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.
Speaker 2: We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade
Speaker 2: the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent.
Speaker 1: Coverage that is possible.
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Speaker 2: the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that,
Speaker 2: let's get to the show.
Speaker 3: Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. We do have a
Speaker 3: quick announcement. Ryan and I have two long days coming
Speaker 3: up here actually because the debate special, the Breaking Points
Speaker 3: Debate Special, where we're bringing together everyone in the Breaking
Speaker 3: Points a cinematic universe, right, that's happening tomorrow night. We
Speaker 3: can put this graphic up on the screen eight pm Eastern.
Speaker 3: There's also a fun graphic where Ryan is trying to
Speaker 3: figure out why he's so angry.
Speaker 1: We can put that one up on the screen too.
Speaker 1: And Emily looks like she wasn't ready for the picture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and she's like looking down at her phone and they're like, oh, oh,
Speaker 1: we're doing this now.
Speaker 3: You know that happened to me one time in the
Speaker 3: outfield playing playing soft.
Speaker 1: And the ball like landed on your head.
Speaker 3: Well I had to go like put my glove up
Speaker 3: and my phone fell out. My coach wasn't happy about that.
Speaker 3: At eight pm. But tonight we will also be moderating
Speaker 3: a debate for zero Hedge on the Border. That's going
Speaker 3: to be at seven pm.
Speaker 1: Is that live or that post later?
Speaker 3: I think it's live. Okay, all right, so seven pm tonight,
Speaker 3: but put.
Speaker 1: Some details about that somewhere.
Speaker 3: Whole Breaking Points universe Tomorrow eight pm for the presidential debate,
Speaker 3: which is totally a first in history. We're going to
Speaker 3: talk about it.
Speaker 1: Robbie's going to be in that debate, right, getting the
Speaker 1: Rising crew back together. Yeah, Open borders, Robbie, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and me and me and Robbie up.
Speaker 3: We'll have nachos on the table.
Speaker 1: Excellent forward to that.
Speaker 3: Okay, So we now that we have the programming notes
Speaker 3: out of the way, we are going to start by
Speaker 3: talking about the debate today. We're then going to go
Speaker 3: over the election results, super super buzzy stuff. Obviously, Ryan
Speaker 3: quite literally wrote the book on the Squad, and the
Speaker 3: Squad is front and center as we have results coming
Speaker 3: in from primary elections all over the country last night.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about a terrible split screen playing
Speaker 3: out in Kenya, where four hundred Kenyans arrived in Port
Speaker 3: of Prince yesterday in Haiti. And also there's at least
Speaker 3: twenty two deaths so far in protests over a.
Speaker 1: New tax bill. Yeah, back in Nairobi, all hell is
Speaker 1: breaking loose, while ye Kenya is sending on behalf of
Speaker 1: the United States an international invasion force into Haiti. So
Speaker 1: we'll break some of that down. I'm going to talk
Speaker 1: about the disclosures from the Portland, Oregon race that we
Speaker 1: covered about a month ago, where a pack as we
Speaker 1: reported at the time, was spending millions of dollars secretly
Speaker 1: to influence that race. They were finally a month after
Speaker 1: the election, forced to disclose their actual funding and despite
Speaker 1: their denials, you're going to be shocked it actually was.
Speaker 1: Apak going to unpack how all of that unfolded. And
Speaker 1: then at the end of the show, we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking to a Theodore Postal, who's one of the
Speaker 1: kind of nuclear war experts in the world and in
Speaker 1: world history, since we only have since the forties, Yeah,
Speaker 1: to think about nuclear war. He's gone back and forth
Speaker 1: from the Pentagon to mit A is one of the
Speaker 1: most respected voices on this He is warning that the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian strikes inside Russia are putting nuclear war at a
Speaker 1: much higher risk than it was before Ukraine started striking
Speaker 1: Russia's early warning nuclear detection system. It's pretty frightening and
Speaker 1: kind of should be leading the news all around the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'd think, kind of like a first order thing that
Speaker 1: I think we all want is to not die in
Speaker 1: a nuclear annihilation, and yet here we are. We'll put
Speaker 1: it at the end of the show.
Speaker 3: Though only one's talking about it at the end of
Speaker 3: the show. Well, let's start with the big news, which
Speaker 3: is that historic debait is still as of right now
Speaker 3: set for tomorrow. I continue to be a synic about
Speaker 3: whether it will actually happen. It seems pretty likely that
Speaker 3: it will actually happen at this point. But Hillary Clinton
Speaker 3: is weighing in. Let's put a one up on the screen.
Speaker 3: Hillary Clinton wrote in otbed for the New York Times,
Speaker 3: where as the Fox News headline put it, she complained,
Speaker 3: it's quote impossible to defeat Trump and a quote waste
Speaker 3: of time to refute his arguments. Ran the thing I
Speaker 3: pulled out of this op ed from Hillary Clinton is
Speaker 3: a quote where she says, Unfortunately, mister Biden starts from
Speaker 3: a disadvantage because there's no way he can spend as
Speaker 3: much time preparing as I did eight years ago. Being
Speaker 3: president isn't just a day job. It's an everything, everywhere,
Speaker 3: all at once job. Historically that has led to weaker
Speaker 3: first debate performances for the incumbent. So I feel like
Speaker 3: this op ed, which she dropped a day before dropping
Speaker 3: her big book announcement, was kind of a nice one
Speaker 3: to pr punch for Hillary Clinton. Savvy as ever, but
Speaker 3: I think she's trying to lay the groundwork for a
Speaker 3: mediocre Biden performance by pushing publishing a opbed in the
Speaker 3: pages of the New York Times saying it's an impossible job.
Speaker 1: That's always what I say after I lose a debate,
Speaker 1: and it's that it's just an impossible task. It's a
Speaker 1: waste of time, yes, But on the other hand, it
Speaker 1: is kind of an impossible task to debate Donald Trump.
Speaker 1: Can you imagine? Then Hillary has actually done it, and
Speaker 1: she had Philippe Brains as the guy trying to pretend
Speaker 1: to be Trump, and but nobody can actually be Trump.
Speaker 1: He is one of a kind in basically world history.
Speaker 1: So you get out there and you have no idea
Speaker 1: what on earth is going to come out of that
Speaker 1: guy's mouth. You just don't know, and you don't even
Speaker 1: know if it's going to work because nobody's ever said
Speaker 1: it before, nobody's ever tried it before. So it's not
Speaker 1: something you can even and train for. And it's not
Speaker 1: as if either Biden or Trump are going to be
Speaker 1: getting into like the nitty gritty of tariff policy or know,
Speaker 1: one of these like nineteen eighties or nineties debates that
Speaker 1: gets like super wonky, like that's just like nobody expects
Speaker 1: anybody to go remotely near that. If these candidates can
Speaker 1: string together a sentence from beginning to end, that that
Speaker 1: is like grammatical yes. And if they can even put
Speaker 1: together a paragraph that can be transcribed and you read
Speaker 1: it and you're like, yeah, that's like eighth grade level
Speaker 1: and it makes a clear point, that would be a
Speaker 1: win for either of them. But I don't expect either
Speaker 1: of those things to happen. What we are expecting, though,
Speaker 1: are some stunts. And Hillary Clinton remembers that right after
Speaker 1: the Access Hollywood moment, Donald Trump responded using what was
Speaker 1: the Steve Bannon's idea of bringing three or four women
Speaker 1: who had accused her husband of sexual assault to the.
Speaker 3: Debate at them like in the front row.
Speaker 1: And had a press conference with them before an absolutely
Speaker 1: extraordinary moment. And so now people are speculating based on
Speaker 1: some leaks and hints from the Trump campaign. We can
Speaker 1: put this next element up here of who Trump is
Speaker 1: going to bring this time, like what kind of event
Speaker 1: he's going to try to create, And one thing they're
Speaker 1: suggesting is that he might bring family members of people
Speaker 1: killed by immigrants here in the United States. Do you
Speaker 1: have any insight from the Trump camp as to what
Speaker 1: kind of kind of a show they're planning on putting on.
Speaker 3: Well, there was an interesting report. This is actually just
Speaker 3: the next element from Byron Yorke over at the Washington Examiner.
Speaker 3: This is a three. We can put it up on
Speaker 3: the screen and I'm going to read from it. Trump
Speaker 3: told the Examiner what they did, I'm pretty sure is
Speaker 3: that they approached me with a debate that I couldn't
Speaker 3: take Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and then Byron put in brackets.
Speaker 3: Trump referred to the CNN anchor commentator as fake Tapper
Speaker 3: throughout no audience, sitting down, originally sitting down a dead debate,
Speaker 3: turn off the mics when you're not speaking so I
Speaker 3: can't interrupt him. They knew I wouldn't accept that because
Speaker 3: it was CNN, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and I like
Speaker 3: an audience, and probably he doesn't, who knows, so they
Speaker 3: thought they would present it. I would say no, and
Speaker 3: they would say we can't debate because Trump said no,
Speaker 3: So I said yes before they even gave me the terms.
Speaker 3: So he got roped into it. Interestingly, that's Trump explaining
Speaker 3: how he even got Biden to agree to a debate.
Speaker 3: And one of the things, in terms of the stunt question,
Speaker 3: this is the reason I described this debate as historic. Obviously,
Speaker 3: debates happen all the time, but some people may be
Speaker 3: aware this is the first debate and modern history that's
Speaker 3: happening without the Presidential Debate Commission. Is that what it's
Speaker 3: called debate committee?
Speaker 1: Debate on Well, it's the first one since the commission
Speaker 1: was created in like the seventies, right, right, And it's
Speaker 1: the earliest ever.
Speaker 3: Earliest ever first since the Debate Commission was created in
Speaker 3: the nineteen seventies, meaning that sounds maybe like a small thing,
Speaker 3: but what it means is that it's totally uncharted territory
Speaker 3: for CNN, it's totally uncharted territory for the campaigns, and
Speaker 3: so much negotiating actually goes into this. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just you saw what Crystal and Sager reported yesterday about
Speaker 3: breaking points not being able to pick up on the
Speaker 3: stream of the debate. I mean, it's the stupidest little
Speaker 3: piece of negotiating, leverage whatever that.
Speaker 1: I would think that a debate would be public for
Speaker 1: everybody to stream or whatever.
Speaker 3: But yeah, you would absolutely think that it would be.
Speaker 3: But this is uncharted territory. And so I think that
Speaker 3: Trump is going to be reacting just in the next
Speaker 3: twenty four to forty eight hours, and we don't really know,
Speaker 3: and I think he doesn't really know, which is why
Speaker 3: he is also doing something similar. Hillary Clinton doesn't run
Speaker 3: it out out in the New York Times without the
Speaker 3: Biden campaign knowing what's going to come. And that's why
Speaker 3: I think Trump talking to Byron New York and being like,
Speaker 3: why did I agree to fake Tapper? Well, you know,
Speaker 3: it was the only way to get Biden to debate.
Speaker 3: I think he's also trying to lay the groundwork for
Speaker 3: mediocre performance, because frankly, they both performed, like I'm trying
Speaker 3: to use mediocre as an adverb mediocrely back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: And there's a funny moment in that interview, kind of
Speaker 1: after that exchange where the interviewer says, Okay, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you couldn't actually say no to a debate, could you?
Speaker 1: And he says, and this is what people love about Trump,
Speaker 1: He's like, yeah, you're right, No, I couldn't. There's just
Speaker 1: no way I could do that. Well, and then he
Speaker 1: and everybody knows that, every politician knows that, but he's
Speaker 1: unique in that he'll just say it, yeah, I couldn't
Speaker 1: have said no.
Speaker 3: Right, And he also said something really interesting recently reflecting
Speaker 3: on He's like, some people told me that maybe the
Speaker 3: reason I won was because of the debates. And that's why.
Speaker 3: I mean, again, they're doing this in late June, but
Speaker 3: that's why the debates are important. Because I think Trump
Speaker 3: is correct that one of the biggest reasons he won
Speaker 3: the primary and then won the election of twenty sixteen
Speaker 3: is because people did not expect him to handle Hillary
Speaker 3: Clinton the way that he did, and obviously the other
Speaker 3: GOP candidates, and Clinton didn't perform well druxtaposed with Donald Trump,
Speaker 3: not as well as people expected her to. I agree
Speaker 3: with her and with you that it's an impossible job
Speaker 3: because he's what was he called yesterday by RFK Junior,
Speaker 3: the best debater of his generation or in a generation,
Speaker 3: or in American history.
Speaker 1: It's just that he's in a different league. And I
Speaker 1: don't mean that necessarily as a compliment, right, He's just different.
Speaker 3: It's like he's so special.
Speaker 1: The way like if you grew up like being some
Speaker 1: Oxford debater like Hillary Clinton, and now all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: the guys just saying wrong and like sayings to lock
Speaker 1: you up.
Speaker 3: It's like you bring women that your husband is accused
Speaker 3: of actually Sultan putting in the front round.
Speaker 1: How do you respond to that? And with with Biden,
Speaker 1: Let's not forget one of what Donald Trump did to
Speaker 1: Biden in twenty twenty. He showed up to the debate
Speaker 1: knowing he had COVID remember this, and yeah, and then
Speaker 1: he skipped the COVID test Like he's calling for a
Speaker 1: drug test this time, saying because he's accusing Biden of
Speaker 1: being on performance enhancing drugs, as if Trump hasn't been
Speaker 1: you know, jacked up on you know, meth and pseuda
Speaker 1: fed his entire life. Uh, suda fed, Like.
Speaker 3: Like we think he's a pseudo fedatict.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's he's on sometimes some type of uppers the Okay,
Speaker 1: you're distracting me from my very good point that I
Speaker 1: was making. But Ronnie Jackson, a congressman, jumped into the
Speaker 1: fray and said that, you know, Biden ought to have
Speaker 1: be drug tests ahead of this spate. Ronnie Jackson was
Speaker 1: Trump's corrupt doctor who was pumping him full of all
Speaker 1: sorts of who knows what the entire why the White
Speaker 1: House doctor, Yeah, and prescribing it like off label to
Speaker 1: all the White House staff.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then Ronnie Jackson is going to come in and
Speaker 1: talk about performance enhancing drugs? Are you kidding me? This
Speaker 1: is a good button whatever, A wonderful point I was
Speaker 1: planning to make.
Speaker 3: So, but this is actually relevant because I think to
Speaker 3: Ronnie Jackson come out and saying that Trumps saying that,
Speaker 3: This is why I still think it's possible the debate
Speaker 3: gets called off in the next twenty four to forty
Speaker 3: eight hours because again.
Speaker 1: They can't fill their prescriptions.
Speaker 3: They can't fill their prescriptions. Also, because the incentive for
Speaker 3: both of them to back out and make a big
Speaker 3: deal of it shifts, as you know, if he can
Speaker 3: make a political point about Biden not agreed to do
Speaker 3: a drug test. As stupid as that sounds, Biden could
Speaker 3: never agree to do a drug test. Everybody knows Biden.
Speaker 1: But the whole thing that's absurd, Like, of.
Speaker 3: Course it is. But but from the political.
Speaker 1: He's serious though, I don't think he's serious, because then
Speaker 1: Trump would have to take a drug test.
Speaker 3: I think it. I mean, I think it's.
Speaker 1: Trump after seven pm is like, come on.
Speaker 3: But Trump also just said that he called, basically called
Speaker 3: CNN's bluff. I think he would be willing to call
Speaker 3: Biden's bluff if the incentive shifts so as much that
Speaker 3: you know, Biden refusing to take a drug test. So
Speaker 3: they're not debating because Biden won't take a drug test.
Speaker 3: If Donald Trump wants to roll with.
Speaker 1: That, Trump's going to pain a cup before this debate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, no, but I think he knows that. And
Speaker 3: again I'm not saying that's what's going to happen. I'm
Speaker 3: saying there are a million different variables up in the
Speaker 3: air right now, because all they agreed to do this
Speaker 3: with was a network and each other. A network and
Speaker 3: each other. It is not the same.
Speaker 1: And we're only sure moderators have to take a performance
Speaker 1: enhancing drug test.
Speaker 3: I'm all for it for it, maybe we should, but
Speaker 3: the thing is, if you're not on drugs, then you're
Speaker 3: just qualified. So anyway, I continue to think that this
Speaker 3: is a very tenuous situation because of the way the
Speaker 3: debate is set up. I think it's going to be
Speaker 3: a mess if it happens for CNN because of that
Speaker 3: exact reason. They're doing commercial breaks. So someone's campaign comes
Speaker 3: into commercial breaks and says, you're cutting the mics too much.
Speaker 3: They're going to be cutting the mics. Trump is going
Speaker 3: to be yelling. It's just a mess.
Speaker 1: So I would recommend actually for Biden microdosing shrooms because
Speaker 1: I don't think that would show up in a test. Now,
Speaker 1: you got to be careful, like you know, you have
Speaker 1: a little too heavy on that.
Speaker 3: Jennet Yellen.
Speaker 1: It's going to be an interesting debate, yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's worth of shot.
Speaker 3: Maybe Janet Yellen can actually give them some shrooms. She
Speaker 3: can administer the doses clinically.
Speaker 1: Does Janet Yellen have a background in South Cybin.
Speaker 3: Remember in China?
Speaker 1: She Oh, that's right, that's right, that's right. She accidentally
Speaker 1: dosed herself. Forgot about that. That's amazing.
Speaker 3: Again, people think Joe Biden like there's there's not not unseious.
Speaker 3: People saying that Biden did this to agreed to do
Speaker 3: this earlier, that Democrats agreed to have Biden debating early
Speaker 3: so that they could have a contingency plan in place
Speaker 3: for the convention in August. I don't know if there's
Speaker 3: truth to that, but a lot on the line of Mark.
Speaker 1: What I've heard from the Biden camp is that they
Speaker 1: they do recognize that they're losing to Trump and and
Speaker 1: felt like they needed some way to shake the race up,
Speaker 1: and that this so therefore they needed an early debate.
Speaker 1: At the same time, they're very unconfident about how he's
Speaker 1: going to perform in the debate, and the thinking is, Okay, well,
Speaker 1: this is worth a shot, and if it works, great,
Speaker 1: but if it doesn't, it's far enough away from the
Speaker 1: general election that people will have forgotten this debate performance.
Speaker 1: Those two things, if you've figured it out, are contradictory
Speaker 1: like you can't, on the one hand, hope that a
Speaker 1: good debate performance is going to catapult you to the
Speaker 1: White House, but believe that a bad debate performance isn't
Speaker 1: actually going to hurt you, because those are ideas or
Speaker 1: in contradiction. Either the debate matters or it doesn't. But
Speaker 1: you know, contradictions have never stopped anybody from moving forward
Speaker 1: with what they wanted to do.
Speaker 3: Anyway, although they can also both be so weak that
Speaker 3: it just neutralizes each other's weaknesses, which I think actually
Speaker 3: is what happened in twenty twenty.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and the other thinking among Democrats is that people
Speaker 1: don't like Donald Trump in general, and so the more
Speaker 1: you can get Donald Trump in front of the American public,
Speaker 1: the worse off it might be for him and liberals
Speaker 1: by kicking him off of Twitter, Facebook, basically, you know,
Speaker 1: deplatforming him, getting him out of people's faces have actually
Speaker 1: done the thing that Trump's advisors were trying to do
Speaker 1: for years, just getting him to calm down and stop
Speaker 1: putting his foot in his mouth and saying outrageous things
Speaker 1: that infuriated people. Nobody could accomplish that except for the
Speaker 1: social media platforms driven by kind of democratic.
Speaker 3: Outrage, and yeah, nobody's on true social and so with now.
Speaker 1: They got to bring him back and put him people's
Speaker 1: face and be like, remember this guy, like you liked
Speaker 1: the economy under him, but you didn't like him. Remember
Speaker 1: that and hope that that's enough.
Speaker 3: Let's move on to some of the most interesting news
Speaker 3: playing out right now, especially in York sixteenth district, where
Speaker 3: Jamal Bowman lost his race pretty handily, double digit loss
Speaker 3: for a squad member Jamal Bowman and Ryan I think
Speaker 3: maybe we just run through some of these results quickly
Speaker 3: and then we want to get I especially curious to
Speaker 3: hear what you have to say about what happened to
Speaker 3: Jamal Bowman and APAC and all of that up in
Speaker 3: New York sixteenth sixteenth. But also Lauren Bobert did win
Speaker 3: that districting ken Bucks. It was ken bucks old seat.
Speaker 3: The Trump back candidate in Utah to replace Romney lost handily.
Speaker 3: It's like a twenty point love Romney twenty Yeah, but Trump,
Speaker 3: I mean, this is this is not There was a
Speaker 3: conversation last week we were talking about Bob good getting
Speaker 3: booted from his seat. He's the chairman of the Freedom Caucus.
Speaker 3: We interviewed him a couple of months ago, and people
Speaker 3: were saying, well was the Trump factor? Trump waded in
Speaker 3: for his opponent, and that's what ded a men really
Speaker 3: mixed bag with Trump endorsements in recent result history, and
Speaker 3: last night was absolutely no exception to that. So those
Speaker 3: are I think a few of the big ones. We
Speaker 3: might touch on a couple of other ones going forward here,
Speaker 3: but let's start with Bowman. Ryan a big, big loss.
Speaker 1: So George Latimer finishes, they're still counting a little bit,
Speaker 1: but he's creeping in on fifty nine percent, fifty eight
Speaker 1: to fifty nine percent, which is about what the polls
Speaker 1: were showing. Like people expected this was going to be
Speaker 1: a landslide. Daniel Maren's over, my old colleague over at
Speaker 1: the Hoffington Post has a really good kind of rundown
Speaker 1: of this race that gets into the retail political I
Speaker 1: don't know if you want to call the mistakes that
Speaker 1: Bowman made over the last couple of years, because mistakes
Speaker 1: implies that he didn't do it on purpose, like what
Speaker 1: Bowman in twenty twenty one took a trip sponsored by
Speaker 1: j Street to visit Israel, and Jay Street had endorsed
Speaker 1: him in twenty twenty against Elliott Engel obviously a pro
Speaker 1: Israel group, a pro Israel, but it's liberal Zionist. It's
Speaker 1: kind of They fight with APAK a lot, and in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two in particular, they were kind of a
Speaker 1: leading element of the coalition that was fighting back against
Speaker 1: APAC while APAK was spending millions of dollars trying to
Speaker 1: take out like squad like members. In twenty twenty, Bowman
Speaker 1: came in DMFI, which was the kind of proto APAC.
Speaker 1: Super Pac spent about two million dollars against Bowman trying
Speaker 1: to buck up Elliott Engle, who was the chairman of
Speaker 1: the Foreign Affairs Committee and one of the leading Israel
Speaker 1: Hawks in Congress. And so for Angle to go down
Speaker 1: was a huge deal. And despite that two million dollars
Speaker 1: in spending, Bowman beat him. Israel Palis and wasn't a
Speaker 1: huge part of the race at the time. It was
Speaker 1: what drove the funding, but it wasn't what drove the
Speaker 1: kind of public conversation about the race. Remember, this was
Speaker 1: the height of the George Floyd protests and Elliot Angle
Speaker 1: had this absolutely monumental gaff where he went to a
Speaker 1: George Floyd rally and he was caught on an open
Speaker 1: mic trying to speak and the guy running the rally
Speaker 1: is like, look, so many elected officials here were not
Speaker 1: letting everybody speak. Well, you know it's hot out here.
Speaker 1: We'll be here all day. And he said, I wouldn't
Speaker 1: ask if I didn't have a primary. I wouldn't even
Speaker 1: be here if I didn't have a primary. Led it,
Speaker 1: and it was on the hot mic, it was on
Speaker 1: New York One. It's like wow, and it fed into
Speaker 1: a that's a tone deaf thing to stay at the
Speaker 1: height of the George Floyd protests. And also he was
Speaker 1: caught living in Maryland at the time, Like a reporter
Speaker 1: went to his door in Maryland and found him there.
Speaker 1: And you've been claiming you've been at these events in
Speaker 1: New York, but you haven't been in New York at all.
Speaker 1: He's like, I've been in both places. And there's no
Speaker 1: evidence he'd been in both places at all. He'd just
Speaker 1: been in Maryland. So the two things came together created
Speaker 1: a big scandal and Bowman crushed him, even in heavily
Speaker 1: Jewish precincts. Twenty twenty one, Jay Street takes him to
Speaker 1: Israel and Apak takes lawmakers to Israel on these guided
Speaker 1: tours every two years. Run Steney Hoyer organizes these trips
Speaker 1: their bipartisan and they come back fortified in their support
Speaker 1: for Israel. Jamal Bowman came back from that trip to
Speaker 1: Israel a changed person, and he's talked about this, like
Speaker 1: seeing the occupation up close in the West Bank, seeing
Speaker 1: that Muslims could not or Palestinians could not go down
Speaker 1: certain roads, seeing the fencing. There's this one famous street
Speaker 1: that has kind of netting over top of the street,
Speaker 1: and I think it's in Hebron because so many of
Speaker 1: the Jewish Israeli settlers there throw trash onto the street
Speaker 1: from their settlements, so they eventually had to put up
Speaker 1: a net. The highways where you can't drive if you
Speaker 1: don't have the right license plate. You have to have
Speaker 1: certain permits to get different areas. He was shocked to
Speaker 1: his core, and so that's why I say I wouldn't
Speaker 1: describe the political decisions he made after that a mistakes,
Speaker 1: because he decided that this was wrong and this was
Speaker 1: something he was going to stand up for now. He
Speaker 1: did in the time since then, he did not build
Speaker 1: inroads into the Jewish community. He did not come to
Speaker 1: the synagogues. And this is what they say, that he
Speaker 1: didn't come to the synagogues and have this dialogue with them.
Speaker 1: He didn't talk to them about his experience that he'd
Speaker 1: had there. It was it was more of just a
Speaker 1: public kind of political campaign that he was running, and
Speaker 1: that's what he felt was appropriate. But what it did
Speaker 1: is it drove this wedge even among say the liberals
Speaker 1: in his district, who might say, you know what, I
Speaker 1: agree with you, I'm against the occupation and again this
Speaker 1: and that they felt like they had just kind of
Speaker 1: lost touch with him, and he didn't care about that community.
Speaker 1: And so it's interesting that Apak spent nearly twenty million
Speaker 1: dollars in this race because his initial race is what
Speaker 1: basically brought a pack into the Super Pac game. Like
Speaker 1: DMFI spending two million dollars and losing to Jamal Bowman
Speaker 1: convinced a pack, Okay, DMFI is not cut out for
Speaker 1: this on its own. Yeah, they're raising five ten million
Speaker 1: dollars a year. We can do much better than that.
Speaker 1: That's why they came in in twenty twenty two and
Speaker 1: spent thirty forty fifty million dollars. And why they came
Speaker 1: in and just spent nearly twenty million just in this race.
Speaker 3: What was wasn't it fourteen? The total somewhere like fourteen
Speaker 3: point for Bowman this race.
Speaker 1: I saw seventeen, but I don't think we've seen a
Speaker 1: final number either.
Speaker 3: I mean, either way, it is the most expensive race,
Speaker 3: and all because of a pack. It's the most expensive
Speaker 3: what house race in the history of house races?
Speaker 1: Yes, it is, and that's including the David Trone, like
Speaker 1: the total Wine guy who spent like twelve of his
Speaker 1: own million dollars to finish in third place in one
Speaker 1: race and then spent more than like roughly that to
Speaker 1: finally win, and god knows what he's spent to lose
Speaker 1: his Senate race this year. That's a I forgot. That's
Speaker 1: a different question. Yeah, most expensive race in history. But
Speaker 1: it's also this New York like buying airtime in New
Speaker 1: York is insanely expensive, and to blanket the airwaves, especially
Speaker 1: when you have to buy New York air, but it's
Speaker 1: like suburban New York that you're actually aiming for is
Speaker 1: going to cost you an enormous amount of money.
Speaker 3: So interestingly, there was a report in Axios this morning
Speaker 3: after Bowman as the dust was kind of clearing. That
Speaker 3: quoted a House Democrat saying it felt kind of gross
Speaker 3: the amount of money that had been spent on the
Speaker 3: Bowman race, and that like a pack. It was this
Speaker 3: sort of rebut not rebuttal. It was this rebuke almost
Speaker 3: off the record. Of course all of these people were
Speaker 3: talking off the record, but of how APAC had handled
Speaker 3: this race, saying this was too much. It was it's
Speaker 3: not even this from people who are sounded like very
Speaker 3: supportive of APAC, saying this is starting to actually undermine
Speaker 3: your cause and give people reason to say you're out
Speaker 3: here putting gross amounts of money to buy races, and
Speaker 3: it's not feeling like so democratic anymore. It's feeling a
Speaker 3: little bit like big money.
Speaker 1: And if you look at APAX donors, they're mostly Republicans,
Speaker 1: which bothers Democrats more than the fact that it's APACK.
Speaker 3: Although not the voters in New York sixteen.
Speaker 1: Well, it's not as if. It's not as if the
Speaker 1: ads say funded by Republican donors who have given money
Speaker 1: to APACK. It says this ad was supported by United
Speaker 1: Democracy Project like I'm for United Democracies. Also was great well.
Speaker 3: I also thought Latimer's messaging was interesting with the way
Speaker 3: Bowman ran his campaign, where Latimer Latimer was saying, I
Speaker 3: won't want to end the chaos in Washington, DC, and
Speaker 3: then just in the last few days. I'm sure actually
Speaker 3: in April poll matched the results that we got last
Speaker 3: night pretty closely. But you have the chaos if you're
Speaker 3: a voter. Was just trying to feed your family, take your
Speaker 3: kids of soccerbractics or whatever. Looking at Jamal Bowman like
Speaker 3: jumping around saying fa pack whatever else he said, and
Speaker 3: then a guy and also the whole fire thing, the
Speaker 3: nine to eleven conspiracy theories, which don't always play so
Speaker 3: well in New York. And he had walked back, you know,
Speaker 3: sort of on a parallel track with Mersher, Taylor Green, you.
Speaker 1: Know, and a lot of anti Bowman people, to your
Speaker 1: point about APAC's gross amount of spending, are frustrated that
Speaker 1: APEX spends so much money because now they can't make
Speaker 1: the argument that Bowman was unpopular yep, and that his
Speaker 1: constituents rejected his brand of politics, you know, fair and square, right,
Speaker 1: but you just can't say that you can you can
Speaker 1: believe it, And I've heard people make a reasonable case
Speaker 1: that Latimer, absent interventions from either side, might have beaten
Speaker 1: Jamal Bowman because of the district that he's running in
Speaker 1: the politics around it. But nobody can say that with
Speaker 1: any confidence because that's not what happened. A pack came
Speaker 1: in and dropped at least you know, we'll see the
Speaker 1: final total in the end, but you know, more money
Speaker 1: than has ever been dropped by any single organization in
Speaker 1: a in a congressional race before, and that obviously tilts
Speaker 1: the scale, and so now it it makes it so
Speaker 1: that nobody has to actually talk about the issues at play,
Speaker 1: and instead both sides you can say, look at look
Speaker 1: at look at the sheer amount of money. And from
Speaker 1: the Democratic side, and we're going to talk about this
Speaker 1: later in our in our a PAC block, it is
Speaker 1: this isn't the A pack block right right? It is
Speaker 1: wild that Democrats are allowing in democratic primaries Republican billionaires
Speaker 1: to funnel so much money into their primaries. It's kind
Speaker 1: of an incredible situation and I just don't think Republicans
Speaker 1: would ever allow that.
Speaker 3: I also think progressives and you know, Corey Bush is
Speaker 3: while worth talking about in this context, looks like she
Speaker 3: might lose her.
Speaker 1: Primary tough one Elan O. Mar's got a tough race.
Speaker 3: A nail bider in Minnesota with Ohan Omar. I think
Speaker 3: progressives have struggled to connect these really front and center,
Speaker 3: high profile discussions about Israel and Palestine to the material
Speaker 3: concerns of some of their voters who for whatever reason,
Speaker 3: and we can all disagree with the reasons, but just
Speaker 3: don't care as much about the issue.
Speaker 1: This is the only district where they where they even
Speaker 1: talked somewhat about Israel Palestine. When APAK runs its ads,
Speaker 1: even in this district, they were they were not about
Speaker 1: Israel Palestine, like when they were going after Bowman. They're
Speaker 1: going after Bowman for not being a loyal enough Democrat
Speaker 1: with holding his vote on the infrastructure bill like that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure they dugged that Opo and.
Speaker 1: Like Firepole on the fire alarm.
Speaker 3: Which he should not have done, and then he shouldn't.
Speaker 1: Have lied about it like he's a principal, and so
Speaker 1: that I think that hurt him because like principles know
Speaker 1: how fire alarms.
Speaker 3: Were, like he thought it was the door, is what
Speaker 3: he said.
Speaker 1: And so even a PAK like doesn't run on Israel Palestine. Right,
Speaker 1: they pull what they think is going to be damaging
Speaker 1: to their opponent and then they run on that.
Speaker 3: But they I mean, the candid it's what they're I mean,
Speaker 3: it's the reality they're facing, is that it's going to
Speaker 3: get I mean, it's going to get dragged into the
Speaker 3: center of the race, even if APAC knows that it's
Speaker 3: not front and center concerns of voters and media conversation
Speaker 3: about Corey Bush.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's what it's the media conversation, but like
Speaker 1: on the ground, so it will be Wesley Bell versus
Speaker 1: Corey Bush. It's the ads are not going to be
Speaker 1: about Israel palestime for the most part. You know, Corey
Speaker 1: Bush will be talking about how she stood up for
Speaker 1: renters and fought against the ending the foreclosure more time,
Speaker 1: and I guess deliver for Saint Louis that she's brought
Speaker 1: back money like Summer League did in Pittsburgh, whereas Wesley
Speaker 1: Bell will say it's too much drama.
Speaker 3: You know, well that's what I was going to say
Speaker 3: a guy like me, And I think it just plays
Speaker 3: into the broader narrative of chaos and like an extremism.
Speaker 3: And I do think that progressive Democrats need to find
Speaker 3: a better way to talk about the issue that neutralizes
Speaker 3: that just the reality that it's going to be used as.
Speaker 1: I mean, Summerly basically showed how to do that, and
Speaker 1: Corey Bush is kind of modeling her campaign after summer Lease.
Speaker 1: Summer Ly. If you look at her, she's basically a
Speaker 1: squad member of you. But if you look at her
Speaker 1: advertising and her messaging in Pittsburgh, it's indistinguishable from a
Speaker 1: normal Democrat. And that's to the point that if you
Speaker 1: have a big turnout in a Democratic primary election, there
Speaker 1: are a lot of normy Democrats who that's just what
Speaker 1: they want.
Speaker 3: Let's talk about Lauren Bobert.
Speaker 1: Why not normies?
Speaker 3: Yes, Lauren Bobert won her primary and the Beetlejuice district.
Speaker 3: Kidding you remember the Beetlejuice story.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, the play.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry that I had to remind you of that
Speaker 3: because the image is indoubtable. But we have the results
Speaker 3: from Lauren Bobert's race. This turned out to be a
Speaker 3: pretty healthy district, pretty healthy primary win for her forty
Speaker 3: three points, though she didn't get over half because the
Speaker 3: so the vote was split between all of these other
Speaker 3: candidates This is ken Buckelle District. As we mentioned right
Speaker 3: up at the top. What's very interesting about this situation
Speaker 3: is that the establishment guy, Jeff Hurd, he won the
Speaker 3: Republican primary in Lauren Bobert's current district, so the third
Speaker 3: congressional district. She switched districts feeling like she was going
Speaker 3: to lose, and she probably would have lost. Actually we
Speaker 3: don't know, but she probably would have lost from that
Speaker 3: third district outside Denver to this district, which is I believe, Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's the fourth congressional district, and the establishment guy, not
Speaker 3: a big maga guy, is the one who ended up
Speaker 3: winning her actual district that she'll be vacating obviously moving
Speaker 3: over to this new district.
Speaker 1: Now, now, in Texas, you have to get over fifty
Speaker 1: percent in a primary or you go to a runoff.
Speaker 1: So if the Republicans in Colorado were running on the
Speaker 1: Texas primary model, you now have a runoff between Bobert
Speaker 1: and what was her name, Jenny, the second place candidate there.
Speaker 1: How do you think that goes? Do you think that
Speaker 1: there's enough anti Bobert sentiment in that district that she
Speaker 1: actually ends up losing and that she only won because
Speaker 1: the anti Bobert vote was split, or do you think
Speaker 1: that a decent number of those candidates had as a
Speaker 1: second choice Bobert so that she'd win in a primary anyway,
Speaker 1: Because the point here is that Bowman last year had
Speaker 1: two opponents. To last election had two opponents, and he
Speaker 1: got like fifty four percent of the vote. He won
Speaker 1: comfortably because they split the anti Bowman vote, But for
Speaker 1: people watching closely, it was a warning sign, like, oh,
Speaker 1: you were just four percentage points over a majority. You
Speaker 1: could have lost that race if there was a single
Speaker 1: opponent against you. She's only forty three.
Speaker 3: She reminds me. Her problems remind me of Bowman's in
Speaker 3: some respect, just thinking about the fire alarm situation and
Speaker 3: the OPO that was dragged out on his previous sort
Speaker 3: of poetry blog that dabbled in nine to eleven truth theorism,
Speaker 3: and also kind of reminds me of Marjorie Tayler Green.
Speaker 3: I made a joke about that earlier, the sort of
Speaker 3: media double standard aside. I think it's really interesting that
Speaker 3: people who are like now in Congress were pulled in
Speaker 3: those directions, because I think it's tempting for all of
Speaker 3: us and I don't think it's isolated to them, And
Speaker 3: I think the populism in particular, when you're seeking out
Speaker 3: explanations for the just rapid changes de industrialization, material concerns
Speaker 3: that have accelerated, you know, it's not crazy to get
Speaker 3: pulled down in crazy directions. You just have to sort
Speaker 3: of be vigilant against those things. But I think Lauren
Speaker 3: Bobert with Jamal Bowman in that sort of fire alarm
Speaker 3: versus beetlejuice situation, they just look ridiculous. And I know
Speaker 3: Lauren Bobert ran on she used to own a bar
Speaker 3: right that was like a Second Amendment the bar basically
Speaker 3: like a gun themed bar. I think it was called
Speaker 3: Shooters something like that.
Speaker 1: If you like, it had more health code violations.
Speaker 3: Than like did it really so SI had a good restaurant.
Speaker 3: But yeah, I mean I think there's she just lost
Speaker 3: a lot of you know, even as like this populous,
Speaker 3: and to.
Speaker 1: Survive, she jumped districts. I wonder what would have happened
Speaker 1: if Bowman jumped districts and ran against Richie Torres and numbers.
Speaker 3: That's super interesting.
Speaker 1: Maybe two years from now that's what he'll do.
Speaker 3: I think. I think Boba probably would have lost, but
Speaker 3: it's hard to say, just given how much money that
Speaker 3: you can raise when you are super maga. Right now,
Speaker 3: I don't know how Trump would have dealt with anything
Speaker 3: like that. That reminds me to read this Dave Wiggle tweet.
Speaker 3: He said this might be the worst primary night for
Speaker 3: Trump endorsed GP candidates all year. Burns loses narrowly in
Speaker 3: South Carolina, Dave Williams getting crushed in Colorado. Five all
Speaker 3: before the Utah Senate race comes in and Pol's had
Speaker 3: voted Trump back Trent Stags down big, And indeed Trent
Speaker 3: Stags did go down to John Curtis, who ended up
Speaker 3: winning the primary for that Romney seat. We can put
Speaker 3: that up on the screen. That's be five. He was
Speaker 3: definitely not the Trump pick in the Utah race and
Speaker 3: ended up winning by double digits fifty endors thirty. I
Speaker 3: believe Romney did endorse John Curtise. Yeah, he's like people
Speaker 3: see him as like a Romney two point zero kind
Speaker 3: of if.
Speaker 1: That makes sense, And I've seen political scientists say that,
Speaker 1: if not for the counterfactual of Joseph Smith wandering out
Speaker 1: to Utah and creating Mormonism, out there that Utah would
Speaker 1: actually be a blue state because of the if in
Speaker 1: other words, if Utah residents voted the same way as
Speaker 1: you know, urban suburban and ex urban voters and role
Speaker 1: voters vote in every other state in the country, there
Speaker 1: are enough urban and suburban voters just concentrated around Salt
Speaker 1: Lake City that it would be a democratic state. But
Speaker 1: because of Mormonism and the conservative strain in it, it's
Speaker 1: a red state. But that would also explain why it
Speaker 1: is anti Trump and trends toward this kind of Curtis
Speaker 1: Romney style.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the governor Spencer Cox is also sort of in
Speaker 3: that mold. There's a very particular type of Republican that
Speaker 3: comes from Utah. And it's not behind me right now,
Speaker 3: I just looked. But the book that's behind me sometimes
Speaker 3: is called Alienated America by Tim Carney. In Utah plays
Speaker 3: a big role in that book because it has a
Speaker 3: really high level of sort of civic society, civil society,
Speaker 3: meaning that community bonds are really tight. They have robust
Speaker 3: like rotary clubs and all of that stuff. And it's
Speaker 3: one of the few red states that was not few,
Speaker 3: it's one of the handful of red states that was
Speaker 3: sort of ardently anti Trump in the Republican primary twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: twenty sixteen, And that is an interesting point along the
Speaker 3: lines of what you were making. If you go to
Speaker 3: you know, rural Wisconsin super like old DEM districts, super
Speaker 3: pro Trump, but in states or in places where the
Speaker 3: social fabric was stronger, southeastern Wisconsin, they're pretty anti Trump
Speaker 3: and anti populism. So I think there's something to that
Speaker 3: about Utah in particular. But it's also hard to extricate
Speaker 3: the Mormonism from the Utahism.
Speaker 1: Too utterly impossible. And if they just solve the drinking
Speaker 1: water problem, you'd all be doing great anything else.
Speaker 3: Oh John avalon CNN guy, But more importantly, I think
Speaker 3: he helped co found no Labels. He won his primary
Speaker 3: in New York.
Speaker 1: As well, Staten Island or something was it?
Speaker 3: Is it the George Santos seat. It's somewhere up that. No,
Speaker 3: it's well, maybe it's New York's first district. But John Avil, Yeah,
Speaker 3: all right, Haiti, we can go ahead and start running
Speaker 3: some of this footage. This is c one. This is
Speaker 3: troops arriving in Porta Prince Kenyan troops arriving in Porta
Speaker 3: Prince yesterday. This block is called Haiti. On the screen,
Speaker 3: it could also be called Kenya though Ryan because this
Speaker 3: was unfolding, called America right, or yeah, this was unfolding
Speaker 3: as just we could literally put it on a split
Speaker 3: screen with what was happening in Nairobi yesterday, which was
Speaker 3: just a demonstration that as of right now, according to
Speaker 3: the Human Rights Commission of Kenya, left twenty to twenty
Speaker 3: two people dead. A section of their parliament, as the
Speaker 3: BBC reported, went up in flames as demonstrations against a
Speaker 3: new tax proposal escalated. I'll keep reading from this BBC report.
Speaker 3: They said protests against an unpopular finance bill, which included
Speaker 3: several tax rises, have been going for days, but they
Speaker 3: escalated on Tuesday as MP's passed an amended bill. Protesters
Speaker 3: broke into Parliament, vandalizing the interior and setting parts of
Speaker 3: the complex on fire. The ceremonial may symbol the authority
Speaker 3: of the legislature was stolen. Police open fire with live ammunition,
Speaker 3: killing at least five people, according to the Kenyan Medical Association.
Speaker 3: This is a quote from twenty four year old named Derek,
Speaker 3: who told the BBC there are some things that are
Speaker 3: hard to understand, like how can you impose a sixteen
Speaker 3: percent tax on bread? How can you tax sanitary pads?
Speaker 3: That was a reference to proposals that were in the
Speaker 3: original bill that fueled some of these protests. We should,
Speaker 3: of course note that this is the troops that landed
Speaker 3: Import of Prince yesterday, the Kenyan troops that landed Import
Speaker 3: of Prince yesterday. It's absolutely part of a US back
Speaker 3: scheme to basically, I mean, we don't know how it's
Speaker 3: going to end. We can probably guess how it's going
Speaker 3: to end, but to engineer the preferred outcome of the
Speaker 3: United States in Haiti. And it comes as a pretty
Speaker 3: important time in Africa for the United States. They just
Speaker 3: gave them what the first Sub Saharan African country, Biden did.
Speaker 3: He designated them a major non NATO ally ally right
Speaker 3: around the same time that these negotiations over Haiti are happening.
Speaker 1: We put that up. I think that's C five. Sorry
Speaker 1: to jump around on you, but you can put up
Speaker 1: C five there.
Speaker 3: It all goes together. And that's one of.
Speaker 1: The important things here. Yes, and so William Rutau. One
Speaker 1: of the things that one of the things that the
Speaker 1: US dangles in front of foreign leaders in exchange for
Speaker 1: things that they want is a trip to Washington, and
Speaker 1: William rutto accepted that trip to Washington. He was here
Speaker 1: very recently. One of the things that they announced was
Speaker 1: that you know they're gonna name Kenya is this major
Speaker 1: non NATO ally all. You know, they were now some
Speaker 1: debt forgiveness and some other some other schemes that are
Speaker 1: supposed to make Kenyon leaders happy. Coincidentally, William Rutteau is
Speaker 1: one of the first people, if not the first people
Speaker 1: ever charged by the International Criminal Court were for war
Speaker 1: crimes for a slaughter that he was allegedly heavily involved in.
Speaker 1: They eventually dropped those charges and now he's now he's
Speaker 1: president of Kenya. The Kenya has also been doing all
Speaker 1: sorts of pro very weird, pro us stuff, weird in
Speaker 1: the sense that it doesn't fit with kind of what
Speaker 1: the politics of the region might indicate. They're the only
Speaker 1: country there that joined our kind of anti Huti coalition.
Speaker 1: And you'll often see if you look at that giant
Speaker 1: UN billboard, when let's say there's an Israel Palestine vote,
Speaker 1: in the entire world is voting one way and there's
Speaker 1: like countries you've never heard of that are like Pacific
Speaker 1: Islands and the US are voting the other way. Kenya
Speaker 1: will be there with them too. Yeah, like what that's
Speaker 1: going on here with Kenya? You can also if you
Speaker 1: want to go down a rabbit hole, go check out
Speaker 1: Kenya's election in which Ruto won in a very very
Speaker 1: scandal plagued election by like zero point one percent or something,
Speaker 1: with all sorts of anomalies and all sorts of allegations
Speaker 1: that that it was rigged and that the that the
Speaker 1: US is preferred candidate Rutto came out on top despite
Speaker 1: not having actual actual majority support. And then fast forward,
Speaker 1: US wants international troops to go into Haiti. The US
Speaker 1: feels like, okay, we can't. We've sent in the Marines
Speaker 1: too many times into Haiti.
Speaker 3: And who we've sent the UN too many times in
Speaker 3: the Haiti right, and what's and what's it?
Speaker 1: Almost it feels racist. It's like, well, we need some
Speaker 1: African troops to like do this invasion for us. You
Speaker 1: know who can help us out? Oh, we've been doing
Speaker 1: a lot of favors for Kenya. Can you will do this?
Speaker 1: It's very unpopular in Kenya. This, this this invasion is
Speaker 1: extremely unpopular. They had to pay the Kenyan troops. I
Speaker 1: think it's reported they're getting paid an extra fifteen hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a month on top of their salaries, which is
Speaker 1: which is only further fueling resentment in Haiti because Haitian
Speaker 1: police officers aren't even getting paid right, Like they haven't
Speaker 1: been paid in months at best, and they're like, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, but you're paying them fifteen you know, the
Speaker 1: average you know, Haitian police officer makes it a tiny
Speaker 1: fraction of that. And you know, there are reports that
Speaker 1: the base that the US built for these canyons isn't
Speaker 1: really ready yet. And then the question is what on
Speaker 1: earth are they going to do? Like what what do
Speaker 1: we think a couple thousand foreign police officers are going
Speaker 1: to do in a situation that is completely out of control?
Speaker 1: Like what?
Speaker 4: Like what? Like it?
Speaker 1: It literally makes no sense, like what what? What is
Speaker 1: the goal here? Like in other words, so they set
Speaker 1: up this presidential council in a hotel room in Jamaica.
Speaker 1: That presidential council took a bunch of resumes.
Speaker 3: Which is we've seen the same thing play up before.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they say they took a bunch of resumes. They
Speaker 1: took sixty resumes from people applying to be a black minister. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they narrowed it down to five. They did a bunch
Speaker 1: of interviews, uh, and then they picked a guy from
Speaker 1: UNICEF to be the prime Minister of Haiti. That's not
Speaker 1: a political solution that has the buy in of the
Speaker 1: of the Haitian people.
Speaker 3: Right, you have the buy in of the United States
Speaker 3: and maybe US some.
Speaker 1: Elements some elements of uh, you know, the Haitian elite,
Speaker 1: which were you know, jockeying and lobbying and pressuring to
Speaker 1: try to get their preferred prime minister outcome. But prime
Speaker 1: minister of what like of a handful of Kenyan troops
Speaker 1: or police officers, not troops.
Speaker 3: So, and this is also in the context of I
Speaker 3: mean some people describe it as a second scramble for Africa,
Speaker 3: Russia and some sort of radical Islamic efforts to capture
Speaker 3: different countries. The United States is trying to keep some
Speaker 3: of that at Bay, is trying to maintain its power
Speaker 3: up with China as well, and so that's where you
Speaker 3: see Kenya becoming especially important to the United States. Kenny
Speaker 3: is in a lot of debt. They have to pay,
Speaker 3: like us, a lot of interest on their debt. That's
Speaker 3: where like.
Speaker 1: US, it can't just have the Federal Reserve handle that
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 3: And so that's where the sort of financial squeeze push
Speaker 3: people into the streets. Let's actually roll C two because
Speaker 3: Barack Obama's half sister was on CNN was being tear
Speaker 3: gassed on CNN reportedly. Let's roll this footage C two.
Speaker 4: Come speak to.
Speaker 1: Live on CNN.
Speaker 4: Why are you here today?
Speaker 5: I'm here because look at what's happening.
Speaker 3: Young Kenyans demonstrating for their rights.
Speaker 5: They're demonstating with flags and banners. I can't even see anymore.
Speaker 3: So that sign, if you were watching it said colonialism
Speaker 3: never ended. One of the fellow protesters with Alma Obama
Speaker 3: had to sign that side colonialism never ended. That was
Speaker 3: here gas. You could hear shots in the background, so
Speaker 3: we can put the next element up on the screen here.
Speaker 3: That's because yeah, they were fired their protesters were being
Speaker 3: fired on in the streets. Obviously, we mentioned earlier that
Speaker 3: part of the Parliament went up on went up in
Speaker 3: flames yesterday as well. This is from the Associated Press quote.
Speaker 3: The Finance bill was meant to raise or introduce taxes
Speaker 3: or fees on a range of daily items and services,
Speaker 3: including internet data, fuel, bank transfers, in diapers. Some measures
Speaker 3: were stripped as Anchor grew, and it's all part of
Speaker 3: the Kenyan government's efforts to raise an extra two point
Speaker 3: seven billion dollars in domestic revenue. Obviously, then sending well
Speaker 3: paid troops to Haiti not going to be popular either,
Speaker 3: I'm assuming, and actually I think the US did pay
Speaker 3: for that operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, the US is paying for it in lots
Speaker 1: of different ways, right, yes. And meanwhile some people watching
Speaker 1: them and say, well, what do you want to do
Speaker 1: in Haiti? Well, a not that like, that's not that's
Speaker 1: not like just because you don't have any other ideas,
Speaker 1: it's not an argument for sending an international like invasionary
Speaker 1: force into try to occupy Haiti. Like, there are Haitian
Speaker 1: political elements that are trying to work toward some type
Speaker 1: of solution and if the kind of United Nations want
Speaker 1: to support that, they can do that with support for uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Haitian farmers, Haitian Haitian merchants, Haitian Haitian businesses,
Speaker 1: Haitian organizations that are trying to come together and you
Speaker 1: can help import the things that they that they need
Speaker 1: to get off the ground. But just coming in with
Speaker 1: more guns and putting Kenyan troops in a base is
Speaker 1: only it's kind of suppressing whatever kind of whatever political
Speaker 1: reckoning and political dialogue needs to happen to eventually get somewhere.
Speaker 1: You've tried, We've been trying, they've been Yeah, we have
Speaker 1: been trying to impose some type of situation on Haiti
Speaker 1: for two hundred years.
Speaker 3: Well, with similar methods too, very similar methods.
Speaker 1: You know, we just dress them up differently, and troops
Speaker 1: from different countries different times, but the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all right. You might remember that back in early May,
Speaker 1: we reported here and at the Intercept that APAK, the
Speaker 1: lobby group that describes itself as pro Israel, was secretly
Speaker 1: intervening in a congressional primary in Portland, Oregon, in order
Speaker 1: to block the sister of Promila Giapaul names Sushila Giapaul,
Speaker 1: from winning an open primary. Now I reported that a
Speaker 1: PAK was routing its money through a super pack that
Speaker 1: claims to have a pro science mission called three fourteen Action,
Speaker 1: and that it also appeared APAC was funneling money through
Speaker 1: a different pack called Voters for Responsive Government. APAC's allies
Speaker 1: furiously denied the reporting, arguing it played into antisemitic tropes.
Speaker 1: Yet about a week later, Jiapaul's opponent, Maxine Dexter, was
Speaker 1: forced to disclose some of her last minute surgeon funding,
Speaker 1: and it turned out it was coming from donors who
Speaker 1: regularly gave to APAC. One of the donors who had
Speaker 1: maxed out to Dexter even told me she wasn't aware
Speaker 1: of the contribution, but that she green lights whatever APAC
Speaker 1: asks her to do. She told me, quote, I give
Speaker 1: all my contributions through APAC. Still, they refused to disclose
Speaker 1: their super pac spending down the stretch, and three fourteen
Speaker 1: Action even brazenly lied about the source of the money.
Speaker 1: And when I say that they lied, I mean they
Speaker 1: straight up, baldfaced lied. The super PACs were relying on
Speaker 1: a campaign rule that treats them differently than candidates. Candidates
Speaker 1: have to disclose every forty eight hours down the stretch
Speaker 1: of the campaign, so nobody can sneak in new money,
Speaker 1: but super PACs only have to disclose their previous month's
Speaker 1: funding on the twentieth day of the next month. The
Speaker 1: election was scheduled for May twenty first, and on May twentieth,
Speaker 1: super PACs would have had to declare all of their
Speaker 1: fundraising from April. On May twentieth. Now, Voters for Responsive
Speaker 1: Government filed a report that claimed it had not raised
Speaker 1: or spent a single penny in April, yet they had
Speaker 1: ads out to the market by May second. In other words,
Speaker 1: their claiming they raised money, hired contractors, produced ads, set
Speaker 1: up bank accounts, and placed the media by all in
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, with none of that work happening in April.
Speaker 1: Of course, that's basically impossible. But the reason they needed
Speaker 1: to make that claim on their paperwork was so that
Speaker 1: they could then delay disclosure of everything all the way
Speaker 1: until June twentieth, a month after the election. Three fourteen
Speaker 1: Action also pushed a ton of their action into their
Speaker 1: May paperwork, So on May twentieth, that's the day before
Speaker 1: the election, they only disclosed three donors. One of them
Speaker 1: was an APAC guy who gave them three hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars, another was Michael Bloomberg, and another was
Speaker 1: unrelated to the race. Now, I've been covering politics for
Speaker 1: about twenty years or so, and I have seen my
Speaker 1: share of dishonesty, but what came next reminded me I
Speaker 1: still know how to be shocked. Eric Poliak, the managing
Speaker 1: director of three fourteen Action, took to Twitter on May twentieth,
Speaker 1: after they released their donors to taunt me, saying, quote
Speaker 1: waiting on Ryan Grimm to issue a retraction. What's so
Speaker 1: stunning about this denial is that when Eric made it
Speaker 1: on May twentieth, he knew that on May first, three
Speaker 1: fourteen Action had cashed a million dollar check from United
Speaker 1: Democracy Project APAX Superpack. And he knew that a month later,
Speaker 1: on June twentieth, that fact would become public. Yet he
Speaker 1: decided to knowingly lie to the public. Anyway. Here it
Speaker 1: is in three fourteen Actions June twentieth filing. So that's
Speaker 1: a lot of zero's on the small screen there, but
Speaker 1: I can count them for you. There's six of them.
Speaker 1: That's a million dollars. In other words, Pollyok knew his
Speaker 1: organization was spending a million dollars of APAX money on
Speaker 1: top of lots more from APAC directed donors, Yet he
Speaker 1: said exactly the opposite the day before the election. Now,
Speaker 1: on May second, a few days before my article initially
Speaker 1: confirmed apax's role in the race. Giapaul and her opponent,
Speaker 1: Eddie Morales held a rare joint press conference raising questions
Speaker 1: about the source of the new money in the race.
Speaker 1: Poliak took to Twitter to mock them. He wrote, after
Speaker 1: Soushila Giapaul and Eddie Morales veep style press conference where
Speaker 1: they offered zero evidence to back the ridiculous claims, It's
Speaker 1: clear they're down in the polls and desperate to smear
Speaker 1: our grassroots movement fueled by millions of contributions. So consider
Speaker 1: the audacity there. He claimed to be leading a grassroots
Speaker 1: movement fueled by millions of contributions. The day after they
Speaker 1: deposited that million dollar check, when Voters for Responsive Government
Speaker 1: disclosed its donors, we learned that APAC had cut them
Speaker 1: a one point three million dollar check, and eight other
Speaker 1: APAC linked donors had kicked in two point six million
Speaker 1: dollars more. According to the paperwork they filed, they managed
Speaker 1: to raise all that money in a single day. Emily,
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever done any fundraising, but
Speaker 1: calling that many people in a single day, just getting
Speaker 1: them on the phone is going to be hard. All
Speaker 1: the zeros there, God, that's a lot just typing in those.
Speaker 1: This is going to take you more than twenty.
Speaker 3: Four hours, so much work for the FEC.
Speaker 1: So yeah, what they are banking on is that the
Speaker 1: FEC will look at this and be like, all right, whatever, right,
Speaker 1: who cares that we don't have enough commissioners.
Speaker 4: We don't.
Speaker 1: I'm a staff. We don't basically enforce laws around here.
Speaker 1: But even if they had disclosed on May twentieth, that's
Speaker 1: still was too late because there's mail in voting. Eighty
Speaker 1: percent of the people had already voted at that point.
Speaker 1: That was just to kind of twist the knife, to
Speaker 1: just keep it so that you didn't even have twenty
Speaker 1: four hours to know who was funding that race.
Speaker 3: Isn't it just just lost? Just to be clear, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: she lost? And isn't it just a fine if you're
Speaker 3: non compliant with FEC.
Speaker 1: Doesn't Yeah, And they might not even get a fine
Speaker 1: if the FEC doesn't bother with it.
Speaker 3: And even let's say the FEC does bother with it'd
Speaker 3: be fine. It's sort of like when you know a
Speaker 3: exonmobile gets a fine. It's just the cost of doing
Speaker 3: business when you have enough fun.
Speaker 1: They spent four million dollars in a couple of weeks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they can afford a little fine.
Speaker 3: This is totally unrelated. But Leifang, your old Colleageluefan Feng
Speaker 3: had a great story he ran in The Guardian this
Speaker 3: week about basically these pro Israel groups that had been
Speaker 3: lobbying on behalf of Israeli government appro says nobody had
Speaker 3: registered for Pharah And again, like it's the same thing
Speaker 3: that the cost of compliance sometimes or the cost of
Speaker 3: non compliance is just worth the non compliance. It's just
Speaker 3: worth what whatever.
Speaker 1: You get out, it's going to be prosecuted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and when there's a timeline, there's like an actual
Speaker 3: election that you can squeeze this past. I mean, it's
Speaker 3: just this should especially given the APAC spending patterns, this
Speaker 3: should get people pause for the next couple of years
Speaker 3: about what's happening in some of these races around the country.
Speaker 3: And obviously you're eagle eyed and keeping you know, your
Speaker 3: own reporting focused on this, but uh, you know, it's
Speaker 3: it's got to get into local papers. Local reporters have
Speaker 3: to pay attention to this stuff. For the purpose of ads.
Speaker 3: People should be paying attention to this stuff that's really dirty.
Speaker 1: And I talked to some local reporters who were trying
Speaker 1: to report it out right at the time, but and
Speaker 1: they and they wrote a couple okay stories where they
Speaker 1: would say, like this looks softully fishy, but they didn't
Speaker 1: have the sourcing to be able to just confirm that.
Speaker 1: They didn't have a source that I had that said like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, this is actually this is definitely a pack, right,
Speaker 1: And so it makes it very tough for and especially
Speaker 1: you know, journalists that don't want to get accused of
Speaker 1: like trafficking and anti Semitic tropes, because you can't just
Speaker 1: go around just recklessly like suggesting without evidence that APAC
Speaker 1: is funding a particular superpack. If you have the evidence,
Speaker 1: you can say it. And they couldn't quite prove it
Speaker 1: because APAC had done a good enough job of keeping
Speaker 1: its keeping its fingerprints off of the money until afterwards.
Speaker 1: Like and it's very smart in a way because it
Speaker 1: like makes you sound crazy when you're saying it in
Speaker 1: real time, like you sound like a conspiracy theorist or
Speaker 1: a lunatic, but then afterwards like, oh yeah, that was us,
Speaker 1: And after the polls closed, APAC was like this shows
Speaker 1: that being pro Israel is good politics. Mm hmm. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: if that's true, why didn't you why do you endorse
Speaker 1: her publicly? Why did you deny that this was happening?
Speaker 1: Like why did you? Why would you have to stress
Speaker 1: so much, why you have to spend so much, and
Speaker 1: why do you have to go to such extreme lengths
Speaker 1: to conceal the role of a pro Israel organization in
Speaker 1: this race?
Speaker 4: Yep?
Speaker 1: Like that that doesn't like, you can't you can't have
Speaker 1: it both ways. You can't say that your involvement is
Speaker 1: shows that being you know, pro a pack is is
Speaker 1: good politics at the same time that you're hiding the
Speaker 1: fact that a Pack was even involved.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean great reporting, crazy stuff, dirty stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's crazy. And what Democrats have realized is that
Speaker 1: the vulnerability for other Democrats here is not that it's
Speaker 1: a PAC money. It's not that it's pro Israel money.
Speaker 1: There was polling done in the district where most voters
Speaker 1: in Portland had actualely no idea who Apack even was right,
Speaker 1: because we think everybody knows who Apack is, because this
Speaker 1: is something we've covered closely. Everybody knows that. Okay, I
Speaker 1: do you always have to remind yourself that we are
Speaker 1: weirdos like unusual that we follow politics this closely. Most
Speaker 1: voters like what's apack? Never heard of APEC absolutely. What
Speaker 1: Democratic voters don't like, however, is Republican rich people spending
Speaker 1: money in Democratic primaries. And if you go through, if
Speaker 1: you scroll back and look at that list of the
Speaker 1: eight people that gave, for instance, I think you'll find
Speaker 1: all of those are like Republican donors, like and not
Speaker 1: just like we give to both, but like mostly Republican donors,
Speaker 1: a lot of Trump donors, and that drives Democratic primary
Speaker 1: voters crazy. Summerlee was able to use that to her
Speaker 1: advantage in the Pittsburgh race. Others have been able to
Speaker 1: use that to their advantage. But by hiding the donors
Speaker 1: until after the election, you strip Democrats of the ability
Speaker 1: to say this is actually Republican money, because you don't.
Speaker 1: You could say it's Apack money if you can, if
Speaker 1: you can report that you have some evidence, but without
Speaker 1: knowing who the specific donors are, you can't necessarily say
Speaker 1: it's Republican money. Even though most APAC money is Republican money.
Speaker 3: Right, is just dirty, It's dirty, dirty stuff.
Speaker 1: Right, and look, if APAC wants to spend seventeen million
Speaker 1: dollars in Jamal Bowman's race, you know, right, have at it,
Speaker 1: right and at least in that race, they did it,
Speaker 1: you know, with their chest. That's so true.
Speaker 3: And they got backlash or they're starting to get backlash
Speaker 3: based on those leaks to well leaks, those off the
Speaker 3: record comments to Access this morning. I don't know how
Speaker 3: much of that you've heard from even relatively pro Israel
Speaker 3: Democrats who just are getting very uncomfortable with APAX tactics.
Speaker 3: This story should be another part of that.
Speaker 1: What, yes, it should be. And but we'll see. Because
Speaker 1: from from the Democratic leadership's perspective, I think as long
Speaker 1: as APAK you know, sticks with its mission of being
Speaker 1: pro Israel and does not carry the agenda of their donors,
Speaker 1: their further agenda of the donors, which which is, you know,
Speaker 1: a Republican agenda, because there's a republican's as long as
Speaker 1: they stick with pros your agenda and as long as
Speaker 1: they only go after progressives in primaries, then I think
Speaker 1: Democratic leadership sees that as a win win. Yeah, probably,
Speaker 1: like that's fine. Actually, probably you're gonna you're gonna discipline
Speaker 1: our left flank. Ye works for us.
Speaker 3: Yeah sounds great.
Speaker 1: But you know, any time that you make a deal
Speaker 1: with people who are not your allies, and these Republican
Speaker 1: donors are quite literally your adversary political adversaries, you're taking
Speaker 1: a huge gamble. And so the question is is the
Speaker 1: is this kind of enemy of my enemy is my
Speaker 1: friend situation really that clever or are you going to
Speaker 1: wind up you know, getting eaten by it?
Speaker 3: Else becomes a crutch, you know, when that money drives up,
Speaker 3: If the money drives up in ten years or whatever,
Speaker 3: you are just left up without a huge funding.
Speaker 1: It also suppresses what you're kind of organic aalition believes
Speaker 1: about a major political issue. Yeah, absolutely, and distances you
Speaker 1: further from your voters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It happened with a lot of the
Speaker 3: libertarian spending, coke spending for Republicans over the years, sort
Speaker 3: of lost touch with the support for social safety net
Speaker 3: among them.
Speaker 1: That very interesting, and then look what they got Trump?
Speaker 3: Yep, So who will be democrats?
Speaker 1: Trump? There you go. I think we might find out.
Speaker 1: We'll stick around long enough.
Speaker 3: We'll find out if we don't end up in a
Speaker 3: nuclear war.
Speaker 1: That's right, We're going to find out if we're going
Speaker 1: to next with a doctor Theodore Postal, one of the
Speaker 1: leading nuclear armament experts in the world stick around for that.
Speaker 1: Joining us now is Professor emeritus from MIT. Theodore Postal
Speaker 1: ted thanks so much for joining us.
Speaker 4: It's my great pleasures. Thank you.
Speaker 1: And so to set up this conversation, can you give
Speaker 1: us a kind of quick run through of of your
Speaker 1: career how you how you wound up both at the
Speaker 1: Pentagon and also you know, doing your doing your academic work.
Speaker 4: Well through a series of accidents. I was actually doing
Speaker 4: basic science, and I was increasingly concerned and interested in
Speaker 4: the arms race. This was in the eighties when arms
Speaker 4: race was just completely out of control, and uh, I
Speaker 4: wound up through a series of accidents and and and
Speaker 4: a very close friend of mine named Washington going to
Speaker 4: the Office of Technology Assessment, where I worked on a
Speaker 4: study of the MX missile, which was the big game
Speaker 4: in town at the time, that international game. And I
Speaker 4: came to the attention of the US Navy because of
Speaker 4: some of the work I was doing with them as
Speaker 4: as an outside analyst, and I was offered a position
Speaker 4: as a science and policy advisor to the Chief of
Speaker 4: naval operations, and of course that was a great opportunity,
Speaker 4: so I took it and I wound up, you know,
Speaker 4: very quickly in the belly of the beast. Worked a
Speaker 4: few years with the chief, saw quite a lot, which
Speaker 4: I must say educated me to a level that maybe
Speaker 4: I should dave at this point, because you see a
Speaker 4: combination of the most capable and the most incapable and
Speaker 4: opportunistic people. You see the spread you know, very very
Speaker 4: good and very very bad people. And it gave me,
Speaker 4: I think, an extremely refined understanding of how these bureaucracies work.
Speaker 4: And of course I took the opportunity to I spent
Speaker 4: many nights in a cage reading classified documents to learn
Speaker 4: as much as I could about the weapon systems that
Speaker 4: you know that I'm supposed to be advising on them.
Speaker 4: And that gave me a baseline that I've been able
Speaker 4: to build on for decades.
Speaker 1: So it's just of accidents, Yeah, and I think baseline
Speaker 1: is definitely being humble there. I think one of the
Speaker 1: foremost experts on the on the issue we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: we start with kind of E E two. Here is
Speaker 1: the Washing Post article headline kind of concerning headline US
Speaker 1: concerned about Ukraine strikes on Russian nuclear radar stations. So
Speaker 1: walk us, walk us through why the US is concerned
Speaker 1: about this, and why we ought to be concerned about
Speaker 1: this as well, what what is what is Ukraine doing here?
Speaker 4: Well, the US should be concerned about this, and unfortunately,
Speaker 4: I think the US has to take responsibility for this
Speaker 4: because of these radar stations are critical to the early
Speaker 4: warning systems of Russia, and Russia, unlike US, does not
Speaker 4: have satellites in space that are capable of seeing the
Speaker 4: whole Earth from space. We have this kind of capability,
Speaker 4: So if they lose a radar, they have no way
Speaker 4: of knowing what's coming at them from that direction, whereas
Speaker 4: if we lose a radar, we just simply go to
Speaker 4: our satellites and look down and say, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 4: can see nothing is happening there. Now, given the high
Speaker 4: state of tension between Russia and the United States at
Speaker 4: this time, I think it's extraordinarily dangerous to tamper with
Speaker 4: anything that has anything to do with Russia's early morning
Speaker 4: capabilities because they are going to be more alert at
Speaker 4: this time because of concerns about nuclear weapon US from
Speaker 4: the United States now Americans tend to have the attitude
Speaker 4: or we would never strike them first. It's a common reaction.
Speaker 4: But I can assure you that they don't believe this
Speaker 4: about us. And in fact, if you look at American
Speaker 4: nuclear weapons systems and the kinds of things we are
Speaker 4: doing even now, it creates the appearance. I want to
Speaker 4: be understanding. It creates an appearance because I don't think
Speaker 4: people realize, you know, what the meaning of what they're
Speaker 4: doing is. But too a well informed technical analyst. On
Speaker 4: the Russian side, it looks like the United States is
Speaker 4: preparing to fight and win a nuclear war with Russia. Now,
Speaker 4: of course, fighting and winning a nuclear war is ridiculous.
Speaker 4: The only way you win a nuclear war is by
Speaker 4: a definition. The definition is ridiculous. It's like, at the
Speaker 4: end of this exchange, where both of our countries and
Speaker 4: civilization is destroyed, we have margin of larger a slightly
Speaker 4: larger number of nuclear weapons left in our arsenal in
Speaker 4: the adversary. Well, that's totally ridiculous. That's like saying, well,
Speaker 4: we'll have more fingernails on our body when our head
Speaker 4: is blown off. So fighting and winning a nuclear war
Speaker 4: is just absolutely this is not a matter of opinion,
Speaker 4: absolutely analytically ridiculous. But these kinds of doctrines have developed
Speaker 4: in the United States and in Russia too, because there
Speaker 4: was a long time where people did not fully understand
Speaker 4: how catastrophic large scale use of nuclear weapons would be.
Speaker 4: From my point of view, this is so obvious that
Speaker 4: you know, an infant would understand it. But unfortunately in
Speaker 4: in the world of military doctrine. And let me be clearer,
Speaker 4: I'm not talking about just the military people. I'm talking
Speaker 4: about civilian political scientists in the Pentagon. They invent these
Speaker 4: magical worlds where you can use nuclear weapons with very
Speaker 4: limited consequences, and the physics I want to understand, the
Speaker 4: physics of this shows that that's not true. Forget about
Speaker 4: all the other complexities, like no one would know what
Speaker 4: was going on if a nuclear weapon was used. Let's
Speaker 4: just reflect back on what happened when the World Trade
Speaker 4: Center was in The President had no idea what was
Speaker 4: going on. The US government couldn't inform it because they
Speaker 4: had no idea of what was going on. Now, imagine
Speaker 4: you have hundreds, if not thousands of events on a
Speaker 4: much larger scale simultaneously going on. Who is going to
Speaker 4: know what's happening, and of course all kinds of reactions
Speaker 4: and counter reactions could be happening automatically, and every simulation,
Speaker 4: every simulation that's worth looking at, indicates that you would
Speaker 4: have a rapid escalation to a general nuclear war, nuclear
Speaker 4: weapons start to get used. So we need to do everything,
Speaker 4: absolutely everything to keep our hands off the Russian systems
Speaker 4: because if they attack us by accident, it's going to
Speaker 4: be the end of everyone. So this is not like
Speaker 4: poking the bear to see what he's going to do.
Speaker 4: This is really dangerous.
Speaker 3: And so as you're watching all of this play out,
Speaker 3: and we can put the first element up on the screen,
Speaker 3: this is what happened in Crimea recently. This is a
Speaker 3: vo of obviously munitions hitting a beach in Crimea and
Speaker 3: control room you can go ahead and put E three
Speaker 3: up after that finishes playing. This is Russia blaming the
Speaker 3: United States for what they call the barbaric Ukrainian attack
Speaker 3: on Crimemea. Obviously it's been an escalation in recent days
Speaker 3: in this war. So, Ted, as you're watching this play out,
Speaker 3: how do you feel, based on all the context you
Speaker 3: just gave us, the administration is handling the threat of
Speaker 3: potential nuclear conflict. Are they. Do you feel good about
Speaker 3: the way the administration?
Speaker 4: No, I'm I'm tremendously disturbed by the way the administration
Speaker 4: is handling this. It's as if the administration is poking
Speaker 4: the Russians, trying to provoke them to do something very dangerous. Now,
Speaker 4: I don't want to sound like a Putent lover, but
Speaker 4: I have to say that looking at Putin very clear eye,
Speaker 4: not all this silly demonization of them, but just looking
Speaker 4: carefully at his history and what he does, what he
Speaker 4: says he's going to do, and how he follows up,
Speaker 4: it is very clear that mister Putin is an extremely stable,
Speaker 4: strategic thinker, and I do not believe he is going
Speaker 4: to do anything rash in responsibility. He's not going to
Speaker 4: be provoked. But it appears, it appears that the United
Speaker 4: States is trying to provoke him to do something silly.
Speaker 4: It's not silly, extraordinarily dangerous and leaving. And I do
Speaker 4: not think he will do this, but I think he
Speaker 4: will strike back, and it will cost American lives in
Speaker 4: the end. He's made it clear just the other day
Speaker 4: that he considers this a serious war crime. Incidentally, I
Speaker 4: haven't seen, it looks to me more like an accident,
Speaker 4: but that's another discussion. But he considers it a war crime,
Speaker 4: and the Russians in general are absolutely outraged. We should
Speaker 4: also keep in mind that the Russians believe, right or wrong,
Speaker 4: that this horrifying Crocus City attack in Moscow, where all
Speaker 4: these innocent people who are murdered by these people who
Speaker 4: appear to be associated with ISIS, and also according to
Speaker 4: the Russians, they believe that the Ukrainians were involved, in
Speaker 4: one way or another, supporting the ISIS attack. Given that
Speaker 4: the Russians have this mindset, independent of whether or not
Speaker 4: this is correct, they are going to be acting on it.
Speaker 4: And instead of doing things to reduce the belief among
Speaker 4: the Russians by either providing them with information intelligence or
Speaker 4: apologizing or making some statements that indicate we do not
Speaker 4: support this kind of thing, we have just stuck stuck
Speaker 4: our thumb in the eyes of the Russians at every opportunity,
Speaker 4: and this is not good diplomacy. We have this war,
Speaker 4: we want to win the war. Incidentally, we're not winning it.
Speaker 4: We are losing it catastrophically, and the American press is
Speaker 4: not covering this right now, The Russians could end this
Speaker 4: war in weeks if they chose to take the casualties.
Speaker 4: Right now, what they are doing is minimizing their casualties
Speaker 4: while they are destroying Ukrainian forces at the rate of
Speaker 4: nearly two thousand casualties a day. That's like for five
Speaker 4: thousand casualties a month. That is the strategy of the
Speaker 4: Russians at this time. That's why we're not seeing great
Speaker 4: gains in territory because their strategy is destroyed the Ukrainian
Speaker 4: army and then when the army is sufficiently depleted, then
Speaker 4: sweep in and take over everything. They have three hundred
Speaker 4: thousand troops, fully armed, fully trained, and fully equipped, not
Speaker 4: involved in the fighting at this point that they can
Speaker 4: call in any time they choose. The problem they have,
Speaker 4: or if you want to call it a problem, is
Speaker 4: they don't want to take the extra casualties associated with
Speaker 4: a big offensive action against the capable army. So the
Speaker 4: first part of their strategy is to destroy the capability
Speaker 4: of the army they're facing and then unleash the backup forces,
Speaker 4: the reserve forces on the remaining army. This is a
Speaker 4: bad situation, and the American press has not reported it accurately.
Speaker 4: I follow this every day. There's a lot of international
Speaker 4: coverage of this from organizations that every time you check
Speaker 4: what has had what they said, and what has actually
Speaker 4: been verified, they're accurate. So it's not it's clear to
Speaker 4: me that we have an accurate that I have. Others
Speaker 4: do too, have an accurate picture of the situation in Ukraine.
Speaker 4: We have lost already unless the Russians, you thought, I'm sorry,
Speaker 4: I was, unless the Russians. Well, the point the point here,
Speaker 4: the point here is that if we have already lost,
Speaker 4: why aren't we talking to the Russians to see what
Speaker 4: kind of cease fire we can get? Instead we talked
Speaker 4: about victory. There is no victory. I'm not saying this
Speaker 4: because I'm you know, some kind of defeat us. I'm
Speaker 4: saying this because the facts are clear, and all that
Speaker 4: is happening right now is the Russians are deepening their commitment.
Speaker 4: They're resolved to finish this thing in a way that
Speaker 4: meets there perceived security objectives. And their perceived security objective
Speaker 4: is to keep NATO out of Ukraine. And what they
Speaker 4: will do, what they are poised to do and can
Speaker 4: do at any time, except that they don't want to
Speaker 4: take the casualties at the moment because they have a
Speaker 4: strategy that's working. What they will do is they will
Speaker 4: take all of Ukraine, of the Black Sea coast. They
Speaker 4: will probably take up to Tiev the land there. They
Speaker 4: may take the main body of what we call Western Ukraine,
Speaker 4: but I don't think they want to do that because
Speaker 4: the Western Ukrainians are deeply hostile to Russians. But what
Speaker 4: they can do is they can then strangle Ukraine because
Speaker 4: the Black Sea Coast is the only way that Ukraine
Speaker 4: can take these tremendous resources they have in brain and
Speaker 4: sell them to the world. So they can just stop
Speaker 4: Ukraine from being an economically viable enterprise. So I don't
Speaker 4: have any idea what they will do. But why do
Speaker 4: we want to play this game? And this is an
Speaker 4: American decision at this point, and it's the only decision
Speaker 4: we have all this fiction, which I believe is designed
Speaker 4: to prevent the average American from understanding that the war
Speaker 4: in Ukraine is lost and that this could have implications
Speaker 4: for the November election. That's what's going on here.
Speaker 1: If you're I was saying, if you're able to come
Speaker 1: to that assessment, you can imagine that the Ukrainian leadership,
Speaker 1: you know, understands the current military strategy of Russia and
Speaker 1: the current military situation they're in, which would lend you know,
Speaker 1: either to our and some type of impulse for you know,
Speaker 1: a negotiated solution to this or something desperate. And it
Speaker 1: seems like what we're seeing in the last several days
Speaker 1: and weeks is desperation. Yesterday there was another strike on
Speaker 1: a Russian kind of radar facility. My understanding from our
Speaker 1: conversation that you and I had yesterdays that that that
Speaker 1: that is not an early that that was not necessarily and.
Speaker 4: That's a command.
Speaker 1: So what can you talk about these latest strikes and
Speaker 1: how those play in.
Speaker 4: Well, the strikes on the Russian UH, yesterday's strike was
Speaker 4: on a radar system that is is designed for communications
Speaker 4: too to two space systems that are extremely deep in space.
Speaker 4: It's it's on UH, it's in a southern latitude. It's
Speaker 4: so it's it's not associated with the early warning system
Speaker 4: very fortunately, but it's it's UH. It's simply a provocation,
Speaker 4: but not something that is going to raise the alert
Speaker 4: status of the Russian nuclear forces. The Russians have a
Speaker 4: big space program. They have probes they send to the Moon,
Speaker 4: to Mars and Venus, and these things are very very
Speaker 4: far away in space, and they have a gigantic and
Speaker 4: tennis that focus radio signals on those specific objects, so
Speaker 4: they could communicate signals to them and get information back.
Speaker 4: So that's what that particular facility was.
Speaker 1: Would there be any military value in taking out one
Speaker 1: of those deep space facilities.
Speaker 4: No, it would be just doing damage to their civil
Speaker 4: space program, their science space program. It would just be
Speaker 4: an irritant I mean in terms of there's no military
Speaker 4: utility to that attack. It's an attack that says we
Speaker 4: want to hurt you, just like unfortunately, our secretary of
Speaker 4: Defense said at one time, he said, well, we we
Speaker 4: want to do strategic damage to Russia. He actually said that.
Speaker 4: So when when someone in his position says something like that,
Speaker 4: how would you miss it if you were Russian? When
Speaker 4: when Anthony Blincoln tells Lavrov, Sergei Lavrov, that well, we
Speaker 4: reserve the right to put nuclear ballistic missiles in Ukraine,
Speaker 4: what does he think Lavrov is thinking? It would be
Speaker 4: like telling John F. Kennedy during the Cuba Cuban missile
Speaker 4: crisis that we deserve the right to put nuclear arm
Speaker 4: ballistic missiles in Cuba, so you Americans don't get tough luck.
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't understand what this administration thinks it's doing.
Speaker 4: It's just I mean, it's incomprehensible to me.
Speaker 1: What about the election is interesting, I'm sorry. The point
Speaker 1: about the election is interesting that the administration may be thinking, well,
Speaker 1: this is off the front pages for now, so we
Speaker 1: can keep If we can keep it off the front
Speaker 1: pages through November, then maybe that reduces the risk to
Speaker 1: the electoral calculus.
Speaker 4: Oh, I think that's clearly what's going on. I don't,
Speaker 4: you know, I don't know, you know, but you know,
Speaker 4: if I look at the body language, so to speak,
Speaker 4: that's absolutely what's going on. They're in a panic because
Speaker 4: they understand, or should understand, they don't understand. God help
Speaker 4: us all. They are in a panic because they know
Speaker 4: that the whole situation in Ukraine could collapse at any time.
Speaker 4: Ukrainian units are refusing to follow orders in many cases now.
Speaker 4: We have reports of that even the other day in
Speaker 4: this Azov unit, which is a bunch of neo Nazis.
Speaker 4: These guys are ultra nationalists. Their followers of this guy
Speaker 4: step On Bandera. Vandera was the guy who fostered a
Speaker 4: political movement that resulted in the murder of one hundred
Speaker 4: and fifty thousand Polish people during the World War Two.
Speaker 4: And also the population of ss Gestapo units with Ukrainian volunteers.
Speaker 4: That's that's, that's the Ukraine.
Speaker 1: That they don't want, even that even that unit is
Speaker 1: facing trouble.
Speaker 4: It's it's what they did, is they there was a
Speaker 4: general in charge of the area where they were assigned,
Speaker 4: that was It's not clear what was happening, but I
Speaker 4: could take a very good, well informed guess they were
Speaker 4: probably order attacks on counter attacks on Russian units. Now,
Speaker 4: these counter attacks cause extraordinary levels of casualties among the Ukrainians,
Speaker 4: and the reason for this is that the Russians now
Speaker 4: have complete control of the air. So this is what
Speaker 4: the Americans have typically in a war. You know, we
Speaker 4: have complete control of the air, but the Russians have
Speaker 4: an ear and they also have ten to one artillery
Speaker 4: firing capability ten to one. So when you go out,
Speaker 4: when you get out of your foxhole and go running
Speaker 4: at the enemy, they slaughter you. And this is exactly
Speaker 4: the kind of combat strategy the Ukraine has been involved
Speaker 4: in for the last couple of years. A very high
Speaker 4: percentage of the losses that the Ukrainians have been suffering
Speaker 4: are due to these hopeless attacks. Rather than falling back
Speaker 4: and trying to defend positions and letting the Russians try
Speaker 4: to take those positions, they just run into the fire
Speaker 4: of the Russians. And it's very clear that Kluton does
Speaker 4: not want a large number of Russian casualties. It's very
Speaker 4: hard to know what's actually happening. So this is a guess.
Speaker 4: I want to be clear, this is a guess, But
Speaker 4: my guess is that the casualties being taken by the
Speaker 4: Ukrainians are five to one. So when you hear about
Speaker 4: fifteen hundred casualties being taken, which is sort of the
Speaker 4: average during the day, fifteen hundred to two thousand, right
Speaker 4: now you're talking about three hundred or three hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty or four hundred casualties on the part of the Russians.
Speaker 4: So this is a massacre. And you know, my own
Speaker 4: view of this is I'm terribly upset about it because
Speaker 4: I from my point of view, you can call me
Speaker 4: whatever you want, but I just see innocent people on
Speaker 4: both these Russian soldiers are no more guilty than these
Speaker 4: Ukrainian soldiers who have been forced into combat, and they're
Speaker 4: murdering each other for no reason. Because Ukraine is lost,
Speaker 4: and the political decision makers are sitting in the White House,
Speaker 4: and in this case they are the ones because they
Speaker 4: have these step on Budera extremists in charge in Ukraine.
Speaker 4: The White House is trying to sustain the appearance with
Speaker 4: the help unfortunately of the American press, which has not
Speaker 4: done a very good job, that this war is still
Speaker 4: open to a potential positive end for the United State.
Speaker 4: It's actually over.
Speaker 3: And I'm sorry, well I was Actually that's a big
Speaker 3: picture question. I'm so curious, as you've worked in the
Speaker 3: space for decades, just thinking about what's happening at the
Speaker 3: White House, as you just outlined it, how does this
Speaker 3: moment compare to previous moments of potential escalation to the
Speaker 3: point where the threat of nuclear conflict? You know, maybe
Speaker 3: even in recent memory. Obviously you mentioned earlier your history
Speaker 3: in the space in the nineteen eighties, but just maybe
Speaker 3: even over the course of the last ten twenty years,
Speaker 3: has there been a moment as precarious as this is.
Speaker 3: It always as precarious as this. How does this compare?
Speaker 6: Well, The problem is there could be a completely unforeseen
Speaker 6: series of accidents.
Speaker 4: Let me give you an example. We know this happened.
Speaker 4: We know this happened. In fact, I have studied in
Speaker 4: some great detail and I've written about it. We know
Speaker 4: that in nineteen ninety six, nineteen ninety six, it was
Speaker 4: yeltsin Clinton, and we were in this phase where both
Speaker 4: Russia and the United States were hoping to have a
Speaker 4: holy new relationship. We watched it, in my view, but
Speaker 4: that's another discussion. But people were not at each other
Speaker 4: at all, and it was there was a sounding rocket,
Speaker 4: a rocket that's launched vertically by scientists, you know, point
Speaker 4: beheading people like me who were just who were just
Speaker 4: trying to understand take measurements in the ionosphere, upper ionosphere.
Speaker 4: And they launched this rocket in a near vertical trajectory
Speaker 4: slightly tipped over away from Russia, but it went to
Speaker 4: a very high altitude eleven thousand kilometers and it was
Speaker 4: taking measurements of the ionosphere. Well, the problem with this
Speaker 4: rock was that its powered flight trajectory had the appearance
Speaker 4: of a trident ballistic missile of going through a near
Speaker 4: vertical trajectory. Now most people would say, why does that matter, Well, this,
Speaker 4: this could be the first part of a nuclear attack
Speaker 4: where you detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude and
Speaker 4: it creates a sort of a radar absorbing layer in
Speaker 4: the atmosphere. So it's it's like you took a blanket,
Speaker 4: you threw it over the radar. Or if you have
Speaker 4: think of yourself as a as someone who's watching and
Speaker 4: I throw I throw a blanket over your head, so
Speaker 4: now you can't see anything. And this kind of precursor
Speaker 4: attack is exactly something you had both sides, Russia and
Speaker 4: the United States planned for in their own nuclear war
Speaker 4: retaliation findings, you know, planning. Now, in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 4: you had a very In fact, I've spoken with the
Speaker 4: guy who was in charge. His name is Victor Yessen.
Speaker 4: He was the guy in charge of the Strategic Rocket
Speaker 4: Forces at the time, and he's a very sober, extremely
Speaker 4: well educated, competent man, and he sat there watching this thing,
Speaker 4: this experiment, which he had no idea whether or not
Speaker 4: it was a nuclear weapon, rise to its maximum altitude.
Speaker 4: In the moment it started to fall back to the earth,
Speaker 4: he called off the alert because he knew that this
Speaker 4: whatever it was, he didn't know what it was, but
Speaker 4: he knew it was not a precursor of nuclear attack. Now,
Speaker 4: if the time was, if we had big fighting going
Speaker 4: on in the Ukraine, in Ukraine at the time, in
Speaker 4: the United States in Russia, maybe we're using tactical nuclear
Speaker 4: weapons against each other or very so is very very
Speaker 4: serious escalation. NATO troops were injected, you know, the French
Speaker 4: troops that Ma Kron wants to put into into Ukraine.
Speaker 4: They're being slaughtered by the Russians, which of course will
Speaker 4: happen if those troops are there, and you know, the
Speaker 4: Russians could think they were under attack. Now, I think
Speaker 4: they are very cautious. So I don't want to overstate this,
Speaker 4: you know, I mean, the Russians are very cautious, They're
Speaker 4: very competent, they're very professional. They understand that if they
Speaker 4: accidentally attack the United States, it's the end of their
Speaker 4: country too. So I don't want to overstate this. But
Speaker 4: the question I would ask you to consider is do
Speaker 4: you think they're them having this state of mind at
Speaker 4: that time without a complete knowledge of what's going on,
Speaker 4: is a good thing for the United states. That's the
Speaker 4: So I don't want to be one of these people. O.
Speaker 4: The sky is falling, the sky has fallen. But when
Speaker 4: the consequences are literally the end of civilization and you know,
Speaker 4: potentially the end of human existence that is less clear,
Speaker 4: but certainly the end of civilization as we know it,
Speaker 4: why would you want to push push the buttons on this.
Speaker 4: I don't understand. I'm baffled. And part of the reason
Speaker 4: may be that the people in the White House are
Speaker 4: not informed. And that's been my experience. Incidentally, I've talked
Speaker 4: to people over decades from time to time in White
Speaker 4: House positions and they don't have a clue there. Because
Speaker 4: these people are political and I'm not saying this to
Speaker 4: attack them. They're concerned is how do I get reelected
Speaker 4: and how do I how do I keep the American
Speaker 4: public from knowing my dark secret, you know, my screw
Speaker 4: up on something. And that's why you see all this
Speaker 4: Kate mongering for Putin. You know, Putin is our adversary.
Speaker 4: There's no question that he doesn't mean good things for us.
Speaker 4: But he's not Adolphe. I mean, this is ridiculous. He's
Speaker 4: a very capable guy who is Jiu jitsing us in
Speaker 4: so many circumstances. These guys don't want the American people
Speaker 4: to figure out how clever he has been and how
Speaker 4: everything we have done to try to screw up the
Speaker 4: Russians has backfired on us because the Russians have been
Speaker 4: clever and responding. So what do you do. You don't
Speaker 4: want to You can't explain this. You don't want to
Speaker 4: explain this to your electorate. You're trying to get reelected.
Speaker 4: So he say, oh, it's this guy Putin. He's so terrible,
Speaker 4: he's so such a Now I'm not trying to say
Speaker 4: that I would want to run against put In an
Speaker 4: election in Russia. He killed me. But but you know,
Speaker 4: Muhammed Ben Salmon is not our oneful somebuddy either. You know,
Speaker 4: these countries have their own political systems, and when you
Speaker 4: when you recognize what's going on in those systems, doesn't
Speaker 4: mean you approve of them, and it doesn't mean you
Speaker 4: think it's good. It's just understanding the facts of the world.
Speaker 4: And this guy, this guy Putin, is unbelievably thoughtful, deep thinking,
Speaker 4: and strategic in his thinking. And he just said just
Speaker 4: yesterday that he's going to find a way to pay
Speaker 4: us back for what he sees as this attack. And
Speaker 4: let me tell you, he doesn't bluff. He doesn't bluff.
Speaker 4: I have watched him with extreme care, and when he
Speaker 4: says something, I don't say, Oh, he's a monster, what
Speaker 4: are you know? Blah blah. You know, I take it
Speaker 4: at its word. And I asked myself, what does this
Speaker 4: guy mean? And we have had a decades of people
Speaker 4: who claim to be experts on Russia feeding us nonsense
Speaker 4: about what a monster this man is. He's not a
Speaker 4: nice person. You wouldn't want him as your close personal friend.
Speaker 4: But that is different from portraying him as this monster
Speaker 4: that goes around murdering people. Whenever he has the notion,
Speaker 4: it's not the case at all. You'll you just have
Speaker 4: to look at the facts. And so we have these
Speaker 4: people who in one way or another are getting funding
Speaker 4: from the US government to a field an alliance to
Speaker 4: the US government, who have painted this portrait that is
Speaker 4: totally bizarre. I mean, why don't we do that with
Speaker 4: other you know, you know, he's not hitler.
Speaker 1: I mean, underestimating your adversary usually doesn't usually doesn't end well.
Speaker 4: Well, it's not simply underestimating it's portraying your adversary in
Speaker 4: a way that hides your bad decisions that are backfired
Speaker 4: on you. So it's what I consider it a politically
Speaker 4: motivated strategy.
Speaker 1: Well, Theodore Postal, thank you so much for joining us,
Speaker 1: you know very much.
Speaker 4: Pretty it's been a pleasure. I hope it's been helpful.
Speaker 1: Very helpful, very helpful. Indeed, very much appreciated.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: That was Ted Postal rather sobering a conversation a little
Speaker 1: bit when when he joined us, he looked behind and said,
Speaker 1: I see Washington is still there.
Speaker 3: But then we had to say, well, it's on a
Speaker 3: loop episode.
Speaker 1: But the fact that we're alive suggest that Washington is
Speaker 1: still here. We are in Washington.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we're not in like a bunker, although his bunker
Speaker 3: temperature sometimes yes.
Speaker 1: Indeed. Anyway, we're having a Ukrainian conversation debate on our
Speaker 1: Friday show, so you know, come back Thursday evening for
Speaker 1: that if you are a Breaking Point subscriber breakingpoints dot
Speaker 1: com to get the to get that early. Otherwise, as
Speaker 1: you can watch the full show on Friday, We're going
Speaker 1: to have another streamer, vash talking to a libertarian state
Speaker 1: median with the comedian.
Speaker 3: What's h comedian?
Speaker 1: So they're going to be teasing out their own takes
Speaker 1: on the Ukrainian conflict, and.
Speaker 3: We're tableted today a little inside baseball. So this is
Speaker 3: one of two debates that Ryan and I are moderating.
Speaker 3: Somehow become debate moderator.
Speaker 1: We have. Life comes at you.
Speaker 3: Fast, sure does, so stay tuned for the breaking points
Speaker 3: debate coverage that you know CNN won't let us carry
Speaker 3: the stream, but we will be here carrying the stream
Speaker 3: with Crystal and Sager tomorrow eight pm. Whether or not
Speaker 3: CNN lets us pick up on the debate stream eight pm.
Speaker 3: Right here seven pm tonight through Zero Hedge Debate. But
Speaker 3: that does it for us for this morning.
Speaker 1: At least. We'll be back pretty soon see you tonight.
Speaker 1: So yeah,