Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 2: Let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: All right, Welcome back to Counterpoints. Glad to be back
Speaker 3: in the studio. We were not here last week.
Speaker 4: Because of the Republican debates, which I hear was a
Speaker 4: lot of fun.
Speaker 5: Was a blast. You didn't watch in France.
Speaker 3: I did not watch that.
Speaker 6: Ryan has been doing a home swap in France, and
Speaker 6: I think Kedo really relaxing, fun time with this family.
Speaker 4: I think it was like four am and I was like,
Speaker 4: you know what, I'm not going to watch this undercard. No,
Speaker 4: I'll catch the Trump Tucker calls some clips later.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there you go, sleep through this. Well, it's good
Speaker 5: to have you back in studio.
Speaker 3: Good to be here.
Speaker 6: All right, Well, we're tracking the hurricane that actually became
Speaker 6: a Category four storm off the coast of Florida overnight
Speaker 6: and Wednesday early and early this morning, briefly intensified, as
Speaker 6: CNN says, into an extremely dangerous Category four hurricane with
Speaker 6: winds of one hundred and thirty miles per hour before
Speaker 6: it weakened slightly. We have some video coming in from
Speaker 6: Florida just as we're taping this right now.
Speaker 5: Take a look.
Speaker 6: Incredible storm sers here this morning at about seven o'clock.
Speaker 2: I'm sitting there.
Speaker 7: Look at one of the marine markers coming through.
Speaker 5: That's a marine marker right there. So that's a big water,
Speaker 5: big wave action.
Speaker 8: It's a protein houses.
Speaker 3: Here on the Fresh Free and pick this.
Speaker 5: Lost power live on air now.
Speaker 6: The National Hurricane Center is predicting there could be a
Speaker 6: surge of upteen up to sixteen feet, which would be
Speaker 6: around once in a lifetime levels again according to CNN.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and this is hitting kind of the hinge.
Speaker 4: What do you call that area at Florida where the
Speaker 4: Panhandle meets the rest of it, something like the hen
Speaker 4: let's go with that. And it's smashing right through there.
Speaker 4: It's going to come up the eastern seaboard. We have
Speaker 4: Ronda Santis here if we want to play his response
Speaker 4: Governor of Florida.
Speaker 9: So we are going to have the full landfall impacts
Speaker 9: very very shortly, within the next couple hours, most likely
Speaker 9: probably by zero eight hundred. It's going to make landfall
Speaker 9: on Florida's Big Bend. So please hunker down wherever you are.
Speaker 9: I don't mess with this storm. Don't do anything that's
Speaker 9: going to put yourself in jeopardy. And there'll be a
Speaker 9: lot of help coming on the back end of the storm,
Speaker 9: and we're ready to go. We as soon as it's
Speaker 9: safe to do. So you're going to see all these
Speaker 9: different assets deployed.
Speaker 4: I knew there was something the Big Bend, the Big Bend,
Speaker 4: the Big Bend, and there was some reporting last night
Speaker 4: that a lot of sheriffs and others from the rural
Speaker 4: counties in the Big Bend urging people to get out.
Speaker 4: A lot of people did not get out because even
Speaker 4: though this is a once in a lifetime storm, Florida's
Speaker 4: seen plenty of storms before.
Speaker 3: So people think, you know, we're.
Speaker 4: Going to hunker down, as Desanta said, and we're gonna
Speaker 4: and we're gonna make it through this.
Speaker 3: And the sheriff was saying.
Speaker 4: That there were way too many spots open in the
Speaker 4: shelters that you know, in an elementary school at handles
Speaker 4: seven hundred, they might have one hundred. And so there's
Speaker 4: a lot of fear that a lot of people stayed,
Speaker 4: not understanding just how bad it could be. Because if
Speaker 4: you are judging you know, present and future climate events
Speaker 4: by the past, you might miss out on some you know,
Speaker 4: stream ones that are going to hit you.
Speaker 6: And you know, it's also expensive to leave. It's inconvenient
Speaker 6: to leave if you have a shift that you.
Speaker 3: Need to getet towards to go to an elementary school
Speaker 3: spend the night. Yeah that's true.
Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely, Why would you leave the comfort of your home?
Speaker 6: Why would you want to if you don't have to,
Speaker 6: and if you feel like you don't have to because
Speaker 6: these warnings sometimes you know, are moved down, they're bumped down,
Speaker 6: they start really severe and things change as the day
Speaker 6: goes on, and so people take their chances. But hope
Speaker 6: everybody who did that the same is staying safe.
Speaker 4: And there was a storm chaser on Fox News who
Speaker 4: was telling people like, no, no, no, seriously, get out,
Speaker 4: get out. So if we have to, we have that
Speaker 4: Fox News clip here we can roll for that.
Speaker 7: Center is going to approach this area within the next
Speaker 7: hour to hour and a half, and we're going to
Speaker 7: see those winds switch around and we're going to have
Speaker 7: to watch for a major water push that's going to
Speaker 7: come inland. Luckily, we have not seen much in the
Speaker 7: way of people out here in this area, which is
Speaker 7: a great thing. We were here yesterday afternoon talking to residents,
Speaker 7: talking to the Taylor County Deputy.
Speaker 3: There was a curfew in effect.
Speaker 7: There's a pretty much a mandatory evacuation in effect. So
Speaker 7: this is a very rare scenario with a system coming
Speaker 7: out of the eastern Gulf of Mexico that has made
Speaker 7: major hurricane status, because that just does not happen in
Speaker 7: this region.
Speaker 4: Yea, And later in the show, we're going to talk
Speaker 4: about several climate protests, kind of one that was out
Speaker 4: at burning Man, another in Washington, d C. All of
Speaker 4: them went terribly, you know, you know, furious reactions from
Speaker 4: the public, and I think part of it comes from
Speaker 4: and we can talk about this more later. Nobody needs
Speaker 4: awareness raised anymore about climate Like if there's basically nobody
Speaker 4: left in the country who doesn't think the climate is
Speaker 4: changing in dangerous ways and also that it's happening because.
Speaker 3: Man made carbon emissions.
Speaker 4: Like almost nobody left now the big fight is over
Speaker 4: what to do about it. Even Vivek in that debate
Speaker 4: when he said the climate agenda, So he's being very
Speaker 4: smarmy and clever there and like because some people are
Speaker 4: going to hear that as climate stuff as a hoax,
Speaker 4: But what he's saying is the agenda as a hoax.
Speaker 3: So he's saying, like, Okay, I agree the climate is changing.
Speaker 4: What I don't agree with is how the left wants
Speaker 4: to use it to kind of re engineer society. But
Speaker 4: about I'm ten years ago or so, I remember thinking,
Speaker 4: all right, it's clear that we're not going to do
Speaker 4: enough about climate change in my lifetime and that we're
Speaker 4: going to see utterly catastrophic results. As in the end,
Speaker 4: it's like, at least I'll be around for that comforting
Speaker 4: feeling if I told you so. Nothing better in the
Speaker 4: world than being able to say I told you so
Speaker 4: to people who fought against the opportunity when it was
Speaker 4: around to do something about it. Watching it happen now,
Speaker 4: I don't get an ounce of satisfaction, Like I'm even
Speaker 4: deprived of the satisfaction of being able to say I
Speaker 4: told you so, Like seeing what happened in Vermont, seeing
Speaker 4: what's happened happened in Canada, of seeing what's happening down
Speaker 4: in Florida right now, none of that even brings me
Speaker 4: an ounce of like I told you so, Joy, I.
Speaker 5: Would I would be worried if it did. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And I think it's abstract, you know, ten years ago
Speaker 4: it's abstract. What what's what's this? What's this climate apocalypse
Speaker 4: going to look like? But when you see some of
Speaker 4: those images where the inland areas have been just been
Speaker 4: turned into ocean, and what is what's that going to
Speaker 4: leave behind? I was driving through the Panhandle a year
Speaker 4: or two ago, and you could still see all the devastation.
Speaker 4: I forget which hurricane it was, but you could it was.
Speaker 4: It was not a couple of weeks prior. It was
Speaker 4: like years prior, and you could still see debris and
Speaker 4: you could still see destruction. I talked to someoney from
Speaker 4: Montpelier last night. They are they've barely recovered from that
Speaker 4: flood up in Vermont. And so as these continue once
Speaker 4: in a lifetime events continue to accumulate, and we become
Speaker 4: increasingly unable to recover.
Speaker 3: From them, like what kind of world does that leave
Speaker 3: behind us?
Speaker 6: And you know, I think you and I have disagreements
Speaker 6: on this, but well, and we can flush some of
Speaker 6: those out in the climate blox. But it's another big
Speaker 6: question for media because one thing I wanted to mention
Speaker 6: here actually is that there's still hundreds of people unaccounted
Speaker 6: for in Maui, and the media coverage of that has slowed.
Speaker 5: To a trickle at best.
Speaker 6: And again, we're looking at years of rebuilding in Maui,
Speaker 6: we're looking at a devastated local economy, and we're looking
Speaker 6: at potentially somewhere around a thousand, if not more deaths.
Speaker 6: We have one hundred and fifteen confirmed deaths as of
Speaker 6: right now, which is a staggering number right now already
Speaker 6: that's a staggering number. It could climb by some tenfold
Speaker 6: by the time all of the.
Speaker 5: Dust, so to speak, settles.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And as I was riding in this morning, I
Speaker 4: was thinking of one. I was going over all the
Speaker 4: twenty years of climate arguments that we've been having over
Speaker 4: the years, one of them that used to hear a
Speaker 4: lot was this one.
Speaker 3: Do you remember maybe you still hear it?
Speaker 4: Like hey, in the sixteenth century, we had a little
Speaker 4: ice age. Now things get colder, things get hotter. That's
Speaker 4: all there is to it. What are you gonna do
Speaker 4: about it? You know, it happens. What I've learned since
Speaker 4: then is that have you heard the theory on why
Speaker 4: we had that little.
Speaker 3: Ice age in the sixteenth Saturday.
Speaker 4: So in fourteen hundred and fifteen hundreds Columbus and the
Speaker 4: Europeans come over to the New World, and they bring
Speaker 4: disease with them. You have a ninety percent population die
Speaker 4: off as a result of that disease coming in. Humanity
Speaker 4: is always at war with nature, or humanity is always
Speaker 4: war with vegetation at least. And so with ninety percent
Speaker 4: of people gone, vegetation just took over North America, which
Speaker 4: is why you have all these descriptions of this kind
Speaker 4: of untouched wilderness one hundred years later that people came through.
Speaker 3: It wasn't that way two hundred years ago.
Speaker 4: It became that way over the course of like fifty
Speaker 4: years from all of this just kind of wilderness taking
Speaker 4: back over where humans had been. And what does vegetation
Speaker 4: do sucks carbon out of the air. So even the
Speaker 4: silly kind of pedantic point that people made about the
Speaker 4: little ice age actually turned out to be also anthropogenic
Speaker 4: in the beginning. Or you could blame a virus, or
Speaker 4: you can blame disease if you want, but it was
Speaker 4: humans that carried the disease over there. And so it
Speaker 4: just shows that, as Elon Musk said on Twitter just
Speaker 4: the other day that at the carbon not Twitter refuse,
Speaker 4: I absolutely refuse that carbon concentration in the atmosphere matters.
Speaker 4: Like it's like it doesn't care about your feelings or
Speaker 4: your politics.
Speaker 5: Like carbon doesn't care about your feelings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it doesn't.
Speaker 4: You take carbon out, gets colder, you put more carbon in,
Speaker 4: it gets warmer. Like this is basic stuff and there's
Speaker 4: just no way around it.
Speaker 5: All right.
Speaker 6: So moving on from this one thing that didn't get
Speaker 6: a lot of play in the media this week is
Speaker 6: a little thing that Marjorie Taylor Green of all people,
Speaker 6: said on I think it was like a real America's
Speaker 6: voice hit something like that, but actually has pretty big
Speaker 6: implication for implications for our politics going forward. Lots of
Speaker 6: Republicans kicking around the idea of impeachment, and I think
Speaker 6: that's about to get really serious. Let's listen to what
Speaker 6: Marjorie Taylor Green has to say, let's.
Speaker 1: Talk about what an impeachment inquiry is. Marina, thank you
Speaker 1: for bringing that up. And impeachment inquiry is just asking
Speaker 1: the question. We're just asking members of Congress do you
Speaker 1: think we should inquire about impeachment? It's not saying do
Speaker 1: you want to impeach? Right?
Speaker 8: Should we just ask the question? And at this point, right.
Speaker 1: Now, I'm like, what the hell is wrong with Republicans
Speaker 1: that we can't just hey, guys, maybe ask the question.
Speaker 5: Maybe we should just ask.
Speaker 1: And think about it and look at it and investigate
Speaker 1: in a much broader way and with more subpoena power.
Speaker 8: Just ask the question, just real quick. That leaves the
Speaker 8: decision to Kevin McCarthy ultimately.
Speaker 9: Are you confident he's going to go with the impeachment
Speaker 9: inquiry this fall in September?
Speaker 1: I am confident. And the reason why I'm confident is
Speaker 1: we had a House GOP call yesterday and that was
Speaker 1: his big push on the call. So I think if
Speaker 1: we were to have the vote today right now, Kevin
Speaker 1: McCarthy would be one of the first ones to vote yes.
Speaker 6: So the Speaker of the House is about ready to
Speaker 6: vote to start an impeachment inquiry. Ryan, let's play this
Speaker 6: clip of Hakeem Jefferies as well, because he's already i think,
Speaker 6: anticipating an impeachment inquiry and has a I think you
Speaker 6: get a little taste of the Democrat messaging strategy ahead
Speaker 6: when you listen to how he responded to questions about
Speaker 6: that on CNN.
Speaker 8: Potentially as soon as the end of next month.
Speaker 6: Is what our colleague, melaniees Andoda I know you know
Speaker 6: quite well, has been reporting.
Speaker 9: Your response to Republicans inching towards launching an impeachment and
Speaker 9: qureer into the president.
Speaker 10: Well throughout this year, the American people have been forced
Speaker 10: to deal with a do nothing, extreme Republican Congress that
Speaker 10: has done nothing to make a difference in the economy,
Speaker 10: nothing to make a difference with respect the job creation,
Speaker 10: nothing as it relates to healthcare affordability, nothing as it
Speaker 10: relates to inflation, nothing as it relates to public safety.
Speaker 10: They have nothing to show for their majority throughout the year,
Speaker 10: and so as a natural consequence of that, they just
Speaker 10: continue to take orders from Donald Trump, their puppet master
Speaker 10: in chief, who has directed them to persecute and to
Speaker 10: go after Joe Biden, which may take the form of
Speaker 10: an illegitimate impeachment inquiry.
Speaker 6: So finally, I would just point out that Kevin McCarthy
Speaker 6: actually addressed some of these comments on Sunday, So before
Speaker 6: both of those conversations happen, we can put the last
Speaker 6: element up on the screen here. He said, So if
Speaker 6: you look at all the information on Fox News we
Speaker 6: have been able to gather so far, it is a
Speaker 6: natural step forward that you would have to go to
Speaker 6: an impeachment inquiry. And McCarthy then said, it provides Congress
Speaker 6: the quote apex of legal power to get all the
Speaker 6: information they need. So Ryan, this is the just asking
Speaker 6: questions impeachment and.
Speaker 4: It's a perfect metaphor for our politics. That Florida would
Speaker 4: be underwater right now, and that the thing that Washington
Speaker 4: would be talking about is and that Congress would be considering.
Speaker 4: It's not like what are we going to do about that?
Speaker 4: Like how are we going to build a sustainable country
Speaker 4: going forward in this new climate environment? But it's like,
Speaker 4: let's move forward with this theatrical impeachment that we know
Speaker 4: is going to fail. And Democrats did the same thing,
Speaker 4: and did it twice, maybe the second time they had
Speaker 4: actually some modest hope that it might succeed, even though
Speaker 4: the guy was out of office by the time the
Speaker 4: impeachment inquiry was done, so there was you couldn't do
Speaker 4: anything other than ha ha, we got you. But on
Speaker 4: the first one, everybody knew there was no way there
Speaker 4: were going to be two thirds to convict in the Senate.
Speaker 4: We know right now there's ninety two thirds in the
Speaker 4: Senate to convict Joe Biden. So Marjorie Taylor Green just
Speaker 4: wants the kind of theater in order to kind of
Speaker 4: show and to show the base that they're delivering. And
Speaker 4: my take on all of this is that it's similar
Speaker 4: to a government shutdown and that neither party is able
Speaker 4: to kind of deliver what its base wants because of
Speaker 4: the way that none of them have enough.
Speaker 3: Votes at this point.
Speaker 4: And so there are like basically two release valves at
Speaker 4: this point for that energy. One is you shut the
Speaker 4: government down, and you're like, look, see we tried, and
Speaker 4: so that Republic they're probably gonna do that in a.
Speaker 3: Few months, yep. And the other is, well, we impeached
Speaker 3: the president, so aren't you happy.
Speaker 6: Well, so that released actually might come sooner than a
Speaker 6: few months. It might actually come within the next month.
Speaker 6: And so again when you so when we're organizing the show,
Speaker 6: we have like this is our A block, and so
Speaker 6: you try to put the most important news in the
Speaker 6: A block because that's the big thing to go through.
Speaker 6: And actually, I think why this belongs at the top
Speaker 6: of the show is because September, as we're heading into
Speaker 6: Labor Day weekend here, September could feature a government shutdown
Speaker 6: and the opening of an impeachment inquiry. And I'm really
Speaker 6: glad you said, Ryan that Democrats with the Ukraine impeachment hearing,
Speaker 6: especially the Ukraine impeachment hearing, and actually Kevin McCarthy himself
Speaker 6: will cite that as a moment that like really made
Speaker 6: the Republican conference as they call it on the House
Speaker 6: side coalesce and people who were in the House and
Speaker 6: went through the Ukraine impeachment inquiry, which, by the way,
Speaker 6: I mean we can talk about, you know what Joe
Speaker 6: Biden did with Victor Shoken, who's been out in the
Speaker 6: media this week talking. He's the prosecutor who Joe Biden
Speaker 6: used for an aid to get rid of in the
Speaker 6: case of he was ostensibly corrupt, as many government officials
Speaker 6: in Ukraine are, and we're but that's Joe Biden sort
Speaker 6: of tethering foreign aid to a decision that the country
Speaker 6: makes and a decision that a foreign country makes. And
Speaker 6: that's essentially what Donald Trump was impeached over. So whether
Speaker 6: that was at the level of an impeachment inquiry is
Speaker 6: a serious question, and so too is what Republicans are
Speaker 6: now going to the questions that they're just going to
Speaker 6: be asking going forward to your point, Ryan, it's become
Speaker 6: a release valve, not what it used to be. And
Speaker 6: so Marjorie Taylor Green trotting at this thing. We're just
Speaker 6: asking questions, We're just asking questions. It's very much because
Speaker 6: if you're looking at an establishment Republican member like Kevin McCarthy,
Speaker 6: I can't emphasize that enough. This is not a guy
Speaker 6: from the Freedom Caucus. This is establishment Republican Kevin McCarthy,
Speaker 6: who says he told me in an interview exactly a
Speaker 6: year ago that that first impeachment completely changed the way
Speaker 6: Republicans saw the game in the House of Representatives. It's
Speaker 6: now fire with fire, and that's how they know that's what.
Speaker 5: Their constituents want, all voters.
Speaker 6: They know that's what the Republican base expects as a
Speaker 6: bare minimum, and so they feel like they can't not
Speaker 6: do it.
Speaker 4: And what put Trump's behavior outside the norm of the
Speaker 4: typical American president was that not that he was using
Speaker 4: American foreign policy as leverage over another country, because that's.
Speaker 3: What we do. We're going to talk about that later
Speaker 3: in the show That's an Empire.
Speaker 4: We talked about Pakistan recently, And so what made it difference?
Speaker 3: It was for pure political gain.
Speaker 4: No, it was like I need you to say that
Speaker 4: you don't even need to do the investigation of Hunter
Speaker 4: and Joe Biden, just like go on CNN and say
Speaker 4: you're doing it.
Speaker 3: That'll satisfy me.
Speaker 6: And in Trumpan fashion, it was more transparent and naked.
Speaker 3: Just completely naked.
Speaker 5: It's self interested.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And because it cut against Ukraine, which was at
Speaker 4: the time and remains kind of an ally slash client
Speaker 4: in our kind of adversarial relationship with Russia, that's what
Speaker 4: flipped it so that the rest of Washington was like, Okay,
Speaker 4: impeach him over this, because the Left had been trying
Speaker 4: to impeach Trump over.
Speaker 3: Anything.
Speaker 4: Muslim band, the massive amounts of like corruption running through
Speaker 4: either you know, Saudi or the Trump Hotel or you
Speaker 4: name it. But all of that stuff was too even
Speaker 4: though he was doing it in a more flagrant way,
Speaker 4: it was to cut too close to the bone of Washington,
Speaker 4: too similar in kind to what a lot of other
Speaker 4: politicians do, except they just do it in a more
Speaker 4: sophisticated and and okay way, and so you weren't going
Speaker 4: to have the Centrists along with you there. Then he
Speaker 4: does the Ukraine thing, and if you remember, it was
Speaker 4: the kind of former intelligence community people like Spanberger and
Speaker 4: others who came out publicly and said, okay, now, now
Speaker 4: he's crossed the line.
Speaker 3: Now we're gonna Now we're gonna do this.
Speaker 4: And at that point the left was like, well, we've
Speaker 4: wanted to impeach him for all these other things.
Speaker 3: We'll take this.
Speaker 4: We're not gonna we're not gonna vote no on impeaching
Speaker 4: Donald Trump. But of course you're not gonna get Republicans
Speaker 4: to go along, even though a lot of Republicans hated
Speaker 4: the idea that you would use our kind of client
Speaker 4: in a way, in any way other than being adversarial
Speaker 4: in our foreign policy towards like Russia or something like that.
Speaker 6: And we could keep pulling at this thread and go
Speaker 6: back to you know, whether Republicans and Newt Gingrich started
Speaker 6: this in the nineties. We could keep talking, we could
Speaker 6: talk about Whitewater, we could talk about we could just
Speaker 6: keep going.
Speaker 5: There's no question about it.
Speaker 6: But the bottom line is Republicans have a very very
Speaker 6: short time to fund the government in September. Not just Republicans,
Speaker 6: actually all of Congress has a very small amount of
Speaker 6: time to fund the fund the government in September. The
Speaker 6: Freedom Caucus thinks a shutdown is and if you talk
Speaker 6: to folks, that's the line they're they're pushing for a shutdown.
Speaker 6: Kevin McCarthy wants what's called the Continuing Resolution to punt
Speaker 6: that into December.
Speaker 5: He's the Freedom Caucus is in.
Speaker 6: All likelihood not going to let him get that continuing resolution,
Speaker 6: meaning that you're trying to start an impeachment inquiry and
Speaker 6: fund the government in September. People are in dire financial
Speaker 6: straits around the country. We're seeing some really frightening indicators
Speaker 6: that we've covered this month, certain things like credit card
Speaker 6: delinquency spiking, and Congress is going to be tangled up
Speaker 6: and likely in another impeachment fight and shutdown fight.
Speaker 4: My guess is that they'll do as I'm curious for
Speaker 4: your taking on this, that they'll do a short term
Speaker 4: extension at the end of toward the end of September.
Speaker 4: That'll push it into early December, and that around then
Speaker 4: is when you'll get your shut down, because I think
Speaker 4: it's I think it's really hard for if you have
Speaker 4: half the Republican conference saying I'm fine with a short
Speaker 4: term extension and you have the other half saying, though,
Speaker 4: I want to shut down now, Like that's such a
Speaker 4: loser argument that I think they'll just take it and
Speaker 4: punt it to December. But what you have a much
Speaker 4: better read on the House Republican So what's what's your guest.
Speaker 5: I could see that happening.
Speaker 6: I think it's the way I can see that happening
Speaker 6: is if McCarthy negotiates with the Freedom Caucus on impeachment.
Speaker 6: So maybe there's something that he can, you know, dangle
Speaker 6: a carot that he can dangle impeachment wise that gets
Speaker 6: him that continuing resolution or the short term extension to December.
Speaker 6: But there, you know, when you talk those guys right now,
Speaker 6: they are hardcore no CR because that's not you know,
Speaker 6: where the bases. That's not what anybody wants to hear.
Speaker 6: It is well past time. If you if you listen
Speaker 6: to just Marjorie Taylor Green, you know you're in the
Speaker 6: freedom caucus, but a sort of freedom coca is adjacent.
Speaker 5: It is well past.
Speaker 6: Time to start this impeachment and Querer it should have
Speaker 6: happened a lot of people think it should have happened
Speaker 6: earlier this year. So I don't think they're in any
Speaker 6: mood to keep pushing it. I don't think they're in
Speaker 6: any mood to push the potential shut down either. So
Speaker 6: I saw, like Mark Levin tweeting today, Reagan shut down
Speaker 6: the government some eight times, and you know it like
Speaker 6: the least it's the least house Republicans could do now
Speaker 6: basically is where the bases. So I don't feel like
Speaker 6: they feel like they have much flexibility. I don't think
Speaker 6: they want to have much flexibility, so I would be surprised.
Speaker 5: But there are some.
Speaker 6: Carrots that McCarthy and he's a good negotiator with.
Speaker 5: Them, so we'll see.
Speaker 4: It is so pathetic. It's like, really, it's like the
Speaker 4: least we can do is a great phrase for it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's like because nobody is going to the bout box saying,
Speaker 4: you know, what I really want is for the Park
Speaker 4: Service to get shut down like that. That's why I'm
Speaker 4: setting you to Washington. But they go and they can't
Speaker 4: deliver on the things that they want to deliver on,
Speaker 4: and so yeah, so they're like, all right, well, what
Speaker 4: can we.
Speaker 5: Do because basically it's impossibly get anything done.
Speaker 3: Especially yeah, yeah, right, that's the thing.
Speaker 4: They control the House of Representatives and they want to
Speaker 4: government from there, you can't, right, and they barely control
Speaker 4: the House of Representatives, that's right, real quick. My unpopular
Speaker 4: take Andrew Johnson worst president ever. Wish he had actually
Speaker 4: been impeached. But the thing that impeached him on was crazy.
Speaker 4: It was after he took over from Lincoln, they passed
Speaker 4: the law saying you can't get rid of your cabinet
Speaker 4: secretaries Lincoln's cabinet secretaries.
Speaker 3: And then that's crazy.
Speaker 4: President's got to be able to hire there a cabinet
Speaker 4: And so then he fired Stanton, and Stanton wouldn't leave
Speaker 4: the War Department. He's like, no, I'm not leaving, not leaving,
Speaker 4: like and people were like defending him.
Speaker 3: It was wild.
Speaker 4: And then I still wish he'd been impeached, even though
Speaker 4: I disagre read with the rationale for.
Speaker 3: They've just done it. They were just asking questions, just
Speaker 3: asking questions. Yeah, did you and he did break that law?
Speaker 3: But the law is kind of crazy.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean many such cases.
Speaker 6: Yeah, all right, Well, speaking of Republicans in difficult situations,
Speaker 6: here's Ron DeSantis has been I mean, a tragedy continues
Speaker 6: to strike Florida this week. There was this horrific, horrific
Speaker 6: shooting in Florida earlier this week. We can put b
Speaker 6: when b one up on the screen. This is from
Speaker 6: the New York Times. I'm going to read from the
Speaker 6: article here. A white gunman wearing a tactical vest barged
Speaker 6: into a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida, on Saturday
Speaker 6: and fatally shot three black people in an attack that
Speaker 6: the authority said they were investigating as a hate crime. Now,
Speaker 6: Ron de Santis has echoed that, he said he's he's
Speaker 6: seen the details and that this is the manifesto and
Speaker 6: this is clearly a racially motivated hate crime. So he's
Speaker 6: on the same page as law enforcement in that question.
Speaker 6: The victim, Angela Michelle Carr, fifty two years old Anault
Speaker 6: Joseph le Garry Junior known as AJ, twenty nine years old,
Speaker 6: and Gerald Deshaun Gallion nineteen years old, twenty one year
Speaker 6: old gunman with an AR fifteen style rifle and a
Speaker 6: glock handgun, as the New York Time says, both of
Speaker 6: which he purchased legally in Florida. So then Ron DeSantis,
Speaker 6: obviously as governor of Florida, this falls under his purview
Speaker 6: to handle the fallout. He did a press conference, and
Speaker 6: let's play some some audio and video from this. You
Speaker 6: can see him getting booed after the press conference.
Speaker 9: Laura's Governor, Ron de Santis is here a w he
Speaker 9: to come back and.
Speaker 5: Thank you for given a.
Speaker 1: Moment.
Speaker 5: We've already been looking to identify.
Speaker 8: Funds to be able to have one avants.
Speaker 6: Security, I said after the press conference, but clearly that
Speaker 6: was in the middle of the press conference. Definitely not
Speaker 6: after the press conference. Now Republicans have looked at the
Speaker 6: media coverage of this, and Ronda Santis is certainly going
Speaker 6: to be dealing I think with that that situation going
Speaker 6: forward in the aftermath of this hurricane that we covered
Speaker 6: earlier in the show That's Heating Florida right now and
Speaker 6: will continue to be a huge process for the communities
Speaker 6: impacted in the days.
Speaker 5: I've had, the months ahead, the years ahead, but.
Speaker 6: Republicans on media coverage of what happened there, and that's
Speaker 6: become sort of a news cycle in and of its own.
Speaker 6: This is Senator Mike Lee. We could put B three
Speaker 6: up on this. This is he's responding to an AP
Speaker 6: journalist who said something to the effect of, you know,
Speaker 6: Ron de Santis had this created the climate of fear,
Speaker 6: and the n DOUBLEACP put out a travel advisory to Florida,
Speaker 6: and then you know, sometime later there's the shooting, the
Speaker 6: racially motivated shooting of.
Speaker 5: Three black people.
Speaker 6: So tying A and B together, Mike Lee jumps in
Speaker 6: and says Scotis effectively immunized journalists from public figure defamation
Speaker 6: liability in nineteen sixty four. Over time, that immunity, coupled
Speaker 6: with political leanings of most journalists, had turned the news
Speaker 6: media into the communications assault arm of the Democratic Party.
Speaker 5: Now I don't agree at all about it.
Speaker 3: Does exhibit A.
Speaker 5: I'll read it right here.
Speaker 6: It's the tweet from it is from Steve Peoples, who
Speaker 6: said rond dea Santis scoffed when the NAACP issued a
Speaker 6: travel advisory the spring warning black people to use quote
Speaker 6: extreme care if traveling to Florida. Just three months later,
Speaker 6: DeSantis is leading his state through the aftermath of a
Speaker 6: racist attack that left three African Americans dead. And I'll
Speaker 6: put the next element up on the screen. This is
Speaker 6: my colleague David Harsani writing at the Federalists and saying, essentially,
Speaker 6: there's nothing in DeSantis's rhetoric that would be responsible for
Speaker 6: motivating a racially motivated terror attack. And so the Republican
Speaker 6: response and the conservative response has become a news cycle
Speaker 6: in and of its own, basically saying to point fingers
Speaker 6: at Ron DeSantis for you know, the ap curriculum that
Speaker 6: we talked about here on this show, for other things
Speaker 6: in Florida. Essentially that the left interprets one way and
Speaker 6: to connect it to a shooting is basically a smear.
Speaker 5: And that's what Mike Lee is arguing. I don't agree
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 6: And the question of liability for the media, that's a
Speaker 6: much more popular, that's an.
Speaker 5: Increasing and popularity.
Speaker 6: I mean, yes, it's a very self interested, but for
Speaker 6: legitimate reasons, I don't agree with that at all. Ryan
Speaker 6: though this is going to be in the few Sure,
Speaker 6: this is going to be a problem for Justsantis. We've
Speaker 6: seen him in ways that Florida voters appear to like
Speaker 6: turn the tables when questions like this happen and say
Speaker 6: this is awful what the media is doing. But at
Speaker 6: the same time, he can't escape the scrutiny no matter what.
Speaker 4: Happens, right, And so Michael is trying to blame the
Speaker 4: NAACP for warning people that black lives are at risk
Speaker 4: in Florida, and then three months later, three black people
Speaker 4: are killed and he's by a racist guy to Dollar
Speaker 4: General and he's like he should be saying, well, NAACP
Speaker 4: was kind of right about that, Right.
Speaker 6: He's blaming the AP for regurgitating the NAACP's line sort
Speaker 6: of credulously.
Speaker 4: And then you've got remember when Rick Scott he did
Speaker 4: that really creepy thing where he's like, it's socialist and
Speaker 4: communists and everybody believes in big governments stay out of Florida,
Speaker 4: warning you don't come down here like that rhetoric also
Speaker 4: like come on, you can't have a socialist can't visit
Speaker 4: Socialists can't visit Florida, Like what do you can't people
Speaker 4: believe in big government ought not to be warned not
Speaker 4: to go to Florida.
Speaker 3: He's talking about.
Speaker 2: So.
Speaker 4: But on the Rhonda Santis press conference, I was watching that,
Speaker 4: I'm thinking, you know, he has a responsibility as a governor.
Speaker 3: Those are these are his constituents.
Speaker 4: Like, he made a choice that he was going to
Speaker 4: be as divisive as he possibly could and as partisan
Speaker 4: as he could, and that was going to be his
Speaker 4: kind of leg up in the presidential primary, that he
Speaker 4: was going to pick fights with Democrats, slash the media,
Speaker 4: which he believes to be the same thing, and you know,
Speaker 4: fire elected prosecutors, you know in cities around Florida, and
Speaker 4: you know, take take take over the curriculum, and on
Speaker 4: and on. He had, he made that choice, and maybe
Speaker 4: it has fifty four percent of the state behind him,
Speaker 4: but that means you might have forty six percent of
Speaker 4: the state vocally again, you even in a moment where.
Speaker 3: Just several years ago everybody would come together.
Speaker 7: Right.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's I think that's an interesting contrast that And
Speaker 6: actually we've seen this with hurricanes past that Ron DeSantis
Speaker 6: has the way that he's approached tragedies like hurricanes under
Speaker 6: his governorship has been pretty well approved.
Speaker 5: It seems to.
Speaker 6: Have like actually been efficient and a proper use of government,
Speaker 6: a useful application of government. And he's actually again emerged
Speaker 6: from a lot of those other tragedies, probably stronger politically
Speaker 6: if anything. But yeah, we didn't used to see quite
Speaker 6: this level of polarization. It used to be that these
Speaker 6: things were like unifying moments for various reasons. But his
Speaker 6: approval rating this is as of July, a Florida Atlantic
Speaker 6: University poll had him at fifty four percent of voters
Speaker 6: approving of the way to Santis is handling his job.
Speaker 6: Then a strong plurality forty one percent saying they strongly
Speaker 6: approve forty one percent. But to your point, Ryan, that
Speaker 6: means twenty four percent of voters strongly disapproved. That's a
Speaker 6: lot of strong disapproval, which means he's generally well liked
Speaker 6: in the state of Florida, probably beyond just a partisan
Speaker 6: Republicans when you have numbers like that, But at the
Speaker 6: same time, that means the disagreement with Ron DeSantis is
Speaker 6: also highly highly polarized, and I think as he continues
Speaker 6: running for president, that's only going to get that's that
Speaker 6: will only become ratcheted out.
Speaker 5: That will only be stronger. The reaction to him and.
Speaker 6: Probably some of his numbers as he sort of flails
Speaker 6: on the national campaign trail will bring his numbers down
Speaker 6: in Florida, I imagine, especially if you end up looking distracted.
Speaker 6: You know, if you end up looking like you're treating
Speaker 6: tragedies as campaigns for a president, which I as campaign
Speaker 6: stops on your presidential bid, that's a pretty bad look too.
Speaker 6: I haven't seen that so far, And I do want
Speaker 6: to say I actually am in the camp where I
Speaker 6: think tying DeSantis personally Ron DeSantis is rhetoric personally to
Speaker 6: what happened, I think makes no sense. But I also
Speaker 6: take the point that that you were making that, you know,
Speaker 6: is it insane for a journalist to say this is
Speaker 6: what the NAACP, a major organization, a major national, powerful organization,
Speaker 6: was saying.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean I take that point.
Speaker 3: Too, right. Yes, I agree with all that that Bronda
Speaker 3: Santis is never born.
Speaker 4: You may very well still have this shooting. Andrew Gillen
Speaker 4: could be governor, right and you might still have this shooting.
Speaker 4: At the same time, what Mike Lee ought to be
Speaker 4: asking is why did the NAACP say that like, what
Speaker 4: is it, What is it that has happened between the
Speaker 4: NUAACP and the Republican Party, which used to be allies
Speaker 4: that led them to a place where they were issuing
Speaker 4: a travel warning to the state and so worked through
Speaker 4: that rather than blaming the AP for reporting on it
Speaker 4: and implying that like there's there would almost be some
Speaker 4: defamation in reporting, like even if there was no nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty four defamation protection, Mike Lee knows better, like you're
Speaker 4: allowed to report what the NAACP says and does as
Speaker 4: a reporter.
Speaker 5: It wasn't.
Speaker 6: It was definitely not the moment, the journalistic moment that
Speaker 6: I would be like, maybe we should look at for
Speaker 6: themation cases because they didn't eat like people's again.
Speaker 3: Who's going to suit Florida?
Speaker 6: Yeah, right, People's didn't or DeSantis, I guess like People's
Speaker 6: didn't make an explicit he didn't really have to. But
Speaker 6: he also didn't make an explicit point of culpability to
Speaker 6: He didn't say Ron DeSantis created the conditions that the
Speaker 6: NAACP issued a travel advisor because Ryan DeSantis is a
Speaker 6: racist and caused the shooting. And we actually do see
Speaker 6: journalists kind of crossing that bridge sometimes. So of all
Speaker 6: of the opportunities, I don't know that this would.
Speaker 3: Be one of them.
Speaker 4: So, speaking of extraordinarily polarizing events, there's been a series
Speaker 4: of climate protests that we wanted to take a look at.
Speaker 4: And first of all, nobody from burning Man is watching
Speaker 4: the show. Maybe they'll watch it when they're done, although
Speaker 4: actually maybe well from them, man, Yeah, maybe there's a
Speaker 4: little some Wi Fi connection out there and they're they're
Speaker 4: they're beaming, they're beaming it in and they're all sitting around.
Speaker 4: You know, I did my honeymoon at Burning Many.
Speaker 6: I didn't know that, but I'm so glad you broke
Speaker 6: that to me on air because.
Speaker 5: That is too perfect.
Speaker 4: Did our honeymoon at burning Man back? This is two
Speaker 4: thousand and seven, very very long time ago.
Speaker 5: Hell of a time. The bush are burning Man, nothing
Speaker 5: like it.
Speaker 4: And so if we could so in order to get there,
Speaker 4: it's basically one or two roads, and it's hours outside
Speaker 4: of Reno, even which is in the absolute middle of nowhere,
Speaker 4: and everybody is supposed to bring all of their own
Speaker 4: things with them, you know, gas and water. But you know,
Speaker 4: if you, let's say, I have to run your car
Speaker 4: for three or four hours in the highway or on
Speaker 4: the on the kind of state parkway unexpectedly that might
Speaker 4: cause some problems for you. And so there was a
Speaker 4: climate protest that blocked traffic for miles and miles and
Speaker 4: miles in the Nevada Northern Nevada desert on the way
Speaker 4: to burning Man. And so let we'll play how it ended,
Speaker 4: but then we'll play a little bit.
Speaker 3: Of what led up to it.
Speaker 4: So here here's a clip of how this how this
Speaker 4: ended in quite a brutal fashion.
Speaker 3: Did anyone get that they say, get down.
Speaker 5: The crowd, want the.
Speaker 3: Crowd, down the crowd.
Speaker 4: So that's a tribal policeman that the tribal police say
Speaker 4: that his conduct is now under review.
Speaker 3: This this was awesome.
Speaker 4: Uh afterwards you see some blood on the face of
Speaker 4: these these women, like he really roughed them up.
Speaker 3: Uh, this was several hours, but not with the truck.
Speaker 3: Not with the truck.
Speaker 4: No, this is like they're he even does the like
Speaker 4: stop resisting thing, uh with while they were absolutely clearly
Speaker 4: not resisting at all.
Speaker 6: So he's under investigation for after he ran through the barricades,
Speaker 6: his treatment of the protesters, which we didn't fully see there, but.
Speaker 3: Right and so so.
Speaker 4: So it's a fascinating dynamic that they're kind of blocking
Speaker 4: people from getting to Burning Man. And so let's play
Speaker 4: a little bit of the discussion between the burners and
Speaker 4: and these protesters.
Speaker 3: We've got some of this clip here.
Speaker 5: Are what are you guys are attacking?
Speaker 8: Let's caused the problem?
Speaker 11: Attack the big attack, the big corporations, attack the government.
Speaker 11: No attack us.
Speaker 8: We're all We're all.
Speaker 5: The same boat here, guys.
Speaker 8: This is this is the most liberal group of people.
Speaker 12: The better.
Speaker 11: That's better liberal policies. Biden is really more oil than
Speaker 11: any president since Bush like. Come on, so liberalism is
Speaker 11: not the answer either. We need to change the system.
Speaker 11: We need burners to rise up. You're intelligent, you're a
Speaker 11: conscious human being. You're awakened.
Speaker 10: We have it.
Speaker 11: Here's a flyer.
Speaker 8: I didn't say.
Speaker 11: Anything about ready system change.
Speaker 5: We need a man.
Speaker 11: Ain't burning Man. Three principles, Rise, honesty, Advocate for change.
Speaker 11: If we can make a full city of one hundred
Speaker 11: thousand people in the desert with zero resources on a
Speaker 11: dry lake bed, we can actually change some polity people
Speaker 11: need to make.
Speaker 4: So there's a good video of that with things like
Speaker 4: twenty five minutes long and just a lot of these
Speaker 4: different arguments going on, and so you did get a
Speaker 4: chance to hear the protester articulate the theory here that
Speaker 4: they're gonna Actually I'm not sure what the theory was.
Speaker 4: What they what's the goal? What's the goal there?
Speaker 6: Well, I mean, she's not wrong from the perspective of
Speaker 6: somebody who has that, and I think you show that
Speaker 6: perspective on climate change that the left is in some
Speaker 6: ways as culpable as the right. Again from that perspective
Speaker 6: for perpetuating the system, because you can do sort of
Speaker 6: band aids here and there, Inflation Reduction Act, which is
Speaker 6: sort of was an environmental policy in many many ways,
Speaker 6: but that's sort of your band aid that's not going
Speaker 6: to fully change the entire system that Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, etcetera.
Speaker 6: Are part and parcel of. So I guess I understand
Speaker 6: it from that perspective.
Speaker 4: On the other hand, Oh yeah, the analysis is dead on, right, yeah, yeah, right,
Speaker 4: but the prescription what like?
Speaker 3: And also I liked one of their demands.
Speaker 4: We didn't show it there, but across the street it
Speaker 4: said ban private planes, which is which is a wonderful
Speaker 4: message for these burners here now obvious. See those people
Speaker 4: don't have private plans because they're rolling in there on cameras,
Speaker 4: although maybe they flew into reno of them right and
Speaker 4: then and then drove from there. But the wealth at
Speaker 4: burning Man is just obscene. It's it's Silicon Valley. It's
Speaker 4: the richest people from northern California who have you know,
Speaker 4: liberal to libertarian values. You know, tons of libertarians out there,
Speaker 4: so it's not just liberals. Uh, but yeah, so banned
Speaker 4: private jets. That's cool, I'll go with that. But how
Speaker 4: are you going to ban private jets by blocking like
Speaker 4: you know, it's like what what by by making everyone
Speaker 4: there hate you so much that they're supporting the police
Speaker 4: right barreling through you and almost killing you.
Speaker 3: Like, if you've lost people to the point where they're like.
Speaker 4: Willing to overlook that, then how are you kind of
Speaker 4: organizing a coalition that's going to have enough power to
Speaker 4: implement the prescriptions that you your analysis rightly says we need.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's really visceral for people who are you saw
Speaker 6: in those videos just incredible line of traffic backed up to.
Speaker 4: The running out of gas and it's one hundred degrees right,
Speaker 4: you made that there's no gas station for hours.
Speaker 6: You made that point but before we started taping the
Speaker 6: show that it's actually really dangerous when you're out in
Speaker 6: the middle of desert and you're the desert and you're
Speaker 6: idling potentially for hours. If the climate protesters get their way,
Speaker 6: you run out of gas. How are you supposed to
Speaker 6: deal with that situation? Obviously there were a lot of
Speaker 6: people backed up, and I'm sure people would be helping
Speaker 6: each other out in the true spirit of burning man.
Speaker 4: But radical self reliance, though, is the true spirit of
Speaker 4: burning man? Was like, Hey, radically self rely on yourself man, Yeah,
Speaker 4: and I'm going to burn on.
Speaker 6: The other end, you know that. I want to play
Speaker 6: the video here from Washington, d C. Actually not too
Speaker 6: far from where we were. That came in over the
Speaker 6: weekend because climate protests are obviously there's been a lot
Speaker 6: here recently, and you know, don't have we don't need
Speaker 6: to have sympathy for like the politicians and lobbyists here
Speaker 6: in DC. But you'll see in this video that's not
Speaker 6: really who's bearing the brunt of the problem.
Speaker 3: We could just roll it here because we can talk
Speaker 3: over it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, take a look yeah, you see here, all white
Speaker 6: and like older.
Speaker 5: Yeah, look like retirees.
Speaker 6: Climate protesters blocking a really busy strip of road here
Speaker 6: in northeast.
Speaker 3: DC and far from the power center.
Speaker 6: Right, multi racial, ostensibly sort of middle class people trying
Speaker 6: to get to work. And when you're listening to the audio,
Speaker 6: you can find the video online. It's just people saying
Speaker 6: over and over again, which we have seen for years
Speaker 6: as these traffic blocking protests have transpired, people saying I
Speaker 6: need to get to work please, like I need to
Speaker 6: make my shift and need to punch in, I need.
Speaker 5: To pick up my kid.
Speaker 6: And I think the real problem even for people who
Speaker 6: are on the same page, which you hear in the
Speaker 6: DC clip.
Speaker 5: One woman saying we all know the world is melting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that woman that we just saw there, that was
Speaker 4: her point. She's like, look, you think we don't know
Speaker 4: the world's melting. Yeah, like we know that.
Speaker 6: It's even people that are on the same page who
Speaker 6: are saying like, like, we get it, but we also
Speaker 6: need to get to work. And it's this lack of
Speaker 6: empathy I think with the material concerns of everyday Americans
Speaker 6: that comes up when.
Speaker 5: You have retired.
Speaker 6: Yea all white retired climate protesters, or even people who are.
Speaker 5: Just you know, blocking your ability to have a normal day.
Speaker 6: That is just so deeply visceral for people saying like, listen,
Speaker 6: we are we get it, but I got kids to feed.
Speaker 4: But I also, I mean I get the impulse, I
Speaker 4: get the fear, the anxiety, the desire to just do something.
Speaker 4: When you look at what's going on in Florida right now,
Speaker 4: when you understand the threat to a sustainable planet, certainly
Speaker 4: at this population level, uh and you and you look
Speaker 4: at the minimal amount of progress that's been made. I
Speaker 4: can I can see where where they would say, you
Speaker 4: know what, just throw it all out, but it but
Speaker 4: that's all that is is personal satisfaction at that point.
Speaker 4: All that all that is is kind of making you
Speaker 4: feel a little bit better about what you did in
Speaker 4: this crisis without any connection between your analysis and your
Speaker 4: action actually doing something. And so if you think deeper
Speaker 4: about it, you don't actually get to credit yourself for
Speaker 4: doing everything you could if what you did didn't actually
Speaker 4: help like good like.
Speaker 5: And they was counterproductive.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: The left has a new phrase over the last several years,
Speaker 4: which is intentions don't matter.
Speaker 3: Impact matters, Actions matter.
Speaker 4: And so when people are apologizing for, you know, whatever
Speaker 4: they're apologizing for, people have now absorbed that, and so
Speaker 4: they don't say anymore what their intentions were.
Speaker 3: When they did something.
Speaker 4: They just acknowledge the impact that their words or their
Speaker 4: actions had on people that they harmed, and they pledged
Speaker 4: to educate themselves and do better. So if intent doesn't matter,
Speaker 4: like if you believe that and you're not just saying
Speaker 4: it to get out of whatever trouble you're in, then
Speaker 4: you have to connect your action yeah, to actual impact.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, and if you're.
Speaker 4: If you're not making progress, if you're actually making things worse,
Speaker 4: then your intent doesn't matter. And so we have if
Speaker 4: you want to put up C five one another one
Speaker 4: of his incidents in Canada, which I think we've seen
Speaker 4: a bunch of these in the UK. That is, I
Speaker 4: think it is just going to lead to draconian penalties
Speaker 4: for people who do this kind of thing.
Speaker 6: Also in Canada, protesters splash paint on a Tom Thompson
Speaker 6: piece at the National Gallery this week. Again we are
Speaker 6: seeing an increase in this, uh, this this type of
Speaker 6: activism that feels it's really intentionally obstructionist. And I don't
Speaker 6: use that phrase pejoratively. I know it's really charged, but
Speaker 6: I don't use it pejoratively because on the left they
Speaker 6: would say, yes, it is obstructionist. That is the entire
Speaker 6: point of you know what David Serota and Adam McKay
Speaker 6: were making, don't look up. It has to be obstructionists
Speaker 6: because we need to radically rethink the way that we're
Speaker 6: our relationship with the planet. At the same time, an
Speaker 6: interesting thing from Canada is the protesters say that paint
Speaker 6: was washable and that there's no damage to the painting.
Speaker 4: There's also a lot of paintings are covered. A lot
Speaker 4: of these masterpieces have a little covering, which this one did.
Speaker 6: Right, and so it's an inverse I think. Also the
Speaker 6: traffic protest, I still don't think people want to see it.
Speaker 6: I mean, they think it's you know, silly. But when
Speaker 6: you're attacking art, that's like sort of high culture as
Speaker 6: opposed to blocking traffic, it's a very different thing. So
Speaker 6: I think climate protesters are trying to reckon with us themselves,
Speaker 6: you know.
Speaker 4: I think this goes back to a kind of naivete
Speaker 4: and a delusion that we have that all of us
Speaker 4: across the political spectrum have and the dudes on Chopo
Speaker 4: Traphouse have talked about this that like on the right,
Speaker 4: this like idea that there's all these conspiracies to kind
Speaker 4: of produce new events so that we forget about the
Speaker 4: events before, and that all of these things are psyops,
Speaker 4: this whole you know, psyop analysis of the world. What
Speaker 4: that assumes is that if people only had the right
Speaker 4: in in front of them, then people would be able
Speaker 4: to act. And so what it does is it explains
Speaker 4: our failure to act as well. People don't understand what's
Speaker 4: happening because there's all these psyops. But that's not true.
Speaker 4: We know what's going on, We have the knowledge. We
Speaker 4: just don't have the power to do anything about it.
Speaker 4: And I think that is so kind of humiliating and
Speaker 4: so difficult to just process as a human being's pessimistic
Speaker 4: that you're just a powerless adam in this getting pushed
Speaker 4: around by these structures. That we then tell stories that
Speaker 4: if only people knew, then we'd be able to change something.
Speaker 4: So and so the corollary there is if we just
Speaker 4: splash enough paint on these paintings and get it into
Speaker 4: the news that there's a climate catastrophe, coming. If we
Speaker 4: block people on their way to work in DC, if
Speaker 4: we block people on the way to burning Man, then
Speaker 4: that will wake people up. They will know that there's
Speaker 4: a climate catastrophe, and then they will use that knowledge
Speaker 4: and they will they will take power and they will
Speaker 4: do something about it. But what's broken is that the
Speaker 4: structures make it impossible for a population to express its
Speaker 4: will because we are locked out of the government, we're
Speaker 4: locked out of decision making authority. So we can raise
Speaker 4: as much awareness as we want.
Speaker 3: That's not the problem.
Speaker 4: The problem is we don't have power, can't rain Nobody
Speaker 4: wants to admit that we don't have power.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and you can't rain in the corporate powers, you
Speaker 6: can't reign in the government powers collusion with the corporate
Speaker 6: powers for those reasons, and it actually reminds me, and
Speaker 6: this is an extreme connection what we're talking about in
Speaker 6: the last block, where Republican voters are demanding the release
Speaker 6: valve of a government shutdown and an impeachment inquiry, and
Speaker 6: again that's because they feel helpless against the system. They
Speaker 6: feel like the system needs a radical check in the
Speaker 6: form of both of those things, which will ultimately, you know,
Speaker 6: be not measures that radically change the system. Right, there
Speaker 6: are measures that will make radical demands of the system,
Speaker 6: that will make radical condemnations of the system, but will
Speaker 6: not ultimately change the system. It's more of a sort
Speaker 6: of esthetic and it's, you know, in substance, it's a rebuttal.
Speaker 6: It's the fire with fire, But you can really understand
Speaker 6: why people are demanding fire with fire. And I think again,
Speaker 6: extreme connection. I know, but fire with fire is blocking
Speaker 6: the roads. It's a similar thing. And I'm not saying
Speaker 6: that it's exact one to one, but I do think
Speaker 6: there's a powerlessness that people feel, especially in a world
Speaker 6: that has been shrunk over the last one hundred years
Speaker 6: because of technology, and that what happens in China and
Speaker 6: India is now dramatically affecting the lives of people in
Speaker 6: Kansas or in Canada. We don't have control really over
Speaker 6: what China and India does. We can try, and we
Speaker 6: don't feel like we even have control over our own government,
Speaker 6: let alone the governments in.
Speaker 5: China and India. And because of the way the world
Speaker 5: has shrunk.
Speaker 3: It all matters.
Speaker 4: But it's point in it's such a sad way that
Speaker 4: even in the sense of the depth of that powerlessness
Speaker 4: of those people on the street feel They still feel
Speaker 4: like if they just raise a little bit more awareness,
Speaker 4: then we're going to solve this. Yeah, I agree, Big
Speaker 4: if true news out of Joe Biden who says that
Speaker 4: as a twenty one year old he convinced strom Thurman
Speaker 4: to support the Civil Rights Act. If we can put
Speaker 4: up the quote from Biden here, he says, I was
Speaker 4: able to literally, not figuratively, talk strom Thurman into voting
Speaker 4: for the Civil Rights Act before he before he died,
Speaker 4: and I thought, well, maybe there's real progress.
Speaker 3: But hate never dies. It just hides, it hides under
Speaker 3: the rocks.
Speaker 4: This is the latest in Joe Biden's long, long history
Speaker 4: of just completely fabricating nonsense about his role in the
Speaker 4: civil rights movement.
Speaker 3: It goes back.
Speaker 4: This is probably the most This is the second most
Speaker 4: absurd of all of them. And we'll get to the
Speaker 4: most absurd in a minute. He actually got in a
Speaker 4: lot of political trouble back in the nineteen eighties for
Speaker 4: claiming that he was he marched, you know, and was
Speaker 4: involved in the civil rights movement, and pressed on it.
Speaker 4: It turned out that he went to I think like
Speaker 4: one luncheon thing after a church event or something, and
Speaker 4: that was and he had kind of then embellished that
Speaker 4: into like serious involvement in the civil rights movement. His
Speaker 4: most absurd one was he basically said he broke into
Speaker 4: prison to see Nelson Mandela.
Speaker 3: Remember this one.
Speaker 4: This was during the campaign, and this this was during
Speaker 4: the twenty twenty presidential campaign, and.
Speaker 6: Before you really start to see like obvious cognitive decline
Speaker 6: in him. So it's not just an old Joe Biden.
Speaker 4: For Joe, he's a liar, Like, yeah, he's he tells lies.
Speaker 4: He also has I think lies to himself.
Speaker 5: That's probably true. This is even more sad.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe, yeah.
Speaker 4: And so the White House was pressed for some clarification
Speaker 4: on this. What do you mean that he literally, not figuratively,
Speaker 4: talked strong thrmin of aving for the Civil Rights Act?
Speaker 4: And they said, what he actually meant, because it's physically impossible.
Speaker 5: He was twenty one not in the Senate.
Speaker 3: And also Strom Thurmon voted against it.
Speaker 4: Yes, Strom, so they literally voted against it, not figuratively.
Speaker 6: Think of all the layers here, Strom Sermon did not
Speaker 6: vote for the Civil Rights Act, Joe Biden did not
Speaker 6: talk him into it, and Joe Biden was twenty one
Speaker 6: years old, not anywhere.
Speaker 5: Near the Senate.
Speaker 3: Now, let's let's let's be generous.
Speaker 4: What he was thinking about, according to the White House,
Speaker 4: is that strom Thurmon ended up voting for the nineteen
Speaker 4: eighty reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Which let's sit
Speaker 4: with that for a minute. That is that is something,
Speaker 4: and it also shows how far our politics has come
Speaker 4: in a way that you know, MLK said, arch of
Speaker 4: history is long, it bends towards justice. It's been more
Speaker 4: of a pendulum than a bent arc, in the sense
Speaker 4: that by the nineteen eighties, you did have kind of
Speaker 4: unanimous support almost for the Voting Rights Act in Congress.
Speaker 4: In two thousand and six, I believe it was maybe
Speaker 4: even more recently than that, there was a Voting Rights
Speaker 4: Reauthorization Act that passed ninety eight to zero in the House,
Speaker 4: in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House of Representatives,
Speaker 4: and then just a few years later John Roberts gutted it,
Speaker 4: saying that Congress's intent on this passing it in nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty five had been basically been fulfilled, completely ignoring that
Speaker 4: it had just been reauthorized in a bipartisan vote and
Speaker 4: signed by a Republican president, George W.
Speaker 3: Bush.
Speaker 4: And so the fact that strom Thurman was among that
Speaker 4: pendulum swing that direction then only to see it swing back,
Speaker 4: I think is a fascinating commentary. But let's talk for
Speaker 4: a second just about Joe Biden. Strom Thurmon the other
Speaker 4: thing that he might have been thinking of. And we
Speaker 4: put up this second story here. This is from history,
Speaker 4: and David Stein, we published this in the intercept, helped
Speaker 4: that at this piece as a great piece of journalism
Speaker 4: from September twenty nineteen during the campaign. The story that
Speaker 4: Stein on Earth's is that in the nineteen seventies, Joe
Speaker 4: Biden was far to the right of Ronald Reagan when
Speaker 4: it came to the crime and to the drug war,
Speaker 4: and relentlessly pushed Jimmy Carter to get tougher and tougher
Speaker 4: on crime and kept insisting to the Democratic leadership, give
Speaker 4: me This was called give me the crime issue, and
Speaker 4: you'll never have to hear about it again because he's
Speaker 4: going to be so tough on crime. After Reagan was elected,
Speaker 4: strom Thurman takes over the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee
Speaker 4: and Biden becomes the ranking member, and he goes to
Speaker 4: strom Thurman and he says, look, we can do a
Speaker 4: crime build together. You and I can get tough on crime.
Speaker 4: He said, and this is his telling of it. If
Speaker 4: you get your right wing guys, and I love the
Speaker 4: idea that strom Thurman is not a right wing guy,
Speaker 4: you get your right wing guys not to kill it.
Speaker 4: I'll get my left people not to kill it, and
Speaker 4: Collective will do a tough on crime bill.
Speaker 3: And Reagan had no interest.
Speaker 4: Initially, the entire nineteen eighty campaign was about unemployment, it
Speaker 4: was about inflation, it was about malaise, it was about
Speaker 4: around hostages.
Speaker 3: We kind of retcon it to be about.
Speaker 4: The war on drugs and the crime wave, but it
Speaker 4: wasn't like that wasn't just the reality of it.
Speaker 3: What that wasn't what the nineteen eighty campaign was about.
Speaker 4: And Biden just kept pushing and pushing and pushing, saying,
Speaker 4: we need to make this the centerpiece of our agenda.
Speaker 4: Reagan vetoed it one of his big tough on crime
Speaker 4: bills because Reagan didn't want to spend the money.
Speaker 3: He was still a he had.
Speaker 4: There was that pull between the small sea conservatism and
Speaker 4: the and the and the push against a strong federal
Speaker 4: government and the desire to be the tough on crime party,
Speaker 4: and whereas Biden didn't have that. Biden was fine with
Speaker 4: big government and he wanted to be tough on crime.
Speaker 4: And so his alliance with strom Thurman is really what
Speaker 4: then enables him to put together the coalition that eventually
Speaker 4: becomes the War on Crime, and you know, ending with
Speaker 4: his not ending with his nineteen ninety four crime Bill,
Speaker 4: because he continued to do the Rave Act and other
Speaker 4: kind of quote unquote tough on crime.
Speaker 3: Legislation after that.
Speaker 4: So that's the actual thing that he talked strom Thurmon
Speaker 4: into doing. And maybe he did actually talk him into
Speaker 4: voting for the Voting Rights Act in nineteen eighty I
Speaker 4: don't know, maybe he did.
Speaker 6: I mean, yeah, who knows at this point. But at
Speaker 6: the same time, I mean, this is part of a
Speaker 6: pattern with Biden, who also he had some interesting words
Speaker 6: about his work with George Wallace. He's had interesting words
Speaker 6: for Robert Bird. In fact, he called Robert Byrd a
Speaker 6: quote mentor, guide and friend. Robert Bird was a leader
Speaker 6: in the KKK.
Speaker 3: He was, but Bird was one of those.
Speaker 4: He renounced that past and like, yes, so if we're
Speaker 4: you know, we're going to allow for that.
Speaker 3: I think we got to allow for that.
Speaker 6: I think I think we absolutely have to allow for that.
Speaker 6: I also think it's a pattern with Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: And Harry Bird. Was you renounced it less, But.
Speaker 6: It's interesting with Joe Biden. And because we're the reason
Speaker 6: that made me think of Bird is that we're also
Speaker 6: doing a segment in the show about how Biden gets
Speaker 6: a surprising win against Pharma, And it's just this pattern
Speaker 6: in Biden of that I actually think the left really
Speaker 6: needs to reckon with in that he is a political
Speaker 6: chameleon and he's willing to say whatever it takes, whether
Speaker 6: or not it's true, and he's gotten away with it.
Speaker 6: He's actually like done that to the presidency, which is,
Speaker 6: you know, he had to drop out of a presidential
Speaker 6: race at one point because he was he was caught
Speaker 6: plagiarizing essentially in the campaign.
Speaker 5: It's dogged his entire career.
Speaker 4: And this speech said that you know, for thousands of
Speaker 4: years my family has been living here. It's like, what
Speaker 4: do you mean thousands of years? And they realized it
Speaker 4: was a Scottish politician that he'd ripped off.
Speaker 6: Yeah again, like it wasn't first of all, it wasn't true,
Speaker 6: and secondly it wasn't even him.
Speaker 5: It is amazing. But at the same time he has
Speaker 5: had all.
Speaker 3: Right stuffhard him too when he got busted for that.
Speaker 6: Right it did, and but he at the same time
Speaker 6: he continues to.
Speaker 5: Just do enough to get things done.
Speaker 6: He's not like radically reforming anything, but he does just
Speaker 6: enough to get things done, to the point where the
Speaker 6: arc of his career is such that in twenty twenty
Speaker 6: three or in twenty twenty the rest of the Democratic
Speaker 6: Party feels the rest of the candidates are talking about
Speaker 6: things like Medicare for all that makes voters uncomfortable, and
Speaker 6: Joe Biden has he's just a step, you know, beyond
Speaker 6: that he says no Medicare for all and gets elected
Speaker 6: as in the United States.
Speaker 5: It just he's had a very telling arc.
Speaker 4: I think he has a fine tuned antenna. He's a
Speaker 4: very good politician in his ability to find the kind
Speaker 4: of political center. And he doesn't care. He's amoral about it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: he doesn't have any value. He's just going to.
Speaker 3: Go where it is.
Speaker 4: And I think part of it comes from coming from Delaware.
Speaker 4: Delaware as several things that make it kind of I
Speaker 4: think a good breeding ground for a good politician. One
Speaker 4: is that it's so wildly corporate dominated that it you know,
Speaker 4: you know, he understands corporate power and so as a
Speaker 4: very strong sense of where where that power lies. But
Speaker 4: also in such a small state, you know, he and
Speaker 4: people like Tom Carper know everybody in that state.
Speaker 3: Like this was like they know by first name.
Speaker 4: Like when I've reported from that state, people are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: I had dinner with Tom Carper, I had dinner with
Speaker 4: Joe Biden.
Speaker 3: Just regular people on the street.
Speaker 4: And also it's a microcosm in the sense that there's
Speaker 4: rural white working class areas, there's rural black working class areas.
Speaker 3: There there's there's.
Speaker 4: Wilmington, there's the Wilmington suburbs, and so you have kind
Speaker 4: of every different political dynamic. And so he is able
Speaker 4: to go into these towns, have authentic conversations across the
Speaker 4: spectrum with people wrote racial and political, and then regurgitate
Speaker 4: those just you know, churn him back out to a
Speaker 4: national population.
Speaker 12: Uh.
Speaker 4: And so that that enables him to find the center
Speaker 4: at all at all times, and it helps him. It
Speaker 4: helps him like fend off the charges from Republicans that
Speaker 4: he's some radical socialists, and it's one of those frustrating
Speaker 4: things for Republicans, like, look, he's doing all these things
Speaker 4: that are pretty progressive, and people just keep assuming that
Speaker 4: he's a centrist kind of reasonable guy because it just
Speaker 4: looks like one, right, And.
Speaker 6: He's always willing to talk to other people, you know,
Speaker 6: clearly like exactly I was going to say, like being George.
Speaker 5: Wallace or strom Thurman.
Speaker 6: He's he has those conversations, which is something that a
Speaker 6: lot of people on the left take issue with and say,
Speaker 6: we're not Essentially it's like we don't negotiate with terrorist line,
Speaker 6: which you can see some of that argument. And at
Speaker 6: the same time, if he talks strom Thurman and the
Speaker 6: voting for the pouting right sect of nineteen eighty.
Speaker 4: Which who knows whether that's true his funeral that he
Speaker 4: spoke at, right.
Speaker 5: I think it was birds, I think, but maybe he
Speaker 5: did both. You might have done both.
Speaker 6: That would't surprise me at all. Actually, ran this is
Speaker 6: let's go back to the Nixon era for our next subject,
Speaker 6: because this is this is actually new information that we're
Speaker 6: receiving declassified CIA presidential daily briefings that were recently declassified.
Speaker 6: We've learned and just in the last month more about
Speaker 6: the coup that overthrew a en Day in Chile. And Ryan,
Speaker 6: you have a lot more information to share on this
Speaker 6: just fascinating stuff.
Speaker 3: Is Joe Biden's freshman year right in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 4: So the so recently, a group of Hispanic members of
Speaker 4: left wing, Hispanic members of Congress Greg gasar O, Kazi Cortes,
Speaker 4: niave Alasquez left to center left, Maxwell Frost did a
Speaker 4: trip to South America, met with a bunch of you know,
Speaker 4: governments and also dissidents to you know, try to build
Speaker 4: bonds between the kind of left here in the United
Speaker 4: States and the rising left down in South America. They
Speaker 4: met with Gabriel Borock, who's who we've talked about on
Speaker 4: the show. Is the or they met with. I don't,
Speaker 4: actually I don't. I don't I think they met with him.
Speaker 4: I don't want to say that for sure, but they had.
Speaker 4: That's the president of Chile, kind of millennial lefty guy
Speaker 4: who's been an officer for about a year. AOC had
Speaker 4: attached an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act asking
Speaker 4: for the documents related to the nineteen seventy three coup
Speaker 4: in Chile to be declassified CIA documents that never even
Speaker 4: got a vote. Lots of amendments don't get a vote,
Speaker 4: but it got a little tiny bit of coverage. Now,
Speaker 4: Borick had pushed for the release of these documents, and
Speaker 4: so they were released by the embassy in Chile, and
Speaker 4: they were released with a note that says, we hope
Speaker 4: that this helps with US Chile and relations because you know,
Speaker 4: Pinochet was in power until nineteen ninety and still has
Speaker 4: you know, still looms over the over the politics there.
Speaker 4: Like his opponent was a kind of Pinochet's supporter and
Speaker 4: talked about you know, uh, talked romantically about the time
Speaker 4: period and so that this is not history for them.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 4: And so what they're released is two presidential daily briefs
Speaker 4: from one was uh, September eleventh, which is a day
Speaker 4: of the coup.
Speaker 3: The other was from three days before the coup.
Speaker 4: And what you see is, you know, Nixon getting information
Speaker 4: from the intelligence agencies that a coup looks like it's
Speaker 4: going to happen. That at first they talk about the
Speaker 4: navy might might be the one that's gonna lead the coup.
Speaker 4: Do you have them September eleventh, they're still not you know,
Speaker 4: certain that it's going to happen. It's the whole situation
Speaker 4: is murky and unclear, and the US role in the
Speaker 4: coup is kind of contentious because the US very clearly
Speaker 4: and actively destabilized the country, wanted Allende ousted. Kissinger famously said,
Speaker 4: make the economy scream. There were CIA agents who were
Speaker 4: you know, played active roles in you know, destabilizing the
Speaker 4: economy through different work stoppages and other kind of other
Speaker 4: kind of sabotage throughout the economy. But there was also
Speaker 4: a you know, very native Chilean element to the coup.
Speaker 4: The Chilean right, you know very much h you wanted
Speaker 4: the support of the United States, but wanted you know,
Speaker 4: it was going to do it. They weren't taking necessarily orders,
Speaker 4: but it's more like they wanted permission. And what's clear
Speaker 4: from the newest Dygram is that the permission was there.
Speaker 3: Like after the.
Speaker 4: Coup, the Nixon administration condemned it and SAIDUS is this
Speaker 4: is outrageous violation of democratic principles. But as we as
Speaker 4: we know now, they were very secretly supportive of it
Speaker 4: immediately and did everything they could to like make sure
Speaker 4: that the coups stuck as it did then for seventeen
Speaker 4: seventeen years.
Speaker 6: And so a lot of this comes from and there's
Speaker 6: parallels with Guatemala, for instance, how the CIA destabilized Guatemala.
Speaker 6: Ayendi tried to nationalize. He did nationalize copper minds in Chile,
Speaker 6: which was a huge I mean, American business was like
Speaker 6: sixty percent.
Speaker 5: Of the Chilean economy at the time.
Speaker 6: And so to business interests that have their tentacles all
Speaker 6: over the CIA and have since the inception of the
Speaker 6: CIA in the OSS, they are saying, we got to
Speaker 6: do something right. And so what's interesting also though, is
Speaker 6: the pretense. And I think it was Nixon who said
Speaker 6: the scream thing to kissing jer and then Kissinger sort
Speaker 6: of carries it out. Yeah, it directs the from the
Speaker 6: Nixon tapes, I think, but directs the CIA to take
Speaker 6: various different steps.
Speaker 3: Right they told the CIA do it, and yeah, exactly.
Speaker 6: And the CIA is funding certain dissidents. But the economy
Speaker 6: under Allende had all absolutely faltered. And you can make
Speaker 6: the argument that's because of his more collectivist policies, or
Speaker 6: you can make the argument and it's because the United
Speaker 6: States said, well, great, like we're not doing business with
Speaker 6: you anymore, and there's no market for all of this copper.
Speaker 5: Sorry.
Speaker 6: And so it's clear interventionism and in their economy on
Speaker 6: our behalf.
Speaker 5: But it's happening in the middle of the Cold War.
Speaker 6: And again what we see with Guatemala, we saw this
Speaker 6: to some extent with Cuba and other places throughout South
Speaker 6: America Honduras, is that there were there were business interests,
Speaker 6: but you also had Allende with contacts in the KGB
Speaker 6: we know from declassified not declassified but obtained KGB Soviet
Speaker 6: information that they had met with a enda that they
Speaker 6: had in some ways fueled the rise of UH and
Speaker 6: is one of a socialist Marxist, socialist kind of guy,
Speaker 6: hard to define than a communist, like a hardcore He's
Speaker 6: not Chae Gavara, he's not fit out Castro, though he
Speaker 6: was also cooperative with Cashro.
Speaker 5: At the same time, you have this like real fear that.
Speaker 6: There's going to be this Soviet bulwark in South America
Speaker 6: that embolden's Cuba right off our coasts with nuclear weapons,
Speaker 6: and it's just I think when you see parallels to
Speaker 6: it today, it's a great example of how it's like Listen,
Speaker 6: we have been doing this for decades and it never
Speaker 6: works out the way you Henry Kissinger, who's still trying
Speaker 6: to like make excuses for ideas like this. It has
Speaker 6: never worked out the way the sort of realists during
Speaker 6: the Cold War set it would never.
Speaker 4: And the irony is that the upshot is that it's
Speaker 4: ending with a lot of these countries forming tighter relationships
Speaker 4: with China.
Speaker 3: Yes, while we were looking at the SIVI Union the
Speaker 3: whole time. It's like, whoops.
Speaker 6: But it did the same thing. It pushed people during
Speaker 6: the Cold War into the Soviet Union's arms in Indonesia,
Speaker 6: for example, where people did not want to turn to
Speaker 6: the Soviet Union, they wanted to have good relationships with
Speaker 6: the United States. And you see the exact same thing
Speaker 6: playing out today. And I think, Ryan, you want to
Speaker 6: talk about Guatemala in this context.
Speaker 4: Yes, if we had put up that second one to
Speaker 4: bring it to the present day. We talked I guess
Speaker 4: two weeks ago about the upcoming Guatemalan election with Bernie
Speaker 4: and Bernie won. Bernardo Arevalo, the progressive insurgent candidate who's
Speaker 4: the grandson of the first president elected back in the
Speaker 4: nineteen forties, so they're the democratic legacy that survived through
Speaker 4: the civil war that came after the US back to
Speaker 4: coup in nineteen fifty four. Is is clearly resonant with
Speaker 4: the Guatemalan people. So he wins, but immediately another and
Speaker 4: I'll just just read this ap article. It's just insane
Speaker 4: what the left has to deal with when they take power.
Speaker 4: Progressive candidate Bernardo Arivallo was confirmed the winner of Guatemala's
Speaker 4: presidential election by the country's Supreme Electoral Tribunal on Monday,
Speaker 4: but the same day another government body ordered his political
Speaker 4: party suspended. Rivallo has faced a slew of legal challenges
Speaker 4: and allegations of irregularity since his unexpected victory over a
Speaker 4: candidate favored by the country's conservative elite. Rivallo appears certain
Speaker 4: take office as president on January fourteenth, but it was
Speaker 4: not clear whether his Seed Movement lawmakers would be able
Speaker 4: to take their seats in the country's Congress. And so
Speaker 4: another situation where you have the will of the people
Speaker 4: expressed through an election. They want Arivallo in power, and
Speaker 4: they want him to be able to enact the agenda
Speaker 4: that he ran on, and he's just getting stonewalled at
Speaker 4: every turn, they might not even let his party take power,
Speaker 4: and then what and then you have a situation that
Speaker 4: Castillo in Peru or elsewhere where he can't then deliver
Speaker 4: on what he was elected to do. You'll see some
Speaker 4: protests and all of a sudden, oh in the shame,
Speaker 4: we had a no confidence vote. And if the United
Speaker 4: States is serious about quote unquote root causes trying to
Speaker 4: like actually bring stability and prosperity to countries so that
Speaker 4: they're not so that people are not kind of pushed
Speaker 4: out two hour border because of both economic and political crises,
Speaker 4: then you would think that we would say, you don't,
Speaker 4: how about you honor the will the people down there, yep,
Speaker 4: Like let the guy take power. But that would require
Speaker 4: allowing Guatemala sovereignty and potentially even allowing Guatemala workers to
Speaker 4: ask for higher wages.
Speaker 6: We talked about foreign aid, like in the context of Ukraine,
Speaker 6: particularly earlier in the show, and the way that it's
Speaker 6: actually fairly normal, like the Trump apologists during the first impeachment,
Speaker 6: like there were some specific things that Trump did that
Speaker 6: were different than how it normally goes because he's just
Speaker 6: like more nakedly transactional.
Speaker 5: But it is normal to use foreign.
Speaker 6: Aid as a as a carrot to get to manipulate
Speaker 6: other countries, and to some extent it's understandable, but it's
Speaker 6: also malign in many cases like this one, and throughout
Speaker 6: our history in Latin America, where we look and conservatives
Speaker 6: people on my side say, well, these Latin American countries
Speaker 6: just need to take care of their own business. It's
Speaker 6: not our business to worry about. You know that this
Speaker 6: is a problem is dragging the American economy down, and
Speaker 6: Guatemala should deal with Guatemala. Why can't Honduras fix Honduras
Speaker 6: And it's like, well, they're reeling from decades of a
Speaker 6: foreign policy that was the pretense was understandable and correct
Speaker 6: about nuclear weapons and communism in Cuba. You know you
Speaker 6: don't want nuclear weapons right off the Florida coast, obviously,
Speaker 6: but it was so often motivated by business interests, literal
Speaker 6: banana republic stuff that we were fomenting in these countries
Speaker 6: that they're still reeling from and that.
Speaker 5: We are still interfering in.
Speaker 6: We talked to the former ambassador to Haiti, this is
Speaker 6: a similar situation had the United States.
Speaker 5: Because we want to be able to deport.
Speaker 6: Impoverished Haitian migrants that have lived in other countries all
Speaker 6: over South and Central America back to Port au Prince.
Speaker 5: Because we want to be able to do that.
Speaker 6: We're backing somebody who basically doesn't have the will of
Speaker 6: the people and using our power to ensure that he
Speaker 6: remains in power in this transactional quid pro quote when
Speaker 6: it comes to migrants, it is still happening. This is
Speaker 6: still our policy essentially, yeah right.
Speaker 4: And all of these kind of conservative Guatemalan elites who
Speaker 4: are trying to block Rivallo from enacting as the agenda
Speaker 4: are either acting on the behalf of the United States
Speaker 4: or think they're acting on behalf of the United States.
Speaker 4: And if you guys really cared about root causes all
Speaker 4: they you know, with a flick of the wrist, they
Speaker 4: could tell them back off.
Speaker 3: He won the election.
Speaker 4: The United States is proud of the Guatemalan people for
Speaker 4: holding this free and fair election. Now it's time to
Speaker 4: allow him to govern. And how can we help, because
Speaker 4: you know, rather than the previous efforts to quote unquote help,
Speaker 4: which is just to try to undermine democracy by saying, well,
Speaker 4: let's create a gigantic area of Honduras or Guatemala that
Speaker 4: has no laws and we're just going to sell it
Speaker 4: to crypto bros.
Speaker 3: And you just do that, oh you're doing.
Speaker 6: But I was actually just going to talk about bo
Speaker 6: Kelly because this our left far right clash in Latin
Speaker 6: America right now is really interesting when you have both
Speaker 6: the fear of the sort of Cardillo and then the
Speaker 6: nostalgia in some ways too, because you have rampant crime
Speaker 6: again created in no small part by our border policies
Speaker 6: and our drug policies all throughout Latin America. And then
Speaker 6: you have people in America looking at Bukele, especially people
Speaker 6: on the left, and just sort of like this is
Speaker 6: outrageous and just sort of dripping with sanctimony over what
Speaker 6: bou Keley is doing. And at the same time, you
Speaker 6: have people in Latin America who are disgusted by, you know,
Speaker 6: the sort of former Sandinista rising to power again because
Speaker 6: people have really visceral, deep memories in their lifetimes of
Speaker 6: the left dictator and the right dictator and this is
Speaker 6: coming to a head again now. It's it's actually like
Speaker 6: really fascinating, but it's so sad the way that we're
Speaker 6: we have learned essensibly zero lessons from.
Speaker 5: Our own lifetimes.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and the conservative Guatemalan candidate fashioned herself as a bukeley.
Speaker 4: I'm going to do it basically what he did and
Speaker 4: lost in a landslide. And we can talk about more
Speaker 4: in the future the Future show. There's this a wild
Speaker 4: story unfolding in Honduras where under the under the coup president,
Speaker 4: they enacted this law that allowed basically bitcoin crypto dudes
Speaker 4: to come in and build their own country almost.
Speaker 3: With its own sovereignty.
Speaker 4: And then once Shiamora Castro was elected kind of progressive
Speaker 4: down in Honduras, she's like, no, as you're just done.
Speaker 3: You can't do this anymore. Now they're like basically suing.
Speaker 4: Honduras are taking there, They're like doing They're they're using
Speaker 4: all of the power of international capital to say no, no, no,
Speaker 4: like we actually own this state.
Speaker 3: You do not.
Speaker 4: It's like, well do we believe in? What are we exporting?
Speaker 4: Crypto bros or democracy?
Speaker 5: It starts with copper mining ends with crypto mining. I
Speaker 5: want to.
Speaker 6: Revisit some comments that Jensaki made while she was watching
Speaker 6: the Republicans.
Speaker 5: They haven't done that yet. Oh, yes, how dare you run?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 6: No, it's actually a pretty interesting thing to talk about.
Speaker 6: So let's actually roll right now a couple of clips
Speaker 6: of Jensaki from her show on MSNBC, which I sometimes
Speaker 6: forget exists as kind of remarkable.
Speaker 5: Kaylee mcananey is on Fox News.
Speaker 6: So former Trump Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, Bush Press Secretary
Speaker 6: Dana Perino Bush Secretary on Fox News. Jensaki is the
Speaker 6: host of her own show on MSNBC these Days, and
Speaker 6: she got into a sort of tiff with conservatives on
Speaker 6: Twitter during the Republican debate because she tweeted, essentially, and
Speaker 6: we'll hear her talk about this in the clip, that
Speaker 6: Democrats do not support late term abortion. I think she
Speaker 6: even said, like nobody supports late term abortion, And then
Speaker 6: on her show, in an attempt to kind of fact
Speaker 6: check Republicans who sought to dunk on her over that comment,
Speaker 6: she basically confirms the criticism of her. And it's really interesting.
Speaker 6: So let's take a look at Jensaki from this weekend.
Speaker 13: This claim that Democrats support abortion up until the moment
Speaker 13: of birth is entirely miss leading. First of all, abortions
Speaker 13: pass the point of fetal viability do not happen often.
Speaker 13: They are incredibly rare, and those that do happen involve agonizing,
Speaker 13: emotional and ethical decisions. According to the CDC, the vast
Speaker 13: majority of abortions in the United States, over eighty percent
Speaker 13: in twenty twenty, happened before ten weeks of pregnancy, and
Speaker 13: over ninety percent take place in the first twelve weeks.
Speaker 13: Less than one percent one percent happen after twenty one
Speaker 13: weeks of pregnancy. If you look state by state, you
Speaker 13: see a similar pattern, as compiled by the Washington Post.
Speaker 13: In Virginia, since two thousand and abortion after twenty eight
Speaker 13: weeks has been performed only in three of the last
Speaker 13: twenty two years. In Oklahoma in twenty twenty one, only
Speaker 13: six out of nearly six thousand abortions took place after
Speaker 13: twenty one weeks, And in Colorado, where the Boulder Abortion
Speaker 13: Clinics specializes in late term abortions, less than two percent
Speaker 13: of nearly twelve thousand abortions in twenty two anyone took
Speaker 13: place after twenty one weeks, and just sixty took place
Speaker 13: after twenty five weeks or later. Are most Democrats in
Speaker 13: favor of a legislation that allows for this Yes, for
Speaker 13: all the reasons, I just outlined at the end of
Speaker 13: the day. The point here is that no one is
Speaker 13: rooting for late term abortions. No one is running on
Speaker 13: the platform of aborting viable babies.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so that's not a fact check at all. Those
Speaker 6: are facts that everyone is on the same page about.
Speaker 6: Every Republican that I know would say exactly everything that
Speaker 6: Jensaki said. Nobody denies any of those facts. Which interesting
Speaker 6: is that she started the segment by saying the Republican
Speaker 6: attack on her was quote misleading, that the Republican talking
Speaker 6: point that Democrats support abortion up until birth is quote misleading.
Speaker 5: That's how she starts the clip.
Speaker 6: She ends the clip with that line where she says,
Speaker 6: do Democrats support legislation that allows for abortion of viable babies? Yes,
Speaker 6: That's how she ended the clip. And that's why I
Speaker 6: wanted to play the full thing because a all of
Speaker 6: her facts there are completely correct. It is most often
Speaker 6: in agonizing, horrific decision that women make to abort late
Speaker 6: term babies. Late term is not a medical definition. It's
Speaker 6: something that's used basically to convey a viability, so around
Speaker 6: twenty one weeks. After twenty one weeks, these are not
Speaker 6: in most cases. Third term abortions there, but they are
Speaker 6: because of medical technology, in many cases viable babies. And
Speaker 6: they're also pain capable babies. And that's another important thing
Speaker 6: to remember when Jensaki is saying, listen, look at these numbers.
Speaker 6: This is exceedingly rare. But would democrats allow for Do
Speaker 6: most Democrats allow for the termination of pregnancies, the abortion
Speaker 6: of babies up until that stage?
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 6: Her thing at the end where she says bottom line
Speaker 6: is nobody is quote rooting for these late term abortions.
Speaker 6: I think is again absolutely true except for some fringe
Speaker 6: of the far left sort of abortion advocacy wing, that
Speaker 6: is largely true. These are horrific decisions that women have
Speaker 6: to make, but Democrat policies absolutely allow for it. And
Speaker 6: Jensaki just said yes to that herself. So she's trying
Speaker 6: to have this sort of semantic debate about whether democrats.
Speaker 6: Saying Democrats support abortion up until birth is the same
Speaker 6: as Democrats.
Speaker 5: Allowing for abortion up until birth.
Speaker 6: And I would say when Republicans argue and conservatives argue
Speaker 6: that Republicans support or that Democrats support abortion up until birth,
Speaker 6: there's absolutely nothing factually inconsistent about that statement. Because the
Speaker 6: Women's Health Protection Act, for instance, which virtually every Democrat
Speaker 6: in Congress voted for and supports, has a mental health
Speaker 6: exception up until birth. So that means you can and
Speaker 6: a doctor can give any woman a mental health exception
Speaker 6: to terminate a pregnancy after viability, after paying capability up
Speaker 6: until the moment of birth. Now, whether or not that
Speaker 6: happens often is a completely different question. The point that
Speaker 6: Republicans are making is that the legislation and the policies
Speaker 6: of Democrats absolutely allow for that, and Jensaki agreed. So
Speaker 6: when we can debate whether or not these are frequent,
Speaker 6: we can look at the facts that Jensaki shared. It's
Speaker 6: absolutely true. I'm going to read from John McCormick, who
Speaker 6: covers this issue really well for National Review, who wrote
Speaker 6: the odd thing about Saki's false assertion that late term
Speaker 6: abortions are quote almost always performed when the baby cannot
Speaker 6: survive after birth or to save the life of the mother,
Speaker 6: is that during her TP segment she quoted the same
Speaker 6: Colorado abortionists. This is a guy out of Boulder who
Speaker 6: said to the Washington Post, quote, in an average week
Speaker 6: at my office, twenty five to fifty percent of the
Speaker 6: patients have some serious catastrophic fetal abnormality, and there are
Speaker 6: some weeks in which this is true for one hundred
Speaker 6: percent of the patients. In other words, in a quote
Speaker 6: average week, fifty to seventy five percent of the viable
Speaker 6: babies he kills with a poison filled syringe are physically healthy.
Speaker 6: That is from the abortionist's own rhetoric. That's his statistics
Speaker 6: on his own clinic. Now, according to Guttmacher, as McCormick continues,
Speaker 6: it's a pro abortion think tank, there are nine hundred
Speaker 6: and thirty thousand abortions performed annually, and one point three
Speaker 6: percent of abortions are performed at twenty one weeks or later.
Speaker 6: This is the same fact that Sak would agree with.
Speaker 6: That equals twelve thousand late term abortions a year. So again,
Speaker 6: we all agree that these are rare. We all agree
Speaker 6: that these are a small, a tiny fraction of annual
Speaker 6: abortions that occur.
Speaker 5: But these are viable babies.
Speaker 6: In many, many cases, and they are pain capable babies
Speaker 6: in almost all cases. And that is absolutely a consequence
Speaker 6: of laws that democrats quote support, which is exactly what
Speaker 6: Sak was herself fact checked for saying, and then in
Speaker 6: her own fact check confirmed. So all I'm going to
Speaker 6: say here is that as we're as we're wrapping up
Speaker 6: and I toss it to Ryan, all I want to
Speaker 6: say is that it is really, really obnoxious for Democrats
Speaker 6: to hide the ball and pretend that their policies do
Speaker 6: not allow for these abortions.
Speaker 5: I remember a Naomi.
Speaker 6: Wolfe essay from the late nineties where she sort of said,
Speaker 6: people who support abortion.
Speaker 5: This is when she was more of a leftist than
Speaker 5: she is now.
Speaker 6: People who support abortion, she wrote, basically, should be open
Speaker 6: about the reality of abortion because the reality is ugly.
Speaker 6: But there's a moral argument. This is her perspective at
Speaker 6: the time. There's a moral argument to allowing women to
Speaker 6: have the freedoms to make these decisions. Now I completely
Speaker 6: disagree with that, and we could have that debate, but
Speaker 6: her point is correct that Democrats who support these policies
Speaker 6: should be honest with the American people, and the media,
Speaker 6: even more importantly, should be honest with the American people
Speaker 6: about what's going on. And the media has a responsibility
Speaker 6: to hold Democrats accountable for supporting policies that support for
Speaker 6: a bora up until birth, and that support abortion through
Speaker 6: viability in early stages you know, twenty one weeks.
Speaker 5: You know, that's called late term, but.
Speaker 6: Early in the phases of viability at least, that should
Speaker 6: absolutely be something. And I understand the politics of it.
Speaker 6: I'm not naive to that, but Democrats can spin all
Speaker 6: they want. The media should not spin on behalf of Democrats,
Speaker 6: and Democrats should have the decency to be honest with
Speaker 6: the American people. I'm not saying anything that Republicans are
Speaker 6: perfectly honest about their positions on abortion, but I am
Speaker 6: saying the media never gives Republicans a pass for it.
Speaker 6: They're constantly giving Democrats a pass for it. So Ryan
Speaker 6: I find this very very frustrating because Jensaki is a
Speaker 6: member of the media now. But also we've seen fact checks,
Speaker 6: so called fact checks from people like Glenn Kessler at
Speaker 6: the Washington Post that do a similar thing, that minimize
Speaker 6: the fact that we're talking about twelve thousand late term
Speaker 6: abortions a year, late term abortions a year so past
Speaker 6: the stage of viability, and that is I think that
Speaker 6: is a huge number, but it doesn't get any play.
Speaker 6: It's minimized, and Republicans are treated like crazy people for
Speaker 6: saying that it happens.
Speaker 4: And if I had to guess it was an honest
Speaker 4: mistake from Saki because I've gone through the same thing
Speaker 4: where like where you hear Republicans saying that Democrats are
Speaker 4: support abortion right up until birth.
Speaker 3: That's insane, right, that's impossible.
Speaker 4: So you go then you go read the Women's Health
Speaker 4: Protection Act, You're like, oh, okay, they do support the
Speaker 4: legal right to it basically right up until birth. This
Speaker 4: one was through a mental health exceptionally.
Speaker 3: Then it goes.
Speaker 4: I think Saki said everything else very well. You know,
Speaker 4: a lot of this is you know that almost all
Speaker 4: of these situations are terribly tragic, and I think Naomi
Speaker 4: Wolf makes a fair point that you know, own it,
Speaker 4: say like that, say that this is the right, that
Speaker 4: this is a fundamental right of the woman to make
Speaker 4: that decision, and that it's not a place for government
Speaker 4: to come in and tell people what to do between
Speaker 4: the choice between a woman and her doctor.
Speaker 3: H So that's where they are now.
Speaker 4: I also think that Democrats would at this point be
Speaker 4: willing to compromise on a like if if they could
Speaker 4: get Roby Wade codified, I think you would have a
Speaker 4: lot of people from will Row.
Speaker 5: Allowed for abortion in that stage too.
Speaker 8: It allowed for.
Speaker 3: States to allow allowed for states to allow it.
Speaker 4: But there I would imagine there'd be some type of
Speaker 4: like if that was the only thing that stood between
Speaker 4: legalizing re legalizing abortion nationwide and and the status quo
Speaker 4: in which so many states are just straight up banning it,
Speaker 4: then I think Democrats would ultimately, uh, you know, compromise
Speaker 4: on that.
Speaker 3: But it feels like that's not where we are.
Speaker 4: In our politics. That it's it's either it's either one
Speaker 4: thing or the other. But we'll see, you know, if
Speaker 4: you know, if Democrats get a trifecta in you know,
Speaker 4: in twenty twenty five, we'll see if they get rid
Speaker 4: of the filibuster and actually push ahead with something. If
Speaker 4: they don't and Republicans get a trifecta, like that's also
Speaker 4: within the realm of possibility. We'll see if they push
Speaker 4: a nationwide ban. But it's hard to see the two
Speaker 4: sitting down and saying, all right, here's how they do it.
Speaker 3: In a lot of European countries.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know that there are regulations after thirty weeks
Speaker 4: after thirty but whatever, it just feels like we're not
Speaker 4: in we don't have a politics that allows for that
Speaker 4: type of negotiation.
Speaker 6: I mean, even the pro life movement is royaled right
Speaker 6: now about the question of Lindsay Band, Lindsay Graham's fifteen
Speaker 6: week ban and Ronda Santa signed a six week ban.
Speaker 6: These things are like even hot in that area.
Speaker 5: And I've seen some.
Speaker 3: Six week ban you basically don't know you're pregnant.
Speaker 7: Right, Yeah.
Speaker 6: I've seen some viewers say because I think when Dobbs
Speaker 6: was decided, we were still over at the Hill and
Speaker 6: we had a lot of conversations about abortion, and I've
Speaker 6: seen some viewers, you know, ask like why I'm anti abortion,
Speaker 6: And I have no problem saying anti abortion.
Speaker 5: I don't need it to be pro life, because that's
Speaker 5: exactly what it is.
Speaker 6: Anti abortion, but it's not. It has absolutely nothing to
Speaker 6: do with religion. For me, it's a simple disagreement with
Speaker 6: people over when life begins. And I've come down on
Speaker 6: the side of Christipprehichins, which is that the science makes
Speaker 6: it really difficult for the pro abortion side to say
Speaker 6: that it's not a life and that's why I think,
Speaker 6: you know, Ryan and Naomi Wolf in the nineties, like
Speaker 6: it's a much more honest position to say, it's a
Speaker 6: balance of the rights versus the life, and like truly,
Speaker 6: that's just my position is that life has begun at
Speaker 6: the point where just about every abortion takes place, and
Speaker 6: it's my position of minority. It is completely unpopular in
Speaker 6: this country, is not politically viable in any way whatsoever.
Speaker 6: And I understand that. I think it happens to be
Speaker 6: morally correct. But that's why those twelve thousand like infant
Speaker 6: lives that are painfully in many cases ended a year
Speaker 6: seems like a five alarm fire to me. It seems
Speaker 6: like something that we should be talking about all the time,
Speaker 6: even though it's a small minority of abortions which are
Speaker 6: now typically medical, not typically you know, medical abortions. They're
Speaker 6: not the same sort of physical process that used to
Speaker 6: take place. It's a lot of times in most times
Speaker 6: now when you have ninety percent, you know, some huge
Speaker 6: percentage of that ninety percent taking the form of an oral,
Speaker 6: medicated abortion.
Speaker 5: So it's different than what it used to be.
Speaker 6: I get that twelve thousand lames a year is seriously
Speaker 6: crazy to me, But if you have that sort of
Speaker 6: disagreement about rights versus life, then I understand so I
Speaker 6: get that. I just still it's very frustrating that the
Speaker 6: media kind of runs cover and pretends things like the
Speaker 6: Women's Health Protection Act didn't exist.
Speaker 4: Well, let's say you're president and the Democratic Congress comes
Speaker 4: to you and says, all right, that you won Farren Square,
Speaker 4: you're the president, this is what you believe. We'll give
Speaker 4: you a twenty week ban after twenty weeks if life, life,
Speaker 4: and health and physical health of the mother. There's exceptions,
Speaker 4: but no mental health exceptions after twenty weeks.
Speaker 3: But before twenty weeks abortion is legal. Would you sign that?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I would do like any compromise to end abortion
Speaker 6: after twenty weeks. And you know that's what is tough
Speaker 6: for the pro life movement. And I think it's actually
Speaker 6: an interesting they're interesting parallels with climate on the left
Speaker 6: that like incrementalism, as people talk about in the pro
Speaker 6: life movement is really controversial. And I think you saw
Speaker 6: Biden sort of face similar things with the Inflation Reduction Act.
Speaker 6: Like it's just if you see something as an absolute emergency,
Speaker 6: a political emergency, and there are good faith disagreements or
Speaker 6: politics about whether abortion or climate constitute these levels of emergency,
Speaker 6: it's like should we be blocking every freeway in the
Speaker 6: world if our kids aren't going to be able to
Speaker 6: breathe fresh air.
Speaker 4: Speaking of Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, yes, we're going to
Speaker 4: have the block that I teased ten minutes ago up now.
Speaker 4: Alex Lawson of sold Security Works is going to join
Speaker 4: us to talk about the long battle for fourteen sixteen
Speaker 4: year battle that's been going on to allow Medicare negotiation
Speaker 4: to negotiate drug prices.
Speaker 3: That's up next stick round.
Speaker 4: The Biden administration yesterday announced the ten medications that it
Speaker 4: is going to be allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices
Speaker 4: over and we're joined here by Alex Lawson, who is
Speaker 4: the executive director of Solid Security Works, which as an
Speaker 4: organization been working on this issue trying to get the
Speaker 4: government to be able to negotiate drug prices for how
Speaker 4: many years.
Speaker 12: Now, really long time, you know, on drug prices for
Speaker 12: over a decade. We've been working in a variety of
Speaker 12: ways to push just any action that the government can
Speaker 12: take to lower prescription drug prices. We pay the highest
Speaker 12: in the world. Medicare negotiation is sort of the nicest
Speaker 12: one that we've pushed. It's the most obvious one. Medicare
Speaker 12: is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the world,
Speaker 12: and we are saying, just use that purchasing power to
Speaker 12: negotiate a better deal than paying the highest prices.
Speaker 8: In the world.
Speaker 4: And this has been a Democratic priority at least since
Speaker 4: I say priority in quotes, because they say that they
Speaker 4: wanted to do it, at least since two thousand and
Speaker 4: six when Ram Emmanuel had this super clever campaign strategy
Speaker 4: as the d TRIPC Chairmany called it six for six
Speaker 4: and one of the six was we're going to negotiate
Speaker 4: drug prices.
Speaker 3: Then, as Alex remembers.
Speaker 4: In two thousand and nine, when they finally got a majority,
Speaker 4: first thing they did is promise big Pharma. Okay, not
Speaker 4: actually do that, because it's not O six anymore.
Speaker 3: It's so nine.
Speaker 5: That was very specific to six.
Speaker 3: Yeah, six, We're going to do it. Oh oh nine. No, no, no, no, nine,
Speaker 3: not this time.
Speaker 4: And so they said, if big Farmer will support us,
Speaker 4: spend one hundred and fifty million dollars defending us in
Speaker 4: reelections and not opposed Obamacare, we will not include prescription
Speaker 4: drug negotiations in there.
Speaker 3: So then they lose their majority.
Speaker 4: So then what happens after that in this fight between
Speaker 4: big pharma and advocates saying like this is insane what
Speaker 4: we're paying.
Speaker 12: Yeah, I think a lot of work just continues happening
Speaker 12: the whole time. But the deal that was cut with
Speaker 12: pharma that has to be one of the worst deals
Speaker 12: that's ever been. One hundred and fifty million dollars is
Speaker 12: literally nothing to these companies.
Speaker 3: So but you know, all the companies together just had
Speaker 3: to pay that.
Speaker 8: Which is nothing.
Speaker 12: I mean that's like one hour of one day of
Speaker 12: profit of some of these drugs. So great deal for them,
Speaker 12: really bad deal for the American people. Expansion of Medicaid
Speaker 12: is great, if you want to think of it that way,
Speaker 12: but we didn't have action on prescription drugs through the
Speaker 12: basically the entirety of the Obama administration. Now Hillary Clinton
Speaker 12: had a robust plan to come after pharma six for
Speaker 12: sixteen it something like that, but it was real and
Speaker 12: at the time, insurers were lining up to punch pharma.
Speaker 8: That's always they always fight each other.
Speaker 3: It's nice when you can have industries against each other.
Speaker 12: Which is what that first Obamacare pharma deal was about.
Speaker 12: It was taking on insurance and not pharma. The correct
Speaker 12: way to do it, if you're wondering, is you take
Speaker 12: them all on at the same time. You can't actually
Speaker 12: think that one of them is going to be on
Speaker 12: your side.
Speaker 8: But along the way, you know, there are a lot
Speaker 8: of victories.
Speaker 12: You have to move policies slowly but losing the ability
Speaker 12: to charge as much as the company wants. Right, with
Speaker 12: no basis in anything, it doesn't have to have show
Speaker 12: any clinical value. Companies can actually just push poison right,
Speaker 12: they'll corrupt the process. You know, the FDA under Janet
Speaker 12: Woodcock get a special seal that says this heroin is
Speaker 12: not addictive, and then bang, you have the overdose crisis.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 12: So that's the caliber of sociopathy that you're dealing with
Speaker 12: with these corporations, and so you have to be able
Speaker 12: to hit them from any angle. There is a lot
Speaker 12: of work on importation, which it makes absolutely yeah, well
Speaker 12: from anywhere that has it's called parallel importation.
Speaker 8: A lot of stuff is from Canada.
Speaker 12: But Canada has the second highest drug prices in the
Speaker 12: world because they're right next to America, so pharma just
Speaker 12: jacks up their prices as well. The truth is that
Speaker 12: these molecules are the same right, it's one factory, and
Speaker 12: if it sends it to America, like charge them, you know,
Speaker 12: as much as humanly possible. And if it goes to
Speaker 12: another country that has a government that actually says, well,
Speaker 12: what's the therapeutic value of this, Let's actually figure out
Speaker 12: what the value of this medication is, and that's what
Speaker 12: we're going to pay. And pharma, you know, hates that.
Speaker 12: They're like, no, no, no, we would rather just charge
Speaker 12: whatever we want. And in the case of insulin, and
Speaker 12: this is it's not just insulin, but at least an insulin,
Speaker 12: the price they're going for is a price that's so
Speaker 12: high that some people die, right, not everybody, because that
Speaker 12: would kill their market, but they want some people to
Speaker 12: die so that everyone else is terrified enough that they'll
Speaker 12: spend every dollar they have and every dollar that they
Speaker 12: can borrow to keep them or their loved ones alive.
Speaker 8: That's a cartel.
Speaker 12: That's extortion, and that is what we needed to break
Speaker 12: in any way possible. And Medicare negotiation was the one
Speaker 12: that had the most political sort of buy in from people,
Speaker 12: as you said, all the going all the way back
Speaker 12: to when it was created. There were a lot of
Speaker 12: Democrats at the time, this corrupt carve out for pharma
Speaker 12: was created by Billy Tousen, which is like in this town,
Speaker 12: I would say it's probably the most corrupt story that
Speaker 12: exists is the creation of the non interference clause.
Speaker 3: Tell the Billy towsand story real quick.
Speaker 8: Billy towsand Democrat turned Republicans.
Speaker 12: He came to Congress with one goal, which was to
Speaker 12: deliver for pharma. He was a Democrat. He rose to
Speaker 12: be committee chair where this was advancing. When the Democrats
Speaker 12: lost power, he just switched parties so he could keep
Speaker 12: that committee position, insert the non interference clause which forbids
Speaker 12: medicare from negotiating. Literally as soon as he did that,
Speaker 12: he just quit Congress and he went and took a
Speaker 12: two million dollars a year job at Pharma, I mean.
Speaker 3: The head of of Big Pharma, the head of.
Speaker 12: The lobbyist organization. I mean, it is as clear as
Speaker 12: day this one. So even since then, Democrats, some Democrats,
Speaker 12: many Democrats have known that this is something that needed
Speaker 12: to be overturned. There was a lot of negotiating and
Speaker 12: just sort of back and forth about what the policy
Speaker 12: itself would look like. And I don't want to go
Speaker 12: like too far into the policy weeds. But if you remember,
Speaker 12: the House passed a bill called HR three, and if
Speaker 12: you look at the battle during that, you can see
Speaker 12: sort of the contours of in the Democratic Party of
Speaker 12: what this policy was going to be. And basically it
Speaker 12: comes down to like weaker or stronger, and HR three
Speaker 12: is quite strong. You know, I think my side won
Speaker 12: more and HR three would be the starting point in
Speaker 12: build back better. That sort of compromises down to what
Speaker 12: actually got passed. And you had some pharmadem deliver some
Speaker 12: really key kneecapping for pharma and because of that, you know,
Speaker 12: we don't have all drugs, We only have some drugs.
Speaker 8: It doesn't start right away.
Speaker 12: So pharma is an incredible opponent to have because they
Speaker 12: have almost unlimited money and their entire profit comes from
Speaker 12: controlling the government. If the government didn't give them the
Speaker 12: ability to charge whatever they wanted, they would not be
Speaker 12: able to do it.
Speaker 6: Well, it's crony capitalism at its finest, as you just
Speaker 6: explained perfectly. And I want to ask about this quote
Speaker 6: you have in Ryan's story and we can put that
Speaker 6: back up on the screen.
Speaker 5: Ryan did a great report on this.
Speaker 6: In the intercept you say this was an unexpected victory
Speaker 6: and a long fight against an illegal cartel of three
Speaker 6: corporations who have raised their insulin prices in lockstep. You're
Speaker 6: referring there to Eli, Lilly, No, NORDESK, and Santafe. And
Speaker 6: then you continue to say the inclusion of insulin in
Speaker 6: the list of negotiated drugs shows that the Biden White
Speaker 6: House is it fucking around?
Speaker 5: Tell us more about what this.
Speaker 6: Says in terms of the Biden White House, because you
Speaker 6: just explained this. The arc of pharma's power in Washington,
Speaker 6: DC when it comes to controlling drug prices amazing. But
Speaker 6: it's also still this like push and pull, and you
Speaker 6: have people in the Biden administration who are actually tugging
Speaker 6: on the other side of the rope in this grand
Speaker 6: game of tug of war to the point where you
Speaker 6: have insulin included here.
Speaker 5: What does that mean?
Speaker 12: So the way I read it is that it reminds
Speaker 12: me of FDRs. I welcome their hatred line about banks
Speaker 12: and speculators. I believe that the Biden White House, the
Speaker 12: people in the Biden White House who they realize that
Speaker 12: if you're going to go after pharma, you got to
Speaker 12: go as hard as possible. You can't be like, oh,
Speaker 12: well they're going to run ads against me, maybe I'll
Speaker 12: do less. They're going to run ads against you if
Speaker 12: you even mention their name. But the thing is everyone
Speaker 12: hates Pharma. Pharma is the most hate did institution in
Speaker 12: this country. According to that pupil that you know, ranks
Speaker 12: all the institutions, Pharma is dead last. So pick the
Speaker 12: fight with Pharma. Be very aggressive. Of course they're going
Speaker 12: to say, oh, you can never win in court and
Speaker 12: all of the things that they're going to say.
Speaker 8: They also said that we'd never get it passed. The
Speaker 8: IRA passed.
Speaker 12: They did everything they could, and you know, I have
Speaker 12: that begrudging respect that you should have for your opponents.
Speaker 12: We didn't see some of their maneuvers coming. We didn't
Speaker 12: see some of the committee plays where they did decap
Speaker 12: the bill.
Speaker 8: They threw everything they can at this.
Speaker 12: But the Biden White House and Democrats in Congress understand
Speaker 12: that this issue a it's morally correct, right, this literally
Speaker 12: helps people, it's incredibly important. But then politically it sells everywhere.
Speaker 12: It does not matter in this country where you go,
Speaker 12: if it is a room full of camo and ra
Speaker 12: hats or a parking lot.
Speaker 8: Full of electric vehicles.
Speaker 12: The people all hate pharma, they hate high drug prices,
Speaker 12: they hate getting ripped off. And the really amazing thing
Speaker 12: is most Americans don't even know how ripped off we're
Speaker 12: getting because they don't fully get that we pay to
Speaker 12: develop the drugs in the first place. It's taxpayer dollars
Speaker 12: that develop these drugs at the NIH, and we give
Speaker 12: grants out to research facilities in universities.
Speaker 8: That we pay for it.
Speaker 12: Then we give the patent to these companies who turn
Speaker 12: around and charge us whatever they want. The ripoff is
Speaker 12: so amazing, so profound that it's hard to imagine. But
Speaker 12: just I think another thing in DC that is important
Speaker 12: is it's also so big that when you stop it,
Speaker 12: you can.
Speaker 8: Use it to pay for other things.
Speaker 12: There's so much money in stopping this ripoff that you
Speaker 12: can pay for enorm miss other things with it.
Speaker 8: You're like, oh, how are we going to pay for that?
Speaker 12: Well, let's just stop getting ripped off by FARMA, And
Speaker 12: everyone's like, hey, that's a great idea, let's do it.
Speaker 12: That creates this one way street. In my estimation, it's
Speaker 12: going to be really hard for FARMA to turn around.
Speaker 4: And That's why Pharma's strategy, as I understood it during
Speaker 4: Build Back Better, was not to try to take their
Speaker 4: piece out of it. They just tried to destroy the
Speaker 4: whole thing because they reasoned that if anything passes, they're
Speaker 4: going to be part of it because they can raise
Speaker 4: somewhere between one hundred to five hundred billion dollars their
Speaker 4: little provision by not getting ripped off by Farma anymore.
Speaker 3: So anything that went through it was going to have them.
Speaker 4: Whereas if you're the carried interest loophole guys who are
Speaker 4: with private equity, like you can go to Cinema and
Speaker 4: say get us out of there, and she'd be like, okay,
Speaker 4: because that's only maybe fifty billion dollars or something, and
Speaker 4: then she was all right, fine, cinema wants it.
Speaker 3: Out, we'll take that out.
Speaker 4: But there's so much money in format that they had
Speaker 4: to stop the whole thing, and briefly it looked like
Speaker 4: they succeeded. It looked like they had taken down the
Speaker 4: entire kind of Biden agenda.
Speaker 6: Legislatively, they had to work really hard to get Joe
Speaker 6: Manchin's phone number.
Speaker 4: Right and until until Mansion came back and kind of
Speaker 4: rescued it at the very end, which what happened there
Speaker 4: like a obviously West Virginia filled with old people who
Speaker 4: don't like paying high drug prices.
Speaker 3: Mansion is a good politician.
Speaker 4: Why why did Manson agree to do something that hurt pharma?
Speaker 12: In your estimation, Oh, you're gonna get me in trouble
Speaker 12: here now. It's because Joe Manchin is not terrible on pharma.
Speaker 12: I mean, that's just the truth. When we were pushing
Speaker 12: for Janet Woodcocks to removal, for her not to be
Speaker 12: confirmed at the FDA, it was in partnership with Joe Manchin.
Speaker 4: Is he just not bought by that industry held oil?
Speaker 8: Right?
Speaker 12: So he but he in his worldview, he understands that
Speaker 12: West Virginians are hurting, you know, like and and literally
Speaker 12: hurting early hurting, and Pharma is not his people. So
Speaker 12: I you know, that's my estimation of Joe Manchin on
Speaker 12: this is that he is not uh, you know, a
Speaker 12: pharmadem I use that you know, like there there are
Speaker 12: definitely uh Democrats who sing who dance to the tune
Speaker 12: that pharma calls, and he's he's not one of them.
Speaker 4: And so what what can by the bide administration still
Speaker 4: do sorry Sang sang the song of Joy for what
Speaker 4: they did do.
Speaker 3: When you know, I hear.
Speaker 4: Talk of march in rights, which is, you know, when
Speaker 4: if we helped fund a thing, you can march in
Speaker 4: and sell this is what you can charge for. There's
Speaker 4: international price setting that we can do. There's other executive action,
Speaker 4: there's legislation at the state.
Speaker 3: Level that could have an impact.
Speaker 4: So what what could still happen and what has the
Speaker 4: Biden administration kind of left on the table.
Speaker 8: There's an enormous amount that can still happen.
Speaker 12: I'll sort of you have to rain me and I'm
Speaker 12: a nerd, so but I'll start. I think one of
Speaker 12: the most exciting things is Governor Gavin Newsom in California
Speaker 12: is actually making big strides on public manufacturing. So he's
Speaker 12: bringing online public manufacturing of insulin with an eye towards
Speaker 12: public manufacturing of anything. For example, the FDA keeps this list.
Speaker 12: It's the shortage list. Right, everyone's heard of the drug shortage.
Speaker 12: It's just getting worse. A lot of stuff is written
Speaker 12: about the adderall drug shortage. I think that's because a
Speaker 12: lot of journalists need adderall.
Speaker 8: Adderall.
Speaker 12: So it's getting a lot of limelight. But this is
Speaker 12: an old issue and a lot of the drugs are cancer,
Speaker 12: are chemo drugs, these are this is classic market failure.
Speaker 12: So these are generic drugs. They're not hard to produce.
Speaker 12: The market hasn't failed in other countries just here. This
Speaker 12: is a total prime the pump type thing. And so
Speaker 12: instead of just keeping a list of the drug shortages,
Speaker 12: the FDA could just end the shortages.
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 12: They're like, I identify it. We we need four hundred
Speaker 12: thousand units of that drug. Okay, well I'm going to
Speaker 12: purchase four hundred thousand units of that drug.
Speaker 8: Boom, the shortage is done.
Speaker 12: Gavin Newsom's work in California is showing one path towards
Speaker 12: doing that. The federal government could do a lot to
Speaker 12: make that easier for Gavin Newsom and to create a
Speaker 12: marketplace amongst the states to use those publicly manufactured drugs
Speaker 12: from California. So that's something that I think is not
Speaker 12: widely talked about, but it has a lot of potential.
Speaker 8: Importation again is a huge one.
Speaker 12: States are importing drugs through the so called personal importation loophole.
Speaker 12: The loophole is so old now that it's just settled law.
Speaker 12: We should actually work on that and make it settled law.
Speaker 12: And one of the things is you could have a
Speaker 12: lot of policies done at the federal level that would
Speaker 12: incentivize states to import their drugs.
Speaker 8: This is one.
Speaker 12: This is also super nonpartisan. Colorado and Florida are the
Speaker 12: two that are taking the lead on this. There are
Speaker 12: enormous costs faced by the states for their workforce. Let
Speaker 12: them buy their drugs the exact same drugs from a
Speaker 12: country where it's cheaper. You have all fifty states doing that,
Speaker 12: and then you know it's a national policy. So there's those.
Speaker 12: There is also the federal use, which is something that
Speaker 12: you brought up with marching or just government use. The
Speaker 12: government does have the ability to say this privilege that
Speaker 12: you have to have a patent. That's a privilege, and
Speaker 12: if you abuse that privilege, you will lose that privilege
Speaker 12: and we will allow another manufacturer to produce that drug
Speaker 12: at a reasonable price.
Speaker 4: My dad actually texted me this morning because a drug
Speaker 4: he takes eloquist, it's a hip of violation on my part.
Speaker 3: I'm just sorry about that. That that's true. I can
Speaker 3: violate hip. Am I bound by HIPPA?
Speaker 12: No, you know, if your father gave you permission, then
Speaker 12: go with that.
Speaker 8: You're good to go.
Speaker 3: So you know that made the list.
Speaker 4: Now it's not until twenty twenty six that this goes
Speaker 4: into effect, correct, But the prices are so insane for
Speaker 4: these drugs. He had to get like a on a
Speaker 4: special like program that brings the prices down, but that
Speaker 4: costs money itself.
Speaker 3: It's just giant mess.
Speaker 4: If people want to know the rest of the drugs
Speaker 4: that are on the list, that can check my intercept
Speaker 4: story out. And also just to let people know, Alex
Speaker 4: Lawson I founded this publishing house many years ago called
Speaker 4: strong Arm Press, which published my book We've Got People
Speaker 4: back in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 3: So thank you to.
Speaker 4: Alex for that, which gives me an opportunity to plug
Speaker 4: my next one.
Speaker 3: So the next book is called Squad Such an Entrepreneur,
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 4: Such a it's coming out at the in December, and
Speaker 4: it's about basically the left from like twenty fifteen, starting
Speaker 4: with Bernie up through Build Back Better and the IRA.
Speaker 4: And we'll put a link in the video here because
Speaker 4: the publishers getting.
Speaker 3: Out free stickers.
Speaker 4: WHOA, you'll get a free sticker if do is sign
Speaker 4: up for some thing.
Speaker 5: I'll put it right here.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I should put it. I got room right here
Speaker 4: for a sticker.
Speaker 5: Hi.
Speaker 6: Excellent, Alex, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 8: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 5: Well that does it for.
Speaker 6: Us on this edition of Counterpoints, our last edition of
Speaker 6: the summer.
Speaker 5: When we come back next week, it'll.
Speaker 3: Be post labor and I will be into the no
Speaker 3: more white.
Speaker 6: She had, no more white Ryan was not wearing his
Speaker 6: white pants.
Speaker 5: Is set.
Speaker 6: But in all seriousness, it's a big fall coming up.
Speaker 6: Probably looking at as we talked about earlier in the show,
Speaker 6: government shutdown. Probably looking at an impeachment inquiry, So all
Speaker 6: kinds of things going on. Four indictments against the former
Speaker 6: president and a presidential election, all of that and more
Speaker 6: coming to you on the other side of Labor Day.
Speaker 5: We'll be here to cover it all.
Speaker 3: I can't wait see as soon