Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here, and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. Emily, how you doing good?
Starting to disappoint everyone? We do not have Bro.
Show today, No Bro show. That's all right, It's all good here still.
Yeah, Sager did a great job holding down the counterpoints for it last week, so we are ready to dive into these about to.
Switch seats because he sat here and I sat there and I liked it so much better.
But I forgot, I forget that you liked the other side. Well, maybe someday you can colonize sager seat. Well, Sager did a great job holding down the fort. But we are within two weeks of the election, so we have quite a big show. Donald Trump is campaigning everyone where Barack Obama campaigned with eminem On behalf of Kamala Harris. Last night, a lot of people saying that he rapped the first verse of Los Yourself. It didn't really, he wasn't really
rapping he was. It was a poetry, right, But I felt like sort of I had been like, what's the Remember when you used to get rick rolled? I felt like I had been rickrolled by people saying Obama was rapping Eminem.
I read the Trump War rumor whoever tweeted it. All the Republicans were, I have no idea what that even was. You know what that was? Come on, yeah, everyone knew, you know what I was trying to do.
So the campaign trail is chaotic as usual right now. So we're going to dive into some highlights from Trump's last twenty four hours. Basically, we're going to talk about how the announcement, huge announcement. He's going to do Joe Rogan's podcast. We're also then going to turn to the Kamala Harris campaign. We're going to talk about Elon Musk. We're going to bring all kinds of updates from the world big money basically playing the role that it's playing
in this election. Then Ryan, we're heading over to.
Number yes, we've got an exclusive poll from the Nebraska Senate race, which show we'll tease for you now shows Dan Osborne, who we had on the show about a month ago, up by two points over the Republican incumbent. This race could flip control of the Senate. Actually, I would say that Nebraska is the Senate race that will decide control of the Senate. Assuming Democrats lose Montana. We already know that they're going to lose West Virginia. Joe Manchin god rest iss all no longer with us.
Well, it could also be an AOC style vibe shift for the Senate, so you know where the seat is scooped up by not a Democrat and an independent candidate right.
An industrial mechanic union leader veteran who led a strike and got fired for it guest on the show potentially now could be a Senator. We'll see.
Yeah, all right, so we will dive into that. I really hate to say this, but we have updates from McDonald's, which is suffering in the stock market and in the stomachs apparently of people around the country.
So far, one person has died, an elderly person died from E coli infected quarter pounders. This, Yeah, the stock mark, the stock price plummeted, dozens of people sick and gross, disgusting, disgusting.
Scager wanted us to talk about it. So here we are also do an update from Cuba. Ryan was able to get a fantastic on the ground report that we're really excited to play for everybody. The blackouts in Cuba are just unbelievable.
Yeah, Cuba went through its most serious blackout in its history post revolution. At Augustine. Reporter for drop site is on the ground in Havana, and we'll update us on that.
Yeah, and we're going to finish with another drop site report actually on the IDF fantastic report that drop.
Site, actually incredible report that looks into that basically maps out an entire Israeli combat battalion, the seven to forty nine Battalion, tracing their entire path of destruction through Gaza starting shortly after October seventh up until today, exclusively relying on their own social media posts. So you'll want to stick around for that one.
So let's start with Donald Trump's last twenty four hours or so on the campaign trail. He sat for an interview with Saudi State TV and talked about what he thinks has become a hostages and at least policy. Let's roll just a clip of that.
You said you have to release these hostages before I reached the White House. So do you think what can be done?
Well, I would have said they have to release them immediately. I think if I said it, they would have done it. I think the hostages would have been back home. But I think even early on, I think a lot of those hosages were dead. I think they were dead. I mean, it's a very sad thing. It's not even believable when you think about it, but I think pretty early on there were a lot that were gone, and you know, just ad rest their souls to live that way and
to you know, spend. And these were largely young people that were having a good time at a festival. Life was a bowl of cherries, right, and they did. It's a very sad thing. But you know, it's interesting. I don't know what's going to happen when they find out there are fewer than they thought, and it could be by a staggering number.
What's about the destruction and the death of civilians? Do you think that tolerable price that Israel's doing in Gaza and in Lebanon.
Now, oh, the destruction's terrebrale, the whole the whole thing is terrible. It should have again, it should have never happened if October seventh wouldn't happen, which it wouldn't have because Iran funds it, and Iran had no money. They had no money, They had absolutely no money. And I would have made a deal with them and they wouldn't have done October seventh, but because they have no respect for Biden, they did it.
So and this continues Donald Trump's campaign trail pitch essentially that Ukraine and the war in Gaza never would have happened if he was president. This is genuinely the way that he handling these massive foreign policy discussions. And honestly, I think it's one of those moments of from Trump where it's like so absurd that it's almost brilliant because it's a you can't really rebut it like, what are
you supposed to say? I have a time machine, and actually I can play out this counterfactual, but we actually know that a lot of times, like the strongman theory of history plays out at least on the micro level, you know, not necessarily macro, but on a micro level, and various conflicts based on how world leaders personally interact with other world leaders. So I don't think it's as ridiculous as a lot of the media is making it
out to be. But it is his. I mean, for any voter, they would actually like to know more specifics, and I think, like, what are you going to do some sort of basic questions. Yeah, but you.
Could as a voter, you could even grant him for the sake of discussion. Okay, let's say that that's true.
Yeah, he's just going to negotiate right now, what right?
Okay, you weren't president. It did happen. Now here's where we are, So now what are you gonna do?
Uh?
His his his point on the hostages is very Trumpian uh, and is also there's some truth to it. It's it's the kind it's it's devastating for a lot of those families to hear and kind of heartless because he doesn't have any specific information and he's not telling them anything specific. He's basically just telling them you should have less hope than you do have. But on the other hand, we do know that so many of the hostages who we thought were alive in Gaza actually died on October seventh.
Like that that is a that is a fact, and it doesn't get that hasn't gotten talked about much, and for it's just a it's just a very trumpy and callous way to kind of inject himself into that, into that question. You know, he recently said, uh, that he that Bibi is holding that Biden is holding net Yahoo back and that in fact, he should do the opposite.
And you have this remarkable situation We're gonna talk about this in a bit where he's now winning our of American voters, right while also saying that Biden has been too tough on net Yahoo. Yet he's smart enough that he's framing the race as around the Cheney's and that he's the peace candidate, right and the enough to stick to that because he's not right.
But the Hair's campaign is playing right into his hands. I mean absolutely again, like this is Donald Trump is absurd in many different ways, but this is not. I mean, I think this is actually one of those moments where Trump is kind of outside the paradigm, the uniparty paradigm that absolutely chains other candidates to unpopular positions. And I'm not saying that it's like morally a pillar of like political moral genius, but it's actually politically pretty smart, like he's slippery.
Although there's never a pace where the Unit Party was part of of the Chinese, like the Chinese were either popular among the trail that is really true, or popular among the Democrats. Really they never had bipartisan support.
At the same time, that's a great point, although they have bipartisan support right now, just not with the.
People, right, I mean, they've they've got Bill Crystal or whatever.
Yeah, but well, and he may actually say he's formerly a Democrat right now, but the entire reason that they're rolling out the Chinese on the campaign trail is he says he's a feminist.
By the way, or Bill Crestl I don't think.
Brings up to do it, but it's because the Harris campaign thinks it'll win swing voters, which is sort of funny. And yeah, yeah, but well, speaking of that, actually this is we were just about to get to this sot of Frank Lunz, sort of famed DC polster, talking about how the Trump campaign could use NICKI Haley. Let's roll Frank lens.
Here Bromp has said that Nicki Haley wants his nemesis in the primaries, could join him on the trail. She's done a robo call for him, She's recorded robo calls on his behalf. But if the Trump campaign deploys her, what kind of voters could that help with?
And where do you think that they'll use her.
It will help with younger women because Trump is doing so well among older men. It'll help in these swing states, and Nikki Haley brings interest, brings attention among independents, among swing voters. There aren't many left, but what is left they will listen to her, and it'll be a surprise because she has been so challenging of him, so negative towards him up to now. It's a very smart strategy, But in the end, it's not going to be the surrogates.
It's going to be what they say and how they say it in the last forty eight hours that will determine these final votes. The key for Haley is absolutely turn.
Out eighteen to twenty nine women. The key for Donald Trump is absolutely union votes, young African American men and Latinos. It's too close to Carl right, now, who does better with those groups is the one who gets selected.
One part of that, right, I'm curious what you make of is him saying that the key for Nicky Haley would be eighteen to twenty nine year old women. I would think it would actually be an older demographic of women, slightly older women in their thirties and forties with kids who want a softer, kind of a softer face on trump Ism.
To reassure that, I would assume he would agree with that. That wherever she can make in roads with women or swing voters in general, or people persuadable in general, that she would go for that. This is a problem of the Democrat's own making, though in some ways like they elevated Nicky Haley as this reasonable centrist, yes true, who should be listened to when it comes to her take on Donald Trump because they liked what she was saying
about Donald Trump when she was running against him. Lowel Behald, you better be careful who you elevate if you don't think that they're actually in your camp. And so it's like, so now there will be this candidate, there's this candidate out there who see an n and MSNBC and all the kind of suburban Democrats have said is a credible voice when it comes to Trump going out and saying Trump is actually good.
Right, that's such a good point. Oh, whoops, No, that's a great point. And this idea that you know what Franklin's was saying, there's like this race is way too close to call. So to your point, Ryan, any slice that you can appeal to easily enough, like you get any surrogate and you put them wherever you can, because it's just a game of numbers, like you're just trying
to tip the scale in one direction. And even if it's you know basically what I'm saying, we don't think Nikki Haley or I don't think Nikki Haley has like some broad demographic appeal in the United States, but there probably is a slim enough demographic of people who are in the middle of the ven diagram where they take the mainstream media seriously and are sort of interested in Donald Trump.
Yeah, right, exactly. Not a huge great and Democrats created her as a reasonable critic. And the reason I say it's a foreseeable air her is that she is a complete maniac like her police Cheney esque and in many ways more insane than Trump's, Like she has never met a country that she doesn't think should be we should be at war with, or should be our proxy doing war for us. Like there are no other countries in the world utterly maniacal when it comes to foreign policy
and militarism. And Democrats were willing to either over Let's be generous to them and say they're willing to overlook it because she was critical of Trump during a primary.
I mean, I think they like it. It's the same people who are elevating.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of sort of breaking out of the uniparty paradigm, Donald Trump agreed to go on Joe Rogan's show Big News yesterday. He's going to sit down for an interview with Joe Rogan on Friday. I'm hoping the episode will air on Friday.
That'll be your weekend plans.
It is, can't wait. But Trump said which podcast was it on? He said like a month ago that he would think about doing Joe Rogan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right. It was Lex Friedman, And it was part of this longer conversation that he was having with Lex Friedman about.
What I'm not going to ask him. He has asked me, I'm not going to ask him.
Yes, right, exactly why it's important to do new media, which is an argument that he's made a couple of times since, which is also pretty interesting. But he said basically like I don't know Joe Rogan. I don't you know. I've walked out into the ring with him. People think that makes us friends, but he's kind of cold towards Joe Rogan when he was having that conversation with Lex Friedman, and here he is, He's agreed to do the podcast.
Really speaks to the power of Joe Rogan. And another credit words due smart move on behalf of the Trump campaign, because I mean, this is a massive audience and Trump is Trump. Trump doesn't have bad interviews. Trump only has Trump interviews. Like there is no good or bad.
It is just Trump. And if we didn't already, we can put a three up on the screen. In some ways, Trump had to swallow some ego here, because it wasn't just that Trump had decided not to go on Joe Rogan's show. Joe Rogan for many years has been saying publicly that he was completely uninterested in having Trump on and that Trump is a buffoon, yep, who he refused to vote for. So Trump knows that, and it is a testament to Rogan's power. He's that when he finally agreed, Okay, fine,
I will have Trump on that. Trump agreed because Trump hates nothing more than people who make fun of him, belittle him, insult him, don't look up to him, don't respect him. So for Trump to say, all right, despite him saying all that, I Am still going to appear on his podcast shows you how important his campaign and he understands Rogan's kind of gettable voting base to be. And that's what Democrats have just or e lead. Democrats are just not understand about Rogan's demographic that some of
them are right are they're locked in right wingers? Some yeah, But most of them, I would argue, are very much gettable there and they're they're open to hearing an argument.
This is the thing that professional Washington struggles to understand is the sort of what they would view as confusing and incoherent political views of the average American. And it's not incoherent at all. It's just like the average American isn't a fixed ideological creature like most of professional Washington is,
and That's what I think Joe Rogan understands. It's interesting because Rogan basically seem to be very exhausted by the pressures of interviewing candidates, because people would when you're talking to Bernie Sanders or Tulsa Gabbard, people would put Rogan in one box with the other and then they would start talking about him in the context of journalism and treating him like he's purporting to be some type of Walter Cronkite figure, which he's not. But he's also apparently
reportedly in talks with the Harris camp. So if Kalin Harris said Joe Rogan, that would be an incredible disaster, because Joe Rogan has sort of like picked up the mantle from Howard Stern and is actually more Howard Stern asked than Howard Stern himself. As we talked about Kamala Harris's very very warm and friendly conversation with Howard Stern recently. I think for Harris, you.
Know, Trump can mix, it'd be a disaster. Why she's so.
Bad in unscripted situations.
But maybe a three hour like she's she's bad in a one minute unscripted situation. You think it might be different, but in a three hour unscripted situation, you know, more of herself would come out possible.
I mean when she did that on Breakfast Club, she got caught lying about smoking weed and listening to what Steep dogg or something.
Yes, yes, she said she used to smoke weed while listening to Gin and Juice or something that it was years before Jen and Juice ever came out. Yeah, right, but she won't. The reason I think she could do better is that I don't think she'll feel a need to pander to Rogan, whereas Breakfast Club is in full on pander mode.
I feel like she would want to panderr on Rogan. No.
I think because she's so kind of inculcated with the democratic idea that this person is an adversary, that she would go into it a little bit adversarial, trying to be charming but understanding it to be an adversarial situation interesting, and so then wouldn't be pandering. Who knows how she would try to pander to Rogan. It'd be funny to think about it. Yeah, maybe she'd try try out some like comedy, some stand up riffs. That'd be fun.
I see what you're saying, and I think there's a nine zero chance it's right. But I think the chance is also small.
Because what people don't under say, she's not dumb. No, she comes across as dumb sometimes because I mean, I don't think she's like she doesn't believe anything, and yet she's running for president. You imagine how hard that would that would be.
Put your stuff in her shoes, put yoursels.
She'd try to say, she's trying to tell you what she believes about things, but doesn't actually believe them. Like that's a hard act for She's been doing it for decades, you know, so have some sympathy for that. But she is the daughter of two brilliant people like you know, uh, you can look look up her parents like extraordinarily talented people, that her sister extraordinarily talented, like civil rights activist, and she herself very smart person. That the role she's in
makes it difficult for her. So if you let her go for three hours, maybe she actually loosens up a little bit. But the problem is the questions are still about what do you believe about things? And if she does believe things, she doesn't have enough confidence in them to say them like she's what she says is what her advisers are saying is the thing that's going to get her elected. So she still could get tripped up by that. But Rogan isn't going to talk policy for
three hours. Yeah, you would just talk about her upbringing, probably ask her lots of stories about bir Yeah.
Well, you and I both know the type of politician that is always in sort of acting mode and struggles to kind of get out of it. And a lot of politicians don't like Obama. Trump is a different animal entirely, But there are some politicians who.
Was in it for so long it is him.
Yeah, but there are some politicians who actually, you know, can like unbutton the jacket, sit down and have a beer and they'll say more interesting things. But there are also those politicians that literally cannot get out of politician mode. It's impossible. And she strikes me as one of those. Just because you play the act for so long, you keep up the act for so long, you forget who you actually are. Kind Of that's my armchair psychology.
But she could do what Elon Musk did on Joe Rogan just a little joint. So speaking of that appears to be what a lot of his canvas seamless.
Transition, Ryan people don't. That's that's it right there, that's the art of transition.
And so an audit, according to the Guardian, if you can put put up a four here of the America pack canvassers finds that one in four of them are stoned and skipping. Okay, I'm kidding about that part.
That's your theory. It's not a bad theory.
Although I'm sure a lot of them are stoned and hitting the doors. Some of them appear to be stoned and not hitting the doors. So of the people that they audited in what Nevada and Arizona, up to a quarter of them were were found to be suspicious. It's what in the army they call pencil whipping, like, instead of actually doing the task that you've been instructed to do, you just pull out your pencil on your clipboard and
you check off the box that you did it. In this case, they're i'm sure checking a box on a tablet, which, as you can imagine, is a very tempting thing for somebody underpaid who doesn't do d GAF. Yeah, you just and of course you could tell the the box the little tablet can tell like it has a GPS. Yeah, if you just hit if you hit them all at the end of your shift. Yeah.
Well, so the Guardian audited data from a group called Blitz Canvassing that is part of the America pac operation. America Pack was founded by Elon Musk, and it sounds like they contracted out to this group Blitz Blitz Canvassing and the Garden shows leaked data shows that twenty four percent of the door knocks in Arizona and twenty five percent of the door knocks in Nevada this week were flagged under its internal quote unusual survey logs, which is
a metric used to determine fake donors. They use just one example where they say showed a canvasser who was marked by GPS as sitting at Aguayo's on the trail restaurant half a mile away from the doors, who was supposedly hitting Globe Arizona. Another canvasser was recorded making voters, marketing voters as quote not home two blocks away from
that apartment. So this is actually kind of technical and I don't know all the details of how often this pretty and again is pretty technical and specific canvassing software. I don't know the details of how often this stuff ends up being off the mark GPS like that is being routed into software like this. It's possible that this
is something campaigns deal with all the time. What is pretty telling the ryan is that someone leaked this to The Guardian from presumably it would have to be inside America Pack or from the canvassing group, which tells you that there's a lot of internal upset, likely over whether or not they're doing a good job. And this was a huge problem for Donald Trump with outsourcing his youth
operation to Turning Point USA. In Turningpoint USA's pack back in twenty twenty, there was a ton of hand ringing in the press by you know, a lot of anonymous source system on the record afterwards saying that that was basically a disaster and that it didn't go very well. And so now it seems as though there's potentially more tension over at America Pack, which we were just talking about.
Why it's important to even go for these like slim dum graphics of people who might be persuaded by Nikki Haley knocking on the doors is pretty important in a place like Nevada in Arizona. That's like the most basic thing that you have to do, right.
Yeah, you know, who knows if Elon Musk's canvassers are doing this more than the typical canvassor. You guess probably, but who knows, and we'll see. But it's funny and we can all have a good laugh.
Now. Less funny is this Lever report.
This is a fun one and this has been kicking around for a while. We can put up this last element of the A block here for a story from David Sirota's The Lever about this provision that's been in law for thirty five years. I've been thinking about this as Elon Musk has talked about taking a government official an official government position. There is a law on the books that is designed as a good government law which says you can and you can imagine how this is.
This is kind of a fair way to approach things. Say, look, you know, you're super rich, you own a bunch of stocks. You are invited by the people you know, through their elected president, to serve the public, and as a result, you're now required to divest from some of your holdings so that you don't have criminal conflicts of interest. The divestment might cost you an enormous amount in capital gains taxes immediately and could practically bankrupt you depending on how
the financial situation unfolds. And so therefore, we're going to allow you to defer all of those capital gains taxes, and we're going to we're gonna otherwise kind of give you a unique tax break that is not available to anybody else in the tax code or in finance, and as a thank you for your government service. And so if Elon Musk gets that tax break, we could end up it could end up being worth billions of dollars. Now Musk is I don't I don't think Elon Musk
is doing all this for that tax break. Yeah, that's that would be crazy. However, it is billions of dollars that we're talking about, and I do think that Elon Musk is doing this for lots of reasons, many of which involve getting, you know, maintaining his position as the richest and most powerful person in the world.
I mean, it's fascinating how people on the right are glossing over the truly insane amount of government subsidies that he's hoovered up in his positions as a defense contractor as an electric vehicle entrepreneur, and putting him in the government obviously ensures that he has more and more oversight of how some of those like massively valuable subsidies that boost his products in the marketplace will be delivered into
the future. Now, obviously there are regulations, like we were just talking about that change you know what you can actually reap when you're in the position. So I doubt you know, I think he has a million different ways to get great tax breaks, to be honest, but it is I mean, the road is right. This is significant.
It's significant. The whole the whole question is significant because it raises the broader question of what on earth he would do because legally he would be required to divest from say, SpaceX, yeah, anything that's getting it makes made Sure, Starlink, anything, Tesla, anything that's getting major government contract, which is everything he does.
And of course he's not going to do that. And if he did do that, the tax break wouldn't be worth that much because the stock price collapsed from him no longer being the CEO of those operations would probably kind of outweigh the tax benefit that he would get from it. So therefore he probably ends up keeping them because who's going to tell him not to? Donald Trump, right,
Donald Trump Attorney General. No way, So he ends up he probably ends up unloading things that he had been holding on to, and now he can get this tax break, but aren't consequential to his two hundred fifty billion dollars kind of enterprise.
It's sort of inconceivable how it would work financially to put him in government. I mean, it's almost impossible to figure out what that would look like and how it would be done ethically, even if you're like doing it in the most charitable possible ethically.
Yeah, people in the seventies conceptualizing this blow their minds. We have a piece that we published Sunday over at Dropsight that Emily actually gave us the right wing sensitivity read for about it's so good Elon Musk and he had just recently incorporated United States of America Inc. He calls his pack America Pack, and it's a look at what on earth Elon Musk might be up to.
It's a good read. I think it's really important. I wish there were people on the right who were doing similar reporting. We're going to on the topic of Elon, but actually move over to the Harrish campaign, because Tim Walls went after Elon Musk at a rally. So let's roll this clip of Tim Walls going after Elon.
Elon's on that stage, jumping around, skipping like a dipshit on these stuns. You know it, Think about it. Think about that that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump by an election. Now, look, they're saying the quiet parts out loud now because Donald Trump has already promised that he would put Elon in charge of government regulations that oversee the businesses that Elon run. That's a hell of
a bye. He could spend billions to make more than ten billion on the back end. So, in other words, Donald Trump, in front of the eyes the American public, is promising corruption. There's something not just nuts but cruel about a billionaire using people's livelihood as a political prop his agenda, let's big corporations not pay people for overtime and diminishes those very workers that he was costplaying as.
Okay, So that was Tim Walls at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin. Random curious what you make actually of Democrats turning Elon Musk into a negative or trying to turn Elon Musk into a negative from a kind of populist line against the Trump campaign. The Trump campaign sees Musk largely as an asset, which is fascinating again in this broader conversation about what actually is populism on the right and what
populism is on the left. This is a billionaire who's very close He's a billionaire defense contractor, very close to all of these foreign leaders right, very much tethered or very much entangled with the US government campaign on behalf of Donald Trump, who you know, it just is so different than at least Donald Trump purports to be so different than the Union Party or the Beltwegh or the swamp. And yet Elon Musk has been kind of entangled in
the swamp for a very long time. Democrats are sending out Dick Cheney or I'm sorry, Liz Cheney, saying nice things about Dick Cheney and then going after Elon Musk.
Elon Musk does have the biography of somebody who people hate, a you know, a billionaire defense contractor, you know, living off the government doll while preaching libertarian free market values. However, you have to acknowledge that Elon Musk is a nique figure like he he doesn't that that's the beginning of the description of Elon Musk, but it's not the end of it. And up until fairly recently, his overall popularity among Democrats, Independence and Republicans was through the roof people
really loved him. In fact, liberals were the ones who were buying all of his solar panels and his and his testless that like it. But as he has become this right wing partisan figure, his numbers, particularly among Democrats, have plummeted, and he's now under fifty percent when it comes you know, they'll do polls that say do you have a positive or negative view of Elon Musk, and he's now under fifty percent. He used to be way
above it. In a polarized world where you are a partisan warrior, that's just necessarily going to be the case. And so I think Walls is certainly you know, he's prett reaching to an audience there that is already primed to hate him, just because he's so strongly supportive of Donald Trump. I don't necessarily think. I think Elon Musk is trying to buy the election. Is Land's hard because he's spending He already puts seventy five million dollars into
an America pack, right. That's that's a billionaire trying to buy the election. The thing where he's doing a goofy lottery where he pays people who sign his petition one hundred bucks or forty seven dollars a million dollars and then a million dollars day to one random person, I think that lands less hard, even though it's crime. You I'm telling you.
That if George Soros did that in Pennsylvania, the reactions on the right would be through the.
Route you very quite literally, specifically explicitly cannot do that. It's against the law. But also this is America, and people are like that should be fine.
Yeah, well yeah, of course, but yeah, I mean, I think I don't think actually there's anything wrong political with Tim Walls making this line, because I think this is very much the mood of the country right now. Is it's much closer to saying that guy is literally the richest man in the world spending millions of dollars to help Donald Trump by an election. That's the Walls quote. I think most Americans would more Americans would sympathize with
That doesn't mean they would dislike Elon Musk. I just think that's a smart case to make. Whether it's you're making the case against the billionaires that are back in the Harris campaign or the billionaires backing the Trump campaign.
It's kind of the mood, right, yeah, exactly, speaking of billionaires with huge egos who may or may not be helpful to the candidate that they're ostensibly trying to support. Mark Cuban running around the country underminding Kamala Harris with voters. He thinks he's to lift her up with Wall Street.
There's an argument this is very effective.
I mean what expect tax rate?
Yeah, well, but effective also for convincing she has to win New York, convincing his peers, well yeah, convincing his peers that it's okay to donate to her.
Who gives a rip? If she has a billion dollars, she's going to finish the campaign with money in the bank.
Well let's yeah, let's take a listen to this, SANBC st We'll play this. This is B three.
I said, why are you letting Mark Cuban be out here being the face of this, Why aren't you saying it yourself when it is something that matters to so many people, because.
They don't want to alien other voters.
That's the big that's a big, of course, the big thing out there. And when I said this matters to so many people, someone told me yesterday they would tell you you're crazy if you said it's the campaign that this matters. The defense is that this isn't something they think is really going to be a moving issue in the last two weeks of the campaign, so they.
Don't want touch it.
They don't want to alienate, but that they don't want.
To alienate the base, but they also don't want to alienate their big donors.
That's the issue they run exactly, and I guess with two weeks left, they'd rather just like Cuban talk about it, even when Trump's going on the attack. They say, we don't want to make it more of a thing by having Harris herself come out and say it. But I agree with you. Especially reporting on this campaign, trying to get concrete details out of them, it's been really difficult.
So the substance of the dispute here is that the Harris campaign had said it supported some type of a wealth tax on billionaires. Mark Cuban went out and said, don't worry about that. She's not actually going to do that. Trust me. He publicly said that, yeah, as in a and he is. That's he's not just a friend of hers. He's not just a guy. He's what they call in campaign world, an official surrogate. In other words, what he says can be tied to the campaign.
His media appearances are presumably being if you're a surrogate, that means you're presumably your media appearances are being coordinated by the camp.
Right.
The difference is that he's a billionaire, and so he does what he wants, and that's the problem with having a billionaire surrogate and so. But he has also said, when asked about Lena Kahan and Gary genslearn whether or not Kamala Harris, you know, supports what they've been up to. He has said, she has told me to go out
and say that she does not support. He calls it regulation by litigation, which is also otherwise known as law enforcement, otherwise known as when these companies break the law, you take them the court or you charge them criminally. And he's out there saying that she doesn't support that. He's been part of the campaign to get rid of Lena Coot and is a storygate on the campaign out there like undermining.
Her, right, And I mean he's very transparent at least about his thought processes on X. Not dissimilar to Trump. It must be a billionaire thing, and truly I think it is a billionaire thing.
Right.
When you have that much power, you feel comfortable like inviting people into your thought process because you're super confident, your ego is pretty rock solid. So it doesn't strike you as something that could be damaging to the campaign because your Mark Fan Cuban or you're Donald Trump, like, it just doesn't strike you as something that can be a vulnerability.
A top Biden economic advisor, Brian Diese, who all of these top advisors have hung around and are advising Kamala Arris.
It was reported recently that he is a supporter of Lena Khan, Gary Gensler, this kind of network, this network of kind of populist financial regulators, and that was read on Waltreet as, oh wait, maybe maybe we're actually being strung along here and that the anchor's point was the right one, that she actually doesn't have the political will to get rid of Lena Kahan, but there's no reason for her to alienate all of her donors at this moment.
On the other hand, maybe she does have the will to do it.
So Jamie Diamond is also this was just the last twenty four hours in New York Times, Is reported basically that Jamie Diamond and Bill Gates are quietly lending their support to Kamala Harris.
I think James Dates a bunch of money too.
Yeah, and Jamie Diamond's been a little bit less quiet about it. He's actually said he would consider a role in the administration. So another kind of Musk esque type person thinking about, hey, maybe I could be Treasury secretary. Axio says he would likely, He says he considered role in her administration. Quote likely Treasury secretary. Treasury secretary, which yes, you can easily. I mean Trump brought in like half of Goldman's sacks.
From the suite. It's a very Clintonian vision. And we're going to find out if Biden's four years of really breaking from neoliberalism when it came to their economic policy was just an aberration, yeah, or if and and that Kama is going to try to take them right back under the Clintonian glide path. But it is very disturbing from a left wing perspective to see people like Jamie Diamond or Liz Cheney or Dick Cheney seeing the Kamala
Harris campaign and saying, Oh, that looks nice. I'm going to join that.
Right and it signals that they think they have a sort of influenced, significant influence they do. Speaking of which, while Tim Walls is talking about the world's richards man going in on the Trump campaign, I just want to pull up this article from the Washington Examiner Gab Kaminski, who we've talked to before. He's a great young reporter.
He wrote a story called Meet Kamala Harris's Influential Mega Donors, outlining Reid Hoffman's influence, Michael Bloomberg's influence, people like Dustin Moskovitz, you can go down, George and Alex Soros, James and Catherine Murdock. It's a really interesting story. Jeffrey Katzenberg. Of course, because the sad read of Tim Waltz going after Elon Musk, that sort of populace vein is that neither party and our viewers and listeners obviously know this has any claim
to be against big money in politics. There's just literally no.
True that Aras campaign has been open arms to these folks. Yeah. And then finally to cap off both of these segments, just utterly hilarious, delightful Donald Trump clip at his rally
yesterday talking about Arabs and Muslims. And watch as you're watching this clip, I think, tell me if you tell me, if you agree afterwards and you notice something he's there's a message that he is being told is going to work, and he's and he's talked to he had he's had calls with a bunch of Arab American mayors who have joined his campaign or endorsing him. So he's heard directly
from them. He knows the messages uh that work with with them and with the audience, which is you know that you know Biden and Harris are killing their family members in Lebanon and in Palestine. Uh and they're a complete failure when it comes to their militarism.
Uh.
So he understands that that's the message and that he if he presents himself as the Canadate piece who's going to put an end to this that works for him. What he really wants to say is that Liz Cheney is an adult and a moron. And so as you watch this clip, there's this gravitational pull of what Trump wants to say that keeps pulling him back into trashing Liz Cheney for being a moron.
Why would Muslim support Lion Kamala Harris when she embraces Muslim hating and very dumb person Liz Chack dumb person who, by the way, lost for Congress in the biggest margin in the history of politics. She lost by almost forty points. The reason she has that honor is that most people, most people wouldn't have stayed in a congressperson that's in that position normally retires before the election, which would have been a good idea for her to do. But Liz
Chaney's a total loser. But her father brought years of war and death to the Middle East. He killed many Arabs, many many Arabs and Muslims. And now Lion Kamala has embraced Liz Cheney. She embraced her, And why would a Muslim or why would an Arab want to vote for somebody that has Liz Cheney as her hero. Liz Cheney is a failed, totally failed politician. Again, she set the worst record. I think it's a terrible mistake that she's met. I think it's a great insult to Muslims all over
the world. And I think that she's going to do very bad in Michigan. I really do. I think she's going to.
Do very badly.
To do that was a bad thing, and I was very surprised to see it.
Ran.
I actually want to put some numbers on this because Matt carp revealed some results from the Center for Working Class Politics that are somewhat relevant here. He said, we surveyed this was yesterday one thousand Pennsylvania registered voters and found that calling Trump a threat to democracy is Kamala Harris's least effective message with all voters, but also especially
with working class voters. And it's that tension. It's the balance between needing to appeal to as many possible demographics while also not suppressing the vote or turning off voters in the other slices of the pie that you need in order to put the math together for the electoral college. So if by using Liz Cheney and hammering this democracy, democracy, democracy message over and over again, which gets picked up by NBC and all these places that people actually watch
nightly news. Whatever are you turning off voters that you might otherwise have. I don't know. I mean, that's a pretty difficult question for the Harris campaign.
Well, it's certainly turning off Arab American voters. The new poll out has Trump up forty five forty three with Arab Americans, which replicates an earlier poll from the Arab American Institute which found him up forty two to forty one among Arab Americans. You don't have to have that long of a memory to remember what Dick Cheney did,
what the Bush administration did to the Mid East. Yeah, like that's and in the com if you are, if you understand and remember that, and you are viewing what's happening now with Gaza and with Lebanon and soon with Iran through that prism, it just makes you that much less sympathetic to the administration's position and that much more certain that they actually hate you and are okay with you and your family being being slaughtered and cut to pieces.
We've one more stot. This was Kamala Harris on Hallie Jackson's show NBC News yesterday. Let's roll this one. It's going to be B two.
We are sitting here two weeks away from election night. Last election, the former president came out on election night and declared victory before all the votes were counted. What is your plan if he does that again in two weeks?
Well, let me say this.
We've got two weeks to go, and I'm very much grounded in the present in terms of the task at hand, and we will deal with election night and the days after as they come, and we have the resources and the expertise and the focus on that as well.
So my team is ready to go. Is that what you're saying? Are you thinking about that as a possibility?
Of course, this is a person, Donald Trump, who tried to undo the free and fair election, who still denies the will of the people, who incited a violent mob to attack the United States capital, and one hundred and forty law enforcement officers were.
Attacked, some who are were killed. This is a serious matter.
The American people are at this point, two weeks out, being presented with a very very serious decision.
I do think what most people are rooting for is that whoever wins wins convincingly.
You No, that's the note, Like if people could vote just for that right, not even for a candidate, but just forly clarity.
Like somebody please win this in a comfortable enough fashion. Even though Biden won by what seven million votes, we knew it was raised within in three states that decided the outcome.
We knew what was likely to happen by midnight an election day, but we just didn't have certainty really until I don't know, five plus days after.
Well, the other problem if you remember election night, it was like three am when the Wisconsin votes finally came in, which you knew was going to happen. Like, if you were following it, that was not surprising, But if you weren't following it, you're like, wait a minute, three am, they get all the boats and oh my god lost it sounds like fraud.
Yeah, it felt like a car crash that you were watching in slow motion play out. So yeah, that's I guess. Hope for more clarity on election night, but I don't think that we are going to get it. One of the most important races to watch is the Nebraska Senate competition between deb Fisher and Dan Osborne. Dan Osborne was a guest on this show really before anybody was paying attention to him, except for, of course Ryan Grimm, who
had his thumb firmly on the pulse of Nebraska politics. Ryan, you have a new report out and drop site, and some of it is exclusive that we're going to share right here.
Yeah, we can add this in post story that went up on drop Site News this morning. A new poll has has Dan Osborne up was a forty eight forty six I believe. So this is the at least the third recent poll that has found Dan Osborne, the kind of populist independent Nebraska up over deb Fisher. A previous one had found him all the way at fifty percent. So over the last several weeks, things have definitely been pushing in his direction. So here's why this race matters
so much. Democrats ended up with Osborne running as an independent and gaining a lot of steam as an independent and refusing their endorsement. They ended up not even nominating a candidate. They said, forget it. We're sick of getting wiped out by twenty points every time anyway, so let's just see what happens with Osborne. Deb Fisher completely slept on this race. She has woken up over the last couple of weeks as the polls have shown her behind him.
The NRSC completely slept on this race.
They s Republicans.
That's a National Republican centatorial committee.
They looked, they looked at the race, and they said that the math just isn't possible for anybody other than a Republican to win this race.
That's therapy plus twenty state.
But Osborne has a biography that a campaign consultant would dream of. He started working in the Omaha Kellogg's plant as an industrial mechanic in two thousand and four, and then in twenty twenty one, when Kellogg tried to shut the plant down and tried to cut their pay, he led a strike that kind of captivated the state's attention, and they won that strike and got a strong contract, such a strong contract that they later maneuvered to get
rid of him. His best revenge running for Senate. Then, I also served in the Navy, the National Guard, so doesn't have a college degree, just supported his family with the union job, which was the kind of twentieth century American dream. He also is like many in Nebraska, personally culturally conservative but politically more libertarian.
All right, He told us he was personally pro life, but that he is.
Would we can roll some of that here from our interview last time that he joined us on the program, We played us here if there was a bill that came to the Senate floor that would codify Roe v. Wade, would you vote to support that? And how big an issue are abortion rights in the Nebraska Senate races fairly conservative state, but then again abortion rights traumped in nearby Kansas. Correct, it did.
And it is also about initiative in Nebraska, as is the legalization of medical cannabis is going to be on the ballot as well. And you know, I always divert back to the Constitution of the United States and the founding fathers and how they envisioned the country. And they envisioned the federal government take care of the big stuff,
the economy, the border, foreign affairs, things like that. And I don't think the United States government should be meddling in our personal affairs, whether that's at the doctor's office or our bedrooms.
I truly believe that, And so you know, I would I codify Roe v.
Wade you know that goes that boils down to also the federal government should be taking care of our individual liberties, right the Second Amendment, things like that, And so I believe that does fall under the category of an individual liberty. Look in my own personal life, I'm on a percent pro life. I would never advocate for anyone that I know or love to have that procedure. But if I also know that I'm a male and I don't have a womban, I would never advocate for women to have
that choice. And I know pregnancy is a very difficult thing and that it does need to be available for women who need that procedure because it could be life threatening.
So you can tell that he's not a professional politician from all of them, right, which is in some ways endearing. I might disagree with what he said in the answer, but I think a lot of people I actually think Donald.
Probably what he actually thinks, which is a shocking thing for a politician.
I think Donald Trump would watch that and think he's a fairly competitive.
FANDID Yeah, if Trump is bio, if Trump has a heart of hearts, and he sat down with deb Fisher and sat down with Dan Osborne, there's no question who he's endorsing there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, But he doesn't have a heart of hearts. He's the leader of the Publican Party, so he's he cut an ad for deb Fisher from his private plane where he's saying Dan Osborne is a Democrat in disguise. Vote for deb Fisher and that's the
message that Republicans are hoping is going to break through. Right, how do you think it will?
I mean, so there's something to what we're hearing from people inside GP circles, which is that this race is in a he might be doing well, he might come close, but at the end of the day, Nebraska is a Trump plus twenty states. So you described this before we went to air. There's a gravity there. There's a momentum for Republicans that is hard for literally anybody to overcome.
So I think there's something to that for sure. Osborne, though, is not coded in a way for you know, the average voter that's going to make him really easily pinned to the far left and even the kind of squishy center Democratic Party that doesn't have a great brand in Nebraska. I mean, he's coded in a way that you would think the guy is a Republican. You think he was kind of maga, so don't. I think there's something too
that I think it's powerful. But basically, we reached out to the NRSC for comment, don't have a comment from them. One thing I heard from a Republican strategist about the race is their sense is that Osborne is tapped out and has hit a ceiling. And so it's two weeks before election day, and that's absolutely something that happens. Someone gets a sturge of momentum, a bunch of money pours
into the they start polling very well. In fact, you could argue this happened with Kamala Harris and peaks too early, so it's not impossible that's what happened. But these poles, I mean where you have, so his internal as you reported at drop site, it has him up by two points. This is the recent poll from deb Fisher. This was from October twelfth to fifteenth. It has her up by
seven points. It has Osbourne at forty four percent. But his poll from October ninth to twelfth had him at fifty percent as you mentioned, and had Fisher at the reverse down at forty four percent. So that's plus six for him. There was an Independent Center. They sponsored a poll that was at the end of September that had Osborne up five so it wasn't a poll from either of the campaign. It had him forty seven to forty two.
Although they have you know, it's the Independence Center. You just tell from the name that they have an interest in an independent doing well. Yes, of which we do too, because.
It's yeah, we'd love to see this is dooptly broken by a populouce, a union mechanic who pushes the Democratic Party aside and then beats a corporate back Republican in Nebraska.
But you're right that I think if the election were today, he's the favorite. But that is not today. Now the mail in voting is happening, which is good for him. Can he There'll be two weeks of millions of dollars spent calling him a Democrat. Being a Democrat Nebraska hurts. The poll shows right now that Donald Trump is winning ninety four percent of Republican voters and deb Fisher is winning eighty percent of Republican voters. That fourteen point gap
is Osborne's path to victory. That fourteen percent of Republicans who are going to vote Trump Osborne puts Osborne in the Senate. She is going to try to She's going to spend every penny she has to close that gap. So if by election dayur or this, ninety six percent of Republicans vote for Trump and eighty nine percent vote for deb Fisher, then Deb Fisher wins if she can close that gap. There are so many Republicans in Nebraska that if she can close that just a little bit,
she wins. Yeah. So for him to keep the jaws of that gap open require him to fight against this polarization and this gravitational pull towards party preference over people's actual respect and support for him.
Yeah. Interesting, And you know they are to your point now that Republicans even get the sense poking around on this that they've finally realized that they have a situation on their hands because control of the Senate is so tight. Don Osborne is obviously at this point, he's obviously proven himself to be a serious candidate, and it's unpredictable. So there's going to be so much money pouring into Nebraska. McConnell and McConnell's allies. Deb Fisher is super close with
the Pentagon those types of wings. So there's plenty of money going around to support deub Fisher.
Problem for her is that there's only so much money you can spend in Nebraska because you have basically the Omaha TV market and people only watch so much TV and there's only so many, you know, evening news programs, because you want to advertise on sports and news like that's that's what that's where you want to put your ads because those are the things that people watch live. Yeah, and you put your ads on anything else. For the most part, people are going to skip skip over the ads.
And expect it to be that Dan Osborne, the line is going to be he's a wolf in sheep's clothing because he hasn't really given an answer. I think this is fair from a conservative perspective. He hasn't really given
a clear answer. We asked him this about whether he would caucus with the Democrats or Republicans or just not caucus because you know, like Bernie Sanders, if you would be an independent in the Senate, it's a huge question who you caucus with because it will likely give there's an indication of which party you're going to side with, especially on the important questions so I think that's what they're going to hit him on over.
Sure they are, and they will.
Just a far left guy who's trying to convince you he's maga.
Yeah. So they're trying to tie him to Bernie, which would be uh interesting if he could, if they If that works and he still wins, well.
We'll keep following the s race for sure. Now let's move over to McDonald's, which you know this is it's sort of a funny story, but it's actually a really serious story as well, because as funny as it is that Donald Trump just made this trip to McDonald's and then a couple of days later there's an e Coli outbreak. So the memes have predictably been good, but forty nine people in ten states have been sickened by this, and an older person in Colorado actually died from this a
COOLi outbreak, which the CDC. If you go to their website, it's right there. It says investigations start date October twenty second, twenty twenty four, yesterday, and on their food safety alert they say this is a fast moving outbreak investigation. Most sick people are reporting eating quarter pounder hamburgers for McDonald's and investigators are working quickly to confirm which food ingredient is contaminated. So looks like they have some reason we can put d one up on the screen. This is
the New York Times breakdown of the story. Looks like they have some good reason to believe that it's specifically linked to the quarter pounder. But you know, this is hitting people especially hard in the West, so Colorado. New York Times lists Colorado, Kansas, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. A lot of this, though, has been speaking of Nebraska. A lot of this has come
from Colorado and Nebraska, so really awful situation. McDonald's obviously is taking these ingredients out to the best that they can, so we'll see what happens.
The border in that image looked really good though, despite the uh no.
Since Trump went to McDonald's, I have really wanted McDonald's because it's just been people have I've been posting so much about McDonald's.
I really feel like we're at a point where McDonald should just like give it up with the actual meat, Like we're at a place the fake meat tastes the same as their their fake meat that has meat in it. So so why like why just if you're if you're actually now killing people like one person, you know, ten people, ten people have been hospitalized, one died so far. It takes several days, you know, for this to work its way through your system until you wind up in the
in the hospital or sick. And so there could be more cases of this. Hopefully, hopefully this is the end of it. But the climate, the climate effects are like profound for the amount of meat we consume, and if it's and if we can't do it safely, it doesn't really even taste that much different. Come on, like those chicken like really those chicken nuggets need to have chicken
in them. Nobody believes that there's really that much chicken in those chicken nuggets anyway, So let's just go, let's just go all the way things.
Well, the sad thing is there is chicken and the chicken nuggets, and the chickens are not you know, very happy chickens.
Well, those are unhappy chickens.
Which is I think there's something of a reckoning happening, just whether it's maha and maga, like having this unlikely marriage where you get like populist left and crunchy populist crunchry populist left coming together with the newly crunchy populist right. It's not a huge part of the country, but it's significant enough that I think there's a real momentum shift against some of our older food practice.
It's also existential in the sense that you're blasting all these factory farmed animals full of antibiotics. They can overcome the cruel and horrific conditions that they're in, which then if you only care about humans, makes you know it's not good for you to just be constantly ingesting antibiotics that already went through an animal. And it makes more, you know, antibiotic resistant bacteria than the fact that we're talking about a bacterial and action here.
It is not a coincidence their stock is plunging. There's some reason to believe it looks like from the reporting that this was linked to onions because there's much meat. Yeah somethe sure, no meat plan it wasn't. Well, I mean, we'll see, but this is from NBC. They say McDonald's is working with public health officials. According to the CDC, the fast food chain has stopped using the slivered onions
and quarter pound beef patties in several states. McDonald's said in a statement Tuesday that its initial findings from the investigation indicate that a subset of illness is maybe linked to slivered onions used in the quarter pounder and sourced by a single supplier that serves three distribution centers, which
would make sense given the pattern of the spread. Now, this is this is something that an expert echoed as well, that the onions are kind of notoriously a difficult which I didn't realize, but sort of notoriously difficult to control the e coali potentially people getting sick outbreaks of So just a proto for everybody maybe be worried about your onions.
There you go.
But Donald Trump actually is sort of infamous for loving McDonald's because it's so right. He believes that fast food restaurants, and not incorrectly, fast food restaurants are so industrialized that their health standards and their cleanliness standards, like they are held to the absolute highest standards because anything like this
is so damaging to their business. They're under microscopes and there they just have this Rinsen repeat operation around the country that he goes to fast food restaurants because he trusted the cleanliness. There was this moment when he's scooping the fries the other day into the fried box whatever. He turns to the camera and goes amazing, never touches the human hands. Yeah, but I mean bad news, bad news.
That's something well, stay safe thought there everyone, in all seriousness, this is you know, can can be incredibly incredibly serious, especially to folks out west. So again, stay safe. Let's move on to Ryan where you have an exclusive report from a reporter on the ground, a drop site news reporter on the ground in Havana.
Last Friday, the entire island of Cuba was plunged into darkness as a result of a power outage. You can put up E two on the screen. It was the most significant power outage in the history of Cuba since the revolution. I put up E one here. This is just an example of, you know what, the absolutely extraordinary event which didn't start to be it didn't start to kind of unravel itself to become fixed to get the
lights back on until yesterday. We're going to talk about, you know where why this is happening where this is where this is coming from, but over at a drop site. A couple of weeks ago, we published this really fascinating look at Biden's we'll call it a sanctions regime, but so much of what he's doing goes beyond sanctions to Cuba and the way that that is impacting the economy there.
That piece was written by Ed Augustine, who was a journalist who was based in Havana, so we asked him yesterday to send us a little dispatch about what it has been like over the last five days in Havana where this is coming from. Here's Ed Augustine.
I'm reporting from South Havana, where finally, after four days of nationwide rolling paraguts, the lights are finally back on. I see yesterday afternoon when the lights came back on and people were cheering, and you can well imagine why. It doesn't take much to imagine how difficult life very quickly becomes without electricity, no lights at nights, no air conditioning, no fans to keep the mosquitos and tropical diseases that
they carry away, but also problems with the water. Millions of people haven't had running water in Cuba for the last five days because the water pumps were electricity. Same story for gas cooking. Gas was losing pressure and was out in parts of Havana. Having said that, the feeling on the ground was a little bit more calm than one might have presumed. If this was to have happened in my own country, the UK people would have completely lost the plot. And people were stressed here and worried,
but not as much as you might think. Cubans are very resilient or preperion. I've WAPs put up, put up with far too much. But I was interviewing people yesterday and they said, no, it wasn't a big deal. We're used to power cuts.
We've been through this for sixty years.
This was the biggest one in Havana that's ever happened. But people kind of shrug and many people even joke about it.
That's a very Cuban thing.
Right now, in Havana, over ninety percent of the city has electricity, but it's a different story for the rest of the country. The national breed is up that is working, but there are still millions of people in this country of approximately ten.
Million people that don't have any then have an.
Electricity right now. The government clearly priority is political reason is the capital. They don't want any unrest as they would see it. Why is this happening Two main reasons. First and foremost US economic alfare Cuba has been sanctioned for longer than any other country in recorded history, and right now the US Treasury Department sanctions some oil tankers that have previously docked in Cuba, and so that dissuades other strongly dissuades other oil tankers from selling oil to
Cuba dealing with Cuba, that dries up costs. So that's just one of hundreds of measures the Cuba currently has that the US currently has on Cuba, the aim of which is to provoke crises and desperation so that people rise up and over their government. The other major reason
economicness management a failed planned vertically planned economic model. There's complete consensus or almost complete consensus in Cuba the current economy is not working, and the Cuban government, despite having their own foot program, have failed to update this system over recent decades that today in Havana a sense of relief. The crisis isn't over. Still massive problems and tens of being able to afford enough petrol, but relief and pens a couple days ago.
So he made a couple of interesting points there, and if you go back and read his piece, then we can put up E four here. This is his piece that he wrote for dropsite. He talks a lot about the State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, and so the Obama in twenty fifteen normalized, basically normalized relations with Cuba and took them off this State Sponsor of Terror list. Trump, as kind of a last act, kind of a little thank you to his friends down in South Florida, put
them back on the list. And people expected that Biden would immediately revert to the Obama administration's policy, say okay, like thanks Trump, you lost. We were not doing this anymore, like we've moved beyond this. Instead, the Biden administration came in and ramped things up and made them even tighter. And part of the reason that they were made tighter is that the American sanctions regime in general around the
world has gotten has gotten broadly tougher. So anybody who's on this State Sponsor of terrorI list now is facing much sharper teeth around the world. And what happens and the way that the sanctions work now is that it's much more difficult for the media stay to pin it directly on Biden. In the past, you would, you know, the US would would directly sanction X, and the media could say, oh, look, you're sanctioning this, it's causing this harm. Therefore, we can talk about whether or not this is a
policy that ought to be in place. By putting them on the state sponsor of Terror list, what it does is it makes it basically impossible for them to use the banking system and to do business with anybody else off of the island. And the US would say, well, that's not our problem. You know, we don't actually specifically ban this particular provider of grain or oil from providing products to Cuba. We don't borrow this particular bank from
doing this. But the banks say, because this designation is so opaque and the penalties are so severe that our lawyers say, we should just not do business anywhere near Cuba, forget it. It might be it might actually be okay, but we're just we're just not going to do it. And as ed Ed said, they also are specifically sanctioning some particular shipping companies which is then keeping oil out of Cuba and driving up energy prices.
Yeah. Mean, I think the big picture story is that sanctions are not I'm not going to say they're categorically unjust and effective, but long term, the long term experiment shows that in many cases they're not effective. Now, I think what the US would say to Cuba is, you know, the good faith actors in the US would say to Cuba, is not our problem until you reform your human rights situation. So I think that's the again, like that's the good faith reading.
But it's also the paper reading, like that we say that our policy is that we believe the Cuban regime should be ousted and that we are going to put on sanctions into place until such time is that we drive the Cuban people into such desperation that they overthrow the government. So yeah, that is our position. Like you don't like this, stop being a communist, Well.
Yes, I think that's true. I think also though, what they would say is this is the good faith reading. Obviously, it's not the reading of people who are just like old Cold warriors who are trying to you know, starve Cubans into regime regime change, which is of course still very much a mindset and mentality that exists in the Pentagon. But also, you know, reform so that you don't rely on all of these other countries for your electrical garrid have some even China. This is actually when Cuba has
been looking to China. This was in a Financial Times report. A lot of people I saw a lot of people like amused by this on Twitter. This is from Financial Times. They say China publicly supports Cuba's right to choose its own path to economic development quote in line with its national conditions, but privately, Chinese officials have long urged the Cuban leadership to shift from its vertically planned economy to
something closer to the Chinese model. According to economists and diplomats briefed on the situation, Chinese officials have been perplexed and frustrated at the Cuban leadership's unwillingness to decisively implement a market oriented reform program despite the glaring dysfunction of the status quo that people said, and I agree, I think the glaring dysfunction of the status quo is pretty well put. So that is all to say, it's not I don't think it's primarily the fault of US sanctions.
I think Cuba working within the parameters that it has, I don't support the sanctions entirely, but I think working within the parameters that exist, Cuba could do a better job servicing its people, keeping his people safe and prosperous and healthy. That said, I also don't think there's a great case that the sanctions are protecting the people of Cuba at this point.
And and Augustine makes that, you know, he made that point at the end there it's talking about how Cuba has talked about reforming its economy the Cuban government but has but has not done so. The politics of that are interesting because the Cuban government is always on its
back foot because of these sanctions. They have no political capital with with the public to do the kinds of reforms that would be difficult in the first weeks of them, but long term would lead to more economic growth and that and that, and as that's not talking about going capitalists, that's that's talking about moving more toward a Chinese kind of you know, socialism with market you know, Chinese care
elements or whatever. That that would lead to some disruption in the in the meantime, and so you would need a little bit more political capital to get that going, and they can't do it. The argument is the reason is not happening because the US is boot is on their neck that they can't even move. My criticism for the Chinese would be, so then you step up. You're talking a big game about how you want to You
think they ought to reform. They can't reform because they their economy is in complete shamnels because of the United States. You know, it's a rounding error for China to help them out. But China's just not going to do it, which goes against which which cuts against this idea that we believe that China has some global hegemonic ambitions, which they don't because they're like, that's the US problem, that's
over by North America. We love, we love that, you know, we come from the same like father, but you know we're not We're not. They're not going to lift a finger to help the Cuban government.
I mean, I don't know. I could see not immediately agree with that in the media future, but I could see long term. This is a great argument I think against sanctions because what Cuba has been doing in light of the post Trump sanction has been turning to Venezuela, turning to part of the reason this is happening is because Venezuela doesn't have the capacity to keep helping Cuba at the same level that had been in those.
Sanctions on the as well. Yeah, that as well, and oil production is collapsed because as a result, I think that's exactly right. If you if you lifted all the sanctions on Cuba, just let let Cuba decide for itself without the sanctions, what kind of government it wanted to operate, what kind of economy wanted to operate. They would open up their economy and it would be a more market orient and economy that the Cuban regime would try to keep like China.
Well, I was going to say, I mean, when that happened under Obama, it was really I mean predictable where the money was going. And maybe I mean the experiment didn't get to play out in the long term, but it was becoming concentrated in the hands of elites.
I mean, not by any not by any like. If you can't compare them to the way that we concentrate money in the hands of the elites, then it's not even compare, it's not even close.
It's an interesting I mean, I think it's a pretty interesting question what would happen in the long term because.
There are still yeah, exactly, and imagine that. Imagine letting Cuba just decide for itself.
Well, yeah, instead of turning them into the arms of people, for example, who want to threaten semiconductor manft manufacturing in Taiwan that we depend on. Potentially, I'm not saying they're actually going to do it, but that's obviously something that's being talked about in Beijing. So no, I mean, China may be right about the problems with the Cubans system, but it's not an argument for China to colonize the Cuban system either, in the same way it's not an
argument for us to do it. But it feels anytime we have this bickering over Cuba, I mean you just again go back to we are not even one hundred years into the nuclear experiment. And the reason that Cuba is such a flashpoint here is because China could be Soviet ask and putting weapons in Cuba, which makes it a huge that to the.
United States, they're just not that right.
So the us, right, so that because of the possibility, you're constantly, constantly at loggerheads. It's actually ultimately an argument against nuclear weapons. But that's a different.
Story if people in a couple other details, Like one of the things we've done, just as just completely malicious and vindictive, is that we put into place a policy that says, if you are European, if you have a if you can come to the United States without having to get a visa, which is Europeans, and like there's like thirty seven countries or so where you can just come to the United States and vacation here France or whatever.
If you go to Cuba, then you now have to get a waiver to come to the United States for like the next ten years. Why like why, like, there's no reason for us to do that other than being vindicted. What are we afraid they're going to fly to Cuba and get like cigars and then fly them back to France and then fly them over here and smoke them like on a balcony somewhere. Like. So what that did is it completely just dried up European tourism, which was
one of the only things they had left. We also allowed Cuban national Cuban Americans here in the United States to sue like cruise lines saying that there that actually that ought to be our property, and so cruise ships stopped docking in Havana, so that disappeared. Like it's just the systematic anything that Cuba had working for it. We just went after and then we're like, oh, look see
we told you communism doesn't work well. And then all the Cubans are flooding the southern border like yes, absolutely, hundreds of thousands more than the Mario boat lift, Like yeah, absolute, Like anyone else you can leave Cuba is leaving.
Cuba and by way of South America, Like it's not like Marrio boat lift, Like actually.
Right, they're flying in Nicaragua and then they're taking a train up.
Yeah. Absolutely. Speaking of humanitarian crises, Ryan, you have a wonderful new report up at drop Site. Wonderful for how vivid and detailed it is, especially compared to so many reports that we see is mainstream press out of Gaza about the destruction of Gaza.
Essentially over at drop Site News, we've published a unique new piece of investigative journalism by reporters units to Rawi and Sammy Vanderlib. They were able to obtain reams of social media posts from soldiers and officers inside a single combat engineering battalion known as Battalion seven forty nine. The unit has been operating in Gaza on and off since shortly after October seventh, and has left an unusually large
amount of destruction in its wake. What makes this reporting unique is that by relying on the battalion's own social media posts, we can trace their path through Gaza, identifying specific acts and linking them to specific actors by name. At one point, the battalion even put together a montage of their destruction and began it with a little homage
to Disney. Now we can play this here, but we're not actually going to play the clip because we're afraid we'll get a copyright takedown, which would be just extraordinarily ironic and a weird testimony to what you're able to do on the Internet. Let me just say that doing this kind of investigative work is extremely resource intensive, and if you can help by becoming a drop site subscriber, either free or paid, and support Breaking Points while you're
at it, Go to breakingpoints dot com. For that go to drop sitenews dot com Counterpoint subscribers can get a discount twenty percent off at drop site news dot com slash counterpoints now look. In mainstream Western media, the coverage of Israel's year of scorch shart destruction often touches on
the victims and events happening in Gaza. In the passive voice, death and destruction befall Palestinians the way a city suffers from a hurricane or an earthquake, though in those cases, actually the media has little difficulty identifying the natural disaster as the cause of the destruction. When it comes to Gaza, it's even worse. Buildings mysteriously explode and people just die
for no obvious reason. Rarely do we see the Israeli military identified as having carried out the act, and never do we see individual members of the military named and identify their actions described in detail, broken down by unit and task. In fact, doing so in Israel is illegal. The stated rationale for that censorship is operational security, but according to a report from Israel's Channel thirteen, the real
aim is to dodge accountability for war crimes. If that's true, the soldiers themselves work against this cover up on a daily basis, posting endless photos, videos and montages from the homes and neighborhoods of Gaza. They are raising that's where this investigation begins. Unison Samy have managed to find an archive all the Instagram stories and daily posts shared by
the soldiers of Battalion seven forty nine. They've mapped out the structure of the unit and identified the individual soldiers and officers involved, along with their various roles in operations. They have tracked the activities of each company in the battalion, including what they were doing, when and where as the force shred its way through Gaza. The mission is nothing less than a systematic, at a concerted and deliberate effort to erase the intellectual, cultural and social future of the
Palestinian people. Quote our job is to flatten Gaza, the soldiers of the official D nine company of the Battalion wrote on their Instagram page. They added, accurately, quote no one will stop us. You likely heard about some of the atrocities described in this article in real time, and if you follow our work here on the Breaking Points channel, learn of the impact on the Palestinian population. But now you can see it from the perspective of those carrying
out and reveling in them. The investigation is a thorough accounting of the acts committed by the seven to forty nine Battalion, complete with the evidence they post themselves. These are not just isolated events, but represent a pattern that runs through the very heart of the Israeli military, a sadistic attitude toward the civilians of Gaza, whose futures they
have been tasked with blowing up or flattening. Now, if statistics sounds harsh, go read through the report and ask yourself if it's not, in the end too soft of a description. From the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, you may recall Benjamin Netyah, who's ominous invocation of the biblical Amalekites. When Netyaho made that remark, the notion was
already in the air. On October ninth, Lieutenant Colonel Addi Bacore, deputy commander of Israel's seven forty nine Combat Engineering Battalion, posted on his personal Instagram account quote, now go attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them, and put to death men and women, children, in infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys unquotes. Now, many of the unit's members liked the post and proceeded
to put it into practice. Seven forty nine Battalion was among the first to enter the Strip through the net Seriem Corridor, the four mile long road separating Gaza City and darry Al Bala that Israel occupied early in the war in order in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping them cement control of South Gaza City, including the nets Corder, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shujaya in Gaza City, the Bourage refugee
camp in central Gaza, and even Rafa. Currently seven forty nine Battalion is operating in North Gaza and Jabaaliyah, where we're even following hamas Let or Yaya Sinwar's killing in southern Gaza, Israel's campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation there. Seven forty nine Battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, quote, we will leave them nothing unquote.
The images in this investigation come primarily from the battalion's private social media group, which Dropsite News, gained access to as well as the profiles and accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the group, we were able to clearly map out the unit's organizational structure, identify over one hundred of its members, and document their activities in the
Gaza trip in detail now. In December twenty twenty three, Company A of the seventh forty nine Battalion was tasked with rigging up the South Gaza City campus of al Azar University with explosives and detonating them, reducing Gaza's second
largest university to rubble. First Master Sergeant David Zoldan, the operational officer of Company A of Israel seven forty nine Battalion, wrote in an Instagram post on December twentieth, quote, on Shabbat, we loaded the mines and I signed off on the shipment with a modification due to the sanctity of Shabbat. A few days later, we assembled them and booby trapped one of Gaza's symbols of the future, al Azar University, in the northern part of the Strip, and blew it
up unquote. Zoldan, a reservist who normally works as a journalist at ICE, a local Israeli news outlet, attached several photos and videos of the entire operation quote from the unloading stage to the massive explosion. Quote. In one of the videos, he cheers as the three buildings of the university campus are prepared to be blown up. Quote this is the explosion before redemption. December twenty twenty three, he says, as the university has blown up, Zoldan tells his fellow soldiers,
quote Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Did you see you can hear it here?
Let it?
Soldan did not provide a military justification for the explosion. In the Israeli military have not reported to have found anything in the university campus. Seven forty nine Battalion, he wrote after the explosion, quote is working day and night and performing holy work in the Gaza strip unquote. Other soldiers from the battalion made no effort to conceal their intentions,
gleefully mocking the destruction of civilian and educational property. Maya Ra Dazowitz, another soldier in the seven forty nine battalion, was among them. She filmed the explosion of Azar University, capturing it quote goodbye to higher education in Gaza with an emoji of hands in the form of a heart
bob go ah del Fie. She's one of twenty seven soldiers that we have identified as being deployed to blow up a Lazar University, including Roy Wicks, who fights with an American flag patch on his sleeve and who helped plant explosives that led to the destruction of the institution. From there, drop site tracked the unit through the rest
of its campaign through Gaza. Many of the social media accounts we use to obtain footage have since been deleted, but you can read the full investigation from Eunice and Sammy and see the rest of the videos over at dropsideews dot com now. In response to our request for comment, the IDF said this in response to the barbaric attacks by Hamas, the IDF is working to dismantle the military administrative capabilities of Hamas in complete contrast to the deliberate
attacks by Hamas on Israeli men, women and children. The IDF operates according to international law and takes possible precautions to reduce harm to civilians. The IDF acts to address exceptional incidents that deviate from the orders and expected values of IDF soldiers. The IDF examines events of this kind, as well as reports of videos posted on social media,
and handles them with command and disciplinary measures. In cases involving a suspicion of a criminal offense arises that justifies opening investigation, and investigation is opened by the Criminal Investigation Division. Upon its conclusion, the findings are transferred to the Military Advocate General for review. It should be clarified that in some of the examined cases it was concluded that the expression of or behavior of the soldiers in the video
was inappropriate and it was handled accordingly. Now Emily, they don't. They didn't tell us specifically which of the incidents were handled in that accordingly fashion. But I think what's important to understand is that the key when it comes because I'm sure a lot of people are thinking, are where's the International Criminal Court and where's the International Court of Justice?
You know, if if we were a nonprofit news organization with the help of some freelance reporters can put together this, certainly the ICC and ICJ can do it as well. So what's going on here, and you see in that response from the IDF part of the part of the explanation. As long as there is a legal process in a state, in a government to provide accountability to war criminals, then the ICC and ICJ don't have jurisdiction like that's that's
that's the setup. So the deal basically is, Okay, we're going to have these international courts, but if you have a sufficient domestic court that prosecutes people, then we're going to stay out. We're going to allow that to unfold. And so while Israel was going through that debate over the prison guards who were accused and then later charged of raping palatiny and detainees, that the internal debate was from defenders of the criminal charges. They said, look, we
have to charge them. If we don't charge them, then the ICC and the ICJ come in. We have to have a process, and their defenders were saying, screw it, we'll take them on.
That's why I think this case study is sort of a really sad but interesting window into the posts and the invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is such a good example of how this is a case study on the incredible failures of global liberalism or post war global liberalism, where I agree with one thing you said in here where you described this as a pattern. I mean, clearly, this is not fringe, This is not you know, nut picking.
This is an obvious, established pattern. And it's also not surprising that it's a pattern, because this is how people react when their husbands and wives and brothers and sons and family members are killed and their countrymen are brutally slaughtered. This is of course how people react. It doesn't make it right. And what happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that we implemented a liberal world order to help not allow retribution like this to happen on the scale on
scale in international relations. And you citing Old Testament versus about the Amalekites and all of that. I mean, this is just the way we decided not to do war
after World War two. And Israel says that it holds the holds itself to the highest standards, and it clearly holds itself to higher standards than places like I mean, if from Hamas you see a lot of this happening out in the open, you say, you hear a lot of this conversation having on though at least Israel purports to have some type of shame about it, but in a way that makes it worse because they're the ones enforcing or being or aren't part of the liberal international order.
And what this shows is that there really is no shame on the ground among the officers and the soldiers that we from outside this can have these debates or is this a genocide? Is it not a genocide? The clear intent of the soldiers and the officers carrying out is genocidal like towards the cultural, social, and political institutions of the palatading people. Like they're not talking about the militarily eradicating them. They're talking about just rooting them out,
root and branch, a complete and total ethnic cleansing. They're very clear about it.
Yeah so, I mean, it's in a sense, it's one of those really difficult questions of how people who wield standards of internet law, like the US, you know, we'll wield these standards of international law on one way towards Putin and in another way towards Israel, are struggling to meet their own standards and in some cases don't even care to meet their own standards.
Yeah. So, who do we have on the Friday Show.
We have Michael Knowles on the Friday Show, which is going to be very interesting. We had Matt Walsh a couple of weeks ago, so we'll do a couple of Daily Wire guys ahead of the election. But one thing I'll say about them is they're willing to chop it up. So I imagine we're going to chop it up with Michael because I can't two people with like further differences or greater differences than you get forward to it. Yeah, it'll be fun. We have a weekend segment right that's going to post as well.
Yes, over Counterpoints, we're rolling out The Palestine Laboratory as a four part podcast series by Anthony Lowenstein based on his book by the same name. This is updated post
October seventh. We'll have a segment we'll post on the weekend in an interview with Lowenstein about this about this casts, and basically The Palestine Laboratory is about how the Israeli military cyber industrial complex uses the Palestinian people and the occupied territories as ways to experiment with new weapons and then markets its products as having been experimented on human beings. And therefore more effective than the competitors.
Well I look forward to that, So everyone stay tuned Breakingpoints dot com from the full premium version of the show early with no ads. Make sure to subscribe there to support us as we head towards election day. But thanks everyone for tuning in.
See you later, See you Friday.