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All right, good morning, and welcome to Counterpoints. The Hunter Biden fallout continues. We're going to start with that. We're going to talk a little bit today about what Barack Obama has to say.
Ryan, I think you have some thoughts on this.
He said wealth got concentrated and it just caused to promise him that wealth.
It just got concentrated.
We'll see Brian's been spending some time with Sager this week, so I'm curious to see if he's been radicalized in.
The other directions.
We'll see.
Maybe I'll be on the left in that one and Ryan.
Will be on the right. Maybe.
And then we're going to get to Donald Trump. There's a court date that was announced for his documents trial and all kinds of stuff continues to happen in the twenty twenty four campaign because he sat down with Brett Baer for a pretty interesting interview.
So that is coming up.
We're going to talk about the ruling that is expected on student debt from the Supreme Court next week. We're gonna talk about Andrew Taits case. Ryan has a great
monologue prepared for everyone on Venezuela. I'm going to talk a little bit about the tragedy unfolding at sea right now as the Titanic rescue efforts continue, and we're super excited to be joined once again by Justin Goodman from Whitecoat Waste, who's going to talk to us about more lablaque evidence that Whitecoat Waiste and others have been uncovering.
Ryan, that's a lot. That's a lot for one.
Day, but the news doesn't and the Supreme Court is possibly a gut the administrative state. Yes, make sure you don't get student debt relief and eliminate affirmative action.
We're going to talk about their upcoming cases.
Yes, we're expecting Supreme Court cases next Thursday, I believe starting next Thursday, and that'll all be going on next week. So but some big changes could be happening to the country in the next week or so. You wanted to mention a little bit about Virginia at the top here.
Oh yeah, real quickly. And so in Virginia, there were primaries last night. The Working Families Party endorsed seven candidates, which is a pretty decent proxy for kind of the progressive verse, kind of centrist, moderate pro business wing of the party. And of those seven, five of them swept, including knocking out a couple incumbents who had been there for a very long time. One of them called himself a Joe Manchin Democrat, and other of whom have been
pretty right wing Democrat. The Virginia Senate Virginia House are going to be much different than they were before. Dick Saslaw, who's the I think has been Senate President since Thomas Jefferson founded that state, probably even before that, is retiring.
He had this amazing quote in the Washington.
Post where he said, why do you want to run these people out of office? He's talking to the voters about these incumbents that are getting beaten, and he says, vote for me.
I'm different their whole thing.
So he's angry that these candidates ran saying that they're going to do something different and that voters elected them on that platform.
Yeah, it's confounding, really why people want something new.
It's so crazy. It just might work.
I think Barack Obama might have an answer for him.
Yes, we'll get to that in the next segment, but for now, the fallout from Hunter Biden. Again, Ryan and Sager covered this yesterday, but he is going to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors. He struck a deal with federal prosecutors where they are resolving that felony firearm charge and that was all announced by the DOJ yesterday. They're going to recommend a sentence, just a probation for those tax charges that was in twenty seventeen and twenty eighteen.
He owed like some hundred thousand dollars in federal taxes in twenty seventeen and then yeah, at least one hundred thy in twenty eighteen as well. So this is you know that you have right off the bat, Tucker Carlson, He's got his new show on Twitter, comes out swinging with an episode, and we have some sound from that.
Here this morning. Hunter Biden pleaded guilty to pretty much nothing. Biden pled to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges, then entered a diversion on a federal gun charge.
That's it.
As far as Merrick Garland's Justice Department is concerned, Hunter Biden is done. There was no pre dawn raid carried live simultaneously on CNN. There was no purp walk, no handcuffs, no press conference. Above all, there was no felony. Hunter Biden, who broke federal gun laws can still carry a gun. It's like it all never happened. In fact, the Justice Department just baptized Hunter Biden. A lifetime of sins washed
away in an instant. It was a secular miracle. Most miraculous of all, Hunter Biden somehow escaped a farret charge. Farah is the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and it is exactly what its name suggests. Under federal law, if you are acting as an agent of a foreign nation in Washington, you were required to register with our government to let everybody know.
So.
Paul Maniford was locked up on a fair charge not too long ago. On the other side of the aisle, I think Tony Podesta was hit with one but didn't get any time, and I want to say Gates did as well.
Yeah, and I think somebody else he mentioned somebody else from the Trump campaign who wound up getting hit with one as well. Oh, Elliott Broydy. It was kind of Trump Trump fundraiser.
Entirely fair, fair charge and all.
Yes, okay, some of these some of these folks are right. And it raises the question, then, well, what was Hunter
Biden doing other than kind of lobbying. The only possible defense I could imagine consultant for him would be that he was such a bad lobbyist that he actually never did any lobbying, and that prosecutors looked for any contact that he made between himself and anybody in the government to actually do the things that he told his clients he was going to do and maybe couldn't find it, because you do find you do see a lot of emails where he's sending notes to his colleagues saying, Hey,
get this meeting for this guy, get this meeting for that guy. It would be funny if the reason they didn't charge him was because he just shirked his job. Like I mean, we know that he was on a year's long bender at this time, that he was supposed to be doing foreign agent work, but literally he was doing work for foreign governments, and not just foreign governments, but like Burisman is not a foreign government, but it's linked to the government, and it is.
You still have to register as a foreign agent.
If you're just serving on the board and giving them advice on how to build a pipeline in Ukraine, then you don't actually have to register. But that's not what he's doing. He's not like an expert when it comes to natural guests. His whole thing is influence. Maybe it's just look, we got his name, he doesn't.
Have to do anything.
I mean, that's an interesting point because he obviously was incompetent. But at the same time, there are photos of his clients on the golf course with his dad.
Or they got there. They clearly got there somehow and they paid him and got there. Yeah.
Yeah, And we have evidence of him email wise setting up meetings the Cafe Milano meeting for instance, which is a super swanky restaurant in Georgetown, that his dad was at the same place with his client. So I just have a really hard time believing they didn't find any reason to charge him with a fair violation they claim, by the way, that the investigation is ongoing, so we'll
see if anything else comes of that. I also think Tucker raises an interesting point of tension with the lefts I guess stance on gun controls and gun control laws and drug violations where it puts Hunter Biden right now.
For instance, Joe Biden himself has lobbied.
For people to have more to have more of a stringent approach to if you are charged with a drug and a firearm violation, that's actually a huge swath of you know, of problems in the country, a huge swath of crime. Is that combination of violating both a weapons law and druggle at the same time. It's a combination that Democrats and a lot of Republicans as well would say should be a very big problem for someone who's being charged in court and he's basically getting.
A slap on the wrist there.
And if we can actually put up a four on this.
You heard from Kodak Blacks lawyer, and you heard it from a lot of different people. Wesley's you know people we've mentioned Wesley Snipes on the show yesterday who went to jail for not paying taxes, but here's Kodak Blacks lawyer saying, look, you commit this crime, you're looking at several years in jail, in federal prison.
Like that's it is extremely unusual.
Now, I think that on the left, at least now maybe among the kind of democratic party, there's a lot of resistance to seeing Hunter go to jail. I think on the left, if you locked Hunter Biden up for a gun charge or for foreign agent, you know, not registering as a foreign agent. Okay, good, you got him, try it, try lock him up.
The real life is not our boy, not the establishment democrat. Yes, yes, of course, this is actually from the federalists. In twenty twenty one, fewer than one percent of cases filed by US attorneys and federal court resulted in the kind of pre trial diversion offered to Hunters. So fewer than one percent of cases. This is from Brett Tolman. He says, if Hunters were a typical case, we would have expected
a much more aggressive deo j response. Mixing illegal drugs and firearms is usually a quick trip to the land of five or seven year mandatory minimum sentences. And again, Hunter Biden is looking at probation essentially.
And I think the real story is that normally they wouldn't have prosecuted it at all. They're only going after this, They're only going after Kodak because.
It's like a famous rapper.
And if Biden hadn't run for president in twenty twenty, they probably never looked at this even at all, and so then when they finally had to look at it, they're so reluctant to bring charges that they get this thing, like you said, less than one percent. Just absolutely appalling for anybody who thinks that there's kind of equal protection under the laws. Joe Biden, who has consistently said my son has done nothing wrong.
Which is now at odds with Hunter saying.
It felt like a lie, so brazen that it wasn't a lie. It's like, it's like we have photos of him doing things wrong all the time. And so for you then say he wrote about it in his book, for you to tell us to our faces that he did nothing wrong, we know that you're either completely delusional or you're just saying this because it's because your son. Anyway, he was asked about it at an event about artificial intelligence yesterday, and here here's what he said, real quickly to day two.
I'm very proud of my song.
Donald Trump had a slightly different reaction. We can put up a three.
Here's the Trump's truth social mostly all caps. The Hunter Joe Biden settlement is a massive cover up and full scale election interference scam in quotes the likes of which has never been seen in our country before, a quote traffic ticket, and Joe is all cleaned up and ready to go into the twenty twenty four presidential election. And this as crooked DOJ state and city prosecutors, Marxists and communists all hit me from all sides and angels with bull.
Angels with bull he means angles with bullshit, but he said angels with.
Bulls all sides and angles with bull bleep. I see America great again.
I would listen to like asmr Ryan Grim reading Trump social media boks.
I just accepted truth socials cookies. I wonder what I don't wonder what weird virus. I'm going to wind up on my luck on my laptop here. I mean, this is bonker stuff. But he's not wrong that this is not the kind of proportionate response a Department of Justice is normally going to give to a defendant, but like Trump.
Also wants two tiers of justice for I'm sure Jared Kushner and I'm sure himself in different cases and people associated with him in different cases. And by the way, there are two tiers of justice in the sense that we've talked about this last week. There are charges in you know, violations of the Espionage Act that Donald Trump is being hit with that you could technically also probably get Joe Biden with. Whether the case would have been
brought without the obstruction is another question. So in that sense, yes, sometimes there are two tiers of justice. The entire Russia collusion narrative.
Was spun up. The pis a warrant.
The lack of punishment for people, you know, you basically just have Kevin Klinsmith getting in trouble. But that's sure, we can all agree that's wrong. But that doesn't mean that people in positions of power who are hit with partisan justice really want there to be one.
Tier of just right.
Everybody wants there to be two tiers.
They just disagree on who belongs in which tier, and they all agree that they don't belong in jail.
Yes, yes, yeah, that's true. The New York Posts I think raised a good question. They actually wrote an editorial and they raised a question about the timing. So they say, again, this investigation began back in twenty eighteen, and we know the.
Fed soon had enough evidence to convict them.
The chargers finally brought perhaps before and surely soon after the twenty twenty election. Are we supposed to believe they held off so long because they were looking into more consequential crimes, only to suddenly decide that they couldn't prove anything else. I think this coming a week after the Trump charges down from Jack Smith, it is you know, you were in the new election cycle.
It eerily.
Jonathan Turley predicted last August, so August of twenty twenty two that the Hunter Biden chargers would end in quote controlled demolition.
That's exactly what this feels saying.
What's so frustrating is that their added statement that the investigation remains ongoing, because I don't really believe that it's ongoing.
If it were ongoing, great, can you know, continue.
To prosecute because there's a lot of stuff, like you said the Cafe Milano meeting, like check that one out.
Did he arranged for that? If he did?
If you can prove it foreign Agent Registration Act violation. But by saying that the investigation is still ongoing, what it allows them to do is not comment on that ten twenty three, that Comer is all Comber and Grass are all fired up about, and anything else that involves the case, well, we can't comment because.
Ongoing investigation. What can I do?
Yeah, And on that note, that's another interesting point because it's this entire, this entire question about Joe Biden twenty twenty four election, Hunter Biden, the controlled demolition question, Like all of this.
Is not improving anybody's.
Faith in our institutions, in our law enforcement, in the FBI. And so now you have the very obvious controlled demolition of Hunter Biden and the real question over and over again, and Republicans that are sort of thirsty for, you know, the bloodlust for the Biden family. They're not even great at doing this themselves. This is about Joe Biden at the end of the day. And right now all we're talking about is Hunter Biden. And that's fine because there's
a good reason to talk about Hunter Biden. But the Cafe Milano meeting, all of these different things that tend for the big guy that's about the sitting president of the United States, and all of that is first.
And foot and should be first and foremost on our mind.
But Hunter is such an easy side show because we have the pictures from the laptop, and it's much easier for the media to talk about Hunter Biden and for Joe Biden to say he's proud of his.
Son and that's fine, he's a father.
Then actually focusing on what the sitting president of the United.
States might have been doing, it's a sideshow.
I think the silver lining from all this, though, is that all of the existential angst of an anxiety of going through this process is going to help Hunter produce some of the greatest artwork that he's made in his career.
Maybe, so, let's hope.
And then again, those prints will be available for sale for the low price of seventy five thousand dollars.
We should get one for the seven.
We're to a fundraiser from the audience. We're we try to raise seventy five thousand dollars so that we can get at least one Hunter print.
And maybe some access to Ukrainian oligarchs.
That's right, Oh, it'll pay for itself many times over.
Well, it's help absolutely.
Let's move on to his new comments made by former President Barack Obama, who is on obviously the podcast circuit right now, because what else.
Do you do?
Which is slaying in Netflix? His Netflix documentary?
I don't even know, so he's obviously not doing a good enough job pedaling it.
Why isn't he here?
He can't be far. He must be in DC. He's certainly close.
I'm sure he's doing by zoom.
Yeah, well that's well, I guess yeah, you're probably right. So on that note, speaking of which, if he is doing it by zoom, his audio is fantastic. Let's listen to this sound by a former president Barack Obama on David Axterrod's podcast.
The crisis in democracy that you're seeing not just in the United States but around the world is not solely an issue of economics, but it is partially. These huge economic disruptions. The speed with which wealth got concentrated, the speed with which people's lives were disrupted, made people worried
and scared. And when people are worried and scared about not just their future but their kids' futures, then the appeal of right wing populism, the appeal of sort of a more cynical view of the social order, and it's dog eat dog, and you've got to kind of choose up your tribe because it's a zero sum game. All that stuff accelerates and expresses itself in our politics.
Okay, So he just said right wing populism there by the way, which is really interesting from the man who when he was leaving office his own.
Party rigged a primary.
And still you have the surge of a populist like Bernie Sanders that is able to nip at the heels of the former Secretary of State, former first Lady who has basically the entire apparatus of the party behind her. And he's just talking there about the concentration of wealth accelerating a rise of right wing as he says, populism, and not looking at the other side of the coin in that analysis at all, which I actually think is pretty interesting.
And what's interesting too is that, and I cover this moment in my last book, is that he sounds a lot like Elizabeth Warren in of twenty eleven talking to Barack Obama.
Right, So, Occupy Wall Street is happening at that.
Docum Wall Street.
He brought her in to set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and then she left to go after it was set up to go run for Senate in Massachusetts.
And so Obama and Warren had kind of an exit interview, first time really that she gets some actual time with Obama, and she says, basically this to him, that wealth, the wealth concentration, wealth got concentrated, the concentration of wealth that he's allowing and engineering to happen is going to produce an inequality that is itself then going to express itself in our politics in the form of right wing popular and that's the kind of thing.
She was saying. And she zeroed in on housing because this.
Is at the height of the eviction crisis, of foreclosure crisis, and that has been the thing that has ripped.
The fabric of our society, you know, the.
Most completely, is the inability of people to live that American dream. The social contract is always involved being able to own a home and grow your wealth through that home, and then the American people then, you know, look the other way on all of the other terrible things that are happening, because that's the thing that is kind of the promise in return, you're going to be able to retire on that you can pass it down to your
kids whatever. Now you can't even afford rent. Ten years on from her warning after that meeting, and she said, you've got to do something policy wise about about where this is headed.
And he's like, I love to hear your ideas are out of time here.
Email me and and we'll talk, you know, and you know, my secretary will give you my personal email. As she as she leaves, she tells the secretary what he said. She's like, yeah, just just email me. I'll make sure he gets it. And they basically never talked about that ever again.
But it's so it's.
Funny to hear him say it now. But I'm curious for your take on this, because I think feel like you somewhat disagree with what he's saying here. There are a lot of Democrats who also disagree and feel like he is downplaying the role of kind of racism and hostility to immigrants and migrants that fueled right wing populism
around this time. And I get beat up every time I point to, you know, economic cataclysms as producing some of these anxieties that, as he says, express themselves in our politics.
So curious where you come down on that.
I think it's definitely the combination. I think you would still have it. Without one, you would still have the other, and you would still have.
I think without without the economic crisis, you'd still have right wing populism, and.
Without the cultural changes you would still have populism, because both are pretty severe. I see, because the rapid concentration of wealth happened very quickly and especially hit certain era is in the Ross Belt, for instance, and Obama actually was reacting to that in two thousand and I actually thought in this clip he was going to go into clinging to guns and religion, one of the most famous quotes that he had based the same thing, almost exactly the same.
He's on the same theme, Yeah, almost.
Exactly the same thing.
And interestingly enough, he was the other side of that coin back in two thousand and eight when he was sort of casting aspersions at right wing populism. He was doing this populism that was left wing but really more palatable to everybody kind of across the board, like a very sort of centrist hope and change type populism, talking about any of the war things that everyone was in agreement with.
At the time.
And then on the other side of this, he you could just look at the mergers that were allowed to happen under his watch that as Matt Stoller I think really appropriately points out, this was not just an economic disruption to borrow the president's word, this was also cultural disruption. So as you have wealth concentrating via these mergers, you also have power over speech concentrating, and you create ideological monopolies.
So both are happening at the same time. You know, when you create economic concentration, you're also when you create wealth concentration, or you allow it to happen just sort of passively, as he says, it just it just happened.
I wouldn't have had anything to do with that.
When you do that, you're also concentrating power. And I think when I look at the Culture War, for instance, those Dear Colleague Letters on Title nine that created basically kangaroo courts on college campuses, that were these he I mean, those were sparks of the culture War flame.
That's where you end up hurdling into gamer Gate.
That's where you end up hurtling into the Dear Colleague letters on Title nines that said gender identity would be conflated legally with biological sex. And that was just via a letter from the Department of Education under Barack Obama, that was his policy.
Kimiopolia at the.
Time said she was like, that's when I knew that Hillary Clinton was losing the election. I saw the Obama administration did that.
Because it's just so divisive.
There was his immigration policy, where he basically just waived a magic wand and used executive powers in a way that a lot of people on the left encouraged him to that.
I mean, I would argue, you probably just agree with this created de facto open borders.
The Beer Summit, which was I think a way that handled the skip gates, the Henry Lewis Kates thing an incredibly divisive way. I think he really fanned the flames on a culture.
Though it's like the Summit bringing people together over beer.
He didn't have to weigh in on it.
I mean, I think that's why the entire weighing in on right.
But it wasn't an easy position for him to be in. I like, actually was just talking about this yesterday. He was in one of the least enviable positions as the first black president, and there was never going to be an easy way to sort of weigh in on those issues. I think a lot of what he did was counter productive, But you know, I don't begrudge him.
I don't.
I think those pretty difficult position to be in. But on a lot of different levels, he fanned the flames of both I think wealth concentration and that sort of ideological monopolization that came to dominate elite circles by the end of his presidency. And you have both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump as a reaction to both of those things. You know, Bernie Sanders did not go on Broad City like Hillary, but that would be mine takeaway.
And I don't want to defend Barack Obama, but on the on the question of kind of black lives matter and racial justice and the way that he interacted with that rising energy, I feel like he gets a bump. You're giving him a bum rap there in the sense that for the first like four or five years of
his administration. And I was critical of him at the time for not saying enough, for being somebody who and as he's talked about since, because he was the first black president, he felt like he couldn't say things that perhaps even Joe Biden would have said. And then some things just get to a point where you're just being irresponsible if you don't weigh in on it, or or you get asked about it.
And you answer the question like this.
You know, there was this famous case if people want to go back and look it up, where Henry Louis Gates as Harvard professor's in Cambridge. He's coming back from a trip, He's got his luggage on his porch and he locked himself out and the Cambridge police arrest him. Which two people like Barack Obama who have been followed through, you know, a Macy's for no doing nothing different than
white people walking through a Macy's. They hear that and like enough of this, Like let's let's let's say something about this. Maybe we maybe we're at a place where we can actually talk about this and move beyond it. And a lot of people on the left like ridiculed the whole idea of a beer summit like that, it didn't even deserve that level of like why are you coddling this kind of attitude rather than just denouncing it.
But yet, and it shows how intractable this stuff is that that if it's if it's the case that from the right, that was viewed as like, how dare you, like, why are you instigating?
Uh?
Why just just leave just leave well enough alone.
No, I mean I think so we definitely don't need to religate the beer some myself probably.
That I remember it was the cop got a blue moon.
I respected that because it's like that's like oftentimes a politician who is like trying to be working class but really wants a blue moon isn't going to.
Do It's not gonna put fruit in their beer. But you're confident about your your social status and your working class status, and give me the blue moons. It's paid for by the White House. I'm getting the blue moon. Yeah, you have the bud light enjoy you can't have the bud light anymore.
Though I thought, I don't like indulging. I don't think that there was I think what we learned, I think was that basically there was no racial animus in that situation, as entirely understandable as you said for people who have been followed through Macy's, Henry Lews Skates or Barack Obama.
As entirely understandable as that is.
I think having the commander in chief indulge charges of racism for a cop who was just doing his job as representative as that actually is that you have sensitivities on both sides, from people that were defending the police and people who were defending skip Gates. I completely get it, but I think elevating that to the level of the White House was a telling mistake that Obama made early in his presidency. And again I don't envy him at all.
That was an incredibly difficult position to be in, but when I look back on that, I think there was sort of indulging the language that has come to be really divisive.
Not an easy thing for him to do, though I don't know.
It just doesn't seem fair to say you just can't talk about this that It's like.
I think the way he talked about on the campaign in two thousand and eight was really unifying, and then I think something shifted after he was in office and he was being forced to respond to cultural things that were happening the people that he wasn't in charge of in the media, for instance, who spread abject lies about
what happened in Ferguson for a really long time. He was then forced to grapple with that in a way that was unfair to him, But I think he made some tactical errors that did inflame tensions.
It's also the case that the country is often willing to speak about kind of racial harmony in general terms, but then when it gets to specifics, everyone's like, huh, yeah, I'm not so sure about in this case, but generally speaking.
I was listening to that actle Rod interview, and one thing that struck me about it was they start the conversation going back over his two thousand and four convention speech with the famous lines, you know, there's no liberal or American conservative America, or no red states and blue states.
There's the United Dates we all worship blah bla blah.
Today on the left, you would get canceled for yes, for saying that. To say that there's no white American, no black American, no brown America, no like that, that would be erasing identities.
And it reminded me.
Of how close to the nineties Obama's kind of rise was, Like Obama's a very is a creature of the nineties, which very much did have that attitude. This two thousand and four that he's given his speech. But you wouldn't have a presidential candidate talk that way on the Democratic side anymore. Now, that would be much more kind of Republican rhetoric, cynically, kind of weaponizing that Martin Luther King same as Martin Luther King line.
Yes, well, Martin Luther King has some lines that would get him canceled from the left as.
Well, and probably probably also had some lines that gotten killed. Yes, But anyway, Supreme Court, or do we have Trump that.
We've got Trump next, because we have to keep talking about Trump.
Otherwise we as people in the media, we shriple up and die. We don't get our Trump picks.
Speaking of which, Donald Trump has a court date August August, Judge Eileen Cannon, I'm mean from the Washington Examiner.
Right now, we can put that element up on the screen. Set the date.
The first court date for the former presidents classified documents trial a little over a week before the first GOP primary debate. It's in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida. That is going to begin on August fourteenth, twenty twenty three, per a court filing that
hit on Tuesday. She said, in the filing that the deadline for both parties to submit pre trial motions and motions in le mean, am I saying my Latin correctly, That means in the beginning is July twenty fourth, twenty twenty three. Now, CBS News makes a really good point and says, quote that date is likely to change as Trump's legal team files requests with the court that could result in the trials. So that July twenty fourth pre trial motion deadline is really important because they are expected
to file before that. There's expected a file motion before that, which would change the date from that week before the first debate. So the trial date is August fourteenth. This is actually it sounds counterintuitive, but this is a if you're Donald Trump, this is a blessing going into the first debate.
This is such a gift.
You're like, I'm going to be in court a week before the first debate.
Bring it on.
That puts me front and center in the conversation. Nobody else will be able to get any oxygen. And I am going to be once again the avatar of normal Americans. As he says, They're not coming after me, I'm just they're coming after you.
I'm just in the.
Way what gives them a better platform to make that message then coming out of court and into the debate. But it actually looks like that debate that date before the debate probably won't happen because they'll probably be submiting pretrial motions.
Right.
And also, the process for these cases is first of all, wildly unconstitutional but has never been tested at the Supreme Court because it is so slanted against defendants that defendants always take plea deals in these situations. But basically, because there are classified documents involved, the jury is restricted on what it's able to see, even though the jury has to then make its decision based on what it's not
able to see. And so the process to allow attorneys to view the documents, to allow the judge to see the documents to then write their briefs from secure areas ends up adding exponential complications to this process, which is another reason that this could get punted well into the future, particularly since this judge, Judge Cannon, doesn't have much experience doing trials period I think like five days or something
of criminal like trials. Right, Trump appointing at the very end of his term, so therefore has very little experience with criminal trials and none with these kinds of trials.
So Donald Trump has been The foctions has been airing in two parts. Donald Trump's interview with Brett Baerr. He sat down with Brett Bearer for a pretty long interview and some new clips came out last night. Hard to pick from the best, it really is, because one we're going to play in a minute is almost unbelievable.
But oh, the death penalty for the drug dealers. That's a fun one, right.
Yeah, he weighs in on Alice Marie Johnson and Brett Baarer pushes him a little bit. But let's start with Donald Trump being pushed on the nickname d sanctimonious.
You can roll that.
Because he has bet apr than other governors. But other governors did a better job than run to Sanctimonious. So look, why did you use that name? Because I got him elected and I thought it was very disloyal, And he said, yes, I got him past two racist, I got him past the primary because he was losing by thirty points or more.
So, he's a soyalty question. Yeah, I'm a big loyalist.
Yes, some people say, some people right here in this room have told me, sure, don't worry about loyalty. Loyalty doesn't mean anything in politics. I said to me, it does.
I got the guy elected.
He came to see me, let's say, weeping, because he was dead.
He was getting out of the race.
He was looking for jobs already, probably at law firms or wherever he's going to look. He was totally dead. He ran a horrible campaign. He was running against Adam Putnam, the Agriculture commissioner, who was running for that position for eight years. Putnham at thirty eight million dollars. Ron had nothing zero. Putnam was at forty percent. Ron was at three percent. It was like a white pant. The election was going to be very soon. I said, you're dead.
If George Washington endorsed you, you're not going to win. He said, sir, if you endorse me, I think I could win. And he fought for me, along with Jim Jordan and hundreds of other people. In all fairness, he was fine, but he fought. But I would see him everyone sort of fighting on the impeachment oaks. So I didn't know Adam Putnam, so I said, let's give it a shot. I endorsed him, and it was like a bomb went off. As soon as I endorsed him. He won the primary.
It was over.
He won by a landslide. But then I had him to get him past gilm who is a rock star. He was going to be the next president of the United States. He was the biggest guy in the party. Him and female very Stacy Abrams. Right, these are the two hottest politicians and the Democrat Party. And Ron said, there's no way I can beat him. I said, you're going to beat him. I did three rallies.
God bless you, thank you so much.
So we had big, messive rallies for three of them. I said, you're gonna win. He ended up winning. He ended up winning by and the three years later they say to him, then, I didn't do it.
I didn't know him that well three years later, but I got him elected.
But I did that with other people too. But you know what, just out of respect, So I said, three years later, they asked him, are you going to run against the president? He said, I have no comment.
I said, no comment. No comment means he's going to run. I said, this guy's gonna run.
So Donald Trump is actually one hundred percent accurate in saying that his endorsement was crucial to Ronda Santas and.
Be off on the numbers slightly, but maybe slightly.
But Ron de Santis knows that because he ran ads at the time emphasizing over and over again how close he was and how Maggie he was. Basically, there's that famous out of him with his kids in his living room.
Where isn't the.
Kid building a wall with blocks building a wall?
Yeah, it's very clearly Ron de Santas endorsing the argument that Donald Trump just made about the Trump endorsement being absolutely critical. The loyalty part is really interesting because I would say Trump doesn't hold up his end.
Of the bargain.
I'm a loyalty question of people in Republican politics learned that lesson the hard way that when Donald Trump says loyalty is really important to him, he does think it's important to him. I think very clearly Donald Trump thinks loyalty is important to him, but it seems like a one way street when you look back on his history with certain advisors.
What did you make of that clib.
One quick ironic interlude here, which is that the DeSantis and Gillham election one of the great hingch points in American politics because this came down to just thirty thousand votes, like an extremely close race. The only reason that DeSantis ends up winning this election is because of FBI election interference. There's your iron there's your irony, and where's Trump and
denouncing this. FBI came in and leaked that there's an investigation into Tallahassee, but that it was focusing on Gilham because Gillam got some Hamilton tickets through his brother, and that Gilliam said he thought his brother had reimbursed the person that he got the Hamilton tickets from, but apparently his brother did not or cousin or whoever did not reimburse, so they went to Hamilton and they didn't pay for their tickets.
And this became a gigantic.
Scandal in like a week or two before the election, and you can and you can see his momentum kind of dampen, and you can imagine that the tiny margin point four percent that Desanta's won by was made up entirely by the FBI creeping in and flipping that election to the Santa. Now later, Gilim has had a lot of personal problems.
We wish, we wish him well, and those you can google. Those, we don't. We don't need to get you need to get into all that.
But Trump is right that he was next president of the United States level level rock star, and that if not for that uh last minute FBI election interference, he probably wins. But broadly speaking, yeah, Trump is just he's just shocked that somebody would challenge him.
How dare he right?
Well, and it's not even so much a lack of loyalty as it is in politics. People obviously have different reasons for I mean, running against someone I guess.
Is a breach of loyalty.
But people believe in their own careers and their own missions, and that's obviously baked into politics, and Trump is sort of rejecting that when it comes to him. Interesting enough, Now this next clip we teased it.
You're going to enjoy it.
It's wild, it's wild. So this is so just to set this up, because the.
Whole exchange with between Bear and Trump on the question of capital punishment for drug dealers is worth watching.
It's way too long to play the entire thing. So to set it up, Bear is they're into it a little bit.
Trump earlier had been talking about Alex Johnson, who he loves to bring up because, you know, helping get her free. She was facing a fifty year sentence for drug dealing.
Kim Kardashian, Jared Kushner, UNKA Trump all team up, get the First Step Back.
First Step Act.
And so it's this weird exchange between Baron Trump where Bear is pointing out to him that he's getting criticized from the right for being too soft on criminal justice because of the First Step Act. Well, meanwhile, he's sitting there calling for the people that he freed to be executed. And so let's see how he sorts this out in his mind.
So even Al Shotson in that ad, she can't do it.
Okay, by the way, if that was there, no, she wouldn't be killed. It would start as of now, so you wouldn't go.
To the head.
But your policy, no, I'm starting now. Yeah, But she wouldn't have done it if it was death penalty. In other words, if it was death penalty, she wouldn't have been on that phone call. She wouldn't have been a dealer. Now, she wasn't much of a dealer because she was sort of like I mean, honestly, she got treated terribly she was treated. She was treated sort of like I get treated, but Bret, she was treated very unfairly. But she got
forty eight years and that was Ben. Now today, if I did what I say that you have to do, and again, I'm not sure the country is ready for it. You know, China was hugely one hundred and fifty years ago. China was taken over by much lesser countries because they were all drugged out on the opium and.
All the problems Communist regime. They well, they drove the hammer.
They were all drugged out and they were totally they were a disaster. They were taken over by other smaller countries, large sections of China, and then things happened and they had strong leadership and they put in the death penalty and they've become they've been able to build. But if you speak to the president, he will tell you without the death penalty, we would have a non functioning country.
So the earlier part is wild, where he's talking about capital punts for the drug dealers and Brett bears like even Alice Johns.
He's like hmm.
He starts to think like they said, well, she wouldn't because she'd be so scared of me that she wouldn't deal the drugs in the first place. And then as you see, he transitions into the most praise that anyone has given Chairman Mao from either party since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.
I would suspect, say what you will about Mao.
He had control, he did, he.
Did have controls.
Basically, yeah.
And it's funny because she she uses this phrase change is not seen in one hundred years, changed in one hundred hundred and fifty years. And what he is saying there, what she has pointed to the exact same thing.
Yes, that that China.
Was getting beaten down by the by the world stage, pieces is getting taken by Japan, and this.
That, and then everyone's high.
Everyone's high because because the British forced opium onto the population, and when the Chinese resisted it, the British went to war Low opium war to force them to continue to buy opium to fund the kind of British imperialism, British colonialism. And so then Mao takes over and they become they you know, they return to the place and they're on their way to return to the place that they feel
like they've always belonged on the stage. So to hear Trump kind of celebrating that all the way through and linking it to the death penalty for drug use just kind of wild. And so I'm curious. On the Republican side, we're what eight years into Trump on the national political stage, so we're used to this sort of stuff, but this is whiplash of kind of an even greater degree. Does or does it not matter?
How does it?
Does it matter that he's on the one hand defending the First Step Act and on the other hand saying that maybe if the country's ready for it, but they're probably not ready for it, but if they are, maybe we should execute drug dealers.
I think it matters only on the margins.
So I think there's a chance that seeing Donald Trump look so unfamiliar with his own legislation and touting Alice Johnson's story and Brett Bair, who I think conducted a great interview pushing back and saying she was running a cocaine ring essentially, and that doesn't reflect on my stance about her sentence, But that's what Donald Trump is being confronted with, right, and that might not have been what Jared was telling him but or what Kim Kardashian was
telling him, but by his own sort of standards of death penalty or not. It just made him look like he lacked leadership skills because he didn't He wasn't even familiar with his own laws and how they would be applied. And then got you know, really, and that's when people do interviews with Donald Trump that aren't policy focused.
It's such a disservice to.
The public because you can really learn so much about Donald Trump when you ask him specific questions about policies. And that's what Brett Bair does in this interview, like I think really gets to the bottom of the way Trump sees drug policy, for instance, and that's very useful. The DeSantis team definitely thinks that the First Step Act is of vulnerability for Donald Trump. Now I believe Desanta has actually voted for the First Step Act he was still in Congress.
But because Donald Trump.
Made a big deal of it, and did you know, head Kim Kardashian there and has touted it for a long time and was really the person who is his administration. You know, shepherded this through Congress. Because crime has become
a really huge hot topic for Republican voters. They believe this is a vulnerability for Donald Trump that if they can get him to talk about the First Step back, this is Pedro Gonzalez talking about this is someone who is he's with the Claremont Institute, I believe, and he says, quote, this is someone Trump who has no idea how government cannot accept the fact that he made mistakes.
And if Trump cannot admit fall on.
Something like the First Step Act, he is completely incapable of leading. And so Trump critics see the First Step Act in particular as vulnerability. I would say expect it to come up more often during the primaries.
Right, and because it freed what a thousand, it barely freed anybody. Like the frustration among criminal justice reformers was that all of the energy that went into passing this act could have just been spent on commuting sentences of individual people one by one, because it freed so many people. But it sounds like that somebody who got freed was in the Latin Kings or something and went on and committed a crime, killed somebody in a bar.
But he had he had been in for drugs.
Because like, if you free several thousand people from prison statistically, Statistically like some out of thousands of people, some people are going to commit crimes in the future, whether they were in prison before or not. If they were in prison, they're probably slightly more likely to commit crimes, not necessarily because they are criminals, but because they have just spent
years in an institution surrounded by criminals. And so yeah, so I guess you're going to see like Willie Horton's style stuff of like, look, individual crime happened the criminal was in jail, wouldn't have happened if he was still in jail. Therefore Trump is responsible for this like that that'll kind of be the argument.
Yeah, so here's Pere should he's with the Charlomagne Institute and Chronicles magazine, not Clermont, but he said he brings up this old Tucker Carlson report. In twenty nineteen. Of the twenty two one hundred roughly inmates twenty two hundred and forty three inmates released under for as Step, only nine hundred and sixty were incarcerated for drug related offenses. On the other hand, four hundred ninety six were in
prison for weapons and explosive related crimes. Two hundred and thirty nine for sex offenses, one seventy eight for fraud, bribery and extortion, one hundred and eighteen for burglary, larcenary larceny, and one hundred and six for robbery. According to the data, another fifty nine were imprisoned over homicide aggravated assault, forty six for immigration related defenses, nine for counterfeiting embezzlement, and.
Two for national security reasons.
So that is again like expect to hear more of that, for sure, because I think Trump opponents see that in particular as crime has risen in some cities unevenly of course, but as that has happened, and as you have had you know, the sort of left wing prosecutors respond to it in a way that you see maybe a cause and effect in places like San Francisco and the pivot from London breed. That's where folks that are running against Donald Trump, I think see a.
Real soft spot, and he thinks he can harden that up by saying, well, kill him.
I'm just going to kill them all.
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh.
By the way, I forgot to mention, at the very top of the show in Fairfax, they went after the reformist prosecutor and lost. So another case of the media kind of blaming criminal justice reformer prosecutors for you know, people being anxious about crime and then voters going to the polls and reelecting those very same people in blue areas.
Exactly in blue areas. It's not always the golden ticket that I think people on the right believe it to be, depending on the location and depending on the messaging. Obviously, speaking of crime, let's move on to the news about Andrew Oh.
I'm sorry, Supreme Court Court.
We're going to get to crime and entertain in just a moment. But the Supreme Court as.
Riots then on a crime spree.
From a conservative perspective, this is why it Ryan says crime spree. There are a lot of decisions that could be coming out of the Supreme Court basically the next week, on student loan debt, on the Chevron doctrine, which is something you'll hear tossed about in beltway circles or ivory towers, but is hugely consequential for the executive branch, and on
affirmative action. So when Supreme Court decisions from this last term are announced in the coming days, this is a hugely consequential moment for people, obviously who have outstanding student loan debt. It will be a big deal for the executive branch and probably a very big deal for people in college admissions offices and students around the country.
Start with student loan debt. We can put up the tear sheets.
C one.
This is from CBS News. The finances of about forty million Americans with college loans are hanging in the balance as borrowers await the Supreme Court's ruling on the legality of President Biden's plan to forgive up to twenty thousand dollars in student loan debt. Borrowers could face a double whammy the summer Supreme Court rules against the debt forgiveness plan.
As the Court's decision is likely to land just before the pause on debt repayment lifts in September, the Court is scheduled to release its next decisions on Thursday morning. In the worst case scenario, CBS continues, borrowers will face restarting their loan payments in September without any debt release. This is being challenged in a couple of different ways. And you'll remember back when Oral arguments happened in the winter. The Supreme Court was very hostile to what the Biden
administration did. As far as you can read the tea leaves from the questionings in the hearing, it was pretty favorable.
It seemed to be.
Pretty unfavorable to the Biden administration. But they're being challenged on basically this question of you're using an emergency declaration to pass the student debt forgiveness and to sort of waive the wan and say it was going away. And you have states Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and South Carolina. You have a lawsuit from the Job Creators Network Foundation
or Conservative group. They're saying basically this was illegal, this was Actura constitutional, and those Republican states were saying it was a financial setback for them because you're going to
get quota reduction in business. This from CNBC among the companies that service federal student loan debts in their states, So that would be, for instance, the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority couldn't meet its financial obligations to the state, is the argument because of that decreased revenue.
And there's also a question of standing that.
Could hurt as related to that right.
Yes, So this is there's a lot on the line basically, and the Supreme Court decision is imminent.
And what this really shows is how bs all of the kind of legal arguments are on both sides. Because to me, just objectively speaking, if you step back and look at the Heroes Act that this was written under, this was a kind of post nine to eleven law that said, in the event of a national emergency, the Department of Education has the ability to pause, suspend, or
cancel student debts. And so we had a national emergency COVID, it was declared as a national emergency and as a result, as a policy response to Department of Education under Trump paused the student debt, and then the Department of Education under Biden determined that the smartest policy would be to cancel a certain amount of it using the authority that was created in two thousand and one or after the two thousand and one attacks, and to invalidate that to me,
says that you're requiring then Congress. You're basically telling Congress that they're not allowed to anticipate future events and put laws in place to allow a government to react to those events. If you can't say in the event of an emergency, you have this authority because you have to come back twenty.
Years later and say no, no, no.
When we said emergency, we actually meant all emergencies, like not just this emergency, but other declared emergency, even though the law says, you know, declared emergenci. It's like, it's very clear, but I don't think it matters the Supreme Court if they don't want to allow it, they're just
gonna not go ahead and allow it. To your point on standing, there's been this fun whack a mole between people who are trying to strike down the law or the executive action for political purposes because they don't like it, and the problem that they need to find somebody who's harmed by it. It's exactly how do you find somebody who's harmed by other people just not having to pay their debts. And so at first they found somebody who because they got their debt.
Waived, now they owed some taxes.
They're like, oh, I hate taxes, so I'm suing, so I don't so I can pay the debts instead of the taxes. And the Biden administration quickly said, Nope, that's moot, because now it's optional.
You don't have to take this free money that we're giving you.
Therefore you have no tax obligations like ah dang and I forget. There was another one and then they and then they wound up with this one where they went to this Missouri company which has not paid its quote unquote obligations to the state of Missouri for fifteen years. And so the state of Missouri is saying, well, now it's not going to be able to pay its obligations to the state to us, but they haven't paid for
fifteen years and you haven't cared. And the company itself, there's a great story if you can put up the second tear sheet here. Employees at this company are all furious that they've been roped into this. Mohila itself is not participating at all. Amy Cony Barrett said during the trial, or said during the oral arguments, if Mohila was here, they would have standing. Mohila is very conspicuously not here,
like they're not interested in this. One of the employees is probably in their slack or whatever, said are we the bad guys? Like how on earth are we being used? And so basically Missouri's argument this triple Bank. Shot is that Mohila would have more business if you keep more people burned with debt. And if Mohila has more business, then there's a better chance that Mohila then kicks money over to Missouri, even though Mohila has not kicked money
to Missouri for fifteen years. So it's all commpletely fake and just political.
So what's actually really interesting about that is it's not entirely dissimilar from what's on the table with Chevron, and the Chevron doctrine.
Is a explain that.
So Chevron.
With Chevron, this is a huge, huge, First of all, it was a huge boon to the left, like this was a really big gift to and I don't mean that in a sort of pejorative sense, like this basically created the administrative state. This basically allows the administrative state to use executive powers in a very broad scope to do some really everyday governing at for instance, the EPA
or the Department of Education. Because this I'm reading from Cornell Law School, which has a lot of really helpful legal information, but just so we have a precise definition from them. In Chevron, the Supreme Court set forth a legal test as to when the court should refer to the agency's answer or interpretation, holding that such judicial deference
is appropriate where the agency's answer was not unreasonable. And here's the key part, so long as Congress had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question, this is where the Heroes Act is actually pretty interesting as well.
From the student debt question, you see the executive.
Branch using that deference, that question of deference to the Secretary of Education that was granted in the hero Act, and you see people on the right saying, well, this is clearly extra constitutional.
This was never a constitutional.
Power that should have been delegated to the Education secretary, and this is an inappropriate use of it anyway. But because we have, for instance, we've talked about this a lot, the vaccine mandate requirement that Joe Biden implemented was he used an obscure provision from the OSHA legislation, the legislation
that Richard Nixon pass that essentially created OSHA. You can sort of pull out from these things and stretch them to meet different authorities from the executive and on the left mint the coin for instance, like there's all of this sort of creative ways that you can get from point A to B with executive power and actually do things in the absence of Congress's ability to do anything anymore because of tribalism and partisanship. That has a deadlock,
maybe a Madisonian deadlock, but a deadlock nonetheless. And so that's why Chevron is, I would say, in terms of conservative efforts target the administrative state, that is like number one, Chevron is, this is like a gift, like you're putting Chevron on a silver platter for the Supreme Court or the with the divide that's at that it has right now, the division between conservative and liberal justices.
This is a really big deal.
It's a very big deal for agencies that have been doing sort of business as usual for a long time, taking these authorities where Congress, to borrow the fresh from Cornell, had not spoken directly to the precise issue at question. They'd been taking that authority upon themselves could be tied
up in tons of legal battles. That every day functioning of these agencies is on the table in a way that you know, I think we've dramatically expanded the scope of regulatory power of the administrative state in ways that why we're talking about gas stove bands. Why we're talking about you know, the way Title nine functions in very specific ways and very specific schools has been harmful.
But the way this is on the table is vast.
I think they're going to do it.
Yes, I guess would be Yes.
They're going for it.
There's a question as to whether they.
Go all the way or they just sort of nibble around the edges of Chevron as.
We know it, whether they want war or they want guerrilla war against the state. I think they want war against the state, but I think that they're not sure if they have the troops for it.
Yeah, I mean it's this would be a big change to the everyday function of Washington, DC. I mean, these administrations, these administrative agencies have exploded really because of Chevrone deference, and.
It would hasten I think the constitutional conflict with the Court. I'm like, yeah, like the Court is already teetering on it's on the authority that it that it kind of spent on overturning Roe v.
Wade.
Yes, And so if they then say, oh, and also, by the way, the EPA is not allowed to function, You're going to take Democrats who are just normally rank and file folks, We're like, you know what for at the Supreme Court? Ignore it. We're done with the Supreme Court. And I'm reading what's the line he's made for that? Andrew Jackson said, he made his ruling, I'll let him enforce it.
Let him enforce it.
Well, I'm reading here from a Federal Society block where they they call Chevron quote the most notorious decision in administrative law. And this is Remember, the Federal Society had a lot of say in the judges that court. And I don't mean that in a Sheldon white House sense where it's like, you know, he's doing the Charlie Kelly on the whiteboard, like this is all a grand conspiracy
of Federal Society money going to the Supreme Court. It's this idiological miliu that, you know, the Federal Society I think has the right stance on Chrevron. But I imagine if we're trying to guess where the Supreme Court is going to land on Chrevron, I imagine it's it's going to go in one very particular direction. And that ideological milieu is basically at a consensus on affirmative action, and that's on the table as well.
So some really kind they'll win that one.
Absolutely, absolutely, because Santra de O Connor herself, in a pretty important decision on this question, said it is a temporary It's meant as a temporary measure to achieve, you know, to get from A to B. And so when you have that as precedent, yeah, I think it's very vulnerable. And again they're coming from an ideological milieu where there's basically a consensus on Chevron Chevron and affirmative action.
And there's an interesting argument made on the left. I think it's by Richard Collenberg.
People can search that up that that argues that if affirmative action is overturned, because it is still a value held by so many institutions and universities, the value diversity, that they will that they will be forced to rely on class diversity in order to achieve identity diversity because we are so far away from an equitable society that it is the case that black students are much more likely to be poor in working class than white students.
And so if you then use a class lens, which is constitutional and legal, in order to increase the number of working class and poor people, that you have in your institution. You will also, as a function of that, increase the number of black students that you have as well.
Some more just mechanism to get to the point anyway from my perspective, but.
A lot of these institutions don't want poor in working class people, so it will be the values that they have intention and we'll see how they sort that out.
Yeah, they meet their quotas through for instance, boarding schools. We're going to take you know, people from the spoorting school, but we're going to make it diverse.
Matthew Iglesias jokes that he like, he went to.
Harvard and one or both of his parents are like Cuban descended, and so he's like they were able to check a box because of Matthew Iglesias, and nobody, as he would acknowledge, nobody pretends that like that is the goal, right, Yeah.
No, that's absolutely true. So I am looking forward to it, but you may not be.
Moving on.
We're going to talk right now about Andrew Tate. There's been some developments in Andrew Tate situation. This is from the last of post Romanian prosecutors announced Tuesday that Internet personality and self described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother have been indicted on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized crime group. I'm going to keep reading from the post here because it's very specific and it's
useful to be precise. The indictment marks the end of a criminal investigation into Tate and two Romanian associates, as prosecutors.
Referred the case for trial.
The prosecutor statement said the injured parties were quote sexually exploited by group members and forced to produce online pornography through acts of quote violence and mental coersion. The legal team for the Tape brothers described the move as quote undoubtedly predictable. They're putting forward this basically stance that they're kind of excited and eager to confront these charges because quote it will undoubtedly substantiate the brothers claims of innocence.
To remember, they were arrested in Romania in December. They do have dual British and American citizenship. They were moved to house arrest back in March. Prosecutors are saying that they these four Tait and his brother and the other two formed a crime group for human trafficking in Romania Britain and the United States.
Here's more from the prosecutors.
The injured persons were recruited by the foreign nationals by misleading them about the intention to establish a marriage slash cohabitation relationship and the existence of real feelings of love. That one of the suspects charged with rape in relation to two incidents back in March of twenty twenty.
Two, so over a year ago, according to prosecutors. What do you make of it?
Ryan, You know, it's important to keep in find the whole idea of innocent until proven guilty. But these guys look guiltier than Trump, even on the classified documents charge.
You know, we'll see what evidence comes up. But we have.
Their own testimony kind of through their videos that they do where they talk about ways that they groom young women and traffic them basically over to Romania and then persuade them into into staying and becoming basically sex slaves. Now they're arguing that that is all done consensually. They prosecutors also have what at least seven witnesses, and so depending on what you hear from those witnesses, if they can add even one notch to what they have already
said publicly. They then you have a pretty slam pretty slam dunk case.
So there are messages where tit has explained to one of the women that he used a webcam business to quote launder money, and that he'd been teaching men to start their own quote. It's all a cover, he wrote, Washington Post said, assuring her she could trust him. He told the victim that he'd meet her in Romania after taking care of some work in Prague, and spoke about the prospect of marriage.
This is from a tape message.
I want to know that you are determined serious about marriage.
So all of that is very is obviously very critical to the case.
The boyfriend method.
Yes, there's some question about if that's all it is, if it's just hideous and disgusting, or if it's a crime. I'm fine these guys getting locked up for even just what they've been saying publicly, But it does appear that it goes even beyond that. That there's you know, the charges talk about you know, violence, it's not just mental COORDI but also violence.
And you know this is this is going to be a real going forward and already we've already seen it happen. But the proliferation of hardcore pornography has made this a
real problem for the coast. So both the proliferation of hardcore pornography and the proliferation of sort of text message based sexual relationships and relationships in general brings this evidence in and then the tape brothers can claim this is consensual and that in some sense it was part of the sexual relationship to if the women claim otherwise, there and they're in a lot of trouble and it appears
like that's likely that the women will claim otherwise. Well, and that's what's so I think disturbing is that you can have evidence of something being on its face problematic, and people can claim that it's consensual, and you know, if that is popularized and becomes sort of normalized, it's it's a very serious problem for both men and women as that kind of stuff happens in the future. It's a big problem for courts in our legal system. It's
a big challenge for courts in the legal system. But it's not great for men or for women because it makes it really really hard to get justice.
Related to this. I wanted to get your thoughts on a new piece.
If you can put up this second element here as a tweet from my colleague Martaza Hussein, who's sharing a new article in New Lines magazine which is headlined how Andrew Tate and the far right made common cause with Islamists. Subhead Western groups find in Muslim communities what they believe is a prototype for a social contract free of wokeism and women's liberation. Story by Rassha al Akadi and Lydia Wilson.
I suggest people check it out, but it opens with a couple examples of things that we've probably all we've all seen kind of as we've watched watched online culture evolve, which is dudes who started out as like proud islamophobes, whether in post nine to eleven or more recently burning the Qouran, you know, warning of the kind of the Muslim hordes are going to take over Europe in the United States and the Hamas is coming through the southern border,
and those same not just that, not just that political tendency, but that too, but those same dudes now completely lining up with a kind of much with a very conservative interpretation of Islam and going to protests where o Kurana is being burned and protesting that saying how dare you and seeing in their warped vision a like based like as they describe a prototype of a society that's free of Wolchism and the dudes over at Chopo trap house.
Since elsewhere I have been like, have been predicting this arc.
Yeah, that a lot of these right wing influencers are like, why don't they just just cut out the middleman and go straight to kind of far right Islam?
And here we here, we're seeing it develop.
Yeah.
Well, this is another really interesting tweet from Martaza. He says, when I first moved to the US, I was actually surprised how many Muslims were sympathetic to the GOP, even in post nine to eleven years, and in places like Chicago and Michigan suburbs, they were just waiting for a
moment they became ten percent less hostile to return. And the Michigan suburbs have been interesting Deerporn area because we've seen the conservative Muslim communities in the Dearborn area make common cause with They.
Had that Pride fight recently.
Recently Pride fight, but also the books and schools like it was in the fall around an election coming together and making a very robust protests, and I think a morally correct protests would probably disagree on that against books in schools, And then you had the American Federation of Teachers on the other side of it, siding with the schools, and it's just like, Yeah, these things getting mixed up is completely fat, fascinating and blended together.
There's some talk in sort of conservative circles.
About the phenomenon of young men following Andrew Tait. I don't think it's Tate specific. I don't think it's Islam specific. I do think you're going to see healthier this kind of two sides of the coin, like people's angs, especially young men's angs, and anguish in this world where it's actually.
Very difficult for young men and young women too.
If we're seeing depression rates increase, we're seeing all kinds of really bad metrics increase when it comes to mental health and physical health. Some people are going to take that out in a healthy way. Some people are going to find really unhealthy ways to channel it, and misogyny is going to be one of those ways. And I'm
not saying that's affiliated with religion at all. I'm saying it's affiliated with in this case entertate, and that that sort of version of masculinity that's less less than healthy. We'll say, toxic masculinity is a real thing. It's not masculinity itself. And I think that's a mistake the left off and makes when they talk about mass toxic masculinity. They act as though masculinity is necessarily toxic. There are, of course, expressions of masculinity and femininity that can be toxic.
And I think the more we see people try to find relief from the pains of living modern life, they're going to go in both unhealthy and healthy places, and entertate would be an unhealthy place right.
And Islam, just like Christianity, you know, lives on a spectrum from you know, liberal to almost secular, all the way over to the far to the far right. And I'm curious if the kind of Republicans are seeing a real opening here because it has always struck me as an odd alliance that you had so many kind of secular, borderline atheist liberals allying with explicitly conservative Muslims in ways that they would not align with.
Explicitly conservative Christians.
And I feel like maybe they felt comfortable making that alliance because the numbers were so.
Small because it was politically convenient, right, and they weren't.
They could be for pluralism as long as the conservative Muslim portion of their coalition stayed below twenty percent or something like that. And pluralism's fine if they're fifty plus percent and have voting power. And you saw some liberals in that Michigan town saying, wait a minute. When we were in power, you know, we were pluralistic. You know, we made sure that there were ordinances that allowed for the call to prayer to happen five times a day.
Now you're in power and you're not operating in a pluralistic way.
But what is pluralism.
Well, I think pluralism is fairly Polarism is kind of like, I.
Don't know, because you can't have pluralism if you're saying that it's hate speech to refuse to use compelled speech so like preferred pronouns for instance, and you disagree on.
What it is that wouldn't be pluralistic intolerant.
Yeah, based on like our interpretation of civil rights law and where that conversation is going. So it's almost like you can't have this concept of pluralism that in the aughts made a little bit more sense. The formula made a little bit more sense when you start to have what I would argue is sort of an intolerant approach to religion, or an intolerant approach she's more tribal.
Yeah, so you try to have a coalition of tribes, which is those are not very stable.
This is like the biggest, deepest coalition.
Of interest groups is one thing, coalition of tribes. It's only going to last so long.
Well, Ryan, what is on what's your point.
To michaelas is on here? Read my point.
There's long been a saying in American politics that our elections begin in Iowa and end in Florida, and the result was that our political system disproportionately handed out goodies to just those two states. It didn't make much sense, but it did make us obese, with massive corn subsidies for Iowa and sugar subsidies for Florida, and of course, whatever the bloodthirsty diaspora in Miami wanted was theirs from both parties, with no questions asked about whether it was
actually in our regional or national interest. How else can you get a counterproductive embargo of Cuba to last this long, but Iowa and Florida are now both solidly Republican states. The silver lining for the rest of the country is that we can now start to make policy decisions based on whether or not something is a good idea, rather
than pandering to a few vote in South Florida. Now, if you remember, back to the last State of the Union, Joe Biden was caught on a hot mic button holing Bob Menendez, who's the Cuban American chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the chambers most aggressive Cuba hawk on the Democratic side.
He said, he wanted to talk.
To talk to you about Cuba.
I'm now there's movement in Venezuela too. Late last month, the newly restored Brazilian President Lula de Silva made a big shift in foreign policy toward the South American country. Instead of recognizing this guy Wangguido, the man the US sort of pretends as president of Venezuela, he invited the guy who actually governs the country, whether we like it or not, Hugo Chavez successor Nicholas Mandoro. Yet, Venezuela hit with some of the toughest sanctions in the world remains
an economic basket case. The result has been a staggering outflow of refugees, with nearly two hundred thousand winding up at our southern border last year. Former Obama National Security advisor Ben Rhodes, now with PODSEV of America, responded to Lou's recognition of Maduro.
Recently and when it.
Comes to sanctions on Venezuela, the Biden administration has clearly lost the Podsave bros.
Take a listen.
Clearly, the US has to make a pretty big shift in its Venezuelan policy because the idea of like just not recognizing this guy's president doesn't work. And meanwhile, we've exacerbated humanitarian crisis there their sanctions that has contributed significantly to people coming to our border.
A quarter of the population has left the country.
We need some agreement that lifts a whole bunch of sanctions, that sets an election that we promised to actually respect the result of, you know, even if we don't like the results, and hopefully we do like the results, you know, but that allows for kind of a reset of what's happening between the US and Latin America. Generally, Venezuela specifically, I would hope again that Cuba is a part of this. Lula also I think could be a source of useful tension.
But keep in mind a lot of people want to say, oh, this is just Lula.
Ben also made the point that the US isn't just out of step with one leftist leader in Brazil, but we're basically losing the entire region.
A lot of people want to say, oh, this is just Lula.
It's not.
It's Lula in Brazil, it's Borech in Chile, it's Petro and Colombia, it's Amlo in Mexico, it's all the major Latin American countries. There is nobody with us in this kind of weird, Miami driven hardline policy.
So this.
Meeting somewhere in the middle between where we currently are in Merlula is is I think the smart way to go. And honestly, this kind of pressure is not the worst thing to try to shake that loose.
So in Congress, four Democrats are circulating a letter that I obtained that sort of calls on the Biden administration to lift sanctions on Venezuela. The letter is written by Jim McGovern. Greg Meek's Joaquin Castro and Barbara Lee, and it reads because we share your view that human rights
should be at the center of US foreign policy. We have been deeply troubled by the extens of reporting on the indiscriminate and counterpardductive impacts on the Venezuelan people of the secondary and sectoral sanctions imposed by the Trump administration.
These kinds of sanctions.
Have often been found to be ineffective in achieving their objectives and are profoundly incoherent from a human rights perspective. In our view, to purposely continue contributing to economic hardship experienced by an entire population is immoral and unworthy of the United States. That is why many of us have previously called on your administration to pursue a better strategy to address the rollback of democracy and the severe violations
of fundamental rights committed by the Maduro government. Now all that is good, and it makes a strong case to immediately and unilaterally lift the sanctions, which makes a line in the last paragraph of the letter strange when it adds quote overcoming Venezuela's multifaceted political and human rights crisis and facilitating the country's desperately needed economic recovery must go hand in hand unquote. Now, typically what a sentence like that means is that sanctions will only be lifted if
Venezuela makes political concessions. Yet the lawmakers just acknowledge in the same letter that sanctions are inhumane and don't actually work to pressure political change anyway. It's a measure of how addicted to sanctions the US is that language like this shows up even in a letter designed to move in the right direction, and one signed by people like Barbara Lee and Jim McGovern who've spoken eloquently about the
cruelty of sanctions. Now, the letter appears to be something of a response to pressure that McGovern has been getting from anti war activists back home, and.
He has not taken action. He has not signed this letter calling up for an end to the sanctions, after telling us for years he's committed to stopping endless and needless deaths in Venezuela. Again, this is confusing and it's also inexcusable.
So emily, these activists have been calling on him to sign on to a what point are you looking at all?
Right, Well, we're going to talk about the tragedy unfolding at sea because there's I think maybe an interesting lesson in all of it. And to be clear, this is a story that's changing minute by minute, and as we're recording this, the latest is that some of the folks on the rescue mission have heard sounds that are like a banging noise coming from the area that they're searching. The actually efforts to sort of pinpoint target the location of that sound have been unsuccessful.
And this is the.
Story of five people being lost at sea in the titan submersible that was on a tourist expedition to view the Titanic costs about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and these folks right now are entirely lost at see.
They have about from what.
We know, twenty four hours at most until about Thursday morning. We're here on Wednesday until about Thursday morning, with the amount of oxygen that people estimate is in that submersible before they run out and are not able to survive, So the window is narrowing. Experts say the longer it takes to locate people, the less chance that they have of survival, which is tragically logic, but it's not really
a good time to play. You know, armchair scientists from inside a news studio or pile on the decision to sort of.
Go on this expedition, but you know, it's a good.
Time to pray for their safe return and an unfortunate i would say, opportunity to reflect on humans evolving, ever evolving relationship with risk itself. So just again some quick facts from what we know right now. Within about two hours, Ocean Gate Expeditions, that's the company that puts together these excursions, they lost contact with the Titan.
It's a twenty one foot submersible vessel.
As far as we know, it's about nine hundred miles east of Cape CODs. They're searching an area that's roughly the size of Kinetic, about nine hundred miles off east off the coast of case Cape Cod and about thirteen thousand feet deep. You have four passengers that were on board and the pilot that are now lost. The New York Post says that this rescue, if it is successful, would be the deepest recovery mission in history, the deepest
recovery mission in history. So they're about twelve thousand, five hundred feet below the surface, and that's obviously an incredible task. Not only to take people down to that level for the viewing of the Titanic, but to then have search and rescue crews basically trying to find a needle in a haystack in this vast expanse of the ocean. It seems maybe like it should be very easy because we know where the submersible went down, we know when it went down, and that seems like it should be easy
to kind of pinpoint the location. But of course it's not, and people have at this point been running or have been trying to find it for days. Safety concerns had been raised in the past. This is CNN, they write. In twenty eighteen, de Manned Underwater Vehicles Committee of the Marine Technology Society penned a letter expressing concern over what they referred to as ocean Gate.
Again that's the company.
Their quote experimental approach with the titan the vessel that's now lost, and its planned expedition to the side of the Titanic wreckage quote. Our apprehension is that the current experimental approach adopted by ocean Gate could result in negative outcomes from minor to catastrophic that would have serious consequences.
For everyone in the industry.
That's a quote from the letter, and of course, tragically that seems to have been pressient. We're going to find out more and more in the days ahead, and this story is evolving again very much. But if we put up an archived version of the website again, I think this is at the very at least as of now, an opportunity to reflect on our as human beings, our relationship with risk.
That's from the archive version of the website.
You can go now and actually look at how they advertised this Titanic expedition. There they say right there, explore the Titanic, and it costs. In their FAQ they say it costs two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
We can also roll some.
Footage from an ad that was on their website as well. You hear them say quotes like this is not a thrill ride for tourists.
Quote, it's not a ride at.
Disney and quote it's very engineered and very safe. Again, it's eerie to reflect on all of this now, and no matter you can be the safest thing in the world, there's always some risk involved in even driving a car or taking a bike.
There's always risk.
That's going to be involved, and so you know when you're taking when you're viewing something like the Titanic some thirteen thousand feet under the sea, of course, you're always going to have to accept that there's a level of danger, and we do that every single day with everything that we do. You can never fully eliminate risk. But this is a lot of to take, and it's a lot of money.
To spend on a risk. So it's more.
Than what an average American makes in a year, by far, much much more than what an average American makes in a year, and just for a brief window of time. So out of curiosity, after I saw that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars price tag, I looked up what the most expensive ticket was on the Titanic itself, and this.
Is really interesting.
It's kind of hard to nail down an inflation adjusted price for that most expensive ticket, but none of the estimates that I saw put it very far north of one hundred thousand dollars. So in twenty twenty three, people are paying more than double the price of the people who perish in the Titanic to tour their graveyard. It's a really strange arc of history right there, They're paying more than twice the price to see something that is broken, to see something that has failed.
It's like an inverse, a weird inverse.
And it's especially interesting when you consider what one economist related back in twenty twenty one. Yahoo Finance reported at the time on those numbers. I'm reading from this report in nineteen thirteen, so that's at the end of the Gilded Age, and the year after the Titanic sank. In nineteen twelve, the Rockefeller, Frick, Carnegie, and Baker families names all tied to monopolistic power, held point eight five percent of the country's total wealth.
The richest point zero.
One percent around eighteen thousand US families have also surpassed now the wealth levels reached in the Gilded Age. These families hold ten percent of the country's wealth today. By comparison, in nineteen thirteen, the top point zero one percent held nine percent of US wealth and a mere two percent in the late nineteen seventies, two percent in the late nineteen seventies. So that's a swing from the Gilded Age to the late seventies, and then a swing from then
until now. Now. Ryan and I would probably disagree on the morality of these different levels, these varying levels of income inequality. But compared with nineteen twelve, financialization completely dominates our economy at this point, and so so much of that wealth isn't even tied up in industries that actually build and create, but industries that sort of shuffle data and shuffle money around. Now, morbid curiosity is a very
real thing. It's inevitable and sort of understandably so whenever it's monetized, it can be really gross, but it's not sort of categorically bad or new. What's different now is our daily levels of comfort here in the West. That's different in the history of human existence. I don't mean that psychologically either. I think it's pretty clear, as Arthur Brooks has calculated that as we have gotten more materially comfortable over the last half century or so, we've actually
gotten increasingly less happy. But we need certain things that we're now rich enough to avoid in many many cases, so physical labor, natural sunlight, fresh food that we grow ourselves. We labor to grow ourselves, and losing these things is driving us crazy in some respects, and we're so desperate for relief. We're so desperate for meaning and for purpose,
that we're looking to really unhealthy solutions. Speaking about risk, my colleague Malli I'm away almost ten years ago now, back in twenty fourteen, wrote a column with this very arresting headline quote, we need to get more comfortable with people dying in space.
I'm going to read this quote.
Part of the reason why the American public was so upset by the loss of the Columbia crew back in two thousand and three is because they were perceived to have died for something trivial. The trip was mostly known for performing children's science fair experiments. She wrote a private or public exploration and settlement program based on larger ideals national security, advancing the human condition, fleeing from religious persecution, or even just to test the limits of human accomplishments
would change the risk calculus. Now, she was clear that that wasn't to downpla any the tragedy is involved, and that it would be absolutely wonderful if we made every new discovery, not just in space, but here on Earth without losing anybody. It's obviously unrealistic. We need bravery, we need a thirst for adventure. We need a healthy relationship
with risk to advance forward we always have. But our comfortable current risk averse society could very quickly become a risk hungry society, and that can go in very different directs. So the ultra wealthy elites who shelled out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to take part in an experimental excursion to the mass grave of prior adventurers, that could be a sign that we're not prepared to channel the restlessness of modern life here in the West in a way that is healthy at all.
We are now four days after a deadline has passed in which Congress had statutorily required the Biden administration to declassify all information that it has related to COVID origins,
and specifically the Wuhan Institute of Virology. We're joined today by Justin Goodman of the White Coast Whitecoat Waste Project to talk about the reporting that his organization has been able to do over the last couple of weeks related to COVID origins, and also this surprising delay on the part of the Biden administration and what that mean given the fact that it is that he is in as we sit here, in violation of a statute.
So justin thank you for joining us.
Pleasure to be here.
As viewers of this show know, Matt Taibi and Mike
Schallenberger maybe a week and a half ago. At this point, we're able to identify the names of three researchers at the Wuhan Lab who US Intelligence believe were hospitalized with COVID like symptoms in November twenty nineteen, which not only kind of upends the timeline of the Hunan seafood market argument that it's spilled over from some type of a pandulin or pangolin or bat or something else, that whatever the claim was at the time, that would require there
to be a time machine involved, and so pushing it back to November, if that's confirmed, eliminates that possibility, and if if these workers themselves were the one second, that also increases the circumstantial evidence that it had something to do this lab and the specific identity of one of the researchers, Ben who has been the focus of subsequent reporting both by me over at the Intercept and also at the Wall Street Journal since then, because Ben who
was a researcher on projects that involved manipulating coronaviruses so that they would be more infectious toward humans, And so can you talk a little bit about what you found in the paperwork that you had gotten from the federal government through foul work, and how that became much more important given the revelations of the names of these researchers.
Absolutely, you know, the wet market proponents who have been pushing that fake news for three years have been saying to follow the science. But what we've been doing since late twenty nineteen is following the money. We followed the money from the NIH to the lab. We followed the money from the NIH to gain a function.
Of the Wuhan lab, and now we followed the money from NIH to possible patients zero.
Ben Who Who, if you look at the preceding years leading up to the pandemic, basically had laid out the blueprint for starscov two. The documents we have directly tied Ben Who to two different US grants that we know we're funding gain of function experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Brology, one from doctor Fauci's National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one from USAID's PREDICT program. Ben Who was a co listed as a co investigator on
those grants. Paperwork that Peter Dasher personally filled out describing his collaboration with the Wuhan Lab, identifying Ben Who as a co investigator on those two US grants that totaled forty one million dollars in Pact payer funds. Now, a Government Accountability Office report that came out last week detailed that about one point four million dollars of that forty one million dollars in tax tailer money went to the Wuhan Institute. We're trying to figure out exactly how much
went to Ben Who specifically. But if Ben Who is determined to be patient zero, then our documents are the smoking gun.
Yeah, no, absolutely, it sounds like that. And there are critics who would say, for instance, this money, even if this money was going to Ben Who, Ben Whose research couldn't have possibly created a lab link that spreads COVID and Justin you study this very closely, and you have been now for years.
What do you say to that argument?
So, actually, the thing that first tipped us off to the Wuhan labs relationship with the National Institutes of Health back in late twenty nineteen, and remember we met with the Trump administration in January twenty twenty, before there was even a pandemic, declared to point out that there was this relationship between the NIH and the Wuhan Lab and that they should look into it. There were crickets at
that time from the administration just for the record. So we were first tipped off by a twenty seventeen paper that Ben Who was the lead author on with Peter Dashik and others, detailing how they were captured. They were collecting wild back coronaviruses around China in remote parts of the country and then.
Bringing them back to the lab and engineering them. But not only that, not only.
Is there this published paper trail of Ben Who's involvement in back coronavirus experimentation and creating these superviruses, these chimeric superviruses. He was one of the people involved in the infamous diffuse proposal that was denied by the Defense Department in twenty eighteen, which was a blueprint for exactly but creating the exact virus that caused the covid pandemic stars Kobe too by inserting the spike protein onto the wild back coronavirus.
Ben who was involved in the creation and conception of that virus got denied by the Defense Department, gets sick a couple of years later, and then of virus is unleashed in the city of Ulan at his doorstep. That resembles exactly the virus he described in this proposal that you wanted to create with US tax dollars. So, I mean, at this point, there is not a doubt in my mind that a lab late is the cause of this pandemic.
I mean, there's literally no evidence to support a web market theory, unless, as Ryan suggests, there was a time machine, because all the wet market theories propose that the virus broke out in December twenty nineteen. Here we have been who and others sick in November twenty nineteen, possibly before that.
Yeah, I think it's worth lingering on the diffuse proposal for a moment, because as we await the declassified information that we're hopefully going to get, and we're going to continue to put pressure on the administration until they release this information, you're going to start seeing kind of a battle royale, I think between multiple different camps within the United States, but then also camps within China, each trying to blame each other for the research that ended.
Up leading to this league.
Let's let's say everybody eventually stipulates that, Okay, it was actually research that we were doing over in this lab. Uh You're going to see Americans, I think, saying well, this was a Chinese kind of military project and that there was Chinese and and it is the case that there were you know, there was Chinese military funding of Uhan lab, and so there's some evidence, you know that there's some plausibility to that argument. At the same time, you have you have been who you have Peter Dashik
others applying to the Pentagon for for money. So I'm already I'm already kind of finding it rich that we're going to see the arguments that, well, this is kind
of this was military funding. How dare you when they were actually trying to get US military funding and did get US AID funding, which is kind of the kind of sketchy agency that is always involved when when you sort of want to layer between what's going on and what's actually going on, and so can you talk a little bit about this this DARPA U this attempt to get DARPA funding.
Sure, I mean, I'll start by saying I mean, shipping tax dollars to a military linked animal laboratory run by a foreign adversary was a recipe for disaster from the very thoughts.
Yeah, whether the money was coming from the DoD.
The State Department, or the NIH or anybody else for that matter.
I think you guys just questioned the science.
The scientists, question the scientists.
Yes, yeah, that's right, that's right.
So I mean, going back to the diffuse proposal, I mean, this is to me, this is just these these experimenters kind of being honest about what their intentions were was to create the supervirus. And I think you know, the the fact that they did apply to the United States Department of Defense to create, depending on what your point of view, is a bio weapon gives some insight into
the nature of these programs. I mean, ultimately, we're looking at a situation where, you know, the Chinese and the American government might agree that, okay, let's do this together, because if there's something goes wrong, there's mutually a short destruction and also mutually uh mutual mutually distribute a blame. You know what I mean exactly, because right now US and China are going to be equally to blame if it's a lab lead, and you're not really going to
be able to hold anybody accountable. And I think that's exactly why the Diviiden the administration is dragging its feet right now. I mean, all signs point to a lab league and if it's true, it's their fault and they're not.
And they don't, you know, so they don't.
And the fact that Democrats are in the White House and running the center right now, I mean, no one really has an appetite for.
Beating up on the NIH or the State Department in terms of you know.
So, I think that the timing of this is unfortunate, but I think the timing of this is also it was designed to be this way, that this information came out at a time where it really doesn't benefit anybody at this point.
It's only going to cause.
Harm to China US relate, and that's again I think part of the point of all this.
And I think it looks like increasingly the Trump administration was dragging their feet as well because they had information implicating our government and we didn't get any of this information as much as Republicans are posturing now back then, probably because their intelligence agencies were aware of some of this. Justin over at Whitecoat Waste, you guys are tracking sort of money being sent with no accountability for crazy projects.
And labs around the world.
And on that note, I want to ask what we know about gain of function right now? The state of US funding for gain of function research, especially in places like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where we don't really have a lot of oversight, We're not seemingly even interested in providing oversight after all of this, Where does this where is this money going right now? If anywhere?
Right?
Great question, Lee, And I just want to start by saying one more thing that I forgot. We have emails. Actually, the same trands of emails that gave us the ben who records him to these brands were also the original emails showing that Fauci's division at the NIH were actively conspiring with Peter Dashchik and the Wan Institute in writing in twenty sixteen to bypass the gain of Function band
that was in place by the Obama Biden administration. So again there's a lot of evidence that we were very intentionally trying to make this project happen in China, bending over backwards to send money there and get approvals to do this dangerous animal experimentation at the Wan Institute. In terms of where things stand now, there's lots of legislation out there looking to crack down or outright band gain.
Of function research. Here's what we've done to date.
We've spent the last three years trying to find exposed defund these foreign labs China and otherwise. In the federal spending bill last year, we were able to cut funding for gain of function research in what they call countries of concern also known as foreign adversaries Russia, Russia, China. Really those were the only countries that were receiving money at that time. So we've also now disqualified the Wuhan
Institute from getting any future funding from the NIH. We're hoping to make that permanent, so Wuhan is disqualified, the Wuhan Lab itself is disqualified from future taxpayer funding. No gain of function funding is going to go to foreign enemy laboratories. However, there are still twenty seven other laboratories, including other CCP run laboratories animal laboratories in China that are eligible to receive money from the NIH and that are receiving money from the NIH We also just finally
cut off money to Russian laboratories. Until recently, taxpayers were funding laboratories in Russia as well. So we've cut the money for gain of function in foreign countries, but there's no restrictions on gain of function here in the United States beyond what existed already that allowed some of these projects.
To go forward.
So we're working with Congress to permanently defund all animal experimentation in countries are concern like Russia and China. Obviously, we know what happened in the Wuhan Institute should be a signal that this is a bad idea. And we're also trying to crack down on gain to function in the United States because some people are arguing that we instead of offshoring it, we should bring in here where we have better oversight.
But again that's just as bad.
I mean, that's basically looking to create a WU arm the West out here in the United States, and it's going to happen, it's just a.
Matter of time.
So we're doing everything we can to make sure that taxpayer funding is not going to these foreign countries that don't have our best interest in mind and for dangerous fermentation that can cause a pandemic on our shores.
And it's good that NIH funding to the Wuhan Lab is being cut off, and it's good that there's kind of being pressure being applied, But I'm curious are those labs going to keep running?
Because let's say.
That the NIH doesn't fund the Wuhan Lab anymore. But if the CCP is like, you know what, we actually kind of think that that research is still useful to us for whatever reason, like as people who have respiratory systems, like we're we don't really care. I mean, we want to know the answer to who funded this, and we want one reason. We want to notice so that we can kind of target it and there can be accountability, But we also don't want there to be pandemics, Like we don't.
It doesn't really matter.
You know, who paid for that day's work of labor for the lab worker who then you know, sneeze at the wet market or whatever and ended up with you know, twenty plus million people dead and lives up ended and immense trauma and the world changed.
Like so what what are are what's the.
Path toward just stopping that research globally, because you know, we have to be lucky every single time.
The virus only has to be lucky once.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, I think there's been conversations about weapons conventions and things like that, carvering these type of uh you know this.
I mean, I would argue that.
This, you know, crosses the line into buyer weapons research. Again, it's all in the ivy beholder and what their intentions are, and I think we need stricter rules. Certainly in the United States we shouldn't be funding this stuff, but certainly globally we should probably agree that this is bad for everybody.
But if you have ill intentions.
And you want to create a bio weapon, there's going to be plenty of opportunities to do it. It's very inexpensive to do you can do it very secretively, and to be totally honest, I wouldn't be shocked at the US's secretively trying to figure out ways to fund this stuff overseas. There's already dangerous loopholes that don't track subgrants. So after Eco Health gives money to Wuhan, Wuhan can rebrant that money somewhere else and we would have no idea.
So I think there's also a lot of spending.
Accountability and transparency that has to happen in the United States to make sure we can follow the money where it's going and ensure we're not funding these projects life Fauci did secretively and Wuhan in the first place that brought us this pandemic that we're still dealing with.
Ryan reported a great story out over at the Intercept on all of this. Justin, we really appreciate you coming on as well, Senior vice president over at Whitecoat Waste. Your insight is always so appreciated, and so is your FOYA acumen.
You guys get everything.
We've gotten a good attorney on retainer.
Yeah.
Without without an attorney nowadays you get zero from Foyle. Yeah that's nothing, absolutely nothing.
Unfortunately, Well, justin, thank you so much. We always appreciate it.
Thank you both.
That does it for us.
On today's edition of Counterpoints, the second edition of the show in the new Studio, again, big thanks to McGriffin. I heard someone in the comments refer to mac and Griffin as McGriffin, and I think that's really beautiful and adorable.
So they are McGriffin from now on.
And we are very grateful to them, and very grateful to all of you for your help and for watching every week programming.
Note I'll be gone next week. That's why I was here yesterday.
He's just never here anymore.
You should see his notebook right now, by the way, if you've ever wanted a glance and said Ryan Grimm's fame notebook, it just says.
Obama coming to Obama.
What was I going to say about Obama?
Nobody?
I don't remember.
It's not important.
But anyway, Crystal will be here, so you'll have a ladies day on Wednesday.
That's right, sounds fun.
We'll do the Today's Show fourth hour thing with two glass of white wine on excellent. All right, well, Ran, we'll see the week after that, and we'll see everybody next week.
Back here for counterpoints