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Welcome to Counterpoints. We're coming to you in the middle of an absolutely crazy week. How are you doing, Ryan, Well.
We haven't gone over the cliff yet, not yet, but as Conny has not been blown up, Vladimir's Zelenski and chairman she Met spoke on the phone yesterday that could be a step toward a Chinese broken piece. Even the United States believes that China might be the only one you know, that has remotely.
The credibility to broke or something.
We're all waiting, I guess for this Spring offensive to finish off, which seems kind of seems kind of morbid that people seem to know this war has to end at some point, but hold on We're just going to do a couple more months of carnage and then we'll end it, rather than just saying, how about all of those people can live, have grandchildren, et cetera.
And the war now.
Right, a crazy story that we'll continue to follow because to your point, the Chinese intervention here seems to be even people in the United States saying, what's going on?
Yeah, you know, the after they struck a Middle East piece deal between Saudi Rape and Iran.
Yeah. No, absolutely, Well, we're going to start today by talking about the debt stand off that's coming to a head maybe today. Actually, we're going to talk about some developments in the twenty twenty four presidential race. We're going to talk about the Supreme Court conflicts of interest stories that have come out in the last couple of weeks. We're talking about the Abbi Grosberg lawsuit that is coming for Fox News. We're going to talk about doctor Fauci's
recent profile in the New York Times. I'm going to tell talk about the United Nations, and Ryan is going to talk about Susan Rice. Let's start with the news of the day, the debts stand off. President Biden yesterday said quote a one here Republican efforts. The Republican legislation is a reckless attempt to extract extreme concessions as a condition for the United States simply paying the bills it has already incurred. Now you have if we put a two up on the screen. Chip Roy, he's from the
House Freedom Caucus. He just wrote this in the Federalist. He says, this is the question that Republicans are presented with, quote, will we cave to the President, Wall Street, massive corporation, swamp lobbyists in the corporate media to continue America's borrow and spend death spiral, or will we instead take this opportunity to stand up for the American people to demand their leaders stop irresponsibly spending money we do not have. So that is a preview of what faces Kevin McCarthy
should he back down on a legislation. Republicans have a bill that they want to vote on today. They need two hundred and eighteen votes. Kevin McCarthy can actually not afford to lose more than what six members of the Freedom Caucus, and so in order to work its way through the House of Representatives, he needs to please people who have the thoughts that Chip Roy has there. Here are a couple of quotes though, that members gave yesterday. This is Jody Errington. He's the leader of the House
Budget Committee. He said, Speaker McCarthy's been at the table and he has offered to negotiate with the President. Now we're going to put our terms on a piece of paper. Get two hundred and eighteen Republicans, and we're going to put the ball in their court. Ralph Norman, he's a member of the Freedom Caucus, says this is the bare minimum for me and a host of other people. They are going to be quote leaning no until they get
concessions from McCarthy. So that's a pretty incredible state of affairs and balance for McCarthy to strike today as they want to push this bill over the finish line. Of course, if you've been following this, President Biden said he's not negotiating period, because he doesn't think the debt ceiling should have to be raised with any.
Conditions pplicating matters for Kevin McCarthy's it's not just the Freedom Caucus that he has to deal with. He also has the the Nancy Mace types you know, who don't like the idea of voting for kind of draconian cuts. Particularly, she doesn't it doesn't She and other modern Republicans don't really like voting against some of these kind of green tax credits because that won't necessarily play well in a swing district.
I think she has people who manufacture in her in South Carolina.
Right, it's becoming a real industry, like the clean energy industry is becoming an industry, and so it's going to have jobs associated with it. It's going to have economic impact associated with it, and therefore it's going to have political economy power. It's going to have people who are like, not so sure about this. Equally, you have these Midwest and I'm sure you know much more about this than
I do. You've got all these Midwest Republicans who are upset that the Republican bill, in order to save money, is pulling back on ethanol subsidies. And to me, what do the kids call it? Based good? Good for Kevin McCarthy if we're taking it also, Oh yeah, ethanol subsidies are the stupidest possible thing on playing Like what we do.
The pinnacle of crony capitalism.
Yeah, we take.
Public money and we pay people to grow corn, and then we then turn that corn into ethanol, and then we force people to put in gasol and put it in their cars.
Ethanol for different reasons.
What are we doing?
No, I think that's great. I think that's great, and I mean the freedom cocke should be all over that. And this is how the Washington Post describes the Republican bill on the table. They say it would quote slash federal spending dramatically and unwind some of Biden's priorities, including a student debt cancelation and efforts to address climate change and exchange. Republicans would agree to increase the debt ceiling obviously, the statutory cap on how much the US government can
borrow to pay its bills. That's from the Post. So as Ryan was saying, it does roll back some of the bills that have already been passed that by President Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act that looks at to target some of those things. Obviously, this is not a bill that Joe Biden is going to agree to. It is, however, a bill that gets really interesting when you kick it over to the Senate, if.
Right, but they don't expect it.
And also just to be clear, if people expect there to be some climate benefit out of ethnol, there isn't because it's so resource intensive to grow the corn in the first place.
To then burn it.
But right, so, Kevin McCarthy's plan here is I'm going to show that I have two hundred and eighteen votes on this bill. And he's say, I'm not negotiating this bill at all, like, this is what we've got, this
is what we're taking to Biden. You've got some Republicans who are saying, and Gates has said this, unless you fiddle with the work requirements, unless you makeer higher work requirements for federal benefits kick in sooner than I'm out, which to me is just not credible because you're threatening to blow up the global economy to move work requirements from twenty hours to thirty hours, and to move it back a little bit close, you know, to implement it
a little bit faster than it's being implemented in a messaging bill that nobody thinks is.
Going to be passed anyway.
It'd be like, you know, pass me the prezels where I'm gonna cut your head off. No bad deal, No, like that's this is not a proportionate response here, Like you really think work requirements should be higher, go to committee, write a bill, talk to your other members of Congress, and then maybe we'll you know, reform work requirements. I think it's silly, but okay, let's let's talk about that. But you're gonna you're gonna use this leverage that.
You have to get that.
The problem with it being a messaging bill is that Gates has absolutely no reason to come to the table with McCarthy. And then it's McCarthy's test to see what he can give to Matt Gates, to Chip Roy, to anybody who's demanding concessions from McCarthy in order to build their support. This is really what Kevin McCarthy is good at.
It's what he prides himself in doing. He always points back to what he did with Jim Jordan and putting him in charge of oversight that this was sort of he'd used the carrot not the stick, and it worked
out really well. So this is like probably the first biggest test because really nobody has any any clear reason to negotiate because if anything, if Matt Gates won't get concessions on that, he knows particularly if he doesn't get a concession on that, he can take it to Fox News, he can take it everywhere he wants and say, Kevin McCarthy, you know, wants welfare or whatever, and he's standing up to the.
Swamp right and it hurts McCarthy.
And so then Gates is in a better position if he's still, you know, in a hostile posture vis a vis McCarthy, Because if he doesn't get these this package through with two hundred and eighteen votes, then McCarthy is badly hobbled with Biden. Now people want to say, well, but if Gates is the one that hobbled McCarthy, isn't it Gates's fault.
No, people don't pay attention like that.
They would just see McCarthy as kind of losing in a standoff with Biden, which then brings McCarthy's demise kind of one day closer, because if he can't get his own caucus to agree on a debt ceiling increase with all of the cuts that he wants that his caucus wants, then how can he go to the negotiating table and ask for anything from Biden when it's clear that he can't even deliver on this maximalist.
Position, right.
Yeah, No, that's a hugely important point. And for Republicans, they obviously need to be strategic about this because if they lose Kevin McCarthy again, as we learned in January, they really have no plausible backup. It just doesn't exist. And he is the one person I'm talking purely from a strategic standpoint right now. He's the one person that has any hope of bridging all of these different divides
and navigating all of these different competing interests. And so if they push it to the limit on this, especially on the messaging the messaging bill, if they push it to the limit on the messaging bill, then they could be in like serious trouble for the rest of this Congress. And I would just add that so far, it does look good for McCarthy because the fact that Chip Roy and people in the Freedom Caucus are saying like we're
at our bare minimum. That may seem not good, but it actually is pretty good for Kevin McCarthy at this point because that was not easy to do. And it seems like they're making these arguments in good faith when they are taking them to the media, and that is positive for him bodes well for today. He probably just wants to get a quick vote, get it over with, but that could be that could go in a million different directions.
So how would you handicap it?
Do you think that he will have the Do you think he'll put it on the floor today and have enough votes to get it passed?
If I had to bet, I would say it goes on the floor today or right after and it does get the votes, but I wouldn't put a lot of money on that.
And then if it if it gets pulled, do you think he comes back by the end of the week with enough votes or do you think he just kind of retrenches and continues the game of chicken that I feel like he has to lose in order for this to wrap up.
Yeah, no, I mean I think that's a really good question, because we saw he went through how many ballots and kept getting concessions and concessions in the speaker race, and maybe there's some muscle memory there and back Gates knows that he can keep going through putting Kevin McCarthy through the ringer time and again and finally get to a
better place despite all odds. Maybe because they really don't have a backup, but it's possible that also blows up in everyone's face, and there are relationships that can never be relationships broken that can never be repaired. So I think that's like the worst case scenario probably.
And yeah, the Freedom Caucus just seems structurally and fundamentally in the same handicap as kind of the Progressive Caucus, which is that they have some leverage because they have some members of Congress they want a much different governing structure than exists, but they don't have a majority right to enact.
That, but they have such the Republicans in general have such a slim majority that they have all the power and the Freedom Caucus's court or the same thing with like the Two Day Group, And we saw this in the Pelosi Congress with Justice Democrats, they really did wield a lot of power, and I think a lot of people on the left would be correct to say they didn't always wield in appropriately or as much as they could.
But the Freedom crowc is has less I think reservations about doing that because they already don't have the media, so they can't afford to blow things up because they're not losing media credibility if they never had it.
They still have the product, they don't have the votes.
But we'll see, we'll see if they can out maneuver that that handicap. So moving to the twenty twenty four election, interesting piece in the Washington Examiner by Con Carol, former Hill staffer.
Right, yes, it.
Is called could be one up here called why Trump beat Clinton, lost to Biden and would lose to Biden again, which I think actually gets at the kind of unspoken truth behind our current politics and the point he's making I wanted to get your take on this is that there are there's an increasing number of people who hate
both candidates and hate both parties. Among those people, though, and this is where groups like no labels the kind of corporate group that is putting its ballot line on ballots all across the countries because they keep looking at poules saying that look, sixty percent of the country says they don't want either of these two parties. They're like boom, Therefore they want a corporate back to Joe Manchin Lisa Murkowski ticket.
It's like, no, I don't think they said that.
I think they said the first thing that they don't like either party, that they didn't say they like you. And so what Con does is he looks at, well, Okay, how are these people actually going to vote in the end, Because almost all of the sixty percent of people say they don't like either party.
They have no other choice.
They vote, and they vote pretty consistently for one party or the other. But what Con points to is that overwhelmingly of the people who hate both candidates, they hate Biden less, yeah, significantly, and they hated Clinton more. And that's and that's and it wasn't that Trump, you know, was able to capture the hearts of the nation in twenty sixteen. It was that people disliked him less than
they disliked Hillary Clinton. And his argument is that's why he lost to Biden in twenty twenty and would again for that simple reason.
Yeah, Biden's just not as hateable.
Well, I think there's there's something to that. And it's not as though Biden captured the hearts of the nation either, That's what is.
Right.
And so, yeah, CON's numbers show that Biden is beating Trump easily fifty four to fifteen percent among those voters that disapprove of both candidates. So then he asks how many of them are this time around. Well, he says forty seven percent of all voters believe that neither Biden nor Trump should run for president in twenty twenty four. Now, Ron DeSantis has higher favorable ratings than Biden and Trump.
That's what con points out. He says, it's not surprising them when you look at both national and state poles. Both Trump is losing to Biden and DeSantis is beating Biden. So that is a really interesting metric, and it gets to this question of how many of those voters actually decide to go to the polls. So if you have forty seven percent of people that don't like either candidate, how many of them just set out? How many of
them actually vote? That's why when I think, you know, the pundit class tries to crunch all of these numbers in interesting ways, and they get into like beautiful mind chalkboard math. It just like there's you can't always predict how many of the people who hate both candidates decide to show up or not. It's just almost impossible to do.
Although, you know, since twenty sixteen and because of Trump, I think I think it's fair to say we've had a surge and engagement, civic engagement on election.
Day, young people. You've pointed out.
Young people, women, men in Pennsylvania who hadn't voted it, didn't even vote in twenty sixteen. They came out and voted in twenty twenty. Like, people are kind of hooked into the circus and the drama of it in a way that they weren't in like twenty twelve, let's say. And so I do think you're going to continue to see that. It's going to continue to kind of dominate our feeds. And so even these people who hate them both are still going to want to participate. They got
to get their selfie. You know, you got to got to make your content. How are you gonna make your voting content your civic content if you don't actually participate in it. So I think that'll drive drive a significant amount of it. But yeah, people, just so the question then I have for you is is there any point at which the Republican base starts to become pragmatic and says, Okay, yeah, we love our guy.
But man, how is he losing to Biden in these polls? And how is it Santa? It's winning?
So we're gonna be pragmatic and we're gonna switch over to the Santus or no way, Like they look at Biden and they're like, that's the most beatable guy in the planet.
I don't care what the Poles say.
No, because there's a really easy answer is because of the flight ninety three election sort of concept that Michael Anton sort of famously popularized. That was, of course when it was a binary choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. But he his thing was like the planes going.
Ninety three, Yeah, yeah, give him the framework again.
So he wrote for Claremont that if you if the plane is going down, the plane is being hijacked, you you put all of your eggs in the one basket. That like is going to just be completely dramatic. And if so, if the country is going down, the metaphor follows, why not just like blow up the government and see what happens and.
Metaphorically grab the wheel.
Yeah, yeah, grab the wheel.
And if you crash a crash, if.
You crash a crash, because we're crashing anyway. So like
that's the calculus. And I think there are a whole lot of people it's sort of like what we were just talking about with the freedom Caucus, Like, what is their incentive to cooperate with Kevin McCarthy, especially on a messaging built Well, what is the average voter who might not be like a died in the wool Republican but really likes Donald Trump Because he said everyone else is lying accurate doesn't mean that he's not lying to and sort of provided that glimmer of hope saying we're going
to stop endless wars, we are going to have a robust middle class, we're going to bring jobs back, et cetera, et cetera. He provided a lot of hope for people like that. And if your alternative then is Ron DeSantis, a guy who has been a politician for a really long time and could never be Donald Trump. Nobody can never be Donald Trump, then no, you don't have a lot of You don't have a lot of incentive to play nice with the Republican Party or to be pragmatic
with the Republican Party. And if we put B two up on the screen, I think that's what a lot of this gets at. This is a tweet from Ron Brownstein where he says a nude PBS News Hour and
pr Marris poll neatly sums up the Republican situation. Heading into twenty twenty four, sixty three percent of Republicans say they want a second Trump turn even if he's found guilty of a crime, but just twenty one percent of independence, twenty four percent of non whites, twenty seven percent under the age of forty five, and seventeen percent of what
does that one say? College? Okay, college whites agree And so if you look at that, this is where we're balancing these what's the best word like the passions of voters, right, So like, if you really love Donald Trump or if you don't like either candidate, what does turnout look like? What does your motivation to actually vote for somebody look like? What does your motivation to give look like? If Bernie and Trump get a bunch of small dollar donors like
that actually can really make a difference. So I think that's one of the big questions here is who has the passion on their side among their voters.
So the Republican hope, it sounds like, is that the Biden supporters won't be passionate enough to come out on election day as maybe they were in the past, or Trump supporters would be, and as a result, then Trump will be able to eke it out. The cold water I would throw on that potential. I think it's possible, and maybe he doesn't even live to the election. But the cold water I would throw on it is that it's not that Democrats support Biden with any passion, but man, do they not like Trump?
And so they will.
Crawl overs They crawl over Glass in twenty eighteen to hit the Women's March in twenty eighteen, to go to the midterms in twenty twenty to throw him out of the White House, and they'll crawl over glass again in twenty twenty four.
I think to elect anybody. Kim Jong un.
Not born in the United States, so not constitutionally eligible, But you know what I mean, they would vote for anybody, and they would crawl over Glass to vote for anybody other than him. That so that that's my guess, because we're a culture and a politics of fear and hatred rather than hope, and so that's what's motivated people.
Well, and yeah, I mean I think there's there's also this question of, you know, the difference between Hillary and Biden, as con points out, I think really accurately, is that one is less unlikable, and so if you have Joe Biden versus another candidate, I think that's also a really interesting question because Biden is sort of you know, you're able to kind of project different things onto him, and
he does that intentionally. You know, he doesn't sort of stake out a hard claim to the progressive base or the centrispace. He does a bunch of it and lets people just kind of be He's everything to whatever anybody wants. But Joe Biden can be, or he tries to, I think, use that strategy, and so that I think does allow you to be a little bit less unlikable than Hillary Clinton and get some more votes than than Trump.
Yes, and speaking of not having any hope, can we put a B five, which is the the This is Bernie Sanders. So after after Biden announced his bid for presidency on two Day Day with his video, Bernie Sanders kind of in the it's not surprising but shocking kind
of development, came out and endorsed Biden immediately. I say not surprising because he's been signaling for the last year or longer that if Biden is running, he's gonna he's not gonna run, and he's gonna endorse Biden, so we knew this was going to happen, but it's still jarring, I guess would be the better word to see the kind of independent democratic socialist Canada who twice ran just immediately endorsing Joe Biden, which I think goes to my
other point that people are not getting behind Biden because they have some hope that he's going to bring kind of fundamental transformational change that the working class needs to this country, but that they just want to beat Trump.
Bernie in his book, his most recent book, he talks about why he immediately why he dropped out so quickly and then immediately basically endorsed Biden, saying that he didn't want anybody to be able to blame him, and he didn't want to feel any sense of personal responsibility for doing anything that could have helped Trump, because in twenty sixteen he waited all the way until the convention to support Hillary Clinton and spent the next several.
Years getting blamed by that.
And it sounds like, from the way he's writing in his book that maybe even kind of blaming himself a little bit.
I was going to ask, is that the implication that he thinks those Chargers had any marriage.
I feel like he some of them stung a little bit because he didn't think I think just trying to you know, mind read through his book. He didn't think that Trump was going to win and he's and he did not want to endorse Hillary Clinton and dragged it out as long as possible, and I think some of it stings sometimes.
I think I think he does.
Some of it does resonate with him, and I think that helps to explain why he capitulated so quickly this time around.
Well, and now Joe Biden has competition in the form of both RFK Junior and marian Williamson. But let's put this next element. I think it's b three up on the screen where you see Maggie Haveraman putting out that Donald Trump is threatening to skip debates. That's gonna be a question for both of the top candidates, it seems, because Joe Biden hasn't signaled any interest in debating Mary Williamson or RFK Junior, although I think the fact that now both of them are in the race has ratcheted
up the pressure on Biden to debate. I do think, especially given where Marianne is on TikTok. Honestly, that an RFK Junior. I think it has a pretty.
Like fourteen percent or something. Yeah, and that's he's got a great name.
So he does have a great name. He's got that going for him, and he seems to be running at least a pretty strategically smart campaign so far. I think that does heighten the pressure on Biden actually to debate. We'll see actually where that goes from from here.
And I love Trump just laying out all of his politics in.
This truth social post where he basically says, look, I'm so far ahead, why would I debate? So maybe DeSantis and Marian Williamson and RFK Junior can debate.
Oh, that would be fun.
That'd be a good one.
I would watch that.
Everybody would watch.
That for Chris Christian see what happens.
Absolutely Chris Christie is welcome to Trump also makes the point that Fred Ryan, who was formerly the CEO of Politico is now publisher of The Washington Post, is the chairman of the Reagan Library. He was Reagan's chief of staff after Reagan was president, and so he's saying, there no way biased can't go to the Reagan Library. How does it feel to have the front running Republicans say that he can't participate at a debate at the Reagan Library because it would be unfair to him.
Reignan Library has a lot of problems with the conservative movement, does it? I think increasingly? Yeah, I mean they hosted List Cheney.
Oh yeah, how do you leave that out? Maybe character character limit?
Maybe well, we should probably move on now to the increasing conversation about ethics on the Supreme Court. Ryan, there's a new intercept report on Harlan Crow's citizenship.
Yes, this was a story that Ken Klippenstein did with Jason Palladino in a partnership with the Project on Government Oversight. If we're gonna put this this first haear sheet up here, but essentially that we got leak documents that show that Harlan Crowe purchased citizenship from Saint Kitts, what's called Saint
Kitts and Nevis one of you know. So there are there there are these corporate slash sovereign structures around the world that have managed to kind basically incorporate themselves into governments, calling themselves places like Saint Kitts, which then have this this allegedly the sovereign powers of a government and what they then do. It's Cyprus being kind of one of the famous ones over and a couple others over in
the EU. You can kind of like what's basically what you do is you can buy your way into citizenship. It's very expensive in the sense that it costs to what to you and me would be an extraordinary amount of money, but in relative terms to a billionaire is like nothing, which is similar to how kind of the Bahamas like makes so much money, or Delaware actually does the same thing.
That it costs a between fifty.
Dollars and five hundred dollars to like incorporate your your company, your tax shelter in Delaware or in the Bahamas with not a lot not a lot of money in absolute terms, but it adds up to you know, millions and billions for these for these countries and so quote unquote countries, and so a place like Saint Kitts then has a new citizen, Harlan Crowe, who can then park his money there and if he has the cleverest tax attorneys, he can get around the he can get around you know,
taxes that he owes here in the United States, and so it's just hilarious.
You know, it's just too much.
It's like, also the guy's name is Harlan Crowe, which
is hilarious. Like all of it is just a complete kind of caricature of an oligarchy that that you would have a Supreme Court justice who presents himself as this guy who loves to ride around the country in his RV and go to NASCAR races, who is also taking you know, global yacht trips with this billionaire who is such an American patriot that he has purchased citizenship elsewhere so he can not perform his civic obligation of like paying his fair share.
I mean, if you're in the upper echelons of American politics, whether it's on the left of the right, you're going to end up on a mega yacht and you're gonna end up pealing around with somebody who has dual citizenship tax haven US. I mean, it is, like, I think that's the sad reality of the said truth. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I do think it really is where the country is right now that you're I mean, if you're in the upper echelons of American politics.
That's people that are just naturally going to be in your circle, the Thomases. And in full disclosure, I very much admired Clarence Thomas. He grew up dirt poor. I think he has an incredible story. He was in the sort of fringe left when he was in college and you know, sort of change his life, turned his life around.
Here's in Cinema quite like Kierson Cinema. Well, yeah, she was fringe left.
I feel like he was even fringier.
Though maybe I don't know she was out there, she was up there.
But I think that some of these folks who are active with the with the fringe left come away with it with the most contempt you could possibly have for the fringe left right. And that's probably true on the fringe fringe right in the way, because if if you're a fringe character, you're you're probably not that fun to be around, probably annoying in meetings, probably not fun to do your little cell block activity with you. And then you come out and you think that everybody on the
left is like that. And I think that I think Cinema has has some of that that her time with with the Green Party, with the Black Block. Their anarchist protesters made her think that everybody was like the people that are in her little block, and so she's taking it out on the world as a result. And I could see that maybe the same is true for Clarence Thomas, that he just.
Was like, Wow, I actually hate you people.
I don't know. There's some his obviously, his autobiography is really a popular book and an excellent book. But yeah, the intercept story, I think grace is this question of whether Crow being a dual citizen has any implications for his his giving and any implications for disclosures that would need to be made.
He's still, you know, since he still has his American citizenship. He's looks like he's good even though. But yeah, like the wealth that he has, a significant portion of it is still in his possession because of his other citizenship. If he had maintained only American citizenship, he would have less of it would have gone to you and me and the rest.
Of the public.
We could democratically just what to do with it, Send it to Ukraine, do whatever we wander with it. So if put up this second element over at Insider, you now have journalists combing through past Supreme Court decisions and cases trying to fact check Harlan Chlorow's claim that he never had or Clarence Thomas claim that Harlan Crow never
had business before the Supreme Court. Anybody who's a billionaire is going to eventually have some business, probably some business that they are connected with, is going to appear before the Supreme Court. Bloomberg's got him busted here with Trammel Crow Residential. It's a case that made it Supreme Court
in two thousand and five. Clarence Thomas did not accuse himself from this one, as our ethics rules would suggest, or do they have rules as our ethics kind of norms suggest that he ought to have.
It's funny, though, because so on that case, I'm thinking, and this is totally a one about, but I'm thinking of how Elena Kagan was the Solicitor General for Obama during Obamacare and then voted Bamacare and the Obamacare case, And it's like, I mean this stuff the Supreme Court, Like, like you said, if you're a billionaire, you're going to end up having a case before the Supreme Court, and if you're really powerful, you're going to end up hanging
out with billionaires, you're going to end up being in the solicitor general in an extremely high profile case. And so again, I think we talked about this last week. I'm completely in favor of tighter ethics rules for the Supreme Court. I think this speaks to a deeper problem and a lot of these reports now, like Politico utterly botched a hit on Neil Gorsich, I mean just botched it. And even some of the Thomas stuff was like the original Thomas reporting had some it was in pro publica,
had some misses in it. And so I just think this would all be a lot more credible if they were doing it across the board, because now there seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to get even like Borsich without even realizing that no Supreme Court justice. My colleague David Harsani went and looked and her big complaint in that political political story is that he tried to conceal a transaction of a land transaction because quote
he did not report the identity of the purchaser. And David said, that's true, but he went back and looked at all the disclosure forms of Supreme Court justices in twenty seventeen, and none of them made a notation in that box for any transaction. So she's acting as though this is highly unusual in suspect none of them did that.
So, but the others had sold property, let.
Me check, but let's see financial none of them had filled that out in financial disclosures.
For previous for previous home sales.
You mean not just for home sales, but for financial like their financial transactions.
I see, so right.
Well, I think one thing that's going on here is that there has been a kind of social contract that the public has had with the Supreme Court, right, which is that, look, we you wear black robes, you're you're not on TV when you make.
Your You don't clap at the City of the Union, you don't clap.
The State of Union. You're just out there.
You're making the decisions, and we're going to trust that you're making them, uh, you know, somewhat barely, and we're going to we're going to honor those decisions. We're going to mostly likely leave you guys alone and think of you as somewhat separate from the democratic process and from the political process. And I think overturning row for a lot of people broke that social contract. He said, all right, you know what, you guys want to play politicians, you
want to lead a political movement. We're going to treat you like politicians, and we're going to examine your conflicts of interest. And I think that because of this social contract, the Supreme Court justices have been rather lazy about their kind of adherence to ethical guidelines and their their financial their financial disclosure reporting because nobody really cared. It's like your Supreme Court was a different thing. It was a
black box with black robes. But now that there are people are lifting the lid, I think you're going to find a lot of things like where you're going to say, well, you know what, it's not okay that none of them filled this out. Yeah, Like we don't trust any of you anymore. Like you want to be politicians, you want
to be political figures. You want to you want to mess with my daily life like this, all right, Well, now you're going to have to abide by the same standards that we hold everybody else to.
And I love that. I am completely not just okay with that, but like eager for that conversation to happen.
But when you have pro publica saying, for instance, that Thomas he criticized like a Chevron related case, meant that he had a quote newly popular on the right that would limit government regulation philosophy that is absurd, Like that was in the Pro public original report, which also said that he needed to disclose the yacht because it counted as transportation in the same way that you know a
bus would or a plane would the plane transactions. I think we're the plain disclosures I think really should have been made. All this is to say, I'm completely fine with having a conversation about ethics on the Supreme Court.
What's happening right now is completely, from my perspective, one sided, when this needs to be a much broader, deeper conversation, and the media acting like these are uniquely terrible problems for Neil Gorsich and Clarence Thomas while turning a blind eye to the Let's say that the Kagan thing, nobody was concerned about that when it happened, except for people like conservative bloggers at the time. I just think it's it's really unhelpful. Overall.
We're getting get a lot more of it.
I hope, sir, I mean I hope we get more about the ethics conversations, because yeah, I don't think it's great to have independent jurists you know who are we don't know are really good friends with billionaires and spending a lot of time with it. I think it's helpful to know that.
Of course, moving on to Abbie Grosberg. So the Ammi Grosberg is the former looking producer executive booking producer over at the Tucker car over at Tucker Carlson's show.
She appeared on MSNBC last night.
If we put up this first element here, she is suing Fox News and Tucker Carlson, claiming a culture of what's the toxic work environment at his.
Show, hostile, indiscriminatory.
Hostile, in discriminatory work environment. There's all sorts of kind of theories about what the role of her suit has been in Tucker Carlson's firing on Monday, and so she appeared with Nicole Wallace. Let's play a little bit of that from last night.
Where are all of those recordings now? Did Dominion ultimately get them?
I still have.
I have several recordings that I'm still going through that we've recovered from all of the phones. There are ninety that we have. I don't know what Fox turned over. I do know based on what I've read, that they did hand over those Sydney and Rudy tapes to them. Fox should have everything. They really should do You have.
You been contacted by Smartmatic? Yes, and you've shared all the odder recordings of them or whatever.
I've been subpedent.
We haven't shared anything.
I've begun the discovery process.
Are you.
So she also talked, we'll run let's run through these clips too. So she also talked about the culture that this is her, specifically describing the culture at Tucker's show.
Early on, they had Andrew Tate on the show, and I raised my hand and I said, we have to be very mindful that this is two white males together. And I use the example of Gail King and r Kelly saying that she could go in a different direction with that interview that I felt Tucker couldn't.
And they weren't happy about.
That because they wanted to be a bro fest. They were all laughing about how fun it would be to go to Romania and hang out with him.
They liked his messaging.
So whenever I said something like that, it put a target on my back, and gradually I was shut out of meeting, I was mocked, I was eventually demoted. That's how it played out for me. And it got worse and it got worse, and it got worse every time I spoke out.
I'm sure you have thoughts there plenty.
Let's let's produce some even deeper thoughts with this last one, because this kind of builds on the earlier point. This is this is her talking about basically her reaction to some of the January sixth covers and her involvement in some of it.
When the January sixth tapes were coming out, Tucker was very set on finding an FBI person who was implanted in the crowd and spinning this conspiracy that they were ultimately the ones responsible for the capital attack, not Fox News as they're about to go into the dominion trial, that it was really, you know, the FBI that set up this thing, not Fox telling the American people that the election was rigged and the voting machines did it.
And when I went back to them and said, look, there's no conspiracy theory here, I called this attorney that's reper. He's setting one of the proud Boys and he flat out told me on two occasions there is no conspiracy.
Get away from this stuff. This is dangerous. Tell talker to stop. Oh, I'm sure that's exactly how it happened. This woman worked for Maria Bartiromo for a long time, who obviously is named in the dominion suit and probably the Smartmatic one as well, and then joined Tucker Show in September of last year, quickly after that, testified in the dominion suit, and is now claiming this like total
ideological pivot, is being totally fetted by the media. Given all of these interviews and treated by Nicole Wallace there and by others, you could say we had the element from The New York Times, given these photo shoots, as something of a hero, as entirely credible because she's speaking out against Fox News, when of course all of the incentives in corporate media right now are to speak out against Fox News. So I would take everything that she
says with a giant grain of salt. I have a lot more thoughts that I could run through, But Ryan, what do you make of her conversation with Wallace?
It's it's just kind of jarring to hear a kind of progressive language try attempt to be applied, or social justice language attempt to be applied to a Tucker Carlson newsroom.
It's like, as if the problem.
With an Andrew Tate interview on Tucker Carlson Show is that it's too many men.
The guys were excited about it.
Any more jender diversity in your celebration of Andrew Tate like like, I don't even know where to go with stuff like that. Yeah, it's like it's like diversifying the raytheon boardroom. In some ways, it's like, this is still Andrew Tate. Where do you think you're going with this? So I have no problem believing that Tucker Carlson's newsroom is worse than a locker room.
I don't.
I don't like if I'm on that jury. If you're watching the show, you're like, and she said, I don't think she said it these clips, but she said elsewhere she said the people that worked for him were true believers. Yeah, but she said that as an insult, right, I know, which is well, I.
Don't like their true beliefs.
However, what are you saying, ue that you want people who spew the kinds of things they spew on the show, but don't believe them, right, what does that just doing it cynically for money and ratings, Right, that's the world that you think is appropriate.
You're radical.
That is really the key statement from her, because that's why she's being trodden out into Nicole Wallace to show New York Times MSNBC, because she's not a true believer. Because she sat there and took what we know she has like ninety recordings, and she released one of Ted Cruz and Maria Barbiromo yesterday that was pretty thoroughly on interesting. Ted Cruse saying that twenty twenty should have a board like they.
Did, said it on the Senate floor.
Yeah, he said that on the Senate floor. But if you are deplicitous and not deplicitous enough to take a paycheck from somebody, record things, pretend to be on the same team for literally years and at least when it comes to Tucker, then no, you're not a true believer. You are taking money and power to further a cause that you're uncomfortable with, which is quite a statement in and of itself for the media then to not be like questioning her as so, what did you ever believe
what do you believe now? And why did you book on these shows that you say are evil for so many years?
Right?
I just don't see how it's better that you're promoting this stuff not believing in it.
Mm hmm, Well I don't think or like I don't.
It's who cares whether you believe it or not, Like what the product you're producing is what matters anyway. Just yeah, it's just rather extraordinary to hear that hear that claim being made that like the problem, that the real problem was that they that they actually believe the things that they were saying.
Yeah, God forbid well and can I just like the there's a really big swath of this country that like unfortunately enjoys watching Andrew videos. And if you have followed what Tucker has been doing over the last couple of years, I don't think he would dispute that he runs a newsroom that is comparable to a locker room in some ways. Maybe it would be different when you're actually subpoenaed in a courtroom, you would have to describe your newsroom a
little bit differently. But I don't think he would dispute that it's like a masculine environment because a lot of what he talks about is that we've you know, overly feminized places, and he truly, truly believes that that men don't have the same outlets for their like natural impulses that they used to. And you can disagree with that or not, but he does really believe that his team really believes that.
On TV.
Yeah, I mean, he definitely believes that.
And if you would, she's saying that he really does, right, yes, and I mean.
He absolutely does. And it's like consistent of his work over the course of years. And that's why he's interested in Andrew Tait, because Andrew Tate talks about those things. It's not to say he like, I don't know, I didn't watch the Andrew Tate thing. It's not to say that he's completely endorsing Andrew Tait, and I would disagree with that if he did. But the point is it's consistent with his beliefs, and those beliefs are not completely out of touch with the with a chunk of people
in America who have zero voice in media. Everyone in media says this is evil. You know, Andrew Tate bad. You're bad. If you ever watched Andrew Tit, if you ever looked at Andrew Tate, you're also a bigot and the sexist. And if you have one voice in all of the media who's willing to engage with Andrew Tate and do an interview with him, acting like that's the end of the world, I think is silly and it's funny to see her just get treated like this by the corporate press.
Well, I mean, I think Andrew Tates is deplorable. Figures you can have. He's facing credible charge. Don't disagree with rape and sex trafficking out in Romania. Even to get charged with sex trafficking in roman almost impossible. He even said, like out loud, like when he was going there, like he was there because of the loose laws around that,
so you have to have really done something. It's like getting speeding on the autubn So good lord, Well, we can't even imagine what he was what he was up to. But the idea that like it would be okay to platform promote that type that that type of ideology without kind of rebutting it. I think if you want to rebut it, yeah, then then I think people should do that because obviously the alternative isn't working, Like he has
spread like wildfire around around the entire world. But the idea that the only thing you really need to do is make sure you have gender sensitivity and gender diversity in the platforming of it, to me, is just mind boggling.
Yeah.
No, I agree on that, and totally agree that if you're if you're going to interview him, give him an extremely tough interview and ask all of the questions that need to be asked. But this idea that just to engage with him at all, even though he's like very popular, surgingly has a surging popularity at the time of that interview, I mean, that's absurd and out of the sort of spirit of journalism.
And I think what I mean about not having a hard time believing that there's a toxic work environment in his office is that if you take the standard corporate HR definition of a of a toxic work environment and you just say the things that he says on his show, like his show, like the things that we know he said in public on his show, would land any manager in HR reviews like any day of the week at
almost any company in this country. So the idea that like that there was a work environment that a normal HR apart would classify as toxic.
Seems to me rather easy to demonstrate.
Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on that point, because I would argue that's says more about the normal HR department than right.
Right, But you would agree that it would violate the HR totally like the current understanding of what a toxic work environment would be.
Absolutely, yeah, I think that would probably not be a terribly difficult.
To press play on this show.
All right, Well, let's move on to doctor Fauci, who did a sat for a very long interview in the New York Times that was published this week. He said had some interesting things to say. One of my favorites is he says, when people say, quote Fauci shut down the economy, it wasn't Fauci, referring to himself as the third person. The CDC was the organization that made those recommendations. I happen to be perceived as the personification of the recommendations.
But show me a school that I shut down, and show me a factory that I shut down. Never, I never did. I gave a public health recommendation that echoed the CDC's recommendation, and people made a decision. Based on that. All right, let's actually just roll right into the SOT. We have e two here. You can make your own decision up based on what Fauci just said there and what Fauci says here.
I recommended to the president that we shut the country down, and that was very difficult decision because I knew it would have serious economic consequences.
All right, So technically not mutually exclusive there he's saying, I recommended to the President that we shut the country down. But you can see how he's much more eager to take credit for having a pivotal voice in those recommendations, for being one of the recommenders that actually mattered and
convinced Donald Trump to shut the country down. And then when it's not convenient for him to take credit for he said, well, I I was just one of the many people making recommendations that would echo the CDC.
Ron De Santas if he actually does end up running, will love to make hay out of that distinction. Oh say, actually it wasn't Fauci, it was shut down Trump. I'm still want to shut down the economy because he was you know, he had Anthony Fauci in his ear, couldn't stand up to five foot five Anthony Fauci.
As Desanta's referred to him as an elf that needed to be chucked into the Potomac. And further he there are they're actually already fighting about this about the shutdown timeline, and Desantas isn't even a declared candidate.
There you go, right, just to have just that intuitive sense of what these Republicans are going.
To go out of, there you go. But to me, Fauci should just own it.
Trying to make a distinction between Okay, yes, we can all agree that Fauci was not a dictator in twenty twenty and was not able to just buy his own pen kind of dictate American policy. There was a process that was involved in Anthony Fauci's kind of public policy ideas becoming the policy ideas that we all followed, and that involved, you know, him talking to the President, him talking to the CDC, and him talking to the media and becoming kind of the face of the COVID response.
So it would to me, it would just be so much more helpful as we're thinking through our response to the pandemic if he would just say, yeah, these were my recommendations. Here's how I think about them in hindsight, and he can even say, like, look in like in the moment, you're never going to get every single call correctly in an unprecedented scenario. Here's the here's the information that I had, and here's why I made the decision. Here's the reasons I think it was a good decision.
Here's the reasons I think it wasn't. Instead, he's going to get all tangled up in well, look, man, I was just spitballing.
It was it was Trump that really kind of you know, ran the show.
Or blame the CDC. He keeps like blaming the CDC, acting as though that his why did you make the recommendation if it didn't matter, doctor Fauci, Go ahead, right.
He wants to blame the CDC, except when he doesn't want to defer to them when it comes to the origin of the pandemic.
Right, yeah, so no, of course not. And let's put E three up on the screen. He got into masking as well, and this really I saw some people reacting to this rightfully with a lot of anger. He says, from a broad public house standpoint. At the population level, masks work at the margins, maybe ten percent He goes on to say that if you wear like a properly fitted Canaan and ninety five, you know they really do work.
That's his take. But again, and it's just he's so flippant about saying these things that a couple of years ago were really affecting the daily lives of many, many, many Americans. And here's another one, Like to your point, Ryan, he sort of toes the line, like he creeps up to the line of taking some blame and accountability. He says when asked by The New York Times, this is actually a pretty tough interview, and Fauci at a couple points gets upset with the interviewer. I think also reflects
an incredible sense of entitlement. But he says, we probably should have communicated better that the clinical trials about the vaccines were only powered to look at the effect on clinically recognizable disease symptomatic disease, So saying, you know, we should have communicated better that the vaccines weren't going to function like vaccines that people think of when they think of the definition of what a vaccine is. So he
sort of flirts with taking some accountability. He says, we probably should have communicated better, and then goes into this like dense medical language. And also, here's another quote from the interview. Did we say that the elderly one much more vulnerable?
Yes?
Did we say it over and over and over again, yes, yes, yes. But somehow or other, the general public didn't get that feeling that the vulnerable are really really heavily weighted toward the elderly. So again he continues to blame the public. You see this over and over in the interview, where he's completely saying, listen, we did what we were supposed to do, but the public is just so dumb and angry.
He continues to blame divisiveness. He invokes that word over and over again, as though it's a totally detached phenomenon from him, that he would have nothing to do with that divisiveness, even though he changed his tune on masks, even though he changes tune on a number of different issues lap League, for instance, we have emails that show he's saying things differently in public and in private. He
is not willing to grapple with any of that. Instead, what he does is continue to just sort of use this language that superficially admits some minor mistakes here and there, but then blames it on the public for being too dumb and too divided to really understand what he was saying.
I do think that so many people experienced the pandemic personally that it did break through that the elderly were much more vulnerable than others.
And also.
The morbidly obese was the was the comorbidity that was so tightly associated with it, which everybody kind of stayed away from, including Fauci, for I think sensitivity reasons that were backfired on.
You know, for a lot of people.
But I do think that that gets to his kind of his fundamental flaw, which was a lack of trust in the public and a misunderstanding of the kind of government's ability to influence public opinion in an era of social media and divided kind of media loyalties. And so I think what he felt like was, I'm going to
air on the side of fudging. I'm going to say that, you know, the herd immunity is this much closer than it really is, because I don't trust people will reach the goal of heart immunity, I might say, where it is like he has said that he was wrong about that, or that he lied about that.
Uh.
He admitted that he lied about masks early on because he said he was nervous that the public would panic and would go out and buy up all the masks, and so he kind of lied about their affectiveness early, undermining his his own authority.
And I think he's he didn't lean into the.
Vulnerability of the elderly population more because he's saying he regrets it, but he didn't do it because he was nervous that if he said that that some people would read it as a well, that population is more vulnerable, therefore I'm less vulnerable. Therefore I'm not going to care about any of these precautions. And so he went overboard, and he aired on the side of telling everybody that they're they're they're more vulnerable than they than they actually
might have been. And then that ends up undercutting his his authority and the eyes of a lot of people.
And I think one of the reasons, I think one of the reasons that he people interpreted them as not saying, you know, the elderly were the most vulnerable over and over again is because the guidelines that he recommended that the CDC put out treated everybody as though they were just as vulnerable as the elderly, and locked everyone down and didn't do a whole lot of like isolating vulnerable populations for in some cases sensitivity reasons. But anyway that
basically everybody was limped into that category. We do have one more on one of Ryan's hobby horses here from the interview of.
Josh Rogan's tweet here, Yeah, this is E four.
He started talking about the lamp League Facchi says, there, I guess quote is actually really fun funny. He agrees that it was not. He says all Intel agencies quote agreed that this was not an engineered virus. He says the D and I assessment says quote most assessed with low con confidence quote, probably not engineered. He also says if it escaped a lab, even if it did escape a lab, quote, that ain't a lab leak. What did you make of that?
Right?
So his argument is that if somebody went to a cave, you know, a couple hundred or a couple thousand miles away from wuhan collected bat samples, got infected doing that work, came back to the lab, left the lab, went to went around Wuhan and spread the virus. That that that's not a lab leak. I think what he means by a lab leak, which is actually disturbing. If this is where his mind goes, because it means that it's something
he's thought a lot about. I would hope so he was funding it, But then right, why why are you continuing to fund it? What he would what he seems to think of as a lab leak is that you are specifically engineering a kind of very highly pathogenic virus and then that leaks out, right, rather than you're collecting viruses doing work.
On them and because of poor.
Because of poor kind of ppe that you get infected and then you and then your workers leave. That that's somehow not a lab leaku, which is that's That's one of the most frightening things I've heard, because if he's like, if public policy officials and politicians are coming to him and coming to the NIH in general and saying, look, we want to make sure that there are no lablaks going on when it comes to the work that you're doing around here, and his mind goes to a place, Oh, no,
don't worry, there's no labliks. Just maybe a couple of researchers getting infected and spreading viruses that they're working on and producing pandemics.
But that's not a lablak.
And if you don't know how his mind is working, you don't know to ask that follow up question.
All you hear is, oh, we're good.
It's a incredible because he even talks in this interview about his back and forth with Rand Paul on gain of function the definition of gain a gain of function, and it's the same tactic. He's doing the same thing with the lab Liak definition that he did with a
gain of function definition. He tries to exhaust the interviewer by filibustering with these completely abstruse medical definitions of what is, what isn't and like how this is, you know, really semantically not technically a gain of function, not technically a lab leak, and all of it is just like this incredible cover for things we don't we still don't have answers from him about And for him to just sit there and say, you know, if anything, what all we
did wrong was underestimate the idiocy of the American public, I just think is like unbelievable. And if I were anyone close to doctor Facci, I would I would recommend that he stopped doing interviews at this point because the
more he talks, the more fodder there is. To just realize, the well that this is springing from is one that is very much and I understand like he's been attacked more than anyone, I think for some good reason, but just psychologically, you're going to feel like you're in trench warfare and you have to lash out at everyone. It's not a good.
Look, right, not even look at all.
A new report from Michael Schellenberger. If you put this first element up here called United Nations, Harvard and Facebook, Google launch push for censorship worldwide, Emily, this is something you wanted to talk about.
You what do you find in here?
Yeah, well, we have a lot of conversations about the dangers of exporting classical liberalism from the Western world elsewhere. And I can't think of a better example of that in How that Happens in twenty twenty three than the Schollenberger story that broke as we were preparing yesterday's show. Let me just read from his lead here. He writes, the United Nations is training people worldwide to demand censorship by social media platforms of their fellow citizens for quote
potentially harmful content. At least one US government funded group, the Atlantic Council, is involved. Now. This UN program, at Shallenberger reports, is hilariously called quote social Media for Peace, with the number four not actually spelling out the word. I guess that makes it a little bit more hip. It's a pilot program for pro censorship activist based in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Colombia, Indonesia,
and Kenya. So those countries are like their test cases that the UN and UNESCO are all using social media four piece again four piece to export. It's also funded by the EU. According to the ENESCO website, it had some online meetings for these censorship workers in Kenya and
Colombia both this week and last week. According to Shallenberger's report, the UN effort, as he continues to emphasizes research and quote monitoring, but as in the US, the explicit goal is to pressure social media platforms to censor disfavored voices. I actually went and looked on the website for this effort to pull some quotes for myself, because it's as
bad as you would expect. It sounds right like some of this stuff is really legitimate, And Matt Tayeedi this week actually published a very good long essay by somebody who worked reasonably in this disinformation space for a very long time, but has come to be disillusioned with the efforts to actually track disinformation because it's turned into a weapon.
The ruling sort of class has turned it into a weapon to marginalize people who disagree with everyone else, who disagree with their perspectives on economics, on everything from A to Z, by increasing that definition, inflating that definition of what constitutes misinformation and disinformation simply to alternative facts, facts that they disagree with. And so there is a really there's a right way of course to combat propaganda, and
on global scale. Absolutely, there's nothing wrong with helping people do that. That's not what this is. That's not what the entire censorship industrial complex is doing. They're able to couch it in really friendly language, but listen, this is from their website. Social media are increasingly used as an
information source in electoral processes. This means that while they enable greater access to information, they can also be used to distort the information ecosystem in a divisive manner and influence voters with manipulative or deceptive messages, all right, manipulative or deceptive that is doing a whole lot of work. That can range from somebody doing what is actually manipulative
and deceptive. For instance, who's the I forget the name, Robert Mackie, the guy who just I think was wrongfully punished, overly punished for putting out a meme saying that you can vote for Hillar Clinton by texting this number, et cetera, et cetera. Listen, I think that is terrible. I think that's exactly the kind of thing that we should crack down on. Do I think it's as big of a deal as his sentence. No, I think that's disproportionate with
its harm. But I do think that stuff is legitimately harmful, And you could content you could consider that quote manipulative or deceptive, as Zesco's language says here. But you can also talk about how we were told the Hunter Biden laptop was manipulative and deceptive in the wake of it being reported by The New York Post in twenty twenty and then turning out to be true. For the most part, everything has been confirmed from that laptop, the reporting on it.
So I think this is just a great case study in how now this center left, the elite center left, has co opted these institutions and is using them to spread these classically liberal Western values which have now been distorted into outright censorship. If you take the American pride in our First Amendment, which Prince Harry for instance, has said, oh and he helps like the Aspen Institute on censorship issues, it said like, well, in America, you have this weird
thing called the First Amendment. If you take things like the First Amendment and our longtime pride in the First Amendment and the fact that you used to have, you know, the old school ACLU types having a decent voice in the American media, and go to where we are today, what we are taking and sending to other countries, because you, of course, remember the US is the top funder of the United Nations billions of dollars a year. It's like a fifth of their annual budget is from money that
was given by the United States. So we're funding this, We're funding this exportation of values abroad that used to sound really great to people and to the Blob in particular. But this is just a great example of how badly it has gone wrong, that we are now going to be paying for and training people in other countries to crack down on speech that threatens power in other countries. This is going to go south really quickly. It's going
to go wrong in a number of ways. I predict we'll be back here talking about how it's gone wrong in a number of ways in places like Kenya not too far from now. But the point remains that there's this instinct a mid populist uprisings in the West to say elites have a responsibility to crack down and control. And I think that's what really is off putting to people about everything they hear at Davos and out of the mouth of Klaus Schwab, because there's a lot of
anxiety among elites. There's a lot of anxiety among populists or people who share populist sentiments because the world feels like a really dark place right now. Those instincts could be channeled in more democratic ways, or those instincts can be channeled in more authoritarian ways. And what we're seeing right now is an exploitation of the good democratic infrastructure of the West into for authoritarian purposes. So Ryan You've
been following this stuff obviously for years. When I talk about like the exportation of a Brian you're about to talk about, I think, some of the biggest news of the week, despite the fact that it hasn't gotten much attention in the media. The president resigned. By that, I mean the shadow president, Susan Rice, what have you got?
And so Susan Rice will be will be in her role as director of the Democratic Policy Committee for the next month. But that means that the president is in the process. She actually announced that she was stepping down on the same day that Don Lemon and Tucker Carlson were fired. And I think, you know, when it comes to kind of historical consequence, her departure will actually have much more meaning and significance.
Down the road, probably than either of theirs.
Because you know, we've seen plenty of people like leave Fox News, they build their own platforms, Fox News finds
new people. CNN will be CNN without Don Lemon. But the choice of you know, who directs Biden's democratic policy over the remaining eighteen months of his of the back half of his first term is going to determine everything from immigration policy, you know, gun control, the implementation of the Climate Provisions and the Inflation Reduction Act, expanding access to abortion services for people who are in states where
it's where it's banned. Infrastructure rollout, like there is an unprecedented really amount of money kind of in the pipeline that can be directed, you know, toward pursuing a Biden agenda, but it's insanely difficult to do in this country.
Like you would not.
Believe how hard it is to just spend money, like for you know, the Tea Party and Freedom Coccus types probably think that, well, it's just drunken sailors just throwing
it off the boat, like cash into the water. But because of the overlapping jurisdictions and competing interests involved with local, state, and federal agencies, actually doing things in this country is getting increasingly difficult and it and is something that kind of, you know, Tucker Carlson would talk about on his show that like it's a country that has a hard time
doing things anymore. And when you travel abroad and you see other infrastructure, other airports, other other other ways that kind of developed to developed countries have managed to actually build things, You're like, what are we what's going on in the United States, and one of the main things going on is that nobody cares about policy anymore, and so who he puts in this position is going to
be extraordinarily important. This isn't the kind of thing, uh that a lot of people on YouTube are going to like go crazy about sharing.
That's a nice thing about how we're only putting a couple elements up.
We can we can do things that actually matter to people and not worry about how much, you know, how much they're going.
To click on YouTube.
So so we can we I'll just run through some of the some of the candidates that I've been hearing from people kind of in and out of the White House, who are who are being considered. The one who is kind of campaign the hardest for it so far is your old buddy near A Tandon, kind of who is one of the most polarizing figures in in the Democratic Party.
She was.
She was nominated to run omb former you know, Hillary Clinton loyalist for ran Capp Center for American Progress. She was nominated to run the OMB, but ran into bipartisan resistance in the Senate. One of the only well, I think it was maybe the first Biden appointee not to get Senate confirmed. They found her a job anyway as an advisor to the White House. She was recently promoted to staff secretary, which is a kind of lame sounding
name but is actually very influential position. You're in you're in basically every every meeting, and you're controlling kind of the paper flow, and so that gives you an enormous
amount of power over the over the agenda. And so she is said to be the one that is kind of pursuing this the hardest, which can all so could also cut against her because this is a city where like filled with like super ambitious people who are supposed to pretend that they're not and if you don't mask that, people don't like that, and so the kind of try too hard aspect might under my mind. Also, the job of DBC director is to kind of build coalitions for policy agenda and then implement it.
And in order to.
Build coalitions, you have to be able to kind of work well with people, and she has an enormous number of supporters, she has a enormous number of detractors, so that may be that may end up hurting her. So second candidate who's being kicked around Tom Perez, who was former Obama Labor Secretary then became chair of the DNC. This is so heavily a kind of managerial and executive role that you would think his handling of the DNC and also of the Iowa caucuses could come back to haunt him.
Here.
He bungled the Iowa caucuses so badly Democrats don't do an Iowa CAUCUSUS anymore.
It was that bad.
If you remember, they had these these crony contractors come in and build an app. App completely melted down. Nobody had any idea who won. Pete Bootage just goes on stage and declares that he won.
Uh.
Tom Prez is nowhere to be seen. He just kind of tries to blame Iowa. Iowa folks blamed Tom Perez. Just a complete nightmare. So he thought about running from Maryland governor, didn't, so he's so he's in he's in.
Line for that. Uh uh.
Tar mcguinnis who is also somebody from CAP, but she was on the kind of political side of CAP, so you know there's a line between the C three and the C four. She was somebody who is kind of known. She worked with Jeff is it sience or zenes, I can never think of science. So she worked with Jeff Science to try to write the ship when Obamacare blew up.
You remember when they launched that, they launched their marketplace, and so she and she and Jeff Zience kind of worked hand in hand, you know, fix fixing that and getting getting that moving. And out of her experience, she wrote a book about kind of technology and government and how to make how to make government actually work. And so because Science has worked so closely with her, you know, he has you know, he understands what she's capable of.
And so I think that she might be kind of a dark horse candidate for this because if the Biden decides what I actually want is for my agenda to actually be implemented, for the money to go out the door efficiently and quickly, and rather than it get tangled up in scandal and kind of palace intrigue, then he would go with somebody like a Tara McGinnis, because she likes her reputation watching is it's not flashy, but she's
going to like really get the job done. Another one who's similar to that is a woman named Anna O'Leary who but who since the Clinton administration has been kind of this kind of powerhouse policy person from the Clinton world.
She was Gavin Newsom's chief of staff.
You might have seen her fighting publicly with him now because she is the lawyer for Walgreens, which was trying to write its policy for how they were going to give out the kind of abortion medication, and Gavin Newsom started attacking her publicly kind of weird like his old chief of staff. She was trying to, like it sounded like she was trying to get Walgreens like to just follow the law, but also get medication abortion out completely completely.
That's a complete side note. People don't think that she would want to move to DC for this job, but if Biden was looking for somebody who's like good at doing stuff, that'd be somebody. And the last one Week
can talk about is is Sarah Bianki. So she's the deputy US Trade Representative and they're sort of I think this rule exists on the Republican side too, But the rule is that if you have a good kind of director of an agency who is in line kind of with the base of the party, then you also need a corporate flunky underneath them to sort of like babysit and watch them and make sure that like they're not really going to do all these things that they say
they're going to do. And so Catherine Tie, the US Trade Representative, is very good, and so Bianchi the deputy, is somebody who's who feels like comes from more of a corporate background. She was literally the lead lobbyist for Airbnb. So Biden talks about being the kind of most pro labor president in history. And I think it would be tough if he had a gig company lobbyist running his domestic policy. But that doesn't mean she's out of the running.
So but we'll say so these are the kind of folks. There are a couple others, but I don't think there is I'll have a story on this in the intercept later today. Probably I don't think there're as much in the running as these ones.
Who do you think is like, probably isn't near a ta near.
It's probably what everybody says is that Nira has the inside track, that she's been gunning for this for a couple of years.
That's crazy.
Yeah, And the only question is is she too polarizing?
Yes?
I mean the answer is yes, But does Science and Biden think that she's too polarizing for the role.
I mean, after what happened with the O and B nomination, you'd think that would be completely glaringly obvious to them. You would think, I can't believe she's even in that. I mean, I can't believe she's in the ring because she comes with so much clout in democratic circles in Washington, d C. But and so therefore she has a lot of people who will lobby on her behalf and say, I'd love to work with Nira, like bring Nara in, and you know you don't necessarilyn't not upset near, et cetera,
et cetera, But man, that would be interesting. I actually hope that she is it because I would love to watch that. Like from the outside, that sounds hilarious.
That it could be some could be some fun drama, could be some fair rudra. Yeah, and there's and maybe the White House thinks that that putting a thumb in the eye of the of the left is like a good thing electorally to kind of show their should their independence. We're not Bernie might have endorsed us, but don't worry about that. We don't care anything about Bernie.
Well, it's a good point. If they're if heading into twenty twenty four, that's the direction that they think they should tack in that will be most beneficial to them. Then near Tandon is your gal.
There you go, we'll see, we'll see.
Oh my gosh, that's that's one to follow. I know I'll be following for the shadenfreude, because Lord knows, we're giving you plenty of it from the right.
Yeah, And I think from the right that's probably the best case scenario if you're two, because then if you get caught up in a lot of palace intrigue, then less of the IRA money's going to go out, less the infrastructure, like less of the Biden kind of agenda agenda that was passed through Congress then ends up getting implemented.
So I guess that would be a win for you guys.
I mean, depends on what happens, what gets stalled.
Busir Nancy Mason, you've got a clean energy factory in your district that you actually want the stuff to get out.
To you need those votes. That's funny. Well, thank you so much for tuning into today's edition of Counterpoints. In the middle of this absolutely insane week. We appreciate everybody watching, We appreciate everybody listening. There's so many stories that will continue to follow up on because they aren't going anywhere soon. So if you're in the media and you're watching this, just cross your fingers and hope you aren't fired this week,
because it's coming for everyone. There you go, We'll see you back here next Wednesday.