4/2/25: Elon Faceplants In Wisconsin, Liberation Day, Luigi Death Penalty, JFK Hearings & MORE!

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All right, good Wednesday morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. Emily is joining us from Waukesha County, Wisconsin, where Elon Musk told us the fate of Western civilization was going to be decided on Tuesday night. We're now in a post Western civilization moment. I for one, am looking forward to it. Emily, how's the mood in the post West environment?

Welcome to the future, Ryn, there are there's a lot to talk about from the election results last night, just here in Wisconsin. Interestingly enough, where you know to precinct yesterday, turnout was really high. We'll get into why that didn't make up the difference for Elon Musk and the right here in Wisconsin, but also election results that are worth talking about in Florida, in Louisiana. So we have all kinds of good stuff to get through. At the top of the Today's Show.

Ryan, Yeah, at four o'clock today, I guess the West is going to try to make a comeback. Donald Trump is going to announce massive tariffs. This is going to be Liberation Day. I see a lot of people joking that it's liberation from your four oh one k day. We're going to talk to Barat rom Mardy, who was the number two basically economic official to Biden administration.

He's going to talk. He's going to give us his take.

On Trump's tariffs and also his critique of this abundance agenda that friend of the Show Ezra Cline, has introduced to the United States, along with instantly like seven different thing organized around this idea of an abundance agenda.

Luigi Manngion, alleged to have done.

Something wrong, is going to get the get death penalty if Pam Bondy gets her way, we'll talk about that the deportation scandal has broken through. Now to Joe Rogan, we're going to play a clip of him asking, wait a minute, why are we Are we sure we're supposed to be sending like gay Barber's have nothing to do with MS thirteen to Dungeons and El Salvador?

Is that really what we signed up for here?

I think it's interesting that this has kind of moved

Emily any quick thoughts.

Wasn't exactly a shining example of republican government from the right either at that hearing, because of course there was that moment.

If you haven't seen it yet, go.

Ahead and google it of Lauren Bobert confusing Oliver Stone and Rogerstone, which is very beautiful.

Anything you know, that's a mistake that can happen. We'll let that one slide. So a bunch of elections last night, two critical ones in Florida where Republicans were defending, you know, seats that Trump had carried by thirty plus points. This is Matt Gates and also Mike Wallas, though both went into the administration. Matt Gates never made it all the way in, but decided he didn't want to take his keep his Panhandle seats. So both of those held special elections.

Here's Susan Crawford the winner.

Last night Today, Wisconsin nights spended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court. And Wisconsin's stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price. Our courts are not for sale.

So Wisconsin voters are getting used to these supreme these pivotal Supreme Court elections. With that victory, the liberals, the Democrats, whatever you want to call them, will can the Supreme Court going forward. We had significant lines at the polls. Emily, we can roll this a one vo here, But Emily, what did you see when it came to turnout an enthusiasm in the state for this off year election.

Yeah, I was out here in Waksha County yesterday and turnout was you know, the poll workers were talking about how high turnout was and you could see it. I mean, it didn't really look like a spring Supreme Court election, le will turnout, it wasn't quite presidential, but turnout turned out to be very high as the information started coming in. Now, there was a state Supreme Court race, which in Wisconsin, by the way, isn't Republican versus Democrat.

It's conservative versus liberal.

And people sort of know that the parties are respectively involved, but it's not technically partisan. So there was a race back in twenty twenty three where it was also at the time breaking spending records. Last night's election turned out to be the actual most expensive judicial race in US history. About one hundred million dollars poured into this. The conservative candidate had a bit of a cash advantage.

They both were around.

I think the Susan Crawford who ended up winning was around forty five million dollars and Brad Schimmel was somewhere north of fifty million dollars. On the Crawford side, you had Soros, Pritzker, and I think Reid Hoffman getting involved, and then Musk, Dicky Line, some others were involved.

On the conservative side.

Musk tried to run his Pennsylvania Playbook because it worked when Trump's name was at the top of the ballot, and he gave out a couple million dollars to different voters, pay people one hundred bucks for signing a petition against activist judges. They put a lot into this race, where the margin now is about ten points for Susan Crawford. She wins, and that's similar to what the margin was for the liberal candidate back in twenty three, which is

Yeah, and it was reported Musk had spent seventeen million dollars and that several days, with several days still left to go in the elections, of the final total certainly

The law there.

He also did a lottery where he gave out, you know, I think two million, you know, million dollar checks to two different people who participated in this thing.

And you're right, it wasn't it wasn't enough.

And so there is a there's a theory on the left which I want to get your take on, because I wonder if this is going to become something that gets talked about in Trump's circles. The theory is is a little bit crazy, but it's just just a theory, and it's it's about it's not about an election being stolen, but it's about what Trump thinks about twenty twenty four.

Here's why it's done. Here are the numbers that are going to come in.

Now, he can easily, from my perspective, have a program that analyzes turnout in different key precincts, compare it to twenty twenty, and then run a projection and just analyze it. This basically the same way that The New York Times does, but a little bit more sophisticated, Like I don't think it requires him to have any inside information or to

If he did.

Now watching elon Musk face plan, like if it was true that Trump thought Musk had some magic up his sleeve, Well, there was no rabbit in the hat in Wisconsin. So I wonder if this is going to cool things between Musk and Trump and between Musk and the Republican Party.

It's a really interesting question because I think one of the reasons Elon Musk started pouring millions into this race, not that you know, fifteen million is is that much to him, but roughly fifteen million is that much to him. But I think one of the reasons he started pouring money into it is in order to prove a point that he could be a net like he's an asset

But I think it would be a hilarious move to try to take over the country just to open up more Tesla dealerships in Wisconsin.

I'd be amazing.

Yeah, yeah, that would be something. But yeah, I mean here in this is where it was also really interesting. So like here in conservative, relatively suburban counties, they were feeling Republicans Conservatives were feeling really good yesterday because of the high turnout. They had the sense that maybe Elon Musk had actually done something very very impressive with the petitions against quote unquote activist judges. And you know that

It just it wasn't enough.

And for many decades, Democrats have been the party of working class voters, and working class voters are less likely to have their IDs just as a as a percentage, and you know, small percentages can change. You know, if you're a college educated mom in the suburbs, you've got your ducks in a row.

If you're not, you're less likely to.

And so for many years Democrats defended the ability of anybody. Hey, here's your address, show you tilly bill, whatever, just sign your name.

If you're registered, you can vote. Now.

It's taken Republicans so long to start winning on voter ID it's going to end up perhaps hurting their voters more.

As you said with me, the David Shore analysis that.

If you have voter suppression of any degree across the board, you're more likely to suppress working class voters.

And so.

Anyway, that's just an interesting kind of irony there, and I think it's also why you're finally seeing Democrats kind of roll over on voter ID like, Okay, you know what, our voters all have ID now, so fine.

We'll go ahead and do it.

And that's the thing you have to remember parties are amoral vehicles for power, Like they don't have any principles on anything. The only principle is they want to win, and so they don't have a principle on what the actual you know, identification you need. Trump said the way that he wrote his executive order recently around around election reform, So if there was a way to read it that would say you could only vote if you had a passport, I think that was poorly written and I don't think that's.

Going to hold up.

But if that were of the law put into place, Democrats would win in a landslide, probably, Like Democrats are more likely probably to have valid passports than Republicans at this point, which is which is a shocking testament to the realignment of the parties that the Democrats have more upper class, upper middle class voters than in the past. Speaking of working last district, there are two in Florida,

They wanted a close race, but not but they didn't want to lose it.

I don't think we have an element for this, but in the Panhandle and Matt Gates's seat, the Democrats actually overperformed the other Florida special election, still lost because it

And while you're talking, you can put up a five.

Over the weekend in Louisiana, they were the right put up four constitutional amendments and all four of them were beaten back.

And there was a Pennsylvania race that was what now, two weeks.

Ago, two weeks an Amish country in Lancaster, the Democrat actually won in an area that is definitely not Democratic country.

Yeah, you know, I'm looking at this posts by Matthew Klein right now Political Report, and he suggested last night one reason that Florida's first district might end up relatively better for Democrats than Florida's six, despite getting no money and attention. He says education Florida one has a bachelor's degree attainment of thirty three point three percent. In Florida six, it's twenty seven point one percent. More college education equals

But that's like a very very.

Interesting shift for Republicans to start dealing with in some of these different places. And it looks like, I mean, some of this really does look like twenty seventeen, some of those races we were watching back then early to see what would happen in the twenty eighteen midterms that went well for Democrats. So I'm hesitant to read too much into this being like a specific rebuke of Doge and Elon Musk, but it was a failure, at least

Yeah, so let's move on to the tariffs. Donald Trump at four pm today will announce Liberation Day. So we're going to have Barat Romamurti to talk about that. Our today is l day, Liberation Day here in the United States. Liberation from what remains slightly unclear. This Fox News clip suggests that you might need to liberate yourself from your attachment to your four oh one k Let's roll this.

And those four oh one k people who are depending, those retirees, all of that, just talking plane speak with them. Look, when this nation used to go to war, people in this country would support the war effort with their materials at home and making things for weaponry and all of that. We got to do one hundred percent buy in over this bumpy period.

Just communicate. You can put up B two.

Donald Trump will be speaking precisely at four pm from the Rose Garden, which is the moment that the bell will be ringing the New York Stock Exchange. He knows that, uh, he chose that for a reason. He's gonna sit back and watch the chaos all day as uh And even if you don't have money in there, it's kind of gonna be.

It's gonna be. It's gonna be a ride, that's for sure.

So uh So to talk about this, we're joined by barat Ram Murty, who was the uh deputy director of the nee C at the at the Biden administration, and and I think from the left as as good a person as we could get to be sympathetic to the broad idea behind tariffs and behind rebuilding America's manufacturing class. There was a strong faction you know, there's a strong faction in the Democratic Party within the Bide administration that uh,

Like, what's what's going on here? Who's in control? Is it Lightheiser? Is it Trump's kind of amalpination of what it is?

Yeah, go ahead, Emily Frank can just jump into say it's actually a big deal that Trump did not bring Bob Laiteizer back into this administration.

He has Navarro around him, but reportedly a.

Lot of this sort of advising or no he's not.

He's he's not formally in the administration, And it's kind of a sore spot for the like tariff the protectionists on the quote unquote new right, because he was seen as somebody who could potentially be even in a Commerce or Treasury secretary role and who wasn't.

But speaking of.

Commerce secretary, reportedly Howard Lutnik is driving a lot of Trump's very particular strategy here, which is interesting.

So anyway, sorry, no, thank you, that's very very helpful.

Like I still see Lightheiser a lot commenting on this and like.

Yeah, but that, but that's a very good amendment. Yes he's not, like in the room.

Yeah, Well, first of all, happy Liberation date.

Happy Liberation Day. Celebrate.

So look, you're right. I think that there is a strategic case. Both a national security and ECONO make a security case for tariffs, but you have to use them in a certain kind of way for them to make sense. So the entire theory of how tariffs work, right, is that it's a tax on imports.

It's a way to think about it.

And so by driving up the cost of importing goods into the United States, it encourages investors and other businesses in the United States to look for domestic options instead.

That's the basic theory.

Right, because those will be relatively cheaper to what's coming in. But if the goal of all of this is to revive certain domestic industries, which is a goal that I support, Let's say you want to build more washing machines in the United States, and the problem is that you can import really cheap washing machines from abroad right now, and nobody's going to build them here because of that. Think about this from the perspective of an investor right who's saying,

Goal, well, washing machine manufat.

Actually maybe there's an opportunity now because the tariff means that the important good has been more expensive. That has to be in place for years in years for that and with certainty for that investor to make a decision that this is a good use of my money. And the problem with the Trump tariffs is that they're completely unstrategic and there's no plan for how long they're going to be in place and what the triggers are for having them go up or go down or anything like that.

I want to ask about first in the Senate, we can go through some of these next elements. We can start with B three. This is Donald Trump going after Tim Kaine, who has sought to perhaps put legislation together that would undermine the Canada tariffs.

And obviously, if people are familiar with the.

History of tariffs, that is very much an Article one power.

So kind of sympathetic to this myself.

But Lisa Murkowski, we can put B four up on the screen, has said indicated that she's sympathetic to this. She says, QUO, I'm looking at my state's interests and it seems to me that his resolution makes sense about the Kane resolution. And then finally, if we put B five up on the screen. Donald Trump has been unloading on Republicans like Rand Paul, Lisa Murkowski, on True Social as well, who have indicated they are not on board with the particular the particulars of the Canada tariff agenda.

But if you were looking at Canada.

Tariffs, would you suggest any sort of walls that should be built around industry with Canada at all? Because most of the left are saying now Canada is an ally leave Canada alone. I think from a sort of war and Usk position, there's a decent argument for some targeted tariffs here.

Yeah, again, there are two interesting things.

Number one they're talking about and across the board tariff right on every single thing. And you know, if there's a case to be made on dairy, you know Canada imposes a tariff on US dairy that's exported to Canada. Maybe we need to put something on our imports from Canada to try to let the playing field there.

There's always interesting.

Contain right now a big issue, right you know, is there something about autos and auto parts? Those are sector bi sector, and you would want to figure out what is a nuanced tariff that makes sense given what the tariff is that the other country is imposing and the relative cost of the goods and across the twenty percent across the board twenty percent tariff or by definition, is unstrategic.

And now the Biden administration left some of Trump's China tariffs in place. Why was that and why were those tariffs worth worth leaving?

I mean, look, there are one of the key purposes of tariffs is to correct a trade imbalance. And if you look at what China is doing, obviously they have much much lower labor and environmental state in China, they can manufacture things much more cheaply because they pay people two dollars a day and they don't care how much pollution they put into the water into the air. The

So yeah, it made sense to keep those in place.

Though.

You know, we did an intensive review of every single tariff in twenty twenty one twenty twenty two when inflation was quite high, and said do all of these make sense or not? And we decided that a lot of them made sense and protected important interests. But remember that was on something like zero point eight percent in imports from China those tariffs. Trump is talking about one hundred percent of imports from China, from the EU, from Canada,

Leaving those tariffs in place mean that they have now been in place for almost I mean, we're coming up on a decade, not quite a decade, but we're coming up on a decade the China tariffs. And I'm curious because I've seen some libertarian or I should maybe just say like anti protectionist economists, which is just saying economist basically, Yeah, push back and say, well, the China tariffs haven't worked. There's your case study. China tariffs have been in place

Yeah.

The thing about tariffs, and honestly with all policy making, is that you have to compare it against a world in which they didn't exist, and it's hard to know exactly what that world looks like. So for those who say things haven't gotten haven't improved as much as you would have liked, my question to them is what would things look like if we hadn't had them in place?

How bad would things have gotten without those in place?

And so, you know, the folks at the White House and the US Trade Representative and others who were most involved in all of this, they did a very careful review and determined that it was worth it overall to keep them in place because again, they were on a relatively small portion of goods and they're directly related to Chinese activities that they felt like were basically unfair trade practices. So, you know, I think that there's a strong case for

Noubt right, right.

Trump initially said I'm going to do something about this, I'm going to close the difference, and then he pulled it back. You know, one thing that actually would have made a lot of sense. If you care about fentanyl, if you care about US domestic production, if you care about protecting US consumers, all of that would have made sense.

But it's the one thing that he hasn't done when it comes to tariffs.

Do you know why?

I have no idea?

Like was it?

I mean I know that right after he did it, you started having people complain that, like other the thing that they had ordered, like wasn't showing up fast enough?

Yeah?

Could it?

Was it really that quickly that he felt the pressure? You think or I don't know?

It looks yeah. The thing about.

Trump, well, Bezos would have loved it.

It's because it's protectionism for Amazon, well, well they bring a lot of crap Inso you know, the thing is with Trump, and again there's a case for tariffs if it is done in a thoughtful, discipline, long term perspective kind of way.

And all of those things are the opposite of Trump right in terms of he'll have a good conversation with a world leader and totally change his policy towards that person. You know, some event will happen, and you know they'll they'll capture somethentyl coming across the border and say this is an example of what I'm talking about.

The tariffs are going to go up. Right.

There's no predictability, and I know that sounds boring, but that's really important if you're trying to make business decisions and make investment decisions over a long term horizon.

The counter argument on China would be that it was true for many years that they were, you know, the source of like all cheap labor, et cetera. But now they're so automated and their factories are so efficient that you know, if you want cheap labor, you're going maybe to like Vietnam or somewhere else whereas China now is competing because they've invested so much, you know, with our

Yeah, you're right, a lot of the quote unquote low skill manufacturing has migrated to Southeast Asia in particular.

But it gets to a point about.

Those Chinese companies often though, right.

Yes, what kind of manufacturing do we want in the United States? Is it important that we literally make every kind of product here for either strategic economic or national

You can't.

It's not just doing the tariffs, it's also supporting it with public funds.

Any response to that, Emily, I know that right kind of now hates the Chips Act, Is that right?

I mean, well, yeah, I think a lot of people read see the Chips Acts as something that has ultimately been vindicated because they're China hawks and know how important it is to entre some of that. But I know we're going to get into this and the abundance discussion.

I don't know if you have a response to that, but I think and.

I would add to that a bunch of buybacks that the companies did, Like the companies would get the subsidies and then quickly like just basically funnel the money directly to shareholders.

How do you balance those two criticisms?

Yeah, well, I would say there're were a lot of criticisms when the rules for this Chips program were announced, because it said, for example, you got to pay workers a certain amount of money and provide certain types of labor protections. The big one that attracted a lot of attention was if you're gonna get this money, you have to provide some kind of affordable childcare for the people

At the federal level.

Well, all of that, I think has been proven to be misplaced, because all of the money in that program has gone out the door. All of the major companies that we wanted to be building in the United States met the requirements and have started building. As I mentioned, TSMC and Micron and Intel are all taking money and building stuff in Columbus and in Arizona and an upstate in New York and so on.

And they met the requirements.

It didn't turn out to be that hard for them to say, oh, you know what, we'll have a care center at our factory so that we can.

Actually have a diverse workforce.

So I actually think that that's in a good example of how this abundance critique has been off the mark, because when we when push came to shove, the attraction of the federal dollars was enough that they were able to meet the requirements. And look, I wish that we had put stronger buyback protections in there. That was a big negotiation during Build the Republicans. You know, we don't want to tell.

How our friends Mansion and Cinema were friendly on that.

Yeah, the Republicans, to her credit, I think Secretary of Commerce Raymondo, who was responsible for administering the program, tried to get some of that into the rules, you know, not the actual statute, but the rules for the program. It probably wasn't as effective as getting it a law that said if you take this money, no buybacks for five years period, but then take the money.

Yeah, but you know that's the thing.

We're not here to build things.

We are here to just take money and gred it to our sharehold But look, you misunderstand the nature of our project.

I think that that is, you know, go to mush this together with the abundance debate. There's I get frustrated a lot about the various inefficiencies in these types of projects, right.

And you know.

What what one person will call, you know, uh produce that you know, providing support for an important domestic industry is another person's corporate welfare.

Right.

And I hate the fact that basically some percentage of these public dollars are going to be wasted in the forum of you know, going into buybacks or higher executive compensation.

We should be doing.

I think it is up to us to do our very very best to make sure that every single dollar is spent as efficiently as possible. And I think that means fighting against some of the process, you know, a completely extraneous requirements that come in. It also means fighting against corporate interests who want to use this money in ways that aren't compatible with the public interest.

It requires doing both.

And I you know, this whole debate that has emerged about abundance, it seems to be kind of like a false choice, right, But yes, we all we should try to pair down these steps and these requirements to really do the things that we want to focus on. But yes, we should also make sure that we're we have an understanding of corporate power and how they seek to distort these processes and how they seek to take public dollars and not do public interested things, and figure out ways of stopping that too.

Yeah, if you're if there are two complaints to choose from, and one of them is a corporation just taking the money and handing it to its shareholders without building anything. And the other complaint is that you're asking them to build a subsidized daycare center or not even necessarily subsidized, which is a daycare center you're convenient to the factory. To get angry at the childcare part just feels like reactionary right wing populism, or not even populism ractionary, just

Yeah, I mean also, I think that's why some on the right look back at Chips and say, because there were Republicans at the last minute who had been supportive of the legislation and ultimately voted against it, and populist republicans,

Yeah, and we're not China. We can't just do good things. We have to buy off our corporate class to ask them to give us permission.

Yeah, and I would lets say one last thing, which is that again, I'm not defending every single government program as perfectly efficient, but it's not like the private sector does everything perfectly efficiently, right, And so you know, and whenever people will complain to me about, oh, you know, I had to wait in line at the DMV, or my IRS refund is taking a week to come to me, it's like, have you ever dealt with Comcast? Have you ever dealt with any of these companies? That had to

Well, let's talk more about this in the next segment that where we're going to go deeper into the debate over this abundance agenda. Ezra Klin has been making the media rounds for his new book on a Bunnets and is getting very little pushback. So we're going to give him a little bit of that here today. The tiniest little poke that he got came from the pod Save Bros. Who characterized some of the criticism that's coming his way

But let's roll this clip here. You mentioned some of the critique from the left. I'm sure you've read all of it, or read.

Most of it.

I'm sure you've talked about the Zephyr teach Out review of Abundance. I wanted to get your reaction to one part of that because I think it summarizes a lot of the criticism on the left. I mean, you mentioned

So I get that.

I guess to the question that teacher, i'd ask, is there room in Abundance for a critique of concentrated economic power and anti monopoly politics and all that.

Trying to think about the nicest way to say this, my friends, in the whole problem is oligarchy part of the party, and I believe a good part of our problems are oligarchy. But there are certain kinds of problems here then willing to see, and certain kinds they're not

Now, one of the key arguments in Ezra's book is that liberals have kind of wrapped the government, tied the government up with too much regulation, and that's keeping it from allowing the abundance to flow. And one of the ten poll case studies that he uses in the book is the billions that were appropriated by Congress to lay out royal broadband and the lack of any royal broadband resulting from that. There was a viral a John Stewart clip that where he kind of lays out this this

Go ahead.

So for a royal broadband, for instance, what you end up having is a fourteen stage process, Like there's a period where the Commerce Department needs to drop a map of which parts of the country don't have the right amount of broadband, and then there's a challenge period on the map and da da da da da da da, and states and jurisdictions try to apply for this money, and again this passes. At the end of twenty twenty one, they have time. By the end of twenty twenty four, three have got into.

The end of the process.

They were trying.

Three of these fifty six Yes, end of the process, meaning they've actioned it, they've built it, or they've now they've gotten done.

Of course I didn't mean they thought that, John, Sorry, I was so okay, I confused you. They just got to the point where in theory they could get the money to build.

They had been approved for the money.

Yes, yes, basically Okay.

So we have a running kind of series on this program where we try to treat our viewers like adults, and so we're going to do that today. And so we're joined by Barat Rommerty, who was a top Biden administration economic policy official, deputy director of NED.

Is that any c any c.

And to contextualize you in the spectrum kind of a Warrenite like former what Elizabeth Warren person and one of the people that Wall Street would be angry at the Biden fort saying, you know, you're ruining what should be a glorious administration by bringing in all these people who are so skeptical of corporate power and being so being so rude to us, and so as it goes on at length in that in that interview and in his book, laying out really what is an outrageous and absurd process,

You can stream.

People want one the damn broadbands and then they didn't get it. So what is what is being left out of this question? Why did they do something so dumb?

Yep? Well, I would say a couple of things.

Number One, if you look at both the answer that Ezra gave on Podz and his answer there, the clear implication is silly liberals. They designed this complicated fourteen step process all by themselves because they're obsessed with making sure that every single group in the United States has an opportunity to weigh in, and they don't prioritize actually building things as somebody who was directly involved in both negotiating this and then ultimately try and implement it. A lot

Passed because Mansion and Cinnemon insisted on pulling it out of reconcising exection. For those who remember that whole process, the reconciliation would have meant fifty votes. Democrats do it on their own. Mansion and Cinema insist on pulling it out. Now you need Republicans go ahead.

So we're stuck in the situation where we need to get at least ten Republican votes. Okay, and where did those specific steps come from? For example, Ezra pointed out, you needed to complete this map, not actually the Commerce Department. The SEC had to complete a map which says, here's where broadband is and is in the entire United States of America. We told them, look, it's going to take at least eighteen months for the SEC to complete this map.

But Republicans insisted that that map.

Be comed completed before we even allocated a single dollar to a state to build this stuff. And the challenge process he brought that up to who pushed for the challenge process.

The big incumbent internet providers.

Why did they push for that because the thing that they are most afraid of is the federal government spending money to build the new broadband that would directly challenge and compete with the broadband that they're already offering in certain places. So they said, we got to make absolutely sure that not a dollar of federal money is spent to build infrastructure where we already provide some broadbands service.

This was such a silly process. Two reasons.

Number one, we already had ten billion dollars through an earlier bill that we passed that was moving much more quickly because it was a democratic only bill operating through the Treasury Department that was providing internet service. And that bill has already provided connections to hundreds of thousands of households that really needed it. So we said, we have this bridge basically a programs providing internet in the short term.

So republic go ahead. Yeah, Emily job Right.

I was just jump in because I could maybe channel Ezra and Derek Thompson here and say, you know, they

To get rid of?

And in this process you want to get rid of some of these good regulations. So what from your perspective did the left, Like what culpability does the left have in the broadband case, more specifically for extending the process if anything? Or was it really I mean many such cases of industry getting these carveouts that make us wildly less than efficient on a bipartisan basis, But what did the left do that may have extended the process here?

I would say that in terms of that fourteen step process that Ezra highlighted, those steps came from Republicans. And the reason I feel confident saying that is because the Democrats went into those negotiations with a bill, a bill that was broadly supported in the Democratic Caucus by Senator Klobachar and Representative Clyburn that was a much faster acting bill and didn't have any of these fourteen steps included in it, and those steps came in in their negotiations with Republicans.

I will admit there were things.

That that we in the Biden administration and the left more generally were pushing for in that process.

And let me give you a couple examples.

Number One, we wanted to make sure that if we were going to build this broadband that it was actually going to deliver affordable service.

To middle class families at the end of it.

So we put in a regulatory requirement that when states applied for this money, they had to show how this progress a process was going to produce broadband for that was affordable to middle class people. Why did we do that because we had stories from across the country, especially at the state level, where states had spent a lot of money trying to build out broadband to rural areas and the broadband got built and then what ended up happening.

How useful is that people either pay or you don't get it?

Yeah, and how useful is that to people if you spent a bunch of taxpayer dollars to build out broadband and then people can't really afford it. So this was actually pushed for by John Tester not exactly here the left, because he'd had this experience in Montana try to serve

And when we say Republican negotiators, we're really talking about the cable and you know, the ISP's internet providers.

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't want to yes.

A lot of it, especially the stuff about the challenge process was because of corporate interest wanting to make sure that we didn't quote unquote overbuild.

That's the term that they use a.

Lot, because they're very concerned about waste expire dollars, right exactly.

Which, by the way, is interesting as Republicans become dominant in rural America, right, Like, that's a fairly interesting political dynamic as well, that there's still Republican politicians are still overly responsive to that industry completely.

Yeah.

But the other thing is that look, as I said, there's a lot of examples in West Virginia and Montana in Maine of states trying to build out broadband and it didn't actually produce usable broadband for people. And the thing is, once you put a little bit of money into it and you start building it out, and then let's say they don't complete the project, they really have you over a barrel, because they're going to say, don't you want to give us another ten million dollars to actually complete.

This thing at this point? Right?

And so a lot of these folks were burned by efforts at the state level. So I want to give them some credit and say they were actually focused in some cases on let's make sure that we think about this and do it efficiently at the end of the day. And I think that that sort of gets into the broader abundance debate, right, because sometimes efficiency means fast.

I agree with that.

But the same folks who who will say let's do this as quickly as possible, will come back a year later and say, why did you waste so much money?

Right, because you went so fast.

So the abundance argument from Ezra and Derek Thompson's zero's in a lot on housing, because like I think that's the that's the place where you can really kind of nail some of these nimbi's who were just you know, throwing up obstacles because they legitimately don't want something built

Monopolies. Absolutely, and look any other examples.

I'm more familiar with a federal level because that's where I've spent my life in policymaking, and I don't want to deny the idea that, especially at the state level, there's lots of barriers that are imposed and maybe a lot of them come from sort of house interesting, yeah, but look on housing in particular. Let me just make a point, if the if The issue is as as in that pod safe clip, you want to do zoning reform.

You know, as you said, I worked for Senator Warren.

We wrote a big comprehensive housing bill and introduced it in twenty eighteen, long time ago, and a key part of that was federal money for new housing, but a big pot of money for zoning reform, basically a race to the top process. That said, any state or any locality that changes zoning requirements gets access to this big pot of money and they can use it to build new parks and roads and whatever. So that's been on our radar and something we've been pushing for for a

And if you don't, you can get sued.

Who are the people who are submitting comments saying this goes too far, this is too quick, this is inefficient. Almost always corporate interests in their lobbyists. Regular people like you and me aren't sitting there looking at the Federal Register and submitting a twenty five page comment on a potential rule. And who is it who's suing the government saying you didn't quite follow our comments and therefore you

Now, Well go ahead, Emily, Well yeah, I mean, I was just gonna say, I think sometimes like this sexually, something that miss is missing on the right a lot, which is this obvious reality that corporations sometimes will push for regulations, like there was a point where Facebook came out totally in favor of Section two thirty because they knew they could handle the regulatory burden of Section two thirty always that any other potential competitors, not really that

And so I think that's true.

I just wonder if you think that the left is sometimes overly responsive to those pushes from corporations because there's this there's habitual, I guess, reflex to say, well, yes, it's appropriate for the government to step in, and then they just kind of stack up on top of each other in ways that are inefficient.

I don't know.

I'm just curious that, like, genuinely what you think of that.

Look, I don't want to make it seem like I'm trying to absolve the left from culpability here.

There is.

I can think of a handful of instances in my personal experience where there is a bit of an obsession

It has been in.

Many cases both the right and the left being very attentive to corporate interests and to incumbent large corporations in particular in what they're pushing for.

Kind of a separate but related question, isn't this all mooted by starlink?

Like can't they just do?

Like it feels like that that product is getting quite good, and it's like, you know what, maybe actually give up on the whole laying broadband everywhere?

Look, or am I wrong about Like I'm.

Not a I think that.

You know, we did an extensive amount of analysis about the right way of serving these households, and if you look at both a technical analysis and sort of a basic cost benefit analysis, trying to lay fiber optic cable to as many of these households as possible is the right way to go. It saves money in the long term, it's basically a future proof product. You do it now, you don't have to come back in five or ten or fifteen years. And dig it up and do it

Starlink.

Sure it is a pretty effective product, but number one, it hasn't been shown to be able to consistently deliver the kinds of speeds that you need to do what you talked about, stream video, do telemedicine, all the stuff that we actually want to do to make sure that

And also there's a limit to how much junk you can have flying up there completely. There's that too.

There is.

So fascinating conversation, and I guess last question here, in responding to some of the pushback that they've been getting, they've said, all right, we're gonna come out with a little bit more substantive analysis that takes into account some of these critiques of corporate power, which like, okay, maybe that could have been in the book, but I will

Yep, I'm sure you.

Saw that argument well as somebody who watched it happen, like.

Is that true?

Like why didn't why didn't you guys push harder despite the law that was in place?

Yeah, I mean, look, I I'm trying not to take offense at that as somebody who after the statute was passed. In the broadband case, with all these steps, we would have regular meetings with the FCC and the Commerce Department and others, and the entire purpose so those meetings was how do we speed this up? Okay, so FCC, you're saying you need eighteen months to finish this map, can

You know, they had ninety days to do it.

Let's push them, if they can voluntarily, to do it in thirty days so you can start reviewing this stuff more quickly. We did that, and we got the incumbent ISPs to actually submit data more clickly, more quickly than they otherwise would so and we did cut that timeline down. So, look, I think there is I'm not going to defend every step of this process. We were stuck with a statute

Right, well, thanks so much for joining us up.

Next, we're going to talk about Luigi. They're trying to kill them, that's right, and utter outrage. How can they do this?

All?

Right?

Stick around?

Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday announced that she was instructing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Luigi Mangioni in the murder trial over Brian Thompson. We could put the first element up on the screen. Pam Bondi did this with a statement yesterday that said Mangioni's murder of Brian Thompson, an innocent man and father of two young children, was

At the same time, I.

Wonder how much of this also was coming from like anti establishment, Maga online, Maga world.

It's kind of interesting.

Was it cold blood? I think is there's some hot bloodedness going on there too.

Definitely hot bloodedness, cold blood in the circumstance, the physical circumstance where Brian Thompson was just walking on the sidewalk, they were like fighting or anything.

Yeah, fair enough.

No, he himself is from the like what do you call it, like the Kaczynski libertarian right, Yeah, roughly, and there's.

A lot of that. There's a lot of anti establishment right and yeah, every not.

Though you know, young young people day you got you guys watching this show. You know you're you're you have curious cross spectrum politics. But a lot of it is organized around knowing that there's something barbaric about the system and also knowing that the levers of uh democratic control have been have been broken, that they're that in many ways, they're an illusion that you can that you can flip flip a switch, but if you actually could look behind

Busy in the cage.

So I think whether that's a left wing anti establishment or right wing anti system message, I don't know. And it depends on kind of where it's channeled and what energy exists at the time to kind of channel it in a particular direction, and it shifts over time, as we've talked about with the kind of the Bernie to Trump pipeline or the Hippie to Que pipeline or whatever

Yeah.

So Playbook yesterday put an item out that said, quote how Trump loses gen Z And that was their little blurb about Pambondi's announcement that she was instructing prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Mangioni and some people on the right pushing back on that.

And you know, I.

Also think there's some truth that seeking the death penalty in this case juxtaposed with you know, you had Bill Cassidy, what was he on Newsmax the other day talking about cuts to Medicare and then corrected himself and said reforms.

Was it Medicare or Medicaid?

Probably yeah, And so he caught himself referring to quote unquote cuts and then sort of smiled at the camera and said, I'm sorry, I mean reforms. I think when you juxtaposed the death penalty in the super high profile case of someone who's become a meme, uh, And I think some of the love for Luigi is is genuine. A lot of it is like kind of pop culture

And they also are just stripping their own moral authority. Their previous argument was, Okay, you have a legitimate grievance that these for profit corporations are making life and death decisions so that they can, you know, so that they can talk a bigger game at their next quarterly conference call. But you shouldn't kill somebody over that. However, we're going to kill this guy over that.

And maybe I'm just.

So divorced from regular American politics and the values that drive it that that won't even be a problem for the people making the argument. But I think for regular people it's like, wait a minute, you just said that he has legitimate grievances, but you shouldn't kill the person. So you have legitimate grievances against him. He allegedly killed somebody, but you're gonna kill him. So now, if we're all back on the same moral plane, he allegedly killed one people.

I don't think, you know, I'm not obviously a death penalty person. A lot of the country is, though, and I think there's still you know, they would say, go ahead and put Brian Thompson on trial, don't shoot him in midtown, and so I think.

That's but then would he get the death penalty after you tried him?

And your point makes sense to me that it's like, if you look at the way Brian Thompson is treated versus the way Amangioni is treated, or other people who are convicted of murder are treated, there's this just glaring disparity in the way that white collar criminals are either never brought to trial and never treated like criminals.

I think that's absolutely true.

And again that's one of those things that the Trump era Republican Party was supposed to kind of have an answer to this.

High level of elite corruption, and it just never I.

Mean, now you have billionaires running around, you know, doing liberation and doge, and it's it's not a it's not the same I think MAGA that it was in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen. So anyway, that's I think there's something to that.

And yeah, meanwhile, some of his supporters aren't taking it. Well, we can put up the second element here. This article goes through the kind of misery being felt by those who you see in Luigi, some type of at least vengeance being exacted on their behalf. I wonder at the same time if this could backfire. The number one hope of people who support Luigi is that there would be some sort of jury nullification where this case would be prominent enough that everybody going in would know the contours.

Just based on the facts.

Facts being guy who's on the street, here's the video, here's what happened.

But so many people.

Have become familiar with this story that the jurors are going to know what's going on here.

If the jurors are also and this is the hope I'm talking about.

On the on behalf of his supporters. If the jurors know that a guilty verdict is going to mean a death sentence, I wonder if that actually increases the likelihood from slim to just a little bit less slim of jury nullification.

What do you think.

No, that's a really interesting point because it's going to be and that's I think it's the political calculation of this too, is this trial is going to be so high profile. It is going to be like massive media coverage. Gen Z's going to be paying attention to it. Every time I'm Luigi's face, people get a glimpse of Luigi's face, it becomes another like iconic meme in the saga of Luigi Mangioniu.

So it's also going.

To like remind people over and over again that the Trump administration is seeking the death penalty, as Pam Bondi put it there, part.

Of Trump's agenda.

They see this as like an agenda item to seek the death penalty in the case of Mangione And they still don't have an actual answer. In healthcare, if anything, they're making cuts. So I mean, I think, yeah, when you're looking at this teenage, well not teenager, this twenty something, or maybe he's in his early thirties now, who suffered immensely.

Right now politically speaking.

And I'm not saying this is what the Vondi or the Trump administration are doing. If I were them and I were deeply cynical and just playing this for politics, I might throw the case. Trump actually might benefit from an acquittal and from the shock that that would create among his supporters. And because if you look at the polling, young people bio plurality are supportive of Luigi, but the overall electorate is not. And a lot of the overall electorate is appalled at the people who were.

Supportive of him.

And so if you got an acquittal and you had all these celebrations in the street, and they would find you know, blue haired kids with like eight ear rings out there celebrating, and they would runt those on Fox News and so that they would elevate that and say, look, this is the country that the Libs want, and so just trying to further feed a backlash. So, uh, yeah, if if if you were a deeply cynical political actor in the Trump administration, you might actually figure out a way to uh to kind of.

Yeah, to throw this one those contradictions.

Yeah, like what do you care, you know, if you if if you can gain political advantage, what do they care if they actually execute Luigi or keep them in prison or let him let him walk free. And then if he's free, every time he's out speaking, he's angering all of the people that you know, are are likely to support some type of reactionary backlash against that. So he's he then becomes a gift to the right that

Well, Ryan, you know this better than I do.

But we would have to be talking about probably like a Trump fifth term for Luigi to actually be executed you.

Know under Trump, chance that he outlives Trump is high.

Yeah.

Well yeah, because this, I mean, the court battle is going to play out and it's going to be very high profile, like in the near future. But then there's appeals and all of that in a death penalty case that could drag on for years and years, So we'll see what happens.

All right, Let's move on to you see Rogan up here on the screen the deportation scandal involving and I know some people don't like when I call it scandal, They just like, what do they want to call it? The deportation celebration with the story of the Venezuela is getting rounded up along with some MS thirteen members and sent down to Nayabukelli's dungeons down in El Salvador broke through to the Joe Rogan podcast partly thanks to front

You got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting like lassued up and deported and sent to like El Salvador prisons, like that kind of shit. Because I'm I read some story it was a Glenn Greenwald.

Yeah, yeah, gay bob a guy, Yeah, yeah.

It's Is that true?

Is that story accurate?

I don't think we know For people who don't know, well, from what I read, I think it was in Time magazine. Jamie, if you can pull it up and maybe we can get an accurate But basically, with the bunch of these trend to a Agua guys, allegedly they got one guy who at least one guy who wasn't a criminal, who was just a gay boba who I think, according to the story, came here legally. He was here legally, that's what they said. Don't know if car I don't know

I feel the same way.

It's and so it's difficult. But it's something that we actually brought up in one of our conversations. We enter it the guy from the Heritage Foundation. We brought this up because I think we talked about this with those as well. When you do things quickly and you do things aggressively. That's how you get shit done. But that's

It's horrific. It's horrific.

I don't think that should be controversial.

No, that's not controversial at all. And this is the thing, you know, measured twice, cut once. This is the like, this is kind of crazy that that could be possible. That's horrific, And that's again that's bad for the cause. Like the cause is let's get the gang members out. Everybody agrees, but what's not innocent? Gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs, and then like, how long before that guy can get out? Can we can we figure

Well, if you think about it from a government perspective, and this is where I think it gets quite sinister is once you've done that, the incentive structure is never going to be to admit that and deal with it. The incentive structure is to say nothing, to cover it up, to pretend it didn't happen.

So if you somehow missed this particular story, this is a This is about a man named Andre Jose Hernandez Romero, Venezuelan man who came to the United States in August.

He said he was fleeing political persecution.

He had he made an asylum appointment, made came to that appointment. When he got there, they noticed on his arm that he had a tattoo of a crown. And this is from the court documents related to his asylum appointment. It says, detaining Hernandez ports this is.

It's sick, it's an error. Don't know what ports like.

These ice agents are not necessarily the best writers. Detaining Hernandez has I guess they mean, Uh, tattoos crowns that are consistent with those of a trend DEG member. That's that's somebody at the Meson Detention Center put put that into his documents, that that stealed his fate. Now we also know that apparently no Venezuelan gangs use tattoos.

Uh.

Whether that's true or not, somebody can maybe fact check me and find some small gang that does trend. De Aragua does not use tattoos as identifying marks for its members. Like that is just a a basic fact that is acknowledged across the spectrum about Trinda Iragua.

Other gangs do.

Somehow, the some people in DHS got the idea in their head that there were crown tattoos associated with this with this gang, and so anybody from Venezuela who had a crown had to wound up getting classified as a member of this gang. We reported earlier about the man who was a professional soccer player from Venezuela who had a crown over a soccer ball which was which was a reference to Real Madrid's logo, Real Madrid being his

And so.

I think Rogan makes a very easily understandable point, and a lot of people are agree that this is a case met measure twice cut once like that that's the perfect cliche to drop on this situation. Because once you cut, and this is why you measure twice. Once you cut, that's it. You've cut.

Once.

You have sent this guy to this El Salvador in dungeon. You've done that. Even if even if they sent him there for one hour and he was beaten up and then returned. That is it's a situation so traumatizing, it would define the rest of your life. One hour there, he's still there. That and that, to me is what's so startling about this situation. So not only did you

I mean, I thought that was a very incisive exchange between Rogan and Constantine kissin partially because of what Constantine said at the end where he said the incentive structure is not to correct the errors. And that's really important here because you have support for mass deportations when it's

So let's take a listen to Caroline Lovett here. This is E two.

Just changing subjects for one second.

The administration has expressed a complete confidence in how all the deportation flights to L.

Salvador were a conducted.

But now that the administration has conceded that there was an error of one Salvadoran national, will there be any reviews conducted? And does the President express any thoughts on the one error that it was disclosed in court last night.

Well, first of all, the error that you are referring to was a clerical error, it was an administrative error. The administration maintains the position that this individual who was deported to L. Salvador and will not be returning to our country was a member of the brutal and vicious MS thirteen gang. That is fact number one. Fact to number two, we also have credible intelligence proving that this

So ran I think the best that the furthest you'll see Stephen Miller and his sort of fellow travelers go in this administration is to slow down and start being more judicious in the deportations and maybe just hope it fades into the background of the news cycle. But this case that they're referring to is really interesting. We can

And this gets us.

It will go through the case and I think found legitimately a lot of things in the case of this man that The Atlantic, just from a journalistic perspective, left out of the story. Its audience would have been better served knowing the full saga of this guy's pinging through the American court system non citizens pinging through the American court citizen system. Why he claimed he suddenly needed an asylum after being here for close to the better part

Though.

Yeah, and so that case and Will's threat is interesting because Will kind of allies throughout the whole point or kind of sidesteps has an important issue the fact that this guy was sent to this El Salvador and torture chamber, and Will, in his threat acknowledges that he should not have been, that that was wrong, that legally he should not have been sent there. Yet he says, well, that's kind of a that's kind of like a minor point here, and I feel like they're kind of Will's kind of

You know, I have your own tools. I need people on a site. Come on. So he gets picked up there.

He was wearing a Bulls jersey, and so they said the Bulls jersey was MS thirteen, which is kind of ridiculous. But then they also said they had a confidential informant who had knowledge of MS thirteen who said this is so and so this is his name in the gang, this is his rank, and this is where he operated as a gang member.

Turns out he never been there.

The confidential most you know, confidential informants are are literally paid to lie. Like the confidential informants are not remotely trustworthy.

But this didn't get adjudicated. It just goes into a hearing.

He went into a bail hearing and the police said, look, this CI says that this guy is in MS thirteen, and so the judge is like, all right, well you don't. You can't rebut this, and so therefore I'm not going to give you bail. He spent year, year and a half in you know.

Locked up.

Eventually they concluded that this guy was lying, he was not an MS thirteen member. He got out on and he has you know, various court dates and then he goes into that very long, you know, immigration process, which I think everybody across the spectrum would agree is this is far too long, and he reapplies at that point for asylum, saying that his and this is what will gets into that his family's Papoosa business had run a foul of eighteen Street gang down in down at L.

Salvador. They were extorted, you know, he was threatened.

It does appear that his brother like that definitely happened to his brother, and his brother fled. So there is some real truth to these claims. The question of whether you know, ten years later, the threats are still live, that's an open one, and that's the kind of thing

They're saying.

What they're saying is they should have been able to deport him somewhere, not to El Salvador. And there they'll say, well, that's that's you know, mistakes happen. It's like, okay, but that's a pretty huge mistake. And also secondly, like you sent this guy to a dungeon from which he may never emerge, like for what, like, for for what crime. Let's say you don't like that he entered the country illegally. Okay, then you to deport him. You don't like that you're

To put him in chains and fly him down to this Dungeon.

Uh, that's the part that like you're saying, is that that's that should be Unamerican.

And at the same time, I look at The Atlantic as someone on the right and think, why was so much of the story left out, even in the interest of time, And I feel like that's where things to the point Constantine Kisten was making in the clip earlier, end up getting locked up because to me, it's very important that these stories are told correctly, because there are cases that are more sympathetic than these people who claim to asylum.

Right away and do have credible fear.

You know, this is more credible fear than this, even if there's some evidence that he may have had fear. You know, we're ten years as your point, as you said, ten years beyond that point. So it's a different calculation than some others.

And so it's.

Hard for people on the right then not you know, I'm happy to say it. I'm not in the administration, but for the administration, they feel like politically they can get away with doing these things because people care when the media botches it. And you know, Biden lets a net eight million people into the country and basically nobody talks about it except for you know, the media ignores it for a long time or relatively ignores it for a long time.

And doesn't tell the story.

So anyway, all this is to say, I think you know this is the what's likely to the best case scenario is that they start to slow down and be more judicious about this. And Ryan, one of the things I wanted to ask you is that all it reminds me of your story, the drop site story about the guy who book La did not want and maybe you can I know you've talked about it, But like, what if they accidentally do that accidentally?

What if one of those guys gets caught.

Up in this?

Oh?

So yeah, so we did this story jos Er Olivrs and I over a drop site.

It's it's a fascinating piece. He took. He took the lead on it.

Going through court records relating to some of the MS teen members that were deported down to El Salvador. And there's an absolutely fascinating story behind it. And it's not what anybody would expect from what they hear about Trump and b Kelly. Bu Kelly when he first came to power, negotiated and denies this, but everybody knows that it's true.

Instead, bou Kelly just let him go.

And bu Kelly's top official who had negotiated this secret deal, drove the guy to the border to get him out of the country. He then gets caught in Mexico and then El Salvador in the US have a fight with Mexico over who can get this guy, because everybody wants these top MS thirteen leaders who know the story of what bu Kelly did, and so now Trump has now sent some of them.

So that was bu Kelly's price.

He's like, ah, I'll charge with the very tiny fee. He's not looking for dollars to house these Venezuelans that the US is deporting there. His price was He's like, I want these guys that know too much about my dealings with MS thirteen. I want them under under my control. So Trump has sent some of them, but we've still held on to others as sort of blackmail against bu Kelly. So the story is always a little bit more complicated and interesting than than you're being told.

But when you're starting to use humans as ponds like this at a rapid clip, it's it's well, we'll see our some of those cases end up going. It was a great story out Just before we leave this block, there's another case. We could put the four up on the screen of a Minnesota student from Cato who's now been caught up in these ice deportations.

Ran, do you have any insight on this?

I mean, it's it's actually kind of hard to keep trying.

There's another another student who, you know, some very minor protest activity presumably appeared on some list that are pro Israel group sent to UH, you know, sent to the administration, the Canary Mission, Batar and others, are you know, very proudly advertising that they are producing lists of students that they that they want that they want kicked out of UH, that they want kicked out of the country for for protesting against the war and the war like that is

That was never said. If that's the new rule.

Now, obviously you could it's quite okay if you're here on a student visa to protest for the war. It's not that you can't weigh in, not that you can't have an opinion on what's happening in Gaza. As long as your opinion is that it is good and the US should do more of it, that's fine. It's if you are critical of what the United States is doing with its support of Israel, then according to Rubio, that is cause for you to be immediately deported. Well, not immediately,

And with those three hundred, With that three hundred number, I mean, we've seen maybe half a dozen really big cases so far. But what that means is there's going to be a trip trip And again, maybe this will happen with immigration, maybe it will happen with students, and the administration will try to move it to the background and be you know, quieter about it, be slower about it.

Who knows.

But the drip drip is coming no matter what, because they've staked a lot on these efforts, so it's it's not going to end. We'll continue to see cases like this one, all.

Right, Senator Corey Booker, broke strom Thurman's record for longest speech in the United States Senate. I think it was twenty five hours and five minutes.

This was.

This was Booker's response to a deeply frustrated Democratic electorate that it's like, isn't there anything that you can do? Something like nothing, like, you can't you can't even negotiate a slightly better cr with these fascists that are rounding people up and destroying you know, the country is far as we're concerned. And so Booker, you know, came to the floor and said, Okay, I'm going to show that

Our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It's not left or right, it's right or wrong. It's getting good trouble. My friend, Madam President, I yield the floor.

Put up the next element on the screen.

So this is, says Corey Boker's officially delivered the longest sentce speech. That is that is that's strom Thurman in his earlier years. Actually because I think what he died at, like one hundred and one or something like that.

Like he was in.

Congress, like when I was covering Congress, and he set his record filibustering the nineteen fifty seven Civil Rights Act.

So that's how long this guy.

Served in the United in the United States Senate, one of the like most one of the most vitriolic segregationists in the United States Senate. There's a I forget what book it's in, but there's a scene where there are a couple of you know, hardcore white supremacist Democrat senators in like the nineteen forties or fifties are watching a strong therm and speech and one of them, you know, says to the other They're like, my god, this guy really believes this stuff.

Like the racists thought that this guy was like two over the top, and it is.

It has always been a real crawl or thorn in the side of Democrats who are now on the other side of this white supremacy question.

That he held this record.

So so it wasn't just pushing back against the job administration Booker, and Booker has said as much. He very much wanted to knock this guy off the pedestal, and he successfully did it with several hours still to go until he until he broke the record, he was saying like he was on the floor saying, I don't think I have enough gas in the tank, like I don't think I don't think I'm going to be able to

It did.

It did capture a lot of people's imaginations, like like the the TikTok.

Numbers were were wild, the the kind of.

Live streaming numbers that you know, he said he got enormous numbers of calls to to his office. You know, you it's like you know, in a in a dark time, even though even a tiny little bit of light is something that a lot of people are going to fly toward. Did you follow this as it was going on and what what what are? What are Republicans they kind of just amused by this or do they see this as a little little flickering of life from the opposition?

Well, I mean the point you just made about even when you're in a period of darkness, even a tiny little bit of light can bolster your spirits. I think that the little bit of light here was very, very tiny in substance. It's unfortunate that for Democrats like Corey Booker wasn't filibustering something I think more substance to this was a huge boost in the Tea Party years for Ted Cruz. I think Rand Paul at one point too,

Is like generally lands.

It might land with the Democratic base, but the clip even that we just played of him ending the filibuster a feet, no doubt, like an impressive feet at that, But it just especially because it's not organized around a substance of like, uh, policy, Like what's the right word?

A goal?

Right? Like there wasn't a thought he wasn't blocking X or shutting down Y.

So I just it's all.

But at the same time, those numbers that we just showed are really significant. You know, there's an F four. This is just the voicemail numbers. We put this up on the screen, the voicemail numbers, which sounds silly, but Booker's team just told them SNBC they've gotten fourteen thousand voicemails from people for people supporting Corey's filibuster and sharing their stories, and another two hundred and eighty million people

Yeah, and for the parliamentary details, like you really can't do a filibuster anymore for the most part, because if if you, if the other side gets sixty votes, they can they can they can move to a final vote, and if they don't, they can't. Whether you're whether you're talking or not. And so this was just kind of an open session where he just kind of grabbed the floor and what what you can still do in the Senate that you can't do.

In the House, Like you wouldn't be able to do this in the house.

In the House, you get a minute, you get five minutes, you get an hour or like whatever you get, you get and when you're and when that's up, you're done. Whereas in the Senate, if you can keep going, you

It would also make the.

Stamina much more difficult, you know, to be able to stand there for twenty five hours.

How long how long a speech you think you would give on the on the Senate floor.

I mean, this is an impossible question because I would never want to be giving a speech on the Senate floor.

What's your answer, right, I don't.

Oh, man, I think it'd be pretty hard to go twenty five hours like That's I don't think I could get anywhere near that.

And yet at the same time, I know.

What I have to say.

I mean, you know, I've got maybe a half an hour stuff to say.

Yeah, yeah, well you can always read green eggs and ham over and over again.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how many. I guess I could do a few hours. I don't know.

Impressive, It's definitely.

We should do it. We should do a show where we just just go.

Actually we could probably first losing money off that. We probably make money off that. Well, Brian, should we move

So well done.

Yeah, people go back and watch that.

It's like a twenty minute interview, and I think it'll get you pretty up to speed.

On the situation.

I feel like nobody on the committee watched that interview, or read any of the documents or has any idea what they're talking about. Let's roll through a bunch of these clips from this super embarrassing hearing as quickly as we can.

So here's Jeff Morley.

It's an honor to testify before you. It's a solemn responsibility to report on the disturbing new revelations that have emerged from the newest JFK files. And it is a grave matter to assert that CIA officers were culpable or complicit in the death of a president. So I want fact checkers to have all the evidence that I'm used to support my testimony. Today, the new fact pattern leads to a new conclusion. We know now what they knew

And what he means by criminal negligence there and he expounds this in his interview with US, is that Angleton was getting regular updates based on their surveillance of Oswald and still somehow let the guy kill Kennedy.

Let's roll one more clip from Morley here.

You actually had written an article specifically addressing a whistleblower that had reports at the CIA potentially showing information that Oswald was in Mexico City.

Can you speak more to that.

I was approached a few years ago by a man who had worked inside the CIA, had a very high security clearance, and in twenty eighteen he came to me and said he was concerned that there was a JFK assassination document.

That he had read while he was working.

At the CIA, and he was afraid that it would never become public. The man was taken considerable legal risk by talking to me. He was talking about classified or potentially classified information. So I published his story last year without his name, which is not something that I usually do. I don't like stories with anonymous sources. But I felt that it was important to get out, and he felt

That is something that we will definitely follow up on.

Let's play a one more Morley clip and then move to some of the some of their reaction.

So who do you think fired the shot?

You don't know, but you don't believe it was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Oswald was not the intellectual author of Kennedy's death, even if he fired a gun.

That who do you think was the intellectual author of Kennedy's death?

Kennedy's enemies high in his own government is as specific as I can be based on the available evidence, probably CIA and Pentagon.

And now so here's Jasmine Crockett and Lauren Bobert. You embarrass themselves in a different way. I think Crockett's is more embarrassing for what it says about the Democratic Party that it now feels itself to be in a genuine coalition with the CIA, such that even when the CIA is being criticized for something that happens sixty plus years ago, they feel like they need to leap to the agency's defense. It's absolutely mind boggling. But let's and then bow were just being dumb.

Go ahead, I say, and vice versa.

Republicans latching onto the CIA sind as the CIA became anti Republicans right now, right.

Now, all of a sudden, Yeah, they're like, yeah, anyway, so yeah, let's so let's roll.

These previously classified JFK assassination files are now public and show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy. But what I find funny about this hearing is that the Republicans are here relitigating whether CIA agents lied sixty years ago, but aren't doing anything about the CIA director lying to Congress just six days ago, we should be having a hearing on the fact that the unqualified Secretary of Defense and other senior Trump officials were carelessly discussing classified military plans

You had something to add on that.

I think you're confusing mister Oliver Stone with mister Rogers Stone. Yet sorry, it's Roger Stone who implicated LBJ in the Assassinators of the President.

It's not my friend that Oliver Stones were there. I may have misinterpreted that, and I apologize for that. But there's seems to be some elluding of like you said, incompetence, got.

A misinterpretation, and then she talks about incopetence right after that.

But she was asking oliver Stone about his theory that LBJ had been behind the assassination, and Oliverston was confused because he was saying LBJ may have had knowledge of or complicity in the Warren Commission, adding Alan Dlles to the Warren Commission. But LBJ, He's like, I've never said that, And Jeff put the pieces together and said, oh, I think you're confusing him with Rogerstone, which is somewhat hilarious.

Carried in his hands.

So she was doing this like brain dead analysis of like the signal chat being somehow relevant to even bring up in this kind.

I mean, it was just pathetic.

And what I want to know is who wrote that. Staffers write these questions almost all the time. What I want to know is who wrote that question? Was this a leadership staffer, this committee staffer?

Was this?

I don't think it would be somebody from Crockett's office, because I think somebody from Crockett's office would have better political instincts than that. And In fact, what's so revealing about that clip is that you can see tell me

In her and you can see her mind where she's like, oh god, that was stupid. And so then she.

Puts the question down that was written for her and says, not that I'm.

Staying there are holes, there are holes. There are definitely holes.

So and she even she used the word platform, which is like a classic kind of you know, mid twenty tens democratic phrase, we're here platforming conspiracy theorists, And that's when her mind was like, did I just say we're platforming conspiracy theorists in relation to the literal one conspiracy that everyone in America believes should be platformed and talking to like and say what you want about Oliver Stone.

He's fascinating.

Guy.

Jefferson Morley is a very very sober journalist who's who's covering this, and he's not going to stay more than then. The fact pattern will allow him to, and the documents and almost exclusively on the record sources will allow him to.

But she seemed to catch herself.

But to me, the whole thing was revealing of how how woven now the Democratic Party is to the CIA and the deep State that.

They feel like they even need to defend Alan Dulles.

Right, who Democrats for Dulles, who like.

If they exhumed him, he'd like put them in the grave if he had a chance.

Yes he would. He would deport all.

Of the students, Yes would, And so would his brother.

At Angleton, who was like the you know, handling the Israel file.

Yeah. Well, if Jasmine Crockett's political instincts were.

Truly legendary, she would have known that this hearing was coming up, and Democrats in general would be trying to

But they did not do that yesterday.

They used it as a sort of culture war platform to go after Signal, to go after Signal Gate, and align themselves with the actual like Deep States CIA intelligence apparatus. It was really unfortunate, although I think, and one of the reasons I was excited for this hearing is that Morley and Oliver Stone have had a couple of weeks to digest this insane volume of new information, which is I mean, it's going to take very long time to put all of these puzzle pieces together, but they've done

So I thought that that was really important.

Ye it was.

Yeah, So his movie on Kennedy, Oliver Stones movie on JFKU basically produced the legislation that produced the records that we got just recently and that we've been getting over the last decades. So yeah, that is kind of a fascinating arc to see. And the last point on this is, like democrats may not understand why I'm harping on this, Like people who don't follow politics closely create heuristics about who's with them and who's against them, and who is

That's a rational approach.

When you have a limited amount of time to invest in and analyzing the political situations like, oh, these people are liars or stupid like one or the other. Either way, I don't want to hear anything else from them. So not helping themselves with regular people by by this performance needlessly.

So it's just so easy for Democrats to.

Don't be afraid of Allen Dallas anymore. He's gone, it's crazy, he's gone.

No reason.

I mean, maybe it right, Maybe there is something substantive about their ties now to CIA world and Intel world, meaning that they don't think the sort of cost benefit makes sense for them to start going in on the CIA, because the CIA still obviously does not want a lot of these pieces to be put together. It doesn't want to see the puzzle come together. So maybe this is actually not just politics.

But yeah, anyway, I hope you had a good time in Wisconsin. Thank you for joining us from all the way out there. Very much appreciated. See you back here. We'll do a Friday show again. You'll be back in here DC, I assume for that.

Oh yeah, absolutely looking forward to it. We look forward to those Friday shows a lot now, and I hope you guys do too.

There are a lot of fun.

Just as a reminder of Breakingpoints dot com to now a premium membership, premium subscription. Appreciate everyone tuning in. Thanks for letting me.

Zoom in here.

Ryan all right, and we'll see you on Friday.