Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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We've got lots of big updates on the dead ceiling, but many questions remain, so we will break all of that down for you. Also, Ronda Santa is taking his strongest shots yet at Donald Trump. Kind of interesting the way that he is attacking him, so we will play those comments for you as well. Also, some pretty interesting revelations about chat GPT and just how it just invents stuff all the time, all the time, like way more than maybe you thought, certainly more than I thought, so
we'll dig into that. We also have some new numbers about where jobs are moving within the United States, and of course workers along with them, and some new comments from Jake Tapper about Joe Biden's pull numbers, which are kind of astonishing.
So that is all very interesting.
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So do both of those things.
Yeah, all right, So let's get to the very latest of what we know about the debt sealing. There is a tentative deal that has been reached between Biden and Kevin McCarthy.
I'll give you the details of it and in just a moment.
Important keep in mind, though, that they've got to sell this deal to the Democrats and maybe most Dice Lee that's not really word, but you guys know what I'm trying to say to the Republican caucus, number of whom have already come out and said like, hell, no, this is horrible, this is disgusting, et cetera, et cetera. Let's take a listen, though, to start with how President Biden was selling this deal to the press yesterday.
Take a listen, and the agreement also represents the compromises me as known. Got everything they want, But that's the responsibility of governing. Suppose you want to try to make it look like I made some compromise in the debt stealing, and I didn't.
I made a compromise on the budget.
That's what they wanted.
It is you make a compromise on the budget, and that's what you've done, even though you haven't gone as far as they wanted. Isn't that sure?
Yeah?
Well, can you think of an alternative? I think he negotiated with me in good faith. He kept his word, He said what he would do, He did what he said he'd do, and I have no idea what to have votes I expect he does.
No idea whether McCarthy has the votes. I expect he does. Nobody got everything they wanted. There was a lot of cope in there about them being like, you said you weren't going to negotiate, and now you're negotiating. He's like, I didn't negotiate at all. This is on the budget, not the dead's doing. Okay, dude, whatever. So we still don't have all the details of this tentative agreement. So but we have some of the outlines here top lines.
Here's Jeff Stein's reporting from the Washington Post. Go and put this up on the screen. So he says, smmary of deal, as I understand it, again, important caveats because nobody has all of the specifics yet. Debt ceiling raised for two years, so it gets Joe Biden passed the next election. Domestic programs frozen next year and then up one percent in twenty twenty five, so it's an inflation adjusted cut that was more along the lines of what Democrats were pushing for.
Joe Biden was pushing for.
It does lift defense spending and also veterans affairs money. There is some tightening of work requirements on TAMP, which is which is the welfare program, and SNAP, which is food stamps Energy Permitting details to be determined. I think Joe Manchin got his pipeline deal in there clawback some new IRS dollars, but not as far as Republicans had originally floated. He goes on to say work requirement for food Stamps moves from age fifty to age fifty four.
Trying to get more clarity on TAMP. Sorry, I'm not sure. We'll update when I learn more details. My understanding is the energy permitting changes are very minimal. Go ahead to the next piece here some additionals a details. Remember one of the things that Republicans were pushing for was to end the student loan debt forgiveness program. He says, there is a student loan provision as well. The agreement, as I understand it, codifies into law the administration's existing plan
to end for barants, so payments will restart. Theoretically, if there is another emergency, they could and again enact of moratorium, no change to Biden's student debt cancelation program. He goes on to say, I'll be watching very carefully to what precisely happened to the portion of the federal government that covers anti poverty.
Programs over two years.
In inflation adjust terms, it could look like a more significant cut than flat funding suggests. Interesting, we actually have gotten some more details about the snap cuts. In particular, it's not even clear that it will be an overall cut to the program, because while they are tightening up work requirements for people age fifty to fifty four, they are eliminating work requirements for people who are homeless and also for veterans.
So you have your sort of just shifting who.
Is eligible for SNAP without work requirements, So it's not even apparent that that is a cut across the board. So Mattaglesius, I think had a good analysis and then saga, I want to get your view of all of this as well. Put this up on the screen from his substack. He says, I thought this was maybe the best line. If you ignore everything about the circumstances of how this
came together, it's really not a bad deal. In particular, the big GOP win here is they forced Biden to agree to flat nominal discretionary spending for one year and then a one percent nominal increase the year after that, which is a significant cut in inflation adjusted per capita or GDP terms.
But and this is the key point.
That's something Republicans could and would have gotten through the normal appropriations process anyway. He goes on to say, by giving Republicans a policy win in this way rather than through the normal appropriations that's the budgeting process, Biden has validated the debt sealing hostage tactic that meaningfully increases the odds of a future substantive disaster either in terms of
policy concessions or a breach. So overall, as I look at this, first of all, it's sort of enraging that we have this whole like potential global crisis catastrophe, which by the way, has already had real economic impact and probably increased our government's borrowing costs and injected all of this uncertainty and chaos and disaster, et cetera for something they could have gotten through normally made. And so I certainly blame the Republicans for using these tactics, which I
think are disgraceful and should be out of bounds. And I certainly blame the Biden administration for giving into these tactics. And I think Aglaysias is exactly right here that, Okay, if you ignore everything else, you'd be like, it's not it could be a lot worse. It could you know, could have been much steeper cuts that hurt a lot more people and also did harm.
To the economy.
But what you're doing is validating this tactic. So you can bet two years down the line they're going to do the same thing all over again.
Yeah, and right, so two years from now, you know, we'll see what happens. But I know on on its face, for the quote unquote merits of the deal will save some more of this analysis. But this is a huge law for Kevin McCarthy and for maybe not Kevin McCarthy, is a massive loss for the Freedom Caucus members of which they are making it known, and on its face, like for Joe Biden, this is I think this would be a victory for him because he can both look.
I think we both also know that there is a fetishization of like bipartisanship or a lot of voters for some reason, they think it's a very good thing. It can be, it can't be, depends on how we talk about it. On the detail. It's all about the nuance, right, So bipartisan rail safety good, bipartisan like bipartisan feigning concern about the deficit while you increase military spending in at Ukraine. Yeah, maybe I'm just going to go ahead and say that's
bad and that's what's happened here. But you know, Biden gets the rhetorical win of inegotiated. He didn't really give away the store. There are not really meaningful cuts. If you are a genuine economic libertarian type, this is ludicrous. You know, if you're looking at this if you're somebody
who cares about the debt. Even on the IRS piece, which was a huge thing, they are only able to claw back apparently some twenty billion or so of the forty billion, and that twenty what they're going to do is they're just going to defer the spending cuts in the future, so they'll still be fully funded for a shorter period of time. It actually won't meaningfully change IRS enforcement at all. This is another thing I was getting so annoyed by, because they are correct in saying that
the IRS disproportionally targets, you know, people were poor. I've done the entire monologues about this. What I've always advocated for is that there's actually a simple change in the law you can make, which is say, don't use this funding go below anybody over one million dollars or so. And of course, you know they never want to insert these pros, so the entire thing is just ridiculous to me.
What makes it especially offensive is that they are not only increasing military spending, but specifically trying to increase some of the backwards a to Ukraine, not the in terms of refilling stockpiles and helping with the depreciation costs, and they're hiding all these other nonsense provisions in there, which are basically just box checks for things that they say that they're against on paper, like the irs, and they didn't even do that. So overall the deal itself, it's
not going to change much. I mean, you know, I guess it's good for everybody's stock for four oh one ks. Now, this is all presumes if it passes, right, because that is actually kind of up in the air right now. I mean, christ, we haven't yet received word from the Progressive Caucus to whether they're going to vote for it or not. If they do, this deal might almost get one hundred percent Democratic support or somewhere near that, and then you don't actually even need that many Republicans to
support it. Although McCarthy has said I will not bring the floor, I will not bring the bill to the floor without a majority of the support. Although that's only what you know, one hundred or so members out of the two I forget the exact number of there. It's really not that many people when you consider how many defections he could have, which would then be a huge internal blow to him for his speakership.
That's right.
So the reason that he is going to commit to and has already committed to we have to have a majority of the Republican caucus behind this is because his ass would be on the line. And you'll recall, as part of the deal that he brokeered in order to become Speaker, he made it a lot easier for them to toss him out as Speaker of the House. So that's in the back of his mind. And you already have a lot of House Freedom Caucus members who are you know, they're not being subtle about this. I mean,
they hate this deal, railing against it on Twitter. You can bet there's going to be a lot of conservative media that is very against the deal. There's a lot of incentive to posture as being against this deal in terms of support from the grossroots space. So he's in a bit of a tricky position, and I'm not sure that he made things easier for himself by saying some
like relatively nice things about Joe Biden. We may like appreciate that level of civility, but there are plenty of people within his caucus who will not appreciate that level of civility. Let's take us in a little bit of what Speaker McCarthy had to.
Say, the President said he would negotiate with us for ninety seven days. He wouldn't even allow us to talk. After we passed a bill, we were able to get in, but it wasn't until the final two weeks that would we really be able to sit down and communicate with
one another. I do want to thank the President's team that he put together, very professional, very smart, very strong beliefs that are different than ours, and I think at the end of the day can look together to be able to pass this in the House and the Senate together.
So very professional, very smart, is what McCarthy had to say about the Biden team. Let's go and put up the next piece, though, of some of the House Freedom Caucus reaction, which is a little bit different tone from what we're hearing from House Speaker McCarthy. There, this is just some These are some of the sort of selected key players and the way they're reacting to it. You've
got Ralph Norman saying this quote deal is insanity. A four trillion dollars debt dealing increase with virtually no cuts is not what we agreed to. Not going to vote to bankrupt our country. The American people deserve better. You've got Congressman Bob good saying, I'm hearing the quote deal. They all put deal in quotations marks for some reason, is for a four trillion dollar increase in the debt limit. If that is true, I don't need to hear anything else.
No one claiming to be conservative could justify a yes vote.
You've got chip Roy.
I do not like the quote deal as I understand it from the cheerleading so far. I will more to follow once I see more details. You've got Dan Bishop of the eighty billion dollar dollars Democrats appropriate to the irs over ten years. The quote deal ver sins one point nine billion. You read that right, That's the kind of get.
That's so good.
McCarthy agreed to increase the debt ceiling for trillion dollars. I saw Lauren Bober. There were others who were also being highly critical, and Sager chip Roy is a key player here, because you know, some of this is so arcane. But one of the parts of the deal that McCarthy also made to secure his speakership was stacking the Rules Committee with some of these hardline House Freedom Caucus members, chip Roy being one of them. This thing has to get through that committee in order to for it even
to get to the floor for a vote. It's looking right now like the swing vote on that. So it's six Republicans four Democrats on there. Usually in recent political history, the opposing party on this committee never votes for whatever the party in power wants.
Like never, that just doesn't happen.
So the four.
Democrats are assumed to be a know although they could in theory crossover and vote for the thing. You've already got a number of Republicans who are on the committee who are on the record saying no, I'm not voting for it.
And so Thomas Massey, who's.
This sort of like quirky libertarian type out of Kentucky, may end up being the swing vote now ideologically on spending. At least, he tends to be more aligned with the House Freedom Caucus. But he also has been turned into somewhat of an ally of McCarthy. He was with him from the beginning in terms of the speakership. So there's a lot of dicey dynamics at play here. Still, I
think the problems are more on the Republican side. We've heard a lot more vocal opposition to the deal on the Republican side than on the Democratic side.
But I guess you never.
Know, yeah exactly. I mean, look, in terms of whether it will pass or not, I genuinely have no idea. As people have pointed out the Rules Committee, it's very possible, given the gravity of its circumstances on the debt ceiling, that the Dems might actually vote, and then that you wouldn't even need many of the Republican votes it could
effect you could have some defections. The other question is also even if it does get through the House up against a deadline of June fifth, and it's going to take a couple of days, we're not going to have a vote here on this thing until Wednesday. Then it's
going to immediately make its way over to the Senate. Now, people shouldn't remember that the easiest way to get something through the Senate is something called unanimous consent, where they waive the thirty hours of debate rule on the floor.
Senator Mike Lee, who is also a libertarian, has come out and said that he wants to do everything possible if he doesn't like the deal to slow it down on the floor, so all you need is a single Senator or Ran Paul for that matter, to object to that, and then you're immediately triggering that debate and the amended process, etc. And who knows how much longer that could take. So we could even be up against a technical default even
if it does get through both of those chambers. That said, Senator McConnell came out with a statement last night and said, I support the bill. Le's immediately pass this thing. So I don't think it will meaningfully have any problems, but there will be some fun intra like intra chamber games about committees and objections and all of this stuff as to how exactly it makes its way through. But I do think the biggest the biggest thing that's up in the air right now is will there be a GOP revolt?
Another question is what about Trump? You know, Trump is not an idiot. He's going to be reading Lauren Bobert's tweets, He's going to be reading all of these. He's said before that Republicans shouldn't give in unless they get every single thing that they want. There's no no world where McCarthy could spend this as this is everything that I got his talking points which you have in front of you are are the stupidest thing you can imagine.
This is okay, So Sahil Kapor got his hand on the GOP talking points that they're using to sell to their own members.
Put this up on the screen.
First of all, they're calling the Fiscal Responsibility Act a little bit of branding there. He says, Republicans will restore fiscal sanity and hold Washington accountable. Number one a stop
out of control inflationary spending. Now, they mentioned cut spending year over year, including a rollback of non defense discretionary spending because God forbid, we cut the Pentagon to twenty two to twenty twenty two levels fully fun via medical limit, top line federal spending to one percent annual growth for the next six years. Now that's not actually even accurate
because the deal is only for two years. But there's like a theoretical like, yeah, maybe we'll do it for a while longer after this, but none of that is binding. So even the six year part of this, which is what the Republicans wanted and not what the Democratic Democrats wanted, is really spin in propaganda.
Number two, lift more.
Americans dount of poverty, that's about the work requirements on SNAP and on welfare, clawback tens of billions and unspent COVID funds. Okay, fine, nobody really objected to that, all that much rain in executive overreach, and act into law the first ever statutory and administrative pay go to hold President Biden accountable for the full cost of executive rules and regulations. Cut red tape and streamline energy and infrastructure projects.
That's that permitting reform, which we still don't have a lot of details on. Slash funding for Biden's new IRS agents. It's relatively modest. Cut there. Restart student loan repayments while they were planning to restart them anyway, Make Congress work again, compel a functioning appropriations process by imposing a temporary ninety nine percent seur level cap until all twelve appropriations bills are enacted. So they're requiring all twelve to go through
the House. Protect our senior's veterans in Americans national security. That's the hike to the Pentagon budget, and block Biden and Congressional Democrats demands for new taxes. That was where they were like, no, we don't want to close the carried interest loophole or you know, tax corporations or the wealthy eddy more than we already do.
So they're claiming that as a win.
I don't know that I would claim that as a win, especially because obviously that doesn't that goes against their aims of reducing the deficit and the debt. So that's the way they're selling it. And I mean, it's free week t in terms of what the demands of the House random Caucus were.
Look ye on like on any objective metric, and the Democrats are silently saying this, we won the House. Republicans completely folded. I think ultimately what happened here is that it came down to the wire because the Democrats, the White House and all of them did have a decent amount of leverage as well. They were saying, no, we're not going to fold on this. We're not going to fold on this. And the business community, as you and
I know, has been freaking out behind the scenes. And I bet you know, we're willing to.
Bet McCarthy's close with him.
Exactly, and look, yeah, he is raising money from all these billionaires. And if you don't think Jamie Diamond and all these other folks don't have his cell phone. They're like, you need to get this done. You need to get your people in line. And then it just came a question of well, who's the smallest minority here. It's the
Freedom Caucus. And if you have enough Democrats who are willing to go along and pass the bill, if he can have defections of thirty, forty, even fifty votes get this thing through, he will be a hero to the business community for all time forgetting this through, which for a lot of these guys, that's what they want, right, you know, Well.
Like he secures his most congressional you know, opportunity career opportunities working as a lobbyist for these people, or on serving on boards or whatever, cashing in whatever way that he wants too, similar to what Paul Ryan did after he left there go the House as well. I do think the Trump factor kind of looms over this, you know, does he say anything, does he weigh in? I think if he weighs in, he will weigh in against the deal. Don It's very likely because that's where the energy on
the base is going to be. That's where the energy and conservative media is going to be. And so the question is just you don't have a lot of Republicans who are in those districts that are truly swing districts that Joe Biden maybe even one or at least that were really close, that are particularly worried about their general
election prospects coming up in twenty twenty four. The overwhelming majority of the GOP caucus, they're going to be looking at their right worried about is this going to sink my chances in a primary? Is this going to become some sort of like litmus test that is used in some sort of Tea party esque fashion to kick me
out through the GOP primary process. If they start to feel like there's a lot of momentum and there's a lot of anger against the deal, and conservative media is all unified, and of course the learned Boberts and those folks are going to be incredibly vocal about their opposition to this deal, that's when you could see things start to crumble and you're left with things like, you know, you could still theoretically have a discharge petition where all
the Democrats vote for something and you get those five ten. However, many actually more moderate Republican members that represent these swing districts to join with them. So even if it all fell apart, it doesn't necessarily mean the thing is dead in the water.
But that also takes a lot of time.
So it's looking like they're between the likely strong support from the Democratic Caucus and some support from the GUP Caucus. It's looking like they're going to be able to push this thing through, but there are still a lot of roadblocks and you know, a lot of possibilities that it could come apart in the next couple days.
Keep everybody updated on what the updates and all that will be. Remember about the seventy two hour period where they do have seventy two hours now to actually review and to read it. So watch the twitter feeds of some of the Freedom Caucus members. One of them is Dan Bishop. I think he likes to live tweet what he finds in the bills. It actually can be really quite informative. Yeah, so I recommend his twitter feed. I will be checking appreciate that as well. All right, let's
speaking of Trump and some possible contrast. Let's get to the next part here. Ron DeSantis, of which I now have more respect for because he actually came out and is the first candidate declared so far not to talk in such mealy mouthed terms, although still just a little bit and actually take a shot at Trump defend himself from the accusations that have been hurled his way. In an interview on The Ben Shapiro Show, here's what he had to say.
So, how do you see a difference between your candidacy, what you've been trying to do, your record in President Trump?
Well, I think it's interesting because he's been attacking me by moving left. So this is a different guy than twenty fifteen. Twenty sixteen. He attacked me for opposing an amnesty bill in the Congress. He did support this amnesty, this good lat too, two million illegal aliens. He wanted to amnesty. I opposed it because that's what America First principles dictate that you're opposed to amnesty. Both based COVID nineteen and we both responded in the way we did.
He responded by elevating Anthony Fauci and really turning the reins over to doctor Fauci, and I think too terrible consequences for the United States. I was the leader in this country and fighting back against Fauci. We bucked him every step of the way starting in April of twenty twenty, whether it's the schools, the businesses, the mandates, and our
state has never done better as a result. I mean, I think the fact that Donald Trump gave Anthony Fauci a presidential commendation on Trump's last day in office, that was a gut punch to millions of people around this country who were harmed by Fauci's lockdowns. I said very clearly, you know, if I'm president somebody like Fauci is in the government, I will bring them in and I will tell them two things. You are fired.
So I mean, look, Christal, I have to at least respect him for prosecuting a case against Trump's literally the first person to do so. Now, well, I think it worked. We'll see the first part on the amnesty. I think it's very interesting rhetorically where he's talking about how Trump is attacking him from the left. Obviously, immigration probably the number one reason why Trump was the nominee in twenty sixteen,
an issue that matters tremendously to the base. The problem I see for DeSantis is, well, rhetorically, you know, sorry, on policy, you may be right. Rhetorically, can you really outdo the Donald whenever it comes to the guy who literally created the wall, or at.
The very least, sure my presumer good people.
It's gonna be tough, I think, to be able to come out against him and to convince people that you're the real deal, although if it were to work, this is probably the only way. The Faucci thing, I also think it is interesting. I'm curious for your thoughts. I just feel as if running from running backwards, as in reltigating COVID policy from three years ago, is not the winner that some of these people seem to think. COVID policy,
lockdowns and all stuff. It matters a lot to a lot of people on the Internet, and it also matters a lot to people who are very very online when at least in my experience, but normal voters who I have seen out, especially interviews as well, whenever they talk about DeSantis and Trump, not one of them mentions COVID. They say, I like that he doesn't have the drama.
I like that he kept Florida, or he's made Florida nice. Yeah, some of that has to do with COVID, but focusing on the COVID piece just seems a little out of step where I think some people were going to vote for him anyway.
I mean, we've seen the numbers, like people don't care.
People have moved on and understandably so we're all moving forward, right.
So I think in a sort of like rational.
Sane world, I think some of these attacks may land, But I just see no evidence that the GOP base is actually that ideological. And Desanta's made this comment in that attack where he's like, you know, this is different than Trump in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, is it because they tried the same line of attack against Trump back then, Ty Cruz in particular, it was like.
He's not a real concern. We're further to the right here.
You know, he was a Democrat, he was he supported a planned parenthood.
He's not.
They were trying to attack him from the right and say we're the true conservatives and he is this rhino and it just didn't work at all. So I do remember this does feel like almost another dejent vous moment of the type of attacks that they launched him last time around, which ultimately fell flat. Now I agree with you, like respect to him for at least trying because this is at least a lot less humiliating than like Nikki.
Haley, I'm not kicking sideways, or.
Even Tim Scott who's like, I love Trump, his his time in office was fantastic and it's like, okay, well why are you running against him? Then that doesn't make any sense, or certainly Mike Pence, who's just humiliating that, you know, because of Trump, people were running around the capitols running to hang him and he can't even come out strongly against him even now after all of that.
So it's a much less humiliating approach, and you know, to be honest with you, I also don't think that he's going to pay a huge price for going after Trump in this way because it is very policy based. Do I think that it's gonna be sufficient?
No.
And this gets back to like, you know, we were being hard on DeSantis about you gotta hit him, and you gotta do this, and you gotta do that, and I just look at the landscape and I'm like, I'm just not really sure there's anything you alone can do yes to knock this guy off. So it's a solid attempt. Do I think it's really gonna work?
Probably not. Yeah, it probably won't work. It's great. The point that you brought up, Like Ted Cruz and Rubio and Jeb tried this. They're like, he's not a conservative. He supports social security and he's like, yeah, I supports SoCal security. They're like, he supports universal healthcare. He's like, yeah, you know, everyone will have healthcare under Maya policy. He's like, he not supports free trade. He said, Yep, He's right,
I don't support free trade. In many ways, Trump's moderation on policy was a huge net positive to him on top of his rhetoric in the twenty sixteen campaign. He was extreme on the right issues for the base, and then not extreme on the issues that didn't necessarily matter. So immigration, though, this is a I think a good attempt, and as you go to at least respect somebody who's going to fight in the primary. Now, will we be able to do that to his face? Is he going
to continue to keep it up? How we will respond to the poll numbers? That is the ultimate question. But one part that really stock out to us is actually where DeSantis again correctly hits Trump on mail in voting. And this was a fascinating part of this interview. It hasn't taken as much notice. Let's take a listen.
Can you talk about your sort of on the ground strategy and how that would be different from what President Trump did in twenty twenty running against the Democrats.
I think telling people not to send in a mail ballot is a huge mistake, and it ends up reducing the pool of prospective voters.
In Florida.
We focused on some of these low propensity voters in my reelection. They usually vote in presidential they don't always vote in midterm, and we converted a lot of them to vote. Most of them chose to vote by absentee ballot through the mail. That was their choice. If we told them you could only vote on election day, some of them very well may not have voted. So understand the battlefield. It's your responsibility as a can it to head off.
That He's right, It's obvious, he's obviously right. I actually loved that he said that. He's the first high profile elected Republican to actually say it, because guess what, Trump absolutely one hundred percent would have won if he had just encouraged mail and voting. That's the funniest thing, you, It's the most patriotic way to vote. It's the magaway And guess what he would have won Georgia. He absolutely,
in my opinion, would have won Arizona. And all he needed was to flip a single other state and the turnout probably would have been even high. Remember, guys, he got ten million more votes. He was campaigning against the easiest way to vote, like he got ten million more when he ran in twenty sixteen. Some what is a seventy five million or whatever people came out to vote for him. It's just one of those where it's so obvious.
And the Georgia, if you don't believe me, the Georgia Secretary of State has already put out the data where if just a number of people voted in the GOP primary by mail had done so in the twenty twenty election whenever it was Biden v. Trump, Trump wins a state he did not lose by all that much. So DeSantis, coming on the heels of what I still believe is his best strength, I won. I turned this state twenty points purple to deep read. I did it because I'm
a winner. I did it on policy, and I want to make America just like what I did down in Florida. That's a very compelling message to a certain group of people. Now, unfortunately those group are mostly general election voters, not necessarily primary voters. But with this I at least have to say, once again, respect to the man for at least trying Yeah, he's making a good case.
Well, what's interesting is even Trump has changed his mind about mail and voting at Sea Pack. I think it was this year he said it's time to change our thinking on early and mail in voting. He also touted his campaign's plans to encourage quote unquote ballot harvesting, which of course had been like you know, derided as practically legal even in those in some states it actually is legal. By Republicans, he says, we have no choice but to
be Democrats at their own game. So even Trump at this point acknowledges that the mail in voting thing was a catastrophe for them certain state of Georgia. We have the numbers that if he had just embraced mail and voting now he went.
He wins.
There's another subtext here.
Though, which is about, you know, obviously what is a hot issue for the Republican base, which is stop the steal twenty twenty Was it legitimate or not, And the subtext of what Desantas is suggesting here is that it was legitimate and the reason you're ass loss is because of things like.
Mail in voting.
Now this represents, though, another area where you know, to this point, Desanta's hasn't really had to be put on the spot about what he fully thinks about twenty twenty, and it's another issue that hangs out there as a very difficult, tricky one for him to navigate because, on the one hand, you go full crazy, you're in, your electability case is going to fall apart because we saw what happened to you know, Mastriano and Carrie Lake and these other characters who were all in.
On stop the steal.
On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of the Republican base still thinks that the twenty twenty election was stolen. So this is one of the ones that's going to be very tricky to navigate. But yeah, I think the subtext of what he's saying there is you lost and one of the reasons you lost is because you didn't embrace bail in voting.
Here, it's a Gordian Knott, I really is, I really don't know how you get yourself out of it. I feel for the man to be honest because it's like in any rational way or like this obviously should work. But you know we don't. As you said, we don't live in a rational world.
So we'll see that's a good Not living in an irrational world is a good pivot to the next start of this.
That's right. And if you think that was nasty. The knives are out for each other between the Trump and DeSantis folks online, we've been paying quite a bit of attention. There was actually this is this is actually everything this Newsmax panel where actually somebody we've had on our show before, Josh Hammer, was up against a Trumps surrogate and they were going at each other on Trump and DeSantis. Here's what it looked like.
DeSantis's botched campaign announcement proves that he and his team are not ready for prime time.
He proposes a national federal sales tax.
He voted to cut social Security. He has no plan to end the war in Ukraine. President Trump cut taxes, secure the border, reinvested in our economy. He is the day one leader that America needs.
Josh.
Just to wrap it up, He's going to Iowa he's got time.
Look, I mean, Carolyn has the talking points, and that's cute and everything. But the reality here is that Republican primary voters are ready for a winner. They are sick of losing. They are sick of relitigating an election from two and a half years ago. They are sick of Stormy Daniels and all of the crap this country is going to tell in a tan basket, it's time to put policy on the agenda and to start winning.
All right, you're reciting your Democrat talking points. My talking points are truth and the pulse.
Prove it.
I just kidding started.
I mean, we got a long way to go here until the Iowa caucus is in the very beginning of twenty twenty four.
You sound like a Democrat. That's what they'll always hit you with that. I've seen it too. They're like, oh, he's a new school you're a Democrat. It's like, yeah, if that's what qualifies in here.
An idiot, Yeah, Well that's that's part of.
The Gurdi and not, as you so abletely, is that Republican based voters have been trained to think any attack on Trump is a democratic attack. Like anything you say about him, doesn't matter if it's from the right, from the left, on his car, whatever, especially when you're talking about things like he mentioned Stormy Daniels, any of the character attacks, you should just forget about it.
The Republican base is so conditioned to anybody who validates that is a Democrat. So actually she's attacking him correctly. He is obviously correct on the merits. So it's difficult, and this is why I'm like, I don't know how exactly you get yourself out of this, you know. At the same time, though, the interest sniping too between the between the DeSantis camp and the Trump camp has reached just very high posting levels. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. You see here, Alex
Bruce Wist. This guy is like a hardcore Trump person online and he's been putting out tweets where he's going after Christina Pushaw, who is a form press secretary for Desantie's part of the DeSantis campaign. She's been going after some of the Trump surrogates online, calling them basically calling out Trump both on policy. Then he's like DeSantis's campaign argues with this sixteen year old kid over Ukraine and botox after actually they accused Christina pushav Bucktocks. Then on
Friday got Trump supporter Gavin Wax fired Gavin. For those who don't know, he's like former New York Republicans head and he was actually working for the Babylon Bee, the satire Republican site. He actually tweeted what the f is wrong with you? Christina Pushaw and then Seth Dillon, the CEO of Babylon b actually fired him on Twitter, and then he apparently was accused about being part of some
drug ring. So just to give you an idea of what level the discourse is at, let's go to the next one there also as well, because as you can see, she's going after Robert Barnesy, somebody I believe he has a very popular show with another guy on Rumble, and they say that, remember who put Fauci in charge of COVID response in twenty twenty, Donald Trump did, and he said, why delete this? It's true because the DeSantis campaign is going after Trump on Fauci and there's a lot of warring over COVID.
Barnes is now what Trump is that.
Barnes is a Trump guy. Yeah, let's go to the next one up here on the screen. Here it's another Twitter account who is Christina Pusha From twenty eighteen. She worked in Georgia the country by the way, as a registered foreign agent for a former Georgian president, Mikhail Sakosphieley, who I believe is actually Ukrainian now last time I checked it, anyway, I think you about that Sakosphiely. Yeah, he's an interesting guy.
I think she worked in Ukraine, too, didn't she.
I believe that she also did, or at least did some work with Zelensky. I want to say, way back in the day before she came to work for Rond DeSantis. Anyway, what do we learn from this? Knives are fully out against each other, and I'm just not sure it's gonna work. I Mean, look, a lot of it just seems like drama, which is on the internet. But I think what people should underscore is that this or should people take away? The biggest takeaway to me is the Dishanta's team is
actually willing to go after him. Yeah, there's no Nikki Haley people out there who were prosecuting outside of like Liz Cheney Trump's or like Trump is a threat to democracy. This is like actual knives out real campaign fighting against each other. It will be bitter and we'll obviously going to be a long and a hard fought content test, but they are willing to actually declare war, and that shows that they have some confidence at least in their process. Now, is it going to work? We'll see.
There's a lot of khi vibes among some of these people, whether its viciousness so that they mean, I'm personally enjoying watching it all unfold greatly, like go go at it, let him fight. But yeah, it is definitely it's game on, like no holds barred. Clearly, DeSantis's launch has sort of open the up the floodgates. People are picking sides. It's going to be absolutely brutal and vicious online, and you know,
we'll see whether he's able to get some traction. I do think that this is like you can't just sit by and take the attacks and not say anything, because ultimately that's just like it's emasculating, it's humiliating. So at the very least, even if you don't think your attacks are going to land, you got to stand up for yourself. You've got to have some level of pushback. You gotta have some knife fighters online who are willing to like
go to the mat for you as well. And you know, the other dynamics that are unfolding are everybody else are too afraid to go after Trump, and so they're training their fire at DeSantis. So if no one is going after Trump, say for maybe Chris Christy when he gets in the race, he's sort of coming in like a you know, guided missile to go directly at Trump and try to knock him off.
So maybe between the two of them.
You're able to get some traction for some of these attacks and able to convince some people that they need to take another look. But I do think maybe the most revealing part of this whole segment was when on the Newsmax panel, the one dude is like launching very sort of grounded attacks on Trump and we're done with the messiness and Stormy Daniels and all of this.
Let's back a winner.
And she's able to very easily dismiss it by you sound like a Democrat's that's hard to overcome when you have a base that has been really trained to see any sort of attack on Trump as coming from bad faith, coming from liberals, come from the Democratic Party. I think it makes it a very difficult sort of situation for them to navigate buble.
We'll see, well, we'll see. Let's go to the next one here. This is just so fascinating. It was first the thread was found by our producer Mac. But it fits neatly with a story that I've just been obsessed with recently. So let's put this up there on the screen. CW. Howell, who is a Duke PhD. And a professor, actually assigned his students a really interesting assignment. He said that he had them all generate an essay, sixty three of his students which used a prompt that he gave them for
chat GPT. Their job was to then grade their essay and look for so called hallucinated information and critique its analysis. Now, what he points out hallucinated information and stuff we talked about here before, fake quotes and fake sources, real sources
that are misunderstood and mischaracterized. He says that all sixty three essays, every single assignment, what he found was that the biggest takeaway is that their students learn that chat TPT was not really because all of them included some sort of hallucinated information crystal, and it shows you that chat GPT, at least in its current form and maybe for all time. Who knows how difficult this is for them to solve. Is that can easily hallucinate and create
false information. As we have shown previously, it has created false sexual assault allegations against people before. People who have tried to use it for purposes. Will ask them questions that they have deep knowledge about, and then we'll get back answers that are set in a very declarative format and which are completely wrong.
Yeah, like page numbers and studies.
What are you talking about? This is literally not what it says. And actually thought, I think, by the way, I love this assignment because showing people how to it's like the real world example where he said the real lesson for all my students was, yeah, you can't trust your DD for stuff like this, And I was like, Wow, what a useful thing to actually teach somebody in university instead of some stupid essay which they're not even going to think about ten years later. Oh, I actually can't
trust everything that I hear. Wow, it's more complicated, it's more nuanced, and it actually fits exactly with the same problem of a lawyer. Let's go ahead and put this up there. Who it was a lawyer for a man suing Avianca Airlines, the Colombian airline. The lawsuit was written by a judge, or sorry, by a lawyer who actually used chat GPT, and in his brief around the lawsuit
cited quote a dozen relevant decisions. All of those decisions, however, actually could not find the decisions or the quotation sided or that were summarized. In other words, they were completely invented by chat GPT, and the lawyer who actually created the brief had to come before the judge and issue an affidavit saying that he had used chat gp to do all of his legal research, which he now has to admit is quote a source that has revealed itself
to be unreliable. Yank. Well. It is funny though, because there are quite a few tech bros you know, who are online being like legal profession is dead. Chat ChiPT can passion, MCAT, exam, chat gp chip, you can pass a legal a brief or what all that, And it's like, yeah, well, you know what else they had to deal with in the medical field. It's called liability. And if you let's
say you're right ninety nine percent of the time. Well, if you get it wrong one percent of the time, then what has Microsoft now just opened itself up to a multi billion dollar lawsuit? And at scale one percent? Is actually a lot of people about.
This lawyer who's now in the New York Times written up for like this moron just like outsourced all his works at chat GPT and didn't fact check any of it. There's a funny exchange in here because apparently he actually asked he didn't fact check it himself, like go outside of the program to look up these cases and make sure that they actually existed. But he asked chat gpt if they were real? He said, is Borghesi a real case?
He typed.
According to a copy of the exchange, he submitted to the judge, yes, the chat but replied, offering a citation, adding it is a real case. Then the lawyer dug deeper, what is your source? He wrote, According to a filing, I apologize for the confusion earlier. Chat GPT responded, offering a legal citation. Are the other cases you provided fake, mister Schwartz, the lawyer asked, chat GPT responded, No, the other cases I provided are real and can be found
in reputable legal databases. None of that was true, and I think, you know, this is eye opening to me of how often chat GPT just makes stuff up on a whole cloth. Because we had seen some examples of people. They asked him a question of, like, you know, what is the most cited like economic paper or something like that. And what it did is it took two existing economists researchers who I think had never worked together or they certainly didn't create this paper together, created a fake paper
with a fake title. But these were real economis. So if you look at it, you would think it's got sort of like the.
Semblance of truth to it.
You're like, oh, okay, well just maybe haven't heard of that paper before.
Let me go check it out.
Totally fabricated, one hundred percent hallucinated. They mentioned in here the sort of theory of how and why this happens, because again, remember what this thing is, it's a so called large language models. The programmers feed it all of this text and existing case history and everything that's online and books and whatever, and then it uses predictive algorithms to come up with what its responses are going to be.
So what they say.
In terms of a theoretical explanation for how this happens is CHATJPT generates realistic responses by making guesses about which fragments of text should follow other sequences based on a statistical model that is ingested billions of examples of text pulled from all over the internet. In mister mattas that's this guy who is the subject of the suit case. The program appears to have discerned the labyrinthine framework of a written legal argument, but is populated with names and
facts from a bullya base of existing cases. So it used this predictive statistical analysis of what it thought should go next to it kind of figured out, okay, this is what a legal brief should look like, and then it just mashed together a bunch of information that didn't wasn't actually real, wasn't actually factually based to generate this brief very similar to what these students found when you
know their professor assigned them this task. Very similar output here, and I thought it was interesting what one of the students said Sager in terms of her concerns, she wrote, I'm not worried about AI getting to where we are now. I'm much more worried about the possibility of us reverting
to where AI is. I'm increasingly thinking that's a real danger where people do outsource a lot of their original thinking to chat, GPT or other large language models, and rather than you know, it making us better, it actually in a sense sort of dumbs us down and you know, waters down our thinking in a sense. You already see
this in a lot of the culture. And I don't know if it's related to technology or what it's related to, but how many of our movies are recycled, how much of our music is just like taking beats from like when I was in high school that were popular and dumping it into a new song and putting some.
New words to it.
I already feel like there is such a degrading of creativity and lessening of creativity, and I think part of that is like the capitalist system, but I could see AI play an increasing role in all it has to draw on is like the things we've done in the past. It's not capable of creating something new. So for increasingly relying on this chat, GPT and other large language models that are just drawing and regurgitating and recycling and mashing
together things that are from our past. Does that stultify our creativity even more than.
Where we're already at.
I agree one hundred percent. There's an elegance to the human One of my favorite scenes in movies from The Wolf of Wall Street where Leo DiCaprio is surrounded by his friends and John Bernhal is one of the actors and he's like, sell me this pen, and he hands it to one of his friends and the guy starts going like, oh, well, this pen is beautiful. He's like, now that's not going to work. And he has one of the other guy who is his favorite salesman, and
Burnhal and he's like, sell me this pen. He's like, hey, can you write something down for me? He's like, no, I can't. He said, yeah, exactly, that's why you need this pen. And it's there's such an elegance to that. And I just actually tried it with chat GPT because it reminded me of this. I've seen this experiment before and it falls for that lowest common denominator of are
you tired of ordinary pens? They're feeling lackluster, you know, like trying to describe, but it doesn't create the demand. It doesn't have that like understanding of the human dynamic of what's actually going on here. And I feel like all chat GPT is done is increase the lowest common denominator, so like it's better now for the lowest of low
effort work. I think, Okay, I mean that's not a bad thing whenever it comes to white collar but people really underestimate, you know, how much little minute decision makings and creativity and things that require human beings to do.
Can you automate all that? Maybe? But I always think about Noam Chomski's op ED where he taught and yeah, NOME right now, very complicated feelings on Noome after the whole Epstein thing, but this area of expertise on linguistics, what he wrote is that what lllms failed to understand is it's just literally not how the human human mind or language evolved. It's not about amalgamating a bunch of
stuff and then spitting it out. You can never capture how language actually came to be in the way that communication really works, which I thought was a really cool way of putting it.
But I could easily see us falling into the you know, trap, the laziness trap of let me just use chat GPT to do my first draft. Yeah, oh yeah, and how much of you know, I mean, we write a lot for this show. We write monologues, you know, all week every week, and so much of my thinking comes from having to actually sit with the blank paper and grapple with it. Yes, and I come up with new and size that I hadn't thought of before. As I'm in
the writing process. Sometimes it starts I'm like, you know, this is weak, Like I need to change what I'm doing here, I need a different angle or whatever. If you're outsourcing even just that first draft to this automated technology, you really are losing some of the like spark that
is unique to human beings. And I could easily see us falling down that path where all we're doing is having this machine regurgitate and mash up for us things that already exist, and you know, it dulling the sort of creativity and joy and variability of the human experience
within our culture. So that's what this really underscored for me is actually some of the perils not of like I do think the concerns about like what's it going to do and how smart's it going to get and what how is it going to I think those are legitimate concerns, but this underscored for me the opposite concern, which is, rather than taking over, it just makes all of it like drags us down.
It makes this Dummer very good point. All right, let's go to the next one here. This is absolutely fascinating. We've been keeping our eye on these metatrends. Put it up there, please, about domestic offshoring or sometimes called interra shoring,
sometimes called like inside shoring. Nobody really knows how exactly to look at it, but I think it's really important because this is about how cities which we have seen have domestic migration, in migration and cities that have lost places are all not only following where people want to live, but also low wage jobs out of some key cities. So when we talk about low wage jobs, we're thinking about call centers. That's one of the ones that they
show here. Basically jobs that don't pay enough to cover the cost of housing in cities like New York, Washington, d C. San Francisco have now been moving at a very fast paced in the last couple of years to less expensive places like Orlando, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. And what's really crazy about this, Crystal is this data is only as recent as twenty twenty one, so we have two full years that have completely changed since this has happened.
They also actually point to the fact that this increase in domestic on shorings or interest storing, as I've said, has led to a huge increase in the number of jobs that specifically not only low wage but in some cases also executive jobs in Austin, Denver, San Jose, San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, Saint Louis, Missouri, and then Phoenix, Arizona. And so what they point to is that within a lot
of these places you are seeing a huge increase. It also kind of fits with what we've talked here about where millions of people flee New York, San Francisco, Chicago, they're all going to the Sunbelt. The sun Belt just seems to be booming in a way that I don't think a lot of people are understanding, or they're going to places where it's a lower tax environment while still in the time zone where you're able to do business for remote work. I've talked about Boise before. Phoenix is
another good example. Obviously everyone knows about Austin, but that's not the only city in Houston that's growing. You've got Houston, and you've got Dallas, all of the suburban area Florida, obviously, Georgia. Atlanta right now is absolutely hot. But you know, there's a lot of other areas in the Sun Belt as well, which has seen a major increase. And I think this is really going to reshape the entire US economy. And
are you really are politics? Because if capital starts leaving these big cities, it lessens their political importance, and it lessens the concentration that made these cities important and all that stuff in the first place. One of the biggest things that they're talking about here is how the only thing that keeps the Washington, San Francisco, New York City and all these cities still high prestige is that they are where quote unquote high end jobs are the most concentrated,
so the highest earners and all the executives. DC is number one, San Francisco number two, New York City is number three. Surprise DC is up there is number one. Probably has to do with government.
I'm sure.
Again we are the legal capital of the world. So there you go.
Well, what they talked, speak to here is a further sort of sorting and bifurcating of our economy, where you know, what really makes the place sort of healthy and vibrant is that you have an array of people, different cultures, different income levels. Crucially, and we've already had this sorting happening in some of the largest cities.
I think San Francisco it's the most.
Clear, where you have very highly paid tech executives and other tech knowledge workers, and then you have you know, people who are you know, really struggling, and you have this vast inequality and it leads to a true hollowing out where if you're a middle class person like you can't live in San Francisco, there's a handful of them like hanging on there by their fingertips because they just
love the place so much. But what this is pointing to is that that sort of hollowing out of those middle tier jobs and them leaving, you know, the jobs themselves leading the city and the workers along with them. Of course, that's coming for a much broader array of society.
They say.
As workers quit expensive cities, they leave behind a smaller workforce that's heavily concentrated with executive decision makers other people.
Who are highly paid.
They write in this report, this growing economic and geographic divide threatens to limit opportunity for people in lower cost regions and could have social and political consequences. As America's high end labor becomes concentrated and so called superstar cities, those living elsewhere could experience less social and economic mobility. I think this says a lot about where once opportunities lie.
If you're a customer service rep or working in that realm, you'll find most of your opportunities away from those coastal cities that will influence your life, who your peers are,
and the opportunities your children have. So it's a sort of further stratifying of American society, which, you know, there's a really good part of this, which is workers remote work, being able to work in cities where it's affordable for them, and being able to leave these cities that have been you know, have a terrible quality of life and they're
just wildly unaffordable. But the more that we sort ourselves, the more that we stratified, the more you're also vulnerable to that sort of like coming apart phenomenon that we've already seen and has now been accelerated by COVID trend. You'll have cities that are the superstar like almost.
Like luxury goods for the very.
Wealthiest among us, and then you'll have like the rest of the country and big divides.
We talked about it before, but they're basically openly admitting that the only way to save Manhattan is to turn it even more so into a rich person's playground. They're like, we got to make sure the bars never close, we got to destroy all the commercial real estate. We just got to turn this into like a Dubai like play like Playboy haven for the richest people in the world.
Which was Bloomberg's vision for the way.
It actually will work.
Great task.
That's the gross part is it will work. It also probably will destroy any of the last like cool things still that remain about New York City, but economically probably the right thing to do. I've seen it in so many places like the South of France, for example. Any charm in the South of France has long disappeared after like all the richest people in the world decided to come in buy it all up. Their whole hit neighborhoods of London which are basically not British anymore, and they
belong to the golf are of states. This is it's not a critique. It's just like being there. You might as well be in Dubai and it's all like the ritzy you know, stuff all all around you, and you're like, oh, well, all the history from this is basically gone. Any of the original you know people, This is all just you know, basically serving money, which is just gross like whenever you see it. And yeah, I mean that's what they want
New York, I guess to become. It probably is the endgame for most of these cities, but it will lead to a further coming apart phenomenon that you're pointing to. Yeah, that's not a good thing.
No, it's not a good thing. So it's a real mix bag. I mean, I really cheer for workers to have a lot more flexibility. And the other part of this is certain jobs that are white collar jobs but are more mid tier level, they can be relocated to you know, a whole variety of other cities. People can live wherever and do those jobs. People who are you know, picking up your trash, who are serving you coffee, like those service sector jobs don't have that same luxury, and
so that's how you'll end up with this. You know, cities that look like San Francisco, where it's the haves and the have nots, there's not a whole lot in between, and that's just not a healthy, healthy ecosystem for anybody whatsoever. We were pretty astonished to see some very critical commentary of President Joe Biden based on some new poll numbers over on CNN from Jake Tapper, who really did not
pull any punches here. Take a listen to what he had to say about these new poll results, and we're back.
With our twenty twenty four lead.
Horrible news, horrible for Joe Biden and our new CNN Paul. While the president leads as Democratic competitors by a huge margin, two thirds of all of the American people surveyed, sixty six percent of the public say that a Biden victory would either be a setback or a disaster. I mean, when it comes to how voters see Joe Biden and another presidential term, I mean, those are some bad numbers.
Well, I mean just your basic favorability, favorable opinion, or unfavorable Joe Biden. Look at how Americans are rating him, Jake, I mean, thirty five percent favorable. That is remarkably low. Fifty seven percent have an unfavorable rating. Well, look at this decline among independents from December thirty five percent favorable rating in December. He's now down a twenty six percent favorable with independence critical voters in the electorate.
Jake. That's a big warning sign.
And David, how do Biden's numbers here compare to those of the Republican front runner Donald Trump?
Right?
Well, you hear Joe Biden say all the time, compare him to the alternative, not the Almighty, And basically they're both not looking good, Jake.
They're both basically equivalent there Trump and Biden's feasibilities. And I think this is a hard thing for Democrats to reckon with because we understand the very negative emotions that a lot of people have about a majority of people have about Donald Trump and feel it would be a disaster for him to be back in the White House. How do you grapple with it that people feel a lot of the same ways and a lot of the same numbers about Joe Biden. So to hear this laid
down so starkly on CNN was really something. I mean, just to go over some of those numbers again, forty one percent of Americans.
Believe it would be a disaster if Biden.
Won in twenty twenty four. Twenty six percent said it would be a setback. Meanwhile, very similar numbers for Trump a little bit more forty four percent say a victory for Trump would be a disaster, twelve percent, so lower numbers say it would be set back, showing the sort of like you know, with Biden, people feel a little
less strongly about them in either direction. But the fact that we have these two guys that overwhelming majority of Americans do not want that a plurality say this would be a disaster if they got back in there, And this is what we're likely to face in twenty twenty four. Yeah, we talked about like the decline of culture, and our chat GPT segment is this is as stark a sign of the.
Decline of this country as I can imagine.
Oh absolutely, And it's reflecting the poll. Put that up there on the screen where you can see. In the Democratic primary, Biden has only got sixty percent of the people who are affirmatively voting for him. RFK Junior is a twenty percent. Maryan Williamson's at eight percent, someone else also at eight percent. I mean, look, that's powerful stuff. And actually that puts Biden right around where Jimmy Carter
ended up in nineteen eighty. Now I think he's probably better off because Trump also has such high negative ratings. But it really reveals to you, like in an alternative universe where the GOP is not twisted itself into notts. I mean, it's easiest lay up election really of all time.
Like if they were able to pull themselves out of it, they could have, and if they had some Reaganesque type figure gal I mean, I honestly think like Glenn youngin somebody like very milk toast or anything, and get like fifty four or fifty five percent of the vote easily by just being like I'm not crazy and I don't like that guy, and neither do you. Everyone be like, okay, sure, I absolutely And that's one of those where the GOP, though, always finds a way to shoot himself, as in the
foot Obama. You know, he wasn't as weak as Biden, but he was pretty weak. I think going into twenty twelve, I wish they acknowledged they were actually somewhat afraid and Romney got acted, They're like, oh we got this. Yeah. They very is easy.
To their credit, though they also ran a very effect absolutely brutal. Romney brutally like you know, set the stage early for the caricature.
Of him that they wanted to prosecute.
He stepped in it with his like infamous forty seven percent comments. But you know, I just think also one thing I have to quibble with in terms of the Jake Taper commentaries, he goes out of his way to be like, oh, he's very, very far ahead of his primary opponents, and it's like yes and no. I mean, you're the sitting incumbent president and you're only getting sixty percent of the.
Vote, and those members are not all that different.
From what Trump is garnering in the Republican primary, and you wouldn't go out of your way to be like, he's very far ahead and he doesn't have any you know, any challenge whatsoever in the GOP primary. So and this is with you know, the media completely shutting out both RFK and Marian and doing everything they can to try to convince the public, like always got no serious primary conteeries.
Practically the nominee already like it's just you know, a matter of time and he's going to be anointed, and no one real has stepped up against him him. Clearly there is a real hunger for there to be some alternative to him. And maybe the most stark numbers that I've seen recently is that you have an actual majority, it's fifty to fifty that think that Biden will even be the Democratic nominee, which shows you the lack of confidence that even Democratic voters and certainly the electric overall
has in the current precedent. So you know, it's a grim landscape. Neither of these dues, as we've talked about, to have any intention of debating, Like, you know, the political calculus for them is that they're not going to pay a price if they don't actually engage in democratic process. And it's just very sad. So it was kind of nice to see a little bit of a little bit of unvarnished truth there slipped through on CNN.
Every once in a while, the trip the truth.
Actually breaks in, all right, sy weally looking at it, well.
It seems every month these days is dedicated to some so called marginalized community. I have no idea where it all came from, because when I was a kid, it was just Black History Month, and that seems fine. But as May comes to an end, we are suddenly seeing the last chance and goodbyes to AAPI month. API Month for the uninitiated is Asian American and Pacific Island Heritage Month. Now, as someone who is technically within that group, the term
has always bothered me. What do I have in common with someone who was South Korean, And what do they have in common with somebody of Cambodian descent, and what do they have in common with literal Polynesians. It collapses on a rudimentary analysis. Yet almost everywhere you look these days, if someone was to classify me in some corporate America structure,
it's where I would fall. I always was just annoyed by it by it, but didn't actually think much until my friend Richard Hanania put out a very informative thread that tells us a lot about modern racial politics. Per Richard's telling, the origin of the term Asian American Pacific Islander actually has its roots in the US government. After the Office of Management and Budget put out Directory of Number fifteen in May nineteen seventy seven and created modern
racial and ethnic categories for census purposes. These include American, Indian or Alaskan, Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black, Hispanic, and white. Now, leaving aside how nebulous Hispanic also is as a term, consider that the only reason they did five is because that was the minimum and they didn't
want to do more. From there, things actually got even more interesting, per his telling, after the creation of the Asian American term, it came time to include Asians in the Small Business Act so that they could give grants to minority contractors. Since we had a new minority, they had to be included because the previous law only covered Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans. Here, Congress took a stab at
deciding which Asians count as disadvantage. They landed on Cambodians, Chinese, Guam, Japan, Korea, Laos, the Northern Mariana Islands, Philippines, Samoa, Taiwan, and Vietnam. That was it for Then there's a lot going on, so not much in common with each other, of course, and
already stupid, but actually gets much stupid stupider. From that point forward, other Asian races so called I guess got upset because they were not included, so they slowly included the places like of India, Tonga, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Nepal, Bhutan, and at that point basically anyone even peripherially connected to the Asian land mass or the Pacific Ocean scrambled to get in because if they didn't, they couldn't take advantage of the tax benefits. Here, though, is where things get
even funnier. By the nineteen nineties, Pacific Islanders inclusion with the AAPIs began to cause problems because for the Pacific Islanders, with the rise of affirmative action, racial regimes and college admissions, they were competing against Asians when getting into college. This presented a problem. The federal government then created a new category called Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders just to make
sure that they could get into college easier. So, as Richard so absolutely puts it, quote in contracting, AAPI are united in being disadvantaged and in getting benefits from the government in college admissions, they are separated so that the few pis in the country don't have to compete with Korean and Chinese students. It's just all so absurd and too much to make up. But it has real as you can see from the chart that he put together.
The term did not exist in the United States until the government created it out of sheer laziness and nepotism. Now it is some full blown fake cultural phenomenon. Reading Biding's executive order declaring AAPI month, you can't help but laugh, he says. Quote. This year, I was proud to launch the first ever national strategy to advance equity, justice, and opportunity for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.
The new national strategy, ironically, is actually supposed to promote diversity, equity inclusion by actually collecting accurate census data on each individual subgroup. In other words, by getting more accurate data, they are admitting that the entire thing is not representative of any group of people and that the current data and term is useless. AAPI, to me, best signifies the diversity Olympics that people who aren't white in America are subject subject it to despite none of us ever asking
for it. My own personal annoyance outside of being lumped in with Asian American is when people call us South Asians as if Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshi's all have so much in common with each other. If they did, then they would be their own country. Why not just refer to people as Americans first, then if you reference prior toscent you can use nationality if that's what that person prefers. Consider the absurdity that Koreans, Japanese and Chinese are all
supposed to be lumped together. It's almost as if bureaucrats who came up with the term, or the people who think about lumping them together as respectful don't know that in actual Asia, these countries individually have very complex relationships, in some cases despise each other or have centuries of intra warfare and conquests. By the way, as our previous discussion on Hispanics revealed, that term too collapses under the
most basic of scrutiny alongside Latino. And finally, let me take this opportunity to speak to my fellow AAPIs the biggest conival by the diversity equity inclusion folks is to try to get us to go along with their nonsense while they simultaneously have architected an entire affirmative action regime designed to preference their admission to the cultural and financial
elite at our expense. When they are forced to compete on merit, they fail miserably, so they are literally fighting tooth and nail to make sure it is harder for us to get in and easier for them. They are also targeting the professions that Asians in America have traditionally excelled at, like doctors and lawyers, to reduce merit based criteria and allow other groups an easier shot. Asians are minorities when they are convenient, and oppressors when they are not.
An easier way is to just simply consider people as individuals with their own story. After all, the reason that most Asians came to the United States was opportunity and to be freed of the suffocating social constructions of traditional Asian cultures in America. You can be anything. We should keep it that way. Now. I hope you all have a good AAPI month. It's crazy that it was created.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today. At breakingpoints, Dot com.
You take a look at Well, guys.
As you all certainly know, Ron DeSantis struggled last week to launch his presidential campaign alongside billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Musk's personal social media platform that would be Twitter. Didn't go all that well. The attempted launch was beset by some catastrophic technical failures that has lasted nearly half
an hour. Once functioning, half the audience was gone, the audio was still horrendous, the content so stilted and fawning that Megan Kelly, who agrees with DeSantis on a lot of his cultural takes, declared it provda esque in its obsequiousness. Of course, this all made for unintentionally amazing schadenfreud to content, but the deeper applications of the incestuous relationships between politicians
and their chosen billionaires those are anything but amusing. Literally, the day after DeSantis launched with Elon Musk, he signed into law a gigantic giveaway to one of Musk's companies that would be SpaceX. This new bill that DeSantis just signed in law protects SpaceX and other commercial space flight companies.
From any leadlegal liability if a.
Crew member or passenger is injured or killed due to the company's negligence, except in certain extreme circumstances, so participants now mussign a waiver which reads quote warning. Under Florida law, there is no liability for an injury to or death of a participant or crew in a spaceflight activity provided by a spaceflight entity if such injury or death results
from the spaceflight activity. Injuries caused by spaceflight activities may include, among others, injury to land equipment, persons, and animals, as well as the potential for you to act in a negligent manner that may contribute to your injury or death. You are assuming the risk of participating in the spaceflight activity. As long as a waiver assigned SpaceX and all the
other spaceflight companies, they're in the clear. Such protection from lawsuits is even more relevant for must Space Exploration right now, given the company's most recent disaster. So about a month ago, the company launched the largest rocket ever built, got off the ground, but not before exploding the launch pad, curling giant hunks of concrete with rebarred to the ocean and dangering offshore fuel storage tanks, and after mere minutes of flight,
the whole thing blew up mid air. Unfortunately, no people aboard, but plenty of people on the ground did suffer. The launch and the subsequent explosions caused particulate matter, including sand, ash and heavier materials that were kicked up by the launch to.
Rain down on a large area.
Residents as far away as Port Isabel, that's a community about six miles away, were inundated.
With this type of material.
Researchers are worried that breathing the stuff in could cause long term respiratory issues. They're still researching that. And as if that wasn't enough, the launch pad explosion also start a wildfire that spread across three and a half acres of state park land. Now, according to environmental and cultural heritage nonprofits, which are now suing the government over all of this, all of these impacts were predictable and should
have been revealed by an environmental impact assessment. They say the FAA violated the National Environment Policy Act by green lighting the launch of the heaviest rocket in history without engaging in this legally mandated thorough review. SpaceX, it turns out, successfully persuaded the FAA to use a less stringent process, which allowed them to piggyback off of approvals for their
much smaller Falcon nine rockets. That's according to substacker Esghound, this process led SpaceX and the government to wildly underestimate the impact and potential destruction of this launch on nearly every level. Such of the swantastic results when government and industry are way too cozy, a disgusting American tradition, which apparently Governor DeSantis happily continues in Florida today. So Ron DeSantis, of course, he stakes a good bit of his political
career on a fight with corporate giant Disney. He frames this battle in almost leftist terms as a noble stand against corporate power, and on that level, he actually has a point. Disney has for decades in Florida, received huge tax breaks been able to run its own government. But the launch with Musk and goodies to Musk revealed that DeSantis clearly doesn't have a problem with unaccountable corporate power so long as it's his ben factors and partisan allies
who ultimately benefit. Now, DeSantis taking on Disney has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with political ambition. In fact, more than anything, the DeSantis Twitter campaign launch revealed just how little the governor actually cares about his supposed principles. He might stand up to Disney, but he's
putty in Elon Musk's hands. He might decry social media censorship of conservatives on free speech grounds, but he will enthusiastically team up with a guy who just brazenly censored journalists in Turkey on behalf of a right wing government. DeSantis and other Republican partisans feigned deep concern about government power teamed up with social media oligarchs, but somehow see nothing wrong with the current governor and top presential contender
receiving overt support from their own social media oligarch. They are rightly outraged by censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story under Jack, but apparently have zero interest in how the platform could be manipulated under Elon to benefit his chosen favored candidate. It is telling that Desant has felt no shame signing Elon Musk giveaway bill one day after
his Elon Musk sponsored launch. He doesn't expect the media to particularly notice, and he doesn't expect the Republican base to particularly care when all the world is a culture war principles really don't matter, only who is on what side. And with Desanta's gamely accepting utter humiliation on Twitter and promptly handing over a giant gift to SpaceX Elon, will have no doubt that DeSantis is firmly on his side, and that is he's having his.
Way with Florida.
He would have his way with the whole nation or DeSantis to ascend to the White House.
And I think what really got me, Sager is the reason.
And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at Breakingpoints dot com. Thank you guys so much for watching, and thank you to all the premium subscribers supporting us helping us build out. So it'll be sad to say goodbye to the desk, but we're ready to move on. I think I think we're ready to move on.
Yeah, we see if we have an emotional reaction to the removal of the brick wall.
New stuff is so cool, it makes it, it makes it easier. I think say goodbye.
That's true.
We've got a lot of great stuff in the work for everybody, and we will see you all tomorrow.