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Good morning, Happy Wednesday, Welcome to Counterpoints. All right, so today we are excited to announce the Friday edition of our show.
Thanks to the.
Support of Breaking Points viewers, listeners and premium subscribers.
Every Friday, you can expect to see us actually right here, but with a slightly different format. We're excited to be hosting long form debates, interviews and all that good stuff starting this Friday.
Actually, and it's not going to be like Crossfire. It's not going to be a point scoring thing. We're not going to be trying to make people look stupid, although if somebody is stupid, we're gonna.
They're welcome to look so they're welcome to We're not going to prevent people from right but we're not going.
To try to do it on purpose. It's not going to be a kind of partisan back and forth. It's going to be more of an effort to kind of shed light rather than heat.
Maybe. Yeah, we'll see.
I think that's a good way to put it, and like find the contrast, figure out where it actually is, get rid of those traps that keep us outraged but poorly informed.
Yes.
Well, like many of you, Ryan and I want to see people that we agree with and people that we disagree with actually just kind of talk it out. Sometimes we'll grill those people ourselves. Other times we'll facilitate debates between different maybe election officials, other journalists, and thought leaders. So that's the plan, and.
We're grateful with Crystal and Saga for continuing to build this network, grateful to all of you for continuing to make it a profitable enterprise or maybe a profitable enterprise eventually, Ryan of the capitalist that's right, and it's what enables us to do this show.
Well. Premium subscribers will get every edition of the Friday Show straight to their inbox early, so you can head on over to Breakingpoints dot com if you'd like to join us for that. We appreciate almost two years now of support from the Breaking Points community, feedback, friendship from everyone. It's been awesome.
And with that will leave you with the teams. We've got a big guest for Friday. I don't I don't want to play them up too much. I think you're going to kind of laugh when you see it. But also I think you'll enjoy it.
I think it'll be I think it'll be a really good conversation. I'm actually very excited about it.
It might be a little bit of a spit take, like, really, that's what you got, It'll be kind of funny, it'll it'll it'll be a good conversation.
Now, last night, yes, huge, huge deal past the Senate. We're going to break down all of that. We're going to talk about some updates of the Middle Least. We're going to talk about Lena Kahn and you have to see voting to ban non compete clauses. Ryan, you've got an interesting story for us, and we have a great guest from Columbia. Before we get to that, you have some news out of Pennsylvania. There were elections last night. It was a Tuesday.
Yeah, so last night Summer Lee was up for re election. She had a significant contest. She had, I should say, a significant challenger from her right. Summer Lee was one of the first members of Congress to come out for a cease.
Fire in Gaza.
Apax spent millions of dollars against her in twenty twenty two, was aiming for her in twenty twenty four, but they saw kind of how strong she was looking going into her primary, decided not to spend money.
Now. Jeff yass who is a.
Republican billionaire in Pennsylvania, a close ally of Netnaho.
Actually big TikTok investor.
Big TikTok investor.
He financed Netnahu's attempt to take over the courts to dodge his little corruption scandal that he's got over there.
He put at least eight hundred thousand dollars in another race.
We don't know exactly how much because the final FEC reports aren't out. But the election last night was a decisive victory for Summerly, winning by at least twenty points as they continue to count the votes. As Summerly put it, opposing genocide is not just good policy, it's also good politics.
Here she is last Night's burg.
But you know what we send a message, and we knew when we sail in the very beginning that this was the message that we were sending. That this movement is.
Moment billionaire.
Shoot at this staga, that everybody who wants to.
Say that the power of the people is not stronger than the people of power.
But we more.
And Emily last night in the Senate billions of dollars more for three war theaters Ukraine, Israel and also China. China just keeps getting kind of smuggled into this conversation. Oh yeah, if we're gonna we're gonna spend sends of billions of dollars on war, let's make sure we're beefing up for World War three in that region as as well.
So were you what did you? What did you make of Congress?
Finally, after months of hemming and hauling doing what kind of everybody expected that they would do in fun more war.
Yeah, no, I would say, so, let's we can put this next element up on the screen. There was overwhelming support for this bill.
And how did this take a year?
Right?
No, it's amazing. Actually, maybe that's the real accomplishment of the Freedom Caucus. It's that they delayed this for a year now. There were there is a pretty impressive list, I would say of Republicans who voted against this bill, even including people who have traditionally been kind of hawkish like Marco Rubio Ted Cruz. When you lose Ted Cruz on an Israel bill, that's I think something. And actually, on that note, we can put the next element up on the screen. This is what's in the bill that
the final bill that was passed. So it's sixty billion dollars for you carrying fifteen billion dollar that will include facilitating weapons sales. Fifteen billion of that is for training and intelligence, military training and intelligence. Eight billion is going to go to the Ukrainian government government operations, one point six billion allocated to the private sector, fourteen billion for Israel,
eight billion for roughly the China theater. So that's kind of how the numbers break down and what was actually passed last night.
And no money in there for defense attorneys at the Hague. But maybe there'll be some pro bono help.
From the US.
Pretty sure they always have money for that. Yeah, there's always money in the bananas, Stan, ye, yes.
So take them one by one. Ted Cruz is a politician's politician.
They're all politicians, but Ted Cruz is the one that I like to watch in the Senate to get a sense of how which way the winds are blowing and of the political movement because he really has his kind
of finger on the pulse of the grassroots. And so to see Ted Cruz come out and vote no on a war spending package that includes billions of dollars for Israel, just you know, days after the Iran attack, which Israel believed was going to really help Greece, this this package through and it did actually help grease this package through suggest that there's you know, something bubbling, you know, within the kind of Republican caucus that has gotten to the surface.
If Ted Cruz is feeling the heat of it. Is that an accurate read? You know, I trust your judgment on the internal Republican politics more than my own.
Yeah, I think it's absolutely an accurate read.
You know, it's and what is It's Ukraine. It's Ukraine overriding, the isolationism overriding.
It's border, the border, it's the border. It's because this didn't include a dime for the border, and people will guess that, People will say well, you know, what do you what do you mean? There was that deal that bipart isn't compromised deal that was brokeer. My opinion on that bill is that it is intentionally designed to and there are a lot of exemptions in it. We could debate it, and we debated it at the time, and I think Crystal and Sacker debated it at the time too.
There were a lot of exemptions written into the bill that would have basically maintained presidential power that you could sort of carve out some of the small concessions Democrats made on asylum and all of that. But the point is Republicans were furious.
With so they wanted the border money in there. And if they didn't get the border money in there, yes, Israel doesn't any money.
And so the media is looking at this and saying like, Mitch McConnell broke her to deal with Chuck Schumer and James Langford, and Republicans are like, well, we never supported that deal. We never would have supported that deal. And so because they got so screwed by leadership on the House side that Mike Johnson said that over and over and over again that you can't have a dime more for Ukraine until you do something serious about the border, and he basically flip flopped on it, and again like
what was going to happen? Probably this was always the inevitable result, but Republicans felt like they didn't even fight. And then on top of the it is the kind of Ukraine. I don't want to call it isolationism because now we're how many years into the war and people like Ted Cruz, Mark Rubio like there and most Republicans actually were initially pretty supportive of the war effort. It's just the Biden administration prosecution of the policy coupled with no border support.
And this is what they call in Congress a free vote because whenever it's this overwhelming, like the outcome is already determined, like you know, no matter how Ted Cruz votes, the bill is going to pass. So that means it is a pure political calculation, like where does he want his name to appear on the YA or the n A column, And so that goes to how is this going to look at back home?
Now?
How is this going to look in presidential primaries in the future, And clearly, you know he made the calculation.
A no vote is going is the winner here. Mitch McConnell.
Meanwhile, kind of doing at victory lap or a dance on Tucker Carlson's had here. So really kind of interesting comments from Mitch McConnell afterwards. Let's let's let's roll roll him on Tucker Carlson.
The demonization of Ukraine began by Tucker Carlson, who, in my opinion, ended up or he should have been all along, which was interviewing Vladimir Putin, and so he had an enormous audience which convinced a lot of rank and viile Republicans. It maybe this was a.
Mistake that dare you interview foreign leaders?
Yeah, I mean, set us time.
Whatever you think of Tucker Carlson, the idea that you can't interview a foreign leader, even a dictator, is you know, utterly absurd. But what's what's interesting about that clip is that's what passes for emotion from Mitch McConnell.
There there may be no stronger.
Supporter of the war, in supporting the war in Ukraine than Mitch McConnell. His his ability to move money, you know, to Ukraine through the Lame Duck, uh, you know, was one of the biggest gifts to the Ukrainian War effort, and you know, he put all of the capital that he had remaining, you know, into it, and it people have talked about it as really one of the only things he has really ever believed in, other than opening up campaign finance laws like that. Like it's that plus
the Ukraine War. And we don't need to get into the psychology of why that is or what happened.
It's it just is.
And he played he and Kevin McCarthy teaming up with Democrats who are almost unanimously supportive of it, you know, have been able to muscle through all of this support. But I found it really interesting that he pinpoints Tucker Carlson as kind of the problem that the problem with inside the Republican coalition that that produced this opposition internally.
And implication of that, by the way, is that his own voters who disagree with him on this are so stupid they just mindlessly followed Tucker Carlos guy exactly. Not that they found they're intelligent that he does it, that they're intelligent people who maybe found an alternative argument compelling. And it's hardly just Tucker Carlson. It's never just been Tucker Carlson. There have been plenty and plenty of other
people Mitch McConnell would complain about. It's not as though Tucker Carlson is like the origin of what McConnell sees as this cancer spreading throughout the country. Because to your point, even Ted Kruz, this is Cruz on Fox. I pulled this up after you mentioned it. Ryan, he said, I'm going to vote no on Fox. But I will tell you this is a very close call. And I struggled for a long time without a vote because there are elements of this bill I really, really strongly support. This
has military aid for Israel. Israel's in the middle of a war. We should have provided this emergency military aid. But I can't support this bill ultimately because it gives money to Gaza, gives money for the NGOs that are trafficking illegal immigrants, and it does nothing zero to stop the invasion at our southern border. It's got to be the priority. If you're listening to this. Ryan just put his head in his hands and he just seemed to sigh an exasperation.
So Ted Cruz, with more than two million people facing starvation, voted against the bill, not because it was sending weapons to the people who are organizing that starvation, but because it also sent food and water and humanitarian relief supplies to the people in Gaza, which he claims is somehow connected to a train of trafficking to the border.
Well and noticing he mentioned yeah, so the NGOs. It's a lot of the things throughout Central America like.
Those he's saying this and right he's saying that, like Hamasa is like trafficking people to the border and they're going to use this like money.
Oh no, I think he's talking about like the like the various aid groups, whether it's like things that are being.
He thinks here is a Pamas front for instance.
Well, but also the stuff in you know, like the Dairying Gap. Some of those groups not and not so much that they're facilitating although he objects to this too. I'm sure facilitating your terrorists coming up or using the border.
Next that to Gaza is But.
I think he's talking about like the Catholic charities or whatever that incentive bias, and they are funded by the UN. They are I don't know exactly about this bill, but I think that's what he's subjecting to just the broader
question of those NGOs facilitating people coming in. And actually we've written at the Federal spout some of those groups that are like explicitly evangelical and Catholic and they basically help people get through the Darien Gap, like here, you might die, but clearly you're going to do it anyway, so we'll be here to help out you. And I probably disagree with yah, but I think.
That's what we may or may not.
But like to connect that to humanitarian relief organizations in Gaza, to me is it makes it almost impossible to even have any kind of non psychedelic conversation about the situation. It's like like there is a genoside going on there, like hundreds of thousands of people immediate risk of famine, millions at risk of starvation. Israel's blockading relief efforts from getting in and this has some peanuts for the people
who are suffering through that. And Cruiz connects it to the aid organizations that he objects to the activities and the Darien Gap and the way that they're incentivizing migrants, which like I see what.
You're saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Well Tom Cotton did not he supported the bill. Kitty Britt supported the bill ninety five billion dollars in total. By the way, we haven't even mentioned that includes the TikTok divestment or the package TikTok divestment.
So Peter Wells sended it to a year. So your TikTok's okay for at least a year.
I mean it will likely always be okay. We'll just come under different owners because they know they can make a ton of money off of this, and that's how it'll bay.
They might screw it up, like chairman, she's doing a good job with it so far.
Right, even better, it's too addictive China where the kids are like eating their vegetables.
On do you and what I think the compromise should be that the Chinese regulate social media for our children because we have a collective action problem here as a parent of kids, like when everybody else's kids is able to see YouTube and is able to be on like this or that, Like it's asking too much to say that each individual parent needs to solve that.
You need a collective solution. What is what's chairman, she's ruled over there. You get like one hour on Friday of video games one hour on Saturday video games. And then that's for everybody. It's all the kids out for kids.
So the kids that are not like complaining and throwing a temper tantrum and the parents being like, all right, finally leave me alone. So that should be the compromise. Let she manage our kids access to social media, and then maybe that's the political speech. And then they can also apparently and they can also do social medias like TikTok is. Apparently they're better at it than our people are, Like, we can't win without just passing a law of banning their stuff.
The list of people who voted no, I mean, I'm looking at it right now. At one point in the list on the Washington Post website, it goes Jeff Merkley, Marco Rubio, Bernie Sanders, Eric Schmidt. I mean, it's just a really interesting coalition of people. And again they're finding different reasons to disagree with the bill. So, for example, Ted Cruz cited first the first thing he cited was the Israel problems that he had with the bill that we just talked about, but then went into the border.
I think for a lot of these guys, they would first and foremost say it was the lack of border funding. Some of them might have objected to, in fact, the TikTok divestment, but overall, when you find Bernie Sanders and Marco Rubio together against this huge what was the final vote was seventy nine and support eighteen against and so three didn't vote. There are two of them came out against the bill. One of them came out for the bill. That's Tim Scott, Rand Paul and Tommy Tubberville were against
the package. They didn't vote because it was, like you said, a free vote. So if your fundraising or whatever, I don't agree with it.
But that's what they do well, and it's it's easier than to tell groups like, oh I would have voted, your would have scored you yeah, and to say like I would have you know, if he's meeting with a pro Israel group, you can say, yeah.
I would have voted for that money.
If he's meeting with a border group, you could say I was going to vote against that, like members of Congress are known to do that.
But when sometimes they scored you and it goes into your score, so.
You're like, yeah, so then but putting all of these things together in one bill is just one more way of kind of abstracting politics away from people. Like because if if everybody was forced to vote yes or no on TikTok, yes or no on Ukraine, yes or no on money for a war with China, yes or no on money for the war for Israel's war, like, then when they run for reelection, people will know, oh, they voted yes on this, they voted no on that.
Here's who I support.
So that's it's a little bit more representative democracy when you put everything in there together and just ask people to do one giant yes or no. It's it's just a one more effort to confuse people and and to kind of separate the idea of accountability and representation.
That is such a good point, and it was one of the conditions actually.
The Freedom Caucus one like single issue votes.
I was, well, she votes, and that was part of their deal in the rules package with Kevin McCarthy. And it has not turned out that way at all. And Mike Johnson, of course, is somebody who's always been you know, in just he said many times, so we shouldn't governed by omnibus, and we shouldn't governed by omnibus precisely because of this. It was the only way, and they knew this, and Mike Johnson knew this. The only way that Mike
Johnson was going to get the money for Israel. He figured this out pretty you know, it was pretty quickly apparent to him after he took the job. The only way that they were going to be able to get money allocated to Israel was to tie it. And Mitch McConnell the same thing. The only reason they were going to get money that was going to go to Ukraine
was to tie it to Israel. And for Johnson, he just realized he couldn't attach meaningful border security to it in the way that the rest of his conference wanted because there was nothing that you could do in the Senate. And so he said, this is more important. Israelis more important.
He flip flopped on Ukraine aid it's another thing he said he wouldn't do without border security, and here we are because when you combine them all together, it's the only way that you can build coalitions instead of having people forced to be courageous and vote up and down on individual items. It's not a good thing, it's not a healthy thing. We're also watching very closely. Yesterday the second theater of conflict, which was in the courtroom in
New York. Donald Trump had a real one yesterday. We can put this first Alan, We're gonna roll this first element, because as the Trump trial has commenced in New York, there are no cameras, there's no audio allowed, and yet we're still getting so much drama actually from it. John Stewart took issue with the way the media has been just in the first couple of days, where now this is the third day of the actual proceedings. He took issue with the way the media has been treating this trial.
Let's roll this club, can we go?
It's on, it's happening.
History will be made, shaping up to be the trial of the century, maybe the trial of the century, the trial of the centric, but just might be the trial of this century.
The taxman is here, Donald Trump. He will finally be forced to face the music.
The legal walls closing in around Donald Trump. The legal walls are starting to close in on Donald Trump.
Yes, this time, mister Bong, it truly is you're doing.
Now.
If you'll excuse me, I'm going to leave this room. Obviously, when I leave, I'm not going to press this button right here that opens all the doors and dismantles the killing machine I've established. Perhaps if we limit the coverage to the issues at hand and try not to create an all encompassing spectacle of the most banal of details, perhaps that would help.
You're looking at live pictures in New York City of Donald Trump's motorcate.
It's about a twenty minute drive between Trump Tower and the Court building.
Trump leaving Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.
They're now making their way across town along fifty seventh Street. They just cross Park Avenue, making their way up towards Lexiston Avenue.
He's heading down the FDR to the Manhattan Courthouse on Chamber Street.
Arriving at this intersection of American history with defiance.
Arriving at the intersection of American history with defiance.
Northeast corner of that intersection is where I'll meet you.
Yeah. Another good lady said, seriously, we're going to follow this guy to court every effing day. You're trying to make this oj. It's not a chase. He's commuting now, he's communting. So the media's first attempt, the very first attempt on the first day at self control failed. Now it's worth noting the vast majority of those clips were from MSNBC. He threw Jack Tapper and for good measure, but the glee of MSNBC. It actually kind of reminded me of what Primila Jaiapaul said on the Sunday Shows
this week. I forget what show it was, but basically she was like, if there was if impeachment had worked, we wouldn't be here right now. And the reason that reminds me like you can connect those two dots. It's just like MSNBC has been going to the bank, like they've been cashing in on this every day for years now, and impeachment didn't work. So all of the different attorneys who Politico revealed their on conference calls, the media attorneys,
did you see this political story? No, these media attorneys, Barbara McQuaid, Jeffrey Tubin. I don't know that you want to be an Zoom with Jeffrey Tubin, but they've been having Zoom salons weekly to talk about Trump's legal drama. And then they go and talk on George Conway, like all of these guys, and so it's like they're frothing at the mouth because it's like, this is what we have to get them. We have to get them, and every opportunity to do that is like great television for them too.
And it's not as if there's nothing else going on in the world.
That's the impression that you would get from this type of coveragew I've said a million times that I agree with Jiapaul in the sense that if they would have impeached him on the night of January sixth, the early morning hours of January seventh, write it just down on some bloodstained paper boat on it right there, kick it over the Senate and force the Senate to deal with it in the remaining couple weeks before he left office,
there's a chance that they actually impeach him. Like Lindsay Graham was completely done with him, like they believed that his time was over, that he had he had come for the system and he had he had missed and when you do that, you're finished.
It was that it was when people went to the airport.
Lindsay Graham got mobbed at the airport by people that were there for January sixth, that they're like, oh, wait, no, we're changing our minds.
Well, that's why I think it never would have gone away, because, like say they had voted to impeach, those are still their constituents, and so now.
Can he run as an impeached for president?
Right?
Like this is MSNBC's big problem, CNN's big problem right now is that they fundamentally do not want to make the argument to people who still support Trump. They just want to sort of wish it away and having him this legal drum.
But what they're left with really is they have to beat him at the ballot box. And they right right, which they did.
In you know, actually twenty sixteen, three million votes.
Yeah, it's not impossible.
They did it in twenty eighteen, they did it in twenty twenty, they did it in twenty twenty two. They can do it again.
But the way to do it is not by censoring a Hunter Biden laptop story. It's by making the arts
on the merits for your candidate. And that's where all of this stuff completely distracts them from that, and they're left with but Trump, like they're left with, but you know, this hush money case, and we can put the snuxt element upon the screen, because this is what they're talking about in the courtroom, that the National Inquirer made up the story about Ted Cruz's father and Lee Harvey Oswald, according to David Pecker, who has taken the stand and
again this case, which is over the hush money payment Stormy Daniels Karen McDougall so reading from this article. David Pecker, the former publisher of National Inquirer, testified at Donald Trump's trial Tuesday that the tab would completely manufacture a negative story in twenty sixteen about the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who was then Trump's rival for the
GOP presidential nomination. The paper had published a photo allegedly showing Cruz's father, Raphael Cruz, with Lee Harvey Oswald, handing out pro Fidel Castra pamphlets in New Orleans in nineteen sixty three, not long before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Trump repeatedly referred to the story on the campaign trails and interviews. Manhattan Prosecutor Joshua Steinlass asked Pecker about the
story's origins during the trial to Sday Manhattan. Pecker said that then National a Choir editor Dylan Howard and the Tabloids research department got involved and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo. That was the foundation for the story. We mashed the photos in the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald and mashed it to together. And that's how the story was prepared created, I would say, Pecker said on the witness stand, they talked about some other headlines.
We can put the next element up on this point.
On that one, the irony is that Packer and Trump did not have the courage to go forward with the actual potential conspiracy. There there was a son of somebody who may have been involved in the JFK's assassination running against him at the time, and that was Jeb Bush. But he did not He didn't have the didn't have the guts to go ahead and say that. Jeb Bush's father one of the only people who doesn't know didn't know where he was on the day.
There are several people.
QUO was then Ali everyone else and my generation remembers that. But I mean, where was I then?
Well he was he goes back to OSS, doesn't.
He I don't know about all the way to the OSS. But he ran the CIA. But yeah, it may have gone all the way to the oss.
So but let's put this next element up on the screen again. This is what's happening in the courtroom. Packer gave some examples of stories Vetch The Inquirer on Trump's opponents, including, and this is paraphrasing some of them, ben Carson left sponge and patient's brain ted, cruse, shamed by porn star, family man Marco Rubio's love child stunner. I think Crystal teld us that was her favorite of the headline. The one that was killing me was that Ben Carson left the sponge and a patient.
Remember that story.
Actually it's good stuff, but seriously, like this trial. There was an op ed in the New York Times just yesterday from someone saying, at first I thought, and I'm paraphrasing it, I'm looking for the headline right now, But it was basically, at first I thought that Alvin Bragg case was an embarrassment, and now I think it's a historic mistake. I just brought it up like this case again. You can have the conversation about should he have classified
this as a campaign expense? But then it's like you want him to classify a hush money payment as a campaign expense, that's probably an issue in and of itself. I mean, obviously step one is don't pay off porn stars with this weird scheme.
But it's legal to do that.
It is, It's perfectly legal because the campaign finance law is that you can't do it if it's only purpose, or you can only do it if it's like you can't have multiple you can have multiple purposes. So if you're saying fundamentally, the only reason was for the campaign, but Trump is saying Milan, I wanted to protect Milania, I wanted to do x Y.
She's trying to have an affair. She was pregnant at the time. He's embarrassed about it. Ironically, the question for the jury turns on whether or not Trump has any shame and as actually trying to keep secrets from his wife or is just a complete and total scumbag who wouldn't even bother. But yeah, he's probably trying to keep
some secrets. Yes, yeah, he's probably got some shame. But when you're in court if he does, if he has a tiniest bit of shame, and the jury can be like, you know what this is, you legitimately can cover up your your affair this way.
And when you're in court, he can like continue to deny as he does, that any of this ever happened, and hypothetically.
Again he denies it even happened.
Yeah, well that he denies that he had the affairs with the women. So again like he can yeah, I know, it's funny, but like he can still cling to that, and there's nothing legally, you know, that's not what's on trial. What's on trial is the payments. And so he can still continue to say that I was trying to quash a false story, which is a perfectly normal thing that happens in the course of campaigns, Like people do it
all the time. And now, actually there's an interesting conversation happening about the precedent for other campaigns that this would set going forward, Like what if he's found guilty on this, what does it mean for different campaign expenses, you know down the road as people mull some much more innocuous questions, not even hush money payment support stars.
Yeah, there's so many other things you can charge them with. I'd say just do that instead.
Come on, So here's Donald Trump talking of talking about the gag order. Let's roll this clip of them yesterday.
I can't even.
Allow articles to be put in.
As an example, these are articles that were over the last day and a half. They're very good articles into the cases of sham and you should be tried.
It shouldn't have been submitted.
And I don't even know if you're allowed to put them in.
We have a gag order, which to be is totally unconstitutional.
I'm not allowed to talk, but people are allowed.
To talk about me.
So they can talk about me. They can say whatever they want.
They can live, but I'm not allowed to say.
And I just have to sit back and look at why a conflicted judge.
It's me to have a game.
I don't think anybody's in a city anything like this.
I'd love to talk to you people, I'd love to say everything that's on my mind, but I'm restricted because I have a gag in it having to do with the schools and the closings. That's Biden's fall. And by the way, this trial is all bighten. You know, this is all Biden. Just in case anybody is any question, and they're keeping me in the courtroom that's freezing, by.
The way, in a courtroom all day long.
Well, he's out campaigning.
That's probably an advantage because he can't campaign.
Nobody knows what he's doing. You can't put two sentences together.
But he's out campaigning.
He's out campaigning, and I'm here at the.
Courtant from sitting him.
Giving sitting up as street as they can all day along, because you know what, it's a very unfair situation.
I think that's a reference to him getting caught sleeping, right, Yeah, they claim they're.
All kinds of weird pieces of color.
If he wants to sleep through his own trial, you know, it seems fine with me.
I mean, it's really a power move power move. But yeah, again, so like the judge's daughter. By the way, one of her clients is Adam Schiff. She works at a progressive consulting company out of Chicago. One of her biggest clients is Adam Schiff, who fundraises awful lot of the law fair against Donald Trump. That is again like he's the judge, that's his daughter, it's not him. But there's some reasons that Donald Trump is going to want to continue to
talk about this case. It's obviously salient in the campaign contact. I don't think it's an easy question because on the one hand, you know, you should have rule of law, and that's why you know. It doesn't like Donald Trump getting sued over this or going to court over this, the criminal charges. I mean, it bothers me that it's not a consistent standard. But people should be obviously held to the law, regardless of how powerful they are, and
so the same thing with the gag order. But at the same time, there's this intersection with an obvious campaign question as to whether he should be able to make his case to the American public in the middle of a presidential election. I think that's a real challenge and a real question about how this is transpiring.
Is he trying to get locked up?
You think no, I don't think so. What do you think? I don't know.
It's it feels like going out and talking about your gag order and just constantly attacking the judge after you've been told you're going to be held in contempt and warning after warning after warning.
Yeah, I could. I could see an explanation either way. That one.
He just is so unused to the idea of consequences that he feels like there there can be no consequences for him for anything, or that he sees political value and historical value in, you know, getting handcuffed and frog marched out of there. But it's very hard to see that because he knows that that would be deeply unpleasant.
He doesn't like that.
It's chili in the courtroom. It's old, like he has to sit up and can't just not off when he feels like it. It's like, it really sucks to have any of your freedoms taken away from you, and the criminal justice system is just absolutely brutal, start to finish, to go through, it's dehumanizing, it's ugly.
It rips the soul out of your body. And so I would.
Imagine that he's feeling that and doesn't want any more of it. On the other hand, he's just walking right into handcuffs here.
If he doesn't if he doesn't listen to the judge.
Well, if he doesn't win and then part in himself. And I think that's what's I think that's the big bet right now, or that there'll be immense pressure on whoever comes next to pardon him.
Now.
The reason Packer was on the stand is because they're trying to the prosecution was trying to show this close relationship between the Trump campaign and the National Inquirer, which very obviously existed. But if that's where MSNBC's glee is coming from at this point in twenty twenty, for proving that Donald Trump was feeding stories to the freaking National Inquirer, amazing.
I just yeah.
A lot of people don't like Ronan Pharaoh for various reasons, but his book Catch and Kill highly recommend it. It's a thriller, like he's got so many interesting documents and inside sources that he's able to tell it like a novel. And he'd tell Catch and kill is the phrase that the National Inquirer would use to help somebody like Trump catch a scandal and then kill it, So like, is
there a love child somewhere? Sure, that's interesting. We'll pay you thirty thousand dollars for that story, and then boom, you kill the story. And now that person has signed an NDA so they can't leak it anywhere else. And so that that's one of the services that the National Inquirer was willing to provide for people like Trump.
Let's move over to the Middle East where they're is escalations and tensions, escalations and violence. Franky Ryan, we can put the first element up on the screen has bella tell us what happened.
So be one up here.
So it has been launching one of its deepest forays into into Israel and years two drones going deep toward the Acre base. This was Ochre Base, Israel saying that there is no no report damage. But you know a lot of this is just kind of people probing and testing defenses and and seeing how far they can push the envelope it is. It has led to significant evacuations, and the evacuations are fascinating because a lot of people talk about the the West Bank and the settlements in
the West Bank as a FATA company. It's like, look, these these people are there. There's there's nothing you can do about. It doesn't matter that the internettional community says these settlements are illegal.
It is what it is, and it always will be this way. This war has shown that that's not necessarily true.
Southern Israel and northern Israel have seen massive evacuations of tens of thousands of people into the interior of Israel. They're about you know, when people talk about reorganizing the West Bank after a peace deal, it's not as if all seven hundred thousand settlers.
Who are there would be moved out.
It's more along the lines between say one hundred and one hundred and fifty thousand, because the deals that have been on the table before would say, look, all right, you've been here for fifty years, like this community is going to stay. We're going to get a land swap in exchange for that where Palestinians are going to have sovereignty and be able to live. But then there are certain settlements that are so illegal and so new that that even Israel say, okay, yes, we will just we
will dismantle those. And it's the far right is often said, well that's impossible, You're never You're never going to do that.
People live there, they're not moving.
And what we're seeing and what we're seeing just from this this Hesbela attack, is that no, actually people people
can move. And in Israel there is a dawning realization that they might not actually kind of resettle the north like there because without it, and that's why you have so many people that are calling for this full on war on on Lebanon and just you know, raise ba route to the ground so that they can reclaim because they have sovereignty over this territory, but they have moved that, so many Israelis have moved out of it, that it's it's sovereignty without any of the benefits of it, because
you can't actually live in it, because it's not safe to live in because there's rockets flying constantly, and so without without some type of peace deal, that that just becomes, you know, land where nobody can live. And so that's one of the things I find fascinating about this attack. Now Israel has responded, we can put up B two here with more more bombing of Gaza and retaliations against.
Well and in southern Lebanon. Yeah, yeah, right, So they their airstrikes killed two has Bula fighters, according to the IDF in Southern Lebanons then confirmed those deaths. Didn't add any details at the time, but that's Israel has killed about two hundred and seventy has Bela fighters and fifty civilians since October, that's according to Reuters, So two more just yesterday.
To the point you were just making, and the media has described the US media has described the war in gazas reaching a kind of low intense quote low intensity phase. But the images you see coming out of the reports that you hear continue to show significant bombing campaign relative.
To October fifteenth. Of course it's going to look like right.
But also Gaza itself is much diminished relative to October fifteenth.
You know, they have pushed everybody into one area and now bombing that area, and in the casually account keeps soaring. That gets us to our next point, which you know, as the nation is and in the globe in some ways, like the Columbia University is becoming like international news as everybody's focused on these encampments that are that are spreading throughout universities. We're finding Palestinian civil forces are finding increasingly finding mass graves as they're returning to hospitals.
Some of these mass graves appear to have.
Been originally made by Palestinian medical personnel. Others appear to have been made by the IDF. And this also goes to the question of you know, how significant is is the undercount that that Hamas is putting out. Because Ralph Nader was actually making an interesting point recently. He's he's been you know, his background is actually in casualties and fatalities and and and the number of people dying as a result of you know, back in the seventies is a GM. Now he's studying it as a result of
this war. His argument is that the numbers are much much higher, uh than than people than than than people are saying they are, and that you shouldn't necessarily trust Hamas figures, not because they're overcounting it, because they're they have an incentive to undercount it, because it is Hamas's job to at the in the end to protect the civilian population, even though you know, there's there's little they can do if uh, you know, the IDEF drops a
two thousand pound bomb on a refugee camp, it's that's going to kill hundreds of people at a minimum. But in general, and and and their numbers are you know, oddly trusted like by the UN, by the US, by by Israel. But what he's saying is it might actually be an undercount and the identification of these mass graves suggest that there may be something to that.
There's truly so much we don't know yet. And according to this report in The Guardian, a total of three hundred and ten bodies have been found in the last week, including thirty five just in the past day, according to Palestinian officials. Now, these are obviously at two of Gaza's largest hospitals, that's where the mass graves were found. And so Israel, you know, rightfully does say that there's Hamas
infrastructure in hospitals. Ryan, We've talked about this before, even granted that where Hamas would be able to let's say, hypothetically like separate itself from the civilian population, which obviously I think was the much more humane well violence in general not humane, but you know, you would be able to separate from the civilian popular. It's incredibly difficult in a dense, densely packed area like Ganza, in a tiny
area like Gaza. So just the kind of conversation on both sides of that, Israel is going to say that this was you know, first of all, they say the claim that the IDF buried Pastadian bodies is baseless and unfounded. They said, after examining the bodies, the IDEF returned them to where they had been previously buried. So that's the
claim from the IDF. Obviously, there's also the issue of the hospitals themselves, where we've had conversations in the past several months about raised on hospitals, and you know, the legitimacy of that as anti terrorism operations versus operations that are going to disproportionately end up targeting vulnerable civilians. Obviously, that's we've debated it for a couple of months now.
For my Intercept podcast that'll be out on Friday, I just interviewed a doctor from Dallas who just recently came back from Gaza.
He was working at the Pan Hospital.
The stories he told from there so disturbing because some of the doctors that he worked with had come from Al Shifa Hospital because after that was raided, and he had he confirmed something that that my college Jeremy Scahill, had heard from other medical personnel had worked in Gaza, which is that the that doctors when the IDF is approaching, have started to take off their scrubs, like and nurses
as well. That there is now a belief among medical personnel that they are more at risk by appearing to be medical personnel than if they can blend in with the civilian population, which, if you sit with and think about what that, what that says is just profoundly, deeply disturbing. And you know, he said that the entire time that he was there, he never saw anybody that looked remotely
like a Humas fighter. At the same time, he said that the European hospital where he was working, everyone there assumes that they are next that the raid is coming, but not that there's some pretext that as if like
there's Hamas guys everywhere, but just that it's coming. And they were hoping that these international doctors would stay as long as they possibly could because they thought that that was the one thing that was standing between them and the entire thing just getting completely flattened, people rounded up and killed. The way that people are seeing it on the ground compared to the way that people are understanding it, hears,
couldn't be couldn't be much different. By the way, David Saderfield, we could talk about this, who has to be the biggest failure of any kind of administration official almost in history. So David's David Saderfield is Biden's guy who's in charge of humanitarian relief in Gaza, and everybody there is dying. So just on a objective level, just complete and total failure.
He came to the State Department briefing yesterday rather than offering contrition like this is the vibe that he decides is the appropriate thing to give off to the public. Let's roll David Saderfield from yesterday's State Department.
Briefing three weeks later. Can you say you're satisfied with the steps that Israel has taken so far? Has the deconfliction mechanism that you talked about you said there's progress? Is that in place now and is working? And the final thing is about the peer we're being told us will rely on Israel for security. Can you elaborate on that? Is it going to be security of US troops provided by Israel? Who will distribute the aid inside GUSA?
Thank you, I'll take your last part in turn to Sonali for that. But I am not going to give you now spare the rest of your colleagues. I'm not going to give you a grade. Did they get an A plus and AARB. We are in the constant process of monitoring, assessing, facilitating, supporting progress towards the goals. The President said, this is not a gotcha test At two pm on the seventh of May, well is reel past
or not. This is a set of requirements to help the people of Gaza and the humanitarian workers whose role is vital in facilitating assistance. Progress is being made, but I am not going to stand here and give you a grade on that. More needs to be done.
They're so bad at that.
Yeah, they're so bad at that was That was Reuter's reporter, whom Ira Pamock by the way.
Yeah, like, not only is he bad.
At his job of getting humanitarian relief into Gaza, but not not good at even making us feel like he's trying.
He seemed to be almost like trying to answer the question. It's like a book report when you're in third grade. You know, you can see this a lot with flax, like they just kind of and he's not even a flack's he was flacking, right, he's in the rooms point of time. Yeah, but he he just like goes may second at this exact point of time. I'm not going to give Israel grade like it's a test. It's like you're just you're just talking to talk at those points
so that you don't answer the question. You're talking around the question.
Yeah, I don't know what he's doing up there, because there's nothing he can say except you know, I resign and I apologize and I will turn myself into the Hague. But other than that, like, what are you even doing you?
I actually think though, and that's what's again, because we disagree on some of this stuff, but I actually think you can make this argument in a way that you know, whether or not the public is in the right place is another question, but in a way that appeals to the PubL Like that is not a way that appeals to the public whatsoever, because basically nobody in the United States, I mean, the public polling is overwhelming that people are upset about the humanitarian issues in Gaza, and so to
just kind of brush it aside like that and say, I'm not going to give them a grade. What are you talking about. We're working on it. Don't worry. It's just there's you can actually do a better job. There is a better way, even if it's like for the sake of propaganda, you can do a better job than that. And that's it's like just not only is a you know, problematic, it's incompetent. Like the combination of those two things is just the Biden administration defined right now.
The FTC yesterday moved to ban non compete agreements. This is Lena Khan's kind of latest victory over corporate power. It was just it was described by some as the perhaps the best thing that the Biden ministry has ever done, because what it can do is unleash significant wage growth and significant kind of economic opportunity for people up and down the ladder. Let's let's actually roll Lena Khan first.
This was an interview posted yesterday with the news organization More Perfect Union to coinciding with the with the final vote. Here's here's a little clip from that interview. Here's FTC chairwoman Lena Khan.
A lot of the comments that we got were from workers that actually wanted to go start their own competing business. We heard from people in the ausephalt business that saw an opportunity in the market wanted to go start a rival firm, but weren't able to do so because they were locked in with a noncompete.
And there's actually correct me if I'm wrong, there's attorneys and bankers who make a decent income who are also affected by it too.
Could be agreements, that's right.
I mean, we got comments from across the income level, people making near minimum wage, but also people making tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, sharing stories about how non competes had been devastating.
For their lives.
We heard from doctors in rural America who shared how non competes really limit their ability to continue providing care for their patients if they ever look to change employers. So this is having real world effects harming Americans and harming their communities.
As you were talking, I was thinking of corporate m and A attorneys and big bankers at firms who work on mergers, and I would just want to make a point to them that Lina CON's got your backs. More freedom of movement as a result of this noncompete ban.
And so the joke there that they're making at the very end is at the expense of these mergers and acquisitions attorneys, because their whole job is to merge, is to consolidate corporate power, to bring corporations together and lead to cons em to seats consumers, right, yeah, they're bringing benefits for con Yeah, And so their whole their whole job is just to sit in the middle of these
mergers and make money. And actually they go out and pitch them constantly like it's it's one of those situations where the economy gets sort of a kink in it, and then in the kink develop a bunch of parasites who make a living off of it, like lobbyists for instance.
And we can talk about this in a future program.
Bobbies are constantly going around creating problems that they then pitch themselves able to solve. It's just like it's this extra layer of problem that is deeper than just the fundamental layer of corruption. And so, but nobody hates Lena Khn other than the Wall Street Journal, more than kind of mergers and acquisitions attorneys, because it's she's making it
harder for corporations to consolidate. And so that's Faz Shakir, that's Bernie Sanders campaign manager saying, look, now you can go find another job, go start a new firm, thanks thanks to Lena Khan. Because non competes up and down ladder really really make it difficult for economic innovation, I believe. I think Crystal and Sacer had one that they had to fight to get out of, you know, when they
went from rising over over to here. Because corporations are always trying to make sure that they control absolutely everything yeah, and you know, if they had their way, you wouldn't have been able to have independent competing businesses. Yeah, like the one we're sitting in right now.
Yeah, the FTC is estimating that it's like one in five workers currently bound by non compete clauses. Now in some industries, that's where the FTC is saying it's stifling because you don't have the freedom to kind of move and competitively because that industry is so dominated where it would be one thing moving from industry to industry. One industry where maybe there's a non compete or it's you know common to have a noncompete, another industry where basically
nobody has non compete, something like that. Matt Stoler has written that non competes so have just exploded. He said it was because of the ease of like printing contracts out, which is probably true that you know, it's just so easy now to like throw it on compezza at people. It's so cheap to throw non competzz at people, and you know why not. But in certain industries it does
clearly stifle competition, there's no question about it. But where there are questions being raised, so the Chamber of Commerce has said they're immediately going to sue. They were beat to the punch, though, is put C three up on the screen by this is so, this is the argument from the FTC. Republican Commissioner too voted against on the FTC and he said he was sympathetic to the rule banning non competes, but beginning with policy puts the cart
before the horse. And Matt said exactly what I thought, opposition on procedural grounds, and that was the lawsuit that was filed in Texas basically immediately by Eugene Scalia, the son of Antonin Scalia, who's making a very broad argument, and Stoler already a newsletter, you know, arguing against it, rebutting the points in the suit that was filed, but basically big it's great, but basically saying that the FTC itself is unconstitutional. The FTC's powers are overly broad. That's
an argument that I'm kind of sympathetic to. But a Matt also kind of walks through how the FTC came to be because Congress was having an impossible time regulating such rapidly changing industries in the twentieth century. Technology and the way markets were moving just made it very hard, and that's where the FTC came in. But where Republicans are going to challenge this. You even see the FTC Republican FTC commissioner saying there, I'm sympathetic to this noncompete.
The proliferation of them is genuinely problematic. That's the sort of predicate for what he said. But the FTC itself has overbrought authority, and so we're challenging it on those grounds. I don't think that will be successful, but I don't know.
Ryan.
And the ruling.
The new rule leaves in place non competes for high level executives that are already in place, but but bars but bars future ones, but it invalidates ones for places like,
for instance, Jimmy John's. My colleague Dave Jamison almost a decade ago had kind of a breakthrough story that really put this issue on the map when when he wrote about the fact that Jimmy John's The Sandwich Place was making it's sandwich makers signed non competes in other words, and attempting to enforce them, and so in other words, there you're making nine dollars an hour, you know, at Jimmy John's making subs and then you see that there's
another job at Subway that's they're now offering eleven dollars an hour. Their short staff they need help. They would tell you, no, you cannot take that job.
How dare you take that proprietary now?
Yeah, it propriet ther knowledge of the way that you I mean, sandwiches, they are freaky fast, It is true.
They really are.
Actually, how did you how did you Ainty make this thing?
So, however, the idea that you're going to prevent somebody from taking a better paying job at a different sandwich shop is just so anathema to the basic idea of freedom and the and the free market and all of the things that we're told are are real about the market, like competition, supply and demand. Everybody has taught these basic things, and it would be as if consumers were told no, you're you're you're only allowed to shop at the store.
Now.
That is what the monopolies try to do structurally. But what these businesses are trying to do is legally say there are other businesses, you're just not allowed to work for any of them.
Matt also pointed out that Lena Khan made the argument that non competes have forced people to stay at employers that sought to violate their religious liberty and said, these noncompetes are robbing people of book core constitutional liberties. And Matt said, who's the conservative here? Yeah, but yeah, I mean there's legitimately a point to the way competition has been hampered to the Obviously you have even Republican FTC
commissioners saying that's problematic. Now, Congress did legitimately delegate this power to the ft.
They point the commissioners, and they fund the agency.
And so we get into sort of CFPB territory too, about if this is something that Congress delegated, it's power that Congress delegated. Can you make this case on strong constitutional grounds? That's what's going to be tested.
Yeah, And it's a kind of micro version in some ways of what I was talking about recently with the way that TikTok was able to come in and dominate the social media space was because we allowed our big tech overlords to just basically stay in place on top of their piles of cash, and anytime a new tech company was coming along with some type of innovation that threatened their dominance in the market, they would do a
catch and kill. They would just buy it and bring their engineers in and smother the thing, or if it was big enough, they'd kind of, you know, make it part of their monopoly operation. And that stifled innovation, and TikTok came from outside was like, oh, you guys haven't developed any new social media in ten years, but we've got a new algorithm that we think people.
Are going to like.
And now our response again as well, we're gonna we're going to ban that and we're going to make you sell it to an American. So the point would be, if you are a company like Jimmy John's, that is, you know, making freaking fast sandwiches, if you want to if you want to maintain your hold in the marketplace, you just have to continue to make freaky fast good sandwiches.
Like you cannot use this law fair to try to build walls around your employees and to try to otherwise prevent competition from rising up.
What you have to do is you have to outcompete. And I hate that these people are making me sound like some free market ideas.
I know. I was going to say you were earlier in the show when you were like thank you for, you know, subscribing and making this a profitable enterprise. And here we go with the competition and the free market.
Yeah, there is a there is a place you know where you know, where you know where they actually have pretty effective markets, where they allow businesses to rise and fail ruthlessly and quickly and in a way that produces actual economic value.
Heaven, China, China. That's what people like that.
And that's what people misunderstand about the kind of Chinese miracle over the last twenty years of economic growth.
Is that they actually allow businesses to fail.
Our system is so corrupt that failing businesses are able to just build up, you know, different different mechanisms of maintaining subsidies.
I don't know if I agree with that, but regardless, we'll put a pin in it and you can transport us to Ecuador.
We recently covered the turmoil engulfing Ecuador after the US ambassador there colluded with the nation's attorney general in what amounted to blatant foreign election interference, pushing the fake idea that the left wing party of Rafael Correa was somehow responsible for the assassination of a rival presidential candidate. That smear campaign did the trick, and the heir to a
banana fortune, Daniel Naboa, was elected with US support. Now, the fact that the US is still helping elect banana magnates one hundred and twenty years after we coined the term banana republic suggests an extraordinary lack of imagination when it comes to our imperial managers. But at least now the bananas double as cover for cocaine exports to Europe. Now, the goal of installing a right wing go government in the South or Central American country, of course, is to
make way for American corporations to profit. The new mechanism we have to do that is called isds, or investor state dispute settlement. Those are global courts that allow multinational corporations to sue small countries and overturn their democratically enacted labor or environmental protections, which the corporations claim inhibit their natural right to profit. Ecuador's Neboa, in taking office, moved immediately to bring those courts back after the government of
Korea had gotten rid of them. Last week, in a Senate hearing, there was a surprisingly honest conversation about those courts and our role in pushing them between Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and US Trade Representative Catherine Tye take a listen.
But I really think that there's something very evil about the entire ISDS mechanism, and it's perhaps best embodied by the attack through the ISDS mechanism of the tobacco industry on the little country of Togo. Togo had the nerve to try to control the packaging of cigarettes with warnings about tobacco's known health effects, and they were sued by the world tobacco industry, which has enormous resources at its disposal. Togo is a country of about eight million people. It
has less than five thousand miles of roads. Its annual budget is about one point two billion. It is in no position to take on a international industry like that that can use it to first of all bully Togo into submission, and then take that and leverage against other countries. In fact, the tobacco industry even ultimately went up against Australia and got them alves tangled up in the complexity of their effort.
But that shows how evil this is.
So the quicker we can get rid of that as a vehicle for putting private interest over public interest and putting some that wait over virtue, the better off we will be. And i'd ask for your thoughts on how we can remove ISDS from those existing agreements and treaties.
Now, you don't hear American policy described as evil in the Senate very often, even though that label could often apply now. Over the weekend, Neboa's effort to bring those courts back to Ecuador was required to go before Ecuadorian voters, and even though the ballot measure was written in the most confusing way possible, more than sixty percent of Ecuadorians said no.
Now.
A few weeks ago, we also reported on how the left leaning government in Honduras is bucking the World Bank's ISDS court in its fight with crypto investors who have seized actual territory inside the country and are claiming they have actual sovereignty there. Both fights, the one in Ecuador and the one in Honduras, were subjects of protests that last week's annual World Bank IMF meetings held here in Washington.
This comes as more than three hundred economics professors urged the White House to strip these courts out of trade deals.
Now Here's how Tie responded to Shelton white House.
Very very interested in the views of members of Congress, especially those who sit on their Judiciary Committee and our lawyers.
Indeed, we.
The US was responsible for pushing a lot of this I SDS nonsense in of those treaties in the first place.
Correct. I think that's absolutely correct.
Yeah, okay, well god speed, stay in touch with us on the conclusions that you draw.
So what's really remarkable, Emily about that that exchange is, first of all, white House is you know, being pretty clear and how he's feeling about these But that's that's one senator. Now, they can they can make a video, you know, they can make an appearance at the Juiciary Committee, but they can't.
Do a lot more than that.
To have Catherine Tie basically agreeing with him is kind of a seed change when it comes to you know, U S trade policy. Tie is what is like Lena Khan also also a former Hill staffer. Like Lena Khan, one of the this this code array of seriously populist aides who have wound up in the Biden administration through kind of a real, you know, organized effort to make sure that the populist wing of the party has quote.
Unquote representation there.
But what they're doing is pushing forward, you know, real real policy change in an in an impressive direction and giving support then to say, the Ecuadorian people who are pushing back against noboah, the Honduran government that is pushing
back against against the World Bank. But it creates this bizarre split screen where you have the Biden administration foisting Neboa on the Ecuadorian public, you know, boosting him to the presidency, uh, the ambassador supporting him all the way, UH, supporting his push for to bring back these corporate courts into Ecuador, while other elements of the Biden administration who are responsible for trade are against that. So it it
creates this really schizophrenic situation. But at least, I guess inside the imperial core there's some opposition to what the rest of the empire's doing.
Although Niboa correct me if I'm wrong, is fairly like in terms of polling, his polls pretty well with the Ecuadorian public.
He did well.
There's a lot of like's. There's maybe a parallels like Bukele and that crime crackdowns, nationalism.
The public supported. So at the same time that this that this measure was up on the corporate courts. He also had some referenda up about cracking down on the mafia and drug cartels, right, and that's the WHI which passed and they and they support him. There there are huge questions about the role of that banana industry that we talked about at the top, his role in it
and relationship to other narco traffickers. So some of this is seen by the Ecuadoran public is kind of intramural warfare among rival kind of narco clans.
Yeah, and this gets to that's an important point, and there's a You were making this point about how the goal of installing a right when government in the South or Central American country is to make way for American corporations to profit and for American control to come in, whether it's trafficking, whatever it's whatever's going on.
If it's uh, you know, Nicaragua, we want it to be US, not China, that kind of thing.
US not China. But forever it was US not Russia. And I think that's what's interesting about the point you were making with Lena Khan Taie is that people are now there's a generation of young leftists and increasingly people on the right who saw what happened with the Cold War see the same playbook being regurgitated or being trotted
out again in these different countries. Now China is obviously part of it, still Russia though, in Africa and in other places, and they're like, we know exactly what's happening. You cannot continue to use the specter of communist nuclear annihilation. The world has changed. We don't live in the you know,
sixties anymore. And I think that's a really healthy reaction to some of this and the increasing like I hope that young leftists continue to be as sort of like anti this global you know it used to be just like World Economic Forum getting protested by young leftists. Now
you only hear talked about on the right. Essentially, I think that's an important like pillar of you know, being in favor of workers, not letting them be dicked by these totally disconnected international bodies that are run by oligarchs.
All right, Well, the only thing that anybody seems to care about in the world is the protest set up at Columbia University. And so we're going to be joined after this by a lead organizer of those protests. Stick around to hear her perspective. All right, we are joined now from the Columbia Encampment by first year a law student and Columbia undergrad graduate Safia Southeast.
Safia, thank you so much for joining us.
It's my pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, you got it.
So when I talked to you a couple of days ago or whenever that was about coming on to join the show, you were out picking up sat or supplies. Can you tell us a little bit about how Sata went there at the encampment.
Yeah, it was honestly one of the most inspiring experiences I've had, and not like anything else. We had dozens and dozens of students gathered around on the floor.
It was my first.
Outdoor stater and it was really beautiful, mostly led by Jewish Voice or Peace here on campus. We had a specialized hagadah talking about the concepts of liberation and it was just a very wonderful multicultural moment.
Nearly everybody on campus or everybody at the camp was there and shared in the moment. So very grateful to have that.
And can you tell us us a little bit about the logistics of the encampment. How many people are there right now? You guys are overnight intense, How are you getting food? What's your life like? Basically we get a good I think visual love it, which we appreciate a lot. But what's your life like right now in the encampment?
Yeah.
So, after the first encampment was kind of dismembered, on Wednesday, a bunch of students jumped over to the West Found of Columbia and we've been here since.
So students are here overnight.
At the very beginning, we weren't allowed to have tents, so we were sleeping on the ground on tarps in the rain, which was not very fun. We now have tents, which is wonderful. We have probably about fifty students here right now. There was supposed to be a police rate at eight a m. This morning, so we have fewer students than we usually do.
Usually there's about two hundred, a lot of them sleeping over here.
We have food from donations and so it's been a really wonderful experience to watch people come in.
There's a system of runners who.
Come and collect food from all over and we have a food table abundance and it's yeah, we have water supplies a lot of students taking care of us. It's a very community driven place where everybody just kind of.
Chips in whatever they can in terms of like labor and support.
And so President Biden recently called the protests that you're a part of flatly anti submit. The Secretary of Education said that he's launching a title, was it nine?
What's the title?
Whatever title they're using to investigate Columbia basically for anti Semitism. What was your reaction, What was your reaction in the camp to that national attention and to that allegation.
Yeah, I am really disappointed and glorified at that idea.
I mean, I'm a Jewish student here.
We have a huge number of Jewish students who we have a Shabbat service and a hof Dollar service and obviously a huge stay. It's part of our strict Columbia like a community guidelines here in the encampment that we accept everybody if they're here and in support of the cause. There has been anti Semitic incidents that have happened outside of the campus gates, usually by individuals or groups that are not aligned with the people who have organized the encampment,
or at least the message is not aligned. And so while I do understand why some Jewish students on campus feel threatened in some capacity, the bumping that in with the encampment I find to be really disheartening, given the fact that this is such a accepting place that has
welcomed me and everybody else. And honestly, I find that the protests and the anti Semitic comments and the focus on that has been a complete distraction from why we are here and the actual message of divestment and transparency and support for Palestinian people that this can't stands for.
Especially because it is such a.
Welcoming environment that I am very grateful to be a part of.
Yeah, you know, I think it's important that you acknowledged some of the stuff that's been, as you say, off message, because you know, there was that all Cassan's next Target
sign that was horrific, but you know, free speeches. There was also the one that said let it be known that was the flood that put the global into FODO back on the table again a speaker, So that's not is you know, it's important though to support free speech when it's really hard, and I guess I would just say you know, probably some of your fellow Jewish students on campus or on the other side of this might say, you know, are you guys cracking down hard enough on
those people who are off message? What would you say to that? What would you say to them if they were in front of you and said, you know, you should be cracking down harder on the people who are veering off message. I imagine you've done some of that.
Yeah, I will say that it's hard to crack down on people when they are individuals and physically outside the bounds of the school. So we are all in this inner space, and a lot of the idea is like taking up this space on campus, and so the idea of like going outside and policing individual people for messages
is firstly impossible. Second of all, Duad the Divestment Group, along with the other organizing groups have actively tried to address and con and and go against the idea of anti Semitism, asking groups outside to stop using this kind of rhetoric. The girl with the all access sign was not a Columbia student. We have no idea how she got here. I have not known of a single incident of a Columbia student or somebody in the encampment using such language.
And so while there has been an active effort to kind.
Of wash this kind of rhetoric, it's it's very very difficult somebody's coming and recording, and so it happens quite often here. So yeah, so we have been trying to also like tell you a students that they're welcome to come with the like stators and services and things like that. We are trying to make this as welcoming a space as possible and ask those groups to really make sure that they are acting in line with the overall message without it being a distraction to what we're here standing for.
One of the big controversies nationally, Pierce Morgan played a role in this, But even without Pierce Morgan, I think you still would have had this this this quote unquote stabbed in the eye controversy that went around. If we could play ef EF four here, just put this put this v up v O up. A student who turns out to be kind of a right wing provocateur. She had previously gone viral like a year or two ago
complaining about Israeli couscous. So here there that's the flag incidents that you guys just saw it basically toy, little toy, little flag that the person is waving as as they're walking through.
Uh.
The the alleged victim said that she had been stabbed in.
The eye and sent fear kind of coursing through Jewish communities around the country. That the video urged finally last night showing that you know, if she was hit at all, it was a it was it was grazing by a kind of rounded ball at the end of a toy toy flag, and that clearly.
Has because she's been on televit and clearly did no damage.
What you know, I'm curious what you know, what the encampment felt when they when they initially heard that story. And also, yes to at Lea's point, what are you guys doing to try to control the message and control the narrative, because now this has become a kind of international spectacle that is kind of a competition for the narrative.
Yeah, I think that there's a sense there is a sense of war reversly at the idea of somebody who was kind of on our side i quote unquote for treating such behavior, but also the idea that incidents get blown out of.
Proportion is not, hir.
We have a lot of students who are counter protesters who try to come in, who try to film our faces and change to the narrative a lot, or take things out of context. We have strict policies here not to interact with counter protesters because we understand that pretty much anything that we do will often be misconstrued or taken out of context. And so, I mean, our main policy is to not encourage that, not give anybody any fuel,
but then also to really not express it. For the most part, I think that we try to work to show it with our actions rather than trying to control a certain message which we have found to be inadequate or futile.
For the most part, there's so many people.
That every single thing we say will get used in some capacity, And we do have a lot of instigators here who try to come who try to video us and change the narrative, and so all we can do is kind of take a.
Step back and hope that the actual message gets through.
And you have House Speaker Mike Johnson coming to Columbia today, what are the things I want to ask I'm sort of fascinated by. On the one hand, do you have people on the right, saying Columbia has been too permissive of the encampment, too permissive of the ravel rousers. On the other hand, the left says Columbia has been and this may be your perspective too, the left has been
cracked down on by the university disproportionately. Tell us a little bit about what your interactions with the university have been, like, what your perspective is on how they've handled the whole situation.
Yeah, I mean, my experience of joining the encampment was specifically in reaction to watching the students get arrested and watching this swarm of NYPD office sers in riot here come and forcibly extract at a couple dozen students from genuinely peacefully protesting. So I find that a large part of this now has been this idea of free speech and the ability to protest on campus, and this area of campus spond has been designated by Columbia as a
free speech sto. And as we see the legacy of Vietnam protests, the idea that within thirty hours the administration came and forcibly removed people with MIPD officers was just a horrific incident and then in light of that, I believe that the administration has been scared to act in any way, and especially after the huge backlash and international
movement that those arrests largely inspired. It's been interesting to see their response so at first, through the course of negotiations that organizers have had, there's been a lot of mixed messages from them, a lot of lack of clarity in terms.
Of the administration.
They've given us mixed messages and most promises regarding ten police presence, how long we can be out here. We were informed last night at ten thirty that there was a threat of the National Guard coming, that president should be actually threatened to send in the National Guard, which is horrific.
Who does she threaten that to directly h they're kind of student negotiators.
Or that was sent to I believe administration or like that was through faculty. Then then told us afterwards, however, we were sent a threatening letter saying that she had a midnight deadline and that if that was for negotiations and if there was no agreement met, that she would take further action. So there was a lot of talk there was supposed to be a police raid last night, and then she decided to change the deadline until eight am today, so.
We believed that there was going to be a huge police raid at.
Eight am today, and then as of this morning, she has changed the deadline to a further forty eight hours. So it's been tiring and tedious, and the administration has been consistently arguing in that faith.
There's been no.
Communication with faculty as in how to handle it, so the faculty are completely in the dart about what to do or how to manage things with their students, how to manage student safety. So there's been such just a sense of confusion both in what's happening and trying to both protect the students and protect the rite of free
speech here on campus. They're somehow not doing any of it, which is just incredibly disappointing and disheartening to see from our administration, especially from a new president.
And so in mid February, the Shearian Collective and if we can put up I think it's f F three here put up this crazy job posting where one of the things they said they were looking for were infiltrators that they can read from it here they said individual they're looking well, individuals with Arabic sounding names and Middle Eastern appearance, may be uniquely positioned for deeper infiltration and will receive cash compensation for their vital role in our operation.
UH.
One of the cities they said they were looking to hire in was UH was New York City.
UH.
The organization some of their internal messages were leaked later It said that they actually hoped that they were just they were just going to spark a lot of paranoia and that they might not even need to go forward, you know, with this operation, that just publicly posting for these job offerings would be enough enough to kind of tear protest groups in half, with everybody you know, pointing
at each other as infiltrators. I'm curious what what the level of paranoia is, although at the same time, calling it paranoia is not quite fair because you know, we know throughout history there have been kind of provocateurs and infiltrators who have come in to try to you know, you know, shout, make make an organization look bad. So how is the encampment handling that particular dynamic.
There is a fear of infiltrators. We try to be on the lookout.
There's a lot of security around this perimeter and people that have now been trained to kind of see to stuss out people for lack of a better word, and it's pretty much impossible, so we can have people come in. We have very strict community guidelines that we try to follow, and so when people violate those community guidelines, like filming people's faces, which has like students have already started to be doxed and exposed for their involvement in any way.
So as soon as we see things like people filming, we can kind of say if we leave.
There have been instances of.
Us having to actively ask people to leave because they were trying to instigate.
It's impossible to see who's trying to infiltrate and who is not.
However, we have alerts kind of like when we know that things are higher, when there's things that are less disorganized, like last night, in the midst of thinking there's going to be a police.
Raid, we were noting that it's a specific time.
That would be very feasible for quote infiltrators to come in.
So there is a level of paranoia, there is a level of fear.
However, everybody here kind of knows that there's a chance of being docs to being exposed, of being arrested or suspended, and so there's only so much that we can do to prevent it. And the only idea is that we can't be scared. We already know that the administration is threatening us enough and so the possibility of infiltrators is surely not enough to kind of.
Change anything here.
And while I've got you, I don't want to put you on the spot too much as a kind of spokesperson for the entire kind of movement. But as here's my old man complaint, as somebody who covered Occupy Walls Street, the so called people's mic, and so for people who don't know, the people's mic is what the protests have developed when the police that you can't use av and you've got to be able to reach people in the back. So somebody will say something and then the entire crowd
kind of repeats it back. And when you're in the middle of it, it can be this production of solidarity and really a moving experience. When you're outside of it, it just looks so creepy and weird, like the people's mic.
I'm like, God, the people's mic has got to go. There's got to be something else.
But I'm curious for you know, how you feel about the people's mic and if there's any other solution, because once it becomes a contest for you know, public ideas and the public narrative, it winds up undermining by just kind of looking weird.
Yeah, there is an incident of this a few days ago in a video that started being put around for some instinct, try to come on to campus, come into the encampment, and we ask them to leave. There was a lot of people mike and then people started singing spirituals, which in the moment made me cry. It was a gorgeous moment and everybody was in solidarity, singing together.
Watched a video of that later. It looked like a horror movie and I understand that.
So I think it's a really difficult line to draw because we need people mike in order to communicate. There's not a lot of capacity as long as the school is not allowing us to use any applification.
But I mean, I'm in agree with you. I've seen those videos. I think.
It's again that kind of line between worrying too much about the media and then having to change organizing tactics in a way to make it yet less useful and less organized and making it so people can't communicate. So again, I think that there's a dentive priorities and a lot of this tire encampment has been trying to figure out what their priorities are.
We have finals coming up. People think that this is more important.
We understand we can look like oh horror movie when using people's mike, But again, we have to do whatever it takes to make sure people are united, even if it gets misconstrued, because as I said before, truly everything is getting misconstrued in a way that's supporting.
The other side.
Its last question for you, how are how are people handling the professional threats you have, you know, senators, members of Congress, billionaires saying we need to identify We're going to have facial recognition technologies can to identify all of these hamas supporters, and we're going to make sure that they're you know, they're never never employed ever again. Obviously, these are successful students who've you know, made it to you know, Columbia undergrad or Columbia graduate school.
And so that is that must be something that is on them at some level. Getting smeared like that.
On the other hand, you're facing this moment of intense moral clarity, witnessing a genocide unfold.
How are people grappling with that tension.
We try to be really careful of privacy.
So privacy is one of the number one concerns at the candid So we always have masks on hand.
We always kind of have levels of a different levels of privacy for different people.
We have the groups of people who are willing to be arrested and then those who don't want such level of attention. We have no photographs of people's spaces. We have really strict rules of the media who come here and what they can and cannot do. We understand that this is such a huge concern for a lot of people who put their life on the line for this, and a lot of what is most useful is the bodies just here and occupying the space and who these people are.
We try to keep that protected as as much as possible.
I am in a very lucky position where my hopefully future employers would never cared if I am identified with this, but a lot of people really do care, and a lot of people are putting their friendships, their family relationships on the line, and while we could do whatever we can again, I think people have assumed this sense of risk coming here and know what may happen, but in interim or trying everything that we possibly can to protect people and also to prevent people from coming in infiltrators
and using that opportunity to expose us, which is really all all that they're able.
To do at this point.
You know, I was just going to say, I had a funny thought while you were talking. Just having worked with so many conservative college students in the last decade, there's something so similar. And there is obviously hypocrisy, but there's just something so similar about students exercising important rights on campus, engaging in free expression, having challenging conversations, and getting to targeted for it. And we just have to
be consistent when it's hardest. And I think that's you know, it's when students are within the bounds and outside of you know, they're not being bigoted, they're not being violent or inciting anything. It's we should be cool, like we should be happy to see this happen on college.
Campuses, and college campuses advertise that there are places where this kind of thing can happen.
I guess. And the actual last question for.
You, what have you said and what would you say to other Jewish students who say that they can't be safe at these protests.
I would say that I understand the fear, and I understand that a lot of the rhetoric can feel really personal. I think that there's a huge distinction between being critical of Israel and being critical of the Jewish people, and that is a distinction that I believe that all the Jews here understand, and that I believe that it is honestly more anti Semitic to conflate those two.
So a lot of the fears that people have are those.
I do understand that there are sometimes personal attacks that are outside of the context of Israel.
However, I would just try to tell Jewish.
Students that this is not about religion, This is not about the personal identities.
This is about holding the school.
Accountable and making sure we know where our tuition money is going, making sure we have a say in that, and honestly just championing deep solidarity with people in Gaza who are currently being murdered, and that is the issue first and foremost, besides and the identities of individual people here. Or the Jewish students on campus and elsewhere, is though almost irrelevant to what we are trying. And this has been such a honestly inspiring, encouraging experience for me as a Jewish student.
Was faced absolutely no far of anti semitism here.
That I really would encourage students to look at it in that lens and know that they are safe at least in.
This encampment and in these spaces.
Well Sofia South, the first year law student at Columbia University, thank you so much for joining us, and good luck with the ongoing protest.
Thank you thanks for having me.
This is a fascinating interview Ryan, and I think an important perspective from somebody who is Jewish and is has this is argument about, you know, the conflation of anti Zionism and anti Semitism perspective quite literally from inside the encampment. Thanks for setting that up. I really thought that was interesting.
And she was telling me before, you know, she's not at all unfamiliar with anti Semitism, and and you know, being in some spaces where it's almost where it's uncomfortable to even mention your your Jewishness, but she said was one of the places where she's been most proud to mention it and felt most welcomed really, which I thought found rather a striking and I'm glad.
You know, it would be one thing if she came on and pretended that some of the other stuff hadn't happened. The Akassar, right, this is targets, this real stuff.
Yeah.
I mean there was that speech about the Oh my gosh, that one speech was so bad from someoney. This must have been on the people's mic. The quote was the Aloxa flood that put the global into fought back on the table again in the sacrificial spirit of the Palestinian freedom fighters, referring to October seventh. I mean, you have to acknowledge that, and you have to talk about how you're dealing with it. It's a real problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it really is.
And it's interesting to see how they're how the students are grappling with it, as you know, because there's a contradiction between you know, their initial kind of rolling out of a small protest aimed at at discrete kind of university policies, which then steam rolls into this international moment, right, and then all of a sudden they're trying to grapple with how that looks.
Yeah, they've got the Speaker of the House coming to talk to them, to talk at them.
Probably I want to see the Speaker of the House use the people's mic like that would be That would be kind of fun.
No comment, Well, just a reminder. We talked about this in the beginning of the show. We're so excited to announce that we're going to be doing a Friday edition of Counterpoints from here on out, starting this week with a very big guest. So breakingpoints dot com if you want to get the show early, you'll get the show early, not just this week but every week. But it will be coming to everybody on Fridays, probably a little bit earlier than that Thursday night if you're a premium subscriber.
Breaking Points dot Com for that. But we're just excited to get it out there.
Go change my tie. So it looks like we did this on a different day.
Yeah, we are about to tape it, but I just destroyed the illusion.
All right, We'll see you guys next time.