Hey, guys, Saga and Crystal here.
Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of the show.
This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else.
So if that is something that's important to you, please go to Breakingpoints dot com. Become a member today and you'll access to our full shows, unedited, ad free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox.
We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at Breakingpoints dot com.
All right, good morning, welcome to the Counterpoints.
I'm Ryan Graelm here in the studio by myself here Awshinsky out on the road, a working journalist, but joining us for the show and nonetheless deeply appreciated Emily.
How you doing great.
I'm here at Scenic LaGuardia, and now I actually mean that because they did a nice job Withlaguardia when they did their COVID renovations.
America has made great again.
So what we learned over the last two days is that the next four years is going to be nothing if not exciting.
That's for sure.
From the left, it might be utterly terrifying. Some parts of it might be invigorating, but there's I don't know when this guy is going to slow down. Uh, maybe he's going to plow right through his first hundred days. When when is Trump going to get a round of golf in? The guy must be shaking at this point.
You just had to go for the golf r and if anything, you should be wanting him to golf.
Relax as the guy. The guys on an absolute role. We're going to talk about more of the executive orders that he's been rolling. And he had a kind of wild press conference last night. Not wild, it's it's a it was a Trump press conference, That's what it was.
It's not we have to stop calling them wild.
It's not wild.
At this point, there's a ton of news on the immigration front, you know, announcement that raids are starting, uh, a kind of backdoor Muslim band getting kicked in, fights about h one b visus kicking up inside the White House.
Uh.
And then we've uh, then we've got a five hundred billion dollar investment announced in Texas towards AI, which has an interesting through line with the immigration conversation.
We can talk more about that.
The South is blanketed with snow wild. The scenes out of New Orleans are pretty incredible. Probably a decent number of the people watching the show are experiencing just an extraordinary weather event right now. I know down here in DC it feels like it's getting close to zero.
Awfully chilly down here.
We're going to talk more about the fallout from elon musks. What do they call it, awkward hand gesture? You know, whenever somebody is out there supporting the far right wing in Germany and puts his hands straight up in the air.
Everybody thinks it's a sea kail. It's quite outrightous.
We're going to talk about some of their response to that, and also we're going to give an update on the Israeli raid on Janine, as well as the kind of ongoing attempts to keep the thees fire in Gaza together, as well as the possibility of an actual future deal with Iran that we may go from Trump ripping up the Obama nuclear deal to Trump having his own Trump Nuclear Deal. So Emily, let's start with Donald Trump's press conference yesterday and we can pick up.
Let's pick up with this.
Question where he gets asked about the brewing debate within the MAGA coalition about H one B Visas and HB one.
I know the program very well.
I use the program matred ds wine. You know experts, even waiters, high quality waiters. You got to get the best people. Now, then you go into people like Larry and he needs engineers, and Massa needs and this gentleman needs engineers like nobody's ever needed engineers. Right.
So, so this puts Trump in a situation where I don't think he's quite comfortable emily basically being the defender of migrant labor and siding with the big tech barons who are literally in the room with him there saying that they need this cheaper labor from overseas. On the kind of the magaside, the argument is, show us, you know, show us who these major d's are that are so good at maj d ing that you have to bring them over and you have to replace somebody who's here
in the United States. You have to take the job away from them and give it to somebody who you brought who you use this process to bring in from overseas.
And what they say is no, Actually.
What you like is that you can pay that Major D one third to a half less than you pay the American worker, and the Major D is not going to complain about sexual harassment by the manager, not going to make demands about wages, not going to organize with other people in the workplace, not going to file any complaints because the second you do, mar A Lago owns that visa and can just yank it, and the Major D is back to where the Major D came from.
That is the reason that employers like like these programs, not because they can't find the skilled workers.
That's that's the counter argument. So what I'm.
Hearing is that this is this is really erupting inside the White House now. But you have the kind of big tech what I heard Steve Bannon calling them brologarchs, which is which is pretty funny that the brologarchs seem to be winning this argument so far.
What are you hearing, Well, you know it's funny you say the broligarchs line, and that Steve Bannon says it because I had a source who was at the Bitcoin Ball last Friday and said, Snoop Dogg's line of the night was quote where my lady's at, because they're just where many ladies at the Bitcoin ball. But I'm sure someone will dispute it and say I was I was a woman who was there, and I'm sure there were many lovely ladies there. But it was so funny that
Snoop Dogg at least picked up on it. And the way that Donald Trump just described his personal use of hwin B visas, at least to the extent he remembers it is exactly why people like Steven Miller and Steve Bannon are deeply against h twin b Visas Sager explains this over and over again. Bernie Sanders has explained this over and over again, and Ryan, you just explained it over and over again, and there was paus.
He probably uses H two B which he said HB one.
Yeah, but he probably uses two which is which is a category for service workers, which sometimes which sometimes you actually do need. Let's you're a you're in a town that has a resort, and they're just literally aren't the people in this rural area in order to work in this like this giant resort that you've got in the middle of nowhere.
And then okay, then you bring in people anyway, go.
Ahead, Well, no, I mean one of the things I heard though that was interesting is he's saying, I've heard from X, Y, and Z, and this is the danger of sort of surrounding yourself with a literal circle of oligarchs. As we're seeing right now, is that they're the ones who have your ear over Bannon and Steven Miller. Maybe you don't like Bannon and Steven Miller, but there's sort of populist sensibilities, and their mission is actually not to mine as much money from the US government as is
human as possible. It's you know, they have real ideological ends. And so the way that Donald Trump was just laid that out is going to maybe Steve Bannon would see it this way. His optimistic taste take would be that it heightens the contradictions, right, that it gets the oligarchs out faster because the sort of rupture happens earlier in the administration. But who's going to win out in the battle over Elon Musk Larry Ellison and Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
I genuinely don't know.
How those guys are going to deal with with these deep, deep ideological disruptions. When Steve Bannon has been calling Elon Musk literally evil. He has been calling him evil for a matter of days.
Now.
It feels weird to be rooting for Steve Bannon in a fight. But these are the the you know, these are the teams on the field. So I'm gonna pull for Bannon in this.
One's a jersey that says Bannon on the back.
He made a comment, he made a comment on his podcast last night that that I found stunning because of how much it resonated with me. And I didn't know that that's that this particular sentiment that I'll describe actually existed on the right. But tell me if I'm just ignorant of kind of you know, the broader kind of intellectual universe. There he said, And it was almost on aside, but he but he said it, and he and he
made a point of it. He said, another reason I'm against this kind of H one B program is because it creates a brain drain in these other countries. He called it intellectual imperialism. That you know, we as he said, we as nationalists want all nations to have sovereignty, in all nations to.
Thrive like we thrive.
And I had not heard nationalists to act as sort of internationalists before. Like the way that I've always conceptualized a right wing nationalism is that it's a zero sum competition against these other countries, and that if we drain the you know, the best and the brightest from India, from Mexico, from Canada, wherever we pull them from, you know, too bad for them. We have a better country and
we're doing better. But his phrase intellectual imperialism, I find to be completely accurate, and I respect it from the perspective of, you know, somebody who has covered a bunch of these other countries that have experienced like legitimate brain drains, it is it, and from somebody who is from a
rural area that experiences brain brain drain. You know, you pull out all the people after they graduate high school or because there just aren't any jobs for them, it does actually, you know, change the culture of that place. And to hear somebody say that that matters was to me kind of surprising. Should I be surprised by that? Or is that kind of a is he out on a ledge there?
No?
I mean I think he's out on a ledge, But it's not a particularly surprising ledge for him, as you know and from my fellow red blooded Americans. When Ryan says internationalist, it's sort of in the Marxist or maybe you would.
Say, yes, like all, we're all humans around the world, we.
Should all we should all value each other.
Well, we've we've seen the.
Issues that can crop up with those domestic disparities as you just mentioned, like world brain drain, the tensions that they can create, culturally, the disparities they can create. But on an international scale, there's a serious question to be asked as to whether the United States is safer and more stable if it is plucking the highest or the most ambitious people from different parts of the world. Does
that destabilize other regions? And that's probably I mean, I don't know, Bannon is really deep into like Marxist Leninism, whether or not he agrees with it in full. He actually is, like he's very familiar with Hegel. So it wouldn't be entirely surprising to me if he is starting to see this through that lens. He's mostly alone in that respect, his small slice, But I don't think it's entirely surprising. I don't hear that argument a lot but I think it's a serious one.
Well, speaking of Steve Vanner, let's talk about the January sixth pardons that he announced, I guess what, two nights ago, and then has been responding to question through throughout the day. He was asked about it at his press conference. Let's roll some of that.
You would agree that.
It's never acceptable to assaulid police officer. Sure, so then if I can't among those who pardon DJ Rodriguez, he drove a stun gun into the neck of a DC police officer who was adopted by the mob that day. He later can passed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes.
Why does he deserve a part? Well, I don't know.
Is it imparton? Because we're looking at commute, so we're looking at portons. Okay, well we'll take a look at everything. But I can say this, murderers today are not even charged. You have murderers that aren't charged all over you. Take look at what's gone on in Philadelphia, take a look at what's gone off in LA where people murder people and they don't get charged. These people have already served years in prison, and they've served them viciously. It's a
disgusting prison. It's been horrible, it's inhumane, it's been a terrible, terrible thing. I also say this, You go to Portland where they did where they wrapped police offices, shot police offices, nothing happened to anybody. You go to Seattle where they took over a big chunk of the city and people died. Portland, a lot of people died. And you go also take a look at Minneapolis, because I was there and I watched it. If I didn't bring in the National Guard,
that city wouldn't even exist today. People were killed and nobody went to jail. So these people have already served a long period of time, and I made a decision to give a pardon. Joe Biden gave a pardon yesterday to a lot of criminals.
So it's kind of wild to watch the Trump's ability to just be two things at once, Like, you know, he's this he's this tough on crime guy who's gonna, you know, talk about Philadelphia and talking about Portland every chance he gets, and then we're going to talk about ross Olverriche in a second. He'll you know, he's happy
to talk about how drug dealers ought to be executed. Uh, and praise chairman she for his you know, the way that he cracks down on drug dealers and then the second and then he freezes ross at the in the next second or uh to be the greatest champion of the police and then to free somebody who you know, stuck a stun gun in a cops eye. How does how does he get away with this? Like, what's the what what is the trick that he's able to pull off here?
Well, the obvious answer I think is, you know, the the level of corruption at the FBI. What has created the permission structure for him to feel like there's a real political license, if not, you know, demand for him to do what he did. And Washington really hates it. But the FBI in the cases of some January sixth years, I mean I was one of the first.
People because I was covering January sixth, as I.
Said many times, live on the West side of the Capitol, and I was one of the first Conservatives to come out and say this was not you know a lot of people were acting of their own volition, whether or not there were Feds in the crowd. This was a serious, you know riot by people who were really pissed off, and you know, conservatives Trump supporters who were really pissed off.
And then the FBI wildly mistreated and abused the justice system in these just prosecutions of people who were beating cops, and so it created this ridiculous politicization of the situation
and the same thing. I mean, I don't want to do a one to one with ross Albricht, but and the j sixers, but the FBI also wildly over prosecuted ross Albricht, who Trump obviously just pardoned, And so it makes it easier and Biden, obviously his pardons make it a lot easier for Donald Trump to feel like he can at least suppress or undermine the left's criticism of
what he just did. So with a lot of voters, it just doesn't pack the punch that it did anymore because they don't necessarily buy the narrative that they're being fed by the media. It doesn't make it right, just makes it easier for Trump to do and.
See and so when and when people say and when the people on the right say that the Justice Department abused the system and the prosecutions were abusive, and the conditions that were like Gulag conditions. You know, they're talking about the horrifying conditions that the people were kept under. I think what this shows is that they just weren't familiar with our justice system.
Before this, And there's definitely true.
And I like when conservatives go to prison, because they come out as criminal justice reformers, like almost almost universally, they go in and they go through this horrifically dehumanizing system that is for anything just six months or so, just a short stint and a medium security, but going through that dehumanizing process and experiencing that, they changes the way that you understand our quote unquote justice system, and you no longer laugh at people who want to.
Who don't like using the term justice system, like you.
No longer consider them to be like, you know, woke lunatics, but actually people who understand what's going on here. So I think that they are correct that the system was
abusive and the conditions were horrible. What I don't think they're correct about is that it was any that they were treated any differently than anybody else that gets put through that system, except for you know, the point one percent when they when they wind up in there they get the kid glove treatment, but everyone else gets abused
by our system. And I wish that they had come out of it with more of a universalist and I suspect some of them will the fact that somebody were segregated just among other j sex or I think will limit that capacity. But I wish that people would come out of it more a universalist kind of reform approach to the system than saying we were actually, you know, abused. Now, there could be cases where there were indeed actually like particular abuses And are.
Is there anything you want.
To add on that, any particular kind of abuses that were that gave the permission structure to be for the blanket pardon?
Yeah, I mean there are a lot of examples, and they're hard to parse because some of them actually are kind of bs. And when you're getting into these like cop beating stories, it's easy that they end up getting conflated with the stories of people who were like, you know, not fed their vegetarian meals, or like Jacob Chansley is the really famous when he wasn't FEDI general vegetarian meals, they tried to hide the evidence of him being walked
through the capital doesn't make any of it right. But there was this big conflation, and there were big like sentences that were just ridiculous, and there was like Enrique Tario is an interesting case. He was working, he was working as an FBI in format So all of that gets brought into the mix. And there are literally hundreds of these cases. There were raids on people's homes that seem insane. There were I mean, just crazy levels of
intense prosecution and sometimes just sometimes very dubious. But I think to the point that you were making, Ryan, it's not entirely out of the sort of realm of plausibility for our justice system.
But I think there was. I think we can all understand that there was a particular zeal for.
Both just reasons like the capital was sacked, and politicized reasons. But to your point, you know, it doesn't mean that it's something other people don't experience.
Yeah, which I think you couldn't separate, because it really was a political crime, like it just just by definition was so it was always going to be politicized. But let's control room, if you don't mind jumping to a five. Since we're talking about ross Son. Donald Trump announced that he's giving a pardon, full pardon to Ross Olbrich, which was the top demand of the Libertarian Party. And my
old colleague KNK Clemstein made an interesting point. He's like, can you imagine the Democrats ever agreeing to any kind of demand made by the Green Party, Like you imagine like Democrats actually trying to get the votes of anybody other than like the Cheney family and their supporters. You know, if you were going to try to get the votes of the Green Party, you might say, look, we know that you have been trying to free Leonard Peltier from federal prison for decades.
Now, like many decades.
He's going to die in prison, probably at this point because Biden did not pardon him and just say we know this is important to the Green Party, and it was important to a lot of Native American groups.
We win, We're gonna We're gonna pardon Leonard Peltier.
It's like you cannot even like your brain breaks just trying to conceptualize the Democrats ever doing that.
Didn't Biden pardon Leonard?
No, No, I mean unless I unless I missed it, did it?
If that came through in the last minute, that would be absolutely amazing, amazing, that's.
So, that's amazing.
But so can you imagine by doing that on day one, promising to do it.
The day one.
Yeah, he commuted the sentence.
Well great, so good commute, wonderful.
But so if he's going to do it anyway, like, think about the way that Trump did it, which is so different than the way Democrats would ever do it. So Trump comes in and says.
By the way, that's a that's such amazing news.
Like in the nineteen nineties, I was making phone calls to Clinton White House asking them to commute his sentence or pardon him.
I was going to say for viewers, like Brian has a ton going on right now. So I feel like it was kind of cool to see you watch that news in real time.
It matters a lot.
It's absolutely delightful.
Like in two thousand, I went with a Green Party like caravan to the prison that he's in in Kansas and was part of like a candlelight vigil outside, like I'm so I'm so happy to hear that he's out. So setting that aside, think think about the way that Trump did it. Trump goes to the Libertarians transactionally says, aren't you tired of being losers, like support a winner and in exchange, I know you like Russ Olbridge and I will pardon him, like let's let's make a deal here.
And then the Libertarian Party there was a you know, internal fight within the Libertarian Party. The faction that took it over wanted to make this the big thing that they asked for from Trump. They asked for it, they got it, and he and he does it now a side note, come on Libertarian Party, Like, good for Ross. I'm happy for him and his mother. The whole thing about him trying to kill people is kind of we
can talk about that in a second. The fact that they went for him rather than Edward Snowden is curious, Like do you have any insight into why they did that? Because one of them is such a stronger kind of ideological case for libertarianism and for exposing government secrets, whereas Ross's an anrochocapitalist, like he's a hardcore libertarian identifies as one. He acted as a liberty anyway, Like why him over Snowden?
Yeah, because I think Snowden is too much of a popular figure.
It would rankle way too many establishment Republicans it would just be harder for Trump to get done without creating a firestorm.
That ends up with negotiations over other things.
Right, Like, I just don't think most establishment Republicans care that much. He's been in jail since what his arrest in twenty thirteen. He was charged. I think he was finally sentenced in twenty fifteen. So he's been in prison for a really long time. And the Internet has changed dramatically during that time, and a lot of people would argue dramatically for the worst.
It doesn't mean that Silk Road is great.
I feel a lot like Sager who posted on XT basically like, I'm not a big fan of Silk Road, but what you if you read about what happened to Russ Olbrich, it's one of the craziest things. It's not entirely surprising, again, but it's a it's an insane story. I think it was just less of a sort of explosive decision, you like, you know, if you pardon Snowed and that just goes off like a bomb.
Yeah, he's trying to get through.
Yeah makes sense. But yeah, so Peltier pardoned.
He's eighty and he will it's pardoned to home confinement, not pardoned, He's commuted to home confinement.
So there he's he's an old man.
He'sn't been held in you know, very difficult federal prison conditions for many decades, which is going to take a toll on you. Uh So, at least I guess he'll get to die at home anyway. Uh So. Uh So, what's been the reaction on the right to the Ross pardon?
You know, Libertarians are obviously really pleased, but I think it just goes to what we were talking about a moment ago, which Republicans don't really care that much. You know, I've seen, i think the Free press published like dueling pieces on why it was good and why it was bad, when the why it was bad is from Charles Van Lehman at the Manhattan Institute. But they're just it didn't
ruffle many feathers. Again, I think it's a lot of people just see it as sort of old news, and the Internet has kind of moved on during that time period, so it's not a scalp that people feel they need to cling to. So probably a very successful decision for Trump, sort of vindicating for mccardal and those folks in that wing of the Libertarian Party.
And for people who don't know, we should have mentioned it off the top. He was the founder of the CEO of Silk Road, which was a place where you could buy and sell stuff. And you know, the main thing that people were buying and selling on there was or a main thing was drugs. They and they basically got him for that, some complicit city in that accused
him of basically being a kingpin. Later after he was convicted of that, they put forward some evidence that he had tried to take out contracts to kill people that apparently did not exist, like.
Somebody seemed like an entrapman.
He claims that his supporters claim the FBI doctor emails right to make it look like.
His supporters say none of those. His supporters say this is fake.
He was never charged, which was just it probably didn't.
Yeah, now they they argue on the other side, Uh, well we didn't charge Hi because he already had a life sentence, So what was the point. Also, there was so much corruption, like extra levels of corruption and his prosecution, like several of the like lead investigators were like caught like stealing bitcoin and drugs and like it. It was an absolutely gigantic mess, so they probably didn't want to kind of go back into that and kind of you know, peel back the layers of that onion and find.
Well, the judge said, this life sentence, which again he was not convicted of any violent crime, was all nonviolent. He wasn't convicted of selling any of the drugs himself, It was just facilitating their sale. A life sentence for that is sort of mind boggling, So that that excuse for them not charging him with the alleged murder of a higher plot doesn't really pass the smell test.
Yeah, and there were no people like so even even if you take the allegations completely at face value, they say that somebody was making up people that didn't exist that were harassing him and then extorting him to go and like kill those people that like, which is kind of bizarre and liked lends some credence to the claim that this that that that whole thing was made up.
But yet, like, there are a lot of illegal substances and illegal things bought and sold on eBay and Amazon and and using lots of other platforms, and we haven't yet you know, arrested Jeff Bezos. So yeah, you can you can see why people feel like this is this was treated differently, although Silk is not exactly Amazon, although Amazon has become like this absolute cesspool of scams.
It's rough.
Like when we when we were doing the push to get people to buy Ray fat Olarreer's book If I Must Die, we ended up selling I think pushing like twenty thousand copies in a matter of a week, and the internet or somebody you know, picked up on that and started making fake versions of it. So within days Amazon was selling like fake copies of this book of poems and pros. And I heard from some people who who accidentally bought it, and it just shows up.
It's like nothing, just totally.
It's like and Bezos and and Lena kana is like, you know, looked very closely at this, like they could do something about this that they're not doing, you know, but it works for them, like they're making money out they're making money both ways.
And speaking of scams, if we.
Can go jump to a four, let's roll this from maybe you can explain some of this to me.
But here's Trump and his meme coin benefited.
I don't know where it is.
I don't know much about it other than I launched it. I heard it was very successful.
I haven't checked it.
Where is it today?
I may die a lot of money?
How much.
Several billion dollars, it seems like in the last several days.
Several billion. That's peanuts for these guys.
So Trump made a meme coin.
And wound up making several billion dollars since getting elected president. Is that what I'm supposed to understand here?
Yes, that is exactly what you're supposed to understand here, That he's at a joking behind the podium.
That's peanuts for these guys.
As he's surrounded by Larry Allison and Sam Altman at this one, you know, like you said, we tried to say it was wild. At the top of it was very much like vintage first Trump administration, very similar. He was really going back and forth with these journalists, like mixing it up with them for a long time, letting everybody ask as many questions as they wanted to, essentially, which has not happened over the course of the last several years.
Binding Kamala Harris rarely ever mixed up with the press, let alone for this long. So it was a winding press conference and Yep, the meme coin came up, and it looks like that's exactly what happened.
Ryan and Trump is enjoying that.
And for context, Brian and I are both on the crypto is a Ponzi scheme, So you can kind of see where we're coming from.
I'd find it all to be rather gross.
Yes, is that the incoming presence or the president is going to run a run, run a Pyramids game?
Anyway? What? What on earth? I mean, where do we Where do you even go with that?
I think we go to Ukraine?
Yeah, so this is next?
Uh yeah, So this was a quite poignant moment of the press conference where he's talking about Ukraine. Le let's roll him talking here about the extraordinary human toll.
Vladimir Putin doesn't come to the table to negotiate with you.
Will you put additional sanctions on Russia?
It sounds likely. Do you think that the war should be frozen currently? Along?
The war should have never started if you had a competent president, which you did, and the war wouldn't have happened. The war in Ukraine would have never happened if I were president. But that couldn't happen because the election was rigged.
Yeah, go ahead, thanks, President, could.
Be very soon.
And you've talked a bit about Ukraine and Russia, but how long.
Would you think it would take to end that conflict?
And I have to speak to President Putin. We're going to have to find out. He can't be thrilled. He's not doing so well. I mean, he's grinding it out. But most people thought that war would have been over in about one week, and now you're into three years, right, So he can't be he can't be thrilled. It's not making him look very good. Now eventually, you know, I mean it's a big machine, so things will happen. But I think it'd be very well off to end the war.
We have numbers that almost a million Russian soldiers have been killed, about seven hundred thousand Ukrainian soldiers are killed. Russia is bigger, they have more soldiers to lose, but that's no way to run a country.
Presumably Trump is speaking there from the briefings that he's getting from our military, because those are bigger numbers than we're used to hearing from public officials.
You know, nearly a million.
Russians, what's six seven hundred thousand Ukrainians is an absolutely mind boggling and staggering death toll, like since twenty twenty two, thinking of nearly two million families, you.
Know, who.
Had a son or a father or brother in twenty twenty two and do not today because of this war, And you ask yourself for what, like, what what has been accomplished in the three years since then that would remotely justify the sacrifice of nearly nearly two million lives?
Emily, what did you make of that? You know, I came from Trump.
Yeah, it's we've seen, you know, those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of numbers sneak into some press re folds. I think the Wall Street Journal had something like that, and it just we just gloss right over it in the political news cycle of we don't do that here, but most people just gloss right over it as though this isn't happening, that this isn't something that we have funded over and over again and seem to have no
legitimate plan to end. And that's what Trump That's where Trump seemed to rankle some people who have previously been
hopeful about his anti interventionist streak. They heard him speaking in a way that felt hawkish about Putin last night, But I also wanted to say, Ryan, I think people read a little bit too much into all of Trump's different point A, B C. D in his negotiations, because he'll say one thing, the next minute says something totally different, and it's him trying to like set the terms of
the debate. And so obviously right now, behind closed doors, he feels like he needs to talk tough to Vladimir Putin. I don't know that that necessarily means hees all of a sudden, you know, on Zelenski's side, one hundred and ten percent, like going full Lindsey Graham. Hopefully, Ryan, what it means is that we're getting closer to an end of the conflict, because when you hear those numbers, apparently from his security briefings, it's no wonder they're having to yank men in.
Their forties off the streets in Ukraine to.
Fight this war because it's a death trap and it's miserable and there's been no end in sight, absolutely no end in sight.
Yeah, this is and this is very Trump like. He says the most belligerent thing he can. Yeah, I'm going to sanction Putin whatever you can come up with. And then he talks later about it, you know, being positioning for his his negotiation. We'll talk about John Bolton later, but even when it came to John Bolton, you know, he's the way he describes his hiring of John Bolton, his yes, he was an idiot and a warmonger, but
I used him very well. And what Trump claims, now, whether this is ret conning or actual strategy, from the beginning, he claims that he brings in people like Bolton to be his his his yap dogs who are going to make a whole lot of noise. And then he's like, you know, you don't want me to let this guy off the leash, do you, And then hopefully then he gets a better deal from Iran, Like that's that's his claim. Whether it's particularly true in the Bolton case or not,
that is generally kind of how he operates. And the and the problem with being so transparent about it is, you know you and I aren't the only ones that see it. It stops working, I would I would assume if you know, everybody can see it, and then in order for it to keep working, you have to ratchet it up higher and higher. And higher, and every time you do that, you're playing with a little bit of fire.
But you know, we'll see.
Yeah, I mean that's sort of the thing.
It's just very, very unpredictable, and I genuinely don't know how Trump behind closed doors is talking to bo Zolenski and putin how he's talking to other NATO countries.
We'll hear more in the days ahead.
Obviously we're literally like forty eight hours into this administration, less than that. At this point, Marco Rubio has been sworn in as Secretary of State, So I think we're going to start seeing a lot more that I'll tell us directionally what's to come in the days and weeks ahead, like in the next forty eight hours probably, Yeah.
And was it interesting that Trump had to issue an executive order telling Marco Rubio not to be a crazy warmonger, Like there's an actual executive order that says instructions to the Secretary of State to make sure that you have in America first foreign policy agenda. That's kind of a did everybody got one of those or just Marco Rubio that was a little.
He should give them everybody That would actually be just like his as almost like a Valentine.
Yeah, yeah, to everyone. I don't know.
I've never seen anyse people like that before, but I think they're more similar than they are different, to be honest, and I know that's not great for the non interventionists, but it's almost like Rubio's meant Trump in the middle. He has had some people who dismissed the sincerity of his changes ideologically are missing out on the real picture. That doesn't mean that he suddenly like Rand Paul, but it means that he is genuinely like meeting Trump kind of in the middle on a lot of this stuff.
All right, Well, let's move on to the looming immigration rays around the country.
Trump borders are.
Tom Homan was on Fox News talking about some of this last night.
Let's roll some of this.
Based on your initial schedule that today roundups of criminal illegal aliens in the process of deporting them would begin.
It seems to have been put on whole for a little while. When can we expect that to happen?
Where will it begin?
No?
It started? Did I started?
Ice teams are out there as of today. We gave them the in direction to prioritize public safety threats that we're looking for that. We've been working on the target list. There was some discussion about Chicago because a Pacific operational plan was released, so we had to look at and re evaluate does this raise after safety concerns? And it does, but we read dressed that and teams are all effective today.
Yeah, and so at dropsite, we had some people in Chicago and they they and there was they spoke to some undocumented folks who did actually said they had some encounters with ICE agents and they told them they were undocumented and ICE agents let them go.
They were kind of.
Going around parking lots basically looking for people who look like day laborers and just asking them for papers. There's a lot of confusion going around and we can actually put up B two.
This is a good example.
This is in it's you know, Chicago, like every city has a you know, a news outlet focused on the restaurants and the reporting there. It's that a lot of people are not showing up for work. There's a lot of skittishness. There's there's a lot of concern that that the raids are going to hit hit say kitchens, and
drag everybody out. What Homan is saying there is that announcing it as Trump did that he's going to hit Chicago on Tuesday, you know, created that kind of panic and and may have then caused some officer safety issues. So I suppose what he's but on the one hand,
I'm curious for your take on this. On the one hand, only they want, I believe, they want spectacular images of confrontations between We're not just confrontations, but they want they want images of booted up ice agents, you know, dragging migrants into the back of paddy wagons.
They want those images on Fox News.
In order to get those images, they've got to get the media out there, and they've got to announce ahead of time where they're going to do these raids. Announcing where they're going to do these raids ahead of time causes the problems that Holman laid out there.
So the question view is, am I right?
Does he just want spectacular images or is there is there a deeper kind of policy being rolled out here.
I think there's something deeper because they again we were talking earlier in the show about Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, who we use kind of as representatives of this broader anti immigration coalition that is now in the administration and is powerful. They feel like they have a mandate to
do a generational immigration crackdown. So I don't think it's just about the optics, and I don't think that you're necessarily saying that, right, But I think they also genuinely know they need those numbers in order to achieve.
Their goal, and they feel it right now. I mean, if you're talking.
People in conservative circles, there's you know, like a absolute appetite for images that the media would have previously sort of weaponized genuinely like heart wrenching stuff. But like they're saying, we don't feel like I mean, the New York Times ran that story on Sunday that said public support for Trump's policies exceeds support for Trump, and one of those
things was deportations. And it's possible that people overreach. So there's an announcement that people overreach and take that as a you know, a mandate when it was just a mandate to like make significant changes. But I don't know, Ryan, Like, I think they're pretty pretty serious about actually expelling a
wide group of people. I don't think it'll have a huge effect on public opinion in the same way that it did back in like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, during the false kids in Cages narrative that said, you know, this was implied at least that this was a new Donald Trump policy and that it hadn't been happening under
Obama and blah blah blah. I think conservatives just now feel bullish because they feel like they have disrupted that kind of legacy media narrative setting ability, and they're kind of ready for what they would see as like a generational crackdown.
So it's I think it's totally serious.
Well, the difference in defense of the hysterics around the kids in cages, and I covered Obama's kids in cages in twenty fourteen fifteen. Those were unaccompanied minors who were being held in bad conditions and that was exposed, and it was good that that was exposed, and it was wrong what Obama was doing, and he was doing it
for the reasons doing an immigration crackdown. What the Trump administration did was a deliberate zero tolerance policy directed at families who were with children, and they said, if the family member is charged with illegal or entry or something else along those lines, they will separate the children from the parents, and they will and they will detain the
children separately. And so that was an actual new policy, and when it was rolled out, it was rolled out specifically with the intent of creating images that would dissuade people from coming across the border. That's one of Miller's big ideas, that you need these images to scare people from coming in. So it was true that there had been kids in cages, but it was also a new policy related to child separation.
Well, and yes, child separation.
Yeah, and Tom Homan, though actually comes out of the Obama administration, like the Obama Deporter and chief Line, Tom Homan was a part of that policy, although the Deporter in chief line didn't get much play outside of places like a huff Post on Huffington Post at the time, And so I think there was a lot of really dishonest coverage from places like Yeah, CBS, NBC, CNN who had not seen the previous policies as turrence or anything
like that. So we don't have to get back into that debate necessarily.
But I think to.
Your point earlier about whether or not there will be a public outcry, I don't think there's going to be a kind of resistance liberal kind of outcry over the principle of it, but how he rolls it out may have an effect. If people keep if restaurants are shutting down, for instance, like like, as that article in Chicago suggested, there's some nervousness around what's going to happen there, and sorry,
you control them to jump around. But if we could do befour here about the about the farm workers that this is this is relevant to this, whether or not
this survey is accurate or not. Directionally, it seems powerfully in one direction, which is, you know, fine, if seventy five percent of says seventy five percent of immigrant farm workers didn't show up yesterday in Bakersfield because of fears of ice raids, America's rural and agricultural regions will be the hardest hit from Trump's immigration policies.
Food prices are going to skyrock.
So that's that's the kind of claim that you're going to get from from critics of this policy, that you actually need these people showing up for work to do the jobs that they're doing at work, and if they don't, you know, the food, food rots, and the vine restaurants don't open you know, all the all the obvious knock on effects that you'd have from you know, what they would call a labor shock, a shock to the labor
supply all of a sudden, people. If people aren't showing up because they're nervous, now, people aren't going to stay home forever because they can't.
They need they need to work.
So it really depends on to me, you know, how this filters down to people and what the actual scale of it is is, is there any nervousness in Republican circles that they might create something that they can't control.
No, And I've never actually, I mean I shouldn't say I've never seen anything like this, but it's a totally they feel like again it's a new age, like Trump has been saying the Golden era, Golden Age line, But that is more than just like this sort of this
attempt at esthetic optimism. It's actually because they feel like there's a it is totally a new day, meaning they can be aggressive about policies they feel like they have a mandate on and not cower and do sort of Gang of Eight style immigration politics like they were forced to in you know, twenty fourteen.
So I think they're actually eager for.
The crackdowns because it'll create and I don't mean this callously. I think this is you know, there's a substance of conversation about this, but it creates on the.
LIB moments right where people like.
That before tweet that we had up on the screen about farm workers. I just think they realize that lands differently with the public.
Now.
Doesn't mean that it's a substance of debate to be had about that, but I think they're like eager for this fight because they feel like immigration is a winning one in the same way that Democrats are eager to talk about abortion because they know that Republicans are on their back feet and it's a losing The more Republicans are talking about abortion, the worse off they are.
And I think.
Republicans say the more Democrats talk about abortion, the more the public is going to agree with Republicans because Democrats haven't moderated enough on it. So I think they're eager for the fight to be honest, and I you know, as I was saying earlier, I think that could create a real overreach. I don't know if it will, but I definitely think it could.
You mean an immigration or abortion.
No, it's immigration. It could end up with some like really bad overreaches.
I see what you mean.
Let's let's talk briefly about Trump announcing that he's in an executive order that he's ending birthrights citizenship, which I think as a news broadcastering correct me if you think I'm wrong, I should add immediately, you can't actually amend the Constitution with an executive orders.
Just like Joe Biden declaring the equal rights of men, right, like Michael Scott declared bankruptcy.
Yeah right, yeah, so right.
Biden on his way out the door posted on Twitter at the twenty fifth Amendment was now ratified and the twenty fifth amn was this the Equal Rights Amendment and it needed to get you know, I had to get three quarters of the states, and Virginia ratified it after Democrats took over the state, and boom, that made three
quarters of the states. But in the law that was passed to create the process to amend the Constitution and add the twenty fifth Amendment, it said you had to do it within a certain number of years, and it was very clean. Amendment twenty fifth is the one for crazy people like me who can't remember which the which amendments to twenty eighth Amendment the era, and they didn't
reach the timeline. They missed it by I think several decades, and Biden just announced Okay, now, so apparently what Biden should have done is just said, by executive order, I have added the twenty eighth Amendment to the Constitution. Because that's basically what Trump is doing here. He's telling you, don't worry about what the Constitution says, don't worry about
what Congress says either, Yeah, executive order. So the argument that he's making is that the fourteenth Amendment says that anybody born here and quote you know, subject to the laws thereof is a citizen. And his argument is that people who are here, whose parents are here without papers or without the right kind of papers. He's saying even if you're here on he's saying, if you're here on a student visa, that you are not subject to.
The laws of the United States.
That's just wrong, Like that's not even an interesting kind of legal argument to hash out. Like anybody who was watching this show who is here on a student visa, go ahead and try to rob a bank and find out whether or not you're subject to the laws of this country. Like people here on a student visa, people here completely illegally can be charged with crimes and in fact are charged with crimes when they're when they're arrested
for them. So the idea that you're not subject to the laws only applies and this is and this is what they meant. It applies to diplomats. If you are an ambassador from Uruguay and you were here in Washington, DC, you are not actually subject to the laws of the United States. And it's it's controversial thing because you'll and sometimes you'll have some drunk ambassador. We'll run somebody over
and kill them and go home, and that's it. Like they don't get charged with that because they have diplomatic community and what you've seeing le at the weapon knows how that works, or princes diaries or Princess diarist and so therefore their children are then not American citizens.
Like that's that's the argument there.
I actually think the Biden parallel is a really good one in this case, because what they were both saying is I'm using my executive authority to say this is now the official executive branch recognition of this legal interpretation of the Constitution. You know, I interpret the Constitution as President Joe Biden or President Ronald Trump. To say that for the birthright citizenship is you know, it wasn't actually intended to be interpreted the way it has been interpreted.
And you can amend the Constitution even beyond the ratification deadline. It can be extended. It doesn't matter these states have rescinded the ratification. So, I mean, this is becoming a theme of the early Trump administration, and it's not entirely surprising, but eos like this are clearly overreached. That would have infuriated the conservative movement in the Republican Party under Obama because Obama did like governing with his pen, and his pen has pad and that was one of the biggest
conservative arguments against Barack Obama. And in fairness, Trump is undoing some previous executive injections, but this is not one of them, and they're not they are not all like that, and this to me is very extra constitutional. But Ryan it is an attempt to move the goalposts in a way that sets the terms and sets the tone for the administration. They do see this as a generational immigration opportunity and if you.
Can put up B three here.
So twenty two Blue states have already sued the federal government saying that no, hey, actually this is ridiculous, this is this is not how the Constitution is written. So we will we'll see, you know, the constitution is in our current system. What the Supreme Court says it is not not what it actually is. So this remains to be determined. And and speaking of fighting out the constitutionality of executive orders, there's a new kind of attempt at a Muslim ban, and this was we can put up
B five here. So this is the way that the Trump administration is kind of back during the Muslim ban is that they're saying, Okay, we're not going to do what we did the first time around, which is basically
single out these Muslim countries. What we're going to do is give the bureaucrats thirty to ninety days to look at all of the countries around the world and then report back to us about the countries that they believe are particularly dangerous based on this objective set of criteria, and then some are all of the travelers from those countries will be banned.
And the assumption and it seemed to be the driving motivation.
Tell me what if you agree, Emily, is that the bureaucrats are basically being instructed to come back with a list of Muslim countries, which they then believe will qualify as some sort of objective enough process that it won't look arbitrary and racist and will be allowed to pass muster.
Is that right, Emily, I mean, it's a clever workaround as far as they go. That's the difference between Trump one point zero and Trump two point zero is you have four years of and I say this seriously.
Project twenty twenty five.
I don't think Donald Trump is like he doesn't have the book in front of him. But there that's a stand in sort of for the broader plans that were made in the conservative movement.
And that's that's what's happening.
I mean, it's it's you know, when you have four years to go back and say, if we come in with a mandate, here's what we're we're going to do. It's almost like historically unusual that they said we have this guy in Donald Trump who's actually going to do what. In some cases we didn't feel Ronald Reagan did George W. Bush certainly certainly didn't. But even though Donald Trump isn't of the conservative movement, he's someone who can be used to advance.
The cause of the conservative.
Movement because he's that like Nixonian madman.
He's against the deep state.
He wants to drain the swamp and he doesn't care and he sort of broke in politics in the paradigm and he can be the vehicle for.
Like radical change.
And that's you know, so far in the first couple of days, we're seeing all of this get tested.
Moving over the artificial intelligence news.
Yesterday at the White House, the main theme coming out of the first couple of days of the Trump administration is this immigration crackdown. But interestingly, he also held an event with some with some brolog arcs announcing a five hundred billion dollars worth of an investment into a Texas data center to power AI. Let's let's roll a little bit of sam Altman from the White House to.
Create one hundreds of thousands of jobs, to create a new industry centered here. We wouldn't be able to do this without you, mister President, and I'm thrilled that we get to.
I think it'll be an exciting project. I think we'll be.
Able to do all of the wonderful things these guys talked about, but the fact that we get to do this in the United States is I think wonderful.
So thank you very much.
First, let me talk to you Sam about what this means for AI and the future for the US investment.
Here.
This means we can create AI and AGI in the United States. In America wouldn't have been obvious that this was possible, but I think that the different president might not have been possible. But we are thrilled to get to do this, and I think it'll be great for Americans, great for the whole world.
Tim, So this has been in the work. We can put up a two here. This has been the works for almost a year so at this point. But what you saw at the White House was.
These CEOs kind of slabbering over Trump and making sure that he felt like he was getting the credit for this, for this rolling out.
And it is the case that the.
Trump administration is going to be extraordinarily friendly towards AI. I think that's not even in doubt. We can put up C three here. You know, one of the executive orders that Trump rolled out was called, you know, unleashing American energy, and he basically declared that the United States was in an energy crisis.
The previous energy.
Crisis that y'all would remember from the nineteen seventies was a crisis so supply. It was when the OPEC countries, you know, cracked down on supply of oil, people had to ration it. They created this American energy crisis. This one is described by Trump in his executive order as a crisis of demand. And the reason he says that it's a crisis of demand is, on the one hand, all of the kind of electricity needs that have been produced by the Biden administrations, you know mandate so, you know,
around climate change. So he nods to that, But importantly, he says that the AI data centers are going to need just absolutely explosive amounts of American energy, and so that has created a crisis, and so he's going to sweep away a lot of regulations in order to drive down the crisis so that you can have these five
hundred billion dollar data centers. And what I found kind of interesting about the timing here is that on the one hand, Trump is talking about an immigration crackdown, which from the populist right perspective is aimed at protecting American workers. With the other hand, he's doing everything he can to boost AI, which many American workers see as in direct competition with them, as aimed at creating a tech feudalism that is going to basically impoverish huge sectors of the American workforce.
Emily, what did you make.
No wonder this roll out? I was gonna say, it's no wonder.
He's listening to what Larry Ellison tells him on H one B visus when he's working as we talked about earlier in the show, on this five hundred billion dollars investment.
And Ryan, you know this.
We often see public private partnerships like this touted at big ceremonies and then jobs don't materialize. One of the most notable recent examples of this actually comes from the first Trump administration in my home state of Wisconsin with Fox Con that never panned out to be anywhere near what it was promised in southeastern Wisconsin.
And you'll remember they were out.
There with the shovels, right, it's previous Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, you know they were shoveling the dirt to break ground and so these things are not always done deals. You know, that's that can change pretty significantly, and it can always
underwhelm people. It could always end up underwhelming people. But I think the sentiment, I mean, if you went to and you probably remember this too, Seapac in twenty fourteen, all of these companies, Google and Facebook had fancy events and they had you know, suites that were had the nicest champagne and you know, amazing food, and conservatives in the first Trump administration looked back on that as a
world really gross thing. Like the conservative movement felt badly about itself because all of those they felt, all of those oligarchs turned on their cultural values and detested them and looked down on them.
And this is I'm curious.
I think it's it's pretty clearly ushering in a new era, and it's beckoning the conservative movement to open back the doors. I mean, I remember I used to go to all of these meetings with conservative news and Facebook.
Like Nick Clegg and a Facebook.
Conference room saying, you know, here's how you know we didn't suppress this. We didn't suppress that. Tell me what your concerns are. And you know, it seems like that's.
Just back like it was, like it never went away.
And it isn't to say that some like the religious skepticism towards AI in conservative spaces is so generative AI, I should say, is so profound that I don't think it's clear yet how this is going to pan out. But if if history I passed this prologue, and it usually is, it looks like that moment is just going to fade away like it never happened.
Basically, yeah, it does feel like we as a public have kind of lost control of this situation here in the United States and that the only thing that the arks need to do is to kind of lavish, like you said, you know, money at the right places, but also then praise and in this case on Trump Larry Allison of Oracle who along with soft Bank, which is interesting from an America first perspective, like this is.
From an Elon Musk perspective. Musk isn't Musk in an antitrust suit against Sam Altman?
Oh yes, big time.
Yes, they're they're at war with each other. And also soft Bank foreign that's that's a foreign investment fund. But here's here's Larry Allison of Oracle doing the same as Altman kind of lavishing Trump with praise.
This is C five.
Once we gene sequence, Once we gene sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer. And you can make that vaccine, that mr NA vaccine. You can make that robot again using AI in about forty eight hours. So imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for the for your particular cancer aimed at you, and have have that vaccine available in forty
eight hours. This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.
Ooh, sorry that that was a different clip that I expected, But that's fine because that's actually kind of an even more important one, which is this is this is what the kind of AI gurus are using to sell the idea of AI as as utterly virtuous and making the world a better place. And of course, if they proved to be correct and they they could actually do that, wonderful. We all we'd all love to have a vaccine that prevents us from getting cancer, cancers, the absolute worst.
I'm not sure he was reading the room right there by.
Bringing up mr NA vaccines inside the Trump White House.
What did you make of that?
Or maybe he was because this is the White House.
This is the continuation of the first White House that spearheaded the Yeah, the pioneering mRNA vaccine is vaccine through Operation warp Speed, which was itself a public private partnership, if you can really even call it that, to be honest, it was just all melded together. So if anything like Mary maybe Larry Ellison is singing from the exact right
him book. No, I mean, obviously, I think it does highlight the the what seemed to be ideological barriers between again the Steve Bannons, the ideological populists and the libertarian I should say, the the quote unquote America First populists and the libertarian populist, the tech populists and the sort of middle American populists that now form Trump's coalition. It's a really uncomfortable marriage. And so far it's sticking together.
But when you put all of these billionaires so deeply into your own coalition, your own inner circle, just the feuding between Musk and Altman, I mean, they all have a lot on the line, like their futures, their freedom, their businesses that's all on the line relationship with Donald Trump. So they have intense scrutiny, or they have intense, you know, incentives to get along with each other and to continue getting along.
With Donald Trump.
But right it is so fragile among them, and then among the broader public, unbelievably fragile.
And this, of course is a global competition which China is participating in, and not coincidentally, on Monday, on Inauguration Day, the Chinese company deep Seek, which is a competitor of open ai, published a peer reviewed paper that announced that effectively they had been able to produce this AI application that uses much less energy and is much more efficient,
and is wide open and and could be decentralized. And so for people that are just listening to this, this is just one tweet from a guy pointing out the irony. He says, quote, we are living in a timeline where a non US company is keeping the original mission of open ai alive, truly open frontier research that empowers all.
It makes no sense.
The most entertaining outcome is the most likely unquote. In other words, open ai was started as a as a nonprofit intended to be open Obviously as open is right there in the name and decentralized and aimed at making the world a better place. It has since been legally dubiously converted to a for profit company. That's what Musk's
fight with Altman is about. Musk wanted to keep it as a nonprofit, and they are going for a centralized approach where they are going to spend at least five hundred billion dollars, you know, on the on on these data centers, and with the idea being that they are going to just build so much computing power that nobody's going to be able to keep up with them, Whereas the Chinese are taking the original open AI version and
saying we're going to everything's going to be open. It's going to be as cheap as possible's gonna use as little electricity as as possible, and it's going to be available, you know, to basically anybody who wants to use it for a very nominal fee. And that decentralized approach is going to be what allows it to get to get everywhere. So we'll see who's able to win at that, but it, you know, at least from the from China, from the
Chinese perspective, they're not. It's interesting they're not having their policy dictated by oligarchs like we are the We are the democracy where you know, we have elections, local elections, we have midterms, we got presidential elections. I have a voter registration card.
I can go down to my elementary school and I can cast a ballot.
Yet our AI policy is not made by me as a voter. Our AI policy is made by Sam Altman and our oligarchs. In China, nobody there can vote. Yet the the Chinese public seems to have much more say over what their AI policy is than we do here. How do we explain that and how do we understand democracy if we're less democratic? I mean in the sense that we have control over our government.
Yeah, I don't know that I agree with that, but I do think we lose a lot of our credibility.
I mean, I think there's just more of.
The marriage between It's almost like you can't call Chinese business people oligarchs because the distinction between public and private just doesn't really exist. And I think things like this, especially when they're not successful and when they're cronius, which is you know, that's what Mark Andresen is trying to say the Biden administration did with AI by the way that they said it was so dangerous. We need to just let the big guys do it, and they need
to listen to us. And I think Sam Altman seems to have said, all right, well, that's the policy that we Then we can you know, basically stamp out any competition. We can do the best big guy, and we can you know, try to mold the government to our preference.
We'll give Donald Trump money for his inauguration. We will be there, we will say nice things, and I bet it'll give us what we want, especially if it makes it look like this is America first, bringing lots of investments in, so you know that they're playing Donald Trump and they're playing the system. They're playing the game in the way that they have for a really long time.
But the point about voter control over AI is really interesting because that is the I think probably one of the clearest examples that and probably some of our defense policy of like the actual definition of oligarchy, which I used to blanch at and you know, criticize Bernie Sanders for using in the United States, But that's oligarchy that's literally what it is.
It's when people have so much money.
That they can circumvent democratic control and change people's daily lives with the flip of a switch. And that's what's happening in AI. So no doubt about that. I totally agree.
Let's move over to a weather update, and I feel like we're going to be increasingly covering the weather over here at counterpoints and breaking points as it gets more more and more just extreme. If you live in the South right now, you're getting absolutely walloped in Florida, they're seeing something they almost never see. Let's roll a one here, which also covers some of the other.
So this, yeah, here's like when was the last time.
Anybody in Florida has experienced like this level of snowfall? You know, you'll you'll sometimes get get a few flakes here and there all across the Gulf Gulf of America.
If if Donald Trump prefers, you go across the Gulf.
Of America over to New Orleans, you're seeing just absolutely extraordinary amounts of snow. I mean that, I don't I don't think that thing's designed to be doing that, but looks actually kind of fun. So I think I would love to hear from people who were down there. I think this would be one of the segments where you know, if you're if you're watching this from the south, go down in the comment section, like like, let us let us know what what what you're experiencing down there and
how people are, how people are responding to it. H that that you know, that amount of snow in a place that's you know, familiar with snow used to getting it isn't isn't the problem at all. But we can put up this this next element here you can see how uh deep and vast this this snowstorm is like covering not you know, New Orleans, all across the Panhandle into into Georgia.
Uh, just truly truly like.
Unusual amounts of snow and colder in places that just aren't aren't prepped for it. Now obviously, because you know this is the timeline we live in, everyone immediately starts making making this political uh the political link here of course,
you can put up D three here. Uh Trump aside from announcing an energy emergency and saying that he's gonna you know, lift, you know, lift any restrictions you can find on drilling, baby drilling drilling in Alaska, drilling off the coastline, whatever you find.
He announced, you can put up D.
Three here that he, uh, the US is going to pull out of, uh, the Paris Accords, which, on the one hand, doesn't matter. The Paris Accords are you know, voluntary commitments.
And if if oh, D.
Three is a stot here, let's let's let's roll Trump talking about withdrawing from the Paris Climate courts.
Next item here is the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Treaty.
Yes, sir, we're.
Going to save over a trillion dollars by withdrawing from that treat.
So they say, there, we're going to You heard the announcer at the end say we're going to save over a trillion dollars withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. That is just complete absurdity. You know, the cost of dealing with the climate crisis, I think is far less than the cost of not dealing with it. Ask ask anybody who's dealing with any of the you know, knock on
effects of the of the climate crisis. And like I was saying, it's a it's a voluntary accord, so the costs are zero, Like it's just we signed, I would say we're going to try to do X. We're also getting to a place where it's very difficult for.
Us to use the arguments that we used to use.
We used to say, it's just not fair that, you know, we're being asked to, you know, deal with the burden of reducing our emissions when you've got countries like China over here who are just blasting away with their emissions. That was always a specious argument, because you know, China was blasting away, creating emissions to produce junk that they would put on barges and send over here for us
to use. So if really, you know, the one responsible for the emissions is to me, the one that's enjoying the kind of you know, product of it, rather than the one that's making it. But setting that aside, China is has either peaked already or is set to peak very soon when it comes to its emissions, and it is on the way down, and is also producing virtually all of say, the components for the solar industry, wind turbines,
et cetera. So we are going to be complaining about bearing the soul burden of addressing the climate crisis for an eternity, while China actually goes and addresses the climate crisis.
And this show is sponsored by Byteedance.
That's right, that's right.
So anyway, first of all, are you hearing from anybody down in the South dealing with this?
You know, I've heard from people enjoying it. If you're not in an emergency situation, you can see how kids are just loving this. They're kind of this a once in a generation storm. Across these Gulf States, there are emergencies. There have been emergencies issued across I believe the Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi. They're getting snow in Texas, significant snow in Texas.
Actually.
The other thing I just want to mention Ryan is that as evacuations are happening down in San Diego now from another wildfire, and there have been lots of deaths in the state of California just in the last couple of weeks. The death toll we shouldn't forget from Hurricane Helene was I think about two hundred and thirty as of what we know right now, there's already there are
already where people are waking up this morning too. I think news that ten people have passed aways as axios historics know, and icy conditions have been linked to at least ten deaths as it disrupts travel across the southern United States. So this is you know, it's depending on how you're experiencing it, obviously affecting people differently. But this this stuff is no joke, no joke at all.
Yeah, So be safe out there, and yeah, enjoy yourself.
See if you can find a sled, I doubt many people have them.
You can use cardboard, by the way, that's it. Yeah, that's a tip. You can if you don't have a sled and they don't sell it at a wind Dixie, just get some cardboard.
Everybody's everybody's got cardboard, and yeah, it'll last for a half hour, forty five minutes.
Then go get another piece of cardboard.
You have a lot of it because of Jeff Bezos.
Yes, you absolutely do.
Well.
Obviously, it's Donald Trump's first week in office, and the media is reacting about.
As you would expect.
Now, there's raging debate over Elon Musk's alleged Nazi salute, and I know Crystal and Zager covered that yesterday, but we wanted to bring this clip of Rachel Mattow reacting to the moment that Elon Musk. He says, you gave his heart out to the audience. That was the line he followed up the salute with. But here's what Rachel Mattow had to say, and then we'll bring you a fun clip from the view, so stay tuned for that.
My heart goes out to you.
He does it twice.
And again. Maybe that's not what he meant. Maybe he doesn't know what that is that happened today.
What we're seeing here with the January sixth pardons, this kind of thing does have the benefit of novelty, right, we've never quite seen something like this before. But like with the corruption, the boring thing about it is that
we know exactly what this leads to. Authoritarian rulers all over the world have always liked to have pair military loyal but unofficial perpetrators of violence and menace to work on their behalf, to intimidate and hurt anyone in opposition, to make it too scary for normal people to participate in politics or civic life, to make everybody who might oppost Trump in any way worry about the thugs that
might turn up at their door. Trump pardoning and releasing from prison the January sixth defendants, including the paramilitaries, means he is effectively immunizing his followers from committing violence in his name. He's making clear, you know, if you support me, the law.
Doesn't apply to you.
We've had political violence before, we've had civil war, but before each of those things has been treated as a calamity and a scandal.
This time it's a platform.
Okay, rain.
So what she did there was make this case that Elon Musk, and if people were listening to this, they didn't see on the screen what her chiron. What wasn't the chiren, It was a picture on the screen said was all caps.
This is not a drill.
And so she's making the case that Elon Musk's what she seemed to believe was a suggestion or a gesture towards metaphorically and literally that that kind of fascist, right wing and maybe even Nazi history. What she's saying is that ties into the j six pardons, because it's this nudging of paramilitary groups that support Trump to to kind of mobilize and rally behind him. So what did you make of that that's a that's an argument that actually
I can see it being sort of a sendant. What do you make of it?
I mean in general, Yeah, And I think a guy like Elon Musk, who is currently out supporting the far right in Germany, doesn't get a whole lot of benefit of the doubt when he does this this gesture twice, you know, one time, ok, whoops, then he does it another time.
I mean, I also think, and Musk has said.
Many times that he is at heart a troll, and the like the troll kind of meme world that he comes out of loves to flirt.
With this kind of stuff like that.
That's one of their main trolls, Like, they love to get the libs upset about something like this.
And so.
I could see him having done it deliberately with some type of deniability, just to create this spectacle, because the far right people absolutely saw it for what they believe it was. They loved it, like they thought it was directed right at them, like look what he's doing. And it's not as if he was like, oh wow, sorry about that, I can't believe I did that. You know, he's just kind of laughing along with it, which is what you would do if you were deliberately doing it as a troll.
So although it's also what you would do if you were like if you see everybody just totally overthinking your attempt, and I'm just taking his charitable explanation, I'm taking his explanation here charitably he was he He says that he was giving his heart to the audience, So when he patted his chest, he was patting his heart, and then when he extended his arm, he was extending it up to the audience.
So the charitable you did it like this right, that's how.
You would also smacked my computer, But that's.
How you would do that he did with the sprinkling his heart on people like, how do you go from how do you go that way unless you're deliberately like come on, Like.
You're giving him way more credit for being a well adjusted sort of adult human being, I think, but even.
More work to do that than than the normal Like, but I.
Was just saying, like, it's also like going along with it and joking about it, and it is I think also how you would react to it if you're like, oh my gosh, people are overthinking the stupid gesture that I made with my arm, So I don't know if the reaction itself is any like vindication of the point that this was a Nazi salute. And I also, I mean a f D is that's what you're referencing support
for in Germany. I mean, Elon Musk says that he supports a f D for like similar reasons that he supports Donald Trump, meaning the borders, immigration, refugees, asylum, Uh, that sort of thing, and a f D is it's just so wild and German politics are wild.
But I mean, I don't think there, I don't.
I don't think there are you know, at least not yet, shades of early Hitler in Elon Musk. So to that extent, I just feel like I'll freak out when he says something that makes him sound like a Nazi and gestures like this. To me, it just looks like Elon Musk being a weirdo.
Anyway, The View responded to it. You know, let's let's hear the view.
The View has been having a week. They've been talking in general about Trump reacting to his speech, and they had an interesting take.
A sick listen the speech itself. I remember when it was done. My first reaction was you know, what is this country he speaks of, because I immediately couldn't reconcile the way I see the country and the people and how it is right now and where he saw it it was. He didn't say carnage, but he said carnage pretty much in everything else. Do you remember the reference
from his first inauguration he said carnage. I just kind of felt this dark feeling, and then he had this kind of martyr like like, you guys are downtrodden and almost irrep you can't save this place, but I can, and like it had this like godlike complex without any Jesus qualities, Like it was kind of like a juxtaposition. But I was really disappointed, not surprised, just to be clear, but disappointed that there wasn't one kind thing to say about the outgoing administration.
My postures this, you.
Guys know, my criticisms of Donald Trump, they remain. I'm going to pay pray for the president. I'm going to thank him when he does things that are good, like the hostage deal. I commend him. I'm grateful for that, and I'm going to call it out when he does things that are recklessly.
And I'm gonna call it out when you.
Talking about Trump, who's been negotiating.
Love to see our old rising hosts over at the View.
Now everyone's having fun. I mean the other thing.
For people who don't know, like she was briefly a rising co host before she got snatched up by the by the ladies of the.
View, snatched up by the Lady's View a memoir, the great memoir title, But yeah, I mean they it's interesting because just one more point on the Elon must thing. I just remember when I was at the Federal List. I think the right is kind of sensitive to this and hopefully it doesn't lead to something that gets taken advantage of by genuine bad people who have awful, like racist, bigoted intentions. But uh, the when I worked at the Federalists,
there was like a many news cycle. You might remember this Ryan about the Federalist eagle being a crypto, a cryptic.
Nazi symbol, and it just like, to me.
This feels like it was plucked from that era of like twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen, of like finding Nazi stuff in everything. But maybe it's also just sort of a roar test. I don't know, but I think the View also that clip. The reason I wanted to include it here is just that this this these differing reactions to Trump two point zero, there's some people who and
I think this is the views example. I mean, when Trump one point zero started, Alyssa was working for Donald Trump, and now it's twenty twenty five, enthusiastically working for Donald Trump. And now it's twenty twenty five, and I feel like the view is sort of stuck in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, whereas we're starting to hear I guess, smarter criticisms of
Trump from different corners of the media. I don't know if you've noticed that, or like evolved criticisms of Trump that don't feel quite as hysterical as I would say that the Matto clip did just now or the view, I don't know, do you agree with that that it was evolution.
The entire resistance liberal architecture is gone, like it's it has, It has not reappeared at all like the last eight years ago. On January twenty first, there were five roughly five million people in the streets. It was the largest single day demonstration in American history. Hundreds of thousands, maybe half a million in Washington, d C. And then another some you know, four plus million in cities all across
the country, Alaska, like you name it. Everybody who was who had been kind of just passively involved in politics on the Democratic side and did not think that Donald Trump was going to win, was kind of shocked into action. A lot of them ended up running for office a lot, but they came out and protested the Muslim band shortly after that.
And.
That, like that kind of changed what Trump was able to get done.
It.
It did create a political counterbalance.
It's not even it's not even remotely there this time, like nobody's even trying to pull that together.
The protests happened unless you were on the national mall over the course of the inauguration weekend, and that was so different from the Women's March, where you know, you could it was it bled into everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So yeah, it's it's just a completely different world, which which then creates space for some different kind of criticism and reaction which is still taking form and shape, and we'll see what that ends up looking like. Following the cease firing Gaza, Israel launched a massive raid into Janine, which is a resistance foot stronghold in the West Bank.
We can put up this.
Article here by Sharif Abdel Cadus and Mariam Barghuti in drop site News.
We'll just want to read from a little bit about this. They write.
Isral launch a major military operation in the occupied West Bank on Tuesday, raiding the city with troops, military vehicles, and bulldozers, backed by airstrikes, drones and Apache helicopters. At least nine Palestinians have been killed and more than forty wounded in the ongoing operation, according to the Ramla based Palestinian Health Ministry. Prime Minister Benjamin Netyah, who said the goal of the quote large scale and significant military operation
was to eradicate terrorism in Janine. Netnyahu wrote on Twitter, we are acting systematically and decisively against the Iranian access axis wherever it extends its reach. Now this is coming as at the same time that there have been riots in Jerusalem.
We can put up some of this footage over there.
Because after some of the captive the Palestinian captives were released by Israel as part of the ceasefire deal, settlers, Israeli settlers then kind of stormed into a refugee camp to try to take revenge over that. The IDF or the Israeli police showed up and saw massed men with guns and believed them to be Palestinians, shot at them, not realizing that they were Israeli extremist settlers, and critically
wounded two of them. And the result that the result of that shooting has been these these riots that from the Israeli public saying, you know, condemning the Israeli government for accidentally mistaking Israelis for Palestinians and shooting at them.
And so while so far nine, you know, roughly ninety Palestinians were released as part of the hostage deal, already Israel has detained more than ninety Palestinians in the West Bank, giving a real kind of spinning the wheels feel to the attempts to reach some type of peace agreement here. At the same time, Uh the the Trump's Middle East envoy, the man you know, Wikoff, who was able to kind
of browbeat Yahoo into agreeing to this ceasefire deal. Uh said a couple of days ago that he was considering a trip to Gaza to see for himself what the destruction has been like.
There.
That was followed yesterday with and we can put up F four here with an explicit invitation from Hamas to say that that Witkoff is is welcome to come and engage in direct talks with Hamasti, to to see for himself what the situation is to he and to hear directly from Palestinians and from Palestinian leadership, you know where they are on the the unfolding UH ceasefire.
H Emily Uh.
Witkoff's intervention into this you at Trump's behest into into this conflict has seemed to change the tenor of it. But what Yahoo is showing here, it seems, is that he is intent on ratcheting up violence, you know, wherever and whenever he can.
Now.
Besil Smotrich was quoted as saying that this raid in Janine was authorized by the war cabinet as a new kind of war aim in exchange for Smotrich and his party agreeing to the ceasefire in Gaza. So, in other words, if we're gonna, if we're gonna sign on to this ceasefire, you have to launch that this incursion into Janine and make this not just a police actions as sometimes happens in Janine, but a full scale invasion. So Uhahu agreed to that and is and is also saying that he.
Holds open the.
Possibility of not just possibility, but almost the certainty of resuming the war in Gaza.
But then enter whitcough.
Do you think that uh witcough or Trump kind of have the will to intervene here, because it seems like they'd have to just constantly befending this off, like that this is the kind of thing you can do once and that it's done. They have to be there with their foot in the door keeping it from closing at all times.
And basically no Republican president other than Donald Trump would have agreed to this particular ceasefire deal. This is another way in which he totally confuses the boundaries, where he totally like sort of explodes the boundaries of acceptable policy
maneuvering on the right. And so I don't know that people in Trump's orbit expected what you just laid out run, which I think is totally correct, because we know one thing Donald Trump is more sensitive about than just about anything else is looking a fool, being made to look a fool. He doesn't seem to particularly like Benjamin Yahoo we've mentioned before, but he posted the reposted that Jeffrey Sachs video about a month ago, and.
He's had plenty of criticism for netyah who in the past.
So I don't think he wants to put up with Netnyah who's or what he sees is net Yah who's bullshit. He doesn't want to look like he's being you know, steered by Benjamin NETANYAHUO and that he is not fully in control.
As Donald Trump.
And that's the dynamic I think that's going to unfold with alongside this new ideological component to the point about no Republican president, you know, agreeing to this deal other than Donald Trump. But I don't think most Republicans in Congress would have agreed to this deal, and maybe not even in his own cabinet.
And so at least a phonic as she was.
Before we get to hurt.
One other piece that private people have probably seen. Trump was asked about whether he thought the cease fire and guys that would hold at his one of his overal office press conferences, and he said, I doubt it now and it's not as you know, he said, it's it's their war, which I'm sure was caused for celebration in Tel Aviv among the Yahoo circle.
Great, but what does that mean in terms of US support you? So is that what's on the table with Donald Trump? This is your war?
Right?
Is it our weapons and their war? Because that right exactly? And what makes it their war rather than our war? So that seems to be his his wish, like I think that's what Donald Trump wishes, that it.
Was their war and not ours.
But it is ours well, And a big reason for that is because the sort of ideological convictions of the sort of coalition that's been part of the Republican Party for a long time that we'll see on display here is E five. This is a least stephonic getting asked. And remember Trump's ambassador to Israel is Mike Hugabye as well. So when you hear a least to phonics the answer to answer to this question, just bear in mind that this is.
You know, obviously, we all know this. You don't even need to be reminded of.
This a fairly consensus position among the sort of intellectual class of the Republican Party. Maybe not the Median Republican voter, although I'm sure many would say yes. But here's how at least Stephanic Handa handled a question about the kind of ideological underpinnings of her position.
Here answers in my office.
But I did ask you whether you subscribe to the views of Finance Minister Smotrich.
I'm sorry, Mo Trich.
This is Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich and the former National Security Minister Benivier, who believe that Israel has a biblical right to the entire West Bank. And in that conversation you told me that, yes, you shared that view.
Is that your view today?
Yes?
Okay.
I think when it comes to this very difficult issue, if the President is going to succeed at bringing peace and stability to the Middle East, we're going to have to look at the UN Security Council resolutions, not just the ones on Lebanon, which we should enforce, but other UN Security Council resolutions, and it's going to be very difficult to achieve that if you continue to hold the view that you just expressed, which is a view that was not held by the founders of the State of Israel,
who were secular Zionists, not religious.
Hiis oh great, So she's being confirmed for ambassadors to the United Niche. And you could parse that in a bunch of different ways. I'm sure she could, or a defender of hers could argue that when she says she believes that there's a biblical claim to those lands, they just mean it in terms of like the Bible laying out the history of the Jewish people having a claim
to being the indigenous people. Quite different, right, But oh yeah, I mean so I think the the obvious and that you know, an evangelical Christian like a Mike Hakabee would say that biblical Israel and the way that it's sort of described not just in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is referring to the modern political state of Israel. And that's not an uncommon belief in evangelical circles. It's
not an uncommon belief in uh many religious circles. So I think that's that's likely, uh the interpretation that's correct in this case. In her case, it takes to explain how why a least defind answer the question that way.
Yeah, the word Israel is in the Bible, Like, Okay, that's true, but what that what that has to do with UN security resolutions is like nothing.
It definitely makes any two state solution, which is like the point that US politicians push on Israel and who says he doesn't believe in a two state solution. That's the ideological position of the secular, even secular Zionists, even somebody like who.
And that's a pretty.
Hard square to circle if you're if you're trying to deal with the West Bank.
And so it's such a convoluted mess because of like you like that uh, out of control ideology, ideological like a relationship to Zionism that you're that you're describing there, coupled with some other developments that we're seeing not just this, not just the ceasefire that we have so far, but also we can put up this next element up on the screen here.
Uh.
Trump in one of his first actions, UH, stripped John Bolton of the security detail.
That's a great tweet though, by the way, you should read it on the screen.
Matthew Petty.
Matthew Petty tweeted the Iran deal two point zero will be offering John Bolton as a blood sacrifice in exchange for building Trump Tower Tehran.
Which is like everything in this era.
Uh, a joke, but also not a joke like.
These are the these are the times we're living in.
Like Trump just yesterday was talking about how North Korea has incredible condo opportunities because of the seafront, you know, so much seafront property. He talked about how spectacular you could do a kind of kind of condo rebuild in Gaza. So the idea of Trump Tower Tehran is not ridiculous.
And they are literally in Arabia, no, I mean they literally announced, the Trump organization literally recently announced they're doing a second Saudi Arabia and tower. Like it's it's to your point, Ryan, like, yes, but they're also like literally holding these towers and with countries that we do these like extremely important form relations with and Trump is technically
divested from Trump Organization at all of that. But we don't need to open up the can of worms to say that the joke has some legs.
Yeah, And my view on the Bolton cure is for your take on this. My view on the Bolton decision to not give him this twenty four hour security anymore is you know, bold, like I don't you know, I don't want anybody killed, but you know, Bolton has made his choices Bolton, as you know, decided to live by the sword, like the most militaristic kind of policy career that you could really conjure up in twentieth and twenty first century America. Like the body count that trails behind
him is just completely countless. So he got to do that with his career. The public does not then have some special obligation.
To him because he made those decisions.
Uh, security details are insanely expensive, like you know, million could you know who? Like I don't, we don't know what it cost, but like millions and millions of dollars, like this is not a it's not a small amount of money to have a security detail on a on a single person like this.
And so correct me if I'm wrong. R.
This was he was the subject of an alleged Iranian assassination plot and that's.
Right, and related related presumably to his U push to assassinate cost some solemney who who was an Iranian official who was killed in Baghdad after landing you know, in the airport and then getting into a car with with some other Iranian officials wearing a suit you know he was he was he ran the IRGC and and you know he you know, UH, so you know, he had
himself a huge trail of bodies behind him. He made, you know, he made his choices, but assassinating him with a drone in another country was it was a huge break with norms uh and and and I believe that's the main thing that that Iran UH has said that
they're you know, angry at Bolton. For for Trump to so quickly strip the security detail from him does to me suggest that he's serious about actually some type of Iran reproachmont which he himself blew up by walking out of the UH the Iran Nuclear Deal and then and then entering into the Abraham Accords in an attempt to kind of uh but you know, combat and counteract UH Iran you through you know, a combination of you know,
an alliance between you A Israel and Saudi Arabia. What's fascinating is that, you know, while we're inaugury and new president here over in Davos, the World Economic Forum, Joe's our meeting, so of course the Saudis are there as well.
You can put up F seven there.
So the Saudi Foreign Minister at Davos gave a speech basically it's very strongly encouraging Trump to continue pursuing warm relations with Iran. And you know, so Israel's you know, assault on Gaz over the last fifteen months has created the kind of kind of political pressure in the region that has pushed paradoxically Saudi Arabia and Iran closer together.
China has actually helped to broker or approachment between them, And what the Saudi Foreign Minister is saying is keep keep that going, like we don't actually need to be adversaries in the way that we are with Iran. And so if this is some kind of blood sacrifice fig leaf, maybe maybe that joke of a tweet was not reading too much into it, and go to this last element and then we get your.
Response to it.
This is f eight yesterday, So the headline here in the Jewish Jewish Insider is pro Israel Republicans alarmed over Trump's Defense Department appoint e.
And it's actually kind of plural.
The yeah, yesterday, the Trump administration announced a whole slew of top political appointees over at at the Pentagon, a dozen or more names, and not a single Neocon on that list, not a single iron Hawk on the list. They also announced that they were firing Brian Hook, who we reported on here, who was He was one of the hard hardest core iron hawks in the previous Trump administration and was brought in to be the a chair
of the State Department Transition. And when when he was appointed to that, a lot of people like, oh, yikes, like this is this is bad news, Like if you've got him in there, this seems like you're going to be organizing for a confrontation with Iran. The first thing he tried to do was try to get Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. That failed, and now Hook himself has has been fired and Trump fired him.
I don't know if you noticed this in a hilarious way he said I have.
He basically he said, I have fired a bunch of idiots from the previous administration, and he put him on the list of those idiots who worked for the previous administration. What he was implying is that he worked for Biden, but he actually worked for Trump and was the chair
of Trump's State Department transition. So just a classic Trump of like hiring the guy and then when he fires him saying he didn't even know him, and he's like pretending he wasn't the chair of the transition, and hey, I'm not going to call him out because good because you know, get that guy out of here. I think Sager posted something on Twitter yesterday saying, like the list of names that were at the Trump depart was just you know, banger after banger, like these are kind of
anti interventionists. You know these folks better than I do. But from my people in these in this world, they were thrilled at this. And the fact that Jewish Insider, which is a very strong reflection of the kind of a pack lacud wing is is alarmed, suggests that the excitement, you know, has the merit to it.
What what's what? What's your assessment? Right?
Yeah, they did this as well. I forget which publication it was.
It was a conservative publication and it was a I think a relatively pro interventionist publication that did this, with Bridge Colby at the kind of gun. Yeah, Soccer's probably right that like this is again we were talking earlier in the show about the immigration hawks seeing this as a generational moment for a crackdown because they had these kind of four Biden interim years to plot a potential Trump return and potential with a popular vote win that they feel like is a mandate and the wind.
At their back.
And they got basically exactly what they were looking for. And that'll have some interesting ramifications. But one place where it could be really positive is on foreign policy, where the conservative movements has made.
A genuine shift.
Not everyone, of course, but you know Donald Trump, you know, out with Bolton and in with these guys, in with the quote banger after banger list that you referenced from soccer. Taking a look at who's at the Pentagon, you could say the same thing over at the State Department. It's shaping up from what I'm hearing to look really similar. So that's obviously not to say that this is going to be like Rand Paul's Pentagon and State Department or
Bernie Sanders Pentagon and State Department. But just about anything is better than the status quo we've been experiencing and you know for the last how many decades, and whatever you think about Donald Trump, he is very good at disrupting the status quo. And if it's going to get disrupted, please please disrupt our foreign policy because it desperately needs new, fresh voices. And Trump is sincerely bringing them in, so we'll see where that goes.
I mean, the Israel. He seems very happy with Steve Wickcough so far.
He seems very happy with the deal so far, even if a lot of his Republican allies are not. But this can all I mean, obviously, this is we were talking about. This is the theme of the show. Is his coalition of personnel is so fragile, his coalition of personnel worth, his coalition of supporters is fragile in and of itself. So this is just a lot that can
change very quickly. But he's at least setting himself up in a much better position in terms of positive foreign policy outcomes than he did in twenty seventeen.
Yeah, And the reason we wanted to do all this in one segment is because all of those things are related. If Trump only cared about the Gaza sees fire deal because of Gaza per se it would fall apart because he doesn't really care about that. But the Saudi Iran an Israel relationship is key to that. Trump very much wants a Saudi Israel normalization deal like that. He desperately wants that, and he wants that to be one of the things he does in order to get that. Gaza
can't be in a conflagration. There cannot be in genocide still going on in Gaza. To get that Nobel Peace Prize that we were talking about on the show last week would require an Iran Saudi Israel. You know, you're not going to get Iran in Israel. But if you can get Iran and Saudi Arabia, Iran in the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia together and deal that is that's like Peace Prize worthy. And none of that can happen if Gaza is still undergoing the genocide like that.
So that would be the structural reason that.
He would actually kind of push back on net Yahoo's effort to keep this going. The article you're talking about, by the way, it also was in Jewish Insider, and the headline was rumored for a Trump posting Elbridge Colby's dubvish views on Iran stand out.
And then it's just absolutely stupid. It's complete nonsense. He's he's a realist, he's anyway, we don't need to get into.
It, but it is just he steamroll He's steamrolled through. Albertge Gubli is in there, and.
People are very excited about it. In the sort of d. C. Magot world, they're very excited about it.
So all right, we'll see where that goes. Anyway, Emily, thanks for thanks for bearing with us.
No, thank you on the road.
Thanks for thanks for bearing with me for sure. No.
Ryan and I obviously both have full time day jobs, so sometimes his life takes us on the road. But just great to be here with you, Ryan, and hope you have a great rest of your week.
We'll see who back here next week. I see everybody