3/8/23: Seymour Hersh EXCLUSIVE: SHREDS NYT Nord Stream Report, Warren Slams Fed Rate Hikes, Biden Defends Medicare Future, China Accuses US Of Containment, DC Crime Bill, Ryan Vs KJP Spying Question, German Chancellor on Nordstream

back to Counterpoints. I'm Ryan Grim here with Emily Kashinsky. Emily, how you doing great? Happy Wednesday? Everyone, Counterpoints Wednesday. Let's make that all right. We've got a lot to talk about today. We've got the FED is going to continue to check up interstraights to continue to drive up unemployment, according to Elizabeth Warren. We're going to talk about the

concentration between her and Chairman Jay Powell. We're going to talk about the battle between the Biden administration and House Republicans over the future of Medicare and tax policy. We're going to talk about the new dominion documents that are out. Also the latest on the Tucker Carlson controversy. I guess we can just call it that and your showdown with

Karie Jean Pierre in the White Rice Jumper. And also later today there will be a vote on the House floor on a War Powers resolution sponsored by Representative Matt Gates and also backed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus to force Biden to end the occupation of Syria the roughly one thousand troops that are still there. We'll talk about that as well, But we wanted to start the show because we were lucky enough to get Politser Prize winning

journalist Seymour Hirsch in for an interview. We talked to him about both his reporting on the North Stream pipeline and also his latest piece out today on his fifty year relationship with Dan Ellsberg, who recently announced that he has a terrible form of pancreatic cancer and has very little time left to live. So we're going to start

with this interview. We're joined now by Puliter Prize winning journalist Seymour Hirsch, who is out with a new piece on his substack called My fifty Years with Dan Elsberg, also joining us to talk about his reporting on the nord Stream pipeline. Seymour Hirsh, thank you so much for

joining us. Oh, glad to be there, you guys, right, And so I wanted to I wanted to start by asking you what you thought of this new reporting from the New York Times and then also from the German press, which in some ways supports what you had reported about the nord Stream pipeline, in other ways contradiction. But first off, let's start with the sourcing. As a journalist, when you looked at the New York Times report, what jumped out to you about it? Well, first of all, my secret

thought always has been with Somalia. I think Somalia, and then I learned it was on the Indian Ocean. So I now make it a Paul. What am I supposed to think about it? It doesn't you know, Ryan and Emily, It doesn't matter what I think. I mean, it's it's either a story or it's not a story. And in the first place, the thing I'm accused of is not naming sources. And of course I noticed both the story in the New York Times in the Washington Post this morning.

I still will get the papers in print. I like to see a paper. Both had no sources in it either. And when I worked for the New York Times for what seven years, during Watergate and Vietnam, I was hired to do Vietnam. I was actually working at the New Yorker and left the New Yorker to go work at the New York Times because at that point in seventy two, it was a straight newspaper. In other words, there were guys in Saigon Homer Biggert and Dave Albersam and Neil

Shehaan who were doing great reporting. And the Washington Bureau was, as it always was in those days, very pro president and the government. And I was hired to go make whoopee there by Abrosenthal, and at that time it was a different newspaper. I just, you know, I wrote maybe a thousand stories in seven years, including stuff really important stories about Chile and the CIA at NSA, and ninety nine percent of them had no sources, but they all,

you know, they trusted me. Even I wrote a story about domestic spying that I didn't tell the editors about on Friday, and I wrote seven thousand words that day and was on the paper Sunday, but mannor headlines and nobody seven unnamed sources. And one editor asked me a question, when so it's a It's just a silly thing to decide that because I don't name sources, or I don't put anybody in a meeting, which is a critical thing not to do, that it doesn't exist. That's just an excuse.

And so just in you know, the New York Times has a lot of very good reporters on it, and I've you know, and ditto for the Washington Post. My argument has always been, since I left the newspaper business and I saw who got promoted and who did not, I'm convinced that we got rid of ninety percent of the edit we'd be much better off. Do you get

the sense that your reporting shook the tree loose? To borrow a phrase that Ryan used earlier, on the rest of these stories that are now coming out where it seems that people in the intelligence community are either putting forward information that in some sense could fit into your reporting or an other sense could not. But do you get the sense, though, that some of these people are

coming forward because your report really did shake the tree loose? Well, not here, not here in terms of the major media or even seeing you know, I think we're talking about post Trump, and post Trump really changed the media landscape you were a fox. You either fox or see it in. I'm in MSBC and you're either the New York Post and other papers like that or what that conservative, or you with the New York Times and Washington Posts. And

so the papers just fell that way. And so when I come up with a story that's very anti Biden, Look what's going on now in this White House is terrifying to me. I don't know if anybody's paid attention to what the I think the Prime Minister of China, the number two guy in China, has been saying that they're writing us along. They've had it with our snotty

comments and canceling meetings because of a balloon. You know, a Secretary of State canceling a meeting with his counterpart because of a balloon and publicly doing it and pointing his finger at a public meeting at a senior Chinese official. I can tell you. I know. I know Americans who have taken what Chinese is said in the government, who have taken diplomats abroad serious guys. And one thing you do is should never do what Tony Blincoln did at when he was in China, pointing a finger in public

to his counterpart. You just don't do that. And so these guys, I don't know what Lincoln and Sullivan and Newland. I call him Lincoln, Blincoln and not. If you've ever had kids, you know what I'm talking about, the children's story. They're just out of their league here. They may have wonderful degrees in the Plomas and experience it, just out of their league. Do they really want to get into

a NATO war? And there's no question we've been increasing the amount of American troops in Poland secretly and deploying much more force, many more arms up in that area. Obviously with the idea, I would guess that the President may authorize or they may push for NATO actually to make a physical presence. It's going to be over in Ukraine. It's just a question of when Putin pulls it. Whether you like Putin or don't like Putin? How can you like a guy that started most the bloodiest war in

Western Europe since World War Two? We had the Balkans and jest now, but this is not Malise, so you have to fault him for that. But it isn't without some reason, or at least some provocation. We expanded NATO to the east. Everybody's watching a show knows what I'm talking about. We also put what we call defensive missiles that can be turned overnight in the missiles that can throw a nuclear nuclear bombs into in the Moscow eight hundred miles away seven minutes, how far were to take.

We've also escalated that escalated the rhetoric. And I don't know what the goal is. I don't know if they know what the goal is. You know, I guess historically presidents who have wars do better in elections. I mean, that's just a fact that the public rallies around a president. I don't know what's going on in that White House, but it's very scary and very dumb. And then the story they put out yesterday is just another example of idiocy. It's not working. What happened here, well, let me just

say this. What happened here with the press blackout did happen the rest of the world. It's all over the world. Joe Biden made a decision to blow up the pipelines because he was afraid that he learned then that there was a stalemate coming at best in or in Ukraine. He wanted more support from Europe, Western Europe and Germany, and historically since the Kennedy years, American presidents this is all part of the containment business that posts World War

two Russia containing communism and business. Historically presidents have been frightened and worried about the Russian influence because of its little, huge amounts of natural gas and oil that they were selling in the Europe that always tried to stop it. It It is nothing new. So there you are. We're in a terrible place right now. The crap they put out yesterday isn't going to work. Nobody's going to believe. Nobody's going to believe that what there Zeits said. Some guys

in a yacht dropped it. We're talking about Sea four with enough Sea four to blow up a major building in Washington or New York, even for each of the pipe clinees. Just go ahead. I'm sorry, yeah, yeah. You allude earlier to some of the criticism that that was coming at your story around not not naming the key source that it was based on. Are you are you working on any any follow ups longest and are you

picking up dissent within the administration? Should we should we look for any additional reporting or are you hoping that the press more generally picks us up and follows it. I'm hoping that the major press is going to pick this up and follow it. I've had from the day I wrote me Li, I've I've had. I've had people for month's sake. Can't be true. When I wrote the

story what was this? I mentioned the one about domestic spying, and I said the CEE I had been spying on literally hundreds of thousands of American anti war citizens and reporters and congress people and the Washington Post for three months every other week. My good friend Levy Ster and I adored him. Who is there, senior? One of their senior editors and reporters was right the stories. I mean, a buddy of mine saying Hirsh's dead. Wrong. It was

the FBI. And then, of course, to his credit, Bill Colby, the head of the CIA, had a hearing told the truth. He said, yeah, there's something to it. But anyway, the bottom line is no, I'm not hoping for the American pression to do anything. The only thing that's going to happen is in Europe. You know, here's what the president did. As far as I can tell and by the way, I've been writing every Wednesday for my substack, and I wrote. One of the pieces I wrote was all about Norway.

If you remember I said that Norroy was involved. I wrote a piece about how Norway worked with us early in the Vietnam War. We were going and provoking stuff in sixty in nineteen sixty four, before North Vietnam even got into the war. We were seals were working on Norwegian Norwegian boats, advanced p T boats, a large, larger PP boats than the one that Kennedy was in in

World War Two. They were going in deep and they were driving up into on the coast of North Vietnam, dropping seals off, going in gutsy guys and blowing trying to blow up radar sites and military sites. And two of the guys even got wounded badly and crawled back and made it back and got medals of honors secrets. I wrote a piece about that a couple of weeks later, making the point that it's not unusual we have a

history of working with Norway. I actually have a photo photograph of Bill calls Bill Colby, who was a lack of a lot of these guys in the CIE. He was in the Office of Special Services OSS and he was behind enemy lines in Norway working with special forces in Norway. Have photographs of him in forty five and forty four in the middle of winter doing all kinds of crap against the Nazis. I mean, these guys, Helms

and Coolby. I wrote a lot of bad stories about him, and to their credit, I mean Helms before he died. He was ahead of the CI for many years and was involved in the Castro stuff and a lot of stuff for the President that he couldn't tell the Congress about. He called me in and we had a long talk before he died about what really was going on that I couldn't use. But you know, you know, you know, the CIA doesn't work for the Congress or for the Constitution.

It works for the Crown, works for the president. Why does the president keep a CIA around? You got a guy, you know Obama, particularly this guy now Bien. He's not going to get his way in Congress, but he can take a walk in the Rose Garden with the head of the CIA. Somebody can be heard eight thousand, eight thousand miles away. That makes you feel pretty good. And so that it's all just we're in a mess, That's all there is to it. And we need a president

that has more integrity than this guy does. And not that I'm all for his domestic program, but and but not not to go a piss on the head of the Chinese and quite as much as he did on Putin. Speaking of that go ahead, I was just gonna say, Putin couldn't have started that war three years ago. I was in Moscow four or five years ago. Nobody liked him. You had drinks with some businessmen, which I did. I did a lot of I was doing something interesting there

and you see somebody in ne Polerbero. They all nobody liked the guy. We don't often don't like our presidents. But Moscow was doing trade with America. Americans are on the street. If they knew you were American, they said hello, thank you for being our friend. And so by being there, and I don't think he could have sold the war against Ukraine. Ukraine was always seen as a self culture

by Russia. In nineteen thirty two, there was a famine and Stalin took all of the wheat from Ukraine and twenty or twenty two billion Ukrainian Star in the nineteen thirty two it was. I mean, it's a great moment of history. What brutes they were, and always they viewed the Ukraines were they but they were also a buffer

between them and the rest of Europe. Anyway, what can I tell you, It's just we're in a real crisis, and I don't know why the Posts and the Times want to keep on playing the game that everything's going to be okay, maybe in Ukraine, and that whatever the White House tells him in briefings is true. And to that point, well, excuse me, go ahead, No, I was going to say to that point about us just being in a mass and a crisis and maybe tomorrow a

phrase a quagmire. I wanted to ask about this wonderful piece you have reflecting on your relationship with Daniel Elsberget's up on your substack right now. You talk about how some reporting that you did in the New York Times led to the establishment of the Senate's Church Committee back

in nineteen seventy five. And one of the interesting things about that is Republicans, for obviously partisan reasons that stem from what I would argue were partisan five s of abuses in the last ten years have sought to recreate, let's say, the magic, to recapture the magic of the original Church Committee, and it looks like that's just not going to work. It looks like the country is not capable of hosting another Church Committee because the divisions are

so strong in Congress right now. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that, as you've been reflecting not only in your relationship with Elsberg but on some of the reporting you were doing at the time. Do you think we're capable of recapturing the magic of the Church Committee or of hosting anything like the Church Committee right

now in twenty twenty three. You know, it's such a good question because that's exactly what I've been thinking about a lot, because Church Committee has popped up quite a bit recently as a sort of a model. It was the first time to see I was ever investigated, and in the piece I wrote about Elsburg plays a big role with my relationship with him in a way too. One thing that came out of the Church Committee, a frank church was a model. It was a liberal, It

wasn't very popular. Guess what, Like like a lot of the guys in the Senate. He got up every morning, he looked in the mirror of it and said, why not me. You know, his ambition was pretty much overbearing, but he was very bright and I actually I got to know him obviously very well and his staff and he did the investigation was amazing because one of the recommendations was for the House and Senate to have intelligence committees,

and they were taken very seriously. They set up staffs and in the particularly in the seventies and eighties, who had people like Ben Bradley, basketball player. He lived down the street around the corner Ben Bradley for years when he was in the Senate. The kids used to play

basketball outside. He walked by in the morning on summer mornings and they would beg him shoot take one, take one, you know, take a shot, and he would walk and finally he'd turn around and maybe from thirty feet just jump up and flip it right through the middle, never miss. Unbelievable for a neighbor, and very hart. When they ran those committees, mad men like me running around chasing stories. They would only talk to me on the record, which

I thought was admirable. They really respected the boundaries and they had meetings, and they had intelligence, and they had between the Democrats and Republicans, there was a sense of unity. And just think of that now. I think I's been destroyed. We've seen the last years in that, particularly in the House Committee with Adam Schiff on one side and the Republicans on the other side, steaming and yelling about everything.

There's no there's no comedy anymore, there's no need. The committees are useless the under the rules that were set up, anytime the special operations have put into effect, there has to be a finding, has to go to the Congress. There's a secret committee I know about in the in the in the House, I don't know how it works. In the Senate, there's a secret four man group off the in the House Appropriation subcommittee, one of them there's that meets but the clerk and they monitor and they

take records. Can you can you believe that this White House had something they wanted to do, like blowing up a pipeline? Would they briefit to speak of McCarthy? Are you kidding? And by the way, terms when I was dealing with Vietnam in the seventies at the New York Times and writing a lot, and then the Democrats were supporting getting out of the war, along with many Republicans.

There were a dozen moderate centrist Republicans. The War Powers Act of nineteen seventy three that forbid any more troops to be on the ground or even air in the war, was written by a moderate Republican and his staff. And now it's such a can you imagine Chuck Soumer now speaking that runs the Senate calling for an investigation of

this of a Democratic president not a chance. And in the House, which has now Republicans in control, they're much more interested in chasing Hunter Biden, and then they are investigating anything seriously. I just don't imagine why this guy Jordan, I watched him in a hearing on financial matters, he actually does his homework. Why somebody isn't even on the Republican side, doesn't seem to want to jump on this.

So there you are. We're in a quagmire. We're in a mess, and and this White House is making worse. I encourage everybody to read the read the latest piece my fifty years with Dan Elsberg as well, is of course the all the previous reporting. Now, thank you, thank you so much for joining us really appreciate it. We have an update from Germany on the pipeline explosion over

the North Stream. So if we if we could put this first element up, so a coalition of German papers and you can just go ahead, you can Google this and just click English on the translation. It's it's so nice this like we have to acknowledge the things that have gotten better that you can now just read German papers. It's not going to be perfect, but you're gonna you're gonna very much get the gist of it. And so

let's start connecting some dots here. So the other day you have the New York Times come out with its extraordinarily thinly sourced article that says, we don't really know anything and we can't say how we know anything, but we definitely know that there were no Americans or British, which is also quite specific. Yes, no Americans are British who participated in this pipeline bombing. But there's new intelligence which leads us to a pro Ukrainian group. Now there

was zero details. The German press is out with what appear to be a bunch of the details that the US security services were referring to when they came when they said we have new intelligence. It seems like this is what they're talking about it would you say that is a fair two dots to connect. That was absolutely my interpretation of all of it. And remember this conversation had basically gone away until the Seamer Hurst story. And if you're watching this, you probably see seymour Hurst down

on the lower bar. He is slated to come on the show. We're hoping everything goes yea right, he said, I'm running around this morning. Yeah, I'm gonna try to make it, so we'll see if you make tivdy. But all of this was just cracked wide open. Nobody was talking about this. None of those reports were coming out until the American government was implicated in Hershe's subsect post, basically,

which renewed conversation about it. And that's where, again I think you start seeing these reports from the New York Times, reports from the German press. It seems like that created the momentum to get the intelligence community to respond, right, and so where the New York Times artc was lacking in details, the German press is kind of overflowing in details, and so we could read out a couple of fun ones.

So first of all, they said that it's so. It was allegedly a yacht rented from a company based in Poland owned by two Ukrainians. So that's the that's their first clue that they say is pointing to the you know, a pro Ukrainian group. They say there were six people, five men and one woman. Now we're talking like a rather incredible level of detail, very specific, not just it wasn't us, right, but although carefully read each one of these articles for overlap between CIA US involvement and what

they're saying. So because so far none of this actually contradicts it could the CIA or some other US you know, security apparatus rent a yacht from a Polish company that's owned by two Ukrainians. Like, absolutely, does the CIA have access to five men and one woman? Yes, presumably they could do this. We've seen their videos. They're all about conversity, so they certainly they certainly have women who can do diving. They said one of the one of the six was

a doctor cias doctors for sure. But more seriously, they say that the equipment for the secret operation was transported to the port and a delivery truck. So again like more specifics, like we don't, they don't. They don't have much about the sourcing here. They're sourcing it back to kind of German investigators. But that level of detail is interesting. I mean, how else are the explosives going to get

there other than a truck? So perhaps that's just deduction, Like I mean, you're not gonna you're not gonna own fly him over and drop them into the yacht. Otherwise you're not gonna have a wheelbarrel either, probably right truck. So uh. The yacht was then returned to the owner in an unclean condition. The more details here, investigators found

traces of explosives on the table in the cabin. Now, some German observers have raised the possibility that some of this was done to kind of bait people into thinking that this, you know, to throw breadcrumbs in a different direction. Yeah, because like if it's the CIA, you know, they they probably either know how to clean up the explosives or if that's difficult, they just sink the boat like you know, or they blow it up like they don't, you know,

they don't, they don't really, they're not. They're not that concerned about getting their deposit back on the rented yacht, like that's that's that's not the top ten you know mission list. They can item they can shake the piggy bank over the pentagony. Yeah yeah, yeah, figure as Kramer says, that's a rite off. Yeah, that's just a write off. And so interestingly, you know, some of this obviously conflicts with what Seymour Hirsch reported. On the other hand, a

lot of it could align with it. And it is interesting. It does seem like Hirsh's reporting kind of shook the trees, yes, and got some of this out. Yeah, absolutely, And this creates I think new conversations between well, I'm curious and maybe if we back up a bit, how do you think Putin is going to start responding if he does start responding to this reporting. So interestingly, you know, Putin's claim was never that it was Ukraine that did this,

and you know, Putin can say whatever he wants. He could like, he can say whatever he thinks is most

advantageous to him. The Russians were blaming British operatives and Hirsh's article said no, it was actually actually the US to have alleged kind of pro Ukrainian group involvement in this I think makes it for very interesting politics, particularly in Germany, because if all of a sudd ud, you have a German public that says, wait a minute, so we're paying these high electricity prices by energy prices because the Ukrainians blew up the pipeline that we had been

invested in building for all of these years, so that they would force us to then continue, you know, cooperating with their defense of the Russian invasion. You you know, if if this catches hold in Germany and if it and if it becomes kind of a settled fact that it was actually this pro Ukrainian group, although the CIA could also be described as a pro Ukrainian group, Uh, then uh then yeah, that that I think plays into the geopolitics and could sour you know, European public opinion

on support for this war. So the fact that the US, by leaking this to the New York Times and the German German investigators, you know, uh, playing with the German press in this way suggest they're kind of really playing with public opinion fire a little bit. And somebody brought that information to Hirsh as well. So point yeah, public information fire. That's absolutely what's happening here. So I think you're right, this is a huge development. And again this

is from German public prosecutors. It's a huge development geopolitically, So you can't really understate what we're learning day to day on this massively expensive pipeline that was I was gonna say that was geopolitically important for years before the war even broke out, and still is. And so latest update of the AP reporting this morning. Germany's Defense minister voiced caution wednesday over media reports that a pro Ukraine group was involved in blowing up the North Stream gas

pipelines in the Baltic Sea last year. So you're running into one of these situations again where you have some elements of the German investigators kind of leaking information, then you have official elements saying, well, well, well, let's be cautious, we don't actually you know, our investigation remains incomplete, and so that you wind up with the public just kind of sorting into its own groups of who and what they're going to believe. Yeah, and I think that's going

to be the case for decades to come. I don't think anyone's ever going to get to the real fact here. I don't think you know, you can make educated guesses based on the reporting that continues to come out, and by the way, I expect this information will continue to kind of drip out over the course of like when

people start writing books about the war in Ukraine. It's like the details we get to CIA's behavior during the Cold War that either come out during church committee hearing or are fleshed out in someone's really well reported book. I don't think we're ever going to know some diver wants to write that memoir right well, the credit Yeah, in the near future, I don't expect we'll have any confirmation from anybody's government or anybody involved about what actually

factually happened. And so moving on. The big economic news came out of the Federal Reserve yesterday. If we can put up a one here, this is a FED chair Jerome Pwell saying that he's actually going to be ramping up interest rate increases much more significantly than he had planned in the past to Congress yesterday and was grilled by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren on what the implications would

be for unemployment. Let's roll Warren here, Chair Pale, if you hit your projections do you know how many people who are currently working, going about their lives will lose their jobs. I don't have that number in front of me. I will say it's amended consequence, but it is and it's in your report, and that would be about two million people who would lose their jobs, people who are

working right now making their mortgages. So, chair pal, if you could speak directly to the two million hard working people who have decent jobs today who you're planning to get fired over the next year, what would you say to them? How would you explain your view that they need to lose their jobs. I would explain to people more broadly, that inflation is extremely high and it's hurting the working people of this country badly. All of them, not just two million of them, but all of them

are suffering under high inflation. And we are taking the only measures we have to bring inflation down, and putting two million people out of work is just part of the cost. Let me ask you about what happens if you do this. Since the of World War Two, there have been twelve times in which the unemployment rate has increased by one percentage point within one year. Exactly what you're aiming to do right now, how many of those times did the US economy avoid falling into a recession?

You know, it's it's not as black and white as very just look at the numbers. It actually is pretty blacks written book on this end, there have been twelve times that we've seen a one point increase in the unemployed, in the unemployment rate in a year. That's exactly what your FED report has put out as the projection and the plan based on how you're going to keep raising these interest rates. How many times do the economy fail to fall into a recession after doing that? Out of

twelve times, I think the number zero. I think the number is zero. That's exactly right. What I like about this is that it's a clash of of real conflicting values. That's a good point. On the one hand, Elizabeth Warren talking about the millions, you know, two million unemployed people that Powell's policy will produce, Like that's not only is that two million people who are who are now paying able to pay their bills, you know, finding dignity in their work that no longer can and no longer do.

But then you then, you know, push fear all the way through the workforce, and you discipline the workforce, and a militant worker who might want to have wanted to organize the you know, into a union or push for a raise, or push back against sexual harassment or other abuse in the workplace. Now all of a sudden, hmm, I'm not going to be able to get another job if I lose this one, and so everybody's life gets worse versus the other value of prices arising too fast,

and that sucks for people. Right. What was your response to that, Well, that's exactly what I was going to say. It's hard for me to give Elizabeth Warren the moral high ground in that question, and obviously that generally applies

to conversations about politicians. But when you're saying, you know, how much spending, for instance, did Elizabeth Warren support that has been making working people's bank accounts bleed because the price of eggs is exploding, and it's not just eggs, of course, it's the entire consumer price in the X If you look at your basket of groceries the last several months, the last year and a half, basically, how much of the spending that contributed to those price hikes

has Elizabeth Warren supported, and so part of this is putting everyone between a rock and a hard place. Either Jerome Powell and Elizabeth Warren like both of them between a rock and a hard place, because from Elizabeth Warren's perspective, and sometimes I think correctly, we need to spend more on X, Y and Z package, but we also know that we'll contribute in some ways to a rise in inflation.

We're nowhere near a hike that looks like vulgar right like, we're not exactly back to that time period, yet we're not suffering under anything quite to that point. Hopefully it doesn't get to that, but the point is getting letting inflation get out of control, and supporting measures that let inflation get out of control. I don't think gives you the moral high ground then to go to Jerome Powell and say, basically, you're intentionally putting people out of work,

because that's part of the story. It might be true, but it's part of the story. And to me, the problem here is that it's not necessarily the case that the treatment is going to cure the disease. And I worry that twenty years from now, if we have some more sophisticated economic modeling capacity. Maybe chat GPT can do that for us. We'll look back and be like, what were these economists thinking, Like, well, I mean, you'll have left wing economists saying, well, we know what they were thinking.

They were serving the interests of the lead. But the ones who were saying, let's let's pretend and take for granted, they're actually trying to kind of manage the economy in the most effective way possible. It's almost as if these are doctors who are bleeding a patient because they have

a fever. The know, the way that George Washington had like eight different doctors, you know that each individually bled him, and they would and then because you would have some people who recovered after they were bled, right you had the medical profession, You're like, well, you know, bleeding actually works. Look here this happens. And so the question that becomes how does kind of raising the unam employment rate affect prices? If prices are either related to you know, ecological or

viral logical crises or to corporate greed. There's there have been reports out that's up to fifty percent of the price increases that we've seen have have come from corporations who have opportunistically raised prices and didn't have to because

wholesale prices arising, So that's half. We also note if you, as an you know, you mentioned the eggs, well, the bird flu has wiped out like millions approaching billions of birds around the world, and there's no interest rate move And I think that makes us kind of sad as humans, as economists, because we want to be able to control everything. We want to think, well, if we, if we, you know, do something about our quantitative easing policy, then we're the

avian flu. Avian flu. With what's seventy five percent confidence, we can predict that the avian flu will be negated by our interest rate measures, right. I think I think some pro Iranian militias launched some strike on a chicken farm in Syria, like maybe that'll do it, Maybe that'll do something about bird flu. But that happened pretty recently.

But so this and the same is true when it comes to kind of ecological crises, that if the planet is not able just to function in the way that it does at this carbon concentration for these eight nine billion people, as it was for six billion people out of lower carbon concentrations. What does that do to our economic models? And what? You know, how does moving the

interest rate and moving the unemployment rate actually help there? Well? Yeah, and that's there's the two million number, which he didn't even have off the top of his head. I think that was a pretty bad luck, first and foremost, that it was in his own report, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out,

and Jerome Powell couldn't mention. Maybe he didn't want to say the number, but it seemed like perhaps he was just entirely ignorant of it, which I think is telling in and of itself, because it treats people or it contributes this idea that the mentality among people sitting at the FED is that people are numbers and numbers can be massaged and we can take care of this with the formula, which may or not be the case for

everybody over at the FED. But when you don't have that number or from your own report, and you're unwilling to say it, then yeah, that's a problem. So but the question then, also, I think, becomes what does all of this do to wages? What does all of that do to corporate profits? To your point, I think that's one area of the right has totally missed an opportunity.

Over the course of last year. There is good reporting on how corporate greed has contributed to all of that, and obviously Elizabeth Warren would be on the right side of that conversation. But I mean, their models can't really account for a lot of that's right, And just to underline the point about work or power, you often see a lot of people who will say, well, look, I'm sorry that one or two million people are going to lose their job, but three hundred and thirty million people

are suffering through higher prices. Yeah, but the reason that unemployment drives down wages is because it spreads fear throughout the entire economy, like they're not just going to, you know, fire these one or two million people and then magically wages go down and prices go down. It's because they're

firing those people as a warning to you. So every single person in the workforce, and every single person who depends on someone in the workforce, which almost gets to three hundred and some million people, is actually going to suffer from high higher unemployment rate. So I think, and perhaps we've had low unemployment now for so long that people forget that what that fear and what that pain

is like, and they might regret getting what they asked for. Yeah, and there's not going to be some sort of like patriotic hug from corporate America to workers as a reaction to the organizing, which, like the numbers on the increase in organizing over year to year have been really really like staggering just and organizing exactly and a direct consequence

of full unemployment. And that goes away when you lose full unemployment, which is why somebody liked Jeroam Pal would like to see the numbers go up a little bit. And he's not wrong that there are trade offs, and I think Elizabeth Warren is maybe glossing over that for the sake of asking those questions in a way, in a very particular way. But to your point, yeah, there's a there's a broader aperture to make those trade offs with them. And speaking of trade offs, let's put up

b one here. Joe Biden has put forward his plan both for defosit reduction and for shoring up medicare challenging Republicans to come up with their own plan. This flows from that kind of iconic moment in his State of the Union where Marjorie Taylor Green and others were saying, you're a liar. We don't want to cut Medicare and solid security, and Biden kind of paused the conversation and said, okay,

so let me make sure everybody's on board here. So what you're saying is cuts to social Security and Medicare are off the table, and they all said off the table. And so he's like, okay, so here's how work. I'm going to shure up Medicare and basically has two He has two planks, very simple. One, he's going to allow Medicare to further negotiate drug prices, save some two hundred billion dollars over ten years, and all of that money goes to the Medicare Trust Fund to extend it. And

then secondly, the ACA put in. And if you're rich, you know this and you're angry about it. Three point eight percent kind of basically investment tax over over four hundred thousand. If you make more than four hundred thousand dollars a year, you pay this three point eight percent hit. And he wants to raise that from three point eight to five percent. Now when they initially passed this three

point eight percent thing. It was one of the most significant kind of class war things that was actually in the ACA, and it became the thing that Republicans worked to repeal incessantly and actually failed. Said that the sky was going to fall, the markets are going to tang like you're you know, we're not going to have We're not going to have a free market, and the kind of free people will cease to exist because of this

three point eight percent. They'll fee that you're that you're attacking on top of people making four hundred thousand dollars on their investments. Here we are most people don't even know it exists. Markets have you done fine? And not done fine? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with that. So these are his two plans. This is it. The rich pay a little bit more and we're going to negotiate with big Pharma. And with that, the Medicare Trust Fund rolls out to twenty fifty. So now the

shoe is on the foot of Republicans. Yeah, exactly, the balls in the court of Republicans use a better cliche. Sure, it's not a bad place for negotiations to begin, and that's what this looks like it looks like he's using the New York Times up ed to kick off and say this is point A, and negotiations obviously always are going to go from A to Z and his starting

point here, it's really not bad you highlighted. And I think we have this element a Washington Post article on the advisor to Kevin McCarthy, who's formerly an advisor to New Ganger. So there's some great quotes from John Bayer in this article basically saying, you know, this particular advisor, Kevin McCarthy doesn't like to tell people know this isn't the piece, but he will Dale Meyer will, yeah, And

I think that's actually probably accurate. But to your point, Ryan, there's this question about how Republicans can kind of make the math work on their end if they don't and a lighter but Republicans could possibly make this math work if they don't want to touch entitlements period that they've said it's off the table. They don't want to do that. If they don't want to, I'm sorry, strengthen entitlements our favorite euphemism. Hearing counterpoints, they don't want to strengthen entitlements,

how do they make the math work. Now, what was interesting to me about this article is that russ Vote the Omb under Donald Trump has a plan on how Republicans can make that math work without touching entitlements. It's a really interesting plan. You can go and read it on the internet, and basically what it does is look for a bunch of that that can be trimmed bureaucratically around these sort of cultural leftist priorities some people may call them woke priorities, and he makes the math work

that way. He's in charge of the budget during the Trump administration, knows his way around O ANDB obviously as a former head of it. What was interesting to me about the Washington Post article that you just saw on the screen by Jeff Stein basically is that Dan Meyer, I can only imagine it's not paying attention to that paper.

And does he run that veterans group now, I'm not sure, a conservative veterans group, Yeah, I'm not sure, which would which would suggest that maybe he'll check out the Pentagon, look under that hood, see if there's a couple trillion

that could come out of there. I would think that that Meyer will be looking wherever he can, because if he's going to make a good faith effort, which I think that's all he's going to do, is like and by good faith, I mean Clinton's old phrase where he used to say, I want to get caught trying, which meant you're actually not going to succeed, but you want to look like you're at least like, Look, I'm doing the best that I can, just to prove to you

that my best is not good enough, because like you said, if you're not cutting the Pentagon, and if you're not cutting Social Security and Medicare, then there isn't the money out there to do what Republicans want to do. Now there is the money if you're willing to do what Biden is willing to do, and we can put this other one up there. This came out this morning in the New York Times. This is Biden previewing what his

deficit reduction plan is going to be. And it's annoying that Biden is focusing on deficit reduction rather than actual investment priorities. But whenever, this is Joe who Joe Biden is, and it's the world we're in. If he's got to do it, I do like the way he's doing it. He suggests basically a wealth tax on everybody making more than one hundred million dollars or worth more than one

hundred million dollars a year. I think it is rather than making more you would and you for those people, they have to pay on their asset growth, in their stock growth. So if you're Elon Musk and you're stuck, you know the value of your portfolio increased by fifty percent in a year, you have to figure out ways

to pay on that. And so that that plus some other kind of corporate taxes and you know other like basic progressive stuff that just hits the rich and major corporations, he ends up reducing the deficit by two trillion dollars over like ten years, which is a big number, and which is a number that Republicans, unless you can think of some way they can do it, just simply can't meet because they're unwilling to raise taxes, unwilling to go after the Pentagon, and unwilling to and they'd love to

go after Medicare and soeleecurity, but they've taken it off the table. Well, I was going to say, yeah, they may be willing to go after the Pentagon. We've seen even the President of the Heritage Foundation at this point calling for things to that extent, there's a real app for going after the Pentagon, at least in the conservative movement,

if not in the Republican Party. I think it's basically impossible to take even if something that the president of the Heritage Foundation wants to do, and then when it comes to the Pentagon, push that through the Republican Party.

So yes, I agree with that point, But it's also a matter of russ vote proposes is cutting the size of the federal guocracy and not just purely for the making the numbers all work out and just balancing balance, getting the balance sheet in order, but also for the sake of like, well, hey, how did they justify the COVID vaccine mandate in an obscure provision of the act

that established OSHA. There's some of these things that are very real extra constitutional encroachments on the everyday American's freedom that can be paired back, and that can make some of this maths start to work without touching entitlements and maybe with you know, minor cuts the Pentagon or something something to that extent. I just don't have a lot of faith that that's what's on the table as Kevin McCarthy's office and his advisors are looking to make these

balance sheets check out. Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be notching some wins on immigration, and I'm curious how the right is viewing this. So recently the Biden administration flowed basically a trial balloon suggesting and this appears to be coming from Susan Rice, who people might forget, bizarrely is running domestic policy for the administration, foreign policy expert. Her entire

career in BID's like, yeah, you'll do domestic policy. She has been one of the most hawkish internally when it comes to cracking down on the border, and so it is assumed that that's where this is, that this trial balloon is coming from, saying that the Biden administration is considering returning to family detention. Now, I know how a

lot of progressives respond to this. They just kind of want to not think about it because it's just kind of too painful because it reminds them of all of the things that they said about Trump when he was doing things like this, and things they didn't say about Obama, things they didn't say about Obama, and then things that they would be forced to say about Biden if they focused on the issue. So they kind of just keep it moving and hope that maybe nobody presses them on

it and they don't have to think about it. But I'm curious what the reaction among Republicans is. If it's some sense a vindication, or if there's a we told you so, or this is actually cynical and we don't believe you're going to do it. So how did Republicans respond to this trial balloon? Yeah, I don't think anybody on the right considers what's been coming out of Biden administration or anything like this will win. And I'm not saying that because I believe that they're just like heroes.

I'm saying that because the numbers I don't think are going to be affected. So long as the Biden administration. Child separation is awful and one thing, but so long as the Biden administration continues its program of humanitarian parole right now, and humanitarian parole sounds like a really good thing. What it is basically is passage into the United States if you can turn yourself in at a border crossing.

They took these steps basically to say people from certain countries and this is all over the last couple of months, will not be eligible for asylum if they're caught crossing illegally. What that is is like sort of a math trick to get it to look like the illegal crossings are lower while they're granting humanitarian parole to more and more people.

It sounds again like a great thing. What it does is set people up for this like tragic existence in the shadows of America's civic civil society and is going to continue being a pole factor for millions of people coming up through Central America and Mexico. We've talked about this many times before. Everybody pays a cartel to get up there. The cartels then turn around and terrorize these countries, overrun these countries. Many people are sexually assaulted, kidnapped along

the journey. So I don't think if you're not going to pair child separation with like a real closure of the border so that people don't believe what happens is people you know, WhatsApp everyone down the line back home and say you have to turn yourself in and you get a court date two years from now. But other than that, you can sort of exist in a sanctuary city, et cetera, et cetera. Even if you don't turn yourself in,

you can exist in the sanctuary city. So unless it's paired, I think with some really like serious uniform legal policy in terms of what's happening when people do turn themselves in, I don't even think that's. What's even more sad is that they would be doing if they brought this back, which I doubt they will, they would be doing child separation with this other inhumane policy, and that is just

the worst of both worlds. And maybe it's hard to figure out what's driving these types of decisions coming from this White House, but maybe they're doing that Trump thing where they try to make they try to kind of express toughness. Yeah, say like, look, I think they are like, it's a deterrent like this, it's trying to act as a deterrent to people even if they're not going to do it. I think that's totally right, and that is

actually an important part of immigration policy. One pastor a shelter that I talked to him outa Mooros last year, said he begs people in the American government to put out a message in plane Spanish that was his quote saying don't come, and he said, we tell them that month after month in our meetings, and they never do it.

It's obviously a very important part of immigration policy, the posture, and if you talk to migrants, they'll look to Joe Biden and say, no estrastica como Trump, He's not the same level of you can expect perhaps something almost like dhaka right under a Joe Biden administration. Migrants of agency, they know exactly what they're doing, and so they do pick up on that kind of posturing and signaling. So

it is an element of that. But I think that's the same thing that he was doing with saying if you come from Venezuela or Cuba and you don't, you don't come in and apply for asylum, turn yourself in, you're not eligible for asylum. If you cross illegally, you're not eligible for asylum. It is part of a posture, but again it's also to make those numbers look different. And they also have implemented this new policy that you can't cross other countries and get asylum, which to me

seems entirely counterintuitive. Like if if you're let's say you're in Guatemala, yeah, and you and you're trying to get asylum in the United States, how do you do that? You can't go to the embassy, Like that's basic, basic, That path is basically shut off. The only way is to go through Mexico and then apply for asylum there unless like charter a private plane. Yeah, that was great fly and that's the really the one vineyard, and it

has happened. I mean, there there are flights that you can get from A to B without actually paying to go through Mexico on a bus or by foot some part of the way. But yeah, I mean it's just it's a this patchwork policy that's the problem. Like it is just completely inhumane to have such patrick policy. That again, when we're talking about like Cuban refugees, Venezuelan refugees, a lot of the Venezuelan migrants have lived in other countries for a long time before they're playing for asylum. I

get it. It's the same thing with the Haitians. But what you end up doing is just closing the door to people. Our asylent policy exists to help. And going back to the Jpal point about unemployment, there's an irony that there seem to be a lot of people who will say, yes, we need to raise interest rates because we need to high unemployment rate, because inflation's out of control, we need to get that down. But those same people will not say, all right, well, then how about we

bring in two million more workers? When the effect when the effect if you believe, I don't think it. I don't actually think it would have the effect on wages that people think it would. Because those workers produce economic activity, they increase GDP, and that increased GDP then results in higher wages out of that more economic activity. But obviously if you have there's some level at which you get so much immigration, so much competition for jobs, that you

would see wages come down. But it's curious, why are people okay with wages coming down? Because you've disciplined the American workforce and fired millions of people and you know, stoked fear you know in workplaces across the country, but they're deeply hostile to producing you know, more labor through immigration policy. Like what like what's it? Why are you okay with one but not another? It's a serious problem.

I mean, it's a huge problem. And it goes to even like what people refer to as high skilled labor when we talk about semiconductors here. One of the biggest problems is that who are you going to get to manage the semiconductor like facility? Seriously, because our for years to get somebody from India to get in, Yeah, exactly, and are so called like best and brightest now all work for Meta right, like all of people that could

be doing this. We're funneled into Silicon Valley for years and years and are just making us worse people instead of making us more security as a country, and just to round out the block. I think that's probably why Susan Rice is on this issue. One thing the media doesn't report a lot. And believe me, I understand the terrorist watch list has plenty of its own problems, but there are dozens of people that crossed just last year

that are on the terrorist watch list. There are reports every single month of people who we should be able to screen better. There's something like fifty one thousand known god aways last month alone somewhere around there, which is higher than about fifty thousand from the previous January. These are huge numbers, and when you're seeing the people who we're actually able to apprehend at the border, dozens of people on the terrorists watch lists that were actually apprehended.

Your mind can sort of extend how many people might be in this country that we should at least be aware of them being in this country, let alone maybe have turned away from getting into this country. So it does make sense that Susan looking at the Biden policy and thinking what the hell are we doing here as a kind of hawkish person, but in general, our immigration policy is just not serving anyone. Well, I would agree with that, except for the fact that it makes sense

that Susan Rice is looking at any domestic policy. What's she doing in domestic policy? Role absurd from the beginning, makes no sense. Let's move on to China, because I think this is a story that's playing out this week getting not enough attention in the press. Here's NPR. Chinese leader Sheijinpang name checked the United States and remarks during the annual session of Parliament underway and Beijing this week, saying it was leading Western countries in an effort to

encircle and suppress China. This is a quote from Xi jinpaning Western countries, led by the US, have implemented comprehensive containment, encirclement and suppression against US, bringing unprecedented, severe challenges to our country's development. Now, on Tuesday, the Foreign Minister also criticized the United States by name. Here's a quote from him. The US claims it wants to compete to win with

China and does not seek conflict. But in fact, the so called competition by the US is all around containment and suppression, a zero sum game of life and death. Why does the US ask China not to provide weapons to Russia, Well, it keeps selling arms to Taiwan. One more quote to hit you with here. When the US says it wants to install guardrails and have no conflict in China US relations, it really means that the US requires China not to fight back when hit or scolded.

But this cannot be done. Now, China, you have two high ranking officials, including Xijen Ping himself, calling out the United States by name this week. By the way, as they continue to basically support Putin's invasion of Ukraine. This

is a really big development. The Wall Street Journal has a long, long story out this week probing whether America is prepared in any capacity for a potential battle over Taiwan and what that could escalate into between in terms of a war between the United States and China, a hot war between the United States and China. So very very very very big deal that she Didn't Ping himself called the United States out by name, including the and

the foreign ministers. While I've been reading actually a bunch of she Didn't Ping speeches this week, actually really over the last couple of weeks. The fact that he used the name the United States. Obviously a lot of China observers picked up on that right away. Ryan, what do you make of it? The argument that the Chinese are making is that the US says it has put up guardrails around it's kind of China confrontation that will prevent

a cold war from developing into a hot war. And they're saying that, no, if you are barreling down the road out of control at this speed, there are no amount of guardrails that are going to prevent an accident. And I do think that the United States, the people

of the United States, need to be deeply worried about that. Yeah, At the same time, we shouldn't forget that the Chinese government around two thousand and seven, you know, two thousand and eight, in the wake of the financial crisis, you know, seeing the United States weakening, you know, really it embarked aggressively on a policy, an intentional policy of confronting the United States and under and under and undermining uh, the

United States. And it's in a significant way, you know, helping to know our our politicians participated in this eagerly. But uh, you know, there was a there was an explicit kind of goal to hollow out American manufacturing the middle class. And you know, and I think that you you occasionally see people talk about fentanyl in this in

this context. But you know, an authoritarian country like like China, which is able to you know, so you know, effectively kind of monitor social media, uh, you know, keep control of their economy, isn't going to have a multi billion dollar fentanyl export industry operating without kind of the approval of the of the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party.

Absolutely they know exactly how much of those precursor chemicals are being shipped to Mexico, right they could and you know, and you know, similarly to the United States having you know, some awareness, some involvement that oh, our allies are the ones that are actually shipping this in. Well, it's important, it's important for our allies to have this funding source. So we're going to kind of look look the other way.

On the on the Chinese side, it's like, well this, you know, this is actually this is weakening our trade rival. It's helping to hollow out a manufacturing base. It's it's

really efiscerating, you know, an entire generation of people. Uh so, uh, all of those things tied in, you know, make it make me, you know, look a little cynically at some of the complaints the crocodile tears from from the Chinese there, Well, the flirting with Vladimir Putin makes me look at all of it various weekly as well when we're talking about an actual invasion. Now what the Chinese scene in that is a rebuke to NATO, It is a rebuke to the West. It is a rebuke to what they see

as Western expansionism. And so obviously it makes sense that they come in and look at Putin's invasion of Ukraine as a sort of strength, a powerful rebuke, something that can genuinely very much weak in the West. I want to ask about reports which I've seen some interesting debate over that China may be considering supplying weapons to Vladimir Putin. I've seen skepticism of those reports as basically saying this is unsubstantiated warmongering, and I'm entirely prepared to believe that's

the case. It also wouldn't surprise me if it was true in some capacity as well, So all of this coming on the heels of that I think is relevant too. Yeah, and what we can know for sure thanks to the Chinese diplomats here is that the US is in fact pressuring China not to supply weapons to Russia. Because the Chinese just complained that the US is pressuring China not to supply weapons to Russia. So how seriously China is actually considering doing that, I think it's an open question.

I think it's clear that Russia has asked for that support.

I think that that reporting is pretty solid, and it's also completely intuitive, like the manufacturing base of the Russian economy with under sanctions, is able to create only so many missiles, only so many tanks, only so much material for its invasion, So we're it would stand a reason that they would go to China, and so China this week, complaining that it's unfair, like how come you know, sounds like a seven year olds Wait, how come you get

to fund Ukraine and you get to supply Ukraine with weapons, but we can't supply Russia with weapons? And there's actually no good answer to that other than because we're the empire and we say som h no, and the Chinese economy isn't. Keep in mind here obviously not where Hugen Ping would want it to be at this moment post COVID, but I would say when you look at the Wall Street Journal, reporter reporting and other reporting that we've covered here for a long time, one thing that worries me

is this is coming. This could be coming faster than people realize. And I'm not talking about, you know, at the nuclear scale, just some level of conflict over Taiwan which could get which could escalate very quickly in the same sense that we are now dealing with those concerns in Ukraine. Any hot confrontation over Taiwan, obviously you have the same type of risk and that could be coming

more quickly than people realize. Specifically because China understands we have a limited time frame or they have a limited time frame before we are able to rebuild our defense capacity to meet some of what would be needed in an amphibious sort of amphibious situation, hot war situation over those islands in the South China Sea, over Taiwan. That's

a huge, huge, huge concerned. They know that that narrows every single month that they have in front of them, because the more that we're resupplying ourselves some of these weapons that have actually gone to Ukraine that would be useful in a hot confrontation over time. One the semiconductors that we're able to reshure again, that can happen in about three years as the estimate, and it started about six months ago. So these are things that genuinely keep

me up at night. And one amendment to what I said earlier, you actually could you can make a plausible argument for why it's okay to fund obviously the defense of Ukraine versus the offense of Russia as Russia invaded Ukraine. Ukraine did not invade Russia. But from the Chinese perspective, and I think this is what's important. They don't see in any circumstance the United States acting as just merely you know, defensive and merely a defensive posture, like they

see us offensive presence all over the world. And so every action that they see the United States taking they see as a projection of a mayor and power, not a defense of just ideals of liberty and democracy. Well yeah, and it's this is world history and perpetuity for the future, by the way, because it's what happens in high tech nuclear order. No matter what, you're going to continue trying to like untangle and get to the bottom of who started what. But Belton Road is like a euphemism for

Chinese expansionism. And euphemism I say that that's just the language itself, but the policy it's a friendly face for exactly. And again when you read speeches from hujin Ping, it's very clear how they see Chinese expansionism socialism with Chinese characteristics. It's sort of undermining the West, not just they talk about mankind and humankind a lot, not just undermining the United States, but spreading outside just China. And so when

you have nuclear technology, everybody shares a border. The great powers share a border. If you have a nucle share a border with every single other country in the world. So we will if it feels like echoes of the Cold War, as people say over and over again, yes, but that's only because we are one hundred years into nuclear history. Human history looks like this. Nuclear technology changes and is just a straight line up, and we are in the very early stages of that era. So it's

these echoes of the Cold War. Get used to it. Yea. And I wish Belton Road was the way that the US would express its power instead of just blowing up belts and roads, and we showed it worked with the Marshall Plan. Well, that was one of our most effective kind of diplomatic forays of the entire second half of the twentieth century rebuilding Europe. And then we pivoted to we're going to we're going to break unions, were going

to break social democracies. We're going to keep wages low so that our corporations continue can continue funneling cheap goods into the country, so that we can then you know, suppress our own kind of discontent within the country, could buy you know, making sure that the price of TVs continues to go down. I mean Belton Road, there is debt trapped to Palmacy Base. We talked about the World Bank last week. I mean, it's it's debt trapped diplomacy

that is used to blackmail developing countries. Not great better than death squad, That's what I would argue. You got to have one form or the other. Well, now in local news, we're going to be talking about the d C Crime bill that's grabbed national headlines for interesting reasons because the District of Columbia where we are right now is a federal district. Is the federal district that is

in trend in the constitution. Ryan and I almost certainly disagree, al though I don't know that we've ever talked about this before, over the question of home rule in DC statehood. But the bill itself grabbed a lot of headlines because Republicans in Congress latched onto it after it looked as though and this is where I take issue with some of the media coverage, including from d CST which had a pretty good write up of at WMU DCUs that

said the bill got scuttled by Republican backlash. Well, Mrel Bowser did not want to sign this bill. Joe Biden himself tweeted that while he supports home rule and DC statehood, I have the exact quote right here. While he supposed it supports home rule in DC statehood, he was also yet here said I support DC statehood and home rule, but I don't support some of the changes DC Council put forward over the mayor's objections, such as lowering penalties

for carjackings. At the Senate votes to overturn what DC Council did, I'll sign it the Carjacking provision of this very complicated bill that over that attempts to make some modifications to a nineteen oh one criminal code. By the way, that's before people had cars to jack. Probably it's a car jack. Yeah right, it's totally been massaged, like any nuance has been out the window in this national conversation. Ryan, you have a good point to make though about the

maximum penalty for carjackings being changed. Oh yeah, maybe we have that element here. But what's amazing is the way that this reduction in maximum penalties from what forty years to something like twenty four years is getting talked about

as this lowering of penalties. Yes, like technically that's it's a lowering of penalties, as if it's going to spur some like soft on crime explosion of carjackings around Washington, DC, Something like ninety nine percent of the sentences that are doled out for carjacking now are significantly under what is the maximum, Like the current maximum allows for like forty years for an armed carjacking, and so they lowered that

to like twenty something. The mandatory minimums for carjackings in DC currently and even in the new Criminal Code if it were enacted, would still be higher. And we were pointing us out. Then in say Tennessee, where Bill Haggerty is leading the charge against this thing, the Tennessee's law is more liberal when it comes to carjackings and armed car more liberal. Though it's basically just a normal penalty. Yeah, it's a gigantic mandatory minimum that like set sixty years ago.

People would be like, you're gonna that's insane, Like, how on earth you're going to put people in prison for that long. Now we just be like, oh, fifteen years for this. Yeah, you're gonna do fifteen years of this. So they're barely loosening the penalties, and it's in a

rewrite of an entire code. And to have Joe Biden say I support a thing in principle, but not when it might cause me some short term political cost potential political costs because and he may now have brought more cost on himself because now everything the DC Council does, reporters are going to get to say, Hey, Joe Biden, what do you think of this, because there's a DC Council provision that is allowing non US citizens, would allow

non US citizens to vote in local elections. To me, I think if you are subject to the laws of an area where you live, then principle says you should have some say, no matter what, even if you're in prison, you should have some say over what those laws are. But you can disagree with that. But now, all of a sudden, that's gonna be something Joe Biden's gonna have to He's gonna have to answer for everything that the

Council does. Yesterday I heard reporters on Capitol Hill asking Republican senators what do you think of allowing non citizens to vote? And me, a DC resident, thinking, oh, really, that's interesting. How about citizens who can't actually vote for senators or members the House? Resident, all of a sudden, you're you know, you're so concerned about the right to vote and they're like and they're shaking their head like

don't don't. We don't approve of it. It's like, we shouldn't have to ask you, Like, it's one thing that we don't get to vote, you know, for House, for Senate. They have a workaround so that we can vote for president. But then you're going to come in and you're going to kind of line at it our criminal code and say, actually, twenty four years for carjacking. I think it should be forty.

Like you get out of here, Okay, So getting we are hitting on where we disagree with this, because here's a National Reviewer go actually cited a Madison quote from Federalist forty three. Now I sound like a real loser. He says, the indispensable necessity of complete authority at the seat of government carries its own evidence with it. Without it, not only the public might be insulted and its proceedings

interrupted with impunity. But a dependence of the members of the General Government on the state, comprehending the seat of government for protection and the exercise of their duty, might bring on the National Councils and imputation of awe or influence. Equally dishonorable to the government and dissatisfactory to the other members. So I would just say of the Confederacy, this is in the era of the Federalist papers. So I think there's we could have a whole debate one day about

home rule and DC statehood. But I do think the federal city should be subject to federal rule and by a wide scope. And this is in the broader context. And I think to your point actually about why this is such a ridiculous thing for Bill Haggerty from Tennessee to be swooping in and like line item vetoing City Council crime overhauls, is that it is obvious if you walk around the District of Columbia post pandemic, that there's

a lot of recovery that needs to happen. It is obvious that we are dealing with particular crime surges, not across the board. Actually, violent crime did decrease from twenty twenty one to twenty twenty two according to Axios, though for the second year in a row, DC exceeded two hundred murders in twenty twenty two, and some crimes did we got chart, Yeah, we also have a chart. But that's where we are. So far in twenty twenty three

here in the district. So in twenty twenty two, robberies were up two percent, car thefts were up eight percent, like in a lot of cities, and carjackings are up fourteen percent. If you look at the chart that's on the screen right now, you can see, for instance, between twenty twenty two to twenty twenty three, the same day in March March seventh, we are from twenty nine to

thirty nine homicides. That's a thirty four percent increase three months into the year, one hundred and twenty percent increase in sex abuse theft in general, we're up to I can't read them and run the screen, but it is up. It looks like eighteen percent. Car theft up from auto twenty two percent. Who those were mined, Oh that's right, leave right alone. Motor vehicle theft up one hundred and

ten percent. So again these are early number, but it's obvious to everybody why there is no appetite, even from the Washington Post, which editorialized that the bill would make DC quote a more dangerous city by decreasing quote punishments for violent crimes such as carjackings, home invasion, burglaries, robberies, and even homicides and tying quote the hands of police and prosecutors will overwhelming courts. That's other stuff in this bill. It's a very big bill that can be debated is

what this would do to the court system. There are arguments, I think serious arguments that it would overwhelm the court system because of changes there. And so when you even have the Washington Post maryel Bowser coming out against a bill like this, I do think it signals despite this weird conversation about carjackings we've had, and especially when Republicans insert themselves national Republicans into this local conversation, there's just no appetite in so many big cities right now for

criminal justice reform. Even if some of it, by the way, would reduce crime and would make cities safer, Nobody wants to talk about it period, because there's our cities do feel dirty to a lot of people, they feel less safer to a lot of people. And I think National Democrats have a lot to answer for, not just in terms of the criminal code, but really just in terms

of the way they govern these cities. And you know, a significant bomb in the crime way came out of the pandemic, people frustrated that fewer people on the street, allowing people to commit more crimes of opportunity, but also arguably undercutting of police, both with rhetoric and legally well.

Undercutting of police. Police having their feelings hurt and deciding not that they're not going to do their job anymore, I think is a serious thing, and we're having their power curtailed in neighborhoods by the way, were black residents said they wanted more police and not less police. As the national movement pushed a lot of people in places like San Francisco, even London breed walked back some of

those policies. I don't think there's necessarily been any evidence yet that places that did criminal justice reform and police reform have had a different crime increase is then places that didn't. So like if you look at you know, if you look at like red states around the country, you see the same crime bump even in places that

never had never got much police reform traction. What you what you did see is it did see a slow down in call response, and like Baltimore being like the most egregious response where they were like cool, you don't like the way we do our jobs. How about we just don't do our jobs at all? Or a lot of police departments are now severely hampered because nobody wants

to work in them, given how demonized they feel. Recruiting as big as right, recruiting for any job anyone, which has become a problem, and it's acute within the within the police force. But yeah, now, Ryan, I'm excited for this next block because this is a Ryan Grim question and the White House Press briefing to Karine Jean Pierre, a question that I don't think anybody else or topic I don't think anybody else has asked about so far. You want to and you can see why based on

her answer. So yeah, this is from this week and in the press briefing you might recognize this voice. Last week, the Department of Justice acknowledged that in twenty twenty they had used the FBI had used seven oh two authorities to illegally spy on a member of Congress. Can you tell us who that member of Congress was? Has that member of Congress been briefed by the White House? I would refer you to a Department of Justice. Just not

going to speak to that from here again. Thanks. I think she so effectively calls on the next person, and then the next person has a question, so there's no room for a follow up, and I see very smooth she's like, I'm not going to answer that question. You go ahead, please ask a different one. And I feel like the White House Press Corps needs just so much better coordination and willingness to kind of work collectively that And you see this, You see this occasionally from the

White House Press Corps. You'll see it on the Hill for sure, and you'll see it with foreign press corps where a reporter asked a question, the person that they're asking the question too, refuses to answer it, and then the next reporter, rather than the question that they had scripted ready for you know, the German chancellor or whatever, they will go back and they'll say, I would actually like first to ask you to answer that last question.

You didn't answer that question, because you know, if nobody can get a follow up in, then all somebody has to do to dodge a questions just dodge the question once and they move on. And then there becomes a political cost to not answering the question. Like eight times

and the press Corps knows how to do this. If you remember a year ago when the war drums were being beaten for fighter jets to be sent to Ukraine, when the press, when the White House Press Secretary said no, we're not we're not going to do that, then the next person would be like, so you said you're not going to send fighter jets over to Ukraine? How about sending fighter jets? What do you think of doing that? I'm going to give time for my colleague to beat

the war drums. Yes, what if Estonia asked to send wardrump? That was one of the That was one of them. They were looking for every single way to ask a follow up. And while the substance of that I thought was deeply disturbing, the cohesion of it was impressive. It was like it was getting the Press corps to really push the administration on a question that they were actually happy to answer. Like she kept giving an answer. Of course, it just wasn't the answer that they wanted. In this case,

She's just not answering. And I didn't ask if the Department of Justice had briefed Congress. I asked if the White House has brief Congress, and asked if she would tell us who the White House spied on, and this could be a situation where she just throws the Trump administration uder the bus, because like this was twenty twenty,

this was the FBI under under the Trump administration. But maybe it was a Democrat, and so maybe it was a Democrat that was illegally spied on, and you could then kind of spin something up about that, but then you might not want to necessarily talk about it. Like so the speculation out there. All we can do is guess. But we know that kind of Eric Swalwell was in the news around that time for some liaison with the woman who turned out to be perhaps connected to Chinese intelligence,

and so it wasn't that, But we don't know. That's absolutely pure speculation. We do know, based on Wired reporting that's based on an internal audit of FBI seven oh two practices, that they did spy on some unnamed member of Congress. We don't know the party, We don't know the name, and White House is declining to say who.

If they were confident in their substantiation, I think they would say it, because especially if it was a Republican and they felt confident in their substantiation I think that they know the Democratic base at this point, is it going to be upset about exercising seven h two power too? And we saw this on of the course, nothing to worry about. Yeah, well, how much criticism did Carter Page get on MSNBC and CNN, Washington Post, New York Times

for like years until they stopped talking about it? Basically? But I mean, if they felt confident in their substantiation. But I think you're touching on a really important point here, which is there is no cohesion on this question. And this is why I still like that the press briefings are televised, even though it feels like theater. I still like that they're televised specifically because they show where the priorities of the White House Press corps are and you

get answers to questions like this one. Every once in a while, someone asks a really good question that the White House just doesn't want to answer, and you see, not only does she say the White House doesn't have a comment on that, she says, I'm going to refer you to the DOJ. When you didn't ask about the DOJ. You asked about the White House. And there's a reason nobody else in the press corps wants to talk about seven oh two powers. It's because either they don't care

or they love that seven oh two powers exist. Because everybody that they talk to in the intelligence community is tripping in their ear about all of these false stories on how the country was saved from destruction by seven oh two. And that is I think very much worth televising these briefings. I love that we get to reflect on that when Ryan goes and asks a damn good question about seven oh two that nobody else wants to

talk about. I did reach out to the Department Justice, said, hey, Kareine says you should answer this question, and what did they say? And yet I'll report back when I get something out of that, turning to the House of Representatives. Actually, while while we were while we're producing this show, very strange development in the world of kind of cross ideological coalitions,

Matt Gates shared my Intercept story. This is really on Twitter basically, and he said, he says, contact you represent him today and ask them to support my legislation to

withdraw US troops from Syria. Voting today with a link to an article that I have up in the Intercept today, which is responsible Statecraft wrote about this Matt Gates effort recently, So essentially there are there are still almost roughly nine hundred American troops helping to occupy Central Syria, along with an unknown number of contractors and other other kind of associated allies in the area backing up the Syrian defense forces, mostly mostly Kurdish element of what is is what remains

kind of the opposition that isn't isis Yesterday evenings, as I reported, the Congressional Progressive Caucus sent out a note to its membership urging a yes vote and noting that this that his legislation is similar to legislation that had been put forward on the NDAA by by Jamal Bowman previously,

which had set a one year timeline. I also reported that Ambassador Robert Ford, who was the Obama administration's ambassador and who had previously been a staunch advocate of more and more kind of US intervention in the area, more support for the opposition, you know, in an attempt to get Asad to the negotiating table that would lead they would hope to Asad stepping down, so one of and he eventually resigned in twenty fourteen because he felt like

the Obama administration wasn't being aggressive enough to accomplish the goal its goals. He's now supporting this Gates measure, and I interviewed him yesterday. I said, sounds like what you're basically saying is go big or go home, and if you're not going big, you might as well go home. He said, yes, he said, except I would add that you have to remember that going big is no guarantee of success either. If you look at the Iraq War, we went pretty big and what we got what he

called mixed results. So the vote is going to be held this evening. When this came to the floor under Jamal Bowman, sixty percent of the Democratic Caucus voted for it. It'll be interesting to see if they pick some up because the CPC is officially calling for them to vote for it, or if they lose some because it's associated with Gates and that Biden is in the White House. Although Biden was in the White House for the last one.

But I'm also curious on the Republican side, there were twenty five Republicans last time, twenty one the first time in twenty twenty one, then twenty five in twenty twenty two who voted to end the occupation of Syria. Do you think Gates gets more than twenty five or is he so toxic in the Republican Party that it's that he's not gonna be able to pull that off. What's your sense of how effective he'll be at doing kind

of his part of this? Yeah, I think you good at some of that in your reporting, which is it's just the process even itself on how Matt Gates cobbled together the legislation and then was able to work with

elhan Omar and cobbling together some coalition, some support. Right, his first version of this a couple of weeks ago allowed fifteen days fit troops, which you know, just you're isn't going to happen because nobody's going to support that, And he immediately dreamed to six months, right, And interestingly, Alan Omer worked directly with him, right and said, look, you got it, these are rookie numbers, man, or you got to bump these numbers up. And he's like, okay, fine,

well let's let's let's do it to six months. Because she's like, you're just not You're not going to get any democratic support for this. So what would what's the point of doing this, You're going to you're able to get a floor vote, Like, why blow it on something that everybody's just going to vote against? And so they

so they came up with this six month threshold. So does that signal that Matt Gates thinks there's no chance of getting significant support either from Republicans or centrist Democrats, so you might as well just put the fifteen days in? Or does it signal that someone on his policy team just and he just did something really dumb with the timeline the question The jury is still out on that question, but I would actually predict a slight increase in that number.

I think that would probably tick up from twenty five, especially amidst problems in Europe, amidst problems in the staff trying to see I think, you know, there's a real, even among people who are more hawkish in the Republican Party, there's a real concern that we're expending military power in places that are draining military power that should be re prioritized and in places that should be reprioritized. So I actually would would predict you know, it's not a like

solid prediction. I don't have any particular intelligence right now on this, but I would expect that number to be higher. All right, Well, that'll be nice to say it's unlikely to get to two eighteen. Yeah at this point, but you know, a serious show of force I think at least puts pressure. And Mark Millie was just there that

I don't think that's a coincidence at all. You know, he went it's the first time he's been there in a very long time, and I think it was he was there to kind of, you know, show confidence in the US presence there, which also we should note is illegal. Like so there was. It's crazy I covered the vote or the whipping or the vote in twenty thirteen around this precise issue ten years. I've been doing this for

too long. And Obama eventually pulled it off the floor after our whipcount showed two hundred and forty three nose and leaning nose. So he was going to lose. He was going to lose the vote. He wasn't going to get authorization for this use of force. Half posts whipcount, yeah, half posted, even like Daily Coast was doing its own kind of separate whip count back back in the days when there was a little bit more skeptical of US

interventions and so there is not that authority. So therefore they're relying on the two thousand and one a UMF, the Authorization of the Use of Military Force, which allows the US to go to war anywhere at once as long as it's against al Qaeda, and the Taliban was thrown in there as well, and they've since said, okay, well al Qaeda anybody kind of similar to al Qaida was hiding under the North Stream, right, Yes, well that was a pro Ukrainian group, and so the but the

administration in the press has been saying that the purpose of this deployment of troops overseas is to counter Iran and pro Iranian militias in Syria. And there's just now if you were going to say, well, they're there to fight isis only then you could maybe say, okay, well, isis is derivative enough of al Qaeda that you know you're not going to win a court case over this.

But there's just no interpretation of the two thousand and one AUMF that authorise as a president to go to war against Iran or pro run milits like that's just just can't do it. And so then the question is does that matter? Clearly doesn't. What about the rules based order? It clearly doesn't matter to the people who are acture us constantly about the rules based order, and like sure other countries about the rules based order. I know where

suckers to even take it seriously. But yeah, what we're supposed to do this for the hell of it, pretend the rules based order matter. What's your point today? All right, Well, we're going to be talking about Tucker Carlson and new Fox News reporting before Tucker started releasing new footage from the Capitol in January sixth. Just this Monday, he actually

prefaced his show with an interesting admission. As he covers the video this week, Carlson said, many mystery mysteries will remain unsolved, and in fact, there were many examples of behavior we saw in those tapes that didn't seem to make sense. Men and civilian clothes holding doors open for protesters, escorting others through the capitol, et cetera. We would love to know who these people were, but as of tonight,

we don't know. And because we don't know, we're not going to put their faces on the screen and suggest they were federal agents. So video of men and civilian clothing. Holding doors open for protesters and escorting others through the Capitol should have been explained by the Special Committee House

Democrats and paneled to investigate January six. In new video, for instance, Carlson showed nearly ten officers calmly escorting the so called QAnon shaman around the Capitol building on January sixth. Maybe this was a crowd control technique. I actually have no idea, but I was there as a reporter, and right away it was clear to me that different parts of the building were experiencing very different versions of events.

To be clear, I think the bottom line about January six is that a group of Trump supporters, not Antifa or the FBI, were so persuaded by the former president and so furious at the political establishment that they gave into mob mentality and violence, thinking it was their last chance to save the country. You could feel it snowballing. But that doesn't mean the FBI didn't have informants involved. We now know definitively they did, And it doesn't mean

the media's coverage was true. We now know definitively it wasn't. For instance, here are some questions the media should be wondering, why does Tuck have videoed the January sixth Committee seems to have contradicted even though they had it in their possession. Why did attorneys for the January sixth defendants, as one said on Laura Ingram Show last night, not get that video? And why is the media more upset? And why are some establishment Republicans from Tom Tillis to Kevin Kramer to

Mitch McConnell who trotted out a prop yesterday. Why are they more upset with Tucker Carlson than with the January sixth Committee or with the media that just completely swallowed the January sixth Committee's narrative whole cloth. So to pivot just slightly here, hundreds of pages of new documents in the dominion lawsuit against Fox News dropped yesterday, and there

is surely plenty to dive into over the coming days. Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, as I just mentioned, Republican senators from Tillis to Kramer to McConnell have been whining about Tucker Carlson's coverage of the January sixth tapes. Chuck Schumer actually called on Rupert Murdoch to yank Tucker Carlson off the air recently. You can see this tweet from Republican Senator jd Vance who said, today, I was asked by multiple

reporters about Tucker's show last night. I was ast zero times about one of the most powerful figures in government actively promoting corporate censorship. Jeter said, censorship. But you can add the word corporate censorship of a media figure. The assault on quote our democracy is this again. He's asking questions about where Republican senators from Mitch McConnell to Kevin Cramer, A Tom Taylis and Mitt Romney are placing their priorities. And that is a useful question to apply to the

media as well. And here's where it's useful to think about the balance overall in American media. Every single corporate media institution regularly attacks Fox News, sometimes with reason but

other times without it. Plus nearly every single reporter now feasting on these dominion documents has helped spread destructive false narratives in recent years, and many of them have done it while deceiving their audience by pretending to be neutral and a political So you don't have to shed any tears for Fox News to recognize that While the network is powerful, the combined powers of their enemies is beyond Rupert Murdoch's wildest imagination. And those enemies are much more

powerful and much more guilty because they feign superiority. So let's pivot for a minute again and enjoy this delightful clip of Russell Brand calmly making NBC analyst John Holman look foolish from last Friday's edition of Real Time. John, I've not known you long, but I love you already. But I have to say that it's disingenuous to claim that the biases they're exhibited on Fox News are any

different from the biases exhibited on MSNBC. It's difficult to suggest that these corporations operate as anything other than mouthpieces for their affiliate owners in Black Rock and Vanguard. And unless we start to embrace and it also mate like just spiritually, if I may use that word in your great country, we have to take responsibility for our own perspectives. I've been on that MSNBC, mate, it was propaganda. It's nut crackery. I went on a strength called Morning Joe.

It was absurd the way they carried Morning Joe. Yeah, I don't know what it was. It wasn't morning. There was no one called Joe there, no one could concentrate. They didn't understand the basic tenets of journalism. No one was willing to stick up for genuine American heroes like Edward Snow. Then no one was willing to talk about Julian Assange and what he suffered trying to bring real

journalism to the American people. And I think to sit within the castle of MSNBC throwing rocks Fox News is ludicrous. Make MSNBC better, Make MSNBC great again, Make MSNBC great again, make the entire media grade again. Maybe Brian's point came amid a discussion on the show of recent legal disclosures that are showing certain hosts and executives at Fox News were unhappy with other people the network's coverage of genuine

disinformation about the twenty twenty election. Since I've written this script that I'm reading now, we're getting even more from the dominion documents. But as he was being criticized for misrepresenting facts, John Heilman, then mister represented the facts about the Fox lawsuit. But that's neither here than there. My only quibble with Brand's point is that Fox News recognizes there's money to be made by being the only corporate media outlet willing to air anti establishment voices. Unlike on

MSNBC or CNN. These days, on Fox News, you will actually hear Glenn Greenwald and Tulsea Gabbard's perspectives. You'll hear absolutely forbidden critiques of the left's excesses like censorship and puberty blockers and neo racism. These are closer to the perspectives you'd hear in a bar in my Wisconsin hometown than anything on MSNBC or CNN. We're questioning the dogma

of rich educated liberals is uncouth and bigoted and intolerable. Again, I'm sure Rupert Murdoch understands this fundamentally as a business strategy, not an altruistic one. Still over on MSNBC and CNN, and in the pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post and even Rupert murdocks Wall Street Journal, it's rare to hear serious critiques of the military industrial complex or corporate power, unless those critiques are about the

military being racist or corporations needing bigger HR departments. Fox platforms warmongers too, that's true. That's true, but they know it's more entertaining than to air other perspectives alongside of them. So while corporate media winds about Kevin McCarthy granting Tucker Carlson access to the January sixth tapes, it's possible to question the decision but recognize that corporate media itself is

the problem. That Tucker seeing the j six footage after a purportedly bipartisan select committee left relevant video out of their hearings and reports, and that media never questioned them. If you're talking about Fox and Tucker and not talking about the broader universe of other networks and journalists who've made a habit of lying and deceiving for partisan purposes,

you're getting sucked into a stupid game. Just like all those Republican senators choosing to waste breath on Tucker, they would never use to critique the entire corporate press and intelligence community for exploiting the tragedy. Ryan, Again, there's a lot coming out of the dominion lawsuits. All right, Well, thank you for joining us. As you may have noticed, if you're watching this on YouTube, we're doing something different.

Posting just a couple of the clips. You can find the rest of them, as you know, on the podcast version, also on the premium version, you know, you get to part with ten year dollars every month to hear that, but then you get it add free, that's right, and you get it emailed into your inbox an hour early. I don't know. Its been a good show though, another typical Wednesday, meaning we are bursting at the seams with

breaking news. There you go, exactly, all right, Well, we will see you guys next Wednesday.