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Speaker 5: it out. Ryan, We have a big show to start
Speaker 5: with today. Elon Musk is now on a rampage against administration.
Speaker 5: He just left. We have updates out of Gaza. We
Speaker 5: have Truck Schumer with an incredible video.
Speaker 3: That looks like an attack on her on basically.
Speaker 5: About Taco Trump Taco Trump, so stick around for that.
Speaker 5: We have a little exclusive from the State Department this
Speaker 5: morning pertaining to a controversy over one of their employees.
Speaker 5: So we're going to do that and talk about updates
Speaker 5: from Ukraine. Joy Reid is way in more on why
Speaker 5: she left MSNBC, so we have some video of her
Speaker 5: and Wanda vid Rojas from Compact joins us to talk
Speaker 5: about Trump's the conflicting what do we say, the conflicting tradiction, Yeah,
Speaker 5: the factions in Trump world. That seems some people seem
Speaker 5: to want a new policy in Latin America. Other people
Speaker 5: seem to be clinging to the Cold War mentality. And
Speaker 5: no surprise there, but Wandavida has been covering all of it,
Speaker 5: and he's going to join us to talk about that.
Speaker 3: Yes, indeed, all.
Speaker 5: Right, let's dive in Ryan with Elon Musk. Playbook actually
Speaker 5: counted that Elon Musk posted thirteen times over the course
Speaker 5: of six hours yesterday, rampaging against Donald Trump's Big Beautiful Bill,
Speaker 5: which we can announce we can now abbreviate helpfully as BBB,
Speaker 5: which is by BBB. Is that the grade of your
Speaker 5: watching this?
Speaker 4: So let's put are they mimicking build back Better?
Speaker 3: Is that what they were trying to do there?
Speaker 5: Or the Better Business Bureau? There's too many triple bes.
Speaker 5: This is literally that's.
Speaker 3: Where the bond rating is going. If you passed this,
Speaker 3: if we're.
Speaker 5: Lucky, so we can put this up on the screen.
Speaker 5: Elon's tweet here, I guess we have to call it
Speaker 5: a post on X.
Speaker 3: We don't know what we don't, he goes.
Speaker 5: Tweet, he goes, I'm sorry, but I just can't stand
Speaker 5: it anymore. This massive, outrageous pork Field Congressional spending bill
Speaker 5: is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it.
Speaker 5: You know you did wrong. You know it, He adds,
Speaker 5: it will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to
Speaker 5: two and a half trillion dollars and burden American citizens
Speaker 5: with crushingly unsustainable debt. Right, there is a lot to
Speaker 5: talk about here. I just want to start by saying
Speaker 5: the central premise of Republicans pushing the big beautiful bill
Speaker 5: is that that two and a half trillion number is wrong,
Speaker 5: that the Congressional Budget Office is underestimating the growth that'll
Speaker 5: come as part of this bill. So Elon Musk is
Speaker 5: not just pushing back on the bill. He is now
Speaker 5: adopting the counter Naar narrative. And he's not the only one.
Speaker 5: You know, people like Ron Johnson and Rand Paul are
Speaker 5: as well. But this is a man who is like
Speaker 5: a week out of his special government employee status at
Speaker 5: the White House, and he sounds a whole lot like
Speaker 5: Rand Paul. And again, Elon Musk was not going anywhere
Speaker 5: near significant criticisms just a week ago.
Speaker 4: I'm on the Musk side here because there's two, you know,
Speaker 4: two types of quote unquote growth that people might be
Speaker 4: referring to. One is asset inflation, which is basically the
Speaker 4: stock market goes up and we get a housing bubble,
Speaker 4: and certainly the more debt we circulate and you know,
Speaker 4: the more like let's say you start having bitcoin backup treasuries, Like, yes,
Speaker 4: you can get a run up then in asset prices.
Speaker 4: That's not economic growth, though, because the way to get
Speaker 4: economic growth either expand productivity or invest or. You invest
Speaker 4: in things that you know yield back, you know, actual
Speaker 4: returns for people in the real economy, and cutting taxes
Speaker 4: for the rich doesn't do that because unlike, you know,
Speaker 4: Elon Musk might be the exception among billionaires because apparently
Speaker 4: he doesn't spend a whole lot of money.
Speaker 3: You know, he doesn't have like fifteen different.
Speaker 5: Houses, is fifteen different children probably, Well.
Speaker 3: That's true.
Speaker 4: He probably spends on all of his different children in
Speaker 4: the amount that a normal billionaire spends on their houses.
Speaker 4: He also flies everywhere. It's not like he's living a cheap.
Speaker 5: Life's a monk.
Speaker 4: The point is he's so rich, and these other rich
Speaker 4: people are so rich that giving them more money doesn't
Speaker 4: mean they spend more. If you give a normal person
Speaker 4: a little extra money, if you give a mouse a cookie,
Speaker 4: they're going to spend it. Yes, yeah, I mean actually
Speaker 4: if you give him as a cookie is sort of
Speaker 4: the explanation for how this works. But if you give
Speaker 4: a regular person money, they're going to spend it because
Speaker 4: there's things that they want that they can't have because
Speaker 4: they don't have enough money. If you give a billionaire
Speaker 4: another fifty thousand dollars, they don't even notice for the
Speaker 4: most part, might see his uptick in this in the
Speaker 4: stock market. So that that's why I think to the
Speaker 4: higher estimate is probably more accurate. Now, if I want
Speaker 4: to nitpick him, is there pork in this bill? Pork
Speaker 4: is where you're like, hey, we're this community center or
Speaker 4: this bridge in this district in Kentucky is going to
Speaker 4: get seventy five million dollars.
Speaker 3: There is there some of that in there.
Speaker 5: So that is definitely a nitpick because no, I'm what.
Speaker 4: They're going to do is the Trump administration will then
Speaker 4: do it for them rather than put it in the bill.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's sort of similar to the Biden Infrastructure Bill.
Speaker 5: But that's actually part of the problem that some people
Speaker 5: like Elon Musk and Ran Paul have with it is
Speaker 5: that it hasn't fully dismantled. So Republicans are chalking this
Speaker 5: up to Elon must be mad that it gets rid
Speaker 5: of some of the EV like Biden's EV support package.
Speaker 4: It's crazy, like who spends one hundreds of millions of
Speaker 4: dollars and gets well, I mean he got all his
Speaker 4: investigations knocked away. But yeah, he's getting absolutely routed when
Speaker 4: it comes to the government benefits that he was getting.
Speaker 5: I just don't know how important that is to him.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's important to Tesla, But how important is Tesla?
Speaker 5: How important is Tesla in his portfolio?
Speaker 4: Is leverage? He is highly leveraged. His collateral is Tesla's
Speaker 4: st Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, that collapses. Then the bankers
Speaker 4: start calling, and the bankers he does not have the
Speaker 4: kind of bankers that you want calling.
Speaker 3: These are people who are like.
Speaker 4: Hey, why don't we meet in the consulate in Istanbul,
Speaker 4: the Saudi consulate in Istanbill to talk about you're a
Speaker 4: little bit overdue on your latest payment and then you
Speaker 4: go and then you leave in a bucket.
Speaker 5: So he's actually by complaining about pork, asking for pork
Speaker 5: for Elon. If that's his definition of pork, which is,
Speaker 5: you know, something that's inserted into the bill to please
Speaker 5: the very particular or niche interest of the donor class,
Speaker 5: is not really the technical definition of pork, but there is.
Speaker 5: Some people are upset that there haven't been This is
Speaker 5: up out in the Wall Street drawer. There haven't been.
Speaker 5: There There isn't enough dismantling of the Biden agenda in
Speaker 5: this bill. But that's of course what's upsetting to Elon.
Speaker 5: And this is where Trump right now is between a
Speaker 5: rock and a hard place, because moderates say the bill
Speaker 5: is already cutting too much, and then people like Rand
Speaker 5: Paul and Ron Johnson say the bill is not cutting enough.
Speaker 5: And that includes now, I suppose Elon Musk. So let's
Speaker 5: go ahead and roll a three. This is Rand Paul
Speaker 5: on Fox Yesterday, Fox Business Yesterday.
Speaker 6: In a separate post, Trump said there's a false narrative
Speaker 6: about spending in this bill. He said it is quote
Speaker 6: single biggest spending cut in history by far. Kentucky Centator round,
Speaker 6: Paul joins me. Now, missus, Senator, I know you want
Speaker 6: more spending cuts included in the bill. Can you tell
Speaker 6: us what specifically you'd want to cut.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's even more than that.
Speaker 8: The biggest objection I have to the bill is adding
Speaker 8: five trillion dollars to the debt ceiling. I'm actually very
Speaker 8: supportive of the tax cuts. I don't accept the CBO
Speaker 8: notion that the tax cuts will lead to deficits. The
Speaker 8: reason I believe there will be more deficits is they're
Speaker 8: raising the debt ceiling five trillion.
Speaker 5: We know that this year.
Speaker 8: Most of the Republicans, not me, voted to continue the
Speaker 8: Biden's spending levels in March, so we're going to go
Speaker 8: through September of this year, and the deficit.
Speaker 7: For this year is going to be over two trillion.
Speaker 8: If you're borrowing five trillion, that makes me think you're
Speaker 8: going to add over two trillion, maybe two point eight
Speaker 8: trillion next year. So it doesn't show me that you've
Speaker 8: turned around. If you look at the spending cuts, it's
Speaker 8: complicated because it's at one point five trillion. It sounds
Speaker 8: like it's enormous number, but it's over ten years. So
Speaker 8: it's one hundred and fifty billion a year. They're also
Speaker 8: increasing spending for the military and for the border three
Speaker 8: hundred billion. That's actually more than all the Doze cuts
Speaker 8: that we've found so far. So something doesn't really add
Speaker 8: up here. And I can't be on record as being
Speaker 8: one who supports increasing the debt by five trillion. I
Speaker 8: think that's irresponsible. The bond markets are already starting to
Speaker 8: show that their skittish over this. We got interest rates
Speaker 8: of over five percent on the ten year bonds. There
Speaker 8: are real problems we face as a country and we
Speaker 8: can't just blithely go on the way we have in
Speaker 8: the past.
Speaker 5: So Ron Johnson also specifically said that he's very concerned
Speaker 5: about how the bill will affect the bond markets, which
Speaker 5: is a completely reasonable concern. Interesting, yeah, right now he's no.
Speaker 5: And they say they only need four of them. That's
Speaker 5: the line that you keep hearing from Rand Paul and
Speaker 5: others in the Senate. They only need to band together
Speaker 5: four people, and that could mean an unusual marriage between
Speaker 5: right Susan Collins.
Speaker 3: So is Utah liberals gonna We'll see.
Speaker 5: But there, I mean, you might not even need that
Speaker 5: because if you combine the fiscal hawks with the moderates,
Speaker 5: you're already easily at four.
Speaker 3: So well Collins, Collins get the four.
Speaker 5: Collins will be wobbly on because of Medicaid. That's she's
Speaker 5: already indicated.
Speaker 4: Your asking Mains senator to cut energy assistance, oil assistance
Speaker 4: for working people in winter in Main.
Speaker 5: Then also, this is where it gets even worse for Republicans.
Speaker 3: They have to gets called there. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Also last they then have to kick this back over
Speaker 5: to the House to approve the changes. And everybody remembers
Speaker 5: that this only went over to the Senate because Mike
Speaker 5: Johnson cut a deal with some of the fiscal hawks
Speaker 5: in the House to basically rubber stamp it and say,
Speaker 5: we trust the President to work with the Senate to
Speaker 5: get a better deal, but we don't like this bill.
Speaker 5: We're not voting for this bill. We're voting basically to
Speaker 5: send it over to the Senate and to get the
Speaker 5: ball rolling. They want to have this bill done. Donald
Speaker 5: Trump continues to push to have this bill done by
Speaker 5: a month from today, July fourth. They want the bill
Speaker 5: to be signed and enacted by the fourth.
Speaker 3: Of July, trying to get it done fast.
Speaker 5: Otherwise you start losing to the recess and you're into
Speaker 5: the fall, and then you're into midterms. So it sounds
Speaker 5: ridiculous because we're only a few months into the presidency,
Speaker 5: but it comes up really. Midterms come up really fast,
Speaker 5: especially because Congress gets so much time off.
Speaker 4: And so the House hawks they want the bill to
Speaker 4: get to add spending cuts in the Senate, right Whereas
Speaker 4: in order to get the senators that are wobbly, to
Speaker 4: get Ran Paul, you'd have to do more cuts like
Speaker 4: the hawks in the House want, But to get Murkowski
Speaker 4: and Collins.
Speaker 3: You'd have to do fewer cuts, right yah.
Speaker 4: And the Pentagon just you can't like, we're doing a
Speaker 4: trillion dollars for the Pentagon and that's all there is.
Speaker 4: Like there's no nobody can come in and be like, hey, guys,
Speaker 4: what if we didn't like massively increase the Pentagon budget.
Speaker 5: So this is where Elon Musk, while he's siding with
Speaker 5: Rand Paul. Here you also heard Rand Paul throw a
Speaker 5: little bit very subtle dig at Doge, saying that the
Speaker 5: spending is higher than the Doge cuts and that's because
Speaker 5: a lot of Republicans in order to get this bill passed,
Speaker 5: which by The way is, as we've talked about, a
Speaker 5: really critical element of the tariff agenda. So they believe
Speaker 5: that the teriff Agenda, this is the sort of necessary
Speaker 5: supplement to it that creates an industrial policy for onsuring.
Speaker 5: We could debate whether or not that's the case, but
Speaker 5: it has things like one ride offs retroactive to January
Speaker 5: twentieth for factory building, manufacturing building, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: I think the corporate tax rate going from twenty one
Speaker 5: to fifteen is industrial policy. So they feel like this
Speaker 5: is an absolutely essential part of the tariff agenda. All
Speaker 5: of that was predicated on the idea that Doge was
Speaker 5: going to find so many cuts in the government that
Speaker 5: they could basically do whatever they wanted to do with
Speaker 5: this bill.
Speaker 4: This is where I start to worry about your people,
Speaker 4: my pav pol. Yeah, that anybody took seriously the claim
Speaker 4: for Elon Musk that he was going to cut a
Speaker 4: trillion dollars and at one point he said it was
Speaker 4: going to be two trillion dollars makes me worry about them,
Speaker 4: makes me for viewers and for regular people whose media
Speaker 4: diet has been telling them that there's waste, fraud and
Speaker 4: abuse shot through the federal.
Speaker 3: Government, their entire lives.
Speaker 4: I don't blame those people who believed that this was
Speaker 4: going to be possible.
Speaker 3: I don't even blame Elon Musk.
Speaker 4: He's just drug addled like tech guy who just like
Speaker 4: most tech people, like, doesn't know anything outside of like
Speaker 4: this very narrow area, but thinks they're experts everywhere.
Speaker 3: That's just his personality types. So I don't even blame him.
Speaker 4: But the people who've spent ten decades in Washington thinking
Speaker 4: that Elon Musk was going to come in and identify
Speaker 4: trillions of dollars in like painless waste fraud abuse, that
Speaker 4: makes me worry about them if they were not just
Speaker 4: cynically using him. Steve Bannon, friend of the show, you know,
Speaker 4: was saying from the very beginning, this is a fraud.
Speaker 4: And now they wouldn't go to the Pentagon, right, And
Speaker 4: now he's been saying, look all of these people in Washington,
Speaker 4: these Republicans in Washington, didn't want to make the painful cuts,
Speaker 4: and so they just put their faith in Elon Musk
Speaker 4: that he was going to find this this trillion dollars.
Speaker 4: He didn't find it, he was never going to find it,
Speaker 4: and so he marched them into this place where now
Speaker 4: they've got all the tax cuts ready to go and
Speaker 4: the Pentagon spending, but they don't have the cuts. The
Speaker 4: cuts were never there because they weren't willing to go
Speaker 4: after power centers like Medicaid and Medicare. Fraud is on
Speaker 4: the provider side. It's the it's the private equity owned doctors.
Speaker 4: It's the straight up fraudulent just you know, just put
Speaker 4: bars around Miami. Don't let anybody leave until you find
Speaker 4: every Medicare fraudster. Yes, I mean, ask Rick Scott medicare fraudster.
Speaker 4: Who's the senator from my from Florida, Like ask him, like, hey,
Speaker 4: how'd you do that? And he could tell you in
Speaker 4: like two minutes. Oh, it's really easy. You just claim
Speaker 4: that you did services that you didn't do, and you
Speaker 4: send that to the federal government. The federal government, with
Speaker 4: no questions asked, sends you money and we're like, oh, well,
Speaker 4: we have AI now that could maybe detect that stuff.
Speaker 4: Like maybe you have to send an actual photo of
Speaker 4: Oh you say you sell wheelchairs, you say you sell scooters,
Speaker 4: Send us a picture of the scooter and we're going
Speaker 4: to reverse Google search image of that thing. Make sure
Speaker 4: you didn't just pull it off the web. You can
Speaker 4: stop this stuff.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 3: It's not that difficult.
Speaker 4: But what's difficult is doing it politically, because these are
Speaker 4: white collar criminals who have bought off the system and
Speaker 4: have gotten themselves elected into the system. Well, so that's
Speaker 4: why you weren't going to find the trillion dollars.
Speaker 5: It's partially a matter of semantics too, because when they
Speaker 5: say things like widespread fraud and abuse, I actually agree
Speaker 5: with that, But so what are they looking at right now?
Speaker 5: Like one hundred and sixty What is one hundred and
Speaker 5: sixty billion in cuts from dose?
Speaker 3: That's the top line nonsense.
Speaker 4: The way to actually calculate what they really saved would
Speaker 4: be how much is Congress quote unquote rescinding.
Speaker 3: That's money that was spent.
Speaker 4: But then because you found the fraud abuse, Congress can
Speaker 4: just take it back, and that's nine billion.
Speaker 5: That's insane.
Speaker 4: Two of that is NPR and PBS, which you don't
Speaker 4: need Doge to like defund NPR and PBS. That's an
Speaker 4: ideological thing that they can just do. So that's seven
Speaker 4: and a bunch of that is like leases and lit's
Speaker 4: just stuff that and God help us if any of
Speaker 4: that actually saves us money, Like this is probably stuff
Speaker 4: that you cut that seven billion dollars, it's going to
Speaker 4: end up costing the federal government more money down the road.
Speaker 4: But okay, fine, seven billion, he found seven billion. How
Speaker 4: do we know that none of it was fraud? Because
Speaker 4: have you seen a single headline about DOGE referring a
Speaker 4: frauds Department of Justice? It's a lot of would that
Speaker 4: not be just leading everywhere? Well, there we got them,
Speaker 4: ladies and gentlemen, you.
Speaker 5: Got them definitely. Okay, So this is what I mean
Speaker 5: semantics the waste question. Yeah, I mean, but if you're
Speaker 5: saying widespread to the tune of two trillion dollars, which
Speaker 5: is what he projected, what you end up finding and
Speaker 5: let me say, plenty of waste at the Pentagon that
Speaker 5: they could have gone after. So no, I do think there's.
Speaker 3: Like why are we doing?
Speaker 4: He could have been like, hey, guys, why are we
Speaker 4: building another nuclear triad?
Speaker 3: Like we don't need it?
Speaker 4: Like they're talking about spending a trillion dollars yep on
Speaker 4: a new batch of nuclear weapons yep. You could you
Speaker 4: could be like, hey, number one on the agenda, what
Speaker 4: let's just not do this, yeah, and make people argue
Speaker 4: why you should do it, Like, actually, all right, we
Speaker 4: heard the arguments we have enough nuclear weapons that we
Speaker 4: can kill everyone on the planet one hundred and seventy
Speaker 4: five times over.
Speaker 3: We're good trillion dollars.
Speaker 4: Saved that you would that would actually but guess what
Speaker 4: that would mean special interests who are involved in that
Speaker 4: nuclear program would it would have to take a haircut,
Speaker 4: and they don't want to do that.
Speaker 5: So that is to say, the question of how widespread
Speaker 5: it is versus the just amount of money that we
Speaker 5: spend on medicaid for example, Medicare, Medicaid, social Security, it
Speaker 5: just pales. And the Pentagon budget too, although you could
Speaker 5: actually just delete the Pentagon, you could go to the
Speaker 5: entire defense budget and it would not make a dent
Speaker 5: in the deficit, which sounds crazy, or in the debt,
Speaker 5: i should say, which sounds crazy, but's true. At the manhattan'stude,
Speaker 5: they've run the numbers on that. So it's just like
Speaker 5: the fiscal hawks there have run the numbers on that.
Speaker 5: It's it's really really good.
Speaker 4: It would get your it would get your lines closer,
Speaker 4: which is what the market really cares about.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, it would be helpful for that type of.
Speaker 4: Thing doesn't close everything because you've got thirty trillion dollar
Speaker 4: debt right now roughly.
Speaker 5: It's I mean, it's still pale. Like Actually, defense spending
Speaker 5: pales in comparison to how much money the expenditures, annual
Speaker 5: expenditures on Medicaid, Medicare and those things.
Speaker 4: I mean, if if you took a trillion out, then
Speaker 4: that thirty trillion dollar dead starts to shrink. However, actually
Speaker 4: it doesn't.
Speaker 3: It does.
Speaker 4: It does then it is the American military that makes
Speaker 4: the dollar the reserve currency. Right, so the whole thing
Speaker 4: collapses without the military.
Speaker 5: It's so much fun.
Speaker 3: But maybe you don't need a trillion dollar one.
Speaker 5: But that's what gives people like Ron Johnson pause. And
Speaker 5: this Ron Johnson from the Tea Party Wave by the way,
Speaker 5: who is talking about how now is not the time
Speaker 5: to be cutting taxes and he specifically has looked at
Speaker 5: the same said to look at the bond markets. He
Speaker 5: was just on Tucker Carlson Show actually making this case,
Speaker 5: making basically an extended case against the BBB. So the
Speaker 5: Trump administration has a month to somehow get these dug
Speaker 5: in factions to the same place and I mean Rand
Speaker 5: Paul has said that he is ready to compromise, that
Speaker 5: he is he understands he's going to have to compromise.
Speaker 5: If you are Mike Johnson and you have been giving
Speaker 5: Elon mus cover for months, you are just beside yourself
Speaker 5: and furious about this right now because he didn't find
Speaker 5: the cuts that he was supposed to find, and now
Speaker 5: he has the audacity to criticize your bill because after
Speaker 5: it is it is. At the same time, you also
Speaker 5: look at someone like Mike Johnson, you say you have
Speaker 5: the audacity to talk about government spending and then put
Speaker 5: a bill like this on the table. So just I
Speaker 5: don't honestly, I don't know where they go. I mean,
Speaker 5: they're desperate, which means that they'll be willing to make
Speaker 5: significant compromises. I don't know that they even have a
Speaker 5: good idea of what some of those compromises might look
Speaker 5: like going forward. And that's pretty important for the way
Speaker 5: that they see the entire economy. The American economy is
Speaker 5: sort of hanging on whether or not they're able to
Speaker 5: get some version of this past. We will see Ryan
Speaker 5: how that ends up. We will continue to follow the story.
Speaker 3: Ryan, Let's move what's the next thing to watch on that,
Speaker 3: and then we'll go to So.
Speaker 5: John Thune is meeting with Donald Trump at the White
Speaker 5: House today and they're hitdling on policy in the particularly
Speaker 5: tax policy. So we'll see what comes out of that.
Speaker 5: It's going to be daily negotiations. I mean, I actually
Speaker 5: think Trump has had sort of a lighter schedule the
Speaker 5: last couple of days because he's working the phones and
Speaker 5: taking meetings try to get people into the same pay
Speaker 5: or onto the same page on this which it's just
Speaker 5: sort of at this point unfathomable what you can do
Speaker 5: to build up bridge, but they have a month to try.
Speaker 4: Pierce Morgan has gotten increasingly fed up with the arguments
Speaker 4: that he's been hearing from defenders of Israel on his
Speaker 4: program in a way that I think is symbolic of
Speaker 4: the broader shift in Western media and politics going on
Speaker 4: at the moment that there have been a couple of
Speaker 4: viral moments just from the last twenty four hours. One
Speaker 4: of those we wanted to play here this is Natasha Hasdorff,
Speaker 4: who is a UK lawyer who represents Israel and went
Speaker 4: on with both comic Dave Smith and Pierce Morgan. Though
Speaker 4: you'll see that Dave Smith plays the same role that
Speaker 4: you're going to play in this which is just watching.
Speaker 3: So let's do that.
Speaker 9: I was told by the investor to the UK it
Speaker 9: was a blood libel for me to suggest that Israeli
Speaker 9: killed children.
Speaker 10: No, I don't believe that was the case. I want
Speaker 10: to do with targeting children. There is a difference because
Speaker 10: we are hearing that Israel's targeting children and that couldn't
Speaker 10: be further from Well.
Speaker 9: Last week, nine out of ten children in one home
Speaker 9: where two doctors reside were killed in an air strike.
Speaker 9: What was that?
Speaker 11: Remarkable?
Speaker 9: What was that?
Speaker 11: That has been based only on the basis of hearsay.
Speaker 9: You don't believe that story?
Speaker 11: Nation, I want these stories.
Speaker 9: Wait, wait, wait a minute, you don't believe those children
Speaker 9: kill I have.
Speaker 10: Seen conflicting accounts, and I want that story to be
Speaker 10: properly investigated before the international media runs with it.
Speaker 9: Do you think those two parents, one of whom I think,
Speaker 9: operated on.
Speaker 11: One of the children.
Speaker 5: I have a question.
Speaker 9: Do you think that those two doctors, the parents they
Speaker 9: just made it up? Why the nine of their ten
Speaker 9: children had been blown to pieces by and Israeli is right?
Speaker 11: If this is true, you don't believe it, well, why.
Speaker 10: On earth was artificially generated imagery used to promote this
Speaker 10: story when it first I've got to say, what.
Speaker 9: You've just said about that family is despicable.
Speaker 11: We've seen time. Sorry, it's despicable.
Speaker 9: Somebody you talk about blood libel, like David said, you
Speaker 9: talk about blood libel, you talk about lies. You're talking
Speaker 9: about promoting propaganda. And who you sit here as a
Speaker 9: lawyer and you say that you do not believe those
Speaker 9: nine children were.
Speaker 11: I didn't say that. You're putting it in my mouth.
Speaker 9: Do you believe it or not?
Speaker 11: Said that they were conflicted?
Speaker 7: Do you believe it?
Speaker 11: And it needs to be invested?
Speaker 9: Do you believe it?
Speaker 11: I thought you would be.
Speaker 9: The parents said nine of their ten children were killed.
Speaker 9: Do you believe them or that there's two doctors make
Speaker 9: it up?
Speaker 10: They haven't said that directly as far as I have seen,
Speaker 10: I have seen secondhand accounts and hearsay.
Speaker 11: But it's important to ask why are these civilians still there?
Speaker 11: Why is it that you know?
Speaker 9: It's important to usk whether you believe that family have
Speaker 9: lost nine of their ten children.
Speaker 11: I want to know why the international don't do you don't?
Speaker 9: And this goes to the point that I would say
Speaker 9: about Israel generally now in this wall, Israel says they
Speaker 9: don't believe anything everything. Every story that comes out about
Speaker 9: the deaths of civilians in Gaza, someone will pop up
Speaker 9: representing the Israeli governments saying it's propaganda, it's not true.
Speaker 9: I've heard it's.
Speaker 4: Not right Emily the most revealing comment from her. I
Speaker 4: thought maybe it was accidental, but she said why are
Speaker 4: those civilians still there? Which I think what she's referring
Speaker 4: to is that, like six months before these nine children
Speaker 4: were killed, there was an evacuation order given for that
Speaker 4: area where they live. The problem with these evacuation orders
Speaker 4: is that they Israel does not they don't expire. They'll say, okay,
Speaker 4: we're going to be the IDEF is going to be
Speaker 4: operating in this area. Everyone from this neighborhood leave, people leave,
Speaker 4: IDF comes in, and then the IDF leaves, and then
Speaker 4: everyone from the neighborhood comes back, and then six months
Speaker 4: later they bombit and say, well, we told you to leave.
Speaker 4: But the underlying quote there, what are these civilians still
Speaker 4: doing there? I think represents this like deep, something deeper,
Speaker 4: like they are very frustrated that there are still civilians
Speaker 4: in Gaza twenty months later, I thought, why have we
Speaker 4: not fully expelled everybody yet, Like, what is going on here?
Speaker 3: Why are you even still there?
Speaker 4: And that brings us to this absolute calamity of an
Speaker 4: effort at AID distribution. Over this week, it's been a
Speaker 4: wild week because over the weekend, you remember, there's this
Speaker 4: massacre at about a kilometer from an AID distribution center.
Speaker 4: The IDF initially claimed that it had not fired any
Speaker 4: shots whatsoever. They sent an email out to some reporters
Speaker 4: that said, off the record, we did fire shots at
Speaker 4: the direction of suspects because we told them to stop
Speaker 4: coming at us and they kept coming. So we did shoot,
Speaker 4: but we don't believe that we shot any right, They.
Speaker 5: Said that off the record, and an email that also
Speaker 5: include the denial.
Speaker 3: Right that also include the denial.
Speaker 4: And so a reporter sent me this and like, Hey,
Speaker 4: I can't use this because I've agreed to receive these
Speaker 4: emails that are off the record. You haven't agreed to this,
Speaker 4: So I published that. So they're like, Okay, yes we
Speaker 4: did shoot, but we don't know who was hit, and
Speaker 4: like maybe there was Hamas And then they released this
Speaker 4: video that they said was hamas gunman doing the shooting.
Speaker 4: Turned out that was at a different day, at a
Speaker 4: different location and where it was in Communis and it
Speaker 4: was gangs that were backed by Israel who had stolen
Speaker 4: aid and we're selling it and people who wouldn't pay
Speaker 4: them for it, they were shooting them. So that fell
Speaker 4: apart the watching post yesterday, should this like incredible like
Speaker 4: correction that said, while three eye witnesses talking about the
Speaker 4: weekend massacre, while three eyewitnesses told the Washington Post that
Speaker 4: the gunfire came from the Israelis, Israel denied it, and
Speaker 4: we did not give proper weight to the Israeli denial
Speaker 4: in our original article. I can't imagine any other shooter
Speaker 4: who would get that kind of grace. Even though three
Speaker 4: people said they saw you do it, you said you didn't,
Speaker 4: and we should have put it that you said you
Speaker 4: didn't right in the headline while this debate over the
Speaker 4: level of Israel's culpability of the weekend massacre was ongoing, I.
Speaker 5: Say, by the way, I don't even object to that,
Speaker 5: because people can make up their own decisions about people
Speaker 5: are supposed to give weight on their own without necessarily
Speaker 5: being handheld to the journal, sayway, and.
Speaker 4: So while this debate has been going on about what
Speaker 4: was Israel's responsibility for the massacre on over the weekend,
Speaker 4: there has been a masker every single day at a
Speaker 4: Gaza Humanitarian Foundation a distribution site, including just recently, including
Speaker 4: and again last night.
Speaker 3: We can roll b one.
Speaker 4: This is This is imagery from yesterday evening Gaza time
Speaker 4: where the Gods of Humanitarian Foundation announced that it was
Speaker 4: going to be pausing distribution because the Boston Consulting Group,
Speaker 4: which was the consulting for American consulting firm that basically
Speaker 4: did all the work to set up GHF, announced that
Speaker 4: it was leaving. They said, this was pro bono work
Speaker 4: and we're putting on leave the partner who brought us
Speaker 4: into this debacle and we're not helping them anymore. Conflicting
Speaker 4: reports came out that they were they were sending million
Speaker 4: dollar invoices for the work that they've done here. I'm
Speaker 4: sure we'll see that sorted out in court.
Speaker 3: Either way. The word goes out, Okay, we lost our consultant.
Speaker 4: We're not We're not gonna We're not gonna do dis
Speaker 4: Truck drivers leak to their friends and family and Gaza. Hey,
Speaker 4: there's going to be a convoy going through that. That
Speaker 4: was Western Gaza City that you see. So a massive
Speaker 4: crowd convenes in Western Gaza City of starving people who
Speaker 4: are there hoping that they're going to be able to
Speaker 4: like a truck will stop. And then what happens is
Speaker 4: when the truck stops, they just unload everything right there,
Speaker 4: and whoever is close enough to the truck and strong
Speaker 4: enough to like hold on to the bag of flower
Speaker 4: gets to like leave with the bag of flower in
Speaker 4: this hunger game style situation. And so while this chaos
Speaker 4: is unfolding, and what you see in the video there
Speaker 4: is people running from gunfire, different reports of where it
Speaker 4: was coming from, helicopters, quad copters. Again, you know, you
Speaker 4: get you get denials. We can put up this next element,
Speaker 4: which I think is B six. So as we're going
Speaker 4: back and forth over you know what happened? Who did
Speaker 4: the shooting? Most of Babutoha, who you guys may remember.
Speaker 4: He's the Gaza poet who won a Pulitzer prize this year.
Speaker 4: He got this video where he says, I've just found
Speaker 4: this video posted by a mean's friend. The man's name.
Speaker 4: The man's named Amin Samir Khalifa. He documented the moment
Speaker 4: when Israeli soldiers opened fire at them yesterday morning. Amen
Speaker 4: was killed along with over thirty people. The Israeli forces
Speaker 4: denied their responsibility for the killing, and the media changed
Speaker 4: their headlines. Can you tell us who killed Amen and
Speaker 4: the other star of people? And if you go find
Speaker 4: this on his feed, it's just an absolutely horrifying scene
Speaker 4: of explosions in gunfire. And then tell yourself this is
Speaker 4: billed as an aid distribution site. This is why you
Speaker 4: don't militarize aid distribution sites like they turn an AID
Speaker 4: site into a war zone. For the first sixteen seventeen
Speaker 4: months of the war, the UN World Food Program, World
Speaker 4: Central Kitchen and others, you didn't see images like this.
Speaker 4: Occasionally you would see the flower Masacre, which involved the IDF.
Speaker 4: You saw World Central Kitchen trucks getting hit by the IDF.
Speaker 4: But you never saw the World of Food Program shooting
Speaker 4: at hungry people. And you never saw scenes of warehouses
Speaker 4: getting mobbed or trucks getting mobbed. It's only when this
Speaker 4: program has taken over that that you start to see this.
Speaker 4: And I think because Pierce Morgan is covering this stuff
Speaker 4: every day that that's what accounts for his turn.
Speaker 3: What do you think.
Speaker 5: It's I think Piers Morgan as such a you just
Speaker 5: said turn, as such a staunch defender of the Israeli
Speaker 5: government and the Israeli side of the conflict, is representative
Speaker 5: of something that we've covered in general, which is the
Speaker 5: public sentiment in places like the UK and the US
Speaker 5: just shifting over the course of the post October seventh
Speaker 5: War in ways that I just people like the barrister
Speaker 5: he was interviewing are not at all prepared for. I
Speaker 5: think it's catching them off guard to some extent. It
Speaker 5: was a really dark exchange, a really dark exchange in
Speaker 5: that video, and just watching the last video we watched
Speaker 5: and hearing thinking back to her point about why artificially
Speaker 5: intelligent videos a I generated videos had initially come out.
Speaker 5: That is so so dark when you think about it.
Speaker 3: We're going to see that now exactly.
Speaker 4: Anytime there'll be a masker going forward, there will also
Speaker 4: be some AI related content that comes out as well,
Speaker 4: and the people who carried out the masker will say, well, look,
Speaker 4: this part's fake, so maybe all of it's fake, and.
Speaker 5: They may generate it.
Speaker 3: They might generate, right, and that's.
Speaker 5: Really really you may generate it as a shield. So
Speaker 5: it's just quite frightening to hear that line. It does
Speaker 5: I think grind smack of desperation. And the only other
Speaker 5: point I wanted to make is I think Piers Morgan
Speaker 5: is wrong. I think she actually does believe that the
Speaker 5: family was killed. I think that's probably why she didn't
Speaker 5: want to really answer the question. And that's to your
Speaker 5: point about the more interesting or the most interesting line
Speaker 5: being that why were they still there? Why were they
Speaker 5: still in Gaza? I think she probably does believe that
Speaker 5: they were killed, and just doesn't feel the need to
Speaker 5: or doesn't feel like it would be advantageous for her
Speaker 5: to defend it. And so it's easier to say, from
Speaker 5: the sort of public relations cynical perspective, well, we don't
Speaker 5: really know what happened. The answer is that they believe
Speaker 5: the government believes that's the collateral damage.
Speaker 4: Yeah, here's the exact line from the Washington Post. The
Speaker 4: Post didn't give proper weight to Israel's denial and gave
Speaker 4: improper certitude about what was known about any Israeli role
Speaker 4: in the shootings. The early versions fell short of Post
Speaker 4: standards of fairness and should not have been published in
Speaker 4: that form. This is after Bill Ackmen, like snitch tagged
Speaker 4: Jeff Bezos on Twitter.
Speaker 3: I was like.
Speaker 4: And saying that, like, this is the kind of thing
Speaker 4: that is producing anti semitism around the country.
Speaker 3: It's like, No, the Washington Post reporting.
Speaker 4: On these massacres is not what is driving anti semitism.
Speaker 4: And to me, none of it should be driving anti
Speaker 4: semitism either way, because Israel is a state and I
Speaker 4: refuse to allow Israel to claim that it represents an
Speaker 4: entire religion of thousands that is thousands of years old
Speaker 4: like that, that, to me is what everyone should be
Speaker 4: drawing a line at this that these actions do not
Speaker 4: represent Judaism.
Speaker 3: Like how anti semitic would it be to say that
Speaker 3: they do.
Speaker 5: The Bill Ackman niche tweet is it's a way to
Speaker 5: use that expand the definition of anti semitism to use
Speaker 5: as a shield that protects a political actor, a state
Speaker 5: actor from scrutiny, do scrutiny that would apply to any
Speaker 5: political or state actor in a conflict.
Speaker 4: So their new version written to satisfy Bill Ackman says,
Speaker 4: while three witnesses said the gunfire came from Israeli military positions.
Speaker 4: The Israel Defense Forces denied the allegations, saying in a
Speaker 4: statement that an initial inquiry indicated that its soldiers did
Speaker 4: not fire at civilians while they were near or within
Speaker 4: the distribution site.
Speaker 3: Then they add An.
Speaker 4: Israeli military official later said that troops had quote acted
Speaker 4: to prevent several suspects from approaching unquote them overnight and
Speaker 4: fired warning shots at the group.
Speaker 3: Well wait a minute, which is.
Speaker 4: It, but that there was quote no connection between this
Speaker 4: incident and the false claims made against the IDF.
Speaker 3: Okay, yes, so we.
Speaker 4: Did shoot at those people at the time that this
Speaker 4: is said to have happened, but there's no connection between that.
Speaker 4: I have never seen a line that is closer to
Speaker 4: These are not the droids you're looking for.
Speaker 3: Than that one.
Speaker 4: Okay, yes we did it, but there's no connection between
Speaker 4: this incident and the false claims made against the IDF. Oh,
Speaker 4: these are not the droids we're looking for.
Speaker 5: It's dark, really really dark stuff.
Speaker 4: Meanwhile, the Gaza flotilla I believe it's called the Maldine
Speaker 4: is getting closer. We can put up this next element
Speaker 4: getting closer to Gaza. This borderline suicidal mission, which includes
Speaker 4: Greta Thurnberg and roughly what a dozen or so international activists.
Speaker 4: I'm trying to think if I see any Americans on here.
Speaker 4: I do not see any Americans on board this ship.
Speaker 4: We can put up before they posted this image or
Speaker 4: this this audio of a drone flying over top of
Speaker 4: them rolled before.
Speaker 12: Hey everyone, this is Diaguablon here on board and Madeline.
Speaker 12: We are on our mission to break the stage of Gaza.
Speaker 12: Is that they're nine and there's a drone on.
Speaker 7: Top of our ship.
Speaker 12: We need your support right now, right now. Please tell
Speaker 12: everyone demand a safe passage. If this is an attack,
Speaker 12: we need your support right now.
Speaker 4: This, of course, is after Lindsey Graham effectively called for
Speaker 4: Israeli sink the ship.
Speaker 3: What do you say?
Speaker 4: I hope that Greta can swim, And a bunch of
Speaker 4: other kind of pro Israel influencers we're making the same
Speaker 4: remarks that wouldn't it be great if Israel would just
Speaker 4: solve our Greta problem here and just, you know, sink
Speaker 4: this ship. After the twenty eleventh flotilla was rated by
Speaker 4: Israeli troops and I think eleven were killed.
Speaker 5: So they're trying to distribute eight as my understanding, So
Speaker 5: how what do you think practically happens when they get
Speaker 5: so they I think set shell sail from Italy. So
Speaker 5: when they get can't I mean it can't be at
Speaker 5: this point too far away. What happens when they get there?
Speaker 5: Practically it would be your prediction.
Speaker 4: I mean, they could just let them, Like it'd be
Speaker 4: wild if they just got out of their way and
Speaker 4: just let them land and let them distribute everything on
Speaker 4: the ship. There's no there's there's no way there's weapons
Speaker 4: on that ship. Just there's just no way, Like how
Speaker 4: suicidal would that be to have weapons on the ship,
Speaker 4: And so just let them give them meta food and
Speaker 4: medicines on the ship and let them just unload it
Speaker 4: and then go.
Speaker 3: Back, go away Like that is a that is an
Speaker 3: option that is available to the Israelis at this moment.
Speaker 4: That that that is not even being discussed in meetings
Speaker 4: about how to handle this is indicative of the tenor
Speaker 4: of the approach towards humanitarian aid. The best case scenario
Speaker 4: is that there's some Israeli naval ships that kind of
Speaker 4: stop the ship and turn it around within what Israel
Speaker 4: is considering the worst case scenari would be what happen
Speaker 4: in twenty eleven where they attacked the ship and board
Speaker 4: it and killed a bunch of people. And let's pray
Speaker 4: that that doesn't happen. Yeah, what are we on next, Oh,
Speaker 4: Chuck Schumer.
Speaker 5: We're going to talk about it ran, which is actually
Speaker 5: sadly a decent segue from this block to the next block,
Speaker 5: because we've seen the connection many times, so of course
Speaker 5: the last couple of weeks, but we do have a
Speaker 5: really incredible clip of Chuck Schumer, the most talented politician
Speaker 5: of his general.
Speaker 4: That's right, and so let's set up to context here.
Speaker 4: So Steve Wikoff, who is managing both the Ukraine file,
Speaker 4: the Iran file, and the Gaza file for Trump.
Speaker 3: The same day he's.
Speaker 4: Dealing with a negotiations between Hamas and Israel over US ceasefire,
Speaker 4: he sent a proposal to Iran around they're re entering.
Speaker 3: The nuclear deal, in which Barack revealed it.
Speaker 4: Axios reported the US conceded that Iran would be able
Speaker 4: to enrich at a civilian level, so there'd be Titans
Speaker 4: in spections. They'd have to blow up a bunch of
Speaker 4: their kind of weaponized program. No new centrifuges, but they
Speaker 4: would be able to pursue a civilian program.
Speaker 3: That gets leaked to Revede.
Speaker 4: Donald Trump then about five hours later, goes on truth
Speaker 4: Social and says absolutely no enrichment happening. Forget it Mullis,
Speaker 4: which then led head to Chuck Schumer injecting himself into
Speaker 4: the negotiations.
Speaker 13: This way, when it comes to negotiating with the terrorist
Speaker 13: government of Iran, Trump's all over the lot. One day,
Speaker 13: sounds tough, the next day he's backing off, and now
Speaker 13: all of a sudden we find out that Witkoff and
Speaker 13: Rubio are negotiation eating a secret side deal with Iran.
Speaker 13: What kind of bull is this? They're going to sound
Speaker 13: tough in public and then have a side deal. It
Speaker 13: lets Iran get away with everything. That's outrageous. We need
Speaker 13: to make that side deal public. Any side deal should
Speaker 13: be before Congress and most importantly, the American people. If
Speaker 13: Taco Trump is already folding, the American public should know
Speaker 13: about it.
Speaker 4: No side deals, So Tago Trump, that's Trump always chickens
Speaker 4: out as the Wall Street phrase for it's okay to
Speaker 4: you go along on Because Trump is going to back
Speaker 4: off of his tariffs and now there's Schumer trying to
Speaker 4: use it to egg on a war with Iran.
Speaker 3: So it leads to this open question of what's actually
Speaker 3: in the proposal?
Speaker 4: It is there Richmond or is there not in Richmond?
Speaker 4: And we'll roll Samuel Aarry in just one second, who's
Speaker 4: a Palacinian who is very.
Speaker 3: Well connected in.
Speaker 4: And has connections to people who are familiar with the negotiations.
Speaker 4: We interviewed him yesterday at drop site. We can roll
Speaker 4: what he says about the enrichment, what's in? What's in
Speaker 4: it regarding enrichment? But think about this, what are the
Speaker 4: chances zero percent to one hundred percent that Donald Trump
Speaker 4: has read Wittkoff's proposal that he delivered to Iran? Because
Speaker 4: we're making news based off of what Trump says about
Speaker 4: the proposal, h so we should know.
Speaker 3: Do you think he read it?
Speaker 5: Did you see the report last week that Telsea Gabbard
Speaker 5: had been preparing to shift the daily intelligence briefing to
Speaker 5: look like a cable news segment. So it's not in
Speaker 5: you didn't see this, it's not You don't.
Speaker 3: Have to read.
Speaker 5: It, right, you don't have to read it, but that.
Speaker 3: Do the like do it as a stand up from
Speaker 3: a couch.
Speaker 5: Trump is famously not super interested in written text, and
Speaker 5: so that's it seems to me that through word of
Speaker 5: mouth he could be getting different versions of what's in
Speaker 5: the wit CO, what different spin in frame.
Speaker 4: Exactly what Trump knows about that proposal is what he
Speaker 4: was told about it.
Speaker 3: No way he read it. Now about my life that
Speaker 3: he did not read this proposal.
Speaker 4: Samuel Arion, We asked him if he had any sense
Speaker 4: of what was in it?
Speaker 3: And this is C five, let's jump to that one.
Speaker 4: What can we understand about what the actual offer is
Speaker 4: from the US to the Iranians?
Speaker 14: Right?
Speaker 15: Yeah, I mean it's incredible that you have one person
Speaker 15: who's acting like the effective Secretary state. That's Steve Wickoff,
Speaker 15: someone has never been confirmed by anybody, has never been
Speaker 15: accountable to anybody except the Trump That's I think that's
Speaker 15: the first, probably in America's history, when it comes to
Speaker 15: one person, one void having all these very crucial files.
Speaker 15: You have the Gaza fhile, the Iran file and the
Speaker 15: Ukraine file. Leaven that aside. My information, which is confirmed
Speaker 15: through what has been reported by in Iran, is that
Speaker 15: indeed the the the letter that was sent by the
Speaker 15: Americans does concede and this is this is very much confirmed,
Speaker 15: concedes the right of Iran to enritually. So that's that
Speaker 15: spoint's already been conceded by the United States, which opened
Speaker 15: the possibility of reaching an agreement. The second point, they
Speaker 15: wanted to freeze the enrichment. The Americans wanted to freeze
Speaker 15: their enrichment and offered that they could be a regional
Speaker 15: hub by which they could be enrichment activities in which
Speaker 15: Iran can participate. Now the details are not very clear,
Speaker 15: but the Iranians are very much encouraged by the fact
Speaker 15: that the Americans have already conceded the point that Iran
Speaker 15: was not willing to walk away if it was willing
Speaker 15: to walk away if that was never conceded. So the
Speaker 15: fact that the Americans have really considered this point that
Speaker 15: opens the passibility of an agreement. The Americans offered a
Speaker 15: three point sixty seven percent I think, whether it's three
Speaker 15: point sixty seven percent or more or less, obviously it's
Speaker 15: going to be less than twenty percent depending on the application,
Speaker 15: is something probably that is subject to negotiations. But the
Speaker 15: Americans never talked about the ballistic program, the rocket program
Speaker 15: or the support of other non state actors, particularly when
Speaker 15: it comes to Israel Palestine. So having the fact that
Speaker 15: the Americans are not tying or linking these objects, and
Speaker 15: that the Americans conceded the point, the possibility of reaching
Speaker 15: an agreement now is much much higher than it was
Speaker 15: a week or ten days ago, or even months ago.
Speaker 15: Will the Israelis accept this, Will they sabotage They will
Speaker 15: definitely do everything in their power to sabotage this. But again,
Speaker 15: because this is a state actor and the implications of
Speaker 15: any military strike on Iran is going to be catastrophe
Speaker 15: not only against US interest but globally it will be filled,
Speaker 15: I think the Americans will be very very careful not
Speaker 15: to allow the isoelists to subletype.
Speaker 4: So you can imagine why the Israelies are upset about this,
Speaker 4: not only as far as our you know, our sources
Speaker 4: and Ravined understand it. It does allow some low level
Speaker 4: of enrichment and does not stop them from supporting amas
Speaker 4: nce A law, Iraqi militious. You know, the whole set
Speaker 4: of proxies as Bela and the ballistic missile program is
Speaker 4: something that is dear to the hearts of the israel government.
Speaker 3: As well, because that is the delivery mechanism for the
Speaker 3: most part.
Speaker 4: This is so you can imagine why they're upset, and
Speaker 4: humor is channeling that right.
Speaker 5: New York Times this morning, the Trump administration is proposing
Speaker 5: an arrangement that would allow Iran to continue enriching uranium
Speaker 5: at low levels while the US and other countries work
Speaker 5: out a more detailed plan intended to block Iran's path
Speaker 5: to a nuclear weapon. The propose will announce to a
Speaker 5: diplomatic bridge intended to maneuver beyond the current situation, but
Speaker 5: the details remain big, and the two sides remain far
Speaker 5: apart on some elements. So potentially what's emerging here is
Speaker 5: a pitch from whitch cough for a bridge, like to say,
Speaker 5: will allow low levels. But that's not the final deal.
Speaker 5: That's our bridge deal, and who knows if the other
Speaker 5: deal actually ever comes, But that seems to be potentially
Speaker 5: what the administration is landing on as an effort to
Speaker 5: sell this to the Lindsay Grahams of the world.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which they don't seem interested because also they don't
Speaker 4: want No, they don't they don't want it to work
Speaker 4: because they don't want sanctions lifted.
Speaker 3: Like that, and that's the key.
Speaker 4: That's another thing that Samuel Arien talked about is that
Speaker 4: the key thing that isn't getting a lot of focus
Speaker 4: here in the US is that Iran's major interest here
Speaker 4: is not just the economic sanctions, which are increasing less
Speaker 4: important than the various terror designations they want because if you,
Speaker 4: as Cuba has found out, like the the fact that
Speaker 4: Cuba is listed as this like state sponsor of terror
Speaker 4: makes it so that they can't bank with anybody anywhere,
Speaker 4: and they're like, what terrorism like, we're not doing any
Speaker 4: terrorism like that, setting Cuba side.
Speaker 5: So we'll talk to talk about that with one roal US.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: But Iran, you can make a stronger case if you
Speaker 4: believe that all of these organizations are terror groups which
Speaker 4: the US designates them. They know Ron does support them,
Speaker 4: so Ron wants, you know, those things lifted. And if
Speaker 4: they don't get that lift, what's the point We're not
Speaker 4: going to give up our turn to turn.
Speaker 3: It if we don't get economic advantage out of it.
Speaker 5: I mean, Chuck Schumer, actually I'm curious how you make
Speaker 5: it the way that Chuck Schumer is framing this, because
Speaker 5: there's the it's oppositional Trump framing. But we can put
Speaker 5: C two on the screen. This is polling from the
Speaker 5: Brookings Institution. Most respondents prefer a deal limiting Iran to
Speaker 5: a peaceful nuclear program. Only fourteen percent of Americans back
Speaker 5: military action to Roy Aron's nuclear program. So, thinking back
Speaker 5: and how the Republican Party framed the Obama nuclear the
Speaker 5: Obama around nuclear deal, the politics of this for Chuck
Speaker 5: Schumer going after Taco Trump are also kind of interesting,
Speaker 5: don't I don't know what they're quite what they're thinking
Speaker 5: with this.
Speaker 4: Ryan Well, either the utility or the futility of Taco
Speaker 4: Trump is demonstrated in this moment because I actually used
Speaker 4: the exact same phrase on TikTok.
Speaker 3: I just Chuck Schumer and I are both you know, TikTok.
Speaker 5: Natives, right, digital natives, and we both.
Speaker 3: Went after Trump over this.
Speaker 4: I went after him from the opposite side for undermining
Speaker 4: Witcoff's offer and called him Taco Trump for his truth
Speaker 4: social where he said there can be no in Richmond. Yeah,
Speaker 4: because he's chickening out against Schumer and then Yahoo and
Speaker 4: the rest are pushing on him. Schumer's calling him Taco
Speaker 4: Trump for the original witcough proposal, right right, So Taco Trump,
Speaker 4: it might not it might fall apart because it might
Speaker 4: just be too useful. It's just you can just use
Speaker 4: it constantly, and anything that like is that vague that
Speaker 4: ends ends up getting drained a meaning and it loses
Speaker 4: its pop.
Speaker 5: Well, it also sounds just kind of whimsical. It makes
Speaker 5: everyone think of tacos, which they love.
Speaker 4: So putting something you love keeps being bothered by it,
Speaker 4: then it will it will maintain its resonance.
Speaker 3: Well, he seems to not like it.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say, so C three we can put
Speaker 5: on the screen. This is Access reporting that the DNC
Speaker 5: rented at Taco Trump to mock to mock Trump on
Speaker 5: the costumes.
Speaker 3: He's not going to like that.
Speaker 5: He's really not gonna like that. But at a certain
Speaker 5: point if it gets if it becomes like dem leadership cringe,
Speaker 5: then it probably does lose its power with Trump. It
Speaker 5: probably becomes a meme of how pathetic it is to
Speaker 5: see Chuck Schumer looking like he's literally in a nursing home,
Speaker 5: which I suppose literally is because he's in the Senate
Speaker 5: in that video that we played, like saying Taco Trump
Speaker 5: to what egg Trump into a nuclear.
Speaker 4: Conflict and also putting tariffs on the entire world, Like
Speaker 4: this is what democrats are daring him to start a
Speaker 4: war with Iran and put tariffs, high tariffs on everybody
Speaker 4: everywhere around the world.
Speaker 5: Right, right, things are going great, could not possibly be
Speaker 5: going better. So all is all is well. But Chuck
Speaker 5: Schumer is a star.
Speaker 3: He is a star. You scroll back and see, like
Speaker 3: just the star power just pops off the screen, It
Speaker 3: jumps right out. How many takes that was? What do
Speaker 3: you think?
Speaker 5: That's a good question because is he reading off a prompter?
Speaker 5: Did he have to memorize lines? Do they have Q
Speaker 5: cards where she gets the bottom un?
Speaker 4: I think that I think he didn't. I think it
Speaker 4: was off the cuff.
Speaker 5: You should be able to do that.
Speaker 3: But it was third or fourth take.
Speaker 5: Yeah, let's move on to Ukraine. Ryan.
Speaker 4: Yes, so we're on the brink of nuclear annihilation in
Speaker 4: right here in Washington everywhere around the world. As the
Speaker 4: escalatory ladder continues to be climbed by by Ukraine.
Speaker 3: We put this vo up here.
Speaker 4: This is footage of the crimea bridge boom going boom.
Speaker 3: This this was many months of planning. According to.
Speaker 4: Ukraine, they strapped enormous amounts of explosives as you can
Speaker 4: see there to to the the base of the bridge.
Speaker 4: Apparently it's back up and running. So maybe we can
Speaker 4: take a step down.
Speaker 5: One of the more important bridges.
Speaker 3: Yes, the Crimea Bridge.
Speaker 4: It's a it's not just a prize infrastructure project of Putin,
Speaker 4: but you know, economically and culturally, it's extremely important for
Speaker 4: connecting you know, Crimea with.
Speaker 3: The say, the rest of Russia.
Speaker 4: At this point, this comes after this you know wild
Speaker 4: drone attack that went deep into Syria. Going after the
Speaker 4: the Russian bombers that are used. You know that the
Speaker 4: Ukrainians will say we hit them because they're used for
Speaker 4: you know, bombing targets deep inside Ukraine. UH critics of
Speaker 4: the operations say they're a central part of Russia's nuclear arsenal,
Speaker 4: and you are playing with nuclear fire by going there.
Speaker 4: One of those is UH retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who
Speaker 4: was asked about how, you know what what he sees
Speaker 4: as the risks of this Ukrainian attack, and he had
Speaker 4: a rather chilling response.
Speaker 14: We can roll that sort of set up an analogy
Speaker 14: Mexico or Canada or any third party, particularly one that
Speaker 14: was approximate to our borders, launching missiles that hit Whiteman
Speaker 14: Air Force Base and destroyed B two bombers, or hit
Speaker 14: Barstow in Louisiana, or mine and destroy'd be fifty two bombers,
Speaker 14: or came in on Growton, Connecticut where a ballistic missile
Speaker 14: submarine was being serviced and hit it. These are things
Speaker 14: that during the Cold War we swore to each other
Speaker 14: Moscow and Washington that we would never do. These are
Speaker 14: things that are so destabilizing that Putin would be in
Speaker 14: his every right with regard to all the lessons we
Speaker 14: have learned and their many to attack and to attack
Speaker 14: with nuclear weapons and to say to the rest of
Speaker 14: the world they provoked me.
Speaker 3: They surely did.
Speaker 14: And I'm not losing my devices for responding should I
Speaker 14: be really provoked by a first strike. And that's what
Speaker 14: you're talking about. Never never hit the assets that your
Speaker 14: nuclear armed enemy needs to assess whether or not you're
Speaker 14: attacking them. That's a no no, Always been a no no.
Speaker 16: No.
Speaker 14: One disputed that in Moscow or Washing, earn it, for
Speaker 14: that matter, in the other capitals in.
Speaker 3: The world, see only.
Speaker 4: I don't think that this justifies a nuclear response from Boutin.
Speaker 4: But I don't like the idea that we're even in
Speaker 4: the area. Yeah, of course where it's an open questions,
Speaker 4: like we should try to avoid being in the area
Speaker 4: the gray zone of nuclear response.
Speaker 5: It's completely insane. Just slept walk directly into it. And
Speaker 5: right now on the hill today Richard Blumenthal, Lindsey Graham,
Speaker 5: our meeting.
Speaker 3: They're back in the US.
Speaker 5: They're back here and meeting with a top advisor to
Speaker 5: Zelenski actually today and pushing the sanctions past package and
Speaker 5: who knows what else.
Speaker 3: The other thing they were just in Ukraine, they were
Speaker 3: just and cheering them on.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and you're demanding more support from Trump, who's obviously
Speaker 5: frustrated with Putin and not without reason in the peace process,
Speaker 5: of course, but right the ease with which I mean
Speaker 5: Ukraine said that operation took several months according to CNN.
Speaker 5: It's crazy to me that when you watch the video
Speaker 5: you realize, I mean it just it seems like that
Speaker 5: should be a much harder target to hit him, and
Speaker 5: it's important.
Speaker 4: Not underwater, and you know they also hit it, you know,
Speaker 4: several months ago. If you remember, there was a footage
Speaker 4: of the car like you're just driving along and boom
Speaker 4: all of.
Speaker 5: A sudden, which is why it's kind of wild that
Speaker 5: they're able to pull it off after several months. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's one of the most obvious targets. But I think
Speaker 5: part of what's it's so obviously provocative to do that
Speaker 5: to the bridge, To do that to that bridge, so
Speaker 5: obviously provocative.
Speaker 4: So yes, it's wild, it really well, these talks are
Speaker 4: going on, Tar talks are going on.
Speaker 5: Ye. Well, and you can't that operation that we covered
Speaker 5: a Monday that went you know, more than three thousand
Speaker 5: miles from Kievan, Russia. That was, of course, literally the
Speaker 5: day before peace talks and assemble. So it's a message obviously,
Speaker 5: and they'd been getting hit really hard in the days
Speaker 5: leading up to it. But Ryan, we were hearing from
Speaker 5: Donald Trump for however long, that he would broke her
Speaker 5: a peace deal within twenty four hours. We are now
Speaker 5: pushing into the six month of his presidency and it's
Speaker 5: getting worse. Yeah, it's not getting closer at all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And meanwhile, there seems to be some operation happening against
Speaker 4: Darren Beattie, who was a top State Department official and
Speaker 4: one of the one of the key guys in pushing
Speaker 4: back against one of the key guys in what you
Speaker 4: call like the peace camp and.
Speaker 5: The non interventionist Yeah. Yeah, he'd be sort of decried
Speaker 5: as an isolationist from the Lindsay Graham faction.
Speaker 4: Yes, And so he's getting hit in the Telegraph with
Speaker 4: this With this article, the headline is Trump official who
Speaker 4: shut down Counter Russia agency has links to Kremlin.
Speaker 3: Darren Beattie, who.
Speaker 4: Alarmed the State Department with his pro Moscow views, is
Speaker 4: married to a woman whose uncle has ties to Vladimir Putin.
Speaker 4: By the way, as a former tabloid reporter at the
Speaker 4: when I was at Tough Post, the word tie anytime
Speaker 4: you see the word ties.
Speaker 3: Or links, that is what's called a.
Speaker 4: Kind of get out of defamation jail free guard because
Speaker 4: think about the word link.
Speaker 3: Yep, you're linked to everything.
Speaker 5: We are linked to Putin by doing this segment.
Speaker 4: We're linked, yes, breaking Points, linked to Putin, yes, or untied.
Speaker 5: To Putin, LinkedIn tie, LinkedIn tid Yes.
Speaker 3: So we have a statement from the State Department here.
Speaker 5: Yeah, this is an exclusive statement to Breaking Points from
Speaker 5: the State Department that says it isn't a coincidence that
Speaker 5: these attacks on Durn Batty are servicing as the administration
Speaker 5: is working to fight censorship domestically and champion free speech
Speaker 5: around the world. We will get back to that in
Speaker 5: just a moment. These fake news outlets are so desperate
Speaker 5: to keep these censorship tactics alive and discredit the transparency initiative,
Speaker 5: they are publishing falsemeres on respective respected and effective employee
Speaker 5: at the State Department. Now. Der Baty is an enormously
Speaker 5: controversial person who was working in the sort of media
Speaker 5: punditry space before being plucked into the State Department. In
Speaker 5: this administration, he had worked in the White House.
Speaker 3: I fired for speaking at like a white nationalist conference.
Speaker 5: Right from the first Trump White House, right, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 5: and then it is brought in the second administration. Ruffles
Speaker 5: feathers for sure in the but especially among the interventionist
Speaker 5: crowd because they are probably more offended by his questioning
Speaker 5: of interventionism.
Speaker 3: The white nationalism whatever.
Speaker 5: It's coalition, Yeah, it's coalition. So anyway, we confirmed the
Speaker 5: State Department says passed all of his background checks. So
Speaker 5: this innu window about his wife and her uncle. It's interesting, Ryan,
Speaker 5: because to work in a key position in the State
Speaker 5: Department actually the Biden State Department went through this with
Speaker 5: what's his name, Rob and Iran stuff. No, that was Trump,
Speaker 5: but Rob Valley on Iran stuff. And it did eventually
Speaker 5: come out that he had some interesting links and ties.
Speaker 5: But he was obviously, oh interesting, you'd obviously be be vetted.
Speaker 5: So his dinner and baby's wife gave a statement to
Speaker 5: The Times, the UK Times quote, far from being Kremlin aligned,
Speaker 5: Putin publicly denounced my uncle and his ownership stake in
Speaker 5: bosh Kirsta, where upon the Putin government stole his company
Speaker 5: from him. He has lived in exile for Russia for
Speaker 5: five years. I'm deeply disappointed that the Telegraph would omit
Speaker 5: these material and publicly discoverable facts that completely undermine the
Speaker 5: suggestion that my uncle or I am Kremlin linked, which
Speaker 5: is the narrative backbone of the entire piece.
Speaker 3: Links linked to the Kremlin by being adversaries.
Speaker 5: It is.
Speaker 3: So we'll find out.
Speaker 4: If this is a get out of defamation jail or not.
Speaker 4: Because I met you know, this is the UK. It's
Speaker 4: much easier to get sued, it's much easier to win
Speaker 4: acclaim than it is here in the US. So yeah,
Speaker 4: like so right, the point is yeah, there is a
Speaker 4: connection between her uncle, which is like, come on, uncle, yeah, now,
Speaker 4: now you're responsible not just for what you do, not
Speaker 4: just for your for what your wife does, but for
Speaker 4: what no wife's uncle does.
Speaker 3: And it turns out the wife's uncle.
Speaker 4: Was actually beefing with Putin over some oligarch stuff.
Speaker 5: Mm hmmmm hmm. And that's not really in the article,
Speaker 5: is yeah, so Ran it is amusing to see the
Speaker 5: State Department and being himself in his post on X said,
Speaker 5: for anyone who passionately supports President Trump and fights to
Speaker 5: advances of Jennifer the American people, media hit pieces come
Speaker 5: with the territory. Interestingly, that echoes the exclusive statement that
Speaker 5: we got from the State Department, which is suggesting that
Speaker 5: this is a hit piece timed specifically because of what's
Speaker 5: happening in Ukraine right now. And you read the piece
Speaker 5: and can even take issue with Darren Beattie working in
Speaker 5: the State Department, can take issue with his views. I
Speaker 5: actually think that it is laden with innuendo and probably
Speaker 5: timed exactly as they're implying it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it probably is, but we shouldn't move on without
Speaker 4: just taking a moment to dwell on the ability of
Speaker 4: the State Department and Marco Rubio's people to apparently hold
Speaker 4: two completely contradictory things in their head at the exact
Speaker 4: same time. One is that their administration, quote is working
Speaker 4: to fight censorship domestically and champion free speech around the world.
Speaker 4: You're like, I'm sorry, you're doing what You're fighting censorship
Speaker 4: domestically by going through the social media of every college
Speaker 4: student and then trying to find anybody who's here on
Speaker 4: a visa.
Speaker 5: If every non citizen college student apparently, and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you've got a permanent resident who protested Israel's
Speaker 4: actions at Columbia, Mood Khalil, a Green card holder married
Speaker 4: to an American citizen who has an American citizen daughter
Speaker 4: who he has never seen because he is behind bars
Speaker 4: for his speech.
Speaker 3: And you every day are.
Speaker 4: Fighting censorship, Like okay, anyway, just that they could say,
Speaker 4: like the fact that they could type that up and
Speaker 4: nobody's like, this kind of come off weird to like
Speaker 4: the whole world who sees what we're doing every day.
Speaker 5: Well, it's important from their perspective messaging wise that they
Speaker 5: actually do lean into that, because their contention, it's not
Speaker 5: from their perspective morally inconsistent because their contention is that
Speaker 5: it's speech for US citizens, And so they've done things
Speaker 5: like get rid of State Department contracts with the Global
Speaker 5: Engagement Center and groups that have designed these censorship apparatus,
Speaker 5: and they what was it just last week, said that
Speaker 5: they were no longer giving visas to people who had
Speaker 5: sought to interfere with the free speech rights of Americans.
Speaker 5: So again, I disagree obviously with the os Turk and
Speaker 5: Khalil cases and the way the State Department has handled those.
Speaker 5: We've said that, We've covered that many times. But I
Speaker 5: think from their perspective, you have to lean all the
Speaker 5: way into saying that we just totally brazenly are champions
Speaker 5: of free speech, because otherwise it would imply that they
Speaker 5: think they actually are curtailing free speech.
Speaker 4: And what's amazing, though, is if you think about that,
Speaker 4: let's take let's take their explanation at face value and
Speaker 4: pretend it is on the up and up. They're saying, yeah, Okay,
Speaker 4: what we are concerned about is the speech of American citizens.
Speaker 4: If you're a foreigner here in our country, that is
Speaker 4: a privilege.
Speaker 3: Just and shut up. We don't want to hear any
Speaker 3: criticism from you.
Speaker 4: At the same time, they're telling other countries, if an
Speaker 4: American citizen is in your country, the First Amendment applies
Speaker 4: to them in your country, and they are not subject
Speaker 4: to your censorship laws.
Speaker 3: Your people, if.
Speaker 4: They come to our country, cannot criticize Israel and they
Speaker 4: are subject to our censorship rules. But when our people
Speaker 4: come to your country, they cannot be censored. Not that
Speaker 4: they would try to make anything consistent, but like, what's
Speaker 4: the principle there under which their citizens are not entitled
Speaker 4: to beach rights in our country, but we, who are
Speaker 4: the free speech champions of the world, insist that ours
Speaker 4: are entitled to it in your country.
Speaker 5: I was gonna say, the really important point is about
Speaker 5: that principle period. Because the argument that Mahmu Khalil or
Speaker 5: Mesa Ostrik are undermining the US foreign policy goals, which
Speaker 5: is the provision that Mark Rubio has used to justify
Speaker 5: revoking the visas the principle of their speech, which in
Speaker 5: Ostrich's case was a pro bds op ed about the
Speaker 5: college student government and the administration at toughts that that
Speaker 5: is somehow undermining the foreign policy of the United States,
Speaker 5: interfering with the foreign policy of the United States. Now
Speaker 5: the powers of that law are broad and actually probably
Speaker 5: should be reconsidered periods. Judge Trump said, yeah, let alone
Speaker 5: used but all those to say, the principle is that
Speaker 5: it is beyond the pale to be critical of Israel
Speaker 5: because it's hurting the foreign policy goals of the United States.
Speaker 5: And I think what you're getting into there is criticism
Speaker 5: of Israel being anti Semitic, which is something of course
Speaker 5: that has been passed in bills in Congress before that
Speaker 5: Anti Zionism is anti Semitism and is a common refrain.
Speaker 5: And that's not free speech for Americans either, even though
Speaker 5: it's being applied in this case to people who aren't
Speaker 5: American citizens. The implications down the line are setting the
Speaker 5: stage for more censorship of American citizens.
Speaker 4: And if we can tell other countries know what their
Speaker 4: speech codes and laws need to be with regard to
Speaker 4: American citizens, can we tell other countries that they must
Speaker 4: ban criticism of Israel within their countries too. Not to
Speaker 4: give ideas to anybody, but like just I mean, most
Speaker 4: of them don't need that idea. That's already they've already
Speaker 4: gone down that road.
Speaker 5: If they end up up getting rid of Darren Beatty.
Speaker 5: They can bring you in. There'll be a job open,
Speaker 5: you can come in.
Speaker 4: Well, Beattie and I have both interviewed in ron Khan.
Speaker 4: Oh really, he did the last interview with him, Ron
Speaker 4: Khan before he was jailed. BET's very good on Pakistan.
Speaker 5: Oh, that's that's quite interesting. He's an eccentric thinker.
Speaker 3: This is undoubtedly true statement I say.
Speaker 5: I was surprised when they brought even I was surprised
Speaker 5: when they brought him, all right, as the kids say, based.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's not.
Speaker 4: I don't think that Rubio was involved in bringing him in,
Speaker 4: to put it gently right, likely.
Speaker 5: Not, Maybe Michael Anton and those guys. I don't know.
Speaker 5: That's a good question. We'll see. All right. Let's move
Speaker 5: on to Joy Reid. Ryan House did MSNBC anchor. Joy
Speaker 5: Reid is sharing more of her thoughts about why she
Speaker 5: ended up getting the act just a couple of months ago.
Speaker 5: Let's roll this first clip of Joy read in conversation
Speaker 5: with Katie Kirk.
Speaker 16: I got to you know, NBC and I Twitter back
Speaker 16: in two thousand. I think I joined an eight or
Speaker 16: nine and the bosses were horrified, and anytime I would
Speaker 16: tweet anything, I would get calls I would get.
Speaker 5: Please get off Twitter. We hate it.
Speaker 16: They just they don't like that it pulls their talent
Speaker 16: and their reporters out of their control because now you're
Speaker 16: not running what you're tweeting through standards and practices. It's
Speaker 16: giving your personality directly to the audience, which they don't
Speaker 16: like because it's no longer managed and curated by them,
Speaker 16: and they don't want people breaking news.
Speaker 5: I'm just not realizing that Katie Kirk has that famous
Speaker 5: picture of Joan Didion framed behind her on her podcast set,
Speaker 5: which is just to be fair, I have a Joan
Speaker 5: Diddion book on our set back here, but that's just
Speaker 5: Katie Kirk with the Joan Didion portrait. Is something just
Speaker 5: really getting under my skin this morning, Ryan, But that's
Speaker 5: neither here nor there, Joy.
Speaker 3: Read guest hosts right while Sager's.
Speaker 5: Out Katie Kirk, Kirk or Joy Read right, Hey, hey,
Speaker 5: you bring your men, see what happens. It's a it's
Speaker 5: a fine line between I've always said this, between Katie
Speaker 5: Kirk and Sager and Jetty they share many similarities. Yeah,
Speaker 5: so it's something I think about now be fun together, Yes, yes,
Speaker 5: something to somebody to think about producers. I know you're listening,
Speaker 5: but joy Read makes a fairly interesting case in this clip,
Speaker 5: by the way, and I will not be rescinding any
Speaker 5: of my criticisms of joy Read whatsoever. But she makes
Speaker 5: an interesting case about MSNBC in this clip, which is
Speaker 5: that she didn't have the worst ratings at MSNBC, which
Speaker 5: is a low bar. By the way, she says to
Speaker 5: Katie Kirk, I wasn't told the ratings were terrible. It's
Speaker 5: something you did. You tweeted a terrible thing. She said.
Speaker 5: She had been being quote extra careful on social media
Speaker 5: at the time because there was a real anxiety, she
Speaker 5: said about it, and that's kind of interesting. She says,
Speaker 5: it wasn't the ratings because we had just a ratings
Speaker 5: meeting a couple of weeks before that, talking about the
Speaker 5: fact that our show, other than Rachel Mattow, we were
Speaker 5: down the least after Tramp's the election win. So being
Speaker 5: down the least, but it's actually an interesting point because
Speaker 5: it's not as though, now that we have a few
Speaker 5: months in hindsight, it is not as though MSNBC is
Speaker 5: actually trying to change its brand. It's not as though
Speaker 5: so when I saw the firing of Joy Reid, and
Speaker 5: I was like, this is this is interesting because Joy
Speaker 5: Reid was I think symbolically a very powerful representation of
Speaker 5: and maybe we disagree on this, but where MSNBC went
Speaker 5: wrong during the Trump years, which was this kind of
Speaker 5: sanctimonious doubling down on being the voice of truth and
Speaker 5: facts and nobody else could possibly or nobody who disagrees
Speaker 5: with me is on the side of truth or facts.
Speaker 5: I'm on the side of truth or facts, and I
Speaker 5: will tell you what's right and what's wrong. And I
Speaker 5: thought maybe that they were getting rid of Joy Reid
Speaker 5: because they were trying, you know, however ham fistedly to
Speaker 5: go in a different direction. But they're definitely not really
Speaker 5: doing that. They haven't really made any significant changes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't Joy as being.
Speaker 4: Differentiating herself in that crowd of people during the first
Speaker 4: Trump You think she had the same kind of approach
Speaker 4: as almost all of them did. The thing that did
Speaker 4: differentiate her from the pack was that she was consistently
Speaker 4: critical of.
Speaker 3: Israel's assault on Gaza.
Speaker 4: Like that was If you try to think about the
Speaker 4: things that make her different than other hosts, either on
Speaker 4: CNN or MSNBC, that's the only one that I can
Speaker 4: think of.
Speaker 5: So she doesn't cite that. She says, quote, I'm a
Speaker 5: black woman doing the thing, you know what I mean,
Speaker 5: And so I'm not different from Mattow or Nicole Wallace.
Speaker 5: But quote, I think that there's a difference for Trump
Speaker 5: and hearing the kinds of criticism, specifically out of a
Speaker 5: black woman.
Speaker 3: That is true, it.
Speaker 5: Bothers them in a way, doesn't bother him like anything else.
Speaker 5: She says there's a fear of him, implying at MSNBC,
Speaker 5: we're seeing it everywhere. Uh now, I'll have.
Speaker 3: To think she's right about that. Like, sorry, Trump people,
Speaker 3: I think she.
Speaker 5: Is really that Trump has some issue.
Speaker 4: Black women being critical of him hits harder for him
Speaker 4: than like a Rachel Maddow or certainly hits harder than
Speaker 4: like a white guy, especially good looking white.
Speaker 5: Well, I guess this is a little bit different. But
Speaker 5: the man he hates more than anyone else is Chuck Todd.
Speaker 5: Chuck Todd seems to be just about anyone he likes.
Speaker 4: Some of the other guys like who wrote the Enemy
Speaker 4: of the People book, people book, the CNN guy Jim Acosta.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, like he loves you can tell he loves.
Speaker 5: He loves going back and forth with Jim Acosta.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because he's that's a handsome newsman right there, you're
Speaker 4: fake news.
Speaker 5: To isn't exactly out of central casting.
Speaker 4: True, he wants them out of central casting. He wants
Speaker 4: his enemies to be good looking white eyes.
Speaker 5: Now remind me. So I'm looking at this right now
Speaker 5: because MSNBC was spun off of so Comcast spun off
Speaker 5: its portfolio of cable news networks and that includes MSNBC.
Speaker 5: This was announced back in November. Reid was let go.
Speaker 5: That was what earlier the spring, roughly around March ish.
Speaker 5: So that's why at the time I thought maybe MSNBC
Speaker 5: was just going in a different direction, which by the way,
Speaker 5: would mean it actually would mean getting rid of Nicole
Speaker 5: Wallace or at least like turning down the volume on
Speaker 5: the entire the Scarborough, the Scarborough Brazizinski disaster, which is I.
Speaker 3: Know, like they all have to go, right, Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 5: If they're trying to brand differently, at least you would.
Speaker 5: But but so she's saying she's basically lumping in the
Speaker 5: CBS settlement and other settlements, what ABC's Stephanopolis settlement and
Speaker 5: implying that MSNBC might have a similar fear.
Speaker 3: Now, which I think is also true.
Speaker 5: It's interesting because it's it's a question of whether Comcast
Speaker 5: still has so where they are in the process of
Speaker 5: actually spinning MSNBC off, is Comcast is there is there
Speaker 5: implication that Comcast is afraid or is it the MSNBC.
Speaker 5: Because MSNBC is a left of center network, I don't
Speaker 5: think would be particularly afraid unless they're trying to get sold.
Speaker 5: Because that was another thing. Elon Musk was flirting with
Speaker 5: the possibility that maybe he would buy MSNBC. But you
Speaker 5: could easily see another like right wing billionaire doesn't have
Speaker 5: to be Elon Musk swooping in and buying MSNBC. And
Speaker 5: then at the time if they were trying to like
Speaker 5: ready it as a property for an acquisition, maybe that's
Speaker 5: what's going on, or maybe it's just hard to work with.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it was the Comcast stuff.
Speaker 4: Like Comcast is a terrible business whose the entire existence
Speaker 4: depends on large s for from the government regulatory for
Speaker 4: the most part, and so that is like the most
Speaker 4: vulnerable kind of company. So you don't want to anger
Speaker 4: the king, you know, if you depend on the king.
Speaker 5: I don't know. I just Joey read. Yeah, I guess
Speaker 5: we'd probably disagree on this, but I've found her to
Speaker 5: be one of the more difficult, one of the representations
Speaker 5: of a lot of the stuff that went wrong during
Speaker 5: Trump era journalism, and to her credit, one of the
Speaker 5: more interesting things she did. She would have conservatives, right wingers,
Speaker 5: mega people on and she made compelling television because she fought,
Speaker 5: and that's something that I think people like Rachel Mattow
Speaker 5: and Chris Hayes and Nicole Wallace I suppose should do
Speaker 5: more of. So I definitely give her credit for I agree.
Speaker 4: Actually, I think the blue Maga stuff is totally fine
Speaker 4: to do as as content if you're going to have
Speaker 4: people arguing with you on there.
Speaker 3: Right now, it's not my kind of thing.
Speaker 4: It's not what I would want to watch, but like,
Speaker 4: if you're going to debate it out with people and
Speaker 4: then the fine, it's it's the it's the blue Maga
Speaker 4: echo chamber stuff that becomes really corrosive.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I agree with that. Rachel Mattow I think has
Speaker 5: sadly fallen prey to though. I just think Rachel Matto
Speaker 5: is really smart and talented journalist and has.
Speaker 4: Her monologues are always the long, like ten minute long
Speaker 4: thing she does the top.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was fun.
Speaker 5: Well, they were also like masterfully crafted and the writing
Speaker 5: was like extremely compelling if you were watching some of those.
Speaker 3: Where is this going? Where's this going?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: The Trump one monologue that Rachel Mattow would do, which
Speaker 5: became kind of famous or infamous, but probably infamous after
Speaker 5: she claimed to have Trump's tax returns and all of
Speaker 5: Washington was watching. I even watched that, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 5: that night and it was like Heraldo at the vault
Speaker 5: by the end of it, like she had her scoop
Speaker 5: was like way over hyped what she actually had. But
Speaker 5: the writing was just masterful. So it's sad when people
Speaker 5: get kind of sucked into the universe where they just
Speaker 5: have purged anyone who might disagree. I think the best
Speaker 5: segment on the debate between porn, the debate over whether
Speaker 5: there's porn in schools and the library controversies is between
Speaker 5: Joy Read and Tiffany Justice on Joy Reads on the
Speaker 5: NBC Show, And I recommend everybody watch that.
Speaker 4: It's good because like it forces them both to learn
Speaker 4: what the other side knows and understands and thinks and.
Speaker 3: That before you can rebut it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So up next, we've got Wanda vid Rojas, who's that conservative,
Speaker 4: like kind of a heterodox conservative.
Speaker 5: I don't even know.
Speaker 4: If writer when it comes to Latin American politics roughly.
Speaker 5: I mean he's conservative on immigration policies. I wonder we
Speaker 5: maybe we should ask him how he sees himself. But
Speaker 5: he does fantastically interesting and heterodox coverage of Latin American
Speaker 5: politics from Ecuador to Venezuela, to Cuba and to Mexico
Speaker 5: as well, and has been on a tear recently with
Speaker 5: some interesting coverage of Claudia Schinbaum front of the show
Speaker 5: and also the world friend of the World Venezuela. We
Speaker 5: particularly want to dive into a story he's written on
Speaker 5: Venezuela because happening under the surface Parklading, under the surface
Speaker 5: of this administration is a divide over how to approach
Speaker 5: Venezuela between like the Rick Gurnell, Laura Lumer camp and
Speaker 5: the old school cold Warriors. So we're going to dive
Speaker 5: into all that with Wanda vid Ross right after this.
Speaker 5: As promised, we're joined now by Wanda vid Rojas, who
Speaker 5: writes at Compact one. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 7: Thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 5: Well, let's start with F two, which is a recent
Speaker 5: piece that you wrote for Compact that both Ryan and
Speaker 5: I found really interesting. The headline is Laura Lumer is
Speaker 5: right about Venezuela. But the story behind that and what
Speaker 5: exactly Laura Lumer is right about is really important because
Speaker 5: just last week there was significant controversy over whether Chevron
Speaker 5: should get a real authorization to continue doing drilling in
Speaker 5: Venezuela basically, and that pitted Rick Grenell against the Marca
Speaker 5: Rubio kind of cold warrior camp, and in a really
Speaker 5: interesting way because we hear from Rubio. Actually I literally
Speaker 5: just heard from Rubio last night at the American Compass
Speaker 5: Gallus saying that people are still clinging to the Cold War,
Speaker 5: that we had these Cold War policies meant to prevent uprisings,
Speaker 5: and then we kept those Cold War policies going forward,
Speaker 5: and you can you started assume in that context he
Speaker 5: was speaking generally, but that he was thinking about Ukraine
Speaker 5: in particular. But Venezuela and Cuba, which we're going to
Speaker 5: talk about as well, are good examples of this too.
Speaker 5: So one, can you tell us a bit about what's
Speaker 5: percolating under the surface of the Trump administration as it
Speaker 5: relates to Venezuela and maybe more broadly Latin America, because
Speaker 5: this is I think a really really important and underappreciated
Speaker 5: part of what's happening over at state.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's a great point.
Speaker 17: I mean, now that I think about, I saw that
Speaker 17: common elsewhere from Rubio as well. But yeah, that definitely
Speaker 17: doesn't apply to Latin America for him. You know, he's
Speaker 17: an old school Miami Hawk and his former constituents here
Speaker 17: in the state of Florida. I live in Fort Lauderdale.
Speaker 17: A lot of the only thing they care about is
Speaker 17: regime change in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. And so you
Speaker 17: have this tug of war within the administration that's really
Speaker 17: interesting between you know, hawks like him, and then like
Speaker 17: in Congress there's the three Republican representatives for South Florida,
Speaker 17: madri Madea, Elvida Sare and Carlos Emenes and yeah, all,
Speaker 17: like I said, all they care about is regime change,
Speaker 17: and so any like new sanctions, any like you know,
Speaker 17: sort of favors or benefits that Venezuela, Cuba could.
Speaker 7: Get in this case, since twenty twenty two.
Speaker 17: Biden has allowed Chevron to pump oil in Venezuela. They
Speaker 17: have a license which allows them, you know, to explore
Speaker 17: in Venezuelan waters, and both administrations to get around the
Speaker 17: same time for a long time, right, And when Trump
Speaker 17: got in, I just assumed that he, you know, they
Speaker 17: would just you know, go maximum pressure again on Venezuela.
Speaker 17: But what we saw is that the immigration hawks actually
Speaker 17: were open to dialogue because they wanted to be able
Speaker 17: to de poor people direct directly to Venezuela, which you know,
Speaker 17: they they weren't authorizing.
Speaker 5: They're voting back and forth.
Speaker 7: Thies I was.
Speaker 5: Going to say one just quickly, the TPS revocation of
Speaker 5: that status temporary. Yeah, of course, three hundred and fifty
Speaker 5: thousand Venezuelans, so the number of deportations that they require
Speaker 5: cooperation with Venezuela otherwise they need to find other countries
Speaker 5: to send literally tens of thousands of people to. That's
Speaker 5: how high stakes it is for them, exactly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's super urgent.
Speaker 17: And so you've had this tug of war between the
Speaker 17: because there's these slim margins in the House of Representatives,
Speaker 17: they just have a two seed majority, so those three
Speaker 17: congressmen can sink basically anything that they want. So in February,
Speaker 17: they threatened to not vote for what was the continuing resolution,
Speaker 17: the like February.
Speaker 3: Budget when there's gonna be a shutdown.
Speaker 17: So the administration said, oh, okay, we're not gonna or
Speaker 17: renew Chevron's license. Then they backpedaled and actually did, and
Speaker 17: then so the Hawks got upset, and uh, you.
Speaker 7: Know, we could talk about that more in depth.
Speaker 4: Well, the key moment comes when Venice, when they when
Speaker 4: they do pull the license, I guess you know. However, briefly,
Speaker 4: Venezuela then pauses taking deportation flights and then the Trump
Speaker 4: administration sends them to Al Salvador instead.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, to walk through how.
Speaker 4: This like pivotal moment in the Trump administration's immigration and
Speaker 4: foreign policy ends up getting decided by these kind of
Speaker 4: three counter revolutionary like South Florida Republicans who could not
Speaker 4: be more the kind of counter to America. First, if
Speaker 4: you try to design it in a lab like that
Speaker 4: they are, they are very explicit that their most important
Speaker 4: priority is Cuba, and then Venezuela, yeah, and then and
Speaker 4: then Nicarwaga and then eventually at some point you get
Speaker 4: down to the North American country of the United States
Speaker 4: of America.
Speaker 17: Yeah, it's horrible because it was definitely a contributing factor.
Speaker 17: I mean, you know, Steven Miller doesn't need all that
Speaker 17: much help to do his own psycho stuff. But you know,
Speaker 17: they they were for like a brief period, a few
Speaker 17: weeks because in days after Trump assumed office, they cut
Speaker 17: this deal with Maduro. Okay, you know, we'll renew of
Speaker 17: the license if you agree to take deportees. And they
Speaker 17: did for a time. Then they renagged and so, okay,
Speaker 17: we can't send people to Venezuela. All right, well let's
Speaker 17: send them, send them to El Salvador. And was really
Speaker 17: horrible is that? At least, according to multiple investigations, one
Speaker 17: from The New York Times another from ABC, at least
Speaker 17: two hundred of the two hundred and thirty eight Venezuelans
Speaker 17: that they sent to a maximum security gang prison in
Speaker 17: El Salvador had no criminal records in the US and Columbia, Chile, Peru,
Speaker 17: a ton of different countries.
Speaker 7: They were really thorough.
Speaker 17: The administration denies this, but they also have refused to
Speaker 17: release the names or the you know, supposedly Hanu's crimes
Speaker 17: that these people committed. To be fair, around like two
Speaker 17: dozen actually had credible, you know, associations as being a
Speaker 17: gang numbers and committed crimes. Yeah, but the I mean,
Speaker 17: this is just completely incompetent, and it's like, why would
Speaker 17: they do this? If you know, I would dispute the
Speaker 17: use of the Alien Enemies Act because you know, they
Speaker 17: said that that you know, they were terrorists and that
Speaker 17: Venezuela's conducting this invasion of the US through what uh
Speaker 17: So I think that you know, using Alien Enemies Act
Speaker 17: is wrong. But at least if they sent actual criminals,
Speaker 17: you could say, okay, all right, well why are we
Speaker 17: going to cry over criminals? And it just completely undermines
Speaker 17: their case. And it's also been a huge boon to Maduro,
Speaker 17: like you know, he just goes out on TV. It's like,
Speaker 17: look at this, these forced disappearances to El Salvador. Look
Speaker 17: at how complicit the Venezuelan opposition is. And he's right
Speaker 17: because the Venezuelan opposition can't criticize Trump because he's their
Speaker 17: chief political and financial backers. So it's been a colossal
Speaker 17: debacle where lumor comes in, that's really funny is that
Speaker 17: her and this Florida businessman wanted to renew the Chevron's
Speaker 17: license because they're saying, hey, you know, Trump has this
Speaker 17: agenda of energy abundance, we should be exploiting Venezuela's oil,
Speaker 17: not in not China because most of Venezuela's oil exports
Speaker 17: go to China. Obviously, she doesn't really care about, you know,
Speaker 17: the deportations at El Salvado or anything like that. But
Speaker 17: you know, in a very narrow sense, she's you know,
Speaker 17: completely right. I mean, on its own term, sanctions have
Speaker 17: not achieved their intended goal of regime change, and it's
Speaker 17: just not going to happen, So why are we doing this?
Speaker 17: It just makes Venezuela more miserable. And yet, if anything,
Speaker 17: improving conditions.
Speaker 7: There by allowing more economic activity, would deter migration.
Speaker 3: And you know, there's something similar going on in Cuba.
Speaker 4: We can put up f F one here, which is
Speaker 4: this political article about how you know where they say
Speaker 4: it's Cuba. Cuba tried to improve its relations with the
Speaker 4: US by cooperating with Trump's deportation flights.
Speaker 3: It didn't work.
Speaker 4: Cuba is facing sanctions and terror designations that make what
Speaker 4: the US is doing to Venezuela seem almost almost friendly.
Speaker 4: You've had an unspeakably large exodus of people from Cuba
Speaker 4: to the United States and to other countries or you know,
Speaker 4: in the in the hemisphere. People are reporting losing like
Speaker 4: enormous amounts of weight, like just there isn't enough food
Speaker 4: to go around. Healthcare and healthcare is just is completely
Speaker 4: collapsing because the sanctions and the and the terror designation
Speaker 4: means you can't get spare parts even like from Europe
Speaker 4: or or anywhere else. Nobody wants to bank or do
Speaker 4: business with Cuba. So they thought, okay, let's let's cooperate
Speaker 4: on these deportation flights, and and that will that will
Speaker 4: end up benefiting us it had it has not. The
Speaker 4: same hardline approach is still being taken to Cuba. I
Speaker 4: actually think, and you know, it's become a kind of
Speaker 4: a mantra that you know, it's been sixty years almost
Speaker 4: and we've been doing the same policy and we haven't
Speaker 4: gotten regime change. I think it's actually possible, given the
Speaker 4: absolute dire state of the situation in Cuba, that they
Speaker 4: may actually accomplish their goal in the near term, Like
Speaker 4: there could be complete collapse of the Cuban regime.
Speaker 3: I don't know, but it like there isn't much left
Speaker 3: holding it up.
Speaker 4: That being a long term goal of the United States,
Speaker 4: and now maybe even being in sight, what on earth
Speaker 4: would happen.
Speaker 3: Let's say they get their wish.
Speaker 4: I would imagine that creating another Haiti, creating a failed
Speaker 4: state on that island does not have the kind of
Speaker 4: immigration consequences that the United States immigration.
Speaker 3: Hawks would want.
Speaker 4: So let's talk a little bit about this weird country
Speaker 4: action at the heart of the rights approach to immigration.
Speaker 4: We're on the one hand, they want no migration or
Speaker 4: very little legal migration. On the other hand, they want
Speaker 4: these hard line policies toward Latin America that that cut
Speaker 4: off development and create failed states and plumbing economies that
Speaker 4: then produce mass exoduses of migrants towards the United States.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 17: And you know, historically, and when we're talking about like
Speaker 17: what I call Miami neocons, they actually supported an open
Speaker 17: door policy with regards to Cubans, and you know, they
Speaker 17: had to backpedal more so with Venezuelans.
Speaker 7: But you know, this makes perfect sense.
Speaker 17: I mean, most people of Cuban descent Venezuela and the
Speaker 17: dead the Broguan descent are extremely hard line with regards
Speaker 17: to foreign policy towards their home countries, are extremely conservative.
Speaker 17: And you know, you have what's called the Cuban Adjustment Act,
Speaker 17: which is basically any Cuban who manages to stay here
Speaker 17: for more than a year and a day is automatically
Speaker 17: granted residency. And this is you know, just electorally. It's
Speaker 17: great for Florida Republicans, and it's something that you know,
Speaker 17: exactly exactly I've argued against it.
Speaker 7: It's it is a magnet.
Speaker 17: For a ton of people on the island, and conditions
Speaker 17: are very dire. As you've said, it's something like two
Speaker 17: million at least have left since twenty twenty one. And
Speaker 17: you know, in the case of Venezuela, this is something
Speaker 17: I push back on some of my anti imperialist friends
Speaker 17: who say that, you know, the country's collapse, so it's
Speaker 17: just due to sanctions. Well, that's not entirely true, because
Speaker 17: Venezuela is an oil estate, and their economy collapse before
Speaker 17: we impose sanctions on the royal sector in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 17: You know, twenty fourteen, the price of oil dropped massively,
Speaker 17: and you know, millions of people had already left before
Speaker 17: we impose sanctions. That said, imposing sanctions obviously will make
Speaker 17: things worse. Worse against sanctions whole scale. The case of
Speaker 17: Cuba is another story. The current crisis has definitely been
Speaker 17: caused by sanctions, specifically putting them on the State Sponsors
Speaker 17: of Terrorism list, which is something that went back and forth.
Speaker 17: Trump put them on the list, and the last days
Speaker 17: of his presidency, like January twenty twenty one, Biden took
Speaker 17: them off days before leaving office, and then Trump put
Speaker 17: them back on the first day. Their economy is completely
Speaker 17: dependent on tourism and putting them on that list means
Speaker 17: that basically no one can do business with them, cruise
Speaker 17: ships and all the like. And actually Biden imposed further
Speaker 17: rules like that European tourists would have to report that
Speaker 17: they've been to Cuba. This is something that drops I
Speaker 17: reported on, Yeah, that they've traveled to a Cuban Obviously
Speaker 17: that's going to be a deterrent to tourism.
Speaker 5: Well. And one, this is so interesting because the Trump
Speaker 5: administration and kind of seems like a two thousand and
Speaker 5: nine era Obama is on this reset tour of the
Speaker 5: Cold War. At least some people in the Trump administration
Speaker 5: would love to reset American foreign policy from the pattern
Speaker 5: that we were stuck in for decades during the Cold War.
Speaker 5: And that applies to Ukraine policy, it applies to NATO policy,
Speaker 5: it applies to certainly Eastern Europe. But when it comes
Speaker 5: to Cuba, very very close around the backyard, Cuba does
Speaker 5: have is some measure of cooperation with China. Venezuela has
Speaker 5: some measure of cooperation with Iran in China as well,
Speaker 5: So it's not all on the US side, although we
Speaker 5: could go back into the tit for tat who pushed
Speaker 5: them into the arms of Iran and all of that.
Speaker 5: But all I'm saying is it does seem like the
Speaker 5: time is ripe for the Grenelles and Laura Loomers to
Speaker 5: make an argument that a Cuba reset or a Venezuela
Speaker 5: reset would be in the American interest. I think about
Speaker 5: like Mara Gaza, Like what about Mara Havana, Like it
Speaker 5: just seems like there's an argument sitting there to be
Speaker 5: made to Trump about what can happen going forward. But
Speaker 5: I guess as long as you have Mariel virus Salazar
Speaker 5: and others. It seems like maybe there's just no path
Speaker 5: to that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, funny story.
Speaker 17: I actually found an article that quoted Trump in like
Speaker 17: the nineteen eighties and he said, yeah, something along the lines, Oh,
Speaker 17: I'd love to build a hotel in Havana.
Speaker 5: Huh.
Speaker 7: So, yeah, there's an opening there.
Speaker 17: But unfortunately, Yeah, the Miami lobby is extremely powerful. I'm
Speaker 17: all for pragmatism.
Speaker 5: I think that what are the politics of that in
Speaker 5: South Florida? By the way, so just since you're there
Speaker 5: to talk a little bit about that too as well.
Speaker 17: Yeah, it's uh, you know, these people are my neighbors,
Speaker 17: and I understand where they're coming from.
Speaker 7: Actually, some of them, you know, actually lived.
Speaker 17: Through really horrible things that were persecuted by these guys
Speaker 17: of governments. Some of them were tortured all these regimes.
Speaker 17: One thing that they'll do is that they'll withhold food
Speaker 17: to families in order to coerce them, you know, to
Speaker 17: vote for them or you know, attend rallies and stuff
Speaker 17: like that. So I genuinely get where they're coming from
Speaker 17: in the same way that I completely understand where a
Speaker 17: lot of the anti imperialists, both internationally and like in
Speaker 17: you know, in the governments of these countries, like you know,
Speaker 17: Cuba for a long time was basically a vassal of
Speaker 17: the US mob and interests were huge. They had didn't
Speaker 17: have control of their own trading policy until trade policy
Speaker 17: until like nineteen thirty four. But through the plat Amendment,
Speaker 17: I mean, really horrible stuff. It's it's kind of obvious
Speaker 17: that the revolution in fifty nine happened, but you know,
Speaker 17: and through a lot of it also there was just
Speaker 17: like dictators that were just kind of stooges of the US.
Speaker 17: So I get it. But because like the each side
Speaker 17: is so like maximal. On the one hand, you know,
Speaker 17: like the Cuban or Venezuelan regime is like, oh, because
Speaker 17: there's sanctions that gives us free rein to just you know,
Speaker 17: kill people on the streets and prisoner torture them. Uh,
Speaker 17: And then the neocons just say, oh, well, look they're
Speaker 17: killing and torturing people, so we need to impose sanctions.
Speaker 7: This is just the circular loop that's pointless.
Speaker 4: And I wanted to pick up on something you said
Speaker 4: earlier about the way that this has really been a
Speaker 4: drag on the Venezuelan opposition because it it feels like
Speaker 4: systematically across the globe, Trump is hurting his allies and
Speaker 4: boot and boosting his adversaries. We just saw in South Korea,
Speaker 4: you know, the left center, yeah, winning the presidential election there,
Speaker 4: which you know, the Bannons of the world are calling,
Speaker 4: you know, Korea having fallen.
Speaker 3: To the CCP.
Speaker 4: But certainly the tariff, the you know, Trump's tariff threats
Speaker 4: to that region dragged down the Trump the Trump aligned
Speaker 4: conservative candidate.
Speaker 3: Australia saw you know, lefties win there.
Speaker 4: Canada saw its conservative movement just completely collapse. And now, yeah,
Speaker 4: in Venezuela, you've got Machado, who is being pushed on
Speaker 4: this question of what do you know, are you with
Speaker 4: venezuel As sovereignty or or are you actually an agent
Speaker 4: of a foreign government? And you know what had what
Speaker 4: has been her response and what's been the kind of
Speaker 4: the response of the public to that.
Speaker 17: So the day, i think the day after days after
Speaker 17: they those Sea Caught deportations, she issued a statement on
Speaker 17: x saying that something along the lines of the Venezuelan
Speaker 17: should not be treated all as criminals. But she didn't
Speaker 17: actually you know, verbalize any sort of opposition, you know,
Speaker 17: put into words that like okay, you know, like the
Speaker 17: Sea Caught episode was not a good thing. So it
Speaker 17: just kind of up in the air. And she has
Speaker 17: since still just told the line of the administration that
Speaker 17: oh Maduro is the head of danda Agua and is
Speaker 17: directing an invasion, which.
Speaker 7: Is just completely insane.
Speaker 17: There's been protests in Venezuela, rightfully so from the family
Speaker 17: members of people that are you know, like now contempted
Speaker 17: to life in prison inside the secote against Bouchele and
Speaker 17: against Trump. You actually had this Bouquele said that he'd
Speaker 17: be willing to do a prisoner swap of the Sea
Speaker 17: Cottu prisoners for if Maduro released a bunch of an
Speaker 17: equivalent number of political prisoners. And so that was just
Speaker 17: kind of a spectacle for the two leaders. Uh Maduro
Speaker 17: actually a few weeks ago uh paraded this like little kid,
Speaker 17: the child of one of the Scott deportees, who they
Speaker 17: didn't send to Venezuela because they were worried for her safety.
Speaker 17: But then they send the mom and then they sent
Speaker 17: the kid, and so Adera was saying, thank you, Donald Trump,
Speaker 17: You're in a beauty of this. But we brought back
Speaker 17: so and so and it's just it's something else.
Speaker 3: Yeah so she so.
Speaker 4: Uh, while we while we have you, I did want
Speaker 4: to ask you about another really good piece you had.
Speaker 3: This was for the Liberal Patriot.
Speaker 4: If we can put up just the final element here,
Speaker 4: what the what democrats can learn from Arena which is
Speaker 4: the party of Amlo and Claudia Shinbaum and you had ah,
Speaker 4: you had a Let me see if I can find
Speaker 4: the deck to this article too. That the subtitle was,
Speaker 4: it sounded like it's written for Breaking Points. The Mexican
Speaker 4: left combined ideological diversity on cultural issues with a shared
Speaker 4: populist division on material concerns, which it's sort of like
Speaker 4: what Breaking Points has been screaming for years would be
Speaker 4: an effective policy from either party. Uh, you know, ideological
Speaker 4: diversity on cultural issues a big tent there, and populous
Speaker 4: vision on material concerns. So what can you tell us
Speaker 4: beyond the headline that you know, for people who were
Speaker 4: just like hey, hey go Cloudia, but like what what
Speaker 4: what beyond that did Amloan Cloudia do effectively that Democrats
Speaker 4: could learn from and also frankly, that Trump could learn from,
Speaker 4: because he seems to have his own odd set of
Speaker 4: admiration for both of those figures.
Speaker 7: Yeah, funny story.
Speaker 17: Last night I got a notification from a pro Morena
Speaker 17: outlet saying that Caroline Lovitt defended shame Bomb that the
Speaker 17: Washington Post ran some sort of I meant to send
Speaker 17: you this. Actually, the Washington Post ran some sort of
Speaker 17: article that uh vuntional seizures at the border had mysteriously declined,
Speaker 17: and so Caroline Levitt was asked about that, and she said,
Speaker 17: it's not mysteriou is, it's because of our tough stance
Speaker 17: on the border and our strong relationship with President Claudia Shamebaum.
Speaker 7: So that was kind of funny, that is and.
Speaker 3: Probably like but let's be real, like that's probably true.
Speaker 3: Like ye, absolutely, state does have more control.
Speaker 4: Both states have more control over fentanyl flows. Then I
Speaker 4: think that they let on.
Speaker 17: Yeah yeah, well, and this is actually a really good
Speaker 17: uh yeah segue into that article. Shane Baum has done
Speaker 17: something really interesting. It's not entirely a U turn, but
Speaker 17: it's been framed that way.
Speaker 7: Well, it is. It is kind of a turn.
Speaker 17: She has taken away tougher stance on security than omlo
Speaker 17: ever did, and I think this is a lesson for
Speaker 17: progressive I'm a big critic of a progressive crime policy.
Speaker 7: Uh, and I love what he did.
Speaker 17: He actually, it's it's not quite entirely correct to say
Speaker 17: that it was like soft on crime. It was kind
Speaker 17: of soft on the cartel's. But in public security, for instance,
Speaker 17: if you go to Mexico's security is very militarized, and
Speaker 17: you see like a lot of troops, you'll see like
Speaker 17: these trucks with like soldiers standing on the back with
Speaker 17: these machine guns. But with regards to the cartels, he
Speaker 17: took a more hands off policy. His view was that
Speaker 17: the previous governments had, you know, they declared a war
Speaker 17: on the narcos, and this just exploded violence. Before two
Speaker 17: thousand and seven, when Felipe Don't, a former president, came in,
Speaker 17: Mexico actually had a pretty low homicide rate equivalent to
Speaker 17: the US of like seven per one. And he came
Speaker 17: in and within months sused, we're gonna bring out the military,
Speaker 17: We're gonna go after the cartels, and this just exploded
Speaker 17: violence and it hasn't really improved much since. When came in,
Speaker 17: he said, Okay, we're gonna shift the strategy. We're going
Speaker 17: to deprioritize seizing drugs, and going after Kingkins.
Speaker 7: We're kind of gonna do damage control.
Speaker 17: So when there's an outbreak of violence with the cartels,
Speaker 17: we're just going to send these huge deployments of soldiers
Speaker 17: to try to quell the violence. According to official figures,
Speaker 17: homicides went down like ten percent during his government, but
Speaker 17: disappearances were still huge, and this was a huge criticism
Speaker 17: against his government. Also, the critique was that it allowed
Speaker 17: cartels to, you expand their control over parts of the country.
Speaker 7: What Shane Baum has done is that.
Speaker 17: She's taken a more She's taken a tougher approach, but
Speaker 17: also a more strategic one.
Speaker 7: So she's prioritizing going after like the mid level guys
Speaker 7: in charge of logistics within cartels, and it really prioritized
Speaker 7: drug seizures because one of the problems was that AMLO
Speaker 7: got rid of the fay and Alis, which a lot
Speaker 7: of people might be familiar with from the movies, replaced
Speaker 7: it with the National Guard. The National Guard was a
Speaker 7: military not a police entity, and so they didn't really
Speaker 7: have the training to do like investigative work and like
Speaker 7: seizing drugs was a problem. So she's looked to professionalize
Speaker 7: the National Guard and is also looking to create an
Speaker 7: investigative police. In Mexico, things are a bit different.
Speaker 10: You have.
Speaker 17: The police don't investigate crimes, it's the prosecutors to do.
Speaker 7: So she's created this.
Speaker 17: Her security minister announced a few weeks ago the creation
Speaker 17: of an investigative.
Speaker 7: Police, and so far the results have been pretty good.
Speaker 7: Drug seizures on.
Speaker 17: The Mexican side have really gone up and homicides have
Speaker 17: gone down around twenty percent.
Speaker 7: So that's extremely promising.
Speaker 4: What's all happening pretty out in the open, So i'd imagine,
Speaker 4: if you know, there be a lot of gains to
Speaker 4: make out of the gate.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 17: Yeah, And to be fair, yeah, a lot of this
Speaker 17: is due to pressure from the Trump administration through tariffs
Speaker 17: and the like whatnot. But going back to the point
Speaker 17: of the piece as to like what democrats can learn
Speaker 17: from what Ana, Yeah, that article is kind of a
Speaker 17: ten year history of the party. Was founded in twenty
Speaker 17: fourteen and in ten years, Wow, they managed to basically
Speaker 17: take over the whole country. And he, you know, some
Speaker 17: people like would dispute this. I like to say that
Speaker 17: he was a traditionalist and he didn't really care a
Speaker 17: lot about social issues. I think that personally he was
Speaker 17: kind of conservative on some of the leg LGBT issues
Speaker 17: and stuff, but it wasn't really the focus of his politics.
Speaker 17: And the focus of his politics was all material raising
Speaker 17: the minimum wage, backing unions, securing Mexico's energy sovereignty. And
Speaker 17: that's a good lesson that I like to critique progressives on.
Speaker 17: I think the climate change is very important, but working
Speaker 17: class people have a very different view of the energy transition.
Speaker 17: They think that, yeah, we should invest in renewables, and
Speaker 17: that's great. Below prices are really the priority you want
Speaker 17: to have in all of the above approach. And that's
Speaker 17: something that the liberal patriot really hammers home all the time.
Speaker 17: It's better in the long run if we just invest
Speaker 17: in renewables, don't you know, generate a backlash among workers
Speaker 17: and bring down energy prices instead of trying to go
Speaker 17: full speed ahead and you know, go in on renewables
Speaker 17: which are unreliable. You know, the sun isn't always shining,
Speaker 17: the wind isn't always blowing. Uh and in South Florida
Speaker 17: exactly exactly, So what Morena has. The policy of Morena was,
Speaker 17: you know, we need to secure the needs of workers Omlow.
Speaker 17: He prioritized refining after previous administrations had decided, you know,
Speaker 17: they were just going to import oil from the US
Speaker 17: and this brought down prices. He you know, he built
Speaker 17: this huge oil refinery in his home state of Talasco.
Speaker 17: And Shane Baum, well, she's a climate scientist. She cares
Speaker 17: about renewables. But so far she's been very practical, and
Speaker 17: especially because of the terriffs, that's forced her to prioritize
Speaker 17: energy sovereignty. So her government is promoting partnerships and renewables
Speaker 17: and public private partnerships and renewables and in fossil fuels.
Speaker 17: Carlos Slim is actually a significant backer of a BANDMICS,
Speaker 17: the state oil company, which has had huge problems.
Speaker 4: Want to beat Rojas, writer for Compact and other outlets.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for joining us. Welcome back any time.
Speaker 5: Thankes, says n That was great, super interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah, big, big, want to beat Rojas fan. Even though
Speaker 4: you know we don't agree on everything, He's always got
Speaker 4: something interesting to say, right yeh.
Speaker 5: So interesting, something different. It's interesting and different. Things parcolating
Speaker 5: under the surface of the Trump administration and we'll see
Speaker 5: where they go. It sounds like none of us are
Speaker 5: particularly optimistic that they'll be a true reset.
Speaker 4: Yeah, there's a lot of entrenched, a lot of incumbent
Speaker 4: interest groups to deal with.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, as a reminder, the monthly subscriptions are back,
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Speaker 5: I am okay, so Ryan's in tomorrow. Then the three
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