to be much more affordable.
Speaker 10: The other places that we like to go is we
Speaker 10: talk about making sure we have the right pack, the
Speaker 10: right price in the right place. So having a different
Speaker 10: size pack that'll have a different price point that'll take
Speaker 10: some pressure off the consumer while they're shopping. So those
Speaker 10: are some of the things that we're doing. But in general,
Speaker 10: the cereal category is a place that a lot of
Speaker 10: folks might come to because the price of a bowl
Speaker 10: of cereal with milk and with fruit is less than
Speaker 10: a dollar, So you can imagine whey a consumer under
Speaker 10: pressure might find that to be a good place to go, right.
Speaker 2: I'm all for innovation and marketing. But the idea of
Speaker 2: having cereal for dinner. Is there the potential for that to.
Speaker 7: Land the wrong way?
Speaker 2: We don't think so.
Speaker 10: In fact, it's landing really well right now, Carl. When
Speaker 10: we look at all of our data, of course, we
Speaker 10: would know that breakfast cereal is the number one choice
Speaker 10: for in home consumption.
Speaker 2: We understand that for breakfast.
Speaker 10: It turns out that over twenty five percent of our
Speaker 10: consumption is outside the breakfast occasion. A lot of it's
Speaker 10: at dinner, and that deck occasion continues to grow, as
Speaker 10: well as the snacking occasion. But cereal for dinner is
Speaker 10: something that is probably more on trend now and we
Speaker 10: would expect to continue as that.
Speaker 2: Consumer is under pressure. As that consumer is under pressure,
Speaker 2: anyone else catch the palatial Florida arct I could spot
Speaker 2: it from a mile away.
Speaker 1: Do you think Gary's given his kids cereal for dinner?
Speaker 2: You see them dumping so you see that palm tree
Speaker 2: in the background. Yeah, that's what a man who in
Speaker 2: the winters fleeing south and has the ability to have
Speaker 2: second homes and to have nice little travel of the
Speaker 2: rest of us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I don't think Gary's eeting fruit loops for dinner.
Speaker 2: Personal He's probably eating a fruit platter, you know that
Speaker 2: as dessert. Let's gohe and put this up there.
Speaker 1: We wonder why we have an obesity crisis and a
Speaker 1: diabetes crisis in those kind.
Speaker 2: Just for me, wanted to know. You don't eat cereal
Speaker 2: for dinner.
Speaker 1: I don't even I don't even want my kids eating
Speaker 1: cereal for breakfast.
Speaker 2: I agree.
Speaker 1: One of the those horrifying places in the entire grocery
Speaker 1: store is the cereal aisle. When you walk down the
Speaker 1: cereal aisle and you see like cookies in small form
Speaker 1: or like sour patch kids cereal, and like, what the
Speaker 1: what did we do? Where did we go wrong? As
Speaker 1: a country? Well, it makes me absolutely hate capitalism and
Speaker 1: people like this.
Speaker 2: Let's put this up there on the screen, just to
Speaker 2: you know, kind of exemplify what he's talking about. Wall
Speaker 2: Street Journal has some great charts. The one that we
Speaker 2: have right there in front of you for those who
Speaker 2: are watching that shows you that the spending share of
Speaker 2: disposable income on food is now at a thirty year high.
Speaker 2: This is especially important because it encompasses not just groceries,
Speaker 2: but also dining out. As people can see, we've actually
Speaker 2: been on a decade long increase in price of dining out.
Speaker 2: Some of that is derivative of like higher cost options,
Speaker 2: but a lot of it also has to do with inputs.
Speaker 2: It plunged in twenty twenty as a result of the
Speaker 2: COVID pandemic, but quickly spiked to an all time high there.
Speaker 2: You know, even in terms of for dining out, it's
Speaker 2: very very high for groceries. What you could see if
Speaker 2: you combine both all food and groceries, you can see
Speaker 2: that we're at the three decade high, and it's taking
Speaker 2: up far more of a percentage of American's income than
Speaker 2: in a very very long time. As they say too, quote,
Speaker 2: relief is not arriving soon. Restaurant and food company executives
Speaker 2: are still quote grappling with rising labor costs and some
Speaker 2: ingredients that are only getting more expensive, and consumers, they said,
Speaker 2: will find ways to cope. If you look at shtorically,
Speaker 2: after periods of inflation, there's really no period where you
Speaker 2: can point to where food prices go back down. They
Speaker 2: tend to be sticky, meaning this is here and it
Speaker 2: is very here to stay.
Speaker 1: Yes, those ways to cope include best groups.
Speaker 2: Well, really, what it is, and this is why it's sad,
Speaker 2: is if you look, it's the people who have disposable income.
Speaker 2: Their consumption patterns have not changed. They're eating the exact
Speaker 2: same out at dining, They're the eating the exact same
Speaker 2: things at the grocery store. It is Denny's, Wendy's and
Speaker 2: all other restaurants change that are now telling their investors
Speaker 2: that their guest count has fallen precipitously throughout twenty twenty
Speaker 2: two and twenty twenty three. Why because their customers are
Speaker 2: the ones who have lower incomes and or for whom
Speaker 2: would you know, the occasional customer or somebody who's going
Speaker 2: to a lower cost option of these type of chain restaurants,
Speaker 2: Their treat quote unquote is now gone. It's been cut
Speaker 2: out of the budget. So if you combine gas and
Speaker 2: cost of living and then grocery price is now replacing that,
Speaker 2: it's just taking a lot of enjoyment. Whatever little enjoyment
Speaker 2: was there at the lower end of the cost spectrum
Speaker 2: is going away. And I think that's actually the tragic
Speaker 2: situation people are in New York City. You're going out
Speaker 2: to eat they're mostly fine, you know, at the higher
Speaker 2: end of the spectrum. Yes, their prices have increased by
Speaker 2: twenty five percent, but if you compare their overall wages
Speaker 2: and the disposal income that they have, they're just eating
Speaker 2: the cost. It's the people who can't afford to eat
Speaker 2: the cost where their quality of life that goes down
Speaker 2: significantly when your food price goes up by twenty five
Speaker 2: thirty percent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, some people who are working in those restaurants who
Speaker 1: can no longer afford to, you know, to eat down
Speaker 1: even somewhere modest, like a Wendy's or a Denny's at
Speaker 1: this point. And Jeff Stine actually had a good piece
Speaker 1: a while back. We talked to him a little bit,
Speaker 1: but as a reminder of why grocery prices continue to
Speaker 1: be so high, you can put this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: He really dives in.
Speaker 5: Jeff does a great job with this stuff.
Speaker 1: His headline here is inflation has fallen, Why are groceries
Speaker 1: still so expensive.
Speaker 5: He's also been visiting.
Speaker 1: Food pantries who across the board are reporting that demand
Speaker 1: for food pantry and food aid is at record highs
Speaker 1: and continues to grow. So there's clearly a lot of
Speaker 1: struggle among the working poor, the working class, and the
Speaker 1: out and out poor that is reflected in those numbers,
Speaker 1: but he trucks. It's a lot of different factors. I
Speaker 1: think what you point in to, Sager the fact that
Speaker 1: you know, when food prices go up, what grocery store
Speaker 1: or what Kellogg's brand CEO is going to say, you
Speaker 1: know what I can afford to bring it back down.
Speaker 1: They're not going to do that because they're greedy. They're
Speaker 1: just going to eat up the extra profit margin. And
Speaker 1: that is part of what is going on here. There's
Speaker 1: actually a White House Council of Economic Advisors report that
Speaker 1: found that grocery store profit margins are higher than their
Speaker 1: pre pandemic levels. That means they're gouging you. That means
Speaker 1: prices could be lower, but instead of lowering prices for consumers,
Speaker 1: they're just going to keep them where they are because
Speaker 1: they can justify it because prices have been high, and
Speaker 1: they're going to suck up the extra profit.
Speaker 5: That's part of it. There have also been so many climate.
Speaker 1: Disasters that have upended a lot of food production, so
Speaker 1: that has factored in. You've continued to have some supply
Speaker 1: chain disruptions even post pandemic. The fallout from that continues
Speaker 1: to reverberate, so that's part of it. So there's a
Speaker 1: lot that goes into it, but one of those pieces
Speaker 1: continues to be effectively green Plati. One of the things
Speaker 1: he points out is a group called the Groundwork Collaborative,
Speaker 1: which is a left leaning think tank. They found that
Speaker 1: a lot of the rise and grocery prices, about thirty percent,
Speaker 1: is focused in five categories of food that are particularly
Speaker 1: vulnerable to supply chain shocks. That includes beef, chicken, fruits, vegetables,
Speaker 1: and snacks. So a lot of this sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the cord like the things you actually want to feed
Speaker 1: your family, not fruit loops, are some of the things
Speaker 1: that have been the most vulnerable to supply chain shocks
Speaker 1: and have contributed to continued high prices there. And people
Speaker 1: wonder why people still don't feel great about the economy,
Speaker 1: why they're still struggling, why they're still, you know, giving
Speaker 1: Joe Biden a very low approval rating. I think part
Speaker 1: of it is just because they have no confidence in him.
Speaker 1: Even when things do get better, they have no confidence
Speaker 1: that he had anything to do with it, or that
Speaker 1: he could continue the tend intrajectory, give in his you know,
Speaker 1: his age and his limited capabilities. But in addition, you
Speaker 1: still have numbers like this that show people are really
Speaker 1: struggling even just to be able to feed themselves and
Speaker 1: feed their families, let alone provide any of those like
Speaker 1: little bonus luxuries that make life.
Speaker 2: And this is so obvious to me because they're like, Crystal,
Speaker 2: but didn't you know that inflation slowed from nine to
Speaker 2: three this quarter. I'm like, guys, that's not how people
Speaker 2: experience inflation. Yeah, go to the grocery store. They're like,
Speaker 2: why is this thirty percent more expensive than five years ago?
Speaker 2: And then they're like, oh, guess we're not going to
Speaker 2: Deny's on Sunday like we usually used to, you know,
Speaker 2: if we meet up after whatever.
Speaker 6: I mean.
Speaker 2: And that's one of those where or you know, you
Speaker 2: pack lunch for your kids, or you pack lunch for
Speaker 2: them as you're going on a road trip, even though
Speaker 2: in the past you might have been like, maybe we'll
Speaker 2: stop somewhere, and that's it's not fun, it's not nice,
Speaker 2: you know. It removes a lot of the spontaneity in life.
Speaker 2: People at the higher income spectrum, they are totally capable
Speaker 2: of absorbing that cost people who are not when you
Speaker 2: really have to think, you know, that is what really
Speaker 2: inhibits a lot of the enjoyment for a lot of people.
Speaker 2: And I think that's I think, you know, really devastating
Speaker 2: for people. And it's why you know, they're not just
Speaker 2: going to take these explanations about build back better or whatever. Seriously,
Speaker 2: I don't think they should. Let's put this finally up here,
Speaker 2: just show you about again how devastating some of these
Speaker 2: numbers can be. American credit card debt, this is just
Speaker 2: from a few days ago, has now hit a record
Speaker 2: one point one to three trillion dollar credit card debt
Speaker 2: has increased actually by fifty billion just in the fourth
Speaker 2: quarter of twenty twenty three. A lot of that is
Speaker 2: holiday spending, and they show that it's actually a five
Speaker 2: percent increase just from the previous quarter in the number
Speaker 2: of debt that's been accumulated. The data currently shows that
Speaker 2: you've risen a total of twenty two hundred and twelve
Speaker 2: billion just in the fourth quarter of twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: And you know, if you look at the quarterly report
Speaker 2: on household debt and credit, Americans are strapped more than
Speaker 2: frankly they ever really have been in the past. The
Speaker 2: other issue is that the delinquencies across all age groups,
Speaker 2: people who are unable to pay them or missing payments,
Speaker 2: are actually high across all of them. Bar It says
Speaker 2: in particular, between the ages of thirty and thirty nine
Speaker 2: are missing their payments at especially fast rates. That's also
Speaker 2: very devastating because those are the exact people who that's
Speaker 2: the age when you are supposed to be thinking about
Speaker 2: being able to buy a house, start a family, any
Speaker 2: of those, and if you are in a mountain of
Speaker 2: credit card debt, you may put off those decisions. It's
Speaker 2: one of those where it's really sad, you know. Just
Speaker 2: to give away some of my trashy television taste, I
Speaker 2: was watching one of these episodes of Love's Blind latest season,
Speaker 2: and there's.
Speaker 5: You and my daughter got me into that show is
Speaker 5: really great.
Speaker 2: Shout out to Nick Thompson from season two, who is
Speaker 2: a fan of this show. By the way, but there's
Speaker 2: a sad conversation that's happening between two I'm not going
Speaker 2: to give away too much of it or who they are,
Speaker 2: where they're like, well, you know, he's like, I really
Speaker 2: want to retire. I really want to be frugal, you know,
Speaker 2: if we have a kid. You know, I'm not so
Speaker 2: sure that that's what he's like. He's like obsessed with
Speaker 2: the idea of not accidentally having a child in the
Speaker 2: next five years. And he's purely talking about it from
Speaker 2: money perspective, because he's like, I grew up in a
Speaker 2: very poor household and I was not provided you know, X,
Speaker 2: Y and Z, I will not do that. You can
Speaker 2: see an emotion. It's causing some relationship tension, and I
Speaker 2: was watching him like this is terrible.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 2: That's one of those where this guy is like frankly
Speaker 2: torpedio ing a relationship because he's so afraid of having
Speaker 2: a child accidentally and not being able to afford it
Speaker 2: because he did not have a good upbringing himself. I mean, look,
Speaker 2: you call it responsible or whatever, but for me, I'm like,
Speaker 2: that is just a perfect example of like how these
Speaker 2: macroeconomic conditions have huge impacts on people's lives that they
Speaker 2: may not even connect to something bigger.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, it's so true.
Speaker 1: And that sense of precarity, that stress that comes from
Speaker 1: having to count every penny, you know, and really like
Speaker 1: to live day to day and dollar to a dollar,
Speaker 1: the way that weighs on your entire life is you know,
Speaker 1: it's a very difficult thing. And people are not wrong
Speaker 1: to feel like Joe Biden, I mean, he's not even
Speaker 1: promising anything in the next what's his economic plan going forward?
Speaker 5: He doesn't have one.
Speaker 1: Trump hasn't announced anything any goals, you know, for for
Speaker 1: the next term. Worried to get reelected. So people aren't
Speaker 1: wrong and they're not crazy to feel like even though
Speaker 1: many of the economic numbers have improved, you know, unemployment
Speaker 1: is low, we just are going up. Certainly, the stock
Speaker 1: market is doing just fine, as we were just discussing,
Speaker 1: but that isn't the totality of how people are experiencing
Speaker 1: the economy. And they're not crazy to look at their
Speaker 1: day to day reality and say this is not working
Speaker 1: for me, and I don't have hope that it's going
Speaker 1: to work for me or my kids for the future either.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, right, all right, let's move on. We already tease
Speaker 2: this AI. This is the funniest story that we've seen.
Speaker 2: It's so long it electrified the internet. Yesterday. Google has
Speaker 2: had to pause AI made images quote after race inaccuracies.
Speaker 2: Let's put this up there on the screen. Let's just
Speaker 2: say that the new Gemini AI system is lacking in
Speaker 2: historical accuracy if you ask it to create images of
Speaker 2: frankly mundane things. This was very quickly spotted by the
Speaker 2: Internet after it was given basic prompts. So guys, let's
Speaker 2: go ahead and give people a taste if we can
Speaker 2: enroll some of these next items. Some of my favorites. Here,
Speaker 2: here's a portrait of a founding father of America. It
Speaker 2: shows a Native American, a black George. Actually I don't
Speaker 2: even think that's George Washington because that's actually a red coat.
Speaker 2: So that's a whole other conversation. A racially ambiguous founding
Speaker 2: father with a wig, and then a Chinese man also
Speaker 2: a dress up from Colonial Times. Christly, you remarked that
Speaker 2: this literally looks like Lee Manuel Miranda's like Hamilton cast
Speaker 2: and you could not be more correct. The other ones
Speaker 2: which are incredible. Here is create an image of a pope.
Speaker 2: It shows a Indian woman actually clad in pople regalia
Speaker 2: than a black man who was similarly donning whatever that
Speaker 2: papal headdress is. That guests more plausible there are, you know,
Speaker 2: African cardinals Here here's an image of a Viking shows
Speaker 2: two Vikings who are black with dreadlocks. So I'm pretty
Speaker 2: sure that one is not historically accurate. Let's go to
Speaker 2: the next one. This is another pro personal favorite of mine.
Speaker 2: It says, depict a European family, and it says, well,
Speaker 2: while I understand your desire to see representations of families,
Speaker 2: I am unable to fulfill your request for depicting a
Speaker 2: white family to create inclusive and respectful content. Generating images
Speaker 2: based on specific racial or ethnics characteristics can perpetuate harmful
Speaker 2: stereotypes and biases. Then you ask, depict a Chinese family,
Speaker 2: it says, sure, here's an image from showing diverse depictions
Speaker 2: of a Chinese family. You know, I guess they're probably
Speaker 2: forgetting that China itself has a lot of racial and
Speaker 2: ethnic populations. But of course that's not nuanced enough for them.
Speaker 2: Let's go to the next one, and let's take a look.
Speaker 2: This one was actually created by our producer Mac and
Speaker 2: the prompt I swear to God that he gave was
Speaker 2: create a European family. And what it created here is
Speaker 2: a white woman who's in a wheelchair, a black man
Speaker 2: who is missing, a leg and then a dog who
Speaker 2: if we are paying attention here, the dog only has
Speaker 2: three legs.
Speaker 5: All three of.
Speaker 2: These European racial mixed family are also all disabled for
Speaker 2: some reason. And just to give everyone an idea of
Speaker 2: how much better some of the competitors are. Let's go
Speaker 2: to the next one. This is from mid Journey, which
Speaker 2: is a software actually that we use sometimes for our thumbnails,
Speaker 2: which is just far more you know, accurate. It just
Speaker 2: says create a European family.
Speaker 6: Here.
Speaker 2: This is a period pieces, you know, showing Eiffel Tower
Speaker 2: whatever traditional dress. Probably it looks more like nineteen forties
Speaker 2: or early nineteen hundreds visually exactly. Look how much more colorful,
Speaker 2: you know, they don't even try and be like photorealistic
Speaker 2: per se. They look more like portraits. It's just more accurate.
Speaker 2: So this is just to demonstrate, like we got a
Speaker 2: long way to go. And this is Google. I mean,
Speaker 2: think about how much money Google has poured into their
Speaker 2: AI program. And it's hilarious because they had to apologize
Speaker 2: their lead developer for creating these for you know, having
Speaker 2: all of these images go completely viral, you don't really
Speaker 2: get to you know, I mean, sure you will get
Speaker 2: a second chance but this is just bad. I think
Speaker 2: they panicked Crystal from the Sora ai release and like
Speaker 2: we got to rush something out and they had all
Speaker 2: of this stuff that had been clearly they had some
Speaker 2: weird PC stuff programmed in, which is somehow generated the
Speaker 2: stupidest results that are known, and now they're apologizing to everybody.
Speaker 1: And how to pull it.
Speaker 2: Yeah they pulled it. Yeah, that's a product that's embarrassing that.
Speaker 5: It's really interesting.
Speaker 1: I really want to know the backstory here, Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I want to know how this happened. And the thing
Speaker 1: with AI generation though, is that in some ways you
Speaker 1: never will know because even the creators, you know, they're
Speaker 1: feeding in all of this information, so it makes the
Speaker 1: output very unpredictable. But I want to know what, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, how they set the wokeness to eleven here
Speaker 1: to get you asked for a.
Speaker 5: Pope and you asked for the founding father.
Speaker 1: It's just it's hilariously absurd and certainly shows the way,
Speaker 1: as you said Soccer earlier, that you know, the technology
Speaker 1: is not independent of the ability of the creators and
Speaker 1: their particular views of the world.
Speaker 2: So here's some interesting takes I saw from people who
Speaker 2: actually work in tech, Yeah this happened. Of how something
Speaker 2: like this happened. Paul Graham's kind of like a some
Speaker 2: difficult It's like a godfather of tech. He was one
Speaker 2: of the people who founded y S Y Combinator, invested
Speaker 2: in a lot of the early very successful companies. He says,
Speaker 2: quote the ridiculous images that were generated by Gemini are
Speaker 2: not an anomaly. They are a self portrait of Google's
Speaker 2: bureaucratic corporate culture. And he points out that the bigger
Speaker 2: your cash cow, the worst cut your culture can get
Speaker 2: without driving you out of business.
Speaker 1: My other good maybe they laid off some of those
Speaker 1: thousands of people. Maybe they needed those folks.
Speaker 2: So my friend Streram Krishnan, who works over at A
Speaker 2: sixteen Z, he says this on Google and Gemini, having
Speaker 2: been art of organizations where there was an implicit progressive
Speaker 2: political leaning, I can see why it would have been
Speaker 2: very hard for anyone to point out the obvious. No
Speaker 2: employee can easily file a bug, as you would have
Speaker 2: to wade through layers of policy and unspoken but understood
Speaker 2: cultural rules. No one can be the kid from the
Speaker 2: Emperor's New Clothes, as the kid would probably have been
Speaker 2: instantly thrown into prison or in this case dragged before
Speaker 2: HR or put into a penalty box. That actually does
Speaker 2: kind of make sense where somebody programmed this stuff in
Speaker 2: and didn't actually think about it at scale, and then
Speaker 2: the programmers were probably too afraid to be like, hey,
Speaker 2: just you know, it's not really creating proper images of
Speaker 2: white people, and they're like, well, you know, I would
Speaker 2: rather just ship it and let something like this happen,
Speaker 2: and then it becomes like a total controversy. I could
Speaker 2: see something like that. The more likely thing is it's
Speaker 2: a combination of all three bad bureaucratic culture, not enough checks,
Speaker 2: and just being terrified at being beaten by open AI.
Speaker 2: I think the ope open ai piece is probably the
Speaker 2: biggest one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that they're upset they really tested exactly before.
Speaker 5: They very clearly they did not fully test it.
Speaker 1: But I mean then some of thing makes some sense
Speaker 1: to me, because if you're an individual employee of Google,
Speaker 1: right and you realize this is squarely if this is
Speaker 1: not going the way it should, you do run a
Speaker 1: risk if you're the one who's like, we got to
Speaker 1: have some white people as founding father.
Speaker 2: Just like, hey, it's not accurately representing founding fathers, Right,
Speaker 2: why is there a Cherokee guy who is included?
Speaker 1: But there's no risk to you to staying silent if
Speaker 1: you weren't the one that created the problem and all
Speaker 1: the you know, blowback is going to fall on someone else.
Speaker 1: Then from a just bureaucratic like safety standpoint, your path
Speaker 1: of least resistance is just to keep your mouth shut
Speaker 1: and be like, well, we'll see all this goes.
Speaker 5: Or maybe they really hated the guy who is going
Speaker 5: to like take the.
Speaker 6: Fall on this.
Speaker 1: They're like, they're like, wait and let's see if Johnny's
Speaker 1: still the golden boy at Google after this comes out.
Speaker 9: Well.
Speaker 2: One of the reasons why it's also really embarrassing for
Speaker 2: Google is Larry Page. You know, according to Elon Musk
Speaker 2: and others and most press reports, the founder of Google
Speaker 2: former CEO, he's been obsessed with AI for like decades,
Speaker 2: Like he's the a. Google has poured untold billions and
Speaker 2: probably hundreds of billions of dollars into AI development. And
Speaker 2: something that's actually given me kind of hope is that
Speaker 2: if you look at Microsoft, Facebook, Google, the big tech
Speaker 2: company Amazon and others, none of them were the innovators
Speaker 2: in AI. It was open Ai. It was a company
Speaker 2: formed in twenty fifteen that came frankly out of nowhere
Speaker 2: and revolutionized the entire SECD. Now, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2: You know Microsoft has now bought a Steak or whatever
Speaker 2: and open Ai, so they've co opted it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: the fact is that the real innovation it didn't come
Speaker 2: out of the big tech houses, and so maybe it's
Speaker 2: because of culture, bureaucracy and all of that. Something like this.
Speaker 2: I would hope that that's more indicative of the future
Speaker 2: that it will actually come from the startups. And that's
Speaker 2: kind of what's floating the Nvidia boom and the idea
Speaker 2: kind of why silicon value is having a resurgence right
Speaker 2: now in San Francisco. Is they really believe like the
Speaker 2: next Google, Facebook and all of that really could come
Speaker 2: and instead not out of the big tech companies themselves.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I don't have that hope.
Speaker 1: I mean, like he's it's already almost over, Like Microsoft
Speaker 1: already snatched up the open Ai tech. You know, the
Speaker 1: big tech players are already so established that anything that
Speaker 1: has any promise at a startup level is just going
Speaker 1: to get bought up and sucked into one of the
Speaker 1: existing monopolies with you know, these sorts of results, and
Speaker 1: I mean these results are just hilarious and silly and
Speaker 1: of no real consequence.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The terror is that the other if they are shipping
Speaker 1: a product that is this manifestly bad in obvious ways,
Speaker 1: you can be assured that they are not thinking through
Speaker 1: whatsoever the long term societal implications that have potentially much
Speaker 1: more serious ramifications, because you know, their interest is justin
Speaker 1: how do I make a buck today, how do I
Speaker 1: stay in front of the competition, how do I spike
Speaker 1: the share price so that I get mine at the
Speaker 1: end of the day. And that's a terrifying set of incentives.
Speaker 1: If it can go this wrong on something that's so
Speaker 1: obvious right in front of your face, just imagine the
Speaker 1: other things of consequence that they probably already are screwing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're absolutely right, all right, guys.
Speaker 1: Very interesting moment over on CNN when Chris Wallace reveals
Speaker 1: that a top Democrat told him they are freaking out
Speaker 1: about Biden's standing in the critical state of Michigan.
Speaker 5: Let's take a listen to that.
Speaker 11: I was talking to a top Michigan Democrat over the
Speaker 11: weekend who said that you know, it's not just Arab Americans.
Speaker 11: They're young people, they are people of color, blacks and
Speaker 11: Hispanics who have a lot of doubts about Joe Biden.
Speaker 11: And you know where another candidate like Dean Phillips might
Speaker 11: not be able to put on much of a show
Speaker 11: against Biden. This Michigan Democratic official was saying, I'm worried
Speaker 11: about Uncommitted. You know, it's really a vote of no
Speaker 11: confidence or lack of confidence in Biden. And this official
Speaker 11: was worried that it could do well enough in the
Speaker 11: primary a week from tomorrow to embarrass Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: So that primary, of course, is coming up next week,
Speaker 1: and Scager, this is something we have covered before. There
Speaker 1: is now an organized effort, backed by a number of
Speaker 1: Democratic officials, including congress Owan Rashida Talib to, instead of
Speaker 1: voting for Joe Biden in the primary, to vote Uncommitted,
Speaker 1: specifically to voice dissent over his unconditional support for Israel.
Speaker 1: And the fear here isn't that you know, Uncommitted is
Speaker 1: going to beat Joe Biden in the state of Michigan
Speaker 1: in the primary. The fear is that the demonstration of
Speaker 1: this anti Joe Biden commitment specifically over this policy could
Speaker 1: really carry over into the general election, and that in
Speaker 1: a lot of senses it may be too late even
Speaker 1: if they changed policy now to win a lot of
Speaker 1: these folks back. Now, the suspicion isn't that they're going
Speaker 1: to you know, switch over and vote, at least not
Speaker 1: in large numbers for Donald trumple if some of them
Speaker 1: may do that as well, but that they'll either stay
Speaker 1: home or they'll notch another protest vote in the fall,
Speaker 1: either for you know, another like write in candidate or
Speaker 1: one of the third party candidates that may be on
Speaker 1: the ballot. There's actually big New York Times piece this
Speaker 1: morning as well breaking down these concerns, which is like,
Speaker 1: you know, activists have been warning of this, and people
Speaker 1: on the left have been warning of this from very
Speaker 1: very early on, and the polls immediately reflected a devastating impact,
Speaker 1: especially among Arab Americans in the state of Michigan and elsewhere.
Speaker 1: This was completely ignored and handwaved a way of basically
Speaker 1: like they'll get over it when they remember it's Donald
Speaker 1: Trump and now they're finally waking up to the reality
Speaker 1: that this could really be a problem for them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, There's been a lot of reporting behind the scenes
Speaker 2: that Representative Debbie Dingel from Michigan has been really pushing
Speaker 2: the White House to change course. The reason I would
Speaker 2: take her very seriously is she's the lady who told
Speaker 2: to Hillary in twenty she's like, you're gonna lose Michigan.
Speaker 2: She's like, you're getting creamed. And the Hillary campaign was like,
Speaker 2: you don't know what you're talking about. She was the
Speaker 2: one who was saying you need to cut, like you
Speaker 2: need to get here now. Like she's like, I promise
Speaker 2: you that you have a big problem on the ground.
Speaker 2: And you know, given her and partly her husband served
Speaker 2: until it was like eighty something years old. So anyway,
Speaker 2: they've got a lot of ties to the state, and
Speaker 2: I believe them whenever they say that there's a problem. Yeah,
Speaker 2: this isn't just some you know, this is like an
Speaker 2: activist necessarily with skin in the game. This is just
Speaker 2: a pure political operator who's pushing the White House and
Speaker 2: know like, you don't understand you have a serious problem
Speaker 2: here on the ground. You need to address it. And
Speaker 2: unfor you know, for them, they haven't done anything about it.
Speaker 1: The mayor of Dearborne, who we interviewed on this show
Speaker 1: also had a New York Times op ed, which, again,
Speaker 1: you know, this is the paper that people in Washington,
Speaker 1: DC are obsessed with, So the fact that they publish
Speaker 1: this op ed is really a big deal. We can
Speaker 1: put this up on the screen. He is also making
Speaker 1: the case to vote uncommitted. He says Dearborn is not
Speaker 1: alone in calling for a permanent ceasefire, and GAZA pull
Speaker 1: conducted last fall found that sixty six percent of Americans
Speaker 1: and a whopping eighty percent of Democrats want a ceasefire. However,
Speaker 1: the president or elective representatives in Congress seem content to
Speaker 1: ignore the will.
Speaker 5: Of the American people.
Speaker 1: He also says, I, like many of my fellow Americans,
Speaker 1: cannot in good conscience support the continuation of a genocide.
Speaker 1: This has weighed heavy on my heart, particularly the presidential
Speaker 1: primary election in Michigan has drawn near. It is for
Speaker 1: that reason that I will be checking the box for
Speaker 1: uncommitted on my presidential primary ballot next Tuesday. In doing so,
Speaker 1: I am choosing hope, the hope that mister Biden will listen,
Speaker 1: the hope that he and those in Democratic leadership will
Speaker 1: choose the salvation of our democracy, over aiding and abetting
Speaker 1: mister Netanyahu's war crimes, the hope that our families in
Speaker 1: Gaza will have food in their bellies, clean water to drink,
Speaker 1: access to healthcare and the internet, and above else, a
Speaker 1: just state in which they have the right to determine
Speaker 1: their own future. Dearborn being a majority Arab American state,
Speaker 1: So the fact that their elected mayor, who is a Democrat,
Speaker 1: is also saying I'm voting uncommitted is a real signal
Speaker 1: of trouble for them. But as Chris Wallace pointed out,
Speaker 1: you know, this goes way beyond just Arab Americans in
Speaker 1: the state, which alone would be an issue in Michigan,
Speaker 1: but we're talking about a whole range of key Democratic
Speaker 1: constituencies which are not just at odds with but furious
Speaker 1: and disgusted by Joe Biden's stance.
Speaker 5: That's here. So there's a new Michigan poll that just
Speaker 5: came out. Just to give you a sense here, put
Speaker 5: this up on the screen.
Speaker 1: So seventy four percent of Democratic voters say they support
Speaker 1: a ceasefire, only twelve percent say that they support Israel's
Speaker 1: operations in Gaza. Twelve percent of Democrats back the Joe
Speaker 1: Biden position with regard to israel I mean that is astonishing.
Speaker 1: And then put this next one up on the screen
Speaker 1: that shows you the comparison here among eighteen to thirty
Speaker 1: four year olds, Biden's favorability thirty two percent. Compare that
Speaker 1: to Michigan's Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, just to show you
Speaker 1: they're not like just pissed off at everybody. Her favorability
Speaker 1: among the same group is almost reversed. It's sixty one percent,
Speaker 1: so thirty two percent favorability and sixty percent close to
Speaker 1: sixty percent unfavorability for Joe Biden among this group, And
Speaker 1: it's almost exactly reversed for Whitmer, who is sixty one
Speaker 1: percent favorable thirty three percent unfavorable. I think that demonstrates
Speaker 1: that it is not just a limited, this one narrow
Speaker 1: demographic group of voters that they have a problem with.
Speaker 1: They have a big problem. And so remember that political
Speaker 1: piece that said that they were looking for alternative pathways
Speaker 1: to victory in Michigan that basically didn't rely on the
Speaker 1: Arab American population.
Speaker 5: What you're not going to rely on young people, You're.
Speaker 1: Not going to rely on anybody who's like, you know,
Speaker 1: even a little bit left of the center of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party, Black voters are expressing this is a problem
Speaker 1: for them because they're looking at all this funding sea
Speaker 1: of overseas conflicts and saying, what about my neighborhood, what
Speaker 1: about my job, what about my livelihood? I mean, that
Speaker 1: was what we heard from some of the current focused
Speaker 1: group voters, and they are one hundred percent correct about that.
Speaker 1: And that's a message that you know, that extends beyond
Speaker 1: just the Democratic coalition into also how independents are viewing
Speaker 1: our unconditional support for these unending conflicts.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Look, I think it's very important for us to pay
Speaker 2: attention to this too, just because again everybody thinks like, oh, well,
Speaker 2: there will come in the end, they may just not vote,
Speaker 2: And I don't think people understand how important that is.
Speaker 2: So there was a decent analysis done back in twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen where if just the same a number of black
Speaker 2: voters in Detroit had showed up in twenty sixteen as
Speaker 2: opposed to twenty twelve or two thousand and eight, then
Speaker 2: Hillary would have easily won the state of Michigan. But
Speaker 2: they just didn't come out to vogue. They didn't like Hillary. Well,
Speaker 2: the same scenario plays out here, except we're talking about
Speaker 2: possibly the same demographic but as well as young voters
Speaker 2: and Arab Americans. Where Trump only won by ten thousand votes,
Speaker 2: Joe Biden did not win by very many votes in
Speaker 2: the state of Michigan. If we're looking also across the
Speaker 2: industrial Midwest, this could have the same impact in the
Speaker 2: state of Pennsylvania or any other place where you're relying
Speaker 2: on very, very slim margins to put you across the
Speaker 2: finish line, combined with the overall economic depression. So at
Speaker 2: a certain point, what does alternative path look like?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 2: Trump has rolled up these white collar or these sorry,
Speaker 2: these white working class voters to a historic degree. I
Speaker 2: don't see them changing course at this point. They either
Speaker 2: may come out to vote for Trump enthusiastically, some may
Speaker 2: stay home, but to cross over and to vote Biden,
Speaker 2: you know, in the current economy, like, I don't see it.
Speaker 2: I don't see how they could possibly do it.
Speaker 1: So let me give you another warning sign here that is,
Speaker 1: you know, not just about Israel, but is about dissatisfaction
Speaker 1: across the board.
Speaker 5: With Joe Biden, concerns.
Speaker 1: About his age discussed with the unconditional support for Israel,
Speaker 1: upset with the economy. You can put all of this
Speaker 1: into this basket. So in twenty twenty, Biden won roughly
Speaker 1: ninety one percent of Black voters ninety one percent. A
Speaker 1: new Quinnipiac this is a national poll has him at
Speaker 1: fifty six percent among Black voters. Wo Trump expands his
Speaker 1: meager support somewhat to fifteen percent, RFK Junior thirteen percent,
Speaker 1: Cornell West thirteen percent. Now, listen, do I think that's
Speaker 1: what it's going to look like at the end of
Speaker 1: the day. No, because, as we've discussed before, oftentimes support
Speaker 1: for third party candidates false off as you get closer
Speaker 1: to election day and there's a realization of like, all right,
Speaker 1: really it's coming down to one of these two dudes.
Speaker 1: So I got to pick between the choices that are
Speaker 1: most likely to actually win and no guarantees. Also that
Speaker 1: rf K Junior and Cornell West are actually on the
Speaker 1: ballot in a majority of states, so a lot of
Speaker 1: caveats there. But this is a flashing red light for
Speaker 1: Biden to go from ninety one percent support to fifty
Speaker 1: six percent support barely You're winning a majority of African
Speaker 1: American voters across the country.
Speaker 5: I mean, he is in very very bad shape.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mentioned underscores that previous point that I made
Speaker 2: perfectly about how it do You only need it in
Speaker 2: a few areas and you can lose maybe one three
Speaker 2: five percent. If you're losing forty percent, that's it, game
Speaker 2: over game. Republicans have always said that they're like, you know,
Speaker 2: if we just won eighty five percent of the black
Speaker 2: vote instead of instead of like two or sorry, if
Speaker 2: Democrats just won eighty five percent instead of ninety two percent,
Speaker 2: we would win all fifty states in the entire country.
Speaker 2: And I don't think people really understand, like how crazy
Speaker 2: that margin actually does work, especially in the Deep South.
Speaker 2: But that's a great example of how bad things can.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Now I always have to put the other side
Speaker 1: out there just to cover our bases, which is that
Speaker 1: Republicans have their own problems. Donald Trump is also very
Speaker 1: much hated. Has tremendously turned off suburban voters. We talked
Speaker 1: yesterday about this insane Alabama Supreme Court ruling that embryos
Speaker 1: are children. You know, this is probably a position that's
Speaker 1: held by like three percent of the American public that
Speaker 1: they would support. There's a push behind the scenes amongst
Speaker 1: sort of like the Trump administration in waiting to use
Speaker 1: the Comstock Act to do this, sort of like blanket
Speaker 1: National Abortion Band. These things are wildly unpopular. Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is wildly unpopular. He is in all sorts of legal
Speaker 1: jump like they have problems too. So at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, you know, I still think it's basically
Speaker 1: a jump ball. I would today say that Trump probably
Speaker 1: has the edge, but it's not written in stone. But
Speaker 1: the fact that Democrats have decided that they are just
Speaker 1: all in for the guy who is so much weaker
Speaker 1: than even just like pick your most random standard off
Speaker 1: the shelf, Democrat in the entire country would probably be
Speaker 1: ten points superior to where Joe Biden is.
Speaker 5: And you're just I mean, it's insane.
Speaker 1: It is absolutely insane where the Democratic Party has put themselves.
Speaker 5: At this point.
Speaker 1: And it is not the fault of these voters who
Speaker 1: are pissed off about your policies and disgusted with your policies.
Speaker 1: It is your fault for enacting those policies and for
Speaker 1: sticking with this dude that a six percent of the
Speaker 1: country says is too old to be president. Another term
Speaker 1: speaking of the policies that have been enacted here. It's
Speaker 1: been a big week for the US running cover for
Speaker 1: Israeli atrocities, whether it was at the International Court Justice,
Speaker 1: whether it was at the UN. And now you have
Speaker 1: a Republican congressman truly going fully genocidal and saying all
Speaker 1: that the kids in Gaza should be killed in response
Speaker 1: to an activist who is pressing him.
Speaker 5: Let's take a listen to that.
Speaker 9: I've seen the footage. You seen footage of children's bodies.
Speaker 9: That's my taxpayer dollars. I'm going to bombs kids. So
Speaker 9: I think we should kill them all if that makes
Speaker 9: you feel better.
Speaker 5: So this is Congressman Andrew Ogles.
Speaker 1: The activist there says, so you're going to bomb these kids,
Speaker 1: and he says, I think we should kill them all
Speaker 1: if that makes you feel better.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: This is another good example of how some of the
Speaker 2: most insane rhetoric on Israel can often come from the
Speaker 2: evangelical community. If we'll remember this dude's yeah, I was
Speaker 2: just looking it up in terms of Tennessee, in terms
Speaker 2: of where he's coming from, and in terms of some
Speaker 2: of the background. It's not altogether surprising because they can
Speaker 2: often be the most psychotic in their support, and it's
Speaker 2: also just really crazy and I don't really understand why
Speaker 2: a lot of Israeli is put up with it. I'm like,
Speaker 2: you know that they support you and like to the
Speaker 2: hilt because they believe that what the apocalypse is coming
Speaker 2: and this is going to be the ground of the
Speaker 2: second coming. Like if you really think about some of
Speaker 2: the reasons, super creepy and you're almost a weird pond
Speaker 2: in their game. Fine, I will put that to the side.
Speaker 2: But Andy Ogeles, Brian Mast you know this coalition, Frankly,
Speaker 2: Mike Johnson full Oh, absolutely, yeah. A lot of this
Speaker 2: is about religious belief. And you know, whenever religion is
Speaker 2: concerned and you're thinking that that instead of national interests
Speaker 2: and other things, that's how you get to a place.
Speaker 2: Like my other thing was, I was like, I wonder
Speaker 2: if he was just saying in control, but I don't
Speaker 2: think so. I hate, like, maybe he's trying to piss
Speaker 2: them off.
Speaker 1: Disgusting to say it either what I mean, and if
Speaker 1: your religious belief leads you to a place of saying
Speaker 1: murder all the children in a place that isn't you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not really Christian but I was raised alround a
Speaker 1: lot of Christians, and that is not my understanding of
Speaker 1: the teachings of Jesus Christ personally. But you know, I
Speaker 1: could be wrong about this. You guys can can check
Speaker 1: out the Bible and see see whether that is consistent
Speaker 1: with the teachings that you may find there. The other
Speaker 1: piece of this is Rashida Slid was literally censured for
Speaker 1: echoing a rally chant calling for equal rights for Palestinians
Speaker 1: and Israelis from the river to the Sea. That was
Speaker 1: a subject of mass media coverage. Every Democratic politician was
Speaker 1: forced to answer for her and condemn her, and many
Speaker 1: of her colleagues did so. This man outright calls for
Speaker 1: the massacre of all of the Palestinian children of the
Speaker 1: Gaza strip and I mean basically crickets from the media
Speaker 1: and certainly from the political class. So the blatant double
Speaker 1: standard here is really astonishing. But it is not only
Speaker 1: American congressmen who have been catching a lot of attention
Speaker 1: for their comments with regards to our great allies. Here
Speaker 1: Israel make Golan, who is the Israeli Minister of Social
Speaker 1: Equality and Women's Advancement, So she is in the Netnyahu
Speaker 1: Cabinet made some absolutely shocking remarks this week as well.
Speaker 1: Let's take a listen to what she has to say.
Speaker 1: I'll read the translation here, so she says, I'm personally
Speaker 1: proud of the ruins of Gaza and that every baby,
Speaker 1: even eighty years from now, will tell their grandchildren what
Speaker 1: the Jews did when their families were murdered. Personally proud
Speaker 1: of the ruins of Gaza, she says, every baby, even
Speaker 1: eighty years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the
Speaker 1: Jews did. Now, keep in mind here that Israel is
Speaker 1: facing a deadline to respond to the ICJ injunctions against
Speaker 1: them that both include you got to cut out the
Speaker 1: acts that led us to determine you were plausibly committing genocide.
Speaker 1: And you have to stop statements exactly like these that
Speaker 1: are incitement to genocide. And you have to punish and
Speaker 1: hold accountable people who continue to make these statements. And here,
Speaker 1: on the eve of that deadline, is this cabinet minister
Speaker 1: saying that she is proud of the complete destruction of
Speaker 1: the Gaza strip. Our own State department was forced to
Speaker 1: respond to these insane and outrageous comments. Let's take a
Speaker 1: listen to how Matt Miller handled this particular moment of
Speaker 1: propaganda and on you know, trying to run cover for
Speaker 1: the Israeli government.
Speaker 12: This is not someone extreme, it's not Smatts, it's not
Speaker 12: a fear this is in Prime ministers.
Speaker 9: Yeah party site.
Speaker 13: I would encourage you to take a close look at
Speaker 13: the comments the Secretary made in Tel Aviv at a
Speaker 13: press conference two weeks ago, where he talked specifically about
Speaker 13: the effects of dehumanized dehumanizing language and why it's important
Speaker 13: that no one on either side of this conflict dehumanize
Speaker 13: anyone else. That will continue to be our position.
Speaker 14: The government and the Kinsid and Israel lant to the
Speaker 14: establishment of a Palestinian state.
Speaker 13: So again you have heard the Secretary speak to this
Speaker 13: that what we will do is continue to lay out
Speaker 13: what we think the best choice for the Government of
Speaker 13: Israel to make and the best choice for the Israeli
Speaker 13: people to make. Ultimately, Israel have to make its own decisions,
Speaker 13: as every sovereign country does.
Speaker 5: Israel will have to make its own decisions.
Speaker 1: But Saga, of course, we are so directly implicated in
Speaker 1: this since we are providing so much aid every year
Speaker 1: and continue to expedite shipments of these weapons continue to
Speaker 1: block you, and Security Council resolutions continue to argue at
Speaker 1: the ICJ on Israel's behalf when they weren't even willing
Speaker 1: to go and defend themselves. But don't worry, the United
Speaker 1: States of America is there to defend them from allegations
Speaker 1: of illegality and crimes at the ICJ.
Speaker 2: That's what cuts That's what really cuts it from them
Speaker 2: is that, you know, at the same time, we're like, well,
Speaker 2: they can do whatever they want, but at the same time,
Speaker 2: our entire political system is like revolving around their war
Speaker 2: and like what they're doing in terms of trying to
Speaker 2: ship them money. And we have this example here of
Speaker 2: the US defense of Israel at the ICJ, specifically, you know,
Speaker 2: using our clout and our sovereignty to try to protect them.
Speaker 2: Here's what they had to say.
Speaker 15: Any movement towards Israel withdrawal from the West Bank and Gods,
Speaker 15: that requires consideration of Israel's very real security needs. We
Speaker 15: were all reminded of those security needs on October seven,
Speaker 15: and they persist. Regrettably those needs have been ignored by
Speaker 15: many of their participants in asserting how the court should
Speaker 15: consider the questions they have asked you to try to
Speaker 15: resolve the whole of the dispute between the parties through
Speaker 15: an advisory opinion addressed to questions focusing on the acts
Speaker 15: of only one party. The United States disagrees with that
Speaker 15: this approach would be consistent with the Court's role within
Speaker 15: the United Nations or the established UN framework for achieving
Speaker 15: peace through negotiations.
Speaker 2: So that's why you were just to talk about Cristol.
Speaker 2: That was a choice by the US government to send
Speaker 2: somebody and to do that. We could have stayed out
Speaker 2: of it if we wanted to, but you know, to
Speaker 2: specifically go and argue on another person's behalf. You're choosing
Speaker 2: a side, and it's like when you choose a side
Speaker 2: and you are going to become accountable.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. And here's the thing too, that was particularly outrageous
Speaker 1: about this moment at the ICJ. I did a monologue
Speaker 1: about this earlier in the week to set the context
Speaker 1: for what these particular hearings were about. This is a
Speaker 1: separate matter from the South African case against Israel alleging genocide.
Speaker 1: This was even pre dates October seventh. They're looking for
Speaker 1: a hearing and a ruling from the ICJ. To determine
Speaker 1: that Israel's occupation is illegal, in part because you know,
Speaker 1: one of the laws around an occupation is can't be permanent.
Speaker 1: And you have, you know, a government after government expanding
Speaker 1: the illegal settlements. Every single government since the seventies has
Speaker 1: expanded the settlements, increase the number of illegal settlers. You
Speaker 1: have government for these violent settlers who are going in
Speaker 1: and pushing through violence, Palestinians off of their land. Part
Speaker 1: of why the October seventh military response from the Israelis
Speaker 1: was so pissed poor is because they had relocated IDs
Speaker 1: soldiers from the area around Gaza in order to aid
Speaker 1: and a bet these violent settlers pushing Palestinans off their land.
Speaker 1: This was already one of the most violent years prior
Speaker 1: to October seventh with regards to attacks on Palestinians in
Speaker 1: the West Bank in particular. So that's what this case
Speaker 1: was about. Now, Previously, the US position has been that
Speaker 1: the settlements are illegal, and so for us to then
Speaker 1: go and argue and dance around, I mean, there was
Speaker 1: all this dancing around to try to avoid calling the
Speaker 1: settlements illegal, to try to avoid calling the occupation illegal.
Speaker 1: Really arguing these kind of legal technicalities of like, well,
Speaker 1: we just don't think this is the place to have
Speaker 1: these arguments. It really is disgraceful, and especially in the
Speaker 1: context of what is happening the Gaza strip right now.
Speaker 1: So you know the idea, oh it Israel can just
Speaker 1: do whatever they want, Well, we are so directly implicated
Speaker 1: here because of all the actions we take on their
Speaker 1: behalf and our little you know, like well we told
Speaker 1: them not to dehumanize Palestinians. Is so utterly pathetic when
Speaker 1: we are completely unwilling to do anything to back up
Speaker 1: our words with any kind of action. And also what
Speaker 1: happened this week too, the Kanesset passed overwhelmingly, by the way,
Speaker 1: a resolution that is directly at odds with a two
Speaker 1: state solution, which is supposedly the policy position of the
Speaker 1: Biden administration, which is actually part of what Matt Malair
Speaker 1: was responding to there. We also want to keep our
Speaker 1: eyes on, you know, potentially devastating situation. Put this up
Speaker 1: on the screen. This was a good analysis written up
Speaker 1: in Haretz. Apparently US officials are worried that Ramadan may
Speaker 1: hold the quote perfect storm, leading to a regional blow up.
Speaker 1: The subhead here Intahu's capitulation to his far right co
Speaker 1: colition partners of our Muslim access to the Temple mount
Speaker 1: during the Holy month is just one of many factors
Speaker 1: sparking concern that a major escalation is imminent.
Speaker 2: So you have these.
Speaker 1: Religious hyper flash points that always create provocations, especially coming
Speaker 1: directly from Ben Gavir with regard to Ramadan. So you
Speaker 1: have that.
Speaker 5: You also have net Nyahu and co.
Speaker 1: Setting a deadline for their invasion of Rafa, that border town.
Speaker 1: You know, with all this one point three million Palestinians
Speaker 1: pressed up against the border with Egypt right there, they
Speaker 1: set a Ramadan deadline for that as well. And it's
Speaker 1: hard to you know, you can't really wrap your hat
Speaker 1: around how provocative this is in the broader region and
Speaker 1: what kind of explosion this could all lead to, not
Speaker 1: to mention, of course, the suffering that continues for the
Speaker 1: Palestinians and the way that they will be further impacted here.
Speaker 2: I'm very worried about the Ramadan thing. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: as you said, it's difficult to contextualize for people who
Speaker 2: aren't really familiar with Islamic culture. But to just say
Speaker 2: it's the holy month is almost frankly an understatement in
Speaker 2: terms of how seriously it's taken. And if there is
Speaker 2: an idea, there's also a lot of ideas you know,
Speaker 2: even within Islam about Ramadan and about like sacrifice and
Speaker 2: working on behalf of other Muslims, which takes on a
Speaker 2: lot more extra significant. So anyway, if there is like
Speaker 2: a mass slaughter that happens during Ramadan, a it is
Speaker 2: one that is very impactful, that would be for a
Speaker 2: lot of the Palestinian population. But really be what I'd
Speaker 2: be the most worried about is that it would ignite
Speaker 2: some sort of broader regional conflict because populations in many
Speaker 2: of these countries would not accept those type of images
Speaker 2: during the Holy month, and it would really instigate for
Speaker 2: a lot of these people a golf monarchies and other
Speaker 2: places in particular to try and push their governments either
Speaker 2: into the war. Same with the Egyptians as well. So
Speaker 2: I would not underestimate that, Yeah, it really would.
Speaker 1: Indeed, and you have you know, psycho coalition partners like
Speaker 1: Ben Gavie who is just looking to for provocation, to
Speaker 1: provoke tensions, specifically with regard to the Temple Mount. He's
Speaker 1: apparently ascended the Temple Mount three different times since becoming
Speaker 1: a Cabinet minister. Each visit earned the ire of the
Speaker 1: international community, endangered the highly fraught status quo at the
Speaker 1: Jerusalem Holy Site. So you couple that with an already
Speaker 1: you know, tense doesn't begin to describe the situation, and
Speaker 1: you are, as they put it, perhaps heading towards a
Speaker 1: perfect storm. And it's important to keep in mind too
Speaker 1: just how horrific the conditions already are on the ground.
Speaker 1: There are multiple reports now of social order basically collapsing
Speaker 1: at this point as the population faces starvation, which has
Speaker 1: become endemic, especially in northern Gaza. So even the aid
Speaker 1: that is coming in is oftentimes getting looted. The drivers
Speaker 1: of the AID convoys are being attacked. Let's take a
Speaker 1: look at a CNN report on what is happening there.
Speaker 12: Gaza's food problem writ large hunger trumping, fear of Israeli bullets,
Speaker 12: news of a coming AID convoy carrying flower into the
Speaker 12: north of Gaza, converging crowds to plunder it. We came
Speaker 12: here and the Israelis started opening fire on us, and
Speaker 12: we hid between the buildings Hams and Nas says, when
Speaker 12: the fire stops, we come out again. And wait for
Speaker 12: the flower. The IDF say they will look into this incident,
Speaker 12: but say they can't rule out hamas shooting. Desperation leading
Speaker 12: to looting a growing problem in northern Gaza.
Speaker 14: We're talking tens and tens of thousands for you know,
Speaker 14: five ten trucks. It's the food that he's getting through
Speaker 14: is just a drop in the ocean. It's not nearly enough.
Speaker 12: Theft so bad. The principal UN food supplier, the WFP,
Speaker 12: declaring Tuesday it will stop deliveries to the North, compounding
Speaker 12: the already dire conditions. Fifteen percent of children under two
Speaker 12: have malnutrition.
Speaker 14: It's now at an emergency level according to international standards.
Speaker 14: Once you're over fifteen percent for acute malnutrition, that's a
Speaker 14: nutritional crisis and an emergency.
Speaker 12: Even before the World Food Program canceled food deliveries, children
Speaker 12: venting fears shared by adults, abandonment by the world, no food,
Speaker 12: no long time, no.
Speaker 2: Legathin how the word share?
Speaker 10: What care on you?
Speaker 1: How are your food your children? While we eat?
Speaker 2: Are you making?
Speaker 1: How?
Speaker 5: So devastating?
Speaker 1: Report there and I believe it was in this report
Speaker 1: as well, where they interviewed a doctor who said, actually
Speaker 1: the number one condition that they are now treating at
Speaker 1: hospitals is malnutrition. That's where we are. CNN also caught
Speaker 1: Israel firing on an AID convoy. That's something that the
Speaker 1: New York Times has reported on as well. Let's put
Speaker 1: this up on the screen, they said. In one case,
Speaker 1: in early February, the UN accused the Israeli navy of
Speaker 1: shelling an AID convoy heading up Gaza's coastal road toward
Speaker 1: Gaza City. Israeli military said it was looking into the claim.
Speaker 1: The headline here, though, is attackers hurling stones, a cement
Speaker 1: block and an axe at the AID convoy trucks. Just
Speaker 1: absolute desperation taking hold here as Palestinians loot these AID
Speaker 1: convoys and social order breaks down. Let me read you
Speaker 1: a little bit of what they said. They said such
Speaker 1: attacks have become common since Israel's invasion last year, as
Speaker 1: desperate civilians faced starvation in pockets of the enclave. According
Speaker 1: to the officials who spoke on condition of nanimity. In
Speaker 1: one recent attack, assailance through an axe at a driver's
Speaker 1: cabin attempting to break in, while another the attackers hurled
Speaker 1: a cement block. According to an official, Israel blames much
Speaker 1: of the theft on Hamas, which it accuses of siphoning
Speaker 1: off supplies for its own forces. There is no evidence
Speaker 1: of that, however, but the Western officials said the attacks
Speaker 1: appeared to be mostly organized by groups of Gazans who
Speaker 1: were unaffiliated with Hamas or were the spontaneous acts of
Speaker 1: desperate civilians. Hamas officials are barely present on the ground
Speaker 1: in any part of Gaza, the official said, and international
Speaker 1: aid organizations are no longer coordinating their movements with that group.
Speaker 1: Until that until October, controlled the entirety of the territory
Speaker 1: and obviously sober. The core problem here is lack of food,
Speaker 1: lack of water, lack of any sort of basic supplies.
Speaker 1: People absolutely desperate and you know, chaos ensuing. But a
Speaker 1: tendant to that problem as well is Lawnford. I mean,
Speaker 1: Hamas ran the Gaza strip, and so law enforcement was
Speaker 1: definitionally you know, affiliated with Hamas. As you know they
Speaker 1: always say the health Ministry run by Hamas et cetera.
Speaker 1: Law enforcement was the same. Well, law enforcement is not
Speaker 1: going to come out and guard these aid convoys for
Speaker 1: fear of being targeted as quote unquote Hamas by Israeli forces.
Speaker 1: Who already are being caught firing on these aid convoys,
Speaker 1: so that further leads to, you know, an escalation of chaos, chaos, looting,
Speaker 1: and breakdown of social order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really bad. I mean, it's one of those
Speaker 2: things that we saw a lot in Iraq. And one
Speaker 2: of the reasons why you want to be very fearful
Speaker 2: of this is that it means that anybody can step
Speaker 2: into the vacuum. And one of the ways actually the
Speaker 2: Taliban raise to rose to power in Afghanistan in the
Speaker 2: late nineties is that you take a very chaotic situation,
Speaker 2: you restore some semblance of order. People are willing to
Speaker 2: put up with it, even if it means their kids
Speaker 2: can't go to school or their wives you know, basically
Speaker 2: come imprisoned in their house. Part of the amass rise,
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Yeah, of course. But this point is just
Speaker 2: that you know, this we could see a lot worse
Speaker 2: than Hamas. We may actually see the what if Palestinian
Speaker 2: Islamic jih Hot or something even more radical comes in
Speaker 2: and that you know, they start shooting all the criminals
Speaker 2: that can Actually in a situation like this, that's very popular,
Speaker 2: and that's exactly how they can roll up defenses. And
Speaker 2: then especially with the way that the Israeli campaign, if
Speaker 2: you combine that with some counterinsurgency effort, you're looking at
Speaker 2: years long issue that there is right there. So the
Speaker 2: security vacuum is not just a obviously it's a humanitarian disaster,
Speaker 2: but it's one of those where we saw it in
Speaker 2: some mile, we saw it in you Rock, we saw
Speaker 2: it in Afghanistan. When we have a vacuum like that,
Speaker 2: it will lead to more military conflict in the future.
Speaker 2: So you don't want it to happen. You want to
Speaker 2: prevent it.
Speaker 1: There are already estimates I think puts together by Johns
Speaker 1: Hopkins group. I believe that show that the deaths from
Speaker 1: starvation and disease could vary rapidly outpace those from the
Speaker 1: bombing and the bullets. And when you look at the
Speaker 1: numbers in terms of in the percentages in terms of
Speaker 1: famine and starvation and children facing severe wasting and malnutrition,
Speaker 1: you know we are really on the cusp of that.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you know the incursion, the imminent
Speaker 1: invasion of Rafa. Remember Rafa is where the aid convoys
Speaker 1: are predominantly coming through, So you already have a population
Speaker 1: that is literally starving to death, and then you're talking
Speaker 1: about further attacking the area where the aid is even
Speaker 1: coming in.
Speaker 5: I mean, it really is.
Speaker 1: I can't even say such disaster them. It's already a disaster,
Speaker 1: and it's impossible to imagine just how much worse things
Speaker 1: could continue to get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker 1: We're very fortunate today to have one of the few
Speaker 1: reporters who are on the ground covering the ins and
Speaker 1: outs of Assange's hearings in London. So let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and get to that. Excited to welcome our next GUESTI
Speaker 1: Gibbons is policy director of Defending Rights and Dissent. He
Speaker 1: has advised multiple congressional offices on reforming the Espionage Act.
Speaker 1: He's currently in London covering those Julian Assange extradition hearings
Speaker 1: as an accredited reporter for Jacobin, and he is also
Speaker 1: working on a book on the history of the FBI
Speaker 1: for Verso that I think is going to be challenging,
Speaker 1: given the FBI doesn't love to give up information he
Speaker 1: was just telling us, But we're looking forward to that
Speaker 1: one as well. Chip.
Speaker 5: Great to have you, welcome.
Speaker 9: Thank you for having me and I've had to sue
Speaker 9: the FBI multiple times to get documents for the book.
Speaker 9: We could publish a coffee table book of all of
Speaker 9: my legal correspondents.
Speaker 1: We can have a companion book about what it took
Speaker 1: to write the book.
Speaker 9: The editor made that joke. We could do a coffee
Speaker 9: table book. Child buy it with the office information. Well, okay,
Speaker 9: needed money at the a litigation chip.
Speaker 1: Let me start by setting the stage here for our viewers.
Speaker 1: Let's put this up on the screen. Some of the
Speaker 1: sights and sounds from the protest outside of the courtroom.
Speaker 1: These are supporters of Julian Assange who believe, as I do,
Speaker 1: that he is being persecuted and that his prosecution here
Speaker 1: in the US is a direct assault on freedom of
Speaker 1: the press. You can see the crowd there which is
Speaker 1: quite numerous, and we played earlier in the week some
Speaker 1: of the comments from his wife, Stella Assange, and also
Speaker 1: some of the comments of journalists Chris Hedges who was
Speaker 1: there on the ground. Could you start by just setting
Speaker 1: up for people who may, like myself, find the UK
Speaker 1: legal system a little bit confusing and hard to discern
Speaker 1: how this all works out, what these hearings are all about,
Speaker 1: and if this is indeed the last chance that Julian
Speaker 1: Assange has to block extradition to the United States.
Speaker 9: Well, I think everyone finds the UK legal system rather
Speaker 9: for plexing. I'm not convinced the British don't find it
Speaker 9: for plexing. But what happened was in twenty nineteen the
Speaker 9: United States put forward a extradition request to the United Kingdom.
Speaker 9: In twenty twenty one, a district judge which they sometimes
Speaker 9: just referred to as a DJ, which is very confusing
Speaker 9: to me why this disc jockey is doing these things.
Speaker 9: But it's a district judge, not a DJ like we
Speaker 9: think deny extradition. In denying extradition, she rejected all of
Speaker 9: the political speech and press freedom grounds the defense for
Speaker 9: Assange argued for. But she found because of his mental
Speaker 9: health and because of the US prison conditions, that extra
Speaker 9: diiting hear him here would be oppressive. We've then had
Speaker 9: years of hearings in which that part of the decision
Speaker 9: was appealed. The UK prosecutors appeal at the UK taxpayers
Speaker 9: expense on behalf of the US government. I can't fathom that,
Speaker 9: but that's what's happening, and they got that part of
Speaker 9: the judge's decision frown out. So with the courts having
Speaker 9: overturned the blocking of the decision on mental health grounds,
Speaker 9: the defense was then able to go and appeal the
Speaker 9: part of the decision on press freedom and political speech grounds.
Speaker 9: What's happening in the UK is you have to have
Speaker 9: a hearing about whether or not you have a right
Speaker 9: to appeal or not. So the two day hearing where
Speaker 9: they took two days of extensive arguments from both sides
Speaker 9: all day hearings from ten thirty to four thirty, was
Speaker 9: in fact not really an appeal, but in a hearing
Speaker 9: about whether or not to have an appeal. Now, if
Speaker 9: Julie Assange loses at this level, that is his last
Speaker 9: chance to block the extradition in the UK. He could
Speaker 9: go to the European Court of Human Rights, but or
Speaker 9: they could try to speak him on a plane. You know,
Speaker 9: there was some concern, as remote as it was, that
Speaker 9: they could have ruled from the bench yesterday and put
Speaker 9: Julian Assange on a plane before the court in Strasburg
Speaker 9: could ever intervene. His attorneys are of course prepared to
Speaker 9: go to the European Court of Human Rights if he loses,
Speaker 9: but there's a big standoff between the Tory government and
Speaker 9: that court in general.
Speaker 2: In the UK right now, got it? So, Chip, as
Speaker 2: I understand it, press freedom is not necessarily like a
Speaker 2: major goal of the UK government. This is a bipartisan thing,
Speaker 2: not necessarily you know, one party. So how does that
Speaker 2: stand in terms of if this hearing you know the
Speaker 2: way that it goes for Julian's chances of even defeating extradition. Period,
Speaker 2: If he loses.
Speaker 9: This hearing, he's done in the UK courses.
Speaker 6: Okay.
Speaker 9: If he wins this hearing, it goes to another UK
Speaker 9: court who will hear very technical legal arguments about the
Speaker 9: European Covenant and human rights, whether or not the two
Speaker 9: thousand and three Extradition Law actually incorporates the language of
Speaker 9: the Extradition Treaty that bars ex tradition on a political offense.
Speaker 9: But I don't think we should get lost in the
Speaker 9: legal weeds. On the second day of these proceedings, the
Speaker 9: British lawyers started by saying flat out, Julian Assange is
Speaker 9: not a journalist. Chelsea Manning is not a whistleblower. So
Speaker 9: while there's all these technical arguments about what is Article
Speaker 9: seven of the European Covenant and what is this part
Speaker 9: of UK domestic well mean for extradition. This is a
Speaker 9: hearing at its core about press freedom and about whether
Speaker 9: or not the US can extradite a journalist to stand
Speaker 9: trial for journalism. And I feel very patriotic about the
Speaker 9: First Amendment. I think it's one of the things we
Speaker 9: do best in America. If this case comes to the US,
Speaker 9: we will be shredding the First Amendments guarantee your press freedom.
Speaker 9: But the reason why there's thousands of people from all
Speaker 9: over the world outside this court is not because they're
Speaker 9: all concerned with how we're doing in the US, but
Speaker 9: I'm sure they wish us well, but because this case
Speaker 9: has global implications for press freedom. Julie Nossage is not
Speaker 9: an American citizen. WikiLeaks is not an American publication. The
Speaker 9: US is saying it cannot only apply the Espionage Act
Speaker 9: to a journalist, which would be terrible if they did
Speaker 9: it to the New York Times or a left wing
Speaker 9: US publication or anything like that. Donastically, but they're saying
Speaker 9: they can apply to anyone anywhere in the world, Seize
Speaker 9: that person, bring them to this country, and disappear them
Speaker 9: into a dungeon, right, that is what the US is arguing,
Speaker 9: and that is a shocking argument. And you know, if
Speaker 9: the US says it can do this, other countries are
Speaker 9: going to do it as well. I mean, imagine you
Speaker 9: had someone who leaked information about the Iranian or Russian governments,
Speaker 9: and Iran or Russia wanted to actually like the journalist
Speaker 9: who published the leaks. We would we would be, we
Speaker 9: would be besides ourselves, and you would listen to these
Speaker 9: these British prosecutors say, Julia Sange isn't a journalist. Wiki
Speaker 9: leagues solicit its information. They're not supposed to publish. It's
Speaker 9: secret information. And it's like, okay, that's what journalism is though,
Speaker 9: and they would read out, Chelsea Manny's not a whistleblower.
Speaker 9: She gave away X number of US military documents on
Speaker 9: the Iraq War. And it's like, no, that is that
Speaker 9: is whistleblowing. And the highlight of the hearing for me
Speaker 9: really came when the defense was allowed. I guess the
Speaker 9: repellants down on defense were allowed to give their rebuttal,
Speaker 9: and they started by saying in two and a half hours,
Speaker 9: my learned colleague, that's how they referred to my learned colleague.
Speaker 9: The judges are my lord and my lady the uh
Speaker 9: the other lawyers are my learned colleague. I'm learning a
Speaker 9: lot about British legal euthanisms, my learned colleague. In two
Speaker 9: and a half half, I have to write a book
Speaker 9: on that. On two and a half hours. In two
Speaker 9: and a half hours, never won mentioned to these documents
Speaker 9: were about state criminality or about war crimes. And when
Speaker 9: you punish someone, when you punish someone for publishing documents
Speaker 9: about state crimes war crimes, you the nextest between that
Speaker 9: and a political offense is completely clear. Because the UK
Speaker 9: judges kept saying or not judges, UK lawyers kept saying, well,
Speaker 9: how can it be a political case? We've had two
Speaker 9: different presidential administrations. If you say it's a political case,
Speaker 9: you're besmirching the prosecutor. You're saying he's bringing it in
Speaker 9: bad faith. And we have such good relationships with the
Speaker 9: US and the lawyers just they make a number of
Speaker 9: brilliant technical legal arguments, but they just came back with
Speaker 9: when you have documents that expose state criminality and you
Speaker 9: put the person in jail, right, the political repression there
Speaker 9: is quite clear. You don't need to be a lawyer
Speaker 9: to know which way the wind blows in this case.
Speaker 9: To paraphrase Bobda.
Speaker 1: It's always important to remember, too, the people actually committed
Speaker 1: those crimes that were revealed, they were never held accountable.
Speaker 1: It's also important to remember that the Obama administration agreed
Speaker 1: with your assessment that this implicated press freedom.
Speaker 5: And you know, they hated Julian Massange as.
Speaker 1: Much as the next administration, but they decided under the
Speaker 1: Obama Biden administration that they could not prosecute him and
Speaker 1: protect journalists at the New York Times, the Washington Post
Speaker 1: and elsewhere, or publishers as well. You know, Chip, how
Speaker 1: did you feel like these hearings went. You know, is
Speaker 1: the deck just hopelessly stacked against Julian because the UK
Speaker 1: is just basically going to do whatever the Biden administration
Speaker 1: wants them to do, or do you think that he
Speaker 1: has a shot here at actually blocking this extradition.
Speaker 9: You know, I appreciate that I'm an American observing the
Speaker 9: UK system, so it's a little bit hard for me
Speaker 9: to tell. Sometimes I would feel very confident if this
Speaker 9: was a US hearing assessing it during the first day,
Speaker 9: the judges asked a number of questions of the Massage
Speaker 9: lawyers about these claims about publishing unredacted human sources, and
Speaker 9: of course WikiLeaks didn't do that. Somebody leaked the password
Speaker 9: and the documents ended up online, which the British prosecutors
Speaker 9: argued didn't matter. He was still responsible for it, and
Speaker 9: even if he wasn't, that was for a US court,
Speaker 9: not a UK court to decide. But the judges did
Speaker 9: have a number of questions for the prosecutors that did
Speaker 9: seem sort of critical some of the claims they were making,
Speaker 9: especially around this claim that Gordon Kromberg made that as
Speaker 9: a foreign national, the US might not consider Assange having
Speaker 9: any First Amendment rights or first defenses to the ESBI
Speaker 9: NAG Act. So we're saying we can put a publisher
Speaker 9: in jail anywhere in the world under our eSPI NASE Act,
Speaker 9: but he can't raise press freedom arguments because those are
Speaker 9: only for America, which is a fascinating double standard.
Speaker 10: Uh.
Speaker 9: And when I talked to some of the people who
Speaker 9: had who had on the legal team and his supporters,
Speaker 9: they felt like the judges were less hostile on their
Speaker 9: questions than past judges were. So I think there's a
Speaker 9: cautious optimism, but this is the British legal system and
Speaker 9: it is you know, there is a political establishment here
Speaker 9: that hates chilling as much as they do.
Speaker 6: In the US.
Speaker 2: I really appreciate the fact that you were on the ground.
Speaker 2: Ryan Graham recommended it. You were one of the only
Speaker 2: people in the United States that actually, you know, was like, hey,
Speaker 2: maybe I'll just go actually check out this very important
Speaker 2: case for our own legal system and for the world. So, Chip,
Speaker 2: we really appreciate the work that you're doing. Where can
Speaker 2: people learn more about it and support you?
Speaker 9: Yeah, come to you can learn more about defending rights
Speaker 9: and assent at rights and descent dot org. I'm also
Speaker 9: on Twitter. Against my better judgment, I should give it
Speaker 9: eighty nine. I keep waiting for Elon Musk to finally
Speaker 9: break Twitter and then I can finally get off of it,
Speaker 9: but they keep threatening us with a good time and
Speaker 9: we never get it.
Speaker 1: I know, yeah, I feel very similarly. But then there
Speaker 1: are also days when Twitter really delivers. You know, the
Speaker 1: Taylor Swift discourse was fun. This Google image situation was entertaining,
Speaker 1: So I can't quit it. I'm not going to pretend Chip,
Speaker 1: thank you so much.
Speaker 5: Again, I'd like to exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: It's great to meet you, and thank you again for
Speaker 1: joining us and for helping our audience understand what's going
Speaker 1: on there.
Speaker 2: Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: If there's anything breaking over the weekend, we will bring
Speaker 2: it to you. Otherwise we will see you all next week.