Hey, guys, ready.
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But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody, Happy Monday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have Crystal?
Indeed we do. Glad to have you back, sir, very glad to be back. We missed you on Thursday.
I had a great time down in Austin. Lex Rereabing podcast will come out soon. I believe that Matt and Shaine Secret podcast will come out as well, so you guys can enjoy that.
Can we reveal how long the lex rooting it is?
It clocks in around five hours, so something like that. There are multiple bathroom breaks that we had to take for the Matt and Shane one. There are some great rants against marijuana and gambling, so I think people will.
I geninitely like I think I would lose my boys up.
At five hours. I did actually lose my I don't think. Oh, and that's funny. I had to I had to like recharge it for the next day. But we made it through. I mean, it was good. It was a great discussion, all right.
Well, there are a bunch of things that I'm interested to hear your take on in the show. Since we haven't gotten you to weigh in on all of the different Trump cabinet picks. We've got some updates for you. There arek Junior in as nominated for HHS Secretary. We also have some updates on the gates and hegseth nominations
as well, so we'll get into that. We've got some elon Musk news, as we do pretty much every day at this point, where he is now going on Twitter to bash tariffs, interesting since his guy is really in terriffs and also trying to put out there his choice for Chargery Secretary. Jeff Stein from the Washington Post has been doing fantastic reporting on all of these things, so he's going to break down for us what is going
on there. Obviously, there's also a lot of battles going on within the Democratic Party.
Ram Em manual blasts from.
The past, who's of course never really in the past, is being flooded as a potential future DNC chair. So I've got a lot to say about that, and a lot of interesting sort of battles that are unfolding there. Meanwhile, we don't want to lose sight of what's going on in terms of foreign Paul see the Biden administration now authorizing the use of long range US missiles inside of Russia by Ukraine. Obviously an extraordinary development, so huge implications there.
We'll talk about that.
Soccer's got a UFO update for me and everyone else.
I missed the hearing. I was so sad not to be there, so many good friends that were in town. But some interesting stuff happens, so I'll recap it.
Yeah, and I'm taking a look at why working class New Yorkers voted for Trump in their own words, Actually, it was kind of surprised by some of the analysis that they offered for why they voted the way they did.
So we'll break all of that down for you.
That's awesome, all right, So go ahead and sign up for Breakingpoints dot Com premium subscribers. Obviously, we had all this incredible election coverage. But now we're really ramping up for the coverage of the administration, and I think you're going to really find both a shift in the way that we're able to look at and go deeper on what all is happening here in Washington. It's a very unique moment for the show, for podcasting, which of course has come out as a big winner in the election.
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And if you do not want to be a come premium subscriber or you already our premium subscriber. Also help us out on YouTube by liking and sharing the videos there. That really helps us in terms of the algorithm. So thank you so much to all of you for your support throughout this entire season. All right, let's get to the very latest RFK Junior being tapped for HHS Secretary. Let's put this up on the screen. This is the official Truth social from our Truth from Donald Trump.
On truth, social whatever.
I'm thrilled to announce RFK Junior as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services. For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation. When it comes to public health, the safety and health of all Americans
is the most important role of any administration. HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming health crisis in this country. Mister Kennedy will restore these agencies their additions of gold standard scientific research and beacons of transparency to end the chronic disease epidemic and to make America
great and healthy again. So, you know, obviously it's been a quite a journey for RFK Junior, once you know solidly liberal environmental activists, was actually floidos of potential Obama administration casin sic. But that got spiked and then has sort of been part of this realignment to the right. So initially he runs as a Democrat in the Democratic primary,
they shut him out as they shut out everybody. During that time, he'd already been kind of you know, you'd go on with Steve bann and he was the Right really liked him because at that point he was a useful weapon for them to use against Joe Biden. Then he decides to drop out of the Democratic primary and starts running as an independent, and the Right does a complete one point eighty switch in in terms of their tune.
There's all these great clips now Sean Hannity like just limbasting him for all of his quote unquote liberal positions and Trump saying he's a radical and he wants the Green New Deal, blah blah blah.
And then again once Trump and him.
Strike a deal and he drops out and is then in the Trump camp, then the tune changes once again and he's you know, the greatest thing ever again. So here we are with Trump basically baking good on what was probably pledged to RFK when he dropped down in the race, and tapping him for strej.
We can't minimize ourrfk's endorsement and his role. You know, Dot Trump only won the presidency by two hundred and fifty four thousand votes in the blue Wall state.
I think it was determinative, to be honest with you, because if he stays in the race, you know, when he dropped down, it was quite clear that he was taking more from Trump. He was much more of a problem for Trump than he was for Biden then ultimately for Kamala Harris. When you look at those three Blue Wall states and you see how narrow the margin is, I think if he stays in the race, I think Trump loses.
I agree with you, and especially if we look at Michigan where we saw a lot of Muslim voters go to Donald Trump and they voted as a protest vote RFK Junior. I mean, look, it's not like Trump and
RFK Junior have particularly different stances on Israel. But if we're thinking of the Trump proxy vote as a protest from any of these Muslim voters in RFK Junior almost certainly would have gotten some percentage of that same If you look at the margin of victory at Michigan and Pennsylvania, remember that outside of Pennsylvania, the Democrats were able to win those Senate seats in those two states, so they had.
Some margin of strength.
So I do think r K Junior was incredibly determinative in the race in Nevada as well. Actually, we were starting to look at the final margins. One of the things that you know always happens after a presidential election is we actually minimize how narrow the gap was. We taught We tried to talk about a lot here on the show about what is the thirty something thousand votes that made Joe Biden the presidency. Here we're talking about two hundred and fifty four thousand votes in those states.
May sound like a lot, it's actually not in terms of the overall tens of millions that were cast in the entire country.
So it does. It is something that we should remember.
And in that way, you know, he did need to make an actual overture to r K Jor. The question is is about how much of this is going to come into contention with a Trump coalition. And I've been thinking about this a lot. Let's go ahead and put for example, how Donald Trump is normally able to twist people into his own purposes.
Let's put the image please up there on the screen.
This is released yesterday, and this was RFK Junior forced to basically sit for a hostage photo a.
Board Trump Force one.
This is Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Donald Trump Junior, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. The four of them other than Mike Johnson, who are sitting down and eating McDonald's. You can actually see RFK Junior there seated with McDonald's, a burger in his hand and a full sugar high
fruit toast, corn syrup coke sitting there next. Not even a Mexican comes twenty four hours really after a clip went viral of recently of RFK Junior talking about how the food on board Trump Force one is quote disgusting, and how it is full of McDonald's. So you may, I personally think that Trump was punishing him and forcing him to eat the food, and he was like, put the.
Burger in your mouth, Robert.
He's like, you have to do it if you want to serve as my HHS secretary. The other big question is is that RFK Junior. You know, despite endorsing Donald Trump, he is a liberal on many issues, issues that may come into major contention with the Republican coalition.
So let's think about a couple of them. Number one is abortion.
We're going to spend a lot of time on that later, but I actually really think that the big tension will be in make America healthy again.
So there are really two parts.
Of MAHA, so called MAHA as I can understand it. One is a libertarian. I think this actually aligns quite well with the MAGA coalition. This is a barstool coalition of people who delivered the White House for Donald Trump. So these are people who are distrustful of institutions. So they want to burn down the FDA. Great, they want to burn down NIH and get transparency about the COVID, COVID lab leak about the COVID vaccine, release the data, all of the trials, fantastic, all that stuff.
That's totally fine.
But where I could see major tensions is really in like a Bloomberg nanny state style liberalism that comes from the European tradition of banning certain chemicals. Now I'm not you know, I'm not saying I don't even advocate for this, but I'm saying, if you look at the way that the American public has traditionally viewed efforts by Michelle Obama or Mike Bloomberg to ban what was.
At large, SODA's in the City of New York.
I mean there is like a deep nanny state element to this that this actually happened in the Biden administration. The Biden administration, under the guise of like black health, wanted to ban menthol cigarettes, and black groups were like, hey, you know, don't tell us what we can and can't smoke. They're like, we like menthol cigarettes. Leave us the hell alone,
and eventually they were able to win that. Now there's no it's obvious that quote unquote banning menthol cigarettes would be definitely beneficial, like public health wise, but we do live in a country where people very much value their freedoms. So that's one of those where I could really see some elements, like for example, on Coca Cola, like banning high fructose corn syrup in favor of cane sugar, or
reducing food dies and all these other things. I mean, the truth is is that while yes, it would definitely be quote unquote healthier, I guess, and somewhat of a balance is.
That it still would probably drive up the price.
And so that's a big question of like whether Americans a want to be told and what is not in their food, and then two, whether they would actually accept whatever the consequences are, and like look my own person, my bias is there on the table. I'm pro tariff and I'm pro mass deportation. I am going to fully acknowledge you that's going to increase a price. I think
it has an overall benefit. Now you can make that argument, but for a lot of the libertarian coalition, and specifically, I mean, if we think about it, households under one hundred thousand dollars who majority voted for Donald Trump, these are the people who do eat McDonald's, and they eat
McDonald's a lot. I mean, if you look at the statistics of the tens and millions of people in this country fast food on an almost daily weekly basis, you have to consider, like what fundamentally changing their menu, their food additives and all of that would look like the attendant price increased. You can make an argument for why it's good. I do think it'd probably be good, but I could see some major pushback on that.
So I think there's like a.
Big libertarian Uh, there's like a big libertarian kind of construct that that will come up against MAGA, and that really if it starts to if you really think about it, you know, one of the reasons that Biden's sunk was inflation and every time somebody goes to order fat.
I was at Taco Bell yesterday, No, when did the burrito cost seven dollars? I was like, what, I remember? Ninety nine cents?
Well, imagine if it goes from seven to ten because of the changes in food regulations.
Do I think that's good? Yes?
I can afford it, though a lot of people you know that increased from what is a nine nine cents to seven dollars, that's burned a lot, and you know, it's made it so it's basically impossible to aborder to eat out and be affordable.
Yeah, I mean how much did like the price of the value menu at McDonald's figure? And yeah, absolutely, I mean that was a huge part the greatest sensitivity. And this is if you if you ask voters, if you look at the polls, if you you know, look at the dominant political conversation, Like, the biggest economic sensitivity that
have right now is to prices. So if you're talking about you know, terrorist as you're talking about stripping away agricultural supports that are the reason why corn is so cheap, which is the reason why you have high corn syrup and all of these things, and if you go through like the middle aisles and the grocery store, everything is just basically like different ways of packaging corn. If you get rid of those supports, yeah, in a lot of ways, prices,
prices are going to go up. I'm not sure that there is as much tension though, because my sense from talking to RFK and we interviewed with him a number of times here and we talked to him about health and we talked to him about health care and what his vision would be et cetera, is that he basically is more on the libertarian front, so you know, for example,
on the left, like I support maticcare for all. I think that would be an incredibly important development in terms of you know, health and combating chronic disease, because then you're taking some of the profit motive out of the healthcare system, You're taking the health insurers out of you know, the middle between you and getting the care that you need. It would help incentivize preventive care, not just people who you know, only go to the doctor when they are
absolutely desperate because they can't afford to before that. And so I asked him about that, and he wasn't in
support of it. He's more of a tradition that I've actually been reading about, which is it's this back to the land movement of the nineteen seventies, where after the sixties are over, and you know, Rfk's father has been killed and MLKA has been killed, and Nixon is ascendant, and there's this retrenchment among the like left countercultural movement, and you had a lot of people who rather than continuing to engage in like mass protests and trying to
change the national conversation, they sort of retreated into these like communes and these different alternative lifestyles. And the ethos there was very libertarian, and it was also very just rejectionist of anything that was mainstream. Good bad are indifferent. If it was mainstream, they didn't want it. Whether it was the nuclear family or modern medicine or using you know, modern farming technology. They'd rather get out a horse than
buggy and try to figure it out. Because it was just anything that's associated with modern life, I'm just going to reject it.
And you know that.
Would that movement would have been in full of fact when RFK Junior was a young man, and I think a lot of his eCos seems to come out of the instincts of that era. Now, part of what happened
to obviously this movement didn't last all that long. Part of what happened is that when you have this purely libertarian like, oh, everybody do what everybody wants to do next thing, you know, you have people who aren't carrying their own weight, You have conflict between what are the values and the structure, and the whole thing kind of crumbles. You also have outbreaks of preventable diseases like hepatitis, and you have staff infections and all those sorts of things.
So all just a long way of saying, like, as best as I can understand rfk's ideology based on what he's said publicly and what he said in our discussions with him when we've pushed him on these things, like, I think he's much more of the direction of just burned down the FDA. Not in my opinion, what really needs to happen is you actually need to strengthen the FDA. You do need to break the corruption in terms of the revolving door and the way that's been incredibly destructive.
You need to take the profit motive out of health care for sure, so that the primary impetus is people getting healthy and people being you know, well, we have terrible we do have a terrible chronic disease epidemic in this country. We have lifespan that is jordening. All these things are very real. But just a strictly libertarian approach to that is not going to get the job done. And so yeah, I think people will be like, you know, they'll probably push to like, okay, now you can drink
raw milk. Sure, fine, that's all well and good. Is that going to really solve the problems that we have?
Though?
Ultimately no, So I think you're right that there is an instinct on the right just to like burn all of these institutions down, when actually all that burning the government institutions down does is empower the corporate for profit institutions, which are not really being attacked on the other side. And that's the danger of the libertarianism. Not to mention of cour Or, It's like, you know, vaccines have been an incredibly important modern health development, and you know the
research that has been funded by the federal government. Actually, one thing we've talked about a bunch is that the drug companies buy and large are not developing new drugs. In fact, all of the new drug molecules that have been developed have been developed over the past twenty some
years with federal government funding. Like that piece is actually really important, So I think it would be I think it would be quite disastrous if there's a rollback of that type of funding, if there's a rollback of that type of research, if there's an actual dismantling destruction of those government agencies, not just stripping out the corruption and putting people's health first.
It's first and foremost before we play what he said. Yes, it's interesting.
Again, I actually talked with some people who were in line to be FDA people under Donald Trump last time, and there are multiple schools of thoughts. So there is what you just said, which is basically like ramp up the FDA, push out the corruption. I think there's also like a quasi libertarian, almost capitalist element to this too, where the problem with the FDA is that it genuinely
has been corporate captured. So one of the things that that RFK wants to do is to ban the pay for play model where the drug companies have to basically pay the bureaucrats to analyze their drugs. This actually keeps out new drug entrants, and it keeps the big companies very very large, which are able to basically push out and stifle all competitions. So if you look at Silicon Valley biotech startups, the FDA is the number one basically reason that many new drugs have not been able to
be pushed from that way. Now, you could say that there is corruption and all that, and you would basically allow a new big pharma to arise, but the truth is we don't have competition in the pharma sector really at all. It's completely rolled up and it's actually weirdly controlled by these Eurokeyan conglomerates. So that's one, and I
actually do think that'd be correct. What are the things we want to do is to change the drug development process and allow for more of less corporate capture that basically allows these big pharma companies do the pay for play FDA revolving door. And I think I do support that in terms of what he's looking at, because I've been hearing it from people who are like biotech founders
now for quite some time. The interesting part also on the vaccine now, and we're going to play some of his comments here as I understand it, and this is
the as reality. Despite what RK has said many times in the past, including no vaccine is quote safe and effective, he believes that you should have transparency on the safety and the efficacy of childhood vaccinations of which they currently are not allowed to release, that does not even run the trials, and that they are immune from what is it they are immune from prosecution under the I forget
the exact piece of legislation. The change in the guidance would basically allow both the safety and the efficacy data to be released. Now, after a while and looking at all this, I think I have come down to his position simply because here's the truth. COVID vacs broke all institutional trust in the entire public health infrastructure, not just COVID vacs masking everything. The rise in vaccination and voluntary
exemption has skyrocketed since COVID. People have legitimate questions because they genuinely don't try us the public health data and the infrastructure at this point. And this is something that Emily Oster, who is a professor at the I forget exactly which school, but she's written a couple of very interesting books about parenthood et cetera. She's considered like the godmother of parenting. One of the things that she really
did well. She's a health economist, and when you read her books, what you see inside of them is everything is based on big longitudinal studies. Some of these do exist for the vaccine, however, or eight vaccines MMR, and many of these other that are included, but a lot of the safety and the efficacy data has not been actually released in terms of the trials, and actually many of them are not even allowed to be run. So what he I think, in practice, what it would look like,
is effectively allowing that and giving quote unquote choice to parents. Now, obviously I understand that that is controversial because each state has to grapple with religious exemption, personal exemption, health exemption, the idea of her immunity, etc. But the thing is is that it's already happening. The vast majority of people do not trust the public health establishment after what happened
under COVID. I personally include myself in them. I remember reading the approval process for the booster vaccine and I said, this is bullshit. I can't believe that you're allowed to be able to do this, and the justification was, oh, well, we do it every year for the flu vaccine, and I was like, okay, Well then I got some questions about the flu vaccine, and I never thought about the flu vaccine. I was just like, yeah, that's fine, but I never considered the actual backstory and all that that
went into it. And you know, it's one of those where the questions around it are now so mainstream. I actually don't really think we have a choice to basically pursue his own agenda.
So I am I again.
I think that his libertarian minded elements of wanting to break up the FDA cartel how NIH works. Doctor j Boticharia apparently isn't in line to lead the Internettion. I think he'd be a fantastic choice, and he was a good controlling voice under COVID. Basically vaccine transparency, safety and efficacy data, a lot of that stuff that could be released.
I think it would be really good.
But again, think that the big tension will come with any sort of European style liberalism, where this is again a big part of like banning food dies and these these things would increase the price or you know, everyone's like, oh, the McDonald's taste better in Europe, which by the way, is not true. But what they say is, you know, if you go home and you look at Europe, they they explicitly cap the amount of sodium they are allowed to put into meat. They have very different standards about
the way things are now. Again, I think that's great, but you know, are we going to deny that grass fed you know, grass fed beef and all that is not exorbitantly more expensive.
I buy it. I think it's definitely a way healthier.
But that's why you really need to think about what that would impact the consumer.
That's why historically this has been a movement of like wealthy white liberals.
Yes, yeah, in California, these are araone California shoppers.
This is why you also had you know, it's been in like Hollywood where you've had people, you know, oh, vaccines aren't natural, so I'm not going to get my kids vaccinated, and then low and behold, you've got a measle down break. I mean, that's the thing is it's like, you know, RFK is not I know, he likes to use Oh I'm not anti VAXs, blah blah blah, he's anti vax Like if you're going to go out and say there is no vaccine that is safe and effective.
I think definitionally you are anti vax now, the COVID piece that you're talking about. I think that the way that public health officials didn't think that the American people could be trusted with the actual like nuances of what this vaccine could and couldn't do and what it was and all of that, I think you're absolutely correct that that broke a lot of public trust, There's no doubt
about it. But you know, when we look at where RFK and his organization, the children what's the name of it, Children's Health Defense, have been involved, like, they have left disasters in their wake, the most prominent of which is they played into these fears around the measles vaccine in Samoa and went in and basically misled people and fomented a whole panic that dropped measles vaccination rates to something like thirty percent. You had a big outbreak and eighty
people died. Eighty plus people died, most of them children under the age of five. So this stuff has real life or death consequences. And when he's been when people have trusted him in these critical arenas it's been a disaster. So you know, RFK is like endlessly skeptical of anything that is like mainstream, settled science. And you know what, you should be skeptical of those things. You should ask questions, you should definitely look at like the monetary incentives and
all absolutely. But then he's endlessly like credulous about any sort of you know, natural seeming, crackpot theory, conspiracy, et cetera. And you should be even more skeptical of that end of the spectrum. And so you know, that's where I have a lot like I think that the things that he did to stoke anti VAXX sentiment and other health lies using his organization, I think they were devastating. And
that example in Samoa is just one. So no, I don't feel comfortable putting him in charge of this like massive federal bureaucracy where you have lots of power and this libertarian instinct, because libertarianism is all well and good until you've got a massive measles outbreak and you know your kid is in the hospital with an easily preventable disease that we should have that we eradicated long ago.
You know, it's very likely it's very possible that we have there's already like an av some kind of avian flu that's spreading right now, monkey pops whatever, Like, it's very possible that we have some sort of significant outbreak. And rfk is does not really accept modern medical science, which has been a miracle in many ways. And then the other piece of this is, like, you know, the to me, the corruption is really the core part of
the problem. But if you actually wanted to get like end the chronic disease epidemic, first of all, it would take way more than the you know, just making food more natural and having fewer ingredients blah blah blah, like the availability of highly dense caloric foods, the total sedentary lifestyle of Americans, like that plays all into it. But also the other thing you would probably do is a lot more people would take ozempic. And he's anti ozempic.
So I genuinely would love to see someone who has his instincts when it comes to being skeptical of the corruption of these companies the impact they have throughout our healthcare system. But what I actually think he's likely to do is only to empower those forces more by undercutting the government agencies that are meant to regulate and serve as a check, a very imperfect check admittedly right now on those massive forces of corporate power.
I could understand that. I mean, the Samoa thing is bad, like there's no getting around it. I don't.
But this is again, though, where I have to put a little bit more trust in institutions and even just look at basically what in practice what he would say, it's like, okay, safety and efficacy of MMR vaccine and then allowing parents a choice. I mean, I don't see the issue broadly. If you're not banning the vaccine, if you're not underwriting it, people have a choice on what they can and can't do.
I think the most liberating thing of.
The RFK quote unquote philosophy, or even the whole like just asking questions thing is you do genuinely go okay, so why do you give a child like four vaccines on the exact same day when they're two months old? When the Europeans do it differently, which is better? Should we compare this versus this? Why is the hepatitis?
What is it?
B vaccine delivered on birth?
To not does?
But no, he raises those things to then just be like that's why vaccines are bad and cause autism, which is a bunch of which is like lies and bullshit,
and it's not just on that. Like our friends at Jelani reported on a great piece about how his group also has backed this completely discredited mode of trying to communicate with people who are nonverbal autistic that involves using like you know, moderate who's supposedly helping them to be able to stabilize their hands so they can type out messages. And like I said, it's been like thoroughly debunked and discredited.
His group pushed this as an actual model, and you know, in some severe cases, there was an instance where you know, a non verbal autistic person was sexually assaulted because their facilitator claimed that they were in some romantic relationship. Like it's there are so many examples where whatever it is
he believes insane like crack put things. And so you know, it puts me in a difficult position trying to defend this because I have my own problems with these institutions, and I think part of why Democrats loss is because they were seen as being like the defenders of the institutions when people are like fuck these institutions. Basically in RFK is also like fucked these institutions. But the specifics
of how you do it matter. And so if you're just taking a sledgehammer to regulatory agencies, that just means that there are going to be more snake oil salesmen. That just means they're going to be people hawking like supplements that claim to do X and y and z for you that are just completely fake in bogus. That
just means you're going to have less regulation. So that just means you're going to have actually less investment in the type of research that generally has developed life saving new drug molecules and treatments, which is what the federal government has done amazingly well actually, I mean again, the drug companies are basically just like, buy up the research
that our taxpayers dollars fund and our distribution mechanism. And you know, to me, what you would want is go in the exact opposite direction and have more of this actually owned by the government, having more government like options and competition like they are doing in California with their
own like government produced insulin, reducing those costs. But I just you know, so I'm yeah, I'm I'm very like skeptical that our K Junior is going to do anything good that's actually going to improve public health.
With put it this way, is that basically the reason why people like RFK or the reason why people voted for Trump at a very base level, They're like, things are so bad under the current system that blowing shit up is the only thing that's possible.
So for me, I'm excited about the possibility.
I think that safety, efficacy, standards, choice, and being informed consent is actually very important. I don't trust the public health establishment in terms of blowing up the FDA and seeing with the new regulatory regime, yeah, I think it. Honestly, what else could come from it for them? And if you look at the way that he Cali and Casey means, the way that they talk and the data that they have around autism, about childhood, obesity, about cancer, the current
trajectory is death. It is a dying and obese civilization where seventy five percent of the population is currently overweight on ozempic. One of the things that I actually like about RFK Junior is that he's not a prescriber. First,
he's not a prescription drug person. First, I have deep skepticism around statins, ozempic and all of these other things in terms of their long term overall effect and the general idea that you must rely for your entire life on a drug company to basically provide you with life because it's a very convenient economic relation ship between you and said think, we don't know what the overall impact is going to be on children who are taking oozebic.
I mean, we're talking about literally slowing down someone's gut at age thirteen years old. At the same time, we're learning a lot about the gut brain you know, what is it the gut brain barrier, and the impact of the gut on mental health and depression and all these other things. He likes, and you know, advocates for natural, natural quote unquote remedies. I mean, even the whole raw milk thing. And this is where actually where I think
he is generally correct on the public health establishment. There are some things like the public health people who are quote unquote banning raw milk and says it's like, look, if you look at the data, is it slightly more like unsafe? Yeah, But it's at the same time, like there's so many other things that are out there which are not banned after ten fifteen thousand times.
People, if you want to drink raw mil let him drink.
It and got diarrhea, Like my guy, No, but it's not.
It's just that it's like, look, if they believe in the soak, I mean, there are like you just pointed out under FDA does not look at any of the stuff, but there are things you can buy over the counter which are ten to fifteen thousand time.
But that's kind of my point, Sager, is that so RFK and people with his mindset and a lot of his supporters are endlessly skeptical of like, you know, actually FDA approved drugs which do have to go through a rigorous process.
Is that process perfect? Is there? Of course?
But there is a rigorous process in place to prove efficacy, okay, And then they're endlessly credulous about like some bullshit supplement because it's got like a natural health whatever or some weird remedy that they read on the internet that has absolutely no efficacy and is just being sold by a literal snake oil salesman. That's my issue, And you know, I mean with regard to RFK, like he doesn't He
has been skeptical over whether HIV actually causes AIDS. He thinks COVID was caused created by Jewish people and Chinese people and doesn't affect them. He thinks wi FI causes cancer. He thinks different chemicals are making kids trans he's anti vacs. I mean, it's just like he thinks anti depressants are the reason for mass shootings.
There's just nothing that one there's the most efficacy for that, No, there's not.
Probably most mass shooters are actually probably need to be on more meds.
The real problem Actually most of them are addicted to weed and antidepressants.
But that's a whole other story that people aren't ready for. No, no, but our depression.
But I was critical of this when it was inside of the Democratic Party, to this complete rejection, like belief that anything that's natural like weed, must inherently be less harmful and less bad for you, right like if, oh, if nature provided it, it must be better for you. And that's just like that's just not true, and I think it can lead to very damaging outcomes as we've seen, Like I said, when RFK Junior has had impacts on people's health, you ended up with eighty some people in Samoa dying.
Right.
So the thing is is that when you're talking about damaging outcomes, look at the damage of the public health I think structure, and I think ten it's a million times.
I think you have to.
Ask yourself, though, why if your goal is to improve people's health outcomes and lower like improve life expectancy, all of these things, why universal health care isn't a part of that at all? When that is the major thing that sets us apart from you know, the rest of the developed world who have not seen these massive declines in terms of their you know, life expectancy. And is it the only thing? No, but is it a critical part. Any honest conversation has to say that is a critical part.
But that would require going after the health insurance CUD. That would require something other than libertarian like you can drink your raw milk and whatever approach and just destroying the FDA and like destroying the NIH and just burning it all down, as you said.
And I do think there's a bit.
I think you're right that there's a big instinct among the public that just like, screw all these institutions, let's just burn them all to the ground.
And RFK channels a.
Lot of that.
But if you don't that's I mean, this is sort of like a core problem with libertarian as is that if you don't do the work to check corporate power and to actually have a government that is strong enough to act that is, you know, not corrupt, to act as a check on those corporate influences, then you're going to end up in a very bad place. And I think that's what his ideology is and certainly is what it's likely to be expressed as through you know, a trumpet mess.
I mean, look possible in terms of corporate capture, cronyism, etc. He does also want to end a lot of the pharma, you know, corruption, and look, I have my own issues with RFK Junior, Okay, in terms of his California nineteen seventies liberalism and the way that it's applied to nuclear power, and just like the general way that he's like you know, you just said in terms of is very accepting of what three Mile island and the fact that it can't
get an insurance policy. So I'm not saying he's a perfect person, but in the world where people have deep distrust of the medical establishment and of the healthcare system.
R K Junior is the natural, you know, extension of this.
Now.
Whether he gets confirmed or not, I don't know. But I have been thinking about it, and I think America actually does to see what it voted for. I've been thinking about this a lot. America voted for a blow up the institution's option. I think Matt Gates should be picked. I think or should get confirmed Pete hag Seth, RFK Junior and all of it. America should see what it's actually like. For years, we've actually wanted to blow shit up.
Let's see what it looks like. If it's chaos, and if it's terrible, you're, you know, welcome to vote the other ways. But there is like a grotesque, weird thing happening here where we don't. In some ways, the Republicans are like trying to protect Trump from himself. It's like, no, he's a grown ass man and he knows exactly what is. But I also think people know what they voted for in a certain sense, and they want to see everything. You don't get burned to the ground. And I honestly
I'm excited to see it too. I want to see him, like, are my instincts correct or am I totally wrong? And you know, even on the universal healthcare front, and this is the fundamental problem when you have lack of trust and institutions. Nobody including me, is signing enough for government healthcare. I'm not signing enough for a COVID vaccine. You know, Oh you can't go get your cold, you know, flu appointment because you didn't take the COVID.
No, no, no.
And then that's the issue, is that after a world where public health and all these other people have tried to impose a regime on our lives and they failed dramatically after their system has been crasically created in one of the most obese countries in the entire world. So what is it were we second to Katar, If we look at our childhood, obesity and all these other things are our food system, why would we trust to the government,
you know, to take over it. So to solve that, you know, you really do actually need the safety of the transparency and a lot of the change in the system that I think to arrive at that would require actually a fundamental revolution in the American people's trust in institutions.
Right now, that's rock bottom.
RFK Matt Gates, p hegseeth all these other people their choice to have one thing in common, what they want to burn the bureaucracy to the ground.
And frankly America voted for that.
Donald Trump himself he doesn't care about anything except for that. So we should see it, like we should actually see what it's like in practice. And people can complain if you lose your I don't know, if no drug gets developed or whatever, it's like, Okay, well that is what you voted for.
Let's be honest, like that's actually what we voted for.
If the Department of Justice gets gutted and nothing, you know, whatever works for six years, where we get the Russigate and all that stuff out of there, frankly, I'd be fine with that. But the point is is that is
what people voted for. So to a certain point, like we do have to respect quote unquote the will of the people and what they have been asking for it under Donald Trump, but also over the last twenty years, and that is an erosion of trust to the point where these institutions don't work for them, They don't trust a word that they have to say, and whether it's good for them or not. I mean in a certain sense that you have, like people have their destiny in
their hands. That's what they decided to do at the ballot box. Donald Trump won the popular vote. I mean, at a certain point we just have to say, okay, you get what you want, you know, And I really think that's where I'm at with RFK Junior is look like I said, I have my own problems with them. I have a very different vision of what the government would and would run like not necessarily with RFK, but you know, under what quote unquote advance administration. But I'm
not the median voter. You know, people voted for this, and that's what they that's what they seem.
To I mean, I think I actually think that's there.
The only thing I would say, like, you know, to read like an ideologically consistent mandate into any election result, I think as a fool's errand because I mean, if you ask people still, people are overwhelmingly in favor of universal health care, so you know, to just say, you know, what they just voted for was to burn it down, that's certainly one element of it. But I also think that there's a lot of ideological inconsistencies among the American people,
to say the least. But the other thing that's funny to me to your point soccer is I think a lot of people, especially the sort of like more like billionaire or Wall Street backers of Trump, I think they really convinced themselves that he didn't really.
Mean Yeah, No, they definitely did.
Yeah.
We'll talk about that with Jeff.
I mean you even expressed like, I don't think he's going to do it now he I think the assumption should be at this point he meant the things that he said on the trail.
Like he meant it.
And there was a clip of what was the sname, Howard Lutnick who's one of the co chairs of the transition on CNN, who is getting asked about RFK Junior, and Caitlyn Collins is like, you know, isn't it going to be a problem if he's HGS secretary And he's like, there's no way that's going to happen. She's like really, because that's what's being floated and he's like, no, not a chance. And this is one of the co chairs
of the transition and here's r f K Junior. And I also think all the speculation and soccer I'm curious your perspective on this of like, oh, the Gates nomination is just like a distraction to try to really get heag set through whatever. Like, No, I think Trump wants
these people. I think he wants all of them, and I think he plans to get them, and if you know, and I think he probably will get almost all of them, whether it's through acting appointments or you know, he's he's got to play and lay down where I don't want to get into all the technical minutia right now, but where he can actually use the powers of the presidency to force the Senate into recess and then get whatever appointments he won once and they don't have to face
any sort of vote in a Senate. So, yeah, you've got a bunch of people out there who are like mom, RFK Junior is not pro life, And that's kind of a big problem for the pro life community because the FDA is very important in terms of the myth of pristone regulation. You know, most abortions in this country at
this point are medication abortions mif of pristone. You know this, sobeig is the number one way like abortions have actually gone up post the overturning of Row versus WAD, because of the availability of myf of pristone, the FDA could
roll back that authorization. So you know, the pro life community is not gonna be happy about the fact r FFK Junior at least seems to be more or less pro choice and is unlikely to use those agencies as a cudgel, which something you know that I'm happy about with regard to the choice of RFK Junior is not likely to use those agencies as a cudgel against abortion rights, but they may not really have their say. I think Trump wants these people, and I think he's probably going to get them.
I think you are right, and that's another reason why I really just think they should all be confirmed. And I mean, I guess to wrap things up, I think in the big, big picture, there are institutions that will check Donald Trump. But also he is going to be the president of the United States, imbued with immense power. So the cabinet officials and the appointees and all that stuff,
yeah they should. And then you know, and just in general, like for what the Republicans and all these other people are saying, like, oh, maybe we'll vote against some I'm like, listen, this is actually on ironically, this is what America wanted. They don't want Bush two point zero. It's pretty clear. I think you're doing a whole monologu about why I've both working class voters. I mean, not to give it away, but isn't it that a lot of them hate the system and they.
Like, well that actually yes, but actually a lot of it had to do it with Gaza or It's like a surprising number that were like, actually Gaza was important to me, which even I was surprised by the number who have said that got it.
I mean, look, of course that's a big part of it, but I would say like, in general, this feeling of this system is broken and we have to blow it up completely. Is the major through line between Tulsi. I mean, really think about it. You know, you asked me once, You're like, how how can we put together people who are warmongers and Tulsi Gabbard or whatever who are up there on the same stage, And I was like, it's
about grievance, It's about blowing shit up. At the end of the day, MSG, that's what they wanted, That's what people actually voted for so I say that's what you should give them and then see if they like the consequences or not. I'm curious too, I've always wanted to know,
like what would it actually look like. It's exciting, and so I think in general, just like looking at all of this, you know, and look the counter the real reason you should also want all these people to come through is if it's a total disaster, then honestly you can finally say it's been tried and it didn't work.
And I think that's another reason why you know, people in certain sense, like who are trying to continue the permanent bureaucracy, you're actually undermining any counter case you could ever give to why these things won't work. You'll finally get to see what it's actually like in practice. We saw a little bit last time, but this time for real, like in the actual mechanisms of the government.
So anyway, I know it's a long winded way. Do you have Jeff Stein standing by?
So sure?
Yeah, do it.
Yeah, let's go and jump.
To Jeff.
Joining us now is friend of the show, Jeff Stein from the Washington Post. Good to see my friend.
Thanks caving back.
Absolutely all right, let's go and put this up there on the screen.
You've been doing some incredible reporting about inside the Trump transition team and some tension between Elon Musk and some of Trump's advisors, including Trump himself. So Elon apparently has not left mar A Lago. Trump even name checked him in the speech and was like, I can't get him to get out of here.
He won't leave me alone.
You saw a clip of Trump actually smacking Elon while I was using his phone at the UFC. So there's some stuff going on behind the scenes. But for our purposes, it appears that Elon has intervened directly in a fight around tariffs and specifically the Treasury secretary. So what can you tell us about what's going on inside right now?
So just outside quickly. Elon Musk tweeted yesterday that he thinks that it's really good that Argentina massively slashed tariffs, and.
That was the first like what.
Is going on we had that?
Actually, can we put that on the screen. Continue to talk to so people can see.
He's gonna be like the Trump co president. You can't go around saying actually, the number one domestic policy priority of the president is stupid, like it seemed like an incredible thing for him to be saying. And then a few hours later he went on X again and said something that I even more annoyed the people I talked to in the Trump or a bit, which was that Trump should pick Howard Lutnik, one of the two candidates
for Treasury secretary. Up until really that point, Musk, you know, he is around mar A Lago all the time, He's around Trump all the time. There's a sense, you know, it's hard to tell with Trump personally, but certainly among Trump advisors that I've spoken to, they are already fed up with Musk. They think he doesn't really understand Washington. They think he doesn't really know what he's doing. Maybe, you know, from the perspective of people who want, you know,
massive changes, that that is maybe an asset. That's what he's bringing, sort of fresh eyes, fresh perspective, not you know, burdened by by what has been but but so two moves by Musk in one day that said, you know, I have strong views that that are not sort of just falling in line with what the leader of this
train is saying. And it's still early and there's I still think they're in the honeymoon romance period, but how long that goes on for when Musk is sort of famous to U sort of drop pet fascinations after a few months getting tired of them, It's true, will be a fascinating story.
Trump Trump also known for dropping those pet fascinations, at least in the in when they're human beings. Tell us about these different potential treasury choices, and you know how they differ ideologically in what some of the policy implications could be.
Yeah, it's a little tricky because I think some of this, you know, gets a little overdetermined, where it's like, because a candidate is not as strong on one thing, it becomes that that are weak on this thing. And so you sort of get these like over dramatized in the press and frankly in some of my stories versions of what each of the candidates represents when it's much more sort of contingent and hard to tell.
The two candidates.
As we were discussing, I feel like most people like go to sleep when I start talking about this. But Scott Bessen's is this hedge fund executive who, despite working for George Soros, which is kind of an amazing thing, has become one of Trump's most trusted economic advisors. As Sager and I were discussing before the show started, he is not just quite a normal Wall Street guy. He is quite strong on a lot of the trade stuff that Trump people.
Have long wanted.
But I think it's fair to say that they also worry that he's not quite as into let's say, universal tariffs, which would you create huge import duties on every US trading partner in Vestin's I think it's fair to say, or fair to wonder about his commitment to that cause. And then the second candidate is this guy, Howard Latna. He's been chaired co chair of the Trump transition team.
Lutnick is also a Wall Street guy, so I think it's a little unfair to be like he is the trade hawk in the race, but he he has been. I think it's fair to say, more willing to embrace tariff's than that, and more and more sort of forthright in that. But I think, possibly even more importantly, Lutnick
doesn't really have sort of the independent power base. Like if we're thinking of analogs to other Trump cabinet positions, I think Lutnick is much more similar to that Gates and that he is kind of with Trump or he's no one. Essen is a megabillionaire who has clout abroad, who has constituencies on the Hill, who has sort of you know, people that he can turn you to back
them up that aren't just Trump. And I think there's a sense that, well Lutnick has the endorsement of Mosque and some others, he is is more of a sort of loyalist surrogate, you know, critics would say lapdog crony type.
And so that's how this race is broken down.
And Trump's seems to be just getting annoyed that these people just keep sniping at each other, taking pot shots, criticizing each other. I heard, we reported broke over the weekend that Besson's people went to Trump and were saying, hey, look, Lutnick hosted a Hillary Clinton fundraiser in twenty sixteen. Lutin's people were coming back and saying, Besson like works for Soros, He's like friends with like people in the deep state.
He's not that serious about your trade stuff. And Trump seems to be like, you know what, screw both you guys. I'm going to look for a third candidate. The fundamental like as Christly, we were alluding to, like the fundamental structural problem for Trump is that he wants massive tariffs to rebalance global trade, which I think is an expression of like a genuine popular sentiment in the country. But he also, you know, wants line to go up, like he loves stomachs, Like Trump is a Wall Street guy,
and so those visions are fundamentally incompatible. Someone who is very strong on trade will be someone who the market's freak out about, and someone who the markets won't freak out about will be weak on trade. And so how Trump reconciles both of those, I think it's going to be really hard to see.
And getting to that, Jeff, you know, what are the tensions already in the economic team? So Larry Kudlow it appears as back of National Economics Council. Larry could not be more anti tariff in terms of all of his
personal commentary and his background. Now we have two Treasury Secretary candidates that are talking here about tariffs, and then Bob Leitheiser, who is probably one of the most legitimate pro tariff's former US Trade representative, is allegedly in the mix, either for trade representative or possibly for trade secretary.
So is it.
Basically a repeat of last time around? How do you think it will happen this time?
You know, if Trump had come out and picked best sent right away, I think you could see him have playing the same role essentially as Mnuchi, which was, you know, to kind of rein in Trump's impulses on tariffs and say, okay, let's like basically preserve the global financial order without like
literally overturning the table. And the fact that Trump hasn't gone down that route I think based on my reporting, I mean this, this reporting is really hard because not you know, you talk to people who say Trump said this, and then you know he likes this candidate, and then you ask them like and then you know, your call your editors and say, oh this, I got this great intel, like this guy is supporting this candidate, like Trump is looking at him closely, and then you think about it
more and then you're like, wait, who do you support? And then that person will often be supporting the candidate that they're leaking is in the mix.
So it's this.
Like weird delicate dance you have to do as a reporter. But my I think the evidence that the evidence I've gathered suggests that Trump Trump does not want a repeat of his first administration when they really just kind of tinkered around the edges of the global trade system. I think he wants to go big, and I think the Gates pick I think other things he's done suggest that he, like as you guys were discussing before I came on, he's serious about about this new world order, this this
like very transformative moment, and wants to pursue that. And you know, is he willing to do that at the expense of the Wall Street of the stock market like that? We're gonna have to see, But he's he's definitely thinking about it.
He's nothing toring with it.
Yeah, that was something I wanted to ask you about, Jeff, because you for a while been saying the Wall Street backers of Trump, or those even who just were sort of comfortable with another Trump term, they just didn't really take him seriously when he was like, no, guys, I'm serious.
I want an across the board import tax on everything, ten twenty percent, maybe two hundred percent, Like I want to do this, and they're like, yeah, but Trump says a lot of things, and to your point, I think we now have every indication that, like, no, the things that he said, he genuinely is inclined to do. So, you know, do you think that there is what is the sense on Wall Street now that that's becoming increasingly clear?
And if there is, what are some of the mechanisms he could use to not have to go through Congress to have a you know, massive implementation of some sort of terriffy and what do you think the impacts of that would likely be?
Yeah, there are people in Washington, as you guys know, who get paid, you know, two or three times when I get paid, and their job is like to gather corporate intelligence for their clients. And I talk to them, and I think they are totally wrong about this because, as you were alluding to, congressional Republicans and corporate leaders and donors have been very convinced that Trump is bluffing
with all this tariff stuff. They think it's a negotiating tactic to scare other foreign countries into doing what we want to do. They think that Trump, you know, is throwing red meat on the campaign trail to his voters. The way like if you listen to him, if you listen to what Trump says, I mean, again, I could be wrong, but if you listen to the words coming out of his mouth, he says tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented. He called them the best word in
the dictionary. He said that there are no downsides to them. He said that they could pay off the national debt, fund a national childcare program, and allow us maybe to abolish the income tax. This is not a guy who is looking at this tool in uh, maybe it'll have some upside, maybe it'll have some downside. Way if if the reality proves to be that way, which I think
it would, maybe he'll pull back from the brink. But the reality is every public, every evidence that he every piece of evidence that he's giving us, suggest that he's dead serious.
To me about this, and a lot.
Of the business leaders and big donors, they see Trump as a vehicle for tax cuts and are hoping that this is just kind of overstated. And that has always seemed to me to be like an incredibly rest risky bet.
I mean, I don't have millions of dollars to give away on the.
Campaign, but like it does seem like like like he's very serious. And to your legal question, Trump has national security authority under AEPA, the law that governs sanctions, to declare a national security emergency and impose traffs on who whatever country he wants.
And that is something that the courts you could.
Adjudicate, but it could take years, by which point all of the trade measures that Trump wants would already be in effect.
Right, one more for you, Jeff from me. And I don't know if Soccer has anything else. But another piece of analysis that I've questioned, and I think maybe you've questioned as well, is that the DOGE agency that was given to Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswami, which is kind of giving, like you know, Blue Ribbon commission, like here's the thing for you to play with and go away, that it may not be as meaningless as it has
been portrayed at times. And that also this administration has explored ways that they could avoid having to go through a filibuster, et cetera to institute massive government spending cuts. That's something that most of the Republican Party would also be on board with. So what is your reading of the import of DOGE.
Yeah, this is another thing I spoke to someone who works for a military defense contractor last week who was saying, like, we're going to be fine, like Congress needs to approve whatever Elon and Vivek come up with. Then I was like, how do you guys get paid so much to do this work that this is not necessarily true? If you look at Trump's omb chief, this is the person who oversees the budget.
His name is Russ Vote.
In the first term, it's a little unclear because he was associated with Project twenty twenty five whether he'll get that spot back, but assuming he does, which I think he will. He has spent the last several years in the Biden administration working on legal theories related to something called empowerment. Impoundment is the president's ability to say I don't want this spending program to continue because I think the original purpose that Congress authorized is no longer valid.
And Russ Vote and.
Some of the lawyers close to him who are already on the Trump team have spent a lot of time thinking about how do we use this legal theory of empowerment to stop spending on federal programs we don't like. And that is a huge potential constitutional showdown here because what it means is that the president could say Congress approved this, but I don't want to do it, and so I'm going.
To stop this federal program.
And that that means the Veka and Elonic if that's real, if they if they either win in the court or just want to try, that could change the entire complexion of a blue driven commission that puts up non binding recommendations to the Hill that the Hill just says like f off, like I already.
Authorized these programs.
And so I think people are really sleeping on the possibility that Elon and Vivek do much more than I think the conventional wisdom even among like well paid lobbyists in Washington.
I think that's a really important point on both of those, which is that it's possible, and it would require novel legal theories. I know, and I've heard very much similar about the pursuit of this. That said, last time around, Jeff, you know, he didn't say many things about tariffs. He did back down, he did, you know, ultimately carried through some national security tariffs on soybeans, you know, et cetera, and a few other things. But by and large, there
was a huge war with congressional Republicans day on. As you said about trying to divert funds. He tried to do that on the border wall. It was a colossal failure, got struck down by the court. So there are several systems in place which could seriously throw a wrench into his plans here.
Now, no, that's totally true, and you know it's hard to you know, know how to wait these things. I think the impoundment thing, you know, they got a shot with the Conservative Supreme Court.
My understanding is, you know from.
People close to this that they're looking at sort of like what what is an example of an obviously wasteful program that like is spending money that the White House clearly has an interest in stopping. Can they get the Supreme Court to approve their theory in that case and then go and implement all these other ones that are maybe like more edge cases. In terms of the tariffs,
whether he does an automatic twenty percent tariff on every country. Again, as you're saying, like there is a lot of resistance among Congressional Republicans to going down that route. My understanding from Trump transition officials that they are working on proposals to do that. So if they backed down when the Robert hits the road like, maybe they will and we'll hopefully you talk about it then, but I think they're going to try.
Yeah, they certainly might, Jeff. We always appreciate your analysis, sir, Thank you for joining us.
Great to see it, Jeff love being on.
Thanks guys, Yeah, a pleasure. All right.
So let's get back to some of the nominations that have already been made and curious for Soccer's reaction.
To these as well.
So we have Matt Gates, who has been nominated to serve as Attorney General of the United States. Let's put this up on the screen. There are some questions over whether or not mister Gates would be confirmed as Attorney General. He has been himself investigated by the Department of Justice for alleged sex trafficking. They drop that investigation. He's also been investigated by a Republican led House Ethics Committee into
a similar allegation. And we can get into a little bit more of the specifics, but in any case, he's also just not really particularly well liked on Capitol Hill amongst anyone.
Yeah, it has nothing to do with policy.
It has almost all to do with well, the Kevin McCarthy thing, and being a grandstander.
Is a hard person to get along with. Yeah, in my personal experience, personal experience, he is a difficult person to like as a human being. So anyway, according to NBC's report, I've seen some other reporting to this effect as well. More than half of Senate Republicans, including someone senior leadership, privately say they do not see a path for Matt Gates to be confirmed as Attorney general would
not support him to lead the Department of Justice. While Gates' ability to be confirmed the right appears on the rocks amongst Senate Republicans, President like Trump's team remains confident he will eventually be confirmed, even if.
It's after an ugly battle.
NBC News spoke to more than fifteen additional Republican sources who agreed there are not enough votes in the Senate to confirm Gates, and some estimated that closer to thirty Republicans consider him an qualified In your thoughts.
I mean this relates to the RFK junior discussion. I think this is what America voted for. I think Donald Trump was serious whenever he said schedule F fire. Everybody the Department of Justice is going to What did JD. Say, he's going to be the most important part of it. Yeah, that's what Gates is. Gates is a loyalist on policy.
I mean, he's actually an interesting guy, right, I mean, he's.
I don't like that he's very pro weed, but he is very consistently pro weed. He's a lot more libertarian wants. What does he wants to pardon Julian Assange, to pardon Edward Snowden. He is genuinely anti war, has been worked with Rocanna previously in the past. So, I mean, if you were to ask me, like relative to some of
the other picks, I actually don't think he's bad. Will he get through that is an open question in fact, But this is actually one two where we were talking about this on the phone, and I still it really remains to be seeing if Trump wants somebody through.
I do feel like he's going to get intane.
And the question around Gates is was this all some jiu jitsu maneuver to avoid the House ethics committed.
I mean, that's certainly possible.
Kevin McCarthy has been insinuating from the very beginning that this entire McCarthy coup was revenge against Kevin McCarthy because he's like, I've seen the text messages, I've seen the ethics report. I'm you know, whether any of that's gonna come to fruition. I mean, the charges against Gates, like the image of it is not great. I mean, I will say in his defense, the charges genuinely were dropped by the DOJ, and all the allegations and stuff were
leaked against him. That's that even if what he was doing was legal, like honestly, let's be honest, like it's skeevie and it's gross, right, and even terms of even the legality of like what he was up to at that time, will it be enough to sink him? Come on, you know, in the age where first of all, you know, what did RFK tell me about skeletons in his closet?
Like in the age where these people are knowingly put up, and especially in a backlash against me too, and then the post Kavanaugh era, I don't see some sexual harassment allegation or whatever against somebody sinking at it.
I mean, I really don't.
Well, there's a few things to say about that. First, First of all, the allegation that we could put let's put a seven up on the screen which has some of the details here of the allegations. A woman told the House Ethics Committee that she saw Matt Gates have sex with a minor. That minor alleged to be seventeen years old. You have both the minor herself and the
client who allegedly witnessed this testifying to these events. You know, it is something that the Republican Party has been running around for years now talking endlessly about the Democratic Party being filled with pedophiles and the whole Qann conspiracy theory and obsessed with Epstein et cetera, et cetera. And then your literal candidate for Attorney General, chief law Enforcement officer of the United States is credibly accused of sleeping with a minor.
So there's that.
Okay, okay, But on this front though, and I'm not diminishing the accusation, the DOJ investigated it, right, they dropped the allegation, they dropped the charges, Like if it was true, wouldn't they prosecute Look, nobody hates Matt Gates.
It's very permanent.
It's very I mean, it's very difficult to it's very difficult to acquire enough evidence to say beyond a reasonable doubt, but you can. I don't think that you would deny that. If you had a similar fact pattern about a Democrat, Republicans would be running wild with it. But the other point to be made here is, you know, all of these men were talking about Trump RFK Junior. R K Junior doesn't even really deny the sexual assault allegations against him. In the interview with you, he did not did not
really deny them. So anyway, r K Jr. Trump himself gates and hegseeth all of them, at least somewhat credibly accused of sexual assault. And part of it is what you said, like the post me to era like that is part of what makes this not an accident that
these men would all be put up. But it's also you know, with Trump, a lot of his picks are about loyalty and his ability to dominate and control them and guarantee that no matter what he wants them to do or what bridge he wants them to cross, that they're not going to you know, they're going to maintain their loyalty and they're going to do whatever he ultimately
wants them to do, no matter what that is. And having a lot of dirt on someone, or having someone who is you know, compromised so much that the rest of like the mainstream world wouldn't accept them, or who's burned their bridges as RFK Junior and Tulsi did with you know, the other political party where they're never going
to be accepted back across that bridge. Those are all insurance policies that those people are going to even if you ask them to do something illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, whatever, that they're going to stay the course and stand by you. So in that way, I don't think it's an accident that you have all of these individuals who have you know, who are kind of deeply compromised in different ways.
Maybe that's part of it, Honestly, I think that look their own personal stuff and all that aside. And by the way, on the Gates case, we did a lot of our stuff on the Gate stuff.
But something Glenn.
Greenwell genuinely to convince me of is, like, you know, when we are just talking about allegations or whatever that were leaked from the DOJ and then they end up dropping the case like that is kind of a miscarriage at least of the way that the public has to look at this stuff. He was accused of sex trafficking miners. I mean, these are heinous, horrible charges that will lock you up for a long time, and the end of the day, they dropped it because of lack of evidence.
Some people do deserve due process, and I think we should actually preserve that for a lot of people. And this is actually a big part of the backlash to the whole me too era and like what really constitutes a sexual harassment cancelation and all of that. So I'll just put that out there specifically on Gates. Whether this woman is lying or not, I have no idea, but you know, in general, when politicians are involved, like I'm skeptical, and if the Department of.
Justice multiple women, that okay.
But if the Justice Department says we don't have the evidence to prosecute you, I mean I'm inclined to go with it and just say, well, clearly there's not enough to back that up.
So somebody says something the House Ethics Committee.
Yes, I actually do, and see this will put me out the other side of MAGA and all people.
Let's see it. Look, I mean, is it going to be good for Gates? Probably not. And that is what I mentioned.
I mean, that's what's very noteworthy is he did not have to resign his seat.
He resigned two days before the.
Support because to be released the report from coming.
Out, and so that the fact that he resigned, then they canceled the meeting where they were supposed to deliberate whether or not to release this report. So, okay, if there's a lack of evidence and there's no there there, then.
People should be able to see the report.
I agree with releasing the report.
The reason they don't want the report released is because, like I just said, it's even if what he was doing this is like when we were talking about Dave Portnoy, it was like Dave Portnoy was you know, he had the me too allegation or whatever against him, and it's like in his his defense was that he was sleeping with girls who were twenty years younger than him, were dming him on Instagram.
Legal, yeah, creepy, weird.
You know.
Yeah.
And so that's the defense of Matt Gates is that he was knowingly engaged in like that, in like sex parties on boats with rich people while doing drugs and getting drunk, like straight up dgen behavior. And it's like, that's not something that a public official wants out of it with very young.
With young women.
People were like eighteen nineteen years old. So yeah, I mean that's sketchy and gross. But this technically legal, so it's one of those in the ethics report. I get why he doesn't want it out there. You know, he's married now and all of it. No politician would want you probably shouldn't be engaging that behavior. But I agree with you, actually, I think the report should be released if you want to be the top law enforcement officer.
First of all, I mean you got to think about this in terms of blackmail and compromise, you know what people used to talk about a lot during the Trump era. You kind of do want all of your skeletons out at this point, and to be honest again, in the Trump era, like this stuff is not going to sink you. Will it be bad, But for Trump himself, will it really lead to him withdrawing his nomination?
No? No, I don't see at all.
And I do think like I do think if he he wants Gates, he's going to get Gates. And you know, I mean you made the point about like he genuinely on economics is like had sets likes Lena Khan and whatever. But I also don't think we should fool ourselves that that's why he got picked. He got picked because he's a loyalist. He got picked because whoever Trump wants Gates to go after, Gates is going to go after and you know, so that's why he's put in the position.
And that is what Donald Trump talked about on the campaign trail. I disagreed that that's really what people voted for. I think people voted more for, like, hey, the economy was kind of good with him more so than like, you know, I want Matt.
Gates to be Attorney.
General in the United States. But you're right, it's not like he didn't. It's not like his statements on the campaign trail are inconsistent with this type of a choice for attorney generally the United States. I do think his statements on the campaign trail are inconsistent with like Marco Rubio and other neo cons being selept selective for key foreign policy positions.
But no one should have been.
Surprised about that either if you look at you know, how inconsistent Trump himself has been, what his first term was like etcetera, etcetera. So the other person we referenced here is Pete Hegseth, who has his own allegations that have just emerged against him. Let's go and put this up on the screen. He's of course picked for Secretary of Defense. Again, very important to know these things in
terms of potential blackmail. And so the allegations here are that so we know that he did pay an accuser who said that he had sexually assaulted her.
The story goes.
That he was at some conference in California and there was a woman who was she's a conservative Republican who was staying at the hotel there with her small children and her husband, who was tasked with the unenviable task of trying to get Pete a drunken Pete Hegseeth back to his hotel room. Apparently a couple of other women that he was at the bar with were becoming kind of uncomfortable with him and his overtures that they were
making to him. So this one was to asked with, Okay, let's get drunken Pete Hegseth back up to his room because he's got to make his flight tomorrow. And then, according to her at some point in the evening she received these texts from the bar. She says that she sensed Hegseth was irritated. What happened next is in dispute, they write. According to the memo, Jane Doe did not remember anything until she was in his hotel room, then stumbling to find her hotel room. Her memory of six
to nine hours was very hazy. Her husband was searching for her and was relieved when she finally showed up. The following day, the woman returned home, had a moment of hazy memory of being raped the night before, had a panic attack, went to the emergency room, received a rape kit examination that was positive for semen. The woman gave county authorities a statement about what happened. According to the memo sent to the transition team, Hegseth says, this is all a lie that she concocted to try to
save her marriage, and that the encounter was consensual. Obviously, you know her version of events is very different from that. We do know that he paid her some undisclosed settlement amount to keep this whole thing quiet. And then the other thing that we know we can put a nine up on the screen is that only the Trump team was caught off guard by this.
They didn't know about this particular allegation.
There is a police record of the you know, the that was recorded at the time of the alleged incident. And so they were kind of caught off guard and had some meetings about this and how serious it was blah blah blah. But like they seem to be standing by him, and that doesn't surprise me.
No, it's air.
Look, I mean again with Pete hagg Seth, it's his own personal life.
It's not exactly like he was an angel.
So yeah, and this is the guy that runs around with all kind of you know, ultra Christian tattoos and whatever.
See even on that it's like, you know, everyone, what is a dous vault that everyone's making. It's like guys in the twenty tens that was huge in military culture. It has nothing to do like a crusader's cross on his chest, Yeah, which he got in Israel. That's actually a little weird if you asked me what. That's a separate conversation. The same thing about Pete hag Seth that I think about RFK and Tulsi and all these people.
These people want to blow shit up.
Pete hag Seth is an anti DEI warrior. People should go and listen to him on the Sean Ryan podcast, which he gave It was a couple of weeks ago, where he talked about his book. He's made it pretty clear like what he wants to do, and that's why Trump picked him.
I would also say there's a huge part of revenge.
And I was texting you guys whenever I was on the plane whenever he got picked, because I was like, people forget. They tried to pick him for VA secretary last time in twenty eighteen. The Pentagon and the bureaucracy hate peak eg Seth Pete. They specifically the Pentagon hates him because he circumvented the UCMJ or whatever and got Eddie Gallagher and those people out of prison and to get Trump to pardon them while he was in the military. So the brass despises him more than anything.
Those are the criminals that he got.
Allegedly, well he pardoned them. So look, actually the case is complicated. There's a good book called.
Alphabet They were.
People still go and read about it.
No, I'm saying the book itself was end no, I'm saying the book basically it's questionable. At least in Eddie's case, it's a weird case. He should go and read about it Alpha Platoon by a New York Times reporter. By the way, he thinks Eddie is guilty, but at least he goes into the details. My point is is that on hag Sat, specifically, the bureaucracy hates his guts. He himself though, is I think he will be very popular with the
rank and file. But really what it is is, if you combine this with the quote unquote like anti woke, anti four star agenda and people who are genuinely loyal to Trump, Hegseth is the correct choice. Hegsath is a former Fox News contributor. He We're being honest on ideology. This dude is all over the damn map. He's pro Israel. He was pro Iraq War. Then he was against the Iraq War. It was pro well you want pro war.
He led an organization that was like pushing the Iraq war.
I mean he was a cheerleader.
And defend Pete. Hegsett's like pro Iraq.
The best case I can give for you is Pete is a maga dude, And for people who know him, including some people I've spoken to, he fundamentally changes his mind when Donald Trump became the person who was in charge. He became a major Trump booster when he was on Fox and Friends on Ukraine, he has had a complete one eighty from an interview that I saw that he gave just a few months ago, So I can at least tell you on that front, he's good to go.
But really what it is is that I actually don't think he's ideological on foreign policy as much as he is just a Trump.
Yes.
Yeah, And I mean to be honest, like, you know, that's frankly best case scenario whenever you're thinking about somebody like Marco Rubio or Mike Waltz, who are for real ideologues, who really do have an agenda, who have people an entire like national security generation of people who are committed neo cons who they will bring in under their team.
A key part that I talked about on the lextreaman podcast so give away some of it here for free is I was like Trump misunderstands bureaucracy and also his own role. So like Trump on Rogan, very interesting part of it where he was like, oh, I hired John
Bolton because he makes people afraid. And people were like, oh see, he hires the Hawks strategically, and it's like, well, first of all, what you don't understand is that when Trump is not paying attention and watching Fox and Friends in the Oval office, is that John Bolton's in the situation room and he's running all that shit. So Bolton, there's a million things that are all happening that Donald Trump never ever touches right his desk. The inner agency process,
that ideology that spreads through the government. Government is not one person, it's five thousand people, and you want all five thousand of those people to be united on an agenda. So when you intentionally pick people who don't agree with you, or even maybe they do agree with you, whatever the scary part of that is, but who have a real ideological agenda, you will have consequences for your actions that
you may not even knowingly sign up for. So Marco Rubio, will Trump really give a shit about South America policy? Almost certainly not right zero in terms of its importance. You think Marko Rubio, the guy who literally wanted like a push in Venezuela for Juan Wide. Oh and once like a return to nineteen eighty style South American revolutionary
or whatever stuff under Ronald Reagan. Yeah, I think he will care under the State Department, and he will install people under his turn you know, in his office who Donald Trump never even thinks about.
But could we have tremendous consequence for policy.
So that is a big problem with a lot of Trump's big ideological picks is he does not understand government at a fundamental level because he thinks that it's all about him, which, of course like serves his role.
Yeah, but the inner agency process of.
The people that you hire in others, when they are really ideological, it's a big problem. And they will, they will, They can cause colossal damage on the inside.
I just think Trump doesn't really isn't really making these choices for primarily ideological reasons outside of I know that they'll be loyal to me and when push comes to show, they're going to do what I want them to do. And I'm not talking about like, you know, trade policy or whatever. I think that when you know, he wanted to overturn the last election and he met resistance from the Department of Justice, Matt resistance from military, met resistance
from the Senate and his own vice president. He made sure he wanted to make sure that that would never happen again. So you put in you know, Gates at the Department of Justice, like Gates is going to do whatever Donald Trump wants him to do. You get JD Vance for a vice president instead of Mike Pence. And part of that audition process for JD was making sure, like you're going to backstop the steal and you're going to say you would have done what Mike Pence wouldn't do, period,
end of story. Pete Hegseth at Department of Defense like very similar vibe, like I'm going to make sure that these major institutions that stood in my way last time are not going to stand in my way this time. And same thing with the Senate. Like in some ways, all of these confirmations are a test of let me put up, like in Matt Gates specifically, let me put up.
The person that you all literally hate.
Like the most like that you find to be like the most odious, And I'm going to force it through. And whether it's you all voting for it or me just doing it, anyway, you're going to see you will not resist me this time. And I'm and this was also important with the power play that he pulled with the advice and consent process, right because this is an important part of the Senate powers. They're very proud of their role in this, like this is a big deal
for them, right. And you got John Throune now in there, who is going to be the Senate Majority leader, who is not the pick of Maga, not who Donald Trump wanted. He's like a Mitch McConnell type acolyte. But even with him, when Trump was like, we're going to do recess appointments and I'm going to get my picks, John Thune was right away like, yes, okay, we will do that. So a lot of these moves, Yes, there are different ideologies that he likes and in this way or likes this
piece or whatever. The consistent through line to me is any institution that was an obstacle to my ambitions on not again, not really policy, but on like overturning the election. If you are an obstacle, then I'm going to make sure that those institutions are bent to my will this time. And you know that's that's what I see primarily in these picks, because there isn't an ideological consistency between Marco Rubio and Tulci Gabberty, right.
That that is literally literally, yeah, that.
Is the you know that is even between like a Pete Hexett and an RFK Junior. There's not ideological consistency. You know, it's about who is going to be there in these institutions that were previously an obstacle to me being able to, you know, do everything I wanted to do. How am I going to make sure that that doesn't
stand in my way this time around? And you know, you've already got the Supreme Court in a lot of ways, you know, not fully, but in many ways kind of you know, it's shaped by his choices that are on the court. He's likely to get at least one war Supreme Court pick. The Supreme Court has already said that he's immune for any quote unquote official acts. What exactly that means is yet to be adjudicated. But you know
why bandwidth there for his own personal immunity. So I think there's going to be very little that stands in his way in terms of getting what he wants and when he wants it.
I think, yes, and no in terms of this, for example, it gets down to what are we actually talking about here. So for let's say the DEI like woke thing, right, that's an area where Pete Hegsath is going to have the total backing of the president. Let's see also in terms of I think it really is just going to depend on a case by case basis. Because even for what you said about recess appointments, it may be true
that John Thune said, yeah, let's do recess appointments. Guess what Mitch McConnell said today, We're not doing any research appointments. And John Thune was like, we don't have the support in the conference to do any recess appointments. Basically, they don't want a cave to the president because in the future they don't want Democrats when they have power to do recess appointments too, right, Which is funny, but it's you know, show you that they still have some auth word.
But the Trump people have worked down this provision that they think that they could use where there's this technicality if the House in the center are in dispute about whether or not they're adjourned and in a recess, then the president can come in and say we're in a recess. And so that's the power that they plan to use to basically have this led from the White House, where it's like, we don't really care John Thune and Mitch McConnell whether you have the votes to go into recess.
We're gonna do it and maybe ultimately through the courts and blah blah blah. Maybe there's some pushback, but you know, who knows. Trump's got a lot of his own judges on the bench at this point, and a Supreme Court that's quite amenable to him as well. But you know, they they have plans in place to get even someone like a Matt Gates or an RFK junior or who have Toulsi whoever you think is the most difficult to confirm,
to get them through. Which is why I just think that, you know, I think that there is a I think there is a concerted plan to make sure that there is no institutional obstacle to Trump doing whatever Trump wants to do.
What does that mean?
I don't think we really know, because it's not like we could have predicted stop the stale in advance. It's not like we could have predicted you know, the Black Lives Matter protests and Trump saying, hey, let's just go and shoot the protesters and the legs. Like, I don't know that we know what that's ultimately going to mean in terms of how he uses the you know, the
powers of the government and the military and whatever. But that, to me, getting all of those roadblocks that previously irked him out of the way is the primary thrust of both the sort of policy thinking that's going into the transition and certainly into these personnel choices.
I don't think there's any policy going into the transition.
You know, but I'm talking about, like, for example, the thing about the how we could use this policy to get into recess. Yes, you know those sorts of things how Jeff talked about. You know, actually there's you can use a national security emergency to institute all of your terrorists, Like there is there is thinking about how they can basically bypass any sort of thing that was a check previously and get done whatever the hell it is that they want to get done.
I don't think that's an incorrect view of it. I think it will really come down. But first of all, Trump is a deeply capricious person who changes his mind literally constantly and depending on the last person that he spoke to. So anybody who thinks he has some concerted grand plan or any of that, I don't.
Think any of that is true.
I do think it's correct that the picks that he has gone with are based upon personal loyalty and basically nothing else. I think that could have great you know, that have a lot of pluses and minuses. In some cases, when he wants to do good things, it'll be fantastic. In some cases, whenever he wants to follow through and stop the steal or some other bullshit like that, it
can be very detrimental to the American system. The question really will come down to what the institutional pushback within the permanent bureaucracy will look like, what Congress and its immense powers will be able to flex, and then of course the Supreme Court. I do think people overestimate the
loyalty that the Supreme Court will give Donald Trump. Don't forget, while they do give him immunity under the last Roberts term, they shot down numerous attempts by him to bypass the interagency process from the Census, the so called travel like Muslim ban, and I can go on forever. I mean
the Obamacare thing, even before that. So there are many examples of the of Trump trying to, you know, use this new legal authority where this is where I think Jeff is also underestimating, you know, what the legal the legal system and the Ninth Circuit and the way our entire appellate court work and the rents that they can throw in. You can, you know, theorize all day long. Joe Biden tried to do a lot of things under executive order like this, you know, the student loan and
all other stuff is shit gets struck down constantly. You know, the appellate courts can come in and they can change things. So I wouldn't underestimate, on the other side what the institutional checks are, although it will be a much more of a loyalist administration.
But I think we knew that going in. I think we also knew that going in. I'm certainly, but I think I knew that going in. I don't, like, I don't know if that's what like. I do think that there is a significant frustration with democracy in the public where the idea of like He's just going to be a strong man and come in and you know, he's like,
I'm going to be a dictator on day one. Like for some people, for some people that was something they had to overcome to vote for him, and for some people that was a feature, not a bug, that was an affirmative part of the pitch of like, hey, democracy, like this doesn't seem so great. Let's just get someone in there who's gonna, like, you know, do whatever he wants to do. So yeah, in that sense, I think there is a chunk of the public that basically voted
for like authoritarian power taking. And I think that's I mean, I think that's the plan and what we're seeing effectuated here, which yeah, it doesn't. I mean, it's entirely consistent with what he was saying and with the way he wanted to operate in the first term.
And the other thing is and then well you can respond if you want, we'll move on, because we've been talking about this for a while. But you also see a number of previously like bastions of quote unquote resistance that have really, out of fear or necessity or whatever, have really capitulated to Trump. So even before the election, you saw Bezos being like, you know, Washington Post, We're
not going to do an endorsement. You saw Zuckerberg, Sundhar Puchai, Tim Cook, Tim Apple as Trump calls him, all of them calling Trump, hey, big guy, just calling a check in, really excited for the next administration, trying to make nice with him because they know that the way that that he was going to get his loyals in place, and he was going to use the federal government to, you know, go after whether it's like Amazon, which has tons of
government contracts, or cracked on on Facebook for any sort of like politics, political speech on there that he doesn't like, et cetera, et cetera. Like the powers of the federal garmer in vast and he's not afraid to weaponize them. So there was a lot of already capitulation to that. And then one funny and annoying indicator of this as well. You had Morning Joe, Joe and Mika.
We're going to cover it tomorrow, I think we have, but just to.
Tease it for now, Joe and Mika making the trek down tomorrow Lago to bend the knee and kiss the ring. And Steve Bannon is out there saying, hey, Matt Gates is he literally said mack Gates is going to prosecute MSNBC host like Ari melbur he named specifically don't go out. So you think Joe and Mika are thinking, like, hey, you know, maybe we need to get on the other side of this, just to be sure and hedge our bets.
So I also think that some of the previous bastions of resistance in twenty sixteen we already know, are not going to be there this time around as well. And you know, I think the courts could also be part of that.
It's certainly possible, I would see.
The thing is is that this time around, the grounds or resistance are just not there.
Trump is not a one off. He's that democratically elected, twice elected.
Always grounds for no.
But I'm saying, like the Russia Gate shock, the lack of the popular vote, all that stuff, last time around, it's gone, and I mean it should be gone. Trump has been literally elected with the popular vote with a mandate to govern, not for the first time of Republicans' two thousand and four.
So you have to adjust your priors just like dramatically.
And a lot of liberals have the view basically that you expressed hocer of like Hey, you people voted for this, get You're going to get what you deserve. Is the attitude. It's not like I think we frame it. I think that sound rageous, but that is that is what you know.
There's like okay, you know, Latinos, you voted for mass deportation, Like okay, now you're this is what Joy Reed said, like now you're responsible for your mixed status family getting deported, Like okay, Muslim Americans, you voted for Trump, Like enjoy as your family members are slaughtered in Gaza and the West Bank, is you know, permanently annexed.
Et cetera, et cetera.
I think that that's personally from the liberal perspect I know you like come at this from a different different angle. I'm not from the liberal perspective. I think that that is disgusting to just like, you know, okay, you deserve what you get, et cetera, et cetera. But that there is that's part of the capitulation to this view is like we're not going to fight it, like enjoy you know, enjoy your new Muslim and enjoy your mass deportation. If you all voted for this, you get what you deserve it.
Yeah, well, and mine is more of an affirmation. I'm like, look, I think they actually want it, and I think they should get it. And I also think that people for so long have been wondering, like, what's it like to actually blow stuff up? And it's like, let's find out, Let's see what happens. You know, it's not like the current system is working all that well. And look here's the craziest and most dangerous thing.
What if it works? What if America likes it?
I mean you were talking about our authoritarian tendencies. I wouldn't put it that way. I think people like a strong executive. People have wanted that for a long time. You know, America does like a monarch and name. But only they liked it under FDR. They liked it under Lbag, they liked it under Nixon. The crazy thing in America is we just get to change, you know, who are immensely powerful person is.
And I think people genuinely do.
You don't want to see us like a serious version of what they actually voted for in practice. The other side of this, and I could be totally wrong too, is that there are all these swing voters out there.
Who believe in like checks and balances.
Right, I'm a Democratic senator and whatever Republican president.
I'm like, well, that's fucking stupid if you ask me, because it's like that means that you're just gonna get nothing done and you're actually voting for the status quo.
But you know, you do what you want.
So I do think though, that there are a large percentage of people, dramatic percentages of people who did swing, especially in these swing coalitions, who voted for Donald Trump, who want to like light the match and put it on the fire and just see what happens. And so in this respect like this, you know, you may call it authoritarian. I think he's like the vehicle. I mean,
what did you say in his twenty sixteen inauguration. I'm forgetting the exact I am your retribution, right, I am your retribution.
I think that's a.
Real reason why a lot of people voted for Trump, and how it will manifest itself.
I mean that's still a big in and open question.
All right, everybody, we had to skip ahead to UFO. We just talked way too much. So the DNC and the Ukraine sections will be pushed to tomorrow, so Tuesday, don't worry we'll have a nice full show already stuff that we're going to discuss, but I did want to get into the show a little bit of a recap of the UFO hearing. There were some very interesting moments that happened there, so we've collated a few of them
for you. The first that we want to start with is testimony and questioning from lou Elizondo, who was a part of the Pentagon and one of the people chiefly responsible for bringing to light the public to the public the existence of a lot of these UFO videos that existed inside of the Pentagon and for some of the transparency movement behind it. So he gave some really shocking testimony under questioning from Anna Paulina Luna.
Let's take a listen.
Would you agree that it's likely that they are being piloted by some mind body connection, ma'am.
I think it is safe to presume here that they are being intelligently controlled, because some cases seem to anticipate our maneuvers and in other cases they seem to And I came across an email where the word stalked was used in a very secure email between Navy officers discussing their ships being pursued by a UAP.
In our previous panel, we had Grush and he had testified to say that some of these were intered dimensional beings.
Can you speak on that at all, ma'am.
I'm not qualified, certainly as a scientist or otherwise to speculate points of origin. I looked at everything from a scientific perspective. So if you look at, for example, instantaneous acceleration, which was one of the observables of the program that I belonged to ATIP, the human body can stand about nine G forces for a short period of time before you suffer negative biological consequences blackouts and ultimately readouts and
even death. Comparison, our best technology, the F sixteen, which is one of this older platform but one of our most highly maneuverable aircraft, manned aircraft made by General Dynamics, you can perform about seventeen or eighteen G forces before you start having structural failure, meaning that the airframe begins to disintegrate where you're flying. The vehicles we're talking about are performing in excess of one thousand, two thousand and three thousand g's.
So are you I guess what'd be safe to infer that they're living craft.
You know, I'm not prepared at this point to state for the record is something alive or not because even that definition, there was a time in science we thought that life required oxygen, and we now know that's not true. They are anaerobic bacteria that's thriving oxygen environments at lack oxygen. And also the same with photosynthesis. When I was in college, it was told everything is derived from photosynthesis as a form of energy, and reality that's not true. There are
things that live off of chemosynthesis. So we're constantly having to reevaluate understanding of what the definition of life is.
Three thousand g's let that one sink in there.
And there's been some discussion previously, especially in regards to the tic TAC incident. Let's also go to the next one here, because this is a really critical part of it.
This is specifically about the GOP overside and about some of the previous allegations that were happening in terms of budgeting and how previous ways that the Department of Defense can get around transparency and others is by piloting and pushing them through military contractors to avoid transparency, to avoid disclosure, it's also part of the reason the Pentagon literally cannot pass an audit.
Let's take a listen to that section. To your knowledge, any communication with a non human life form.
So the term communication is a bit of a trick word because there's verbal communication like we're having now. The problem is you also have nonverbal communication. And so I would say definitively yes, but from a nonverbal meaning. A Russian reconnaissance aircraft comes into US airspace, we scramble two F twenty two's and we are certainly communicating intent and capability. I think the same goes with this. We have these things that are being observed over controlled US airspace, and
they're not really doing a good job hiding themselves. They're making it pretty obvious they have the ability to even interfere with our nuclear equities and our nuclear readiness.
So two, you know, pretty interesting allegations there. So there's a look. In terms of the hearing, it was a lot about getting stuff on the record. There were some issues, as I was told, in terms of the Immaculate Constellation document, the twelve page document that was put into the congressional record. I won't go into all of that just yet because we're about to play a video. But overall, this was about getting lou Elizondo in questioning getting some of the
things on the record going into the Trump administration. And that's one thing where look, Trump and RK actually Gates you know as well, have all said that they are at least you know, in favor of UFO transparent of disclosure. There is like some sort of horseshoe MAGA crossover currently with UFOs and Trump. So the question is is that are we going to get some of this to be released?
You know, considering that Tulsa Gabbard's now going up for the ODE and I position, it's certainly possible in some sort of transparency laden effort to actually declassify a lot of these documents and actually just.
Give it out to the general public.
The other option is the permanent bureaucracy only burrows even further in and you're not going to get anything. But nonetheless, it was very interesting to see some of this going on the record.
Was there enough for during the first Trump administration to get him to release this documents?
And why why has he said that he.
Didn't this year?
So he said he did it at the request of Mike Pompeo, just like with the JFK.
So let's you know first with that.
Also, look, Trump doesn't care about the issue, and this is unfortunate. He's not somebody who has ever expressed a deep interest. The whole UFO thing has taken years to enter the public consciousness. Louel Zondo's one of those people who's chiefly responsible for getting these videos out to the public. He was there and name checked in the twenty seventeen New York Times article that started this whole thing. That's when people were like, holy shit, are UFOs actually real.
In those videos? I could say that for myself.
The problem with the legitimization is people kind of just saw it and then just moved past Louel Is onto himself was out of the government. Then what happened, you know, in the interim period of years is people like David Fraber came out and gave interviews. You had people now
like David Grosse who have come forward. You've had almost eight years of the public reconciling himself to both the lies and the transparency, and people like Christopher Miller and others who have come forward and have spoken about this program. So I would say it is more primed I think both for the public, for the military, bureocracy, and also even members of Congress.
You know, these are people. It is all a joke. Rubio is a UFO guy. That's very true. Well, okay, I'll put it this way.
I don't know if he's a UFO guy in terms of he's a believer, but he was the head of the Intelligence Committee in the Senate, and his staff and others were always consistent that they were very concerned about the reports that they would get notice.
And I think this is intentional.
Is they always talk about readiness because the one way angle you can always get Congress and others to care about is like, hey, we literally have things that are flying around up there, and we have no idea what they are, including being able to disable like nuclear missile silos and submarines, and people have no clue like what's actually happening. So I think that's how it would contextualize this hearing. I will end with this part, but again I have to note that there were some issues with
the enter of this into the record. So let's go ahead and get to Nancy Mace's questioning about the Immaculate Constellation. Program entered in the Congressional record. Let's take a listen.
There is a document that will be entered into the Congressional record today. Mister Timberchat from Tennessee has this document and we just distributed it to every member up here on the dais of this document. But this is going to be the original document from the Pentagon about Immaculate Constant that Michael Schellenberger delivered to Congress today. So thank you mister Schellenberger for this information. We are all reading it in real time now and mister Burchett will enter
it into the record. But twelve pages about this unacknowledged special access program that your government says does not exist.
Like I said, in terms of that pro basically it's entered into the Congressional record, but as I understand it, like I said, there were some issues regarding the enter of that into the record, and this is part of the controversy and you know, things that have come out
of it. My point just being that on the program itself in terms of getting things into the congressional effort, this was an effort to try and to enter Michael Schellenberger's original report, you know in there, so that people can read for itself, and because you want to get this stuff into the record, it allows for investigation public transparency, which is the ultimate goal.
Of the project. Overall.
I would not call it hearing like a tremendous success or anything like that, because nothing other than actual disclosure is I think it was just pushing the ball forward and setting things up for the next Trump administration and what that will.
Look like gonna be interesting. I know I'm going to get Trump. At least I can get like JFP thousand and aliens.
That's would be interesting. I mean, think about it.
You know, if you if you ever wanted someone to meet an alien, wouldn't it be Donald Trump?
Terms of the president, who would you want? Which which commander?
Achievement have definitely not I'm sure this is something that I've really thought that that I'm prepared to find on.
I haven't really want to go eat.
There is a theory that Dwight Eisenhower once had a conference with aliens, but we won't get to that today.
A socialist candidate for mayor of New York City took a unique approach to finding out why non white working class voters in the Bronx and in Queen's decided to vote.
How they did? He actually went and awesome.
Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
I didn't vote?
And why did you not vote?
Because I don't believe in the system anymore.
Did you get a chance to vote on Tuesday?
Yes?
And who did you vote for?
Trump?
A million dollar question?
Trump Trump?
Donald Trump?
Well, actually early voted. I voted for Trump.
Honestly, I didn't vote.
He voted for Trump.
I voted for Trump.
I vote for trumpet before I vote Democrats.
At this moment, I voted Donald Trump.
Hillside Avenue in Queens and Fordham Road in the Bronx are two areas that saw the biggest shift.
Towards Trump in last week's election.
Even more residents didn't vote at all.
They like Trump because they don't want the Palestinian the Brothers to kill the war in Ukraine.
The Democrat is giving all the money in the water. This is no good. The swing is because people want lower prices.
They probably believe that Trump will give them that.
Market energy gas.
Also, these people are working families. They're working one to two three jobs and rent as expensive, foods are going up, Utility bills are up, and.
That's your hope to see a little bit more of an affordable life.
Absolutely, what Trump did in the first four years fordham Road saw something where Kamala couldn't do that.
There are young voters who didn't wrote for her because of the genocide and what wouldn't have about her if I did.
But I did vote for her obviously because that comments on.
Can you tell me a little bit more about why you didn't vote since you're out here, you know Gaza? Who should I vote either side?
We'll go ahead, send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters.
Palestine issue, and then the other issue is that, like Rassia and the Ukraine, he stopped that war.
That's why I vote him.
You can't say you're a Democrat and stand for the genocide that's going on in Gaza.
Period.
Practically, I like I like you, but I don't look like you.
See regarda plot people have dying.
Have you voted for Democrats in the past?
I have?
And what would it take for you to vote for a Democrat in the future.
Being able to pay attention to the regular Americans and their economic needs.
They shouldn't make economics the forefront of their campaign, the.
People were not really feeling it in their pockets.
I vote if for Hillary Clinton in twenty sixteen. I voted against Trump also in the twenty eighteen midterms, insulting us, playing on our emotions. All they do is shame you, and they just want to use like see campaigns and I guess celebrities.
It's like, if you're speaking to things that people want to hear about, I don't care what color you are, I'll vote for you.
So obviously quite a number of voters they're expressing concerns about prices, the economy, etc. But I was actually genuinely surprised by how many brought up the issue of Gaza. Quote the Democrats are giving all the money in the war. Quote either side will go ahead and send bombs from here to kill my brothers and sisters. Quote you can't say you're a Democrat and stand for the genocide that's going on in Gaza.
Period.
This actually echoes what AOC heard from her own constituents who had backed her and Trump on the same ballot. Number of these AOC Trump voters said they felt she and Trump were both authentic or anti establishment. But again, Gaza came up a number of times in these responses, quote voted for Trump and you not genocide Harris. Democrats became the party that supports war and simply because of Gaza.
None of this is scientific, of course, but there are some other indications that Gaza really was a significant part of Kamala Harris's loss. Remember, black and brown voters have always had more sympathy towards Palestine and supported a seize fire by larger numbers than white voters in general. It's plausible to think some of Trump's gains with these groups had to do with discuss with war in general and
Gaza in particular. The other demographic group, of course, most disgusted with the Biden Harris genocidal policy was young people, and sure enough, this election saw a turnout collapse among the youngest group of voters. A lot of the post election conversation has been understandably centered around how much Trump improved his margins among young voters, all true young men in particular, But the more significant phenomenon may actually be how many of these young voters just simply decided to
stay home. As Eric Blanc points out, when you look at the total number of eighteen to twenty nine years old who are eligible to vote. Trump, ever so slightly improved his standing from twenty twenty. In twenty twenty, he received eighteen percent of the total eligible population. This time he edged that number up by a single percentage point to about nineteen percent. On the other side of the ledger, however,
Democrats collapse. They went from receiving about thirty percent of the eligible youth vote in twenty twenty to only about twenty two percent this time around. So Trump held on to his young voters and marginally even improved while the Democratic share plummeted.
Was this Agaza effect?
When you consider the youth activism around the issue and Kamala's absolute unwillingness to take a moral stand against genocide, you gotta think that discuss with her approach was a significant factor in this drop in turnout, her choice of Liz Cheney over Rashida Talib spoke volumes about her moral commitments. Of note on that choice. By the way, the Palestinian American who was blocked from speaking at the Dancy, actually improved her winning margin in her Georgia state House district.
As she wrote on Twitter, quote, maybe does maybe voters appreciate when you speak out for the things you truly believe in. Perhaps discussed over, Gaza really was a significant and perhaps determinative factor in this election, something even I didn't anticipate, and it was a just rua who was rejected. On a podcast with Ronnie Colli, Conoors and Jamal Bowman revealed that his offer to campaign for Kamalin Michigan was also rejected. Listen to what they chose to do instead.
I then told them I could share text with you, so you have evidence of this. I am ready to be dispatched in any parts of the country. Let me know. I want to go to Michigan particular, right. I told them this. They never get back to me. Even worse, they send Richie Trres, Bill Clinton, and Liz Cheney to Michigan. So again, and not only that, Bill Clinton is scolding Arab Americans.
Yeah, like, yo, they were there first.
Pretty much, they were there first. Y'all got to just deal with it or leave like this is what their campaign decided to do. Let's not send Jamal Bowman there. Who again, I have, thank god, you know a homdullah right, like, so much support in Michigan where like my opponent attacked me for it. Like he literally was like, I don't represent your district. You represent California and dearborn Michigan. My
opponent said this shit in a debate. Wow, okay, so that is how And he said that because he knows that's an Arab American community.
Yeah damn, that's like someone goes there.
Yeah, right, you'll don't y'all ignore me, which tells me who you have around you in your campaign. But you said Bill Clinton, Richie Torrez.
So that was the choice.
Basically, Bill Clinton was Janne Richie Dorres, and not Jamal Bowman or anyone else who might have been able to help with a Muslim American or Arab American community. The results, of course, speak to this being an utter political catastrophe, not to mention a moral one.
So what's the counter argument here.
Well, if you look at exit polls, very few voters say that foreign policy actually drove their decision. Even among young voters, only four percent attributed their vote to foreign policy concerns. As with all voters, the top concern by far was the economy. But I've always suspected this was kind of the wrong way to think about the electoral consequences of the genocide in Gaza. There's a way in which Gaza undermines literally every argument that Kamma and the
Democrats were attempting to make against Donald Trump. How can you posture is a clear moral alternative to Trump and trump Ism when you are backing a war in which seventy percent of those killed are women and children with starvation is being deployed systematically as a weapon of war.
When we saw things this year like a child having their leg amputated with no anesthetic on a kitchen table, a body crushed like a bag of tomatoes under a bulldozer, an endless, ever expanding turn of death, carnish disease, rubble. But you want people to believe Trump's the unique evil, at the very least his evil, it's not looking so unique.
How can you position yourself as the big tent party building a large unified coalition when your tent wasn't big enough for a single Palestinian American speaker at the DNC, When you couldn't do the basics of outreach to a Muslim community that was horror struck and utterly disgusted that the Big ten has room for Liz Cheney but not young people protesting a genocide or Arab Americans, some of whom had family members who were slaughtered in Gaza. Doesn't
exactly send the open arms. Everyone's welcome that you think that you're sending. The party is open to you, so long as you agree not to breathe a word about these taxpayer funded whoors. And how can people trust that you're going to pay attention to their economic needs you're at home when you seem way more eager, way more interested in sending money abroad for wars in Ukraine, Gaza
and the entire Middle East. I heard something similar to that sentiment from any number of voters to this cycle, Basically, why are you focused on all these global conflicts rather than our needs right here at home. Biden really leaned into this dynamic in a bad way, in particular with all his obsession with NATO and Aucus and inability to talk about the actually decent things that his administration did
accomplish on anti trust, labor and industrial policy. Kamala was, of course saddled with this legacy and did.
Nothing to break it.
Even Trump's infamous They Them add plays into this sentiment that Kama and the Democrats are not really paying attention to what you care about. AOC herself made a version of this point.
Take a listen all of this debate that people are talking about with this woke thing, right, Oh my gosh, it's because we care about trans people. And that's why only Donald Trump cared about trans people.
Yes, he was the one running under the thirty million dollars at of ads.
The Harris campaign said nothing about bus issue. That's right, that's.
Right, And listen the ads. It's not to even deny the fact that these ads were effective in certain areas. What I think people are paying too much attention to is the first half of that ad, which says Kamala Harris is that said Kamala Harris is for the them. Everyone's focusing on that. They're not focusing on the second half of that ad where he said Donald Trump is
for you. And Democrats very often in their messaging they speak and in this in terms and in concepts and not in the second person, I care about you, and political races are not about one candidate versus another candidate. Too often it.
Gets pigeonholed like that.
It is a race to convince a person about who cares about you more.
In a lot of ways.
Gaza is emblematic of democratic hypocrisy, moral collapse, and working class disengagement. Is it possible that Gaza alone costs the Democrats the election? I mean, if you think about it, Trump won Wisconsin by about thirty thousand votes, Michigan by only about eighty thousand votes, in Pennsylvania by about one hundred and twenty thousand votes.
In the grins game of things, that's really not a lot.
How many young people stayed home, how many Muslims switched to Trump in a vain hope that he'd make good on his pandering. How many working class voters could not shake the nagging sense that these wars were more important to Democrats than the price of ex Trump didn't deserve to win and has already nominated a bunch of neo kan warhowk Israel for psychos to key foreign policy positions.
But for this and many other reasons, the Democrats they absolutely deserved to lose, And Sager I was initially.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. All right, guys, thank you so much for watching. We appreciate you. Sorry that we talked so much. We're going to talk a bit more tomorrow.