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.
We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio ad staff give you, guys, the best independent.
Coverage that is possible.
If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support.
But enough with that, let's get to the show.
All right, Good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints.
Before we get into the show today, I wanted to do a quick update from last night. The crackdown on campus protests continues that we can actually roll. We have some footage from a GW University student that was sent to us last night. Here's police resting a student in a wheelchair, putting him in the Pattio wagon. There here as a miner who was also participating in the protest that they put into the police car.
There.
There was also a crackdown at FT Fashion Institute of Technology up in Manhattan. Also, UMass Amherst saw their encampments swept in what was a pretty severe crackdown. So these are unfolding day after day. Our Counterpoints Friday show is going to touch on these campus protests. So we're going to have Glenn Greenwald in debate with Iliya Shapiro, and
I think it's going to be a fascinating one. Shapiro has been basically called like one of the lead champions of this crackdown, and Greenwald has been one of the lead opponents of the crackdown. All but extra interesting, I think because Shapiro himself was canceled, yeah back in twenty twenty two, not.
Long ago, and recently wrote a fairly moving essay about the experience of cancel culture. They're also both lawyers, so I think that's going to be pretty interesting from a legal perspective what the limits are free speech are.
And so if you want to get that early, it'll be out Thursday evening. You have to go to Breakingpoints dot Com become a subscriber. Most of you probably are already subscribers, like how could you not be? But if you're not going to bring woys dot com subscribes, you can get it earlier in your inbox.
Otherwise that show will be out to you Friday morning.
We're going to talk about the ongoing Israeli invasion of RAFA and the US response to it.
And we've also got the Trump trial because it's getting fun.
Yeah, that's right.
Stormy Daniels testified for the prosecution in the hush money trial yesterday in New York. Donald Trump, Man, do we have some interesting updates from inside the courtroom because Donald Trump was reprimanded, and we'll tell you why we do.
Indeed, as Crystal would say, TikTok is suing under the First Amendment to overturn the attempted ban or we're going to get into why. I think we both think they have a pretty strong case. There was an assassination attempt against Zelensky. We'll get into that and its implications, as well as a new report on gen Z debt.
You know, and I think there's a media story on gen Z debt as well, because just a couple of weeks ago, you probably remember, there were viral charts showing how great gen Z is doing compared to other generations. So we'll dive into all of that. But Ryan, let's start in RAFA where we have images we can start roll.
This is this first yeah, first tear sheet here from out to zero that the US has been saying that this invasion of Rafa, and this has been interesting to watch un faults. So if Israel finally launches this much awighted invasion of Rafa, the response from the United States has been to say that actually, this is not really an invasion of Rafa.
This is a this is a targeted assault.
The surgical operation aimed at disrupting Hamas infrastructure and also particularly went after the Rafa border crossing.
We can roll some of the footage from this.
Yesterday, they went after the Rafa border crossing, and the argument was that Hamas as the de facto government, has been running this border crossing and as a result, has been collecting customs revenue, and their customs revenue, then you know, fuels Hamas's infrastructure and existence, and so therefore Israel's going to go in and it's going to seize the border. That the border crossing is not that deep into Gaza, you know, so you can do a kind of targeted
operation there. At the State Apartment yesterday a number of reporters were asking, Okay, you're saying this is not a major military operation, that these are just a collection of small military operations.
Isn't there a point at which a lot of small.
Operations add up to a major military operation, and they acknowledged yes. So it became this like philosophical debate about you know, how many angels can dance on a pin when it moves from a targeted surgical operation, how many targeted operations become until they become a major military operation. So we can put up this next element from this is from the Wall Street Journal here.
So this the rift that is developing between the.
United States has to do with the insistence over months and months and months that Israel not launched an invasion into Rafa yet that entire time, Biden continued sending weapons up until just last week when apparently roughly three thy five hundred bombs were withheld because the US finally started taking Israel at its word that they actually did plan to launch this invasion which they had been saying that they were going to launch for a very long time.
At the States Department yesterday, I asked, you know, what went wrong internally, Like you're going to review your process, Like how do you end up accidentally arming an operation that you say that you oppose?
But how does that surely not the first time we've done that?
Well, interestingly, so we can move to this next element. The Politico and others reported that the State Department is indefinitely delaying the release of its National Security memo that is aimed at determining whether or not Israel has committed war crimes with American weapons if they conclude that they did.
This report is supposed to be due today.
If they conclude they did, the US would have to stop sending Israel weapons. So they they said, we're actually not going to submit this on time.
They say they hope they're going to get it done soon, but it's an awful lot of work.
And at the briefing yesterday they said it was the first time we've ever done something like this, so it's taking a little longer than we expected. Matt Lee, the AP's State Department reporters will wait a minute, Hold on a second. Did you just say you've never put together an investigation into whether the countries that you're arming have committed war crimes?
Reports efort have committed.
War crimes, like you've never done that before. Said, well, we've never done it.
Like this, And this is all related to the lay he law.
Right, This is right.
There are laws on the books that say the State Department is supposed to care Josh Paul quit because Josh Paul's State Department employee. His job was to kind of investigate and certify whether or not the arms that were going out the door were going to be used to commit human rights abuses. He said that during after October seventh,
all checks on that were eliminated. In any effort that he made to interrogate whether or not this was going to go to a unit or to be used in a way that was against international law would be just bulldozed and the arms will grow out the door.
That's why he famously kind of quit in protests.
So we're not sure when we're going to get this report on Israeli war crimes.
All of this coming to a head.
At the exact same time, I was at an event last night where Representative Rocanna spoke, and this is my fancy camera work here. He criticized the State Department in the administration for this delay of this report and said that he'll be introducing legislation to block offensive weapons shipments to Israel while this RAFA assault is ongoing.
We can roll this clip from Rocana.
And our entire Youngerman has said going into Rafa would be a catastrophe. So I will be introducing an amendment again in the House Armed Services Committee on made twenty second to stop again eddie offensive weapons going in to that until the invasion stops.
And there.
I'm very very disappointed that the administration is not coming out with its report that was due to the United States Congress on whether there were human rights violations in international law violations that have been committed in Gaza. That report was supposed to be to Congress on May eighth, and it has been even definitely delayed. No explanation of plot.
So I know where America talked about climate but of course receiving the dysfunction of our planet because on one can't help but think of the interconnection between the two.
That was at an event for the Youth Climate Group Climate Defiance Rocanna, they're talking about the decision not to release this report yet or the failure to release report at this point, Emily, where do you come down on this? Are we looking at a major military operation invasion into Rafa, which in which has included shelling.
There's there's footage of tanks shelling tents there.
There have been air strikes that have killed a number of civilians, as well as the taking over of the border crossing, which a source confirmed to me did result in the destruction of about three to four eight major AID trucks. There have been reports that it was many more. My source who does work on the ground there, says that no, it's three to four AID trucks. But when you have miles of AID trucks, every every AID truck that you blow up and don't move out of the way, uh,
just delays AID getting in further. Israel so far just completely blocked in gress and egress at the Rafa border crossing as full blown famine has reached has reached the north.
So this is where I would say that major is relative, you know, because I don't know that.
There's feels major.
I don't know there's any military encourasion into Raffa that can be anything button major. And that is a concession I think Israel implicitly makes when they say this is necessary to quote unquote eradicate Hamas. And meanwhile, by the way, I think this is one of the strangest things it's happening right now. Not strange and that it's unexpected, but strange in that it just peaques your curiosity as to how they are quote eradicating Hamas while also negotiating a
peace deal with Hamas and while the RAFA. So they say they killed what twenty militants over the last forty eight hours something like that, it might be more Hamas obviously was that Sunday that they got four Israelly.
The the cormcial crossing right.
Right, they killed four soldiers.
But there's just no way, I think, specifically with RAFA, that you can do anything there that isn't major. And one question I had for you, Ryan, you had mentioned that you were at the State Department proofing yesterday, and we went through both the Al Jazeera article in the Wall Street Journal article about how the Biden administration obviously has always said that this would be a sticking point.
Now whether they're able to actually execute on being a sticking point when they're so deeply entangled in this conflict is a different question.
What sense do you get?
I mean, just having been in the room at the State Department yesterday asking questions, Matt Lee pushing the State Department as well, that these are genuine frustrations. I actually think in this case they seem to be genuine frustrations.
And it may be from a lot of officials.
Sometimes the inexorable force of American policy is one thing and what some mid level officials want it to be is another thing.
And I think that might be the case here.
There does seem to be you know, they continue to say that they do not want Israel to launch an invasion of Rapha, that they oppose such an invasion. They were clear that so they suggest that Israel urged one hundred thousand people to flee to a different zone. State Department yesterday was clear they don't believe that the area that they are sending those people to is adequate because they're sending people to just giant piles of rubble, like in their current situation is one of the only places
that has not been reduced to rubble. And so where they're currently sheltered, you might have say, three hundred people for one bathroom, and everybody might have one, you know, an average about it seems like a one liter of water a day for all uses, you know, hygiene and drinking and cooking.
They're now being asked, urge told.
Forced to move to this rubble strewn area that has zero bathrooms, zero access to water zero. You know, humanitarian aid facilities set up to receive those people. And as the State Department accurately pointed out, you might tell one hundred thousand people to move, but once you start bombing, hundreds of thousands of people are going to move there and you're going to have you know, firefest but actually dangerous for people.
I believe about half the population of Gaza, roughly half the population of gazas around Rafa, but at least before recent evacuation started in Obviously Israel did the sort of usual leaflets and text messages and all of that.
But the point, from some genuine complaints in the.
United States is but to where you know, if you're dropping leaflets, where are you telling people to go? And Israel will come back and say what I mean, we're doing what we can do.
Right, They bought a bunch of tents and they put them back by the rubble, right, and anybody with any sense, it's like, that's okay. That that might be okay for like an hour. You can't live like that. Ware's what if you get thirsty?
What do you do? What if you go to the bathroom?
Yeah, like what if you have to do all the things that humans do when they're trying to stay alive.
And again, the negotiations were just a sloppy disaster this week. I know Crystal and Sager covered this as well, but Israel and the United States were on completely different pages, and this is the way the deal fell apart. Whether there was even a deal that was workable, we still honestly don't really know what happened with that. But all of this is again the name of quote eradicating Hamas well.
They're negotiating a peace deal with Hamas So I just think that tells you a lot in and of itself about what's happening right now.
And the State Department was yesterday saying, and so was John Kirby over at the White House, that they they have a lot of hope that the deal will be overcome because the difference is between the deal that the US, you know, called extraordinary and worked out with Israel and presented to Egypt and Kutter, which presented it to pass, are trivial like they are they are, they are minor differences. And those two two minor differences are uh and do
we have do we have the net yahouh? Because we could we can start with net Yahu here if we do, yeah, roll, this is this is his This is basically the argument
that he's making. And if you can just read the translation on on this if if you're watching it otherwise, Basically what he's saying is that there was no sea fire deal on the table, you know, for Hamas to accept in Hamas made changes to the deal, and the changes were major, and that it was a gigantic ruse to make Israel look like it doesn't want peace when in fact Israel does uh want want peace, although he contradicts himself because he says, you know, Israel you know,
does not want peace if it means that any formation of Hamas you know, remains in you know, in in Gaza.
Right, but yeah, I mean it's absurd when you're negotiating that way right there, negotiating are in northern Gaza once again, yeah right.
And so basically the differences were around the definition of sustainable calm. The New York Times and others have have reported on the slight tweaks that Hamas did make to the ceasefire deal that they then accepted, and so uh, Israel had not defined the phrase kind of sustainable calm in the document, and sustainable calm is the phrase they're using to repla place permanent ceasefire, because permanent ceasefire has become toxic and they're fighting over it.
And so that was the substitute.
The kind of US Israeli gip came up to, Okay, let's let's agree to a sustainable calm, and Hamas basically defined sustainable calm as something like a permanent ceasefire, and the US had agreed to that. The US privately had assured Hamas, okay, yes, like if you do get through all these different phases, then yes, we will assure you that Israel will not relaunch a war in you know,
four or five months or whenever this is over. The other difference was that the initial phase of hostage release was supposed to be in the first proposal six weeks. Hamas slowed that down in its response to you know, three three hostages every week, and which adds up to more than six weeks. And Hamas also said, all of these thirty three that you want are actually alive, and
so we can't guarantee that. And so while that is a big difference, if that's true at this point, there's nothing a moss can do about that, like they know they have the living hostages that they have. Israel's persuasive counter argument to me is those who are in ill health like need to be released as fast as possible, exactly like they need to get out because they are. They're dying. Everyone in Gaza is dying. The conditions are horrific.
Not only are they do they risk getting blown up in a bombing, but there's no you know, there's no medical system to speak of. There's little access to clean water, and there's very little food. So if you're a hostage who was an ill health and elderly like you, just like everyone else in Gaza is suffering. Even though ironically and paradoxically, the hostages have more value probably to Hamas than a random Palestinian civilian. They're going to be traded
for Palestinian hostages that are in Israeli administrative attention. The one other thing that Hamas said was that Israel had wanted to take like two hundred people off the list that they would not release, and Hamas said, no, don't, you can't.
Don't take anybody off the list that you're not going to release.
But Ultimately, of course, it's up to Israel who they let out of their prisoners. So no matter what they agreed to and then off with the last agreement, they went out. Israel went out and rearrested a bunch of the people that they arrested because they know where they are.
Also, in all of this, the broader geo political ambitions, I think even here in the United States, you hear way too little about the remaining American hostages. I believe they're five remaining American hostages. And President Biden was giving remarks in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day. He had a long speech, and we have some video of that speech that we can roll right now. This is President Biden, and it should be a seven.
Twenty twenty three, on a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Romas on least the deadliest day of the Jewish people since the Holocaust, driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the earth.
Over one thousand, two hundred innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents slaughtered in the kibbutz, massacred at the music festival, brutally raped, mutilated, and sexually assault It thousands more carrying wounds, bullets, some shrapnel from the memory of that terrible day they endured, hundreds taken hostage, and Mike commitment to the safety of the Jewish people, the security of Israel and its right to exist as an independent Jewish state, is ironclad. Even
when we disagreed. My administration is working around the clock the free remaining hostages. Jess, we have free hostages already and will not rest until we bring them all home. On college campuses, Jewish students blocked, harassed, attacked while walking to class, anti semitism, anti Semitic posters, slogans calling for
the annihilation of Israels the world's only Jewish state. But there is no place on any campus in America, any place in America, for anti Semitism or hate speech or threats of violence of any kind.
Okay, so he did obviously mention the hostages there.
But Ryan, we also heard from house speak Mike Johnson, let's roll clips of let's throw this clip of Mike Johnson.
German universities like those at Strausburg were at the heart of renaissance and intellectual life, but it was at those same elite centers of learning where Jewish faculty and students were suddenly expelled, where anti Jewish courses were introduced, and where professors performed horrific pseudo science experiments on Jewish people brought from nearby concentration camps. We remember what happened then, and now today we are witnessing American universities quickly becoming
hostile places for Jewish students and faculty. The very campuses which were once the envy of the International Academy have succumbed to an anti Semitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers are now known for stabbing their Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags and with our survivors before us. If you close your eyes and the quietness of your own heart, you can almost hear
the glass of Jewish storefronts shattered by stormtroopers. You could see fathers being executed at point blank in the ghettos. You can feel a brother's hand slipping out of his sisters, as men in uniforms separate them into lines, and they can only mouth to one another everything will be okay,
hoping that it would be. You can hear screams coming from the gas chambers, and it's in these troubling times we must look to this audience, to the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants to help us remember and to bear witness. Several weeks ago, I am very proud to report to you that the United States Congress overwhelmingly passed security assistance to Israel.
All right, So, meanwhile, Code Pink caught up with a Republican representative, Brian Mast in the halls of It looks like it was one of the house buildings. Interestingly enough, Code Pink and Brian Mass both tweeted this video. We should mention that President Biden and Mike Johnson were speaking at the same Holocaust remembrance event in those last two clips. But let's roll media Benjamin and Brian Mass here.
Now that Hamas has agreed to a ceasfire.
I think the Reults should go in there to kick the ship out, just absolutely destroy them, their infrastructure level, anything that they touched.
Is there enough?
Congressman, the world is calling for a ceasefire. He used to say a Mass' we'll agree to a ceasefire. Hamas had just agreed. It was a proposal cut forward by Egypt. Cutter. You know CIA director William Burns has been there negotiating.
Oh, if there's an American or somebody else be in help, there should be every expectation that Americans women killed them as well.
There's an American being helped, we should go kill the people that are Why are you so hateful? It's not hateful.
It is because my people are Palestinian. You're killing my people with our tax dollars.
And you saying that everything.
Should associated themselves are terrorists. They shouldn't vote terrorists into office.
Israel is the terrorist, israel Is, the.
Terrorists lions almost please say to you every single times, but people are children, They're the ones that are wearying the RUNA.
Say that's very clearly. I literally don't believe a word.
That you say.
I think what you see there is the narrow spectrum of political opinion within the power center here in the United States, from from Biden to Johnson to mast not a whole lot of different differences between them, but not a whole lot of uh daylight, and we can we can go over each of them. But did Mike Johnson basically compare campus protesters to Nazis? Like that's that was? Like you you walk around these campuses and you can hear the screams from the gas chambers.
If it wasn't if it wasn't direct, it was certainly getting close to it. And I actually agree with you about the narrow spectrum of opinion, because, first of all, Mike Johnson repeated the I stabbing claim the flag.
Did you hear mention that? Well?
What I find interesting about that is you have Republican speech writers the highest, the upper echelon of their career, and they're clearly not even listening because you wouldn't want to embarrass your boss by putting that in a speech or something that's been putting that in this speech. Surely you could find another example. In fact, we've talked here, We even talked with a student about some of the
legitimate examples that are problematic. You can find something, but I think it just speaks to how uninterested in dissent on this they are, how uninterested they are and looking at it through any lens of good faith, rather than just dismissing everyone as Nazis, as anti semites, et cetera. And we can talk about this in the Tech Talk book. I know that we're going to, but this is one
of the I think biggest problems on the right. But it's not just on the right, it's sort of the center left to this pro Israel center left that is now dismissing a lot of you know, very deeply held sentiments among gen Z as bigotry when it's it's something different for many of them. That's not to say there isn't any legitimate bigotry, of course there is, but to dismiss all of it, to paint it with a broad
brush as bigoted, that's actually reflective. I think of a deep problem for the right and the pro Israel center.
Yeah, and Biden who continues to attack campus protesters as just filled with anti Semitism, like refuses to acknowledge that they may have genuine concerns with what they're seeing.
On Fold and Rafa.
You know, he talked about babies killed on October seventh. October seventh was a day of deep trauma. Nearly seven hundred civilians you know, were killed, just horrifying, you know, day from start to finish. There were three babies between the ages of zero and three who were killed on October seventh, three too many than should have been killed. Last night in Rafa. I can read this from doctor
Mustafa L. Marcy el Masri. He says, I am utterly heartbroken to announce the tragic loss of my dear colleague, a devoted psychologist and psychotherapist, along with her four children in an Israeli airstrike on their home at dawn yesterday, more children than he described there. So the President of the United States is not going to talk about the four children who were killed last night in Rafa. He's not going to talk about it the day after it happened.
He's not going to talk about it six or seven months later. The gap between his willingness to express his horror, legitimate horror over what happened on October seventh, and his refusal to acknowledge any of the horror that is being visited upon Palestinians on a daily basis. It strikes people as just deeply immoral. And then to have him also lecture the protesters and tell them that they are in fact simply driven by anti Semitism.
It's just beyond the pale. You know.
It's interesting that I keep going back to us that. Brian mast also tweeted the video that code painting.
Oh he loved it.
Yeah, so Brian Mass.
By the way, if you weren't level everything they touch, if you weren't watching it, you're not familiar with Brian Mast. He lost both of his legs in AFGHANISTANUS I think he was in kandahart clearing IDs in twenty ten, and he then tweeting the.
Video to me. Ryan.
It reminds me a lot of the sentiments around the hard hat riot. Remember in nineteen seventy you have all those construction workers in New York City, like the blue collar, proud Nixon construction workers, just absolutely unloading on people associated I think it was with student strikes back in nineteen seventy and that dynamic. You can just see it becoming
just blossoming right now in American politics. It's not in nineteen sixty eight rhyme, but it's close enough to nineteen sixty eight, especially with the Chicago convention approaching and lots and lots of protests planned that you just have this
Joe Biden, for instance, going after the campus protesters. You have this kind of cultural dynamic where he doesn't want to be seen as being on the side of disruptors, being on the side of sort of the far left in an election year, and the politics of this are pretty fascinating in and of itself when you think about
what's going on. You know, the image of the custodian at Columbia getting pinned against the wall by a protester, and the Free Press has had more articles with a couple of different custodians that have come out in the last week. It is an interesting dynamic that's being set up, and I think the politics of that are Brian, what Biden is responding to, what Brian mass is responding to,
what Mike Johnson is responding to. There's something there. But again, I think it's a much bigger problem to dismiss everyone as big when some of these really deeply held opinions are coming from a place that if you dismiss it, you're never going to persuade people away from Aria.
Yeah, because it just comes back around the Biden administration and withholding three thousand, five hundred bombs from Israel will get attacked as being anti Semitic for being insufficiently supportive of Israel, and those are the terms of the debate that Biden himself is established, and he would the more that he becomes critical of Israel's operation in Rafa and in general, which he's going to have to do because he has set himself up, because he has publicly said
so many times that he is opposed to an invasion of Raffa, which at Yahoo seems intent on carrying out. Anyway, he's going to speak out against it, and then his own words we used against him, and he will be told that he's anti Semitic, and because he's insufficiently supportive of Israel's right to quote unquote defend himself.
So and by the way, she mentioned the hardhet right was in the wake of Kent State, so very on the nose. Actually, looking back on that, you might think, why would anyone want to be affiliated with people, you know, getting letting themselves loose on students who were protesting after Kent State. I think this is a very similar dynamic playing out exactly right now. You say, these students are just they genuinely are opposing a mascre for students, for
if there are other fellow students. These students are, you know, in some cases very genuinely protesting what they see is a genocide, in many cases very genuinely protesting that why would you want to be affiliated with the crackdown? And I mean, I think there are pretty obvious political reasons that we're going to see either Joe Biden continue to distance himself from that, but also Republicans embrace the crackdown run on the crackdown.
I think that the difference will be that there's always, there is always a bellicost nationalist element of the working class, and that's and that's what Nixon, you know, was channeling at the time, and that's what was behind that kind of hard hat riot. Currently there's a Democrat in the White House, and it's hard to identify the nationalist impulse right here. It's not like the kids aren't even protesting an American war. Like the kids are protesting an American
fueled and funded and armed war. And so I think that the nationalist impulses that do exist in some elements with the working class will be blunted by the fact that why are they going to stand up for a foreign country? Like standing up for the stars and stripes, Okay, one thing, standing up for a foreign country's right to wage this war with our money harder to I think, get regular people to rally around.
And just one final point because again these you know, the rhymes of history here are pretty strong because the union representing the custodians has actually been putting the screws to Columbia over letting. They're creating an unsafe situation for their employees. Union later, after the hard hat riots said the union's had nothing to do with it.
The men acted on their own.
They did it because they were fed up with violence by anti war demonstrators, those who spat at the American flag and desecrated it. And again this lumping together of legitimate violent protesters that we see today with the actual peaceful practitioners of civil disobedience, that is a problem that it's not going to get better if you don't deal with it by lumping everyone together as a bigot.
Right now, that's I think, in the long.
Term, a serious issue for the right and the sort of pro Israel center. But even just like the pro Western center, you can't if you just continue toss people simply as bigots rather than people with a deeply held, vastly different worldview, it will not pan out well in the long term.
And one thing that we skipped over, but it's worth just keeping an eye on and Powrets reported that it has agreed to interesting language allow basically an American company to occupy the row of port. At the State Department briefing yesterday, a reporter asked the spokesperson Miller about this report and he said they had nothing to add to it.
Was not familiar with what, you know, Howrettes is talking about here, But it is interesting that this is being floated through Harets that Israel might attempt to maintain kind of indefinite control of the Rafa border crossing by outsourcing operation of it to an American mercenary company.
Just just a strange development to.
Keep an eye on, especially as the US, you know, as is building a port outside Gaza as well, amid all of the fears that the occupation that is underway is not going anywhere like that, they're just going to try to lock this area down.
So meanwhile, two huge development stateside. Because former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee for president, continues to be in court in the hush money trial. He was face to face with the porn starring Core yesterday. But at the same time, we're going to get to this in just one moment. One of his biggest trials. A classified document case was
indefinitely postponed by Eileen Cannon yesterday. So let's start first in New York where Stormy Daniels, who is alleged to have had an affair with Donald Trump in two thousand and six in Lake Tahoe.
Looks like that affair likely happened. I don't know that we need the allegedly, but.
But that is of course part of the case, which is why she was testifying on behalf of the prosecution. So we can go ahead and put the first element up here. We're going to roll a clip. This is a clip from CNN of people just talking about what was happening in the courtroom yesterday.
One thing that I've been sort of noticing as this has gone on is that there have been a couple times where she seems to be cracking a joke trying to get a reaction from the jury, and our reporters in the room have noted that the jury hasn't seemed to respond. I mean, what do you make of that.
Humor is risky in the courtroom, especially if you go in with lines like it looks like Stormy. If something happens spontaneously if an easel falls over, people will laugh. They're human, but it's never going to work if you go in there like I'm going to amuse the jury. I'm going to sort of say this clever thing.
So as Jake Tapper Casey Hunton, I think Eli Hoenig, a CNN senior legal analyst, talking about what was happening in the courtroom yesterday, and actually it was a pretty interesting scene in the courtroom yesterday. The judge at one point actually admonished Donald Trump for cursing. And this is a judge, one.
Merchant cursing about like in response to probably just saying bs, probably because there was some reporting that people could audibly hear him saying BS.
And that's right, and that's what the judge again, one merchant was saying. You know, I think he said something like I don't want you, know, you to continue, like I don't want you to embarrass yourself. Basically a patronizing yeah approach from the judge. But he said something like,
you're audibly cussing. And Stormy Daniels meanwhile was regaling the jury, or as Casey hunt was kind of describing their attempting to regale the jury in very colorful terms about what happened allegedly in two thousand and six, going into intimate details, quite literally intimate details about all that. The judge actually cut her off at one point. CNN's analysis said that it seemed like the prosecution was trying to focus Stormy
Daniels on this now substantively. An interesting part of her testimony is that she said her publicists had been trying to sell a story about the affair around the time of the twenty sixteen election, but didn't.
Really get any.
Interest until after the Access Hollywood tape came out, at which point they were able to sell it to what Ami I think is the formal company that was the David Packer and David Packer who has already testified as well the catch and kill attempt, and that's what this hush money trial is about, that there was a hush money arrangement, catch and kill arrangement with this one hundred and thirty thousand dollars payment to Stormy Daniels over what happened.
Now.
She is going to be back in court on Thursday. The judge seemed to be pretty displeased with how everything proceeded, and I think at one point said, of these details needn't have been in court. The point of Stormy Daniels the prosecution getting Stormy Daniels to talk about in detail. You know, she talked about spanking Trump with a magazine. She talked in very, very great detail about what she says happened that night. The point is obviously to establish
that it was something that was real. Thus, here's the incentive for the hush money payment.
You know, if it.
Wasn't a real, gripping story, why would Donald Trump pay this money? Now Trump would and will obviously argue that he paid the money because you know, he's trying to silence somebody who's spreading a vicious lie about his marriage. That's going to be the argument. That has been the argument. But Ryan, that was just quite a scene in the middle of an election.
It's yes, and it's just wild and right.
Like you said, Eileen Cannon, who was Trump appointed as bad as seems about as Trump friendly a a judge as you could possibly get, just basically said never mind about this trial.
Yeah, this is too well.
There be and we got to do all this discovery and there's a lot of work to do, and so we're just gonna punt this and we'll get back to you about when we're gonna when we're gonna have this the one that he seemed that is moving the fastest and that he seems to be the most obviously, I mean a bunch of them. He's kind of obviously guilty of everybody gets their band court.
But come on, like, uh.
Well, whether he's legally guilty or like ethically guilty.
Is exactly like did he do this thing?
Like did he have an affair with Stormy Daniels and then direct hush money payments to silence it in the middle of the campaign?
Yeah, like he did that?
Is it an illegal campaign expense? That's honestly a much tougher question.
Right, because it's this, it's this. They have to prove that, you know, he did that.
He did it, you know, for the campaign reason, and not because he just was embarrassed.
Only for the campaign reason. It can't be for anything.
How do you get inside his head?
Like, does anyone want to get inside his head?
What's going on in there?
And so, yeah, he did the thing, but also so it's the least he's in the least peril. Yeah, Like it's not the only way to me that I can see him going to jail as a result of this Stormy Daniels trial is is through contempt conviction, which almost feels like.
He wants to Yeah, and he could go to jail.
Judge that throw him in Rikers for a day or two and he could have it.
Yeah, I agree with that.
I completely agree with that, because he might see that as something that makes it even ratchets up the stakes even higher for anyone else to throw him in prison, if you know, you sort of test the country's reaction
to a former president actually being thrown in Rikers. And it could just be for a lunch hour, it could be for a day or two in the contempt for him not listening to the instructions of the judge not too you know, yesterday I think he came out of court and said something very vague, like any honest reporter would say that was a.
Crazy day in court, something like that.
But if he keeps pushing this judge who Trump is probably eager to push because again, his daughter is it works for a public relations firm in Chicago who's like top client is Adam Schiff.
You know, it's at they.
Found somebody with liberal family in New York.
Yes, yes, but I mean you can see how Trump would seize on that, and you know, it's I kind of agree with you that he's intentionally pushing this potentially to the brink of going to Jill.
He's He's not far from it at this point at all. And even in.
This case, you've had The New York Times publishing lawyers on the left, progressive attorneys saying that the Brag case is weak. So does Donald Trump want to push the Brag case since it's first here front and center to the brank, get thrown in jail and then sort of see what happens in the rest of the cases. Dare everyone else to, you know, push the country in that direction. I actually think that could possibly be part of the strategy.
And Trump going to wrikers would not only be amazing for the drama, but it would also have potentially long lasting implications for his approach to criminal justice reform.
Every basically every.
Politician who ever goes to jail comes out changed as they see the criminal justice system plago yah let from left to right because experiencing it firsthand, experiencing the incredible dehumanization that goes on in our criminal justice system and experiencing it with other humans who you come to recognize as just.
People you know who've had it, who've had a who you know.
Some of them did horrible things, others didn't and just got caught up in the system, but they're all all humans. And then to have yourself lumped in with them in this dehumanizing system, it changes people and it changes the way they think about the criminal justice system. Now, Trump is not a normal human, so it might be impossible for him to absorb the same kinds of lessons that other people do, given whatever weird kind of psychology goes on inside that that nogat of his.
But it's it's possible.
Anything is possible is possible.
So just a couple of quick bits about the Aileen Cannon case.
So, I don't know, like the a lot.
Of people on the left seeing this is a an in sort of center analyst a big win for the Trump.
This is the documents one where he like classified document let's all the boxes of documents and stuff, right.
Mar Lago classified documents.
And you know, again a lot of people saying there's a win for Donald Trump's a straight win for Donald Trump. Well, maybe Team Trump thinks that, and maybe you know anti Trump people think that, but this could push the case to August and September. So that's where the Trump people right now want the case to land. The prosecution is pushing for a July trial start date to begin. There's going to be a hearing on June twenty fourth, and this is what looks like a win for Team Trump.
They wanted to sort of have a conversation or have a hearing about Biden records, essentially Trump's request for Biden's records, and Aileen can't actually agree to that on June twenty fourth, So that's something coming up fairly quickly, just a little bit over a month away. But the May trial date now will be pushed either to midsummer if the prosecution gets its way, or late summer early fall, within months
of the election. And whether or not that's good for Donald Trump, I actually think is an open question.
Aileen can and did.
I think she makes it an interesting point when she says that this is this case presents some serious novel is the word she used, challenges with classified information, No question about that. So it doesn't seem like an insane decision to me. But pushing it into late summer early fall. I don't know that that's even helpful for Donald Trump, to be honest.
That's an interesting point, yeah, because.
That's when things are going to be really heating up. A lot of the other legal dates are coming up around that time period too, and that's when he has to be campaigning. You know, from just pure political strategy perspective, that's when you would want to be. It's more important to campaigning then than it is in May.
So who knows, Yeah, and what about and so then the Georgia case is just petering along because of the prosecution, and then Jack Smith, what happened to that guy? Still out there like he had a case? What happened his case?
I mean, it's is that case coming?
It's still out there.
The full timeline is like almost impossible to keep track of, and because honestly, precisely, because it keeps changing all the time. I'm looking at it right now. If you get into the fall, So if you push, for example, this one into the fall, CNN has a crazy calendar here. So Fulton County prosecutors proposed trial data is August fifth, which is literally like three weeks after the Republican convention right ahead of a week.
It's about a week before the dem convention.
Yeah, about a week before the den convention.
So his trial would still probably be going on during the Democratic convention. So you'd have a split screen of Democrats giving their speeches in Chicago, protests roiling Chicago, right, and Trump getting prosecuted.
Right.
And remember also that's that would be if Trump's team gets their way, then he can he would be pivoting right before Labor Day or potentially right after Labor Day from that trial back to the Eileen Canon trial. I mean, it's just really crazy, this timeline into the fall, especially if this one changes. And this, by the way, we should mention is what a lot of legal analysty is by far the most serious case.
Against Donald Trump, the Jack Smith one.
The classified documents case.
I mean, it does seem like a slam dunk. But also you're going to you can lock him up for that. I mean, they certainly have locked up plenty of whistleblowers for it.
Yeah.
Actually, it's just impossible for me to believe they'd lock up anybody with any power for that.
Yeah, I mean I don't, I'm I mean, I don't disagree with that. But whether the legal case is probably the best for the prosecution, I guess because they've had some success with the Espionage Act.
Over the years, which is of course what Trump has tried with.
And also he so flagrantly did it, you know, and he's like telling like people, he's like, there's audio of him telling people this is classified. You can't shouldn't have this. It's like like just hilariously like guilty stuff.
Billionaire white collar criminals going to rikers is typically delicious. But if it's going to be Donald Trump, you know, I would really like to see Hillary Clinton too.
If we're going to do this, let's do it.
Lock them all up, let's do it.
Let's yeah, lock them all up.
Put bars around this whole city.
Yeah, probably probably fair. All right, let's move on to TikTok, because Ryan, you actually have some original reporting here. This this is unraveling in a crazy direction, and you have some audio actually.
Yes and so, and it backs up this this crazy exchange that between Secretary Saint Anthony Blincoln and Mitt Romney over the weekend, in which apparently they were they forgot that they were speaking in front of a live audience and were being recorded and just got super honest. So now that the audio that we have, you could to excuse them a little bit because they did not think that they were not in front of a kind of public audience. But somebody leaked it to us. We'll play
that in a moment. But first, here's Romney and Blincoln.
Why has the PR been so awful? I know that's not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that. Which is I mean, as you said, why has a mass disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire, and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It's like, why aren't not screaming about Amas except the ceasefire? Bring over the hostages? It said, It's all the other way around. Typically the Israelis are good at PR. What's happened here?
How have they?
How have they and we been so ineffective communicating the reality is there and our point of view?
How this narrative has evolved. Yeah, it's a great question. I don't have a good answer to that. There one can speculate about what some of the causes might be.
I don't know.
I can tell you this. We were talking about this a little bit over dinner with Cindy. I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over thirty years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment. And when I started out in the early nineteen nineties,
everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment, your house, you picked up a hard copy of the New York Times, to Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and then if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at six thirty or seven o'clock and watched the National Network News.
Now, of course we are on.
An intervenience feed of information with new Impulse's inputs every millisecond, And of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost and the emotion the impact of images dominates. And we can't discount that, but I think it also has a very very very challenging effect on.
The narrative.
A small parenthetical point, which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for US to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I know that's a real interest and the President will get the chance to make action in that regard.
Now, normally, after a clip like that, we'd like to help youeople read between the lines, because sometimes politicians speak in code not there. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they tell you exactly what they're thinking. Another case is Representative Mike Lawler, who was recently in a private meeting with the organization No Labels, which kind of a pro corporate group that tried to recruit Joe Manchin and a bunch of other
people to run for president. He met with some No Labels donors in a private zoom with Josh Gottheimer, who is another of leader of No Labels. And this was what Mike Lawler had to say about his role and Congress's role in the TikTok ben. This audio was obtained by the Intercept. My colleagues of Kale Leasy and prim Tucker wrote about this wrote wrote about his comments, also calling for the FBI to like investigate all campus protests.
But he also spoke about TikTok, which they mentioned. But I wanted to play this clip here.
As Josh pointed out, when you have amas Iran China endorsing these protests, it speaks volume to the absurdity of them. It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the Foreign Supplemental Aid package, because you're seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups for entities or countries to foemen hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment near.
In the US.
So all of this is relevant because as we can put up this third element, TikTok has now sued as was expected to overturn the law on constitutional grounds. First Amendment is very clear. It says Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of the press. Shall make no law. I guess a bunch of Bill of rights are confusing and vaguely written. What does it mean that a well regulated militia allows you to keep in bare arms like you know, even arguing about that for hundreds of years.
Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of the press is pretty straightforward and culturally. The First Amendment has been upheld by kind of the American people who deeply believe in this idea that Congress shall make no law bridging the freedom of press. So, according to Mitt Romney and Mike Lawler, Congress made law to abridge the freedom of the press.
Well, what's interesting about that is they seem to be talking about TikTok as though it is. And Blinken is especially interesting in this context. He's comparing TikTok directly to newspapers and as he says, news networks. Now, I would actually disagree with that, And I think Section two thirty is one of the big questions here about what constitutes a publication, what constitutes a news outlet. If you're just a platform, do you have the same roles and responsibilities
as a newspaper. I think that's genuinely a major question, and I think it's heavily implicated in this conversation about the First Amendment and TikTok. The government is going to argue, for example, that you can say whatever you would say on TikTok. Nobody's right to say it. Whatever you were going to say on TikTok, nobody's.
Saying you can't say that. You can just say it in another form, just not on this forum.
But that becomes again a pretty serious discussion about what the First Amendment actually means. It is again fascinating as what we talked about in the Israel Block and actually we've talked about all of this, or we talked about this all the time. How avoiding the issue saying everybody is either a bigot or they've had their brain poisoned by bigots, as you heard Mike Lawler argue.
In that auditulating the young people, Yes that.
It's not none of these sentiments are legitimate or part of sort of deeper worldviews. That is a huge mistake from Republicans and from sort of center pro Israel people to just dismiss this either as bigotry or purely manipulation. And that's exactly what they're doing. I have like actual serious national security concerns about TikTok. I've had that conversation. We've had that conversation many times. But to be so dismissive is a huge not just a tactical error, but an ideological one too.
And at least Lawler's comment are a little bit less reckless than Blincoln's when it and Romney's when it comes to kind of a legislative intent perspective in when it comes to like giving away the game, because at least he's sticking to this idea that actually is Hamas and Iran and China that are using the platform to manipulate. However, the laws, like the law is specific to like China and a couple other countries. What he's really talking about
the content. What's so clear is that this really is content based, Yeah, and that means it's a violation of the First Amendment.
And you may remember when the Osama Bin lad Laden letter went viral just a few months ago, and there was this panic about how the algorithm may have been tweaked by Beijang to get all of these young Americans to discover the bin Laden letter and post about how it really changed the perception of the US negative direction. And I think part of the problem here is that
is entirely possible and entirely problematic. That should be something that legislators are concerned about and they deal with, and that is front and center on their minds.
But there was some.
Really excellent reporting tracing the arc of virality in that particular place, and it looks like it had nothing to do with TikTok, tweaking the algorithm, and everything to do with organic sentiment among young people who were discovering the bin laden letter for the first time and saying, oh, my goodness. You know, was it totally naive from my perspective, yes, but saying, oh my goodness, this completely radically changed my
perception of the United States. The evidence that it was organic and then maybe it had like a streisand effect is yes.
Well, you know, you know what really happened, I think from from watching that whole bin laden letter virality take off.
Yeshar Ali, Yes, remember this.
So he's a power Twitter user who identified this phenomenon.
International amount of mystery on.
TikTok and he found like three clips of people doing this on TikTok, and he brought it over to Twitter, yes, and shared it with the boomers on Twitter.
Yes, And the Boomers had a moral.
Panic streisand effected it.
Yes.
And so then that moral panic is what poured the gasoline on a couple of sparks.
It's a good Washington Post article on this.
Yeah.
So the idea that China did it is kind of undercut by the fact that we know who did it. It was your shar It's like he's the one that super charged it. And I don't think did he respond to that, like, I'm not sure. I think he said, well, look, I was identifying a real phenomenon. It's not my fault that you all panicked and freaked out about it.
The same thing, though, is true if you look at the one thing that people like Lawler will point to is the breakdown in posts that are pro Palestine versus pro Israel on TikTok. To the extent that we can actually break that down, it's dramatically different. You know, more pro Palestine posts on TikTok than there are pro Israel posts on TikTok, and that is pointed at and said,
this is evidence of form manipulation. Again, it's entirely possible that is true, but there's significant evidence that shows that breakdown looks a lot like how young people view the
breakdown themselves. And there was an interesting poll this week that found that the issue is not rated among the most important for college students, so they're more likely to say the most important issue to them is healthcare and education financing and all of that doesn't mean that they don't think that the United States and Israel are wrong in the conflict, because public opinion polling on that shows they do, and that the TikTok breakdown actually matches the
opinion breakdown better than anything else.
Right, And it's all relative.
So for Romney to say, you know, there's more pro Palestine stuff on TikTok than there is anywhere else. Two things on that people who post all the time about Palestine on TikTok will tell you, like, there is still significant censorship.
There's so much censorship.
On TikTok of pro Palestinian content that people you know who were told that, you know, the Chinese must be you know, juicing the stats for hamas or like, are you crazy, Like you go on here and try to post pro Postinian content and see what happens. But it's relative to these American companies, right that massively put their
thumb on the scale. So China kind of just has their thumb on the scale against Palestinians less than the American and other platforms, which make it, you know, very very difficult to push pro Palestinian content through without being censored and shadow band and so on. Setting that all aside, the way that Blake and Romney frame it is just kind of.
Incredible, just a pr problem.
How did we just how did we lose the narrative?
Should have hired Don Draper just appear.
It's not the thirty four thousand plus killed. It's not the more than thirteen fourteen thousand children killed. It's not it's not blocking humanitarian aid. It's not deliberately targeting a world's central kitchen staffers.
It's none of that.
It's the fact that we used to have the New York Times, Watch Post and Wall Street Journal and evening news, and we could then shape the narrative that was being delivered to people. Now they can see for themselves what is going on that they then followed that up with therefore, that's why we banned that and are trying to go back to where we could put things in a bottle. Is a moment of just such absolute self unawareness, just a word, self awareness.
Obama pining for like the position that she didn't ping was in the reserve of a big this is this is what he did Trump agree on, yes, and this is blinkin pining for like the days of John Foster Dulles where he could just just call Climb magazine, which he still can you know, he's he's still but it doesn't have the same Yeah, exactly, it doesn't have the
same power. The last time I say on this is it's also people are making the mistake of assuming this was the same thing with like the Russian interference that actually, like to the extent that it did happen, it was those silly viral memes and everything that what China would want to do is to strictly advance the Palestinian cause in the United States as opposed to destabilized public opinion. That's really what Russia was trying to do back in twenty sixteen. Was so discord you know, they were of
the memes. There were some really cheesy, awful pro like right memes and some really cheesy awful pro BLM pro left memes. So even what their conception of what might be happening here is just in this sort of box that it's either going to be China wants us all
to be pro Palestine because China supports the Palestinians. China just wants us at each other's throats if anything like that looks like the strategy looks like the long term strategies to weaken Americans love of America frankly, and to sow discord, which is similar to how Russia has approached it for decades.
Too, and how Voice of America approaches it.
You know, radio free are all of these Yeah, I'm not wrong, it's not right.
We love the so descent also and prop up like civil society organizations that profess to have concerns about human rights and so.
Yeah. No, now he's doing anything new, No, not at all.
We will never escape the Cold War.
Vledi Mcputin's inauguration is happening right now in Russia. I don't know if you caught this big news, Ryan, but Steven Sagal is there. He was there to support Vitamin Lutin as his inauguration unfolded this week.
It's his fifth term.
I think by the end of this term he will actually have been in power in Russia longer than Stalin was so huge news.
Also, this is the New York Times.
Just as we were talking, reports a large Russian missile and drone assault caused serious damage to several power plants. Across Ukraine early Wednesday. According to Ukrainian officials, it's Russia's fifth attack, The New York Times says on energy facilities just in this last month and half. Part of their campaign, as The Times describes it, to cut off electricity to the big swaths of Ukraine and to make life harder for Ukrainian civilians. Meanwhile, Ukraine is saying that it arrested
two kernels. We can put the first element here up on the screen, two colonels who had taken money from Russia. Allegedly, according to Ukrainian prosecutors, charged them with treason, charged one of them with a terrorist act, a terrorist act, attempted terrorist act. They had allegedly taken drones and ammunition from the FSB to assassinate Vladimir Zelenski, President of Ukraine. Obviously this is that they had taken money from the FSB,
So those drones, those ammo money. There were assassination attempts, I mean there have been. Zelenski has had a number of close calls of course of the war. Sometimes that's just from him like going to the front lines, but there were also attempts last August and in April. According to officials on Zelenski's life. It's some amazing how many brushes
with death that Selenski's had. Ryan This one is particularly interesting given that the allegation here is Russia paid to Kernels to assassinate Zolensky, which means that Russia's penetrated.
The inner circle of Zelenski.
Also interesting because it means potentially people on the American payroll in some indirect way or potentially direct way, depending on how you look at our funding, were paid by the FSP to assassinate Zolensky.
And one more reason that, as Trump said to the Israelis, is you need to wrap up your war?
Like, yes, a good reason to wrap up this war.
Like the American advisors to the Ukrainian forces at this point are chiefly and almost solely focused on advising the Ukrainians how to hold the territory that they currently have. The idea that they are going to be able to put together enough of a a manpower and military power structure to wage a counter offensive and retake territory is no longer taken seriously by American advisors who are basically
running the strategy for the Ukrainians. So if they have acknowledged that, then why keep fighting if it is possible to get a deal, Like if peace defends the same territory that you currently have, why would you not choose that rather than war, which comes at a much higher
risk of collapsing. Now, a peace deal can collapse. Peace deals throughout history eventually always have collapsed, Like we always get another war at some point, But the current war has significant risks to the Ukrainian front lines and forces who could collapse at any point and then could see major Russian gains. And now you're negotiating from an even weaker position, and you may even have you know, Zelenski assassinated.
And there's why at this point are we continuing this other than the fact that the money was appropriated and it's got to be spent.
Maybe I just answered my own question.
Well, and the assassination of Zelenski isn't just about Zelensky. Potentially, if it were to happen tragically, it would mean complete
destabilization of the government and already unstable government. There's also worth mentioning that the energy attack that Ukrainian officials say happened just today while we were taping this comes as Ukraine is looking for more air defense, basically the air defensive weapons, its ability to protect its energy sources, and amid all of that, it's asking I think Spain maybe even like a couple of other countries directly for this right now, talking about Romania also has been in talks
about this.
So I agree with everything you just said. Ryan.
Here's an interesting quote from Zelenski. He said, today, everyone who so this is right as Russia is about to commemorate World War two, Ukraine is commemorating World War two. Zelenski says, today everyone who remembers World War Two and has survived to this day feels a sense of deja vu. Russia has brought the terrible past back into the daily lives, proving into the daily news, proving with each crime that
Nazism has revived. Surely Lant Putin is going to also invoke Nazism tomorrow from the other side of the conflict.
Just really ugly, really ugly stuff.
So Zelenski's saying Putin's a Nazi now, yes, And Mike Johnson is saying that the camp's protesters are Nazis.
There's Nazis everywhere.
Everyone is a Nazi.
Nazism, everyone is either Hamas or a Nazi.
Did you see that?
Maybe both?
Did you see Tom Brady?
Oh?
Actually there is a whole Hamas or Nazis thing.
Oh? Absolutely? Did you see the Tom Brady roast?
No heard Tom Brady he's a Nazi hitler.
Yeah it was. That was a bit by Tom Sugura and Bert Krischner.
I heard it was good. I gotta go back it is.
I think you'll like it. I think you'll like it. But yeah, everybody's a Nazi. We can't escape the Cold War, we can't escape World War two.
We are perpetually reliving the twentieth century for partisan football game.
Right, and as crystalin Soccer covered, the UK Foreign minister recently said that it's okay for Ukraine to use its long range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, and Putin responded by saying if they do that that he considers the UK a legitimate target, and also launched a tactical nuclear weapons scenario planning strategy gaming out which he said was in response to this Western provocation. And you have to say that he's correct to say that it is
Western provocation. To shift from it is not okay to launch you Western long range missiles into Russia. To say actually it is okay to launch like that is an escalation and a provocation. Yeah, why at this date, like how it almost feels like the West just hates Ukraine and is baiting Russia to just overruns it's decrepit front lines.
Well, it's it's constantly living at the end of World War two in the Cold War. I mean, that's where people like the and Apple bombs of the West and the Tony Blinkns of the West are focused like just it's it's only the end of World War two, the beginning of the Cold War. Those are the only possible dynamics. And that's why NATO needs to expand all the way to Ukraine. That's why it needs to you know, bring in Finland, and that's why it needs to.
Move further and further towards Russia. Essentially, is because we're still.
At the the dawn of the Cold War era after World War Two, the stakes are at the exact same and in some respect it is true the stakes are the same, like nuclear war, same stakes, but we've now had one hundred years nearly to learn from.
Actually, we've had just under one hundred years to learn, which is interesting you itself.
How new the technology is how to navigate these waters, and we refuse to learn those lessons, are constantly stuck exactly before any of those lessons could have been learned.
So you wanted to talk about a new phenomenon around gen z debt.
Yeah, so the Wall Street Journal had to report we can put this up on the screen because I want to juxtapose it with something that went viral just a couple of weeks ago. Ryan, I don't know if you remember this headline from the Economist. We'll get to it in a second, but here's the Wall Street Journal. They say gen Z sinks deeper into debt and all a little bit from the beginning, bless you. They say young Americans are starting out with more credit card debt than
generations before them. That financial burden can have long lasting effects, no kidding. The rising debt load largely reflects a surge in prices for food and shelter, food and shelter at the start of their careers, coupled with a larger percentage
of gen Z who graduated with student loans. Now, the average credit card balance for twenty two to twenty four year olds was two eight hundred and thirty four dollars in the last quarter of last year, compared with an average inflation adjusted balance of about twenty two hundred dollars in the same period in twenty thirteen. That's according to TransUnion data from TransUnion.
Younger people with.
Higher debt are more delinquent on credit card payments and need to rely on family for help if they lose their jobs. They economists and financial advisors. They also often delay life milestones, including home ownership and marriage, say the economists, Yes, obviously, now right, it was up about ten percent, a little bit, yeah, ten years, Yeah, about ten percent and ten years.
They also compare it though with boomers.
Another new zeala that compared gen Z to boomers recently was the Economists, and this one fairly viral on Twitter. There were a lot of conversations. It looked like libertarian Twitter was just gloating over this. Gen Z is unprecedentedly rich. That's the headline from the Economist. Just a couple of weeks so. That was published on April sixteenth, and the economists wrote gen Z is taking over in the rich world.
There are at least two hundred and fifty million people be towarnt between born between ninety seven and twenty twelve, about half renown a job in the average American workplace. The number of gen Zers working full time is about to surpass the number of full time baby Boomers, those born between forty five and sixty four. America now has more than six thousand Zoomer chief executives and a thousand Zoomer politicians.
And they're saying that, you know, gen.
Z's full time employment makes them puts them ahead of boomers and millennials. I would assume Ryan, that's mostly due to women in the workforce.
And millennials because of the two thousand and eight financial crisis and the massive recession. Because what well, y'all gen Z people don't remember is what.
It was like to have high unemployment.
And you know, except for COVID, although a lot of them were still in.
School, right and you got and there was a six hundred dollars a week, you know, unemployment bonus on top
of your regular unemployment. So, but the idea of looking for a job and being unable to find it, it is something that people obviously still experience, but nowhere near at the scale that they experienced in the twenty tens, and then also in like the late seventies, eighties into the early nineties, which is and it's a tragedy that there's been this kind of cultural memory holding of the pain of unemployment because we have been grappling with the
pain of inflation instead, and it has made people kind of forget how good it is to be able to tell your boss to f off and go to another job, to tell your boss that you and your coworkers have organized the union and there's nothing they can do about it except recognize it, and so on.
So the journal goes on to talk about credit scores. So as interest rates have climbed over the past two years, those credit scores have taken a hit. The drop was most drastic for millennials with credit scores between six sixty and seven nineteen, who scores fell by twenty six points.
Gen Z wasn't far behind.
The average credit score change for gen Z with credit scores above seven twenty fell twenty four points during that time period, according to credit Karma.
Now another thing.
Forbes wrote about this recently. They said, eugen Z is not just doing okay, we're actually the authors a zoomer, actually really well off as a whole. In twenty twenty two, nearly a third of twenty five year old Americans. We're already homeowners, outpacing both millennials and Gen X at the same age. Our luxury spending is expected to grow three times faster than older generations. So if we do ex suppose that luxury spending with credit card debt, that's an
interesting thing too. It depends on how you're classifying luxury spending, obviously, but there's also just this moment of really cheap luxury that's accumulated in the wake of you know, China and flooding our market with all kinds of different goods, with influencer culture and all of that.
It's just like people spend.
Because if you can't afford a home, and I think that's part of what this is speaking to. I'm curious what you think about this. Ran is people are having dramatically different experiences, and that was true of millennials. Obviously, this is always partially the case, but I think it's especially been it's been acute for millennials and Gen Z, where you whether you're doing well or poorly, you're going to be doing really well or really poorly, that there's
this sort of polarization of people's experiences. And for gen Z, if you're not in that third of homeowners, you know, probably to get by, you are loading up on credit card debt, and you probably are purchasing what might be classified as a luxury. And we've seen this kind of happening. As luxuries get cheaper more affordable, it's easy to kind of load up on them just to get by in the misery of like being a renter perpetually and trying to dig out of the hole when you feel like
there isn't a lot of room for upward mobility. You may be employed, but you may not feel like you're in a space where there's a lot of room for growth. You were, you know, promised that college education was your ticket to the middle class, and instead I've heard this from some of my friends that you just you already have fifty thousand dollars in debt, so why not take
the vacation. And we may disagree with that, and you know, we could get Dave Ramsey here and he could disagree with that, but the justification for it is fairly obvious.
And one thing that doesn't get talked about a lot is that millennials also got subsidized services. They were subsidized by the federal reserves, like zero interest rate policies. It's quantitative vis and it pumped Silicon Valley full of money. Silicon Valley was then willing to lose lots of money on these different apps services, uberft, uber eats, food delivery, like all of that stuff was losing huge amounts of money.
And they were able to lose that money because they were trying to grow their membership, and that was entirely subsidized by the Federal Reserve. It was just handing money to these Silicon Valley executives who then believed that they were geniuses, you know, for making an app that helps you get food, you know, from McDonald's to your house. And so it was so cheap to get an uber and to get uber eats and the rest of it that it became embedded in the culture that gen Z
then inherited. Yes, then they turned the spigot off, and the price of ubers and lifts and and the meal deliveries, you know, went up to a place where the companies are actually trying to make profit instead of just relying on the on the Federal Reserve doal that money is coming out of gen Z budgets. That's point in a way that millennials didn't have to pay it before, and it's kicked off this like really you know, crazy discourse
around food delivery and such. But underlying it all is a real structural change in the economy that people may not necessarily identify as having occurred on their watch.
But they feel it.
Yeah, that they feel it at the end of the month when they're like, oh, my credit card debt is higher than it was last month and higher than it was before, and I just cannot make things work anymore.
Why, What's what's going on? What am I doing wrong?
I'm really curious.
Actually, that's such a good point, because I'm really curious how many of those kind of gig economy expensive are classified as luxury expenses in the calculations that Forbes was citing, Because if you're classifying uber eats as a luxury expense, but you know, at this point, you're somebody whose entire life has been sort of built around like maybe you don't have a car because you've always relied on fairly cheap Uber eats delivery before you know, maybe prices keep
going up higher and higher. You just didn't get a car. You live in a city and you didn't need a car, You didn't need to go take a bus to go to this restaurant. Or whether or not this is wise spending is a different question than whether or not people reasonably came to rely on it because prices were lower than.
They're getting now. So I think that's it.
And even Uber in and of itself, maybe you didn't buy a car because Uber was really cheap and easy to use and the car that you were in the city that you lived in, is that classified as a luxury expense or how is that? How are prices going up in some of these things that have become really baked into the lifestyles of a lot of younger people because it was like there that they breathed, It's the way that the city worked.
How was that being classic?
Yeah, I think the car point is a much stronger one just from a.
Food delivery sympathetic perspective, because it's like, yeah, like you budgeted the past, it was going to cost you x amount of money to take ubers and so as a result, you're like, you know what, there's also subways and buses and and I'm going to cobble that together, and I'm not going to get a car, So you don't get a car. Then the cost of ubers goes through the roof, while at the same time, the cost of audio insurance and the costs of cars has gone through the roof.
So you're kind of stuck either way.
As a gen xer, I see the food delivery debate, and I'm like, come on, you look, get on your bike, go walk to the place and pick your own food up or cook it home like you can.
Like there's lots of YouTube videos you can learn. You know, you can cook something.
So I hear you.
But but even as somebody with antipathy to that whole position, I recognize that the rug was pulled out from people in the sense that culturally and economically it was dirt cheap to get all this stuff because of the FED. Yes, and now all of a sudden it's not cheap, and you've built your life.
So I can I can tisk people.
But things did change, yes, yes, and it change up boiling the frog kind of way and just slowly getting more and more expensive, until all of a sudden you're like whoa, Right, this was forty dollars for this bowl, right and then yeah bowl?
But come on, and obviously before and after the pandemic some of this is different. But I think the point about Uber is a really really interesting one. And you think about, like, for example, Spotify, I bet that's I bet that's classified as a luxury good. Would they have classified a Wall Street Journal subscription twenty years ago as a luxury good? Because honestly, a lot of people subscribe to Spotify for their playlists, but also because it's probably their primary source of news.
Is probably where they.
Get the podcast or else you're going to get breaking points.
That's right, Well you can get it everywhere that you download your podcast and that you stream your podcast.
Right.
But seriously, I mean there's all of these kinds of things that are just different than they were in previous generations. That Spotify is profitable, I believe, but Uber is still not a profitable.
Company, which is insane to me. Full of Uber does nothing.
Uber has, like Google Maps and like PayPal, laid over each other with a chat app in there, and they don't do anything after that. The driver, you know, buys the car, puts the gas in the car drives the car, the user connects with the driver. How this middleman can't figure out how to make a profit.
They can, they just don't want to.
They want to keep writing it out because they can keep getting the money.
I mean, it's it's a vicious cycle.
Anyway.
Anyway, that's enough of us doing the Simpsons meme of old man yelling at cloud.
Probably for this wednes there.
I think so.
Probably.
Yeah, make sure to subscribe so that Ryan can continue getting like colored blue suits.
Well it's the same one for Lemon. Yeah, should I get one more?
I don't know.
It's probably enough.
We'll start to gofund me actually instead of a go fod to, just subscribe.
To and what you'll get is the debate that we're going to post on Thursday night Friday. If you're not a subscriber, it's going to be between Glenn Greenwall and Ilia Shapiro arguing the right to protest on campus and everything related.
Yeah, I'm really excited about that one.
You can also get these fun counterpoint counterpoints mugs there you go on breakingpoints dot com. But make sure, yes, subscribes, you get that Friday show early.
We've been having a lot of fun with the Friday show.
These are classified by the Wall Street Journal as necessity rather than a luxury.
Yes, by Forbes, you mean, how dare you two very different right Forbes Patience. Yes, but we've been having a lot of fun with the Friday shows. We appreciate all the feedback, all the support for it. Appreciate Crystal and Sire continuing to support the show. Last week's debate got some Between the Don Lemon interview, the debate with Destiny and Omar, things have been off to hell of a Star at Ryan So been a lot of fun.
We have a lot more fun planned to.
It's been interesting. So I guess we'll see you on Friday.
See you then,