4/12/23: Trump Hints US Blew Up Nordstream on Tucker, Tim Scott Joins Race, Elon Leaks Texts With Taibbi, Inflation, Gov Censor Tools Social Media, Biden's Title IX Rule, Rashida Tlaib Defends Assange, Marianne Williamson TikTok 2024

Welcome back to Counterpoints. Everybody, all right? Last night, President, former president Donald Trump appeared on Tucker Carlson's show, The Man who says he absolutely despises him or whatever. Trump complained apparently to Tucker like, how could you say that about me? Man? And I can imagine that the exchange from there was like, why don't you come on my show? And it work and boom, he's got another interview. So we're going to play some clips for that. Inflation numbers,

March inflation numbers are coming out this week. That has a lot of implications for what the Federal Reserve is going to do going forward. You're going to be talking about Title nine later today, right, and we have news from Elon Musk and Matt ta Abi's ongoing feud. We'll be covering some big developments in investigations into the collusion between Silicon Valley and our federal government. And you've got

some Julianssange stuff to talk. Yes, the squad plus Greg Kasar put out a letter to Merrik Garland asking for the Department of Justice to drop the charges against Juliana Song. We're going to talk about that and some other international efforts to release to get to get the extradition effort dropped. And also, as you can see at the bottom of the bar that we're going to have Mary and Williamson to talk about her the marian mania that has gripped TikTok, believe it or not. And I had to be told

this because I don't know. She is an absolute phenom on TikTok and it's showing up in polls, as Crystal Lencheon earlier this week showing up in polls. So we're going to talk to her about why that is and what that means. But first, let's roll a little bit of this Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump interview. What I thought perhaps the most newsworthy element of it was his comments about the Russian role and the US role in the blowing up of the North Stream pipeline. Let's play

a four here. Who blew up the North Stream pipeline. I don't want to get our country in trouble, so I won't answer it. But I can tell you who it wasn't was Russia about when they blamed Russia's you know, they said Russia blew up their own pipeline. You got to kick out of that one too. It wasn't Russia. So first of all, it's not as if he was in the planning if the United States did this of

the blowing up of the North Stream pipeline. But he is somebody who plausibly has connections to people who would know. He's also not necessarily the most credible source for information. But he did say he was going to get arrested, and he did get arrested. He called that one, So he's on a roll. So what you make of his claim here that basically he's saying the United States did this? So I want to Actually I just looked this up

as you were talking. Biden barred Trump from getting intelligence briefings, So I had forgotten that little tidbit which is pretty crucial president since the era of the deep state, to get cut off by the deep state, And it's a pretty crucial element of how we interpret this right here now. As you say, it's entirely plausible that he has he knows somebody who knows I mean, he knows a guy,

he knows a guy who maybe knows a guy. But either way, it's entirely plausible that he does have insider information. Here he said, I don't want to get our country in trouble. That's a big one. That's a big one, don't you think, Yeah, Yeah, And then very later at the end he says, he says, even more firmly, Russia did not blow it up its own popeline, which everybody

kind of understands at this point. There was i mean US intel that Russia was out shopping for contractors to get estimates to fix this, and it was something like five hundred million dollar, like an extraordinary amount of money

to patch this up and get it moving again. And so that just further undercut the claim that Russia would have blown it up, because if they're finding Russia out privately trying to figure out how to fix it, it just strains to the breaking point of credibility that they would have blown it up in order to then figure out how to fix it. Yeah, and you're right. I think this was the newsiest bit from the entire interview.

Tucker just comes out and asks who blew up the nord stream, which was one great way of getting it at the question. Actually, but he also he dow who killed Kennedy? Come on, right, he should have just like, yeah, no, he should have like John Stossel did to my Pompeio recently, which was pretty well done. But he also got Trump to sort of talk about his experience in the courthouse in Manhattan last week. So let's roll a one. Tell us from your perspective what that was like. They were incredible.

When I went to the court, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in, and I'll tell you, people were crying. People that work there, professionally work there, that have no problems putting in murderers and they see everybody. It's tough, tough place, and they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, I'm sorry they were crying. Were they crying? They were actually crying? What do you think?

I don't know, it's too hard to say. I mean, anything's possible, Maybe anything's possitively I could believe this guy. It'd be so fun to like have him as a reliable narrator of his life. But then he wouldn't be who he is. No, yes, he was. Can't have one

without the other. But you know, there are obviously people who are They have in the same sense, with a lot of populist, charismatic figures over the course of world history, American history that are very deeply emotionally connected for some very understandable reasons to Donald Trump, who believe that absolutely, to that that we know that, we know for sure, it's not impossible to me that people would be crying.

But as you say, not the most credible narrator. And so Trump has been asked before about Putin the war in Ukraine. This to me was slightly different than and a little bit more than we've gotten from him in the past. Let's let's roll a little bit of this on Putin and Ukraine. R ask you talk to Putin about Ukraine? What did you say to him? I could see that he loved it, and I said, he loved Ukraine. He considers it to be a part of Russia. Yeah, I said not when I'm president. We had a very

good relationship, he was. I mean, look, I was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I closed up this pipeline. You never heard the word the words nord Stream two until I came along. Nord Stream two is the pipeline. And I had a great relationship with him. But it was very tough because they had a fake Russia investtigation. And I told him, and he told me,

he said, it's very hard for us to deal. Don't you think I said, very hard because we have a fake investigation that turned out to be a fake for two years it went on. Donald Trump is actually right there. He's completely correct about Nordstream. He's completely correct about how he handled Ukraine and during his own presidency it's different than how the Biden administration handled Ukraine, and Nordstream is a part of that, and so he's not off the

mark on that point. Again, his relationship with Putin, We've talked about this before you get to the Madman theory of international relations that if you have somebody like Donald Trump who's sees this as transactional in a business relationship, which a lot of countries will be ess about like, look at Macrone in China this week. He's just completely bullshitting everybody in the way that politicians do diplomacy. It's not how Donald Trump did diplomacy, did diplomacy like a businessman,

and it had some strange consequences at times. The amendment I would make to that is that his doing business at doing diplomacy as business had a knock on effect of actually ending up arming Ukraine to the teeth in a way that the Obama administration didn't do. And that's a weird history of this is that you had Ukraine up through the Obama era, particularly after twenty fourteen, with the kind of US supported coup flipping at the government

there and then Russia annexing Crimea. You had Ukraine pushing the Biden administration for all sorts of weapons, javelins and billions in weapons flows that had not been coming previously. The Obama administration actually said, no, we don't want to

antagonize Russia over here. When the Trump administration came in because and Trump talks about it, because of all this Trump Russia stuff, Trump I think was more eager to be tougher on Putin as a result, and then he also saw that Ukraine wanted something from him, and this is where the business side comes in. Ukraine wanted weapons from Does Trump care why Ukraine wants weapons or whether Ukraine should have weapons, No, he doesn't care. What he

knows these people want something from me. I want something from them. And that's when he had his perfect phone call with Zelensky where he's like, look, you guys want these weapons, here's what I want. I want you going on TV saying that Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are corrupt and you know, the whole thing that led to his impeachment. And so as a result, what comes out of that is Ukraine getting tons of weapons, right, and

Russia feeling antagonized. Well, so Russia not moving in until Joe Biden's president, though yes, we don't know whether or not he would have moved in when Biden, but it is a matter of historical record that it ended up being Trump that armed Ukraine in a way that Obama

did not, which is which complicates the whole question. Although yeah, I still think there's an argument that Zelensky or that Putin doesn't move under Trump because he sees all of the weapons flowing and realizes the United States would probably under Trump have a different approach, which it turned out to be different though right like, Trump turned out to be tough in terms of sending the weapons, even while he talked one way about Putin and then when the

war actually kicked in the high gear. For all kinds of political reasons, Donald Trump has been one of the people basically in the Republican Party breaking the near kon consensus. Yeah. Interestingly enough, the argument that Trump seems to be making is that he's so crazy that Putin was afraid of him.

And I don't think we have this clip queued up, but there's this exchange back and forth where he says, I told she, if you go after Taiwan, and I told Putin, if you go off for Ukraine, I'm going to do something that's so terrible that we can't even speak about it. And later he calls it the N word, which he says nuclear. And so he's like, and she and Putin they didn't believe me, but they believed me

ten percent. Yeah, and that ten percent was enough to keep them out of Taiwan, to keep them out of Ukraine. So his argument is reading between the lines that he threatened to nuke them if they stepped over the border, and as a result, they stayed back, and that that ten percent of a question in their mind of is this guy mad enough to do this is what held them back. I don't know how sustainable that is as a farm policy, right exactly, and again not impossible. There's

truth to it, and we've talked about it before. So we also have one more clip of him talking about he's asked sort of what the biggest threat to the United States is. Let's roll a three. I often say. They said to me the other day one of your fellow journalists said, who's the biggest problem? So is it China? Could it be Russia? Could it be North Korea? And now I said, the biggest problems from within? It's these sick, radical people from within. Because we can handle if we're smart,

we can handle Russia. China. I did. I took him bidding and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars from China. No other president took in anything. And they respected me. He's the same thing, you know. I told him you can't go into Taiwan. You can't, you can't do it. I won't tell you exactly what I said, but it was something that probably a lot of people wouldn't like if they heard it, But it was very tough. Don't go into Taiwan. If you do, we're going to have problems.

Other than that, we're going to be great relationship. We're gonna have a great relationship. And he said to me when I said we're going to do something, if he goes no, no, no, you wouldn't do it, I'll do that. I swear I do that. And he didn't believe me, but he believed me ten percent. The same thing with Putin. I said I was going to do something really nasty if he goes into Ukraine. He said, no, no, You're not going to do that, and I said, so we

did have that clip. I didn't realize it was the same one where he talks about the radical siccos yes, but yeah, so is that you're read too that he basically threatened to nuke them? Is that what he's trying to say? Yeah, No, I think it's absolutely And again it's not. I mean that threat is always looming over. That is our threat, Like, that's the whole reason we have a nuclear arsenal to make that threat. It's been

the world order for one hundred years now. Like that's how international It is the single biggest thing that looms over international relations period, and people don't say it aloud. I think for some defensible reasons. People can correct me if in the comments or whatever, I'm wrong. But I think China has signed a no first strike pledge, but

the United States has not and refuses to. If everybody would sign a no first strike pledge, we wouldn't be one hundred percent out of the woods, would We'd be much further out of the Woods's certainly such a hippie. Well, I mean, I think avoiding nuclear annihilation is pretty rad man. I just I don't believe anybody, you know, back into a corner. And again this is madman theory. With you talk about North Korea, you can talk about all kinds of places are on where nuclear weapons are on the table.

In the same way that they might not trust Donald Trump with what he says, but just trust him that ten percent, you know, signing a no first strike treaty and getting everyone on board with that, then you're putting a lot of trust in the hands of people we don't necessarily treat as good faith actors. But it would would prevent you, at minimum from I think making those threats, like if you said, if you go into Taiwan, we're going to New qub Like you signed up. Are you

breaking your pledge here? Yeah? I don't just scare with that. Yeah, anyway, we might get another shot at four years of Trump. He's still climbing in the polse and he's looking good. He's not looking good in the general election, but he's looking good in the primary. In the primary. This is yeah, absolutely, and Tucker, we should say this was obviously taped at mar a Lago, was aired last thing on Fox News, he said, before tossing to the first commercial break of Trump.

For a man who is caricatured as an extremist, we think you'll find what he has to say moderate, sensible, and wise, which the media contrasted with. As you mentioned earlier, Ryan, those text messages where Tucker just said he despises Trump, He's excited to get wait to never talk about him again. You never have to talk about Donald Trump again again. Understandable, life comes at you fast. Yes, I don't necessarily think

those are mutually exclusive things. I think he can say that Trump in this interview sounded moderate sensible, and he's a moderate sensible madman, except where he gets to wise. I'm not sure that I would use the word wise in that context, but it's definitely he sends, I'll tell you this, wiser than a whole lot of our foreign policy elites who sound like absolute morons when they talk about this stuff and continue to dig us deeper into holes that we're already in. So on that note, at

least he's wiser. I guess everything's relative. And speaking of his own legal jeopardy, news out of the prosecution of Donald Trump, Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA is now suing Jim Jordan to try to block where you put up that first element here, to try basically to try to keep Jim Jordan out of this case. He went for a temporary restraining order to prevent Jordan from subpoenaing former prosecutor in his office, who Elijah Orlans talked about in

our interview last week. He's written a book kind of playing up his role as a prosecutor, resigning in protest because Bragg wasn't going in the direction he wanted. Jordan's trying to subpoena him Jordan is otherwise trying to get all sorts of information about roughly five thousand dollars in federal money that Bragg has spent in the tax part of the investigation so far. And Bragg is straight up calling this substruction of justice, Like you said, you're obstructing

this investigation. I want the judge to stop it. The judge has rejected the temporary restraining order request but has said that Jim Jordan needs to reply by I think April fifteenth or seventeenth for a hearing around April nineteenth.

So this is moving quickly because it raises all sorts of separation of power and questions and so independence of the judiciary, Like can you subpoena and publicly attack a prosecutor in the middle of a prosecution in a deliberate effort to slow down the prosecution like that to obstruct, like they're trying to obstruct. They won't even say they're doing anything other than trying to obstruct the prosecution, right, yeah, I mean so, Jim Jordan says, first they in died

a president for no crime. This is what he tweeted yesterday. Then they sue to block congressional oversight when we ask questions about the federal funds, they say they used to do it. So, yes, he's using that roughly five thousand dollars as a I think you can understand why it falls into the oversight umbrella. He's using it as well. You used, yeah, exactly five thousand dollars. I don't think he's deeply concerned about the five thousand dollars, but he's

using it as his in to then file this. And I saw experts quoted, I think in Axios this morning saying listen, Bragg does not really have a shot here, but his goal is likely to slow it all down, to tie it all up. And I think even John Deane tweeted that it was like a genius move or a brilliant move I have about and Bragg defiled this just tangle him up in court rather than having to

keep going. Yeah, I guess sure makes sense. So in related news, the Gang of Eight, which is known as the kind of two heads, and we put up this

second element. The two heads of the intelligence committees on both sides of the Capitol, and the leaders of the Senate and the House are now in possession of the classified documents that both Biden and Trump intentionally or unintentionally scrolled away into their garages and their resorts, and so they now know what was missing, what was purloined, you know, what kind of leaked out. I have always said the way to resolve this is to basically show the public

everything except the stuff. I guess it would get somebody killed, yes, immediately, and then let people judge like, was this did they take, you know, the CIA's stupidly classified Soup of the Day menu, or was this something related to nuclear technology that the UAE was going to pay for? Because those are completely different questions about whether or not the public should consider

this to be something they care about exactly. And we have some indications that the documents at morologually we sort of know that some of those are highly classified. We know that some of those because there were pictures that were filed. Obviously we can sort of make conclusions from that.

But still having that lack of information between the Pence documents, the Biden documents, and the Trump documents, it's a world apart based on Soup of the Day, which is a joke but also not really, I really do that, Yeah, they really do that. Between that and between like actual

nuclear secret stuff. And we've been having this conversation for coming up on what this was last August, so coming up on a year now, we've been having this conversation about the Trump documents, totally in the dark about exactly how bad they are. Again, we have some indications, but without knowing exactly what that is. And this gets us closer to that process, obviously, because as senators see things, they say things and just sort of gets the ball rolling.

The closer that we get to that, the more we can as the public make judgments about this, because it's actually really hard to say. Knowing that the documents removed, knowing that Trump was trying to obstruct the words seemingly was trying to obstruct the collection of the documents, it makes a world of difference what was in those boxes, and we haven't known for almost a year. This is also a good excuse for me to bring up beef

I have with the way the Congress does this. The idea that you have a gang of eight, that you have eight elected members of Congress who have this kind of special ability to see intelligence material that other members of Congress who have also been elected by equal districts around the country or states that are equal in the Constitution, creates a situation that puts Congress in this subservient role

to the intelligence community. To me, if you are a member of Congress, the people have invested in you their trust and the power and authority that comes with that trust. Like if you believe in a democratic republic, then you have to I think give everyone that the people send

to Washington the same access. Otherwise you wind up with this power imbalance where even people who are on the Intelligence Committee, Republicans, Republicans, even yeah in the majority on the the Intelligent Committee, don't have access to some of this stuff. And I think that's important because part of what we're talking about here is that we have indications not just from those pictures, but via leaks to the media about the Trump files, and we saw that of

course of the Russia collusion investigation. We saw that with the Iraq War. Leaks to the media are often dramatically out of context. The media will contextualize them exactly as their national security sources want them to contextualize them, and that can mean that soup of the day is alluded to in media reports as something much more serious than it actually is. And you can come up with a

million different ways to do that. You could say, you know, highly classified information about the personal decisions made by national security officials, when that is actually just the soup that they ate for lunch, but that it's really really misleading when we play this leak game with national security, and again we have a million different examples to show us

that very clearly at this point. And so that's part of the reason why having not just the Department of Justice know what's in those documents is so important, even if it is senators from both the Democratic and Republican party, and that gets it closer to the public having and

understanding of it. You then have competing interests that are they both know what's there, and they can be they can bring us slightly closer to an accurate or balanced perspective of what's there, even if we can't see it ourselves. And I feel like those competing interests should have should have the legal ability to use their own judgment for what they believe they ought to share with the public.

Like I think it's wild that the Speaker of the House and the leader of the Senate can be told by a bureaucrat it wasn't elected what they can share with the public, And it shows a kind of split

between the faith that a lot of Americans. If you take like an extreme like libertarian, right wing approach to the market, they'd say, we don't need you know, don't we don't need an FAA because if an if an airplane crashes, then consumers are just going to not fly on that one, and so that people are then incentivized to build safer airplanes like that. That's that that's the kind of faith that some people will put into a market,

but they don't put that same faith in voters. Like if a Speaker of the House recklessly released classified information that the public felt should not have been released, you can vote him out of office. You can vote their party out of office. So if you believe in the kind of the wisdom of the crowds that make up a market, why not put the same vest the same authority and dignity into the people who elect our members of Congress. Well, this is a little bit of a

preview of the title name segment. But before we get to that, Mediaite also was reporting on a leaked Nikki Haley memo that went after Trump for being indicted, which is an interesting development. This is a memo to donors from Nikki Haley Donald Trump had a pretty good Q one if you count being indicted as good. Media continues. Her campaign also claimed Trump only promised more drama quote more drama in the future as his legal woes continue

to mount. The other candidate to get mentioned, media says is DeSantis. It accuses him of making numerous quote missteps since officially launching his twenty twenty four campaign with a book tour. Here's the quote. Ron Desantus essentially launched his presidential campaign with a national book tour during this period and made one misstep after another, confirming what many observers have long suspected. He's not ready for prime time. It continues to say. And then there are the others. Wait

what others? Just really clever stuff from whoever wrote the donor memo? Who? How is Nicki Haley being received on the right? Is she's just nothing? Do people think she's running for something else? For a future? I'd like to just raise her profile, Like, is what's the kind of right kind of conventional wisdom about what the Nicki Haley campaign is? Yeah? I think it's that she's not being well received by the conservative movement. But Republican voters are

a totally different question than that. You know, your average Republican primary voter is not what is called a movement conservative on the right. That's just not the case. So sort of institutional conservatives, movement conservatives look at Nikki Haley grassroots and say she's totally behind the curve, like she's she's running a campaign from twenty twelve. I would argue

that's close to the truth in twenty twenty two. And at the same time, Nicki Haley's going to say, well, I can connect with suburban women, I can connect with you know, your soccer mahams. Yeah, it's a totally different demographic than your your sort of grassroots Republican activist or your movement conservative who is pretty averse to this Ni Chele campaign not cheb. Yeah, they're and they're tied up obviously in the Trump DeSantis feud. The conservative movement is

very tied up in the Trump DeSantis food feud. Speaking of which, we have polling. This is a New Morning Console poll. This was published on Tuesday, of thirty six hundred potential Republican primary voters, almost sixty percent according to media again said they preferred Trump to DeSantis in a twenty twenty four matchup sixty percent. Trump tops the poll with fifty six percent in the survey, DeSantis is behind him with twenty three percent. That is a thir thirty

three point margin. Nicky Haley, Mike Pence and Nicky Haley are following Trump and DeSantis at seven percent and four percent. Liz Cheney's in there with three percent, and every other option is at one percent or less. Salon is reporting that support for former President Donald Trump fell rapidly after five appear. Yeah, that was the good news. Here's that bad. Here is another poll thirty four Felon accounts, obviously from last week, his his support in an ABC News IPSOS

poll dipped pretty heavily after that. Salon is pointing out that, you know, Trump says he thinks the indictment could help him by boosting his support in election. The poll found that a majority of Americans fifty three percent believe he did something illegal, eleven percent say he acted wrongly but not intentionally, twenty percent believe he was not culpable at all. CNN poll released last week, so that sixty two percent

of independent voters approved of the indictment. That ABC News poll from this week found fifty percent of people believe that Trump should be charged with a crime. Thirty three percent think he should not. Nearly have a respondent said Trump should suspend his campaign in the wake of the indictment. That was up from forty three percent before the indictment. So, as you said, Ryan, a little good news, a little bad news. But this is a perfect contrast between primary

and general election. The poll of Republican primary voters has him up at nearly sixty percent with thirty three points over DeSantis, who's at twenty three points. Whereas when you're looking towards the general election, you have that broader pool, not just a Republican primary voters saying, eh, this might actually change my mind. What's amazing is that you have Biden's approval rating in here at thirty four percent, and you have him up almost ten higher than Trump, whose

approval rating is sitting at twenty five percent. Now, as Ron Klain famously tweeted after McCrone won with like a thirty percent approval rating, he was like, he did iball emoje. He's look at that turns out you can win an election with thirty percent approval rating. Somebody has to win like that. That is the actual way that we do elections.

So it's at this point it looks like it's either going to be somebody with a twenty five percent approval rating or somebody with a thirty four percent approval rating, unless entering the chat is Tim Scott, South Carolina Senator. I've put up b six here, who just formed an exploratory presidential committee. He's been kind of flirting with a presidential run for years now. Yeah, and kind of. But so I'm curious again on the right, what's the conventional

wisdom about Tim Scott. I think it's the exact same as Nikki Haley, except he panders less, at least overtly to that sort of soccer mom crowd. You know, there was a lot of cringing over Nikki Haley's response to Don Lemon where he made the horrible gaff saying that she was passed her prime. It was just bizarre. It was again said pastor Prime, said Nicki Haley was pastor prime. Oh my gosh, if you miss this, you got to go back and watch the cook because it's absolutely hilarious,

But it wasn't a gaff either. It was just Don Lemon being Don Lemon, and Nikki Haley just responded to it and I think a pretty cringy way. And Tim Scott, you know, has had less opportunity to do that as of now. I think he's probably ideologically similar. Obviously, they're both South Carolina Republicans, people that would have really excited I think the Tea Party wing of the party back in twenty twelve, twenty sixteen, but have adapted to the

Trump era by not really adapting. Have adapted to the Trump era, maybe by changing the way they talk about the media, maybe by changing the way they talk about rural America and forgotten Americans, but policy wise really hasn't

been a ton of shift from then to now. They say that's good, right, that's the thing that allows them to connect and communicate with suburban voters, your typical Republican voters, people that Democrats pander to when it comes to you know, certain like the Gottheimer wing of the Democratic Party rights that a whole wing, do we have to call that not a whole wing actually, but it's a well funded wing that funded the Gottheimer the Gottheimer Democrats could be

Nikki Haley Republicans, right, like that's or Tim Scott reports, Yeah, the problem Solver's caucus and No Label's crew, like that's there. Yeah, that is. I mean we might see it in twenty twenty four with No Labels spending seventy million dollars to get ballot lines everywhere, Salt deduction voters, yeah, like Mansion Haley. Yeah. Well, and again there is a It depends on the economic climate,

It depends on the cultural climate. People have good reasons for being interested in different things depending on where they're coming from, depending on what their interests are. And yeah, that's a their their betting that you can you can make the pitch. But when you have Donald Trump up right now, things change. But when you have him up over DeSantis on that level, I mean, it just looks like twenty sixteen again, where it's Donald Trump and everyone

else and the vote against Donald Trump. This time, maybe it's only forty percent. I doubt it stays exactly sixty forty, But you're either voting for Trump, you're voting against Trump, just with a different flavor of voting against Trump, and that makes him it's a glide path for the nomination to him, And y'all couldn't beat Trump in twenty sixteen when you had sixty to sixty five percent of the party against him in primaries. Now you have like forty

percent against him. So and he's dominating the media because one of the biggest news stories in the world is this indictment. I'm a former president, so he's going to eat up all the airtime as will be looming over. There's two other cases, three other cases actually this Documents case, the Georgia case, and there's one that I'm forgetting, But the one that he was indicted on last week I don't even think is going toc court until December. So

good luck. There you go. Well, let's move on to the brewing substack and Twitter battle, which goes back to this an exchange between Matt Tayebe and Twitter CEO and SpaceX CEO and Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, which Elon Musk bizarrely and for some reason felt wise to share on Twitter and then quickly delete screenshots last forever. So we have some of these here we can put to the

first element. I think the account hall all flow may have been one of the first to post this, so you can find the full exchanges over at his account and elsewhere to read something. So Matt basically reached out to him and said, hey, He says, you're taking down all of my Twitter files threads because you're mad at me personally for not leaving the company where I was already employed. Really Elon Musk writes back, No, this shouldn't

be happening, will be fixed tomorrow. But then he seizes on something in Matt's tweet text and he says, you're employed at substack and from there tell you me. Then explains to him he says, my subscribers there employ me, and I have a great thing going there. I also have loyalty to the company which did originally hire me, and if I moved to Twitter, it would have been a major optics issue for us both. But this isn't related to the threads being removed, so this is going

to be fixed. Musk tells him it's going to be fixed, and then Tyev explains to him that he was using the word hired loosely, and he says, I was never a substack employee. I was one of the first substack pro contributors, which is a guaranteed return system. For the first year that was known publicly. Like tayeb has been very transparent, Substack was offering deals to all sorts of

different writers in order. Yeah, it's a contract they offered me one several years ago where it's like, we'll give you because if you're going to leave your full time job based on the hope that people are going to fund your you know, at five six dollars a month fund your substack, then what they were doing is they were giving a kind of yes, here's a minimum to make sure you pay your mortgage and entice you to

come over. They don't do that anymore. What they found, I think is that a lot of people were coasting. Like it worked for some of the biggest names like Iglesias, Tayibe, Andrew Sullivan, like did he take one? I don't remember if he took one to that it worked for them because they ended up bringing in a lot more you know, readership than the minimum paid out. So it was a

gamble like am I going to get? Because if you end up getting if they offer you two hundred thousand dollars and you make a million, but they keep most of that extra. But if they offer you tw hundred thousand, you're only bring in fifty. Well, now you didn't get evicted because you didn't get four clothes on. So anyway, these substackt deals were widely known. Musk then tweeted, if you remember, apparently Matt Tabee is or was employed by substecs.

So he read this full exchange that he had privately with Mett and then publicly tweeted that he was employed, which is which wasn't true, as though he had inside secret information that Matt had told him he was somehow actually employed, he had some other source like when in fact the source was Matt. He was telling him the

truth about how substack. And to me, it seems like Musk is having a hard time understanding a company that pays its creators, or that has a relationship that sends money to creators, rather than one that the relationship goes the other way. Give us your eight dollars a month. Yeah, it might be like that. I mean, I also think he just has a million pots on the stove right now and is very transparently working through his different issues

on public forums. He tweets this, then deletes it, I think, and this is in the broader context of him being upset that Substack launched a notes feature that he thinks is competitive with Twitter, which is where the whole feud

between Musk and Tayebe started. That's because he tweeted that Tybee was apparently an employee of Substack to undercut Tayeebee's points about out why he was not going to be on Twitter anymore, was not going to be working on the Twitter files anymore, and so that was where Musk

was coming from in tweeting that out. I really just think, like, honestly goodness, I think Elon Musk is working on like huge all of these huge, different projects he's trying to make Twitter he now says he has it in shape to break even instead of running that like three million dollar annual deficit that he said it was running when

he took over. And he's just he's so public in dealing with these different workplace issues, like he's actually dealt with basically human resources issues on Twitter, and so when you can see it all playing out in real time for someone who's extremely busy, sort of aggressive and combative, it's just weird. And I think that's where you get to him deleting this because it's he's inaccurate. He's interpreting this stuff inaccurately. He probably realized that he shouldn't have

tweeted this out. It got members of Congress to say, well, now we know when Matt Tayebi wouldn't give up his sources when they were pressing him for sources in that absurd congressional hearing where Democrats beclowned themselves about a month ago, they were like, well, now we know Musk is tayebe source. It's like, oh, well, what took you off? It's great work, you guys. And since now everybody apparently knows that Musk seems like he's the only one who didn't know that.

His relationship with Tayabe is one as a source to a journalist, and so many sources just don't understand what that is like. So git here, if you could put up this second element, put up one of my favorite quotes out there. Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.

That's an iconic quote from the book The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, and he goes into the psychology and the psychopathology of the relationship between sources and journalists and just how amazing it is the way that sources kind of open up to journalists expect that there's this like two way relationship when the source is also often a subject, and the journalist is going to take take what they can and need from that source and

pull in from other sources as well, and produce journalism that is not necessarily going to be exactly what the source wanted, and the source will then be shocked that the journalists when the story is over, it's like no, no, no, I'm going to notes. Yeah, we're not friends. Well, and it's also, I mean, the vast majority of the Twitter

files reporting has been document based. It hasn't been relying on unnamed sources or there's been some lots of there's been reporting, but it doesn't seem like it was going to Musk because Musk wasn't there right the time. You wouldn't know. But they did interview a lot of of like former vice presidents and former engineers and that sort of thing. Yeah, they've they've gotten information from them. But I feel like the backbone of every ting I've learned

from the Twitter fows is document based. You see it in everybody's own words. And it's true that must gave them access. That's publicly knowledge. We know that must gave them access because he talked about how he gave them access, and Matt talked about how he gave them access. So none of that is like shocking. And for people to say like this is a dunk on Tayibe, I think

is ridiculous. What you see here is some decent source massaging where he says, understandably, if I was at Twitter, it would have been a major optics issue for us, both right, and he's not wrong about that. It would have looked ridiculous. He couldn't He honestly couldn't have reported that story if he was totally beholden to Twitter as an employee or anything like that. That's totally journalism. Yeah, no,

that's not journalism. So, speaking of notes, if we can put up this this stir one here so no it has rolled out. This is substack basically version of Twitter. Are you on substack? No, you can get on substack. So I'm on substack. I've been on there since like twenty seventeen or something. Yeah, you're an early adopter. Yeah, my newsletters called bad News. I mean, I think it might change the name back to just Ryan. Maybe I'll stick with bad news anyway, go find bad news on there.

I've been doing a newsletter since before Substack. I've been talking to these guys since the very beginning. I'm really proud and excited for, you know, what they've been able to build. And I think they've done a really actually good job of creating space for free and open expression without kind of getting pigeonholed as kind of reactionary right wing, like has happened to a lot of other platforms that

tried to do that. And I think that's like impressive on their front because it's so it is so important to end the value of open expression is not inherently right wing, and so for them to have been able to swim against that, I think has been impressed. And you can imagine when you look at this notes app why Elon Musk is like, hmm, that looks a lot

like Twitter. Oh yeah, I still don't think it's really a competitor to Twitter, though, because in the same sense that like, it's hard for us to apply our definition of monopoly to Facebook or Instagram, because people would say, well, Twitter is a competitor. Up here, people want to see what it looks like. Yeah, take a look at this. If you're watching this is what Yeah, you can see how it looks similar to Twitter. I mean, it actually does really look similar to Twitter. And it makes sense

that Elon Musk would retaliate. That's how business goes. He says, I'm drawing a red line in the sand here. It's weird to pick on Tayibi out of all of that, but that is to say, the point of Facebook isn't really a competitor to TikTok. As a competitor in your time, but you can't like the point of Facebook is that every person is on the same platform. Every person is on the same platform with Twitter, every person is on the same platform. When it comes to TikTok, that's the

point of your feed. Your feet is supposed to be encompassing. So I don't necessarily know that it's a good apples to apples to say that this is a competitor. But at the same time, I think you're right that what substack has done is so impressive as a business, and part of it is a good lesson I think to other people in C suites, which is they just draw redline on content. They say, we are not getting involved

in content decisions. And I think being upfront about that and being very bold about that, never ever wavering on it is so so important because when you do that, it gives you cover when stuff comes at you from the left, when stuff comes at you from the right. It's a good lesson for Twitter actually too, because I think it's what Elon Musk sort of aspires to be. But Twitter still can't quite do because it gets involved

in content moderation more than it should. And what Substack I think is trying to do is what Jack Dorsey suggested in a post that you just put up I think last night, if we could put up the fifth element here, which is basically to say that you should not be able to, you know, take content that a creator created and put on the Internet. Nobody else but the creator of it, the author of it, should be

able to take that off the Internet. Where the where the role of the Internet and the public comes in is how you how you moderate and how you amplify those comments. So in other words, it might it's okay to leave terrible things up. Yeah, the problem comes if you're taking terrible things and just shoving them in everybody's face. And so what subsect tries to do is allow you to curate very carefully, you know what it is that

you want to see. Uh. Elon Must did an interview with the BBC last night on spaces and it became this big fight between the BBC reporter and Musk where BBC reporter was saying, my for you tab is just garbage. It's like a bunch of trash that I don't want, and he said that I'm seeing a lot of things that are he used the phrase hateful, and then Must

ask him to define that. He was like, well, they're slightly sexists and slightly racist, and Must is like, give me some examples, and he's like, I haven't looked at the for you tab for three weeks because it's just a stream of garbage. And Mast's like, aha, you say that they're slightly racist likely sexist. Things in the for youtab but you can't name a single example of it. But what he's trying to get at is something deeper, which is their BBC reporter, which is that he didn't

want all this for you stuff. It's Twitter that was like, we think this stuff is for you, whereas what substack is saying, and what Jack Dorsey's suggesting is give people more of an ability to choose their own algorithmic experience. Like he said, you should there should be a g rated algorithm that you can choose from the other, and then other algorithms that were you can transparently decide this is the way that I'd like to have my feed shaped and these are the people that I want to follow.

Because social media companies, YouTube among them, have gotten away from the idea that if you click subscribe or you click follow, that that means anything. They don't care. They're like, no, we know what you're going to interact with better than you do, and we think engagement is more important than your own conscious choice of what you want. And that's what really pisss me off about the four you tab on Twitter, which will just you get toggled onto by default.

It tries to insane right right, right, right, because you get pushed way more divisive content and this is just my interpretation, more divisive, viral, annoying content than what you've curated for yourself. Which is the cool thing about Twitter. It's one of the coolest ways to curate news because it's exactly what you're asking for. It's you know, you can follow all of the different outlets that you really like, that you really trust, whether they're on the left or

the right. You can pepper some celebrity content, some Vanderbunkerules content in there, the promo content that Ryan lives be it, let me choose it, yes, right, right, right, And it's there's no algorithm that's going to do that because it's not me. No matter how much it thinks it's me,

it's not so anyway. And it's all just a great reminder that we are are guinea pigs in the real time process of theorizing how some of this technology is best employed, the sort of capitalistic philosophy behind the ethics of it. And you know, it's a reminder like what brandeis when he's writing about privacy, he's writing about photography, right, the ethics of photography, And that's really wasn't all that

long ago. So in the same way that people who were suddenly being photographed and immortalized, there were big philosophical privacy questions about that. There still are. That's a lot what we're getting into right now with the content we self publish online and real quickly. I'll just read from Jack Dorsey because two interesting things where he waiting. One he said everything that happened to Twitter is my fault. He's like, in twenty twenty, we had an activist investor

who came on to the board. If you're watching Succession, you guys know how this works. They didn't like the way that I wanted to approach free expression and the user's relationship to the algorithm, and I gave up and made my exit strategy. I left Twitter, and I feel terrible about that. So that's that's part one of what he says on the On the Twitter files, he says,

I do believe absolute transparency builds trust. As for the files, I wish they were released wikileague style with many more eyes and interpretations to consider, and along with that commitments of transparency for present and future actions. I'm hopeful all of this will happen. There's nothing to hide only a lot to learn. The current attacks on my former colleagues could be dangerous and doesn't solve anything if you want to blame directed at me and my actions or lack thereof.

And he's he's his full piece, which you can get up at Abla dot news is called a Native Internet Protocol for social media, which is laying out the kind of intellectual rationale for his basically new kind of attempt at building the social media company or organization that that does. He what he's talking about gives freedom to users to post basically whatever they want, but then gives other protocols the ability to moderate and amplify that in ways that

are hopefully creating a better experience for people. Do we have inflation numbers? By the way we do there we go okay, So inflation numbers are out. Bapasani is a CNBC reporter. He calls it Goldielocks CPI. Just the markets are very, very excited by these numbers. So he's March core CPI. So core CPI. That's Those are the inflation numbers that do not include kind of volatile fuel and food prices are up zero point four percent month over month,

which is in line with expectations. Last month it was zero point five percent, So that's actually a significant drop when you go from point five to point four. That that meant that year over year, year over year inflation was five point five percent. The expectations have been five point six percent, So it's cooling at an even faster rate than people expected that it would. As a result, the market is rallying on that because they think that that means that the Federal Reserve is then going to

ease off on its interest rate cuts. One reason they're easing off on their interest rate cuts, though, ironically, is at the point of an interest rate cut is to restrict lending, restrict credit, and banks have been doing that on their own because they're like, oh, whoops, we're about to get a bank run and collapse, and so you're

functionally you're getting a lot of the same thing. Basically, my read on this, and I'm curious for your take, is that this is just an extraordinary vindication for they basically Knesian style Bidenomics that rushed out of the gate with the one point nine tillion dollar American Rescue plan, with the hundreds of billions in what the Chips Act and You've got the IRA, which was you know, something like seven hundred billion dollars over a couple of years

of spending. You had from the kind of Reaganomics Obama nomics types, Larry Summers types saying this is going to

create runaway inflation. Barry Summers said, We're going to have you know, endemic endless inflation as a result of this, and that Biden's American Rescue Plan and his other spending are going to go down in his treers one of the great economic mistakes because they produced way too much demand in the economy, and Biden was saying no. Jennet Yellen was saying no, saying no, we like, we believe this is this is transitory, and they get mocked a lot for that because transitory if if the next week

it's still going people were like, you said this was going to be over and say, well, we didn't mean it was going to be over in a week. So to be to be heading this consistently down for about a ye year now, I think demonstrates that there was a lot more capacity in the economy to be invested in and to produce than people thought. Now separately, and

I think it's important to separate this out. Housing prices are still killing people, but I don't think that's either fiscal or interest rate right now, you can say it's interest rate relating in a sense that it's pushing up asset prices. But if you don't ever build any new housing, then you're just and the population keeps growing and wages grow, even if they grow in line with inflation, you're going

to have runaway housing prices. So that's I think you have to have a separate housing policy that addresses that. But anyway, so that so my read on this is that it's a vindication for a kind of progressive economic

vision for the economy. What's the Do you have the breakdown of where it's I'm trying to look for it now, but these numbers are coming out as we're speaking here, so it's always interesting to see where CPI is, like it's uneven in some cases, and to your point about interest So right, so headline inflation even better, zero point one percent in March, practically flat and five percent year over year, which is you know, that's not the nine Like, that's not the nine percent that you can kind of

scare people with. I think people now, people I think still are feeling a lot of pain because of basically because of rent and housing prices. So is it the soft landing that was much mocked so far? Yeah, so so far you do have and we should get you know, we could get stoler back on here. I'm sure he'd like to do a victory lap over because if if you can continue to have wages at the bottom quintile,

because that's what that's what people need. If you look at the data, people say, well, who wants is better off? Since Biden became president, everybody in the bottom twenty percent has seen like significant wage increases over inflation. Now, if they're facing if they're facing rent problems, if they didn't have a locked in lease, or they're you know, otherwise screwed when it comes to housing, they're not appreciating those wage increases in the way that they would otherwise. But

that's why I'm saying those are separate things. In some ways, you have to figure out ways to deal with the housing crisis that are independent of this, the broader wage fight that we're having. Well, and I was going to say, speaking of an even this, I'm looking at the breakdown now, like Brian said, these were breaking as we're talking, which

is why we wanted to cover it live. But grocery prices is from the Hill drops substantially to an eight point four percent annual increase from ten point two percent last month. Food prices, which are some of the inflation that consumers feed most fuel most acutely. They read it as feed most acutely, which is kind of funny, are still running much hotter than inflation. Overall, fruits and vegetables drop by one point three percent of the month, will

meets declined by one point four percent. So obviously there's still stuff that consumers are going to be feeling pretty badly. And so that's where the Biden administration their attempts to say we're handling this, there's just so soft landing here get really tricky. It's not to say there isn't truth to it, it's just to say it's a tough sell

political right, some other context. This the headline increase was the smallest since June of twenty twenty one, which is when you really saw the kind of the economy reopening and inflation really kicking off. You also found what they call shelter costs, rent and housing the smallest gain since November, so a point six percent increase, but that still resulted in prices rising eight point two percent on an annual basis.

And so that's where you see this increasingly difficult society to live in, because if you continue to have shelter costs rising at over eight percent and wages rising at less than that, because shelter makes up an increasing amount of your monthly income, the rest of the rest of the inflation numbers coming down don't help you as much. Yeah, no,

I think that's true. There's also, I mean, there's just so much going on here in this conversation because you can you can also look at obviously we've talked about corporate greed increasing inflation over the course of the last year or more, and we've also talked about rising wages for the bottom you know, quintile or quartile and quarter quarter the coffee. By the way, this morning, jet Fields, So I've only about halfway done of it, halfway done with it. Jacked up it came out, but not because

I don't think I can drink. It came out looking like hot fudge. But anyway, all that is to say, I hope that some of the rising or the price gouging has contributed to rising wages. I hope that that's the case, but there's also also serious case that a lot of bidings, biden spending put consumers in this position in the first place. And I think a good takeaway from all of that is our system is way too concentrated in the hands of small groups of powerful, powerful people,

and the system is completely perverted because of that. And when they try to reverse engineer the things that in some cases they caused. I mean, inflation isn't great for every person in a C suite across the country, when they try to reverse engineer it, they find themselves just they're so hapless, right. And also when the one tool that they have raising interest rates, also it cools the housing market in a good way in the sense that

it pushes down asset prices. But at the same time, rising asset prices are a signal to builders to build more housing. And so if now interest rates are going up and uh, and you're putting off, you're putting kind of a hold on a bunch of projects. That's that's the opposite of what you need, Like you need to figure out a way you can pull asset prices down but also produce more housing. And if you only rely on those two tools, then you're not gonna be able

to do that. But if you say no, as as a as a public, we want to invest in this like housing is basically one hundred percent creation of government policy, like from the from the New Deal till now, the thirty year mortgage, all the other regulations, the back, the back we we we developed, the suburbs, we developed. All of this was by design. You can't have it without highways, right and we can. We can. So if it's done

by design, we can. We can redesign it and we and we have to do that because even if wages are rising at the bottom by five or six percent, if housing it even at this pace, is rising by eight percent, people are still falling behind. And and it hits people very, very differently. People don't get necessarily an average every month increase in their housing costs. It's like you got your lease for a year, and then when you've got to find a new place, now you're paying

twenty percent more than you were before. Well, and this is where I give credit to libertarians, because they have an ideologically consistent and I think more more credible response, which is, it's nonsense to pretend that the free market is what's distorting and creating problems in housing. It's the combination of this like faux free market with massive subsidies

in government design that has things completely jacked up. And so I think your response would be to have more government design to have If the government is going to be involved, which should be, it should make it smart, like this policy should actually be workable and benefit consumers and benefit voters. I would suggest probably rolling back government intervention in housing because I think it probably produce better results.

But either way we can What we can agree on now is again you're at the worst of both worlds, where you have crony government policy and crony capitalist policy, and it's just terrible. And we can't get a chance to talk in today's show about the big news out of Colorado, which is the Biden administration has put out a different a couple different policy proposals around the Colorado River,

one which would basically say Arizona doesn't exist anymore. Another would say that we're going to be in court with California for the next several decades over their water rights. And so it is funny to think about interest rate policy as our number one tool for prices when you're running and when the Colorado River is running dry on the Hoover Dam is like on the brink of no

longer producing hydro electric power. It's like there's nothing the Fed can do with interest rate policy or quantitative easing that is going to do anything about that. Like, these are problems that our are constantly growing economy is going to have to address as it impacts reality. I can't get over how bad this coffee is. Moving on to big tech. Let's put this up on the screen. This is actually a report from the Federalist this week that

I think deserves more attention. This is quoting from Margo Cleveland's reporting here, the federal government pedal technology to big tech companies to assist them in censoring American speech on social media in the run up to the twenty twenty election. That is according to emails Missouri and Louisiana uncovered in their First Amendment lawsuit against the Biden administration. We've covered that suit. There's some interesting stuff coming out of it,

and this is no exception. Margo continues to say, specifically, the State Department marketed the censorship technology through its Global Engagement Center. If you've been following the Twitter file as, you recognize the GEC. If you've been following the State Department for years, you recognized the name of the GEC.

In other words, our tax dollars not only funded the development of tools to silence speech that dissented from the regime's narrative, they also paid for government employees to act

as sales reps, pitching the censorship products to big tech. Now, there's some emails that show in twenty twenty, federal government employees were contacting social media platforms to promote the GEC's disinfocloud, and they were promoting it like sales reps for a product basically, and GEC represented this government product and it was saying it would give quote companies, technology companies, technology and tools to assist with identifying, understanding, and addressing disinformation,

and then it gave some of these private tech companies access to disinfocloud. That's really similar to how GEC was describing infocloud and congressional testimony recently. And even the State Department's website marketed as quote a one stop shop to identify and then test tools that counter propaganda and disinformation, which they were relying on NewsGuard ratings partially. I think that's an important part of this report. NewsGuard ratings probably

better than some other groups. They're relatively willing at least to engage with different publications, but still downvote publications that promote information that dissents from sort of the official narrative. And when you again, that's fine as a private business if NewsGuard wants to do that, but when you end up colluding with the federal government, the State Department in

election related issues, that's where you get into problems. Because we know this never just stops, as Lefong is reported, I think really powerful in the intersept It never just stops with actual propaganda. What we've seen over the last five ten years, longer than that you count the years after nine to eleven, is this lumping in of legitimate American speech with propaganda that they cannot help themselves from doing.

We have run that experiment, we know the results. We know that they're not just stopping with legitimate Russian, Chinese propaganda. It's not happening. They are lumping other legitimate speech into it. So I think this is really concerning and you couple

that with something we can put up on the screen. Here, a Daily Caller report that found Google, Twitter, Meta and TikTok's executive ranks have included over two hundred former employees of surveillance government agencies, creating an employment pipeline between the government and big tech companies. That's according to the Callers investigation.

They basically scraped linked in and found that those tech companies recruited two hundred and forty eight employees from the DOJ, FBI, CIA, and dh AS between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty two for the most part. And they're feeling, you know, as the caller says, top director positions with people who spent more than a decade in some of those agencies. Yeah, I'm kind of pessimistic that we're going to ever wind up in any neutral space when it comes to this.

It feels like to me that and I think that's because you know, as we have this hyper polarization kind of whoever, you know, as you move, even if you move from you know, big tech into government or government into big tech, if you feel like your team blue, then you're going to bring that kind of tribal attitude with you. If you're feeling your team red, you're going to bring that attitude with you. But is it more team Natsck like, isn't it? That's what I which is

increasingly blue. It feels like right, because it's Peter Struck and Lisa Page, it's Andy McCabe, it's you know, they may actually vote for George Bush or Jeb Bush, but they're never going to vote for it, probably Bernie Sanders.

They're never going to vote for Donald Trump. And again, like everyone is fine to make those personal decisions for themselves and to vote in their different ways, but when you're carrying that water on behalf of the government and then bringing it into the corporate sector, the same that we've seen the revolving door be problematic with the FDA and what you know over the course of American history the last one hundred years, Basically, when you see that

happen in these these companies that are doing something unprecedented with surveillance capitalism, with data that is insane, and I think it's worse that it's not strictly Team Read and Team Blue. They aren't, I would say, increasingly team Blue. Even though in the past, they were starkly team Red. That is terrifying and I feel like and we probably got to get move into your title nine thing pretty soon. If we're going to get to Marianne and Julian asangent

time to me. I guess my final take on this will be if the government is going to participate in this, they're only the only thing they have left to do is be just one hundred percent fully transparent about it. Like, look, you're the dhs DJ whoever, and you have thoughts on what information is flowing around. Post it, yeah, post it,

and post your citations. Tell us that you think this this person in Kansas who really likes Donald Trump and doesn't care that he's you know, that press conference with Putin. Tell us why you think they're working for Russia. Say it with your chest, give us some citations, and then

let us decide. Rather than in this back channel thing where you have a portal where you can tell you employees a Twitter who then are then are stuck in the position of either rejecting the most powerful government on the planet's request or accepting their request and censoring some type of account. Just let go and then and then people if they want if they trust the DHS and DJ they can use that information to kind of curate

their own information diet. But I think they have lost if they ever had the ability to do this with any authority, kind of surreptitiously well and again like just just surround this out. That's why relying on NewsGuard is such nonsense, because the corporate press completely botched got Pilitz surprises for batching the Russia collusion investigation the Federalist which

obviously has we wigh fewer resources and money. So we can't be in Ukraine, we can't be in Moscow, we can't be everywhere doing all of the sort of international reporting, and we don't have bureaus all over the country. But we got that much much much more accurate then the vast majority of corporate media, even though NewsGuard will penalize us in ways that they won't penalize the corporate media.

So when the government is relying on NewsGuard to in its software and to help tech companies censor propaganda, you see exactly how it's a vicious cycle. And the Times is a big thing. The Times should have put in ken Vogel's work on Ukraine. Yes, for its Pultzer. They should have that. He was way ahead on that. Yeah, he was, he was. Title nine. There are new rules out and you've got some You've got a breakdown, Yeah,

a little bit of a breakdown here. As we were actually prepping counterpoints last week, the Biden administration ruled out it's long away to Title nine rule related to athletics. It's a proposal, it's more than one hundred pages long, and it marked a slight departure from what I expected, at least in style, if not in substance. So we took a breath and dug in before going too wild

with it. So as a quick reminder, Title nine, as you know, is a Nixon era law nineteen seventy two that has come to dictate policies on everything from sexual assault to sports. It was just one short part of a larger bill, so we can read the full text here.

Here's what it says. No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. For years, Title nine was best known for its controversial effect on men's sports. But in the Obama era it became a lightning rod when the Education Department issued a

series of Dear Colleague letters on sexual assault and gender identity. Essentially, they made federal funding contingent on schools reading sex and Title nine as gender identity and on conforming their sexual assault policies to standards that bipartisan experts eventually denounced as kangaroo courts. Plus, Dear Colleague letters are anti democratic expansions of executive power that allow unelected DC bureaucrats to legislate

via a letter. So on both counts it was a mess, So much so that when Betsy Devas walked back the sexual assault policies, even the editorial board of the Washington Posts and a lot of other people on the left sided with her. When it comes to sports, I expected the Biden administration to basically revert back to pretty much what Obama did and simply stay sex is gender identity. Therefore there can be no legal distinctions between the two

in sports, or locker rooms or anywhere else. This is basically what the boss Stoc decision that Neil Gorsuch wrote the opinion for did with Title seven when it comes to employment. Now, when it comes to sports, that reading is totally backwards. Title nine is remembered as an achievement of the American Women's movement because it gave women greater

access to athletics. I've talked to at least three different kids involved in legal battles who all told me the gender identity interpretation is costing girls scholarships, as single male athletes can dominate in regional leagues. It can also, of course, girls in danger when they're forced into contact sports with people who are at least on average stronger. But instead of going down the Obama route, Biden's Education Department devised

what they probably think is a very clever workaround. As you read the proposed rule, you realize they're essentially creating burdens for schools who wish to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex. As title line says, this is where I'm glad we waited to cover the rule, expecting something more along the lines of what Obama did. Immediate reactions to the proposals seem to suggest it marked some kind of compromise that's really only true on the most superficial level.

If gender identity is the exact same thing as sex. Then it makes no sense whatsoever to say, Hey, schools can discriminate on the basis of sex if they can prove it's actually good. You either believe that gender identity and sex are the same or you don't, and placing the burden on schools who are actually trying to follow the spirit of the original law by preventing sex discrimination to prove that they should be able to do that, just reinstating the Obama rule with packaging that's meant to

be kind of distracting. Here's how the New York Times interpreted the rule. Quote. Elementary school students would generally be able to participate on teams matching their identity. But as students get older and go through puberty, and as competition increases, schools and athletic organizations would make a multi pronged assessment of whether or not to restrict transgender athletes from playing

on their preferred team. The age of the students, the level of the fairness, and the nature of the sport would be among the considerations. All right, so that sport, the age of the students, all of those things. Let's consider that phrase. The New York Times used multi pronged assessment for just a moment. If the rule remains unchanged

after the thirty day comment period, we're now in. That's what schools are going to have to undergo to do what feminists in the seventies fought for, the multi pronged assessment on all of those counts, age, sport, et cetera. So that shows us clearly it's the exception and not

the norm. Theoretically, the Biden administration wants to argue that it's created a pathway for schools to do what they think is best, but in practice, we have no idea how often those quote multi pronged assessments would be approved. Plus it's absolutely absurd to force schools to ask the Department of Education for permission to discriminate against women. But of course, even this radical definition of sex as gender identity, except when a school can prove to the federal government

it should be otherwise, did not satisfy professional activists. On Monday, trans lawmakers from around the country sent Biden a letter quote. While we understand the administration may have been attempting to provide legal protections and clarity, in actuality, this proposed rule changes will simply provide those who seek to deny us are write a roadmap for how to do so. The letter read. The decision was criticized by everyone from HRC to AOC. Well, why, I mean, first of all, again,

you either believe sexist gender identity or you don't. And the Biden administration hedging and that makes no sense. But if it did, if this rule provides quote a roadmap, as that letter argues, really have to squint. Here is exactly what the proposal reads. The proposed regulation would require that if a recipient adopts or applies sexuated criteria, that it would limit or deny students eligibility to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity.

Such criteria must for each sport level of competition at greater education level, one be substantially related to the achievement of an important educational objective, and two minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied.

The proposed regulation would not affect a recipient's discretion to offer separate male and female athletic teams when selection is based on competitive skill or the activity involved as a contact sport. So not only do you have to meet all of that criteria, you also then have to minimize harms and meet criteria to do that. If you don't do this to the satisfaction of the Education Department, you risk losing your federal funding. The incentive for schools to

test those limits is remarkably low. It's also absurd that we're so accustomed to federal power graphs right now that executive branch issues aren't even a part of this conversation. It's worth remembering that the Obama era Dear Colleague Letter on gender identity made decisions for schools everywhere from Brooklyn to rural Kansas, dramatically changing their day to day operations

in one fell swoop. We have the system of federalism we do in order to avoid precisely this, and what happened in the subsequent years is why this is key. Rather than allowing communities to sort these different, these extremely difficult questions and issues out on their own democratically and come to the right consensus, Washington did it for the whole country at once. Gender identity is just not as

clear cut a category. It's just not the same thing, and that by its very definition, and that's by the very definition its proponents advance, one that seeks to radically change the way we understand biology and psychology. It's crucial to protect children dealing with gender dysphoria and the enormous pains that it can bring with it. Legislating with letters and administrators rules thrusts kids into awful political debates where

they become pawns in national partisan games. This will make that problem worse as schools around the country are expected by stakeholders on both sides to push schools into going one way or the other, forcing the Education Department to settle the fights, and putting kids in the middle of all of it. All. Right, Ryan, I think you have some assange reflections to share with us this morning. What

are you at? So we have a new letter from Democrats in Congress, actually seven Democrats in Congress, and we can put up this tweet from Congressman Rashida Talib who led a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding that he end the prosecution of Julian Assan for publishing classified documents and and the extradition attempt. It was signed by

the kind of six members of the squad. That's talib Omar, Jamal Bowman, Corey bush Aana Presley, who did I leave out I'll see you a Bowman, Yeah, and Greg Kassar, who is a freshman who represents Austin, Texas. So the only one outside of the squad to jump on was Gazar. You might have expected maybe Summer Lee, who is kind of also considered to be part of this kind of

growing squad. You might have expected maybe Adli Ramirez. You may have expected Rocanna or Promeila Jayapaul, both of whom have spoken in favor of this position that charges should be dropped. But it appears like the Congressional Progressive Caucus probably wanted this to be more of a squad letter

than to be a Progressive Caucus letter. Now, according to Gabriel Shipton, who is Juliana Sanchez brother, he tells me that there are there are other letters coming as well, one one from Australia, which has forty eight members of what do they have a parliament there? Whatever they have down under forty eight forty eight of those many times more than the United States. In the UK thirty five

members of parliament. Letters also coming from Mexico and Brazil, with combined more than one hundred legislators, all calling for the end of the end of this prosecution, the protection of a free press, and the dropping of the extradition attempt against Julian Assange. Now my understanding is that this letter was circulated among Democrats because there is a a because we're in a hyper polarized environment, and b because the administration that is prosecuting him is democratic, And so

the thinking is that there are more. You know, it's more useful to have Democrats pressuring a democratic administration and republicans. So I think that's why there are zero Republicans on this letter, even though some have publicly called for these charges to be dropped. What did you make of you know, as as shipped and put it to me, he's there excited that it is a start from the outset tie.

People must say it's frustrating that there are only seven Democrats who are willing to stand up for this issue. But your interpretation is more that they kind of wanted to keep it to the squad. I don't think the squad did. I think the rest of the the rest of them. I think the rest of Caucus doesn't just simply Democratic Caucus doesn't want to be associated with Julian Assange.

So this is interesting because it reminds me of what we were talking about earlier in the show, in the context of you know, the National Security State being team Red or Team Blue, or actually just being team Nats, being team Blob. And I think this is a good example of how their team blob, where you have the Obama administration resist going after Assange in the same way

that Trump administration did. The Trump administration figures out, you know that they don't really care about the so called New York Times problem that the Obama administration identified, and the Biden administration now is overseeing the case against Assange.

And it shows you, I think, even when you know, in this evolution post Obama, when Assange kind of fell out of the news in the same way, he's definitely out of the news in not in the same way that he was in the news in the Obama administration, the early Trump administration twenty sixteen Russia collusion wiki leagues

type time. Now that he's fallen out of the news, Democrats are like, we can be team Blob, we can you know, it's sort of in the same It's a reverse of how Donald Trump had this weird patchwork of people that were team Blob but also like team populist isolationist almost you have like John Bolton working alongside random other Trump people who seem decide more with Donald Trump,

and you know, Rand Paul on foreign policy. It's like the reverse of that, where you have this strange, like leftist some people in the Biden administration being kind of leftist, but the security establishment being security establishment, and they're in control now, They're firmly in control, and that's who I

think democrats ultimately listen to. They don't want to go against them on those big questions because then you get you face the media pressure that Obama based during the Assinge, the initial Assinge era, right, and the charge the specific charges relate to the leaks by Chelsea Manning, including the kind of collateral murder video if people remember that, which which showed evidence of video evidence of US troops massacring

civilians and a Reuter's photographer. The only people charged in connection with that mass murder have been Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning. Also the State Department cables and some other things that that Manning leaked. So those are the charges from that period of time, But it is really his twenty sixteen reporting and publishing John Podesta emails, you know, and the Hillary Clinton speeches that were embedded in the

John Podesta emails. That really is the thing I think that has Democrats in the anti Assange camp, like they still blame him for acting Trump and Assange was privately supportive of of Trump, he thought, and he thought that it would be better for the rest of the world if Trump were president, and they thought that Democrat his his reasoning was that Democrats would be so reflexively anti Trump that they would constrain his imperialistic tendencies, and so

US Empire would be constrained by that kind of push and pull between the two parties. That kind of frankly reasonable ish take like that, and he's entitled to his take like that. It's not it's not a crime for a journalist to have a position in an election one way or the other. And he was asked, why didn't you kind of leaked Trump's emails, He's like, nobody gave me Trump's emails. Well, that's the thing. If he got

if somebody leaked him Trump's emails. Trump doesn't use email, but let's say Donald Trump Junior's emails, he'd have dumped them, like we we can be we can be very confident of that, Like that's that's what he does. And but I think it's that stigma associated with Trump that has Democrats unwilling to go anywhere near him because then they're going to face all kinds of blowback from their kind of their democratic voter base, who is also very hostile to assange. So I wonder how it would shape out

if it was just the blob, just the CIA. Yeah, yeah, And I don't totally know. Well, and maybe like that's that's the thing, Like, is it potentially true that some agents of Russia leaked this information to Wiki League? Sure could be. That's not the point. And that published information that was allegedly uh you know, leaked or hacked by other foreign governments, not Russia, but uh, other other governments. If it's true and we can authenticate it, yeah, still journalism,

it's newsworthy. And that's a complete distinction that gets glossed over. And that's where this case is so frustrating. Before I also published plenty of stuff off the wiki League's cables, which according to them, came from Russia. So I have done that. So yeah, you also count accused of working for the CIA. So I think someone just needs to get their story straight about who you work for, whether you work for Russia, Yeah, the same thing is there's

something much bigger going on. Yeah you work for cloudshoss No. I think that's what's so frustrating about this is that if you have evidence that Julian Nossange stole state secrets by all means, but their evidence for that is such bullshit that it actually does endanger other journalists. It's a ridiculous case. And again, if you have that case, make it. But they don't. This is their like they've they've already devised their genius way of getting Julian massage. And it's

not like a slam dunk case. It's a ridiculous case that implicates other journalists. And that's the problem. Like you can think what Julian Nossange did was wrong, you can think that he shouldn't have published what looks like it's possibly propaganda to destabilize the United States. That's not a question of journal in news. That's a question that's a separate question. But what he published was obviously newsworthy. Yeah,

no question about it, no question about it whatsoever. Wouldn't have been news all over the world if it wasn't, ye, nope, nope. So next up, we're going to be joined by Maryann Williamson to talk about her the TikTok Marion mania that

has gripped the nation. Yes, looking forward to that coming up right next, Well, if the presidential election were held today on what is one of the biggest social media company platforms in the country, in fact, the biggest certainly under people among fifty years old, the winner of that prize would be none other than Mary Anne Williamson. That's right, what do you mean close? Absolute landslide blowout. So we're joined by the president elect of TikTok now herself, Maryann

Williamson joins us. Now, Marianne, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. And so what do you make of this Marianne mania that has been gripping TikTok And how did you learn actually that you've become such a kind of cultural phenomenon on this app Well, you know, part of my decision making about whether or not to run. Had to do it.

Taking a college tour. I spoke at eight colleges and universities because I wanted to get a sense of where younger people were and whether they would see me and whether I would see them, and whether there would be any connection in terms of what I wanted to do as a candidate and hopefully one day as a president. And so i'm I feel I understand the alignment between what I have to say and younger people. You know,

gen Z, they're not even twentieth century people. Most of these kids in college today weren't even born in the twentieth century, or if they were, they just hung out there for a few years as babies. And so they have a visceral sense that they are living their lives, that the effect of bad ideas left over from the twentieth century. Every generation wants to individuate. Every person does this generation. It's individuating from a century and from a millennium.

They want to build on what worked, and they want to cut the cord and start over again with a lot of things. And that's my that's my agenda. And they hear me, and the fact that their pain is recognized by my campaign. They don't want to hear this bs about how the economy is doing well. You know, last night I spoke to Yale at Yale University. I said something at Yale, and I also said at Stanford,

and I saw all these kids on their head. I said, even with a degree from one of these schools, you know, you're not going to be able to afford the house that your parents had. You know that it's going to all of this neoliberal trickle down economic theory that so holds down the majority of people on some level, it will hold you down to and even if the system says to you, oh, we'll let you in because it

needs the best and the brightest to perpetuate itself. Don't allow yourself to be seduced, because it's not okay for you to live your life where everything's okay at the expense of pain and suffering for the majority of people. Young people hear that, and I'm glad that they do. And there are a bunch of different types of clips of yours that have gone viral. Some are kind of speeches of yours from the nineteen eighties and nineties. Some of the clips from the twenty twenty your twenty twenty

presidential campaign. I want to play one here though that this is from the current presidential campaign been viewed, you know millions, many millions of times's let's play that one here. What are you going to do when you first get there? First thing I'm going to do is cancel the Willow Project. I'm also going to cancel all student debt. I'm going to declassify marijuana from a Schedule one drug. In addition

to auditing the Pentagon. Oh, also I want to cancel We're going to immediately cancel all government contracts with union busting companies. And we're going to really bolster the NLRB, and we're going to really bolster everything involved with supporting unions. One of the first things I'll do is put together a conference where I hear from the best experts in this country on everything related to childhood. You know, John Kennedy said in ten years will land a man on

the moon. You know what I'm going to say to you. Within ten years, every public school, this is my vision that every public school in the United States would be a palace of learning and culture in the arts. Well, what struck me about that clip? Is it? It kind of combines cultural critique and cultural issues with kind of with class war, with corruption, and with a pro worker agenda.

You don't see, you know a lot of candidates talking about an LRB or getting into the weeds on the way that the federal government could cancel contracts with union busting or non union non union firms. So is that Are you finding that the combination of those is resonating or is one of them kind of hotter than another to your audience. Now, my political campaigning is no different than my writing. I say what I believe needs to be said. You know, many years ago I read a

quote by a man named Arnold Patton. He said, if you genuine have something you need to say, there's someone out there who genuinely needs to hear it. I'm not filtering myself. Well do they want to hear that? Will they like it? If I say that? Will there be a demographic who hears that? I'm saying what I believe needs to be said in order to repair the country, which I also believe is what needs to be said

in order to win the presidency in twenty twenty four. Yes, I think that a lot of people on the left, on the right everybody's in these silos. And I think this goes back to gen Z. I think gen Z are among millions of Americans who can we break out of the silos? Please? Can we realize that in many issues it's both and it's political and it's cultural, it's policy change, and it's personal change. I think that's what

the twenty first century demands. This thinking that's sort of the stale thinking, Well, if you talk about if you talk about the NLRB, you're not also going to be talking about cultural issues with children. Well, actually maybe you will. And I think that that's where people are ready to be. And I was gonna say, totally unshackled by that binary that it's either politics as personal. It's either left or

it's right. And on that note, what I like about that clip is, you know, it's one of the same things I like about looking back at Ronald Reagan's rhetoric

is that it's kind of soaring and optimistic. When you look back at how Americans talked about the future in the nineteen eighties, or successful American politicians talked about the nineteen eighties they were seeing something on the horizon, or in the nineteen sixties, Kennedy, like you said, and I want to ask you know, in some sense, it seems to me, really that this stuff resonates because gen Z is in a lot of pain because they want they're

desperate for something to be optimistic about, because they're just sort of drowning and pessimism because they are in a lot of personal pain for both political and cultural reasons. But I wonder if if that's your take on this too, that they really aren't in pain, and so part of why your message resonates with them is is sadly because of that. Absolutely they've been sold a bill of goods that success means making it within what is ultimately a

meaningless universe. I mean, if all the system can offer is a way to have success within a hyper capitalist system, that will have you, you you know, like just every single day trying to struggle to make it more and at the expense sometimes of the things that matter most in life. They understand that something's wrong with that. I think millions of Americans understand that something's wrong with that. People understand that this country has swerved away from very essential things

and even people. You know, one of the things we were talking about last night, because a lot of these kids are into economics, you know, in political theory, and I pointed out that Adam Smith, himself, the primary architect of free market capitalism, said it cannot exist outside an ethical universe. So the country, whether you're on the left or the right, knows that there's a soullessness at the center of how we're operating. There's a lack of ethics.

I mean, look at what's happening in this country. I don't care what your politics are. Something's wrong at the heart of things. And I believe that it is time for a president who is willing to name that and speak to it in a meaningful way, not just as a slogan, but actually connecting the dots between the way we operate politically and economically with the suffering of so many human beings, both those who are making it and

those who are not. And pekingbacking on what Emily said, I want to play one other clif that's been circulating on TikTok, let's roll that one. People these days talk about how traumatized they are by the Trump phenomena. I'm just so traumatized by it. Do you think that people who walked across the bridge at Soma were not traumatized. Everybody said, I'm so anxious. It's just this whole thing has been so anxious. Really, what about those women standing

up at a wrong right now? We need to toughen up. Butter cups everybody in this room. However pushed down we are, is nothing compared to how push down the air ononians are right now, and they are showing up. So I think we have gotten to a point where we're toddling our neuroses a little too much. Right now we need to say, meditate, take a shower tray in the morning, and kick ass in the afternoon. Paste not to minimize the pain. Sometimes you call your girlfriends, you call the

people in your life, can I share my pain? And then that call is over and the person who loves you on that call says, promise me, you're going to get out there this afternoon and show them what you've got. You and I were talking the other day for an article I'm working on for the Intercept on this same phenomenon, and I put to you kind of controversial idea and I want to get your take on it here too, which is that I see some parallels with early Jordan Peterson.

I like that that you couldn't You could end up filling the same void that Jordan Peterson before he before he drifted off into what he's doing now filled for a lot of a lot of young people in this country. And I thought in that clip, you saw some of the closest parallels, uh, both both inspirational but also not pandering and not taking responsibility away from people, you know, to you know, go out there and kick ass in

the afternoon. So what what's your take on that kind of out out there comparison that there could be some overlap there. Well, I think the significant word is early, you know early Jordan Peterson. I thought, oh, this is good. He's really telling people to stop being such precious, entitled, you know, spoiled brats. He's really telling people to toughen up and be mature. And then he took this this just this dive, this turn into a direction that I

find kind of frightening. Actually, So yes, as long as you make it very early Jordan Peterson, but where he has gone with it is very very very different, complete opposite from where I would go. You must, as you become more mature, become more compassionate, more humble, and you must see your politics that way as well. And I he's become very, very different than anything on whatever any direction I would ever take at who he is now.

And it's an interesting question because, yeah, early Jordan Pearson was telling people basically make your bed, take control of your life. And what I like about what what you were saying in that clip, Marian is it's it's not denying that people are in pain. It's not denying that there's some suffering, but it's putting it in perspective and empowering people to deal with it differently. And and on that note, I would be vermisfitted and asked, I mean, I think TikTok is part of some of the mental

health crises that people are having. They did they just spend too much time on TikTok uh. So on that note, what would what would you say to some of the zoomers who this is really resonating with on on TikTok?

What would you say to them about, you know, their their strategy for balancing you know, political activism on TikTok and political activism in the real world support for someone like you on TikTok versus support for someone like you also, you know, in Iowa, in New Hampshire, in South Carolina.

What do you think the right balance should be there? Well, I think young people as well as the rest of us are reading all the articles, we are understanding the very very deleterious effects mentally and emotionally psychologically on too much social media use. I mean, everybody gets that, But to me, the fact that somebody is on TikTok doesn't of itself logically mean that they're on it many, many

hours a day. I think we're all recognizing now the addictive qualities of social media and the damage that it does to our lives if we're on those tablets too long every single day. But the fact that younger people are looking for different ways to share information to get information is a separate issue from surveillance capitalism. For whether it has to do with TikTok or an American company and lot of that. This is where they are, this is what they're going to be doing, regardless of what

we think about social media, it's here to stay. This is an example where the answer is not only government regulations. Obviously, there's some serious questions going on there and serious issues to balance about free speech versus all of those things. But a lot of it does have to do with personal change all of us, whether it has do with TikTok or our phone or anything. I mean, mature conscious people are saying, I got to put this thing, that thing down. I should not be spending so many hours

on that. We're recognizing the addictive qualities, and I trust America's young people to recognize it as well. And you know, as as your campaign picks up steam, you're going to start coming under more scrutiny. To the extent that you have gotten any coverage from the mainstream corporate press, it

has been critical of your previous treatment of staff. So I'm curious, One, if you've heard that from people that you that have come up to you on the campaign trail, They've asked you about those claims from past staff, And two, you know, how do you respond to those? I get those Politico or maybe there's another article from former staff saying that you're a rough boss to work for. A lot of people have worked for me for years and

think I'm a nice person. I think that if you know, I wish I could speak always in those deals, in those zin calm, loving tones of all the men who run Washington. I'll try to be more like them. Look, I've raised my voice at times, and I'm sorry. And if anybody has ever experienced me as less than respectful to them, then I am sorry. And if ten percent of that is true, it's something to look at within myself. And I think that's true. But those stories are so overblown,

planted smear hit. I've never thrown a phone or anything like that. So if I lost my temper a few times in the office, absolutely, But the picture of me is that has been painted is beyond mischaracterization, and I think most people know it most importantly, even people who've read the articles. What I find out in those states you were talking about are people who want healthcare, they want child care, they want pay family leave, they want a livable wage. They want to be able to send

their kids to college. You know, in the nineteen seventies they could. In the nineteen seventies, the average worker could afford to send their kids to college, could afford a yearly vacation, could afford a home, could afford these things that are now like some past middle class that used to exist almost in some fairy tale. That's what people want to talk about, not the games of how the DNC is going to plant stories about me because I'm

inconvenient to the system. People see beyond that. I know that people who actually are meeting me in these in these in these other states are beyond that. But of course the DNC is having their you know, they're having their desired effect. Throwing a lot of fairy does a lot of people's eyes almost blackout in certain media outlets.

But that's why these young people and they're and such as yourself independent media giving me a chance so that the American people can see what does this person offer me? What would this person do as president? And for that, I just want to add one thing I have been I have witnessed a sitting president get upset, No more upset than I've gotten. And you know what my thought about it was at the time, well reason to be angry. Sorry guys, anybody who thinks that anyway, I think I

made my point. And last last question is this is the TikTok phenomenon translating into kind of small dollar donations into the campaign. I don't see a lot of ways on TikTok, like the way that you would see on say Twitter, YouTube or Facebook in the past to channel that into the campaign. Yeah, yeah, you know, I don't have a way of knowing. I see a lot of five dollar donations come in. I see a lot of

ten dollar donations come in. I see a lot of three dollar donations come in, but whether they came from TikTok or not, you know. I was watching an article on TV last night, a segment on television last night about the twenty twenty two elections and how the accepted

wisdom has been the young people don't vote. This generation of young people, sure as heck, does vote, and they prove that in twenty twenty two, and they prove that in Wisconsin the other day as well as Chicago, obviously, because they know that their lives are on the line for this younger generation, whether or not they have healthcare, whether or not they can get rid of these college loan debts, whether or not they can go to college, whether or not they're going to have a habitable planet.

They are recognizing the importance of politics, and they say, why should somebody who's only going to be here for maybe ten, fifteen, maybe twenty years longer get to have such an undue influence on what happens forty years from now, and they are getting that, so we know that their interest is translating into into voting. Whether or not it's

translating into into financial giving, I don't know. I hope that they will understand that they're five dollars, certainly in a campaign like mine, obviously not corporate backed, run on small dollar donations. I can only hope that they're recognizing. You know, I didn't say it last night, but what I was thinking is if each of you kids, you know, gave me three dollars, it would be a good day in fundraising. So well, there you go, Marian, thanks so

much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. It's always nice to be with you guys. Thank you. You got it. And Emily, is there is there a conservative parallel, any any kind of right wing politician who's lighting up TikTok in the way that Mary and Mania has gripped it. I don't go on TikTok because, as you know, I'm not in my thirties as of last month, so I'm too old for TikTok. Yeah, No, I mean,

I actually don't go on TikTok. But I think the Jordan Peterson comparison is a really interesting one because and also one thing that it makes me think of is I've said for a long time, it's just it honestly puzzles me why there hasn't been kind of a Ralph Nader running on issues with sort of like technology and alienation, and you really like the there hasn't been a candidate

like that in a really long time. And I think Marian sort of is someone who's prepared to talk like that about alienation, about psychological problems that the country is facing in mass health problems that the country is facing in mass But on the right, I just hear way too little of that. So no, I don't think there's anything like that, and I do want to see that on the debate stage really badly. I can imagine Nator

doing well on TikTok. The Native would do great on He almost says the Bernie esque quality right, like he's kind of commugionally. I sold I sold Ralph Nader T shirts in two thousand. Of course he's Madison Square Garden rally. Of course you did. He also was supposed to STEALT T shirts at Woodstock ninety nine. I'm not making this up. Weren't you You were supposed to be part of the volunteer staff. That's right. I was gonna sell T shirt Kindness t shirts that would talk ninety nine, and I

backed out at the last minute. I eagerly await the Ryan Grim memoir. Glad I didn't what they have burned down the Kindest T shirt stand. That's the question. Didn't they? I think he didn't go because I didn't go. Oh yeah, they probably would have. Actually later made a T shirt where I had a friend draw Ralph Nader's face on that iconic Shade portrait. It's a great T shirt. Oh my god, it's funny. Well, that's a great place to

leave it. There you go. Make tune in next Wednesday for more bizarre stories from the life and times of writing. All right, we'll talk to you later. Take it easy. To see you next week.