Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at Breaking Points, are already thinking of
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Speaker 3: But enough with that, let's get to the show.
Speaker 4: Good morning, Welcome to Breaking Points. I'm Sager and Jetty kidding.
Speaker 4: I don't know how many times I can use.
Speaker 1: That joke, Crystal, I think it lands every time. It's
Speaker 1: almost like our ritual part of the morning routine when
Speaker 1: you're here. Nice to see you, by the way, Emily,
Speaker 1: great to have you as always, girl.
Speaker 5: Show Yes, always fun indeed, and we have a big show.
Speaker 1: Actually, yeah, there's a lot to get into this morning.
Speaker 1: So apparently Obama is back. He's going to try to
Speaker 1: rescue Biden. He's all in giving advice, et cetera. We'll
Speaker 1: break that down a' so kareem jump here having an
Speaker 1: inexplicable meltdown on a radio program that we will share
Speaker 1: with you as well. The rn C has an interesting
Speaker 1: new hiring process and the litmus test that you definitely.
Speaker 6: Definitely want to know about that.
Speaker 1: We had a big abortion oral arguments at Supreme Court
Speaker 1: this week. This is with regard to that abortion pill
Speaker 1: and whether it could be potentially banned nationwide. Seems like
Speaker 1: a lot of the justices were very skeptical of the
Speaker 1: arguments that were being made, so we'll break that down
Speaker 1: for you. We also had, related to that, a special
Speaker 1: election for a House district in Alabama. I know you're
Speaker 1: on the edge of your seats to find out the results,
Speaker 1: but it was noteworthy because Alabama, of course, was where
Speaker 1: that court ruling on IVF came down, and the Democrat
Speaker 1: ran really explicitly.
Speaker 6: On that IVF ruling and she cleaned up like.
Speaker 1: The margin is actually really shocking. So that's why it's
Speaker 1: worth paying attention to. Also have some major media fails
Speaker 1: with regard to Israel coverage that we want to bring
Speaker 1: you both The Atlantic and The New York Times. We
Speaker 1: have Joe Rogan coming out and saying Israel is committing
Speaker 1: a genocide and what he even described as a mini holocaust.
Speaker 1: Speaking of genocide, I'm taking a look at a UN
Speaker 1: report arguing that there are reasonable grounds to believe Israel
Speaker 1: is in fact committing a genocide. Of course, the author
Speaker 1: of that report was immediately smeared by State Department spokesperson
Speaker 1: Matt Miller as being you guessed it anti Semitic. And
Speaker 1: we have Max Alvarez, who is both a Baltimore City
Speaker 1: resident and also a fantastic reporter, taking a look at
Speaker 1: the very latest we know with regard to that horrible
Speaker 1: bridge collapse in that city.
Speaker 5: Very eager to hear Maxi's thoughts.
Speaker 4: Let's start with this outrageous Korean John Pierre meltdown in
Speaker 4: North Carolina.
Speaker 5: Now North Carolina.
Speaker 4: Is where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we're visiting on Tuesday.
Speaker 5: Hence why karrein John.
Speaker 6: Pierre, I didn't realize that actually.
Speaker 4: She was on WBT local radio AM radio in North Carolina.
Speaker 4: And this is per the Daily Beast. They describe it
Speaker 4: like this, they say in the audio. John Pierre called
Speaker 4: out WBT Charlotte news director Mark Garrison for quote incredibly
Speaker 4: offensive end quote, insulting question about President Joe Biden's health.
Speaker 5: During the phone interview earlier in the day.
Speaker 4: I would add to that she also was offended that
Speaker 4: he asked about people's grocery bills, and later ended the
Speaker 4: chat by cordially thanking the interview first time and hanging up.
Speaker 4: The White House contended in a statement to The Daily
Speaker 4: Beast that John Pierre had offered the interview seven minutes
Speaker 4: of her time sandwich between other interviews, and that the
Speaker 4: station was well aware of the time constraints.
Speaker 5: There's a lot to say about this. Let's roll the
Speaker 5: tape first, though.
Speaker 7: When I told a number of people that I was
Speaker 7: talking to you today that it was interesting though, they
Speaker 7: all said, would you please just ask her?
Speaker 3: Does the president have dementia? So before I move on
Speaker 3: from that, does he that?
Speaker 7: Mark?
Speaker 8: Mark? I can't even believe you're asking me this question.
Speaker 8: That is an incredibly offensive question to ask.
Speaker 3: But you know people ask you.
Speaker 8: Wait, no, no, no, no, no, you Mark, you you're
Speaker 8: taking us down as rabbit hole. Let me let me
Speaker 8: let me be very clear about this.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 8: For the past several years, the president's physician has laid
Speaker 8: out very in a comprehensive way, the president's health. This
Speaker 8: is a president if you watch him every day, if
Speaker 8: you really pay attention to his record and what he
Speaker 8: has done, you will see exactly how focus he's been
Speaker 8: on the American people, how historic his actions have been.
Speaker 8: And so I'm not even going to truly truly uh really,
Speaker 8: you know, take take the premise of your question. I
Speaker 8: think it is incredibly insulting, and so we can, you know,
Speaker 8: we can move on to the next question.
Speaker 4: So the next question was in fact about grocery prices,
Speaker 4: and these are basically crystal and cares for your take
Speaker 4: on this. The two issues that Normy voters actually really
Speaker 4: are focused on with Joe Biden specifically, is are you okay?
Speaker 4: And why can't I pay for my groceries in the
Speaker 4: same way that I used to just a few years ago?
Speaker 4: If they are incapable of having good answers to those questions,
Speaker 4: and by the way, there are good answers to those
Speaker 4: questions from a political perspective, from the perspective of strategy,
Speaker 4: maybe not so much the first one, but you can
Speaker 4: at least, you know, go full Paul Krugman talking about
Speaker 4: grocery prices.
Speaker 5: Yeah, absolutely good.
Speaker 6: They have plenty of data they can point to.
Speaker 1: Is it, you know, totally representative of how the American
Speaker 1: people are feeling and doing?
Speaker 6: No, but there are things they could point to.
Speaker 1: It's not that hard, and the Daily Beasts character is
Speaker 1: she cordially hung up the phone cordially okay.
Speaker 4: After seven minutes, almost like they took the White House's
Speaker 4: line that she only had seven minutes.
Speaker 5: She was generous with her time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's just she very huffily after she
Speaker 1: gets asked the grocery question, just like you know, it's
Speaker 1: like I gotta go, hangs.
Speaker 5: Up the phone.
Speaker 1: And if you do have look, i know she's a
Speaker 1: busy lady. I'm sure she did have other things scheduled whatever.
Speaker 1: There's an actually cordial way to handle that of like, hey,
Speaker 1: can we do like one more question. I'm really sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm just you know, super slammed. And there's the not
Speaker 1: cordial way of just literally hanging up the phone.
Speaker 5: It's we're done.
Speaker 6: Listen, if you don't want.
Speaker 10: To get asked tough questions, don't take this job.
Speaker 1: Your whole job is to take these questions. You're the
Speaker 1: press secretary. It's crazy, and you have the thing like.
Speaker 6: This is not out of line.
Speaker 1: People have a right to ask that question because we
Speaker 1: have seen this man had to give an entire press
Speaker 1: conference to assure voters that he was like mentally there,
Speaker 1: and then he went ahead and confused the president of
Speaker 1: Egypt with President of Mexico in the very press conference,
Speaker 1: in the very like I'm not Senile, I promise press conference.
Speaker 1: Pull from February, eighty six percent of Americans think the
Speaker 1: President Joe Biden is too old to serve another term.
Speaker 1: So you can't get all snippy and offended when a
Speaker 1: radio host asked you a question that is clearly on
Speaker 1: the mind of some eighty six percent of Americans at least.
Speaker 1: But you know, this is kind of a it's a
Speaker 1: typical I would say democratic strategy, but I think strategy
Speaker 1: in general with politician rather than actually trying to deal
Speaker 1: with this, which how do you deal with the age
Speaker 1: question in particular? They're you know, all you can say
Speaker 1: is like the nonsense. She said, Oh, just watch him,
Speaker 1: which that's the problem we have been watching against. That's
Speaker 1: why we have the concerns. Okay, but that's really kind
Speaker 1: of all you can do with it. And he's not
Speaker 1: getting younger, so there's no real effective way to parry that.
Speaker 1: Whereas with the economic stuff, you know, there's at least,
Speaker 1: like I was saying, there's at least something there you
Speaker 1: can work with. Consumer sentiment is up. I do think
Speaker 1: that is part of why you're seeing a little bit
Speaker 1: of Biden positive movement in terms of the polls. But
Speaker 1: you know, to just get snippy and hang of the phone,
Speaker 1: is like, why did you do this interview in the
Speaker 1: first place?
Speaker 4: Then yeah, well, no exactly, and she should be perfectly
Speaker 4: capable of handling these interviews great questions. I thought, like,
Speaker 4: this is not getting down in conspiracy theory rabbit holes.
Speaker 4: He did a great job. He just asked two clear,
Speaker 4: fair questions.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: This is also on the heels of the New York
Speaker 4: Times reporting that President Obama is getting a former President
Speaker 4: Obama's getting increasingly involved in the twenty twenty four election.
Speaker 4: We can put this tear sheet up on the screen.
Speaker 4: The headline from the New York Times is Obama fearing
Speaker 4: Biden lost to Trump, is on the phone to strategize,
Speaker 4: They write, as the election approaches, President Biden is making
Speaker 4: regular calls to former President Obama to catch up on
Speaker 4: the race or talk about family. But mister Obama is
Speaker 4: making calls of his own to Jeff Zeinz, the White
Speaker 4: House Chief of Staff, and to top aids at the
Speaker 4: Biden campaign just to strategize and relay advice. This level
Speaker 4: of engagement illustrates mister obama support for mister Biden, but
Speaker 4: also what one of his senior aides characterized as mister
Speaker 4: Obama's grave concern that Biden could lose to former President
Speaker 4: Donald J.
Speaker 5: Trump.
Speaker 4: So we've seen other people start really sounding the alarms,
Speaker 4: saying this is not you cannot, for example with Karreean
Speaker 4: Jean Pierre, you cannot just expect to be morally indignant
Speaker 4: at questions about Joe Biden's age and people's concerns about
Speaker 4: the economy and expect that Trump will be so crazy
Speaker 4: you will just cruise to reelection. That is not going
Speaker 4: to be a winning strategy. You have to have something
Speaker 4: better than saying, look at Joe Biden, because to your point, Crystal.
Speaker 5: It's kind of the problem.
Speaker 4: So they've had that interesting relationship Obama and Biden for
Speaker 4: a long time, and obviously this was even in the
Speaker 4: Special Council. Her transcript, Biden conceded that Obama didn't want
Speaker 4: him to run back in twenty sixteen, but now Obama said,
Speaker 4: gotta get in there, Joe, because this one is going to.
Speaker 5: Be pretty close by the way.
Speaker 1: I think Obama's political instincts in twenty sixteen were dead wrong.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously it didn't work out with Hillary Clinton.
Speaker 1: I think Joe Biden, you know, he was much more
Speaker 1: at the top of his game in twenty sixteen. I
Speaker 1: think he was probably a more talented political figure. And
Speaker 1: I think Joe Biden is right to feel like he
Speaker 1: had a shot. I mean, if he could beat Trump
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty as a diminished Joe Biden, I think
Speaker 1: he had a decent shot at beating Trump in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen as well, and was better positioned than Hillary Clinton
Speaker 1: to do so. One can never know, but I do
Speaker 1: think that Barack Obama's political instincts in that regard were
Speaker 1: dead wrong. And with Obama, you know, in terms of
Speaker 1: his political instincts, they've really never served anyone except himself,
Speaker 1: Like he was very good at getting himself elected and
Speaker 1: getting himself re elected did but also during his time,
Speaker 1: over the course of that eight years, the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: was really decimated, especially in rural areas. There was just
Speaker 1: you know, a thousand state house seats that were lost.
Speaker 1: It was at a critical time because it was twenty ten,
Speaker 1: and that's when redistricting happened, the number of governor's matches
Speaker 1: that were lost. You know, ultimately, the lose the House,
Speaker 1: and they lose the Senate, and then they lose the
Speaker 1: presidency to Donald Trump. So while he is himself personally
Speaker 1: an extraordinarily talented political figure, there's no indication that there's
Speaker 1: really an ability to transfer that over to anyone else.
Speaker 1: Now that being said, Obama, even though he kind of
Speaker 1: stays out of the political limelight, he seeks other SERTs
Speaker 1: of limelights that stays out of the political limelight. He
Speaker 1: obviously has been incredibly influential in crafting the trajectory of
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party in his post presidency, and basically, you know,
Speaker 1: his goal, his interests in terms of securing his legacy
Speaker 1: have always been to make sure that no one does
Speaker 1: anything like bigger and.
Speaker 6: Better than he does.
Speaker 1: So that's why he was on the warpath against Bernie Sanders,
Speaker 1: because how does Obamacare look in retrospect if you end
Speaker 1: up with Medicare for all, well, that kind of really
Speaker 1: diminishes him and his legacy ultimately. So he uh famously,
Speaker 1: you know, was very involved in DNC and putting Tom
Speaker 1: Perez in charge. He was very involved then in helping
Speaker 1: Joe Biden secure the nomination in twenty twenty, even though
Speaker 1: all the indications were that once again he was very
Speaker 1: reluctant about thinking that Joe Biden was the guy.
Speaker 6: He waited.
Speaker 1: He you know, flirted with Pete and Bato and a
Speaker 1: whole cast of other Democratic contenders before it was clear like, okay,
Speaker 1: if you actually want to beat Bernie, you got to
Speaker 1: line up behind Joe Biden right now. And he made
Speaker 1: the calls and got every ready to drop out and
Speaker 1: fall in line behind Joe Biden. And so he really
Speaker 1: does to a large extent, which I think probably greats
Speaker 1: on him. Ohe his election and you know, his success
Speaker 1: in winning the nomination to Barack Obama, as you reference,
Speaker 1: they've always had. You just has an interesting relationship, a beautifulship.
Speaker 1: It's a complex relationship because Obama is this you know,
Speaker 1: Ivy league intellectually, He's got all those sorts of types
Speaker 1: around him. That's the ecosystem that he's comfortable in. Joe Biden,
Speaker 1: I'm a Scranton you know, with is like working class.
Speaker 5: Affects, a powering intellect.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying he's a stupid man, but he's you know,
Speaker 1: they're they're sort of like oil and water when it
Speaker 1: comes to their style of politics. Biden is all about
Speaker 1: the personal and not way. He's kind of more like Trump.
Speaker 1: You know, it's very hands on. He wants to be
Speaker 1: in there working this person and that person.
Speaker 6: And at this point, you.
Speaker 1: Know, the politics have really moved past that era and
Speaker 1: is sort of like, you know, very outdated that mode
Speaker 1: of doing politics, and he and Obama just you know,
Speaker 1: they kind of clash in terms of their political style,
Speaker 1: though Obama people kind of look down their nose at him.
Speaker 1: Reportedly from other reports, Joe Biden still is like talks
Speaker 1: about Obama all the time, like, oh, I bet Obama
Speaker 1: wishes he could have done that. So I think a
Speaker 1: big motivation in his presidency is just to like prove
Speaker 1: the Obama people wrong. So anyway, that's you know, when
Speaker 1: you talk about their interesting relationship, that's some of the
Speaker 1: backstory there, and that's why part of why it's noteworthy
Speaker 1: that you know, Obama's jumping into the freight here wholeheartedly
Speaker 1: to try to rescue Joe because clearly he feels that
Speaker 1: this campaign is not exactly off to a stunningly successful start.
Speaker 4: You know, there were people in twenty fifteen and twenty
Speaker 4: sixteen that said, you know, bregsit really had a chance,
Speaker 4: and there were people who didn't, and Obama was very
Speaker 4: much among the people who didn't. And then that pretended
Speaker 4: what happened in twenty sixteen with Donald Trump. And yeah,
Speaker 4: I agree, I think that's that's a really good point.
Speaker 4: And now, actually, here's an interesting glimpse also at maybe
Speaker 4: how Democrats are trying to have good political instincts. We
Speaker 4: can put this next tear sheet up on the screen
Speaker 4: from Axios that writes for the first time in more
Speaker 4: than two months, President Biden. On Tuesday, he was in
Speaker 4: North Carolina again publicly uttered a word that he and
Speaker 4: other Democrats have largely abandoned, quote biden nomics. It was
Speaker 4: the first time that he did that since January twenty fifth.
Speaker 4: Shout out to Axios for tracking the times that Biden
Speaker 4: uses the phrase Bidenomics, because if you look at that chart,
Speaker 4: it's extremely detailed. They also, i mean it started, yeah,
Speaker 4: twenty nine, twenty nine times in July twenty one and fifteen,
Speaker 4: thirteen fourteen. They have these like very detailed counts. But
Speaker 4: it's also gone to congressional Democrats. They have a chart
Speaker 4: in the same article where they show congressional Democrats mentioning
Speaker 4: Bidenomics way less in the fall and now basically not
Speaker 4: using that phrase at all.
Speaker 5: Meanwhile, Republicans have.
Speaker 4: Used bidenomics quote nearly five hundred times this month in
Speaker 4: their public statements.
Speaker 5: So there you see, And this is interesting.
Speaker 4: It goes back to the Korean John Pierre interview, right
Speaker 4: that she could have had some type of answer to
Speaker 4: what was going on with the grocery bills and that
Speaker 4: just basic question that is in a lot of people's minds,
Speaker 4: even though Democrats don't want to admit that, some people
Speaker 4: still aren't super happy with the economy, and a lot
Speaker 4: of it comes down to, you know, the rate of
Speaker 4: increase of inflation can decrease, it doesn't mean that prices
Speaker 4: are any lower than they were when people remember, and
Speaker 4: so they just it's like they're flailing to come up
Speaker 4: with a good answer to this question. Yeah, Chris, it
Speaker 4: actually shouldn't be that hard. Just from like a political.
Speaker 1: Perspective, Democrats famously horrific at branding and messaging, just terrible
Speaker 1: build back back, come on the inflation reduction. I like
Speaker 1: they're so bad at this Apparently Biden was kind of
Speaker 1: reluctant about the Bidenomics label to start with. I don't know,
Speaker 1: his political team seemed like they were into it, and
Speaker 1: he was like a little bit reluctant with it to
Speaker 1: begin with. And his instinct in this case was much
Speaker 1: better than the teams, because you don't want to own
Speaker 1: with your name branded oh every aspect of this economy
Speaker 1: right now, you really don't. And so I think, you know,
Speaker 1: when they saw the way that Republicans found this branding
Speaker 1: very useful and seized on it, and they sort of realize, oh,
Speaker 1: people are not feeling great about this economy. In fact,
Speaker 1: the economy is not great, and they still have a
Speaker 1: lot of really legitimate problems with it. And there's also
Speaker 1: like I could explain to you what Bidenomics is, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that their team could explain to you what
Speaker 1: Bidenomics is, but I don't. It's not like there's a
Speaker 1: super clear like this is the biden way of approaching
Speaker 1: the economy that most normies would be able to explain
Speaker 1: to you. So it was a fail on every level.
Speaker 1: It does sort of remind me of you know, the
Speaker 1: Obamacare Affordable Care act Oba versus Obamacare debate. Back in
Speaker 1: the day, Republicans wanted to brand it as Obamacare because
Speaker 1: they wanted him to own anything that people were dissatisfied
Speaker 1: with with the law, and they also wanted to put
Speaker 1: you know, he was very unpopular at the time, so
Speaker 1: they wanted to brand it in that way also to
Speaker 1: undercut the program itself. And you know, at the time
Speaker 1: that was listen that you guys know my thoughts on healthcare,
Speaker 1: like it was better than the previous iteration, but obviously
Speaker 1: still has a whole lot of problems. So at the
Speaker 1: time that branding was really bad for them. Now it's
Speaker 1: not as bad as things have worn on, and so
Speaker 1: maybe ten years from now people would be able to
Speaker 1: speak to a Bidenomics that they understand and that they
Speaker 1: could relate to. But right now, in the here and now,
Speaker 1: obviously this has this particular branding exercise has not worked
Speaker 1: out well for them, and.
Speaker 6: They've taken more to wanting to blame Trump.
Speaker 1: For any dissatisfaction that people have with the economy, which
Speaker 1: is a polar opposite approach of branding the economy like
Speaker 1: Bidenomics and trying to own all of it. Instead they're
Speaker 1: actually now trying to more like shift blame, like, oh, well,
Speaker 1: if you're not happy, it's because of the last guy,
Speaker 1: and we're trying to clean up his mess.
Speaker 4: If unless you're mailing people checks in an emergency or
Speaker 4: any at any time like Donald Trump did, you're not
Speaker 4: going to want to put your name on the state
Speaker 4: of the economy because there are always a big chunk
Speaker 4: of people who are like this is the nature of
Speaker 4: the American economy. There's always going to be a big
Speaker 4: chunk of people that are deeply dissatisfied with the economy,
Speaker 4: especially after a pandemic and then recession and all of
Speaker 4: the various economic fallout from that. It's just an incredibly
Speaker 4: stupid move to want to put your name on that again,
Speaker 4: unless you are literally mailing tecks and signing them Joe Biden, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it just makes no sense from a political perspective.
Speaker 1: I mean, I said in a minute ago, I could
Speaker 1: describe you a Bidenomics is I mean, if you actually
Speaker 1: look at the record of this administration, because I'm not
Speaker 1: one hundred percent sure what they mean by Bidenomics, to
Speaker 1: be totally honest with you, like how they would describe
Speaker 1: the policy. The actual policy record is allowing all of
Speaker 1: the pandemic era social safety net pieces to expire, allowing
Speaker 1: the child tax credit to expire, so.
Speaker 5: Basically up student loan forgiveness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so basically like undercutting the social safety net that's
Speaker 1: been one part of Bidenomics. You've got the infrastructure, You've
Speaker 1: got some sort of like you've got antitrust, You've got
Speaker 1: the NLRB, which is much more muscular than it's ever been.
Speaker 1: Those are the pieces that I would put on the positive.
Speaker 6: Side of the ledger.
Speaker 1: So those are like the actual realities of Bidenomics.
Speaker 6: But I don't know that that's how they would.
Speaker 1: They would probably not emphasize that stripping of the social
Speaker 1: safety net piece.
Speaker 5: Probably in particular.
Speaker 4: They just like to talk about cracking down on corporate greed,
Speaker 4: which I mean from the anti trust perspective, sure, but
Speaker 4: they never talk about their anti trust policy.
Speaker 5: Is funny enough. Let's take a look at the polling though.
Speaker 4: So this is where things are going to get really
Speaker 4: interesting because we talked about Ryan and I talked about
Speaker 4: the RFK junior vice presidential announcement on yesterday's show, and
Speaker 4: you know, as much as I know, it's fun for
Speaker 4: people online to like dunk on RFK Junior, there's going
Speaker 4: to be there's potential for this to really affect the
Speaker 4: Trump and Biden campaigns, So there's no question about it.
Speaker 4: So if we put a four up on the screen,
Speaker 4: what we will see is just Joe Biden and Donald
Speaker 4: Trump head to head. So to Crystal's point she mentioned earlier,
Speaker 4: Biden has seen this is quinnipiac. Biden has seen some
Speaker 4: better polling recently, so he's at forty eight here and
Speaker 4: Trump he's at forty five percent. So that's that may
Speaker 4: or may not be within the margin of error. It's
Speaker 4: pretty close. And the RCP average has Donald Trump up
Speaker 4: one point four. So Trump's at forty six point seven
Speaker 4: and Biden's at forty five point three in the RCP average.
Speaker 4: But that said, it's actually been tightening for if you
Speaker 4: look at it about the past month. So it's a
Speaker 4: close race, and then it gets a whole lot closer
Speaker 4: because increasingly the Biden Trump binary is not what is
Speaker 4: going to be on the ballot. It's not realistic from
Speaker 4: an electoral college perspective at this point either.
Speaker 5: So we have more polling that we can put up.
Speaker 4: The next element when you add third party candidates, and
Speaker 4: that's an additional seven percent support if you're looking at
Speaker 4: this on your screen for Jill Stein and Cornell West,
Speaker 4: so not just RFK Junior, but if you put all
Speaker 4: of them together, he's around thirteen percent. In that Quinnipiac
Speaker 4: University poll, you are around twenty percent of support for
Speaker 4: third party candidates. People have looked at the support for
Speaker 4: both of the major party nominees and said the polling
Speaker 4: is on track when you add a third party candidate
Speaker 4: in the race for them to be at Clinton esque
Speaker 4: eras when Ross Perrot was a bit of a spoiler
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety two. That's obviously hotly debated still to
Speaker 4: this day, but the point remains that he took a
Speaker 4: share of the vote away from both candidates, and that
Speaker 4: meant Bill Clinton. I think he was what forty two
Speaker 4: forty three percent he won the presidency somewhere somewhere in
Speaker 4: there where it's not like the big mandate. When you
Speaker 4: have somebody like Barack Obama winning in two thousand and eight,
Speaker 4: you're realistically looking at a candidate that's going to win
Speaker 4: with perhaps low forties or even high thirties percent of
Speaker 4: the vote, and could be you know these candidates in
Speaker 4: a state like Pennsylvania, right, And I talked about this
Speaker 4: yesterday to Crystal. Jill Stein only basically needed to be
Speaker 4: on the ballot in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in twenty sixteen
Speaker 4: to make Hillary Clinton blame Russia for losing. Because Jill
Speaker 4: Stein actually did take a decent chunk away from Hillary
Speaker 4: Clinton in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin electorally.
Speaker 1: Well, that also is hotly content because if you ask
Speaker 1: a lot of jill Stein voters, if they're like, I
Speaker 1: was not going to vote if it wasn't for Jill Stein.
Speaker 5: I think that's true and obvious.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously, when you lose and you blame some
Speaker 1: other entity, it's almost always cope. So we'll put all
Speaker 1: that aside. But by the way I looked it up,
Speaker 1: you were very close. Bill Clinton forty three percent overall,
Speaker 1: George hw Bush thirty seven point four, and Ross Borrow
Speaker 1: eighteen point nine. So we are right in that ballpark
Speaker 1: of those potential results.
Speaker 6: Jill Stein, when.
Speaker 1: You look at these three candidates, is the one who
Speaker 1: actually has the clearest path to being on the ballots
Speaker 1: in the most states. And you know there is a
Speaker 1: chance she'll take a few percentage points from Joe Biden.
Speaker 1: She's certainly not taking any from Donald Trump or very
Speaker 1: minimal Cornell West. I think has probably the most challenging
Speaker 1: path to getting ballot access in potentially any states.
Speaker 6: I don't know.
Speaker 1: RFK Junior, you know, he also has a challenging path,
Speaker 1: but he has much more money behind him. He's got
Speaker 1: apparently a real organization trying to get on the ballot
Speaker 1: in a number of key swing states that they have targeted.
Speaker 1: In Novada, yeah, well, maybe he did obtain the requisite
Speaker 1: number of signatures, but my understanding is that you know,
Speaker 1: they may they This is not really his fault. They
Speaker 1: make these procedures as onerous as they possibly can to
Speaker 1: try to keep third party candidates off the ballot. Apparently,
Speaker 1: when he filed his signatures in Nevada, you had to
Speaker 1: have a vice presidential pick. He didn't quite have a
Speaker 1: vice presidential pick yet, so not with's in doubt whether
Speaker 1: he'll actually get on the ballot Nevada.
Speaker 6: I don't know what the.
Speaker 1: Latest is with that, but it is a good illustration
Speaker 1: of some of the obstacles that he faces, even with
Speaker 1: a well funded campaign and now a vice presidential pick
Speaker 1: who can further fund the campaign as you and Ryan were,
Speaker 1: I think abstutely discussing which to me. You know, I
Speaker 1: know people are a little confused in some ways by
Speaker 1: his vice presidential pick. But if your number one challenge
Speaker 1: is ballot access, is not the craziest thing in the
Speaker 1: world to bring in a billionaire who can, you know,
Speaker 1: front you one hundred million bucks and help you get
Speaker 1: on the ballot.
Speaker 6: If that's like old.
Speaker 1: Number one, and you got your eyes on the prize,
Speaker 1: then maybe that's not such a crazy, such a crazy
Speaker 1: choice to make.
Speaker 5: You guys should have picked billionaires to host counterpoints, be.
Speaker 4: Doing this from like fund the top of the Empire
Speaker 4: state building.
Speaker 6: I'm happy with our choices personally.
Speaker 4: No regrets, No regrets. That's from one of my favorite movies,
Speaker 4: We're the Millers. Oh really, ma gosh, Crystal. Okay, you
Speaker 4: know it's a pretty it's a pretty let's say basic movie. Now,
Speaker 4: Donald Trump is pivoting to RFK Junior.
Speaker 5: Let's put this next image up on the screen.
Speaker 4: This is a truth social post for Donald Trump, who
Speaker 4: says rf K Junior is the most radical left candidate
Speaker 4: in the race by far. He's a big fan of
Speaker 4: the Green new scam and other economy killing disasters.
Speaker 5: So if you're watching this, you see.
Speaker 4: Trump posted a pretty hefty paragraph on truth social at
Speaker 4: one am on March.
Speaker 1: Six, always a sign of a cool, reasoned and rational
Speaker 1: social media posting when it drops at one fifty two am.
Speaker 4: Oh Man, well, soccer was already like doing his morning workout.
Speaker 6: Is could plunge?
Speaker 5: That was for soccer.
Speaker 4: But so this is actually again, this is interesting, really
Speaker 4: interesting from my perspective because I think we are going
Speaker 4: to see more of this from Donald Trump. I think
Speaker 4: he's actually like, really rankled that any group of sort
Speaker 4: of anti establishment Republican voters that he has owned, he
Speaker 4: has created to some extent this movement that is now
Speaker 4: sort of looking at RFK Junior. Now, I don't think
Speaker 4: that they're going to shift from in huge numbers from
Speaker 4: RFK Junior to from Donald Trump to RFK Junior. I do, though,
Speaker 4: think that Trump is really bothered by it. He knows
Speaker 4: that those margins could be thin in a place like
Speaker 4: Wisconsin or Pennsylvania. And as Trump pivots to RFK Junior
Speaker 4: and says, for example, he's a fan of the green
Speaker 4: news scam. My theory is that actually made more Biden
Speaker 4: leaners become interested in RFK Junior. People who have only
Speaker 4: heard of him as a crazy anti vaxxer from the
Speaker 4: media turn and realize this guy.
Speaker 5: Clean up the Hudson River.
Speaker 4: Well, like, this guy has some real progressive bona fides
Speaker 4: going back decades. So I think, I that's one of
Speaker 4: the interesting things. Yeah, potentially about DEM voters Biden and RFK.
Speaker 1: I wish he was actually in favor of the quote
Speaker 1: unquote green new scam. But I mean I've interviewed him
Speaker 1: a couple times and asked him specifically about his environmental policy,
Speaker 1: and he was very explicit that he believes in, you know,
Speaker 1: the free market's ability to clean up the environment. He
Speaker 1: doesn't want to really talk about climate change because he
Speaker 1: thinks that it's like off putting to you know, some
Speaker 1: of the independents or Republicans potentially that he wants to
Speaker 1: win over. So he does not in fact support the
Speaker 1: quote unquote green news scam as much as I actually
Speaker 1: wish that he would.
Speaker 5: And that's why Trump is threatened by him, because he's
Speaker 5: not talking about it.
Speaker 1: Well, and let's put the next up on the screen.
Speaker 1: This is the other reason why even though I know, recently,
Speaker 1: polls have shown that more Biden voters defect RFK Junior
Speaker 1: than Trump, although it continues to be pretty close.
Speaker 6: You still have.
Speaker 1: These favorable ratings that are much higher for RFK among
Speaker 1: Republicans than they are among Democrats. So keep this up
Speaker 1: on the screen so I can explain this. This is
Speaker 1: from a New Economist you gov poll that I found,
Speaker 1: and they ask rfk's favorability by voter intent. So if
Speaker 1: you say you're you're you know, Biden and Trump are
Speaker 1: the only choices, and you say you're going to vote
Speaker 1: for Biden. Out of that group, only nineteen percent have
Speaker 1: a favorable view of RFK. If your intention is to
Speaker 1: vote for Trump fifty eight percent, so much higher number.
Speaker 1: You know, large majority have a favorable view of RFK.
Speaker 1: And of course the favorability is the polar opposite. Sixty
Speaker 1: five percent of voters who are Biden intending voters have
Speaker 1: an unfavorable view of RFK and for the Trump number,
Speaker 1: it's only twenty seven percent. You have a negative view
Speaker 1: of RFK Junior. I mean, he really is kind of
Speaker 1: a prism, like depends on what issue, depends.
Speaker 6: On what era.
Speaker 1: Even his anti vax stuff, right, just ten years ago,
Speaker 1: that would have read as like kooky left liberal, Hollywood
Speaker 1: right viewpoint right right now it reads j yeah, exactly
Speaker 1: now codes very heavy right wing right. You know, the
Speaker 1: way he talks about censorship, like he really leaned into Ukraine,
Speaker 1: which you know, his view of ending that war and
Speaker 1: stopping the weaponship, the things I support, by the way,
Speaker 1: but that codes at this point right wing, which is
Speaker 1: kind of ridiculous, but anyway, that's how it often codes.
Speaker 1: And then, like I said, the fact that he's so
Speaker 1: prominent in the anti vax movement, I want to really
Speaker 1: the leaders there that obviously codes right wing. So and
Speaker 1: you had at the beginning of his campaign, when he
Speaker 1: was running in the Democratic primary, all of these Republicans
Speaker 1: who found it very convenient, including the Fox News types
Speaker 1: two boost him and thought that was really useful as
Speaker 1: a weapon against Joe Biden. And then when he switched
Speaker 1: to running as an independant, they couldn't just turn that
Speaker 1: off and be like just kidding, Actually, we hate this
Speaker 1: guy and he's a liberal and he loves the Green
Speaker 1: News crist who.
Speaker 4: Was on Epstein's jet, Like that's the stuff that bubbles
Speaker 4: up on this right in these corners of social media,
Speaker 4: but truly like it's when you look at, for example,
Speaker 4: how he's courted the Libertarian Party's vote and whether he
Speaker 4: would run on the Libertarian Party ticket, which had the
Speaker 4: infrastructure to get on the ballot in some of those
Speaker 4: states in a way that you know, the knowledgeable people
Speaker 4: that were doing this and had, like Jill Stein, she
Speaker 4: knows how to do it. If you look back at
Speaker 4: how he tried to court libertarian voters, a lot of
Speaker 4: them had a problem with that sort of regulatory question.
Speaker 4: But he's running to address that because he seems to
Speaker 4: think that's his best path to getting significant numbers in
Speaker 4: some of those states. And how that evolves if the
Speaker 4: Republican Party starts really amplifying Trump's message. They have done
Speaker 4: it a little bit before this true social post. It's
Speaker 4: not the first time they've waited, Yeah, put out statements
Speaker 4: and stuff.
Speaker 1: Well they also, I mean, Sean Hannity had been like
Speaker 1: his best buddy while he was running in the Democratic primary.
Speaker 1: And then he comes back on and Hannity drops like
Speaker 1: but clearly a whole abo file that he had gotten
Speaker 1: from Trump of like here's all the ways you're a
Speaker 1: liberal global is terrible whatever. So, I mean they did
Speaker 1: try to turn on a dime with regard to their
Speaker 1: attitude towards them. There were even some conservatives like on
Speaker 1: Twitter who literally were like, now I'm going to attack
Speaker 1: him because now he's no longer useful to me. All
Speaker 1: of this is a long way for in terms of
Speaker 1: you know, my perspective saying, it's very unclear to me
Speaker 1: who ultimately he's going to quote unquote.
Speaker 6: Take more from.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, with Jilli, with Jill Biden, Jill Stein,
Speaker 1: and Cornell West much more clear, like they're lefties. You
Speaker 1: know they're going to pull from that side of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: That's very clear. RFK Junior. I still think it's a
Speaker 1: giant question mark. The Kennedy name obviously very democratic coded
Speaker 1: some more recent views, and the ecosystems he was inhabiting
Speaker 1: much more Republican coded. Now he's got this new vice
Speaker 1: presidential pick who does seem to be like a lib
Speaker 1: you know in the causes she's funded, etc. And then
Speaker 1: there's always the question of what ballots will even be on,
Speaker 1: which is where the Libertarian Party nomination potential really comes
Speaker 1: into play.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Absolutely, the RNC, speaking of the twenty twenty four election,
Speaker 4: the RNC is gearing up to actually address concerns about
Speaker 4: the election itself, which are rampant in conservative circles, in
Speaker 4: conservative movement circles, in conservative supporter circles, conservative donor circles.
Speaker 4: So you can understand why the RNC is then going
Speaker 4: to try to make this a focus of its sort
Speaker 4: of campaign on the ground in the next several months.
Speaker 4: But Crystal, oh my goodness, a lot of people know
Speaker 4: probably that Trump's daughter in law, Laura Trump, who's married
Speaker 4: to Eric Trump, is now a co chair of the
Speaker 4: RNC after the sort of soft coup that ousted Roni McDaniel,
Speaker 4: who then faced another soft coup at NPC news just
Speaker 4: can't get going from the revolutionaries in the Republican Party.
Speaker 4: But Laura Trump is now a co chair of the RNC,
Speaker 4: which is obviously the Republican Party's official apparatus. Here in Washington, DC,
Speaker 4: she sat down for an interview with Garrett hak of
Speaker 4: NBC News and they had a conversation about basically the
Speaker 4: way they're going to handle the question of the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty election, which is huge because it affects the way
Speaker 4: they're going to handle the twenty twenty four election. It
Speaker 4: affects the way voters decide whether or not to even
Speaker 4: go to the polls, whether or not to how to
Speaker 4: think about election results. So let's first start by just
Speaker 4: rolling the clip and we'll dive into it after that.
Speaker 11: Is it going to be the position of the RNC
Speaker 11: in twenty twenty four that the twenty twenty election was
Speaker 11: not fairly decided or the was stolen somehow?
Speaker 10: Well, I think we're past that. I think that's in
Speaker 10: the past. We learned a lot. Certainly, we took a
Speaker 10: lot of notes. Right now, we have twenty three states
Speaker 10: that have seventy eight law suits in these states to
Speaker 10: ensure that it is harder to cheat and easier to vote.
Speaker 10: We want fairness and transparency in our elections.
Speaker 11: Does that support for him financially include paying his legal
Speaker 11: bills directly, not from the RNC.
Speaker 10: It does not support paying his legal bills.
Speaker 11: How do you tell people who are sending money to
Speaker 11: the RNC, people who may have never hired a lawyer
Speaker 11: for themselves before in their life, but it's more important
Speaker 11: to put their money towards paying the legal bills of
Speaker 11: a billionaire than helping elect Republicans in Pennsylvania or in Michigan.
Speaker 10: Well, if you've never had to hire a lawyer, you're
Speaker 10: doing great stuff.
Speaker 5: You're in great shape.
Speaker 6: I'm very happy for you.
Speaker 10: Look, that is the waterfall of the Joint Fundraising Committee
Speaker 10: you're referencing, and anyone who does not want to contribute
Speaker 10: to that very small amount of money is able to
Speaker 10: opt out of that.
Speaker 4: So I think he expected her to give a different
Speaker 4: answer to the question about whether the RNC is going
Speaker 4: to pay Donald Trump legal bills, because then he tried
Speaker 4: to say, well, what do you say to R and
Speaker 4: C donors who are giving money to pay Trump's legal
Speaker 4: bills when she had just said that's through the.
Speaker 5: Joint Fundraising Committee.
Speaker 4: Now, obviously money is fungible and people are telling donors
Speaker 4: where to put their money to do X, Y and z.
Speaker 4: So that's still obviously part of the conversation. But you know,
Speaker 4: Chrystal I was prepared based on the media coverage of
Speaker 4: that interview. She stumbles, especially a little bit in the
Speaker 4: beginning where she's like, that's in the past, it's in
Speaker 4: the past, and kind of didn't know where to go
Speaker 4: from there.
Speaker 5: But it's a really really hard question.
Speaker 4: I mean, I thought, if you were just watching that
Speaker 4: and not like looking at a transcript. She came out fine,
Speaker 4: But that question Republicans still don't have a really really
Speaker 4: good answer for it, which brings us to this tear
Speaker 4: sheet we can put up. This is B two from
Speaker 4: the Washington Post. Those seeking employment at the RNC after
Speaker 4: a Trump back purge of the committee this month had
Speaker 4: been asked in job interviews if they believe the twenty
Speaker 4: twenty election was stolen, according to people familiar with the interviews,
Speaker 4: making the false claim a litmus test of sorts for hiring.
Speaker 4: In recent days, Trump advisors have quizzed multiple employees who
Speaker 4: had worked in key twenty twenty four states and who
Speaker 4: are reapplying for jobs about their views on the last
Speaker 4: presidential election, according to people who spoke on the condition
Speaker 4: of anonymity. So that's from the Washington Post. That is
Speaker 4: why the RNC is in an incredible pickle. So a
Speaker 4: lot of people lost their jobs but were invited to
Speaker 4: reapply for them, as the story shows, And what they're
Speaker 4: trying to do with the Trump people are trying to
Speaker 4: do is filter out anyone who kind of like Ron McDaniel.
Speaker 4: In her first interview with NBC News, when being pushed
Speaker 4: about the twenty twenty election claims by Kristen Welker, said,
Speaker 4: you know, when you work at the RNC, you just
Speaker 4: got to take one for the team and I can
Speaker 4: be more myself now, which is such a swampy thing
Speaker 4: to say. They're now trying to filter out the operators
Speaker 4: for the true believers, Like they want people who are
Speaker 4: genuinely committed, and what they might end up getting are
Speaker 4: people who are genuinely committed to acting like they're genuinely committed,
Speaker 4: which is a real skill in Washington.
Speaker 6: Well, in the end, what's the difference?
Speaker 5: That's good?
Speaker 6: Truly, you know, if you're in to me, that's well
Speaker 6: what it is.
Speaker 4: I think there were people who did that in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 4: and they learned that those people when the going gets tough,
Speaker 4: like in Alyssa Farah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So are you willing in your job interview to
Speaker 1: basically like accept these preposterous.
Speaker 6: Things and state it publicly?
Speaker 1: Like are you willing to kind of like debase yourself
Speaker 1: to jump through that hoop? That's the requirement. They're being
Speaker 1: hired back to the RNC.
Speaker 4: They don't want Mike Pences like people who January sixth,
Speaker 4: comes and they are not listening to what Donald Trump
Speaker 4: and Johnny Sman are saying should be done with the electors,
Speaker 4: Like that's what they're trying to screen out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's very I mean, it's obviously very dissonant
Speaker 1: with what Laura Trump was trying to say in that
Speaker 1: NBC interview, like, Oh, that's in the past.
Speaker 6: Oh really, why is it.
Speaker 1: A central part of your hiring process? Because Trump has
Speaker 1: made this a central litmus for the Republican Party and
Speaker 1: the Republican base. I think sees it as a central
Speaker 1: litmus test. That's why you got the slate of candidates
Speaker 1: you did in the midterm elections, which was really, you know,
Speaker 1: unfortunate for Republicans who were hoping for better results there.
Speaker 1: And obviously it's not in the past for Donald Trump,
Speaker 1: who continues to talk about it all the time and
Speaker 1: put this up on the screen from Truth Social just
Speaker 1: recently saying how many times is Fox New is going
Speaker 1: to put on Rhino Bush apologist Mark Tieson he was
Speaker 1: wrong about me in twenty sixteen, twenty twenty, I got
Speaker 1: more votes than any sitting present in history, but the
Speaker 1: election was rigged, et.
Speaker 6: Cetera, etc.
Speaker 1: This is still you know, very standard at his rallies,
Speaker 1: in his speeches. This is not the past for him,
Speaker 1: and he's not going to let it go. He's not
Speaker 1: going to move forward. And it has implications not only
Speaker 1: in terms of this like R and C takeover and
Speaker 1: making sure that they're you know, totally aligned with him
Speaker 1: in every single way, which, let's be honest, the party committees,
Speaker 1: like you know under Obama are now under by like that. Obviously,
Speaker 1: the DNZ is fully aligned behind Joe Biden that primary
Speaker 1: for him effectively. So it's not like it's unusual to
Speaker 1: have the party apparatus totally in lockstep with whoever the
Speaker 1: current president or the current nominee is. But it also
Speaker 1: matters a lot when it comes to this question of
Speaker 1: early voting. Yes, hugely because and that's part of what
Speaker 1: Laura Trump was kind of like gesturing towards in that interview.
Speaker 1: You know, if Trump had just leaned into getting people
Speaker 1: to vote early and by mail, it's very possible he's
Speaker 1: president right now. But instead of casting doubt on that process,
Speaker 1: that everybody had to show up on election day, and
Speaker 1: you guys, know how life is, right, you may have
Speaker 1: every intention of voting and then you forget, or your
Speaker 1: kid gets sick, or you got to stay late at
Speaker 1: the job, or you're just really tired, or it's writing on.
Speaker 6: You don't feel it like there's a million reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 6: there's a million reasons. I can come up on election.
Speaker 1: Day where you're like, Eh, this isn't going to happen.
Speaker 6: For me today. This just isn't the cards.
Speaker 1: So if you are banking on trying to get your
Speaker 1: supporters there on that day, you are putting yourself at
Speaker 1: a profound disadvantage.
Speaker 6: Trump has clearly.
Speaker 1: Been told by his political advisors that this was a
Speaker 1: problem for him. At times he has signaled like, Okay,
Speaker 1: now we got to do the mail in balloting thing,
Speaker 1: But he also is very reluctant. And the views of
Speaker 1: this among the Republican base are also pretty baked in now,
Speaker 1: where they feel that this is susceptible to ringing. They
Speaker 1: feel like they need to wait and show up on
Speaker 1: election day. And so in every election we've had since then,
Speaker 1: the early vote comes in more heavily democratic, the day
Speaker 1: a vote comes in more heavily Republican. That is reversal
Speaker 1: by the way of previous trends prior to COVID so
Speaker 1: they're trying to reverse that. But the fact that this
Speaker 1: election denialism and stop the deal stuff is still so
Speaker 1: central to the Republican Party and so central and important
Speaker 1: to Trump himself makes it very difficult to move beyond
Speaker 1: that orientation towards early voting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's just like an incredible catch twenty two. If
Speaker 4: you talk about this and you tackle the issue head on,
Speaker 4: which is exactly what your voters want you to do,
Speaker 4: you also so distrust in the electoral process, which can
Speaker 4: hurt turnout.
Speaker 7: Yea.
Speaker 5: So it's a really hard problem.
Speaker 4: And I think that's one of the things that you know,
Speaker 4: the Democrats made Katie Porter apologize for saying that she
Speaker 4: felt her primary was rigged, which it's.
Speaker 5: Like, clearly money does rig elections.
Speaker 4: And as much as I hate to test the quote
Speaker 4: stolen talk, and that's one of the interesting things about
Speaker 4: Trump's true social posts is that he said rigged, and
Speaker 4: he kind of started off staying stolen and has now
Speaker 4: moved to using that rigged parlance. More that takes a
Speaker 4: lot of money to push back on. You know, Molly
Speaker 4: Ball had a long report and Time Magazine about all
Speaker 4: of the money that Mark Zuckerberg poured into early voting efforts,
Speaker 4: ballot curation, all of these things.
Speaker 5: That party apparatuses.
Speaker 4: Democrats just realized during COVID that they can use all
Speaker 4: of these mechanisms put a lot of money behind it
Speaker 4: in Democratic districts.
Speaker 5: And that's politics.
Speaker 4: So as much as I have an ideological disagreement with
Speaker 4: huge early voting, which is a totally fair debate, I
Speaker 4: think it's an interesting conversation.
Speaker 5: As much as I might not like that, it is
Speaker 5: the reality.
Speaker 4: And so that's why they want to have loyalists stacking
Speaker 4: the RNC because they know they need to get on
Speaker 4: one page about this question, because it actually when you
Speaker 4: have such a close match that could be within one
Speaker 4: point between Trump and Biden, and you have all these
Speaker 4: third party candidates we already talked about, you need to
Speaker 4: be confident that you did absolutely everything you could in
Speaker 4: those respects and that your voters wanted to vote because
Speaker 4: they felt like their votes were going to be counted
Speaker 4: in a place like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, whatever. So it's a
Speaker 4: hugely difficult issue for Republicans. They're in a pickle catch
Speaker 4: twenty two whatever you want to call it, and it's
Speaker 4: not there's really no easy answer, But I guess they've
Speaker 4: realized from a political perspective, it's better that they're on
Speaker 4: the same page.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The proof that this is a real problem for them
Speaker 1: comes from those Georgia elections that happened right after the
Speaker 1: runoff election for those two Senate seats. And typically, you
Speaker 1: know Sager and I when we were looking at the
Speaker 1: election day results and we're like, oh, it's going to
Speaker 1: a runoff. These are probably both going to be Republican
Speaker 1: seats because that usually historically was the way the trend went,
Speaker 1: that Republicans would out turn out Democrats in the runoff period.
Speaker 1: And I think two things ended up being really critical.
Speaker 1: Number One, Democrats, for once in their lives, actually had
Speaker 1: a really good message that was very clear, which was
Speaker 1: vote for us and you will get checks.
Speaker 6: That worked very effectively.
Speaker 1: But the other thing was you had all the stop
Speaker 1: this Deal staff and you had people literally going down
Speaker 1: to Georgia ostensibly the campaign for these candidates who were
Speaker 1: calling into question whether your vote is even going to
Speaker 1: be counted. So, yeah, if you're a voter and you're like,
Speaker 1: what why am I going to take time out of
Speaker 1: my life to go and vote when these people are
Speaker 1: telling me, it's right and it's not going to be counted.
Speaker 1: So I do think that that played into as well
Speaker 1: the fact that they lost both of those seats and
Speaker 1: therefore control of the Senate.
Speaker 4: So let's pivot over to Alabama, where a fascinating special
Speaker 4: election for a state House seat was just held.
Speaker 5: There are results.
Speaker 4: I you know, Chrystal, the media has talked a bit
Speaker 4: about it, but I don't think they've talked about exactly
Speaker 4: how impressive this margin of victory is for Democrats based
Speaker 4: on what happened just in the twenty twenty two election
Speaker 4: in this district. So we can go ahead and put
Speaker 4: the first graphic up on this up on the screen.
Speaker 4: This is Alabama State House District ten where Marylyn Lands
Speaker 4: ran against Teddy Powell. She ran against a different candidate,
Speaker 4: David Cole, back in twenty twenty two. You can see
Speaker 4: the margin there. It was fifty two to forty five Republican.
Speaker 4: Marylyn Lands just won this district sixty two to thirty
Speaker 4: seven thirty eight Democrat. A huge flip and she even
Speaker 4: as a conservative. Media and Alabama has pointed out she
Speaker 4: ran explicitly against the IVF decision in the Alabama Court
Speaker 4: that got headlines for literally weeks because it was so huge.
Speaker 4: She made that a centerpiece of her campaign, to the
Speaker 4: point where, actually, Crystal I took a look at conservative
Speaker 4: media and Alabama's coverage leading up to the vote on Tuesday,
Speaker 4: and a lot of people seem to think that she
Speaker 4: was running this national media campaign that wouldn't necessarily resonate
Speaker 4: in a hyper local statehouse race. Oh interesting that the
Speaker 4: other candidate, the Republican candidate, had localized it. Yellowhammer News
Speaker 4: had an article I read them for like the conservative
Speaker 4: take on Alabama politics. They have some good stuffy They
Speaker 4: wrote basically that he was focused on these hyper local
Speaker 4: issues and that she had made the abortion conversation a
Speaker 4: centerpiece of her campaign.
Speaker 5: And look at the margins. Wow, it wasn't you know what.
Speaker 4: Some people might have expected, which is if she nationalized
Speaker 4: a really local race and talked about these heavy, divisive issues,
Speaker 4: she would turn off voters. And it wasn't you know,
Speaker 4: resonant with people in this is like a district are
Speaker 4: Huntsville who wasn't resonant That's actually turned out to be
Speaker 4: very resonant.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well this is a district.
Speaker 1: I know everybody, you think Alabama, you think super read
Speaker 1: this is a swing district Trump wanted by a single point,
Speaker 1: but she won it by a whole lot more than
Speaker 1: a single point. I mean, I was kind of shocked
Speaker 1: when we put this graphic up. I actually didn't realize
Speaker 1: that it was that large of a margin. It's quite astonishing.
Speaker 1: And I think there's a couple things going on here
Speaker 1: in these special election results, which.
Speaker 6: This is not a one off.
Speaker 1: We've consistently seen a trend of Democrats really outperforming in
Speaker 1: these special election off year elections that we've seen this
Speaker 1: year and before. I think there's two things. I think
Speaker 1: one row is absolutely huge, the fact that she tied
Speaker 1: this right into that IVF decision and just went after
Speaker 1: it really hard and you have this kind of a result.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's it's pretty undeniable, right. But the other
Speaker 1: issue you have for Republicans is now that you've had
Speaker 1: more of this realignment of college educated voters like white
Speaker 1: collar voters.
Speaker 6: Into the Democratic coalition.
Speaker 1: Republicans used to always have this advantage in mid terms,
Speaker 1: off your election, special elections, et cetera, which is that
Speaker 1: their coalition was more likely they were the more reliable voters,
Speaker 1: and that's not the case anymore. You partly have the
Speaker 1: issue we were talking about before about how there's a
Speaker 1: deep skepticism of things like early voting or early in
Speaker 1: person or mail in balloting or whatever. So you're limiting
Speaker 1: yourself in terms of options you have getting the polls anyway,
Speaker 1: making onerous on you anyway, and then you have these
Speaker 1: ships in the coalition that lead to Democrats actually having
Speaker 1: more of the like sort of I come out every
Speaker 1: single election no matter what voters, and you end up
Speaker 1: with these you know, consistent outperformances in the special elections.
Speaker 1: It does make me question too, you know, the polling
Speaker 1: we've been looking at it hasn't been reflective in terms
Speaker 1: of I don't know that there was even any public
Speaker 1: polling done in this race. But we've seen in other instances,
Speaker 1: we've seen Trump underperforming in his primaries. We've seen you know,
Speaker 1: Democratic out performances consistently again outside of the poll in
Speaker 1: these special elections.
Speaker 6: So it also does make.
Speaker 1: Me question, like, are the polls missing some dynamic that's
Speaker 1: going on here that may have an impact on the
Speaker 1: presidential race. Now, on the other hand, that benefit of
Speaker 1: you know, the Democrats having in their coalition the reliable
Speaker 1: voter that's going to turn up. Even in the off
Speaker 1: year election, that may not matter as much when you're
Speaker 1: talking about a presidential election, when you know you have
Speaker 1: a large turnout and so then you you know, are
Speaker 1: bringing in more of the Republican coalition to the mix.
Speaker 1: But you've had this polling trend as well where Biden
Speaker 1: does really well with people who actually voted in the
Speaker 1: last presidential election. Trump in one poll I think is
Speaker 1: the New York Times Siena poll, he was winning people
Speaker 1: who hadn't voted before who said they were going to
Speaker 1: vote this time by twenty three points. So this will
Speaker 1: be one of the central dynamics of you know, whatever
Speaker 1: happens Trump b Biden.
Speaker 5: That's a really good point.
Speaker 4: And actually, if we put the A C two back
Speaker 4: up on the screen, the actually this is probably not
Speaker 4: entirely surprising, but the Lands campaign or Lands herself said today,
Speaker 4: Alabama women and family sent a clear message that will
Speaker 4: be heard of Montgomery and across the nation. Our legislature
Speaker 4: must repeal Alabama's no exceptions abortion ban, fully, restore access
Speaker 4: to IVF, and protect the right to contraception. The president
Speaker 4: of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, it's the big dem
Speaker 4: organization in Alabama that's sort of squarely focused on these
Speaker 4: state races called the victory quote a political earthquake, And
Speaker 4: of course Democrats are going to spin something in a
Speaker 4: way that's best for them. But it's extremely telling that
Speaker 4: when Lance declared victory in a local house race, she
Speaker 4: said women and families sent a clear message about the
Speaker 4: no exceptions abortion ban, access to IVF, and the right
Speaker 4: to contraception. I mean, it's interesting because Republicans and conservatives
Speaker 4: in Alabama weren't necessarily wrong to look at a campaign
Speaker 4: like that in a local race and say other things
Speaker 4: like don't we need new sidewalks or bike trails or
Speaker 4: something like that. That's it's a common, you know, strategic
Speaker 4: mistake that people make.
Speaker 1: Not in this environment, all politics as national now, you know,
Speaker 1: it really is. It's just a different it's just a
Speaker 1: different landscape. And I also think it's very telling though
Speaker 1: that the Republicans decided to run the hyperlocal race and
Speaker 1: just avoid because you also, I mean, the other thing is,
Speaker 1: it's not like this IVF decision was a national decision.
Speaker 1: It was an Alabama situation, so it is also local.
Speaker 1: It's not like she was opening on something over which
Speaker 1: you would have no say and no input in the
Speaker 1: state house there. But I do think it's it's a
Speaker 1: tell because you see this dynamic often, you know where
Speaker 1: let's say you have a Democrat running in a rural
Speaker 1: area that's trending red. Let's say in Ohio. You know
Speaker 1: this trending rud or whatever. Yeah, they'll try to localize that.
Speaker 1: I'm not like those Democrats in Washington. This isn't about them,
Speaker 1: This about us right here in this place, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And that used to work very effectively, and I just
Speaker 1: don't think that it does really anymore. And you know,
Speaker 1: you can certainly point to certain examples where the trend
Speaker 1: goes in the other direction. But I think buy in
Speaker 1: large politics, it's national and if you're fighting against some
Speaker 1: big national issue that voters really have on their mind
Speaker 1: and you just don't want to talk about it, and
Speaker 1: then you're just trying to push it off to the side, like,
Speaker 1: don't think about that and don't worry about that. It's
Speaker 1: a challenging landscape to try to operate in. But like
Speaker 1: I said, the fact that the Republican just didn't even
Speaker 1: want to really approach this, didn't ever I don't know
Speaker 1: what their response was.
Speaker 6: I don't know how they were talking about it, but.
Speaker 1: They clearly didn't want to lean into that in their campaign.
Speaker 1: Is indicative of how, even in a district that Trump
Speaker 1: did win by a point, this ruling was so toxic
Speaker 1: that they know they just have to run away from it.
Speaker 1: And even when they did, they're losing by you know,
Speaker 1: more than twenty points.
Speaker 4: So now, speaking of losing, yeah, a lot of people
Speaker 4: predicted that the Supreme Court's oral arguments in Actually it's
Speaker 4: a case where conservatives are running against the FDA right
Speaker 4: because of methipristone, which is the oral abortion drug that
Speaker 4: is now accounting for more than half of abortions.
Speaker 5: We'll talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 4: But Aaron Hawley, who is actually the wife of Senator
Speaker 4: Josh Hawley, was arguing on behalf of an alliance of
Speaker 4: doctors that is upset about the FDA's fast tracking of
Speaker 4: MEPhI Perstone.
Speaker 5: This was back in like two thousand.
Speaker 4: This happened a really long time ago, and finally someone
Speaker 4: brought a case about it. That was the Fifth Circuit,
Speaker 4: which Ryan calls the crazy Circuit.
Speaker 5: It tends to be more conservative.
Speaker 4: Agreed that the FDA was wrong to fast track the
Speaker 4: approval of MEPhI Perstone when it did so at the
Speaker 4: time all those years ago. But basically standing was a
Speaker 4: huge question during the oral arguments that happened this week,
Speaker 4: and yet on standing and other issues. That question of
Speaker 4: standing meaning whether or not the alliance of doctors that
Speaker 4: Aaron Holly was representing has the sort of standing, has
Speaker 4: the legal sort of not right, but the legal case
Speaker 4: to present this argument to object to the approval.
Speaker 5: All those years ago.
Speaker 4: Aaron Hawley was getting really tough questions from the Conservative justices,
Speaker 4: so not just Kentanji Brown Jackson, but also from Brett Kavanaugh,
Speaker 4: also Amy Cony Barrett, who of course was ushering in
Speaker 4: the era of the Handmad's tale when she was confirmed,
Speaker 4: and others on the Supreme Court. I think even Justice
Speaker 4: Roberts joined the sort of pile on against Aaron Hawley.
Speaker 4: So there's an interesting exchange here with Neil Gorsich. Just
Speaker 4: listen to how he asks. It's a pretty pointed question
Speaker 4: to Aaron Hawley.
Speaker 12: If we were to find that there are conscientious objections
Speaker 12: that say hospitals take them into account, and these doctors
Speaker 12: do have a way to not do these kinds of
Speaker 12: procedures should we in this case on that basis, No.
Speaker 9: You're honor, we would welcome that holding, but it's not
Speaker 9: broaden up to remedy our doctor's harm. Why because these
Speaker 9: are emergency situations. They can't waste precious moments scrubbing in No.
Speaker 12: No, no, I'm saying, assuming we have a world in
Speaker 12: which they can actually lodge the objections that you say
Speaker 12: that they have, my question is, isn't that enough to
Speaker 12: remedy their issue?
Speaker 3: Do we have to.
Speaker 12: Also entertain your argument that no one else in the
Speaker 12: world can have this drug or no one else in
Speaker 12: America should have this drug in order to protect your clients.
Speaker 5: So, again, your.
Speaker 9: Honor, it's not possible given the emergency nature of these situations.
Speaker 13: So let me interrupt there.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry.
Speaker 13: I think just as Jackson's saying, and let's spots you
Speaker 13: all that, okay with respect to your clients. Normally, in
Speaker 13: Article three traditional equitable remedies we issue and we say
Speaker 13: over and over again, provide a remedy sufficient to address
Speaker 13: the plaintive susserted injuries and go no further. We have
Speaker 13: before us a handful of individuals who have asserted a
Speaker 13: conscious objection. Normally we would allow an equitable relief to
Speaker 13: address them. Recently, I think what Justice Jackson's alluding to,
Speaker 13: we've had one might call it a rash of universal
Speaker 13: injunctions or vacatures, and this case seems like a prime
Speaker 13: example of turning what could be a small lawsuit into
Speaker 13: a nationwide legislative assembly on an FDA rule or any
Speaker 13: other federal government action.
Speaker 4: So what you heard there is a heavy focus on
Speaker 4: the question of standing. If you were listening to this
Speaker 4: and not watching, you heard Kontanji Brown Jackson ask questions
Speaker 4: about that, and then you heard Neil Gorsich trumpet pointed
Speaker 4: Justice interrupt with some really pointed questions of his own.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for Aeron kind of came in over the top, like,
Speaker 1: let me break this.
Speaker 5: Down right, Crystal. Are you surprised by that?
Speaker 4: A lot of conservaives are not remotely surprised by how Kavanaugh, Gore,
Speaker 4: such and Amy Cony Barrett have expressed their skepticism. Obviously
Speaker 4: standard disclosure. You never know based on oral arguments. People
Speaker 4: are often very surprised by what happens after oral arguments.
Speaker 4: Yet this one was sort of resoundingly against Aaron Hawley
Speaker 4: and her alliance of doctors.
Speaker 1: I'm not particularly surprised because I think the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: is trying to almost like rescue Republicans from the most
Speaker 1: extreme conclusions of the positions that they've you know, staken, staked.
Speaker 6: Down, staken out.
Speaker 5: So it's just sticking.
Speaker 6: Sticking, sticking down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll go, We're going to go with that in
Speaker 1: any case. I so, you know, they also are very
Speaker 1: concerned with especially Roberts, with the standing of the incredibility
Speaker 1: of the court.
Speaker 6: So if the Court is.
Speaker 1: Going out there and like, hey, Ivey have his band
Speaker 1: and no more you know abortion pill that is used
Speaker 1: now for sixty three percent of abortions, and they're just
Speaker 1: like going wild after Dobbs, then you're going to have
Speaker 1: a real problem of legitimacy of the court. You could
Speaker 1: have a real movement to you know, stack the court
Speaker 1: or term limit or age limit or something. And by
Speaker 1: the way, those sorts of things, certainly the age term
Speaker 1: limits really popular if you ask the American public. So
Speaker 1: you can easily see some momentum getting behind an idea
Speaker 1: like that. If you have decisions routinely coming down that
Speaker 1: are wildly at odds with where the American people are.
Speaker 1: You know, my view of the court is that they
Speaker 1: take into consideration more of the political aspect of things
Speaker 1: then they do necessarily like then they'll find the legal
Speaker 1: grounding for wherever they want to be politically, ideologically, etc.
Speaker 1: But in terms of this legal question of standing, in particular,
Speaker 1: multiple of the justices, many of the conservative justices, we're
Speaker 1: saying basically like, listen, Okay, so you're a group of
Speaker 1: doctors that has this religious based objection to prescribing mif
Speaker 1: of pristone or performing abortions.
Speaker 6: Ordinarily, the normal.
Speaker 1: Sort of resolution or solution to that problem would be
Speaker 1: to give you a conscience exemption.
Speaker 6: You already have that. So now rather than you know.
Speaker 1: Being fine or filing some small lawsuit as Gorsich was
Speaker 1: suggesting there, now you're trying to clean injury even though
Speaker 1: you already have an exemption here. You don't have to
Speaker 1: prescribe mefipristo. No one is making you do that. You're
Speaker 1: trying to stretch to find some sort of harm that
Speaker 1: could theoretically be done to you. And in the course
Speaker 1: of you know, establishing that standing, then you want to
Speaker 1: take the ability of the entire nation to have access
Speaker 1: to this FDA approved drug. So a lot of the
Speaker 1: questions focused on that and didn't even get into what's
Speaker 1: called the merits of whether or not you can, you know,
Speaker 1: use this process to overturn what the FDA found because
Speaker 1: the FDA said, hey, this is safe. There's lots of
Speaker 1: studies that say it's safe. You know, there are very
Speaker 1: few problems or complications with it. And their argument is no, no, no,
Speaker 1: the FDA was wrong and they didn't go through they
Speaker 1: didn't do enough to make sure that it's safe. And
Speaker 1: so that's part of why we're harmed as doctors because
Speaker 1: we could hypothetically, theoretically have to treat a woman who's
Speaker 1: been injured by these pills even though we didn't prescribe it.
Speaker 1: And so I do think it's fair to say it's
Speaker 1: a bit of a stretch. They couldn't point to an
Speaker 1: example where this has actually happened. They're just sort of
Speaker 1: theorizing that maybe it possibly could potentially happen and using
Speaker 1: that as a way to try to, you know, undercut
Speaker 1: the FDA's approval for this drug for everyone in the
Speaker 1: entire country. So I mean, bottom line, listen, like you said,
Speaker 1: you never know how it's going to come down. You
Speaker 1: gotta wait and see and how it's going to go whatever.
Speaker 1: But if you've got Amy Coney Barrett, who is obviously
Speaker 1: very religious and very ideological on these issues, if even
Speaker 1: she's looking at your case like, no, this doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense to me in terms of the harm, in
Speaker 1: terms of the standing, then I think you are in
Speaker 1: a pretty tough position in terms of prevailing here. And
Speaker 1: you know what, I bet there are a lot of
Speaker 1: smart Republican and operatives out there who are praying, oh
Speaker 1: for the Supreme Court to say no to this and
Speaker 1: to you know, keep MiFi pristone legal. Because of the
Speaker 1: results we were talking about in Alabama, and because of
Speaker 1: the national trend which has now consistently been postdobs for
Speaker 1: more and more and more people to actually embrace abortion rights.
Speaker 1: I mean, it really has sort of tipped the scales
Speaker 1: on an issue that previously was very much a fifty
Speaker 1: to fifty issue.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you know, our viewers know that I represent
Speaker 4: the minority of the minority on the question of abortion,
Speaker 4: pretty anti abortion. I do think there's some scary stuff
Speaker 4: out there about MEPhI pristone, and mostly it relates to
Speaker 4: doctors not doing a good job of prescribing it and
Speaker 4: saying this is what might happen. You know, these are
Speaker 4: possible complications, and there are some stories of women having
Speaker 4: awful experiences. You know, that's not happening every time people
Speaker 4: take mephipristone.
Speaker 5: But that's why.
Speaker 4: That's at least an explanation for why conservatives felt that
Speaker 4: they should bring this case, and why religious doctors conservative
Speaker 4: doctors felt like they should bring this and so one
Speaker 4: exchange that was interesting just on that question of standing
Speaker 4: was between Justice Alito and the Solicitor General, who was
Speaker 4: representing the FDA. Alito said, so, your argument here is
Speaker 4: that it doesn't matter if the FDA flagrantly violated the law,
Speaker 4: didn't do it was what it should have done, endangered
Speaker 4: the health of women. It's just too bad. Nobody can
Speaker 4: sue in court. There's no remedy. The American people have
Speaker 4: no remedy for that. The Solicitor General replied, well, I
Speaker 4: think it would be wrong to suggest that if the
Speaker 4: FDA had made a mistake and a drug were actually
Speaker 4: producing safety consequences, that there was nothing to be done.
Speaker 5: I thought that.
Speaker 4: Exchange was sort of the best clash of both sides
Speaker 4: of the sort of Alito objection and the Solicitor General
Speaker 4: the government's position here.
Speaker 5: It is just an interesting question also.
Speaker 4: Again, christ kind of like a flipping of the general
Speaker 4: political positions on like the FDA versus doctors. Like a
Speaker 4: lot of times you would have the FDA is basically
Speaker 4: funded by pharma, and you have a lot of conservatives
Speaker 4: that are very in the past have been very defensive
Speaker 4: of the FDA because generally the positions of pharma and
Speaker 4: so here you have that like totally different clashing of opinions.
Speaker 4: So it's definitely like reading the tea leaves here, it
Speaker 4: looks like Thomas and Alito might be the only descents
Speaker 4: in this space. And especially because like Gorsach, Amy, Cony, Barrett,
Speaker 4: and Kavanaugh, a lot of conservatives see them as being
Speaker 4: more libertarian than quote unquote like a conservative like Burkian
Speaker 4: conservative positions, whether or not that's true Gorsis, especially, people
Speaker 4: suspect that of So just a really interesting presentation at
Speaker 4: the Supreme Court and the political consequences to your point, Crystal,
Speaker 4: We've got some polling.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is pretty interesting. Our producers pulled this. Let's
Speaker 1: go and put this first one up on the screen.
Speaker 1: So we've got specific question here from Fox News on
Speaker 1: that liberal rag outlet Fox News views on mifipristone and
Speaker 1: on a nationwide abortion law, and you have sixty eight
Speaker 1: percent saying that access to abortion medication if a pristone,
Speaker 1: should be legal and only twenty eight percent saying it's illegal.
Speaker 1: I would actually like to see the partisan breakdown there,
Speaker 1: because that level of support means there is a significant
Speaker 1: chunk of Republicans who also think that you should have
Speaker 1: legal access to this.
Speaker 6: They also asked about.
Speaker 1: Support for a law guaranteeing access to legal abortion nationwide
Speaker 1: sixty five percent, so more than a supermajority say yes,
Speaker 1: we're in favor of that law guaranteeing access to legal abortion.
Speaker 1: Only thirty two percent of pose That would have been
Speaker 1: a very different result predobs in terms of views on abortion.
Speaker 1: Here you can actually see the trend which continues to
Speaker 1: move only in one direction. So now in March of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, you have thirty five percent who say
Speaker 1: abortion should always be legal. You have twenty four percent
Speaker 1: who say it should be legal most of the time.
Speaker 1: You have thirty two percent who say it should be
Speaker 1: illegal except for the tipical exceptions for rape incests and
Speaker 1: life of the mother. And you only have seven percent
Speaker 1: who say it should always be illegal. And you know
Speaker 1: that matters because there are a number of states where
Speaker 1: that is the de facto positions that should always be illegal.
Speaker 1: That's how you end up with a decision like in
Speaker 1: Alabama even outlawing IVF. And you can see the way
Speaker 1: that this has shifted over time to move where people
Speaker 1: are moving more and more to the pro choice position
Speaker 1: as it becomes really clear what the actual landscape looks.
Speaker 6: Like if you don't have those rights enshrined.
Speaker 1: In law, and people very you know, people very unhappy
Speaker 1: with potential IVF limits are going back to the stem
Speaker 1: cell debates or banning myth of pristone. These are wildly
Speaker 1: unpopular positions with a majority of the American public.
Speaker 4: One thing I wanted to point to in the polling
Speaker 4: is if you're looking at the movement between April twenty
Speaker 4: twenty two and March twenty twenty four, a lot of Republicans, conservatives,
Speaker 4: anti abortion groups will say Democrats' biggest vulnerability on this
Speaker 4: is the always legal group. That group has gone up
Speaker 4: since April of that's the largest group now look at
Speaker 4: that thirty five percent right now in March of twenty
Speaker 4: twenty four, and I agree, I think politically that is
Speaker 4: the sort of anti abortion side's best, like that's the
Speaker 4: best political message to defend themselves.
Speaker 5: I don't disagree with that.
Speaker 4: I think they're right about that, but it's getting less
Speaker 4: and less effective when polls show people say the should
Speaker 4: always be between a woman and their doctor. You know,
Speaker 4: if they want an abortion in the third tremester, its
Speaker 4: must be for a good reason. That's the argument now
Speaker 4: that anti abortion candidates groups have to address, and it's
Speaker 4: actually getting even that's becoming more and more of an
Speaker 4: uphill battle. Also, what you see there is the legal
Speaker 4: except for rape incest, say the life of the mother,
Speaker 4: that has gone down to thirty two percent from forty
Speaker 4: three percent since April of twenty twenty two. And it
Speaker 4: is generally and it was back in twenty twenty two
Speaker 4: that was the biggest group and now always legal is
Speaker 4: the biggest group.
Speaker 5: To your point, Crystal H.
Speaker 4: One reason for that might be people are having experiences
Speaker 4: with mephipristone that aren't the exceptions we can put the
Speaker 4: Washington Post.
Speaker 5: This is actually c five guys. You can put this
Speaker 5: up on this screen.
Speaker 4: The Washington Post headline here, abortions outside medical system increase
Speaker 4: sharply after row Fell study fines abortions after row Fell
Speaker 4: are actually going up. And I think a lot of
Speaker 4: that is because of MEPhI pristone. I mean, undoubtedly a
Speaker 4: lot of that is because MEFI pristone. Pro abortion groups
Speaker 4: have made a concerted effort to increase the availability of
Speaker 4: MEPhI pristone and to increase public awareness about MEFA pristone.
Speaker 4: So this is something that has to be contended with
Speaker 4: in ways that I don't think. And of course it
Speaker 4: was clear Ryan and I said this as it was
Speaker 4: happening on air when the Dobbs decision came out. The
Speaker 4: Republican Party has never been prepared for this, never been
Speaker 4: prepared for this, even though the writing was on the
Speaker 4: wall that something like this could be coming and that
Speaker 4: people would be really deeply unhappy about it. And Chris,
Speaker 4: with your point about the Court's perspective on itself, you
Speaker 4: know how it the threats to the sort of institutional
Speaker 4: trust of the Supreme Court. I bet that is weighing
Speaker 4: on their minds as they consider this huge case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I mean, they're looking, they're consuming the news,
Speaker 1: they see this what has been an extraordinary backlash. I mean,
Speaker 1: I really underestimated just what a massive, massive shift this
Speaker 1: would be in terms of the politics of the issue,
Speaker 1: how much it would matter to people, how much it
Speaker 1: would dictate the results of elections. Every time, no matter
Speaker 1: what state you put it up in, if you've got
Speaker 1: a ballot initiative that's a bout abortion, the pro choice
Speaker 1: side has won every single time, you know, results in
Speaker 1: Alabama where you're winning by close to thirty points based
Speaker 1: on you know, the fallout after this decision.
Speaker 6: They're very aware of that.
Speaker 1: They're very aware of that, and that, you know, if
Speaker 1: they continue to you know, push in that direction and
Speaker 1: codify things that go even further than the Dobbs decision,
Speaker 1: that they're going to be on really thin ice. Because
Speaker 1: one thing that was noteworthy to me looking at some
Speaker 1: of that polling is that it's not like after Dobbs
Speaker 1: there was a major shake up and opinion and it
Speaker 1: just stopped there. The trend continues in this direction of
Speaker 1: more people saying, you know, I should just always be legal,
Speaker 1: or it should at least be legal in most cases,
Speaker 1: and the people who are on the pro life side.
Speaker 1: That number is dwindling and dwindling and dwindling, even within
Speaker 1: the Republican Party. And then the other thing that has
Speaker 1: really changed is previously the group that was most organized
Speaker 1: and most activated on this issue, we're almost all on
Speaker 1: the pro life side, where this was like the voting issue,
Speaker 1: and that's just not the case anymore. Now you have,
Speaker 1: i think probably many more people who are really activated
Speaker 1: on the other side of this equation. And that's why
Speaker 1: you see such a tremendous shift in terms of electoral results.
Speaker 1: We played previously Trump getting asked about abortion, his instincs on.
Speaker 5: This are much better than most Republicans.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you can also tell like he knows it's
Speaker 1: a problem, yes, and there is no He did the
Speaker 1: thing that you suggested of like, oh, let's talk about
Speaker 1: you know, these partial board the versions or and the
Speaker 1: third trimester or when the baby's been born, which of
Speaker 1: course doesn't doesn't happen, but anyway, he tried to pivot
Speaker 1: to that. But that's just not the landscape that things
Speaker 1: are being fought on right now. The landscape that's being
Speaker 1: fought on is if of pristone and IVF and how
Speaker 1: much are you going to curtail the rights and you know,
Speaker 1: personhood bills and is there going to be a national
Speaker 1: abortion band, et cetera. And so I really don't think
Speaker 1: there is a messaging fixed for this. So, like I said,
Speaker 1: I'm sure Trump and a lot of other Republicans are
Speaker 1: very happy that the Supreme Court is going in the
Speaker 1: other direction with the Smith of Pristone decision, likely because.
Speaker 6: It would be a total political catastrophe.
Speaker 1: For them if they went in in the other direction.
Speaker 1: And they're just hoping that emotions around this die down
Speaker 1: and that they're able to reassure people enough that they're
Speaker 1: you know, not totally out on the fringes on this.
Speaker 1: But Trump is the guy that put those justices there,
Speaker 1: and you can't really, you can't really run away from
Speaker 1: that ultimately, Like it's very difficult. Like I said, I
Speaker 1: don't think it's something you can message your way out
Speaker 1: of because the reality has become so apparent to people.
Speaker 4: No, it would need to be a culture shift for
Speaker 4: the politics to shift, and that would be a dramatic,
Speaker 4: it would have to be a dramatic, major culture shift.
Speaker 7: Churs.
Speaker 5: I hear the media is.
Speaker 1: Doing their thing as usual again all right, So let's
Speaker 1: go and put this up on the screen from the
Speaker 1: New York Times. So leave us up for a moment,
Speaker 1: because I'm going to give a little bit of a
Speaker 1: preview here. You guys will recall we've been covering it here.
Speaker 1: Ryan's some great work on this. Grey Zone has done
Speaker 1: a lot of work. There's a lot of journalists who
Speaker 1: have done a lot of work on this. But New
Speaker 1: York Times published at the end of last year this
Speaker 1: piece that was supposed to be this seminal investigation into
Speaker 1: systematic rape as a weapon of war used by Hamas
Speaker 1: on October seventh. Okay, this piece drops, you know, they
Speaker 1: news alerted, they get it in under the deadline to
Speaker 1: try to submit it for Pulitzer, etc. And immediately some
Speaker 1: of the accounts are called into question, in particular the
Speaker 1: main account in the story that they lead the story
Speaker 1: with that makes up you know, a third of the
Speaker 1: written out reporting in the story. The family of this
Speaker 1: woman that they're alleging in the piece was subjected to
Speaker 1: sexual assault by Hamas says, we don't think that happened,
Speaker 1: and we didn't know that this is what you were
Speaker 1: reporting on. You interviewed us under false pretenses. Some of
Speaker 1: them went so far to say this is just not true, this.
Speaker 6: Is a lie. They have other evidence that contradicts is.
Speaker 5: So you got that.
Speaker 1: Then you have the reporters themselves very much called into question.
Speaker 1: So there were three people on the bilining of Jeffrey Gettlman,
Speaker 1: who's sort of like the heavy hitter, Pulitzer Prize winner, etc.
Speaker 1: He comes out after the pieces is like, well, what
Speaker 1: I do isn't really providing evidence, It's just telling stories.
Speaker 6: Like wait what. The other two on this who.
Speaker 1: Shared this byline had very little journalistic experience. One of
Speaker 1: them are not Schwartz, literally a none. Prior to October seventh,
Speaker 1: she had been a small time like document documentarian and
Speaker 1: they're sent into Israel to do all on the ground
Speaker 1: reporting and are this is an incredibly sensitive topic, Like
Speaker 1: the fact that they're working with the New York Times,
Speaker 1: the pinnacle of journalistic excellence around the world, and they're
Speaker 1: put on this assignment is crazy. And she gave an
Speaker 1: interview Ryan Unearth Thiss in Hebrew talking about her process.
Speaker 1: As she's going around the country talking to the hospitals.
Speaker 5: She can't find podcast Yeah, right.
Speaker 1: Can't find a single survivor, can't find any for forensic evidence,
Speaker 1: but she finds this. She finally lands on this account
Speaker 1: of a medic who claims, and they write this out
Speaker 1: in the piece, that he saw two teenage girls murdered
Speaker 1: at Kibbutz Bier and describes them in this state seamen
Speaker 1: smeared on one of these their backs, horrific things that
Speaker 1: he describes. Right, So she runs with this, this is
Speaker 1: put into the piece, etc. Now, the New York Times
Speaker 1: itself is debunking that portion of the story, so they say,
Speaker 1: Israeli soldier's video has undercut this medics account of sexual
Speaker 1: assault at Kibbutz Bei a re. Kibbut's residents concluded that
Speaker 1: two sisters killed on October seventh were not victims of
Speaker 1: sexual violence. And again, this was a key part of
Speaker 1: the story. And in fact, I believe, if memory serves,
Speaker 1: when she came upon this account, this was what Anna
Speaker 1: Schwartz said, convinced her that, oh there was something systematic here.
Speaker 1: You've got two teenage girls here, and this is what
Speaker 1: persuaded her that there weren't isolated incidents, that it was
Speaker 1: a pattern of conduct. Well, this turns out to now,
Speaker 1: according to the New York Times, have been debunked.
Speaker 6: Let me read you this. They say.
Speaker 1: New video is surface that undercuts the account of an
Speaker 1: Israeli military paramedic who said two teenagers killed mcmas led
Speaker 1: terrorist attack on October seventh were sexually assaulted. The unnamed
Speaker 1: paramedic from an Israeli commando unit was among dozens of
Speaker 1: people interviewed for a December twenty eighth article. Even that
Speaker 1: is very disingenuous because most of those dozens of people
Speaker 1: said they had no evidence of sexual assault. He said
Speaker 1: he discovered the bodies of two partially clothed teenage girls
Speaker 1: and a home in Kibbutz be Are that bore signs
Speaker 1: of sexual violence. But footage taken biden is Raeli soldier
Speaker 1: who was in Beery on October seventh, which was viewed
Speaker 1: by leading community members in February and by The Times
Speaker 1: this month, shows the bodies of three female victims, fully
Speaker 1: clothed with no apparent signs of sexual violence, at home
Speaker 1: where many residents had believed that the assaults had occurred.
Speaker 1: Let me just tell you you know what they say.
Speaker 1: They say that it's unclear if the metic was referring
Speaker 1: to the same scene. Residents said no other home in
Speaker 1: Beery were two teenage girls killed. They concluded from the
Speaker 1: video of the girls had not been sexually assaulted. A
Speaker 1: member of that Kibbutz said, quote, this story is false.
Speaker 1: By the way, Ryan had also gotten a statement from
Speaker 1: the Kibbutz, also saying this story is false. Of the
Speaker 1: Times backing up his reporting, of course, he doesn't don't
Speaker 1: give MA any credit, but put that aside. I also
Speaker 1: em I mean, you know, these are human beings who
Speaker 1: were slaughtered in a horrible and brutal way, two sisters
Speaker 1: alongside their mother. But one of the people at the
Speaker 1: Kabbutz says what happened to them was horrifying, but it
Speaker 1: was a great relief to find out they.
Speaker 6: Were not sexually assaulted.
Speaker 1: So think about what the Times did here to these
Speaker 1: people and to their families. Like, on top of all
Speaker 1: the horror, you have to go with a now thoroughly
Speaker 1: discredited account claiming that they were raped and that there
Speaker 1: was semen smeared on one of their backs and totally
Speaker 1: debunked and ispriven. And by the way, in that original report,
Speaker 1: screams without words is what it's called. Rather than take
Speaker 1: out that section, rather than retract the whole thing, which,
Speaker 1: based on all of the questions that have been raised
Speaker 1: on is what's really called for At this point, they
Speaker 1: kept that reporting in about the you know, semen smeared
Speaker 1: on her back and the partially clothed, etc. Which they
Speaker 1: are now reporting is not true based on this evidence,
Speaker 1: and they just added this note in so they still
Speaker 1: have all the language there.
Speaker 6: And then they add in this note update.
Speaker 1: Newly released video viewed by the Time show the bodies
Speaker 1: of two teenage girls in kilbots be a refully closed,
Speaker 1: undercutting this account from an Israeli military paramedic who recovered
Speaker 1: bodies in multiple locations after the October seventh attack. It
Speaker 1: was unclear if the paramedic was describing bodies he discovered elsewhere.
Speaker 1: There is no indication that there are any other bodies
Speaker 1: elsewhere that.
Speaker 6: Could have fit this description.
Speaker 1: So it's just one more incident where The Times has
Speaker 1: found itself has created this incredible controversy for itself, and
Speaker 1: you know, it really has gotten to that level of
Speaker 1: like WMD or the Caliphate podcast. And I saw one
Speaker 1: person who's been involved in you know, really digging into
Speaker 1: this story online saying it's quite noteworthy that the three
Speaker 1: major scandals for The Times recently from a journalistic perspective,
Speaker 1: all had to do with reporting out of the Middle East.
Speaker 4: So I mean, yes, that this original time story the
Speaker 4: end steps piece on this. As you've mentioned, Crystal and
Speaker 4: other people have done work in the space too on
Speaker 4: that particular screams without words a piece. I like the
Speaker 4: way that Ryan puts it, which is that there's about
Speaker 4: a zero percent chance that there was no sexual violence
Speaker 4: on October seventh. There's like, it is overwhelmingly clear that there.
Speaker 5: Was some sexual violence.
Speaker 4: So to see this time story I think get absolutely
Speaker 4: ripped to shreds. It's like the byline problem is shocking,
Speaker 4: and it shouldn't be shocking, but it's something that happens
Speaker 4: across the board on a lot of stories. So this
Speaker 4: is it's kind of the tip of the iceberg as
Speaker 4: to corporate media doing that the byline. There were people
Speaker 4: at the Wall Street Journal who were former members of
Speaker 4: the IDF who were writing covering this stuff and it
Speaker 4: wasn't disclosed. Meanwhile, they are sneering at the standards of
Speaker 4: other publications, looking down at New Media US as though
Speaker 4: we have no editorial standards, which is absurd given all
Speaker 4: of this and I say that as someone I like
Speaker 4: you said it. Chrysal ninety seven civilians were slaughtered at
Speaker 4: this commits. There were I think more than twenty hostages taken.
Speaker 4: I think it was close to thirty hostages were taken.
Speaker 4: Some of them are probably still in Gaza. This was
Speaker 4: a traumatized and absolutely devastated community of people. That was
Speaker 4: just the fact that so many people the way you
Speaker 4: put it, also about people being upset to and relieved
Speaker 4: to learn that these daughters were not victims of sexual assault.
Speaker 4: They're turned into political pawns by people with partisan causes,
Speaker 4: and that's not journalism. Don't do it in the service
Speaker 4: of journalism. I don't do it period, but definitely don't
Speaker 4: do it in the service of journalism, which is a
Speaker 4: giant lie that just completely completely eradicates credibility for the
Speaker 4: entire industry as a whole. Again, as a pro Israel person,
Speaker 4: if you are a pro Israel, you should be upset
Speaker 4: with this because it has undermined the credibility of the
Speaker 4: pro Israel position because now people are going to look
Speaker 4: at all of the reporting on it and have these
Speaker 4: lingering questions, how could you that story was, as you pointed, out.
Speaker 4: It was like a watershed piece of reporting is how
Speaker 4: it was treated. And so the people who are now
Speaker 4: learning that there are questions about the story's credibility. That's
Speaker 4: lingers in your mind when you read the media going forward.
Speaker 1: And the response from the Times was not, how did
Speaker 1: you know these incredibly inexperienced junior reporters get put on
Speaker 1: the story? How did they get so many pieces wrong?
Speaker 1: Where you have families who you have reached tru I mean,
Speaker 1: you have added to their pain and suffering. Who are
Speaker 1: coming at you saying first of all, you lied to
Speaker 1: give this interview. Second of all, this isn't what happened.
Speaker 1: You know, here's video evidence, et cetera. Rob figuring out
Speaker 1: what the hell went wrong here. Instead, they went after
Speaker 1: the leakers and launched a whole leak investigation to figure
Speaker 1: out who was providing, you know, internal information to Ryan
Speaker 1: and other reporters. That was their response. And so, yeah,
Speaker 1: they had a partisan agenda. They wanted this story to
Speaker 1: come together in a specific way. They didn't want to show,
Speaker 1: you know, a few isolated incidents. They wanted to be
Speaker 1: able to paint this picture because this is what was
Speaker 1: being offered both by the US government, by the Israeli
Speaker 1: government of rapes systematically used as a weapon of war.
Speaker 6: And they basically found.
Speaker 1: The facts or fit the facts to create that narrative.
Speaker 1: And it's just peace by piece been falling apart. But
Speaker 1: you know, I always come back to it. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure it's again. She had never worked so bad. She
Speaker 1: didn't have a single byline before she gets picked up
Speaker 1: by the New York Times. Journalists spent their entire career
Speaker 1: winning a byline at the New York Times.
Speaker 6: How does this happen?
Speaker 5: Does not make sense.
Speaker 1: On such like the most sensitive issue you can imagine,
Speaker 1: mind blowing.
Speaker 4: It's inexplicable, and it doesn't make a lack of sense.
Speaker 4: Her career path does not make any sense whatsoever to
Speaker 4: be to sort of be a documentarian and then to
Speaker 4: be suddenly plucked to the New York Times as a
Speaker 4: reporter on the ground, right, you said, Crystal, Like people
Speaker 4: have to you know, sort of pay their dues in
Speaker 4: you know, like Middle Eastern bureaus, you know, doing the driest.
Speaker 5: Copy like wire reports. Basically, so it's very very odd.
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 4: Let alone, it's odd enough that the byline was there
Speaker 4: without any disclosures, but it's it's odd that that byline exists.
Speaker 1: Well, as you're noting, because I don't think I mentioned
Speaker 1: that she had previously served in the idea.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in an intelligence unit. So in an intelligence unit
Speaker 4: and then randomly gets a job at the New York Times.
Speaker 6: Riddle me that one.
Speaker 1: Guys, all right, we have another incredible use of journalistic
Speaker 1: resources coming at you from the Atlantic.
Speaker 6: We can put this up on the screen that's.
Speaker 1: Got a lot of a lot of interest for reasons
Speaker 1: that will quickly become a parent. So headline here in
Speaker 1: the war at Stanford, I didn't know that college would
Speaker 1: be a factory of unreason by fo Baker some of
Speaker 1: New York Times reporter.
Speaker 6: Heater Baker No way really, Oh oh yeah.
Speaker 1: His mom is also a journalist. So you know, he's
Speaker 1: a sophomore at Stanford and gets this big cover story
Speaker 1: at the Atlantic. I'm sure it's fully on his merit, emily,
Speaker 1: and absolutely nothing else. So in any case, in this story,
Speaker 1: he says he spent five months reporting on basically any
Speaker 1: views of his fellow classmates that he felt he should
Speaker 1: hall monitor as being a little bit outside of the
Speaker 1: norm or the mainstream.
Speaker 6: Starts the story, I'm not.
Speaker 1: Even going to read this piece because I find it inappropriate.
Speaker 1: Starts the story by basically doxing this twenty three year
Speaker 1: old Stafford student that he goes to school with and
Speaker 1: you know, calling out, like listing out his views and
Speaker 1: framing them, you know, as inappropriate. There certainly, I think
Speaker 1: outside of the mainstream, it's fair to say, but this
Speaker 1: is a you know, powerless twenty three year old. You
Speaker 1: would think that the Atlantic would have journalistic resources like
Speaker 1: better spent in other directions.
Speaker 6: While there is this.
Speaker 1: Massive assault going on in Gaza that a majority of
Speaker 1: Biden voters and probably a majority of Stanford University students
Speaker 1: think is a genocide. You might want to focus on
Speaker 1: the powerful people that are involved in the policy making
Speaker 1: versus these powerless students whose views you find to be uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: There was this one part of the story though that
Speaker 1: to me, Emily, it almost irritated me the most. I
Speaker 1: think there are genuine, like privacy issues with this Tattletale
Speaker 1: Hall monitor putting this person's name in highlighting their views
Speaker 1: first and foremost, like, I think that is inappropriate and
Speaker 1: incredibly unfortunate. Again, this is just one person, but in
Speaker 1: any case, he also writes, Elite universities attract a certain
Speaker 1: kind of student, the overachieving driver who's won all the
Speaker 1: right athletes for all the right activities. Is it such
Speaker 1: a surprise that the kids who are trained in the
Speaker 1: constant pursuit of perfect scores think they have to look
Speaker 1: at the world like a series of multiple choice questions
Speaker 1: with clearly right or wrong answers, Or that they think
Speaker 1: they can gamify political cause in the same way they
Speaker 1: ace a stand test. Everyone knows that the only reliable
Speaker 1: way to get into a school like Stanford is to
Speaker 1: be really good at looking really good. Now that they're here,
Speaker 1: students know that one easy way to keep looking good
Speaker 1: is to side with the majority of protesters and condemn Israel.
Speaker 1: So he smears this entire group of student protesters who
Speaker 1: are opposed to Israel's onslaught in Gaza, which un report
Speaker 1: has just called a genocide. I'll be breaking that down
Speaker 1: in my monologue. He thinks he smears all of them
Speaker 1: as basically just like disingenuous drivers who are trying to
Speaker 1: be on the cool side of a popular cause. Rather
Speaker 1: than saying, hey, maybe, just maybe they see these images
Speaker 1: of kids being murdered with weapons that our tax dollars
Speaker 1: are paying for.
Speaker 6: Perhaps they have a genuine.
Speaker 1: Issue with that, maybe that's like actually a moral problem
Speaker 1: for them. So it's just astonishing on every level. I mean,
Speaker 1: the NEPO baby part is always present.
Speaker 6: The fact that The.
Speaker 1: Atlantic again spent apparently five months of journalistic resources doing
Speaker 1: tattletale work on college kids and frame this is important
Speaker 1: journalism in the context of everything that's going on, and
Speaker 1: the way that these kids were just sort of lumped
Speaker 1: together and our college students, I mean, they are mostly adults, right,
Speaker 1: but college students lump together and smeared as having disingenuous
Speaker 1: motives and you know, being extremists, I think is just wrong.
Speaker 6: It's just wrong, and it's inappropriate.
Speaker 4: So here's a line on this piece of recess. I've
Speaker 4: watched many of my classmates treat death so cavalierly that
Speaker 4: they can protest as a pregame to a party.
Speaker 5: And what's interesting about.
Speaker 4: That is, listen, not to like both sides things, but
Speaker 4: this is, as with any like extremely politically charged hot
Speaker 4: button issue, people on both sides are treating death very
Speaker 4: cavalierly on this question.
Speaker 5: You know, And that's that's something that you've talked about.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would.
Speaker 1: I would argue that by fixating on what college students
Speaker 1: say or don't say in the middle of tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of people getting slaughtered, you tell me who's the
Speaker 1: one who's treating death cavalierly? Right, because you know, to
Speaker 1: spend that time and energy and you know, precious space
Speaker 1: in a very prominent elite magazine fixated on what basically
Speaker 1: powerless people are doing and saying and painting them all
Speaker 1: with this very broad brush, rather than you know, actually
Speaker 1: challenging the powerful people who are running the Israel policy.
Speaker 1: You know, again, you tell me who's treating death more
Speaker 1: cavalierly and who is you know, more interested in like
Speaker 1: college debates than what is actually happening to people right
Speaker 1: now in Gaza, all of whom are one hundred percent
Speaker 1: of whom are suffering from, you know, on the verge
Speaker 1: of famine, ten children to day, starving to death, et cetera.
Speaker 4: Well, Stanford is also the home of the Hoover Institute, which,
Speaker 4: by the way, is the sort of home of a
Speaker 4: lot of the architects of the Iraq War. So it's
Speaker 4: you know, there are criticisms of the university system that
Speaker 4: I actually think are really important, and I do have
Speaker 4: a different perspective on this. I think it's I've actually
Speaker 4: always found what happens on college campuses to be newsworthy
Speaker 4: and salient.
Speaker 5: I've reported on a lot of the.
Speaker 4: Stuff myself because I think what people were so caught
Speaker 4: off guard by everything that happened in twenty twenty. It's like, well,
Speaker 4: if you were paying attention to some of these trends
Speaker 4: on campuses, the public would have understood that young people
Speaker 4: have very different ideas than they think young people do,
Speaker 4: and people have been shocked. For example, we're blaming TikTok
Speaker 4: for all of the anti Israel sentiment and the sort
Speaker 4: of disparate pro Palestine versus pro Israel sentiments that were
Speaker 4: going viral on TikTok after October seventh, And it's like, again,
Speaker 4: if you were paying attention to college campuses, this wouldn't
Speaker 4: have been surprising to you at all, and you wouldn't
Speaker 4: have blamed China. You would have understood that this is organic.
Speaker 4: And by the way, we know that it's not China
Speaker 4: that was manipulating this sentiment entirely because it was repeated
Speaker 4: on different social media platforms that are not controlled by
Speaker 4: China because young people are supporting Palestine on the questions,
Speaker 4: so I don't necessarily take issue with the concept of reporting.
Speaker 4: Like he talks about how people have had massusa's ripped
Speaker 4: from their doors at Stanford, and you know the quote
Speaker 4: that he has from his his section leader saying he
Speaker 4: thinks Joe Biden should be dead. Someone should kill Joe Biden.
Speaker 4: If that's true, that's pretty wild. And I think it's uh,
Speaker 4: you know, like messusas if people are rippingssusa's off people's doors,
Speaker 4: then you know, and Stanford isn't doing anything about it.
Speaker 5: That's insane.
Speaker 4: But that's one of the crazy issues on this is
Speaker 4: how poorly college campuses have been able to defend their
Speaker 4: own like anti speech policies and then like that of
Speaker 4: silence and suppressed conservative ideas and then tried to explain away,
Speaker 4: you know, punishing students who take issue with israell It's
Speaker 4: been a glaring incoherency and it's one of the I've
Speaker 4: talked to Ryan about this before. It's one of the
Speaker 4: issues where elite the polarization and elite opinion is unusual,
Speaker 4: where you have some very virulently pro Israel voices in academia,
Speaker 4: high profile academia positions like this is what Bill Ackman
Speaker 4: has basically been reacting to. And then you have some
Speaker 4: people in academia that are deeply pro Palestinian, and there's
Speaker 4: this weird clash happening on college campuses. Now I don't
Speaker 4: think so. I saw someone tweet this and say it
Speaker 4: was ritually reported. I wouldn't call this story richly reported.
Speaker 6: I think that might have been as Dad. That's right
Speaker 6: in that he did tweat something to the fact.
Speaker 1: Well, let me just say that, I think you know,
Speaker 1: your nuanced perspective is well taken and appreciated, because certainly
Speaker 1: we talk here like about the pulling about young people
Speaker 1: and how their perspectives are different generationally. To me, I
Speaker 1: find that very relevant. Yeah, what one kid thinks about
Speaker 1: Joe Biden at Stanford when he has literally no power
Speaker 1: in the context of what is actually happening in terms
Speaker 1: of our foreign policy. Do I find that particularly like relevant,
Speaker 1: certainly relevant enough to like dox him in a way
Speaker 1: that could direct a lot of hate.
Speaker 6: And horror in his way.
Speaker 1: No, And to use that quote then to paint with
Speaker 1: a broad brush.
Speaker 4: Well, did he know that that was being reported on
Speaker 4: when he said it, by the way, because that's another thing,
Speaker 4: like if.
Speaker 1: You he very much disputes some of the quote unquote
Speaker 1: facts that are in the in there, including that you know,
Speaker 1: THEO Baker says all I move sections and apparently even
Speaker 1: that he says, that's not why.
Speaker 6: He moved, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So he does dispute some of the way that he
Speaker 1: was characterized. But you know, I think what we've seen
Speaker 1: is if you had a similar piece reported about let's say,
Speaker 1: a crazy Trump supporter who says some QAnon insanity, and
Speaker 1: then that's used to say, and I think everybody at
Speaker 1: the Trump rally or everybody that's supporting Donald Trump, like
Speaker 1: this is what's really going on with them, not picking
Speaker 1: would I object to that too? And that's what we
Speaker 1: don't do that, you know here, and we really to
Speaker 1: avoid these like you know, a man on the street
Speaker 1: type things where you find the craziest person and then
Speaker 1: you use that to say everybody thinks this way and
Speaker 1: this is now should we look at pole Okay, how
Speaker 1: prevalent are q andon theories, What are the actual views
Speaker 1: of Trump supporters? What can we glean from the data
Speaker 1: very different? And why are people coming to those conclusions,
Speaker 1: not smearing their intentions. So I try to be consistent
Speaker 1: in objecting to that form of quote unquote journalism, whether
Speaker 1: it is with people who agree more with me ideologically
Speaker 1: or oppose me ideologically. So you're right that there is
Speaker 1: something important and relevant about what's happening on college campuses
Speaker 1: and the fervency, the fervent emotion that many young people
Speaker 1: see and have voiced and you know, come out and
Speaker 1: protested and engage in whatever activism they can figure out
Speaker 1: with regard to that conflict. I'm not saying that's not important,
Speaker 1: but to you know, smear them, tag them all as
Speaker 1: extremists to engage in this like five month long journals
Speaker 1: stick odyssey in order to accomplish that goal that I
Speaker 1: find to be disgusting well.
Speaker 4: And to be congratulated for like a journalistic accomplishment. We
Speaker 4: don't need to not pick on the show like and
Speaker 4: find someone throw a microphone in their face and have
Speaker 4: them say something crazy, because.
Speaker 5: We have Sager.
Speaker 4: That's why he's like the crazy perspective of like your
Speaker 4: cousin on the street, like spend ten minutes every day
Speaker 4: staring right into the sun when.
Speaker 5: You wake up. Sorry, Okay, don't drink booze.
Speaker 1: Let's transition into what mister Rogan is thinking about this conflict,
Speaker 1: because you know, to the point of whether the views
Speaker 1: of these college students are extremeor mainstream. At this point,
Speaker 1: when you have a majority of Joe Biden voter saying
Speaker 1: this is a genocide, when you have the International Criminal
Speaker 1: Court of Justice saying that's plausible, when you have a
Speaker 1: new UN report saying there's reasonable grounds to believe. And
Speaker 1: now you can add, oh, you have Alex Jones saying
Speaker 1: it's a genisid I believe, can't someone's has said similar things.
Speaker 1: AOC has now come out and said the same. You
Speaker 1: can add to that growing list of voices Joe Rogan,
Speaker 1: who made.
Speaker 6: Some very interesting comments on his podcast.
Speaker 14: Let's take a listen, even in the right, like look
Speaker 14: what's going on with Candice Owns and Ben Shapiro, Like
Speaker 14: what did she say? I want to know what was
Speaker 14: what she was fired for? Because was it criticism of Israel?
Speaker 3: Was it?
Speaker 14: I mean, did she show that Edward Snowden video that
Speaker 14: he put up on Twitter that shows them Jrome bombing
Speaker 14: those kids? That are those men, I should say, unarmed
Speaker 14: people that were walking towards the rubble that clearly weren't
Speaker 14: causing any danger to anybody.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just bombed them, yeh know, it's your duty.
Speaker 5: It's just like for Biden or whoever you like, you're
Speaker 5: supposed to cover up for them because things.
Speaker 14: Like they're always saying they're only targeting Hamas and everybody
Speaker 14: else is a casualty. Well, if those guys are just
Speaker 14: unarmed civilians and they're walking alone, that's what they appear
Speaker 14: to be, Dresden and you just blast them from the
Speaker 14: sky with robots.
Speaker 6: This is that of war.
Speaker 14: Yeah, this is insane and no one knows what to
Speaker 14: think now, because if you can't talk about that, if
Speaker 14: you can't say that's real, then you're saying that genocide
Speaker 14: is okay as long as we're doing it, And that.
Speaker 3: Is what we're saying.
Speaker 14: And if you're saying that from a perspective of someone
Speaker 14: who literally went through the Holocaust or your your people,
Speaker 14: your tribe went through the fucking Holocaust, and now you're willing.
Speaker 6: To do it, I hope the irony is not lost
Speaker 6: on you.
Speaker 3: It's so nuts.
Speaker 14: It's so hard to imagine that someone where a culture,
Speaker 14: like a country was like officially founded in what forty seven,
Speaker 14: forty eight, okay, officially founded. So that's so recent, and
Speaker 14: you guys are willing to do what was done to
Speaker 14: you that led you to believe that you need to
Speaker 14: start your own country. You're willing to do that, at
Speaker 14: least in a small scale in Gaza, like there's nothing
Speaker 14: left if you see the videos, let's let's see some
Speaker 14: recent footage of Gaza.
Speaker 1: So some really pointed the Atlantic would say those comments
Speaker 1: were extremist.
Speaker 5: Greg greg Abot would say antisemitic.
Speaker 1: There you go many and apparently Matt Miller would as
Speaker 1: well talk about that also in my monologue, but I
Speaker 1: mean he really, he really goes in. Apparently that video
Speaker 1: that Al Jazeera obtained, the drone footage of them striking
Speaker 1: and killing these four unarmed civilians who are just walking
Speaker 1: along in con Unis.
Speaker 6: I mean, it's it's horrible to watch.
Speaker 1: We played just a little bit of it, but if
Speaker 1: you do watch the whole thing, you know, you see
Speaker 1: the initial drone strike, You see one of them at
Speaker 1: least like crawling after being hit initially wounded.
Speaker 6: And then hit again, and all of them killed.
Speaker 1: And you know, you can't butt hamas that, you can't,
Speaker 1: Oh human shield that it's just so naked, and I
Speaker 1: think one of the things that people have reacted to
Speaker 1: so strongly, because I've been rapping trying to wrap my
Speaker 1: head emily around why this video. This seems to have
Speaker 1: been the thing for Alex Jones, that's what he quote tweeted.
Speaker 1: It seems to have been, you know, the thing for
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan, and just judging by the tenor of the
Speaker 1: commentary and the shift, you know, AOC then comes out
Speaker 1: shortly thereafter. I also calls it a genocide. I've been
Speaker 1: trying to wrap my head around what it was about
Speaker 1: this video because we've seen so many horrors play out
Speaker 1: in front of our eyes, and I think it's the
Speaker 1: fact that all the typical justifications are null. You can't,
Speaker 1: like I said, you can't, but hamas it.
Speaker 6: You can't.
Speaker 1: There's a tunnel there, you can't. You know, it's anti
Speaker 1: semitic to say this. All the normal justifications are they're
Speaker 1: not human shields are kind of null and void, and
Speaker 1: then there's something so nightmarish and terrifying. Alex Stroen is
Speaker 1: called a robotic mass genocide. I believe about the fact
Speaker 1: that they're walking along totally unawares and then out of
Speaker 1: the sky boom, it's over. And also the David and
Speaker 1: golithe nature of that, I mean, they're unarmed, they have
Speaker 1: nothing right and everything around them in the video too,
Speaker 1: is complete rubble, as Rogan is saying, right there, look
Speaker 1: at gods, there's nothing left his guys.
Speaker 6: It's like Dresden.
Speaker 1: They're completely unarmed, they're completely vulnerable. And meanwhile Israel has
Speaker 1: this incredibly high tech killing technology, and that's what they're
Speaker 1: up against. And there's something about that video that marked
Speaker 1: a real turning point for the way a lot of
Speaker 1: people were viewing this conflict.
Speaker 4: So Alections apparently has also been calling Rabbi Shmooley the
Speaker 4: butt plug Rabbi.
Speaker 6: They had a debate. He did, Yes, he did?
Speaker 5: Okay, good? Interesting enough.
Speaker 4: Well, the Rogan clip to me is fascinating because he
Speaker 4: goes back and says, listen, this is really recent history,
Speaker 4: like the Holocaust is really recent history in the living
Speaker 4: memory of many people. That the founding of modern Israel
Speaker 4: comes in nineteen forty eight, and what also happens there
Speaker 4: is Brian and I talked about this a little bit yesterday,
Speaker 4: But the new definitions are the formal international agreement on
Speaker 4: what the definition of genocide is, because basically, the UN
Speaker 4: come together after World War Two and says we need
Speaker 4: to prevent Dresden, we need to prevent the Holocaust, we
Speaker 4: need to you know, all of that, and that living
Speaker 4: memory is also why you know, you see net Yahoo
Speaker 4: and other leaders in Israel, and even by the way,
Speaker 4: some well intentioned liberal Israelis feel the need to turn
Speaker 4: Gaza into a quote, parking lot, because those threats remain
Speaker 4: so ingrained in the minds, and that's what Rogan is
Speaker 4: reacting to and saying it's strange, it's a it's a
Speaker 4: strange like dissonance between you know, saying we want to
Speaker 4: prevent another Holocaust and then seeing the destruction of Gaza
Speaker 4: and calling for the destruction of Gaza, calling for it
Speaker 4: in the name of stopping another Holocaust be turned into
Speaker 4: a parking lot. And I understand, you know why, that's
Speaker 4: why that hits home.
Speaker 5: With people like Joe Rogan.
Speaker 4: I completely understand the perspective of UH being grown out
Speaker 4: by the drone attacks and the sort of like it is,
Speaker 4: this is a different kind like since we have since
Speaker 4: World War Two.
Speaker 5: This is a new.
Speaker 4: Kind of conflict, and I don't think the net and
Speaker 4: Yahoos and the Joe Biden's of the world were prepared
Speaker 4: for how the public was going to react to it.
Speaker 4: It's similar to other conflicts like high like urban warfare,
Speaker 4: but Syria other places, but it's it's different, it's completely different.
Speaker 4: And I think they underestimated where the public would be
Speaker 4: when watching this, because I mean, it's just these videos
Speaker 4: are tough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it is sort of There are quotes
Speaker 1: from the early Zionists, and I think it's very much
Speaker 1: illustrated in not just the Israeli response here, but in
Speaker 1: you know, wars since they're founding basically this notion of
Speaker 1: because of the whoors that they were subjected to, and
Speaker 1: this idea that they're quote unquote in a tough neighborhood.
Speaker 1: Part of why they go in with such overwhelming you
Speaker 1: know force and commit these ores and war crimes and
Speaker 1: you know, totally annihilate all.
Speaker 6: Of Gaza is this idea.
Speaker 1: But we have to demonstrate that actually were the biggest assholes,
Speaker 1: that we are just as tough, tougher.
Speaker 6: And badder than anyone else.
Speaker 1: And they talk openly about you know, restoring deterrence and
Speaker 1: that's code for basically what I said, we need to
Speaker 1: put on display that we can be the brutal barbarians
Speaker 1: just as much as anyone else. And so you know,
Speaker 1: it is a deep horror and deep irony that the
Speaker 1: people who you know suffer through the Holocaust, and you know,
Speaker 1: the state that is founded out of, you know, the
Speaker 1: ashes of World War two and the holocausts that then
Speaker 1: would turn around and repeat some of the same ideologies
Speaker 1: some of you know Rogan calls like on a small scale,
Speaker 1: and obviously the death count isn't approaching on what the
Speaker 1: Holocaust is, but it is there is a similar like
Speaker 1: quest towards annihilation. There is a similar I mean, there's
Speaker 1: a Jewish supremacist ideology here. So I think his comments
Speaker 1: are entirely appropriate. In another way, it's not. It shouldn't
Speaker 1: be surprising because you see this on a human level too,
Speaker 1: people who were victims of abuse and then they turn
Speaker 1: around and become the abusers. I mean, that is a
Speaker 1: common pattern that plays out psychologically.
Speaker 6: In human life.
Speaker 1: So obviously, you know, for Rogan, who's kind of like
Speaker 1: you know, Limus tests from normy opinion, you know, it's
Speaker 1: not a particular ide logue in any direction to have
Speaker 1: come to this conclusion, and again like that it was
Speaker 1: this video that seems to have led him there. I
Speaker 1: just found that very interesting, very noworthy, And obviously he's
Speaker 1: very influential, very impactful, So in and of itself it
Speaker 1: matters a lot.
Speaker 4: When I was going to say, just another kind of
Speaker 4: wake up call, probably for Biden and Yahoo and people
Speaker 4: like Ted Cruz who sat and respectfully talked to us
Speaker 4: about this, would be that Joe Rogan also isn't going
Speaker 4: to deny that Hamas and like actual Islamic extremism isn't
Speaker 4: genocidal towards Jews, it of course is, and he's not
Speaker 4: going to He's not the kind of person that's going
Speaker 4: to make the Judith Butler argument about Hamas being a
Speaker 4: resistance organ a part of the global resistance whatever. He's
Speaker 4: not that kind of person, like you said, crysl his
Speaker 4: normy opinion on all of this. And so that's where
Speaker 4: this becomes. And even I'm going to mention this Chris
Speaker 4: Rufo reacted to I've made a little joke about Greg
Speaker 4: Abbott earlier in this segment. That's because Greg Abbott instructed
Speaker 4: universities in Texas to update their speech policies to ban
Speaker 4: anti Semitic speech, and Chris Rufo, obviously a conservative, obviously
Speaker 4: pro Israel, and other kind of conservatives on the new
Speaker 4: right like Sager and people like myself who have objected
Speaker 4: to the new speech policing since October seventh on the
Speaker 4: ground that it's sort of hypocritical from people like both
Speaker 4: wrong and hypocritical from people like Greg Abbott. Chris Ruffer
Speaker 4: reacted and said, what's the difference between this and banning
Speaker 4: anti black speech or anti white speech. It's not how
Speaker 4: we do things in this country, and that has been
Speaker 4: again wildly underestimated by people like Greg Abbott, who probably
Speaker 4: had no idea or had no nobody in his circles
Speaker 4: was like, you're going to upset people like a Chris Rufo,
Speaker 4: like others in those circles that take issue with this.
Speaker 4: They just they don't have awareness that it really rankles
Speaker 4: people because it's a bubble.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that it is a bubble all the way around.
Speaker 1: And we have some polling that shows you also the
Speaker 1: public shift that I think speaks to some of the
Speaker 1: points that you're making here. So these are the overall
Speaker 1: numbers and you can see the difference between November twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, so we're talking about shortly after October seventh
Speaker 1: versus now, in November, a majority fifty percent of Americans
Speaker 1: approved of Israeli military action in Gaza versus forty five
Speaker 1: percent who disapproves. So it's pretty closely split, but you've
Speaker 1: got a majority in favor. Now totally different, only thirty
Speaker 1: six percent approve, fifty five percent disapprove.
Speaker 6: It's interesting to me in these.
Speaker 1: Polls, the no opinion number actually goes up in all
Speaker 1: of these poles. I'm about to show you just kind
Speaker 1: of in that as a conflict has gone on, there
Speaker 1: are more people who are moving from that approval to
Speaker 1: just like I don't know, I don't have an opinion,
Speaker 1: I don't want to talk about this anymore, which you'd
Speaker 1: see some in the discourse online where people who were
Speaker 1: previously like staunch defenders have just kind of gone quiet.
Speaker 1: I think we have additional polling we can put up,
Speaker 1: don't we guys that has the partisan breakdown here, because
Speaker 1: the way that Democrats have moved has been interesting. So
Speaker 1: here we've got an indication of how closely people have
Speaker 1: been paying to the conflict and what their views are
Speaker 1: based on whether they say they're following very closely or not.
Speaker 1: Those who are following very closely fifty five percent disapprove.
Speaker 1: Those who are following some closely fifty six percent disapprove.
Speaker 1: Those who are not following closely fifty four percent.
Speaker 6: Disapprove.
Speaker 1: The numbers in terms of approve are highest among those
Speaker 1: who are following very closely. So there's a bit of
Speaker 1: an indication here. It's not like a huge shift depending
Speaker 1: on the biggest difference you see is just the number
Speaker 1: of people who are offering no opinion and then put
Speaker 1: the next one up on the screen. Guys, this is
Speaker 1: the partisan breakdown that I was mentioning. So we'll start
Speaker 1: with the Republicans relevant to the Chris Rufo and Texas discussion.
Speaker 1: So back in November, seventy one percent of Republicans say yes,
Speaker 1: I approve of this military action.
Speaker 6: Only twenty three percent say no, I do not.
Speaker 1: Now both of those numbers have shifted. Sixty four percent
Speaker 1: say they approve. That's still a large number, but thirty
Speaker 1: percent is a significant minority who now say they disapprove.
Speaker 1: Independence big movement here. So it was split basically fifty
Speaker 1: to fifty forty seven approved, forty eight disapprove. Now you
Speaker 1: only have twenty nine percent of Independence who approve, sixty
Speaker 1: percent disapprove, and the Democratic numbers are just overwhelming. So
Speaker 1: you've always had a majority of Democrats who disapproved.
Speaker 6: Now that number.
Speaker 1: Has shot up to seventy five percent and only eighteen
Speaker 1: percent say that they approve, And once again you have
Speaker 1: an increase in the number who are like, no opinion,
Speaker 1: count me out. I don't want to talk about this,
Speaker 1: let's just move on, which I did find noteworthy, given
Speaker 1: that you would think that as the conflict goes on,
Speaker 1: where people form an opinion, but it actually has been
Speaker 1: the opposite here. I read into that people who previously
Speaker 1: were on the approved side that are now like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm just going to say no opinion.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think that's right. But this is a huge
Speaker 4: blind spot. This isn't the same. The public is not
Speaker 4: reacting to this in the same way that the public
Speaker 4: has reacted to other conflicts, frankly, in Gaza, in Israel.
Speaker 4: It's just completely different this time around, and people were
Speaker 4: unprepared for that.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Absolutely, all right, Chris, Well.
Speaker 5: I'm excited to hear your monologue.
Speaker 1: What have you got for us today, Well Atlantic Magazine
Speaker 1: was dedicating months worth of journalistic resources to investigating whether
Speaker 1: powerless college kids have opinions slightly outside of mainstream acceptability.
Speaker 1: The UN Special Rappertoire for Human Rights in Palestine was
Speaker 1: engaged in what one might reasonably say was a slightly
Speaker 1: more pressing endeavor, reporting on whether Israel is in fact
Speaker 1: committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Here is Francesca Albanies
Speaker 1: explaining her.
Speaker 15: Task following nearly six months of unrelenting Israelia Sultan occupied Gaza.
Speaker 15: It is my solemn duty to report on the worst
Speaker 15: of what humanity is capable of, and to present my
Speaker 15: finding the anatomy of a genocide. History teaches us that
Speaker 15: genocide is a process, not a single act. It starts
Speaker 15: with the dehumanization of a group as ada and the
Speaker 15: denial of that group's humanity, and ends with the destruction
Speaker 15: of the group in all or in part. The dehumanization
Speaker 15: of Palestinians as the group as a group is the
Speaker 15: whole mark of their history of ethnic lensing, dispossession, and apartheid.
Speaker 15: In the words of Edward's Eyde, Palestinians were made orphans
Speaker 15: of a homeland by the creation of the State of
Speaker 15: Israel and its continuous policies intended to there is their
Speaker 15: presence from their land. Genocide is defining international law as
Speaker 15: specific sets of acts committed with intent to destroy, in
Speaker 15: whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.
Speaker 3: As such, it.
Speaker 15: Is often referred to as the crime of crimes due
Speaker 15: to its complexity and because of the challenge of proving
Speaker 15: the specific intent as the Convention requires. And yet this
Speaker 15: complexity is not about the creation of a hierarchy among
Speaker 15: atrocity crimes. It's rather a reflection of a different nature
Speaker 15: and scale. The height and th threshold for intent, namely
Speaker 15: to destroy a group, was prescribed by Article two of
Speaker 15: the Genocide Convention must be proven directly or inferred from
Speaker 15: facts which admit of no other reasonable inference. But when
Speaker 15: genocidal intent is so conspicuous, so ostentatious, as it is
Speaker 15: in Gaza, we cannot avert our eyes. We must confront genocide,
Speaker 15: we must prevent it, and we must punish it.
Speaker 6: I hope you really took that.
Speaker 1: In here we have Albaniz She is a human rights
Speaker 1: lawyer hired by the UN Human Rights Counsel to provide analysis.
Speaker 1: She is telling them, in no uncertain terms that there
Speaker 1: are quote reasonable grounds to believe that Israel is in
Speaker 1: fact committing genocide. The viewpoint, maligned as fringe and hysterical
Speaker 1: by the US media, is now finding widespread validation among
Speaker 1: everyone from un hired experts to the International Court of Justice,
Speaker 1: to the majority of Biden twenty twenty voters, to cultural
Speaker 1: figures like O goodness, we showed you earlier. And as
Speaker 1: time passes an awareness of what has already unfolded seeps in.
Speaker 1: The truth is only going to become more undeniable, which
Speaker 1: is why when questioned about this report, US State Department
Speaker 1: spokesperson Matt Miller reacted in the most predictable way possible.
Speaker 1: Rather than engaging with the compelling facts of the report,
Speaker 1: he smeared its author as an anti sentmite.
Speaker 16: Let me ask you have you did you see or
Speaker 16: read the report made by Francisca alban As yesterday in
Speaker 16: Geneva where she cited where she actually what she showed
Speaker 16: was irrefutable, as far as he's concerned, a refutable evidence
Speaker 16: that is well engaged in genocide. Did you see the report?
Speaker 16: What is your comment?
Speaker 17: I did see the report?
Speaker 5: Let me say a couple things about it.
Speaker 17: First, we have long, for long standing, for a long
Speaker 17: standing period of time, opposed the mandate of this special Rapperteur,
Speaker 17: which we believe is not productive. And when it comes
Speaker 17: to the individual who holds that position, I can't help
Speaker 17: but note history of anti Sybmitic comments that she has
Speaker 17: made that have.
Speaker 16: Been reported and made anti Semitic comments.
Speaker 17: She has and comments she made in December that appeared
Speaker 17: to add justify the attacks of October seventh, So I
Speaker 17: think it's important to take that into account.
Speaker 3: But with respect to.
Speaker 17: The report itself, we have made clear that we believe
Speaker 17: that allegations of genocide are unfounded. But at the same time,
Speaker 17: we have are deeply concerned by the number of civilian
Speaker 17: casualties in Gaza, and that's why we have pressed the
Speaker 17: government of Israel on multiple occasions to everything it can
Speaker 17: to minimize those civilian casualties.
Speaker 16: Yeah, well, she's been getting a lot of the death
Speaker 16: threats and other threats and so on because people think
Speaker 16: she made anti Semitic comments.
Speaker 3: That's on.
Speaker 17: Let me just go, Oh, can't make a comment like
Speaker 17: that without letting obviously, death threats against anyone are inappropriate.
Speaker 1: Of course, Francesca Albanize has not made anti Semitic comments.
Speaker 6: It's a baseless smear.
Speaker 1: She has, though, and critical of Israel, and is now
Speaker 1: offering compelling evidence and analysis of grave crimes which directly
Speaker 1: implicate the United States and Matt Miller himself. His nasty
Speaker 1: response there is an indication of how significant this report
Speaker 1: actually is. It's especially impactful for three key reasons. First
Speaker 1: because of the clarity and analytical precision with which it
Speaker 1: is written. Second because, as a report by UN hire
Speaker 1: and expert delivered for the benefit of that body, it
Speaker 1: may carry special weight with the International Court of Justice
Speaker 1: itself a UN body. And finally, because it calls for
Speaker 1: specific actions to be taken by UN member states, including
Speaker 1: or perhaps especially, the United States of America. Now, let's
Speaker 1: start with some of the details from the report which
Speaker 1: led Albanies to her dramatic conclusion. She identifies three genocidal
Speaker 1: acts as defined by the Genocide Convention. Number one killing
Speaker 1: members of the group, Number two causing serious bodily or
Speaker 1: mental harm to members of the group, and number three
Speaker 1: deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
Speaker 1: bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Speaker 1: now as evidence of these acts. She cites everything from
Speaker 1: the tonnage of explosives used in just the first several
Speaker 1: months of the onslaught the equivalent of two nuclear bombs,
Speaker 1: to the lifelong trauma those who survive will no doubt
Speaker 1: struggle with after seeing every aspect of their civilian lives destroyed,
Speaker 1: and the siege which is causing ten children to starve
Speaker 1: to death every day. She writes in the report, quote,
Speaker 1: Gaza has been completely sacked. Israel's relentless targeting of all
Speaker 1: means a basic survival has compromised the ability of palace
Speaker 1: means in Gaza to live on that land. This engineered
Speaker 1: collapse of life sustaining infrastructure corresponds to these stated intentions
Speaker 1: to make Gaza quote permanently impossible to live in where
Speaker 1: no human being can exist. She also, of course, critically
Speaker 1: spends quite a bit of time on intent. The mensrea
Speaker 1: or mental state required to prove genocide includes both a
Speaker 1: general intent to commit the acts and a specific intent
Speaker 1: to eliminate a group in whole or in part. This
Speaker 1: would be the now somewhat infamous Dolls. Here is a
Speaker 1: portion of what Albanese writes with regard to how intent
Speaker 1: may be established and why she believes that intent has
Speaker 1: been demonstrated with regards to Israel in a uniquely clear
Speaker 1: cut way. Quote, the nature and scale of the atrocities,
Speaker 1: if demonstrably capable of achieving a genocidal outcome, are strong
Speaker 1: evidence of intent.
Speaker 6: The words of.
Speaker 1: State authorities, including dehumanizing language, combined with acts, are considered
Speaker 1: a circumstantial basis from which intent can be inferred. Dehumanization
Speaker 1: can be understood as foundational to the process of genocide.
Speaker 1: Evidence of context may help determine the intent and must
Speaker 1: be considered with the actual content conduct. Intent should be
Speaker 1: evident above all from words and deeds and patterns of
Speaker 1: purposeful action, such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn.
Speaker 1: Now in the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal
Speaker 1: intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the
Speaker 1: whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced.
Speaker 1: Eye ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing
Speaker 1: public statements evincing genocidal intent. She then proceeds to list
Speaker 1: a selection of such harrowing public statements, many of which
Speaker 1: you will probably already be familiar, and which taken together,
Speaker 1: paid an undeniable portrait of dehumanization and intention to annihilate,
Speaker 1: coming from every level of government and echoing throughout society.
Speaker 1: For anyone who has acquainted themselves with the South African
Speaker 1: filing against Israel, the facts and utterances offered in these
Speaker 1: sections will likely be pretty familiar.
Speaker 6: But there were two.
Speaker 1: Areas in which I thought Albanese's report was particularly illuminating. First,
Speaker 1: she systematically exposed the way that Israel's perverted the language
Speaker 1: of international humanitarian law in order to justify crimes against humanity.
Speaker 1: Albani's writes that Israel's use this jarkin to transform all
Speaker 1: civilians into human shields who can be murdered at will,
Speaker 1: all civilian infrastructure into legitimate military targets. Quote After October seventh,
Speaker 1: this macro characterization of Gaza civilians as a population of
Speaker 1: human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel's top ranking
Speaker 1: political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, accomplices,
Speaker 1: or human shields among whom Hamas is embedded. In November,
Speaker 1: Israel's Minister of Foreign Affairs defined the resonance of the
Speaker 1: Gaza strip as human shields and accused Hamas of using
Speaker 1: the civilian population as human shields. The Ministry defines armed
Speaker 1: groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately embedded in the
Speaker 1: population to such an extent that it cannot be concluded
Speaker 1: from the mere fact that seeming civilians or civilian objects
Speaker 1: have been targeted that an attack was unlawful. Now, two
Speaker 1: rhetorical elementary rights of this key legal policy document indicate
Speaker 1: the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its
Speaker 1: infrastructures of life into a legitimate targetable shield. The use
Speaker 1: of the all encompassing the combined with the quotation marks
Speaker 1: to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought
Speaker 1: to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon. Another particular
Speaker 1: strength of this report is how Albanese acknowledges the context
Speaker 1: of this process of genocide, arguing that since the birth
Speaker 1: of the Zius settler colonial project, the groundwork has been
Speaker 1: laid for exactly this current outcome of annihilation. That's a
Speaker 1: radical departure from the liberal Zionis claim that Israel simply
Speaker 1: lost its way under BB in the current horror or
Speaker 1: due to a few bad apples, rather than being the
Speaker 1: logical outgrowth of a decades long attempt to ethnically cleanse
Speaker 1: this land of its Arab inhabitants. Take a listen to
Speaker 1: how she describes this logic and its importance to the present.
Speaker 15: The genocide in Gaza is the most extreme stage of
Speaker 15: a long standing settler colonial process over issure of the
Speaker 15: native Palestinians. For over seventy six years, this process has
Speaker 15: oppressed the Palestinians as a people in every way imaginable,
Speaker 15: crushing their in the inalienable right to self determination demographically, economically, territorially, culturally,
Speaker 15: and politically. Israel has attempted to displace them, expropriate their
Speaker 15: land and other resources, and ultimately replace them the colonial
Speaker 15: Amnija of the West as condon Israel's colonial settler project.
Speaker 15: From the violity story of the very birth of the
Speaker 15: State of Israel to its oppressive occupation since nineteen sixty seven,
Speaker 15: the crippling enclosure of Gaza since nineteen ninety three, and
Speaker 15: its military assaults on Gaza since two thousand and seven,
Speaker 15: the world now sees the bitter fruit of the impunity
Speaker 15: afforded to Israel. This was a tragedy foretold.
Speaker 6: Tragedy for told. Now.
Speaker 1: The report's not particularly long, It's about twenty five pages.
Speaker 1: It's not intended to be exhaustive, but it is a
Speaker 1: highly affected summation and analysis of what's becoming increasingly undeniable.
Speaker 1: This is not it's never been a targeted hunt for Hamas.
Speaker 1: It's an excuse to attempt to finish the job of
Speaker 1: Zionism by fully dominating the Palestinians, destroying them in Holler,
Speaker 1: and part establishing a new demographic reality that can safeguard
Speaker 1: their state policy of Jewish supremacy. The second reason that
Speaker 1: this report is consequential is because, as.
Speaker 6: A report prepared for and delivered.
Speaker 1: To the UN, it may carry special weight with the
Speaker 1: International Court of Justice, which is of course a UN body.
Speaker 1: The International Court of Justice has already determined that South
Speaker 1: Africa's case against Israel on violation of the Genocide Convention
Speaker 1: is strong enough.
Speaker 6: To be plausible.
Speaker 1: I the chance to speak with Muen Rabani this week
Speaker 1: for Crystal Colin Friends. Fresh off his debate on the
Speaker 1: Wex Friedman podcast. He went so far as to say
Speaker 1: that Albanes's report obligates the ICJ to take seriously.
Speaker 6: A finding of genocide. Take a listen.
Speaker 18: I think the significant issue here is that the International
Speaker 18: Court of Justice, unlike the International Criminal Court, is a
Speaker 18: UN organ It's one of the principal UN organs, and
Speaker 18: therefore you could almost consider it a kind of obligation,
Speaker 18: even if that's putting it too strongly. The ICJ will
Speaker 18: take UN documents particularly seriously, and I think this is
Speaker 18: part of the reason that it ultimately rest on it
Speaker 18: positively to South Africa's application in December, was because so
Speaker 18: much of the information contained that the South African application
Speaker 18: was based on UN sources, so the ICJ basically had
Speaker 18: to either confirm the validity of what the UN was
Speaker 18: saying or go against its own organization, so to speak.
Speaker 18: I think this report is a little different because of
Speaker 18: the way it was produced, but nevertheless it will now
Speaker 18: become an official UN document. It will have to be
Speaker 18: carefully studied by the ICJ, and again I have to
Speaker 18: read it in detail, but from what I've seen it
Speaker 18: seems to be a well argued summary of the case
Speaker 18: against Israel, which once again finds that there is a
Speaker 18: plausible case against Israel for genocide.
Speaker 1: And finally, this report is significant because it demands action
Speaker 1: of the UN and its member states. After all, it
Speaker 1: is incumbent on every signatory to the Genocide Conventions not
Speaker 1: just to abide by the conventions themselves, but to work
Speaker 1: to prevent genocide and to punish genocide. Specifically, Albaniese calls
Speaker 1: for a complete arms embargo of Israel and suggests sanctions
Speaker 1: may also be required to secure an immediate and lasting ceasefire. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: of course, the US has gone in the polar opposite direction.
Speaker 1: The very weak that this report, titled Anatomy of a
Speaker 1: Genocide was presented, the US outrageously claimed that Israel was
Speaker 1: acting in compliance with international humanitarian law, accepting that country's
Speaker 1: perversion of such law and the logic that all civilians
Speaker 1: and civilian infrastructure can be safely marked for destruction and extermination.
Speaker 1: This certification was granted specifically in order to enable the
Speaker 1: weaponshipments on which Israel is wholly dependent for continuation of
Speaker 1: their genocidal acts. The US State Department additionally asserted that
Speaker 1: Israel is not blocking humanitarian aid, which is funny since
Speaker 1: the US has been reduced to dropping aid into Gaza
Speaker 1: from the sky at great danger to civilians, as if
Speaker 1: into some hostile territory rather than into a strip of
Speaker 1: land controlled by our great ally Israel. Those of us
Speaker 1: who have been paying attention have been watching this genocide
Speaker 1: unfold clearly for months, from the reporting on how civilian
Speaker 1: power targets were being intentionally destroyed, to the early announcement
Speaker 1: of a complete sage in which Palestinians were described as
Speaker 1: human animals, to the dire warnings of starvation, and seeing
Speaker 1: those dire warnings becoming a nightmare reality. But for some reason,
Speaker 1: the last couple weeks do seem to have really shifted
Speaker 1: perceptions that Al Jazeera drone videos showing four unarmed Palestinians
Speaker 1: strolling along obviously before being killed by a robot which
Speaker 1: was controlled by some murderous human being who was doing
Speaker 1: the bidding of their entire genocidal government, seems to have
Speaker 1: been what flipped Alex Jones Joe Rogan. The Flower massacre,
Speaker 1: where over one hundred Palestinians were murdered for the crime
Speaker 1: of seeking aid for their starving families, that seems to
Speaker 1: have brought home from any the scale of barbarism and cruelty,
Speaker 1: the levels of absolute desperation that Israel had has driven
Speaker 1: these people too with our help. Of course, a new
Speaker 1: poll taken after the Flower Masker actually shows the majority
Speaker 1: of Americans now disapprove of Israel's military action. Democrats disagree
Speaker 1: by a margin of seventy five to eighteen. In addition
Speaker 1: to everything else, this report is validation you aren't crazy.
Speaker 1: The horrors you're watching every day are exactly what they
Speaker 1: seem to be. The powerless college kids who oppose this genocide,
Speaker 1: they're not the maniacs, They're not the monsters. The supposedly
Speaker 1: civilized class of DC elites who have turned the Gaza
Speaker 1: Strip into a pit of human misery, death, starvation, and despair, they.
Speaker 6: Are the true demons.
Speaker 1: One day, I'd like to see some deep reporting on
Speaker 1: how these supposedly liberal humanitarians learn to love the crime
Speaker 1: of crimes. So, guys, we still have our eyes on
Speaker 1: that horrific bridge collapse just outside of Baltimore.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 1: The expectation is that six construction workers who had been
Speaker 1: there repairing potholes are presumed dead after they plunged into
Speaker 1: that river after the bridge collapse, where fortunately joined this
Speaker 1: morning by Maximilian Alvarez. He is editor in chief of
Speaker 1: the Real News. He's also the author of the fantastic
Speaker 1: book The Work of Living, and also happens to be
Speaker 1: a Baltimore resident who had just gotten back from a
Speaker 1: really important reporting trip to East Palestine, Ohio when this
Speaker 1: bridge collapsed, and was there on the scene talking to
Speaker 1: some people who were associated with those workers.
Speaker 6: It's great to see you, Max.
Speaker 3: Great to see you too, sister. Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1: So first, let's talk about who these workers were. We
Speaker 1: have a little bit of a report here from the
Speaker 1: Washington Post we can put up on the screen. They write,
Speaker 1: six presumed dead in bridge collapse were immigrants, soccer fans,
Speaker 1: family men.
Speaker 6: They say.
Speaker 1: The key bridge, now twisted wreckage submerged in the Potapsco,
Speaker 1: once held six men high above the river. They were fathers, husbands,
Speaker 1: and hard workers. At least some of them had traveled
Speaker 1: to this country for a life they hoped would be
Speaker 1: prosperous and long. Just reflect a bit Max about the
Speaker 1: circumstances that put them in this position of danger and
Speaker 1: who they were in their lives.
Speaker 7: Well, I'll start with the men we have identified so far,
Speaker 7: because I want people to know their names right, because
Speaker 7: as we try to show every week here at the
Speaker 7: Real News Network as I try to show on the
Speaker 7: Arctic Class Wars segment breaking points, and you do the
Speaker 7: same with your coverage.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 7: These are not just you know, name tags and job titles.
Speaker 7: These are human beings who had lives and families and
Speaker 7: backstories and dreams, and who were just trying to make
Speaker 7: a living and provide for their families, just like all
Speaker 7: of us are. These were workers, just like you. These
Speaker 7: were you know, community members. And so far, we, according
Speaker 7: to the New York Times, have been able to identify
Speaker 7: four of the men, two of whom were recovered in
Speaker 7: the last twenty four hours dead in a car. But
Speaker 7: the names we have so far are Alejandro Hernandez Fuentes
Speaker 7: thirty aged thirty five, dor Lean Ronean Castillo Carrera twenty six,
Speaker 7: Miguel who was in his forties and from El Salvador,
Speaker 7: who was married with three children and been living in
Speaker 7: Maryland for nineteen years. Maner Yasir Suazzo Sandoval, who was
Speaker 7: in his thirties from Honduras and immigrated here more than
Speaker 7: seventeen years ago. What we know, and what I've been
Speaker 7: reporting at the Real News is that we all know
Speaker 7: what happened to the bridge. This this cargo ship on
Speaker 7: its way to Sri Lanka that had just left the
Speaker 7: port minutes earlier, experienced a catastrophic propulsion failure, issued a
Speaker 7: may Day call about ninety seconds, where we had about
Speaker 7: ninety seconds from that call to respond to it. And
Speaker 7: that is why police responded to that call to block
Speaker 7: traffic from entering the bridge. And you know, credit to them,
Speaker 7: they did save lives. But you can hear in the
Speaker 7: dispatch recordings an increasingly desperate dispatch. You're asking if anyone's
Speaker 7: going to go tell the work crew on that bridge
Speaker 7: about what was about to happen to them, And you
Speaker 7: hear a police officer saying, I'm here at the bridge
Speaker 7: like waiting for backup, and then I'll go up and
Speaker 7: tell them. And then the next thing you hear is
Speaker 7: another voice saying, the bridge just collapsed. The thing that
Speaker 7: I've been trying to point out to people and the
Speaker 7: thing that Hasu's compos another construction worker who works for
Speaker 7: Brauner Builders, that's the contractor that employed the crew on
Speaker 7: that bridge. They were contracting with the State of Maryland
Speaker 7: to fill potholes on the bridge. In the middle of
Speaker 7: the night, so the rest of us could have a safe,
Speaker 7: smooth drive to work in the morning. They got no
Speaker 7: warning that they were about to meet their debts. They
Speaker 7: were on that bridge without it like, in a clearly
Speaker 7: potentially hazardous work environment. And let's not forget the construction
Speaker 7: is one of the deadliest jobs in the country.
Speaker 3: Already.
Speaker 7: Six crew members on a similar crew died last year
Speaker 7: in Baltimore County when a car barreled into their crew
Speaker 7: on the.
Speaker 3: Side of the road. Right, So it was already dangerous.
Speaker 7: They were doing that work, they were contracted out, They
Speaker 7: were doing that work in the dead night while these
Speaker 7: mega ships were passing beneath their feet, and they had
Speaker 7: no direct line to emergency dispatch. That's why the police
Speaker 7: couldn't get to them in time. Was I'm not saying
Speaker 7: that the police should have raced faster to tell the
Speaker 7: men on the crew. I'm saying the men on that
Speaker 7: crew doing that job should have had a direct line
Speaker 7: to emergency dispatch in case something like this happened. We
Speaker 7: see why that's a necessity. But these men were just
Speaker 7: like so many other men who are and women who
Speaker 7: were working in this country trying to, you know, make
Speaker 7: a life for themselves. Right, They went to work, they
Speaker 7: kissed their families good goodbye that night to head to
Speaker 7: their night shift, which went from nine pm to five
Speaker 7: am in the morning, and they never came home, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, like, and these are the kind of people
Speaker 7: people like hasus, people like the men on that bridge,
Speaker 7: people like me, people like my own foster daughter and
Speaker 7: her friends. She's undocumented from Honduras as well. Like, I mean,
Speaker 7: these are just regular people who we are all trying
Speaker 7: to make a life for ourselves. And right now, Trump
Speaker 7: and the people he is poisoned with his ideology are
Speaker 7: out there saying that we are the enemy destroying this country.
Speaker 7: But what are we actually doing. We're filling your potholes
Speaker 7: at night, We're cleaning your office buildings. Our children are
Speaker 7: being found cleaning bone saws in meat packing plants and
Speaker 7: working in parts distributing manufacturers for Hyundai in Alabama, or
Speaker 7: picking tomatoes in Florida under slave like conditions for the
Speaker 7: hamburger that you get at Wendy's right.
Speaker 3: But it's not just that.
Speaker 7: I mean, there are so many of us who are
Speaker 7: just out there doing regular jobs, trying to live our lives.
Speaker 7: We're not out here to try to destroy this country.
Speaker 7: We are helping making this country great, while the people
Speaker 7: who are destroying it are clear and obvious and in
Speaker 7: front of all of us. And yet people have been
Speaker 7: so brain poisoned by this, this xenophobic crap that they
Speaker 7: can't they are too cowardly to confront the reality that
Speaker 7: is staring us right in the face, which is that
Speaker 7: the rich, the corporations, and they're bought off politicians are
Speaker 7: screwing over all of us.
Speaker 3: And pitting us against one another.
Speaker 7: Well, everything from East Palestine to Boeing planes is crumbling
Speaker 7: all around us. I'm truly, as you can tell, kind
Speaker 7: of overwhelmed right now.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, and I wish we could say it was just
Speaker 1: Donald Trump or it was just right wing media, but
Speaker 1: we've seen the way that Democrats have fully embraced the
Speaker 1: republican position. I mean, you literally have Joe Biden going
Speaker 1: out and saying, you.
Speaker 6: Know, I thought Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Previously they were talking about how he's a fascist on
Speaker 1: the border. Now Biden's going out and saying, oh, why
Speaker 1: don't you work with me? I would love to adopt
Speaker 1: your your border policy. The media consistently frames immigrants in
Speaker 1: a negative light, very similar to the Trumpian framing as criminals,
Speaker 1: as invaders, as a problem to be dealt with, versus
Speaker 1: you know, when you see who the actual human beings
Speaker 1: who were here literally risking and losing their lives so
Speaker 1: that you can have a safer and smoother commute, it's
Speaker 1: a very different reality that's out there of who these
Speaker 1: actual individuals are, which, by the way, almost everybody in
Speaker 1: this country has to know an immigrant from somewhere, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's impossible not to think about who those
Speaker 1: people are in your life, Like, think about who those
Speaker 1: people are, because I can tell you in my life,
Speaker 1: literally the best people I know in my entire life
Speaker 1: are people who immigrated to this country. And so even
Speaker 1: though it's not, you know, affecting me directly personally my family,
Speaker 1: it does because I'm personally insulted by the caricature that
Speaker 1: has been painted of them and the way that they're
Speaker 1: consistently smeared. Again now at this point across the board.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, like, I don't know what else to
Speaker 7: say at this point, but I mean, like to anyone
Speaker 7: on breaking points, to sager to to anyone who listens
Speaker 7: to him, and like, I mean, if you can't think
Speaker 7: of anyone else at least think of me. You guys
Speaker 7: watch me on this channel too, Think of me and
Speaker 7: my family, right, I mean, like you know, and I
Speaker 7: don't know, maybe that's not enough, but you know, I
Speaker 7: just really want to stress to people that, I mean,
Speaker 7: like we are human beings and fellow workers just like you.
Speaker 7: Our kids are your kids friends at school, Like you know,
Speaker 7: we're sitting next to you in the pews at church, right,
Speaker 7: I mean, we are not some horned, fanged, you know,
Speaker 7: like monstrous race of mongrels coming here to quote unquote
Speaker 7: destroy this country. And you're absolutely right, Crystal, Like, I mean,
Speaker 7: shame on the Democrats for just jumping on board this
Speaker 7: crap and totally throwing us and the constituents who voted
Speaker 7: for Biden in twenty twenty under the bus because we
Speaker 7: were shocked and horrified by what we were seeing at
Speaker 7: the border and now we're just seeing a continuation of that,
Speaker 7: and like what are we supposed to do? Who's gonna
Speaker 7: fight for us? And I just want to make like
Speaker 7: one more point here because you mentioned at the top
Speaker 7: that like I got back from East Palestine, Ohio, where
Speaker 7: I've been like like twenty four hours before this bridge collapsed.
Speaker 7: I was there filming with the Real News. I've been
Speaker 7: interviewing people from that community. That's Trump country, right. I've
Speaker 7: been talking to those people all year about the hell
Speaker 7: that they are going through and lifting up their voices
Speaker 7: and their stories.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 7: And I told East Palestinians in East Palestine this Saturday,
Speaker 7: it's not that working people have forgotten you. It's that
Speaker 7: so many other people out there feel just as forgotten
Speaker 7: as you do.
Speaker 17: Right.
Speaker 7: Because I remember when Donald Trump came to Lordstown, just
Speaker 7: a few miles down the road from East Palestine, and
Speaker 7: told all the manufacturing workers they're particularly the workers who
Speaker 7: worked at the famous GM plant in Lordstown, don't sell
Speaker 7: your homes because we're bringing manufacturing jobs back. I remember
Speaker 7: talking to workers at the Lord'stown GM plant who felt
Speaker 7: hopeful about that. I also remember when Trump achieved his
Speaker 7: signature policy goal, which was a truly massive tax cut
Speaker 7: for the rich and for corporate America in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 7: I remember him gleefully at mar A Lago going to
Speaker 7: tell his rich friends, quote, you all just got a
Speaker 7: lot richer. And the you in that sentence includes companies
Speaker 7: like GM and their CEO, Mary Barra, and I remember
Speaker 7: when GM got their tax cut, they were making great profits,
Speaker 7: and they still laid off fourteen thousand people and shuttered
Speaker 7: the Lord's Town plant. In twenty nineteen, I talked to
Speaker 7: those workers. I interviewed some of them on my podcast.
Speaker 7: The Congressional Budget Office estimated that Trump's tax cuts alone
Speaker 7: would cost nearly two trillion dollars over the next ten years.
Speaker 7: That's two trillion dollars worth of money, like out of
Speaker 7: the tax space, into the pockets of the one percent,
Speaker 7: into the offshore accounts. And now these same people, the
Speaker 7: same corporate class that is like buying off Republicans and Democrats,
Speaker 7: like you said, is telling all of us that immigrants
Speaker 7: are the ones destroying these countries. They are going back
Speaker 7: to communities like East Palestine and Lordstown, Ohio, and saying
Speaker 7: that people who look like me, the workers, the migrants
Speaker 7: who are coming here for a better life, they're the
Speaker 7: ones who are ruining your country while they're robbing all
Speaker 7: of us blind.
Speaker 3: We have to be able to see through this crap.
Speaker 7: We have to be able to find one another on
Speaker 7: that basic human level and say I will fight for you.
Speaker 3: You are not that much different than I am.
Speaker 7: We are working people who are all just trying to
Speaker 7: make a better life, and we are all getting screwed
Speaker 7: over by this oligopoly, by this or this oligarchy that
Speaker 7: is that has taken over our economy, that is steering
Speaker 7: our politics, that is profiting off of war, that is
Speaker 7: cutting costs, cutting corners, leading to Boeing planes falling out
Speaker 7: of the sky, railroads derailing in our backyards. This country
Speaker 7: is going down the twos because of them, not because
Speaker 7: of us. And if we band together and actually fight
Speaker 7: as one, as a community of the forgotten, as working
Speaker 7: people who say we will be forgotten no more, we
Speaker 7: can actually make a difference. But if you are buying
Speaker 7: into the crap, if you're taking the bait, and you're
Speaker 7: letting yourself believe that immigrants like the men who are
Speaker 7: working on this bridge filling potholes for you and me
Speaker 7: in the middle of the night, then I don't know
Speaker 7: what else to tell you. You're being played, You're doing
Speaker 7: the boss's work for them.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about that ideology that is
Speaker 1: the problem. To put this up on the screen. I mean,
Speaker 1: I honestly I shouldn't have been surprised, but this is
Speaker 1: the type of logic that passes for elite economic thinking.
Speaker 1: So City Group's Andrew Hollenhorst was asked by Bloomberg about,
Speaker 1: you know, rebuilding the bridge, which seems like a pretty
Speaker 1: obvious basic priority, and he said, quote, the US is
Speaker 1: already grappling with an unprecedented deficit that is threatening to
Speaker 1: balloon in the coming years without substantial changes. If the
Speaker 1: US borrows even more to invest in nuts and bolts,
Speaker 1: it would be inflationary in the short term, even if
Speaker 1: longer term.
Speaker 6: It fosters greater price stability.
Speaker 1: So he's saying, no, the actually the federal Garment shouldn't even.
Speaker 6: Pay to rebuild this bridge. That's his argument.
Speaker 7: I mean, like again, like this is this is the
Speaker 7: kind of crap that like you, you the conclusions you
Speaker 7: come to when you live in this sort of elite
Speaker 7: bubble and everything that you're talking about is just a concept.
Speaker 7: But you're not talking to the actual people on the ground,
Speaker 7: working people, Democrat, Republican, non voter, immigrant, non immigrant, a union,
Speaker 7: non union. If you just talk to people on the ground,
Speaker 7: you will get a very different picture of America than
Speaker 7: what people like that are trying to present to you.
Speaker 3: And we're already seeing this, I.
Speaker 7: Think, I know, Ryan and Emily kind of covered this
Speaker 7: about the you know, ridiculous you know, right wing conspiracy
Speaker 7: theories that are already like filtering through social media about
Speaker 7: this bridge collapse. And again I say to people thinking
Speaker 7: like that, you know like that that stop being a coward.
Speaker 7: Look at the reality that is staring you right in
Speaker 7: the face. You don't need to come up with some
Speaker 7: boogeyman explanation for what is patently obvious. I understand that
Speaker 7: people are going to try to use towns like East
Speaker 7: Palestine and play them off Baltimore and say like, oh,
Speaker 7: this is Trump country and Biden hasn't helped them, But look,
Speaker 7: he's going to go try to rebuild the bridge as
Speaker 7: quick as possible in Baltimore. And what I would say
Speaker 7: to you is someone who has been covering this on
Speaker 7: the railroads in East Palestine and now in Baltimore, that like, actually,
Speaker 7: what Biden is doing is incredibly consistent with what happened
Speaker 7: in East Palestine, because that's probably why they made the
Speaker 7: disastrous decision. In Norfolk, Southern pressured the local officials to
Speaker 7: vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chlorides,
Speaker 7: set them on fire. Release that massive death plume into
Speaker 7: the air, even though the manufacture of the vinyl chloride.
Speaker 3: Said that that was not necessary.
Speaker 7: There were no signs that the contents of those cars
Speaker 7: were going to explode like Norfolk Southern said they would,
Speaker 7: which has led people in the community to, I think
Speaker 7: rightly surmise that the whole reason that they have been
Speaker 7: poisoned by that decision was not to prevent an explosion,
Speaker 7: but it was to clear the way so that Norfolk
Speaker 7: Southern could reopen those rail lines as soon as possible,
Speaker 7: which I saw trains going through there every fifteen minutes.
Speaker 7: That's why Biden is committing to rebuilding this bridge. It
Speaker 7: is a major thoroughfare. A lot of our trade depends
Speaker 7: on it. It's gonna hit the economy hard, I mean, like,
Speaker 7: but that's why they're rushing to again, like protect the
Speaker 7: sort of business interests, the economic interests, like, but they
Speaker 7: are not gonna.
Speaker 6: Like about the people. It's about protecting capital. Yeah, that's
Speaker 6: exactly right.
Speaker 1: Well, Max, tell people where they can they can find
Speaker 1: more of your work. And I wish Saga was here
Speaker 1: today so he could have this exchange with you as well,
Speaker 1: since his name came up we'll have to have you
Speaker 1: back on so you can have some of these conversations,
Speaker 1: you know, face to face and engage on the topic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would love to.
Speaker 7: I'd love to tell you with have heart to heart
Speaker 7: right because this is you guys. This is personal for me,
Speaker 7: this is personal for a lot of people that you know.
Speaker 7: We're not just abstractions. If we can at least talk
Speaker 7: on that level, I can deal with differences of opinion.
Speaker 7: But look me in the face, see the people that
Speaker 7: you were talking about, and then let's talk about how
Speaker 7: to move forward. So Sager, I welcome the conversation, brother,
Speaker 7: and I appreciate again all the work that you guys do,
Speaker 7: but of course, for obvious reasons, like I feel very
Speaker 7: strongly about this, I feel very strongly about you know,
Speaker 7: working people and our collective struggles, which is what we
Speaker 7: try to cover every week at the Real News Network.
Speaker 7: Folks can find us at the realnews dot com. Please
Speaker 7: support the work that we're doing. Like every other media outlet,
Speaker 7: we're trying to do our best.
Speaker 3: With what we've got.
Speaker 7: You can find my podcast Working People wherever you find
Speaker 7: podcasts are listened to, and of course you can catch
Speaker 7: me occasionally on the art of class war here.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much Crystal for having me on.
Speaker 6: Oh it's my pleasure.
Speaker 1: And we always love your segments that on the art
Speaker 1: of class war that pop up here and the audience
Speaker 1: really enjoys them, so I'll have to work on one
Speaker 1: of those again soon in the future. Great to see you, Max,
Speaker 1: take care you too. Thank you guys so much for
Speaker 1: watching today. Sager should be back next week. Thank you
Speaker 1: to Emily. She has like five different jobs, so she
Speaker 1: had to run to do her other job as the
Speaker 1: show went long today, but always fun to spend time
Speaker 1: with her as well.
Speaker 6: And we'll see you guys next week. Y