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Speaker 1: Breakingpoints dot com. Well, hello everyone, welcome to Counterpoints. Ryan,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? Wonderful? Happy Wednesday to you, Happy
Speaker 1: Wednesday to you. Now there's a lot going on here
Speaker 1: because House I was just going to say a House
Speaker 1: minority leader, but now Speaker of the House, Kevin McArthur,
Speaker 1: Kevin McCarthy is set to meet with President Biden today
Speaker 1: and they're going to talk about whether we will default
Speaker 1: basically on our debt, and what the path might look
Speaker 1: like to get there. Right, And there was one thing
Speaker 1: you wanted to mention at the top of the show.
Speaker 1: In interesting development and some of the biggest news of
Speaker 1: the last week. Oh yeah, a couple of things actually.
Speaker 1: So first of all, tonight in Memphis, the funeral for
Speaker 1: Tyree Nichols will be held. Kamala Harris has told the
Speaker 1: family that she will be there to speak. Reverend Al
Speaker 1: Sharpton is going to lead the event. Organizers said they
Speaker 1: expect something like twenty five hundred people to go, even
Speaker 1: though Memphis is under an ice storm at the moment,
Speaker 1: it'll be right in downtown Memphis. We're also coming up
Speaker 1: to the culmination of the fight over lan Omar's seat
Speaker 1: on the Foreign Affairs Committee. You had Matt Gates come
Speaker 1: out and say that he's undecided, and I'm curious what
Speaker 1: your sense from House Republicans is, are there people like Gates?
Speaker 1: I think Gates might in principle, like I think it's
Speaker 1: a bad idea to just start kicking people off committees
Speaker 1: for on a partisan vote because you disagree with something
Speaker 1: they said, because you know who would be one of
Speaker 1: the first people that would be kicked often reverse him.
Speaker 1: What's your sense of whether or not McCarthy's going to
Speaker 1: have the votes, because he's it looks it looks like
Speaker 1: he's wobbly. But he said today or he said on
Speaker 1: Tuesday when asked in the hallway, that yes, I have
Speaker 1: the votes. You know this is an interesting case study
Speaker 1: because there's a huge distinction between Ilhan Omar and what
Speaker 1: happened with Eric Swawall and Adam Schiff on intelligence committees,
Speaker 1: because they have both i think, demonstrated really poor judgment
Speaker 1: in that arena. And you can look at Adam Schiff.
Speaker 1: I'll talk about this a little in my monologue. Just
Speaker 1: being utterly unqualified and making it egregious doesn't even begin
Speaker 1: to describe the lapses in judgment that he's had over
Speaker 1: the last several years. Whereas they're upset with Ilhan Omar
Speaker 1: over this interpretation of what constitutes anti Semitism. Whether or
Speaker 1: not they believe that Ilhan and Omar, as she said
Speaker 1: over the weekend, did not understand the tropes and was
Speaker 1: sort of unintentionally offensive with her language, or if she's
Speaker 1: genuinely harbor some anti Semitic beliefs and is willing to
Speaker 1: publicly say them. That's a different case study than lacking
Speaker 1: a qualification. So when Gates and ken Buck, who we've
Speaker 1: had on Crystal and Sager had on, say I don't
Speaker 1: believe in punting people just to get even with Democrats
Speaker 1: on this case, but not the others, that is really
Speaker 1: interesting you know, and Republicans will say, well, Democrats started it.
Speaker 1: They had because you know, they kicked Gosar and mar
Speaker 1: Martha Taylor Green off. That was a bipartisan vote, which
Speaker 1: means it's a slightly different precedent than kicking people off
Speaker 1: by a partisan vote. The Intelligence Committee is a separate
Speaker 1: is a separate precedent because the speaker can kind of
Speaker 1: unilaterally decide who goes on there. When it comes to Omar,
Speaker 1: it just really does seem like, like you said, they
Speaker 1: don't like her. Well, yeah, and listen to I mean,
Speaker 1: this is one of the biggest suspeaks in politics right
Speaker 1: now is how we define bigotry, How will we define racism,
Speaker 1: how we define anti semitism? And I think Republicans have
Speaker 1: had a sort of experience over the last several years
Speaker 1: that shows them very clearly how easily those definitions can
Speaker 1: be inflated against them and their voters, because it happens
Speaker 1: all of the time. How do they square in their
Speaker 1: minds this They're driven by this anti wokeness, like that's
Speaker 1: the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning.
Speaker 1: It's fighting the Wokes and they're going to cancel somebody
Speaker 1: for something they said off of a committee that like
Speaker 1: in their heads, is that something that conflicts or in
Speaker 1: their minds, there's just there's a Palestinian exception to all
Speaker 1: of this, and it doesn't even kind of raise the
Speaker 1: level of something that they need to work out in
Speaker 1: their own minds. I think there are case studies, especially
Speaker 1: on campuses, in which proponents or opponents of cancel culture
Speaker 1: have been hypocritical when it comes to, as you say,
Speaker 1: like a Palestinian exception. I do, however, think that the
Speaker 1: standards for members of Congress are reasonably different, even if
Speaker 1: you're an opponent of cancel culture. It's entirely fair to
Speaker 1: say members of Congress should be hold to a different
Speaker 1: held do a different standard than a comedian or an actor,
Speaker 1: an actor or something like that. And if it's you know,
Speaker 1: you can then talk about whether they what they think
Speaker 1: about everything that Trump has said. Hypocrisy in that too.
Speaker 1: I wish Republicans got out of bed every morning and
Speaker 1: you know, actually wanted to do something and not just
Speaker 1: whine about what they see as wokeness or cancel culture.
Speaker 1: But we generally just have to settle for the whinings.
Speaker 1: That's a good point. These are all Trump supporters, at
Speaker 1: least they were in the last election cycle. And Trump
Speaker 1: probably says more things, more anti Semitic things in a
Speaker 1: single day than Omar has said in her lifetime. But
Speaker 1: he's like, Israel controls Congress, and like he did say that, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're so good with money, and like he's just constantly
Speaker 1: saying explicitly anti Semitic things. And of course he has
Speaker 1: Jewish grandchildren, his daughters, right, and he's like, they're going
Speaker 1: to be great with money. But this is an example
Speaker 1: of where Republicans, I think, understand how those definitions, Like
Speaker 1: I don't think anybody would say that Donald Trump, a
Speaker 1: man's whose daughter who he loves is Jewish as anti
Speaker 1: Semitic by their definition. But if you're inflating that definition,
Speaker 1: it's going to get uncomfortable when you have to look
Speaker 1: at certain people who you would not consider. And so
Speaker 1: we just have inflated these definitions to the point where
Speaker 1: the political football is you toss it around and it's cheapened.
Speaker 1: I think the actual definitions to the point where we
Speaker 1: can't agree anymore on like what actually is very much
Speaker 1: objectionable rhetoric. And that's a really sad state of affairs.
Speaker 1: We'll probably have to cut that into a separate box
Speaker 1: because it just went on. But on that note, Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy is going to meet with Joe Biden to talk
Speaker 1: about a really big yeah, a one. Put that up
Speaker 1: on the screen. And actually, so this is a headline
Speaker 1: from Cnnwards says Biden's message to McCarthy ahead of critical
Speaker 1: White House meeting, which is today. By the way, show
Speaker 1: me your plan. Why don't we actually hear those words
Speaker 1: from the man himself, President Joe Biden. Let's rull a
Speaker 1: two pend. You want to negotiate, you tell me your budget.
Speaker 1: I'll start your mind. What is your message? What is
Speaker 1: your message to leader McCarthy, the speaker McCarthy, Sorry, sir,
Speaker 1: what will be your message? Put show me your budget.
Speaker 1: I'll show your mind. Show me your budget, and I'll
Speaker 1: show you mine. Kevin McCarthy responded on Twitter to some
Speaker 1: of what was coming out of the Biden White House.
Speaker 1: We can put a three up on the screen, he said,
Speaker 1: mister President, I received your staff's memo, space Enter. I'm
Speaker 1: not interested in political games, space Enter. I'm coming to
Speaker 1: negotiate for the American people. A very short, but very
Speaker 1: poignant piece of poetry looking at it out of his
Speaker 1: green He did it in Stanza form, which I think
Speaker 1: was even a high coup if he worked on it
Speaker 1: a little more, right, he was almost there, certainly a choice. Ryan,
Speaker 1: they're going back and forth. McCarthy said this Sunday, we're
Speaker 1: taking Medicare and Social Security off the table, and that
Speaker 1: was always going to be a non starter for the
Speaker 1: Biden administration. I do, however, have a quote from Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy where he says, if you read our commitment to America,
Speaker 1: all we talk about is strengthening Medicare and Social Security.
Speaker 1: I know the President doesn't want to look at it,
Speaker 1: but we have to make sure we strengthen those seemingly
Speaker 1: in conflict. If you want to really do anything about
Speaker 1: the debt, there's there's not much you can do without
Speaker 1: tinkering with entitlement programs. So on that note, or with
Speaker 1: that in mind, they're kind of at an impasse. Right,
Speaker 1: we can pause this and ask the class of question here.
Speaker 1: Does everybody here know what people in Washington mean when
Speaker 1: they say we're going to strengthen social Security? How do
Speaker 1: you make it stronger? It's one of the greatest lies
Speaker 1: that is that is like dropped on the heads of
Speaker 1: the American people. I do technically think it's true that
Speaker 1: a solvent social security system would be a strengthen social
Speaker 1: security system. But that is mutually exclusive with cutting. When
Speaker 1: they say strengthen, they mean they mean they mean cut,
Speaker 1: they mean cut. And so in other words, think of
Speaker 1: it this way. If everybody's social security benefits were dropped
Speaker 1: down to a dollar, that would be the strongest program ever, right,
Speaker 1: because it's soft, Because it's so soft, because you can
Speaker 1: all you're very comfortable that the trust fund is going
Speaker 1: to have the money in it that it can pay
Speaker 1: that dollar every single month, and you have then strengthened
Speaker 1: the programs. What they're saying romantics, right, and what they're
Speaker 1: saying the fund runs out in a certain amount of time,
Speaker 1: and so in order to make it go longer, we're
Speaker 1: going to pay you less, and that strengthens social security.
Speaker 1: Most people when they hear the words strength and social security,
Speaker 1: they think, oh, I'm gonna get a nice little extra
Speaker 1: cola little another fifty bucks in my check is a
Speaker 1: stronger check. It's about it isn't like just bs political length, right,
Speaker 1: And so for Macarthy to say we're taking Medicare and
Speaker 1: social security off the table, and we're just going back
Speaker 1: to what we said in our Commitment to America. And
Speaker 1: then you go back and you read the Commitment to
Speaker 1: America and as you said, the Commitment America says strength
Speaker 1: and sold security and Medicare. So it's cut, that's cut
Speaker 1: benefits for both so that you can supposedly prolong the
Speaker 1: actuarial and like the different tables will work out a
Speaker 1: little bit better for them, right. And one thing I
Speaker 1: think it just gets lost in this entire conversation because
Speaker 1: you know, even Republicans now are talking about the Pentagon,
Speaker 1: even Kevin I forget if it was Kevin mccarthur. There's
Speaker 1: a Republican who said, and many Republicans would agree with this,
Speaker 1: that maybe there are some cuts that need to happen
Speaker 1: to the Pentagon so that it's more efficient and effective
Speaker 1: and can pass, for instance, an audit like any business
Speaker 1: with that much money, and it would have to. But
Speaker 1: the other point that I wanted to make is all
Speaker 1: of all of you could put up the next element there,
Speaker 1: which is right, yeah, yea talking about that, yep, yep, exactly.
Speaker 1: So Manu Raja is reporting, he's saying that some have
Speaker 1: floated really stiff cut some Republicans to domestic programs and
Speaker 1: to trim the defense budget. But Brian read all Over
Speaker 1: at the Manhattan Institute has crunched the numbers on this,
Speaker 1: and it's truly astounding how many things you could cut
Speaker 1: without really making a debt and the national debt, so
Speaker 1: you could actually eliminate the entire Pentagon and you still
Speaker 1: don't make a dent in the debt because those programs
Speaker 1: are overloaded with boomer benefits right now. They weren't designed
Speaker 1: particularly well, we haven't been managing them responsibly. But whether
Speaker 1: it's humane to let's say, strengthen strengthened by a cuts
Speaker 1: to those programs, I mean, I think at this moment
Speaker 1: time absolutely not the answer. That is absolutely not unless
Speaker 1: you have some political imagination that we're not cueued into
Speaker 1: yet that does this in a humane way. I think
Speaker 1: we can all agree solvent social security would be better,
Speaker 1: but there's literally no plan for that other than yanking
Speaker 1: benefits out from under people's feet. Well, no, there's a plan.
Speaker 1: Raise the cap. So they're currently oh, sure, you're capped
Speaker 1: on the amount of self security taxes and Medicare taxes
Speaker 1: that you paid I think it's one hundred and sixteen
Speaker 1: thousand dollars or something like that. After that, you don't
Speaker 1: pay into Social Security anymore. And so what the left
Speaker 1: says is just get rid of the cap you pay
Speaker 1: your self, Security, Medicare, taxes on everything. What folks like
Speaker 1: Bernie and are saying is okay, will allow a grace
Speaker 1: from like one sixteen. I think it's up to two fifty,
Speaker 1: he says, Others say up to four hundred. So you're
Speaker 1: not going to see an increase in your taxes if
Speaker 1: you're making between one sixteen and two fifty or four hundred,
Speaker 1: but over four hundred you would then continue to pay
Speaker 1: into Social Security and Medicare. Yeah, boom, guess what all
Speaker 1: of a sudden those numbers start to add up and
Speaker 1: you have strengthened programs. Yes, the numbers start to add
Speaker 1: up until we have ballooning costs of healthcare that continue
Speaker 1: to create an in time. And so like single pair
Speaker 1: can handle that, we'll get to that unless they can
Speaker 1: come up with a way to do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just such This is like the crux of it.
Speaker 1: It's such bs where they're selling out people's lives for
Speaker 1: political purposes again and again. Whether it's on the left
Speaker 1: or the right, it's like, well, we'll just keep doing X,
Speaker 1: Y and Z without tackling this because we'll get booted
Speaker 1: out of Congress again. Whether you're on the left or
Speaker 1: the right, we'll worry about it later. We'll worry about
Speaker 1: it later. Well, at some point, and you can make
Speaker 1: an argument right now that the inflation crisis is partially
Speaker 1: because in some part, maybe it's a small part, but
Speaker 1: in some part, the average American is their bank account
Speaker 1: is worse off because of the incredible amount of debt
Speaker 1: that we have. And maybe the solution is meant the coin,
Speaker 1: maybe the solection is MMPT, but the bottom line is
Speaker 1: that it's not a solvent program. But cuts are also
Speaker 1: absolutely not a humane thing on the table right now.
Speaker 1: Even Republicans know that. So it's they're just going to
Speaker 1: be They're going to end up passing a cr because
Speaker 1: that's the way that they can sort of get themselves
Speaker 1: through the summer, because you would likely default if you
Speaker 1: don't do anything on this around, and they'll raise the
Speaker 1: debt ceiling. You think without a fight, I think goes
Speaker 1: you could put that. Manu Roger tweet back up again.
Speaker 1: That's what Manu says in there. He says, but there
Speaker 1: are ours who are no votes, no matter what I
Speaker 1: think that that's what you are sort of implying there.
Speaker 1: He can only lose like two or three votes, depending
Speaker 1: on what's going on. He's gonna bind is Santo's still
Speaker 1: going to be in office by then. We'll see. Well,
Speaker 1: and here's Thomas Massey, he said. One idea, according to CNN,
Speaker 1: he has been advocating for, is passing a cr quote
Speaker 1: as soon as possible that funds the government at ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent of its current levels and pairs it with
Speaker 1: a debt ceiling increase, just so that they have a
Speaker 1: backup plan in case they're unable to come to an
Speaker 1: agreement on the debt ceiling or funding the government. One
Speaker 1: reason that's important is because I think they're just going
Speaker 1: to end up going back and forth tiki taky over
Speaker 1: discretionary spending. That will be the inch that Biden gives,
Speaker 1: and it'll be the inch, you know McCarthy gets, is
Speaker 1: that you get some cuts to some woke program, A
Speaker 1: program McCarthy can say is woke here and there, and
Speaker 1: Biden will give on that, and they'll do their cr
Speaker 1: and that's how they'll avoid everything. Well, see, and we
Speaker 1: tease the McConnell one, we can put a five back up,
Speaker 1: right if people got an early look at that, it's
Speaker 1: fascinating to watch the Senate just be like this, mo
Speaker 1: Ning is Paul, this is between y'all. You guys, just
Speaker 1: work this out. Let us know when you get to something.
Speaker 1: If you remember the last suck, yes, if you remember
Speaker 1: last time McConnell allowed for the first time, you said it,
Speaker 1: this will be the only time, and nobody believed it
Speaker 1: was going to be the only time a fifty vote
Speaker 1: threshold to get the debt ceiling through. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: there was Republican cooperation, but it didn't show up on
Speaker 1: the Senate floor, which is all they want. And McConnell
Speaker 1: has consistently said there is not going to be a
Speaker 1: debt ceiling crisis. We're going to raise the debt limit.
Speaker 1: Every time he says that, it undercuts McCarthy a little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then he says, I'm deferring to Kevin over there.
Speaker 1: Good luck Kevin, but we're not going to have a
Speaker 1: debt ceiling crisis. Right, So they're both in incredibly tight spots.
Speaker 1: Republicans are incredibly tight spots on this, and the Biden
Speaker 1: administration politically at least, isn't a great position. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's hard for them to lose on these negotiations because
Speaker 1: a default looks bad for Republicans. Prolonging inch and closer
Speaker 1: to a debt crisis looks bad for Republicans. You know,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people, there are some people
Speaker 1: and there this is a huge part of the Tea
Speaker 1: Party movement, for instance, back in the day, but really
Speaker 1: wanted to see strengthening of Social Security and Medicare because
Speaker 1: people are worried about what their kids end up getting
Speaker 1: out of it. And I get that. I think that
Speaker 1: is very real, but it's a much harder sell and
Speaker 1: it works much effectively on a political level than protecting
Speaker 1: those programs. And even Donald Trump knows that. JD. Vance
Speaker 1: knows that, because they've both come out in support of
Speaker 1: getting the hell off the table before Democrats use it
Speaker 1: to tank the Republican Party and before Republicans use it
Speaker 1: to pull the rug out from under average Americans. The
Speaker 1: way to keep those programs solvent those to keep the
Speaker 1: economy strong, which goes to immigration, which I think we'll
Speaker 1: talk about later. We will, we can go to Ukraine first.
Speaker 1: So this is again the tanks were sent last week.
Speaker 1: Germany and the United States sort of agreed on the
Speaker 1: Leopard tanks. B one here, Yeah, if we put up
Speaker 1: B one. This is a headline from Fox News. Biden
Speaker 1: says no to F sixteen fighter juts for Ukraine. France
Speaker 1: considers sending warplanes now. Basically what happened in the France
Speaker 1: situation is that Macron along with the Dutch Prime minister
Speaker 1: both said that they wouldn't rule it out, basically sending
Speaker 1: fighter juts to Ukraine. Biden and Schultz in Germany have
Speaker 1: both said no to this. Biden replied with a simple no.
Speaker 1: This is from Fox. When asked if the US would
Speaker 1: send the sophisticated war planes to Kiev, Schultz has said,
Speaker 1: quote he says, NATO is not at war. NATO is
Speaker 1: not at war a Russia and quote, we will not
Speaker 1: allow such an escalation. Brian, what do you make of
Speaker 1: the difference between not Krone and the United States and
Speaker 1: Germany there, Well, it suggests that we might be entering
Speaker 1: the pattern that we're getting familiar with, which is Ukraine
Speaker 1: makes a demand for something Germany in the US say no,
Speaker 1: we're not going to do that. That's going to escalate
Speaker 1: the war. They ask again a couple of times, We're like, okay,
Speaker 1: you know what, actually fine, you can have that, which,
Speaker 1: you know, which is what happened with the tanks. Now
Speaker 1: with Germany and now the US also sending tanks over there,
Speaker 1: and it feels like Schultz himself is exasperated and recognizes
Speaker 1: this pattern. There's this great quote from him in there
Speaker 1: where he says the fact we've only just made a
Speaker 1: decision on sending tanks and the next debate is fire
Speaker 1: up in Germany, that just seems frivolous. Well, so he's like,
Speaker 1: I just gave you tanks, is it? Do you think though,
Speaker 1: then them saying no is theater they know they ultimately
Speaker 1: have to give on this or are they saying please stop?
Speaker 1: I think it's them seeing where the line is. I
Speaker 1: think they're gonna And you know, then the Biden administration
Speaker 1: has been resistant to sending jets since you know, February
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty two with front at the time
Speaker 1: of the initial invasion, and Ukraine has been asking it
Speaker 1: since then. If you remember, that was the thing that
Speaker 1: the White House Press Corps was like, you know, banging
Speaker 1: the war jumps for for for weeks that they're only
Speaker 1: when are you going to send the planes? What are
Speaker 1: you going to send the fighter jets? About that fourteen
Speaker 1: one of the sixteenes and so they have held firm
Speaker 1: on that, but you know that ask was up here. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: they've got the other asks up here and now here,
Speaker 1: the tanks and the lepers and the abrams. So it
Speaker 1: feels like Germany saying no, but wondering like are we
Speaker 1: going to get steamrolled on this too? And I think
Speaker 1: some of it depends on what happens with this upcoming
Speaker 1: Russian offensive that is being telegraphed. So I was just
Speaker 1: going to ask you to talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: How do you interpret they're gaining momentum post tanks for
Speaker 1: f sixteens in light of the Russian offensive that they've
Speaker 1: been telegraphing. That's the thing that kind of uncorked the
Speaker 1: tanks from the West is this sense that Russia's gaining
Speaker 1: some ground here and there and is going to launch
Speaker 1: this going to launch this offensive. It feels like each
Speaker 1: side looking to the other for more permission to escalate further,
Speaker 1: just making the situation that much more dangerous. You occasionally
Speaker 1: hear people saying, well, what this will do is this
Speaker 1: will help Ukraine when it eventually gets the negotiating table,
Speaker 1: But nobody in positions of power or anywhere near positions
Speaker 1: of power will lay out a roadmap for what it
Speaker 1: would take to get to that place where they are
Speaker 1: actually negotiations going on. What do you make of the
Speaker 1: argument that if the United States, in Germany and NATO
Speaker 1: partners did more right now so increase spending handed over
Speaker 1: for instance of F sixteen's right now, and gave Ukraine
Speaker 1: a big jump in its capacity, that Russia wouldn't be
Speaker 1: able to withstand that level of pressure and this would
Speaker 1: end sooner than trying to sort of do tif for
Speaker 1: tight de escalation. I question whether or not there is
Speaker 1: the capacity to do that. Like you talk about their
Speaker 1: moving twelve tanks, you know, from Germany and movement in
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen or whatever from the United States,
Speaker 1: It's going to take weeks and months to make that happen.
Speaker 1: People need to be trained up. Like that argument really
Speaker 1: only works if you're talking about overwhelming force, like some
Speaker 1: type of Powell doctrine type of thing, which means, you know,
Speaker 1: American boots on the ground and like actually bringing the
Speaker 1: full weight of the US military to bear on the situation,
Speaker 1: because there are going to be constraints if you're dealing
Speaker 1: with the Ukrainian army, Like the Ukrainian army can only
Speaker 1: it can only do so much. So it just that
Speaker 1: to me seems dangerous. This this like idea that you're
Speaker 1: going to get peace through annihilation the other right, and
Speaker 1: that's where I was going to go with it. My
Speaker 1: response to that argument would be, I'm not sure that
Speaker 1: we're in a position where we want to be testing
Speaker 1: vironment Putin's tolerance escalation at that. Let are nuclear weapons involved, right,
Speaker 1: there are nuclear weapons involved, and the importance of Ukraine
Speaker 1: to Putin or let's say even he let's say his
Speaker 1: end goal is just some sort of maybe he has
Speaker 1: to use tactical nukes in his perspective to to seize
Speaker 1: what he wants from Donbos? Is that more important to
Speaker 1: him than it is to NATO and to the military
Speaker 1: budgets of other countries and the people of other countries
Speaker 1: that have supported this war effort rightfully up until this point.
Speaker 1: I think the answer to that question is very much
Speaker 1: up in the air. How far Vladimir Putin is willing
Speaker 1: to take his country to unlawfully seize that territory, how
Speaker 1: much blood he's willing to shed to unlawfully seize that
Speaker 1: territory feel like an enormous amount. Because his survival, his
Speaker 1: political survival, requires him not to lose this war. It's
Speaker 1: been framed as basically an existential test for Russia, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't require and I think that one mistake people
Speaker 1: make is it doesn't require in order for him to
Speaker 1: stay in power. He doesn't need to win. He just
Speaker 1: needs to not lose. And so to not lose, all
Speaker 1: he has to do is continue to feed Russian lives
Speaker 1: into the maw of Ukraine, just destroying Ukraine and destroying
Speaker 1: Ukrainian lives in the process. And so as long as
Speaker 1: he's doing that on some scale, he can continue to
Speaker 1: claim that he's he hasn't lost the war. And so
Speaker 1: what capacity does Ukraine have to prevent Russia from ever
Speaker 1: doing that? Because that's such it's such a low bar
Speaker 1: for Russia to do. Are Americans willing to put boots
Speaker 1: on the ground? They answered that question absolutely not, No,
Speaker 1: absolutely not. Despite the funding the war at such a
Speaker 1: high level, which American people aren't really asked if they
Speaker 1: wanted to do that. We never asked anymore. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a decision that was made and then once and
Speaker 1: then once Republicans took over, they funded it, you know,
Speaker 1: for the next six months or whatever through the lame duck. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And on that note, this question of how far Putin
Speaker 1: is willing to push things. Boris Johnson, I don't mean
Speaker 1: to chuckle there, but you have to see this clip
Speaker 1: of Boris Johnson because it's Boris Johnson being very Boris Johnson.
Speaker 1: Let's roll that clip of him talking about a quote
Speaker 1: extraordinary phone call he had with Putin. He said, you
Speaker 1: say that Ukraine is not getting to on NATO anytime soon?
Speaker 1: He said in English anytime soon? What is anytime soon?
Speaker 1: And I said, well, it's not going to join a
Speaker 1: NATO for the foreseeable future, you know that perfectly. Well,
Speaker 1: he fundamentally wasn't about you know, he sort of he
Speaker 1: threatened me at one point and said, you know, Boris,
Speaker 1: I don't want to hurt you, but with a missile
Speaker 1: it would only take a minute or something like that,
Speaker 1: you know, Johnny. But I think from the very relaxed
Speaker 1: tone that he was taking, the sort of air of
Speaker 1: detachment that he seemed to have. He was just playing
Speaker 1: along with my attempts to get him to negotiate. First
Speaker 1: of all, perhaps to Boris Johnson for giving up on
Speaker 1: the accent after the first word he started to retell,
Speaker 1: I've done it myself. He's started to like retell the
Speaker 1: story in Putin's voice, but just gave up on it
Speaker 1: right after the word Bori. Second, the Kremlin says this
Speaker 1: is a lie. It is worth I think zeroing in
Speaker 1: on what Johnson himself said, where he says it was
Speaker 1: a very relaxed tone, there's this Arab detachment, and he
Speaker 1: was just playing along with my attempts to get him negotiate,
Speaker 1: just some casual missile jokes to further to sort of
Speaker 1: grease the wheels on the negotiations. Also, the evidence that
Speaker 1: it might be a lie is that we do know
Speaker 1: that the other part is a lot. He was not
Speaker 1: trying to negotiate. He was if you remember, there was
Speaker 1: a reporting that he went to Kiev and pressured Zelenski
Speaker 1: not to try to negotiate. That's right with Putin, so
Speaker 1: Boris Johnson was on the other side of that question,
Speaker 1: Boris Johnson was trying to stop negotiations, not produce negotiations.
Speaker 1: That's a good question. I look forward to his memoir
Speaker 1: in which he says the exact opposite, and these interviews
Speaker 1: where he's yeah, I was trying to negotiate an end
Speaker 1: to it, and he threatened me with a missile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: surely the memoir is forthcoming. But would he have made
Speaker 1: that up, the line about it will only take him? No,
Speaker 1: it's a missile. I don't know. No, it's very I
Speaker 1: think it's is very specific. And to put it out
Speaker 1: in public. If anything Putin likes that, I mean that.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine Putin is upset if people think he's
Speaker 1: tough enough to joke around with the Prime Minister about
Speaker 1: hitting him with a missile. I mean, it makes him
Speaker 1: look like he's the stronger one in that negotiation. He's
Speaker 1: got the upper hand there if he's going to joke
Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, And there was some reporting that Russia
Speaker 1: has said that London would be the first place they'd
Speaker 1: hit if they went, if they went ham there you go. Now,
Speaker 1: speaking of our Pentagon defence budget and all of that
Speaker 1: wonderful stuff, this is a really big story that I
Speaker 1: think has gotten buried in the news cycle, and we
Speaker 1: can put the first tear sheet up for this block
Speaker 1: elaked memo. Here's the headline from the Hill. US general
Speaker 1: predicts country will be at war with China and twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five. Now where that news comes from is elaked
Speaker 1: memo two troops from a four star Air Force general,
Speaker 1: Mike Minahan. He's the head of the Air Mobility Command.
Speaker 1: That's like fifty thousand service members, some five hundred planes.
Speaker 1: They do transport, they do refueling. According to press reports,
Speaker 1: this moment got leaked. I think it was first to NBC.
Speaker 1: He said that he believes the country will be at
Speaker 1: war with China by twenty twenty five. So that is
Speaker 1: a four star Air Force general putting in writing in
Speaker 1: a memo to everyone under his command that he thinks
Speaker 1: the US is going to be at war with China
Speaker 1: by twenty twenty five. His reasoning is that because both
Speaker 1: Taiwan and the US have presidential elections coming up in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, the US will be quote distractive, and
Speaker 1: Shujinping will have an opportunity to move on Taiwan in
Speaker 1: the shadow of American attention that's devoted to the presidential election.
Speaker 1: It's addressed to all of the air win commanders in
Speaker 1: the AMC and other Air Force operational commanders. Here's the
Speaker 1: other part. It orders them to report all major efforts
Speaker 1: to prepare for the China fight to Minihan by February
Speaker 1: twenty eighth. That's from NBC orders them to report all
Speaker 1: major efforts to prep for the China fight by February
Speaker 1: twenty eighth. So the word of caution that I I
Speaker 1: would offer there is that there are about seven hundred
Speaker 1: four star generals out there, and so think about it,
Speaker 1: there are four hundred and thirty five members of the
Speaker 1: House of Representatives, and we would not put stock in
Speaker 1: the word of every one of those bozos. We sure wouldn't.
Speaker 1: So out of that seven hundred, you're gonna, you're gonna,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get a few that are might might be
Speaker 1: a little bit, a little bit off the reservation when
Speaker 1: it comes to some of this stuff eccentric. But it's
Speaker 1: not just the Kookie thing he said. I mean he
Speaker 1: put it in writing an AMMO and asked for actions.
Speaker 1: Kookie too. Now, so the Pentagon was asked about this
Speaker 1: and said that this guy's note to his airman does
Speaker 1: not represent the thinking of the United States Army or
Speaker 1: Air Force or Peagon or anybody else other than him. However,
Speaker 1: we can take the question on it on the merits,
Speaker 1: like is it reasonable that this could happen? Of course
Speaker 1: it is. You know, China is is closely watching. I think,
Speaker 1: you know, how the world responds to to Russia's invasion
Speaker 1: of Ukraine and whether or not they kind of you know,
Speaker 1: backchannel financial systems that they've built up to try to
Speaker 1: get around United States sanctions to try to continue to
Speaker 1: have a robust economy, you know, with sanctions in place,
Speaker 1: whether whether whether that's enough. They're they're looking at the
Speaker 1: capabilities that the West has and whether or not that's
Speaker 1: it's gonna be enough to kind of, you know, if
Speaker 1: to succeed in an amphibious invasion of Taiwan. The Taiwanese
Speaker 1: say that they don't, they're not worried. Everything's fine. What
Speaker 1: else would they say? In some ways, so it's it's
Speaker 1: certainly possible. But and the fact that I think the
Speaker 1: guys four stars give him a little more credibility than
Speaker 1: maybe his argument deserves. Yeah, although to your point is
Speaker 1: it possible. Is it plausible? I think clearly the answer
Speaker 1: to that question is yes. And one thing I would
Speaker 1: look at in particular is the semiconductor trips, which we've
Speaker 1: talked about a lot on the show, and I know
Speaker 1: Soger and Crystal have talked about it as well. That's
Speaker 1: really one of the key issues when it comes to Taiwan,
Speaker 1: because you said amphibious invasion, So only real way for
Speaker 1: China to invade Taiwan or the military incursion. Couldn't they send,
Speaker 1: like slowly send twenty thousand people and they all changed
Speaker 1: into their uniforms there. I don't want to give anybody
Speaker 1: ideas just gu I mean, you can travel back and forth,
Speaker 1: so like, why do you would you have to do
Speaker 1: it in like an invasion at gunpoint? I mean, I
Speaker 1: might figure that one out what's going on suddenly, but gosh,
Speaker 1: now it's going to happen. Well, if it's peaceful, it's
Speaker 1: one country anyway, according to our policy. That's right, according
Speaker 1: to our policy. And again the semiconductors, we had this
Speaker 1: big piece of legislation that I would argue was probably
Speaker 1: way more croneistic than was appropriate, but it it takes
Speaker 1: some by estimates like some three to four years for
Speaker 1: that process to really complete itself. For the United States
Speaker 1: to open semiconductor factories and start manufacturing the stuff that
Speaker 1: is essential to modern life for the American people and
Speaker 1: for our military. That's a process to get these factors
Speaker 1: up and running takes several years. And that's one of
Speaker 1: the biggest things that concerns me about the timeline here
Speaker 1: because as we're going about that process, as we're trying
Speaker 1: to reshure the essential sort of critical parts of our
Speaker 1: supply chain post COVID, we all learned that with various
Speaker 1: parts of protective equipment and everything. China knows that and
Speaker 1: they know that once we get the capacity to do
Speaker 1: those things, the calculus shifts a little bit. And relevant
Speaker 1: to the Dutch Prime Minister was here in the middle
Speaker 1: of January, and while there there was a lot of
Speaker 1: news reporting about this. Biden pressured him, like to stop
Speaker 1: exporting these semiconductors ups to to China. They're apparently they're
Speaker 1: the makers of a certain type of chip that is
Speaker 1: the only factor that makes it, like you know, top
Speaker 1: of the world essential to the semiconductor supply chains. They
Speaker 1: have not agreed to that yet, but the fact that
Speaker 1: the US is applying so much pressure to a country
Speaker 1: like the Netherlands to get to get in line with
Speaker 1: this attempted semiconductor isolation of China is extraordinary. It's it's
Speaker 1: unlike anything that the US has done before on on
Speaker 1: kind of trade and nial security and foreign foreign policy.
Speaker 1: And so if if anything that could uh, you know,
Speaker 1: push push things to the brink. So on. On that note,
Speaker 1: speaking of things that from the Chinese perspective they're projecting
Speaker 1: might push them to the brink. This is from the
Speaker 1: Foreign A Foreign Ministry spokeswoman on Monday at a news
Speaker 1: briefing said, quote, we urge certain individuals in the US
Speaker 1: to earnestly abide by the one China China Prince, and
Speaker 1: they should quote stop doing anything that violates the basic
Speaker 1: norms and international relations. Now on its own, that might
Speaker 1: that quote might seem very vague in general, but as
Speaker 1: Fox reports, quote Mao is responding. That's the spokeswoman to
Speaker 1: a question about a report last week that Kevin McCarthy
Speaker 1: was planning a trip to Taiwan, something he said he
Speaker 1: would do should he be elected House Speaker, after saying
Speaker 1: he supported the August trip by Nancy Pelosi. Now Mao,
Speaker 1: the spokeswoman, according to Fox Quote, later reaffirmed her government
Speaker 1: would never promise to give up the use of force
Speaker 1: to unify Taiwan and China, and said the Chinese government
Speaker 1: hoped to resolve the situation peacefully. You think McCarthy goes.
Speaker 1: How long does he last as speaker? That's entirely fair.
Speaker 1: He tries to wait it out. Actually, I think if
Speaker 1: he lasts a speaker, then then then he'll probably go.
Speaker 1: It'll be able to become a new tradition, bipartisan tradition
Speaker 1: in America to like attempt a world war get when
Speaker 1: you get the gavel. I think this makes it more
Speaker 1: likely that he goes, if anything, Having the spokesman for
Speaker 1: the Chinese Foreign ministry talk in terms like that basically
Speaker 1: dare him to go. I think now that he said
Speaker 1: he would go just if China says no, that makes
Speaker 1: it all the more likely that he has to do it.
Speaker 1: I mean, it basically forces his hand. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: he's not forced to like walk us closer to a
Speaker 1: nuclear war from a political perspective. From a purely political perspective,
Speaker 1: I guess. But I just don't think the public cares
Speaker 1: that much like that. I mean, they don't want a
Speaker 1: nuclear war, but I mean I don't think they're following along.
Speaker 1: I do think the Taiwanese and Chinese and American relations
Speaker 1: enough to be able to answer basic kind of trivia
Speaker 1: questions about it, let alone have a firm opinion or
Speaker 1: even understand why him traveling directly to Taiwan would even
Speaker 1: be that offensive. And like, I feel like it's, you know,
Speaker 1: it's an internal like it's kind of an insider politics
Speaker 1: thing rather than something that matters more broadly to people. Well,
Speaker 1: but except for the broad China question, which is really
Speaker 1: important to Republican voters that Kevin mccarthyen again, he's in
Speaker 1: a really tight spot with his own caucus because there
Speaker 1: are these divisions within the voter base, or these demands
Speaker 1: in this atmosphere within the Republican voter base. So it's
Speaker 1: the if it's tied into this broader China narrative, it
Speaker 1: makes him look weak and makes Republicans look weak against China. Again.
Speaker 1: That's why I think politically it's sort of unfeasible for
Speaker 1: him to now back away from what he said he
Speaker 1: would do because China warned him like, don't do it. Kevin,
Speaker 1: He's just saying. He just kept keeps saying on planning
Speaker 1: the trip. I'm gonna do it. Don't don't you worry.
Speaker 1: It's coming up. It's just around the corner anything now.
Speaker 1: So moving on. There's a new report in Axios actually
Speaker 1: that came out on Tuesday. They say the Biden administration
Speaker 1: quote is weighing a plan to declare a public health
Speaker 1: emergency that would free up resources to help people access abortions.
Speaker 1: That's the first tear sheet we have. We can put
Speaker 1: that up on the screen. You know. There's some debate
Speaker 1: even within the Biden administration because they're kind of noncommittal
Speaker 1: in this axious thing. Basically, they're saying that the administration
Speaker 1: is saying. This is from Javier Bessera. He told Axios
Speaker 1: this on Monday. There are discussions on a wide range
Speaker 1: of measures that we can take to try to protect
Speaker 1: people's rights. It would allow the administration, according to Axios,
Speaker 1: to help support states that protect abortion, deploy public health
Speaker 1: services core teams, and give the government quote the ability
Speaker 1: to accelerate access to new medications authorized for abortion. But
Speaker 1: there's debate within the administration itself, which has been getting
Speaker 1: pressure from Democrats who say and in abortion groups who say,
Speaker 1: this is a necessary step, this is a public health
Speaker 1: emergency post row, and the White House has an obligation
Speaker 1: to do it. But there's debate within the administration as
Speaker 1: to whether this would do much, if it would free
Speaker 1: up enough resource, enough resources to make a difference to
Speaker 1: be worth it. I think you know again, yeah, we
Speaker 1: were talking earlier. It doesn't do a whole lot, or
Speaker 1: it depends on how you interpret it. Yeah, it's exactly
Speaker 1: and I think that's the thing they said the Biden
Speaker 1: administration over the summer said basically, they went back and
Speaker 1: talked to experts and experts. After they'd consulted with experts,
Speaker 1: they realized it would free up a pool that amounted
Speaker 1: to quote tens of thousands of dollars as opposed to
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of dollars, tens of millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars. And they
Speaker 1: weren't confident it would do a lot on the other
Speaker 1: fronts that people claim it would do a lot on.
Speaker 1: So what is your take on that? Do you do
Speaker 1: you think there's evidence that suggests a public health emergency
Speaker 1: in this case, I mean one thing that I see
Speaker 1: this article from NBC News. Under the PREP Act, the
Speaker 1: HHS Secretary can issue a declaration that a countermeasure, a drug, device,
Speaker 1: or biological product is needed to respond to quote a
Speaker 1: disease or other health condition or other threat to health
Speaker 1: that constitutes a public health emergency. So then the article
Speaker 1: mentions the Health Secretary would define the countermeasure and population
Speaker 1: that needs it, but that federal declaration declaration would pre
Speaker 1: empt any state law that is in conflict with it.
Speaker 1: So the public health emergency can basically say, hey, this
Speaker 1: over the counter abortion not over the counter. This prescription
Speaker 1: abortion pill for first trendmester, which is a very common
Speaker 1: use of that pill is qualifies under the public Health emergency.
Speaker 1: So states that ban it you can go around. I
Speaker 1: don't think they need that though, to allow legal access
Speaker 1: to abortion medication, reclassify it in the same sense as
Speaker 1: like Plan B. Is that what you'd say, Well, yeah, there,
Speaker 1: I mean, as long as it's FDA approved, then my
Speaker 1: understanding is that states cannot come in and ban FDA
Speaker 1: approve drugs that that federal law preempts when it when
Speaker 1: it when it comes to whether or not that can happen,
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't. I don't think they would need a
Speaker 1: public health emergency for that, but they would need the
Speaker 1: FDA to come in. The FDA has alread approved it,
Speaker 1: but states have banned it, have they not? But they
Speaker 1: but but they can't ban it by mail, right, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: you can ban like the selling of it in a right,
Speaker 1: so would And I think then the question is whether
Speaker 1: this would would it stand up in court? Would it
Speaker 1: hold up in court this court? Right, I mean, well
Speaker 1: in lower courts even it would it hold up in court?
Speaker 1: And then is it sort of legally constitutionally allowed to
Speaker 1: preempt those laws because it's if he's declared it a
Speaker 1: public health emergency, has defined that access to abortion being
Speaker 1: curtailed in the wake of Dobbs has constituted a public
Speaker 1: health emergency. He's defined it as such. Thus, this would
Speaker 1: have to qualify because it's a drug that would treat right,
Speaker 1: It's it just depends on who wins the elections and
Speaker 1: is able to appoint the justices because like before Republicans
Speaker 1: had the majority on the court, it would have been
Speaker 1: obvious that yes, like it was obvious like there's there's
Speaker 1: a constitutional right to abortion that was the law of
Speaker 1: the land. Now they've reinterpreted the constitutions say that there's
Speaker 1: no constitutional right right to abortion. So I'm sure that
Speaker 1: they would say I have no doubt that Alito right
Speaker 1: comes to down and tries to nuke something like this
Speaker 1: if it actually does anything effective. Yeah, no, absolutely, But
Speaker 1: though it raises the question for me of why politically
Speaker 1: the Biden administration wouldn't just do this. It just seems
Speaker 1: to me like it's an obvious thing to do if
Speaker 1: it's going to be from their perspective, inconsequential. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't think they're that worried about setting dangerous precedent
Speaker 1: at this point. So just from a sheerly, like nakedly
Speaker 1: political perspective, I don't understand why they're not just doing
Speaker 1: it unless they consulted sort of constitutional legal experts and
Speaker 1: those experts told them this could create a legal nightmare
Speaker 1: because it would open up things that perhaps the Biden
Speaker 1: administration is worried would be used against Democrats, would be
Speaker 1: called radical et cetera, et cetera. But I actually, I
Speaker 1: mean I could see it in the case of the
Speaker 1: abortion by mail drugs being used that way by Republicans
Speaker 1: to say they just mandated access to this, you know,
Speaker 1: they undercut the Supreme Court. But if that, if that
Speaker 1: interpretation wouldn't even fly, it seems to me like politically
Speaker 1: it would be a winner for them. Yeah. The bigger
Speaker 1: win to me would be getting abortion access on federal property,
Speaker 1: on federal land, so in any state, if it's federal property, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so right exactly. And so if you can then get
Speaker 1: abortion medication through the mail, and you can get abortion
Speaker 1: services in federal property, then you know, then you're going
Speaker 1: to have you know, access restored in a substantial way.
Speaker 1: I think the interesting thing also from my perspective is
Speaker 1: the Biden administration has recently said the COVID emergency is
Speaker 1: ending in May. Right, So it's just I hate to
Speaker 1: be cynical here, but it's just these things are just
Speaker 1: being used as political footballs, right Like Biden says the
Speaker 1: pandemic is over, and then he gets hit by some
Speaker 1: people who are still cleaning to the idea that the
Speaker 1: pandemic is very much raging and he has to take
Speaker 1: it back. And then we're in a public health emergency
Speaker 1: right now. And you look around, obviously there's still suffering
Speaker 1: and tragedy from COVID, it's it's still real, it's still happening.
Speaker 1: But the public health emergency level, I think that's a
Speaker 1: pretty open debate. And so when these distinctions just get
Speaker 1: tossed around like political footballs, I don't actually even blame
Speaker 1: either party for doing it at this point, because they
Speaker 1: becomes so meaningless that it's like a winner for your
Speaker 1: side to cling to one side because it's all been
Speaker 1: blurred anyway. The importance has bred. And if you remember
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz, back when Trump was declaring a national emergency
Speaker 1: to build his wall when he couldn't get Walt money
Speaker 1: through Congress, Ted Cruz was saying, be careful, because you're
Speaker 1: going to have a Democratic president who's going to declare
Speaker 1: a climate emergency and implement communism Green New Deal via
Speaker 1: a climate emergency. Right. He didn't realize at the time
Speaker 1: that he would so quickly get to see Row overturned,
Speaker 1: but he probably would have said, look, they're going to
Speaker 1: do something like this if you so, you're right both
Speaker 1: you know, both parties when they get into office are
Speaker 1: having a hard time getting an agenda through Congress. Voters
Speaker 1: are demanding, yes that they do something, so they're just
Speaker 1: going to find ways to do things, or Republicans are
Speaker 1: probably a little bit better at that than than Democrats.
Speaker 1: That's why they're still having and hauling over doing a
Speaker 1: thing that isn't even obviously going to do anything. I
Speaker 1: remember talking to Ted Cruz back in like twenty eighteen
Speaker 1: about his position on the legislative philibuster, which has obviously
Speaker 1: been a huge debate on the left and even on
Speaker 1: the right too, even though the right is basically against
Speaker 1: overtraining the filibuster, and at the time, Ted Cruz is like,
Speaker 1: it's actually a really serious question as to whether because
Speaker 1: it's like a done deal. His perspective at the time
Speaker 1: is it's basically a done deal. Democrats retake the Senate,
Speaker 1: they get rid of the filibuster immediately, so why would
Speaker 1: Republicans not do it? Like he's talking about how his
Speaker 1: perspective has shifted on that, but it's like we're still
Speaker 1: in this period where we're totally unable to actually like
Speaker 1: Congress is totally unable to do everything. We funneled it
Speaker 1: all to the executive branch into the wider bureaucracy, but
Speaker 1: we still haven't quite dispensed with the pretense and just
Speaker 1: kind of opened up the floodgates yet. Yeah. So speaking
Speaker 1: of George Santos, I was so happy, I was so
Speaker 1: hoping that you would take the top of this block.
Speaker 1: Please update us on George Santos. George Santos, Well, first
Speaker 1: of all, there was some CNN reporting from his ex boyfriend.
Speaker 1: You can go find I think it was CNN. You
Speaker 1: go find that. That's some if you want a little
Speaker 1: scandalous drama. His ex boyfriend is appalled at his psycho
Speaker 1: psychopathic lying. But over here in Washington, Santos has told
Speaker 1: Republicans you can put up the first one here that
Speaker 1: he's going to voluntarily step off of the Committee Sciences.
Speaker 1: He was given three panels by by Kevin McCarthy. Kevin McCarthy,
Speaker 1: you know, needed every single vote to become speaker and
Speaker 1: did not want to hear word one about not seating
Speaker 1: George Santos or kicking George Santos out until he was through.
Speaker 1: He now has to govern. We talked earlier in the show.
Speaker 1: He needs George Santos's vote to kick ilhan Omar off
Speaker 1: the Foreign Affairs which is rather incredible to think about
Speaker 1: that you're going to have a member in good standing
Speaker 1: elected three times by her district, sent to Washington to
Speaker 1: be a voice for the people of Minneapolis, and George
Speaker 1: Santos is going to cast the tie breaking vote to
Speaker 1: kick her off of the committee, just utterly appalling. He
Speaker 1: said he felt like his appearance there was on these
Speaker 1: committees was a distraction, which maybe maybe there would have
Speaker 1: been more ratings for them. I'd like to see George
Speaker 1: Santos kind of interrogating some of these guys. And then
Speaker 1: we also had we could put the second one up
Speaker 1: here from Sahill, a poll from his district showing that
Speaker 1: basically everybody wants him to step down except what was it,
Speaker 1: thirteen percent, like some some funny number of people who
Speaker 1: are like no, I'm good with it said and say
Speaker 1: they don't know, like this is too entertaining, stick it out. Then, yes,
Speaker 1: come on, this is good stuff. Well, obviously he won
Speaker 1: a swing district, so Republicans are very hesitant to do
Speaker 1: anything that could damage them holding that seat or that
Speaker 1: could jeopardize them holding that seat, especially with such a
Speaker 1: slim majority in Congress. Now, what continues to infuriate me
Speaker 1: about the story, and we talked about it last week
Speaker 1: to your point about ilhan Omar is that first of all,
Speaker 1: what's did Republicans know about whether this man was qualified
Speaker 1: to hold the office, whether he would completely embarrass his constituents,
Speaker 1: their party, and the whole embarrass and bring shame to
Speaker 1: the Institution of Congress to the extent that is still
Speaker 1: possible to do that. What did they know about that
Speaker 1: when they were doing their vulnerability studies? And why did
Speaker 1: Democrats not have the resources to come up with the
Speaker 1: oppo research on this? And why did local media pay
Speaker 1: no attention to it. The owner of the publisher of
Speaker 1: a really small paper on Long Island said it was
Speaker 1: because everyone was distracted. He broke some stories about Santos
Speaker 1: before the election and said everyone else was started distracted
Speaker 1: by bigger races. Well, when you have poultry at local
Speaker 1: media presence, that's what happens, and it's not what voters deserve, honestly,
Speaker 1: and the Santos voters should have had the appropriate information
Speaker 1: that we expect to have as voters, that you and
Speaker 1: I expect to have in front of us as voters.
Speaker 1: As journalists, you and I can't look into every member
Speaker 1: of Congress and every single story, and so we expect
Speaker 1: that other people are covering these bases and local races,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. People deserve to have that information
Speaker 1: before he was elected. And the big questions for me
Speaker 1: when we're looking at the fact, I mean the investigations
Speaker 1: into him, the fact that these are happening after this
Speaker 1: guy's elected to Congress, not during his campaign or not
Speaker 1: during before he even decides to become a public figure.
Speaker 1: I mean, this stuff is horrible. The FEC stuff makes
Speaker 1: sense that it's after the election because obviously it's campaign
Speaker 1: finance stuff. But he's now allegedly involved in this Harbor
Speaker 1: City Capital ponzis game. Have you looked at this? The
Speaker 1: SEC is looking into it. Shocking. Have you heard about
Speaker 1: this a little bit? Yeah, He's like the SEC is
Speaker 1: now asking people basically, you know what he told them
Speaker 1: when he was pitching them on Harbor City Capital, the
Speaker 1: campaign finance finance stuff that the FEC is looking into.
Speaker 1: This is a quote. This is from the Washington Post.
Speaker 1: Over the past few years, FEC analysts have repeatedly identified
Speaker 1: problems with Santos's filings with the regular sending regulators sending
Speaker 1: multiple letters seeking care, clarification or correction of apparent issues,
Speaker 1: including accepting contributions beyond the allowable limit, omitting required donor information,
Speaker 1: and filling to fill out required performs to report details
Speaker 1: with the loans Santos claims to have made to his campaign.
Speaker 1: Did he think he was going to win? I feel
Speaker 1: like he didn't even think he was going to win,
Speaker 1: so he just winged it. Yeah, he's he doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like the kind of guy that has a long term plan.
Speaker 1: You're what's just one lie after another, cover up the
Speaker 1: last one. Yeah, and problems with its expenses, like people
Speaker 1: going through like his disbursements are just making absolutely no sense,
Speaker 1: not adding up, and again to linger on the point
Speaker 1: again for a second. The Houses Republicans are going to
Speaker 1: vote because it'll be a party line. I assume unless
Speaker 1: Josh Gottheimer like does something weird, will vote. Will vote
Speaker 1: on whether or not ilhan Omar should be booted off
Speaker 1: of the House Foreign Affairs Committee for her alleged anti Semitism.
Speaker 1: The tie breaking vote could be cast by a guy
Speaker 1: who got elected by saying that his grandmother died in
Speaker 1: the Holocaust and his mother died in the Twin Towers
Speaker 1: in nine to eleven, and that's and who faked being
Speaker 1: Jewish and then said no, no, no no, no, I meant
Speaker 1: that I was jew Ish, right, And he's going to
Speaker 1: cast the tie breaking vote to kick Omar off the
Speaker 1: committee because of concerns around anti Semitism. That's the situation
Speaker 1: that we find ourselves in right now, you know it is.
Speaker 1: And Republicans feel like if you talk to like Freedom
Speaker 1: Caucus people, or even if you talk to you know,
Speaker 1: leadership people. At this point, they were so exasperated by
Speaker 1: what happened after January sixth, the whin Pelosi transformed the
Speaker 1: powers of leadership in Congress, and by the sort of
Speaker 1: escalation in media corruption and media the media corruption, particularly
Speaker 1: as it pertains to Republicans and Conservatives have been so
Speaker 1: exasperated by it. They say, our voters want us to
Speaker 1: demonstrate raw political power right now. So George Santos might
Speaker 1: be a horrible human being, and we could probably all
Speaker 1: agree on that might be, you know, we maybe we
Speaker 1: can all agree on it. The evidence suggests he is.
Speaker 1: But he's a vote, and he's a vote to advance
Speaker 1: your interests. You saw this all the time over the
Speaker 1: conversation about Roy Moore, for instance, you had all these
Speaker 1: voters in Alabama, everyone in Washington. D C was like, Heeah,
Speaker 1: this guy out of here. This is embarrassment. But there
Speaker 1: are a lot of voters in Alabama and this shows
Speaker 1: you where the Republican base is. Obviously, he ultimately lost,
Speaker 1: but there were a lot of people saying, we want
Speaker 1: to overturn Row. We believe this is a matter of
Speaker 1: life and death in the same way that people on
Speaker 1: the left believe climate as a matter of urgent life
Speaker 1: and death. And that's I think speaks to the I
Speaker 1: think confluence of different emergencies that we're facing. Again, whether
Speaker 1: you're conservative or whether you're liberal, the stakes just feel
Speaker 1: incredibly high right now, and that's driving these sentiments among voters,
Speaker 1: and it's translating into our politics now too, and that
Speaker 1: we're seeing leadership take, you know, the most overused word
Speaker 1: in politics, unprecedented steps in different directions and start breaking
Speaker 1: the norms, breaking the norms, breaking the norms. Because all
Speaker 1: of the norms have been broken in the culture. People
Speaker 1: are just really fed up and they want raw political power,
Speaker 1: and I think in the case of Santo's it's really unfortunate.
Speaker 1: Santos juxappose with Omar the Omar question about allegeddancy semitism.
Speaker 1: That is really important and really unfortunate in a sad
Speaker 1: statement as where we are. So and that's why I
Speaker 1: think that Republicans probably won't force him out. Although interesting
Speaker 1: to note that this decision came a day after he
Speaker 1: met with McCarthy and he was asked, did McCarthy tell
Speaker 1: you to do this? Why do you ask George Santos anything?
Speaker 1: Such a good point, it such a good source of information,
Speaker 1: like did you see he's been leaving out Duncan and
Speaker 1: Chick fil A for reporters. Yeah, I did see, I
Speaker 1: did see that. Did you take any of it? No? No,
Speaker 1: I have not gone by there yet. Actually, would you
Speaker 1: have taken it? Yeah, you shouldn't, but I probably you don't.
Speaker 1: I probably would have. But real quickly, we can put
Speaker 1: up the second stile that the third element here Santos
Speaker 1: voters say, this goes to your point that Santo's voters
Speaker 1: say sixty three percent to thirty one percent, it means
Speaker 1: it's a third element for the blog. So one out
Speaker 1: of three Santos voters, Yeah, look at what he's said
Speaker 1: since then, and they're like, yeah, I'd still vote for him.
Speaker 1: And I think those are probably the most rational ones
Speaker 1: in some ways. Yeah, I agree, because they're the ones
Speaker 1: who are, like, principle, well, what do you want to do?
Speaker 1: Vote for the Democrat? Exactly right, Like it's a matter
Speaker 1: of ideological consistency. And I think you can disagree with
Speaker 1: the ethics of actually taking that vote on the question
Speaker 1: of character, the question of reliability and responsibility, et cetera,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But that's one hundred percent where we are.
Speaker 1: The stakes are that high. I don't blame people for
Speaker 1: making that calculation in their own head, even though I
Speaker 1: disagree with it. It's just hard to argue back. You know, again,
Speaker 1: I disagree with it, but it's hard to argue that
Speaker 1: people aren't coming from a legitimate place of desperation, and
Speaker 1: Santus is from a given where he's from in that district,
Speaker 1: they're probably a handful of sort of independent. They're probably
Speaker 1: a lot of independent. Maybe some Democratic voters who cast
Speaker 1: their votes for him, maybe they liked where he stood
Speaker 1: on cultural social issues, which there's a lot of eyes
Speaker 1: going on there. There's a whole lot of that going
Speaker 1: down there anywhere is like Jewish, yes, yes, So anyway,
Speaker 1: it's just just pathetic that none of those came out before,
Speaker 1: but hopefully some justice will be sare now one last
Speaker 1: point on that. Cuomo gets some blame for this, and
Speaker 1: guess how so because his conservative Democratic judges throughout the
Speaker 1: Democratic app that had gone through the commission and then
Speaker 1: kicked it over to some like guy in Pittsburgh to
Speaker 1: a Republican Pittsburgh to like redraw it. That delayed the
Speaker 1: primaries in New York until if you remember, like close
Speaker 1: to mid September, interesting, really really late, so you didn't
Speaker 1: know who the Republican candidate was until after well after
Speaker 1: Labor Day, slim window first, right, So, and now you're
Speaker 1: into you're done with house races, like you're down with
Speaker 1: that portion of the House races at that point, but
Speaker 1: at that point you're looking at control of the Senate.
Speaker 1: You know you still have a time, you'd still have
Speaker 1: time to vet a handful of them, but you know,
Speaker 1: at that point you're nine weeks away from the election
Speaker 1: or less. That's a great point. I've forgotten about them.
Speaker 1: So thanks Cuomo. I'm always willing to so Santos is
Speaker 1: Cuomo's fault sounds good to me. What's your points today? Though? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to talk about a sad story.
Speaker 1: I'll start with the sad story that they don't teach
Speaker 1: you in most history classes. And Ryan, you probably know
Speaker 1: about the story of Jean Seberg, an actress that was
Speaker 1: familiar to many people. Pulling this out of the Cointel
Speaker 1: profiles familiar to many people back in the sixties and seventies.
Speaker 1: This is from fifty three years ago. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote from a report and we can put
Speaker 1: the graphic up on the screen in The Independent after
Speaker 1: a movie was made about Jean Sieberg's life in twenty twenty. Quote.
Speaker 1: I should preface this by saying she ultimately took her
Speaker 1: own life and independent rights. Days after her suicide, the
Speaker 1: FBI admitted that its agents had plotted to ruin her
Speaker 1: reputation as part of their counter intelligence program Cointel pro
Speaker 1: authorized by Jaeger Hoover himself. Seeburg's crime, in Hoover's eyes
Speaker 1: was her involvement in political causes and her support of
Speaker 1: the Black Panther Party. In particular, they were suspicious of
Speaker 1: her close links with Black Power leader Hakim Jamal In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy, The Independent continues, the FBI planted the false
Speaker 1: rumor that Sieberg was pregnant by a Black Panther party
Speaker 1: member in order to quote cause her embarrassment and quote
Speaker 1: cheapen her image with the American public, and their plan worked.
Speaker 1: It was dispiriting but inevitable that some gossip columnists followed
Speaker 1: the false leads that the FBI dangled in front of them.
Speaker 1: From the FBI's point of view, the Independent continues, she
Speaker 1: was involved in radical politics, had contributed financially to the
Speaker 1: Black Panthers, and was therefore fair game. You can just
Speaker 1: sort of see the wheels turning in Hoover's head. The
Speaker 1: story was picked up by gossip colmnist Joyce Haber, who
Speaker 1: referred obliquely to it in the Los Angeles Times. Newsweek
Speaker 1: also wrote about it, and they named Sieburg. After that
Speaker 1: story came out, Sieberg was so distressed by the attention
Speaker 1: that it had brought to her by the false story.
Speaker 1: By the way, the FBI that was trying to exploit
Speaker 1: racist animates, animus about interracial relationships at that point, just
Speaker 1: completely disgusting and cynical. Moved by jaredgar Hoover. She lost
Speaker 1: her baby. She was so stressed. She lost her baby.
Speaker 1: She was depressed about that for the rest of her life.
Speaker 1: She would attempt suicide in every anniversary that she lost
Speaker 1: the baby until she took her own life. Unfortunately, and
Speaker 1: again the stress is downstream of the FBI deciding that
Speaker 1: within its scope of authority and just a moral use
Speaker 1: of state power is to create a completely false story
Speaker 1: and plant it in the press. And guess what. In
Speaker 1: this case, two journalists played ball with them, granted their
Speaker 1: gossip columnists, but they're still putting stuff in print, serious
Speaker 1: stuff that affects people's lives, and that is coming to
Speaker 1: them from powerful people in the FBI. Again, we're not
Speaker 1: talking about small little publications. We're talking about at the
Speaker 1: time Newsweek, which actually named her in the Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 1: So what does any of this have to do with
Speaker 1: the case of Hamilton sixty eight. Well, that's what we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about. Matt Taibi had an excellent report
Speaker 1: and turned into a series of report series of reports
Speaker 1: in the Twitter files that was published last Friday about
Speaker 1: Hamilton sixty eight. You might remember that name. It's sort
Speaker 1: of in those hazy days of the early Trump administration
Speaker 1: when the Russia collusion narrative was in full blast and
Speaker 1: there was just frenzied media coverage from wall to wall.
Speaker 1: Hamilton sixty eight was a dashboard that was a project
Speaker 1: of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which is of itself
Speaker 1: a project of the German Marshall Fund. Hamilton sixty eight
Speaker 1: was created by Clint Watts. He's an MSNBC and NBC
Speaker 1: News contributor. You'll be shocked to learn he also happens
Speaker 1: to be a former FBI special agent who has still
Speaker 1: consulted with the FBI. I don't know how recently, but
Speaker 1: he has consulted with the FBI in the past, and
Speaker 1: of course he's an ex FBI special agent. Twitter disproved
Speaker 1: the results of the Hamilton sixty eight dashboard in October
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen. According to emails that Matt uncovered when he
Speaker 1: was digging through the Twitter files, Hamilton sixty eight would
Speaker 1: not make public as I reported in the Federalists here,
Speaker 1: They just would not make public their data. They went
Speaker 1: to the MET and said trust us, They went to
Speaker 1: think tanks, they went to elite universities and said trust us.
Speaker 1: This data is real and it shows that Russian bots
Speaker 1: are pushing all of these fake trends on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: Twitter is allowing it to happen. It was just a
Speaker 1: total panic. But of course, again journalists took the bait.
Speaker 1: They took the bait. Elite universities my alma Manter, Sager's
Speaker 1: alma Monter, GW and NYU, Harvard and Princeton, they all
Speaker 1: boosted junk science that Hamilton's sixty eight was promoting. And
Speaker 1: Twitter realized back in October of twenty seventeen. Yolol Roth
Speaker 1: himself is the one who reverse engineered Hamilton's sixty eighth
Speaker 1: methodology and came up with the full list of alleged
Speaker 1: Russian bots they said were wreaking havoc on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: we're evidence. They used this of evidence of Russia collusion
Speaker 1: and the hoax, and it was built into was basically
Speaker 1: use so much that it was baked into the broader
Speaker 1: media coverage of the Russia collusion saga. They knew that
Speaker 1: this was Most of the people on this list were
Speaker 1: neither Russian nor bots. They were for the most part,
Speaker 1: just regular Americans. There were some accounts like RT and
Speaker 1: Sputnik that were Russian, but for the most part it
Speaker 1: was regular people. And by the way, some anti establishment
Speaker 1: leftists got caught up in all this being called Russian bots.
Speaker 1: Twitter knew that. Hamilton's sixty eight knew that, and Clint
Speaker 1: Watts goes out and talks about this on MSNBC, and
Speaker 1: MSNBC lets him, NBC lets him. Every major news network
Speaker 1: basically had stories on this. It's incredible how much coverage
Speaker 1: Hamilton sixty eight got and it was based on junk science.
Speaker 1: There was no reason for it to ever get any
Speaker 1: coverage because it was always dubious. The fact that they
Speaker 1: wouldn't reveal what the accounts were for the excuse that, well,
Speaker 1: if they did that, Russia would automatically take the accounts down.
Speaker 1: Isn't that your goal? Isn't that your goal? They used
Speaker 1: it as a cudgel against Twitter. They're trying to attract
Speaker 1: attack Twitter and Facebook, and Twitter, by the way, let
Speaker 1: it go on. They let it go on despite knowing
Speaker 1: in October of twenty seventeen that they had reverse engineered
Speaker 1: at yell ross shared at Google doc. If you look
Speaker 1: at the emails Matt polled that reverse engineered, it showed
Speaker 1: that it was all BS. Ever, and at Twitter you
Speaker 1: can see in these emails from Matt's report knows that
Speaker 1: it's BS. They're talking about it. They're frustrated that they
Speaker 1: aren't going public with the information you all raw. It
Speaker 1: just suggests at one point giving Hamilton sixty eight an
Speaker 1: ultimatum saying, either you publish the list or we do.
Speaker 1: But they never told Hamilton sixty eight or the media
Speaker 1: publicly that they had the list. When Dianne Feinstein and
Speaker 1: Adam Schiff asked Twitter, they sent a letter to Twitter
Speaker 1: and Facebook saying, you have to start investigating these Russian bots.
Speaker 1: This Hamilton sixty eight. They found so much body activity,
Speaker 1: you have to start investigating it. Twitter responded in a
Speaker 1: letter saying, you know, we don't have the list. It's
Speaker 1: not public. The list isn't public, so we can't do
Speaker 1: anything about this. That raises questions about whether Twitter was
Speaker 1: briefing people in private, because the emails show that their
Speaker 1: communications people were briefing people in private. They said reporters
Speaker 1: were chafing at the information that they were sharing about
Speaker 1: Hamilton sixty eight not being true, but they had to
Speaker 1: be careful until Twitter said something publicly without revealing the
Speaker 1: extent of what they really knew, which is that all
Speaker 1: of this was nonsense. Their employees were internally debating all
Speaker 1: of that I mean, it's just these Russia collusion stories.
Speaker 1: I always hesitate to continue covering them. Not that I wouldn't,
Speaker 1: but every time I'm was just like, do we have
Speaker 1: to go through this again? Because they're so convoluted and
Speaker 1: some of them are really inaccessible, because it's just like
Speaker 1: you have to remember so many different details about this
Speaker 1: elaborate conspiracy theory. But in this case, it's so simple.
Speaker 1: They're really following the Hoover playbook, right, Create junk science
Speaker 1: and I get hiss x FBI. But create junk science,
Speaker 1: tease it to the press, create junk story, a false story,
Speaker 1: tease it to the press, and just let them go
Speaker 1: wild with it. And in certain cases in the past,
Speaker 1: for instance MLKA wiretaps, whether you belie those are real
Speaker 1: or not, journalists didn't run with them. Whether you believe
Speaker 1: the results of those are real or not, I should say,
Speaker 1: obviously we know the wiretaps are real, but what we
Speaker 1: the FBI says they obtained from them, journalists resisted publishing.
Speaker 1: There was a famous case where it was Howard Hunt.
Speaker 1: It's in his memoir American Spy talks about how Chuck
Speaker 1: Colson had him forge cables about JFK and Vietnam, and
Speaker 1: they tried to get him in Life magazine, and Life
Speaker 1: Magazine wouldn't publish it because they couldn't prove that the
Speaker 1: cables were authentic. Why did no journalists try to prove
Speaker 1: that the Hamilton sixty eight data was authentic. They just
Speaker 1: went and took the word of all of these ex
Speaker 1: intelligence people who had access to grind against the political
Speaker 1: enemy that were completely obvious, and that is completely pathetic.
Speaker 1: It's just another really sad statement on where we are
Speaker 1: right now as a country that you have this pan
Speaker 1: institutional rot. Academia falls for it, journalists, journalists fall for it,
Speaker 1: and the intelligence community because the German Marshall Fund and
Speaker 1: the Alliance for Security Democracy are stocked with ex Intel people,
Speaker 1: with ex State Department people, with government officials, all of
Speaker 1: these people who supported this Hamilton's sixty eight work despite
Speaker 1: never being able to see these accounts that were implicated Tayibi.
Speaker 1: We have a graphic here of all the media coverage
Speaker 1: that generated. Look at that. That doesn't even encapsulate the
Speaker 1: full scope of it, doesn't encapsulate all the cable news segments.
Speaker 1: It was so baked into the cake of Russia collusion
Speaker 1: that you can't separate the two. It was one of
Speaker 1: the big pieces of evidence that Russia was hacking our elections.
Speaker 1: So again, this is not Historically, there's some precedent for
Speaker 1: the intelligence community acting in this completely reprehensible way. Now
Speaker 1: we don't know that Watts was consulting for the FBI
Speaker 1: with any of this, there's no evidence to suggest that,
Speaker 1: but we know that he is former FBI, a former consultant,
Speaker 1: and former special agent. This is straight out of a
Speaker 1: playbook that has happened before. And you'd think, given the
Speaker 1: shame with which we look back now on that era
Speaker 1: in American history and some of what happened during that
Speaker 1: American era in American history, that the media would maybe
Speaker 1: have some basic journalistic standards and check this shit out
Speaker 1: with before running it. But of course that's not what happened.
Speaker 1: Ryan the fourth estate. In the absence of a fourth
Speaker 1: estate that's going to check this stuff out before running
Speaker 1: with it, the FBI can get away with anything. What's
Speaker 1: what's your point today? Some people say that's overly hostile.
Speaker 1: I think it works. Yes, I don't really have a point.
Speaker 1: I'm more just because I was I was on the road,
Speaker 1: so I didn't really write anything sophisticated this week, just
Speaker 1: just got back, but I did want to talk about
Speaker 1: the situation of Haiti and elevate some really, really incredible
Speaker 1: reporting done by the Associated Press. If we could put
Speaker 1: this first one up here and let me pull this
Speaker 1: up since I don't have my glasses on. But so
Speaker 1: the AP center quarter around with a guy named Barbecue.
Speaker 1: If you guys haven't followed this clothes, that's Jimmy Chevalier,
Speaker 1: Jimmy Sharazier, who is one of the leading gang leaders
Speaker 1: at this point in Haiti. And just to back people
Speaker 1: up who haven't been following this, but I think a
Speaker 1: lot of our viewers have been. The former Haitian president,
Speaker 1: Jovenil Moyes was assassinated in what was at the summer
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty one, and it appears that the current
Speaker 1: Prime Minister Arilnrie was involved in that assassination. We know
Speaker 1: for a fact that Henri was had a number of
Speaker 1: phone calls with people involved with the assassination right around
Speaker 1: the time of the assassination. We also know that in
Speaker 1: a power struggle that ensued afterwards, he only became Prime
Speaker 1: Minister officially because the United States and five other countries
Speaker 1: put out a press release saying that we recognize Ariel
Speaker 1: Honrie the Prime minister. That is literally how he became
Speaker 1: the de facto prime minister. Now, in January, the final
Speaker 1: terms of the remaining Haitian senators expired. That was the
Speaker 1: last and the Haitian Senate doesn't have a whole lot
Speaker 1: of power anyway, but that was the last bastion of
Speaker 1: any body in Haiti that had any connection to the
Speaker 1: citizenship to being democratically put into place. So all you
Speaker 1: have left is Arilnrie, who was not elected and it
Speaker 1: was basically just appointed to this role by the United States,
Speaker 1: and after evidence of his complicity in the assassination of
Speaker 1: the president came about, and underneath him kind of a
Speaker 1: skeleton government. And so what's happening now, and that's where
Speaker 1: this ap story comes in. What's happening now is that
Speaker 1: so called gangs are taking over basically all of the
Speaker 1: country and moving into places where that that previously had
Speaker 1: been safe. And I say so called gangs because they're
Speaker 1: actually now looking to rebrand themselves. And we have a
Speaker 1: couple of great quotes that that Barbecue Sharazier gave to
Speaker 1: the gave to the Associated Press reporter here. Well, one
Speaker 1: of them actually comes from one of his bodyguards who
Speaker 1: says to kind of a video editor that was going
Speaker 1: along with the AP reporters. She said, he said to her,
Speaker 1: we're not the bad bad guys. We're just the bad guys.
Speaker 1: So that's there. That's how they're easing into this. But
Speaker 1: here's here's Sharazier describing himself as a quote revolutionary. He says,
Speaker 1: I'm not a thief, I'm not involved in kidnapping, I'm
Speaker 1: not a rapist. I'm just carrying out a social fight.
Speaker 1: He says, I'm a threat to the system. So what
Speaker 1: Sharazier did several months ago is that when ariel on
Speaker 1: Re under pressure from the United States and others, removed
Speaker 1: subsidies from gas prices, jacking up the price of gas
Speaker 1: and everything else on the Haitian Island, shiraz organized a
Speaker 1: blockade for two months of gas coming into the into
Speaker 1: the island and and since then has kind of saying
Speaker 1: that he was protest protesting, and you and you had
Speaker 1: genuine outrage in the streets people protesting. Since then, he
Speaker 1: has expanded his control and you know what you're seeing
Speaker 1: now is this kind of people theoretically talk about state
Speaker 1: formation as being the gangs who won a monopoly on
Speaker 1: violence eventually implementing a state like there if you talk
Speaker 1: about you know, state craft and the creation of governments
Speaker 1: like that, that's this one theory that people kick around,
Speaker 1: like where did governments come from? Well, they came from
Speaker 1: people who had power and took power violently and then
Speaker 1: had a monopoly on that violence, and then they and
Speaker 1: then they went through and produced some mechanisms by which
Speaker 1: they would continue to rule with the consent of the
Speaker 1: government rather than strictly through violence. And so Henri does
Speaker 1: not want that process to unfold. Of course, he's asking
Speaker 1: for the UN to authorize some type of invasion, armed invasion.
Speaker 1: So far, none of the kind of western countries have
Speaker 1: taken up his invitation yet to invade, although there's been
Speaker 1: so many invasions of Haiti over the years. So as
Speaker 1: of now, the question is how long will the rest
Speaker 1: of the world kind of allow Haitians to actually sort
Speaker 1: this out themselves or are we just going to let
Speaker 1: it fester and then invade the country. We're joined now
Speaker 1: by Todd Benzman, his new book out February twenty first
Speaker 1: is called Overrun, How Joe Biden unleashed the greatest border
Speaker 1: crisis in US history. He's also a senior national security
Speaker 1: Fellow at the Conservative Center for him Greation Studies. Todd,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here.
Speaker 1: Thank you absolutely. You wrote a newsweek op ed that
Speaker 1: I think we can get into, and Ryan might even
Speaker 1: have some points of debate to bring up last week
Speaker 1: called I liked the title of it too. It was
Speaker 1: basically I think it was called Joe Biden's magic trick.
Speaker 1: You right, and the American public will indeed see sharp
Speaker 1: declines in the monthly illegal apprehension statistics following Biden's new
Speaker 1: moves on the border, starting with the January report which
Speaker 1: comes out next month, and the Biden administration will tut
Speaker 1: these is evidence of vastly improved border security thanks to
Speaker 1: new quote enforcement system that it had just expanded. But
Speaker 1: this claim of enforcement success is founded on a purposeful
Speaker 1: accounting cheat. The illusion would impress Harry Houdini, So Todd
Speaker 1: tell us what the accounting cheat is. In this case,
Speaker 1: the Biden administration has really shifted gears on its border
Speaker 1: policy in January by creating us the cornerstone, the new
Speaker 1: cornerstone of its policy to start diverting people who were
Speaker 1: going to be crossing illegally into a sort of quasi
Speaker 1: legalized system where they are being granted humanitarian parole, which
Speaker 1: is an authority that doesn't exist the way they're using
Speaker 1: it on the Mexican side and south of the border,
Speaker 1: where thousands and hundreds of thousands of people will be
Speaker 1: given these permission slips on that side and then transported
Speaker 1: into the United States across ports of entry by land
Speaker 1: and also by air, flying from airport to airport by
Speaker 1: the hundreds of thousands each year. And what this will
Speaker 1: do is it will have the effect of reducing the
Speaker 1: terrible optics of apprehensions illegal apprehensions at the border, but
Speaker 1: it will do nothing to prevent all of these foreign
Speaker 1: nationals from still entering the country and becoming illegal in
Speaker 1: about a year or two. So they're all going to
Speaker 1: still be here. They're just moving them from one accounting
Speaker 1: column to a different accounting column which is not even public.
Speaker 1: And also these people will be moved through ports of entrigue,
Speaker 1: which are inside buildings, so you can't fly Fox News
Speaker 1: drones over it and see thousands and thousands of people,
Speaker 1: and you won't be able to look it up in
Speaker 1: the CBP website to see what the numbers are. We
Speaker 1: still haven't figured out how they're going to produce those
Speaker 1: statistics of how many people are they're letting in this way.
Speaker 1: So if we can increase the amount of transparency involved
Speaker 1: in this process, and if we can we can write
Speaker 1: legal guidelines around it through through Congress or through whatever
Speaker 1: other executive means that you would find appropriate, would you
Speaker 1: then find yourself saying that, Okay, this is better than
Speaker 1: the current system. Well, for one thing, the legal admission
Speaker 1: systems that are in place now, the visas, the student visas,
Speaker 1: the immigration applications, and all of the legal ways to
Speaker 1: enter the country have been approved duly by Congress. This
Speaker 1: is an admission program that they've created outside of Congress
Speaker 1: with no approval whatsoever. They've kind of cobbled this together
Speaker 1: without the approval of the American people, so that over
Speaker 1: the next couple of years you may very well have
Speaker 1: you know, a couple million more people enter the country
Speaker 1: this way outside of an approved system. Now, if Congress
Speaker 1: came back and approved it, then you know, who is
Speaker 1: anybody to complain about it? But Congress has not to
Speaker 1: prove this system, and they're using an authority known as
Speaker 1: humanitarian parole. Remember that humanitarian parole. It's going to be
Speaker 1: important in the next months. Humanitarian parole is in the
Speaker 1: ISNA for a case by case somebody's wounded or hurt
Speaker 1: and climbing up the riverbank or whatever it may be,
Speaker 1: and we're going to let that one person in to
Speaker 1: get medical treatment and then send them back when it's over.
Speaker 1: And what they're doing is applying this one off, case
Speaker 1: by case thing to hundreds of thousands of people at
Speaker 1: a time. There's litigation. Now twenty different states, most of
Speaker 1: them are Republican states, have sued saying that you're misusing
Speaker 1: this authority, and it's probably going to win because they
Speaker 1: put it in the Fifth Circuit Court, the Fifth Circuit
Speaker 1: Court of Appeals, which is a conservative court, and then
Speaker 1: it'll go to the Supreme Court at some point. But
Speaker 1: all of this is outside of any kind of normal
Speaker 1: admissions program in the United States. And Ryan's point is
Speaker 1: a good and interesting one. Todd because Biden has recently
Speaker 1: started sending, for instance, Cubans back because there's so many
Speaker 1: Cubans who are fleeing up through Central America and into Mexico.
Speaker 1: And that is like the asylum system. If there is
Speaker 1: a humane asylum system in the United States, my goodness.
Speaker 1: I mean, some of these people from Cuba and Venezuela
Speaker 1: should not be getting sent back. But we don't have
Speaker 1: a humane asylum system. We don't have a logical, sensical,
Speaker 1: coherent asylum system because the system is clogged up by
Speaker 1: so many of these different places, the humanitarian parole while
Speaker 1: people their asylum cases penned. And one thing I want
Speaker 1: to ask you about Todd is you do you have
Speaker 1: done a lot of like wrenching, vivid reporting from Central
Speaker 1: America on things like the Darien Gap, and these numbers
Speaker 1: under Biden are different. You know, we have seen a
Speaker 1: steady uptick over the course of a really long time,
Speaker 1: but what we're seeing now just flatly pales. The restles
Speaker 1: stuff pales into comparison to what we're seeing now. So
Speaker 1: as somebody who's been down that's sort of the road
Speaker 1: that the super highway that goes up through the c
Speaker 1: the Darian Gaps, the Panama Canal and into Mexico and
Speaker 1: then into places like Alpaso and Brownsville. What is happening
Speaker 1: down south, further down south, and then further down south
Speaker 1: from that, and then further done south from that. What
Speaker 1: is bringing people up right now in these big numbers. Right, So,
Speaker 1: when you talk to the immigrants, as I frequently do,
Speaker 1: you know, and you ask them, you know, why are
Speaker 1: you coming, what they'll tell you is all of my
Speaker 1: relatives got let in when they showed up at the border.
Speaker 1: All of my friends got in, and they sent us
Speaker 1: the selfias and they're like this, and you know, when
Speaker 1: we are seeing all of our friends and neighbors get across,
Speaker 1: we're borrowing our money, selling everything we own, and paying
Speaker 1: the smugglers to go over to why not they're letting
Speaker 1: us in. That really is the snowball effect that has
Speaker 1: led to this avalanche of a historic migration crisis. We've
Speaker 1: never seen any kind of numbers like this, not even close,
Speaker 1: in the history of the United States. And it's really
Speaker 1: not a very complicated calculus. When you talk to them,
Speaker 1: they're like, everybody I know got in, so we're getting
Speaker 1: into Well, to complicate it just a little bit, let's
Speaker 1: you don't see and you know, back in the what
Speaker 1: nineteenth century and also then in the nineteen sixties again,
Speaker 1: when Democrats did immigration reform, then there was a bipart
Speaker 1: as an immigration reform. Sure you know this story that
Speaker 1: you know, they expected that there would then be this
Speaker 1: flood of immigration from Europe into the United States and
Speaker 1: a lot of the kind of racist lawmakers were and
Speaker 1: frustrated that actually instead a lot of these quotas were
Speaker 1: made up by people coming from Third world countries over
Speaker 1: over to the United States. And so to complicate the
Speaker 1: point a little bit, people don't, I think, want to
Speaker 1: uproot their entire lives. You know, people have a sense
Speaker 1: of connection to place. Place. Place matters to people. You know,
Speaker 1: their their you know their their their mother and father
Speaker 1: live there, their grandparents live there, their great grandparents live there.
Speaker 1: You have to be driven, uh, you know, to some
Speaker 1: type of desperation to want to to want to leave
Speaker 1: from the place where you are from to go to
Speaker 1: another place where you don't even speak the language. Now
Speaker 1: I I I suspect you probably would even agree with that, right. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's really no place like the United States. It's a
Speaker 1: storied land. Uh, it's got a reputation that precedes it
Speaker 1: as a land of milk and honey. Most of the
Speaker 1: people that are crossing in are getting you know, a
Speaker 1: media assistance. Nobody's starving or going hungry. Everybody's taken care of.
Speaker 1: Everybody's getting on on the rolls. You know, they're in
Speaker 1: four star hotels in New York. So now everybody wants
Speaker 1: to go to New York and they send that home.
Speaker 1: And it is true that, you know, a lot of
Speaker 1: these countries are less livable than the United States. You know,
Speaker 1: I certainly can empathize with anybody who wants to upgrade
Speaker 1: their lifestyle. But most of the for example, Venezuelans who
Speaker 1: are coming in right now are not living in Venezuela
Speaker 1: and haven't for many years. They've been living in relative
Speaker 1: safety and prosperity in seventeen different Latin American countries. Colombia
Speaker 1: has the largest share of them, and they've been there
Speaker 1: for years and years, and they decided not to go
Speaker 1: during the Trump administration because if you lay down ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to cross the US border under Trump, you
Speaker 1: would end up back in Mexico with no return on
Speaker 1: your investment. But under the Biden administration, they were happily
Speaker 1: ensconced in these other countries and they saw that the
Speaker 1: that there was a chance to upgrade, to move up
Speaker 1: a few notches and live with relatives, or just have
Speaker 1: a better shot at prosperity. And so that's why they came.
Speaker 1: Most of the Haitians. It's the same thing with most
Speaker 1: of the Haitians. None of them were living in Haiti.
Speaker 1: I was in Chilean. I was just gonna say, Todd,
Speaker 1: you just use a really important phrase, a better shot.
Speaker 1: I remember in Monta Moros talking to a group of
Speaker 1: Haitians who would freely say we weren't in like necessarily
Speaker 1: dire straits. The economy had gotten bad in Brazil or
Speaker 1: Argentina or whatever. They would say that, but they said,
Speaker 1: this is like sticks with me. It was very poignant.
Speaker 1: They said, we want. They were trying to sort of
Speaker 1: talk and and translate their Spanish, translate their French, I
Speaker 1: should say, into Spanish and then into English. But I
Speaker 1: always like filled in their sentence. At one point I
Speaker 1: was like, you're trying to say the American dream, and
Speaker 1: they just were like, yes, the American dream. We want
Speaker 1: the American dream. And on that note, we were talking
Speaker 1: earlier the show about the news that four more people
Speaker 1: have been charged in the assassination attempt against now deceased
Speaker 1: because he was assassinated a former president of Haiti, Jobnel
Speaker 1: Luiz and Todd. Haiti has played a really big role
Speaker 1: in this recent wave, this mass of human suffering, where
Speaker 1: as you've reported, people are dying crossing through the Darien Gap,
Speaker 1: They're being threatened, they're being abused by cartels who are profiting,
Speaker 1: you know, in the to the tune of millions and
Speaker 1: millions of dollars every single year because of this. What
Speaker 1: role has has Haiti played, particularly the situation in Haiti
Speaker 1: since twenty ten, as people have gone to different parts
Speaker 1: of Latin America. What is unique about the Haitian situation
Speaker 1: during this last several years, as we've seen big peaks. Sure,
Speaker 1: Haiti is a terrible place to live. I don't blame
Speaker 1: anybody for trying to flee that country. It's simply unlivable Haiti.
Speaker 1: Having said that, the vast majority of the Haitians that
Speaker 1: managed to leave were living in all of these other
Speaker 1: countries for years in relative prosperity. Just like you said,
Speaker 1: they had a shot briefly in twenty twenty one at
Speaker 1: national elections they were going to have they were scheduled
Speaker 1: for November seventh, the first round, they were finally going
Speaker 1: to be able to elect a parliament, they haven't had
Speaker 1: a parliament in years, and then they were going to
Speaker 1: get a chance to elect a president. And then we
Speaker 1: had the Haitian encampment crisis in Rio under the bridge,
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand Haitians down there. And it gets a little
Speaker 1: bit complicated here about what happened was the Biden administration
Speaker 1: felt like it had to shut down that camp. It
Speaker 1: was really too big of an iore and they said
Speaker 1: about deporting people from that camp, not back to Chile
Speaker 1: where they've been living happily for years, but to actual
Speaker 1: Haiti itself. They rioted. But when the Biden administration did that,
Speaker 1: they needed a leader there who would be willing to
Speaker 1: accept them at the tarmac. And so the Biden administration
Speaker 1: ordered that Haiti canceled its elections and they bestowed dictatorship
Speaker 1: on this guy Ariel and robbed Haiti completely of its democracy.
Speaker 1: It's one shot of democracy, canceled both elections, and that
Speaker 1: guy still running the country to this day. And as
Speaker 1: Ryan has to get rid of a camp that was
Speaker 1: a political problem for the right terms right, and the
Speaker 1: void of Haiti resigned in protests over that very decision.
Speaker 1: So then what would be so wrong with if implement
Speaker 1: instead going back and implementing this new policy, this humanitarian relief.
Speaker 1: You got this big camp. Okay, sit down, interview people,
Speaker 1: process them, move them, move them through the system. So
Speaker 1: you know, if Congress could agree on it, well that's
Speaker 1: the thing. Congress isn't going to agree on it. So
Speaker 1: we the three of us, can try to agree on
Speaker 1: something here. I mean, let's take let's take a look
Speaker 1: at it from a broader perspective. Since nineteen fifty or so, right,
Speaker 1: the US birth rate has been on a very steady decline.
Speaker 1: And I think the twenty first century is really going
Speaker 1: to be marked by eventually when people get around to it,
Speaker 1: a competition for immigrants, a competition for people in the West,
Speaker 1: I think, all over the world, all over the world,
Speaker 1: because you're you're you're seeing declining birth rates, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially everywhere everywhere that starts to develop even
Speaker 1: a little bit, you start to see birth birth rates decline.
Speaker 1: And if you're going to have you know, and I'm
Speaker 1: biased here, I'm going to be old pretty soon. And
Speaker 1: if you have a top heavy elderly population without enough
Speaker 1: young people to grow that economy to do the work
Speaker 1: that the old people can no longer, do countries collapse?
Speaker 1: So why shouldn't we be worried about that? Why shouldn't
Speaker 1: we look back at what's happened, you know, throughout American
Speaker 1: history and seeing the contributions that immigrants have made and say,
Speaker 1: you know what, all right, if the Biden administration is
Speaker 1: figuring out a better system, that's that's shutting out the cartels,
Speaker 1: let's do that. Well. I think you make a good point,
Speaker 1: and I think that there's a definite Those issues that
Speaker 1: you raise about are declining birth rate, those are perfectly debatable.
Speaker 1: They're worthy of debate as a matter of public policy.
Speaker 1: The issue that I am a lot of people have
Speaker 1: with it is that the current laws require the president
Speaker 1: to stop, block, deter, detain, and deport immediately anybody who
Speaker 1: illegally crosses the border. And as last I checked the
Speaker 1: law as it stands, the INA that requires those things
Speaker 1: are still in place. Like we haven't treated, we haven't
Speaker 1: dismissed the INA, like we've dismissed the federal marijuana law.
Speaker 1: We may be moving in the direction of dismissing the INA.
Speaker 1: Like we have the marijuana law, but the law requires
Speaker 1: that everybody who illegally enters the border without permission is
Speaker 1: to be detained and deported. Even if they apply for asylum,
Speaker 1: they still have to remain in detention for the duration
Speaker 1: of their asylum claim until it's adjudicated. What the administration
Speaker 1: is doing is they created a new kind of extra
Speaker 1: legal process that's based on an interpretation of a piece
Speaker 1: of the law that most minds greater than mine legal
Speaker 1: minds anyway, say it is not legal. You can't just
Speaker 1: go outside of Congress and create a thing where anybody
Speaker 1: in the world who wants to come across the border
Speaker 1: can come across the border. What you're talking about is
Speaker 1: a legal system that is debatable and then has to
Speaker 1: be implemented by Congress with an executive signing the law,
Speaker 1: and then we go from there. But to just create
Speaker 1: extra channels that, you know, just oh, let's do this
Speaker 1: with this and that and get as many people in
Speaker 1: as want to come in. That's not the intent of Congress.
Speaker 1: And that's the problem with this issue. Seems to have
Speaker 1: a lot of extra legal stuff going on. If you remember,
Speaker 1: Donald Trump shut down the government in order to kind
Speaker 1: of pressure Congress to give him money for his wall.
Speaker 1: He failed. He caved well, Ris refused and he's like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm going to build the wall anyway.
Speaker 1: And there was the Doug Doocey situation where the shipping
Speaker 1: containers is yeah, yeah, and so yes, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of it. But I think that's to Todd's point, like
Speaker 1: a problem with the absence of legal congressional activity on
Speaker 1: this issue is that it ends up becoming ad hoc,
Speaker 1: and the victims of that are humans who don't have
Speaker 1: a clear path and because of that, cartel's prey on
Speaker 1: them and say we'll smuggle you across the border, we'll
Speaker 1: turn you into humanitarian parole, and then you can have
Speaker 1: this existence that DACA kids have had for such a
Speaker 1: long time, where there's just illegal limbo because Congress can't
Speaker 1: agree on a damn thing. Todd Benzman, thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining us, for being willing to have this discussion.
Speaker 1: We appreciate it so much. Happy to be here. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Of course, will continue to obviously cover the situation on
Speaker 1: our southern border and the humanitarian crisis that's absolutely unfolding
Speaker 1: there as development's unfold I have a great Wednesday, everybody