3/9/23: Capitol Police's Jan 6th Nonsense Defense, Tucker Trump Texts, Budget Standoff, Gov Demands Elon Contacts, Chomsky ChatGPT, Fauci Lab Leak, CDC Director on Gain of Function, Tucker's Ukraine Test, Stock Buybacks, Ken Roth on Netanyahu Power Grab

Breakingpoints dot com. Good morning, everybody, Happy Thursday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do lots of interesting stories this morning. We have a blowback on Capitol Hill from Republicans about that release of January six tapes. On Tucker Carlston Show. We also have some new text messages Tucker explaining exactly how he feels about Donald Trump in reality, very different from the picture he puts forward on his show. So we'll break

that down for you. New budget battles. As the debt ceiling deadline comes closer and closer, Biden putting out his budget plans, House Republicans starting to come coalesce around their package of cuts that they are trying to demand, so we've got all of that for you. We also have new shots fired between Elon Musk at Twitter and the FTC. They are demanding all sorts of information, including the journalists and information about the journalists he interacted with and what

exactly they had access to. Noam Chomsky out with a new ed warning about AI and chat GPT. And we also have a look at the House hearings on COVID and what was said there. But soccer first, we have a big announcement, big announcement here that we have been working on for literally years now at this point, so we will now have the full show video with time stamps on our Spotify Premium podcast. So what that means is our premium subscribers who have connected the full show

their ability to watch it to their Spotify account. You no longer can just listen to it. You can also watch it inside of the Spotify app, as you can with many podcasts. So we've been working on that for a long time. Technologically it was actually it's far more difficult that it might sound to actually pull off. Thank you to our friends over at Supercast at Spotify and to our team here who has been ground testing it. It looks fantastic, It works fantastic, so enjoy and you

can also listen at three point five speed. Yes, indeed, you get listen at whatever speed you desire. And it looks I have to say it was. It looks really great. It looks really nice, and Griffin was just showing us this morning. It actually has like the time codes, so you can easily sort of jump around and if there are certain segments you want to listen to and other things you want to skip past, it makes it easy

to do that. So really excited about that. If you aren't premium subscriber, go ahead and become one so that you can have access to that as well, because it is very cool feature. It's an awesome thing. All right. Let's start with Fox News. So we have been covering quite a bit here, I know Emily did as well, the release of the Tucker Carlson footage from January sixth.

It's actually kicked up quite a storm here Washington. A lot of GOP senators actually getting very upset with Fox and Tucker, specifically editorial coverage of that, all converging around the singular idea that the Capitol Police did nothing wrong on January sixth, Mitch McConnell, underscoring met let's take a listen to Abe by speak of a party to give access to touch approves of this situat My concern is

how it was depicted, which is a different issue. Clearly, the chief of the Capitol Police, in my view, correctly describes what most of us witness firsthand on January sixth. So that's my reaction to it. It was a mistake, in my view for Fox News to depict this in a way that's completely at variance with what our chief law enforcement official here at the Capital thingcts. This is

the interesting thing. So everybody's converging around the Capitol Police as if they didn't do anything particularly wrong that day. So let's go and put this up there on the screen. The Capitol Police chief letter. I'll read some of it to you in full. He says, quote A false allegation is that our officers helped the riders and acted as quote, tour guides. This is outrageous and false. The department stands by the officers in the video that was shown last night.

I don't have to remind you how outnumbered our officers were on January sixth, Those officers did their best to use de escalation tactics to try to talk to rioters into getting each other to leave the building. The program conveniently cherry picked from the cammer moments of the forty one thousand hours of the video and commentary fails to provide context about the chaos and violence. So let's all just have a little bit of a reminder of what

exactly that footage showed. It showed Capitol police officers, not if I mean effectively escorting and just following around the QAnon Chaman and look, Christal, I think we can sympathize with people who may want to quote, de escalate a conflict. That's certainly what I would advise as opposed to sorry,

violence when you are outnumbered. But there there's a fine line between de escalation and straight up opening doors for someone, including to the floor of the United States Senate, like yes, that is where I just really have no idea how they can defend the conduct of these officers. For you could say, hey, you know one thing, listen, man, you know it would be better for you if you just

left right now. That's one thing, But there's a whole other thing to literally basically follow somebody around seven people at one point one person, crazy person with like a weird sharpened spear. Why would you want to let that person onto the floor of the Senate. And then while they're like, hey, just so you know, like this is a really holy place, and you know, it was like, what, that's not Dschal, That's just odd. It's odd behavior, very odd behavior. If I may be permitted to have a

nuanced view on this, there's two pieces. First of all, you know, a lot of what Tucker showed was like trying to cherry pick the calmest moments from January sixth and present a portrait that is at odds with reality. And so I sympathize with Republican senator and others who were like, this is bullshit. We also with our own eyes that parts of this day were extremely violent. A lot of people were injured, there were a lot of scuffles,

there was a lot of fighting, all of that stuff. So, you know, don't give us just your sanitized, propaganda filled version that accords with the narrative that you have been trying to spin on your program, which, by the way, we'll get to in a moment. You know, he clearly put is happy to put lies out on his program that are wildly at odds with what he believes with So that's one piece. The piece though, that you're honing in on, though I think the explanation of the Capitol

believes here, it just makes absolutely no sense. I mean and de escalatory tex You're leading him around, You're trying locked doors, like helping him to find the chamber he was How is that a de escalatory tactic? How is that like talk trying to talk him out of do it?

There is none of that evident on the tape. And right in the wake of January sixth, there was a lot of I think very reasonable questions about how the hell this was allowed to happen, about failures of law enforcement on that day, including by the way, there were media questions, there were political questions, I believe, from both sides of the aisle, and there was an entire investigation done by the Capitol Police where they put some of their own people on leave because they did not conduct

themselves in the way that they would want them to on that day. So even the Capitol Police previously did not agree with this assessment that it was all well and good on that day. And we'll get to some of that in a moment. Let's just put this next piece up on the screen, because this is the part I'm sympathetic to. Here's they say GOP senators were buke

Tucker Carlsons narrative that January six was largely peaceful. Tillis said, it's bullshit, Kramer said, just a lia Graham said, I'm not interested in whitewashing January six, and Romney said trying to normalize that behavior is dangerous and disgusting. And those pieces, I actually am totally sympathetic too, because I do think he overall presented this very like selective, whitewashed version of what actually occurred on that day, and I think that's fine.

But what I was saying was that and this is what I put out yesterday. The tell me in the freak out is that everyone is attacking the editorial position instead of trying to explain the actions of the Capitol Police in escorting the QAnon shaman around the Capital, right. And it's like you can listen every by definition, all editorial coverage of January sixth by any news network is going to be editorial. It is going to be cherry picked.

The Washington Post literally won a Pulitzer Prize by quote cherry picking the video to be like reconstructing the attacks. So did the New York Times. They've have these highly produced documentaries, and I think that's fine. So at this point, now it's been over what it's been several years, you can at this point you can watch any footage to reinforce any narrative that you want to on this one.

Let's take the editorial aside. Let's take the footage that we had not seen before and just say, hey, that's pretty weird. What was going on with that? And for some reason there is just been coalescing around the actions of the Capitol Police, when in reality, as you said, in the early days, there was broad recognition that this was a failure of tremendous proportions. I saw Joe Biden staffer or whatever put out a tweet yesterday being like, in my opinion, January sixth was just as bad as

nine to eleven. Let's think about nine to eleven. Imagine if we did not have the takeaway that the FBI and the CIA had colossally failed at their jobs by allowing nine to eleven to happen. You can both venerate first responders, yes, and the violence and the victims, and also say, hey, structurally, this was a massive screw up. Now, unfortunately we didn't go full bore in terms of the intelligence community, but in this case, in the very early days,

put us up there on the screen. As you alluded to, the Capitol Police suspended six of its officers and investigated dozens more after the Capital riots, and as this New York Times report is highlighting, there were several efforts after in the days to talk about how the force was in crisis, about how at one point the gear that they needed crystal was literally on a bus that was somewhere that was locked. They didn't have a rapid response plan.

It was one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time. And I think that's why so many people are willing to believe a lot of theories that this was like a full blown false flag, because you're like, hey, you guys literally had FBI informants planted in the Proud Boys and the othkeepers, probably in the crowd. At the very least, we know there was some uniform on uniform. Uh, there were some undercover police officers that have been come out

and test and given affidavits in court. How could you possibly not know and have given the Capitol Police heads up? Secondary like why was there an order given to the Capitol Police to not necessarily like use the full scope of law enforcement response? And the National Guard? Why was a National Guard not on call? Why were they called in you know, hours later? It was a complete and

total mess. Initially there were actually some questions about this, but then eventually it all came down to, well, they were heroes, can't question anything, and oh, by the way, let's give them a ton more money in funding. I mean, the most likely explanation for the failures is in confidence. That's usually the common explanation for things that we have trouble understanding or explaining. I think they just failed in

a lot of ways. They failed to prepare. And I'm not just talking about the US Capitol Police here or responsible for you know, the response on that day, but I'm talking about you know, law enforcement FBI leading up to the events of this day, when there was all kinds of intel out there and chatter public chatter about

what they were planning to do on January sixth. I think a very logical explanation is, listen, it's no secret that law enforcement tends to be more right leaning, and they were more sympathetic to the cause, and so they in their own minds downplayed the potential risks of what could happen on January sixth. And you know, there were a couple signs of that. First of all, as we said before, there were and we'll play this in just

a second. You know, right afterwards, videos emerged of some of the Capitol Police officers little literally opening appearing to open the barricade for protesters to go through, which fits then with this video of them like shepherding the QAnon shaman around and showing him exactly where he wants to go. One potential explanation is they were ideologically sympathetic and that was a barrier to them effectively doing their job in

the way that we would want them to. And there was actually even one Capitol police officer put this up on the screen who was found guilty of obstruction with regards to January sixth case. Basically, what this guy was doing is the day after the attack, I'm reading from this article here. A Facebook friend of this former Capitol police officer with whom he'd never exchanged messages before, posted some images on Facebook of himself inside the Capitol during

the attack, so he took it on himself. This dude then to message this guy who'd never talked to you before but he was friends with on Facebook, and rather than forwarding that information to the authorities, which you might expect someone in law enforcement to do, he instead instead sent the rioter a private message with advice about how to avoid being caught. He said, quote, I'm a Capitol Police officer who agrees with your political stance. Take down

the part about being in the building. They're currently investigating and everyone, everyone who was in the building is going to be charged, he wrote, just looking out. So you know, there are plenty of signs that potentially one explanation here is that they were ideologically sympathetic, and so they failed to prepare in advance, not just the Capitol Police, but the FBI, who we know had infiltrators within some of

these groups. They didn't take it seriously. They were too distracted with their other like elaborate designing plots for Gretchen Whitmer and Agent provocateurs and Black Lives Matter protests and all of those things to actually effectively prepare for what was a very dangerous situation. And then on the day of as we said before, at the time people were allowed and the Capitol Police themselves were investigating whether their

people actually responded in the way that they were supposed to. Now, the reason that this all turned is because I think there were a couple things that happened. First of all, you know, this was at a time when Democrats were all freaked out about what defund the police had done to their standing with voters, so they were skittish about like critiquing law enforcement whatsoever. Republicans usually reliably back up law enforcement kind of no matter what, no matter whether

they were good, bad, and different, honest line, whatever. And Democrats decided that the simple narrative that they wanted to go with on January sixth, because they thought it would be the most sympathetic to the American public, is these people were heroes, the Capitol Police officers in every single instance, and the people on the other side are the clear villains. And so they went with that Disney version of events, which obviously obscured some key reasons why the response failed

so devastatingly on that day. Yeah, and I think that's a very important thing to underscore, which is you can what's his name with Eugene Goodman, right, he was one of those who escorted the senators. Sure, absolutely a heroic act. But at the same time of the famous video, let's go ahead and put it up there on the screen, we have Capitol police officers here literally shown opening the gates for protesters. I mean, there is literally no zero,

zero innocent explanation for this. You could see the guy waving people in from the crowd. How can you possibly claim that that wasn't one of the greatest failures of all I mean, imagine also if these people had been more violent, they could have burned this thing to the ground, like eighteen twelve. It's one of those where you initially

had a little bit of criticism. Some Republicans were like, hey, Nancy Pelosi, why did you not call in the National Guard because you apparently had some level of chain of command. And then everybody just quashed it and we decided to move on. And then the jan six Committee, which was supposed to get to the bottom of this type of stuff, just ignored it completely. And of course here's the worst part.

Put this up there after everything. Because of this narrative, the Capitol Police received two point one billion dollars in July of twenty twenty one in quote emergency funding to avoid furloughs, to pay for overtime, to pay for training, when in reality, on that day, if you have one hundred more police officers, maybe with the proper riot gear, the entire thing goes completely differently. And we are talking here about billions upon billions that have now been given

to this incompetent agency, which clearly failed dramatically. Nobody was ever fired at the very top. There was never any

real screen. They didn't even have a real commission, Like look, there's a lot to say about the nine to eleven commission, but it did at least recommend some changes to the way that intelligence sharing and the way that the US intelligence community would operate with respect to terrorist threats, because we all acknowledge, you know, Biparson fashion, like this is one of the greatest law enforcement and intelligence failures literally of all times. So let's try to make sure that

we avoid it. And unfortunately we also gave them a ton of money and not enough oversight. But in this case, we didn't even do the oversight. We just gave them more money. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, And the last thing I want to say about this too is the QAnon shaman dude. I think his name is what

Jessin Chansley is at. Yes, I mean they clearly because he was like the most visible symbol of the day, which he you know, took upon himself and listen, he's responsible for his own actions and no one here is saying otherwise. However, I do think it's outrageous that they didn't have access to this footage when he was considering mounting a defense. Now he pled guilty very quickly. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but it could have

potentially made a difference in terms of sentencing. And you know, I try to stand up for people's rights regardless of whether I agree with them politically or not, and I think it would be really inconsistent if we didn't do so here and say he deserved to have access to this footage, his defense deserve to have access to this footage, and potentially things may have gone somewhat different for him.

And there's a lot of other defendants who actually requested who the judge denied access to this footage and sentenced them and did not even allow the jury or even their own attorneys to be able to present any of this to try and strike a different deal. As you said, I mean, there's no way you cannot defend that because if that flat I mean, listen, what did he end up getting four years? I think, yeah, I mean, if this comes out, you know, and it went to trial

in Northern Virginia, jury probably would have convicted him. Anyways, that said, you know, you have no idea what it could have gone differently. So anyway, like you said, he pled guilty. He is a grown man at the end of the day. Nobody asked him to take a shirt off draw weird pentagrams on it stormcap Yah. Yeah, Like, I'm not saying the man is innocent, but you know, the whole point of trial, and you know, especially in

our judicial system, is to try, you know, innocent. You're innocent before proven guilty, and you're supposed to be able to give in the best possible chance at providing a defense. And I don't think it was fair that they withheld it. Anyway.

Let's go to the next part here inside of the ongoing one point six billion dollar lawsuit for Dominion voting Systems versus Fox News, of which Fox has a very serious chance of suffering reputation, not only just reputational damage now at this point through the discovery process, but they may have to pay, and pay big time. So let's go and put this up there on the screen. Interesting exchange between Tucker Carlson and I believe it's one of

his producers. This is on January fourth. He says, quote, we are very very close to be able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly cannot wait. I want nothing more. It feels very close. I imagine things will start around mid February. That's from an unknown probably likely somebody works on the show. He says, quote, I hate him passionately. I blew up at Peter today, Peter Navarro in frustration. I actually like Peter, but I can't handle much more

of this. Put the next one up there on the screen, which I actually found this one to be funnier, he says Tucker Carlton. It really explains why the left wins so much. They have Mark Elliots and lawyers from every other major law firm. We have Lynnwood and Sydney Powell, that's the last four years. We've got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to die out because we're all pretending we've got a lot to show for it. But yeah,

there isn't really an upside to Trump. So that's something that he put. You know, I'm curious for Crystal because I didn't necessarily read it the same way. I think that while Tucker has always played defense for Trump, he has not necessarily defended him. He has always positioned himself.

And look, this is more of a content way that a lot of people in Fox are, which is if you don't have someone that you want to one hundred percent defend, what you do is you just attack all of their enemies and you focus on the enemy specifically. And you know in private, I know, you know, based on the reporting and all that, what came out from Syria where he basically convinced Trump not to bomb Iran,

he was one of the major forces on that. He also part of the reason why he would reserve his fire, from what I understand, was because he maintained a decent relationship with Trump, and every once in a while Trump would actually listen to him. For example, COVID he was one of those people who traveled to Florida and was like, hey, you need to take this seriously. I am not defending him.

I'm just saying, like, from what I have understood his position positionality with Trump is that Trump was like a figure who he didn't necessarily like, didn't necessarily want to defend, and so would attack the enemies instead. Because also that makes what good ratings whenever you're dealing with audience. So I'm curious what you think. I mean, I don't doubt that that's what he tells himself, but it's also cope,

you know. I mean, ultimately, at the end of the day, your position visa VI the audience, especially as like an analyst an opinion journalist as he is, is to tell them what you really think. And obviously he was not telling them what he really thought and very much misled the audience, if not outright lied to the audience about his actual views of the situation. In that, I don't

think he's unique. I mean, there were, you know, a lot of elite Republicans and journalists who had some similar rationale about like, oh well, if I work in the administration, and I do his dirty work for him, then I'll be able to like influence him a little bit, or you know, this is what I have to do in order to keep my job, et cetera, et cetera. You know, Tucker's a wealthy guy. He would be fine if his ratings fell. He'd be fine if he was out of

a job at Fox. And so I think it's shameful, like that's the basic deal you make with your audience, that you're going to be straightforward with them, and so, you know, I think there's always a question people's minds when they're watching cable doos, whether it's Fox or other outlets of like do these people really believe what they're

selling the public? And in this instance, and in the instance of a lot of Sean Hannity and laur Ingram based on some of the texts that came out about them too, the answer is plainly no. I think it's actually a sad tale because it's one of those where that is a perfect illustration of how, whenever you want to maintain influence inside of the system, many times you

really can't say exactly what you think. And the reason, as you said, I mean there's no question, like, look, Fox could fire him tomorrow, he'd have one of the most popular podcasts of all time. I have no doubt about that whatsoever. I think it'd be completely fine in an independent media environment. As you said, I don't think

it particularly cares even about money at this point. So what is the point of the game, And I mean most of them like the influence that Fox gives them to influence policy, to have their actual opinions influence the

political process. The speakers race Ukraine, COVID. I laid out some of those examples, but unfortunately, and one of the reasons that you and I decided to do this, and increasingly the more that we have done this have probably the less least amount not even influenced, but even contact with the system, is that when you say what you think that hurts you inside of the system because they

don't they don't, they don't even appreciate it. They actively punish people, and so it's difficult, you know, it really is is like when you're inside of this, it is a game in which saying you know, I look, I always try to tell people exactly what I think, and it has cost me a lot personal relationships professional relationships and all that. You know, with the knowledge, I think

that obviously you're going to hold me accountable. But also, you know, many of the people watching this show are they would I think they would know if you're pulling your punch, yes, And I think that's that's what the unfortunate part of it. Yeah, well, what you see zooming out from Tucker and looking at the entirety of the Fox text message revelations, which are pretty devastating to them.

I mean, any like a reasonable person looking at that would be like, Okay, you all are completely manipulative, like just selling us what we want to hear. They are suffering deeply from audience capture, and you know, the road to hell is paved with this sort of rationalization of like, well, I got to back them up on this thing because then I'll maintain my influence. I got to go along

with this other thing because I'll maintain my influence. And that's never been more clear than with a figure like Trump, who's just going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing the envelope until you find yourself like, you know, pretending that January sixth was actually totally fine or pretending like going along with stop the steal when you privately are like Sydney Pal's insane and she's a lunatic, and this is all complete nonsense, Like he's just going to

keep pushing you to a more and more ridiculous spot. But since you justified all these other steps along the road, you're going to keep justifying the further steps down the road, even though now you've just gone like wildly away from

what you actually think. And to give you an example that you know is on like the liberal side of things, it reminds me in a small way of Elizabeth Warren in the last presidential primary, where you know, she came into her political power a deep critique of Joe Biden on economic issues and specifically on bankruptcy law. But when she was actually up on the stage, rather than saying what she really at least at one point believed and had said very clearly and powerfully before she held her fire,

why because she wanted to maintain her influence. Remember she said, I'm just a player in the game. That was her whole thing was like, well, I can't really say what I actually think about this guy because he may well win. I want to be vice president or maybe Treasury secretary. I want to get invited to the White House. I

want to keep being a player in the game. And so she ultimately really compromised like a key part of what she claimed to believe previously and what she built her entire career on, out of a justification of, well, I got to play nice because I need to be a player inside the game. So I think we've seen

this play out so many times in Washington. I mean, this is a particularly stark example where the guy that you've been propping up for years behind the scenes, You're not just like I don't know about this guy, You're like,

I hate him passionately. Right. It's a particularly stark example, but I think you can find a million such examples at CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and throughout the DC ecosystem, where people rationalize and justify morally indefensible positions insert because they tell themselves they're so important that they need to maintain their influences. I thought that too, you know, I saw a lot of mainstream media people be like, this

is how little Fox thinks of its audience. I was like, yo, we're going to pretend that you don't think just as little of yours. I'm like, let me ask you behind closed doors, behind a glass of whiskey, like you really believed in Russiagate the whole time, Like you really think Joe Biden is up there and that he has a stutter that miraculously appeared when you were seventy nine years old, Like, give me a break. So look, I think it's a systemic problem all of that. So yeah, anyway, that's what

it is. And I've never been happier just to be able to do this show. We've already we've cut those times the sale. Yeah, we're good, We're free, and it is a good thing, all right. So let's talk about what is going on with the debt sailing. There are a couple of things that are converging right at the moment. On the one side, you have Joe Biden putting out

his budget. Now this is not directly about the debt ceiling, but it is kind of him positioning himself and creating the messaging he wants about his vision for the country versus the ground that the Republicans are staking out. So in that way you can sort of see these as you know, two separate positions on the debt ceiling, even though that's not quite directly the case. All right, let's put this up on the screen. In terms of what Joe Biden is proposing. We have some new details this

morning I can share with you as well. This is the New York Times. They say he set to detail three trillion dollars in measures to reduce the deficits. This is primarily the deficit reduction part of this is primarily about taxes on the wealthy and large corporation, so they say is expected to announce a new tax on households worth more than one hundred million dollars woud apply to both their earned income and unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets like stock, So this is kind

of a well tax. He will also call for the quadrupling of attacks on stock buybacks that was approved as part of a sweeping tax healthcare and climate Billy signed last year. So I'm actually going to go deep on stock buybacks in my monologue today, if you guys are interested in such things. The original tax that he levied, I love the way they phrased this was one percent. It did absolutely nothing in terms of like curtailing stock buybacks.

So when they're like, he's quadrupling a tax on stock buybacks from one percent to four percent, So wow, that's incredible, they should just be banned outright. Moving on, they also said that it will increase an expansion of an investment tax on high earners, which would be directed to the Medicare Trust. Mind, they say that that plus the proposed savings from additional Medicare negotiations on prescription drugs, would reduce deficits by about nine hundred billion dollars on net and soccer.

There's additional reporting this month from the Washington Post. I think Jeff Stein was involved in that that they're going to in the budget propose some of the pieces that were initially in build back better, including the expanded child tax credit, some moves on paid family leave, some moves on childcare, and some moves on universal pre K, along with this set of tax hikes on the wealthy effectively in order to so that's sort of their proposal is

an expanded social safety net plus these tax cuts or tax hikes on the wealthy in order to pay for it. Right, And I think I know Counterpoints covered this yesterday too, but it bears repeating, listen, this budget is totally fake. It's not going to happen. There has not been an act. It's a messaging BUDGDGET. That's all that has passed Congress. I want to say since two thousand and not maybe two thousand and seven, the last time that the president

delivered a budget. They held hearings on the budget and then they passed it in full. Our budgeting system is a gigantic mass, basically been dead since the days of Obama. So I think people should understand how this is basically a campaign. That's exactly right. It's a messaging document staking out his position, which is high taxes on the rich, expand the social safety net. The Republican position heading into the debt ceiling showdown is quite different. Let's go and

put this up on the screen. So this is also the New York Times. They say House GOP prepares to slash federal programs in coming budget showdown, with social Security and medicare off the table. Conservatives are focusing on a wide range of smaller programs as a clash with Biden and Democrats looms. So they have taken off the table after initially sort of like some of them were flirting with it, but they have now taken off the tables

are security and Medicare. I think Trump was probably very influential on that, as well as honestly Biden in the State of the Union, who when they all freak down, Oh, of course, we don't cut Social Security Medicare, even though we've been trying to do that for decades and decades and decades, they kind of back themselves into a corner on that one. So those have been put off the table.

And they also don't want to really cut the defense budget other than some like minor line item for a like diversity initiative, which basically amounts to next to nothing in terms of the actual amount of money you would save. So since they put those big pieces on the table off the table, that means that they have to deeply slash basically everything else. What they are talking about here

in this article. In particular, they say it includes a forty five percent cut to for and aid, adding work requirements for food Stamp and Medicaid beneficiaries, forty three percent cut to housing programs, including phasing out Section eight. All together cutting the FBI's counter intelligence budget by nearly half. I think I could probably get behind that piece of it and eliminating Obamacare expansions to Medicaid to save tens of billions of dollars. Nearly forty states have accepted that

Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. About twelve million people benefit from that. So what they're proposing here is effectively cutting healthcare for twelve million Americans, among a lot of other cuts. So that's the position that they've found

themselves at. And we've been talking about Listen, if you're taking entitlements and defense off the table, like the math doesn't really work out, you basically have to kill the entire rest of the federal budget in order for this to come together with the math that they want, right.

I think it's important for people to understand that too, which is like, if you really do want to get serious about it and you don't want to cut defense, like, there's really no way to do it without impacting a lot of American programs which are actually broadly popular amongst Republicans. There's a reason that forty how many states voted for Republicans a lot more than four or yeah, a lot

less than ten or a lot more than ten. You tend that haven't expanded Medicaid, and that's because it's actually very popular, especially in the South, with a lot of governors who have quietly kind of used it for expansion. I would just say that, and it does not necessarily fit within the spirit of don't touch Social Security and Medicare because Medicaid is also used increasingly also by a lot of Republican voters. So that's one that I would know.

And it's popular too, by the way. Yeah, I mean, look, healthcare is popular. Don't know why. It's exactly difficult for people to get their minds around that broadly in terms of the budget too. Even with the GOP one, it's the same thing as a messaging campaign document. It doesn't mean anything like much of this is not going to happen. I increasingly looking at these two documents, I'm curious what you think. I think we're just going right back to seaquestration.

There is no for people who don't know what sequestration is. It basically is off the board percentage cuts against It's like a haircut across the federal government, including with the defense budget. And it's one of the ways that they were able to square it during the Obama years, and it's because there was just no there was no agreement on anything. All they could agree to fund the government

was basically haircutting all of federal spending. And when you do that, it broadly impacts all programs across the board. So I don't see a way that we get through all of this without just going right back towards it. And by the way, sequestration was very unpopular. People in the military hated it, people domestic programs hate Republicans hated it, Democrats hated it, And that's part of the reason why I was the only compromise. I don't know, I genuinely

don't know how it gets resolved. And the deadline is I mean, it's it's the summer, so this is not far away. And the Republican caucus, obviously in the House, they have a very small majority, so it's not just getting agreement with the Democrats, who you know, are disgusted with the idea of taking the country's economy hostage to force any spending cuts through. So that's the you know,

that's the big barrier. But even within their own caucus, this is an initial sort of like high level plan, but when you actually get to the nitty gritty and people start realizing like, oh, this is going to hurt this project in my district. This is going to hurt this program in my district. My constituents are going to be furious if they lose their healthcare and they start

blaming me. That becomes very dicey as well. And then you have some hardliners in the Republican Caucus who are like, I'm not voting for a debts only increased period period, end of story. I don't care how, I'm just not doing it, period. So I genuinely we do not know how this is going to be resolved, and that's why we're continuing to focus on it, because it's this thing that's sort of hanging out there as a real threat to the economy and a major political like blow up

in the near future, and there is no clear resolutions. No, there isn't a clear resolution. That's an important point for everybody to understand too, which is that we could very certainly get to some sort of debt breach. One of the reasons why I don't think it will matter is that just think about it, you know, you may eventually What would happen is and also McCarthy shot himself in

the foot with the motion to vacate. All the Democrats would need to do is force a vote onto the floor through some legislative chicanery, and then you could get some moderate Republicans to join the Dems to push through a debt sealing package. The only question is whether Hakim Jefferies would let the Democrats do that. But I do think that if we came down to some showdown and he had only ten Republicans doing the holdout, I think there are enough Dems who are like, look, we're not

going to crash the economy, let's just pass. So you think there'll be some sort of a like what do they call that from a legally blonde what's the petition? Oh, discharge petition? Yes, well, discharge petition is a little bit different. I think discharge petition is through a committee, but it is similar principle in terms of given the rules that McCarthy set forward. If people don't know the history of the original debt ceiling fight, this happened all the time.

Bayiner would go to Pelosi and be like, listen, I can't pass this thing without you, so I'm going to bring it to the floor, you bring, you bringing some of your people in far left. Yeah, right. Problem is but that's the issue is because they made it so easy to toss McCarthy. If he does make a deal with them, he will know that that's the end of

his speakers. It's possible, and that's why it's so that's why the positions are so hardened, and it's so difficult to see the way that they get out of this. The Republicans are clearly going to they're either really actually serious and comfortable with breaching the debt ceiling and whatever fallout may occur from that, or they're going to great lengths to bluff in that regard. Let's go and put this last piece up on the screen, because they have gone.

They have taken what they describe as an step on preparing for federal default. And basically what they're doing here is something called debt prioritization, where they're taking all of the hour running millions of payments that the federal government puts out and they're trying to say, all right, well, we'll keep paying these ones if we breach the debt ceiling,

but not those ones. And they're trying to come up with like what does that whole process look like ultimately, because they want to either signal like we're serious, we're not worried about going breaching the debt ceiling, We've got a plan in place, or because they want to bluff and want to convince everybody that they're actually serious and try to force cuts that way. Well, it's one of

those where this is a big fight. One of the things that in the previous era they realize is that if you give the executive the authority, because they have incoming revenue, they could distribute it the way that they would want to. This would be a way for Congress to bigfoot the Treasury Department say no, if we go into default, you're going to spend money exactly the way that we want to. We won't let you support social programs. You have to only do like debt payoffs or whatever,

which have to be a giveaway to Wall Street. Which is funny, yeah, but huge giveaway to Wall Street. I mean it would if they go forward with it would be huge political It would be a disaster for the economy and no one should cheer for it. It would be a political gift to Democrats because they can say, oh, you're paying off the like wealthy bondholders, but you're letting kids go hungry and like stripping people's healthcare. How is that going to look for the Republican Party? So in

any case, it's a mess. I don't know how it's going to be resolved, and everybody's sort of like staking out their positions right now. Yeah, good luck. Okay, have a little bit of elon Twitter government news which is quite interesting. And I'm not one hundred percent sure what to make of all of this, so just put the facts upon the screen for you. Let's go and put this on up from the Wall Street Journal, the FTC,

that's the Federal Trade Commission, led by Lena Khan. Their Twitter investigation sought Elon Musk's internal communications, including journalists names. Documents obtained by a House panel shed light on the probe into Twitter's compliance with a settlement. Let me go and read a little bit of this to you. They say.

They demanded Twitter turnover internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed info about layoffs, citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company's ability to protect users. Documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal show they go on to say in twelve letters sent to Twitter and lawyers, the FTC asked the company to identify all journalists granted access to company records and provide info about the launch

of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service. They're also seeking to depose mister Musk in connection with the probe. Now, the core of what they say are their concerns here are whether Twitter is holding up their end of the agreement that they have already with the FDC, because there's already a consent order in place with regards to keeping users information private. I'm somewhat sympathetic to that end, especially given that, I mean, Twitter has been a shit show,

like keeps crashing, having problems. Listen, it's easy forget that Twitter has long had a lot of technical issues, but they have definitely accelerated in the Elon Musk era. So I think it's reasonable for the FTC to be, like, you holding up your end of the deal here, are you actually protecting users privacy in the way that you're

supposed to. However, the part that is very, very troubling from a First Amendment perspective is them demanding the names of journalists who were given access to Twitter information and also you know, wanting to know the specifics of those communications and exactly what was provided. So that was actually my take. So the more I read into it, I was like, is this a political persecution of Elon? Like

what's happening here? It's actually kind of complicated. So, as you alluded to, there is a consent degree and the reason why is that back in twenty eleven, there was a consent order between FTC and Twitter that barred it from misrepresenting how its individual's contact information would be stored. So they did not disclose that they for years had actually fed information including phone numbers and email addresses. This is before any time that Twitter was taken over by Elon.

Those were used ostensibly for account security purposes two factor authentication. They were using that data without our consent and feeding it into their advertising tools, so linking our phone numbers with stuff that we had signed up before on our iPhone so they could better serve us ads. They had actually had to pay one hundred and fifty million dollar fine, and between twenty and thirteen and twenty nineteen, Twitter had told users that it was collecting their information only to

enable multi factor authentication measures on their accounts. According to the DOJ complaint, the company did not notify any users. Actually remember this because I never was notified either that this information would be used to help sell ads. So this is called a deceptive behavior tactic that affected up to one hundred and forty million people, and it was directly admitted to by then Chief Privacy offer officer over

at Twitter. Actually, what this really underscores to me is, like I said, at first, I was like, I feel like this is BS, They're just going after Elon. But when I read into it, this is actually part of the mess that he bought. And I'm not quite sure that he understood that there was this consent degree which they were operating under, where the DOJ basically has the right with the FTC to come in and slap you with massive fines if you are not abiding by that

same system. It also calls into the question with Twitter Blue and some of the other personal data, he basically is going to have to prove that all of the info that we willingly provide to Twitter is properly disclosed to us how that info is used. And the only reason why I think it's possibly he could be in trouble is there's just not a lot of employees working on this stuff. They may not even even known when

they bought the company. Yeah, that this is kind of the stuff that you have to disclose, and this is the legal nightmare that you walk into with a lot of these social media companies. And clearly like the layoffs have been very aggressive and also very haphazard. There was a whole exchange that unfolded on Twitter that I'm sure some of you saw, where there was a guy it was like, hey, am I still an employer or not? Because I don't know. I didn't get any notification, but

I don't have an email. There was a kind of an ugly back and forth. Ultimately Elon had to end up apologizing this guy. And I don't think you should have apologized. Well, I think he was worried about a lawsuit. It was one hundred percent worried about a lawsuit because he was you know, he was like, I don't know whether what he said about this man was true or not, but it was very ugly and so he ultimately had to apologize and was like he's considering coming back to

work for us. So anyway, it's just a sign that the layoffs were done in a very brute force like kind of a way, and so it's not crazy to think that some of the people who were in charge of overseeing the implementation of this consent decree may no longer be there. Let's return those to the journalist's question. I think this is probably the single most one. It is not in the and we've done quite a bit

of defense here for Lenacon. It is not in the business of the United States government to say, quote, why the FTC needs to know the identity of journalists who are engaging with Twitter. As their lawyer says, there is no logical reason why the FTC, on the basis of user privacy, needs to analyze all of Twitter's personnel decisions. And there's no logical reason why they need every single

internal Twitter communication about Elon Musk. So this is where a government overstep almost certainly could be one, and with the journalist one where I'm sorry, I don't care who you are, what administration, whether good work you have done, it is not in your business to be subpoenaing and looking at the private communications to Twitter and its journalists, because that actually would look like retribution for publishing the Twitter files. There was also no violating a consent degree.

Crystal is one thing. Yeah, journalist communications is a whole other pie. Hundred percent agree. And there's another piece here, which is, of course the media angle, which is, you know, the brave defenders of the First Amendment. Many outlets just left out that part right of all of this, like they just didn't mention that, Like, oh and by the way, they asked for all of these details about the journalists they were communicating with, they just left that out, not

to mention that. So, I mean, basically no mainstream outlets actually covered any of the revelations from the Twitter files anyway, and so which was disgraceful and insane. Given that Twitter is really important, there's a lot of interest in it. What happened there previously is really important. What's happening there currently is really important, especially in terms of like elite shaping of national opinion. So a lot of media failures here,

very clear, and a lot of media hypocrisy here. Very cool. Oh yeah, absolutely put the next one up there too, please on the screen, which is that actually that suffered after a basically a shutdown of the website for a while where you basically could not link out to different websites. Elon said, quote, a small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason, will ultimately need a complete rewrite. So he's blaming basically

the previous engineers at Twitter. It's actually, I mean, certainly possible. Maybe from what I have heard, it's not even just Twitter, but many of the most important systems. Remember we found out with the no tam thing with the FAA, where they're like, a single code change can bring down the entire thing. People were like, you would be shocked at how many massive corporate, multi billion dollar corporations are architecture this way where literally just one guy accidentally presses one

thing in the entire site can shut down. So yeah, I mean, who knows whether it has somebody to do with the layoffs or with the code stack, but that probably does not help because if the code sack is so brittle, if they don't have as many employees who are working on maintaining the databases and the security, that also could lead to problems for you privacy wise, if you're vulnerable for sure attack to you know, like a yes, some sort of phishing attack or a data breach or

anything like that that would really be a devastating blow to it and zooming out from Twitter. This is a this Remember we used to talk to Gigisone who actually her nomination just just got new blown up by Joe Manchin. But anyway, she used to talk to us about how, you know, it's the penalties on companies for like keeping their systems so insecure that people's private, private data can

be breached all the time, Like it's very low. I am very much in favor of there being a lot more penalties and a lot more scrutiny over the way that companies protect their data. So in that way, I'm sympathetic. But yeah, the journalists piece absolutely not. And it's shameful that the media just ultimately goes along with it and

doesn't say anything. One last piece because I look this up about the ounages on Twitter under Elon, because as I said before, like Twitter has I think it's probably true that Twitter's technology has always been in his word, brittle, because there have been certainly outages in the past, but they seem to have escalated during the Elon era when they have had so many layoffs. You had on January twenty third, Android users couldn't load new tweets or post them.

February eighth, error message told users they were over the daily limit for sending tweets for a while. On February fifteenth, tweets just stop loading. On February eighteen, the timeline broke, replies its beard. On March one, the timeline stopped working, and then you had this configuration change leading to these

issues on Monday. Yeah, exactly correct. So anyway, it could be a big problem for Elon and the top line one on the journalism front is if you actually stand for the First Amendment, this is something you're supposed to speak out against. But of course, because it's Matt Tayebe and Barry Wise involved, they're like, oh no, we you know, we're not just going to keep one of us. We're just going to keep our power. We're not employed by

the New York Times, so they don't count bullshit. They would they would have a five alarm fire if that ever happened to them, fair, especially if it happened under the Trump administration. Imagine. Okay, so this is really really fascinating. So an op ed in the New York Times. You know, we've been trying to closely follow what's going on with AI, what's going on with chat GPT, bang, all of that stuff.

So Nom Chomsky, in conjunction with two others wrote an op ed for The New York Times about their view of these large language models, including Google's Barred and Microsoft's Sydney. Let's go and put this up on the screen from

the New York Times. The headline here is Noam Chomsky the false promise of chat GPT, and their view is essentially, you know, there's a lot of sensationless headlines about chat GPT and about what all of this means for the future, and people even sort of, you know, insinuating that they're not sentient, but they're getting close to having that sort of human reasoning and understanding that's much more complex and much more sophisticated than anything we've seen before. And these

three are really pumping the brakes on that notion. Now. Nom Chomsky, being a linguist, a language expert, looking at the ways that what chat GPT is doing is fundamentally different from the way that humans speak and reason and the way that human you know, even morality works. Let me read you a little bit of this so you

can get a sense of it. It's very thought provoking. Honestly, I don't know what I think about all of these things, so that's why I just want to put all the views on the table as we sort of sort through what is what and what it means for the future. They say open AI's Chat, GPT, Google's Bard, and Microsoft

Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it, and become increasingly proficient and generating statistically probable outputs such as

seemingly human like language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence, that long prophecied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory, but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight,

artistic creativity, and every other distinctively human faculty. And that's the part they really push back on on the piece they go on that day may come, but it's done, is not yet breaking. Contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments, the is this borgesian I don't know what that word is. I think I look that way. I believe that is a reference to a philosopher, Okay, the American Argentinian writer Jorge

Luis Borgess. Okay, I'm probably saying it or Jessean revelation will go with of understanding has not and will not, and we submit cannot occur if machine learning programs like chat GPT continue to dominate the field of AI. However useful these programs might be in some narrow domains, we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these

programs can do. Encoding the with ineradicable defects. They talk about a number of areas where they see them as really deficient and you know, not even close to approximating what a human mind can do. One of them is on morality, and you can see this in some of the fights over like you know, they're framed as like always chat, GPT, woke or whatever. But the deeper level

question is any morality is programmed in by humans? Exactly? Yeah, And I actually thought there was a really poignant part where he says, quote, the human mind is not like chat GPT and his ILK, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system

that operates with small amounts of information. It seeks not to infer brute correlations amongst data points, but to create explanations. He points to how a young child acquiring a language is developing unconsciously, automatically and speedily from actually minuscule amounts of data from grammar and a stupendously faciphisticated system of

logical principles and parameter So, I don't know. I'm not sure exactly which of these areas that I fall onto, but yeah, one quote I found especially important from Chonsky was this quote, the human mind is not like chatch ebt and its ILK, a lumbering statistical engine or pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question.

On the contrary, the human mind is surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information. It seeks not to infer brute correlations amongst data points, but to create explanations. So I actually thought it was a really interesting piece the way that he lays it out. And I'm of two minds. On the one hand, you know, I believe very much in technology, very much in the

ability for technological innovation to surprise us. And sometimes I think it's difficult for people to even conceive of what it would look like in the future. You know the famous Henry four quote where he's like, if I'd ask people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses, because they couldn't even conceive of like what a combustible

automobile would look like. On the other we should also have some hubris about like, oh, our human mind, which has evolved over millions of years through selective evolution, and you know, in a very complex process across billions and billions of people that have lived now throughout the world, can be so easily replicated through a statistical pattern recognition regime. I actually thought he was correct, which is, yeah, I think in some areas like rote data computer programming things

that are completely linear that don't require as much creativity. Totally. I think he's right. Those those are the ones where it will be most effective. But in terms of like a full scale takeover, well, I'm not so sure. On the other hand, you could take up matrix point of view where our humanity and our like you know, quote unquote efficiency actually keeps us away from operation at the most efficient level, which would enable us to have takeover.

So I really don't know which way I stand on it. Yeah, you know, I was reminded as I was reading this of Derek Thompson front of the show interviewed Kevin Bruce of The New York Times, who is the one who had that really bizarre like Sydney conversation where the chat GPT being Microsoft thing starts professing its love and everyone's like,

oh my god, what is going on here? So anyway, Derek was interviewing Kevin and he asked him this question, which I thought was a really good one, which is, you know, with the self driving cars, it has turned out to be very very, very very difficult. Yes, to get the last pieces, you can get it like ninety five percent of the way there, But then there are parts of driving that effectively require in the moment human

judgment of ambiguous situations and novel situations. And so he asked him, do you have kind of the same similar type problem with chat GPT where you can get like a lot, you can do some things that are really impressive and get a lot of the way there, but there's this last ten percent that is just an almost unsolvable problem. And it seems to me that that's kind

of what Chomsky is laying out here. And it's not like, Okay, if you keep going, you know, what's the new version of it's going to be like chat GPT four whatever that's coming out. As long as you are using this basic model of just taking in all of this these inputs and then using a probability to predict what the next like thing for the chat bot to say would be, there's going to be hard limitations and you will never

get all of the way there. There will always be a limit to how far you're able to go, even as you improve it and improve it and improve it. And that seems correct to me. Now, on the other hand, I think that even with what they've designed here, it could be potentially revolutionary you don't have to get all of the way there for it's still to be a revolutionary technology. And I mean that in both the positive

and negative sense. One really clear implication to me is with regard to the industry of journalism, where if you have chat GPT able to do a decent job, a you know, ninety ninety five percent decent job of aggregating all of the information about a news story that's out there and putting it on the search results rather than people having to click through. Well, that one innovation in and of itself completely upends the business model of journalism.

So I guess I see both the limitations, but I also think that even as it exists now, it could be potentially transformational in certain space. So I actually think the perfect analogy is self driving. As you said, So, I've been in a Tesla that was going full self driving, and look, I'm gonna be honest, like it was a mess. And the reason why is it was not able to compute.

And this is I'm talking on city streets, not a highway, so we're talking like it didn't know, for example, that one lane is closed during rush hour, so it goes you into that lane. People are park there during this time, and so then it has to wait to move over. And then in terms of turning left, it didn't read properly. But there were a bunch of different lights here in Washington area. We have these ridiculous systems, and so it

reads one as a green light, which is beyond the green. Now, look, these are all problems that maybe can be solved, but also what you said was important. That doesn't mean though, that the car can't still drive itself for hours on the highway. That's pretty nice. That's actually a huge change to the driving experience. So if you're driving five hours and you only have to drive, and you're driving almost entirely on a highway, you're only actually driving for let's

say ten percent of that time. That revolutionizes the road trip. That doesn't mean that it changes your daily commute in the city. So that's one of those where you can actually still go very far. The technology is very impressive, but you're not one hundred percent of the way. I no longer have to look at my car type thing, which was the original promise. So I actually probably just

more need to calibrate your expectations. So one projection in terms of upending the workforce is like lawyers, who a lot of what their work is doing is like taking some previous document that they use for some previous situation, going through it, inserting in just like the new company name or the new language into this already pre prepared document. An AI could probably do that pre effectively, but even within that, you're still going to have instances where it's

a little complex. You got to actually rework this paragraph a lot. It doesn't quite make sense because this company was different from this company, and their situation is a little bit different in ways that are nuanced and complicated and that an AI isn't really prepared to be able to handle. In the same way that you know, the self driving thing falls apart when there's a sign that just got put up that day of like, well if you drive in this lane, you know you're gonna get

a tay or whatever. So I think it will still require a human being to then go in and look at like, Okay, well did they get everything? Did they Does this make sense? Et cetera. But even just the simple fact of automating all of that early grunt work, well, that's going to profoundly change the legal profession because instead of all of those hours that they spend typically going through and like reworking these documents, ninety percent of that done by the AI, and then you're just coming in

after the fact and doing like an edit job. So that's as best as I can figure these things out. That's how I see it right now. But I could be totally wrong about any of this and what it means and where it's going. Well, that's why it's fun. It's fun to be on the phone. That's why it's fascinating. Yeah, it feels like it's like nineteen ninety five and you're like eighty Internet. What is Internet? Yeah, there's actually some

why I recommend people go and watch. There's all these documentaries from the nineties about how people thought the Internet was going to be, and there was this two parallels. There was like web Internet and then the Information Super Highway about how you would use your TV to like stream devices and they were onto something. But the idea was that the TV would be like hooked up to

the dial up and there would anyway. It's really fascinating that's how Bill Gates actually thought that the Internet was going to go. So people should go back and watch, you know how as wrong as they were, you could see how you know it was a reasonable idea at the time. All right, let's go move on, doctor Fauci. More lab league stuff happening both on Capitol Hill and in terms of the fallout from that new Energy Department report.

The first, most importantly doctor Fauci in retirement, but of course going back to his old home over on CNN, Anderson Cooper, to his credit, actually asked Fauci about the Energy Department finding that it almost certainly was a lab leak. I guess with low confidence, but the FBI says it with moderate confidence, and Fauci really tries to wiggle his way out of this one. Let's take a listen. Are

the FBI and Energy Department right about the lab leak? Well, it's very tough to tell that, Anderson, because they're talking about information that they have that we don't have privy to, so we don't really know. They have made opinions on low confidence from the Department of Energy and moderate confidence I believe from the FBI. So I don't think there's a really correct and verifiable answer to your question. It's

just still remains unknown. How important is to figure it out? Well, it is, Anderson, because you want to make sure that whichever of those alternatives it is, that we do whatever we can to prevent it from happening in the future, because we have had outbreaks before. I mean, we had saws COVID one, which was clearly shown to go from a bat to a civic cat to a human. And if there's a possibility, which there is certainly we haven't

ruled it out of they're being lablik. There are things that you can do to prevent the recurrence of these things. For example, the data showing that it might be a natural occurrence would make you want to be very careful about the animal human interface and make sure that we have strict regulation of bringing animals into wet markets. If it turns out to be a lablik, you want to be very much more stringent in the controls of the experiments that you allow to be done. So it is

relevant to understand whether or not we ever will know. Anderson, I'm not sure, just a complete weasel and still pushing the natural origin hype. That is what drives me mad. I mean, still the Chinese still are not pushing wet market. He's the last man on earth. Who believes in the West. I mean, here's what we have said for a long time.

If there is even a possibility that is either of these things, you should be doing the things that he says, putting in the controls, putting in the regulations, because you know it's possible it came from natural love, and you know it's possible it came That's really all you need

to know. And so for me, the part of the end where he's like, we just may never know, We won't know because of you, that's the giveaway of like, he doesn't want anyone to do anything until you have one hundred percent proven that it is, you know, definitively smoking gun, that it came out of a lab. And so that's now his dodge because it's now too far down the road where you can't just say no, absolutely, I was in a lab leak, et cetera, et cetera.

So now he's got to say, well, we just may never know, and if we do find out, then of course we should do something. But we probably we had one chance at a smoking gun, and it was January of twenty twenty when he decided to cover up the lab leak. That was it that's the only chance that we ever had, because if he had not used his influence to prompt that investigation and that paper to cover up the lab leak, then the US government might have been able to get some of the early intelligence coming

out of China done the original research. At this point, the Chinese have totally muddied the waters. They've covered it up. Now they're going after Elon and anybody else who wants to talk about Lab leak and lo and behold, gain of function research is chugging right along here in the

United States. We are spending more on gain of function research today as a country, both from private and public sector, than we did before the pandemic, and not a single new safety mechanism that has been put into place because of the actions of this man. That is why I'm mean watching that it's maddening. And also what really pisses me off too is Anderson and the people who happened to interview him, they such a softball way of like are they right? Are they not ask him about the paper,

ask about the email, ask asking why originally at all? Yes, like the original call, you said this. Then May of twenty twenty, you went on National geographic and said there's no chance of a lab leak. Now you're saying it's open. What changed, doctor Fauci. This is what That's what an

actual interview with this man would look like. They let him skate completely, and you know, a lot of it is actually really coming to the four because over on the House side, the Republicans have started a new committee and this is the second part here, but this committee to investigate the lab leak and the possible origins of COVID nineteen already kicking off with a huge bang because they interviewed yesterday doctor Robert Redfield, the former CDC director

under Donald Trump, who was outrageously smeared under the Trump administration and who has maintained that it was a lab leak from the very beginning. And he outlined to the committee the specific problems with gain of function and exactly how he believes that COVID nineteen was unleashed upon the world. Let's take a listen to what he said. So one other path of questioning for you, doctor Rifflin. Proponents of this research claimant may result in vaccines or maybe even

stop a pandemic. Doctor Redfield has gained function, created any life saving vaccines or therapeutics. To your knowledge not to my knowledge, has Gain of Function stopped a pandemic? In your opinion? Now, in the contrary, I think it probably caused the greatest pandemic or world of scene. Do you find any tangible benefits to Gain of function recent search

at this time? I personally don't, but I do want to stress I think the men and women that supported are people of good faith because they truly believe it's going to lead to a potential benefit. I disagree with that assessment. Where's that line? Wow? Former CDC director says that Gain of Function research at the Wuon Lab caused the greatest pandemic that the world has seen in one hundred years. This is madness, and it is completely ignored outside of either right wing media or people here on

the show. You know, I even look back, I forgot how badly that they smeared Redford. They called him an apparatic. Of course, because it was twenty twenty. They decided to call him a racist because apparently black employees at the CEC weren't advancing enough. Because that's what matters most when they're in the middle of a goddamn pandemic, and it's like, when I look back at how they treated this man, and also how his initial response with the Sanjay Gooped

interview two years ago. Now at this point he says, yeah, I think it came out of the WU Lab. Same thing, racist, a Trump apparatric. He's a legitimate virologist, epidemiologist and scientist. I'm not saying he did a great job during the pandemic, but at the very least he was privy to the intelligence and he has maintained it now from the beginning.

And it's like I read the Washington Post and you get these joker virologists who come out of nowhere from some random ass university who happened to be funded by the NIH and they're like, hey, it's still probably on natural origin. He was the CDC director, he was literally there. You cannot tell me that he doesn't have more of an authority. Where's his op ed in any of these papers?

When it comes to gain a function, it seems like there was a pretty basic question here which I literally haven't heard anyone asked until this moment, which is what are we getting out of this? Right? Has this stopped anything? What are we getting Okay, cost benefit, Let's do the analysis. The cost is it potentially caused millions of people to die worldwide and the unleash the worst pandemic you know in the history of modern world, or however he phrased it. Okay,

that's the cost. Okay. The benefit apparently nothing nothing, no benefit, nothing provable, nothing clear. What are we doing here? Like, it's so basic And even even if you are still like on the fence, maybe it was one maybe Okay, I think that's fair, given that you have multiple different assessments, different groups that are saying that's that's fair. But clearly the risk here is absolutely immense, and based on what he's saying, the benefit is a bunch of scientists whose

careers have been made by it. Yeah, that's effectively the benefit. Well, and a ton of money. That's really what it is is money. There is billions of dollars flowing out of the NIH from the NGOs, the Global Virum Project into labs across this country and across the world that is funding exactly this type of research, and there's no congressional scrutiny. The former CDC director is laughed out of the room. People are going to call this a right wing hearing.

I mean, look, he's literally the goddamn CDC director. No coverage, you know, where is he on? And have him on Anderson Cooper's show. Let him and doctor Fauci appear on a joint panel, two former public health officials. They will never do, and of course it would. Yeah, listen, by the way, doctor Fauci, You're welcome here on the show anytime.

I'm sure you'll take us up on that invitation. But this is so important, I think for people to understand, and it was a very very important moment from that hearing. And of course I didn't see a single, not one scrap of coverage of that from anybody in the mainstream press. And that's the most insane part to me. Amazing, all right,

Tiger were looking at well. Tucker Carlson has gotten quite a bit of attention recently for his release of previously unseen and bizarre January six footage which shows Capitol police officers escorting this so called QAnon shaman around. And while I believe that is an important story, there might be an even more important one that most are ignoring. His new litmus test for candidates in the GOP primary specifically on Ukraine. Let's take a listen to the questionnaire that

he is sent to current and prospective candidates. But we've written a questionnaire for Republicans who may decide to jump into the race for president in twenty twenty four. It's a very simple questionnaire. Here are the questions. First, is opposing Russia in Ukraine a vital American national strategic interest? Is it really important or not? And if so why? Two? What specifically is our objective in Ukraine? And how we know when we've achieved it? What's our goal? And how

are we going to know when we've won? If we don't know that, we should slow down? Three? What is the limit of funding in material military equipment you would be willing to send to the government of Ukraine. We're sending fighter geest. Should we send nukes? Four? Should the United States support regime change in Russia? Everyone hates Putin? Should we kill him? Is that a good idea? What

happens next? Five? Given that Russia's economy and currency are stronger than they were before the war, do you still believe that US sanctions have been effective? Everyone assumes that sanctions work. Do they? And finally, do you believe if the United States faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia.

Really simple, what are the stakes here? So we sent these questions to people who have announced or seemed like they might announce, Donald Trump, Nikki Hayley, Vivik Ramaswami, Ron DeSantis, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence, Tim Scott, Glenn Youngkin, Christian and New Christinom, Greg Abbott, Chris Christy, Asa Hutchinson, and John Bolton. We sent these questions with respect. We sincerely want to know.

We sincerely believe the public has right to know their position on the biggest issue in the world right now, which is will there be a third World War? And we said we'll give you on Monday to reply. That seemed fair and at that point we'll let you know what they say. Okay, So to review, is opposing Russia and Ukraine to our strategic interest? And why? What is our objective in Ukraine? How do we know when we've won? What is the limit of funding and material of what

you're willing to send to Ukraine? Should the United States support regime change in Russia? Do you believe that sanctions have been effective against Russia? And do you believe the United States faces the risk of nuclear war with Russia. Reasonable questions. No matter what you think of Tucker and

important ones, Will we get real answers? Probably not, And his questions here are important for two obvious reasons, one being that he's probably the most popular commentator on all of Fox and if any, probably holds the most sway with Republican primary voters. Two, every candidate, either in the race or who looks like they might jump in, has been weasling their way through answers on Ukraine with no specifics. Trump, for instance, has claimed for nearly a month that he

could bring peace in Ukraine in twenty four hours. But, as he said a seapack, he cannot tell us how. He said this also an interview. Take a listen. Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, I will have the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine settled. It will be settled quickly. Go I will get the problem solved, and I will get it solved in rapid order, and it will take me no longer than one day. I know exactly what to say to each of them. I

got along with very well with him. It really has to be done from the office of the president, and you have to get them both in a room, and there are things you can say to each one of them which I won't reveal now, which WI we'll guarantee that this war will end immediately. So basically it moounts to trust me. I'll figure it out, but I can't

tell you. Given the fact that Trump actually sent Javelin missiles to Ukraine and escalated the conflict in Afghanistan after he promised to pull out in twenty seventeen, hired John Bolton and Mike Pompeo. At this point, that's well trodden

ground with all things Trump. Who knows, you'll find out when you find out the thing is Trump at least has rhetorically opposed increase aid to Ukraine, He's called for peace in the conflict, and he's generally seemed skeptical of the US paying the vast majority of the weapons cost while the Europeans sent a fraction. Sadly, he might be the most specific candidate right now on Ukraine, So then

let's look at the rest of the field. The obvious and really only real contender against Trump is Ron DeSantis, who recently made waves on Ukraine after Biden's latest visit to Kiev. Let's take a listen to exactly what he said. Well, they have effectively a blank check policy with no clear strategic objective identified, and these things can can escalate. And I don't think it's in our interest to be getting into proxy war with China, getting involved over things like

the border lands or over crimea. So I think it would behoove them to identify what is the strategic objective that they're trying to achieve. But just saying it's an open ended blank check that is not acceptable. So main takeaways. Desanta says a quote blank check policy with no strategic objective identified, and the US has no interest in getting in a proxy war with Russia by all counts. That

is America first type rhetoric. But he also has an interesting pass on Ukraine, as previous journalists have identified desantas wanted to send weapons to Ukraine when he was a congressman, saying of Obama, quote, we in Congress have been urging the president. I've been or urging him to provide arms to Ukraine. They want to fight the good fight. They're not asking us to fight it for them. The President

has steadfastly refused. I think that's a mistake. He also said in December twenty seventeen, he was quote of the Reagan school that's tough on Russia while in a Fox and Friends interview, and he said Russia is a third rate military power. Though now now here's the thing. People can change their minds. That's completely fine, But Desanta's has also been all over the place on Ukraine. Even recently.

In a recent interview with the Times of London, DeSantis lost his cool when he was pressed on the actual difference is that he would have from Joe Biden on his policy in Ukraine. The interviewer writes, quote, I ask about Ukraine. He says that there's a critique of Biden. I think I'm sympathetic to it in the sense that it's in our policy just to do whatever Zelenski wants, or do we have a concrete idea of what we're trying to achieve exactly? He adds quote when I ask

him how it should be handled. Differently, he refers to Biden quote being weak on the world stage and failing at deterrence. But as that is not answering how it should be handled, I ask again, he does not have anything to add perhaps you should cover some other ground. I think I've said enough, so no specifics. Apparently very testy at being pressed. I guess fair enough. You're only a governor, you're not even an official candidate. But things need to get specific fast. On the other ones, it's

not too hard. Nikki Haley and Pike Bompeo, they have been trying to have their cake and eat it too. Haley, of course, refuses to criticized Trump. She's not kicking sideway, She's only kicking forward. Probably the dumbest lines I've ever heard.

But on Ukraine, her stance is actually pretty unambiguous. She has criticized Biden for not being tough enough on Russia, not expanding Russian sanctions, and in a most recent interview told Barry Weiss from The Free Press quote, I think it's up to us to tell people standing with Ukraine is standing for America. Pompeo, also, who despite serving as Trump's Secretary of State, has decided he somehow can differentiate himself from him, has also been dropping veiled hints at

his differences from Trump on Ukraine. Two days ago, he tweeted quote, Vladimir Putin should not be underestimated he wants to do the American people harm, which is why helping Ukraine is in our interest. He failed to mention anything about Ukraine at Seapack, as did Haley, but also has only been criticizing Biden first not sending enough aid to

the country. All of this is interesting and how it maps onto the primary and to some extent, whether Tucker Carlson view will prevail in the primary or the GOP establishment view. Almost all polling data that we have available to us tells us the Republican primary electorate in particular is turning fast against aid for Ukraine, with independence joining them. Only Democrats remain steadfast. But as we have learned through

the Trump years, rhetoric does not mean anything. Being specific and locking people into answers is what matters, and then whether they actually do any of that, which matters even more. For now, we're in wait and see mode. So I don't think anybody's going to actually answer this question here. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. Crystal,

what are you taking a look at? Well? Once upon a time, America was a land where it generally seemed like a rising tide could lift all boats. When American corporations thrive, they were able to invest in their workforce, creating a stable middle class, and they were able to invest in innovation, which created dynamism and more, thriving in

a virtuous circle. In that time, business leaders and politicians they had healthy debates about exactly who corporations were meant to serve the nation, the community, their shareholders, their workers, But pretty much no one took the view so that they should be run by the executive class for the

sole benefit of the executive class. Today, however, this perverse conception of corporations is destroying the health and vitality of our entire economy, creating bubbles based on fakery, robbing employees of fair compensation for their labor. In fact, new numbers underscore just how extreme and radical this modern form of corporation has actually become. Take a look at this as

from rolth Nader. He says stunning figure. The White House's National Economic Council reports that major corporations are spending about ninety percent of their earnings on stock buybacks and dividends. Ninety percent what's left for investment, not much unless these corporations are taking on debt, he says. Now, stock buybacks are exactly what they sound like. It's when a corporation buys back their own stock, it has the predictable impact

of at least temporarily goosing that company's stock price. So, rather than investing in innovation or expansion or their workforce, our largest companies are all funneling almost all of their cash right now into the pockets of wealthy shareholders and critically, their own executives, who derive most of their compensation from their stockholdings. It is a blatant CEO money grap Now.

I know the discussion on stock buybacks it can sound kind of wonky, but it is hard to overstate just what a damaging effect their near takeover of the marketplace has had on our entire nation. First of all, this stock buybacks make the stock market completely fake. In fact, they were deemed illegal market manipulation repeatedly in nineteen sixty seven,

in nineteen seventy and again in nineteen seventy three. It wasn't until the market radicals grab power under the Reagan administration that they were even allowed and legalized over the past nine years, stock buybacks have come to completely dominate public markets. Corporations plowed and eye popping three point eight trillion dollars into buying their own stocks. That was more than any other type of investor combine. Think about that.

The stock market it's supposed to theoretically reflect some underlying value. Instead it increasingly reflects just how much financial rigging corporations are willing to do. Second, stock buybacks reward financial engineering over actual productivity and innovation. Trump's massive corporate tax be guess they were theoretically supposed to unleash corporate research and productivity enhancements, expansions, jobs, employee pay raises, etc. Instead they

unleashed a flood of stock buybacks. In fact, in twenty eighteen, after the massive giveaway went into effect, only forty three percent of S and P five hundred companies recorded any research and development expenses at all. The majority of companies spent not a single penny on new innovation, and you

can see why it's a sick incentive structure. Why take a risk on building something new when you can just reward yourself and service the stockholders by artificially goosing your own stock price and a compelling example of exactly this, journalist Ronafarujar chronicles how Apple stock performed far better in years that stock buybacks were done than in the year that they revolutionized music with the release of the Apple iPod.

So if short term shareholder profits are all that matter, Apple is duty bound to engage in market manipulation, not to invent new products. Third, stock buybacks and rich executives and wealthy shareholders had the expensive workers fueling world historic inequality, and the legalization of stock buybacks. Combined with other ruggan eero radical reforms, things like crushing union, slashing taxes on the rich, and no holds barred free trade, they have

combined to create a second, more extreme Gilded Age. If you want to know why it feels like our whole society is coming unglued right now, this is a great place to start the hunt for both the causes and the culprits. Our national understanding of corporations has actually gone through a few different evolutions over the course of our nation's history. In the early days of our Republic, the

founding fathers had quite a complex relationship with corporations. Now, on the one hand, the early American project was effectively based on for profit corporations like the Virginia Company. Some of our early experiments in democracy and agitation for revolution. They were actually inspired by rights of representation that were granted not by a constitution, but by corporate charters those governed the colonies. On the other the founders were, of course,

deeply skeptical of concentrations of power. In his book We the Corporations, How American Businesses Won their Civil Rights, Adam Winkler writes about Sir William Blackstone of England, one of the most influential thinkers in corporations, whose writing on corporations is still cited regularly by our own Supreme Court. Blackstone explained that the enemies must serve a dual public and private purpose. They were not, as conceived of now, simply

for profit entities meant to enrich their owners. Instead, they must be quote for the advantage of the public, or else their charter would be completely denied. Now our founders too, believed that corporations must serve some public interest. According to the Atlantic, many early stock certificates bore an image a factory a car canal, representing the purpose of the corporation that issued them. It was a reminder that the financial

instrument was being put to productive use. Early corporations were chartered for a specific tasks. They building a canal. They had charters of limited duration, lasting either ten or forty years, and they were frequently terminated upon the completion of that specific task that they were chartered for. Now, after the Civil War, corporate advocates they used the courts to claim

greater and greater power for themselves. In fact, in a disgusting turn of events, at the same time that the rights of black people under the Fourteenth Amendment being stripped away and the Jim Crow regime architected, corporations were using the Fourteenth Amendment to great effect, grabbing for themselves new and unprecedented rights. Again for Adam Lan Winkler quote between

eighteen sixty eight, when the Amendment was ratified. In nineteen twelve, when a scholar sent out to identify every Fourteenth Amendment case heard by the Supreme Court, the justices decided twenty eight cases dealing with the rights of African Americans and in astonishing three hundred and twelve cases dealing with the

rights of corporations. Now, this brave new world of corporate rights led to the first Gilded Age and Robber Baron era, which allowed wealth inequality to skyrocket to previously unimaginable heights before being checked by the fallout of the Great Depression and FDR's New Deal era. The Reagan era would see corporate rule on s steroids, as he and all the administrations after him embraced new radical views on the role of corporations, now seen as exclusively meant to increase short

term shareholder value. Was under this new extreme philosophy that buybacks would be legalized and come to mistasticize into the economy eating menace that they are today. And in Washington, in spite of these shocking figures cited here by Ralph Nader, there seems to be little interest in change, in a sign of how timid and unequal to the task our current political leadership is. Rather than take the obvious step of just banning stock buybacks altogether, President Biden passed a

measly one percent tax on stock buybacks. It's had precisely the impact you would expect, which is absolutely nothing at all. He's now saying that companies which seek chips ACKed subsidies must forego stock buybacks for a period of five years, the limited reform impacting a small number of companies, and in his boldest stance, Bind's new budget calls for a still pitdling four percent tax on stock buybacks, which is also unlikely to do really much of anything at all.

Buybacks should be banned period end of According to Adam Winkler at the founding of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson warrant of quote the aristocracy of our money and corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. Our government is no longer challenged by moneyed corporations today. On the contrary, they're quite comfortable with rule by corporate power.

That ninety percent number stunned me. And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. So we have been tracking mass protests that have swept across the nation of Israel in response to current Prime Minister Netanyahu's attacks on the independent judiciary there. It's a fairly complex situation, so we wanted to get in an expert who has been following this closely to break down exactly what is happening.

So we're happy to welcome back to the show, Ken Roth. He is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch. Great to see you, Ken, good diseaser, good to be back, thank you. So just to set up a little bit of the context here, let's go and put this element up on the screen to give you a sense of how widespread these protests have become axios. Reporting that they have actually spread to the Israeli military, which is in

Maya is quite extraordinary. So can you just start with the basics here, Ken, of what Netanyahoo is trying to do and why there has been such resistance to it. Okay, well, Christal, maybe a good place to begin is to explain, you know, this may be too basic, but you know, why do you care about an independent judiciary? And you know, I think it's there's a temptation in a democracy to think, oh, democracy means elections, Democracy means majority rule, and obviously that's

an essential element of democracy, but that's not sufficient. Democracy also means that the majority is limited by your rights. You know, the government can't do anything, They can't censor you, they can't throw you in prison. There's certain things they can't do, and we depend on an independent judiciary to uphold those rights. We also depend on an and in judiciary to make sure that government officials are subject to

the law. That means the rule of law. So you can't have you know, a president or prime minister steal or you know, can meet crimes. They too are subject to the law. So these are essential elements of democracy, and that's why people are so exercised about what n'tagna who is now trying to do. He you know, he leads a very far right coalition, including you know, people who were considered you know, just beyond the pale a few months ago, and now our ministers. So this is

an extreme government. Natagnaho was desperate to put it together because he himself is trying to avoid corruption charges and he thought the best way to do that would be to become prime minister. Again, that meant he had to have a majority in the Knesset, and he now has a majority of sixty four seats in the one hundred

and twenty member Knesset. So that's the badrop. Now he is proposing in this bill to take two important steps that would undermine the ability of the judiciary to ensure that the government respects rights and abides by the rule of law. One is that he's proposing that the Kannesse, the parliament in Israel, could simply overturn any court rule

by a simple one vote majority. And so you can imagine court saying, no, you can't pass this law because that would be undermining freedom of expression, or you can't pass that law because that would be discrimination, and the canessset would say tough, We're just going to vote, you know, it could be sixty one to fifty nine, and we're going to overturn your ruling. So that is basically destroying

the concept of judicial review. It's saying that the Supreme Court does not have the power to enforce rights or to uphold the rule of law. And then on top of that, Natanya who is trying to change the way that judges are selected for the Screme Court. Currently there's a committee of nine that proposes appointments, and five of those nine people are not members of the government, so there's a good degree of independence here. They're either a

judges or members of our associations. And this is a way to again ensure that the government just doesn't stack the court with people who are going to then vote in favor of the government. Nowtayah who wants to change that. He wants to have his appointees make up a majority of this appointing committee so that he can gradually change the composition of the court to one that would be more attuned to what he's trying to do. Yep, so Ken, how does this map onto US relations I understand that

it has disrupted the visit of Secretary of Austin. How is the Biden administration reacting to this and how is this going to change the foreign political situation vis a the our relationships in the world's relationship with Israel. Well, what everybody is worried about is that, you know, if in fact, you have this far right Natanyahu government, unfettered by the rule of law, unscrutinized by an independent Supreme Court,

it could do whatever it wants. And so, you know, the things that people are worried about within Israel proper, They're worried that, you know, an increasingly religious religious government is going to start imposing its views on what still is you know, a significantly secular Jewish population in Israel, People who don't want to abide by the you know, the strict requirements of ultra Orthodoxy, and they're worried that

this somehow might be imposed. And so you can imagine what this would be, you know, say for same sex marriage, where the Court currently has been very positive on that. It has said, for example, there was a law on surrogacy and they it was originally passed so only single women could be surrogates, and they said, you know, no, it could be it could be a single man who wants to bring in a who wants to have a child.

It could be the same sex couple. You know, this is an example of how the Court is upholding you know, kind of basic rights, and they've been very good about upholding freedom of expression, freedom of the media. Suddenly that could all be out the window. You would have, you know, a government that could censor the media, that could start,

you know, undercutting basic rights for Israelis. Now, the big fear is what happens in the occupied territories, right and you know, we've already seen elements of this extreme government. They have declared nine illegal outposts suddenly legal. These are you know, settlements that are not even authorized by the Israeli government. It's worth noting that settlements themselves are illegal.

They violate what is known as Article forty nine of the Fourth Shiva conn which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied territory. So the settlements are clearly illegal. That basically are war crimes. The government is going ahead and legalizing, you know, declaring that it approves of morales. Now, even the existing Supreme Court has not

been willing to sort of address the issue. It's trying to duct the issue, so it's never declared, you know, whether they're legal or illegal because you know, frankly, to do that, it would have to declare them illegal if it was at all honest, So it just ducks the issue. But the fear is that Natanyahu now could try to annex broad parts of the West Bank. It could you know, just kind of expand Israel's boundaries into the occupied territory,

and that there'd be no court to stop that. So these are the kinds of things that would have, you know, a dramatic impact on Israel's standing in the world and certainly on US Israeli relations where you know, the United States in fact, just recently Anthony Blincoln and Secretary of State, you know, tried to gociate a six month pause in these kinds of actions, and within days Natanyahu had flouted it by preceding that this plan with respect to these

nine out posts. So you know, this is a government that needs to be scrutinized. You need an independence screen court. And if that is gone, who knows where it's going to go. We're already seeing you know that American Jews are increasingly unhappy with this government, and I anticipate that the US government as a whole is going to be

increasingly unhappy if it continues in this direction. Well, and there has also been fallout in the US Israel relationship over comments that were made by the Israeli finance minister. He called up for a Palestinian village in the West Bank to be quote wiped out. Can you talk to tell explain that situation and explain what the US response

has been and what you think that it should be. Yes, the finance minister is a man by the name of bezal Lal Smote Ridge, and he was talking about the Palestinian village of Huara, and this was the site initially of a place where Palestinian gunmen murdered to Israeli brothers from a nearby settlement who were driving through this Palestinian town. In revenge, settlers rampaged through this town of Huara, you know, set buildings on fire, destroyed large parts of the town.

And the Finance minister, when asked about this, you know, rather than condemning the violence, saying, you know, yes, the initial killings were wrong, but so is this rampage by settlers, which I should say, this rampage happened, you know, under the watchful eyes of the Israelian military, which did nothing to stop the settlers. But the finance minister, rather than say this is horrible, we don't take law into our own hands, he said they should have wiped out the village.

So you know, this is a minister advocating lawlesses. Now, you know, under pressure Natagnan, who is kind of you know, repudiated that a little bit. But this, this finance minister is supposed to be coming to the United States to sell Israeli bonds. And it's not clear at this point whether the US government is going to give him visa, whether he's going to be allowed to come. He's already's already clear that he's not going to get any official meetings.

But this is the kind of extremism that now populates the senior positions of the Natenna government, and it highlights all the more why we need an independent Israeli Supreme Court if these people are just not going to run rampant. You know, another person who is like this is a guy by the name of Gitamar ben Gevier, who leads

what's known as the Jewish Power Party. This is a member of N'atagnana, who's coalition and it's part of the government, and he's already been convicted, criminally convicted of supporting a terrorist group and of racist incitement. And that he's in the government, he's got a seat in the Knesset, part in Netaannaho's majority. So this is what we're dealing with

it and you know what this is. You know, frankly, many people think this is really about behind the scenes, is Netagnaho trying to avoid prison because, as I mentioned, net Taya, who is facing criminal charges for corruption the cases proceeding, and one thing that people fear if he pushes through this, you know, this undermining of the Supreme Court's independence, is that he could then get his majority in the Knissese to pass a law saying, for example,

you can't convict a sitting prime minister, or a sitting prime minister can't be removed momus or something like that. The existing Supreme Court would probably say no way that, you know, that's wrong, and might overturn it. But if the Supreme Court has been eviscerated, if the Canessic can just overturn the Supreme Court's ruling by one vote, none of this means anything Netagna, who then has his get

out of jail card forever. This lastly, just to to sort of circle back to where we started this, where we're talking about how these protests have even rocked the Israeli military, which is quite extraordinary. You know, how widespread is your sense that these protests actually are. You know, where is the population of Israel with regards to what Netna who is trying to do with regards to judiciary and does he care I mean that will that pressure

caused him to change course? Well, there have been huge demonstrations, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, which in a small country like Israel, like I saw a calculation that said that would be as if you know, eight million people took to the streets of that states. So these are really big strations. Now does Natagna who care? You know, if if somehow these demonstrations, you know, forced a member of his coalition to step down and he suddenly lost power,

yes he would care about that. But this is a really far right coalition. You know, they to determine to go ahead, and it's not clear you know what domestically can stops. You know, that's where pressure from the United States matters so much. And you know, the US government

has a terrible record of criticizing Israel. I mean, just recently, the UN Security Council was considering a resolution condemning the legal settlements, and the US State Department negotiated so that it could be turned into a mere presidential statement, which is non binding, because they just always try to soften criticism of Israel and didn't want to have to, you know,

veto the embarrassment of vetoing a resolution of the Security Council. So, I mean, the Biden administration has been horrible about criticizing Israel. Now they're becoming a bit more outspoken about this effort to undermine the judiciary. But this is you know, really just the tip of the iceberg, because you know, of course what goes on day today is very severe repression in the West Bank, East Drool, Slim and Gaza, and that barely gets mentioned from the Biden administration. Yeah. I

think that's all really well said. Thank you so much for taking some time to lay all of this out for us, because it's extraordinarily important. Thank you so much, Ken, Thanks for having me. That's a pleasure man, really good segment, so in depth. You're not going to see that anywhere else, so really appreciate it very thorough man. Thank you guys so much for watching. We really appreciate it. Enjoy the full show on Spotify. As we announce for all of

our premium members, we enjoy your support and look. Counterpoints did fantastic yesterday. Thank you guys for listening for watching. The show has been doing phenomenally well recently, so we appreciate you all so much. And all of the new people who are coming in we love you too. So there you go. We'll see you next week. See you guys next week.